America Fallen!. John Bernard Walker

was found that each of the three ships of the Imperator class could carry 10,000 troops with their full equipment.

      The work of transforming the liners that had been interned in the United States began on the day they left New York, and they were stripped and ready for the shipyard workmen by the time, seven days later, they reached the home ports. With such efficiency and dispatch was this work carried through that the second expeditionary force of 50,000 men was embarked and had sailed on or before the 28th of March. The transports carrying this force were vessels of from 20 to 23 knots' speed. Some of them sailed boldly on advertised schedules, direct for New York; the rest slipped away by night, adopting the same ruses and secrecy as the transports of the first expedition. They ​sailed at intervals during the last two weeks of March, and the rate of steaming was so adjusted as to bring the whole expedition to New York, Boston, and Washington between the 1st and 3d of April.

      The third army of 130,000 men, in transports of from 14 to 19 knots' speed set sail on April 1st, the faster ships of the George Washington and America type pushing on with all speed, and the slower ships proceeding as a fleet under convoy of the ten battleships of the Wittlesbach and Kaiser Wilhelm II. classes.

      And so it came about that, by employing the full force of every naval and private shipyard in the country, Germany, within the month, had embarked upon the seas an army of invasion composed of 200,000 of the picked veteran troops of the war, completely equipped with artillery, transport, and supplies.

      And, thanks to the tightening of the ​censorship and the patriotic silence of the shipyard employees, not a whisper of what was going on escaped to the outside world, until on April 1st the third expeditionary force, convoyed by battleships, steamed boldly out into the North Sea and laid its course by way of the English Channel for the coasts of America.