iceless work in October 1914, when
the huge German armies, beaten by the heroic French at the immortal
Battle of the Marne, tried to take the North-East coast of France with
the ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne. Held by Joffre further
south, they found more than their match in the north, when French's
little British army fought them to a standstill, while the Navy simply
burnt them away from the coast by a perfect hurricane of fire.

Better still was the way the Navy finished off the submarine blockade.
Of the 203 enemy submarines destroyed 151 were finished by the British
Navy. The French, Americans, and Italians killed off the rest. All the
150 submarines surrendered came slinking into Harwich, the great British
base for submarines. All the 170 submarines the Germans were building
when the war was stopped were given up to the Allied Naval Commission
headed by a British admiral and backed by a British fleet.

But even more wonderful than this was the oversea transport done by all
kinds of British sea-power working together as one United Service. The
British carried nearly half of all the imports into Italy and France.
They repaired more than a thousand ships a month. They ferried nearly
two-thirds of all the Americans that crossed the Atlantic. They took to
the many different fronts more than half a million vehicles, from
one-horse carts to the biggest locomotives; more than two million
animals--horses, mules, and camels; and more than twenty-two millions of
men. Add to this well over a couple of hundred million tons of oil,
coal, and warlike stores; remember that this is by no means the whole
story, and that it takes no account of the regular trade; and you may
begin to understand what British sea-power meant in this war. In the
mere transportation of armies alone it meant the same thing as taking the
entire population of Canada, three times over, with all its baggage three
times over, and with its very houses three times over, across thousands
of miles of dangerous waters in the midst of the worst war ever known.
And yet, out of the more than twenty-two millions of men, less than five
thousand were killed on the way; and many of these were murdered in
hospital ships marked with the sacred Red Cross. The chances of safety
from murder and fair risks of war put together were nearly five thousand
to one. The chances of safety from fair risks of war by themselves were
nearly ten thousand to one.

No war