(Why! Send for Jephthah!) “And Jephthah said unto the elders of Gilead” (who came supplicating, asking him to come back as their captain) “Did ye not hate me and expel me? And why are ye come unto me now when ye are in distress?” And the elders of Gilead said unto Jephthah: “We turn again to thee now, that thou mayest go with us and fight!” By Sea, when the German Fleet took the German Army to Riga, we had a wonderful sure certainty of destroying the German Fleet and the Kiel Canal, but we let it slip because there were risks. (As if war could be conducted without risks!) Considered Rashness in war is Prudence, and Prudence in war is usually a synonym for imbecility! Observe the Mediterranean! The whole Sea Power of France and Italy is collected in the Mediterranean to fight the puny Austrian Fleet, but they haven’t fought it. Not only that, but hundreds of vessels of the English Navy are perforce out in the Mediterranean to aid them; and yet the German ships, “Goeben” and “Breslau,” known to be fast, powerful and efficient, emerge from the Dardanelles with impunity and massacre two of our Monitors--never meant to be out there and totally unfitted for such service--and two obsolete British Destroyers have to put up a fight! But God intervened and sent the “Goeben” and “Breslau” on top of mines. It was thus the act of God and not the act of our Sea Fools that kept these two powerful German ships from going to the coast of Syria, where they would have played Hell with Allenby and our Palestine Army. We have pandered to our Allies from the very beginning of the War, and yet practically we find most of the money and have found four million soldiers, and a thousand millions sterling lent to Russia have been lent in vain. You know as well as I do that our Expeditionary Force should have been sent in August, 1914, to Antwerp and not to France; we should then have held the Belgian Coast and the Scheldt, but this was too tame--we were all singing: “Malbrook s’en va-t’en guerre!” The Baltic Project was scoffed at, though it had the impregnable sanction of Frederick the Great, and the project was turned down in November, 1914; and now the Germans, because of their possession of the Baltic as a German lake, are going to annex all the Islands they want that command Russia and Sweden, and the Russian Fleet, with its splendid “Dreadnoughts” and Destroyers disappear and eight British Submarines have been sunk. Ichabod! Yours truly, FISHER. THE GERMAN SUBMARINE MENACE. _Lord Fisher to a Friend._ _March 2nd, 1918._ MY DEAR “MR. FAITHFUL,”