Without any doubt, the “beseechings” of the Grand Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus on January 2nd, 1915,[7] addressed to Kitchener in such soldierly terms, moved that great man’s heart; for say what you will, Kitchener was a great man. But he was a great deception, all the same, inasmuch as he couldn’t do what a lot of people thought he could do. Like Moses, he was a great Commissariat Officer, but he was not a Napoleon or a Moltke; he was a Carnot in excelsis, and he was the facile dupe of his own failings. But “Speak well of those who treat you well.” I went to him one evening at 5 p.m., with Mr. Churchill’s knowledge, and said to him as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty that if his myrmidons did not cease that same night from seducing men from the private shipyards to become “Cannon-fodder” I was going to resign at 6 p.m. I explained to him the egregious folly of not pressing on our shipbuilding to its utmost limits. He admitted the soft impeachment as to the seduction; and there, while I waited, he wrote the telegram calling off the seducers. If only that had been stuck to after I left the Admiralty, we shouldn’t be rationed now in sugar nearly a year after the Armistice, nor should we be bidding fair to become a second Carthage. We left our element, the sea, to make ourselves into a conscript nation fighting on the Continent with four million soldiers out of a population of forty millions. More than all the other nations’ was our Army.
The last words of Mr. A. G. Gardiner’s article about him who is now dictating are these: “He is fighting his last great battle. And his foe is the veteran of the rival service. For in his struggle to establish conscription Lord Roberts’s most formidable antagonist is the author of the ‘Dreadnought.’”
Well, once more resuming the Dardanelles story. These side-lights really illuminate the situation. These Armies we were raising incited us to these wild-cat expeditions. I haven’t reckoned them up, but there must have been a Baker’s Dozen of ’em going on. Now, do endeavour to get this vital fact into your mind. We are an Island. Every soldier that wants to go anywhere out of England—a sailor has got to carry him there on his back.
Consequently, every soldier that you raise or enlist, or recruit, or whatever the proper word is, unless he is absolutely part of a Lord Lieutenant’s Army, never to go out of England and only recruited, like the Militia—that splendid force!—to be called up only in case of invasion—as I say, every soldier that is recruited on any other basis means so much tonnage in shipping that has to be provided, not only to take him to the Continent; but it’s got to be kept ready to bring him back, in case of his being wounded, and all the time to take him provisions, ammunition, stores. Those vessels again have to have other vessels to carry out coal for those vessels, and those colliers have again to be supplemented by other colliers to take the place of those removed from the normal trade, and the coal mines themselves necessitate more miners or the miners’ working beyond the hours of fatigue to bring forth the extra coal; or else the commercial work of the nation gets diminished and your economic resources get crippled, and that of itself carried in extremis means finishing the war. As a matter of fact, it has nearly finished the English Nation—the crippling of our economic resources by endeavouring to swell ourselves out like the Frog in Æsop’s Fables, and become a great continental Power—forgetting the Heaven-sent gift of an incomparable Navy dating from the time of Alfred the Great, and God’s providing a breakwater 600 miles long (the British Islands) in front of the German Coast to stop the German access to the ocean, and thus by easy blockade killing him from the sea as he was killed eventually. Alas! what happened? In the House of Commons the British Navy is called a subsidiary Service. And then Lord Rosebery doesn’t like my “frisking”; and cartoons represent that I want a job; and fossil Admirals call me immodest!
Mr. Churchill was behind no one both in his enthusiasm for the Baltic project, and also in his belief that the decisive theatre of the war was beyond doubt in Northern waters; and both he and Mr. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, magnificently responded to the idea of constructing a great Armada of 612 vessels, to be rapidly built—mostly in a few weeks and only a few extending over a few months—to carry out the great purpose; and I prepared my own self with my own hands alone, to preserve secrecy, all the arrangements for landing three great armies at different places—two of them being feints that could be turned into a reality. Also I made all the preparations, shortly before these expeditions were to start, to practise them embarking at Southampton and disembarking at Stokes Bay, so that those who were going to work the Russian Armies would be practised in the art, having seen the experiment conducted on a scale of twelve inches to the foot with 50,000 men.
(We once embarked 8,000 soldiers on board the Mediterranean Fleet in nineteen minutes, and the fleet steamed out and landed them at similar speed. Old Abdul Hamid, the Sultan, heard of it, and he complimented me on there being such a Navy. That was the occasion when a red-haired, short, fat Major, livid with rage, complained to me on the beach that a bluejacket had shoved him into the boat and said to him “Hurry up, you bloody lobster, or I’ll be ’ung!” I explained to the Major that the man would have been hanged; he was responsible for getting the boat filled and shoved off in so many seconds.)
I remember that at the War Council held on January 28th, 1915, at 11.30 a.m., Mr. Churchill announced that the real purpose of the Navy was to obtain access to the Baltic, and he illustrated that there were three naval phases. The first phase was the clearing of the outer seas; and that had been accomplished. The second phase was the clearing of the North Sea. And the third phase was the clearing of the Baltic. Mr. Churchill laid stress on the importance of this latter operation, because Germany always had been and still was very much afraid of being attacked in the Baltic. For this purpose special vessels were needed and the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher, had designed cruisers, etc., etc., meaning the Armada. Mr. Lloyd George said to me at another meeting of the War Council, with all listening: “How many battleships shall we lose in the Dardanelles?” “A dozen!” said I, “but I prefer to lose them elsewhere.” In dictating this account I can’t represent his face when I said this.
Here I insert a letter on the subject which I wrote to Lord Cromer in October, 1916:—
36, Berkeley Square,
October 11th, 1916.
Dear Lord Cromer,