Part 27

“If this is carried away and then that is, why, then, we have--” as one had often heard officers say on board our own ships. But that was hypothesis. Here was demonstration, which made a glimpse of the _Lion_ and the _Tiger_ so interesting. The _Lion_ had had a narrow escape from going down after being hit in the feed tank; but once in dry dock, all her damaged parts had been renewed. Particularly it required imagination to realise that this tower had ever been struck; visually, more convincing was a plate elsewhere which had been left unpainted, showing a spatter of dents from shell-fragments.

“We thought that we ought to have something to prove that we had been in battle,” said the host. “I think I’ve shown all the hits. There were not many.”

Having seen the results of German gun-fire, we were next to see the methods of British gun-fire; something of the guns and the men who did things to the Germans. One stooped under the overhang of the turret armour from the barbette and climbed up through an opening which allowed no spare room for the generously built, and out of the dim light appeared the glint of the massive steel breech block and gun, set in its heavy recoil mountings with roots of steel supports sunk into the very structure of the ship. It was like other guns of the latest improved type; but it had been in action, and one kept thinking of this fact that gave it a sort of majestic prestige. One wished that it might look a little different from the others, as the right of a veteran.

As the plugman swung the breech open I had in mind a giant plugman on the U. S. S. _Connecticut_ whom I used to watch at drills and target practice. Shall I ever forget the flash in his eye if there were a fraction of a second’s delay in the firing after the breech had gone home! The way in which he made that enormous block obey his touch in oily obsequiousness suggested the apotheosis of the whole business of naval war. I don’t know whether the plugman of H. M. S. _Lion_ or the plugman of the U. S. S. _Connecticut_ was the better. It would take a superman to improve on either.

Like the block, it seemed as if the man knew only the movements of the drill; as if he had been bred and his muscles formed for that. One could conceive of him playing diavolo with that breech. He belonged to the finest part of all the machinery, the human element, which made the parts of a steel machine play together in a beautiful harmony.

The plugman’s is the most showy part; others playing equally important parts are in the cavern below the turret; and most important of all is that of the man who keeps the gun on the target, whose true right eye may send twenty-five thousand tons of battleship to perdition. No one eye of any enlisted man can be as important as the gun-pointer’s. His the eye and the nerve trained as finely as the plugman’s muscles. He does nothing else, thinks of nothing else. In common with painters and poets, gun-pointers are born with a gift, and that gift is trained and trained and trained. It seems simple to keep right on, but it is not. Try twenty men in the most rudimentary test and you will find that it is not; then think of the nerve it takes to keep right on in battle, with your ship shaken by the enemy’s hits.

How long had the plugman been on his job? Six years. And the gun-pointer? Seven. Twelve years is the term of enlistment in the British navy. Not too fast but thoroughly, is the British way. The idea is to make a plugman or a gun-pointer the same kind of expert as a master artisan in any other walk of life, by long service and selection.

None of all these men serving the two guns from the depths to the turret saw anything of the battle, except the gun-pointer. It was easier for them than for him to be letter-perfect in the test, as he had to guard against the exhilaration of having an enemy’s ship instead of a cloth target under his eye. Super-drilled he was to that eventuality; super-drilled all the others through the years, till each one knew his part as well as one knows how to turn the key in the lock of his bureau. Used to the shock of the discharges of their own guns at battle practice, many of the crew did not even know that their ship was hit, so preoccupied was each with his own duty, which was to go on with it until an order or a shell’s havoc stopped him. Every mind was closed except to the thing which had been so established by drill in his nature that he did it instinctively.

A few minutes later one was looking down from the upper bridge on the top of this turret and the black-lined planking of the deck eighty-five feet below, with the sweep of the firm lines of the sides converging toward the bow on the background of the water. Suddenly the ship seemed to have grown large, impressive; her structure had a rocklike solidity. Her beauty was in her unadorned strength. One was absorbing the majesty of a city from a cathedral tower after having been in its thoroughfares and seen the detail of its throbbing industry.

Beyond the _Lion’s_ bow were more ships, and port and starboard and aft were still more ships. The compass range filled the eye with the stately precision of the many squadrons and divisions of leviathans. One could see all the fleet. This seemed to be the scenic climax; but it was not, as we were to learn when we should see the fleet go to sea. Then we were to behold the mountains on the march.

One glanced back at the deck and around the bridge with a sort of relief. The infinite was making him dizzy. He wanted to be in touch with the finite again. But it is the writer, not the practical, hardened seaman, who is affected in this way. To the seaman, here was a battle-cruiser with her sister battle-cruisers astern, and there around her were Dreadnoughts of different types and pre-Dreadnoughts and cruisers and all manner of other craft which could fight each in its way, each representing so much speed and so much metal which could be thrown a certain distance.

“Homogeneity!” Another favourite word, I remember, from our own wardrooms. Here it was applied in the large. No experimental ships there, no freak variations of type, but each successive type as a unit of action. Homogeneous, yes--remorselessly homogeneous. The British do not simply build some ships; they build a navy. And of course the experts are not satisfied with it; if they were, the British navy would be in a bad way. But a layman was; he was overwhelmed.

From this bridge of the _Lion_ on the morning of the 24th of January, 1914, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty saw appear on the horizon a sight inexpressibly welcome to any commander who has scoured the seas in the hope that the enemy will come out in the open and give battle. Once that German battle-cruiser squadron had slipped across the North Sea and, under cover of the mist which has ever been the friend of the pirate, bombarded the women and children of Scarborough and the Hartlepools with shells meant to be fired at hardened adult males sheltered behind armour; and then, thanks to the mist, they had slipped back to Heligoland with cheering news to the women and children of Germany. This time when they came out they encountered a British battle-cruiser squadron of superior speed and power, and they had to fight as they ran for home.

Now, the place of an admiral is in his conning tower after he has made his deployments and the firing has begun. He, too, is a part of the machine; his position defined, no less than the plugman’s and the gun-pointer’s. Sir David watched the ranging shots which fell short at first, until finally they were on, and the Germans were beginning to reply. When his staff warned him that he ought to go below, he put them off with a preoccupied shake of his head. He could not resist the temptation to remain where he was, instead of being shut up looking through the slits of a visor.

But an admiral is as vulnerable to shell-fragments as a midshipman, and the staff did its duty, which had been thought out beforehand like everything else. The argument was on their side; the commander really had none on his. It was then that Vice-Admiral Beatty sent Sir David Beatty to the conning tower, much to the personal disgust of Sir David, who envied the observing officers aloft their free sweep of vision.

Youth in Sir David’s case meant suppleness of limbs as well as youth’s spirit and dash. When the _Lion_ was disabled by the shot in her feed tank and had to fall out of line, Sir David must transfer his flag. He signalled for his destroyer, the _Attack_. When she came alongside, he did not wait on a ladder, but jumped on board her from the deck of the _Lion_. An aged vice-admiral with chalky bones might have broken some of them, or at least received a shock to his presence of mind.

Before he left the _Lion_ Sir David had been the first to see the periscope of a German submarine in the distance, which sighted the wounded ship as inviting prey. Officers of the _Lion_ dwelt more on the cruise home than on the battle. It was a case of being towed at five knots an hour by the Indomitable. If ever submarines had a fair chance to show what they could do it was then against that battleship at a snail’s pace. But it is one thing to torpedo a merchant craft and another to get a major fighting ship, bristling with torpedo defence guns and surrounded by destroyers. The _Lion_ reached port without further injury.

XXIX

ON THE “INFLEXIBLE”

Veterans of the Dardanelles--“The range of them”--The Falkland affair--The “double bluff” on von Spee--The intercepted British wireless--Sturdee’s trap--Story book of strategy--The Germans go down with their colours flying--Only a disordered wardroom-- The chaplain’s anecdote--All a lark for the midshipman-- Souvenirs of action.

What Englishman, let alone an American, knows the names of even all the British Dreadnoughts? With a few exceptions, the units of the Grand Fleet seem anonymous. The _Warspite_ was quite unknown to the fame which her sister ship the _Queen Elizabeth_ had won. For “_Lizzie_” was back in the fold from the Dardanelles; and so was the _Inflexible_, flagship of the battle of the Falkland Islands. Of all the ships which Sir John Jellicoe had sent away on special missions, the _Inflexible_ had had the grandest Odyssey. She, too, had been at the Dardanelles.

The _Queen Elizabeth_ was disappointing so far as wounds went. She had been so much in the public eye that one expected to find her badly battered, and she had suffered little, indeed, for the amount of sport she had had in tossing her fifteen-inch shells across the Gallipoli peninsula into the Turkish batteries and the amount of risk she had run from Turkish mines. Some of these monster shells contained only eleven thousand shrapnel bullets. A strange business for a fifteen-inch naval gun to be firing shrapnel. A year ago no one could have imagined that one day the most powerful British ship, built with the single thought of overwhelming an enemy’s Dreadnought, would ever be trying to force the Dardanelles.

The trouble was that she could not fire an army corps ashore along with her shells to take possession of any batteries she put out of action. She had some grand target practice; she escaped the mines; she kept out of reach of the German shells, and returned to report to Sir John with just enough scars to give zest to the recollection of her extraordinary adventure. All the fleet was relieved to see her back in her proper place. It is not the business of super-Dreadnoughts to be steaming around mine-fields, but to be surrounded by destroyers and light cruisers and submarines safeguarding her giant guns which are depressed and elevated as easily as if they were drum-sticks. One had an abrasion, a tracery of dents.

“That was from a Turkish shell,” said an officer. “And you are standing where a shell hit.”

One looked down to see an irregular outline of fresh planking.

“An accident when we did not happen to be out of their reach. We had the range of them,” he added.

“The range of them” is a great phrase. Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee used it in speaking of the battle of the Falkland Islands. “The range of them” seems a sure prescription for victory. Nothing in all the history of the war appeals to me as quite so smooth a bit of tactics as the Falkland affair. It was so smooth that it was velvety; and it is worth telling again, as I understand it. Sir Frederick is another young admiral. Otherwise, how could the British navy have entrusted him with so important a task? He is a different type from Beatty, who in an army one judges might have been in the cavalry. Along with the peculiar charm and alertness which we associate with sailors--they imbibe it from the salt air and from meeting all kinds of weather and all kinds of men, I think--he has the quality of the scholar, with a suspicion of merriness in his eye.

He was Chief of Staff at the Admiralty in the early stages of the war, which means, I take it, that he assisted in planning the moves on the chessboard. It fell to him to act; to apply the strategy and tactics which he planned for others at sea while he sat at a desk. It was his wit against von Spee’s, who was not deficient in this respect. If he had been he might not have steamed into the trap. The trouble was that von Spee had some wit, but not enough. It would have been better for him if he had been as guileless as a parson.

Sir Frederick is so gentle-mannered that one would never suspect him of a “double bluff,” which was what he played on von Spee. After von Spee’s victory over Cradock, Sturdee slipped across to the South Atlantic, without any one knowing that he had gone, with a squadron strong enough to do unto von Spee what von Spee had done unto Cradock.

But before you wing your bird you must flush him. The thing was to find von Spee and force him to give battle; for the South Atlantic is broad and von Spee, it is supposed, was in an Emden mood and bent on reaching harbour in German Southwest Africa, whence he could sally out to destroy British shipping on the Cape route. When he intercepted a British wireless message--Sturdee had left off the sender’s name and location--telling the plodding old _Canopus_ seeking home or assistance before von Spee overtook her, that she would be perfectly safe in the harbour at Port William, as guns had been erected for her protection, von Spee guessed that this was a bluff, and rightly. But it was only Bluff Number One. He steamed to the Falklands with a view to finishing off the old _Canopus_ on the way across to Africa. There he fell foul of Bluff Number Two. Sturdee did not have to seek him; he came to Sturdee.

There was no convenient Dogger Bank fog in that latitude to cover his flight. Sturdee had the speed of von Spee and he had to fight. It was the one bit of strategy of the war which is like that of the story books and worked out as the strategy always does in proper story books. Practically the twelve-inch guns of the _Inflexible_ and the _Invincible_ had only to keep their distance and hang on to the _Scharnhorst_ and the _Gneisenau_ in order to do the trick. Light-weights or middle-weights have no business trafficking with heavy-weights in naval warfare.

“Von Spee made a brave fight,” said Sir Frederick, “but we kept him at a distance that suited us, without letting him get out of range.”

He had had the fortune to prove an established principle in action. It was all in the course of duty, which is the way that all the officers and all the men look at their work. Only a few ships have had a chance to fight and these are emblazoned on the public memory. But they did no better and no worse, probably, than the others would have done. If the public singles out ships, the navy does not. Whatever is done and whoever does it, why, it is to the credit of the family, according to the spirit of service that promotes uniformity of efficiency. Leaders and ships which have won renown are resolved into the whole in that harbour where the fleet is the thing; and the good opinion they most desire is that of their fellows. If they have that, they will earn the public’s when the test comes.

Belonging to the class of the first of battle-cruisers is the _Inflexible_, which received a few taps in the Falklands and a blow that was nearly the death of her in the Dardanelles. Tribute enough for its courage--the tribute of a chivalrous enemy--von Spee’s squadron receives from the officers and men of the _Inflexible_, who saw them go down into the sea tinged with sunset red with their colours still flying. Then in the sunset red the British saved as many of those afloat as they could.

Those dripping German officers who had seen one of their battered turrets carried away bodily into the sea by a British twelve-inch shell, who had endured a fury of concussions and destruction, with steel missiles cracking steel structures into fragments, came on board the _Inflexible_ looking for signs of some blows delivered in return for the crushing blows that had beaten their ships into the sea and saw none until they were invited into the wardroom, which was in chaos-- and then they smiled.

At least, they had sent one shell home. The sight was sweet to them, so sweet that, in respect to the feeling of the vanquished, the victor held silence with a knightly consideration. But where had the shell entered? There was no sign of any hole. Then they learned that the fire of the guns of the starboard turret midships over the wardroom, which was on the port side, had deposited a great many things on the floor which did not belong there; and their expression changed. Even this comfort was taken from them.

“We had the range of you!” the British explained.

The chaplain of the _Inflexible_ was bound to have an anecdote. I don’t know why, except that a chaplain’s is not a fighting part and he may look on. His place was down behind the armour with the doctor, waiting for wounded. He stood in his particular steel cave listening to the tremendous blasts of her guns which shook the _Inflexible’s_ frame, and still no wounded arrived. Then he ran up a ladder to the deck and had a look around and saw the little points of the German ships with the shells sweeping toward them and the smoke of explosions which burst on board them. It was not the British who needed his prayers that day, but the Germans.

Perhaps the spirit of the _Inflexible’s_ story was best given by a midshipman with the down still on his cheek. Considering how young the British take their officer-beginners to sea, the admirals are not young, at least, in point of sea service. He got more out of the action than his elders; his impressions of the long cruises and the actions had the vividness of boyhood. Down in one of the caves, doing his part as the shells were sent up to feed the thundering guns above, the whispered news of the progress of the battle was passed on at intervals till, finally, the guns were silent. Then he hurried on deck in the elation of victory, succeeded by the desire to save those whom they had fought. It had all been so simple; so like drill. You had only to go on shooting--that was all.

Yes, he had been lucky. From the Falklands to the Dardanelles, which was a more picturesque business than the battle. Any minute off the Straits you did not know but a submarine would have a try at you or you might bump into a mine. And the _Inflexible_ did bump into one. She had two thousand tons of water on board. It was fast work to keep the remainder of the sea from coming in, too, and the same kind of dramatic experience as the _Lion’s_ in reaching port. Yes, he had been very lucky. It was all a lark to that boy.

“It never occurs to midshipmen to be afraid of anything,” said one of the officers. “The more danger, the better they like it.”

In the wardroom was a piece of the mine or the torpedo, whichever it was, that struck the _Inflexible_; a strange, twisted, annealed bit of metal. Every ship which had been in action had some souvenir which the enemy had sent on board in anger and which was preserved with a collector’s enthusiasm.

The _Inflexible_ seemed as good as ever she was. Such is the way of naval warfare. Either it is to the bottom of the sea or to dry docks and repairs. There is nothing half way. So it is well to take care that you have “the range of them.”

XXX

ON THE FLEET FLAGSHIP

The “grande dames” of the fleet--The boarding--Nelson’s heritage-- Guardians of the peace of the seas--Sir John Jellicoe--The China seas incident--The compliment returned at Manila Bay-- Friends in the service--That command of Joshua’s--Waiting and watching--England’s true genius--A complete blockade-- Intricate and concentrated mechanism--Personality of Sir John-- The spirit of service.

Thus far we have skirted around the heart of things, which in a fleet is always the commander-in-chief’s flagship. Our handy, agile destroyer ran alongside a battleship with as much nonchalance as she would go alongside a pier. I should not have been surprised to have seen her pirouette over the hills or take to flight.

There was a time when those majestic and pampered ladies, the battleships--particularly if a sea were running as there was in this harbour at the time--having in mind the pride of paint, begged all destroyers to keep off with the superciliousness of _grandes dames_ holding their skirts aloof from contact with nimble, audacious street gamins, who dodged in and out of the traffic of muddy streets. But destroyers have learned better manners, perhaps, and battleships have been democratised. It is the day of Russian dancers and when aeroplanes loop the loop, and we have grown used to all kinds of marvels.

But the sea has refused to be trained. It is the same old sea that it was in Columbus’ time, without any loss of trickiness in bumping small craft against towering sides. The way that this destroyer slid up to the flagship without any fuss and the way her bluejackets held off from the paint as she rose on the crests and slipped back into the trough, did not tell the whole story. A part of it was how, at the right interval, they assisted the landlubber to step from gunwale to gangway, making him feel perfectly safe when he would have been perfectly helpless but for them.

I had often watched our own bluejackets at the same thing. They did not grin--not when you were looking at them. Nor did the British. Bluejackets are noted for their official politeness. I should like to have heard their remarks--they have a gift for remarks--about those invaders of their uniformed world in Scotch caps and other kinds of caps and the different kind of clothes which tailors make for civilians. Without any intention of eavesdropping, I did overhear one asking another whence came these strange birds.

One knew the flagship by the admirals’ barges astern, as you know the location of an army headquarters by its automobiles. It seemed in the centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression. Where its place would be in action is one of those secrets as important to the enemy as the location of a general’s shell-proof shelter in Flanders. Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe may be on some other ship in battle. If there is any one foolish question which one should not ask it is this.

As one mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought one was bound to think of another flagship in Portsmouth harbour, Nelson’s _Victory_--at least, an American was. Probably an Englishman would not indulge in such a commonplace. One would like to know how many Englishmen had ever seen the old _Victory_. But, then, how many Americans have been to Mount Vernon and Gettysburg?