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THE SILENT WATCHERS
* * * * * *
_By the Same Author_
THE LOST NAVAL PAPERS
_A series of exciting stories which reveal_
_the English Secret Service as it really_
_is—silent, unsleeping, and supremely_
_competent._
“William Dawson is a great creation, a sheer
delight. If Mr. Bennet Copplestone’s intriguing
book meets with half the success it deserves, the
inimitable Sherlock Holmes will soon be out-rivalled
in popularity by the inscrutable William
Dawson.”—_Daily Telegraph._
_$1.50 Net_
JITNY AND THE BOYS
“The book is full of the thoughts which make
us proud to-day and help us to face to-morrow.
Yes, ‘Jitny’ has my blessing.”—_Punch._
“Motoring people could do nothing better than
sit down and have a spin, in imagination, by reading
this book. A clinking motor-car story.”
—_Daily Chronicle._
_$1.50 Net_
NEW YORK—E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
* * * * * *
THE
SILENT WATCHERS
England’s Navy during the Great War:
What It Is, and What We Owe to It
by
BENNET COPPLESTONE
Author of
“The Lost Naval Papers”
“The Navy is a matter of machines only in
so far as human beings can only achieve material
ends by material means. I look upon the ships and
the guns as secreted by the men just as a tortoise
secretes its shell.”—PROLOGUE.
[Illustration]
New York
E. P. Dutton & Company
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright, 1918
By E. P. Dutton & Company
All Rights Reserved
First Printing, Sept., 1918
Second Printing, Oct., 1918
Printed in the United States of America
NOTE
Between June, 1916, and February, 1918, I
contributed a good many articles and sketches on
Naval subjects to _The Cornhill Magazine_. They
were not designed upon any plan or published
in any settled sequence. As one article led up
to another, and information came to me from my
generously appreciative readers (many of whom
were in the Service), I revised those which I had
written and ventured to write still more. This
book contains my _Cornhill_ articles—revised and
sometimes re-written in the light of wider information
and kindly criticism—and several additional
chapters which have not previously been published
anywhere. I have endeavoured to weave into a
connected series articles and sketches which were
originally disconnected, and I have introduced
new strands to give strength to the fabric. Through
the whole runs a golden thread which I have
called THE SECRET OF THE NAVY.
B. C.
_March, 1918._
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE AFTER THE BATTLE
I. A BAND OF BROTHERS
II. THE COMING OF WAR
III. THE GREAT VICTORY
IV. WITH THE GRAND FLEET: A NORTH SEA “STUNT”
V. WITH THE GRAND FLEET: THE TERRIERS AND THE RATS
VI. THE MEDITERRANEAN: A SUCCESS AND A FAILURE
VII. IN THE SOUTH SEAS: THE DISASTER OFF CORONEL
VIII. IN THE SOUTH SEAS: CLEANING UP
IX. HOW THE “SYDNEY” MET THE “EMDEN”
X. FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH
XI. THE CRUISE OF THE “GLASGOW”: PART I—RIO TO CORONEL
XII. THE CRUISE OF THE “GLASGOW”: PART II—CORONELTO JUAN FERNANDEZ
XIII. THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS: PART I
XIV. THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS: PART II
EPILOGUE LIEUTENANT CÆSAR
LIST OF MAPS
THE NORTH SEA
THE MEDITERRANEAN OPERATIONS
THE SOUTH SEAS
HOW THE “SYDNEY” MET THE “EMDEN”
THE “SYDNEY-EMDEN” ACTION
THE CRUISE OF THE “GLASGOW”
THE PACIFIC: VON SPEE’S CONCENTRATION
THE CRUISE OF THE “GLASGOW”
THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS
THE SILENT WATCHERS
PROLOGUE
AFTER THE BATTLE
“Cæsar,” said a Sub-lieutenant to his friend, a temporary Lieutenant
R.N.V.R., who at the outbreak of war had been a classical scholar at
Oxford, “you were in the thick of our scrap yonder off the Jutland
coast. You were in it every blessed minute with the battle cruisers, and
must have had a lovely time. Did you ever, Cæsar, try to write the story
of it?”
It was early in June of 1916, and a group of officers had gathered near
the ninth hole of an abominable golf course which they had themselves
laid out upon an island in the great land-locked bay wherein reposed
from their labours long lines of silent ships. It was a peaceful scene.
Few even of the battleships showed the scars of battle, though among
them were some which the Germans claimed to be at the bottom of the sea.
There they lay, coaled, their magazines refilled, ready at short notice
to issue forth with every eager man and boy standing at his action
station. And while all waited for the next call, officers went ashore,
keen, after the restrictions upon free exercise, to stretch their
muscles upon the infamous golf course. It was, I suppose, one of the
very worst courses in the world. There were no prepared tees, no
fairway, no greens. But there was much bare rock, great tufts of coarse
grass greedy of balls, wide stretches of hard, naked soil destructive of
wooden clubs, and holes cut here and there of approximately the
regulation size. Few officers of the Grand Fleet, except those in
Beatty’s Salt of the Earth squadrons, far to the south, had since the
war began been privileged to play upon more gracious courses. But the
Sea Service, which takes the rough with the smooth, with cheerful and
profane philosophy, accepted the home-made links as a spirited triumph
of the handy-man over forbidding nature.
“Yes,” said the naval volunteer, “I tried many times, but gave up all
attempts as hopeless. I came up here to get first-hand material, and
have sacrificed my short battle leave to no purpose. The more I learn
the more helplessly incapable I feel. I can describe the life of a ship,
and make you people move and speak like live things. But a battle is too
big for me. One might as well try to realise and set on paper the Day of
Judgment. All I did was to write a letter to an old friend, one
Copplestone, beseeching him to make clear to the people at home what we
really had done. I wrote it three days after the battle. Here it is.”
Lieutenant Cæsar drew a paper from his pocket and read as follows:
* * * * *
“MY DEAR COPPLESTONE,—Picture to yourself our feelings. On Wednesday we
were in the fiery hell of the greatest naval action ever fought. A real
Battle of the Giants. Beatty’s and Hood’s battle cruisers—chaffingly
known as the Salt of the Earth—and Evan Thomas’s squadron of four fast
Queen Elizabeths had fought for two hours the whole German High Seas
Fleet. Beatty, in spite of his heavy losses, had outmanœuvred Fritz’s
battle cruisers and enveloped the German line. The Fifth Battle Squadron
had stalled off the German Main Fleet, and led them into the net of
Jellicoe, who, coming up, deployed between Evan Thomas and Beatty,
though he could not see either, crossed the T of the Germans in the
beautifullest of beautiful manœuvres, and had them for a moment as good
as sunk. But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; it is sometimes
difficult to say Blessed be the Name of the Lord. For just when we most
needed full visibility the mist came down thick, the light failed, and
we were robbed of the fruits of victory when they were almost in our
hands. It was hard, hard, bitterly hard. But we had done the utmost
which the Fates permitted. The enemy, after being harried all night by
destroyers, had got away home in torn rags, and we were left in supreme
command of the North Sea, a command more complete and unchallengeable
than at any moment since the war began. For Fritz had put out his full
strength, all his unknown cards were on the table, we knew his strength
and his weakness, and that he could not stand for a moment against our
concentrated power. All this we had done, and rejoiced mightily. In the
morning we picked up from Poldhu the German wireless claiming the battle
as a glorious victory—at which we laughed loudly. But there was no
laughter when in the afternoon Poldhu sent out an official message from
our own Admiralty which, from its clumsy wording and apologetic tone,
seemed actually to suggest that we had had the devil of a hiding. Then
when we arrived at our bases came the newspapers with their talk of
immense losses, and of bungling, and of the Grand Fleet’s failure! Oh,
it was a monstrous shame! The country which depends utterly upon us for
life and honour, and had trusted us utterly, had been struck to the
heart. We had come back glowing, exalted by the battle, full of
admiration for the skill of our leaders and for the serene intrepidity
of our men. We had seen our ships go down and pay the price of sea
command—pay it willingly and ungrudgingly as the Navy always pays.
Nothing that the enemy had done or could do was able to hurt us, but we
had been mortally wounded in the house of our friends. It will take
days, weeks, perhaps months, for England and the world to be made to
understand and to do us justice. Do what you can, old man. Don’t delay a
minute. Get busy. You know the Navy, and love it with your whole soul.
Collect notes and diagrams from the scores of friends whom you have in
the Service; they will talk to you and tell you everything. I can do
little myself. A Naval Volunteer who fought through the action in a
turret, looking after a pair of big guns, could not himself see anything
outside his thick steel walls. Go ahead at once, do knots, and the
fighting Navy will remember you in its prayers.”
* * * * *
The attention of others in the group had been drawn to the reader and
his letter, and when Lieutenant Cæsar stopped, flushed and out of
breath, there came a chorus of approving laughter.
“This temporary gentleman is quite a literary character,” said a
two-ring Lieutenant who had been in an exposed spotting top throughout
the whole action, “but we’ve made a Navy man of him since he joined.
That’s a dashed good letter, and I hope you sent it.”
“Yes,” said Cæsar. “But while I was hesitating, wondering whether I
would risk the lightning of the Higher Powers, a possible court martial,
and the loss of my insecure wavy rings, the business was taken out of my
hands by this same man to whom I was wanting to write. He got moving on
his own account, and now, though the battle is only ten days old, the
country knows the rights of what we did. When it comes to describing the
battle itself, I make way for my betters. For what could I see? On the
afternoon of May 31st, we were doing gun drill in my turret. Suddenly
came an order to put lyddite into the guns and follow the Control.
During the next two hours as the battle developed we saw nothing. We
were just parts of a big human machine intent upon working our own
little bit with faultless accuracy. There was no leisure to think of
anything but the job in hand. From beginning to end I had no suggestion
of a thrill, for a naval action in a turret is just gun drill glorified,
as I suppose it is meant to be. The enemy is not seen; even the
explosions of the guns are scarcely heard. I never took my
ear-protectors from their case in my pocket. All is quiet, organised
labour, sometimes very hard labour when for any reason one has to hoist
the great shells by the hand purchase. It is extraordinary to think that
I got fifty times more actual excitement out of a squadron regatta
months ago than out of the greatest battle in naval history.”
“That’s quite true,” said the Spotting Officer, “and quite to be
expected. Battleship fighting is not thrilling except for the very few.
For nine-tenths of the officers and men it is a quiet, almost dull
routine of exact duties. For some of us up in exposed positions in the
spotting tops or on the signal bridge, with big shells banging on the
armour or bursting alongside in the sea, it becomes mighty wetting and
very prayerful. For the still fewer, the real fighters of the ship in
the conning tower, it must be absorbingly interesting. But for the true
blazing rapture of battle one has to go to the destroyers. In a
battleship one lives like a gentleman until one is dead, and takes the
deuce of a lot of killing. In a destroyer one lives rather like a pig,
and one dies with extraordinary suddenness. Yet the destroyer officers
and men have their reward in a battle, for then they drink deep of the
wine of life. I would sooner any day take the risks of destroyer work,
tremendous though they are, just for the fun which one gets out of it.
It was great to see our boys round up Fritz’s little lot. While you were
in your turret, and the Sub. yonder in control of a side battery, Fritz
massed his destroyers like Prussian infantry and tried to rush up close
so as to strafe us with the torpedo. Before they could get fairly going,
our destroyers dashed at them, broke up their masses, buffeted and
hustled them about exactly like a pack of wolves worrying sheep, and
with exactly the same result. Fritz’s destroyers either clustered
together like sheep or scattered flying to the four winds. It was just
the same with the light cruisers as with the destroyers. Fritz could not
stand against us for a moment, and could not get away, for we had the
heels of him and the guns of him. There was a deadly slaughter of
destroyers and light cruisers going on while we were firing our heavy
stuff over their heads. Even if we had sunk no battle cruisers or
battleships, the German High Seas Fleet would have been crippled for
months by the destruction of its indispensable ‘cavalry screen.’”
As the Spotting Officer spoke, a Lieutenant-Commander holed out on the
last jungle with a mashie—no one uses a putter on the Grand Fleet’s
private golf course—and approached our group, who, while they talked,
were busy over a picnic lunch.
“If you pigs haven’t finished all the bully beef and hard tack,” said
he, “perhaps you can spare a bite for one of the blooming ’eroes of the
X Destroyer Flotilla.” The speaker was about twenty-seven, in rude
health, and bore no sign of the nerve-racking strain through which he
had passed for eighteen long-drawn hours. The young Navy is as
unconscious of nerves as it is of indigestion. The Lieutenant-Commander,
his hunger satisfied, lighted a pipe and joined in the talk.
“It was hot work,” said he, “but great sport. We went in sixteen and
came out a round dozen. If Fritz had known his business, I ought to be
dead. He can shoot very well till he hears the shells screaming past his
ears, and then his nerves go. Funny thing how wrong we’ve been about
him. He is smart to look at, fights well in a crowd, but cracks when he
has to act on his own without orders. When we charged his destroyers and
ran right in he just crumpled to bits. We had a batch of him nicely
herded up, and were laying him out in detail with guns and mouldies,
when there came along a beastly intrusive Control Officer on a battle
cruiser and took him out of our mouths. It was a sweet shot, though.
Someone—I don’t know his name, or he would hear of his deuced
interference from me—plumped a salvo of 12-inch common shell right into
the brown of Fritz’s huddled batch. Two or three of his destroyers went
aloft in scrap-iron, and half a dozen others were disabled. After the
first hour his destroyers and light cruisers ceased to be on the stage;
they had flown quadrivious—there’s an ormolu word for our classical
volunteer—and we could have a whack at the big ships. Later, at night,
it was fine. We ran right in upon Fritz’s after-guard of sound
battleships and rattled them most tremendous. He let fly at us with
every bally gun he had, from 4-inch to 14, and we were a very pretty
mark under his searchlights. We ought to have been all laid out, but our
loss was astonishingly small, and we strafed two of his heavy ships.
Most of his shots went over us.”
“Yes,” called out the Spotting Officer, “yes, they did, and ricochetted
all round us in the Queen Elizabeths. There was the devil of a row. The
firing in the main action was nothing to it. All the while you were
charging, and our guns were masked for fear of hitting you, Fritz’s
bonbons were screaming over our upper works and making us say our
prayers out loud in the Spotting Tops. You’d have thought we were at
church. I was in the devil of a funk, and could hear my teeth rattling.
It is when one is fired on and can’t hit back that one thinks of one’s
latter end.”
“Did any of you see the _Queen Mary_ go?” asked a tall thin man with the
three rings of a Commander. “Our little lot saw nothing of the first
part of the battle; we were with the K.G. Fives and Orions.”
“I saw her,” spoke a Gunnery Lieutenant, a small, quiet man with dreamy,
introspective eyes—the eyes of a poet turned gunner. “I saw her. She
was hit forrard, and went in five seconds. You all know how. It was a
thing which won’t bear talking about. The _Invincible_ took a long time
to sink, and was still floating bottom up when Jellicoe’s little lot
came in to feed after we and the Salt of the Earth had eaten up most of
the dinner. I don’t believe that half the Grand Fleet fired a shot.”
There came a savage growl from officers of the main Battle Squadrons,
who, invited to a choice banquet, had seen it all cleared away before
their arrival. “That’s all very well,” grumbled one of them; “the four
Q.E.s are getting a bit above themselves because they had the luck of
the fair. They didn’t fight the High Seas Fleet by their haughty selves
because they wanted to, you bet.”
The Gunnery Lieutenant with the dreamy eyes smiled. “We certainly
shouldn’t have chosen that day to fight them on. But if the _Queen
Elizabeth_ herself had been with us, and we had had full
visibility—with the horizon a hard dark line—we would have willingly
taken on all Fritz’s 12-inch Dreadnoughts and thrown in his battle
cruisers.”
“That’s the worst of it,” grumbled the Commander, very sore still at
having tasted only of the skim milk of the battle; “naval war is now
only a matter of machines. The men don’t count as they did in Nelson’s
day.”
“Excuse me, sir,” remarked the Sub-Lieutenant; “may I say a word or two
about that? I have been thinking it out.”
There came a general laugh. The Sub-Lieutenant, twenty years of age,
small and dark and with the bright black eyes of his mother—a pretty
little lady from the Midi de la France whom his father had met and
married in Paris—did not look like a philosopher, but he had the
clear-thinking, logical mind of his mother’s people.
“Think aloud, my son,” said the Commander. “As a living incarnation of
l’Entente Cordiale, you are privileged above those others of the
gun-room.”
The light in the Sub’s eyes seemed to die out as his gaze turned
inwards. He spoke slowly, carefully, sometimes injecting a word from his
mother’s tongue which could better express his meaning. He looked all
the while towards the sea, and seemed scarcely to be conscious of an
audience of seniors. His last few sentences were spoken wholly in
French.
“No—naval war is a war of men, as it always was and always will be. For
what are the machines but the material expression of the souls of the
men? Our ships are better and faster than the German ships, our guns
heavier and more accurate than theirs, our gunners more deadly than
their gunners, because our Navy has the greater human soul. The Royal
Navy is not a collection of lifeless ships and guns imposed upon men by
some external power as the Kaiser sought to impose a fleet upon the
Germans, a nation of landsmen. The Navy is a matter of machines only in
so far as human beings can only achieve material ends by material means.
I look upon the ships and guns as secreted by the men just as a tortoise
secretes its shell. They are the products of naval thought, and naval
brains, and, above all, of that ever-expanding naval soul (_l’esprit_)
which has been growing for a thousand years. Our ships yonder are
materially new, the products almost of yesterday, but really they are
old, centuries old; they are the expression of a naval soul working,
fermenting, always growing through the centuries, always seeking to
express itself in machinery. Naval war is an art, the art of men, and
where in the world will one find men like ours, officers like ours? Have
you ever thought whence come those qualities which one sees glowing
every day in our men, from the highest Admiral to the smallest ship
boy—have you ever thought whence they come?”
He paused, still looking out to sea. His companions, all of them his
superiors in rank and experience, stared at him in astonishment, and one
or two laughed. But the Commander signalled for silence. “Et après,” he
asked quietly; “d’où viennent ces qualités?” Unconsciously he had
sloughed the current naval slang and spoke in the native language of the
Sub.
The effect was not what he had expected. At the sound of the Commander’s
voice speaking in French the Sub-Lieutenant woke up, flushed, and
instantly reverted to his English self. “I am sorry, sir. I got speaking
French, in which I always think, and when I talk French I talk the most
frightful rot.”
“I am not so sure that it was rot. Your theory seems to be that we are,
in the naval sense, the heirs of the ages, and that no nation that has
not been through our centuries-old mill can hope to stand against us. I
hope that you are right. It is a comforting theory.”
“But isn’t that what we all think, sir, though we may not put it quite
that way? Most of us know that our officers and men are of
unapproachable stuff in body and mind, but we don’t seek for a reason.
We accept it as an axiom. I’ve tried to reason the thing out because I’m
half French; and also because I’ve been brought up among dogs and horses
and believe thoroughly in heredity. It’s all a matter of breeding.”
“The Sub’s right,” broke in the Gunnery Lieutenant with the poet’s eyes;
“though a Sub who six months ago was a snotty who has no business to
think of anything outside his duty. The Service would go to the devil if
the gun-room began to talk psychology. We excuse it in this Sub here for
the sake of the Entente Cordiale, of which he is the living embodiment;
but had any other jawed at us in that style I would have sat upon his
head. Of course he is right, though it isn’t our English way to see
through things and define them as the French do. No race on earth can
touch us for horses or dogs or prize cattle—or Navy men. It takes
centuries to breed the boys who ran submarines through the Dardanelles
and the Sound and stayed out in narrow enemy waters for weeks together.
Brains and nerves and sea skill can’t be made to order even by a German
Kaiser. Navy men should marry young and choose their women from sea
families; and then their kids won’t need to be taught. They’ll have the
secret of the Service in their blood.”
“That’s all very fine,” observed a Marine Lieutenant reflectively; “but
who is going to pay for it all? We can’t. I get 7_s._ 6_d._ a day, and
shall have 11_s._ in a year or two; it sounds handsome, but would hardly
run to a family. Few in the Navy have any private money, so how can we
marry early?”
“Of course we can’t as things go now,” said the Gunnery Lieutenant. “But
some day even the Admiralty will discover that the English Navy will
become a mere list of useless machines unless the English naval families
can be kept up on the lower deck as well as in the wardroom and
gun-room. Why, look at the names of our submarine officers whenever they
get into the papers for honours. They are always salt of the sea, names
which have been in the Navy List ever since there was a List. You may
read the same names in the Trafalgar roll and back to the Dutch wars.
Most of us were Pongos before that—shore Pongos who went afloat with
Blake or Prince Rupert—but then we became sailors, and so remained,
father to son. I can only go back myself to the Glorious First of June,
but some of us here in the Grand Fleet date from the Stuarts at least.
It is jolly fine to be of Navy blood, but not all plum jam. One has such
a devil of a record to live up to. In my term at Dartmouth there was a
poor little beast called Francis Drake—a real Devon Drake, a genuine
antique—but what a load of a name to carry! Thank God, my humble name
doesn’t shine out of the history books. And as with the officers, so
with the seamen. Half of them come from my own country of Devon—the
cradle of the Navy. They are in the direct line from Drake’s buccaneers.
Most of the others come from the ancient maritime counties of the
Channel seaboard, where the blood of everyone tingles with Navy salt.
The Germans can build ships which are more or less accurate copies of
our own, but they can’t breed the men. That is the whole secret.”
The Lieutenant-Commander, whose war-scarred destroyer lay below
refitting, laughed gently. “There’s a lot in all that, more than we
often realise when we grumble at the cursed obstinacy of our old
ratings, but even you do not go back far enough. It is the old blood of
the Vikings and sea-pirates in us English which makes us turn to the
sea; the rest is training. In no other way can you explain the success
of the Fringes, the mine-sweepers, and patrols, most of them manned by
naval volunteers who, before the war, had never served under the White
Ensign nor seen a shot fired. What is our classical scholar here, Cæsar,
but a naval volunteer whom Whale Island and natural intelligence have
turned into a gunner? But as regards the regular Navy, the Navy of the
Grand Fleet, you are right. Pick your boys from the sea families, catch
them young, pump them full to the teeth with the Navy Spirit—_l’esprit
marin_ of our bi-lingual Sub here—make them drunk with it. Then they
are all right. But they must never be allowed to think of a darned thing
except of the job in hand. The Navy has no use for men who seek to peer
into their own souls. They might do it in action and discover blue funk.
We want them to be no more conscious of their souls than of their
livers. Though I admit that it is devilish difficult to forget one’s
liver when one has been cooped up in a destroyer for a week. It is not
nerve that Fritz lacks so much as a kindly obedient liver. He is an
iron-gutted swine, and that is partly why he can’t run destroyers and
submarines against us. The German liver is a thing to wonder at. Do you
know——” but here the Lieutenant-Commander became too Rabelaisian for
my delicate pen.
The group had thinned out during this exercise in naval analysis.
Several of the officers had resumed their heart-and-club-breaking
struggle with the villainous golf course, but the Sub, the volunteer
Lieutenant, and the Pongo (Marine) still sat at the feet of their
seniors. “May I say how the Navy strikes an outsider like me?” asked
Cæsar diffidently. Whale Island, which had forgotten all other Latin
authors, had given him the name as appropriate to one of his learning.
“Go ahead,” said the Commander generously. “All this stuff is useful
enough for a volunteer; without the Pongos and Volunteers to swallow our
tall stories, the Navy would fail of an audience. The snotties know too
much.”
“I was going to speak of the snotties,” said Cæsar, “who seem to me to
be even more typical of the Service than the senior officers. They have
all its qualities, emphasised, almost comically exaggerated. I do not
know whether they are never young or that they never grow old, but there
is no essential difference in age and in knowledge between a snotty six
months out of cadet training and a Commander of six years’ standing.
They rag after dinner with equal zest, and seem to be equally well
versed in the profound technical details of their sea work. Perhaps it
is that they are born full of knowledge. The snotties interest me beyond
every type that I have met. Their manners are perfect and in startling
contrast with those of the average public school boy of fifteen or
sixteen—even in College at Winchester—and they combine their real
irresponsible youthfulness with a grave mask of professional learning
which is delightful to look upon. I have before me the vision of a child
of fifteen with tousled yellow hair and a face as glum as a sea-boot,
sitting opposite to me in the machine which took us back one day to the
boat, smoking a ‘fag’ with the clumsiness which betrayed his lack of
practice, in between bites of ‘goo’ (in this instance Turkish Delight),
of which I had seen him consume a pound. He looked about ten years old,
and in a husky, congested voice, due to the continual absorption of
sticky food, he described minutely to me the method of conning a
battleship in manœuvres and the correct amount to allow for the inertia
of the ship when the helm is centred; he also explained the tactical
handling of a squadron during sub-calibre firing. That snotty was a
sheer joy, and the Navy is full of him. He’s gone himself, poor little
chap—blown to bits by a shell which penetrated the deck.”
“In time, Cæsar,” said the Commander, “by strict attention to duty you
will become a Navy man. But we have talked enough of deep mysteries. It
was that confounded Sub, with his French imagination, who started us.
What I really wish someone would tell me is this: what was the ‘northern
enterprise’ that Fritz was on when we chipped in and spoilt his little
game?”
“It does not matter,” said the Gunnery Lieutenant. “We spoilt it,
anyhow. The dear old newspapers talk of his losses in big ships as if
they were all that counted. What has really crippled him has been the
wiping out of his destroyers and fast new cruisers. Without them he is
helpless. It was a great battle, much more decisive than most people
think, even in the Grand Fleet itself. It was as decisive by sea as the
Marne was by land. We have destroyed Fritz’s mobility.”
The men rose and looked out over the bay. There below them lay their sea
homes, serene, invulnerable, and about them stretched the dull, dour,
treeless landscape of their northern fastness. Their minds were as
peaceful as the scene. As they looked a bright light from the compass
platform of one of the battleships began to flicker through the
sunshine—dash, dot, dot, dash. “There goes a signal,” said the
Commander. “You are great at Morse, Pongo. Read what it says, my son.”
The Lieutenant of Marines watched the flashes, and as he read grinned
capaciously. “It is some wag with a signal lantern,” said he. “It reads:
Question—Daddy,—what—did—you—do—in—the—Great—War?”
“I wonder,” observed the Sub-Lieutenant, “what new answer the lower deck
has found to that question. Before the battle their reply was: ‘I was
kept doubling round the decks, sonny.’”
“There goes the signal again,” said the Pongo; “and here comes the
answer.” He read it out slowly as it flashed word after word: “‘=I
laid the guns true, sonny.=’”
“And a dashed good answer, too,” cried the Commander heartily.
“That would make a grand fleet signal before a general action,” remarked
the Gunnery Lieutenant. “I don’t care much for Nelson’s Trafalgar
signal. It was too high-flown and sentimental for the lower deck. It was
aimed at the history books, rather than at old tarry-breeks of the fleet
a hundred years ago. No—there could not be a better signal than just
‘Lay the Guns True’—carry out your orders precisely, intelligently,
faultlessly. What do you say, my Hun of a classical volunteer?”
“It could not be bettered,” said Cæsar.
“I will make a note of it,” said the Gunnery Lieutenant, “against the
day, when as a future Jellicoe, I myself shall lead a new Grand Fleet
into action.”
CHAPTER I
A BAND OF BROTHERS
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”—_King Henry V._
My boyhood was spent in Devon, the land of Drake and the home of the
Elizabethan Navy. A deep passion for the Sea Service is in my blood,
though, owing to family circumstances, I was not able to indulge my
earliest ambition to become myself one of the band of brothers who serve
under the White Ensign. My elder brother lived and died afloat. Two of
my sons, happier than their father, are privileged to play their parts
in the great ships of the Fleets. So that, though not in the Service, I
am of it, by ties of blood and by ties of the earliest association.
Whenever I have sought to penetrate its mysteries and to interpret them
to my fellow countrymen, my motive has never been that of mere idle
curiosity.
The Royal Navy wields, and has always wielded, a great material force,
but the secret of its strength lies not in the machines with which it
has equipped itself in the various stages of its development. Vast and
terrible as are the ships and the guns, they would be of little worth if
their design and skilful employment were not inspired by that spiritual
force, compounded of tradition, training, devotion and discipline, which
I call the Soul of the Navy. In the design of its weapons, in its
mastery of their use, above all in its consummate seamanship, the Royal
Navy has in all ages surpassed its opponents; but it has done these
things not through some fortuitous gift of the Sea Gods, but because of
the never-failing development of its own spirit. It has always been at a
great price, in the sacrifice of ease and in the outpouring of the lives
of men, that the Navy has won for itself and for us the freedom of the
seas. Those who reckon navies in ships and guns, in weight of metal and
in broadside fire, while leaving out of account the spirit and training
and devotion of the men, can never understand the Soul of the Navy. For
all these material things are the expression of the Soul; they are not
the Soul itself.
The Navy is still the old English Navy of the southern maritime counties
of England. It has become the Navy of Great Britain, the Navy of the
British Empire, but in spirit, and to a large extent in hereditary
personnel, it remains the English Navy of the Narrow Seas. Many counties
play a great part in its equipment, but to me it is always the Navy of
my own land of Devon; officers and men are the lineal successors of
those bold West Country seamen who in their frail barks ranged the wide
seas hundreds of years ago and first taught to us and to the world the
meaning of the expression “sea communications.”
There is not an officer in the permanent service of the Fleets of to-day
who was not trained in Devon. On the southern seaboard of that county,
set upon a steep slope overlooking the mouth of the most lovely of
rivers, stands the Naval College in which are being trained those who
will guide our future Fleets. A little way to the west lies one of the
greatest of naval ports and arsenals. From my county of Devon comes half
the Navy of to-day, half the men of the Fleet, be they warrant officers,
seamen or engineers. The atmosphere of Devon, soft and sleepy as it may
appear to a stranger, is electric with the spirit of Drake, which is the
spirit of Nelson, which is the spirit of the boys of Dartmouth. For
generation after generation, in the old wooden hulks _Britannia_ and
_Hindustan_, and afterwards in the Naval College on the heights, the
cadets during their most impressionable years have breathed in the
spirit of the Navy. I have often visited them there and loved them; my
brother, who worked among them and taught them, died there, and is
buried in the little cemetery which crowns the hill where, years ago in
a blinding snowstorm, I stood beside his open grave and heard the Last
Post wail above his body. I have always envied him that great privilege,
to die in the service of the Navy and to be buried within hail of the
boys whom he loved.
The cadets of Dartmouth have learned that the Sea Service is an exacting
and most jealous mistress who brooks no rival. They have learned that
the Service is everything and themselves nothing. They have learned that
only by humbly submitting themselves to be absorbed into the Service can
they be deemed to be worthy of that Service. The discipline of the Navy
is no cast-iron system imposed by force and punishment upon unwilling
men; there is nothing in it of Prussian Militarism. It is rather the
willing subordination of proud free men to the dominating interests of a
Service to which they have dedicated their lives. The note of their
discipline is “The Service first, last, and all the time.” The Navy
resembles somewhat a religious Order, but in the individual
subordination of body, heart, brains and soul there is nothing of
servitude. The Naval officer is infinitely proud and infinitely humble.
Infinitely proud of his Service, infinitely humble in himself. If an
officer through error, however pardonable, loses his ship—and very
young officers have command of ships—and in the stern, though always
sympathetic, judgment of his fellows he must temporarily be put upon the
shelf, he does not grumble or repine. He does not write letters to the
papers upon his grievances. He accepts the judgment loyally, even
proudly, and strives to merit a return to active employment. No
fleshpots in the outer world, no honours or success in civil employment,
ever compensate the naval officer for the loss of his career at sea.
From the circumstances of their lives, so largely spent among their
fellows at sea or in naval harbours, and from their upbringing in naval
homes and training ships, officers and men grow into a class set apart,
dedicated as Followers of the Sea, in whose eyes the dwellers in cities
appear as silly chatterers and hucksterers, always seeking after some
vain thing, be it wealth or rank or fame. The discipline of the Navy is,
like its Soul, apart and distinct from anything which we know on land.
It is very strict but also very human. There is nothing in it of Caste.
“I expect,” said Drake, “the gentlemen to draw with the mariners.” Drake
allowed of no distinction between “gentlemen” and “mariners” except that
“gentlemen” were expected always to surpass the “mariners” in tireless
activity, cheerful endurance of hardships, and unshakable valour in
action. Drake could bear tenderly with the diseased grumbling of a
scurvy-stricken mariner, but the gentleman adventurer who “groused” was
in grievous peril of a rope and a yard arm. The gentlemen adventurers
have given place to professional naval officers, the mariners have
become the long-service trained seamen in their various grades who have
given their lives to the Navy, but the spirit of Drake endures to this
day. The Gentlemen are expected to draw with the Mariners.
When a thousand lives and a great ship may be lost by the lapse from
vigilance of one man, very strict discipline is a vital necessity. But
as with officers so with men it is the discipline of cheerful, willing
obedience. The spirit of the Navy is not the spirit of a Caste. It burns
as brightly in the seaman as in the lieutenant, in the ship’s boy as in
the midshipman, in the warrant officer as in the “Owner.” It is a
discipline hammered out by the ceaseless fight with the sea. The Navy is
always on active service; it is always waging an unending warfare with
the forces of the sea; the change from a state of peace to a state of
war means only the addition of one more foe—and if he be a gallant and
chivalrous foe he is welcomed gladly as one worthy to kill and to be
killed.
Catch boys young, inure them to Naval discipline, and teach them the
value of it, and to them it will become part of the essential fabric of
their lives. A good example of how men of Naval training cling to the
discipline of the Service as to a firm unbreakable rope was shown in
Captain Scott’s South Polar expeditions. Some of the officers, and
practically the whole of the crews, were lent by the Navy, but the
expeditions themselves were under auspices which were not naval. At sea
Captain Scott’s legal authority was that of a merchant skipper, on land
during his exploring expeditions he had no legal authority at all. Yet
all the officers and men, knowing that their lives depended upon willing
subordination, agreed that the discipline both at sea and on land should
be that of the Navy to which most of them belonged. The ships were run
exactly as if they had flown the White Ensign, and as if their
companions were under the Navy Act. Strict though it may be, there is
nothing arbitrary about naval discipline, and those who have tested it
in peace and war know its quality of infinite endurance under any
strain.
The Navy is a small Service, small in numbers, and to this very
smallness is partly due the beauty of its Soul. For it is a picked
Service, and only by severe selection in their youth can those be chosen
who are worthy to remain among its permanent members. The professional
officers and men number only some 150,000, and the great temporary war
expansion—after the inclusion of Naval Reservists, Naval Volunteers,
and the Division for service on land, did little more than treble the
active list. The Navy, even then, bore upon its rolls names less than
one-twelfth as numerous as in those legions who were drafted into the
Army. Yet this small professional Navy, by reason of its Soul and the
vast machines which that Soul secretes and employs with supreme
efficiency, dominated throughout the war the seas of the whole world.
The Navy has for so long been a wonder and a miracle that we have ceased
to be thrilled by it; we take it for granted; but it remains no less a
wonder and a miracle.
Many causes have combined to make this little group—this few, this
happy few, this band of brothers—the most splendid human force which
the world has ever seen. The Naval Service is largely hereditary.
Officers and men come from among those who have served the sea for
generations. In the Navy List of to-day one may read names which were
borne upon the ships’ books of hundreds of years ago. And since the
tradition of the sea plays perhaps the greatest part in the development
of the Naval Soul, this continuity of family service, on the lower deck
as in the wardroom and gun room, needs first to be emphasised. The young
son of an officer, of a warrant-officer, of a seaman, or of a marine,
enters the Service already more than half trained. He has the spirit of
the Service in his blood, and its collective honour is already his own
private honour. I remember years ago a naval officer said to me
sorrowfully, “My only son must go into the Service, and yet I fear that
he is hardly fit for it. He is delicate, shy, almost timid. But what can
one do?”
“Is it necessary?” I asked foolishly. He stared at me: “We have served
from father to son since the reign of Charles II.” So the boy entered
the _Britannia_, and I heard no more of him until one morning, years
after, I saw in an Honours List a name which I knew, that of a young
Lieutenant who had won the rare naval V.C. in the Mediterranean. It was
my friend’s son; blood had triumphed; the delicate, shy, almost timid
lad had made good.
The Navy catches its men when they are young, unspoiled, malleable, and
moulds them with deft fingers as a sculptor works his clay. Officers
enter in their early teens—now as boys at Osborne who afterwards become
naval cadets at Dartmouth. Formerly they spent a year or two longer at
school and entered direct as cadets to the _Britannia_. The system is
essentially the same now as it has been for generations. The material
must be good and young, the best of it is retained and the less good
rejected. The best is moulded and stamped in the Dartmouth workshop, and
emerges after the bright years of early boyhood with the naval hall mark
upon it. The seamen enter as boys into training-ships, and they, too,
are moulded and stamped into the naval pattern. It is a very exacting
but a very just education. No one who has been admitted to the privilege
of training need be rejected except by his own fault, and if he is not
worthy to be continued in training, he is emphatically not worthy to
serve in the Fleets.
Of late years this system, which requires abundance of time for its full
working out, has proved to be deficient in elasticity. It takes some
seven years to make a cadet into a sub-lieutenant, while a great
battleship can be built and equipped in little more than two years. The
German North Sea menace caused a rapid expansion in the output of ships,
especially of big ships, which far outstripped the training of junior
officers needed for their service. The Osborne-Dartmouth system had not
failed, far from it, but it was too slow for the requirements of the
Navy under the new conditions. In order to keep up with the demand, the
supply of naval cadets was increased and speeded up by the admission of
young men from the public schools at the age when they had been
accustomed to enter for permanent Army commissions. A large addition was
also made to the roll of subalterns of Marines—who received training
both for sea and land work—and in this way the ranks of the junior
officers afloat were rapidly expanded. There was no departure from the
Navy’s traditional policy of catching boys young and moulding them
specially and exclusively for the Sea Service; the new methods were
avowedly additional and temporary, to be modified or withdrawn when the
need for urgent expansion had disappeared. The Navy was clearly right.
It was obliged to make a change in its system, but it made it to as
small an extent as would meet the conditions of the moment. The second
best was tacked on to the first best, but the first best was retained in
being to be reverted to exclusively as soon as might be. To catch boys
young, preferably those with the sea tradition in their blood, to teach
them during their most impressionable years that the Navy must always be
to them as their father, mother and wedded wife—the exacting mistress
which demands of them the whole of their affections, energies and
service, to dedicate them in tender years to their Sea Goddess—this
must always be the way to preserve, in its purest undimmed water, that
pearl of great price, the Soul of the Navy.
It follows from the circumstances of their training and life that the
Navy is a Family of which the members are bound together by the closest
of ties of individual friendship and association. It is a Service in
which everybody knows everybody else, not only by name and reputation
but by personal contact. During the long years of residence at Osborne
and Dartmouth, and afterwards in the Fleets, at the Greenwich Naval
College, at the Portsmouth schools of instruction, officers widely
separated by years and rank learn to know one another and to weigh one
another in the most just of balances—that of actual service. Those of
us who have passed many years in the world of affairs, know that the
only reputation worth having is that which we earn among those of our
own profession or craft. And none of us upon land are known and weighed
with the intimate certainty and impartiality which is possible to the
Sea Service. We are not seen at close contact and under all conditions
of work and play, and never in the white light which an ever-present
peril casts upon our worth and hardihood. No fictitious reputation is
possible in the Navy itself as it is possible in the world outside.
Officers may, through the exercise of influence, be placed in positions
over the heads of others of greater worth, they may be written and
talked about by civilians in the newspapers as among the most brilliant
in their profession—especially in time of peace—but the Navy, which
has known them from youth to age inside and out, is not deceived. The
Navy laughs at many of the reputations which we poor civilians
ignorantly honour. No naval reputation is of any value whatever unless
it be endorsed by the Navy itself. And the Navy does not talk. How many
newspaper readers, for instance, had heard of Admiral Jellicoe before he
was placed in command of the Grand Fleet at the outbreak of war? But the
Navy knew all about him and endorsed the choice.
What I write of officers applies with equal force to the men, to the
long-service ratings, the petty officers and warrant officers who form
the backbone of the Service. They, too, are caught young, drawn wherever
possible from sea families, moulded and trained into the naval pattern,
stamped after many years with the hall mark of the Service. It is a
system which has bred a mutual confidence and respect between officers
and men as unyielding as armour-plate. Before the battle of May 31st,
1916, the Grand Fleet had gone forth looking for Fritz many times and
finding him not. Little was expected, but if the unexpected did happen,
then officers believed in their long-service ratings as profoundly as
did these dear old grumblers in their leaders. Many times in the
wardrooms of the battle squadrons the prospects of action would be
discussed and always in the same way.
“No, it’s not likely to be anything, but if it is what we’ve been
waiting for, I have every confidence in our long-service ratings if the
Huns are really out for blood. You know what I mean—those grizzled old
G.L.I.s (gun-layers, first-class), and gunners’ mates and horny-handed
old A.B.s whom we curse all day for their damned obstinacy. The Huns
think that two years make a gunlayer; we know that even twelve years are
not enough. Our long-service ratings would pull the country through,
even if we hadn’t the mechanical advantage over Fritz which we actually
possess. And the combination of the long-service ratings and the
two-Power standard will, when we get to work upon him, give Fritz
furiously to think.”
Even when the great expansion among the big fighting ships called for a
corresponding expansion in the crews, little essential change was made
in the system which had bred confidence such as this. There was some
slight dilution. Officers and men of the R.N.R. and the Naval
Volunteers, to the extent of about 10 per cent., were drafted into the
first-line battleships, but the cream of the professional service was
kept for the first fighting line. For the most part the new temporary
Navy, of admirable material drawn from our almost limitless maritime
population, was kept at work in the Fringes of the Fleet—the
mine-sweepers, armed liners, blockading patrols, and so on—where less
technical navy skill was required, and where invaluable service could be
and was done. The professional Navy has the deepest respect and
gratitude for the devoted work discharged by its amateur auxiliaries.
The Navy is a young man’s service. In no other career in life are the
vital energies, the eager spirits, the glowing capacities of youth given
such ample opportunities for expression. A naval officer can become a
proud “Owner,” with an independent command of a destroyer or submarine,
at an age when in a civil profession he would be entrusted with scanty
responsibilities. In civil life there is a horrible waste of youth; it
is kept down, largely left unused, by the jealousy of age. But the Navy,
which is very wise, makes the most of every hour of it. The small craft,
the Fringes of the Fleet as Mr. Kipling calls them, the eyes and ears
and guardians of the big ships, the patrol boats, submarines and
destroyers, are captained by youngsters under thirty, often under
twenty-five. The land crushes youth, the sea allows and encourages its
fine flower to expand. Naval warfare is directed by grave men, but is to
an enormous extent carried on by bright boys.
But the Navy which employs youth more fully than any other service, also
uses it up more remorselessly. Unless an officer can reach the rank of
Commander—a rank above that of a Major in the Army—when he is little
more than thirty he has a very scanty chance in time of peace of ever
serving afloat as a full Captain. The small ships are many in number,
but the big ships are comparatively few. Only the best of the best can
become Commanders at an age which enables them to reach post rank in
that early manhood which is a necessity for the command of a modern
super-Dreadnought. Many of those who do become Captains in the early
forties have to eat out their hearts upon half-pay because there are not
enough big ships in commission to go round. It is only in time of war
that the whole of our Fleets are mobilised. Some years ago I was dining
with several naval officers from a battle squadron which lay in the
Firth of Forth. Beside me sat a young man looking no more than
thirty-five, and actually little older. He was a Captain I knew, and in
course of conversation I asked for the name of his ship. “The
_Dreadnought_,” said he. This was the time when the name and fame of the
first _Dreadnought_, the first all-big-gun ship which revolutionised the
construction of the battle line, was ringing through the world. And yet
here was this famous ship in charge of a young smooth-faced fellow,
younger than myself, and I did not then consider that I was middle-aged!
“Are you not rather young?” I enquired diffidently. He smiled, “We need
to be young,” said he. Then I understood. It came home to me that the
modern Navy, with its incredibly rapid development in machinery, must
have in its executive officers those precious qualities of adaptability
and quick perception, that readiness to be always learning and testing,
seeking and finding the best new ways of solving old problems, which can
only be found in youth. Youth is of the essence of the Navy, it always
has been so and it probably always will be. Youth learns quickly, and
the Naval officer is always learning. In civil life we enter our
professions, we struggle through our examinations as doctors or lawyers
or engineers, and then we are content to pass our lives in practice and
forget our books. But the naval officer, whose active life is passed on
the salt sea, is ever a student. He goes backwards and forwards between
the sea and the schools. There is no stage and no rank at which his
education stops. Gunnery, torpedo practice, electricity, navigation,
naval strategy, and tactics are all rapidly progressive sciences. A few
years, a very few years, and a whole scheme of practice becomes
obsolete. So the naval officer needs for ever to be passing from the sea
to the _Vernon_, or the _Excellent_, or to Greenwich, where he is kept
up-to-date and given a perennial opportunity to develop the best that is
in him. From fifteen to forty he is always learning, always testing,
always growing, and then—unless his luck is very great—he has to give
way to the rising youth of other men and rest himself unused upon the
shelf. The highest posts are not for him. It is very remorseless the way
in which the Navy uses and uses up its youth, and very touching the
devoted humble way in which that youth submits to be so used up. The
Navy is ever growing in science and in knowledge, it must always have of
the best—the remorselessness with which it chooses only of the best,
and the patience with which those who are not of the best submit without
repining to its devices, are of the Soul of the Navy.
Admiral Sir David Beatty became Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet at
the age of forty-five. In years of life and of service he was junior to
half the Captains’ List. He had sprung by merit and by opportunity some
ten years above his contemporaries at Dartmouth. First in the Soudan,
when serving in the flotilla of gunboats, he won promotion from
Lieutenant to Commander at the age of twenty-seven. Again at Tien-tsin
in China, his chance came, and in 1900, while still under thirty, he
reached the captain’s rank. When the war broke out he was a Rear-Admiral
in command of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, and was given the
acting rank of Vice-Admiral. He is now an acting Admiral, and his
seniors in years, and even in rank, willingly serve beneath him. Admiral
Beatty is not a scientific sailor, and is not wedded to the Service as
are most of his brother officers. But for the outbreak of the war he
would probably have retired. Yet no one questions his pre-eminent
fitness for his dazzling promotion. He has that rare indefinable quality
of leadership of men and of war instinct which cannot be revealed except
by war itself. When, by fortunate chance, this quality is discovered in
an officer it is instantly recognised as beyond price, and cherished at
its full worth.
The Naval system which teaches subordination, also teaches independence.
If to men roaming over the seas in command of ships, orders come, it is
well; if orders do not come it is also well—they get on very well
without them. If the entire Admiralty were wiped out by German bombs, My
Lords and the whole staff destroyed, the Navy would, in its own
language, “proceed” to carry on. In the middle of the political crisis
of December 1916, when a new Naval Board of Admiralty had just been
appointed, I asked a senior officer how the new lot were getting on. He
said: “There isn’t any First Lord. The First Sea Lord is in bed with
influenza. The Second Sea Lord is in bed with influenza. The Third Sea
Lord is in bed with influenza. The Fourth Sea Lord is at work but is
sickening for influenza. _But the Navy is all right._” That is the note
of serene confidence which distinguishes the Sea Service. Whatever
happens, the Navy is all right.
The Navy is a poor man’s Service. It is a real profession in which the
officers as a rule live on their pay and ask for little more. Men of
great houses will enter the Army in time of peace and regard it as a
mild occupation, men of money will enter for the social position which
it may give to them. But no man of rank or of money in search of a
“cushy job,” was ever such an ass as to look for it in the Navy. Few
officers in the Navy—except among those who have entered in quite
recent years—have any resources beyond their pay; many of them are born
to it, and in their families there have been scanty opportunities for
saving. The Admiralty, until quite recently, required that young
officers upon entry into the Navy or the Marines should be allowed small
specified sums until they attained in service pay the eminence of about
11_s._ a day, and also that a complete uniform equipment should be
provided for them; but after that initial help from home they were
expected to make their pay suffice. And in the great majority of cases
they did what was expected of them. Living is cheap in the Sea Service.
Ships pay no duties upon their stores, and there are few opportunities
afloat for the wasting of money. Mess bills in wardroom and gun-room are
small, and must be kept small, or the captain will arise in wrath and
ask to be informed (in writing) of the reason why. Ere now young men
have been dismissed their ships for persistently running up too large a
wine bill; and to be dismissed one’s ship means not only a bad mark in
the Admiralty’s books, but loss of seniority, which in turn means an
extra early retirement upon that exiguous half-pay which looms always
like a dark cloud upon the naval horizon.
Unhappily for its officers and the country the Navy has not been a
married man’s service; it has been too exacting to tolerate a divided
allegiance. Sometimes poor young things under stress of emotion have got
married, and then has begun for them the most cruel and ageing of
struggles—the man at sea hard put to it to keep up his position, simple
though it be; the wife ashore in poor lodgings or in some tiny villa,
lonely, struggling, growing old too fast for her years; children who
rarely see their father, and whose prospects are of the gloomiest. I do
not willingly put my pen to this picture. Young Navy men, glowing with
health and virile energy, and the spirit of the Service, are very
attractive creatures to whom goes out the love of women, but though
they, too, may love, they are usually compelled to sail away. It is well
for them then if they are as firmly wedded to the Service as the Roman
priest is to his Church, and if they are not always as continent as the
priest, who is so free from sin that he will dare to cast a stone at
them? If the country and its rulers had any belief in heredity, of which
the evidence stares at them from the eyes of every naval son born to the
Service, they would grant to a young officer a year of leave in which to
be married, and pay to him and to his mate a handsome subsidy for every
splendid son whom they laid in the cradles of the Service of the future.
Of late years there has been a change. The rapid expansion of the Fleets
has brought in many young cadets of commercial families, whose parents
have far more money than is wholly good for their sons. The Navy is not
so completely a poor man’s service as it was even ten years ago. The
junior officers are, some of them, too well off. Not long since, a
senior Captain was lamenting this change in my presence. “The snotties
now,” he groaned, “all keep motor bicycles, the sub-lieutenants are not
happy till they own cars, and the Lieutenant-Commanders think nothing of
getting married. All this has been the result of concentrating the
Fleets in home waters. Germany compelled us to do it, but the Service
was the better for the three-year Commissions on foreign stations.” All
this is true. The junior ranks are getting richer. At sea they can spend
little, but ashore and in harbour there are opportunities for gold to
corrupt the higher virtues. For my part, however, I have the fullest
confidence in the training and the example of the older officers. In
this war there has been nothing to suggest that the young Navy is less
devoted and self-sacrificing than the old. The wealthier boys may take
their fling on leave—and who can blame them?—but at sea the Service
comes first.
We love that most which is most hardly won. And the Navy men love their
Service, not because it is easy but because of the hardness of it, and
because of the sacrifices which it exacts from them. It fastens its grip
upon them in those first years between fifteen and twenty, and the grip
grows ever tighter with the flight of time. It is at its very tightest
when the dreadful hour of retirement arrives. When War broke out, in
August 1914, it was hailed with joy by the active Navy afloat, but their
joy was as water unto wine in comparison with that which transfigured
the retired Navy ashore. For them at long last the impossible had
crystallised into fact. For those who were still young enough, the
uniforms were waiting ready in the tin boxes upstairs, and it was but a
short step from their house doors to the decks of a King’s ship. Once
more their gallant names could be written in the Active List of their
Navy. They hastened back, these eager ones, and if there was no
employment for them in their own rank, they snatched at that in any
other rank which offered. Captains R.N. became commanders and even
lieutenants R.N.R. in the Fringes. Admirals became temporary captains.
There were indeed at one time no fewer than nineteen retired admirals
serving as temporary officers R.N.R. in armed liners.
If you would understand how the Navy loves the Service, how that love is
not a part of their lives, but is their lives, reflect upon the case of
one aged officer. I will not give his name; he would not wish it. He had
been in retirement for nearly forty years, too old for service in his
rank, too old possibly for service in any rank. But his pleadings for
employment afloat softened the understanding hearts at Whitehall. He was
allowed to rejoin and to serve as a temporary Lieutenant-Commander in an
armed yacht which assisted the ex-Brazilian monitors sent to bombard the
Belgian coast. There against Zeebrugge he served among kindly lads young
enough to be his grandsons, and there with them and among them he was
killed—the oldest officer serving afloat. And he was happy in his
death. Not Wolfe before Quebec, not Nelson in the cockpit of the
_Victory_, were happier or more glorious in their deaths than was that
temporary Lieutenant-Commander (transferred at his own request from the
retired list) who fought his last fight upon the decks of an armed yacht
and died as he would have prayed to die.
The Navy hates advertisement and scorns above all things in heaven or
upon earth the indiscriminating praise of well-meaning civilians. I
sadly realise that it may scorn me and this book of mine. But I will do
my best to make amends. I will promise that never once in describing
their deeds will I refer to Navy men as “heroes.” I will not, where I
can possibly avoid doing so, mention the name of anyone. I will do my
utmost at all times to write of them as men and not as “b—— angels.” I
will, at the peril of some inconsistency, declare my conviction that
naval officers haven’t any souls, that they are in the Service because
they love it, and not because they care two pins for their country, that
they are rather pleased than otherwise when rotten civilians at home get
a bad fright from a raid. I will declare that they catch and sink German
submarines by all manner of cunning devices, from the sheer zest of
sport, and not because they would raise a finger to save the lives of
silly passengers in luxurious ocean liners. I will do anything to turn
their scorn away from me except to withdraw one word which I have
written upon the Soul of the Navy. For upon this subject they would, I
believe, write as I do if the gods had given to them leisure for
philosophical analysis—which they are much too busy to bother
about—and the knack of verbally expressing their thoughts. When I read
a naval despatch I always groan over it as an awful throwing away of the
most splendid opportunities. I always long to have been in the place of
the writer, to have seen what he saw, to know what he knew, and to tell
the world in living phrase what tremendous deeds were really done. Naval
despatches are the baldest of documents, cold, formal, technical, most
forbiddingly uninspiring. Whenever I ask naval officers why they do not
put into despatches the vivid details which sometimes find their way
into private letters they glare at me, and even their beautiful courtesy
can scarcely keep back the sniff of contempt. “Despatches,” say they,
“are written for the information of the Admiralty.” That is a complete
answer under the Naval Code. The despatches, which make one groan, are
written for the information of the Admiralty, not to thrill poor
creatures such as you and me. A naval officer cares only for his record
at the Admiralty and for his reputation among those of his own craft. If
a newspaper calls Lieutenant A—— B—— a hero, and writes
enthusiastically of his valour, he shudders as would a modest woman if
publicly praised for her chastity. Valour goes with the Service, it is a
part of the Soul of the Navy. It is taken for granted and is not to be
talked or written about. And so with those other qualities that spring
from the traditions of the Navy—the chivalry which risks British lives
to save those of drowning enemies, the tenderness which binds up their
wounds, the honours paid to their dead. All these things, which the
Royal Navy never forgets and the German Navy for the most part has never
learned, are taken for granted and are not to be talked of or written
about.
* * * * *
It is inevitable from the nature of its training that the Navy should be
intensely self-centred. If one catches a boy when he has but recently
emerged from the nursery, teaches him throughout his active life that
there is but one work fit for the service of man, dedicates him to it by
the strictest discipline, cuts him off by the nature of his daily life
from all intimate contact with or understanding of the world which moves
upon land, his imagination will be atrophied by disuse. He will become
absorbed into the Naval life which is a life entirely of its own, apart
and distinct from all other lives. There is a deep gulf set between the
Naval life and all other lives which very few indeed of the Navy ever
seek to cross. Their attitude towards civilians is very like that of the
law-making statesman of old who said: “The people have nothing to do
with the laws except to obey them.” If the Navy troubled to think of
civilians at all—it never does unless they annoy it with their futile
chatter in Parliament and elsewhere—it would say: “Civilians have
nothing to do with the Navy except to pay for it.” Keen as is the
imaginative foresight of the Navy in regard to everything which concerns
its own honour and effectiveness, it is utterly lacking in any
sympathetic imaginative understanding of the intense civilian interest
in itself and in its work. We poor creatures who stand outside, I who
write and you who read, do in actual fact love the Navy only a little
less devotedly than the Navy loves its own Service. We long to
understand it, to help it, and to pay for it. We know what we owe to it,
but we would ask, in all proper humility, that now and then the Navy
would realise and appreciate the certain fact that it owes some little
of its power and success to us.
I cannot in a formula define the collective Soul of the Navy. It is a
moral atmosphere which cannot be chemically resolved. It is a subtle and
elusive compound of tradition, self sacrifice, early training, willing
discipline, youth, simplicity, valour, chivalry, lack of imagination,
and love of the Service—and the greatest of these is Love. I have tried
to indicate what it is, how it has given to this wonderful Navy of ours
a terrible unity, a terrible force, and an even more terrible
intelligence; how it has transformed a body of men into a gigantic
spiritual Power which expresses its might in the forms and means of
naval warfare. I cannot exactly define it, but I can in a humble
faltering way do my best to reveal it in its working.