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 ournégligé 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.Thatshows 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 thePowerful—all save one—and thePowerfulwished to know where that one had gone. Now the rendezvous given us by thePowerfulcould 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 thePowerfulsave her sister ship theTerrible, who signalled politely: ‘I suppose the —— is waiting at rendezvous signalled by you?’ To this thePowerfulstiffly, with many flags: ‘When ships have any doubt about signal, officers should reply: Not understood!’ TheTerrible, 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 thePowerful’smind, 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 thePowerfulpulling 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.’
No ship is ever at her best till you leave her. Then you hold her up as a shining example to your present craft. For that is England.
My Marine—the skirmisher in South American Suburbs—stood under the shadow of the poop looking like a stuffed man with an automatic arm for saluting purposes; but I knew him on the human side. ‘Goin’ off to-morrow, ain’t you, sir? Well, there are only twenty of us ’ere, butifyou ever want to see the Marines, a lot of ’em, it might perhaps be worth your while to’—and he gave me the address of a place where I would find plenty of Marines. He spoke as though his nineteen friends were no-class animals; and a foreigner would have taken him at his word.
A ‘COMMODIOUS COFFEE-GRINDER’
The entire Ward-room explained carefully that their commodious coffee-grinder must not be taken as a sample of the Navy at its best. Wasn’t she a good sea-boat? Oh, yes; remarkably so. Couldn’t she go on occasion? Oh, yes. She could go, but, after all, she wasn’t a patch on certain other craft, being only a third-class cruiser—practically an enlarged destroyer—a tin-pot of the tinniest. ‘Now in my last ship,’ the Captain began. That was an unlucky remark, for I remembered that last ship and a certain first night aboard her in the long swell of Simon’s Bay, when the Captain took Heaven and Earth and the Admiralty to witness that of all cluttered-up boxes of machinery and bags of tricks his new command was the worst. To hear him now she must have been a trifle larger than theMajesticwith twice thePowerful’sspeed. We are a deceptive people. ‘Come and see us next year when we’ve shaken down a bit,’ said the Ward-room, ‘and you’ll like it better.’ That last was impossible, but I accepted the offer.
Our cruiser was about to refit at some Dockyard or other in a few days, and I gathered that it would be no fault of the Captain, the Ward-room or the warrant officers if she did not arrive with a list of alterations and improvements as long as her mainmast. So it is with every new ship. The dear boys take her out to see what she can do, and in that process discover what she cannot do. If by any arrangement or rearrangement of stay, stanchion, davit, steam-pipe, bridge, boat-chocks, or hatchway she can, in their judgment, be improved, rest assured that the dockyard will know it by letter and voice. She never gets more than half what she wants, and so is careful to apply for thrice her needs.
DISCONTENTED AND IMPENITENT THIEVES
To her just and picturesque demands the Yard opposes the suspicion of Centuries, saying, unofficially: ‘You are all a set of discontented and impenitent thieves. Go away.’ The ship, considering her own comfort and well-being for the rest of the commission, replies, also unofficially: ‘Ah, you’re thinking of the So-and-so. She a nest of pirates if you like: but we’re good. We’re the most upright ship you ever clapped eyes on, and you’re the finest Yard in the Kingdom. You’re up to all the ropes. There’s no getting round you, and you’ll pass our indents. We won’t give you any trouble. Just a few minor repairs, and our own people will carry them out. Don’t disturb yourself in the least. Send the stuff alongside and we’ll attend to it.’
And when the stuff comes alongside in charge of a slow-minded understrapper they do attend to it. They talk the man blind and dumb, sack his cargoes, and turn him adrift to study vouchers at his leisure. Then the First Lieutenant grins like a Cheshire cat; the carpenter, so called because he very rarely deals with wood, the armourer and the first-class artificers sweat with joy, and the workshop lathes buzz and hum. But the understrapper gets particular beans because a great part of his stuff was meant for another ship, and she is very angry about it.
STOLEN PAINT
Late in the afternoon the defrauded vessel sends over a boat to theEarlyand wants to know if she has seen or heard anything of some oak baulks, a new gangway grating, some brass-work, and a few drums of white paint.
‘Why, was that yours?’ says the First Lieutenant. ‘We thought it was ours.’
‘Well, it isn’t. It’s ours. Where is it?’
‘I’m awfully sorry, but—I say, won’t you come and have a drink?’
They come—just in time to see the brass rods in position, the oak baulks converted into some sort of boat-furniture; the gangway platform receives their weary feet, and a fine flavour of paint from a flat forward tells them all they will ever know of the missing drums.
Then they call the First Lieutenant a pirate, and he, poor lamb, says that he was misled by the chuckle-headed understrapper who brought the stuff alongside. Words cannot express the First Lieutenant’s contrition. It is too bad, too bad, but you know what asses these Dockyard chaps can be.’
With soft words and occasional gin and bitters he coaxes the visitors into their boat again, for he has studied diplomacy under West African Kings. They return to their own place, being young and guileless, and their reception is not cordial. Their Captain says openly that he has not one adequate thief in the ship, and that they had better go into the Church. They should have captured the understrapper early in the day. He will speak to the other Captain. And he does, like a brother, next time he meets him, galley passing galley, going to call on the Admiral.
‘You infernal old pirate! What have you done with my paint?’ cries the robbed one.
‘Me, sar? Not me, sar. My brother Manuel, sar? That paintmafeesh. Done gone finish.Kerritch hogya.’ This from the other potentate.
The coxswains duck their heads to hide a grin. And that is one of the ways they have in the Navy, (seeNote I.)
TheEarly Birddeparts with a reputation that would sink a slave-dhow, to try the same trick on Hong Kong or Bombay Yard.
A BLISSFUL FORTNIGHT
This and more—oh! much more—did my friends fore and aft convey to me in that blissful fortnight when I was privileged to watch their labours. I heard, undilutedly, what a boy thinks of punishment and the man who reported him for it; how a carpenter regards a Dockyard ‘matey,’ what are the sentiments of a signaller towards an Admiral and of a stoker towards the Authorities who have designed his washing accommodation. I overheard in the darkness of beautiful nights, fragments of Greek drama from the forward flats which it is my life’s regret that I cannot make public; lectures on all manner of curious things delivered by the ship’s jester; and totally unveracious reports of conversations with superiors retailed by a delinquent Marine.
Fire and collision-drill, general quarters and the like take on new meaning when they are translated for you once, by the Head who orders them and again by the tail who carry them out. When you have been shown lovingly over a torpedo by an artificer skilled in the working of its tricky bowels, torpedoes have a meaning and a reality for you to the end of your days.
‘MEN LIVE THERE’
Next time you see the ‘blue’ ashore you do not stare unintelligently. You have watched him on his native heath. You know what he eats, and what he says, and where he sleeps, and how. He is no longer a unit; but altogether such an one as yourself—only, as I have said, better. The Naval Officer chance met, rather meek and self-effacing, in tweeds, at a tennis party, is a priest of the mysteries. You have seen him by his altars. With the Navigating Lieutenant ‘on the ’igh an’ lofty bridge persecuting his vocation’ you have studied stars, mast-head angles, range-finders, and such all; the First Lieutenant has enlightened you on his duties as an Upper Housemaid, (seeNote Ia.) and the Juniors have guided you through the giddy whirl of gunnery, small-arm drill, getting up an anchor, and taking kinks out of a cable. So it comes that next time you see, even far off, one of Her Majesty’s cruisers, all your heart goes out to her. Men live there.
It was the Captain’s coxswain (seeNote II.)—precise, immaculate, and adequate as ever—who met the returning guest at Devonport a year later—September, 1898. This time my cruiser was not with the Fleet, but on urgent private affairs. A misguided collier had seen fit to sit on her ram for a minute or so in Milford Haven, a few days before, and had twisted it thirteen inches to starboard. The collier was beached as soon as possible, and the Admiral he said to us (this I got from the coxswain as we drove to North Corner, by night, through blue-jacketed Devonport): ‘Can you go round to Plymouth with your nose in that state?’ ‘Lord love you, yes,’ said we, or words to that effect. ‘Very good,’ said the Admiral, ‘then you go.’ This we did at an average speed of sixteen knots, through a head-sea, with a collision-mat over our nose (‘Same mat we used when we tied up theThrasher, sir’), and we ran her up to eighteen point two for a few hours to see how the bulkhead would stand it. The carpenter and the carpenter’s mate (‘Yes, they’re the same as last year, sir’) sat up to watch, but nothing happened.
‘An’ now we’re under orders to go back and join the Fleet at Bantry. We’ve been cruising all round England since August.’
THE RECORD OF A YEAR
Once aboard the lugger the past twelve months rolled up like a chart that one needs no longer. The ‘commodious coffee-grinder’ welcomed me as a brother, for by good luck no one had been changed; the same faces greeted me in the little ward-room, and we fell to chattering like children. Had I seen the new fore and aft bridge that we had managed to screw out of the Dockyard? A great contraption—a superior contraption. We had worked in a little extra deck under the forebridge, so that now the signalman had a place to stand in, which I would remember was not the case last year. Had I heard of our new coaling record? Nearly fifty tons per hour, which for a third-class cruiser represented four times that amount for a battleship. Had I heard of the zephyr that blew at Funchal; of unrecorded evolutions in Minorca Bay; of the First Lieutenant’s great haul of paint; of a recent target-practice when nothing was left of the target; of the influenza that overtook the steam-whistle; and a hundred other vital matters?
The record of a year with the Channel Fleet is not to be told in two hours, but I gathered a good deal ere I dropped into my well-remembered berth that joyous night. We departed at noon the next day, unhampered by signals. A liner leaves Plymouth in one style; a cruiser snakes out from Devonport in quite another, which was explained to me on the ‘’igh an’ lofty bridge’ as we skated round buoy after buoy, courteously pulled out a little not to interfere with a yacht race, and ran through the brown-sailed Plymouth fishing fleet. It was divine weather—still, cloudless, and blue—and the bridge was of opinion that he who had a farm should sell it and forthwith go to sea.
OUR NOBLE SELVES
The Cornwall coast slid past us in great grey-blue shadows, laid out beyond the little strip of sail-dotted blue; but my eyes were all inboard considering our noble selves. We had accumulated all sorts of small improvements since last year. She had shaken into shape, as a new house does when one has decided where to put the furniture. The First Lieutenant, as usual, explained that we were in no sense clean; that twenty ton at least of the four hundred we had just taken in lay about the deck in dust, and that it would cost a fortnight to put any appearance on her.
‘We’re supposed to be burning No. 2 Welsh. It’s road sweepings and soot really. That’s on account of the Welsh Coal Strike. Isn’t it filthy? We smoked out the whole of the Fleet and the Rock of Gibraltar the other day. But wait till you see some of the others. They’re worse. Isn’t she apukkapigsty?’
From the landsman’s point of view she seemed offensively clean, but it is hard to please a First Lieutenant. Ours utilised the delay at Devonport to touch her up outside; and the perfect weather at Bantry to paint her thoroughly inside. The only time he left her was to pull round her in a boat and see how she looked from various points of view. Then I think he was satisfied—for nearly half a day.
RASH INTEREST IN GUN PRACTICE
Over against Falmouth we found the sea sufficiently empty for gun practice, and went to work at two thousand six hundred yards on the little, triangular, canvas target, all splintered and bepatched from past trials. This year the three-pounders were using up some black powder ammunition, and with the wind behind us we were villainously wrapped in smoke. But for all that the shots were very efficiently placed on and about the tiny mark. One shrapnel burst immediately above the thing, and the deep was peppered with iron from above. It looked like the cloud-wristed hand of a god (as they draw it in the Dutch picture-books) dropping pebbles into a pond. The more one sees of big gun practice the less one likes it; but a big yacht of the R.Y.S. thought otherwise, streaming down on us of a sudden with all the rash interest of a boy in next-door’s fireworks.
‘She thinks the target is a derelict,’ said the bridge. ‘She’s coming for salvage. She’ll be right in the middle of it in a minute.’
‘No, she won’t. Starboard bow Maxim there—thirteen hundred yards.’
The little demon set up the ‘irritating stammer’ that the nine point two gun found so objectionable, and spattered up the blue all about the canvas, as a swizzle-stick works up a cocktail.
Our friend turned on her heel with immense promptitude and scuttled to windward.
Later on I heard some interesting tales of craft—excursion steamers for choice—anchoring between a man-of-war and her target because their captains had heard that there would be gun practice, and the passengers, at a shilling a head, wished to see the fun.
‘But they didn’t think,’ said my informant, ‘thatIwas the man who’d have been hung, drawn, and quartered if a life was lost. They anchored slap behind the Island I was firing at—experimental firing at a dummy gun, if you please, with six-inchers, twelve-pounders, and Maxims all turned loose together. They were angry when we told ’em to go away!’
* * * * * * *
Out of the strong-shouldered Atlantic swell—bluer than sapphires—rose the double-fanged rock of the Fastnet. We were close enough to see its steps and derricks and each wave as it shot thirty feet up the rocks—the Fastnet in fair weather. It was like meeting a policeman in evening dress. One does not think of the Fastnet save as a blessed welcoming wink of light through storm and thick weather.
BIG ATLANTIC ROLLERS
The Irish coast is a never-failing surprise to the big Atlantic rollers. They trip and ground—you can see them check—on the shallows; fling up a scornful eyebrow and then lose their temper and shape in great lashings of creamy foam.
‘That’s Berehaven,’ said the bridge, indicating an obscure aperture in the jagged coast-line. ‘We shall find the Fleet round the corner. The tide’s setting us up a little. Did you ever read “The Two Chiefs of Dunboy?” We shall open Dunboy House in a minute round the corner.’
‘And a half-nine!’ sang the leadsman, cursing the long-stocked port-anchor under his breath, for he had to cast to one side of it and it stuck out like a cat’s whiskers.
We were between two rocky beaches, split and weathered by all the gales of the Atlantic, black boulders embroidered with golden weed, and beryl bays where the rollers had lost their way and were running in rings. Behind them the green, tiny-fielded land, dotted with white cottages, climbed up to the barren purple hills.
‘Ah! TheArrogant'shere anyhow. See her puff!’
THE STRONGEST FLEET IN THE WORLD.
A monstrous plume of black, heavy smoke went up to the sky. We whipped round a buoy and came on the Fleet. There were eight battleships alike as peas to the outsider; and four big cruisers. They were not cruising or manœuvring just then; but practising their various arts and crafts.
The Marines fell in on the poop, and with bugles and all proper observances we paid our compliments as we ran past the sterns of the cruisers, waiting the Admiral’s word to moor.
‘He’s given us a billet of our own. Under his wing too.’ An officer shot down on to the foc’sle, while the yeoman of signals, whose nose is that of a hawk, kept an unshut eye on the Flag.
‘Isn’t there a four-foot patch somewhere about here?’ said a calm and disinterested voice. The Navigator having brought her in did not need to wrestle with cables; and our anchors with their low, cramped davits are no treat.
‘We told ’em about our anchors in the Dockyard,’ said the bridge. ‘We told ’em so distinctly, and they said: “We’re very much obliged to you for the information, and we’ll make the changes you recommend—in the next boat of your class.” That’s what I call generosity.’
‘Does that ship always behave like that?’ I asked. From all three funnels of a high, stubby cruiser the smoke of a London factory insulted the clean air.
‘Oh, no; she’s only burning muckings like the rest of us. She’s our “chummy” ship. She’s a new type—she and theFurious. Fleet rams they call ’em. Rather like porcupines, aren’t they?’
The two had an air of bristling, hog-backed ferocity, strangely out of keeping with the normal reserve of a man-of-war.
TheBlake, long and low, looked meek and polite beside them, but I was assured that she could blow them out of the water. Their own Captains, of course, thought otherwise.
ASHORE IN IRELAND
All Ireland was new to me, and I went ashore to investigate Castletown’s street of white houses, to smell peat smoke and find Dan Murphy, owner of a jaunting car and ancient friend of the ward-room. In this quest me and the Navigator mustered not less than half the male population of Cork County, the remainder being O’Sullivan’s; but we found Dan at last—old, grizzled, with an untameable eye, voluble and beautifully Celtic.
‘Will I meet ye to-morrow at Mill Cove at nine-thirty? I will. Here’s my hand an’ word on it. Will I dhrive ye to Glenbeg for the fishing? I will. There’s my hand an’ word on it. Do I mean it? Don’t I know the whole livin’ fleet, man an’ boy, for years?’
He appeared at the appointed hour with a raw-boned horse and wonderful yarns of trout taken by ‘the other gentlemen’ in Glenbeg, the lough of our desire, fourteen miles across the hills. It was a cloudless day with a high wind—bad for trout but good for the mere joy of life; and the united ages of my companions reached forty-five. We were quite respectable till we cleared Castletown, and such liberty-men as might have been corrupted by our example. Then we sang and hung on to the car at impossible angles, and swore eternal fidelity to the bare-footed damosels on the road, they being no wise backward to return our vows; and behaved ourselves much as all junior officers do when they escape on holiday. It was a land of blue and grey mountains, of raw green fields, stone-fenced, ribbed with black lines of peat, and studded with clumps of gorse and heather and the porter-coloured pools of bog water. Great island-dotted bays ran very far inland, and bounding all to Westward hung the unswerving line of Atlantic. Such a country it was as, without much imagination, one could perceive its children in exile would sicken for—a land of small holdings and pleasant green ways where nobody did more work than was urgent.
ROARING DAY OF SUN AND WIND
At last we came on an inky-black tarn, shut in by mountains, locked and lonely and lashed into angry waves by a downward-smiting blast.
There was no special point in the fishing; not even when the Sub-Lieutenant tried to drown himself; but the animal delight of that roaring day of sun and wind will live long in one memory. We had it all to ourselves—the rifted purple flank of Lackawee, the long vista of the lough darkening as the shadows fell; the smell of a new country, and the tearing wind that brought down mysterious voices of men from somewhere high above us.
None but the Irish can properly explain away failure. We left with our dozen fingerlings, under the impression—Mister Cornelius Crowley gave it—that we had caught ten-pounders.
So home, blown through and through with fresh air; sore with hanging on to the car and laughing at nothing; to dine with two Cruiser Captains aboard one of the big fleet-rams. My hosts had been friends since theirBritanniadays (it is this uniformity of early training that gives to the Navy its enduring solidarity), and, one reminiscence leading to another, I listened enchanted to weird yarns in which Chinese Mandarins, West Coast nigger Chiefs, Archimandrites, Turkish Pashas, Calabrian Counts, dignity balls, Chilian beachcombers, and all the queer people of the earth were mingled.
‘But it’s a lonely life—a lonely life,’ said one. ‘I’ve commanded a ship since Eighty something, and—you see.’
How could one help seeing? Between the after-cabin and the rest of the world (with very few exceptions) lies the deep broad gulf that is only overpassed by sentries, signalmen, and subordinates entering with reports. A light tap, a light foot, a doffed cap, and—‘Rounds all correct, sir.’ Then the silence and the loneliness settle down again beyond the hanging red curtain in the white steel bulkhead. Herman Melville has it all inWhite Jacket, but it is awesome to see with bodily eyes.
Sometimes the talk gets serious, and the weather-bitten faces discuss how they would ‘work her in a row.’ Each delivers his opinion with side-digs at his neighbour, less heavily armoured or more lightly gunned, but the general conclusion (which I shall not give) is nearly always the same. It is a terrible power that they wield, these Captains, for, saving the Admiral, there is no one that can dictate to them in the exercise of their business. They make their ships as they make or unmake the careers of their men. Yet, mark how Providence arranges an automatic check! It is in the Navy that you hear the wildest and freest adjectives of any Service, the most blistering characterisation of superiors, the most genuinely comic versions of deeds that elsewhere might be judged heroic.
A SERVICE OF HUMOURISTS
Things are all too deadly serious and important for any one to insult by taking seriously. Every branch of the Service is forced to be a humourist in spite of itself; and by the time men reach the rank of Captain the least adaptable have some saving sense of fun hammered into them. A Captain remembers fairly well what song the Midshipmen were used to sing about the Lieutenant; what views he held in his own Lieutenancy of his Commander, and what as a Commander he thought of his Captain. If he forgets these matters, as in heat, on lonely stations, or broken with fever some men do, then God help his ship when she comes home with a crop of Court-martials and all hands half crazy!
But to go back to methods of attack. You can hear interesting talk among the juniors when you sit on a man’s bunk of an afternoon, surrounded by the home photographs, with the tin-bath and the shore-going walking sticks slung up overhead. They are very directly concerned in War, for they have charge of the guns, and they speculate at large and carelessly. We (I speak for our cruiser) are not addicted to swear in the words of the torpedo Lieutenant because we do not carry those fittings; but we do all devoutly believe that it is the business of a cruiser to shoot much and often (seeNote III). What follows is, of course, nonsense—the merest idle chaff of equals over cigarettes; but rightly read it has its significance.
‘Thefirst thing to do,’ says authority aged Twenty-One, ‘is to be knocked silly by concussion in the conning-tower. Then you revive when all the other chaps are dead, and win a victory off your own bat—à laillustrated papers. ’Wake up in Haslar a month later with your girl swabbing your forehead and telling you you’ve wiped out the whole Fleet.’
‘Catch me in the conning-tower! Not much!’ says Twenty-Three. ‘Those bow-guns of yours will stop every shot that misses it; an’ the upper bridge will come down on you in three minutes.’
‘Don’t see that you’re any better off in the waist. You’d get the funnels and ventilators and all the upper fanoodleums on top ofyou, anyhow,’ is the retort. ‘We’re a lot too full of wood, even with our boats out of the way.’
‘The poop’s good enough for me,’ says Twenty-Four (that is his station). ‘Fine, light airy place, and we can get our ammunition handier than you can forward.’
‘What’s the use of that?’ says he in charge of the bow guns. ‘You’ve got those beastly deck torpedo-tubes just under you. Fancy a Whitehead smitten on the nose by one little shell. You’d go up.’
‘So’d you. She’d blow the middle out of herself. If they took those tubes away we could have a couple more four-inchers there. There’d be heaps of room for their ammunition in the torpedo magazine.’
GUNS AND TORPEDOES
We are blessed with a pair of deck torpedo-tubes, which weigh about ten tons, and are the bane of our lives. Our class is a compromise, and the contractors have generously put in a little bit of everything. But public opinion (except the Gunner) is unanimous in condemning those dangerous and hampering tubes.
‘Torpedoes are all rot on this class unless they’re submerged. Two more four-inchers ’ud be a lot better. They’re as handy as duck-guns. I say, did you see that last shrapnel of mine burst over the target? I laid it myself.’ Twenty-Three looks round for applause, but the other guns deride.
‘That’s all luck,’ says Twenty-One, irreverently.
‘Mine burst just beyond. It would have been dead right for an end-on shot. It would have snifted her just on the engine-room hatch. Sound place that. It mixes up the engines.’
‘Mahan says, somewhere, that broadside fighting is going to pay with our low freeboards, because most shots go wrong in elevation. Of course, broadside-on, a shell that misses you misses you clean. It don’t go hopping along your upper works as it would if you were end-on.’
‘Oh, I meant my shot for an end-on shot, of course,’ says Twenty-one; and some one promptly sits on him.
‘BEARING’ IN A GALE
‘No-o,’ says Twenty-Four, meditatively. ‘What wereallywant if we ever go into a row is weather—lots of it. Good old gales—regular smellers. Then we could run in and beak ’em while it’s thick. I believe in beaking.’ (That belief, by the way, is curiously general in the Navy.)
‘D’you mean to say you’d ram with a tea-tray like ours? I’m glad you aren’t the skipper,’ I interrupt.
‘Oh,he’dbeak like a shot, if he saw his chance. Of course, he wouldn’t beak anything our size—it ’ud be cheaper to hammer her—but take the —— (he named a ship that does not fly Our flag). If you got in onheralmost anywhere she’d turn turtle. And she cost about a million and a quarter. It’s just a question of L.S.D.’
‘And what ’udwedo afterwards, please?’
‘Ah, that’s our strong point. What happened when that collier drifted down on us at Milford? It only improved our steaming power, didn’t it? We’re a regular honeycomb of compartments forward. I believe you could swipe off twenty foot of her forward, and she’d get home somehow,’ says an expert, enthusiastically.
‘Bit risky,’ says Twenty-One. ‘That ship you talked of is awfully plated up topside, but all her underpinnings are pretty weak. If you could lob in a few shell under some of those forward sponsons of hers, I believe she’d crumple up with the weight of her own guns. But (sorrowfully) you’d need a nine point two to do that properly.’
‘Beak her! Beak her! Catch her in a gale, coming out of harbour’ (the speaker named the very port). ‘It takes their people a week to get their tummies straight.’
‘Yes, but they never come out of harbour. At least they didn’t in the old days. And if they do,wesha’n’t be allowed a look-in. We shall be used for scouting—coaling all day and steaming all night. But we want those deck-tubes taken out all the same.’
‘I’d like target-practice every week,’ says another. ‘Say four times our present allowance of practice-ammunition. It ’ud wear the guns out, but it ’ud pay.’
And so the talk goes on; varying with each ship. Some of them are all for torpedoes, and have submarine vaults the size of a small church devoted to this game; but we, being what we are, are mainly for guns, and the Gunner who is in charge of the torpedoes has a hard time of it when he runs his quarterly trials.
‘A beautiful thing,’ says he, as the silver-coloured devil flops from the tube and tears away towards the mark. . . . ‘Well, I’m blowed.’ The torpedo has sheered away to the left, and now is poisoning the air with its garlic-scented Holmes light, fifty yards from the target.
‘What did I tell you?’ says some onesotto voce. ‘We could have got in a dozen shots from the four inch while you were touching off that boomerang.’
‘They’d hang you on the —— if you laughed at torpedoes.’
‘I wouldn’t if ours were submerged, but with these deck-tubes one never knows how they’ll take the water. That thing must have canted as it fell.’
The Gunner looks grieved to the quick, but is presently consoled by a few score pounds of guncotton, and goes off with grapnels and batteries to practise ‘sweeping’ and ‘creeping’ at the mouth of the bay with a few score other boats. They mine and countermine expeditiously in the Channel Fleet. The process is a technical one, and need not be described here, for there is no necessity to make public either the area covered with mines or the time that it took to lay them. The Gunner returned with a detailed account and some fish that had been stunned by concussion.
‘It was a nice little show,’ he said. ‘A very nice little show. Did you happen to see our smoke?’
I had seen one end of Bantry Bay ripped up from its foundations, but did not inquire farther.
‘MAN AND ARM BOATS’
Many things are impressive and not a few terrifying in the Fleet, but the most impressive sight of all is the swift casting-forth from the trim black sides of the instruments and ministers of death. They vary hourly, according to the taste and fancy of the speller. A wisp of signals floats from the Flagship. Our little cruiser erupts—boils like a hive—and some one takes out a watch. There is a continuous low thunder of bare feet, a clatter, always subdued, of arms snatched from the racks, a creaking of falls and blocks, and the noise of iron doors opening and shutting. Of a sudden the decks stand empty; the Maxims have gone from the bulwarks, and the big cutters are away, pulling mightily for the Flagship. From each one of our twelve neighbours pour forth the silent crowded boats. They cluster round the Flag, are looked over, and return. They are not merely boats with men in them. They are fully provisioned; the larger ones have boat-guns, the smaller Maxims, with a proper allowance of ammunition and spare parts, medical, chests, and all the hundred oddments necessary for independent action. All or any one of them can be used at once for patrol work or for landing parties, can be switched off from the main system, as a light engine is switched off up a siding. Each unit is complete and self-contained. In ten minutes the boats are back again, the Maxims replaced, the rifles stacked and racked, the provisions and water returned to store. The ordinary routine of ‘man and arm boats’ is over.
LANDING PARTIES
Another signal (seeNote IV.) will turn out, transport, land, embark, and disembark three thousand armed men, with twenty-one field guns, in the inside of three hours; leaving six thousand men in the ships to carry on if necessary the work of a bombardment; or you can vary the programme and load a mere thousand or so into eight identical double-funnelled fifteen-knot steam launches—one from each battleship—and play miniature Fleet-manœuvres to your heart’s content. They are as used to performing evolutions together as are their big parents. They can tow half-a-dozen cutters a-piece and work in four feet of water. As an experiment you can land your twenty-one-field guns with sufficient men to throw up earthworks round them; or you can yoke men to the guns and drag them up the flanks of mountains. Or, as in mining operations, you can turn loose all hell with a string to it—pay it out and swiftly drag it back again. One never wearies of watching the outrush and influx of the landing parties; the swift flight of the boats; the minute’s check at the beach; the torrents of blue and red pouring over the bows; and the loose-knit line of mingled red and blue winding away inland among the boulders and heather.
Long practice so perfectly conceals Art that the thing presents no points of the picturesque; makes no noise; calls for no more comment than the set of the waves before a prevailing wind. Only when you go over certain MS. books, giving the name, station, and duties of every man aboard under all conceivable contingencies, do you realise how wheel works within wheel to the ordered, effortless end.
SUPERIOR AND ADEQUATE PERSONS
You can disarrange the clockwork as much as you please, but the surviving cogs and rachets will still go on and finish the job; for I do honestly believe that, if any accident removed from the Fleet every single Commissioned Officer, the Warrant and Petty Officers would still carry on with resource and fertility of invention till properly relieved. The public is apt to lump everything that does not carry the executive curl on its coat-sleeve as some sort of common sailor. But a man of twenty-five years’ sea experience—cool, temperate, and judgmatic, such an one as the ordinary Warrant Officer—is a better man than you shall meet on shore in a long day’s march. His word is very much law forward. He knows his men, if possible, better than the officers. He has seen, tried, approved, and discarded hundreds of dodges and tricks in all departments of the ship. At a pinch he can wring the last ounce out of his subordinates by appeals unbefitting for an officer to make, by thrusts at pride and vanity, which he has studied more intimately than any one else. Hear him expounding his gospel to a youth who does not yet realise that the Navy is his father and his mother and his only Aunt Jemima; go out with him when he is in charge of a cutter; listen to him in the workshop; in the flats forward; between the pauses of practice-firing, or up on the booms taking stock of the boats, and you will concede that he is a superior and an adequate person.
‘Yes, I suppose it’s all very nice,’ said one of them, while I applauded and admired some manœuvre that he did not trouble to raise an eyelid for, ‘but just think what we could do if we had the men all together for three years steady! As it is, we’re practically a Training Squadron. When we get back to Plymouth they’ll snatch a hundred of our best men an’ turn ’em over to the Mediterranean, and we’ll have to take up a lot of new ones. The Mediterranean have got the better trained men, but they haven’t our chances of working together.’
‘But the men are trained when you get ’em, surely?’
‘Yes; but you get the same lot in one ship all through her commission, and you put a polish on ’em.’
‘P.Q. 2,’ cried a signalman. That was a well-known message. It meant: ‘Get into your boats as fast as you know how and pull round the Fleet.’ The men leaped on to the nettings and fell outboard like dolphins.
‘That shows it,’ said the Warrant Officer with a sniff. ‘Look at that man crawlin’ into his place’ (to me he seemed to be flying). ‘Our first boat ought to be away in fifteen seconds’ (it was quite thirty before the last drew clear). ‘There go the Arrogants.’ His face darkened. Was it possible that that tip-tilted, hog-backed cruiser had——
‘We’re well first away,’ said a Lieutenant.
‘Hum! We ought to have been more previous,’ said the Warrant Officer. ‘The Arrogants nearly beat us. We love theArrogant, but we do not allow her to lead if we can help it.’
A TALE WORTH TELLING
Another time we were not so lucky. The tale is worth telling to show (a) how one is at the mercy of one’s subordinates, and (b) how there is no excuse in the Navy. At odd hours, chiefly in the black night, the Admiral, feeling lonely, calls up one boat from each ship to his gangway, and the signal, which we will label T.V.K., reads: ‘Cutter to Flagship from each ship; third-class cruisers to send whaler.’ Warned by experience, the First Lieutenant, whom it is not easy to catch napping, had the whaler’s crew sleeping all handy by, where one order would send them out like fly-stung cattle. A cutter requires about three times as many men, and on a small cruiser one cannot keep these together. Enter, then, at 11:45 p.m., a zealous signalman with the words: ‘Cutter to the Flagship.’ In his haste he had omitted to read the conclusion of the signal vouchsafing us the whaler, and (this was his black error) told no one that it was ‘T.V.K.,’ which would have explained the situation. No, he needs must say ‘cutter’; so cutter it was. After the men had been variously dug out of their hammocks and the heavy boat got away, the Flagship wanted to know why we were several scandalous minutes behind our time. It was a direct reflection on the ship and its smartness; a galling and unanswerable wigging that makes men dance and swear with rage. We could only have said that the signal was misread, which would not have helped us in the least; so we shut our mouths and killed the signalman next morning. His own chief, the hawk-nosed Yeoman of Signals, flung him bound to the executioner, saying: ‘He ought to have known, sir; he ought to have known.’ So he was boiled, scraped, and sand-papered, his hair was cut and his number was taken; after which he went forward and heard precisely what the lower deck thought of him. Then a visiting Captain’s galley hanging on to the gangway rubbed it in gracefully and casually, and a fat beef-boat condoled with us ironically, and the whaler (seeNote V.) heard all about it next time she went sailing without an officer in the stern-sheets. It was most annoying, but can’t you see how easily this sort of accident may happen?
I had the honour of dining on the Flagship next night, and so contagious is the naval spirit that I went there, as it were, annoyed and uneasy over the matter of the misread signal. One cannot regard an Admiral in the exercise of his duty as a mere human. It is in his power to make you get up an anchor by hand if he thinks you are slack; he can stop your coaling and bid you man and arm boats in the middle of the grimy mess; he can make you repeat a certain business till you are sick and dizzy; or he can raise you to high honour by signalling: ‘Well done, So-and-so. Evolution creditably performed.’ He blocks up all the horizon when he appears on it. At six miles off, across the windy blue, the spirit may move him to chat with you, and if your best signalman have not his best telescope at his best eye, and the Admiral be forced to repeat his remarks, you will hear about it at closer range.