The communications of the Great Alliance—it is their point of vulnerability—are sea communications, and if that key-stone slips

From the first the Central Powers held the splendid advantage of the interior and shorter lines. Theirs were the spokes of the wheel, the spokes along which run the railways. On the circumference of the wheel held by the Alliance, on the rim of ocean, went and came all things—men and the interminable machinery of war. The Allied and far longer lines therefore on the arc of an immense circle traverse the sea from Archangel to Gibraltar; from Gibraltar to Suez or the Cape; from Suez to Colombo; from Colombo to Melbourne; from Melbourne to Vladivostok. Nothing less was here required than a railroad belting the globe, whose rolling stock was ships. And the problem faced by Britain, as the great maritime partner in the alliance of 1913, remains essentially a problem of sea transport, and transport on a scale wholly without parallel in the world's history. Since Britain herself had never dreamt of raising an army of five million men, provision for the bridge of boats required for such numbers, with all their battle apparatus, had found no place in her plans. But she had ships and sailors.

"We have just returned here after making three trips with troops from Southampton to France," wrote an officer. "It was really marvellous work. Southampton was full of troop ships and like clock work they were handled. Every ship had a number allotted to her and a special signal. One ship would arrive alongside, fill up her holds and decks, and, in less than half-an-hour, she was away again. As soon as they got one vessel off her berth, up would go the signal for another steamer to take her place, and so the work went on. Ship followed ship off the port like a line of vessels manoeuvring. Orders came for 94 to go alongside. Up went the signal, and in less time than it takes one to write, we were following the rest."

The ferrying of vast human and material cargoes across the Channel—an undertaking one might think serious enough—was in fact a trifle compared with the undertaking as a whole; for, since the recruiting areas for Britain's forces lay in every latitude, there fell within it the transference of great bodies of troops from Australia and New Zealand across 10,000 miles of ocean, from India across 6,000 miles; from Canada, more than 2,000 miles away, and not, be it remembered, a transference to Britain or France only but to Egypt, the Persian Gulf, the Dardanelles, Salonika; a transference continuous, unending, processional.

"It is not only a war with Germany," said Sir Edward Carson. "You have a war—a naval war—going on over the whole of the seas—war in the Channel, war in the Atlantic, war in the Pacific, war in the Mediterranean, war round Egypt, war in the Adriatic, war in Mesopotamia, war at Salonika, and day by day the Navy is called upon to supply the material for carrying on all these wars. Did anybody ever contemplate a war of that kind? When I mention one figure to you that at the commencement of the war we had something like 150 small vessels for patrol work, and now we have something like 3,000, you will see the gigantic feat that has been accomplished by the Navy. In all these theatres of war we have to provide patrols, convoys, mine-sweepers, mine-layers, air service, mine-carriers, fleet messengers."

Owing to the demands of the Royal Navy upon the shipyards additions to mercantile tonnage were out of the question. With the ordinary resources of peace the vast unapprehended responsibilities of war had to be met. There was no other way. Besides the armies and the great guns, the various belligerent zones called for hundreds of miles of railroad with engines and rolling stock complete; horses and mules and their fodder; cargoes of wood for trench making; river boats in sections for the Persian Gulf; motor lorries, literally in thousands; material and food for whole moving populations and their multiform activities.

"During the last five or six weeks," said Sir William Robertson on May 12, "we have expended no less than 200,000 tons of munitions in France alone, and we have taken out some 50,000 tons of stones for making and mending roads." "Everything has been taken ashore," wrote an officer on transport service in the East, "by lighters and rafts. The major part of our cargo is railway material, cattle trucks, ambulance vans, oxen, horses, mules, fodder, ammunition and troops. We have a mixture of everything necessary for warfare from 'a needle to an elephant.'"

Think also of the coal, carried overseas to the Allies; nitrates shipped from South, munitions from North America; ore from Spain and the Mediterranean; and contemplate the dizzy shuffling on the high seas of these mighty freights. All the while the needs of peace remained inexorable. The sugar and the wheat, the cotton, coffee and all the other requirements of the home population of these islands had still unceasingly to be provided. The mind refuses to calculate in these dimensions; our foot-rules will not measure them. Let us however write down the unthinkable figures. Eight millions of men; ten million tons of supplies and explosives; over a million sick and wounded; over a million horses and mules; fifty million gallons of petrol alone. These of course are merely the additional undertakings of war. To complete the picture one has to include ordinary imports and exports, such trifles as 100 million hundredweights of wheat; seven million tons of iron ore; 21 million centals of cotton—the figures for 1916. For the same 12 months the value of the home products exported was 500 millions. British ships have been busy in these thundering years!

But the Allies, you will say, assisted. France had 360 ocean-going vessels; Italy about the same number; Russia 174; Belgium 67. No doubt, yet these nations were nevertheless borrowers, not lenders. Their ships were far from sufficient for their own necessities, and to France, Britain despite her own searching requirements, lent about 600 ships, to Italy about 400, a sixth of her own far from adequate supply. "Without our Mercantile Marine the Navy—and indeed—the nation—could not exist," said Admiral Jellicoe. One perceives the truth of it. But the tale does not end there. About a hundred merchant ships were commissioned as auxiliary cruisers, and armed with guns like the Carmania took their share in the fighting. The Empress of Japan captured the collier Exford, the Macedonia rounded up the transports accompanying Von Spee, the Orama was in at the death of Dresden. Colliers too are needed for the Royal Navy; supply and repair ships; auxiliaries for the fighting flotillas and the great blockade patrol. Extending from the Shetlands to the coast of Greenland and the Arctic ice a wide net had to be flung whose meshes were British ships. And yet again in the narrow seas and in the defiles of the trade routes, day in day out, the British trawlers—fleets of them—swept for the German mines.

What were, in fact, the maritime resources that made these things at all possible? At the outbreak of war Britain possessed over 10,000 ships, and of these about 4,000 ocean-going ships were over 1,600 tons; of smaller ocean traders there were about 1,000. Add to these the fishing trawlers and drifters, over 3,000 of which are now in Government employ. Gradually the traders were requisitioned, at first for military then for national purposes. Sugar was the first article for which Government took responsibility, first and early. Then came wheat, maize, rice and other grains. To these were added month by month many other commodities of which the authorities took charge and for which they found the necessary tonnage. The pool of free ships diminished, contracted to narrow limits and finally dried up. Britain's shipping virtually passed in 1916 wholly under national control. That is in brief the history of the ships; but what of the crews? What of the men and their willingness to serve under war conditions, surrounded by deadly risks. If we include over 100,000 fishermen, the marine population of the empire may be reckoned at not less than 300,000 men. Of these 170,000 are British seamen; 50,000 are Lascars, and 30,000 belong to other nationalities. There you have the absolute total of sea-farers, to whose numbers, owing to their way of life and the peculiarity of their profession it is impossible during war rapidly or greatly to add. No other reservoir of such skill and experience as theirs can anywhere be found. Perhaps the most valuable community in the world to-day and certainly irreplaceable. Means of replenishing it there is none. A Royal Commission appointed in 1858 reported that the nation "possesses in the Merchant Service elements of naval power such as no other Government enjoys," and in 1860 the Royal Naval Reserve Act was passed, by which the Royal Naval Volunteers became the Royal Naval Reserve, and a force enrolled which, though inadequate in numbers, has proved of inestimable value. The Royal Naval Reserve man signs on for a term of 5 years; undergoes each year a short period of training, and reports himself twice a year to the authorities. While in training he receives navy pay and a retaining fee of £4.10. a year during service as a merchant seaman. Twenty years' service qualifies for a pension and a medal. Belonging to this force there were at the outbreak of the war about 18,500 officers and men available, but the number of merchant sailors and fishermen serving with the combatant forces has been trebled and now stands at 62,500. Add to these another 100,000 merchant sailors who, since they share all the risks of a war with an enemy that makes no distinction between belligerents and non-combatants, may well be included among Britain's defenders, and one begins to perceive the true nature and extent of the nation's maritime resources and the utter dependence upon these resources of an island kingdom—the vulnerable heart of a sea sundered empire. In 1893 the Imperial Merchant Service Guild had been established, a body, the value of whose services, already notable, cannot yet be fully calculated. To it, and to the profession it represents, the nation will yet do justice. For the professional skill and invincible courage of her merchant seamen has at length made clear to Britain the secret of her strength; the knowledge that to them she owes her place and power in the world. She has found in them the same skill and the same courage with which their forefathers sailed and fought in all the country's earlier wars. "The submarine scare," said the Deutsche Tageszeitung, "has struck England with paralysing effect, and the whole sea is as if swept clean at one blow." To this one answers that the sailing of no British ship has been delayed by an hour by fear of the submarine menace. If the sea be indeed swept clear of ships how strange that every week records its batch of victims! A sufficient testimony, one would think, to their presence, and, might not one add, of equal eloquence in their praise. It was assumed—a magnificent assumption—that a British crew could never fail. It never did. The Vedamore was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland, and most of her crew killed or drowned. In wild and wintry weather the survivors, 16 in all, after many hours' exposure in open boats, made a successful landing. These 16 reached London and proposed, you will say, to snatch a few days' rest, a little comfort after their miseries. Their object was a different one:—to ask for a new ship. "Had enough?" one of the crew of the torpedoed Southland was asked, when he came ashore. "Not me," he replied, "I shall be off again as soon as I can find a berth." "If," said one torpedoed seaman, "there were fifty times the number of submarines it wouldn't make no difference to us. While there's a ship afloat there will be plenty to man her. My mates and I were torpedoed a fortnight ago and just as soon as we get another ship we shall be off." She has her faults, has Britain, but she still breeds men: And mothers of men. Take the authentic circumstance of the vessel whose crew was not of British stock. They declined when safely in port to undertake another and risky voyage. But there appeared to them next day an Englishwoman, the Captain's wife, with the announcement, perhaps unwelcome, that she proposed on that trip to accompany her husband. She went; and with her, for their manhood's sake, the reluctant crew.

You may say "It is not in nature that there should have been no failures." Well, here is one. "Only a short while ago," said Mr. Cuthbert Laws, "we found it necessary to prosecute a seaman who had failed to join a transport, and there was no doubt that he was technically guilty, but he set up and successfully sustained a defence which is unique in the annals of the Mercantile Marine. He admitted that he had failed to join the vessel, but he said that his reason for doing so was that his shipmates refused to sail with him because he had already been torpedoed six times. In other words, while they were prepared to take the ordinary sporting chance of being blown up, they were not prepared to accept the handicap of having a Jonah on board."

The story of docks and harbours, of the loading and unloading of the war freights merits a chapter of its own. To understand it you must remember that ships are of many sizes and of very varying draught. The depths of water in the ports, the tides, the quay accommodation, the provision of cranes and sorting sheds, of available railway trucks have in each case to be considered. Grain requires one type of machinery for unloading, timber another, fruit or meat yet another. If the cargo be mixed and consigned perhaps to hundreds of dealers, in various parts of the country, sorting sheds are a necessity. Many harbours provide only for small coasting craft and cannot accommodate large ocean traders, many are affected by tide and quite unprovided with docks; others again lack quay and truck accommodation save of the simplest order. There is also the problem of dock labourers, men skilled in the handling of particular types of cargo. Manifestly you cannot order any ship to any port. Vessels must therefore run to their usual harbours and to provide the machinery for "turning them" rapidly round presents, under the congested conditions of war, a problem of extreme complexity. Heavy munition trains, miles upon miles of them, are daily pouring into the Southern ports. Great guns, railway trucks and engines and rails form a part of these stupendous freights. There are many harbours in the South but few capable of berthing, loading and unloading the largest liners, and if we would criticise these operations, and free criticism of them has been, after our national manner, plentiful, we should understand that to the transport work of peace that of the greatest of wars has been added, and understand too that the shipping problem involves much more than ships, and requires to-day something like the higher mathematics for its solution.

"Both are now one service in spirit," wrote Admiral Jellicoe of the Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marine, "and never have British seamen united in a more stern and mighty cause." Say what we will, be it in prose or verse, it falls short of their deserving. The merchant sailor and the fisherman has had his share in the fighting and more than his share in the labours of the war. They took part in Jutland and the earlier battles. Some are in command of destroyers and torpedo boats, others of vessels on the blockade patrol or of submarine chasers; others again of transport and repair ships. On mine carriers and mine sweepers they serve; on paddle steamers and panting tug boats; on water ships and balloon ships; on salvage and escort work. They are to be found on trawlers and drifters and motor craft; on captured German steamers, now playfully renamed, the Hun line,—Hun-gerford, Hun-stanton; on oilers and colliers and meat ships, in the North Sea and Mediterranean and the distant oceans; on transport and repair, on observation and remount and hospital vessels everywhere. They gathered the great armies from the ends of the earth, they fuel and munition the Grand Fleet; the Suez Canal knows them and the Royal Indian Marine and the African rivers. No sea that has not seen them, "no climate that is not witness to their toils." For proof that they are a pugnacious breed read the story of the Gallipoli landings, where Commander Unwin and Midshipman Drewry won each his Victoria Cross, where supplies were daily put ashore under the shrapnel fire from Turkish batteries; read the story of Carmania's fight with Cap Trafalgar; of Clan McTavish and her spirited combat with MÖwe, which filled the seamen of the Grand Fleet with delighted admiration. Read of the whalers in Sudi harbour, of the attacks on Jubassi in the Cameroons; of the actions on the Tigris and Rafigi rivers, in all which actions officers of the Merchant Service distinguished themselves. Called upon for every type of action, navigating under war conditions by lightless coasts, responsible for new and strange undertakings, in armed or defenceless craft, on the bridge of sinking ships or adrift in open boats, the fearless spirit of the British sailor meets the occasion, and as with his ancestor and prototype of the Viking times, the harder the enterprise the harder grows his heart.

It is good for us now and then to contemplate men nobler than ourselves; to be told that volunteers over 60 years of age paid their own passage from Australia to serve afloat, that there is at least one engineer—and a health to him—of over 80 with a commission in the Royal Naval Reserve. For who is there so dead at heart as not to covet so springing and mounting a spirit? "I have taken the depth of the water," said Admiral Duncan in the engagement off the Texel, "and when the Venerable goes down, my flag will still fly."

There is something in it, this companionship with the sea, that kindles what is heroic in a race to the finest resolution. Perhaps it is not to be expected that we shore-dwellers should have more than a languid appreciation of hardships and labours indescribable and should read tales of the sea rather for pleasure than edification, but if ever a people had masters in the school of nobility we are fortunate in our teachers of to-day. Already over 3,000 men and officers of the Royal Naval Reserve have fallen in their country's service, and of Merchant Sailors pursuing their ordinary calling not fewer. Born fighters, you will say, the English. Yes, but these men died most of them without hope of glory.

When Captain Wicks of the Straton dashed in among the wreckage of the sinking Runo and assisted in the saving of 200 lives, the look-out man shouted to him "Two mines right ahead, sir." "Can't be helped," replied the Captain, "it is risking lives to save lives." Which is indeed in a sentence the daily task, whatever or wherever the allotted posts of these cavaliers of the sea. The day dawns or the night descends, to find them on the bridge or in the engine-room, North or South of the Line, running the grim gauntlet of murderous things that the sea, with all its grey ages of experience, never before has known.