THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT
Our Western front is a line that does not really end at the sea. If it did, then its left flank might be turned. But its real left flank is not there. It is somewhere far out on a line that runs north-west of Nieuport, through and beyond the North Sea. The British soldier in Belgium or France may not see much of the Navy itself. But every day brings him some proof that the Navy is holding its part of the line. His letters never go wrong, and he knows that, but for the Fleet, they would have to make their way to him like swimmers across a bay full of sharks. It is faith in the Navy that makes the men going on leave laugh when obeying the order to put on lifebelts on leaving harbour. In the soldier’s mind that long left flank of our line is not forgotten but rather written off, once for all, as unbreakable. He puts much the same sort of trust in the power of the Fleet as he puts in the affection of friends at home. To him it is one of the things that need never be feared for; it cannot fail.
This is not to say that soldiers underrate the hardness of the Navy’s task. A few sailors visit the front from time to time and hold curious arguments with the soldiers, each side being deeply convinced that the other has the harder time of it. The soldier’s imagination is struck by the large proportion of deaths among the casualties of naval war and by visions of night duty on vessels at sea in bad winter weather. What strikes the sailor, in presence of the imperfections of dug-outs, is the soldier’s hardship of not being able to “go below” into some small cubic space of warmth and dryness when action is over or a watch is through. When a naval officer, who visited the Somme front last summer, and saw a fight near Martinpuich, rejoined the ship that he commanded, he paraded his whole ship’s company and spent two hours in telling them what a rough time the soldiers had, and what fine work they were doing. The generosity of the praise made his soldier guide feel almost ashamed, remembering the almost instant fate of the “Cressy,” “Aboukir,” and “Hogue,” and the obedience of the “Theseus” to the heart-breaking order to abandon her sinking consort.
Few officers or men from the western front can visit the Fleet; but the winds of chance, which blow casualties and convalescents all about Great Britain, drop a few of them down in spots where the Fleet, as Mr. Bone draws it, is under their eyes. Drawings like those of “A Fleet Seascape” (LXXXIX) and “A Line of Destroyers” (LXXXVI) awake recollections of guard duty in a small Scotch fishing village; of the majestic seaward procession through the midsummer night, before the battle of Jutland; of the return from the fight, the destroyers streaming tranquilly back to their moorings under the hill, with the great searchlight wheeling to and fro along the sea outside them, like a sentry moving alertly on his post; a few wounded ships steaming in more sedately, or taking a tow, one with a couple of funnels knocked out of the straight, another with a field-dressing of bedding stuffed into a hole in her side, and the whole wound, apparently, smeared with red paint, as the surgeons smear flesh wounds with yellow; and then of the coming ashore, the men triumphant and happy, the officers learning with astonishment and indignation that people at home had heard more of losses than of the victory.
Mr. Bone’s drawings give an insight into the world of the Navy to which these random glimpses can add nothing. “H.M.S. ‘Lion’ in dry dock” (LXXXIII) is wonderful, technically—if a layman may judge—and in spirit. A whole aspect of modern naval life is lit up by “A boiler-room on a battleship” (XCIII). For, to the astonished landsman visiting a man-of-war, the sailors of to-day seem to work and eat and sleep in a variety of engineering laboratories, surrounded by countless wheels, handles, buttons and bells for the evocation or dismissal of the genies of steam, petrol and electricity. Nothing could be more unlike the lower decks of seventeenth and eighteenth century battleships as we imagine them. The only things which have not changed, from the days of Drake to those of Hawke, and from Nelson’s time to Beatty’s, are the hereditary instinct for the sea and the fine fighting temperament of officers and men.
G. H. Q., France,
April, 1917
LXXXI
“OILING”: A BATTLESHIP TAKING IN OIL FUEL AT SEA
Viewed from the bridge. A large oil “tanker” is alongside. Unseen, but very fast, the oil fuel is running into the battleship. How great a boon this new fuel is can be understood, at any rate partly, by those who have endured the coaling of a great ship in the old way. The scene shown in the drawing was animated by the changeful gleam of the gay signal flags flapping in the foreground and by the flashing of the wings of innumerable hungry gulls.
LXXXII
ON A BATTLE-CRUISER (H.M.S. “LION”)
The ship’s funnel behind and the sailor’s figure on the left help to give the scale of the great gun.
LXXXIII
H.M.S. “LION” IN DRY DOCK
The great hull we see here has seen more battling in the present war than any other of our “capital” ships. Officially “sunk” by the Germans, she will yet prove a troublesome ghost to them. In the foreground the dockyard workers are busily surveying the ship’s Gargantuan cables for weakened or damaged links.
LXXXIV
ON A BATTLESHIP: LOWERING A BOAT FROM THE MAIN DERRICK
The “Main Derrick” is a great crane and lifts a heavy boat like the one in the drawing, or an Admiral’s barge, out of the water and stows it on deck with the greatest ease.
LXXXV
APPROACHING A BATTLESHIP AT NIGHT
A battleship revealed by the beam of its own searchlight. A big gun emerges in silhouette, as well as a sentry on duty. One feels considerable awe when threading one’s way in a small picket boat between the ships of the Fleet at night.
LXXXVI
A LINE OF DESTROYERS
A line of destroyers at anchor. Seen from a distance, in this formation, a long line of destroyers looks curiously like a battalion drawn up in line of platoons in file, at a wide interval, and standing on the sea. It will be remembered that the battle of Jutland was as much a battle of destroyers as of any other type of warship.
LXXXVII
ON A BATTLESHIP: A GUN TURRET
Part of the deck of one of the most famous of British ships, cleared for action.
LXXXVIII
ON A BATTLESHIP IN THE FORTH
Britain has many beautiful estuaries, but the Forth has features like the distant Highland hills and its enormous Bridge which make it unique among our waterways. The Bridge makes even the largest warship seem a pigmy, yet one has a queer sensation when about to pass under it for the first time; one momentarily expects all the ship’s top hamper to be carried away—everything about the Bridge being on so big a scale that what is safely distant seems perilously close.
LXXXIX (a and b)
A FLEET SEASCAPE
To the left a group of destroyers are gathered round a parent ship. To the right is the beginning of an imposing line of battleships.
