The losses so far enumerated were all strictly naval losses. Up to this time, although we had been transporting troops by the hundred thousand from Canada and Australia to England, and from England to France, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Gallipoli, our numbers had hardly suffered the smallest diminution by submarine action. Again, during the last three years (1916-18) we have had minor losses now and then; but the one and only real disaster of this kind came upon us in 1915. On August 14, the British transport, the _Royal Edward_, was in the Ægean, carrying reinforcements for the 29th Division in Gallipoli, and details of the Royal Army Medical Corps, when she was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank rapidly. She had on board 32 military officers and 1,350 troops, in addition to her own crew of 220 officers and men. Of all these, only 600 were saved; and for the first time in modern war we suffered the cruel loss of soldiers to the strength of a whole battalion killed--not in battle, but helpless and unresisting, without the chance of firing a shot or delivering a last charge with the bayonet. The ship herself was a less harrowing loss; but she was a fine vessel that we could ill spare--a steel triple-screw steamer of 11,117 tons and 545 feet in length. She, like her sister ship, the _Royal George_, was originally built for the Egyptian Mail Steamship Company, and ran between Marseilles and Alexandria. Her later service was carrying the mails for the Canadian Northern Steamship Company between Avonmouth and Montreal--and now she had returned to Eastern waters, only to give an isolated and inconclusive triumph to a desperate enemy. The remainder of the year saw many attempts by the U-boat commanders to repeat this success; but they mostly ended in failure. On September 2, the transport _Southland_ was hit by a torpedo, but got into Madras under her own steam, with a loss of 30 men killed in the explosion. On September 19, the _Ramazan_, with 385 Indian troops on board, was shelled and sunk by a submarine, off Antikythera. In October, the transport _Marquette_ was sunk in the Ægean. On November 3, the transport _Mercian_ was heavily shelled, and had nearly 100 killed and wounded. On November 5 the _Tara_, armed boarding-steamer, was sunk in the Bay of Sollum, on the eastern border of Egypt; and immediately afterwards two small Customs cruisers--the _Prince Abbas_ of 300 tons and the _Abdul Moneim_ of 450--were sunk at the same place, and no doubt by the same pair of U-boats.