In looking over my letters of that period, I find many references that picture the state of the official mind. All that time I was keeping closely in touch with Ambassador Page, who was energetically seconding all my efforts to bring more American ships across the Atlantic.
"It remains a fact," I wrote our Ambassador, "that at present the enemy is succeeding and that we are failing. Ships are being sunk faster than they can be replaced by the building facilities of the world. This simply means that the enemy is winning the war. There is no mystery about that. The submarines are rapidly cutting the Allies' lines of communication. When they are cut, or sufficiently interfered with, we must accept the enemy's terms."
Six days before our destroyers put in at Queenstown I sent this message to Mr. Page:
Allies do not now command the sea. Transport of troops and supplies strained to the utmost and the maintenance of the armies in the field is threatened.
Such, then, was the situation when our little destroyer flotilla first went to sea to do battle with the submarine.
Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, who now became the commander of the American destroyers at Queenstown, so far as their military operations were concerned, had spent fifty years in the British navy, forty years of this time actually at sea. This ripe experience, combined with a great natural genius for salt water, had made him one of the most efficient men in the service. In what I have already said, I may have given a slightly false impression of the man; that he was taciturn, that he was generally regarded as a hard taskmaster, that he never made friends at the first meeting, that he was more interested in results than in persons--all this is true; yet these qualities merely concealed what was, at bottom, a generous, kindly, and even a warm-hearted character. Admiral Bayly was so retiring and so modest that he seemed almost to have assumed these exterior traits to disguise his real nature. When our men first met the Admiral they saw a man who would exact their last effort and accept no excuses for failure; when admitted to more intimate association, however, they discovered that this weather-beaten sailor had a great love for flowers, for children, for animals, for pictures, and for books; that he was deeply read in general literature, in history, and in science, and that he had a knowledge of their own country and its institutions which many of our own officers did not possess. Americans have great reason to be proud of the achievements of their naval men, and one of the most praiseworthy was the fact that they became such intimate friends of Admiral Bayly. For this man's nature was so sincere that he could never bring himself to indulge in friendships which he deemed unworthy. Early in his association with our men, he told them bluntly that any success he and they might have in getting on together would depend entirely upon the manner in which they performed their work. If they acquitted themselves creditably, well and good; if not, he should not hesitate to find fault with them. It is thus a tribute to our officers that in a very short time they and Admiral Bayly had established relations which were not only friendly but affectionate. Not long after our destroyers arrived at Queenstown most of the British destroyers left to reinforce the hard-driven flotillas in the Channel and the North Sea, so that the destroyer forces at Queenstown under Admiral Bayly became almost exclusively American, though they worked with many British vessels--sloops, trawlers, sweepers, and mystery ships, in co-operation with British destroyers and other vessels in the north and other parts of Ireland. The Admiral watched over our ships and their men with the jealous eye of a father. He always referred to his command as "my destroyers" and "my Americans," and woe to anyone who attempted to interfere with them or do them the slightest injustice! Admiral Bayly would fight for them, against the combined forces of the whole British navy, like a tigress for her cubs. He constantly had a weather eye on Plymouth, the main base of the British destroyers, to see that the vessels from that station did their fair share of the work. Once or twice a dispute arose between an American destroyer commander and a British; in such cases Admiral Bayly vigorously took the part of the American. "You did perfectly right," he would say to our men, and then he would turn all his guns against the interfering Britisher. Relations between the young Americans and the experienced Admiral became so close that they would sometimes go to him with their personal troubles; he became not only their commander, but their confidant and adviser.