But there is no reason why British strength should not have been reduced. Knowing as we now do, not the potentialities, but the practical use that can be made of submarines and destroyers, it must be plain to all that, had Germany intended to begin a world war with a blow at Great Britain, she might well have hoped to have reduced our strength to such a margin before the war began, as to make it almost unnecessary to provide against a fleet action. Most certainly a single surprise attack by submarines could have done all that was desired.
By a singular coincidence, an opportunity for such an attack—an opportunity that could hardly have failed of a most sinister success—offered itself at the strategic moment when the Central Powers had already resolved to use the murder of the Archduke as a pretext for an unprovoked attack on Christendom. All our battleships of the first, second, and third lines, all our battle-cruisers commissioned and in home waters, almost all our armoured cruisers and fast light cruisers, and the bulk of our destroyers and auxiliaries were, in the fateful third week in July, gathered and at anchor—and completely unprotected—in the fairway of the Solent. There were to be no manœuvres in 1914, but a test mobilization instead, and this great congregation of the Fleet was to be a measure of the Admiralty’s capacity to man all our naval forces of any fighting worth. The fact that this gathering was to take place on a certain and appointed date was public property in the month of March. A week or a fortnight before the squadrons steamed one by one to their moorings, a plan of the anchored lines was published in every London paper. The order of the Fleet, the identity of every ship in its place in every line, might have been, and probably were, in German hands a week before any single ship was in her billet. From Emden to the Isle of Wight is a bare 350 miles—a day and a half’s journey for a submarine—and in July 1914, Germany possessed between twenty and thirty submarines. It was a day and a half’s journey if it had been all made at under-water speed. What could not a dozen Weddigens and Hersings have done had they only been sent upon this fell mission, and their arrival been timed for an hour before daybreak on the morning of July 18? They surely could have gone far beyond wiping out a margin of five big ships, which was all the margin we had against the German Fleet alone. They could, in the half light of the summer’s night, have slipped five score torpedoes into a dozen or more battleships and battle-cruisers. They could have attacked and returned undetected, leaving Great Britain largely helpless at sea and quite unable to take part in the forthcoming European war.
Germany could, of course, have done much more to complete our discomfiture. A hundred merchant ships, each carrying three brace of 4-inch guns, and sent as peaceful traders astride the distant trade routes; the despatch of two score or more destroyers to the approaches of the Channel and the Western ports, and all of them instructed—as in fact, eight months afterwards, every submarine was instructed—to sink every British liner and merchantman at sight, without waiting to search or troubling to save passengers or crew—raids organized on this scale and on these principles could have reduced our merchant shipping by a crippling percentage in little more than forty-eight hours. The two things taken together—the assassination of the Fleet, the wholesale murder of the merchant marine—must certainly have thrown Great Britain into a paroxysm of grief and panic.
What a moment this would have been for throwing a raiding force, could one have been secretly organized, upon the utterly undefended, and now indefensible, eastern coast! Secretly, skilfully, and ruthlessly executed these three measures could have done far more than make it impossible for Great Britain to take a hand in the defence of France. They might, by the sheer rapidity and terrific character of the blows, have thrown us so completely off our balance as to make us unwilling, if we were not already powerless, to make further efforts even to defend ourselves. At least, so it must have appeared to Germany. For it was the essence of the German case that the nation was too distracted by political differences, too fond of money-making, too debilitated by luxury and comfort, too conscious of its weak hold on the self-governing colonies, too uncertain of its tenure on its oversea Imperial possessions, to stand by its plighted word. The nation has since proved that all these things were delusions. But it was no delusion that Great Britain would be very reluctant to participate in any war. And we need not have fallen so low as Germany supposed and yet be utterly discomposed and incapable of further effort, had we indeed, in quick succession or simultaneously, received the triple onslaught that it was well within the enemy’s power to inflict.
Even had these blows so failed in the completeness of their several and combined effects as to crush us altogether, had we recovered and been able to strike back, what would have been the situation? It would have taken us some months to hunt down and destroy a hundred armed German merchantmen. If 100,000 or 150,000 men had been landed, the campaign that would have ended in their defeat and surrender could not have been a very rapid one. Our re-assertion of the command of the seas might have had to wait until the dockyards, working day and night shifts, could restore the balance of naval power. Suppose, then, we escaped defeat; suppose these assassin blows had ended in the capture or sinking of a hundred merchantmen in the final overthrow of Germany’s sea power—could these things have been any loss to Germany, if it had been the price of swift and complete victory in Europe? In the unsuccessful attack on Verdun alone she threw away not 150,000 men but three times that number. There is not a German merchantman afloat that has been worth sixpence to her country since war was declared, nor in the first two years of war did the German Fleet achieve anything to counter-balance what the German Army lost by having to face the British as well as the French Army in the west. The sacrifices, then, would have been trivial compared with the stake for which Germany was playing. If it had resulted in keeping us out of the Continent for six months only, our paralysis, even if only temporary, should have decided the issue in Germany’s favour.
Greatly as Germany dared in forcing war upon a Europe altogether surprised and almost altogether unready, yet in point of fact she dared just too little. Abominably wicked as her conduct was, it was not wicked enough to win the justification of success. If war was intended to be inevitable from the moment the Serbian ultimatum was sent, the capacity of Great Britain to intervene should have been dealt with resolutely and ruthlessly and removed as a risk before any other risk was taken. It sobers one to reflect how changed the situation might have been had German foresight been equal to the German want of scruple. Looking back, it seems as if it was but a very little thing the enemy had to do to ensure the success of all his plans.
Had any one before the war sketched out this programme as one which Germany might adopt, he would perhaps have been regarded by the great majority of his countrymen as a lunatic. But to-day we can look at Germany in the light of four years of her conduct. And we can see that it was not scruple or tenderness of conscience or any decent regard for the judgment of mankind that made her overlook the first essential of success. We must attribute it to quite a different cause. I am quoting from memory, but it seems to me that Sir Frederick Pollock has put the truth in this matter into exact terms. “The Germans will go down to history as people who foresaw everything except what actually happened, and calculated everything except its cost to themselves.” It is the supreme example of the childish folly that, for the next two years, we were to see always hand in hand with diabolical wickedness and cunning. And always the folly has robbed the cunning of its prey.
In the edifying tales that we have inherited from the Middle Ages, when simple-minded Christian folk personified the principle of evil and attributed all wickedness to the instigation of the Devil, we are told again and again of men who bargained with the Evil One, offering their eternal souls in payment for some present good—a grim enough exchange for a man to make who believed he had a soul to give. But it is seldom in these tales that the bargain goes through so simply. Sometimes it is the sinner who scores by repentance and the intervention of Heaven and a helpful saint. But often it is the Devil that cheats the sinner. The forfeit of the soul is not explicit in the bargain. There is some other promise, seemingly of plain intent, but in truth ambiguous, which seems to make it possible for sin to go unpunished. Too late, the deluded gambler finds the treaty a “scrap of paper.” The story of Macbeth is a case in point.
Does it not look as if Germany had made some unhallowed bargain of this kind?—as if this hideous adventure was started on the faith of a promise of success given by her evil genius and always destined to be unredeemed? Is it altogether chance that there should have been this startling blindness to the most palpable of the forces in the game?—such inexplicable inaction where the right action was so obvious and so easy?