I believe they have discussed the Jutland affair at every meal, trying to find out who was beaten, what the results were, etc. Villiers is friendly with a lot of engineer officers, who, like himself, passed through the School of the Arts et Métiers and he is also accustomed to dealing with figures and is very exact. He says that things like the Jutland affair kick up a dust in the newspapers and in speeches, but that in fact they are of absolutely no use whatsoever. Fourgues is for hitting the Germans every time there is a chance, and he says that if the English had been able to smash the whole German fleet the war would be almost over. Villiers maintains that this is not true at all, that even if the big German ships were at the bottom of the sea, their coasts would still be just as well defended by guns, mines, submarines, and Zeppelins, and that the English could not get any nearer than now; he also says that if the Germans had lost all their big ships, under-sea warfare would not be changed one little bit and the submarines would give us just as much trouble. Battleships, he says, are as much ancient history as muzzle-loading cannon; in the future there won’t be anything but submarines, mines, and light boats to carry on the real work, as this war has demonstrated. * * * * * Although I know Fourgues really agrees, he would reply--just to keep things going--that as long as one side builds big ships, the other is obliged to. But Villiers didn’t catch on. He asked by what means the _Gambetta_, the _Ocean_, the _Cressy_, the _Hogue_, the _Aboukir_, the _Bouvet_, the _Hampshire_, and all the other big ships were sunk? Not by big ships, but by torpedoes which cost twenty thousand francs at most, but which can send battleships costing fifty millions and more to the bottom. So if for each ship worth fifty millions, twenty-five submarine torpedo-boats or mine-layers were built, the Allies would have a thousand, perhaps, and the Germans, with all the Dreadnoughts in the world, would not dare put their noses out of doors. But inversely, if the Germans had five hundred or a thousand submarines instead of big ships, they would make the sea untenable for us. As they are not people who stick to a thing when they find it’s a dud, they soon tumbled to it that submarines and mines are the weapons for war at sea and are going to turn them out like hot cakes. Fourgues repeated this conversation to me so often that I knew Villiers had shut him up completely, but he wanted to quibble, so one evening Villiers said to him: “To-morrow I’m going to bring you an estimate of the cost of the Battle of Jutland according to official accounts in England at the time we left, and you will see if it’s worth while to build big ships.”