It was as deliberate and cold-blooded a murder as was ever committed--the very epitome of that order of the German Naval authorities to “destroy without trace.” The destruction of the boats with axes to cut off all means of escape, the deliberate taking away of the lifebelts, the search for weapons, the order to the men to take off their outer clothes, all were thought out, were part of a settled policy on the part of Captain Wagenfuhr, if not on the part of the German Higher Command. All were easy to understand. Even the object of depriving the crew of their clothes, which is obscure to many, becomes plainer upon consideration. Men carry papers and things in their pockets which lead to identification. In taking their clothes from the men, the Germans were also robbing them of their identity, for if any of the poor victims happened to be found clad only in their shirts floating dead in the sea, there was practically nothing to furnish a clue as to who they were, what ship they belonged to, if they belonged to a ship at all. But the Germans, in their hurried search of the men, overlooked the fact that three of them wore lifebelts concealed beneath their clothing, and these three men, by the aid of their lifebelts, managed to survive until they were picked up. So the world learned of the German crime. But for these three witnesses, nothing would have been known except that the _Belgian Prince_ had vanished with every soul aboard. Throughout August 1, 1917, the naval craft were scouring the neighbourhood for a sign of the U-boat, trying to get on its track. The sea was empty. Casting farther and farther afield, one of our torpedo boats sighted a periscope on the afternoon of the next day nearly a hundred miles from the scene of the outrage. Keen eyes at the other end of the periscope must have detected the torpedo boat almost as soon as the torpedo boat saw the periscope, for our naval gunners had time to get in only a couple of rounds before the periscope disappeared. Racing to the spot, the torpedo boat dropped a depth charge. But she was too late: the enemy was gone. A torpedo fired at a cattle boat proceeding from Ireland to England furnished the next clue to the enemy submarine. The torpedo missed, and the cattle boat, calling up patrol boats by wireless, managed to escape. The U-boat hunted warily, for Paul Wagenfuhr had a definite mission to perform. His task was to lay a minefield in the way of the cattle boats coming out of Waterford harbour in order to interfere with the regular traffic to England. The submarine was equipped with a number of huge mines and special mine-laying apparatus which enabled her to lay these death-dealers while she herself was snugly out of sight beneath the surface. Mostly the mine-laying was done at night, and regularly about once a month a U-boat would scatter her deadly cargo and pen the shipping in harbour until the mines were swept up and a passage cleared.