Thus far we have skirted around the heart of things, which in a fleet is always the commander-in-chief’s flagship. Our handy, agile destroyer ran alongside a battleship with as much nonchalance as she would go alongside a pier. I should not have been surprised to have seen her pirouette over the hills or take to flight.
There was a time when those majestic and pampered ladies, the battleships—particularly if a sea were running as there was in this harbour at the time—having in mind the pride of paint, begged all destroyers to keep off with the superciliousness of grandes dames holding their skirts aloof from contact with nimble, audacious street gamins, who dodged in and out of the traffic of muddy streets. But destroyers have learned better manners, perhaps, and battleships have been democratised. It is the day of Russian dancers and when aeroplanes loop the loop, and we have grown used to all kinds of marvels.
But the sea has refused to be trained. It is the same old sea that it was in Columbus’ time, without any loss of trickiness in bumping small craft against towering sides. The way that this destroyer slid up to the flagship without any fuss and the way her bluejackets held off from the paint as she rose on the crests and slipped back into the trough, did not tell the whole story. A part of it was how, at the right interval, they assisted the landlubber to step from gunwale to gangway, making him feel perfectly safe when he would have been perfectly helpless but for them.
I had often watched our own bluejackets at the same thing. They did not grin—not when you were looking at them. Nor did the British. Bluejackets are noted for their official politeness. I should like to have heard their remarks—they have a gift for remarks—about those invaders of their uniformed world in Scotch caps and other kinds of caps and the different kind of clothes which tailors make for civilians. Without any intention of eavesdropping, I did overhear one asking another whence came these strange birds.
One knew the flagship by the admirals’ barges astern, as you know the location of an army headquarters by its automobiles. It seemed in the centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression. Where its place would be in action is one of those secrets as important to the enemy as the location of a general’s shell-proof shelter in Flanders. Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe may be on some other ship in battle. If there is any one foolish question which one should not ask it is this.
As one mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought one was bound to think of another flagship in Portsmouth harbour, Nelson’s Victory—at least, an American was. Probably an Englishman would not indulge in such a commonplace. One would like to know how many Englishmen had ever seen the old Victory. But, then, how many Americans have been to Mount Vernon and Gettysburg?
It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave any fighting to be done by his successors. Maintaining herself as mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength—except in the late fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France a temporary lead on paper—ship after ship, through all the grades of progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without firing a shot in anger.
The Victory was one landmark, or seamark, if you please, and this flagship was another. Between the two were generations of officers and men working through the change from stagecoach to motors and aeroplanes and seaplanes, who had kept up to a standard of efficiency in view of a test that never came. A year of war and still the test had not come, for the old reason that England had superior strength. Her outnumbering guns which had kept the peace of the seas still kept it.
All second nature to the Englishman this, as the defence of the immense distances of the steppes to the Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall and the Mississippi’s flow to the man in Kansas. But the American kept thinking about it; and he wanted the Kansans to think about it, too. A sentimentalist envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar Square, with the one-armed figure turned toward the wireless skein on top of the Admiralty Building when he went on board the flagship of Sir John Jellicoe.
One first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago on the China coast, when he was Chief of Staff to Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Squadron. Indeed, one was always hearing about Jellicoe. He was the kind of man whom people talk about after they have met him, which means personality. It was in China seas, you may remember, that when a few British seamen were hard pressed in a fight that was not ours that the phrase, “Blood is thicker than water,” sprang from the lips of an American commander, who waited not on international etiquette but went to the assistance of the British.