traditions of their own, and a corporate spirit and capacity that are unique, wonderful, and to most landsmen incomprehensible. Their standards and traditions can only be maintained and can only be enforced by themselves. And the great peril that follows from excluding all reference to them of the accidents and failures of war is that, failing this reference, we have no security that naval action will be judged as it should be, solely by the highest naval standard. Much was said in the House of Commons about the loss of ships. Mr. Churchill assumed that the only motive for asking for courts-martial was to find a scapegoat. Lord Charles Beresford only made clear that a court-martial was as much for clearing the character as for finding criminals. There was a significant phrase in Mr. Churchill’s speech that raises, it seems to me, a point in this connection of far greater importance. The battle of the Dogger Bank, he said, was “not fought out because the enemy made good their escape into waters infested by submarines and mines.” The officer who had to call off a fleet in these circumstances was necessarily faced by a grave and almost terrifying responsibility. To be too bold was to risk everything, to be too cautious was to throw away a victory. Can any tribunal, except the Navy, judge whether this responsibility was rightly exercised? When we remember that in our greatest days hardly a naval battle took place that was not followed by courts-martial, it seems to me a most perilous thing to allow these tremendous issues to go by the board because unless they are adjudicated upon by the profession itself they are not adjudicated upon at all. CHAPTER XIX THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND I. NORTH SEA STRATEGIES The battle off Jutland Bank, which took place on May 31, 1916, was the first and, at the time of writing, has been the only meeting between the main naval forces of Great Britain and Germany. It was from the first inevitable that we should have to wait long for a sea fight. It was inevitable, because the probability of a smaller force being not only decisively defeated, but altogether destroyed in a sea fight, is far greater than in a land battle, and the consciousness of this naturally makes it chary of the risk. Sea war in this respect preserves the characteristic of ancient land fighting, for--as is luminously explained in Commandant Colin’s incomparable “Transformations of War”--it was a common characteristic of the older campaigns that the main armies would remain almost in touch with each other month after month before the battle took place. He sums up his generalization thus: