Chapter 33

WAR

(1914-1915)

No one who has had a look behind the scenes will ever forget the three War Wednesdays of 1914, the 22nd and 29th of July and the 5th of August; for during that dire fortnight the fate of the whole world hung trembling in the scales of life and death.

On the first the King reviewed the Grand Fleet, when twenty-two miles of fighting ships steamed by, all ready for instant battle with the High Sea Fleet of Germany: ready not only for battles _on_ the water but _under_ the water and _over_ the water as well. No king, even of sea-girt Britain, was ever so good a judge of what a fleet should be as was King George on that momentous day; for, till the death of his elder brother made him Heir to the Throne, he had spent the whole of his keen young life as a naval officer who did his work so well that he must have risen to a place among the best of British Admirals. Just as it was a great thing to have had King Edward the Wise to make (as he alone could make) the _Entente Cordiale_ with France, so it was a great thing to have had King George the Sailor standing by the helm of the ship of state when the fated war had come. British to the backbone, knowing the Empire overseas as no other king had known it, George V was born to distrust the Germans, being the son of the Danish Princess Alexandra, who had seen all the country round the Kiel Canal torn from the Crown of Denmark within a year of her marriage to King Edward. The Kaiser's lying letter to Lord Tweedmouth in 1908 was the last straw that broke King George's little patience with the German plotters headed by Grand Admiral von Tirpitz. "What," he exclaimed, "would the Kaiser say, if the King wrote a letter like that to Tirpitz?"

The chief kinds of fighting craft in the Grand Fleet can be told off on the fingers of one hand. First, the Battleships and Battle Cruisers. These are to our own fleets what ships-of-the-line-of-battle were to Nelson's, that is, they are the biggest and strongest, with the biggest and strongest guns and the thickest armour. The battle cruiser is faster than the battleship, and therefore not so strong; because to be faster you must thin your heavy armour to let you put in bigger engines. All the ships of this first kind were either Dreadnoughts or super-Dreadnoughts; that is, they were classed according to whether they had been built during the five years after the _Dreadnought_ (1905-10), or during the five years just before the war (1910-14). Each year there had been great improvements, till ships like the _Queen Elizabeth_ had eight gigantic guns throwing shells that weighed nearly a ton each and that could be dropped on an enemy twenty miles away.

The second kind is Cruisers, made up of Armoured Cruisers and Light Cruisers, the Armoured being the bigger and stronger, the Light being the smaller and faster, and both being too small for the line of battle. Cruisers are used in at least a dozen different ways. They scout. They attack and defend oversea trade. They "mother" flotillas ("little fleets") of destroyers, which are much smaller than themselves. They attack and defend the front, flank, and rear of the great lines of battle, clearing off the enemy's cruisers and destroyers and trying to get their own torpedoes home against his larger vessels. They are the eyes and ears, the scouts and skirmishers, the outposts and the watchdogs of the Fleet--swift, keen, sinewy, vigilant, and able to hit pretty hard.

Thirdly come Destroyers. This was the way in which they got their name. Navies had small gunboats before torpedoes were used. Then they had torpedo-boats. Then they built torpedo-gunboats. Finally, they built boats big enough to destroy gunboats, torpedo-boats, and torpedo-gunboats, without, however, losing the handy use of guns and torpedoes in vessels much smaller than cruisers. As battleships and cruisers are arranged in "squadrons" under admirals so destroyers are arranged in "flotillas" under commodores, who rank between admirals and captains.

A new kind of light craft--a sort of dwarf destroyer--grew up with the war. It is so light that it forms a class of its own--the featherweight class. Its proper name is the Coastal Motor Boat, or the C.M.B. for short. But the handy man knows it simply as the Scooter. The first scooters were only forty feet long, the next were fifty-five, the last were seventy. Everything about them is made as light as possible; so that they can skim along in about two feet of water at an outside speed of nearly fifty (land) miles an hour. They are really the thinnest of racing shells fitted with the strongest of lightweight engines. They are all armed with depth charges, which are bombs that go off under water at whatever depth you set them for when attacking submarines. The biggest scooters also carry torpedoes. The scooters did well in the war. Whenever the hovering aircraft had spotted a submarine they would call up the scooters, which raced in with their deadly depth charges. Even destroyers were attacked and torpedoed. One day a German destroyer off Dunkirk suddenly found itself surrounded by scooters which came in so close that a British officer had his cap blown off by the blast from a German gun. He and his scooter, however, both escaped and his torpedo sank the Hun.

Fourthly, come the submarines, those sneaky vipers of the sea that seem made on purpose for the underhand tricks of ruthless Germans. Deadly against unarmed merchantmen, and very dangerous in some other ways, the submarine is slow under water, no match for even a destroyer on the surface, and "tender" to attack by gunfire, to bombs dropped from aircraft, to "sea-quaking" depth charges, and, of course, to ramming. We shall presently hear more about these inventions of the devil.

Fifthly, come the seaplanes, that is, aircraft which can light on the water as well as fly. We began the war with a fair number of comparatively small planes and ended it with a great number of large ones, a few of which could drop a ton-weight bomb fit to sink most battleships if the shot went home. But these monsters of the air were something more than ordinary seaplanes. For out of the seaplane there gradually grew a regular flying boat which began to make it hot for German submarines in 1917. Commander Porte, of the Royal Navy, went on inventing and trying new kinds of flying boats for nearly three years before he made one good enough for its very hard and dangerous work. He had to overcome all the troubles of aircraft and seacraft, put together, before he succeeded in doing what no one had ever done before--making a completely new kind of craft that would be not only seaworthy but airworthy too. Porte's base was at Felixstowe, near the great destroyer and submarine base at Harwich on the east coast of England. Strangely enough, Felixstowe was a favourite summer resort of the Kaiser whenever he came to the British Isles. Felixstowe is within a hundred miles of the Belgian coast, where the Germans had submarines at Ostend and Zeebrugge. It is only fifty from the Dutch lightship on the North Hinder Bank, where German submarines used to come up so as to make sure of their course on their way between the English Channel and their own ports. The neighbourhood of this lightship naturally became a very favourite hunting ground of the new flying boats, which used to bomb the Huns whenever one of their submarines was sighted either on or below the surface. Forty flying boats were launched in 1917, and forty-four submarines were bombed. The "Porte Baby," as the flying boat of '17 was called, measured a hundred feet across the wings and carried a small aeroplane, complete with its own airman, on top. The "Porte Super-Baby" of 1918 could lift no less than fifteen tons and was easily the strongest aircraft in the world. The "Baby's" crew was four--pilot, navigator, wirelesser, and engineer. The "Super-Baby" carried more. Two gigantic Zeppelins and several submarines were destroyed by the "Babies." The "Super-Babies" had no proper chance of showing what they could do, as the Armistice came (11 November 1918) before they were really at work. Porte had many Canadians in his crews; and Canadians brought down the first Zeppelin and sank the first submarine.

But the five chief kinds of fighting craft are only half the battle. There are five more to be told off on the fingers of the other hand. First, the Auxiliary Cruisers, which are swift merchant liners quickly armed and manned by trained Reservists, who are mostly merchant seamen and fishermen in time of peace. These cruisers do scouting and escort duty, and sometimes have a hard fight with the enemy; though they are not strong enough for regular battles between great men-of-war. Secondly, the Supply Vessels of every size and every kind, which keep the Fleet supplied with food and fuel, munitions and repairs, and everything else a great fleet needs. So vast is British sea-power of every kind, compared with the sea-power of any other people, that foreign fleets and joint expeditions generally have to get British shipping to help them through their troubles when the British are either neutral or allied. The Russian fleet could not have gone to the Far East in 1904-05 without the supply ships of the British. The American fleet that went round the world in 1908-09 had to depend on British colliers. And over three-fifths of all the American soldiers that went to France to fight the Germans went in British transports. Transports are any ships that can be used to carry troops, horses, motors, stores, munitions, guns, and all the other things an army needs. They come third on this list. Fourthly, come those Merchantmen which are not used by the Army or Navy because they carry on the regular oversea trade as best they can. Fifthly, comes the Fishing Fleet, many of whose best men and vessels have to be used to fish for mines and submarines, but much of which must still be left to help out the food supply. The merchantmen and fishing craft which carried on their peace-time trade throughout the Great War had many an adventure quite as thrilling and many a hero quite as glorious as any in the fighting fleets. So there was no kind of British sea-power which did not feel the awful stress of war; and none, we may be proud to add, that failed to do its duty.

On the second War Wednesday (July 29th) the British Foreign Minister warned the German Ambassador that the British could not be so base as not to stand by their friends if Germany attacked them without good reason. All through that night the staff of the Foreign Office were wonderfully cheered up in their own work by looking across the famous Horse Guards Parade at the Admiralty, which was ablaze with lights from roof to cellar. The usual way, after the Royal Review that ended the big fleet manoeuvres for the year, was to "demobilize" ships that had been specially "mobilized" (made ready for the front) by adding Reserve men to their nucleus crews. But this year things were different. War was in the very air. So the whole fleet was kept mobilized; and the wireless on top of the Admiralty roof was kept in constant touch with every ship and squadron all round the Seven Seas. By Friday night, the 31st, the whole Grand Fleet had steamed through the Straits of Dover into the grim North Sea and on to Scapa Flow, where it was already waiting when, four days later, it got the midnight call to arms.

By the third War Wednesday (August 5th) the Germans had invaded Belgium and France; that great soldier and creator of new armies, Lord Kitchener, had replaced the civilian, Lord Haldane, at the head of the War Office; Lord French's immortal first army had just got the word _GO!_ and a German mine-layer was already at the work which cost her own life but sank the cruiser _Amphion_.

Years before the first shot was fired the French and British Navies had prepared their plans for blockading the Austrians in the Adriatic and the Germans in the North Sea. The French were more than a match for the Austrians, the British more still for the Germans. But the Austrians had their whole navy together, while the Germans also had at least nine-tenths of their own. So the French and British, in their efforts to keep the seaways open for friends and closed to enemies, had to reckon with the chances of battle as well as with those of blockade. The Austrians never gave much trouble, except, like the Germans, with their submarines; and after the Italians had joined us (May 1915) the Austrian Navy was hopelessly outclassed.

But the Germans were different. By immense hard work they had passed every navy in the world except the British; and they were getting dangerously close even to that. Their Navy did not want war so soon; and no Germans wanted the sort of war they got. Their Navy wanted to build and build for another ten or twenty years, hoping that our Pacifist traitors (who were ready for peace at any price, honour and liberty of course included) would play the German game by letting the German Navy outbuild the British. Then _Der Tag_ (the day) would come in the way the Germans hoped when they drank to it with shouts of _Hoch der Kaiser!_ (which really meant, _The Kaiser on top, the British underneath!_ though that is not the translation). To get this kind of _Tag_ the Germans needed to strike down their victims one by one in three quite separate wars: first, France and Belgium, Russia and the Southern Slavs; a thing they could have done with Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey on their side and the rest of Europe neutral. Then, having made sure of their immensely strengthened new position in the world, _Der Tag_ would come against the British Empire. Last of all, they would work their will in South America, being by that time far too strong for the United States. A nightmare plan, indeed! But, with good luck and good management, and taking us one by one, and always having our vile Pacifists to help them, this truly devilish plot might well have been worked out in three successive generations during the course of the twentieth century.

As it was, we had trouble enough to beat them; for they fought well by sea and land and air, though more like devils than like men. The charge of cowardice against our enemies, especially the Turks and Germans, is nonsense. Besides, it takes away our own men's glory if they had nothing more than cowards to put down. Of course the enemy had cowards, as other peoples have; but they had plenty of brave men too; and what, that unsurpassable hero of the air, McCudden, said of one brave German will do for many more. "I shall never forget my admiration for that German pilot who, single-handed, fought seven of us for ten minutes, and also put some bullets through all our machines. His flying was wonderful, his courage magnificent."

The Germans had not only the advantage of being able to mass nearly all their navy together but of training it all together on the same North Sea practice ground, and of building battle squadrons on purpose for one kind of fight close at home: a single tiger-spring and that was all. The British, on the other hand, had to build a good many ships "fit to go foreign" thousands of miles away, and so had to give up much space to the men's quarters and to fuel; while the Germans could save half this space for increased power in armour, engines, guns, and other things suited to one short cruise and tiger-spring near home. Not the least of the many British triumphs was winning against an enemy who was so brave, so skilful, so strong in many ways, and so very devilish in all.

Now that we know what we are about, let us clear the decks for action and go full steam ahead right through the fight at sea.

The British Navy had to help the British Army into France and take care that the Army's ever-growing forces there, as well as on a dozen different fronts elsewhere, always had the sea-roads kept open to many different bases over half the world. The Seven Seas are ten times bigger than the whole of North and South America. Yet the Navy watched or kept in touch with every part of all of them. So much for space. Now for time. Time was needed to get Kitchener's vast new armies ready. Millions sprang to arms. But it would have been sheer murder to send them to the front without many months of very hard training. So the enemy had to be kept at arm's length for a very long time--for the whole war, indeed, because reinforcements and supplies were always needed in vast and ever vaster quantities, both from the Mother Country and from the Empire, Allies, and Neutrals overseas. In addition to this the British oversea trade routes had to be kept open and the German ones closed; fisheries protected on one side, attacked on the other; and an immense sea service carried on for our Allies as well.

Some staggering facts and figures will be given in the chapter called "Well done!" Here we shall only note that the Navy, with all its Reserves and Auxiliaries, grew from two and a half million tons of shipping to eight millions before the war was over. This means that the Navy, in spite of all its losses, became bigger than any other country's navy, mercantile marine, fishing fleet, river steamers, and all other kinds of shipping, put together, since the world began. When we add the British mercantile marine, British shipbuilding, the British fishing fleets, and all the shipping interests of the Empire overseas, we shall find that British sea-power of all kinds equalled all the sea-power of all the rest of the world together. Destroy that sea-power and we die.

Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands off the north of Scotland was a perfect base for the Grand Fleet, because it was well placed to watch the way out of the North Sea through the two-hundred-mile gap between Norway and the Shetlands, and also because the tremendous tidal currents sweeping through it prevented submarines from sneaking about too close. Six hundred miles south-east was the German Fleet, near the North Sea end of the Kiel Canal. Between lay a hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles of water on which, taking one day with another the whole year round, you could not see clearly more than five miles. This "low average visibility" accounts for all the hide-and-seek that suited German tricks so well.

Within three hours of the British Declaration of War two British submarines were off for Heligoland, where they spied out the enemy's fleet. From that time on every German move was watched from under the water, on the water, or over the water, and instantly reported by wireless to the Admiralty in London and to the Grand Fleet based on Scapa Flow.

Then, when the first British army began to cross into France, the Fleet covered its flank against the Germans, and went on covering it for fifty-one months without a break, through cold and wet, through ceaseless watching, and through many fights.

The first fight was off Heligoland, when British light cruisers and destroyers went into the Bight on a scouting cruise planned by the Admiralty, not the Grand Fleet. The German destroyers fell back to lure the British within range of the enormous guns on Heligoland. That failed. But suddenly, out of the morning mist, came a bunch of German shells throwing up water-spouts that almost splashed aboard. Instantly the British destroyers strung out, farther apart, and put on full racing speed as the next two bunches crept closer in. _Whirrh!_ went the fourth, just overhead, as the flotilla flagship _Arethusa_ signalled to fire torpedoes. At once the destroyers turned, all together, lashing the sea into foam as their sterns whisked round, and charged, faster than any cavalry, straight for the enemy. When the Germans found the range and once more began bunching their shells too close in, the British destroyers snaked right and left, threw out the range-finding, and then raced ahead again. In less than ten minutes they had made more than five miles, fired their torpedoes, and were on their way back. Then up came the British cruisers and converged on the _Mainz_, which went down fighting. "The _Mainz_," wrote one of the British officers who saw her, "was immensely gallant. With her whole midships a fuming inferno she kept one gun forward and another aft still spitting forth fury and defiance like a wild cat mad with wounds." In the mean time Jellicoe, rightly anxious about leaving British light craft unsupported by heavier vessels so close to the German Fleet, urged the Admiralty to change their plan by sending on the battle cruisers. Then up came Beatty's four lordly giants--_Lion, Queen Mary, Invincible, New Zealand_--and the outclassed Germans retired.

The destroyer _Defender_, having sunk a German, had lowered a whaleboat to pick up survivors, when she was chased by a big German cruiser. So there, all alone, was her whaler, a mere open boat, on the enemy's part of the battlefield. But, through a swirl alongside, up came Submarine E4, opened her conning tower, took the whole boat's crew aboard, dived down again before the Germans could catch her, and landed safe home.

E9 crept in six miles south of Heligoland a fortnight later and sank the German cruiser _Hela_. But within a week the German von Weddigen had become the most famous of submarine commanders, for sinking no less than three British armoured cruisers with the loss of fifteen hundred men. The _Aboukir_, having been hit first, was closed by the _Hogue_ and _Cressy_ in order to save her crew. But they were themselves torpedoed before they could either see their enemy or save their friends.

Meanwhile the only German squadron overseas had been doing some daringly clever work under its first-class admiral, Graf von Spee. Leaving his worst vessels at Tsing-tao (the German port in China which was taken by the Japanese and British later on) he sailed into the vast Pacific with his seven best. On his way south he sent the _Königsberg_ to raid the east coast of Africa and the _Emden_ to raid the Indian Ocean. The _Königsberg_ did a good deal of damage to merchantmen and sank the much weaker British light cruiser _Pegasus_, which was caught refitting at Zanzibar and was pounded into scrap iron with the loss of half her crew. But when the _Königsberg_ made off, probably fearing the arrival of some avenging British, the _Pegasus_ still had her colours flying, not from the mast, for that was shot away, but in the steadfast hands of two undauntable Marines.

The _Emden_ was the most wonderful raider of modern times; and her captain, von Müller, behaved much better than the general run of Germans. Arrived in the Indian Ocean he bagged six ships in five days, sending all the crews into Calcutta in the sixth after sinking the rest. But he soon beat this by twice taking no less than seven ships in a single day! Then he dashed into Penang and sank the unready Russian cruiser _Jemchug_ on his way in and the ready little French destroyer _Mousquet_ on his way out. The _Mousquet_ hadn't the ghost of a chance. But she went straight for the _Emden_ and fought till she sank; her heroic captain, with both legs blown off, commanding her to the very last gasp. By this time, however, the net was closing in; and twelve days later the big Australian cruiser _Sydney_ finished the _Emden_ on Cocos Island Reef.

Meanwhile von Spee's five cruisers had been pressed south by the clever network of Japanese warships working over the vast area of the Pacific under the orders of a staff officer watching every move from his desk at Tokyo. Sir Christopher Cradock was waiting to catch the Germans. But his slow battleship _Canopus_ had not yet joined him when (November 1), with only three cruisers and one armed merchantman, he attacked them off Coronel on the coast of Chili; though they were very hard to see, being against the mountains, while his own ships were clearly outlined against a brilliant sunset. Ordering the armed merchantman away he began the fight between the armoured cruisers: _Good Hope_ and _Monmouth_ against _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_. The German ships were newer, faster, better armed, and the best shooting vessels of the German fleet. The first of their salvoes (volleys) to get home set the _Good Hope_ blazing fore and aft. There was a gale blowing and big seas running; so the end soon came. Cradock's last signal was for the light cruiser _Glasgow_ to save herself, as she could do no further service. But she stood by the _Monmouth_, whose own captain also ordered her away with the signal that, being too hard hit to escape himself, he would try to close the enemy so as to give the _Glasgow_ a better chance. Suddenly, like a volcano, the _Good Hope_ was rent by a shattering explosion. Then the _Monmouth_ began sinking by the head, and her guns ceased firing. No boat could live in those mountainous seas. So the _Glasgow_, now under the fire of the whole German squadron, raced away for her life.

Von Spee then swept the coast; and British vessels had to take refuge in Chilean harbours. But Captain Kinnear, a merchant skipper, ran the gauntlet with a skill and courage which nothing could surpass. Off the dreaded Straits of Magellan a German cruiser chased him at twenty-one knots, his own _Ortega's_ regular full speed being only fourteen. But he called for volunteers to help the stokers, whereupon every one of the two hundred Frenchmen going home to fight at once stepped forward, stripped to the waist, and whacked her up to eighteen. Yet still the cruiser kept closing up. So Kinnear turned into Nelson's Channel, the very worst channel in the very worst straits in the world, unlit, uncharted, and full of the wildest currents swirling through pinnacle rocks and over hidden reefs. The cruiser stopped, dumbfounded. The _Ortega_ then felt her way ahead, got through without a scratch, and took her Frenchmen safe to France.

Von Spee presently rounded the Horn and made for the Falkland Islands, the British naval base in the South Atlantic. But, only a month after the news of Coronel had found Sir Doveton Sturdee sitting at his desk in London as the Third Sea Lord of the Admiralty, his avenging squadron had reached the Falklands more than eight thousand miles away. Next morning von Spee also arrived; whereupon Sturdee's much stronger squadron sprang out of Port Stanley and began a chase which could only have one ending. Von Spee turned to fight, with his two armoured cruisers against the two over-powering battle cruisers of the British, so that his three light cruisers might "star away" at their utmost speed, on three divergent courses, in an effort to escape. Vain hope! Sturdee's battle cruisers sank the _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_, while his other cruisers sank two of the three German cruisers. All the Germans went down with colours flying and fighting to the very last. Only the little _Dresden_ escaped; to be sunk three months later by two British cruisers at Robinson Crusoe's island of Juan Fernandez, four hundred miles off the coast of Chili.

From this time forward not a single enemy warship sailed the outer seas. The Austrians were blockaded in the Adriatic, the Germans in the North Sea, and the Turks at the east end of the Mediterranean. Now and then a German merchantman would be armed in the German colonies or in some friendly neutral harbour and prey on British trade routes for a time. But very few of these escaped being sunk after a very short career; and those that did get home never came out again. So 1914 closed with such a British command over the surface of the sea as even Nelson had never imagined. The worst of the horrible submarine war was still to come. But that is a different story.

The joint expedition of French and British against the Turks and Germans in the Dardanelles filled 1915 with many a deed of more or less wasted daring. Victory would have meant so much: joining hands with Russia in the Black Sea, getting the Russian wheat crop from Odessa, driving the Turks from Constantinople, and cutting right through the Berlin-to-Bagdad line. But, once the Allied Governments had given the enemy time to hold the Dardanelles in full force, the only right way to reach Constantinople was the back way round by land through Greece and Turkey, combined with attacks on the Dardanelles. This, however, needed a vastly larger army than the Governments could spare. So, despite the objections of Fisher, their naval adviser, they sent fleets and armies to wear themselves out against the Dardanelles, till Kitchener, their military adviser, got leave to take off all that were left.

The politicians had blundered badly over the whole campaign. But the French and British soldiers and sailors, after fighting gloriously against long odds, managed their retirement in a way which might serve as the perfect model of what such retirements should be. The Turks and Germans, though eager to crown their victorious defence by smashing the fleet and army which had so long attacked them, were completely hoodwinked. The French and British kept up the cleverest show of force till the last streak of daylight had died away. Then, over the worst of broken ground, down terrific slopes, and across the puzzling beaches, the gallant armies marched, silent as the grave and regular as clock-work. The boats were loaded and taken off to their appointed places as skilfully as Wolfe's were brought down the St. Lawrence the night before the Battle of the Plains. Next morning the astounded enemy found an empty land in front of them; while the sea was swarming with crowded transports, safe beyond the retiring men-of-war.