For it would have to be remembered that, while on the one hand the terrors of naval warfare had immeasurably increased, the men who had to endure them had become, on the other, the educated products of a more sensitive civilization. Whereas, even in Nelson's time, the majority of British seamen were quite unable to read or write, and were too often, for all their courage, little better than human animals--many had been impressed by slum raids in seaport towns, and disciplined by a brutality now scarcely imaginable--the sailors of to-day, if of the same fibre, were men of a wholly different upbringing. They were the brothers of the shop-attendants, the men in the counting-house, the skilled workmen with their trade unions. They were even better educated than these, with a mellower, deeper, and more humorous philosophy of life. For them the navy was a career, from boyhood to old age, with solid rewards--and not a last resort. How would their new refinement weather the storm? In the following pages we have tried to answer this, as often as possible, in their own words. {3} THE HEROIC RECORD OF THE BRITISH NAVY CHAPTER I THE FOURTH OF AUGUST, 1914 Roman, Phoenician, Saxon, Dane, From these white shores turned not again. Save to the sea that bore them hence, For their delight or their defense, Judgment, persuasion, daring, thrift, Each to the others lent his gift, To whom, when all had shared, the sea Added her own of admiralty. It was early on the morning of July 20, 1914, that a couple of guests, who had courteously been invited to be present in the gunboat _Niger_ for the King's inspection of the Fleet, made their way through the sleeping streets toward Portsmouth Dockyard. There were to be no manoeuvres this year since, as had already been announced in March, a test mobilization of the Third Fleet was to take their place. This Third Fleet consisted of the older ships of the navy, and depended for a large proportion of its _personnel_ upon the Royal Fleet Reserve--a body of ex-naval seamen and other ratings, brought into being under Lord Goschen, and afterward strengthened and reorganized by the Selborne administration {4} of 1902 onward. To man this fleet had necessitated the calling of about 10,000 seamen and 1,500 marines--all of them volunteers from civil life; and its assemblage at Spithead with the First and Second Fleets had secured, between the Hampshire coast and the Isle of Wight, the greatest exhibition of naval power that the world had then seen.