LAND AND WATER. 
August 14, 1915. 
might attempt {"> raid our comtnuuitAtioas or be 
driven to the desjH*rate resolution of a sortie in 
force. But to the enemy, faced by the unpleasjint 
fact tliat British shi{>s were stopping his traffic 
and hohling t4ie seas against him, the submarine 
would Ix' a device of almost dail>' necessity. It 
Wivs. in ish<»rt, primarily the weapon of the weaker, 
and not the weapon of the stronger power. And 
it was much more the business of the stronger 
jH;>wer to find means to defeat it. 
It next created a very widespread belief that 
there was something mysterious and incalculable 
about this instrument of war. The letters 
to which the controversy gave rise showed how 
vague and undefined the general understanding 
of the pit)bleMi was, and how little fitted the 
majority of peo[)le were to reason coherently on a 
subject which |K)ssessed such awful potentialities. 
iWhen, in the course of Septemlier and October, a 
few British ships succumbed to the submarine, the 
public alarm w;is really verj- great, although its 
exj)ression was wisely suppressed. It cannot, I 
think, be doubted that the.se successes, following 
so swiftly on the Scott prophecies, shook general 
faith, if not in the Navy, at least in the Naval 
administration. The controversy may, then, have 
contributed to the succession of changes which 
have taken place in the supreme command at 
iiWhitehall. 
Finally, it would seem more than probable 
that the prophecies and the ahirm they created 
in England did much to inspire the German 
Admiralty and the German people with very 
exaggerated ideas, first, as to the vulnerability of 
England to submarine attack, and, next, as to the 
effect which its " f rightfulness '" would have upon 
the nation. The prophecy that when merchant- 
men were torpedoed, trade, being timid, would 
•be frightened from the sea, was doubtless remem- 
bered. Experience, however, was to give the lie 
both to the prophecy and German expectations. 
By the time that the submarine blockade 
began, the public had got to realise that, compared 
with the expectations formed of it, the submarine 
•was even a gi-eater failure than the torpedo had 
been in previous wars, while, when the day of 
trial came,* the merchant service showed a sus- 
tained contempt for the cowardly brutality of our 
enemies which astonished us almost as much as it 
did them. 
SUBMARINE WAR: FIRST PHASE. 
The war had hardly Ijeen in progress a week 
before we heard that the British cruiser squad- 
ron had been attacked by submarines, and it was 
a singular piece of good fortune that made it 
possible to add, not only tliat the attack had 
failed, but that it had failed through the sub- 
marine Itself being sunk. H.M.S. Birmingham 
had the honour of ramming the first underwater 
craft destroyed in war. It was not till Septem- 
l-)er 5 that there was a submarine .success, and 
It was not till some d.-.ys later that the public 
knevv that the Pathfinder, which had been sunk 
oft the East C oast, had fallen, not to a mine as it 
was suppo.sed, but to a torpedo. In little more 
than a fortnight there came a more reverberatino- 
o rTif "''■' ^'?"?^^' ''''"^ """3^' h«f» gone a^ 
one fell .swwp, with a loss of sixty officers and 
fourteen hundred men. On October 16 the same 
shr„annes.jnk the //.;„./•. in the North Sea, and 
on the 31st the Hermes was t<)rj>edoed in the 
Supplement to l^uo »«o wmer. August .4. .90 
22* 
•^Straits of Dover. There could be no doubt at all 
that the sinking of these ships was seriously 
alarming to those whose minds still echoed with 
the disturbing vaticinations of the previous June. 
It was no use saying that each and all of them, 
excej)t the Pathfinder, were old-fashioned, obso- 
lete vessels of negligible military value. Here 
were six ships, all of them within a few miles of 
the English c^ast, struck down with a terrible 
loss of life, without notice and without warning. 
The thing looked easy. Was there any reason why 
it should not occur indefinitely? All this alarm 
was baseless. Of the six ships that had l)een 
sunk, one only, the Hermes, could be said to have 
been caught legitimately. That the Cressys were 
patrolling ia the circumstances that laid them 
open to attack was obviously a blunder of disposi- 
tion. The ships were too slow and cumbersome, 
and carried crews far too large to be risked an 
such work as this. To employ them in a squad- 
ron, unguarded by fast crafts, was to make the 
risk incalculably greater. That the other ships 
stood by when Ahoukir was hit, and so ensured 
their own fate, was a splendid instance of courage 
and generosity— magnificent, perhaps— but it was 
not war. The Hawke, it was supposed, was en- 
gaged to stoj) and search neutral traffic. Per- 
haps it needed the loss of a ship to show that this 
procedure must be carried on further afield, and 
not within such short range of the submarine 
depots. Formidable was lost in circumstances 
that were quite novel. But it was an unnecessary, 
The Formidable was the last victim that the 
Royal^Navy gave to the German submarines. No 
one of the victims had been constituents of the 
Grand Fleet. But the safety of the Grand Fleet 
was far from being the onlv evidence that ships 
were not defenceless. If the Scott prophecy had 
scared the public, it certainly had not scared the 
Navy. Before the war was ten days old, the 
British Channel was alive with transports carry- 
ing General French's Army to France. Every pre- 
conceived notion about sea power had gone hy the 
board. The enemy had a fleet 'Mn being " less 
than a day's steam from this line of traffic. Ilis 
submarines might be anyv/here. When, in 
February, the submarines began to attack trading 
ships thirty-two vessels were sunk between the 
Straits of Dover and Start Point in the end of 
February, March, and the first weeks in April. 
But throughout all these months, and, indeed 
from the second week in August, the Channel had 
been full of transports and supply shius. Not a 
single one fell to the submarines. It was obvious, 
if the requisite craft wer^ available, any given 
route or any given ship coifld be made practically 
safe against submarine attack. The submarine 
succeeded against the merchantmen simply 
because it was impossible to convoy them all. 
SUBMARINE WAR : SECOND PHASE. 
But the campaign had not been under way for 
more than six weeks when all attacks in the 
Channel ceased. Of the fifty-eight ships attacked 
between February 18 and April 11 sixty per 
cent, had been sunk in the Channel, and two or thwe 
in the Irish Channel. Both these areas have now 
long been immune. Not only is it possible, there- 
cent, had been sunk in the Channel and two or three 
to forbid certain limited areas to submarines 
altogether. These two things prove that had tlia 
