The test of perfect motion—Is the fleet bottled by submarines?—The message arrives—The sea-march of dull-toned unadorned power—Destroyers in the van—The majestic procession of battleships—The secret in sheer hard work—The sea-lion on the hunt—The “old” Dreadnought—The exotic Turk—An hour and still passing—Irresistible power—Visualizing the whole globe, safe behind that fleet—Back in London—The Zeppelin’s pitiable target—Meaning of British dominion—A German comparison.

There is another test besides that of gun drills and target practice which reflects the efficiency of individual ships, and the larger the number of ships the more important it is. For the business of a fleet is to go to sea. At anchor it is in garrison rather than on campaign, an assembly of floating forts. Navies one has seen which seemed excellent when in harbour, but when they started to get under way the result was hardly reassuring. Some erring sister fouled her anchor chain; another had engine room trouble; another lagged for some other reason; there was fidgeting on the bridges. Then one asked, What if a summons to battle had come?

Our own officers were authority enough for me that the British had no superiors in any of the tests. But strange reports dodged in and out of the alleys of pessimism in the company of German insistence that the Tiger and other ships which one saw afloat had been sunk. Was the fleet really held prisoner by fear of submarines? If it could go and come freely when it chose, the harbour was the place for it while it waited. If not, then, indeed, the submarine had revolutionised naval warfare. Admiral Jellicoe might lose some of his battleships before he could ever go into action against von Tirpitz.

“Oh, to hear the hoarse rattle of the anchor chains!” I kept thinking while I was with the fleet. “Oh, to see all those monsters on the move!”

A vain wish it seemed, but it came true. A message from the Admiralty arrived while we were on the flagship. Admiral Jellicoe called his flag secretary, spoke a word to him, which was passed in a twinkling from flagship to squadron and division and ship. He made it as simple as ordering his barge alongside, this sending of the Grand Fleet to sea.

From the bridge of a destroyer beyond the harbour entrance we saw it go. I shall not attempt to describe the spectacle, which convinced me that language is the vehicle for making small things seem great and great things seem small. If you wish words invite splendid and magnificent and overwhelming and all the reliable old friends to come forth in glad apparel from the dictionary. Personally, I was inarticulate at sight of that sea march of dull-toned, unadorned power.

First came the outriders of majesty, the destroyers; then the graceful light cruisers. How many destroyers has the British navy? I am only certain that it has not as many as it seems to have, which would mean thousands. Trying to count them is like trying to count the bees in the garden. You cannot keep your eye on the individual bees. You are bound to count some twice, so busy are their manoeuvres.

“Don’t you worry, great ladies!” one imagined the destroyers were saying to the battleships. “We will clear the road. We will keep watch against snipers and assassins.”

“And if any knocks are coming, we will take them for you, great ladies!” said the cruisers. “If one of us went down, the loss would not be great. Keep your big guns safe to beat other battleships into scrap.”

For you may be sure that Fritz was on the watch in the open. He always is, like the highwayman hiding behind a hedge and envying people who have comfortable beds. Probably from a distance he had a peek through his periscope at the Grand Fleet before the approach of the policeman destroyers made him duck beneath the water; and probably he tried to count the number of ships and identify their classes in order to take the information home to Kiel. Besides, he always has his fingers crossed. He hopes that some day he may get a shot at something more warlike than a merchant steamer or an auxiliary; only that prospect becomes poorer as life for him grows harder. Except a miracle happened, the steaming fleet, with its cordons of destroyers, is as safe from him as from any other kind of fish.

The harbour which is the fleet’s home is landlocked by low hills. There is an eclipse of the sun by the smoke from the ships getting under way; streaming, soaring columns of smoke on the move rise above the skyline from the funnels of the battleships before they appear in sight around a bend. Indefinite masses as yet they are, under their night-black plumes. Each ship seems too immense to respond to any will except its own. There is something automatic in the regularity with which, one after another, they take the bend, as if a stop watch had been held on twenty thousand tons of steel for a second’s variation. As they approach they become more distinct and, showing less smoke, there seems less effort. Their motive-power seems inherent, perpetual.

There is some sea running outside the entrance, enough to make a destroyer roll. But the battleships disdain any notice of its existence. It is no more to them than a ripple of dust to a motor truck. They plough through it.

Though you were within twenty yards of them you would feel quite safe. An express train was in no more danger of jumping the track. Mast in line with mast, they held the course with a majestic steadiness. Now the leading ship makes a turn of a few points. At the same spot, as if it were marked by the grooves of tires in a road, the others make it. Any variation of speed between them would have been instantly noticeable, as one forged ahead or lagged; but the distance between bows and sterns did not change. A line of one length would do for each interval so far as one could discern. It was difficult to think that they were not attached to some taut moving cable under water. How could such apparently unwieldy monsters, in such a slippery element as the sea, be made to obey their masters with such fine precision?

The answer again is sheer hard work! Drills as arduous in the engine room as at the guns; machinery kept in tune; traditions in manoeuvring in all weathers, which are kept up with tireless practice.

Though all seemed perfection to the lay eye, let it be repeated that this was not so to the eyes of admirals. It never can be. Perfection is the thing striven for. Officers dwell on faults; all are critics. Thus you have the healthiest kind of spirit, which means that there will be no cessation in the striving. “Look at that!” exclaimed an officer on the destroyer. “They better try another painting on her and see if they can’t do better.”

Ever changing that northern light. For an instant the sun’s rays, strained by a patch of peculiar cloud, playing on a Dreadnought’s side made her colour appear molten, exaggerating her size till she seemed as colossal to the eye as to the thought.

“But look, now!” said another officer. She was out of the patch and seemed miles farther away to the vision, a dim shape in the sea-haze.

“You can’t have it right for every atmospheric mood of the North Sea, I suppose!” muttered the critic. Still, it hurt his professional pride that a battleship should show up as such a glaring target even for a moment.

The power of the fleet was more patent in movement than at rest; for the sea-lion was out of his lair on the hunt. Fluttering with flags at a review at Spithead the battleships seemed out of their element; giants trying for a fairy’s part. Display is not for them. It ill becomes them, as a pink ribbon on a bulldog. Irresistibly ploughing their way they presented a picture of resolute utility—guns and turrets and speed. No spot of bright colour was visible on board. The crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets, give the range, lay the sights on the enemy’s ships, and the battle was on.

“There is the old Dreadnought,” said an officer.

The old Dreadnought—all of ten years of age, the senile old thing! What a mystery she was when she was building! The mystery accentuated her celebrity—and almost forgotten now, while the Queen Elizabeth and the Warspite and others of their class with their fifteen-inch guns would be in the public eye as the latest type till a new type came. A parade of naval types was passing. One seemed to shade into the other in harmonious effect.

But here was an outsider, whom one noted instantly as he studied those rugged silhouettes of steel and counted guns. She had been a Turk. As the Turks were going to have only one battleship, they were not bothered about squadron homogeneity. They piled turret on turret, twelve twelve-inch guns in exotic array. She was finished and the Turks were already on board to take her home when the war began. But British law requires that any foreign man-of-war building in English shipyards may be taken over for her cost in case of war. So England kept the ship, which the Turks, I understand, thought was hardly a sporting thing to do.

One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts—even a squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of its might. Sixteen—twenty—twenty-four—it was the unending numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive. An hour passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes behind the wind screen of the destroyer’s bridge, only to look back and see more Dreadnoughts going by. One had not realised that there were so many in the harbour. He had a suspicion that Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of a hat.

The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea, and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever; still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King Edward VII class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were yet to come. One’s eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they had seen the whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.

The destroyer commander looked at his watch.

“Time!” he said. “I’ll put you on shore.”

He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the engine room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at twenty knots towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth.

One’s imagination sped across seas where he had cruised into harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was trying to visualise the whole globe—all of it except the Baltic seas and a thumbmark in the centre of Europe. Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay—yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them where countless millions dwell were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet.

Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system—and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight’s play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot was fired at those sturdy men behind armour.

When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and open markets under the British flag; when you compare the vociferations of von Tirpitz glorying in the torpedoing of a Lusitania with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea-power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on women and children would use that power if they had it.