Take it for all in all, the most remarkable1 thing about the naval2 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 immediate3 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 contingencies4 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 undo5 Germany utterly6 at sea proved to be a very simple business indeed.
Much has been made of this statesman or that admiral having actually issued the mandate7 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 defensive8 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 testimony9 than Mr. Churchill’s first Memorandum10 after his elevation11 to the control of British naval policy and of the British109 Fleet. The thing, therefore, that was done was the mere12 mechanical discharge of a standing13 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 Mediterranean14, 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 possessed15 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 alluded16 to holds good. It was a margin17 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 infinitely18 greater odds19. His numbers were not such as to make inglorious inactivity compulsory20 had he been resourceful, enterprising, and willing to risk all in the attack. It certainly was a position that bristled21 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 intervention22 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 conquerors23. 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 drawn24. 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 resolutely25 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 insanity26. 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 postponed27 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 doomed28 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 tabulate29. 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 enumerated30. Had Germany contemplated31 war on Great Britain she would, of course, not have sent the Goeben away to the Straits. The nucleus32 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 plausible33 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 done all that was desired.
By a singular coincidence, an opportunity for such an attack—an opportunity that could hardly have failed of a most sinister34 success—offered itself at the strategic moment when the Central Powers had already resolved to use the murder of the Archduke as a pretext35 for an unprovoked attack on Christendom. All our battleships of the first, second, and third lines, all our battle-cruisers commissioned and in home waters, almost all our armoured cruisers and fast light cruisers, and the bulk of our destroyers and auxiliaries36 were, in the fateful third week in July, gathered and at anchor—and completely unprotected—in the fairway of the Solent. There were to be no man?uvres in 1914, but a test mobilization instead, and this great congregation of the Fleet was to be a measure of the Admiralty’s capacity to man all our naval forces of any fighting worth. The fact that this gathering37 was to take place on a certain and appointed date was public property in the month of March. A week or a fortnight before the squadrons steamed one by one to their moorings, a plan of the anchored lines was published in every London paper. The order of the Fleet, the114 identity of every ship in its place in every line, might have been, and probably were, in German hands a week before any single ship was in her billet. From Emden to the Isle38 of Wight is a bare 350 miles—a day and a half’s journey for a submarine—and in July 1914, Germany possessed between twenty and thirty submarines. It was a day and a half’s journey if it had been all made at under-water speed. What could not a dozen Weddigens and Hersings have done had they only been sent upon this fell mission, and their arrival been timed for an hour before daybreak on the morning of July 18? They surely could have gone far beyond wiping out a margin of five big ships, which was all the margin we had against the German Fleet alone. They could, in the half light of the summer’s night, have slipped five score torpedoes39 into a dozen or more battleships and battle-cruisers. They could have attacked and returned undetected, leaving Great Britain largely helpless at sea and quite unable to take part in the forthcoming European war.
Germany could, of course, have done much more to complete our discomfiture40. A hundred merchant ships, each carrying three brace41 of 4-inch guns, and sent as peaceful traders astride the distant trade routes; the despatch42 of two score or more destroyers to the approaches of the Channel and the Western ports, and all of them instructed—as in fact, eight months afterwards, every submarine was instructed—to sink every British liner and merchantman at sight, without waiting to search or troubling to save passengers or crew—raids organized on this scale and on these principles could have reduced our merchant shipping43 by a crippling percentage in little more than forty-eight hours. The two things taken together—the assassination44 of the Fleet, the wholesale115 murder of the merchant marine—must certainly have thrown Great Britain into a paroxysm of grief and panic.
What a moment this would have been for throwing a raiding force, could one have been secretly organized, upon the utterly undefended, and now indefensible, eastern coast! Secretly, skilfully45, and ruthlessly executed these three measures could have done far more than make it impossible for Great Britain to take a hand in the defence of France. They might, by the sheer rapidity and terrific character of the blows, have thrown us so completely off our balance as to make us unwilling46, if we were not already powerless, to make further efforts even to defend ourselves. At least, so it must have appeared to Germany. For it was the essence of the German case that the nation was too distracted by political differences, too fond of money-making, too debilitated47 by luxury and comfort, too conscious of its weak hold on the self-governing colonies, too uncertain of its tenure48 on its oversea Imperial possessions, to stand by its plighted49 word. The nation has since proved that all these things were delusions50. But it was no delusion51 that Great Britain would be very reluctant to participate in any war. And we need not have fallen so low as Germany supposed and yet be utterly discomposed and incapable52 of further effort, had we indeed, in quick succession or simultaneously53, received the triple onslaught that it was well within the enemy’s power to inflict54.
Even had these blows so failed in the completeness of their several and combined effects as to crush us altogether, had we recovered and been able to strike back, what would have been the situation? It would have taken us some months to hunt down and destroy a hundred armed German merchantmen. If 100,000 or 150,000116 men had been landed, the campaign that would have ended in their defeat and surrender could not have been a very rapid one. Our re-assertion of the command of the seas might have had to wait until the dockyards, working day and night shifts, could restore the balance of naval power. Suppose, then, we escaped defeat; suppose these assassin blows had ended in the capture or sinking of a hundred merchantmen in the final overthrow55 of Germany’s sea power—could these things have been any loss to Germany, if it had been the price of swift and complete victory in Europe? In the unsuccessful attack on Verdun alone she threw away not 150,000 men but three times that number. There is not a German merchantman afloat that has been worth sixpence to her country since war was declared, nor in the first two years of war did the German Fleet achieve anything to counter-balance what the German Army lost by having to face the British as well as the French Army in the west. The sacrifices, then, would have been trivial compared with the stake for which Germany was playing. If it had resulted in keeping us out of the Continent for six months only, our paralysis56, even if only temporary, should have decided57 the issue in Germany’s favour.
Greatly as Germany dared in forcing war upon a Europe altogether surprised and almost altogether unready, yet in point of fact she dared just too little. Abominably58 wicked as her conduct was, it was not wicked enough to win the justification59 of success. If war was intended to be inevitable60 from the moment the Serbian ultimatum61 was sent, the capacity of Great Britain to intervene should have been dealt with resolutely and ruthlessly and removed as a risk before any other risk was taken. It sobers one to reflect how changed the117 situation might have been had German foresight62 been equal to the German want of scruple63. Looking back, it seems as if it was but a very little thing the enemy had to do to ensure the success of all his plans.
Had any one before the war sketched64 out this programme as one which Germany might adopt, he would perhaps have been regarded by the great majority of his countrymen as a lunatic. But to-day we can look at Germany in the light of four years of her conduct. And we can see that it was not scruple or tenderness of conscience or any decent regard for the judgment65 of mankind that made her overlook the first essential of success. We must attribute it to quite a different cause. I am quoting from memory, but it seems to me that Sir Frederick Pollock has put the truth in this matter into exact terms. “The Germans will go down to history as people who foresaw everything except what actually happened, and calculated everything except its cost to themselves.” It is the supreme66 example of the childish folly67 that, for the next two years, we were to see always hand in hand with diabolical68 wickedness and cunning. And always the folly has robbed the cunning of its prey69.
In the edifying70 tales that we have inherited from the Middle Ages, when simple-minded Christian71 folk personified the principle of evil and attributed all wickedness to the instigation of the Devil, we are told again and again of men who bargained with the Evil One, offering their eternal souls in payment for some present good—a grim enough exchange for a man to make who believed he had a soul to give. But it is seldom in these tales that the bargain goes through so simply. Sometimes it is the sinner who scores by repentance72 and the intervention of Heaven and a helpful saint. But often it is the118 Devil that cheats the sinner. The forfeit73 of the soul is not explicit74 in the bargain. There is some other promise, seemingly of plain intent, but in truth ambiguous, which seems to make it possible for sin to go unpunished. Too late, the deluded75 gambler finds the treaty a “scrap of paper.” The story of Macbeth is a case in point.
Does it not look as if Germany had made some unhallowed bargain of this kind?—as if this hideous76 adventure was started on the faith of a promise of success given by her evil genius and always destined77 to be unredeemed? Is it altogether chance that there should have been this startling blindness to the most palpable of the forces in the game?—such inexplicable78 inaction where the right action was so obvious and so easy?
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1
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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naval
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| adj.海军的，军舰的，船的 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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contingencies
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| n.偶然发生的事故，意外事故( contingency的名词复数 )；以备万一 | |
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undo
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| vt.解开，松开；取消，撤销 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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mandate
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| n.托管地；命令，指示 | |
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defensive
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| adj.防御的；防卫的；防守的 | |
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testimony
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| n.证词；见证，证明 | |
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memorandum
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| n.备忘录，便笺 | |
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elevation
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| n.高度；海拔；高地；上升；提高 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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Mediterranean
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| adj.地中海的；地中海沿岸的 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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alluded
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| 提及，暗指( allude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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margin
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| n.页边空白；差额；余地，余裕；边，边缘 | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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odds
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| n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别 | |
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compulsory
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| n.强制的，必修的；规定的，义务的 | |
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bristled
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| adj. 直立的，多刺毛的 动词bristle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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intervention
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| n.介入，干涉，干预 | |
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conquerors
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| 征服者，占领者( conqueror的名词复数 ) | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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resolutely
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| adj.坚决地，果断地 | |
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insanity
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| n.疯狂，精神错乱；极端的愚蠢，荒唐 | |
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postponed
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| vt.& vi.延期，缓办，（使）延迟vt.把…放在次要地位；[语]把…放在后面（或句尾）vi.（疟疾等）延缓发作（或复发） | |
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doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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tabulate
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| v.列表，排成表格式 | |
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enumerated
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| v.列举，枚举，数( enumerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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contemplated
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| adj. 预期的 动词contemplate的过去分词形式 | |
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nucleus
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| n.核，核心，原子核 | |
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plausible
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| adj.似真实的，似乎有理的，似乎可信的 | |
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sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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pretext
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| n.借口，托词 | |
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auxiliaries
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| n.助动词 ( auxiliary的名词复数 )；辅助工，辅助人员 | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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isle
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| n.小岛，岛 | |
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torpedoes
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| 鱼雷( torpedo的名词复数 )； 油井爆破筒； 刺客； 掼炮 | |
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discomfiture
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| n.崩溃；大败；挫败；困惑 | |
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brace
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| n. 支柱,曲柄,大括号; v. 绷紧,顶住,(为困难或坏事)做准备 | |
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despatch
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| n./v.(dispatch)派遣；发送；n.急件；新闻报道 | |
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shipping
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| n.船运（发货，运输，乘船） | |
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assassination
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| n.暗杀；暗杀事件 | |
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skilfully
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| adv. (美skillfully)熟练地 | |
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unwilling
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| adj.不情愿的 | |
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debilitated
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| adj.疲惫不堪的，操劳过度的v.使（人或人的身体）非常虚弱( debilitate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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tenure
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| n.终身职位；任期；(土地)保有权，保有期 | |
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plighted
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| vt.保证，约定（plight的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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delusions
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| n.欺骗( delusion的名词复数 )；谬见；错觉；妄想 | |
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delusion
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| n.谬见，欺骗，幻觉，迷惑 | |
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incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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simultaneously
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| adv.同时发生地，同时进行地 | |
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inflict
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| vt.(on)把…强加给，使遭受，使承担 | |
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overthrow
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| v.推翻，打倒，颠覆；n.推翻，瓦解，颠覆 | |
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paralysis
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| n.麻痹(症)；瘫痪(症) | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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abominably
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| adv. 可恶地，可恨地，恶劣地 | |
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justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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ultimatum
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| n.最后通牒 | |
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foresight
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| n.先见之明，深谋远虑 | |
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scruple
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| n./v.顾忌，迟疑 | |
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sketched
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| v.草拟（sketch的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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diabolical
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| adj.恶魔似的，凶暴的 | |
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prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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70
edifying
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| adj.有教训意味的，教训性的，有益的v.开导，启发( edify的现在分词 ) | |
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71
Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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72
repentance
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| n.懊悔 | |
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73
forfeit
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| vt.丧失；n.罚金，罚款，没收物 | |
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74
explicit
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| adj.详述的，明确的；坦率的；显然的 | |
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75
deluded
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| v.欺骗，哄骗( delude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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76
hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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77
destined
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| adj.命中注定的；(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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78
inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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