My Year of the War Part 34

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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls. .h.i.t 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l-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 pa.s.sages 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. .h.i.t fifteen times, and the Tiger, which was. .h.i.t eight. Wherever you went every square inch of s.p.a.ce 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 sh.e.l.ls and powder from the magazine deep below the water to the guns.

"H----was killed here. Impact of the sh.e.l.l pa.s.sing 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 sh.e.l.l-bursts are the terrestrial expression of marine construction. No one sh.e.l.l happened to get many men either on the Lion or the Tiger.

But the effect of the burst was felt in the pa.s.sages, for the air- pressure is bound to be p.r.o.nounced in enclosed s.p.a.ces 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 ma.s.sive 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 bra.s.s fittings of speaking-tubes and levers and push-b.u.t.tons, which would have puzzled even the "h.e.l.lo, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 sh.e.l.l-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 ma.s.sive 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. .h.i.t.

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. .h.i.t, so preoccupied was each with his own duty and the need of going on with it until an order or a sh.e.l.l'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 compa.s.s 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.

"h.o.m.ogeneity!" 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. h.o.m.ogeneous, yes--remorselessly h.o.m.ogeneous. 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l-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.