Land-power, too!  On the continent vast armies wrestled for some square miles of earth.  France has, say, three million soldiers; Germany, five; Austria, four—­and England had, perhaps, a hundred thousand men, perhaps more, on board this fleet which defended the English land and lands far overseas without firing a shot.  A battalion of infantry is more than sufficient in numbers to man a Dreadnought.  How precious, then, the skill of that crew!  Man-power is as concentrated as gun-power with a navy.  Ride three hundred miles in a motor-car along an army front, with glimpses of units of soldiers, and you have seen little of a modern army.  Here, moving down the lanes that separated these grey fighters, one could compass the whole!

Four gold letters, spelling the word Lion, awakened the imagination to the actual fact of the Bluecher turning her bottom skyward before she sank off the Dogger Bank under the fire of the guns of the Lion and the Tiger astern of her, and the Princess Royal and the New Zealand, of the latest fashion in battle-cruiser squadrons which are known as the “cat” squadron.  This work brought them into their own; proved how the British, who built the first Dreadnought, have kept a little ahead of their rivals in construction.  With almost the gun-power of Dreadnoughts, better than three to two against the best battleships, with the speed of cruisers and capable of overpowering cruisers, or of pursuing any battleship, or getting out of range, they can run or strike, as they please.

Ascend that gangway, so amazingly clean, as were the decks above and below and everything about the Lion or the Tiger, and you were on board one of the few major ships which had been under heavy fire.  Her officers and men knew what modern naval war was like; her guns knew the difference between the wall of cloth of a towed target and an enemy’s wall of armour.

In the battle of Tsushima Straits, Russian and Japanese ships had fought at three and four thousand yards and closed into much shorter range.  Since then, we had had the new method of marksmanship.  Tsushima ceased to be a criterion.  The Dogger Bank multiplied the range by five.  A hundred years since England, all the while the most powerfully armed nation at sea, had been in a naval war of the first magnitude; and to the Lion and the Tiger had come the test.  The Germans said that they had sunk the Tiger; but the Tiger afloat purred a contented denial.

You could not fail to identify among the group of officers on the quarter-deck Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, for his victory had impressed his features on the public’s eye.  Had his portrait not appeared in the press, one would have been inclined to say that a first lieutenant had put on a vice-admiral’s coat by mistake.  He was about the age of the first lieutenant of one of our battleships.  Even as it was, one was inclined to exclaim:  “There is some mistake!  You are too young!” The Who is Who book says that he is all of forty-four years old and it must be right, though it disagrees with his appearance by five years.