s
visible on board. The crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets,
give the range, lay the sights on the enemy's ships, and the battle
was on.

"There is the old Dreadnought," said an officer. The old Dreadnought
--all of ten years of age, the senile old thing! What a mystery she was
when she was building! The mystery accentuated her celebrity--and
almost forgotten now, while the Queen Elizabeth and the Warspite,
and others of their class with their fifteen-inch guns, would be in the
public eye as the latest type till a new type came. A parade of naval
types was passing. One seemed to shade into the other in
harmonious effect. But here was an outsider, whom one noted
instantly as he studied those rugged silhouettes of steel. She had
twelve twelve-inch guns, with turret piled on turret in an exotic
fashion--one of the two Turkish battleships building in England at the
time of the war and taken over by the British.

One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts--even a
squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense
of its might. Sixteen--twenty--twenty-four--it was the unending
numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive.
An hour passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes
behind the wind-screen of the destroyer's bridge, only to look back
and see more Dreadnoughts going by. A spectator had not realized
that there were so many in the harbour. He had a suspicion that
Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of
a hat.

The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea,
and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever;
still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King
Edward VII. class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients
of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were
yet to come. One's eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps
march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they
had seen the whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the
whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.

The destroyer commander looked at his watch.

"Time!" he said. "I'll put you on shore."

He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the
engine-room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots
an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming
at twenty knots, towering