Bennet Copplestone

“ The Maker of Guns and Ships turned on me, this calm, cold man whom I had thought a stranger to emotion. “And whose fault is that? You are a bit of an ass, Copplestone, and inconveniently inquisitive. But you can be useful sometimes. When you come to write of the war at sea, do not wrap yourself up in a tangle of strategy and tactics of which you know very little. Stick to the broad human issues. Reveal the men who fight rather than the ships which are fought with. Think of the Navy as a Service of flesh and blood and soul, no less than of brains and heart. ”

“ Our ships yonder are materially new, the products almost of yesterday, but really they are old, centuries old; they are the expression of a naval soul working, fermenting, always growing through the centuries, always seeking to express itself in machinery. Naval war is an art, the art of men, and where in the world will one find men like ours, officers like ours? Have you ever thought whence come those qualities which one sees glowing every day in our men, from the highest Admiral to the smallest ship boy—have you ever thought whence they come? ”

“ Our Navy has played the great game of war by sea for too many hundreds of years ever to under-rate its foes. It is even more true of the sea than of the land that the one thing sure to happen is that which is unexpected. Until they have measured by their own high standards the quality of an enemy, our officers and men rate him in valour, in sea skill, and in masterful ingenuity as fully the equal of themselves. Until August 1914 the Royal Navy had never fought the German, and had no standards of experience by which to assay him. ”

“ I will, at the peril of some inconsistency, declare my conviction that naval officers haven’t any souls, that they are in the Service because they love it, and not because they care two pins for their country, that they are rather pleased than otherwise when rotten civilians at home get a bad fright from a raid. I will declare that they catch and sink German submarines by all manner of cunning devices, from the sheer zest of sport, and not because they would raise a finger to save the lives of silly passengers in luxurious ocean liners. ”

“ And the Navy men love their Service, not because it is easy but because of the hardness of it, and because of the sacrifices which it exacts from them. It fastens its grip upon them in those first years between fifteen and twenty, and the grip grows ever tighter with the flight of time. It is at its very tightest when the dreadful hour of retirement arrives. When War broke out, in August 1914, it was hailed with joy by the active Navy afloat, but their joy was as water unto wine in comparison with that which transfigured the retired Navy ashore. ”

“ It is a moral atmosphere which cannot be chemically resolved. It is a subtle and elusive compound of tradition, self sacrifice, early training, willing discipline, youth, simplicity, valour, chivalry, lack of imagination, and love of the Service—and the greatest of these is Love. I have tried to indicate what it is, how it has given to this wonderful Navy of ours a terrible unity, a terrible force, and an even more terrible intelligence; how it has transformed a body of men into a gigantic spiritual Power which expresses its might in the forms and means of naval warfare. ”

“ From my county of Devon comes half the Navy of to-day, half the men of the Fleet, be they warrant officers, seamen or engineers. The atmosphere of Devon, soft and sleepy as it may appear to a stranger, is electric with the spirit of Drake, which is the spirit of Nelson, which is the spirit of the boys of Dartmouth. For generation after generation, in the old wooden hulks Britannia and Hindustan, and afterwards in the Naval College on the heights, the cadets during their most impressionable years have breathed in the spirit of the Navy. ”

“ Our ships are better and faster than the German ships, our guns heavier and more accurate than theirs, our gunners more deadly than their gunners, because our Navy has the greater human soul. The Royal Navy is not a collection of lifeless ships and guns imposed upon men by some external power as the Kaiser sought to impose a fleet upon the Germans, a nation of landsmen. The Navy is a matter of machines only in so far as human beings can only achieve material ends by material means. I look upon the ships and guns as secreted by the men just as a tortoise secretes its shell. ”

“ Battleship fighting is not thrilling except for the very few. For nine-tenths of the officers and men it is a quiet, almost dull routine of exact duties. For some of us up in exposed positions in the spotting tops or on the signal bridge, with big shells banging on the armour or bursting alongside in the sea, it becomes mighty wetting and very prayerful. For the still fewer, the real fighters of the ship in the conning tower, it must be absorbingly interesting. But for the true blazing rapture of battle one has to go to the destroyers. ”

“ Naval warfare, viewed in the scattered detail of operations taking place all over the world, is a mightily confusing study; but, if it be analysed and set forth in its essential features, the resultant picture has the clarity and atmosphere of the broad sea horizon itself. There is nothing in naval warfare, as waged by the Royal Navy, of that frightful confusion and grime and clotted horror which has become inseparable from the operations of huge land forces. Sailors live clean lives—except when the poor fellows are coaling ship!—and die clean deaths. ”

“ Though the German Navy had not had time or opportunity to evolve within itself that dominant moral force which I have called a naval Soul, it contained both officers and men of notable fighting quality and efficiency. The Royal Navy no more under-rated the personality of its German opponents than it under-rated their ships and their guns. We English, though in foreign eyes we may appear to be self-satisfied, even bumptious, are at heart rather diffident. No nation on earth publicly depreciates itself as we do; no nation is so willing to proclaim its own weaknesses and follies and crimes. ”

“ Von Spee and his officers and men were gallant enemies, they saw instantly the moment the battle cruisers issued forth, overwhelming in their speed and power, that for themselves and for their squadron the sun had risen for the last time. They had come for sport, the easy capture of the Falkland Islands, but sport had turned upon the instant of staggering surprise to tragedy; nothing remained but to fight and to die as became gallant seamen. ”

“ The range is long, the German shells fired with high elevation fall very steeply, and we are safe except from the ill-luck of heavy projectiles pitching upon our decks. From the signal bridge of the Lion we can see every battle cruiser as it swings, or as it approaches the turning point, we can see the whole beautiful length of them, and we also see a sight which has never before been impressed upon the eyes of man. For we see two splendid battle cruisers struck and sink; first the Indefatigable, and then the Queen Mary. ”

“ Anyone who has ever seen a battleship upon a building slip, and knows how few are the slips which can accommodate them and how few are the builders competent to make them, and how few can build the great guns and gun mountings, will smile at the idea of secret yards and secret construction. Details may be kept secret, as with the first Dreadnought and with many of our super-battleships, but the main dimensions and purpose of a design are glaringly conspicuous to the eyes of the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Service. ”

“ It has always been at a great price, in the sacrifice of ease and in the outpouring of the lives of men, that the Navy has won for itself and for us the freedom of the seas. Those who reckon navies in ships and guns, in weight of metal and in broadside fire, while leaving out of account the spirit and training and devotion of the men, can never understand the Soul of the Navy. For all these material things are the expression of the Soul; they are not the Soul itself. ”

“ To catch boys young, preferably those with the sea tradition in their blood, to teach them during their most impressionable years that the Navy must always be to them as their father, mother and wedded wife—the exacting mistress which demands of them the whole of their affections, energies and service, to dedicate them in tender years to their Sea Goddess—this must always be the way to preserve, in its purest undimmed water, that pearl of great price, the Soul of the Navy. ”

“ From the circumstances of their lives, so largely spent among their fellows at sea or in naval harbours, and from their upbringing in naval homes and training ships, officers and men grow into a class set apart, dedicated as Followers of the Sea, in whose eyes the dwellers in cities appear as silly chatterers and hucksterers, always seeking after some vain thing, be it wealth or rank or fame. The discipline of the Navy is, like its Soul, apart and distinct from anything which we know on land. ”

“ The sun dips and evening comes on; a glorious evening such as one only gets fairly far north in the spring, and a signal comes again, this time: “Raise steam for —— knots and report.” Now one sees smoke pouring forth continuously from the coal-driven ships, and every now and then a great gust of cold oil vapour from the aristocratic new battleships whose fires are fed with oil only.
Dinner in the wardroom starts in a blaze of light and a buzz of talking, and the band plays cheerfully on the half-deck outside. ”

“ The Royal Navy was, and is, as superior to that of Germany in officers and men as in ships and in guns. Indeed the one is the direct and inevitable consequence of the other. Ships and guns are not imposed upon the Navy by some outside intelligence; they are secretions from the brains and experience and traditions of the Service itself; they are the expressions in machinery of its Soul. One always comes back to this fundamental fact when making any comparison of relative values in men or in machines. It was the Navy’s Soul which conceived and made ready the ships and the guns. ”

“ It is the one and only National Service which has always declined to recognise in its practice the British policy of muddling through. It is the one Service with a mind and an iron Soul of its very own. So that when Germany set to work to create out of nothing a navy to compete with our own, she was up against a vast spiritual power which she did not understand, the Soul of the Navy, that unifying dominating force which gives to it an incomparable strength. ”

“ The enemy ship—to those few of the fighting men who can see it—is a spot upon the distant horizon from which spit out at intervals little columns of fire and smoke. There is no sign of a living foe. And upon one’s own ship the attention of everyone is absorbed by mechanical operations—the steam steering gear, the fire control, the hydraulic or electric gun mechanism, the glowing fires down below fed by their buzzing air fans, the softly purring turbines. ”

“ The note of their discipline is “The Service first, last, and all the time.” The Navy resembles somewhat a religious Order, but in the individual subordination of body, heart, brains and soul there is nothing of servitude. The Naval officer is infinitely proud and infinitely humble. Infinitely proud of his Service, infinitely humble in himself. If an officer through error, however pardonable, loses his ship—and very young officers have command of ships—and in the stern, though always sympathetic, judgment of his fellows he must temporarily be put upon the shelf, he does not grumble or repine. ”

“ There is a deep gulf set between the Naval life and all other lives which very few indeed of the Navy ever seek to cross. Their attitude towards civilians is very like that of the law-making statesman of old who said: “The people have nothing to do with the laws except to obey them.” If the Navy troubled to think of civilians at all—it never does unless they annoy it with their futile chatter in Parliament and elsewhere—it would say: “Civilians have nothing to do with the Navy except to pay for it.” ”

“ In civil life there is a horrible waste of youth; it is kept down, largely left unused, by the jealousy of age. But the Navy, which is very wise, makes the most of every hour of it. The small craft, the Fringes of the Fleet as Mr. Kipling calls them, the eyes and ears and guardians of the big ships, the patrol boats, submarines and destroyers, are captained by youngsters under thirty, often under twenty-five. The land crushes youth, the sea allows and encourages its fine flower to expand. Naval warfare is directed by grave men, but is to an enormous extent carried on by bright boys. ”

“ The Navy knows little of excitement or of thrills—it has too much to think about and to do. At Action Stations in a great ship, not one man in ten ever sees anything but the job immediately before him. The enemy, if enemy there be in sight from the spotting tops, is hidden from nine-tenths of the officers and crew by steel walls. So, if even a battle be devoid of thrills—except those painfully vamped up upon paper after the event—a “stunt,” without expectation of battle, becomes the most placid of sea exercises. ”

“ The whole art of successful war is the concentration upon an enemy at a given moment of an overwhelming force and the concentration of that force outside the range of his observation. Both these things were done by the Royal Navy between November 6th and December 8th, 1914, and their fruits were the shattered remains of von Spee’s squadron lying thousands of fathoms deep in the South Atlantic. ”

“ It came home to me that the modern Navy, with its incredibly rapid development in machinery, must have in its executive officers those precious qualities of adaptability and quick perception, that readiness to be always learning and testing, seeking and finding the best new ways of solving old problems, which can only be found in youth. Youth is of the essence of the Navy, it always has been so and it probably always will be. Youth learns quickly, and the Naval officer is always learning. ”

“ All through August and September and right up to the moment when, late in October, Turkey was forced into the war by German pressure, our Foreign Office hugged the belief—God alone knows how acquired—that diplomatic pressure at Constantinople could counteract the display of successful force embodied in the frowning guns of the Goeben and the Breslau. In the eyes of a non-maritime people two modern warships within easy gunshot of their chief city are of more pressing consequence than the Grand Fleet far away. ”