THE SPIRIT OF THE FLEET
“Through all the monotony of its unending vigil, the Spirit of the
Fleet remains unchanged.”--_Daily Paper._
A flotilla of mine-sweeping sloops entered harbour with the last of the
light and secured to their buoys; they were weary sea-battered little
ships, and for a while they remained as silent as a stable-full of
costermongers’ donkeys at the close of a hard day’s work. The ebb tide
strengthened and they swung to their moorings in an invisible “rip” that
swept round a curve of the adjoining island. One by one the cables
tautened and the line straightened.
“That’s better,” said one. “Now we can talk comfortably.”
“Talk!” echoed her neighbour. “Who wants to talk? I want to rest. Did
you see that signal just now from the S.O.M.S.?” (Senior Officer of
Mine-sweepers). “We slip at dawn, my hearties, to go over the ground
again--the same old ground in the dawn--ugh!” Her tone was jerky and
irritable. “I hate the dawn.”
“Hullo, hullo!” observed a Subdivisional Leader. “Nerves a bit--eh?”
“Nerves be sugared! That affair this morning was nothing. No, I don’t
care about the dawn, that’s all. Diving seafowl break the surface just
under my bows and give one a turn in a bad light.”
The sloop that didn’t want to talk had hove a German mine up in her
sweep that morning, and brought it under her counter before anyone
noticed it was there. She lay rolling in the swell with the horns
missing impact by inches; to veer the wire would have probably caused
the detonation, and the lieutenant in command ordered his ship’s company
to abandon ship, crawled over the stern with a queer grim smile on his
face and removed the primer with a spanner. It was an entirely
unpleasant quarter of an hour, and he was at that moment giving a lurid
summary of his sensations at the time to an assembly of three brother
captains in the tiny wardroom of the next ship.
“When I was working on the east coast--” began another sloop.
“Ah!” interrupted the end ship of the line, “that was clearing the
trade routes, I suppose? Of course _we_ clear the fleet routes--the path
of the battle squadrons!” The east coast sweeper was a new arrival.
“Very useful, no doubt. On the other hand, we fed England. If the trade
routes had got foul, England would have starved. They’ve trained
trawlers to do the work now, but when I was on that job----”
“East coast?” chipped in another recent addition to the flotilla. “Is
there a war there too? I come from the Clyde, myself.”
The Tyne-built sloop snorted. “I’ve seen our East Coast Striking Force
go out past us while we were at work and be back again with wounded and
prisoners within half a dozen hours of leaving harbour. War, indeed!
It’s on our doorstep.”
“That’s because you haven’t got a fleet to keep it away from your
doorstep. Our fighting ships have to steam south for a day and a night
to find an enemy, while we sweep and wait and sweep again against their
home-coming.” The speaker glanced at her neighbour through a
rust-streaked hawse-pipe. “’Member Jutland? How they came back that
evening all battle-stained----?”
“And didn’t forget to give us a cheer as they passed!” The sloop
chuckled. “I had an artist fellow on board the other day. He came out
to paint the headlands and the fleet coming back from a sweep south. He
was _very_ sick.”
The moon swam into a windy sky from behind the blue-black hills
encircling them. The vast anchored fleet that had dropped into obscurity
at nightfall became distinct against the shimmer of the water. The wind
was full of the voices of ships talking among themselves, and fragrant
with salt heather smells from hundreds of spray-drenched islands. You
could detect the deep grumbling tones of the battleships in the air, as
the Romans might have heard the talk that floated into the night from
the gladiators’ barracks. It mingled with the gossip of the light
cruisers, whose conversation was largely technical, as they lay floating
at their moorings with steam raised: nervous, high-spirited, mettlesome
things, spoiling for a fight. Their talk concerned each other’s boiler
tubes, turning circles, thrust bearings, and gyro compasses: rather dull
to the layman, but interesting to the destroyers in the flotilla
anchorage, who were their cousins. One of the T.B.D. flotillas was
unmooring, and through a waterway between the islands their lights
winked and flickered as they swore and fumed at each other, manœuvring
in the narrow waters.
The flotilla leader slipped out into the broader expanse of the bay and
slowed down. “Now then,” she called, “who are we hanging on to the slack
for? Z.19--you again?”
“No,” said 19 in tones of tense exasperation, “not this time.... But if
73 tries to cut in under my stern again as she did just now, she’ll get
a kick in the ribs one of these days----” her syren hooted angrily.
“_Gang-way!_ That damned drifter!”
Destroyers are as short-tempered as athletes before a “Sports.” They are
always at short notice, and always trained to a hair, which, as every
schoolboy knows, is a very touchy state. “Don’t forget,” said the
leader, “until sunrise the challenge and reply is ‘St. George!’ and
‘England!’”
She rang down for half speed, and one by one the long, slim forms
slipped out after her and picked up station in the darkness with the
ease and sureness that belied all their abuse of each other.
The patient mine-sweepers rocked in the swell as the line went by. They
were modest, hard-working little ships who did their jobs without
talking about theories and the complications of their interiors.
Sufficient unto each day was the labour and calamity thereof, without
burdening the night with conjecture about the morrow.
“Hope you old plumbers did your job all right this afternoon!” shouted a
destroyer as they passed. “My word, we’re a trusting lot of innocents!”
The sloops nodded and dipped, rather pleased in their humble way at
being taken notice of. “You’re all right!” they chorused back.
The destroyers were slipping into their stride and their tempers were
sweetening like a long-distance runner as he gets his second wind.
“Who’s all right?” hailed the last boat in the line.
“We’re all all right!” roared the flotilla. They were nearing the light
cruiser lines, and the light cruisers, swung to a turn of the tide, all
looked the other way.
“Come on, all you fire-eaters!” called the flotilla leader, “ain’t you
coming on the trail with us to-night? We’re the Y.M.C.A. off for a
jaunt: quite respectable, my dear fellars, sure you.... You know all
about our respectability, don’t you--’smarvellous!”
“Won’t mother let you come?” sniggered a quivering, palpitating black
shadow as it slipped past, and then broke into ribald song:
“Hi! For the crest of a breaking sea!
Ho! For the deep sea roll!
Stanchions down and tubes trained free--
Ain’t you comin’ along wi’ we,
Or d’you know of a better ’ole?”
Irritating doggerel to anyone whose orders are to remain at their
moorings at three hours’ notice. The singer broke off and they all
started halloing:
“Hi! Gate, there! Gate! The sun’ll be scorching our eyes out before
we’re through!’
The roar of their fans died away down wind and the flotilla passed
through the distant gates and was swallowed by the misty moonlight of
the outer sea.
The boom-marking trawlers, the humblest of all units of His Majesty’s
Fleet, reeled and staggered and nodded to each other after they had
passed.
“Yon destroyers,” said one, “they’re gey witless bodies, A’m thinkin’.”
“Aye,” said a companion dourly, “aye, juist that.”
They settled down again to silence and the heart-breaking monotony of
their toil. A quarter of an hour elapsed before the silence of the boom
line was broken again; then the youngest of the trawlers spoke:
“Eh!” he said, and sighed to the bellying floats, “A’d like fine to be a
destroyer.”
Then silence again.
The light cruisers in the meanwhile were fuming among themselves: even
members of the same family do not relish gratuitous insult. “Funny
little fellows!” said one bitterly. “But there! What can you expect
from a destroyer: neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. I
took a couple out last month for a blow through; had to send the poor
little things back because it was too rough for them.”
“_Poor_ little things!” said another acidly. “Their plating _is_ thin,
isn’t it?... Well, as I was saying when all this vulgar interruption
happened, my Chief rigged a Weston’s purchase and lifted off the top of
my L.P. cylinder ...” and they plunged into their private affairs again.
The destroyers remaining in the T.B.D. anchorage felt that somehow the
last word remained with the light cruisers.
“Always talkin’ obstetrics ...” floated across the heave and uneasy
motion of the moonlit harbour from the flotilla trot.
“I know. Disgustin’....”
After which, conversation among the light cruisers perceptibly dwindled.
From out of the wind-swept spaces of the North Sea as the night wore on
came a murmur of voices: it grew nearer and deepened: “Ho, there! Gate,
gate!”
Position lights winked amongst the assembled fleet as a squadron of
battle cruisers loomed up, black as doom, in the entrance of the bay.
One by one in line ahead they passed to their anchorage and picked up
their berths with a thunderous roar of cables.
“Clear hawse!” cried the battle squadrons from their orderly lines. This
is the greeting from ships at anchor to those that enter harbour.
“Clear hawse to you,” said the new-comers. They were on a visit from a
more southerly base and there was a good deal of ceremonious exchange of
compliments between them and the battleships. “Hope you’ll find the
billets to your liking,” said the latter, “plenty of swinging room and
so on. Oilers will be alongside at daybreak, but in the meanwhile if
there is anything you’d like ...?”
The visitors said they wanted nothing, and were most comfortable. As if
to show how at home they were, they all swung in different directions
and sprawled their 25,000-ton bulks abroad on the dark face of the
waters.
“Waal, boys!” drawled a voice from the American battle squadron. “What’s
the noos from down your way?’
“Hullo, old flick!” exclaimed the battle cruiser flagship. “Hope you’re
keeping gay up here?”
The American chuckled and the laugh ran round the lattice-masted ships.
“We surely are,” was the reply. “Say, you missed a joyous stunt last
week----” he lowered his voice, for the fleet flagship has long ears.
“Fleet exercises, an’ we came back in the durndest fog ever. Tumbled
slap on top of a U-boat cruiser; guess he got sucked to the surface in
the wash of our _pro_-pellors; we were churning up most of the cod banks
of the North Sea. Sir, he was the sickest-looking U-boat that ever jined
the flotilla of the dead men when we’d finished with him.”
The battle cruisers expressed courteous credulity and congratulation.
“Couldn’t see the British flagship,” said the ship who had done most of
the business of dispatching the enemy. “But when it was all over, my
cap’n--say, d’you know my cap’n? Some seaman!--waal, he jest flicked a
wireless signal along to the British admiral: ‘Sunk a German U-boat
cruiser, latitood so an’ so, longitood something else--WHERE AM I?’”
Again the laughter rippled round the American squadron. It made you
think of some family chuckling in obscure enjoyment of one of its own
jokes.
The battle cruisers considered it, chewed the cud of it in silence, and
gave it up. “You don’t tumble? Waal, Commander-in-chief didn’t tumble
either. Took a long time to think it over an’ then answered: ‘Your
signal received. Last sentence not understood. Congratulate you.’”
The battle cruiser flagship felt that the time had come to say
something. “Well, that was very nice. What--what would an American
commander-in-chief have said?”
“An Ammurican? An Ammurican admiral, sir, would have answered: ‘Where
are you? TOP OF THE CLASS, MY SON!’ You Britishers are very
im-purturbable....”
“Meaning dull,” said a battleship in the nearest line. “I’ll not deny we
are. You’ll be dull in about three years’ time if we’re still here. But
I must say you’ve brightened things up for us no end.”
“That so? Waal ... you put us wise first. Guess we were children at some
of the monkey-tricks you call tactics.”
The battleships murmured polite indistinctnesses, and one or two
remembered things that happened in the later days of 1914 when war was
still in process of becoming a reality to their serried squadrons.
“Wait a bit,” said the American flagship. “We ain’t blooded yet. _You_
ain’t properly blooded yet. No, boys, Jutland was a game of tag to what
we’ll face together one of these days.”
“How long, how long?” rumbled down the lines of the battle fleet.
“_Quien sabe?_ That’s what they say down Manilla. You don’t know Manilla
though, I guess. But when it comes--it’ll be----”
“Our turn!” interrupted a clear, quiet voice in under the lee of one of
the islands. It proceeded apparently from a row of low-lying shadows on
the surface of the water. “We’ve done some waiting too.” An ocean-going
submarine was talking. “Quiet and deep ... down among the flatfish and
the mine moorings where you never go--er--at least we hope you’ll never
go. Off the Terschellings ... Heligoland Bight ... the mouth of the Ems.
Coming up to breathe at night with a conning-tower awash among the
wave-tops ... letting the little ships go by in the hope of bagging a
big one.... We can teach you how to wait, my masters, we of the Watch
Below.”
It was a long sentence for a submarine, accustomed as they are to
holding their breath rather than to waste it in mere conversation. It is
their pent-up breath that spits the deadly torpedo at its quarry a
couple of miles away.
The battleships were silent. They didn’t altogether like the reference
to flatfish and mine moorings and depths their keels left undisturbed in
their majestic passage.
A seaplane-carrier chuckled out of the darkness, where she lay like a
hen with her brood under her wing. “I don’t know whether you submarines
are trying to make us surface craft feel uncomfortable, but I could tell
you a story or two about what goes on in the air that would make you
feel giddy--very giddy indeed.”
“I don’t want to know what goes on in the air, thanks,” said an armed
merchant cruiser. She had called in for oil that afternoon, and was
distantly related to the seaplane-carrier. “A German submarine missed me
with two torpedoes last week; I came quite near enough to going up into
the air then for _my_ taste, thanks very much.”
“You’re all deplorably self-centred,” observed the theatre ship,
speaking for the first time. She was a condemned cargo boat that had
been gutted, and her interior transformed into a lecture room and
theatre. She was a sort of convivial missionary who ministered to the
fleet irrespective of class or creed or function. “Not to say _cliquey_.
Each one of you seems to think that the fate of the Empire depends on
you individually. It’s not a bad spirit, I admit, but it can be carried
too far. Individually you count for very little without each other’s
help. Where would the destroyers be without the mine-sweepers--where
would you all be without the mine-sweepers? Where would the battleships
and battle cruisers be without the destroyers and light cruisers to
screen and scout? A seaplane-carrier without support would be a sad
sight ten minutes after the Germans heard she was in the neighbourhood.
Submarines--er--submarines ...”
“Well?” asked the submarines quietly. The theatre ship was delivering
her oration on the strength of a lecture some staff officer had recently
given on board her to a number of yawning brother officers. It had been
called “The Co-ordination of Fleet Units,” or some such title, but
unhappily the theatre ship couldn’t remember how it went on when you got
to the part about submarines.
The rest of the fleet said nothing, but contented themselves with
winking to each other mischievously. They loved the theatre ship and
owed her a debt immeasurable, but there were times when she adopted the
“Mission to Seamen” pose and became rather tedious.
“Well?” repeated the submarines moored in rows alongside their parent
ship, and nudged each other in the ribs. As all the fleet knew,
submarines are the Ishmaels of the Navy, who at sea vanish instantly on
the sight of either enemy or friend.
“Who might _we_ be dependent on to help us do our jobs?”
“Er--as I was saying,” continued the theatre ship rather lamely, “where
should we _all_ be without the submarines ...?”
“We!” echoed the submarines’ parent ship, jealous of her charges. “I
like that, you old tub-thumper! Where are your bally innards?” Actually
she said neither “bally” nor “innards.”
Pandemonium ensued, squadrons and flotillas all talking at once: jest
and repartee, personalities and retorts flickering across the harbour
like summer lightning. Above it all, quelling the noisy tumult on the
instant, boomed the voice of the fleet flagship: “_Still!_”
A night bird called in some far-off bay, and the water lapped against
the smooth grey flanks of the ships, but there were no other sounds.
Then--
“_Battle and battle cruiser squadrons and light cruisers raise steam for
full speed with all dispatch. Report by squadrons when ready. Nth Battle
Squadron, destroyers, and submarines proceed instantly and rendezvous in
execution of previous orders._” The echoes broke back from the quiet
hills and died away.
“Gee!” muttered an irrepressible American ship. “Hold tight, Emma! we’re
off!”
“Gate!” yelped the destroyers, “stand by the gates!” and presently they
sped forth to meet the dawn and their destiny. The grinding sound of
cables crawling through the hawsepipes as the squadrons shortened in
filled the harbour. The dark water eddied and swirled as each ship tried
her engines; then one by one from the flagships of squadrons came the
deep-toned “Ready, aye, ready!”
Each time, like the chanted responses to a litany, the hospital ships
echoed “God go with you!” So the last hour of night passed.
Outside, as the dawn was paling in the sky, the night patrols
encountered the van of the battle fleet forming up across the waste of
grey waters beneath its pall of smoke.
“St. George!” rang the challenge. In one great breath came the fleet’s
reply:
“England!”
[Illustration]