“Why should we let America interfere with our plan to starve England?” was the question I heard repeatedly.  Their belief that they could starve England was absolute.  What could be simpler than putting a ring of U-boats round the British Isles and cutting off all trade until the pangs of hunger should compel Britain to yield?  I heard no talk then about the “base crime of starving women and children,” which became their whine a year later when the knife began to cut the other way.

In 1915 it was immaterial to the mass of Germans whether America joined their enemies or not.  Their training had led them to think in army corps, and they frankly and sneeringly asked us, “What could you do?” They were still in the stage where they freely applied to enemies and possible enemies the expression, “They are afraid of us.”  “The more enemies, the more glory,” was the inane motto so popular early in the war that it was even printed on post cards.

The Gulflight, flying the Stars and Stripes, was torpedoed in the reign of submarine anarchy immediately inaugurated.  But two can play most games, and when the British Navy made it increasingly difficult for U-boats to operate in the waters near the British Isles, the German Foreign Office and the German Admiralty began to entertain divergent opinions concerning the advisability of pushing the submarine campaign to a point which would drag the United States into the war.

Only a few people in Germany know that von Bethmann-Hollweg strenuously opposed the plan to sink the Lusitania.  That is, he opposed it up to a point.  The advertisement from the German Embassy at Washington which appeared in American newspapers warning Americans could not have appeared without his sanction.  In the last days of July, 1914, backed by the Kaiser, he had opposed the mobilisation order sufficient to cause a three days’ delay—­which his military opponents in German politics claim was the chief cause of the failure to take Paris—­but in the case of the Lusitania he was even more powerless against rampant militarism.

For nearly a year after the colossal blunder of the Lusitania, there existed in the deep undercurrents of German politics a most remarkable whirlpool of discord, in which the policy of von Tirpitz was a severe tax on the patience of von Bethmann-Hollweg and the Foreign Office, for it was they who had to invent all sorts of plausible excuses to placate various neutral Powers.

The Kaiser after disastrously meddling with the General Staff during the first month of the war, subsequently took no active hand in military, naval and political policies unless conflicts between his chosen chieftains forced him to do so.