AFTER THE BATTLE “Cæsar,” said a Sub-lieutenant to his friend, a temporary Lieutenant R.N.V.R., who at the outbreak of war had been a classical scholar at Oxford, “you were in the thick of our scrap yonder off the Jutland coast. You were in it every blessed minute with the battle cruisers, and must have had a lovely time. Did you ever, Cæsar, try to write the story of it?” It was early in June of 1916, and a group of officers had gathered near the ninth hole of an abominable golf course which th

A BAND OF BROTHERS “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”— King Henry V. My boyhood was spent in Devon, the land of Drake and the home of the Elizabethan Navy. A deep passion for the Sea Service is in my blood, though, owing to family circumstances, I was not able to indulge my earliest ambition to become myself one of the band of brothers who serve under the White Ensign. My elder brother lived and died afloat. Two of my sons, happier than their father, are privileged to play their parts

THE COMING OF WAR Our Navy has played the great game of war by sea for too many hundreds of years ever to under-rate its foes. It is even more true of the sea than of the land that the one thing sure to happen is that which is unexpected. Until they have measured by their own high standards the quality of an enemy, our officers and men rate him in valour, in sea skill, and in masterful ingenuity as fully the equal of themselves. Until August 1914 the Royal Navy had never fought the German, and h

THE GREAT VICTORY In naval warfare there are many actions but few battles. An action is any engagement between war vessels of any size, but a battle is a contest between ships of the battle-line—sometimes called “capital ships” upon the results of which depends the vital issues of a war. During the whole of the long contest with Napoleon, there were only two battles of this decisive kind—the Nile and Trafalgar. And although the fighting by sea and land went on for ten years after Trafalgar had g

WITH THE GRAND FLEET: A NORTH SEA “STUNT” “ So young and so untender! ”— King Lear For more than eighteen months the Grand Fleet had been at war. It was the centre of the great web of blockading patrols, mine-sweeping flotillas, submarine hunters, and troop-transport convoys, and yet as a Fleet it had never seen the enemy nor fired a shot except in practice. The fast battle cruisers, stationed nearest to the enemy in the Firth of Forth had grabbed all the sport that was going in the Bight of Hel

WITH THE GRAND FLEET: THE TERRIERS AND THE RATS “You missed a lot, Soldier,” said the Sub-Lieutenant to his friend the Marine Subaltern, “through not being here at the beginning. Now it is altogether too comfortable for us of the big ships; the destroyers and patrols get all the fun while we hang about here in harbour or put up a stately and entirely innocuous parade of the North Sea. No doubt we are Grand in our Silent Might and Keep our Unsleeping Vigil and all the rest of the pretty tosh whic

THE MEDITERRANEAN: A FAILURE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES War is made up of successes and failures. We English do not forget our successes, but we have an incorrigible habit of wiping from our minds the recollection of our failures. Which is a very bad habit, for as every man realises, during his half-blind stumbles through life, failure is a most necessary schoolmistress. Yet, though civilians seem able to bring themselves to forget that in war we ever fail of success, soldiers and sailors do not forge

IN THE SOUTH SEAS: THE DISASTER OFF CORONEL Sunset and evening star *         *         *         * And after that the dark. During the years 1912 and 1913 the Captain of the British cruiser Monmouth , the senior English Naval Officer on the China Station, and Admiral Count von Spee, commanding the German Far-Eastern Squadron, were close and intimate friends. The intimacy of the chiefs extended to the officers and men of the two squadrons. The English and Germans discussed with one another the c

IN THE SOUTH SEAS: CLEANING UP Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer . . . And all the clouds that lour’d In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. The naval operations which culminated in the action off the Falkland Islands are associated vividly in my mind with two little personal incidents. On November 12th, 1914, a week after the distressful news had reached this country of the destruction by the enemy of the cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth off the Chilean coast, a small slip

HOW THE “SYDNEY” MET THE “EMDEN” Forward, each gentleman and knight! Let gentle blood show generous might And chivalry redeem the fight! The Luck of the Navy is not always good. There are wardrooms in the Grand Fleet within which to mention any Joss except of the most devilish blackness may lead to blasphemy and even to blows. One can sympathise. Those who sped on May 31st, 1916, across 400 miles of sea and who, though equipped with all the paraphernalia of fire-directors, spotting-officers, ran

FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH Since I have not been so foolish as to set myself the task of writing a history of the Naval War, I am not hampered by any trammels of chronological sequence. It is my purpose to select those events which will best illustrate the workings of the British Naval Soul, and to present them in such a manner and in such an order as will make for the greatest simplicity and force. Naval warfare, viewed in the scattered detail of operations taking place all over the world, is a

THE CRUISE OF THE “GLASGOW” Part I.—Rio to Coronel (July 27th to Nov. 1st, 1914) Everyone has heard of the light cruiser Glasgow , how she fought at Coronel, and then escaped, and is now the sole survivor among the warships which then represented Great Britain and Germany; how she fought again off the Falkland Islands, and with the aid of the Cornwall sank the Leipzig ; how after many days of weary search she discovered the Dresden in shelter at Juan Fernandez, and with the Kent finally brought

THE CRUISE OF THE “GLASGOW” Part II.—Coronel to Juan Fernandez (Nov. 1st, 1914, to March 14th, 1915) We left the British cruiser Glasgow off the River Plate, where she had arrived after her escape, sore at heart and battered in body, from the disaster of Coronel. The battleship Canopus remained behind at Port Stanley to defend the newly established coaling-station at the Falkland Islands. Her four 12-⁠inch guns would have made the inner harbour impassable to the lightly armoured cruisers of Admi

THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS: SOME IMPRESSIONS AND REFLECTIONS Part I It is strange how events of great national importance become associated in one’s mind with small personal experiences. I have told with what vividness I remember the receipt in November, 1914, of private news that the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible had left Devonport for the Falkland Islands, and how I heard Lord Rosebery read out Sturdee’s victorious dispatch to 6,000 people in St. Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow. In a similar

THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS: SOME IMPRESSIONS AND REFLECTIONS Part II At the close of my previous Chapter I took a mean advantage of my readers. For I broke off at the most interesting and baffling phase in the whole Battle of the Giants. It was easy to write of the first two phases—the battle-cruiser action up to the turn where the Queen Mary and Indefatigable were lost, and the phase during which Beatty, though sorely weakened, gallantly headed off the German line, and Evan-⁠Thomas, with his Fift