You knew the flagship by the admirals’ barges astern, as you know the location of an army headquarters by its motor-cars.  It seemed in the centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression.  Where its place would be in action is one of those secrets as important to the enemy as the location of a general’s shell-proof shelter in Flanders.  Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe may be on some other ship in battle.  If there is any one foolish question which you should not ask it is this.

As you mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought you were bound to think—­at least, an American was—­of another flagship in Portsmouth harbour, Nelson’s Victory.  Probably an Englishman would not indulge in such a commonplace.  I would like to know how many Englishmen had ever seen the old Victory.  But then, how many Americans have been to Mount Vernon and Gettysburg?

It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a first-class naval war.  Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave any fighting to be done by his successors.  Maintaining herself as mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength—­except in the late ’fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France a temporary lead on paper—­ship after ship, through all the grades of progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without firing a shot in anger.  The Victory was one landmark, or seamark, if you please, and this flagship was another.  Between the two were generations of officers and men, working through the change from stagecoach to motors and aeroplanes and seaplanes, who had kept up to a standard of efficiency in view of a test that never came.  A year of war and still the test had not come, for the old reason that England had superior strength.  Her outnumbering guns which had kept the peace of the seas still kept it.  All second nature to the Englishman this, as the defence of the immense distances of the steppes to the Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall and the Mississippi’s flow to the man in Kansas.  But the American kept thinking about it; and he wanted the Kansans to think about it, too.  When he was about to meet Sir John Jellicoe he envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar Square, surmounted by the one-armed figure turned toward the wireless skein on top of the Admiralty building.

I first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago when he was Chief of Staff to Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Squadron.  Indeed, you were always hearing about Jellicoe in those days on the China coast.  He was the kind of man whom people talk about after they have met him, which means personality.  It was in China seas, you may remember, that when a few British seamen were hard pressed in a fight that was not ours the phrase, “Blood is thicker than water,” sprang from the lips of an American commander, who waited not on international etiquette but went to the assistance of the British.