ew or passengers of the dangers threatening.

"Neutral ships will also incur danger in the war region, where, in
view of the misuse of the neutral flags ordered by the British
Government and incidents inevitable in sea warfare, attacks intended
for hostile ships may affect neutral ships also.

"The sea passage to the north of the Shetland Islands and the eastern
region of the North Sea in a zone of at least thirty miles along the
Netherlands coast is not menaced by any danger.

(Signed) Berlin, February 4, 1915, Chief of Naval Staff,

VON POHL."

[Illustration: The German Submarine War Zone.]

The effect of this proclamation, which was in truth nothing more than
official sanction for the work that the submarines had been doing for
some weeks, and which they continued to do, was to bring Germany into
diplomatic controversy with neutral countries, particularly the United
States; such controversy is taken up in a different chapter of this
history. In connection with the naval history of the Great War it
suffices to say that such a proclamation constituted a precedent in
naval history. The submarine had heretofore been an untried form of
war craft. The rule had formerly been that a merchantman stopped by an
enemy's warship was subject to search and seizure, and, if it offered
no resistance, was taken to one of the enemy's ports as a prize. If
it offered resistance it might be summarily sunk. But it was
impossible for submarines to take ships into port on account of the
patrols of allied warships; and the limited quarters of submarines
made it impossible to take aboard them the crews of ships which they
sank.

Reference made to the use of neutral flags quoted in the German
proclamation had been induced by the fact that certain of the British
merchant ships, after Germany had begun to send them to the bottom
whenever one of its submarines caught up with them had gone through
the waters where the submarines operated flying the flag of the United
States and other neutral powers in order to deceive the commanders of
the submarines. The latter had little time to do more than take a
brief observation of merchantmen which they sank, and one of the first
things they sought was the nationality of the flag that the intended
victims carried; unless they could be sure of the identity of a ship
through familiarity with the lines of her hull, they ran the risk, in
attacking