The earth is full of anger,
The seas are dark with wrath,
The Nations in their harness
Go up against our path:
Ere yet we loose the legions—
Ere yet we draw the blade,
Jehovah of the Thunders,
Lord God of Battles, aid!
****
E'en now their vanguard gathers,
E'en now we face the fray—
As Thou didst help our fathers,
Help Thou our host to-day!
Fulfilled of signs and wonders,
In life, in death made clear—
Jehovah of the Thunders,
Lord God of Battles, hear!
—Rudyard Kipling.
CHAPTER XXIV
WAR
(1914-1915)
No one who has had a look behind the scenes will ever forget the three War Wednesdays of 1914, the 22nd and 29th of July and the 5th of August; for during that dire fortnight the fate of the whole world hung trembling in the scales of life and death.
On the first the King reviewed the Grand Fleet, when twenty-two miles of fighting ships steamed by, all ready for instant battle with the High Sea Fleet of Germany: ready not only for battles on the water but under the water and over the water as well. No king, even of sea-girt Britain, was ever so good a judge of what a fleet should be as was King George on that momentous day; for, till the death of his elder brother made him Heir to the Throne, he had spent the whole of his keen young life as a naval officer who did his work so well that he must have risen to a place among the best of British Admirals. Just as it was a great thing to have had King Edward the Wise to make (as he alone could make) the Entente Cordiale with France, so it was a great thing to have had King George the Sailor standing by the helm of the ship of state when the fated war had come. British to the backbone, knowing the Empire overseas as no other king had known it, George V was born to distrust the Germans, being the son of the Danish Princess Alexandra, who had seen all the country round the Kiel Canal torn from the Crown of Denmark within a year of her marriage to King Edward. The Kaiser's lying letter to Lord Tweedmouth in 1908 was the last straw that broke King George's little patience with the German plotters headed by Grand Admiral von Tirpitz. "What," he exclaimed, "would the Kaiser say, if the King wrote a letter like that to Tirpitz?"
The chief kinds of fighting craft in the Grand Fleet can be told off on the fingers of one hand. First, the Battleships and Battle Cruisers. These are to our own fleets what ships-of-the-line-of-battle were to Nelson's, that is, they are the biggest and strongest, with the biggest and strongest guns and the thickest armour. The battle cruiser is faster than the battleship, and therefore not so strong; because to be faster you must thin your heavy armour to let you put in bigger engines. All the ships of this first kind were either Dreadnoughts or super-Dreadnoughts; that is, they were classed according to whether they had been built during the five years after the Dreadnought (1905-10), or during the five years just before the war (1910-14). Each year there had been great improvements, till ships like the Queen Elizabeth had eight gigantic guns throwing shells that weighed nearly a ton each and that could be dropped on an enemy twenty miles away.