August 7, 1915, 
LAND AND WATER. 
the old St. James's Gazette, on the possibilities of 
the suggestio falsi by headlines. A., the owner of a 
paper, has brought an action against B., who wins ; 
but A. gets level with his enemy in reporting his 
evidence. B., in cross-examination, has stated 
that it was his habit to destroy his receipted bills 
at the end of six years. The headline announced 
" The Defendant pleads guilty to the destruction 
of documents." When B. admits that on first 
acquaintance he had been convinced of A.'s 
honesty and bona fides, but that A.'s subsequent 
conduct had led to a change in his opinion, this 
headline appeared : " Defendant admits previous 
conviction." When I am told that I belittled the 
Grand Fleet's activity, and saddled Admiral 
Beatty with a failure, I seem to myself to be a 
fellow-sufferer with B. 
THE GRAND FLEET'S TASK. 
But to clear the matter up, may I expand the 
sentence I have quoted ? Command of the sea, as 
all the world knows, depends not on the possession 
of more or less active submarines, but on the pos- 
session of what, in its totality, has been proved in 
battle, or has been recognised by the enemy, to be 
a superior sea force. And as — notwithstanding 
all prophecies to the contrary — a fleet of battle- 
ships is still the greatest embodiment of sea force 
conceivable, our command of the sea depends 
entirely upon the Grand Fleet, its Commander-in- 
Chief, its Admirals, its captains, its officers, and 
its men. It is not only in itself a supreme force; 
it is its existence, ever ready and unimpaired, that 
gives liberty of action to all the lesser squadrons 
and flotillas to carry out subsidiary operations. 
It is these, in turn, that put into effect the com- 
mand that the Battle Fleet has either won or 
seized, and holds unchallenged. Our cruisers 
could not otherwise have driven German com- 
merce and German cruisers from the seas, could 
not now search neutral trading ships, and stop 
such goods going to German ports as we may 
resolve to keep away from them. Our destroyers 
could not patrol, nor our merchantmen carry on 
their trade, unless the Grand Fleet were main- 
tained, intact, and ready to accept any challenge 
our enemies can offer. But it cannot fight the air 
—nor make the enemy come out. From 1803 to 
1805 a series of British fleets stood, unengaged, off 
Brest, Ferrol, Cadiz, Gibraltar, and Toulon. 
Nelson, when Villeneuve, after weary months of 
waiting, escaped, chased him from one end of the 
Mediterranean to the other, and then beat across 
to the West Indies and back again. And he only 
got his reward in fighting after two years of cease- 
less vigilance. And the vigilance, remember, was 
not of Nelson's alone, but of every ship of the line, 
and every fleet with which we were blockading the 
Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of the enemy. 
Just as all these gallant seamen were idle in a 
fighting sen.se, just so much, and no more, have the 
ships of the Grand Fleet been idle in the last 
twelve months. 
And in one very important particular 
indeed they have been far less idle, for they have 
had an enemy to pursue them unknown in any 
past war. They have, with this menace constantly 
on them, had to maintain themselves in coal and 
supplies without the benefit of a properly fitted 
harbour near at hand. And the danger from the 
hidden torpedo-firing enemy is infinitely more 
real than the danger that adverse wind and 
weather held over sailing ships a century ago. 
In the ordinary course, it is the rarest thing for 
any warship to be continuously at sea for more 
than a fortnight. The strain of being long at sea 
is far greater than any landsman, who has not 
habitually been in men-of-war, both in harbour 
and afloat, can possibly realise. The dangers and 
discomforts from the sea are, no doubt, less than 
they were. Steam and the size of the ships have 
made it impossible for a capital vessel to be beaten 
down by the waves alone, except in most unusual 
conditions. But the necessity to proceed always 
at speed and to navigate at night without lights 
have added almost as many and as great anxieties 
as have been removed. If this is true when the 
difficulties are only those necessarily incidental to 
the elements in which ships have their being, and 
the intricacies of modern mechanisms, what are we 
to say when, to aK the difficulties, dangers, and 
discomforts of the ocean, is added the constant 
threat of the submarine? 
It is in these conditions that the Grand Fleet 
has maintained itself, in a northern climate, 
through a winter of exceptionally inclement 
weather, and through a summer at an altitude 
where the long continuance of daylight gives 
hardly a single hour in which a ship is reasonably 
safe from submarine attack. 
We have practically no information as to the 
movements of the Grand Fleet and very little 
knowledge of how it passes its days. But officers 
occasionally come ashore, and those of us who have 
friends or relatives in the Fleet see letters from the 
men afloat. After perusing many hundreds of 
such it is possible to form a view — no doubt very 
incomplete, but probably, as far as it goes, a very 
true one — of the state of things in that Fleet now. 
First, we must realise that they have been through 
a year of incessant steaming, incessant activity, 
of incessant vigilance, yet never in the history of 
navies have so many squadrons of so many ships 
been brought to and kept in such perfect fighting 
trim. The labours and anxieties are borne by all 
with equal cheerfulness, and, what is not a little 
remarkable, by almost all without there being 
visible evidence that there is a strain at all. The 
breakdowns in health have been actually less than 
in normal times. The theory that no fleet's nerves 
could endure the continual threat of submarines 
and mines has been proved to be absolutely false. 
And this result has not been brought about by 
evading the difficulties of the situation by flight. 
It has been brought about by facing the difficul- 
ties and surmounting them. There is, of course, not 
a single man, from Conmiander-in-Chief down- 
wards, who would not prefer to end the task out- 
right and have a fleet action with all its risks. 
But there is equally no single man who does not 
realise that the daily task, which has continued 
for a year and must continue to the end, is for 
every minute of the time just as obviously the 
path of duty as right conduct when the fighting 
begins. 
Those who know the Navy from within (even 
in the slightest degree) will find nothing surpris- 
ing in this being the state of things. But they will 
only not be surprised if their knowledge h?.s led 
them to an appreciation of the astonishing 
standard of duty and self-sacrifice which t lie sea- 
man always must maintain. It is one thing for a 
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