observer looked out from a turret. He was killed and another man took
his place. Fresh armour and no sign of where the shot had struck. Then
below, into a compartment between the side of the ship and the armoured
barbette which protects the delicate machinery for feeding shells and
powder from the magazine deep below the water to the guns.
“H---- was killed here. Impact of the shell passing through the outer
plates burst it inside; and, of course, the fragments struck harmlessly
against the barbette.”
“Bang in the dugout!” one exclaimed, from army habit.
“Precisely! No harm done next door.”
Trench traverses and “funk-pit shelters” for localising the effects of
shell-bursts are the terrestrial expression of marine construction.
No one shell happened to get many men either on the _Lion_ or the
_Tiger_. But the effect of the burst was felt in the passages, for the
air-pressure is bound to be pronounced in enclosed spaces which allow
of little room for the expansion of the gases.
Then up more ladders out of the electric light into the daylight,
hugging a wall of armour whose thickness was revealed in the cut made
for the small doorway which you were bidden to enter. Now you were in
one of the brain-centres of the ship, where the action is directed.
Through slits in that massive shelter of the hardest steel one had a
narrow view. Above them on the white wall were silhouetted diagrams of
the different types of German ships, which one found in all observing
stations. They were the most popular form of mural decoration in the
British navy.
Underneath the slits was a literal panoply of the brass fittings of
speaking-tubes and levers and push-buttons, which would have puzzled
even the “Hello, Central” girl. To look at them revealed nothing more
than the eye saw; nothing more than the face of a watch reveals of the
character of its works. There was no telling how they ran in duplicate
below the water line or under the protection of armour to the guns and
the engines.
“We got one in here, too. It was a good one!” said the host.
“Junk, of course,” was how he expressed the result. Here, too, a man
stepped forward to take the place of the man who was killed, just as
the first lieutenant takes the place of a captain of infantry who
falls. With the whole telephone apparatus blown off the wall, as it
were, how did he communicate?
“There!” The host pointed toward an opening at his feet. If that failed
there was still another way. In the final alternative, each turret
could go on firing by itself. So the Germans must have done on the
_Blücher_ and on the _Gneisenau_ and the _Scharnhorst_ in their last
ghastly moments of bloody chaos.
“If this is carried away and then that is, why, then, we have--” as
one had often heard officers say on board our own ships. But that was
hypothesis. Here was demonstration, which made a glimpse of the _Lion_
and the _Tiger_ so interesting. The _Lion_ had had a narrow escape
from going down after being hit in the feed tank; but once in dry
dock, all her damaged parts had been renewed. Particularly it required
imagination to realise that this tower had ever been struck; visually,
more convincing was a plate elsewhere which had been left unpainted,
showing a spatter of dents from shell-fragments.
“We thought that we ought to have something to prove that we had been
in battle,” said the host. “I think I’ve shown all the hits. There were
not many.”
Having seen the results of German gun-fire, we were next to see the
methods of British gun-fire; something of the guns and the men who did
things to the Germans. One stooped under the overhang of the turret
armour from the barbette and climbed up through an opening which
allowed no spare room for the generously built, and out of the dim
light appeared the glint of the massive steel breech block and gun, set
in its heavy recoil mountings with roots of steel supports sunk into
the very structure of the ship. It was like other guns of the latest
improved type; but it had been in action, and one kept thinking of this
fact that gave it a sort of majestic prestige. One wished that it might
look a little different from the others, as the right of a veteran.
As the plugman swung the breech open I had in mind a giant plugman on
the U. S. S. _Connecticut_ whom I used to watch at drills and target
practice. Shall I ever forget the flash in his eye if there were a
fraction of a second’s delay in the firing after the breech had gone
home! The way in which he made that enormous block obey his touch in
oily obsequiousness suggested the apotheosis of the whole business of
naval war. I don’t know whether the plugman of H. M. S. _Lion_ or the
plugman of the U. S. S. _Connecticut_ was the better. It would take a
superman to improve on either.
Like the block, it seemed as if the man knew only the movements of the
drill; as if he had been bred and his muscles formed for that. One
could conceive of him playing diavolo with that breech. He belonged to
the finest part of all the machinery, the human element, which made the
parts of a steel machine play together in a beautiful harmony.
The plugman’s is the most showy part; others playing equally important
parts are in the cavern below the turret; and most important of all is
that of the man who keeps the gun on the target, whose true right eye
may send twenty-five thousand tons of battleship to perdition. No one
eye of any enlisted man can be as important as the gun-pointer’s. His
the eye and the nerve trained as finely as the plugman’s muscles. He
does nothing else, thinks of nothing else. In common with painters and
poets, gun-pointers are born with a gift, and that gift is trained and
trained and trained. It seems simple to keep right on, but it is not.
Try twenty men in the most rudimentary test and you will find that it
is not; then think of the nerve it takes to keep right on in battle,
with your ship shaken by the enemy’s hits.
How long had the plugman been on his job? Six years. And the
gun-pointer? Seven. Twelve years is the term of enlistment in the
British navy. Not too fast but thoroughly, is the British way. The
idea is to make a plugman or a gun-pointer the same kind of expert as a
master artisan in any other walk of life, by long service and selection.
None of all these men serving the two guns from the depths to the
turret saw anything of the battle, except the gun-pointer. It was
easier for them than for him to be letter-perfect in the test, as
he had to guard against the exhilaration of having an enemy’s ship
instead of a cloth target under his eye. Super-drilled he was to that
eventuality; super-drilled all the others through the years, till each
one knew his part as well as one knows how to turn the key in the lock
of his bureau. Used to the shock of the discharges of their own guns
at battle practice, many of the crew did not even know that their ship
was hit, so preoccupied was each with his own duty, which was to go on
with it until an order or a shell’s havoc stopped him. Every mind was
closed except to the thing which had been so established by drill in
his nature that he did it instinctively.
A few minutes later one was looking down from the upper bridge on the
top of this turret and the black-lined planking of the deck eighty-five
feet below, with the sweep of the firm lines of the sides converging
toward the bow on the background of the water. Suddenly the ship seemed
to have grown large, impressive; her structure had a rocklike solidity.
Her beauty was in her unadorned strength. One was absorbing the majesty
of a city from a cathedral tower after having been in its thoroughfares
and seen the detail of its throbbing industry.
Beyond the _Lion’s_ bow were more ships, and port and starboard and
aft were still more ships. The compass range filled the eye with the
stately precision of the many squadrons and divisions of leviathans.
One could see all the fleet. This seemed to be the scenic climax; but
it was not, as we were to learn when we should see the fleet go to sea.
Then we were to behold the mountains on the march.
One glanced back at the deck and around the bridge with a sort of
relief. The infinite was making him dizzy. He wanted to be in touch
with the finite again. But it is the writer, not the practical,
hardened seaman, who is affected in this way. To the seaman, here was a
battle-cruiser with her sister battle-cruisers astern, and there around
her were Dreadnoughts of different types and pre-Dreadnoughts and
cruisers and all manner of other craft which could fight each in its
way, each representing so much speed and so much metal which could be
thrown a certain distance.
“Homogeneity!” Another favourite word, I remember, from our own
wardrooms. Here it was applied in the large. No experimental ships
there, no freak variations of type, but each successive type as a unit
of action. Homogeneous, yes--remorselessly homogeneous. The British
do not simply build some ships; they build a navy. And of course the
experts are not satisfied with it; if they were, the British navy would
be in a bad way. But a layman was; he was overwhelmed.
From this bridge of the _Lion_ on the morning of the 24th of January,
1914, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty saw appear on the horizon a sight
inexpressibly welcome to any commander who has scoured the seas in
the hope that the enemy will come out in the open and give battle.
Once that German battle-cruiser squadron had slipped across the North
Sea and, under cover of the mist which has ever been the friend of
the pirate, bombarded the women and children of Scarborough and the
Hartlepools with shells meant to be fired at hardened adult males
sheltered behind armour; and then, thanks to the mist, they had slipped
back to Heligoland with cheering news to the women and children of
Germany. This time when they came out they encountered a British
battle-cruiser squadron of superior speed and power, and they had to
fight as they ran for home.
Now, the place of an admiral is in his conning tower after he has
made his deployments and the firing has begun. He, too, is a part of
the machine; his position defined, no less than the plugman’s and the
gun-pointer’s. Sir David watched the ranging shots which fell short
at first, until finally they were on, and the Germans were beginning
to reply. When his staff warned him that he ought to go below, he put
them off with a preoccupied shake of his head. He could not resist the
temptation to remain where he was, instead of being shut up looking
through the slits of a visor.
But an admiral is as vulnerable to shell-fragments as a midshipman,
and the staff did its duty, which had been thought out beforehand like
everything else. The argument was on their side; the commander really
had none on his. It was then that Vice-Admiral Beatty sent Sir David
Beatty to the conning tower, much to the personal disgust of Sir David,
who envied the observing officers aloft their free sweep of vision.
Youth in Sir David’s case meant suppleness of limbs as well as youth’s
spirit and dash. When the _Lion_ was disabled by the shot in her feed
tank and had to fall out of line, Sir David must transfer his flag. He
signalled for his destroyer, the _Attack_. When she came alongside, he
did not wait on a ladder, but jumped on board her from the deck of the
_Lion_. An aged vice-admiral with chalky bones might have broken some
of them, or at least received a shock to his presence of mind.
Before he left the _Lion_ Sir David had been the first to see the
periscope of a German submarine in the distance, which sighted the
wounded ship as inviting prey. Officers of the _Lion_ dwelt more on
the cruise home than on the battle. It was a case of being towed at
five knots an hour by the Indomitable. If ever submarines had a fair
chance to show what they could do it was then against that battleship
at a snail’s pace. But it is one thing to torpedo a merchant craft and
another to get a major fighting ship, bristling with torpedo defence
guns and surrounded by destroyers. The _Lion_ reached port without
further injury.
XXIX
ON THE “INFLEXIBLE”
Veterans of the Dardanelles--“The range of them”--The Falkland
affair--The “double bluff” on von Spee--The intercepted British
wireless--Sturdee’s trap--Story book of strategy--The Germans
go down with their colours flying--Only a disordered wardroom--
The chaplain’s anecdote--All a lark for the midshipman--
Souvenirs of action.
What Englishman, let alone an American, knows the names of even all the
British Dreadnoughts? With a few exceptions, the units of the Grand
Fleet seem anonymous. The _Warspite_ was quite unknown to the fame
which her sister ship the _Queen Elizabeth_ had won. For “_Lizzie_” was
back in the fold from the Dardanelles; and so was the _Inflexible_,
flagship of the battle of the Falkland Islands. Of all the ships which
Sir John Jellicoe had sent away on special missions, the _Inflexible_
had had the grandest Odyssey. She, too, had been at the Dardanelles.
The _Queen Elizabeth_ was disappointing so far as wounds went. She had
been so much in the public eye that one expected to find her badly
battered, and she had suffered little, indeed, for the amount of sport
she had had in tossing her fifteen-inch shells across the Gallipoli
peninsula into the Turkish batteries and the amount of risk she had run
from Turkish mines. Some of these monster shells contained only eleven
thousand shrapnel bullets. A strange business for a fifteen-inch naval
gun to be firing shrapnel. A year ago no one could have imagined that
one day the most powerful British ship, built with the single thought
of overwhelming an enemy’s Dreadnought, would ever be trying to force
the Dardanelles.
The trouble was that she could not fire an army corps ashore along
with her shells to take possession of any batteries she put out of
action. She had some grand target practice; she escaped the mines; she
kept out of reach of the German shells, and returned to report to Sir
John with just enough scars to give zest to the recollection of her
extraordinary adventure. All the fleet was relieved to see her back in
her proper place. It is not the business of super-Dreadnoughts to be
steaming around mine-fields, but to be surrounded by destroyers and
light cruisers and submarines safeguarding her giant guns which are
depressed and elevated as easily as if they were drum-sticks. One had
an abrasion, a tracery of dents.
“That was from a Turkish shell,” said an officer. “And you are standing
where a shell hit.”
One looked down to see an irregular outline of fresh planking.
“An accident when we did not happen to be out of their reach. We had
the range of them,” he added.
“The range of them” is a great phrase. Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee
used it in speaking of the battle of the Falkland Islands. “The range
of them” seems a sure prescription for victory. Nothing in all the
history of the war appeals to me as quite so smooth a bit of tactics as
the Falkland affair. It was so smooth that it was velvety; and it is
worth telling again, as I understand it. Sir Frederick is another young
admiral. Otherwise, how could the British navy have entrusted him with
so important a task? He is a different type from Beatty, who in an
army one judges might have been in the cavalry. Along with the peculiar
charm and alertness which we associate with sailors--they imbibe it
from the salt air and from meeting all kinds of weather and all kinds
of men, I think--he has the quality of the scholar, with a suspicion
of merriness in his eye.
He was Chief of Staff at the Admiralty in the early stages of the war,
which means, I take it, that he assisted in planning the moves on the
chessboard. It fell to him to act; to apply the strategy and tactics
which he planned for others at sea while he sat at a desk. It was his
wit against von Spee’s, who was not deficient in this respect. If he
had been he might not have steamed into the trap. The trouble was that
von Spee had some wit, but not enough. It would have been better for
him if he had been as guileless as a parson.
Sir Frederick is so gentle-mannered that one would never suspect him
of a “double bluff,” which was what he played on von Spee. After von
Spee’s victory over Cradock, Sturdee slipped across to the South
Atlantic, without any one knowing that he had gone, with a squadron
strong enough to do unto von Spee what von Spee had done unto Cradock.
But before you wing your bird you must flush him. The thing was to
find von Spee and force him to give battle; for the South Atlantic is
broad and von Spee, it is supposed, was in an Emden mood and bent on
reaching harbour in German Southwest Africa, whence he could sally out
to destroy British shipping on the Cape route. When he intercepted
a British wireless message--Sturdee had left off the sender’s name
and location--telling the plodding old _Canopus_ seeking home or
assistance before von Spee overtook her, that she would be perfectly
safe in the harbour at Port William, as guns had been erected for her
protection, von Spee guessed that this was a bluff, and rightly. But
it was only Bluff Number One. He steamed to the Falklands with a view
to finishing off the old _Canopus_ on the way across to Africa. There
he fell foul of Bluff Number Two. Sturdee did not have to seek him; he
came to Sturdee.
There was no convenient Dogger Bank fog in that latitude to cover
his flight. Sturdee had the speed of von Spee and he had to fight.
It was the one bit of strategy of the war which is like that of the
story books and worked out as the strategy always does in proper
story books. Practically the twelve-inch guns of the _Inflexible_
and the _Invincible_ had only to keep their distance and hang on
to the _Scharnhorst_ and the _Gneisenau_ in order to do the trick.
Light-weights or middle-weights have no business trafficking with
heavy-weights in naval warfare.
“Von Spee made a brave fight,” said Sir Frederick, “but we kept him at
a distance that suited us, without letting him get out of range.”
He had had the fortune to prove an established principle in action. It
was all in the course of duty, which is the way that all the officers
and all the men look at their work. Only a few ships have had a chance
to fight and these are emblazoned on the public memory. But they did
no better and no worse, probably, than the others would have done. If
the public singles out ships, the navy does not. Whatever is done and
whoever does it, why, it is to the credit of the family, according to
the spirit of service that promotes uniformity of efficiency. Leaders
and ships which have won renown are resolved into the whole in that
harbour where the fleet is the thing; and the good opinion they most
desire is that of their fellows. If they have that, they will earn the
public’s when the test comes.
Belonging to the class of the first of battle-cruisers is the
_Inflexible_, which received a few taps in the Falklands and a blow
that was nearly the death of her in the Dardanelles. Tribute enough for
its courage--the tribute of a chivalrous enemy--von Spee’s squadron
receives from the officers and men of the _Inflexible_, who saw them
go down into the sea tinged with sunset red with their colours still
flying. Then in the sunset red the British saved as many of those
afloat as they could.
Those dripping German officers who had seen one of their battered
turrets carried away bodily into the sea by a British twelve-inch
shell, who had endured a fury of concussions and destruction, with
steel missiles cracking steel structures into fragments, came on board
the _Inflexible_ looking for signs of some blows delivered in return
for the crushing blows that had beaten their ships into the sea and saw
none until they were invited into the wardroom, which was in chaos--
and then they smiled.
At least, they had sent one shell home. The sight was sweet to them,
so sweet that, in respect to the feeling of the vanquished, the victor
held silence with a knightly consideration. But where had the shell
entered? There was no sign of any hole. Then they learned that the fire
of the guns of the starboard turret midships over the wardroom, which
was on the port side, had deposited a great many things on the floor
which did not belong there; and their expression changed. Even this
comfort was taken from them.
“We had the range of you!” the British explained.
The chaplain of the _Inflexible_ was bound to have an anecdote. I don’t
know why, except that a chaplain’s is not a fighting part and he may
look on. His place was down behind the armour with the doctor, waiting
for wounded. He stood in his particular steel cave listening to the
tremendous blasts of her guns which shook the _Inflexible’s_ frame, and
still no wounded arrived. Then he ran up a ladder to the deck and had
a look around and saw the little points of the German ships with the
shells sweeping toward them and the smoke of explosions which burst on
board them. It was not the British who needed his prayers that day, but
the Germans.
Perhaps the spirit of the _Inflexible’s_ story was best given by a
midshipman with the down still on his cheek. Considering how young
the British take their officer-beginners to sea, the admirals are not
young, at least, in point of sea service. He got more out of the action
than his elders; his impressions of the long cruises and the actions
had the vividness of boyhood. Down in one of the caves, doing his part
as the shells were sent up to feed the thundering guns above, the
whispered news of the progress of the battle was passed on at intervals
till, finally, the guns were silent. Then he hurried on deck in the
elation of victory, succeeded by the desire to save those whom they had
fought. It had all been so simple; so like drill. You had only to go on
shooting--that was all.
Yes, he had been lucky. From the Falklands to the Dardanelles, which
was a more picturesque business than the battle. Any minute off the
Straits you did not know but a submarine would have a try at you or you
might bump into a mine. And the _Inflexible_ did bump into one. She
had two thousand tons of water on board. It was fast work to keep the
remainder of the sea from coming in, too, and the same kind of dramatic
experience as the _Lion’s_ in reaching port. Yes, he had been very
lucky. It was all a lark to that boy.
“It never occurs to midshipmen to be afraid of anything,” said one of
the officers. “The more danger, the better they like it.”
In the wardroom was a piece of the mine or the torpedo, whichever it
was, that struck the _Inflexible_; a strange, twisted, annealed bit
of metal. Every ship which had been in action had some souvenir which
the enemy had sent on board in anger and which was preserved with a
collector’s enthusiasm.
The _Inflexible_ seemed as good as ever she was. Such is the way of
naval warfare. Either it is to the bottom of the sea or to dry docks
and repairs. There is nothing half way. So it is well to take care that
you have “the range of them.”
XXX
ON THE FLEET FLAGSHIP
The “grande dames” of the fleet--The boarding--Nelson’s heritage--
Guardians of the peace of the seas--Sir John Jellicoe--The
China seas incident--The compliment returned at Manila Bay--
Friends in the service--That command of Joshua’s--Waiting
and watching--England’s true genius--A complete blockade--
Intricate and concentrated mechanism--Personality of Sir John--
The spirit of service.
Thus far we have skirted around the heart of things, which in a fleet
is always the commander-in-chief’s flagship. Our handy, agile destroyer
ran alongside a battleship with as much nonchalance as she would go
alongside a pier. I should not have been surprised to have seen her
pirouette over the hills or take to flight.
There was a time when those majestic and pampered ladies, the
battleships--particularly if a sea were running as there was in this
harbour at the time--having in mind the pride of paint, begged all
destroyers to keep off with the superciliousness of _grandes dames_
holding their skirts aloof from contact with nimble, audacious street
gamins, who dodged in and out of the traffic of muddy streets. But
destroyers have learned better manners, perhaps, and battleships have
been democratised. It is the day of Russian dancers and when aeroplanes
loop the loop, and we have grown used to all kinds of marvels.