These complaints are not justified. Those who make them have failed to realise the deadly earnestness of the struggle we are carrying on. It is hard on the patriotic student of war that we should go short of facts, and hard on the anxious that they should lack encouraging information; but how much harder would it be for our seamen and submarine crews, if the secret of their tactics were given away to an enemy only too quick to take advantage of what he can succeed in overhearing? When one interesting paragraph in a newspaper may possibly mean the sacrifice of many lives, what statesman or staff officer would take the responsibility of passing it for publication? But the secrets of the Admiralty in this war have not been timidly or unintelligently kept. In spite of the tradition of ‘the Silent Service’--which only means that ‘the Navy doesn’t advertise’--there is no general feeling against telling the truth and the whole truth, when it can be done to the advantage of the country. Those in power have been for the most part in favour of ‘taking the lid off’ when the right time has come; and in this very matter of the mysterious honours, it was the First Lord himself who at last told the public what could no longer be valuable information for the enemy. So long as the use of disguised Special Service ships, or Q-boats, was a new method, indispensable to us and unsuspected by the Germans, or at least unfamiliar to them, so long was it highly undesirable that we should speak or write publicly of their successes. But now that after many losses, and some escapes, from Q-boats, the enemy’s submarine service has found out all their secrets, our own Navy has naturally ceased to rely on this kind of surprise, and has invented new devices, even more deadly and more difficult to evade. Of these we are, very reasonably, forbidden to write; but of the old and well-known hunting methods--of the work of destroyers, patrol-boats, trawlers, submarines, aircraft and Q-boats--we may now give illustrations; for we shall be telling nothing that the enemy does not know to his cost already. The very name, Q-boat, is as familiar in Germany as in this country. The submarine which escaped from the _Dunraven_ carried away a very complete understanding of the work of these Special Service ships, and the _Illustrierte Zeitung_ of July 12, 1917, contained a full description of a fight between a U-boat and a ‘submarine trap,’ which took place on February 22 of that year.