'Beaucoup de combat' (Lots of fight). I replied, 'Please go to it!' We had only a little ammunition left, and very little water. It really looked as if we would soon be dispatched. The mood of the men was dismal. Suddenly, about 10 o'clock in the morning, there bobbed up in the north two riders on camels, waving white cloths. Then there appeared, coming from the same direction, a long row of about one hundred camel troops, who drew rapidly nearer, singing, in a picturesque train. They were messengers and troops from the Emir of Mekka.

"The wife, it appeared, had in the course of the first negotiations dispatched an Arab boy to Jeddah. From that place the Governor had telegraphed to the Emir. The latter at once sent the camel troops with his two sons and his personal surgeon. The whole Bedouin band now speedily disappeared. Our first act afterward was a rush for water. Then we cleared up camp, but had to harness the camels ourselves, for the drivers had fled at the beginning of the skirmish. More than thirty camels were dead. Saddles did not fit. These German sailors knew how to rig up schooners, but not camels. Much baggage was left lying in the sand for lack of packanimals. Under protection of Turkish troops we now got to Jeddah, where the authorities and populace received us well. From there we proceeded in nineteen days, without mischance, by sailing boat to Elwesh, and under abundant guard with Suleiman Pahsa, in a fiveday caravan-journey towrd El Ela, where we were seated at last in a train and riding toward Germany. We shall get into the war at last."

Details of another armed cruiser's exploits, the Karlsruhe, in capturing British vessels during September and October, 1914, became public some weeks afterward. The Houlder liner, La Rosarina, and the Yeoward liner, Andorinha, arrived in the Mersey on November 3 from Teneriffe, bringing the masters, officers, and crews of thirteen British vessels that had been captured in the South Atlantic Ocean by the Karlsruhe. With the exception of three, all were sunk. The three spared were kept for the sake of the large amount of coal they had on board and the oil and stores. In each case the Karlsruhe followed the same procedure. Crews of the captured vessels were first transported to two German merchantmen, who accompanied her on her raiding expeditions, and then the doomed ships were sunk by heavy charges of dynamite. The merchantmen carried their passengers to Teneriffe, where they were cared for by the British

Consul until ships arrived to take them to Liverpool. With the publication in November 1916 of the war diary of Captain Lieutenant Aust, one of the surviving officers of the Karlsruhe, the mystery surrounding her fate was dispelled. According to Captain Aust's account, the Karlsruhe was blown up by an internal explosion on the evening of November 4, 1914, while a short distance off the northeast coast of South America. Her surviving officers and men, by sailing in one of her prizes, had succeeded in slipping through the British network of warships and reaching a Norwegian port on November 29. The Karlsruhe was at Havana at the outbreak of the war. Prior to that she had been on duty in

THE GERMAN CRUISER "KARLSRUHE"

The Karlsruhe was described by the Hamburger Fremdenblatt as "the terror of the Atlantic." She was reported to have been blown up by an internal explosion off the northeast coast of South America in November, 1914

Mexican waters. She took on coal and provisions at San Juan, Porto Rico, on August 9, 1914. Captain Lubinus understood that she had sunk seventeen ships between that date and her capture of the Farne on October. How many more she sent to the bottom between that time and her own sinking on November 4, was not known.

On January 28, 1915, the American schooner, William P. Frye, loaded with a cargo of wheat consigned to an English firm, was sunk by the German auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, and in a communication to the German Government the Government of the United States contended that the act was unwarranted by international law, as the cargo

could be considered only conditional contraband, and there was no evidence that it was to be used for military purposes. The outcome was regarded as a victory for the American contention for the safety of innocent persons on the high seas. The agreement was reached at a time when grave issues had risen between Germany and the United States in consequence of the loss of many American lives in the sinking of passenger ships, of which the most notable was the Lusitania, in May 1915. The Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the Crown Prince Wilhelm, two German commerce destroyers, entered the harbor of Newport News in March 1915, after extended cruises in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, during which a number of French and English vessels were destroyed. At first the commanders of both vessels indicated their intention of making necessary repairs and putting to sea again, but the presence of English war-vessels outside the harbor caused them to change their plans, and both vessels were eventually interned.

Late on the afternoon of November 2, 1914, eight warships sailed from the Elbe base-three battle-cruisers, the Seydlitz, the Moltke, and the Von der Tann; two armored cruisers. the Blücher and the Yorck; and three light cruisers, the Kolberg, the Graudenz, and the Strassburg. Except the Yorck, they were fast vessels, making at least 25 knots. The battle-cruisers carried 11-inch guns. Having cleared for action, they started for the coast of England, and early in the morning ran through the nets of a British fishing fleet eight miles east of Lowestoft. An old police boat, the Halcyon, was sighted, and received a few shots. About eight o'clock, when opposite Yarmouth, they proceeded to bombard the wireless-station and naval air-station from a distance of about ten miles. Their shells only plowed sands and disturbed the water. In a quarter of an hour they moved away, dropping many floating mines, which later in the day caused the loss of one submarine and two fishingboats. The enterprise was unlucky, for on the road back the Yorck struck a mine and went to the bottom with most of her crew.

The cannonade caused a sensation in Yarmouth. It began soon after 7 o'clock and went on furiously for 20 minutes.

At

Many who were asleep were awakened by reverberations, the clattering of windows and the shaking of houses. the beach there was little to be seen. The haze of an autumn dawn hung over the sea. The ships that were firing were not visible to the gathering crowds, who could see only flash after flash on the horizon, followed by the dropping of shells in the sea and the leaping of great cascades. Men with glasses on the pier at the harbor-mouth were only able to distinguish one ship, a large four-funneled vessel, steaming close to the Cross Sands lightship, which lies about 10 miles off the coast, well outside the Yarmouth Roads. Some of the shells dropt within a mile or two of the shore; others came closer. Soon after the departure of the ships, several destroyers and submarines put out of Yarmouth into the North Sea. The submarines were in company, and during the morning's patrol work one of them came to grief. After striking a mine a few miles from the coast, she sank quickly. Only four survivors were picked up.

In the middle of December, while the Allies were strengthening their Ines in France and Belgium, and while, in Poland, Germany was claiming the greatest victory of the war, and "a complete shattering of the Russian offensive," and while the eastern theater witnessed the torpedoing of the Turkish battleship Messudyeh in the Dardanelles by a British submarine which had dived under five rows of mines, a German cruiser flotilla eluded the British patrol fleet in

the North Sea, bombarded three English towns, and made good its escape. While developments then taking place in France and Poland were major events, the feat of the submarine in the Dardanelles was perhaps the most daring exploit thus far in the war, but the interest of the British public and press was focused chiefly on the bombardment by German cruisers on Dcember 16 of Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby. For the first time in centuries, English blood had been shed on English soil by a foreign foe. As a consequence of this event Englishmen now knew from experience that England was not immune from attacks; that the British Navy was not an impregnable fortress floating around the British Isles, and, that Great Britain would require in this war all her military resources of whatsoever kind and character.

But the event, it was thought, might be worth "a million recruits to Kitchener's army.' An immediate sequel to the bombardments and the killing of more than a hundred innocent persons, two-thirds of them women and children, was a general rush to the recruiting-offices. Prince von Bülow, the former German Chancellor, was quoted as saying this was "simply the prelude to what the German fleet would soon undertake and which might astound the world." The exploit probably produced a more profound impression on the English people than any other event of the war up to that time. Stories of English people, with familiar English names, dwelling in an every-day English town that was like hundreds of other towns, now torn to pieces by shrapnel, their homes burned, their women folk struck down in the streets, and their babies buried in burning wreckage, were declared to be "taking hold of the imagination of people as no tales of atrocity, fire, and sword in Belgium; as no shiploads of wounded soldiers and starving refugees, had been able to approach."

Nearly a year afterward a German naval officer insisted that "before the cruisers had fired a shot the Moltke got a 6-inch shell from the forts, which struck the battle-cruiser and tore away officers' cabins in a lightly protected portion

In an interview with Karl H. von Wiegand, correspondent of the United Press, as published in The World (New York).