It is probable that a good deal of the information contained in this book will be new to the public; for it has been collected under favour of exceptional circumstances. But the reader will gain little if he cannot contribute something on his side—if he cannot share with the writer certain fundamental beliefs. The first of these is that every nation has a spirit of its own—a spirit which is the mainspring of national action. It is more than a mechanical spring; for it not only supplies a motive force, but determines the moral character of the action which results. When we read the history of nations, and especially the history of their explorations, wars, and revolutions, we soon recognise the spirit of each, and learn to expect its appearance in every moment of crisis or endurance. If it duly appears, our impression is confirmed; if it fails on any occasion, we are disappointed. But the disappointments are few—nations may at times surprise us; but, as a rule, they are like themselves. Even when they develop and seem to change, they are apt, under the stress of action, to return to their aboriginal character, and to exhibit it in their old historic fashion. To attempt, then, to give an account of any national struggle, without paying attention to the influence of the characteristic spirit of the country or countries concerned, would be a difficult undertaking, and a mistaken one. Even in a short crisis, a great people will probably display its historic colours, and in a long one it certainly will. To ignore this, to describe national actions without giving a sense of the animating spirit, would be not only a tame and inadequate method; it would lower the value of life itself by making mere prose of what should, by right, partake of the nature of poetry. History cannot often be entirely poetical, or poetry entirely historical. When Homer told the tale of Troy, he did not make prose—or even history—of it. He everywhere infused into it ‘an incomparable ardour’—he made an epic. But Mr. Thomas Hardy wrote history in ‘The Dynasts,’ and made it an epic too. An epic—the common definition tells us—is ‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style.’ ‘The Dynasts’ certainly is that—the struggle is great, the issues are great, the men are great. Even more than their heroic fighting, their speech and manners in the moment of action are such as to show unfailingly by what a distinctive and ever-present spirit national life may be sustained and magnified.

When we come to nearer times, and more familiar events, the same necessity is upon us. What writer of artistic sense, or scientific honesty, would touch, for example, the history of modern Egypt without attempting to understand the character of such men as Gordon and Cromer, and the spirit which (however personal and diverse in its manifestations) they both drew from the nation that sent them forth? Such an understanding would enable the narrator to carry us all with him. For every man of our national birth and breeding would feel, when he was told the story of such heroes, not only their superiority but their likeness to himself. ‘There,’ he would say, ‘but for lack of fortune, or opportunity, or courage, or stature, there goes John Smith.’ It is admiration which helps us to feel that, and a mean spirit which conceals it from us.

Further, it is my belief that the historian who would deal adequately with our present War must have an even wider understanding and sympathy. He must have a broad enough view to recognise all the various motives which impelled us, section by section, to enter the struggle; and a deep enough insight to perceive that, below all motives which can be expressed or debated in words, there was an instinct—a spontaneous emotion—which irresistibly stirred the majority of our people, and made us a practically unanimous nation. He must be able to see that this unanimity was no freak—no sudden outburst—but the natural fulfilment of a strong and long-trained national character; and he must trace, with grateful admiration, the national service contributed by many diverse classes, and by a large number of distinguished men—the leaders and patterns of the rest. However scientific the historian’s judgments, and however restrained his style, it must be impossible for any reader to miss the real point of the narrative—the greatness of the free nations, and the nobility of their heroes. Belgians, Serbians, French, Italians, Americans—all must hear their great men honoured, and their corporate virtues generously recognised. We Britons, for our own part, must feel, at every mention of the names of our champions, the fine sting of the invisible fire with which true glory burns the heart. It must never be possible to read, without an uplifting of the spirit, the achievements of commanders like Smith-Dorrien, Haig, and Birdwood—Plumer and Rawlinson, Allenby and Byng, and Horne; or the fate of Cradock and Kitchener; or the sea-fights of Beatty and Sturdee, of Keyes and Tyrwhitt. It must be clear, from the beginning to the end of the vast record, that the British blood has equalled and surpassed its ancient fame—that in every rank the old virtues of courage, coolness, and endurance, of ordered energy and human kindliness, have been, not the occasional distinction, but the common characteristics of our men. Look where you will on the scene of war, you must be shown ‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style’—fit, at least, to indicate the greatness of the national spirit.

In this book our concern is with the war at sea, and with a part only of that gigantic effort. But of this part, every word that has been said holds good. The submarine and anti-submarine campaign is not a series of minor operations. Its history is not a mere episode among chapters of greater significance. On the contrary, the fate of Britain, and the fate of Germany, were speedily seen to be staked upon the issue of this particular contest, as they have been staked upon no other part of the world-wide struggle. The entrance of America into the fellowship of nations was involved in it. The future of civilisation depends upon it. Moreover, in its course the British seaman has shown himself possessed, in the highest degree, of the qualities by which his forefathers conquered and kept our naval predominance; and finally, it is in the submarine war that we see most sharply the contrast of the spirit of chivalry with the spirit of savagery; of the law of humanity with the lawlessness of brute force; of the possible redemption of social life with its irretrievable degradation. It is a subject worthy, thrice over, of treatment in a national epic.

The present book is not an epic—it is not a poetical work at all. Half of it is mere technical detail; and the rest plain fact plainly told. But it is far from my intention that the sense of admiration for national heroes, or the recognition of national greatness, shall be absent from it. I have used few epithets; for they seemed to me needless and inadequate. The stories of the voyages and adventures of our own submarines, and of the fighting of our men against the pirates, need no heightening. They need only to be read and understood; and it is chiefly with a view to their better understanding, that the reader is offered a certain amount of comment and description in the earlier chapters. But a suggestion or two may be made here, at the very beginning, in the hope of starting a train of thought which may accompany the narrative with a whisper of historic continuity—a reminder that as with men, so with nations—none becomes utterly base on a sudden, or utterly heroic. Their vices and their virtues are the harvesting of their past.

Let us take a single virtue, like courage, which is common to all nations but shows under a different form or colour in each, and so becomes a national characteristic, plainly visible in action. A historical study of British courage would, I believe, show two facts: first, that the peculiar quality of it has persisted for centuries; and, secondly, that if our people have changed at all in this respect, they have only changed in the direction of greater uniformity. Once they had two kinds of courage in war; now they have but one, and that by far the better one. In the old days, among the cool and determined captains of our race, there were always a certain number of hot heads—‘men of courage without discipline, of enthusiasm without reason, of will without science.’ The best of them, like Sir Richard Grenville, had the luck to die conspicuously, in their great moments, and so to leave us an example of the spirit that defies odds, and sets men above the fear of death. The rest led their men into mad adventures, where they perished to the injury of their cause. Most Englishmen can understand the pure joy of onset, the freedom of the moment when everything has been given for the hope of winning one objective; but it has been the more characteristic way of our people—at any rate for the last five centuries—to double courage with coolness, and fight not only their hardest but their best. From Cressy to Waterloo, and from Mons to Arras, we have won many battles by standing steadily and shooting the attack to pieces. Charges our men have made, but under discipline and in the nick of opportunity. The Black Prince charged fiercely at Poitiers; but it was only when he had broken three attacks, and saw his chance to win. The charge of the Worcesters at Gheluvelt, the charge of the Oxfords at Nonneboschen, and a hundred more like them, were as desperate as any ‘ride of death’; but they were neither reckless nor useless, they were simply the heroic move to win the game. Still more is this the rule at sea. Beatty at Jutland, like Nelson and Collingwood at Trafalgar, played an opening in which he personally risked annihilation; but nothing was ever done with greater coolness, or more admirable science. The perfect picture of all courage is, perhaps, a great British war-ship in action; for there you have, among a thousand men, one spirit of elation, of fearlessness, of determination, backed by trained skill and a self-forgetful desire to apply it in the critical moment. The submarine, and the anti-submarine ship, trawler or patrol-boat are, on a smaller scale, equally perfect examples; for there is no hour of their cruise when they are not within call of the critical moment. In the trenches, in the air, in the fleet, you will see the same steady skilful British courage almost universally exemplified. But in the submarine war, the discipline needed is even more absolute, the skill even more delicate, the ardour even more continuous and self-forgetful; and all these demands are even more completely fulfilled.

This is fortunate, and doubly fortunate; for the submarine war has proved to be the main battlefield of our spiritual crusade, as well as a vital military campaign. The men engaged in it have been marked out by fate, as our champions in the contest of ideals. They are the patterns and defenders of human nature in war, against those who preach and practise barbarism. Here—and nowhere else so clearly as here—the world has seen the death struggle between the two spirits now contending for the future of mankind. Between the old chivalry, and the new savagery, there can be no more truce; one of the two must go under, and the barbarians knew it when they cried Weltmacht oder Niedergang. Of the spirit of the German nation it is not necessary to say much. Everything that could be charged against them has been already proved, by their own words and actions. They have sunk without warning women and children, doctors and nurses, neutrals and wounded men, not by tens or hundreds but by thousands. They have publicly rejoiced over these murders with medals and flags, with songs and school holidays. They have not only broken the rules of international law; they have with unparalleled cruelty, after sinking even neutral ships, shot and drowned the crews in open boats, that they might leave no trace of their crimes. The men who have done—and are still doing—these things have courage of a kind. They face danger and hardship to a certain point, though, by their own account, in the last extreme they fail to show the dignity and sanity with which our own men meet death. But their peculiar defect is not one of nerve, but of spirit. They lack that instinct which, with all civilised races, intervenes, even in the most violent moment of conflict or desperation, and reminds the combatant that there are blows which it is not lawful to strike in any circumstances whatever. This instinct—the religion of all chivalrous peoples—is connected by some with humanity, by some with courtesy, by ourselves with sport. In this matter we are all in the right. The savage in conflict thinks of nothing but his own violent will; the civilised and the chivalrous are always conscious of the fact that there are other rights in the world beside their own. The humane man forbears his enemy; the courteous man respects him, as one with rights like his own; the man with the instinct of sport knows that he must not snatch success by destroying the very game itself. The civilised nation will not hack its way to victory through the ruins of human life. It will be restrained, if by no other consideration, yet at least by the recollection that it is but one member of a human fellowship, and that the greatness of a part can never be achieved by the corruption of the whole.

The German nature is not only devoid of this instinct, it is roused to fury by the thought of it. Any act, however cruel and barbarous, if only it tends to defeat the enemies of Germany, is a good deed, a brave act, and to be commended. The German general who lays this down is supported by the German professor who adds: ‘The spontaneous and elementary hatred towards England is rooted in the deepest depths of our own being—there, where considerations of reason do not count, where the irrational, the instinct, alone dominates. We hate in the English the hostile principle of our innermost and highest nature. And it is well that we are fully aware of this, because we touch therein the vital meaning of this War.’ Before the end comes, the barbarian will find this hostile principle, and will hate it, in the French, the Italians, the Americans—in the whole fellowship of nations against which he is fighting with savage fury. But, to our satisfaction, he has singled us out first; for, when we hear him, we too are conscious of a spontaneous hatred in the depths of our being; and we see that in this we do ‘touch the vital meaning of this War.’