A Fleet in Being

‘That’s what they always do. When I was in – ’

And one went on to tell of other Manœuvres in which he had apparently taken a leading part, while we jogged Southward behind the Powerful as far as the Eastern entrance to Berehaven. But there were no battleships in Bantry Bay. They had gone on to target practice, and presently we cruisers dispersed among the headlands for the same business, with orders to rendezvous a few miles South of the Fastnet, that well-worn mile-post of the Transatlantic liner.

ALMOST INFERNAL MOBILITY

No description will make you realise the almost infernal mobility of a Fleet at sea. I had seen ours called, to all appearance, out of the deep; split in twain at a word, and, at a word, sent skimming beyond the horizon; strung out as vultures string out patiently in the hot sky above a dying beast; flung like a lasso; gathered anew as a riata is coiled at the saddle bow; dealt out card-fashion over fifty miles of green table; picked up, shuffled, and redealt as the game changed. I had seen cruisers flown like hawks, ridden like horses at a close finish, and manœuvred like bicycles; but the wonder of their appearance and disappearance never failed. The Powerful spoke, and in ten minutes the cruiser-squadron had vanished; each ship taking her own matches and sulphur to make a hell of her own. And what that hell might be if worked at full power I could, presently, guess as we swung round a headland, and the bugles began. At this point the gunner became a person of importance (in the Navy each hour of the day has its king), and the captains of the guns separated themselves a little from the common herd. Remember, we were merely a third-class cruiser, capable, perhaps, of slaying destroyers in a heavy sea, but meant for the most part to scout and observe. Our armament consisted of eight four-inch quick-fire wire guns, the newest type – two on the foc’sle, four in the waist, and two on the poop, alternating with as many three-pounder Hotchkiss quick-firers. Three Maxims adorned the low nettings. Their water-jackets were filled up from an innocent tin-pot before the game began. It looked like slaking the thirst of devils.

MAN-SLAYING DEVILTRIES

We found an eligible rock, the tip of a greyish headland, peopled by a few gulls – the surge creaming along its base – and a portion of this we made our target, that we might see the effect of the shots and practise the men at firing on a water-line. Up came the beautiful solid brass cordite cartridges; and the four-inch shells that weigh twenty-five pounds apiece. (The little three-pounders, as you know, have their venomous shell and charge together like small-arm ammunition.) The filled belts of the Maxims were adjusted, and all these man-slaying deviltries waked to life and peered over the side at the unsuspecting gulls. It was ‘still’ throughout the ship – still as it will be when the Real Thing arrives. From the upper bridge I could hear, above the beat of the engines, the click of the Lieutenants’ scabbards (Why should men who need every freedom in action be hampered by an utterly useless sword?); the faint clink of a four-inch breech swung open; the crisper snick of the little Hotchkiss’s falling-block; and an impatient sewing-machine noise from a Maxim making sure of its lock-action. On his platform over my head the Navigating Officer was giving the ranges to the rock.

‘Two thousand seven hundred yards, sir.’

‘Two thousand seven hundred yards,’ – the order passed from gun to gun – ‘ten knots right deflection – starboard battery.’ The gun-captains muzzled the rubber-faced shoulder-pieces, and the long lean muzzles behind the shields shifted fractionally.

‘Try a sighting shot with that three-pounder!’

The smack of cordite is keener, and catches one more about the heart, than the slower-burning black powder. There was a shrillish gasping wail – exactly like the preliminary whoop of an hysterical woman – as the little shell hurried to the target; and a puff of dirty smoke on the rock-face sent the gulls flying. So far as I could observe there was not even a haze round the lips of the gun. Till I saw the spent case jerked out I did not know which of the clean, precise, and devilish four had spoken.

WHEN THE REAL THING COMES

‘Two thousand four hundred,’ the voice droned overhead, and the starboard bow four-inch quick-firer opened the ball. Again no smoke; again the song of the shell – not a shriek this time, but a most utterly mournful wail. Again the few seconds suspense (what will they be when the Real Thing comes?) and a white star on the target. The cruiser winced a little, as though some one had pinched her.

Before the next gun had fired, the empty cartridges cylinder of the first was extracted, and by some sleight of hand I could not see the breech had closed behind a full charge. A Martini-Henri could hardly have been reloaded more swiftly.

‘Two thousand three hundred,’ cried the reader of that day’s lessons, and we fell seriously to work; high shriek and low wail following in an infernal fugue, through which, with no regard for decency, the Maxims quacked and jabbered insanely. The rock was splintered and ripped and gashed in every direction, and great pieces of it bounded into the sea.

‘Two thousand one hundred.’

‘Good shot. Oh, good shot! That was a water-liner… That was the Marines’ three-pounder. Good!.. Ah – ah! Bad. Damn bad! Short! Miles short! Who fired that shot?’

A shell had burst short of the mark, and the captain of that gun was asked politely if he supposed Government supplied him with three-pound shell for the purpose of shooting mackerel.

And so we went on, till the big guns had fired their quota and the Maxims ran out in one last fiends’ flurry, and target-practice for the month was over. The rock that had been grey was white, and a few shining cartridge-cases lay beside each gun.

SQUIRTING DEATH THROUGH A HOSE

Then the horror of the thing began to soak into me. What I had seen was a slow peddling-out of Admiralty allowance for the month, and it seemed to me more like squirting death through a hose than any ordinary gun-practice. What will it be when all the ammunition-hoists are working, when the Maxims’ water-jacket puffs off in steam; when the three-pounder charges come up a dozen at a time to be spent twenty to the minute; when the sole limit of four-inch fire is the speed with which the shells and cases can be handled? What will it be when the Real Thing is upon us?

And the smiling, careless faces answered with one merry accord: ‘Hell! Every kind of Hell! But– things will happen.’

In ancient days there was an etiquette in sea battles. No line-of-battle ship fired at a frigate unless the latter deliberately annoyed her. Then she blew the frigate out of the water. What will be the etiquette next time? Suppose a cruiser met a battleship with one set of engines unusable crawling along at eight knots. Would she jackal the lame thing and tempt her into wasting ammunition? It is a risky game to play with sides no thicker than an average tea-tray; but under circumstances it might be lucrative. Would she – and a fast cruiser can do this – try to rush her by night, destroyer-fashion? At the beginning of the war she might do all sorts of things; at the end of it she would take exactly that kind of liberty which experience of the other side’s personnel had shown to be moderately safe. There is no saying what she could or could not do in heavy weather, and Navies that do not like heavy weather; tumble-home boats unused to working in a sea; a beaky and a plated Navy, with big tops that roll and strain, might suffer.

Therefore we must pray for foul weather, head-seas and steep swells, gale that bewilders, cold that numbs, and small fine rain that blinds, chills, and dispirits. Our men know them.

MEN WHO TAKE THEIR CHANCES

Under these conditions the possibilities of a good sea-boat are almost illimitable, given always the men who know how to handle her – the men who will take their chances. And as in the Army so in the Navy runs the unwritten Law: ‘You must not imperil the property of the taxpayer committed to your charge or you will be publicly broke; but if you do not take every risk you can and more also you will be broke in the estimation of your fellows. Your men will not love you, and you will never get on.’ To do him justice the junior officer steers a very fair line between the two councils. Thanks to our destroyers, which give him an independent command early in his career, he studies a little ingenuity and artifice. They are young on the destroyers – the chattering black decks are no place for the middle-aged – they have learned how to handle 200ft. of shod death that cover a mile in two minutes, turn in their own length, and leap to racing speed almost before a man knows he has signalled the engine-room. In these craft they risk the extreme perils of the sea and make experiments of a kind that would not read well in print. It would take much to astonish them when, at the completion of their command, they are shifted, say, to a racing cruiser. They have been within spitting distance of collision and bumping distance of the bottom; they have tested their craft in long-drawn Channel gales, not grudgingly or of necessity because they could not find harbour, but because they ‘wanted to know, don’t you know;’ and in that embroilment have been very literally thrown together with their men.

ENOUGH TO SOBER ULYSSES

This makes for hardiness, coolness of head, and above all resource. You realise it when you hear the dear boys talk among themselves. The Naval man’s experience begins early, and by the time he has reached his majority a Sub-Lieutenant should have seen enough to sober Ulysses. But he utterly refuses to be sobered. There is no case on record of a depressed Sub. It takes three of him to keep one Midshipman in order; but the combined strength of the Assistant Engineer, the Doctor, and the Paymaster will not subdue one Sub-Lieutenant. He goes his joyous way, impartially and picturesquely criticising his elders and his betters; diverse, undulating, and irrepressible. But when he stands on the bridge at midnight and essays to keep the proper distance in front of the next steel ram dreamily muttering through the water, ten knots an hour, two hundred yards behind him – why then the Sub sweats big drops till he gets used to it. Let us suppose he is third in a line of four, that the hour is near midnight, and he has been on watch since eight. So far, we have kept our distance beautifully: we have even sneered at the next line a mile away to the right, where they have once or twice been ‘all over the shop.’ In twenty minutes there will come relief, a bowl of hot cocoa, three pulls at a pipe, and blessed bed. The Sub watches the speed-lights of the next ahead, for as those lanterns change so must he adjust his pace. But the next ahead is using up all the basest coal she can find, and the wind blows not less than two million samples of it into his straining eyes. He has – he had – the distance absolutely correct; he would swear to it. The Quartermaster by the tiny wheel half heaves up one big shoulder. Till that moment he has given no sign of life. The Sub’s heel taps impatiently on the planking; his mouth hovers over the engine-room voice tube; his lips open to speak to the Quartermaster in case – in case it should be necessary to sheer out of line; for something has gone wrong with the next ahead. She has badly overrun her station, and sheers to the left of our leading ship. The Sub wipes the cinders out of his left eye and says something.

NOW BEGINS THE FUN

Now begins the fun. The leading ship has slowed a certain number of revolutions – say, from ten knots to nine and a half; but she has not changed her speed-lights in time. We slide out to the right of our next ahead, swiftly and quietly. And now we must all mark time, as it were, till our leader straightens herself. That which was a line has suddenly become a town on the waters; representing roughly three-quarters of a million sterling in value, ten thousand tons weight, and eight hundred lives. Our next ahead lies on our port bow, and – oh, horror! – our next astern is alongside of us. Heaven send that the Captain may not choose this hour to wake. The Sub has slowed her down to eighty-five, but engines are only engines after all, and they cannot obey on the instant. Meantime we can see into the chart-room of her that should have lain behind us. A Navigating Lieutenant sprawled half over the table, cap tilted over forehead to keep out the glare of the lamp, is poring on a chart; we can hear the officer of the watch on her bridge speaking to his Quartermaster, and there comes over to us a whiff of Navy tobacco. She is slowing – she has slowed with a vengeance, and when ships slow too much they lose steerage-way, and, what is far worse, they wake the Captain. This strikes the Sub with lurid clearness; but the impetus of the recent ten knots is on us all, and we are all going much faster than we think. Again his foot taps the deck.

ARE THEY NEVER GOING TO SLOW?

Are they never going to slow in the engine-room? The pointer on the dial before the Quartermaster moves through some minute arc, and our head falls off to the left. It is excessively lonely on this high and lofty bridge, and the spindle-shaped hull beneath looks very unmanageable. Our next ahead draws away slowly from our port bow, and we continue at a safe distance to starboard of her. The line is less of a lump and more of a diagonal than it was. Our next astern is sliding back to where she belongs. Now, two revolutions at a time, the Sub lets us out till he sees our erring sister ahead return to her place, and joyfully slinks in behind her. The Sub mops his heated brow, thanking Heaven that the Captain didn’t wake up, and that the tangle was straightened before the end of the watch. But speed-lights unless properly handled – as ours are handled – are, he doubts not, an invention of the Devil. So, also, is the Fleet; so are all cruisers; and the sea and everything connected therewith.

Now comes the judgment! Our leader, of course, cannot signal back down her line, but the signal must be repeated from the leading ship of the line to starboard. Thus, you see, we read it diagonally. A dull glow breaks out at the mast-head of that transmitter of wiggings – and a wigging it is for somebody – a wigging in drunken winks – long and short ones – irresistibly comic if you don’t happen to be in the Service. Once again we are saved. The avenging electric spells out the name of our next ahead, a second-class cruiser – and then – ‘Why don't you keep station?’ Let us thank God for second-class cruisers and all other lightning-conductors!

The middle watch comes up; the Sub demands of the stars and the deep profound about him: ‘Who wouldn’t sell a farm and go to sea?’ descends the bridge in one light-hearted streak, and three minutes later is beautifully asleep, the ship’s kitten purring under his left ear. But the Captain was awake all the time. The change of speed roused him, and he lay watching the tell-tale compass overhead, his mouth at the bridge voice-tube; one eye cocked through the open port, and one leg over the edge of the bunk – in case. The Sub must learn his business by himself – must find confidence in isolation precisely as the Captain did a quarter of a century ago. It is not good for him to know that he is being watched.

Next morning the Captain makes a casual allusion to ‘massed fleets in line of sixes and sevens.’ ‘It was our next ahead, sir,’ says the Sub deferentially. ‘Yes, it was the next ahead when I was a Sub,’ is the reply. ‘I know that next ahead.’ Then the wardroom, to whom the Sub has been confiding the success of his manœuvres, ask him whether he got to windward of the ‘owner’ – much.

HOW THE SUB GETS LEARNING

And that is one of the ways in which youth gets learning. On a big battleship, they tell me, the Sub is little better than the Midshipmen he despises. He lives in the gun-room, he goes to school, he is sent on errands, and if he is good he is allowed to preserve discipline while a fraction of the decks are being washed. But on a third-class cruiser he is a watch-officer, an ornament of the ward-room, pitched into responsibility, and he enjoys himself, as I have tried to show.

CHAPTER III

Apropos of signals – to go on where I left off – we were to have more than enough of them after target-practice. We finished first of all the cruisers, and went on to our rendezvous the Fastnet, but if we had listened to the passenger – he wanted to lower a boat and investigate the shattered rock – we should have been spared many sorrows. But we were zealous, Mr. Simple, and we went to the Fastnet; and it was hazy, and through the haze we heard a horrible elemental moaning that should have warned us. The battleships which we had not found at Bantry were scattered about those waters at their practice. Then I remembered that a twelve-inch gun discharges a projectile weighing some 800lb. and ranging about ten miles. And we went to the rendezvous encircled by these deep mutterings of invisible monsters, and behold! we came slap on the Flagship, who was running torpedoes. Any other of the big ones would not have mattered, but our luck sent us to the Flag. There was a feeling of calamity in the thick air, and I know one man who was not in the least relieved when she signalled: ‘Where are you bound?’ We replied we were waiting as ordered on that spot, for the rest of the cruisers, and remained in a deferential attitude, while the Flagship maintained her horrible composure.

OUR FATAL MISTAKE

Thinking no harm, we drifted some two miles to leeward, which was our fatal mistake, though we kept a skinned eye on her. Presently we saw a signal, but end on, as flags are apt to be when the signaller is dead up wind and the signallee down. We hung our answering pennant at the dip to show that we saw but could not understand, and scuttled up to the Flagship as fast as might be. The first part of the signal was an order to close, and the second expressed a desire to speak to us by semaphore. (Our signalmen’s faces were studies in gloom about this crisis; and the sad moaning of the guns went on afar.) We learned that the Flag had been trying to attract our attention for some time, and did not appreciate our négligé déshabillé, or words to that effect. There is no excuse in the Navy, and we took what was served out to us by the gibbering semaphore in silence, standing at attention. To tell the truth, we had been rather pleased with our target-practice, and this sudden dash of cold water chilled us. But there is a reason for all things. Now, we must signal the name of the officer of the watch (frantic searchings of heart among the officers) and the signalman (the signalmen had got beyond even despair), on duty on Friday morning last. What the nature of their crime was we knew not, and it was not ours to ask; but later we heard it had something to do with somebody else’s error. We gave that information (the Flag could have learned much more if she had asked for it) and I effaced myself with a great effacement forward, where the wits of the foc’sle were telling the signalman of Friday morning what sorts of death and disrating awaited him.

‘WE’VE LOST THE GAME’

‘We’ve lost the game,’ said one man. ‘First come first served. That shows it,’ and with this dark saying I was forced to be content.

Then the Flag removed herself, her sixty signalmen, her four-deep strings of signals, and her grim semaphore. Truly was it written:

‘Every day brings a ship,Every ship brings a word,Well for him who has no fearLooking seaward, well assuredThat the word the vessel bringsIs the word that he would hear.’

Anon the cruisers popped over the horizon, led by the Powerful– all save one – and the Powerful wished to know where that one had gone. Now the rendezvous given us by the Powerful could have been read in two ways. We all knew how the mistake had arisen, and, with one exception, had all repaired to the place which our leader had in her massive mind. But there was no ship, of course, that could stand up to and gently rebuke the Powerful save her sister ship the Terrible, who signalled politely: ‘I suppose the – is waiting at rendezvous signalled by you?’ To this the Powerful stiffly, with many flags: ‘When ships have any doubt about signal, officers should reply: Not understood!’ The Terrible, more politely than ever: ‘Your signal perfectly understood,’ meaning thereby, ‘My friend, you made a mistake, and you jolly well know it.’ We small craft stood back and sniggered while this chaff flew between the two mammoths. The thing must have weighed on the Powerful’s mind, for late that evening, as we were going home, she woke up and began talking about it in flashes from the mast-head, to the effect that when signals were obviously wrong ships should do something or other laid down in the Regulations.

ASTONISHING THE CROWDED CHANNEL TRAFFIC

But really it made no difference. The missing cruiser cast up presently with one funnel blistered and a windsail rigged aft, which gave her a false air of being hurried and hot; and home we cruisers all went to Portland, past the Wolf and the toothed edges of the Scillies, astonishing the crowded Channel traffic – sometimes a Jersey potato-ketch full of curiosity; or a full-rigged trader of the deep sea, bound for one or other of the Capes; a Norwegian, Dane, German, or Frenchman; and now and again a white-sided, brass bejewelled yacht.

For a few minutes every funnel was in line. Then one saw the Powerful pulling out for a sailing ship, and blotting half the horizon with her hull. Then a second-class cruiser would flicker from the line to starboard, all spangled with her mast-head, her speed, helm, and sailing-lights as the pale glimmer of a fishing-smack’s lantern crawled out astern of her: And now it was our turn to give way.

That was a Royal progress. No blind man’s bluff off the Lizard or dreary game of hunt-the-Needles such as the liners play, but through the heavenly clear night the leisurely, rolling slow-march of the overlords of all the seas.

OURS BY RIGHT OF BIRTH

And the whole thing was my very own (that is to say yours); mine to me by right of birth. Mine were the speed and power of the hulls, not here only but the world over; the hearts and brains and lives of the trained men; such strength and such power as we and the World dare hardly guess at. And holding this power in the hollow of my hand; able at the word to exploit the earth to my own advantage; to gather me treasure and honour, as men reckon honour, I (and a few million friends of mine) forbore because we were white men. Any other breed with this engine at their disposal would have used it savagely long ago. In our hands it lay as harmless as the levin-rods of the Vril-Ya. Thus I stood, astounded at my own moderation, and counted up my possessions with most sinful pride.

The wind, and the smell of it off the coasts, was mine, and it was telling me things it would never dream of confiding to a foreigner. The short, hollow Channel sea was mine – bought for me drop by drop, every salt drop of it, in the last eight hundred years – as short a time as it takes to make a perfect lawn in a cathedral close. The speech on the deck below was mine, for the men were free white men, same as me, only considerably better. Their notions of things were my notions of things, and the bulk of those notions we could convey one to the other without opening our heads.

THINGS ONE TAKES FOR GRANTED

We had a common tradition, one thousand years old, of the things one takes for granted. A warrant officer said something, and the groups melted quietly about some job or other. That same caste of man – that same type of voice – was speaking in the commissariat in Burma; in barracks in Rangoon; under double awnings in the Persian Gulf; on the Rock at Gibraltar – wherever else you please – and the same instant obedience, I knew, would follow on that voice. And a foreigner would never have understood – will never understand! But I understood, as you would have understood, had you been there. I went round, to make sure of my rights as a taxpayer under Schedule D; saw my men in my hammocks sleeping, without shading their eyes, four inches from the white glare of my electric; heard my stokers chaffing each other at my ash-shoot; and fetched up by a petty officer who was murmuring fragments of the Riot Act into my subordinate’s attentive ear. When he had entirely finished the task in hand he was at liberty to attend to me. ‘Hope you’ve enjoyed your trip, sir. You see’ (I knew what was coming) ‘we haven’t quite shaken down yet. In another three months we shall be something like.’