Sir J. R. Jellicoe.
Yet all this while, the British Fleet was tightening its grip upon the command of the sea to an extent which may now be described as absolute. The German flag, war ensign and merchant pennant, has been swept from the oceans as if it had never flown. Hamburg and Bremen, the Fatherland's prides, are as completely demolished, as far as their usefulness to Germany for war is concerned, as if they had been battered into smoking ruins. German mercantile trade simply no longer exists, except such of it as can be smuggled in tramps and ferries across the narrow reach of the Baltic between Pomerania and the Scandinavian ports. The Germanic Allies can import and export nothing oversea except by the grace of Jellicoe. Their deported propaganda chieftains or compromised ambassadors and attachés can not return to their homes in Europe from the United States without gracious "safe conduct" by the British Fleet. The toymakers of Nuremberg can not deliver a solitary tin soldier to an American Christmas tree unless Jellicoe says yes. Two score proud German liners, including the queen of them all, the Vaterland, are rotting and rusting in United States harbors, ingloriously imprisoned by British naval power. In a dozen other ports throughout the world Hamburg and Bremen vessels tug at anchor--greyhounds enchained. Germany is banned from the oceans like an outlaw. Her people can eat and drink only on the ration basis. The British Fleet has done something else of which, it seemed to me, an American Presidential message might legitimately have made mention. It has enabled the people of the United States for many months to traverse the oceans in security.
These are the immediate effects of British sea supremacy on the enemy, but even they are incommensurate with the advantages which accrue to Britain herself. A navy has three cardinal functions: to preserve its own shores from invasion; to maintain inviolate its country's oversea communications, including cables, food supply, passenger traffic and postal transportation; and, finally, to destroy the sea forces of the enemy. The first two of these functions have been fulfilled by the Grand Fleet, and at a cost in men and material, though not inconsiderable, which is infinitesimal, measured by the results attained. To absolve the third, and, of course, climacteric, function, Jellicoe and his men and his ironclads stand ready when the opportunity is given them--readier, by far, than when the war began. They have not lost a really vital fighting unit (supposing unconfirmed reports to the contrary to be unfounded). They have had a priceless experience of sea warfare under almost every conceivable condition. They are veterans of every essential contingency. There is hardly a terror, military or atmospheric, which they have not faced and surmounted. They have added to their battle efficiency by a great many new and powerful ships. Their morale is unbroken.
When the Kaiser's Canal Armada finally makes up its mind, as I believe that German public opinion will some day compel it to, to forsake the snug harbors of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven and the screen of Heligoland for the high sea, it will find that Jellicoe has up his iron sleeve a welcome, as to the issue of which no one in these islands is capable of cherishing the remotest doubt. History is barren of an instance of a Power defeated in war, who retained command of the sea. Were there no other considerations which spell the eventual, though probably not the early, frustration of Germany's ambition to master Europe and, as William II once sighed, to snatch the trident from Britannia's grasp, the vise-like grip of naval power which Jellicoe has wrested alone denotes that Armageddon can have but one ending, however long it be deferred.
In this cursory review of the men at Britain's helm, the Sovereign is deliberately put at the end instead of the beginning. I mean to cast no impious slur upon George V in thus classifying his relative importance in the scheme of British war life, yet to rank him at the front of the captains of the State would be hyperbole as unpardonable in a chronicler as gratuitous defamation would be.
To discuss the figure cut by England's King during the past year is a task which a foreigner approaches with diffidence. I should not dream of taking such liberties with their Britannic Majesties, for example, as my gifted friend and colleague, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, who recently diagnosed the Royal situation in England thus: "I have seen the King and Queen, and I know now why they call him George the Fifth; Mary's the other four-fifths." Whether this subtle tribute to the undoubtedly potent influence of the gracious Queen explains it or not, the indisputable fact remains that the part played by King George in the day of supreme British national trial has been a keen disappointment to a great many of his subjects. It is not a topic which they discuss at all in public, nor one upon which it is easy to extract their views even in private. But when an inquiring alien even of unmistakably sympathetic sentiment accomplishes the miracle of inducing a Briton to pour out his heart, he will secure evidence corroborative of an impression the foreigner has had from the start, if he has lived in England since August, 1914--that the monarchy, as such, has not given a wholly satisfactory account of itself. Men who are so utterly un-English as to be "quite" frank even suggest that King George's insistence not only upon enacting the "constitutional monarch," but overplaying that rôle, has not inconsiderably undermined the solidity of the Royal principle in numerous British hearts. They will tell you, if in communicative mood, that George has failed to rise to the majestic opportunities of the moment. They contrast his incorrigibly "constitutional" behavior with what they feel assured is the red-blooded lead King Edward would have given. They assert that the hour of Imperial peril, when national existence itself is at stake, has caused so many cherished shibboleths to go by the board, that the strait-jacket of "constitutional monarchy," which is another name for Irresponsibility, ought to go with them. In times of peace, say Englishmen, a conscientious figurehead on the throne is good enough. In times of war, they want a King. He need not be the blatant, ubiquitous limelight-chaser that the Kaiser is, but some of that royal dynamo's attributes, diluted with English seasoning, would not have been unwelcome to his people during the past year and a half. Britons, though, I repeat, they do not cry it out for the multitude to hear, are not edified by the spectacle of a sovereign who has sojourned with his army and fleet only in the most formal manner, whose war-time activities are confined to peripatetic visits to hospitals and convalescent homes, to inspections and reviews, and to distribution of Victoria Crosses and Distinguished Service medals at Buckingham Palace.
"The King," to whom Englishmen, before 10 P.M., still drink in reverential sincerity, and who rise in devout respect when they hear the anthem which beseeches Divine salvation for him, is an institution from which Britain felt it had a right to expect both lead and deed in a great war. She did not demand, or at least no conspicuous section of her has, that the King should take the field or the sea, and prance about in the saddle or on the quarter-deck, but they did hope, I think, for something more inspiring than nebulous constitutionalism. It was many months after thousands of other British mothers had sent their sons to death and glory that Queen Mary consented to the dispatch of the twenty-one-year-old Prince of Wales to the trenches. And Prince Albert, who is twenty, and was in the navy before the war, was never, as far as the public is informed, able to gratify his desire to return to active service afloat, but must cool his martial ardor in the inglorious capacity of an Admiralty messenger in London. Britons look across to Germany, Russia and Italy, even to Belgium and Serbia, and, contrasting the spectacle with "constitutionalism" in their own Royal household, acknowledge that theirs is not a thrilling picture.
If you attempt to penetrate into what may strike you as a mystery, you will be told that the cause as far as King George is concerned, is twofold: first, his high-minded, even slavish, devotion to his conception of his constitutional limitations, and, secondly, his equally incorrigible shyness. Sarah Bernhardt, when King George and Queen Mary were in Paris a couple of years ago, was once summoned to the royal box of the Comédie Franchise for presentation to the British sovereigns. She explained to friends afterward that the King's modesty positively unnerved her. He was as bashful as a schoolgirl. I have been told that his manner in the presence even of his Ministers is almost deferential. He does not know the meaning of "mixing," an art in which his late father excelled. "The King and Queen are fond of lunching alone, and usually take their tea together," I read the other day in a "well-informed" society paper. Edward VII was fond of lunching with men of affairs. He did not heed the hoots of the aristocratic set, which was scandalized by his intimacy with tea-merchants and money kings, because through them he was accustomed to keep in touch with the human currents of his people's life and times. Edward would hardly have allowed even the Empire's greatest soldier (Englishmen explain) to call the new army "Kitchener's Army." It would have been called the "King's Army" and the King would have thrown his incalculably great moral influence into the breach in some more practical way than lending his photograph for recruiting advertisements. George V could have been England's finest recruiting sergeant. He preferred to remain a constitutional monarch.
