There came a savage growl from officers of the main Battle Squadrons, who, invited to a choice banquet, had seen it all cleared away before their arrival. ‘That’s all very well,’ grumbled one of them; ‘the four Q.E.s are getting a bit above themselves because they had the luck of the fair. They didn’t fight the High Seas Fleet by their haughty selves because they wanted to, you bet.’ The Gunnery Lieutenant with the dreamy eyes smiled. ‘We certainly shouldn’t have chosen that day to fight them on. But if the _Queen Elizabeth_ herself had been with us, and we had had full visibility—with the horizon a hard dark line—we would have willingly taken on all Fritz’s twelve-inch Dreadnoughts and thrown in his battle cruisers.’ ‘That’s the worst of it,’ grumbled the Commander, very sore still at having tasted only of the skim milk of the battle; ‘naval war is now only a matter of machines. The men don’t count as they did in Nelson’s day.’ ‘Excuse me, sir,’ remarked the Sub-Lieutenant; ‘may I say a word or two about that? I have been thinking it out.’ There came a general laugh. The Sub-Lieutenant, twenty years of age, small and dark and with the bright black eyes of his mother—a pretty little lady from the Midi de la France whom his father had met and married in Paris—did not look like a philosopher, but he had the clear-thinking, logical mind of his mother’s people. ‘Think aloud, my son,’ said the Commander. ‘As a living incarnation of l’Entente Cordiale, you are privileged above those others of the gun-room.’ The light in the Sub’s eyes seemed to die out as his gaze turned inwards. He spoke slowly, carefully, sometimes injecting a word from his mother’s tongue which could better express his meaning. He looked all the while towards the sea, and seemed scarcely to be conscious of an audience of seniors. His last few sentences were spoken wholly in French.