Sea fights, sea raids, and the hourly expectation of a great naval battle--a struggle for the control of the seas between modern armadas--held the attention of the world during the first six months of the Great War. These, with the adventures of the _Emden_ in the waters of the Far East, the first naval fight off Helgoland, the fight off the western coast of South America, the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and the exploits of the submarines--held the world in constant expectancy and threatened to involve neutral nations, thus causing a collapse of world trade and dragging all the peoples of the earth into the maelstrom of war. This chapter will review the navies as they gather for action. It will follow them through the tense moments on shipboard--the days of watching and waiting like huge sea dogs tugging at the leash. Interspersed are heroic adventures which have added new tales of valor to the epics of the sea. The naval history of the great European conflict begins, not with the first of the series of declarations of war, but with the preliminary preparations. The appointment of Admiral von Tirpitz as Secretary of State in Germany in 1898 is the first decisive movement. It was in that year that the first rival to England as mistress of the world's seas, since the days of the Spanish Armada, peeped over the horizon. Two years before the beginning of the present century, Von Tirpitz organized a campaign, the object of which was to make Germany's navy as strong as her military arm. A law passed at that time created the present German fleet; supplementary laws passed in 1900 and 1906 through the Reichstag by this former plowboy caused the German navy to be taken seriously, not only by Germans but by the rest of the world. England, jealous of her sea power, then began her maintenance of two ships for each one of her rival's. Germany answered by laying more keels, till the ratio stood three to two, instead of two to one. Two years before the firing of the pistol shot at Sarajevo, which precipitated the Great War, the British admiralty announced that henceforth the British naval base in the Mediterranean would be Gibraltar instead of Malta. Conjectures were made as to the significance of this move; it might have meant that England had found the pace too great and had deliberately decided to abandon her dominance of the eastern Mediterranean; or that Gibraltar had been secretly reequipped as a naval base. What it did mean was learned when the French Minister of Marine announced in the following September that the entire naval strength of France would thereafter be concentrated in the Mediterranean. This was the first concrete action of the _entente cordiale_--the British navy, in the event of war, was to guard the British home waters and the northern ports of France; the French navy was to guard the Mediterranean, protecting French ports as well as French and British shipping from "the Gib" to the Suez.