lO 
Land & Water 
February 7, igiH 
their best physical and mental energies in serving their country 
before the real test came. Men like this do not rise to the 
head of their profession without po-^essing exceptional guts 
and rare personalities. They command affection no less 
than respect, and they inspire loyalties that make their 
admirers sensitive to any lack of honour to their liero-S. 
The prestige of such men is an invaluable asset wnen 
thev are in command. But it becomes an almost incalcu- 
lable danger when they fail. The reason is that their folo >vers 
professional no less than lay, are blinded by devotion and 
cannot realise that failure has oc'curred. , j- x- 
A man of the highest rank, who^e long, faithful and distin- 
guished services makes him to many a sort of personihcation 
of the nax'v' he has commanded, is— quite unexpctedlv by 
tho-e who believe in him— relieved of his office or his com- 
mand and his task handed on to another. Those who are 
unable to see that a new situation calls for a new system, new 
methods of work, a new organisation, fail also to realise that 
the new mechanism must be handled and directed by new men 
And if, as was the case with our navy, the chief command 
ashore as well as the highest posts in the sea commands had 
for half a generation been monopolised by men of one com- 
plexion of thought, it necessarily follows that the new inen 
called in after the revolution must have less reputation, less 
distinguished services, less experience than those that are dis- 
placed. It is, then, only natural that the partisans of the 
dispossessed should burst out into praise of their heroes, and 
decry the injustice of their supercession. But they adopt a 
rhetorical method to which there is no reply, for the defenders 
of the new system cannot retaliate by criticism of the old 
leaders. It is, however, legitimate to criticise the old methods 
and a word of reply to the Naval and Military Record will not 
be out of place. 
The passage which I have quoted above gives the point of 
the attack on the present writer. The case set up as to our 
former naval administrations — one must suppose both pre- 
war and after the war— until the ruthless campaign finally 
begin a year ago, is that at each stage the employment of 
submarine against trading ships came, and rightly came, as a 
complete surprise. The Admiralty had never been warned 
and therefore had no reasons to anticipate the event. In any 
event I am completely wrong in saying that " naval writers 
and thinkers " at once realised the import of the submarine 
as giving reality to Aube's theory of the guerre de course. 
Aube, it will be remembered, was not merely in his day the 
most brilliant and famous of French writers on naval war. 
Not many years after his historic prophecy that the ruthless 
sinking of trading ships was the form which naval war would 
inevitably take in the future, he became Minister of Marine 
in France. His prophecy was published just at the time when 
the British public was being awakened by the late Mr. William 
Stead to the serious deficiencies in material of the British 
fleet. Never before had the public mind been so stirred on the 
subject of sea power. When Aube became Minister, the 
political rivalry between France and England was at its 
highest, and the interest created by Stead in the Navy was 
being fed by the epoch-making volumes by Mahan that were 
now following one upon the other year by year. So awake 
indeed was the British Admiralty to the novelty of Aube's 
theory of war, that we embraced and followed for many years 
a policy in shipbuilding essentially unsound, and excusable 
only on the ground that the French had begun it. I allude, 
of course, to the policy of building armoured cruisers. It 
was on these and the torpedo that Aube relied to bring Great 
Britain low in war. A more scientific study of the subject 
showed the fallacy of the armoured cruiser theory, but 
not till we had followed it for more than fifteen years. The 
weakness of Aube's torpedo theory was that the boats of his 
day were neither fast nor sea-worthy enough to make 
the menace real. Indeed, it was not till about 1906 that 
; even the submarine put this theory on a new basis. And it 
was in 1907 that Commander, now Commodore, Murray 
Sueter published his admirable work on under-water war. 
The Second Warning 
Already by this time the cruising and sea-keeping capacity 
of the submarine had gone far beyond what was dreamed 
_ of when Aube had the first of these boats under his fostering 
care as head of the French Navy. And the Commodore set 
out in his book in very unmistakable fashion that, barbarous 
as a ruthless attack on trade would be, yet there was no 
ojjvious antidote to it. He went as far as so junior an officer 
could, to indicate to his superiors that the problem was one 
that called for analysis and experiment. That transports, 
jnunition ships and fleet auxiliaries were fair game for the 
•Stibma.rin« captain, he set out without any eva ion at all, nor 
did he siiggest how the commander of the under-water ship 
could possibly, simply by a hasty inspection of their hulls, 
distinguish between one kind of merchant ship and another. 
It surely was an obvious inference that anything he thouglit 
suspect it would be his duty to destroy. By 1907 then there 
war all the warning on this subject that any vigilant admini- 
stration could possibly desire. Of published writing on the 
subject I know of nothing between Commodore Sueter s 
book and Sir Percy Scott's letter, written in January 1914 
and published six months later. 
In a measure, however,- all this justification of my state- 
ment is really beside the mark. A naval administration 
equipped to anticipate the developments of future war really 
should not be dependent upon chance published warnings. 
When the Admiralty is publicly criticised, it is qmte usual 
for those who defend it to tell the discontented to hold their 
peace, on the ground that the Admiralty alone knows all the 
facts and can judge rightly of the situation. Well, what is 
sauce for the absolving goose is sauce for the indicting gander. 
The point is not, did naval writers and thinkers warn the 
Admiralty, but were the facts of the situation and the known 
theories of their application to certain purposes in war such 
that it was the Admiralty's business to be ready for this 
particular form of attack before it came ? Looked at in this 
way there can be no possible doubt as to the reply. 
False Prophets 
And now to take this matter one step further. In another 
passage of this editorial, those that have written on naval 
subjects since the war are taunted with the falsifications of 
their prophecies. But it does not occur to the writer that the 
explanation of many of these miscarriages is to be found in a 
certain simplicity of mind not altogether discreditable. One 
at least of the " worst offenders " to whom he so pointedly 
alludes, did indeec^ say, in the second month of the campaign, 
that the protection of merchant shipping was far fro.-n being 
an insoluble problem, because the trade could be directed into 
narrow and defined channels and these protected just as the 
transport routes had been. The submarines would then be 
compelled to seek their quarries at focal points, where pro- 
perly equipped convoy vessels could deal with them. 'Two 
months later when the published returns showed that 82 
ships had in four months been submarined in the triangle of 
which a fine from a point just west of the Fastnet to the 
centre of St. George's Channel was one side, another south of 
this to a point below the Scillies, and fro n here back to the 
Fastnet the third, the suggestion that had the trade been 
kept in a narrow path, the problem of making that path 
unassailable, would have been simple. And he went on : 
The capacity of the Admiralty to defend the merchant shipping 
seems to depend almost entirely upon possessing an adequate 
number of fast, well-armed patrols. The number, of course, 
depends upon the area to be patrolled. A system that would 
confine' merchant shipping entering or returning from the 
Atlantic to definite routes would reduce that area to one 
fortieth of its present size. It should not be very long before 
a number of destroyers sufficient to patrol such routes should 
be available. I say this because I naturally assume that 
special provision was made for increasing the number of 
destroyers in the first months of the war, when it was seen how 
great a role the submarine would play, and that this pro- 
vision was doubled, trebled and quadrupled in December ist 
when the Germans announced their intention to add murder- 
ous piracy to-their other crimes . 
Now both these statements were made in reliance upon two 
incontrovertible, and indeed quite obvious, truths. The 
first was that for many months our military traffic to France 
had been carried on without a single casualty, because from 
the first it had been conducted upon right lines, and next, 
that past experience of naval war had shown, that it was only 
by convoy that trade could be protected when it was possible 
for the enemy to get scattered naval force on to the open seas. 
Now when a man says that there is no reason to fear the sub- 
marine campaign, because the enemy's efforts can be frus- 
trated, and says this, on the supposition that what had long 
been a commonplace of naval discussion would be made the 
basis of Admiralty policy, can he really be reproached with 
being a misleading prophet ? It surely was not his fault 
that action so clearly elementary as this was not adopted 
until two years after it had been discussed, until indeed 
shipping and cargoes to the value of more than, £1,000,000,00 > 
sterling had been sent to the bottom. '\ 
It is of very little interest to anybody, and certainly not to 
me, to argue whether on any particular question I or any other 
naval writer was right or wrong two or three years age 
What is of intense interest is that the naval dynasty that wa^ 
incapable of seeing that the convoy system would have saved 
us from the first, was manifestly incapable of carrying on the 
chief command in war. Noi would I have worried the reader 
with these reminders had it not appeared that in some quarters, 
and those far from uninfluential, loyalty to ttiis 4ypasty might 
work to endanger the new regime. We should Tjc blockheads 
indeed if we went backwards now. Arthur Pollen. 
