January 27, 1916. 
LAND AND WATER 
reflections on the First Lord and his colleagues. 
" They are merely facts which no one would deny." 
His predecessor illustrated his rashness and faulty 
judgment by ignoring the seamen, and we have 
the Dardanelles fiasco as a consequence. Mr. 
Balfour may not be rash, but he too may fail through 
being too cautious or too indolent. When Pitt saw 
the Navy at a standstill in 1805, he chose Lord 
Barham, a full admiral and eighty years of age, 
as First Lord of the Admiralty, and in six months 
got the reward of his foresight in the Battle of 
Trafalgar. Once more sea supremacy is vital 
and has yet to be won. Lord Fisher is the creator 
of the Navy on whose power to win supremacy we 
rely. The Battle of the Falkland Islands, our 
success in crushing the submarine piracy — these 
are samples of the work he has already done. We 
have not exhausted German naval plans for our 
discomfiture. Plans to counter them must be 
prepared. Is it not obvious that we must have a 
sailor answerable for sea policy and a sailor who 
enjoys the full confidence of the nation ? It must 
be a sailor, for with his naval colleagues on the 
Board he must carry on the Blockade and make 
the war his care. He must have seniority, wide ex- 
perience, and a long and honourable career behind 
him, or he will not carry conviction with the public 
and reassure us, as he should, from his place in 
the House of Lords. Lord Fisher, in short, must 
go to the Admiralty because he is our only em- 
bodiment of the Barham traditions and " the 
Nelson touch." These are Mr. Hurd's arguments. 
AN ELOQUENT PLEA. 
It is an eloquent and sincere plea. But I 
submit that we need hardly go beyond the principles 
Mr. Hurd lays down, to find its refutation. The ideal 
First Lord must be a sailor whose professional 
attainments and knowledge are such as to secure 
infallibihty ; he, " with his naval colleagues on 
the Board " are carrying on the administration of 
the Navy. Now Lord Fisher was from November 
till May, First Sea Lord of the Adrniralty. He was 
principal naval adviser when the Dardanelles 
project was first proposed, and, he signed every 
order necessary for carrying on the naval operations 
there until he went out of office. Mr. Hurd tells 
us that this fiasco was due to the faulty judgment 
and to the rashness of the admiralty's lay chief. We 
know from Mr. Churchill's own, words that he was 
misled by the analogy of the fate of Liege, Namur 
and Maubeuge into thinking that naval 12-inch 
and 15-inch guns could repeat on the Dardanelles 
forts the work which the Austrian howitzers had 
done on land. Once seized with this delusion, he 
planned to send pre-Dreadnoughts and the 
Queen Elizabeth to carry out an operation which 
seemed to him to be manifestly within their power. 
Lord Fisher seems throughout to have been 
haunted with vague misgivings that the business 
was unwise. But, he aas never aware that, from 
the first, success was impossible. Had his ac- 
quaintance with modern gunnery practice been 
either intimate or recent, he would have realised 
that all the pre-Dreadnoughts in the world and all 
the Queen Elizabeths that could be built, could 
never, unless aided by land forces victoriously 
occupying the heights above them, destroy the 
Turkish forts of the Narrows by gun fire. Had his 
professional grasp of this elementary technical 
truth been of that infallible character so necessary 
to the desired new chief at Whitehall, he could have 
nipped the whole Churchill project in the bud 
by forbidding it on technical grounds. These not 
even Mr. Churchill could have questioned. 
Taking then the first of Mr. Hurd's points, it 
would seem that the moral is this. To use the 
modern navy with effect, it must be in hands that 
in technical matters are guided by exact knowledge 
of, and familiarity with, the limitations in the 
use of naval force. The unhappy history of the 
Dardanelles adventure shows that we did wrong 
to rely for this knowledge on anyone, however 
eminent, whose sea experience ended long before 
the development of modern methods began. 
Now let us take Mr. Hurd's second point. 
The ideal First Lord "is to act with his naval 
colleagues." When Lord Fisher returned to the 
Admiralty in November, 1914, he found the 
administration of the Navy as he had left it in 
1910 with one somewhat startling difference. 
Lord Cawdor, Lord Tweedmouth and Mr. Mac- 
Kenna had adopted the principle that having 
chosen Lord Fisher as their principal adviser, it 
was both logical and loyal to give him a free hand. 
So from the autumn of 1904 till Christmas, 1910, 
while the supreme authority at Whitehall was 
nominally lay, it was actually naval and was in 
fact in Lord Fisher's hands alone. Mr. Churchill 
revived the principal of autocracy, but he made 
it his own and not a professional autocracy. It 
was a state of affairs which everyone familiar with 
the course of naval events, since the beginning of 
the war, had recognised as a growing danger. 
Had Lord Fisher recognised this danger ; had he 
realised that the remedy was that which Mr. 
Hurd suggests, viz., the co-operation of the seamen 
on the Board, Lord Fisher could have averted 
not only the disaster of the Dardanelles but a 
great many other very undesirable things that 
happened. And with regard to the Dardanelles 
question, let this too be added. We have seen 
that Lord Fisher did not perceive the primary 
fallacy that inspired that operation. He had 
misgivings and doubts as to its wisdom, but they 
were apparently not doubts for which he could 
give any cogent reasons. • But it is characteristic 
of Lord Fisher to have brilliant inspirations. 
Many of his most valuable naval reforms have 
arisen from an instinct for the right thing. The 
value of the reforms has had to be realised by the 
work of others. If these instincts and intuitions are 
to be of value they must be subjected to naval 
criticism. If, in those eventful days of January 
and February last year, he had put his doubts 
befoi-e his naval colleagues and insisted upon the 
question of the Dardanelles being made a Board 
question, it is certain that no more would have 
been heard of that unhappy project. 
Taking then Mr. Hurd's own principles, it is 
not necessary for us to argue whether Lord Fisher's 
very wonderful record as aj^peace administrator 
encourages us to entrust him in war with the 
sole control of the Navy. For it is clear that on 
the two points vital to success, he has already 
been tested and found wanting. And, again to 
quote Mr. Hurd, in pointing these things out, lam 
not reflecting on a famous man whom an unfor- 
tunate loyalty has placed in a false position, but 
merely recording facts " which no one would 
deny." ARTHUR POLLEN. 
P.S. — The above was written be/ore the War Trade 
Departments analysis of the recent figures oj 
neutral imports was published. 
