“There is the old Dreadnought,” said an officer.
The old Dreadnought—all of ten years of age, the senile old thing! What a mystery she was when she was building! The mystery accentuated her celebrity—and almost forgotten now, while the Queen Elizabeth and the Warspite and others of their class with their fifteen-inch guns would be in the public eye as the latest type till a new type came. A parade of naval types was passing. One seemed to shade into the other in harmonious effect.
But here was an outsider, whom one noted instantly as he studied those rugged silhouettes of steel and counted guns. She had been a Turk. As the Turks were going to have only one battleship, they were not bothered about squadron homogeneity. They piled turret on turret, twelve twelve-inch guns in exotic array. She was finished and the Turks were already on board to take her home when the war began. But British law requires that any foreign man-of-war building in English shipyards may be taken over for her cost in case of war. So England kept the ship, which the Turks, I understand, thought was hardly a sporting thing to do.
One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts—even a squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of its might. Sixteen—twenty—twenty-four—it was the unending numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive. An hour passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes behind the wind screen of the destroyer’s bridge, only to look back and see more Dreadnoughts going by. One had not realised that there were so many in the harbour. He had a suspicion that Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of a hat.
The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea, and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever; still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King Edward VII class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were yet to come. One’s eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they had seen the whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.
The destroyer commander looked at his watch.
“Time!” he said. “I’ll put you on shore.”
He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the engine room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at twenty knots towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth.
One’s imagination sped across seas where he had cruised into harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was trying to visualise the whole globe—all of it except the Baltic seas and a thumbmark in the centre of Europe. Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay—yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them where countless millions dwell were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet.
Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system—and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight’s play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot was fired at those sturdy men behind armour.