"There are navies and navies. The old and fighting British navy, whose representatives keep the seas today against the king's enemies, has been heard of once or twice during the present war, but for the most part preserves a certain aristocratic and dignified aloofness from the public gaze. There is, however, another and an older navy which comes and goes under the eyes of all, as it has done any time these three or four centuries. On its six or eight thousand ships, to prove that England is Old England still, the Elizabethan mariner has come to life again, who took war very much as he took peace, unconcernedly, in his day's work. Needless to say no other nation on earth could have produced, either in numbers or quality, for no other nation possessed these men, bred to the sea and the risks of the sea, born where the air is salt, who, undeterred by the hazards of war, which was none of their employ, answered their country's call as in the old Armada days. From the Chinese and Indian seas they came, from the Pacific and Atlantic trade routes, from whaling, it might be, or the Newfoundland fishing grounds or the Dogger Bank--three thousand officers and some two hundred thousand men--to supply the Grand Fleet, to patrol the waterways, to drag for the German mines, to carry the armies of the Alliance, and incidentally, to show the world, what it has perhaps forgotten, that it is not by virtue of their fighting navy that the British are a maritime people, but by virtue of an instinct amounting to genius, rooted in a very ancient and unmatched experience of shipping and the sea. The Grand Fleet is only the child of this service which was already old before the word 'Admiralty' was first employed, which made its own voyages and fought its own battles since Columbus discovered America, and before even that considerable event. These travel-worn ships formed the solid bridge across which flowed in unbroken files the men and supplies to the British and the Allied fronts.