“That is true,” said the Maker, “but the Great Silent Sea Service loathes advertisement like the very devil, and it is right. The Service would be ruined if senior officers tried to bid against one another for newspaper puffs.” “Yet I have known them do it,” said I drily, and then slid away from the delicate topic. “Let us return to the first part of the action, and examine the division of the Fleet between Jellicoe and Beatty. Was this division, admittedly hazardous, a sound method of bringing the Germans to action?” The Gunner took upon himself to reply. “It is not, and never has been, possible to bring the Germans to action in the southern part of the North Sea except with their own consent. There is no room. They can always break off and retire within their protected waters. Steam fleets of the modern size and speed cannot force an action and compel it to be fought out to a finish in a smaller space than a real ocean. You must always think of this when criticising the division of our fleets. Beatty was separated from Jellicoe by nearly sixty miles, and strengthened by four fast Queen Elizabeth battleships to enable him to fight an action with a superior German Fleet. He was made just strong enough to fight and not too strong to scare the Germans away. In theory, the division of our forces within striking distance of the enemy was all wrong; in practice, it was the only way of persuading him into an action. Both sides at the end of May, 1916, wanted to bring off a fight at sea. Fritz wanted something which he could claim as a success in order to cheer up his blockaded grumblers at home, who were getting restive. We wanted to stop the projected German naval and military onslaught upon Russia in the Baltic. The wonderful thing about the Jutland Battle is that it appears to have achieved both objects. Fritz, by sinking three of our battle cruisers, has been able to delude a nation of landsmen into accepting a highly coloured version of a great naval success; and we, by making a sorry mess of his main fleet, did in fact clear the northern Russian flank of a grave peril. The later Russian successes in the South were the direct result of Jutland, and without those successes the subsequent Italian, French, and British advances could not have been pushed with anything like the effect secured. Regarded in this broad international way, the division of our fleets justified by its results the risks which it involved. What I don’t understand is why we suffered so much in the first part of the action when Beatty had six battle cruisers and four battleships against five battle cruisers of the enemy. He lost the _Indefatigable_ and _Queen Mary_ while he was in great superiority both of numbers and of guns. Then, when the German main fleet had come in, and he was carrying out an infinitely more hazardous operation in the face of a greater superior force, he lost nothing. If the _Indefatigable_ and _Queen Mary_