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THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET
The Work of the Merchant Seamen and Fishermen in the War
by
W. MACNEILE DIXON
Professor in the University of Glasgow
[Illustration]
New York
George H. Doran Company
Copyright, 1917.
By George H. Doran Company
Printed in the United States of America
FOREWORD
What follows is not written to praise our merchant sailors and
fishermen. They are indeed worthy of all praise. But we looked for
nothing else than that they would in every circumstance of trial and
danger show themselves to be what they are, peerless. At what date or
on what occasion in their history have they failed? From a fierier
ordeal a firmer courage and a harder resolution have emerged, as we
believed it would. Of this the world is already very well aware. Their
friends know it and their foes. What remains then is not to praise them
but to instruct ourselves. Our vision has been limited. We knew that
in the Navy lay our strength, but in our thoughts we defined it as the
Royal Navy. Till these troubled years the Merchant Service had for many
Englishmen only a shadowy existence. For the first time it has come
acutely home to us that "the sea is all one,--the navy is all one."
That ships are Britain's treasure, her shipping trade her most vital
industry, her sea-faring population her unique possession, the sea
itself her partner in her national fortunes, and her merchant sailors
the builders of her empire have been facts manifest enough to others,
perceived perhaps by Britons in moments of reflection, but how rarely
reflected in the full light of national consciousness.
"Thy story, thy glory,
The very fame of thee,
It rose not, it grows not,
It comes not, save by sea."
Let it not be said that we shall do justice to our merchant sailors
and fishermen when the history of their doings in these days comes
to be written. It will never be written. And for several good and
sufficient reasons. Battles on sea or land may be described, great
moments in the dreary annals of war. In armies masses of men, in fleets
numbers of ships act together, and some picture of the great assault
or the heroic defence can be painted in broad outlines. But the ships
of the merchant service are solitary wayfarers, scattered units in
a waste of waters. The adventures of a thousand ships, the deeds of
a thousand skippers, how are these to be set forth in a convenient
handbook? On each the sleepless watch, on each the long anxious hours,
and for how many of them the same tragic disaster? One record is like
another record; one story like another story. And as for their deeds
they differ hardly at all. If to meet the crisis as it should be met,
with perfect skill and perfect devotion to duty, be heroism, then all
are heroes. A hero to-day has for his Valhalla a newspaper paragraph.
Many good men have walked the earth as many good sailors have sailed
the sea without so much. Men do not always fight and die in the light,
and legions of shining acts must remain unsung. With the best will in
the world you cannot number the brave men in the world; nor make your
battle canvas as huge as you please will you find room in it for all
the gallant faces. If it be sad to think that they will be forgotten,
it is inspiring to think they are so many. Because courage and resource
and determination are everywhere, a single scene or act is nowhere
elevated above the rest. The unit is merged in the magnificent total.
You will say they form a wonderful series. It is indisputable, but the
historian cannot unify such a series or do justice to the individuals
who form it. Not this or that exceptional act which chance reveals, but
the compact body of its achievement, the pluck, the unshaken heart of
the whole service is the impressive thing. So we may put aside the hope
that the future will help us better than the present to appreciate the
"captains courageous" who in our time have upheld the long incomparable
tradition of British seamen and seamanship. Yet if Britain be persuaded
by their deeds to do justice to their successors, which will be
nothing more than to do justice to herself, we may believe that even
though unrecorded nothing has been lost. In the temple or cathedral or
national monument one does not count less essential or less worthy the
stones that are hid from view.
CONTENTS
PAGE
A MARITIME NATION 9
THE KEY-STONE OF THE ARCH 19
SEA WARFARE: THE NEW STYLE 33
THE MINE-FISHERS 53
THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 71
OLD SAILORS
With many an old Sailor, on many an old ship,
Who hoisted out many a barrel onto many an old slip,
And went below to his hammock or to a can of flip
Like an old Sailor of the Queen's
And the Queen's old Sailor.
With many an old brave captain we shall never know,
Who walked the decks under the colours when the winds did blow,
And made the planks red with his blood before they carried him below
Like an old Sailor of the Queen's
And the Queen's old Sailor.
And in Davy Jones's Taverns may they sit at ease,
With their old tarpaulin aprons over their old knees,
Singing their old sea ballads and yarning of the seas
Like good old Sailors of the Queen's
And the Queen's old Sailors.
--From _A Sailor's Garland_,
edited by John Masefield.
THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET
A MARITIME NATION
I built the ships and I sailed the ships, and they lie in my
havens fair,
With the sea-god's salt on their crusted plates and the green
of the sea nymph's hair;
I built the ships and I sailed the ships, on the slack and the
flowing tide;
Will ye match my skill in the hulls I build on the narrow seas
or wide?
Will ye match my men from the oceans five, or better the work
of their hands
From the books that are writ or the tales that are told, the
tales of the hundred lands?
Cease to think of Britain's naval power in terms of battleships and
cruisers and you begin to understand it. Think of it rather in terms
of trade routes and navigation, of ship and dockyards, of busy ports
and harbours, of a deeply indented coast line, 7,000 miles in length;
of great rivers flowing into wide estuaries; of liners and tramps;
weatherly east coast trawlers and burly Penzance luggers; of ancient
fishing villages looking out from every bay and rocky inlet. Built
by nature to be the home of a maritime people, inhabited by the
descendants of sea-faring races, accessible only from other lands by
water, every stone in the British Isles is fitted into a geographical
foundation. Not many of us know it but we are none the less children
of the sea and live by it. We are its captives and masters, imprisoned
by it and forcing it to serve our needs. In the language daily on
our lips are phrases salt as the ocean itself--we "make headway" and
"weather a difficulty"; we are "taken aback," or "out of soundings"
or have "the wind taken out of our sails," or discern "rocks ahead,"
or find "another shot in the locker." To the people who made this
language the sea has been the "nursing mother." View it thus, and the
Royal Navy becomes no more than a symbol, the expression of a peculiar
national life. Science may think of it as the tough exterior hide, the
armour, like that of the dinosaurus, with which nature in the process
of evolution provides her mightiest creatures. It is in fact simply
the glittering shaft on the string of a powerful bow, the power is in
the bow and not the arrow. Any one can see that the mere possession
of a fleet cannot bestow naval power. The Royal Navy occupies indeed
to-day the centre of the picture, yet without the vast and supporting
background of arsenals, building yards, docks, harbours, bases, a
fleet is nothing. Behind it lives, moves and has its being, the great
maritime nation--an organisation of extreme complexity with its coal
and iron mines, its manufactories, its endless machinery and, far
above all, its age-long tradition and experience of the sea. View it
historically, and the Royal Navy is the heir of the Merchant Service,
the inheritor of its fighting spirit and tradition. Not till Victoria's
reign was any clear line of division drawn between the merchant sailor
and the man-of-war's-man. Both stood together in the nation's first
line of defence during the critical moments of its history, when
Philip planned his great _coup_, and Napoleon bestrode the world like
a Colossus. And now that the fiery wheel of fate has revolved once
more and swept the peoples into the maelstrom of war, history repeats
itself, and the mariners of England from the merchant and fishing
fleets are fighting men once more as in the old and famous days.
Histories, as they have too often been written, obscure the vision
and provide a false perspective. Faithful chronicles no doubt of the
red-letter days of battle, but how few and far between were the battles
in our long naval wars! Too often the histories speak of the Navy as
if it were a thing apart, a mere fighting instrument, and forget to
tell us of the fleets behind the fleet; of the merchant sailors and
the fishermen, the pioneers and the builders of our sea-supported
confederacy. These "traders," it was said of the Elizabethan seamen,
"escaped the notice of kings and chroniclers." Nevertheless it was
these men who saved England and America from becoming provinces of
Spain. We Englishmen forget, if we have ever considered and known, that
in all their naval enterprises, and they have not been few, the country
invariably called upon her merchantmen and fisher folk; upon all her
resources in men and ships. The "navy," as we call it, what has history
to say of it? That until the reign of Henry VIII, the pious founder of
the Royal Navy, it was, in fact, neither more nor less than England's
mercantile marine. As for Elizabeth's tall ships and proud captains,
Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher and many another, they were stout
merchant skippers, and of the fleet which met the Great Armada, near
upon 200 sail, but 34 belonged to the Queen's Navy. In that expedition
to Cadiz, too, which singed the whiskers of His Majesty of Spain, not
more than 5 or 6 in a fleet of 40 vessels were men-of-war. In its palmy
days the Merchant Navy was accustomed and very well able to look after
itself, and not seldom lent a hand in the affairs of magnitude and
importance. Trading and fighting indeed went together; buccaneers and
privateers abounded, and the line between war and peace was negligently
drawn. Peace there might be on land, but never a year passed, never a
month, for that matter, without its encounters at sea.
Through the 17th and 18th centuries it was much the same. Britain's
"navy" consisted of little more than merchantmen and their crews; for
themselves and for her they traded; for themselves and for her they
fought. As the records show, officers of the Royal Navy on half-pay
or the retired list were not too proud to go to sea in command of
merchantmen; a practice which continued till the crowning year 1815.
On the "glorious first of June" 1796, the merchant service won his
victory for Lord Howe, and the fleets of Hood and Nelson must have
employed not less than 50,000 men, who learnt their sea-going and their
fighting as fishermen or traders. Nelson himself--symbol let it be of
the inseparable fellowship--served his apprenticeship on a merchantman,
and in those days service afloat, whether in king's ship or trader,
counted for promotion in the Royal Navy. As for fighting, no one ever
complained that the men of the merchant service shrank from undertaking
that business, or fell short in the performance of it.
It was a merchant ship, the Mountjoy, that in 1689 under the fire of
the shore batteries led the vessels sent to the relief of Derry. She
rammed and shattered the boom, forced the barrier, and raised the
historic siege. "To prevent all thoughts among my men of surrendering
ye ship," wrote the commander of the _Chambers_, an East India merchant
vessel in 1703, when attacked by a French 64 and a frigate, "I nailed
the ensigne to the staff from head to foot, and stapled and forecockt
the ensigne staff fast up. I resolved to part with ship and life
together." In 1804 the East India Company's fleet in the China Seas
engaged, beat off and pursued a powerful squadron of war vessels which
contained 2 frigates and a line-of-battle ship of 74 guns, under the
Comte de Linois. As for transport, how many expeditions of British
soldiers have been ferried by British merchantmen? A fleet of no less
than 90 vessels took part in the great expedition to the Crimea in
1854, which carried 30,000 men and 3,000 horses to the distant seat of
war; while in 1860 two hundred vessels transported troops to China.
"I do not remember," wrote Lord Wolseley, "having witnessed a grander
sight than our fleet presented when steering for the Peiho. All ships
were under full sail, the breeze being just powerful enough to send
them along at about 5 knots an hour, and yet no more than rippled the
sea's surface, which shone with all the golden hues of a brilliant
sunshine. The ships were in long lines, one vessel behind the other,
with a man-of-war leading each line.... Looking upon that brilliant
naval spectacle I could scarcely realise the fact of being some 16,000
miles from England."
During the South African War, conducted 6,000 miles from home, almost a
million soldiers were carried across the seas, and about a million tons
of stores. Hundreds of trading vessels were then employed. To-day we
may count these elementary operations, for the fighting navy held the
sea, and better parallels to the work of our merchant seamen in these
times may be found in our earlier wars.
Gradually indeed during the last 100 years, the services drew apart.
Gradually the Board of Trade usurped the control of the Royal
prerogative exercised through the Admiralty, of the nation's shipping;
but the hand of war has turned back the leaves, and Britain's naval
power has again to be calculated, as it should never have ceased to
be calculated, in the broad terms of men and ships; the extent and
efficiency not of this service or that, but of the assembled and
fraternal society of the sea. In its charge to-day is the destiny of
the nations.
It is a good story, that of the British sailor in the long centuries
that lie between us and Beowulf, the first seafarer and warrior in
the 7th century, of which our literature tells. And if ever there was
a tale to catch the ear it lies to the hand of the future historian
of the Merchant Marine, for without it, without the resolution and
enterprise with which it espoused the country's cause, the story were
long since ended. That is the gist of the matter, and argument about it
there can be none. Not for a moment is it disputable that despite all
its immense resources and striking power the Grand Fleet could not have
saved Europe or Britain as they have been saved from ruinous defeat.
Without her merchant sailors, without her fisher-folk in this war as
waged with a cunning and ruthless foe, the life blood of Britain would
inevitably have ebbed away drop by drop, a creeping and fatal paralysis
overtaken her. Had her merchant sailors faltered, had her fisher-folk
been less resolute, had their old qualities not sprung forth to meet
the new and deadly perils, the destiny of the world would have been
other than it will be. Not once or twice have they thus stood across
the dragon's path. History, then, repeats itself, but on a scale by
sea and land that dwarfs even the spacious days when the Armada sailed
from Spain, or Nelson scoured the Mediterranean. History repeats
itself, but with a difference. The incidence of the pressure and the
strain, protracted, exhausting, of this war, has been less directly
upon the Grand Fleet, equal and more than equal to all that it has been
called upon to perform. The incidence of the pressure has fallen, as
it has always fallen, upon those men who were not by profession of the
fighting company; upon ships and men engaged till the fateful year 1914
in peaceful callings; toilers of the deep who rolled round the world on
the trade routes, or pursued the whale south of the equatorial line, or
dragged their heavy trawls through the cold seas of the north.
It is no new thing then for men of the merchant service to man their
guns and fight their ships. And not for the first time has Britain
mobilised all her maritime resources. Never before, however, in a
fashion so far-reaching or so impressive. Her previous history is
written over again but in larger characters. Never before have her
merchant navies been called upon to support so stupendous an operation,
to carry almost the whole weight of transport and supplies for millions
of fighting men. Since ships are the railroads of the Allies; since
without ships neither soldiers nor guns can reach the distant seats
of war; since without them Britain herself cannot hope to sustain her
life--ships and sailors have been and are, as they have been in the
past, the first and last and utterly essential element.
None but a great maritime people, however powerful its fighting fleets,
could have faced or upheld for a week the gigantic undertaking. We
speak of an empire of thirteen million square miles, of four hundred
millions of inhabitants. We should speak of it as an empire of ships
and sailors, an empire of tonnage--20 millions of it--carrying the
weight of half the world's goods, a voyaging empire, in everlasting
motion on the seas, that in days of peace serves every race and
country--
To give the poles the produce of the sun,
And knit the unsocial climates into one.
that unites in a close-wrought texture the whole fabric of
civilisation, links island to island, continent to continent; a
prodigious network of travel. The empire of ships, that has brought
the East to meet the West, sought out the far and foreign lands;
enabled China and India and the Isles to interchange ideas and gifts
with Europe, is not the fleet of battleships but that other which, in
times of peace, extended in a fashion no other instrument has ever
rivalled, and enriched beyond arithmetic the intercourse and resources
of mankind.
THE KEY-STONE OF THE ARCH
These are the men who sailed with Drake,
Masters and mates and crew:
These are the men, and the ways they take
Are the old ways through and through;
These are the men he knew.
The communications of the Great Alliance--it is their point of
vulnerability--are sea communications, and if that key-stone slips
"Rome in Tiber melts, and the wide arch
Of the ranged Empire falls."
From the first the Central Powers held the splendid advantage of the
interior and shorter lines. Theirs were the spokes of the wheel, the
spokes along which run the railways. On the circumference of the
wheel held by the Alliance, on the rim of ocean, went and came all
things--men and the interminable machinery of war. The Allied and far
longer lines therefore on the arc of an immense circle traverse the
sea from Archangel to Gibraltar; from Gibraltar to Suez or the Cape;
from Suez to Colombo; from Colombo to Melbourne; from Melbourne to
Vladivostok. Nothing less was here required than a railroad belting
the globe, whose rolling stock was ships. And the problem faced by
Britain, as the great maritime partner in the alliance of 1913, remains
essentially a problem of sea transport, and transport on a scale wholly
without parallel in the world's history. Since Britain herself had
never dreamt of raising an army of five million men, provision for
the bridge of boats required for such numbers, with all their battle
apparatus, had found no place in her plans. But she had ships and
sailors.
"We have just returned here after making three trips with troops from
Southampton to France," wrote an officer. "It was really marvellous
work. Southampton was full of troop ships and like clock work they were
handled. Every ship had a number allotted to her and a special signal.
One ship would arrive alongside, fill up her holds and decks, and, in
less than half-an-hour, she was away again. As soon as they got one
vessel off her berth, up would go the signal for another steamer to
take her place, and so the work went on. Ship followed ship off the
port like a line of vessels manœuvring. Orders came for 94 to go
alongside. Up went the signal, and in less time than it takes one to
write, we were following the rest."
The ferrying of vast human and material cargoes across the Channel--an
undertaking one might think serious enough--was in fact a trifle
compared with the undertaking as a whole; for, since the recruiting
areas for Britain's forces lay in every latitude, there fell within
it the transference of great bodies of troops from Australia and New
Zealand across 10,000 miles of ocean, from India across 6,000 miles;
from Canada, more than 2,000 miles away, and not, be it remembered,
a transference to Britain or France only but to Egypt, the Persian
Gulf, the Dardanelles, Salonika; a transference continuous, unending,
processional.
"It is not only a war with Germany," said Sir Edward Carson. "You
have a war--a naval war--going on over the whole of the seas--war
in the Channel, war in the Atlantic, war in the Pacific, war in
the Mediterranean, war round Egypt, war in the Adriatic, war in
Mesopotamia, war at Salonika, and day by day the Navy is called upon to
supply the material for carrying on all these wars. Did anybody ever
contemplate a war of that kind? When I mention one figure to you that
at the commencement of the war we had something like 150 small vessels
for patrol work, and now we have something like 3,000, you will see
the gigantic feat that has been accomplished by the Navy. In all these
theatres of war we have to provide patrols, convoys, mine-sweepers,
mine-layers, air service, mine-carriers, fleet messengers."
Owing to the demands of the Royal Navy upon the shipyards additions
to mercantile tonnage were out of the question. With the ordinary
resources of peace the vast unapprehended responsibilities of war had
to be met. There was no other way. Besides the armies and the great
guns, the various belligerent zones called for hundreds of miles of
railroad with engines and rolling stock complete; horses and mules
and their fodder; cargoes of wood for trench making; river boats in
sections for the Persian Gulf; motor lorries, literally in thousands;
material and food for whole moving populations and their multiform
activities.
"During the last five or six weeks," said Sir William Robertson on May
12, "we have expended no less than 200,000 tons of munitions in France
alone, and we have taken out some 50,000 tons of stones for making and
mending roads." "Everything has been taken ashore," wrote an officer on
transport service in the East, "by lighters and rafts. The major part
of our cargo is railway material, cattle trucks, ambulance vans, oxen,
horses, mules, fodder, ammunition and troops. We have a mixture of
everything necessary for warfare from 'a needle to an elephant.'"
Think also of the coal, carried overseas to the Allies; nitrates
shipped from South, munitions from North America; ore from Spain and
the Mediterranean; and contemplate the dizzy shuffling on the high seas
of these mighty freights. All the while the needs of peace remained
inexorable. The sugar and the wheat, the cotton, coffee and all the
other requirements of the home population of these islands had still
unceasingly to be provided. The mind refuses to calculate in these
dimensions; our foot-rules will not measure them. Let us however write
down the unthinkable figures. Eight millions of men; ten million tons
of supplies and explosives; over a million sick and wounded; over a
million horses and mules; fifty million gallons of petrol alone. These
of course are merely the additional undertakings of war. To complete
the picture one has to include ordinary imports and exports, such
trifles as 100 million hundredweights of wheat; seven million tons
of iron ore; 21 million centals of cotton--the figures for 1916. For
the same 12 months the value of the home products _exported_ was 500
millions. British ships have been busy in these thundering years!
But the Allies, you will say, assisted. France had 360 ocean-going
vessels; Italy about the same number; Russia 174; Belgium 67. No
doubt, yet these nations were nevertheless borrowers, not lenders.
Their ships were far from sufficient for their own necessities, and
to France, Britain despite her own searching requirements, lent about
600 ships, to Italy about 400, a sixth of her own far from adequate
supply. "Without our Mercantile Marine the Navy--and indeed--the
nation--could not exist," said Admiral Jellicoe. One perceives the
truth of it. But the tale does not end there. About a hundred merchant
ships were commissioned as auxiliary cruisers, and armed with guns
like the _Carmania_ took their share in the fighting. The _Empress of
Japan_ captured the collier _Exford_, the _Macedonia_ rounded up the
transports accompanying Von Spee, the _Orama_ was in at the death
of _Dresden_. Colliers too are needed for the Royal Navy; supply and
repair ships; auxiliaries for the fighting flotillas and the great
blockade patrol. Extending from the Shetlands to the coast of Greenland
and the Arctic ice a wide net had to be flung whose meshes were British
ships. And yet again in the narrow seas and in the defiles of the trade
routes, day in day out, the British trawlers--fleets of them--swept for
the German mines.
What were, in fact, the maritime resources that made these things at
all possible? At the outbreak of war Britain possessed over 10,000
ships, and of these about 4,000 ocean-going ships were over 1,600
tons; of smaller ocean traders there were about 1,000. Add to these
the fishing trawlers and drifters, over 3,000 of which are now in
Government employ. Gradually the traders were requisitioned, at first
for military then for national purposes. Sugar was the first article
for which Government took responsibility, first and early. Then came
wheat, maize, rice and other grains. To these were added month by
month many other commodities of which the authorities took charge and
for which they found the necessary tonnage. The pool of free ships
diminished, contracted to narrow limits and finally dried up. Britain's
shipping virtually passed in 1916 wholly under national control. That
is in brief the history of the ships; but what of the crews? What
of the men and their willingness to serve under war conditions,
surrounded by deadly risks. If we include over 100,000 fishermen,
the marine population of the empire may be reckoned at not less than
300,000 men. Of these 170,000 are British seamen; 50,000 are Lascars,
and 30,000 belong to other nationalities. There you have the absolute
total of sea-farers, to whose numbers, owing to their way of life and
the peculiarity of their profession it is impossible during war rapidly
or greatly to add. No other reservoir of such skill and experience as
theirs can anywhere be found. Perhaps the most valuable community in
the world to-day and certainly irreplaceable. Means of replenishing it
there is none. A Royal Commission appointed in 1858 reported that the
nation "possesses in the Merchant Service elements of naval power such
as no other Government enjoys," and in 1860 the Royal Naval Reserve Act
was passed, by which the Royal Naval Volunteers became the Royal Naval
Reserve, and a force enrolled which, though inadequate in numbers, has
proved of inestimable value. The Royal Naval Reserve man signs on for
a term of 5 years; undergoes each year a short period of training, and
reports himself twice a year to the authorities. While in training he
receives navy pay and a retaining fee of £4.10. a year during service
as a merchant seaman. Twenty years' service qualifies for a pension and
a medal. Belonging to this force there were at the outbreak of the war
about 18,500 officers and men available, but the number of merchant
sailors and fishermen serving with the combatant forces has been
trebled and now stands at 62,500. Add to these another 100,000 merchant
sailors who, since they share all the risks of a war with an enemy
that makes no distinction between belligerents and non-combatants, may
well be included among Britain's defenders, and one begins to perceive
the true nature and extent of the nation's maritime resources and
the utter dependence upon these resources of an island kingdom--the
vulnerable heart of a sea sundered empire. In 1893 the Imperial
Merchant Service Guild had been established, a body, the value of whose
services, already notable, cannot yet be fully calculated. To it, and
to the profession it represents, the nation will yet do justice. For
the professional skill and invincible courage of her merchant seamen
has at length made clear to Britain the secret of her strength; the
knowledge that to them she owes her place and power in the world.
She has found in them the same skill and the same courage with which
their forefathers sailed and fought in all the country's earlier wars.
"The submarine scare," said the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_, "has struck
England with paralysing effect, and the whole sea is as if swept clean
at one blow." To this one answers that the sailing of no British ship
has been delayed by an hour by fear of the submarine menace. If the
sea be indeed swept clear of ships how strange that every week records
its batch of victims! A sufficient testimony, one would think, to
their presence, and, might not one add, of equal eloquence in their
praise. It was assumed--a magnificent assumption--that a British crew
could never fail. It never did. The _Vedamore_ was torpedoed off the
coast of Ireland, and most of her crew killed or drowned. In wild and
wintry weather the survivors, 16 in all, after many hours' exposure
in open boats, made a successful landing. These 16 reached London and
proposed, you will say, to snatch a few days' rest, a little comfort
after their miseries. Their object was a different one:--to ask for a
new ship. "Had enough?" one of the crew of the torpedoed _Southland_
was asked, when he came ashore. "Not me," he replied, "I shall be off
again as soon as I can find a berth." "If," said one torpedoed seaman,
"there were fifty times the number of submarines it wouldn't make no
difference to us. While there's a ship afloat there will be plenty
to man her. My mates and I were torpedoed a fortnight ago and just
as soon as we get another ship we shall be off." She has her faults,
has Britain, but she still breeds men: And mothers of men. Take the
authentic circumstance of the vessel whose crew was not of British
stock. They declined when safely in port to undertake another and
risky voyage. But there appeared to them next day an Englishwoman, the
Captain's wife, with the announcement, perhaps unwelcome, that she
proposed on that trip to accompany her husband. She went; and with
her, for their manhood's sake, the reluctant crew.
You may say "It is not in nature that there should have been no
failures." Well, here is one. "Only a short while ago," said Mr.
Cuthbert Laws, "we found it necessary to prosecute a seaman who
had failed to join a transport, and there was no doubt that he was
technically guilty, but he set up and successfully sustained a defence
which is unique in the annals of the Mercantile Marine. He admitted
that he had failed to join the vessel, but he said that his reason for
doing so was that his shipmates refused to sail with him because he
had already been torpedoed six times. In other words, while they were
prepared to take the ordinary sporting chance of being blown up, they
were not prepared to accept the handicap of having a Jonah on board."
The story of docks and harbours, of the loading and unloading of the
war freights merits a chapter of its own. To understand it you must
remember that ships are of many sizes and of very varying draught. The
depths of water in the ports, the tides, the quay accommodation, the
provision of cranes and sorting sheds, of available railway trucks have
in each case to be considered. Grain requires one type of machinery for
unloading, timber another, fruit or meat yet another. If the cargo be
mixed and consigned perhaps to hundreds of dealers, in various parts of
the country, sorting sheds are a necessity. Many harbours provide only
for small coasting craft and cannot accommodate large ocean traders,
many are affected by tide and quite unprovided with docks; others again
lack quay and truck accommodation save of the simplest order. There
is also the problem of dock labourers, men skilled in the handling of
particular types of cargo. Manifestly you cannot order any ship to any
port. Vessels must therefore run to their usual harbours and to provide
the machinery for "turning them" rapidly round presents, under the
congested conditions of war, a problem of extreme complexity. Heavy
munition trains, miles upon miles of them, are daily pouring into the
Southern ports. Great guns, railway trucks and engines and rails form a
part of these stupendous freights. There are many harbours in the South
but few capable of berthing, loading and unloading the largest liners,
and if we would criticise these operations, and free criticism of them
has been, after our national manner, plentiful, we should understand
that to the transport work of peace that of the greatest of wars has
been added, and understand too that the shipping problem involves
much more than ships, and requires to-day something like the higher
mathematics for its solution.
"Both are now one service in spirit," wrote Admiral Jellicoe of the
Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marine, "and never have British seamen
united in a more stern and mighty cause." Say what we will, be it in
prose or verse, it falls short of their deserving. The merchant sailor
and the fisherman has had his share in the fighting and more than his
share in the labours of the war. They took part in Jutland and the
earlier battles. Some are in command of destroyers and torpedo boats,
others of vessels on the blockade patrol or of submarine chasers;
others again of transport and repair ships. On mine carriers and mine
sweepers they serve; on paddle steamers and panting tug boats; on
water ships and balloon ships; on salvage and escort work. They are
to be found on trawlers and drifters and motor craft; on captured
German steamers, now playfully renamed, the Hun line,--_Hun-gerford_,
_Hun-stanton_; on oilers and colliers and meat ships, in the North Sea
and Mediterranean and the distant oceans; on transport and repair, on
observation and remount and hospital vessels everywhere. They gathered
the great armies from the ends of the earth, they fuel and munition the
Grand Fleet; the Suez Canal knows them and the Royal Indian Marine and
the African rivers. No sea that has not seen them, "no climate that
is not witness to their toils." For proof that they are a pugnacious
breed read the story of the Gallipoli landings, where Commander Unwin
and Midshipman Drewry won each his Victoria Cross, where supplies
were daily put ashore under the shrapnel fire from Turkish batteries;
read the story of _Carmania's_ fight with _Cap Trafalgar_; of _Clan
McTavish_ and her spirited combat with _Möwe_, which filled the seamen
of the Grand Fleet with delighted admiration. Read of the whalers
in Sudi harbour, of the attacks on Jubassi in the Cameroons; of the
actions on the Tigris and Rafigi rivers, in all which actions officers
of the Merchant Service distinguished themselves. Called upon for every
type of action, navigating under war conditions by lightless coasts,
responsible for new and strange undertakings, in armed or defenceless
craft, on the bridge of sinking ships or adrift in open boats, the
fearless spirit of the British sailor meets the occasion, and as
with his ancestor and prototype of the Viking times, the harder the
enterprise the harder grows his heart.
It is good for us now and then to contemplate men nobler than
ourselves; to be told that volunteers over 60 years of age paid their
own passage from Australia to serve afloat, that there is at least one
engineer--and a health to him--of over 80 with a commission in the
Royal Naval Reserve. For who is there so dead at heart as not to covet
so springing and mounting a spirit? "I have taken the depth of the
water," said Admiral Duncan in the engagement off the Texel, "and when
the _Venerable_ goes down, my flag will still fly."
There is something in it, this companionship with the sea, that kindles
what is heroic in a race to the finest resolution. Perhaps it is not
to be expected that we shore-dwellers should have more than a languid
appreciation of hardships and labours indescribable and should read
tales of the sea rather for pleasure than edification, but if ever a
people had masters in the school of nobility we are fortunate in our
teachers of to-day. Already over 3,000 men and officers of the Royal
Naval Reserve have fallen in their country's service, and of Merchant
Sailors pursuing their ordinary calling not fewer. Born fighters, you
will say, the English. Yes, but these men died most of them without
hope of glory.
When Captain Wicks of the _Straton_ dashed in among the wreckage of the
sinking _Runo_ and assisted in the saving of 200 lives, the look-out
man shouted to him "Two mines right ahead, sir." "Can't be helped,"
replied the Captain, "it is risking lives to save lives." Which is
indeed in a sentence the daily task, whatever or wherever the allotted
posts of these cavaliers of the sea. The day dawns or the night
descends, to find them on the bridge or in the engine-room, North or
South of the Line, running the grim gauntlet of murderous things that
the sea, with all its grey ages of experience, never before has known.
SEA WARFARE: THE NEW STYLE
Come all ye jolly mariners, and list ye while I tell,
Afore we heave the capstan round and meet the Channel swell,
Of a handy ship, and sailor lads and women folk, a score,
And gallant gentlemen who sail below the ocean floor;
A tale as new, and strange and true as any historie,
Of the German law and courtesie
And custom of the sea.
That our merchant seamen would be called upon to face the fiercest
blast of the storm would have seemed a fantastic prophecy. Look however
at the circumstances. They have been called paradoxical, unprecedented
in the whole previous history of naval war. To think of it! A
fleet--the British--of immeasurable and unchallenged strength, beyond
debate absolute upon the seas, is found unable to protect its country's
commerce! Slowly it rose and took shape, this spectre of an incredible,
amazing situation. A new situation? Yes, in a way, for the weapons
were new, but not so new as it appears. Have any of us considered the
losses of our Mercantile Marine in the American or the Napoleonic wars?
During the latter we captured 440 French ships. How many did we lose?
Five thousand three hundred and fourteen British vessels were captured
by the French! Our losses were over 40 per cent of our tonnage! This,
remember, was in Nelson's days, when we held command of the sea. With
these facts in mind one is better able to judge the price of sea
supremacy and to understand that fleets have never been able wholly to
safeguard commerce. As in our previous history the situation arises
from the very supremacy of the Grand Fleet, a supremacy so complete
as to leave no alternative to the weaker naval power which, in such
circumstances, invariably resorts to the _guerre de course_. In the
under water campaign we have a new form of attack, but it is simply the
confession that upon the sea Germany was powerless and had abandoned
hope. No less a confession, too, that beneath the sea and against the
British Navy she was equally powerless. Who can doubt that had the
chance been given she would unhesitatingly have preferred victory in
fair fight, a victory resounding and glorious. That denied her, she
declined upon victory without honour, of any pattern and at any price.
She gave free range to her unmatched genius for destruction. Men, when
they discussed naval warfare, viewed it with speculative eye as a
clash of battleships in one or two terrific, decisive, world-shaking
encounters. Few, if any, foresaw that the enemy, declining the great
issue, would aim at a slow grinding pressure, adopting a kind of
warfare in which the fighting fleets would hardly feel the shock. There
indeed they lie in the misty North, volcanic and destroying powers,
which any hour may release, and yet from day to day and month to month
they wait unchallenged, and the enemy blows are directed and dealt
against less formidable adversaries. They rain with desperate violence
against men whose profession was never that of arms, who nevertheless
were they offered a fair field and no favour would prove themselves
more than a match for their assailants. Unsustained by the exhilaration
of battle, defenceless, and in single, far-separated ships, their part
in the drama offers few attractions. There are enviable occupations, no
doubt, even in war, but who would choose the part of a running target
for enemy shells and torpedoes?
It is natural to enquire how far Admiral Mahan's pronouncement on
commerce destruction is true to-day. "The harassment and distress
caused to a country by serious interference with its commerce will be
conceded by all. It is doubtless a most important secondary operation
of naval war, and is not likely to be abandoned till war itself shall
cease: but regarded as a primary and fundamental measure, sufficient in
itself to crush an enemy, it is probably a delusion, when presented in
the fascinating garb of cheapness to the representatives of a people.
Especially is it misleading when the nation against whom it is directed
possesses, as Great Britain did and does, the two requisites of a
strong sea power--a widespread healthy commerce and a powerful Navy."
Has the advent of the submarine fundamentally altered the situation?
"No," we may answer with confidence, if the rules of international law
be observed. If these be thrown aside there remains, until the event
decides, room for much argument.
To the most casual observer it seems now obvious enough that the
vulnerable point in the formidable power of the Alliance opposed to
Germany lay in the length and character of its sea communications.
But the German Higher Command, soldiers most of them, took long
to realise it. Land power must outmatch sea power, they reckoned.
"Moltke," announced the _Tageblatt_ triumphantly, "has conquered
Mahan." Doubtless to harass British trade was expedient, and it had
in the plans been marked down for attack. High hopes were entertained
of a _guerre de course_ conducted by armed cruisers in distant seas.
Any impoverishment of the enemy is grist to the mill. But it was a
secondary affair. And events proved that there was no sufficiency
in it. When Von Spee's squadron vanished beneath the seas Germany
applied her mind to the matter and perceived at length the true nature
of the issue. Successes here and there could not help her. She must
somehow, heroically or otherwise, cut the Gordian knot or reckon with
defeat. Thus it was that the rôles were reversed, and while Britain
unexpectedly threw her weight into military operations, Germany turned
her gaze seawards and sought to pluck victory from an element not her
own.
Dimly at first but with growing clearness she perceived that from the
sea the Alliance daily renewed its strength, that the sea was the
source of its recuperative energy, the healing well; that while the
seas were open it would nourish as it were eternal youth, that the
waterways were the avenues to the _elixir vitae_, the resources of
the world which made good even the crushing wear and tear of modern
war. There is no better judge among the nations of where lie the odds
in material things, and with faultless judgment she put aside any
temptation that may have assailed her to make the heroic venture, to
engage outright the Grand Fleet. There lay the irreducible factor in
the situation. "With its defeat the problem would have solved itself.
But with Jutland that solution had to be abandoned, and with it the
faith she had taught herself that in men and gunnery her navy was more
than Britain's equal. Another way had to be chosen. Undefeated, could
the Grand Fleet be circumvented? Could it somehow be eliminated from
the calculation, could a blow be dealt at the communications of the
Alliance from which battleships were powerless to shield it? In evasion
and circumvention, she judged, lay the key to the unforceable lock.
With the immense self-confidence that marks these serfs of theory,
the Germans drew their plan--a ruthless campaign conducted with the
same pitiless logic, the same patience and forethought that they were
accustomed to devote to their military operations. Eluding the armed
adversary, with all their great and remaining strength they would
strike at the unarmed,--
"God's mercy, then, on little ships
Who cannot fight for life."
Were it possible, and Germany believed it possible, to sever Britain's
sea arteries, the hated enemy might bleed to death, slowly perhaps but
surely. She perceived the joint in the harness and drove in the knife.
Intimidation was here to play its usual part. If horror accompanied
terror so much the better, the world must learn what it was to oppose
an angry and implacable Germany. Then, and not till then, Britain
realised the strength and weakness of her position; perceived at last
and with many searchings of heart her vulnerability, and with growing
pride the peculiar genius of her race. So the sea affair finally
reduced itself into an attack upon the Allies' communications, that is
an attack upon Britain's Merchant Marine, accompanied, since no less
would suffice, with crime of the first magnitude. Casting about for
weapons to be used against a foe unchallengeable in a direct encounter
Germany found three to her hand--the disguised raider, the mine and the
submarine, all be it observed prowling or furtive weapons, with whose
stealthy assistance Germany proposes to usher in the Golden Age. With
this new and triple-headed engine Britain was to be bludgeoned into
submission. You desire to make allowances for Germany's difficulties,
and they were many. Waive then the inherent defect of these engines,
that two of them cannot be employed with humanity. Argue if you like
that in the interests of your own people, the general interests of
the race must be sacrificed; that war is war, and that chivalrous war
is a Christian absurdity. The Dark Ages would no doubt have described
the use of the new weapons as savagery. In our enlightened times harsh
phrases are inadmissible. There appears therefore to be need of some
gently uncomplaining word to describe the indiscriminate slaughter of
non-combatants, of humanitarian helpers on relief ships, of crippled
wounded aboard hospital ships. Her errand of mercy did not save the
Norwegian steamer _Storsted_, known to be carrying a cargo of maize for
the relief of starving Belgians.