CHAPTER V
WITH THE GRAND FLEET: THE TERRIERS
AND THE RATS
“You missed a lot, Soldier,” said the Sub-Lieutenant to his friend the Marine Subaltern, “through not being here at the beginning. Now it is altogether too comfortable for us of the big ships; the destroyers and patrols get all the fun while we hang about here in harbour or put up a stately and entirely innocuous parade of the North Sea. No doubt we are Grand in our Silent Might and Keep our Unsleeping Vigil and all the rest of the pretty tosh which one reads in the papers—but in reality we eat too much for the good of our waists and do too little work for our princely pay. But it was very different at the beginning. Then we were like a herd of wild buffaloes harassed day and night by super-mosquitoes. When we were not on watch we were saying our prayers. It was a devil of a time, my son.”
“I thought that you Commanded the Seas,” observed the marine, an innocent youth who had lately joined.
The Sub-Lieutenant, dark and short, with twenty years to his age and the salt wisdom of five naval generations in his rich red blood, grinned capaciously, “So the dear simple old British Public thought. So their papers told them every day. We did not often get a sight of newspapers—there were no regular mails, as now, and none of the comforts of an ordered civilised life, as some ass wrote the other day of the Grand Fleet. What the deuce have we to do with an ordered civilised life! Fighting’s our job, and that’s what we want, not beastly comforts. While we were being chivied about by Fritz’s submarines it was jolly to be told that we Commanded the Seas of the World. But to me it sounded a bit sarcastic at a time when we had not got the length of commanding even the entrances to our own harbours. That’s the cold truth. For six months we hadn’t a submarine proof harbour in England or Scotland or Ireland though we looked for one pretty diligently. We wandered about, east and west and north, looking for some hole where the submarines couldn’t get in without first knocking at the door, and where we could lie in peace for two days together. Wherever we went it was the same old programme. The Zepps would smell us out and Fritz would come nosing around with his submarines, and we had to up anchor and be off on our travels once more. At sea we were all right. We cruised always at speed, with a destroyer patrol out on either side, so that Fritz had no chance to get near enough to try a shot with the torpedo. A fast moving ship can’t be hit except broadside on and within a range of about 400 yards; and as we always moved twice as fast as a submerged U boat he never could get within sure range. He tried once or twice till the destroyers and light cruisers began to get him with the ram and the gun. Fritz must have had a good many thrilling minutes when he was fiddling with his rudder, his diving planes and his torpedo discharge gear and saw a destroyer foaming down upon him at over thirty knots. Fritz died a clean death in those days. I would fifty times sooner go under to the ram or the gun than be caught like a rat in some of the dainty traps we’ve been setting for a year past. We are top dog now, but I blush to think of those first few months. It was a most humiliating spectacle. Fancy fifty million pounds worth of the greatest fighting ships in the world scuttling about in fear of a dozen or two of footy little submarines any one of which we could have run up on the main derrick as easily as a picket boat. If I, a mere snotty in the old Olympus, felt sore in my bones what must the Owners and the Admirals have felt? Answer me that, Pongo?”
“It’s all right now, I suppose,” said the Pongo.
“Safe and dull,” replied he, “powerful dull. No chance of a battle, and no feeling that any day a mouldy in one’s ribs is more likely than not. If Fritz had had as much skill as he had pluck he would have blown up half the Grand Fleet. Why he didn’t I can’t imagine, except that it takes a hundred years to make a sailor. Our submarine officers, with such a target, would have downed a battleship a week easy.”
“Fritz got the three Cressys.”
“He simply couldn’t help,” sniffed the Sub-Lieutenant. “They asked for trouble; one after the other. Fritz struck a soft patch that morning which he is never likely to find again.”
“Had the harbours no booms?”
“Never a one. We had built the ships all right, but we had forgotten the harbours. There wasn’t one, I say, in the east or north or west which Fritz could not enter whenever he chose to take the risk. He could come in submerged, a hundred feet down, diving under the line of patrols, but luckily for us he couldn’t do much after he arrived except keep us busy. For as sure as ever he stuck up a periscope to take a sight we were on to him within five seconds with the small stuff, and then there was a chase which did one’s heart good. I’ve seen a dozen, all much alike, though one had a queer ending which I will tell you. It explains a lot, too. It shows exactly why Fritz fails when he has to depend upon individual nerve and judgment. He is deadly in a crowd, but pretty feeble when left to himself. We used to think that the Germans were a stolid race but they aren’t. They have nerves like red-hot wires. I have seen a crew come up out of a captured submarine, trembling and shivering and crying. I suppose that frightfulness gets over them like drink or drugs or assorted debauchery. Now for my story. One evening towards sunset in the first winter—which means six bells (about three o’clock in the afternoon) up here—a German submarine crept into this very harbour and the first we knew of it was a bit alarming. The commander was a good man, and if he had only kept his head, after working his way in submerged, he might have got one, if not two, big ships. But instead of creeping up close to the battleships, where they lay anchored near the shore, he stuck up a periscope a 1,000 yards away and blazed a torpedo into the brown of them. It was a forlorn, silly shot. They were end on to him, and the torpedo just ran between two of them and smashed up against the steep shore behind. The track of it on the sea was wide and white as a high road, and half a dozen destroyers were on to that submarine even before the shot had exploded against the rocks. Fritz got down safely—he was clever, but too darned nervous for under-water work—and then began a hunt which was exactly like one has seen in a barn when terriers are after rats. The destroyers and motor patrols were everywhere, and above them flew the seaplanes with observers who could peer down through a hundred feet of water. In a shallow harbour Fritz could have sunk to the bottom and lain there till after dark, but we have 200 fathoms here with a very steep shore and there was no bottom for him. A submarine can’t stand the water pressure of more than 200 feet at the outside. He didn’t dare to fill his tanks and sink, and could only keep down in diving trim so long as he kept moving with his electric motors and held himself submerged with his horizontal planes. Had the motors stopped, the submarine would have come up, for in diving trim it was slightly lighter than the water displaced. All we had to do was to keep on hunting till his electric batteries had run down, and then he would be obliged to come up. Do you twig, Pongo?”
“But he could have sunk to the bottom if he had chosen?”
“Oh, yes. But then he could never have risen again. To have filled his tanks would have meant almost instant death. At 200 fathoms his plates would have crumpled like paper.”
“Still I think that I should have done it.”
“So should I. But Fritz didn’t. He roamed about the harbour, blind, keeping as deep down as he could safely go. Above him scoured the patrol boats and destroyers, and above them again flew the seaplanes. Now and then the air observers would get a sight of him and once or twice they dropped bombs, but this was soon stopped as the risk to our own boats was too great. Regarded as artillery practice bomb dropping from aeroplanes is simply rotten. One can’t possibly aim from a thing moving at fifty miles an hour. If one may believe the look outs of the destroyers the whole harbour crawled with periscopes, but they were really bully beef cans and other rubbish chucked over from the warships. When last seen, or believed to be seen, Fritz was blundering towards the line of battleships lying under the deep gloom of the shore, and then he vanished altogether. Night came on, the very long Northern night in winter, and it seemed extra specially long to us in the big ships. Searchlights were going all through the dark hours, the water gleamed, all the floating rubbish which accumulates so fast in harbour stood out dead black against the silvery surface, and the Officers of the Watch detected more periscopes than Fritz had in his whole service. The hunt went on without ceasing for, at any moment, Fritz’s batteries might peter out, and he come up. It was a bit squirmy to feel that here cooped up in a narrow deep sea lock were over a hundred King’s ships, and that somewhere below us was a desperate German submarine which couldn’t possibly escape, but which might blow some of us to blazes any minute.”
“Did any of you go to sleep?” asked the Pongo foolishly.
The Sub-Lieutenant stared. “When it wasn’t my watch I turned in as usual,” he replied. “Why not?
“In the morning there was no sign of Fritz, so we concluded that he had either sunk himself to the bottom or had somehow managed to get out of the harbour. In either case we should not see him more. So we just forgot him as we had forgotten others who had been chased and had escaped. But he turned up again after all. For twenty-four hours nothing much happened except the regular routine, though after the scare we were all very wide awake for more U boats, and then we had orders to proceed to sea. I was senior snotty of the Olympus, and I was on the after look-out platform as the ship cast loose from her moorings and moved away, to take her place in the line. As we got going there was a curious grating noise all along the bottom just as if we had been lightly aground; everyone was puzzled to account for it as there were heaps of water under us. The grating went on till we were clear of our berth, and then in the midst of the wide foaming wake rolled up the long thin hull of a submarine. A destroyer dashed up, and the forward gun was in the act of firing when a loud voice from her bridge called on the gunners to stop. ‘Don’t fire on a coffin,’ roared her commander. It was the German submarine, which after some thirty hours under water had become a dead hulk. All the air had long since been used up and the crew were lying at their posts—cold meat, poor devils. A beastly way to die.”
“Beastly,” murmured the Marine. “War is a foul game.”
“Still,” went on the Sub-Lieutenant, cheerfully, “a dead Fritz is always much more wholesome than a live one, and here were a score of him safely dead.”
“But what had happened to the submarine?” asked the Marine, not being a sailor.
“Don’t you see?” explained the Sub-Lieutenant, who had held his story to be artistically finished. “What a Pongo it is! Fritz had wandered about blind, deep down under water, until his batteries had given out. Then the submarine rose, fouled our bottom by the merest accident, and stuck there jammed against our bilge keels till the movement of the ship had thrown it clear. It swung to the tide with us. The chances against the submarine rising under one of the battleships were thousands to one, but chances like that have a way of coming off at sea. Nothing at sea ever causes surprise, my son.”
The Sub-Lieutenant spoke with the assurance of a grey-haired Admiral; he was barely twenty years old, but he was wise with the profound salt wisdom of the sea and will never get any older or less wise though he lives to be ninety.
Though our friend the young Lieutenant of Marines was no sailor he was a scholar, trained in the class-rooms and playing fields, of a great English school. He was profoundly impressed, as all outsiders must be, by the engrained efficiency of the seafolk among whom he now dwelt, their easy mastery of the technicalities of sea craft, and their almost childish ignorance of everything that lay outside it. It was borne in upon him that they were a race apart, bred to their special work as terriers and racehorses are bred, the perfect product of numberless generations of sea fighters. It was borne in upon him, too, that no nation coming late to the sea, like the Germans, could, though taking an infinity of thought, possibly stand up against us. Sea power does not consist of ships but of men. For a real Navy does not so much design and build ships as secrete them. They are the expression in machinery of its brains and Soul. He arrived at this conclusion after much patient thought and then diffidently laid it before his experienced friend. The Sub-Lieutenant accepted the theory at once as beyond argument.
“That’s the whole secret, my son, the secret of the Navy. Fritz can’t design ships; he can only copy ours, and then he can’t make much of his copies. Take his submarine work. He has any amount of pluck, though he is a dirty swine; he doesn’t fail for want of pluck but because he hasn’t the right kind of nerve. That is where Fritz fails and where our boys succeed, because they were bred to the sea and their fathers before them, and their fathers before that. Submarining as a sport is exactly like stalking elephants on foot in long grass. One has to wriggle on one’s belly till one gets within close range, and then make sure of a kill in one shot. There’s no time for a second if one misses. Fritz will get fairly close up, sometimes—or did before we had taken his measure—but not that close enough to make dead sure of a hit. He is too much afraid of being seen when he pops his periscope above water. So he comes down between two stools. He is too far off for a certain hit and not far enough to escape being seen. That story I told you the other day was an exact illustration. The moment he pops up the destroyers swoop down upon him, he flinches, looses off a mouldy, somehow, anyhow, and then gets down. That sort of thing is no bally use; one doesn’t sink battleships that fool way. Our men first make sure of their hit at the closest range, and then think about getting down—or don’t get down. They do their work without worrying about being sunk themselves the instant after. That’s just the difference between us and the Germans, between terriers and rats. It’s no good taking partial risks in submarine work; one must go the whole hog or leave it alone.
“Risks are queer things,” went on the Sub-Lieutenant, reflectively. “The bigger they are, the less one gets hurt. Just look at the seaplanes. One would think that the ordinary dangers of flight were bad enough—the failure of a stay, the misfiring of an engine, a bad gusty wind—and so we thought before the war. It looked the forlornest of hopes to rush upon an enemy plane, shoot him down at the shortest of range, or ram him if one couldn’t get a kill any other way. It seemed that if two planes stood up to one another, both must certainly be lost. And so they would. Yet time and again our Flight officers have charged the German planes, seen them run away or drop into the sea, and come off themselves with no more damage than a hole or two through the wings. It’s just nerve, nerve and breeding. When we dash in upon Fritz with submarine or seaplanes, taking no count of the risks, but seeking only to kill, he almost always either blunders or runs. It isn’t that he lacks pluck—don’t believe that silly libel; Fritz is as brave as men are made—but he hasn’t the sporting nerve. He will take risks in the mass, but he doesn’t like them single; we do. He doesn’t love big game shooting, on foot, alone; we do. He does his best; he obeys orders up to any limit; he will fight and die without shrinking. But he is not a natural fighting man, and he is always thinking of dying. We love fighting, love it so much that we don’t give a thought to the dying part. We just look upon the risk as that which gives spice to the game.”
“I believe,” said the Marine, thoughtfully, “that you have exactly described the difference between the races. With us fighting and dying are parts of one great glorious game; with Fritz they are the most solemn of business. We laugh all the time and sing music-hall songs; Fritz never smiles and sings the Wacht am Rhein. I am beginning to realize that our irrepressible levity is a mighty potent force, mightier by far than Fritz’s solemnity. The true English spirit is to be seen at its best and brightest in the Navy, and the Navy is always ready for the wildest of schoolboy rags. If I had not come to sea I might myself have become a solemn blighter like Fritz.”
In the wardroom that evening the Marine repeated the Sub-Lieutenant’s story and was assured that it was true. The Navy will pull a Soldier’s leg with a joyous disregard for veracity, but there is a crudity about its invention which soon ceases to deceive. They can invent nothing which approaches in wonder the marvels which happen every day.
The talk then fell upon the ever-engrossing topic of submarine catching, and experiences flowed forth in a stream which filled the Marine with astonishment and admiration. He had never served an apprenticeship in a submarine catcher and the sea business in small sporting craft was altogether new to him.
“It is a pity,” at last said a regular Navy Lieutenant, “that submarines are no good against other submarines. That is a weakness which we must seek to overcome if, as seems likely in the future, navies contain more under-water boats than any other craft.”
“That is not quite true,” spoke up a grizzled Royal Naval Reserve man, and told a story of submarine v. submarine which I am not permitted to repeat.
“Yes,” said the Commander of the Utopia (The Pongo’s ship). “Very clever and very ingenious. But did you ever hear how the Navy, not the merchant service this time, caught a submarine off the —— Lightship. That was finesse, if you please, Mr. Royal Naval Reserve.”
Our young marine hugged himself. He had set the Navy talking, and when the Navy talks there come forth things which make glad the ears.
“You know the —— Lightship,” went on the Commander, a sea potentate of thirty-five, with a passion for music-hall songs which he sang most divinely. “She is anchored on a shoal which lies off the entrance to one of the busiest of our English harbours. Though her big lantern is not lighted in war time the ship remains as a day mark, and two men are always on board of her. She is anchored on the top of a sandbank where at low water there are not more than twelve feet, though close by the channels deepen to thirty feet. A little while ago the men in the Lightship were interested to observe a German submarine approach at high water—of course submerged—and to take up a position about a hundred yards distant where the low-water soundings were twenty-two feet. There she remained on the bottom from tide to tide, watching through her periscope all the shipping which passed in and out of the harbour. Her draught in cruising trim was about fourteen feet, so that at high water she was completely submerged except for the periscope and at low water the top of her conning tower showed above the surface. At high tide she slipped away with the results of her observations. The incident was reported at once to the naval authorities and the lightship men were instructed to report again at once if the submarine’s performance was repeated. A couple of days later, under the same conditions, Fritz in his submarine came back and the whole programme of watchfully waiting was gone through again. He evidently knew the soundings to a hair and lay where no destroyer could quickly get at him through the difficult winding channels amid the sandbanks except when the tide was nearly at the full. Even at dead low water he could, if surprised, rise and float and rapidly make off to where there was depth enough to dive. He couldn’t be rushed, and there were three or four avenues of escape. Fritz had discovered a safe post of observation and seemed determined to make the most of it. But, Mr. Royal Naval Reserve, even the poor effete old Navy has brains and occasionally uses them. The night after the second visit an Admiralty tug came along, hauled up the lightship’s anchors, and shifted her exactly one hundred yards east-north-east. You will note that the German submarine’s chosen spot was exactly one hundred yards west-south-west of the lightship’s old position. The change was so slight that it might be expected to escape notice. And so it did. Three days passed, and then at high tide the U boat came cheerfully along upon its mission and lay off the lightship exactly as before. The only difference was that now she was upon the top of the shoal with barely twelve feet under her at low water instead of twenty-two feet. The observers in the lightship winked at one another, for they had talked with the officer of the Admiralty tug and were wise to the game. The tide fell, the submarine lay peacefully on the bottom, and Fritz, intent to watch the movements of ships in and out of the harbour, did not notice that the water was steadily falling away from his sides and leaving his whole conning tower and deck exposed. Far away a destroyer was watching, and at the correct moment, when the water around the U boat was too shallow to float her even in the lightest trim, she slipped up as near as she could approach, trained a 4-inch gun upon Fritz and sent in an armed boat’s crew to wish him good-day. Poor old Fritz knew nothing of his visitors until they were hammering violently upon his fore hatch and calling upon him to come out and surrender. He was a very sick man and did not understand at all how he had been caught until the whole manœuvre had been kindly explained to him by the Lieutenant-Commander of the destroyer, from whom I also received the story. ‘You see, Fritz, old son,’ observed the Lieutenant-Commander, ‘Admiralty charts are jolly things and you know all about them, but you should sometimes check them with the lead. Things change, Fritz; light-ships can be moved. Come and have a drink, old friend, you look as if you needed something stiff.’ Fritz gulped down a tall whisky and soda, gasped, and gurgled out, ‘That was damned clever and I was a damned fool. For God’s sake don’t tell them in Germany how I was caught.’ ‘Not for worlds, old man,’ replied the Lieutenant-Commander. ‘We will say that you were nabbed while trying to ditch a hospital ship. There is glory for you.’ ”
“A very nice story,” observed the Royal Naval Reserve man drily.
“I believed your yarn,” said the Commander reproachfully, “and mine is every bit as true as yours. But no matter. Call up the band and let us get to real business.”
Two minutes later the anteroom had emptied, and these astonishing naval children were out on the half-deck dancing wildly but magnificently. Commanders and Lieutenants were mixed up with Subs., clerks and snotties from the gun room. Rank disappeared and nothing counted but the execution of the most complicated Russian measures. It was a strange scene which perhaps helps to reveal that combination of professional efficiency and childish irresponsibility which makes the Naval Service unlike any other community of men and boys in the world.