“Of course we could not take our colours into action,” said Niven. “They would have been torn into tatters or buried in a shell crater. But we’ve always kept them up at battalion headquarters. I believe we are the only battalion that has. We promised the Princess that we would.” In her honour an old custom has been renewed in France: knights are fighting in the name of a fair lady. XXVI FINDING THE BRITISH FLEET The Briton’s island instinct--Secrecy surrounding the fleet--The magic message--The journey--A night drive along the bleak coast of Scotland--Boy scouts as sentries--An obdurate guard--The navy yard--The Admiral’s “quarter deck”--The largest contract in all England--Great dry docks--Patriots in workmen’s clothes. The Briton’s national self-consciousness is surrounded by salt water. His island instinct is only another word for sea instinct. Ebb and flow of war on the Continent, play of party politics at home, optimism and pessimism wrestling in the press--in the back of his head he was thinking of the navy. During the first year of the war all other curtains of military secrecy were parted at intervals; but the world of British naval operations seemed hermetically sealed. One could only imagine what the Grand Fleet was like. He had despaired of ever seeing it in the life, when good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the burrowing army in its trenches to the solid decks of battleships; which changed the war correspondent’s modern steed, the automobile, trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy seas off English coasts. But not all the journeying was on destroyers. One must travel by car also if he would know something of the intricate, busy world of the Admiralty’s work, which makes coastguards a part of its personnel. There was more than ships to see; more than one place to go in that wonderful week. The transition is less sudden if we begin with the career of an open car along the coast of Scotland in the night. Dusk had fallen on the purple cloud-lands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing sheep in the Scotch highlands under changing skies, with headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea, forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their “bonnie Scotland forever,” were worthy to be masters of that sea.