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the Waldorf Astoria, stepped up to the elevator, and directed the startled operator to stop at a high floor. They got off, walked to the opposite end of the hotel, found another bank of elevators, and returned to the lobby, then exited through a side door.
    After a brief walk along Fifth Avenue, they caught a city bus and rode it uptown to House’s building. As exhilarating as this escape may have been, it was no cure for Wilson’s malaise. On their return, Wilson confessed to House that as they were out walking he had found himself wishing that someone would kill him.
    In the midst of this darkness, Wilson still managed to see America as the world’s last great hope. “We are at peace with all the world,” he said in December 1914 in his annual address to Congress. In January, he dispatched Colonel House on an unofficialmission to Europe to attempt to discover the conditions under which the Allies and the Central Powers might be willing to begin peace negotiations.
    House booked passage on the largest, fastest passenger ship then in service, the
Lusitania
, and traveled under a false name.On entering waters off Ireland, the ship’s then-captain, Daniel Dow, following a tradition accepted in times of war, raised an American flag as a
ruse de guerre
to protect the ship from attack by German submarines. The act startled House and caused a sensation aboard, but as a means of disguise it had questionable value: America did not operate any liners of that size, with that distinctive four-funnel silhouette.
    The incident highlighted the press of forces threatening to undermine American neutrality. The battles in Europe posed no great worry, with the United States so distant and secure within its oceanic moat. It was Germany’s new and aggressive submarine war that posed the greatest danger.
    A T THE beginning of the war, neither Germany nor Britain understood the true nature of the submarine or realized that it might produce what Churchill called “this strange form of warfare hitherto unknown to human experience.”
    Only a few prescient souls seemed to grasp that the design of the submarine would force a transformation in naval strategy. One of these was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, a year and a half before the war, wrote a short story (not published until July 1914) in which he envisioned a conflict between England and a fictional country, Norland, “one of the smallest Powers in Europe.” In the story, entitled “Danger!,” Norland at first seems hopelessly overmatched, but the little country has a secret weapon—a fleet of eight submarines, which it deploys off the coast of England to attack incoming merchant ships, both cargo and passenger. At the time Doyle conceived his plot, submarines did exist, but British and German naval commanders saw them as having little value.Norland’s submarines, however, bring England to the verge of starvation. At one point, without warning, the commander of the submarine fleet, Capt. John Sirius, uses a single torpedo to sink a White Star passenger liner, the
Olympic
. England eventually surrenders. Readers found that last attack particularly shocking because the
Olympic
was a real ship. Its twin had been the
Titanic
, lost well before Doyle wrote his story.
    Intended to sound the alarm and raise England’s level of naval preparedness, the story was entertaining, and frightening, but was widely deemed too far-fetched to be believable, for Captain Sirius’s behavior would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a “prize court” would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels.
    In the story, Doyle’s narrator dismisses as a delusion England’s