The Silent Watchers England's Navy during the Great War: What It Is, and What We Owe to It

At the close of my previous Chapter I took a mean advantage of my readers. For I broke off at the most interesting and baffling phase in the whole Battle of the Giants. It was e...

The naval operations which culminated in the action off the Falkland Islands are associated vividly in my mind with two little personal incidents. On November 12th, 1914, a week...

My boyhood was spent in Devon, the land of Drake and the home of the Elizabethan Navy. A deep passion for the Sea Service is in my blood, though, owing to family circumstances,...

It is strange how events of great national importance become associated in one’s mind with small personal experiences. I have told with what vividness I remember the receipt in...

Everyone has heard of the light cruiser _Glasgow_, how she fought at Coronel, and then escaped, and is now the sole survivor among the warships which then represented Great Brit...

We left the British cruiser _Glasgow_ off the River Plate, where she had arrived after her escape, sore at heart and battered in body, from the disaster of Coronel. The battlesh...

Since I have not been so foolish as to set myself the task of writing a history of the Naval War, I am not hampered by any trammels of chronological sequence. It is my purpose t...

The Luck of the Navy is not always good. There are wardrooms in the Grand Fleet within which to mention any Joss except of the most devilish blackness may lead to blasphemy and...

Our Navy has played the great game of war by sea for too many hundreds of years ever to under-rate its foes. It is even more true of the sea than of the land that the one thing...

During the years 1912 and 1913 the Captain of the British cruiser _Monmouth_, the senior English Naval Officer on the China Station, and Admiral Count von Spee, commanding the G...

For more than eighteen months the Grand Fleet had been at war. It was the centre of the great web of blockading patrols, mine-sweeping flotillas, submarine hunters, and troop-tr...

In naval warfare there are many actions but few battles. An action is any engagement between war vessels of any size, but a battle is a contest between ships of the battle-line—...

“You missed a lot, Soldier,” said the Sub-Lieutenant to his friend the Marine Subaltern, “through not being here at the beginning. Now it is altogether too comfortable for us of...

War is made up of successes and failures. We English do not forget our successes, but we have an incorrigible habit of wiping from our minds the recollection of our failures. Wh...