English had kept their forces together von Spee need never have fought; they would have had not the smallest chance of getting near him except by his own wish. Admiral Cradock flew his flag in the armoured cruiser _Good Hope_, which, though of 14,000 tons and 520 feet long, had only two guns of bigger calibre than 6-inch. These were of 9.2 inches, throwing a shell of 380 lb., but the guns, like the ship, were twelve years old. Her speed was about seventeen knots, four or five knots less than that of the German cruisers she had come to chase! The _Monmouth_, of the “County Class,” was as obsolete as the _Good Hope_. Eleven years old, of nearly 10,000 tons, she carried nothing better than fourteen 6-inch guns of bygone pattern. She may have been good for a knot or two more than the _Good Hope_, but her cruising and fighting speed was, of course, that of the flagship. The one effective ship of the whole squadron was the _Glasgow_, which curiously enough is the sole survivor now of the Coronel action, either German or English. Out of the eight warships which fought there off the Chilean coast on November 1st, 1914, five German and three English, the _Glasgow_ alone remains afloat. She is a modern light cruiser, first commissioned in 1911. The _Glasgow_ is light, long and lean. She showed that she could steam fully twenty-five knots and could fight her two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns most effectively. She was a match for any one of von Spee’s light cruisers, though unable to stand up to the _Scharnhorst_ or _Gneisenau_. The modern English navy has been built under the modern doctrine of speed and gun-power—the _Good Hope_, _Monmouth_, and _Canopus_, the products of a bad, stupid era in naval shipbuilding, had neither speed nor gun-power. The result, the inevitable result, was the disaster of Coronel in which the English ships were completely defeated and the Germans barely scratched. The Germans had learned the lesson which we ourselves had taught them. When one considers the two squadrons which met and fought off Coronel, in the light of experience cast by war, one feels no surprise that the action was over in fifty-two minutes. Cradock and his men, 1,600 of them, fought and died. Sunset and evening star * * * * * And after that the dark.