My Year of the War Part 33

"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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage. 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 pa.s.sageway 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 sh.e.l.ls? 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 compa.s.s 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 j.a.panese 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.