ais.s3 7.fgy < n u PRESENTED in <7«. THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR LORD NELSON THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR ' BY W. MACNEILE DIXON Professor in the University of Glasgow 9J* BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Jibe fltocreibc prca* CambriDgr 1917 Gilt DEC S Wt ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For a number of descriptive quotations in the following pages I am indebted to the correspondence columns of the Times, and to articles in the Cornhill and other magazines. I have also to acknowledge with best thanks permission to use plans of the Falklands battle and of the engagement between the Sydney and the Emden which appeared in the Times. W. M. D. CONTENTS I. The War at Sea and Its New Problems — German Tactics i II. The First Phase — The Heligoland Action — Germany's Fleet in Being 7 III. The Ocean Battles — Coronel — The Falkland Isles 15 IV. North Sea Battles — The Dogger Bank — Jut- land 27 V. The Submarine Menace — The Work of British Submarines 44 VI. Blockade and Bombardment 54 VII. Single Ship Actions — Sailors and Seamanship . 63 VIII. Bridging the Seas 73 IX. Navies and Armies — What the British Navy has DONE FOR THE WORLD 82 APPENDIX German Colonial Possessions surrendered to the Allies since August, 1914 91 ILLUSTRATIONS Lord Nelson Frontispiece Admiral Sir John R. Jellicoe, G.C.B., G.C.V.O. . . i Admiral Sir David Beatty, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., D.S.O. . 4 Map of the World showing Ocean Battles and Ger- many's lost Colonial Possessions 8 Commodore Tyrwhitt 10 Two Views of Heligoland 12 Admiral Craddock 18 Battle of the Falkland Isles (plan) 20 Admiral Sturdee 22 Firing A Salvo 24 Map of the North Sea 28 Battle of Jutland (plan) 32 The British Fleet at Sea 36 Rear-Admiral the Hon. Horace L. A. Hood, C.B., M.V.O., D.S.O 40 Submarine C 34 coming into port 44 Looking through the Periscope of a Submarine . . 46 A Submarine's Foremost Torpedo Tubes .... 50 Lieutenant-Commander Horton 56 Map of the Dardanelles 58 „ 1 1. M.S. Cornwallis Firing at the Turks in the Mountains 60 iz ILLUSTRATIONS Engagement between H.M.A.S. Sydney and the Emden (plan) 64 A Floating Dry-Dock 68 Sentinels of the Empire: Naval Guns .... 76 A Blue-jacket inside the Muzzle of a i 5-inch Gun on Board H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth 84 Photograph by J. Russell £s Sons, Soulhsea ADMIRAL SIR JOHN JELLICOE, G.C.B., G.C.V.O. THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR CHAPTER I THE WAR AT SEA AND ITS NEW PROBLEMS — GERMAN TACTICS At the outbreak of war Britain was not altogether un- prepared: she was superior to her enemy on the sea. But she was none the less faced by grave anxieties. The days of Trafalgar, her last great naval engagement, lay far in the past, and, however glorious her sea traditions, vic- tories a hundred years ago afford no guarantee of victories in the present. Empires majestic as her own, founded, as it had once seemed, upon rock, — Assyria, Greece, Tyre, Carthage, Rome itself, — had gone down into the dust, and who could affirm that Britain's hour had not struck? Britons, indeed, were confident that even if Fortune proved a fickle jade, the Fates themselves might shrink from the resistance of the grim old lion of the sea. They were con- scious, too, that it was a splendid quarrel in which to win or lose, a quarrel great as "ever the sword had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed," and that if their country's day were done, a noble cause would at least make noble the last chapter of her history. Still no prophet could forecast the issue of the struggle or attempt to picture the coming scenes of the imperial drama. Since Nelson's day, if not all, almost all, the conditions of warfare on the sea had been transformed. Problems hardly yet stated confronted i THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR the British admirals. Wood and rope and sail had been re- placed by steel and steam. The speed of ships, the range of guns, the defensive armour, the offensive weapons, all were changed. A single gun from a super-dreadnought to-day discharges a greater weight of metal in a single shot than the whole broadside of a hundred guns on Nelson's flagship. The fleets opposed to them, upon which Ger- many had expended £300,000,000, were, moreover, next to their own the most powerful in the world, composed of the most formidable modern vessels, equipped with every engine of destruction the wit of man could devise, and manned by experienced, skilled, and resolute seamen. Science had almost exhausted itself in their construction. Her adversary was certainly not to be despised. Naval warfare, too, is full of surprises. The chance of battle, a single mistake on the part of one of her admirals, might eliminate Britain's superiority in capital ships, a second might spell her ruin. Upon the shoulders of Sir John Jelli- coe lay a responsibility the heaviest, beyond all argument, that any sailor, not excepting Nelson himself, had ever borne, for without doubt the magnitude of the operations which faced the British Navy was utterly without prece- dent. It had not merely to deal with the German High Seas Fleet, if opportunity offered, and in any case, and at all hazards, to watch and contain it, but at the same time to provide for a hundred contingencies, to establish a blockade of enemy ports, to keep an eye on vessels under other flags, to hunt down Germany's swift commerce raid- ers at large in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, to conduct THE WAR AT SEA vast operations in the Eastern Mediterranean; all this and more — to cover the transport of soldiers, literally in millions, from Canada, from India, from Australia, from Britain to every zone of war, France, Egypt, Turkey; and of munitions and supplies not alone for these but for her allies to Russian and Italian ports. A never-ending pro- cession of troop-ships, munition-ships, passenger-ships, merchant-ships, whole armies coming and going upon the seven seas — ninety-two transports conveyed the Indian, thirty-two the Canadian, troops, how many have crossed from Britain to France, from France to Britain, or down the busy street of the Mediterranean since August, 19 14? — and all these with hardly a thought of Germany and the second most powerful navy ever built ! "I consider," said Admiral Hornby, "that I have com- mand of the sea when I am able to tell my Government that they can move an expedition to any point without fear of interference." Such is Sir John Jellicoe's position to-day. Consider now the scale of these early operations. It is unheard of, fabulous, unimaginable, the miracle, not that inevitable mistakes were made, but that this stupen- dous thing was possible at all in the face of such opposi- tion as Germany, putting forth all her strength, was pre- pared to offer and did offer. Hardly, then, can one say that the great glory of Britain's achievement in this war is to be found in the spectacular events, the hours of actual battle, thrilling though they be; rather is it to be found in three invisible things, the organization that supported so gigantic a super-structure, the resourceful skill with which 3 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR the altogether novel problems were met and solved, and the superb spirit, which burned and burns like an unquench- able flame, in the breasts of the British seamen themselves. Amid all the changes since Drake's or Nelson's day, that remained unchanged. You may very properly point out that in respect of some of these undertakings Great Brit- ain had the support of gallant and powerful allies, France, Italy, Russia, Japan. It is true, and to these allies, no one — least of all Englishmen — will deny unstinted admira- tion and praise. Yet these nations will themselves acknowl- edge that in the major operations, and at the point of chief est hazard, the nerve centre of the North Sea and the English Channel, the strain has rested wholly on the Grand Fleet and its auxiliaries. What, now, is the outstanding fact of the whole naval war, which governs all others and gives its character to the situation from first to last? It is the unwilling and tacit, but the full, acceptance by Germany, with all the strategy and tactics involved in the admission, of her naval inferiority. Before a blow was struck she accepted the position of the weaker power, framed her plans and made her dispositions in the light of it. That estimate of the position was just, wise, intelligible, and the measures which flowed from it logical and beyond criticism. The vapourings in the Ger- man press, the inability of German admirals, after pro- longed and anxious searches, to discover the British fleet, the joyful announcements of victory, the flags, and compli- ments and speeches had all no doubt their calculated value. "Make-Believe" is a good game and Germans play it 4 lDMIRAL SIR DAVID BEATTY, K.C.B., K.CVO D.S.O THE WAR AT SEA well. But the high naval command, Admirals von Schccr and von Schipper, have no illusions, they know where Sir David Bcatty is to be found on any day and at any hour. But they know, too, that a living dog is better than a dead lion, and a llect afloat than a fleet submerged. Inferiority, unless the gods directly intervene, spells ruin in a great engagement, and Germany has put her trust, and she was right, in harassing tactics, in attempts to deal unexpected blows, in efforts to reduce the indisputable superiority of her foe by submarine attacks, to lure pursuing squadrons into mine fields or to cut off scouting cruisers by concen- trations of superior strength. These are the tactics of the weaker power; they lead to small, they may lead, with assistance of fortune, to considerable, successes. They fail only in one particular, they cannot compass a victory. The situation which within twenty-four hours the Brit- ish Navy established remains, unchanged, the situation to-day. A single sentence covers it; the British ships, whether men-of-war or merchantmen, are upon the sea, the German in their ports. Nowhere, perhaps, was the supreme significance of their inconspicuous, their silent, presence and pressure immediately realized. Guileless men were heard to ask the question, "What is the British Navy doing?" For many months neither in Germany nor among neutral states did uninstructed opinion clearly per- ceive that the key of the whole European situation, mili- tary as well as naval, lay in the keeping of that invisible fleet, that the great arc of the Allies' communications from north to south, vital to all their efforts, depended upon its 5 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR efficiency and upon its efficiency alone, that it was, too, the band of encircling steel destined in the end to strangle by its unremitting pressure the strength and resources of the Central Powers. Slow in its working, sea power must, in a protracted struggle, prove decisive. If now we summarize the work of the British Navy in the present war, four headings will suffice : — 1. Battle, either with the enemy's Grand Fleet or with subsidiary squadrons or commerce raiders. 2. Blockade, including the capture of enemy merchant- ships on the high seas. 3. Bombardment, or assistance in combined naval and military operations. 4. Bridging the seas, keeping open, that is, a secure line of communications behind the league-long battle front of the Allied armies. All its multitudinous activities may be ranged under this comprehensive scheme. Each in itself came, of course, vividly before the riveted gaze of the world only as scene succeeded scene in the amazing drama. The opening phase of the struggle, for the most part confined to minor opera- tions in the North Sea, — preliminary steps of contending boxers who spar for a position and an opening, — was mainly an affair of submarines and mines. Some stirring events, however, belong to the first months of war, the chief of these the action off Heligoland on August 28, the battle of Coronel, and the engagement which may be said to have rung down the curtain on the first act — the battle of the Falkland Isles. CHAPTER II THE FIRST PHASE — THE HELIGOLAND ACTION — GERMANY'S FLEET IN BEING With her Grand Fleet sentenced to inactivity within its canals and land-locked harbours, her merchant navy captured or driven from the seas, — over half a million tons of German shipping was captured in the first month of hostilities, in two months over a million tons, — Ger- many was already in evil case. Samoa taken by the New Zealand expedition, and Neu Pommern in the Bismarck Archipelago by an Australian, were early lost to her, the wireless stations in Togoland, South-West Africa, the Caroline Islands in the Pacific, and German New Guinea, all went the way of her stricken raiders. In August, 1914, Germany had numerous fast vessels on the ocean routes, but she could not maintain them. Like the hundred-handed giant of the old fables, the British Navy, bestriding the world, destroyed them in their far- separated hunting-grounds. The Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was the first victim, sunk by the Highflyer off the Cape Verde Islands, on August 30, 1914. Next the Cap Trafalgar, after a duel with the Carmania, went down in the South Atlantic on September 14. The Spreewald was captured in the same month by the Berwick in the North Atlantic. Then it was the Emden's turn, by far the most successful raider, whose skilful handling under Von M Ciller 7 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR aroused considerable admiration in Britain. The Kaiser had just despatched his congratulations to the town of Emden on "its God-child in the Indian Ocean" when the end came and she was battered to a wreck by the Sydney off the Cocos Keelings on November 10. On December 8 Von Spee's powerful squadron ran into Sturdee at the Falklands, and that day's fighting disposed of the Scharn- horst, the Gneisenau, the Niirnberg, and the Leipzig. On March 14 of the following year the Dresden was destroyed off Juan Fernandez by the Kent and the Glasgow. The Prinz Eitel Friederich, no longer able to keep the seas, retired to Newport News and was interned there on April 8. The Karlsruhe's fate remains unknown; she vanished, possibly in a storm, and ceased to trouble the world's com- merce. The Konigsberg ran and hid herself amid the trees of a tropical African forest, but perished there, in the Ru- figi River, under the guns of monitors on July II, 1915, and the game was at an end. Soon, too, since the Fatherland could send them no assistance, the greater German colo- nies began to fall like ripe fruit from the shaken tree. After the Falklands battle the guerre de course collapsed, and before five months were over Germany's zone of naval warfare was restricted to the Baltic and the North Sea, except for the operation of submarines here and there in bursts of brief activity. In this early part of the war she had, however, one great and startling success against war- vessels, which brought sharply to the attention of Britain and the world in general the destructive power of this venomous type of craft. A single submarine under Von ch Aug 26, 1914- Aug 29,1914 .. .Sept. 21, 1914 mrendered to British.. Sept 24 t 19(4 ,, « ., July 9, 1915 -♦, .«».... „ Sept. 4,1916 jn Governor and Territory Feb 16, 1916 80' 20 ^r 40 NO R !A M E H RIG Prim' 9 Eit el Friederich NORTH \A.TUJLNTIt ~o E a A S I A £*' to*...-*.: 180 40 Inter led April ®< 20 7W5^ TROfMC OF CANCER b tropic or 40 lA __ CAPRICORN -fci -*s^ J C SOIX' r H ME Sunk iterch 14, ISIS Dresden A For t/ie complete list of German Colonial Possessions surrendered to the Allies since ifrc outbreak of War see Appendix Kaiser Wifhe/m , o*'er Grosse Sunk Au&30,/?t? A F HI RICA Xv <^ V| >(4+ m . JSJQX k W- k AN %%m!tt JL T L < p.Stharnhorft) T^SnssmaM. in" a L&RMig- JL N T destroyed iV X <5 «»-.w» ]r* ■®- Emden destroyed Nor, 10,19, f JC AUSTRAL 180 s r€0° 140 I20 5 I00 Q 80 l 60 c 40 c 20° © Togo/and surrendered to British and French .- Aug.26,/9/4 ® Samoa „... „.-...*,._ Aug.29,1914 ® Bismarck Archipelago „„ u „ .Sept.21, 1914 © German New Guinea and Solomon Islands surrendered to British. .Sept. 24, 1914 (|) German South West Africa „,, « ./ duly 9,1915 © Dar-es- Salaam.-. ft .... 4h */ Sept. 4, 1916 @ Kamerun No formal surrender, but German Governor and , t roops retiree d into Spanish Territ ory. r Feb. 16, 1916 f eo° «oo° i2o° 20 ZEALAND Bave life as they had done in fighting the ship. Boats were hastily repaired 25 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR and lowered by men eagerly volunteering to help. Unfortunately the sea was rough and the water very cold, so we only succeeded in picking up twelve men, of whom five subsequently died. Thus, then, in its various episodes the battle of the Falk- land Isles was fought and won. A crushing and decisive blow had been struck, but two German ships, the Prinz Eitel Friederich, an armed liner, and the Dresden, a light cruiser, had made their escape and were still at large in the Pacific. They, too, had to be dealt with. For some months longer they contrived to elude capture and to harass shipping on the Chilian coast. In March, however, the Eitel Friederich came to the end of her resources, reached an American port, and decided not to leave it. About the same time the Dresden was rounded up by the Kent and the Glasgow at Juan Fernandez. She displayed little stomach for fighting and after a five-minutes' action hauled down her colours. The crew were taken on board the British ships. She had been badly damaged and set on fire. Finally the magazine exploded and she sank, the last of Von Spee's once able and menacing squadron. So terminated Germany's naval adventures in the far seas. They had been skilfully conducted by determined and resourceful men; in a fashion they proved successful; they may have encouraged Germany in the belief that her sailors were a match for Britain's, but they were, never- theless, hopeless from the first. And when the cost is counted and the final verdict is given, whether in Ger- many or elsewhere, who will say that the game, though bravely played, was worth the candle? CHAPTER IV NORTH SEA BATTLES — THE DOGGER BANK — JUTLAND The swift cruiser raids on the east coast of England served a double purpose. They wounded British, while they heartened German, homes. They had, however, a military as well as a political object — "to entice," said a German sailor who was present, "the British fleet out of port." "In the first place," he remarked, "our small cruisers, which were packed full of mines, had strewn the local waters with them. ... In the second place, we have shown the Englishman who is always boasting of his com- mand of the sea that he cannot protect his own coast. . . . In the third place, we have given the inhabitants of Eng- land, and especially the people of Yarmouth, a thorough fright." These, then, were the aims, illustrating clearly enough German tactics and German psychology. In the first raid on Yarmouth, on November 3, 1914, the attack- ing vessels were invisible from the shore in the autumnal haze and were too distant and too frightened themselves to do much damage; in the second, on December 16, the casualties were heavy in Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scar- borough; many women and children ware slaughtered and churches and houses wrecked, the firing being quite indis- criminate and at a venture. Once more in the mist the Ger- 27 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR man vessels, retiring at full speed, escaped their pursuers. The third was planned but intercepted. On January 24, 1915, Admiral Beatty's patrolling squad- ron sighted a German fleet of four battle-cruisers, accom- panied by a number of light cruisers and destroyers, mak- ing for the English coast and distant from it about thirty miles. Without hesitation the Germans turned and fled at their best pace for home. A grim chase and a running fight ensued. The disposition of the German guns, for their vessels are more heavily armed for flight than for pursuit, gave them some advantage, while the British in the rear could bring to bear only their bow guns and not broadsides upon the escaping raiders. During the greater part of the engagement only the leading British ships, the Lion and the Tiger, came within reasonable range of the enemy. It should be borne in mind that in a general en- gagement, however desirable it may be for the superior force to close with the enemy and thus ensure his destruc- tion, a complete overlap must first be established by superior speed. Until that is obtained the enemy screen of destroyers thwart any such attempt by dropping mines, the line of which cannot safely be crossed to secure a close range. With the great ships racing at thirty miles an hour, one marvels that the range could be kept at all, yet the fire was deadly. The unhappy Bliicher, a great fifteen thousand ton ship but slower than her colleagues, fell out of the line shockingly mangled, and was torpedoed out of existence by the Arethusa. The rest fled on. Favoured by fortune, for a lucky shot disabled one of the Lion's feed 28 NORTH SEA BATTLES tanks, they reached in melancholy straits their own mine fields, which forbade further pursuit, but when last seen the flames were mounting on the Seydlitz, the next in line, as high as her masthead, and the Derfflinger, ahead of her, was in hardly better case. Some hundreds of grateful survivors were picked up by the British from the Bluchcr's crew, one of whom is reported to have said, "On land we can beat you, but here, no." Despite the German tales not a single British vessel failed to return and the casual- ties were very few. Imagination cannot picture the condition of a vessel under such a sustained deluge of shells as crashed upon the luckless Germans. Read the account given by one of the Blucher's survivors: — Shots came slowly at first. They fell ahead and over, raising vast columns of water; now they fell astern and short. The British guns were ranging. Those deadly waterspouts crept nearer and nearer. The men on deck watched them with a strange fascina- tion. Soon one pitched close to the ship and a vast watery pillar, a hundred metres high one of them affirmed, fell lashing on the deck. The range had been found. Dann aber gings los! Now the shells came thick and fast with a horrible droning hum. At once they did terrible execution. The electric plant was soon destroyed, and the ship plunged in darkness that could be felt. "'You could not see your hand before your nose," said one. Down below decks there was horror and confusion, mingled with gasping shouts and moans as the shells plunged through the decks. It was only later, when the range shortened, that their trajectory ilattcned and they tore holes in the ship's side and raked her decks. At first they came dropping from the skies. They pene- trated the decks. They bored their way even to the stokehold. The coal in the bunkers was set on fire. Since the bunkers were half empty the fire burned merrily. In the engine-room a shell licked 2 9 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR up the oil and sprayed it around in flames of blue and green, scar- ring its victims and blazing where it fell. Men huddled together in dark compartments, but the shells sought them out, and there death had a rich harvest. The terrific air-pressure resulting from explosion in a confined space, left a deep impression on the minds of the men of the Bliicher. The air, it would seem, roars through every opening and tears its way through every weak spot. All loose or insecure fittings are transformed into moving instruments of destruction. Open doors bang to, and jamb — and closed iron doors bend outward like tin plates, and through it all the bodies of men are whirled about like dead leaves in a winter blast, to be battered to death against the iron walls. . . . In one of the engine-rooms — it was the room where the high velocity engines for ventilation and forced draught were at work — men were picked up by that terrible Luftdruck, like the whirl- drift at a street corner, and tossed to a horrible death amidst the machinery. There were other horrors too fearful to recount. If it was appalling below deck, it was more than appalling above. The Bliicher was under the fire of so many ships. Even the little destroyers peppered her. " It was one continuous explosion," said a gunner. The ship heeled over as the broadsides struck her, then righted herself, rocking like a cradle. Gun crews were so destroyed that stokers had to be requisitioned to carry ammunition. Men lay flat for safety. The decks presented a tangled mass of scrap iron. . . . The Bliicher had run her course. She was lagging lame, and with the steering gear gone was beginning slowly to circle. It was seen that she was doomed. The bell that rang the men to church parade each Sunday was tolled, those who were able assembled on deck, helping as well as they could their wounded comrades. Some had to creep out through shot holes. They gathered in groups on deck awaiting the end. Cheers were given for the Bliicher, and three more for the Kaiser. "Die Wacht am Rhein" was sung, and permission given to leave the ship. But some of them had already gone. The British ships were now silent, but their torpedoes had done their deadly work. A cruiser and de- stroyers were at hand to rescue the survivors. The wounded 30 NORTH SEA BATTLES BlQcher Bettled down, turned wearily over, and disappeared in a swirl of water. This action' gave pause to Germany. Licking her wounds and nursing unhappy memories she decided to forego for a time the pleasures and political advantages of raiding and to spread for Britain less costly lures. A half-hearted at- tempt on Lowestoft, which had little serious result, was, indeed, made in April, 1916, — a half-hour's friendly call: Sir John Jcllicoe would have preferred a longer visit, but in these matters Germany preserves a rigid etiquette. Of raids great and small it may be observed that they are the only activities, no great things, left to the German Navy, powerful as it is. Other and better occupations, indeed, it has none, no mercantile marine to protect, no mines to sweep, no transports or wide extent of coast to guard. A raiding squadron can choose its own hour, dash out at night or in fog, fire at anything it may chance to see, trawler or trader, fisher or warship, enemy or neutral, and return at express speed. Of these trivial achievements is it possible that so great a fleet, debarred from all other undertakings, can really be proud? Come now to that stern and decisive conflict, which clinched, as it were, the naval situation, the battle of Jut- land, in respect of all particulars that make a battle great, the magnitude of the forces engaged, the scale of the opera- tions, and the significance of the results, the fiercest clash of fleets since Trafalgar. Fought on a summer's day, the eve of the glorious "first of June," so famous in the annals of the British Navy, it compares in hardly a single feature 31 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR with any naval conflict in history, except perhaps with that minor action in the Bight of Heligoland, which in some fashion it resembles. For like that it was a far-flung and dispersed series of conflicts, a clashing of ships in mist and darkness or in patches of short-lived light. At ex- treme range, to avoid the deadly torpedo attacks, the great war-vessels pounded each other amid haze and smoke screens, behind which the Germans when pressed withdrew from sight. Wounded vessels drifted out of the scene and left their fate in doubt; destroyers dashed to and fro attacking and retreating; ships, the flames licking their iron masts a hundred feet aloft, loomed up for a few moments only to vanish in the mist. As "was anticipated" the Germans put their trust chiefly in torpedo attacks, easily made against approaching, difficult to direct against retiring, vessels. Throughout destroyers on both sides played a magnificent and conspicuous part, the "hussar" tactics of a naval action. But so numerous were the vessels engaged and so dim the weather that a certain confusion inseparable from the conditions reigned the entire day. Indubitably a long-hoped-for opportunity had come to the British; the German fleet had actually emerged in strength and "upon an enterprise." Yet emerged only to withdraw, to tantalize, and, if possible, to lure into fatal areas the pursuing foe. The annoyance which Nelson suffered from the French Admiral Latouche Treville, who used "to play bo-peep in and out of Toulon, like a mouse at the edge of her hole, 1 ' as the British Admiral expressed it, was the lot also of Sir 32 2NC GERNAI* JUTLAND FLEET \ 8ANK \ VON SCHEERS HIGH SEA FLEET APPROXIMATE C JELLICOES GRANO FLEET 6 O 6 20 HOOD'S BATTLE J CRUISERS n3SQOAOR0N) JUTLAND BANK 3 rd STAGE N TlAND BANK BRITISH DESTROYER ATTACKS BEATTY NORTH SEA BATTLES John Jcllicoc. Von Schccr repeated the tactics of La- touche. His orders were, no doubt, the same, to show the "greatest circumspection," to risk nothing. But this "fet- tered and timid" warfare, as a French writer once com- plained, must always fail. The chief hope and aim of the British fleet in the present war has been the same as Nel- son's, to compel a decisive engagement; the aim of the enemy's fleet to avoid one, a perfectly legitimate and per- fectly intelligible policy, with which no one can quarrel. Germany consistently refuses all actions except on chosen ground at her own front door, where she can, when the odds are against her, withdraw her ships immediately within her protected ports and slam the door in the face of her antagonist. There only will she fight, within a few miles of her own coast, in shallow waters suitable for the operation of underwater craft, and in the immediate neigh- bourhood of her own mine fields. Had Nelson been alive to-day he could have done no more than the British Ad- mirals have done — offer battle to the unwilling enemy on his own terms. Germany takes only as much of the war as she wishes, Britain takes the whole, everywhere and all the time. Repeatedly Sir David Beatty has faced this sit- uation with its attendant risks. Repeatedly with his cruis- ing squadron he appeared within sight of the German de- fences, four hundred miles from his own base. If he could engage the Germans even at heavy cost to himself, "cling to them as long as his teeth would hold," in an entangling and detaining action the Grand Fleet might reach him in time to secure an overwhelming victory. That was his 33 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR hope. And let it be frankly admitted the hope was not fulfilled. At Jutland once more he took the risks — some say unwisely, for why do more than contain the German Navy useless in its ports? — he incurred the inevitable losses, the main British fleet arrived in time to strike a shattering blow, but failed to administer the coup de grace. "I can fully sympathize with his feelings," wrote Sir John Jellicoe, "when the evening mist and fading light robbed the fleet of that complete victory for which he had man- oeuvred, and for which the vessels in company with him had striven so hard." To understand, even in a measure, this immense con- flict, one must bear in mind that the British Grand Fleet under Sir John Jellicoe was on May 30 actually at sea, to the north of Sir David Beatty's battle-cruisers, who on the 31st, having completed his sweep, turned away from the south to rejoin the Commander-in-Chief. Since the tactics which led to it cannot be here disclosed, let us pass at once to the encounter itself. About half-past two Beatty received signals from his light cruiser squadron that the enemy was out and in force. A seaplane scout went aloft and confirmed the signals. German battle- cruisers were in sight, but falling back upon probably still stronger forces. To engage or not to engage was hardly Beatty's problem. Should he at all cost pursue, encounter, and detain the foe, or, avoiding more than a mere ex- change of shots, continue on his course to join Admiral Jellicoe? Faint heart never won a great decision. He chose the heroic, the British, way, and determined to force the 34 NORTH SEA BATTLES battle, "to engage the enemy in sight." We may, per- haps, best understand the action if we divide it into three stages, (a) pursuit, (b) retreat, (c) again pursuit; the first, that in which Beatty was engaged with the enemy's battle- cruisers falling back upon (heir main fleet, which lasted about an hour, from 3.48 when the opening shots were fired till the German High Seas Fleet showed itself at 4.38. At this point Beatty swung round to draw the enemy to- ward Jellicoe approaching from the north, and the second stage of the battle began in which the British were heavily engaged with a greatly superior force, in fact, the whole German Navy. They had, however, the assistance of the Fifth Battle Squadron under Evan Thomas, four power- ful battleships which had come up during the first phase, fired a few shots at the extreme range of about twelve miles and took the first fire of Von Scheer's battleships. Steaming north now instead of south, Beatty slackened speed to keep in touch with the heavy ships. This stage of the action also lasted about an hour or more, when about six o'clock Jellicoe came in sight five miles to the north, and the third phase began. Beatty toward the end of the second stage had drawn ahead of the enemy, press- ing in upon and curving round his line, and now drove straight across it to the east, closing the range to twelve thousand yards, with two objects — first, to bring the leading German ships under concentrated fire, and second, to allow a clear space for Jellicoe to come down and com- plete their destruction. It was a masterly manoeuvre which enabled the Third Battle-Cruiser Squadron, in ad- 35 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR vance of Jellicoe, under Admiral Hood, to join at once in the battle, and assist in "crumpling up" the head of the German line. The supreme moment had come. Jellicoe's great fleet was in line behind Hood, bearing down on Von Scheer in overwhelming force. By beautiful handling the British Admiral effected the junction of his fleets in very difficult conditions. There still remains in naval warfare much of the splendid pageantry of old, which in land operations is gone beyond recall. "The grandest sight I have ever seen," wrote an officer in the fleet, "was the sight of our battle line — miles of it fading into mist — taking up their posi- tions like clock-work and then belching forth great sheets of fire and clouds of smoke." But the prize was snatched from the British grasp. It was already seven o'clock and the evening brought with it the thick North Sea haze be- hind which and his own smoke screens Von Scheer turned and fled for his ports. "Great care was necessary," wrote Sir John Jellicoe, "to ensure that our own ships were not mistaken for enemy vessels." By half-past eight or nine practically all was over, save for the British destroyer at- tacks, which lasted far into the darkness, on the scattered and fleeing enemy. Only two hours of a misty daylight had been left to Sir John Jellicoe to accomplish his task. Then came night, and in the night the shattered and shaken Germans crept — one is not quite clear by what route — through their mine fields to the blessed security of pro- tected harbours. Had the weather been different — well, who knows whether in that case the German fleet would 36 NORTH SEA BATTLES have put to sea? Now as ever in naval warfare command- ers must choose conditions the most favourable to their designs. The British Admiral remained on the scene of the battle, picking up survivors from some of the smaller craft till after midday (1.15 p.m.) on June 1. On that day not one German ship was in sight on a sea strewn with the tan- gled and shapeless wreckage of proud vessels, the melan- choly litter of war. Perhaps Jutland, inconclusive as it seemed, may be judged by the world the true crisis of the struggle. While Germany, after her manner, poured forth to the sceptical world tidings of amazing victory, Britain, too, after her manner, said little save bluntly to record her losses, and later published merely the reports of the admirals engaged. They are very plain and matter-of-fact, these documents without brag. So they can be recommended to the atten- tion of seekers after truth. For lovers of romance, of course, the German versions will afford brighter reading. Here, however, is the unofficial account of a midship- man on board one of the battleships: — We were all as cheery as Punch when action was sounded off. The battle-cruisers, which, by the way, were first sighted by your eldest son, who went without his tea to look out in the foretop, were away op the bow, firing like blazes, and doing a colossal turn of speed. I expect they were very pleased to see us. The battle fleet put it across them properly. We personally "strated" a large battleship, which we left badly bent, and very much on fire. They fired stink shells at us, which fortunately bursl some dis- tance away. They looked as if they smelt horrible. We engaged a Zepp which Bhowed an inclination to become pally. I think it thought we were Germans. Altogether it was some stunt. 37 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR Yes, you were right, I was up in the foretop and saw the whole show. I told you I was seventeen hours up there, did n't I? Simply bristling with glasses, revolvers, respirators, ear-protectors, and what-nots. I cannot imagine anything more intensely dramatic than our final junction with the battle-cruisers. They appeared on the starboard bow going a tremendous speed and firing like blazes at an enemy we could not see. Even before we opened first the colossal noise was nearly deafening. The Grand Fleet opened fire. We commenced by "strafing" one of the "Kaisers" that was only just visible on the horizon, going hell for leather. The whole High Sea Fleet were firing like blazes. It is the most extraordinary sensation I know to be sitting up there in the foretop gazing at a comparatively unruffled bit of sea, when suddenly about five immense columns of water about a hundred feet high shoot up as if from nowhere, and bits of shell go rattling down into the water, or else, with a noise like an express train, the projectiles go screeching overhead and fall about a mile the other side of you. You watch the enemy firing six great flashes about as many miles away, and then for fifteen seconds or so you reflect that there is about two tons of sudden death hurtling toward you. Then with a sigh of relief the splashes rise up, all six of them, away on the starboard bow. On the other hand, there is a most savage exultation in firing at another ship. You hear the order "Fire!" the foretop gets up and hits you in the face, an enormous yellow cloud of cordite smoke — the charge weighs two thousand pounds — rises up and blows away just as the gentleman with the stop-watch says, "Time ! " and then you see the splashes go up, perhaps between you and the enemy, behind the enemy, perhaps, or, if you are lucky, a great flash breaks out on the enemy, and when the smoke has rolled away you just have time to see that she is well and truly blazing before the next salvo goes off. I had the extreme satisfaction of seeing the Liitzow get a salvo which must have caused her furiously to sink. There are minor side-shows, too, which contribute greatly to the excitement. We also discharged our large pieces at the Rostock, but she was getting such a thin time from somebody else that we refrained from pressing the question. Her mainmast and after-funnel had gone. She was quite stationary, and badly on fire. We sighted 38 NORTH SEA BATTLES submarines, two in number, and also large numbers of enemy destroyers, one of which we soundly "strafed." So soundly, in fact, that it gave up the ghost . • . Well, when I climbed down from the forctop late that ni^ht I was as black as a nigger, very tired, and as hungry as a hunter, I having missed my tea. I wish you could have seen the state we were in between the decks. Water everywhere, chairs, stools, radiators, tin baths, boots, shoes, clothes, books, and every con- ceivable article, clunked all over the place. We did n't care a h^, because we all thought of "Der Tag" on the morrow which we all expected. Destroyers and light cruisers were attacking like fury all night, and when I got up at the bugle "Action!" at 2 A.M. I felt as if I had slept about three and a half minutes. At about 3 a.m. we sighted a Zepp, which was vigorously fired at. It made off "quam celerrime," which means quick with a capital Q. Look now a little more closely at the details and epi- sodes of this engagement. Picture a calm and hazy sea and spread over an immense area the fleets of larger ships surrounded by screens of light cruisers and destroyers furiously engaged in encounters of their own, battles with- in the greater battle, and one sees how entirely this action lacks the classic simplicity of such engagements as the battle of the Nile or Trafalgar. But the main movements are clear enough. The heaviest losses of the British were sustained in the earlier, of the Germans in the later, stages, when the efficiency of their gunnery "became rapidly reduced under punishment, while ours was maintained throughout." Hardly was Beatty in action before he lost two battle cruisers, the Indefatigable and the Queen Mary. Later, the Invincible, the flagship of the Third Cruiser Squadron, went down with Admiral Hood, who had brought bis ships into "action ahead in a most inspiring 39 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR manner worthy of his great naval ancestors." One may note here two difficulties of pursuit in a modern action: first, that the enemy fire is concentrated on the leading ship, which can hardly escape punishment, and second, that his fast smaller craft, continually present on your engaged bow, discharge torpedoes and drop mines if you attempt to close him. Three armoured cruisers and eight destroyers shared the fate of the larger vessels. The Ger- man losses, on a conservative estimate, were still more severe, especially when "the head of their line was crum- pled up, leaving battleships as targets for the majority of our battle-cruisers." The enemy constantly "turned away" in the last stage and under cover of smoke screens endeavoured to avoid the withering fifteen-inch gun fire, but at least four or five battleships and battle-cruisers, as many light cruisers, and six or eight destroyers were finally lost, probably twenty vessels in all and ten thousand men. Throughout the day of thunderous war the destroyers dashed to the torpedo attacks on the great ships, careless of the heart-shaking deluge of shells, utterly careless of life and youth, and all else save the mighty business in hand, and when night put an end to the main action, continued their work in the uncanny darkness, under the momen- tary glare of searchlights or the spouting flames from some wounded vessel. And all the while the unruffled sea appeared, we are told, like a marble surface when the searchlights swept it, and moving there the destroyers looked like venomous insects — "black as cockroaches 40 REAR IDMIRALTHEHON. HOK.M-K I. \ . II'X'D. i ' U MAo.D.SO NORTH SEA BATTLES on a floor." Never in the proud history of her navy have English sailors fought with more inspiring dash, more superb intrepidity. "The Skipper was perfectly wonder- ful," wrote one young officer to his home. "He never left the bridge for a minute for twenty-four hours, and was either on the bridge or in the chart-house the whole time we were out, and I 've never seen anybody so cool and un- ruffled. He stood there sucking his pipe as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening." Or, again, "A little Brit- ish destroyer, her midships rent by a great shell meant for a battle-cruiser, exuding steam from every pore, able to go ahead but not to steer, coming down diagonally across our line, unable to get out of anybody's way; like to be rammed by any one of a dozen ships; her siren whim- pering, 'Let me through, make way!'; her crew fallen in aft, dressed in life belts, ready for her final plunge — and cheering wildly as it might have been an enthusiastic crowd when the King passes. Perfectly magnificent!" "Sir David Beatty," said the Commander-in-Chief, "showed all his fine qualities of gallant leadership, firm determination and correct strategical insight." "The con- duct of officers and men throughout the day and night was entirely beyond praise. No word of mine can do them justice. On all sides it is reported to me that the glorious traditions of the past were most worthily upheld. I cannot adequately express the pride with which the spirit of the fleet filled me." Who will venture to add to that testi- mony! Let us say only that Nelson would have been proud to command such men. Nor did the British refuse 4i THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR their tribute to a courageous foe. They "fought," said Sir John Jellicoe, "with the gallantry that was expected of them. We particularly admired the conduct of those on board a disabled German light cruiser, which passed down the British line shortly after deployment, under a heavy fire, which was returned by the only gun left in action." So ended the battle of Jutland. But this, you may nat- urally say, is very different from the German story. There is no denying it, the discrepancy exists. Make the most liberal allowance for national prejudices and you cannot harmonize the versions. Which, then, are we to believe? There are no independent witnesses that can be summoned into court. How can one decide between statements so conflicting? There is one way and one way only. Victor- ies, like everything else in the world, have results; a tree is known by its fruits. If, indeed, therefore, the Germans won, as they claim, a great victory, — they were certainly first in the field with the news, and, lest there should be any mistake in the matter, made the announcement at express speed, — how, the announcement apart, do we know of it? We have, of course, the Kaiser's assurances to his people, and that is of great importance. But did he also announce that the British blockade would no longer harass Germany? Oddly enough it was not mentioned and since the battle has become much more stringent. Do German merchantmen now go to sea? None are to be found on any waterway except as before in the Baltic. On the other hand, let us ponder these facts: Immediately after the engagement the great naval port, Wilhelmshaven, 42 NORTH SEA BATTLES was sealed with seven seals, so that no patriotic German could look upon his victorious ships. Britain proclaimed her losses, Germany concealed her wounds. Later she dis- covered that she had accidentally in her haste overlooked the loss of a few trifling vessels. And meanwhile, steadily and without even momentary interruption, British mer- chantmen and liners pursued, as they had hitherto pur- sued, their accustomed journeys; the transport of soldiers by the hundred thousand, of supplies by the million ton, of artillery, heavy artillery, by the shipload proceeded in the Channel, the Mediterranean, the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. If these results are possible after "defeat," how magnificent must be the fruits of "victory." One enquires for them without much success. They are very disappoint- ing in fruit, these paper trees. CHAPTER V THE SUBMARINE MENACE — THE WORK OF BRITISH SUBMARINES The submarine is not a German invention. Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, in 1774, an Englishman named Day was drowned at Plymouth while experiment- ing with an underwater boat of his own invention. Ameri- can engineers, like Bushnell and Fulton, did more than any others to perfect the type, and an American, Holland, first solved in a practical fashion the problem of submarine navigation. His vessel was so highly thought of in England that the construction of others was at once begun, and since 1901 submarines have formed part of the British Navy. Exactly as with the problem of flight in the air Germany did not originate, she followed the ideas of brighter and quicker minds. Her experts laughed when Britain first added these boats to her fleet, but anxiety followed premature laughter, and by 1906 she awoke to the obvious fact that they had a future, especially as the weapon of the weaker naval power. At the beginning of hostilities Germany had probably in commission forty such vessels as against Britain's sixty or seventy. Even in this region of naval strength on which she prides herself she was inferior. Yet no one will deny that the deeds of German submarines have filled our ears, while little has been heard of Britain's doings beneath the sea. The rea- 44 V ' SUBMARINES son is not far to sock. The sportsman's bag will be large if game be plenty, and if he fire at every living thing he may chance to sec. It will be correspondingly small if his aim be to bring down only the rarely met and dangerous ani- mals and permit the rest to pass unharmed. On all the seas of all the world passenger, trading, and fishing ves- sels, line after line, pursue their lawful enterprises under the British flag. There is no scarcity of game for the hunter and no great glory in the sport, for, add neutral ships and on the busy streets of the sea, one could hardly discharge a torpedo in any direction without striking some- thing that floats. "A week or two ago," wrote a voyager in the North Sea in October, 1914, "I counted at one time from one point forty-seven vessels, tramps, trawlers, drifters, all in full view, and I took no count of sailing craft or of vessels hull down in the offing." Not one of these was a German ship. All were open to the attack of German raiders, while for the British submarine commander not a single target was in view. Who, then, need feel surprise that vastly more has been heard of Germany than Britain in this form of war? But something has still to be added. Preserving as she must the grand traditions and noble chivalry of the sea, which are, indeed, in so large a measure, her creation, Britain takes anxious care for the lives of voyagers and the shedding of innocent blood has never been her foible. For Germany no meaning attaches to the splendid and moving history of ships and sea-going, of the fellowship among mariners of all nations, of the humanity that distinguishes the true sailor, of the honourable code 45 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR of chivalry to which his allegiance is due and by which he is proudly bound. Ships are for her but trading or mili- tary machines. Germany, having freed herself from the noble restraint that distinguishes the seafaring nations, profits by her "freedom." Of this "liberty" the world must judge. "Things are what they are and the conse- quences of them will be what they will be." Meanwhile the spectacular glory is all her own and no Briton desires to contest her claim to it. One must allow that Germany's submarines achieved cer- tain legitimate successes against warships, more especially in the early days, but these did nothing to alter the balance of naval power, and her great and less glorious campaign has been against defenceless vessels. Why has she devoted such energy and attention to submarine warfare? For no other reason than despair of doing anything else upon the seas. "On and after February 18 [191 5] every enemy ship found in the war region will be destroyed," she announced, "without its being always possible to warn the crew or passengers of the dangers threatening." Before that date, indeed, vessels like the Ben Cruachan had been sunk, for the sake, one supposes, of a little preliminary practice. But the world refused to believe that men had really come to this, that a great nation was prepared in pursuit of her purpose to slay both friends and enemies, to outrage and so cultivate the respect and admiration of humanity. They were driven to revise their estimate of what, indeed, was possible among Christians. On May 7 came the greatest moral shock civilization had ever received, and the black 46 LOOKIM". riiKniuii III I- PERISCOP1 OF A SUBMARINE SUBMARINES horror of it seemed to eclipse the last hopes of human kind. A great passenger liner, unarmed, a mere floating hotel crowded with innocent passengers, many of them Ameri- cans, deliberately mangled by a German torpedo, sank in .1 few minutes with twelve hundred victims of the felon Mow. Germany received the news with joyful applause, with thanksgiving to the German God, for was not this a signal proof of divine assistance? "The officers of the German Navy," said Baron Mar- shall von Bicberstein, at The Hague in 1907 — "I say it with a high voice — will always fulfil in the strictest man- ner the duties which flow from the unwritten law of hu- manity and civilization." So the Herr Baron Marshall von Bicberstein! A high voice, a high tone, a high personage! A single word remains to be added to this lofty and agree- able announcement — "Lusitania!" One point of extreme importance must here be empha- sized. The British declaration of foodstuffs as absolute contraband followed the German attempt to staroe her rival by the submarine attack on traders; Germany, though she represents Britain as the aggressor, herself initiated the starvation campaign. She saw and struck at Britain's vul- nerable spot, the supply of food to her people. Von Tir- pitz declared that he could "starve England" and the German announcement bears the date February, 1915J the British answer to it came in March of the same year. For the facts, if facts have any meaning in these days, con- sult the documents. Possibly no single accomplishment of the British Navy 47 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR will in the end rank higher than the incomparable resource and incomprehensible skill with which it met the new, un- expected, and fiercely driven attack. Figure to yourself the task. Remember the number of possible victims on the crowded waters, the extent of the seas themselves, with their innumerable and hidden avenues of approach, the invisibility of the shark-like foe, the swift and stealthy advance from any quarter, the destructive character of his weapon. Imagine defending yourself in the dark from a blow which may be struck at any moment and from any direction. Well may Von Tirpitz and his followers have believed that all precautions would be vain, and that the submarine ruthlessly employed must bring the hated foe to her knees. Resolutely wielded it seemed impossible that it should fail. Yet fail it did, and failed because, with that deep instinct for the sea and all that pertains to it, British sailors devised a hundred measures, so ingenious, so resourceful, so unforeseen, that numbers of the merci- less raiders vanished with their crews. Doubtless with fierce energy Germany continues to build and despatch others, doubtless her victims have been numerous and will be more numerous still. Yet fierce and fast though she send them one hardly thinks that the British Empire will be sunk by torpedoes. Foiled in the narrow seas, foiled in the wider waters of the Mediterranean, Germany has now extended her operations to the still wider Atlantic. She will take her toll of shipping, hundreds more will be done to death, but it will all prove a delusion and then will come the reckoning. "The gods," said a Roman, "never con- 48 SUBMARINES cern themselves with the protection of the innocent, but only with the punishment of the guilty." For the sake of victory Germany bade farewell to honour and nobility and generosity, and like the great Apostate Angel declared, "Evil, be thou my Good!" And in the end what will be left to her? The terrible accusing finger of humanity ever pointing to the hideous record — innocent freights of women and children, unoffending and defenceless fisher- men and holiday-makers, non-combatants, citizens of friendly states, of neutral countries — all murdered. Ger- many will yet, I fancy, desire with a great longing to blot this and some other chapters she has written out of the world's book of remembrance and she will not be able. What a burden for a people to bear till the end of time ! "The moving finger writes, and having writ Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a word of it." The Lusitania, one thinks, will avenge itself. Despite its widely advertised activities and ravages among defenceless ships, against which, of course, any old blunderbuss of a weapon, if supported by speed, will serve, as a fighting vessel the submarine has proved dis- tinctly disappointing. So slow a craft — no submersible can equal the speed of a surface ship — becomes the easy prey of a destroyer which, travelling almost twice as fast, can cover considerably over a mile in the time a sub- marine takes to dive and ram it even when some feet below the surface. Blind always by night, blind by day 49 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR when the periscope is submerged, the submarine betrays itself in smooth water by a following wave and attracts the unwelcome attention of excited sea-birds to whom the strange monster is clearly visible far below the surface. Probably in the future its greatest enemy will be the air- ship, which discerns the unconscious enemy at a great depth, remains poised above it, waits for the rise, and then in perfect security drops a bomb which shatters and sinks it. This feat has already been performed by a British air- man off Middelkerke on November 28, 1915. The effec- tive handling, too, of this weapon, especially against swift armed vessels, is not easily learned. "If any one wishes to appreciate some of the difficulties of submarine work," says Admiral Bacon, "let him sit down under a chart of the Channel suspended from the ceiling, let him punch a hole through it, and above the hole place a piece of look- ing glass inclined at forty-five degrees. Let him further imagine his chair and glass moving sideways as the effect of tide. Let him occasionally fill the room with steam to represent mist. Let him finally crumple his chart in ridges to represent waves, and then try to carry out some of the manoeuvres which look so simple when the chart is spread out on a table and looked down upon in the quiet solitude of a well-lit study." We know what German submarines have, or have not, achieved since August, 1914. Turn now to the other side of the account and contrast the work of British officers and men in these vessels which have given so strange and un- exampled a character to the naval war of to-day. Neces- 50 SUBMARINES sarily it was very different work, directed exclusively against the military strength of the Central Powers. "The Trade," as it is called in the British Navy, offers a field to adventurous spirits, and its doings have been many and astounding, but unadvertiscd. Long before Germany's, British submarines crossed the Atlantic; but their chief centres of operations — the war zones of the North Sea and the Dardanelles — gave to their commanders more varied and exciting problems than ocean cruising. Take a few remarks from the log books. "Spray froze as it struck and bridge became a mass of ice. Experienced con- siderable difficulty in keeping the conning tower hatch free from ice. Found it necessary to keep a man continu- ously employed on this work. Bridge screen immovable, ice screen six inches thick on it. Telegraphs frozen." "Heard a noise similar to grounding. Knowing this to be impossible in the water in which the boat then was, I came up to twenty feet to investigate, and observed a large mine preceding the periscope at a distance of about twenty feet, which was apparently hung up by its moorings to the port hydroplane." That particular trouble was got rid of after a series of complicated manoeuvres. A somewhat trying life, one judges, and, indeed, what between keeping a weather eye open for destroyers, scrap- ing along the bottom to avoid mines, blindly groping for the only channel, diving for your life with no certainty that the depth is sufficient to enable you to escape the bow of a ramming enemy, twisting into position for a shot at hos- tile' craft, waiting for "tin- correct moment after tiring" 51 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR till the torpedo detonates, cautiously rising again to as- certain results, diving at once and with extreme haste to avoid a destroyer lying in wait for you — you are amply provided with the type of romance in which are concen- trated the joys of hunting and being hunted at the selfsame time. For sorrows you have the stoppage of engines when most desperately required, hitches in your electric appara- tus, defects in machinery, leaks in the tanks, entangle- ment in nets and wires, exasperation when your well- directed torpedo fails to explode, and all the minor ills of life in a "box full of tricks," where the air as well as the food is always "tinned," and oil exudes from every corner and joint and fitting. The Sea of Marmora provided even more varied fare, hourly thrills of the finest quality. For here the game was complicated by a system of nets and wires of fabulous and fascinating intricacy, cunning beyond computation, while shore batteries and even "horsemen on the cliffs," not to speak of patrolling tugs and dhows, let loose their artillery. Torpedo boats shepherded you, sweeping trawlers geni- ally attempted to encircle you with nets, even at one time "the men in a small steamboat leaning over tried to catch hold of the top of the periscope." A crowded scene and a busy life in the neighbourhood of Constantinople! And when at the end of three weeks or so of this gentle art of sinking enemies, after losing possibly one of your periscopes by a well-aimed shot from a big gun, or bumping along the bottom in a fierce tide, watching the compass while the current swirls your vessel — or your coffin — to 52 SUBMARINES and fro, you crave a little respite and repose — you find it "in the centre of the Sea of Marmora," that shady un- tillcd garden of the East. So runs the tale as told by these young Britons, not, indeed, to the curious public, but in their log books for the better information of "My lords" at the Admiralty. Their "business" was, of course, that of grievous war, the harry- ing of transports and munition ships, the destruction of battleships like the Barbarossa, or the ubiquitous gunboats. Passenger steamers they always spared, hospital ships went unmolested, and, even when dhows laden with mili- tary stores had to be disposed of, the crews were "towed in shore and given biscuits, beef and rum and water, as they were rather wet." The Turk has proved a more hon- ourable foe than his master the German, he both offers and receives courtesies. One is not surprised to hear that in these cases they parted from our humane commanders "with many expressions of good-will." CHAPTER VI BLOCKADE AND BOMBARDMENT What are Germany's views on blockade? "Whoever is engaged in war," said Caprivi, the German Chancellor, in the Reichstag, "wishes to obtain his object; and if he be vigorous he will employ every means to obtain it. In a naval war the cutting off of an enemy's supplies is one of those means. No one can forego it. And, really, is it anything more than is done on land? If during the siege of Paris some one had equipped a train with foodstuffs for the Parisians the train would simply have been stopped. Exactly the same thing happens at sea. If some one equipped a ship to supply the wants of the enemy, then the other side would try to capture those supplies, even if they con- sisted only of foodstuffs and raw material indispensable for the enemy's industries. . . . In such conduct I should see absolutely no barbarity, or any difference from the measures taken in a war on land." Before the war these were Germany's principles, quite simply and unequivocably enunciated, nor is there any need to expand them. If she no longer approves of these principles one understands it. Things may be much less pleasant to suffer than to inflict. But there stands her declaration, make of it what you will. With the principles of blockade, however, the British Navy is not concerned. It fulfils the duties prescribed to 54 BLOCKADE AND BOMBARDMENT it, stretching a great net from north to south, from Ireland to the Mediterranean, a net with meshes so close that the fish, however dexterous and elusive, comes to rest there at last. In the early months a cruiser squadron did the netting, but by degrees old warships were exchanged for swifter steamers and lighter craft mounting guns, com- manded by a naval officer, but retaining for the most part their old crews, men who had learned their seamanship in widely varying schools, steamer and 'fore-and-after, trad- ing or fishing fleets. Only a great maritime nation breeds this hardy race or builds the ships they manned — a great company, hundreds of them of every shape and rig, trawlers rubbing shoulders with yachts, drifters with tramps, tugs with motor-boats, the true democracy of the sea. The aristocracy all this while on its "shrouded throne among the northern storms " had its own affairs in hand, more dignified occupations no less efficiently performed. The blockading ships have their rules and regulations apart and hold lonelier vigil. For thirty or forty days each vessel keeps the seas, through all the hazards of fog and storm as in times of peace with the added uncer- tainties and dangers of a bitter war. Day and night, whatever the skies, they toss on their weary beats, weav- ing the inner or the outer meshes — for you are not yet Bafe when you pass one line of ships — of the barrier patrol. From the 1st to the 21st of September, 1916, four hundred and thirty-five vessels were intercepted by the Northern Patrol. "Out at sea and working on deck for at least twenty hours," said a fisherman, "wet through 55 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR to the skin, then below for two hours' sleep. Then come on deck for another twenty hours, and keep on doing that for a month, Blow high, blow low, rain, hail or snow, mines or submarines, we have to go through it." Boarding sus- picious vessels, too, in heavy weather, when boats can hardly be launched and the spray freezes on the deck, through the long winter nights of northern latitudes in blinding sleet and rain. "We have just crawled into port again," wrote an officer; "what fearful weather it has been, nothing but gales, rain and snow, with rough seas. Two nights out of the last four were terrible. . . . Here for the last fortnight it seems to have been one incessant gale, sometimes from the East and then, for a change, from the West, with rain all the time. This morning it did turn out fine, but it has now set in a howling easterly gale with snow. . . . The strictest look-out must be kept at all times, as, with the rough seas that are going now, a sub- marine's periscope takes a bit of spotting, likewise a float- ing mine," the watchers "hanging on to the rigging in blinding rain with seas drenching over them for four hours at a time, peering into the darkness." And this only the "watch and ward," for when the suspected ship is stopped — and one out of every eight of them was attempting to run the blockade — there remained the multitudinous tricks to be detected, the false manifests, the hollow spars and hollow bottoms, stuffed with contraband, the copper keels, the cotton in flour barrels and the rubber in coffee bags, so that only a kind of second-sight could divine the endless and unheard-of expedients. 56 Phi! LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER MAX K HI BLOCKADE AND BOiMBARDMENT So it went and still goes, and none save those who know the sea can form a picture or imagine at all the unrelax- ing toil and strain aboard these ocean outposts that link northern with southern climes and draw their invisible barrier across the waters. The sea, if you would traf- fic with her, demands a vigilance such as no landsman dreams of, but here you have men who to the vigilance of the mariner have added that of the scout, who to the sailor's task have added the sentry's, and on an ele- ment whose moods are in ceaseless change, to-day bright as the heavens, to-morrow murky as the pit. To this rough duty in northern seas what greater contrast than that other in southern, the naval bombard- ment of the Dardanelles? How broad and various the support given by the British fleet to the Allies can thus be judged. Separated each from the other by some thou- sands of miles, the one fleet spread over leagues of ocean, kept, every ship, its lonely watch, while the bombarding vessels, concentrated in imposing strength, attempted to force a passage through a channel, the most powerfully protected in the world. Unsuccessfully, it is true, but in the grand manner of the old and vanished days when war had still something of romance, and was less the hide- ous thing it has become. We have here at least a standard by which to measure the doings of Britain on the sea. For remember the at- tempt upon the Dardanelles, with all the strength and energy displayed in it, must be thought of as no more than a minor episode in the work of the Navy, not in any way 57 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR vital to the great issue. It was not the first nor even the second among the tasks allotted to it. For while, first and chief, the great vessels under the Commander-in- Chief paralyzed the activities of the whole German Navy, while, second in importance, the cruising patrols held all the doors of entrance and exit to the German ports, still another fleet of great battleships remained free to conduct so daring an adventure as the attempt upon the Darda- nelles. Nor was this all, for, when the unsupported fleet could do no more, another heroic undertaking was planned upon which Fortune beguilingly smiled — the landing on the historic beaches of Gallipoli. Take, first, the attempt of the ships upon the Straits. In the light of failure no doubt it must be written down a military folly. Ships against forts had long been held a futile and unequal contest. But it was not the forts that saved Constantinople. In the narrow gulf leading to the Sea of Marmora no less than eight mine fields zigzagged their venomous coils across the channel. The strong, un- changing current of the Dardanelles, flowing steadily south, carried with it all floating mines dropped in the upper reaches. Torpedo tubes ranged on the shore dis- charged their missiles halfway across the Straits. Before warships could enter these waters a lane had to be swept and kept. Daily, therefore, the mine-sweepers steamed ahead of the fleet to clear the necessary channel. But when thus engaged they became the target of innumerable and hidden guns, secluded among the rocks, in gullies and ruins and behind the shoulders of the hills, in every fold 58 BLOCKADE AND BOMBARDMENT of the landscape. To "spot" these shy, retiring batteries was of course imperative, but when spotted they vanished to some other coign of vantage, equally inconspicuous, and continued to rain fire upon the mine-sweepers. The warships poured cataracts of shell along the shores and among the slopes, the sea trembled and the earth quaked. Amid the devastating uproar the trawlers swept and grappled and destroyed the discovered mines, but almost as fast as they removed them others were floated down to fill their places. Ships that ventured too far in support of the sweepers, like the Bouvet and the Triumph, perished; the waterways were alleys of death. Progress, indeed, was made, but progress at a cost too heavy, and wisdom de- creed the abandonment of the original plan. There remained another way. An army landed on the peninsula might cross the narrow neck of land, demolish the batteries and free the mine-sweepers from their de- structive fire. Could that be done, it was thought the ships might yet force a passage into the broader waters and approach within easy range of the Turkish capital. After long and fatal delay the attempt was made. What might have been easily accomplished a month or two earlier had increased hour by hour in difficulty. Warned in good time of the coming danger the Turks converted Gallipoli, a natural fortress, into a position of immeasurable strength. With consuming energy, in armies of thousands, they worked with pick and shovel till every yard of ground commanding a landing-place was trench or rifle pit or gun emplacement. An impenetrable thicket of barbed 59 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR wire ran up and down and across the gullies, stretched to the shore and netted the shallow waters of the beach it- self. Then when all that man could do was done they awaited the British attack in full confidence that no army, regiment, or man could land on that peninsula and live. No more extraordinary venture than this British landing on a naked beach within point-blank range of the most modern firearms can be read in history or fable. It was a landing of troops upon a foreign shore thousands of miles from home, hundreds from any naval base. Without ab- solute command of the sea it could not have been so much as thought of. Men, guns, food, ammunition, even water had to be conveyed in ships and disembarked under the eyes of a hostile army, warned, armed, alert, and behind almost impregnable defences. To conceive the preposterous thing was itself a kind of sublime folly; to attempt it almost an incredible mad- ness; to accomplish it, simply and plainly stated, a feat divine. Though a thousand pens in the future essay the task no justice in words can ever be done to the courage and determination of the men who made good that land- ing. Put aside for a moment the indisputable fact that the whole gigantic undertaking achieved in a sense nothing whatever. View it only as an exploit, a martial achievement, and it takes rank as the most amazing feat of arms the world has ever seen or is like to see. That at least remains, and as that, and no less than that, with the full price of human life and treasure expended, it goes upon the record immortal as the soul of man. And noth- 60 BLOCKADE AND BOMBARDMENT ing could be more fitting than that an accomplishment which dims the glory of all previous martial deeds, which marks the highest point of courage and resolution reached by Britain in all her wars, should have been carried through by British, Irish and Colonial troops, represen- tative of the whole Empire under the guidance and pro- tecting guard of the British fleet. At Lemnos, for the more than Homeric endeavour on Homer's sea, lay an assemblage of shipping such as no harbour had ever held. Within sight of Troy they came and went, and in the classic waters ringed round by classic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line upon line of black transports, crowded with the finest flower of modern youth, and beyond them, nearer the harbour mouth, the long, projecting guns and towering hulls of the warships. On April 24 they sailed, while, amid tempests of cheering, as the anchors were got and the long proces- sion moved away, the bands of the French vessels played them to the Great Endeavour. There is no need to tell again the story of the arrival, the stupendous uproar of the bombardments, so that men dizzy with it staggered as they w r alked, the slaughter in the boats and on the bullet- torn shingle, the making good of the landings and all the subsequent battles on that inhuman coast. They will be told and retold while the world lasts. And now that all is over, the chapter closed, the blue water rippling undis- turbed which once was white with a tempest of shrapnel, the armies and the ships withdrawn, and one reflects upon the waste of human life, the gallant hearts that beat no 61 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR longer, the prodigal expenditure of thought and energy and treasure, there should, perhaps, mingle with our poignant regret and disappointment no sense of exultation. Yet it surges upward and overcomes all else. For our nature is so moulded that it can never cease to admire such doings, the more, perhaps, if victory be denied the doers. And here at least on the shell-swept beaches, among the rocks and flowery hillsides of Gallipoli, men of the British race wrote, never to be surpassed, one of the world's deathless tales. CHAPTER VII SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS — SAILORS AND SEA- MANSHIP The tradition of the British Navy is all in favour of close fighting, stern and decisive, in which her seamen, apart from the mere machines they handle, may display their old accustomed, unsurpassed hardihood. In such encounters, they fancy, their star must invincibly pre- vail. But the range of modern guns has thrust the com- batants far apart, widened more and more the gaps be- tween the ships engaged, and naval actions are now less contests between men than between iron mastodons, which belch destruction at each other across great spaces of intervening sea. Yet the human interest still clings and will always cling to the battles or incidents in which some touch of heroism or of pathos appears, some spiritual quality of splendid daring or invincible devotion showing through that soulless smoky clash of giant machinery'. One looks into the furious arena of modern battle to find where one can the unconquerable human spirit, still master of itself though the heavens themselves be rent. And single ship actions, more particularly, perhaps, those in which this human element is most easily perceived, or seems least obscured by the mighty engines it handles, attract more attention than their military importance warrants. For this reason are remembered such famous engagements 63 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR as that of the Shannon and the Chesapeake, for instance, fought a hundred years ago, with their Old-World chiv- alry of challenges, "in all respects such as a gentleman might write," their punctilious preliminaries, their courte- sies of offering the first shot, and all the rest of the ancient graces which once humanized war; now a business in which the Furies so let loose the passions that, by compari- son, many of the Old-World battles seem hardly more than friendly tournaments in which fame or glory were the only stakes. Of such naval duels, where the point of honour was no less important than victory, we read no longer, but duels there have been, of which, perhaps, that between the Sydney and the Emden excited the liveliest interest, though others, like the engagement between the Carmania and the Cap Trafalgar, both armed merchantmen, more nearly reproduced the conditions of the older and better time. On November 9, 1914, the Sydney, steering for Co- lombo in the Indian Ocean, about fifty miles to the east of the Keelings, picked up a wireless message, "Strange warship off entrance." It was the last the Cocos station had time to send before a German landing party from the Emden destroyed the installation, but it was enough. Al- tering course at once, the Sydney made for the islands and sighted them two hours later. In a few minutes, the Emden, the long-sought and elusive raider, herself ap- peared — a welcome sight. She came out at great speed and lost no time in opening fire. Three times in the course of the first exchanges she hulled the British ship. The 64 N KEELING ISLAND 17' iWL 15 IS TO EMOEN 12 SYDNEY 9 30 NOV 10.1914 ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN H.M.A.S. SYDNEY & the EMDEN SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS Sydney's foremast range-finder was shot to pieces, her after-control platform wrecked, and a cordite fire started. Thus the Emden drew first blood, but the damage was not serious, and then came the Sydney's turn. For the rest of the engagement she gave all and took none. To- day speed is what the "weather gage" was in Nelson's time. The faster vessel in a modern action keeps what distance she pleases, chooses the range, selects the posi- tion she will. Racing at twenty-five or twenty-six knots, — thirty miles an hour, — the Sydney hurled broadside after broadside, first from port, then from starboard, then again from port, round after round of smashing fire from all her guns at little more than five or six thousand yards from her enemy. In the hour and forty minutes the fight lasted she covered fifty-six miles of sea. The German's case was piteous and without hope. About 11.20, steam- ing at nearly twenty knots, and finding no way of escape, she threw herself, with a terrific crash which killed the helmsman, on the shore of the North Keeling, and lay there a flaming wreck, more than a hundred and twenty of her crew already dead, and the rest with shocking wounds or dazed after that deluge of shell. No one who went on board the Emden remains in love with war, for all sick- ened at the sight. Nothing to please was there, only tangled masses of iron, bent and torn, or human bodies shattered beyond recognition. One is not surprised to hear that there was no cheering on the Sydney when she made Colombo Harbour with her cargo of wounded and sur- vivors. That touch of British humanity, which would 65 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR have gone to Nelson's heart, was not a little appreciated by the German prisoners. The Carmania and the Cap Trafalgar were far better matched. There the British victory was fairly won by superior skill and seamanship, and owed nothing to engine power or mere weight of guns. If anything the Cap Tra- falgar had the advantage in armament, but failed to make the best use of it. One hears, and it touches the chord of romance, that the Carmania's crew were all for lying along- side the enemy and boarding with cutlasses after the an- cient fashion of their forefathers, but the captain saw a better way. Firing a single unaimed shot as a summons to surrender, he was met by a full broadside of the Ger- man guns. But the surprise failed, for the aim was de- fective and the shells flew over the British ship. For the first quarter of an hour the German fired four or five shots to the Carmania's one, a rapid but nervous fusillade, to which the deadly answer came in the form of deliberate, methodical pounding of the Cap Trafalgar's hull. No wild shooting was there. Manoeuvring his ship with great dex- terity so as to present always only his bow or stern — the smallest target — to his enemy, and employing his fore or aft guns as the position demanded, within twenty min- utes the British captain put matters clean out of doubt. The German smoked from stern to stern and the flames spread like lightning. Then she bethought herself of flight, but the moment was past. An ominous list to starboard was already apparent and slowly increased till her funnels drank the sea. Two dull explosions followed, her stern 66 SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS mounted high above the waves, and bow foremost the Cap Trafalgar bade good-bye to the sunlight and vanished in the swirling eddies. Her crew had more anxious thought for their lives than for victory, hope of which they early relinquished. Before their vessel sank they had crowded into the boats, and all who thus abandoned the ship were picked up by the colliers in attendance. Many things happen in the North Sea of which the world, including the Germans, is ignorant. There are com- ings and goings, full of surprising interest, foreseen and unforeseen incidents, titanic labours and cheerful hu- mours. A corner of the veil lifts at times to disclose a little history like this: A fast British squadron is out on an ad- venture, no matter what. Two or three hundred miles from home, exact locality not stated, but within, let us say, thirty miles of Germany, the adventure is about to be launched, when inside five minutes, with that incred- ible perversity which distinguishes these waters, a yellow fog of city density blots out every ship from every other. Does any landsman guess how manoeuvring signals are to be made in such a case unknown to the enemy? They must be made. Shrieking sirens advertise your affairs, wireless shouts to every German ship and station that you are in the neighbourhood. Yet signals you must have, and in the perilous turning movements which followed some were missed. Ship groped for ship, and, seeking blindly in narrow circles, a destroyer that had lost touch found herself clean under the bows of a cruiser. The inevitable crash followed, and instantly the recoiling ships losl sighl 67 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR of each other. There was time to see and hear, nothing more. The damaged destroyer not only disappeared in the darkness, she could not anywhere be found. Hour after hour of straining, desperate search failed to locate her. A whole day and half the night, in German waters remem- ber, passed before she was recovered, and in what a plight! Her crumpled bows "had fallen off into the sea, so that from another ship one could look right into her and see her storerooms and other compartments, whilst the muzzle of her foremost gun, at ordinary times twenty feet or so back from her bows, now protruded over the 'front' of the ship like a tree out-growing from a cliff. The men's living spaces right forward had retired to the bottom of the North Sea, and the waves were rolling in unhindered against the capstan engine, anchor chain lockers, and fore- most men decks." But she was still afloat! One trusty bulkhead held. You cannot tow a ship by the bows if she has no bows. She must be towed somehow but evidently otherwise. You cannot launch a boat to get a hawser aboard, for the sea is too heavy. Six hours of feverish work followed. Casks were towed past the wreck with wires attached till one was picked up, but every hawser parted soon after it was made fast. Then, thirty-six hours after the accident, to the accompaniment of wind, heavy seas, and a couple of snowstorms, firmly grappled to a cruiser, she was brought three hundred miles or so into a British harbour. There you have seamanship. In this strangest of all wars in which steamers have been captured by seaplanes, airships by destroyers, in which 68 SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS submarines have been destroyed by aircraft and infantry attacked from above by their machine-gun fire, any won- der seems possible. We have supped full of astonishments as well as horrors and the flights of romantic imagination are outdone. Courage, audacity, nerve hardly any longer surprise us, they seem universal, the possession not of sin- gle, exceptional men, but of the race itself. For wherever she may have failed Britain of a surety has not failed in men. And if there be anything upon which humanity can congratulate itself in these days of insensate destruction, there stands first and preeminent the revelation of amaz- ing courage and endurance not to be matched in any pre- vious record. The men of to-day, measure them by what standard you will, outshine in their achievements the men of all previous times. The virtues on which Homer proudly dwells in his heroes look pale beside the virtues of the sol- dier in the ranks, the simple merchant seaman, the volun- teer from the desk in service afloat or ashore. Hector and Achilles must yield pride of place to more splendid exem- plars. For if hateful inhumanity has degraded some men to the level of the brute, superb self-devotion has no less certainly raised others to angelic heights. The world will not easily forget the fortitude of the Captain and Commander of the Formidable, lost in the Channel on that terrible New Year's Day of 1915, the un- shaken Loxley, a typical figure, standing to the last on the forebridge of his sinking ship, with his old terrier Bruce by his side, smoking a cigarette, unruffled as if in harbour, while he directed the launching of the boats — "Steady, 69 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR men, keep cool and be British," not forgetting in his last words praise of the Lieutenant who had got the boats smartly away — "You have done very well, Simmonds." Worthy of his place in the story, too, was William Pillar, master of the smack Providence, who, with his little crew of three and an apprentice lad, saved seventy men of the Formidable in that raging gale by sheer pluck and seaman- ship of which only his fellows can rightly judge — "beyond all praise " said the officer in charge of the rescued cutter. The Providence, herself running for shelter, had been forced to heave to, so great was the weight of wind, when right under her lee she sighted the ship's boat riding to a sea anchor and smothered in foam, the men bailing hard to keep her afloat. Captain Pillar swung the Providence clear. The crew, with almost superhuman efforts, took another reef in the mainsail and set the storm jib, for until that had been done it would have been disastrous to attempt a rescue. Meanwhile the cutter drifted toward them, although at times they lost sight of her in the heavy sea. Clark climbed the rigging and presently discovered her brav- ing the storm just to leeward of his boat. The Captain decided to gybe — a perilous manoeuvre in such weather since the mast was liable to give way. Four times did the gallant smacksmen seek to get a rope to the cutter. Each effort was more difficult than the last, but in the end they obtained a good berth on the port tack. A small warp was thrown and caught by the sailors. This they made fast round the stern of the capstan, and with great skill the cutter was hauled to a berth at the stern. The warp was brought round to the leeside and the cutter brought up to the lee quarter. Then the naval men began to jump on board; but even now there was a danger of losing men as the seas were rising some thirty feet at times. The rescues from the cutter to the smack took thirty minutes to accomplish. 70 SINGLE SHIP ACTIONS During the height of the storm for eleven hours the boat had been almost continuously engulfed by great seas. Such men as Pillar and his mates are of the true sea-dog breed, before whose magnificence the glory of kings and princes withers away. Of adventurous gallants many a one and bold mariners the talcs will be told when men have time to take their breath and write, — tales from Jaffa and Beyrut, from the Persian Gulf, from Dar-es-Salam and Duala; of the relief- ships struggling up the Tigris and the heroic sacrifices of men like Cookson; of the whalers in Sudi Harbour under the fire of four-inch guns; of the fighting on Nyassa or Lake Tanganyika, where two British motor-boats cap- tured the armed steamer Kingani after an action lasting ten minutes; of the great naval gun transported seven hun- dred miles to the siege of Garua, in the Cameroons, one hundred and sixty miles up the Niger, four hundred up the Benue River; of the blocking of the Rufigi, by sinking the coal steamer, Newbridge, to imprison the Konigsberg, under the fire of maxims at short range; of the destruction of the German by monitors as she lay hid in the jungle with branches lashed to her masts as a disguise; of armed guards on board blockade-runners in thick weather; of landings on the Syrian coast to cut telegraphs and railways; of the North Sea trawlers far from their proper homes, rolling and staggering along in the far /Egean; of the panting tug- boats dragging rows of lighters from Malta to tin- C\ Hades — the thousand and one tales, all of which have their place in the history of the Navy in the Great War. It is a 71 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR very proud service, the British Navy, and it has certain reasons for its pride. Where is one to look for a more pic- turesque or romantic record than the history of this close- knit brotherhood of the sea? CHAPTER VIII BRIDGING THE SEAS There arc navies and navies. The old and fighting Brit- ish Navy, whose representatives keep the seas to-day against the King's enemies, has been heard of once or twice during the present war, but for the most part pre- serves a certain aristocratic and dignified aloofness from the public gaze. There is, however, another and an older navy which comes and goes under the eyes of all, as it has done any time these three or four centuries. On its six or eight thousand ships, to prove that England is Old England still, has come to life again the Elizabethan mariner, who took war very much as he took peace, unconcernedly, in his day's work. Needless to say no other nation on earth could have produced, either in numbers or quality, for no other nation possessed, these men, bred to the sea and the risks of the sea, born where the air is salt, who, undeterred by the hazards of war, which was none of their employ, answered their country's call as in the old Armada days. From the Chinese and Indian seas they came, from the Pacific and Atlantic trade routes, from whaling, it might be, or the Newfoundland fishing grounds, or the Dogger Bank — three thousand officers and some two hundred thou- sand men — to supply the Grand Fleet, to patrol the water- ways, to drag for the German mines, to carry the armies of the Alliance, and, incidentally, to show the world, what 73 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR it had perhaps forgotten, that it is not by virtue of their fighting navy that the British are a maritime people, but by virtue of an instinct amounting to genius, rooted in a very ancient and unmatched experience of shipping and the sea. The Grand Fleet is only the child of this service, which was already old before the word "Admiralty" was first employed, which made its own voyages and fought its own battles since Columbus discovered America, and be- fore even that considerable event. These travel- worn ships form the solid bridge across which flow in unbroken files the men and supplies to the British and the Allied fronts. Picture a great railroad which has for its main line a track four or five thousand miles in length, curving from Archangel in Russia to Alexandria in Egypt, a track which touches on its way the coasts of Norway, of the British Isles, of France, of Portugal, of Spain, of Italy, of Greece. Picture from this immense arc of communication branch lines longer still, diverging to America, to Africa, to India, knitting the ports of the world together in one vast rail- way system. That railway system, with its engines and rolling stock, its stations and junctions, its fuel stores and offices, over which run daily and nightly the wagon-loads of food, munitions, stores for a dozen countries at war with the Central Powers, is a railroad of British ships. To dislocate, to paralyze it Germany would willingly give a thousand millions, for the scales would then descend in her favour and victory indubitably be hers. For consider the consequences of interruption in that stream of traffic. Britain herself on the brink of starvation, her troops in 74 BRIDGING THE SEAS France, in Egypt, in Salonica, cut off without food, with- out ammunition, unable to return to their homes. But for this fleet that bridges the seas Britain could not send or use a single soldier anywhere save in defence of her own shores. India, Australia, Canada, all her dependencies would be cut off from the Mother Country, the bonds of Empire immediately dissolved. Some little importance, tin n, may be attached to this matter of bridging the water- ways, and some admiration extended toward the men who do it and the manner of the doing. If you ask what have the Allies gained, take this evi- dence of a French writer in Le Temps: — If at the beginning of the war we were enabled to complete the equipment of our army with a rapidity which has not been one of the least surprises of the German Staff, we owe it to the fleet which has given us the mastery of the seas. We were short of horses. They were brought from Argentina and Canada. We were short of wool and of raw material for our metal industries. We applied to the stock-breeders of Australia. Lancashire sent us her cottons and cloth, the Black Country its steel. And now that the consumption of meat threatens to imperil our supplies of live stock, we are en- abled to avoid the danger by the importation of frozen cargoes. For the present situation the mastery of the sea is not only an ad- vantage, but a necessity. In view of the fact that the greater part of our coal area is invaded by the enemy the loss of the command of the sea by England would involve more than her own capitula- tion. She, indeed, would be forced to capitulate through starva- tion. But France also and her new ally, Italy, being deprived of coal and, therefore, of the means of supplying tluir factories and military transport, would soon be at the mercy of their adver- saries. On this command of the sea rests, then, the whole mili- tary structure of the Alliance. It opposes to Germany and 75 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR her friends not the strength of a group of nations, each righting its own battle, separate and apart, but the strength of a federation so intimately knit together as to form a single united power which has behind it the inexhaustible resources of the world. Thus the British Navy rivets the Great Alliance by operations on a scale hardly imaginable, Operations whose breadth and scope beggar all description, since they span the globe itself. As for the men and the spirit in which they work, let him sail on a battleship, a tramp, a liner, or a trawler, the British sailor is always the same, much as he has been since the world first took his measure in Elizabeth's days. "Like the old sailors of the Queen and the Queen's old sailors." A great simplicity is his quality, with something of the child's unearthly wisdom added, and a Ulysses-like cun- ning in the hour of necessity, an ascetic simplicity almost like the saints', looking things in the face, so that to that fine carelessness everything, all enterprises, hazards, for- tunes, shipwreck, if tjt come, or battle, are but the inci- dents of a chequered day, and his part merely to "carry on" in the path of routine and duty and the honourable tradition of his calling. Manifestly his present business is epic and the making of epic, if he knew it, yet not knowing it he grasps things, as the epic paladins always grasp them, by the matter-of-fact, not the heroic, handle. What better stories have the poets to tell than that of Captain Parslow, a Briton if ever there was one, who, refusing to surrender, saved his ship in a submarine attack at the cost of his own 76 BRIDGING THE SEAS life? Mortally wounded as he stood on the bridge, the wheel was taken from the dying father's hand by his son, the second mate. Knocked down by the concussion of a sheil that gallant son of a gallant father still held to his post and steered the vessel clear. Or have they anything better to relate than the tale of the Ortega and Captain Douglas Kinneir, who, when pursued by a German cruiser of vastly greater speed, called upon his engineers and stokers for a British effort and drove his vessel under full steam, and a trifle more, into the uncharted waters of Nelson's Straits, "a veritable nightmare for navigators," the narrowest and ugliest of channels, walled by gloomy cliffs, bristling with reefs, rocks, overfalls and currents, through which, by the mercy of God and his own daring, he piloted his ship in safety and gave an example to the world of what stout hearts can do. It is such men Ger- many supposes she can intimidate! These are but episodes in the long roll of honour. You will find others in the quite peaceful occupation of mine- sweeping, or the search for mines — "fishing" the Navy calls it — that the impartial German scatters to trip an enemy, perhaps a friend, — an equal chance and it mat- ters not which, — an occupation for humanitarians and seekers after a quiet life. On this little business alone a thousand ships and fourteen thousand fishermen have been constantly engaged. Take the case of Lieutenant Parsons, who was blown up in his trawler, escaped with his life and undisturbed continued to command his group of sweepers. On that day near Christmas-time they blew 77 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR up eight and dragged up six other mines, while, as inci- dents within the passage of ten crowded minutes, his own ship and another were damaged by explosions and a third destroyed! Read that short chapter of North Sea history and add this, for a better knowledge of these paths of peace, from the letter of an officer: "Things began to move rapidly now. There was a constant stream of reports coming from aloft. 'Mine ahead, Sir'; 'Mine on the port bow, Sir ' ; ' There is one, Sir, right alongside ' ; and on look- ing over the bridge I saw a mine about two feet below the surface and so close that we could have touched it with a boat hook. . . . After an hour at last sighted the mine- sweepers, which had already started work." One may judge of these North Sea activities from the record of a single lieutenant of the Naval Reserve, who, besides attending to other matters, destroyed forty or fifty mines; twice drove off an inquisitive German Taube; attacked an equally inquisitive Zeppelin; twice rescued a British seaplane and towed it into safety; rescued in June the crew of a torpedoed trawler, sixteen men ; also the crew of a sunk fishing vessel; in July assisted two steamers that had been mined, saving twenty-four of the sailors; in September assisted another steamer, rescued three men from a mined trawler; towed a disabled Dutch steamer, and assisted in rescuing the passengers; in November as- sisted a Norwegian steamer, rescued twenty-four men, and also a Greek steamer which had been torpedoed, and rescued forty. Some day it will all be chronicled, and not the least 78 BRIDGING THE SEAS fascinating record will be that of men who, perhaps, never fired a shot, but who enlarged their vision of the recesses of the enemy mind in other ways and met his craft by deeper craft, or navigated African rivers, fringed by desolate mangrove swamps, in gunboats, or hammered down the Mediterranean in East Coast trawlers, boys on their first command, or saw with their own eyes things they had believed to be fables. \Ye travel about a thousand miles a week, most of it in practically unknown seas, full of uncharted coral reefs, rocks, islands, whose existence even is unknown. And by way of making things still more difficult we keep meeting floating islands. I always thought these things were merely yarns out of boys' adventure books. However, I have seen five, the largest about the size of a football field. They are covered with trees and palms, some of them with ripe bananas on them. They get torn away from the swampy parts of the mainland by the typhoons, which are very frequent at this time of year. The story of these things cannot be written here; it will fill many volumes. Here an attempt has been made to sketch merely in its broadest outlines some of the ac- tivities of British sailors during the greatest of wars. What- ever the future historian will say of the part they bore, he will not minimize it, for on this pivot the whole matter turned, on this axis the great circle of the war revolved. He will affirm that, though in respect of numbers almost negligible compared with the soldiers who fought in the long series of land battles, the sailors held the central avenues, the citadel of power. If it be possible in a single paragraph, let us set before our eyes the work of the British Navy and its auxiliaries 79 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR during these loud and angry years. Let us first recall the fact that, besides the protection of Britain and her de- pendencies from invasion, together with the preserva- tion of her overseas trade, to the Navy was entrusted a duty it has fulfilled with equal success, the protection of the coasts of France from naval bombardment or attack — no slight service to Britain's gallant ally. Behind this barrier of the British fleet she continued to arm and munition her armies undisturbed. Recall, too, the French colonial armies as well as our own overseas troops, escorted to the various seats of war — more than seven million men — ■ the vital communications of the Allies, north and south, secured, the supplies and munitions — seven million tons — carried over the seas, a million and a quarter horses and mules embarked, carried, and disembarked, the left wing of the Belgian force supported in Flanders by bombard- ment, the Serbian army transferred to a new zone of war, and last, if we may call last what is really first and the mas- tering cause of all the rest, Germany's immense navy fettered in her ports. Bring also to mind that fifty or sixty of her finest war-vessels have been destroyed, be- sides many Austrian and Turkish, five or six million tons of the enemy's mercantile marine captured or driven to rust in harbour, her trade ruined, a strict blockade of her ports established which impoverishes day by day her in- dustrial and fighting strength, hundreds of thousands of Germans overseas prevented from joining her armies, her wireless and coaling stations over all the world and her colonial empire, that ambitious and costly fabric of her 80 BRIDGING THE SEAS dreams, cut off from the Fatherland and brought help- lessly t<> the ground. When all this has been passed in review dwell for a mo- ment on the matter reversed — but for the British fleet Germany's will would now be absolute, her Emperor the master of the world. There, briefly stated, you have the record of the Brit- ish Navy's work, an achievement to which we stand too near for full appreciation, but to which men of the genera- tions to come will look back with an amazed bewilderment and admiration. No soothsayer can inform us how the mighty debate will end, but of one thing we can inform our- selves — Britain has always placed the sea first in her affections, Germany has given it the second place. But she is a jealous mistress, and the faithful lover, as in the great and old romances, will come to his own. CHAPTER IX NAVIES AND ARMIES — WHAT THE BRITISH NAVY HAS DONE FOR THE WORLD Nothing is more natural than to compare the policy of a naval with that of a military state, the deeds of navies with those of armies. And if Britain be compared with Germany, the British Navy with the German Army, two questions inevitably arise. One asks first, "How does a naval power differ from a military power?" and second, "May not a great fleet be as powerful an instrument of tyranny as a great army, is 'navalism, ' that is, any less of a danger to the world than militarism?" To answer these questions we must go to history, and history answers in these words: Unlike military strength naval strength has this peculiarity — you may call it even a disability — that it cannot enslave, cannot subjugate the people against •whom it is directed. Since Salamis broke Xerxes and the Persian power, fleets have often been a bulwark of liberty, whereas armies have constantly been the instruments of tyranny. Has any one yet heard of a Nero, a Caesar, a Napoleon of the seas? History teems with examples of whole populations trodden under foot by hostile armies; never, for it is impossible, by hostile navies. A navy can- not interfere with the internal economy of any state, with its laws or customs, its religion or government. It cannot in the very nature of things overrun and destroy. Fleets do not 82 NAVIES AND ARMIES climb mountains, occupy cities, or pass nations under the yoke of bondage. How often have conquering armies laid lands desolate, set up new kingdoms, overturned the an- cient government and legal system, established, as did the Turks, a new religion at the edge of the sword. All these things, and worse things than these, have been the work of military monarchs, who, as readers of history well know, not once or twice, but a thousand times, have made a desert of a smiling countryside, burned, despoiled, dev- astated, driven whole populations into exile and left in the track of their destroying marches hardly a blade of grass in once fertile fields. The records of sea power can show no such deeds. On the contrary, they show that it has frequently curbed a tyrant's designs, arrested his ambitious progress, and set a limit to his destructive career. Sea power is an arresting and defensive, military power always an aggressive, force. When does sea supremacy become a danger? Only when it is an additional weapon wielded by a military state or despot. And when, one may well enquire, did the world become aware of Britain's tyrannous pro- ceedings on the sea? Not apparently till it was told by Germany! The nations were unconscious of the sufferings they endured until Germany unveiled to them the hideous facts. And when, until August, 1914, were the seas any- thing but free to Germany? I have travelled by German steamers [writes a neutral. Nils Stenj nearly all over the world, but never heard a German officer complain of England's naval supremacy. . . . For the last hundred years Norway has been England's greatest competitor on the When has Norway had reason to complain <>f England's jealousy 83 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR or English supremacy? In all the harbours of the world the Norwegian and the English flag have been hoisted side by side. When have unfriendly feelings existed between these two coun- tries? Hundreds and thousands of times Norwegian boats have been lying within range of English guns. Have they felt this as danger? No, on the contrary, they have felt it as a guarantee for just and noble treatment! And does any one believe that were the naval situation reversed, were Germany as strong by sea as she is by land, that this ruthless power, that has trampled Belgium under foot and carried fire and sword through Serbia and deso- lated Poland, would treat more generously than Britain the rights of powerless neutrals at sea? "Look how you suffer," she cries to the neutral states, "under the oppres- sive sea-tyranny of England. Join with me in a holy cru- sade against the despot." But what delirium is this and in what lunatic world do we find ourselves? The champion of freedom appeals to neutral states and inaugurates her sacred campaign by sinking, careless of the safety of their crews, three or four hundred peaceful vessels belonging to these states; and not, observe, vessels touching at British ports alone, but as in the case of the Blommersdijk, neu- tral vessels trading between neutral ports! This logic passes human understanding; it is super-logic and dazes the intellect of all but super-men. The philosophers of the future must be left to deal with it. Not, then, till the outbreak of war with England did Germany herself discover and proclaim the abomination of naval power. The greatest of authorities, Admiral Ma- han, not a prejudiced Englishman, but a disinterested 84 / - "■■ w m N - - NAVIES AND ARMIES American, takes a different view. The instincts of naval power, he tells us, are "naturally for peace because it has so much at stake outside its shores." And if Britain in the past has hoisted her flag in every region of the globe is there nothing to set out in her favour? At least many of her colonies are now, with the full consent of the mother country-, independent and self-governing states free to mould as they will their own destinies. "Why," asked Admiral Mahan, "do English innate political conceptions of popular representative government, of the balance of law and liberty, prevail in North America from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pa- cific? Because the command of the sea at the decisive era belonged to Great Britain." And when the judges are upon their seats, may one not recite to them the services of her fleet to the world in opening up during the infancy of navi- gation the ocean routes to voyagers from all the states, by men, "who thought it a thing more divine than human to sail by the West into the East," adding to the immor- tal names and deeds of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch sailors names and deeds hardly less famous — Humphrey Gilbert, who, at the height of the storm in which he perished, cried out, "We are as near to heaven by sea as by land"; the fearless Davis, who gave his name to the Straits, and wrote of the seaman that noble sentence of praise, "By his exceeding great hazards the form of the earth, the quantities of countries, the diversity o\ nations, and the nature of zones, climates, countries, and people, are made known to us"; Hudson, of Hudson's Bay; Tap- 85 THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR tain Cook, who first crossed the Arctic Circle, and Parry and Ross and Franklin and many another to whom all gen- erations owe an unceasing debt? And when the charges against Britain's misuse of sea power are formulated, not preferred, as Germany prefers them, in vague, incoherent cries of anger, may it not be remembered what her Navy has done to free and police the seas, to establish a chivalrous tradition of fellowship among the members of that gallant company who go down to the sea in ships and do their business in the great waters, to sound the deeps and chart the channels and direct the mariner on his way? The seas were not always free. For centuries they were the hunting ground of buccaneers, filibusters, pirates, slave- dealers, marauders of every type. There is no nation which has done as much, or half as much, for the security of travellers by water as Britain. Take the state of the Medi- terranean only a hundred years ago when a squadron under Lord Exmouth destroyed the last stronghold of the Barbary corsairs, long the terror of that inland sea, who had for generations seized the trading vessels of all nations and massacred or made slaves of their unhappy crews. By that expedition alone two thousand Christian captives were set free, and "many a merchant sailor for many a year after blessed the name of Lord Exmouth." So runs the history of the British Navy in the days of peace. But add to this that expeditions almost without number have been despatched not only against such common foes of mankind as the slave-dealer or the pirate, as for purposes of ocean survey and sounding, of collecting geographical and scien- 86 NAVIES AND ARMIES tific knowledge of oceans, coasts, ice tracks, tides, currents. Add again to these services the publication of Bailing direc- tions for the waterways of all the world, to be found on vessels flying every flag, and the work of the British Ad- miralty in peaceful times must be acknowledged as un- paralleled, a glory not to Britain only, but to humanity whom it has so universally and nobly served. APPENDIX X! a w < K ex ex =3 en cd >1 -3 v— a C 3 S" Oh rt tO 3 73 .2 s a _fi fl -3 <— . g P en o > "S r; > >, u «5 ,£1 3-J :§£ b2 £> c 3 X in O ■*-■ *a >, g .3 03 m OJ 3 £ K S 3,? ■8 -> 5 £ rt 3 ^ J3 <~ ^3^ 2ffl >> *3 i; 3 §S a a a o -a o c CO ed u IS> en O •— * 1 C O 'i en 3 cr a3 O s 1 o 0) a u en 95 in t— 1 '_! .5 U 3 < IX 3 o be u o s IS (1 w< 3 3 O S _o o CO C 8. 3 I r""i -O w fc. "^ 5 ^r> *> -O *0 - 1 j« 1| ■ i 1 a> \ •a CO U 1 1 (J v c •— 1 QJ 35 5 u "u d i-" in 3 - r ■4-* CQ U a) 2: rt S ^ 1 — 1 - a. -a — . 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