meter antiaircraft gun of the
motor-gun section of Renigny in the neighborhood of Brabant-le-roi, on
February 21, 1916. This airship was hit by an explosive shell which
ignited the gas bag and caused an explosion of the bombs, so that it
was completely wrecked and fell in flames. The _L-19_, belonging to
the German navy, previously had been destroyed by a storm in the North
Sea on January 31, 1916.

PART XII--THE UNITED STATES AND THE BELLIGERENTS

CHAPTER LIX

SINKING OF THE ARABIC--ANOTHER CRISIS--GERMANY'S DEFENSE AND
CONCESSIONS.

The _Lusitania_ issue, after the dispatch to Germany of the third
American note of July 21, 1915, was withdrawn from the publicity in
which the exchange of diplomatic communications had been made. Note
writing having fulfilled its mission in stating the case, an interlude
followed devoted to private conversations between the American
Ambassador at Berlin and the German Foreign Office and between the
German Ambassador at Washington and the State Department. Apparently a
way out of the impasse was seen in conferences in the privacy of the
chancelleries rather than by negotiations conducted in the light of
day on the theory that absorbed public observation and criticism of
every stage in the exchanges was not helpful to a settlement. But time
did not show that this resort to secrecy smoothed the path of Germany
meeting the American demands.

In fact, the ruthless course of the submarine warfare, which the
sinking of the _Lusitania_ only momentarily checked, relegated that
specific issue to the background, or at least made it only one of a
series of indictments by the United States of the entire submarine
policy pursued by the Teutonic Powers.

Thirty days after the American Government had warned Germany that any
further contravention of American neutral rights at sea would be
regarded as an act "deliberately unfriendly," the White Star Atlantic
liner, the _Arabic_, with twenty-nine Americans among her company, was
sunk without warning off the south of Ireland by a German submarine.
Germany had not responded to the reiterated demands made in the third
American note on the _Lusitania_ and the question was impetuously
asked in the press: Was the sinking of the _Arabic_ Germany's answer?
This view of Germany's second blow at transatlantic liners, made at a
time when the _Lusitania_ crisis had only seemingly abated because
withdrawn from the public gaze, found its best expres