When the contingency arose, however, the plans were there; and the mobilization and transport to France of our Expeditionary Force will remain on record as one of the most efficient military operations ever undertaken by any country. Second only to the rapidity and completeness with which the navy took command of the sea, were the speed and secrecy with which those first divisions were conveyed across the Channel. That in mere numbers they seem in retrospect to have been almost ridiculously inadequate is merely a measure of the colossal proportions that the war on land afterward assumed. Small as that army was, however, it was the largest force that we had ever sent oversea as a single undertaking; and it must be borne in mind that, in all probability, it was the most highly trained then in existence, and that its presence in France had both moral and material effects of almost incalculable importance.
Nobody who lived, or was staying, near any of our great southern railway lines during those early days of August will ever forget the emotions roused by that endless series of troop trains, passing with such precision day and night; and of the feelings produced in France by this visible pledge of our friendship there was instant and abundant evidence. Between August 9th and August 23d five Divisions of Infantry and two Cavalry Divisions were safely landed in France; and when it is remembered what a single division consists of some idea may be obtained of what that accomplishment meant.
Apart from the Headquarters' Staff with a personnel of 82, requiring 54 horses, 2 wagons, and 5 motor-cars, it embraced three Infantry Brigades, Headquarters' divisional artillery, three brigades of Field Artillery, one Howitzer Brigade, one heavy battery, a divisional ammunition column, the Headquarters' division of engineers, two Field companies, one Signal company, one Cavalry squadron, one Divisional train, and three Field ambulances—comprising a total personnel of over 18,000 men, 5,500 horses, 870 wagons, 9 motor-cars, and 280 cycles, the number of guns, including machine guns, amounting to 100; and with a base establishment for each division of 1,750 men and 10 horses.
Such was the task performed by the transport officers, every kind of vessel being assembled for the purpose, from the cross-channel packet boat accommodating not more than three hundred at a time to the giant Atlantic liner carrying as many thousands. Chiefly from Southampton, but also from Dover, Folkestone, Newhaven, Avonmouth, and many other ports, that constant stream of men, horses, provisions, and equipment poured ceaselessly for nearly a fortnight, screened by destroyer-escorts, and with aeroplanes and seaplanes keeping watch over them from the sky. Without a single casualty as the result of enemy action, they were mustered and marched into line of the French left flank; and that this great achievement should have been possible within so short a period from the declaration of war is perhaps the completest tribute that could be paid to the consummate skill of our naval dispositions.
Scarcely realized by those splendid battalions, whistling "Tipperary" on the way to Mons, and even now, perhaps, hardly appreciated by the bulk of their countrymen at home, it was the navy and the navy alone that made that glorious epic possible. With their eyes on Europe and the impending clash of the armies; hearing in imagination, under the unsuspected force of the heavy German artillery, the crumpling up of those iron-clad cupolas of the Brialmont forts at Liège—few would have thought twice, perhaps, even if they had known what they were doing, of those tiny submarines E6 and E8 creeping, the first of their kind, into the Bight of Heligoland. Yet but for them and their gallant crews and officers, Lieutenant-Commanders Talbot and Goodhart; but for the presiding destroyers, Lurcher and Firedrake and the submarines of the Eighth Flotilla—the passage of the Expeditionary Force might well have been impossible and the first battle of the Marne fought with another issue.
Within three hours of the first outbreak of the war, E6 and E8 stole out on their perilous errands; and it was upon the information brought back by them from those mined and fortified waters that the later dispositions were made. From August 7th onward, until the Expeditionary Force had been safely landed, the submarines kept their watch. In the lee of islands, at the mouths of channels, in hourly danger of detection and death, day and night, without relief, those cautious periscopes maintained their vigil. Farther to the south, guarding the approaches to the Channel, between the North Goodwins and the Ruytingen, were the two destroyers Lurcher and Firedrake, with the main covering submarine flotilla; while to the northeast of these, the Amethyst and Fearless, each with a flotilla of destroyers, took turns about on patrol duty during the passage of the army.
Nor must it be forgotten, so swift was the subsequent progress both in the range and effectiveness of submarine activity, that this was, at that time, a branch of the service scarcely tried and of unknown possibilities. The submarines used were of a type soon so outclassed as to become almost obsolete, the easiest of prey to net and torpedo, and working at a distance from their bases then unprecedented. Nevertheless, after the Expeditionary Force had been safely transported to France, they were, in the words of Commodore, afterward Vice-Admiral, Roger Keyes, "incessantly employed on the enemy's coast in the Heligoland Bight and elsewhere, and have obtained much valuable information regarding the composition and movement of his patrols. They have occupied his waters and reconnoitred his anchorages, and, while so engaged, have been subjected to skilful and well-executed anti-submarine tactics; hunted for hours at a time by torpedo craft, and attacked by gunfire and torpedoes."
That was written on October 17, 1914, when the action, now about to be described, had already made the Bight of Heligoland a familiar term to most people, but without conveying, perhaps, to more than a very few all that it meant from a strategical standpoint. Between three and four hundred miles from the nearest of our naval bases, and from some of the chief of them more than six hundred miles distant, it was in this small area that there was concentrated practically the whole of Germany's naval forces, the Kiel Canal connecting it with the Baltic, rendering these available in either sea.
Nor would it be easy to imagine, from the point of view of defense, either a bay of littoral with greater natural advantages. Bounded on the east by the low-lying shores of Schleswig-Holstein, with their fringe of protecting islands, and on the south by the deeply indented coast-line between the Dutch frontier and the mouth of the Kiel Canal, each of the four great estuaries, from west to east, of the Ems, the Jade, the Weser, and the Elbe, had been subdivided by sandbanks into a meshwork of channels than which nothing could have been easier to make impregnable. These were further guarded by the continuation of the scimitar curve of the Frisian Islands, beginning opposite Helder in Holland with the Dutch island of Texel, becoming German in the island of Borkum just beyond the Memmert Sands, opposite the mouth of the Ems, and continued, as a natural screen, in the successive islands of Juist, Nordeney, Baltrum, Langeoog, Spiekeroog, and Wangeroog as far as the entrance of Jade Bay, covering the approach to Wilhelmshaven.
Situated on the western lip of this channel, and connected by locks with the Ems and Jade Canal, this was one of the largest of Germany's naval bases and a town of about 35,000 inhabitants. In the next estuary, that of the Weser, and on the eastern coast of it, lay Bremerhaven, another naval base and important dockyard; and, on the same stretch of coast, at the point of the tongue of land between the Weser and the Elbe, lay Cuxhaven, yet a third and immensely powerful naval port. This, with the attendant batteries of Döse, was flanked at sea by the Roter and Knecht sandbanks and the little island of Sharhorn, and was only about forty miles distant from Heligoland, lying in the centre of the Bight and commanding the hole.