I’ll go to instances. My Secretary, W. F. Nicholson, C.B., was really just as capable of being First Sea Lord as I was, when associated with my Naval Assistant. I often used to say that the First Sea Lord was in commission, and that I was the facile dupe of these two; and I was blessed with a succession of Naval Assistants who knew so exactly their limitations as regards Admiralty work as allowed the Admiralty machine to be, as was officially stated, the best, most efficient, and most effective of all the Government Departments of the State. I have a note of this, made by the highest authority in the Civil Service. I would like here to name my Naval Assistants, because they were out and away without precedent the most able men in the Navy: Admirals Sir Reginald Bacon, Sir Charles Madden, Sir Henry Oliver, Sir Horace Hood, Sir Charles de Bartolomé, Captain Richmond and Captain Crease—I’ll back that set of names against the world.
I was the originator of the Naval War College at Portsmouth—that’s quite a different thing from an Imperial General Staff at the War Office. The vulgar error of Lord Haldane and others, who are always talking about “Clear thinking” and such-like twaddle, is that they do not realise that the Army is so absolutely different from the Navy. Every condition in them both is different. The Navy is always at war, because it is always fighting winds and waves and fog. The Navy is ready for an absolute instant blow; it has nothing to do with strategic railways, lines of communication, or bridging rivers, or crossing mountains, or the time of the year, when the Balkans may be snowed under, and mountain passes may be impassable. No! the ocean is limitless and unobstructed; and the fleet, each ship manned, gunned, provisioned and fuelled, ready to fight within five minutes. The Army not only has to mobilize, but—thank God! this being an island—it has to be carried somewhere by the Navy, no matter where it acts. I observe here that when Lord Kitchener went to Australia to inaugurate the scheme of Defence, he forgot Australia was an island. What Australia wants to make it impregnable is not Conscription—it’s Submarines. However, I fancy Kitchener was sent there to get him out of the way. They wanted me to go to Australia, but I didn’t.[11] Jellicoe has gone there. But then, Jellicoe hasn’t always sufficient foresight; exempli gratia, he was persuaded to take the deplorable step of giving up command of the Grand Fleet and going as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty. Never was anything so regrettable. I told the War Council that I am very glad Nelson never went to the Admiralty, and that Nelson would have made an awful hash of it. Nelson was a fighter, not an administrator and a snake charmer—that’s what a First Sea Lord has to be.
Gross von Schwartzhoff told me on the sands of Scheveningen:—
“Your Navy can strike in thirteen hours; Our Army can’t under thirteen days.”
Frau von Pohl tells us the Germans did expect us so to strike, but Nelson was in heaven (Dear Reader, look again at what Frau von Pohl said, you’ll find it in Chapter III.). On one occasion I got into a most unpleasant atmosphere. I arrived at a country house late at night, and at breakfast in the morning, I not knowing who the guests were, a Cabinet Minister enunciated the proposition that sea and land war were both in principle and practice alike. At once getting up from the breakfast table, in the heat of the moment, and not knowing that distinguished military officers were there, I said, “Any silly ass could be a General.” I graphically illustrated my meaning. I gave the contrast between a sea and a land battle. The General is somewhere behind the fighting line, or he ought to be. The Admiral has got to be in the fighting line, or he ought to be. The Admiral is indeed like the young Subaltern, he is often the first “Over the top.” The General, at a telescopic distance from the battle scene and surrounded by his Kitcheners, and his Ludendorffs, and his Gross von Schwartzhoffs, has plenty of time for the “Clear thinking” à la Lord Haldane; and then, acting on the advice of those surrounding him, he takes his measures. So far as I can make out from the Ludendorff extracts in The Times, Hindenburg, the Generalissimo, was clearly not in it. He was “the silly ass”! Ludendorff did it all as Chief of the Staff.
Now what’s the corresponding case at sea? The smoke of the enemy, not even the tops of his funnels, can be seen on the horizon. (I proved this myself with the great Mediterranean fleet divided into two portions.) Within twenty minutes the action is decided! Realise this—it takes some minutes for the Admiral to get his breeches on, to get on deck and take in the situation; and it takes a good many more minutes to deploy the Fleet from its Cruising Disposition into its Fighting Disposition. In the Cruising Disposition his guns are masked, one ship interfering with the fire of another. The Fleet for Battle has to be so disposed that all the guns, or as many as possible, can concentrate on one or a portion of the enemy’s fleet. Each fleet pushes on at its utmost speed to meet the other, hoping to catch the other undeployed. Every telescope in the fleet (and there are myriads) is looking at the Admiral as he goes to the topmost and best vantage spot on board his flag ship to see the enemy, and sees him alone outlined against the sky—neither time nor room for a staff around him, and if there were they’d say, “It’s not the Admiral who is doing it,” and be demoralized accordingly—fatal to victory. In the fleet the Admiral’s got to be like Nelson—“the personal touch” so that “any silly ass can’t be an Admiral”; and the people of the Fleet watch him with unutterable suspense to see what signal goes up to alter the formation of the fleet—a formation on which depends Victory or Defeat. So it was that Togo won that second Trafalgar; he did what is technically known as “crossing the T,” which means he got the guns of his fleet all to bear, all free to fire, while those of the enemy were masked by his own ships. One by one Rozhdestvensky’s ships went to the bottom, under the concerted action of concentrated fire. What does it? Speed. And what actuates it? One mind, and one mind only. Goschen was right (when First Lord of the Admiralty); he quoted that old Athenian Admiral who, when asked what governed a sea battle, replied, “Providence,” and then with emphasis he added: “and a good Admiral.” Which reminds me too of Cromwell—a pious man, we all know; when asked a somewhat similar question as to what ruled the world, he replied “The Fear of the Lord,” and he added with an emphasis equal to that of the Athenian Admiral—“And a broomstick.” No one votes more for the Sermon on the Mount than I do; but I say to a blithering fool “Begone!”
A Naval War Staff at the Admiralty is a very excellent organisation for cutting out and arranging foreign newspaper clippings in such an intelligent disposition as will enable the First Sea Lord to take in at a glance who is likely amongst the foreigners to be the biggest fool or the greatest poltroon, who will be opposed to his own trusted and personally selected Nelson who commands the British Fleet. The First Sea Lord and the Chief Admiral afloat have got to be Siamese twins. And when the war comes, the Naval War Staff at the Admiralty, listening every moment to the enemy’s wireless messages (if he dare use it), enables the First Sea Lord to let his twin at sea know exactly what is going on. He takes in the wireless, and not necessarily the Admiral afloat, on account of the far greater power of reception in a land installation as compared with that on a ship. When you see that spider’s web of lines of wire on the top of the Admiralty, then thank God this is more or less a free country, as it got put up by a cloud of bluejackets before a rat was smelt! An intercepted German Naval letter at the time gave me personally great delight, for it truly divined that wireless was the weapon of the strong Navy. For the development of the wireless has been such that now you can get the direction of one who speaks and go for him; so the German daren’t open his mouth. But if he does, of course the message is in cypher; and it’s the elucidation of that cypher which is one of the crowning glories of the Admiralty work in the late war. In my time they never failed once in that elucidation. Yes, wireless is the weapon of the strong. So also is the Submarine—that is if they are sufficiently developed and diversified and properly applied, but you must have quantities and multiplicity of species.
What you want to do is to fight the enemy’s fleet, make him come out from under the shelter of his forts, where his ships are hiding like rabbits in a hole—put in the ferrets and out come the rabbits, or they kill ’em where they are. Nelson blockading Toulon, as he told the Lord Mayor of London in one of his most characteristic letters, didn’t want to keep the French fleet in; he wanted them to come out and fight. But he kept close in for fear they should evade him in darkness or in fog.
But the mischief of a Naval War Staff is peculiar to the Navy. I understand it is quite different in the Army—I don’t know. The mischief to the Navy is that the very ablest of our Officers, both young and old, get attracted by the brainy work and by the shore-going appointment. I asked a splendid specimen once whatever made him go in for being a Marine Officer. He said he wanted to be with his wife! Well, it’s natural. I know a case of a Sea Officer whose long absence caused his children not to recognise him when he came home from China and, indeed, they were frightened of him. The land is a shocking bad training ground for the sea. I once heard one bluejacket say to another the reason he believed in the Bible was that in heaven there is “no more sea.” I didn’t realise it at the time, but I looked up “Revelations” and found it was so. A shallower spirit observed: “Britannia rules the waves, but the mistake was she didn’t rule them straight.” A very distinguished soldier who came to see me when I was Port Admiral at Portsmouth said that the Army, as compared with the Navy, was at a great disadvantage. In the Army, or even in the country, he said, anyone who had handled a rifle laid down the law as if he were a General; but the Navy, he said, was “A huge mystery hedged in by sea-sickness.”
So far as the Navy is concerned, the tendency of these “Thinking Establishments” on shore is to convert splendid Sea Officers into very indifferent Clerks. The Admiralty is filled with Sea Officers now who ought to be afloat; and the splendid civilian element—incomparable in its talent and in its efficiency—is swamped. Before the war, when I was First Sea Lord, when I left the Admiralty at 8 p.m., prior to some approaching Grand Manœuvres, I left it to my friend Flint, one of the Higher Division Clerks, to mobilize the fleet by a wireless message from the roof of the Admiralty; and the deciding circumstances having arisen, he did it off his own bat at 2 a.m. A weaker vessel, knowing of the telephone at my bedside, might have rung me up; but Flint didn’t. Good old Flint! Always one of the Clerks was on watch, all the year round, night and day; and that obtained in the Admiralty long before any other Department adopted it.