August, 1914.

Take it for all in all, the most remarkable thing about the naval war is that it took the Germans by surprise. They had planned the most perfect thing imaginable in the way of a scheme for the conquest of all Europe. It had but one flaw. They left Great Britain out of their calculations—left us out, that is to say, not as ulterior victims, but as probable and immediate combatants. We were omitted because Germany assumed that we should either be too rich, too frightened, or too unready to fight. So that, of all the contingencies that could be foreseen, simultaneous sea war with Great Britain and land war on two frontiers, was the one for which almost no preparations had been made. Hence to undo Germany utterly at sea proved to be a very simple business indeed.

Much has been made of this statesman or that admiral having actually issued the mandate that kept the Grand Fleet mobilized and got it to its war stations two days before war was declared. But there is here no field for flattery and no scope for praise, and the historical interest in identifying the actual agent is slender. It has always been a part of the British defensive theory that the main Fleet shall be ever ready for instant war orders. Of the fact of its being the plan, we need no further testimony than Mr. Churchill’s first Memorandum after his elevation to the control of British naval policy and of the British109 Fleet. The thing, therefore, that was done was the mere mechanical discharge of a standing order.

Once the Fleet was mobilized and at its war stations, German sea power perished off the outer seas as effectually as if every surface ship had been incontinently sunk. There was not a day’s delay in our using the Channel exactly as if no enemy were afloat. Within an hour of the declaration of war being known, no German ship abroad cleared for a German port, nor did any ship in a German port clear for the open sea. The defeat was suffered without a blow being offered in defence, and, for the purposes of trade and transport, it was as instantaneous as it was final.

Nor was it our strength, nor sheer terror of our strength, that made the enemy impotent. He was confounded as much by surprise as he was by superior power. In point of fact, the disparity between the main forces of the two Powers in the North Sea, though considerable, was not such as to have made Germany despair of an initial victory—and that possibly decisive—had she been free to choose her own method of making war on us, and had she chosen her time wisely. In August 1914 three of our battle cruisers were in the Mediterranean, one was in the Pacific, one was in dockyard hands. Only one German ship of the first importance was absent from Kiel. In modern battleships commissioned and at sea, the German High Seas Fleet consisted of at least two K?nigs, five Kaisers, four Helgolands, and four Westfalens. All except the Westfalens were armed with 12.2 guns—weapons that fire a heavier shell than the British 12-inch. The Westfalens were armed with 11-inch guns. They could, then, have brought into action a broadside fire of 110 12-inch guns and 40 11-inch. Germany had, besides, four110 battle-cruisers, less heavily armed than our ships of the same class, quite as fast as our older battle-cruisers and much more securely armoured. So that if protection—as so many seem to think—is the one essential quality in a fighting ship, they were more suited to take their share in a fleet action than our battle-cruisers could have been expected to be.

On our side we had twenty battleships and four armoured cruisers. In modern capital ships, then, we possessed but twenty-four to nineteen—a percentage of superiority of only just over 25 per cent., and less than that for action purposes if the principle alluded to holds good. It was a margin far lower than the public realized. At Jutland we lost two battle cruisers in the first forty minutes of the action. Had such an action been fought, with like results, in August, 1914, our surviving margin would have been very slender indeed. But the enemy dared not take the risk. He paid high for his caution. Yet his inferiority should not have paralyzed him. At Jutland he faced infinitely greater odds. His numbers were not such as to make inglorious inactivity compulsory had he been resourceful, enterprising, and willing to risk all in the attack. It certainly was a position that bristled with possibilities for an enemy who, to resource, courage, and enterprise, could add the overpowering advantage of choosing the day and the hour of attack, and could strike without a moment’s warning.

If the German Government had realized from the start that in no war that threatened the balance of power in Europe could we remain either indifferent or, what is far more important, inactive spectators, then they would have realized something else as well, something that was, in point of fact, realized the moment Germany began her111 self-imposed—but now impossible—task of conquering Europe by first crushing France and Russia. She would have realized as then she did, that if Great Britain were allowed to come into the war her intervention might be decisive. It would seemingly have to be so for very obvious reasons. With France and Russia assured of the economic and financial support of the greatest economic and financial Power in Europe, Germany’s immediate opponents would have staying power: time, that is to say, would be against their would-be conquerors. The intervention of Great Britain, then, would make an ultimate German victory impossible. In a long war staying power would make the population of the British Empire a source from which armies could be drawn. Beginning by being the greatest sea Power in the world, we would necessarily end in becoming one of the greatest military Powers as well. The two things by themselves must have threatened military defeat for Germany. Nor, again, was this all. For while sea power, and the financial strength which goes with sustained trade and credit, could add indefinitely to the fighting capacity and endurance of Russia and France, sea power and siege were bound, if resolutely used, to sap the fighting power and endurance of the Central Powers.

To the least prophetic of statesmen—just as to the least instructed students of military history—the situation would have been plain. And there could be but one lesson to be drawn from it. To risk everything on a quick victory over France or Russia was insanity. If the conquest of Europe could not be undertaken with Great Britain an opponent, the alternative was simple. Either the conquest of Great Britain must precede it or the conquest of the world be postponed to the Greek Kalends.

112 Was the conquest of Great Britain a thing so unattainable that it had only to be considered to be discarded as visionary? No doubt, had we been warned and upon our guard, ready to defend ourselves before Germany was ready to strike, then certainly any such scheme must have been doomed to failure. But I am not so sure that a successful attack would have been beyond the resources of those who planned the great European war, had they from the first, grasped the elementary truth that it was necessary to their larger scheme. For to win the conquest of Europe it would not be necessary to crush Great Britain finally and altogether. All that was required was to prevent her interference for, say, six months, and this, it really seems, was far from being a thing beyond the enemy’s capacity to achieve.

The essentials of the attack are easy enough to tabulate. First, Germany would have to concentrate in the North Sea the largest force of capital ships that it was possible to equip. Her own force I have already enumerated. Had Germany contemplated war on Great Britain she would, of course, not have sent the Goeben away to the Straits. The nucleus of the German Fleet, then, would have been twenty and not nineteen ships. To these might have been added the three completed Dreadnoughts of the Austrian Fleet, the Viribus Unitis, Tegetthof, and Prinz Eugen—all of which were in commission in the summer of 1914. They would have contributed a broadside fire of 36 12-inch guns—a very formidable reinforcement—and brought the enemy fleet to an almost numerical equality with ours. A review at Kiel would have been a plausible excuse for bringing the Austrian Dreadnoughts into German waters. Supposing the British force, then, to have been undiminished, the war might have opened113 with a bare superiority of five per cent. on the British side.

But there is no reason why British strength should not have been reduced. Knowing as we now do, not the potentialities, but the practical use that can be made of submarines and destroyers, it must be plain to all that, had Germany intended to begin a world war with a blow at Great Britain, she might well have hoped to have reduced our strength to such a margin before the war began, as to make it almost unnecessary to provide against a fleet action. Most certainly a single surprise attack by submarines could have ............