The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 2

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

But if Russia should once be established at Herat, with railway communications to that point, there would be hardly any limit to the force with which it would become necessary to resist her. He therefore urged that the Russian Government should be given to understand that any advance of her forces into Afghanistan would be regarded by England as a hostile act. At the same time he admitted that it was difficult to see how Russia was in that event to be fought. He still thought that she would be vulnerable at Vladivostock—at any rate until her railway to the Pacific should be completed [Footnote: He considered that, with a view to any future struggle with Russia, the abandonment of Port Hamilton in 1886 by Lord Salisbury had been unfortunate. See, as to Port Hamilton, Life of Granville, ii. 440; Europe and the Far East, by Sir Robert Douglas, pp. 190, 248]—but he was aware that this view was shared neither by the Indian nor the British officers likely to be heard.

In his chapter on Indian Defence Dilke had exhausted the subject from the Indian point of view. He was fully acquainted with the ideas of all those who had been seriously concerned with the problem, of which he had discussed every aspect with them, and his exposition was complete. When in his last chapter he came to "examine the conditions of the defence of the Empire as a whole, and to try to find some general principle for our guidance," he was to a great extent breaking new ground. The subject had been treated in 1888 by Colonel Maurice, afterwards General Sir Frederick Maurice, in his essay on the Balance of Military Power in Europe, but Maurice based his scheme on the assumption of a Continental alliance which Dilke thought impracticable. It had also been treated with great insight as early as 1880 by Sir John Colomb in his Defence of Great and Greater Britain. His brother Admiral Philip Colomb had more recently expounded the view that the right plan was to make the enemy's coasts our frontier, and to blockade the whole of his ports, so that it would be impossible for his fleets to issue forth. This seemed to Dilke to imply a superiority of naval force which England did not possess, and was not then intending to create. But Sir John Colomb in 1880 had admitted the absolute necessity of being prepared to render invasion impossible by purely military forces. "It was necessary," he had said, "that invasion be efficiently guarded against, so that, should our home fleet be temporarily disabled, we may, under cover of our army, prepare and strengthen it to regain lost ground and renew the struggle for that which is essential to our life as a nation and our existence as an Empire."

Sir Charles Dilke thought this sound sense, and that it was rash, in view of the inadequate strength of the actual navy and of the uncertainty as to the effect of new inventions on naval warfare, to count upon beginning a future war with a repetition of Trafalgar. He admitted that the navy, if concentrated in home waters, would be fully able to defend the United Kingdom, but that the fleets if so concentrated must abandon the remainder of the Empire, and that this would involve the destruction of our commerce and would be as severe a blow to the Empire as the invasion of England. He inferred that the navy must be the chief agent in defence, but backed by fortification and by land forces. There ought to be squadrons in distant seas strong enough to hold their own, without reinforcements, against probable enemies on the same stations. The coaling ports must be suitably fortified and have all the troops necessary for their garrisons on the spot in time of peace. [Footnote: Autumn of 1889: 'Among those with whom I corresponded about my book was Lord Charles Beresford, who gave me a great deal of information about coaling-stations for my chapter on Imperial Defence, in which I also had Charles Brackenbury's help to a considerable extent.'] He carefully considered the question of food-supply at home and the possibility of a commercial blockade of the United Kingdom. He did not think that such a blockade could be established or maintained. "Our manufactures would be seriously assailed, our food-supply would become precarious, but we should not be brought to the point of surrender by absolute starvation, and the possibility of invasion is not excluded, as some of the naval school pretend, by the fact that it would be unnecessary."

"On the other hand, a defeat or a temporary absence of the fleet might lead to bombardments, attacks upon arsenals, and even to invasion, if our mobile land forces, our fortifications and their garrisons, were not such as to render attacks of any kind too dangerous to be worth attempting. In the absence of the fleet a landing could not be prevented. But the troops landed ought to be attacked. For this purpose we do not need an immense number of ill-trained, badly-equipped, and unorganized troops, but an army completely ready to take the field and fight in the open, supplied with a well-trained field artillery."

But the mere protection of Great and Greater Britain was not enough. "It is idle to suppose that war could be brought to a termination unless we are prepared in some way to obtain advantages over the enemy such as to cause him to weary of the struggle. The riposte is as necessary in warfare as in fencing, and defence must include the possibility of counter-attack." "In view of almost any conceivable hostilities, we ought to be prepared to supply arms and officers to native levies which would support our Empire in various portions of the globe." But we had too few officers for our own troops at home, in India, and in the auxiliary forces. The stocks of arms ought to be larger than they were, and there ought to be centres of production for them in various parts of the Empire. "The moneys that the British Empire spends upon defence are immensely great, and what is wanted is that those moneys should be spent as is decided by the best advisers who can be obtained." "The main thing needed for a joint organization of the whole of the defensive forces of the Empire is the creation of a body of men whose duty it would be to consider the questions raised, and to work out the answers." For this purpose he thought the one thing needful was a General Staff, an institution of which he gave a brief account, based on Mr. Spenser Wilkinson's essay The Brain of an Army, of which the author had sent him the proofs. "A General Staff," Dilke wrote, "would neither inspect troops nor regulate the promotion of the army, but it would decide the principles which would arrange the distribution of the Imperial forces…. The very existence of a General Staff would constitute a form of Imperial military federation."

II.

In December, 1890, Dilke read before the Statistical Society a paper on the Defence Expenditure of the Chief Military and Naval Powers. He had taken great pains to ascertain what each Power spent on its army and navy, and what return it obtained for its money. The net result was that, while France and Germany for an expenditure of about 28 millions sterling could each of them put into the field a mobile force of two million men, the British Empire, at a cost of 35-1/2 millions, had "a nominal force of 850,000 of various degrees of training wholly unorganized, and supplied only with the professional artillery needed for a force of about 150,000 men." The British navy was more formidable than the French, and "the German navy does not as yet exist. I say 'as yet,' for the Germans mean business with their navy, and have begun, in a businesslike manner, at the top, putting at the head of it their best administrators." The French were spending altogether on defence a total of 36 to 36-1/2 millions, the Germans 38, and the British Empire 57 millions. The moral was that, "whatever the peace expenditure, war cannot be commenced with a fair chance of winning by a nation which waits until war to make her organization perfect. Germany before 1870 prepared in time of peace her corps, her armies, and provided them all with officers for the various commands, who knew what their duties would be in war. All countries spending much on their armies now do the same, except the United Kingdom, which stands alone in having still practically little but a regimental system in existence. But although we are old-fashioned, to the point of being utterly unprepared (except in India) for the stress of war, we nevertheless spend sums so vast as to stagger and amaze even the French and German critics, who ought to be pretty well used, one would think, to large sums for military expenditure." [Footnote: Sir Charles notes in 1893: 'Sir William Harcourt on the British Army: "One knows a man who has ten thousand a year, sixteen horses, and ten carriages, and yet if one guest comes he has difficulty to find a dogcart to meet him, and if two come a fly has to be hired. The British nation also spends its money freely, and has equal difficulty in meeting the slightest emergency."']

Early in 1891 Dilke proposed to Spenser Wilkinson that they should join in writing a new popular book on Imperial Defence. During that year the two men kept up a constant correspondence, and Wilkinson was frequently Dilke's guest in London, at Dockett and Pyrford, and in the Forest of Dean. At Whitsuntide Dilke stayed at Aldershot (where Wilkinson was in camp with his old volunteer battalion, the 2nd Manchester), and went every day to see the regiment at work.

In September, on the eve of Dilke's starting for the French manoeuvres, Wilkinson sent him the draft of an introduction to the proposed book. It challenged the widely-held opinion that war is wicked in itself, and might by political arrangement be rendered unnecessary, and deprecated the abstention from inquiry into its methods which this opinion encouraged. It challenged the maxim 'No foreign policy,' which meant either having no relations with other countries, or, having such relations, conducting them without system. War should be conceived of as imposed upon States by an irreconcilable opposition of purposes, and was always a means to an end. Peace could not be secured by a policy which adopts it as a supreme end. The confusion between defence as a political attitude and defence as an operation of war had led to the neglect, by English public opinion, of all naval and military preparations that might be available for attack. But the essential elements of defensive strength, fleets and armies, were mobile and equally available for offensive operations, and no efficient preparation for defence was possible that would not also serve for attack. Without a clear and true conception of the character of war as a conflict of national purposes, proper conduct of military operations and of defensive preparations was impossible, and to its absence was due the unorganized condition of the defence of the Empire. Dilke, in acknowledging the manuscript, wrote: "I've read it all and like it, but shall shorten it a little," and in returning the manuscript, with his modifications, wrote: "The introduction is most excellent—stately and interesting: I can say this, as it is almost all yours." Wilkinson then sent a chapter entitled "The Primacy of the Navy."

"An attack on land conducted across the sea is a most hazardous speculation so long as there exists anywhere a hostile fleet that is able to fight. In order to make such an attack safe, it is indispensable that the attacker should secure himself from all interruption by destroying or driving from the sea any hostile fleet. The Power which should succeed in doing this would have 'the command of the sea' as against its particular enemy…. The territories of the Power having command of the sea are virtually safe against attack by sea…. The British navy, then, so long as it maintains the superiority at sea is a sufficient protection against invasion for every part of the Empire except India and Canada. If, however, the navy were to suffer decisive defeat, if it were driven to seek the shelter of its fortified harbours and kept there, or if it were destroyed—then, not only would every part of the Empire be open to invasion, but the communication between the several parts would be cut, and no mutual succour would be possible.