A DEMONSTRATION OF SEA-POWER.*
IT was a Pacificist writer, Mr. F. W. Hirst—as Mr. Hurd reminds us in his Introduction to this book—who declared that the British Fleet was the creation of" Six Panics." Mr. Hirst coulki not have paid a greater compliment to the sound sea instinct of the British people, an instinct sounder than that of their political rulers, sounder by far than that of many soldiers. The Grand Fleet which has saved civilization, which was mobilized just forty-three hours before we declared war upon Germany, the Grand Fleet upon which the Germans have looked once and desire not to look again, was been of the "Dreadnought Panic" of 1909. The most surprising thing about our modern Navy is its newness. Old in spirit, it is extraordinarily new in material. There is not a battleship or battle-cruiser afloat of the first class which is older than 1912, and the cream of the Fleet, that which if taken away would leave it by comparison -skim-milk, has been commissioned since the war broke out. The ships of the Queen Elizabeth ' and the 'Royal Sovereign' type could by themselves put up quite a pretty fight with every battleship which the Kaiser possesses.
Very few writers have been more successful than Mr. Hurd in keeping the public interested in the Navy, well informed about its doings, and proud of its spirit and history. We maynot always agree with him, but we know him to be as sincere as he is enthusiastic.
The first victory which the Navy won in this war was blood- less. It was won before war had been declared. It was won when, fully mobilized, the Grand Fleet slipped out of Spithead and took up the war stations which had been assigned to it in the Admiralty's plans. So far as we are aware, neither the Cabinet
• The British Fleet in the Great War. By Aichibald Hurd. London : Constable and Co. 17s. CA. net.]
nor Parliament were consulted at all. We owe that stroke of strategy which placed the Grand Fleet where it could deny the seas to the Germans,. that stroke. which anticipated the German naval mobilization by whole days, to the then Board of Admiralty, of which Mr. Churchill and Lord Milford Haven were the chiefs. And for what followed we are largely debtors to ourselves, to the ma instinct of the British people. Great Britain was stripped of the Regular Army, then of the Territorials, then of most of the volunteers who enlisted, in the New Armies, although the second strongest Fleet in the world lay unbeaten in battle within apparent striking distance of the Channel crossing. According to all the rules of sea warfare, the German High Seas Fleet was "In being," and yet the Admiralty, who were responsible for the safety of the Channel transports, treated it as if it did not exist. More astonish- ing still, the people without .a qualm—though the perils of a German invasion had been preached at them for years—allowed the oountry to be but lightly held by troops. They looked only towards France, and never paid to the German Dreadnoughts the homage of a single side-long glance. That is where our sea instinct came in.
We are BO accustomed now to the safety of the Channel crossing that we should scarcely feel surprise if trains were run across to schedule time on a gigantic pontoon bridge. But at the beginning we had not our present sense of security. We expected some losses, possibly many losses. We expected that some German cruisers would get out, and that submarines would be really dangerous in the Narrow Seas. There have been losses—to hospital ships and mail-boats, but not to transports protected by destroyers. During the ten years after Trafalgar French frigates roamed about the Channel almost as freely as English frigates ; the Narrow Seas were the arena for Homeric combats between single ships. Had we tried to transport an army to France in them years, our communications would have been raided every clay.
Since the Straits are no more than twenty-one miles wide, it may not be held to be so very wonderful that we were able to close the gap, and to hold it closed against everything except an occasional destroyer raid.. Mr. Hurd argues that the true test of the soundness of our naval dispositions was our capacity to contain the German High Seas Fleet and to deny passage from the North Sea to German cruisers :— "In the course of three and a half years," he writes, "not a German battleship, battle-cruiser, or light cruiser has escaped through the meshes of the Grand Fleet, though the passage between the Scottish coast and Norway has a width of 300 or 400 miles, Norway on the eastern side protecting her neutral rights. This is a notable record. It is particularly notable in view of the fact that when the war opened the enemy possessed forty light cruisers with speeds ranging from 21 to 27i knots, in addition to nearly 150 destroyers. . . . Three or four disguised merchant ships, it is true, managed by artful design to get out on the trade routes, but the damage done was slight."
There never has been any attempt made by us to " blockade " the German ports, and to prevent the enemy ships from putting forth to sea. Our Navy has ardently desired that they should. Yet few have been the German ventures, and fewer still those which have not been adequately punished. "What," asks Mr. Hurd, "would have been said in our day if on three successive occasions the German High Seas Fleet had got to sea, cruised at large in the Atlantic, and then managed to return to port without being engaged by a single unit of the British Fleet, perhaps having destroyed a dozen or more transports crowded with troops ? " It is true that three French Fleet escapades, closely resembling those suggested by Mr. Hard for the German High Seas Fleet, did happen during the Napoleonic Wars under the nose of none other than Nelson himself ! Had our Grand Fleet been less powerful, and had its strategical disposition been less perfect, there would have been a good deal more fighting, and possibly a good many more opportunities for "regrettable incidents." All the same, the doctrine of securing "passage and communication" as the end-all and be-all of naval strategy seems to us inadequate.
Germany, potentially beaten upon the sorface of the sea, took to the submarine, and, unable to sink one unit of our battle squadrons by torpedo, sought to prey piratically on merchant vessels, both Allied and neutral. That the '-boat warfare should have brought grave embarrassment upon us, and for the present limited the American opportunities for military assistance, is to no small ex- tent the fault of our rulers, including those in. charge of the Admiralty. We are paying now for the neglect of mercantile shipbuilding. We are paying for ,the failure to perceive that dominion over the seas of the world is of little use- if one has not the means to use them. The Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marine are complementary; they are both essential to the exercise of sea-power. The Navy was never stronger than it is at present ; the Mercantile Marine— in relation to the work which is urgently needed to be done—was never weaker. If we fail to win complete victory over the Germans,
it will be became we lack the means to use the seas which the Royal Navy has won for us. "The Sea controls the Land." So
Mahan taught, and so Mr. Hurd emphasizes and illustrates in this most interesting book. But the control of the Land by the Sea is limited in practice to the carrying capacity of the ships which are free to sail upon it.
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