Castles of Steel (16 page)

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.