In all Nelson’s letters, memoranda, and sayings, he is haunted by the vital importance of swift decision and rapid and resolute action. The whole spirit behind the Trafalgar Memorandum is impatience of delay. When the Allied Fleet was seen, there was no time wasted in securing symmetrical formations or order. The Fleet was roughly grouped as Nelson intended it should be, and the only preliminary of action was not a race to get into station but a race to get to grips with the enemy. The cult of the close action was thus a direct outcome of the haunting uncertainty as to whether the fighting ship would be able to move or not. This has all been changed by steam. Admiral Sturdee, for instance, at 10:20, 11:15, and 12:20 knew perfectly well that he could have the Germans in his grip and finish the thing off in five minutes whenever he liked. If he played with them as a cat plays with a mouse, it was because he knew that he had time on his side. But time will not always be on the side of what is for the moment the stronger force. The enemy may be heading for protection or may be expecting reinforcements, or the light may suddenly fail altogether. In spite of steam, therefore, the desirability of a quick decision is really as paramount in modern conditions as in the old days. So that, had the problem of action never been complicated by the long-range torpedo, we ought, as soon as we began the cultivation of long-range gunnery, to have realized that it was useless to limit our skill to conditions in which the target ship and the firing ship were keeping steady courses.
A further argument against closing the range in modern conditions has been put forward. Just as the change from sails to steam has helped the tactician of to-day, so the altered relation of the destructive power of the weapon and the resisting power of the ship has operated to his disadvantage. Lion, for instance, in the Dogger Bank affair, was knocked out by a chance shot that killed no men and did no vital injury to the ship at all. But it cut the feed pipes of an engine, and in two minutes the ship was disabled and for the purposes of that action, useless. Only small damage could be done to sailing ships by a shot amongst the masts and rigging. And when to a single shot there is added the risk of a torpedo, it must be admitted that the arguments against closing are stronger to-day than they were.
A POINT IN NAVAL ETHICS
The conduct of Cradock and his captains at Coronel, of Von Müller in Emden, and of the captains of Gneisenau, Leipzig, and Nürnberg, raises an interesting point in the ethics of war. Captain Glossop, it will be remembered, after driving Emden on to the rocks at Direction Island, had to return towards Keeling Island to look for the Emden’s tender. When he came back with certain prisoners on board, he appealed to Von Müller to surrender. No reply was given, and the prisoners on board the Sydney informed Captain Glossop that no surrender would be made. It therefore became necessary to open fire again. This brought about the hauling down of the German flag. Gneisenau had lost 600 killed out of a crew of eight or nine hundred when, at 8:40, she hauled down her flag. Leipzig and Nürnberg were in a similar case. Bluecher was similarly defeated long before she was sunk. Both Good Hope and Monmouth were apparently out of action within five minutes of action beginning. Now in each instance it is obvious that fighting was carried on, and that therefore men were sacrificed, long after the ship was hopelessly beaten. But in many cases not only was the fighting carried on, so to speak, gratuitously, but the ship herself scuttled, thus ensuring the drowning of several wounded men and risking the drowning of a very large number of unwounded. In all, taking the Emden, Gneisenau, Nürnberg, Leipzig, and Bluecher together, it is not improbable that over 1,000 lives were thus thrown away to no immediately military purpose. The alternative was to surrender the ship. Why is it taken for granted that no ship, however fairly defeated in action, however hopeless further resistance, may not quite honourably yield herself a prize to the enemy? It is an entirely new doctrine, unknown in an age surely not inferior in naval skill, in military spirit, or in chivalrous feeling. Does it date from the howl of execration that went up in Russia when, after the flower of the Russian fleet had been defeated at Tsushima, Nebogatoff surrendered his archaic craft to the overwhelming force of the victors?
So far as I know it was in that war that the great break with the old tradition was made. The old tradition, of course, was that a ship that had fought till it could fight no longer could be surrendered to a victorious enemy without shame. The records of the wars of a century ago abound in courts-martial on officers who in these circumstances had yielded a beaten ship, and they were always honourably acquitted, when it was shown that all that was possible had been done. It was evidently thought to be mere inhumanity to condemn a crew that had fought bravely to death by fire or drowning. Not that there are not grim stories that tell of a sterner resolution, like that of Grenville in the Revenge.
But on the whole the navy that had done more fighting than any other, and in the period of its existence when its fighting was most continuous, took what is at once a rational and a Christian view of these situations. Now it seems that war at sea dooms those who have fought unfalteringly to finish the business, when they can fight no longer, by a savage self-immolation. It is the only alternative to allowing the enemy the glory of a capture. Is this, after all, an intolerable humiliation? To find it so is a break with the old tradition and is not an innovation for the better. It sets up a pagan standard, and it is not the paganism of the stoic, but the unfeeling barbarism of the Choctaw.