from front to rear, with eighteen flagships
leading its different squadrons, and scores of destroyers ahead,
astern, and on the flanks, not one of which was counted in the
thirty-two long miles of lines-ahead.

Before it had gone eight bells at four o'clock that morning, the
_Revenge_, flagship of Sir Charles Madden, Second-in-Command of the
Grand Fleet, led the way out to the appointed rendezvous: "X position,
latitude 56, 11 North, longitude 1, 20 West." The present _Revenge_, a
magnificent super-dreadnought, is the ninth of her name in the Navy;
and, besides her name, has three curious links to recall the gallant
days of Drake. In her cabin is a copy of the griffin which, being
Grenville's crest, the first _Revenge_ so proudly bore in the immortal
fight of "The One and the Fifty-Three." Then, had the German Fleet
come out again, Madden and this ninth _Revenge_ would have taken
exactly the same place in action as Drake and the First _Revenge_ took
just three hundred and thirty years before against the Great Armada.
Thirdly (but this, alas, was too good to come true!) Sir Charles told
his Canadian guest one day in Scapa Flow that he and Sir David Beatty
had agreed to be caught playing a little game of bowls on the Grand
Fleet clubhouse green the next time the German Fleet appeared. "And,"
he added, "we'll finish the game first, and the Germans after"--just
what Drake had said about the Spaniards.

Nearing the rendezvous at nine the bugles sounded _Action Stations!_
for though the German ships were to come unarmed and only manned by
navigating crews it was rightly thought wiser not to trust them. You
never catch the Navy napping. So, when the two fleets met, every
British gun was manned, all ready to blow the Germans out of the water
at the very first sign of treachery. Led captive by British cruisers,
and watched by a hundred and fifty fast destroyers, as well as by a
huge airship overhead, the vanquished Germans steamed in between the
two victorious lines, which then reversed by squadrons, perfect as a
piece of clockwork, and headed for the Firth of Forth. Thus the vast
procession moved on, now in three lines-ahead, but filling the same
area as before: a hundred square miles of sea. In all, there were over
three hundred men-of-war belonging to the four greatest navies the
world has ever known.

At eight bells that afternoon all hands were piped aft by the
boatswains' whistles, the bugles rang out the _Sun