THE NTH BATTLE SQUADRON
No propaganda poster artist with an eye to lurid backgrounds could have
secured such an effect. Great buttresses of cloud, inky black with their
burden of unshed snow, were banked about the sunset. The snow that had
fallen during the past week rested like a shroud upon peak and headland,
promontory and cliff-top, encircling the sombre waters of Ultima Thule
with a dazzling white girdle. Against this background lay the Grand
Fleet, an agglomeration of tripod masts and superimposed structures, as
familiar a feature of the scene as the surf that broke endlessly about
the cliffs, or the unappeased calling of the gulls. A little to the
westward, however, where the cloud-masonry was split and reft by crimson
shafts of light, an outstretched wing of the vast battle fleet struck an
oddly unfamiliar note. Instead of the tripod masts and hooded
control-tops, slender towers of latticed steel rose in pairs from each
hull. Against the black clouds, every ensign in the fleet was clearly
discernible; but it was not the White Ensign that showed up so vividly
above the strangers. It was the “Stars and Stripes” painted with the
glory of a northern winter sunset.
Only a few weeks had elapsed since they arrived, rust-streaked and
travel-stained, as ships might well be that had battled through one
winter gale after another from Chesapeake Bay to Ultima Thule; and at
the sight of them the grey, war-weary battle fleet of Britain burst into
a roar of welcome such as had never before greeted a stranger within its
gates in either peace or war. For--and herein lies the magic of the
thing--these were not merely allies swinging up on to the flank of a
common battle-line, but kinsmen joining kinsmen as an integral part of
one fleet. The rattle of their cables through the hawse pipes was
drowned by the tumult of cheering, and forthwith the American Admiral
dispatched a telegram to Washington, whose laconic business-like brevity
alone did justice to what may prove the most significant message of
history: “Arrived as per schedule,” it said.
This linking of the two navies may need an explanation. It may be asked
(it will be asked if I know anything of the talkers in this war): Could
not the American Fleet co-operate in the war without merging its
identity in that of the British? The answer is this: Victory in modern
naval warfare demands more than mere co-operation between allied
squadrons. Navies fight otherwise than armies, whose generals can meet
and confer even during the crisis of a battle. Squadrons working in
unity afloat require one controlling intellect, one source of orders and
information; one pair of shoulders, and one only, to take the burden of
final responsibility.
Hence, to the sure shield of civilisation and the allied cause has been
added a formidable buckler. The Grand Fleet has had grafted into its
side a new rib and a stout one.
It must be realised, however, that a common speech between two nations
does not necessarily mean that their respective navies talk in the same
tongue. The system of signalling in the American Fleet, the significance
of flags, the arrangement of codes and ciphers, are peculiarly and
completely theirs. The meanings of the flags had nothing in common with
the British. Their system has been evolved through generations; is, so
to speak, their navy’s mother tongue. The signalmen of the Nth Battle
Squadron, blowing on their numbed fingers amid the snows of Ultima
Thule, had to forget in twenty-four hours what had been laboriously
taught them for years. They had to master a different-coloured alphabet
as it is sighted two miles away tangled up in halliards or half obscured
by funnel and (mayhap) battle smoke. Manœuvres on a scale they had
hitherto regarded as exceptional: Fleet exercises and squadron
competition, intership signalese (whereby the movement of a semaphore
arm through fifteen degrees of the arc meant things undreamed of in
their philosophy), tricks which northern visibility plays with daylight
signalling--these things were their daily and nightly portion.
In the words of one of them, “it was a tough proposition,” and they
tackled it like tigers. In a fortnight they were through with it. In a
month the British signal boatswains rubbed their telescope lenses and
said they were damned.
But the communication problem didn’t end there. Wireless plays an even
more important part than visual signalling in naval warfare. It is
important enough in peace, and the American Fleet had by no means
neglected the subject. But aerial conditions in the region of Manilla
differ considerably from those in the North Sea. Speaking
radiographically, the North Sea is the most crowded thoroughfare in the
world. All through the twenty-four hours ships and submarines and shore
wireless stations are talking, talking, talking. British warnings to
shipping on its lawful occasions, streams of lies from Berlin (branded
at the outset “German Press Message”), cipher cryptograms from three
Admiralties, destroyers bleating in a fog, appeals from a hunted
merchantman--all these interspersed with the gibbering Telefunken of the
German submarine.
Now the American wireless experts have been concerned principally with
covering long distances. The development of “spark” and power in a
comparatively undisturbed ether was the main preoccupation of their
operators. From this serene condition, ships and silent cabinets passed
into the windy parrot-house of the North Sea. Here, power, as they
understood the term, was negligible. The greatest distance required of
their Hertzian waves was a preposterous 400 miles or so. But not only
had they to thread a way unbroken through this aerial Babel, but, what
was even more difficult, the operator was required to detect and read
messages on one tune in a vast discord of diverse and unfamiliar notes.
It is even said that an Englishman’s touch on a sending key differs from
that of an American as radically as the spoken accent differs. Yet,
after a month of assiduous practice, the former are in a fair way to
presenting as few difficulties to communication as the latter.
So much for the technical aspect of the affair. But there is another to
consider: each nation having evolved, perfected, and adopted a system,
considers it, _ipso facto_, the best system in the world. To ask a
segment of that nation to dump the cherished thing overboard and adopt
the theory and practice of another nation “likely not so good” is
demanding much. That the order was obeyed instantly goes without saying.
But let it be noted that it was obeyed in a spirit of uncritical loyalty
and whole-souled enthusiasm by every man concerned from Admiral to
Signal Boy. To this the British Commander-in-Chief has testified.
But after all, these matters are merely externals. In adopting British
methods of communications and staff work for the smooth working of the
whole, the American ships have not lost a jot of their identity. Their
customs remain, with their traditions, American--indeed, they are but
thrown into stronger relief; and the British Fleet around them is
noting, drawing comparisons with intent interest, as two scions of the
same family might meet and study gesture or physiognomy, searching
eagerly for kindred traits. And daily the bonds are tightening.
* * * * *
The Admiral commanding the force of American battleships which
constitutes the Nth Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet stood and thawed
before the burnished radiator in his cabin.
“Now,” he said, “you’ve spent a day on board this ship. What struck you
most? what remains your most vivid impression?”
I had been waiting for the question, and wondering what the deuce I was
going to say. A man who spends ten crowded hours in unfamiliar
surroundings, trying to draw comparisons between them and his accustomed
environment, finds his impressions at the end of it like a jigsaw puzzle
that has been upset.
I looked at him as he stood taking me in, and in the quizzical, humorous
smile hovering about his eyes, in the set of his very imperturbable
mouth, in his wholly comfortable attitude before the radiator, I read my
answer. It was something that had been struggling for expression at the
back of my brain all day.
“Well, sir,” I said (and then wished I could have embarked on my
explanation as our sailors do with “It’s like this ’ere, sir”), “to all
intents and purposes you’ve dropped out of the skies plop into the
middle of the Grand Fleet. It’s a fleet that has been 3½ years at
war. It belongs to the oldest and most conservative--if not the
proudest--navy in the world. It’s got the Armada and the Nile and
Copenhagen and Trafalgar and Jutland to its credit, and, I fancy, it
takes a largish size in hats on the strength of it. It certainly has a
standard by which to judge strangers.”
“Sure,” said the Admiral softly, with his eyes on the far-off snowy
hills.
I took a long breath. I’m not used to making stump speeches to admirals.
“Well, from the moment your ships rounded that headland the British
Fleet has been sizing you up. Every boat that is manned and leaves your
ship, every officer or man who moves about your decks, is being watched
and criticised and studied by several thousand pairs of eyes. You live
in the limelight.”
“Sure,” said the Admiral, so softly that it was hardly more than a
gentle expiration between his teeth. He may have been wondering when I
was coming to the point.
“Well, sir,” I continued, “all that is apt to make a very good
man indeed self-conscious. I came over on the look-out for
self-consciousness, like a lady visitor looks out for wet paint on
board. I’ve been ten hours in your flagship, and I’ve talked to samples
of every rank and rating. I’ve only seen one person self-conscious
under friendly scrutiny.”
“Ah?” said the Admiral. His eyebrows lifted a shade.
“I caught sight of myself in a looking-glass,” I explained....
Not that this absence of self-consciousness is the outcome of
indifference. The American Squadron is keenly alive to the intent
observation it is undergoing. Its method of showing how aware was
perhaps the most graceful imaginable. For a few days it visited one of
the fleet’s more southerly bases, and the ships’ companies were given
leave to visit a great town. Six thousand five hundred men availed
themselves of this permission. They were greeted by the inhabitants with
an enthusiasm that might well have thrown a staider and older set of men
off their balance. The traditional British methods of extending
hospitality were thrust upon these youngsters fresh from a long and
arduous voyage. It might have resulted in a _tamasha_ that would have
made the memory of Mafeking night seem like a temperance revival by
comparison. Yet when those six thousand five hundred mortal men
returned to their ships and the bonds of discipline--nine only were
slightly under the influence of liquor. Nine all told.
Apropos of this visit, it may be added that it occurred at
Christmas-time. Now, the flagship of the American Squadron is, I
believe, known in the United States as the “Christmas-ship.” Americans
are all probably familiar with the origin of this name; but for the
benefit of my own countrymen, I must relate their pretty tradition.
Every Christmas Day this particular ship lies in New York harbour; on
Christmas Eve the crew goes ashore into the slums and Bowery, and every
man invites a child to a dinner on board the following day. The little
guests are carefully chosen. They are the type of child that would not
otherwise eat a Christmas dinner, would not probably eat a dinner at
all. The poorest of the poor, from gutter and dive and archway. And not
only do these pathetic little guests get dinner, but also a suit of
clothes, a toy, and a present of money.
For the first time the Christmas just passed found the
“Christmas-ship’s” moorings in New York harbour empty. She was lying at
the base I have referred to within reach of a great British city. But
the tradition remained the same. They had forty-eight hours in which to
arrange the whole thing, but they did it. They added one stipulation
that has not been laid down in New York. Preference was to be given in
the matter of selection to those waifs whose fathers had laid down their
lives in battle.
Britannia, noting this story, may remember and echo the words of the
greatest of all child lovers:
“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these....”
* * * * *
To the naval officer a ship’s personnel is necessarily an absorbing
study. The human element is one in which he works and lives, and
whatever the development of the machine, man and his ways afloat must
ever remain the primary factor in a navy’s efficiency. It goes without
saying that when the personnel belongs to the ship of another nation the
interest is largely charged with curiosity.
I attempted to convey something of this interest to the captain of an
American battleship, who was my host for the day. We were sitting in his
cabin; and the talk had ranged from the Yukon to Brooklyn Yard, and was
what a certain weekly paper would call “Mainly About People.”
I hinted at my interest in the men not without diffidence, because to
ask the captain of a man-of-war if you can go and look at his ship’s
company as a matter of curiosity is tantamount to demanding leave of a
stranger to go and smoke a pipe in his nursery while his children are
being bathed. A mess deck is an intimate place.
“Want to see the men?” he echoed, and thrust on his cap. “I’ll show ’em
to you.” He was a mighty man possessing volcanic energy and a voice
designed to carry orders through a gale. “Come right along.”
We plunged straightway into the seething life of the mess-deck and
living spaces of the great ship, the captain leading; and as we threaded
a path forward, men stepped aside, stood quietly to attention until we
passed, and resumed their tasks or leisure. Workshops, kitchens,
laundry, bakeries, dental surgery, sick bay, mess-rooms, round we went
in a swift, slightly bewildering rush, while the “owner” jerked
explanations over his shoulder. He displayed a familiarity with the
details of it all that was to say the least of it interesting to one of
another navy, whose captains claim to be not indifferent “ships’
husbands.”
Our whirlwind tour carried us into a speckless electric bakery piled
high with fragrant loaves. The captain had flung open and closed the
door of an oven secured by an ingenious but rather complicated latch. As
we emerged I commented on his evident familiarity with the internal
fitting of his ship’s bakery. “Built her,” he explained, and plunged,
doffing his cap, into the sick bay. There were over a thousand men on
board, and about half a dozen of them had found their way here.
“Well, T----,” said the captain, addressing by name an able seaman of a
stature well-nigh equalling his own, “how’s that hand getting on?”
The man stood up and met his captain’s eyes without embarrassment; just,
in fact, as one citizen regards another.
“Nicely, thank you, sir,” he replied.
“Hit your man in a softer place next time,” said the captain, and the
seaman laughed, nursing his bandaged hand.
“I will, surely,” he said. A chuckle ran round the sick bay. I had the
sensation of a stranger left trying to fathom a family joke.
“Want to talk to ’em?” asked the captain a minute later, as we stopped
to watch a veteran superintending the splicing of a five-inch wire by
two ordinary seamen. “Here, B----,” he called one of the youngsters,
again by name. The boy dropped his marling-spike and responded smartly.
“Where were you raised?” asked the captain.
“Kentucky, sir,” came the reply in the soft Southern drawl. The lad
stood before us without a trace of sheepishness or apparently aware of
any distinction in being thus singled out by his captain by name from
amongst a thousand other men. The captain nodded. “Trade?” “Farm-hand,
sir.”
It was my turn, and I asked him the question no sailor has ever been
able to answer. “Why did you come to sea?” He grinned, showing two rows
of perfect teeth. “Him,” he said, and jerked his head over his shoulder
at the other ordinary seaman wincing beneath the whispered exhortations
of his instructor. “Him an’ me ...” adding, “He’s my chum....” Strong
men have tried to write books on all that was contained in these two
sentences; most have died with the task unfinished.
We had concluded lunch--a meal that commenced with iced grape-fruit
(grape-fruit in Ultima Thule, harkee!)--when the captain beckoned me to
accompany him on another tour. It was of a more official nature this
time, and included a routine inspection of the storerooms and magazines,
and I joined the little group of officers who hurried in the wake of
that tall, striding figure with gold lace round the peak of his cap,
who knew his ship as I know the inside of my pocket. We were a band of
strenuous adventurers in search of the unfindable. Never did red-shirted
miners ply pick and shovel in the first days of the Klondyke rush as
that captain laboured through the long afternoon in search of Dust. Up
and down the shafts leading to speckless storerooms, hand over hand by
burnished steel rungs into the uttermost bowels of the ship we went; and
as we passed, the captain’s hand was for ever going out to run along a
transverse frame or search the interior of a cofferdam in the same
fruitless quest. Perspiration ran down our faces, but the break-neck
pace never slackened. “Light!” barked the captain, and the breathless
first lieutenant obediently flashed an electric torch into some
crannyhole.... The hunt checked while the captain craned and peered, and
then moved on. The first lieutenant’s sigh of relief was always audible
above the ring of our footsteps. Once as the procession sped along some
labyrinth among the shell-rooms the captain’s finger shot out accusingly
to indicate a junction-box on the white enamelled bulkhead (an
infinitesimal detail in the vast complexity of a battleship). It was an
affair of brass secured by small screws, but one of the screws was
missing.
“Spoke about that last week,” rapped out the captain, already a dozen
yards ahead. The first lieutenant looked at the junction-box as we
hurried on, and wiped his face.
“Gee!” he said. Then he eyed me with mingled desperation and pride.
“_Some_ captain,” he said.
I dropped out of the running about four o’clock because we were in the
neighbourhood of the gunroom (steerage, they called it) where I had been
invited to tea. I took with me an uneasy recollection of the first
lieutenant’s reproachful eyes as I sheered out of the procession, but it
was speedily obliterated by the interest and charm of the ensuing hour.
The American midshipman is the senior of his British “opposite number”
by perhaps a couple of years--but there the difference begins and ends.
The half-shy warmth of my welcome; the rather oppressive decorum of the
assembly as we took our places round the tea-table, were not otherwise
than it would have been in a British gunroom under similar conditions;
the quick thaw that synchronised with the rapid disappearance of
buttered toast and jam was Youth asserting itself over International
Courtesies.
The meal (they explained that they had picked up the habit of
“seven-bell tea” from us, and the lesson had not been ill-learned) was
nearing its close when a sudden shout of laughter obliterated the hum of
chaff and conversation. Every eye turned on a midshipman at the end of
the table, whose face was slowly turning carmine to the roots of his
curly hair. The President extended his closed fist, thumb pointing
downwards. One after another the remainder followed suit until every
member sat thus with the exception of the blushing victim. He looked the
length of the long table twice, gathered his cup and plate together, and
without further ado vanished beneath the table to the accompaniment of
unbridled mirth.
If nothing else had been needed to emphasise the fact, I realised in
that moment that I was in a gunroom of the Eternal Navy.
There was no question of “showing off” before a stranger--indeed they
had forgotten my existence; it was not even ragging. It was just that I
had accidentally witnessed the workings of some great Law, immutable and
inexplicable as Fate, in full swing about my uncomprehending head.
The meal progressed as if nothing had occurred to break its serenity. I
pleaded for light.
“It’s just our mail, you see,” explained the President. “Something has
happened to our mails. All the rest of the ships get theirs regularly
and ours hasn’t fetched up once since we’ve been here.”
“It’s the fault of the ship’s name,” chipped in another (the ship bore
the name of a great American State); “d’rectly the bags reach Liverpool,
someone looks at the labels an’ says, ‘Here, ain’t that somewhere in
America?’ an’ back they go. They’ve been goin’ backwards an’ forwards
for months.” “With Fritz takin’ pot-shots at them as they come and go,”
added a voice.
Muffled requests for reinforcements of buttered toast drifted up from
underneath the table. “Well?” I queried, still hopelessly in the dark.
“Oh, well, you see, anyone who mentions the word ‘mail’ at meals just
has to quit an’ go underneath the table; we’ve made it a rule.”
A British midshipman who draws a dirk in the gunroom stands a round of
port after dinner. To each navy its own etiquette--and penalties.
It was when we had lit our pipes (the exile had been suffered to return
to our midst) and sprawled in comfort, elbows on table, that the real
inner meaning of this great Alliance dawned fully upon me. Together we
refought Jutland as it has been refought in scores and scores of
gunrooms amid tobacco smoke and the shifting of spoons and matches
across a tablecloth; after that, it was baseball instead of rugger;
Annapolis instead of Dartmouth training college; but it all amounted to
a common ideal, voiced, not by politicians or diplomats, but by a
nation’s youth in common speech with ours.
I visited the compact double cabins--only they called them
staterooms--each with its intimate links with home suggested by the
backs of familiar books on a shelf and photographs pinned to the heads
of bunks. In fancy I made obeisance to the smiling American girlhood
that has good cause to be proud of its knights: and so back to the
gunroom, where one of the gay company had just sat down to the piano.
We perched round on the table and the backs of chairs, and sang. They
were the latest patriotic songs from the United States, tuneful,
emotional jingles whereby every nation going to the wars shamelessly
strives to voice its inner feelings. And when the player’s repertoire
was ended we started afresh; while the more energetic fox-trotted to and
fro across the narrow deck space.
Tune and words have since escaped me; but the refrain of the last song
lingers still by reason of its significance in these sombre days.
“We’re coming over, we’re coming over!” roared the young voices; and I
stole a glance at the lean faces, at the laughing, confident eyes all
about me--“AND WE WON’T COME BACK TILL IT’S OVER, OVER THERE!”
I came nearer to feeling sorry for the Hun than I had since the war
started.
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