As to the vexed question of the number of submarines possessed by Great Britain and Germany respectively at the beginning of the war, one can only say that authorities differ. According to an interview granted by Mr Winston Churchill to M. Hugues le Roux which appeared in _Le Matin_ in the first week of February 1915, we then had more underwater boats than the enemy, but Lord Jellicoe afterward asserted that in August 1914 “the German Navy possessed a great many more oversea submarines than we did.”[16] Unless there is a subtle distinction between the general term used by the then First Lord and the oversea type referred to by the former Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, it is impossible to reconcile the two statements, for it is obvious that the leeway mentioned by the latter cannot have been made up in five months. According to the Berlin official naval annual _Nautilus_, published in June 1914, the total number of completed German submarines up to the previous month was twenty-eight. Commander Carlyon Bellairs, R.N., M.P., estimated them at “fifty built, building, and projected.” Austria had six ready, four under construction at Pola, and five on the stocks in Germany. In the five years immediately preceding the beginning of the struggle Germany certainly spent more on underwater craft than Great Britain, the figure for the former being £5,354,206, and for the latter £4,159,670. CHAPTER II _Life as a Latter-day Pirate_ “_The unrestricted U-boat war means a very strong naval offensive against the Entente._”—ADMIRAL VON CAPELLE. Writing in the early summer of 1915, a neutral who visited the once busy ports of Danzig, Stettin, Hamburg, and Bremen remarked that “wherever one goes in these cities, wherever one takes one’s meals, one hears the word _Unterseeboot_. Amazing, and often untrue, stories are told of the number of submarines that are being constructed, the size and speed of the latest ones, and the great number of English ships that have been sunk, but whose loss has been ‘concealed from the British public.’” The submarine barometer was Set Fair. It soon dropped to Change. Within six months the industrious and outspoken Captain Persius was confessing in the _Berliner Tageblatt_ that “regarding the effectiveness of our U-boats in the trade war, one hears frequently nowadays views that bear little resemblance to the views uttered a year ago. Then, alas, hopes were extravagant, owing to a disregard of facts which the informed expert, indeed, observed, but which remained concealed from the layman”—a confession of failure, notwithstanding the offer of substantial rewards for every merchant vessel sunk, and pensions for each man in a submarine which destroyed a transport.