“Seekest Thou Great Things for Thyself? Seek them not!” (The Prophet Jeremiah.)
You have given me a list of subjects which you think require elucidation in regard to my past years—a résumé especially of the incidents which claim peculiar notice between 1902 and 1910; and you ask me to add thereto such episodes from the past as will enlighten the reader as to how it came about that those big events between 1902 and 1910 were put in motion.
It’s a big order, in a life of some sixty years on actual service—with but three weeks only unemployed, from the time of entry into the Navy to the time of Admiral of the Fleet.
I begin by being heartfelt in my thankfulness to a benign Providence for being capable yesterday, September 13th, 1919, of enjoying suet pudding and treacle with a pleasure equal to that which I quite well remember, of having suet pudding and treacle on July 4th, 1854, when I went on board H.M.S. “Victory,” 101 guns, the flagship at Trafalgar of Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson. Yes! my thankfulness, I hope, is equal to but hardly as wonderful as that of the almost toothless old woman who, being commiserated with, replied: “Yes, I only ’as two left; but thank God they meet!” So I say, to express the same thankfulness with all my heart for the years that remain to me, though I have all my teeth—or nearly all—notwithstanding that I have not had even one single “thank you” for anything that I have done since King Edward died. Nevertheless, I thank that same God as the old woman thanked, Who don’t let a sparrow fall without a purpose and without knowledge.
I have no doubt the slight has done me a lot of good!
I thought at the age of nineteen, when I was Acting Captain of H.M.S. “Coromandel,” that I never could again be so great. Please look at my picture then. It’s a very excellent one—rather pulled down at the corners of the mouth even then. (The child is father to the man.) And though now nearly as old as Dandolo I don’t feel any greater than at 19. Dandolo after an escapade at the Dardanelles similar to mine, became conqueror of Byzantium at 80 years of age. And Justinian’s two Generals, Belisarius and Narses, were over 70. Dolts don’t realise that the brain improves while the body decays—provided of course that the original brain is not that of a congenital idiot, or of an effete poltroon who never will run risks.
“Risks and strife” are the bread of Life to a growing brain.
I beg the reader of this dictation to believe that, whatever he may hear to the contrary (and he probably will), though swaggering as I did just now at suet-puddening at 79 as efficiently as at nineteen, yet I do daily realise what that ancient monk wrote in the year 800, when he studied the words of Job—that “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time” compared to eternity, and death may be always near the door; and no words are more beautiful in connection therewith than when a parting friend at the moment of departure makes us say: “Teach us who survive in this and other like daily spectacles of mortality to see how frail and uncertain our own condition is.”
First of all in this Recapitulation comes back to me a prophecy I ventured at that age of 19 I have just mentioned—that the next great war that we should have at sea would be a war of young men. And how beautifully this is illustrated by the letter received only a few days ago from that boy in Russia (see [Chapter IV]) where two battleships were sent to the bottom and the British sailors in command were only Lieutenants. And in passing one cannot help paying a tribute to the Subalterns on shore. General Sir Henry Rawlinson said lately: “Those who really won the war were the young Company Leaders and the Subalterns,” and pathetic was the usual Gazette notice of those killed:
“Second Lieutenants unless otherwise mentioned.”
There was little “otherwise!” So has it been in the Navy, at Zeebrugge and elsewhere.
There is, however, a very splendid exception—when all hands, old and young, went to the bottom; and that is in the magnificent Merchant Navy of the British Nation. Seven million tons sank under these men, and the record of so many I’ve seen who were saved was: “Three times torpedoed.” And remember! for them no Peerage or Westminster Abbey. They didn’t even get paid for the clothes they lost, and their pay stopped the day the ship was sunk. Except in the rare cases where the shipowner was the soul of generosity, like my friend Mr. Petersen, who paid his men six months or a year to do nothing after such a catastrophe. But we go with Mr. Havelock Wilson: “We hope to change all that.” For who is going to deny, when we all stand up for them, that the Merchant Navy shall be incorporated in the Navy of the Nation and with all the rights and money and rank and uniform and widows’ pensions and pensions in old age? All this has to come; and I am Mr. Havelock Wilson’s colleague in that matter, as he was mine in that wonderful feeding and clothing of our thousands of British Merchant sailor prisoners, who didn’t, for some damned red tape reason, come within the scope of the millions of money in that enormous Prince of Wales’s Fund, and the Red Cross.
Somebody will have to be a martyr, perhaps it’s me. And I expect I am going to be burnt at the stake for saying these things; but in those immortal words of the past “I shall light the candle!” Isn’t it just too lovely—when Bishop Latimer, as the flames shot up around him at the stake in Oxford in A.D. 1555, cried to his brother Bishop, equally burning:
“Play the man, Master Ridley! We shall this day light such a candle by God’s Grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.”
So may it be in our being burnt for the sake of the great Merchant Navy that saved our country!
* * * * *
As regards the years 1902 to 1910, the first conceptions of these great changes stole upon me when I perceived in that great Fleet in the Mediterranean how vague were the views as to fighting essentials. For instance, in one of the lectures to the Mediterranean Fleet Officers I set forth a case of so dealing with a hostile fleet that we should ourselves first of all deliberately and in cold blood sacrifice several of our fastest cruisers. Why?
To delay the flying enemy by the wounding of his hindermost ships. Possibly a ruthless German Admiral might leave a “Blücher” to her fate; but not so our then probable and chivalrous foe! The most shocking description I have ever read of the horrors of war was that detailed by one of the crew of the “Blücher” as he describes Beatty’s salvoes gradually approaching the “Blücher” and falling near in the water, and then the hell when these salvoes arrived, immediately extinguishing the electric light installation, till all below between decks was pitchy darkness only lighted up by the bursting shells as they penetrated and massacred the crew literally by hundreds, who, huddled up together in the “Blücher’s” last moments, were hoping behind the thickest armour to escape destruction.
I saw that the plan of sacrificing vessels in the pursuit of an enemy seemed a new feature to my hearers; and yet it was as old as the hills. And another “eye-opener” I had—in the inability to realise so obvious a fact as, alas! was somewhat the case in the North Sea recently—that you need not be afraid of a mine field; for where the enemy goes you can go, if you keep in his wake, that is. In close regard with this matter, I am an apostle of “End-on Fire,” for to my mind broadside fire is peculiarly stupid. To be obliged to delay your pursuit by turning even one atom from your straight course on to a flying enemy is to me being the acme of an ass. And, strange to say, in connection with this I, only yesterday, September 13th, 1919, got a letter from Admiral Weymouth—a most excellent letter, delightfully elaborating with exceptional acuteness this very idea, which came along so long ago as 1900, when the first thought of the “Dreadnought” came into my brain, when I was discussing with my excellent friend, Mr. Gard, Chief Constructor of Malta Dockyard, the vision of the “Dreadnought.”
I greatly enjoyed years ago overhearing a lady describe to another lady, when crossing over to Ryde, a passing Ryde passenger steamer (just built and differing very greatly from the one we were on board of) as a Battleship. And she wasn’t far out as to what a battleship should be. The enterprise of the Ryde Steam Packet Company had just produced that vessel, which went just as fast astern as she did ahead. In fact, she had no stern. There was a bow at each end and a rudder at each end and screws at each end; so they never had any bother to turn round. Now when you go to Boulogne or Folkestone, I don’t know how much time you don’t waste fooling around to go in stern first, so as to be able to come out the right way; and having escaped sea-sickness so far, I myself have found that the last straw. Let us hope every ship now built after this Chapter will be a “Double-Ender.” But in this world you are a lunatic if you go too fast.
Take now the submarines. They began by diving head first to get below water; and in the beginning some stuck their noses in the mud and never came up again, and in the shallow waters of the North Sea this limited the dimension of the submarine. But now there’s no more diving. A lunatic hit by accident on the idea of sinking the ship horizontally; so there is no more bother about the metricentric problems, and all the vagaries of Stabilities. No limit to size!
This sort of consideration brought into one’s mind that a great “Education” was wanted; and that we wanted “Machinery Education,” both with officers and men; and also that the education should be the education of common sense. My full idea of Osborne was, alas! emasculated by the schoolmasters of the Nation; but it is yet going to spread. As sure as I am now dictating to you, the practical way of teaching is “Explanation, followed by Execution.” Have a lecture on Optics in the morning: make a telescope in the afternoon. Tell the boys in the morning about the mariner’s compass and the use of the chart; and in the afternoon go out and navigate a Ship.
Similarly, with the selection of boys for the Navy, I didn’t want any examination whatsoever, except the boy and his parents being “vetted,” and then an interview with the boy to examine his personality (his soul, in fact); and not to have an article in the Navy stuffed by patent cramming schoolmasters like a Strasburg goose. A goose’s liver is not the desideratum in the candidate. The desideratum was: could we put into him the four attributes of Nelson:—
I. Self reliance.
(If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will.)
II. Fearlessness of Responsibility.
(If you shiver on the brink you’ll catch cold, and possibly not take the plunge.)
III. Fertility of Resource.
(If the traces break, don’t give it up, get some string.)
IV. Power of initiative.
(Disobey orders.)