The Germans made a great point about the brutality of the English blockade.  They told stories about the starving babies of Germany, who were being denied milk because of the cruelty of the English.  As a matter of fact, what Germany really lacked was rubber, cotton, gasoline, and above all, nickel and cobalt, two metals which were needed in the manufacture of guns and shells.

Finally, in the summer of 1916, came a world surprise.  A large German submarine, the Deutschland, made the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and bobbed up unexpectedly in the harbor of Baltimore.  In spite of all the trouble that the United States had had with Germany over the sinking of ships by submarines, the crew of this vessel was warmly received, and the cargo of dyes which she brought was eagerly purchased.  The Germans, in return, loaded their ship with the metals and other products of which Germany was so short.  As one American newspaper said, the Deutschland took back a cargo of nickel and rubber to the starving babies of Germany.  Once more the Deutschland came, this time to New London, and again 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.