That must have been, then, the root fact in the mind of its Commander-in-Chief--the "Hell-fire Jack" of earlier years--and in no operation could he allow himself to forget it. Ashore it was different. Here a key position, a province, even an army might be lost--might at any rate be gambled with {169} justifiably--and the ultimate victory still not be compromised. But at sea it was not so. Nor was the German navy in any sense comparably placed. Its capital ships might be sunk or destroyed without the empire behind them falling to the ground. It could therefore afford to take chances denied to the British, and it was to find them doing so that the Grand Fleet yearned. For this its outposts probed the Ems and the Weser, and the Grand Fleet itself swept the seas. But it was a long vigil, though not so long as Nelson's, watching the Toulon Fleet for over two years; for the Jutland Battle, as decisive at sea, though not at once so demonstrably so, as that of Trafalgar, was fought within twenty-two months of the outbreak of the war. During that time, as we have seen, a continual marine struggle had been in progress; there had been a few collisions of capital ships; and the Grand Fleet had been constantly on patrol. But there had been no pitched battle on a grand scale; and it had even begun to seem that there never would be. Time after time, for its exercises, the Fleet would vanish silently from its berths. There was hardly a day when some fraction of it, large or small, would not be away at sea--sailing so unobtrusively, even to those most intimate with it, the wives and families of its men and officers, that they would not be aware of its departure till the empty berths told them the secret.