A Fleet in Being

* * * * * * *NO. 2 WELSH COAL

‘Isn’t it scandalous? Isn’t it perfectly damnable?’ said an officer after we had got under way, pointing to the foul, greasy columns of smoke that poured from every funnel. ‘Her Majesty’s Channel Squadron, if you please, under steam, burning horse-dung.’

Truthfully, it was a sickening sight. We could have been seen thirty miles off, a curtain of cloud, spangled and speckled with bits of burning rubbish and lumps of muck. The First Lieutenant looked at the beach of clinkers piling up on his hammock-nettings and blessed the Principality of Wales. The Chief Engineer merely said, ‘You never know your luck in the Navy,’ put on his most ancient kit, and was no more seen in the likeness of a Christian man. Fate had hit him hard, for, just as his fires were at their pink of perfection, a battleship chose to get up her anchor by hand, delaying us an hour, and blackening the well-cherished furnaces. ‘No. 2 Welsh’ (this must have been an Admiralty jest) needs a lot of coaxing.

CHIMNEY-SWEEPS ON THE HIGH SEAS

But we were not quite such an exhibition as the Arrogant. She showed like chemical works in full blast as we swept out of Bantry and headed south for the Scillies. Then up came the Blake (see Note VI.), a beautiful boat, giving easily to the swell that was lifting us already, and she dodged about left and right till we asked: ‘What are you trying to do?’ ‘Trying to get out of your smoke,’ said she, vomiting cascades of her own the while. Meantime the Fleet-rams were doing their best to blind and poison us, and the battleships sagged away to leeward looking like wet ricks ablaze.

It was not the ignominy of the thing – the mere dirt and filth – that annoyed one so much as the thought that there was no power in the State which owes its existence to the Navy whereby a decent supply of State-owned, State-dug coal could be assured to us. There had been a strike, and while masters and men were argle-bargling ashore Her Majesty’s ships were masquerading in the guise of chimney-sweeps on the high seas.

The delay, the disorder, the cruel extra work on stokers, not to mention the engineers, who at all times are worked pitilessly, is in Peace no more than merely brutal. In war it would be dangerous.

FOUR HOURS AT FULL SPEED

As if that were not enough, the swell that the battleships logged as light (Heaven forgive them!) began to heave our starboard screw out of the water. We raced and we raced and we raced, dizzily, thunderously, paralytically, hysterically, vibrating all down one side. It was, of course, in our four hours of full speed that the sea most delighted to lift us up on one finger and watch us kick. From 6 to 10 p.m. one screw twizzled for the most part in the circumambient ether, and the Chief Engineer – with coal-dust and oil driven under his skin – volunteered the information that life in his department was gay. He would have left a white mark on the Assistant-Engineer, whose work lay in the stokehold among a gang of new Irish stokers. Never but once have I been in our engine-rooms; and I do not go again till I can take with me their designer for four hours at full speed. The place is a little cramped and close, as you might say. A steel guard, designed to protect men from a certain toothed wheel round the shaft, shore through its bolts and sat down, much as a mudguard sits down on a bicycle-wheel. But the wheel it sat on was also of steel; spinning one hundred and ninety revolutions per minute. So there were fireworks, beautiful but embarrassing, of incandescent steel sparks, surrounding the Assistant-Engineer as with an Aurora Borealis. They turned the hose on the display, and at last knocked the guard sideways, and it fell down somewhere under the shaft, so that they were at liberty to devote their attention to the starboard thrust-block, which was a trifle loose. Indeed, they had been trying to wedge the latter when the fireworks began – all up their backs.

The thing that consoled them was the thought that they had not slowed down one single turn.

THE NAVAL ENGINEER

‘She’s a giddy little thing,’ said the Chief Engineer. ‘Come down and have a look.’

I declined in suitable language. Some day, when I know more, I will write about engine-rooms and stokers’ accommodation – the manners and customs of Naval Engineers and their artificers. They are an amazing breed, these quiet, rather pale men, in whose hands lie the strength and power of the ship.

‘Just think what they’ve got to stand up to,’ says Twenty-One, with the beautiful justice of youth. ‘Of course, they are trained at Keyham and all that; but fancy doing your work with an eight-inch steam-pipe in the nape of your neck, an’ a dynamo buzzin’ up your back, an’ the whole blessed shoot whizzin’ round in the pit of your stomach! Then we jump about an’ curse if they don’t give us enough steam. I swear I think they’re no end good men in the engine room!’

If you doubt this, descend by the slippery steel ladders into the bluish copper-smelling haze of hurrying mechanism all crowded under the protective deck; crawl along the greasy foot-plates, and stand with your back against the lengthwise bulkhead that separates the desperately whirling twin engines. Wait under the low-browed supporting-columns till the roar and the quiver has soaked into every nerve of you; till your knees loosen and your heart begins to pump. Feel the floors lift below you to the jar and batter of the defrauded propeller as it draws out of its element. Try now to read the dizzying gauge-needles or find a meaning in the rumbled signals from the bridge. Creep into the stoke-hold – a boiler blistering either ear as you stoop – and taste what tinned air is like for a while. Face the intolerable white glare of the opened furnace doors; get into a bunker and see how they pass coal along and up and down; stand for five minutes with slice and ‘devil’ to such labour as the stoker endures for four hours.

HIS HOURLY RISK

The gentleman with the little velvet slip between the gold rings on his sleeve does his unnoticed work among these things. If anything goes wrong, if he overlooks a subordinate’s error, he will not be wigged by the Admiral in God’s open air. The bill will be presented to him down here, under the two-inch steel deck, by the Power he has failed to control. He will be peeled, flayed, blinded, or boiled. That is his hourly risk. His duty shifts him from one ship to another, to good smooth and accessible engines, to vicious ones with a long record of deviltry, to lying engines that cannot do their work, to impostors with mysterious heart-breaking weaknesses, to new and untried gear fresh from the contractor’s hands, to boilers that will not make steam, to reducing-valves that will not reduce, and auxiliary engines for distilling or lighting that often give more trouble than the main concern. He must shift his methods for, and project himself into the soul of, each; humouring, adjusting, bullying, coaxing, refraining, risking, and daring as need arises.

Behind him is his own honour and reputation; the honour of his ship and her imperious demands; for there is no excuse in the Navy. If he fails in any one particular he severs just one nerve of the ship’s life. If he fails in all the ship dies – a prisoner to the set of the sea – a gift to the nearest enemy.

And, as I have seen him, he is infinitely patient, resourceful, and unhurried. However it might have been in the old days, when men clung obstinately to sticks and strings and cloths, the newer generation, bred to pole-masts, know that he is the king-pin of their system. Our Assistant-Engineer had been with the engines from the beginning, and one night he told me their story, utterly unconscious that there was anything out of the way in the noble little tale.

‘NO END GOOD MEN’

It was his business so to arrange that no single demand from the bridge should go unfulfilled for more than five seconds. To that ideal he toiled unsparingly with his Chief – a black sweating demon in his working hours, and a quiet student of professional papers in his scanty leisure.

‘An’ they come into the ward-room,’ says Twenty-One, ‘and you know they’ve been having a young hell of a time down below, but they never growl at us or get stuffy or anything. No end good men, I swear they are.’

‘Thank you, Twenty-One,’ I said. ‘I’ll let that stand for the whole Navy if you don’t mind.’

NOTES

NOTE IPAINT AND GILDING

A ship who attempted to dress on her service allowance of paint would in three months be as disreputable as a battery or regiment which kept its mess or band on the strict army footing. Therefore, over and above anything that they may secure by strategy and foresight, the officers must dip into their own pockets to supply the many trifles (none of them cheap) which make for the smartness of a ship. This was forcibly brought home to me when I admired a shield and scroll-work at the bows of a large cruiser. ‘Yes,’ said a friend, ‘it takes about fifty books (of gold-leaf) to gild that decently.’

‘No. Seventy,’ said another.

‘How d’you know?’

‘Well, somebody’s got to gild it, and the Yard don’t give you seventy books for nothing,’ was the significant reply.

If there were any means of reckoning, the tax-payer would be somewhat astonished at the sums spent by Navy and Army for the privilege of serving the Queen. Both services have curious and crusted tales bearing on this head.

NOTE IA

As the comfort and efficiency of the ship, not to mention the Captain’s peace of mind, depend on the First Lieutenant, the Captain as a rule takes good care to pick his own man. Here are a few of the First Lieutenant’s duties. He must act as a strainer between the Captain and the ship; holding back the unessential, passing on the vital. That is to say, he must be a subtle and discriminating editor. He must make all his arrangements; for the ordering and disposition of every soul aboard, through the next day, week or month; with the cheerful foreknowledge that the bulk of them will be knocked into a naval cocked hat by the exigencies of the service. He must then retire into himself with a pack of printed cards, one for each man, and work out the whole puzzle afresh. At the same time he must not allow his own irritation to affect his dealings with the Wardroom, whose official head he is, and whose members are (a) his subordinates, and (b) gentlemen of leisure assembled of an evening for a quiet rubber. He must get the utmost out of them, not by the menace of his authority, because that means a smash-up sooner or later, but because of their genuine liking for him as an individual. The Wardroom is young, very male, and unable to avoid meeting itself every day and all day long. You will concede that a certain amount of tact may be necessary in handling it? He must, further, see with those eyes which he is authorised to wear at the back of his head, that no warrant or petty officer, no ship’s corporal, or master-at-arms is abusing authority to spite some man or boy. He must still further see that no official, yielding to a natural desire for popularity, is quietly letting down the discipline of the lower-deck. He must know the Captain’s mind seventeen and two-thirds seconds before the Captain opens his mouth, because he will need that time to think out arrangements to meet the order. He must be the soul of rectitude and honour, but he must grasp the inwardness and frustrate the outwardness of every trick and trap sprung on him twenty times a day. In the Captain’s absence he is the visitors’ host and chaperone, and as visitors in harbour may range from Royalty to ragamuffins, his manners must be in the widest sense of the word, adaptable. Finally, at all crises, where the “blue” goes there must he lead: leaping the larger abyss; standing nearer to the danger; walking the more slippery foothold, passively enduring longer the exposure; and through it all he must keep the cool eye and balanced head of authority.

And the public is surprised when a naval officer proves that he is a diplomat!

NOTE IICOXSWAINS AND GALLEYS

The Captain’s coxswain is always an important person. As a rule the Captain has known him for a long time, often for ten or fifteen years, and the man follows his superior’s fortunes with unswerving loyalty, till he blossoms into the dignity of coxswain of the Admiral’s barge, beside whom dukes are not even three a penny. He is, by virtue of his office, the smartest man in the ship, and by training becomes a clean-shaved miracle of tact and discretion. Each boat’s crew have a life of their own, a little world, into which they enter, picking up where they left off, so soon as cutter or whaler leaves the ship’s side; but I fancy the esprit de corps is most strongly developed in the Captain’s galley. On one occasion we had been out all day fishing, and the wind forced us to row the long seven miles back to the fleet, against the tide, round rocky points fringed with conflicting currents. It was a lumpy and disheartening sea, leaden grey in the twilight except where the shoals cast up wisps and smudges of half-phosphorescent white – a three hours’ journey, enlivened by the incessant dry roar and rattle of the surf around Roancarrig and the answering growl of the waves on the mainland. I watched the untiring machine digging out over the steep-pitched cross-waters; eight pair of shoulders rising and falling against the first stars and the smoke of spray about the bows; till every muscle in me ached out of sympathy. Thrice they were invited to rest themselves, for they had been ten hours at work, and there was six hundred pounds’ dead weight of fish in the boat; and thrice they replied: ‘Oh, we can jog on like this, sir.’ So they jogged with never a quiver or a falter through all the tumble, and when we reached still water, under the lee of the ships, they spurted up the avenue as though returning from a call on the flagship half a mile away. I demanded of the coxswain how this thing was done.

‘Oh, you get used to it,’ said he. ‘Besides, that wasn’t anything particular. Sometimes you have the boat half full of water, jumping out and coming down like a hammer. That’s the time you learn to row.’

‘I see. Why didn’t some of you miss your stroke in that tumble coming round the point when we took the water over the bows?’

‘Well,’ – still the same smile – ‘if you did that – why, you wouldn’t be in the galley. There’s all the other boats to practise that in. You’ve never seen her properly under sail, have you?’

For sheer luxury of motion, commend me to a galley which has just “taken on” a brother captain’s craft for a small walk down the bay. The rig is simplicity itself: there is a man to every rope that vitally communicates with anything: and the most highly trained shifting-ballast in the world, spread low between the thwarts, obeys the wave of the hand.

NOTE IIITHE ART OF GUNNERY

Many men will tell you that our ships are under-gunned. So they are – on paper: but on paper a gun merely represents a tube sticking out of the side. One does not see the little group of from three to nine men who work it in action; the ammunition hoist that feeds it; or the pile of live shell and cartridge that would lie beside it. These things take up space, and the more space you supply, the less will the gun be disconcerted by its own or a neighbour’s disaster. Our people do not like to work in crowds. They prefer, as we do ashore, to manage their own little shows alone. The effect of wounded men kicking and hiccoughing in a crowded secondary battery is bad for cool aiming; besides which, idlers, cooks and servants might be jostling the workers in their efforts to get the wounded below. On an open deck, with fair intervals between the guns, the wounded can be moved out of the way at once; and if the gun itself, by any chance, be dismounted, there is a margin of safety for its inboard collapse, and room for a working-party to take charge of it. I am speaking now of light armaments behind shields. The knowledge that one lucky shot might wreck two or three guns together does not make for happiness. This is why our guns are comparatively few in number, but exceedingly handy to work. A ship knows, of course, exactly where the crowd would of necessity be gathered in any craft opposed to her. Two or three shots in a nest of crowded guns, open ammunition-hoists, and piles of ‘ready’ cartridges, will do more moral and intellectual damage than the effacement of one or two guns in a line strung evenly from bow to stern.

NOTE IVOMDURMAN

You must understand here that the Flagship was not only our central authority, but Reuter’s Agency as well; and that between orders for drills were sandwiched little pieces of news from the world ashore. One peaceful morning the Yeoman of Signals came to the captain’s cabin at the regulation pace, but with heightened colour and an eye something brighter than usual. ‘Signal from the flagship, sir,’ said he, reading off the slate. ‘Omdurman fallen: killed so many, and wounded so many.’ ‘Thank you,’ said the captain. ‘Tell the men.’ On this, I went forward to see how the news would be received. We were busy painting some deck-houses, and the work continued to an accompaniment of subdued voices – the hushed tones of men under the eye of authority. Word was passed to the lower deck and the stokehold: and the hum of talk rose, perhaps, half a note. I halted by the painters. Said one, dipping deep in the white lead: ‘Um, ah! This ought to make the French sickish. Almost ’ear ’em coughin’, can’t you?’ Said another, reaching out for the broadest and slabbiest brush: ‘I say, Alf, lend us that Khartoum brush o’ yours.’ After a long pause, stepping back to catch the effect of a peculiarly juicy stroke – head a little aside and one eye shut: ‘Well, we’ve waited about long enough, ’aven’t we?’ Bosun’s mate with a fine mixture of official severity and human tolerance: ‘What are you cacklin’ for over there! Carry on quiet, can’t you?’ And that was how we took the news of the little skirmish called Omdurman.

NOTE VBOAT-RACING

Our whaler would go out between lights under pretence of practising, but really for the purpose of insulting other whalers whom she had beaten in inter-ship contests. Boat-racing is to the mariner what horse-racing is to the landsman. The way of it is simple. When your racing crew is in proper condition, you row under the bows of the ship you wish to challenge and throw up an oar. If you are very confident, or have a long string of victories to your credit, you borrow a cock from the hen-coops and make him crow. Then the match arranges itself. A friendly launch tows both of you a couple of miles down the bay, and back you come, digging out for the dear life, to be welcomed by hoarse subdued roars from the crowded foc’sles of the battleships. This deep booming surge of voices is most moving to hear. Some day a waiting fleet will thus cheer a bruised and battered sister staggering in with a prize at her tail – a plugged and splintered wreck of an iron box, her planking brown with what has dried there, and the bright water cascading down her sides. I saw the setting of such a picture one blood-red evening when the hulls of the fleet showed black on olive-green water, and the yellow of the masts turned raw-meat colours in the last light. A couple of racing cutters spun down the fairway, and long after they had disappeared we could hear far-off ships applauding them. It was too dark to catch more than a movement of masses by the bows, and it seemed as though the ships themselves were triumphing all together.

NOTE VITHE BEAUTY OF BATTLESHIPS

Do not believe what people tell you of the ugliness of steam, nor join those who lament the old sailing days. There is one beauty of the sun and another of the moon, and we must be thankful for both. A modern man-of-war photographed in severe profile is not engaging; but you should see her with the life hot in her, head-on across a heavy swell. The ram-bow draws upward and outward in a stately sweep. There is no ruck of figure-head, bow-timbers or bowsprit-fittings to distract the eye from its outline or the beautiful curves that mark its melting into the full bosom of the ship. It hangs dripping an instant, then, quietly and cleanly as a tempered knife, slices into the hollow of the swell, down and down till the surprised sea spits off in foam about the hawse-holes. As the ship rolls in her descent you can watch curve after new curve revealed, humouring and coaxing the water. When she recovers her step, the long sucking hollow of her own wave discloses just enough of her shape to make you wish to see more. In harbour, the still waterline, hard as the collar of a tailor-made jacket, hides that vision; but when she dances the Big Sea Dance, she is as different from her Portsmouth shilling photograph as is a matron in a macintosh from the same lady at a ball. Swaying a little in her gait, drunk with sheer delight of movement, perfectly apt for the work in hand, and in every line of her rejoicing that she is doing it, she shows, to these eyes at least, a miracle of grace and beauty. Her sides are smooth as a water-worn pebble, curved and moulded as the sea loves to have them. Where the box-sponsioned, overhanging, treble-turreted ships of some other navies hammer and batter into an element they do not understand, she, clean, cool, and sweet, uses it to her own advantage. The days are over for us when men piled baronial keeps, flat-irons, candlesticks, and Doré towers on floating platforms. The New Navy offers to the sea precisely as much to take hold of as the trim level-headed woman with generations of inherited experience offers to society. It is the provincial, aggressive, uncompromising, angular, full of excellently unpractical ideas, who is hurt, and jarred, and rasped in that whirl. In other words, she is not a good sea-boat and cannot work her guns in all weathers.

End