It seems natural to say that if England wants victory on sea or land, she must provide herself with a Nelson or a Napoleon. The statement is quite true, but it requires to be rightly interpreted. If it means that a nation must always choose a great man to command its navy or its army it is an impossible maxim, because a great man cannot be recognised until his power has been revealed in some kind of work. Moreover, to say that Nelson and Napoleon won victories because they were great men is to invert the order of nature and of truth. They are recognised as great men because of the mastery of their business which they manifested in action. That mastery was due primarily to knowledge. Wordsworth hit the mark when, in answer to the question "Who is the Happy Warrior?" he replied that it was he—
"Who with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn."
The quality that made them both so valuable was that they knew the best that was known and thought in regard to the art of war. This is the quality which a nation must secure in those whom it entrusts with the design and the conduct of the operations of its fleets and its armies.
There is a method for securing this, not by any means a new one, and not originally, as is commonly supposed, a German invention. It consists in providing the army and the navy with a General Staff or Department for the study, design, and direction of operations. In such a department Bourcet, Napoleon's master, spent the best years of his life. In such a department Moltke was trained; over such a department he presided. Its characteristic is that it has one function, that of the study, design, and direction of the movements in fighting of a fleet or an army, and that it has nothing whatever to do with the maintenance of an army, or with its recruiting, discipline, or peace administration. Its functions in peace are intellectual and educational, and in war it becomes the channel of executive power. Bourcet described the head of such a department as "the soul of an army." The British navy is without such a department. The army has borrowed the name, but has not maintained the speciality of function which is essential. In armies other than the British, the Chief of the General Staff is occupied solely with tactics and strategy, with the work of intellectual research by which Nelson and Napoleon prepared their great achievements. His business is to be designing campaigns, to make up his mind at what point or points, in case of war, he will assemble his fleets or his armies for the first move, and what the nature of that move shall be. The second move it is impossible for him to pre-arrange because it depends upon the result of the first. He will determine the second move when the time comes. In order that his work should be as well done as possible, care is taken that the Chief of the Staff shall have nothing else to do. Not he but another officer superintends the raising, organising, and disciplining of the forces. Thus he becomes the embodiment of a theory or system of operations, and with that theory or system he inspires as far as possible all the admirals or generals and other officers who will have to carry out his designs.
In the British system the Chief of the General Staff is the principal military member of the Board which administers the army. Accordingly, only a fraction of his time can be given to thinking out the problems of strategy and tactics. At the Admiralty the principal naval member of the Board is made responsible not only for the distribution and movements of ships—a definition which includes the whole domain of strategy and tactics —but also for the fighting and sea-going efficiency of the fleet, its organisation and mobilisation, a definition so wide that it includes the greater part of the administration of the navy, especially as the same officer is held responsible for advice on all large questions of naval policy and maritime warfare, as well as for the control of the naval ordnance department. Thus in each case the very constitution of the office entrusted with the design of operations prevents the officer at its head from concentrating himself upon that vital duty. The result is that the intellectual life both of the army and of the navy lags far behind that of their German rivals, and therefore that there is every chance of both of them being beaten, not for lack of courage or hard work, but by being opposed to an adversary whose thinking has been better done by reason of the greater concentration of energy devoted to it.
The first reform needed, at any rate in the navy, is a definition of the functions of the First Sea Lord which will confine his sphere to the distribution and movement of ships and the strategical and tactical training of officers, so as to compel him to become the embodiment or personification of the best possible theory or system of naval warfare. That definition adopted and enforced, there is no need to lay down regulations giving the strategist control over his colleagues who administer matiriel and personnel; they will of themselves always be anxious to hear his views as to the methods of fighting, and will be only too glad to build ships with a view to their being used in accordance with his design of victory. But until there is at the Admiralty department devoted to designing victory and to nothing else, what possible guarantee can there be that ships will be built, or the navy administered and organised in accordance with any design likely to lead to victory?
XIV
THE NEEDS OF THE NAVY
The doubt which, since the Prime Minister's statement on the introduction of the Navy Estimates, has disturbed the public mind, is concerned almost exclusively with the number of modern battleships in the Royal Navy. The one object which the nation ought to have in view is victory in the next war, and the question never to be forgotten is, what is essential to victory? While it is probably true that if the disparity of numbers be too great a smaller fleet can hardly engage a larger one with any prospect of success, it is possible to exaggerate the importance both of numbers and of the size of ships.