In the battle of Tsushima Straits, Russian and Japanese ships 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. You 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 one of our 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!" They 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. "I had heard that you took your admirals from the schoolroom," said one of the Frenchmen, "but I begin to believe that it is the nursery." Night and day they must be on watch. No easy chairs; their shop is their home. They must have the vitality that endures a strain. One error in battle by any one of them might wreck the British Empire. It is difficult to write about any man-of-war and not be technical; for everything about her seems technical and mechanical except the fact that she floats. Her officers and crew are engaged in work which is legerdemain to the civilian. "Was it like what you thought it would be after all your training for a naval action?" one asked. "Yes, quite; pretty much as we reasoned it out," was the reply. "Indeed, this was the most remarkable thing. It was battle practice-- with the other fellow shooting at you!" The fire-control officers, who were aloft, all agreed about one unexpected sensation, which had not occurred to any expert scientifically predicting what action would be like. They are the only ones who may really "see" the battle in the full sense.