DRIFTERS WORKING AT SEA
While this was in progress other work of immense significance had been going on. The Admiralty had undertaken a gigantic task of supreme importance with complete success. Great defensive preparations were made in British waters, where all traffic was regulated and controlled. The vast maritime resources of the country were added to the naval service. Two battleships building for Turkey, another for Chile, and certain flotilla leaders and other craft building in the country, were taken over. Officers and men in abundance were ready. The magnificent seafaring populations of the merchant marine and the fisheries were drawn into the naval service, and subsequently the whole mercantile marine was brought under naval control, and for practical purposes was embodied with the Navy. Officers and men of these services showed splendid heroism in situations of terror and responsibility never anticipated.
A wide network of patrols was brought into being; the blockade was organised and strengthened; the examination services were set on foot and perfected; and the coast sectors of defence, with their flotillas, were raised to a standard of high efficiency. Mine-sweepers and net-drifters were at work. Every shipyard in the country and a multitude of engineering and ammunition works began to buzz with work for the Navy and the mercantile marine. Provision was made for dealing with the raiding cruisers and armed merchantmen of the enemy.
At the time, the public knew little or nothing of what was in progress. Imagination fails even now to grasp the magnitude of what was achieved. The naval share in the campaign was of baffling obscurity, while the stage of the war on land became crowded with fighting men, locked in a terrible conflict, which at that time seemed to bode no good to the Allies. After the brush in the Heligoland Bight on August 28th, 1914, the Fleet was lost to view. Not at first, but slowly, did it become realised that the prognostications of peace-time alarmists had proved baseless. There had been no “bolt from the blue,” as had been foretold; neither invasion, nor raid, nor foray was attempted upon British shores, and there was no anxiety about food. There was always, with economy, enough to eat.
But popular confidence seemed for a time to be unreasonably disturbed by a record of successive alarming and generally unexplained incidents—the escape of the Goeben and Breslau in the Mediterranean, the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, Hogue, Formidable, and other vessels, the depredations of German raiding cruisers on the distant lines of our trade, the bombardment of Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scarborough, and other disquieting episodes. Strange as it may seem, there were people who went about asking, “What is the Fleet doing?” Was it not the ancient inspiration of the Navy to seek out the enemy and to capture or sink or burn his ships wherever they were to be found? Yet there was no battle. The German coast was not attacked. Allied shipping to the value of millions of pounds was being sunk. Why, then, was the Navy inactive? When, later on, the submarine menace assumed formidable proportions, alarm began again to seize upon the newspapers, when there was justification only for precaution.
The hidden truth was not comprehended. Victories were expected when, owing to the coyness of the enemy’s strategy, none were possible. The Seven Years’ War—the most successful in British annals, the turning-point in British history, the war in which Horace Walpole asked each morning what victory there was to record—began with the disaster of Minorca, followed by the tragedy of Byng. The central facts of naval history were but little known. Yet the Navy was, and is, in truth, all in all to the country, the Empire, and the Allies.
Before we enter into the main purpose of this book, in which we shall discover in several theatres of war the real nature of sea-power, as well as the character and momentous consequences of the antagonism which grew up between England and Germany, we may inquire what services could in reason have been expected from the Navy in the great cataclysm which was about to sweep with destruction over the nations. It would not have been expected to fight a battle every month or even every year, for battles are rare events in naval history. It would not have been expected to attack fortified coasts, though it might do so on occasions, because ships are designed and built to fight at sea. The Navy would not have been expected to forestall every untoward incident. Fish often slip through the net, as raiders have slipped through our guard in this and other wars. Nor, in these days of the stealthy submarine and the blind death-dealing mine, could the Fleet have been expected to remain immune from every misfortune. No one could have expected the Navy to devise a single conclusive defence against the attack of the submarine, any more than it was asked to find an infallible remedy for the effects of gunfire.
What we should have expected was that it would make the sea again the protecting wall, as Shakespeare says, of the British Isles,
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands.