miles wide, two hundred miles long and five feet deep yielding some
twenty to fifty per cent. of sodium nitrate. The deposit originally
belonged to Peru, but Chile fought her for it and got it in 1881. Here
all countries came to get their nitrates for agriculture and powder
making. Germany was the largest customer and imported 750,000 tons of
Chilean nitrate in 1913, besides using 100,000 tons of other nitrogen
salts. By this means her old, wornout fields were made to yield greater
harvests than our fresh land. Germany and England were like two duelists
buying powder at the same shop. The Chilean Government, pocketing an
export duty that aggregated half a billion dollars, permitted the
saltpeter to be shoveled impartially into British and German ships, and
so two nitrogen atoms, torn from their Pacific home and parted, like
Evangeline and Gabriel, by transportation oversea, may have found
themselves flung into each other's arms from the mouths of opposing
howitzers in the air of Flanders. Goethe could write a romance on such a
theme.

Now the moment war broke out this source of supply was shut off to both
parties, for they blockaded each other. The British fleet closed up the
German ports while the German cruisers in the Pacific took up a position
off the coast of Chile in order to intercept the ships carrying nitrates
to England and France. The Panama Canal, designed to afford relief in
such an emergency, caved in most inopportunely. The British sent a fleet
to the Pacific to clear the nitrate route, but it was outranged and
defeated on November 1, 1914. Then a stronger British fleet was sent
out and smashed the Germans off the Falkland Islands on December 8. But
for seven weeks the nitrate route had been closed while the chemical
reactions on the Marne and Yser were decomposing nitrogen-compounds at
an unheard of rate.