BATTLE IN TBE MUD 279

was "nonsensical and untrue" that the German Navy BiJl was
meant as a challenge to British naval supremacy and to state
that "the German Navy was built against nobody at all," For
what, then, was it built?

It was this challenge which made England's participation by
France's side in a European War inevitable. The sea was England's
lifeline. Though her people did not know it, her rulers—almost
without realising that they did so—were forced to commit her
in advance. By an agreement to entrust the policing of the
Mediterranean to France so as to concentrate the entire battle
fleet in the North Sea, they made themselves morally responsible
for the defence of the French Channel and the Atlantic coasts.
Henceforward France and Britain had a common interest-
resistance to Germany. For Germany threatened the existence
of both.

Even then it was the educated minority rather than the
majority who grasped the significance of what was happening.
The unthinking multitude was still absorbed with its sports and
its struggles for a happier existence. But in London An English-
man* s Home played to packed houses, and young Winston Churchill,
unconsciously turning towards the task that was his life's work,
suddenly ceased to be the bitter opponent of army and navy
estimates to become the Liberal First Lord who, deifying Little
Englanders and the Treasury, boldly laid down two keels to
Germany's one and, in a turning-point of history gave the order
that kept the Grand Fleet at sea in the hour of Armageddon.

It only remained to set a spark to all this explosive material.
For this simple task the rulers of imperial Germany were more
than equal. They were neurotic, they were voluble and they
were vain. They were also intensely arrogant. They wane so
obsessed with their own point of view that they were constitu-
tionally incapable of listening quietly to, let alone, seeing any
one else's. At their head, though far from controlling them or
the ruthless "military machine they wielded, was the Kaiser—a
clever, talkative, .undisciplined, excitable egotist. His indiscre-
tions were the terror of the European chancelleries. Add to this,
the fact that no German in authority, though quick enough to
blunder and bluster, seemed able to apologise or withdraw, and
that the jingo Press in all countries magnified every incident
and hasty word, and it was obvious that an explosion could not
be long delayed.