Chapter XIV: Part 14

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 that 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. One liked that. He keeps watch over the fleet himself when he is on the quarter-deck. One 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 him 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 that present; only the broom was von 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’ “_unter see_ boots,” which 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 gun-positions marked in vari-coloured pencillings. Instantly a submarine was sighted anywhere, Sir John had word of it, and another 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 characterise them. 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 that 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 only 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

England’s navy, the culmination of her brains and application--A
perpetual war-footing--Pride of craft--The personnel behind
the guns--Physique, health, conduct--Fate’s favourites in the
trenches!--Gun practice--A miniature German Navy--The acme of
efficiency--The British nation lives or dies with its navy--The
prototype of our own Atlantic fleet.

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 organisation 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 Britain.

“It is not so different from what it was for ten years before 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 preparation is more dangerous than lack of land preparation. 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’s 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 any one 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?

One had an eye to more than guns and machinery and to more than the character of the officers. He wanted to become 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. One noted when an order was given out 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 any one of the crew of a Dreadnought having to be called up in default, 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 the 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 dugouts, 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, and von Spee’s men, too, 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 subcalibre 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 subcalibre 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-pointers, 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-pointers 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 dugout; 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 organised; 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 criticised 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. But seamen do meet 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 light-hearted 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 afloat and on high--Diabolical bombs--Sighting a
submarine--The chase--Submarine defences--Torpedo boats at
home--The mine sweepers--Patience in the cold of the North Sea.

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, it 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 fish and birds?

“I’d like to drop that hundred-pounder onto a Zeppelin!” said one of the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it. Also Fritz, of 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 can 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 lookout for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes altogether. It is a tireless game of hide-and-seek, like that of 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 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 cargo of explosive to dent that 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 sometime in one place, or if they come up with a rush, that is suggestive. Then, it does not require a nautical mind to realise 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. Admirals 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 a harbour. It reminded one of the old days of the drawbridge to the 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 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 cruisers, or battleships, 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, again, do not forget those who watch, those who keep the blockade, from the Channel to Iceland, and those trawlers who 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

The test of perfect motion--Is the fleet bottled by submarines?--
The message arrives--The sea-march of dull-toned unadorned
power--Destroyers in the van--The majestic procession of
battleships--The secret in sheer hard work--The sea-lion on
the hunt--The “old” Dreadnought--The exotic Turk--An hour and
still passing--Irresistible power--Visualizing the whole globe,
safe behind that fleet--Back in London--The Zeppelin’s pitiable
target--Meaning of British dominion--A German comparison.

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 for me 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 revolutionised naval warfare. Admiral Jellicoe might lose some of his battleships before he could ever go into action against von Tirpitz.

“Oh, to hear the hoarse rattle of the anchor chains!” I kept thinking while I was with the fleet. “Oh, to see all those 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 secretary, 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 manœuvres.

“Don’t you worry, great ladies!” one 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 peek 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 in sight 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. 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.

There is some sea running outside the entrance, enough to make a destroyer roll. But the battleships disdain any notice of its existence. It is no more to them than a ripple of dust to a motor truck. They plough through it.

Though you were within twenty yards of them you would feel quite safe. An express train was in no more danger of jumping the track. Mast in line with mast, they held the course with a majestic steadiness. Now the leading ship makes a turn of a few points. At the same spot, as if it were marked by the grooves of tires in a road, the others make it. Any variation of speed between them would have been instantly noticeable, as one forged ahead or lagged; but the distance between bows and sterns did not change. A line of one length would do for each interval so far as one could discern. It was difficult to think that they were not attached to some taut moving cable under water. How could such apparently unwieldy monsters, in such a slippery element as the sea, be made to obey their masters with such fine precision?

The answer again is sheer hard work! Drills as arduous in the engine room as at the guns; machinery kept in tune; traditions in manœuvring in all weathers, which are kept up with tireless practice.

Though all seemed perfection to the lay eye, let it be repeated that this was not so to the eyes of admirals. It never can be. Perfection is the thing striven for. Officers dwell on faults; all are critics. Thus you have the healthiest kind of spirit, which means that there will be no cessation in the striving.

“Look at that!” exclaimed an officer on the destroyer. “They better try another painting on her and see if they can’t do better.”

Ever changing that northern light. For an instant the sun’s rays, strained by a patch of peculiar cloud, playing on a Dreadnought’s side made her colour appear molten, exaggerating her size till she seemed as colossal to the eye as to the thought.

“But look, now!” said another officer. She was out of the patch and seemed miles farther away to the vision, a dim shape in the sea-haze.

“You can’t have it right for every atmospheric mood of the North Sea, I suppose!” muttered the critic. Still, it hurt his professional pride that a battleship should show up as such a glaring target even for a moment.

The power of the fleet was more patent in movement than at rest; for the sea-lion was out of his lair on the hunt. Fluttering with flags at a review at Spithead the battleships seemed out of their element; giants trying for a fairy’s part. Display is not for them. It ill becomes them, as a pink ribbon on a bulldog. Irresistibly ploughing their way they presented a picture of resolute utility--guns and turrets and speed. No spot of bright colour was visible on board. The crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets, give the range, lay the sights on the enemy’s ships, and the battle was on.

“There is the old Dreadnought,” said an officer.

The _old_ Dreadnought--all of ten years of age, the senile old thing! What a mystery she was when she was building! The mystery accentuated her celebrity--and almost forgotten now, while the _Queen Elizabeth_ and the _Warspite_ and others of their class with their fifteen-inch guns would be in the public eye as the latest type till a new type came. A parade of naval types was passing. One seemed to shade into the other in harmonious effect.

But here was an outsider, whom one noted instantly as he studied those rugged silhouettes of steel and counted guns. She had been a Turk. As the Turks were going to have only one battleship, they were not bothered about squadron homogeneity. They piled turret on turret, twelve twelve-inch guns in exotic array. She was finished and the Turks were already on board to take her home when the war began. But British law requires that any foreign man-of-war building in English shipyards may be taken over for her cost in case of war. So England kept the ship, which the Turks, I understand, thought was hardly a sporting thing to do.

One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts--even a squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of its might. Sixteen--twenty--twenty-four--it was the unending numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive. An hour passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes behind the wind screen of the destroyer’s bridge, only to look back and see more Dreadnoughts going by. One had not realised that there were so many in the harbour. He had a suspicion that Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of a hat.

The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea, and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever; still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King Edward VII class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were yet to come. One’s eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they had seen the whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.

The destroyer commander looked at his watch.

“Time!” he said. “I’ll put you on shore.”

He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the engine room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at twenty knots towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth.

One’s imagination sped across seas where he had cruised into harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was trying to visualise the whole globe--all of it except the Baltic seas and a thumbmark in the centre of Europe. Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay--yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them where countless millions dwell were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet.

Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system--and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight’s play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot was fired at those sturdy men behind armour.

When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and open markets under the British flag; when you compare the vociferations of von Tirpitz glorying in the torpedoing of a _Lusitania_ with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea-power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on women and children would use that power if they had it.

XXXIV

MANY PICTURES

The aviation grounds--Arabian Nights’ heroes and their magic
carpets--Corps’ spirit--A chivalric custom--Billeting in
French houses--Well-disciplined guests--Teaching the art of
war--Picturesque tribesmen from India--Their loyalty--British
justice--Matins and Angelus--Farming without men--The peasants
win--Greeting the French troops--Sir John French on duty--
“Inspecting and disinfecting”--The new “shilling a day” men--
Albert Edward, the “willing prince”--Care of the wounded.

A single incident, an impression photographic in its swiftness, a chance remark, may be more illuminating than a day’s experiences. One does not need to go to the front for them. Sometimes they come to the gateway of our château. They are pages at random out of a library of overwhelming information.

* * * * *

One of the aviation grounds is not far away. Look skyward at almost any hour of the day and you will see a plane, its propeller a roar or a hum according to its altitude. Sometimes it is circling in practice; again, it is off to the front. At break of day the planes appear; in the gloaming they return to roost.

If an aviator has leave for two or three days in summer he starts in the late afternoon, flashing over that streak of Channel in half an hour and may be at home for dinner without getting any dust on his clothes or having to bother with military red tape at steamer gangways or customs houses.

The airmen are a type, with certain marked characteristics. No nervous man is wanted, and it is time for an aviator to take a rest at the first sign of nerves. They seem shy and diffident, men of the kind given to observation rather than to talking; men accustomed to using their eyes and hands. It is difficult to realise that some quiet young fellow, who is pointed out, has had so many hairbreadth escapes. What tales, worthy of Arabian Nights’ heroes who are borne away on magic carpets, they bring home, relating them as matter-of-factly as if they had broken a shoelace.

Up in their seats, a whir of the motor, and they are off on another adventure. They shy at mention of their names in print, for that is not good for the spirit of corps of this newest branch in the service of war. Anonymity is absolute. Everything is done by the corps for the corps. Possibly because it is so young, because it started with chosen men, the British Aviation Corps is unsurpassed; but partly it is because of the British temperament, with that combination of coolness and innate love of risk which the British manner sometimes belies.

Something of the old spirit of knighthood characterises air service. It is individual work; its numbers are relatively few. I like one of the aviation customs, not for its chivalry alone, but because it makes one feel more kindly toward the Germans. If a German aviator has to descend in the British lines, whether from motor trouble or because he is winged by an anti-aircraft gun, a British aviator flies over the German lines and drops a “message-bag” with long streamers telling whether the unfortunate one is dead or alive, and the Germans do the same.

* * * * *

Some mornings ago I saw several young soldiers with notebooks going about our village street. They were from the cadet school where privates, from the trenches, take a course and return with chocolate drops on their sleeve-bands as commissioned officers. This was a course in billeting. For ours is not an army in tents, but one living in French houses and barns. The pupils were learning how to carry out this delicate task; for delicate it is. A stranger speaking another language becomes the guest of the host for whom he is fighting. Mr. Atkins receives only shelter; he supplies his own meals. His excess of marmalade one sees yellowing the cheeks of the children in the family where he is at home. Madame objects only to his efforts to cook in her kitchen; womanlike, she would rather handle the pots and pans herself.

Tommy is thoroughly instructed in his duty as guest and under a discipline that is merciless so far as conduct toward the population goes; so the two get on better than French and English military authorities feared that they might. Time has taught them to understand each other and see that difference in race does not mean absence of human qualities in common, though differently expressed. Many armies I have seen, but never one better behaved than the British army in France and Flanders in its respect for property and the rights of the population.

And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we hear the t-r-r-t of a machine gun at a machine-gun school about a mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools within sound of the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army in the midst of war, with the teachers bringing their experience from the battle-line.

* * * * *

“Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass,” wrote a Sikh soldier home, “and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land.”

Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gherwalis, the brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey, bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war. Aeroplanes interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for drawing water. They would watch that for hours.

Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge and all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire. I was homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers or the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is the secret of the American’s nervous energy. It seemed to me that it was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the year, let alone fighting Germans.

Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought on foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life of true equine gentry. Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit defiant of the weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward the reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East passed by, every one seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French barns.

One asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay into resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders winter? What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to fight for England? Among the brown faces topped with turbans appeared occasional white faces. These were the men; these the force.

The marvel was not that the Indians were able to fight as well as they did in that climate, but that they fought at all. What welcome summer brought from their gleaming black eyes! July or August could not be too hot for them. On a plateau one afternoon I saw them having a _gymkana_. It was a treat for the King of the Belgians, who has had few holidays, indeed, this last year, and for the French peasants who came from the neighbourhood. Yelling, wild as they were in tribal days before the British brought order and peace to India, the horsemen galloped across the open space, picking up handkerchiefs from the ground and impaling tent pegs on their lances. The French peasants clapped their hands and the British Indian officers said, “Good!” when the performer succeeded, or, “Too bad!” when he failed.

If you asked the officers for the secret of the Indian Empire they said: “We try to be fair to the natives!” which means that they are just and even-tempered. An enormous, loose-jointed machine the British Empire, which seems sometimes to creak a bit but yet holds together for that very reason. Imperial weight may have interfered with British adaptability to the kind of warfare which was the one kind that the Germans had to train for; but certainly some Englishmen must know how to rule.

* * * * *

That church bell across the street from our château begins its clangour at dawn, summoning the French women and children and the old men to the fields in harvest time. But its peals carrying across the farmlands are softened by distance and sweet to the tired workers in the evening. In the morning its peal in their ears tells them that the day is long and they have much to do before dark. After that thought I never complained because it robbed me of my sleep. I felt ashamed not to be up and doing myself, and worked with a better spirit.

“Will they do it?”

We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw? Would the peasants be able to get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away? I had inside information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker that they would. A financial expert, the baker. Of course, he said that France would go on fighting till the German was beaten, just as the old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell was clanging the matins or the angelus. But there was the question of finances. It took money to fight. The Americans, he knew, had more money than they knew what to do with--as Europeans universally think, only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the distribution-- and if they would loan the Allies some of their spare billions, Germany was surely beaten.

A busy man the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading chestnut tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing American reapers and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly and saved the day. But not all farmers felt that they could afford the charge. These kept at their small patches with sickles. Gradually the carpets of gold waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble, and great conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the stray stems left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense bouquets of wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or three loaves of the _pain de ménage_ that the baker sold. So the peasants did it; they won; and this was some compensation for the loss of Warsaw.

One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual. But these were French troops in the British zone, _en route_ from somewhere in France to somewhere else in France. There was not a person left in any house in that village. Everybody was out, with affection glowing in their eyes. For these were their own--their soldiers of France.

* * * * *

When you see a certain big limousine flying a small British flag pass you know that it belongs to the Commander-in-Chief; and though it may be occupied only by one of his aides, often you will have a glimpse of a man with a square chin and a drooping white moustache, who is the sole one among the hundreds of thousands at the British front who wears the crossed batons of a field marshal.

It is erroneous to think that Sir John French or any other commander, though that is the case in time of action, spends all his time in the private house occupied as headquarters, designated by two wisps of flags, studying a map and sending and receiving messages, when the trench line remains stationary. He goes here and there on inspections. It is the only way that a modern leader may let his officers and men know that he is a being of flesh and blood and not a name signed to reports and orders. A machine-gun company I knew had a surprise when resting in a field waiting for orders. They suddenly recognised in a figure coming through an opening in a hedge the supreme head of the army in France. There was no need of a call to attention. The effect was like an electric shock, which sent every man to his place and made his backbone a steel rod. Those crossed batons represented a dizzy altitude to that battery which had just come out from England. Sir John walked up and down, looking over men and guns after their nine months’ drill at home, and said, “Very good!” and was away to other inspections where he might not necessarily say, “Very good!”

Frequently his inspections are formal. A battalion or a brigade is drawn up in a field, or they march past. Then he usually makes a short speech. On one occasion the officers had arranged a platform for the speech-making. Sir John gave it a glance and that was enough. It was the end of such platforms erected for him.

“Inspections! They are second nature to us!” said a new army man. “We were inspected and inspected at home and we are inspected and inspected out here. If there is anything wrong with us it is the general’s own fault if it isn’t found out. When a general is not inspecting, some man from the medical corps is disinfecting.”

Battalions of the new army are frequently billeted for two or three days in our village. The barn up the road I know is capable of housing twenty men and one officer; for this is chalked on the door. Before they turn in for the night the men frequently sing, and the sound of their voices is pleasant.

A typical inspection was one that I saw in the main street. The battalion was drawn up in full marching equipment on the road. Of those officers with packs on their backs one was only nineteen. This is the limit of youth to acquire a chocolate drop on its arm. The sergeant major was an old regular, the knowing backbone of the battalion, which had taken the men of clay and taught them their letters and then how to spell and to add and subtract and divide. One of those impressive red caps arrived in a car, and the general who wore it went slowly up and down the line, front and rear, examining rifles and equipment, while the young officers and the old sergeant were hoping that Jones or Smith hadn’t got some dust in his rifle-barrel at the last moment.

Brokers and carpenters, bankers and mechanics, clerks and labourers, the new army is like the army of France, composed of all classes. One evening I had a chat with two young fellows in a battalion quartered in the village, who were seated beside the road. Both came from Buckinghamshire. One was a schoolmaster and the other an architect. They were “bunkies,” pals, chums.

“When did you enlist?” I asked.

“In early September, after the Marne retreat. We thought that it was our duty, then. But we’ve been a long time arriving.”

“How do you like it?”

“We are not yet masters of the language, we find,” said the schoolmaster, “though I had a pretty good book knowledge of it.”

“I’m learning the gestures fast, though,” said the architect.

“The French are glad to see us,” said the schoolmaster. “They call us the Keetcheenaires. I fancy they thought we were a long time coming. But now we are here, I think they will find that we can hold up our end.”

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.