D ecenibcr 14, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
The Foundations of Victory 
By Arthur Pollen 
A Lawyer Chief 
NOW that Sir Edward Carson has succeeded Mr. 
l^alfour, the Board of Admiralty may be con- 
sidered an entirely new body, and this although 
tlie Third Sea Lord and the three civilian members 
continue in their posts. It is a new body so far as the 
control of policy is concerned. I can see no disad\'antage 
in Sir Edward Carson being a lawyer, nor in liis lack of 
previous experience in the administration of a Govern- 
ment department. The two qualities most needed in a 
First Sea Lord are highly developed intelligence — for 
without it he cannot possibly hope to master the extra- 
ordinarily complex problem he and his colleagues must 
solve — and next, a combination of modesty, patience and 
decision. If his intelligence leads him to think that he 
knows more about naval operations than the seamen, if 
his forensic gifts enable him to talk them down and 
browbeat them into courses of which they disapprove, if 
he linds it intolerable ever to delay action until the 
measures necessary for making it successful are taken, if 
he is unable to take the responsibility for a decision when, 
in spite of incompleteness, decision is manifestly vital, 
then great intellectual gifts, unregulated in one direction 
b}' common sense and in the other by resolution, can only 
make either for confusion or what is almost worse, in- 
action. There is surely no reason for fearing that Sir 
Edward Carson should err in the direction of either 
extreme. His very inexperience of departmental forms 
will probably be this'assistance to him, that it will him help 
to reach, by the shortest route, to the heart of the questions 
he must deal with. And his lawyer's training will have 
gone for nothing if he does not show himself a master of 
the methods by which to extract from the sailors a clear 
justilication of the policies that they recommend. The 
proverbial difliculty of mixing oil and water explains a 
high proportion of our failures in naval administration. 
Tlie seamen not only live in a world of action and ideas 
httle, if at all, understood by those who have not the 
sailor's training, but they habitually set out their wishes 
in language that laymen find incomprehensible, precisely 
because it relates to things that are unreal to them. But 
no man can rise to a be great figure at the Bar unless he 
is capable of a swift mastery of the dialects of strange 
worlds. A man who, in the course of a single week, may 
be leading in a great libel action in one court, arguing a 
subtle point of constitutional law in another, and cross- 
examining experts in a patent action a third, attains to a 
versatility of mind which should be the best augury for 
ensuring a thorough, because an intelligent, co-operation 
with professional men. 
The Sea Lords, and pre-eminently the First Sea Lord, 
arc the naval advisers of the Government. As indivi- 
duals they have to recommend and justify the several 
jjolicies they put forward. As a tearii they have to see 
that these policies, in all essentials, prevail. It has 
been said that when they are really equal to their task 
in their first character, they never have to act in their 
second, for the excellent reason that if their policies are 
sound and are justified by arguments that are compre- 
hensible as well as conclusive, their reasoning will always 
be effective, without resort to their authority. It is an 
old truism that amongst intelligent people there is no 
such thing as advice ; there is only convincing information. 
In naval matters it has been precisely the difficulty of 
making the information intelligible — and therefore con- 
vincing — that has blocked progress. And it is because I 
cannot believe that the most successful barrister of the 
day can fail to elicit such information, that I expect Sir 
Edward Carson to succeed, and to succeed brilliantly, in 
the task he has undertaken. 
Of the overwhelming importance, gravity and difficulty 
of that task there is no need to speak. As to victory, 
it may be possible to continue to misuse sea force 
and still win. But no doubt at all, whether victory 
comes earlier or later, its iinal character miu-. 
be conditioned by the way the work of the New Board is 
carried on. For it is upon the sea, and what its use 
means, that the entire military fabric of the Allies is based 
— a. truth so obvious and so portentous as to make it, at 
the lirst sight, seem strange that the First Lord of the 
Admiralty should not be one of the small committee to 
whom the direct conduct of the war is entrusted. But 
those who do constitute that committee are, of course. 
as fully alive to this truth as any of the rest of us, and 
the reconstituted and re-energised Board will have to be 
the most lamentable kind of failure if it does not keep 
constantly before the inner council, both the extensions — ■ 
and the limitations — of warlike action, which sea con- 
ditions impose. For that matter, the number and variety 
of difficulties with which the Admiralty have to deal 
are so exceptional that, if the new Chief is to master 
them with sufficient completeness to make his personality 
felt, then he will certainly not have time — at any rate, 
not for some months — -to take a useful hand in the general 
administration of all the other war activities that will 
come before the committee. What, then, might be called 
the third objection to the new arrangement — namely, 
that the First Lord is not in the \^'ar Council — should, 
like his legal training and his departmental inexperience, 
prove an utterly groundless suggestion for alarm. 
The new Board has hardly taken office before it is 
faced by two rather startling and unexpected events. 
A new Moewe has got to sea, and her escape must call 
for instant and highly complicated measures. The 
cordon has been so well kept for nearly two years and a 
half that it is to be hoped that no efforts will be made to 
shake public confidence in Admiralt}' arrangements 
because of so exceptional an event, though there can be 
no doubt at all that the Admiraltj/ itself will look 
sharply into an arrangement that made even this one 
escape possible. In matters like this the new Board 
will not go wrong if it is somewhat more relentless than 
its predecessors. It is is ultimately no kindness to the 
Service to allow incidents such as the Channel raid and 
what followed on it to pass uncensured. The Navy, as 
a whole would welcome a far stricter disciphnc. The 
second new cause of trouble is the capture by the Germans 
of Captain Blaikes of the Caledonia. We had brave 
words from the late Prime Minister when Captain Fryatt 
was murdered. The Admiralty' must keep the new 
Government up to the mark in tliis case. There must be 
no ambiguity as to the course we shall follow if any 
repetition of the Frj'att horror is threatened. 
Safety of Sea Supplies 
We saw last week that the most urgent problem of the 
day was to counteract the operations of the German 
submarines. The public hardly appreciates the excep-, 
tional character of the situation they have created and 
as, in a recent article, I may have contributed to this 
misunderstanding, it might be as well for me to attempt 
to put it right. Writing in the issue of October 5th I 
said that the ratio of submarine successes did not, so far 
as analogy of previous submarine campaigns was a guide, ' 
correspond with the increase in numbers of boats em- 
ployed. My argument was that, hitherto the efficiency 
of our defensive measures had increased in a higher ratio. 
This was indeed the plain moral of the campaigns of 
February- September, 1915, of the Mediterranean cam- 
paign of" that winter, and of the belated Tirpitz campaign 
of the spring of this year. I wrote when the returns of 
only a very few weeks of the new campaign were avail- 
able, and when it seemed reasonable — in view of past 
experience — to suppose that that campaign should not 
be maintained at its in?tial efficiency. But, in point of 
fact, it has been maintained, and what is worse, at in- 
creased efficiency. 
From this only one conclusion is possible, and it is 
that there must have been some essential change in the 
