Britain at Bay - Spenser Wilkinson
How then in practice can the principle of duty be brought into our
national and our individual life? I think that the right way is that we
should join in doing those things which are evidently needed, and should
postpone other things about the necessity of which there may be
disagreement. I shall devote the rest of this volume to considering how
the nation is to prepare itself for the first duty laid upon it, that of
assuring its security and so making good its position as a member of the
European community. But before pursuing that inquiry I must reiterate
once more the principle which it is my main purpose to set before my
countrymen.
The conception of the Nation is the clue to the solution of all the
problems with which the people of Great Britain are confronted. They are
those of foreign and imperial policy, of defence national and imperial,
of education and of social life.
Foreign and imperial policy include all affairs external to Great
Britain, the relations of Great Britain to Europe, to India, to the
Colonies, and to the Powers of Asia and America. In all these external
affairs the question to be asked is, what is Britain's duty?
It is by the test of duty that Great Britain's attitude towards Germany
should be tried. In what event would it be necessary and right to call
on every British citizen to turn out and fight, ready to shed his blood
and ready to shoot down enemies? Evidently only in case of some great
and manifest wrong undertaken by Germany. As I am aware of no such wrong
actually attempted, I think a conflict unnecessary. It is true I began
by pointing out the danger of drifting into a war with the German
Empire, but I wish to do what I can to prevent it, and to show that by
right action the risk will be diminished.
The greatest risk is due to fear--fear in this country of what Germany
may do, fear in Germany of what Great Britain may do. Fear is a bad
adviser. There are Englishmen who seem to think that as Germany is
strengthening her navy it would be wise to attack her while the British
navy is superior in numerical force. This suggestion must be frankly
discussed and dealt with.
A war is a trial of strength. To begin it does not add to your force.
Suppose for the sake of the argument that a war between England and
Germany were "inevitable"--which is equivalent to the supposition that
one of the two Governments is bound to wrong the other--one of the two
Governments must take the initiative. You take the initiative when you
are the Power that wants something, in which case you naturally exert
yourself to obtain it, while the adversary who merely says No to your
request, acts only in resistance. England wants nothing from Germany, so
that she is not called upon for an initiative. But the initiative, or
offensive, requires the stronger force, its object being to render the
other side powerless for resistance to its will. The defensive admits of
a smaller force. A conflict between England and Germany must be
primarily a naval war, and Germany's naval forces are considerably
weaker than those of England. England has no political reason for the
initiative; Germany is debarred from it by the inferiority of her navy.
If, therefore, Germany wants anything from England, she must wait to
take the initiative until she has forces strong enough for the
offensive. But her forces, though not strong enough for the offensive,
may be strong enough for the defensive. If, therefore, England should
take the initiative, she would in so doing give away the one advantage
she has. It may be Germany's interest to have a prompt decision. It can
hardly be her interest to attack before she is ready. But if she really
wanted to pick a quarrel and get some advantage, it would exactly serve
her purpose to be attacked at once, as that would give her the benefit
of the defensive. The English "Jingoes," then, are false guides, bad
strategists, and worse, statesmen.
Not only in the affairs of Europe, but in those of India, Egypt, and
the Colonies, and in all dealings with Asia, Africa, and America the
line of British policy will be the line of the British nation's duty.
If Britain is to follow this line two conditions must be fulfilled. She
must have a leader to show the way and her people must walk in it with
confidence.
The mark of a leader is the single eye. But the traditional system gives
the lead of the nation to the leader of one party chosen for his success
in leading that party. He can never have a single eye; he serves two
masters. His party requires him to keep it in office, regarding the
Opposition as the enemy. But his country requires him to guide a united
nation in the fulfilment of its mission in Europe and a united Empire in
the fulfilment of its mission in the world. A statesman who is to lead
the nation and the Empire must keep his eyes on Europe and on the world.
A party leader who is to defeat the other party must keep his eyes on
the other party. No man can at the same time be looking out of the
window and watching an opponent inside the house, and the traditional
system puts the Prime Minister in a painful dilemma. Either he never
looks out of the window at all or he tries to look two ways at once.
Party men seem to believe that if a Prime Minister were to look across
the sea instead of across the floor of the House of Commons his
Government would be upset. That may be the case so long as men ignore
the nation and so long as they acquiesce in the treasonable doctrine
that it is the business of the Opposition to oppose. But a statesman who
would take courage to lead the nation might perhaps find the Opposition
powerless against him.
The counterpart of leadership is following. A Government that shows the
line of Britain's duty must be able to utilise the whole energies of her
people for its performance. A duty laid upon the nation implies a duty
laid upon every man to do his share of the nation's work, to assist the
Government by obedient service, the best of which he is capable. It
means a people trained every man to his task.
A nation should be like a team in which every man has his place, his
work to do, his mission or duty. There is no room in it either for the
idler who consumes but renders no service, or for the unskilled man who
bungles a task to which he has not been trained. A nation may be
compared to a living creature. Consider the way in which nature
organises all things that live and grow. In the structure of a living
thing every part has its function, its work to do. There are no
superfluous organs, and if any fails to do its work the creature
sickens and perhaps dies.
Take the idea of the nation as I have tried to convey it and apply it as
a measure or test to our customary way of thinking both of public
affairs and of our own lives. Does it not reveal that we attach too much
importance to having and to possessions--our own and other people's--and
too little importance to doing, to service? When we ask what a man is
worth, we think of what he owns. But the words ought to make us think of
what he is fit for and of what service he renders to the nation. The
only value of what a man has springs from what he does with it.
The idea of the nation leads to the right way of looking at these
matters, because it constrains every man to put himself and all that he
has at the service of the community. Thus it is the opposite of
socialism, which merely turns upside down the current worship of
ownership, and which thinks "having" so supremely important that it
would put "not having" in its place. The only cry I will adopt is
"England for ever," which means that we are here, every one of us, with
all that we have and all that we can do, as members of a nation that
must either serve the world or perish.
But the idea of the nation carries us a long way further than I have yet
shown. It bids us all try at the peril of England's fall to get the
best Government we can to lead us. We need a man to preside over the
nation's counsels, to settle the line of Britain's duty in Europe and in
her own Empire, and of her duty to her own people, to the millions who
are growing up ill fed, ill housed and ill trained, and yet who are part
of the sovereign people. We need to give him as councillors men that are
masters of the tasks in which for the nation to fail means its ruin, the
tasks of which I have enumerated those that are vital. Do we give him a
master of the history of the other nations to guide the nation's
dealings with them? Do we give him a master of war to educate admirals
and generals? Do we give him a master of the sciences to direct the
pursuit of knowledge, and a master of character-building to supervise
the bringing up of boys and girls to be types of a noble life? It would
serve the nation's turn to have such men. They are among us, and to find
them we should only have to look for them. It would be no harder than to
pick apples off a tree. But we never dream of looking for them. We have
a wonderful plan of choosing our leaders, the plan which we call an
election. Five hundred men assemble in a hall and listen to a speech
from a partisan, while five hundred others in a hall in the next street
are cheering a second partisan who declaims against the first. There is
no test of either speaker, except that he must be rich enough to pay
the expenses of an "election." The voters do not even listen to both
partisans in order to judge between them. Thus we choose our members of
Parliament. Our Government is a committee of some twenty of them. Its
first business is to keep its authority against the other party, of
which in turn the chief function is to make out that everything the
Government does is wrong. This is the only recognised plan for leading
the nation.
You may be shocked as you read this by the plainness of my words, but
you know them to be true, though you suppose that to insist on the facts
is "impracticable" because you fancy that there is no way out of the
marvellously absurd arrangements that exist. But there is a way out,
though it is no royal road. It is this. Get the meaning of the nation
into your own head and then make a present to England of your party
creed. Ask yourself what is the one thing most needed now, and the one
thing most needed for the future. You will answer, because you know it
to be true, that the one thing most needed now is to get the navy right.
The one thing most needed for the future is to put the idea of the
nation and the will to help England into every man's soul. That cannot
be done by writing or by talking, but only by setting every man while
he is young to do something for his country. There is one way of
bringing that about. It is by making every citizen a soldier in a
national army. The man who has learned to serve his country has learned
to love it. He is the true citizen, and of such a nation is composed.
Great Britain needs a statesman to lead her and a policy at home and
abroad. But such a policy must not be sought and cannot be found upon
party lines. The statesman who is to expound it to his countrymen and
represent it to the world must be the leader not of one party but of
both. In short, a statesman must be a nation leader, and the first
condition of his existence is that there should be a nation for him to
lead.
XIII.
THE EFFECT OF THE NATIONALISATION OF WAR UPON LEADERSHIP
The argument of the preceding chapters points to the conclusion that if
Great Britain is to maintain her position as a great Power, probably
even if she is to maintain her independence, and certainly if she is to
retain the administration of India and the leadership of the nations
that have grown out of her colonies, her statesmen and her people must
combine to do three things:--
1. To adopt a policy having due relation to the condition and needs of
the European Continent.
2. To make the British navy the best possible instrument of naval
warfare.
3. To make the British army strong enough to be able to turn the scales
in a continental war.
What are for the navy and for the army the essentials of victory? If
there had never been any wars, no one would know what was essential to
victory. People would have their notions, no doubt, but these notions
would be guesses and could not be verified until the advent of a war,
which might bring with it a good deal of disappointment to the people
who had guessed wrong. But there have already been wars enough to afford
ample material for deductions as to the causes and conditions of
success. I propose to take the two best examples that can be found, one
for war at sea and the other for war on land, in order to show exactly
the way in which victory is attained.
By victory, of course, I mean crushing the enemy. In a battle in which
neither side is crippled, and after which the fleets part to renew the
struggle after a short interval, one side or the other may consider that
it has had the honours of the day. It may have lost fewer ships than the
enemy, or have taken more. It may have been able and willing to continue
the fight, though the enemy drew off, and its commander may be promoted
or decorated for having maintained the credit of his country or of the
service to which he belongs. But such a battle is not victory either in
a political or a strategical sense. It does not lead to the
accomplishment of the purpose of the war, which is to dictate conditions
of peace. That result can be obtained only by crushing the enemy's force
and so making him powerless to renew the contest.
A general view of the wars of the eighteenth century between Great
Britain and France shows that, broadly speaking, there was no decision
until the end of the period. The nearest approach to it was when Hawke
destroyed the French fleet in Quiberon Bay. But this was hardly a
stand-up fight. The French fleet was running away, and Hawke's
achievement was that, in spite of the difficulties of weather on an
extremely dangerous coast, he was able to consummate its destruction.
The real decision was the work of Nelson, and its principal cause was
Nelson himself.
The British navy had discovered in its conflicts with the Dutch during
the seventeenth century that the object of naval warfare was the command
of the sea, which must be won by breaking the enemy's force in battle.
This was also perfectly understood by the Dutch admirals, and in those
wars was begun the development of the art of fighting battles with
sailing vessels. A formation, the line of battle, in which one ship
sails in the track of the ship before her, was found to be appropriate
to the weapon used, the broadside of artillery; and a type of ship
suitable to this formation, the line-of-battle ship, established itself.
These were the elements with which the British and French navies entered
into their long eighteenth century struggle. The French, however, had
not grasped the principle that the object of naval warfare was to obtain
the command of the sea. They did not consciously and primarily aim, as
did their British rivals, at the destruction of the enemy's fleet. They
were more concerned with the preservation of their own fleet than with
the destruction of the enemy's, and were ready rather to accept battle
than to bring it about. The British admirals were eager for battle, but
had a difficulty in finding out how a decisive blow could be struck. The
orthodox and accepted doctrine of the British navy was that the British
fleet should be brought alongside the enemy's fleet, the two lines of
battleships being parallel to one another, so that each ship in the
British fleet should engage a corresponding ship in the French fleet. It
was a manoeuvre difficult of execution, because, in order to approach
the French, the British must in the first place turn each of their ships
at right angles to the line or obliquely to it, and then, when they were
near enough to fire, must turn again to the left (or right) in order to
restore the line formation. And during this period of approach and
turning they must be exposed to the broadsides of the French without
being able to make full use of their own broadsides. Moreover, it was
next to impossible in this way to bring up the whole line together.
Besides being difficult, the manoeuvre had no promise of success. For if
two fleets of equal numbers are in this way matched ship against ship,
neither side has any advantage except what may be derived from the
superior skill of its gunners. So long as these conditions prevailed,
no great decisive victory of the kind for which we are seeking was
gained. It was during this period that Nelson received such training as
the navy could give him, and added to it the necessary finishing touch
by never-ceasing effort to find out for himself the way in which he
could strike a decisive blow. His daring was always deliberate, never
rash, and this is the right frame of mind for a commander. "You may be
assured," he writes to Lord Hood, March 11, 1794, "I shall undertake
nothing but what I have moral certainty of succeeding in."
His fierce determination to get at the ultimate secrets of his trade led
him to use every means that would help him to think out his problem, and
among these means was reading. In 1780 appeared Clerk's "Essay on Naval
Tactics." Clerk pointed out the weakness of the method of fighting in
two parallel lines and suggested and discussed a number of plans by
which one fleet with the bulk of its force could attack and destroy a
portion of the other. This was the problem to which Nelson gave his
mind--how to attack a part with the whole. On the 19th of August 1796 he
writes to the Duke of Clarence:--
"We are now 22 sail of the line, the combined fleet will be above 35
sail of the line.... I will venture my life Sir John Jervis defeats
them; I do not mean by a regular battle but by the skill of our
Admiral, and the activity and spirit of our officers and seamen. This
country is the most favourable possible for skill with an inferior
fleet; for the winds are so variable that some one time in the 24 hours
you must be able to attack a part of a large fleet, and the other will
be becalmed, or have a contrary wind."
His opportunity came in 1798, when in the battle of the Nile he crushed
the French Mediterranean Fleet. In a letter to Lord Howe, written
January 8, 1799, he described his plan in a sentence:--
"By attacking the enemy's van and centre, the wind blowing directly
along their line, I was enabled to throw what force I pleased on a few
ships."
We know that Nelson's method of fighting had for months before the
battle been his constant preoccupation, and that he had lost no
opportunity of explaining his ideas to his captains. Here are the words
of Captain Berry's narrative:--
"It had been his practice during the whole of the cruise, whenever the
weather and circumstances would permit, to have his captains on board
the Vanguard, where he would fully develop to them his own ideas of the
different and best modes of attack, and such plans as he proposed to
execute upon falling in with the enemy, whatever their position or
situation might be, by day or by night. There was no possible position
in which they might be found that he did not take into his calculation,
and for the most advantageous attack on which he had not digested and
arranged the best possible disposition of the force which he commanded."
The great final victory of Trafalgar was prepared in the same way, and
the various memoranda written in the period before the battle have
revealed to recent investigation the unwearying care which Nelson
devoted to finding out how best to concentrate his force upon that
portion of the enemy's fleet which it would be most difficult for the
enemy to support with the remainder.
Nelson's great merit, his personal contribution to his country's
influence, lay first and foremost in his having by intellectual effort
solved the tactical problem set to commanders by the conditions of the
naval weapon of his day, the fleet of line-of-battle ships; and
secondly, in his being possessed and inspired by the true strategical
doctrine that the prime object of naval warfare is the destruction of
the enemy's fleet, and therefore that the decisive point in the theatre
of war is the point where the enemy's fleet can be found. It was the
conviction with which he held this principle that enabled him in
circumstances of the greatest difficulty to divine where to go to find
the enemy's fleet; which in 1798 led him persistently up and down the
Mediterranean till he had discovered the French squadron anchored at
Aboukir; which in 1805 took him from the Mediterranean to the West
Indies, and from the West Indies back to the Channel.
So much for Nelson's share of the work. But Nelson could neither have
educated himself nor made full use of his education if the navy of his
day had not been inspired with the will to fight and to conquer, with
the discipline that springs from that will, and had not obtained through
long experience of war the high degree of skill in seamanship and in
gunnery which made it the instrument its great commander required. These
conditions of the navy in turn were products of the national spirit and
of the will of the Government and people of Great Britain to devote to
the navy as much money, as many men, and as vigorous support as might be
necessary to realise the national purpose.
The efforts of this nature made by the country were neither perfect nor
complete. The Governments made mistakes, the Admiralty left much to be
desired both in organisation and in personnel. But the will was there.
The best proof of the national determination is to be found in the best
hated of all the institutions of that time, the press-gang, a brutal and
narrow-minded form of asserting the principle that a citizen's duty is
to fight for his country. That the principle should take such a shape
is decisive evidence no doubt that society was badly organised, and that
education, intellectual and moral, was on a low level, but also, and
this is the vital matter, that the nation well understood the nature of
the struggle in which it was engaged and was firmly resolved not only to
fight but to conquer.
The causes of the success of the French armies in the period between
1792 and 1809 were precisely analogous to those which have been analysed
in the case of the British navy. The basis was the national will,
expressed in the volunteers and the levy _en masse_. Upon this was
superimposed the skill acquired by the army in several years of
incessant war, and the formal cause of the victories was Napoleon's
insight into the art of command. The research of recent years has
revealed the origin of Napoleon's mastery of the method of directing an
army. He became an officer in 1785, at the age of sixteen. In 1793, as a
young captain of artillery, he directed with remarkable insight and
determination the operations by which the allied fleet was driven from
Toulon. In 1794 he inspired and conducted, though still a subordinate, a
series of successful operations in the Maritime Alps. In 1796, as
commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy, he astonished Europe by the
most brilliant campaign on record. For these achievements he had
prepared himself by assiduous study. As a young officer of artillery he
received the best professional training then to be had in Europe, while
at the same time, by wide and careful reading, he gave himself a general
education. At some period before 1796, probably before 1794, he had read
and thoroughly digested the remarkable treatise on the principles of
mountain war which had been left in manuscript by General Bourcet, an
officer who during the campaigns of half a century had assisted as
Quartermaster-General a number of the best Generals of France.
Napoleon's phenomenal power of concentration had enabled him to
assimilate Bourcet's doctrine, which in his clear and vigorous mind took
new and more perfect shape, so that from the beginning his operations
are conducted on a system which may be described as that of Bourcet
raised to a higher power.
The "Nelson touch" was acquired by the Admiral through years of effort
to think out, to its last conclusion, a problem the nature of which had
never been adequately grasped by his professional predecessors and
comrades, though it seems probable that he owed to Clerk the hint which
led him to the solution which he found. Napoleon was more fortunate in
inheriting a strategical doctrine which he had but to appreciate to
expand and to apply. The success of both men is due to the habit of mind
which clings tenaciously to the subject under investigation until it is
completely cleared up. Each of them became, as a result of his thinking,
the embodiment of a theory or system of the employment of force, the one
on sea and the other on land; and such an embodiment is absolutely
necessary for a nation in pursuit of victory.
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--