Take it for all in all, never in the history of war has organized force accomplished its purpose at so small a cost in unpreventable loss, or with such utter thoroughness, or in face of such unanticipated difficulties.
It was inevitable that there should be some failures. Not every opportunity has been seized, nor every chance of victory pushed to the utmost. Who can doubt that there are a hundred points of detail in which your material, the methods open to you, the plans which tied you, might have been more ample, better adapted to their purpose, more closely and wisely considered? For when so much had changed, the details of naval war had to differ greatly from the anticipation. In the long years of peace--that seem so infinitely far behind us now--you had for a generation and a half been administered by a department almost entirely civilian in its spirit and authority. It was a control that had to make some errors in policy, in provision, in selection. But your skill counter-balanced bad policy when it could; your resources supplied the defects of material; too few of you were of anything but the highest merit for many errors of selection to be possible.
And the nation understood you very little. Your countrymen, it is true, paid you the lip service of admitting that you alone stood between the nation and defeat if war should come. But war seemed so unreal and remote to them, that it was only a few that took the trouble to ask what more you needed for war than you already had.
And you were so absorbed in the grinding toil of your daily work to be articulate in criticism; too occupied in trying to get the right result with indifferent means--because the right means cost too much and could not be given to you--to strive for better treatment; too wholly wedded to your task to be angry that your task was not made more easy for you. Hence you took civilian domination, civilian ignorance, and civilian indifference to the things that matter, all for granted, and submitted to them dumbly and humbly, as you submitted silent and unprotesting to your other hardships; you were resigned to this being so; and were resigned without resentment. If, then, the plans were sometimes wrong, if you and your force were at other times cruelly misused, if the methods available to you were often inadequate, it was not your fault--unless, indeed, it be a fault to be too loyal and too proud to make complaint.