I hope I shall not be considered presumptuous in saying all this. I humbly confess I am neither a diplomatist nor a politician. I thank God I am neither. The former are senile, and the latter are liars. But it all does seem such simple common sense to me that for our Army we require mobile troops as against sedentary garrisons, and that our military intervention in any very great Continental struggle is unwise, remembering what Napoleon said on that point with such emphasis and such sure conception of war, and that great combined Naval and Military expeditions should be our rôle. In the splendid words of Sir Edward Grey: “The British Army should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy.”
The foundation of our policy is that the communications of the Empire must be kept open by a predominant Fleet, and ipso facto such a Fleet will suffice to allay the fears of the “old women of both sexes” in regard to the invasion of England or the invasion of her Colonies.
Nelson’s Copenhagen
In May, 1907, England had seven “Dreadnoughts” ready for battle, and Germany had not one. And England had flotillas of submarines peculiarly adapted to the shallower German waters when Germany had none.
Even in 1908 Germany only had four submarines. At that time, in the above letter I wrote to King Edward, I approached His Majesty, and quoted certain apposite sayings of Mr. Pitt about dealing with the probable enemy before he got too strong. It is admitted that it was not quite a gentlemanly sort of thing for Nelson to go and destroy the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen without notice, but “la raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure.”
Therefore, in view of the known steadfast German purpose, as always unmitigatedly set forth by the German High Authority that it was Germany’s set intention to make even England’s mighty Navy hesitate at sea, it seemed to me simply a sagacious act on England’s part to seize the German Fleet when it was so very easy of accomplishment in the manner I sketched out to His Majesty, and probably without bloodshed. But, alas! even the very whisper of it excited exasperation against the supposed bellicose, but really peaceful, First Sea Lord, and the project was damned. At that time, Germany was peculiarly open to this “peaceful penetration.” A new Kiel Canal, at the cost of many, many millions, had been rendered necessary by the advent of the “Dreadnought”; but worse still for the Germans, it was necessary for them to spend further vast millions in deepening not only the approaches to the German Harbours, but the Harbours themselves, to allow the German “Dreadnoughts,” when built, to be able to float. In doing this, the Germans were thus forced to arrange that thirty-three British pre-“Dreadnoughts” should be capable of attacking their shores, which shallow water had previously denied them. Such, therefore, was the time of stress and unreadiness in Germany that made it peculiarly timely to repeat Nelson’s Copenhagen. Alas! we had no Pitt, no Bismarck, no Gambetta! And consequently came those terrible years of War, with millions massacred and maimed and many millions more of their kith and kin with piercèd hearts and bereft of all that was mortal for their joy.
Queen Alexandra, Lord Knollys, and Sir Dighton Probyn.
At the end of these short and much too scant memories of him whom Lord Redesdale rightly calls in the letter I printed above
“The best friend you ever had,”
I can’t but allude to a Trio forming so great a part of his Glory. Not to name them here would be “King Edward—an Unreality.” I could not ask Queen Alexandra for permission either to print her Letters or her Words, but I am justified in printing how her steadfast love, and faith, and wonderful loyalty and fidelity to her husband have proved how just is the judgment of Her Majesty by the Common People—“the most loved Woman in the whole Nation.”