When he turned up, he said it hadn’t been properly surveyed, and he believed it was called Scapa Flow! So up went a surveying ship about an hour afterwards, and discovered, though the current raged through the Pentland Firth at sometimes 14 knots, yet inside this huge secluded basin it was comparatively a stagnant pool! Wasn’t that another proof that we are the ten lost tribes of Israel? And the Fleet went there forty-eight hours before the War, and a German in the German Fleet wrote to his father to say how it had been intended to torpedo the British Fleet, but it had left unexpectedly sooner for this Northern “Unknown!” Also, he said in his letter that Jellicoe’s appointment as Admiralissimo was very painful to them as they knew of his extreme skill in the British Naval Manœuvres of 1913. Also, thirdly, he added to his Papa that it was a d--d nuisance we had bagged the two Turkish Dreadnoughts in the Tyne the very day they were ready to start, as they belonged to Germany! The mention of Jellicoe reminds me of Yamamoto saying to me that, just before their War with Russia, he had superseded a splendid Admiral loved by his Fleet, because Togo was “just a little better!!!” The superseded man was his own _protégé_, and Togo wasn’t. No wonder these Japanese fight! Prince Fushishima, the Mikado’s brother, told me of 4,000 of a special company of the bluest blood in Japan, of whom all except four were killed in action or died of wounds--only nine were invalided for sickness. However, I remarked to him we were braver than those 4,000 Japanese, because their religion is they go to Heaven if they die for their country, and we are not so sure! He agreed with me, and gave me a lovely present. A PRE-WAR PROPHECY. On December the 3rd, 1908, when I was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, I hazarded a prophecy (but, of course, I was only doing the obvious!) that should we be led by our anti-Democratic tendencies in High Places, and by Secret Treaties and by Compromising Attendances of Great Military Officers at the French Manœuvres at Nancy, into a sort of tacit pledge to France to land a British Army in France in a war against Germany, then would come the biggest blow to England she would ever have experienced--not a defeat, _because we never succumb_--but a deadly blow to our economic resources and by the relegation of the British Navy into a “Subsidiary Service.” I said in 1908 (and told King Edward so) that the German Emperor would, in such a case, order his generals “to fight neither with small nor great,” but only with the English and wipe them out! So has it come to pass, as regards the Emperor giving these orders and his having this desire!