XXX
On The Fleet Flagship
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 see her pirouette over the hills or take to flying.
There was a time when those majestic and pampered ladies, the battleships—particularly if there were a sea running as 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 democratized. 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 her 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 Scottish caps and other kinds of caps and the different kinds of clothes which tailors make for civilians. Without any intention of eavesdropping, I did overhear one asking another whence came these strange birds.
You knew the flagship by the admirals' barges astern, as you know the location of an army headquarters by its motor-cars. 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 you should not ask it is this.
As you mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought you were bound to think—at least, an American was—of another flagship in Portsmouth harbour, Nelson's Victory. Probably an Englishman would not indulge in such a commonplace. I 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. When he was about to meet Sir John Jellicoe he envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar Square, surmounted by the one-armed figure turned toward the wireless skein on top of the Admiralty building.
I first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago when he was Chief of Staff to Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Squadron. Indeed, you were always hearing about Jellicoe in those days on the China coast. 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 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.
Nor will anyone who was present in the summer of '98 forget how Sir Edward Chichester stood loyally by Admiral George Dewey, when the German squadron was empire-fishing in the waters of Manila Bay, until our Atlantic fleet had won the battle of Santiago and Admiral Dewey had received reinforcements and, east and west, we were able to look after the Germans. The British bluejackets said that the rations of frozen mutton from Australia which we sent alongside were excellent; but the Germans were in no position to judge, doubtless through an oversight in the detail of hospitality by one of Admiral Dewey's staff. Let us be officially correct and say there was no mutton to spare after the British had been supplied.