nd reached
the hull. A hunt was made for the hostile submarine by the British
destroyers, but she was found by the British battleship _Majestic_;
but before the British ship could fire a shot at the German submarine,
the latter fired a torpedo that caught the battleship near her stern
and sank her immediately. Apprehension was now felt for the more
formidable ships such as the _Queen Elizabeth_ and others of her class
which were in those waters; inasmuch as the operations at the
Dardanelles assumed more and more a military rather than a naval
character, the British admiralty thought it wiser to keep the _Queen
Elizabeth_ in safer waters; she was consequently called back to
England. Only old battleships and cruisers were left to cooperate
with the troops operating on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Naval warfare in southern waters was continued against British
warships by the Austrian navy. On June 9, 1915, the Austrian admiralty
announced that a cruiser of the type of the _Liverpool_ had been
struck by a torpedo fired by an Austrian submarine while the former
was off San Giovanni di Medua, near the Albanian coast. Reports of the
incident issued by the Austrian and British naval authorities
differed, the former claiming that the cruiser had sunk, and the
latter that it had remained afloat and had been towed to an Adriatic
port.

Most unique was an engagement between the Italian submarine _Medusa_
and a similar craft flying the Austrian flag on June 17, 1915. This
was the first time that two submarines had ever fought with each
other. On that day the two submarines, the presence of each unknown to
the other, lay submerged, not a great distance apart. The _Medusa_,
after some hours, came up, allowing only her periscope to show; seeing
no enemy about, her commander brought the rest of her out of the
water. She had not emerged many moments before the Austrian vessel
also came up for a look around and the commander of the latter espied
the Italian submarine through his periscope. He immediately ordered a
torpedo fired; it found a mark in the hull of the _Medusa_ and she was
sent to the bottom. One of her officers and four of her men were
rescued by the Austrian submarine and made prisoners.

Italy's navy was not to continue to act as a separate naval unit in
the southern naval theatre of war, for on June 18, 1915, the Minister
of Marine of France announced that the "Anglo-French forces in the
Mediterranean were cooperating with