Chapter 28

"Here to-day and gone to-morrow," said an officer. "What a time they had last winter! You know how cold the North Sea is--no, you cannot, unless you have been out in a torpedo boat dancing the tango in the teeth of that bitter wind, with the spray whipping up to the tops of the smoke-stacks. In the dead of night they would come into this pitch- dark harbour. How they found their way is past me. It's a trick of those young fellows, who command."

Stationary they seemed now as the quay itself; but let a signal speak, an alarm come, and they would soon be as alive as leaping porpoises. The sport is to those who scout and hunt. But do not forget those who watch, those who keep the blockade, from the Channel to Iceland, and the trawlers that plod over plotted sea- squares with the regularity of mowing-machines cutting a harvest, on their way back and forth sweeping up mines. They were fishermen before the war and are fishermen still. Night and day they keep at it. They come into the harbours stiff with cold, thaw out, and return to hardships which would make many a man prefer the trenches. Tributes to their patient courage, which came from the heart, were heard on board the battleships.

"It is when we think of them," said an officer, "that we are most eager to have the German fleet come out, so that we can do our part."

XXXIII The Fleet Puts To Sea

There is another test besides that of gun-drills and target practice which reflects the efficiency of individual ships, and the larger the number of ships the more important it is. For the business of a fleet is to go to sea. At anchor, it is in garrison rather than on campaign, an assembly of floating forts. Navies one has seen which seemed excellent when in harbour, but when they started to get under way the result was hardly reassuring. Some erring sister fouled her anchor chain; another had engine-room trouble; another lagged for some other reason; there was fidgeting on the bridges. Then one asked, What if a summons to battle had come? Our own officers were authority enough that the British had no superiors in any of the tests. But strange reports dodged in and out of the alleys of pessimism in the company of German insistence that the Tiger and other ships which one saw afloat had been sunk. Was the fleet really held prisoner by fear of submarines? If it could go and come freely when it chose, the harbour was the place for it while it waited. If not, then, indeed, the submarine had revolutionized naval warfare. Admiral Jellicoe might lose some of his battleships before he could get into action against the Germans.

"Oh, to hear the hoarse rattle of the anchor chains!" I kept thinking while I was with the fleet. "Oh, to see all these monsters on the move!"

A vain wish it seemed, but it came true. A message from the Admiralty arrived while we were on the flagship. Admiral Jellicoe called his Flag Lieutenant and spoke a word to him, which was passed in a twinkling from flagship to squadron and division and ship. He made it as simple as ordering his barge alongside, this sending of the Grand Fleet to sea.

From the bridge of a destroyer beyond the harbour entrance we saw it go. I shall not attempt to describe the spectacle, which convinced me that language is the vehicle for making small things seem great and great things seem small. If you wish words invite splendid and magnificent and overwhelming and all the reliable old friends to come forth in glad apparel from the dictionary. Personally, I was inarticulate at sight of that sea-march of dull-toned, unadorned power.

First came the outriders of majesty, the destroyers; then the graceful light cruisers. How many destroyers has the British navy? I am only certain that it has not as many as it seems to have, which would mean thousands. Trying to count them is like trying to count the bees in the garden. You cannot keep your eye on the individual bees. You are bound to count some twice, so busy are their manœuvres.

"Don't you worry, great ladies!" you imagined the destroyers were saying to the battleships. "We will clear the road. We will keep watch against snipers and assassins."

"And if any knocks are coming, we will take them for you, great ladies!" said the cruisers. "If one of us went down, the loss would not be great. Keep your big guns safe to beat other battleships into scrap."

For you may be sure that Fritz was on the watch in the open. He always is, like the highwayman hiding behind a hedge and envying people who have comfortable beds. Probably from a distance he had a peep through his periscope at the Grand Fleet before the approach of the policeman destroyers made him duck beneath the water; and probably he tried to count the number of ships and identify their classes in order to take the information home to Kiel. Besides, he always has his fingers crossed. He hopes that some day he may get a shot at something more warlike than a merchant steamer or an auxiliary; only that prospect becomes poorer as life for him grows harder. Except a miracle happened, the steaming fleet, with its cordons of destroyers, is as safe from him as from any other kind of fish.

The harbour which is the fleet's home is landlocked by low hills. There is an eclipse of the sun by the smoke from the ships getting under way; streaming, soaring columns of smoke on the move rise above the skyline from the funnels of the battleships before they appear around a bend. Indefinite masses as yet they are, under their night- black plumes. Each ship seems too immense to respond to any will except its own. But there is something automatic in the regularity with which, one after another, they take the bend, as if a stop watch had been held on twenty thousand tons of steel for a second's variation. As they approach they become more distinct and, showing less smoke, there seems less effort. Their motive-power seems inherent, perpetual.

There is some sea running outside the entrance, enough to make a destroyer roll. But the battleships disdain any notice of its existence. It is no more to them than a ripple of dust to a motor truck. They plough through it.

Though you were within twenty yards of them you would feel quite safe. An express train was in no more danger of jumping the track. Mast in line with mast, they held the course with a majestic steadiness. Now the leading ship makes a turn of a few points. At the same spot, as if it were marked by the grooves of tyres in a road, the others make it. Any variation of speed between them would have been instantly noticeable, as one forged ahead or lagged; but the distance between bows and sterns did not change. A line of one length would do for each interval so far as one could discern.

It was difficult to think that they were not attached to some taut, moving cable under water. How could such apparently unwieldy monsters, in such a slippery element as the sea, be made to obey their masters with such fine precision?

The answer again is sheer hard work! Drills as arduous in the engine- room as at the guns; machinery kept in tune; traditions in manoeuvring in all weathers, which is kept up with tireless practice.

Though all seemed perfection to the lay eye, let it be repeated that this was not so to the eyes of admirals. It never can be. Perfection is the thing striven for. Officers dwell on faults; all are critics. Thus you have the healthiest kind of spirit, which means that there will be no cessation in the striving.

"Look at that!" exclaimed an officer on the destroyer. "They ought to try another painting on her and see if they can't do better."

Ever changing that northern light. For an instant the sun's rays, strained by a patch of peculiar cloud, playing on a Dreadnought's side, made her colour appear molten, exaggerating her size till she seemed as colossal to the eye as to the thought.

"But look, now!" said another officer. She was out of the patch and seemed miles farther away to the vision, a dim shape in the sea- haze.

"You can't have it right for every atmospheric mood of the North Sea, I suppose!" muttered the critic. Still, it hurt his professional pride that a battleship should show up as such a glaring target even for a moment.

The power of the fleet was more patent in movement than at rest; for the sea-lion was out of his lair on the hunt. Fluttering with flags at a review at Spithead, the battleships seemed out of their element; giants trying for a fairy's part. Display is not for them. It ill becomes them, as does a pink ribbon on a bulldog.

Irresistibly ploughing their way they presented a picture of resolute utility--guns and turrets and speed. No spot of bright colour was visible on board. The crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets, give the range, lay the sights on the enemy's ships, and the battle was on.

"There is the old Dreadnought," said an officer. The old Dreadnought --all of ten years of age, the senile old thing! What a mystery she was when she was building! The mystery accentuated her celebrity--and almost forgotten now, while the Queen Elizabeth and the Warspite, and others of their class with their fifteen-inch guns, would be in the public eye as the latest type till a new type came. A parade of naval types was passing. One seemed to shade into the other in harmonious effect. But here was an outsider, whom one noted instantly as he studied those rugged silhouettes of steel. She had twelve twelve-inch guns, with turret piled on turret in an exotic fashion--one of the two Turkish battleships building in England at the time of the war and taken over by the British.

One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts--even a squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of its might. Sixteen--twenty--twenty-four--it was the unending numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive. An hour passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes behind the wind-screen of the destroyer's bridge, only to look back and see more Dreadnoughts going by. A spectator had not realized that there were so many in the harbour. He had a suspicion that Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of a hat.

The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea, and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever; still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King Edward VII. class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were yet to come. One's eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they had seen the whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.

The destroyer commander looked at his watch.

"Time!" he said. "I'll put you on shore."

He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the engine-room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at twenty knots, towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth.

Imagination sped across seas where a man had cruised into harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was trying to visualize the whole globe--all of it except the Baltic seas and a thumb-mark in the centre of Europe. Hong-Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay--yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them, where countless millions dwell, were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet.

Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system--and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight's play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at those sturdy men behind armour.

When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and open markets under the British flag; when you compare the vociferations of von Tirpitz, glorying in the torpedoing of a Lusitania, with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea- power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on women and children would use that power if they had it.

XXXIV British Problems

Throughout the summer of 1915 the world was asking, What about the new British army? Why was it not attacking at the opportune moment when Germany was throwing her weight against Russia? A facile answer is easy; indeed, facile answers are always easy. Unhappily, they are rarely correct. None that was given in this instance was, to my mind. They sought to put a finger on one definite cause; again, on an individual or a set of individuals.

The reasons were manifold; as old as Waterloo, as fresh as the last speech in Parliament. They were inherent in the Anglo-Saxon race. Whoever raised a voice and said, This, or that, or you, are responsible! should first have looked into his own mind and into the history of his race and then into a mirror. Least of all should any American have been puzzled by the delay.

"Oh, we should have done better than that--we are Americans!" I hear my countrymen say. Perhaps we should. I hope so; I believe so. The British public thought that they were going to do better; military men were surprised that they did as well.

Along with laws and language we have inherited our military ideas from England. In many qualities we are different--a distinct type; but in nothing are we more like the British than in our attitude toward the soldier and toward war. The character of any army reflects the character of its people. An army is the fist; but the muscle, the strength, of the physical organism behind the blow in the long run belong to the people. What they have prepared for in peace they receive in war, which decides whether they have been living in the paradise of a fool or of a wise man.

As a boy I was brought up to believe, as an inheritance of the American Revolution, that one American could whip two Englishmen and five or six of any other nationality, which made the feathers of the eagle perched on the national escutcheon look glossy. It was a satisfying sort of faith. Americans had never tried five or six of any first-class fighting race; but that was not a thought which occurred to me. As we had won victories over the English and the English had whipped the French at Waterloo, the conclusion seemed obvious. English boys, I understand, also had been brought up to believe that one Englishman could whip five or six men of any other nationality, but, I take it for granted, only two Americans. This clothed the British lion with majesty, while the lower ratio of superiority over Americans returned the compliment in kind from the sons of the lion to the sons of the eagle.

After I began to read history for myself and to think as I read, I found that when British and Americans had met, the generals on either side were solicitous about having superior forces, and in case of odds of two to one they made a "strategic retreat." When either side was beaten, the other always explained that he was overcome by superior numbers, though perhaps the adversary had not more than ten or fifteen per cent, advantage. Then I learned that the British had not whipped five or six times their number on the continent of Europe. The British Expeditionary Force made as fine an effort to do so at Mons as was ever attempted in history, but they did not succeed.

It was a regular army that fought at Mons. The only two first-class nations which depend upon regulars to do their fighting are the British and the American. This is the vital point of similarity which is the practical manifestation of our military ideas. We have been the earth's spoiled children, thanks to the salt seas between us and other powerful military nations. Before any other Power could reach the United States it must overwhelm the British navy, and then it must overwhelm ours and bring its forces in transports. Sea-power, you say. That is the facile word, so ready to the lips that we do not realize the wonder of it any more than of the sun rising and setting.

When we want soldiers our plan still is to advertise for them. The ways of our ancestors remain ours. We think that the volunteer must necessarily make the best soldier because he offers his services; while the conscript--rather a term of opprobrium to us--must be lukewarm. It hardly occurs to us that some forms of persuasion may amount to conscription, or that the volunteer, won by oratorical appeal to his emotions or by social pressure, may suffer a reaction after enlistment which will make him lukewarm also, particularly as he sees others, also young and fit, hanging back. Nor does it occur to us that there may be virtue in that fervour of national patriotism aroused by the command that all must serve, which, on the continent in this war, has meant universal exaltation to sacrifice. The life of Jones means as much to him as the life of Smith does to him; and when the whole nation is called to arms there ought to be no favourites in life- giving.

For the last hundred years, if we except the American Civil War, ours have been comparatively little wars. The British regular army has policed an empire and sent punitive expeditions against rebellious tribes with paucity of numbers, in a work which the British so well understand. Our little regular army took care of the Red Indians as our frontier advanced from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. To put it bluntly, we have hired someone to do our fighting for us.

Without ever seriously studying the business of soldiering, the average Anglo-Saxon thought of himself as a potential soldier, taking his sense of martial superiority largely from the work of the long- service, severely drilled regular. Also, we used our fists rather than daggers or duelling swords in personal encounters and, man to man, unequipped with fire-arms or blades, the quality which is responsible for our sturdy pioneering individualism gave us confidence in our physical prowess.

Alas! modern wars are not fought with fists. A knock-kneed man who knows how to use a machine-gun and has one to use--which is also quite important--could mow down all the leading heavy-weights of the United States and England, with the latest champion leading the charge.

Now, this regular who won our little wars was not representative of the people as a whole. He was the man "down on his luck," who went to the recruiting depot. Soldiering became his profession. He was in a class, like priests and vagabonds. When you passed him in the street you thought of him as a strange being, but one of the necessities of national existence. It did not interest you to be a soldier; but as there must be soldiers, you were glad that men who would be soldiers were forthcoming.

When trouble broke, how you needed him! When the wires brought news of his gallantry you accepted the deeds of this man whom you had paid as the reflection of national courage, which thrilled you with a sense of national superiority. To him, it was in the course of duty; what he had been paid to do. He did not care about being called a hero; but it pleased the public to make him one--this professional who fights for a shilling a day in England and $17.50 a month in the United States.

Though when the campaign went well the public was ready to take the credit as a personal tribute, when the campaign went badly they sought a scapegoat, and the general who might have been a hero was sent to the wilderness perhaps because those busy men in Congress or Parliament thought that the army could do without that little appropriation which was needed for some other purpose. The army had failed to deliver the goods which it was paid to produce. The army was to blame, when, of course, under free institutions the public was to blame, as the public is master of the army and not the army of the public.

A first impression of the British army is always that of the regiment. Pride of regiment sometimes appears almost more deep-seated than army pride to the outsider. It has been so long a part of British martial inheritance that it is bred in the blood. In the old days of small armies and in the later days of small wars, while Europe was making every man a soldier by conscription, regiment vying with regiment won the battles of empire. The memory of the part each regiment played is the inspiration of its present; its existence is inseparable from the traditions of its long list of battle honours.

The British public loves to read of its Guards' regiment and to watch them in their brilliant uniforms at review. When a cadet comes out of Sandhurst he names the regiment which he wishes to join, instead of being ordered to a certain regiment, as at West Point. It rests with the regimental commander whether or not he is accepted. Frequently the young man of wealth or family serves in the Guards or another crack regiment for awhile and resigns, usually to enjoy the semi-leisurely life which is the fortune of his inheritance.

Then there are the county line regiments, such as the Yorkshires, the Kents, and the Durhams. In this war each county wanted to read about its own regiments at the same time as about the Guards, just as Kansans at home would want to read about the Kansas regiment and Georgians about the Georgia regiment. The most trying feature of the censorship to the British public was its refusal to allow the exploitation of regiments. The staff was adamant on this point; for the staff was thinking for the whole and of the interests of the whole. In the French and the German armies, as in our regular army, regiments are known by numbers.

The young man who lives in the big house on the hill, the son of the man of wealth and power in the community, as a rule does not go to West Point. None of the youth of our self-called aristocracy which came up the golden road in a generation past those in modest circumstances who have generations of another sort back of them, think of going into the First Cavalry or the First Infantry for a few years as a part of the career of their class. A few rich men's sons enter our army, but only enough to prove the rule by the exception. They do not regard the army as "the thing." It does not occur to them that they ought to do something for their country. Rather, their country ought to do something for them.

But sink the plummet a little deeper and these are not our aristocracy nor our ruling class, which is too numerous and too sound of thought and principle for them to feel at home in that company. Any boy, however humble his origin, may go to West Point if he can pass the competitive examination. Europe, particularly Germany, would not approve of this; but we think it the best way. The average graduate of the Point, whether the son of a doctor, a lawyer, or a farmer, sticks to the army as his profession. We maintain the Academy for the strict business purpose of teaching young men how to train our army in time of peace and to lead and direct it in time of action.