Charles Madden, the Chief of Staff, were
looked upon as being the very fittest of the fit.

But even the best of men and ships will not make the best fleet unless
trained and "tuned up" to act together; and here, in its combined
manuoeuvres, lay the crowning glory of the vast Grand Fleet. One day a
visitor was watching it fight a sham battle against an enemy firing big
guns at long range, when up came a real enemy, in the form of a German
submarine, much closer than the sham. Of course the visitor turned his
glasses on the "sub" and on the destroyers racing after it, like
greyhounds slipped from the leash. But when, a few minutes later, he
looked round at the fleet, he could hardly believe his eyes; for there
it was, moving, mile upon mile of it, in a completely new formation,
after a sort of magic "general post" that had made light craft and
battle-line entirely change places, over an area of a hundred square
miles, without a moment's slackening of speed. Hundreds of vessels had
been in the best formation to fight each other on the surface. Now
they were in the best formation to fight submarines. Then came four of
those "sea-quakes" that make you feel as if your own ship had been
torpedoed, but which really were depth-charges dropped round the
submarine. Then an anxious pause, quickly followed by "all clear," and
that by another fleet order which changed the whole formation back
again as easily as if the lines of wheeling ships had been a single
piece of clockwork and their two million tons of steel had simply
answered to the touching of a single spring.

_First Round of the Great Fight: 2.30 to 4.38 P.M. Beatty and Hipper
with their Battle Cruisers._

At noon on the fateful 31st the Grand Fleet turned north and the German
Fleet turned south, each having come to the end of its "drive," and
neither knowing that the other one was there. The weather had been
very warm and fine; but the North Sea mists had risen in time to veil
the fleets from Zeppelins and other aircraft. Jellicoe's Battle Fleet
was going north within a hundred miles of southern Norway, and von
Scheer's Battle Fleet was going south within a hundred miles of the
Jutland coast of Denmark, when the two Battle Cruiser Fleets under
Beatty and von Hipper suddenly saw each other's smoke, half way between
Jellicoe and Scheer, and a hundred miles west of the Skager Rack.
Jellicoe and Scheer were then more than a hundred miles apart. But the
_Galate