THE HEROIC RECORD
of the
BRITISH NAVY
A Short History of
the Naval War
1914-1918
BY
ARCHIBALD HURD
AND
H. H. BASHFORD
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
To the generous help and criticisms of many participants in the events
hereafter recorded, and particularly to Admirals Viscount Jellicoe of
Scapa Flow and W. S. Sims of the United States Navy; to Vice-Admirals
Sir F. Doveton Sturdee and Sir Reginald H. Bacon; and to
Lieutenaut-Commander A. D. Turnbull of the United States Navy, the
authors desire to express their most grateful acknowledgment.
CONTENTS
Foreword
CHAPTER
I. August 4, 1914
II. The Battle of the Bight
III. Coronel
IV. The Battle of the Falkland Islands
V. Back to the North Sea
VI. The Seamen at Gallipoli
VII. Sub-mariners of England
VIII. The Battle of Jutland
IX. The Dover Patrol
X. The Sealing of Zeebrugge and Ostend
XI. The Coming of the Americans
XII. The Harvest of Sea Power
Index
{ix}
FOREWORD
In the years immediately preceding the Great War, already so hard to
reconstruct, it was not uncommonly suggested that the British seafaring
instinct had begun to decline. In our professional navy most thinkers
had confidence, as in a splendid machine ably manned; but, as regarded
the population as a whole, it was feared that modern industrialism was
sapping the old sea-love. That this has been disproved we hope to make
clear in the following pages--a first attempt, as we believe, to give,
in narrative form, a reasonably complete and consecutive history of the
naval war. We have indeed gone further, for we have tried to show not
only that the spirit of admiralty has survived undiminished, but that
we have witnessed such a re-awakening of it, both in Great Britain and
America, as has had no parallel since the days of Elizabeth. We have
also tried to make clear that, in a thousand embodiments, in men and
boys fallen or still living, it has shone with a spiritual even more
than any material significance; and that it has again declared itself
to be the peculiar expression in world-affairs of the English-speaking
races.
Nor was the little apparent interest shown, just before the war, in the
navy and the navy's exercises very remarkable. Our attitude, as a
people, toward {x} it had always been a curious union of apathy and
adventure. We had been sea-worshippers so long that our reverence had
often been dulled by much familiarity, and to such an extent, at times,
that, only by the supremest efforts, had we, as a nation, escaped
catastrophe. But if, on the one hand, we had lost the neophyte's fire,
we had perhaps gained a little in tolerance. The seas had not found in
us jealous masters. Our harbours and ships had been at the world's
disposal. No empire in history had been so leisurely or less
designedly built up, as none was to prove, perhaps, to have been so
apparently loosely but yet so organically knit--probably because the
idea of empire had always meant less to us than the growing idea of
admiralty. Nor is that so obscure as it may at first seem, since, in
spite of so much outward indifference, the call of the sea, as closer
examination will show, was still among the most insistent to which we
responded. There was scarcely a cottage, for instance, even in the
remotest highlands, in which the picture of a ship did not hang upon
the walls, or that had failed to send a son or a brother or a cousin to
serve either in the navy or the mercantile marine. Even in the greyest
and most smoke-laden of our central industrial cities, wherever there
was a pond, the children sailed their little boats upon it; and, once a
year, as to some lustral rite, the town-bred inhabitant took his family
to the coast.
That these were indications of any racial significance the non-seagoing
Briton had seldom, perhaps, realized. That, because of them, his
language had become a familiar tongue in the uttermost parts of the
{xi} earth; that because of them every would-be world-tyrant, since
Philip of Spain, had been frustrated; that because of them the freedom
of nations, no less than that of individuals, had slowly become
humanity's gospel--this had been as little present to him as to the
inhabitant of Turnham Green that he was living in the greatest harbour
of the world; and yet that it was so was but a matter of fact, and
indeed the natural outcome of our origin. Since Britain had become an
island every wave of invaders had necessarily come to it in ships and
with experience of the sea. However various may have been their other
contributions to the ultimate nation into which they were to be merged,
this had been common to them, they had all been seamen, of whatever
temperament or complexion; and, while of the earliest inhabitants of
what are now the British Islands, no boat-lore can definitely
postulated, the discovery of the famous barge in the Carse of Stirling
shows that, 3,000 years before Christ, there must have been some
knowledge of navigation; while, of the first Celtic immigrants enough
must be assumed, at any rate, to have enabled them successfully to
cross the Channel.
Of these the Gaelic Celts, landing from Spain upon the coasts of Devon
and Cornwall and in Ireland, seem to have been the pioneers, followed
by a stronger invasion of Cymric Celts, who landed in Kent and Essex,
and afterward drove the Gaels before them into the northern and western
fastnesses. Of later Aryans, the first members of the great Teutonic
family to land on these shores were, almost certainly, the Belgae, who
settled on the south and east coasts; {xii} while the Scillies and
Cornwall appear to have been regularly visited by Phoenician traders
and Greek merchants from Marseilles--a sea-borne commerce that
continued for many years after the first Roman expedition.
This took place under Julius Cæsar, first in B.C. 55, and its
ostensible purpose seems to prove the existence of some kind of
pre-Roman British fleet--Cæsar's declared object being to punish the
Britons for having sent assistance in ships and men to the Veneti, a
kindred Celtic tribe, with which he was at war on the mainland. He
appears to have encountered no opposition from it, however, for when he
set sail from the coast of France, somewhere between the present ports
of Calais and Boulogne, his fleet of war-galleys and transports crossed
unchallenged, as far as the sea was concerned.
Achieving little more on his first visit than a demonstration of the
power of Rome, on his return, a few months later, with 30,000 men,
including cavalry, he penetrated deeply inland, although it was not
until nearly a century later that Britain became definitely a Roman
province; and it was not until the reign of Vespasian at Rome and his
deputy Julius Agricola in Britain that Roman vessels for the first time
circumnavigated Great Britain and Scotland. The father-in-law of
Tacitus, and himself an extremely able and far-sighted administrator,
it was by Agricola that the earliest definite foundations of what was
to become the British nation may be said to have been laid. Securing
the confidence of the islanders, he not only encouraged amongst them
the absorption of Roman {xiii} culture, but protected them against any
excess of official exploitation; and, although he was presently
recalled by the Emperor Domitian, the principles of administration that
he had laid down were generally adopted and developed by his successors
in office--forming, in many respects, those of that greater empire
whose foundations were already being laid.
It would be hard to exaggerate, indeed, the debt of the nations of
British origin to the three and a half centuries of Roman rule, during
which period the Christian religion was first preached in these
islands. And, though it failed, if that had been its design, to create
a strong and independent and self-governing colony--so that when the
Roman power was finally withdrawn, owing to impending disasters at the
core of the Empire, the Islanders became a prey, if not an easy one, to
the next Saxon invaders--its legend of equity as between man and man,
its perception and methods of development of natural resources, and its
patient thoroughness of execution appealed to the minds and survived in
the practice of every succeeding race of immigrants.
That together with these qualities and those to be infused with the
next current of invasion there was a real love of the sea among this
early population has sometimes been doubted; and Ruskin in one of his
essays seems definitely to deny this, adducing Chaucer as an argument.
In this great poet of a later period, the first representative voice of
emerging England, he finds no expression of it and indeed a positive
aversion from all that the sea and sea-travel stood for. {xiv} But
whether or not that be the case, and though there were undoubtedly
periods, notably just before the rise of Alfred, wherein the nation as
a whole, if it may so be spoken of, had largely forgotten the
importance of sea-power, each of the three great tribes, who had then
overrun the land, had depended for their success upon their maritime
skill.
Saxons and Jutes and Angles, they had all been coast-dwellers upon the
Weser, the Elbe, and the Ems, the sea-banks between them, and the
tongue of land dividing the Baltic from the North Sea; and, while a
certain number of them had already become settlers in Britain,
attracted by its prosperity under Roman rule, the majority had been
pirates, with an established reputation as amongst the bravest and
fiercest of ocean-adventurers. Bold as they were, however, and
disorganized as the Romanized Britons had become, upon the withdrawal
of the tutelage of their governors, it was nearly two centuries before
Great Britain could be said to have become definitely Anglo-Saxon, and
yet another two before the newcomers themselves had established any
sort of unity; and already, by that time, fresh bodies of invaders had
begun to make their presence felt.
These were the Wikings or Vikings, men of the Scandinavian fiords,
racially allied with the original Saxon conquerors, but whose
subsequent conversion, both to Christianity and what seemed to them the
tamer life of agriculture, they affected to regard with indignation,
not unmixed with contempt. Carrying their arms into every known sea,
and believed to have been the first discoverers of America, these
Vikings {xv} saw in Great Britain, with its increasing fertility, an
ideal and convenient theatre of war.
As early as the later years of the eighth century, they were making
sporadic raids upon the Northumbrian coast, and, in 832, they sailed up
the Thames, ravaged the Isle of Sheppey, and escaped unscathed. A year
later, they attacked the coast of Dorset, and, in 834, they joined the
Cornish Celts, when they were defeated, however, by Egbert, King of
Wessex--the first, in any real sense, King of England.
But this was little more than a local defeat, and almost every
succeeding year saw further raids, until, in 855, a squadron actually
entrenched in Sheppey and proceeded to spend the whiter there--the
first indication in the minds of the Northmen of serious ideas of
invasion. From 866 to 870, they made attacks in such force and with
such ferocity that, by the beginning of 871, the whole of England,
north of the Thames, lay at their mercy; while, several years before
this, permanent settlements of Danes had taken place in Ireland, the
Shetland Islands, the Hebrides, and the Orkneys.
This was the situation when, at the age of twenty-two, Alfred,
afterward to be called the Great, ascended to the throne. Nor could he
well have become king at a less propitious moment. For, with the whole
of the north and east now firmly in their grasp, the Danes were already
pressing upon Wessex. A battle fought almost immediately after his
accession to the throne was rather in the nature of a draw than a
victory; and, although the enemy withdrew for a time, a few years later
found Alfred at bay in the {xvi} marshes of West Somerset, with the
Danes overrunning and apparently in secure possession of some of the
most fertile parts of his kingdom.
Fortunately for his people, however, Alfred, for all his refinement,
his love of culture, and cosmopolitan boyhood, had inherited in full
measure the stubborn Saxon refusal to accept either slavery or defeat;
and, a few months later, rallying to his standard an army of Hampshire,
Wiltshire, and Somersetshire men, he inflicted upon the Danes, at the
battle of Ethandun, the severest defeat that they had yet sustained.
By the treaty of Wedmore in 878, he secured the integrity of the south
and west, recognizing that, in the north and east, the Danish element
was not only too strong to be expelled, but was already becoming
welded, not wholly to its disadvantage, with the national life. He
agreed, therefore, for his own part, to recognize the Danish influence
upon the other side of Watling Street, at the same time persuading its
representative leaders to forsake their paganism and embrace
Christianity.
Against further aggression, however, from abroad, he determined at all
costs to protect the Island; and he was the earliest of his line to
realize that his country's first defense was the sea that washed its
shores. Already, in 875, he had been the victor in Swanage Bay over a
small but strong fleet of pirates; and, after the peace of Wedmore, he
set himself to the serious construction and effective distribution of a
fleet of war. With no lack of raw material, with good craftsmen, and
with a maritime population needing nothing but initiative, he built a
navy that, in respect of {xvii} _personnel_ no less than in technical
equipment, soon outclassed that of the Danes. Distributed round the
coast, he had, according to varying accounts, from 120 to 300 warships;
and, behind this bulwark, for the next fifteen years, England achieved
an almost miraculous degree of progress. In 896, after a considerable
struggle, another attempted invasion was crushed, and Alfred's fleet,
grown in strength and experience, extinguished the recurrence of piracy
that had accompanied it. Merciful in character and tolerant in
statesmanship, toward these pirates he showed no clemency, and, when he
died in 901, he left a country prosperous and at peace and with its
sea-boards inviolate.
To what extent his son and grandson, Edward the Elder and Athelstan,
appreciated the full significance of sea-power we do not know; but it
is interesting that Athelstan, during whose brilliant reign the Danish
portions of England were largely reabsorbed, conferred the dignity of
thane-ship upon any merchant who had made three voyages of length in
his own trading vessel--thereby fostering, and even perhaps founding,
the dynasty of those merchant-adventurers, upon whom in years to come,
and on seas then unknown, Britain was to climb to a destiny beyond his
imaginings. Nor can the work of Alfred and Athelstan, in these
respects, be discounted because of the eclipse that followed in the
reign of Ethelred, and that led to the passing of England,
predominantly Saxon, under Danish sovereignty for a quarter of a
century, and then, after a further period of twenty-four years, under
the permanent rule of the Normans.
{xviii}
Tenacious of its rights, impossible to dragoon, there has always been a
strain of inertia in the Saxon character--the reflex of that tolerance,
perhaps, which has in so many respects been the secret of its influence
throughout the world; and it was probably inevitable that there should
have been phases in our national growth, and especially in its
adolescence, when this should have seemed to be uppermost. To the
minority Celt, with his quicker wits, this has often and justly been a
subject of annoyance. In it the Normans, conscious in their persons of
the latest current of oversea adventure, avid of culture, and
contemptuous of ignorance, saw, and at once seized, their opportunity.
For men of their enterprise, intellectual subtlety, and disciplined
military energy, the prosperous island, with its clannish dissensions
and lack of organization, seemed an obvious prey. And if, in the
immediate moment, they were largely successful owing to the flank
attack upon Harold by his brother Tostig, it was to a lack of vision,
curiously Anglo-Saxon, that they were hardly less indebted for their
victory.
Gathering for the defense of the realm, both by land and sea, the
largest forces that had ever been collected in England, had William and
his armies tried to land a month or two earlier they might well have
done so in vain. But with August and September came the demands of the
harvest, the autumn ploughing, and the neglected farms. As so often
before and since in English history, the parochial and individual
obscured the national. William had not come. Perhaps he would never
come. The discontented soldiery {xix} could not be kept together. The
ships of the Fleet, or many of them, had to return for re-fitting, and,
when on September 28th, William arrived at Pevensey, three days after
Harold had defeated his brother at Stamford Bridge, it was to land
unopposed both on shore and at sea. Moreover, there was yet another
factor, and one also that was to recur again and again in English
history--a failure, fresh from military victory, to appreciate the
value of sea-power--that contributed not a little to Harold's defeat.
By October 14th, the date of the Battle of Hastings, the English Fleet
had again been mobilized, and held the Channel. Between their position
in Sussex and their base in France, the Normans' connections had been
cut; and, just as in later years it was Nelson's "storm-tossed ships
upon which the Grand Army never looked" that stood between Napoleon and
the dominion of the world, so might Harold's, had he trusted them more
fully, have stood between William of Normandy and the conquest of
England.
With William's forces dependent for their supplies upon the rapidly
dwindling stores of the surrounding country; with that silent pressure
behind him of England's naval power--there would have been time and
plenty, had Harold been content to wait, for the English armies to have
consolidated themselves in overwhelming strength. But it was not to
be. Dazzled by his recent success, and thinking in terms of armies
rather than navies, he forced the issue and was defeated, and England
passed under Norman power; and yet so incompletely that there are few
Englishmen of to-day who, on reading the story of the Battle {xx} of
Hastings, do not instinctively associate themselves with the defeated
Harold rather than with the conquering William.
Nor is that as remarkable as it might superficially appear, since,
within a very few decades of the Battle of Hastings, the same
absorptive process that had been so characteristic a reaction of these
islands to their previous conquerors was again in full swing. Even the
Romans, although in Gaul and Spain they had succeeded in replacing the
original dialects with their own stately language, had never succeeded
in Latinizing Britain to any appreciable extent; and, while it is true
that many Roman contributions remain as permanent features of our laws
and customs, their four hundred years' sojourn left a scarcely
perceptible impress upon the tongue of the supposedly defeated. Just
as in Roman times, too, there was a considerable and real mingling,
both in municipal life and in actual marriage, between the original
inhabitants and the Roman colonists, so, in Saxon times, we find a
similar process always at work in varying degrees, and indeed
officially encouraged by several of the most far-sighted of the
Anglo-Saxon kings and administrators. A similar absorptive phenomenon
became observable in the later relations of Saxon and Dane; and, with
the loss of Normandy, in the reign of King John, and the common cause
then made between the French-derived barons and the English hitherto so
despised by them, the world was to hear in Magna Charta the first
authentic word of the England that we know to-day.
Nor was this process, unique though it was, as far {xxi} as recorded
history can inform us, altogether inexplicable when the position of
Great Britain and its succeeding invaders is considered. To each group
of these, in the then world, it was an _Ultima Thule_. Beyond it, as
far as they knew, there was no other--it was the verge of all things.
To each its occupation had been an adventure, presumably undertaken by
the most daring of the represented race. Each was at bay there to
those that followed and of a spirit and fibre that could not easily be
obliterated; and, in each, despite the ferocity of the times, was the
respect of brave men for each other. Centuries later, on the other
side of the Atlantic, similar conditions were to come into being; and
it may well be that, in the larger island of America, we are witnessing
a similar process on an extended scale.
But America was then in the womb of time, though it is a curious and
significant fact that its discovery largely coincided with that great
renaissance of the sea-instinct of England, embodied in the persons of
the Elizabethan sailors. Up to then, the English national purview had
been almost wholly insular and focussed on the Continent. The
Anglo-Continental dreams of the Norman and Plantagenet kings had
scarcely died; and they had died hard. The loss of Calais, perhaps the
culminating factor in bringing about the new vision so soon to dawn,
had seemed, at the time, nothing but a disgrace and a disaster, and far
from the beginning of a greater epoch.
Yet it was no less than this, and, thence onward, we see the England,
that had been on the world's edge, looking toward the New World, and
perceiving, {xxii} by right of its position and history, a wider
destiny opening overseas. Fighting more stubbornly than ever against
every attempt to make it an appanage of Europe, the eyes of England
began to turn more and more constantly to those just-discovered realms
with their incalculable future. In the imagination of the Celt, the
organizing power of the Roman, the tenacity of the Saxon, the daring of
the Norman, and in the sea-lore of them all, it seemed that Fate had
been slowly forging a new instrument for the new task. It was only the
realization of it that was to seek in the composite race that had thus
been built up; and it is not too much to say, perhaps, that the loss of
Calais was the right-about-turn that brought this about. Not Europe
but the West was the new watchword. But the corollary to that was a
new conception of the sea. It was no longer the means of defense,
insulating Britain from her foes. It was the highway of her full and
peculiar national expression. As never before and not often perhaps
since, the sense of what admiralty meant flooded through the nation;
and though, as in all the enterprises of human society, the motives in
this one were no doubt mixed--though the desire for gold and the lust
of fighting for fighting's sake were dominant in the minds of many of
those sailors--it is equally clear that, for the best and finest of
them, the idea of admiralty had a definite spiritual meaning.
As we gather from their letters and records, they had begun to realize
in themselves the upholders and missionaries of a nobler life. They
were in true succession to the best of those Norman knights, whose
{xxiii} spiritual contribution to England they had inherited; and, in
admiralty, as they dreamed of it, we may trace the reincarnation, with
a fuller and wider outlook, of that older chivalry.
These then were their objects, and the means was the navy, whose first
foundations, as we now know it, had already been laid in the reign of
Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII. Up to that time, though the Government
had possessed the right, in times of war, to employ merchant shipping,
there had been no definite navy, permanently established, in the modern
sense of the word. In return for certain privileges, merchant
ship-owners--and especially, in earlier days, those of the Cinque
Ports--were under contract, on demand of the king, to supply a
specified number of vessels, manned and equipped for war. It was with
fleets so assembled that, in 1212, the English had raided Fécamp and
prevented a French invasion; that, two years later, in a similar action
under William Longsword, they had again destroyed the French Fleet; and
that, in 1334, one of the greatest British naval victories had been won
at Sluys over vastly superior numbers. And, though the Cinque Ports
had, by this time, already dwindled from their earlier importance,
similar arrangements were in force, when Henry VIII came to the throne,
with the merchant shippers of Bristol, Plymouth, Newcastle, and many
other quickly growing ports.
Under Henry VIII, however, we find coming into being the important
Government dockyards of Portsmouth, Deptford, and Woolwich, and every
provision made for the regular supply of the timber requisite {xxiv}
for their needs. The same reign witnessed the establishment of the
Navy Office, out of which our present Admiralty has grown, and the
granting of a charter to Trinity House--that corporation of "godly
disposed men who, for the actual suppression of evil disposed persons
bringing ships to destruction by the shewing forth of false beacons, do
bind themselves together in the love of our Lord Christ, in the name of
the Master and Fellows of the Trinity Guild, to succour from the
dangers of the sea all who are beset upon the coasts of England, to
feed them when a-hungered, to bind up their wounds, and to build and
light proper beacons for the guidance of mariners." And, although at
the time of the Armada, as indeed ever since in moments of maritime
urgency, a large bulk of the British Fleet consisted of transformed
merchantmen belonging to private owners, the Elizabethan admirals found
at their disposal the rudiments, at any rate, of a specialized navy.
How gloriously, and to what purpose, against what was then the greatest
Power in the world, they used their inferior instrument, with its
improvised auxiliaries, is the birth-story of British admiralty.
Pitted not only for life, but, as it was to turn out, for the common
freedom of the seas, they showed the world a spectacle of such a
victory against odds as it had scarcely beheld since the Homeric ages.
On the one hand, it saw an empire, one of the greatest ever known,
under the ablest of statesmen and soldiers--an empire including Spain
and Portugal, most of the Netherlands, and nearly the whole of Italy;
Tunis, Oran, Cape Verde, and the Canary Islands in Africa; {xxv}
Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Cuba in America; the mastery of the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic; and a yearly revenue ten times that of
England--and on the other a little island, of which Wales and Scotland
were still largely independent, containing a population less by two
million than that of London and its suburbs to-day, and possessing
beyond its own coast not a yard of territory overseas.
Such were the odds, and the issue was but one more instance of the
inevitable decisiveness of the human factor--a factor that to-day,
perhaps, such has been the extravagant growth in the weight and
precision of modern weapons, has tended to become once more a little
obscured. That history has revealed it again, just as it revealed it
for us in the case of the Elizabethans, we hope to show; and, if
fortune fought for them, it was not until they had proved themselves
superior to it in skill, courage, and equanimity.
"Touching my poor opinion," wrote Sir Francis Drake to Queen Elizabeth
on April 15, 1588, _how strong your Majesty's Fleet should be to
encounter this great force of the enemy, God increase your most
excellent Majesty's forces both by sea and land daily; for this I
surely think there was never any force so strong as there is now ready
or making ready against your Majesty and true religion, but that the
Lord of all strength is stronger and will defend the truth of His word,
for His own name's sake, unto the which be God all glory given. Thus
all humble duty, I continually will pray to the Almighty to bless and
give you victory over all His, and your enemies._
"We met with this fleet," wrote Hawkins to Sir {xxvi} Francis
Walsyngham on July 31st in the same year, "somewhat to the westward of
Plymouth upon Sunday in the morning, being the 21st of July, where we
had some small fight with them in the afternoon. By the coming aboard
one of the other of the Spaniards, a great ship, a Biscayan, spent her
foremast and bowsprit; which was left by the fleet in the sea, and so
taken up by Sir Francis Drake the next morning. The same Sunday there
was, by a fire chancing by a barrel of powder, a great Biscayan spoiled
and abandoned, which my Lord took up and sent away. The Tuesday
following, athwart of Portland, we had a sharp and long fight with
them, wherein we spent a great part of our powder and shot, so as it
was not thought good to deal with them any more till that was relieved.
The Thursday following, by the occasion of the scattering of one of the
great ships from the fleet, which we hoped to have cut off, there grew
a hot fray, wherein some store of powder was spent, and after that,
little done till we came near to Calais, where the fleet of Spain
anchored, and our fleet by them; and because they should not be in
peace there, to refresh their water or to have conference with those of
the Duke of Parma's party, my Lord Admiral, with firing of ships,
determined to remove them; as he did, and put them to the seas; in
which broil the chief galleass spoiled her rudder and so rode ashore
near the town of Calais, where she was possessed of our men, but so
aground as she could not be brought away. That morning, being Monday,
the 29th of July, we followed the Spaniards, and all that day had with
them a long and great fight, wherein {xxvii} there was great valour
shown generally of our company."
A few days later, Admiral Howard, also writing to Sir Francis
Walsyngham, said, "In our last fight with the enemy, before Gravelines,
the 29th of July, we sunk three of their ships, and made some go near
the shore, leaking so they were not able to live at sea. After that
fight, notwithstanding that our powder and shot was well near all
spent, we set on a brag countenance and gave them chase, as though we
had wanted nothing, until we had cleared our own coast, and some part
of Scotland of them."
Such were the Fathers of admiralty as to-day we envisage it; and, dark
as some of our naval pages have since been, their tradition has never
died, or lacked among us sons to sustain and adorn it in larger issues.
There have been times when the country in general and its statesmen in
particular have lost or under-valued their sea-vision. In 1667, less
than eighty years after the defeat of the Armada, and scarcely ten
after the death of Blake, one of the greatest figures in English naval
history, to such a pass had our naval administration come that the
Dutch were able to sail almost unchallenged up the Medway; to destroy
the booms and half-equipped battleships; to capture the _Royal Charles_
as a trophy; for several weeks to blockade London; and, in the end, to
compel the English Government to a disadvantageous peace.
Fortunately that was a lesson that England never forgot, and, though
there were to follow lapses, not a few, in the struggles that followed
against the lust for world-power, first of Louis XVI, and, a hundred
{xxviii} later, of Napoleon, the navy of England played a not unworthy
and probably a decisive part. In Hawke and Rodney and Hood, and
supremely in Nelson, in their unremembered captains and too-often
ill-requited men, the spirit of the great Elizabethans lived again and
ultimately prevailed, as it was bound to do. Not less for peoples in
the comity of nations than for individuals in smaller societies, the
highest task is to put at the disposal of human progress their
characteristic genius. In military capacity, never the equal of
France; behind many other nations in certain of the arts and sciences;
lacking the spiritual insight of the East and the buoyant versatility
of the West, this maritime adequacy, this gift of admiralty, seems, by
virtue of her history, to have been allotted to Britain--and she has
always been at her greatest, both for herself and for mankind, when she
and her statesmen have realized this most fully.
That among her seamen this conception was as strong as ever, the
history of the Great War has abundantly made clear, little as most of
them dreamed, on that July morning, to be described in our first
chapter, that they were on the verge of an ordeal, in which humanity's
fate would lie in their hands as never in history. And yet, had they
been gifted with a vision of what was to come, certain doubts might
well have been pardoned in them. Colossal as the machinery was, it was
largely untried. New methods and engines, with unforeseeable
possibilities, were already in embryo or in actual being. The
submarine, the airship, the mine--in less than half an hour, a fleet
might be at the bottom. Recent {xxix} naval campaigns had shown that,
whereas a century before, it had been the exception for a stricken ship
to sink, it was now the exception for it to float; and what of the men
in a modern naval battle?
For it would have to be remembered that, while on the one hand the
terrors of naval warfare had immeasurably increased, the men who had to
endure them had become, on the other, the educated products of a more
sensitive civilization. Whereas, even in Nelson's time, the majority
of British seamen were quite unable to read or write, and were too
often, for all their courage, little better than human animals--many
had been impressed by slum raids in seaport towns, and disciplined by a
brutality now scarcely imaginable--the sailors of to-day, if of the
same fibre, were men of a wholly different upbringing. They were the
brothers of the shop-attendants, the men in the counting-house, the
skilled workmen with their trade unions. They were even better
educated than these, with a mellower, deeper, and more humorous
philosophy of life. For them the navy was a career, from boyhood to
old age, with solid rewards--and not a last resort. How would their
new refinement weather the storm?
In the following pages we have tried to answer this, as often as
possible, in their own words.
{3}
THE HEROIC RECORD OF THE BRITISH NAVY
CHAPTER I
THE FOURTH OF AUGUST, 1914
Roman, Phoenician, Saxon, Dane,
From these white shores turned not again.
Save to the sea that bore them hence,
For their delight or their defense,
Judgment, persuasion, daring, thrift,
Each to the others lent his gift,
To whom, when all had shared, the sea
Added her own of admiralty.
It was early on the morning of July 20, 1914, that a couple of guests,
who had courteously been invited to be present in the gunboat _Niger_
for the King's inspection of the Fleet, made their way through the
sleeping streets toward Portsmouth Dockyard. There were to be no
manoeuvres this year since, as had already been announced in March, a
test mobilization of the Third Fleet was to take their place. This
Third Fleet consisted of the older ships of the navy, and depended for
a large proportion of its _personnel_ upon the Royal Fleet Reserve--a
body of ex-naval seamen and other ratings, brought into being under
Lord Goschen, and afterward strengthened and reorganized by the
Selborne administration {4} of 1902 onward. To man this fleet had
necessitated the calling of about 10,000 seamen and 1,500 marines--all
of them volunteers from civil life; and its assemblage at Spithead with
the First and Second Fleets had secured, between the Hampshire coast
and the Isle of Wight, the greatest exhibition of naval power that the
world had then seen.
Since Wednesday, July 10th, the various units and squadrons had been
gathering to their appointed stations, in some places eleven lines
deep; while, upon the same occasion, and for the first time, there had
been a full mobilization of the naval air forces. Less dramatic than
the usual manoeuvres, and unaccompanied by any of the splendour that
had attended most previous Royal reviews, this test mobilization--this
bringing into being of the full fighting power of our naval
reserves--was so valuable an exercise that, as Mr. Winston Churchill,
the First Lord of the Admiralty, had said in his announcement of it, it
was a matter for some surprise that it had never before been
undertaken. Nevertheless, as a national spectacle, it had attracted
but little public attention, as the blinded windows and empty streets
of Southsea and Portsmouth testified.
Grey as steel from vault to horizon but for a single wavering streak of
blue, there seemed little prospect in the sky overhead of the fine day
that the sailors had foretold; and nothing could have been more sombre
than the early morning scene when, without ceremony and almost
unnoticed, the Royal Yacht, with the King on board, left her berth in
the Dockyard. Picking her course slowly past the Sally Port, {5} so
beloved by Marryat, she steamed through the choppy waters to her place
at the head of the great fleet; and it was not until she reached
Spithead, unsaluted by flag or gun, that the clouds up above began to
break, and the sun to shine down on that floating city, now beginning
briskly to awake to life.
Long before the little _Niger_, indeed, was herself out in the Solent,
all the long lines were fully astir. Trim picket-boats, scattering
spray, were plying up and down with mails and provisions. Cables were
rattling till only a single anchor held each of the great ships in her
proper position. Flags and semaphores were busy with final
instructions. Veils of smoke began to wreathe in the air; and then, at
the Admiral's signal, and with no other pageantry than that inherent in
its own latent might, the vast assembly, with deliberate precision,
began to get under way and out to sea.
Led by the Royal Yacht, the _Victoria and Albert_, her graceful black
hull streaked with gold--preceded, according to custom, by the state
vessel of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House--by the time the _Iron
Duke_, at the head of the First Fleet's battleships, came abreast of
the Nab Lightship, the Royal Yacht was already at anchor to receive the
salutes of the departing navy. For two whole hours the King stood on
the bridge, while ship after ship filed before him, each of the larger
battleships an embodiment of greater strength than was represented by
the whole fleet that had destroyed the Armada, and each of the
battle-cruisers capable of a speed and striking-power that, a century
before, would have seemed but the {6} wildest of dreams. These were
led by the _Lion_, flying the flag of a then comparatively unknown
officer, Sir David Beatty, who, only the evening before, had received
the honour of knighthood on board the Royal Yacht.
Following the _Lion_ and her consorts came the light cruisers, and
after these the destroyers and submarines, each of the latter
submerging and rising to the surface again as she came abreast of the
_Victoria and Albert_, while, to complete the picture, and to
foreshadow the enormous development of aerial power in the years
immediately to follow, each accompanying aeroplane and seaplane dipped
in the air by way of salute.
So the Fleet passed out, great though it was, still only a portion of
the total British sea forces, and producing scarcely a ripple upon the
national attention, fixed on what seemed to it then a thousand more
important matters. Had it been known that, as it then was, no eye
would ever behold it again; that, in less than three weeks, stripped at
its war stations, the fate of the world would visibly depend upon
it--with what other eyes would the whole Empire have watched Spithead
on that July morning! But, for the vast mass of Englishmen the world
over, the incident passed without notice. Politically, the affairs of
Ireland, the readjustment of the House of Lords, and the aspirations of
Labour apparently held the field. For the anxious few, to whom the
position in Europe seemed already ominously uneasy, it may have been
otherwise. But none of them had publicly spoken; and it is now clear,
with so sinister a rapidity {7} did the events leading to war follow
each other, that the test mobilization designed, not without criticism,
to supercede the usual manoeuvres, was coincident with, rather than the
outcome of, the hardening of the general diplomatic position.
That was on July 20, 1914, and, upon the political events that ensued,
it would be quite impossible, in the present volume, to dwell for more
than a moment or two. Very briefly, they succeeded one another as
follows. On July 23d, the Austrian memorandum to Serbia, relative to
the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, by a
Serbian anarchist at Sarajevo on June 28th, was formally submitted. So
drastic were the terms of this that its warlike significance was
immediately apparent to the whole of Europe: and a reply from Serbia
was demanded in forty-eight hours. This was given within the specified
time, all the Austrian demands being acceded to, with two exceptions.
These were that Austrian representatives should collaborate with Serbia
in the suppression of anti-Austrian agitation and also in the judicial
proceedings that were demanded against all connected with the Serajevo
murder.
The acceptance of these demands would, of course, have been tantamount
to an admission by Serbia that she had ceased to be an independent
nation. Nevertheless she was ready to refer them to the Hague
Tribunal. The Austrian ambassador, however, acting on instructions
from his Government, refused to accept anything but an unqualified
assent, and left Belgrade on June 25th.
It was clear that, as regarded Serbia at any rate, {8} Austria had
determined upon war; but Sir Edward, afterward Viscount, Grey, then in
charge of the British Foreign Office, took instant and most strenuous
steps to prevent this. He first proposed a conference in London, in
which Germany, France, and Italy should participate, to mediate in the
issues between the two countries. To this Germany disagreed, stating
that discussions were taking place between Austria and Russia, from
which she had hopes of a successful issue. So fraught, however, was
the whole European atmosphere with dark and immeasurable possibilities,
that, in common with every other great Power, Great Britain had been
obliged to take certain precautions; and, in the most immediately
important of these, the navy was, of course, concerned.
Owing to the illness of his wife, Mr. Winston Churchill had left London
for Cromer on the evening of July 24th--Prince Louis of Battenburg,
afterward the Marquis of Milford Haven, being, as First Sea Lord, left
in charge. About lunch time on Sunday, July 26th, the day after the
Austrian Ambassador had left Belgrade, Mr. Churchill telephoned Prince
Louis, and, in view of this serious development, told him to take what
steps seemed to him advisable, at the same time informing him that he
was returning to town that evening instead of on Monday, as he had
originally designed.
In ordinary circumstances, the demobilization, following upon the naval
exercises, was to have begun on this Monday morning. But Prince Louis,
having made himself acquainted with all the telegrams received at the
Foreign Office, had an order telegraphed {9} to Admiral Sir George
Callaghan, then Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleets at Portland--the
newest and most powerful units of which were afterward to form the
nucleus of what was to become known as the Grand Fleet--to the effect
that no ship was to leave anchorage until further orders, and that all
vessels of the Second Fleet were to remain at their home ports near
their balance crews. Throughout Monday, July 27th, by telegrams all
over Europe to our various representatives, by interviews at home with
foreign ambassadors in London, the British Foreign Office, under Sir
Edward Grey, ceaselessly worked to avoid the impending collision, or,
if that might not be averted, at least to limit its extent.
On Tuesday, July 28th, Austria declared war on Serbia, and, by the next
day, was bombarding the Serbian capital. On this day, both Russia and
Belgium were mobilizing their armies, Belgium as a precautionary
measure of self-defense, and Russia, as regarded her southern armies
only, on account of Austria's invasion of Serbia. It was early on
Wednesday morning, July 29th, that the German Chancellor, then Herr von
Bethmann-Hollweg, suggested to Sir Edward Goschen, our ambassador at
Berlin, that if Britain remained neutral in the event of France joining
Russia against an Austro-German combination, Germany would guarantee to
make no territorial demands of France; would respect the neutrality of
Holland; but might be forced to enter Belgium, whose integrity she
would preserve, however, after the war. In respect of the French
colonies, she would make no promises.
{10}
This meant the tearing up, of course, of the treaty, in which we as
well as Germany had guaranteed Belgium's inviolability, and was an
unmistakable index of the line of action that Germany was prepared to
take, should it suit her purpose; and it was on this morning,
unreported by the papers, and entirely unknown to the nation, that the
First Fleet, under Sir George Callaghan, sailed out of Portland to its
war-stations.
Peace was still possible, however, or so Sir Edward Grey hoped; and,
while immediately rejecting, as he was in honour bound to do, Germany's
proposal with regard to Belgium, he made the new suggestion of a
European Council--a Council to which these problems, even at the
eleventh hour, might be submitted to avert disaster. This plan was
also destined to be fruitless. On July 31st, Germany sent a note to
Russia demanding the instant dispersal of her armies, and requesting a
favourable answer by eleven o'clock on Saturday, August 1st; and it was
on the same day that Sir Edward Grey asked both Germany and France if
they would guarantee the integrity of Belgium, always provided that
this was not infringed by any other Power. To this France assented at
once, but Germany made no reply.
Such was the position on Friday, and, on the Saturday afternoon, August
1st, Germany declared war on Russia, following this up, early on Sunday
morning, with the invasion of Luxembourg by part of her advanced
armies. This was the day on which the remainder of our naval
reservists, including all naval and marine pensioners up to the age of
fifty-five, {11} were called to the colours--the plans for their
mobilization, reception, and embarkment, in any such event as had now
arisen, having been carefully prepared and coördinated with the
preliminary steps required of all other Government Departments, and
included in the War Book, compiled by the Committee of Imperial
Defense, under the presidency of Mr. Asquith, then Prime Minister.
Simultaneously, or rather on the previous Saturday afternoon, an order
to mobilize had been received at Dartmouth--the Royal Naval College in
which, and in the _Britannia_ before it, so many generations of
officers had received their first training. Already, on the preceding
Tuesday, the cadets had been summoned to the Quarter Deck, as the big
recreation hall was called, and told by the Captain that, in the event
of war, they would certainly be mobilized--the six "terms" into which
the cadets were divided, being ordered to report in three groups at
Chatham, Portsmouth, and Devonport, in this order of departure.
Of the thrill produced by this, anybody who has been a schoolboy of
fifteen will have little difficulty in forming an idea; and it may be
doubted if any of the boys who heard it--many of them, alas, never to
see another birthday--will ever again live through such a moment as
when the summons actually came on the following Saturday afternoon. It
came with added force, because, since Tuesday, the excitement had
naturally died down, while most of the boys, in common with their
fathers, and indeed the majority of English men and women, had found it
difficult to believe that so huge a convulsion would not in some {12}
manner be prevented. By what now seems, too, in retrospect, to have
been almost the acme of ironical circumstance, they were due to start
their holidays on August 4th, and to these their minds had already
begun to turn again.
But the summons came, and with it in each boy, as hardly less in the
college itself, the death of an era so instantaneous that it was only a
little later that it could be realized. A moment before, and the
normal Saturday afternoon life had been swinging along, as for so many
years past--on the cricket field, in the swimming baths, in the
Devonshire countryside surrounding the college; and the moment after,
the cricket field was empty, with the stumps still standing there
undrawn, and the lanes and river banks were being everywhere searched
for such boys as were not in college. Long before nightfall half the
cadets--scarcely more than children--had left the place forever; and it
was not until then that the sense of what lay before them fell upon the
officers and masters left behind. For a little while this was almost
intolerable, and the more so because it would have seemed indecent to
them to put it into words. Characteristically enough, perhaps--most of
them being products of the same kind of system that had produced the
boys--it was finally decided, dusk though it was, and tired as they
were, to turn out the beagles.
By the evening of August 3d, therefore, August Bank Holiday, and a day
of serene and cloudless beauty, the Admiralty was able to announce that
the entire navy had been placed upon a war footing, the mobilization
having been completed in all respects by {13} 4 o'clock in the morning.
This was the position when, in a House of Commons charged with emotions
tenser than any man remembered, Sir Edward Grey rose to explain the
situation and the attitude of the Government, for which he desired the
country's mandate. Beginning by assuring the House that the Government
and himself had worked "with all the earnestness in our power to
preserve peace," he went on to deal with the British obligations toward
her friends in the Entente--making it clear that the country was not
bound, by any secret treaty, to provide armed assistance. That was but
a small matter, however, and what had to be determined was our moral
position in the circumstances that had arisen.
Dealing first with naval matters, Sir Edward Grey pointed out that, the
French Fleet being in the Mediterranean, her northern and western
coasts--a tribute to her confidence in ourselves--were left absolutely
unprotected; while, in the Mediterranean, should the French Fleet have
to be withdrawn for vital purposes elsewhere, we ourselves had not then
a fleet strong enough to meet all possible hostile combinations. Under
those conditions, and with a German declaration of war upon her
probably the question of a few hours, it had obviously been our bounden
duty to make our position clear toward France; and this had been done
on the previous afternoon. Subject to the support of Parliament, the
British Government had promised that, if the German Fleet should come
into the Channel, or through the North Sea, to undertake hostile
operations against the French coast or shipping, the British Fleet
would give to the {14} French all the protection in its power. Just
before coming to the House, Sir Edward Grey added, he had learned that,
if we would pledge ourselves to neutrality, Germany would be prepared
to agree that its fleet should not attack the northern coast of France.
But that, as he said, was a far too narrow engagement.
Even more vital, however, was the question of Belgium's integrity, not
only to France and ourselves, but to the whole basis upon which the
relations of all civilized Powers had come to rest. In connection with
this, Sir Edward Grey told the House that a personal telegram had just
been received by the King, in which the King of Belgium had made a
supreme appeal for the diplomatic intervention of Great Britain.
Should Belgium be compelled, Sir Edward Grey pointed out, to compromise
her neutrality by allowing the passage of foreign troops, whatever
might ultimately happen to her, her independence would have gone. To
stand by and see that would, in his opinion--and this was
overwhelmingly endorsed both by the House and the country--be "to
sacrifice our respect and good sense and reputation before the world."
On the same day, Germany declared war on France, and, on Tuesday,
August 4th, Great Britain asked for a definite assurance from Germany
that Belgium's refusal to allow the passage of troops through her
territory should be respected. An answer was desired before midnight,
but the only German reply was to present our ambassador with his
passports, and, before the day ended, Great Britain was at war not only
for her life but for the life of civilization.
{15}
And now, as regarded the navy, there occurred a little incident, not
without an element in it of the deepest pathos, but demonstrating, at
the outset, that one at least of our great naval traditions shone as
brightly as ever. For eight years--longer than any other living
admiral--Sir George Callaghan had been afloat in various responsible
commands; and, in 1911, he had become Commander-in-Chief of the Home
Fleet. Its efficiency as an instrument was due in no small measure to
his personal thoroughness and enthusiasm; and the mingled feelings of
pride, confidence, and anxiety, with which he had led it to its war
stations, can readily be imagined. At last he was to see in action,
under his very eyes, that splendid weapon, for which he had so long
been responsible. But it was not to be. Just as in most recent naval
campaigns conducted by other countries, it had been considered
advisable for the leader in war to have come fresh from staff work at
headquarters, so it had been felt in England that the admiral
commanding the Fleet in action must be not only a sea-officer of high
standing, but one with a more intimate knowledge of the general
strategical position than it had been possible for an officer so long
afloat to acquire. It was for such reasons that Admiral Sampson had
been placed in charge of the American Fleet in the Spanish-American
War, and Admiral Togo by the Japanese Government in the Japanese War
with Russia, and, for similar considerations, it had been decided to
appoint Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, still young as admirals went, to the
command of the Grand Fleet.
{16}
As a former Director of Ordnance and Torpedoes, and thus familiar with
every branch of munitionment; as a former Third Sea Lord in control of
ship-building and equipment; and, as Second Sea Lord, responsible not
only for _personnel_ but familiar, as Deputy for the First Sea Lord,
with all questions of strategy, Admiral Jellicoe, apart from his
personal qualities, had had unique opportunities of studying the whole
naval problem from every possible standpoint. He had proved himself in
addition, during naval manoeuvres, a tactical leader of the highest
order; and he was already due, later in the year, to succeed Sir George
Callaghan in command of the Home Fleets. It was therefore decided--not
without considerable personal reluctance on the part of Admiral
Jellicoe himself--that he should at once replace Sir George Callaghan
on board the fleet-flagship _Iron Duke_; and nothing could have been
more typical of naval _esprit de corps_ and the subservience of even
the most illustrious officer to the interests of the whole service than
that this incident took place without a trace of bitterness or the
slightest personal jealousy. Even so, five years after Trafalgar,
having never been allowed to set foot again on English soil,
Collingwood had died in his cabin, content that in his long sea-exile
he had served his country; and even so, having carried upon his
shoulders perhaps the heaviest individual responsibilities of the war,
Jellicoe himself, at the end of 1917, walked quietly out of the
Admiralty to hang pictures at home.
Born on December 5, 1859, Sir John Jellicoe was in his fifty-fifth year
when he stepped on board the {17} _Iron Duke_ as admiralissimo of the
Grand Fleet. The son of a well-known captain in the mercantile marine,
who lived long enough, as it is pleasant to remember, to witness his
son's success, he was also related ancestrally to that Admiral Patton,
who had been Second Sea Lord at the time of Trafalgar; while, in Lady
Jellicoe, daughter of the late Sir Charles Cayzer, one of the Directors
of the Clan Line of Steamships, he had formed, on his marriage, yet
further connections with the sea. After a few years at a private
school at Rottingdean, he had entered the _Britannia_ as a cadet in
1872, and, from the first, seems without effort to have made the
fullest use of his opportunities.
Passing out of the _Britannia_, the head of his year, with every
possible prize that could be taken, he had qualified--again with three
first prizes--as sub-lieutenant in 1878, being appointed a full
lieutenant three years later, with three first-class certificates. Two
years after this, he had taken part in the Egyptian campaign, obtaining
the silver medal for the expedition, and also the Khedive's Bronze
Star. Returning to Greenwich for a course in gunnery, he had obtained
the £80 prize for gunnery lieutenants, and, soon afterward, had been
appointed a Junior Staff Officer at the _Excellent_ School of Gunnery
at Portsmouth; and it was here that he had come into contact, and begun
a lifelong friendship, with the greatest naval genius of modern times,
then plain Captain Fisher, and scarcely known outside the service.
It was while still a lieutenant that, in 1886, he had received the
Board of Trade Medal for gallantry {18} in a forlorn attempt--during
which he was himself shipwrecked--to save a stranded crew near
Gibraltar. Becoming a commander in 1891, he had been appointed to Sir
George Tryon's flagship, the ill-fated _Victoria_, afterward to be sunk
during manoeuvres--Commander Jellicoe himself, ill in his cabin at the
moment, having the narrowest escape from drowning. Six years later, he
had become a captain, joining Sir Edward Seymour's flagship, the
_Centurion_, on the China Station; and it was in China that, three
years afterward, he had seen his next active service during the Boxer
Rebellion. In this he had been Chief Staff Officer to Sir Edward
Seymour, who commanded the Naval Brigade; and, at the Battle of
Pietsang, on June 21, 1900, he had been very severely wounded. Happily
he had recovered, receiving for his services the Companionship of the
Bath, and, four years later, had found himself at the Admiralty as
Director of Naval Ordnance--a position that he had held during the
revolution produced by the appearance of the first British
_dreadnought_. He had also been largely responsible for the immense
improvement in our gunnery, associated with the name of Admiral Sir
Percy Scott. In 1907 Captain Jellicoe had been promoted to the rank of
Rear-Admiral, being appointed to a command in the Atlantic Fleet a
little later in the same year. In 1908 he had become one of the Lords
Commissioners of the Admiralty and Controller of the Navy, and, two
years afterward, he had reached the vice-admirals' list and had
succeeded to the command of the Atlantic Fleet. In 1911, having
already been made a K.C.V.O., he had been {19} honoured with a K.C.B.
at the coronation of King George V, and, in 1912, after a short spell
of service in command of the Second Battle Squadron of the Home Fleet,
he had become Second Sea Lord, the position he was holding on the
outbreak of war.
Such were the qualifications of the man in whose hands, on that fateful
fourth of August, rested more heavily than in those of any other the
destiny of our empire and of mankind. Had they proved inadequate, it
is no exaggeration to say that the sun of freedom would have set for
both. That they were not so is common knowledge, and the fullest
justification of those who had believed in them--chief among whom was
that masterful administrator, who had changed the whole aspect of our
naval strategy.
Rugged of face, with hosts of detractors, and, at this time, well over
seventy years of age; a prey to moods, with some defects of his
qualities, and a mind too often intolerant of the weaknesses of others,
it was to Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, more than to any single living
man, that the navy of August 4th owed its strength. Lacking the
hereditary sea-influences so strong in Sir John Jellicoe, and with none
of the powerful encouragement that he himself had bestowed upon the
younger admiral, Lord Fisher had risen to power by sheer mental ability
united with an extraordinary force of character; although full credit
must be given to Mr. Balfour who, as Prime Minister in 1902, gave Sir
John Fisher, as he then was, the fullest scope for his genius.
These had included changes so radical and far-reaching, in almost every
branch of naval {20} administration, that it would be impossible here
to recapitulate them; and they are already familiar to most people.
Briefly, they had amounted, first, to a drastic redistribution of our
whole naval forces, including the partial absorption of the
Mediterranean Fleet, hitherto our strongest command, into an enormously
powerful force in the home seas always ready for war; the
disestablishment of overseas squadrons of no strategical importance;
the remorseless scrapping of many old ships that were doing little else
than eating up money; and the reduction of distant dockyards that had
long ceased to have any potential significance. Hand in hand with all
this, a revision of the entire system of naval education had been
undertaken; the Royal Fleet Reserve had been strengthened by the
inclusion of a number of seamen who had had five or more years'
training; and from these were to be drawn the balance crews that, in
time of war, were to bring the vessels of the Second Fleet up to their
full complement.
It had further become clear, both from the lessons learned in the naval
actions between Russia and Japan, and in the strong bid for an
overpowering fleet then being made by Germany, that new developments in
the matter of design were a problem of the most serious urgency. It
had accordingly been decided to replace the very large number of
differing vessels, of which the navy then consisted, by a few definite
classes, each designed to fulfil in war some clearly thought-out
tactical purpose; and, at the same time, in absolute secrecy, the first
of the great British dreadnoughts had been laid down.
{21}
This had not only compelled an immediate response in every navy
throughout the world, but had once more secured for us the margin of
vital security that had seriously been encroached upon before these
reforms were initiated. That in spite of changes of Government and the
natural reluctance of the nation, in view of social necessities, to
increase its naval expenditure, Lord Fisher had succeeded in carrying
through his programme, was the best evidence of his strength; and men
of all parties had become increasingly united in endorsing the general
wisdom of his attitude.
So swift, even since then, however, had been the advance in naval
construction that, when Sir John Jellicoe stepped on board the _Iron
Duke_, the first of the dreadnoughts was almost obsolete. Itself since
outstripped by the ships of the _Queen Elizabeth_ class, when war was
declared on August 4th, the _Iron Duke_, as regarded battleships, was
perhaps the flower of the British Navy. In full commission displacing
27,000 tons, and costing more than £2,000,000 to build, she had
attained on trial, in spite of her enormous armament, a speed of no
less than 22 knots. Each of her large guns, of which she carried ten,
so arranged as to be able to fire on each broadside, was capable of
hurling a shell from twenty to twenty-five miles, during which it would
rise far higher than Mont Blanc; and, besides these, she had a dozen
6-inch guns with which to repel possible destroyer attacks. Her armour
at the water-line was twelve inches thick; she was fitted with four
submerged torpedo-tubes, and carried on board three thousand tons of
fuel {22} and a complement of over a thousand officers and men.
No less powerful, though not so heavily armoured, and capable of a
speed when pressed, of about thirty knots an hour, was the _Lion_, the
flagship of the battle-cruisers, of whom Sir David Beatty was in
command. She, too, carried ten 13.5-inch guns, with sixteen smaller
quick-firing guns, and two submerged torpedo-tubes. Typical of yet
another class was the since famous _Arethusa_ flying the pennant of
Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt, as he then was--a light armoured cruiser,
or, in Mr. Churchill's phrase, "a destroyer of destroyers," displacing
a little less than 4,000 tons, but capable of a speed, when pressed,
approaching forty knots. Lastly should be mentioned the _L_ class,
then the latest of our destroyers, consuming oil fuel only--those
antennæ of the Fleet, as fast as an express train, and the very
incarnation of vigilance and daring.
Such then was the navy in which on August 3d, speaking in that
breathless House of Commons, Sir Edward Grey had said that those
responsible for it had the completest confidence. To it had been
added, on the outbreak of war, a couple of battleships that had just
been completed for Turkey and two destroyer-leaders, built for Chile,
that had been purchased from her by arrangement. As the child of the
cockle-ships that Alfred had beaten the Danes with, that had won the
Battle of Sluys for Edward III; as the offspring of the fleets of Drake
or even of Nelson, its least unit would have defied belief. But it was
of the same family, legitimately descended, and with the {23} old names
scattered amongst its children. _Bellerophon_, _St. George_,
_Téméraire_, its history was implicit in its roll call; while the dead
animals stood re-invoked upon the prows that bore their legends.
Collingwood, Benbow, St. Vincent; Albemarle, Cochrane, Hawke--they were
at war for England if only as words. But did they live again in the
men that hailed them? Well, the nation believed so, and, in that dark
hour, this was the sheet-anchor of its hope. In the words of the King
to Sir John Jellicoe, it sent them the full assurance of its confidence
that they would "prove once again the true shield of Britain and of her
Empire in the hour of trial."
{24}