The receipt of the news on the western front is reported to have been beneficial. Every fighting force must occasionally have its dark days; they are never so dark that news of success on another front will fail to bring a ray of light. Those of us in the fleet itself had often experienced such feelings of elation when our military brothers had brought off a "coup." The Navy and Army, and the Air Force with them, are one at heart. The fighting services are interdependent. Our Navy cannot win a war unaided any more than our Army can prevent Great Britain from being defeated by starvation. The waging of war, in the case of a maritime country which is unselfsupporting, cannot rightly be divided into naval warfare, military warfare, and combined naval and military operations, though the three types are commonly referred to and in that order. All war in which the British Empire is involved is in the nature of combined naval and military warfare. The actions of one arm are inevitably reflected in the other. The Grand Fleet, from which so many of our officers and men were drawn for the operation on St. George's Day, was naturally elated at the result. Certainly the morale in the fleet had always been of a high order, but an extra touch of enthusiasm was not without value. Of the effect in neutral countries I am not competent to speak, but I have some personal knowledge of the manner in which the news was received in the United States. The enthusiasm in that part of the {260} world was genuine enough and undoubtedly assisted to cement the friendship between that country and our own Empire, a friendship which has a firm foundation even if the latter be occasionally hidden beneath a political superstructure which we are apt to mistake for the foundation itself. {261} CHAPTER XI SOME REMARKS ON THE ENTERPRISE This book would be incomplete if I omitted to append some general remarks on the operation and on the factors which led to success.