Frau von Pohl tells us the Germans did expect us so to strike, but Nelson was in heaven (Dear Reader, look again at what Frau von Pohl said, you’ll find it in Chapter III.). On one occasion I got into a most unpleasant atmosphere. I arrived at a country house late at night, and at breakfast in the morning, I not knowing who the guests were, a Cabinet Minister enunciated the proposition that sea and land war were both in principle and practice alike. At once getting up from the breakfast table, in the heat of the moment, and not knowing that distinguished military officers were there, I said, “Any silly ass could be a General.” I graphically illustrated my meaning. I gave the contrast between a sea and a land battle. The General is somewhere behind the fighting line, or he ought to be. The Admiral has got to be _in_ the fighting line, or he ought to be. The Admiral is indeed like the young Subaltern, he is often the first “Over the top.” The General, at a telescopic distance from the battle scene and surrounded by his Kitcheners, and his Ludendorffs, and his Gross von Schwartzhoffs, has plenty of time for the “Clear thinking” _à la_ Lord Haldane; and then, acting on the advice of those surrounding him, he takes his measures. So far as I can make out from the Ludendorff extracts in _The Times_, Hindenburg, the Generalissimo, was clearly not in it. He was “the silly ass”! Ludendorff did it all as Chief of the Staff. Now what’s the corresponding case at sea? The smoke of the enemy, not even the tops of his funnels, can be seen on the horizon. (I proved this myself with the great Mediterranean fleet divided into two portions.) Within twenty minutes the action is decided! Realise this--it takes some minutes for the Admiral to get his breeches on, to get on deck and take in the situation; and it takes a good many more minutes to deploy the Fleet from its Cruising Disposition into its Fighting Disposition. In the Cruising Disposition his guns are masked, one ship interfering with the fire of another. The Fleet for Battle has to be so disposed that all the guns, or as many as possible, can concentrate on one or a portion of the enemy’s fleet. Each fleet pushes on at its utmost speed _to meet the other_, hoping to catch the other undeployed. Every telescope in the fleet (and there are myriads) is looking at the Admiral as he goes to the topmost and best vantage spot on board his flag ship to see the enemy, and sees him alone outlined against the sky--neither time nor room for a staff around him, and if there were they’d say, “It’s not the Admiral who is doing it,” and be demoralized accordingly--fatal to victory. In the fleet the Admiral’s got to be like Nelson--“the personal touch” so that “_any silly ass can’t be an Admiral_”; and the people of the Fleet watch him with unutterable suspense to see what signal goes up to alter the formation of the fleet--a formation on which depends Victory or Defeat. So it