battle! Think of the strain of it! The British temperament is well
fitted to undergo such a test, and particularly well fitted are these
sturdy seamen of mature years. An enemy may imagine them wearing down
their efficiency on the leash. They want a fight; naturally, they want
nothing quite so much. But they have the seaman’s philosophy. Old von
Tirpitz may come out and he may not. It is for him to do the worrying.
They sit tight. The men’s ardour is not imposed upon. Care is taken
that they should not be worked stale; for the marksman who puts a dozen
shots through the bull’s-eye had better not keep on firing, lest he
begin rimming it and get into bad habits.
Where an army officer has a change when he leaves the trench for his
billet, there is none for the naval officer, who, unlike the army
officer, is Spartan-bred to confinement. The army pays its daily toll
of casualties; it lies cramped in dugouts, not knowing what minute
extinction may come. The Grand Fleet has its usual comforts; it is safe
from submarines in a quiet harbour. Many naval officers spoke of this
contrast with deep feeling, as if fate were playing favourites, though
I have never heard an army officer mention it.
The army can give each day fresh proof of its courage in face of the
enemy. Courage! It takes on a new meaning with the Grand Fleet. The
individual element of gallantry merges into gallantry of the whole.
You have the very communism of courage. The thought is to keep a cool
head and do your part as a cog in the vast machine. Courage is as much
taken for granted as the breath of life. Thus, Cradock’s men, and von
Spee’s men, too, fought till they went down. It was according to the
programme laid out for each turret and each gun in a turret.
Smith, of the army, leads a bomb-throwing party from traverse to
traverse; Smith, of the navy, turns one lever at the right second. Army
gunners are improving their practice day by day against the enemy; all
the improving by navy gunners must be done before the battle. No sieges
in trenches; no attacks and counter-attacks: a decision within a few
hours--perhaps within an hour.
This partially explains the love of the navy for its work; its cheerful
repetition of the drills which seem such a wearisome business to
the civilian. The men know the reason of their drudgery. It is an
all-convincing bull’s-eye reason. Ping-ping! One heard the familiar
sound of subcalibre practice, which seems as out of proportion in a
fifteen-inch gun as a mouse squeak from an elephant whom you expect
to trumpet. As the result appears in subcalibre practice, so it is
practically bound to appear in target practice; as it appears in target
practice, so it is bound to appear in battle practice.
It was on the flagship that I saw a device which Sir John referred
to as the next best thing to having the Germans come out. He took as
much delight in it as the gun-pointers, who were firing at German
Dreadnoughts of the first line, as large as your thumb, which were
in front of a sort of hooded arrangement with the guns of a British
Dreadnought inside--the rest I censor myself before the regular censor
sees it. When we heard a report like that of a small target rifle
inside the arrangement a small red or a small white splash rose from
the metallic platter of a sea. Thus the whole German navy has been
pounded to pieces again and again. It is a great game. The gun-pointers
never tire of it and they think they know the reason as well as anybody
why von Tirpitz keeps his Dreadnoughts at home.
But elsewhere I saw some real firing; for ships must have their regular
target practice, war or no war. If those cruisers steaming across the
range had been sending six- or eight-inch shrapnel, we should have
preferred not to be so near that towed square of canvas. Flashes from
turrets indistinguishable at a distance from the neutral-toned bodies
of the vessels and the shells struck, making great splashes just beyond
the target, which was where they ought to go.
A familiar scene, but with a new meaning when the time is one of war.
So far as my observation is worth anything, it was very good shooting,
indeed. One broadside would have put a destroyer out of business as
easily as a “Jack Johnson” does for a dugout; and it would have made a
cruiser of the same class as the one firing pretty groggy--this not
from any experience of being on a light cruiser or any desire to be on
one when it receives such a salute. But it seems to be waiting for the
Germans any time that they want it.
Oh, that towed square of canvas! It is the symbol of the object of all
building of guns, armour, and ships, all the nursing in dry dock, all
the admiral’s plans, all the parliamentary appropriations, all the
striving on board ship in man’s competition with man, crew with crew,
gun with gun, and ship with ship. One had in mind some vast factory
plant where every unit was efficiently organised; but that comparison
would not do. None will. The Grand Fleet is the Grand Fleet.
Ability gets its reward as in the competition of civil life. There
is no linear promotion indulgent to mediocrity and inferiority which
are satisfied to keep step and harassing to those whom nature and
application meant to lead. Armchairs and retirement for those whose
inclinations run that way; the captain’s bridge for those who are fit
to command. Officers’ records are the criterion when superiors come
to making promotions. But does not outside influence play a part? you
ask. If professional conscience is not enough to prevent this, another
thing appears to be: that the British nation lives or dies with its
navy. Besides, the British public has said to all and sundry outsiders:
“Hands off the navy!” All honour to the British public, much criticised
and often most displeased with its servants and itself, for keeping its
eye on that canvas square of cloth!
The language on board was the same as on our ships; the technical
phraseology practically the same; we had inherited British traditions.
But a man from Kansas and a man from Dorset live far apart. If they
have a good deal in common they rarely meet to learn that they have.
But seamen do meet and share a fraternity which is more than that of
the sea. Close one’s eyes to the difference in uniform, discount the
difference in accent, and one imagined that he might be with our North
Atlantic fleet.
The same sort of shop talk and banter in the wardroom, which trims
and polishes human edges; the same fellowship of a world apart.
Securely ready the British fleet waits. Enough drill and not too
much; occasional visits between ships; books and newspapers and a
light-hearted relaxation of scattered conversation in the mess. One
wardroom had a thirty-five-second record for getting past all the
pitfalls in the popular “Silver Bullet” game, if I remember correctly.
XXXII
HUNTING THE SUBMARINE
Seaplanes afloat and on high--Diabolical bombs--Sighting a
submarine--The chase--Submarine defences--Torpedo boats at
home--The mine sweepers--Patience in the cold of the North Sea.
Seaplanes cut practice circles over the fleet and then flew away on
their errands, to be lost in the sky beyond the harbour entrance. With
their floats, they were like ducks when they came to rest on the water,
sturdy and a little clumsy looking compared to those hawks the army
planes, soaring to higher altitudes.
The hawk had a broad, level field for its roost; the duck, bobbing with
the waves after it came down, had its wings folded as became a bird at
rest after its engines stopped and a dead thing, it was lifted on board
its floating home with a crane, as cargo is swung into the hold.
On shipboard there must be shipshapeness; and that capacious, one-time
popular Atlantic liner had undergone changes to prepare it for its
mothering part, with platforms in place of the promenades where people
had lounged during the voyage, and bombs in place of deck quoits and
dining-saloons turned into workshops. Of course, one was shown the
different sizes and types of bombs. Aviators exhibit them with the
pride of a collector showing his porcelains. Every time they seem to me
to have grown larger and more diabolical. Where will aerial progress
end? Will the next war be fought by forces that dive and fly like fish
and birds?
“I’d like to drop that hundred-pounder onto a Zeppelin!” said one of
the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it.
Also Fritz, of the submarine, does not like to see the shadow of man’s
wings above the water.
Seaplanes and destroyers carry the imagination away from the fleet to
another sphere of activity, which I had not the fortune to see. An
aviator can see Fritz below a smooth surface; for he cannot travel
much deeper than thirty or forty feet. He leaves a characteristic
ripple and tell-tale bubbles of air and streaks of oil. When the planes
have located him they can tell the hunters where to go. Sometimes it
is known that a submarine is in a certain region; he is lost sight
of and seen again; a squall may cover his track a second time, and
the hunters, keeping touch with the planes by signals, course here
and there on the lookout for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes
altogether. It is a tireless game of hide-and-seek, like that of
gunnery at the front. Naval ingenuity has invented no end of methods
and no end of experiments have been tried. Strictest kept of naval
secrets, these. Fritz is not to be told what to avoid and what not to
avoid.
Very thin the skin of a submarine; very fragile and complicated its
machinery. It does not take much of a shock to put it out of order or
a large cargo of explosive to dent that skin beyond repair. It being
in the nature of submarines to sink, how does the hunter know when he
has struck a mortal blow? If oil and bubbles come up for sometime in
one place, or if they come up with a rush, that is suggestive. Then,
it does not require a nautical mind to realise that by casting about
on the bottom with a grapnel you will learn if an object with the bulk
and size of a submarine is there. Admirals accept no guesswork from the
hunters about their exploits; they must bring the brush to prove the
kill.
With Admiral Crawford I went to see the submarine defences of a
harbour. It reminded one of the old days of the drawbridge to the
castle, when a friend rode freely in and an enemy might try to swim the
moat and scale the walls if he pleased.
“Take care! There is a tide here!” the coxswain was warned, lest the
barge get into some of the troubles meant for Fritz. “A cunning fellow,
Fritz. We must give him no openings.”
The openings appear long enough to permit British craft, whether
trawlers, or flotillas, or cruisers, or battleships, to go and come.
Lying as close together as fish in a basket, I saw at one place a
number of torpedo boats home from a week at sea.
“Here to-day and gone to-morrow,” said an officer. “What a time they
had last winter! You know how cold the North Sea is--no, you cannot,
unless you have been out in a torpedo boat dancing the tango in the
teeth of that bitter wind, with the spray whipping up to the tops
of the smoke-stacks. In the dead of night they would come into this
pitch-dark harbour. How they found their way is past me. It’s a trick
of those young fellows, who command.”
Stationary they seemed now as the quay itself; but let a signal speak,
an alarm come, and they would soon be as alive as leaping porpoises.
The sport is to those who scout and hunt. But, again, do not forget
those who watch, those who keep the blockade, from the Channel to
Iceland, and those trawlers who plod over plotted sea-squares with the
regularity of mowing machines cutting a harvest, on their way back and
forth sweeping up mines. They were fishermen before the war and are
fishermen still. Night and day they keep at it. They come into the
harbours stiff with cold, thaw out, and return to hardships which would
make many a man prefer the trenches. Tributes to their patient courage,
which came from the heart, were heard on board the battleships.
“It is when we think of them,” said an officer, “that we are most eager
to have the German fleet come out, so that we can do our part.”
XXXIII
THE FLEET PUTS TO SEA
The test of perfect motion--Is the fleet bottled by submarines?--
The message arrives--The sea-march of dull-toned unadorned
power--Destroyers in the van--The majestic procession of
battleships--The secret in sheer hard work--The sea-lion on
the hunt--The “old” Dreadnought--The exotic Turk--An hour and
still passing--Irresistible power--Visualizing the whole globe,
safe behind that fleet--Back in London--The Zeppelin’s pitiable
target--Meaning of British dominion--A German comparison.
There is another test besides that of gun drills and target practice
which reflects the efficiency of individual ships, and the larger the
number of ships the more important it is. For the business of a fleet
is to go to sea. At anchor it is in garrison rather than on campaign,
an assembly of floating forts. Navies one has seen which seemed
excellent when in harbour, but when they started to get under way the
result was hardly reassuring. Some erring sister fouled her anchor
chain; another had engine room trouble; another lagged for some other
reason; there was fidgeting on the bridges. Then one asked, What if a
summons to battle had come?
Our own officers were authority enough for me that the British had no
superiors in any of the tests. But strange reports dodged in and out of
the alleys of pessimism in the company of German insistence that the
_Tiger_ and other ships which one saw afloat had been sunk. Was the
fleet really held prisoner by fear of submarines? If it could go and
come freely when it chose, the harbour was the place for it while it
waited. If not, then, indeed, the submarine had revolutionised naval
warfare. Admiral Jellicoe might lose some of his battleships before he
could ever go into action against von Tirpitz.
“Oh, to hear the hoarse rattle of the anchor chains!” I kept thinking
while I was with the fleet. “Oh, to see all those monsters on the move!”
A vain wish it seemed, but it came true. A message from the Admiralty
arrived while we were on the flagship. Admiral Jellicoe called his flag
secretary, spoke a word to him, which was passed in a twinkling from
flagship to squadron and division and ship. He made it as simple as
ordering his barge alongside, this sending of the Grand Fleet to sea.
From the bridge of a destroyer beyond the harbour entrance we saw it
go. I shall not attempt to describe the spectacle, which convinced
me that language is the vehicle for making small things seem great
and great things seem small. If you wish words invite splendid and
magnificent and overwhelming and all the reliable old friends to
come forth in glad apparel from the dictionary. Personally, I was
inarticulate at sight of that sea march of dull-toned, unadorned power.
First came the outriders of majesty, the destroyers; then the graceful
light cruisers. How many destroyers has the British navy? I am only
certain that it has not as many as it seems to have, which would mean
thousands. Trying to count them is like trying to count the bees in the
garden. You cannot keep your eye on the individual bees. You are bound
to count some twice, so busy are their manœuvres.
“Don’t you worry, great ladies!” one imagined the destroyers were
saying to the battleships. “We will clear the road. We will keep watch
against snipers and assassins.”
“And if any knocks are coming, we will take them for you, great
ladies!” said the cruisers. “If one of us went down, the loss would not
be great. Keep your big guns safe to beat other battleships into scrap.”
For you may be sure that Fritz was on the watch in the open. He always
is, like the highwayman hiding behind a hedge and envying people who
have comfortable beds. Probably from a distance he had a peek through
his periscope at the Grand Fleet before the approach of the policeman
destroyers made him duck beneath the water; and probably he tried
to count the number of ships and identify their classes in order to
take the information home to Kiel. Besides, he always has his fingers
crossed. He hopes that some day he may get a shot at something more
warlike than a merchant steamer or an auxiliary; only that prospect
becomes poorer as life for him grows harder. Except a miracle happened,
the steaming fleet, with its cordons of destroyers, is as safe from him
as from any other kind of fish.
The harbour which is the fleet’s home is landlocked by low hills. There
is an eclipse of the sun by the smoke from the ships getting under way;
streaming, soaring columns of smoke on the move rise above the skyline
from the funnels of the battleships before they appear in sight around
a bend. Indefinite masses as yet they are, under their night-black
plumes. Each ship seems too immense to respond to any will except its
own. There is something automatic in the regularity with which, one
after another, they take the bend, as if a stop watch had been held
on twenty thousand tons of steel for a second’s variation. As they
approach they become more distinct and, showing less smoke, there seems
less effort. Their motive-power seems inherent, perpetual.
There is some sea running outside the entrance, enough to make
a destroyer roll. But the battleships disdain any notice of its
existence. It is no more to them than a ripple of dust to a motor
truck. They plough through it.
Though you were within twenty yards of them you would feel quite safe.
An express train was in no more danger of jumping the track. Mast in
line with mast, they held the course with a majestic steadiness. Now
the leading ship makes a turn of a few points. At the same spot, as
if it were marked by the grooves of tires in a road, the others make
it. Any variation of speed between them would have been instantly
noticeable, as one forged ahead or lagged; but the distance between
bows and sterns did not change. A line of one length would do for each
interval so far as one could discern. It was difficult to think that
they were not attached to some taut moving cable under water. How could
such apparently unwieldy monsters, in such a slippery element as the
sea, be made to obey their masters with such fine precision?
The answer again is sheer hard work! Drills as arduous in the engine
room as at the guns; machinery kept in tune; traditions in manœuvring
in all weathers, which are kept up with tireless practice.
Though all seemed perfection to the lay eye, let it be repeated that
this was not so to the eyes of admirals. It never can be. Perfection is
the thing striven for. Officers dwell on faults; all are critics. Thus
you have the healthiest kind of spirit, which means that there will be
no cessation in the striving.
“Look at that!” exclaimed an officer on the destroyer. “They better try
another painting on her and see if they can’t do better.”
Ever changing that northern light. For an instant the sun’s rays,
strained by a patch of peculiar cloud, playing on a Dreadnought’s side
made her colour appear molten, exaggerating her size till she seemed as
colossal to the eye as to the thought.
“But look, now!” said another officer. She was out of the patch and
seemed miles farther away to the vision, a dim shape in the sea-haze.
“You can’t have it right for every atmospheric mood of the North Sea,
I suppose!” muttered the critic. Still, it hurt his professional pride
that a battleship should show up as such a glaring target even for a
moment.
The power of the fleet was more patent in movement than at rest; for
the sea-lion was out of his lair on the hunt. Fluttering with flags
at a review at Spithead the battleships seemed out of their element;
giants trying for a fairy’s part. Display is not for them. It ill
becomes them, as a pink ribbon on a bulldog. Irresistibly ploughing
their way they presented a picture of resolute utility--guns and
turrets and speed. No spot of bright colour was visible on board. The
crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets, give the range, lay
the sights on the enemy’s ships, and the battle was on.
“There is the old Dreadnought,” said an officer.
The _old_ Dreadnought--all of ten years of age, the senile old thing!
What a mystery she was when she was building! The mystery accentuated
her celebrity--and almost forgotten now, while the _Queen Elizabeth_
and the _Warspite_ and others of their class with their fifteen-inch
guns would be in the public eye as the latest type till a new type
came. A parade of naval types was passing. One seemed to shade into the
other in harmonious effect.
But here was an outsider, whom one noted instantly as he studied those
rugged silhouettes of steel and counted guns. She had been a Turk.
As the Turks were going to have only one battleship, they were not
bothered about squadron homogeneity. They piled turret on turret,
twelve twelve-inch guns in exotic array. She was finished and the Turks
were already on board to take her home when the war began. But British
law requires that any foreign man-of-war building in English shipyards
may be taken over for her cost in case of war. So England kept the
ship, which the Turks, I understand, thought was hardly a sporting
thing to do.
One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts--even a
squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of
its might. Sixteen--twenty--twenty-four--it was the unending numbers
of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive. An hour
passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes behind the
wind screen of the destroyer’s bridge, only to look back and see more
Dreadnoughts going by. One had not realised that there were so many in
the harbour. He had a suspicion that Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror
who could take Dreadnoughts out of a hat.
The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea,
and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever;
still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King Edward
VII class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients of the
pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were yet
to come. One’s eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps march through
Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they had seen the
whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the whole German army in
sea-power and in land-power, too.
The destroyer commander looked at his watch.
“Time!” he said. “I’ll put you on shore.”
He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the
engine room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an
hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at
twenty knots towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth.
One’s imagination sped across seas where he had cruised into harbours
that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was trying to
visualise the whole globe--all of it except the Baltic seas and a
thumbmark in the centre of Europe. Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney,
Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay--yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San
Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them where
countless millions dwell were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet.
Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with
its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual
freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system--and
as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city!
From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight’s play,
the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was
dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot was fired at
those sturdy men behind armour.
When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers
fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and
open markets under the British flag; when you compare the vociferations
of von Tirpitz glorying in the torpedoing of a _Lusitania_ with the
quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark of
conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea-power
to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on women and
children would use that power if they had it.
XXXIV
MANY PICTURES