June I, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
13 
The Navy at War 
By Arthur Pollen 
LAST week T was one of a party on a naval 
tour. Wc saw something of the coast patrol, 
of shipbuilding, of the two main divisions 
of the Grand Fleet. At the headquarters 
of one of the sections of the, trade route defences we 
saw a sample of the new navy that the submarine 
blockade has called into existence. Apart from the 
captain in command and a staff of perhaps half a dozen 
naval officers, practically the whole of this force is 
commanded by naval pensioners, merchant, trawler 
and drifter skippers, and mates promoted to command 
on the strength of an aptitude shown since this force 
was organised. The crews a,re wholly taken from 
the trading craft, the fisheries, the coasters and longshore- 
men. Besides tliis the attack of hostile aircraft is part 
of the commanding ofhcer's duty. He has, therefore, 
fixed and mobile guns, and great coveys of seaplanes, 
from the largest to the smallest, under his orders. 
The chief part of the work lies in the keeping of the 
war route clear of mines and the unceasing patrol main- 
tained to counter the submarines. These are grim and 
glorified forms of fishing and pf deep-sea hunting. Tire 
sport of kings has become the sport of what, in more 
normal times, is one of the least royal of classes. Only 
those to whom a sport is a business could have developed 
the thing so rapidly and with such astonishing success. 
It is fierce and merciless, and calls equally for courage 
and for cunning. It has created a new brotherhood 
between the Royal Navy and the coasting and the fishing 
navies — a brotherhood born of a common danger, fostered 
by a common aim, and crowned by an uncommon success. 
Mine-sweeping is always a perilous business, for excellent 
as is the design of the German, mine, and, if possible, 
still more excellent its workmanship, it does not always 
happen that these devilish contrivances keep their depth. 
Their cables do not always hold, and the rule that a 
mine, once the cable is broken, is thrown out of action, 
is one too often dishonoured, by non-observance. And, 
apart from mines, the sweepers are exposed to gun attacks 
from submarines. So while those specially detailed for 
the larger game of submarine hunting both seek and 
encounter the greater danger, all, though unequallj^ are 
exposed to it. ■ • 
The keeping of the war route for merchant ships is a 
different job entirely from sweeping for the safe passage 
of the main fleets across the North Sea. And the sub- 
marine patrol is again a totally different thing from that 
maintained for carrying on the commercial blockade. 
For these again entirely new naval forces have been 
created. Both are hazardous, and the second incredibly 
exacting, in that it must be carried on in all weathers. 
To all of tliis work the merchant navy has contributed 
officers and men with clieerful generosity, a personnel 
which has only taught us in war how high a character is 
developed by the sea service in time of peace. If you 
take the merchant, fisher, and coast trade men now 
serving under the white ensign, and add to them those 
who, in the service of the nation's suppl3^ have faced the 
new perils of the sea, you will find that there is but little 
margin left for slackers. If, the Government has been 
rutiiless , in commandeering ships, the Admiralty has 
never had to conscribe the men.^ It was splendid to hear 
the tributes of the naval men to' tlieir new comrades, not 
less splendid to see how perfectly the fishermen and others 
have fallen into naval ways and learned the few naval 
arts they did not know ahead}'. . ,«, „,,.. w.-l 
Next on the Tync and Clyde, wf see the, two main 
centres of shipbuilding. The' reader will have seen 
elsewhere picturesque and detailed accounts of. these, 
written by the very able journalists who composed the 
party. For myself I find it anything but a,siipple busi- 
ness either to analyse my impressions of what I saw, or 
indeed to recognise e.xactly what those impressions were. 
To say that seeing is believing is not so obviously true 
as it sounds. You may in point of fact see so much as to 
become incredulous. On the Tyne and Clj'de shipyards' 
and engine works are not numbered by threes and fours, 
hut by the dozen. It is not the biggest of these that turns 
out, and has turned out for years, a thousand horse- 
power a day. Here are battleships and battle cruisers, 
light cruisers and destroyers, patrol ships and mine 
sweepers, some finishing in the tide way, others on the 
stocks, some actually beginning to grow upon the slips ! 
before another keel, on a parallel set of blocks, is ready 
for launching — a bewildering panorama of noisy activity 
Mammoth Works 
What, at a single visit, are you to make of a firm that, 
in its ordnance munition works and ship-yards, employs 
between 60,000 and 70,000 hands ; is turning out every 
form of vessel from the fastest and most heavily gunned 
capital ship to the latest of motor-driven patrol boats ; 
which makes every nature of naval gun from the 15-inch 
to the i2-pounder, and every form of land gun from the 
giant howitzer to the British equivalent of the 75 ; that, 
on the top of all this, is grinding out shells — from mon- 
strous things that stand nearly 6 feet high and weigh 
the greater part of a ton, to i8-pounder shrapnel and 
high explosives— -and is completing, all told, nearly 
20,000 of all kinds per day ? The only single impression 
that is left is that Sir Edward Grey, so far as these two 
centres are concerned, was well within the mark when 
he told our Russian visitors that Great Britain was all 
out to win. Here at least every man, every machine, 
eveiy atom of our working capacity is pledged to the 
great cause. 
Then came the visits to the two bases between which 
the Grand Fleet is chiefly divided when not at sea. On the 
Tyne and Clyde we had seen ships in the making. At these 
two bases we saw the fleet in being. The lines of battle 
cruisers, the vast array of battleships, the attendant 
flotillas of cruisers and submarines, even the seaplane 
ships and the destroyer depots, and the main auxiliaries 
for engineering, water suppl^^ etc. — with fleets so com- 
posed the great Spithead Reviews had familiarised tis. 
What was a revelation was to find how in war a fleet, to 
keep in being, calls for the attendance, in addition not 
only of almost uncounted colliers and oil ships, but for an 
incredible array of mine sweepers and patrols, to clear 
for it a safe passage and to screen it from submarines. 
Certainly the fleet to-day is a very different force from 
that with which we began the war. The odds against 
the enemy to-day seem, on paper, to be hopeless. 
It is, indeed, impossible to see these vast Armadas, 
still less possible to converse with the Admirals, of 
officers and men who handle. them„ without wondering 
what are the enemy's leal views of his prospects at sea. 
The famous Navy Law said it was German policy to build 
a fleet so powerful that the strongest navy in the world 
could not attack it without being so reduced in strength 
as to be a ready prey to weaker Powers. The German 
fleet would have to fight, and the neutral navies would 
have to seize the opportunity which the expected^ — but 
Pyrrhic — victorj' of the British would afford. Is it the 
coyness of the neutrals that explains German bashful- 
ness ? Failing this, so Bernhardi has explained to us, 
the British fleet was to be reduced by attrition. 
Mines, submarines, bomb dropping aircraft were 
to take a steady toUi of our swollen numbers. \\'cll, 
in 20 months of war the fleet has grown by nearer 20 than 
10 of the largest capital units, so that the triple attrition 
has not beeji very effective. There were anxious months 
no doubt, when inadequate protection made the sub- 
marine menace hideously serious. Nothing but an 
incredible vigilance, a heroic continuing effort, could 
have brought the mine danger to safe proportions. Only 
the cultivation of an excellent skill in gunnery could have 
brought the aircraft threat to nothing. But the simple 
fact remains that attrition as a policy has not succeeded. 
When attrition had done its expected work, two other 
principles were to be employed to complete our 
