Those are words that, if they were true of the first sea-recruits of 1914, are equally, and, in some respects, more astonishingly applicable to the thousands that subsequently joined them from all ranks. Of these earlier candidates for sea service, none was more typical than Lieutenant-Commander H. T. Gartside Tipping, the oldest naval officer then afloat and one of the first to perish in the Narrow Seas. Having retired from the navy, with the rank of lieutenant, thirty-five years before the outbreak of war, Lieutenant-Commander Tipping had inherited a small estate, including a yacht, in the Isle of Wight. Here he had lived a quiet country life, ardently devoted to yacht racing; had kept himself alert and physically fit; and, at the age of sixty-six, having rejoined his old service and been given the rank of lieutenant-commander, had gladly and efficiently served under officers who might almost have been his grandsons. To such a man as Lieutenant-Commander Tipping, however, the call of the sea may quite understandably have been imperative. Far less foretellable, and only to be explained, surely, by the racial instinct {214} referred to by Admiral Bacon, was the later phenomenon of expert sailors quartering the seas in fast patrol-boats, who, but a year or two before, had been farmers or commercial travellers, or clerks behind counters in London shops. Christened in naval fashion by their professional brothers with various opprobious nicknames, these were in reality but the affectionate symbols of the older navy's pride in its temporary junior partners; and the best measure of their work--necessarily undramatic, as all preventive work must largely be--is a survey of what the enemy was unable to accomplish in any representative period of the war. Let us take, for example, the six months before the Battle of Jutland, in its middle period. In that half year, through the Dover Patrol alone, there passed 21,000 merchant ships, and of these only 21 were lost or seriously damaged as the result of enemy action--little less than one in every thousand, entrusted to the case of this particular command. More remarkable still, perhaps, since these were inevitably, of course, the enemy's constant and most tempting target, not a single transport or one soldier's life was lost at sea during the same time.