Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  In April 1883, Fisher’s health was sufficiently improved for him to return to duty. Lord Northbrook, the solicitous First Lord,fn2 sent him back to Excellent, this time—twenty-one years after his first arrival—as commanding officer. From this point, Fisher was not to go to sea again for fifteen years. He remained on Excellent only two years, but in this time he developed a devoted coterie of younger officers who shared his sense of alarm and urgency about improving the offensive power of the fleet. Two of these lieutenants, both to be heard from in the future, were especially concerned about the accuracy of naval gunnery; they were Percy Scott and John Jellicoe.

  In the summer of 1885, when Fisher left Excellent, he began a span of fifteen months when the navy could find no job for him. Not surprisingly for a man of his energy, these doldrums were cause for despair. Besides, he found that he still suffered from his old Egyptian malady, dysentery. It was in the summer of 1886 that, in order to treat this lingering disease, he first went to the famous Bohemian spa of Marienbad. Set amidst pine forests two thousand feet above sea level, Marienbad offered the curative balm of the sparkling spring waters of the Kreuzbrunnen. Those who came were not all invalids, nor were their diets always rigidly simple. Trout, grouse, and peaches from local streams, farmlands, and orchards appeared regularly before the visitors, who might have spent the day playing golf, fishing, or shooting and who could look forward to an evening of music, cards, or conversation. The Prince of Wales discovered Marienbad in 1899, and thereafter beautiful women and distinguished and fashionable gentlemen crowded into the spa’s splendid little hotels. Every morning, some of the most famous faces in Europe could be seen strolling along the Promenade, discreetly watched by detectives keeping an eye out for anarchists or jewel thieves. Among the detectives, other men with notepads, busily sketching, turned out to be tailors, fixing their gaze on the figure of Prince of Wales, moving slowly along the Promenade in a blue jacket, white flannel trousers, and a soft felt hat. Within a season, fashionable gentleman across Europe would wear what the tailors had seen and copied.

  Fashion added glitter to Marienbad’s attractions, but most people still came to improve their health. Fisher’s account of his experience is typical: “When all the doctors failed113 to cure me, I accidentally came across a lovely partner I used to waltz with, who begged me to go to Marienbad in Bohemia. I did so and in three weeks I was in robust health... it really was a miracle and I never again had a recurrence of my illness.” Thereafter, whenever he could, he spent several weeks in the summer at his “beloved Marienbad.”114 Usually he went alone, although at least once he was accompanied by his daughter Dorothy. He traveled eight hundred miles from London, crossing the Channel at Calais, going by train through Cologne, Mainz, and Nuremberg to the Austro-Hungarian frontier and on to Marienbad. Once there, he stayed in a modest hotel, the Zum Grünen Kreuz, next door to the famous Hotel Weimar where the Prince and his retinue put up. He had little money and he spent it carefully: “I got breakfast115 for tenpence, lunch for a shilling, and dinner for eighteen pence... and a bed for three and a sixpence.... Once... I did a three weeks’ cure there, including railway fare and every expense, for twenty-five pounds.”

  Fisher thrived in the cross section of men and women he met at Marienbad. “Every day is happy116 in this delightful place, even when it is raining cats and dogs as it is at present,” he wrote. He met many distinguished English countrymen: judges, generals, ambassadors, and businessmen. “If you are restricted117 to a Promenade only a few hundred yards long for two hours morning and evening, while you are drinking your water, you can’t help knowing each other quite well.... I almost think I knew Campbell-Bannerman the best. He was delightful to talk to. I have no politics. But in after years I did so admire his giving Freedom to the Boers. Had he lived, he would have done the same to Ireland without any doubt whatever.”

  In 1895, Fisher went on from Marienbad to Switzerland. He climbed to the top of the Gorner Grat above Zermatt, reaching nearly 10,300 feet “fresh as a daisy”;118 but he had to come down after only an hour, “the sun so burning hot... our faces and necks so fearfully burnt.” He watched with amusement the behavior of two tall young ladies who, one of his companions observed, “were husbandeering119 and not mountaineering.” By the time he reached Geneva, Fisher’s sunburn was painful and his temper was foul. He called Geneva “over-rated...120 a very second-class place” and Mont Blanc “a fraud.” He unleashed his feelings against other tourists, particularly “the flood of Americans...121 so overwhelmingly nauseous and disagreeable... [that] I will never come abroad again.... Foreigners cannot distinguish them from English, and so I am not surprised we are so unpopular abroad.” There were too many Americans in Paris, too: “The Americans swarm122 so everywhere that the whole place abroad is quite nauseous to me. Such vulgar brutes they all are, both men and women.”fn3

  In November 1886, fully recovered, Fisher became Director of Naval Ordnance, a post he held for five years. His field was the design and construction of all guns, torpedoes, and ammunition aboard British warships. His greatest triumph was the development of quick-firing, breech-loaded guns which could get off a shell every seven seconds and thus help to deal with the growing threat of fast French torpedo boats swarming out from their bases at Brest on the Atlantic or Bizerte on the Mediterranean to attack the British battle fleet. Fisher himself laconically claimed a different achievement: it was during his term at Naval Ordnance, he said, “that wooden boarding pikes127 were done away with” in the Royal Navy.

  Fisher’s task was complicated by the fact that in 1886 control of naval gun manufacture and supplies of ammunition, which had been lifted from the Admiralty during the Crimean War, still remained in the hands of the War Office. The army, with little knowledge or interest in naval requirements, was responsible for delays in arming new ships and for keeping the Admiralty generally in the dark as to the quantity of naval ammunition it had on hand. Fisher, frustrated by this irrational arrangement, fought it vigorously, with the full support of an admiring First Lord, Lord George Hamilton. But the soldiers were well entrenched and it was not until another two decades had passed and Jacky Fisher was First Sea Lord that the navy finally gained full control over the design of guns for its ships. Even then, naval ammunition continued to be stored ashore in army depots.

  In 1890, Fisher was promoted to Rear Admiral, and from May 1891 to February 1892 he served a brief stint as Admiral Superintendant of the Portsmouth Dockyard. He was impatient with all delay and relentless in his demand for efficiency. The most important construction in the yard during his tenure was Royal Sovereign, the first of a new class of seven 14,500-ton battleships designed by Sir George White and armed with four 13.5-inch and ten six-inch guns. Fisher was generally irritated by the fact that it took at least three and a half years to build a battleship and some took up to seven. He was specifically angry because Royal Sovereign, which had been laid down twenty months before his arrival at the yard, was still less than half completed. Fisher’s solution was to pull workmen off other ships and concentrate them on the most important ship “like a hive of bees.”128 He was constantly at the building slip, learning workmen’s first names, praising, joshing, bullying. As a result, Royal Sovereign was finished and commissioned twelve months after Fisher’s arrival; her total building time of thirty-two months from laying of the keel to commissioning into the fleet was a record for that day. Fisher’s approach to ships which came into his dockyard for repairs was similar. One battleship came in needing replacement of a single heavy gun barrel, normally a two-day job. Fisher had a chair put on the gun platform the first morning, declaring that he would sit there until the job was done. At midday, a table was brought and his lunch was served. The new gun was installed in four hours.

  In May 1892, Fisher went back to the Admiralty to commence five and a half years as Third Sea Lord, charged with designing, building, fitting out, and repairing all the ships of the fleet. Once again, imagination and innovation held sway. Under
Fisher’s leadership, the water-tube boiler was introduced into British warships. Traditionally, heat from the furnaces passed in tubes through large tanks of water to raise the temperature and make steam. Fisher reversed the process, passing water in tubes directly through the furnaces, raising steam much more rapidly and with less expenditure of coal. He introduced a new class of small, fast ships into the fleet to screen the big ships and deal with the growing mass of French torpedo boats. Fisher himself supplied the name “destroyers”129 for these craft; they were meant to “destroy” the French torpedo boats.

  During these years, Fisher was knighted (1894) and promoted to Vice Admiral (1896). In August 1897, he went back to sea for the first time in fifteen years, as Commander-in-Chief of the North Atlantic and West Indies Station. He had only one battleship (his flagship, the light, fast Renown) and five cruisers, but he whipped things into shape as if war were imminent. Suddenly, everything on this peaceful, almost sleepy station was bustle and speed. “There were no half-measures130 with Jacky,” a junior officer remembered. “It was first in everything or Look Out! We were beaten once getting out torpedo nets. Result: no leave for the next few days until we reduced time to what was afterwards... never beaten again.... Jacky was never satisfied with anything but ‘Full Speed.’ We shoved off from the accommodation ladder at full speed, then reversed engines at full speed. He loved dash and making a fine effect.”

  On board ship, he inspired fear and awe. “He had a terrific face131 and jaw, rather like a tiger, and he prowled around with the steady, rhythmical tread of a panther. The quarterdeck shook and all hands shook with it. The word was quickly passed from mouth to mouth when he came on deck, ‘Look out, here comes Jack.’ Everyone then stood terribly to attention while the great one passed on and away.” Officers who did not measure up were sent home in ignominy. “On the other hand,132 if any of us were in trouble or any of the youngsters were sick, he and Lady Fisher were the first to enquire about it.” While at Halifax and Bermuda, he regularly asked a group of midshipmen ashore to join himself and his wife for the weekend. There, off duty, he encouraged junior officers and midshipmen to talk freely and give him their ideas. He did not mind when they stood up to him, providing their arguments were sound. “Williamson and Paine133 pulled his leg and chaffed him in the most astounding way,” reported an awed lieutenant. “Repartee was bandied about and Jacky used to go into convulsions of merriment.”

  When in 1898, the Fashoda crisis threatened to actually produce a war with France, Fisher’s war plans were dramatic. He would send Renown to the Mediterranean to bolster the fleet in the main theater of action, and he and his cruisers would attack and mop up the French West Indies. The high point would be an assault on Devil’s Island designed to kidnap the celebrated Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whose arrest and trial in 1894 had convulsed the French Army and French society. It was Fisher’s intention to carry Dreyfus across the Atlantic and set him ashore on the French coast where, Fisher believed, the captain’s appearance would confuse and disrupt the officer corps of the French Army. When the French stepped back from Fashoda and the crisis ended, Fisher was sad. “One ought not to wish for war,134 I suppose,” he said, “but it was a pity it could not have come off just now when I think we should have made rather a good job of it.”

  Fisher was happy in the North American and West Indies command and not at all pleased to learn that his tour was being terminated eighteen months early so that he might serve as British naval delegate to the forthcoming First Hague Peace Conference. Fisher’s selection had been made personally by Lord Salisbury, who remembered how effective Fisher had been in fighting the War Office on the issue of naval gun manufacture. (Lord Salisbury remembered even more clearly because Fisher’s principal military antagonist had been Colonel Alderson, Salisbury’s brother-in-law.) Salisbury declared that he expected Fisher to fight with the same vigor at the peace conference. “So I did,”135 said Fisher, “though it was not for peace.” Fisher’s disappointment at his premature removal from his term of sea duty was appeased by the promise that, when the peace conference was over, he would be given the Mediterranean Fleet, “the tip-top appointment136 of the Service,” he told his daughter.

  The first Hague conference originated in a proposal issued by Count Mikhail Nikolaevich Muraviëv, the Russian foreign minister, in the name of the young Tsar Nicholas II. Mankind would benefit, the Russian proposal suggested, if the nations could agree on limitation of armaments, on rules to mitigate the horrors of war, and on establishment of permanent machinery to arbitrate international disputes. Many disdained the proposal. “It is the greatest nonsense137 and rubbish I ever heard of,” King Edward said to Lady Warwick. “France could never consent to it—nor We.” For once the King and his nephew were in agreement. The Kaiser wrote disapprovingly to his cousin Nicky: “Imagine a monarch138 holding personal command of his army, dissolving his regiments sacred with a hundred years of history... and handing his towns over to Anarchists and Democracy.” The Admiralty’s view was offered by the First Lord, Edward Goschen, when he presented the Naval Estimates (the Admiralty’s annual budget request) to the House of Commons: “If you think that war139 is simply an absurd possibility, if you think you can have peace without power, if you believe in the sweet reasonableness of Europe in arms, then I admit that these Estimates are a crime.”

  Despite all doubts, no nation could afford to offend the Tsar by outright refusal to come, and twenty-two states sent delegates to the conference, which lasted from mid-May to the end of July 1899. The chairman of the British delegation, Sir Julian Pauncefote, British Ambassador to the United States, had strict instructions from the Cabinet: Great Britain must retain her supremacy at sea; no limitation of naval armaments could be permitted to threaten her maintenance of the Two Power Standard. The Sea Lords, the army, and the Cabinet also opposed any restrictions on new weapons or explosives. Fisher’s presence in the delegation was intended to make sure that no mischief come from the conference. With forty-five years of naval service behind him and command of Britain’s primary fleet ahead of him, the colorful Admiral was a highly visible symbol and reminder of Britain’s naval might. Fisher himself made no bones of what he thought of limiting armaments. No foreigner, he declared bluntly to anyone who listened, should have the power to limit the size, strength, or freedom of action of the British Navy. Signing his name in a journalist’s autograph book before the conference began, he wrote, “The supremacy of the British Navy is the best security of the peace of the world.”

  Personally, Fisher was “instantly acclaimed as the heartiest, jolliest, smartest delegate at The Hague.” At a party at the British Legation on the first evening of the conference, Fisher, then fifty-nine, “danced down everyone else in the ballroom.” Socially, “by the charm of his manner,140 the frank heartiness of his conversation and the genuine, unmistakeable earnestness with which he applied himself,” he swept all before him. He stayed in Scheveningen in a seaside hotel which was swamped by the conference. “Such a rush141 always going on,” he wrote to his wife. “Band plays at breakfast, and at lunch and at dinner!!! Huge boxes arrive continuously and the portier rushes about like a wild animal.” On a day off, he visited Amsterdam, which he thought “detestable and smelly,” dined in “a beastly, stuffy142 little hole over a stinking canal,” and went to see Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” the only Dutch painting he decided he liked. Ruefully, he stared at the English naval flags captured by the famous Admiral Michiel de Ruyter in the Anglo-Dutch naval wars of the seventeenth century.

  At public meetings, Fisher said little, but he made his weight felt walking the corridors, talking informally. Here, the dancing charmer became the grim little warrior admiral. Although dressed in white top hat, frock coat, and gray gloves, he created an impression not unlike that produced aboard Renown: that of a dangerous jungle cat on the prowl. In forceful, often luridly exaggerated language, he hammered home his belief that war could only be deterred, not by a limitation of armaments, b
ut by making war too horrible to contemplate. “The humanizing of war?143 You might as well talk about humanizing Hell!” Fisher said bluntly. “The essence of war is violence! Moderation in war is imbecility!... I am not for war, I am for peace. That is why I am for a supreme Navy.... If you rub it in both at home and abroad that you are ready for instant war... and intend to be first in and hit your enemy in the belly and kick him when he is down and boil your prisoners in oil (if you take any)... and torture his women and children, then people will keep clear of you.” He derided the idea of granting immunity to neutral ships bound for enemy ports. “Look,” he said to an English journalist walking away from church one morning, “when I leave The Hague144 I go to take command of the Mediterranean Fleet. Suppose that war breaks out and I am expecting to fight a new Trafalgar on the morrow. Some neutral... [freighters loaded with coal] try to steam past us into the enemy’s waters. If the enemy gets their coal into his bunkers, it may make all the difference in the coming fight. You tell me I must not seize these colliers. I tell you that nothing that you, or any power on earth, can say will stop me from seizing them or from sending them to the bottom, if I can in no other way keep their coal out of the enemy’s hands; for tomorrow I am to fight the battle which will save or wreck the Empire. If I win it, I shall be far too big a man to be affected about protests about the neutral colliers; if I lose it, I shall go down with my ship into the deep and then protests will affect me still less.”

  Fisher’s vehemence particularly impressed the German military and naval delegates, Colonel von Schwarzkopf and Captain Siegel. Reporting to Berlin, Siegel gave a concise summary of the principles of British sea power, stripped of pretense and façade: