The German Pacific Squadron, being on foreign service, had not only picked officers of outstanding merit, but also long-service crews of unpressed men. It was, therefore, in organisation and personnel much more akin to our Navy than was the High Seas Fleet at home in which the men were for the most part conscripts on short service (three years) from the Baltic, Elbe and inland provinces. In our Service the sailors and marines join for twenty-one years, and in actual practice frequently serve very much longer. They begin as children in training-ships and in the schools attached to Marine barracks, and often continue in middle life as grave men in the petty and warrant officer ranks. The Naval Service is the work of their lives just as it is with the commissioned officers. But in the German High Seas Fleet, with its three years of forced service, a man was no sooner half-trained than his time was up and he gladly made way for a raw recruit. The German crews were not of the Sea nor of the Service. During the war, no doubt, they became better trained. The experienced seamen were not discharged and the general level of skill arose; the best were passed into the submarines which alone of the Fleet were continuously at work on the sea. In our own Navy, in consequence of the very great increase in the number of ships, both large and small, the professional sailors had to be diluted by the calling up of Naval Reservists, and by the expansion of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. But unlike Germany we had, fortunately for ourselves, an almost limitless maritime population from which to draw the new naval elements. Fishermen at the call of their country flocked into the perilous service of mine sweeping and patrolling, young men from the seaports readily joined the Volunteer detachments in training for the great ships, dilution was carried on deftly and with so clear a judgment that the general level of efficiency all round was almost completely maintained. That this was possible is not so remarkable as it sounds. The Royal Navy of the fighting ships, even after the war expansion, remained a very small select service of carefully chosen men. Half of its personnel was professional and perfectly trained, the second and new half was so mingled and stirred up with the first that the professional leaven permeated the whole mass. The Army which desired millions had to take what it could get; but the Navy, which counts its men in tens of thousands only, could pick and choose of the best. In the Army the old Regulars were either killed or swamped under the flood of new entrants; in the Navy the professionals remained always predominant. It was very characteristic of the proud exclusiveness of our Royal Navy, very characteristic of its haughty Soul, that the temporary officers were allotted rank marks which distinguished them at a glance, even of civilian eyes, from the regular Service.