"The story of these things cannot be written here; it will fill many
volumes. Here an attempt has been made to sketch merely in its
broadest outlines some of the activities of British sailors during the
greatest of wars. Whatever the future historian will say of the part
they bore he will not minimize it, for on this pivot the whole matter
turned, on this axis the great circle of the war revolved. He will
affirm that, though in respect of numbers almost negligible compared
with the soldiers who fought in the long series of land battles, the
sailors held the central avenues, the citadel of power.

"If it be possible in a single paragraph, let us set before our eyes
the work of the British navy and its auxiliaries during these loud and
angry years. Let us first recall the fact, that, besides the
protection of Britain and her dependencies from invasion, together with
the preservation of her overseas trade, to the navy was intrusted a
duty it has fulfilled with equal success, the protection of the coasts
of France from naval bombardment or attack--no slight service to
Britain's gallant ally. Behind this barrier of the British fleet, she
continued to arm and munition her armies undisturbed. Recall, too, the
French colonial armies as well as our own overseas troops, escorted to
the various seats of war--more than seven million men--the vital
communications of the Allies, north and south, secured; the supplies
and munitions--seven million tons--carried overseas; 1,250,000 horses
and mules embarked, carried and disembarked; the left wing of the
Belgian force supported in Flanders by bombardment; the Serbian army
transferred to a new zone of war; and last, if we may call last what is
really first and the mastering cause of all the rest, Germany's immense
navy fettered in her ports. Bring also to mind that fifty or sixty of
her finest war vessels have been destroyed, besides many Austrian and
Turkish; five or six million tons of the enemy's mercantile marine
captured or driven to rust in harbor; her trade ruined, a strict
blockade of her ports established which impoverishes day by day her
industrial and fighting strength; hundreds of thousands of Germans
overseas prevented from joining her armies; her wireless and coaling
stations over all the world and her colonial empire, that ambitious and
costly fabric of her dreams, cut off from the Fatherland and brought
helplessly to the ground.

"When all this has been passed i