The Buzzer’s career as a king’s ship was brief, and her death glorious. One night, or rather early morning, she was far out in the misty jaws of a Highland loch, within which temporarily rested many great battle-cruisers. Cæsar despised these vast and potent vessels. “What use are they?” he would ask of his chief. “There is nothing for them to fight, and they would all have been sunk long ago but for us.” Fast motor-boats, with 120 horse-power engines, twenty-five knots of speed—thirty at a pinch, untruthfully claimed the Lieutenant—and beautiful 3-pounder guns were in Cæsar’s view, the last word in naval equipment. The Lieutenant would shake his head gravely at his Sub’s exuberant ignorance. “They are gay old guys just now,” he would reply, “and feeling pretty cheap. But some day they will get busy and knock spots off Fritz’s hide. You Britishers are darned slow, but when you do fetch a gun it’s time to shin up trees. The Germs have stirred up the British Lion real proper and, I guess, wish now they’d let him stay asleep.”
The Buzzer had chased many a German submarine, compelling it to dive deeply and become harmless, but never yet had Cæsar been privileged to see one close. Upon this misty morning of her demise, when he gained fame, she was farther out to sea than usual, and was cruising at about the spot where enterprising U-boats were wont to come up to take a bearing. I am writing of the days before our harbour defences had chilled their enterprise into inanition. Cæsar was on watch, and stood at the wheel amidships. The petty officer and a blue-jacket were stationed at the gun forward. Our friend’s senses were very much alert, for he took his duties with the utmost seriousness. Near his boat the sea heaved and swirled, and as he saw a queer wave pile up he became, if possible, even more alert and called to his watch to stand by. The sea went on swirling, the surface broke suddenly, and up swooped the hood and thin tube of a periscope. It was less than fifty yards away, and for a moment the lenses did not include the Buzzer within their field of vision. For Cæsar, his watch on deck, and the sleepers below, the next few seconds were packed with incident. Round came the Buzzer pointing straight for the periscope, the exhaust roared as Cæsar called for full speed, and the gun crashed out. Away went periscope and tube, wiped off by the spreading cone of the explosion, as if they were no more substantial than a bullrush, and up shot the Buzzer’s bows as Cæsar drove her keel violently upon the top of the conning tower of the rising U-boat. Keel and conning-tower ripped together; there was a tremendous rush of air-bubbles, followed by oil, and the U-boat was no more. She had gone, and the Buzzer, with six feet of her tender bottom torn off, was in the act to follow. As she cocked up her stern to dive after her prey there was just time to get officers and crew into lifebelts and to signal for help. Cæsar met in the water his commanding officer, who, though nearly hurled through his cabin walls by the shock, and entirely ignorant of the cataclysm in which he had been involved, was cheerful as ever. “Sakes,” he gasped, when he had cleared mouth and nose of salt water, “when you Britishers do get busy, things—sort of—hum.”
A destroyer rushing down picked up the swimmers and heard their story. The evidence was considered sufficient, for oil still spread over the sea, and there were no rocks within miles to have ripped out the Buzzer’s keel, so another U-boat was credited to the Royal Navy and Cæsar became a lieutenant. It was a proud day for him.
But he had lost his ship, and was for a time out of a job. The new harbour defences were under way and fast motor-boats were for a while less in demand. The Admiralty solved the problem of his future. “This young man,” it observed, “is nothing better than a temporary lieutenant of the Volunteer Reserve, but he is not wholly without intelligence and has a pretty hand with a gun. We will teach him something useful.” So the order was issued that Lieutenant Cæsar should proceed to Whale Island, there to be instructed in the mysteries of naval gunnery. “You will have to work at Whale Island,” warned the captain of his flotilla, “and don’t you forget it. It is not like Oxford.” This to reduce Cæsar to the proper level of humility.
Up to this stage in his career Lieutenant Cæsar, though temporarily serving in the Royal Navy, knew nothing whatever about it. His status was defined for me once by a sergeant of Marines: “A temporary gentleman, sir, ’ere to-day and gone to-morrow, and good riddance, sir.” Upon land the corps and regiments have been swamped by temporaries, but at sea the Regular Navy remains in full possession. In the barracks at Whale Island, where Cæsar was assigned quarters, he felt like a very small schoolboy newly joining a very large school. His fellow-pupils were R.N.R. men, mercantile brass-bounders with mates’ and masters’ certificates, and R.N.V.R.’s drawn from diverse classes. To him they seemed a queer lot. He lay low and studied them, finding most of them wholly ignorant of everything which he knew, but profoundly versed in things which he didn’t. The instructors of the Regular Service gave him his first definite contact with the Navy. “My original impression of them,” he told me, laughing, “was that they were all mad. I had come to learn gunnery, but for a whole week they insisted upon teaching me squad drill, about the most derisory version of drill which I have ever seen. Picture us, a mob of mates out of liners and volunteers out of workshops and technical schools, trailing rifles round the square at Whale Island, feeling dazed and helpless, and wondering if we had brought up by mistake at a lunatic asylum. After the first week, during which Whale Island indulged its pathetic belief that its true métier is squad drill, we were all right. We got busy at the guns, and found plenty to learn.” It was at Whale Island that he received the name of Cæsar, the one Latin author of which his messmates had any recollection. During the first month of his training he daily cursed Winchester and Oxford for the frightful gaps which they had left in his educational equipment. He could acquire languages with anyone, but mathematics, that essential key to the mysteries of gunnery, gave him endless trouble. But he had a keenly tempered brain and limitless persistence. Slowly at first, more rapidly later, he made up on his contemporaries, and when after two months of the toughest work of his life he gained a first-class certificate, he felt that at last he had tasted a real success.
Time brings its revenges. As a Sub in a motor-boat he had affected to think slightingly of the great battle-cruisers which his small craft protected, but now that he was transferred to one of the new Cats of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron his views violently changed. Battleships were all very well, they had huge guns and tremendous armour, but when it came to speed and persistent aggressiveness what were these sea monsters in comparison with the Cats? Why nothing, of course. Which shows that Cæsar was becoming a Navyman. Put a naval officer into the veriest tub which can keep herself afloat with difficulty, and steam five knots in a tideway, and he will exalt her into the most efficient craft beneath the White Ensign. For she is His Ship.
Lieutenant Cæsar very quickly became at one with his new ship, and entered into his kingdom. Whether upon the loading platform of a turret or in control of a side battery, he serenely took up his place and felt that he had expanded to fill it adequately. His tone became obtrusively professional. When I asked for some details of his hardships and his thrills, he sneered at me most rudely. “There are no hardships,” he declared; “we live and grow fat, and there is not a thrill to the whole war. My motor-boat was a desperate buccaneer in comparison with these stately Founts of Power. Every week or two we do a Silent Might parade in the North Sea, but nothing ever happens.” This was after the Dogger Bank action for which he was too late, and before the Jutland Battle. He wrote to me many veiled accounts of the North Sea stunts upon which the battle-cruisers were persistently engaged, but always insisted that they were void of excitement.
“Dismiss from your landsman’s mind,” he would write—Cæsar was now a sailor among sailors—“all idea of thrills. There aren’t any. When the hoist Prepare to Leave Harbour goes up on the flagship, and black smoke begins to pour from every funnel in the Squadron, there is no excitement and no preparation—for we are already fully prepared. We go out with our attendant destroyers and light cruisers and scour at will over the ‘German Ocean’ looking for Fritz, that we may fall upon him. But he is too cunning for us. I wish that we had some scouting airships.”