August 8, 19 I 8 
Land & Water 
Four Years of Naval War : By ArtKur Pollen 
A Retrospect 
IN looking back over the laet four years, the sharpest 
outHnes in the retrospect are the ups and downs of 
hopes and fears. Indeed, so acutely must every one 
bear these alternations in mind, that to remark on them 
is almost to incur the guilt of commonplace. For they 
illustrate the tritest of all the axioms of war. It is human 
to err — and every error has to be paid for. If the greatest 
general is he who makes the fewest mistakes, then the making 
of some mistakes must be common to all generals. The 
rises and reversals of fortune on all the fronts are of necessity 
the indices of right or wrong strategy. These transforma- 
tions have been far more numerous on land than at sea, and 
locally have in many instances been seemingly final. Thus 
to take a few of many examples, Serbia, Montenegro, and 
Russia are almost completely eliminated as factors ; our 
effort in the Dardanelles had to be acknowledged as a com- 
plete failure. But at no stage was any victory or defeat of 
■so overwhelming and wholesale a nature as to promise an 
immediate decision. The retreat from Mons, Gallipoli, 
Neuve Chapelle, Hulloch, Kut — the British Army could 
stand all of these, and much more. France never seemed to 
be beaten, whatever the strain. Even after the defection of 
Russia, a German victory seemed impossible on land. Never 
once did either side see defeat, immediate and final, threat- 
ened. A right calculation of all the forces engaged ma.y 
have shown a discerning few where the final preponderance 
lay. The point is that, despite extraordinary and numerous 
vicissitudes, there never was a moment when the land war 
seemed settled once and for all. 
This has not been the case at sea. The transformations 
here have been fewer ; but they have been extreme. For ' 
two and a half years the sea-power of the Allies appeared 
both so overwhelmingly established and so abjectly accepted 
by the enemy, that it seemed incredible that this condition 
could ever alter materially. Yet between the months of 
February and May, 1917, the change was so abrupt and so 
terrific that for a period it seemed as if the enemy had estab- 
lished a form of superiority which must, at' a date that was 
not doubtful, be absolutely fatal to the alliance. And again, 
in six months' time, the situation was transformed, so that 
sea-power, on which the only hope of AHied victory has ever 
rested, was once more assured. 
Thus, after the most anxious year in our history we came 
back to where we started. This nation, France, Italy, and 
America no less, we have all returned to that absolute and 
unwavering confidence in the navy as the chief anchor of all 
AHied hopes. Not that the navy had ever failed to justify 
that confidence in the past. There was no task to which 
any ship was ever set that had not been tackled in that 
heroic spirit of self-sacrifice which we have been taught to 
expect from our officers and men ; there had never been a 
recorded case of a single ship declining action with the enemy. 
There were scores of cases in which a smaller and weaker 
British force had attacked a larger and stronger German. 
Ships had been mined, torpedoed, sunk in battle, and the men 
on board had gone to their death smiling, calm and unper- 
turbed. If heroism, goodwill, a blind passion for duty could 
have won the war, if devotion and zeal in training, patient 
submission to discipline, a fieiy spirit of enterprise could 
have won — then we never should have had a single dis- 
appointment at sea. The traditions of the past, the noble 
character of the seamen of to-day — we hoped for a great 
deal, nor ever was our hope disappointed. And' when the 
time of danger came, when our tonnage was slipping away 
at more than six million tons a year, so tliat it was literally 
possible to calculate how long the country could endure 
before surrender, it never occurred to the most panic-stricken 
to blame the navy for our danger. The nation saw quite 
clearly where the fault lay, and the Government, sensitive 
to the popular feeling, at last took the right course. 
But it was a course that should hav^ been taken long before. 
For, though the purposes for which sea-power exists seemed 
perfectly secure and never in danger at all till little m(jre 
than a year ago, yet there had been a series of unacc<juntable 
miscarriages of sea-power. Battles were fought in which the 
finest ships in the world, armed with the best and heaviest 
guns, commanded by officers of unrivalled skill and resolu- 
tion, and manned by officers and crews perfectly trained, 
and acting in battle with just the same swift, calm exactitude 
that they had shown in drill — and yet the enemy was not 
sunk and victory was not won. Though, seemingly, we 
possessed overwhelming numbers, the enemy seerned to be 
able to flout us, first in one place and then in another, and we 
seemed powerless to strike back. Almost since the war 
began we kept running into disappointments which our 
belief in and knowledge of the navy convinced us were 
gratuitcus disappointments. A rapid survey of the chief 
events since August, 1914, will illustrate what I mean. 
The First Crisis 
The opening of the war at sea was in every respect 
auspicious for the Allies. By what looked like a happy 
accident, the British Navy had just been mobilised on an 
unprecedented scale. It was actually in process of returning 
to its normal establishment when the international crisis 
became acute, and, by a dramatic stroke, it was kept at 
war strength and the main fleet sent to its war stations 
before the British ultimatum was dispatched to Berlin. The 
effect was instantaneous. Within a week transports were 
carrying British troops into France and trade was con- 
tinuing its normal course, exactly as if there were no German 
Navy in existence. The German sea service actually went 
out of existence. Before a month was over a small squadron 
o"f battle cruisers raided the Bight bet weep Heligoland and 
the German harbours,, sank three small cruisers and half' a 
dozen destroyers, , challenged the High Seas Fleet to battle, 
and came away without the enemy having attempted to use 
his capital ships to defend his small craft or to pick up the 
glove so audaciously thrown down. The mere mobilisation 
of the British Fleet seemed to have paralysed the enemy, 
and it looked as if our ability to control sea communications 
was not only surprisingly complete, but promised to be enduring. 
The nation's confidence in the Navy had been absolute from 
the beginning, and it seemed as if that confidence could not 
be shaken. , 
Before another two months had passed we had run into 
one of those crises which were to recur not once, but again 
and again. During September an accumulation of errors 
came to light. The enormity of the political and naval 
blunder which had allowed Goeben and Breslau to slip through 
our fingers in the Mediterranean, and so bring Turkey into 
the war against us, at last became patent. There was no 
blockade, "f here were the raids which Emden and Karlsruhe 
were making on our trade in the Indian Ocean, and between 
the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The enemy's submarines 
had sunk some of our cruisers — three in succession on a 
single day and in the same area. Then rumours gained 
ground that the Grand Fleet, driven from its anchorages by 
submarines, was fugitive, hiding now in one remote loch, 
now in another, and losing one of its greatest units in its 
flight. For a moment it looked as if the old warnings, that 
surface craft were impotent against under-water craft, had 
suddenly been proved true. Von Spec with a powerful pair 
of armoured cruisers was known to be at large. As a final 
insult, German battle- :ruisers crossed the North Sea, and 
battered and ravaged the defenceless inhabitants of a small 
seaport town on the East Coast. Something was evidently 
wrong. But nobody seemed to know quit6 what it was. 
The crisis was met by a typical expedient. We are a 
nation of hero^worshippers and proverbially loyal to our 
favourites, long after they have lost any title to our favour. 
In the concert-room, in the cricket-field, on the stage, in 
Parliament — in every phase of life — it is the old an,d tried 
friend in whom we confide, even if we have conveniently to 
overlook the fact that he has not only been tried, but con- 
victed. This blind loyalt}' is perhaps amiable as a weakness, 
and almost peculiar to this nation. But we have another 
which is neither amiable nor peculiar. We hate having our 
complacency disturbed by being proved to be wrong and, 
rather than acknowledge our fault, are easily persuaded that 
the cause of our misfortune is some hidden and malign influ- 
ence. And so in October, 1914, the explanation of things 
being wrong at sea was suddenly found to be quite simple. 
It was that the First Lord of the Admiralty was of German 
birth. With the evil eye gone the spell would be removed. 
And so a most accomplished officer retired, and Lord Fisher, 
now almost a mythological hero, took hiis place. 
Within very few weeks the scene suffered 
a sea change 
Into something rich and strange. 
Von Spec was left but a month in which to enjoy his triumph 
over Cradock ; Emden was defeated and captured by Sydney ; 
Karlsruhe vanished as by enchantment from the sea ; and 
