These pieces were written as journalism, in response to a request by the Admiralty, as the British public realised that World War I certainly was not going to be 'over by Christmas', and wanted to know what the Navy, the 'silent service', on which so much money had been spent in the decade before the war, was doing. The end of the 'Great War' against Napoleonic France had left Great Britain undoubted mistress of the oceans, and the Royal Navy was the largest in the world. This situation remained unchanged until 1914, but the rising power of a unified Germany, not merely economic but in imperial ambitions, had created a perceived threat from the mid-1890s onwards.