Part 26

This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed, as a part of an unfathomable, complicated business of guards within guards, intelligence battling with intelligence, deceiving raiders by land or sea, of those responsible for the safety of England and the mastery of the seas.

* * * * *

It is from the navy yard that the ships go forth to battle and to the navy yard they must return for supplies and for the grooming beat of hammers in the dry dock. Those who work at a navy yard keep the navy’s house; welcome home all the family, from Dreadnoughts to trawlers, give them cheer and shelter, and bind up their wounds.

The quarter-deck of action for Admiral Lowry, commanding the great base on the Forth, which was begun before the war and hastened to completion since, was a substantial brick office building. Adjoining his office, where he worked with engineers’ blue prints as well as with sea maps, he had fitted up a small bedroom where he slept, to be at hand if any emergency arose.

Partly we walked, as he showed us over his domain of steam-shovels, machine shops, cement factories, of building and repairs, of coaling and docking, and partly we rode on a car that ran over temporary rails laid for trucks loaded with rocks and dirt. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, a river bottom had been filled in back of the quays with material that had been excavated to form a vast basin with cement walls, where squadrons of Dreadnoughts might rest and await their turn to be warped into the great dry docks which open off it in chasmlike galleries.

“The largest contract in all England,” said the contractor. “And here is the man who checks up my work,” he added, nodding to the lean, Scotch naval civil engineer who was with us. It was clear from his look that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency.

“And the workers? Have you had any strikes here?”

“No. We have employed double the usual number of men from the start of the war,” he said. “I’m afraid that the Welsh coal troubles have been accepted as characteristic. Our men have been reasonable and patriotic. They’ve shown the right spirit. If they hadn’t, how could we have accomplished that?”

We were looking down into the depths of a dry dock blasted out of the rock, which had been begun and completed within the year. And we had heard nothing of all this through those twelve months! No writer, no photographer, chronicled this silent labour! Double lines of guards surrounded the place day and night. Only tried patriots might enter this world of a busy army in smudged workmen’s clothes, bending to their tasks with that ordered discipline of industrialism which wears no uniforms, marches without beat of drums, and toils that the ships shall want nothing to ensure victory.

XXVII

ON A DESTROYER

Losing one’s heart to the British navy--“Specialised in torpedo work”--Watching for submarines--Passing a flotilla--The eyes of the navy--Cold on the bridge--A jumpy sea--Look out for the spray--A symphony in mechanism--Around a bend and: the sea power of England!

Now we were on our way to the great thing--to our look behind the curtain at the hidden hosts of sea-power. Of some eight hundred tons’ burden our steed, doing eighteen knots, which was a dog-trot for one of her speed.

“A destroyer is like an automobile,” said the commander. “If you rush her all the time she wears out. We give her the limit only when necessary.”

On the bridge the zest of travel on a dolphin of steel held the bridle on eagerness to reach the journey’s end. We all like to see things well done and here one had his first taste of how well things are done in the British navy, which did not have to make ready for war after the war began. With an open eye one went, and the experience of other navies as a balance for his observation; but one lost one’s heart to the British navy and might as well confess it now. A six months’ cruise with our own battleship fleet was a proper introduction to the experience. Never under any flag not my own did I feel so much at home.

After the arduous monotony of the trenches and after the traffic of London, it was freedom and sport and ecstasy to be there, with the rush of salt air on the face! Our commander was under thirty years of age; and that destroyer responded to his will like a stringed instrument. He seemed a part of her, her nerves welded to his.

“Specialised in torpedo work,” he said, in answer to a question. That is the way of the British navy: to learn one thing well before you go on with another. If in the course of it you learn how to command, larger responsibilities await you. If not--there’s retired pay.

Inside a shield which sheltered them from the spray on the forward deck, significantly free of everything but that four-inch gun, its crew was stationed. The commander had only to lean over and speak through a tube and give a range, and the music began. That tube bifurcated at the end to an ear-mask over a youngster’s head; a youngster who had real sailor’s smiling blue eyes, like the commander’s own. For hours he would sit waiting in the hope that game would be sighted. No fisherman could be more patient or more cheerful.

“Before he came into the navy he was a chauffeur. He likes this,” said the commander.

“In case of a submarine you do not want to lose any time; is that it?”

“Yes,” he replied. “You never can tell when we might have a chance to put a shot into Fritz’s periscope or ram him--Fritz is our name for submarines.”

Were all the commanders of destroyers up to his mark, one wondered. How many more had the British navy caught young and trained to such quickness of decision and in the art of imparting it to his men?

Three hundred revolutions! The destroyer changed speed. Five hundred! She changed speed again.

Out of the mist in the distance flashed a white ribbon knot that seemed to be tied to a destroyer’s bow and behind it another destroyer, and still others, lean, catlike, but running as if legless, with greased bodies sliding over the sea. We snapped out some message to them and they answered as passing birds on the wing before they swept out of sight behind a headland with uncanny ease of speed. How many destroyers had England running to and fro in the North Sea, keen for the chase and too quick at dodging and too fast to be in any danger of the under-water dagger thrust of the assassins whom they sought. We know the figures in the naval lists, but there cannot be too many. They are the eyes of the navy; they gather information and carry a sting in their torpedo tubes.

It was chilly there on the bridge, with the prospect too entrancing not to remain even if one froze. But here stepped in naval preparedness with thick, short coats of llama wool.

“Served out to all the men last winter, when we were in the thick of it patrolling,” the commander explained. “You’ll not get cold in that!”

“And yourself?” was suggested to the commander.

“Oh, it is not cold enough for that in September! We’re hardened to it. You come from the land and feel the change of air; we are at sea all the time,” he replied. He was without even an overcoat; and the ease with which he held his footing made land lubbers feel their awkwardness.

A jumpy, uncertain tidal sea was running. Yet our destroyer glided over the waves, cut through them, played with them, and let them seem to play with her, all the while laughing at them with the power of the purring vitals that drove her steadily on.

“Look out!” which at the front in France was a signal to jump for a “funk pit.” We ducked, as a cloud of spray passed above the heavy canvas and clattered like hail against the smokestack. “There won’t be any more!” said the commander. He was right. He knew that passage. One wondered if he did not know every gallon of water in the North Sea, which he had experienced in all its moods.

Sheltered by the smokestack down on the main deck, one of our party, who loved not the sea for its own sake but endured it as a passageway to the sight of the Grand Fleet, had found warmth, if not comfort. Not for him that invitation to come below given by the chief engineer, who rose out of a round hole with a pleasant, “How d’y do!” air to get a sniff of the fresh breeze, wizard of the mysterious power of the turbines which sent the destroyer marching so noiselessly. He was the one who transferred the captain’s orders into that symphony in mechanism. Turn a lever and you had a dozen more knots; not with a leap or a jerk, but like a cat’s sleek stretching of muscles. Not by the slightest tremor did you realise the acceleration; only by watching some stationary object as you flew past.

Now a sweep of smooth water at the entrance to a harbour, and a turn-- and there it was: the sea power of England!

XXVIII

SHIPS THAT HAVE FOUGHT

The “invisible” fleet--No chance for German submarines--No end to the greyish blue-green monsters--the _Queen Elizabeth_-- Sea-power and world power--Ships that have been under fire--A German “mistake”--Sir David Beatty--“Youth for action”--On board the _Lion_--Sensations during the fighting--Importance of accurate marksmanship--Crashing blasts and the scream of shells--Watching the hits--The precious turret--Result of German gunfire--A city of steel--Its brain-center--A panoply of tubes, levers, push-buttons--Methods of British gunfire-- One of the great guns--Its human complement--The gun-pointer-- From the upper bridge--An impressive beauty--The chase off Heligoland--Safe return of the _Lion_.

But was that really it? That spread of greyish blue-green dots set on a huge greyish blue-green platter? One could not discern where ships began and water and sky which held them suspended left off. Invisible fleet it had been called. At first glance it seemed to be composed of baffling phantoms, absorbing the tone of its background. Admiralty secrecy must be the result of a naval dislike of publicity.

Still as if they were rooted, these leviathans! How could such a shy, peaceful looking array send out broadsides of twelve- and thirteen-five and fifteen-inch shells? What a paradise for a German submarine! Each ship seemed an inviting target. Only there were many gates and doors to the paradise, closed to all things that travel on and under the water without a proper identification. Submarines that had tried to pick one of the locks were like the fish who found going good into the trap. A submarine had about the same chance of reaching that anchorage as a German in the uniform of the Kaiser’s Death’s Head Hussars, with a bomb under his arm, of reaching the vaults of the Bank of England.

And was this all of the greatest naval force ever gathered under a single command, these two or three lines of ships? But as the destroyer drew nearer the question changed. How many more? Was there no end to greyish blue-green monsters, in order as precise as the trees of a California orchard, appearing out of the greyish blue-green background? First to claim attention was the _Queen Elizabeth_, with her eight fifteen-inch guns on a platform which could travel at nearly the speed of the average railroad train.

The contrast of sea and land warfare appealed the more vividly to one fresh from the front in France. What infinite labour for an army to get one big gun into position! How heralded the snail-like travels of the big German howitzer! Here was ship after ship, whose guns seemed innumerable. One found it hard to realise the resisting power of their armour, painted to look as liquid as the sea, and the stability of their construction, which was able to bear the strain of firing the great shells that travelled ten miles to their target.

Sea-power, indeed! And world power, too, there in the hollow of a nation’s hand, to throw in whatever direction she pleased. If an American had a lump in his throat at the thought of what it meant, what might it not mean to an Englishman? Probably the Englishman would say, “I think that the fleet is all right, don’t you?”

Land-power, too! On the Continent vast armies wrestled for some square miles of earth. France has, say, three million soldiers; Germany, five; Austria, four--and England had, perhaps, a hundred thousand men, perhaps more, on board this fleet which defended the English land and lands far over seas without firing a shot. One American regiment of infantry is more than sufficient in numbers to man a Dreadnought. How precious, then, the skill of that crew! Man-power is as concentrated as gun-power with a navy. Ride three hundred miles in an automobile along an army front, with glimpses of units of soldiers, and you have seen little of a modern army. Here, moving down the lanes that separated these grey fighters, one could compass the whole!

Four gold letters, spelling the word Lion, awakened the imagination to the concrete of the _Blücher_ turning her bottom skyward before she sank off the Dogger Bank under the fire of the guns of the _Lion_ and of the _Tiger_, astern of her, and the _Princess Royal_ and the _New Zealand_, of the latest fashion in battle-cruiser squadrons which are known as the “cat” squadron. This work brought them into their own; proved how the British, who built the first Dreadnought, have kept a little ahead of their rivals in construction. With almost the gun-power of Dreadnoughts, better than three to two against the best battleships, with the speed of cruisers and capable of overwhelming cruisers, or of pursuing any battleship, or getting out of range, they can run or strike, as they please.

Ascend that gangway, so amazingly clean, as were the decks above and below and everything about the _Lion_ or the _Tiger_, and you were on board one of the few major ships which had been under heavy fire. Her officers and men knew what modern naval war was like; her guns knew the difference between the wall of cloth of a towed target and an enemy’s wall of armour.

In the battle of Tsushima Straits battleships had fought at three and four thousand yards and closed into much shorter range. Since then, we had had the new method of marksmanship. Tsushima ceased to be a criterion. The Dogger Bank multiplied the range by five. A hundred years since England, all the while the most powerfully armed nation at sea, had been in a naval war of the first magnitude; and to the _Lion_ and the _Tiger_ had come the test. The Germans said that they had sunk the _Tiger_; but the _Tiger_ afloat purred a contented denial.

One could not fail to identify among the group of officers on the quarter-deck Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, for his victory had impressed his features on the public’s eye. Had his portrait not appeared in the press, one would have been inclined to say that a first lieutenant had put on a vice-admiral’s coat by mistake. He was about the age of the first lieutenant of our own battleships. Even as it was, one was inclined to exclaim: “There is some mistake! You are too young!” The Who is Who book says that he is all of forty-four years old and it must be right, though it disagrees with his appearance by five years. A vice-admiral at forty-four! A man who is a rear-admiral with us at fifty-five is very precocious. And all the men around him were young. The British navy did not wait for war to teach again the lesson of “youth for action!” It saved time by putting youth in charge at once.

Their simple uniforms, the directness, alertness, and definiteness of these officers, who had been with a fleet ready for a year to go into battle on a minute’s notice, was in keeping with their surroundings of decks cleared for action and the absence of anything which did not suggest that hitting a target was the business of their life.

“I had heard that you took your admirals from the school-room,” said one of the Frenchmen, “but I begin to believe that it is the nursery.”

Night and day they must be on watch. No easy-chairs; their shop is their home. They must have the vitality that endures a strain. One error in battle by any one of them might wreck the British Empire.

It is difficult to write about any man-of-war and not be technical; for everything about her seems technical and mechanical except the fact that she floats. Her officers and crew are engaged in work which is legerdermain to the civilian.

“Was it like what you thought it would be after all your training for a naval action?” one asked.

“Yes, quite; pretty much as we reasoned it out,” was the reply. “Indeed, this was the most remarkable thing. It was battle practice-- with the other fellow shooting at you!”

The fire-control officers, who were aloft, all agreed about one unexpected sensation, which had not occurred to any expert scientifically predicating what action would be like. They are the only ones, who may really “see” the battle in the full sense.

“When the shells burst against the armour,” said one of these officers, “the fragments were visible as they flew about. We had a desire, in the midst of our preoccupation with our work, to reach out and catch them. Singular mental phenomenon, wasn’t it?”

At eight or nine thousand yards one knew that the modern battleship could tear a target to pieces. But eighteen thousand--was accuracy possible at that distance?

“Did one in five German shells hit at that range?” I asked.

“No!”

Or in ten? No! In twenty? Still no, though less decisively. One got a conviction, then, that the day of holding your fire until you were close in enough for a large percentage of hits was past. Accuracy was still vital and decisive, but generic accuracy. At eighteen thousand yards all the factors which send a thousand or fifteen hundred or two thousand pounds of steel that long distance cannot be so gauged that each one will strike in exactly the same line when ten issue from the gun-muzzles in a broadside. But if one out of twenty is on at eighteen thousand yards, it may mean a turret out of action. Again, four or five might hit, or none. So, no risk of waiting may be taken, in face of the danger of a chance shot at long range. It was a chance shot which struck the _Lion’s_ feed tank and disabled her and kept the cat squadron from doing to the other German cruisers what they had done to the _Blücher_.

“And the noise of it to you aloft, spotting the shots?” I suggested. “It must have been a lonely place in such a tornado.”

“Yes. Besides the crashing blasts from our own guns we had the screams of the shells that went over and the cataracts of water from those short sprinkling the ship with spray. But this was what one expected. Everything was what one expected, except that desire to catch the fragments. Naturally, one was too busy to think much of anything except the enemy’s ships--to learn where your shells were striking.”

“You could tell?”

“Yes, just as well and better than at target practice for the target was larger and solid. It was enthralling, that watching the flight of our shells toward their target.”

Where were the scars from the wounds? One looked for them on both the _Lion_ and the _Tiger_. That armour patch on the sloping top of a turret might have escaped attention if it had not been pointed out. A shell struck there and a fair blow, too. And what happened inside? Was the turret gear put out of order?

To one who has lived in a wardroom a score of questions were on the tongue’s end. The turret is the basket which holds the precious eggs. A turret out of action means two guns out of action; a broken knuckle for the pugilist.

Constructors have racked their brains over the subject of turrets in the old contest between gun-power and protection. Too much gun-power, too little armour! Too much armour, too little gun-power! Off the Virginia capes we have pounded antiquated battleships with shells as a test, with sheep inside the turrets to see if life could survive. But in the last analysis results depend on how good is your armour, how sound your machinery which rotates the turret. That shell did not go through bodily, only a fragment, which killed one man and wounded another. The turret would still rotate; the other gun remained in action and the one under the shell-burst was soon back in action. Very satisfactory to the naval constructors.

Up and down the all-but perpendicular steel ladders with their narrow steps, and through the winding passages below decks in those cities of steel, one followed his guide, receiving so much information and so many impressions that he was confused as to details between the two veterans, the _Lion_, which was hit fifteen times, and the _Tiger_, which was hit eight. Wherever you went every square inch of space and every bit of equipment seemed to serve some purpose.

A beautiful hit, indeed, was that into a small hooded aperture where an observer looked out from a turret. He was killed and another man took his place. Fresh armour and no sign of where the shot had struck. Then below, into a compartment between the side of the ship and the armoured barbette which protects the delicate machinery for feeding shells and powder from the magazine deep below the water to the guns.

“H---- was killed here. Impact of the shell passing through the outer plates burst it inside; and, of course, the fragments struck harmlessly against the barbette.”

“Bang in the dugout!” one exclaimed, from army habit.

“Precisely! No harm done next door.”

Trench traverses and “funk-pit shelters” for localising the effects of shell-bursts are the terrestrial expression of marine construction. No one shell happened to get many men either on the _Lion_ or the _Tiger_. But the effect of the burst was felt in the passages, for the air-pressure is bound to be pronounced in enclosed spaces which allow of little room for the expansion of the gases.

Then up more ladders out of the electric light into the daylight, hugging a wall of armour whose thickness was revealed in the cut made for the small doorway which you were bidden to enter. Now you were in one of the brain-centres of the ship, where the action is directed. Through slits in that massive shelter of the hardest steel one had a narrow view. Above them on the white wall were silhouetted diagrams of the different types of German ships, which one found in all observing stations. They were the most popular form of mural decoration in the British navy.

Underneath the slits was a literal panoply of the brass fittings of speaking-tubes and levers and push-buttons, which would have puzzled even the “Hello, Central” girl. To look at them revealed nothing more than the eye saw; nothing more than the face of a watch reveals of the character of its works. There was no telling how they ran in duplicate below the water line or under the protection of armour to the guns and the engines.

“We got one in here, too. It was a good one!” said the host.

“Junk, of course,” was how he expressed the result. Here, too, a man stepped forward to take the place of the man who was killed, just as the first lieutenant takes the place of a captain of infantry who falls. With the whole telephone apparatus blown off the wall, as it were, how did he communicate?

“There!” The host pointed toward an opening at his feet. If that failed there was still another way. In the final alternative, each turret could go on firing by itself. So the Germans must have done on the _Blücher_ and on the _Gneisenau_ and the _Scharnhorst_ in their last ghastly moments of bloody chaos.