IT WAS A vital game, in which Room 40 gave Britain an edge of inestimable value at a time when the war, far from concluding quickly, was expanding everywhere, with Germany ascendant. Battles raged in Russia, Austria, Serbia, Turkey, and Asia. In the South China Sea a German torpedo boat sank a Japanese cruiser, killing 271 men. In the Pacific, off Chile, German warships sank two British cruisers, drowning 1,600 men and delivering a blow to Britain’s pride and morale, the empire’s first defeat in a naval battle since the War of 1812, when a British naval force on Lake Champlain had been defeated by the fledgling U.S. Navy. On New Year’s Day, 1915, a German submarine sank the British battleship HMS Formidable, for a loss of 547 men. British warships nearby were forbidden to rescue survivors, in accord with the policy set up after the Aboukir disaster.
The war had grown darker and had sired new tactics for killing. German warships shelled the English coastal towns of Scarborough, Whitby, and Hartlepool, injuring over five hundred people and killing more than one hundred, most of them civilians. The dead in Scarborough included two nine-year-old boys and a fourteen-month-old baby.