ain her crew was welcomed with every
sign of hospitality.

[Illustration: The Deutschland in Chesapeake Bay]

In December, 1916, at the close of the victorious German campaign
against Roumania, the central powers, weary of war and beginning to
feel the pinch of starvation and the drain on their young men, made it
known that as they had won the war they were now ready to treat for
peace. This message carried with it a threat to all countries not at
war that if they did not help to force the Entente to accept the
Kaiser's peace terms, Germany could not be held responsible for
anything that might happen to them in the future.

President Wilson, always apprehensive that something might draw the
United States into the conflict, grasped eagerly at this opportunity,
and in a public message he asked both sides to state to the world on
what terms they would stop the war.

The Germans and their allies did not make a clear and definite
proposal. On the other hand, the nations of the Entente, in no
uncertain terms, declared that no peace would be made unless the
central powers restored what they had wrongfully seized, paid the
victims of their unprovoked attack for the damage they had done, and
guaranteed that no such act should ever be committed in the future.
They also declared that the Poles, Danes, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians,
Alsatians, and Serbs should be freed from the tyrannous governments
which now enslaved them. In plain language this meant that the central
powers must give back part of Schleswig to Denmark, allow the kingdom
of Poland to be restored as it once had been; permit the Bohemians and
Slovaks to form an independent nation in the midst of Austria-Hungary;
allow the people of Alsace and Lorraine the right of returning to
France; annex the Italians in Austria-Hungary to Italy, and permit the
Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina to join their cousins to the southeast
in one great Serbian nation.

When these terms were published the German government exclaimed that
while they had been willing to make peace and perhaps even give back
the conquered portions of Belgium and northern France in return for
the captured German colonies in Africa and the Pacific Ocean, with the
payment of indemnities to Germany, now it was plain that the nations
of the Entente intended to wipe out utterly the German nation and
dismember the empire of Austria-Hungary; and that since Germany had
offered her enemies an honorable peace and they h