The Fleets Behind the Fleet

What were, in fact, the maritime resources that made these things at all possible? At the outbreak of war Britain possessed over 10,000 ships, and of these about 4,000 ocean-going ships were over 1,600 tons; of smaller ocean traders there were about 1,000. Add to these the fishing trawlers and drifters, over 3,000 of which are now in Government employ. Gradually the traders were requisitioned, at first for military then for national purposes. Sugar was the first article for which Government took responsibility, first and early. Then came wheat, maize, rice and other grains. To these were added month by month many other commodities of which the authorities took charge and for which they found the necessary tonnage. The pool of free ships diminished, contracted to narrow limits and finally dried up. Britain's shipping virtually passed in 1916 wholly under national control. That is in brief the history of the ships; but what of the crews? What of the men and their willingness to serve under war conditions, surrounded by deadly risks. If we include over 100,000 fishermen, the marine population of the empire may be reckoned at not less than 300,000 men. Of these 170,000 are British seamen; 50,000 are Lascars, and 30,000 belong to other nationalities. There you have the absolute total of sea-farers, to whose numbers, owing to their way of life and the peculiarity of their profession it is impossible during war rapidly or greatly to add. No other reservoir of such skill and experience as theirs can anywhere be found. Perhaps the most valuable community in the world to-day and certainly irreplaceable. Means of replenishing it there is none. A Royal Commission appointed in 1858 reported that the nation "possesses in the Merchant Service elements of naval power such as no other Government enjoys," and in 1860 the Royal Naval Reserve Act was passed, by which the Royal Naval Volunteers became the Royal Naval Reserve, and a force enrolled which, though inadequate in numbers, has proved of inestimable value. The Royal Naval Reserve man signs on for a term of 5 years; undergoes each year a short period of training, and reports himself twice a year to the authorities. While in training he receives navy pay and a retaining fee of £4.10. a year during service as a merchant seaman. Twenty years' service qualifies for a pension and a medal. Belonging to this force there were at the outbreak of the war about 18,500 officers and men available, but the number of merchant sailors and fishermen serving with the combatant forces has been trebled and now stands at 62,500. Add to these another 100,000 merchant sailors who, since they share all the risks of a war with an enemy that makes no distinction between belligerents and non-combatants, may well be included among Britain's defenders, and one begins to perceive the true nature and extent of the nation's maritime resources and the utter dependence upon these resources of an island kingdom – the vulnerable heart of a sea sundered empire. In 1893 the Imperial Merchant Service Guild had been established, a body, the value of whose services, already notable, cannot yet be fully calculated. To it, and to the profession it represents, the nation will yet do justice. For the professional skill and invincible courage of her merchant seamen has at length made clear to Britain the secret of her strength; the knowledge that to them she owes her place and power in the world. She has found in them the same skill and the same courage with which their forefathers sailed and fought in all the country's earlier wars. "The submarine scare," said the Deutsche Tageszeitung, "has struck England with paralysing effect, and the whole sea is as if swept clean at one blow." To this one answers that the sailing of no British ship has been delayed by an hour by fear of the submarine menace. If the sea be indeed swept clear of ships how strange that every week records its batch of victims! A sufficient testimony, one would think, to their presence, and, might not one add, of equal eloquence in their praise. It was assumed – a magnificent assumption – that a British crew could never fail. It never did. The Vedamore was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland, and most of her crew killed or drowned. In wild and wintry weather the survivors, 16 in all, after many hours' exposure in open boats, made a successful landing. These 16 reached London and proposed, you will say, to snatch a few days' rest, a little comfort after their miseries. Their object was a different one: – to ask for a new ship. "Had enough?" one of the crew of the torpedoed Southland was asked, when he came ashore. "Not me," he replied, "I shall be off again as soon as I can find a berth." "If," said one torpedoed seaman, "there were fifty times the number of submarines it wouldn't make no difference to us. While there's a ship afloat there will be plenty to man her. My mates and I were torpedoed a fortnight ago and just as soon as we get another ship we shall be off." She has her faults, has Britain, but she still breeds men: And mothers of men. Take the authentic circumstance of the vessel whose crew was not of British stock. They declined when safely in port to undertake another and risky voyage. But there appeared to them next day an Englishwoman, the Captain's wife, with the announcement, perhaps unwelcome, that she proposed on that trip to accompany her husband. She went; and with her, for their manhood's sake, the reluctant crew.

You may say "It is not in nature that there should have been no failures." Well, here is one. "Only a short while ago," said Mr. Cuthbert Laws, "we found it necessary to prosecute a seaman who had failed to join a transport, and there was no doubt that he was technically guilty, but he set up and successfully sustained a defence which is unique in the annals of the Mercantile Marine. He admitted that he had failed to join the vessel, but he said that his reason for doing so was that his shipmates refused to sail with him because he had already been torpedoed six times. In other words, while they were prepared to take the ordinary sporting chance of being blown up, they were not prepared to accept the handicap of having a Jonah on board."

The story of docks and harbours, of the loading and unloading of the war freights merits a chapter of its own. To understand it you must remember that ships are of many sizes and of very varying draught. The depths of water in the ports, the tides, the quay accommodation, the provision of cranes and sorting sheds, of available railway trucks have in each case to be considered. Grain requires one type of machinery for unloading, timber another, fruit or meat yet another. If the cargo be mixed and consigned perhaps to hundreds of dealers, in various parts of the country, sorting sheds are a necessity. Many harbours provide only for small coasting craft and cannot accommodate large ocean traders, many are affected by tide and quite unprovided with docks; others again lack quay and truck accommodation save of the simplest order. There is also the problem of dock labourers, men skilled in the handling of particular types of cargo. Manifestly you cannot order any ship to any port. Vessels must therefore run to their usual harbours and to provide the machinery for "turning them" rapidly round presents, under the congested conditions of war, a problem of extreme complexity. Heavy munition trains, miles upon miles of them, are daily pouring into the Southern ports. Great guns, railway trucks and engines and rails form a part of these stupendous freights. There are many harbours in the South but few capable of berthing, loading and unloading the largest liners, and if we would criticise these operations, and free criticism of them has been, after our national manner, plentiful, we should understand that to the transport work of peace that of the greatest of wars has been added, and understand too that the shipping problem involves much more than ships, and requires to-day something like the higher mathematics for its solution.

"Both are now one service in spirit," wrote Admiral Jellicoe of the Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marine, "and never have British seamen united in a more stern and mighty cause." Say what we will, be it in prose or verse, it falls short of their deserving. The merchant sailor and the fisherman has had his share in the fighting and more than his share in the labours of the war. They took part in Jutland and the earlier battles. Some are in command of destroyers and torpedo boats, others of vessels on the blockade patrol or of submarine chasers; others again of transport and repair ships. On mine carriers and mine sweepers they serve; on paddle steamers and panting tug boats; on water ships and balloon ships; on salvage and escort work. They are to be found on trawlers and drifters and motor craft; on captured German steamers, now playfully renamed, the Hun line, —Hun-gerford, Hun-stanton; on oilers and colliers and meat ships, in the North Sea and Mediterranean and the distant oceans; on transport and repair, on observation and remount and hospital vessels everywhere. They gathered the great armies from the ends of the earth, they fuel and munition the Grand Fleet; the Suez Canal knows them and the Royal Indian Marine and the African rivers. No sea that has not seen them, "no climate that is not witness to their toils." For proof that they are a pugnacious breed read the story of the Gallipoli landings, where Commander Unwin and Midshipman Drewry won each his Victoria Cross, where supplies were daily put ashore under the shrapnel fire from Turkish batteries; read the story of Carmania's fight with Cap Trafalgar; of Clan McTavish and her spirited combat with Möwe, which filled the seamen of the Grand Fleet with delighted admiration. Read of the whalers in Sudi harbour, of the attacks on Jubassi in the Cameroons; of the actions on the Tigris and Rafigi rivers, in all which actions officers of the Merchant Service distinguished themselves. Called upon for every type of action, navigating under war conditions by lightless coasts, responsible for new and strange undertakings, in armed or defenceless craft, on the bridge of sinking ships or adrift in open boats, the fearless spirit of the British sailor meets the occasion, and as with his ancestor and prototype of the Viking times, the harder the enterprise the harder grows his heart.

It is good for us now and then to contemplate men nobler than ourselves; to be told that volunteers over 60 years of age paid their own passage from Australia to serve afloat, that there is at least one engineer – and a health to him – of over 80 with a commission in the Royal Naval Reserve. For who is there so dead at heart as not to covet so springing and mounting a spirit? "I have taken the depth of the water," said Admiral Duncan in the engagement off the Texel, "and when the Venerable goes down, my flag will still fly."

There is something in it, this companionship with the sea, that kindles what is heroic in a race to the finest resolution. Perhaps it is not to be expected that we shore-dwellers should have more than a languid appreciation of hardships and labours indescribable and should read tales of the sea rather for pleasure than edification, but if ever a people had masters in the school of nobility we are fortunate in our teachers of to-day. Already over 3,000 men and officers of the Royal Naval Reserve have fallen in their country's service, and of Merchant Sailors pursuing their ordinary calling not fewer. Born fighters, you will say, the English. Yes, but these men died most of them without hope of glory.

When Captain Wicks of the Straton dashed in among the wreckage of the sinking Runo and assisted in the saving of 200 lives, the look-out man shouted to him "Two mines right ahead, sir." "Can't be helped," replied the Captain, "it is risking lives to save lives." Which is indeed in a sentence the daily task, whatever or wherever the allotted posts of these cavaliers of the sea. The day dawns or the night descends, to find them on the bridge or in the engine-room, North or South of the Line, running the grim gauntlet of murderous things that the sea, with all its grey ages of experience, never before has known.

SEA WARFARE: THE NEW STYLE

Come all ye jolly mariners, and list ye while I tell,

Afore we heave the capstan round and meet the Channel swell,

Of a handy ship, and sailor lads and women folk, a score,

And gallant gentlemen who sail below the ocean floor;

A tale as new, and strange and true as any historie,

Of the German law and courtesie

And custom of the sea.

That our merchant seamen would be called upon to face the fiercest blast of the storm would have seemed a fantastic prophecy. Look however at the circumstances. They have been called paradoxical, unprecedented in the whole previous history of naval war. To think of it! A fleet – the British – of immeasurable and unchallenged strength, beyond debate absolute upon the seas, is found unable to protect its country's commerce! Slowly it rose and took shape, this spectre of an incredible, amazing situation. A new situation? Yes, in a way, for the weapons were new, but not so new as it appears. Have any of us considered the losses of our Mercantile Marine in the American or the Napoleonic wars? During the latter we captured 440 French ships. How many did we lose? Five thousand three hundred and fourteen British vessels were captured by the French! Our losses were over 40 per cent of our tonnage! This, remember, was in Nelson's days, when we held command of the sea. With these facts in mind one is better able to judge the price of sea supremacy and to understand that fleets have never been able wholly to safeguard commerce. As in our previous history the situation arises from the very supremacy of the Grand Fleet, a supremacy so complete as to leave no alternative to the weaker naval power which, in such circumstances, invariably resorts to the guerre de course. In the under water campaign we have a new form of attack, but it is simply the confession that upon the sea Germany was powerless and had abandoned hope. No less a confession, too, that beneath the sea and against the British Navy she was equally powerless. Who can doubt that had the chance been given she would unhesitatingly have preferred victory in fair fight, a victory resounding and glorious. That denied her, she declined upon victory without honour, of any pattern and at any price. She gave free range to her unmatched genius for destruction. Men, when they discussed naval warfare, viewed it with speculative eye as a clash of battleships in one or two terrific, decisive, world-shaking encounters. Few, if any, foresaw that the enemy, declining the great issue, would aim at a slow grinding pressure, adopting a kind of warfare in which the fighting fleets would hardly feel the shock. There indeed they lie in the misty North, volcanic and destroying powers, which any hour may release, and yet from day to day and month to month they wait unchallenged, and the enemy blows are directed and dealt against less formidable adversaries. They rain with desperate violence against men whose profession was never that of arms, who nevertheless were they offered a fair field and no favour would prove themselves more than a match for their assailants. Unsustained by the exhilaration of battle, defenceless, and in single, far-separated ships, their part in the drama offers few attractions. There are enviable occupations, no doubt, even in war, but who would choose the part of a running target for enemy shells and torpedoes?

It is natural to enquire how far Admiral Mahan's pronouncement on commerce destruction is true to-day. "The harassment and distress caused to a country by serious interference with its commerce will be conceded by all. It is doubtless a most important secondary operation of naval war, and is not likely to be abandoned till war itself shall cease: but regarded as a primary and fundamental measure, sufficient in itself to crush an enemy, it is probably a delusion, when presented in the fascinating garb of cheapness to the representatives of a people. Especially is it misleading when the nation against whom it is directed possesses, as Great Britain did and does, the two requisites of a strong sea power – a widespread healthy commerce and a powerful Navy." Has the advent of the submarine fundamentally altered the situation? "No," we may answer with confidence, if the rules of international law be observed. If these be thrown aside there remains, until the event decides, room for much argument.

To the most casual observer it seems now obvious enough that the vulnerable point in the formidable power of the Alliance opposed to Germany lay in the length and character of its sea communications. But the German Higher Command, soldiers most of them, took long to realise it. Land power must outmatch sea power, they reckoned. "Moltke," announced the Tageblatt triumphantly, "has conquered Mahan." Doubtless to harass British trade was expedient, and it had in the plans been marked down for attack. High hopes were entertained of a guerre de course conducted by armed cruisers in distant seas. Any impoverishment of the enemy is grist to the mill. But it was a secondary affair. And events proved that there was no sufficiency in it. When Von Spee's squadron vanished beneath the seas Germany applied her mind to the matter and perceived at length the true nature of the issue. Successes here and there could not help her. She must somehow, heroically or otherwise, cut the Gordian knot or reckon with defeat. Thus it was that the rôles were reversed, and while Britain unexpectedly threw her weight into military operations, Germany turned her gaze seawards and sought to pluck victory from an element not her own.

Dimly at first but with growing clearness she perceived that from the sea the Alliance daily renewed its strength, that the sea was the source of its recuperative energy, the healing well; that while the seas were open it would nourish as it were eternal youth, that the waterways were the avenues to the elixir vitae, the resources of the world which made good even the crushing wear and tear of modern war. There is no better judge among the nations of where lie the odds in material things, and with faultless judgment she put aside any temptation that may have assailed her to make the heroic venture, to engage outright the Grand Fleet. There lay the irreducible factor in the situation. "With its defeat the problem would have solved itself. But with Jutland that solution had to be abandoned, and with it the faith she had taught herself that in men and gunnery her navy was more than Britain's equal. Another way had to be chosen. Undefeated, could the Grand Fleet be circumvented? Could it somehow be eliminated from the calculation, could a blow be dealt at the communications of the Alliance from which battleships were powerless to shield it? In evasion and circumvention, she judged, lay the key to the unforceable lock. With the immense self-confidence that marks these serfs of theory, the Germans drew their plan – a ruthless campaign conducted with the same pitiless logic, the same patience and forethought that they were accustomed to devote to their military operations. Eluding the armed adversary, with all their great and remaining strength they would strike at the unarmed, —

"God's mercy, then, on little shipsWho cannot fight for life."

Were it possible, and Germany believed it possible, to sever Britain's sea arteries, the hated enemy might bleed to death, slowly perhaps but surely. She perceived the joint in the harness and drove in the knife. Intimidation was here to play its usual part. If horror accompanied terror so much the better, the world must learn what it was to oppose an angry and implacable Germany. Then, and not till then, Britain realised the strength and weakness of her position; perceived at last and with many searchings of heart her vulnerability, and with growing pride the peculiar genius of her race. So the sea affair finally reduced itself into an attack upon the Allies' communications, that is an attack upon Britain's Merchant Marine, accompanied, since no less would suffice, with crime of the first magnitude. Casting about for weapons to be used against a foe unchallengeable in a direct encounter Germany found three to her hand – the disguised raider, the mine and the submarine, all be it observed prowling or furtive weapons, with whose stealthy assistance Germany proposes to usher in the Golden Age. With this new and triple-headed engine Britain was to be bludgeoned into submission. You desire to make allowances for Germany's difficulties, and they were many. Waive then the inherent defect of these engines, that two of them cannot be employed with humanity. Argue if you like that in the interests of your own people, the general interests of the race must be sacrificed; that war is war, and that chivalrous war is a Christian absurdity. The Dark Ages would no doubt have described the use of the new weapons as savagery. In our enlightened times harsh phrases are inadmissible. There appears therefore to be need of some gently uncomplaining word to describe the indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants, of humanitarian helpers on relief ships, of crippled wounded aboard hospital ships. Her errand of mercy did not save the Norwegian steamer Storsted, known to be carrying a cargo of maize for the relief of starving Belgians.

Finally you come to Germany's dealing with neutrals. The world has dreamt many evil dreams, but this is a nightmare. You are at peace with a neighbouring nation. You find it necessary nevertheless to destroy its property. Wonderful! You are in fact on the friendliest terms with her people, to whom you owe many of your essential supplies, but you kill them without hesitation and without mercy – Still more wonderful! If they complain you become virtuously indignant and threaten worse things. It is past whooping! Already over 800 neutral ships, all of course unarmed, have been done to death. These are indeed martial achievements. Judge of the whole by a part of the most dolorous history in the records of civilisation. "Norway," said the National Tidende in April 1917, "has lost since the beginning of the war one-third of her mercantile marine, and about 300 of her sailors, and is now losing 5 lives daily and an average of two ships, valued at two million kroner." Denmark has lost 150 ships, and more than 200 of her sailors have been killed. Do not mistake. It is all pure friendliness. As Hamlet says, "They but poison in jest." "Thirteen survivors of the crew of the Norwegian ship Medusa, 1023 tons, have been landed," runs the record of May 22, 1917, "their vessel having been shelled and sunk by a German submarine. Seven of the thirteen were hospital cases. The Germans in addition to not giving them any warning, continued shelling the crew while they were lowering the boats. The bursting of the shells scattered shrapnel which killed two men and severely wounded seven others. One man had half his left foot blown away, and another some of his scalp blown off, while a third had his neck lacerated."

Let us not imagine however that Germans are themselves in agreement with respect to this warfare. Professor Flamm of Charlottenburg is dissatisfied. In Die Woche he advocates sterner dealing. Fewer men of the crews of torpedoed vessels should be saved. Best of all would it be if destroyed neutral ships disappeared without leaving a trace even of wreckage. Then terror would strike at men's hearts. How charming a friend is Professor Flamm. For it is not enemies he desires to treat thus. It is not war he advocates, only an exposition of the German mind. Norway, Denmark and the rest are enjoying the pleasures of peace. Perhaps learning will supply us with a new name for these operations. Had Germany begun the war with justice on her side her conduct of it would long since have driven justice, a fugitive, to the opposite camp. Into the teeth of this hurricane of hate the merchant seamen put forth, and every hour that we watch it from sheltered homes is taking toll of their lives. Read the long list of officers in the service that are gone, and remember that beyond it lies a longer and more sorrowful category still of men that held no rank nor ever thought of fame; engineers and deck hands, boys and stokers, so that in the fishing villages from North to South the tiniest mourns its unreturning dead.