Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  " 'Here's this huge empire, stretching half over Central Europe -an empire growing like wildfire, I believe, in people, wealth, and everything. They've licked the French and the Austrians and are the greatest military power in Europe… What I'm concerned with is their seapower. It's a new thing with them but it's going strong and that Emperor of theirs is running it for all it's worth. He's a splendid chap, and anyone can see he's right. They've got no colonies to speak of, and must have them, like us. They can't get them and keep them, and they can't protect their huge commerce without naval strength. The commerce of the sea is the thing nowadays, isn't it. I say, don't think these are my ideas… It's all out of Mahan and those fellows. Well, the Germans have got a small fleet at present, but it's a thundering good one and they're building hard.' "

  England, on the other hand, ignores the source of her greatness and spurns the zealous "sun-burnt, brine-burnt" sailors who understand these things and know how to save her:

  " 'We're a maritime nation,' " Davies tells Carruthers. " 'We've grown by the sea and live by it; if we lose command of it, we starve. We're unique in that way; just as our huge Empire, only linked by the sea, is unique. And yet, my God!… see what mountains of apathy and conceit have had to be tackled. It's not the people's fault. We've been so safe so long, and grown so rich, that we've forgotten what we owe it. But there's no excuse for those blockheads of statesmen as they call themselves, who are paid to see things as they are… By Jove, we want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn't wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country and sees ahead… We aren't ready for her [Germany]; we don't look her way. We have no naval base in the North Sea and no North Sea fleet… And, to crown all, we were asses enough to give her Heligoland which commands her North Sea coast… We can't talk about conquest and grabbing. We've collared a fine share of the world and they've every right to be jealous. Let them hate us and say so; it'll teach us to buck up; and that's what really matters.' *

  * The Riddle of the Sands was the only novel written by this passionate, quixotic man. A well-bred Englishman who went to Cambridge, Erskine Childers worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, where the lengthy recesses and vacations provided him leisure to enjoy what he loved best: yachting in the North Sea and the Baltic. He was an English patriot who served his country with the horse artillery in the Boer War and as an aerial observer and intelligence officer in the First World War. Before the Great War came, however, a new passion had entered Childers' life. In 1908, he visited Ireland. He became a fervent Home Ruler and quit his job in the House of Commons to devote himself to the Irish cause. In July 1914, as the Protestants of Ulster were arming to resist Home Rule, Childers and his American wife rendezvoused their fifty-foot yacht with a German tugboat off the coast of Belgium and took aboard hundreds of Mauser rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition to supply the Irish nationalists. This secret act preceded his service to England in the Great War. After demobilization, Childers gave himself again to Ireland. Entangled between factions of Irish nationalists, he chose the most extreme, which was temporarily to lose. Arrested by soldiers of the Irish Free State, he was found to be carrying a small pistol and, on this pretext, he was condemned and executed by a firing squad on November 24, 1922. "I die full of intense love for Ireland," he wrote to his wife the night before he died. In reply to Winston Churchill's charge that he hated England, he told his wife, "It is not true. I die loving England and passionately praying that she may change completely and finally towards Ireland." In 1973, Erskine Childers' son, Erskine Hamilton Childers, became President of the Republic of Ireland.

  Growing public concern over the danger of German invasion can be measured by comparing Childers' innocent, windswept tale with a lurid, melodramatic book which appeared three years later. In March 1906, when Campbell-Bannerman's Liberal government had been in power only three months, the London Daily Mail began to serialize The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Queux. Behind the book lay Lord Roberts' warnings that, despite the navy, Britain lay open to foreign invasion. Le Queux also believed in conscription and building a larger army; the purpose of his book was to shock the nation into believing the same.

  In The Invasion of 1910, the invading army assembles in exactly the spot reconnoitered by Erskine Childers' two yachtsmen: amidst the tidal sands of the Frisian coast. Charging suddenly across the North Sea, it falls upon an unprepared England. Although untrained -because Lord Roberts' call for conscription has gone unheeded- England's soldiers and civilians fight with desperate bravery, but are no match for the efficient, professional enemy. On both sides, the war is fought with ferocity. The Germans are monsters who bayonet women and children, force terrified citizens to dig their own graves, and, in retaliation for the ambush of a German supply party, slaughter the entire population of an English town. The Kaiser is not a "splendid chap," but a bloodthirsty barbarian who craves the bombardment and sacking of London. "The pride of these English must be broken," commands the All-Highest. The English are almost as brutal: any German who falls into their hands is shot, stabbed, hanged, or garrotted.

  In Le Queux's plot, London is subjected to bombardment with heavy loss of life, then to fighting in the streets. Covered with gore, the Germans capture the city but cannot hold it. An enraged England rises up, forces the surrender of the invading army, and wreaks vengeance. German prisoners are lynched, torn limb from limb, or die in ways "too horrible to here describe in detail." The war ends in uneasy compromise. Germany, having annexed Holland and Denmark, ponders its chances in another invasion. England's economy, finances, and trade are demolished. Those wealthy enough to get away have fled; those left behind are starving.

  The moral of this tale is hammered home by Le Queux when a character says, "Had we adopted his [Roberts'] scheme for universal service, such dire catastrophe could never have occurred." The point also was made in a foreword written by Roberts, in which he declared that "the catastrophe that may happen if we still remain in our present state of unpreparedness is vividly and forcibly illustrated in Mr. Le Queux's new book which I recommend to the perusal of everyone who has the welfare of the British Empire at heart."

  The idea for the novel was born in the restless mind of Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, who ceaselessly strove to boost the circulation of his London Daily Mail. Roberts' constant warnings that a weak and complacent England was open to invasion suggested a story, and Le Queux was hired to write it. For four months, financed by the Daily Mail, the novelist roamed the east coast of England, scouting invasion beaches and sites for his fictional battles. He took his research to Lord Roberts and, together, hack writer and former Commander-in-Chief sat down to plot the course of the German campaign. Their work went to Lord Northcliffe, who initially vetoed it on the grounds that, although militarily sound, it overlooked the fundamental truths of newspaper circulation. For Northcliffe's purposes, the German Army had to battle its way through big cities and large towns, "not keep to remote, one-eyed villages where there was no possibility of large Daily Mail sales."

  Lord Northcliffe launched The Invasion of 1910 with sandwich men in spiked helmets and Prussian blue uniforms parading down Oxford Street, their boards proclaiming imminent invasion. Each day thereafter, advertisements advised which towns would be invaded the following morning in the Daily Mail. Success was overwhelming: newspapers sold out, again and again; published in book form, the novel was translated into twenty-seven languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic, and sold over a million copies around the world. The German edition chagrined Le Queux. Its cover depicted a triumphant German Army marching into the smoking ruins of a shattered London, and the translator's editing left the invading army in possession of the British capital. The Kaiser, who read both editions, ordered that the General Staff of the Army and the staff of the German Admiralty analyze the book for useful information.

  Again, foreigners living in Britain became suspect. "Most of these men," Le Queux told his readers, "were Germans who, having served in th
e army, had come over to England and obtained employment as waiters, clerks, bakers, hairdressers, and private servants, and being bound by their oath to their Fatherland, had served their country as spies. Each man, when obeying the Imperial command to join the German arms, had placed in the lapel of his coat a button of a peculiar shape with which he had long ago been provided and by which he was instantly recognized as a loyal subject of the Kaiser." Across England, worried citizens looked up from the Daily Mail or Le Queux's book, casting about for potential "enemy agents." The War Office was flooded with reports of German plots to seize dockyards and naval bases, thereby putting the Fleet out of action as a prelude to invasion. Mysterious airships were rumored floating over British towns at night. The number of potential enemy warriors already in England escalated from Le Queux's relatively innocuous "6,500 spies" to Lord Roberts' "80,000 trained soldiers" to the revelation by a Colonel Driscoll that "350,000 trained German soldiers" resided in Britain. A Conservative M.P., Sir John Barlow, asked Haldane, the War Secretary, to tell the House of Commons what he knew about the 66,000 German Army reservists living near London. While he was at it, Barlow suggested, the War Secretary might also investigate the secret cache of thousands of German rifles stored in the cellars of a bank in Charing Cross. Another Tory M.P., Colonel Lockwood, asked that something be done about the "military men from a foreign nation" who had been busy for two years in the neighborhood of Epping "sketching and photographing the whole district."

  The government attempted to deal with these fears. The "mysterious airships" turned out to be small balloons put up to advertise new automobiles. The German rifles in Charing Cross were traced to a purchase of old pieces by the Society of Miniature Rifle Clubs, temporarily stored by the society's bankers. Haldane, disgusted by Le Queux, Roberts, and the entire spy-invasion mania, sarcastically suggested that the enemy agents near Epping had been wasting their time as the information they required was already available in public ordnance survey maps. "Lord Roberts' repeated statements that we are in danger of invasion and are not prepared to meet it… are doing a good deal of mischief," he told the House. "Worse still is the effect on the public mind that Germany is the enemy which renders any attempt to improve relations increasingly difficult. The King is a good deal worried about this and I have told him that I would myself back up Lord Roberts' proposal for Compulsory Service in order to restore confidence and banish the German bogey if I were not convinced that it was both impracticable and dangerous."

  In part, the Liberal government's annoyance at The Invasion of igio and similar works stemmed from the Tory prejudice of most of the authors of these books. Le Queux made his views explicit, ascribing the initial success of his German invasion to the fact that "a strong, aristocratic Government had been replaced by a weak administration, swayed by every breath of popular impulse. The peasantry, who were the backbone of the nation, had vanished and been replaced by the weak, excitable population of the towns." Irritated by such slurs, Liberal M.P.'s rose in Parliament to ask what could be done to limit the damage done by vulgar, inaccurate books which aroused passions and inflamed hatreds. Campbell-Bannerman, the Prime Minister, advised leaving the book "to be judged by the good sense and good taste of the British people." The government, of course, could decide on the policy matter of compulsory conscription. It decided against Lord Roberts: peacetime conscription of men into the British Army never occurred.

  Roberts, nevertheless, continued to speak, and accounts of fictional invasions continued to appear. In January 1909, at the height of the Naval Scare, when the Cabinet was locked in fierce debate over whether to authorize four or six dreadnoughts, a new play, An Englishman's Home, opened at London's Wyndham's Theatre. The playwright was Guy du Maurier, a Regular Army officer who had never written a play or anything else and who at that moment was in South Africa serving as second in command, Third Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers. Before leaving England, Major du Maurier, affected by Roberts' warnings, had written the play and given it to his brother, Gerald du Maurier, the actor and theatrical manager.* Gerald du Maurier read his brother's work and, without troubling to inform the far-off major, put it on the stage.

  In the play, England is invaded by a foreign army. The Lord Chamberlain's office, which approved and licensed theatrical works, worried that a specific foreign power might be offended; thus, the nationality of the invaders was unspecified. Accordingly, the enemy soldiers swear allegiance to "the Emperor of the North" and their country is known as "Nearland." The action takes place in the parlor of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, a middle-class English family whose house is suddenly surrounded and entered by a troop of Nearland soldiers. The names of the invaders-Prince Yoland, Thol, Garth, and Hobart-vaguely disguise their national identity, but their spiked helmets provide an unmistakable clue. Initially, Mr. Brown is apathetic, declaring that wars should be fought between professional soldiers. The enemy commander, Prince Yoland, treats the Englishman and his family with rigid civility and arrogant contempt. When household articles are destroyed or confiscated, the damage or loss is paid for. As the play develops, Brown becomes increasingly indignant at the presence of intruders in his domestic castle and verbally

  * Father of novelist Daphne du Maurier.

  lashes out. Ultimately, he seizes a rifle and points it at his enemies. Prince Yoland coolly reminds him of his own previous statement that civilians have no role in fighting wars. Brown replies, "Bah! What does that matter? I am an Englishman!" Nightly, at this line, the theater rang with sustained applause. In the end, brave Mr. Brown kills two Nearland soldiers and then is himself executed, a hero but also a victim of England's unpreparedness. At the final curtain, patriotism is avenged when British regulars arrive to expel the invaders.

  The play played to packed houses for eighteen months. The sight, even on stage, of foreign soldiers in spiked helmets trampling across an English lawn and bursting through French windows into the parlor of an English house was too much for many a fervent theatergoer. The army set up a special recruiting station in the lobby of the theater so that fiery young men, erupting out of the stalls once the curtain had fallen, could volunteer on the spot for Haldane's new Territorial Army.

  CHAPTER 35 The Budget and the House of Lords

  In January 1906, after the Liberal Party had spent a decade in the political wilderness, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman led it back into power. The General Election that month had produced a landslide Liberal victory. Sir Henry and his Cabinet had no doubt as to what their followers expected: they had been elected on a classic Liberal platform of Peace, Retrenchment (i.e., cutting military spending and, therefore, taxes), and Reform. The new Entente with France and a similar arrangement with the Russians would help maintain peace, while the Germans were kept in check by Sir John Fisher and his dreadnoughts. Retrenchment was achieved when Haldane at the War Department and Fisher at the Admiralty produced greater fighting efficiency for less money. The area of greatest expectation, however, was Reform. The party had promised significant changes in the patterns of British life. Elimination of religious instruction in state-supported schools, extension of the temperance laws, establishment of old-age pensions, limitations on hours of work, better housing, and land reform all were parts of the Liberal program. Many new M.P.'s, along with the voters who supported them, believed that it would not take long to transform the promise into legislative reality. The experienced politicians who sat on the Government Bench knew better; before a single item of the new government's reform program could become law, it had to be passed by the House of Lords. And, in 1908, the Lords, with five hundred Unionist peers and only eighty-eight Liberals, were adamantly, viscerally opposed to reform.

  The dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons who made up the Lords Temporal of the House of Lords (the Lords Spiritual were the archbishops of Canterbury and York and twenty-four other bishops) were accustomed to ruling England. They were the old landed nobility; they owned the most property, and, having the largest stake in the country,
thought it normal that they be expected to look after it. The rest of the population-workers, townspeople, tradesmen, and middle classes-would, of course, be fairly treated according to station. In determining the most effective blend of firmness, kindness, and condescension to be meted out, the aristocracy had the benefit of generations of experience with grooms, gamekeepers, gardeners, and indoor staff. The rise of the House of Commons in Tudor times, the temporary victory of the Parliamentarians and Oliver Cromwell, made no essential difference in this pattern of oligarchic rule. Even the wide expansion of the electorate through the great Reform Acts of the nineteenth century brought little change in the character and breeding of the men at the top. The public voted in larger numbers, but it still voted to choose which of the great noblemen, Whig or Tory, would serve as ministers of the Crown and custodians of the national destiny.

  The institutional embodiment and ultimate political bastion of the landed aristocracy was the House of Lords. Here, whether they chose ever to enter the chamber or not, all hereditary peers were entitled to sit. The hall, eighty feet long, forty-five feet wide, was illuminated by high windows in which portraits of England's monarchs were set in stained glass. Peers sat on four rows of red leather benches, ascending on either side of the center aisle. Two golden royal thrones, almost never occupied, and the Woolsack, a large red cushion stuffed with wool,* from which the Lord Chancellor presided and, when necessary, called for order, dominated the chamber.