William Wood

“ Having found that the new fort on the hill commanding the town was not yet occupied, Drake and Oxenham marched against the town at the head of their sixty men, Oxenham by a flank, Drake straight up the main street, each with a trumpet sounding, a drum rolling, fire-pikes blazing, swords flashing, and all ranks yelling like fiends. Drake was only of medium stature. But he had the strength of a giant, the pluck of a bulldog, the spring of a tiger, and the cut of a man that is born to command. ”

“ The future lies within the ships that sail the offing of these hills, crowded with those hosts of immigration who are so eager to become a part of what may be a mighty nation. And there, between and round the ships and hills, in sea and sky and on the land, our kindred of the wild are linking these vastly different ages close together in what should be a present paradise. Shall one, short, heedless generation break that whole chain of glorious life and make that paradise a desert? ”

“ No wise people, least of all the men who know it best, ever sing the praise of war itself. They might as well sing the praises of disease. But, while those who, like the Germans, force a wicked war upon the world are no better than poisoners of wells and spreaders of the plague, those, on the other hand, who, like the Allies, fight the poisoners of wells and spreaders of the plague are doing the same kind of service that doctors do when fighting germs. Therefore, as doctors to disease, so is the Happy Warrior to war. He no more likes war than doctors like the germs of deadly sickness ”

“ Stuart was a Virginian ex-officer of United States Dragoons, trained in frontier fighting, and the perfect type of what a cavalry commander should be: tall, handsome, splendidly supple and strong, hawk-eyed and lion-hearted, quick, bold, determined, and inspiring, yet always full of knowledge and precaution too; indefatigable at all times, and so persistent in carrying out a plan that the enemy could no more shake him off than they could escape their shadows. ”

“ The hungry great Antarctic wind comes swooping down. The Victoria lays over to it, her forefoot slashing, her lee side hissing, the windward rigging strained and screaming, and every stitch of canvas drawing full. Still the skipper carries on. He and his vessel have a name to keep up; and he has carried on till all was blue ere this, and left more than one steam kettle panting. Every timber, plank, mast, yard, and tackle wakes to new life and thrills in response to the sails. She answers her helm quickly, eagerly. ”

“ I need not remind you that from the topmost heights of Evolution you can see whole realms of Nature infinitely surpassing all those of business, sport and tourist recreation, and that the theory of Evolution itself is the crowned brain of the entire Animal Kingdom. But I doubt whether, as yet, we fully realize that Labrador is absolutely unique in being the only stage on which the prologue and living pageant of Evolution can be seen together from a single panoramic point of view. The sea and sky are everywhere the same primeval elements. ”

“ There was a display of devil's fireworks such as few men have ever seen or could imagine. Sizzling, crackling, and roaring, the blinding flames leaped into the jet-black sky, lighting up the camps of both armies, where thousands of soldiers watched these engines of death sweep down on the fleet. Each of the seven ships was full of mines, blowing up and hurling shot and shell in all directions. The crowded mass of British vessels seemed doomed to destruction. But the first spurt of fire had hardly been noticed before the men in the guard boats began to row to the rescue. ”

“ So far as fitness for battle depended on the officers and men of the Navy itself the Grand Fleet was as nearly perfect as anything could be. Sprung from the finest race of seamen in the world, trained for a longer time than any foreigners, and belonging to what everyone for centuries has known to be the first of all the navies, the British bluejackets formed the handiest crews you could have found in any age or country. ”

“ Canada is the child of the sea. Her infancy was cradled by her waterways; and the life-blood of her youth was drawn from oceans, lakes, and rivers. No other land of equal area has ever been so intimately bound up with the changing fortunes of all its different waters, coast and inland, salt and fresh.
The St Lawrence basin by itself is a thing to marvel at, for its mere stupendous size alone. Its mouth and estuary are both so vast that their salt waters far exceed those of all other river systems put together. ”

“ Santa Cruz, as a very able admiral, knew that no such sea road could possibly be safe while the ubiquitous English navy was undefeated and at large. Some time or other a naval battle must be won, or Parma's troops, cut off from their base of supplies and surrounded like an island by an angry sea of enemies, must surely perish. Win first at sea and then on land, said the expert warriors, Santa Cruz and Parma. Get into hated England with the least possible fighting, risk, or loss, said the mere politician, Philip, and then crush Drake if he annoys you. ”

“ He was one of the deepest thinkers on war who ever lived, especially on the British kind of war, by land and sea together; and he had had the preparation of a lifetime to help him in using a fleet and army that worked together like the two arms of one body. He simply made a plan which took proper account of all the facts and all the chances. Fools make lucky hits, now and then, by the merest chance. But no one except a genius can make and carry out a plan like Wolfe's, which meant at least a hundred hits running, all in the selfsame spot. ”

“ All the great questions of peace and war and other foreign relations were settled by the mother country, which was the only sovereign power and which alone possessed the force to make any British rights respected. The Americans supplied subordinate means and so became subordinate men when they and the Imperial forces worked together. This, to use a homely phrase, made their leaders feel out of it. Everything that breeds trouble between militiamen and regulars, colonials and mother-countrymen, fanned the flame of colonial resentment till the leaders were able to set their followers on fire. ”

“ The last two weeks in May and the first in June were full of glamour in crowded, stirring Louisbourg. There was Wolfe's picked army of nine thousand men, with Saunders's mighty fleet of fifty men-of-war, mounting two thousand guns, comprising a quarter of the whole Royal Navy, and convoying more than two hundred transports and provision ships; all coming and going, landing, embarking, drilling, dividing, massing; every one expectant of glorious results and eager to begin. ”

“ Labrador is a miracle of youth and age combined. It is still growing out of the depths with the irresistible vigour of youth. But its titanic tablelands consist of those azoic rocks which form the very roots of all the other mountains in the world, and which are so old, so immeasurably older than any others now standing on the surface of the globe, that their Laurentians alone have the real right to bear the title of "The Everlasting Hills". ”

“ He shows that this wanton and brutal defacement of Nature, this annihilation of the natural resources that should be part of the National capital of our children and children's children, this destruction of so much that is beautiful and grand, goes hand in hand with the sordid selfishness which is responsible for so very much of the misery of our civilization. The movement for the conservation of our natural resources, for the protection of our forests and of the wild life of the woods, the mountains and the coasts, is essentially a democratic movement. ”

“ For the sea lies between all the different parts of the British Empire; and so the life-or-death question we have to answer in every great war is this: does the sea unite us by being under British control, or does it divide us by being under enemy control? United we stand: divided we fall. ”

“ Nor did the Lincoln touch stop there. It even began to make its quietly persuasive way among the finer spirits of the South from the very day on which the Second Inaugural closed with words which were the noblest consummation of the prophecy made in the First. This was the prophecy: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." ”

“ Wolfe's Quebec campaign marked the supreme crisis of the greatest war the British Empire ever waged: the war, indeed, that made the Empire. To get a good, clear view of anything so vast, so complex, and so glorious, we must first look at the whole course of British history to see how it was that France and England ever became such deadly rivals. It is quite wrong to suppose that the French and British were always enemies, though they have often been called 'historic' and 'hereditary' foes, as if they never could make friends at all. ”

“ Thus should man at once lose the half of his inheritance if the art of navigation did not enable him to manage this untamed beast; and with the bridle of the winds and the saddle of his shipping make him serviceable. Now for the services of the sea, they are innumerable: it is the great purveyor of the world's commodities; the conveyor of the excess of rivers; uniter, by traffique, of all nations; it presents the eye with divers colors and motions, and is, as it were with rich brooches, adorned with many islands. It is an open field for merchandise in peace ”

“ The Germans put their wits to work with hellish cunning. They wanted to surround Great Britain with a sea of death so full of mines and submarines that no ship could live. The mines were not placed at random, but where they would either kill their victims best or make them try another way where the lurking submarines could kill them. The sea-roads into great ports like London and Liverpool converge, just as railway tracks converge toward some great central junction. ”

“ The Confederate bombardment ceased. The Federal guns and rifles held their fire. Fate hung in silence on those gallant lines of gray. Then the Federal skirmishers down in the valley began fitfully firing; and the waiting masses on the Federal slopes began to watch more intently still. "Here they come! Here comes the infantry!" The blue ranks stirred a little as the men felt their cartridge boxes and the sockets of their bayonets. The calm warnings of the officers could be heard all down the line of Gibbon's magnificent division, which stood straight in Pickett's path. "Steady, men, steady! ”

“ At daybreak of the 12th the whole fleet stood into Gabarus Bay, a large open roadstead running west from the little Louisbourg peninsula. The Provincials eyed the fortress eagerly. It looked mean, squat, and shrunken in the dim grey light of early dawn. But it looked hard enough, for all that. Its alarm bells began to ring. Its signal cannon fired. And all the people who had been living outside hurried in behind the walls.
The New Englanders were so keen to land that they ran some danger of falling into complete disorder. But Pepperrell managed very cleverly. ”

“ Till quite recently Nature had her own sanctuaries, where man either did not go at all or only as a tool-using animal in comparatively small numbers. But now, in this machinery age, there is no place left where man cannot go with overwhelming forces at his command. He can strangle to death all the nobler wild life in the world to-day. To-morrow he certainly will have done so, unless he exercises due foresight and self-control in the mean time. There is not the slightest doubt that birds and mammals are now being killed off much faster than they can breed. ”

“ But if these countries had not been brought into the British Empire they could only have had the choice of two evils—either to have remained lands of blood and savagery or to have been bullied by the Germans. And if the British do not make friends of those they conquer, how is it that so many Natives fought for them without being in any way forced to do so, and how is it that the same Boer commander-in-chief who fought against the British in the Boer War led a Boer army on the British side against the Germans? ”

“ For while the distracted Sidonia was getting his fleet into the 'eagle formation,' so suitable for galleys whose only fighting men were soldiers, the English fleet was stealing the weather gage, his one remaining natural advantage. An English squadron of eight sail manoeuvred coast-wise on the Armada's inner flank, while, unperceived by the Spanish lookout, Drake stole away to sea, beat round its outer flank, and then, making the most of a westerly slant in the shifting breeze, edged in to starboard. ”

“ Once more the flag of truce came out, this time to return the compliment with a basket of wine. As the gate swung to, the cannon roared again on either side. Amherst's was no unmerited compliment; for Madame Drucour used to mount the ramparts every day, no matter what the danger was, and fire three cannon for the honour of her king. But the French had no monopoly in woman's work. True, there were no officers' wives to play the heroine on the British side. But there were others to play a humbler part, and play it well. ”

“ But of course this was well matched by many a vessel on the British side, in a fight so fierce and a turmoil so appalling that only men of iron training and steel nerves could face it. Light craft of all kinds were darting to and fro, attacking, defending, firing guns and torpedoes, smashing and being smashed, sinking and being sunk, and trying to help or hinder the mighty lines of battle whose own gigantic guns flashed and thundered without a moment's pause. ”

“ But of all English sovereigns he stands foremost as the monarch of the sea. Young, handsome, learned, exceedingly accomplished, gloriously strong in body and in mind, Henry mounted the throne in 1509 with the hearty good will of nearly all his subjects. Before England could become the mother country of an empire overseas, she had to shake off her medieval weaknesses, become a strongly unified modern state, and arm herself against any probable combination of hostile foreign states. Happily for herself and for her future colonists, Henry was richly endowed with strength and skill for his task. ”

“ The silent Saunders was one of the best admirals that even England ever had. And when people drank to "the eye of a Hawke, and the heart of a Wolfe!" they showed they knew of other first-rate leaders too. But by far the greatest head and heart, by far the most inspiring soul, of this whole vast Empire War was Pitt. In many and many a war, down to our own day, the warriors who have led the fleets and armies have been greater and nobler than the statesmen who managed the government. But Pitt was greater, though even he could not be nobler, than any of the warriors who served the Empire under him ”

“ So, whether by sea or land or air, whether as warriors or as civilians, the people of Great Britain gave their united all to the noblest cause on earth. And, when the war ended, Great Britain had the biggest army as well as the biggest navy in the world—biggest not only in absolute numbers but also biggest in proportion to the whole number of men fit to bear arms. ”

“ But even the best of men and ships will not make the best fleet unless trained and "tuned up" to act together; and here, in its combined manuoeuvres, lay the crowning glory of the vast Grand Fleet. One day a visitor was watching it fight a sham battle against an enemy firing big guns at long range, when up came a real enemy, in the form of a German submarine, much closer than the sham. Of course the visitor turned his glasses on the "sub" and on the destroyers racing after it, like greyhounds slipped from the leash. ”

“ The Normans at last gave England what none of her other Norsemen gave her, the power of becoming the head and heart of the future British Empire. The Celts, Danes, Jutes, and Anglo-Saxons had been fusing together the iron of their natures to make one strong, united British race. The Normans changed this iron into steel: well tempered, stronger than iron could be, and splendidly fit for all the great work of imperial statesmen as well as for that of warriors by land and sea. ”

“ For two thousand years Eastern fleets and armies tried to conquer Europe. Sometimes hundreds of years would pass without an attack. But the result was always the same—the triumph of West over East; and the cause of each triumph was always the same—the sea-power of the West. Without those Western navies the Europe and America we know today could never have existed. There could have been no Greek civilization, no Roman government, no British Empire, and no United States. First, the Persians fought the Greeks at Salamis in 480 B.C. Then Carthage fought Rome more than two hundred years later. ”

“ The Navy is not the whole of British sea-power; for the Merchant Service is the other half. Nor is the Navy the only fighting force on which our liberty depends; for we depend upon the United Service of sea and land and air. Moreover, all our fighting forces, put together, could not have done their proper share toward building up the Empire, nor could they defend it now, unless they always had been, and are still, backed by the People as a whole, by every patriot man and woman, boy and girl. ”

“ And he was now holding this key to the English Channel with the same skill and courage as was shown by the famous Dover Patrol throughout the war against the Germans.
Hubert saw at once that the best way to defend England from invasion was to defeat the enemy at sea by sailing out to meet him. This is as true today as ever. The best possible way of defending yourself always is to destroy the enemy's means of destroying you; and, with us of the British Empire, the only sure way to begin is to smash the enemy's fleet or, if it hides in port, blockade it. ”

“ It was a glorious moment in world-history when British, French, and Americans at last stood side by side. The American Navy led the way, joining the hunt for German submarines with a keenness whetted by having been held back so long. The Army followed, bit by bit, until two million men had gone to Europe, thanks chiefly to the British ships that took them there. The Nation backed both Army and Navy with vast sums of money, which it could so easily afford, and with patriotic work of every splendid kind. ”

“ There never was a better victory nor one more clearly gained by greater skill. Nor has there ever been a victory showing more clearly how impossible it is to keep sea empires safe without a proper navy.
But, after all, it is the whole Sea-Dog war, and not any single battle or campaign, that really made those vast changes in world-history which we enjoy today. For we owe it to the whole Sea-Dog breed that the fair lands of North America are what they are and not as Spain might otherwise have made them. The Sea-Dogs won the English right of entry into Spain's New World. ”

“ Nothing daunted, she went straight on, her pulsing engines making her quiver with the thrilling race for life or death between them. Once abreast of them she fired her guns and torpedoes right and left, sinking two German destroyers, one on each side, and giving the rest as good as she got, till, hit by torpedoes on both sides together, she sank like a stone. Her commander, Loftus Jones, was awarded the second posthumous V.C. for the wonderfully gallant way he fought her till she went down with colours flying. ”

“ The British fleets blockading Germany of course seized and kept for the Government, as spoils of war, whatever warlike stores (guns, shells, and so on) they could lay their hands on. But all the other goods the Navy stopped the Government bought, paying fair market prices. So the American and other neutrals trying to trade with the enemy had really nothing to complain of; for a blockade at sea is very like a siege on land, and nobody has ever pretended that a besieging army has not a perfect right to stop any supplies of any kind from reaching the besieged. ”

“ Of course a raft is a poor, slow, clumsy sort of ship; no ship at all, in fact. But when rafts were the only "ships" in the world there certainly were no trains and nothing like one of our good roads. The water has always had the same advantage over the land; for as horses, trails, carts, roads, and trains began to be used on land, so canoes, boats, sailing ships, and steamers began to be used on water. Anybody can prove the truth of the rule for himself by seeing how much easier it is to paddle a hundred pounds ten miles in a canoe than to carry the same weight one mile over a portage. ”

“ Now, tribute simply means squeezing as much blood-money as possible out of an enslaved country, no matter at what cost of life and liberty to the people there; while trade, though often full of cheating, really means an exchange of goods and some give-and-take all round. When we consider this great difference, and remember how cruel the Spaniards were to all whom they had made their enemies, we can understand why the Spanish Empire died and why the British lives.
One day Queen Elizabeth sent for Drake and spoke her mind straight out. ”