[Illustration: French sailors who have landed on the southwestern coast of Belgium making a jovial feast of their dinner ashore] On January 21, 1915, the Germans recaptured the Le Pretre woods near St. Mihiel, and next day the belligerents fought a fierce engagement in the Vosges without advantage to either side. Prince Eitel, the second son of the Kaiser, commanded an attack upon Thann in Alsace on January 25, 1915, but was repulsed by the French defenders. On January 28, 1915, the Germans made some gains in the Vosges and in Upper Alsace, but in their attempt to cross the River Aisne on the 29th they were unsuccessful. January 30, 1915, brought some successes to the Germans in the Argonne forest, where throughout the month the most savage fighting was going on in thick underbrush and from tree tops. PART II--NAVAL OPERATIONS * * * * * CHAPTER XXXII STRENGTH OF THE RIVAL NAVIES 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 or her rival's. Germany answered by laying more keels, till the ratio stood three to two, instead of two to one.