er last journey she carried a crew of
90 men and some 160 passengers, many of the latter being women and
children. The commander of the submarine brought his craft to the
surface off the bow of the _Falaba_, and gave the captain of the
steamship five minutes in which to put his crew and passengers into
lifeboats. A torpedo was sent against her hull and found the engine
room, causing a tremendous explosion. One hundred and eleven persons
lost their lives because they had not been able to get off in time, or
because they were too near the liner when she went down. This was the
most important merchantman which had been sent to the bottom by a
submarine since the proclamation of February 15, 1915.

The next two victims of this sort of warfare were the steamships
_Flaminian_ and the _Crown of Castile_, one of which was sunk by the
_U-28_, and the other by an unidentified submarine on April 1, 1915.
They went down off the west coast of England with no loss of life,
though the _Crown of Castile_ was torpedoed before her crew could get
off. The _Flaminian_ had tried to get away, but had to stop under fire
from deck guns on the submarine. The shells did not hit her in vital
spots, however, and it was necessary to send a torpedo into her hull
to sink her.

The ease with which submarines had been able to bob up in unexpected
places and to sink British merchantmen, in spite of the patrols
maintained by British warships, caused the captains of merchant
vessels to petition the British Government to be allowed to arm their
vessels on April 1, 1915. This was not granted, because their being
armed would have made the steamship legitimate prey for the
submarines, nor was any attention paid to the demand made by the
British press that the crews and officers of captured German
submarines be treated, not as prisoners of war, but as pirates.
Reprisals on the part of the Germans was feared.

Beachy Head on the 1st of April, 1915, was again the scene of two
successful attacks on merchantmen by submarines. On that day the
French steamship _Emma_, after being torpedoed, went to the bottom
with all of the nineteen men in her crew. The same submarine sank the
British steamer _Seven Seas_, causing the deaths of eleven of her men.

In order to indicate the amount of harm which the submarine warfare
caused British shipping, the admiralty on April 1, 1915, announced
that though five merchantmen had been sent to the bottom and one had
been only pa