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. 

Return

St. Ives, Cambridgeshire

Edward Hilton Young’s poem “Air Service (For M.J.G.D. 1896-1918)” remembers a young pilot who, killed at the age of twenty-one, was “swifter than all things save the wings of death.” E.H. Young was an officer with the Royal Navy when late in 1916 he met Royal Naval pilot Jeffery Miles Game Day at Harwich. The officers shared an enthusiasm for tea and the belief that life should be lived “all out”—holding nothing back from devoted action.  They became close friends, meeting numerous times during the war, the last time in February of 1918. In his memoir of Miles Day, Young recalls listening to his friend talk about his home in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire: “It is not about his own marvellous service that he likes best to talk: he is happiest when he is talking about country places and especially about his own country-side of river, fen, and mere. He loves them truly.”*

E. Hilton Young

On February 27^th, 1918, Day’s plane “was shot down by six German aircraft which he attacked single-handed, out to sea…. because he wished to break the [enemy’s] formation, in order to make it easier for the less-experienced people behind him to attack.” His plane in flames, Day “nose-dived, flattened out, and landed perfectly on the water. He climbed out of his machine and waved his fellow-pilots back to their base; being in aeroplanes [not sea-planes] they could not assist him.”** Despite an immediate and lengthy search, Day’s body was never found.  He is remembered on the naval memorial to the missing at Chatham.

Less than two months later, Young was seriously wounded while manning a rear gun on the H.M.S. Vindictive in the raid on Zeebrugge. Although his right arm was amputated, Young returned to active duty and survived the war.  In 1919, he published his only book of poetry, The Muse at Sea. The book closes with a trilogy of poems remembering Jeffery Miles Day; the final poem recounts a visit to the birthplace and home that Day loved.    

Miles Jeffery Game Day

Return

This was the way that, when the war was over,

we were to pass together. You, it’s lover,

would make me love your land, you said, no less,

its shining levels and their loneliness,

the reedy windings of the silent stream,

your boyhood’s playmate, and your childhood’s dream.

The war is over now: and we can pass

this way together.  Every blade of grass

is you: you are the ripples on the river:

you are the breeze in which they leap and quiver.

I find you in the evening shadows falling

athwart the fen, you in the wildfowl calling:

and all the immanent vision cannot save

my thoughts from wandering to your unknown grave.

                        St. Ives, 1919

            —Edward H. Young

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* Edward Hilton Young, “Memoir,” Poems and Rhymes by Jeffrey Day, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1919, pp. 12-13.

** Edward Hilton Young, “Memoir,” p. 8.