Page:Admirals of the British Navy.djvu/64

 There is no lack of lip-service to the sea-creed in these islands. The sea-litany and the sea-liturgy and the sea-prayers and the sea- collects and the sea-psalms and the sea-proverbs are tirelessly chanted and sung and said by high and low. Line upon line, precept upon precept, sea-bible and sea-gospel and sea-hymn we know them all by heart. Our Newbolts, our Kiplings, our Conrads, our Hurds, our Leylands yes, and our Mahans they are all a great cloud of witnesses to the supreme necessity of sea-power. And yet in one's lay bones one feels that our practice falls far short of our preaching, and that we as a race are not utterly single-minded in our worship of the one power who has never betrayed us, the sea. The sea is a jealous god, and in these latter days a sure instinct leads one back to the old faith taught by Nelson and his forerunners, by the great captains and admirals whose bones are dust. Peace is a rust that tarnishes a Navy, and, as one studies these portraits and these all too brief and bare biographies, one wonders whether " the Nelson touch " is hereditary, and whether these clear- eyed, strong-lipped admirals are all chips of the old block. One wonders, I say, and yet one does not doubt, for at every meal we eat the proof of the pudding. These admirals and their men have kept the faith and held the sea against High Seas Fleet and mine and submarine. Not for many a long day will all the wonders they have wrought be known or even suspected. Few there be who are allowed to peep into the inner shrine of admiralty. The higher secrets of sea-power are guarded and will be guarded long after Britain shall have won this war. Herein is the true explanation of these modest memoirs which tell so little with all their camouflage of dates and decorations. Compared with a British admiral, Tacitus was a loquacious and copious blabber and babbler. If you interrogate him, he smiles and displays a long row of ribbons or a festoon of foreign orders. " The Silent Navy " is silent because it is not safe to talk or to be talked about, and also because it is not in love with the gauds of publicity. I confess I like the austere reticence of these dull and dreary lifelets of our great admirals. It warns us that we must walk by faith and not by sight when, like Peter, we take to the stormy waters. There is, of course, the doubting Thomas, who is " hot for certainties ' in the sea affair. He whispers in my ear that there is in the higher ranks a dearth of genius as compared with the lower ranks, and he tries to support his theory by asserting that all the brilliant junior officers must pass through a narrow bottle-neck before they become captains, and that the captains, after ten or twelve years of that awful solitude which is the captain's pride and peril, are apt to suffer from the ossifying brain which rejects new ideas, from the crusted con- servatism which resists reform, from deskwork and paperwork, and from all the ravages of the red tapeworm.