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Most assuredly in modern sea-warfare it may be said, in the Laureate's words used by him, of course, with a very different sense that "the individual dwindles," so that the prediction, which some of our readers may remember was once made by a First Lord of the Admiralty, seems not unlikely one day to become sober fact that the time will come when we shall no longer require sailors, because all that our warships will need will be stokers and artillerymen.
And we come, after much ignorant denial and obstinacy, back to the inexorable truth that 'they who take the sword shall perish with the sword. If we consider the 'sword' as a metaphor for every instrument of destruction, we shall see the force of its application the submarine, for example, built for the most treacherous kind of sea-warfare how often they that undertake its work are slain themselves!
In a few short years he revolutionized, not the strategy or tactics of sea-warfare, but the very conception of victory itself. And this is genius. In that alone, through the fidelity of his fortune and the power of his inspiration, he stands unique amongst the leaders of fleets and sailors. He brought heroism into the line of duty. Verily he is a terrible ancestor.
For all the space we steamed through that Sunday evening must now be one great minefield, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot perhaps where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much fussy importance. Mines; Submarines. The last word in sea-warfare! Progress impressively disclosed by this war. There have been other wars!
On the latter point he wrote: "Keeping such a squadron in British waters, alarming their coasts, intercepting their trade, and descending now and then upon their least protected ports, is the only way that we, with our slender resources, can sensibly affect our enemy by sea-warfare." This is an exact outline of the policy which Jones and other United States captains actually carried out.
What a wicked thing of the Englander to shell an "undefended" town! The search-lights and the huge gun positions and the maze of trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements hewn out of the living rock, of course, to the Teuton mind, do not constitute defence. But you must not think that we have had it all our own way in this sea-warfare here.
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