The anti-German fury in England claimed an early victim and a shining mark--His Serene Highness Vice-Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, who, as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, was practically in supreme control of British strategy at sea. Prince Louis is a native-born Austrian, and although he had been a naturalized British subject and attached to the Royal Navy since 1868, and in 1884 married into the British Royal Family by wedding his own cousin, Princess Victoria of Hesse, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, a campaign inaugurated and mercilessly prosecuted by the aristocratic Morning Post, led, on October 29, to the Prince's resignation. Public opinion unreservedly approved the disappearance from a post, from which it was not too much to say the destinies of the Empire were controlled, of a man who was brother-in-law of Prince Henry of Prussia, the Inspector-General of the German Navy, and of the Grand Duke of Hesse, one of the Kaiser's federated allies. The same spirit of "Safety First" which sent the German barbers and waiters to camps in Frith Hill and the Isle of Man dispatched Vice-Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg into official oblivion. Nobody actually distrusted his patriotism. But England was in no humor to run even remote risks. He had to go. Satisfaction over Battenberg's retirement was only slightly modified by a later revelation that it was Prince Louis himself, and not Mr. Churchill, as universally supposed, who was chiefly responsible for the mobilization of the British Fleet just before the outbreak of war in consequence of having "commanded the ships to stand fast, instead of demobilizing as ordered."
November was a month of kaleidoscopic sorrow and joy for the British. It began in gloom, with Turkey's entry into the war and the inherent menace to Egypt which that event denoted. Then came the great naval action off Chili, with first blood to the Kaiser in the only regulation stand-up battle in which British and German warships had so far met. The sinking of Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock's flagship, the cruiser Good Hope, and her companion, the Monmouth, by Admiral Count von Spee's cruiser squadron, with the loss of one thousand four hundred precious lives, was a bitter blow. Lord Charles Beresford, under whom Cradock had once served, told me that his death was a more serious loss to the British Fleet than a squadron of cruisers.
It was a depressing beginning for the First Sea Lordship of Lord "Jackie" Fisher, who succeeded Prince Louis of Battenberg. Churchill was still First Lord of the Admiralty--what we in the United States should call Secretary of the Navy--but Fisher, as First Sea Lord, was in practical control of everything connected with the actual activities of the Fleet. The First Lord of the Admiralty's business is to get ships for the navy. The First Sea Lord's task is to man, arm and fight them. Fisher lost no time in angry remorse over Cradock's disaster. He set about to repair it. He applied forthwith the "Fisher touch." He ascertained that it was Rear-Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee, Chief of the War Staff, who had been chiefly responsible for dispatching Cradock's squadron to waters in which it would have to meet a German force superior in both tonnage and gun-power. Whereupon Fisher ordered Sturdee to place himself at the head of a squadron which was to find and destroy von Spee, and not come back until it had done so. Sturdee "delivered the goods" with neatness and dispatch. Almost a month later to the day--it is a fortnight's journey from British waters to the Southern Atlantic even for twenty-seven-knot battle-cruisers--he carried out Fisher's imperious orders. On December 8 Cradock was gloriously avenged. Von Spee in his flagship, the Scharnhorst, together with the sister cruiser Gneisenau and the smaller Leipzig, was sent to the bottom off the Falkland Islands, and the remaining units in the German squadron, the Dresden and Nürnberg, were accounted for later. Britain breathed easier. The bulldog breed in her navy was still to be relied upon. Everybody instinctively felt that there was any number of more Sturdees and ships and guns and sailors ready to do equally invincible service for England if the Germans would but give them the chance von Spee had offered at the Falklands.
Spirits which had drooped when Cradock was lost were revived ten days later by the most welcome piece of naval news the British people had had since the war began--the destruction of the Kaiser's champion commerce-raider Emden by the Australian cruiser Sydney off the Cocos Islands and the capture of her intrepid commander, Captain von Müller, and many of his crew. The Emden sank seventeen ships and cargoes worth eleven million dollars before her career was ended. But von Müller won universal renown and even popularity in Great Britain for his daring, "sportsmanship" and gallantry to vanquished merchantmen. Germans do not appreciate such a spirit, and do not deserve to be its beneficiary--the utter lack of the sporting instinct in the Fatherland is responsible for that unfortunate fact--yet if von Müller had been landed a prisoner of war in England and could have been paraded down Pall Mall, he might have counted confidently on a welcome which Englishmen customarily reserve for their own heroes. Here and there in London protests were raised against the encomiums which almost every newspaper, and for the matter of that almost every Englishman, uttered in praise of von Muller's vindication of the nobility of the sea, but the overwhelmingly prevalent opinion was that he had "played the game" and, pirate though he was, deserved well of a race which still holds high the traditions of the naval service.
Ever-changing and stirring were November's events--the capitulation of Germany's prized Chinese colony of Kiau-Chau to the besieging Japanese; Lord Roberts' tragic death in the field among the soldiers he loved so well, the Indians who had come to Europe to fight Britain's battles; the still victorious advance of the Russians in East Prussia, though Hindenburg's smashing blow in the Tannenberg swamps had been delivered many weeks before; the honorable acquittal of Rear-Admiral E. C. T. Troubridge, commanding the Mediterranean cruiser squadron, on the charge of having allowed the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau to slip through his meshes into Constantinople--the Admiral had applied for a court-martial, to clear himself of a grotesque accusation that a relationship with the captain of the Goeben had induced him to let the Germans through. But all these things combined left no such indelible impression on my mind as the Lord Mayor's dinner at the Guildhall in the city of London on the night of November 9. That function, the inauguration of the new chief magistrate, is celebrated in British history as the annual occasion on which leaders of the State promulgate some great new line of Governmental policy--a national keynote for the year to come. The Guildhall dinner in the midst of Britain's greatest war was sure to be of immemorial significance, and my heart beat high with anticipation when Lord Northcliffe assigned me to attend it and record an American's impressions of England's most august feast.
Guildhall was the scene of a famous flamboyancy by the Kaiser not so many years ago, when he had talked about the comparatively firmer consistency of blood compared to water and consecrated himself to the cause of Anglo-German peace and friendship. I was keenly anxious to hear what sort of sentiments would echo through the century-old sanctuary of the City to-night, with men like Asquith, Balfour, Kitchener, Churchill and Cambon, the French Ambassador, as the speakers. I looked forward to an evening sure to be crowded with imperishable memories. I was not disappointed. At midnight when it was all over, I sat down to write "an American's impressions" for The Daily Mail, and as they were exuberant with the freshness of mental sensations just experienced and have not cooled in the sincerity of their utterance in the long interval which has supervened, I make no apology for repeating them herewith verbatim:
"When I became the joyful recipient of an invitation to attend last night's Guildhall banquet I reveled in the prospect of a feast of Bacchanalian pomp and pageantry. I expected to witness nothing much except a Lord Mayor's 'show,' translated into Lucullian environment, a riot of food, drink, cardinal robes, gold braid, gold chains, gold sticks, wigs and the other trappings of mayoral magnificence. I came away utterly disillusioned, for I had spent three hours in what will live in my recollection as the Temple of British Dignity.
"Those stately Gothic walls, whose simple groups of statuary which tell of Wellington and Nelson and Beckford; those amazingly non-panicky war speeches of your Romanesque premier, your grim Kitchener, your--and our--Winston Spencer Churchill, and your polished Balfour, all made me feel that I was tarrying for the nonce within four walls which, if they did not envelop all the great qualities of the British race, at least typified and epitomized them.
"Guildhall is dignified by itself beyond my feeble hours of description. I have never trod its historic floors before, but I have the unmistakable impression that it has taken on fresh dignity to-day for the words which were spoken in it yestereve. I was about to say, in the idiom which springs more naturally to the lips of an American, 'for the words which rang through it.' Words were not made to 'ring' through Guildhall. They would be ludicrously out of place. An American political spellbinder, no matter how silver-tongued, would pollute the atmosphere of London's civic shrine. Its acoustic qualities, which I should think were not faultless, are intended for exclusively such oratory as put them to the test last night.
"Guildhall's tone is the tone of Mr. Asquith--'practicing the equanimity of our forefathers, the fluctuating fortunes of a great war will drive us neither into exaltation nor despondency.' I thought that striking phrase of a brilliant peroration British character in composite. It was more than that. It was Guildhallian. The cheers for the Premier, like those for Balfour, Churchill and Kitchener, would have been more vociferous in my country. But my country is not British. We are not devoid of dignity, I hope, but we have no Guildhall."