November 23, 191b 
LAND & WATER 
II 
House in which ardent opinions were expressed by some 
that private property at sea ought to be immune from 
capture. If that had been so . . . a very large part 
of the activities of the Heet would have disappeared 
altogether." He suggested, in fact, tliat the old insistence 
on the subsidiary functions of the Heet^ — namely, the 
attack and defence of trade, invasion, etc., becaine 
necessary because the worse heresy of the immunity of 
private property had made this insistence imperative. 
But two wrongs do not make a right. The point is that 
the argument, as stated, both officially and unofficially, 
before the war, threw no emphasis upon decisive victory 
at all. And it seemed clear enough that the unfortunate 
indiscretion of Mr. Churchill was only a throw-back to 
his pre-war frame of mind, and that this in turn was one 
that was impressed upon him by the traditions and sur- 
roundings that he found at Whitehall. It is, no doubt, 
illuminating to be told that there were other errors which 
those errors were designed to combat. It is as if one were 
told that a sick man was hovering between cholera and 
typhoid, and it was just a question which microbe would 
ultimately prevail. If the Montagus and Capulets fall 
out, it is indeed possible that the victory of one is pre- 
ferable to the victory of the other. But it is a better 
state if the city is free from anarchy altogether. For 
the kind of peace that results must always be threatened 
by the menace of fresh disorders. 
Churchill Heresies Disowned 
These elementary truths are excellently exemplified 
in the Lord President's own replj'. He, like Lord 
Lytton, disowned the Churchill heresies in phrases no 
doubt suggested to him by his naval colleagues. " The 
.\dmiralty," he said, " will not be found to agree with the 
conclusion, by whomever reached, that the destruction 
of the enemy's fleet is not the first, object of our naval 
policy. The destruction of the enemy's fleet must, it is 
obvious even to an ignorant landsman like myself, remain 
the prime object of our naval policy." All this is excellent, 
but a few lines further on, when he is dealing with the. 
immunity of private property at sea and alluding to the 
efforts of those who tried to make this a rule of future 
wars, he continued as follows :. " If that had been so, 
it is quite true that the existence of fleets would only 
have been useful, cither for purposes of invading an 
enemy country, or for the holding of gladiatorial combats 
on the open sea. A very large part of the activities of the 
fleet would thus disappear altogether." Gladiators were 
men who fought to afford a public entertainment. What, 
then, w-as in Lord Crewe's mind when he used the word ? 
Lord Crewe is not a careless speaker. Did he mean that 
naval victories were always superfluous luxuries, or tliat 
if private pro]X'rty were immune from capture decisive 
naval victory must be barren of results ? 
There is something tp be said for this view, but surely 
not so much as this. For, if naval victory meant com- 
plete freedom of military transport, with all that this 
implies for invading purposes, if it meant complete im- 
munity from the fear of invasion, and all that this in turn 
would mean in releasing adchtional force for invasion, 
then immense as would be the military loss that would 
result from non-contraband trade being free of the enemy's 
ports, nevertheless much in the way of blockade would 
still be feasible, and this, with the other gains, would 
.still make a na\'al victory of enormous, though not 
perhaps of crushing importance. So that the term 
" gladiatorial " would seem, even with private property 
immune, a curiously infelicitous term to apply. One is 
therefore led to ask, was it in fact used because of the 
abbreviated advantages that would follow in the supposed 
conditions ? May it not have been used because Lord 
Crewe himself — in spite of his protestations that he is an 
ignorant landsman — had nevertheless been infected by 
the heresy that wrecked Mr. Churchill ? And in 
selecting this term, was he, too, harking back to the time 
when a naval xictory was assumed to be just a risky, 
costly, uupPcasant, unnecessary thing, and that to envisage 
it, to analyse what was needed for winning it, and then 
to prepare and supply the means, were all works of 
supererogation ? 
However this may be, we must be content for the moment 
that right doctrine has won a real, though as I have said, 
a negative victory. The question is, can its scope be 
extended ? The human mind finds it difiicult to receive 
and harbour ideas except through the medium of words, 
and as one idea gives birth to anotlier, it is a vital matter 
that all basic principles should be so expressed that the 
phrases themseh'cs suggest the realities with which they 
correspond. No terms should be employed that are 
misleading, either because they arc vague or because 
their meaning is compromised by association with other 
realities not germane to the matter in hand. If our 
actual naval policy in war is to be the expression of ideas 
deriving from the fundamental principles underlying 
the right use of naval force, it is not, then, a mere question 
of acadamic interest that such fundamental principles 
should be justly and accurately expressed. Now it is 
noteworthy in the Lords debate, that several attempts 
w'ere made to put the root of the matter into words. 
Lord Lytton, for instance, adopts the phrase, " To seek 
out and destroy the enemy." I have earlier quoted 
Admiral Dewey's expression " to find and defeat the 
hostile fleet or any of its detachments." Both of these 
statements, at first sight, seem to be both accurate and 
almost exhaustive. But in reality the expressions 
" find " and " seek " do not quite meet the requirements 
of the situation. The words are reminiscent of a naval 
war that differs in very important particulars from the 
conditions of to-day. Similarly the phrase, " containing 
an enemy's fleet," meant something very different a 
hundred years ago from what it means now. 
New Naval Weapons 
The addition of two new na\'al weapons to the gun — • 
which for centuries was the only naval weapon — has 
mainly brought about these changes. The mine, and 
the torpedo as wielded by the submarine, impose obvious 
restrictions, both in seeking out your enemy and in 
containing him. The development of the underwater 
ship has indeed made one form of containment liternlly 
impossible, because except in unusual circum.stances the 
underwater shij-) cannot be contained at all. Certainly 
it cannot be contained until decisive victory has disposed 
of the enemy's battle force. Further, the speed of modern 
ships has quite changed the conditions of war. 
Is it possible to find a phrase that meets the.se changed 
conditions ? It seems to me that it has already been 
found. On October qth there appeared in the Times 
a contribution from Sir Reginald Custance to the con- 
troversy which Mr. Churchill's indiscretion aroused. It 
contained the following passage : " The generally 
accepted doctrine is, that the aim or object in war, whether 
by land or sea, is to destroy, disarm or contain — that 
is neutralise the action of — the enemy's armed force, 
and that this can only be brought about by battle or the 
threat of battle." 
" To destroy or neutralise the action of the enemy's 
armed " ships : As a definition of the functions of a 
fighting fleet this really covers the ground completel3^ 
for the word " destroy " covers both all that is necessary 
for bringing the fleets into contact, when contact is 
possible, and the operations by which contact is con- 
verted into victory. And the word " neutralise " brings 
home to us the truth that, while the primary purpose of 
the navy is to destroy the enemy's fleet, that nevertheless 
the opportunities for doing so must be rare and may be 
long delayed, and that in the meantime every naval 
operation of the enemy's, that is carried out with" a view, 
either to making battle more diflicult or to attacking our 
war units piecemeal or our tran.sports and trade wholesale, 
must be met by appropriate counter-operations until the 
battle, from which the enemy flinches, is by a general and 
unceasing pressure made compulsory to him. 
Let us see, for instance, how this definition compares 
with the other in the matter of suggestion, in a specific 
case. If you hear two people arguing, one for a more 
forward naval policy, the other defending things as they 
are, it is almost certain that the two sides will be expressed 
somewhat as follows. One will say that our policy in 
concentrating our fleet so far to the north is a strategic 
weakness, that we should liavc held the North Sea in 
force — so as to have a more immediate command over 
the enemy's movements — and thus be sure of bringing 
him to action the moment he puts out of his harbours. 
The other side will retort that this implies looking for a 
general action right on tlic German coast, Where 
