"Perhaps you are right," said the victor of the Battle of the Falklands thoughtfully, "but you must not lose sight of the fact that to win this victory over the German the British sailor has had to win an even more remarkable victory over himself. At the outbreak of the war I had every confidence that, in one way or another, we would be able to establish a control of the sea quite as complete as that which we actually have established; but, if any one could have assured me that the foundations of that control would have to rest upon the Grand Fleet being based in this isolated harbour, with the men practically cut off from intercourse with the world for months at a time, I must confess that I might have been--well, somewhat less sure, to say the least. Certainly I would never have dared more than to hope that the moral of the men of the Fleet, far from being lowered by the most trying experience of the kind sailors have ever been called upon to endure, would actually be heightened. On the score of enthusiasm and 'lust for battle,' there could not, of course, have been any improvement, but this has given way to a cheerful, high-spirited willingness which, if possible, makes the Fleet a more efficient fighting unit with every day that passes. If you will observe well the spirit of the men of the Grand Fleet at a time when the German Fleet--based though it is in the Kiel Canal, where regular shore-leave is easy to arrange--is filled with unrest and threatened with mutiny, I think you will agree with me the keeping of the British sailor in a healthy state of mind and body, without once letting him verge on 'staleness,' is worthy to rank as an achievement with that of keeping the enemy off the seas." Evidence of the high spirits of the men of the Grand Fleet I had been having from the moment I sighted the first car-load of returning-from-leave sailors on my journey up from London, but the occasion on which I was the most impressed was the morning on which I was allowed the honour of helping to coal ship by wheeling 2-cwt. sacks on a barrow for a couple of hours, an experience the memory of which promises long to outlast even the not unlingering stiffness of my dorsal muscles. The ship had not been ordered, and was not expecting to be ordered to sea, and there was no reason to rush the coaling save to be free to take up some other of the regular grind of routine drudgery next in order. I have watched warships coaling in many ports of the world, but never have I seen men working under the stimulus of extra shore-leave at Gibraltar, Nagasaki, or Valparaiso get the stuff into bunkers faster than did those lusty men of the good old "X----" that misty morning in Scapa Flow. Almost every man who was not smoking was singing, and even out of the dust-choked inferno of the collier's holds, the beat of a chesty chorus welled up in the pauses of the grinding winches.