November 20, 1015. 
LAND AND ^^■ A 1" E R 
The. main point of Mr. ChurchiU's apology 
was that nothing was done while he was at the 
Admiralty except with the signed concnrrenee 
of the h'irst Sea Lord of the day. No one 
liad ever doubted that this was so. But 
he put forward this fact to clear himself of the 
accusation that he was an insurgent amateur, 
who had snatched the control of the navy from 
the seamen's hands. To prove his point he made 
very free with the seamen's names. Prince Louis, 
Lord Fisher, Sir Arthur Wilson, Sir Henry Jackson, 
Admirals Garden and de Robeck — their entire or 
partial concurrence with his \-arious proposals 
came trippingly off his tongue. But it is to be 
noted that the points referred to them were given 
in general terms. The telegrams to Admirals 
Cardan and de Robeck were paraphrased. But 
it is obvious that they were in terms to which only 
one kind of answer was expected. It was not 
advice, but concurrence that was asked, and the 
exact terms are after all essential. . We all remem- 
ber the story of the two sailors had up for fighting, 
when the party who was attacked asserted that he 
had found the aggressor in his hammock and had 
remarked to him in the civillest way in the world, 
" William, sez I, this is my 'ammick, sez I, I 
must trouble you to leave it, sez L" To which the 
aggressor responded, " If you please, sir, them was 
not the words he used. Bill yer (blank), sez he, 
hup, horf and hout of it, sez he, or I'll bung your 
(something) eye out." The general purport of 
the Garden and de Robeck reply-telegrams is clear. 
They acquiesced iti the proposals made from \\'hite- 
hall. But if responsibility is to be put upon these 
officers, the terms of the Admiralty telegrams to 
them is essential to defining that responsibilit}'. 
So, too, of Sir Arthur Wilson and Sir Henry 
Jackson's share in the Dardanelles plan. To the 
outsider it seems a very unfair business to quote 
these officers' names unless the references to them 
are quoted textually also. 
PASSING OF THE BOARD. 
But a much larger question than this is 
involved. Remember the issue is : W'as Mr. 
Ghurchill's Whitehall rule one in which he forced 
the sailors to agree, or the genuinely combined 
rule of himself and his advisers ? The first thing 
to note is that from t^je beginning of his speech 
to the end he never even mentioned the Board of 
Admiralty. So far as the control of the Navy in 
war is concerned then, we have to accept the posi- 
tion that the Board, as a Board, is powerless. 
Gonstitutionally under the Orders in Gouncil — if 
they are constitutional — this has. for some time 
theoretically been the position. But just as Lord 
Fisher by resigning in time could ha\e stopped the 
whole Dardanelles adventure, so too one cannot 
helji thinking, that the other seamen on the Board, 
had they combined to resent it, could have made it 
impossible that they should be treated through- 
out as nonentities. 
The Board being thus ignored, it is to be noted 
that Mr. Churchill consulted with Sir Arthur 
Wilson and Sir Henry Jackson, neither of whom 
were Chiefs of the \\ar Staff. The position of 
each then must h^ve been exceptional. \\'e do 
not understand that at any stage he consulted 
Lord Fisher, Sir Arthur Wilson or Sir Henr\- 
Jackson together, or in joint conference with 
the War Staff. It seems almost to be clear that 
he was himself the sole channel of communication 
connecting the different advisers together. Mani- 
festly if business is run upon these lines, if the 
admirals on the spot are, as Mr. Churchill informed 
us, brought into the matter through personal 
communications with himself, and only by way of 
reply to leading questions, then his disclaimer of 
personal rule becomes exceedingly uncon\'incing. 
Mr. Churchill's career at Whitehall is then a 
supreme illustration of the danger of the personal 
rule in an e.xpert field by one who is not himself 
an expert. Vigour, courage, resourcefulness, 
energy are real, and when rightly used, very 
valuable qualities. But if they centre in one 
whose power of self expression is so over- 
whelming as to make his ascendancy over those 
around him certain, then these qualities in a 
head of the Navy in war head straight for disaster. 
If a layman gets some bee in his bonnet, and 
instead of calling in a surgeon, operates — with 
fatal results — upon one of his children, we do not 
proceed to acclaim his " vigour, courage, resource- 
fulness and energy." The man who brushes aside 
the special knowledge of bankers, financiers, stock- 
brokers and accountants, and loses liis fortune for 
his pains, is not held up to us as an example of 
bravery and enterprise. The hard case of the client 
who is his own lawyer is, after all, proverbial. 
These simple things are worth bearing in mind. 
READINESS OF THE FLEET. 
Finally, we get to Mr. Churchill's one 
success — tiie victory of the British Fleet in being 
where it was, and what it was, when war began. 
And' as to this, let it be noted first of all 
that if this is set up as Mr. Churchill's personal 
triumph, the whole point of his apology — • 
that his rule was not personal — goes by the 
board. It is, however, worth taking the 
three points separately. The Fleet's victory 
was due to three things — what it was, where it 
was, and when it was there. The Fleet of which 
Sir John Jellicoc took supreme command before 
the War, did not contain a single capital unit 
ordered by the Board of which Mr. Churchill was 
the political head. It was as completely Mr. 
McKenna's Fleet — or to be strictly correct, Lord 
Tweedmouth's and Mr. McKenna's Fleet — as the 
army that fought from Mons to the Marne, and 
held the lines in France to the fighting at Neuve 
Chappelle, was Lord Haldane's army. But it was 
not only a Fleet of great power — for which others 
than Mr. Churchill must be thanked — but it was a 
Fleet actually ready for war. Was this Mr. 
Churchill's doing ? He would hardly say so himself. 
It is not to be forgotten that the instant readiness 
of the British Battle Fleet for war is not the fruit 
of any recent determination to have it prepared. 
It is an ideal as old as the British Navy itself, and 
has been a fully achieved ideal for the last half a 
generation. Indeed, it was within a very few weeks 
of succeeding Mr. McKenna that Mr. Churchill 
announced this well-known fact in the following 
terms : — " The main part of the British Fleet, in 
sufficient strength to seek a general battle, is 
aluays ready to proceed to sea without any mobilis- 
ing of reserves as soon as steam is raised." 
Let us next ask to whom is due the credit for 
the selection of the Fleet's war stations ? The 
bulk of the British battle strength was until about 
1905 centred in the Mediterranean. With the 
growth of German sea power and the approach of 
Russia and France towards an understanding 
with Great Britain, it became quite obvious that 
the Mediterranean was not the focal point of naval 
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