The bombardment of Durazzo, mentioned in the last chapter, took place on October 2, 1918, and was the last offensive operation, on a large scale, undertaken by the Allied navies. During the fortnight preceding it, there had fallen to the Entente armies, in every theatre of war, such a series of victories as had never been witnessed in the recorded history of mankind. To the sea-borne and sea-fed armies in the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria had been the first of Germany's allies to make unconditional surrender; before the sea-borne and sea-fed armies in Syria--brought thither from Great Britain, from India, from Australia, and New Zealand--the last of Turkey's military power had melted like snow in summer; while, upon the Western Front, from the Flanders coast to the forest of the Woeuvre, the sea-borne and sea-fed British and American armies with their sea-equipped French comrades were surging forward, under Marshal Foch, in an irresistible tide. The end was now apparent, though, at the last, it was to come with startling suddenness. Little by little, for fifty-two months, scarcely realized by the majority of their peoples, hardly realized even by the outside world, the Central Empires had been dying {284} of sea-hunger. Deprived, like prisoners in a closed chamber, of the oxygen necessary for life--the economic oxygen that could alone be drawn from the free oceans of the world, they had come to a point where the only choice lay between surrender and extinction. Defeated at Jutland so decisively that, as their leaders well knew, those sea-windows could never be opened by the efforts of their surface ships, their campaign under water had failed with equal completeness. Beneath the Dover Barrage, the North Sea minefields, and the Straits of Otranto lay their dead submarines. Trapped by _Q_ ships, rammed by destroyers, sunk by armed merchantmen, they had lost scores of others--more than two hundred in all had been put out of action by the Allied navies--while the spirit of admiralty that they had challenged, and the fringe of whose code they had been unable to grasp, had so ordered the ways of the world's free peoples that, even on land, they were reeling before them.