Landing Parties
Another signal (see Note IV.) will turn out, transport, land, embark, and disembark three thousand armed men, with twenty-one field guns, in the inside of three hours; leaving six thousand men in the ships to carry on if necessary the work of a bombardment; or you can vary the programme and load a mere thousand or so into eight identical double-funnelled fifteen-knot steam launches—one from each battleship—and play miniature Fleet-manœuvres to your heart’s content. They are as used to performing evolutions together as are their big parents. They can tow half-a-dozen cutters a-piece and work in four feet of water. As an experiment you can land your twenty-one-field guns with sufficient men to throw up earthworks round them; or you can yoke men to the guns and drag them up the flanks of mountains. Or, as in mining operations, you can turn loose all hell with a string to it—pay it out and swiftly drag it back again. One never wearies of watching the outrush and influx of the landing parties; the swift flight of the boats; the minute’s check at the beach; the torrents of blue and red pouring over the bows; and the loose-knit line of mingled red and blue winding away inland among the boulders and heather.
Long practice so perfectly conceals Art that the thing presents no points of the picturesque; makes no noise; calls for no more comment than the set of the waves before a prevailing wind. Only when you go over certain MS. books, giving the name, station, and duties of every man aboard under all conceivable contingencies, do you realise how wheel works within wheel to the ordered, effortless end.
Superior and Adequate Persons
You can disarrange the clockwork as much as you please, but the surviving cogs and rachets will still go on and finish the job; for I do honestly believe that, if any accident removed from the Fleet every single Commissioned Officer, the Warrant and Petty Officers would still carry on with resource and fertility of invention till properly relieved. The public is apt to lump everything that does not carry the executive curl on its coat-sleeve as some sort of common sailor. But a man of twenty-five years’ sea experience—cool, temperate, and judgmatic, such an one as the ordinary Warrant Officer—is a better man than you shall meet on shore in a long day’s march. His word is very much law forward. He knows his men, if possible, better than the officers. He has seen, tried, approved, and discarded hundreds of dodges and tricks in all departments of the ship. At a pinch he can wring the last ounce out of his subordinates by appeals unbefitting for an officer to make, by thrusts at pride and vanity, which he has studied more intimately than any one else. Hear him expounding his gospel to a youth who does not yet realise that the Navy is his father and his mother and his only Aunt Jemima; go out with him when he is in charge of a cutter; listen to him in the workshop; in the flats forward; between the pauses of practice-firing, or up on the booms taking stock of the boats, and you will concede that he is a superior and an adequate person.
‘Yes, I suppose it’s all very nice,’ said one of them, while I applauded and admired some manœuvre that he did not trouble to raise an eyelid for, ‘but just think what we could do if we had the men all together for three years steady! As it is, we’re practically a Training Squadron. When we get back to Plymouth they’ll snatch a hundred of our best men an’ turn ’em over to the Mediterranean, and we’ll have to take up a lot of new ones. The Mediterranean have got the better trained men, but they haven’t our chances of working together.’
‘But the men are trained when you get ’em, surely?’
‘Yes; but you get the same lot in one ship all through her commission, and you put a polish on ’em.’
‘P.Q. 2,’ cried a signalman. That was a well-known message. It meant: ‘Get into your boats as fast as you know how and pull round the Fleet.’ The men leaped on to the nettings and fell outboard like dolphins.
‘That shows it,’ said the Warrant Officer with a sniff. ‘Look at that man crawlin’ into his place’ (to me he seemed to be flying). ‘Our first boat ought to be away in fifteen seconds’ (it was quite thirty before the last drew clear). ‘There go the Arrogants.’ His face darkened. Was it possible that that tip-tilted, hog-backed cruiser had——
‘We’re well first away,’ said a Lieutenant.
‘Hum! We ought to have been more previous,’ said the Warrant Officer. ‘The Arrogants nearly beat us. We love the Arrogant, but we do not allow her to lead if we can help it.’
A Tale Worth Telling
Another time we were not so lucky. The tale is worth telling to show (a) how one is at the mercy of one’s subordinates, and (b) how there is no excuse in the Navy. At odd hours, chiefly in the black night, the Admiral, feeling lonely, calls up one boat from each ship to his gangway, and the signal, which we will label T.V.K., reads: ‘Cutter to Flagship from each ship; third-class cruisers to send whaler.’ Warned by experience, the First Lieutenant, whom it is not easy to catch napping, had the whaler’s crew sleeping all handy by, where one order would send them out like fly-stung cattle. A cutter requires about three times as many men, and on a small cruiser one cannot keep these together. Enter, then, at 11:45 p.m., a zealous signalman with the words: ‘Cutter to the Flagship.’ In his haste he had omitted to read the conclusion of the signal vouchsafing us the whaler, and (this was his black error) told no one that it was ‘T.V.K.,’ which would have explained the situation. No, he needs must say ‘cutter’; so cutter it was. After the men had been variously dug out of their hammocks and the heavy boat got away, the Flagship wanted to know why we were several scandalous minutes behind our time. It was a direct reflection on the ship and its smartness; a galling and unanswerable wigging that makes men dance and swear with rage. We could only have said that the signal was misread, which would not have helped us in the least; so we shut our mouths and killed the signalman next morning. His own chief, the hawk-nosed Yeoman of Signals, flung him bound to the executioner, saying: ‘He ought to have known, sir; he ought to have known.’ So he was boiled, scraped, and sand-papered, his hair was cut and his number was taken; after which he went forward and heard precisely what the lower deck thought of him. Then a visiting Captain’s galley hanging on to the gangway rubbed it in gracefully and casually, and a fat beef-boat condoled with us ironically, and the whaler (see Note V.) heard all about it next time she went sailing without an officer in the stern-sheets. It was most annoying, but can’t you see how easily this sort of accident may happen?
Chapter VI
I had the honour of dining on the Flagship next night, and so contagious is the naval spirit that I went there, as it were, annoyed and uneasy over the matter of the misread signal. One cannot regard an Admiral in the exercise of his duty as a mere human. It is in his power to make you get up an anchor by hand if he thinks you are slack; he can stop your coaling and bid you man and arm boats in the middle of the grimy mess; he can make you repeat a certain business till you are sick and dizzy; or he can raise you to high honour by signalling: ‘Well done, So-and-so. Evolution creditably performed.’ He blocks up all the horizon when he appears on it. At six miles off, across the windy blue, the spirit may move him to chat with you, and if your best signalman have not his best telescope at his best eye, and the Admiral be forced to repeat his remarks, you will hear about it at closer range.
The Isolation of an Admiral
The loneliness of a Captain is society beside the isolation of an Admiral. He goes up on the after-bridge, and moves some £10,000,000 worth of iron and steel at his pleasure. No man can stop him, few dare even suggest. Then comes the sea, as it did round the Orkneys, and a little roaring ‘roost’ marked with a few hair-lines on the chart—a tide-rip