CHAPTER XIII
THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS: SOME IMPRESSIONS
AND REFLECTIONS
Part I
It is strange how events of great national importance become associated in one’s mind with small personal experiences. I have told with what vividness I remember the receipt in November, 1914, of private news that the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible had left Devonport for the Falkland Islands, and how I heard Lord Rosebery read out Sturdee’s victorious dispatch to 6,000 people in St. Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow. In a similar way the Jutland battle became impressed upon my mind in an unforgettable personal fashion. On May 22nd, 1916, I learned that Admiral Beatty had at his disposal the four “Cats”—Lion, Tiger, Queen Mary, and Princess Royal—of about twenty-nine knots speed, and each armed with eight 13.5-inch guns, the two battle cruisers New Zealand and Indefatigable, of some twenty-seven knots of speed, and carrying each eight 12-inch guns, and the Queen Elizabeth, of twenty-five knots, all of which were armed with eight of the new 15-inch guns, which were a great advance upon the earlier thirteen-point-fives. The ships of the Fifth Battle Squadron had all been completed since the war began. The Queen Elizabeth herself went into dock at Rosyth for repairs, so that for immediate service the squadron was reduced to four ships—Barham, Valiant, Warspite, and Malaya.
Upon the following Saturday, May 27th, I was invited to lunch in one of the battleships, but upon arrival at South Queensferry, I found the Fleet under Short Notice for sea, and no one was allowed to leave the ships, or to receive friends on board. It was a beautiful day, the long, light-coloured Cats and the Futurist-grey battleships were a most noble sight, but I felt too much like a Peri shut out of Paradise to be happy in observing them. A day or two later, Thursday, June 1st, was fixed for my next visit, but again the Fates were unkind. When I arrived in the early morning and stood upon the heights overlooking the anchorage, Beatty’s Fleet had gone, and, though I did not know it, had even then fought the Jutland battle. In the afternoon, news came with the return to the Forth of the damaged battleship Warspite surrounded by her attendant destroyers. That was on the Thursday afternoon, but it was not until the evening of Friday that the first Admiralty message was issued, that famous message which will never be forgotten either by the country or by the Navy. The impression which it made may be simply illustrated. I was sitting in my drawing-room after dinner, anxiously looking for news both on national and personal grounds, when a newsboy shrieked under my window “Great Naval Disaster: Five British Battleships Sunk.” The news printed in the paper was not so bad as that shouted, but it was bad enough; it gave the impression of very heavy losses incurred for no compensating purpose, and turned what had really been a conspicuous naval success into an apology for a naval disaster. As a humble student, I could to some extent read between the lines of the dispatch and dimly perceive what had happened, but to the mass of the British public, the wording of that immortal document could not have been worse conceived. To them it seemed that the End of All Things was at hand.
The story runs that the first bulletin was made up by clerks from scraps of messages which came over the wireless from the Grand Fleet, but in which the most important sentence of all was omitted. “The Germans are claiming a victory,” wailed the Admiralty clerks through the aerials at Whitehall. “What shall we say?” “Say,” snapped the Grand Fleet, “say that we gave them hell!” If the Admiralty had only said this, said it, too, in curt, blasphemous naval fashion, the public would have understood, and all would have been well. What a dramatic chance was then lost! Think what a roar of laughter and cheering would have echoed round the world if the first dispatch had run as follows:
“We have met and fought the German Fleet, and given it hell. Beatty lost the Queen Mary and Indefatigable in the first part of the battle when the odds were heavily against us, but Jellicoe coming up enveloped the enemy, and was only prevented by mist and low visibility from destroying him utterly. The Germans have lost as many ships as we have, and are shattered beyond repair.”
That message, in a few words, would have given a true impression of the greatest sea fight that the world has known, a fight, too, which has established beyond question the unchallengeable supremacy of British strategy, battle tactics, seamanship, discipline, and devotion to duty of every man and boy in the professional Navy. In the technical sense, it was an indecisive battle: the Germans escaped destruction. But morally, and in its practical results, no sea fight has been more decisive. Nearly two years have passed since that morning of June 1st when the grey dawn showed the seas empty of German ships, and though the High Seas Fleet has put out many times since then, it has never again ventured to engage us. Jutland drove sea warfare, for the Germans, beneath the surface, a petty war of raids upon merchant vessels, a war—as against neutrals—of piracy and murder. By eight o’clock on the evening of May 31st, 1916, the Germans had been out-fought, outmanœuvred, and cut off from their bases. Had the battle begun three hours earlier, and had visibility been as full as it had been in the Falkland Islands action, had there been, above all, ample sea room, there would not have been a German battleship afloat when the sun went down. There never was a luckier fleet than that one which scrambled away through the darkness of May 31st-June 1st, worked its way round the enveloping horns of Jellicoe, Beatty, and Evan-Thomas, and arrived gasping and shattered at Wilhelmshaven. We can pardon the Kaiser, who, in his relief for a crowning mercy, proclaimed the escape to be a glorious victory.
But though the Kaiser may, after his manner, talk of victories, German naval officers cherish no illusions about Jutland. If one takes the trouble to analyse their very full dispatches, their relief at escaping destruction shines forth too plainly to be mistaken. Admiral Scheer got away, and showed himself to be a consummate master of his art. But he never, in his dispatches, claims that the British Fleets were defeated in the military sense. They were foiled, chiefly through his own skill, but they were not defeated. The German dispatches state definitely that the battle of May 31st “confirmed the old truth, that the large fighting ship, the ship which combines the maximum of strength in attack and defence, rules the seas.” The relation of strength, they say, between the English and German Fleets, “was roughly two to one.” They do not claim that this overwhelming superiority in our strength was sensibly reduced by the losses in the battle, nor that the large English fighting ships—admittedly larger, much more numerous, and more powerfully gunned than their own—ceased after Jutland to rule the seas. Their claim, critically examined, is simply that in the circumstances the German ships made a highly successful escape. And so indeed they did.
The Jutland battle always presents itself to my mind in a series of clear-cut pictures. Very few of those who take part in a big naval battle see anything of it. They are at their stations, occupied with their pressing duties, and the world without is hidden from them. I try to imagine the various phases of the battle as they were unfolded before the eyes of those few in the fighting squadrons who did see. Perhaps if I try to paint for my readers those scenes which are vividly before me, I may convey to them something of what I have tried to learn myself.
Let us transport ourselves to the signal bridge of Admiral Beatty’s flagship, the battle cruiser Lion, and take up station there upon the afternoon of May 31st, at half-past two. It is a fine afternoon, though hazy; the clouds lie in heavy banks, and the horizon, instead of appearing as a hard line, is an indefinable blend of grey sea and grey cloud. It is a day of “low visibility,” a day greatly favouring a weak fleet which desires to evade a decisive action. We have been sweeping the lower North Sea, and are steering towards the north-west on our way to rejoin Jellicoe’s main Fleet. Our flagship, Lion, is the leading vessel of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, and following behind us, we can see the Princess Royal, Queen Mary, and Tiger. At a little distance behind the Tiger appear the two ships which remain to us of the Second Battle Cruiser Squadron, the Indefatigable and New Zealand, fine powerful ships, but neither so fast nor so powerful as are our four Cats of the First Squadron. Some five or six miles to the west of us we can make out, against the afternoon sky, the huge bulk of the Barham, which, followed by her three consorts, Valiant, Warspite, and Malaya, leads the Fifth Battle Squadron of the most powerful fighting ships afloat. We are the spear-head of Beatty’s Fleet, but those great ships yonder, silhouetted against the sky, are its most solid shaft.
THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS.
Word runs round the ship that the enemy has been sighted, but since we know nothing of his numbers or of his quality—Jutland, though anticipated and worked for, was essentially a battle of encounter—our light cruisers fly off to make touch and find out for us. Away also soars seaplane, rising from the platform of our carrying ship Engadine, a clumsy-looking seagull, with its big pontoon feet, but very fast and very deftly handled. The seaplane flies low, for the clouds droop towards the sea, it is heavily fired upon, but is not hit, and it returns to tell us—or rather the Admiral, in his conning tower below—just what he wishes to learn. There is an enemy battle cruiser squadron immediately in front of us, consisting of five armoured ships, with their attendant light cruisers and destroyers. The German battle cruisers are: Derfflinger (12-inch guns), Lützow (12-inch), Moltke (11-inch), Seydlitz (11-inch), and another stated by the Germans to be the von der Tann, which had more than once been reported lost. Since our four big battle cruisers carry 13.5-inch guns, and two other guns of 12-inch, and the four battleships supporting us great 15-inch weapons, we ought to eat up the German battle cruisers if we can draw near enough to see them distinctly. By half-past three the two British battle cruiser squadrons are moving at twenty-five knots, formed up in line of battle, and the Fifth Battle Squadron, still some five miles away, is steaming at about twenty-three knots. The Germans have turned in a southerly direction, and are flying at full speed upon a course which is roughly parallel with that which we have now taken up. During the past hour we have come round nearly twelve points—eight points go to a right angle—and are now speeding away from Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet, which is some forty miles distant to the north and west. Since we are faster than Jellicoe, the gap between us and him is steadily opening out.
From the signal bridge, a very exposed position, we can see the turret guns below us and the spotting top above. The turrets swing round, as the gunners inside get their directions from the gunnery-control officer who, in his turn, receives every few moments the results of the range-finding and rate-of-change observations which are being continually taken by petty officers charged with the duty. Further corrections will be made when the guns begin to shoot, and the spotting officers aloft watch for the splashes of the shells as they fall into the sea. Naval gunnery, in spite of all the brains and experience lavished upon it, must always be far from an exact science. One has to do with moving ships firing at other moving ships, many factors which go to a precise calculation are imperfectly known, and though the margin of error may be reduced by modern instruments of precision, the long fighting ranges of to-day make the error substantial. The lower the visibility, the greater becomes the gunner’s uncertainty, for neither range-finding nor spotting can be carried on with accuracy. Even on the clearest of days it is difficult to “spot” a shell-splash at more than 14,000 yards (eight land miles), a range which is short for the huge naval gun. When many guns are firing, it is not easy to pick up the splashes of one’s own shells, and to distinguish between their water-bursts and the camouflage put up by an enemy.
At our position upon the signal bridge, though we are there only in spirit, we probably feel much more of excitement than does any officer or man of the big ship upon which we have intruded our ghostly presence. Most of them can see nothing; all of them are too busy upon their duties to bother about personal feelings. There is an atmosphere of serene confidence in themselves and their ship which communicates itself even to outsiders like us. At 3.48 the enemy is some 18,500 yards distance, and visible, for the light has improved, and firing begins almost simultaneously from us and our opponents. The first crash from the Lion’s two fore-turrets nearly throws us off the bridge, so sudden and fierce it is, and so little does its intensity seem to be subdued by our ear-protectors. But as other crashes follow down the line we grow accustomed to them, grip tightly at the hand-rail, and forget ourselves in the grandeur of the sight unfolding itself before us. Away, far away, is the enemy, hull down, smothered in smoke and by the huge gouts of spray thrown up by our bursting shells. He is adding to the splashes by firing his own side batteries into the sea to confuse the judgment of our spotters.
At each discharge from our ship, a great cone of incandescent gas flames forth, cutting like a sword through the pale curtain of smoke. From the distant enemy ships we can see thin flashes spurt in reply, and his shells pitch beside us and over us, lashing our decks with sea foam and sometimes throwing a torrent of water over the spotting top and bridge. Before five minutes have passed, we are wet through, our ears are drumming in spite of the faithful protectors, and all sensation except of absorbed interest in the battle has left us. At any moment we may be scattered by a bursting shell, or carried to the bottom with our sunken ship, but we do not give a thought to the risks.
While we are firing at the enemy, and he is firing at us at ranges varying from ten to eight miles, a fierce battle is going on between the lines of big ships. Light cruisers are fighting light cruisers, destroyers are rushing upon destroyers. At an early stage in the action, the German Admiral Hipper—in command of the battle cruisers—launched fifteen destroyers at our line, and was taught a rough lesson in the quality of the boys who man our T.B.D.s. Twelve of our heavier and more powerfully armed destroyers fell upon the German fifteen, huddled them into a bunch, and had started to lay them out scientifically with gun and torpedo, when they fled back to the shelter of their own big ships. Following them up, our destroyers delivered a volley of torpedoes upon the German battle cruisers at less than 3,000 yards distance. Probably no damage was done, for it is the forlornest of jobs to loose mouldies against fast manœuvring ships, but lack of success does not in any way dim the splendour of the attempt. As light cruisers and destroyers fight and manœuvre, the torrent of heavy shells screams over their heads, flying as high in their course as Alpine mountains, and dropping almost vertically near the lines of battle cruisers.
As soon as we turned to the south in pursuit of Hipper’s advance squadron of battle cruisers, Admiral Evan-Thomas closed his supporting battleships upon us, and we can now see them clearly about two miles away on our starboard quarter, formed in line of battle, the flagship Barham leading. At eight minutes past four they join in the fight, firing at a range of 20,000 yards (twelve miles), not an excessive distance for their tremendous flat-shooting 15-inch guns if the light were good, but too far for accuracy now that the enemy ships can be seen so very indistinctly. Up to now the German gunnery has been good; our ships have not often been seriously struck, but the shells in bunched salvoes have fallen very closely beside us. Our armour, though much thinner than that of the battleships behind us, is sufficient to keep off the enemy’s light shells—our 13.5-inch shells are twice the weight of his 11-inch, and the 15-inch shells fired by the Queen Elizabeths astern of us are more than twice the weight of his 12-inch. We feel little anxiety for our turrets, conning towers, or sides, but we notice how steeply his salvoes are falling at the long ranges, and are not without concern for our thin decks should any 12-inch shells of 850 lb. weight plump fairly upon them from the skies. By half-past four the German fire has slackened a good deal, has become ragged and inaccurate, showing that we are getting home with our heavy stuff, and the third ship in the line is seen to be on fire. All is going well, the enemy is outclassed in ships and in guns; we are still between him and his bases to the south-west, he is already becoming squeezed up against the big banks which stretch out one hundred miles from the Jutland coast, and for a while it looks as if Beatty had struck something both soft and good.
But a few minutes make a great change. All through the last hour we have been steaming fast towards the main German High Seas Fleet and away from Jellicoe, and at 4.42 the leading German battleships can be seen upon the smoky horizon to the south-east. Though we do not know it yet, the whole High Seas Fleet is before us, including sixteen of the best German ships, and it were the worst of folly to go any farther towards it. We could, it is true, completely outflank it by continuing on our present course, and with our high speed might avoid being crushed in a general action, but we should have irrevocably separated ourselves from Jellicoe, and have committed a tactical mistake of the biggest kind. We should have divided the English forces in the face of the enemy, instead of concentrating them. So a quick order comes from the conning tower below, and away beside us runs a signal hoist. “Sixteen points, starboard.” Sixteen points mean a complete half-circle, and round come our ships, the Lion leading, turning in a curve of which the diameter is nearly a mile, and heading now to the north, towards Jellicoe, instead of to the south, away from him. Our purpose now is to keep the Germans fully occupied until Jellicoe, who is driving his battleships at their fullest speed, can come down and wipe Fritz off the seas. As we come round, the German battle cruisers follow our manœuvre, and also turn through sixteen points in order to place themselves at the head of the enemy’s battle line.
As we swing round and take up our new course, we pass between the Queen Elizabeths and the enemy, masking their fire, and for a few minutes we are exposed in the midst of a critical manœuvre to the concentrated salvoes of every German battleship within range. The range is long, the German shells fired with high elevation fall very steeply, and we are safe except from the ill-luck of heavy projectiles pitching upon our decks. From the signal bridge of the Lion we can see every battle cruiser as it swings, or as it approaches the turning point, we can see the whole beautiful length of them, and we also see a sight which has never before been impressed upon the eyes of man. For we see two splendid battle cruisers struck and sink; first the Indefatigable, and then the Queen Mary. It is not permitted to us to describe the scene as actually it presented itself to our eyes.
Beatty has lost two battle cruisers, one of the first class and one of the second. There remain to him four—the three Cats and the New Zealand; he is sorely weakened, but does not hesitate. He has two duties to carry out—to lead the enemy towards Jellicoe, and so dispose of his battle cruisers beyond the head of the German lines as powerfully to aid Jellicoe in completing their development. Beatty is now round, and round also comes the Fifth Battle Squadron, forming astern of the battle cruisers, and with them engaging the leading German ships. The enemy is some 14,000 yards distant from us in the Lion (8½ miles), and this range changes little while Beatty is speeding first north and then north-east, in order to cross the “T” of the German line. We will continue to stand upon the Lion’s bridge during the execution of this most spirited manœuvre, and then leave Beatty’s flagship in order to observe from the spotting top of a battleship how the four Queen Elizabeths fought the whole High Seas Fleet, while our battle cruisers were turning its van. What these splendid ships did, and did to perfection, was to stall the Germans off, and so give time both for the enveloping movement of Beatty and for the arrival and deployment of Jellicoe’s main Fleet.
By five o’clock Beatty is fairly off upon his gallant adventure, and during the next hour, the hardest fought part of the whole battle, the gap between the battle cruisers and the four supporting battleships steadily widens. If the Germans are to be enveloped, Beatty must at the critical moment allow sufficient space between himself and Evan-Thomas for Jellicoe to deploy his big Fleet between them, and this involves on the part of the Commander-in-Chief a deployment in the midst of battle of a delicacy and accuracy only possible to a naval tactician of the highest order. But both Beatty and Evan-Thomas know their Jellicoe, to whom, at few-minute intervals, crackle from the aerials above us wireless messages giving with naval precision the exact courses and speeds of our ships and the bearings of the enemy. For an hour—up to the moment when we turned to the north—we ran away from Jellicoe, but during the next hour we steamed towards him; we know that he is pressing to our aid with all the speed which his panting engineers can get out of his squadrons. Beatty’s battle cruisers, curving round the head of the German line at a range of 14,000 to 12,000 yards, are firing all the while, and being fired at all the while, but though often hit, they are safer now than when they were a couple of miles more distant.
We have now reached a very important phase in the battle. It is twenty minutes past six. At six o’clock the leading vessels of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet had been sighted five miles to the north of us and his three battle cruisers—Invincible (Admiral Hood), Inflexible, and Indomitable—have flown down to the help of Beatty. They come into action, steaming hard due south, and take station ahead of us in the Lion. By this lengthening of his line to the south Beatty has now completely enveloped the German battle cruisers, which turn through some twelve points and endeavour to wriggle out of the jaws of the trap which they see closing remorselessly upon them. They are followed in this turn by the battleships of the High Seas Fleet which, for more than an hour, have been faithfully hammered by Evan-Thomas’s Queen Elizabeths, and show up against the sky a very ragged outline. The range of the battle cruisers is now down to 8,000 yards, and they get well home upon battleships as well as upon opponents of their own class. We do not ourselves escape loss, for the Invincible, which has become the leading ship, is shattered by concentrated gun-fire. The gallant Hood, with his men, has gone to join his great naval ancestors.
And now let us put the clock back to the hour, 4.57, when the Queen Elizabeths had completed their turn to the north, and had taken up position astern of Beatty to hold off the main German Fleet while he is making his enveloping rush. From the spotting top of the battleship upon which we have descended we get a most inspiring view, though every now and then we are smothered in oily smoke from the huge flat funnels below us, and are drenched with water which is flung up in torrents by shells bursting alongside. The enemy ships upon which we are firing are some 18,000 yards distant, we can with great difficulty make them out amid the smoke and haze, and we wonder mightily how the keen-eyed spotting officers beside us can judge and correct, as they appear to be doing, the bursts of our shells more than ten miles distance. Our guns, and those of our consorts, are firing deliberately, for we do not know how long the battle will endure, and the supply of 15-inch shell and cordite cannot be unlimited in the very biggest of ships. We learn from the spotting officers that all our ships, except the Valiant, have been hit several times while coming into action by dropping shots, but that no serious harm has been done. Meanwhile the shells are falling fast about us, and all of our ships are repeatedly straddled. The Warspite suffered the most severely, though even she was able to go home to the Forth under her own steam. This is the battleship whose steering gear went wrong later in the action, and which turned two complete “O’s” at full speed. Round she went in great circles of a mile in diameter, spitting shots with every gun that bore upon the enemy during her wild gyrations. Fritz began well, but does not seem able to stand punishment. He rarely hits us now, though we are giving him a much better mark than he presents to us. For we are silhouetted against the almost clear sky to the west, while he—and there are a great many of him—is buried in mist and smoke to the east. Rarely can our range-finding officers take a clear observation; rarely can our spotters make sure of a correction. Yet every now and then we note signs that our low-flying, hard-hitting shells—each one of which weighs not much short of a ton!—are getting home upon him at least as frequently as his shots are hitting us. Three of his battleships are new, built since the war began, but the rest are just Königs and Kaisers, no better than our Dreadnoughts of half a dozen years ago. We would willingly take on twice our numbers of such battleships and fight them to a finish upon a clear summer’s day.
Our battle tactics are now plain to see. They are to keep out to the farthest visible range, to avoid being materially damaged, and to keep Fritz’s battleships so fully occupied that they will have no opportunity of closing in upon Beatty when he completes his envelopment. We can see our battle cruisers some three miles away, swinging more and more round the head of the German line, and the enemy’s battle cruisers edging away in the effort to avoid being outflanked. Far away to the north appears the smoke of the three battle cruisers which are speeding ahead of Jellicoe’s main Fleet; they are getting their instructions from Beatty’s Lion, and are already making for the head of his line so as to prolong it, and so to complete the envelopment which is now our urgent purpose. Our Queen Elizabeth battleships are not hurrying either their engines or their guns. We are moving just fast enough to keep slightly ahead of the first half-dozen of the German battleships; we are pounding them steadily whenever a decent mark is offered us—which unhappily is not often—and we have seen one big ship go down smothered in smoke and flames. The time draws on and it is already six o’clock; we have borne the burden of the fight for more than an hour, though it seems but a few minutes since we turned more than twenty miles back to the south, and first gave Fritz a taste of what the Fifth Battle Squadron could do. We are slowing down now, and the gap between us and Beatty is widening out, for we know that Jellicoe is coming, and that he will deploy his three battle squadrons between us and our battle cruisers which, extended in a long line, with Hood’s Invincible in front, are well round the head of the German ships. The whole German Fleet is curving into a long, close-knit spiral between us and Beatty, and, if the light will hold, we have it ripe for destruction. We have played our part; the issue now rests with Jellicoe and the gods of weather.
Everything for which we and the battle cruisers have fought and suffered, for which we have risked and lost the Queen Mary and Indefatigable, is drawing to its appointed end. Our Fifth Battle Squadron has nearly stopped, and has inclined four points towards the east, so as to allow the gap for Jellicoe’s deployment to widen out. Firing upon both sides has ceased. We have great work still to do, and are anxious to keep all the shells we yet carry for it, and the enemy is too heavily battered and in too grievous a peril to think of anything but his immediate escape. We are waiting for Jellicoe, whose squadrons are already beginning to deploy.
While the Queen Elizabeths wait, ready at any moment to resume the action whenever and wherever their tremendous services may be called for, we will leave the Fifth Battle Squadron, and, flying far over the sea, will penetrate into the Holy of Holies, the conning tower of the Fleet flagship wherein stands the small, firm-lipped, eager-eyed man who is the brain and nerve centre of the battle. There are those who have as sharp a thirst for battle—Beatty has; and there are those who have been as patient under long-drawn-out delays and disappointments—Kitchener was; yet there have been few fighting men in English history who could, as Jellicoe can, combine enduring patience with the most burning ardour, and never allow the one to achieve mastery over the other. Watch him now in the conning tower of the Iron Duke. He has waited and worked during twenty-two months for just this moment, when the German High Seas Fleet have placed their cards upon the table, and he, exactly at the proper instant, will play his overwhelming trumps. If ever a man had excuse for too hasty a movement, for too great an eagerness to snatch at victory, Jellicoe would have one now. His eyes flash, and one may read in them the man’s intense anxiety not to allow one moment of unnecessary delay to interpose between his Fleet and the scattering enemy. Yet until the exact moment arrives when he can with sure hand deploy his squadrons into line of battle, and fit them with precision into the gap made for them between Beatty to the east and south and Evan-Thomas to the west and south, he will not give the order which, once given, cannot be recalled. For as soon as his Fleet has deployed, it will be largely out of his hands, its dispositions will have been made, and if it deploys too soon, the crushing opportunity will be missed, and the Germans will infallibly escape. So, with his divisions well in hand, he watches upon the chart the movements of his own and Beatty’s vessels, as the wireless waves report them to him, and every few minutes goes to the observation hoods of the conning tower, and seeks to peer through the thick haze and smoke which still hide from him the enveloping horns of the English ships, and the curving masses of the enemy. If he could see clearly his task would be less difficult and the culmination of his hopes less doubtful. But he cannot see; he has to work by wireless and by instinct, largely by faith, trusting to the judgment of Beatty and Evan-Thomas, far away, and himself subject to the ever-varying uncertainties of sea fighting. He goes back to the chart, upon which his staff are noting down the condensed essence of all the messages as they flow in, and then, the moment having arrived, he gives the word. Away run the signal flags, picked up and interpreted by every squadron flagship, and then repeated by every ship. The close divisions of the Grand Fleet spread out, melt gracefully into lines—to all appearance as easily as if they were battalions of infantry—they swing round to the east, the foremost vessel reaching out to join up with Beatty’s battle cruisers. As the Grand Fleet deploys, Evan-Thomas swings in his four Queen Elizabeths so that the Barham, without haste or hesitation, falls in behind the aftermost of Jellicoe’s battleships, and the remainder of the Fifth Battle Squadron completes the line, which stretches now in one long curve to the west and north and east of the beaten Germans. The deployment is complete, the whole Grand Fleet has concentrated, the enemy is surrounded on three sides, we are faster than he is, and more than twice as powerful; if the light will hold, his end has come. Although from the Iron Duke we cannot now see the wide enveloping horns, yet we have lately been with them and know them. The main Fleet in whose centre we now steam, consists of Dreadnoughts, Orions, King George the Fifths, Iron Dukes (all acting as flagships), Royal Sovereigns, with 15-inch guns, the Canada, with 14-inch guns, and that queer Dago ship the Agincourt, with her seven turrets all on the middle line, and each containing two 12-inch guns. Not a ship in our battle line has been afloat for more than seven years, and most of them are less than three years old. The material newness of the Grand Fleet is a most striking testimony to the eternal youth of the Navy’s ancient soul.
We have now concentrated in battle line the battleships of our own main Fleet and six battle cruisers, after allowing for our losses, and the Germans have, after making a similar allowance, not more than fourteen battleships and three battle cruisers. I do not count obsolete pre-Dreadnoughts. The disparity in force is greater even than is shown by the bare numbers, which it is not permitted to give exactly. Scarcely a ship of the enemy can compare in fighting force with the Queen Elizabeths or the Royal Sovereigns, or even with the Iron Dukes, Orions, and King George the Fifths. Of course he made off; he would have been a fool if he had not—and Admiral Scheer is far from being a fool.
Our concentrated Fleet came into action at 6.17, and at this moment the Germans were curving in a spiral towards the south-west, seeking a way out of the sea lion’s jaws. They were greatly favoured by the mist and were handled with superb skill. They relied upon constant torpedo attacks to fend off our battleships, while their own big vessels worked themselves clear. We could never see more than four or five ships at a time in their van, or from eight to ten in their rear. For two hours the English Fleet, both battleships and battle cruisers, sought to close, and now and then would get well home upon the enemy at from 11,000 to 9,000 yards, but again and again under cover of torpedo attacks and smoke clouds, the Germans opened out the range and evaded us. We could not get in our heavy blows for long enough to crush Scheer, and he could not get in his mosquito attacks with sufficient success wholly to stave us off. For us those two hours of hunting an elusive enemy amid smoke and fog banks were intensely exasperating; for him they must have been not less intensely nerve-racking. All the while we were hunting him, he was edging away to the south-west—“pursuing the English” was his own humorous description of the manœuvre—and both Jellicoe and Beatty were pressing down between him and the land, and endeavouring to push him away from his bases. All the while our battleships and battle cruisers were firing heavily upon any German ship which they could see, damaging many, and sinking one at least. The return fire was so ragged and ineffective that our vessels were scarcely touched, and only three men were wounded in the whole of Jellicoe’s main Fleet. By nine o’clock both Beatty and Jellicoe were far down the Jutland coast, and had turned towards the south-west in the expectation that daylight would reveal to them the German Fleet in a favourable position for ending the business.