Some improvement was made in the six ships of the Danton class which were built in 1911 and 1912.  They displaced 18,000 tons, had armor from 9 to 12 inches thick and carried guns of 12-inch caliber.  They correspond to the British ship Temeraire.  In 1913 and 1914 were launched the Jean Bart, Courbet, Paris, and France of the dreadnought type, but much slower and not so heavily armed as the British ships of the same class.  In eight ships which were incomplete when war was declared the matter of speed received greater attention, and they are consequently faster than the older vessels of the same type.  It is in the nineteen French armored cruisers—­France has no battle cruisers—­that the French showed better efforts as builders of speedy ships, for they made 23 knots or more.  In the list of French fighting ships there are in addition two protected cruisers, the D’Entrecasteaux and the Guichen, together with ten light cruisers.  But the French “mosquito fleet,” consisting of destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines, is comparatively large.  Of these she had 84, 135, and 78, respectively.

After the Russo-Japanese War the battle fleets of Russia were entirely dissipated, so that when the present conflict came she had no ships which might have been accounted worthy aids to the navies of England and France.  In so far as is known, her heaviest ships were the Andrei Pervozvannyi and the Imperator Pavel I, each displacing only 17,200 tons, and of the design of 1911.

Against these fighting naval forces of the allied powers were ranged the navies of Germany and Austria-Hungary.  The former had, at the outbreak of hostilities, 36 battleships, 5 battle cruisers, 9 armored cruisers, and 43 cruisers.  Instead of giving attention to torpedo boats she gave it to destroyers, of which she had 130.  And of submarines she had 27.

In detail her naval forces consisted, first, of the Kaiser Friedrich III, Kaiser Karl der Grosse, Kaiser Barbarossa, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, all built as a result of the first agitation of Von Tirpitz, between the years 1898 and 1901.  They each displaced 10,614 tons, had a speed of 18 knots, required 13,000 horsepower, were protected with from 10 to 12 inches of armor, and carried four 9.4-inch guns, fourteen of 5.9 inches, twelve of 3.4-inches, and twenty of smaller measurement.  Roughly they corresponded to the British ships of the Canopus class, both in design and time of launching.

Following this class came that of the Wittelsbach, including also the Wettin, Zaehringen, Mecklenburg, and Schwaben, built between 1901 and 1903, displacing 11,643 tons, making 18 knots, protected with from 9 to 10 inches of armor and carrying a primary battery of four 9.4-inch guns, eighteen 5.9-inch guns, and a large secondary battery.  The similar type in the British navy was the Canopus—­for England was far ahead of Germany, both in the matter of displacement and primary battery.  During the same years England had launched ships of the type of the Implacable.