On the other hand, it was very confident that it could not be decisively beaten. Being an inferior force, the German Navy has been driven to giving the utmost consideration to all the methods of fighting that can add to the defensive in battle. It was not slow to realize, as we have seen, the enormous advantage that the dirigible airship offered in scouting, and from the first it has devoted itself with special energy and care to the practice and development of the defensive tactics which the long-range torpedo made possible. Nor is this all. For though the Germany Navy was the last of all the great navies to cultivate long-range gunnery, it very quickly appreciated the fact that its efficiency depended upon the visibility of the target, that it should be launched at periods when the rate of change was constant. It consequently made it a first step in its war preparations to supply itself with the finest optical instruments regardless of cost, so as to get the range and the rate with utmost accuracy and rapidity and to master all the means by which the enemy’s gunfire could be made nugatory both by devices that would hide its own ships from his view, and by imposing sudden manœuvres by torpedo attack. We have already seen, in the story of the Dogger Bank engagement, how the pursuing British battle-cruisers were hampered in their chase and indeed deflected from their course by submarines skilfully stationed for attack, and by the employment in action of destroyer flotillas. And, again, how when _Bluecher_ was disabled, and two out of three battle-cruisers were on fire and their batteries useless, they were shielded in their final flight by the destroyers interposing themselves on the British line of fire and then raising huge volumes of smoke impenetrable to the eye. Lastly, as German writers since the battle have never ceased to remind us, the German Fleet had never been built with the idea of its being able to fight and defeat the British Fleet, but with the idea of creating a force so formidable that the British Fleet would not face the risk to itself that would be involved in its destruction. That there was some justification for such a belief will become apparent when we consider the statements of various British naval authorities made after the action was over. I draw attention to it here because it was undoubtedly reliance on some hesitation of this kind that gave the Germans such confidence in the methods of evasion which they adopted when the two fleets met.