s know the speed and power of every fighting ship
afloat, British or foreign, as you or I before the war knew the public
form of every leading golfer or cricketer. In every bar where
sailormen met one another, and met, too, the brothers and fathers of
sailormen, the Lords of the Admiralty were weighed and condemned. It
is a thing most serious when in the cradles of the Navy, Portsmouth
and the Three Towns, faith in the wisdom of Whitehall becomes shaken.
One may muzzle the Press, but no muzzle yet devised can close the
mouths of sailormen and their friends in dockyard towns.

In the afternoon of the same day, while the news of the disaster was
still fresh, there came a whisper, which gained in loudness and in
precision of detail as it passed from mouth to ear and from ear to
mouth, that the worst had not yet been told. There had been not one,
but two disasters. Two battle-cruisers, it was declared, had been sunk
in the Channel by German mines or submarines. What were their names?
inquired the white-faced women. The names were not yet known, but they
would soon come. A little later the severity of the rumour became
softened. The battle-cruisers had not, it appeared, been sunk, but
severely damaged. They were at that moment on their way to the Sound,
crippled sorely, yet afloat. Men groaned. Two battle-cruisers blown up
in the Channel; what in God's name were two battle-cruisers doing in
the mine-strewn Channel when their proper place was in one of the safe
eyries overlooking the North Sea? A plausible explanation was offered.
The two battle-cruisers had been coming to Plymouth to take in stores
that they might speed away south to avenge those other two cruisers
sunk by the Germans as had been told in the morning's papers. If this
were indeed true, the news was of the worst; England's prestige afloat
was gone. She could not spare two other whole battle-cruisers to
proceed upon a mission of vengeance to the South Seas while the
Germans' Battle Squadrons in the North Sea ports were still
undefeated. Meanwhile the Germans far away to the south could do what
they pleased; they could sink and burn our merchant steamers at will.
The command of the Pacific had passed from England to Germany, and the
White Ensign hung draggled and shamed for all the world to sneer at.
The Three Towns almost forgot their personal grief for drowned friends
in their horror at the disgrace which had come to their own sacred
Service.

It was still l