Chapter XIII: The Spirit of the Fleet

“Through all the monotony of its unending vigil, the Spirit of the
Fleet remains unchanged.”--_Daily Paper._

A flotilla of mine-sweeping sloops entered harbour with the last of the light and secured to their buoys; they were weary sea-battered little ships, and for a while they remained as silent as a stable-full of costermongers’ donkeys at the close of a hard day’s work. The ebb tide strengthened and they swung to their moorings in an invisible “rip” that swept round a curve of the adjoining island. One by one the cables tautened and the line straightened.

“That’s better,” said one. “Now we can talk comfortably.”

“Talk!” echoed her neighbour. “Who wants to talk? I want to rest. Did you see that signal just now from the S.O.M.S.?” (Senior Officer of Mine-sweepers). “We slip at dawn, my hearties, to go over the ground again--the same old ground in the dawn--ugh!” Her tone was jerky and irritable. “I hate the dawn.”

“Hullo, hullo!” observed a Subdivisional Leader. “Nerves a bit--eh?”

“Nerves be sugared! That affair this morning was nothing. No, I don’t care about the dawn, that’s all. Diving seafowl break the surface just under my bows and give one a turn in a bad light.”

The sloop that didn’t want to talk had hove a German mine up in her sweep that morning, and brought it under her counter before anyone noticed it was there. She lay rolling in the swell with the horns missing impact by inches; to veer the wire would have probably caused the detonation, and the lieutenant in command ordered his ship’s company to abandon ship, crawled over the stern with a queer grim smile on his face and removed the primer with a spanner. It was an entirely unpleasant quarter of an hour, and he was at that moment giving a lurid summary of his sensations at the time to an assembly of three brother captains in the tiny wardroom of the next ship.

“When I was working on the east coast--” began another sloop.

“Ah!” interrupted the end ship of the line, “that was clearing the trade routes, I suppose? Of course _we_ clear the fleet routes--the path of the battle squadrons!” The east coast sweeper was a new arrival.

“Very useful, no doubt. On the other hand, we fed England. If the trade routes had got foul, England would have starved. They’ve trained trawlers to do the work now, but when I was on that job----”

“East coast?” chipped in another recent addition to the flotilla. “Is there a war there too? I come from the Clyde, myself.”

The Tyne-built sloop snorted. “I’ve seen our East Coast Striking Force go out past us while we were at work and be back again with wounded and prisoners within half a dozen hours of leaving harbour. War, indeed! It’s on our doorstep.”

“That’s because you haven’t got a fleet to keep it away from your doorstep. Our fighting ships have to steam south for a day and a night to find an enemy, while we sweep and wait and sweep again against their home-coming.” The speaker glanced at her neighbour through a rust-streaked hawse-pipe. “’Member Jutland? How they came back that evening all battle-stained----?”

“And didn’t forget to give us a cheer as they passed!” The sloop chuckled. “I had an artist fellow on board the other day. He came out to paint the headlands and the fleet coming back from a sweep south. He was _very_ sick.”

The moon swam into a windy sky from behind the blue-black hills encircling them. The vast anchored fleet that had dropped into obscurity at nightfall became distinct against the shimmer of the water. The wind was full of the voices of ships talking among themselves, and fragrant with salt heather smells from hundreds of spray-drenched islands. You could detect the deep grumbling tones of the battleships in the air, as the Romans might have heard the talk that floated into the night from the gladiators’ barracks. It mingled with the gossip of the light cruisers, whose conversation was largely technical, as they lay floating at their moorings with steam raised: nervous, high-spirited, mettlesome things, spoiling for a fight. Their talk concerned each other’s boiler tubes, turning circles, thrust bearings, and gyro compasses: rather dull to the layman, but interesting to the destroyers in the flotilla anchorage, who were their cousins. One of the T.B.D. flotillas was unmooring, and through a waterway between the islands their lights winked and flickered as they swore and fumed at each other, manœuvring in the narrow waters.

The flotilla leader slipped out into the broader expanse of the bay and slowed down. “Now then,” she called, “who are we hanging on to the slack for? Z.19--you again?”

“No,” said 19 in tones of tense exasperation, “not this time.... But if 73 tries to cut in under my stern again as she did just now, she’ll get a kick in the ribs one of these days----” her syren hooted angrily. “_Gang-way!_ That damned drifter!”

Destroyers are as short-tempered as athletes before a “Sports.” They are always at short notice, and always trained to a hair, which, as every schoolboy knows, is a very touchy state. “Don’t forget,” said the leader, “until sunrise the challenge and reply is ‘St. George!’ and ‘England!’”

She rang down for half speed, and one by one the long, slim forms slipped out after her and picked up station in the darkness with the ease and sureness that belied all their abuse of each other.

The patient mine-sweepers rocked in the swell as the line went by. They were modest, hard-working little ships who did their jobs without talking about theories and the complications of their interiors. Sufficient unto each day was the labour and calamity thereof, without burdening the night with conjecture about the morrow.

“Hope you old plumbers did your job all right this afternoon!” shouted a destroyer as they passed. “My word, we’re a trusting lot of innocents!”

The sloops nodded and dipped, rather pleased in their humble way at being taken notice of. “You’re all right!” they chorused back.

The destroyers were slipping into their stride and their tempers were sweetening like a long-distance runner as he gets his second wind. “Who’s all right?” hailed the last boat in the line.

“We’re all all right!” roared the flotilla. They were nearing the light cruiser lines, and the light cruisers, swung to a turn of the tide, all looked the other way.

“Come on, all you fire-eaters!” called the flotilla leader, “ain’t you coming on the trail with us to-night? We’re the Y.M.C.A. off for a jaunt: quite respectable, my dear fellars, sure you.... You know all about our respectability, don’t you--’smarvellous!”

“Won’t mother let you come?” sniggered a quivering, palpitating black shadow as it slipped past, and then broke into ribald song:

“Hi! For the crest of a breaking sea!
Ho! For the deep sea roll!
Stanchions down and tubes trained free--
Ain’t you comin’ along wi’ we,
Or d’you know of a better ’ole?”

Irritating doggerel to anyone whose orders are to remain at their moorings at three hours’ notice. The singer broke off and they all started halloing:

“Hi! Gate, there! Gate! The sun’ll be scorching our eyes out before we’re through!’

The roar of their fans died away down wind and the flotilla passed through the distant gates and was swallowed by the misty moonlight of the outer sea.

The boom-marking trawlers, the humblest of all units of His Majesty’s Fleet, reeled and staggered and nodded to each other after they had passed.

“Yon destroyers,” said one, “they’re gey witless bodies, A’m thinkin’.”

“Aye,” said a companion dourly, “aye, juist that.”

They settled down again to silence and the heart-breaking monotony of their toil. A quarter of an hour elapsed before the silence of the boom line was broken again; then the youngest of the trawlers spoke:

“Eh!” he said, and sighed to the bellying floats, “A’d like fine to be a destroyer.”

Then silence again.

The light cruisers in the meanwhile were fuming among themselves: even members of the same family do not relish gratuitous insult. “Funny little fellows!” said one bitterly. “But there! What can you expect from a destroyer: neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. I took a couple out last month for a blow through; had to send the poor little things back because it was too rough for them.”

“_Poor_ little things!” said another acidly. “Their plating _is_ thin, isn’t it?... Well, as I was saying when all this vulgar interruption happened, my Chief rigged a Weston’s purchase and lifted off the top of my L.P. cylinder ...” and they plunged into their private affairs again.

The destroyers remaining in the T.B.D. anchorage felt that somehow the last word remained with the light cruisers.

“Always talkin’ obstetrics ...” floated across the heave and uneasy motion of the moonlit harbour from the flotilla trot.

“I know. Disgustin’....”

After which, conversation among the light cruisers perceptibly dwindled.

From out of the wind-swept spaces of the North Sea as the night wore on came a murmur of voices: it grew nearer and deepened: “Ho, there! Gate, gate!”

Position lights winked amongst the assembled fleet as a squadron of battle cruisers loomed up, black as doom, in the entrance of the bay. One by one in line ahead they passed to their anchorage and picked up their berths with a thunderous roar of cables.

“Clear hawse!” cried the battle squadrons from their orderly lines. This is the greeting from ships at anchor to those that enter harbour.

“Clear hawse to you,” said the new-comers. They were on a visit from a more southerly base and there was a good deal of ceremonious exchange of compliments between them and the battleships. “Hope you’ll find the billets to your liking,” said the latter, “plenty of swinging room and so on. Oilers will be alongside at daybreak, but in the meanwhile if there is anything you’d like ...?”

The visitors said they wanted nothing, and were most comfortable. As if to show how at home they were, they all swung in different directions and sprawled their 25,000-ton bulks abroad on the dark face of the waters.

“Waal, boys!” drawled a voice from the American battle squadron. “What’s the noos from down your way?’

“Hullo, old flick!” exclaimed the battle cruiser flagship. “Hope you’re keeping gay up here?”

The American chuckled and the laugh ran round the lattice-masted ships. “We surely are,” was the reply. “Say, you missed a joyous stunt last week----” he lowered his voice, for the fleet flagship has long ears. “Fleet exercises, an’ we came back in the durndest fog ever. Tumbled slap on top of a U-boat cruiser; guess he got sucked to the surface in the wash of our _pro_-pellors; we were churning up most of the cod banks of the North Sea. Sir, he was the sickest-looking U-boat that ever jined the flotilla of the dead men when we’d finished with him.”

The battle cruisers expressed courteous credulity and congratulation.

“Couldn’t see the British flagship,” said the ship who had done most of the business of dispatching the enemy. “But when it was all over, my cap’n--say, d’you know my cap’n? Some seaman!--waal, he jest flicked a wireless signal along to the British admiral: ‘Sunk a German U-boat cruiser, latitood so an’ so, longitood something else--WHERE AM I?’”

Again the laughter rippled round the American squadron. It made you think of some family chuckling in obscure enjoyment of one of its own jokes.

The battle cruisers considered it, chewed the cud of it in silence, and gave it up. “You don’t tumble? Waal, Commander-in-chief didn’t tumble either. Took a long time to think it over an’ then answered: ‘Your signal received. Last sentence not understood. Congratulate you.’”

The battle cruiser flagship felt that the time had come to say something. “Well, that was very nice. What--what would an American commander-in-chief have said?”

“An Ammurican? An Ammurican admiral, sir, would have answered: ‘Where are you? TOP OF THE CLASS, MY SON!’ You Britishers are very im-purturbable....”

“Meaning dull,” said a battleship in the nearest line. “I’ll not deny we are. You’ll be dull in about three years’ time if we’re still here. But I must say you’ve brightened things up for us no end.”

“That so? Waal ... you put us wise first. Guess we were children at some of the monkey-tricks you call tactics.”

The battleships murmured polite indistinctnesses, and one or two remembered things that happened in the later days of 1914 when war was still in process of becoming a reality to their serried squadrons.

“Wait a bit,” said the American flagship. “We ain’t blooded yet. _You_ ain’t properly blooded yet. No, boys, Jutland was a game of tag to what we’ll face together one of these days.”

“How long, how long?” rumbled down the lines of the battle fleet.

“_Quien sabe?_ That’s what they say down Manilla. You don’t know Manilla though, I guess. But when it comes--it’ll be----”

“Our turn!” interrupted a clear, quiet voice in under the lee of one of the islands. It proceeded apparently from a row of low-lying shadows on the surface of the water. “We’ve done some waiting too.” An ocean-going submarine was talking. “Quiet and deep ... down among the flatfish and the mine moorings where you never go--er--at least we hope you’ll never go. Off the Terschellings ... Heligoland Bight ... the mouth of the Ems. Coming up to breathe at night with a conning-tower awash among the wave-tops ... letting the little ships go by in the hope of bagging a big one.... We can teach you how to wait, my masters, we of the Watch Below.”

It was a long sentence for a submarine, accustomed as they are to holding their breath rather than to waste it in mere conversation. It is their pent-up breath that spits the deadly torpedo at its quarry a couple of miles away.

The battleships were silent. They didn’t altogether like the reference to flatfish and mine moorings and depths their keels left undisturbed in their majestic passage.

A seaplane-carrier chuckled out of the darkness, where she lay like a hen with her brood under her wing. “I don’t know whether you submarines are trying to make us surface craft feel uncomfortable, but I could tell you a story or two about what goes on in the air that would make you feel giddy--very giddy indeed.”

“I don’t want to know what goes on in the air, thanks,” said an armed merchant cruiser. She had called in for oil that afternoon, and was distantly related to the seaplane-carrier. “A German submarine missed me with two torpedoes last week; I came quite near enough to going up into the air then for _my_ taste, thanks very much.”

“You’re all deplorably self-centred,” observed the theatre ship, speaking for the first time. She was a condemned cargo boat that had been gutted, and her interior transformed into a lecture room and theatre. She was a sort of convivial missionary who ministered to the fleet irrespective of class or creed or function. “Not to say _cliquey_. Each one of you seems to think that the fate of the Empire depends on you individually. It’s not a bad spirit, I admit, but it can be carried too far. Individually you count for very little without each other’s help. Where would the destroyers be without the mine-sweepers--where would you all be without the mine-sweepers? Where would the battleships and battle cruisers be without the destroyers and light cruisers to screen and scout? A seaplane-carrier without support would be a sad sight ten minutes after the Germans heard she was in the neighbourhood. Submarines--er--submarines ...”

“Well?” asked the submarines quietly. The theatre ship was delivering her oration on the strength of a lecture some staff officer had recently given on board her to a number of yawning brother officers. It had been called “The Co-ordination of Fleet Units,” or some such title, but unhappily the theatre ship couldn’t remember how it went on when you got to the part about submarines.

The rest of the fleet said nothing, but contented themselves with winking to each other mischievously. They loved the theatre ship and owed her a debt immeasurable, but there were times when she adopted the “Mission to Seamen” pose and became rather tedious.

“Well?” repeated the submarines moored in rows alongside their parent ship, and nudged each other in the ribs. As all the fleet knew, submarines are the Ishmaels of the Navy, who at sea vanish instantly on the sight of either enemy or friend.

“Who might _we_ be dependent on to help us do our jobs?”

“Er--as I was saying,” continued the theatre ship rather lamely, “where should we _all_ be without the submarines ...?”

“We!” echoed the submarines’ parent ship, jealous of her charges. “I like that, you old tub-thumper! Where are your bally innards?” Actually she said neither “bally” nor “innards.”

Pandemonium ensued, squadrons and flotillas all talking at once: jest and repartee, personalities and retorts flickering across the harbour like summer lightning. Above it all, quelling the noisy tumult on the instant, boomed the voice of the fleet flagship: “_Still!_”

A night bird called in some far-off bay, and the water lapped against the smooth grey flanks of the ships, but there were no other sounds. Then--

“_Battle and battle cruiser squadrons and light cruisers raise steam for full speed with all dispatch. Report by squadrons when ready. Nth Battle Squadron, destroyers, and submarines proceed instantly and rendezvous in execution of previous orders._” The echoes broke back from the quiet hills and died away.

“Gee!” muttered an irrepressible American ship. “Hold tight, Emma! we’re off!”

“Gate!” yelped the destroyers, “stand by the gates!” and presently they sped forth to meet the dawn and their destiny. The grinding sound of cables crawling through the hawsepipes as the squadrons shortened in filled the harbour. The dark water eddied and swirled as each ship tried her engines; then one by one from the flagships of squadrons came the deep-toned “Ready, aye, ready!”

Each time, like the chanted responses to a litany, the hospital ships echoed “God go with you!” So the last hour of night passed.

Outside, as the dawn was paling in the sky, the night patrols encountered the van of the battle fleet forming up across the waste of grey waters beneath its pall of smoke.

“St. George!” rang the challenge. In one great breath came the fleet’s reply:

“England!”