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belief that no nation would stoop to such levels. “Common sense,” Captain Sirius says, “should have told her that her enemy will play the game that suits them best—that they will not inquire what they may do, but they will do it first and talk about it afterwards.”Doyle’s forecast was dismissed as too fantastic to contemplate.
    But Britain’s own Adm. Jacky Fisher, credited with reforming and modernizing the British navy—it was he who had conceived the first
Dreadnought
—had also become concerned about how submarines might transfigure naval warfare. In a memorandum composed seven months before the war, Fisher forecast that Germany would deploy submarines to sink unarmed merchant ships and would make no effort to save the ships’ crews. The strengths and limitations of the submarine made this outcome inescapable, he argued. A submarine had no room to bring aboard the crew of a merchant ship and did not have enough men of its own to put a prize crew aboard.
    What’s more, Fisher wrote, the logic of war required that ifsuch a strategy were adopted it would have to be pursued to the fullest extent possible. “The essence of war is violence,” he wrote, “and moderation in war is imbecility.”
    Churchill rejected Fisher’s vision. The use of submarines to attack unarmed merchant ships without warning, he wrote, would be “abhorrent to the immemorial law and practice of the sea.”
    Even he acknowledged, however, that such tactics when deployed against
naval
targets constituted “fair war,” but early on neither he nor his German counterparts expected the submarine to play much of a role in deep-ocean battle. The strategic thinking of both sides centered on their main fleets, the British “Grand Fleet” and the German “High Seas Fleet,” and both anticipated an all-or-nothing, Trafalgar-esque naval duel using their big battleships. But neither side was willing to be the first to come out in direct challenge of the other. Britain had more firepower—twenty-seven
Dreadnought
-class battleships to Germany’s sixteen—but Churchill recognized that chance events could nullify that advantage “if some ghastly novelty or blunder supervened.” For added safety, the Admiralty based the fleet in Scapa Flow, a kind of island fortress formed by the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. Churchill expected Germany to make the first move, early and in full strength, for the German fleet would never be stronger than at the war’s beginning.
    German strategists, on the other hand, recognized Britain’s superiority and crafted a plan whereby German ships would make limited raids against the British fleet to gradually erode its power, a campaign that Germany’s Adm. Reinhard Scheer called “guerrilla warfare,” borrowing a Spanish term for small-scale warfare in use since the early nineteenth century. Once the British fleet was pared down, Scheer wrote, the German fleet would seek a “favorable” opportunity for the climactic battle.
    “So we waited,” wrote Churchill; “and nothing happened. No great event immediately occurred. No battle was fought.”
    At the start of the war, the submarine barely figured in the strategic planning of either side. “In those early days,” wrote Hereward Hook, a young British sailor, “I do not think that anyonerealized that a submarine could do any damage.”He was soon to learn otherwise, in an incident that demonstrated in vivid fashion the true destructive power of submarines and revealed a grave flaw in the design of Britain’s big warships.
    At dawn, on the morning of Tuesday, September 22, 1914, three large British cruisers, HMS
Aboukir
,
Hogue
, and
Cressy
, were patrolling a swath of the North Sea off Holland known as the “Broad Fourteens,” moving at eight knots, a leisurely and, as it happened, foolhardy pace. The ships were full of cadets. Hook, one of them, was fifteen years old and assigned to the
Hogue
. The ships were old and slow, and so clearly at