d had the grandest Odyssey. She, too, had been at the
Dardanelles.

The Queen Elizabeth was disappointing so far as wounds went. She
had been so much in the public eye that one expected to find her
badly battered, and she had suffered little, indeed, for the amount of
sport she had had in tossing her fifteen-inch shells across the Gallipoli
peninsula into the Turkish batteries and the amount of risk she had
run from Turkish mines. Some of these monsters contained only
eleven thousand shrapnel bullets. A strange business for a fifteen-
inch naval gun to be firing shrapnel. A year ago no one could have
imagined that one day the most powerful British ship, built with the
single thought of overwhelming an enemy's Dreadnought, would ever
be trying to force the Dardanelles.

The trouble was that she could not fire an army corps ashore along
with her shells to take possession of the land after she had put
batteries out of action. She had some grand target practice; she
escaped the mines; she kept out of reach of the German shells, and
returned to report to Sir John with just enough scars to give zest to
the recollection of her extraordinary adventure. All the fleet was
relieved to see her back in her proper place. It is not the business of
super-Dreadnoughts to be steaming around mine-fields, but to be
surrounded by destroyers and light cruisers and submarines
safeguarding her giant guns, which are depressed and elevated as
easily as if they were drum-sticks. One had an abrasion, a tracery of
dents.

"That was from a Turkish shell," said an officer. "And you are standing
where a shell hit."

I looked down to see an irregular outline of fresh planking.

"An accident when we did not happen to be out of their reach. We
had the range of them," he added.

"The range of them" is a great phrase. Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee
used it in speaking of the battle of the Falkland Islands. "The range of
them" seems a sure prescription for victory. Nothing in all the history
of the war appeals to me as quite so smooth a bit of tactics as the
Falkland affair. It was so smooth that it was velvety; and it is worth
telling again, as I understand it. Sir Frederick is another young
admiral. Otherwise, how could the British navy have entrusted him
with so important a task? He is a different type from Beatty, who in an
army one judges might have been in the cavalry. Along with the
peculiar charm and alertness which we associate with sailors-