d after hours in the water. He will never forget the long,
piercing wail of despair from hundreds of victims as the gallant ship
went down.

This made it clear to all but those who did not want to understand that
Germany was going to defy the laws of the sea, at least as far as she
could without changing President Wilson's Government into an enemy. So
things went on, getting worse and worse, for another two years. The
British, French, and Italians had never prepared for a war like this.
They were ready to fight submarines that fought their own men-of-war,
as well as those that tried to sink transports carrying soldiers and
arms to the many different fronts. But who would have thought that
even the Germans would sink every merchantman without the least care
for the lives of the crew? The rest of the world thought the days of
pirates and cut-throats were over among all civilized nations. But the
Germans did not. So the Allies, the British especially, built more and
more destroyers to fight the German submarines. The Germans, of
course, built more and more submarines; and so the fight went on,
growing ever fiercer.

It was up-hill work for the British to guard thousands of ships over
millions of miles against the hidden foe, who sometimes struck without
being seen at all. A ship is a small thing on millions of square
miles. A slinking submarine is very much lower and harder to see on
the surface. A periscope is far harder still. The ordinary periscope
is simply a tube, a few inches in diameter, with a mirror in the upper
end reflecting the outside view on the corresponding mirror at the
lower end, where the captain watches his chance for a shot. No wonder
the Germans got on well for so long. It was over two years before
British merchantmen were armed. There was a shortage of guns; and the
neutral American Government would not allow any armed merchantmen into
their ports, though many and many a life was lost because a vessel was
unarmed. But, bit by bit, the merchantmen were forced to arm or die
like sheep before the German wolves; and once they had a gun they soon
learnt how to use it.

One gun over the stern was all that most ships had. It was mounted
astern because the best chance of escape was to turn away and go full
speed, zig-zagging every which way as you went, firing at the chasing
submarine; This made vessels harder for submarines to hit, not only on
account of the zig-zags, but because the shi