THE COMING OF WAR
Our Navy has played the great game of war by sea for too many hundreds
of years ever to under-rate its foes. It is even more true of the sea
than of the land that the one thing sure to happen is that which is
unexpected. Until they have measured by their own high standards the
quality of an enemy, our officers and men rate him in valour, in sea
skill, and in masterful ingenuity as fully the equal of themselves.
Until August 1914 the Royal Navy had never fought the German, and had no
standards of experience by which to assay him. The Navy had known the
maritime nations of Europe and fought them many times, but the Germans,
a nation of landsmen artificially converted into sailors within a single
generation, were a problem both novel and baffling. Eighteen years
before the War, Germany had no navy worth speaking of in comparison with
ours; during those fateful years she built ships and guns, trained
officers and men, and secured her sea bases on the North Sea and in the
Baltic at a speed and with a concentrated enthusiasm which were wholly
wonderful and admirable. “The Future of Germany lies on the water,”
cried the Kaiser one day, and his faithful people took up the cry. “We
here and now challenge Britain upon her chosen element.” Quite seriously
and soberly the German Navy Law of 1900 issued this challenge, and the
Fatherland settled down to its prodigious task with a serene confidence
and an extraordinary energy which won for it the ungrudging respect of
its future foes.
Perhaps the Royal Navy in those early years of the twentieth century,
and especially in 1913 and 1914, became just a little bit infected by
the mental disease of exalting everything German, which had grown into
an obsession among many Englishmen. At home during the War men oppressed
by their enemy’s land power, would talk as if one German cut in two
became two Germans. German organisation, German educational training,
German mechanical and scientific skill are very good, but they are not
superhuman. Their failures, like those of other folk, are fully as
numerous as their successes. In trade they won many triumphs over us
because British trading methods were individualistic and were totally
lacking in national direction and support. But the Royal Navy is in
every respect wholly distinct from every other British institution. It
is the one and only National Service which has always declined to
recognise in its practice the British policy of muddling through. It is
the one Service with a mind and an iron Soul of its very own. So that
when Germany set to work to create out of nothing a navy to compete with
our own, she was up against a vast spiritual power which she did not
understand, the Soul of the Navy, that unifying dominating force which
gives to it an incomparable strength. She was up, too, against that
experience of the sea and of sea warfare in a race of islanders which
had been living and growing since the days of King Alfred. The wonderful
thing is this: not that the German Navy has at no point been able to
bear comparison with ours—in design of ships, in quality and weight of
guns, in sea cunning, in sea training and in hardihood—but that in the
few short years of the present century the German Navy should have been
built at all, manned at all, trained at all.
As the German Navy grew, and our ships came in contact with those of the
Germans, especially upon foreign stations, our naval officers and men
came to regard their future foes with much respect and even with
admiration. We knew how great a task the Germans had set to themselves,
and were astonished at the speed with which they made themselves
efficient. I have often been told that during the years immediately
before the war, the relations between English and German naval officers
and men were more close than those between English officers and men and
the sailors of any other navy. It became recognised that in the Germans
we should have foemen of undoubted gallantry and of no less undoubted
skill. There are few officers and men in our Fleets who do not know
personally and admire their opposite numbers upon the enemy’s side, and
though our foes have in many ways broken the rules of war as understood
and practised by us, one never hears the Royal Navy call the Germans
“pirates.” Expressions such as this one are left to civilians. When Mr.
Churchill announced that the officers and crews of captured U boats
would be treated differently from those taken in surface ships, the Navy
strongly disapproved. To them it seemed that the responsibility for
breaches of international law and practice lay not with naval officers
and men, whose duty it was to carry out the orders of the superiors, but
that it lay with the superiors who gave those orders. To retaliate upon
subordinate officers and men for the crimes of their political chiefs
seemed cowardly, and worse—it struck a blow at the whole fabric of
naval discipline not only in the German but in every other Service,
including our own. Our officers saw more clearly than did the then First
Lord that no Naval Service can remain efficient for a day if it be
encouraged to discriminate between the several orders conveyed to it,
and to claim for itself a moral right to select what shall be obeyed and
what disobeyed.
Germany had no maritime traditions and a scanty seafaring population to
assist her. Her seaboard upon the North Sea is a maze of shallows and
sandbanks, through which devious channels leading to her naval and
commercial bases are kept open only by continuous dredging. God has made
Plymouth Sound, Spithead and the Firth of Forth; the Devil, it is
alleged, has been responsible for Scapa and the Pentland Firth in
winter; but man, German man, has made the navigable mouths of the Elbe,
the Weser and the Ems. The Baltic is an inland sea upon which the
coasting trade had for centuries been mainly in the hands of
Scandinavians. Until late in the nineteenth century Germany was one of
the least maritime of all nations; almost at a leap she sprang into the
position of one of the greatest. It is said that peoples get the
governments which they deserve; it is certainly true that when peoples
are blind their governments shut their eyes. In the Country of the Blind
the one-eyed man is not King; he is flung out for having the
impertinence to pretend to see. In a state of blindness or of careless
indifference we made Germany a present of Heligoland in 1890. It looked
a poor thing, a crumbling bit of waste rock, and when the Kaiser asked
for it he received the gift almost without discussion. Both our
Government and Court at that time were almost rabidly pro-German. We all
cherished so much suspicion of France and Russia that we had none left
to spare for Germany. Heligoland was then of no great use to us, but it
was of incalculable value to our future enemies. A German Heligoland
fortified, equipped with airship sheds and long-distance wireless, a
shelter for submarines, was to the new German Navy only second in value
to the Kiel Canal. Islands do not “command” anything beyond range of
their guns, especially when they have no harbours; but Heligoland,
though it in no sense commanded the approach to the German bases, was an
invaluable outpost and observation station. It is a little island of
crumbling red rock, preserved only by man’s labour from vanishing into
the sea; it is a mile long and less than one-third of a mile wide; it is
28 miles from the nearest mainland. Yet when we gave to Germany this
scrap of wasting rock, we gave her the equivalent in naval value of a
fleet. We secured her North Sea bases from our sudden attacks, and we
gave her an observation station from which she could direct attacks
against ourselves.
Heligoland, a free gift from us, was the first asset, a most valuable
asset, which Germany was able to place to the credit side of her naval
balance sheet. Other assets were rapidly acquired. In 1898 the building
of the new navy seriously began, in 1900 was passed the famous German
Navy Law setting forth a continuous programme of expansion, the back
alley between the North Sea and the Baltic was cut through the isthmus
of Schleswig-Holstein, and Germany as a Sea Power rose into being. The
British people, at first amused and slightly contemptuous, became
alarmed, and the Royal Navy, always watchful, never boastful, never
undervaluing any possible opponent, settled down to deal in its own
supremely efficient fashion with the German Menace.
Neither the British people nor the Royal Navy were lacking in confidence
in themselves, but neither the people nor the Navy—we are, perhaps, the
least analytical race on earth—realised the immovable foundation upon
which their confidence was based. The people were wise; they simply
trusted to the Navy and gave to it whatever it asked. But the Navy,
though fully alive to the value of its own traditions, training, and
centuries-old skill, did not fully understand that the source of its own
immense striking force was moral rather than material. Like its critics
it thought over much in machines, and when it saw across the North Sea
the outpouring of ships and guns and men which Germany called her Navy,
it became not a little anxious about the result of a sudden unforeseen
collision. It was, if anything, over anxious.
But while this is true of the Navy as a whole, it is not true of the
higher naval command. Away hidden in Whitehall, immersed in the study of
problems for which the data were known and from which no secrets were
hid, sat those who had taken the measure of the German efforts and
gauged the value of them more justly than could the Germans themselves.
They, the silent ones,—who never talked to representatives of the Press
or inspired articles in the newspapers—knew that the German ships,
especially the all-big-gun ships, generically but rather misleadingly
called “Dreadnoughts,” were in nearly every class inferior copies of our
own ships of two or three years earlier. The Royal Navy designed and
built the first Dreadnought at Portsmouth in fifteen months, and
preserved so rigid a secrecy about her details that she was a “mystery
ship” till actually in commission. This lead of fifteen months, so
skilfully and silently acquired, became in practice three years, for it
reduced to waste paper all the German designs. The first Dreadnought was
commissioned by us on December 11th, 1906; it was not until May 3rd,
1910, that the Germans put into service the first _Nassaus_, which were
inferior copies. Our lead gained in 1906 was more than maintained, and
each batch of German designs showed that step by step they had to wait
upon us to reveal to them the path of naval progress. With us the upward
rush was extraordinarily rapid; with the Germans it was slow and
halting—they were slow to grasp what we were about and were then slow
to interpret in steel those of our intentions which they were able to
discern. Once our Navy had adopted the revolutionary idea of the
all-big-gun ship—the design was perhaps an evolution rather than a
revolution—its constructors and designers developed the principle with
the most astonishing rapidity. The original _Dreadnought_ was out of
date in the designers’ minds within a year of her completion. After two
or three years she was what the Americans call “a back number,” and when
the War broke out we had in hand—some of them nearly completed—the
great class of _Queen Elizabeths_ with 25 knots of speed and eight
15-inch guns, vessels as superior to the first _Dreadnought_ in fighting
force as she was herself superior to the light German battleships which
her appearance cast upon the scrap heap. And Germany, in spite of her
patient efforts, her system of espionage—which rarely seemed to
discover anything of real importance—and her outpouring of gold, had
even then as her best battleships vessels little better than our first
_Dreadnought_. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the five
_Queen Elizabeths_ and the five _Royal Sovereigns_ which we put into
commission during the war, equipped with eighty 15-inch guns, could have
taken on with ease the whole of the German battle fleet as it existed in
August 1914. Up to the outbreak of war, at each stage in the race for
weight of guns, power and speed, Britain remained fully two years ahead
of Germany in quality and a great deal more than two years ahead in
magnitude of output. During the war, as I will show later on, the
British lead was prodigiously increased and accelerated.
In its inmost heart, and especially in the heart of the higher command,
the Royal Navy knew that German designers of big ships were but pale
copyists of their own, and that the shipyards of Danzig and Stettin and
Hamburg could not compete in speed or in quantity with its own yards and
those of its contractors in England and Scotland. And yet knowing these
things, there was an undercurrent of anxiety ever present both in the
Navy and in those circles within its sphere of influence. It seemed to
some anxious minds—especially of civilian naval students—that what was
known could not be the whole truth, and that the Germans—belief in
whose ingenuity and resources had become an obsession with many
people—must have some wonderful unknown ships and still more wonderful
guns hidden in the deep recesses behind the Frisian sandbanks. In those
days, a year or two before August 1914, men who ought to have known
better would talk gravely of secret shipyards where stupendous vessels
were under construction, and of secret gunshops where the superhuman
Krupps were at work upon designs which would change the destinies of
nations. Anyone who has ever seen a battleship upon a building slip, and
knows how few are the slips which can accommodate them and how few are
the builders competent to make them, and how few can build the great
guns and gun mountings, will smile at the idea of secret yards and
secret construction. Details may be kept secret, as with the first
_Dreadnought_ and with many of our super-battleships, but the main
dimensions and purpose of a design are glaringly conspicuous to the eyes
of the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Service. One might as well try to hide
a Zeppelin as a battleship.
As with ships so with guns. I will deal in another chapter with the
Navy’s belief, fully justified in action, in the bigger gun—the
straight shooting, hard hitting naval gun of ever-expanding calibre—and
in the higher speed of ships which enables the bigger gun to be used at
its most effective range. There was nothing new in this belief; it was
the ripe fruit of all naval experience. Speed without hitting power is
of little use in the battle line; hitting power without speed gives to
an enemy the advantage of manœuvre and of escape; but speed and hitting
power, both greater than those of an enemy, spell certain annihilation
for him. He can neither fight nor run away. Given sufficient light and
sea room for a fight to the finish, he must be destroyed. The North Sea
deadlock is due to lack of room.
Our guns developed in size and in power as rapidly as did our great
ships in the capacity to carry and use them. Krupps have a very famous
name, made famous beyond their merits by the extravagant adulation which
for years past has been poured upon them in our own country by our own
people. The Germans are a race of egotists, but they have never exalted
themselves, and everything that is German, to the utterly absurd heights
to which many fearful Englishmen have exalted them in England. Krupps
have been bowed down to and almost worshipped as the Gods of Terror.
Their supreme capacity for inventing and constructing the best possible
guns has been taken as proved beyond the need of demonstration. But
Krupps were not and are not supermen; they have had to learn their trade
like more humble folk, and naval gun-making is not a trade which can be
taken up one day and made perfect on the next. Krupps are good
gun-makers, but our own naval gunshops have for years outclassed them at
every point—in design, in size, in power, in quality, and in speed of
production. The long wire-wound naval gun, a miracle of patient
workmanship, is British not German. While Krupps were labouring to make
11-inch guns which would shoot straight and not “droop” at the muzzle,
our Navy was designing and making 12-inch and 13.5-inch weapons of far
greater power and accuracy; when Krupps had at last achieved good
12-inch guns, we were turning out rapidly 15-inch weapons of equal
precision and far greater power. In naval guns Krupps lag far behind us.
And even in land guns—well, the huge siege howitzers which battered
Liège and Namur into powder, came not from Essen but from the Austrian
Skoda Works at Pilsen! And among field guns, the best of the best by
universal acclaim is the French _Soixante Quinze_, in design and
workmanship entirely the product of French artistic skill. War is a sad
leveller, and it has not been very kind to Krupps.
Collectively, the Navy is a fount of serene knowledge and wisdom, and
has been fully conscious of its superiority in men, in ships, and in
guns, but individual naval officers afloat or ashore are not always
either learned or wise. Foolish things were thought and said in 1913 and
in 1914, which one can now recall with a smile and charitably endeavour
to forget.
The Royal Navy was, and is, as superior to that of Germany in officers
and men as in ships and in guns. Indeed the one is the direct and
inevitable consequence of the other. Ships and guns are not imposed upon
the Navy by some outside intelligence; they are secretions from the
brains and experience and traditions of the Service itself; they are the
expressions in machinery of its Soul. One always comes back to this
fundamental fact when making any comparison of relative values in men or
in machines. It was the Navy’s Soul which conceived and made ready the
ships and the guns. The officers and men are the temporary embodiment of
that immortal Soul; it is preserved and developed in them, and through
them is passed on to succeeding generations in the Service.
Though the German Navy had not had time or opportunity to evolve within
itself that dominant moral force which I have called a naval Soul, it
contained both officers and men of notable fighting quality and
efficiency. The Royal Navy no more under-rated the personality of its
German opponents than it under-rated their ships and their guns. We
English, though in foreign eyes we may appear to be self-satisfied, even
bumptious, are at heart rather diffident. No nation on earth publicly
depreciates itself as we do; no nation is so willing to proclaim its own
weaknesses and follies and crimes. Much of this self-depreciation is
mere humbug, little more sincere than our confession on Sunday that we
are “miserable sinners,” but much of it is the result of our native
diffidence. No Scotsman was ever mistrustful of himself or of his race,
but very many Englishmen quite genuinely are. And the Navy being, as it
always has been, English of the English, tends to be modest, even
diffident. It is always learning, always testing itself, always seeking
after improvement; it realises out of the fullness of its experience how
much still remains to be learned, and becomes inevitably diffident of
its very great knowledge and skill. No man is so modest as the genuine
unchallengeable expert.
If one cannot improvise ships and guns of the highest quality by an
exercise of the Imperial will, still less can one improvise the officers
and men who have to man and use them. But Germany tried to do both. The
German Navy could not secrete its ships and guns, for there was no
considerable German navy a score of years ago; the machines were
designed and provided for it by Vulcan and Schichau and Krupps, and the
personnel to fight them had to be collected and trained from out of the
best available material. The officers were largely drawn from Prussian
families which for generations had served in the Army, and had in their
blood that sense of discipline and warlike fervour which are invaluable
in the leaders of any fighting force. But they had in them also the
ruthless temper of the German Army, which we have seen revealed in its
frightful worst in Belgium, Serbia and Poland; they knew nothing of that
kindly chivalrous spirit which is born out of the wide salt womb of the
Sea Mother. Many of these officers, though lacking in the Sea Spirit,
were highly competent at their work. Von Spee’s Pacific Squadron, which
beat Craddock off Coronel and was a little later annihilated by Sturdee
off the Falkland Islands, was, officer for officer and man for man,
almost as good as our best. The German Pacific Squadron was nearer the
realisation of the naval Soul than was any other part of the German
Navy. Admiral von Spee was a gallant and chivalrous gentleman, and the
captain of the _Emden_, ingenious, gay, humorous, unspoiled in success
and undaunted in defeat, was as English in spirit as he was unlike most
of his compatriots in sentiment. The Navy and the public at home were
right when they acclaimed von Spee and von Müller as seamen worthy to
rank with their own Service.
The German Pacific Squadron, being on foreign service, had not only
picked officers of outstanding merit, but also long-service crews of
unpressed men. It was, therefore, in organisation and personnel much
more akin to our Navy than was the High Seas Fleet at home in which the
men were for the most part conscripts on short service (three years)
from the Baltic, Elbe and inland provinces. In our Service the sailors
and marines join for twenty-one years, and in actual practice frequently
serve very much longer. They begin as children in training-ships and in
the schools attached to Marine barracks, and often continue in middle
life as grave men in the petty and warrant officer ranks. The Naval
Service is the work of their lives just as it is with the commissioned
officers. But in the German High Seas Fleet, with its three years of
forced service, a man was no sooner half-trained than his time was up
and he gladly made way for a raw recruit. The German crews were not of
the Sea nor of the Service. During the war, no doubt, they became better
trained. The experienced seamen were not discharged and the general
level of skill arose; the best were passed into the submarines which
alone of the Fleet were continuously at work on the sea. In our own
Navy, in consequence of the very great increase in the number of ships,
both large and small, the professional sailors had to be diluted by the
calling up of Naval Reservists, and by the expansion of the Royal Naval
Volunteer Reserve. But unlike Germany we had, fortunately for ourselves,
an almost limitless maritime population from which to draw the new naval
elements. Fishermen at the call of their country flocked into the
perilous service of mine sweeping and patrolling, young men from the
seaports readily joined the Volunteer detachments in training for the
great ships, dilution was carried on deftly and with so clear a judgment
that the general level of efficiency all round was almost completely
maintained. That this was possible is not so remarkable as it sounds.
The Royal Navy of the fighting ships, even after the war expansion,
remained a very small select service of carefully chosen men. Half of
its personnel was professional and perfectly trained, the second and new
half was so mingled and stirred up with the first that the professional
leaven permeated the whole mass. The Army which desired millions had to
take what it could get; but the Navy, which counts its men in tens of
thousands only, could pick and choose of the best. In the Army the old
Regulars were either killed or swamped under the flood of new entrants;
in the Navy the professionals remained always predominant. It was very
characteristic of the proud exclusiveness of our Royal Navy, very
characteristic of its haughty Soul, that the temporary officers were
allotted rank marks which distinguished them at a glance, even of
civilian eyes, from the regular Service.
Though, as events proved, the Royal Navy need have felt little anxiety
about the result of a fair trial of strength with its German opponents,
there was one ever-present justification for that deeper apprehension
with which the Navy in peace regarded an outbreak of war. It really was
feared lest our Government should leave to the Germans the moment for
beginning hostilities. It was feared lest while politicians were waiting
and seeing the Germans would strike suddenly at their “selected moment,”
and by a well-planned torpedo and submarine attack in time of supposed
peace, would put themselves in a position of substantial advantage.
There was undoubted ground for this fear. The German Government has not,
and never has had, any scruples; it has no moral standards; if before a
declaration of war it could have struck hard and successfully at our
Fleets it would have seized the opportunity without hesitation. And
realising this with the clarity of vision which distinguishes the Sea
Service, the Navy feared lest its freedom of action should be fatally
restricted at the very moment when its hands needed to be most free.
A distinguished naval captain—now an admiral—once put the matter
before me plainly from the naval point of view:
“If the Germans secretly mobilise at a moment when a third of our big
ships are out of commission or are under repair, they may not only by a
sudden torpedo attack cripple our battle squadrons, but may open the
seas to their own cruisers and submarines. We might, possibly should,
recover in time to deal with an invasion, but in the meantime our
overseas trade, on which you people depend at home for food and raw
materials, would have been destroyed. And until we had fully recovered,
not a man or a gun could be sent over sea to help France.”
“Surely we should have some warning,” I objected.
“You won’t get it from Germany,” said he gravely. “The little old man
(Roberts) is right. Germany will strike when Germany’s hour has struck.
If we are ready she will have no chance at all and knows it; she will
not give us a chance to be ready. When she wants to cover a secret
mobilisation she will invite parties of journalists, or provincial
mayors, or village greengrocers to visit Berlin and to see for
themselves how peaceful her intentions are!”
That is how the Navy felt and talked during the months immediately
before the War, and who shall say that their apprehensions were not well
founded? What it feared was unquestionably possible, even probable. But
happily for the Navy, and for these Islands and the Empire which it
guards, those whom the gods seek to destroy they first drive mad. The
wisdom of Germany’s rulers was by all of us immensely overrated. They
fell into the utter blindness of unimaginative stupidity. They
understood us so little that they thought us sure to desert our friends
rather than risk the paint upon our ships and the skins upon our fat and
slothful bodies. They watched us quarrelling among ourselves, talking
savagely of fighting one another in Ireland—we went on doing these
things until July 28th, 1914, four days before Germany attacked
Belgium!—and failed to realise that the ancient fighting spirit was as
strong in us as ever, however much it might seem to be smothered under
the rubbish of politics and social luxury. And meanwhile, during those
intensely critical weeks of July, while Parliament chattered about
Ulster and politicians looked hungrily for the soft spots in one
another’s throats, the Royal Navy was quietly, unostentatiously
preparing for war. What the Navy then did,—moving in all things with
its own silent, serene, masterful efficiency and grimly thanking God for
the dense political gas clouds behind which it could conceal its
movements from the enemy,—saved not only Great Britain and the Empire;
it saved the civilisation of the world.
Blindly Germany went on with her preparations for war against France and
Russia, including in the programme the swallowing up of little Belgium,
and left us wholly out of her calculations. The German battle Fleet,
which had been engaged in peace manœuvres, was cruising off the
Norwegian coast. Grand Admiral von Tirpitz had never expected us to
intervene, and no naval preparations were made. The Germans were in no
position to interfere with our disposition, or to move their cruisers
upon our trade communications. But all through those later days of
imminent crisis the English First Fleet lay mobilised at Portland,
whither it had moved from Spithead, until one night it slipped silently
away and disappeared into the northern mists. The Second and Third
Fleets had been filled up and were completely ready for war in the early
summer dawn of August 3rd. The big ships rushed to their war stations
stretching from the Thames to the Orkneys and commanding both outlets
from the North Sea; the destroyers and submarines swarmed in the Channel
and off the sand-locked German bases. The hour had struck, everything
had been done exactly as had been planned. The German Fleet crept into
safety through the back door of the Kattegat and Kiel, and on the
evening of August 4th, the British Government declared war.
Germany, who thought to catch the Navy asleep, was herself caught. She
had never believed that we either would or could fight for the integrity
of Belgium. She went on blindly in her appointed way until suddenly her
sight returned in a flash of bitter realisation that the Royal Navy,
without firing a single shot, had won the first tremendous decisive,
irreparable battle in the coming world’s war. Her chance of success at
sea had disappeared for ever. Before her lay a long cruel dragging fight
with the seas closed to her merchant ships and her whole Empire in a
state of blockade. No wonder that then, and since, Germany’s fiercest
passion of hate has been directed against us, and above all against that
Royal Navy which shields us and strikes for us. Before a shot had been
fired she saw herself outwitted, outmanœuvred, out-fought. “Gott strafe
England!”