By his rapid appreciation of the new position, his instant decision, and the course that he had taken, Admiral Beatty was now ahead of the long parallel German line and slowly bending it toward the north-east, keeping within an eight-mile range of the leading cruisers. To von Hipper and von Scheer--the latter newly in command of the German High Seas Fleet--he must have seemed, for a few minutes, but a retreating and easy prey; but, a little to the north-west, the British Battle Fleet was hurrying at full {182} speed to his assistance--the space between them diminishing at the rate of forty-five miles an hour. The most crucial moments of the whole engagement were now irrevocably approaching--moments that were to test, as they had scarcely been tested before, perhaps, the initiative and tactical skill of the commanding admirals. Already there was in progress a naval action extending over many miles of sea, and being fought under conditions of mist and fog of the most complex and baffling nature. It was an action that even then, involving every device of modern offensive warfare, had assumed proportions more titanic than that of any sea-fight ever fought; and there was now to be committed to it--and so committed to it that not a moment was to be lost--the mightiest battle fleet in the world and the one vital safeguard of the Allies. When it is further remembered that the situation, however accurately signalled by the engaged squadrons, was changing with lightning-like rapidity from moment to moment; and that the deployment--the dove-tailing, as it were--of the six parallel columns of twenty-four dreadnoughts into the line of battle-cruisers already formed would, under any circumstances, have been an operation of the most delicate nature, something may be conceived of the sort of task that Admiral Jellicoe had to undertake. By no other hand could this stupendous manoeuvre have been more ably carried out, and, as a commander at sea, by the sternest of all tests, he proved himself among the finest that Britain has produced. Nor were his admirals unworthy of him either in their divination {183} of the movements demanded by their relative positions, or in the seamanship and machine-like precision with which such movements were carried out. Let us follow these, as far as possible, in the order in which they occurred.