We love that most which is most hardly won. And the Navy men love their Service, not because it is easy but because of the hardness of it, and because of the sacrifices which it exacts from them. It fastens its grip upon them in those first years between fifteen and twenty, and the grip grows ever tighter with the flight of time. It is at its very tightest when the dreadful hour of retirement arrives. When War broke out, in August 1914, it was hailed with joy by the active Navy afloat, but their joy was as water unto wine in comparison with that which transfigured the retired Navy ashore. For them at long last the impossible had crystallised into fact. For those who were still young enough, the uniforms were waiting ready in the tin boxes upstairs, and it was but a short step from their house doors to the decks of a King’s ship. Once more their gallant names could be written in the Active List of their Navy. They hastened back, these eager ones, and if there was no employment for them in their own rank, they snatched at that in any other rank which offered. Captains R.N. became commanders and even lieutenants R.N.R. in the Fringes. Admirals became temporary captains. There were indeed at one time no fewer than nineteen retired admirals serving as temporary officers R.N.R. in armed liners. If you would understand how the Navy loves the Service, how that love is not a part of their lives, but is their lives, reflect upon the case of one aged officer. I will not give his name; he would not wish it. He had been in retirement for nearly forty years, too old for service in his rank, too old possibly for service in any rank. But his pleadings for employment afloat softened the understanding hearts at Whitehall. He was allowed to rejoin and to serve as a temporary Lieutenant-Commander in an armed yacht which assisted the ex-Brazilian monitors sent to bombard the Belgian coast. There against Zeebrugge he served among kindly lads young enough to be his grandsons, and there with them and among them he was killed—the oldest officer serving afloat. And he was happy in his death. Not Wolfe before Quebec, not Nelson in the cockpit of the _Victory_, were happier or more glorious in their deaths than was that temporary Lieutenant-Commander (transferred at his own request from the retired list) who fought his last fight upon the decks of an armed yacht and died as he would have prayed to die.