Though our friend the young Lieutenant of Marines was no sailor he was a scholar, trained in the class-rooms and playing fields, of a great English school. He was profoundly impressed, as all outsiders must be, by the engrained efficiency of the seafolk among whom he now dwelt, their easy mastery of the technicalities of sea craft, and their almost childish ignorance of everything that lay outside it. It was borne in upon him that they were a race apart, bred to their special work as terriers and racehorses are bred, the perfect product of numberless generations of sea fighters. It was borne in upon him, too, that no nation coming late to the sea, like the Germans, could, though taking an infinity of thought, possibly stand up against us. Sea power does not consist of ships but of men. For a real Navy does not so much design and build ships as secrete them. They are the expression in machinery of its brains and Soul. He arrived at this conclusion after much patient thought and then diffidently laid it before his experienced friend. The Sub-Lieutenant accepted the theory at once as beyond argument. “That’s the whole secret, my son, the secret of the Navy. Fritz can’t design ships; he can only copy ours, and then he can’t make much of his copies. Take his submarine work. He has any amount of pluck, though he is a dirty swine; he doesn’t fail for want of pluck but because he hasn’t the right kind of nerve. That is where Fritz fails and where our boys succeed, because they were bred to the sea and their fathers before them, and their fathers before that. Submarining as a sport is exactly like stalking elephants on foot in long grass. One has to wriggle on one’s belly till one gets within close range, and then make sure of a kill in one shot. There’s no time for a second if one misses. Fritz will get fairly close up, sometimes—or did before we had taken his measure—but not that close enough to make dead sure of a hit. He is too much afraid of being seen when he pops his periscope above water. So he comes down between two stools. He is too far off for a certain hit and not far enough to escape being seen. That story I told you the other day was an exact illustration. The moment he pops up the destroyers swoop down upon him, he flinches, looses off a mouldy, somehow, anyhow, and then gets down. That sort of thing is no bally use; one doesn’t sink battleships that fool way. Our men first make sure of their hit at the closest range, and then think about getting down—or don’t get down. They do their work without worrying about being sunk themselves the instant after. That’s just the difference between us and the Germans, between terriers and rats. It’s no good taking partial risks in submarine work; one must go the whole hog or leave it alone.