CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF WAR
Our Navy has played the great game of war by sea for too many hundreds of years ever to under-rate its foes. It is even more true of the sea than of the land that the one thing sure to happen is that which is unexpected. Until they have measured by their own high standards the quality of an enemy, our officers and men rate him in valour, in sea skill, and in masterful ingenuity as fully the equal of themselves. Until August 1914 the Royal Navy had never fought the German, and had no standards of experience by which to assay him. The Navy had known the maritime nations of Europe and fought them many times, but the Germans, a nation of landsmen artificially converted into sailors within a single generation, were a problem both novel and baffling. Eighteen years before the War, Germany had no navy worth speaking of in comparison with ours; during those fateful years she built ships and guns, trained officers and men, and secured her sea bases on the North Sea and in the Baltic at a speed and with a concentrated enthusiasm which were wholly wonderful and admirable. “The Future of Germany lies on the water,” cried the Kaiser one day, and his faithful people took up the cry. “We here and now challenge Britain upon her chosen element.” Quite seriously and soberly the German Navy Law of 1900 issued this challenge, and the Fatherland settled down to its prodigious task with a serene confidence and an extraordinary energy which won for it the ungrudging respect of its future foes.
Perhaps the Royal Navy in those early years of the twentieth century, and especially in 1913 and 1914, became just a little bit infected by the mental disease of exalting everything German, which had grown into an obsession among many Englishmen. At home during the War men oppressed by their enemy’s land power, would talk as if one German cut in two became two Germans. German organisation, German educational training, German mechanical and scientific skill are very good, but they are not superhuman. Their failures, like those of other folk, are fully as numerous as their successes. In trade they won many triumphs over us because British trading methods were individualistic and were totally lacking in national direction and support. But the Royal Navy is in every respect wholly distinct from every other British institution. It is the one and only National Service which has always declined to recognise in its practice the British policy of muddling through. It is the one Service with a mind and an iron Soul of its very own. So that when Germany set to work to create out of nothing a navy to compete with our own, she was up against a vast spiritual power which she did not understand, the Soul of the Navy, that unifying dominating force which gives to it an incomparable strength. She was up, too, against that experience of the sea and of sea warfare in a race of islanders which had been living and growing since the days of King Alfred. The wonderful thing is this: not that the German Navy has at no point been able to bear comparison with ours—in design of ships, in quality and weight of guns, in sea cunning, in sea training and in hardihood—but that in the few short years of the present century the German Navy should have been built at all, manned at all, trained at all.
As the German Navy grew, and our ships came in contact with those of the Germans, especially upon foreign stations, our naval officers and men came to regard their future foes with much respect and even with admiration. We knew how great a task the Germans had set to themselves, and were astonished at the speed with which they made themselves efficient. I have often been told that during the years immediately before the war, the relations between English and German naval officers and men were more close than those between English officers and men and the sailors of any other navy. It became recognised that in the Germans we should have foemen of undoubted gallantry and of no less undoubted skill. There are few officers and men in our Fleets who do not know personally and admire their opposite numbers upon the enemy’s side, and though our foes have in many ways broken the rules of war as understood and practised by us, one never hears the Royal Navy call the Germans “pirates.” Expressions such as this one are left to civilians. When Mr. Churchill announced that the officers and crews of captured U boats would be treated differently from those taken in surface ships, the Navy strongly disapproved. To them it seemed that the responsibility for breaches of international law and practice lay not with naval officers and men, whose duty it was to carry out the orders of the superiors, but that it lay with the superiors who gave those orders. To retaliate upon subordinate officers and men for the crimes of their political chiefs seemed cowardly, and worse—it struck a blow at the whole fabric of naval discipline not only in the German but in every other Service, including our own. Our officers saw more clearly than did the then First Lord that no Naval Service can remain efficient for a day if it be encouraged to discriminate between the several orders conveyed to it, and to claim for itself a moral right to select what shall be obeyed and what disobeyed.
Germany had no maritime traditions and a scanty seafaring population to assist her. Her seaboard upon the North Sea is a maze of shallows and sandbanks, through which devious channels leading to her naval and commercial bases are kept open only by continuous dredging. God has made Plymouth Sound, Spithead and the Firth of Forth; the Devil, it is alleged, has been responsible for Scapa and the Pentland Firth in winter; but man, German man, has made the navigable mouths of the Elbe, the Weser and the Ems. The Baltic is an inland sea upon which the coasting trade had for centuries been mainly in the hands of Scandinavians. Until late in the nineteenth century Germany was one of the least maritime of all nations; almost at a leap she sprang into the position of one of the greatest. It is said that peoples get the governments which they deserve; it is certainly true that when peoples are blind their governments shut their eyes. In the Country of the Blind the one-eyed man is not King; he is flung out for having the impertinence to pretend to see. In a state of blindness or of careless indifference we made Germany a present of Heligoland in 1890. It looked a poor thing, a crumbling bit of waste rock, and when the Kaiser asked for it he received the gift almost without discussion. Both our Government and Court at that time were almost rabidly pro-German. We all cherished so much suspicion of France and Russia that we had none left to spare for Germany. Heligoland was then of no great use to us, but it was of incalculable value to our future enemies. A German Heligoland fortified, equipped with airship sheds and long-distance wireless, a shelter for submarines, was to the new German Navy only second in value to the Kiel Canal. Islands do not “command” anything beyond range of their guns, especially when they have no harbours; but Heligoland, though it in no sense commanded the approach to the German bases, was an invaluable outpost and observation station. It is a little island of crumbling red rock, preserved only by man’s labour from vanishing into the sea; it is a mile long and less than one-third of a mile wide; it is 28 miles from the nearest mainland. Yet when we gave to Germany this scrap of wasting rock, we gave her the equivalent in naval value of a fleet. We secured her North Sea bases from our sudden attacks, and we gave her an observation station from which she could direct attacks against ourselves.
Heligoland, a free gift from us, was the first asset, a most valuable asset, which Germany was able to place to the credit side of her naval balance sheet. Other assets were rapidly acquired. In 1898 the building of the new navy seriously began, in 1900 was passed the famous German Navy Law setting forth a continuous programme of expansion, the back alley between the North Sea and the Baltic was cut through the isthmus of Schleswig-Holstein, and Germany as a Sea Power rose into being. The British people, at first amused and slightly contemptuous, became alarmed, and the Royal Navy, always watchful, never boastful, never undervaluing any possible opponent, settled down to deal in its own supremely efficient fashion with the German Menace.
Neither the British people nor the Royal Navy were lacking in confidence in themselves, but neither the people nor the Navy—we are, perhaps, the least analytical race on earth—realised the immovable foundation upon which their confidence was based. The people were wise; they simply trusted to the Navy and gave to it whatever it asked. But the Navy, though fully alive to the value of its own traditions, training, and centuries-old skill, did not fully understand that the source of its own immense striking force was moral rather than material. Like its critics it thought over much in machines, and when it saw across the North Sea the outpouring of ships and guns and men which Germany called her Navy, it became not a little anxious about the result of a sudden unforeseen collision. It was, if anything, over anxious.
But while this is true of the Navy as a whole, it is not true of the higher naval command. Away hidden in Whitehall, immersed in the study of problems for which the data were known and from which no secrets were hid, sat those who had taken the measure of the German efforts and gauged the value of them more justly than could the Germans themselves. They, the silent ones,—who never talked to representatives of the Press or inspired articles in the newspapers—knew that the German ships, especially the all-big-gun ships, generically but rather misleadingly called “Dreadnoughts,” were in nearly every class inferior copies of our own ships of two or three years earlier. The Royal Navy designed and built the first Dreadnought at Portsmouth in fifteen months, and preserved so rigid a secrecy about her details that she was a “mystery ship” till actually in commission. This lead of fifteen months, so skilfully and silently acquired, became in practice three years, for it reduced to waste paper all the German designs. The first Dreadnought was commissioned by us on December 11th, 1906; it was not until May 3rd, 1910, that the Germans put into service the first Nassaus, which were inferior copies. Our lead gained in 1906 was more than maintained, and each batch of German designs showed that step by step they had to wait upon us to reveal to them the path of naval progress. With us the upward rush was extraordinarily rapid; with the Germans it was slow and halting—they were slow to grasp what we were about and were then slow to interpret in steel those of our intentions which they were able to discern. Once our Navy had adopted the revolutionary idea of the all-big-gun ship—the design was perhaps an evolution rather than a revolution—its constructors and designers developed the principle with the most astonishing rapidity. The original Dreadnought was out of date in the designers’ minds within a year of her completion. After two or three years she was what the Americans call “a back number,” and when the War broke out we had in hand—some of them nearly completed—the great class of Queen Elizabeths with 25 knots of speed and eight 15-inch guns, vessels as superior to the first Dreadnought in fighting force as she was herself superior to the light German battleships which her appearance cast upon the scrap heap. And Germany, in spite of her patient efforts, her system of espionage—which rarely seemed to discover anything of real importance—and her outpouring of gold, had even then as her best battleships vessels little better than our first Dreadnought. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the five Queen Elizabeths and the five Royal Sovereigns which we put into commission during the war, equipped with eighty 15-inch guns, could have taken on with ease the whole of the German battle fleet as it existed in August 1914. Up to the outbreak of war, at each stage in the race for weight of guns, power and speed, Britain remained fully two years ahead of Germany in quality and a great deal more than two years ahead in magnitude of output. During the war, as I will show later on, the British lead was prodigiously increased and accelerated.