2p6 ENGLISH SAGA

Behind the army lay another force without which its efforts
would have availed nothing. During the four and a quarter years
of the war the army absorbed nearly six million Britons, the
navy only half a million. But those five hundred thousand men
and their Admiral could have lost the war in a single hour. By
their mere existence hundreds of miles away from the struggling
armies and smoking towns that fed the battlefield, the strength
of Germany was slowly sapped. The terrible purpose of England
beset by foes was expressed in its final form in remote silence:
among the islands of the North the Fleet was in being. It was
enough. The only half-hearted attempt to challenge it ended
in the thunder of Jutland; but when the mists and smoke of
that confused cannonade lifted, the seas remained as they were—
England's forbidden waterway. The people of central Europe
tried every way to avert and postpone the hungry negation of
that invisible siege. Even while their armies, out-gunned, out-
manoeuvred and out-fought, were falling back before the advanc-
ing surge of victorious khaki and blue, hunger was gnawing at
the vitals of the German workers and housewives at home.
Revolution and surrender went hand in hand. And at the end
of all, the Kaiser's tall ships of war, manned by hungry and
mutinous men, tailed in mournful submission to Scapa Flow.
1 Victory, eagerly hoped for in 1914, struggled for in vain and
in the face of repeated disappointments and defeats in the long
middle years, almost despaired of in the spring and summer of
1918, had come at last. Never a military nation, England, when
it came to testing the martial virtues, had outlasted all others.
That was why she won. In after years successful men of peace
were to argue that her financial resources had given her victory
just as the defeated Germans, forgetting their sores, Were to
contend that there had been no victory at all. But in the grim
days of March, 1918, and during the fierce, terrible advance
against the struggling German lines of that September and
October, the fate of the world rested on the stubborn shoulders
of the British soldier. He and the superb fighters that the British
nations overseas sent from their lands of snow and sun to stand
by England's side, were the ultimate arbiters of that iron time.
Had they failed the world would have failed, and the German
ideal of rule by power would have triumphed while Adolf Hitler
was still a corporal. Not Britain's wealth but her character was
the deciding factor in that hour of destiny.