LAND & WATER 
June 14. 1917 
Oprman Fleet, then, wowld have been twenty and not nineteen 
ships. To these mi^ht liave been added the three completed 
Dreadnoughts of the Austrian Fleet, the ]'iribus Cni/is, 
Tegetthoj, and I'riti- liiisien—M of whirh were in eoinmission 
in the summer of n>i4. They would have eoiUributtd a 
broadside tire of ;\(-> 12-inch fjuns — a very formidable reinforre- 
ment — and brought the enemy fleet to an almost numerical 
equality with ours. A review at Kiel would have been a 
plausible excuse for bringing the Austrian Dreadnoughts 
mto German waters. Supfwjsing the British force, then, to 
have been undiminished, the war might have opened with a 
bare superiority of 5 per cent, on the British side. 
But there is no reason why British strength should not have 
been reduced. Knowing as we now do, not the i)otentialities. 
but the practical use tnat can be made of submarines atid 
destroyers, it must be plain to all that had Germany intended 
to begin a world war with a blow at England, she might well 
have hoped to have reduced our strength to such a margin 
before the war began, as to make it almost unnecessary to 
provide against a fleet action. Most certainly a single surprise 
attack by submarines could have done all that was desired. 
By a singular coincidence, an opportunity for such an 
attack — an opportunity tiiat could have hardly failed of a 
most sinister success — offered itself at the strategic moment. 
All our battleships of the first, second, and third lines, all our 
battle-cruisers commissioned and in home waters, almost all 
our armoured cruisers and fast light cruisers, and the bulk 
of our destroyers and auxiliaries were, in the fateful third 
week in July, gathered and at anchor — and completely un- 
. protected — in the fairway of the Solent. There were to be no 
manoeuvres in 1914, but a test mobihsation instead, and this 
great congregation of the Fleet was to be a measure of the 
.Admiralty's capacity to man all our naval forces oF any 
lighting worth. 
■ The fact that this 'great naval gathering was to take 
place on a certain and appointed date was public property 
in the month of ^farch. A week or fortnight before the 
squadrons steamed tme by one to their moorings, a plan of the 
anchored lines was ])ublished in every London paper. Tlie 
order of the Fleet, the exact location of every ship, the 
identity of every ship in its place in every line, might have 
been,- and probably were, in German hands a week before any 
single ship was in her billet. From Cuxhaven to the Isle of 
Wigiit is a bare 350 miles — a day and a half's journey for a 
submarine, and in July 1914 Germany possessed between 
twenty and thirty submarines. It was a day and a half's 
journey if it had been all made at under-water speed. What 
coidd not a dozen W'eggidens and Hersings have done had 
they only been sent upon this felt mission, and their arrival 
been timed for an hour before daybreak on the morning of 
July i8th ? They surely could have gone far beyond wiping 
out a margin of five big ships, which was all the margin we 
had against the German Fleet alone. They could, in the half 
light of the summer's night, have slipped torpedoes into a 
dozen or more battleships and battle-cruisers. They could 
have attacked and returned undetected, leaving Great Britain 
largely helpless at sea and quite unable to take part in the 
forthcoming European war. 
Germany could, of course, have done much more to com- 
plete our discomfiture. F'ive score or so of merchant ships. 
each carrying three brace of 4-inch guns, and sent as peaceful 
traders astride the distant trade routes ; the despatch of two 
score or more destroyers to the approaches of the Channel 
and the W'esterij ports, and all of them instructed — as, in 
fact, eiglit months afterwards, every submarine was in- 
structed — to sink every British liner and merchantman at 
sight, without waiting to search or troubling to save passengcis 
or crew — raids organised on this scale and on these principles 
could have reduced our merchant shipping by a crippling 
peicentage in little more than forty-eight hours. The two 
thmgs taken together—the assassination of the Fleet, the 
wholesale murder of the merchant marine — must certainly 
have thrown Grerft Britain into a paroxysm of grief and 
panic. 
What a moment this would have been for throwing a 
raiding force, could qne have been secretly organised, upon 
the utterly undefended, and now indefensible, Eastern coast. 
Secretly, skilfully, and ruthlessly executed, these three 
measures could have done far more than make it impossible 
for Great Britain to take a hand in the defence of France. 
They might, by the sheer rapidity and terrific character of the 
blows, have thrown us so completely oft our balance as to 
make us unwilling, if we were not already powerless, to make 
further efforts even to defend ourselves. At least, so it must 
have appeared to Germany. F'or it was the essence of the 
German case that the nation was too distracted by jwlitical 
differences, too fond of money- making, too debilitated by 
luxur>' and comfort, too conscious of its weak hold on th6 
self-governing colonies, too uncertain of its tenure on its 
oversea Imperial possessi6ns, to stand by its plighted word. 
' The nation has since proved that all these things were a 
delusion. But it was no delusion that (ireat Britain would be 
very reluctant to particij^ate in any war. And we need not 
ha\e fallen so low as Gi-rmany supposed and yet be utterly 
discijinposed and incaiKibie of further effort, had we indeed, 
in quick succession or sinniltaneously, received the triple 
onslaught that it was well within the enemy's power to 
inflict. 
F-ven had these blows so failed in the completeness -of their 
several and combined effects as to crush us altogether, had we 
recovered and been able to strike back, what would have been 
the situation ? It would have taken us some months to hunt 
down and destroy 100 armed German merchantmen. If 
lou 000 or 150,000 men had been landed, the campaign that 
would have ended' in their defeat and surrender could not 
have been a very rapid one. Our re-assertion of the com- 
mand of the seas might have had to wait until the dockyards, 
working day and night shiftSi, could restore the balance of 
naval power. Suppose then we escaped defeat ; suppose 
these assassin blows had ended in the capture or sinking of 
100 merchantmen in the final overthrow of Germany's sea 
power — could these things have been any loss to Cierniany 
in a F-uropean war ? In the unsuccessful attack on Verdun 
alone she has thrown away not 150,000 men but three times 
that number. There is not a German merchantman afloat 
that has been worth si-xpence to her country since war was. 
declared, nor is there any military purpose that can be said 
to have been achieved by Germany's war fleet that can 
counterbalance what Germany has lost by our troops being 
free of the French ports. The sacrifices then would have 
been trivial compared with the stake for which Germany was 
playing. ■ If it resulted in keeping us out of the Continent 
for six months only, our paralysis, even if only temporary, 
might have dei-.ided the issue in Germany's favour. 
Greatly as (iermany dared in forcing war upon a F^urojie 
altogether surprised and almost altogether unready, yet m 
point of fact she dared just too little. Abominably wicked 
as her conduct was, it was not wicked enough to win the 
justification of success. If war was intended to be inevitable 
from the moment the Serbian ultimatiim was sent, the 
capacity of (ireat Britain to intervene should have been 
dealt with resolutely and ruthlessly and removed as a risk 
before any other risk was taken. It sobers one to reflect 
how changed the situation might have been had (ierman 
foresight been equal to the German want of scruple. Looking 
back, it seems as if it was but a \ery little thing the enemy 
had to do to ensure the success of all his plans. 
Had anyone before the war sketched out this programme 
as one which Germany might adopt, he would perhaps have 
been regarded by the gieat majority of his countrymen as a 
lunatic. But to-day wc can look at Germany in the light of 
two years of her conduct. And we can see that it was not 
scruple or tenderness of conscience or anv decent regard for 
the judgment of mankind that made her overlook the first 
essential of success. We must attriimte it to quite a different 
cause. I am quoting fn.m memory, but it seems to m."" that 
Sir FVederick, Pollock has put tlit- truth in this matter into 
these terms:' , 
The Getnmms will go down to Itistory as people who joraaw 
everything except what actually happened, and calciilafei 
everything except its cost to themselves. 
It is the supreme example of the childish folly that, lor tlic 
next two years, we were to see always hand in hand with 
diabolical wickedness and cunning. And always the folly 
has robbed the cunning of its prey. 
In the edifying tales that we have inherited from the 
Middle .\ges, when simple-minded Christian folk personified 
the principle of evil and attributed all wickedness to the 
instigation of the Devil, we are told again and again of men who 
bargained with the FZvil One, offering their eternal souls in 
payment for sorhe preseiit good — a grim enough exchange 
for a man to make who believed he had a sou! to give. But 
it is seldom in these tales that the bargain goes through so 
simply. Sometimes it is'ihe sinner who scores by repentance 
and the intervention of Heaven and a helpful saint. But 
often it is the Devil that cheats the sinner. The forfeit of the 
soul is not explicit in the bargain. There is some other pro- 
mise, seemingly of plain intent, but in truth ambiguous, which 
seems to make it possible for sin to go unpunished. Too late, 
the deluded gambler finds the treaty a " scrap of paper." 
The story of Macbeth is a ca.se in point. 
Does it not look as if Gerriiany had maxle some unhallowed 
bargain of this kind— as if this hideous adventure was 
started on the faith of a promise of success given by her evil 
genius and always destined to be unredeemed ? Is it alto- 
gether chance that there should have been this startling blind- 
ness to, the most pilpable of the forces in the game, such 
inexplicable inactidti where' the right action was so obvious 
andso'easv? ■■■■'■■■ Arthi-r Polten 
