The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Silent Watchers, by Bennet Copplestone
THE SILENT WATCHERS
By the Same Author
THE LOST NAVAL PAPERS
A series of exciting stories which reveal
the English Secret Service as it really
is—silent, unsleeping, and supremely
competent.
“William Dawson is a great creation, a sheer
delight. If Mr. Bennet Copplestone’s intriguing
book meets with half the success it deserves, the
inimitable Sherlock Holmes will soon be out-rivalled
in popularity by the inscrutable William
Dawson.”—Daily Telegraph.
$1.50 Net
JITNY AND THE BOYS
“The book is full of the thoughts which make
us proud to-day and help us to face to-morrow.
Yes, ‘Jitny’ has my blessing.”—Punch.
“Motoring people could do nothing better than
sit down and have a spin, in imagination, by reading
this book. A clinking motor-car story.”
—Daily Chronicle.
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New York—E. P. Dutton & Company
THE
Silent Watchers
England’s Navy during the Great War:
What It Is, and What We Owe to It
By
BENNET COPPLESTONE
AUTHOR OF
“THE LOST NAVAL PAPERS”
“The Navy is a matter of machines only in
so far as human beings can only achieve material
ends by material means. I look upon the ships and
the guns as secreted by the men just as a tortoise
secretes its shell.”—Prologue.
New York
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright, 1918
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
All Rights Reserved
First Printing, Sept., 1918
Second Printing, Oct., 1918
Printed in the United States of America
NOTE
Between June, 1916, and February, 1918, I
contributed a good many articles and sketches on
Naval subjects to The Cornhill Magazine. They
were not designed upon any plan or published
in any settled sequence. As one article led up
to another, and information came to me from my
generously appreciative readers (many of whom
were in the Service), I revised those which I had
written and ventured to write still more. This
book contains my Cornhill articles—revised and
sometimes re-written in the light of wider information
and kindly criticism—and several additional
chapters which have not previously been published
anywhere. I have endeavoured to weave into a
connected series articles and sketches which were
originally disconnected, and I have introduced
new strands to give strength to the fabric. Through
the whole runs a golden thread which I have
called The Secret of the Navy.
B. C.
March, 1918.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE [After the Battle]
III. [The Great Victory]
IV. [With the Grand Fleet: A North Sea “Stunt”]
V. [With the Grand Fleet: The Terriers and the Rats]
VI. [The Mediterranean: A Success and a Failure]
VII. [In the South Seas: The Disaster off Coronel]
VIII. [In the South Seas: Cleaning Up]
IX. [How the “Sydney” Met the “Emden”]
XI. [The Cruise of the “Glasgow”: Part I—Rio to Coronel]
XII. [The Cruise of the “Glasgow”: Part II—Coronelto Juan Fernandez]
XIII. [The Battle of the Giants: Part I]
XIV.[The Battle of the Giants: Part II]
EPILOGUE [Lieutenant Cæsar]
LIST OF MAPS
[The Mediterranean Operations]
[How the “Sydney” Met the “Emden”]
[The Pacific: von Spee’s Concentration]
THE SILENT WATCHERS
PROLOGUE
AFTER THE BATTLE
“Cæsar,” said a Sub-lieutenant to his friend, a temporary Lieutenant R.N.V.R., who at the outbreak of war had been a classical scholar at Oxford, “you were in the thick of our scrap yonder off the Jutland coast. You were in it every blessed minute with the battle cruisers, and must have had a lovely time. Did you ever, Cæsar, try to write the story of it?”
It was early in June of 1916, and a group of officers had gathered near the ninth hole of an abominable golf course which they had themselves laid out upon an island in the great land-locked bay wherein reposed from their labours long lines of silent ships. It was a peaceful scene. Few even of the battleships showed the scars of battle, though among them were some which the Germans claimed to be at the bottom of the sea. There they lay, coaled, their magazines refilled, ready at short notice to issue forth with every eager man and boy standing at his action station. And while all waited for the next call, officers went ashore, keen, after the restrictions upon free exercise, to stretch their muscles upon the infamous golf course. It was, I suppose, one of the very worst courses in the world. There were no prepared tees, no fairway, no greens. But there was much bare rock, great tufts of coarse grass greedy of balls, wide stretches of hard, naked soil destructive of wooden clubs, and holes cut here and there of approximately the regulation size. Few officers of the Grand Fleet, except those in Beatty’s Salt of the Earth squadrons, far to the south, had since the war began been privileged to play upon more gracious courses. But the Sea Service, which takes the rough with the smooth, with cheerful and profane philosophy, accepted the home-made links as a spirited triumph of the handy-man over forbidding nature.
“Yes,” said the naval volunteer, “I tried many times, but gave up all attempts as hopeless. I came up here to get first-hand material, and have sacrificed my short battle leave to no purpose. The more I learn the more helplessly incapable I feel. I can describe the life of a ship, and make you people move and speak like live things. But a battle is too big for me. One might as well try to realise and set on paper the Day of Judgment. All I did was to write a letter to an old friend, one Copplestone, beseeching him to make clear to the people at home what we really had done. I wrote it three days after the battle. Here it is.”
Lieutenant Cæsar drew a paper from his pocket and read as follows:
“My dear Copplestone,—Picture to yourself our feelings. On Wednesday we were in the fiery hell of the greatest naval action ever fought. A real Battle of the Giants. Beatty’s and Hood’s battle cruisers—chaffingly known as the Salt of the Earth—and Evan Thomas’s squadron of four fast Queen Elizabeths had fought for two hours the whole German High Seas Fleet. Beatty, in spite of his heavy losses, had outmanœuvred Fritz’s battle cruisers and enveloped the German line. The Fifth Battle Squadron had stalled off the German Main Fleet, and led them into the net of Jellicoe, who, coming up, deployed between Evan Thomas and Beatty, though he could not see either, crossed the T of the Germans in the beautifullest of beautiful manœuvres, and had them for a moment as good as sunk. But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; it is sometimes difficult to say Blessed be the Name of the Lord. For just when we most needed full visibility the mist came down thick, the light failed, and we were robbed of the fruits of victory when they were almost in our hands. It was hard, hard, bitterly hard. But we had done the utmost which the Fates permitted. The enemy, after being harried all night by destroyers, had got away home in torn rags, and we were left in supreme command of the North Sea, a command more complete and unchallengeable than at any moment since the war began. For Fritz had put out his full strength, all his unknown cards were on the table, we knew his strength and his weakness, and that he could not stand for a moment against our concentrated power. All this we had done, and rejoiced mightily. In the morning we picked up from Poldhu the German wireless claiming the battle as a glorious victory—at which we laughed loudly. But there was no laughter when in the afternoon Poldhu sent out an official message from our own Admiralty which, from its clumsy wording and apologetic tone, seemed actually to suggest that we had had the devil of a hiding. Then when we arrived at our bases came the newspapers with their talk of immense losses, and of bungling, and of the Grand Fleet’s failure! Oh, it was a monstrous shame! The country which depends utterly upon us for life and honour, and had trusted us utterly, had been struck to the heart. We had come back glowing, exalted by the battle, full of admiration for the skill of our leaders and for the serene intrepidity of our men. We had seen our ships go down and pay the price of sea command—pay it willingly and ungrudgingly as the Navy always pays. Nothing that the enemy had done or could do was able to hurt us, but we had been mortally wounded in the house of our friends. It will take days, weeks, perhaps months, for England and the world to be made to understand and to do us justice. Do what you can, old man. Don’t delay a minute. Get busy. You know the Navy, and love it with your whole soul. Collect notes and diagrams from the scores of friends whom you have in the Service; they will talk to you and tell you everything. I can do little myself. A Naval Volunteer who fought through the action in a turret, looking after a pair of big guns, could not himself see anything outside his thick steel walls. Go ahead at once, do knots, and the fighting Navy will remember you in its prayers.”
The attention of others in the group had been drawn to the reader and his letter, and when Lieutenant Cæsar stopped, flushed and out of breath, there came a chorus of approving laughter.
“This temporary gentleman is quite a literary character,” said a two-ring Lieutenant who had been in an exposed spotting top throughout the whole action, “but we’ve made a Navy man of him since he joined. That’s a dashed good letter, and I hope you sent it.”
“Yes,” said Cæsar. “But while I was hesitating, wondering whether I would risk the lightning of the Higher Powers, a possible court martial, and the loss of my insecure wavy rings, the business was taken out of my hands by this same man to whom I was wanting to write. He got moving on his own account, and now, though the battle is only ten days old, the country knows the rights of what we did. When it comes to describing the battle itself, I make way for my betters. For what could I see? On the afternoon of May 31st, we were doing gun drill in my turret. Suddenly came an order to put lyddite into the guns and follow the Control. During the next two hours as the battle developed we saw nothing. We were just parts of a big human machine intent upon working our own little bit with faultless accuracy. There was no leisure to think of anything but the job in hand. From beginning to end I had no suggestion of a thrill, for a naval action in a turret is just gun drill glorified, as I suppose it is meant to be. The enemy is not seen; even the explosions of the guns are scarcely heard. I never took my ear-protectors from their case in my pocket. All is quiet, organised labour, sometimes very hard labour when for any reason one has to hoist the great shells by the hand purchase. It is extraordinary to think that I got fifty times more actual excitement out of a squadron regatta months ago than out of the greatest battle in naval history.”
“That’s quite true,” said the Spotting Officer, “and quite to be expected. Battleship fighting is not thrilling except for the very few. For nine-tenths of the officers and men it is a quiet, almost dull routine of exact duties. For some of us up in exposed positions in the spotting tops or on the signal bridge, with big shells banging on the armour or bursting alongside in the sea, it becomes mighty wetting and very prayerful. For the still fewer, the real fighters of the ship in the conning tower, it must be absorbingly interesting. But for the true blazing rapture of battle one has to go to the destroyers. In a battleship one lives like a gentleman until one is dead, and takes the deuce of a lot of killing. In a destroyer one lives rather like a pig, and one dies with extraordinary suddenness. Yet the destroyer officers and men have their reward in a battle, for then they drink deep of the wine of life. I would sooner any day take the risks of destroyer work, tremendous though they are, just for the fun which one gets out of it. It was great to see our boys round up Fritz’s little lot. While you were in your turret, and the Sub. yonder in control of a side battery, Fritz massed his destroyers like Prussian infantry and tried to rush up close so as to strafe us with the torpedo. Before they could get fairly going, our destroyers dashed at them, broke up their masses, buffeted and hustled them about exactly like a pack of wolves worrying sheep, and with exactly the same result. Fritz’s destroyers either clustered together like sheep or scattered flying to the four winds. It was just the same with the light cruisers as with the destroyers. Fritz could not stand against us for a moment, and could not get away, for we had the heels of him and the guns of him. There was a deadly slaughter of destroyers and light cruisers going on while we were firing our heavy stuff over their heads. Even if we had sunk no battle cruisers or battleships, the German High Seas Fleet would have been crippled for months by the destruction of its indispensable ‘cavalry screen.’ ”
As the Spotting Officer spoke, a Lieutenant-Commander holed out on the last jungle with a mashie—no one uses a putter on the Grand Fleet’s private golf course—and approached our group, who, while they talked, were busy over a picnic lunch.
“If you pigs haven’t finished all the bully beef and hard tack,” said he, “perhaps you can spare a bite for one of the blooming ’eroes of the X Destroyer Flotilla.” The speaker was about twenty-seven, in rude health, and bore no sign of the nerve-racking strain through which he had passed for eighteen long-drawn hours. The young Navy is as unconscious of nerves as it is of indigestion. The Lieutenant-Commander, his hunger satisfied, lighted a pipe and joined in the talk.
“It was hot work,” said he, “but great sport. We went in sixteen and came out a round dozen. If Fritz had known his business, I ought to be dead. He can shoot very well till he hears the shells screaming past his ears, and then his nerves go. Funny thing how wrong we’ve been about him. He is smart to look at, fights well in a crowd, but cracks when he has to act on his own without orders. When we charged his destroyers and ran right in he just crumpled to bits. We had a batch of him nicely herded up, and were laying him out in detail with guns and mouldies, when there came along a beastly intrusive Control Officer on a battle cruiser and took him out of our mouths. It was a sweet shot, though. Someone—I don’t know his name, or he would hear of his deuced interference from me—plumped a salvo of 12-inch common shell right into the brown of Fritz’s huddled batch. Two or three of his destroyers went aloft in scrap-iron, and half a dozen others were disabled. After the first hour his destroyers and light cruisers ceased to be on the stage; they had flown quadrivious—there’s an ormolu word for our classical volunteer—and we could have a whack at the big ships. Later, at night, it was fine. We ran right in upon Fritz’s after-guard of sound battleships and rattled them most tremendous. He let fly at us with every bally gun he had, from 4-inch to 14, and we were a very pretty mark under his searchlights. We ought to have been all laid out, but our loss was astonishingly small, and we strafed two of his heavy ships. Most of his shots went over us.”
“Yes,” called out the Spotting Officer, “yes, they did, and ricochetted all round us in the Queen Elizabeths. There was the devil of a row. The firing in the main action was nothing to it. All the while you were charging, and our guns were masked for fear of hitting you, Fritz’s bonbons were screaming over our upper works and making us say our prayers out loud in the Spotting Tops. You’d have thought we were at church. I was in the devil of a funk, and could hear my teeth rattling. It is when one is fired on and can’t hit back that one thinks of one’s latter end.”
“Did any of you see the Queen Mary go?” asked a tall thin man with the three rings of a Commander. “Our little lot saw nothing of the first part of the battle; we were with the K.G. Fives and Orions.”
“I saw her,” spoke a Gunnery Lieutenant, a small, quiet man with dreamy, introspective eyes—the eyes of a poet turned gunner. “I saw her. She was hit forrard, and went in five seconds. You all know how. It was a thing which won’t bear talking about. The Invincible took a long time to sink, and was still floating bottom up when Jellicoe’s little lot came in to feed after we and the Salt of the Earth had eaten up most of the dinner. I don’t believe that half the Grand Fleet fired a shot.”
There came a savage growl from officers of the main Battle Squadrons, who, invited to a choice banquet, had seen it all cleared away before their arrival. “That’s all very well,” grumbled one of them; “the four Q.E.s are getting a bit above themselves because they had the luck of the fair. They didn’t fight the High Seas Fleet by their haughty selves because they wanted to, you bet.”
The Gunnery Lieutenant with the dreamy eyes smiled. “We certainly shouldn’t have chosen that day to fight them on. But if the Queen Elizabeth herself had been with us, and we had had full visibility—with the horizon a hard dark line—we would have willingly taken on all Fritz’s 12-inch Dreadnoughts and thrown in his battle cruisers.”
“That’s the worst of it,” grumbled the Commander, very sore still at having tasted only of the skim milk of the battle; “naval war is now only a matter of machines. The men don’t count as they did in Nelson’s day.”
“Excuse me, sir,” remarked the Sub-Lieutenant; “may I say a word or two about that? I have been thinking it out.”
There came a general laugh. The Sub-Lieutenant, twenty years of age, small and dark and with the bright black eyes of his mother—a pretty little lady from the Midi de la France whom his father had met and married in Paris—did not look like a philosopher, but he had the clear-thinking, logical mind of his mother’s people.
“Think aloud, my son,” said the Commander. “As a living incarnation of l’Entente Cordiale, you are privileged above those others of the gun-room.”
The light in the Sub’s eyes seemed to die out as his gaze turned inwards. He spoke slowly, carefully, sometimes injecting a word from his mother’s tongue which could better express his meaning. He looked all the while towards the sea, and seemed scarcely to be conscious of an audience of seniors. His last few sentences were spoken wholly in French.
“No—naval war is a war of men, as it always was and always will be. For what are the machines but the material expression of the souls of the men? Our ships are better and faster than the German ships, our guns heavier and more accurate than theirs, our gunners more deadly than their gunners, because our Navy has the greater human soul. The Royal Navy is not a collection of lifeless ships and guns imposed upon men by some external power as the Kaiser sought to impose a fleet upon the Germans, a nation of landsmen. The Navy is a matter of machines only in so far as human beings can only achieve material ends by material means. I look upon the ships and guns as secreted by the men just as a tortoise secretes its shell. They are the products of naval thought, and naval brains, and, above all, of that ever-expanding naval soul (l’esprit) which has been growing for a thousand years. Our ships yonder are materially new, the products almost of yesterday, but really they are old, centuries old; they are the expression of a naval soul working, fermenting, always growing through the centuries, always seeking to express itself in machinery. Naval war is an art, the art of men, and where in the world will one find men like ours, officers like ours? Have you ever thought whence come those qualities which one sees glowing every day in our men, from the highest Admiral to the smallest ship boy—have you ever thought whence they come?”
He paused, still looking out to sea. His companions, all of them his superiors in rank and experience, stared at him in astonishment, and one or two laughed. But the Commander signalled for silence. “Et après,” he asked quietly; “d’où viennent ces qualités?” Unconsciously he had sloughed the current naval slang and spoke in the native language of the Sub.
The effect was not what he had expected. At the sound of the Commander’s voice speaking in French the Sub-Lieutenant woke up, flushed, and instantly reverted to his English self. “I am sorry, sir. I got speaking French, in which I always think, and when I talk French I talk the most frightful rot.”
“I am not so sure that it was rot. Your theory seems to be that we are, in the naval sense, the heirs of the ages, and that no nation that has not been through our centuries-old mill can hope to stand against us. I hope that you are right. It is a comforting theory.”
“But isn’t that what we all think, sir, though we may not put it quite that way? Most of us know that our officers and men are of unapproachable stuff in body and mind, but we don’t seek for a reason. We accept it as an axiom. I’ve tried to reason the thing out because I’m half French; and also because I’ve been brought up among dogs and horses and believe thoroughly in heredity. It’s all a matter of breeding.”
“The Sub’s right,” broke in the Gunnery Lieutenant with the poet’s eyes; “though a Sub who six months ago was a snotty who has no business to think of anything outside his duty. The Service would go to the devil if the gun-room began to talk psychology. We excuse it in this Sub here for the sake of the Entente Cordiale, of which he is the living embodiment; but had any other jawed at us in that style I would have sat upon his head. Of course he is right, though it isn’t our English way to see through things and define them as the French do. No race on earth can touch us for horses or dogs or prize cattle—or Navy men. It takes centuries to breed the boys who ran submarines through the Dardanelles and the Sound and stayed out in narrow enemy waters for weeks together. Brains and nerves and sea skill can’t be made to order even by a German Kaiser. Navy men should marry young and choose their women from sea families; and then their kids won’t need to be taught. They’ll have the secret of the Service in their blood.”
“That’s all very fine,” observed a Marine Lieutenant reflectively; “but who is going to pay for it all? We can’t. I get 7s. 6d. a day, and shall have 11s. in a year or two; it sounds handsome, but would hardly run to a family. Few in the Navy have any private money, so how can we marry early?”
“Of course we can’t as things go now,” said the Gunnery Lieutenant. “But some day even the Admiralty will discover that the English Navy will become a mere list of useless machines unless the English naval families can be kept up on the lower deck as well as in the wardroom and gun-room. Why, look at the names of our submarine officers whenever they get into the papers for honours. They are always salt of the sea, names which have been in the Navy List ever since there was a List. You may read the same names in the Trafalgar roll and back to the Dutch wars. Most of us were Pongos before that—shore Pongos who went afloat with Blake or Prince Rupert—but then we became sailors, and so remained, father to son. I can only go back myself to the Glorious First of June, but some of us here in the Grand Fleet date from the Stuarts at least. It is jolly fine to be of Navy blood, but not all plum jam. One has such a devil of a record to live up to. In my term at Dartmouth there was a poor little beast called Francis Drake—a real Devon Drake, a genuine antique—but what a load of a name to carry! Thank God, my humble name doesn’t shine out of the history books. And as with the officers, so with the seamen. Half of them come from my own country of Devon—the cradle of the Navy. They are in the direct line from Drake’s buccaneers. Most of the others come from the ancient maritime counties of the Channel seaboard, where the blood of everyone tingles with Navy salt. The Germans can build ships which are more or less accurate copies of our own, but they can’t breed the men. That is the whole secret.”
The Lieutenant-Commander, whose war-scarred destroyer lay below refitting, laughed gently. “There’s a lot in all that, more than we often realise when we grumble at the cursed obstinacy of our old ratings, but even you do not go back far enough. It is the old blood of the Vikings and sea-pirates in us English which makes us turn to the sea; the rest is training. In no other way can you explain the success of the Fringes, the mine-sweepers, and patrols, most of them manned by naval volunteers who, before the war, had never served under the White Ensign nor seen a shot fired. What is our classical scholar here, Cæsar, but a naval volunteer whom Whale Island and natural intelligence have turned into a gunner? But as regards the regular Navy, the Navy of the Grand Fleet, you are right. Pick your boys from the sea families, catch them young, pump them full to the teeth with the Navy Spirit—l’esprit marin of our bi-lingual Sub here—make them drunk with it. Then they are all right. But they must never be allowed to think of a darned thing except of the job in hand. The Navy has no use for men who seek to peer into their own souls. They might do it in action and discover blue funk. We want them to be no more conscious of their souls than of their livers. Though I admit that it is devilish difficult to forget one’s liver when one has been cooped up in a destroyer for a week. It is not nerve that Fritz lacks so much as a kindly obedient liver. He is an iron-gutted swine, and that is partly why he can’t run destroyers and submarines against us. The German liver is a thing to wonder at. Do you know——” but here the Lieutenant-Commander became too Rabelaisian for my delicate pen.
The group had thinned out during this exercise in naval analysis. Several of the officers had resumed their heart-and-club-breaking struggle with the villainous golf course, but the Sub, the volunteer Lieutenant, and the Pongo (Marine) still sat at the feet of their seniors. “May I say how the Navy strikes an outsider like me?” asked Cæsar diffidently. Whale Island, which had forgotten all other Latin authors, had given him the name as appropriate to one of his learning.
“Go ahead,” said the Commander generously. “All this stuff is useful enough for a volunteer; without the Pongos and Volunteers to swallow our tall stories, the Navy would fail of an audience. The snotties know too much.”
“I was going to speak of the snotties,” said Cæsar, “who seem to me to be even more typical of the Service than the senior officers. They have all its qualities, emphasised, almost comically exaggerated. I do not know whether they are never young or that they never grow old, but there is no essential difference in age and in knowledge between a snotty six months out of cadet training and a Commander of six years’ standing. They rag after dinner with equal zest, and seem to be equally well versed in the profound technical details of their sea work. Perhaps it is that they are born full of knowledge. The snotties interest me beyond every type that I have met. Their manners are perfect and in startling contrast with those of the average public school boy of fifteen or sixteen—even in College at Winchester—and they combine their real irresponsible youthfulness with a grave mask of professional learning which is delightful to look upon. I have before me the vision of a child of fifteen with tousled yellow hair and a face as glum as a sea-boot, sitting opposite to me in the machine which took us back one day to the boat, smoking a ‘fag’ with the clumsiness which betrayed his lack of practice, in between bites of ‘goo’ (in this instance Turkish Delight), of which I had seen him consume a pound. He looked about ten years old, and in a husky, congested voice, due to the continual absorption of sticky food, he described minutely to me the method of conning a battleship in manœuvres and the correct amount to allow for the inertia of the ship when the helm is centred; he also explained the tactical handling of a squadron during sub-calibre firing. That snotty was a sheer joy, and the Navy is full of him. He’s gone himself, poor little chap—blown to bits by a shell which penetrated the deck.”
“In time, Cæsar,” said the Commander, “by strict attention to duty you will become a Navy man. But we have talked enough of deep mysteries. It was that confounded Sub, with his French imagination, who started us. What I really wish someone would tell me is this: what was the ‘northern enterprise’ that Fritz was on when we chipped in and spoilt his little game?”
“It does not matter,” said the Gunnery Lieutenant. “We spoilt it, anyhow. The dear old newspapers talk of his losses in big ships as if they were all that counted. What has really crippled him has been the wiping out of his destroyers and fast new cruisers. Without them he is helpless. It was a great battle, much more decisive than most people think, even in the Grand Fleet itself. It was as decisive by sea as the Marne was by land. We have destroyed Fritz’s mobility.”
The men rose and looked out over the bay. There below them lay their sea homes, serene, invulnerable, and about them stretched the dull, dour, treeless landscape of their northern fastness. Their minds were as peaceful as the scene. As they looked a bright light from the compass platform of one of the battleships began to flicker through the sunshine—dash, dot, dot, dash. “There goes a signal,” said the Commander. “You are great at Morse, Pongo. Read what it says, my son.”
The Lieutenant of Marines watched the flashes, and as he read grinned capaciously. “It is some wag with a signal lantern,” said he. “It reads: Question—Daddy,—what—did—you—do—in—the—Great—War?”
“I wonder,” observed the Sub-Lieutenant, “what new answer the lower deck has found to that question. Before the battle their reply was: ‘I was kept doubling round the decks, sonny.’ ”
“There goes the signal again,” said the Pongo; “and here comes the answer.” He read it out slowly as it flashed word after word: “ ‘I laid the guns true, sonny.’ ”
“And a dashed good answer, too,” cried the Commander heartily.
“That would make a grand fleet signal before a general action,” remarked the Gunnery Lieutenant. “I don’t care much for Nelson’s Trafalgar signal. It was too high-flown and sentimental for the lower deck. It was aimed at the history books, rather than at old tarry-breeks of the fleet a hundred years ago. No—there could not be a better signal than just ‘Lay the Guns True’—carry out your orders precisely, intelligently, faultlessly. What do you say, my Hun of a classical volunteer?”
“It could not be bettered,” said Cæsar.
“I will make a note of it,” said the Gunnery Lieutenant, “against the day, when as a future Jellicoe, I myself shall lead a new Grand Fleet into action.”
CHAPTER I
A BAND OF BROTHERS
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”—King Henry V.
My boyhood was spent in Devon, the land of Drake and the home of the Elizabethan Navy. A deep passion for the Sea Service is in my blood, though, owing to family circumstances, I was not able to indulge my earliest ambition to become myself one of the band of brothers who serve under the White Ensign. My elder brother lived and died afloat. Two of my sons, happier than their father, are privileged to play their parts in the great ships of the Fleets. So that, though not in the Service, I am of it, by ties of blood and by ties of the earliest association. Whenever I have sought to penetrate its mysteries and to interpret them to my fellow countrymen, my motive has never been that of mere idle curiosity.
The Royal Navy wields, and has always wielded, a great material force, but the secret of its strength lies not in the machines with which it has equipped itself in the various stages of its development. Vast and terrible as are the ships and the guns, they would be of little worth if their design and skilful employment were not inspired by that spiritual force, compounded of tradition, training, devotion and discipline, which I call the Soul of the Navy. In the design of its weapons, in its mastery of their use, above all in its consummate seamanship, the Royal Navy has in all ages surpassed its opponents; but it has done these things not through some fortuitous gift of the Sea Gods, but because of the never-failing development of its own spirit. It has always been at a great price, in the sacrifice of ease and in the outpouring of the lives of men, that the Navy has won for itself and for us the freedom of the seas. Those who reckon navies in ships and guns, in weight of metal and in broadside fire, while leaving out of account the spirit and training and devotion of the men, can never understand the Soul of the Navy. For all these material things are the expression of the Soul; they are not the Soul itself.
The Navy is still the old English Navy of the southern maritime counties of England. It has become the Navy of Great Britain, the Navy of the British Empire, but in spirit, and to a large extent in hereditary personnel, it remains the English Navy of the Narrow Seas. Many counties play a great part in its equipment, but to me it is always the Navy of my own land of Devon; officers and men are the lineal successors of those bold West Country seamen who in their frail barks ranged the wide seas hundreds of years ago and first taught to us and to the world the meaning of the expression “sea communications.”
There is not an officer in the permanent service of the Fleets of to-day who was not trained in Devon. On the southern seaboard of that county, set upon a steep slope overlooking the mouth of the most lovely of rivers, stands the Naval College in which are being trained those who will guide our future Fleets. A little way to the west lies one of the greatest of naval ports and arsenals. From my county of Devon comes half the Navy of to-day, half the men of the Fleet, be they warrant officers, seamen or engineers. The atmosphere of Devon, soft and sleepy as it may appear to a stranger, is electric with the spirit of Drake, which is the spirit of Nelson, which is the spirit of the boys of Dartmouth. For generation after generation, in the old wooden hulks Britannia and Hindustan, and afterwards in the Naval College on the heights, the cadets during their most impressionable years have breathed in the spirit of the Navy. I have often visited them there and loved them; my brother, who worked among them and taught them, died there, and is buried in the little cemetery which crowns the hill where, years ago in a blinding snowstorm, I stood beside his open grave and heard the Last Post wail above his body. I have always envied him that great privilege, to die in the service of the Navy and to be buried within hail of the boys whom he loved.
The cadets of Dartmouth have learned that the Sea Service is an exacting and most jealous mistress who brooks no rival. They have learned that the Service is everything and themselves nothing. They have learned that only by humbly submitting themselves to be absorbed into the Service can they be deemed to be worthy of that Service. The discipline of the Navy is no cast-iron system imposed by force and punishment upon unwilling men; there is nothing in it of Prussian Militarism. It is rather the willing subordination of proud free men to the dominating interests of a Service to which they have dedicated their lives. The note of their discipline is “The Service first, last, and all the time.” The Navy resembles somewhat a religious Order, but in the individual subordination of body, heart, brains and soul there is nothing of servitude. The Naval officer is infinitely proud and infinitely humble. Infinitely proud of his Service, infinitely humble in himself. If an officer through error, however pardonable, loses his ship—and very young officers have command of ships—and in the stern, though always sympathetic, judgment of his fellows he must temporarily be put upon the shelf, he does not grumble or repine. He does not write letters to the papers upon his grievances. He accepts the judgment loyally, even proudly, and strives to merit a return to active employment. No fleshpots in the outer world, no honours or success in civil employment, ever compensate the naval officer for the loss of his career at sea.
From the circumstances of their lives, so largely spent among their fellows at sea or in naval harbours, and from their upbringing in naval homes and training ships, officers and men grow into a class set apart, dedicated as Followers of the Sea, in whose eyes the dwellers in cities appear as silly chatterers and hucksterers, always seeking after some vain thing, be it wealth or rank or fame. The discipline of the Navy is, like its Soul, apart and distinct from anything which we know on land. It is very strict but also very human. There is nothing in it of Caste. “I expect,” said Drake, “the gentlemen to draw with the mariners.” Drake allowed of no distinction between “gentlemen” and “mariners” except that “gentlemen” were expected always to surpass the “mariners” in tireless activity, cheerful endurance of hardships, and unshakable valour in action. Drake could bear tenderly with the diseased grumbling of a scurvy-stricken mariner, but the gentleman adventurer who “groused” was in grievous peril of a rope and a yard arm. The gentlemen adventurers have given place to professional naval officers, the mariners have become the long-service trained seamen in their various grades who have given their lives to the Navy, but the spirit of Drake endures to this day. The Gentlemen are expected to draw with the Mariners.
When a thousand lives and a great ship may be lost by the lapse from vigilance of one man, very strict discipline is a vital necessity. But as with officers so with men it is the discipline of cheerful, willing obedience. The spirit of the Navy is not the spirit of a Caste. It burns as brightly in the seaman as in the lieutenant, in the ship’s boy as in the midshipman, in the warrant officer as in the “Owner.” It is a discipline hammered out by the ceaseless fight with the sea. The Navy is always on active service; it is always waging an unending warfare with the forces of the sea; the change from a state of peace to a state of war means only the addition of one more foe—and if he be a gallant and chivalrous foe he is welcomed gladly as one worthy to kill and to be killed.
Catch boys young, inure them to Naval discipline, and teach them the value of it, and to them it will become part of the essential fabric of their lives. A good example of how men of Naval training cling to the discipline of the Service as to a firm unbreakable rope was shown in Captain Scott’s South Polar expeditions. Some of the officers, and practically the whole of the crews, were lent by the Navy, but the expeditions themselves were under auspices which were not naval. At sea Captain Scott’s legal authority was that of a merchant skipper, on land during his exploring expeditions he had no legal authority at all. Yet all the officers and men, knowing that their lives depended upon willing subordination, agreed that the discipline both at sea and on land should be that of the Navy to which most of them belonged. The ships were run exactly as if they had flown the White Ensign, and as if their companions were under the Navy Act. Strict though it may be, there is nothing arbitrary about naval discipline, and those who have tested it in peace and war know its quality of infinite endurance under any strain.
The Navy is a small Service, small in numbers, and to this very smallness is partly due the beauty of its Soul. For it is a picked Service, and only by severe selection in their youth can those be chosen who are worthy to remain among its permanent members. The professional officers and men number only some 150,000, and the great temporary war expansion—after the inclusion of Naval Reservists, Naval Volunteers, and the Division for service on land, did little more than treble the active list. The Navy, even then, bore upon its rolls names less than one-twelfth as numerous as in those legions who were drafted into the Army. Yet this small professional Navy, by reason of its Soul and the vast machines which that Soul secretes and employs with supreme efficiency, dominated throughout the war the seas of the whole world. The Navy has for so long been a wonder and a miracle that we have ceased to be thrilled by it; we take it for granted; but it remains no less a wonder and a miracle.
Many causes have combined to make this little group—this few, this happy few, this band of brothers—the most splendid human force which the world has ever seen. The Naval Service is largely hereditary. Officers and men come from among those who have served the sea for generations. In the Navy List of to-day one may read names which were borne upon the ships’ books of hundreds of years ago. And since the tradition of the sea plays perhaps the greatest part in the development of the Naval Soul, this continuity of family service, on the lower deck as in the wardroom and gun room, needs first to be emphasised. The young son of an officer, of a warrant-officer, of a seaman, or of a marine, enters the Service already more than half trained. He has the spirit of the Service in his blood, and its collective honour is already his own private honour. I remember years ago a naval officer said to me sorrowfully, “My only son must go into the Service, and yet I fear that he is hardly fit for it. He is delicate, shy, almost timid. But what can one do?”
“Is it necessary?” I asked foolishly. He stared at me: “We have served from father to son since the reign of Charles II.” So the boy entered the Britannia, and I heard no more of him until one morning, years after, I saw in an Honours List a name which I knew, that of a young Lieutenant who had won the rare naval V.C. in the Mediterranean. It was my friend’s son; blood had triumphed; the delicate, shy, almost timid lad had made good.
The Navy catches its men when they are young, unspoiled, malleable, and moulds them with deft fingers as a sculptor works his clay. Officers enter in their early teens—now as boys at Osborne who afterwards become naval cadets at Dartmouth. Formerly they spent a year or two longer at school and entered direct as cadets to the Britannia. The system is essentially the same now as it has been for generations. The material must be good and young, the best of it is retained and the less good rejected. The best is moulded and stamped in the Dartmouth workshop, and emerges after the bright years of early boyhood with the naval hall mark upon it. The seamen enter as boys into training-ships, and they, too, are moulded and stamped into the naval pattern. It is a very exacting but a very just education. No one who has been admitted to the privilege of training need be rejected except by his own fault, and if he is not worthy to be continued in training, he is emphatically not worthy to serve in the Fleets.
Of late years this system, which requires abundance of time for its full working out, has proved to be deficient in elasticity. It takes some seven years to make a cadet into a sub-lieutenant, while a great battleship can be built and equipped in little more than two years. The German North Sea menace caused a rapid expansion in the output of ships, especially of big ships, which far outstripped the training of junior officers needed for their service. The Osborne-Dartmouth system had not failed, far from it, but it was too slow for the requirements of the Navy under the new conditions. In order to keep up with the demand, the supply of naval cadets was increased and speeded up by the admission of young men from the public schools at the age when they had been accustomed to enter for permanent Army commissions. A large addition was also made to the roll of subalterns of Marines—who received training both for sea and land work—and in this way the ranks of the junior officers afloat were rapidly expanded. There was no departure from the Navy’s traditional policy of catching boys young and moulding them specially and exclusively for the Sea Service; the new methods were avowedly additional and temporary, to be modified or withdrawn when the need for urgent expansion had disappeared. The Navy was clearly right. It was obliged to make a change in its system, but it made it to as small an extent as would meet the conditions of the moment. The second best was tacked on to the first best, but the first best was retained in being to be reverted to exclusively as soon as might be. To catch boys young, preferably those with the sea tradition in their blood, to teach them during their most impressionable years that the Navy must always be to them as their father, mother and wedded wife—the exacting mistress which demands of them the whole of their affections, energies and service, to dedicate them in tender years to their Sea Goddess—this must always be the way to preserve, in its purest undimmed water, that pearl of great price, the Soul of the Navy.
It follows from the circumstances of their training and life that the Navy is a Family of which the members are bound together by the closest of ties of individual friendship and association. It is a Service in which everybody knows everybody else, not only by name and reputation but by personal contact. During the long years of residence at Osborne and Dartmouth, and afterwards in the Fleets, at the Greenwich Naval College, at the Portsmouth schools of instruction, officers widely separated by years and rank learn to know one another and to weigh one another in the most just of balances—that of actual service. Those of us who have passed many years in the world of affairs, know that the only reputation worth having is that which we earn among those of our own profession or craft. And none of us upon land are known and weighed with the intimate certainty and impartiality which is possible to the Sea Service. We are not seen at close contact and under all conditions of work and play, and never in the white light which an ever-present peril casts upon our worth and hardihood. No fictitious reputation is possible in the Navy itself as it is possible in the world outside. Officers may, through the exercise of influence, be placed in positions over the heads of others of greater worth, they may be written and talked about by civilians in the newspapers as among the most brilliant in their profession—especially in time of peace—but the Navy, which has known them from youth to age inside and out, is not deceived. The Navy laughs at many of the reputations which we poor civilians ignorantly honour. No naval reputation is of any value whatever unless it be endorsed by the Navy itself. And the Navy does not talk. How many newspaper readers, for instance, had heard of Admiral Jellicoe before he was placed in command of the Grand Fleet at the outbreak of war? But the Navy knew all about him and endorsed the choice.
What I write of officers applies with equal force to the men, to the long-service ratings, the petty officers and warrant officers who form the backbone of the Service. They, too, are caught young, drawn wherever possible from sea families, moulded and trained into the naval pattern, stamped after many years with the hall mark of the Service. It is a system which has bred a mutual confidence and respect between officers and men as unyielding as armour-plate. Before the battle of May 31st, 1916, the Grand Fleet had gone forth looking for Fritz many times and finding him not. Little was expected, but if the unexpected did happen, then officers believed in their long-service ratings as profoundly as did these dear old grumblers in their leaders. Many times in the wardrooms of the battle squadrons the prospects of action would be discussed and always in the same way.
“No, it’s not likely to be anything, but if it is what we’ve been waiting for, I have every confidence in our long-service ratings if the Huns are really out for blood. You know what I mean—those grizzled old G.L.I.s (gun-layers, first-class), and gunners’ mates and horny-handed old A.B.s whom we curse all day for their damned obstinacy. The Huns think that two years make a gunlayer; we know that even twelve years are not enough. Our long-service ratings would pull the country through, even if we hadn’t the mechanical advantage over Fritz which we actually possess. And the combination of the long-service ratings and the two-Power standard will, when we get to work upon him, give Fritz furiously to think.”
Even when the great expansion among the big fighting ships called for a corresponding expansion in the crews, little essential change was made in the system which had bred confidence such as this. There was some slight dilution. Officers and men of the R.N.R. and the Naval Volunteers, to the extent of about 10 per cent., were drafted into the first-line battleships, but the cream of the professional service was kept for the first fighting line. For the most part the new temporary Navy, of admirable material drawn from our almost limitless maritime population, was kept at work in the Fringes of the Fleet—the mine-sweepers, armed liners, blockading patrols, and so on—where less technical navy skill was required, and where invaluable service could be and was done. The professional Navy has the deepest respect and gratitude for the devoted work discharged by its amateur auxiliaries.
The Navy is a young man’s service. In no other career in life are the vital energies, the eager spirits, the glowing capacities of youth given such ample opportunities for expression. A naval officer can become a proud “Owner,” with an independent command of a destroyer or submarine, at an age when in a civil profession he would be entrusted with scanty responsibilities. In civil life there is a horrible waste of youth; it is kept down, largely left unused, by the jealousy of age. But the Navy, which is very wise, makes the most of every hour of it. The small craft, the Fringes of the Fleet as Mr. Kipling calls them, the eyes and ears and guardians of the big ships, the patrol boats, submarines and destroyers, are captained by youngsters under thirty, often under twenty-five. The land crushes youth, the sea allows and encourages its fine flower to expand. Naval warfare is directed by grave men, but is to an enormous extent carried on by bright boys.
But the Navy which employs youth more fully than any other service, also uses it up more remorselessly. Unless an officer can reach the rank of Commander—a rank above that of a Major in the Army—when he is little more than thirty he has a very scanty chance in time of peace of ever serving afloat as a full Captain. The small ships are many in number, but the big ships are comparatively few. Only the best of the best can become Commanders at an age which enables them to reach post rank in that early manhood which is a necessity for the command of a modern super-Dreadnought. Many of those who do become Captains in the early forties have to eat out their hearts upon half-pay because there are not enough big ships in commission to go round. It is only in time of war that the whole of our Fleets are mobilised. Some years ago I was dining with several naval officers from a battle squadron which lay in the Firth of Forth. Beside me sat a young man looking no more than thirty-five, and actually little older. He was a Captain I knew, and in course of conversation I asked for the name of his ship. “The Dreadnought,” said he. This was the time when the name and fame of the first Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun ship which revolutionised the construction of the battle line, was ringing through the world. And yet here was this famous ship in charge of a young smooth-faced fellow, younger than myself, and I did not then consider that I was middle-aged! “Are you not rather young?” I enquired diffidently. He smiled, “We need to be young,” said he. Then I understood. It came home to me that the modern Navy, with its incredibly rapid development in machinery, must have in its executive officers those precious qualities of adaptability and quick perception, that readiness to be always learning and testing, seeking and finding the best new ways of solving old problems, which can only be found in youth. Youth is of the essence of the Navy, it always has been so and it probably always will be. Youth learns quickly, and the Naval officer is always learning. In civil life we enter our professions, we struggle through our examinations as doctors or lawyers or engineers, and then we are content to pass our lives in practice and forget our books. But the naval officer, whose active life is passed on the salt sea, is ever a student. He goes backwards and forwards between the sea and the schools. There is no stage and no rank at which his education stops. Gunnery, torpedo practice, electricity, navigation, naval strategy, and tactics are all rapidly progressive sciences. A few years, a very few years, and a whole scheme of practice becomes obsolete. So the naval officer needs for ever to be passing from the sea to the Vernon, or the Excellent, or to Greenwich, where he is kept up-to-date and given a perennial opportunity to develop the best that is in him. From fifteen to forty he is always learning, always testing, always growing, and then—unless his luck is very great—he has to give way to the rising youth of other men and rest himself unused upon the shelf. The highest posts are not for him. It is very remorseless the way in which the Navy uses and uses up its youth, and very touching the devoted humble way in which that youth submits to be so used up. The Navy is ever growing in science and in knowledge, it must always have of the best—the remorselessness with which it chooses only of the best, and the patience with which those who are not of the best submit without repining to its devices, are of the Soul of the Navy.
Admiral Sir David Beatty became Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet at the age of forty-five. In years of life and of service he was junior to half the Captains’ List. He had sprung by merit and by opportunity some ten years above his contemporaries at Dartmouth. First in the Soudan, when serving in the flotilla of gunboats, he won promotion from Lieutenant to Commander at the age of twenty-seven. Again at Tien-tsin in China, his chance came, and in 1900, while still under thirty, he reached the captain’s rank. When the war broke out he was a Rear-Admiral in command of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, and was given the acting rank of Vice-Admiral. He is now an acting Admiral, and his seniors in years, and even in rank, willingly serve beneath him. Admiral Beatty is not a scientific sailor, and is not wedded to the Service as are most of his brother officers. But for the outbreak of the war he would probably have retired. Yet no one questions his pre-eminent fitness for his dazzling promotion. He has that rare indefinable quality of leadership of men and of war instinct which cannot be revealed except by war itself. When, by fortunate chance, this quality is discovered in an officer it is instantly recognised as beyond price, and cherished at its full worth.
The Naval system which teaches subordination, also teaches independence. If to men roaming over the seas in command of ships, orders come, it is well; if orders do not come it is also well—they get on very well without them. If the entire Admiralty were wiped out by German bombs, My Lords and the whole staff destroyed, the Navy would, in its own language, “proceed” to carry on. In the middle of the political crisis of December 1916, when a new Naval Board of Admiralty had just been appointed, I asked a senior officer how the new lot were getting on. He said: “There isn’t any First Lord. The First Sea Lord is in bed with influenza. The Second Sea Lord is in bed with influenza. The Third Sea Lord is in bed with influenza. The Fourth Sea Lord is at work but is sickening for influenza. But the Navy is all right.” That is the note of serene confidence which distinguishes the Sea Service. Whatever happens, the Navy is all right.
The Navy is a poor man’s Service. It is a real profession in which the officers as a rule live on their pay and ask for little more. Men of great houses will enter the Army in time of peace and regard it as a mild occupation, men of money will enter for the social position which it may give to them. But no man of rank or of money in search of a “cushy job,” was ever such an ass as to look for it in the Navy. Few officers in the Navy—except among those who have entered in quite recent years—have any resources beyond their pay; many of them are born to it, and in their families there have been scanty opportunities for saving. The Admiralty, until quite recently, required that young officers upon entry into the Navy or the Marines should be allowed small specified sums until they attained in service pay the eminence of about 11s. a day, and also that a complete uniform equipment should be provided for them; but after that initial help from home they were expected to make their pay suffice. And in the great majority of cases they did what was expected of them. Living is cheap in the Sea Service. Ships pay no duties upon their stores, and there are few opportunities afloat for the wasting of money. Mess bills in wardroom and gun-room are small, and must be kept small, or the captain will arise in wrath and ask to be informed (in writing) of the reason why. Ere now young men have been dismissed their ships for persistently running up too large a wine bill; and to be dismissed one’s ship means not only a bad mark in the Admiralty’s books, but loss of seniority, which in turn means an extra early retirement upon that exiguous half-pay which looms always like a dark cloud upon the naval horizon.
Unhappily for its officers and the country the Navy has not been a married man’s service; it has been too exacting to tolerate a divided allegiance. Sometimes poor young things under stress of emotion have got married, and then has begun for them the most cruel and ageing of struggles—the man at sea hard put to it to keep up his position, simple though it be; the wife ashore in poor lodgings or in some tiny villa, lonely, struggling, growing old too fast for her years; children who rarely see their father, and whose prospects are of the gloomiest. I do not willingly put my pen to this picture. Young Navy men, glowing with health and virile energy, and the spirit of the Service, are very attractive creatures to whom goes out the love of women, but though they, too, may love, they are usually compelled to sail away. It is well for them then if they are as firmly wedded to the Service as the Roman priest is to his Church, and if they are not always as continent as the priest, who is so free from sin that he will dare to cast a stone at them? If the country and its rulers had any belief in heredity, of which the evidence stares at them from the eyes of every naval son born to the Service, they would grant to a young officer a year of leave in which to be married, and pay to him and to his mate a handsome subsidy for every splendid son whom they laid in the cradles of the Service of the future.
Of late years there has been a change. The rapid expansion of the Fleets has brought in many young cadets of commercial families, whose parents have far more money than is wholly good for their sons. The Navy is not so completely a poor man’s service as it was even ten years ago. The junior officers are, some of them, too well off. Not long since, a senior Captain was lamenting this change in my presence. “The snotties now,” he groaned, “all keep motor bicycles, the sub-lieutenants are not happy till they own cars, and the Lieutenant-Commanders think nothing of getting married. All this has been the result of concentrating the Fleets in home waters. Germany compelled us to do it, but the Service was the better for the three-year Commissions on foreign stations.” All this is true. The junior ranks are getting richer. At sea they can spend little, but ashore and in harbour there are opportunities for gold to corrupt the higher virtues. For my part, however, I have the fullest confidence in the training and the example of the older officers. In this war there has been nothing to suggest that the young Navy is less devoted and self-sacrificing than the old. The wealthier boys may take their fling on leave—and who can blame them?—but at sea the Service comes first.
We love that most which is most hardly won. And the Navy men love their Service, not because it is easy but because of the hardness of it, and because of the sacrifices which it exacts from them. It fastens its grip upon them in those first years between fifteen and twenty, and the grip grows ever tighter with the flight of time. It is at its very tightest when the dreadful hour of retirement arrives. When War broke out, in August 1914, it was hailed with joy by the active Navy afloat, but their joy was as water unto wine in comparison with that which transfigured the retired Navy ashore. For them at long last the impossible had crystallised into fact. For those who were still young enough, the uniforms were waiting ready in the tin boxes upstairs, and it was but a short step from their house doors to the decks of a King’s ship. Once more their gallant names could be written in the Active List of their Navy. They hastened back, these eager ones, and if there was no employment for them in their own rank, they snatched at that in any other rank which offered. Captains R.N. became commanders and even lieutenants R.N.R. in the Fringes. Admirals became temporary captains. There were indeed at one time no fewer than nineteen retired admirals serving as temporary officers R.N.R. in armed liners.
If you would understand how the Navy loves the Service, how that love is not a part of their lives, but is their lives, reflect upon the case of one aged officer. I will not give his name; he would not wish it. He had been in retirement for nearly forty years, too old for service in his rank, too old possibly for service in any rank. But his pleadings for employment afloat softened the understanding hearts at Whitehall. He was allowed to rejoin and to serve as a temporary Lieutenant-Commander in an armed yacht which assisted the ex-Brazilian monitors sent to bombard the Belgian coast. There against Zeebrugge he served among kindly lads young enough to be his grandsons, and there with them and among them he was killed—the oldest officer serving afloat. And he was happy in his death. Not Wolfe before Quebec, not Nelson in the cockpit of the Victory, were happier or more glorious in their deaths than was that temporary Lieutenant-Commander (transferred at his own request from the retired list) who fought his last fight upon the decks of an armed yacht and died as he would have prayed to die.
The Navy hates advertisement and scorns above all things in heaven or upon earth the indiscriminating praise of well-meaning civilians. I sadly realise that it may scorn me and this book of mine. But I will do my best to make amends. I will promise that never once in describing their deeds will I refer to Navy men as “heroes.” I will not, where I can possibly avoid doing so, mention the name of anyone. I will do my utmost at all times to write of them as men and not as “b—— angels.” I will, at the peril of some inconsistency, declare my conviction that naval officers haven’t any souls, that they are in the Service because they love it, and not because they care two pins for their country, that they are rather pleased than otherwise when rotten civilians at home get a bad fright from a raid. I will declare that they catch and sink German submarines by all manner of cunning devices, from the sheer zest of sport, and not because they would raise a finger to save the lives of silly passengers in luxurious ocean liners. I will do anything to turn their scorn away from me except to withdraw one word which I have written upon the Soul of the Navy. For upon this subject they would, I believe, write as I do if the gods had given to them leisure for philosophical analysis—which they are much too busy to bother about—and the knack of verbally expressing their thoughts. When I read a naval despatch I always groan over it as an awful throwing away of the most splendid opportunities. I always long to have been in the place of the writer, to have seen what he saw, to know what he knew, and to tell the world in living phrase what tremendous deeds were really done. Naval despatches are the baldest of documents, cold, formal, technical, most forbiddingly uninspiring. Whenever I ask naval officers why they do not put into despatches the vivid details which sometimes find their way into private letters they glare at me, and even their beautiful courtesy can scarcely keep back the sniff of contempt. “Despatches,” say they, “are written for the information of the Admiralty.” That is a complete answer under the Naval Code. The despatches, which make one groan, are written for the information of the Admiralty, not to thrill poor creatures such as you and me. A naval officer cares only for his record at the Admiralty and for his reputation among those of his own craft. If a newspaper calls Lieutenant A—— B—— a hero, and writes enthusiastically of his valour, he shudders as would a modest woman if publicly praised for her chastity. Valour goes with the Service, it is a part of the Soul of the Navy. It is taken for granted and is not to be talked or written about. And so with those other qualities that spring from the traditions of the Navy—the chivalry which risks British lives to save those of drowning enemies, the tenderness which binds up their wounds, the honours paid to their dead. All these things, which the Royal Navy never forgets and the German Navy for the most part has never learned, are taken for granted and are not to be talked of or written about.
It is inevitable from the nature of its training that the Navy should be intensely self-centred. If one catches a boy when he has but recently emerged from the nursery, teaches him throughout his active life that there is but one work fit for the service of man, dedicates him to it by the strictest discipline, cuts him off by the nature of his daily life from all intimate contact with or understanding of the world which moves upon land, his imagination will be atrophied by disuse. He will become absorbed into the Naval life which is a life entirely of its own, apart and distinct from all other lives. There is a deep gulf set between the Naval life and all other lives which very few indeed of the Navy ever seek to cross. Their attitude towards civilians is very like that of the law-making statesman of old who said: “The people have nothing to do with the laws except to obey them.” If the Navy troubled to think of civilians at all—it never does unless they annoy it with their futile chatter in Parliament and elsewhere—it would say: “Civilians have nothing to do with the Navy except to pay for it.” Keen as is the imaginative foresight of the Navy in regard to everything which concerns its own honour and effectiveness, it is utterly lacking in any sympathetic imaginative understanding of the intense civilian interest in itself and in its work. We poor creatures who stand outside, I who write and you who read, do in actual fact love the Navy only a little less devotedly than the Navy loves its own Service. We long to understand it, to help it, and to pay for it. We know what we owe to it, but we would ask, in all proper humility, that now and then the Navy would realise and appreciate the certain fact that it owes some little of its power and success to us.
I cannot in a formula define the collective Soul of the Navy. It is a moral atmosphere which cannot be chemically resolved. It is a subtle and elusive compound of tradition, self sacrifice, early training, willing discipline, youth, simplicity, valour, chivalry, lack of imagination, and love of the Service—and the greatest of these is Love. I have tried to indicate what it is, how it has given to this wonderful Navy of ours a terrible unity, a terrible force, and an even more terrible intelligence; how it has transformed a body of men into a gigantic spiritual Power which expresses its might in the forms and means of naval warfare. I cannot exactly define it, but I can in a humble faltering way do my best to reveal it in its working.
CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF WAR
Our Navy has played the great game of war by sea for too many hundreds of years ever to under-rate its foes. It is even more true of the sea than of the land that the one thing sure to happen is that which is unexpected. Until they have measured by their own high standards the quality of an enemy, our officers and men rate him in valour, in sea skill, and in masterful ingenuity as fully the equal of themselves. Until August 1914 the Royal Navy had never fought the German, and had no standards of experience by which to assay him. The Navy had known the maritime nations of Europe and fought them many times, but the Germans, a nation of landsmen artificially converted into sailors within a single generation, were a problem both novel and baffling. Eighteen years before the War, Germany had no navy worth speaking of in comparison with ours; during those fateful years she built ships and guns, trained officers and men, and secured her sea bases on the North Sea and in the Baltic at a speed and with a concentrated enthusiasm which were wholly wonderful and admirable. “The Future of Germany lies on the water,” cried the Kaiser one day, and his faithful people took up the cry. “We here and now challenge Britain upon her chosen element.” Quite seriously and soberly the German Navy Law of 1900 issued this challenge, and the Fatherland settled down to its prodigious task with a serene confidence and an extraordinary energy which won for it the ungrudging respect of its future foes.
Perhaps the Royal Navy in those early years of the twentieth century, and especially in 1913 and 1914, became just a little bit infected by the mental disease of exalting everything German, which had grown into an obsession among many Englishmen. At home during the War men oppressed by their enemy’s land power, would talk as if one German cut in two became two Germans. German organisation, German educational training, German mechanical and scientific skill are very good, but they are not superhuman. Their failures, like those of other folk, are fully as numerous as their successes. In trade they won many triumphs over us because British trading methods were individualistic and were totally lacking in national direction and support. But the Royal Navy is in every respect wholly distinct from every other British institution. It is the one and only National Service which has always declined to recognise in its practice the British policy of muddling through. It is the one Service with a mind and an iron Soul of its very own. So that when Germany set to work to create out of nothing a navy to compete with our own, she was up against a vast spiritual power which she did not understand, the Soul of the Navy, that unifying dominating force which gives to it an incomparable strength. She was up, too, against that experience of the sea and of sea warfare in a race of islanders which had been living and growing since the days of King Alfred. The wonderful thing is this: not that the German Navy has at no point been able to bear comparison with ours—in design of ships, in quality and weight of guns, in sea cunning, in sea training and in hardihood—but that in the few short years of the present century the German Navy should have been built at all, manned at all, trained at all.
As the German Navy grew, and our ships came in contact with those of the Germans, especially upon foreign stations, our naval officers and men came to regard their future foes with much respect and even with admiration. We knew how great a task the Germans had set to themselves, and were astonished at the speed with which they made themselves efficient. I have often been told that during the years immediately before the war, the relations between English and German naval officers and men were more close than those between English officers and men and the sailors of any other navy. It became recognised that in the Germans we should have foemen of undoubted gallantry and of no less undoubted skill. There are few officers and men in our Fleets who do not know personally and admire their opposite numbers upon the enemy’s side, and though our foes have in many ways broken the rules of war as understood and practised by us, one never hears the Royal Navy call the Germans “pirates.” Expressions such as this one are left to civilians. When Mr. Churchill announced that the officers and crews of captured U boats would be treated differently from those taken in surface ships, the Navy strongly disapproved. To them it seemed that the responsibility for breaches of international law and practice lay not with naval officers and men, whose duty it was to carry out the orders of the superiors, but that it lay with the superiors who gave those orders. To retaliate upon subordinate officers and men for the crimes of their political chiefs seemed cowardly, and worse—it struck a blow at the whole fabric of naval discipline not only in the German but in every other Service, including our own. Our officers saw more clearly than did the then First Lord that no Naval Service can remain efficient for a day if it be encouraged to discriminate between the several orders conveyed to it, and to claim for itself a moral right to select what shall be obeyed and what disobeyed.
Germany had no maritime traditions and a scanty seafaring population to assist her. Her seaboard upon the North Sea is a maze of shallows and sandbanks, through which devious channels leading to her naval and commercial bases are kept open only by continuous dredging. God has made Plymouth Sound, Spithead and the Firth of Forth; the Devil, it is alleged, has been responsible for Scapa and the Pentland Firth in winter; but man, German man, has made the navigable mouths of the Elbe, the Weser and the Ems. The Baltic is an inland sea upon which the coasting trade had for centuries been mainly in the hands of Scandinavians. Until late in the nineteenth century Germany was one of the least maritime of all nations; almost at a leap she sprang into the position of one of the greatest. It is said that peoples get the governments which they deserve; it is certainly true that when peoples are blind their governments shut their eyes. In the Country of the Blind the one-eyed man is not King; he is flung out for having the impertinence to pretend to see. In a state of blindness or of careless indifference we made Germany a present of Heligoland in 1890. It looked a poor thing, a crumbling bit of waste rock, and when the Kaiser asked for it he received the gift almost without discussion. Both our Government and Court at that time were almost rabidly pro-German. We all cherished so much suspicion of France and Russia that we had none left to spare for Germany. Heligoland was then of no great use to us, but it was of incalculable value to our future enemies. A German Heligoland fortified, equipped with airship sheds and long-distance wireless, a shelter for submarines, was to the new German Navy only second in value to the Kiel Canal. Islands do not “command” anything beyond range of their guns, especially when they have no harbours; but Heligoland, though it in no sense commanded the approach to the German bases, was an invaluable outpost and observation station. It is a little island of crumbling red rock, preserved only by man’s labour from vanishing into the sea; it is a mile long and less than one-third of a mile wide; it is 28 miles from the nearest mainland. Yet when we gave to Germany this scrap of wasting rock, we gave her the equivalent in naval value of a fleet. We secured her North Sea bases from our sudden attacks, and we gave her an observation station from which she could direct attacks against ourselves.
Heligoland, a free gift from us, was the first asset, a most valuable asset, which Germany was able to place to the credit side of her naval balance sheet. Other assets were rapidly acquired. In 1898 the building of the new navy seriously began, in 1900 was passed the famous German Navy Law setting forth a continuous programme of expansion, the back alley between the North Sea and the Baltic was cut through the isthmus of Schleswig-Holstein, and Germany as a Sea Power rose into being. The British people, at first amused and slightly contemptuous, became alarmed, and the Royal Navy, always watchful, never boastful, never undervaluing any possible opponent, settled down to deal in its own supremely efficient fashion with the German Menace.
Neither the British people nor the Royal Navy were lacking in confidence in themselves, but neither the people nor the Navy—we are, perhaps, the least analytical race on earth—realised the immovable foundation upon which their confidence was based. The people were wise; they simply trusted to the Navy and gave to it whatever it asked. But the Navy, though fully alive to the value of its own traditions, training, and centuries-old skill, did not fully understand that the source of its own immense striking force was moral rather than material. Like its critics it thought over much in machines, and when it saw across the North Sea the outpouring of ships and guns and men which Germany called her Navy, it became not a little anxious about the result of a sudden unforeseen collision. It was, if anything, over anxious.
But while this is true of the Navy as a whole, it is not true of the higher naval command. Away hidden in Whitehall, immersed in the study of problems for which the data were known and from which no secrets were hid, sat those who had taken the measure of the German efforts and gauged the value of them more justly than could the Germans themselves. They, the silent ones,—who never talked to representatives of the Press or inspired articles in the newspapers—knew that the German ships, especially the all-big-gun ships, generically but rather misleadingly called “Dreadnoughts,” were in nearly every class inferior copies of our own ships of two or three years earlier. The Royal Navy designed and built the first Dreadnought at Portsmouth in fifteen months, and preserved so rigid a secrecy about her details that she was a “mystery ship” till actually in commission. This lead of fifteen months, so skilfully and silently acquired, became in practice three years, for it reduced to waste paper all the German designs. The first Dreadnought was commissioned by us on December 11th, 1906; it was not until May 3rd, 1910, that the Germans put into service the first Nassaus, which were inferior copies. Our lead gained in 1906 was more than maintained, and each batch of German designs showed that step by step they had to wait upon us to reveal to them the path of naval progress. With us the upward rush was extraordinarily rapid; with the Germans it was slow and halting—they were slow to grasp what we were about and were then slow to interpret in steel those of our intentions which they were able to discern. Once our Navy had adopted the revolutionary idea of the all-big-gun ship—the design was perhaps an evolution rather than a revolution—its constructors and designers developed the principle with the most astonishing rapidity. The original Dreadnought was out of date in the designers’ minds within a year of her completion. After two or three years she was what the Americans call “a back number,” and when the War broke out we had in hand—some of them nearly completed—the great class of Queen Elizabeths with 25 knots of speed and eight 15-inch guns, vessels as superior to the first Dreadnought in fighting force as she was herself superior to the light German battleships which her appearance cast upon the scrap heap. And Germany, in spite of her patient efforts, her system of espionage—which rarely seemed to discover anything of real importance—and her outpouring of gold, had even then as her best battleships vessels little better than our first Dreadnought. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the five Queen Elizabeths and the five Royal Sovereigns which we put into commission during the war, equipped with eighty 15-inch guns, could have taken on with ease the whole of the German battle fleet as it existed in August 1914. Up to the outbreak of war, at each stage in the race for weight of guns, power and speed, Britain remained fully two years ahead of Germany in quality and a great deal more than two years ahead in magnitude of output. During the war, as I will show later on, the British lead was prodigiously increased and accelerated.
In its inmost heart, and especially in the heart of the higher command, the Royal Navy knew that German designers of big ships were but pale copyists of their own, and that the shipyards of Danzig and Stettin and Hamburg could not compete in speed or in quantity with its own yards and those of its contractors in England and Scotland. And yet knowing these things, there was an undercurrent of anxiety ever present both in the Navy and in those circles within its sphere of influence. It seemed to some anxious minds—especially of civilian naval students—that what was known could not be the whole truth, and that the Germans—belief in whose ingenuity and resources had become an obsession with many people—must have some wonderful unknown ships and still more wonderful guns hidden in the deep recesses behind the Frisian sandbanks. In those days, a year or two before August 1914, men who ought to have known better would talk gravely of secret shipyards where stupendous vessels were under construction, and of secret gunshops where the superhuman Krupps were at work upon designs which would change the destinies of nations. Anyone who has ever seen a battleship upon a building slip, and knows how few are the slips which can accommodate them and how few are the builders competent to make them, and how few can build the great guns and gun mountings, will smile at the idea of secret yards and secret construction. Details may be kept secret, as with the first Dreadnought and with many of our super-battleships, but the main dimensions and purpose of a design are glaringly conspicuous to the eyes of the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Service. One might as well try to hide a Zeppelin as a battleship.
As with ships so with guns. I will deal in another chapter with the Navy’s belief, fully justified in action, in the bigger gun—the straight shooting, hard hitting naval gun of ever-expanding calibre—and in the higher speed of ships which enables the bigger gun to be used at its most effective range. There was nothing new in this belief; it was the ripe fruit of all naval experience. Speed without hitting power is of little use in the battle line; hitting power without speed gives to an enemy the advantage of manœuvre and of escape; but speed and hitting power, both greater than those of an enemy, spell certain annihilation for him. He can neither fight nor run away. Given sufficient light and sea room for a fight to the finish, he must be destroyed. The North Sea deadlock is due to lack of room.
Our guns developed in size and in power as rapidly as did our great ships in the capacity to carry and use them. Krupps have a very famous name, made famous beyond their merits by the extravagant adulation which for years past has been poured upon them in our own country by our own people. The Germans are a race of egotists, but they have never exalted themselves, and everything that is German, to the utterly absurd heights to which many fearful Englishmen have exalted them in England. Krupps have been bowed down to and almost worshipped as the Gods of Terror. Their supreme capacity for inventing and constructing the best possible guns has been taken as proved beyond the need of demonstration. But Krupps were not and are not supermen; they have had to learn their trade like more humble folk, and naval gun-making is not a trade which can be taken up one day and made perfect on the next. Krupps are good gun-makers, but our own naval gunshops have for years outclassed them at every point—in design, in size, in power, in quality, and in speed of production. The long wire-wound naval gun, a miracle of patient workmanship, is British not German. While Krupps were labouring to make 11-inch guns which would shoot straight and not “droop” at the muzzle, our Navy was designing and making 12-inch and 13.5-inch weapons of far greater power and accuracy; when Krupps had at last achieved good 12-inch guns, we were turning out rapidly 15-inch weapons of equal precision and far greater power. In naval guns Krupps lag far behind us. And even in land guns—well, the huge siege howitzers which battered Liège and Namur into powder, came not from Essen but from the Austrian Skoda Works at Pilsen! And among field guns, the best of the best by universal acclaim is the French Soixante Quinze, in design and workmanship entirely the product of French artistic skill. War is a sad leveller, and it has not been very kind to Krupps.
Collectively, the Navy is a fount of serene knowledge and wisdom, and has been fully conscious of its superiority in men, in ships, and in guns, but individual naval officers afloat or ashore are not always either learned or wise. Foolish things were thought and said in 1913 and in 1914, which one can now recall with a smile and charitably endeavour to forget.
The Royal Navy was, and is, as superior to that of Germany in officers and men as in ships and in guns. Indeed the one is the direct and inevitable consequence of the other. Ships and guns are not imposed upon the Navy by some outside intelligence; they are secretions from the brains and experience and traditions of the Service itself; they are the expressions in machinery of its Soul. One always comes back to this fundamental fact when making any comparison of relative values in men or in machines. It was the Navy’s Soul which conceived and made ready the ships and the guns. The officers and men are the temporary embodiment of that immortal Soul; it is preserved and developed in them, and through them is passed on to succeeding generations in the Service.
Though the German Navy had not had time or opportunity to evolve within itself that dominant moral force which I have called a naval Soul, it contained both officers and men of notable fighting quality and efficiency. The Royal Navy no more under-rated the personality of its German opponents than it under-rated their ships and their guns. We English, though in foreign eyes we may appear to be self-satisfied, even bumptious, are at heart rather diffident. No nation on earth publicly depreciates itself as we do; no nation is so willing to proclaim its own weaknesses and follies and crimes. Much of this self-depreciation is mere humbug, little more sincere than our confession on Sunday that we are “miserable sinners,” but much of it is the result of our native diffidence. No Scotsman was ever mistrustful of himself or of his race, but very many Englishmen quite genuinely are. And the Navy being, as it always has been, English of the English, tends to be modest, even diffident. It is always learning, always testing itself, always seeking after improvement; it realises out of the fullness of its experience how much still remains to be learned, and becomes inevitably diffident of its very great knowledge and skill. No man is so modest as the genuine unchallengeable expert.
If one cannot improvise ships and guns of the highest quality by an exercise of the Imperial will, still less can one improvise the officers and men who have to man and use them. But Germany tried to do both. The German Navy could not secrete its ships and guns, for there was no considerable German navy a score of years ago; the machines were designed and provided for it by Vulcan and Schichau and Krupps, and the personnel to fight them had to be collected and trained from out of the best available material. The officers were largely drawn from Prussian families which for generations had served in the Army, and had in their blood that sense of discipline and warlike fervour which are invaluable in the leaders of any fighting force. But they had in them also the ruthless temper of the German Army, which we have seen revealed in its frightful worst in Belgium, Serbia and Poland; they knew nothing of that kindly chivalrous spirit which is born out of the wide salt womb of the Sea Mother. Many of these officers, though lacking in the Sea Spirit, were highly competent at their work. Von Spee’s Pacific Squadron, which beat Craddock off Coronel and was a little later annihilated by Sturdee off the Falkland Islands, was, officer for officer and man for man, almost as good as our best. The German Pacific Squadron was nearer the realisation of the naval Soul than was any other part of the German Navy. Admiral von Spee was a gallant and chivalrous gentleman, and the captain of the Emden, ingenious, gay, humorous, unspoiled in success and undaunted in defeat, was as English in spirit as he was unlike most of his compatriots in sentiment. The Navy and the public at home were right when they acclaimed von Spee and von Müller as seamen worthy to rank with their own Service.
The German Pacific Squadron, being on foreign service, had not only picked officers of outstanding merit, but also long-service crews of unpressed men. It was, therefore, in organisation and personnel much more akin to our Navy than was the High Seas Fleet at home in which the men were for the most part conscripts on short service (three years) from the Baltic, Elbe and inland provinces. In our Service the sailors and marines join for twenty-one years, and in actual practice frequently serve very much longer. They begin as children in training-ships and in the schools attached to Marine barracks, and often continue in middle life as grave men in the petty and warrant officer ranks. The Naval Service is the work of their lives just as it is with the commissioned officers. But in the German High Seas Fleet, with its three years of forced service, a man was no sooner half-trained than his time was up and he gladly made way for a raw recruit. The German crews were not of the Sea nor of the Service. During the war, no doubt, they became better trained. The experienced seamen were not discharged and the general level of skill arose; the best were passed into the submarines which alone of the Fleet were continuously at work on the sea. In our own Navy, in consequence of the very great increase in the number of ships, both large and small, the professional sailors had to be diluted by the calling up of Naval Reservists, and by the expansion of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. But unlike Germany we had, fortunately for ourselves, an almost limitless maritime population from which to draw the new naval elements. Fishermen at the call of their country flocked into the perilous service of mine sweeping and patrolling, young men from the seaports readily joined the Volunteer detachments in training for the great ships, dilution was carried on deftly and with so clear a judgment that the general level of efficiency all round was almost completely maintained. That this was possible is not so remarkable as it sounds. The Royal Navy of the fighting ships, even after the war expansion, remained a very small select service of carefully chosen men. Half of its personnel was professional and perfectly trained, the second and new half was so mingled and stirred up with the first that the professional leaven permeated the whole mass. The Army which desired millions had to take what it could get; but the Navy, which counts its men in tens of thousands only, could pick and choose of the best. In the Army the old Regulars were either killed or swamped under the flood of new entrants; in the Navy the professionals remained always predominant. It was very characteristic of the proud exclusiveness of our Royal Navy, very characteristic of its haughty Soul, that the temporary officers were allotted rank marks which distinguished them at a glance, even of civilian eyes, from the regular Service.
Though, as events proved, the Royal Navy need have felt little anxiety about the result of a fair trial of strength with its German opponents, there was one ever-present justification for that deeper apprehension with which the Navy in peace regarded an outbreak of war. It really was feared lest our Government should leave to the Germans the moment for beginning hostilities. It was feared lest while politicians were waiting and seeing the Germans would strike suddenly at their “selected moment,” and by a well-planned torpedo and submarine attack in time of supposed peace, would put themselves in a position of substantial advantage. There was undoubted ground for this fear. The German Government has not, and never has had, any scruples; it has no moral standards; if before a declaration of war it could have struck hard and successfully at our Fleets it would have seized the opportunity without hesitation. And realising this with the clarity of vision which distinguishes the Sea Service, the Navy feared lest its freedom of action should be fatally restricted at the very moment when its hands needed to be most free.
A distinguished naval captain—now an admiral—once put the matter before me plainly from the naval point of view:
“If the Germans secretly mobilise at a moment when a third of our big ships are out of commission or are under repair, they may not only by a sudden torpedo attack cripple our battle squadrons, but may open the seas to their own cruisers and submarines. We might, possibly should, recover in time to deal with an invasion, but in the meantime our overseas trade, on which you people depend at home for food and raw materials, would have been destroyed. And until we had fully recovered, not a man or a gun could be sent over sea to help France.”
“Surely we should have some warning,” I objected.
“You won’t get it from Germany,” said he gravely. “The little old man (Roberts) is right. Germany will strike when Germany’s hour has struck. If we are ready she will have no chance at all and knows it; she will not give us a chance to be ready. When she wants to cover a secret mobilisation she will invite parties of journalists, or provincial mayors, or village greengrocers to visit Berlin and to see for themselves how peaceful her intentions are!”
That is how the Navy felt and talked during the months immediately before the War, and who shall say that their apprehensions were not well founded? What it feared was unquestionably possible, even probable. But happily for the Navy, and for these Islands and the Empire which it guards, those whom the gods seek to destroy they first drive mad. The wisdom of Germany’s rulers was by all of us immensely overrated. They fell into the utter blindness of unimaginative stupidity. They understood us so little that they thought us sure to desert our friends rather than risk the paint upon our ships and the skins upon our fat and slothful bodies. They watched us quarrelling among ourselves, talking savagely of fighting one another in Ireland—we went on doing these things until July 28th, 1914, four days before Germany attacked Belgium!—and failed to realise that the ancient fighting spirit was as strong in us as ever, however much it might seem to be smothered under the rubbish of politics and social luxury. And meanwhile, during those intensely critical weeks of July, while Parliament chattered about Ulster and politicians looked hungrily for the soft spots in one another’s throats, the Royal Navy was quietly, unostentatiously preparing for war. What the Navy then did,—moving in all things with its own silent, serene, masterful efficiency and grimly thanking God for the dense political gas clouds behind which it could conceal its movements from the enemy,—saved not only Great Britain and the Empire; it saved the civilisation of the world.
Blindly Germany went on with her preparations for war against France and Russia, including in the programme the swallowing up of little Belgium, and left us wholly out of her calculations. The German battle Fleet, which had been engaged in peace manœuvres, was cruising off the Norwegian coast. Grand Admiral von Tirpitz had never expected us to intervene, and no naval preparations were made. The Germans were in no position to interfere with our disposition, or to move their cruisers upon our trade communications. But all through those later days of imminent crisis the English First Fleet lay mobilised at Portland, whither it had moved from Spithead, until one night it slipped silently away and disappeared into the northern mists. The Second and Third Fleets had been filled up and were completely ready for war in the early summer dawn of August 3rd. The big ships rushed to their war stations stretching from the Thames to the Orkneys and commanding both outlets from the North Sea; the destroyers and submarines swarmed in the Channel and off the sand-locked German bases. The hour had struck, everything had been done exactly as had been planned. The German Fleet crept into safety through the back door of the Kattegat and Kiel, and on the evening of August 4th, the British Government declared war.
Germany, who thought to catch the Navy asleep, was herself caught. She had never believed that we either would or could fight for the integrity of Belgium. She went on blindly in her appointed way until suddenly her sight returned in a flash of bitter realisation that the Royal Navy, without firing a single shot, had won the first tremendous decisive, irreparable battle in the coming world’s war. Her chance of success at sea had disappeared for ever. Before her lay a long cruel dragging fight with the seas closed to her merchant ships and her whole Empire in a state of blockade. No wonder that then, and since, Germany’s fiercest passion of hate has been directed against us, and above all against that Royal Navy which shields us and strikes for us. Before a shot had been fired she saw herself outwitted, outmanœuvred, out-fought. “Gott strafe England!”
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT VICTORY
In naval warfare there are many actions but few battles. An action is any engagement between war vessels of any size, but a battle is a contest between ships of the battle-line—sometimes called “capital ships” upon the results of which depends the vital issues of a war. During the whole of the long contest with Napoleon, there were only two battles of this decisive kind—the Nile and Trafalgar.
And although the fighting by sea and land went on for ten years after Trafalgar had given to us the supreme control of the world’s seas, there were no more naval battles. Battles at sea are very rare because, when fought out, they are so crushingly decisive. This characteristic feature of the great naval battle has been greatly emphasised by modern conditions. Upon land armies have outgrown the very earth itself; fighting frontiers have become lines of trenches; battles have become the mere swaying of these trench lines—a ripple here or there marks a success or failure—but the lines re-formed remain. Even after weeks or months of fighting, if the lines remain unbroken, neither side has reached a decision. War upon land between great forces is a long drawn-out agony of attrition.
But while battles upon land have become much less decisive than in the simpler days of small armies and feeble weapons, fighting upon the sea has become much quicker, much more crushingly final, in its effects and results than in the days of our grandfathers. Speed and gun power are now everything. The faster and more powerful fleet—more powerful in its capacity for dealing accurate and destructive blows—can annihilate its enemy completely within the brief hours of a single day. The more powerful and faster his ships the less will the victor himself suffer. Only under one condition can a defeated fleet escape annihilation, and that is when the lack of light or of sea room snatches from the victor a final decision. If an enemy can get away under shelter of his shore fortifications, or within the protection of his minefields, he can defy pursuit; but if there be ample room and daylight Speed and Power wielded by men such as ours, will prevail with absolute mathematical certainty—the losers will be sunk, the victors will, by comparison, be little damaged. Every considerable engagement during the war has added convincing proof to the conclusions which our Navy drew from the decisive battle in the Sea of Tsushima between the Japanese and the Russians, and the not less decisive action upon a smaller scale in which the Americans destroyed the Spanish squadron off Santiago, Cuba. In both cases the losers were destroyed while the victors suffered little hurt. These outstanding lessons were not lost upon the Royal Navy, its officers had themselves seen both fights, and so in its silent way the Navy pressed upon its course always seeking after more speed, more gun power, and above all more numbers. “Only numbers can annihilate,” said Napoleon, and what the Emperor declared to be true of land fighting is the more true of fighting by sea. Only numbers can annihilate.
Upon the evening of August 4th, 1914, I was sitting in a London office beside a ticking tape machine awaiting the message that the Germans had declined our ultimatum to withdraw from Belgium, and that war had been declared. “There will be a big sea battle this evening,” observed my companion. “There has been a big battle,” observed I, “but it is now over.” Although he and I used similar language we attached to the words very different meanings. He thought, as the bulk of the British people thought at that time, that the British and German battle fleets would meet and fight off the Frisian Islands. But I meant, and felt sure, that the last thing our Grand Fleet desired was to fight in restricted and dangerous waters, amid the perils of mines and submarines, when it had already won the greatest fight of the war without firing a shot or risking a single ship or man. There had been no “battle” in the popular sense, but there had in fact been achieved a tremendous decisive victory which through all the long months to follow would dominate the whole war by sea and by land. Our great battleships were at that moment cruising between Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and the Cromarty Firth on the north-eastern shores of Scotland. Our fastest battle cruisers were in the Firth of Forth together with many of the better pre-Dreadnought battleships which, though too slow for a fleet action, had heavy batteries available for a close fight in narrow waters. Many other older and slower battleships and cruisers were in the Thames. The narrow straits of Dover were thickly patrolled by destroyers and submarines, and more submarines and destroyers were on watch off the mouths of the Weser, the Jade, the Elbe and the Ems. Light cruisers hovered still farther to the north where the Skagerrak opens between Denmark and the Norwegian coast. The North Sea had become a mare clausum—no longer, as the mapmakers term it, a German Ocean, but one which at a single stroke had become overwhelmingly British.
Take a map of the North Sea and consider with me for a moment the relative strengths and dispositions of the opposing battle fleets. There was nothing complicated or super-subtle about the Royal Navy’s plans; on the contrary they had that beautiful compelling simplicity which is the characteristic feature of all really great designs whether in war or in peace.
There are two outlets to the North Sea, one wide to the north and west beyond the Shetlands, the other narrow and shallow to the south-west through the Straits of Dover. The Straits are only twenty-one miles wide; opposite the north of Scotland the Sea is 300 miles wide. But before German battleships or cruisers could get away towards the wide north-western outlet beyond the Shetlands they would have to steam some 400 miles north of Heligoland. Except for the Pacific Squadron based upon Tsing-tau in the Far East and cruising upon the east and west coasts of Mexico, all the fleets of our enemy were at his North Sea ports or in the Baltic—a land-locked sheet of water which for the moment is out of our picture. From Heligoland to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys—where Admiral Jellicoe had his headquarters and where he had under his hand twenty-two of our most powerful battleships—is less than 550 miles. Jellicoe had also with him large numbers of armoured and light cruisers. In the Firth of Forth, less than 500 miles from Heligoland, Admiral Beatty had five of the fastest and most powerful battle cruisers afloat and great quantities of lighter cruisers and destroyers. In the Thames, about 350 miles from Heligoland, lay most of our slower and less powerful pre-Dreadnought battleships and cruisers, vessels of a past generation in naval construction, but in their huge numbers and collective armaments a very formidable force to encounter in the narrow waters of the Straits of Dover.
Three possible courses of action lay before the German Naval Staff. They had at their disposal seventeen battleships and battle cruisers built since the first Dreadnought revolutionised the battle line, but, as I have already pointed out, these vessels, class for class and gun for gun, were lighter, slower, and less well armed than were the twenty-seven great war vessels at the disposal of Jellicoe and Beatty. The Germans could have tried to break away to the north with their whole battle fleet, escorting all their lighter cruisers, in the hope that while the battle fleets were engaged the cruisers might escape round the north of Scotland, and get upon our trade routes in the Atlantic. That was their first possible line of action—a desperate one, since Jellicoe and Beatty with much stronger forces lay upon the flank of their course to the north, and the preponderating strength and swiftness of our light and heavy cruisers would have meant, in all human probability, not only the utter destruction of the enemy’s battle fleet but also the wiping out of his would-be raiders. Our cruisers could have closed the passages between the Orkneys and Iceland long before the Germans could have reached them. This first heroic dash for the free spaces of the outer seas would have been so eminently gratifying to us that it is scarcely surprising that the Germans denied us its blissful realisation.
THE NORTH SEA.
The second possible course, apparently less heroic but in its ultimate results probably as completely destructive for the enemy as the first course, would have been to bear south-west, hugging the shallows as closely as might be possible, and to endeavour to break a way through the Straits of Dover and the English Channel. From Heligoland to the Straits is over 350 miles, and we should have known all about the German dash long before they could have reached the Narrows. Those Narrow Seas are like the neck of a bottle which would have been corked most effectually by our serried masses of pre-Dreadnought battleships and cruisers interspersed by swarming hundreds of submarines and destroyers with their vicious torpedo stings. We can quite understand how the Germans, who had read Sir Percy Scott’s observations of a month or two before on the deadliness of submarines in narrow waters, liked a dash for the Straits as little as they relished a battle with Jellicoe and Beatty in the far north, more especially as their line of retreat would have been cut off by the descent from their northern fastnesses of our battle fleets. Not then, nor a week or two later when we were passing our Expeditionary Force across the Channel, did the Germans attempt to break through the Straits and cut us off from our Allies the French.
The third course was the one which the Germans in fact took. It was the famous course of Brer Rabbit, to lie low and say nuffin’, and to wait for happier times when perchance the raids of their own submarines, and our losses from mines, might so far diminish our fighting strength as to permit them to risk a Battle of the Giants with some little prospect of success. And in adopting this waiting policy they did what we least desired and what, therefore, was the safest for them and most embarrassing for us. Never at any time did we attempt to prevent the German battle fleets from coming out. We no more blockaded them than Nelson a hundred years earlier blockaded the French at Toulin and Brest. We maintained, as Nelson did, a perpetual unsleeping watch on the enemy’s movements, but our desire always was the same as Nelson’s—to let the enemy come out far enough to give us space and time within which to compass his complete and final destruction.
Although the Germans, by adopting a waiting policy, prevented the Royal Navy from fulfilling its first duty—the seeking out and destruction of an enemy’s fighting fleets—their inaction emphasised the completeness of the Victory of Brains and Soul which the Navy had won during those few days before the outbreak of war. It was because our mobilisation had been so prompt and complete, it was because the disposition of our fleets had been so perfectly conceived, that the Germans dared not risk a battle with us in the open and were unable to send out their cruisers to cut off our trading ships and to break our communications with France. Although the enemy’s fleets had not been destroyed, they had been rendered very largely impotent. We held, more completely than we did even after the crowning mercy of Trafalgar, the command of the seas of the world. The first great battle was bloodless but complete, it had won for us and for the civilised world a very great victory, and the Royal Navy had never in its long history more fully realised and revealed its tremendous unconquerable Soul.
It may be of some little interest, now that the veil of secrecy can be partly raised, to describe the opposing battle fleets upon which rested the decision of victory or defeat. Before the war it had become the habit of many critics, both naval and civilian, to exalt the striking power of the torpedo craft—both destroyers and submarines—and to talk of the great battleship as an obsolete monster, as some vast Mammoth at the mercy of a wasp with a poison sting. But the war has shown that the Navy was right to hold to the deep beliefs, the outcome of all past experience, that supremacy in the battle line means supremacy in Sea Control. The smaller vessels, cruisers, and mosquito craft, are vitally necessary for their several rôles,—without them the great ships cannot carry out a commercial blockade, cannot protect trade or transports, cannot conduct those hundreds of operations both of offence and defence which fall within the duties of a complete Navy. But the ultimate decision rests with the Battle Fleets. They are the Fount of Power. While they are supreme, the seas are free to the smaller active vessels; without such supremacy, the seas are closed to all craft, except to submarines and, as events have proved, to a large extent even to those under-water wasps.
In August, 1914, our Battle Fleets available for the North Sea—and at the moment of supreme test no vessels, however powerful, which were not on the spot were of any account at all—were not at their full strength. The battleships were all at home—the ten Dreadnoughts, each with ten 12-inch guns, the four Orions, the four K.G.V.s and the four Iron Dukes, each with their ten 13.5-inch guns far more powerful than the earlier Dreadnoughts,—and were all fully mobilised by August 3rd. But of our nine fast and invaluable battle cruisers as many as four were far away. The Australia was at the other side of the globe, and three others had a short time before been despatched to the Mediterranean. Beatty had the Lion, Queen Mary, and Princess Royal, each with eight 13.5-inch guns and twenty-nine knots of speed, in addition to the New Zealand, and Invincible each with eight 12-inch guns. The First Lord of the Admiralty announced quite correctly that we had mobilised thirty-one ships of the battle line, but actually in the North Sea at their war stations upon that fateful evening of August 4th—which now seems so long ago—Jellicoe and Beatty had twenty-seven only of first line ships. They were enough as it proved, but one rather grudged at that time, those three in the Mediterranean and the Australia at the Antipodes. Had there been a battle of the Giants we should have needed them all, for only numbers can annihilate. Jellicoe had, in addition to those which I have reckoned, the Lord Nelson and Agamemnon—pre-Dreadnoughts, each with four 12-inch guns and ten 9.2-inch guns—useful ships but not of the first battle line.
Opposed to our twenty-seven available monsters the Germans had under their hands eighteen completed vessels of their first line. I do not count in this select company the armoured cruiser Blücher, with her twelve 8-inch guns, which was sunk later on in the Dogger Bank action by the 13.5-inch weapons of Beatty’s great cruisers. Neither do I count the fine cruiser Goeben, a fast vessel with ten 11-inch guns which, like our three absent battle cruisers, was in the Mediterranean. The Goeben escaped later to the Dardanelles and ceased to be on the North Sea roll of the German High Seas Fleet.
Germany had, then, eighteen battleships and battle cruisers, and had it been known to the public that our apparent superiority in available numbers was only 50 per cent. in the North Sea, many good people might have trembled for the safety of their homes and for the honour of their wives and daughters. But luckily they did not know, for they could with difficulty have been brought to understand that naval superiority rests more in speed and in quality and in striking power than in the mere numbers of ships. When I have said that numbers only can annihilate, I mean, of course, numbers of equal or superior ships. In quality of ships and especially of men, in speed and in striking power, our twenty-seven ships had fully double the strength of the eighteen Germans who might have been opposed to them in battle. None of our vessels carried anything smaller—for battle—than 12-inch guns, and fifteen of them bore within their turrets the new 13.5-inch guns of which the weight of shell and destructive power were more than 50 per cent. greater than that of the earlier 12-inch weapons. On the other hand, four of the German battleships (the Nassau class) carried 11-inch guns and were fully two knots slower in speed than any of the British first line. Three of their battle cruisers also had 11-inch guns. While therefore we had guns of 12 and 13.5 inches the Germans had nothing more powerful to oppose to us than guns of 11 and 12 inches. Ship for ship the Germans were about two knots slower than ourselves, so that we always had the advantage of manœuvre, the choosing of the most effective range, and the power of preventing by our higher speed the escape of a defeated foe. Had the Germans come north into the open sea, we could have chosen absolutely, by virtue of our greater speed, gun power and numbers, the conditions under which an action should have been fought and how it should have been brought to a finish.
An inch or two in the bore of a naval gun, a few feet more or less of length, may not seem much to some of my readers. But they should remember that the weight of a shell, and the weight of its explosive charge, vary as the cube of its diameter. A 12-inch shell is a third heavier than one of 11 inches, while a 13.5-inch shell is more than one-half heavier than a 12-inch and twice as heavy as one of 11 inches only. The power of the bursting charge varies not as the weight, but as the square of the weight of a shell. The Germans were very slow to learn the naval lesson of the superiority of the bigger gun and the heavier shell. It was not until after the Dogger Bank action when Beatty’s monstrous 13.5-inch shells broke in a terrible storm upon their lighter-armed battle cruisers that the truth fully came home to them. Had Jellicoe and Beatty fought the German Fleet in the wide spaces of the upper North Sea in August, 1914, we should have opposed a fighting efficiency in power and weight of guns of more than two to one. Rarely have the precious qualities of insight and foresight been more strikingly shown forth than in the superiority in ships, in guns, and in men that the Royal Navy was able to range against their German antagonists in those early days of August, when the fortunes of the Empire would have turned upon the chances of a naval battle. In the long contest waged between 1900 and 1914, in the bloodless war of peace, the spiritual force of the Navy had gained the victory; the enemy had been beaten, and knew it, and thenceforward for many months, until the spring of 1916, he abode in his tents. Whenever he did venture forth it was not to give battle but to kill some women, some babes, and then to scuttle home to proclaim the dazzling triumph which “Gott” had granted to his arms.
It may seem to many a fact most extraordinary that in August, 1914, not one of our great ships of the first class—the so-called “super-Dreadnoughts”—upon which we depended for the domination of the seas and the security of the Empire, not one was more than three years old. The four Orions—Orion, Conqueror, Thunderer and Monarch—were completed in 1911 and 1912. The four K.G. Fives—King George V, Centurion, Ajax, and Audacious in 1912 and 1913; and the four Iron Dukes—Iron Duke, Marlborough, Emperor of India and Benbow—in 1914. All these new battleships carried ten 13.5-inch guns and had an effective speed of nearly 23 knots. The super-battle cruisers—Lion, Queen Mary and Princess Royal—were completed in 1912, carried eight 13.5-inch guns, and had a speed of over 29 knots. Upon these fifteen ships, not one of which was more than three years old, depended British Sea Power. The Germans had nothing, when the war broke out, which was comparable with these fifteen splendid monsters. Their first line battleships and battle cruisers completed in the corresponding years, from 1911 to 1914—their “opposite numbers” as the Navy calls them—were not superior in speed, design and power of guns to our Dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers, which had already passed into the second class, and which, long before the war ended, had sunk to the third class. But the newness and overwhelming superiority of our true first line do not surprise those who realise that these fifteen great ships were the fine flower of our naval brains and soul. The new Navy of the three years immediately preceding the war was simply the old Navy writ large. As the need had arisen, so had the Navy expanded to meet it. The designs for these fifteen ships did not fall down from Heaven; they were worked out in naval brains years before they found their material expression in steel. The vast ships issued forth upon the seas, crushingly superior to anything which our enemy could put into commission against us, because our naval brains were superior to his and our naval Soul was to his as a white glowing flame to a tallow candle. In a sentence, while Germany was laboriously copying our Dreadnoughts we had cast their designs aside, and were producing at a speed, with which he could not compete, Orions, K.G. Fives, Iron Dukes and Lions.
The North Sea, large as it may appear upon a map, is all too small for the manœuvres of swift modern fleets. No part of that stretch of water which lies south of the Dogger Bank—say, from the Yorkshire coast to Jutland—is far enough removed from the German bases to allow of a sure and decisive fleet action. There was no possibility here of a clean fight to a finish. An enemy might be hammered severely, some of his vessels might be sunk—Beatty showed the German battle cruisers what we could do even in a stern chase at full speed—but he could not be destroyed. On the afternoon and night of May 31st-June 1st, 1916, the Grand Fleet had the enemy enveloped and ripe for destruction, but were robbed of full victory by mist and darkness and the lack of sea room. Nelson spoke with the Soul of the Navy when he declared that a battle was not won when any enemy ship was enabled to escape destruction. So while the divisions of the Grand Fleet, and especially the fastest battle cruisers of some twenty-eight to twenty-nine knots speed (about thirty-three miles per hour) neglected no opportunity to punish the enemy ships that might venture forth, what every man from Jellicoe to the smallest ship boy really longed and prayed for, was a brave ample battle in the deep wide waters of the north. Here there was room for a newer and greater Trafalgar, though even here the sea was none too spacious. Great ships, which move with the speed of a fairly fast train and shoot to the extreme limits of the visible horizon, really require a boundless Ocean in which to do their work with naval thoroughness. But the upper North Sea would have served, and there the Grand Fleet waited, ever at work though silent, ever watchfully ready for the Great Day. And while it waited it controlled by the mere fact of its tremendous power of numbers, weight, and position the destinies of the civilised world.
The task of the Royal Navy in the war would have been much simpler had the geography of the North Sea been designed by Providence to assist us in our struggle with Germany. We made the best of it, but were always sorely handicapped by it. The North Sea was too shallow, too well adapted for the promiscuous laying of mines, and too wide at its northern outlet for a really close blockade. Had the British Isles been slewed round twenty degrees further towards Norway, so that the outlet to the north was as narrow as that to the English Channel—and had there been a harbour big enough for the Grand Fleet between the Thames and the Firth of Forth—then our main bases could have been placed nearer to Germany and our striking power enormously increased. We could then have placed an absolute veto upon the raiding dashes which the Germans now and then made upon the eastern English seaboard. As the position in fact existed we could not place any of our first line ships further south than the Firth of Forth—and could place even there only our fastest vessels—without removing them too far from the Grand Fleet’s main concentration at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Invergordon in the Cromarty Firth was used as a rest and replenishing station. The German raids—what Admiral Jellicoe called their tactics of “tip and run”—were exasperating, but they could not be allowed to interfere with the naval dispositions upon which the whole safety of the Empire depended. We had to depend on the speed of our battle cruisers in the Firth of Forth to give us opportunity to intercept and punish the enemy. The German battle cruisers which fired upon Scarborough, Whitby, and the Hartlepools were nearly caught—a few minutes more of valuable time and a little less of sea haze would have meant their destruction. A second raid was anticipated and the resulting Dogger Bank action taught the enemy that the Navy had a long arm and long sight. For a year he digested the lesson, and did not try his luck again until April, 1916, when he dashed forth and raided Lowestoft on the Norfolk coast. The story of this raid is interesting. The Grand Fleet had been out a day or two before upon what it called a “stunt,” a parade in force of the Jutland coast and the entrance to the Skaggerak. It had hunted for the Germans and found them not, and returning to the far north re-coaled the ships. The Germans, with a cleverness which does them credit, launched their Lowestoft raid immediately after the “stunt” and before the battle cruisers, re-coaling, could be ready to dash forth. Even as it was they did not cut much time to waste. It was a dash across, a few shots, and a dash back.
Then was made a re-disposition of the British Squadrons, not in the least designed to protect the east coast of England—though the enemy was led to believe so—but so to strengthen Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Squadrons that the enemy’s High Seas Fleet, when met, could be fought and held until Jellicoe with his battle squadrons could arrive and destroy it. The re-disposition consisted of two distinct movements. First: the pre-Dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers which had been stationed in the Forth were sent to the Thames. Second: Admiral Evan-Thomas’s fifth battle squadron of five Queen Elizabeth battleships (built since the war began)—of twenty-five knots speed and each carrying eight 15-inch guns—Queen Elizabeth, Barham, Valiant, Warspite, and Malaya—were sent from Scapa to the Firth of Forth to reinforce Beatty and to give him a support which would enable him and Evan-Thomas to fight a delaying action against any force which the Germans could put to sea. Three of the Invincible type of battle cruisers were moved from the Forth to Scapa to act as Jellicoe’s advance guard, and to enable contact to be quickly made between Beatty and Jellicoe. But for this change in the Grand Fleet’s dispositions, which enabled the four splendid battleships—Barham, Valiant, Warspite and Malaya (the Queen Elizabeth was in dock)—to engage the whole High Seas Fleet on the afternoon of May 31st, 1916, while Beatty headed off the German battle cruisers and opened the way for Jellicoe’s enveloping movement, the Battle of Jutland could never have been fought.
CHAPTER IV
WITH THE GRAND FLEET: A NORTH SEA “STUNT”
“So young and so untender!”—King Lear
For more than eighteen months the Grand Fleet had been at war. It was the centre of the great web of blockading patrols, mine-sweeping flotillas, submarine hunters, and troop-transport convoys, and yet as a Fleet it had never seen the enemy nor fired a shot except in practice. The fast battle cruisers, stationed nearest to the enemy in the Firth of Forth had grabbed all the sport that was going in the Bight of Heligoland, or in the Dogger Bank action. But though several of the vessels belonging to the Grand Fleet had picked up some share in the fighting—at the Falkland Islands and in the Dardanelles—Jellicoe with his splendid squadrons still waited patiently for the Day. The perils from submarines had been mastered, and those from mines, cast into the seas by a reckless enemy, had been made of little account by continuous sweeping. The early eagerness of officers and men had given place to a sedate patience. At short intervals the vast Fleet would issue forth and, attended by its screen of destroyers and light cruisers, would make a stately parade of the North Sea. All were prepared for battle when it came, but as the weeks passed into months and the months into years, the parades became practice “stunts,” stripped of all expectation of encountering the enemy and devoid of the smallest excitement. The Navy knows little of excitement or of thrills—it has too much to think about and to do. At Action Stations in a great ship, not one man in ten ever sees anything but the job immediately before him. The enemy, if enemy there be in sight from the spotting tops, is hidden from nine-tenths of the officers and crew by steel walls. So, if even a battle be devoid of thrills—except those painfully vamped up upon paper after the event—a “stunt,” without expectation of battle, becomes the most placid of sea exercises. I will describe such a “stunt” as faithfully as may be, adding thereto a little imaginary incident which will, I hope, gratify the reader, even though he may be assured in advance that I invented it for his entertainment.
It was the beginning of the afternoon watch, and the vast harbour of Scapa Flow was very still and sunny and silent. The hands were sitting about smoking, or “caulking” after their dinner, and the noisome “both watches” call was still some fifteen minutes away. But though everything appeared to be perfectly normal and sedate, an observant Officer of the Watch, looking through the haze within which the Fleet flagship lay almost invisible against the dark hills, could see a little wisp of colour float to her yards and remain. Forthwith up to the yards of every vessel in harbour ran an exactly similar hoist, and as it was dipped on the flagship it disappeared from sight upon all. It was the signal to prepare for sea, and now mark exactly how such a signal—seemingly so momentous to a civilian—is received by the Navy at war.
If the Officer of the Watch upon a ship knows his signals he will put his glass back under his arm and think, “Good, I’ve got off two days’ harbour watch keeping at least; my first and middle, too.” The signal hands on the bridge look at the calm sea, which will for once not drench them and skin their hands on the halliards, and gratefully regard the windless sky under which hoists will slide obediently up the mast and not tug savagely like a pair of dray horses. The signal bos’n turns purple with fierce resentment which he does not really feel, for he will be up all day and half the night beside the Officer of the Watch on the bridge running the manœuvring signals, and he loves to feel indispensable. There is no excitement on the mess decks, only a smile since sea means a period of peace of mind when parades and polishings are suspended, and one keeps three watches or sleeps in a turret all night and half the day. Besides there is deep down in the minds of all the hope that, in spite of a hundred duds and wash-outs and disappointments, this trip may just possibly lead to that glorious scrap that all have been longing for, and have come to regard as about as imminent as the Day of Judgment. The gunnery staff look important and the “garage men”—armourers and electricians, commonly called L.T.O.s, in unspeakable overalls carrying spanners and circuit-testing lamps—float round the turrets looking for little faults and flies in the amber. The bad sailors shiver, though there is hope even for them in the silence and calmness of the sky. There is no obvious bustle of preparation, for the best of reasons: there is nothing to do except to close sea doors and batten down; the Fleet is Already Prepared. Let the reader please brush from his mind any idea of excitement, any idea of unusualness, any idea of bustle; none of these things exist when the Grand Fleet puts to sea. The signal which ran up to the yards of the flagship and was repeated by all the vessels in the Fleet read: “Prepare to leave harbour,” and simply meant that the Fleet was going out, probably that night, and that no officer could leave his ship to go and dine with his friends in some other ship’s wardroom.
By and by up goes another little hoist, also universally acknowledged; this makes the stokers and the engine room artificers, and the purple-ringed, harassed-looking engineer officers jump lively down below so as to cut the time notice for full steam down by half and be ready to advance the required speed by three knots or so.
The sun dips and evening comes on; a glorious evening such as one only gets fairly far north in the spring, and a signal comes again, this time: “Raise steam for —— knots and report.” Now one sees smoke pouring forth continuously from the coal-driven ships, and every now and then a great gust of cold oil vapour from the aristocratic new battleships whose fires are fed with oil only.
Dinner in the wardroom starts in a blaze of light and a buzz of talking, and the band plays cheerfully on the half-deck outside. The King’s health is drunk and the band settles down to an hour of ragtime and waltzes, the older men sip their port, and the younger ones drift out to where the gun room is already dancing lustily. Our wonderful Navy dances beautifully, and loves every evening after dinner to execute the most difficult of music-hall steps in the midst of a wild Corybantic orgie. In the choosing of partners age and rank count for nothing. The wardroom and gun room after dinner are members of one happy family.
Then suddenly the scene is transformed. In the doorway of the anteroom and dining-room appears framed the tall form of the Owner, who in a dozen words tells that the Huns are out. They are in full force strolling merrily along a westerly course far away to the south. Already the battle-cruisers from the Forth are seeking touch with the enemy, and the light stuff and the advance destroyers, the screen of the Grand Fleet, have already flown from Scapa to make contact with the battle cruisers. Our armoured cruisers have moved out in advance and the Grand Fleet itself is about to go.
As the wardroom gathers round the Owner, the band packs up hastily and vanishes down the big hatch into the barracks or Marines’ mess to stow its instruments and put on warm clothing. Those snotties who have the first watch scatter, and the remainder gather in the gun room to turn over the chances on the morrow which seems to their eager souls more mist-shrouded and promising than have most morrows during the long months of waiting.
Let us now shift the scene to the compass platform or Monkey’s Island of one of the great new oil-fired battleships of the Fifth Battle Squadron, one of the five ships known as Queen Elizabeths—all added to the Navy since the war began and all members of the most powerful and fastest squadron of battleships upon the seas of the world. They have a speed of twenty-five knots, carry eight 15-inch guns in four turrets arranged on the middle line, and have upon each side a battery of six 6-inch guns in casemates for dealing faithfully and expeditiously with enemy destroyers who may seek to rush in with the torpedo. As our ship passes out into the night, the port and starboard 6-inch batteries are fully manned and loaded, and up on the compass platform, in control of these batteries, are two young officers—a subaltern of Marines and a naval sub-lieutenant—to each of whom is allotted one of the batteries. One has charge of the port side, the other of the starboard. I have called the Navy a young man’s service, and here we see a practical example; for beneath us is the last word in super-battleships dependent for protection against sudden torpedo attack upon the bright eyes and cool trained brains of two youngsters counting not more than forty years between them. I will resume my description and put it in the mouth of one of these youthful control officers—the Marine subaltern who a year before had been a boy at school:
“Going to the gun room I warn the Sub, my trusted friend and fellow control officer on the starboard side, and depart to my cabin, where I dress as for a motor run on a cold day. I have a great Canadian fur cap and gorgeous gloves which defeat the damp and cold even of the North Sea. As I stand on the quarter deck for a moment’s glance at the sunset, which I cannot hope to describe, there comes a sound, a sort of hollow metallic clap and a flicker of flame. They are testing electric circuits in the 6-inch battery, and No. 5 gun port has fired a tube. These sounds recur at short intervals from both sides for a couple of minutes. Then the gun layers are satisfied and stop. I go along the upper deck above the battery—which is in casemates between decks—and reach the pagoda, and then pass up, up, through a little steel door, above the signal bridge and the searchlights to the airy, roomy Monkey’s Island with the foremast in the middle of the floor, holding the spotting top—usually known as the topping spot, an inversion which ironically describes its exposed position in action—poised above our heads. There is a little charthouse forward of the mast on its raised date of the compass platform proper, where the High Priest busies himself between his two altars, the old and the new.
“Looking ahead it is already dark. The sea is still and the ships are dim black masses. We have already weighed—the Cable Officer’s call went as I passed along the upper deck—and are gliding to our station in the Squadron, all of which are moving away past those ships which have not yet begun to go out. Gradually we leave the rest of the Grand Fleet behind, for our great speed gives us the place of honour, and so pass outside and breast the swell of the open sea.
“We find that the wind has risen outside the harbour, but there has not yet been time for a serious swell to get up. The water heaves slowly, breaking into a sharp clap which sets our attendant destroyers dancing like corks, but of which we take no notice whatever. This is one way in which the big ships score, though they miss the full joy of life and the passion for war which can be felt only in a destroyer flotilla. Our destroyer escort has arisen apparently from nowhere and we all plough on together. At intervals we tack a few points and the manœuvre is passed from ship to ship with flash lamps. Behind us, though we cannot see them, follows the rest of the Grand Fleet, in squadrons line ahead, trailing out up to, and beyond the horizon.
“That night watch on my first big ‘stunt’ lives in my memory. Never before had I been by myself in control of a battery of six 6-inch guns for use against light fast enemy craft, which might try the forlorn hazard of a dash to within easy torpedo range of about 500 yards. Torpedoes are useless against rapidly moving ships unless fired quite close up. This form of attack has been very rare, and has always failed, but it remains an ever-present possibility. Even in clear weather with the searchlights on—which are connected up to me and move with me—one cannot see for more than a mile at night, and a destroyer could rush in at full speed upon a zig-zag track to within point blank range in about a minute. Direct-aimed fire would fail at such a rapidly moving mark. One has to put up a curtain of fire, fast and furious for the charging vessel to run into. But there is no time to lose, no time at all.
“There was a bright moon upon that first night, so everything was less unpleasant and nerve-racking than it might have been. Somehow in the Navy one seems to shed all feelings of nervousness. Perhaps this is the result of splendid health, the tonic sea air, and the atmosphere of serene competent resourcefulness which pervades the whole Service. We are all trained to think only of the job on hand and never of ourselves.
“From the height of the compass platform there is no appearance of freeboard. The ship’s deck seems to lie flush with the water, and one sees it as a light-coloured shaped plank—such as one cut out of wood when a child and fitted with a toy mast. The outline is not regularly curved but sliced away at the forecastle with straight sides running back parallel with one another. ‘A’ turret is in the middle of the forecastle, which is very narrow; and behind it upon a higher level stands ‘B’ with its long glistening guns sticking out over ‘A’s’ back. From aloft the turrets look quite small, though each is big enough for a hundred men to stand comfortably on the roof. The slope upwards is continued by the great armoured conning tower behind and higher than ‘B’ turret, and directly above and behind that again stands the compass platform. Overhead towers the draughty spotting top for the turret guns. Behind again, upon the same level as my platform, are the two great flat funnels spouting out dense clouds of oily smoke. When there is a following wind the spotting top is smothered with smoke, and the officers perched there cough and gasp and curse. It is then worthy of its name, for it is in truth a ‘topping spot!’
“We are a very fast ship, but at this height the impression of speed is lost. The ship seems to plough in leisurely fashion through the black white-crested waves, now and then throwing up a cloud of spray as high as my platform, to descend crashing upon ‘A’ turret, which is none too dry a place to sleep in. We don’t roll appreciably, but slide up and down with a dignified pitch, exactly like the motion of that patent rocking-horse which I used to love in my old nursery.
“Down below, though they are hidden from me by the deck, the gunners stand ready behind their casemates, waiting for my signal. The guns are loaded and trained, the crews stand at their stations, shells and cordite charges are ready to their hands. The gun-layers are connected up with me and are ready to respond instantly to my order.
“So the watch passes; my relief comes, and I go.
“I was on watch again in the forenoon, and then one could see something of the Grand Fleet and realise its tremendous silent power. We had shortened speed so as not to leave the supporting Squadrons too far behind and one could see them clearly, long lines of great ships, stretching far beyond the visible horizon. Nearest to us was the cream of the Fleet, the incomparable Second Squadron—the four Orions and four K.G. Fives—which with their eighty 13.5-inch guns possess a concentrated power far beyond anything flying Fritz’s flag. Upon us of the Queen Elizabeths, and upon the Second Battle Squadron, rests the Mastery of the Seas. Far away on the port quarter could be seen the leading ships of the First Battle Squadron of Dreadnoughts, all ships of 12-inch guns, all good enough for Fritz but not in the same class with the Orions, the K.G. Fives or with us. Away to starboard came more Dreadnoughts, and Royal Sovereigns—as powerful as ourselves but not so fast—and odd ships like the seven-turreted Agincourt and the 14-inch gunned Canada. It was a great sight, one to impress Fritz and to make his blood turn to water.
“For he could see us as we thrashed through the seas. It looked no larger than a breakfast sausage, and I had some difficulty in making it out—even after the Officer of the Watch had shown it to me. But at last I saw the watching Zeppelin—a mere speck thousands of feet up and perhaps fifty miles distant. Our seaplanes roared away, rising one after the other from our carrying-ships like huge seagulls, and Herr Zeppelin melted into the far-off background of clouds. He had seen us, and that was enough to keep the Germans at a very safe distance. He, or others like him, had seen, too, our battle cruisers which, sweeping far down to the south, essayed to play the hammer to our most massive anvil. In the evening, precisely at ten o’clock, the German Nordeich wireless sent out a volley of heavy chaff, assuring us that we had only dared to come out when satisfied that their High Seas Fleet was in the Baltic. It wasn’t in the Baltic; at that moment it was scuttling back to the minefields behind Heligoland. But what could we do? When surprise is no longer possible at sea, what can one do? It is all very exasperating, but somehow rather amusing.
“We joined the Battle Cruiser Squadron in the south and swept the ‘German Ocean’ right up to the minefields off the Elbe and Weser, and north to the opening of the Skaggerak. Further we could not go, for any foolish attempt to ‘dig out’ Fritz might have cost us half the Grand Fleet. Then our ’stunt’ ended, we turned and sought once more our northern fastnesses.”
It was during the return from this big sweep of the North Sea that our young Marine chanced upon his baptism of fire and his first Great Adventure. His chance came suddenly and unexpectedly—as chances usually come at sea—and I will let him tell of it himself in that personal vivid style of his with which I cannot compete.
“The wonderful thing has happened! I have been in action! It was not a great battle; it was not what the hardiest evening newspaper could blaze upon its bills as a Naval Action in the North Sea. From first to last it endured for one minute and forty seconds; yet for me it was the Battle of the Century. For it was my own, my very own, my precious ewe lamb of a battle. It was fought by me on my compass platform and by my bold gunners in the 6-inch casemates below. All by our little selves we did the trick, before any horrid potentates could interfere, and the enemy is at the bottom of the deep blue sea—it is not really very deep and certainly is not blue. What I most love about my battle is that it was fought so quickly that no one—and especially none of those tiresome folks called superior officers—had any opportunity of kicking me off the stage. All was over, quite over, and my guns had ceased firing before the Owner had tumbled out of his sea cabin in the pagoda, and best of all before my gunnery chief had any chance to snatch the control away from me. He came charging up, red and panting, while the air still thudded with my curtain fire, and wanted to know what the devil I was playing at. ‘I have sunk the enemy, sir,’ I said, saluting. ‘What enemy?’ cried he, ‘I never saw any enemy.’ ‘He’s gone, sir,’ said I standing at attention. ‘I hit him with three 6-inch shells and he is very dead indeed.’ ‘It’s all right,’ called out the Officer of the Watch, laughing. ‘This young Soldier here has been and gone and sunk one of Fritz’s destroyers. He burst her all to pieces in a manner most emphatic. I call it unkind. But he always was a heartless young beast.’ Then the Bloke, who is a very decent old fellow, cooled down, said I was a lucky young dog, and received my official report. He carried it off to the Lord High Captain—whom the Navy people call the Owner—and the great man was so very kind as to speak to me himself. He said that I had done very well and that he would make a note of my prompt attention to duty. I don’t suppose that I shall ever again fight so completely satisfying a naval battle, for I am not likely to come across another one small enough to keep wholly to myself.
“I will tell you all about it. I was up on my platform at my watch. My battery of 6-inch guns was down below, all loaded with high explosive shell, weighing 100 lbs. each. All the gunners were ready for anything which might happen, but expecting nothing. So they had stood and waited during a hundred watches. It was greying towards dawn, but there was a good bit of haze and the sea was choppy. The old ship was doing her rocking-horse trick as usual, and also as usual I was feeling a bit squeamish but nothing to worry about. As the light increased I could see about 2,000 yards, more or less—I am not much good yet at judging sea distances; they look so short. The Officer of the Watch was walking up and down on the look-out. ‘Hullo,’ I heard him say, ‘what’s that dark patch yonder three points on the port bow?’ This meant thirty degrees to the left. I looked through my glasses and so did he, and as I could see nothing I switched on the big searchlight. Then there came a call from the Look Out near us, the dark patch changed to thick smoke, and out of the haze into the blaze of my searchlight slid the high forepeak of a destroyer. I thought it was one of our escort, and so did the Officer of the Watch; but as we watched the destroyer swung round, and we could see the whole length of her. I can’t explain how one can instantly distinguish enemy ships from one’s own, and can even class them and name them at sight. One knows them by the lines and silhouette just as one knows a Ford car from a Rolls-Royce. The destroyer was an enemy, plain even to me. She had blundered into us by mistake and was now trying hard to get away. I don’t know what the Officer of the Watch did—I never gave him a thought—my mind simply froze on to that beautiful battery of 6-inch guns down below and on to that enemy destroyer trying to escape. Those two things, the battery and the enemy, filled my whole world.
“Within five seconds I had called the battery, given them a range of 2,000 yards, swung the guns on to the enemy and loosed three shells—the first shells which I had seen fired in any action. They all went over for I had not allowed for our height above the water. Then the Boche did an extraordinary thing. If he had gone on swinging round and dashed away, he might have reached cover in the haze before I could hit him. But his Officer of the Watch was either frightened out of his wits or else was a bloomin’ copper-bottomed ’ero. Instead of trying to get away, he swung back towards us, rang up full speed, and came charging in upon us so as to get home with a torpedo. It was either the maddest or the bravest thing which I shall ever see in my life. I ought to have been frightfully thrilled, but somehow I wasn’t. I felt no excitement whatever; you see, I was thinking all the time of directing my guns and had no consciousness of anything else in the world. The moment the destroyer charged, zig-zagging to distract our aim, I knew exactly what to do with him. I instantly shortened the range by 400 yards, and gave my gunners rapid independent fire from the whole battery. The idea was to put up a curtain of continuous fire about 200 yards short for him to run into, and to draw in the curtain as he came nearer. As he zig-zagged, so we followed, keeping up that wide deadly curtain slap in his path. There was no slouching about those beautiful long-service gun-layers of ours, and you should have seen the darlings pump it out. I have seen fast firing in practice but never anything like that. There was one continuous stream of shell as the six guns took up the order. Six-inch guns are no toys, and 100-lb. shells are a bit hefty to handle, yet no quick-firing cartridge loaders could have been worked faster than were my heavy beauties. Every ten seconds my battery spat out six great shells, and I steadily drew the curtain in, keeping it always dead in his path, but by some miracle of light or of manœuvring the enemy escaped destruction for a whole long minute. On came the destroyer and round came our ship facing her. The Officer of the Watch was swinging our bows towards the enemy so as to lessen the mark for his torpedo, and I swung my guns the opposite way as the ship turned, keeping them always on the charging destroyer. Away towards the enemy the sea boiled as the torrent of shells hit it and ricochetted for miles.
“At last the end came! It seemed to have been hours since I began to fire, but it couldn’t really have been more than a minute; for even German destroyers will cover half a mile in that time. The range was down to 1,000 yards when he loosed a torpedo, and at that very precise instant a shell, ricochetting upwards, caught him close to the water line of his high forepeak and burst in his vitals. I saw instantly a great flash blaze up from his funnels as the high explosive smashed his engines, boilers and fires into scrap. He reared up and screamed exactly like a wounded horse. It sounded rather awful, though it was only the shriek of steam from the burst pipes; it made one feel how very live a thing is a ship, how in its splendid vitality it is, as Kipling says, more than the crew. He reared up and fell away to port, and two more of my shells hit him almost amidships and tore out his bottom plates like shredded paper. I could hear the rending crash of the explosions through my ear-protectors, and through the continuous roar of my own curtain fire. He rolled right over and was gone! He vanished so quickly that for a moment my shells flew screaming over the empty sea, and then I stopped the gunners. My battle had lasted for one minute and forty seconds!
“ ‘But what about the torpedo?’ you will ask. I never saw it, but the Officer of the Watch told me that it had passed harmlessly more than a hundred feet away from us. ‘You sank the destroyer,’ said the Officer of the Watch, grinning, ‘but my masterly navigation saved the ship. So honours is easy, Mr. Marine. If I had had those guns of yours,’ he went on, ‘I would have sunk the beggar with about half that noise and half that expenditure of Government ammunition. I never saw such a wasteful performance,’ said he. But he was only pulling my leg. All the senior officers, from the Owner downwards, were very nice to me and said that for a youngster, and a Soldier at that, I hadn’t managed the affair at all badly.
“I thought that the guns’ crews had done fine and told them so; but the chief gunner—a stern Marine from Eastney—shook his head sadly. No. 3 gun had been trained five seconds late, he said, and was behind the others all through. He seemed to reckon the sinking of the destroyer as nothing in condonation of the shame No. 3 had brought upon his battery. I condoled with him, but he was wounded to the heart.
“The Officer of the Watch said that all the time the destroyer was charging she was firing small stuff at our platform with a Q.-F. gun on her forepeak. And I knew nothing about it! This is the simple and easy way in which one earns a reputation for coolness under heavy fire.”
CHAPTER V
WITH THE GRAND FLEET: THE TERRIERS
AND THE RATS
“You missed a lot, Soldier,” said the Sub-Lieutenant to his friend the Marine Subaltern, “through not being here at the beginning. Now it is altogether too comfortable for us of the big ships; the destroyers and patrols get all the fun while we hang about here in harbour or put up a stately and entirely innocuous parade of the North Sea. No doubt we are Grand in our Silent Might and Keep our Unsleeping Vigil and all the rest of the pretty tosh which one reads in the papers—but in reality we eat too much for the good of our waists and do too little work for our princely pay. But it was very different at the beginning. Then we were like a herd of wild buffaloes harassed day and night by super-mosquitoes. When we were not on watch we were saying our prayers. It was a devil of a time, my son.”
“I thought that you Commanded the Seas,” observed the marine, an innocent youth who had lately joined.
The Sub-Lieutenant, dark and short, with twenty years to his age and the salt wisdom of five naval generations in his rich red blood, grinned capaciously, “So the dear simple old British Public thought. So their papers told them every day. We did not often get a sight of newspapers—there were no regular mails, as now, and none of the comforts of an ordered civilised life, as some ass wrote the other day of the Grand Fleet. What the deuce have we to do with an ordered civilised life! Fighting’s our job, and that’s what we want, not beastly comforts. While we were being chivied about by Fritz’s submarines it was jolly to be told that we Commanded the Seas of the World. But to me it sounded a bit sarcastic at a time when we had not got the length of commanding even the entrances to our own harbours. That’s the cold truth. For six months we hadn’t a submarine proof harbour in England or Scotland or Ireland though we looked for one pretty diligently. We wandered about, east and west and north, looking for some hole where the submarines couldn’t get in without first knocking at the door, and where we could lie in peace for two days together. Wherever we went it was the same old programme. The Zepps would smell us out and Fritz would come nosing around with his submarines, and we had to up anchor and be off on our travels once more. At sea we were all right. We cruised always at speed, with a destroyer patrol out on either side, so that Fritz had no chance to get near enough to try a shot with the torpedo. A fast moving ship can’t be hit except broadside on and within a range of about 400 yards; and as we always moved twice as fast as a submerged U boat he never could get within sure range. He tried once or twice till the destroyers and light cruisers began to get him with the ram and the gun. Fritz must have had a good many thrilling minutes when he was fiddling with his rudder, his diving planes and his torpedo discharge gear and saw a destroyer foaming down upon him at over thirty knots. Fritz died a clean death in those days. I would fifty times sooner go under to the ram or the gun than be caught like a rat in some of the dainty traps we’ve been setting for a year past. We are top dog now, but I blush to think of those first few months. It was a most humiliating spectacle. Fancy fifty million pounds worth of the greatest fighting ships in the world scuttling about in fear of a dozen or two of footy little submarines any one of which we could have run up on the main derrick as easily as a picket boat. If I, a mere snotty in the old Olympus, felt sore in my bones what must the Owners and the Admirals have felt? Answer me that, Pongo?”
“It’s all right now, I suppose,” said the Pongo.
“Safe and dull,” replied he, “powerful dull. No chance of a battle, and no feeling that any day a mouldy in one’s ribs is more likely than not. If Fritz had had as much skill as he had pluck he would have blown up half the Grand Fleet. Why he didn’t I can’t imagine, except that it takes a hundred years to make a sailor. Our submarine officers, with such a target, would have downed a battleship a week easy.”
“Fritz got the three Cressys.”
“He simply couldn’t help,” sniffed the Sub-Lieutenant. “They asked for trouble; one after the other. Fritz struck a soft patch that morning which he is never likely to find again.”
“Had the harbours no booms?”
“Never a one. We had built the ships all right, but we had forgotten the harbours. There wasn’t one, I say, in the east or north or west which Fritz could not enter whenever he chose to take the risk. He could come in submerged, a hundred feet down, diving under the line of patrols, but luckily for us he couldn’t do much after he arrived except keep us busy. For as sure as ever he stuck up a periscope to take a sight we were on to him within five seconds with the small stuff, and then there was a chase which did one’s heart good. I’ve seen a dozen, all much alike, though one had a queer ending which I will tell you. It explains a lot, too. It shows exactly why Fritz fails when he has to depend upon individual nerve and judgment. He is deadly in a crowd, but pretty feeble when left to himself. We used to think that the Germans were a stolid race but they aren’t. They have nerves like red-hot wires. I have seen a crew come up out of a captured submarine, trembling and shivering and crying. I suppose that frightfulness gets over them like drink or drugs or assorted debauchery. Now for my story. One evening towards sunset in the first winter—which means six bells (about three o’clock in the afternoon) up here—a German submarine crept into this very harbour and the first we knew of it was a bit alarming. The commander was a good man, and if he had only kept his head, after working his way in submerged, he might have got one, if not two, big ships. But instead of creeping up close to the battleships, where they lay anchored near the shore, he stuck up a periscope a 1,000 yards away and blazed a torpedo into the brown of them. It was a forlorn, silly shot. They were end on to him, and the torpedo just ran between two of them and smashed up against the steep shore behind. The track of it on the sea was wide and white as a high road, and half a dozen destroyers were on to that submarine even before the shot had exploded against the rocks. Fritz got down safely—he was clever, but too darned nervous for under-water work—and then began a hunt which was exactly like one has seen in a barn when terriers are after rats. The destroyers and motor patrols were everywhere, and above them flew the seaplanes with observers who could peer down through a hundred feet of water. In a shallow harbour Fritz could have sunk to the bottom and lain there till after dark, but we have 200 fathoms here with a very steep shore and there was no bottom for him. A submarine can’t stand the water pressure of more than 200 feet at the outside. He didn’t dare to fill his tanks and sink, and could only keep down in diving trim so long as he kept moving with his electric motors and held himself submerged with his horizontal planes. Had the motors stopped, the submarine would have come up, for in diving trim it was slightly lighter than the water displaced. All we had to do was to keep on hunting till his electric batteries had run down, and then he would be obliged to come up. Do you twig, Pongo?”
“But he could have sunk to the bottom if he had chosen?”
“Oh, yes. But then he could never have risen again. To have filled his tanks would have meant almost instant death. At 200 fathoms his plates would have crumpled like paper.”