Submarine and Anti-submarine

Transcriber’s Note: The cover of this eBook was created by the Transcriber by adding text to the Frontispiece of the original book. The cover and added text are in the Public Domain.
“Whose crew abandoned ship and then all stood up and cursed us.”
BY HENRY NEWBOLT
AUTHOR OF ‘THE BOOK OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR,’ ‘TALES OF THE GREAT WAR,’ ETC.
WITH A COLOURED FRONTISPIECE AND 20 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY NORMAN WILKINSON, R.I.
NEW YORK: LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 1919
TO JOHN BUCHAN



It is probable that a good deal of the information contained in this book will be new to the public; for it has been collected under favour of exceptional circumstances. But the reader will gain little if he cannot contribute something on his side—if he cannot share with the writer certain fundamental beliefs. The first of these is that every nation has a spirit of its own—a spirit which is the mainspring of national action. It is more than a mechanical spring; for it not only supplies a motive force, but determines the moral character of the action which results. When we read the history of nations, and especially the history of their explorations, wars, and revolutions, we soon recognise the spirit of each, and learn to expect its appearance in every moment of crisis or endurance. If it duly appears, our impression is confirmed; if it fails on any occasion, we are disappointed. But the disappointments are few—nations may at times surprise us; but, as a rule, they are like themselves. Even when they develop and seem to change, they are apt, under the stress of action, to return to their aboriginal character, and to exhibit it in their old historic fashion. To attempt, then, to give an account of any national struggle, without paying attention to the influence of the characteristic spirit of the country or countries concerned, would be a difficult undertaking, and a mistaken one. Even in a short crisis, a great people will probably display its historic colours, and in a long one it certainly will. To ignore this, to describe national actions without giving a sense of the animating spirit, would be not only a tame and inadequate method; it would lower the value of life itself by making mere prose of what should, by right, partake of the nature of poetry. History cannot often be entirely poetical, or poetry entirely historical. When Homer told the tale of Troy, he did not make prose—or even history—of it. He everywhere infused into it ‘an incomparable ardour’—he made an epic. But Mr. Thomas Hardy wrote history in ‘The Dynasts,’ and made it an epic too. An epic—the common definition tells us—is ‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style.’ ‘The Dynasts’ certainly is that—the struggle is great, the issues are great, the men are great. Even more than their heroic fighting, their speech and manners in the moment of action are such as to show unfailingly by what a distinctive and ever-present spirit national life may be sustained and magnified.