This had not only compelled an immediate response in every navy throughout the world, but had once more secured for us the margin of vital security that had seriously been encroached upon before these reforms were initiated. That in spite of changes of Government and the natural reluctance of the nation, in view of social necessities, to increase its naval expenditure, Lord Fisher had succeeded in carrying through his programme, was the best evidence of his strength; and men of all parties had become increasingly united in endorsing the general wisdom of his attitude.
So swift, even since then, however, had been the advance in naval construction that, when Sir John Jellicoe stepped on board the Iron Duke, the first of the dreadnoughts was almost obsolete. Itself since outstripped by the ships of the Queen Elizabeth class, when war was declared on August 4th, the Iron Duke, as regarded battleships, was perhaps the flower of the British Navy. In full commission displacing 27,000 tons, and costing more than £2,000,000 to build, she had attained on trial, in spite of her enormous armament, a speed of no less than 22 knots. Each of her large guns, of which she carried ten, so arranged as to be able to fire on each broadside, was capable of hurling a shell from twenty to twenty-five miles, during which it would rise far higher than Mont Blanc; and, besides these, she had a dozen 6-inch guns with which to repel possible destroyer attacks. Her armour at the water-line was twelve inches thick; she was fitted with four submerged torpedo-tubes, and carried on board three thousand tons of fuel and a complement of over a thousand officers and men.
No less powerful, though not so heavily armoured, and capable of a speed when pressed, of about thirty knots an hour, was the Lion, the flagship of the battle-cruisers, of whom Sir David Beatty was in command. She, too, carried ten 13.5-inch guns, with sixteen smaller quick-firing guns, and two submerged torpedo-tubes. Typical of yet another class was the since famous Arethusa flying the pennant of Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt, as he then was—a light armoured cruiser, or, in Mr. Churchill's phrase, "a destroyer of destroyers," displacing a little less than 4,000 tons, but capable of a speed, when pressed, approaching forty knots. Lastly should be mentioned the L class, then the latest of our destroyers, consuming oil fuel only—those antennæ of the Fleet, as fast as an express train, and the very incarnation of vigilance and daring.
Such then was the navy in which on August 3d, speaking in that breathless House of Commons, Sir Edward Grey had said that those responsible for it had the completest confidence. To it had been added, on the outbreak of war, a couple of battleships that had just been completed for Turkey and two destroyer-leaders, built for Chile, that had been purchased from her by arrangement. As the child of the cockle-ships that Alfred had beaten the Danes with, that had won the Battle of Sluys for Edward III; as the offspring of the fleets of Drake or even of Nelson, its least unit would have defied belief. But it was of the same family, legitimately descended, and with the old names scattered amongst its children. Bellerophon, St. George, Téméraire, its history was implicit in its roll call; while the dead animals stood re-invoked upon the prows that bore their legends. Collingwood, Benbow, St. Vincent; Albemarle, Cochrane, Hawke—they were at war for England if only as words. But did they live again in the men that hailed them? Well, the nation believed so, and, in that dark hour, this was the sheet-anchor of its hope. In the words of the King to Sir John Jellicoe, it sent them the full assurance of its confidence that they would "prove once again the true shield of Britain and of her Empire in the hour of trial."
CHAPTER II
THE BATTLE OF THE BIGHT
In his speech of August 3d in the House of Commons, Sir Edward Grey told his listeners that we had incurred no obligations to help France either by land or sea. In view not less, however, of the increasing difficulties of our diplomatic relations with Germany than of the spontaneous friendship that had been growing between ourselves and our French neighbours, the question of coöperation with the latter, in certain eventualities, had inevitably arisen and been discussed. It had also been pointed out that unless some conversations were to take place between the naval and military experts of both countries—unless some definite lines were laid down as to the methods by which each country was to help the other—such coöperation, even if desired, would almost certainly be fruitless. At the same time, in a letter written on November 22, 1912, to the French ambassador, Sir Edward Grey had made it clear that these discussions between their respective experts did not commit either Government to a specified course of action "in a contingency which has not yet arisen and may never arise."