BOOK III

THE AGE OF STEAM AND STEEL

PART I
A CENTURY OF CHANGE
(1814-1914)

CHAPTER XX
A CENTURY OF BRITISH-FRENCH-AMERICAN PEACE
(1815-1914)

Germany made 1914 a year of blood; but let us remember it as also being the hundredth year of peace between the British, Americans, and French, those three great peoples who will, we hope, go on as friends henceforward, leading the world ever closer to the glorious goal of true democracy: that happier time when every boy and girl shall have at least the chance to learn the sacred trust of all self-government, and when most men and women shall have learnt this lesson well enough to use their votes for what is really best.

CHAPTER XXI

A CENTURY OF MINOR BRITISH WARS
(1815-1914)

During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War against the Germans the Royal Navy had no more fights for life or death. But it never ceased to protect the Empire it had done so much to make. It took part in many wars; it prevented many others; it helped to spread law and justice in the world; and, at the end of all this, it was as ready as ever to meet the foe.

Sometimes it acted alone; but much oftener with the Army in joint expeditions, as it had for centuries. And here let us remind ourselves again that the Navy by itself could no more have made the Empire than the Army could alone. The United Service of both was needed for such work in the past, just as the United Service of these and of the Royal Air Force will be needed to defend the Empire in the future. Nor is this all we must remember; for the fighting Services draw their own strength from the strength of the whole people. So, whenever we talk of how this great empire of the free was won and is to be defended, let us never forget that it needed and it needs the patriotic service of every man and woman, boy and girl, whether in the fighting Services by sea and land and air or among those remaining quietly at home. One for all, and all for one.

The Navy's first work after the peace of 1815 was to destroy the stronghold of the Dey of Algiers, who was a tyrant, enslaver, and pirate in one. This released thousands of Christian slaves and broke up Algerian slavery for ever. A few years later (1827) the French and British fleets, now happily allied, sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino, because the Sultan was threatening to kill off the Greeks. Then the Navy sent the Pasha of Egypt fleeing out of Beirut and Acre in Syria, closed in on Alexandria, and forced him to stop bullying the people of the whole Near East.

By this time (1840) steam had begun to be used in British men-of-war. But the first steamer in the world that ever fired a shot in action, and the first to cross any ocean under steam the whole way, was built at Quebec in 1831. This was the famous Royal William, which steamed from Pictou (in Nova Scotia) to London in 1833, and which, on the 5th of May, 1836, in the Bay of San Sebastian, fired the first shot ever fired in battle from a warship under steam. She had been sold to the Spanish Government for use against the Carlists, who were the same sort of curse to Spain that the Stuarts were to Britain, and was then leading the British Auxiliary Steam Squadron under Commodore Henry. (The American Savannah is often said to have crossed the Atlantic under steam in 1819. But her log (ship's diary) proves that she steamed only eighty hours during her voyage of a month.)

In 1854 French and British were again allied, this time against Russia, which wanted to cut Europe off from Asia by taking Constantinople. The Allies took Sebastopol in the Crimea because it was the Russian naval base in the Black Sea. The Czar never thought that "bleeding his big toe" could beat him. But it did. He had to supply his army by land, while the Allies supplied theirs by sea; and though theirs fought thousands of miles from their bases at home, while his fought in Russia itself, within a few hundred miles of its bases inland, yet their sea-power wore out his land-power in less than two years.

Russia was at that time a great world-power, stretching without a break from the Baltic to Alaska, which she owned. What, then, kept Canada free from the slightest touch of war? The only answer is, the Royal Navy, that Navy which, supported by the Mother Country alone, enabled all the oversea Dominions to grow in perfect peace and safety for this whole hundred years of British wars. Moreover, Canada was then, and long remained, one of the greatest shipping countries in the world, dependent on her own and the Mother Country's shipping for her very life. What made her shipping safe on every sea? The Royal Navy. But, more than even this, the Mother Country spent twenty-five hundred millions of her own money on keeping Canada Canadian and British by land and sea. And here, again, nothing could have been done without the Navy.

The Navy enabled the Mother Country to put down the Indian Mutiny, a mutiny which, if it had succeeded, would have thrown India back a thousand years, into the welter of her age-long wars; and these wars themselves would soon have snuffed out all the "Pacifist" Indian Nationalists who bite the British hand that feeds them, though they want Britain to do all the paying and fighting of Indian defence. The Navy enabled the Mother Country to save Egypt from ruin at home, from the ruthless sword of the Mahdi in the Soudan, and from conquest by the Germans or the Turks. The Navy also enabled the Mother Country to change a dozen savage lands into places where people could rise above the level of their former savage lives.

All this meant war. But if these countries had not been brought into the British Empire they could only have had the choice of two evils—either to have remained lands of blood and savagery or to have been bullied by the Germans. And if the British do not make friends of those they conquer, how is it that so many Natives fought for them without being in any way forced to do so, and how is it that the same Boer commander-in-chief who fought against the British in the Boer War led a Boer army on the British side against the Germans? The fact is that all the white man's countries of the British Empire overseas are perfectly free commonwealths in which not only those of British blood but those of foreign origin, like Boers and French-Canadians, can live their lives in their own way, without the Mother Country's having the slightest wish or power to force them to give a ship, a dollar, or a man to defend the Empire without which they could not live a day. She protects them for nothing. They join her or not, just as they please. And when they do join her, her Navy is always ready to take their soldiers safe across the sea. No League of Nations could ever better this.

Nor is this the only kind of freedom that flourishes under the White Ensign of the Navy. The oversea Dominions, which govern themselves, make what laws they please about their trade, even to charging duty on goods imported from the Mother Country. But the parts of the Empire which the Mother Country has to rule, (because their people, not being whites, have not yet learnt to rule themselves), also enjoy a wonderful amount of freedom in trade. And foreigners enjoy it too; for they are allowed to trade with the Natives as freely as the British are themselves. Nor is this all. During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War most of the oversea colonies of Holland, Spain, and Portugal could have easily been taken by British joint expeditions. But not one of them was touched.

There never was the slightest doubt that the Navy's long arm could reach all round the Seven Seas. When the Emperor of Abyssinia imprisoned British subjects wrongly and would not let them go, the Navy soon took an army to the east coast of Africa and kept it supplied till it had marched inland, over the mountains, and brought the prisoners back. When the Chinese Mandarins treated a signed agreement like a "scrap of paper" (as the Germans treated the neutrality of Belgium) they presently found a hundred and seventy-three British vessels coming to know the reason why, though the Chinese coast was sixteen thousand miles from England. No, there is no question about the Navy's strong right arm. But it has no thievish fingers.

The Empire has grown by trade rather than by conquest. There have been conquests, plenty of them. But they have been brought on either by the fact that other Powers have tried to shut us out of whole continents, as the Spaniards tried in North and South America, or by fair war, as with the French, or by barbarians and savages who would not treat properly the British merchants with whom they had been very glad to trade. Of course there have been mistakes, and British wrongs as well as British rights. But ask the conquered how they could live their own lives so much in their own way under a flag of their own and without the safeguard of the Royal Navy.

These things being so, the Empire, which is itself the first real League of Nations the world has ever seen, would be wrong to give up any of the countries it holds in trust for their inhabitants; and its enormous size is more a blessing than a curse. The size itself is more than we can quite take in till we measure it by something else we know as being very large indeed. India, for instance, has three times as many people as there are in the whole of the United States; though India is only one of the many countries under the British Crown. So much for population. Now for area. The area added to the British Empire in the last fifty years is larger than that of the whole United States. Yet we don't hear much about it. That is not the British way. The Navy is "The Silent Service."

PART II

THE GREAT WAR
(1914-1918)

CHAPTER XXII
THE HANDY MAN

We have not been through the Sailing Age without learning something about the "Handy Man" of the Royal Navy, whether he is a ship's boy or a veteran boatswain (bo's'n), a cadet or a commander-in-chief, a blue-jacket or a Royal Marine ("soldier and sailor too"). But we must not enter the Age of Steam and Steel without taking another look at him, if only to see what a great part he plays in our lives and liberties by keeping the seaways open to friends and closed to enemies. Without the Handy Man of the Royal Navy the Merchant Service could not live a day, the Canadian Army could not have joined the other British armies at the front, and the Empire itself would be all parts and no whole, because divided, not united, by the Seven Seas. United we stand: divided we fall.

The sea is three times bigger than the land, but three hundred times less known. Yet even our everyday language is full of sea terms; because so much of it, like so much of our blood, comes from the Hardy Norsemen, and because so much of the very life of all the English-speaking peoples depends upon the handy man at sea. Peoples who have Norse blood, like French and Germans, but who have never lived by sea-power, and peoples who, like the Russians and Chinese, have neither sea-power nor a sea-folk's blood, never use sea terms in their ordinary talk. They may dress up a landsman and put him on the stage to talk the same sort of twaddle that our own stage sailors talk—all about "shiver my timbers," "hitching his breeches," and "belaying the slack of your jaw." But they do not talk the real sea sense we have learnt from the handy man of whose strange life we know so little.

When we say "that slacker's not pulling his weight" we use a term that has come down from the old Rowing Age, when a man who was not helping the boat along more with his oar than he was keeping her back with his weight really was the worst kind of "slacker." But most of the sea terms we use in our land talk come from the Sailing Age of Drake and Nelson. To be "A1" is to be like the best class of merchant ships that are rated A1 for insurance. "First-rate," on the other hand, comes from the Navy, and means ships of the largest size and strongest build, like the super-dreadnoughts of to-day. If you make a mess of things people say you are "on the wrong tack," may "get taken aback," and find yourself "on your beam ends" or, worse still, "on the rocks." So you had better remember that "if you won't be ruled by the rudder you are sure to be ruled by the rock." If you do not "know the ropes" you will not "keep on an even keel" when it's "blowing great guns." If you take to drink you will soon "have three sheets in the wind," because you will not have the sense to "steer a straight course," but, getting "half seas over," perhaps "go by the board" or be "thrown overboard" by friends who might have "brought you up with a round turn" before it was too late. Remember three other bits of handy man's advice: "you'd better not sail so close to the wind" (do not go so near to doing something wrong), "don't speak to the man at the wheel" (because the ship may get off her course while you are bothering him), and, when a storm is brewing, mind you "shorten sail" and "take in a reef," instead of being such a fool as to "carry on till all is blue." When you are in for a fight then "clear the decks for action," by putting aside everything that might get in your way. The list could be made very much longer if we took the whole subject "by and large" and "trimmed our sails to every breeze" when we were "all aboard." But here we must "stow it," "make everything ship-shape," trust to the "sheet-anchor," and, leaving the age of mast and sail, go "full steam ahead" into our own.

"Full steam ahead" might well have been the motto of Nelson's flag-captain, Hardy, when he was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty; because, twenty years before the first steam armoured ship was launched, he wrote this opinion: "Science will alter the whole Navy. Depend on it, steam and gunnery are in their infancy." There were just a hundred years between Trafalgar and laying the keel of the first modern Dreadnought in 1905. But Hardy foresaw the sort of change that was bound to come; and so helped on toward Jellicoe and Jutland. That is one reason why foreigners cannot catch the British Navy napping.

Another is because the British "handy man" can "turn his hand to anything"; though even his worst enemies can never accuse him of being "jack of all trades and master of none." He is the master of the sea. But he knows the ropes of many other things as well; and none of the strange things he is called upon to do ever seem to find him wanting. When a British joint expedition attacked St. Helena the Dutch never dreamt of guarding the huge sheer cliffs behind the town. But up went a handy man with a long cord by which he pulled up a rope, which, in its turn, was used to haul up a ladder that the soldiers climbed at night. Next morning the astounded Dutchmen found themselves attacked by land as well as by sea and had to give in.

One day the admiral (Sir William Kennedy) commanding in the Indian Ocean a few years ago heard that two Englishwomen had been left on a desert island by a mail steamer from which they had landed for a picnic. The steamer was bound to go on. The women were not missed till too late. So the captain telegraphed to the Admiral from the next port. The Admiral at once went to the island in his flagship, found the women with their dresses all torn to ribbons on the rocks, measured them for sailor suits himself, and had them properly rigged out by the ship's tailor, just like the bluejackets, except for the skirts—white jerseys, navy blue serge uniforms, with blue jean collars and white trimmings, straw hats with H.M.S. Boadicea on the ribbon in gold, knife and lanyard, all complete.

To beat this admiral in turning his hand to anything at a moment's notice we must take the bluejacket whom Captain Wonham saw escaping from a horde of savages on the West Coast of Africa during the Ashanti War of 1874. This man knew the natives well, as he had been the Governor's servant there for several years before the niggers swarmed out of the bush to kill off the whites. Every one seemed to be safe in the boats, when Captain Wonham suddenly spied Jack running for his life on top of a long spit of high rocks that jutted out like a wharf. The natives, brandishing their spears and climbing the rocks, were just going to cut Jack off when he, knowing their craze for the white man's clothes, threw his cap at them. Immediately there was a scramble which held up their advance. As they came on again he threw them his serge, and so on, taking a spurt after each throw. At last he took off his trousers, which set all the niggers fighting like mad round two big chiefs, each of whom was hanging on to one leg. Then he took a neat header and swam off to the boats, which had meanwhile pulled in to his rescue.

When the battleship Majestic was sunk in the Dardanelles a bluejacket ran along her upper side as she rolled over, then along her keel as she turned bottom upwards. Finally, seeing that she was sinking by the stern, and knowing both her own length and the depth of the water, he climbed right up on the tip-top end of her stem, from which he was taken off as dry as a bone. Meanwhile a very different kind of rescue was being made by Captain Talbot, who, having gone down with the ship, rose to the surface and was rescued by a launch. He had barely recovered his breath when he saw two of his bluejackets struggling for their lives. He at once dived in and rescued both at the very great risk of his own.

From East to West, from the Tropics to the Poles, the Navy has gone everywhere and done nearly everything that mortal man can do. Think of the Admiralty "rating" Newfoundland, a country bigger than Scotland and Wales put together, as one of His Majesty's Ships and putting a captain in command! Yet that was done in the early days; and it worked very well. Think of the naval brigades (that is, men landed for service ashore) which have fought alone or with the Army, or with many foreign armies and navies, all over the world for hundreds of years. Drake, as we have seen, always used naval brigades, and they have always been the same keen "first-class fighting men" wherever they went. The only trouble was in holding them back. At the siege of Tangier in North Africa in the seventeenth century Admiral Herbert "checked" Captain Barclay "for suffering too forward and furious an advance, lest they might fall into an ambush"; whereupon Barclay said, "Sir, I can lead them on, but the Furies can't call them back." A naval brigade man-handled the guns on the Plains of Abraham the day of Wolfe's victory, and took forty-seven up the cliff and into position before the army had dug itself in for the night. Nelson lost his right arm when leading a naval brigade at Teneriffe in 1797. Peel's naval brigade in the Indian Mutiny (1857-9) man-handled two big guns right up against the wall that kept Lord Clyde's army from joining hands with the British besieged in Lucknow, blew a hole in it, though it was swarming with rebels, and so let the Marines and the Highlanders through.

In Egypt (1882) Lord Fisher, of whom we shall soon hear more, rigged up a train like an ironclad and kept Arabi Pasha at arm's length from Alexandria, which Lord Alcester's fleet had bombarded and taken. Lieutenant Rawson literally "steered" Lord Wolseley's army across the desert by the stars during the night march that ended in the perfect victory of Tel-el-Kebir. Mortally wounded he simply asked: "Did I lead them straight, Sir?"

The Egyptian campaigns continued off and on for sixteen years (1882-1898) till Lord Kitchener beat the Mahdi far south in the wild Soudan. British sea-power, as it always does, worked the sea lines of communication over which the army's supplies had to go to the front from England and elsewhere, and, again as usual, put the army in the best possible place from which to strike inland. Needless to say, the naval part of British sea-power not only helped and protected the mercantile part, which carried the supplies, but helped both in the fighting and the inland water transport too.

At one time (1885) the little Naval Brigade on the Nile had to be led by a boatswain, every officer having been killed or wounded. In the attempt to rescue the saintly and heroic General Gordon from Khartoum, Lord Beresford rigged up the little Egyptian steamer Safieh with armour plates and took her past an enemy fort that could easily have sunk her as she went by, only eighty yards away, if his machine-gunners had not kept such a stream of bullets whizzing through every hole from which an Egyptian gun stuck out that not a single Egyptian gunner could stand to his piece and live.

Lord Beresford was well to the fore wherever hard work had to be done during that desperate venture; and it was he who performed the wonderful feat of getting the Nile steamers hauled through the Second Cataract by fifteen hundred British soldiers, who hove them up against that awful stream of death while the blue-jackets looked after the tackle. Beresford's Naval Brigade used to tramp fifteen miles a day along the river, sometimes work as many hours with no spell off for dinner, haul the whaleboats up-stream to where the rapids made a big loop, and then, avoiding the loop, portage them across the neck of land into the river again. Handling these boats in the killing heat would have been hard enough in any case; but it was made still worse by the scorpions that swarmed in them under the mats and darted out to bite the nearest hand. Beresford himself had to keep his weather eye on thirty miles of roaring river, on hundreds of soldiers and sailors, and on thousands of natives. Yet he managed it all quite handily by riding about on his three famous camels: Bimbashi, Ballyhooly, and Beelzebub.

But let no one imagine that dozens of joint expeditions ever make the Navy forget its first duty of keeping the seaways clear of every possible enemy during every minute of every day the whole year round. When the Russian fleet was going out to the Sea of Japan during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) it ran into the "Gamecock Fleet" of British fishing vessels in the North Sea, got excited, and fired some shots that killed and wounded several fishermen. Within a very few hours it was completely surrounded by a British fleet that did not interfere with its movements, but simply "shadowed" it along, waiting for orders. There was no fight; and the Russians were left to be finished by the Japanese. But the point is, that, although the British Empire was then at peace with the whole world, the British Navy was far readier for instant action than the Russian Navy, which had been many months at war.

THE HAPPY WARRIOR

Wordsworth's glorious poem is not in praise of war but of the self-sacrificing warriors who try to save their country from the horrors of war. No wise people, least of all the men who know it best, ever sing the praise of war itself. They might as well sing the praises of disease. But, while those who, like the Germans, force a wicked war upon the world are no better than poisoners of wells and spreaders of the plague, those, on the other hand, who, like the Allies, fight the poisoners of wells and spreaders of the plague are doing the same kind of service that doctors do when fighting germs. Therefore, as doctors to disease, so is the Happy Warrior to war. He no more likes war than doctors like the germs of deadly sickness; and he would rid the world of this great danger if he could. But while war lasts, and wars are waged against the very soul of all we hold most dear, we need the Happy Warrior who can foresee the coming war and lead a host of heroes when it comes. And leaders and followers alike, when faithful unto death, are they not among the noblest martyrs ever known? For greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

Who is the Happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
—It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
Whose high endeavours are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright:
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes his moral being his prime care;
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain;
In face of these doth exercise a power
Which is our human nature's highest dower;
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of their bad influence, and their good receives:
By objects, which might force the soul to abate
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate;
Is placable—because occasions rise
So often that demand such sacrifice;
More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure,
As tempted more; more able to endure,
As more exposed to suffering and distress;

****

Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
But who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a Lover; and attired
With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired;
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw;

****

Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
For ever, and to noble deeds give birth,
Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame,
And leave a dead unprofitable name—
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause:
This is the Happy Warrior; this is He
That every Man in arms should wish to be.
—William Wordsworth.

CHAPTER XXIII

FIFTY YEARS OF WARNING
(1864-1914)

In 1864 the Fathers of Confederation met at Quebec, while the Germans took from the Danes the neck of land through which they cut the Kiel Canal to give the German Navy a safe back way between the North Sea and the Baltic. At first sight you cannot understand why Canadian Confederation and the German attack on Denmark should ever be mentioned together. But, just as the waters of two streams in the same river system are bound to meet in the end, so Canada and Germany were bound to meet on the same battlefield when once Canada had begun to grow into a nation within the British Empire and Germany had begun to grow into an empire for whose ambitions there was no room without a series of victorious wars. After beating Austria in 1866, to win the leadership of Central Europe, Germany beat France in 1870, took Alsace and Lorraine, and made herself the strongest land-power in the world. Even then two such very different Englishmen as Cardinal Newman and John Stuart Mill foresaw the clash that was bound to come between the new empire of the Germans and the old one of the British. But most people never see far ahead, while many will not look at all if the prospect seems to be unpleasant.

Thirty years before the war (1884) Germany began to get an empire overseas. Taking every possible chance she went on till she had a million square miles and fifteen million natives. But she neither had nor could get without victorious war any land outside of Germany where she could bring up German children under the German flag. Even including the German parts of Austria there was barely one quarter-million of square miles on which German-speaking people could go on growing under their own flags; while the English-speaking people of the British Empire and the United States had twenty times as much land, fit for whites, on which to grow bigger and bigger populations of their own blood under their own flags. This meant that the new, strong, and most ambitious German Empire was doomed to an ever-dwindling future as a world-power in comparison with the British Empire. The Germans could not see why they should not have as good a "place in the sun" of the white man's countries as the British, whom they now looked on very much as our ancestors looked upon the oversea Spaniards about the time of the Armada. "Why," they asked, "should the British have so much white man's country while we have so little?"

There are only three answers, two that the Germans understand as well as we do, and one that, being what they are, they could hardly be expected to admit, though it is the only one that justifies our case. The two answers which the Germans understand are of course these: that we had the sea-power while they had not; and that, because we had it, we had reaped the full benefit of "first come, first served." But the third answer, which is much the most important, because it turns upon the question of right and wrong, is that while the Germans, like the Spaniards, have grossly abused their imperial powers, we, on the whole, with all our faults, have not.

There are so many crimes for which the Germans have to answer that this whole book could not contain the hundredth part of them. But one crime in one of their oversea possessions will be enough to mention here, because it was all of a piece with the rest. In German South-West Africa the Herreros, a brave native people, were robbed if they worked hard for the German slave-drivers, flogged till their backs were flayed if they did not, and killed if they stood up for their rights. There are plenty of German photographs to prove that the modern Germans are very like the Spaniards of Philip II and utterly unlike the kindly modern French, Italians, Americans, and British. The world itself is witness now, and its conscience is the judge. So there we shall leave our case and turn to follow the ever thickening plot of coming war.

In 1889 Britain spent an extra hundred million dollars on building new men-of-war. Next year Germany got Heligoland from Britain in exchange for Zanzibar. Heligoland is only a tiny inland off the North Sea coast of Germany. But it was very useful to the Germans as one of the main defences of the great naval base there.

In 1897 the Kaiser said, "I shall not rest till I have made my fleet as strong as my army." A year later he said, "Our future is on the water." And in 1900 the German Navy Bill passed by the German Parliament began by saying, "The German Navy must be strong enough to endanger the supremacy of even the mightiest foreign navy." What "foreign navy" could that be if not the British? In 1908 the Kaiser tried to steal a march on the too pacific British Government by writing privately to Lord Tweedmouth, the feeble civilian First Lord of the Admiralty. The First Lord represents the Navy in Parliament; and Parliament represents the People, who elect its members. So when a First Lord is a real statesman who knows what advice to take from the First Sea Lord (who is always an admiral) everything goes well; for then Parliament and the Navy work together as the trusted servants of the whole People. But Tweedmouth, feeble and easily flattered, was completely taken in by the sly Kaiser, who said Germany was only building new ships in place of old ones, while she was really trying to double her strength. It was therefore a very lucky thing that the Kaiser also tried to fool that wonderful statesman, wise King Edward, who at once saw through the whole German trick.

Meanwhile (1898) the Americans had driven the Spaniards out of their last oversea possessions, much to the rage of the Germans, who had hoped to get these themselves. The German admiral at Manilla in the Philippines blustered against the American fleet under Admiral Dewey; but was soon brought to book by Sir Edward Chichester, who told him he would have to fight the British squadron as well if he gave any more trouble about things that were none of his business.

The same year the Germans tried to set the French and British by the ears over Fashoda. A French expedition came out of French Africa into the Sudan, where Kitchener's army was in possession after having freed Egypt from the power of the Madhi's wild Sudanese. French and British both claimed the same place; and for some years Fashoda was like a red rag to a bull when mentioned to Frenchmen; for Kitchener had got there first. Luckily he had fought for France in 1870, spoke French like a Frenchman, and soon made friends with the French on the spot. More luckily still, King Edward the Wise went to Paris in 1903, despite the fears of his Ministers, who did all they could to make him change his mind, and then, when this failed, to go there as a private person. They were afraid that memories of Fashoda and of all the anti-British feeling stirred up by Germans in Europe and America over the Boer War (1899-1902) would make the French unfriendly. But he went to pay his respects to France on his accession to the British Throne, showed how perfectly he understood the French people, said and did exactly the right thing in the right way; and, before either friends or foes knew what was happening, had so won the heart of France that French and British, seeing what friends they might be, began that Entente Cordiale (good understanding of each other) which our glorious Alliance in the Great War ought to make us keep forever. Paris named one of her squares in his honour, Place Edouard Sept; and there the wise king's statue stands to remind the world of what he did to save it from the German fury.

Next year Lord Fisher went to London as First Sea Lord (1904-10) to get the Navy ready for the coming war. He struck off the list of fighting ships every single one that would not be fit for battle in the near future. He put "nucleus crews" on board all ships fit for service that were not in sea-going squadrons for the time being; so that when the Reserves were called out for the war they would find these nucleus crews ready to show them all the latest things aboard. He started a new class of battleships by launching (1906) the world-famous Dreadnought. This kind of ship was so much better than all others that all foreign navies, both friends and foes, have copied it ever since, trying to keep up with each new British improvement as it appeared.

But the greatest thing of all was Fisher's new plan for bringing the mighty British fleets closer together and so "handier" for battles with the Germans. The old plan of posting British squadrons all over the world takes us back to the Conquest of Canada; for it was the work of St. Vincent, to whom Wolfe handed his will the night before the Battle of the Plains (1759). St. Vincent's plan of 1803 was so good that it worked well, with a few changes, down to Fisher's anti-German plan of 1904, about which time the French and British Navies began talking over the best ways of acting together when the Germans made their spring. In 1905—the centenary of Trafalgar—a British fleet visited France and a French fleet visited England. It was a thrilling sight to see that noble Frenchman, Admiral Caillard, whose example was followed by all his officers, stand up in his carriage to salute the Nelson statue in Trafalgar Square.

In 1908, when Canada was celebrating the Tercentenary of a life that could never have begun without Drake or been saved without Nelson, the French and British Prime Ministers (Clemenceau and Campbell-Bannerman) were talking things over in Paris. The result was that the British left the Mediterranean mainly in charge of the French Navy, while the French left the Channel mostly and the North Sea entirely in charge of the British. There was no treaty then or at any other time. Each Government left its own Parliament, and therefore its own People, whose servant it was, to decide freely when the time came. But the men at the head of the French and British fleets and armies arranged, year by year, what they would do when they got the word GO! At the same time (six years before the war) that the Prime Ministers were in conference in Paris Lord Haldane, then Secretary of State for War, was warning Lord French in London that he would be expected to command the British army against the Germans in France, and that he had better begin to study the problem at once.

A great deal of sickening nonsense has been talked about our having been so "righteous" because so "unprepared." We were not prepared to attack anybody; and quite rightly too; though we need not get self-righteous over it. But our great Mother Country's Navy was most certainly and most rightly prepared to defend the Empire and its allies against the attack that was bound to come. If France and Great Britain had not been well enough prepared for self-defence, then the Germans must have won; and wrong would have triumphed over right all over the world. There is only one answer to all this "Pacifistic" stuff-and-nonsense—if you will not fight on the side of right, then you help those who fight on the side of wrong; and if you see your enemy preparing to attack you wrongfully, and you do not prepare to defend yourself, then you are a fool as well as a knave.

All the great experts in statesmanship and war saw the clash coming; and saw that it was sure to come, because the German war party could force it on the moment they were ready. Moreover, it was known that the men of this war party would have forced it on at once if a peace party had ever seemed likely to oust them. The real experts even foresaw the chief ways in which the war would be fought. Lord Fisher foresaw the danger of sea-going submarines long before submarines were used for anything but the defence of harbours. More than this, ten years before the war he named all the four senior men who led the first British army into Flanders. In Lord Esher's diary for the 17th of January, 1904, ten years before the war, is the following note about Fisher's opinion on the best British generals: "French, because he never failed in South Africa, and because he has the splendid gift of choosing the right man (he means Douglas Haig). Then Smith-Dorrien and Plumer." In the same way Joffre and Foch were known to be the great commanders of the French. Again in the same way (that is, by the foreknowledge of the real experts) Lord Jellicoe, though a junior rear-admiral at the time, was pointed out at the Quebec Tercentenary (1908) as the man who would command the Grand Fleet; while Sir David Beatty and Sir Charles Madden were also known as "rising stars."

The following years were fuller than ever of the coming war. In 1910 the Kaiser went to Vienna and let the world know that he was ready to stand by Austria in "shining armour." Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece were all to be used for the grand German railway from Berlin to Bagdad that was to cut Russia off from the rest of Europe, get all the trade of the Near East into German hands, and, by pushing down to the Persian Gulf, threaten the British oversea line between England and Asia.

During the next three years the Italian conquest of Tripoli (next door to Egypt) and the two wars in the Balkans hurt Germany's friends, the Turks and Bulgarians, a great deal, and thus threatened the German Berlin-to-Bagdad "line of penetration" through the Near East and into the Asiatic sea flank of the hated British. With 1914 came the completion of the enlarged Kiel Canal (exactly as foretold by Fisher years before); and this, together with the state of the world for and against the Germans, made the war an absolute certainty at once. The murder of the heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, was only an excuse to goad the gallant Serbians into war. Any other would have done as well if it had only served the German turn.