Chapter 34 Invading England
The role of the navy in Britain's wars was defensive; the offensive weapon was the army. And so the metaphor: the navy, the shield; the army, the spear; or, as Fisher modernized it: "the Army is a projectile to be fired by the Navy." The navy's primary mission was to defend the British Isles and the trade routes of the Empire. Yet, no matter how great its power, it could reach no farther than an enemy's coast. Alone, it could not defeat a great Continental enemy; decades of war against the Sun King and against Napoleon had proven that. Naval officers admitted that Britain needed an army; their preference was for a small, highly professional expeditionary force which, given the mobility provided by dominant sea power, could strike suddenly at any point on a hostile coastline with an impact out of all proportion to its numbers. In conceiving the role of the British Army, however, British admirals and captains never imagined that it should be responsible for the defense of the Home Islands. Since the Armada, it had been the duty of the Royal Navy to sink the warships, troopships, and barges of any invading power before a single enemy soldier set foot on an English beach.
As the nineteenth century approached an end, some in Britain began to doubt the navy's ability to perform even its defensive role. Much of this doubt was deliberately stirred by army officers. Was it wise, they asked, for Britain to put all her eggs in a single basket? "I know of nothing that is more liable to disaster than anything that floats on the water," Lord Wolseley, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, declared in 1896. "We often find in peace and in the calmest weather our best ironclads running into one another. We find great storms dispersing and almost destroying some of the finest fleets that ever sailed. Therefore, it is essentially necessary for this country that it should always have a powerful army, at least sufficiently strong to defend our own shores." Even if British battleships managed not to run into one another or were not swamped by storms, there was always the chance that they might be decoyed away from the Channel long enough for an invading army to slip across. For these reasons, the army suggested, the army ought to be larger.
The army's initial defeat in the Boer War strengthened this argument. Heavy reinforcements of troops had to be sent from England, denuding the homeland of soldiers. The Continental press, vociferously pro-Boer, fumed against Britain's "free-booting enterprise in South Africa" and urged a European coalition to take advantage of Britain's vulnerability at home. That vulnerability was more psychological than real-the British Fleet remained on station in European waters-but it was keenly felt. "The Empire, stripped of its armor, with its hands tied behind its back and its bare throat exposed to the keen knife of its bitterest enemies," was the graphic description of the celebrated journalist W. T. Stead. As there were almost no troops in England, the French might lure the Fleet away long enough to ferry across fifty thousand or a hundred thousand men and march into London unopposed. Even Lord Salisbury, who customarily ignored talk of any threat to Britain, took note. In May 1900, when his countrymen felt most exposed, he proposed the formation of private rifle clubs throughout the country; invaders were to be deterred by the prospect of amateur riflemen popping up from behind the hedgerows.
Despite the Prime Minister's suggestion, the government maintained faith in the navy's ability to prevent invasion. During the Boer War, the Fleet had, in fact, played its traditional role. Absolute command of the sea had made possible the uninterrupted transport of 250,000 soldiers and their munitions and supplies over a route of six thousand miles. Meanwhile, talk in the Paris and Berlin press notwithstanding, no Continental soldiers had set foot in England.
The First Sea Lord of the period, Sir Walter Kerr, explained with professional calm: "Unless our Navy was quite wiped out in home waters, the risk to an invading force would be enormous and I suspect this is fully realized across the Channel." As it happened, no European government had any intention of challenging Great Britain, no matter how far away her soldiers might be. And no European fleet had the capacity to challenge the Royal Navy. The French Fleet, the only force which might conceivably have posed a threat, was throughout the span of the Boer War wholly unprepared for action. By December 1900, the sense of vulnerability in England had passed. The Naval and Military Record had regained a properly British sense of aloofness regarding threats from abroad: "The only difficulty we see in the way of an invasion of England-and it may arise through our insular prejudice-is that the French troops would have to be conveyed across the water."
After South Africa, the British Army naturally wished to correct the organizational and material flaws which had led to its embarrassment at the hands of the Boer commandos. Many officers also wanted a general expansion to give Britain the army of a Great Power. In 1901, St. John Broderick, Unionist Secretary of War in Salisbury's last Cabinet, introduced a plan for an army of 600,000 men structured in six army corps. One hundred and twenty thousand of these soldiers would be given the traditional role of an expeditionary force; 480,000 were to be assigned the new role of home defense. The reason, Broderick explained, was that something might happen to the navy. "Invasion may be an off-chance," he declared. "but you cannot run an Empire of this size on off-chances." The War Secretary's scheme met with general disapproval. "A great defensive army will never have anything to do in this country that is worth doing," announced the Times. "Not thirty army corps could redress the balance if the fleet were swept from the seas," Lord Rosebery declared in the House of Lords. Winston Churchill expressed the argument succinctly: "As to a stronger Regular Army, either we had command of the sea or we had not. If we had it, we required fewer soldiers; if we had it not, we wanted more ships."
The army persisted. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the famous "Bobs," Britain's greatest living military hero, winner of the Victoria Cross, veteran of India, victor in South Africa, and, from 1901 to 1904, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, became its advocate. Roberts' fear was that if the shield of the navy were to be broken or misplaced, the British Army would pose no obstacle to an invading force from any Continental power. His proposal was to create a large British Army based on compulsory conscription.
When the Unionist government of Arthur Balfour turned him down, he resigned from the army to devote himself to this cause. In 1905, he became president of the National Service League, a militant group favoring conscription. Freed from the restraints of office, Lord Roberts, over seventy, became a familiar figure speaking on behalf of conscription in the House of Lords and at public meetings. When, in the last months of his Premiership, Balfour assured the House of Commons that invasion was "not an eventuality which we need seriously to consider," Roberts replied in the Lords: "I have no hesitation in stating that our armed forces, as a body, are as absolutely unfitted and unprepared for war as they were in 1899-1900."
Roberts' hostility towards Balfour was mild compared to his feelings about the new Liberal government which took power in December 1905. Looking to find money for social programs, Camp-bell-Bannerman and Asquith cut both the Army and the Navy Estimates. Soon, Lord Roberts was writing regularly to Mr. Balfour, who was the acknowledged authority in the Commons on defense as well as leader of the opposition. Roberts calculated that if, for one reason or another, the British Navy did not intervene, it would require only ninety-four hours for a Continental enemy to hurry seventy thousand soldiers across the Channel or the North Sea. Once in England, these invaders would be augmented by eighty thousand foreigners, all trained soldiers, already living in Great Britain. Many of the latter, he charged, worked in large hotels at the country's chief railway stations, where they could step out on the tracks to tie up Britain's transportation system.
Balfour was sufficiently impressed by Roberts' warnings to suggest that the Committee of Imperial Defense reconsider England's vulnerability to invasion. Before and during his Premiership, the potential invaders had been French; now they had become German. A subcommittee met and began to hear evidence. In April 1908, when Asquith became Prime Minister, the matter was taken m
ore seriously. Because of his expertise, Balfour was asked to appear and to analyze the information gathered. In the presence of Asquith, Grey, Haldane, Lloyd George, and Lord Roberts, Balfour spoke for an hour. It was, said a witness, a "luminous" exposition, "quite perfect in form and language" which so "dumfounded" the committee that none of them, not even Roberts, could think of a single question to ask. "The general opinion was that no finer exposition of this question has ever been made." Balfour's opinion and the subcommittee's conclusion was that the navy should be the first line of defense and that as long as its supremacy remained assured, England could not successfully be invaded.
Fisher, who had little respect for the army, had always been contemptuous of suggestions that the navy could not fend off an invasion. "The Navy," he said on becoming First Sea Lord in 1904, "is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th… ad infinitum Line of Defence! If the Navy is not Supreme, no army however large is of the slightest use. It's not invasion we have to fear if our Navy is beaten, IT'S STARVATION!" As to enemy soldiers suddenly rushing across the North Sea and landing on an English beach, Fisher snorted: "I am too busy to waste my time over this cock and bull story." It would take months of preparation to assemble transports and embark soldiers; this could not go unnoticed. As to seventy thousand men, Fisher pointed out that during the month of October 1899, at the beginning of the Boer War, the greatest maritime power in the world, possessing the world's largest merchant fleet and using five great seaports, managed to send to sea only thirty thousand troops with less than four thousand horses. Fisher bristled that the Committee of Imperial Defence had bothered to meet to listen to Lord Roberts. At a Guildhall banquet in 1907, in one of the two public speeches Fisher ever made, the First Sea Lord ridiculed the idea of a German army arriving in England like a bolt from the blue. "You might as well talk of embarking St. Paul's Cathedral in a penny steamer," he declared. "No, gentlemen, you may go home and sleep quiet in your beds."
Although the subcommittee's conclusion and the government's endorsement were decisive as far as policy was concerned, both remained secret and had no effect on the raging public debate over invasion. Despite the First Sea Lord's assurances, despite the new dreadnoughts joining the Fleet, despite Haldane's efficient reorganization of the army, English men and women still worried. Henry James, almost an Englishman, living at Rye on the Channel coast, worried that he might one day look out to sea and spot the light-gray ships of the German Fleet, training their guns on his house. "When the German Emperor carries the next war into this country," he said, "my chimney pots, visible for a certain distance out to sea, may be his very first objective." The Daily Mail gave advice to diners: "Refuse to be served by an Austrian or German waiter. If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport."
These worries were aggravated by a growing torrent of special literature-books, pamphlets, plays, and newspaper stories-based on the imminence of foreign invasion. With the growth of literacy and the rise of mass-circulation newspapers, a boom in sensational writing was on. Invasion literature erupted in the form of spy stories, imaginary-war novels, and invasion novels. For twenty years, from the beginning of the 1880s until 1903, when a colonial agreement with France was near completion, the fictional invaders had always been French. Britain's diplomatic quarrel with France over Egypt was a factor, heightened in 1898 by the war scare over Fashoda, but the roots of the antagonism went back centuries. In the late Victorian Age, the English explained it as purely a matter of France's envy: "envy of England's great Empire, envy of her freedom, envy of the stability of her Government, or her settled monarchy, or her beloved Queen."
In 1882, a flurry of invasion fears titillated England. A scheme, proposed that year in Parliament, envisaged digging a twenty-mile railway tunnel from Dover to Calais. In the subsequent outcry, rational discussion of the commercial advantage of opening this avenue for trade was forsaken. On the surface, the sole issue became whether the Channel tunnel might function as a breach of Britain's guardian moat. Underneath lurked other fears. A tunnel would mean the end of Splendid Isolation. It would force Britons to cast aside images of themselves as inhabitants of "this sceptred isle… set in a silver sea," as defenders of "this fortress built by Nature for herself." No stranger to England could understand. A generation earlier, Prince Albert, always enthusiastic about technology, had proposed a tunnel to Lord Palmerston; the Prime Minister, who never strayed far from the views of the average Englishman, replied "without losing the perfectly courteous tone which was habitual to him, 'You would think very differently, Sir, if you had been born on this island.' " Most Englishmen still shared this view. In 1882, impassioned citizens descended upon the London offices of the Channel Tunnel Company and broke the windows. A mass antitunnel petition signed by Browning, Tennyson, Huxley, Cardinal Newman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, five dukes, ten earls, fifty-nine generals, seventeen admirals, and twenty-six members of Parliament solemnly declared that the digging of a tunnel "would involve this country in military dangers and liabilities from which, as an island, it has hitherto been happily free." The uproar fired the imagination of writers. A torrent of pamphlets, tracts, and penny novels poured off the presses, with titles such as The Channel Tunnel, or England in Danger; The Seizure of the Channel Tunnel; Battle of the Channel Tunnel; Surprise of the Channel Tunnel; and How John Bull Lost London. A stock character appeared in this school of fiction: the
French waiter, working in England, with a rifle hidden in his luggage. Trained as soldiers, he and his compatriots would seize their arms, sneak from their lodgings, and, in the dark of night, capture the English terminal of the Channel tunnel. The following morning, a conquering French Army would arrive in England by train. The tunnel itself would make the influx of a number of foreigners seem unsuspicious: "The great increase in prosperity that the Tunnel brought to Dover," one novelist explained, "caused a large number of French restaurateurs, waiters, bootmakers, milliners, and pastrycooks to settle in that town."
Great Britain's two most senior military officers added to the uneasiness. Field Marshal His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army (and cousin to the Queen) wrote that if the English terminal to a tunnel were seized by surprise, Britain could not hope to oppose any great Continental power. "We might, despite all our precautions, very possibly some day find an enemy in actual possession of both its ends and able at pleasure to pour an army through it unopposed." Lord Wolseley, Adjutant General, thought that it might be possible for an enemy to invade without waiters and pastrycooks. "A couple of thousand armed men might easily come through a tunnel in a train at night, avoiding all suspicion by being dressed as ordinary passengers, or passing at express speed through the tunnel with the blinds down, in their uniforms and fully armed." As the years went by-with no tunnel present or in the offing-Channel tunnel invasion stories dwindled. One of the last, written in 1901, focussed on a tunnel being secretly bored from Calais. The clandestine terminus was to be established on a farm in Kent belonging to a French spy who had taken the name and manners of an Englishman. The plot was frustrated, but English readers were warned that "the tube of steel still lies beneath the sea…"
As relations with France grew warmer and relations with Germany chilled, the source of fictional invasions shifted: it was from across the North Sea and not the Channel that England's despoilers were to come. In the best of the invasion genre, Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903, the invaders were Teutons. Childers' tale is one of adventure at sea: two young Englishmen on holiday aboard a small yacht are sailing and duck shooting amidst the elaborate web of sand banks, estuaries, and tidal pools that stretch along the German North Sea coast from the Dutch frontier to the mouth of the Elbe. Here, in this shifting maze of sand and water, they stumble upon a mysterious enterprise, avoid attempted murder, dine with a gentlemanly English traitor, overhear shocking plans, and, one dark night, hidden aboard a German tugboat, one of the two young sailors catches a glimpse of His Imperia
l Majesty, the German Emperor. The Kaiser is present to verify the feasibility of the enterprise; the stowaway realizes what it is when he realizes where the tugboat is going:
"The course… was about west, with Norderney light a couple of points off the port bow. The course for Memmert? Possibly; but I cared not, for my mind was far from Memmert tonight. It was the course for England too. Yes, I understood at last. I was assisting at an experimental rehearsal of a great scene, to be enacted, perhaps in the near future-a scene when multitudes of sea-going lighters, carrying full loads of soldiers, not half-loads of coal, should issue simultaneously, in seven ordered fleets, from seven shallow outlets, and, under escort of the Imperial Navy, traverse the North Sea and throw themselves bodily upon English shores."
The Riddle of the Sands is more than a spy story; it is also a sailor's book. Childers himself was a yachtsman; he writes of "the wind humming into the mainsail," "the persuasive song the foam sings under the lee bow," and "the noble expanse of wind-whipped blue, half surrounded by distant hills." His own preference among his two young heroes is Davies, the owner of the yacht, a resourceful sailor whose daring and skill at the helm pilot the craft to the point where the secrets of the sands can be discovered. Davies has been to Oxford, been turned down by the navy, and now lives on his old thirty-foot sloop, its rigging and decks turned gray, its brass tarnished green. Davies' shipmate is Carruthers, an Oxford friend in the Foreign Office, whose world consists of writing reports and dining and dancing at country-house weekends. When Carruthers arrives, dressed in flannels and blazer, one look from Davies is enough; Carruthers changes into old clothes. Davies, not Carruthers the Foreign Office professional, understands what is going on. Sitting one day belowdecks, while the yacht lies in a harbor wrapped in clammy, silent fog, Davies puffs on his pipe and rolls out his charts on the cabin table. He is filled with respect, even admiration, for Germany:
Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War Page 84