German professors have sometimes said that the land would sooner or later beat the sea—that “Moltke” would become the victor over “Mahan.” That is the convinced opinion of the Pan-Germans, who say that the railway will yet prove the more rapid and the more secure means of transport than the steamship. The lines from Antwerp by Cologne to Vienna, and from Hamburg to Berlin, and thence through the very heart of Europe to Vienna, and on by Belgrade and Sofia to Constantinople, and from the opposite shore of the Bosphorus to Baghdad and down to the Gulf, and by a branch through Persia to the confines of India, were to give commercial and, perchance, military command of two continents. Enterprise by the branch railway through Aleppo and Damascus against Egypt, with a view to further developments in Africa, was related to this conception of land-power. The measures adopted by the Allies for the reconstitution of Serbia, the expeditions to the Dardanelles and Salonika, the strong action taken in Greece, the naval movements on the coast of Syria, the operations in the Sinai peninsula and Palestine, and the expedition from the Persian Gulf to Baghdad were the answer to these gigantesque projects of the enemy.
Behind them all lay the working of the fleets. Every class of ship and almost every kind of vessel employed in naval warfare has been used in one or other of these operations—the battleship, cruiser, destroyer, torpedo-boat, submarine, mother ship, aeroplane, aircraft-carrier, mining vessel, river gunboat, motor launch, mine-trawler, armed auxiliary, special service vessel, transport, store ship, collier, oiler, tank, distilling ship, ordnance vessel, hospital ship, tug, lighter, and a crowd of other craft. All these are required for the work of the Navy in the Mediterranean, as elsewhere, and they have been employed with a quality of seamanlike skill, enterprise, resource, courage, and success such as the history of the sea has no previous record of. The appearance at the Golden Horn of a British submarine, which had traversed a Turkish mine-field, was the sign of new powers in naval warfare. We are lost in admiration of the self-sacrifice of officers and men, both of the regular naval service and of the mercantile marine and the fisheries, the latter being the heroes of the perilous work of mine-sweeping. The British and French navies, and the vessel representing the Russian Navy, acted in the closest co-operation, and all the naval forces worked in intimate association with the armies.