By a singular coincidence, an opportunity for such an attack--an opportunity that could hardly have failed of a most sinister success--offered itself at the strategic moment when the Central Powers had already resolved to use the murder of the Archduke as a pretext for an unprovoked attack on Christendom. All our battleships of the first, second, and third lines, all our battle-cruisers commissioned and in home waters, almost all our armoured cruisers and fast light cruisers, and the bulk of our destroyers and auxiliaries were, in the fateful third week in July, gathered and at anchor--and completely unprotected--in the fairway of the Solent. There were to be no manœuvres in 1914, but a test mobilization instead, and this great congregation of the Fleet was to be a measure of the Admiralty’s capacity to man all our naval forces of any fighting worth. The fact that this gathering was to take place on a certain and appointed date was public property in the month of March. A week or a fortnight before the squadrons steamed one by one to their moorings, a plan of the anchored lines was published in every London paper. The order of the Fleet, the identity of every ship in its place in every line, might have been, and probably were, in German hands a week before any single ship was in her billet. From Emden to the Isle of Wight is a bare 350 miles--a day and a half’s journey for a submarine--and in July 1914, Germany possessed between twenty and thirty submarines. It was a day and a half’s journey if it had been all made at under-water speed. What could not a dozen Weddigens and Hersings have done had they only been sent upon this fell mission, and their arrival been timed for an hour before daybreak on the morning of July 18? They surely could have gone far beyond wiping out a margin of five big ships, which was all the margin we had against the German Fleet alone. They could, in the half light of the summer’s night, have slipped five score torpedoes into a dozen or more battleships and battle-cruisers. They could have attacked and returned undetected, leaving Great Britain largely helpless at sea and quite unable to take part in the forthcoming European war.