rdly be necessary to point out the fact that this lesson
may be read in terms of "preparedness." The British navy was
prepared when the war began; the British army was not. The German
army was prepared; the German navy was not--in the sense of being
large enough for its mission. With these facts in mind, we have only
to look at the contrast between the progress of the war on land and
that on the sea to read the whole lesson of preparedness in a form
so concrete that it is hard to understand how any observer can fail
to grasp its full significance.

Among the minor lessons of the war, it will probably appear to most
laymen that the unforeseen effectiveness of the submarine is the
most significant. In a way this is true; but the significance of the
lesson may be dangerously exaggerated unless we recognize the part
contributed to the early successes of the submarine by the element
of surprise to which allusion has already been made. When the war
began, the submarine was an untried and an almost unknown weapon,
and the British navy was rather contemptuous of it, or at least
indifferent toward it. Its dramatic appearance in the North Sea at
early dawn of a misty September morning was as great a surprise to
the three British cruisers which it sank in rapid succession as the
story of the disaster was to the world at large. The fact that the
cruisers by their carelessness invited the fate which came to them
does not, of course, deprive the incident of significance. But after
all, the world has never doubted that a submarine could sink a ship
that practically insisted upon being sunk.

As a result of this experience, British men-of-war operating
thereafter in what they considered submarine territory, took
reasonable precautions; and in such waters no other important
successes have been scored against them. But neither to them nor,
probably, to anyone else except their adversaries, did it occur that
a submarine could make its way from the North Sea to the
Dardanelles. And so it came about that when one of them appeared
there, it found conditions again ideal for surprise, and taking
advantage of these conditions delivered its attack and scored a
success as striking as the earlier one in its own home waters.

The activities of submarines against merchant shipping we need not
discuss here. The only lesson they hold for us, from the point of
view of naval warfare, is the lesson that for them, as for all other
activities of the su