THE GENERAL, THE ADMIRAL AND THE KING
That Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in France
and Flanders, an army which reduces to comparative insignificance the
largest host ever marshaled by Napoleon, comes from fighting stock is
plain enough from the fact that his only sister, Mrs. Despard, is a
militant suffragette. She herself provides homely evidence that the
appointment of her brother (whom she practically "brought up") to lead
the British fight against the Germans on land realized a boyhood
aspiration. "When we were children," Mrs. Despard relates, "the great
province of Schleswig-Holstein was taken from Denmark by what was then
Prussia. We were discussing the disgraceful incident of poor little
Denmark losing the province, and a certain little boy, then ten or
twelve years of age, strutted about and said: 'If I was only a man, I
know what I'd do to them.' He was very indignant. That little boy is
now commander of Britain's great army."
It has been said that South Africa is the grave of British military
reputations. Sir Redvers Buller's was buried there, and though those of
Roberts and Kitchener emerged from the Boer War, the renown of Botha and
Dewet admittedly outshone them. One British General at least was "made"
by the three years' conflict with the Dutch Republics--Sir John French,
the cavalryman who relieved Kimberley, and whose escutcheon during the
sorry South African campaign was alone untarnished by blunder or
reverse. As Kitchener was the logical choice for organizer of Britain's
new armies, Sir John French was the natural selection for their
field-commandership. French, following in paternal footsteps, began his
fighting career in the navy, but he has been a soldier for the past
forty-one years--he was sixty-three in September, 1915. A man whose
entire manhood has been lived in the army, who knows it through and
through, loves it passionately, has devoted himself to it with the zeal
of a student, and fought in all its campaigns for nearly half a century,
had an ideal claim upon its supreme honor in the hour of superlative
crisis. Doubtless in the Government's mind when it entrusted "Jack"
French with the command of the British Expeditionary Force was the
reputation he had won in South Africa as a fighting field-general.
Unquestionably the broad sweeping movements his cavalry divisions
executed at Elandslaagte, Lombard's Kop, Bloemfontein, Pretoria and
Barberton were operations which contributed, perhaps, more than any
other scheme of the brilliantly mismanaged Boer campaign finally to
bring it to a victorious end. Neither the British nor the German
General Staff realized in August, 1914, that Armageddon was going to
develop into a trench or "positional" war, with little or no latitude
for those grandiose tactical maneuvers which delighted the heart of
Moltke and made a Sedan the ambition of every modern tactician. Yet Sir
John French, whose military virtues include adaptability, if not
imaginativeness, which is oftener born, than acquired, turned out to be
ideally fitted for "spade warfare," in which the qualities of endurance,
steadfastness and patience have displaced the more spectacular talents
of daring and recklessness and those bold strokes of magnificent
vastness known as Napoleonic. Bonaparte's scintillating genius, his
predilection for the stupendous, would probably have counted for little
amid such immobile conditions as the Allied armies have had to face in
the West, just as the Germans' prized Moltke traditions in the same
region have come to naught.
[Illustration: Sir John French.]
Military history will unquestionably accord the retreat of the British
army from Mons a place among the finest achievements of all times. It
was due to Sir John French's strategy that Berlin was cheated of that
fiendishly coveted orgy of gloating over the "annihilation" of what the
Kaiser is said to have called "the contemptible little British army."
Since Mons and the Marne the British Field-Marshal's task has been to
"hold" the enemy and to inspire his men to fulfil, unflinchingly, that
prodigious, but comparatively inglorious, task. In the circumstances it
was fortunate that a man of Sir John French's temperament was in charge.
He knew how to "sit tight." Kinship with his soldiers has been his
lifetime specialty. He is fond of sharing their joys and sorrows not in
any stereotyped, dress-parade sense, but actually. He likes to move
among them, and does so. His jaunty fighting bearing and unfailing good
humor are a constant inspiration. Short and stocky, straight and
energetic of movement, he looks every inch a soldier, and he has a
soldier's habit of saying what he means, direct from the shoulder,
whether it is a corporal, a staff officer, a brigadier or a Cabinet
Minister to whom he is addressing himself.
The Allied military arrangement conferred supreme authority on General
Joffre, but the British Field Marshal's character and career were
considered a joint guarantee that Sir John French would not be found
lacking when called upon to do and dare greatly on his own account. It
would be going too far to say that the war has covered French with
glory. He would be the first to banish such a thought. Though Britons
have fallen laurel-crowned on a score of fields in France and Flanders
and irrigated the cock-pit which lies between the Alps and the Channel
with as heroic blood as was ever spilled, the British offensives in the
West have been little more than brilliant failures. Neuve Chapelle is
an undying story of Anglo-Saxon gallantry, as was Ypres before it; but
it was nothing else. The "big push" which England hoped had at last
begun with the fighting in Artois and the Champagne at the end of
September, 1915, turned out to be a victory of distressingly short life
and little real effectiveness. Yet when Germany lost the war--when she
failed to take Paris--the British army under Sir John French wrote
history of which Englishmen will never be ashamed. Who it was that most
effectually parried von Kluck and the Crown Prince's thrust at the
French capital will probably, among generations of schoolboys yet
unborn, be as fruitful a theme of argument as is the question who won
Waterloo--Wellington or Bluecher--but whatever the verdict of posterity
the smashing of the Germans on the Marne reeked glory for all concerned,
and Britain's share of it is a heritage which will survive with
Blenheim, Balaclava, Kandahar and Khartoum.[1]
[1] Sir John French returned to England in December, 1915, relinquishing
(at his own request, it was officially stated) the
commandership-in-chief in France for the command of the Home Defense
forces. King George conferred the dignity of a Viscountcy on the
Field-Marshal.
Another Sir John--Admiral Jellicoe--is commander-in-chief of the British
navy. Events still to come must determine whether Anglo-Saxon history
is to be enriched with another Nelson. But as far as human prescience
could foretell, "Jack" Jellicoe was of all men in the British Fleet
preordained by talent, temperament and training to be the admiral in
whose keeping could safely be entrusted British destinies more priceless
than those which were safeguarded at Trafalgar.
Jellicoe was one of the godfathers of the dreadnought, having been
summoned by Lord Fisher, the real author of that revolution in naval
science, to support and carry into execution the all-big-gun ship idea.
Fisher had years before associated young Captain Jellicoe with him as
assistant director of naval ordnance, whereupon there ensued an intimacy
which friends say will link their names together much as history
associated St. Vincent and Nelson as the twin victors of Trafalgar--the
one, the far-sighted planner of preparatory reforms; the other, the
faithful executor of their purpose.
Jellicoe resembles Sir John French in more than given name. Like him,
he is of quite markedly small stature. Neither the Generalissimo or
Admiralissimo of Britain in the Great War at all corresponds,
physically, to the popular notion that the English are "big" men. Like
French, again, Jellicoe is mild and gentle, a pair of conspicuously
tight lips indicating poise, reserve force and self-confidence. The
chieftain of the Grand Fleet--that is its official title and not an
effusive expletive--did not make his first acquaintance with danger
afloat when von Tirpitz' submarines began to make life a burden for
British sailors. He has been snatched from the jaws of death on three
separate occasions. In 1893 Jellicoe was commander of Sir George
Tryon's _Victoria_, when it was sent to its doom in the Mediterranean,
and, although "below" in the ship-hospital with fever at the moment of
the disaster, was miraculously rescued by a midshipman when he came to
the surface more dead than alive after the vessel foundered. Seven
years previous, as if Fate was keeping a protecting hand over him for
some great hour, Jellicoe had an equally marvelous escape from drowning
when a gig he was commanding off Gibraltar capsized and he was washed
ashore. In the Boxer war of 1900, Jellicoe was flag captain to Admiral
Seymour, the commander of the Allied expedition which marched from
Tien-tsin to the relief of the Powers' legations in Pekin, and at the
battle of Peitsang Jellicoe was struck by a Chinese bullet, incurring
wounds which the flagship-surgeon considered fatal. Again Jellicoe was
spared. A brother-officer tells a story of Jellicoe's agony on that
occasion, which illuminates his capacity for facing the music, however
doleful. He had asked how the advance to Pekin was proceeding. Told
that everything was going satisfactorily, Jellicoe flashed back: "Tell
me the truth, damn it. Don't lie!"
The triumvirate which has accomplished that amazing, silent victory of
the British Fleet in the war--the complete conquest of sea power without
anything savoring of a decisive action in the open--consists of Lord
Fisher, the creator of the dreadnought; Admiral Sir Percy Scott, the
inventor of the central "fire control" system, and Sir John Jellicoe, to
whose gunnery science and innovations in that all-important branch of
naval warfare are ascribed, in large measure, the acknowledged
preeminence of the British Fleet as a striking force. He had not been
director of ordnance a year when the percentage of the navy's hits out
of rounds fired increased from forty-two to more than seventy. "In
other words," as a critic describes it, "Jellicoe enhanced by more than
a third the fighting value of the British Fleet, and that without a keel
being added to its composition."
Jellicoe, who is fifty-six years old, has nothing but sailor blood in
his veins. His father was a captain in the Fleet before him, and one of
his kinsmen, Admiral Philip Patton, was Second Sea Lord in Nelson's
time. Jellicoe is the incarnation of the spirit, traditions, practises
and brain-force of the British navy of to-day. He has the not
inconsiderable advantage of having had opportunity personally to take
the measure of his German antagonists, for he has visited their country,
where he made the acquaintance of von Tirpitz, Ingenohl, Pohl, Behncke,
Holtzendorff, Prince Henry and all the other naval men of the
Fatherland, and was even privileged to cruise over Berlin in a Zeppelin.
England has heard little and seen nothing of Jellicoe during the war.
The veil of mystery which envelops the Grand Fleet is seldom lifted.
Not one Englishman in a million knows where the Fleet is, though all
know that it is where it ought to be. A ten days' visit paid to the
officers and men of the Armada by the Archbishop of York in the late
summer of 1915 resulted in imparting to the nation the first glimmer of
their life, of their indomitable watch and wait, which had been
forthcoming.
"It is difficult for our sailormen," wrote the Archbishop, "to realize
the value of their long-drawn vigil. Their one longing is to meet the
German ships and sink them; and yet month after month the German ships
decline the challenge. The men have little time or chance or perhaps
inclination to read accounts in serious journals of the invaluable
service which the Navy is fulfilling by simply keeping its watch; and
naval officers do not make speeches to their men. I think, indeed I
know, that it was a real encouragement to them to hear a voice from the
land of their homes telling them of the debt their country owes them for
the command of the seas--the safety of the ships carrying food and means
of work to the people, supplies of men and munitions to the fields of
battle--which is secured to us by the patient watching of the Fleet."
Speaking of Admiral Jellicoe, the Archbishop said:
"It was refreshing and exhilarating beyond words to find oneself in a
world governed by a great tradition so strong that it has become an
instinct of unity and mutual trust. But to the influence of this great
tradition must be added the influence of a great personality. I can not
refrain from saying here that I left the Grand Fleet sharing to the full
the admiration, affection, and confidence which every officer and man
within it feels for its Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Jellicoe. He
reassuredly is the right man in the right place at the right time. His
officers give him the most absolute trust and loyalty. When I spoke of
him to his men I always felt that quick response which to a speaker is
the sure sign that he has reached and touched the hearts of his hearers.
The Commander-in-Chief--quiet, modest, courteous, alert, resolute,
holding in firm control every part of his great fighting engine--has
under his command not only the ships but the heart of his Fleet. He
embodies and strengthens that comradeship of single-minded service which
is the crowning honor of the Navy."
More than once the criticism has been uttered in England itself that the
Fleet has been conspicuously lacking in the "Nelson touch." Even
Americans, friendly observers, have ventured to suggest that there
seemed to be an absence of the Farragut or Dewey "to-hell-with-mines"
spirit. Up to the end of the first year of war, Britons faced the fact
that their "supreme navy" had lost seven battleships aggregating 97,600
tons (not counting a super-dreadnought reported by the foreign press to
have been lost in the early months of the war, but which was a loss
never "officially confirmed" in England), and ten cruisers aggregating
81,365 tons. Submarines, in that nerve-racking and troublous day before
Scott and Jellicoe solved the problem of sinking "U boats" almost faster
than German dockyards could launch substitutes, accomplished terrific
havoc among the British merchant fleet, even though the sea commerce of
these islands was never remotely in danger of being "paralyzed," as von
Tirpitz and the minions of Frightfulness fondly planned.
[Illustration: Sir J. R. Jellicoe.]
Yet all this while, the British Fleet was tightening its grip upon the
command of the sea to an extent which may now be described as absolute.
The German flag, war ensign and merchant pennant, has been swept from
the oceans as if it had never flown. Hamburg and Bremen, the
Fatherland's prides, are as completely demolished, as far as their
usefulness to Germany for war is concerned, as if they had been battered
into smoking ruins. German mercantile trade simply no longer exists,
except such of it as can be smuggled in tramps and ferries across the
narrow reach of the Baltic between Pomerania and the Scandinavian ports.
The Germanic Allies can import and export nothing oversea except by the
grace of Jellicoe. Their deported propaganda chieftains or compromised
ambassadors and attaches can not return to their homes in Europe from
the United States without gracious "safe conduct" by the British Fleet.
The toymakers of Nuremberg can not deliver a solitary tin soldier to an
American Christmas tree unless Jellicoe says yes. Two score proud
German liners, including the queen of them all, the _Vaterland_, are
rotting and rusting in United States harbors, ingloriously imprisoned by
British naval power. In a dozen other ports throughout the world
Hamburg and Bremen vessels tug at anchor--greyhounds enchained. Germany
is banned from the oceans like an outlaw. Her people can eat and drink
only on the ration basis. The British Fleet has done something else of
which, it seemed to me, an American Presidential message might
legitimately have made mention. It has enabled the people of the United
States for many months to traverse the oceans in security.
These are the immediate effects of British sea supremacy on the enemy,
but even they are incommensurate with the advantages which accrue to
Britain herself. A navy has three cardinal functions: to preserve its
own shores from invasion; to maintain inviolate its country's oversea
communications, including cables, food supply, passenger traffic and
postal transportation; and, finally, to destroy the sea forces of the
enemy. The first two of these functions have been fulfilled by the
Grand Fleet, and at a cost in men and material, though not
inconsiderable, which is infinitesimal, measured by the results
attained. To absolve the third, and, of course, climacteric, function,
Jellicoe and his men and his ironclads stand ready when the opportunity
is given them--readier, by far, than when the war began. They have not
lost a really vital fighting unit (supposing unconfirmed reports to the
contrary to be unfounded). They have had a priceless experience of sea
warfare under almost every conceivable condition. They are veterans of
every essential contingency. There is hardly a terror, military or
atmospheric, which they have not faced and surmounted. They have added
to their battle efficiency by a great many new and powerful ships.
Their _morale_ is unbroken.
When the Kaiser's Canal Armada finally makes up its mind, as I believe
that German public opinion will some day compel it to, to forsake the
snug harbors of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven and the screen of Heligoland for
the high sea, it will find that Jellicoe has up his iron sleeve a
welcome, as to the issue of which no one in these islands is capable of
cherishing the remotest doubt. History is barren of an instance of a
Power defeated in war, who retained command of the sea. Were there no
other considerations which spell the eventual, though probably not the
early, frustration of Germany's ambition to master Europe and, as
William II once sighed, to snatch the trident from Britannia's grasp,
the vise-like grip of naval power which Jellicoe has wrested alone
denotes that Armageddon can have but one ending, however long it be
deferred.
In this cursory review of the men at Britain's helm, the Sovereign is
deliberately put at the end instead of the beginning. I mean to cast no
impious slur upon George V in thus classifying his relative importance
in the scheme of British war life, yet to rank him at the front of the
captains of the State would be hyperbole as unpardonable in a chronicler
as gratuitous defamation would be.
To discuss the figure cut by England's King during the past year is a
task which a foreigner approaches with diffidence. I should not dream
of taking such liberties with their Britannic Majesties, for example, as
my gifted friend and colleague, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, who recently
diagnosed the Royal situation in England thus: "I have seen the King and
Queen, and I know now why they call him George the Fifth; Mary's the
other four-fifths." Whether this subtle tribute to the undoubtedly
potent influence of the gracious Queen explains it or not, the
indisputable fact remains that the part played by King George in the day
of supreme British national trial has been a keen disappointment to a
great many of his subjects. It is not a topic which they discuss at all
in public, nor one upon which it is easy to extract their views even in
private. But when an inquiring alien even of unmistakably sympathetic
sentiment accomplishes the miracle of inducing a Briton to pour out his
heart, he will secure evidence corroborative of an impression the
foreigner has had from the start, if he has lived in England since
August, 1914--that the monarchy, as such, has not given a wholly
satisfactory account of itself. Men who are so utterly un-English as to
be "quite" frank even suggest that King George's insistence not only
upon enacting the "constitutional monarch," but _overplaying_ that role,
has not inconsiderably undermined the solidity of the Royal principle in
numerous British hearts. They will tell you, if in communicative mood,
that George has failed to rise to the majestic opportunities of the
moment. They contrast his incorrigibly "constitutional" behavior with
what they feel assured is the red-blooded lead King Edward would have
given. They assert that the hour of Imperial peril, when national
existence itself is at stake, has caused so many cherished shibboleths
to go by the board, that the strait-jacket of "constitutional monarchy,"
which is another name for Irresponsibility, ought to go with them. In
times of peace, say Englishmen, a conscientious figurehead on the throne
is good enough. In times of war, they want a King. He need not be the
blatant, ubiquitous limelight-chaser that the Kaiser is, but some of
that royal dynamo's attributes, diluted with English seasoning, would
not have been unwelcome to his people during the past year and a half.
Britons, though, I repeat, they do not cry it out for the multitude to
hear, are not edified by the spectacle of a sovereign who has sojourned
with his army and fleet only in the most formal manner, whose war-time
activities are confined to peripatetic visits to hospitals and
convalescent homes, to inspections and reviews, and to distribution of
Victoria Crosses and Distinguished Service medals at Buckingham Palace.
"The King," to whom Englishmen, before 10 P.M., still drink in
reverential sincerity, and who rise in devout respect when they hear the
anthem which beseeches Divine salvation for him, is an institution from
which Britain felt it had a right to expect both lead and deed in a
great war. She did not demand, or at least no conspicuous section of
her has, that the King should take the field or the sea, and prance
about in the saddle or on the quarter-deck, but they did hope, I think,
for something more inspiring than nebulous constitutionalism. It was
many months after thousands of other British mothers had sent their sons
to death and glory that Queen Mary consented to the dispatch of the
twenty-one-year-old Prince of Wales to the trenches. And Prince Albert,
who is twenty, and was in the navy before the war, was never, as far as
the public is informed, able to gratify his desire to return to active
service afloat, but must cool his martial ardor in the inglorious
capacity of an Admiralty messenger in London. Britons look across to
Germany, Russia and Italy, even to Belgium and Serbia, and, contrasting
the spectacle with "constitutionalism" in their own Royal household,
acknowledge that theirs is not a thrilling picture.
If you attempt to penetrate into what may strike you as a mystery, you
will be told that the cause as far as King George is concerned, is
twofold: first, his high-minded, even slavish, devotion to his
conception of his constitutional limitations, and, secondly, his equally
incorrigible shyness. Sarah Bernhardt, when King George and Queen Mary
were in Paris a couple of years ago, was once summoned to the royal box
of the Comedie Franchise for presentation to the British sovereigns.
She explained to friends afterward that the King's modesty positively
unnerved her. He was as bashful as a schoolgirl. I have been told that
his manner in the presence even of his Ministers is almost deferential.
He does not know the meaning of "mixing," an art in which his late
father excelled. "The King and Queen are fond of lunching alone, and
usually take their tea together," I read the other day in a
"well-informed" society paper. Edward VII was fond of lunching with men
of affairs. He did not heed the hoots of the aristocratic set, which was
scandalized by his intimacy with tea-merchants and money kings, because
through them he was accustomed to keep in touch with the human currents
of his people's life and times. Edward would hardly have allowed even
the Empire's greatest soldier (Englishmen explain) to call the new army
"Kitchener's Army." It would have been called the "King's Army" and the
King would have thrown his incalculably great moral influence into the
breach in some more practical way than lending his photograph for
recruiting advertisements. George V could have been England's finest
recruiting sergeant. He preferred to remain a constitutional monarch.
[Illustration: King George V.]
Englishmen excuse, rather than blame, the King. They point out, in his
extenuation, that George's is a gentle, self-effacing nature little
fitted for the soul-stirring era in the midst of which Fate decreed that
his reign should fall. They cast no aspersions on his rugged patriotism
or even on his kingly zeal. They believe that, according to his lights,
he exercises faithfully what he considers to be his prerogatives. They
feel, they tell you, that it is not his fault that he remains the only
man in the Kingdom who still wears a Prince Albert coat. His is,
somehow, not the magnetic influence which, if it were that of Edward
VII, would still be condemning Englishmen to cling to that ancient robe.
They explain that it is his psychic misfortune, rather than a failing,
that nobody thinks it worth while to emulate him by taking the pledge
"for the duration of the war" and drinking barley-water. Edward VII's
abstemious decree would have blotted the liquor trade out of existence,
because in the lap of his example sat militant loyalty. The "old
King's" wish was law.
Perhaps--I do not know--George V is wiser than men think. Perhaps he is
not being kept in cotton-wool by his Victorian private secretary.
Perhaps he is not yielding as supinely as many people imagine to the
inflexible mandates of constitutionalism. Perhaps he has his ear closer
to the ground than his contemporaries realize, and with it hears the
far-off but unmistakable rumbles of the limitlessly democratized Britain
which is already emerging from the crucible of war. Perhaps injustice
is done to him by those who accuse him of not rising more vigorously to
the opportunities of his Empire's hour of destiny. May he not be
fitting himself still to sit the throne in that coming day when Britain
will perhaps want even a more constitutional ruler than ermine and the
crown now rest upon?