at is, they are the biggest and strongest, with the biggest
and strongest guns and the thickest armour. The battle cruiser is
faster than the battleship, and therefore not so strong; because to be
faster you must thin your heavy armour to let you put in bigger
engines. All the ships of this first kind were either Dreadnoughts or
super-Dreadnoughts; that is, they were classed according to whether
they had been built during the five years after the _Dreadnought_
(1905-10), or during the five years just before the war (1910-14).
Each year there had been great improvements, till ships like the _Queen
Elizabeth_ had eight gigantic guns throwing shells that weighed nearly
a ton each and that could be dropped on an enemy twenty miles away.

[Illustration: BATTLESHIP.]

The second kind is Cruisers, made up of Armoured Cruisers and Light
Cruisers, the Armoured being the bigger and stronger, the Light being
the smaller and faster, and both being too small for the line of
battle. Cruisers are used in at least a dozen different ways. They
scout. They attack and defend oversea trade. They "mother" flotillas
("little fleets") of destroyers, which are much smaller than
themselves. They attack and defend the front, flank, and rear of the
great lines of battle, clearing off the enemy's cruisers and destroyers
and trying to get their own torpedoes home against his larger vessels.
They are the eyes and ears, the scouts and skirmishers, the outposts
and the watchdogs of the Fleet--swift, keen, sinewy, vigilant, and able
to hit pretty hard.

Thirdly come Destroyers. This was the way in which they got their
name. Navies had small gunboats before torpedoes were used. Then they
had torpedo-boats. Then they built torpedo-gunboats. Finally, they
built boats big enough to destroy gunboats, torpedo-boats, and
torpedo-gunboats, without, however, losing the handy use of guns and
torpedoes in vessels much smaller than cruisers. As battleships and
cruisers are arranged in "squadrons" under admirals so destroyers are
arranged in "flotillas" under commodores, who rank between admirals and
captains.

A new kind of light craft--a sort of dwarf destroyer--grew up with the
war. It is so light that it forms a class of its own--the
featherweight class. Its proper name is the Coastal Motor Boat, or the
C.M.B. for short. But the handy man knows it simply as the Scooter.
The first scooters were only forty feet long, the next were fifty-five,