On April 29, 1915, the _Cressington_ caught fire at sea. Three days later, in the hold of the _Kirk Oswald_, a sailor found a bomb tucked away in a hiding place where its later explosion would have started a serious fire. So it came about that when the four lesser conspirators of the fire-bomb plot had served their six months' sentences, they were at once rearrested on the specific charge of having actually planted that bomb in the _Kirk Oswald_. The burly dock captains, Bode and Wolpert, who had blustered their innocence in the previous trial, and had succeeded in securing heavy bail from the Hamburg-American Line pending separate trials for themselves, were nipped this time with evidence which let none slip through. Rintelen was haled from his cell to answer to his part in the _Kirk Oswald_ affair, and the jury, in January, 1918, declared the nine plotters "guilty as charged" and Judge Howe sentenced them to long terms in prison. Rintelen, alone of the group, as they sat in court, had an air of anything but wretched fanatic querulousness. He followed the proceedings closely, and once took the trial into his own hands in a flash of temper when the State kept referring to the loss of the _Lusitania_. It went hard with the nobleman to be herded into a common American court with a riff-raff of hireling crooks and treated with impartial justice. In Germany it never could have happened!
If those trials had occurred in May, 1915, the history of the transport of arms and shells would not have been marred by such entries as these:
May 8--_Bankdale_; two bombs found in cargo.
May 21--_Anglo-Saxon_; bomb found aboard.
July 4--_Minnehaha_; bomb exploded at sea. (The magnetos.)
July 24--_Craigside_; five fires in hold.
July 27--_Arabic_; two bombs found aboard.
Aug. 9--_Asuncion de Larriñaga_; afire at sea.
Aug. 27--Lighter _Dixie_; fire while loading.
On August 31 the White Star liner _Arabic_, nineteen hours out of Liverpool was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank in eleven minutes, taking 39 lives, of which two were American. Germany, on September 9, declared that the U-boat commander attacked the _Arabic_ without warning, contrary to his instructions, but only after he was convinced that the liner was trying to ram him; the Imperial Government expressed regret for the loss of American lives, but disclaimed any liability for indemnity, and suggested arbitration. On October 5, however, the government in Berlin had changed its tune to the extent of issuing a note expressing regret for having sunk the ship, disavowing the act of the submarine commander, and assuring the United States that new orders to submarines were so strict that a recurrence of any such action was "considered out of the question." If the cargoes could be fired at sea, no submarine issue need be raised. And so fires and bombs continued to be discovered on ships just as consistently as before. The log, resumed, runs thus: