PART II

At the close of my previous Chapter I took a mean advantage of my readers. For I broke off at the most interesting and baffling phase in the whole Battle of the Giants. It was easy to write of the first two phases—the battle-cruiser action up to the turn where the _Queen Mary_ and _Indefatigable_ were lost, and the phase during which Beatty, though sorely weakened, gallantly headed off the German line, and Evan-Thomas, with his Fifth Battle Squadron, stalled off the Main High Seas Fleet in order to allow Beatty the time necessary for the execution of his manœuvre, and Jellicoe the time to bring up the Grand Fleet. This second phase of the battle was perfectly planned and perfectly executed. It will always stand out in the pages of English Naval History as a classical example of English battle tactics. I could have described these two phases with much more of intimate detail had the Censor permitted, but perhaps I gave enough to make clear what was sought to be done and what was, in fact, achieved.

When Jellicoe had deployed his potent squadrons, fitting them in between Evan-Thomas and Beatty and curving round the head of the German line, which by then had turned back upon itself and taken the form of a closely knit spiral, the Germans appeared to be doomed. They were not enveloped in the strict sense of being surrounded—we were twice as strong as they were in numbers of modern ships and nearly three times as strong in effective gun power, yet we had not nearly sufficient numbers actually to surround them. A complete envelopment of an enemy fleet rarely, if ever, occurs at sea. But though Admiral Scheer was not surrounded he was in the most imminent peril of destruction. Jellicoe and Beatty were between his ships and the Jutland Coast, and as they pressed towards the south and west were pushing him away from the Wet Triangle and the security of his home bases. We had him outmanœuvred and beaten, but we did not destroy him. Why was that?

No question is more difficult to answer fairly and truthfully. I have discussed this third critical phase of the battle with a great many officers who were present—and in a position to see what happened—and with a great many who, though not present, had means of informing themselves upon essential details. I have studied line by line the English and German dispatches and have paid more regard to what they do not tell than to what they do tell. It is stupid to reject Admiral Scheer’s dispatch as fiction; it is not, but it is coloured with the purpose of making the least of his tactical defeat and the most of his very skilful escape. Jellicoe’s dispatch is also coloured. I do not doubt that the statements contained in it are strictly true, but there are obvious omissions. By a process of examination and inquiry I have arrived at an answer to my question. I put it forward in all deference, for though I am of the Navy in blood and spirit, and have studied it all my life, yet I am a layman without sea training in the Service.

The first point essential to an understanding is that Jellicoe’s deployment was not complete until late in the afternoon, 6.17 p.m. G.M.T., that the evening was misty, and the “visibility” poor. Had the encounter between Beatty’s and Hipper’s battle cruisers occurred two hours earlier, and had Jellicoe come into action at 4.15 instead of 6.15, one may feel confident that there would not now be any High Seas German Fleet, that we could, since May 31st, 1916, have maintained a close blockade with fast light craft of the German North Sea and Baltic bases, and that the U-boat activity, which still threatens our sea communications and has had a profound influence on the progress of the war, would never have been allowed by us to develop. Upon so little, two hours of a day in late spring, sometimes hangs the fate of nations.

The afternoon was drawing towards evening; the light was poor, the German lines had curved away seeking safety in flight. But there remained confronting us Hipper’s battle cruisers and Scheer’s faster battleships, supported by swarms of torpedo craft. We also had our destroyers, many of them, and light cruisers. There was one chance of safety open to Scheer, and he took it with a judgment in design and a skill in execution which marks him out as a great sea captain. His one chance was so to fend off and delay Jellicoe and Beatty by repeated torpedo attacks driven home, that the big English ships would not be able to close in upon the main German Fleet and destroy it by gun-fire while light remained to give a mark to the gunners. And so Scheer decided to “attack,” and did attack. In his dispatch he deliberately gives the impression—for the comfort and gratification of German readers—that he successfully attacked our Grand Fleet with his main High Seas Fleet. He was no fool of that sort. He attacked, but it was with torpedo craft supported by Hipper’s battle cruisers.

The range of a modern torpedo, the range at which it may occasionally be effective, is not far short of 12,000 yards, about seven land miles. This, when the visibility is low, is about the extreme effective range for heavy guns. The guns can shoot much farther, twice as far, when the gunners or the fire directors up aloft can see; but gunnery without proper light is a highly wasteful and ineffective business. At the range—usually about 12,000 yards, though sometimes coming down to 9,000 yards—to which the German torpedo attacks forced Jellicoe and Beatty to keep out, only some four or five enemy ships in the van could be seen at once; more of the rear squadron could be seen, though never more than eight or twelve. Our marks were usually not the hulls of the enemy’s ships but the elusive flashes of his guns. Scheer used his torpedo craft in exactly the same way as a skilful land General—in the old days of open fighting—used his cavalry during a retreat. He used them to cover by repeated charges, sometimes of single flotillas, at other times of heavily massed squadrons, the retirement of his main forces.

If, therefore, we combine the factor of low visibility and the approach of sunset, with the other factor of the long range of the modern torpedo, we begin to understand why Jellicoe and Beatty were not able to close in upon their enemy and wipe him off the seas. From the English point of view the third phase—that critical third phase to which the first and second phases had led up and which, under favourable circumstances, would have ended with the destruction of the German Fleet—found us in the position of a “following” or “chasing” fleet. But from the German point of view the same phase found their fleet in the position of “attackers.” I have shown how these points of view can be reconciled, for while the main German Fleet was intent upon getting away and our main fleet was intent upon following it up and engaging it, the German battle cruisers, supported by swarms of torpedo craft, were fighting a spirited rearguard action and attacking us continually. The visibility was poor and mist troubled both sides. But the escape of the Germans was not wholly due to the difficulty of seeing them distinctly. If we could have closed in we should have seen his ships all right; we did not close in because the persistence and boldness of his torpedo attacks prevented us.

The third phase, which lasted from 6.17 p.m. until 8.20 p.m., was fought generally at about 12,000 yards, though now and then the range came down to 9,000 yards. The Germans, fending us off with torpedo onslaughts, did their utmost to open out the ranges and used smoke screens to lessen what visibility the atmosphere permitted. Their gun-fire was so poor and ineffective that Jellicoe’s Main Fleet was barely scratched and three men only were wounded. But we cannot escape from the conclusion that Scheer’s rearguard tactics were successful, he did fend Jellicoe off and kept him from closing, and he did withdraw the bulk of his fleet from the jaws which during two hours were seeking to close upon it. He made two heavy destroyer attacks, during one of which the battleship _Marlborough_ was hit but was able to get back to dock under her own steam. The third phase of the Jutland Battle was exactly like a contest between two boxers—one heavy and the other light—being fought in an open field without ropes. The little man, continually side-stepping and retreating, kept the big man off; the big man could not close for fear of a sudden jab in his vital parts, and there were no corners to the ring into which the evasive light weight could be driven.

If one applies this key to the English and German descriptions of the third phase in the Jutland Battle one becomes able to reconcile them, and becomes able to understand why the immensely relieved Germans claim their skilful escape as a gift from Heaven. They do not in their dispatches claim to have defeated Jellicoe, except in the restricted sense of having foiled his purpose of compassing their destruction. They got out of the battle very cheaply, whatever may have been their actual losses. This they realise as plainly as we do. Relief shines out of every line of their official story and is compressed, without reserve, into its concluding sentence. “Whoever had the fortune to take part in the battle will joyfully recognise with a thankful heart that the protection of the Most High was with us. It is an old historical truth that fortune favours the brave.”

* * * * *

I am afraid that I can do little to elucidate the fourth phase of the Battle of the Giants—the night scrimmage (one cannot call it a battle) during which our destroyers were seeking out the enemy ships in the darkness and plugging holes into them at every opportunity. And that dawn upon June 1st, of which so much was hoped and from which nothing was realised? Who can describe that? Nothing that I can write would approach in sublimity the German dispatch. Consider what the situation was. Jellicoe and Beatty had worked far down the Jutland coast and had partially edged their way between Scheer and the German bases. Their destroyers had sought out the German ships, found them and loosed mouldies at them, lost them again and found them again; finally had lost them altogether. At dawn the visibility was even lower than during the previous evening—only three to four miles—our destroyers were out of sight and touch and did not rejoin till 9 o’clock. No enemy was in sight, and after cruising about until 11 o’clock Jellicoe was forced to the conclusion that Scheer had got away round his far-stretching horns and was even then threading the mine fields which protected his ports of refuge. There was no more to be done, and the English squadrons, robbed of the prey upon which they had set their clutches, steamed off towards their northern fastnesses. There the fleet fuelled and replenished with ammunition, and 9.30 a.m. on June 2nd was reported ready for action. The German description of that dawn is a masterpiece in the art of verbal camouflage: “As the sun rose upon the morning of the historic First of June in the eastern sky, each one of us expected that the awakening sun would illumine the British line advancing to renew the battle. This expectation was not realized. The sea all round, so far as the eye could see, was empty. One of our airships which had been sent up reported, later in the morning, having seen twelve ships of a line-of-battle squadron coming from the southern part of the North Sea holding a northerly course at great speed. To the great regret of all it was then too late for our fleet to intercept and attack them.” The British Fleet, which the writer regretted not to see upon the dawn of a long day in late spring, was of more than twice the strength of his own. It would have had sixteen hours of daylight within which to devour him; yet he regretted its absence! The Germans must be a very simple people, abysmally ignorant of the sea if this sort of guff stimulates their vanity.

* * * * *

In war the moral is far greater than the material, the psychological than the mechanical. One cannot begin to understand the simplest of actions unless one knows something of the spirit of the men who fight them. In sea battles, more than in contests upon land, events revolve round the personalities of the leaders and results depend upon the skill with which these leaders have gauged the problem set them, and dispose their forces to meet those varying phases which lead up to a conclusion. It is borne in upon us by hard experience that the southern part of the North Sea is not big enough and not deep enough to afford space for a first-class naval battle to be fought out to the finish. The enemy is too near his home bases, he can break off an action and get away before being overwhelmed. Yet even in the southern North Sea there is room in which to dispose great naval forces and in which to manœuvre them. Fleets are not tucked up by space as are modern armies. Jutland was a battle of encounter and manœuvre, not of heavy destructive fighting. There was a dainty deftness about the first two phases which is eminently pleasing to our national sea pride, and however we may growl at the tactical incompleteness of the battle we cannot but admit that, taken as a whole, it was as strategically decisive an action as has ever been fought by the English Navy throughout its long history. It re-established the old doctrine, which the course of the Sea War has tended to thrust out of sight, that Command of the Sea rests as completely as it always has done in the past upon the big fighting ships of the main battle line. Upon them everything else depends; the operations of destroyers and light cruisers, of patrols and even of submarines. For upon big ships depends the security of home bases. Surface ships alone can occupy the wide spaces of the sea and can hold securely the ports in one’s own country and the ports which are ravished from an enemy. Submarines are essentially raiders, their office is the obstruction of sea communications, but submarines are useless, even for their special work of obstruction, unless they can retire, refit, and replenish stores at bases made secure by the existence in effective being of a strong force of big fighting ships. Had Jutland been as great a tactical success as it was a strategical success, had it ended with the wiping out of the German High Seas Fleet, then, as I have already stated, the U-boat menace would have been scotched by the destruction of the protecting screen behind which the U-boats are built, refitted, and replenished. No small part of the German relief at the issue of Jutland is due to their realisation of this naval truth. They express that realisation in a sentence which contains the whole doctrine of the efficacy of the big ship as the final determinant in naval warfare. Admiral Scheer in his dispatch declared that the Battle of May 31st, 1916, “confirmed the old truth that the large fighting ship, the ship which combines the maximum of strength in attack and defence, rules the seas.” They do not claim that the English superiority in strength—which they place at “roughly two to one”—was sensibly reduced by our losses in the battle, nor that the large English fighting ships—admittedly larger, more numerous, and more powerfully gunned than their own—ceased after Jutland to rule the seas. The German claim, critically considered, is simply that in the circumstances it was a very lucky escape for the German ships. And so indeed it was. It left them with the means of securing their bases from which could be carried on the U-boat warfare against our mercantile communications at sea.

When the day arrives for the veil which at present enshrouds naval operations to be lifted, and details can be discussed freely and frankly, a whole literature will grow up around the Battle of the Giants. Strategically, I repeat—even at the risk of becoming tedious—it was a great success, both in its inception and in its practical results. Tactically its success was not complete. The Falkland Islands and Coronel actions were by comparison simple affairs of which all essential details are known. Jutland, from six o’clock in the evening of May 31st until dawn upon June 1st, when the opposing fleets had completely lost touch, the one with the other, is a puzzling confusing business which will take years of discussion and of elucidation wholly to resolve—if ever it be fully resolved. If any one be permitted to describe the three actions in a few words apiece one would say that Coronel was both strategically and tactically a brilliant success for the Germans. Von Spee concentrated his squadron outside the range of our observation, placed himself in a position of overwhelming tactical advantage, and won a shattering victory. At the Falkland Islands action we did to von Spee exactly what he had done to us at Coronel. This time it was the English concentration which was effected outside the German observation, and it was the German squadron which was wiped out when the tactical clash came. The first two phases of Jutland were, in spite of our serious losses in ships, notable tactical successes; they ended with Beatty round the head of the German Fleet and Jellicoe deployed in masterly fashion between Beatty and Evan-Thomas. Then we get the exasperating third phase, in which the honours of skilful evasion rest with the Germans, and the fourth or night phase, during which confusion became worse confounded until all touch was lost. And yet, in spite of the tactical failure of the third and fourth phases, the battle as a whole was so great a success that it left us with an unchallengeable command of the sea—a more complete command than even after Trafalgar. The Germans learned that they could not fight us in the open with the smallest hope of success. One of the direct fruits of Jutland was the intensified U-boat warfare against merchant shipping. The Germans had learned in the early part of the war that they could not wear down our battleship strength by under-water attacks; they learned at Jutland that they could not place their battleships in line against ours and hope to survive; nothing was left to them except to prey upon our lines of sea communication. And being a people in whose eyes everything is fair in war—their national industry—they proceeded to make the utmost of the form of attack which remained to them. Viewed, therefore, in its influence upon the progress of the war, the Battle of Jutland was among the most momentous in our long sea history.

I have discussed the Battle of the Giants so often, and so remorselessly, with many officers who were present and many others who though not present were in a position to know much which is hidden from onlookers, that I fear lest I may have worn out their beautiful patience. There are two outstanding figures, Beatty and Jellicoe, about whose personalities all discussion of Jutland must revolve. They are men of very different types. Beatty is essentially a fighter; Jellicoe is essentially a student. In power of intellect and in knowledge of his profession Jellicoe is a dozen planes above Beatty. And yet when it comes to fighting, in small things and in great, Beatty has an instinct for the right stroke at the right moment, which in war is beyond price. Whether in peace or in war, Jellicoe would always be conspicuous among contemporaries; Beatty, unless war has given him the stage upon which to develop his flair for battle, would not have stood out. He got early chances, in the Soudan and in China; he seized them both and rushed up the ladder of promotion. He was promoted so quickly that he outstripped his technical education. As a naval strategist and tactician Jellicoe is the first man in his profession; Beatty is by professional training neither a strategist nor a tactician—he was a commander at twenty-seven and a captain at twenty-nine—but give him a fighting problem to be solved out in the open with the guns firing, and he will solve it by sheer instinctive genius. In the Battle of Jutland both Beatty and Jellicoe played their parts with consummate skill; Beatty was in the limelight all through, while Jellicoe was off the stage during the first two acts. Yet Jellicoe’s part was incomparably the more difficult, for upon him, though absent, the whole issue of the battle depended. His deployment by judgment and instinct—sight was withheld from him by the weather—was perfect in its timing and precision. He should have been crowned with the bays of a complete Victor, but the Fates were unkind. He was robbed of his prey when it was almost within his jaws. Do not be so blind and foolish as to depreciate the splendid skill and services of Lord Jellicoe.

* * * * *

I find the writing of this second Chapter upon the Battle of the Giants a very difficult job. Twice I have tried and failed; this is the result of the third effort. My failures have been used to light the fires of my house. Even now I am deeply conscious of the inadequacy of my tentative reflections. Upon so many points one has not the data; upon so many others one is not allowed—no doubt properly—yet still not allowed to say what one knows. Though sometimes I write grave articles, many of my readers know that by instinct I am a story-teller, and to me narrative by dialogue comes more readily than a disquisition. Therefore, if you will permit me, I will cast the remaining portion of this chapter into the form of dialogue and make of it a discussion between two Admirals, a Captain, and myself. One of these Admirals I will call a Salt Horse, a man who has seen service during half a century but who has not specialised in a technical branch such as gunnery, or navigation, or torpedoes. A Salt Horse is an all-round sailor. The other Admiral I will call a Maker, and regard him as a highly competent technical officer in the design and construction of ships of war, of their guns, and of their armour. The Captain, a younger man, I will call a Gunner, one who has specialised in naval gunnery in all its branches, and one who knows the old methods and those which now are new and secret. These officers have not been drawn by me from among my own friends. They are not individuals but are types. Any attempts which may be made at identifying them will fail and justly fail—for they do not exist as individuals. Let this be clearly understood. They are creations of my own; I use them to give a sense of vividness to a narrative which tends to become tedious, and to bring out features in the Battle of Jutland which cannot without impertinence be presented directly by one, like myself, who is not himself a naval officer.

Bennet Copplestone, an intrusive and persistent fellow, begins the conference by inquiring whether Beatty had, in the professional judgment of his brother officers, deserved Admiral Jellicoe’s praise of his “fine qualities of gallant leadership, firm determination, and correct strategic insight.” Was he as good as his public reputation? I knew, I said, a good deal too much of the making of newspaper reputations and had come to distrust them.

“Beatty is a real good man,” declared the Maker. “He sticks his cap on one side and loves to be photographed looking like a Western American ‘tough.’ But under all this he conceals a fine naval head and the sturdiest of hearts. He is a first-class leader of men. I had my own private doubts of him until this Jutland Battle, but now I will take off my hat in his presence though he is my junior.”

The Maker’s colleagues nodded approval.

“There was nothing much in the first part,” went on the Maker. “Any of us could have done it. His pursuit of the German battle cruisers up to their junction with the High Seas Fleet was a reconnaissance in force, which he was able to carry through without undue risk, because he had behind him the Fifth Battle Squadron. His change of course then through sixteen points was the only possible manœuvre in order to bring his fleet back towards Jellicoe and to lead the Germans into the trap prepared for them. So far Beatty had done nothing to distinguish him from any competent fleet leader. Where he showed greatness was in not diverging by a hair’s breadth from his plans after the loss of the _Indefatigable_ and the _Queen Mary_. Mind you, these losses were wholly unexpected, and staggering in their suddenness. He had lost these fine ships while fighting battle cruisers fewer in numbers and less powerful in guns than his own squadrons. A weaker man might have been shaken in nerve and lost confidence in himself and his ships. But Beatty did not hesitate. Although he was reduced in strength from six battle cruisers to four only he dashed away to head off the Germans as serenely as if he had suffered no losses at all. And his splendid dash had nothing in it of recklessness. All the while he was heading off the Germans he was manœuvring to give himself the advantage of light and to avoid the dropping shots which had killed his lost cruisers. All the while he kept between the Germans and Jellicoe and within touch of his supporting squadron of four Queen Elizabeths. Had he lost more ships he could at any moment have broken off the action and, sheltered by the massive Fifth B.S., have saved what remained. As a mixture of dash and caution I regard his envelopment of the German line, after losing the _Queen Mary_ and _Indefatigable_, as a superb exhibition of sound battle tactics and of sublime confidence in himself and his men. But I wish that he would not wear his cap on one side or talk so much. He has modified both these ill-practices since he became Commander-in-Chief. That is one comfort.”

“Nelson was a poseur,” said I, “and as theatrical as an elderly and ugly prima donna. He posed to the gallery in every action, and died, as it were, to the accompaniment of slow music. It was an amiable weakness.”

“Jellicoe doesn’t pose,” growled the Maker.

“Jellicoe hates advertisement,” I observed. “Whenever he used to talk to the gangs of newspaper men who infested the Grand Fleet, he always implored them to spare his own shrinking personality. It is a matter of temperament. Jellicoe is a genuinely modest man; Beatty is a vain one. They form a most interesting contrast. Life would be duller without such contrasts. One could give a score of examples from military and naval history of high merit allied both to modesty and vanity.”

“That is true,” said the Maker, “but the Great Silent Sea Service loathes advertisement like the very devil, and it is right. The Service would be ruined if senior officers tried to bid against one another for newspaper puffs.”

“Yet I have known them do it,” said I drily, and then slid away from the delicate topic. “Let us return to the first part of the action, and examine the division of the Fleet between Jellicoe and Beatty. Was this division, admittedly hazardous, a sound method of bringing the Germans to action?”

The Gunner took upon himself to reply.

“It is not, and never has been, possible to bring the Germans to action in the southern part of the North Sea except with their own consent. There is no room. They can always break off and retire within their protected waters. Steam fleets of the modern size and speed cannot force an action and compel it to be fought out to a finish in a smaller space than a real ocean. You must always think of this when criticising the division of our fleets. Beatty was separated from Jellicoe by nearly sixty miles, and strengthened by four fast Queen Elizabeth battleships to enable him to fight an action with a superior German Fleet. He was made just strong enough to fight and not too strong to scare the Germans away. In theory, the division of our forces within striking distance of the enemy was all wrong; in practice, it was the only way of persuading him into an action. Both sides at the end of May, 1916, wanted to bring off a fight at sea. Fritz wanted something which he could claim as a success in order to cheer up his blockaded grumblers at home, who were getting restive. We wanted to stop the projected German naval and military onslaught upon Russia in the Baltic. The wonderful thing about the Jutland Battle is that it appears to have achieved both objects. Fritz, by sinking three of our battle cruisers, has been able to delude a nation of landsmen into accepting a highly coloured version of a great naval success; and we, by making a sorry mess of his main fleet, did in fact clear the northern Russian flank of a grave peril. The later Russian successes in the South were the direct result of Jutland, and without those successes the subsequent Italian, French, and British advances could not have been pushed with anything like the effect secured. Regarded in this broad international way, the division of our fleets justified by its results the risks which it involved. What I don’t understand is why we suffered so much in the first part of the action when Beatty had six battle cruisers and four battleships against five battle cruisers of the enemy. He lost the _Indefatigable_ and _Queen Mary_ while he was in great superiority both of numbers and of guns. Then, when the German main fleet had come in, and he was carrying out an infinitely more hazardous operation in the face of a greater superior force, he lost nothing. If the _Indefatigable_ and _Queen Mary_ had been lost during the second hour before Jellicoe arrived I should have felt no surprise—we were then deliberately risking big losses—but during the first hour of fighting, when we had ten ships against five—and five much weaker individually than our ten—we lost two fine battle cruisers. I confess that I am beaten. It almost looks as if at the beginning the German gunners were better than ours, but that they went to pieces later. What do you think?” He turned to the Salt Horse, who spoke little, but very forcibly when he could be persuaded to open his lips.

“Everyone with Beatty, to whom I have spoken,” declared the Salt Horse, “agrees that the German gunnery was excellent at the beginning. We were straddled immediately and hit again and again while coming into action. Our gunners must have been a bit over-anxious until they settled down. We ought to have done something solid in a whole hour against five battle cruisers with our thirty-two 13.5-inch guns and thirty-two 15-inch. And yet no one claims more than one enemy ship on fire. That means nothing. The burning gas from one big shell will make the deuce of a blaze. There is no explanation of our losses in the first part, and of Fritz’s comparative immunity, except the one which you, my dear Gunner, are very unwilling to accept. Fritz hit us much more often than we hit him. There you have it. I have spoken.” Admiral Salt Horse, a most abstemious man, rang the bell of the club of which we were members, and ordered a whisky and soda. “Just to take the taste of that admission out of my mouth,” he explained.

The Maker of Ships and Guns smiled ruefully. “I have reckoned,” said he, “that the Cats fired twenty rounds per gun during the first hour and the Queen Elizabeths ten. That makes 640 rounds of 13.5-inch shell and 320 rounds of 15-inch. Three per cent. of fair hits at the ranges, and in the conditions of light, would have been quite good. But did we score twenty-eight hits of big shell, or anything like it? If we had there would have been much more damage done than one battle cruiser on fire. The Salt Horse has spoken, and so have I. I also will wash the taste of it out of my mouth.”

“You will admit,” muttered the Gunner, “that in the second part, after Beatty and the Queen Elizabeths had turned, our control officers and long-service gunners came into their own?”

“Willingly,” cried Admiral Salt Horse. “Nothing could have been finer than the hammering which Evan-Thomas gave to the whole High Seas Fleet. And Beatty crumpled up his opposite numbers in first-class style. Our individual system, then, justified itself utterly. Fritz’s mechanical control went to bits when the shells began to burst about his fat ears, but it was painfully good while it lasted. Give Fritz his due, Master Gunner, it’s no use shutting our eyes to his merits.”

I had listened with the keenest interest to this interchange, for though I should not myself have ventured to comment upon so technical a subject as naval gunnery, I had subconsciously felt what the old Salt Horse had so bluntly and almost brutally expressed.

“We have arrived, then, at this,” observed I, slowly, “that during the first hour, up to the turn when the main High Seas Fleet joined up with Hipper’s battle cruisers, our squadrons got the worst of it, though they were of twice Fritz’s numbers and of far more than twice his strength. It is a beastly thing for an Englishman to say, but really you leave me no choice. Though I hate whisky, I must follow the example set by my betters.”

The Master Gunner laughed. “In the Service,” said he, “we learn from our mistakes. At the beginning we did badly on May 31st, but afterwards we profited by the lesson. What more could you ask? . . . Civilians,” said he, aside to his colleagues, “seem to think that only English ships should be allowed to have guns or to learn how to use them.”

“Now we have given Fritz his due,” said I, “let us get on to the second part of the battle, Act Two of the naval drama. You will agree that the handling of our damaged squadrons by Beatty and Evan-Thomas was magnificent, and that the execution done by us was fully up to the best English standards?”

“Yes,” replied the grim Salt Horse, to whom I had specially appealed. “We will allow both. Beatty’s combination of dash and caution was beyond praise and the gunnery was excellent.”

“None of our ships were sunk, none were seriously hit,” put in the Gunner. “On the other hand we certainly sank one German battle cruiser and one battleship, and very heavily damaged others. I don’t know how many. I think that we must accept as proved that not many German ships of the battle line were sunk in any part of the action. When badly hit they fell out and retired towards home, which they could always do. During the second part both fleets were steaming away from the German bases, so that a damaged enemy ship had only to stop to be left behind in safety. A good many ships were claimed by our officers as sunk when they were known to have been damaged and had disappeared; but I feel sure that most of them had fallen out, not been sunk.”

“The outstanding feature,” cried the Maker of Guns, “was the superiority of our gunnery. We have always encouraged individuality in gun laying, and have never allowed Fire Control to supersede the eyes and hands of the skilled gun-layers in the turrets. Control and individual laying are with us complementary, not mutually exclusive. With the Germans an intensely mechanical control is of the essence of their system. They are very good up to a point, but have not elasticity enough to deal with the perpetual variations of range and direction when fighting ships are moving fast and receiving heavy punishment. Fritz beat us in the first part, but we, as emphatically, beat him in the second.”

We then passed to a technical discussion upon naval gunnery, which cannot be given here in detail. I developed my thesis, aggravating to expert gunners, that when one passes from the one dimension—distance—of land shooting from a fixed gun at a fixed object, to the two dimensions—distance and direction—of moving guns on board ship firing at moving objects, the drop in accuracy is so enormous as to make ship gunnery frightfully ineffective and wasteful. I readily admitted that when one passed still further to three dimensions—distance, direction, and height—and essayed air gunnery, the wastefulness and ineffectiveness of shooting at sea were multiplied an hundredfold. But, as I pointed out, we were not at the moment discussing anti-aircraft gunnery, but the shooting of naval guns at sea in the Jutland Battle.

Of course I brought down a storm upon my head. But my main thesis was not contested. It was, however, pointed out that I had not allowed sufficient weight to the inherent difficulties of shooting from a moving ship at a moving ship ten or a dozen miles away, and that instead of calling naval gunnery “wasteful and ineffective” I ought to be dumb with wonder that hits were ever brought off at all. I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

“Don’t be hard on the poor man,” at last interposed the kindly Salt Horse. “He means well and can be useful to the Service sometimes though he has not had a naval training. The truth is,” he went on confidentially, “we feel rather wild about the small damage that we did to Fritz on May 31st: small, that is, in comparison with our opportunities. Our gunnery officers and gun-layers are the best in the world, our guns, range-finders and other instruments are unapproachable for precision, our system of fire direction is the best that naval brains can devise and is constantly being improved, and yet all through the war the result in effective hits has been most disappointing—don’t interrupt, you people, I am speaking the truth for once. Fritz’s shooting, except occasionally, has been even worse than ours, which indicates, I think, that the real inner problems of naval gunnery are not yet in sight of solution. You see, it is quite a new science. In the old days one usually fired point blank just as one might plug at a haystack, and the extreme range was not more than a mile and a half; but now that every fighting ship carries torpedo tubes we must keep out a very long way. I admit the apparent absurdity of the situation. Here on May 31st, two fleets were engaged off and on for six hours—most of the time more off than on—and the bag for Fritz was three big ships, and for us possibly four, by gun-fire. The torpedo practice was no better except when our destroyers got in really close. During all the third part of the action, when Scheer was fending us off with torpedo attacks he hit only one battleship, the _Marlborough_, and she was able to continue in action afterwards and to go home under her own steam. Yet upon a measured range at a fixed mark a torpedo is good up to 11,000 yards, nearly six miles. In action, against moving ships, one cannot depend upon a mouldy hitting at over 500 yards, a quarter of a mile. If gunnery is wasteful and inefficient, what about torpedo practice in battle?”

“What is the solution?” I asked, greatly interested.

“Don’t ask me!” replied the Salt Horse. “I knew something of gunnery once, but now I’m on the shelf. I myself would risk the mouldies and fight at close quarters—we have the legs of Fritz and could choose our own range—but in-fighting means tremendous risks, and the dear stupid old public would howl for my head if the corresponding losses followed. The tendency at present is towards longer and longer ranges, up to the extreme visible limits, and the longer the range the greater the waste and inefficiency. Ask the Gunner there, he is more up-to-date than I am.”

The Master Gunner growled. He had listened to Admiral Salt Horse’s homily with the gravest disapproval. He was a simple loyal soul; any criticism which seemed to question the supreme competence of his beloved Service was to him rank treachery. Yet he knew that the Salt Horse was as loyal a seaman as he was himself. It was not what was said which caused his troubled feelings—he would talk as freely himself before his colleagues—but that such things should be poured into the ears of a civilian! It was horrible!

“After the first hour, when our gunners had settled down,” said he gruffly, “their practice was exceedingly good. They hit when they could see, which was seldom. If the light had been even tolerable no German ship would have got back to port.”

“I agree,” cried the Maker of Guns and Ships. “We did as well as the light allowed. Fritz was all to pieces. The bad torpedo practice was Fritz’s, not ours. The worst of the gunnery was his, too. We have lots to learn still—as you rightly say, naval gunnery is still in its infancy—but we have learned a lot more than anyone else has. That is the one thing which matters to me.”

“Have we not reached another conclusion,” I put in, diffidently, “namely, that big-ship actions must be indecisive unless the light be good and the sea space wide enough to allow of a fight to a finish? We can’t bring Fritz to a final action in the lower part of the North Sea unless we can cut him off entirely from his avenues of escape. In the Atlantic, a thousand miles from land, we could destroy him to the last ship—if our magazines held enough of shell—but as he can choose the battle ground, and will not fight except near to his bases, we can shatter him and drive him helpless into port, but we cannot wipe him off the seas. Is that proved?”

“Yes,” said the Gunner, who had recovered his usual serenity. “In my opinion that is proved absolutely.”

“One talks rather loosely of envelopment,” explained the Maker, “as if it were total instead of partial. The German Fleet was never enveloped or anything like it. What happened was this: As the Germans curved away in a spiral to the south-west our line curved in with them, roughly parallel, also to the south-west, keeping always between Fritz and the land. We were partly between him and his bases, but he could and did escape by getting round the horn which threatened to cut him off.”

“Could not Jellicoe,” I asked, “have worked right round so as to draw a line across the mouths of the Elbe and Weser, and to cut Scheer completely off from the approaches to Wilhelmshaven?”

“Not without immense risk. He would have had to pass into mine fields and penetrate them all through the hours of darkness. He might have lost half his fleet. Our trouble has always been the extravagant risk involved by a close pursuit. When the Germans retire to their protected waters we must let them go. The Grand Fleet is too vital a force to be needlessly risked. When Jellicoe’s final stroke failed, owing to the bad light and the German retirement, the battle was really over. Jellicoe’s blow had spent itself on the air. The Germans were almost safe except from our torpedo attacks, which were delivered during the night with splendid dash and with considerable success. But that night battle was the queerest business. When the sun rose the enemy had vanished. Fritz says that we had vanished. I suppose, strictly speaking, that we had. At least we were out of his sight, though unintentionally. Touch had been lost and the enemy had got safely home, taking most of his damaged ships with him. Nothing remained for us to do except to return to our northern bases, recoal, and refit. The Jutland Battle was indecisive in one sense, crushingly decisive in another. It left the German Fleet undestroyed, but left it impotent as a fighting force. Thereafter it sank into a mere guard for Fritz’s submarine bases.”

“And the gunnery in the third part?” I asked with a sly glance towards the Gunner. He rose at the bait.

“I do not doubt that, measured by the percentage of hits to rounds fired, Copplestone would call it wasteful and inefficient. But the Navy regards the gunnery in the third part as even better than in the second, as proving our superiority over the Germans. They were then at their worst while we were at our best; we rapidly improved under the test of battle, they as rapidly deteriorated. The facts are certain. The enemy ships were hit repeatedly both by our battleships and battle cruisers, several were seen to haul out of the line on fire, and at least one battleship was observed to sink. Throughout all the time—two hours—during which Jellicoe’s main fleet was engaged his ships were scarcely touched; not a single man was killed, and three only were wounded. Is that not good enough for you?”

“You have forgotten the _Invincible_,” remarked that candid critic whom I have called Salt Horse. “She took station at the head of Beatty’s line at 6.21. Her distance from the enemy was then 8,000 yards. It was a gallant service, for Beatty needed support very badly, but by 6.55 the _Invincible_ had been destroyed. The _Iron Duke_ passed her floating bottom up. She must have been caught by the concentrated fire of several enemy ships. It was a piece of luck for Fritz; the last that he had. Apart from the downing of the _Invincible_, I agree that the third part of the battle showed our gunnery to be highly effective, and that of the Germans to be almost wholly innocuous. It was his torpedoes we had then to fear, not his guns.”

“During the third part,” said the Maker, “the ranges were comparatively low, from 9,000 to 12,000 yards, but the visibility was so bad that damaged ships could always betake themselves out of sight and danger. I am disposed to think that most of Fritz’s sorely damaged ships did get home—in the absence of evidence that they did not—for we never really closed in during the whole of the third part of the battle. Fritz was continually coming and going, appearing and disappearing. His destroyer attacks were well delivered, and though one battleship only was hit, our friend the _Marlborough_, we were kept pretty busy looking after ourselves. Jellicoe was like a heavy-weight boxer trying to get home upon a little man, skipping about just beyond his reach. We had the speed and the guns and the superiority of position, but we couldn’t see. That is the explanation of the indecisiveness of the third part of the Jutland battle, that part which, with decent luck, would have ended Fritz’s business. Our gunnery was then top-hole. Take the typical case of the flagship _Iron Duke_. She got a sight of a _Koenig_ at 12,000 yards (seven miles), straddled her at once, and began to hit at the second salvo. That is real gunnery, not much waste about it either of time or shell. Then towards sunset the _Lion_, _Princess Royal_, and _New Zealand_ engaged two battleships and two battle cruisers at 10,000 yards. Within eighteen minutes three of the Germans had been set on fire, two were listing heavily, and the three burning ones were only saved by becoming hidden in smoke and mist. That is the way to get on to a target and to hold on. I agree with our old friend Salt Horse that the long ranges during the first part of the action, 18,000 to 20,000 yards—and even more for the _Queen Elizabeth_—are altogether too long for accuracy unless the conditions are perfect. The distances are well within the power of the big-calibre guns which we mount, but are out of harmony with the English naval spirit. We like to see our enemy distinctly and to get within real punishing distance of him. Compare our harmless performance during the first part with the beautiful whacking which we gave Fritz in the third whenever we could see him. The nearer we get to Fritz the better our gunners become and the more completely his system goes to bits. Which is just what one would expect. Our long-service gunners can lay by sight against any ships in the world and beat them to rags, but when it comes to blind laying directed from the spotting tops much of the advantage of individual nerve and training is lost. Like Salt Horse, I am all for in-fighting, at 10,000 yards or less, and believe that our gun-layers can simply smother Fritz if they are allowed to get him plainly on the wires of their sighting telescopes.”

“There is not a petty officer gunlayer who wouldn’t agree with you,” remarked the Gunner thoughtfully, “but the young scientific Gunnery Lieutenants would shake their heads. For what would become of the beautiful fire-direction system which they have been building up for years past if we are to run in close and pound in the good old fashion? Ten thousand yards to a modern 15-inch gun is almost point blank.”

“Our business is to sink the enemy in the shortest possible time,” cried Admiral Salt Horse, “and to fight in the fashion best suited to what Copplestone here rightly calls the Soul of the Navy. Long-range fighting is all very well when one can’t do anything else—during a chase, for example—but when one can close in to a really effective distance, then, I say, close in and take the risks. In the Jutland Battle we lost two battle cruisers at long range and one only after the ranges had shortened. Fritz shot well at long range, but got worse and worse as we drew nearer to him, until at the end his gunnery simply did not count. Our ancestors had a similar problem to solve, and solved it at the Battle of the Saints in brutal fashion by breaking the French line and fighting at close quarters. There is a lot to be learned from the Jutland Battle, though it is not for an old dog like me to draw the lessons. But what does seem to shout at one is that the way to fight a German is to close in upon him and to knock the moral stuffing out of him. The destroyers always do it and so do our submarines. I am told that the way the destroyers charged battleships by night, and rounded up the enemy’s light stuff by day, was a liberal education in naval psychology. We are at our best when the risks are greatest—it is the sporting instinct of the race that sustains us. But Fritz, who is no sportsman, and has a good deal more of imagination than our lower deck, cracks when the strain upon his nerves passes the critical point. Our young officers and men have no nerves; Fritz has more than is good for him; let us take advantage of his moral weakness and hustle him beyond the point when he cracks. He is a landsman artificially made into a seaman; our men are seamen born. In a battleship action the personal factor tends to be over-borne by the immensity of the fighting instruments, but it is there all the time and is the one thing which really counts. We give it full scope in the destroyers, submarines, and light cruisers; let us give it full scope in the big ships of the battle line. Let our MEN get at Fritz; don’t seek to convert them into mere parts of a machine, give their individuality the fullest play; you need then have no fear lest their work should prove wasteful or ineffective.”

The Master Gunner, a man ten years younger than old Salt Horse, smiled and said, “I am afraid that the gunnery problem has become too complicated to yield to your pleasing solution. A few years ago it would have been considered a futile waste of shell to fight at over 10,000 yards, but the growth in the size of our guns and in our methods of using them have made us at least as accurate at 20,000 yards as we used to be at 10,000. At from 9,000 to 12,000 in good light we are now terrific. All my sympathies are on your side; the Navy has always loved to draw more closely to the enemy, and maybe our instincts should be our guide. I can’t say. If we could have a big-ship action every month the problem would soon be solved. Our trouble is that we don’t get enough of the Real Thing. You may be very sure that if our officers and men were told to run in upon Fritz and to smash him, at the ranges which are now short, they would welcome the order with enthusiasm. The quality and training of our sea personnel is glorious, incomparable. I live in wonder at it.”

“And so do I,” cried the Maker, a man not ready to display enthusiasm. “One has lived with the professional Navy so long that one comes to take its superb qualities for granted; one needs to see the English Navy in action to be aroused to its merits. On May 31st very few of those in Evan-Thomas’s or Jellicoe’s squadrons had been under fire—Beatty’s men had, of course, more than once. If they showed any defect it was due to some slight over-eagerness. But this soon passed. In a big-ship action not one man in a hundred has any opportunity of personal distinction—which is an uncommonly good thing for the Navy. We have no use for pot-hunters and advertisers. We want every man to do his little bit, devotedly, perfectly, without any thought of attracting attention. Ours is team work. If men are saturated through and through with this spirit of common devotion to duty they sacrifice themselves as a matter of course when the call comes. More than once fire penetrated to the magazines of ships. The men who instantly rolled upon the blazing bags of cordite, and extinguished the flames with their bodies, did not wait for orders nor did they expect to be mentioned in dispatches. It was just their job. But what I did like was Jellicoe’s special mention of his engineers. These men, upon whose faithful efficiency everything depends, who, buried in the bowels of ships, carry us into action and maintain us there, who are the first to die when a ship sinks and the last to be remembered in Honours lists, these men are of more real account than almost all those others of us who prance in our decorations upon the public stage. If the conning tower is the brain of a ship, the engine-room is its heart. When Jellicoe was speeding up to join Beatty and Evan-Thomas his whole fleet maintained a speed in excess of the trial speeds of some of the older vessels. Think what skilful devotion this simple fact reveals, what minute attention day in day out for months and years, so that in the hour of need no mechanical gadget may fail of its duty. And as with Jellicoe’s Fleet so all through the war. Whenever the engine-rooms have been tested up to breaking strain they have always, always, stood up to the test. I think less of the splendid work done by destroyer flotillas, by combatant officers and men in the big ships, by all those who have manned and directed the light cruisers. Their work was done within sight; that of the engine-rooms was hidden.”

“I wish that the big public could hear you,” I said, “the big public whose heart is always in the right place though its head is always damned ignorant and often damned silly.”

The Maker of Guns and Ships turned on me, this calm, cold man whom I had thought a stranger to emotion. “And whose fault is that? You are a bit of an ass, Copplestone, and inconveniently inquisitive. But you can be useful sometimes. When you come to write of the war at sea, do not wrap yourself up in a tangle of strategy and tactics of which you know very little. Stick to the broad human issues. Reveal the men who fight rather than the ships which are fought with. Think of the Navy as a Service of flesh and blood and soul, no less than of brains and heart. If you will do this, and write as well as you know how to do, the public will not remain either damned ignorant or damned silly.”

“I will do my best,” said I, humbly.

EPILOGUE

LIEUTENANT CÆSAR

Now in the names of all the gods at once, Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed, That he is grown so great?

When the war is over and tens of thousands of young men, who have drunk deep of the wine of life, are thrown back upon ginger ale, what will be the effect upon their heads and stomachs? I do not know; I have no data, except in the one instance of my friend, Lieutenant Cæsar, R.N.V.R.

I must write of him with much delicacy and restraint, for his friendship is too rich a privilege to be imperilled. His sense of humour is dangerously subtle. Cæsar is twenty-three, and I am—well, fully twice his age—yet he bears himself as if he were infinitely my senior in years and experience. And he is right. What in all my toll of wasted years can be set beside those crowded twenty-two months of his, now ended and done with? The fire of his life glowed during those months with the white intensity of an electric arc; in a moment it went black when the current was cut off; he was left groping in the darkness for matches and tallow candles. I dare not sympathise with him openly, though I feel deeply, for he would laugh and call me a silly old buffer—a term which I dread above all others.

* * * * *

The variegated career of Lieutenant Cæsar fills me with the deepest envy. When the war broke out he was a classical scholar at Oxford, one of the bright spirits of his year. His first in Greats, his prospects of the Ireland, his almost certain Fellowship—he threw them up. The Army had no interest for him, but to the Navy he was bound by links of family association. To the Navy therefore he turned, and prevailed upon a somewhat reluctant Admiralty to gazette him as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. “A classical scholar,” argued Whitehall, “is about as much use to us as a ruddy poet. What can this young man do away from his books?” Cæsar rapidly marshalled his poor accomplishments. He could row—no use, we are in the steam and petrol age; he had been a sergeant of O.T.C.—no thanks, try the Royal Naval Division; he could drive a motor-car and was a tolerable engineer. At last some faint impression was made. Did he understand the engines of a motor-boat? It appeared that he did; was, in fact, a mildly enthusiastic member of the Royal Motor Boat Club at Southampton. “Now you’re talking,” said Whitehall. “Why didn’t you say this at once instead of wasting our time over your useless frillings?” The official wheels stirred, and within two or three weeks Cæsar found himself gazetted, and dropped into a fine big motor patrol boat, which the Admiralty had commandeered and turned to the protection of battleships from submarines. At that time we had not a safe harbour anywhere except on the South Coast, where they did not happen to be wanted. For many months Cæsar patrolled by night and day deep cold harbours on the east coast of Scotland, hunting periscopes. It was an arduous but exhilarating service. His immediate chief, a Lieutenant R.N.V.R., was a benevolent American, the late owner of the boat. He had handed her over without payment in return for a lieutenant’s commission. “I was once,” he declared, “a two-striper in Uncle Sam’s Navy. I got too rich for my health, chucked the Service, and have been eating myself out of shape. Take the boat but, for God’s sake, give me the job of running her. She’s too pretty for your thumb-crushing blacksmiths to spoil.” When reminded that he was an alien, he treated the objection as the thinnest of evasive pleas. “King George is my man; there are no diamonds in his garters,” he wrote.

The Lords of the Admiralty, who never in their sheltered lives had read such letters as now poured in upon them, gasped, collapsed, and gave to the benevolent neutral all that he asked.

Cæsar worshipped the big motor-boat and her astonishing commander. His first love wrapped itself round the twin engines, two of them, six-cylinders each, 120 horse-power. They were ducks of engines which never gave any trouble, because Cæsar and the two American engineers—I had almost written nurses—were always on the watch to detect the least whimper of pain. But though he never neglected his beloved engines, the mysterious fascinations of the three-pounder gun in the bows gradually vanquished his mature heart. Her deft breech mechanism, her rapid loading, the sweet, kindly way she slipped to and fro in her cradle, became charms before which he succumbed utterly. Cæsar and the gun’s high-priest, a petty officer gunlayer, became the closest of friends, and the pair of them would spend hours daily cleaning and oiling their precious toy. The American lieutenant had his own bizarre notions of discipline—he thought nothing of addressing the petty officer as “old horse”; but he worked as hard as Cæsar himself, kept everyone in the best of spirits through the vilest spells of weather, and was a perpetual fount of ingenious plans for the undoing of Fritz. The _Mighty Buzzer_—named from her throbbing exhaust—was a happy ship.

The _Buzzer’s_ career as a king’s ship was brief, and her death glorious. One night, or rather early morning, she was far out in the misty jaws of a Highland loch, within which temporarily rested many great battle-cruisers. Cæsar despised these vast and potent vessels. “What use are they?” he would ask of his chief. “There is nothing for them to fight, and they would all have been sunk long ago but for us.” Fast motor-boats, with 120 horse-power engines, twenty-five knots of speed—thirty at a pinch, untruthfully claimed the Lieutenant—and beautiful 3-pounder guns were in Cæsar’s view, the last word in naval equipment. The Lieutenant would shake his head gravely at his Sub’s exuberant ignorance. “They are gay old guys just now,” he would reply, “and feeling pretty cheap. But some day they will get busy and knock spots off Fritz’s hide. You Britishers are darned slow, but when you do fetch a gun it’s time to shin up trees. The Germs have stirred up the British Lion real proper and, I guess, wish now they’d let him stay asleep.”

The _Buzzer_ had chased many a German submarine, compelling it to dive deeply and become harmless, but never yet had Cæsar been privileged to see one close. Upon this misty morning of her demise, when he gained fame, she was farther out to sea than usual, and was cruising at about the spot where enterprising U-boats were wont to come up to take a bearing. I am writing of the days before our harbour defences had chilled their enterprise into inanition. Cæsar was on watch, and stood at the wheel amidships. The petty officer and a blue-jacket were stationed at the gun forward. Our friend’s senses were very much alert, for he took his duties with the utmost seriousness. Near his boat the sea heaved and swirled, and as he saw a queer wave pile up he became, if possible, even more alert and called to his watch to stand by. The sea went on swirling, the surface broke suddenly, and up swooped the hood and thin tube of a periscope. It was less than fifty yards away, and for a moment the lenses did not include the _Buzzer_ within their field of vision. For Cæsar, his watch on deck, and the sleepers below, the next few seconds were packed with incident. Round came the _Buzzer_ pointing straight for the periscope, the exhaust roared as Cæsar called for full speed, and the gun crashed out. Away went periscope and tube, wiped off by the spreading cone of the explosion, as if they were no more substantial than a bullrush, and up shot the _Buzzer’s_ bows as Cæsar drove her keel violently upon the top of the conning tower of the rising U-boat. Keel and conning-tower ripped together; there was a tremendous rush of air-bubbles, followed by oil, and the U-boat was no more. She had gone, and the _Buzzer_, with six feet of her tender bottom torn off, was in the act to follow. As she cocked up her stern to dive after her prey there was just time to get officers and crew into lifebelts and to signal for help. Cæsar met in the water his commanding officer, who, though nearly hurled through his cabin walls by the shock, and entirely ignorant of the cataclysm in which he had been involved, was cheerful as ever. “Sakes,” he gasped, when he had cleared mouth and nose of salt water, “when you Britishers do get busy, things—sort of—hum.”

A destroyer rushing down picked up the swimmers and heard their story. The evidence was considered sufficient, for oil still spread over the sea, and there were no rocks within miles to have ripped out the _Buzzer’s_ keel, so another U-boat was credited to the Royal Navy and Cæsar became a lieutenant. It was a proud day for him.

But he had lost his ship, and was for a time out of a job. The new harbour defences were under way and fast motor-boats were for a while less in demand. The Admiralty solved the problem of his future. “This young man,” it observed, “is nothing better than a temporary lieutenant of the Volunteer Reserve, but he is not wholly without intelligence and has a pretty hand with a gun. We will teach him something useful.” So the order was issued that Lieutenant Cæsar should proceed to Whale Island, there to be instructed in the mysteries of naval gunnery. “You will have to work at Whale Island,” warned the captain of his flotilla, “and don’t you forget it. It is not like Oxford.” This to reduce Cæsar to the proper level of humility.

Up to this stage in his career Lieutenant Cæsar, though temporarily serving in the Royal Navy, knew nothing whatever about it. His status was defined for me once by a sergeant of Marines: “A temporary gentleman, sir, ’ere to-day and gone to-morrow, and good riddance, sir.” Upon land the corps and regiments have been swamped by temporaries, but at sea the Regular Navy remains in full possession. In the barracks at Whale Island, where Cæsar was assigned quarters, he felt like a very small schoolboy newly joining a very large school. His fellow-pupils were R.N.R. men, mercantile brass-bounders with mates’ and masters’ certificates, and R.N.V.R.’s drawn from diverse classes. To him they seemed a queer lot. He lay low and studied them, finding most of them wholly ignorant of everything which he knew, but profoundly versed in things which he didn’t. The instructors of the Regular Service gave him his first definite contact with the Navy. “My original impression of them,” he told me, laughing, “was that they were all mad. I had come to learn gunnery, but for a whole week they insisted upon teaching me squad drill, about the most derisory version of drill which I have ever seen. Picture us, a mob of mates out of liners and volunteers out of workshops and technical schools, trailing rifles round the square at Whale Island, feeling dazed and helpless, and wondering if we had brought up by mistake at a lunatic asylum. After the first week, during which Whale Island indulged its pathetic belief that its true _métier_ is squad drill, we were all right. We got busy at the guns, and found plenty to learn.” It was at Whale Island that he received the name of Cæsar, the one Latin author of which his messmates had any recollection. During the first month of his training he daily cursed Winchester and Oxford for the frightful gaps which they had left in his educational equipment. He could acquire languages with anyone, but mathematics, that essential key to the mysteries of gunnery, gave him endless trouble. But he had a keenly tempered brain and limitless persistence. Slowly at first, more rapidly later, he made up on his contemporaries, and when after two months of the toughest work of his life he gained a first-class certificate, he felt that at last he had tasted a real success.

Time brings its revenges. As a Sub in a motor-boat he had affected to think slightingly of the great battle-cruisers which his small craft protected, but now that he was transferred to one of the new Cats of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron his views violently changed. Battleships were all very well, they had huge guns and tremendous armour, but when it came to speed and persistent aggressiveness what were these sea monsters in comparison with the Cats? Why nothing, of course. Which shows that Cæsar was becoming a Navyman. Put a naval officer into the veriest tub which can keep herself afloat with difficulty, and steam five knots in a tideway, and he will exalt her into the most efficient craft beneath the White Ensign. For she is His Ship.

Lieutenant Cæsar very quickly became at one with his new ship, and entered into his kingdom. Whether upon the loading platform of a turret or in control of a side battery, he serenely took up his place and felt that he had expanded to fill it adequately. His tone became obtrusively professional. When I asked for some details of his hardships and his thrills, he sneered at me most rudely. “There are no hardships,” he declared; “we live and grow fat, and there is not a thrill to the whole war. My motor-boat was a desperate buccaneer in comparison with these stately Founts of Power. Every week or two we do a Silent Might parade in the North Sea, but nothing ever happens.” This was after the Dogger Bank action for which he was too late, and before the Jutland Battle. He wrote to me many veiled accounts of the North Sea stunts upon which the battle-cruisers were persistently engaged, but always insisted that they were void of excitement.

* * * * *

“Dismiss from your landsman’s mind,” he would write—Cæsar was now a sailor among sailors—“all idea of thrills. There aren’t any. When the hoist Prepare to Leave Harbour goes up on the flagship, and black smoke begins to pour from every funnel in the Squadron, there is no excitement and no preparation—for we are already fully prepared. We go out with our attendant destroyers and light cruisers and scour at will over the ‘German Ocean’ looking for Fritz, that we may fall upon him. But he is too cunning for us. I wish that we had some scouting airships.”

* * * * *

This wish of Lieutenant Cæsar is, I believe, shared by every officer in the Grand Fleet from the Commander-in-Chief downwards. Airships cannot fight airships or sea ships, and are of very little use as destructive agents, but they are bright gems in the firmament of scouts.

I asked Cæsar why he did not keep notes of his manifold experiences. “It is against orders,” answered he sorrowfully. “We are not allowed to keep a diary, and I have a rotten memory for those intimate details which give life to a story. If I could keep notes I would set up in business as a naval Boyd Cable.” But I am afraid that Cæsar was reckoning without the Naval Censor, a savage, hungry lion beside whom his brother of the Military Department is a complacent lamb. Cæsar has a pretty pen, but his hands are in shackles.

Cæsar bent his keen eyes upon those with whom he was associated, studied their strength and weakness, and delivered judgment, intolerant in its youthful sureness.

“The young lieutenants,” he wrote, “are wonderful. Profoundly and serenely competent at their own work, but irresponsible as children in everything else. Their ideas of chaff and ragging never arise above those of the fifth form. Whenever they speak of the Empire they mean the one in Leicester Square. Shore leave for them means a bust at the Trocadero, with a music-hall to follow, preferably with a pretty girl. Their notions of shore life are of the earth earthy, not to say fleshy, but at sea work they approach the divine. There is not a two-striper in my wardroom who could not with complete confidence and complete competence take the Grand Fleet into action. But of education, as you or I understand the word, they have none. The Navy has been their strictly intensive life since they left school at about thirteen. Of art, or literature, or music—except in the crudest forms—they know nothing, and care nothing. And this makes their early retirement the more tragical. They go out, nine-tenths of them, before they reach forty without mental or artistic resources. The Navy is a remorseless user up of youth. Those who remain afloat, especially those without combatant responsibilities, tend to degenerate into S.O.B.s.”

* * * * *

I will not translate; Cæsar is too young and too clever to be sympathetic towards those of middle age.

One afternoon in spring Lieutenant Cæsar was plunged without warning into the Jutland Battle. He and his like were placidly waiting at action stations in their turrets, when the order came to put live shell into the guns. For six hours he remained in his turret, serving his two 13.5-inch guns, but seeing nothing of what passed outside his thick steel walls. When I implored him to recount to me his experiences, he protested that he had none.

* * * * *

“You might as well ask a sardine, hermetically sealed in a tin, to describe a fire in a grocer’s shop,” wrote he. “I was that sardine, and so were nearly all of us. Those in the conning tower saw something, and so did the officers in the spotting top when they were not being smothered by smoke and by water thrown up by bursting shells. But as for the rest of us—don’t you believe the stories told you by eye-witnesses of naval battles. They are all second or third hand, and rubbish at that. When I have sorted the thing out from all those who did see, and collated the discrepant accounts, I will give you my conclusions, but I shall not be allowed to write them. For a literary man the Navy is a rotten service.”

* * * * *

Cæsar at this time wrote rather crossly. He had, I think, visualised himself as the writer some day of an immortal story of the greatest naval battle in history. Now that he had been through it, he knew as little of it at first hand as a heavy gunner in France does of the advancing infantry whose path forward he is cutting out.

The isolation of a busy turret in action may be realised when one learns that Cæsar knew nothing of the loss of the _Queen Mary_, _Indefatigable_, or _Invincible_ until hours after they had gone to the bottom. He had heard nothing even of damage suffered by his own ship until, a grimy figure in frowsy overalls, he crawled through the roof of his big sardine tin and met in the darkness one of his friends who had been in the spotting top.

* * * * *

“There was a frightful row going on as we sat there on the turret’s roof,” wrote Cæsar to me. “Our destroyers were charging in upon Fritz’s flying ships, which with searchlights and guns of all calibres were seeking to defend themselves. We could not fire for our destroyers were in the way. The horizon flamed like the aurora borealis, and now and then big shells, ricochetting, would scream over us. I enjoyed myself fine, and had no wish to seek safety in my turret, of which I was heartily sick. That is the only part of the action which I saw, and the details were buried in confusion and darkness. All the rest of the day I had been serving two hungry guns with shells and cordite, and firing them into unknown space. I was too intent on my duties to be bored, but I did not get the least bit of a thrill until I climbed out on the roof. Still I am glad to have been in the Battle, and, I love my big wise guns.”

* * * * *

It was while his battle-cruiser was being refitted, and when he had just returned from a few days’ leave, that the wheel of his destiny made another turn. He was hauled struggling and kicking out of his turret as one plucks a periwinkle from its shell, and cast into a destroyer attached to the North Sea patrol. He had, as I have told, an easy knack of picking up languages. To a solid knowledge of German he had added in past vacations more than a speaking acquaintance with the Scandinavian tongues—Norse, Danish, and Swedish—and his industry was now turned to his undoing. Naval gunners were more plentiful than boarding officers who could converse with the benevolent and unbenevolent neutral, and Cæsar’s unfortunate accomplishments clearly indicated him for a new job. At first he was furious, but became quickly reconciled. For, as he argued, fighting on a grand scale is over, Fritz has had such a gruelling that he won’t come out any more; North Sea stunts will seem very tame after that day out by the Jutland coast; patrolling the upper waters of the North Sea cannot be quite dull, and cross-examining Scandinavian pirates may become positively exciting. So Cæsar settled down in his destroyer, in so far as any one can settle down in such an uneasy craft.

Cæsar now formed part of the inner and closer meshes of the North Sea blockade designed to intercept those ships which had penetrated the more widely spread net outside. Many of the masters whom he interviewed claimed to have a British safe-conduct, but Cæsar was not to be bluffed. With a rough and chocolate-hued skin he had acquired the peremptory air of a Sea God.

* * * * *

“It is rather good fun sometimes,” he wrote to me. “We can’t search big ships on the high seas at all thoroughly, and we don’t want to send them all into port for examination, so we work a Black List. I have a list from the War Trade Department of firms which are not allowed to ship to neutral countries, and of all suspected enemy agents in those countries. The Norse, Danish and Dutch skippers are very decent and do their best to help, but the Swedes are horrid blighters. Whenever there is any doubt at all we send ships into port to be thoroughly examined there. You may take it that not much gets through now. Next to a complete blockade of all sea traffic for neutral ports—which I don’t suppose the politicians can stomach—our Black List system seems to be the goods. I get good fun with these merchant skippers, and am becoming quite a linguist, but the work is less exciting than I had hoped. It is amusing to see a 7,000-ton tramp escorted into port by a twenty-foot motor-boat which she could sling up on her davits, but even this sight becomes a matter of course after a while. I have seen something of war from three aspects, and seem to have exhausted sensations. They are greatly overrated.”

* * * * *

But Lieutenant Cæsar was destined to have one more experience before war had used him up and relaid him upon the shelf from which he was plucked in September, 1914. A destroyer upon patrol duty is still a fighting vessel, and fights joyfully whenever she can snatch a plausible opportunity. Cæsar had sunk a submarine, served through the Jutland Battle, and assisted to stop the holes in the British blockade, but he had not yet known what fighting really means. That is reserved for destroyers in action. One afternoon he was cruising not far from the Dogger Bank, when the sound of light guns was heard a few miles off towards the east. The Lieut.-Commander in charge of our unit in H.M.S. _Blockade_ obeyed the Napoleonic rule and steered at once for the guns. In about ten minutes a group of small craft wreathed in smoke, lighted up at short intervals by gun flashes, appeared on the horizon, and roaring at her full speed of 34 knots the British destroyer swept down upon them. Presently seven trawlers were made out firing with their small guns at two German torpedo boats, which with torpedo and 23-pounder weapons were intent upon destroying them. One trawler was blown sky-high while Cæsar’s ship was yet half a mile distant, and another rolled over shattered by German shell. “It was a pretty sight,” said Cæsar, when I visited him in hospital, and learned to my deep joy that he was out of danger. “When we got within a quarter of a mile we edged to starboard to give the torpedo tubes a clear bearing on the port bow. A shell or two flew over us, but the layers at the tubes took no notice. They waited till we were quite close, not more than two hundred yards, and then loosed a torpedo. I have never seen anything so quick and smart. I saw the mouldy drop and start, and then a huge column of water spouted up, blotting out entirely the nearest German boat. The water fell and set us tossing wildly, but I kept my feet and could see that German destroyer shut up exactly like a clasp-knife. She had been bust up amidships, her bow and stern almost kissed one another, and she went down vertically. The other turned to fly, firing heavily upon us, but our boys had her in their grip. We had three fine guns, 4-inch semi-automatics. We hit her full on the starboard quarter as she turned, and then raked her the whole length of her deck. I did not see the end, for earth and sky crashed all round me, and I went to sleep. When I awoke I was lying below, my right leg felt dead, but there was no pain, and from the horrid vibration running through the vessel I knew that we were at full speed.

“‘Did we get the other one?’ I asked of my servant, whom I saw beside me. ‘She sunk proper, sir,’ said he. ‘You, sir, are the only casualty we ’ad.’ It was an honour which I found it difficult to appreciate. ‘What’s the damage?’ I muttered. ‘I’m afraid, sir,’ he replied diffidently, ’that your right leg is blowed away.’ Then I fainted, and did not come round again till I was in hospital here. My leg is gone at the knee; I lost a lot of blood, and should have lost my life but for the tourniquet which the Owner himself whipped round my thigh. They have whittled the stump shipshape here, and I am to have a new leg of the most fashionable design. The doctors say that I shall not know the difference when I get used to it, and shall be able to play golf and even tennis. Golf and tennis! Good games, but they seem a bit tame after the life I’ve led for the last two years.” Cæsar fell silent, and I gripped his hand.

“It isn’t as if you were in the Regular Service,” I murmured. “It isn’t your career that’s gone. That is still to come. You’ve done your bit, Cæsar, old man.”

His eyes glittered and a tear welled over and rolled down his cheek. That was all, the only sign of weakness and of regret for the lost leg and the lost opportunities for further service. When he spoke again it was the old cheerful Cæsar whom I knew. “It seems funny. A month or two hence I shall be back at Oxford, reading philosophy and all sorts of absurd rubbish for my First in Greats. From Oxford I came, and to Oxford I shall return; these two years of life will seem like a dream. A few years hence I shall have nothing but my medal and my wooden leg to remind me of them. It has been a good time, Copplestone—a devilish good time. I have done my bit, but I wasn’t cut out for a fighting man. There is too much preparation and too little real business. I should have exhausted the thing and got bored. In time I should have become an S.O.B. like some of those others. No, Copplestone, I have nothing to regret, not even the lost leg. It is better to go out like this than to wait till the end of the war, and then to be among the Not Wanteds.”

“They’ve made you a Lieutenant-Commander,” I said slowly.

“Two and a half stripes,” he murmured. “They look pretty, but they are only the wavy ones, not the real article. I was never anything but a ‘tempory blighter, ’ere to-day and gone to-morrow, and good riddance.’ It was decent of them to think of me, but stripes are no use to me now. I shall be at Oxford with the other cripples, and the weak hearts, and the aliens, and the conscientious objectors—what do the dregs of Oxford know of stripes?”

* * * * *

I saw as much as I could of Cæsar during the weeks that followed. His mental processes interested me hugely. He has an enviable faculty of concentrating upon the job in hand to the complete exclusion of everything outside. He forgot Oxford in the Service, and now seemed to have almost forgotten the Service in his return to Oxford, and to what he calls civilisation. He was greatly taken up with the design for his wooden leg. I met him after his first visit to Roehampton to be measured, and found him bubbling over with enthusiasm. “Such legs and arms!” cried he. “They are almost better than meat and bone ones. I saw a Tommy with a shorter stump than mine jumping hurdles and learning to kick. He was a professional footballer once. Another with a wooden arm could write and even draw. In a month or two’s time, when my stump is healed solid and I have learnt the tricks of my new leg, it will be a great sport exercising it and trying to find out what it can’t do. A new interest in life.”

“You seem rather to like having a leg blown off,” I said, wondering.

He is extraordinarily exuberant. I looked for depression after a month in hospital, but looked in vain. He builds up a future with as much zest as a youthful architect executes his first commission. The First in Greats is “off”; Cæsar says that he has not time to bother about such things. “I shall read History and modern French and Russian literature. History will do for my Final Schools, and Literature for my play. I shall learn Russian. Then when I have taken my degree I shall go in for the Foreign Office. My wooden leg will actually help me to a nomination, and the exam. is nothing. It’s not a bad idea; I thought of it last night.”

“You don’t take long over a decision,” I remarked.

“I never did,” said he calmly.

When he returned to Oxford early in November he urged me to pay him a visit. I was in London a week or two later and having twenty-four hours to spare ran up to Oxford, established myself at the Clarendon, and summoned Cæsar to dine with me. All through the meal wonder grew upon me. For my very charming guest was an undergraduate in his fourth year, bearing no trace of having been anything else. We talked of Balzac, Anatole France, and Turgeniev. I listened politely to Cæsar’s views upon German and Russian Church music. I learned that the scarcity of Turkish cigarettes was causing him distress, that his rooms were delightful, and that Oxford was a desert swept clear of his old friends. The war was never once referred to. His conversation abounded in slang with which I was not familiar—I come from the other shop. It was an insufferable evening, and I saw Cæsar hobble away upon his crutches with positive relief. He could use his leg a little, but the stump was still rather sore. That hobble was the one natural and human thing about him.

I passed a wretched night, came to a desperate resolution early in the morning, and carried it out about nine o’clock. Cæsar was in his “delightful rooms.” They certainly had a pleasant aspect, but the furniture disgusted me; it might have been selected by a late-Victorian poet. I looked for a book or a picture which might connect Cæsar with the R.N.V.R., and looked in vain. He was busy trampling upon the best two years of his life and forgetting that he had ever been a man. It should not be. Presently he came in from his bedroom and began to talk in the manner of the night before but I cut him short. “Cæsar,” I said brutally, “you are no better than an ass. Look at these rooms. Is this the place for a man who has lived and fought in a motor-boat, a battle-cruiser, and a T.B.D.? You have sunk a German submarine, served in the Jutland Battle, and lost a leg in your country’s service. Hug these things to your soul, don’t throw them away. Brood upon them, write about them, for the love of Heaven don’t try to forget them.”

I saw his eyes light up, but he said nothing. His lips began to twitch and, knowing him as I did, I should have heeded their warning. But unchecked I drivelled on:

“Are you the man to shrink from an effort because of pain? Did you grouse when your leg was blown off? Wring all you can out of the future. Read History, join the F.O., study Russian. But do these things in a manner worthy of Lieutenant-Commander Cæsar, and don’t try to revive the puling Oxford spark that you were two years ago before the war came to sweep the rubbish out of you.”

He gave a clumsy leap, tripped over his new leg, and fell into a chair. Lying there he laughed and laughed and laughed. How he laughed! Not loud, but deeply, thoroughly, persistently, as if to make up for a long abstinence.

“Confound you!” I growled. “What the deuce are you laughing at?”

“You,” said Cæsar simply.

At the word the truth surged over me in a shameful flood. That preposterous dinner with its babble of Balzac and Turgeniev, Church music, and Turkish cigarettes. These rooms stripped of all reminders of two strenuous years of war. That Oxford accent and the intolerable Oxford slang. “Cæsar,” I shouted, joining in his exuberant laughter, “you have been pulling my leg all the time.”

“All the time,” said he. “My bedroom is full of stuff that I cleared out of here. Last night, Copplestone, your ever-lengthening face was a lovely study, and I have wondered ever since how I kept in my laughter.”

“You young villain,” cried I, overjoyed to find that Cæsar was still my bright friend of the R.N.V.R. “How shall I ever get even with you?”

“I owe you some reparation,” said he, “and here it is.” He hobbled over to his desk and drew out a great roll of paper. “This is the first instalment; there are lots more to come. For the last month I have been trying to remember, not to forget. I am writing of everything that I have done and seen and heard and felt during those two splendid years. Everything. It will run to reams of paper and months of time. When it is finished you shall have it all. Take it, saturate yourself in it, add your spells to it. We will stir up the compound of Copplestone and Cæsar until it ferments, and then distil from the mass a Great Work. It shall be ours, Copplestone—yours and mine. Will you have me as your partner.”

“With the greatest pleasure in life,” I cried.

We discussed our plans in full detail, and parted the best of friends. Cæsar is rekindling the ashes of a life which I had thought to be extinguished; soon there will be a great and glowing fire of realised memory which will keep warm the years that are to come. He has solved the problem of his immediate future. But what of those others, those tens of thousands, who when the war is over will seek for some means to keep alive the fires which years of war have lighted in their hearts? Are they to be merged, lost, in the old life as it was lived before 1914? Are they to degenerate slowly but surely into S.O.B.s, intent only upon earning a living somehow, playing bad golf, or looking on at football matches? I do not know, I have no data, and it is rather painful to indulge oneself in speculation.

* * * * *

This sketch was published a year ago. Two months after I had visited Cæsar at Oxford he called upon me in London. He was in uniform, and explained that he had quickly grown tired of sick leave and had recalled himself to Service. “I can’t go to sea again,” said he, “with this timber toe, but I am at least good for an office job ashore.” But Cæsar was not made to fit the stool of any office, and when I last heard from him was an observer in the R.N.A.S.

In this fashion he has rounded off his experiences, and basely failed me, his friend and biographer, of the scanty data with which to answer the question set forth in the first sentence of this chapter.

* * * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in punctuation have been maintained.

Some illustrations moved to facilitate page layout.