Now to have achieved all this, while at the same time containing the German High Seas Fleet in the North Sea--and so containing it that not even a single squadron was able to break through on to our lines {46} of commerce--is the best witness to the fundamental rightness of our initial naval strategy; although the test of war immediately emphasized what was then our chief need--an even larger number, such were our manifold requirements, of fast battle-cruisers. It was our shortness in this respect that, in the last analysis, led to the disaster of Coronel, arguable as the wisdom of certain of our oversea dispositions may not unjustly now seem to have been. And, while in our treatment of both the _Goeben_ and _Breslau_, as regarded the Mediterranean, and the command of von Spee in the Far East and subsequently in the South Pacific, there are many points to be reasonably debated before the bar of naval judgment, neither problem can be fairly considered apart from the whole situation. In the present and following chapters we are concerned only with von Spee and the five vessels under his command. To consider the vessels first, these consisted of two armoured cruisers, the _Scharnhorst_ and the _Gneisenau_, and three light cruisers, the _Nürnberg_, the _Dresden_, and the _Leipzig_. Both the _Scharnhorst_ and the _Gneisenau_ were most efficient units, each with a speed of over 22 knots, each with a displacement of over 11,000 tons, a belt of 6-inch armour amidships, and each carrying eight 8.2-inch guns, six 6-inch guns, eighteen 24-pounders, and four torpedo-tubes. The three light cruisers were each capable of a speed of about twenty-five knots, carried ten 4.1-inch, eight 5-pounder, and four machine-guns, with two submerged torpedo-tubes, and displaced between 3,000 and 4,000 tons. It will be seen at once, therefore, {47} that they formed a homogeneous and easily manoeuvred squadron, and it may be readily admitted that they were not only gallantly but very skilfully handled; while their concentration--since, at the outbreak of war, they had been scattered over half the world--was a feat of no mean order, however open to criticism may have been the larger policy involved in it. As for von Spee himself, he seems to have been of a type apparently all too rare in the German naval service, a chivalrous, modest, and efficient seaman, reticent in victory, and brave in defeat. Under his command, the _Scharnhorst_ and the _Gneisenau_ had attained an extremely high standard of gunnery, and it is probable that in this respect they were second to none flying the German flag.