Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands off the north of Scotland was a perfect base for the Grand Fleet, because it was well placed to watch the way out of the North Sea through the two-hundred-mile gap between Norway and the Shetlands, and also because the tremendous tidal currents sweeping through it prevented submarines from sneaking about too close. Six hundred miles south-east was the German Fleet, near the North Sea end of the Kiel Canal. Between lay a hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles of water on which, taking one day with another the whole year round, you could not see clearly more than five miles. This "low average visibility" accounts for all the hide-and-seek that suited German tricks so well.
Within three hours of the British Declaration of War two British submarines were off for Heligoland, where they spied out the enemy's fleet. From that time on every German move was watched from under the water, on the water, or over the water, and instantly reported by wireless to the Admiralty in London and to the Grand Fleet based on Scapa Flow.
Then, when the first British army began to cross into France, the Fleet covered its flank against the Germans, and went on covering it for fifty-one months without a break, through cold and wet, through ceaseless watching, and through many fights.
The first fight was off Heligoland, when British light cruisers and destroyers went into the Bight on a scouting cruise planned by the Admiralty, not the Grand Fleet. The German destroyers fell back to lure the British within range of the enormous guns on Heligoland. That failed. But suddenly, out of the morning mist, came a bunch of German shells throwing up water-spouts that almost splashed aboard. Instantly the British destroyers strung out, farther apart, and put on full racing speed as the next two bunches crept closer in. Whirrh! went the fourth, just overhead, as the flotilla flagship Arethusa signalled to fire torpedoes. At once the destroyers turned, all together, lashing the sea into foam as their sterns whisked round, and charged, faster than any cavalry, straight for the enemy. When the Germans found the range and once more began bunching their shells too close in, the British destroyers snaked right and left, threw out the range-finding, and then raced ahead again. In less than ten minutes they had made more than five miles, fired their torpedoes, and were on their way back. Then up came the British cruisers and converged on the Mainz, which went down fighting. "The Mainz," wrote one of the British officers who saw her, "was immensely gallant. With her whole midships a fuming inferno she kept one gun forward and another aft still spitting forth fury and defiance like a wild cat mad with wounds." In the mean time Jellicoe, rightly anxious about leaving British light craft unsupported by heavier vessels so close to the German Fleet, urged the Admiralty to change their plan by sending on the battle cruisers. Then up came Beatty's four lordly giants—Lion, Queen Mary, Invincible, New Zealand—and the outclassed Germans retired.
[Illustration: DESTROYER.]
The destroyer Defender, having sunk a German, had lowered a whaleboat to pick up survivors, when she was chased by a big German cruiser. So there, all alone, was her whaler, a mere open boat, on the enemy's part of the battlefield. But, through a swirl alongside, up came Submarine E4, opened her conning tower, took the whole boat's crew aboard, dived down again before the Germans could catch her, and landed safe home.
E9 crept in six miles south of Heligoland a fortnight later and sank the German cruiser Hela. But within a week the German von Weddigen had become the most famous of submarine commanders, for sinking no less than three British armoured cruisers with the loss of fifteen hundred men. The Aboukir, having been hit first, was closed by the Hogue and Cressy in order to save her crew. But they were themselves torpedoed before they could either see their enemy or save their friends.
Meanwhile the only German squadron overseas had been doing some daringly clever work under its first-class admiral, Graf von Spee. Leaving his worst vessels at Tsing-tao (the German port in China which was taken by the Japanese and British later on) he sailed into the vast Pacific with his seven best. On his way south he sent the Königsberg to raid the east coast of Africa and the Emden to raid the Indian Ocean. The Königsberg did a good deal of damage to merchantmen and sank the much weaker British light cruiser Pegasus, which was caught refitting at Zanzibar and was pounded into scrap iron with the loss of half her crew. But when the Königsberg made off, probably fearing the arrival of some avenging British, the Pegasus still had her colours flying, not from the mast, for that was shot away, but in the steadfast hands of two undauntable Marines.