LANDING OF THE FRENCH IN SUSSEX.
The Briton is, alas! too prone to underrate his adversary. It is this
national egotism, this fatal over-confidence, that has led to most of
the reverses we have sustained in recent wars.
The popular belief that one Briton is as good as half a dozen
foreigners, is a fallacy which ought to be at once expunged from the
minds of every one. The improved and altered conditions under which
international hostilities are carried on nowadays scarcely even admit of
a hand-to-hand encounter, and the engines of destruction designed by
other European Powers being quite as perfect as our own, tact and
cunning have now taken the place of pluck and perseverance. The strong
arm avails but little in modern warfare; strategy is everything.
Into Brighton, an hour after dawn, the enemy's vessels were pouring
volley after volley of deadly missiles. A party had landed from the
French flagship, and, summoning the Mayor, had demanded a million
pounds. This not being forthcoming, they had commenced shelling the
town. The fire was, for the most part, directed against the long line of
shops and private residences in King's Road and at Hove, and in half an
hour over a hundred houses had been demolished. The palatial Hotel
Metropole stood a great gaunt ruin. Shells had carried large portions of
the noble building away, and a part of the ruin had caught fire and was
burning unchecked, threatening to consume the whole. Church steeples
had been knocked over like ninepins, and explosive missiles dropped in
the centre of the town every moment, sweeping the streets with deadly
effect. The enemy met with little or no opposition. Our first line of
defence, our Navy, was missing! The Admiralty were unaware of the
whereabouts of three whole Fleets that had mobilised, and the ships
remaining in the Channel, exclusive of the Harbour Defence Flotilla,
were practically useless.
At Eastbourne, likewise, where a similar demand had been made, shot fell
thick as hail, and shells played fearful havoc with the handsome
boarding-houses and hotels that line the sea front. From the redoubt,
the Wish Tower, and a battery on the higher ground towards Beachy Head,
as well as a number of other hastily constructed earthworks, a reply was
made to the enemy's fire, and the guns in the antiquated martello
towers, placed at intervals along the beach, now and then sent a shot
towards the vessels. But such an attempt to keep the great ironclads at
bay was absurdly futile. One after another shells from the monster guns
of the Russian ship _Pjotr Velikij_, and the armoured cruisers _Gerzog
Edinburskij_, _Krejser_, and _Najezdnik_, crashed into these out-of-date
coast defences, and effectually silenced them. In Eastbourne itself the
damage wrought was enormous. Every moment shells fell and exploded in
Terminus and Seaside Roads, while the aristocratic suburb of Upperton,
built on the hill behind the town, was exposed to and bore the full
brunt of the fray. The fine modern Queen Anne and Elizabethan residences
were soon mere heaps of burning debris. Every moment houses fell,
burying their occupants, and those people who rushed out into the roads
for safety were, for the most part, either overwhelmed by debris, or had
their limbs shattered by flying pieces of shell.
The situation was awful. The incessant thunder of cannon, the screaming
of shells whizzing through the air, to burst a moment later and send a
dozen or more persons to an untimely grave, the crash of falling walls,
the clouds of smoke and dust, and the blazing of ignited wreckage,
combined to produce a scene more terrible than any witnessed in England
during the present century.
And all this was the outcome of one man's indiscretion and the cunning
duplicity of two others!
At high noon Newhaven fell into the hands of the enemy.
The attack had been so entirely unexpected that the troops mobilised and
sent there had arrived too late. The town was being sacked, and the
harbour was in the possession of the French, who were landing their
forces in great numbers. From Dieppe and Havre transports were arriving,
and discharging their freights of fighting men and guns under cover of
the fire from the French warships lying close in land.
Notwithstanding all the steps taken during the last twenty years to
improve the condition of our forces on land and sea, this outbreak of
hostilities found us far from being in a state of preparedness for war.
England, strangely enough, has never yet fully realised that the
conditions of war have entirely changed. In days gone by, when troops
and convoys could move but slowly, the difficulty of providing for
armies engaged in operations necessarily limited their strength. It is
now quite different. Improved communications have given to military
operations astonishing rapidity, and the facilities with which large
masses of troops, guns, and stores can now be transported to great
distances has had the effect of proportionately increasing numbers. As a
result of this, with the exception of our own island, Europe was armed
to the teeth. Yet a mobilisation arrangement that was faulty and not
clearly understood by officers or men, was the cause of the enemy being
allowed to land. It is remarkable that the military authorities had not
acted upon the one principle admitted on every side, namely, that the
only effective defence consists of attack. The attack, to succeed,
should have been sudden and opportune, and the Army should have been so
organised that on the occurrence of war a force of adequate strength
would have been at once available.
In a word, we missed our chance to secure this inestimable advantage
afforded by the power of striking the first blow.
There was an old and true saying, that "England's best bulwarks were her
wooden walls." They are no longer wooden, but it still remains an
admitted fact that England's strongest bulwarks should be her Navy, and
that any other nation may be possessed of an equally good one; also that
our best bulwark should be equal to, or approach, the fighting power of
the bulwarks owned by any two possible hostile nations.
To be strong is to stave off war; to be weak is to invite attack. It was
our policy of _laissez faire_, a weak Navy and an Army bound up with red
tape, that caused this disastrous invasion of England. Had our Fleet
been sufficient for its work, invasion would have remained a threat, and
nothing more. Our Navy was not only our first, but our last line of
defence from an Imperial point of view; for, as a writer in the _Army
and Navy Gazette_ pointed out in 1893, it was equally manifest and
unquestionable that without land forces to act as the spearhead to the
Navy's over-sea shaft, the offensive tactics so essential to a thorough
statesmanlike defensive policy could not be carried out. Again, the
mobility and efficiency of our Regular Army should have been such that
the victory of our Fleet could be speedily and vigorously followed by
decisive blows on the enemy's territory.
Already the news of the landing of the enemy had--besides causing a
thrill such as had never before been known in our "tight little
island"--produced its effect upon the price of food in London as
elsewhere. In England we had only five days' bread-stuffs, and as the
majority of our supplies came from Russia the price of bread trebled
within twelve hours, and the ordinary necessaries of life were
proportionately dearer.
But the dice had been thrown, and the sixes lay with Moloch.