Sir H. H. Bashford

“ Beneath the Dover Barrage, the North Sea minefields, and the Straits of Otranto lay their dead submarines. Trapped by Q ships, rammed by destroyers, sunk by armed merchantmen, they had lost scores of others—more than two hundred in all had been put out of action by the Allied navies—while the spirit of admiralty that they had challenged, and the fringe of whose code they had been unable to grasp, had so ordered the ways of the world's free peoples that, even on land, they were reeling before them. ”

“ In Lord Kitchener there had come to the War Office the foremost soldier of the Empire, the man who had been recalled by an irresistible popular appeal from the governorship of Egypt, in whose name the new armies, voluntarily recruited from every social rank, had outrun equipment, ammunition, even places to be lodged in—a man who already, in his sixty-fourth year, had become an almost legendary figure, the liberator of the Sudan, Roberts' successor in South Africa, the administrator of India and Egypt, omnivorous of work, relentless, silent, and the public's beau-ideal of personal efficiency. ”

“ At that time the Leipzig and Nürnberg were well in view, with the Dresden almost out of sight on the horizon—the Leipzig on the starboard bow, nearer at hand, and being engaged by the Glasgow, and a moment afterward by the Cornwall, and the Nürnberg away to port and considerably more distant. Then came the order to pursue the latter, the Leipzig being given a salvo or two in passing; and it was then that there began the race that was destined to become traditional in every engine-room of the navy. With no coal to spare, everything combustible was crammed into her long-suffering furnaces. ”

“ Always ready, at first hand, to examine the ideas of his most junior officers, invariably loyal to them, and caring nothing for personal dignity so that the war might be won in the speediest fashion, it was little wonder not only that he was idolized by all who served under him, but that his British colleagues could have asked for no more able or inspiring a helper. ”

“ So the night passed, never to be forgotten by any who lived through it, and, for only too many, slipping benumbed off rafts and wreckage into the water, or going down in the roar of explosions, the last night of all. "When a battleship is hit and seriously damaged," afterward wrote the famous American, Admiral Dewey, "there is no way of knowing whether or not she is about to sink. It may be possible that she will remain afloat for hours, or that she may not sink at all. Her purpose is to continue to damage the enemy to the greatest possible extent. ”

“ Hammered by modern artillery, the world had seen such strongholds as those of Liège, Namur, and Antwerp, crumbling to pieces in a few hours, and theories were once more in the melting-pot. Since the outbreak of war, too, there had been added to the navy, in the 15-inch guns of the Queen Elizabeth, the most powerful marine artillery that the world had yet seen. Could the navy then tackle the problem alone? ”

“ From the attackers' point of view nothing could have happened more fortunately; but now, by one of those sea-whims that nothing could have foretold, a sudden fog descended upon the scene and threatened to baulk the whole plan. As though they had been blinded by some perverse agent, the destroyers and motor-boats found themselves in darkness, hidden from each other, as they were hidden from the Vindictive, and with their flares and searchlights unavailing. ”

“ Though both vessels must, he knew, have been badly crippled, von Spee was unaware, of course, of their real condition, and had ordered his light cruisers to chase and attack them, himself crossing the British line, and turning his course northward.
Meanwhile the Monmouth, staggering along in the darkness, and slowly sinking by the head, was in touch with the Glasgow—the neighbourhood of the enemy and the state of the sea rendering any assistance from the latter impossible. The Glasgow herself had had an almost miraculous escape, not only from destruction, but even from serious damage. ”

“ A single final shot fired from a sinking ship may be the blow that will turn the tide of battle and the destiny of empires. The damaged battleship, therefore, continues to fight. The men remain in the fire room, in the turrets, at their guns. Every man continues that particular job which is his in fighting the ship as long as she may strike a blow. It therefore happens that, when a battleship goes down, there is practically nobody on deck, and there is no man who may leave his post in time to put on a lifebelt or launch a raft. Quite naturally, every man dies with the ship. ”

“ Fighting more stubbornly than ever against every attempt to make it an appanage of Europe, the eyes of England began to turn more and more constantly to those just-discovered realms with their incalculable future. In the imagination of the Celt, the organizing power of the Roman, the tenacity of the Saxon, the daring of the Norman, and in the sea-lore of them all, it seemed that Fate had been slowly forging a new instrument for the new task. ”

“ Deprived, like prisoners in a closed chamber, of the oxygen necessary for life—the economic oxygen that could alone be drawn from the free oceans of the world, they had come to a point where the only choice lay between surrender and extinction. Defeated at Jutland so decisively that, as their leaders well knew, those sea-windows could never be opened by the efforts of their surface ships, their campaign under water had failed with equal completeness. ”

“ But it must never be forgotten that, for nearly four years, the Dover Patrol carried on its work with the hostile ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend always within three hours' steaming. Darkness is the friend of the destroyer, daylight the friend of the submarine. Both were stationed at these enemy ports; and the strain upon the Dover command can thus be gauged. Further, it has to be remembered that through no other channel in the world passes so continual a procession of ships, how integral in the life of this country let a single incident suffice to show. ”

“ Both the destroyers sunk were four-funnelled vessels of the fastest and latest German type; two others had been crippled; and over a hundred men and officers taken prisoners. When the Broke rammed, as her helmsman had said, "I smiled for the first time during the action"—and that smile may be taken as representative not only of both ships' companies but of the town of Dover on that April morning, when the two destroyers, saluted by everything in the harbour, modestly crept to their buoys. ”

“ If the navy, that was to say, could force itself unaided into the Sea of Marmora and shell Constantinople, troops that would be very valuable elsewhere need not be diverted to a new theatre of war; a great deal of tonnage would be saved at a time when the pressure on our mercantile marine was everywhere immense, while, if it were unsuccessful, such an attack could be abandoned, it was thought, without much damage to our prestige. ”

“ To the smaller vessels were allotted patrol-duties at the mouth of the Mediterranean, local convoy work, and convoy work with vessels bound to and from the Azores. Far less sea-worthy than the larger vessels, and, as regarded the yachts, not intended for war-service, theirs were, perhaps, the hardest tasks of all and as little dramatic as those of the others. Precisely in the same spirit, however, of cheerful grumbling as that of their sea-loving British brethren, the officers and men of these heterogeneous vessels set themselves to compass their various tasks. ”

“ Grey as steel from vault to horizon but for a single wavering streak of blue, there seemed little prospect in the sky overhead of the fine day that the sailors had foretold; and nothing could have been more sombre than the early morning scene when, without ceremony and almost unnoticed, the Royal Yacht, with the King on board, left her berth in the Dockyard. Picking her course slowly past the Sally Port, {5} so beloved by Marryat, she steamed through the choppy waters to her place at the head of the great fleet ”

“ Placed as it was, the German navy could scarcely be brought to action against its own will, and the deployment in line of battle of so great a fleet in the North Sea—notably in its restricted southern area—would have been a matter of the greatest difficulty even on a clear day. It was Beatty's task, therefore, to lure the enemy, should he be encountered, into the arms of the Battle Fleet; and, for that reason, he had to be strong enough to engage considerable hostile forces, and yet not so strong as to scare them home again. He had to be swift enough to chase, but also swift enough to run away ”

“ Try and imagine a frail destroyer steaming thirty knots, with four battle-cruisers on either side belching forth flame and smoke continually, the screech of the {96} projectiles flying overhead seeming to tear the very air into ribbons, 12-inch shells dropping perilously near, and raising columns of water a hundred feet into the air, a few yards away, the spray washing our decks and drenching all hands. ”

“ Saxons and Jutes and Angles, they had all been coast-dwellers upon the Weser, the Elbe, and the Ems, the sea-banks between them, and the tongue of land dividing the Baltic from the North Sea; and, while a certain number of them had already become settlers in Britain, attracted by its prosperity under Roman rule, the majority had been pirates, with an established reputation as amongst the bravest and fiercest of ocean-adventurers. ”

“ Watching the deck of the Mainz through his powerful glasses, he was at first completely puzzled by two things—the absence of corpses and the enormous profusion of deck-sponges soaked in blood. It was not for some time {40} that he began to realize that the one accounted for the other. "Enough said," he wrote, "a six-inch projectile does not kill a man nor even dismember him; it simply scatters him." ”

“ Time after time, by the resource of our fishermen, of sea-loving undergraduates, of amateurs of all sorts, what might have been disasters of the first magnitude were averted or overcome. Between the navy proper, with its thousands of other problems, and these new and insidious dangers—the laying of minefields by apparently innocent neutrals, the ever-present activities of enemy submarines—the courage, the cunning, the native sea-instinct of these otherwise untrained forces was the buffer. The fishermen of Galilee became fishers of men. ”

“ Just as in most recent naval campaigns conducted by other countries, it had been considered advisable for the leader in war to have come fresh from staff work at headquarters, so it had been felt in England that the admiral commanding the Fleet in action must be not only a sea-officer of high standing, but one with a more intimate knowledge of the general strategical position than it had been possible for an officer so long afloat to acquire. ”

“ Six and a half million tons of shipping in all the seas of the world were thus almost instantly immobilized. Further, every German colony, but for its wireless, was isolated from its centre and prepared for capture; while of the two million men of enemy origin who might otherwise have returned home to join the armies, scarcely a handful—such was the navy's mastery—was, in fact, able to do so. Lastly, not a single Dominion, Colony, or Dependency of Great Britain or her Allies was invaded or seriously molested by an enemy naval force. ”

“ By this time, the Arethusa, the Fearless, and the advanced destroyer flotillas had been in action almost continuously for more than six hours; the Arethusa's speed, owing to her injuries, was slowly diminishing knot by knot; upon the bridge of the little Laurel, Commander Frank Rose, with both his legs crippled, still kept his post; three German cruisers and two destroyers, including the commodore in command, were known to have been sunk; and, behind the mists in the Bight, nothing was more likely than that overwhelming reinforcements were hurrying to the spot. ”

“ There was scarcely a cottage, for instance, even in the remotest highlands, in which the picture of a ship did not hang upon the walls, or that had failed to send a son or a brother or a cousin to serve either in the navy or the mercantile marine. Even in the greyest and most smoke-laden of our central industrial cities, wherever there was a pond, the children sailed their little boats upon it; and, once a year, as to some lustral rite, the town-bred inhabitant took his family to the coast. ”

“ Following the Lion and her consorts came the light cruisers, and after these the destroyers and submarines, each of the latter submerging and rising to the surface again as she came abreast of the Victoria and Albert, while, to complete the picture, and to foreshadow the enormous development of aerial power in the years immediately to follow, each accompanying aeroplane and seaplane dipped in the air by way of salute. ”

“ Creeping toward the viaduct, with his little crew on deck, he had made straight for an aperture between the steel-covered piles, and to the blank amazement and apparent paralysis of the Germans crowded upon the viaduct, had rammed in the submarine up to her conning-tower before lighting the fuse that was to start the explosion. ”

“ Considered in the light of after events, indeed, no action of the war seems to have depended less on human prevision, or to have been so determined by natural forces and a leisurely and inscrutable destiny. From the beginning, the odds were against Cradock, just as, six weeks later, they were against von Spee; and when the Glasgow, the first to sight the enemy, saw the four funnels of the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, there could have been little doubt, save for extraordinary good luck, of the final issue of the battle. ”