Before we enter into the main purpose of this book, in which we shall discover in several theatres of war the real nature of sea-power, as well as the character and momentous consequences of the antagonism which grew up between England and Germany, we may inquire what services could in reason have been expected from the Navy in the great cataclysm which was about to sweep with destruction over the nations. It would not have been expected to fight a battle every month or even every year, for battles are rare events in naval history. It would not have been expected to attack fortified coasts, though it might do so on occasions, because ships are designed and built to fight at sea. The Navy would not have been expected to forestall every untoward incident. Fish often slip through the net, as raiders have slipped through our guard in this and other wars. Nor, in these days of the stealthy submarine and the blind death-dealing mine, could the Fleet have been expected to remain immune from every misfortune. No one could have expected the Navy to devise a single conclusive defence against the attack of the submarine, any more than it was asked to find an infallible remedy for the effects of gunfire. What we should have expected was that it would make the sea again the protecting wall, as Shakespeare says, of the British Isles, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands. We should have expected it to safeguard the incoming of the supplies without which neither the people nor their industries could exist—to be the panoply of all trade and interests afloat, whether in the nature of imports or exports. We should have expected it to deny all external activity to the enemy at sea—we might not have anticipated the advent of the submarine as a pirate commerce-destroyer—to shut off his sea-borne supplies, and to exert that noiseless pressure on the vitals of the adversary of which Admiral Mahan speaks—“that compulsion, whose silence, when once noted, becomes to the observer the most striking and awful mark of the working of sea-power.” We should have expected the Navy to become the support, in thrust and holding, of the armies in the field—the shaft to their spearhead; their flank and rearguard also. Inasmuch as the war is world-wide, and we have powerful Allies, we should have expected naval influence and pressure to be manifested in the oceans, in the Mediterranean, and, indeed, wherever the enemy is and the seas are. Finally, we should have expected the Navy to be to the British Empire what it has always been to the Empire’s heart—its safeguard from injury and disruption, and the bond that holds it together. Each one of these functions has been executed by in Navy with triumphant success in the war, and history would show that it is executing them now as the Sea Service has accomplished them in all the wars of the past. CHAPTER II THE CENTRE OF SEA-POWER[A]