n the protection afforded by
Helgoland and that the most damage could be done to the enemy by picking
off her larger ships one by one. In other words, he again turned to the
policy of attrition. He immediately put it into force.

On the 3d of September the British gunboat _Speedy_ struck a mine in the
North Sea and went down. It was only two days later that the light
cruiser _Pathfinder_ was made the true target of a torpedo fired by a
German submarine off the British eastern coast, and she, too, went to
the bottom. But the British immediately retaliated, for the submarine
_E-9_ sighted the German light cruiser _Hela_ weathering a bad storm on
September 13 between Helgoland and the Frisian coast. A torpedo was
launched and found its mark, and the _Hela_ joined the _Koeln_ and
_Mainz_. Up to this point the results of attrition were even, but the
Germans scored heavily during the following week.

On September 22 the three slow British cruisers _Cressy_, _Hogue_, and
_Aboukir_ were patrolling the waters off the Dutch coast, unaccompanied
by small craft of any kind, when suddenly, at half past six in the
morning, the _Aboukir_ crumpled and sank, the victim of another
submarine attack. But the commander of the _Hogue_ thought she had been
sunk by hitting a mine, and innocently approached the spot of the
disaster to rescue such of the crew of the _Aboukir_ as were afloat. The
work of mercy was never completed, for the _Hogue_ itself was hit by two
torpedoes in the next few moments, and she joined her sister ship. The
commander of the _Cressy_, failing to take a lesson from what he had
witnessed, now approached, and his ship was also hit by two torpedoes,
making the third victim of the German policy of attrition within an
hour, and Captain Lieutenant von Weddigen, commander of the _U-9_, which
had done this work, immediately became a German hero.

CHAPTER XXXIV

BATTLES ON THREE SEAS

So stood the score in the naval warfare in the North Sea at the end of
the second month of the Great War. But while these events were taking
place in the waters of Europe, others of equal import had been taking
place in the waters of Asia. On August 23, 1914, Japan declared war on
Germany and immediately set about scouring the East for German craft of
all kinds.

Japan brought to the naval strength of the Allied powers no mean unit.
Hers was the only navy in the world which had seen the ultramodern
battleships in action; the Russia