My answer is that the sea is a giant that refreshes itself, and that your Nelson is proof against his routine, master of his groove. The long duel with the submarine is in itself evidence of the adaptability of our seamen. Where we have failed is not on the sea but in the dim region behind the sea, where the word of the sailor is no longer dominant and where other forces and factors interlock and interplay. Many and manifold are the uses of sea-power ; many and manifold also are its abuses. And it is one of the qualities of sea-power that it is inarticulate, not given to polemics or dialectics or rhetoric or oratory, a thing of profound instinct and intuition, a product of the genius of race. Napoleon never understood sea-power as the German Emperor and Admiral von Tirpitz have learned to understand it, after much patient poring over the writings of Mahan. In all humility we ought not to be surprised that some of our own great ones have been and perhaps still are in the same state of pupilage as Napoleon. But war is a schoolmaster whose lessons are learned in due time by the most backward scholars. There is a music-hall song sung in these stern days by some witless buffoon, " If you don't want to fight, join the Navy." As if the locker of Davy Jones were not fat with the valour of our seamen and our fishermen ! In the bitterness of his soul a Super-Dreadnought captain said to me, " After the war I'll not be able to walk down Piccadilly without being hissed." These are extravagances of hyperbole, but they are a reflection of the folly that asks, " What is the Navy doing ? ' When I hear that fatuous question I retort, ' What on earth and what on the sea is the Navy not doing ? ' It is keeping the ring for all the armies of all the Allies, and it is waiting for the last great sea-fight of Armageddon, the fight that is bound to come. " They were dull, weary, eventless months, those months of watching and waiting of the big ships. Purposeless they surely seemed to many, but they saved England. Those far distant storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world." A greater army than the Grand Army, led by chieftains hardly less renowned than Napoleon, is battering, as I write, at the gates of the Channel Ports. Whatever may befall, we know in our bones that these admirals of ours and their seamen stand between the Emperor Wilhelm and his imperial dream of world tyranny. Sir David Beatty sitting in his deck-chair is a living symbol of sea-power, and the armchair pessimist may well emulate his nonchalant vigilance, noting the wicked twinkle in his humorous eye and the sardonic curl of his sailor-mouth. The Kaiser has chosen to sup with the sea-devil, and he has need of a very long spoon before he sees his supper, which happens to be our freedom and the freedom of all free men. JAMES DOUGLAS.
