So here ends my personal experience of the famous Battle of Jutland. It will be readily understood that it is only a fraction of the whole. As is now well known the Fifth Battle Squadron and the Battle-Cruiser Fleet did their job so efficiently that the Germans fled to their base—thus robbing the Grand Fleet of the chance to win a decisive victory.
The Huns, with that genius for mendacity which they have exhibited throughout the war, claimed to have defeated the British Navy—a claim based presumably on the idea that "he who fights and runs away will live to fight another day." Subsequent events must have convinced even their own people of the fallacy of that claim, and there remains the proven fact that with their whole forces in action they refused to face more than a quarter of our Fleet.
... They leaped at the sun To give it their loving friends to keep; Naught man could do have they left undone, And you see their harvest, what they reap.
In triumphs, people have dropped down dead— "Paid by the world, what dost thou owe Me?"—God might question; now, instead, 'Tis God shall repay:—They are safer so.
_Those whose men took part in the Battle of Jutland may forgive—I think they can never forget—the way in which England received the first tidings of that heroic fight. It is the custom in many quarters to blame the Admiralty for the wording of their first published report; but, as my son wrote to me: "They only said that there had been an engagement, and that we had lost certain ships. Why should people jump to the conclusion that the enemy's losses were less than ours?"_
_~Why~ indeed! It showed, not only a complete lack of imagination, but a singular want of faith in the efficiency of the Navy, in which they had always proclaimed such unbounded confidence. It would appear that the great majority of the British public had not the faintest conception of the magnitude of the sacrifices involved in a naval battle fought under conditions of modern warfare. Were the people so dazzled and blinded by the century-old memory of Trafalgar as to forget the fact that at Trafalgar there were neither submarines, nor mines, nor aircraft, nor 15-inch guns to contend with? It would seem incredible—if it were not true—that men landing from the ships with the knowledge that by almost superhuman courage and endurance they had won the greatest naval fight in the history of the world, were yet greeted by the public with cold looks—in some cases even with hisses—and by the Press with a cynical pessimism which could only ask why they had not done ~more~!—and this, remember, at a moment when they were on the rack of mourning for so many gallant friends and comrades who had bought Victory with their lives._