I had listened with the keenest interest to this interchange, for though I should not myself have ventured to comment upon so technical a subject as naval gunnery, I had subconsciously felt what the old Salt Horse had so bluntly and almost brutally expressed. “We have arrived, then, at this,” observed I, slowly, “that during the first hour, up to the turn when the main High Seas Fleet joined up with Hipper’s battle cruisers, our squadrons got the worst of it, though they were of twice Fritz’s numbers and of far more than twice his strength. It is a beastly thing for an Englishman to say, but really you leave me no choice. Though I hate whisky, I must follow the example set by my betters.” The Master Gunner laughed. “In the Service,” said he, “we learn from our mistakes. At the beginning we did badly on May 31st, but afterwards we profited by the lesson. What more could you ask? . . . Civilians,” said he, aside to his colleagues, “seem to think that only English ships should be allowed to have guns or to learn how to use them.” “Now we have given Fritz his due,” said I, “let us get on to the second part of the battle, Act Two of the naval drama. You will agree that the handling of our damaged squadrons by Beatty and Evan-Thomas was magnificent, and that the execution done by us was fully up to the best English standards?” “Yes,” replied the grim Salt Horse, to whom I had specially appealed. “We will allow both. Beatty’s combination of dash and caution was beyond praise and the gunnery was excellent.” “None of our ships were sunk, none were seriously hit,” put in the Gunner. “On the other hand we certainly sank one German battle cruiser and one battleship, and very heavily damaged others. I don’t know how many. I think that we must accept as proved that not many German ships of the battle line were sunk in any part of the action. When badly hit they fell out and retired towards home, which they could always do. During the second part both fleets were steaming away from the German bases, so that a damaged enemy ship had only to stop to be left behind in safety. A good many ships were claimed by our officers as sunk when they were known to have been damaged and had disappeared; but I feel sure that most of them had fallen out, not been sunk.” “The outstanding feature,” cried the Maker of Guns, “was the superiority of our gunnery. We have always encouraged individuality in gun laying, and have never allowed Fire Control to supersede the eyes and hands of the skilled gun-layers in the turrets. Control and individual laying are with us complementary, not mutually exclusive. With the Germans an intensely mechanical control is of the essence of their system. They are very good up to a point, but have not elasticity enough to deal with the perpetual variations of range and direction when fighting ships are moving fast and receiving heavy punishment. Fritz beat us in the first part, but we, as emphatically, beat him in the second.”