"No more extraordinary venture than this British landing on a naked beach within point-blank range of the most modern firearms can be read in history or fable. It was a landing of troops upon a foreign shore thousands of miles from home, hundreds from any naval base. Without absolute command of the sea, it could not have been so much as thought of. Men, guns, food, ammunition, even water had to be conveyed in ships and disembarked under the eyes of a hostile army, warned, armed, alert, and behind almost impregnable defenses.
"To conceive the preposterous thing was itself a kind of sublime folly; to accomplish it, simply and plainly stated, a feat divine. Though a thousand pens in the future essay the task no justice in words can ever be done to the courage and determination of the men who made good that landing. Put aside for a moment the indisputable fact that the whole gigantic undertaking achieved in a sense nothing whatever. View it only as an exploit, a martial achievement, and it takes rank as the most amazing feat of arms that the world has ever seen or is likely to see. That at least remains, and as that, and no less than that, with the full price of human life and treasure expended, it goes upon the record, immortal as the soul of man. And nothing could be more fitting than that an accomplishment which dims the glory of all previous martial deeds, which marks the highest point of courage and resolution reached by Britain in all her wars, should have been carried through by British, Irish, and Colonial troops, representatives of the whole empire under the guidance and protecting guard, of the British fleet.
"At Lemnos, for the more than Homeric endeavor on Homer's sea, lay an assemblage of shipping such as no harbor had ever held. Within sight of Troy they came and went, and in the classic waters ringed round by classic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line upon line of black transports, crowded with the finest flower of modern youth, and beyond them, nearer the harbor mouth, the long, projecting guns and towering hulls of the warships. On April 24th they sailed, while, amid tempests of cheering, as the anchors were got and the long procession moved away, the bands of the French vessels played them to the Great Endeavor. There is no need to tell again the story of the arrival, the stupendous uproar of the bombardments, so that men dizzy with it staggered as they walked, the slaughter in the boats and on the bullet-torn shingle, the making good of the landings and all the subsequent battles on that inhuman coast. They will be told and retold while the world lasts. And now that all is over, the chapter closed, the blue water rippling undisturbed which once was white with a tempest of shrapnel, now that all is over, the armies and the ships withdrawn, and one reflects upon the waste of human life, the gallant hearts that beat no longer, the prodigal expenditure of thought and energy and treasure, there should perhaps mingle with our poignant regret and disappointment no sense of exultation. Yet it surges upward and overcomes all else. For our nature is so molded that it can never cease to admire such doings, the more perhaps if victory be denied the doers. And here at least on the shell-swept beaches, among the rocks and flowery hillsides of Gallipoli, men of the British race wrote, never to be surpassed, one of the world's deathless tales.…
"There are navies and navies. The old and fighting British navy, whose representatives keep the seas today against the king's enemies, has been heard of once or twice during the present war, but for the most part preserves a certain aristocratic and dignified aloofness from the public gaze. There is, however, another and an older navy which comes and goes under the eyes of all, as it has done any time these three or four centuries. On its six or eight thousand ships, to prove that England is Old England still, the Elizabethan mariner has come to life again, who took war very much as he took peace, unconcernedly, in his day's work. Needless to say no other nation on earth could have produced, either in numbers or quality, for no other nation possessed these men, bred to the sea and the risks of the sea, born where the air is salt, who, undeterred by the hazards of war, which was none of their employ, answered their country's call as in the old Armada days. From the Chinese and Indian seas they came, from the Pacific and Atlantic trade routes, from whaling, it might be, or the Newfoundland fishing grounds or the Dogger Bank—three thousand officers and some two hundred thousand men—to supply the Grand Fleet, to patrol the waterways, to drag for the German mines, to carry the armies of the Alliance, and incidentally, to show the world, what it has perhaps forgotten, that it is not by virtue of their fighting navy that the British are a maritime people, but by virtue of an instinct amounting to genius, rooted in a very ancient and unmatched experience of shipping and the sea. The Grand Fleet is only the child of this service which was already old before the word 'Admiralty' was first employed, which made its own voyages and fought its own battles since Columbus discovered America, and before even that considerable event. These travel-worn ships formed the solid bridge across which flowed in unbroken files the men and supplies to the British and the Allied fronts.
"Picture a great railroad which has for its main line a track four or five thousand miles in length, curving from Archangel in Russia to Alexandria in Egypt, a track which touches on its way the coasts of Norway, of the British Isles, of France, of Portugal, of Spain, of Italy, of Greece. Picture from this immense arc of communication branch lines longer still, diverging to America, to Africa, to India, knitting the ports of the world together in one vast railway system. That railroad system, with its engines and rolling stock, its stations and junctions, its fuel stores and offices, over which run daily and nightly the wagon loads, of food, munitions, stores for a dozen countries at war with the Central Powers, is a railroad of British ships. To dislocate, to paralyze it, Germany would willingly give a thousand millions, for the scales would then descend in her favor and victory indubitably be hers. For consider the consequences of interruption in that stream of traffic. Britain herself on the brink of starvation, her troops in France, in Egypt, in Salonica, cut off without food, without ammunition, unable to return to their homes. But for this fleet that bridges the seas, Britain could not send or use a single soldier anywhere save in defense of her own shores. India, Australia, Canada, all her dependencies would be cut off from the Mother Country, the bonds of empire immediately dissolved. Some little importance then may be attached to this matter of bridging the waterways, and some admiration extended towards the men who do it and the manner of the doing.
"If you ask what have the Allies gained, take this evidence of a French writer in Le Temps: 'If at the beginning of the war we were enabled to complete the equipment of our army with a rapidity which has not been one of the least surprises of the German staff, we owe it to the fleet which has given us the mastery of the seas. We were short of horses. They were brought from Argentina and Canada. We were short of wool and of raw materials for our metal industries. We applied to the stockbreeders of Australia. Lancashire sent us her cottons and cloth, the Black Country its steel. And now that the consumption of meat threatens to imperil our supplies of live stock, we are enabled to avoid danger by the importation of frozen cargoes. For the present situation the mastery of the sea is not only an advantage but a necessity. In view of the fact that the greater part of our coal area is invaded by the enemy the loss of the command of the sea by England would involve more than her own capitulation. She indeed would be forced to capitulate through starvation. But France also and her new ally, Italy, being deprived of coal and, therefore, of the means of supplying their factories and military transport, would soon be at the mercy of their adversaries.'
"On this command of the sea rested, then, the whole military structure of the Alliance. It opposed to Germany and her friends not the strength of a group of nations, each fighting its own battle, separate and apart, but the strength of a federation so intimately knit together as to form a single united power which has behind it the inexhaustible resources of the world. Thus the British navy riveted the Great Alliance by operations on a scale hardly imaginable, operations whose breadth and scope beggar all description, since they span the globe itself. As for the men and the spirit in which they work, let him sail on a battleship, a tramp, a liner, or a trawler, the British sailor is always the same, much as he has been since the world first took his measure in Elizabeth's days.
'Like the old sailors of the Queen and the Queen's old sailors.'
"A great simplicity is his quality, with something of the child's unearthly wisdom added, and a Ulysses-like cunning in the hour of necessity, an ascetic simplicity almost like the saints', looking things in the face, so that to that fine carelessness everything, all enterprises, hazards, fortunes, shipwreck, if it come, or battle, are but the incidents of a chequered day, and his part merely to 'carry on' in the path of routine and duty and the honorable tradition of his calling. Manifestly his present business is epic and the making of epic, if he knew it; yet not knowing it he grasps things, as the epic paladins always grasp them, by the matter-of-fact, not the heroic, handle. What better stories have the poets to tell than that of Captain Parslow, a Briton if ever there was one, who, refusing to surrender, saved his ship in a submarine attack at the cost of his own life? Mortally wounded as he stood on the ship, the wheel was taken from the dying father's hand by his son, the second mate. Knocked down by the concussion of a shell that gallant son of a gallant father still held to his post and steered the vessel clear. Or have they anything better to relate than the tale of the Ortega and Captain Douglas Kinneir, who, when pursued by a German cruiser of vastly greater speed, called upon his engineers and stokers for a British effort and drove his vessel under full steam, and a trifle more, into the uncharted waters of Nelson's Straits, 'a veritable nightmare for navigators,' the narrowest and ugliest of channels, walled by gloomy cliffs, bristling with reefs, rocks, overfalls, and currents, through which, by the mercy of God and his own daring, he piloted his ship in safety and gave an example to the world of what stout hearts can do. It is such men Germany supposed she could intimidate!
"These are but episodes in the long roll of honor. You will find others in the quite peaceful occupation of minesweeping, or the search for mines—'fishing' the navy calls it—that the impartial German scatters to trip an enemy, perhaps a friend, an equal chance and it matters not which, an occupation for humanitarians and seekers after a quiet life. On this little business alone a thousand ships and fourteen thousand fishermen have been constantly engaged. Take the case of Lieutenant Parsons, who was blown up in his trawler, escaped with his life, and undisturbed continued to command his group of sweepers. On that day near Christmas time they blew up eight and dragged up six other mines, while, as incidents within the passage of ten crowded minutes, his own ship and another were damaged by explosions and a third destroyed! Read that short chapter of North Sea history and add this, for a better knowledge of these paths of peace, from the letter of an officer: 'Things began to move rapidly now. There was a constant stream of reports coming from aloft. "Mine ahead, Sir," "Mine on the port bow, Sir"; "There is one, Sir, right alongside," and on looking over the bridge I saw a mine about two feet below the surface and so close that we could have touched it with a boat hook.… After an hour at last sighted the minesweepers, which had already started work.'