now as always a fight between men. Battles are fought and won by men and by the souls of men, by what they have thought and done in peace time as a preparation for war, by what they do in war as the result of their peace training. The whole art of successful war is the concentration upon an enemy at a given moment of an overwhelming force and the concentration of that force outside the range of his observation. Both these things were done by the Royal Navy between November 6th and December 8th, 1914, and their fruits were the shattered remains of von Spee’s squadron lying thousands of fathoms deep in the South Atlantic. But nothing which the Admiralty planned upon November 6th would have availed had not the Royal Navy designed and built so great a force of powerful ships that, when the far-off call arose, two battle cruisers could be spared to travel 7,000 miles from the North Sea to the Falkland Islands without sensibly endangering the margin of safety of the Grand Fleet at home. While the _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ were occupying the front of the battle stage and disposing of the hostile stars, the English light cruisers were enjoying themselves in the wings in a more humble but not less useful play. The cruiser _Kent_ astonished everybody. She was the lame duck of the Squadron, a slow old creature who could with extreme difficulty screw out seventeen knots, so that, in the company of much faster boats, her armament of fourteen 6-inch guns appeared to be practically wasted. Yet this elderly County cruiser, so short of coal that her fires were fed with boats, ladders, doors, and officers’ furniture, got herself moving at over twenty-one knots, chased and caught the _Nürnberg_—which ought to have been able to romp round her if one of her boilers had not been out of action—and sank the German vessel out of hand. Afterwards her officers claimed with solemn oaths that she had done twenty-four knots, but there are heights to which my credulity will not soar. One is compelled on the evidence to believe that she did catch the _Nürnberg_, but how she did it no one can explain, least of all, I fancy, her Engineer Commander himself. The _Leipzig_ was rapidly overhauled by the speedy _Glasgow_, who sank her with the aid of the _Cornwall_ and so repaid in full the debt of Coronel. The cruiser _Bristol_, a sister of the _Glasgow_, was sent after the German Squadron’s transports and colliers, and, in company with the armed liner _Macedonia_, “proceeded,” in naval language, “to destroy them.” Out of the whole German Squadron the light cruiser _Dresden_ (own sister to the _Emden_) alone managed to get away. She had turbine engines and fled without firing a shot. She passed a precarious hunted existence for three months, and was at last disposed of off Robinson Crusoe’s Island on March 14th, 1915. The _Glasgow_, still intent upon collecting payment for her injuries, and our aged but active