serious matter for us. Meanwhile, the best brains in naval England are
at work, and one can feel the sailors straining at the leash. In the
first eighteen days of February, there were forty fights with
submarines. The Navy talks very little about them, and says nothing of
which it is not certain. But all the scientific resources, all the
fighting brains of naval England are being brought to bear, and we at
home--well, let us keep to our rations, the only thing we can do to help
our men at sea!

How this grey estuary spread before my eyes illustrates and illuminates
the figures I have been quoting! I am on the light cruiser of a famous
Commodore, and I have just been creeping and climbing through a
submarine. The waters round are crowded with those light craft,
destroyers, submarines, mine-sweepers, trawlers, patrol boats, on which
for the moment at any rate the fortunes of the naval war turns. And take
notice that they are all--or almost all--_new_; the very latest products
of British ship-yards. We have plenty of battle-ships, but "we must now
build, as quickly as possible, the smaller craft, and the merchant ships
we want," says Sir Edward Carson. "Not a slip in the country will be
empty during the coming months. Every rivet put into a ship will
contribute to the defeat of Germany. And 47 per cent, of the Merchant
Service have already been armed." The riveters must indeed have been
hard at work! This crowded scene carries me back to the Clyde where I
was last year, to the new factories and workshops, with their
ever-increasing throng of women, and to the marvellous work of the
ship-yards. No talk now of strikes, of a disaffected and revolutionary
minority, on the Clyde, at any rate, as there was twelve months ago.
Broadly speaking, and allowing for a small, stubborn, but insignificant
Pacifist section, the will of the nation, throughout all classes, has
become as steel--to win the war.