WITH THE GRAND FLEET: THE TERRIERS
AND THE RATS
“You missed a lot, Soldier,” said the Sub-Lieutenant to his friend the
Marine Subaltern, “through not being here at the beginning. Now it is
altogether too comfortable for us of the big ships; the destroyers and
patrols get all the fun while we hang about here in harbour or put up a
stately and entirely innocuous parade of the North Sea. No doubt we are
Grand in our Silent Might and Keep our Unsleeping Vigil and all the rest
of the pretty tosh which one reads in the papers—but in reality we eat
too much for the good of our waists and do too little work for our
princely pay. But it was very different at the beginning. Then we were
like a herd of wild buffaloes harassed day and night by
super-mosquitoes. When we were not on watch we were saying our prayers.
It was a devil of a time, my son.”
“I thought that you Commanded the Seas,” observed the marine, an
innocent youth who had lately joined.
The Sub-Lieutenant, dark and short, with twenty years to his age and the
salt wisdom of five naval generations in his rich red blood, grinned
capaciously, “So the dear simple old British Public thought. So their
papers told them every day. We did not often get a sight of
newspapers—there were no regular mails, as now, and none of the
comforts of an ordered civilised life, as some ass wrote the other day
of the Grand Fleet. What the deuce have we to do with an ordered
civilised life! Fighting’s our job, and that’s what we want, not beastly
comforts. While we were being chivied about by Fritz’s submarines it was
jolly to be told that we Commanded the Seas of the World. But to me it
sounded a bit sarcastic at a time when we had not got the length of
commanding even the entrances to our own harbours. That’s the cold
truth. For six months we hadn’t a submarine proof harbour in England or
Scotland or Ireland though we looked for one pretty diligently. We
wandered about, east and west and north, looking for some hole where the
submarines couldn’t get in without first knocking at the door, and where
we could lie in peace for two days together. Wherever we went it was the
same old programme. The Zepps would smell us out and Fritz would come
nosing around with his submarines, and we had to up anchor and be off on
our travels once more. At sea we were all right. We cruised always at
speed, with a destroyer patrol out on either side, so that Fritz had no
chance to get near enough to try a shot with the torpedo. A fast moving
ship can’t be hit except broadside on and within a range of about 400
yards; and as we always moved twice as fast as a submerged U boat he
never could get within sure range. He tried once or twice till the
destroyers and light cruisers began to get him with the ram and the gun.
Fritz must have had a good many thrilling minutes when he was fiddling
with his rudder, his diving planes and his torpedo discharge gear and
saw a destroyer foaming down upon him at over thirty knots. Fritz died a
clean death in those days. I would fifty times sooner go under to the
ram or the gun than be caught like a rat in some of the dainty traps
we’ve been setting for a year past. We are top dog now, but I blush to
think of those first few months. It was a most humiliating spectacle.
Fancy fifty million pounds worth of the greatest fighting ships in the
world scuttling about in fear of a dozen or two of footy little
submarines any one of which we could have run up on the main derrick as
easily as a picket boat. If I, a mere snotty in the old _Olympus_, felt
sore in my bones what must the Owners and the Admirals have felt? Answer
me that, Pongo?”
“It’s all right now, I suppose,” said the Pongo.
“Safe and dull,” replied he, “powerful dull. No chance of a battle, and
no feeling that any day a mouldy in one’s ribs is more likely than not.
If Fritz had had as much skill as he had pluck he would have blown up
half the Grand Fleet. Why he didn’t I can’t imagine, except that it
takes a hundred years to make a sailor. Our submarine officers, with
such a target, would have downed a battleship a week easy.”
“Fritz got the three Cressys.”
“He simply couldn’t help,” sniffed the Sub-Lieutenant. “They asked for
trouble; one after the other. Fritz struck a soft patch that morning
which he is never likely to find again.”
“Had the harbours no booms?”
“Never a one. We had built the ships all right, but we had forgotten the
harbours. There wasn’t one, I say, in the east or north or west which
Fritz could not enter whenever he chose to take the risk. He could come
in submerged, a hundred feet down, diving under the line of patrols, but
luckily for us he couldn’t do much after he arrived except keep us busy.
For as sure as ever he stuck up a periscope to take a sight we were on
to him within five seconds with the small stuff, and then there was a
chase which did one’s heart good. I’ve seen a dozen, all much alike,
though one had a queer ending which I will tell you. It explains a lot,
too. It shows exactly why Fritz fails when he has to depend upon
individual nerve and judgment. He is deadly in a crowd, but pretty
feeble when left to himself. We used to think that the Germans were a
stolid race but they aren’t. They have nerves like red-hot wires. I have
seen a crew come up out of a captured submarine, trembling and shivering
and crying. I suppose that frightfulness gets over them like drink or
drugs or assorted debauchery. Now for my story. One evening towards
sunset in the first winter—which means six bells (about three o’clock
in the afternoon) up here—a German submarine crept into this very
harbour and the first we knew of it was a bit alarming. The commander
was a good man, and if he had only kept his head, after working his way
in submerged, he might have got one, if not two, big ships. But instead
of creeping up close to the battleships, where they lay anchored near
the shore, he stuck up a periscope a 1,000 yards away and blazed a
torpedo into the brown of them. It was a forlorn, silly shot. They were
end on to him, and the torpedo just ran between two of them and smashed
up against the steep shore behind. The track of it on the sea was wide
and white as a high road, and half a dozen destroyers were on to that
submarine even before the shot had exploded against the rocks. Fritz got
down safely—he was clever, but too darned nervous for under-water
work—and then began a hunt which was exactly like one has seen in a
barn when terriers are after rats. The destroyers and motor patrols were
everywhere, and above them flew the seaplanes with observers who could
peer down through a hundred feet of water. In a shallow harbour Fritz
could have sunk to the bottom and lain there till after dark, but we
have 200 fathoms here with a very steep shore and there was no bottom
for him. A submarine can’t stand the water pressure of more than 200
feet at the outside. He didn’t dare to fill his tanks and sink, and
could only keep down in diving trim so long as he kept moving with his
electric motors and held himself submerged with his horizontal planes.
Had the motors stopped, the submarine would have come up, for in diving
trim it was slightly lighter than the water displaced. All we had to do
was to keep on hunting till his electric batteries had run down, and
then he would be obliged to come up. Do you twig, Pongo?”
“But he could have sunk to the bottom if he had chosen?”
“Oh, yes. But then he could never have risen again. To have filled his
tanks would have meant almost instant death. At 200 fathoms his plates
would have crumpled like paper.”
“Still I think that I should have done it.”
“So should I. But Fritz didn’t. He roamed about the harbour, blind,
keeping as deep down as he could safely go. Above him scoured the patrol
boats and destroyers, and above them again flew the seaplanes. Now and
then the air observers would get a sight of him and once or twice they
dropped bombs, but this was soon stopped as the risk to our own boats
was too great. Regarded as artillery practice bomb dropping from
aeroplanes is simply rotten. One can’t possibly aim from a thing moving
at fifty miles an hour. If one may believe the look outs of the
destroyers the whole harbour crawled with periscopes, but they were
really bully beef cans and other rubbish chucked over from the warships.
When last seen, or believed to be seen, Fritz was blundering towards the
line of battleships lying under the deep gloom of the shore, and then he
vanished altogether. Night came on, the very long Northern night in
winter, and it seemed extra specially long to us in the big ships.
Searchlights were going all through the dark hours, the water gleamed,
all the floating rubbish which accumulates so fast in harbour stood out
dead black against the silvery surface, and the Officers of the Watch
detected more periscopes than Fritz had in his whole service. The hunt
went on without ceasing for, at any moment, Fritz’s batteries might
peter out, and he come up. It was a bit squirmy to feel that here cooped
up in a narrow deep sea lock were over a hundred King’s ships, and that
somewhere below us was a desperate German submarine which couldn’t
possibly escape, but which might blow some of us to blazes any minute.”
“Did any of you go to sleep?” asked the Pongo foolishly.
The Sub-Lieutenant stared. “When it wasn’t my watch I turned in as
usual,” he replied. “Why not?
“In the morning there was no sign of Fritz, so we concluded that he had
either sunk himself to the bottom or had somehow managed to get out of
the harbour. In either case we should not see him more. So we just
forgot him as we had forgotten others who had been chased and had
escaped. But he turned up again after all. For twenty-four hours nothing
much happened except the regular routine, though after the scare we were
all very wide awake for more U boats, and then we had orders to proceed
to sea. I was senior snotty of the _Olympus_, and I was on the after
look-out platform as the ship cast loose from her moorings and moved
away, to take her place in the line. As we got going there was a curious
grating noise all along the bottom just as if we had been lightly
aground; everyone was puzzled to account for it as there were heaps of
water under us. The grating went on till we were clear of our berth, and
then in the midst of the wide foaming wake rolled up the long thin hull
of a submarine. A destroyer dashed up, and the forward gun was in the
act of firing when a loud voice from her bridge called on the gunners to
stop. ‘Don’t fire on a coffin,’ roared her commander. It was the German
submarine, which after some thirty hours under water had become a dead
hulk. All the air had long since been used up and the crew were lying at
their posts—cold meat, poor devils. A beastly way to die.”
“Beastly,” murmured the Marine. “War is a foul game.”
“Still,” went on the Sub-Lieutenant, cheerfully, “a dead Fritz is always
much more wholesome than a live one, and here were a score of him safely
dead.”
“But what had happened to the submarine?” asked the Marine, not being a
sailor.
“Don’t you see?” explained the Sub-Lieutenant, who had held his story to
be artistically finished. “What a Pongo it is! Fritz had wandered about
blind, deep down under water, until his batteries had given out. Then
the submarine rose, fouled our bottom by the merest accident, and stuck
there jammed against our bilge keels till the movement of the ship had
thrown it clear. It swung to the tide with us. The chances against the
submarine rising under one of the battleships were thousands to one, but
chances like that have a way of coming off at sea. Nothing at sea ever
causes surprise, my son.”
The Sub-Lieutenant spoke with the assurance of a grey-haired Admiral; he
was barely twenty years old, but he was wise with the profound salt
wisdom of the sea and will never get any older or less wise though he
lives to be ninety.
* * * * *
Though our friend the young Lieutenant of Marines was no sailor he was a
scholar, trained in the class-rooms and playing fields, of a great
English school. He was profoundly impressed, as all outsiders must be,
by the engrained efficiency of the seafolk among whom he now dwelt,
their easy mastery of the technicalities of sea craft, and their almost
childish ignorance of everything that lay outside it. It was borne in
upon him that they were a race apart, bred to their special work as
terriers and racehorses are bred, the perfect product of numberless
generations of sea fighters. It was borne in upon him, too, that no
nation coming late to the sea, like the Germans, could, though taking an
infinity of thought, possibly stand up against us. Sea power does not
consist of ships but of men. For a real Navy does not so much design and
build ships as secrete them. They are the expression in machinery of its
brains and Soul. He arrived at this conclusion after much patient
thought and then diffidently laid it before his experienced friend. The
Sub-Lieutenant accepted the theory at once as beyond argument.
“That’s the whole secret, my son, the secret of the Navy. Fritz can’t
design ships; he can only copy ours, and then he can’t make much of his
copies. Take his submarine work. He has any amount of pluck, though he
is a dirty swine; he doesn’t fail for want of pluck but because he
hasn’t the right kind of nerve. That is where Fritz fails and where our
boys succeed, because they were bred to the sea and their fathers before
them, and their fathers before that. Submarining as a sport is exactly
like stalking elephants on foot in long grass. One has to wriggle on
one’s belly till one gets within close range, and then make sure of a
kill in one shot. There’s no time for a second if one misses. Fritz will
get fairly close up, sometimes—or did before we had taken his
measure—but not that close enough to make dead sure of a hit. He is too
much afraid of being seen when he pops his periscope above water. So he
comes down between two stools. He is too far off for a certain hit and
not far enough to escape being seen. That story I told you the other day
was an exact illustration. The moment he pops up the destroyers swoop
down upon him, he flinches, looses off a mouldy, somehow, anyhow, and
then gets down. That sort of thing is no bally use; one doesn’t sink
battleships that fool way. Our men first make sure of their hit at the
closest range, and then think about getting down—or don’t get down.
They do their work without worrying about being sunk themselves the
instant after. That’s just the difference between us and the Germans,
between terriers and rats. It’s no good taking partial risks in
submarine work; one must go the whole hog or leave it alone.
“Risks are queer things,” went on the Sub-Lieutenant, reflectively. “The
bigger they are, the less one gets hurt. Just look at the seaplanes. One
would think that the ordinary dangers of flight were bad enough—the
failure of a stay, the misfiring of an engine, a bad gusty wind—and so
we thought before the war. It looked the forlornest of hopes to rush
upon an enemy plane, shoot him down at the shortest of range, or ram him
if one couldn’t get a kill any other way. It seemed that if two planes
stood up to one another, both must certainly be lost. And so they would.
Yet time and again our Flight officers have charged the German planes,
seen them run away or drop into the sea, and come off themselves with no
more damage than a hole or two through the wings. It’s just nerve, nerve
and breeding. When we dash in upon Fritz with submarine or seaplanes,
taking no count of the risks, but seeking only to kill, he almost always
either blunders or runs. It isn’t that he lacks pluck—don’t believe
that silly libel; Fritz is as brave as men are made—but he hasn’t the
sporting nerve. He will take risks in the mass, but he doesn’t like them
single; we do. He doesn’t love big game shooting, on foot, alone; we do.
He does his best; he obeys orders up to any limit; he will fight and die
without shrinking. But he is not a natural fighting man, and he is
always thinking of dying. We love fighting, love it so much that we
don’t give a thought to the dying part. We just look upon the risk as
that which gives spice to the game.”
“I believe,” said the Marine, thoughtfully, “that you have exactly
described the difference between the races. With us fighting and dying
are parts of one great glorious game; with Fritz they are the most
solemn of business. We laugh all the time and sing music-hall songs;
Fritz never smiles and sings the Wacht am Rhein. I am beginning to
realize that our irrepressible levity is a mighty potent force, mightier
by far than Fritz’s solemnity. The true English spirit is to be seen at
its best and brightest in the Navy, and the Navy is always ready for the
wildest of schoolboy rags. If I had not come to sea I might myself have
become a solemn blighter like Fritz.”
* * * * *
In the wardroom that evening the Marine repeated the Sub-Lieutenant’s
story and was assured that it was true. The Navy will pull a Soldier’s
leg with a joyous disregard for veracity, but there is a crudity about
its invention which soon ceases to deceive. They can invent nothing
which approaches in wonder the marvels which happen every day.
The talk then fell upon the ever-engrossing topic of submarine catching,
and experiences flowed forth in a stream which filled the Marine with
astonishment and admiration. He had never served an apprenticeship in a
submarine catcher and the sea business in small sporting craft was
altogether new to him.
“It is a pity,” at last said a regular Navy Lieutenant, “that submarines
are no good against other submarines. That is a weakness which we must
seek to overcome if, as seems likely in the future, navies contain more
under-water boats than any other craft.”
“That is not quite true,” spoke up a grizzled Royal Naval Reserve man,
and told a story of submarine _v._ submarine which I am not permitted to
repeat.
* * * * *
“Yes,” said the Commander of the _Utopia_ (The Pongo’s ship). “Very
clever and very ingenious. But did you ever hear how the Navy, not the
merchant service this time, caught a submarine off the —— Lightship.
That was finesse, if you please, Mr. Royal Naval Reserve.”
Our young marine hugged himself. He had set the Navy talking, and when
the Navy talks there come forth things which make glad the ears.
“You know the —— Lightship,” went on the Commander, a sea potentate of
thirty-five, with a passion for music-hall songs which he sang most
divinely. “She is anchored on a shoal which lies off the entrance to one
of the busiest of our English harbours. Though her big lantern is not
lighted in war time the ship remains as a day mark, and two men are
always on board of her. She is anchored on the top of a sandbank where
at low water there are not more than twelve feet, though close by the
channels deepen to thirty feet. A little while ago the men in the
Lightship were interested to observe a German submarine approach at high
water—of course submerged—and to take up a position about a hundred
yards distant where the low-water soundings were twenty-two feet. There
she remained on the bottom from tide to tide, watching through her
periscope all the shipping which passed in and out of the harbour. Her
draught in cruising trim was about fourteen feet, so that at high water
she was completely submerged except for the periscope and at low water
the top of her conning tower showed above the surface. At high tide she
slipped away with the results of her observations. The incident was
reported at once to the naval authorities and the lightship men were
instructed to report again at once if the submarine’s performance was
repeated. A couple of days later, under the same conditions, Fritz in
his submarine came back and the whole programme of watchfully waiting
was gone through again. He evidently knew the soundings to a hair and
lay where no destroyer could quickly get at him through the difficult
winding channels amid the sandbanks except when the tide was nearly at
the full. Even at dead low water he could, if surprised, rise and float
and rapidly make off to where there was depth enough to dive. He
couldn’t be rushed, and there were three or four avenues of escape.
Fritz had discovered a safe post of observation and seemed determined to
make the most of it. But, Mr. Royal Naval Reserve, even the poor effete
old Navy has brains and occasionally uses them. The night after the
second visit an Admiralty tug came along, hauled up the lightship’s
anchors, and shifted her exactly one hundred yards east-north-east. You
will note that the German submarine’s chosen spot was exactly one
hundred yards west-south-west of the lightship’s old position. The
change was so slight that it might be expected to escape notice. And so
it did. Three days passed, and then at high tide the U boat came
cheerfully along upon its mission and lay off the lightship exactly as
before. The only difference was that now she was upon the top of the
shoal with barely twelve feet under her at low water instead of
twenty-two feet. The observers in the lightship winked at one another,
for they had talked with the officer of the Admiralty tug and were wise
to the game. The tide fell, the submarine lay peacefully on the bottom,
and Fritz, intent to watch the movements of ships in and out of the
harbour, did not notice that the water was steadily falling away from
his sides and leaving his whole conning tower and deck exposed. Far away
a destroyer was watching, and at the correct moment, when the water
around the U boat was too shallow to float her even in the lightest
trim, she slipped up as near as she could approach, trained a 4-inch gun
upon Fritz and sent in an armed boat’s crew to wish him good-day. Poor
old Fritz knew nothing of his visitors until they were hammering
violently upon his fore hatch and calling upon him to come out and
surrender. He was a very sick man and did not understand at all how he
had been caught until the whole manœuvre had been kindly explained to
him by the Lieutenant-Commander of the destroyer, from whom I also
received the story. ‘You see, Fritz, old son,’ observed the
Lieutenant-Commander, ‘Admiralty charts are jolly things and you know
all about them, but you should sometimes check them with the lead.
Things change, Fritz; light-ships can be moved. Come and have a drink,
old friend, you look as if you needed something stiff.’ Fritz gulped
down a tall whisky and soda, gasped, and gurgled out, ‘That was damned
clever and I was a damned fool. For God’s sake don’t tell them in
Germany how I was caught.’ ‘Not for worlds, old man,’ replied the
Lieutenant-Commander. ‘We will say that you were nabbed while trying to
ditch a hospital ship. There is glory for you.’”
“A very nice story,” observed the Royal Naval Reserve man drily.
“I believed your yarn,” said the Commander reproachfully, “and mine is
every bit as true as yours. But no matter. Call up the band and let us
get to real business.”
Two minutes later the anteroom had emptied, and these astonishing naval
children were out on the half-deck dancing wildly but magnificently.
Commanders and Lieutenants were mixed up with Subs., clerks and snotties
from the gun room. Rank disappeared and nothing counted but the
execution of the most complicated Russian measures. It was a strange
scene which perhaps helps to reveal that combination of professional
efficiency and childish irresponsibility which makes the Naval Service
unlike any other community of men and boys in the world.