By five o’clock Beatty is fairly off upon his gallant adventure, and during the next hour, the hardest fought part of the whole battle, the gap between the battle cruisers and the four supporting battleships steadily widens. If the Germans are to be enveloped, Beatty must at the critical moment allow sufficient space between himself and Evan-Thomas for Jellicoe to deploy his big Fleet between them, and this involves on the part of the Commander-in-Chief a deployment in the midst of battle of a delicacy and accuracy only possible to a naval tactician of the highest order. But both Beatty and Evan-Thomas know their Jellicoe, to whom, at few-minute intervals, crackle from the aerials above us wireless messages giving with naval precision the exact courses and speeds of our ships and the bearings of the enemy. For an hour—up to the moment when we turned to the north—we ran away from Jellicoe, but during the next hour we steamed towards him; we know that he is pressing to our aid with all the speed which his panting engineers can get out of his squadrons. Beatty’s battle cruisers, curving round the head of the German line at a range of 14,000 to 12,000 yards, are firing all the while, and being fired at all the while, but though often hit, they are safer now than when they were a couple of miles more distant.
We have now reached a very important phase in the battle. It is twenty minutes past six. At six o’clock the leading vessels of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet had been sighted five miles to the north of us and his three battle cruisers—Invincible (Admiral Hood), Inflexible, and Indomitable—have flown down to the help of Beatty. They come into action, steaming hard due south, and take station ahead of us in the Lion. By this lengthening of his line to the south Beatty has now completely enveloped the German battle cruisers, which turn through some twelve points and endeavour to wriggle out of the jaws of the trap which they see closing remorselessly upon them. They are followed in this turn by the battleships of the High Seas Fleet which, for more than an hour, have been faithfully hammered by Evan-Thomas’s Queen Elizabeths, and show up against the sky a very ragged outline. The range of the battle cruisers is now down to 8,000 yards, and they get well home upon battleships as well as upon opponents of their own class. We do not ourselves escape loss, for the Invincible, which has become the leading ship, is shattered by concentrated gun-fire. The gallant Hood, with his men, has gone to join his great naval ancestors.
And now let us put the clock back to the hour, 4.57, when the Queen Elizabeths had completed their turn to the north, and had taken up position astern of Beatty to hold off the main German Fleet while he is making his enveloping rush. From the spotting top of the battleship upon which we have descended we get a most inspiring view, though every now and then we are smothered in oily smoke from the huge flat funnels below us, and are drenched with water which is flung up in torrents by shells bursting alongside. The enemy ships upon which we are firing are some 18,000 yards distant, we can with great difficulty make them out amid the smoke and haze, and we wonder mightily how the keen-eyed spotting officers beside us can judge and correct, as they appear to be doing, the bursts of our shells more than ten miles distance. Our guns, and those of our consorts, are firing deliberately, for we do not know how long the battle will endure, and the supply of 15-inch shell and cordite cannot be unlimited in the very biggest of ships. We learn from the spotting officers that all our ships, except the Valiant, have been hit several times while coming into action by dropping shots, but that no serious harm has been done. Meanwhile the shells are falling fast about us, and all of our ships are repeatedly straddled. The Warspite suffered the most severely, though even she was able to go home to the Forth under her own steam. This is the battleship whose steering gear went wrong later in the action, and which turned two complete “O’s” at full speed. Round she went in great circles of a mile in diameter, spitting shots with every gun that bore upon the enemy during her wild gyrations. Fritz began well, but does not seem able to stand punishment. He rarely hits us now, though we are giving him a much better mark than he presents to us. For we are silhouetted against the almost clear sky to the west, while he—and there are a great many of him—is buried in mist and smoke to the east. Rarely can our range-finding officers take a clear observation; rarely can our spotters make sure of a correction. Yet every now and then we note signs that our low-flying, hard-hitting shells—each one of which weighs not much short of a ton!—are getting home upon him at least as frequently as his shots are hitting us. Three of his battleships are new, built since the war began, but the rest are just Königs and Kaisers, no better than our Dreadnoughts of half a dozen years ago. We would willingly take on twice our numbers of such battleships and fight them to a finish upon a clear summer’s day.
Our battle tactics are now plain to see. They are to keep out to the farthest visible range, to avoid being materially damaged, and to keep Fritz’s battleships so fully occupied that they will have no opportunity of closing in upon Beatty when he completes his envelopment. We can see our battle cruisers some three miles away, swinging more and more round the head of the German line, and the enemy’s battle cruisers edging away in the effort to avoid being outflanked. Far away to the north appears the smoke of the three battle cruisers which are speeding ahead of Jellicoe’s main Fleet; they are getting their instructions from Beatty’s Lion, and are already making for the head of his line so as to prolong it, and so to complete the envelopment which is now our urgent purpose. Our Queen Elizabeth battleships are not hurrying either their engines or their guns. We are moving just fast enough to keep slightly ahead of the first half-dozen of the German battleships; we are pounding them steadily whenever a decent mark is offered us—which unhappily is not often—and we have seen one big ship go down smothered in smoke and flames. The time draws on and it is already six o’clock; we have borne the burden of the fight for more than an hour, though it seems but a few minutes since we turned more than twenty miles back to the south, and first gave Fritz a taste of what the Fifth Battle Squadron could do. We are slowing down now, and the gap between us and Beatty is widening out, for we know that Jellicoe is coming, and that he will deploy his three battle squadrons between us and our battle cruisers which, extended in a long line, with Hood’s Invincible in front, are well round the head of the German ships. The whole German Fleet is curving into a long, close-knit spiral between us and Beatty, and, if the light will hold, we have it ripe for destruction. We have played our part; the issue now rests with Jellicoe and the gods of weather.
Everything for which we and the battle cruisers have fought and suffered, for which we have risked and lost the Queen Mary and Indefatigable, is drawing to its appointed end. Our Fifth Battle Squadron has nearly stopped, and has inclined four points towards the east, so as to allow the gap for Jellicoe’s deployment to widen out. Firing upon both sides has ceased. We have great work still to do, and are anxious to keep all the shells we yet carry for it, and the enemy is too heavily battered and in too grievous a peril to think of anything but his immediate escape. We are waiting for Jellicoe, whose squadrons are already beginning to deploy.
While the Queen Elizabeths wait, ready at any moment to resume the action whenever and wherever their tremendous services may be called for, we will leave the Fifth Battle Squadron, and, flying far over the sea, will penetrate into the Holy of Holies, the conning tower of the Fleet flagship wherein stands the small, firm-lipped, eager-eyed man who is the brain and nerve centre of the battle. There are those who have as sharp a thirst for battle—Beatty has; and there are those who have been as patient under long-drawn-out delays and disappointments—Kitchener was; yet there have been few fighting men in English history who could, as Jellicoe can, combine enduring patience with the most burning ardour, and never allow the one to achieve mastery over the other. Watch him now in the conning tower of the Iron Duke. He has waited and worked during twenty-two months for just this moment, when the German High Seas Fleet have placed their cards upon the table, and he, exactly at the proper instant, will play his overwhelming trumps. If ever a man had excuse for too hasty a movement, for too great an eagerness to snatch at victory, Jellicoe would have one now. His eyes flash, and one may read in them the man’s intense anxiety not to allow one moment of unnecessary delay to interpose between his Fleet and the scattering enemy. Yet until the exact moment arrives when he can with sure hand deploy his squadrons into line of battle, and fit them with precision into the gap made for them between Beatty to the east and south and Evan-Thomas to the west and south, he will not give the order which, once given, cannot be recalled. For as soon as his Fleet has deployed, it will be largely out of his hands, its dispositions will have been made, and if it deploys too soon, the crushing opportunity will be missed, and the Germans will infallibly escape. So, with his divisions well in hand, he watches upon the chart the movements of his own and Beatty’s vessels, as the wireless waves report them to him, and every few minutes goes to the observation hoods of the conning tower, and seeks to peer through the thick haze and smoke which still hide from him the enveloping horns of the English ships, and the curving masses of the enemy. If he could see clearly his task would be less difficult and the culmination of his hopes less doubtful. But he cannot see; he has to work by wireless and by instinct, largely by faith, trusting to the judgment of Beatty and Evan-Thomas, far away, and himself subject to the ever-varying uncertainties of sea fighting. He goes back to the chart, upon which his staff are noting down the condensed essence of all the messages as they flow in, and then, the moment having arrived, he gives the word. Away run the signal flags, picked up and interpreted by every squadron flagship, and then repeated by every ship. The close divisions of the Grand Fleet spread out, melt gracefully into lines—to all appearance as easily as if they were battalions of infantry—they swing round to the east, the foremost vessel reaching out to join up with Beatty’s battle cruisers. As the Grand Fleet deploys, Evan-Thomas swings in his four Queen Elizabeths so that the Barham, without haste or hesitation, falls in behind the aftermost of Jellicoe’s battleships, and the remainder of the Fifth Battle Squadron completes the line, which stretches now in one long curve to the west and north and east of the beaten Germans. The deployment is complete, the whole Grand Fleet has concentrated, the enemy is surrounded on three sides, we are faster than he is, and more than twice as powerful; if the light will hold, his end has come. Although from the Iron Duke we cannot now see the wide enveloping horns, yet we have lately been with them and know them. The main Fleet in whose centre we now steam, consists of Dreadnoughts, Orions, King George the Fifths, Iron Dukes (all acting as flagships), Royal Sovereigns, with 15-inch guns, the Canada, with 14-inch guns, and that queer Dago ship the Agincourt, with her seven turrets all on the middle line, and each containing two 12-inch guns. Not a ship in our battle line has been afloat for more than seven years, and most of them are less than three years old. The material newness of the Grand Fleet is a most striking testimony to the eternal youth of the Navy’s ancient soul.
We have now concentrated in battle line the battleships of our own main Fleet and six battle cruisers, after allowing for our losses, and the Germans have, after making a similar allowance, not more than fourteen battleships and three battle cruisers. I do not count obsolete pre-Dreadnoughts. The disparity in force is greater even than is shown by the bare numbers, which it is not permitted to give exactly. Scarcely a ship of the enemy can compare in fighting force with the Queen Elizabeths or the Royal Sovereigns, or even with the Iron Dukes, Orions, and King George the Fifths. Of course he made off; he would have been a fool if he had not—and Admiral Scheer is far from being a fool.
Our concentrated Fleet came into action at 6.17, and at this moment the Germans were curving in a spiral towards the south-west, seeking a way out of the sea lion’s jaws. They were greatly favoured by the mist and were handled with superb skill. They relied upon constant torpedo attacks to fend off our battleships, while their own big vessels worked themselves clear. We could never see more than four or five ships at a time in their van, or from eight to ten in their rear. For two hours the English Fleet, both battleships and battle cruisers, sought to close, and now and then would get well home upon the enemy at from 11,000 to 9,000 yards, but again and again under cover of torpedo attacks and smoke clouds, the Germans opened out the range and evaded us. We could not get in our heavy blows for long enough to crush Scheer, and he could not get in his mosquito attacks with sufficient success wholly to stave us off. For us those two hours of hunting an elusive enemy amid smoke and fog banks were intensely exasperating; for him they must have been not less intensely nerve-racking. All the while we were hunting him, he was edging away to the south-west—“pursuing the English” was his own humorous description of the manœuvre—and both Jellicoe and Beatty were pressing down between him and the land, and endeavouring to push him away from his bases. All the while our battleships and battle cruisers were firing heavily upon any German ship which they could see, damaging many, and sinking one at least. The return fire was so ragged and ineffective that our vessels were scarcely touched, and only three men were wounded in the whole of Jellicoe’s main Fleet. By nine o’clock both Beatty and Jellicoe were far down the Jutland coast, and had turned towards the south-west in the expectation that daylight would reveal to them the German Fleet in a favourable position for ending the business.