The second possible course, apparently less heroic but in its ultimate results probably as completely destructive for the enemy as the first course, would have been to bear south-west, hugging the shallows as closely as might be possible, and to endeavour to break a way through the Straits of Dover and the English Channel. From Heligoland to the Straits is over 350 miles, and we should have known all about the German dash long before they could have reached the Narrows. Those Narrow Seas are like the neck of a bottle which would have been corked most effectually by our serried masses of pre-Dreadnought battleships and cruisers interspersed by swarming hundreds of submarines and destroyers with their vicious torpedo stings. We can quite understand how the Germans, who had read Sir Percy Scott’s observations of a month or two before on the deadliness of submarines in narrow waters, liked a dash for the Straits as little as they relished a battle with Jellicoe and Beatty in the far north, more especially as their line of retreat would have been cut off by the descent from their northern fastnesses of our battle fleets. Not then, nor a week or two later when we were passing our Expeditionary Force across the Channel, did the Germans attempt to break through the Straits and cut us off from our Allies the French. The third course was the one which the Germans in fact took. It was the famous course of Brer Rabbit, to lie low and say nuffin’, and to wait for happier times when perchance the raids of their own submarines, and our losses from mines, might so far diminish our fighting strength as to permit them to risk a Battle of the Giants with some little prospect of success. And in adopting this waiting policy they did what we least desired and what, therefore, was the safest for them and most embarrassing for us. Never at any time did we attempt to prevent the German battle fleets from coming out. We no more blockaded them than Nelson a hundred years earlier blockaded the French at Toulin and Brest. We maintained, as Nelson did, a perpetual unsleeping watch on the enemy’s movements, but our desire always was the same as Nelson’s—to let the enemy come out far enough to give us space and time within which to compass his complete and final destruction.