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Siam. They are also rather naive in their artless egoism. They find difficulty believing in really evil intentions in others; they are very calm, very phlegmatic, very optimistic. The country exudes wealth, comfort, content and confidence in its own power and future. The people simply cannot believe that things could ever go really wrong, either at home or abroad. With the exception of a few leading men, they work little and leave themselves time for everything.
    Now England was enjoying the most beautiful August weather in many years. The holiday season had begun and the coming weekend would be prolonged by a bank holiday on Monday. Even as Russia, Austria, France, and Germany were mobilizing, English vacationers were flocking to the railway stations and the beaches. It was not surprising that foreign observers—the Germans hopefully and the French anxiously—concluded that Great Britain had determined to stand aside from the war about to engulf Europe.
    Winston Churchill was confident that by sending the Grand Fleet into “the enormous waste of water to the north of our islands” he had guarded it against surprise attack; he worried, nonetheless, about its strength relative to that of the High Seas Fleet. On paper, the ratio of dreadnoughts—twenty-four to seventeen—looked reassuring. But for the First Lord, it was not enough. “There was not much margin here,” he wrote later, “for mischance nor for the percentage of mechanical defects which in so large a fleet had to be expected.” Providentially, the margin could be enlarged at a single decisive stroke. For years, British shipyards had been building warships for foreign navies. Sometimes, depending on the specifications required by the various admiralties, these ships were more powerful than vessels the same shipyard was building for Britain. In 1913, for example, Vickers completed
Kongo,
then the finest battle cruiser in the world, for Japan. Mounting ten 14-inch guns, lavishly armored, and capable of 27 knots, she was superior in almost every respect to the latest British battle cruiser,
Tiger,
still, in July 1914, undelivered to the Royal Navy. When
Kongo
sailed for home, she left behind, under construction in British shipyards, four other foreign superdreadnoughts, all equal to Britain’s best. Two were being built for Turkey and two for Chile. Now, in the summer of 1914, as the European crisis worsened, the Turkish ships—
Reshadieh,
modeled on the
Iron Duke
class, and
Sultan Osman I,
carrying fourteen 12-inch guns, were nearing completion and preparing to sail for the Bosporus. At this point, the First Lord insisted that the Turks must not be permitted to take physical possession of their ships.
    The first of the Turkish vessels, the 23,000-ton dreadnought
Reshadieh,
was similar to
King George V,
carrying ten 13.5-inch guns. The second, larger, battleship eventually would earn a unique place in the history of naval construction for, within a single year, it was owned by three different governments. For a decade, the three principal South American powers, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, had been conducting their own dreadnought-building race, draining each country of a quarter of its annual national income. Brazil began by ordering from British yards a pair of 21,000-ton dreadnoughts each carrying twelve 12-inch guns. Argentina responded by ordering two 28,000-ton battleships with twelve 12-inch guns—one ship from the New York Ship Building Company, the other from the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Brazil, alarmed by the larger size of the new Argentine vessels, returned to Britain in 1911 to order a third new battleship. This vessel was to be a phenomenon: the longest dreadnought in the world, with the unequaled armament of fourteen 12-inch guns set in seven turrets. Laid down in September 1911 at Armstrong’s Elswick yard in Newcastle upon Tyne, she was launched in January 1913 as
Rio de Janeiro.
By October, however, cheap rubber from