Two British battles in the middle of 1916 might have been crucial to the outcome of war. Neither turned out to be, and neither looms large in Dublin’s narrative of the war, dominated as it is by other events of 1916. The first was the major naval encounter of the war: Jutland, in the North Sea, around a hundred miles from the Danish and Norwegian coasts. Since the start of the war the German naval command had known that they should not seek a decisive battle with the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet due to numbers. However, during spring 1915 they had sought to draw parts of it into a more evenly matched fight, offering as temptation submarine warfare against merchants and assaults on British coastal targets. Meanwhile, the British did not believe they could satisfactorily draw out the German fleet by air raids or mining, and therefore felt that their only chance of engaging the High Seas Fleet was to wait for it in a part of the North Sea which was not mined. Throughout the spring of 1915 only a series of minor encounters was fought.2