CHAPTER XI
THE Nth BATTLE SQUADRON
No propaganda poster artist with an eye to lurid backgrounds could have secured such an effect. Great buttresses of cloud, inky black with their burden of unshed snow, were banked about the sunset. The snow that had fallen during the past week rested like a shroud upon peak and headland, promontory and cliff-top, encircling the sombre waters of Ultima Thule with a dazzling white girdle. Against this background lay the Grand Fleet, an agglomeration of tripod masts and superimposed structures, as familiar a feature of the scene as the surf that broke endlessly about the cliffs, or the unappeased calling of the gulls. A little to the westward, however, where the cloud-masonry was split and reft by crimson shafts of light, an outstretched wing of the vast battle fleet struck an oddly unfamiliar note. Instead of the tripod masts and hooded control-tops, slender towers of latticed steel rose in pairs from each hull. Against the black clouds, every ensign in the fleet was clearly discernible; but it was not the White Ensign that showed up so vividly above the strangers. It was the “Stars and Stripes” painted with the glory of a northern winter sunset.
Only a few weeks had elapsed since they arrived, rust-streaked and travel-stained, as ships might well be that had battled through one winter gale after another from Chesapeake Bay to Ultima Thule; and at the sight of them the grey, war-weary battle fleet of Britain burst into a roar of welcome such as had never before greeted a stranger within its gates in either peace or war. For—and herein lies the magic of the thing—these were not merely allies swinging up on to the flank of a common battle-line, but kinsmen joining kinsmen as an integral part of one fleet. The rattle of their cables through the hawse pipes was drowned by the tumult of cheering, and forthwith the American Admiral dispatched a telegram to Washington, whose laconic business-like brevity alone did justice to what may prove the most significant message of history: “Arrived as per schedule,” it said.
This linking of the two navies may need an explanation. It may be asked (it will be asked if I know anything of the talkers in this war): Could not the American Fleet co-operate in the war without merging its identity in that of the British? The answer is this: Victory in modern naval warfare demands more than mere co-operation between allied squadrons. Navies fight otherwise than armies, whose generals can meet and confer even during the crisis of a battle. Squadrons working in unity afloat require one controlling intellect, one source of orders and information; one pair of shoulders, and one only, to take the burden of final responsibility.
Hence, to the sure shield of civilisation and the allied cause has been added a formidable buckler. The Grand Fleet has had grafted into its side a new rib and a stout one.
It must be realised, however, that a common speech between two nations does not necessarily mean that their respective navies talk in the same tongue. The system of signalling in the American Fleet, the significance of flags, the arrangement of codes and ciphers, are peculiarly and completely theirs. The meanings of the flags had nothing in common with the British. Their system has been evolved through generations; is, so to speak, their navy’s mother tongue. The signalmen of the Nth Battle Squadron, blowing on their numbed fingers amid the snows of Ultima Thule, had to forget in twenty-four hours what had been laboriously taught them for years. They had to master a different-coloured alphabet as it is sighted two miles away tangled up in halliards or half obscured by funnel and (mayhap) battle smoke. Manœuvres on a scale they had hitherto regarded as exceptional: Fleet exercises and squadron competition, intership signalese (whereby the movement of a semaphore arm through fifteen degrees of the arc meant things undreamed of in their philosophy), tricks which northern visibility plays with daylight signalling—these things were their daily and nightly portion.
In the words of one of them, “it was a tough proposition,” and they tackled it like tigers. In a fortnight they were through with it. In a month the British signal boatswains rubbed their telescope lenses and said they were damned.
But the communication problem didn’t end there. Wireless plays an even more important part than visual signalling in naval warfare. It is important enough in peace, and the American Fleet had by no means neglected the subject. But aerial conditions in the region of Manilla differ considerably from those in the North Sea. Speaking radiographically, the North Sea is the most crowded thoroughfare in the world. All through the twenty-four hours ships and submarines and shore wireless stations are talking, talking, talking. British warnings to shipping on its lawful occasions, streams of lies from Berlin (branded at the outset “German Press Message”), cipher cryptograms from three Admiralties, destroyers bleating in a fog, appeals from a hunted merchantman—all these interspersed with the gibbering Telefunken of the German submarine.
Now the American wireless experts have been concerned principally with covering long distances. The development of “spark” and power in a comparatively undisturbed ether was the main preoccupation of their operators. From this serene condition, ships and silent cabinets passed into the windy parrot-house of the North Sea. Here, power, as they understood the term, was negligible. The greatest distance required of their Hertzian waves was a preposterous 400 miles or so. But not only had they to thread a way unbroken through this aerial Babel, but, what was even more difficult, the operator was required to detect and read messages on one tune in a vast discord of diverse and unfamiliar notes. It is even said that an Englishman’s touch on a sending key differs from that of an American as radically as the spoken accent differs. Yet, after a month of assiduous practice, the former are in a fair way to presenting as few difficulties to communication as the latter.