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A NEW YEAR'S GREETING. 
By ARTHUR POLLEN, 
^T^O the Admirals, Captains, Officers and Men 
2 of the Royal Navy and of the Royal 
Naval Reserve ; 
To the men of the merchant service 
and the landsmen who have volunteered for it'ork 
ad oat ; 
To all who are serving or fighting Jor their 
country at sea ; 
To all naval officers who are serving— fnuch 
against their will — on land ; 
To all naval offiicers— still more against their 
will — retired and unemployed ; 
(Greetings, good wishes and gratitude from 
all landsmen. 
We do not wish yon a Merry Christmas, for 
to none of us, neither to you at sea nor to us on 
land, can Christmas be a merry season now. Nor, 
amid so much misery and sorrow, does it seem, at 
first sight, reasonable to carry the conventional 
phrase further and wish you a Happy New Year. 
But happiness is a different thing from merriment. 
In the strictest sense of the word you are happy 
in your great task, and we doubly and trebly 
happy in the security that your great duties, so 
finely discharged, confer. So, after all it is a 
Happy New Year that we wish you. 
If you could ha\e your wish, you of the 
Grand Fleet — well, we can guess what it would 
be. It is that the war would so shape itself as to 
force the enemy Heet out, and make it put its 
past work and its once high hopes to the test 
against the power which you command and use 
with all the skill your long vigil and faithful servi^^e 
has made so singly yours to-day. And in one 
sense — and for your sakes, becau.se your glory 
would be somehow lessened if it did not happen — 
we too could wish that this could happen. But 
we wish it only because you do. Although you do 
not grumble, though wc hear no fretful word, we 
realise how wearing and how wearying your cease- 
less watch must be. It is a watchfulness that 
could not be what it is, unless ycu hoped, and 
indeed more than hoped, expected that the enemy 
must early or late prove vour readiness to meet 
liim, either seeking you, or letting you lind him, 
in a High Seas' light of ship to ship, and man to 
man. We, like you, look forward to such a timi; 
with no misgiving as to the result, though, unlike 
you, wc dread the price in noble lives and gallant 
ships that even an overwhelming victory may cost. 
Your hopes and expectation for this dreadful, 
but glorious, end to all your work do not date 
from August i8 months ago. When as little boys 
you "^oniXoihe Britannia, you went drawn there by 
the magic of the sea. It was not the sea that 
carries the argosies of fabled wealth ; it was not 
the sea of yaclits and pleasure boats. It was the 
sea that had been ruled so proudly by your Fathers 
that drew you. And you as the youngest of the 
race went to it as the heirs to a stern and noble 
heritage. So, almost from the nursery, have you 
been vowed to a life of hardship and of self-denial, 
of peril and of poverty — a fitting apprenticeship for 
those who were destined to bear themselves so 
nobly in the day of strain antl battle. To the 
mission confided to you in boyhood you have 
been true in youth and true in manhood. So that 
when war came it was not war that surprised you, 
but you that surprised war. 
NAVAL ACTIONS. 
When the war came, you from the beginning 
did your work as simply, as skilfully, and as easily 
as you had always done it. Not one of j'ou ever 
met the enemy, however inferior the force you 
might be in, but you fought him resolutely and 
to the end. Twice and only twice was he engaged 
to no piu"pose. Pegasus, disabled and outranged, 
fell nobly, and the valiant Cradock faced over- 
powering odds because dutj' pointed to fighting. 
Should the certainty of death stand between him 
and that which England expects of every seaman ? 
There could only be one answer. In no other case 
has an enemv shin sought action with a British ship. 
In every other case the enemy has been forced 
to fight, and made to fly. It was so from the first. 
\Mien two small cruisers penetrated the waters of 
Heliogoland with a flotilla of destroyers, the enemy 
kept ins High Seas fleet and his fast cruisers, and 
his well-gunned armoured ships, in the ignoble 
safety of his harbours and his canal. He left, to 
his shame, his small cruisers to fight their 
battle alone. Tyrwhitt and Blount might, and 
should, have been the objects of overwhelming 
attack. But the Germans were not to be drawn 
into battle. The ascendancy that you gained in the 
first three weeks ot war you have maintained ever 
since. Three times under the cover of darkness or 
of fog, the greater, faster units of the German force 
have — in a frenzy of fearful daring — ventured to 
cross or enter the sea that once was known as the 
(xerman ocean. Three times they have known no 
alternative but precipitate flight to the place 
from which they came. 
Not once has a single merchant ship bound for 
England been stopped or taken by an enemy ship 
in home waters. But 56 out of 8,000 were over- 
taken in distant seas. It has been yours to 
shepherd and protect the vast armies we have sent 
out from Ivngland, and so completely have you 
done it that not a single transport or supply ship 
has been impeded between this country and 
France. From the first there has not been, nor 
can there now ever be, the slightest threat or the 
remotest danger of these islands being invoded. 
Indeed so utter and complete has been your work 
that the phrase "Comm.and of the Sea" has a new 
meaning. The sea holds no danger for us. Allied 
to other great land Powers, we find ourselves able 
and compelled to become a great land Power also. 
The army of four millions is thus not the least of 
your creations. 
So thorough is your work that Britain stands 
to-day on a pinnacle of power unsurpassed by any 
nation at any time. 
Has the completeness of your work been im- 
paired by the ravages of the submarine ? Its gift ot 
invisibility has seemed to some so mystic a thing 
that its powers become magnified. Because it 
clearly sometimes might strike a deadly blow, it was 
though that it always could so strike, till madness 
was piled upon madness, and it seemed as if the 
very laws of force had been upset, and shins 
. 
