Four gold letters, spelling the word Lion, awakened the imagination to the concrete of the _Blücher_ turning her bottom skyward before she sank off the Dogger Bank under the fire of the guns of the _Lion_ and of the _Tiger_, astern of her, and the _Princess Royal_ and the _New Zealand_, of the latest fashion in battle-cruiser squadrons which are known as the “cat” squadron. This work brought them into their own; proved how the British, who built the first Dreadnought, have kept a little ahead of their rivals in construction. With almost the gun-power of Dreadnoughts, better than three to two against the best battleships, with the speed of cruisers and capable of overwhelming cruisers, or of pursuing any battleship, or getting out of range, they can run or strike, as they please. Ascend that gangway, so amazingly clean, as were the decks above and below and everything about the _Lion_ or the _Tiger_, and you were on board one of the few major ships which had been under heavy fire. Her officers and men knew what modern naval war was like; her guns knew the difference between the wall of cloth of a towed target and an enemy’s wall of armour. In the battle of Tsushima Straits battleships had fought at three and four thousand yards and closed into much shorter range. Since then, we had had the new method of marksmanship. Tsushima ceased to be a criterion. The Dogger Bank multiplied the range by five. A hundred years since England, all the while the most powerfully armed nation at sea, had been in a naval war of the first magnitude; and to the _Lion_ and the _Tiger_ had come the test. The Germans said that they had sunk the _Tiger_; but the _Tiger_ afloat purred a contented denial. One could not fail to identify among the group of officers on the quarter-deck Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, for his victory had impressed his features on the public’s eye. Had his portrait not appeared in the press, one would have been inclined to say that a first lieutenant had put on a vice-admiral’s coat by mistake. He was about the age of the first lieutenant of our own battleships. Even as it was, one was inclined to exclaim: “There is some mistake! You are too young!” The Who is Who book says that he is all of forty-four years old and it must be right, though it disagrees with his appearance by five years. A vice-admiral at forty-four! A man who is a rear-admiral with us at fifty-five is very precocious. And all the men around him were young. The British navy did not wait for war to teach again the lesson of “youth for action!” It saved time by putting youth in charge at once. Their simple uniforms, the directness, alertness, and definiteness of these officers, who had been with a fleet ready for a year to go into battle on a minute’s notice, was in keeping with their surroundings of decks cleared for action and the absence of anything which did not suggest that hitting a target was the business of their life.