The opening of the war at sea was in every respect auspicious for the Allies. By what looked like a happy accident, the British Navy had just been mobilized on an unprecedented scale. It was actually in process of returning to its normal establishment when the international crisis became acute, and, by a dramatic stroke, it was kept at war strength and the main fleet sent to its war stations before the British ultimatum was despatched to Berlin. The effect was instantaneous. Within a week transports were carrying British troops into France and trade was continuing its normal course, exactly as if there were no German Navy in existence. The German sea service actually went out of existence. Before a month was over a small squadron of battle-cruisers raided the Bight between Heligoland and the German harbours, sank there small cruisers and half-a-dozen destroyers, challenged the High Seas Fleet to battle, and came away without the enemy having attempted to use his capital ships to defend his small craft or to pick up the glove so audaciously thrown down. The mere mobilization of the British Fleet seemed to have paralyzed the enemy, and it looked as if our ability to control sea communications was not only surprisingly complete, but promised to be enduring. The nation’s confidence in the Navy had been absolute from the beginning, and it seemed as if that confidence could not be shaken. Before another two months had passed we had run into one of those crises which were to recur not once, but again and again. During September an accumulation of errors came to light. The enormity of the political and naval blunder which had allowed _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ to slip through our fingers in the Mediterranean, and so bring Turkey into the war against us, at last become patent. There was no blockade. There were the raids which _Emden_ and _Karlsruhe_ were making on our trade in the Indian Ocean and between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The enemy’s submarines had sunk some of our cruisers--three in succession on a single day and in the same area. Then rumours gained ground that the Grand Fleet, driven from its anchorages by submarines, was fugitive, hiding now in one remote loch, now in another, and losing one of its greatest units in its flight. For a moment it looked as if the old warnings, that surface craft were impotent against under-water craft, had suddenly been proved true. Von Spee, with a powerful pair of armoured cruisers, was known to be at large. As a final insult, German battle-cruisers crossed the North Sea, and battered and ravaged the defenceless inhabitants of a small seaport town on the east coast. Something was evidently wrong. But nobody seemed to know quite what it was.