I.
Sir Charles Dilke's visit to India in 1888-1889 convinced him that he had been right in believing the Indian army to be better prepared for war than the portion of the army which was kept at home. A great difficulty he now saw was that there were two rival plans of campaign, the one cherished in India, the other by officers at home. "The greater number of Indian officers expect to march with a large force into Afghanistan to meet the Russians, and believe that reinforcements will be sent from England to swell their armies and to make up for losses in the field. On the other hand, the dominant school in England expect to send an expedition from England, in combination with Turkey or some other allied Power, to attack Russia in other quarters." Dilke was led accordingly to the general conclusion that the one thing needful was "that we should try to remove the consideration of these subjects from the home or the Indian or the Canadian point of view, and should take a general view of the possibilities of Imperial defence."
The attempt to take this imperial view was made in Problems of Greater Britain, which Dilke wrote during the remainder of the year 1889. In this work he discussed the defence of the North-West Frontier of India as a prelude to the examination of the defence of the British Empire. His reason for this separate treatment was that "only on this one of all the frontiers of the Empire the British dominion is virtually conterminous with the continental possessions of a great military Power." He showed that the serious import of this condition was understood by all who knew India well and by both the political parties in England. He dissented from the view that security could be obtained by an agreement with Russia, because it was not easy to see "how Russia could put it out of her own power at any moment to threaten us on the North-West Frontier." The suggestion that Russia should be allowed to occupy the northern portion of Afghanistan he rejected, first because it would have been a flagrant breach of faith with the Amir, and secondly because it would give to Russia territory which she could quickly transform into a base of operations against India.
He thought that Russia could not invade India with a good chance of success if she started from her present frontier, but that if she were allowed to occupy the northern portion of Afghanistan the Indian Government would be put to ruinous expense for the defensive preparations which would then be required. [Footnote: 'Lord Dufferin wrote to me from the Embassy at Rome to express his satisfaction with the Indian portion of my book, and especially those passages in which I demonstrated the exceeding folly of which we should be guilty if ever we consented to a partition of Afghanistan with Russia.'] He noted that the policy of advance upon our left, which he had recommended in 1868, had been adopted with success, chiefly by the efficacy of the Sandeman system of recognizing and supporting the tribal chiefs and requiring them to maintain order, and also by the occupation and fortification of the position of Quetta and by the opening of roads from Quetta through the Gomul and other passes to the Indus at Dera Ismail Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan. This would enable an Indian army to attack the right flank of any Russian force attempting to advance along the Khyber line, which would be resisted in the Khyber hills and at Attock, and be stopped at the fortress of Rawal Pindi. Generally speaking, he held that Indian "defence must be by the offensive with the field army, and the less we have to do with fortifications, the better." He urged the extension northwards of the Sandeman system to all the independent tribes between the Indian and the Afghan borders. If the separate armies for the Presidencies were to be united under a single Commander-in-Chief, as the Indian Government had long desired, and if the principle of enlisting in the native army only men of fighting races were fully adopted, and the native Princes induced to place effective contingents at the disposal of the Government, he thought that India with reinforcements from home would be well able to resist a Russian attack starting from the frontier that Russia then possessed.
But if Russia should once be established at Herat, with railway communications to that point, there would be hardly any limit to the force with which it would become necessary to resist her. He therefore urged that the Russian Government should be given to understand that any advance of her forces into Afghanistan would be regarded by England as a hostile act. At the same time he admitted that it was difficult to see how Russia was in that event to be fought. He still thought that she would be vulnerable at Vladivostock—at any rate until her railway to the Pacific should be completed [Footnote: He considered that, with a view to any future struggle with Russia, the abandonment of Port Hamilton in 1886 by Lord Salisbury had been unfortunate. See, as to Port Hamilton, Life of Granville, ii. 440; Europe and the Far East, by Sir Robert Douglas, pp. 190, 248]—but he was aware that this view was shared neither by the Indian nor the British officers likely to be heard.
In his chapter on Indian Defence Dilke had exhausted the subject from the Indian point of view. He was fully acquainted with the ideas of all those who had been seriously concerned with the problem, of which he had discussed every aspect with them, and his exposition was complete. When in his last chapter he came to "examine the conditions of the defence of the Empire as a whole, and to try to find some general principle for our guidance," he was to a great extent breaking new ground. The subject had been treated in 1888 by Colonel Maurice, afterwards General Sir Frederick Maurice, in his essay on the Balance of Military Power in Europe, but Maurice based his scheme on the assumption of a Continental alliance which Dilke thought impracticable. It had also been treated with great insight as early as 1880 by Sir John Colomb in his Defence of Great and Greater Britain. His brother Admiral Philip Colomb had more recently expounded the view that the right plan was to make the enemy's coasts our frontier, and to blockade the whole of his ports, so that it would be impossible for his fleets to issue forth. This seemed to Dilke to imply a superiority of naval force which England did not possess, and was not then intending to create. But Sir John Colomb in 1880 had admitted the absolute necessity of being prepared to render invasion impossible by purely military forces. "It was necessary," he had said, "that invasion be efficiently guarded against, so that, should our home fleet be temporarily disabled, we may, under cover of our army, prepare and strengthen it to regain lost ground and renew the struggle for that which is essential to our life as a nation and our existence as an Empire."
Sir Charles Dilke thought this sound sense, and that it was rash, in view of the inadequate strength of the actual navy and of the uncertainty as to the effect of new inventions on naval warfare, to count upon beginning a future war with a repetition of Trafalgar. He admitted that the navy, if concentrated in home waters, would be fully able to defend the United Kingdom, but that the fleets if so concentrated must abandon the remainder of the Empire, and that this would involve the destruction of our commerce and would be as severe a blow to the Empire as the invasion of England. He inferred that the navy must be the chief agent in defence, but backed by fortification and by land forces. There ought to be squadrons in distant seas strong enough to hold their own, without reinforcements, against probable enemies on the same stations. The coaling ports must be suitably fortified and have all the troops necessary for their garrisons on the spot in time of peace. [Footnote: Autumn of 1889: 'Among those with whom I corresponded about my book was Lord Charles Beresford, who gave me a great deal of information about coaling-stations for my chapter on Imperial Defence, in which I also had Charles Brackenbury's help to a considerable extent.'] He carefully considered the question of food-supply at home and the possibility of a commercial blockade of the United Kingdom. He did not think that such a blockade could be established or maintained. "Our manufactures would be seriously assailed, our food-supply would become precarious, but we should not be brought to the point of surrender by absolute starvation, and the possibility of invasion is not excluded, as some of the naval school pretend, by the fact that it would be unnecessary."
"On the other hand, a defeat or a temporary absence of the fleet might lead to bombardments, attacks upon arsenals, and even to invasion, if our mobile land forces, our fortifications and their garrisons, were not such as to render attacks of any kind too dangerous to be worth attempting. In the absence of the fleet a landing could not be prevented. But the troops landed ought to be attacked. For this purpose we do not need an immense number of ill-trained, badly-equipped, and unorganized troops, but an army completely ready to take the field and fight in the open, supplied with a well-trained field artillery."
But the mere protection of Great and Greater Britain was not enough. "It is idle to suppose that war could be brought to a termination unless we are prepared in some way to obtain advantages over the enemy such as to cause him to weary of the struggle. The riposte is as necessary in warfare as in fencing, and defence must include the possibility of counter-attack." "In view of almost any conceivable hostilities, we ought to be prepared to supply arms and officers to native levies which would support our Empire in various portions of the globe." But we had too few officers for our own troops at home, in India, and in the auxiliary forces. The stocks of arms ought to be larger than they were, and there ought to be centres of production for them in various parts of the Empire. "The moneys that the British Empire spends upon defence are immensely great, and what is wanted is that those moneys should be spent as is decided by the best advisers who can be obtained." "The main thing needed for a joint organization of the whole of the defensive forces of the Empire is the creation of a body of men whose duty it would be to consider the questions raised, and to work out the answers." For this purpose he thought the one thing needful was a General Staff, an institution of which he gave a brief account, based on Mr. Spenser Wilkinson's essay The Brain of an Army, of which the author had sent him the proofs. "A General Staff," Dilke wrote, "would neither inspect troops nor regulate the promotion of the army, but it would decide the principles which would arrange the distribution of the Imperial forces…. The very existence of a General Staff would constitute a form of Imperial military federation."