They had the fresh complexions which come from healthy, outdoor work. There was something engaging in their boyishness and their views. For they had a wider range of interests than that professional soldier, Mr. Atkins, these citizens who had taken up arms. They knew what trench-fighting meant by work in practice trenches at home.

"Of course it will not be quite the same; theory and practice never are," said the schoolmaster.

"We ought to be well grounded in the principles," said the architect thoughtfully, "and they say that in a week or two of actual experience you will have mastered the details that could not be taught in England. Then, too, having shells burst around you will be strange at first. But I think our battalion will give a good account of itself, sir. All the Bucks men have!" There crept in the pride of regiment, of locality, which is so characteristically Anglo-Saxon.

They change life at the front, these new army men. If a carpenter, a lawyer, a sign-painter, an accountant, is wanted, you have only to speak to a new army battalion commander and one is forthcoming—a millionaire, too, for that matter, who gets his shilling a day for serving his country. Their intelligence permitted the architect and the schoolmaster to have no illusions about the character of the war they had to face. The pity was that such a fine force as the new army, which had not become trench stale, could not have a free space in which to make a great turning movement, instead of having to go against that solid battle front from Switzerland to the North Sea.

We have heard enough—quite enough for most of us?—about the German Crown Prince. But there is also a prince with the British army in France. No lieutenant looks younger for his years than this one in the Grenadier Guards, and he seems of the same type as the others when you see him marching with his regiment or off for a walk smoking a brier-wood pipe. There are some officers who would rather not accompany him on his walks, for he can go fast and far. He makes regular reports of his observations, and he has opportunities for learning which other subalterns lack, for he may have both the staff and the army as personal instructors. Otherwise, his life is that of any other subaltern; for there is an instrument called the British Constitution which regulates many things. A little shy, very desirous to learn, is Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and the Empire of India. He might be called the willing prince.

This was one of the shells that hit—one of the hundred that hit. The time was summer; the place, the La Bassee region. Probably the fighting was all the harder here because it is so largely blind. When you cannot see what an enemy is doing you keep on pumping shells into the area which he occupies; you take no risks with him.

The visitor may see about as much of what is going on in the La Bassee region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when promenading in the grass. The only variation in the flatness of the land is the overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward, and rows of poplar trees along the level, and a hedge, a grove, a cottage, or trees and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts timidly in a field it is stopped before it goes far. That "hot corner" is all the hotter for a burning July sun. The army water-carts which run back to wells of cool water are busy filling empty canteens, while shrapnel trims the hedges.

A stretcher was being borne into the doorway of an estaminet which had escaped destruction by shells, and above the door was chalked some lettering which indicated that it was a first clearing station for the wounded. Lying on other stretchers on the floor were some wounded men. Of the two nearest, one had a bandage around his head and one a bandage around his arm. They had been stunned, which was only natural when you have been as close as they had to a shell- burst—a shell that made a hit. The concussion was bound to have this effect.

A third man was the best illustration of shell-destructiveness. Bullets make only holes. Shells make gouges, fractures, pulp. He, too, had a bandaged head and had been hit in several places; but the worst wound was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak, with a sort of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had hit his leg had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would have been killed instantly. He was also an illustration of how hard it is to kill a man even with several shell-fragments, unless some of them strike in the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had whispered the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten the German shell, after all.

Returning by the same road by which we came a motor-car ran swiftly by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the big, painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier boot- soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into place at the estaminet by the sturdy, kindly, experienced medical corps men.

Before we reached the village where our car waited, the ambulance passed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the shell-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so that everybody would know what to prepare for. At the village, which was outside the immediate danger zone, was another clearing station. Here the stretchers were taken into a house—taken without a jolt by men who were specialists in handling stretchers—for any re- dressing if necessary, before another ambulance started journey, with motor-trucks and staff motor-cars giving right of way, to a spotless, white hospital ship which would take them home to England the next night.

It had been an incident of life at the front, and of the organization of war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a great city.



XXVI Finding The Grand Fleet



Good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the life of the burrowing army in its trenches to the life of battleships; from motors trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy seas off English coasts.

But there was more than one place to go in that wonderful week; more than ships to see if one would know something of the intricate, busy world of the Admiralty's work, which makes coastguards a part of its personnel. The transition is less sudden if we begin with a ride in an open car along the coast of Scotland. Dusk had fallen on the purple cloudlands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing sheep in the Scottish Highlands under changing skies, with headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea, forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their "Bonnie Scotland forever," were worthy to be masters of that sea. The Americans who think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land's End to John o' Groat's, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea, in tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy behind the curtains for forty years.

At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us and took the number of our car; but this time sentries who were guarding a navy's rather than an army's secrets. With darkness we passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. A man might have been puzzled as to where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom he had seen at the front came from, if he had not known that the canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.

The Frenchmen of our party—M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign Minister, M. Rene Bazin, of the Academie Francaise, M. Joseph Reinach, of the Figaro, M. Pierre Mille, of Le Temps, and M. Henri Ponsot—who had never been in Scotland before, were on the look out for a civilian Scots in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find a single one.

This night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be moving about in England under the guise of cockney or of Lancashire dialects in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He could never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he were, once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotsman at heart.

The officer of the Royal Navy who was in the car with me confessed to less faith in his symbol of authority than in the generations' bred burr of our chauffeur to carry conviction of our genuineness; so arguments were left to him and successfully, including two or three with Scotch cattle, which seemed to be co-operating with the sentries to block the road.

After an hour's run inland, as the car rose over a ridge and descended on a sharp grade, in the distance under the moonlight we saw the floor of the sea again, melting into opaqueness, with curving fringes of foam along the irregular shore cut by the indentations of the firths. Now the sentries were more frequent and more particular. Our single light gave dim form to the figures of sailors, soldiers, and boy scouts on patrol.

"They have done remarkably well, these boys!" said the officer. "Our fears that, boy like, they would see all kinds of things which didn't exist were quite needless. The work has taught them a sense of responsibility which will remain with them after the war, when their experience will be a precious memory. They realize that it isn't play, but a serious business, and act accordingly."

With all the houses and the countryside dark, the rays of our lamp seemed an invading comet to the men who held up lanterns with red twinkles of warning.

"The patrol boats have complained about your lights, sir!" said one obdurate sentry.

We looked out into the black wall in the direction of the sea and could see no sign of a patrol boat. How had it been able to inform this lone sentry of that flying ray which disclosed the line of a coastal road to anyone at sea? He would not accept the best argumentative burr that our chauffeur could produce as sufficient explanation or guarantee. Most Scottish of Scots in physiognomy and shrewd matter-of- factness, as revealed in the glare of the lantern, he might have been on watch in the Highland fastnesses in Prince Charlie's time.

"Captain R———, of the Royal Navy!" explained the officer, introducing himself.

"I'll take your name and address!" said the sentry.

"The Admiralty. I take the responsibility."

"As I'll report, sir!" said the sentry, not so convinced but he burred something further into the chauffeur's ear.

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

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

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

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

"The largest contract in all England," said the contractor. "And here is the man who checks up my work," he added, nodding to the lean, Scottish naval engineer who was with us. It was clear from his looks that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency, "And the workers? Have you had any strikes here?"

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

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



XXVII On A Destroyer



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

"A destroyer is like a motor-car," said the commander. "If you rush her all the time she wears out. We give her the limit only when necessary."

On the bridge the zest of travel on a dolphin of steel held the bridle on eagerness to reach the journey's end. We all like to see things well done, and here one had his first taste of how well things are done in the British navy, which did not have to make ready for war after the war began. With an open eye one went, and the experience of other navies as a balance for his observation; but one lost one's heart to the British navy and might as well confess it now. A six months' cruise with our own battleship fleet was a proper introduction to the experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

"And yourself?" was suggested to the commander.

"Oh, it is not cold enough for that in September! We're hardened to it. You come from the land and feel the change of air; we are at sea all the time," he replied, He was without a great-coat; and the ease with which he held his footing made landlubbers feel their awkwardness.

A jumpy, uncertain tidal sea was running. Yet our destroyer slipped over the waves, cut through them, played with them, and let them seem to play with her, all the while laughing at them in the confident power of her softly purring vitals.

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

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

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



XXVIII Ships That Have Fought



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You could not fail to identify among the group of officers on the quarter-deck Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, for his victory had impressed his features on the public's eye. Had his portrait not appeared in the press, one would have been inclined to say that a first lieutenant had put on a vice-admiral's coat by mistake. He was about the age of the first lieutenant of one of our battleships. Even as it was, one was inclined to exclaim: "There is some mistake! You are too young!" The Who is Who book says that he is all of forty-four years old and it must be right, though it disagrees with his appearance by five years.

A vice-admiral at forty-four! A man who is a rear-admiral with us at fifty-five is very precocious. And all the men around him were young. The British navy did not wait for war to teach again the lesson of "youth for action!" They saved time by putting youth in charge at once.

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

"I had heard that you took your admirals from the schoolroom," said one of the Frenchmen, "but I begin to believe that it is the nursery."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No!"

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

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

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

"You could tell?"

"Yes—just as well and better than at target practice; for the target was larger and solid. It was enthralling, this watching the flight of our shells toward their target." Where were the scars from the wounds? One looked for them on both the Lion and the Tiger. An armour patch on the sloping top of a turret might have escaped attention if it had not been pointed out. A shell struck there and a fair blow, too. And what happened inside? Was the turret gear put out of order?

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

Constructors have racked their brains over the subject of turrets in the old contest between gun-power and protection. Too much gun- power, too little armour! Too much armour, too little gun-power! Finally, results depend on how good is your armour, how sound your machinery which rotates the turret. That shell did not go through bodily, only a fragment, which killed one man and wounded another. The turret would still rotate; the other gun kept in action and the one under the shell-burst was soon back in action. Very satisfactory to the naval constructors.

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

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

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

"Bang in the dug-out!" one exclaimed, from army habit.

"Precisely! No harm done next door."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From this bridge of the Lion on the morning of the 24th of January, 1915, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty saw appear on the horizon a sight inexpressibly welcome to any commander who has scoured the seas in the hope that the enemy will come out in the open and give battle. Once that German battle-cruiser squadron had slipped across the North Sea and, under cover of the mist which has ever been the friend of the pirate, bombarded the women and children of Scarborough and the Hartle-pools with shells meant to be fired at hardened adult males sheltered behind armour; and then, thanks to the mist, they had slipped back to Heligoland with cheering news to the women and children of Germany. This time when they came out they encountered a British battle-cruiser squadron of superior speed and power, and they had to fight as they ran for home.

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

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

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

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



XXIX On The "Inflexible"



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We had the range of you!" the British explained. The chaplain of the Inflexible was bound to have an anecdote. I don't know why, except that a chaplain's is not a fighting part and he may look on. His place was down behind the armour with the doctor, waiting for wounded. He stood in his particular steel cave listening to the tremendous blasts of her guns which shook the Inflexible's frame, and still no wounded arrived. Then he ran up a ladder to the deck and had a look around and saw the little points of the German ships with the shells sweeping toward them and the smoke of explosions which burst on board them. It was not the British who needed his prayers that day, but the Germans. Personally, I think the Germans are more in need of prayers at all times because of the damnable way they act.

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

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

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

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

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



XXX On The Fleet Flagship



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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave any fighting to be done by his successors. Maintaining herself as mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength—except in the late 'fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France a temporary lead on paper—ship after ship, through all the grades of progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without firing a shot in anger. The Victory was one landmark, or seamark, if you please, and this flagship was another. Between the two were generations of officers and men, working through the change from stagecoach to motors and aeroplanes and seaplanes, who had kept up to a standard of efficiency in view of a test that never came. A year of war and still the test had not come, for the old reason that England had superior strength. Her outnumbering guns which had kept the peace of the seas still kept it. All second nature to the Englishman this, as the defence of the immense distances of the steppes to the Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall and the Mississippi's flow to the man in Kansas. But the American kept thinking about it; and he wanted the Kansans to think about it, too. When he was about to meet Sir John Jellicoe he envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar Square, surmounted by the one-armed figure turned toward the wireless skein on top of the Admiralty building.

I first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago when he was Chief of Staff to Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Squadron. Indeed, you were always hearing about Jellicoe in those days on the China coast. He was the kind of man whom people talk about after they have met him, which means personality. It was in China seas, you may remember, that when a few British seamen were hard pressed in a fight that was not ours the phrase, "Blood is thicker than water," sprang from the lips of an American commander, who waited not on international etiquette but went to the assistance of the British.

Nor will anyone who was present in the summer of '98 forget how Sir Edward Chichester stood loyally by Admiral George Dewey, when the German squadron was empire-fishing in the waters of Manila Bay, until our Atlantic fleet had won the battle of Santiago and Admiral Dewey had received reinforcements and, east and west, we were able to look after the Germans. The British bluejackets said that the rations of frozen mutton from Australia which we sent alongside were excellent; but the Germans were in no position to judge, doubtless through an oversight in the detail of hospitality by one of Admiral Dewey's staff. Let us be officially correct and say there was no mutton to spare after the British had been supplied.

In the gallant effort of the Allied force of sailors to relieve the legations against some hundreds of thousands of Boxers, Captain Bowman McCalla and his Americans worked with Admiral Seymour and his Britons in the most trying and picturesque adventure of its kind in modern history. McCalla, too, was always talking of Jellicoe, who was wounded on the expedition; and Sir John's face lighted at mention of McCalla's name. He recalled how McCalla had painted on the superstructure of the little Newark that saying of Farragut's, "The best protection against an enemy's fire is a well-directed fire of your own"; which has been said in other ways and cannot be said too often.

"We called McCalla Mr. Lead," said Sir John; "he had been wounded so many times and yet was able to hobble along and keep on fighting. We corresponded regularly until his death."

Beatty, too, was on that expedition; and he, too, was another personality one kept hearing about. It seemed odd that two men who had played a part in work which was a soldier's far from home should have become so conspicuous in the Great War. If on that day when, with ammunition exhausted, all members of the expedition had given up hope of ever returning alive, they had not accidentally come upon the Shi-kou arsenal, one would not be commanding the Grand Fleet and the other its battle-cruiser squadron.

Before the war, I am told, when Admiralty Lords and others who had the decision to make were discussing who should command in case of war, opinion ran something like this: "Jellicoe! He has the brains." "Jellicoe! He has the health to endure the strain, with years enough and not too many." "Jellicoe! He has the confidence of the service." The choice literally made itself. When anyone is undertaking the gravest responsibility which has been an Englishman's for a hundred years, this kind of a recommendation helps. He had the guns; he had supreme command; he must deliver victory—such was England's message to him.

When I mentioned in a dispatch that all that differentiated him from the officers around him was the broader band of gold lace on his arm, an English naval critic wanted to know if I expected to find him in cloth of gold. No; nor in full dress with all his medals on, as I saw him appear on the screen at a theatre in London.

Any general of high command must be surrounded by more pomp than an admiral in time of action. A headquarters cannot have the simplicity of the quarter-deck. The force which the general commands is not in sight; the admiral's is. You saw the commander and you saw what it was that he commanded. Within the sweep of vision from the quarter-deck was the terrific power which the man with the broad gold band on his arm directed. At a signal from him it would move or it would stand still. That command of Joshua's if given by Sir John one thought might have been obeyed.

One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred twelve-inch guns and larger, which could carry two hundred tons of metal in a single broadside for a distance of eighteen thousand yards! But do not forget the little guns, bristling under the big guns like needles from a cushion, which would keep off the torpedo assassins; or the light cruisers, or the colliers, or the destroyers, or the 2,300 trawlers and mine-layers, and what not, all under his direction. He had submarines, too, double the number of the German. But with all the German men-of-war in harbour, they had no targets. Where were they? You did not ask questions which would not be answered. The whole British fleet was waiting for the Germans to show their heads, while cruisers were abroad scouting in the North Sea.

At the outset of the war the German fleet might have had one chance in ten of getting a turn of fortune in its favour by an unexpected stroke of strategy. This was the danger against which Jellicoe had to guard. For in one sense, the Germans had the tactical offensive by sea as well as by land; theirs the outward thrust from the centre. They could choose when to come out of their harbour; when to strike. The British had to keep watch all the time and be ready whenever the enemy should come.

Thus, the British Grand Fleet was at sea in the early part of the war, cruising here and there, begging for battle. Then it was that it learned how to avoid submarines and mine-fields. Submarines had played a greater part than expected, because Germany had chosen a guerrilla naval warfare: to harass, to wound, to wear down. Doubtless she hoped to reduce the number of British fighting units by attrition.

Weak England might be in plants for making arms for an army, but not in ship-building. Here was her true genius. She was a maritime power; Germany a land power. Her part as an ally of France and Russia being to command the sea, all demands of the Admiralty for material must take precedence over demands of the War Office. At the end of the first year she had increased her fighting power by sea to a still higher ratio of preponderance over the Germans; in another year she would increase it further.

Admiral von Tirpitz wanted nothing so much as to draw the British fleet under the guns of Heligoland or into a mine-field and submarine trap. But Sir John Jellicoe refused the bait. When he had completed his precautions and his organization to meet new conditions, his fleet need not go into the open. His Dreadnoughts could rest at anchor at a base, while his scouts kept in touch with all that was passing, and his auxiliaries and destroyers fought the submarines. Without a British Dreadnought having fired a shot at a German Dreadnought, nowhere on the face of the seas might a single vessel show the German flag except by thrusting it above the water for a few minutes.

If von Tirpitz sent his fleet out he, too, might find himself in a trap of mines and submarines. He was losing submarines and England was building more. His naval force rather than Sir John's was suffering from attrition. The blockade was complete from Iceland to the North Sea. While the world knew of the work of the armies, the care that this task required, the hardships endured, the enormous expenditure of energy, were all hidden behind that veil of secrecy which obviously must be more closely drawn over naval than over army operations.

From the flagship the campaign was directed. One would think that many offices and many clerks would be required. But the offices and the clerks were at the Admiralty. Here was the execution. In a room perhaps four feet by six was the wireless focus which received all reports and sent all orders, with trim bluejackets at the keys. "Go!" and "Come!" the messages were saying; they wasted no words. Officers of the staff did their work in narrow space, yet seemed to have plenty of room. Red tape is inflammable. There is no more place for it on board a flagship prepared for action than for unnecessary woodwork.

At every turn compression and concentration of power were like the guns and the decks, cleared for action, significant in directness of purpose. The system was planetary in its impressive simplicity, the more striking as nothing that man has ever made is more complicated or includes more kinds of machinery than a battleship. One battleship was one unit, one chessman on the naval board.

Not all famous leaders are likeable, as every world traveller knows. They all have the magnetism of force, which is quite another thing from the magnetism of charm. What the public demands is that they shall win victories, whether personally likeable or not. But if they are likeable and simple and human and a sailor besides—well, we know what that means.

Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe is not a great man. It is not for a civilian even to presume to judge. We have the word of those who ought to know, however, that he is. I hope that he is, because I like to think that great commanders need not necessarily appear formidable. Nelson refused to be cast for the heavy part, and so did Farragut. It may be a sailor characteristic. I predict that after this war is over, whatever honours or titles they may bestow upon him, the English are going to like Sir John Jellicoe not alone for his service to the nation, but for himself.

Admiral Jellicoe is one with Captain Jellicoe, whose cheeriness even when wounded kept up the spirits of the others on the relief expedition of Boxer days. "He could do it, too!" one thought, having in mind Sir David Beatty's leap to the deck of a destroyer. Spare, of medium height, ruddy, and fifty-seven—so much for the health qualification which the Admiralty Lords dwelt upon as important. After he had been at sea for a year he seemed a human machine, much of the type of the destroyer as a steel machine—a thirty-knot human machine, capable of three hundred or five hundred revolutions, engines running smoothly, with no waste energy, slipping over the waves and cutting through them; a quick man, quick of movement, quick of comprehension and observation, of speech and of thought, with a delightful self-possession—for there are many kinds—which is instantly responsive with decision.

A telescope under his arm, too, as he received his guests. You liked that. He keeps watch over the fleet himself when he is on the quarter- deck. You had a feeling that nothing could happen in all his range of vision, stretching down the "avenues of Dreadnoughts" to the light- cruiser squadron, and escape his attention. It hardly seems possible that he was ever bored. Everything around interests him. Energy he has, electric energy in this electric age, this man chosen to command the greatest war product of modern energy.

Fastened to the superstructure near the ladder to his quarters was a new broom which South Africa had sent him. He was highly pleased with the present; only the broom was Tromp's emblem, while Blake's had been the whip. Possibly the South African Dutchmen, now fighting on England's side, knew that he already had the whip and they wanted him to have the Dutch broom, too.

He had been using both, and many other devices in his campaign against von Tirpitz's "unter See" boats, as was illustrated by one of the maps hung in his cabin. Quite different this from maps in a general's headquarters, with the front trenches and support and reserve trenches and the gun-positions marked in vari-coloured pencillings. Instantly a submarine was sighted anywhere, Sir John had word of it, and a dot went down on the spot where it had been seen. In places the sea looked like a pepper-box cover. Dots were plentiful outside the harbour where we were; but well outside, like flies around sugar which they could not reach.

Seeing Sir John among his admirals and guests one had a glimpse of the life of a sort of mysterious, busy brotherhood. I was still searching for an admiral with white hair. If there were none among these seniors, then all must be on shore. Spirit, I think, that is the word; the spirit of youth, of corps, of service, of the sea, of a ready, buoyant definiteness—yes, spirit was the word to characterize these leaders. Sir John moved from one to another in his quick way, asking a question, listening, giving a direction, his face smiling and expressive with a sort of infectious confidence.

"He is the man!" said an admiral. I mean, several admirals and captains said so. They seemed to like to say it. Whenever he approached one noted an eagerness, a tightening of nerves. Natural leadership expresses itself in many ways; Sir John gave it a sailor's attractiveness. But I learned that there was steel under his happy smile; and they liked him for that, too. Watch out when he is not smiling, and sometimes when he is smiling, they say.

For failure is never excused in the fleet, as more than one commander knows. It is a luxury of consideration which the British nation cannot afford by sea in time of war. The scene which one witnessed in the cabin of the Dreadnought flagship could not have been unlike that of Nelson and his young captains on the Victory, in the animation of youth governed with one thought under the one rule that you must make good.

Splendid as the sight of the power which Sir John directed from his quarter-deck while the ships lay still in their plotted moorings, it paled beside that when the anchor chains began to rumble and, column by column, they took on life slowly and, majestically gaining speed, one after another turned toward the harbour's entrance.



XXXI Simply Hard Work



Besides the simple word spirit, there is the simple word work. Take the two together, mixing with them the proper quantity of intelligence, and you have something finer than Dreadnoughts; for it builds Dreadnoughts, or tunnels mountains, or wins victories.

In no organization would it be so easy as in the navy to become slack. If the public sees a naval review it knows that its ships can steam and keep their formations; if it goes on board it knows that the ships are clean—at least, the limited part of them which it sees; and it knows that there are turrets and guns.

But how does it know that the armour of the turrets is good, or that the guns will fire accurately? Indeed, all that it sees is the shell. The rest must be taken on trust. A navy may look all right and be quite bad. The nation gives a certain amount of money to build ships which are taken in charge by officers and men who, shut off from public observation, may do about as they please. The result rests with their industry and responsibility. If they are true to the character of the nation by and large that is all the nation may expect; if they are better, then the nation has reason to be grateful. Englishmen take more interest in their navy than Americans in theirs. They give it the best that is in them and they expect the best from it in return. Every youngster who hopes to be an officer knows that the navy is no place for idling; every man who enlists knows that he is in for no junket on a pleasure yacht. The British navy, I judged, had a relatively large percentage of the brains and application of England.

"It is not so different from what it was for ten years preceding the war," said one of the officers. "We did all the work we could stand then; and whether cruising or lying in harbour, life is almost normal for us to-day."

The British fleet was always on a war footing. It must be. Lack of naval preparedness is more dangerous than lack of land preparedness. It is fatal. I know of officers who had had only a week's leave in a year in time of peace; their pay is less than our officers'. Patriotism kept them up to the mark.

And another thing: once a sailor, always a sailor, is an old saying; but it has a new application in modern navies. They become fascinated with the very drudgery of ship existence. They like their world, which is their house and their shop. It has the attraction of a world of priestcraft, with them alone understanding the ritual. Their drill at the guns becomes the preparation for the great sport of target practice, which beats any big-game shooting when guns compete with guns, with battle practice greater sport than target practice. Bringing a ship into harbour well, holding her to her place in the formation, roaming over the seas in a destroyer—all means eternal effort at the mastery of material, with the results positively demonstrated.

On one of the Dreadnoughts I saw a gun's crew drilling with a dummy six-inch; weight, one hundred pounds.

"Isn't that boy pretty young to handle that big shell?" an admiral asked a junior officer.

"He doesn't think so," the officer replied. "We haven't anyone who could handle it better. It would break his heart if we changed his position."

Not one of fifty German prisoners whom I had seen filing by over in France was as sturdy as this youngster. In the ranks of an infantry company of any army he would have been above the average of physique; but among the rest of the gun's crew he did appear slight. Need more be said about the physical standard of the crews of the fighting ships of the Grand Fleet?

You had an eye to more than guns and machinery and to more than the character of the officers. You wanted to get better acquainted with the personnel of the men behind the guns. They formed patches of blue on the decks, as one looked around the fleet, against the background of the dull, painted bulwarks of steel—the human element whose skill gave the ships life—deep-chested, vigorous men in their prime, who had the air of men grounded in their work by long experience. I noted when an order was given that it was obeyed quickly by one who knew what he had to do because he had done it thousands of times.

There are all kinds of bluejackets, as there are all kinds of other men. Before the war some took more than was good for them when on shore; some took nothing stronger than tea; some enjoyed the sailor's privilege of growling; some had to be kept up to the mark sharply; an occasional one might get rebellious against the merciless repetition of drills.

The war imparted eagerness to all, the officers said. Infractions of discipline ceased. Days pass without anyone of the crew of a Dreadnought having to be called up as a defaulter, I am told. And their health? At first thought, one would say that life in the steel caves of a Dreadnought would mean pasty complexions and flabby muscles. For a year the crews had been prisoners of that readiness which must not lose a minute in putting to sea if von Tirpitz should ever try the desperate gamble of battle.

After a turn in the trenches the soldiers can at least stretch their legs in billets. A certain number of a ship's company now and then get a tramp on shore; not real leave, but a personally conducted outing not far from the boats which will hurry them back to their stations on signal. However, all that one needs to keep well is fresh air and exercise. The blowers carry fresh air to every part of the ship; the breezes which sweep the deck from the North Sea are fresh enough in summer and a little too fresh in winter. There is exercise in the regular drills, supplemented by setting-up exercises. The food is good and no man drinks or eats what he ought not to, as he may on shore. So there is the fact and the reason for the fact: the health of the men, as well as their conduct, had never been so good.

"Perhaps we are not quite so clean as we were before the war," said an officer. "We wash decks only twice a week instead of every day. This means that quarters are not so moist, and the men have more freedom of movement. We want them to have as much freedom as possible."

Waiting, waiting, in such confinement for thirteen months; waiting for battle! Think of the strain of it! The British temperament is well fitted to undergo such a test, and particularly well fitted are these sturdy seamen of mature years. An enemy may imagine them wearing down their efficiency on the leash. They want a fight; naturally, they want nothing quite so much. But they have the seaman's philosophy. Old von Tirpitz may come out and he may not. It is for him to do the worrying. They sit tight. The men's ardour is not imposed upon. Care is taken that they should not be worked stale; for the marksman who puts a dozen shots through the bull's-eye had better not keep on firing, lest he begin rimming it and get into bad habits.

Where an army officer has a change when he leaves the trench for his billet, there is none for the naval officer, who, unlike the army officer, is Spartan-bred to confinement. The army pays its daily toll of casualties; it lies cramped in dug-outs, not knowing what minute extinction may come. The Grand Fleet has its usual comforts; it is safe from submarines in a quiet harbour. Many naval officers spoke of this contrast with deep feeling, as if fate were playing favourites, though I have never heard an army officer mention it.

The army can give each day fresh proof of its courage in face of the enemy. Courage! It takes on a new meaning with the Grand Fleet. The individual element of gallantry merges into gallantry of the whole. You have the very communism of courage. The thought is to keep a cool head and do your part as a cog in the vast machine. Courage is as much taken for granted as the breath of life. Thus, Cradock's men fought till they went down. It was according to the programme laid out for each turret and each gun in a turret.

Smith, of the army, leads a bomb-throwing party from traverse to traverse; Smith, of the navy, turns one lever at the right second. Army gunners are improving their practice day by day against the enemy; all the improving by navy gunners must be done before the battle. No sieges in trenches; no attacks and counter-attacks: a decision within a few hours—perhaps within an hour.

This partially explains the love of the navy for its work; its cheerful repetition of the drills which seem such a wearisome business to the civilian. The men know the reason of their drudgery. It is an all- convincing bull's-eye reason. Ping-ping! One heard the familiar sound of sub-calibre practice, which seems as out of proportion in a fifteen- inch gun as a mouse-squeak from an elephant whom you expect to trumpet. As the result appears in sub-calibre practice, so it is practically bound to appear in target practice; as it appears in target practice, so it is bound to appear in battle practice. It was on the flagship that I saw a device which Sir John referred to as the next best thing to having the Germans come out. He took as much delight in it as the gun-layers, who were firing at German Dreadnoughts of the first line, as large as your thumb, which were in front of a sort of hooded arrangement with the guns of a British Dreadnought inside— the rest I censor myself before the regular censor sees it.

When we heard a report like that of a small target rifle inside the arrangement a small red or a small white splash rose from the metallic platter of a sea. Thus the whole German navy has been pounded to pieces again and again. It is a great game. The gun- layers never tire of it and they think they know the reason as well as anybody why von Tirpitz keeps his Dreadnoughts at home.

But elsewhere I saw some real firing; for ships must have their regular target practice, war or no war. If those cruisers steaming across the range had been sending six or eight-inch shrapnel, we should have preferred not to be so near that towed square of canvas. Flashes from turrets indistinguishable at a distance from the neutral-toned bodies of the vessels and the shells struck, making great splashes just beyond the target, which was where they ought to go.

A familiar scene, but with a new meaning when the time is one of war. So far as my observation is worth anything, it was very good shooting, indeed. One broadside would have put a destroyer out of business as easily as a "Jack Johnson" does for a dug-out; and it would have made a cruiser of the same class as the one firing pretty groggy—this not from any experience of being on a light cruiser or any desire to be on one when it receives such a salute. But it seems to be waiting for the Germans any time that they want it.

Oh, that towed square of canvas! It is the symbol of the object of all building of guns, armour, and ships, all the nursing in dry dock, all the admiral's plans, all the parliamentary appropriations, all the striving on board ship in man's competition with man, crew with crew, gun with gun, and ship with ship. One had in mind some vast factory plant where every unit was efficiently organized; but that comparison would not do. None will. The Grand Fleet is the Grand Fleet. Ability gets its reward, as in the competition of civil life. There is no linear promotion indulgent to mediocrity and inferiority which are satisfied to keep step and harassing to those whom nature and application meant to lead. Armchairs and retirement for those whose inclinations run that way; the captain's bridge for those who are fit to command. Officers' records are the criterion when superiors come to making promotions. But does not outside influence play a part? you ask. If professional conscience is not enough to prevent this, another thing appears to be: that the British nation lives or dies with its navy. Besides, the British public has said to all and sundry outsiders: "Hands off the navy!" All honour to the British public, much criticized and often most displeased with its servants and itself, for keeping its eye on that canvas square of cloth! The language on board was the same as on our ships; the technical phraseology practically the same; we had inherited British traditions. But a man from Kansas and a man from Dorset live far apart. If they have a good deal in common they rarely meet to learn that they have. Our seamen do meet British seamen and share a fraternity which is more than that of the sea. Close one's eyes to the difference in uniform, discount the difference in accent, and one imagined that he might be with our North Atlantic fleet.

The same sort of shop talk and banter in the wardroom, which trims and polishes human edges; the same fellowship of a world apart. Securely ready the British fleet waits. Enough drill and not too much; occasional visits between ships; books and newspapers and a lighthearted relaxation of scattered conversation in the mess. One wardroom had a thirty-five-second record for getting past all the pitfalls in the popular "Silver Bullet" game, if I remember correctly.



XXXII Hunting The Submarine



Seaplanes cut practice circles over the fleet and then flew away on their errands, to be lost in the sky beyond the harbour entrance. With their floats, they were like ducks when they came to rest on the water, sturdy and a little clumsy looking compared to those hawks the army planes, soaring to higher altitudes.

The hawk had a broad, level field for its roost; the duck, bobbing with the waves after it came down, had its wings folded as became a bird at rest, after its engines stopped, and, a dead thing, was lifted on board its floating home with a crane, as cargo is swung into the hold.

On shipboard there must be shipshapeness; and that capacious, one-time popular Atlantic liner had undergone changes to prepare it for its mothering part, with platforms in place of the promenades where people had lounged during the voyage and bombs in place of deck-quoits and dining-saloons turned into workshops. Of course, one was shown the different sizes and types of bombs. Aviators exhibit them with the pride of a collector showing his porcelains. Every time they seem to me to have grown larger and more diabolical. Where will aerial progress end? Will the next war be fought by forces that dive and fly like fishes and birds?

"I'd like to drop that hundred-pounder on to a Zeppelin!" said one of the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it. And Fritz, the submarine, does not like to see the shadow of man's wings above the water.

Seaplanes and destroyers carry the imagination away from the fleet to another sphere of activity, which I had not the fortune to see. An aviator can see Fritz below a smooth surface; for he cannot travel much deeper than thirty or forty feet. He leaves a characteristic ripple and tell-tale bubbles of air and streaks of oil. When the planes have located him they tell the hunters where to go. Sometimes it is known that a submarine is in a certain region; he is lost sight of and seen again; a squall may cover his track a second time, and the hunters, keeping touch with the planes by signals, course here and there on the look out for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes altogether. It is a tireless game of hide and seek, like gunnery at the front. Naval ingenuity has invented no end of methods, and no end of experiments have been tried. Strictest kept of naval secrets, these. Fritz is not to be told what to avoid and what not to avoid.

Very thin is the skin of a submarine; very fragile and complicated its machinery. It does not take much of a shock to put it out of order or a large charge of explosives to dent the skin beyond repair. It being in the nature of submarines to sink, how does the hunter know when he has struck a mortal blow? If oil and bubbles come up for some time in one place, or if they come up with a rush, that is suggestive. Then, it does not require a nautical mind to realize that by casting about on the bottom with a grapnel you will learn if an object with the bulk and size of a submarine is there. The Admiralty accept no guesswork from the hunters about their exploits; they must bring the brush to prove the kill.

With Admiral Crawford I went to see the submarine defences of the harbour. It reminded one of the days of the drawbridge to a castle, when a friend rode freely in and an enemy might try to swim the moat and scale the walls if he pleased.

"Take care! There is a tide here!" the coxswain was warned, lest the barge should get into some of the troubles meant for Fritz. "A cunning fellow, Fritz. We must give him no openings."

The openings appear long enough to permit British craft, whether trawlers, or flotillas, or cruiser squadrons, to go and come. Lying as close together as fish in a basket, I saw at one place a number of torpedo boats home from a week at sea.

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

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

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



XXXIII The Fleet Puts To Sea



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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