The Briton’s island instinct—Secrecy surrounding the fleet—The magic message—The journey—A night drive along the bleak coast of Scotland—Boy scouts as sentries—An obdurate guard—The navy yard—The Admiral’s “quarter deck”—The largest contract in all England—Great dry docks—Patriots in workmen’s clothes.

The Briton’s national self-consciousness is surrounded by salt water. His island instinct is only another word for sea instinct. Ebb and flow of war on the Continent, play of party politics at home, optimism and pessimism wrestling in the press—in the back of his head he was thinking of the navy.

During the first year of the war all other curtains of military secrecy were parted at intervals; but the world of British naval operations seemed hermetically sealed. One could only imagine what the Grand Fleet was like. He had despaired of ever seeing it in the life, when good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the burrowing army in its trenches to the solid decks of battleships; which changed the war correspondent’s modern steed, the automobile, trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy seas off English coasts.

But not all the journeying was on destroyers. One must travel by car also if he would know something of the intricate, busy world of the Admiralty’s work, which makes coastguards a part of its personnel. There was more than ships to see; more than one place to go in that wonderful week.

The transition is less sudden if we begin with the career of an open car along the coast of Scotland in the night. Dusk had fallen on the purple cloud-lands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing sheep in the Scotch highlands under changing skies, with headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea, forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their “bonnie Scotland forever,” were worthy to be masters of that sea.

The Americans who think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea, of tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy behind the curtains for forty years.

At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us and took the number of our car; but this time sentries, who were guarding a navy’s rather than an army’s secrets. With darkness we passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. One wondered where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom he had seen at the front came from, without, I trust, disclosing any military secret that the canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.

The Frenchmen of our party—M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign Minister, M. RÉnÉ Bazin, of the Academie FranÇaise, M. Joseph Reinach, of the Figaro, M. Pierre Mille, of Le Temps, and M. Henri Ponsot—who had never been in Scotland before, were on the lookout for a civilian Scot in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find a single one.

That night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be moving about in England under the guise of cockney or of Lancashire dialects in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He could never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he were, once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotchman at heart.

The officer of the Royal Navy, who was in the car with me, confessed to less faith in his symbol of authority than in the generations’-bred burr of our chauffeur to carry conviction of our genuineness; so arguments were left to him and successfully, including two or three with Scotch cattle, which seemed to be co-operating with the sentries to block the road.

After an hour’s run inland and the car rose over a ridge and descended on a sharp grade, in the distance under the moonlight we saw the floor of the sea again, melting into opaqueness, with curving fringes of foam along the irregular shore cut by the indentations of the firths. Now the sentries were more frequent and more particular. Our single light gave dim form to the figures of sailors, soldiers, and boy scouts on patrol.

“They’ve done remarkably well, these boys!” said the officer. “Our fears that, boylike, they would see all kinds of things which didn’t exist were quite needless. The work has taught them a sense of responsibility which will remain with them after the war, when their experience will be a precious memory. They realise that it isn’t play, but a serious business, and act accordingly.”

With all the houses and the countryside dark, the rays of our lamp seemed an invading comet to the men who held up lanterns with red twinkles of warning.

“The patrol boats have complained about your lights, sir!” said one obdurate sentry.

We looked out into the black wall in the direction of the sea and could see no sign of a patrol boat. How had it been able to inform this lone sentry of that flying ray which disclosed the line of a coastal road to any one at sea? He would not accept the best argumentative burr that our chauffeur might produce as sufficient explanation or guarantee. Most Scottish of Scots in physiognomy and shrewd matter-of-factness, as revealed in the glare of the lantern, he might have been on watch in the Highland fastnesses in Prince Charlie’s time.

“Captain R——, of the Royal Navy!” explained the officer, introducing himself.

“I’ll take your name and address!” said the sentry.

“The Admiralty. I take the responsibility.”

“As I’ll report, sir!” said the sentry, not so convinced but he burred something further into the chauffeur’s ear. This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed, as a part of an unfathomable, complicated business of guards within guards, intelligence battling with intelligence, deceiving raiders by land or sea, of those responsible for the safety of England and the mastery of the seas.

It is from the navy yard that the ships go forth to battle and to the navy yard they must return for supplies and for the grooming beat of hammers in the dry dock. Those who work at a navy yard keep the navy’s house; welcome home all the family, from Dreadnoughts to trawlers, give them cheer and shelter, and bind up their wounds.

The quarter-deck of action for Admiral Lowry, commanding the great base on the Forth, which was begun before the war and hastened to completion since, was a substantial brick office building. Adjoining his office, where he worked with engineers’ blue prints as well as with sea maps, he had fitted up a small bedroom where he slept, to be at hand if any emergency arose.

Partly we walked, as he showed us over his domain of steam-shovels, machine shops, cement factories, of building and repairs, of coaling and docking, and partly we rode on a car that ran over temporary rails laid for trucks loaded with rocks and dirt. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, a river bottom had been filled in back of the quays with material that had been excavated to form a vast basin with cement walls, where squadrons of Dreadnoughts might rest and await their turn to be warped into the great dry docks which open off it in chasmlike galleries.

“The largest contract in all England,” said the contractor. “And here is the man who checks up my work,” he added, nodding to the lean, Scotch naval civil engineer who was with us. It was clear from his look that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency.

“And the workers? Have you had any strikes here?”

“No. We have employed double the usual number of men from the start of the war,” he said. “I’m afraid that the Welsh coal troubles have been accepted as characteristic. Our men have been reasonable and patriotic. They’ve shown the right spirit. If they hadn’t, how could we have accomplished that?”

We were looking down into the depths of a dry dock blasted out of the rock, which had been begun and completed within the year. And we had heard nothing of all this through those twelve months! No writer, no photographer, chronicled this silent labour! Double lines of guards surrounded the place day and night. Only tried patriots might enter this world of a busy army in smudged workmen’s clothes, bending to their tasks with that ordered discipline of industrialism which wears no uniforms, marches without beat of drums, and toils that the ships shall want nothing to ensure victory.