Part I

It is strange how events of great national importance become associated in one’s mind with small personal experiences. I have told with what vividness I remember the receipt in November, 1914, of private news that the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible had left Devonport for the Falkland Islands, and how I heard Lord Rosebery read out Sturdee’s victorious dispatch to 6,000 people in St. Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow. In a similar way the Jutland battle became impressed upon my mind in an unforgettable personal fashion. On May 22nd, 1916, I learned that Admiral Beatty had at his disposal the four “Cats”—Lion, Tiger, Queen Mary, and Princess Royal—of about twenty-nine knots speed, and each armed with eight 13.5-⁠inch guns, the two battle cruisers New Zealand and Indefatigable, of some twenty-seven knots of speed, and carrying each eight 12-⁠inch guns, and the Queen Elizabeth, of twenty-five knots, all of which were armed with eight of the new 15-⁠inch guns, which were a great advance upon the earlier thirteen-point-fives. The ships of the Fifth Battle Squadron had all been completed since the war began. The Queen Elizabeth herself went into dock at Rosyth for repairs, so that for immediate service the squadron was reduced to four ships—Barham, Valiant, Warspite, and Malaya.

Upon the following Saturday, May 27th, I was invited to lunch in one of the battleships, but upon arrival at South Queensferry, I found the Fleet under Short Notice for sea, and no one was allowed to leave the ships, or to receive friends on board. It was a beautiful day, the long, light-coloured Cats and the Futurist-grey battleships were a most noble sight, but I felt too much like a Peri shut out of Paradise to be happy in observing them. A day or two later, Thursday, June 1st, was fixed for my next visit, but again the Fates were unkind. When I arrived in the early morning and stood upon the heights overlooking the anchorage, Beatty’s Fleet had gone, and, though I did not know it, had even then fought the Jutland battle. In the afternoon, news came with the return to the Forth of the damaged battleship Warspite surrounded by her attendant destroyers. That was on the Thursday afternoon, but it was not until the evening of Friday that the first Admiralty message was issued, that famous message which will never be forgotten either by the country or by the Navy. The impression which it made may be simply illustrated. I was sitting in my drawing-room after dinner, anxiously looking for news both on national and personal grounds, when a newsboy shrieked under my window “Great Naval Disaster: Five British Battleships Sunk.” The news printed in the paper was not so bad as that shouted, but it was bad enough; it gave the impression of very heavy losses incurred for no compensating purpose, and turned what had really been a conspicuous naval success into an apology for a naval disaster. As a humble student, I could to some extent read between the lines of the dispatch and dimly perceive what had happened, but to the mass of the British public, the wording of that immortal document could not have been worse conceived. To them it seemed that the End of All Things was at hand.

The story runs that the first bulletin was made up by clerks from scraps of messages which came over the wireless from the Grand Fleet, but in which the most important sentence of all was omitted. “The Germans are claiming a victory,” wailed the Admiralty clerks through the aerials at Whitehall. “What shall we say?” “Say,” snapped the Grand Fleet, “say that we gave them hell!” If the Admiralty had only said this, said it, too, in curt, blasphemous naval fashion, the public would have understood, and all would have been well. What a dramatic chance was then lost! Think what a roar of laughter and cheering would have echoed round the world if the first dispatch had run as follows:

“We have met and fought the German Fleet, and given it hell. Beatty lost the Queen Mary and Indefatigable in the first part of the battle when the odds were heavily against us, but Jellicoe coming up enveloped the enemy, and was only prevented by mist and low visibility from destroying him utterly. The Germans have lost as many ships as we have, and are shattered beyond repair.”

That message, in a few words, would have given a true impression of the greatest sea fight that the world has known, a fight, too, which has established beyond question the unchallengeable supremacy of British strategy, battle tactics, seamanship, discipline, and devotion to duty of every man and boy in the professional Navy. In the technical sense, it was an indecisive battle: the Germans escaped destruction. But morally, and in its practical results, no sea fight has been more decisive. Nearly two years have passed since that morning of June 1st when the grey dawn showed the seas empty of German ships, and though the High Seas Fleet has put out many times since then, it has never again ventured to engage us. Jutland drove sea warfare, for the Germans, beneath the surface, a petty war of raids upon merchant vessels, a war—as against neutrals—of piracy and murder. By eight o’clock on the evening of May 31st, 1916, the Germans had been out-fought, outmanœuvred, and cut off from their bases. Had the battle begun three hours earlier, and had visibility been as full as it had been in the Falkland Islands action, had there been, above all, ample sea room, there would not have been a German battleship afloat when the sun went down. There never was a luckier fleet than that one which scrambled away through the darkness of May 31st-June 1st, worked its way round the enveloping horns of Jellicoe, Beatty, and Evan-⁠Thomas, and arrived gasping and shattered at Wilhelmshaven. We can pardon the Kaiser, who, in his relief for a crowning mercy, proclaimed the escape to be a glorious victory.

But though the Kaiser may, after his manner, talk of victories, German naval officers cherish no illusions about Jutland. If one takes the trouble to analyse their very full dispatches, their relief at escaping destruction shines forth too plainly to be mistaken. Admiral Scheer got away, and showed himself to be a consummate master of his art. But he never, in his dispatches, claims that the British Fleets were defeated in the military sense. They were foiled, chiefly through his own skill, but they were not defeated. The German dispatches state definitely that the battle of May 31st “confirmed the old truth, that the large fighting ship, the ship which combines the maximum of strength in attack and defence, rules the seas.” The relation of strength, they say, between the English and German Fleets, “was roughly two to one.” They do not claim that this overwhelming superiority in our strength was sensibly reduced by the losses in the battle, nor that the large English fighting ships—admittedly larger, much more numerous, and more powerfully gunned than their own—ceased after Jutland to rule the seas. Their claim, critically examined, is simply that in the circumstances the German ships made a highly successful escape. And so indeed they did.

The Jutland battle always presents itself to my mind in a series of clear-cut pictures. Very few of those who take part in a big naval battle see anything of it. They are at their stations, occupied with their pressing duties, and the world without is hidden from them. I try to imagine the various phases of the battle as they were unfolded before the eyes of those few in the fighting squadrons who did see. Perhaps if I try to paint for my readers those scenes which are vividly before me, I may convey to them something of what I have tried to learn myself.

Let us transport ourselves to the signal bridge of Admiral Beatty’s flagship, the battle cruiser Lion, and take up station there upon the afternoon of May 31st, at half-past two. It is a fine afternoon, though hazy; the clouds lie in heavy banks, and the horizon, instead of appearing as a hard line, is an indefinable blend of grey sea and grey cloud. It is a day of “low visibility,” a day greatly favouring a weak fleet which desires to evade a decisive action. We have been sweeping the lower North Sea, and are steering towards the north-west on our way to rejoin Jellicoe’s main Fleet. Our flagship, Lion, is the leading vessel of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, and following behind us, we can see the Princess Royal, Queen Mary, and Tiger. At a little distance behind the Tiger appear the two ships which remain to us of the Second Battle Cruiser Squadron, the Indefatigable and New Zealand, fine powerful ships, but neither so fast nor so powerful as are our four Cats of the First Squadron. Some five or six miles to the west of us we can make out, against the afternoon sky, the huge bulk of the Barham, which, followed by her three consorts, Valiant, Warspite, and Malaya, leads the Fifth Battle Squadron of the most powerful fighting ships afloat. We are the spear-head of Beatty’s Fleet, but those great ships yonder, silhouetted against the sky, are its most solid shaft.