Days to Remember by John Buchan — Read

The British Navy earned during the war the title of "The Silent Service," and the phrase needs a word of comment, for it is full of meaning. There has always been a feeling in the Service that sea-power is the one thing vitally necessary to the safety of the Empire, and that so long as this is being maintained the less talk about it the better; for where the life of nations is daily and hourly in trust, all advertisement is unworthy and all description inadequate. Then the Great War came, and the landsmen, who form the bulk of our people all over the world, naturally wished to know how the Sea Service was handling the affair; but the rule of silence still held. For the Navy, besides their old tradition, had now the reason of policy on their side; operations at sea can be, and must be, kept secret to a degree which is not possible in a land campaign. To inform the public at home would be to take the chance of being overheard by the enemy.

Moreover the work of the Navy is so multifarious, so technical, and so far-sighted in its aims, that by far the greater part of it would always be difficult to grasp. The ordinary news-reading citizen must be content to judge of it by its results, and he is not always capable of doing even that. Neither in this country, nor in the Dominions overseas, still less in the outer world, has the supreme importance or the decisive achievement of our naval Service been realized. Yet to those who understand, the influence of sea-power on history has never been so conclusively demonstrated. In this war, as in the war of a hundred years before, it was from first to last our ships that lay between a military despot and the domination of the world.