Part 8

The conception of the Nation is the clue to the solution of all the problems with which the people of Great Britain are confronted. They are those of foreign and imperial policy, of defence national and imperial, of education and of social life.

Foreign and imperial policy include all affairs external to Great Britain, the relations of Great Britain to Europe, to India, to the Colonies, and to the Powers of Asia and America. In all these external affairs the question to be asked is, what is Britain's duty?

It is by the test of duty that Great Britain's attitude towards Germany should be tried. In what event would it be necessary and right to call on every British citizen to turn out and fight, ready to shed his blood and ready to shoot down enemies? Evidently only in case of some great and manifest wrong undertaken by Germany. As I am aware of no such wrong actually attempted, I think a conflict unnecessary. It is true I began by pointing out the danger of drifting into a war with the German Empire, but I wish to do what I can to prevent it, and to show that by right action the risk will be diminished.

The greatest risk is due to fear--fear in this country of what Germany may do, fear in Germany of what Great Britain may do. Fear is a bad adviser. There are Englishmen who seem to think that as Germany is strengthening her navy it would be wise to attack her while the British navy is superior in numerical force. This suggestion must be frankly discussed and dealt with.

A war is a trial of strength. To begin it does not add to your force. Suppose for the sake of the argument that a war between England and Germany were "inevitable"--which is equivalent to the supposition that one of the two Governments is bound to wrong the other--one of the two Governments must take the initiative. You take the initiative when you are the Power that wants something, in which case you naturally exert yourself to obtain it, while the adversary who merely says No to your request, acts only in resistance. England wants nothing from Germany, so that she is not called upon for an initiative. But the initiative, or offensive, requires the stronger force, its object being to render the other side powerless for resistance to its will. The defensive admits of a smaller force. A conflict between England and Germany must be primarily a naval war, and Germany's naval forces are considerably weaker than those of England. England has no political reason for the initiative; Germany is debarred from it by the inferiority of her navy. If, therefore, Germany wants anything from England, she must wait to take the initiative until she has forces strong enough for the offensive. But her forces, though not strong enough for the offensive, may be strong enough for the defensive. If, therefore, England should take the initiative, she would in so doing give away the one advantage she has. It may be Germany's interest to have a prompt decision. It can hardly be her interest to attack before she is ready. But if she really wanted to pick a quarrel and get some advantage, it would exactly serve her purpose to be attacked at once, as that would give her the benefit of the defensive. The English "Jingoes," then, are false guides, bad strategists, and worse, statesmen.

Not only in the affairs of Europe, but in those of India, Egypt, and the Colonies, and in all dealings with Asia, Africa, and America the line of British policy will be the line of the British nation's duty.

If Britain is to follow this line two conditions must be fulfilled. She must have a leader to show the way and her people must walk in it with confidence.

The mark of a leader is the single eye. But the traditional system gives the lead of the nation to the leader of one party chosen for his success in leading that party. He can never have a single eye; he serves two masters. His party requires him to keep it in office, regarding the Opposition as the enemy. But his country requires him to guide a united nation in the fulfilment of its mission in Europe and a united Empire in the fulfilment of its mission in the world. A statesman who is to lead the nation and the Empire must keep his eyes on Europe and on the world. A party leader who is to defeat the other party must keep his eyes on the other party. No man can at the same time be looking out of the window and watching an opponent inside the house, and the traditional system puts the Prime Minister in a painful dilemma. Either he never looks out of the window at all or he tries to look two ways at once. Party men seem to believe that if a Prime Minister were to look across the sea instead of across the floor of the House of Commons his Government would be upset. That may be the case so long as men ignore the nation and so long as they acquiesce in the treasonable doctrine that it is the business of the Opposition to oppose. But a statesman who would take courage to lead the nation might perhaps find the Opposition powerless against him.

The counterpart of leadership is following. A Government that shows the line of Britain's duty must be able to utilise the whole energies of her people for its performance. A duty laid upon the nation implies a duty laid upon every man to do his share of the nation's work, to assist the Government by obedient service, the best of which he is capable. It means a people trained every man to his task.

A nation should be like a team in which every man has his place, his work to do, his mission or duty. There is no room in it either for the idler who consumes but renders no service, or for the unskilled man who bungles a task to which he has not been trained. A nation may be compared to a living creature. Consider the way in which nature organises all things that live and grow. In the structure of a living thing every part has its function, its work to do. There are no superfluous organs, and if any fails to do its work the creature sickens and perhaps dies.

Take the idea of the nation as I have tried to convey it and apply it as a measure or test to our customary way of thinking both of public affairs and of our own lives. Does it not reveal that we attach too much importance to having and to possessions--our own and other people's--and too little importance to doing, to service? When we ask what a man is worth, we think of what he owns. But the words ought to make us think of what he is fit for and of what service he renders to the nation. The only value of what a man has springs from what he does with it.

The idea of the nation leads to the right way of looking at these matters, because it constrains every man to put himself and all that he has at the service of the community. Thus it is the opposite of socialism, which merely turns upside down the current worship of ownership, and which thinks "having" so supremely important that it would put "not having" in its place. The only cry I will adopt is "England for ever," which means that we are here, every one of us, with all that we have and all that we can do, as members of a nation that must either serve the world or perish.

But the idea of the nation carries us a long way further than I have yet shown. It bids us all try at the peril of England's fall to get the best Government we can to lead us. We need a man to preside over the nation's counsels, to settle the line of Britain's duty in Europe and in her own Empire, and of her duty to her own people, to the millions who are growing up ill fed, ill housed and ill trained, and yet who are part of the sovereign people. We need to give him as councillors men that are masters of the tasks in which for the nation to fail means its ruin, the tasks of which I have enumerated those that are vital. Do we give him a master of the history of the other nations to guide the nation's dealings with them? Do we give him a master of war to educate admirals and generals? Do we give him a master of the sciences to direct the pursuit of knowledge, and a master of character-building to supervise the bringing up of boys and girls to be types of a noble life? It would serve the nation's turn to have such men. They are among us, and to find them we should only have to look for them. It would be no harder than to pick apples off a tree. But we never dream of looking for them. We have a wonderful plan of choosing our leaders, the plan which we call an election. Five hundred men assemble in a hall and listen to a speech from a partisan, while five hundred others in a hall in the next street are cheering a second partisan who declaims against the first. There is no test of either speaker, except that he must be rich enough to pay the expenses of an "election." The voters do not even listen to both partisans in order to judge between them. Thus we choose our members of Parliament. Our Government is a committee of some twenty of them. Its first business is to keep its authority against the other party, of which in turn the chief function is to make out that everything the Government does is wrong. This is the only recognised plan for leading the nation.

You may be shocked as you read this by the plainness of my words, but you know them to be true, though you suppose that to insist on the facts is "impracticable" because you fancy that there is no way out of the marvellously absurd arrangements that exist. But there is a way out, though it is no royal road. It is this. Get the meaning of the nation into your own head and then make a present to England of your party creed. Ask yourself what is the one thing most needed now, and the one thing most needed for the future. You will answer, because you know it to be true, that the one thing most needed now is to get the navy right.

The one thing most needed for the future is to put the idea of the nation and the will to help England into every man's soul. That cannot be done by writing or by talking, but only by setting every man while he is young to do something for his country. There is one way of bringing that about. It is by making every citizen a soldier in a national army. The man who has learned to serve his country has learned to love it. He is the true citizen, and of such a nation is composed. Great Britain needs a statesman to lead her and a policy at home and abroad. But such a policy must not be sought and cannot be found upon party lines. The statesman who is to expound it to his countrymen and represent it to the world must be the leader not of one party but of both. In short, a statesman must be a nation leader, and the first condition of his existence is that there should be a nation for him to lead.

XIII.

THE EFFECT OF THE NATIONALISATION OF WAR UPON LEADERSHIP

The argument of the preceding chapters points to the conclusion that if Great Britain is to maintain her position as a great Power, probably even if she is to maintain her independence, and certainly if she is to retain the administration of India and the leadership of the nations that have grown out of her colonies, her statesmen and her people must combine to do three things:--

1. To adopt a policy having due relation to the condition and needs of the European Continent.

2. To make the British navy the best possible instrument of naval warfare.

3. To make the British army strong enough to be able to turn the scales in a continental war.

What are for the navy and for the army the essentials of victory? If there had never been any wars, no one would know what was essential to victory. People would have their notions, no doubt, but these notions would be guesses and could not be verified until the advent of a war, which might bring with it a good deal of disappointment to the people who had guessed wrong. But there have already been wars enough to afford ample material for deductions as to the causes and conditions of success. I propose to take the two best examples that can be found, one for war at sea and the other for war on land, in order to show exactly the way in which victory is attained.

By victory, of course, I mean crushing the enemy. In a battle in which neither side is crippled, and after which the fleets part to renew the struggle after a short interval, one side or the other may consider that it has had the honours of the day. It may have lost fewer ships than the enemy, or have taken more. It may have been able and willing to continue the fight, though the enemy drew off, and its commander may be promoted or decorated for having maintained the credit of his country or of the service to which he belongs. But such a battle is not victory either in a political or a strategical sense. It does not lead to the accomplishment of the purpose of the war, which is to dictate conditions of peace. That result can be obtained only by crushing the enemy's force and so making him powerless to renew the contest.

A general view of the wars of the eighteenth century between Great Britain and France shows that, broadly speaking, there was no decision until the end of the period. The nearest approach to it was when Hawke destroyed the French fleet in Quiberon Bay. But this was hardly a stand-up fight. The French fleet was running away, and Hawke's achievement was that, in spite of the difficulties of weather on an extremely dangerous coast, he was able to consummate its destruction. The real decision was the work of Nelson, and its principal cause was Nelson himself.

The British navy had discovered in its conflicts with the Dutch during the seventeenth century that the object of naval warfare was the command of the sea, which must be won by breaking the enemy's force in battle. This was also perfectly understood by the Dutch admirals, and in those wars was begun the development of the art of fighting battles with sailing vessels. A formation, the line of battle, in which one ship sails in the track of the ship before her, was found to be appropriate to the weapon used, the broadside of artillery; and a type of ship suitable to this formation, the line-of-battle ship, established itself. These were the elements with which the British and French navies entered into their long eighteenth century struggle. The French, however, had not grasped the principle that the object of naval warfare was to obtain the command of the sea. They did not consciously and primarily aim, as did their British rivals, at the destruction of the enemy's fleet. They were more concerned with the preservation of their own fleet than with the destruction of the enemy's, and were ready rather to accept battle than to bring it about. The British admirals were eager for battle, but had a difficulty in finding out how a decisive blow could be struck. The orthodox and accepted doctrine of the British navy was that the British fleet should be brought alongside the enemy's fleet, the two lines of battleships being parallel to one another, so that each ship in the British fleet should engage a corresponding ship in the French fleet. It was a manoeuvre difficult of execution, because, in order to approach the French, the British must in the first place turn each of their ships at right angles to the line or obliquely to it, and then, when they were near enough to fire, must turn again to the left (or right) in order to restore the line formation. And during this period of approach and turning they must be exposed to the broadsides of the French without being able to make full use of their own broadsides. Moreover, it was next to impossible in this way to bring up the whole line together. Besides being difficult, the manoeuvre had no promise of success. For if two fleets of equal numbers are in this way matched ship against ship, neither side has any advantage except what may be derived from the superior skill of its gunners. So long as these conditions prevailed, no great decisive victory of the kind for which we are seeking was gained. It was during this period that Nelson received such training as the navy could give him, and added to it the necessary finishing touch by never-ceasing effort to find out for himself the way in which he could strike a decisive blow. His daring was always deliberate, never rash, and this is the right frame of mind for a commander. "You may be assured," he writes to Lord Hood, March 11, 1794, "I shall undertake nothing but what I have moral certainty of succeeding in."

His fierce determination to get at the ultimate secrets of his trade led him to use every means that would help him to think out his problem, and among these means was reading. In 1780 appeared Clerk's "Essay on Naval Tactics." Clerk pointed out the weakness of the method of fighting in two parallel lines and suggested and discussed a number of plans by which one fleet with the bulk of its force could attack and destroy a portion of the other. This was the problem to which Nelson gave his mind--how to attack a part with the whole. On the 19th of August 1796 he writes to the Duke of Clarence:--

"We are now 22 sail of the line, the combined fleet will be above 35 sail of the line.... I will venture my life Sir John Jervis defeats them; I do not mean by a regular battle but by the skill of our Admiral, and the activity and spirit of our officers and seamen. This country is the most favourable possible for skill with an inferior fleet; for the winds are so variable that some one time in the 24 hours you must be able to attack a part of a large fleet, and the other will be becalmed, or have a contrary wind."

His opportunity came in 1798, when in the battle of the Nile he crushed the French Mediterranean Fleet. In a letter to Lord Howe, written January 8, 1799, he described his plan in a sentence:--