The existence and power of the Navy have been as vital to us as the air we breathed and the sun which kept us alive, and the pressure of the British blockade was, perhaps, the dominating element in the victory of the Allies.

But these things are so great and so evident that it seemed in this little book best to take them for granted.

They have been the presuppositions of all the rest.

What has not yet been so clear--or so I venture to think--to our own people or our Allies, has been the full glory of the part played by the Armies of the British Empire in the concluding phases of the war.

The temporary success of the German sortie of last spring--a mere episode in the great whole--made so deep an impression on the mind of this nation, that the real facts of an _annus mirabilis_, in their true order and proportion, are only now, perhaps, becoming plain to us.