Perhaps it might be only a few small ships that we could retain, but it would serve to keep traditions alive until we could again build up a fleet as great or even greater than the one we lost. Von Spee was a sailor's admiral. He was a seaman by temperament, open, honest, and jovial, uncomfortable on land and only himself when on the bridge of his flagship. Too many of our professional fighting men, I regret to say, were more ornamental than useful. They were good at wearing gold lace and that is about all. But not Von Spee. He was at his best on a quarter-deck in a storm. I still can see him pacing back and forth, with his bushy brows and piercing blue eyes. The day after he said _auf wiedersehen_ to us at Kiel, he and his officers and men left by transport for the Orient, there to relieve the officers and men aboard the cruisers of our small Pacific Squadron at Tsing Tao. What was to have been their two-year term overseas began as commonplace, quiet routine. It ended under the salvos of British guns off the Falkland Islands. Von Spee's plan, when the war caught him 15,000 miles from German waters, was to harass the Allies in the Pacific and then try to slip back through the North Sea to Kiel. Lady Luck smiled on him for a little while and then deserted him. After crossing the Pacific, he caught Craddock, the British admiral, off the coast of Chile. Von Spee's star was in its ascendancy at this time and Craddock's on the wane. A German secret agent in Chile flashed a wireless to Von Spee giving him the information that Craddock was waiting for the arrival of the big but old battleship _Canopus_ that was rounding the Horn. Without the _Canopus_, Craddock's forces were weaker than Von Spee's, and Von Spee instantly dashed to the attack so as to engage Craddock before the _Canopus_ came up. Craddock and his men met their fate like true British sailors. Outgunned, the British cruisers continued to fire until they sank. Only one, a small boat, got away. But their conqueror's days were numbered. Von Spee now began his long race toward Kiel. Only two routes were possible, one by Cape Horn and the other by the Cape of Good Hope. Of course, he knew the British would be laying for him at both places. He knew also that they would be after him with swifter and more powerful ships than his own. His one chance was to beat them to Cape Horn, lose himself in the broad Atlantic, make a run for it, and probably fight his way through the blockade. By now he was short of both munitions and coal. A wireless from Germany brought the good news that a supply ship had slipped through the blockade and was now on its way out to meet him. What a tremendous voyage he might now have made! What a hair-raising dash at the Allied blockade line he might have made! But he never got the chance.