rtance then may be attached to this matter of bridging the
waterways, and some admiration extended towards the men who do it and
the manner of the doing.

"If you ask what have the Allies gained, take this evidence of a French
writer in _Le Temps_: 'If at the beginning of the war we were enabled
to complete the equipment of our army with a rapidity which has not
been one of the least surprises of the German staff, we owe it to the
fleet which has given us the mastery of the seas. We were short of
horses. They were brought from Argentina and Canada. We were short of
wool and of raw materials for our metal industries. We applied to the
stockbreeders of Australia. Lancashire sent us her cottons and cloth,
the Black Country its steel. And now that the consumption of meat
threatens to imperil our supplies of live stock, we are enabled to
avoid danger by the importation of frozen cargoes. For the present
situation the mastery of the sea is not only an advantage but a
necessity. In view of the fact that the greater part of our coal area
is invaded by the enemy the loss of the command of the sea by England
would involve more than her own capitulation. She indeed would be
forced to capitulate through starvation. But France also and her new
ally, Italy, being deprived of coal and, therefore, of the means of
supplying their factories and military transport, would soon be at the
mercy of their adversaries.'

"On this command of the sea rested, then, the whole military structure
of the Alliance. It opposed to Germany and her friends not the
strength of a group of nations, each fighting its own battle, separate
and apart, but the strength of a federation so intimately knit together
as to form a single united power which has behind it the inexhaustible
resources of the world. Thus the British navy riveted the Great
Alliance by operations on a scale hardly imaginable, operations whose
breadth and scope beggar all description, since they span the globe
itself. As for the men and the spirit in which they work, let him sail
on a battleship, a tramp, a liner, or a trawler, the British sailor is
always the same, much as he has been since the world first took his
measure in Elizabeth's days.

'Like the old sailors of the Queen and the Queen's old sailors.'

"A great simplicity is his quality, with something of the child's
unearthly wisdom added, and a Ulysses-like cunning in the hour of
necessity, an ascetic simplicity a