The Silent Watchers / England's Navy during the Great War: What It Is, and What We Owe to It

by Bennet Copplestone

I will not give to this base of the Glasgow its true name; let us call it the Pirates’ Lair, and restore to it the romantic flavour of irresponsible buccaneering which I do not doubt that it enjoyed a century or so earlier. In the Glasgow’s day it mounted a lighthouse and an exceedingly inquisitive keeper whom German Junkers would have terrorised, but whom the kindly English, themselves to some extent trespassers, left unharmed to the enjoyment of his curiosity. He, lucky man, did not know that there was a war on.

Realise, if you can, the feelings of the officers and men of this small English cruiser lying isolated from the world in her Pirates’ Lair. Their improvised base, not far from the main trade routes, might at any moment have been discovered—as indeed it was before very long; it was the territory of a neutral country, a country most friendly then and afterwards, but bound to observe its declaration of neutrality. They knew that coal and store ships from England would be sent out, but did not know whether they would arrive. They were in wireless touch with the British representatives at Rio, Pernambuco, and Montevideo, but authentic news came in scraps intermingled with the wildest rumour. They, or rather their captain, had to sort the grains of essential fact from the chaff of fiction. As the month of August unfolded, their news of the war came chiefly from German wireless, and those of us who lived through and remember those early weeks of war also remember that the news from enemy sources had no cheerful sound. For some weeks they were free from anxiety for supplies, provided that their base could be retained, yet the future was blank. I do not think that they worried overmuch; the worst time they had lived through was during those few days in Rio before war broke out, and those days immediately afterwards, when they were seeking those corners of their Lair least exposed to gales and surf. Very often coaling was impossible; more often it was both difficult and dangerous.

It may seem strange that for many weeks—until well into September—the Glasgow heard nothing of Cradock and his West Indies Squadron. Yet it was so. Cradock in the Suffolk had on August 5th met the Karlsruhe coaling at sea, and signalled to the fast Bristol to look after her. The Bristol got upon the chase and fired a shot or two, but, speedy though she was, the Karlsruhe ran away from her and was seen no more and heard of no more until she began her ravages upon steamers to the South of Pernambuco. Cradock, thinking she had gone north, and moreover having charge of the whole North Atlantic trade on its western side, became farther and farther separated from the Glasgow, and even went so far away as Halifax. Meanwhile the Dresden slipped down and entered the Glasgow’s sea area on August 9th, though her movements were not yet known. On the 13th Captain Luce learned that the Monmouth was coming out to him under a captain who was his junior, so that upon himself would still rest the responsibility for the South Atlantic. He was now beginning to get some news upon which he could act, and already suspected that the Dresden or the Karlsruhe, or both, had broken away for the south. He could hear the Telefunken wireless calls of the Dresden to her attendant colliers from somewhere in the north a thousand miles away. During his cruises from the Lair he was always on the look out for her, and once, on the 16th, thought that he had her under his guns. But the warship which he had sighted proved to be a Brazilian, and the thirst of the Glasgow’s company for battle went for a while unslaked. The Dresden, for which the Glasgow was searching, had coaled at the Rocas Islands, there met the Baden, a collier of twelve knots, carrying 5,000 tons of coal, and together the two vessels made for the south and remained together until after the Falkland Islands action had been fought. The Dresden picked up a second collier, the Preussen, and set her course for the small barren Trinidad Island, another old Pirates’ Lair some 500 miles from that of the Glasgow, at which she in her turn established a temporary base. At one moment the Dresden and Glasgow were not far apart, the wireless calls sounded near, yet they did not meet. This was on the 18th, when the Glasgow was coaling at her base, and two days before she went north to join up with the Monmouth off Pernambuco.

This journey to the north coincided in time with the Dresden’s passage to Trinidad Island, so that by the 20th the two cruisers were again a thousand miles apart, but with their positions reversed. While the Glasgow had been going up, the Dresden had been going south and east. For awhile we will leave the Dresden, which after spending two days under the lee of Trinidad Island went on her way to the south, drawing farther and farther away from the Glasgow and more and more out of our picture. Her movements were from time to time revealed by captures of British ships, of which the crews were sent ashore. Her captain, Lüdecke, at no time made a systematic business of preying upon merchant traffic and upon him rests no charge of inhumanity. It may be that commerce raiding and murder did not please him; it may be that he was under orders to make his way at the leisurely gait of his collier Baden—he left the Preussen behind at Trinidad Island—towards the Chilean coast, and the ultimate meeting with von Spee.

At sea off Pernambuco on August 20th, the Glasgow met the Monmouth, which had been commissioned on August 4th, mainly with naval reservists, and hastily despatched to the South Atlantic. Rumour still pointed to the presence of the Dresden in the vicinity, and it seemed likely that she might meditate an attack upon our merchant shipping in the waters afterwards greatly favoured by the Karlsruhe. The two English cruisers remained in the north for a week, hearing much German wireless, which was that of the Karlsruhe, and not of the Dresden. On the night of the 27th the armed liner Otranto heralded her approach, and on the following day the Glasgow met her at the Rocas Islands. Captain Luce had now progressed from the command of one cruiser to the control of quite a squadron, three ships. Already the concentration about the small form of the Glasgow had begun.

The bigness of the sea and the difficulty of finding single vessels, though one may be equipped with all the aids of cable and wireless telegraphy, will begin to be realised. I have told how the Dresden passed the Glasgow on the 18th. She had been at the Rocas Islands on the 14th. The Karlsruhe, too, had been at the Rocas Islands on the 17th. She, also, had come south, though Cradock, with his squadron, was hunting for her in the north up to the far latitudes of Halifax. The two German cruisers, which had seemed so far away from the Glasgow when she was at Rio calculating possibilities on August 1st, had both evaded the West Indies squadron and penetrated into her own slenderly guarded waters.

Upon August 30th the Glasgow, Monmouth, and Otranto were back at their Pirates’ Lair, which they could not leave for long, since it formed their rather precarious base of supply, and there they learned that the Dresden had sunk the British steamer Holmwood far to the south off Rio Grande do Sul and must be looked after at once, since she might have it in mind to raid our big shipping lines with the River Plate. Here on the 31st they learned also of the action in the Heligoland Bight, and of the German invasion of France, and of the retreat from Mons. The land war seemed very far off, but very ominous to those Keepers of the South Atlantic in their borrowed base upon a foreign shore thousands of miles away.

My readers, especially those who are the more thoughtful, may ask how the Glasgow was able with a clear conscience to hie away to the north and leave during all those weeks our big shipping trade to Brazil, Uruguay, and the Argentine uncovered from the raiding exploits of all the German liners lying there which might have issued forth as armed commerce raiders. The answer is that none of the German liners had any guns. The spectre of concealed guns which might upon the outbreak of war be mounted, proved to be baseless. The German liners had no guns, not even the Cap Trafalgar, sunk later, September 14th, off Trinidad Island by the Carmania. The Cap Trafalgar’s guns came from the small German gunboat Eber, which had arranged a meeting with her at this unofficial German base. The project of arming the Cap Trafalgar was quite a smart one, but, unfortunately for her, the first use to which she put her borrowed weapons was the last, and she went down in one of the most spirited fights of the whole war. The Carmania had come down from the north in the train of Rear-Admiral Cradock.

At the beginning of September the Glasgow and the Monmouth shifted down south, in the hope of catching the Dresden at work off the River Plate. There they arrived on the 8th, but found no prey, though rumours were many, and unrewarded searches as many. The Otranto came down to join them, and down also came the news that Cradock in his new flagship, the Good Hope, sent out to him from England, was also coming to take charge of the operations. Upon September 11th the Dresden was reported to be far down towards the Straits of Magellan and for the time out of reach, so the Glasgow’s squadron returned to its northern Lair and the junction with the Good Hope. From Cradock the officers learned that the Cornwall and Bristol, with the Carmania and Macedonia, had arrived on the station, and that the old battleship Canopus was coming out. At the beginning of the war there had been one ship only in the South Atlantic, the Glasgow; now there were no fewer than five cruisers and three armed liners, and a battleship was on the way. One ship had grown into eight, was about to grow into nine, and before long was destined to become the focus of the most interesting concentration of the whole war.

We have now reached September 18th, by which date the Dresden was far off towards the Pacific. She reached an old port of refuge for whalers near Cape Horn, named Orange Bay, on the 5th, and rested there till the 16th. At Punta Arenas she had picked up another collier, the Santa Isabel, and, accompanied by her pair of supply vessels passed slowly round the Horn. At the western end of the Magellan Straits she met with the Pacific liner Ortega, which, though fired upon and called to stop, pluckily bolted into a badly charted channel and conveyed the news of the Dresden’s movements to the English squadron, which for awhile had lost all trace of her.