ew the flagship by the admirals' barges astern, as you know
the location of an army headquarters by its motor-cars. It seemed in
the centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression.
Where its place would be in action is one of those secrets as
important to the enemy as the location of a general's shell-proof
shelter in Flanders. Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe may be on some other
ship in battle. If there is any one foolish question which you should not
ask it is this.

As you mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought you
were bound to think--at least, an American was--of another flagship in
Portsmouth harbour, Nelson's Victory. Probably an Englishman would
not indulge in such a commonplace. I would like to know how many
Englishmen had ever seen the old Victory. But then, how many
Americans have been to Mount Vernon and Gettysburg?

It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a
first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave
any fighting to be done by his successors. Maintaining herself as
mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength--except in the
late 'fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France a
temporary lead on paper--ship after ship, through all the grades of
progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without
firing a shot in anger. The Victory was one landmark, or seamark, if
you please, and this flagship was another. Between the two were
generations of officers and men, working through the change from
stagecoach to motors and aeroplanes and seaplanes, who had kept
up to a standard of efficiency in view of a test that never came. A year
of war and still the test had not come, for the old reason that England
had superior strength. Her outnumbering guns which had kept the
peace of the seas still kept it. All second nature to the Englishman
this, as the defence of the immense distances of the steppes to the
Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall and the Mississippi's flow to the
man in Kansas. But the American kept thinking about it; and he
wanted the Kansans to think about it, too. When he was about to
meet Sir John Jellicoe he envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar
Square, surmounted by the one-armed figure turned toward the
wireless skein on top of the Admiralty building.

I first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago when he was Chief of Staff to
Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of the Asiati