can run or strike,
as they please.

Ascend that gangway, so amazingly clean, as were the decks above
and below and everything about the Lion or the Tiger, and you were
on board one of the few major ships which had been under heavy
fire. Her officers and men knew what modern naval war was like; her
guns knew the difference between the wall of cloth of a towed target
and an enemy's wall of armour.

In the battle of Tsushima Straits, Russian and Japanese ships had
fought at three and four thousand yards and closed into much shorter
range. Since then, we had had the new method of marksmanship.
Tsushima ceased to be a criterion. The Dogger Bank multiplied the
range by five. A hundred years since England, all the while the most
powerfully armed nation at sea, had been in a naval war of the first
magnitude; and to the Lion and the Tiger had come the test. The
Germans said that they had sunk the Tiger; but the Tiger afloat
purred a contented denial.

You could not fail to identify among the group of officers on the
quarter-deck Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, for his victory had
impressed his features on the public's eye. Had his portrait not
appeared in the press, one would have been inclined to say that a
first lieutenant had put on a vice-admiral's coat by mistake. He was
about the age of the first lieutenant of one of our battleships. Even as
it was, one was inclined to exclaim: "There is some mistake! You are
too young!" The Who is Who book says that he is all of forty-four
years old and it must be right, though it disagrees with his
appearance by five years.

A vice-admiral at forty-four! A man who is a rear-admiral with us at
fifty-five is very precocious. And all the men around him were young.
The British navy did not wait for war to teach again the lesson of
"youth for action!" They saved time by putting youth in charge at
once.

Their simple uniforms, the directness, alertness, and definiteness of
these officers who had been with a fleet ready for a year to go into
battle on a minute's notice, was in keeping with their surroundings of
decks cleared for action and the absence of anything which did not
suggest that hitting a target was the business of their life.

"I had heard that you took your admirals from the schoolroom," said
one of the Frenchmen, "but I begin to believe that it is the nursery."

Night and day they must be on watch. No easy chairs; their shop is
their home. They must have the vitality that