Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

The cause of this German inactivity was not known in Britain, and the stillness created fears that something terrible might be in store. These fears centered on the nightmare of a German invasion, or, more likely, a series of amphibious raids on England’s east coast. (Churchill estimated that up to 10,000 Germans might be landed.) In fact, at no time during the Great War did either the General Staff of the German army or the German Naval Staff ever seriously discuss or plan an invasion of England on any scale, large or small. The passivity of the German fleet while the BEF was crossing stemmed from other causes. Despite the kaiser’s cries of betrayal by his English cousins and Bethmann-Hollweg’s hand-wringing over “a scrap of paper,” officers in the German army were neither surprised nor troubled by Britain’s entry into the war. The Army General Staff had expected the British to come in. “In the years immediately preceding the war, we had no doubt whatever of the rapid arrival of the British Expeditionary Force on the French coast,” testified General Hermann von Kuhl, a General Staff officer. The staff calculated that the BEF would be mobilized by the tenth day after a British declaration of war, gather at the embarkation points on the eleventh, begin embarkation on the twelfth, and complete the transfer to France by the fourteenth day. This estimate proved relatively accurate. More important, the Germans did not much care what the British army did. Confident of a quick victory on the Western Front, they felt that measures taken to prevent the passage of the BEF would be superfluous. The kaiser had described the British as a “contemptible little army,” and Helmuth von Moltke had told Tirpitz, “The more English, the better,” meaning the more British soldiers who landed on the Continent, the more who would be quickly gobbled up by the German army.

  The Imperial Navy thought differently, and once the passage of the expeditionary force began, many in the German fleet were anxious to contest it. The Naval Staff was surprised that the BEF was under way so early; they had not expected the cross-Channel movement to begin until August 16. This, added to its surprise at Britain’s institution of a distant rather than a close blockade, created an atmosphere of uncertainty in the German navy, which militated against acts of sudden boldness. In fact, despite the heavy protection given the Channel transports, a bold approach might have produced favorable results for the Germans. During the crossing of the expeditionary force, the Grand Fleet moved south and kept to sea as much as possible, but Jellicoe’s destroyers were constantly returning to base for fuel. A strong German attack, with destroyers dashing into the Channel to torpedo the transports, could have been attempted against the comparatively light British forces based in southern waters, with the attackers returning to Germany before Jellicoe could intervene. But without the support of heavy ships, Ingenohl believed, the German destroyer force would be massacred, and he held it back. As for submarines, ten U-boats already had gone to sea in an effort to find the British blockade line and locate the Grand Fleet. Ordered out on August 6, they were beyond wireless communication and thus could not be summoned to attack in the Channel. The German navy, therefore, did nothing.

  Once the main body of the BEF was safely across the Channel, the Admiralty turned its attention to the wider seas. The threats there, besides Goeben and Breslau, were the two powerful armored cruisers of the German East Asia Squadron, and seven widely scattered light cruisers. One effective antidote to the German light cruisers would have been Britain’s fast new light cruisers, but at the outbreak of war the Royal Navy still had too few of these. “We grudged every light cruiser removed from home waters,” said Churchill, who believed that “the fleet would be tactically incomplete without its sea cavalry.” The Admiralty had to make do with other ships, older, slower, less capable. Many of Britain’s numerous predreadnought battleships were dispatched around the globe—Glory to Halifax, Canopus to Cape Verde, Albion to Gibraltar, Ocean to Queenstown—to serve as rallying points in case German armored cruisers broke out of the North Sea onto the oceans. Elderly British armored cruisers, some only a few months from the scrap yard, were mobilized and sent to sea. Twenty-four commercial ocean liners were armed and commissioned as auxiliary merchant cruisers.

  In addition, there were troopships to be convoyed across the oceans. Two British regular army infantry divisions, broken into separate battalions and scattered on garrison duty around the globe from Bermuda to Hong Kong, had to be collected and brought home. Thirty-nine regular army infantry battalions from the British Indian army were to be gathered up and formed into the 27th, 28th, and 29th Divisions. They, in turn—to preserve order in India and the prestige of the Raj—were to be replaced in India by three undertrained Territorial divisions brought out from England. To the military mind, all this shuffling and exchanging, designed to place in France the best-trained soldiers Britain possessed, made excellent sense. To the navy, required to transport and convoy these thousands of men in different directions, the task was complicated, burdensome, and dangerous. Nevertheless, it was done. During September, two British Indian divisions and additional cavalry—50,000 men—were crossing the Indian Ocean bound for Europe. The Australian politician Andrew Fisher, soon to become prime minister, had declared that Australia would support “the mother country to the last man and the last shilling,” and volunteers had swarmed into recruiting depots. A New Zealand contingent waited to be escorted across 1,000 miles of South Pacific Ocean to Australia, where it would be added to 25,000 Australians and with them be convoyed to Europe. The threat of German surface raiders on the sea-lanes forced a delay in the sailing of the Australian convoy, but on November 1, the convoy carrying the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps sailed from Perth for the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

  Meanwhile, two Canadian divisions were escorted across the Atlantic. The Canadian convoy sailed from the St. Lawrence on October 3 with more than 25,000 enthusiastic volunteers embarked in thirty-one ships. Detailed, uncensored stories in Canadian newspapers had followed the enlistment and training of these men, their boarding of the transports, the nature of the convoy, and its escort. With all this information freely available, the Canadian government belatedly became apprehensive for the convoy’s safety. The original close escort, a squadron of old British cruisers under Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, had seemed inadequate to the Canadian government, whereupon the Admiralty added the old battleships Glory and Majestic. In addition, the Grand Fleet battle cruiser Princess Royal was secretly dispatched from Scapa Flow to rendezvous with the convoy in the mid-Atlantic and protect it against any German battle cruiser that might slip out of the North Sea. The movements of the Princess Royal were extraordinarily stealthy and her presence was concealed even from the Canadian government. Had the ship’s involvement been known, the Canadians would have been reassured, but Jellicoe insisted that the fact be revealed to no one. He had permitted the vessel to go because he understood the political disaster that would accompany any harm coming to the convoy. Nevertheless, he could not bear the German Naval Staff and the High Seas Fleet commander knowing that his battle cruiser force had been diminished by this major unit. And so it was that in the middle of the Atlantic, Rear Admiral Wemyss was astonished one day to see looming nearby the massive gray shape of Princess Royal.

  Ten days later, as the convoy approached the English Channel, a U-boat was reported off the Isle of Wight. The army’s wish had been to come up the Channel and disembark the troops at Portsmouth, near the British army’s main training camps. Nevertheless, within an hour of the submarine report, the Admiralty asserted its paramount responsibility for the safety of the convoy and the transports were ordered into Plymouth, at the western end of the Channel. There, on October 14, the first Canadians came ashore in England.

  With the navy’s help, the equivalent of five British regular army divisions had been carried to Europe and replaced in the Indian subcontinent by three divisions of Territorial troops from England. Two Canadian divisions had crossed the Atlantic, and, although this was not concluded until December, two divisions were to be convoyed from Australia and New Zealand to
Egypt. The effect of this concentration was to add five British regular army divisions to the six divisions with which Great Britain had begun the war. By the end of November, the British army in France had been raised from five to approximately thirteen divisions of regular, highly trained troops. This did not count the Canadian and Australian divisions training in England and Egypt, the ten Territorial Army divisions which remained for the moment in England, or the twenty-four divisions of new volunteers that Lord Kitchener was raising. For the Admiralty and the navy, the important thing was that all these vast, complicated movements at sea had been completed “without the loss of a single ship or a single life.”

  CHAPTER 5 Beatty

  During the Great War, Britain’s best-known admiral was not John Jellicoe. It was David Beatty. The youngest British admiral since Nelson, the commander of the famous Battle Cruiser Squadron, and then, succeeding Jellicoe, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, Beatty personified the Royal Navy to the British public. He was everything they liked to imagine in a naval hero: brave, impetuous, eager to attack, driving his ships toward the enemy at maximum speed—and then demanding that they go even faster. Beatty possessed the charisma that the calm and cautious Jellicoe lacked, and throughout the war the younger man—Beatty was twelve years younger than Jellicoe—was the darling of the popular press. It was Beatty’s postcard photo, not Jellicoe’s, that placarded every newsagent’s window and sold in the millions.

  Beatty’s aura radiated in part from his genuine accomplishments and in part from successful exhibitionism. He was short and trim, easy to miss in a crowd, until he made himself instantly recognizable on board ship and in photographs by turning himself into a seagoing dandy. He tilted his famous extra-wide-brimmed cap over his eyes at a jaunty, devil-may-care angle; he stuck his thumbs rakishly into the pockets of his blue uniform jacket, which his tailor had been instructed to make with six brass buttons instead of the regulation eight. Like other flamboyantly egotistical and successful warriors—George S. Patton, who wore pearl-handled revolvers and high riding boots while commanding tanks, or Douglas MacArthur sloshing ashore (toward an army cameraman) on a newly captured Pacific island, wearing sunglasses and his self-designed, gold-braided hat, his trademark corncob pipe clenched between his teeth—Beatty used visual imagery to capture popular fancy.

  Behind the imagery in Beatty’s case lay a brilliant, frequently controversial career—and a life of private pain. A hero of colonial wars in the Sudan and China, twice promoted far ahead of other men his age, Beatty had attempted to mesh his naval career with marriage to a wealthy woman and, at her insistence, to present himself as a man of fashion in hunting circles and London society. Over the years, this effort took a heavy toll. Sometimes on the bridge of his flagship, Beatty would release his inner tension by making faces. “For no apparent reason,” said an officer who served with him, “he would screw his face into a fearsome grimace and hold it quite unconsciously for a minute or two.” Another peculiarity was his addiction to fortune-tellers: a Mrs. Robinson, a Madame Dubois, and, in Edinburgh when he commanded the Grand Fleet, a “Josephine.”

  David Beatty’s wartime fame was fully justified. He was an audacious sea commander, a fighting admiral who gave his country significant victories and who also made significant mistakes. What the man in the street, the popular press, and even many of his colleagues in the navy did not know was how Beatty managed to do this and at what cost. Only a few could look behind the facade and “observe the private unhappiness and uncertainty in that hollow pose.”

  David Beatty was born on January 17, 1871, in a country house in Cheshire, but his roots lay in the Anglo-Irish squirearchy of County Wexford. Beatty’s family heritage revolved around the army and the stables. For forty years, his grandfather was Master of the Wexford Hounds. David’s father had served in the British cavalry in India, then left the army and moved from Ireland to Cheshire, where his four sons and a daughter were born. Curiously, this father was six feet four inches tall and had long arms and big hands and feet, whereas his two older sons, Charles and David, were short and had small hands and feet. Life at home was tumultuous; their father was eccentric, irascible, and tyrannical and became a heavy drinker; their mother, famous in her youth for her long, golden hair, died an alcoholic. Nevertheless, everyone in the family excelled on horseback, taking risks to the point of recklessness. David’s parents both rode Irish hunters in pursuit of foxes and then came home to a tame fox kept in the house. David’s three brothers followed their father into the army; his older brother, Charles, fought in the Boer War, earning a DSO, and then became a well-known gentleman jockey and steeplechase rider. During the Great War, Charles rejoined the army and died of wounds suffered in France. David’s younger brother William became an owner and trainer of horses at Newmarket, and his youngest brother, George, like their father, became famous as a gentleman jockey, polo player, and steeplechase rider. David, the second son, shared the family passion for riding, but unlike his father and brothers, he decided to go to sea.

  This is the surface history of David Beatty’s early life. There is a deeper layer, rigidly suppressed while Beatty was alive, which helps explain the character and behavior of the famous admiral. He and his brother Charles were born out of wedlock. Their father had stolen the wife of another man and together he and she had produced two illegitimate sons within twelve months. At that time in Britain, legitimacy had as much to do with preservation of landed property as with morality. “Natural children” or “bastards” were banned from inheriting landed estates, which passed from father to the eldest legitimate son. When Charles and David were born—Charles in 1870; David in 1871—their mother was married to a Mr. Chaine. Six months after David’s arrival, Mr. Chaine belatedly divorced his wife, who then married Captain Beatty. After the parents married, two other sons and a daughter, all legitimate, were born; legally, the two later sons became possible heirs as Charles and David were not. From the time the older brothers discovered the facts of their birth, they faced a lifelong apprehension that somebody else would discover the relevant birth and marriage certificates. As his fame grew larger, David, in particular, had to live with the possibility that the secret might come out. As it happened, no one learned the truth, and Charles inherited the family estate, eventually passing it along to his own eldest son.

  In 1884, at thirteen, David Beatty left this turbulent, complicated family behind and entered Britannia. His record as a cadet was mediocre; he left eighteenth in a class of thirty-three. When he was a midshipman, influence gained him a three-year appointment to Alexandra, flagship of the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Unsurprisingly, Beatty’s interest outside the navy was riding and he often rode as a jockey on the racetrack and polo grounds at Malta, mounted on horses and ponies belonging to other officers. When he returned to England to take naval courses at Greenwich, his performance continued to be mediocre; the explanation perhaps had something to do with the fact that his cabin at Greenwich was filled with warmly inscribed photographs of London actresses. Thereafter, he served on the royal yacht, in the West Indies, and again in the Mediterranean, where he joined the battleship Camperdown a few months after she rammed and sank Victoria with Jellicoe on board.

  In 1896, when Beatty was a twenty-five-year-old navy lieutenant of no particular distinction, he was sent to command a gunboat on the Upper Nile during Kitchener’s march to reconquer the Sudan. Here, in the first major turning point in his career, Beatty’s quick reflexes and instinctive bravery thrust him forward. When a shell struck his gunboat and came to rest unexploded, Beatty, under fire for the first time, calmly picked it up and threw it overboard. In the spring of 1898, Beatty commanded the shallow-draft gunboat Fateh, assigned to provide gunfire support for the army’s advance up the Nile. Following Kitchener’s famous victory at the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, Beatty and his gunboat carried the victorious general 400 miles farther up the Nile to Fashoda,
where Britain, in the person of Kitchener, met France, represented by Captain Marchand. Beatty was praised by Kitchener—“I cannot speak too highly of this officer’s behavior”—and was awarded a DSO. More important to Beatty, at twenty-seven he was promoted to commander over the heads of 400 lieutenants senior to him. The usual time served as a lieutenant before promotion to commander was eleven or twelve years. Beatty had done it in six.

  On returning from Egypt to England, Beatty had four months’ leave, which he devoted to foxhunting. It was in the country, on horseback, that he met a married American woman living in England, Ethel Tree, the only daughter of the enormously wealthy Chicago department-store owner Marshall Field. Riding sidesaddle, wearing a top hat and veil, slim and graceful with a long neck, high cheekbones, and dark hair, Ethel Tree was sophisticated, widely traveled, and, said Beatty’s nephew and biographer Charles Beatty, “free ranging in her affections.” Her fearless riding immediately appealed to Beatty, who noticed not only her beauty and horsemanship, but, being a second son with no inheritance whose naval pay amounted to a few hundred pounds a year, the money behind her. He quickly discovered that her marriage to Arthur Tree was unhappy and that she had a three-year-old son, Ronald. Despite her encumbrances, a strong attraction—perhaps more—sprang up between David and Ethel. For both, the relationship was risky. In Queen Victoria’s reign, a divorced woman could not be received in society; above all, no divorced person could be presented at court. As for Beatty, an officer known to be the lover of a married woman or who married a divorced woman exposed himself to social ostracism and placed his naval career in jeopardy. As it happened, these considerations became moot in April 1899, when Beatty was appointed commander of the battleship Barfleur on the China Station. To Ethel, this separation was shocking; no man she liked had ever walked away from her before.