“Is it necessary?” I asked foolishly. He stared at me: “We have served from father to son since the reign of Charles II.” So the boy entered the Britannia, and I heard no more of him until one morning, years after, I saw in an Honours List a name which I knew, that of a young Lieutenant who had won the rare naval V.C. in the Mediterranean. It was my friend’s son; blood had triumphed; the delicate, shy, almost timid lad had made good.
The Navy catches its men when they are young, unspoiled, malleable, and moulds them with deft fingers as a sculptor works his clay. Officers enter in their early teens—now as boys at Osborne who afterwards become naval cadets at Dartmouth. Formerly they spent a year or two longer at school and entered direct as cadets to the Britannia. The system is essentially the same now as it has been for generations. The material must be good and young, the best of it is retained and the less good rejected. The best is moulded and stamped in the Dartmouth workshop, and emerges after the bright years of early boyhood with the naval hall mark upon it. The seamen enter as boys into training-ships, and they, too, are moulded and stamped into the naval pattern. It is a very exacting but a very just education. No one who has been admitted to the privilege of training need be rejected except by his own fault, and if he is not worthy to be continued in training, he is emphatically not worthy to serve in the Fleets.
Of late years this system, which requires abundance of time for its full working out, has proved to be deficient in elasticity. It takes some seven years to make a cadet into a sub-lieutenant, while a great battleship can be built and equipped in little more than two years. The German North Sea menace caused a rapid expansion in the output of ships, especially of big ships, which far outstripped the training of junior officers needed for their service. The Osborne-Dartmouth system had not failed, far from it, but it was too slow for the requirements of the Navy under the new conditions. In order to keep up with the demand, the supply of naval cadets was increased and speeded up by the admission of young men from the public schools at the age when they had been accustomed to enter for permanent Army commissions. A large addition was also made to the roll of subalterns of Marines—who received training both for sea and land work—and in this way the ranks of the junior officers afloat were rapidly expanded. There was no departure from the Navy’s traditional policy of catching boys young and moulding them specially and exclusively for the Sea Service; the new methods were avowedly additional and temporary, to be modified or withdrawn when the need for urgent expansion had disappeared. The Navy was clearly right. It was obliged to make a change in its system, but it made it to as small an extent as would meet the conditions of the moment. The second best was tacked on to the first best, but the first best was retained in being to be reverted to exclusively as soon as might be. To catch boys young, preferably those with the sea tradition in their blood, to teach them during their most impressionable years that the Navy must always be to them as their father, mother and wedded wife—the exacting mistress which demands of them the whole of their affections, energies and service, to dedicate them in tender years to their Sea Goddess—this must always be the way to preserve, in its purest undimmed water, that pearl of great price, the Soul of the Navy.
It follows from the circumstances of their training and life that the Navy is a Family of which the members are bound together by the closest of ties of individual friendship and association. It is a Service in which everybody knows everybody else, not only by name and reputation but by personal contact. During the long years of residence at Osborne and Dartmouth, and afterwards in the Fleets, at the Greenwich Naval College, at the Portsmouth schools of instruction, officers widely separated by years and rank learn to know one another and to weigh one another in the most just of balances—that of actual service. Those of us who have passed many years in the world of affairs, know that the only reputation worth having is that which we earn among those of our own profession or craft. And none of us upon land are known and weighed with the intimate certainty and impartiality which is possible to the Sea Service. We are not seen at close contact and under all conditions of work and play, and never in the white light which an ever-present peril casts upon our worth and hardihood. No fictitious reputation is possible in the Navy itself as it is possible in the world outside. Officers may, through the exercise of influence, be placed in positions over the heads of others of greater worth, they may be written and talked about by civilians in the newspapers as among the most brilliant in their profession—especially in time of peace—but the Navy, which has known them from youth to age inside and out, is not deceived. The Navy laughs at many of the reputations which we poor civilians ignorantly honour. No naval reputation is of any value whatever unless it be endorsed by the Navy itself. And the Navy does not talk. How many newspaper readers, for instance, had heard of Admiral Jellicoe before he was placed in command of the Grand Fleet at the outbreak of war? But the Navy knew all about him and endorsed the choice.
What I write of officers applies with equal force to the men, to the long-service ratings, the petty officers and warrant officers who form the backbone of the Service. They, too, are caught young, drawn wherever possible from sea families, moulded and trained into the naval pattern, stamped after many years with the hall mark of the Service. It is a system which has bred a mutual confidence and respect between officers and men as unyielding as armour-plate. Before the battle of May 31st, 1916, the Grand Fleet had gone forth looking for Fritz many times and finding him not. Little was expected, but if the unexpected did happen, then officers believed in their long-service ratings as profoundly as did these dear old grumblers in their leaders. Many times in the wardrooms of the battle squadrons the prospects of action would be discussed and always in the same way.
“No, it’s not likely to be anything, but if it is what we’ve been waiting for, I have every confidence in our long-service ratings if the Huns are really out for blood. You know what I mean—those grizzled old G.L.I.s (gun-layers, first-class), and gunners’ mates and horny-handed old A.B.s whom we curse all day for their damned obstinacy. The Huns think that two years make a gunlayer; we know that even twelve years are not enough. Our long-service ratings would pull the country through, even if we hadn’t the mechanical advantage over Fritz which we actually possess. And the combination of the long-service ratings and the two-Power standard will, when we get to work upon him, give Fritz furiously to think.”
Even when the great expansion among the big fighting ships called for a corresponding expansion in the crews, little essential change was made in the system which had bred confidence such as this. There was some slight dilution. Officers and men of the R.N.R. and the Naval Volunteers, to the extent of about 10 per cent., were drafted into the first-line battleships, but the cream of the professional service was kept for the first fighting line. For the most part the new temporary Navy, of admirable material drawn from our almost limitless maritime population, was kept at work in the Fringes of the Fleet—the mine-sweepers, armed liners, blockading patrols, and so on—where less technical navy skill was required, and where invaluable service could be and was done. The professional Navy has the deepest respect and gratitude for the devoted work discharged by its amateur auxiliaries.
The Navy is a young man’s service. In no other career in life are the vital energies, the eager spirits, the glowing capacities of youth given such ample opportunities for expression. A naval officer can become a proud “Owner,” with an independent command of a destroyer or submarine, at an age when in a civil profession he would be entrusted with scanty responsibilities. In civil life there is a horrible waste of youth; it is kept down, largely left unused, by the jealousy of age. But the Navy, which is very wise, makes the most of every hour of it. The small craft, the Fringes of the Fleet as Mr. Kipling calls them, the eyes and ears and guardians of the big ships, the patrol boats, submarines and destroyers, are captained by youngsters under thirty, often under twenty-five. The land crushes youth, the sea allows and encourages its fine flower to expand. Naval warfare is directed by grave men, but is to an enormous extent carried on by bright boys.
But the Navy which employs youth more fully than any other service, also uses it up more remorselessly. Unless an officer can reach the rank of Commander—a rank above that of a Major in the Army—when he is little more than thirty he has a very scanty chance in time of peace of ever serving afloat as a full Captain. The small ships are many in number, but the big ships are comparatively few. Only the best of the best can become Commanders at an age which enables them to reach post rank in that early manhood which is a necessity for the command of a modern super-Dreadnought. Many of those who do become Captains in the early forties have to eat out their hearts upon half-pay because there are not enough big ships in commission to go round. It is only in time of war that the whole of our Fleets are mobilised. Some years ago I was dining with several naval officers from a battle squadron which lay in the Firth of Forth. Beside me sat a young man looking no more than thirty-five, and actually little older. He was a Captain I knew, and in course of conversation I asked for the name of his ship. “The Dreadnought,” said he. This was the time when the name and fame of the first Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun ship which revolutionised the construction of the battle line, was ringing through the world. And yet here was this famous ship in charge of a young smooth-faced fellow, younger than myself, and I did not then consider that I was middle-aged! “Are you not rather young?” I enquired diffidently. He smiled, “We need to be young,” said he. Then I understood. It came home to me that the modern Navy, with its incredibly rapid development in machinery, must have in its executive officers those precious qualities of adaptability and quick perception, that readiness to be always learning and testing, seeking and finding the best new ways of solving old problems, which can only be found in youth. Youth is of the essence of the Navy, it always has been so and it probably always will be. Youth learns quickly, and the Naval officer is always learning. In civil life we enter our professions, we struggle through our examinations as doctors or lawyers or engineers, and then we are content to pass our lives in practice and forget our books. But the naval officer, whose active life is passed on the salt sea, is ever a student. He goes backwards and forwards between the sea and the schools. There is no stage and no rank at which his education stops. Gunnery, torpedo practice, electricity, navigation, naval strategy, and tactics are all rapidly progressive sciences. A few years, a very few years, and a whole scheme of practice becomes obsolete. So the naval officer needs for ever to be passing from the sea to the Vernon, or the Excellent, or to Greenwich, where he is kept up-to-date and given a perennial opportunity to develop the best that is in him. From fifteen to forty he is always learning, always testing, always growing, and then—unless his luck is very great—he has to give way to the rising youth of other men and rest himself unused upon the shelf. The highest posts are not for him. It is very remorseless the way in which the Navy uses and uses up its youth, and very touching the devoted humble way in which that youth submits to be so used up. The Navy is ever growing in science and in knowledge, it must always have of the best—the remorselessness with which it chooses only of the best, and the patience with which those who are not of the best submit without repining to its devices, are of the Soul of the Navy.
Admiral Sir David Beatty became Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet at the age of forty-five. In years of life and of service he was junior to half the Captains’ List. He had sprung by merit and by opportunity some ten years above his contemporaries at Dartmouth. First in the Soudan, when serving in the flotilla of gunboats, he won promotion from Lieutenant to Commander at the age of twenty-seven. Again at Tien-tsin in China, his chance came, and in 1900, while still under thirty, he reached the captain’s rank. When the war broke out he was a Rear-Admiral in command of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, and was given the acting rank of Vice-Admiral. He is now an acting Admiral, and his seniors in years, and even in rank, willingly serve beneath him. Admiral Beatty is not a scientific sailor, and is not wedded to the Service as are most of his brother officers. But for the outbreak of the war he would probably have retired. Yet no one questions his pre-eminent fitness for his dazzling promotion. He has that rare indefinable quality of leadership of men and of war instinct which cannot be revealed except by war itself. When, by fortunate chance, this quality is discovered in an officer it is instantly recognised as beyond price, and cherished at its full worth.