The “grande dames” of the fleet—The boarding—Nelson’s heritage—Guardians of the peace of the seas—Sir John Jellicoe—The China seas incident—The compliment returned at Manila Bay—Friends in the service—That command of Joshua’s—Waiting and watching—England’s true genius—A complete blockade—Intricate and concentrated mechanism—Personality of Sir John—The spirit of service.

Thus far we have skirted around the heart of things, which in a fleet is always the commander-in-chief’s flagship. Our handy, agile destroyer ran alongside a battleship with as much nonchalance as she would go alongside a pier. I should not have been surprised to have seen her pirouette over the hills or take to flight.

There was a time when those majestic and pampered ladies, the battleships—particularly if a sea were running as there was in this harbour at the time—having in mind the pride of paint, begged all destroyers to keep off with the superciliousness of grandes dames holding their skirts aloof from contact with nimble, audacious street gamins, who dodged in and out of the traffic of muddy streets. But destroyers have learned better manners, perhaps, and battleships have been democratised. It is the day of Russian dancers and when aeroplanes loop the loop, and we have grown used to all kinds of marvels.

But the sea has refused to be trained. It is the same old sea that it was in Columbus’ time, without any loss of trickiness in bumping small craft against towering sides. The way that this destroyer slid up to the flagship without any fuss and the way her bluejackets held off from the paint as she rose on the crests and slipped back into the trough, did not tell the whole story. A part of it was how, at the right interval, they assisted the landlubber to step from gunwale to gangway, making him feel perfectly safe when he would have been perfectly helpless but for them.

I had often watched our own bluejackets at the same thing. They did not grin—not when you were looking at them. Nor did the British. Bluejackets are noted for their official politeness. I should like to have heard their remarks—they have a gift for remarks—about those invaders of their uniformed world in Scotch caps and other kinds of caps and the different kind of clothes which tailors make for civilians. Without any intention of eavesdropping, I did overhear one asking another whence came these strange birds.

One knew the flagship by the admirals’ barges astern, as you know the location of an army headquarters by its automobiles. It seemed in the centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression. Where its place would be in action is one of those secrets as important to the enemy as the location of a general’s shell-proof shelter in Flanders. Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe may be on some other ship in battle. If there is any one foolish question which one should not ask it is this.

As one mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought one was bound to think of another flagship in Portsmouth harbour, Nelson’s Victory—at least, an American was. Probably an Englishman would not indulge in such a commonplace. One would like to know how many Englishmen had ever seen the old Victory. But, then, how many Americans have been to Mount Vernon and Gettysburg?

It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave any fighting to be done by his successors. Maintaining herself as mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength—except in the late fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France a temporary lead on paper—ship after ship, through all the grades of progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without firing a shot in anger.

The Victory was one landmark, or seamark, if you please, and this flagship was another. Between the two were generations of officers and men working through the change from stagecoach to motors and aeroplanes and seaplanes, who had kept up to a standard of efficiency in view of a test that never came. A year of war and still the test had not come, for the old reason that England had superior strength. Her outnumbering guns which had kept the peace of the seas still kept it.

All second nature to the Englishman this, as the defence of the immense distances of the steppes to the Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall and the Mississippi’s flow to the man in Kansas. But the American kept thinking about it; and he wanted the Kansans to think about it, too. A sentimentalist envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar Square, with the one-armed figure turned toward the wireless skein on top of the Admiralty Building when he went on board the flagship of Sir John Jellicoe. One first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago on the China coast, when he was Chief of Staff to Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Squadron. Indeed, one was always hearing about Jellicoe. He was the kind of man whom people talk about after they have met him, which means personality. It was in China seas, you may remember, that when a few British seamen were hard pressed in a fight that was not ours that the phrase, “Blood is thicker than water,” sprang from the lips of an American commander, who waited not on international etiquette but went to the assistance of the British.

Nor will any one who was present in the summer of ’98 forget how Sir Edward Chichester stood loyally by Admiral George Dewey, when the German squadron was empire-fishing in the waters of Manila Bay, until our Atlantic Fleet had won the battle of Santiago and Admiral Dewey had received reinforcements and, east and west, we were able to look after the Germans. The British bluejackets said that the rations of frozen mutton from Australia which we sent alongside were excellent; but the Germans were in no position to judge, as none was sent to them, doubtless through an oversight in the detail of hospitality by one of Admiral Dewey’s staff. No. Let us be officially correct. We happened to run out of spare mutton after serving the British.

In the gallant effort of the Allied force of sailors to relieve the legations against some hundreds of thousands of Boxers, Captain Bowman McCalla and his Americans worked with Admiral Seymour and his Britons in the most trying and picturesque thing of its kind in modern history. McCalla, too, was always talking of Jellicoe, who was wounded on the expedition; and Sir John’s face lighted at mention of McCalla’s name. He recalled how McCalla had painted on the superstructure of the little Newark that saying of Farragut’s, “The best protection against an enemy’s fire is a well-directed fire of your own”; which has been said in other ways and cannot be said too often.

“We called McCalla Mr. Lead,” said Sir John; “he had been wounded so many times and yet was able to hobble along and keep on fighting. I corresponded regularly with him until his death.”

Beatty, too, was on that expedition; and he, too, was another personality one kept hearing about. It seemed odd that two men, who had played a part in work which was a soldier’s far from home, should have become so conspicuous in the Great War. If on that day when, with ammunition exhausted, all members of the expedition had given up hope of ever returning alive, they had not accidentally come upon the Shi-kou arsenal, one would not be commanding the Great Fleet and the other its battle-cruiser squadron.

Before the war, I am told, when Admiralty lords and others who had the decision to make were discussing who should command in case of war, opinion ran something like this:

“Jellicoe! He has the brains!”

“Jellicoe! He has the health to endure the strain, with years enough and not too many!”

“Jellicoe! He has the confidence of the service!”

The choice literally made itself. When any one is undertaking the gravest responsibility which has been an Englishman’s for a hundred years, that kind of a recommendation helps. He had the guns; he had supreme command; he must deliver victory—such was England’s message to him.

When I mentioned in a despatch that all that differentiated him from the officers around him was the broader band of gold lace on his arm, an English naval critic wanted to know if I expected to find him in cloth of gold. No; nor in full dress with all his medals on, as I saw him appear on the screen at a theatre in London.

Any general of high command must be surrounded by more pomp than an admiral in time of action. A headquarters cannot have the simplicity of the quarter-deck. The force which the general commands is not in sight; the admiral’s is. You saw the commander and you saw what it was that he commanded. Within the sweep of vision from the quarter-deck was the terrific power which the man with the broad gold band on his arm directed. At a signal from him it would move or it would stand still. That command of Joshua’s if given by Sir John one thought might have been obeyed.

One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred twelve-inch guns and larger, which could carry a hundred tons and more of metal in a single broadside for a distance of eighteen thousand yards! But do not forget the little guns, bristling under the big guns like needles from a cushion, which would keep off the torpedo assassins; or the light cruisers, or the colliers, or the destroyers, or the 2,300 trawlers and mine-layers, and what not, all under his direction. He had submarines, too, double the number of the German. But with all the German men-of-war in harbour, they had no targets. Where were they? One did not ask questions that could not be answered. Waiting, as the whole British fleet was waiting, for the Germans to show their heads, while cruisers were abroad scouting the North Sea.

At the outset of the war the German fleet might have had one chance in ten of getting a turn of fortune of its favour by an unexpected stroke of strategy. This was the danger which Admiral Jellicoe had to guard against. For in one sense, the Germans had the tactical offensive by sea as well as by land; theirs the outward thrust from the centre. They could choose when to come out of their harbour; when to strike. The British had to keep watch all the time and be ready whenever the enemy should come.

Thus, the British Grand Fleet was at sea in the early part of the war, cruising here and there, begging for battle. Then it was that they learned how to avoid the submarines and the mine-fields. Submarines had played a greater part than expected, because Germany had chosen a guerrilla naval warfare: to harass, to wound, to wear down. Doubtless she hoped to reduce the number of British fighting units by attrition.

Weak England might be in plants for making arms for an army, but not in ship-building. Here was her true genius. She was a maritime power; Germany a land-power. Her part as an ally of France and Russia being to command the sea, all demands of the Admiralty for material must take precedence over demands of the War Office. At the end of the first year she had increased her fighting power by sea to a still higher ratio of preponderance over the Germans; in another year she would increase it further.

Admiral von Tirpitz wanted nothing so much as to draw the British fleet under the guns of Heligoland or into a mine-field and submarine trap. But Sir John Jellicoe refused the bait. When he had completed his precautions and his organisation to meet all new conditions, his fleet need not go into the open. His Dreadnoughts could rest at anchor at a base while his scouts kept in touch with all that was passing and his auxiliaries and destroyers fought the submarines. Without a British Dreadnought having fired a shot at a German Dreadnought, nowhere on the face of the seas might a single vessel show the German flag except by thrusting it above the water for a few minutes.

If von Tirpitz sent his fleet out he, too, might find himself in a trap of mines and submarines. He was losing submarines and England was building more. His naval force rather than Sir John’s was suffering from attrition. The blockade was complete from Iceland to the North Sea. While the world knew of the work of the armies, the care that this task required, the hardships endured, the enormous expenditure of energy, were all hidden behind that veil of secrecy which obviously must be more closely drawn over naval than over army operations.

From this flagship the campaign was directed. One would think that many offices and many clerks would be required. But the offices and the clerks were at the Admiralty. Here was the execution. In a room perhaps four feet by six was the wireless focus which received all the reports and sent all the orders, with trim bluejackets at the keys. “Go!” and “Come!” the messages were saying; they wasted no words. Officers of the staff did their work in narrow space, yet seemed to have plenty of room. Red tape is inflammable. There is no more place for it on board a flagship prepared for action than for unnecessary woodwork.

At every turn the compression and the concentration of power were like the guns and the decks cleared for action in their significant directness of purpose. The system was planetary in its impressive simplicity, the more striking as nothing that man has ever made is more complicated or includes more kinds of machinery than a battleship. One battleship was one unit, one chessman on the naval board.

Not all famous leaders are likeable, as every world traveller knows. They all have the magnetism of force, which is quite another thing from the magnetism of charm. What the public demands is that they shall win victories, whether personally likeable or not. But if they are likeable and simple and human in the bargain and a sailor besides—well, we know what that means.

Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe is not a great man. It is not for a civilian even to presume to judge. We have the word of those who ought to know, however, that he is. I hope that he is, because I like to think that great commanders need not necessarily appear formidable. Nelson refused to be cast for the heavy part, and so did Farragut. It may be a sailor characteristic. I predict that after this war is over, whatever honours or titles they may bestow on him, the English are going to like Sir John Jellicoe not alone for his service to the nation, but for himself.

Admiral Jellicoe is one with Captain Jellicoe, whose cheeriness even when wounded kept up the spirits of the others on the Relief Expedition of Boxer days. “He could do it, too!” one thought, having in mind Sir David Beatty’s leap to the deck of a destroyer. Spare, of medium height, ruddy, and fifty-seven. So much for the health qualification which the Admiralty lords dwelt upon as important. After he had been at sea for a year he seemed a human machine, much of the type of that destroyer as a steel machine—a thirty-knot human machine, capable of three hundred or five hundred revolutions, engines running smoothly, with no waste energy, slipping over the waves and cutting through them; a quick man, quick of movement, quick of comprehension and observation, of speech and of thought, with a delightful self-possession—for there are many kinds—which is instantly responsive with decision.

A telescope under his arm, too, as he received his guests. One liked that. He keeps watch over the fleet himself when he is on the quarter-deck. One had a feeling that nothing could happen in all his range of vision, stretching down the “avenues of Dreadnoughts” to the light-cruiser squadron, and escape his attention. It hardly seems possible that he was ever bored. Everything around him interests him. Energy he has, electric energy in this electric age, this man chosen to command the greatest war product of modern energy.

Fastened to the superstructure near the ladder to his quarters was a new broom which South Africa had sent him. He was highly pleased with that present; only the broom was von Tromp’s emblem, while Blake’s had been the whip. Possibly the South African Dutchmen, now fighting on England’s side, knew that he already had the whip and they wanted him to have the Dutch broom, too.

He had been using both, and many other devices in his campaign against von Tirpitz’ “unter see boots,” which was illustrated by one of the maps hung in his cabin. Quite different this from maps in a general’s headquarters, with the front trenches and support and reserve trenches and gun-positions marked in vari-coloured pencillings. Instantly a submarine was sighted anywhere, Sir John had word of it, and another dot went down on the spot where it had been seen. In places the sea looked like a pepper-box cover. Dots were plentiful outside the harbour where we were; but well outside, like flies around sugar which they could not reach.

Seeing Sir John among his admirals and guests one had a glimpse of the life of a sort of mysterious, busy brotherhood. I was still searching for an admiral with white hair. If there were none among these seniors, then all must be on shore. Spirit, I think, that is the word; the spirit of youth, of corps, of service, of the sea, of a ready, buoyant definiteness—yes, spirit was the word to characterise them. Sir John moved from one to another in his quick way, asking a question, listening, giving a direction, his face smiling and expressive with a sort of infectious confidence.

“He is the man!” said an admiral. I mean, several admirals and captains said so. They seemed to like to say it. Whenever he approached one noted an eagerness, a tightening of nerves. Natural leadership expresses itself in many ways; Sir John gave it a sailor’s attractiveness. But I learned that there was steel under his happy smile; and they liked him for that, too. Watch out when he is not smiling, and sometimes when he is smiling, they say.

For failure is never excused in that fleet, as more than one commander knows. It is a luxury of consideration which the British nation cannot afford by sea in time of war. The scene which one witnessed in the cabin of the Dreadnought flagship could not have been unlike that of Nelson and his young captains on the Victory, in the animation of youth governed with only one thought under the one rule that you must make good.

Splendid as the sight of the power which Sir John directed from his quarter-deck while the ships lay still in their plotted moorings, it paled beside that when the anchor chains began to rumble and, column by column, they took on life slowly and majestically gaining speed one after another turned toward the harbour’s entrance.