Chapter 9

"To this rough duty in northern seas what greater contrast than that other in southern, the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles? How broad and various the support given by the British fleet to the Allies can thus be judged. Separated each from the other by some thousands of miles, the one fleet spread over leagues of ocean, kept every ship its lonely watch, while the bombarding vessels, concentrated in imposing strength, attempted to force a passage through a channel, the most powerfully protected in the world. Unsuccessfully, it is true, but in the grand manner of the old and vanished days when war had still something of romance, and was less the hideous thing it has become.

"We have here at least a standard by which to measure the doings of Britain on the sea. For remember the attempt upon the Dardanelles, with all the strength and energy displayed in it, must be thought of as no more than a minor episode in the work of the navy, not in any way vital to the great issue. It was not the first nor even the second among the tasks allotted to it. For while, first of all, the great vessels under the commander-in-chief paralyzed the activities of the whole German navy, while second in importance, the cruising patrols held all the doors of entrance and exit to the German ports, still another fleet of great battleships remained free to conduct so daring an adventure as the attempt upon the Dardanelles. Nor was this all, for, when the unsupported fleet could do no more, another heroic undertaking was planned upon which fortune beguilingly smiled--the landing on the historic beaches of Gallipoli.

"Take, first, the attempt of the ships upon the Straits. In the light of failure no doubt it must be written down a military folly. Ships against forts had long been held a futile and unequal contest. But it was not the forts that saved Constantinople. In the narrow gulf leading to the Sea of Marmora no less than eight mine fields zigzagged their venomous coils across the channel. The strong, unchanging current of the Dardanelles, flowing steadily south, carried with it all floating mines dropped in the upper reaches. Torpedo tubes ranged on the shore discharged their missiles halfway across the Straits. Before warships could enter these waters a lane had to be swept and kept. Daily, therefore, the minesweepers steamed ahead of the fleet to clear the necessary channel. But when thus engaged they became the target of innumerable and hidden guns, secluded among the rocks, in gullies and ruins and behind the shoulders of the hills, in every fold of the landscape. To 'spot' these shy, retiring batteries was of course imperative, but when spotted they vanished to some other coign of vantage, equally inconspicuous, and continued to rain fire upon the minesweepers. The warships poured cataracts of shell along the shores and among the slopes, the sea trembled, and the earth quaked. Amid the devastating uproar the trawlers swept and grappled and destroyed the discovered mines, but almost as fast as they removed them others were floated down to fill their places. Ships that ventured too far in support of the sweepers, like the _Bouvet_ and the _Triumph_, perished; the waterways were alleys of death. Progress indeed was made, but progress at a cost too heavy, and wisdom decreed the abandonment of the original plan.

"There remained another way. An army landed on the peninsula might cross the narrow neck of land, demolish the batteries, and free the minesweepers from their destructive fire. Could that be done, it was thought the ships might yet force a passage into the broader waters and approach within easy range of the Turkish capital. After long and fatal delay the attempt was made. What might have been easily accomplished a month or two earlier had increased hour by hour in difficulty. Warned in good time of the coming danger, the Turks converted Gallipoli, a natural fortress, into a position of immeasurable strength. With consuming energy, in armies of thousands, they worked with pick and shovel till every yard of ground commanding a landing place was trench or rifle pit or gun emplacement. An impenetrable thicket of barbed wire ran up and down and across the gullies, stretched to the shore and netted the shallow waters of the beach itself. Then when all that man could do was done, they awaited the British attack in full confidence that no army, regiment, or man could land on that peninsula and live.

"No more extraordinary venture than this British landing on a naked beach within point-blank range of the most modern firearms can be read in history or fable. It was a landing of troops upon a foreign shore thousands of miles from home, hundreds from any naval base. Without absolute command of the sea, it could not have been so much as thought of. Men, guns, food, ammunition, even water had to be conveyed in ships and disembarked under the eyes of a hostile army, warned, armed, alert, and behind almost impregnable defenses.

"To conceive the preposterous thing was itself a kind of sublime folly; to accomplish it, simply and plainly stated, a feat divine. Though a thousand pens in the future essay the task no justice in words can ever be done to the courage and determination of the men who made good that landing. Put aside for a moment the indisputable fact that the whole gigantic undertaking achieved in a sense nothing whatever. View it only as an exploit, a martial achievement, and it takes rank as the most amazing feat of arms that the world has ever seen or is likely to see. That at least remains, and as that, and no less than that, with the full price of human life and treasure expended, it goes upon the record, immortal as the soul of man. And nothing could be more fitting than that an accomplishment which dims the glory of all previous martial deeds, which marks the highest point of courage and resolution reached by Britain in all her wars, should have been carried through by British, Irish, and Colonial troops, representatives of the whole empire under the guidance and protecting guard, of the British fleet.

"At Lemnos, for the more than Homeric endeavor on Homer's sea, lay an assemblage of shipping such as no harbor had ever held. Within sight of Troy they came and went, and in the classic waters ringed round by classic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line upon line of black transports, crowded with the finest flower of modern youth, and beyond them, nearer the harbor mouth, the long, projecting guns and towering hulls of the warships. On April 24th they sailed, while, amid tempests of cheering, as the anchors were got and the long procession moved away, the bands of the French vessels played them to the Great Endeavor. There is no need to tell again the story of the arrival, the stupendous uproar of the bombardments, so that men dizzy with it staggered as they walked, the slaughter in the boats and on the bullet-torn shingle, the making good of the landings and all the subsequent battles on that inhuman coast. They will be told and retold while the world lasts. And now that all is over, the chapter closed, the blue water rippling undisturbed which once was white with a tempest of shrapnel, now that all is over, the armies and the ships withdrawn, and one reflects upon the waste of human life, the gallant hearts that beat no longer, the prodigal expenditure of thought and energy and treasure, there should perhaps mingle with our poignant regret and disappointment no sense of exultation. Yet it surges upward and overcomes all else. For our nature is so molded that it can never cease to admire such doings, the more perhaps if victory be denied the doers. And here at least on the shell-swept beaches, among the rocks and flowery hillsides of Gallipoli, men of the British race wrote, never to be surpassed, one of the world's deathless tales. . . .

"There are navies and navies. The old and fighting British navy, whose representatives keep the seas today against the king's enemies, has been heard of once or twice during the present war, but for the most part preserves a certain aristocratic and dignified aloofness from the public gaze. There is, however, another and an older navy which comes and goes under the eyes of all, as it has done any time these three or four centuries. On its six or eight thousand ships, to prove that England is Old England still, the Elizabethan mariner has come to life again, who took war very much as he took peace, unconcernedly, in his day's work. Needless to say no other nation on earth could have produced, either in numbers or quality, for no other nation possessed these men, bred to the sea and the risks of the sea, born where the air is salt, who, undeterred by the hazards of war, which was none of their employ, answered their country's call as in the old Armada days. From the Chinese and Indian seas they came, from the Pacific and Atlantic trade routes, from whaling, it might be, or the Newfoundland fishing grounds or the Dogger Bank--three thousand officers and some two hundred thousand men--to supply the Grand Fleet, to patrol the waterways, to drag for the German mines, to carry the armies of the Alliance, and incidentally, to show the world, what it has perhaps forgotten, that it is not by virtue of their fighting navy that the British are a maritime people, but by virtue of an instinct amounting to genius, rooted in a very ancient and unmatched experience of shipping and the sea. The Grand Fleet is only the child of this service which was already old before the word 'Admiralty' was first employed, which made its own voyages and fought its own battles since Columbus discovered America, and before even that considerable event. These travel-worn ships formed the solid bridge across which flowed in unbroken files the men and supplies to the British and the Allied fronts.

"Picture a great railroad which has for its main line a track four or five thousand miles in length, curving from Archangel in Russia to Alexandria in Egypt, a track which touches on its way the coasts of Norway, of the British Isles, of France, of Portugal, of Spain, of Italy, of Greece. Picture from this immense arc of communication branch lines longer still, diverging to America, to Africa, to India, knitting the ports of the world together in one vast railway system. That railroad system, with its engines and rolling stock, its stations and junctions, its fuel stores and offices, over which run daily and nightly the wagon loads, of food, munitions, stores for a dozen countries at war with the Central Powers, is a railroad of British ships. To dislocate, to paralyze it, Germany would willingly give a thousand millions, for the scales would then descend in her favor and victory indubitably be hers. For consider the consequences of interruption in that stream of traffic. Britain herself on the brink of starvation, her troops in France, in Egypt, in Salonica, cut off without food, without ammunition, unable to return to their homes. But for this fleet that bridges the seas, Britain could not send or use a single soldier anywhere save in defense of her own shores. India, Australia, Canada, all her dependencies would be cut off from the Mother Country, the bonds of empire immediately dissolved. Some little importance then may be attached to this matter of bridging the waterways, and some admiration extended towards the men who do it and the manner of the doing.

"If you ask what have the Allies gained, take this evidence of a French writer in _Le Temps_: 'If at the beginning of the war we were enabled to complete the equipment of our army with a rapidity which has not been one of the least surprises of the German staff, we owe it to the fleet which has given us the mastery of the seas. We were short of horses. They were brought from Argentina and Canada. We were short of wool and of raw materials for our metal industries. We applied to the stockbreeders of Australia. Lancashire sent us her cottons and cloth, the Black Country its steel. And now that the consumption of meat threatens to imperil our supplies of live stock, we are enabled to avoid danger by the importation of frozen cargoes. For the present situation the mastery of the sea is not only an advantage but a necessity. In view of the fact that the greater part of our coal area is invaded by the enemy the loss of the command of the sea by England would involve more than her own capitulation. She indeed would be forced to capitulate through starvation. But France also and her new ally, Italy, being deprived of coal and, therefore, of the means of supplying their factories and military transport, would soon be at the mercy of their adversaries.'

"On this command of the sea rested, then, the whole military structure of the Alliance. It opposed to Germany and her friends not the strength of a group of nations, each fighting its own battle, separate and apart, but the strength of a federation so intimately knit together as to form a single united power which has behind it the inexhaustible resources of the world. Thus the British navy riveted the Great Alliance by operations on a scale hardly imaginable, operations whose breadth and scope beggar all description, since they span the globe itself. As for the men and the spirit in which they work, let him sail on a battleship, a tramp, a liner, or a trawler, the British sailor is always the same, much as he has been since the world first took his measure in Elizabeth's days.

'Like the old sailors of the Queen and the Queen's old sailors.'

"A great simplicity is his quality, with something of the child's unearthly wisdom added, and a Ulysses-like cunning in the hour of necessity, an ascetic simplicity almost like the saints', looking things in the face, so that to that fine carelessness everything, all enterprises, hazards, fortunes, shipwreck, if it come, or battle, are but the incidents of a chequered day, and his part merely to 'carry on' in the path of routine and duty and the honorable tradition of his calling. Manifestly his present business is epic and the making of epic, if he knew it; yet not knowing it he grasps things, as the epic paladins always grasp them, by the matter-of-fact, not the heroic, handle. What better stories have the poets to tell than that of Captain Parslow, a Briton if ever there was one, who, refusing to surrender, saved his ship in a submarine attack at the cost of his own life? Mortally wounded as he stood on the ship, the wheel was taken from the dying father's hand by his son, the second mate. Knocked down by the concussion of a shell that gallant son of a gallant father still held to his post and steered the vessel clear. Or have they anything better to relate than the tale of the _Ortega_ and Captain Douglas Kinneir, who, when pursued by a German cruiser of vastly greater speed, called upon his engineers and stokers for a British effort and drove his vessel under full steam, and a trifle more, into the uncharted waters of Nelson's Straits, 'a veritable nightmare for navigators,' the narrowest and ugliest of channels, walled by gloomy cliffs, bristling with reefs, rocks, overfalls, and currents, through which, by the mercy of God and his own daring, he piloted his ship in safety and gave an example to the world of what stout hearts can do. It is such men Germany supposed she could intimidate!

"These are but episodes in the long roll of honor. You will find others in the quite peaceful occupation of minesweeping, or the search for mines--'fishing' the navy calls it--that the impartial German scatters to trip an enemy, perhaps a friend, an equal chance and it matters not which, an occupation for humanitarians and seekers after a quiet life. On this little business alone a thousand ships and fourteen thousand fishermen have been constantly engaged. Take the case of Lieutenant Parsons, who was blown up in his trawler, escaped with his life, and undisturbed continued to command his group of sweepers. On that day near Christmas time they blew up eight and dragged up six other mines, while, as incidents within the passage of ten crowded minutes, his own ship and another were damaged by explosions and a third destroyed! Read that short chapter of North Sea history and add this, for a better knowledge of these paths of peace, from the letter of an officer: 'Things began to move rapidly now. There was a constant stream of reports coming from aloft. "Mine ahead, Sir," "Mine on the port bow, Sir"; "There is one, Sir, right alongside," and on looking over the bridge I saw a mine about two feet below the surface and so close that we could have touched it with a boat hook. . . . After an hour at last sighted the minesweepers, which had already started work.'

"One may judge of these North Sea activities from the record of a single lieutenant of the Naval Reserve who, besides attending to other matters, destroyed forty or fifty mines, twice drove off an inquisitive German Taube, attacked an equally inquisitive Zeppelin, twice rescued a British seaplane and towed it into safety; rescued in June the crew of a torpedoed trawler, sixteen men, also the crew of a sunk fishing vessel; in July assisted two steamers that had been mined, saving twenty-four of the sailors; in September assisted another steamer, rescued three men from a mined trawler, towed a disabled Dutch steamer and assisted in rescuing the passengers; in November assisted a Norwegian steamer, rescued twenty-four men, and also a Greek steamer which had been torpedoed and rescued forty.

"Some day it will all be chronicled, and not the least fascinating record will be that of men who, perhaps, never fired a shot but enlarged their vision of the recesses of the enemy mind in other ways and met his craft by deeper craft, or navigated African rivers, fringed by desolate mangrove swamps, in gunboats, or hammered down the Mediterranean in East Coast trawlers, boys on their first command, or saw with their own eyes things they had believed to be fables.

"'We travel about 1000 miles a week, most of it in practically unknown seas, full of uncharted coral reefs, rocks, islands, whose existence even is unknown. And by way of making things still more difficult we keep meeting floating islands.

"'I always thought these things were merely yarns out of boys' adventure books. However, I have seen five, the largest about the size of a football field. They are covered with trees and palms, some of them with ripe bananas on them. They get torn away from the swampy parts of the mainland by the typhoons, which are very frequent at this time of year.'

"The story of these things cannot be written here; it will fill many volumes. Here an attempt has been made to sketch merely in its broadest outlines some of the activities of British sailors during the greatest of wars. Whatever the future historian will say of the part they bore he will not minimize it, for on this pivot the whole matter turned, on this axis the great circle of the war revolved. He will affirm that, though in respect of numbers almost negligible compared with the soldiers who fought in the long series of land battles, the sailors held the central avenues, the citadel of power.

"If it be possible in a single paragraph, let us set before our eyes the work of the British navy and its auxiliaries during these loud and angry years. Let us first recall the fact, that, besides the protection of Britain and her dependencies from invasion, together with the preservation of her overseas trade, to the navy was intrusted a duty it has fulfilled with equal success, the protection of the coasts of France from naval bombardment or attack--no slight service to Britain's gallant ally. Behind this barrier of the British fleet, she continued to arm and munition her armies undisturbed. Recall, too, the French colonial armies as well as our own overseas troops, escorted to the various seats of war--more than seven million men--the vital communications of the Allies, north and south, secured; the supplies and munitions--seven million tons--carried overseas; 1,250,000 horses and mules embarked, carried and disembarked; the left wing of the Belgian force supported in Flanders by bombardment; the Serbian army transferred to a new zone of war; and last, if we may call last what is really first and the mastering cause of all the rest, Germany's immense navy fettered in her ports. Bring also to mind that fifty or sixty of her finest war vessels have been destroyed, besides many Austrian and Turkish; five or six million tons of the enemy's mercantile marine captured or driven to rust in harbor; her trade ruined, a strict blockade of her ports established which impoverishes day by day her industrial and fighting strength; hundreds of thousands of Germans overseas prevented from joining her armies; her wireless and coaling stations over all the world and her colonial empire, that ambitious and costly fabric of her dreams, cut off from the Fatherland and brought helplessly to the ground.

"When all this has been passed in review dwell for a moment on the matter reversed--but for the British fleet Germany's will would now be absolute, her emperor the master of the world."

"I KNEW YOU WOULD COME"

We are all very proud that America was permitted to have a share in the holiest defensive war ever known. Then let us also remember that our share in it was largely made possible by England. While we hesitated, considered, debated, who was it that maintained the freedom of the seas and kept inviolate our coasts? The great, gallant, modest navy of Great Britain.

Despite her desperate need of us England uttered no reproaches, and she never seemed to doubt our final decision. It recalls an incident which I discussed with British officers as I stood with them in a concealed observation post on a summit of Vimy Ridge in September. On a dark night a raid on the German trenches was made, and in the party were two brothers, English lads. The raid was successful, but when the men returned one of the brothers was missing. The other pleaded for permission to return and bring him in. The colonel refused on the ground that the attempt would be both dangerous and fruitless. Finally, he yielded to the lad's passionate pleading, and the young soldier crawled out into No Man's Land, returning a half hour later with a machine gun bullet in his shoulder, yet gently carrying the brother, whose spirit rose to the ranks of the greater army just as they reached the trench. "You see, my boy," said the colonel, "it was useless, your brother is gone, and you are wounded." "No, colonel," replied the lad, "it was not useless. I had my reward, for just as I found him out there, he said, 'Is that you, Tom? I knew you would come.'"

This seems a fitting moment not only to thank God that we came in time to be of service, but to thank England for her patience and her confidence which have never failed. If after entering the war we are gratified at placing two million men quickly upon the battlefield, let us remember that nearly 1,200,000 of them were transported in British vessels and convoyed by British warships.