The Naval system which teaches subordination, also teaches independence. If to men roaming over the seas in command of ships, orders come, it is well; if orders do not come it is also well—they get on very well without them. If the entire Admiralty were wiped out by German bombs, My Lords and the whole staff destroyed, the Navy would, in its own language, “proceed” to carry on. In the middle of the political crisis of December 1916, when a new Naval Board of Admiralty had just been appointed, I asked a senior officer how the new lot were getting on. He said: “There isn’t any First Lord. The First Sea Lord is in bed with influenza. The Second Sea Lord is in bed with influenza. The Third Sea Lord is in bed with influenza. The Fourth Sea Lord is at work but is sickening for influenza. But the Navy is all right.” That is the note of serene confidence which distinguishes the Sea Service. Whatever happens, the Navy is all right.
The Navy is a poor man’s Service. It is a real profession in which the officers as a rule live on their pay and ask for little more. Men of great houses will enter the Army in time of peace and regard it as a mild occupation, men of money will enter for the social position which it may give to them. But no man of rank or of money in search of a “cushy job,” was ever such an ass as to look for it in the Navy. Few officers in the Navy—except among those who have entered in quite recent years—have any resources beyond their pay; many of them are born to it, and in their families there have been scanty opportunities for saving. The Admiralty, until quite recently, required that young officers upon entry into the Navy or the Marines should be allowed small specified sums until they attained in service pay the eminence of about 11s. a day, and also that a complete uniform equipment should be provided for them; but after that initial help from home they were expected to make their pay suffice. And in the great majority of cases they did what was expected of them. Living is cheap in the Sea Service. Ships pay no duties upon their stores, and there are few opportunities afloat for the wasting of money. Mess bills in wardroom and gun-room are small, and must be kept small, or the captain will arise in wrath and ask to be informed (in writing) of the reason why. Ere now young men have been dismissed their ships for persistently running up too large a wine bill; and to be dismissed one’s ship means not only a bad mark in the Admiralty’s books, but loss of seniority, which in turn means an extra early retirement upon that exiguous half-pay which looms always like a dark cloud upon the naval horizon.
Unhappily for its officers and the country the Navy has not been a married man’s service; it has been too exacting to tolerate a divided allegiance. Sometimes poor young things under stress of emotion have got married, and then has begun for them the most cruel and ageing of struggles—the man at sea hard put to it to keep up his position, simple though it be; the wife ashore in poor lodgings or in some tiny villa, lonely, struggling, growing old too fast for her years; children who rarely see their father, and whose prospects are of the gloomiest. I do not willingly put my pen to this picture. Young Navy men, glowing with health and virile energy, and the spirit of the Service, are very attractive creatures to whom goes out the love of women, but though they, too, may love, they are usually compelled to sail away. It is well for them then if they are as firmly wedded to the Service as the Roman priest is to his Church, and if they are not always as continent as the priest, who is so free from sin that he will dare to cast a stone at them? If the country and its rulers had any belief in heredity, of which the evidence stares at them from the eyes of every naval son born to the Service, they would grant to a young officer a year of leave in which to be married, and pay to him and to his mate a handsome subsidy for every splendid son whom they laid in the cradles of the Service of the future.
Of late years there has been a change. The rapid expansion of the Fleets has brought in many young cadets of commercial families, whose parents have far more money than is wholly good for their sons. The Navy is not so completely a poor man’s service as it was even ten years ago. The junior officers are, some of them, too well off. Not long since, a senior Captain was lamenting this change in my presence. “The snotties now,” he groaned, “all keep motor bicycles, the sub-lieutenants are not happy till they own cars, and the Lieutenant-Commanders think nothing of getting married. All this has been the result of concentrating the Fleets in home waters. Germany compelled us to do it, but the Service was the better for the three-year Commissions on foreign stations.” All this is true. The junior ranks are getting richer. At sea they can spend little, but ashore and in harbour there are opportunities for gold to corrupt the higher virtues. For my part, however, I have the fullest confidence in the training and the example of the older officers. In this war there has been nothing to suggest that the young Navy is less devoted and self-sacrificing than the old. The wealthier boys may take their fling on leave—and who can blame them?—but at sea the Service comes first.
We love that most which is most hardly won. And the Navy men love their Service, not because it is easy but because of the hardness of it, and because of the sacrifices which it exacts from them. It fastens its grip upon them in those first years between fifteen and twenty, and the grip grows ever tighter with the flight of time. It is at its very tightest when the dreadful hour of retirement arrives. When War broke out, in August 1914, it was hailed with joy by the active Navy afloat, but their joy was as water unto wine in comparison with that which transfigured the retired Navy ashore. For them at long last the impossible had crystallised into fact. For those who were still young enough, the uniforms were waiting ready in the tin boxes upstairs, and it was but a short step from their house doors to the decks of a King’s ship. Once more their gallant names could be written in the Active List of their Navy. They hastened back, these eager ones, and if there was no employment for them in their own rank, they snatched at that in any other rank which offered. Captains R.N. became commanders and even lieutenants R.N.R. in the Fringes. Admirals became temporary captains. There were indeed at one time no fewer than nineteen retired admirals serving as temporary officers R.N.R. in armed liners.
If you would understand how the Navy loves the Service, how that love is not a part of their lives, but is their lives, reflect upon the case of one aged officer. I will not give his name; he would not wish it. He had been in retirement for nearly forty years, too old for service in his rank, too old possibly for service in any rank. But his pleadings for employment afloat softened the understanding hearts at Whitehall. He was allowed to rejoin and to serve as a temporary Lieutenant-Commander in an armed yacht which assisted the ex-Brazilian monitors sent to bombard the Belgian coast. There against Zeebrugge he served among kindly lads young enough to be his grandsons, and there with them and among them he was killed—the oldest officer serving afloat. And he was happy in his death. Not Wolfe before Quebec, not Nelson in the cockpit of the Victory, were happier or more glorious in their deaths than was that temporary Lieutenant-Commander (transferred at his own request from the retired list) who fought his last fight upon the decks of an armed yacht and died as he would have prayed to die.
The Navy hates advertisement and scorns above all things in heaven or upon earth the indiscriminating praise of well-meaning civilians. I sadly realise that it may scorn me and this book of mine. But I will do my best to make amends. I will promise that never once in describing their deeds will I refer to Navy men as “heroes.” I will not, where I can possibly avoid doing so, mention the name of anyone. I will do my utmost at all times to write of them as men and not as “b—— angels.” I will, at the peril of some inconsistency, declare my conviction that naval officers haven’t any souls, that they are in the Service because they love it, and not because they care two pins for their country, that they are rather pleased than otherwise when rotten civilians at home get a bad fright from a raid. I will declare that they catch and sink German submarines by all manner of cunning devices, from the sheer zest of sport, and not because they would raise a finger to save the lives of silly passengers in luxurious ocean liners. I will do anything to turn their scorn away from me except to withdraw one word which I have written upon the Soul of the Navy. For upon this subject they would, I believe, write as I do if the gods had given to them leisure for philosophical analysis—which they are much too busy to bother about—and the knack of verbally expressing their thoughts. When I read a naval despatch I always groan over it as an awful throwing away of the most splendid opportunities. I always long to have been in the place of the writer, to have seen what he saw, to know what he knew, and to tell the world in living phrase what tremendous deeds were really done. Naval despatches are the baldest of documents, cold, formal, technical, most forbiddingly uninspiring. Whenever I ask naval officers why they do not put into despatches the vivid details which sometimes find their way into private letters they glare at me, and even their beautiful courtesy can scarcely keep back the sniff of contempt. “Despatches,” say they, “are written for the information of the Admiralty.” That is a complete answer under the Naval Code. The despatches, which make one groan, are written for the information of the Admiralty, not to thrill poor creatures such as you and me. A naval officer cares only for his record at the Admiralty and for his reputation among those of his own craft. If a newspaper calls Lieutenant A—— B—— a hero, and writes enthusiastically of his valour, he shudders as would a modest woman if publicly praised for her chastity. Valour goes with the Service, it is a part of the Soul of the Navy. It is taken for granted and is not to be talked or written about. And so with those other qualities that spring from the traditions of the Navy—the chivalry which risks British lives to save those of drowning enemies, the tenderness which binds up their wounds, the honours paid to their dead. All these things, which the Royal Navy never forgets and the German Navy for the most part has never learned, are taken for granted and are not to be talked of or written about.
It is inevitable from the nature of its training that the Navy should be intensely self-centred. If one catches a boy when he has but recently emerged from the nursery, teaches him throughout his active life that there is but one work fit for the service of man, dedicates him to it by the strictest discipline, cuts him off by the nature of his daily life from all intimate contact with or understanding of the world which moves upon land, his imagination will be atrophied by disuse. He will become absorbed into the Naval life which is a life entirely of its own, apart and distinct from all other lives. There is a deep gulf set between the Naval life and all other lives which very few indeed of the Navy ever seek to cross. Their attitude towards civilians is very like that of the law-making statesman of old who said: “The people have nothing to do with the laws except to obey them.” If the Navy troubled to think of civilians at all—it never does unless they annoy it with their futile chatter in Parliament and elsewhere—it would say: “Civilians have nothing to do with the Navy except to pay for it.” Keen as is the imaginative foresight of the Navy in regard to everything which concerns its own honour and effectiveness, it is utterly lacking in any sympathetic imaginative understanding of the intense civilian interest in itself and in its work. We poor creatures who stand outside, I who write and you who read, do in actual fact love the Navy only a little less devotedly than the Navy loves its own Service. We long to understand it, to help it, and to pay for it. We know what we owe to it, but we would ask, in all proper humility, that now and then the Navy would realise and appreciate the certain fact that it owes some little of its power and success to us.
I cannot in a formula define the collective Soul of the Navy. It is a moral atmosphere which cannot be chemically resolved. It is a subtle and elusive compound of tradition, self sacrifice, early training, willing discipline, youth, simplicity, valour, chivalry, lack of imagination, and love of the Service—and the greatest of these is Love. I have tried to indicate what it is, how it has given to this wonderful Navy of ours a terrible unity, a terrible force, and an even more terrible intelligence; how it has transformed a body of men into a gigantic spiritual Power which expresses its might in the forms and means of naval warfare. I cannot exactly define it, but I can in a humble faltering way do my best to reveal it in its working.