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men were discussing the need to save money. Churchill was under constant pressure from David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and other colleagues in the Liberal Cabinet to pare the enormous sums being spent on building dreadnoughts. The amount allotted to the navy in 1914, over £50 million, would be the largest disbursement of this kind in British history. One economizing measure—only a gesture, admittedly—would be to substitute a test mobilization of the Third Fleet, the reserve fleet, for the annual summer maneuvers. Cancellation of the maneuvers would save only a pittance—£100,000 worth of coal and oil burned—but at least the Admiralty would have made the gesture toward the Exchequer.
    In March 1914, therefore, when Churchill presented the House of Commons with the yearly Naval Estimates (the Admiralty’s annual budget request), he announced the change. The plan was to call back from civilian life twenty thousand men of the fleet reserve, man the Third Fleet’s two squadrons of the navy’s oldest predreadnought battleships, and place every vessel in the Royal Navy on a war footing. Once this was done, King George V would review the entire British fleet at Spithead; afterward, the ships would carry out brief exercises at sea and then disperse.
    The fleets and ships involved varied greatly in power and readiness. The First Fleet, the core of British naval power, was built around three battle squadrons of modern dreadnoughts manned by regular navy crews and always ready for action. The Second Fleet, two battle squadrons of relatively recent predreadnought battleships with attendant smaller craft, needed only to collect its regular navy personnel from various naval training schools ashore. The Third Fleet’s old ships, whose capabilities and readiness the mobilization was designed to test, were more or less permanently moored in quiet harbors and tended by skeleton maintenance crews. To make them ready for sea and turn them into fighting machines, thousands of naval reservists were now to be called up and brought aboard.
    It was coincidence that the Royal Navy’s test mobilization, determined as a matter of budgetary economy, occurred at a time of crisis in the Balkans. On July 10, as the Austrian Foreign Ministry was drafting its ultimatum to Serbia, thousands of British naval reservists began arriving at manning depots, where they were issued uniforms and boarded their assigned ships. By July 16, the Second and Third Fleets had sailed from their home ports to join the First Fleet for the royal review at Spithead, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. On July 17, King George arrived and the First Lord, bursting with pride, presented the monarch with a fleet that Churchill declared to be “incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world.”
    On Monday morning, July 20, the armada put to sea for exercises. Every ship was decked with flags, with bands playing and sailors and marines lining the rails. The fleet took six hours to pass the royal yacht, even steaming at fifteen knots. The next three days were spent in tactical exercises in the Channel. On July 23, the three fleets parted company. The ships of the Third Fleet began returning to their home ports to discharge their crews and lapse again into tranquillity. The First and Second Fleets moved to Portland harbor, where they were to remain until Monday morning, July 27. By noon that day, however, the harbor would be empty, the separate battle squadrons dispersed, some to begin gunnery exercises, others to release their crews on midsummer leave. The Second Fleet would return to its home ports to send its crews back to gunnery schools, torpedo schools, and other training establishments ashore. By Friday, some of the ships would be in dry dock for overhaul, others tied to quays for lesser repairs.
    There seemed no reason not to return the fleet to peacetime status. Despite the tragedy at Sarajevo,