A vice-admiral at forty-four!  A man who is a rear-admiral with us at fifty-five is very precocious.  And all the men around him were young.  The British navy did not wait for war to teach again the lesson of “youth for action!” They saved time by putting youth in charge at once.

Their simple uniforms, the directness, alertness, and definiteness of these officers who had been with a fleet ready for a year to go into battle on a minute’s notice, was in keeping with their surroundings of decks cleared for action and the absence of anything which did not suggest that hitting a target was the business of their life.

“I had heard that you took your admirals from the schoolroom,” said one of the Frenchmen, “but I begin to believe that it is the nursery.”

Night and day they must be on watch.  No easy chairs; their shop is their home.  They must have the vitality that endures a strain.  One error in battle by any one of them might wreck the British Empire.

It is difficult to write about any man-of-war and not be technical; for everything about her seems technical and mechanical except the fact that she floats.  Her officers and crew are engaged in work which is legerdemain to the civilian.

“Was it like what you thought it would be after all your training for a naval action?” one asked.

“Yes, quite; pretty much as we reasoned it out,” was the reply.  “Indeed, this was the most remarkable thing.  It was battle practice—­ with the other fellow shooting at you!”

The fire-control officers, who were aloft, all agreed about one unexpected sensation, which had not occurred to any expert scientifically predicting what action would be like.  They are the only ones who may really “see” the battle in the full sense.

“When the shells burst against the armour,” said one of these officers, “the fragments were visible as they flew about.  We had a desire, in the midst of preoccupation with our work, to reach out and catch them.  Singular mental phenomenon, wasn’t it?”

At eight or nine thousand yards one knew that the modern battleship could tear a target to pieces.  But eighteen thousand—­was accuracy possible at that distance?

“Did one in five German shells hit at that range?” I asked.

“No!”

Or in ten?  No!  In twenty?  Still no, though less decisively.  You got a conviction, then, that the day of holding your fire until you were close in enough for a large percentage of hits was past.  Accuracy was still vital and decisive, but generic accuracy.  At eighteen thousand yards all the factors which send a thousand or fifteen hundred or two thousand pounds of steel that long distance cannot be so gauged that each one will strike in exactly the same line when ten issue from the gun-muzzles in a broadside.  But if one out of twenty is on at eighteen thousand yards, it may mean a turret out of action.  Again, four or five might hit, or none.  So, no risk of waiting may be taken, in face of the danger of a chance shot at long range.  It was a chance shot which struck the Lion’s feed tank and disabled her and kept the cat squadron from doing to the other German cruisers what they had done to the Bluecher.