In the eyes of the German Admiralty the _Lusitania_ was the symbol of British supremacy on the seas. There were larger ships flying the Prussian flag, but one of them lay in her German harbor, the other at her Little-German pier in Hoboken, while the _Lusitania_ swept gracefully over the Western Ocean as she regally saw fit, leaving only a thin trail of smoke for the sluggish undersea enemy to follow. Time and again during the early months of war the plotters in Berlin had attempted her destruction, and every time she had slipped away--until the last, when the plot was developed on American soil.
[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_
The _Lusitania_ leaving the Hudson River on her last voyage]
Her destruction would carry home to Germany news of heartening influence out of all proportion to the mere sinking of a large single tonnage. The German visible navy had, with the exception of scattering excursions into the North Sea, and the swiftly quenched efforts of the South Atlantic fleet, been of negligible--and irksome--consequence. To sink the mistress of the British merchant fleet would be to inform all the world that Britain was incapable of protecting her cargo and passenger vessels, to puncture the comfortable British boast of the moment that business was being performed "as usual," and to gratify the blood-letting instincts of the Junkers. So von Tirpitz, with his colleagues, undertook to sink the _Lusitania_, and to warn neutrals to travel in their own ships or stay ashore.
Early in December, 1914, the German agents who met nightly at the Deutscher Verein in Central Park South speculated on ways and means of bringing down this attractive quarry. Communication between Berlin and New York at that time was as facile as a telephone conversation from the Battery to Harlem. There were new 110-kilowatt transmitters in the German-owned Sayville wireless station, imported through Holland and installed under the expert supervision of Captain Boy-Ed, and memoranda issued in Berlin to the naval attaché were frequently the subject of guarded conversation in the German Club within a few hours after they had left the Wilhelmstrasse. Occasionally the conspirators found it more tactful to drive through the Park in a limousine during the evening, to discuss the project. Spies had made several trips to Liverpool and back again aboard the ship, under false passports, and Paul Koenig's waterfront henchmen supplied all necessary information of the guard maintained at the piers. All this was passed up to the clearing-house of executives, and their plans began to take shape.