distance from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, which represents coast
line to be guarded; and we may find a lesson, too, we who must make our
real defence by sea, of tireless vigils which may be our own if the old
Armageddon beast ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that
we have to defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes.
Not even the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike
dummy behind the curtains for forty years.
At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped
us and took the number of our car; but this time sentries, who were
guarding a navy’s rather than an army’s secrets. With darkness we
passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a
scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. One wondered
where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom he had seen at the front
came from, without, I trust, disclosing any military secret that the
canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.
The Frenchmen of our party--M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign
Minister, M. Réné Bazin, of the Academie Française, M. Joseph Reinach,
of the _Figaro_, M. Pierre Mille, of _Le Temps_, and M. Henri Ponsot--
who had never been in Scotland before, were on the lookout for a
civilian Scot in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find a
single one.
That night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be moving
about in England under the guise of cockney or of Lancashire dialects
in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He could
never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he were,
once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotchman at heart.
The officer of the Royal Navy, who was in the car with me, confessed
to less faith in his symbol of authority than in the generations’-bred
burr of our chauffeur to carry conviction of our genuineness; so
arguments were left to him and successfully, including two or three
with Scotch cattle, which seemed to be co-operating with the sentries
to block the road.
After an hour’s run inland and the car rose over a ridge and descended
on a sharp grade, in the distance under the moonlight we saw the floor
of the sea again, melting into opaqueness, with curving fringes of foam
along the irregular shore cut by the indentations of the firths. Now
the sentries were more frequent and more particular. Our single light
gave dim form to the figures of sailors, soldiers, and boy scouts on
patrol.
“They’ve done remarkably well, these boys!” said the officer. “Our
fears that, boylike, they would see all kinds of things which didn’t
exist were quite needless. The work has taught them a sense of
responsibility which will remain with them after the war, when their
experience will be a precious memory. They realise that it isn’t play,
but a serious business, and act accordingly.”
With all the houses and the countryside dark, the rays of our lamp
seemed an invading comet to the men who held up lanterns with red
twinkles of warning.
“The patrol boats have complained about your lights, sir!” said one
obdurate sentry.
We looked out into the black wall in the direction of the sea and could
see no sign of a patrol boat. How had it been able to inform this lone
sentry of that flying ray which disclosed the line of a coastal road to
any one at sea? He would not accept the best argumentative burr that
our chauffeur might produce as sufficient explanation or guarantee.
Most Scottish of Scots in physiognomy and shrewd matter-of-factness, as
revealed in the glare of the lantern, he might have been on watch in
the Highland fastnesses in Prince Charlie’s time.
“Captain R----, of the Royal Navy!” explained the officer, introducing
himself.
“I’ll take your name and address!” said the sentry.
“The Admiralty. I take the responsibility.”
“As I’ll report, sir!” said the sentry, not so convinced but he burred
something further into the chauffeur’s ear.
This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed,
as a part of an unfathomable, complicated business of guards within
guards, intelligence battling with intelligence, deceiving raiders by
land or sea, of those responsible for the safety of England and the
mastery of the seas.
* * * * *
It is from the navy yard that the ships go forth to battle and to the
navy yard they must return for supplies and for the grooming beat of
hammers in the dry dock. Those who work at a navy yard keep the navy’s
house; welcome home all the family, from Dreadnoughts to trawlers, give
them cheer and shelter, and bind up their wounds.
The quarter-deck of action for Admiral Lowry, commanding the great base
on the Forth, which was begun before the war and hastened to completion
since, was a substantial brick office building. Adjoining his office,
where he worked with engineers’ blue prints as well as with sea maps,
he had fitted up a small bedroom where he slept, to be at hand if any
emergency arose.
Partly we walked, as he showed us over his domain of steam-shovels,
machine shops, cement factories, of building and repairs, of coaling
and docking, and partly we rode on a car that ran over temporary rails
laid for trucks loaded with rocks and dirt. Borrowing from Peter to pay
Paul, a river bottom had been filled in back of the quays with material
that had been excavated to form a vast basin with cement walls, where
squadrons of Dreadnoughts might rest and await their turn to be warped
into the great dry docks which open off it in chasmlike galleries.
“The largest contract in all England,” said the contractor. “And here
is the man who checks up my work,” he added, nodding to the lean,
Scotch naval civil engineer who was with us. It was clear from his look
that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be
acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency.
“And the workers? Have you had any strikes here?”
“No. We have employed double the usual number of men from the start of
the war,” he said. “I’m afraid that the Welsh coal troubles have been
accepted as characteristic. Our men have been reasonable and patriotic.
They’ve shown the right spirit. If they hadn’t, how could we have
accomplished that?”
We were looking down into the depths of a dry dock blasted out of the
rock, which had been begun and completed within the year. And we had
heard nothing of all this through those twelve months! No writer, no
photographer, chronicled this silent labour! Double lines of guards
surrounded the place day and night. Only tried patriots might enter
this world of a busy army in smudged workmen’s clothes, bending to
their tasks with that ordered discipline of industrialism which wears
no uniforms, marches without beat of drums, and toils that the ships
shall want nothing to ensure victory.
XXVII
ON A DESTROYER
Losing one’s heart to the British navy--“Specialised in torpedo
work”--Watching for submarines--Passing a flotilla--The eyes
of the navy--Cold on the bridge--A jumpy sea--Look out for
the spray--A symphony in mechanism--Around a bend and: the sea
power of England!
Now we were on our way to the great thing--to our look behind the
curtain at the hidden hosts of sea-power. Of some eight hundred tons’
burden our steed, doing eighteen knots, which was a dog-trot for one of
her speed.
“A destroyer is like an automobile,” said the commander. “If you
rush her all the time she wears out. We give her the limit only when
necessary.”
On the bridge the zest of travel on a dolphin of steel held the bridle
on eagerness to reach the journey’s end. We all like to see things
well done and here one had his first taste of how well things are done
in the British navy, which did not have to make ready for war after
the war began. With an open eye one went, and the experience of other
navies as a balance for his observation; but one lost one’s heart
to the British navy and might as well confess it now. A six months’
cruise with our own battleship fleet was a proper introduction to the
experience. Never under any flag not my own did I feel so much at home.
After the arduous monotony of the trenches and after the traffic of
London, it was freedom and sport and ecstasy to be there, with the rush
of salt air on the face! Our commander was under thirty years of age;
and that destroyer responded to his will like a stringed instrument. He
seemed a part of her, her nerves welded to his.
“Specialised in torpedo work,” he said, in answer to a question. That
is the way of the British navy: to learn one thing well before you
go on with another. If in the course of it you learn how to command,
larger responsibilities await you. If not--there’s retired pay.
Inside a shield which sheltered them from the spray on the forward
deck, significantly free of everything but that four-inch gun, its crew
was stationed. The commander had only to lean over and speak through
a tube and give a range, and the music began. That tube bifurcated at
the end to an ear-mask over a youngster’s head; a youngster who had
real sailor’s smiling blue eyes, like the commander’s own. For hours he
would sit waiting in the hope that game would be sighted. No fisherman
could be more patient or more cheerful.
“Before he came into the navy he was a chauffeur. He likes this,” said
the commander.
“In case of a submarine you do not want to lose any time; is that it?”
“Yes,” he replied. “You never can tell when we might have a chance to
put a shot into Fritz’s periscope or ram him--Fritz is our name for
submarines.”
Were all the commanders of destroyers up to his mark, one wondered.
How many more had the British navy caught young and trained to such
quickness of decision and in the art of imparting it to his men?
Three hundred revolutions! The destroyer changed speed. Five hundred!
She changed speed again.
Out of the mist in the distance flashed a white ribbon knot that seemed
to be tied to a destroyer’s bow and behind it another destroyer, and
still others, lean, catlike, but running as if legless, with greased
bodies sliding over the sea. We snapped out some message to them and
they answered as passing birds on the wing before they swept out of
sight behind a headland with uncanny ease of speed. How many destroyers
had England running to and fro in the North Sea, keen for the chase
and too quick at dodging and too fast to be in any danger of the
under-water dagger thrust of the assassins whom they sought. We know
the figures in the naval lists, but there cannot be too many. They are
the eyes of the navy; they gather information and carry a sting in
their torpedo tubes.
It was chilly there on the bridge, with the prospect too entrancing not
to remain even if one froze. But here stepped in naval preparedness
with thick, short coats of llama wool.
“Served out to all the men last winter, when we were in the thick of it
patrolling,” the commander explained. “You’ll not get cold in that!”
“And yourself?” was suggested to the commander.
“Oh, it is not cold enough for that in September! We’re hardened to it.
You come from the land and feel the change of air; we are at sea all
the time,” he replied. He was without even an overcoat; and the ease
with which he held his footing made land lubbers feel their awkwardness.
A jumpy, uncertain tidal sea was running. Yet our destroyer glided over
the waves, cut through them, played with them, and let them seem to
play with her, all the while laughing at them with the power of the
purring vitals that drove her steadily on.
“Look out!” which at the front in France was a signal to jump for a
“funk pit.” We ducked, as a cloud of spray passed above the heavy
canvas and clattered like hail against the smokestack. “There won’t be
any more!” said the commander. He was right. He knew that passage. One
wondered if he did not know every gallon of water in the North Sea,
which he had experienced in all its moods.
Sheltered by the smokestack down on the main deck, one of our party,
who loved not the sea for its own sake but endured it as a passageway
to the sight of the Grand Fleet, had found warmth, if not comfort. Not
for him that invitation to come below given by the chief engineer,
who rose out of a round hole with a pleasant, “How d’y do!” air to
get a sniff of the fresh breeze, wizard of the mysterious power of
the turbines which sent the destroyer marching so noiselessly. He was
the one who transferred the captain’s orders into that symphony in
mechanism. Turn a lever and you had a dozen more knots; not with a leap
or a jerk, but like a cat’s sleek stretching of muscles. Not by the
slightest tremor did you realise the acceleration; only by watching
some stationary object as you flew past.
Now a sweep of smooth water at the entrance to a harbour, and a turn--
and there it was: the sea power of England!
XXVIII
SHIPS THAT HAVE FOUGHT
The “invisible” fleet--No chance for German submarines--No end
to the greyish blue-green monsters--the _Queen Elizabeth_--
Sea-power and world power--Ships that have been under fire--A
German “mistake”--Sir David Beatty--“Youth for action”--On
board the _Lion_--Sensations during the fighting--Importance
of accurate marksmanship--Crashing blasts and the scream of
shells--Watching the hits--The precious turret--Result of
German gunfire--A city of steel--Its brain-center--A panoply
of tubes, levers, push-buttons--Methods of British gunfire--
One of the great guns--Its human complement--The gun-pointer--
From the upper bridge--An impressive beauty--The chase off
Heligoland--Safe return of the _Lion_.
But was that really it? That spread of greyish blue-green dots set on
a huge greyish blue-green platter? One could not discern where ships
began and water and sky which held them suspended left off. Invisible
fleet it had been called. At first glance it seemed to be composed of
baffling phantoms, absorbing the tone of its background. Admiralty
secrecy must be the result of a naval dislike of publicity.
Still as if they were rooted, these leviathans! How could such a shy,
peaceful looking array send out broadsides of twelve- and thirteen-five
and fifteen-inch shells? What a paradise for a German submarine! Each
ship seemed an inviting target. Only there were many gates and doors to
the paradise, closed to all things that travel on and under the water
without a proper identification. Submarines that had tried to pick one
of the locks were like the fish who found going good into the trap.
A submarine had about the same chance of reaching that anchorage as a
German in the uniform of the Kaiser’s Death’s Head Hussars, with a bomb
under his arm, of reaching the vaults of the Bank of England.
And was this all of the greatest naval force ever gathered under a
single command, these two or three lines of ships? But as the destroyer
drew nearer the question changed. How many more? Was there no end to
greyish blue-green monsters, in order as precise as the trees of a
California orchard, appearing out of the greyish blue-green background?
First to claim attention was the _Queen Elizabeth_, with her eight
fifteen-inch guns on a platform which could travel at nearly the speed
of the average railroad train.
The contrast of sea and land warfare appealed the more vividly to one
fresh from the front in France. What infinite labour for an army to
get one big gun into position! How heralded the snail-like travels of
the big German howitzer! Here was ship after ship, whose guns seemed
innumerable. One found it hard to realise the resisting power of their
armour, painted to look as liquid as the sea, and the stability of
their construction, which was able to bear the strain of firing the
great shells that travelled ten miles to their target.
Sea-power, indeed! And world power, too, there in the hollow of a
nation’s hand, to throw in whatever direction she pleased. If an
American had a lump in his throat at the thought of what it meant, what
might it not mean to an Englishman? Probably the Englishman would say,
“I think that the fleet is all right, don’t you?”
Land-power, too! On the Continent vast armies wrestled for some square
miles of earth. France has, say, three million soldiers; Germany, five;
Austria, four--and England had, perhaps, a hundred thousand men,
perhaps more, on board this fleet which defended the English land and
lands far over seas without firing a shot. One American regiment of
infantry is more than sufficient in numbers to man a Dreadnought. How
precious, then, the skill of that crew! Man-power is as concentrated as
gun-power with a navy. Ride three hundred miles in an automobile along
an army front, with glimpses of units of soldiers, and you have seen
little of a modern army. Here, moving down the lanes that separated
these grey fighters, one could compass the whole!
Four gold letters, spelling the word Lion, awakened the imagination to
the concrete of the _Blücher_ turning her bottom skyward before she
sank off the Dogger Bank under the fire of the guns of the _Lion_ and
of the _Tiger_, astern of her, and the _Princess Royal_ and the _New
Zealand_, of the latest fashion in battle-cruiser squadrons which are
known as the “cat” squadron. This work brought them into their own;
proved how the British, who built the first Dreadnought, have kept a
little ahead of their rivals in construction. With almost the gun-power
of Dreadnoughts, better than three to two against the best battleships,
with the speed of cruisers and capable of overwhelming cruisers, or
of pursuing any battleship, or getting out of range, they can run or
strike, as they please.
Ascend that gangway, so amazingly clean, as were the decks above and
below and everything about the _Lion_ or the _Tiger_, and you were on
board one of the few major ships which had been under heavy fire. Her
officers and men knew what modern naval war was like; her guns knew the
difference between the wall of cloth of a towed target and an enemy’s
wall of armour.
In the battle of Tsushima Straits battleships had fought at three and
four thousand yards and closed into much shorter range. Since then,
we had had the new method of marksmanship. Tsushima ceased to be a
criterion. The Dogger Bank multiplied the range by five. A hundred
years since England, all the while the most powerfully armed nation at
sea, had been in a naval war of the first magnitude; and to the _Lion_
and the _Tiger_ had come the test. The Germans said that they had sunk
the _Tiger_; but the _Tiger_ afloat purred a contented denial.
One could not fail to identify among the group of officers on the
quarter-deck Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, for his victory had
impressed his features on the public’s eye. Had his portrait not
appeared in the press, one would have been inclined to say that a first
lieutenant had put on a vice-admiral’s coat by mistake. He was about
the age of the first lieutenant of our own battleships. Even as it
was, one was inclined to exclaim: “There is some mistake! You are too
young!” The Who is Who book says that he is all of forty-four years old
and it must be right, though it disagrees with his appearance by five
years. A vice-admiral at forty-four! A man who is a rear-admiral with
us at fifty-five is very precocious. And all the men around him were
young. The British navy did not wait for war to teach again the lesson
of “youth for action!” It saved time by putting youth in charge at once.
Their simple uniforms, the directness, alertness, and definiteness of
these officers, who had been with a fleet ready for a year to go into
battle on a minute’s notice, was in keeping with their surroundings
of decks cleared for action and the absence of anything which did not
suggest that hitting a target was the business of their life.
“I had heard that you took your admirals from the school-room,” said
one of the Frenchmen, “but I begin to believe that it is the nursery.”
Night and day they must be on watch. No easy-chairs; their shop is
their home. They must have the vitality that endures a strain. One
error in battle by any one of them might wreck the British Empire.
It is difficult to write about any man-of-war and not be technical; for
everything about her seems technical and mechanical except the fact
that she floats. Her officers and crew are engaged in work which is
legerdermain to the civilian.
“Was it like what you thought it would be after all your training for a
naval action?” one asked.
“Yes, quite; pretty much as we reasoned it out,” was the reply.
“Indeed, this was the most remarkable thing. It was battle practice--
with the other fellow shooting at you!”
The fire-control officers, who were aloft, all agreed about
one unexpected sensation, which had not occurred to any expert
scientifically predicating what action would be like. They are the only
ones, who may really “see” the battle in the full sense.
“When the shells burst against the armour,” said one of these officers,
“the fragments were visible as they flew about. We had a desire, in the
midst of our preoccupation with our work, to reach out and catch them.
Singular mental phenomenon, wasn’t it?”
At eight or nine thousand yards one knew that the modern battleship
could tear a target to pieces. But eighteen thousand--was accuracy
possible at that distance?
“Did one in five German shells hit at that range?” I asked.
“No!”
Or in ten? No! In twenty? Still no, though less decisively. One got
a conviction, then, that the day of holding your fire until you were
close in enough for a large percentage of hits was past. Accuracy was
still vital and decisive, but generic accuracy. At eighteen thousand
yards all the factors which send a thousand or fifteen hundred or two
thousand pounds of steel that long distance cannot be so gauged that
each one will strike in exactly the same line when ten issue from the
gun-muzzles in a broadside. But if one out of twenty is on at eighteen
thousand yards, it may mean a turret out of action. Again, four or
five might hit, or none. So, no risk of waiting may be taken, in face
of the danger of a chance shot at long range. It was a chance shot
which struck the _Lion’s_ feed tank and disabled her and kept the cat
squadron from doing to the other German cruisers what they had done to
the _Blücher_.
“And the noise of it to you aloft, spotting the shots?” I suggested.
“It must have been a lonely place in such a tornado.”
“Yes. Besides the crashing blasts from our own guns we had the screams
of the shells that went over and the cataracts of water from those
short sprinkling the ship with spray. But this was what one expected.
Everything was what one expected, except that desire to catch the
fragments. Naturally, one was too busy to think much of anything except
the enemy’s ships--to learn where your shells were striking.”
“You could tell?”
“Yes, just as well and better than at target practice for the target
was larger and solid. It was enthralling, that watching the flight of
our shells toward their target.”
Where were the scars from the wounds? One looked for them on both the
_Lion_ and the _Tiger_. That armour patch on the sloping top of a
turret might have escaped attention if it had not been pointed out. A
shell struck there and a fair blow, too. And what happened inside? Was
the turret gear put out of order?
To one who has lived in a wardroom a score of questions were on the
tongue’s end. The turret is the basket which holds the precious eggs. A
turret out of action means two guns out of action; a broken knuckle for
the pugilist.
Constructors have racked their brains over the subject of turrets in
the old contest between gun-power and protection. Too much gun-power,
too little armour! Too much armour, too little gun-power! Off the
Virginia capes we have pounded antiquated battleships with shells as
a test, with sheep inside the turrets to see if life could survive.
But in the last analysis results depend on how good is your armour,
how sound your machinery which rotates the turret. That shell did not
go through bodily, only a fragment, which killed one man and wounded
another. The turret would still rotate; the other gun remained in
action and the one under the shell-burst was soon back in action. Very
satisfactory to the naval constructors.
Up and down the all-but perpendicular steel ladders with their narrow
steps, and through the winding passages below decks in those cities of
steel, one followed his guide, receiving so much information and so
many impressions that he was confused as to details between the two
veterans, the _Lion_, which was hit fifteen times, and the _Tiger_,
which was hit eight. Wherever you went every square inch of space and
every bit of equipment seemed to serve some purpose.