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THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET

The Work of the Merchant Seamen and Fishermen in the War

by

W. MACNEILE DIXON

Professor in the University of Glasgow







[Illustration]

New York
George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1917.
By George H. Doran Company

Printed in the United States of America




FOREWORD


What follows is not written to praise our merchant sailors and
fishermen. They are indeed worthy of all praise. But we looked for
nothing else than that they would in every circumstance of trial and
danger show themselves to be what they are, peerless. At what date or
on what occasion in their history have they failed? From a fierier
ordeal a firmer courage and a harder resolution have emerged, as we
believed it would. Of this the world is already very well aware. Their
friends know it and their foes. What remains then is not to praise them
but to instruct ourselves. Our vision has been limited. We knew that
in the Navy lay our strength, but in our thoughts we defined it as the
Royal Navy. Till these troubled years the Merchant Service had for many
Englishmen only a shadowy existence. For the first time it has come
acutely home to us that "the sea is all one,--the navy is all one."
That ships are Britain's treasure, her shipping trade her most vital
industry, her sea-faring population her unique possession, the sea
itself her partner in her national fortunes, and her merchant sailors
the builders of her empire have been facts manifest enough to others,
perceived perhaps by Britons in moments of reflection, but how rarely
reflected in the full light of national consciousness.

    "Thy story, thy glory,
      The very fame of thee,
    It rose not, it grows not,
      It comes not, save by sea."

Let it not be said that we shall do justice to our merchant sailors
and fishermen when the history of their doings in these days comes
to be written. It will never be written. And for several good and
sufficient reasons. Battles on sea or land may be described, great
moments in the dreary annals of war. In armies masses of men, in fleets
numbers of ships act together, and some picture of the great assault
or the heroic defence can be painted in broad outlines. But the ships
of the merchant service are solitary wayfarers, scattered units in
a waste of waters. The adventures of a thousand ships, the deeds of
a thousand skippers, how are these to be set forth in a convenient
handbook? On each the sleepless watch, on each the long anxious hours,
and for how many of them the same tragic disaster? One record is like
another record; one story like another story. And as for their deeds
they differ hardly at all. If to meet the crisis as it should be met,
with perfect skill and perfect devotion to duty, be heroism, then all
are heroes. A hero to-day has for his Valhalla a newspaper paragraph.
Many good men have walked the earth as many good sailors have sailed
the sea without so much. Men do not always fight and die in the light,
and legions of shining acts must remain unsung. With the best will in
the world you cannot number the brave men in the world; nor make your
battle canvas as huge as you please will you find room in it for all
the gallant faces. If it be sad to think that they will be forgotten,
it is inspiring to think they are so many. Because courage and resource
and determination are everywhere, a single scene or act is nowhere
elevated above the rest. The unit is merged in the magnificent total.
You will say they form a wonderful series. It is indisputable, but the
historian cannot unify such a series or do justice to the individuals
who form it. Not this or that exceptional act which chance reveals, but
the compact body of its achievement, the pluck, the unshaken heart of
the whole service is the impressive thing. So we may put aside the hope
that the future will help us better than the present to appreciate the
"captains courageous" who in our time have upheld the long incomparable
tradition of British seamen and seamanship. Yet if Britain be persuaded
by their deeds to do justice to their successors, which will be
nothing more than to do justice to herself, we may believe that even
though unrecorded nothing has been lost. In the temple or cathedral or
national monument one does not count less essential or less worthy the
stones that are hid from view.




  CONTENTS


                                        PAGE

  A MARITIME NATION                        9

  THE KEY-STONE OF THE ARCH               19

  SEA WARFARE: THE NEW STYLE              33

  THE MINE-FISHERS                        53

  THE SEA TRAFFICKERS                     71




    OLD SAILORS


    With many an old Sailor, on many an old ship,
    Who hoisted out many a barrel onto many an old slip,
    And went below to his hammock or to a can of flip
            Like an old Sailor of the Queen's
            And the Queen's old Sailor.

    With many an old brave captain we shall never know,
    Who walked the decks under the colours when the winds did blow,
    And made the planks red with his blood before they carried him below
            Like an old Sailor of the Queen's
            And the Queen's old Sailor.

    And in Davy Jones's Taverns may they sit at ease,
    With their old tarpaulin aprons over their old knees,
    Singing their old sea ballads and yarning of the seas
            Like good old Sailors of the Queen's
            And the Queen's old Sailors.

     --From _A Sailor's Garland_,
     edited by John Masefield.




THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET

A MARITIME NATION

    I built the ships and I sailed the ships, and they lie in my
       havens fair,
    With the sea-god's salt on their crusted plates and the green
       of the sea nymph's hair;
    I built the ships and I sailed the ships, on the slack and the
       flowing tide;
    Will ye match my skill in the hulls I build on the narrow seas
       or wide?
    Will ye match my men from the oceans five, or better the work
       of their hands
    From the books that are writ or the tales that are told, the
       tales of the hundred lands?


Cease to think of Britain's naval power in terms of battleships and
cruisers and you begin to understand it. Think of it rather in terms
of trade routes and navigation, of ship and dockyards, of busy ports
and harbours, of a deeply indented coast line, 7,000 miles in length;
of great rivers flowing into wide estuaries; of liners and tramps;
weatherly east coast trawlers and burly Penzance luggers; of ancient
fishing villages looking out from every bay and rocky inlet. Built
by nature to be the home of a maritime people, inhabited by the
descendants of sea-faring races, accessible only from other lands by
water, every stone in the British Isles is fitted into a geographical
foundation. Not many of us know it but we are none the less children
of the sea and live by it. We are its captives and masters, imprisoned
by it and forcing it to serve our needs. In the language daily on
our lips are phrases salt as the ocean itself--we "make headway" and
"weather a difficulty"; we are "taken aback," or "out of soundings"
or have "the wind taken out of our sails," or discern "rocks ahead,"
or find "another shot in the locker." To the people who made this
language the sea has been the "nursing mother." View it thus, and the
Royal Navy becomes no more than a symbol, the expression of a peculiar
national life. Science may think of it as the tough exterior hide, the
armour, like that of the dinosaurus, with which nature in the process
of evolution provides her mightiest creatures. It is in fact simply
the glittering shaft on the string of a powerful bow, the power is in
the bow and not the arrow. Any one can see that the mere possession
of a fleet cannot bestow naval power. The Royal Navy occupies indeed
to-day the centre of the picture, yet without the vast and supporting
background of arsenals, building yards, docks, harbours, bases, a
fleet is nothing. Behind it lives, moves and has its being, the great
maritime nation--an organisation of extreme complexity with its coal
and iron mines, its manufactories, its endless machinery and, far
above all, its age-long tradition and experience of the sea. View it
historically, and the Royal Navy is the heir of the Merchant Service,
the inheritor of its fighting spirit and tradition. Not till Victoria's
reign was any clear line of division drawn between the merchant sailor
and the man-of-war's-man. Both stood together in the nation's first
line of defence during the critical moments of its history, when
Philip planned his great _coup_, and Napoleon bestrode the world like
a Colossus. And now that the fiery wheel of fate has revolved once
more and swept the peoples into the maelstrom of war, history repeats
itself, and the mariners of England from the merchant and fishing
fleets are fighting men once more as in the old and famous days.

Histories, as they have too often been written, obscure the vision
and provide a false perspective. Faithful chronicles no doubt of the
red-letter days of battle, but how few and far between were the battles
in our long naval wars! Too often the histories speak of the Navy as
if it were a thing apart, a mere fighting instrument, and forget to
tell us of the fleets behind the fleet; of the merchant sailors and
the fishermen, the pioneers and the builders of our sea-supported
confederacy. These "traders," it was said of the Elizabethan seamen,
"escaped the notice of kings and chroniclers." Nevertheless it was
these men who saved England and America from becoming provinces of
Spain. We Englishmen forget, if we have ever considered and known, that
in all their naval enterprises, and they have not been few, the country
invariably called upon her merchantmen and fisher folk; upon all her
resources in men and ships. The "navy," as we call it, what has history
to say of it? That until the reign of Henry VIII, the pious founder of
the Royal Navy, it was, in fact, neither more nor less than England's
mercantile marine. As for Elizabeth's tall ships and proud captains,
Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher and many another, they were stout
merchant skippers, and of the fleet which met the Great Armada, near
upon 200 sail, but 34 belonged to the Queen's Navy. In that expedition
to Cadiz, too, which singed the whiskers of His Majesty of Spain, not
more than 5 or 6 in a fleet of 40 vessels were men-of-war. In its palmy
days the Merchant Navy was accustomed and very well able to look after
itself, and not seldom lent a hand in the affairs of magnitude and
importance. Trading and fighting indeed went together; buccaneers and
privateers abounded, and the line between war and peace was negligently
drawn. Peace there might be on land, but never a year passed, never a
month, for that matter, without its encounters at sea.

Through the 17th and 18th centuries it was much the same. Britain's
"navy" consisted of little more than merchantmen and their crews; for
themselves and for her they traded; for themselves and for her they
fought. As the records show, officers of the Royal Navy on half-pay
or the retired list were not too proud to go to sea in command of
merchantmen; a practice which continued till the crowning year 1815.
On the "glorious first of June" 1796, the merchant service won his
victory for Lord Howe, and the fleets of Hood and Nelson must have
employed not less than 50,000 men, who learnt their sea-going and their
fighting as fishermen or traders. Nelson himself--symbol let it be of
the inseparable fellowship--served his apprenticeship on a merchantman,
and in those days service afloat, whether in king's ship or trader,
counted for promotion in the Royal Navy. As for fighting, no one ever
complained that the men of the merchant service shrank from undertaking
that business, or fell short in the performance of it.

It was a merchant ship, the Mountjoy, that in 1689 under the fire of
the shore batteries led the vessels sent to the relief of Derry. She
rammed and shattered the boom, forced the barrier, and raised the
historic siege. "To prevent all thoughts among my men of surrendering
ye ship," wrote the commander of the _Chambers_, an East India merchant
vessel in 1703, when attacked by a French 64 and a frigate, "I nailed
the ensigne to the staff from head to foot, and stapled and forecockt
the ensigne staff fast up. I resolved to part with ship and life
together." In 1804 the East India Company's fleet in the China Seas
engaged, beat off and pursued a powerful squadron of war vessels which
contained 2 frigates and a line-of-battle ship of 74 guns, under the
Comte de Linois. As for transport, how many expeditions of British
soldiers have been ferried by British merchantmen? A fleet of no less
than 90 vessels took part in the great expedition to the Crimea in
1854, which carried 30,000 men and 3,000 horses to the distant seat of
war; while in 1860 two hundred vessels transported troops to China.
"I do not remember," wrote Lord Wolseley, "having witnessed a grander
sight than our fleet presented when steering for the Peiho. All ships
were under full sail, the breeze being just powerful enough to send
them along at about 5 knots an hour, and yet no more than rippled the
sea's surface, which shone with all the golden hues of a brilliant
sunshine. The ships were in long lines, one vessel behind the other,
with a man-of-war leading each line.... Looking upon that brilliant
naval spectacle I could scarcely realise the fact of being some 16,000
miles from England."

During the South African War, conducted 6,000 miles from home, almost a
million soldiers were carried across the seas, and about a million tons
of stores. Hundreds of trading vessels were then employed. To-day we
may count these elementary operations, for the fighting navy held the
sea, and better parallels to the work of our merchant seamen in these
times may be found in our earlier wars.

Gradually indeed during the last 100 years, the services drew apart.
Gradually the Board of Trade usurped the control of the Royal
prerogative exercised through the Admiralty, of the nation's shipping;
but the hand of war has turned back the leaves, and Britain's naval
power has again to be calculated, as it should never have ceased to
be calculated, in the broad terms of men and ships; the extent and
efficiency not of this service or that, but of the assembled and
fraternal society of the sea. In its charge to-day is the destiny of
the nations.

It is a good story, that of the British sailor in the long centuries
that lie between us and Beowulf, the first seafarer and warrior in
the 7th century, of which our literature tells. And if ever there was
a tale to catch the ear it lies to the hand of the future historian
of the Merchant Marine, for without it, without the resolution and
enterprise with which it espoused the country's cause, the story were
long since ended. That is the gist of the matter, and argument about it
there can be none. Not for a moment is it disputable that despite all
its immense resources and striking power the Grand Fleet could not have
saved Europe or Britain as they have been saved from ruinous defeat.
Without her merchant sailors, without her fisher-folk in this war as
waged with a cunning and ruthless foe, the life blood of Britain would
inevitably have ebbed away drop by drop, a creeping and fatal paralysis
overtaken her. Had her merchant sailors faltered, had her fisher-folk
been less resolute, had their old qualities not sprung forth to meet
the new and deadly perils, the destiny of the world would have been
other than it will be. Not once or twice have they thus stood across
the dragon's path. History, then, repeats itself, but on a scale by
sea and land that dwarfs even the spacious days when the Armada sailed
from Spain, or Nelson scoured the Mediterranean. History repeats
itself, but with a difference. The incidence of the pressure and the
strain, protracted, exhausting, of this war, has been less directly
upon the Grand Fleet, equal and more than equal to all that it has been
called upon to perform. The incidence of the pressure has fallen, as
it has always fallen, upon those men who were not by profession of the
fighting company; upon ships and men engaged till the fateful year 1914
in peaceful callings; toilers of the deep who rolled round the world on
the trade routes, or pursued the whale south of the equatorial line, or
dragged their heavy trawls through the cold seas of the north.

It is no new thing then for men of the merchant service to man their
guns and fight their ships. And not for the first time has Britain
mobilised all her maritime resources. Never before, however, in a
fashion so far-reaching or so impressive. Her previous history is
written over again but in larger characters. Never before have her
merchant navies been called upon to support so stupendous an operation,
to carry almost the whole weight of transport and supplies for millions
of fighting men. Since ships are the railroads of the Allies; since
without ships neither soldiers nor guns can reach the distant seats
of war; since without them Britain herself cannot hope to sustain her
life--ships and sailors have been and are, as they have been in the
past, the first and last and utterly essential element.

None but a great maritime people, however powerful its fighting fleets,
could have faced or upheld for a week the gigantic undertaking. We
speak of an empire of thirteen million square miles, of four hundred
millions of inhabitants. We should speak of it as an empire of ships
and sailors, an empire of tonnage--20 millions of it--carrying the
weight of half the world's goods, a voyaging empire, in everlasting
motion on the seas, that in days of peace serves every race and
country--

    To give the poles the produce of the sun,
    And knit the unsocial climates into one.

that unites in a close-wrought texture the whole fabric of
civilisation, links island to island, continent to continent; a
prodigious network of travel. The empire of ships, that has brought
the East to meet the West, sought out the far and foreign lands;
enabled China and India and the Isles to interchange ideas and gifts
with Europe, is not the fleet of battleships but that other which, in
times of peace, extended in a fashion no other instrument has ever
rivalled, and enriched beyond arithmetic the intercourse and resources
of mankind.




THE KEY-STONE OF THE ARCH

    These are the men who sailed with Drake,
      Masters and mates and crew:
    These are the men, and the ways they take
      Are the old ways through and through;
      These are the men he knew.


The communications of the Great Alliance--it is their point of
vulnerability--are sea communications, and if that key-stone slips

    "Rome in Tiber melts, and the wide arch
    Of the ranged Empire falls."

From the first the Central Powers held the splendid advantage of the
interior and shorter lines. Theirs were the spokes of the wheel, the
spokes along which run the railways. On the circumference of the
wheel held by the Alliance, on the rim of ocean, went and came all
things--men and the interminable machinery of war. The Allied and far
longer lines therefore on the arc of an immense circle traverse the
sea from Archangel to Gibraltar; from Gibraltar to Suez or the Cape;
from Suez to Colombo; from Colombo to Melbourne; from Melbourne to
Vladivostok. Nothing less was here required than a railroad belting
the globe, whose rolling stock was ships. And the problem faced by
Britain, as the great maritime partner in the alliance of 1913, remains
essentially a problem of sea transport, and transport on a scale wholly
without parallel in the world's history. Since Britain herself had
never dreamt of raising an army of five million men, provision for
the bridge of boats required for such numbers, with all their battle
apparatus, had found no place in her plans. But she had ships and
sailors.

"We have just returned here after making three trips with troops from
Southampton to France," wrote an officer. "It was really marvellous
work. Southampton was full of troop ships and like clock work they were
handled. Every ship had a number allotted to her and a special signal.
One ship would arrive alongside, fill up her holds and decks, and, in
less than half-an-hour, she was away again. As soon as they got one
vessel off her berth, up would go the signal for another steamer to
take her place, and so the work went on. Ship followed ship off the
port like a line of vessels manœuvring. Orders came for 94 to go
alongside. Up went the signal, and in less time than it takes one to
write, we were following the rest."

The ferrying of vast human and material cargoes across the Channel--an
undertaking one might think serious enough--was in fact a trifle
compared with the undertaking as a whole; for, since the recruiting
areas for Britain's forces lay in every latitude, there fell within
it the transference of great bodies of troops from Australia and New
Zealand across 10,000 miles of ocean, from India across 6,000 miles;
from Canada, more than 2,000 miles away, and not, be it remembered,
a transference to Britain or France only but to Egypt, the Persian
Gulf, the Dardanelles, Salonika; a transference continuous, unending,
processional.

"It is not only a war with Germany," said Sir Edward Carson. "You
have a war--a naval war--going on over the whole of the seas--war
in the Channel, war in the Atlantic, war in the Pacific, war in
the Mediterranean, war round Egypt, war in the Adriatic, war in
Mesopotamia, war at Salonika, and day by day the Navy is called upon to
supply the material for carrying on all these wars. Did anybody ever
contemplate a war of that kind? When I mention one figure to you that
at the commencement of the war we had something like 150 small vessels
for patrol work, and now we have something like 3,000, you will see
the gigantic feat that has been accomplished by the Navy. In all these
theatres of war we have to provide patrols, convoys, mine-sweepers,
mine-layers, air service, mine-carriers, fleet messengers."

Owing to the demands of the Royal Navy upon the shipyards additions
to mercantile tonnage were out of the question. With the ordinary
resources of peace the vast unapprehended responsibilities of war had
to be met. There was no other way. Besides the armies and the great
guns, the various belligerent zones called for hundreds of miles of
railroad with engines and rolling stock complete; horses and mules
and their fodder; cargoes of wood for trench making; river boats in
sections for the Persian Gulf; motor lorries, literally in thousands;
material and food for whole moving populations and their multiform
activities.

"During the last five or six weeks," said Sir William Robertson on May
12, "we have expended no less than 200,000 tons of munitions in France
alone, and we have taken out some 50,000 tons of stones for making and
mending roads." "Everything has been taken ashore," wrote an officer on
transport service in the East, "by lighters and rafts. The major part
of our cargo is railway material, cattle trucks, ambulance vans, oxen,
horses, mules, fodder, ammunition and troops. We have a mixture of
everything necessary for warfare from 'a needle to an elephant.'"

Think also of the coal, carried overseas to the Allies; nitrates
shipped from South, munitions from North America; ore from Spain and
the Mediterranean; and contemplate the dizzy shuffling on the high seas
of these mighty freights. All the while the needs of peace remained
inexorable. The sugar and the wheat, the cotton, coffee and all the
other requirements of the home population of these islands had still
unceasingly to be provided. The mind refuses to calculate in these
dimensions; our foot-rules will not measure them. Let us however write
down the unthinkable figures. Eight millions of men; ten million tons
of supplies and explosives; over a million sick and wounded; over a
million horses and mules; fifty million gallons of petrol alone. These
of course are merely the additional undertakings of war. To complete
the picture one has to include ordinary imports and exports, such
trifles as 100 million hundredweights of wheat; seven million tons
of iron ore; 21 million centals of cotton--the figures for 1916. For
the same 12 months the value of the home products _exported_ was 500
millions. British ships have been busy in these thundering years!

But the Allies, you will say, assisted. France had 360 ocean-going
vessels; Italy about the same number; Russia 174; Belgium 67. No
doubt, yet these nations were nevertheless borrowers, not lenders.
Their ships were far from sufficient for their own necessities, and
to France, Britain despite her own searching requirements, lent about
600 ships, to Italy about 400, a sixth of her own far from adequate
supply. "Without our Mercantile Marine the Navy--and indeed--the
nation--could not exist," said Admiral Jellicoe. One perceives the
truth of it. But the tale does not end there. About a hundred merchant
ships were commissioned as auxiliary cruisers, and armed with guns
like the _Carmania_ took their share in the fighting. The _Empress of
Japan_ captured the collier _Exford_, the _Macedonia_ rounded up the
transports accompanying Von Spee, the _Orama_ was in at the death
of _Dresden_. Colliers too are needed for the Royal Navy; supply and
repair ships; auxiliaries for the fighting flotillas and the great
blockade patrol. Extending from the Shetlands to the coast of Greenland
and the Arctic ice a wide net had to be flung whose meshes were British
ships. And yet again in the narrow seas and in the defiles of the trade
routes, day in day out, the British trawlers--fleets of them--swept for
the German mines.

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 ships
    Who 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.

Of the raiders, so far as it has been written, we know the record. The
sea is wide, and one might almost as well look for an escaped bird
in the forest as for a single ship in any ocean. They have had their
victims; fifty of our merchantmen were seized or sunk before the first
phase ended with the battle of the Falklands and the destruction of
Von Spee. There were of course escapes and adventures, like that of
the Pacific Steam Navigation cargo vessel and her conversation with
the _Karlsruhe_, which had information of her position and sent out a
wireless signal asking for the latitude and longitude. The operator,
instructed by the captain, sceptical soul, refused the friendly
suggestion. The polite enemy retorted, "English schweinhund. This is
German warship, _Karlsruhe_, we will you find." But the night set
in thick with misty rain, and though only a few miles distant the
English ship, heedless of angry signals, slipped away and escaped.
The subsequent disguised commerce raiders could only creep at long
intervals and under colours not their own, through the patrols, in
rain or snow storms, by circuitous routes and through territorial
waters. _Meteor_, under the Russian flag, was rounded up deserted and
destroyed by her own crew. _Berlin_ driven into Trondhjem and interned.
_Greif_ disguised as a Norwegian ship perished in the encounter with
_Alcantara_. Of these ventures, one may say, that they repeated tactics
familiar in all our wars; tactics which never yet turned the scale
or threatened to turn it. Consider now the far more serious menace
of the submarine and mine. These were weapons indeed not altogether
novel, the novelty lay in the scale and ruthless manner of their
employment; and the ruthless policy once launched, three things,
at first but dimly distinguishable amid the confusion of so vast a
conflict, took shape and form. First that the war, however long the
decision might be postponed, had entered upon its final and decisive
stage. Second that the full strength and pressure of the attack would
now be transferred from the Royal Navy to the Mercantile Marine; and
third that upon its tenacity and powers of endurance depended not the
destiny of Britain alone but that of the world. It was to be a conflict
grim and great, suited to the stupendous consequences which hung upon
the issue, a conflict without the dramatic and inspiring incidents of
engagements between embattled fleets, of monotonous almost featureless
repetitions of the same gruesome story, in which the enemy trusted to
the accumulated effect of a blow dealt again and again, and yet again,
in hardly varying circumstances, reducing with each successful effort
the maritime resources upon which the fortunes of the Alliance were
absolutely staked. Britain's capital--who is now unaware of it?--is her
shipping, and the drain upon that capital, the ceaseless call upon this
bank of national security could not fail if unarrested to compass her
ruin. Britain, and with Britain her allies, would succumb to a series
of stabs in the back.

How is one to account for the success of the submarine campaign?
The answer is that Britain was not prepared for it. Why was she not
prepared? For no other reason than that it was unthinkable. It is as if
a respectable curate of your acquaintance were to whip out a revolver
and demand your purse. You are taken by surprise for you had not
thought these things possible in your neighbourhood, and particularly
not to be expected from a clergyman. The world did not anticipate
the new code of morals, more especially from a people of culture. It
simplifies the business of the highwayman if you have believed him to
be an evangelist. Deceived by the spectacles and the missionary manner
Britain left her merchant ships unarmed, and was quite unprovided with
mines or any other defensive machinery for her traders. By the law and
custom of the nations merchant vessels must not be destroyed at sea but
brought into port, and become prizes of war only if condemned after
a judicial enquiry. From the first these provisions of international
law were thrown aside by Germany. That they had existed, that
civilisation had trusted and that she herself had endorsed them gave
her a magnificent advantage. She took advantage--the most hideous form
of depravity--of the world's growth in goodness. It was felt however
that something might be pardoned to an enemy in sore straits, and even
Britain made no angry complaint. Having discarded civilised usage as
regards property and discarded it in vain the temptation assailed her
to descend another step and disregard considerations of humanity. At
first, as one knows, the crews and passengers of torpedoed ships were
given a chance to escape death. Then, reaching the lowest rung of the
malevolent ladder, Germany bowed farewell to her last scruple. _Facilis
descensus Averni._ Free yourself from restraint, lay aside obligations
moral and legal, and for the destruction of commerce you have in the
submarine a weapon without equal, an immoral inspiration. Unaware that
the world, had outgrown morals, that chivalry was wholly out of date,
Britain taken aback had, it may be confessed, no ready or immediate
answer, and it seemed indeed as if the new instrument possessed
qualities unanswerable, borrowed from the region of fable. Only in
fables does one put on at will the mantle of invisibility or don
invulnerable armour. To see without being seen; to cover yourself with
a garment upon which blows fall in vain--these powers suggest magic
or dealings with the infernal world. How is an enemy to be resisted
who can attack unexpectedly and, if threatened, vanish like a dream?
Each of our merchant vessels, it has been said is like an unarmed man
walking down a dark lane infested with armed highwaymen. Carrying 30 or
40 of a crew, armed with a gun for surface fighting, and that terrible
and devastating weapon, the torpedo, for the secret offensive, capable
of an underwater speed--8-10 knots--equal to, and a surface speed of
18 to 20 knots--far in excess of the average trader; with a radius of
action extending to three or four thousand miles, and the capacity of
remaining at sea for months at a time, one need feel no surprise that
the world rings with the performances of this submersible cruiser.
The torpedo is in itself a mechanism of uncanny quality; nothing else
than a small vessel, costing £1,000 to build, it moves with a speed
of 40 knots, is propelled by its own engines and directed by its
own steering gear. Effective at any range under 10,000 yards, given
position at the range of a couple of miles it may easily kill; at a
mile it kills infallibly. Supply your merchantmen with guns and you
drive the submarine to shelter, but you do not disarm it, and though
it must manœuvre for position to discharge a successful torpedo, if
the missile take effect, a single shot usually suffices. The German
submarine hates the gun behind which stands a British crew, and prefers
the warfare in which blow cannot be returned for blow. No Briton
dislikes a fair fight, or doubts of his success in it, but a warfare in
which he can neither see nor retaliate upon the foe, in which his hands
are tied, strikes his simple and uncultured mind as cowardly. There is
nothing for it but to run away, and for running away Britons are by
nature little adapted.

Of the capital expended by Germany on this campaign 15 or 20 millions
at least already lie in the ocean depths; but side by side with
these millions lies the uncounted wealth of the slaughtered ships
and cargoes. Only when we perceive the true character of the weapon
and the value of the campaign can the endurance and achievements of
the merchant sailor emerge for us into the full sunshine of their
splendour. Examine the matter coolly and one sees that the submarine
owes its success as much to its novelty as to its inherent capacities.
The limitations and defects are as obvious as the qualities. Virtually
powerless on the surface against armed vessels of high speed like
destroyers, completely submerged it has hearing indeed but not sight.
It can obtain little or no knowledge of the drift of current and tide
and is blind to surrounding dangers. Above water it can be rammed or
shelled, below it can be netted or mined. Strange things have happened
to it at the hands of ingenious skippers. Anchors have rudely disturbed
its repose when nestling in the sand, and an enterprising seaman
has been known to leap aboard a rising vessel, lay about him with a
hammer, smash the periscope tube and deprive the aggrieved monster,
like another Polyphemus, of his single eye. Against observation or
attack from the air, too, the submarine is wholly without defence. It
is incapable of descending to great depths and rarely dives lower than
50 feet. The dirigible or hydroplane poised above it is master of the
situation, can discover its presence at a great depth, and with ease
and perfect security destroy it, either when it emerges or even by
means of explosives below the surface.

"Spotting" is everything, for once spotted there is little hope for
the monster. A signal calls to his lair the neighbouring patrols and
surrounded by a swarm of hostile craft he is quickly given the choice
of ascending to surrender or descending for ever. To this mastery the
comparative freedom of the English Channel from submarine depredations
is largely due. Life aboard such a craft is not without its terrors
and bad moments, while it creeps through channels where the water is
shoal or puts up its periscope in an unlucky spot. We may be sure that
black care sits in the cabin with the crew, a justified uneasiness.
The end may be very sudden and of a kind one hardly likes to think of.
Mistakes--and mistakes with half trained crews are inevitable--bring
quick disaster. The deep sea pirates aboard super-submarines operating
on the trade routes have lighter hearts no doubt than those engaged in
the narrow seas, but exits and entrances are not without peril, as the
North Sea depths could reveal. Yet their work goes forward, and the
last sentences of this barbaric sea history are not yet written.

What of the defence in this crafty and lawless war, and what counter
measures have been taken? Apart from the continual patrolling of
dangerous areas and the vigilant antisubmarine warfare conducted by
the warders of the sea routes, the secrets of which none may reveal,
broadly stated, the only present reply to torpedo attack consists in
some form of evasion. A thousand busy brains are at work, but were an
answer discovered to-day how many months would be needed to prepare
and supply the necessary gear to some three or four thousand ships?
Meanwhile traffic instructions form a separate and highly developed
section of Admiralty work. Shipping Intelligence Officers at the ports,
in close conjunction with the Customs Officers issue route orders,
varying with the needs of the hour, to each British ship outward bound.
To neutrals advice is tendered. Orders for homeward bound vessels are
now issued at foreign ports in the Western hemisphere or elsewhere
by the Consular officers, assisted by men of sea-faring experience
specially instructed. In addition, masters have very precise schooling
in the arts of avoiding hostile craft. That these arts have their
value experience proves, and of the various devices zigzagging has
been found perhaps the most effective. The attacking submarine sights
her prospective prey and notes the course. She then manœuvres
to bring her torpedo-tubes to bear, and submerges. But the helm on
the approaching vessel is meanwhile put over to port or starboard
and the favourable position is lost. Reduced in speed and turning
power by submersion, the submarine commander is thrown out. Again he
manœuvres for position but finds his target has again shifted her
helm and escaped him. Zigzagging however adds materially to the length
of the voyage and the time consumed by it is cordially disliked by
skippers. A temptation naturally assails men of their breed to make a
dash for it. Time, too, is always a consideration, and the risks to
a vessel of less than 10 knots speed are not appreciably diminished
by its adoption. For an 8 knot boat, and many of the most valuable
traders can hardly attain a greater pace, the increase in the length
of the voyage and the time involved balance or eliminate the advantage
of this and other palliatives. In the nature of the case there can be
no immediate remedy for the disease. Merchant ships--that is the root
of the trouble--are not built to resist torpedoes. Possibly such ships
might be built, possibly a cure for this sea malady may yet be found.
But to combat a new plague or pestilence the physician must have time
to study the devastating organism and its peculiar properties. The
study proceeds. The arming of merchantmen, a preliminary and successful
measure, was necessary to drive the U-boat below the surface. There,
capable only of torpedo attack, it loses half its observing, half its
striking powers. But the true defence is a vigorous offensive, which is
the business not of merchantmen but of patrol and fighting ships. They
are at work in daily increasing numbers, they employ new and ingenious
devices, they are happy and confident. But the veil is never lifted.
A deep, gloomy, mysterious silence prevails. Where her submarines are
lost, how they are lost Germany is ignorant. Each goes forth on its
mission, with uncertainty at the prow and misgiving at the helm. All
the enemy knows is that vessel after vessel fails to return, that they
run like sand through the fingers. How many submarines does Germany
possess? Probably, including the mine-layers, the number does not much,
if at all, exceed two hundred, and of these only a proportion can be at
sea in any given week or month, perhaps a third. Submarines, despite
Germany's boasts, one of her favourite weapons, cannot be built in a
day nor yet a month, and crews are worse than useless with less than
half a year's training. The end is not in sight but the barometer of
hope must already be falling fast. "If the submarine attack against
England be defeated," said Herr Ballin, "it will be a miracle, and
I do not believe in miracles." One looks forward with interest to
the conversion of Herr Ballin to a less sceptical theology. His
philosophical countrymen will no doubt supply him with the necessary
metaphysic.

As for ourselves and our lack of foresight in this matter, let us not
be too critical. We misjudged human nature, that is all. We believed
some species of it were extinct. We believed there were things of which
white men were not capable. For this noble error, and it was noble,
we pay the price, and are not without compensation. Since none can
judge of a vessel's seaworthiness in harbour, none can judge of the
spirit of a man or race until it encounters the storm. And if again the
superb courage and shining of the British sailor has been proved, if
we have been reminded that as a nation with him we stand or fall, we
may be magnanimous, and return polite thanks to an enemy that has made
these things clear, who has liberated yet again the flashing spirit of
liberty. The stars still shine for us above the wild weather of the
world.




    THE MINE-FISHERS

    In any weather
    They flock'd together,
    Birds of a feather,
        Through Dover Strait;

    The seas that kiss'd her
    Brought tramp or drifter
    From ports that miss'd her
        In flag and freight;

    Trawler and whaler
    And deep-sea sailer,
    They would not fail her
        At danger's gate.


Almost before a gun had spoken the fishermen rallied to their country's
aid. Some few indeed were off the Danish coast or far North, Iceland
way, unconscious that a more feverish business than fishing had begun,
and heard the astonishing news only on their return from waters already
troubled. Which of us knows anything of this community or thought
it essential to our naval efficiency? Yet if anywhere the spirit of
personal independence survives, they cherish it these men, Britons to
the bone, wedded to freedom since their ancestors came in their long
galleys out of the North East to harry the Saxon farmers. Take English
and Scotch together and you may number the East Coast fishermen at a
hundred thousand, and their ships, trawlers and drifters, accustomed to
voyage to the Polar ice or the White Sea, at some three thousand six
hundred. Of these perhaps four hundred of the slower and more ancient
craft, the lame ducks of the flotillas, some of them of outlandish
type and antiquated gear, manned by boys and men past service in the
wars, still drag their trawls or lie to their nets to keep the markets
supplied. Since eighty per cent of our spoils of the sea go abroad
in normal times, the home supplies can be maintained by the reduced
fleet. The rest, over three thousand, steamers and rare sea-boats all,
are in national employ, often with their crews complete and handled
by the skippers who know them, proud warrant officers now in His
Majesty's fleet, and working for the most part in groups commanded by
some Lieutenant of the Royal Naval Reserve, a Commodore, in his way,
with a squadron admirals might envy. Many of the fisher folk belonged
to the Reserve and joined the fighting fleets, and practically all of
military age are long since involved in the sea affair. Two things
belong to the story--these men, whether of Grimsby or Hull, Cardiff or
Leith, or any other of the great centres, were volunteers, and assess
their motives for what you will, it was not the Government wage that
brought them. Their fellows, old men, still on the fishing grounds, do
a thriving business compared with that for which the Government pays
its few shillings a day. It is well that the country should know that
the work for which no gold can pay was not undertaken for gold, and
that they have held on as mine-sweepers when as fishermen they would
have lain snugly in harbour. "If there have been frozen feet in the
trenches there have been frozen fingers on the sea," says one. "Fifteen
hours of drenching and buffeting were our portion that day. The vessel
with the pull of the tackle and the drive of the engines keeping her
like a half tide rock, never clear of sweeping seas. Thud, slap, crash
and swish as they came over our bows and swirled along the deck, never
ceasing." They were needed, every man of them. For it happened that in
this most civilised warfare machines were employed with which, search
the world round for them, no other men could effectively deal. But for
their never resting labours the seas about these islands would have
been as impassable for ships as a tropical forest for a motor car. Let
us open our eyes and acknowledge the grandiosity of the German mind,
the spaciousness of its schemes. It is not characteristic of Germany to
do things by halves and the simple may well be amazed at the grandeur
of her mine-laying campaign.

No country can teach Germany anything on this subject. She is sole
mistress of the black art. Before the outbreak of war she had put her
mind to it and possessed vessels fitted to carry 500 mines, fitted with
special and ingenious mechanisms for lowering and floating them. When
her surface ships were driven from the seas her resources were not
exhausted, and a fleet of mine-laying submarines continues the business
with magnificent industry. No one will ever write a song on "The
Mariners of Germany," for the German is not a sailor. Nor has he ever
understood the code of honour which prevails upon the sea. But as an
engineer he has perhaps few equals, and in so far as engineering skill
applied to ships can go you will do well to reckon with him. As for his
mines themselves, they are of many patterns, strange sea-beasts with
"all manner of horns and of bumps." "There are some kinds," says the
author of "In the Northern Mists," "that have horns--like a dilemma;
and any logician will tell you that a dilemma is a very dangerous thing
for the inexperienced to handle. It is better not to break the horns
of the ungodly in this case, for when the horns are broken the mine
explodes. Some are arranged to come up to the surface long after they
are hidden in the depths, and at unexpected times, like regrettable
incidents from a hectic past. Others are constructed with fiendish
ingenuity to wait after touching a ship until they have felt at its
most vulnerable part before exploding. Some are made to float about at
random, as a malevolent wit flings about his spiteful jests, caring
not whom he wounds. And others, more dangerous still, drift when they
were meant to remain anchored; and then, when they are cast upon the
German coasts, our enemy is ever ready to describe them as _English_
mines,--never German, mark you. But it is a rascally people, that
cares nothing for the difference between _meum_ and _tuum_. The task
of sweeping for all these different brands of tinned doom is almost as
great as that of the old lady in the nursery rhyme, whose job it was to
sweep the cobwebs out of the sky. The labour of Sisyphus was child's
play compared to it."

Conceived in the magnificent style, elaborated with curious subtlety,
representing meticulous and anxious thought the purpose was no less
than to convert the waters frequented by Allied shipping into a broad
field of death. The magnitude of the conception fascinates one. Had it
been understood, as it has not been understood, the timid might have
had less sleep o'nights; but they slept untroubled, and none save those
whose grave charge it was to counter the campaign can judge or form any
estimate of its far-reaching and devilish audacity.

It has been, let us bear in mind, not an occasional but a continuous
menace, and threatens us still. Day and night mines are freely sown--a
patch here and a patch there--steadily, persistently. "They grow like
daisies," some one has said, "cut down in the afternoon, they are up
again next morning." Let the sweepers work how they will the end is
never in sight. Mines have been laid from the Cape to the West Indies;
from Archangel to the Dardanelles; off every Allied port; in every
navigable channel; on every avenue of approach to these islands from
the ocean or the narrow sea. Strewn with a lavishness that counts
no cost too heavy, they represent an expenditure that runs to many
millions. In one area alone more than 1,000 mines have been destroyed
by our sweepers. No more necessary, no more exhausting, no more
hazardous work than theirs is done to-day in any waters.

Let it not be supposed that these admirable activities involve a
careless or haphazard disposal of the destructive charges. Each has
been laid in accordance with a calculated plan and with definite
intention. There is a method in this madness. Take a single instance:
in certain areas mines are laid time and again to deflect the stream
of traffic into a channel where submarines may act with comparative
impunity from danger. The game is played so that the pawn, endeavouring
to escape capture by the knight falls a victim to the castle. These
thoughtful contrivances demand thoughtful answers and result in an
encounter of wits such as the world will probably never see again upon
the chequer-board of the seas. But not wits alone are sufficient, and
the pieces in the game are numerous. Bear in mind that the area of
the North Sea alone is greater than Germany. It is not a case of 20
or 50 or 100 vessels. One can form some picture of such activities.
But what are the actual numbers? On the British side some 1,700 ships
and 25,000 men concentrate their activities on sweeping for mines. The
mind staggers at the immensity of the thing. Is any one surprised that
German confidence stands high; that it believed no answer was possible;
that it had as good right to believe in the success of these battalions
of explosives as in German artillery and German armies?

In the early days mines were directed against our fighting fleet,
to endanger their excursions in the North Sea, or to fetter their
movements in pursuit of hostile vessels. To protect the fleet,
mine-sweepers, specially constructed, or old gunboats, built some
of them as early as 1887, manned throughout by naval ratings, kept,
unknown to the public,--whose gaze was concentrated upon the trawlers
and drifters,--a vigil unimaginable in its range and exhausting in its
intensity. Their work continues; but the jackals, baulked of nobler
prey, changed their hunting ground and laid still more numerous traps
for less wary creatures--the traders. They, too, however are learning
caution. There is a certain region through which since the war began
38,000 trading vessels have voyaged; in which no more than 4 have been
destroyed by mines. Weigh these facts and consider the compliment that
fits the achievement. If you ask by what methods the German mines are
safely garnered you will be told that the trawlers sweep in pairs; a
method which seems to have advantages over that of the enemy. Pursue
your enquiry and you will learn that they are less dangerous at high
than at low water; that floating mines since they are easily pushed
aside, and explode to expend their force largely in the vacant air,
are less of a danger than the anchored type; that when brought to the
surface gun or rifle fire disposes of them at a safe distance; that
there are other little things to be found when fishing. "Last month,
when nearly completing the sweeping, I swept up five mines and came
across five full petrol tanks, each holding about 51 gallons or more,
which appeared as if they had been moored."

When you have gathered these facts from an authority, the conversation
lapses into generalities. It is useless to display an eagerness for
knowledge, the book is closed. For the curious it may be added,
however, that mine fishing is an art, considerably more complicated
than baiting a hook or throwing a fly; that some men are fishers by
nature and others despite experience, remain clumsy; that the wriggle
and the tug and the play of the fish are part of the sport, that the
amusement is not unaccompanied by danger, and that good fishermen are
not easy to replace. With these suggestions the matter stands adjourned
_sine die_--that is, till the end of the war.

Mine sweepers are of course protected, for the sympathetic mind will
understand that a submarine which has just laid traps resents their
removal. Like the ghost of the murderer, its habit is to haunt the
region of its labours. For trading with these gentry the fishers
have their own methods, sometimes more primitive and courageous than
effective, as when the master of a sailing craft--it is fact not
fiction--fancied himself a 40 knot destroyer and tried to ram the
enemy. Unarmed audacity occasionally, indeed, achieves miracles. One
gunless trawler by persistent ill-mannered harassing pursuit, so
terrified a German commander who was attacking a merchant vessel, that
his quarry escaped. Submarine hunting in armed craft is of course
another matter and accounted the greatest of all great games. Sea-going
Britons pine for it with an inextinguishable longing. Lowestoft
mine-sweepers hanker after leave not to spend by the fireside but
on this brave sport. Volunteers jostle each other for the service.
Admirals previously on the retired list renew in it all the zest and
vigour of their youth. Alas, that after the war a pursuit which outbids
in popularity tiger-shooting or steeple-chasing should come to an
untimely end.

Another submarine habit is with infinite, untiring Teutonic patience to
do the work over again in the wake of the sweepers, for which amiable
procedure there is no cure save an equal and opposite persistence. Yet
another is to lay little mines nearer the surface to catch trawlers
engaged in fishing for bigger ones placed deeper for larger ships. Oh
excellent, persevering and philanthropic Teuton!

No one in the world can teach trawler or drifter men, who spend less
than a month ashore in the twelve, seamanship. "Smooth sea and storm
sea" is alike to them. Grey, tumbling waters are their winter portion,
decks continually awash, frozen gear, intolerable motion. Watch that
short bluff little vessel 100 miles from any port and a gale rising,
with her high bows staggering up from the hollow of the wave that hid
her from sight, streaming from rail to rail, to plunge headlong into
the next hollow, climb up the approaching mountain to encounter the
smothering crest, shake herself and disappear again into the turbid
water between the bigger seas. You will see no one on deck save the
unconcerned man at the wheel in oilskins and sea-boots, in whom it
produces no emotion. That wild sky and furious sea are familiar
acquaintances of his, that waif of a boat rolling and pitching through
it is his home. Skald to the Viking's son! Mine fishing to men of this
stamp was merely a variation in the ordinary way of business. Of course
the danger was vastly greater, but they were inured to danger. Against
shelling they have a prejudice, for mines they care nothing, and among
those still at their old trade the Admiralty prohibition against
fishing in mine fields--a prohibition constantly disregarded--creates
perhaps as much resentment as the German sowing of them. Good brooms
they make these broad-beamed, bluff-bowed vessels, and life preservers
too. To their presence in the North Sea and elsewhere thousands already
owe their lives. Twenty miles off Tory Island a trawler picked up the
survivors from the _Manchester Commerce_; another, the _Coriander_,
saved 150 of the men from _Cressy_ and _Hogue_; still another brought
home fifty men of the ill-fated _Hawke_; the _Daisy_ rescued twenty
men from the destroyer _Recruit_. In the Mediterranean the North Sea
men were ubiquitous. In answer to distress signals they appeared
as if by magic. "Ultimately," wrote one of the passengers on the
ill-fated _Arabia_, "I was put aboard a trawler on which were about 166
rescued.... We had few wraps and most of us lay till we reached Malta
in drenched clothes. They were 37 hours of utter misery.... More than
half the survivors on the trawler were women and children."

Drudgery, and monotonous drudgery, it all is, relieved, if you find
it relief, that any moment may see the end of you and your ship. Here
is the process. "A deck hand came up the ladder and handed up two
pneumatic lifebelts. The Captain silently passed one to me. After we
had fastened them securely he glanced at the chart and compass. Then
he gave a command and a signal was flashed to the other boat. Thus the
first preparation was made for our 'fishing.' The other boat nosed
easily alongside. There was a clanking of machinery and she made off
again, carrying one end of a heavy steel cable. Several hundred yards
away she resumed her course, while the cable sagged far down beneath
the surface of the water. That was all--we were sweeping.... It was
late in the afternoon that we made our first catch. A sudden tightening
of the cable made it clear that we had hit an obstruction. There was
just a slight tremor all through the boat. Everybody stepped to the
rail and gazed intently into the water. 'That'll be one,' said the
commander as the cable relaxed. Sure enough it was 'one.' The Boche
mine broke the surface of the water and floated free, her mooring of 1
inch steel cut off as cleanly as if with a mighty pair of shears. As it
rolled lazily in the swell it reminded me of a great black turtle with
spikes on its back." Such is the normal procedure, and a rifle bullet
does the rest. "There was an explosion that made our teeth rattle,
while a huge volume of black smoke belched upward into the still air.
And a shining column of water shot straight up through the black cloud
to a height of 50 or 60 feet.... Then the water poured back through the
smoke and the grim cloud drifted off over the waste of the North Sea."

If you pursue your search for incidents you may meet something of this
type. The gear of the trawler _Pelican_ was just being hove in when a
mine was discovered entangled in the warp. The winch was stopped just
as the mine bumped--anxious moment--the ship's side. Any lurch meant an
explosion and certain destruction. The skipper ordered all hands into
the boat and to pull away. Remaining alone on board, with infinite care
he worked to clear the mine, gently, very gently, unwinding the gear
of the winch. The men lay on their oars at a safe distance and waited
in suspense. At last the mine was released and the skipper cautiously
paid out 120 fathoms of line. Hardly was it done when, having touched
something, the devil-fish exploded, shaking the trawler from stem to
stern and half filling the distant boat with water. When the warp was
hauled on board it revealed nothing but a mass of wreckage. If you are
in search of adventure on board a mine-sweeper and are in luck you may
enjoy the excitement of an aeroplane attack, with bombs dropping around
you from the overhead circling enemy, or machine gun bullets rattling
on the deck from a German battle-plane. Or again an angry submarine
commander rising out of the deep may send a shell or two your way. For
the rest it is a peaceful life, and if you escape the attentions of all
these death-dealing devices, mine, aeroplane and submarine, you may
arrive home safe enough. The odds are probably somewhat in your favour,
but the mathematicians have not worked out the table of chances. You
may have the best of it and secure quite a number of mines, or one
of the enemy devices may secure you. You never can tell. Here is a
transcript.

"It was about four in the morning. This time of year. Just such
darkness as this. The _London Girl_ came down on my port side.... I
opened the door (of the deckhouse) to hear what she had to say. 'Don't
go near so-and-so,' her old man shouted. 'What's that?' I said. 'Don't
go,' he hailed--'so-and-so--some mines adrift.' That's all. I was just
backing into the wheelhouse again when there was a flash and a roar.
He'd gone. Not enough left afloat to make a platter. That's it. There's
five boats in line astern of you one minute. There's a bright light
and when you look back there's only four. It ain't the mines you see
that's the worry. I've seen hundreds. It's the beggar you can't see.
Never know when it's under your forefoot. Dirty game, like, I call it.
No sense in it. Sinking ships. Any ships. I'd never have believed it.
Don't know what's come over the world." Most of us are in like case.
Only the knights of the German Round Table, those idealist seekers
after grace and loveliness, know and in good time, perhaps, will take
the rest of the world into their confidence.

Against mines you cannot retaliate but against the U. boat you can
occasionally hit back. "A number of trawlers," writes a correspondent,
"were fishing off Aberdeen on a fairly stormy day when a submarine came
to the surface and commenced firing at the trawlers, making for one in
particular--the _Strathearn_. The _Strathearn_ ran for it, pursued by
the submarine. While the shots were falling round, some of the crew
shouted to Geordie, the skipper, 'Geordie, get the boat out.' Said
Geordie, 'I'll see you in h--ll first! Fire up! If she's gaun doon, I'm
gaun doon. Fire up! I think we hae a chance.'

"During this time Geordie was making towards another trawler, the
_Commissioner_ (armed) which had her gear down and seemed totally
unconcerned. But, as soon as the _Strathearn_ passed her and there was
nothing between the submarine and herself, a blow with an axe cut her
gear away, she swung round, and at the same moment her gun appeared.

"Her first shot missed the submarine, so did the second; the third hit
the enemy's conning tower, a fourth hit the enemy's gun, and the fifth
sent the submarine down in flames, and all was over, bar the shouting."

Our Allies could bear witness to the work of British mine-sweepers
and patrols in the Mediterranean. In one raid Austrian cruisers and
destroyers attacked the patrol line in the Adriatic and sank 14 of
our drifters. Our fishermen have swept for mines off Russian, French
and Italian ports, and of their work at the Dardanelles all the world
has heard. Captain Woodgate of the _Koorah_ has vividly described an
episode in which he was himself the protagonist.

"When we were up in the Dardanelles there were what we call three
groups--One, Two and Three--and each group had to go up, one at a time.
The vessel I was in belonged to the second group. The night we were
going to make the final dash in the Dardanelles, up in the Narrows, we
went, no lights up, everything covered in. They let us get right up to
the Narrows, and as we turned round to take our sweeps up one of our
number was blown up. Then they peppered us from each side, from one
and a half to two miles. We heard cries for help. I said, 'We shall
have to do the best we can, and go back and pick up.' There was no
waiting, no saying 'Who shall go?' As soon as I called for volunteers
three jumped in. I kept the vessel as close as I could to shelter them.
I did not think any would come back alive, but they did come back. No
one was hit, and I said, 'Now we'll get the boat in.' Just as we got
the boat nicely clear of the water, along came a shot and knocked it
in splinters. I shouted, 'All hands keep under cover as much as you
can,' and I got on the bridge, and we went full steam ahead. I could
not tell you what it was like, with floating and sunken mines and shots
everywhere. We got knocked about, the mast almost gone, rigging gone,
and she was riddled right along the starboard side. One of the hands
we picked up had his left arm smashed with shrapnel; that was all the
injury we got. When we got out the commander came alongside and said,
'Have you seen any more trawlers?' I said, 'Yes, we've got the crew of
one on board, the _Manx Hero_.' We were the last out, and I can tell
you I never want to see such a sight again.... I thought of the three
men in the fiery furnace, how they were preserved, and of Daniel in the
lion's den, and I think of the 24 of us coming out under that terrible
fire and the water covered with floating and sunken mines."

"There's one good thing about it," remarked a skipper who had his
second vessel blown up under him,--"you take it calmer the second
time." We thought we knew the mettle of these men. We did, but we know
it better now. Eighty of these skippers have been killed in action,
many have been blown up more than once, and several, among them that
celebrity "Submarine Billy," have had three such elevating experiences.
But it makes no difference. They go to sea again. One hardly knows what
to make of this type of human being. Perhaps the British race has no
monopoly in it, but one wonders. Let an expert speak, the commander of
a destroyer, whose testimonial, if any testimonials are required, has
value.

"Only a quarter of an hour before the Admiral had wished me a pleasant
trip. That quarter of an hour now seemed æons away. The Channel was
battering us and bruising us.... To climb to the bridge was a perilous
adventure in mountaineering. Here crouched three figures, swathed from
head to heel like Polar explorers. The glass of the wind-screen was
sweating and trickling like the window of a railway carriage. From time
to time the Captain wiped clear patches with the finger of his fur
glove and made very uncomplimentary remarks about the snow. Behind him
stood the steersman, a swaddled mummy with a blue nose tip, dripping
icicles." All in a moment appeared a smudge on the horizon--"a friend
and brother--the King of the Trawlers." "They're It, absolutely It,"
said the Captain. "No weather's too bad for 'em. They're our eyes and
our ears. They know every blessed wave in the Channel, not merely as
passing acquaintances, but they address 'em by their Christian names.
They'll do anything, and go anywhere and chance the luck. They're
just simple fishermen but they run the whole show and they run it
magnificently--guns, semaphores, wireless, everything! They live on
kippers and tea, and I don't believe they ever go to sleep."

If the Royal Navy, which has its own views on efficiency, says these
things of them, further remarks seem needless.




    THE SEA TRAFFICKERS

    Quit now the dusty terraces and taverns of the town,
    And to the great green meadows you shall with us go down;
    By the long capes and islands the open highways run
    For us the pilgrims of the sea, and pupils of the sun.

    'Tis Neptune pours the wine for us, the deep-sea Muses sing,
    And through our airy palaces the flutes of morning ring:
    We traffic with the stars, we trade adown the Milky Way,
    We are the pilots of romance, merchants of Arcady.


Unfold a map of the world and observe how small a part of the earth's
surface is land, how much less habitable land, how vast on the other
hand--nearly three-quarters of the whole--the interminable plain of
sea. Here you have an almost limitless expanse and without a barrier,
here you have what was once the dividing flood, the estranging ocean,
what is now Nature's great medium of communication. There are no
difficult mountains to cross, no scorching deserts, the way lies open.
One can sail round the world without touching land, one cannot walk
round it without somewhere crossing the sea. Imagine then a road which
leads everywhere and you have the first clue to the meaning of that
majestic thing, sea-traffic. These immense regions, once so forbidding,
and until a few hundred years ago, unknown, uncharted ocean solitudes,
are now the broad highway of all the nations. Across them vessels under
every flag, laden with all that men produce or peoples require, follow
the plotted curves of the chart, and "toss the miles aside" with the
same confidence, the same continuity as the trains on their iron tracks
across Europe and America. They depart and arrive along the familiar
belts of passenger and trade routes with the regularity and exactness
of the great land expresses. Safe in times of peace from all dangers
save the natural perils of the sea, the freedom of this, the broadest
and busiest of all highways, open to all, used by all, vital to the
modern structure of civilisation, is unchallenged. Imagine this highway
closed and the whole fabric falls to pieces, trade expires, commerce is
at an end, famine and chaos impend over half the inhabited regions of
the globe.

Seated between the old world and the new, at the centre of traffic,
at the midmost point of all the markets Britain laid hold of her
great opportunity. All the great routes were open to her, South to
Africa, South West to the Spanish Main and Panama, West to America
and Canada, North East to the Baltic, East through the pillars of
Hercules to the Mediterranean, a route prolonged by the Suez Canal
to India, China and Japan. The opportunity was, indeed, great and to
meet it she built her merchant navy, "the most stupendous monument,"
as Bullen wrote, "of human energy and enterprise that the world has
ever seen." What the nations bought and sold the ships of England
carried. Necessity gave assistance, for as islanders her own people
had need of overseas products and sent abroad their own manufactures.
Nor was it disadvantageous that in order to build her fortunes she had
to exhibit enterprise and cultivate hardihood. No one will say that
the sea-farer's life is an easy one. But its discipline and hardships
brought their reward in the courage and sustained vigour of the race.
When it was a new thing the romance of this ocean travel took hold of
the Elizabethan imagination, and the poets rhapsodised over "Labrador's
high promontory cape," "the Pearled Isles," "the famous island,
Mogadore," "the golden Tagus or the Western Inde."

    "I should but lose myself and craze my brain
    Striving to give this glory of the main
    A full description, though the Muses nine
    Should quaff to me in rich Mendaeum wine."

The Elizabethan poets gloried too in Britain's insularity,

    "This precious stone set in the silver sea"

protected by the waters as a house is protected by a moat "against
the envy of less happier lands." The historians have expounded the
advantages of her position. We were happy in that we were islanders,
inhabiting a natural and impregnable fortress. The sea was our bulwark,
to us it was no barrier, to the enemy an impassable one. The romantic
mood is, however, difficult to maintain and of late the coming and
going of some ten or eleven thousand British ships has been productive
of little emotion. As a rule the landsman "dismisses the sea with a
shudder." Rocks and shoals and icebergs and dark nights and fogs and
the making of difficult harbours and winds of strength "8" on the
Beaufort scale, are not things that habitually occupy his mind. Hourly
our seamen were engaged in the routine of a perilous calling. Two
thousand of them in times of peace lose their lives every year. We were
not much concerned. But the submarine has now come to our assistance.
It has at least this to its credit that we view our insularity with
less composure. We see now that there are two sides to this blessing of
insularity. We know now that every ton of food brought into the country
is purchased with men's lives, and that is an arresting thought. We
know, too, that if they do not continue to bring it we are in very
evil case, a still more arresting and unfamiliar idea. We have had
episodes and hours and experience it will not be easy to forget. There
is something to be said for the submarine. It has proved to us that not
to our encircling sea, but to our sailors we owe our good fortune; that
the sea is as ready to ruin as to enrich us; that in them, not in her,
we must put our trust. "The one thing," it has been said, "that would
really wake the nation to the vital importance of the Merchant Navy
would be for the butcher, the baker and the grocer to cease to ring the
back-door bell every morning." Well, we have come within measurable
distance of that and can now turn with the more appreciation to the
anxieties and trials of the men who have averted the catastrophes.

"It was passing beautiful to see, and to think of," says the old
chronicler of a sea battle in the Edwardian days; "the glistening
armour, the flags and streamers glancing and quivering in the wind."
The beauty and the bravado which lingered on till Nelson's time are
gone. Gone too are the courtesy and chivalry of the old sea battles.
You need not go for romance, with the pleasant sting of brine in it, to
the ugly and stealthy story of the German submarine. A dull monotonous
history from first to last, as he who cares to turn over the Admiralty
files will find; a baleful, intolerable, damnable repetition. The very
extent and enormity of the record deadens all sensibility, so that
one soon reads mechanically, giving no thought to the matter, however
melancholy. Let us set down some sentences, each a verbal extract from
the official record.

"The crew were mustered after the explosion and five men were missing."

"While abandoning the ship the chief engineer was killed by the
enemy's fire, and two of the crew were wounded."

"Two of the crew were not seen after the explosion."

"Two of the crew were killed and two were scalded."

"Of the fifteen who left the ship only the chief officer and three
others were saved."

"While the ship was being abandoned the enemy continued to fire,
hitting the ship and wounding five men."

"One man who had been badly scalded died on board the patrol which
picked up the boat."

"The chief officer's boat was picked up at 10 a.m., the boatswain who
had been wounded dying in the boat."

"Eighteen of the crew went down in the vessel. One boat reached the
shore, but there was a heavy sea running and two men were drowned while
attempting to land."

"In one of the boats picked up twenty-four hours after the vessel's
destruction were seventeen dead and frozen bodies."

"The submarine rendered no assistance. The commander looked at the men
in the water, and shook his fist, saying something in German."

"The master's boat with seven men kept at the oars for forty hours,
having a heavy sea to contend with. The steward died in the boat
from exhaustion. On reaching the shore the boat capsized, but all
six reached land, though the second engineer and a fireman died
immediately on the beach."

"The ship was hove to in a gale of wind when she was torpedoed without
warning by an unseen submarine. The ship was abandoned by the crew
in three boats. Two men were drowned while manning the boats. The
apprentice who made his report states that the chief officer's boat
when last seen was apparently filled with water, lying broadside on to
the sea.... The boat of the apprentice which had been lying to with a
sea anchor out, made sail at dawn and steered for the land. At 9.30 the
survivors were picked up. While drifting in the gale six of the crew
of this boat died and were buried at sea.... Only nine men from the
steamship were landed, suffering from exposure and frostbite."

"At 8.40 the boat capsized owing to the sea, and sight of the other
boat was lost. All hands (16) regained boat, but she was full of water.
Before midnight she had again capsized three times and then only four
hands were left. About 8 a.m. two seamen became exhausted and were
washed overboard. A handkerchief on a stick failed to attract the
attention of a passing vessel. About 5 o'clock the first mate dropped
into the water in the boat and died. His body and the only survivor
were picked up two days after the sinking of the vessel." What profit
in further citations from this baleful volume? Multiply these records
by hundreds and one begins to appreciate the prowess of the enemy in
dealing with defenceless vessels. Gentlemen of the German Navy, we
congratulate you!

The official phraseology does not help us to realise these happenings.
The records deal only in flat commonplaces. There is not a picturesque
word anywhere, no sign of emotion, an utter absence of psychology. We
are not told how the men felt when the shells struck the ship or the
torpedo tore out its entrails. They appear to do just ordinary sensible
things and probably the ideas that occurred to them were ordinary
sensible ideas. When the steering gear is shattered or the engines
disabled they do their best to repair the damage. If a boat capsizes
they try to right her. When attacked by aeroplanes they take up a
rifle, if there is one aboard, and fire at them, usually without much
effect. But what else can you do? As for excitement, these men are not
given to it. Nerve storms are not in their line of life.

The look-out man under the conditions of the new warfare has need
of his eyesight. Dangers overhead, dangers on the surface, dangers
underfoot. To scan at one and the same moment the horizon for the
conning tower of a U. Boat, the water around and ahead of him for mines
and the sky for approaching aircraft is a task inconsistent with any
form of contemplative philosophy. "When the ship was 22 miles S.S.E.
from Flambro' Head," writes an officer, "the Second Mate reported he
saw a mine. To pass a mine involves a penalty, so I turned back and
got close to it. It had five prongs on it, and was right in the track
of shipping. As I had no gun to destroy it, and in the vicinity of
Flambro' would be the nearest patrol boat, I thought it best to put a
mark on it, as we would possibly lose it through the night, and settle
some one coming along. I ordered the small boat out although there was
a moderate breeze S.W. with quite a choppy sea, also a N.E. swell. I
could not ask any one to go and make a line fast to it, as it is a very
dangerous object to handle, so I decided to go myself. When lowering
the boat down, the Chief Officer and the Boatswain got into her, and
wished to share the danger. I asked them to consider, and say their
prayers. I also ordered the Second Mate that as soon as he saw we were
connected with the mine to send the lifeboat to take us off the small
boat, as we intended to leave her as a buoy or mark to the mine, and
then we would advise another ship to send a patrol steamer. We got to
the mine, but had great difficulty making a rope fast to it, owing to
its peculiar shape. After two failures, we fell on a plan to make the
rope stop from slipping under it. We put a timber-hitch round the body
of the mine and hung the hitch up with strands to two of the horns.
What with the bobbing up and down and keeping the boat from coming
down on the horns, and cold water, it was no nice job. Anyhow it got
finished at last, and it seemed so secure that I thought we would be
able to tow it until we met a patrol boat, so when the lifeboat came
I returned on board with her, and took her on board. She got damaged
putting her out and taking in, owing to the ship rolling. I now picked
up the small boat with the other two men and got another line connected
on to the one on the mine and went slow ahead. This worked all right,
but I thought she could go faster so put on full speed. This was now 6
p.m. About five minutes after full speed the mine exploded and sent the
water and a column of black smoke from two to three hundred feet in the
air. Several pieces of the mine fell on deck, small bits, also small
stuff like clinker from the funnel. It was a relief to all hands, and
possibly saved some other ship's mishap, as we met about twenty that
night on the opposite course to us."

A chapter on "Pleasant Half hours with Aeroplanes" will form a part
of future histories of the Merchant Service. Witness the experience
of the _Avocet_ on her voyage from Rotterdam. "The weather being calm
and clear, sea smooth, but foul with drifting mines, three aeroplanes
were observed coming up from the Belgian Coast, one being a large
'battle-plane.' In a few minutes they were circling over the ship, and
the battle-plane dropped the first bomb, which hit the water 15 ft.
away, making a terrific report, flames and water rising up for 50 ft.,
and afterwards leaving the surface of the sea black over a radius of
30 ft. as far as it was possible to judge. Altogether 36 bombs were
dropped, all falling close, six of them missing the steamer by not more
than 7 ft.

"After apparently exhausting all the bombs, the battle-plane took up
a position off the port beam and opened fire at the bridge with a
machine gun. The ship's sides, decks and water were struck with many
bullets--it was like a shower of hail. A port in the chief engineer's
room was pierced and his bed filled with broken glass.

"The battle-plane was handled with great skill, attacking from a height
of from 800 to 1,000 feet. Going ahead of the ship, he turned and came
end on to meet her, and when parallel to her dropped his bombs so as to
have her full length and make sure of scoring a hit. The ship's helm
was put hard-a-starboard, and as she swung to port three bombs missed
the starboard bow and three the port quarter by at most 7 ft. Had the
vessel kept her course these bombs would have landed on the forecastle
head and poop deck.

"The two smaller planes crossed and recrossed the _Avocet_, dropping
their bombs as they passed over her. They all made a most determined
attempt to sink the ship which only failed because they hadn't nerve
enough to fly lower.

"After the first bomb was dropped a rapid rifle fire was commenced
which was kept up until the rifles were uncomfortably hot. The chief
officer of the _Avocet_ was lucky enough to explode a rocket distress
signal within a few feet of one Taube; had it hit him there would have
been a wreck in mid-air. The action lasted 35 minutes, and when it
was over and the aeroplanes flew away the decks of the _Avocet_ were
littered with shrapnel.... The look-out man on the forecastle head
actually reported a floating mine right ahead of the ship while bombs
were bursting all around. He stuck to his post through it all, and kept
a good look-out."

It is the habit of nations to recall and glorify their past, to dwell
with satisfaction upon the doings of their heroes, the achievements of
their great men. These enter into and become a part of the national
life. Perhaps the world may yet see another and a rarer thing--a nation
weeping at the tomb of its honour. For with what emotion--will it be
one of happiness?--can the Germany of to-morrow recall a history like
the following?

     French S. S. _Venezia_,
       Fabre, Line,
         At Sea, March 28th, 1917.

  The Managers, Messrs. The Union Castle Mail
     S. S. Co. (Ltd.) London.

  Gentlemen,

  With deep regret I have to report the loss of your steamer _Alnwick
  Castle_, which was torpedoed without warning at 6.10 a.m. on Monday,
  March 19, in a position about 320 miles from the Scilly Islands.

  At the time of the disaster there were on board, besides 100 members
  of my own crew and 14 passengers, the Captain and 24 of the crew of
  the collier transport _Trevose_ whom I had rescued from their boats at
  5.30 p.m. on the previous day, Sunday, March 18, their ship having been
  torpedoed at 11 a.m. that day, two Arab firemen being killed by the
  explosion, which wrecked the engine room.

  I attach a list of survivors from my lifeboat rescued by the S. S.
  _Venezia_ on Friday, March 23, together with those who perished from
  exposure and thirst in the boat. It may be summarised as follows:

  Captain and crew of _Alnwick
  Castle_                                13 souls

  Third-class passengers                  6

  Crew of _Trevose_                       5

                                         --
                                         24 survivors

  Crew of _Alnwick Castle_ who
  perished in lifeboat                    5

  Total occupants of No. 1 lifeboat      29

  I was being served with morning coffee at about 6.10 a.m. when the
  explosion occurred, blowing up the hatches and beams from No. 2 and
  sending up a high column of water and débris which fell back on the
  bridge. The chief officer put the engines full astern, and I directed
  him to get the boats away. All our six boats were safely launched and
  left the ship, which was rapidly sinking by the head.

  The forecastle was now (6.30 a.m.) just dripping, though the ship
  maintained an upright position without list. The people in my boat
  were clamouring for me to come, as they were alarmed by the danger
  of the ship plunging. The purser informed me that every one was out
  of the ship, and I then took Mr. Carnaby from his post, and we went
  down to No. 1 boat and pulled away. At a safe distance we waited to
  see the end of the _Alnwick Castle_. Then we observed the submarine
  quietly emerge from the sea end on to the ship with a gun trained on
  her. She showed no periscope--just a conning tower and a gun as she lay
  there--silent and sinister. In about 10 minutes the _Alnwick Castle_
  plunged bow first below the surface; her whistle gave one blast and the
  main topmast broke off, there was a smothered roar and a cloud of dirt,
  and we were left in our boats, 139 people, 300 miles from land. The
  submarine lay between the boats, but whether she spoke any of them I do
  not know. She proceeded north-east after a steamer which was homeward
  bound about four miles away, and soon after we saw a tall column of
  water, etc., and knew that she had found another victim.

  I got in touch with all the boats, and from the number of their
  occupants I was satisfied that every one was safely in them. The one
  lady passenger and her baby three months old were with the stewardess
  in the chief officer's boat. I directed the third officer to transfer
  four of his men to the second officer's boat to equalise the number,
  and told them all to steer between east and east-north-east for
  the Channel. We all made sail before a light westerly wind, which
  freshened before sunset, when we reefed down. After dark I saw no more
  of the other boats. That was Monday, March 19.

  I found only three men who could help me to steer, and one of these
  subsequently became delirious, leaving only three of us. At 2 a.m.
  Tuesday, the wind and sea had increased to a force when I deemed it
  unsafe to sail any longer; also it was working to the north-west and
  north-north-west. I furled the sail and streamed the sea-anchor, and
  we used the canvas boat-cover to afford us some shelter from the
  constant spray and bitter wind. At daylight we found our sea-anchor
  and the rudder had both gone. There was too much sea to sail; we
  manœuvred with oars, whilst I lashed two oars together and made
  another sea-anchor. We spent the whole of Tuesday fighting the sea,
  struggling with oars to assist the sea-anchor to head the boat up
  to the waves, constantly soaked with cold spray and pierced with
  the bitter wind, which was now from the north. I served out water
  twice daily, one dipper between two men, which made a portion about
  equal to one-third of a condensed-milk tin. We divided a tin of milk
  between four men once a day, and a tin of beef (6 lbs.) was more than
  sufficient to provide a portion for each person (29) once a day. At
  midnight Tuesday-Wednesday, the northerly wind fell light, and we made
  sail again, the wind gradually working to north-east and increasing
  after sunrise. All the morning and afternoon of Wednesday we kept
  under way until about 8 p.m., when I was compelled to heave to again.
  During this day the iron step of our mast gave way and our mast and
  sail went overboard, but we saved them, and were able to improvise a
  new step with the aid of an axe and piece of wood fitted to support
  the boat cover strongback. We were now feeling the pangs of thirst as
  well as the exhaustion of labour and exposure and want of sleep. Some
  pitiful appeals were made for water. I issued an extra ration to a few
  of the weaker ones only.

  During the night of Wednesday-Thursday the wind dropped for a couple
  of hours and several showers of hail fell. The hailstones were eagerly
  scraped from our clothing and swallowed. I ordered the sail to be
  spread out in the hope of catching water from a rain shower, but we
  were disappointed in this, for the rain was too light. Several of
  the men were getting light-headed, and I found that they had been
  drinking salt-water in spite of my earnest and vehement order.

  It was with great difficulty that any one could be prevailed on
  to bale out the water, which seemed to leak into the boat at an
  astonishing rate, perhaps due to some rivets having been started by
  the pounding she had received.

  At 4 a.m. the wind came away again from north-east and we made sail,
  but unfortunately it freshened again and we were constantly soaked
  with spray and had to be always baling. Our water was now very low,
  and we decided to mix condensed milk with it. Most of the men were now
  helpless and several were raving in delirium. The foreman cattleman,
  W. Kitcher, died and was buried. Soon after dark the sea became
  confused and angry; I furled the tiny reef sail and put out the sea
  anchor. At 8 p.m. we were swamped by a breaking sea and I thought all
  was over. A moan of despair rose in the darkness, but I shouted to
  them, "Bale, Bale, Bale," and assured them that the boat could not
  sink. How they found the balers and bucket in the dark I don't know,
  but they managed to free the boat, whilst I shifted the sea anchor
  to the stern and made a tiny bit of sail and got her away before
  the wind. After that escape the wind died away about midnight, and
  then we spent a most distressing night. Several of the men collapsed
  and others temporarily lost their reason and one of these became
  pugnacious and climbed about the boat uttering complaints and threats.

  The horror of that night, together with the physical suffering, are
  beyond my power of description. Before daylight, however, on March 23,
  the wind permitting, I managed with the help of the few who remained
  able, to set sail again, hoping now to be in the Bay of Biscay and to
  surely see some vessel to succour us. Never a sail or wisp of smoke
  had we seen. When daylight came the appeals for water were so angry
  and insistent that I deemed it best to make an issue at once. After
  that had gone round, amidst much cursing and snatching, we could see
  that only one more issue remained. One fireman, Thomas, was dead;
  another was nearly gone; my steward, Buckley, was almost gone; we
  tried to pour some milk and water down his throat, but he could not
  swallow. No one could now eat biscuits; it was impossible to swallow
  anything solid, our throats were afire, our lips furred, our limbs
  numbed, our hands were white and bloodless. During the forenoon,
  Friday 23rd, another fireman named Tribe, died, and my steward
  Buckley, died; also a cattleman, whose only name I could get as Peter,
  collapsed and died about noon.

  To our unspeakable relief we were rescued about 1.30 p.m. on Friday,
  23rd, by the French Steamer _Venezia_, of the Fabre Line, for New York
  for horses. A considerable swell was running, and in our enfeebled
  state we were unable to properly manœuvre our boat, but the French
  captain M. Paul Bonifacie handled his empty vessel with great skill
  and brought her alongside us, sending out a lifebuoy on a line for
  us to sieze. We were unable to climb the ladders, so they hoisted us
  one by one in ropes until the 24 live men were aboard. The four dead
  bodies were left in the boat, and she was fired at by the gunners of
  the _Venezia_ in order to destroy her, but the shots did not take
  effect.

  I earnestly hope that the other five boats have been picked up, for
  I fear that neither of the small accident boats had much chance
  of surviving the weather I experienced. At present I have not yet
  regained fully the use of my hands and feet, but hope to be fit again
  before my arrival in England, when I trust you will honour me with
  appointment to another ship.

  I am, Gentlemen, your obedient servant,

     (Signed) BENJ. CHAVE.

Steamship _Alnwick Castle_ torpedoed at 6.10 a.m. 19.3.17. Crew rescued
by Steamship _Venezia_ 23/3/17, and landed at New York:--B. Chave,
master; H. Macdougall, chief engineer; R. G. D. Speedy, doctor; R. E.
Jones, purser; N. E. Carnaby, Marconi operator; K. R. Hemmings, cadet;
S. Merrels, quartermaster; T. Morris, A. B.; A. Meill, greaser; F.
Softley, fireman; H. Weyers, assistant steward; S. Hopkins, fireman.

_Deaths._ R. Thomas, fireman;--Tribe, fireman and trimmer;--Buckley,
captain's steward; W. Kitcher, foreman cattleman; Peter (?), cattleman.

_Rescued passengers ex "Alnwick Castle" 3rd class._ J. Wilson, J.
Burley, G. Fraser, D. J. Williams, W. T. Newham, E. O. Morrison.

There are of course records which provide better reading. Worthy of
the best sea company is the story of Robert Fergusson, a Glasgow man,
but a naturalised American, and his companions Smith and Welch, who
refused in the heaviest of gales to leave the tug _Valiant_, when she
was abandoned by her Captain and crew in mid-Atlantic. "I wouldn't
have brought her back for all the money in the world if the British
Government hadn't wanted her," he said, "but I knew that every ship
was wanted." Fortified by that thought Fergusson determined to stand
by the vessel and save her if she could be saved. "Show your Yankee
spirit," he cried to the Americans in the crew. And Welch responded,
"I'm for you." "I'll not quit either," said Smith the fireman. And the
great liner which had stood by and taken off the others left them--the
three men--to fight their way homeward, if indeed that forlorn hope
might succeed, in the battered craft, through the worst weather the
Atlantic had known that winter. Smothered by great seas, with all the
tug's gear on deck smashed or adrift, the three fought on, Fergusson on
the bridge, Welch at the engines, and Smith toiling in the stokehold,
each alone. Then the steering gear went, and the vessel was thrown
on her beam ends. Wallowing in the trough, it seemed impossible that
she could live, the seas mounting to her upper deck. But live she did,
and without food or drink, with the last ounce of their strength spent
and more than spent, supported by their own dauntless determination
and that incalculable fortune which loves to side with a superb
undertaking, they made land and the port of Cardiff, to the honour of
both Britain and America, an alliance we may believe invincible.

To read too of men like the trawler skipper, who, when a shell from a
pursuing submarine smashed part of the wheel under his hands, "went on
steering with the broken spokes," fought his enemy with his light gun
and finally drove him off, makes one feel that it is something to have
entered life under British colours. Sir Percy Scott cannot have had
the British sailor in his eye when in his forecast of the character
maritime war would probably assume he wrote, "Trade is timid, it will
not need more than one or two ships sent to the bottom to hold up the
food supply of this country." How overwhelming is the evidence for this
timidity. The timidity of Captain Lane for instance, who continued to
fight the enemy submarine amid the flames which its shell fire had
produced; beat off his pursuer, and when the crew were safely in the
boats and the vessel in a sinking condition, with the assistance of the
engineer himself beached his ship, and finally subduing the flames,
repaired the damages and resumed his voyage. The timidity of the
Parslows, father and son--the father, killed at the wheel, succeeded by
the son, who resolutely held on his course and saved his vessel. The
timidity of Captain Pillar, who saved seventy men of the _Formidable_
by incomparable seamanship and a daring manœuvre in a furious gale,
or of Captain Walker of the transport _Mercian_, an unarmed vessel,
crowded with troops, who kept on his way, undeterred by the storm
of shells from the enemy, though his decks were full of dead and
wounded. The timidity aboard the _Thordis_, a heavily laden collier,
attacked when head to wind and sea, an easy victim, capable of no more
than 3 knots, whose Captain put over his helm, and crashing into the
astonished enemy sent her to the bottom. There is the story of the
timid skipper of the _Wandle_, another collier, who, blown off his feet
on the bridge by the concussion of a shell, gave back shot for shot,
sank his enemy, and in his little vessel, her flag still flying, made
a triumphal progress up the Thames with her rent bulwarks as proof of
her timidity; the sirens on the tugs ahead and astern advertising it;
the bells ringing at Greenwich Hospital, and riverside London cheering
itself hoarse for joy of it. There is the story of the timid Captain
Kinneir, who, ordered to stop by a German cruiser, north of Magellan
Straits, answered the order by driving his ship, the _Ortega_, right
into Nelson's Straits, the most gloomy ocean defile in the world,
without anchorage, an unchartered channel never before attempted,
which no seaman knows or desires to know, and so baffled his pursuers
who dared not follow. You cannot capture the record for it outruns
description. These timid captains, in the spirit of the old English,
fight till none is left to fight.

Then there are the timid apprentices and deckhands and engineers.
The seas swarm with them, they are to be found on every cargo tank
and collier and transport and ocean liner. You cannot rid yourself
of these nervous sea-farers. There was Davies, second officer of the
_Armenian_, who saved thirty-five of her crew; and Hetherington of the
_Jacona_, who in somewhat similar circumstances swam from the sinking
ship to a drifting boat, into which he dragged his shipmates clinging
to drifting wreckage. There were the engineers of the _Southport_, at
the Carolines, seized by the German corvette _Geier_. Left with her
machinery dismantled that she might serve as an enemy store ship, these
men in twelve days of feverish work replaced the essential parts, and
setting sail made Brisbane, 2,000 miles away, in a ship capable only
of steaming one way. There was the half hour's work of three men,
Engineers Wilson, East and the mate Gooderham, of a fishing boat mined
in the North Sea, the first of whom, heedless of the scalding steam
in the damaged engine-room, rushed in and after desperate exertions
plugged the hole caused by the explosion, while East dragged from an
almost hopeless position in the bunker the imprisoned stoker, and
Gooderham swung a boat over and rescued under the overhanging side
of another trawler, mined at the same time, seven of her crew. Look
through the long list of Admiralty rewards for timidity in rescue
work, in battles against odds, in seamanship. Germany, hanging on
the arm of the false jade to whom she has sold herself, the creed of
frightfulness, was very sure.

"Swept clear of ships," was her description of the Channel. Pathetic
delusion! Why it is more like a maritime fair. Never was there such
a bustle of shipping since the world was made. An average of over a
hundred merchant ships a day pass through the narrow gateway guarded
by the Dover patrol. Motor boats, flocks of them; scores of traders
at anchor in the Downs; busy transports on their way to Havre; up
to windward a cluster of mine-sweepers; down to leeward a line of
lean destroyers, it is night and day with them as with all the
ships, through every changing mood of the Channel--rain, storm, snow
blizzards, sunshine and sweet airs or "wind like a whetted knife." For
this is the gate of all the gates, the vital trade route, and from
Foreland to Start, from Start to Lizard in three years of war the
German fleet has not seen these famous headlands! Very busy, but very
much at home, are the British vessels in that long sea lane. Talkative
too, for the gossip never ceases. Hoarse megaphone conversations,
rocket and semaphore talk, wireless chatter without end. Within a few
hours steaming of the lively scene, when you may count as many as fifty
vessels within sight at one time, lies the magnificent German fleet,
for it is magnificent, save the British the finest the world has ever
seen, equipped with all the most destructive engines the heart of man
could devise. Hindenburg and his devoted divisions suffer terrible
things under the fire of 4,000 British guns, discharging 200,000 tons
of shells within the passage of a few short weeks. Admirals Von Scheer
and Von Hipper pace their quarter decks and take no notice. They know
that these guns, these shells, and the troops behind them can enter
France only by water.

Here surely was their opportunity, and yet only in the outer seas, and
there only by furtive attacks, is the transport upon which all depends
anywhere impeded. That the bridge from England to France stands firm,
that the Channel is no sundering gulf, but as it were solid land, may
seem to us as natural as it is essential, but that it does stand firm
is not merely, if we ponder it, a wonder in itself, it is perhaps the
greatest of the wonders that we have witnessed in these amazing years.
By the navy that vital area, that great and indispensable bridge has
been securely held, and when we say "the navy" let us now and always
mean nothing short of British ships and sailors anywhere, everywhere,
in all the range and variety of their sea-faring activities. Let us
separate them neither in our thoughts nor our affections, and say of
our merchant sailors and fishermen as of the Royal Navy that--what was
expected of them they accomplished, what was required of them they
gave; if courage it was there, if skill it was always forthcoming,
if death they offered their lives freely. There were among them no
strikers or conscientious objectors. In all the virtues that mankind
have held honourable they need not fear comparison either with their
own ancestors or with their adversaries. From "the stoker who put his
soul into his shovel" to the Captain who was the last to leave his ship
they upheld beyond reproach the chivalry of the great sea tradition.
And if we say that the last chapter of the Merchant Sailor's history,
tested by any standard you care to apply, is nobler than any previously
written, we do him no more than justice, and yet ask for him universal
and wondering admiration.


[Illustration: THE GERMAN SUBMARINE BLOCKADE AREA.--THUS MARKED IN
DEEP BLUE]


[Illustration: THE MARKETS OF THE WORLD.

OPEN TO GREAT BRITAIN: CLOSED TO GERMANY.]




      *      *      *      *      *      *




Transcriber's note:

Obvious printer errors have been corrected. The following misspelled
words have been changed from:

immeasureable to immeasurable - page 33
inadmissable to inadmissible - page 39
metal to mettle - page 69
stearing to steering - page 90

Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and
hyphenation have been left intact.



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