Admiral von Tirpitz wanted nothing so much as to draw the British fleet under the guns of Heligoland or into a mine-field and submarine trap. But Sir John Jellicoe refused the bait. When he had completed his precautions and his organization to meet new conditions, his fleet need not go into the open. His Dreadnoughts could rest at anchor at a base, while his scouts kept in touch with all that was passing, and his auxiliaries and destroyers fought the submarines. Without a British Dreadnought having fired a shot at a German Dreadnought, nowhere on the face of the seas might a single vessel show the German flag except by thrusting it above the water for a few minutes.
If von Tirpitz sent his fleet out he, too, might find himself in a trap of mines and submarines. He was losing submarines and England was building more. His naval force rather than Sir John's was suffering from attrition. The blockade was complete from Iceland to the North Sea. While the world knew of the work of the armies, the care that this task required, the hardships endured, the enormous expenditure of energy, were all hidden behind that veil of secrecy which obviously must be more closely drawn over naval than over army operations.
From the flagship the campaign was directed. One would think that many offices and many clerks would be required. But the offices and the clerks were at the Admiralty. Here was the execution. In a room perhaps four feet by six was the wireless focus which received all reports and sent all orders, with trim bluejackets at the keys. "Go!" and "Come!" the messages were saying; they wasted no words. Officers of the staff did their work in narrow space, yet seemed to have plenty of room. Red tape is inflammable. There is no more place for it on board a flagship prepared for action than for unnecessary woodwork.
At every turn compression and concentration of power were like the guns and the decks, cleared for action, significant in directness of purpose. The system was planetary in its impressive simplicity, the more striking as nothing that man has ever made is more complicated or includes more kinds of machinery than a battleship. One battleship was one unit, one chessman on the naval board.
Not all famous leaders are likeable, as every world traveller knows. They all have the magnetism of force, which is quite another thing from the magnetism of charm. What the public demands is that they shall win victories, whether personally likeable or not. But if they are likeable and simple and human and a sailor besides—well, we know what that means.
Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe is not a great man. It is not for a civilian even to presume to judge. We have the word of those who ought to know, however, that he is. I hope that he is, because I like to think that great commanders need not necessarily appear formidable. Nelson refused to be cast for the heavy part, and so did Farragut. It may be a sailor characteristic. I predict that after this war is over, whatever honours or titles they may bestow upon him, the English are going to like Sir John Jellicoe not alone for his service to the nation, but for himself.
Admiral Jellicoe is one with Captain Jellicoe, whose cheeriness even when wounded kept up the spirits of the others on the relief expedition of Boxer days. "He could do it, too!" one thought, having in mind Sir David Beatty's leap to the deck of a destroyer. Spare, of medium height, ruddy, and fifty-seven—so much for the health qualification which the Admiralty Lords dwelt upon as important. After he had been at sea for a year he seemed a human machine, much of the type of the destroyer as a steel machine—a thirty-knot human machine, capable of three hundred or five hundred revolutions, engines running smoothly, with no waste energy, slipping over the waves and cutting through them; a quick man, quick of movement, quick of comprehension and observation, of speech and of thought, with a delightful self-possession—for there are many kinds—which is instantly responsive with decision.
A telescope under his arm, too, as he received his guests. You liked that. He keeps watch over the fleet himself when he is on the quarter- deck. You had a feeling that nothing could happen in all his range of vision, stretching down the "avenues of Dreadnoughts" to the light- cruiser squadron, and escape his attention. It hardly seems possible that he was ever bored. Everything around interests him. Energy he has, electric energy in this electric age, this man chosen to command the greatest war product of modern energy.
Fastened to the superstructure near the ladder to his quarters was a new broom which South Africa had sent him. He was highly pleased with the present; only the broom was Tromp's emblem, while Blake's had been the whip. Possibly the South African Dutchmen, now fighting on England's side, knew that he already had the whip and they wanted him to have the Dutch broom, too.
He had been using both, and many other devices in his campaign against von Tirpitz's "unter See" boats, as was illustrated by one of the maps hung in his cabin. Quite different this from maps in a general's headquarters, with the front trenches and support and reserve trenches and the gun-positions marked in vari-coloured pencillings. Instantly a submarine was sighted anywhere, Sir John had word of it, and a dot went down on the spot where it had been seen. In places the sea looked like a pepper-box cover. Dots were plentiful outside the harbour where we were; but well outside, like flies around sugar which they could not reach.