Sea battle

“ A sea fight and a sack, battle and plunder and torch, a flight seaward in the long ships to escape destruction upon the rocks, and a killing strain and struggle against the frosty, foundering seas—who, then, should know aught or mark a stranger woman in her hour with her feet fast set on the way of death? ”

“ Such is battle! and he who rushes into it, impelled by other than the highest motives, perils more than life in the encounter. It is a glorious privilege to fight for one’s country; but, the seaman or the soldier who strikes for lucre or ambition, is an unworthy combatant. As the day advanced, the weather became tempestuous; huge clouds, swollen with rain, rose in rapid succession, and sweeping over, discharged themselves in heavy gusts. A mist of varying density, wreathed along the coast, was here and there disparted by a bold promontory, or sharp projecting rock. ”

“ And an enemy baffled by English strength, turned from an East Coast raid.
⁠They'll know they travel because men fought
⁠And skilfully handled what strong men wrought.
Thousands who never have seen the sea, or the great grey steel-clad forms,
Or the lithe black shapes of the smaller craft, or the scud of the North Sea storms,
Will talk of armour and shells and guns, and the battle by Horn Reef light,
And of sunken ships and of brave deeds done in the hours of a short May night.
⁠No song and no dance!—but they've lost the fear
⁠Of losing their maids and their baccy and beer. ”

“ Hopeless of victory—
Daring unequal strife,
Valuing more than life
Honor and chivalry.
Forth from the harbor's room
Rushing to meet thy doom,
Lit by the day's clear light.
"Out to the waters free!
Out to the open sea!
There should a sailor fight."
Where the red battle's roar
Beats on the rocky shore,
Thunders proclaiming
How the great cannon's breath
Hurls forth a dreadful death,
Smoking and flaming.
While her guns ring and flash,
See each frail vessel dash,
Though our shots rend her,
Swift through the iron rain,
Bearing the flag of Spain,
Scorning surrender. ”

“ There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the noble, terrifying, and picturesque conditions of some of our sea-fights. Hawke’s battle in the tempest, and Aboukir at the moment when the French Admiral blew up, reach the limit of what is imposing to the imagination. And our naval annals owe some of their interest to the fantastic and beautiful appearance of old warships and the romance that invests the sea and everything sea-going in the eyes of English lads on a half-holiday at the coast. ”

“ Battle and siege are thus in essence complementary modes of war and all military action may roughly be defined as fighting, or some method of postponing fighting, or steps or preparations towards fighting.
SEA WAR
War at sea is carried on, as we have seen, by naval fleets. The immediate object of a fleet is to find, defeat, and destroy the enemy’s fleet. The ultimate or further objective which is gained by such destruction is to monopolize the use of the sea, as the master highway, by retaining51 freedom for the passage of the victor’s ships while denying such passage to those of the defeated. ”

“ They stand to the deck through the battle’s wreck, when the great shells roar and screech—
And never they fear; when the foe is near, to practice what they preach:
But, off with your hat, and three times three, for the war-ship’s true-blue sons,
The men who batter the foe—my Boys—the men behind the guns.
Oh, light and merry of heart are they, when they swing into port, once more,
When, with more than enough of the “green-backed stuff,” they start for their leave-o’-shore ”

“ If the sea force of the side possessing command includes means of engaging stationary defences with success, and removing passive sea defences from the approaches to the enemy’s coast and harbours, then it can even beat down the enemy’s coast protection and invade him directly. ”

“ In all ages the naval commander who sought to achieve his purpose by avoiding battle went to disaster. The true objective must be, now as always, the destruction of the enemy's fleet.
Such are the material and the spiritual essentials of sea power. ”

“ The swirl of the sea and the tide, and the force of the gale, drive the boat far away to leeward; the men hoist her sails again, heave her to, and then try to stay her, and make in again directly for the wreck; but she misses stays, as the seas come rushing over her, and they have to wear her round. They battle on, and are speedily ready for their third attempt, thankful to find that the poor labouring wreck is still afloat. ”

“ And although the fighting by sea and land went on for ten years after Trafalgar had given to us the supreme control of the world’s seas, there were no more naval battles. Battles at sea are very rare because, when fought out, they are so crushingly decisive. This characteristic feature of the great naval battle has been greatly emphasised by modern conditions. Upon land armies have outgrown the very earth itself; fighting frontiers have become lines of trenches ”

“ We are minded to watch them prepare for battle, and even accompany them into the fight, noting the activities, the perils, and the hardships of the seamen, the clever tactics, the moves and counter-moves, the customs of the sea and of the ship especially. Over boundless, deep-furrowed oceans not sighting land for weeks; or in short coasting voyages hurrying from headland to headland before impending tempest ”

“ For a country like ours to know every part of the sea's bottom is highly important, because in a naval battle, say somewhere round the coast of the Mauritius, or in coral seas of the far Pacific ocean, the side that had the best charts of reefs and deep water would almost surely manoeuvre the enemy into a tight corner, from which there would be no exit. ”

“ In the later days when war and strife had brought the Golden Age to an end, battle ships that could navigate the air had to a great extent replaced the battle ships at sea—having naturally proved far more powerful engines of destruction. ”

“ Several sailors, sheltered behind the curved bottoms of their boats, were watching this battle of the sky and the sea. ”

“ It is regarded as a disaster, and at once somebody, it is assumed, must be to blame. This is hard measure on the seaman. Surely, an admiral, he tells us, has a greater claim upon the generosity of his countrymen than a general. “His warfare is almost76 entirely novel. Scarcely one had ever had any experience of sea fighting. ”

“ As it was desirable to employ the greatest number of men in fighting, and as few as might be aloft, while it was obviously convenient to diminish to the utmost the surface presented to an enemy's fire, it was a practice imposed by the conditions of sea battles to go into action with a diminished spread of sail. ”

“ I'd rather starve to death in the sweet air, or drown in the brave, salt sea, or have one fierce glad hour of battle, and then a bullet, than lead the life of a brute in a stinking hell, and gasp out my broken breath at last on a pauper's pallet. ”

“ The attacking fleet would divide and re-unite, break up and vanish, amazingly reappear. The longer the defender's coast the more wretched his lot. Never before in the world's history was the command of the sea worth what it is now. ”

“ Then the creatures of the high air answered to the battle, foretelling the destruction that would be done that day; and the sea chattered of the losses, and the waves gave heavy shouts keening them, and the water-beasts roared to one another, and the rough hills creaked with the danger of the battle, and the woods trembled mourning the heroes, and the grey stones cried out at their deeds, and the wind sobbed telling them, and the earth shook, foretelling the slaughter; and the cries of the grey armies put a blue cloak over the sun, and the clouds were dark; ”

“ The awful force and roar of the wind, the violent pitching and rolling, the absolute darkness outside, the puny efforts of the big, powerful ship and its apparent helplessness, added to the fact that we knew we were in an unknown position in a sea in many places uncharted and dotted with coral reefs and islands,—all convinced us that we were in the immediate presence of the Great Adventure and that only the guidance of the Divine Hand could succor us. ”

“ For the crowds of dead bodies, and likewise the fragments of shields and spears, bestrewed the entire gulf of the sea, and tossed on the tide, so that the harbours were not only straitened, but stank. The vessels stuck, hampered amid the corpses. They could neither thrust off with oars, nor drive away with poles, the rotting carcases that floated around, or prevent, when they had put one away, another rolling up and driving against the fleet. You would have thought that a war had arisen with the dead, and there was a strange combat with the lifeless. ”

“ Others might control for a time a continent; only those who command the sea can dispose of the destinies of the world.
But while an essential factor in world-power, the command of the sea is not its sum; and the war throughout its course illustrated the weakness of attack by sea against a well-defended coast. ”

“ Eight of their kind may protrude from the decks of a great battleship like the Queen Elizabeth, and, as the round breech of one of them is swung back, like the door of a safe, and you look down the shining and tapering barrel to the far-off mouth, it is easy to imagine that the grey waters of the North Sea are heaving beyond it, while the enemy ships are lying on the edge of the horizon, in their low visibility against a misty sky. ”

“ As before, the sea received the tumbling maze of spars, rigging, and sails; the vessel surging at the same instant, from its recumbent position, and rolling far and heavily to windward.
"She rights! she rights!" exclaimed twenty voices which had been mute, in a suspense that involved life and death.
"Keep her dead away!" added the calm but authoritative voice of the young commander. "Stand by to furl the fore-top-sail—let it hang a moment to drag the ship clear of the wreck—cut, cut—cheerily, men—hatchets and knives—cut with all, and cut off all!" ”

“ It was no wonder that the attack and defence of fortified places assumed large importance in the eyes of the British people. The command of the sea held by the allied powers was so complete and all-pervading that no one stopped to think what the course of hostilities would have been without it, any more than men stop to think what the course of any particular business would be if there were no atmosphere to breathe in. Not a single allied soldier had been delayed on passage by the hostile fleet; not a single merchant vessel belonging to the allies had been captured by a hostile cruiser. ”

“ Fierce the storm of battle pours:
But unmoved as ocean's rock,
When the tempest round it roars,
Every seaman breasts the shock,
Boldly stepping where his brave messmates fall.
O'er his head, full oft and loud,
Like the vulture in a cloud,
As it cuts the twanging shroud,
Screams the ball.
Before the siroc blast
From its iron caverns driven,
Drops the sear'd and shiver'd mast,
By the bolt of battle riven,
And higher heaps the ruin of the deck—
As the sailor, bleeding, dies,
To his comrades lifts his eyes,
"Let our flag still wave," he cries,
O'er the wreck. ”

“ Only a handful of men at bay, while mass after mass of the enemy came down upon them like the waves of the incoming tide upon the sea shore; and as at times a rock-bound coast gives way and falls before the encroaching advances of the ocean, so that ill-fated square gave way before the overwhelming numbers of the soldiers of the Prophet, and in a moment all chance for our men seemed over. ”

“ The occupants of an open boat five miles away would not have known that the most deadly sea-fight ever waged since men had first gone down to the sea in ships was being fought out under that smiling May-day sky. ”

“ We want at once a navy for our rivers and creeks and bays and sounds; a navy consisting chiefly of vessels that, for the most part, will only be required to keep the sea for a few days at a time.” These ships would be so small as to present little more than a feather-edge as a target to the enemy, and therefore be more invulnerable than the best shot-proof men-of-war. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It being late, the galleys did not engage until this morning. You must imagine what my feelings were to see our three little men-of-war going on to the attack of these three vessels, who have spread terror on our coast, and who were drawn up in order of battle; but the weight of our metal soon damped the courage of these heroes, who soon took to their boats; and as many as could, abandoned the vessel with everything on board, of which we immediately took possession. What is extraordinary, we have not one man hurt. ”

“ Unless, therefore, we are to be content to leave our ocean routes, where most crowded and therefore most vulnerable, to the mercy of an enemy, we must have cruisers to meet the hostile cruisers. If we still adhere to our localised defence, we shall have two distinct kinds of force—-one provided merely for local, and consequently restricted, action; the other able to act near the shore or far out at sea as circumstances may demand. ”

“ All along the main deck there were groups of men standing in almost total darkness, waiting at the gun tackles for the signal to run out the guns. The feeble glimmer of the fighting-lanterns shone on the glistening arms and bodies of half-naked seamen, who stood in almost deathlike silence listening to the shouts of their unseen foes. ”