preparations were made to go to sea, finally refused to go out at all. And that was the end." Commander C---- (to give his equivalent British rank) volunteered a good deal more about Jutland on this occasion, as well as of the strategy in connection with those final plans which went awry through the failure of men, but it will be best, perhaps, to let this appear in its proper sequence in a connected account of what he told, in the course of the several days we were thrown together, of the German naval problems generally, and his own experiences and observations at Horn Reef in particular. "We were greatly disappointed when England came into the war," he said, "but hardly dismayed. We had built all our ships on the theory that it was the English fleet they were to fight against, and we felt confident that we had plans that had a good chance of ultimately proving successful. But those plans did not contemplate--either at the outset, or at any subsequent stage of the war down to the very end--a gunnery battle to a finish. The best proof of that fact is the way the guns were mounted in our capital ships, with four aft and only two forward. That meant that their _rôle_ was to inflict what damage they could in swift attacks, and that they were expected to do their heaviest fighting while being chased back to harbour. Since the British fleet had something like a three-to-two advantage over us in modern capital ships, and about two-to-one in weight of broadside, I think you will agree that this was not only the best plan for us to follow, but practically the only one. "I think it will hardly surprise you when I say that, up to the outbreak of the war, we knew a great deal more about your navy than you did about ours. To offset that--and of much greater importance--is the fact that your knowledge of our navy and its plans during the war was far better than ours of yours. You always seem to score in the end. But at the outset, as I have said, we were the better informed, and, among other things, we knew that we had better mines than you had, and (as I think was fully demonstrated during the first two years) we had a far better conception in advance of the possibilities of using them--both offensively and defensively--than you had. During the first two years and a half your mines turned out to be even worse than we had expected, and it is an actual fact that some of the more reckless of our U-boat commanders used to fish them up and tow them back to base to make punchbowls of. In the last twenty months you not only had two or three types of mine (one of them American, I think) that were better than anything we ever had, but you were also using them on a scale, and with an effectiveness, we had never dreamed of.