"One may judge of these North Sea activities from the record of a single lieutenant of the Naval Reserve who, besides attending to other matters, destroyed forty or fifty mines, twice drove off an inquisitive German Taube, attacked an equally inquisitive Zeppelin, twice rescued a British seaplane and towed it into safety; rescued in June the crew of a torpedoed trawler, sixteen men, also the crew of a sunk fishing vessel; in July assisted two steamers that had been mined, saving twenty-four of the sailors; in September assisted another steamer, rescued three men from a mined trawler, towed a disabled Dutch steamer and assisted in rescuing the passengers; in November assisted a Norwegian steamer, rescued twenty-four men, and also a Greek steamer which had been torpedoed and rescued forty.
"Some day it will all be chronicled, and not the least fascinating record will be that of men who, perhaps, never fired a shot but enlarged their vision of the recesses of the enemy mind in other ways and met his craft by deeper craft, or navigated African rivers, fringed by desolate mangrove swamps, in gunboats, or hammered down the Mediterranean in East Coast trawlers, boys on their first command, or saw with their own eyes things they had believed to be fables.
"'We travel about 1000 miles a week, most of it in practically unknown seas, full of uncharted coral reefs, rocks, islands, whose existence even is unknown. And by way of making things still more difficult we keep meeting floating islands.
"'I always thought these things were merely yarns out of boys' adventure books. However, I have seen five, the largest about the size of a football field. They are covered with trees and palms, some of them with ripe bananas on them. They get torn away from the swampy parts of the mainland by the typhoons, which are very frequent at this time of year.'
"The story of these things cannot be written here; it will fill many volumes. Here an attempt has been made to sketch merely in its broadest outlines some of the activities of British sailors during the greatest of wars. Whatever the future historian will say of the part they bore he will not minimize it, for on this pivot the whole matter turned, on this axis the great circle of the war revolved. He will affirm that, though in respect of numbers almost negligible compared with the soldiers who fought in the long series of land battles, the sailors held the central avenues, the citadel of power.
"If it be possible in a single paragraph, let us set before our eyes the work of the British navy and its auxiliaries during these loud and angry years. Let us first recall the fact, that, besides the protection of Britain and her dependencies from invasion, together with the preservation of her overseas trade, to the navy was intrusted a duty it has fulfilled with equal success, the protection of the coasts of France from naval bombardment or attack—no slight service to Britain's gallant ally. Behind this barrier of the British fleet, she continued to arm and munition her armies undisturbed. Recall, too, the French colonial armies as well as our own overseas troops, escorted to the various seats of war—more than seven million men—the vital communications of the Allies, north and south, secured; the supplies and munitions—seven million tons—carried overseas; 1,250,000 horses and mules embarked, carried and disembarked; the left wing of the Belgian force supported in Flanders by bombardment; the Serbian army transferred to a new zone of war; and last, if we may call last what is really first and the mastering cause of all the rest, Germany's immense navy fettered in her ports. Bring also to mind that fifty or sixty of her finest war vessels have been destroyed, besides many Austrian and Turkish; five or six million tons of the enemy's mercantile marine captured or driven to rust in harbor; her trade ruined, a strict blockade of her ports established which impoverishes day by day her industrial and fighting strength; hundreds of thousands of Germans overseas prevented from joining her armies; her wireless and coaling stations over all the world and her colonial empire, that ambitious and costly fabric of her dreams, cut off from the Fatherland and brought helplessly to the ground.
"When all this has been passed in review dwell for a moment on the matter reversed—but for the British fleet Germany's will would now be absolute, her emperor the master of the world."
"I KNEW YOU WOULD COME"
We are all very proud that America was permitted to have a share in the holiest defensive war ever known. Then let us also remember that our share in it was largely made possible by England. While we hesitated, considered, debated, who was it that maintained the freedom of the seas and kept inviolate our coasts? The great, gallant, modest navy of Great Britain.