m a journal written at the time:

It is nearly dawn. A red light in the northeast is coming up
over the snowy hills. The water, steely grey--the tide
rising. What strange moving bodies are those, scudding along
over the dim surface, like the ghosts of sea planes? Dense
flocks of duck apparently, rising and falling along the
shallows of the shore. Now they are gone. Nothing moves. The
morning is calm, and the water still. And on it lie, first a
cruiser squadron, and then a line of Dreadnoughts stretching
out of sight. No lights anywhere, except the green lights on
a hospital ship far away. The great ships lie dark and
silent, and I sit and watch them, in the cold dawn, thinking
that but for them, and the multitude of their comrades that
guard these seas and shores, England would be as Belgium or
as Northern France, ravaged and destroyed by a barbarian
enemy. My heart goes out to you, great ships, and you,
gallant unwearied men, who keep your watch upon them! That
watch has been kept for generations. Never has there been
such need for it as now....

But the day has risen, and the sun with it. As I leave the shore in the
Vice-Admiral's boat, the sunlight comes dancing over a low line of hill,
lighting up the harbour, the mighty ships, with their guns, and, scattered
out to sea along the distance, the destroyers, the trawlers, the
mine-sweepers, the small auxiliary craft of all kinds--those "fringes of
the fleet"--which Kipling has caught and photographed as none but he can.

The barge stops beside the Flag-ship, and the Admiral descends into it.
What is the stamp, the peculiar stamp that these naval men bear?--as of a
force trained and disciplined to its utmost capacity, and then held
lightly in check--till wanted. You see it in so many of their faces, even
in eyes hollow for want of sleep. It is always there--the same strength,
the same self-control, the same humanity. Is it produced by the testing
weight of responsibility, the silent sense of ever-present danger, both
from the forces of nature and the enmity of man, the high, scientific
training, and last but not least, that marvellous comradeship of the Navy,
whether between officer and officer, or between officers and men, which
is constantly present indeed in the Army, but is necessarily closer and
more intimate here, in the confined world of the ship, where all live
together