Page:The Outline of History Vol 2.djvu/540

 through the winter of 1917-18, London on every moonlight night became familiar with the banging of warning maroons, the shrill whistles of the police alarm, the hasty clearance of the streets, the distant rumbling of scores and hundreds of anti-aircraft guns growing steadily to a wild uproar of thuds and crashes, the swish of flying shrapnel, and at last, if any of the raiders got through the barrage, with the dull heavy bang of the bursting bombs. Then presently, amidst the diminuendo of the gun fire, would come the inimitable rushing sound of the fire brigade engines and the hurry of the ambulances.... War was brought home to every Londoner by these experiences.

While the Germans were thus assailing the nerve of their enemy home population through the air, they were also attacking the overseas trade of the British by every means in their power. At the outset of the war they had various trade destroyers scattered over the world, and a squadron of powerful modern cruisers in the Pacific, namely, the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the Leipzig, the Nürnberg, and the Dresden. Some of the detached cruisers, and particularly the Emden, did a considerable amount of commerce destroying before they were hunted down, and the main squadron caught an inferior British force off the coast of Chile and sank the Good Hope and the Monmouth on November 1st, 1914. A month later these German ships were themselves pounced upon by a British force, and all (except the Dresden) sunk by Admiral Sturdee in the Battle of the Falkland Isles. After this conflict the allies remained in undisputed possession of the surface of the sea, a supremacy which the great naval Battle of Jutland (May 1st, 1916) did nothing to shake. The Germans concentrated their attention more and more upon submarine warfare. From the beginning of the war they had had considerable submarine successes. On one day, September 22nd, 1914, they sank three powerful cruisers, the Aboukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy, with 1473 men. They continued to levy a toll upon British shipping throughout the war; at first they hailed and examined passenger and mercantile shipping, but this practice they discontinued for fear of traps, and in the spring of 1915 they began to sink ships without notice. In May, 1915, they sank the great passenger liner, the Lusitania, without any warning, drowning a number of American citizens.