This chapter will review the navies as they gather for action.  It will follow them through the tense moments on shipboard—­the days of watching and waiting like huge sea dogs tugging at the leash.  Interspersed are heroic adventures which have added new tales of valor to the epics of the sea.

The naval history of the great European conflict begins, not with the first of the series of declarations of war, but with the preliminary preparations.  The appointment of Admiral von Tirpitz as Secretary of State in Germany in 1898 is the first decisive movement.  It was in that year that the first rival to England as mistress of the world’s seas, since the days of the Spanish Armada, peeped over the horizon.  Two years before the beginning of the present century, Von Tirpitz organized a campaign, the object of which was to make Germany’s navy as strong as her military arm.  A law passed at that time created the present German fleet; supplementary laws passed in 1900 and 1906 through the Reichstag by this former plowboy caused the German navy to be taken seriously, not only by Germans but by the rest of the world.  England, jealous of her sea power, then began her maintenance of two ships for each one or her rival’s.  Germany answered by laying more keels, till the ratio stood three to two, instead of two to one.

Two years before the firing of the pistol shot at Sarajevo, which precipitated the Great War, the British admiralty announced that henceforth the British naval base in the Mediterranean would be Gibraltar instead of Malta.  Conjectures were made as to the significance of this move; it might have meant that England had found the pace too great and had deliberately decided to abandon her dominance of the eastern Mediterranean; or that Gibraltar had been secretly reequipped as a naval base.  What it did mean was learned when the French Minister of Marine announced in the following September that the entire naval strength of France would thereafter be concentrated in the Mediterranean.  This was the first concrete action of the entente cordiale—­the British navy, in the event of war, was to guard the British home waters and the northern ports of France; the French navy was to guard the Mediterranean, protecting French ports as well as French and British shipping from “the Gib” to the Suez.

What was the comparative strength of these naval combinations when the war started?

From her latest superdreadnoughts down to her auxiliary ships, such as those used for hospital purposes, oil carrying and repairing, England had a total of 674 vessels.  Without consideration of ages and types this total means nothing, and it is therefore necessary to examine her naval strength in detail.  She had nine battleships of 14,000 tons displacement each, built between 1895 and 1898—­the Magnificent, Majestic, Prince George, Jupiter, Caesar, Mars, Illustrious, Hannibal, and Victorious—­with engines developing 12,000 horsepower that sent them through the water at 17.5 knots, protected with from nine to fourteen inches of armor, and prepared to inflict damage on an enemy with torpedoes shot from under and above the water, and with four 12-inch guns, twelve 6-inch guns, sixteen 3-inch guns, and twenty guns of smaller caliber but of quicker firing possibilities.