In spite of possible influence and efforts, Ambassador Gerard’s intervention was unavailing, and on July 27th, the very day of the execution, he telegraphed to London that his efforts to secure a postponement of the trial were futile because the German Government insisted that “the German submarine witnesses could not be further detained.” In other words, the men whose business it was to conduct a sea campaign of lawlessness and “frightfulness” could not be delayed from their destructive work by anything so paltry as a consideration of justice and honor in the trial of a prisoner. GERMAN EXULTATION Neither Sir Edward Grey and Ambassador Gerard, nor others interested in securing a fair trial for the accused, imagined that his trial and execution would be the hurried work of an afternoon, and there was consternation when a Reuter despatch of July 28th gave the first news of the shooting and made public the German _communiqué_ as follows: “The accused was condemned to death because although he was not a member of a combatant force, he made an attempt on the afternoon of March 20, 1915, to ram the German submarine _U-33_ near the Maas Lighthouse. The accused as well as the first officer and the chief engineer of the steamer received at the time from the British Admiralty a gold watch as a reward of his brave conduct on that occasion, and his action was mentioned with praise in the House of Commons. “On the occasion in question, disregarding the U-boat’s signal to stop and show his national flag, he turned at a critical moment at high speed on the submarine, which escaped the steamer by a few meters only by immediately diving. He confessed that in so doing he had acted in accordance with instructions from the Admiralty. “One of the many nefarious _franc-tireur_ proceedings of the British Merchant Marine against our war vessels has thus found a belated but merited expiation.” This report aroused intense indignation in England, and hardly less resentful feelings in neutral countries, especially in the United States, whose Ambassador in Berlin was the intermediary of the English protest against the basis of the court-martial. At once the British Foreign Office addressed a note to Ambassador Page in London in which was the statement: “His Majesty’s Government finds it difficult to believe that a master of a merchant ship who, after German submarines adopted the practice of sinking merchant vessels without warning and without regard to the lives of passengers or crew, took the only means at his disposal of saving not only the vessel but the lives of all on board can have been deliberately shot in cold blood for that action”; and the request was made that urgent inquiry be made by the United States Embassy at Berlin.