Sea Warfare

Lord Horatio Nelson

British maritime poems of the First World War frequently called upon the  naval heroes of Britain’s past to inspire the country and its navy.  In “Called Up” by Dudley Clark (1916), the poem directly addresses both Sir Francis Drake and Lord Nelson in repeated refrains, closing with the lines

Art thou ready, good Sir Francis? See they wait upon the quay!
Praise be to God, Lord Nelson,  they ha’ thought of you an’ me!

Evelyn Underhill’s poem “The Naval Reserve” (1916) also envisions the supernatural aid that Britain’s past heroes might contribute to the modern war effort:

Back they come, the mighty dead,
Quick to serve where they have led.
..........

Rank on rank, the admirals
Rally to their old commands:
Where the crash of battle falls,
There the one-armed hero stands.
Loud upon his phantom mast
Speak the signals of the past. 

But British maritime poetry of the First World War is often Janus-faced, looking both to the past and the future, as it attempts to forge ties between the tradition of historic naval victories and the operations of the British navy in the first industrial world war. 

Rudyard Kipling in his book Sea Warfare (1916) closes the section on submarine warfare with his untitled poem (later named “Tin Fish”). The poem explores the menace of unseen weapons of war, a new kind of sea warfare that does not neatly fit the previous conventions of naval heroism: 

The ships destroy us above
   And ensnare us beneath.
We arise, we lie down, and we move
   In the belly of Death.
The ships have a thousand eyes
   To mark where we come...
And the mirth of a seaport dies
   When our blow gets home. 

“Tin Fish” depicts a monstrous, modern warfare that destroys and ensnares the ships it targets as well as the submarine crew members who arise, lie down, and move “in the belly of Death.” 

Mine-sweeper Marksman makes
smokescreen ©IWM ART 735

Another poem that acknowledges the gulf between the First World War’s engagements at sea and Britain’s heroic past is “Mine-sweeping Trawlers” by Edward Hilton Young, who served with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Written aboard the HMS Iron Duke in 1914, the poem begins,

Not ours the fighter’s glow
The glory, and the praise.
Unnoticed to and fro
we pass our dangerous ways.
We sift the drifting sea,
And blindly grope beneath;
Obscure and toilsome we,
the fishermen of death. 

Poems like these acknowledge that the crews of the mine-sweepers will never earn the glory and praise that Drake and Nelson enjoyed. In the First World War, Britain’s maritime supremacy did not bring a rapid end to the war that slogged on in the trenches, and the bravery and sacrifices of the blind “fishermen of death” often went unnoticed. 

Shortly after the war ended, there were those who worried that Britain’s maritime fighters would be forgotten in the histories of the Great War. In 1920, Guy N. Pocock, an instructor at the Dartmouth’s Royal Naval College published the poem “Years Ahead.” Even though many of the bodies of those fighting the land war were never identified, the poem laments for those who died at sea, their resting places unmarked, with not even a “cross of wood, or a carven block,/ A name-disc hung on a rifle-stock.” The key question of the poem is Who shall honour the sailor dead? The poem concludes, 

Merchant Seamen Memorial, Tower Hill, London

Days to come, days to come—
But who shall ask of the wandering foam,
The weaving weed, or the rocking swell,
The place of our sailor-dead to tell?
From Jutland reefs to Scapa Flow
Tracks of the wary warships go,
But the deep sea-wastes lie green and dumb
All the days to come.

Years ahead, years ahead,
The sea shall honour our sailor-dead!
No mound of mouldering earth shall show
The fighting place of the men below,
But a swirl of seas that gather and spill;
And the wind’s wild chanty whistling shrill
Shall cry “Consider my sailor-dead!”
In the years ahead.