The British Navy in Battle

justice, or fear has failed and a nation wishes, or in self

hus brought to naught. Its resolution to renew the attack or to continue resistance is broken down. If defeat throws it open to invasion without power of stopping the invader, its national life, internal and external, is paralyzed and i

ched battle being fought at all. These may be regarded as the extremes. Normally, war may end victoriously for one side without the other having been deprived of the means of continuing even effective resistance. In such cases it is som

ise is indistinguishable from defeat, and defeat must carry with it the negation of everything which makes national life tolerable. The Germans have convinced themselves that there is no alternative to world dominion but downfall, and the civilized world is determined that there shall be no German world domin

ary prudence dictates that there shall be protected lines or some strong place into which it can retreat in the event of defeat. And when it is thus compelled to abandon open fighting and seek a position of natural or artificial strength, it becomes the business of the stronger to complete the business by destroying and penetrati

ve. It entrenches and fortifies itself. Thus, as military operations, the attack and defence of fortifications may become general, and this without either side being necessarily able to inflict the pressure of siege upon its opponent, siege being understood to mean severing of communications with the outside world.

all military action may roughly be defined as fighting, or some meth

A

ther objective which is gained by such destruction is to monopolize the use of the sea, as the master highway, by retaining51 freedom for the passage of the victo

poradic attempts on communications. These can never be maintained to a degree that can be decisive, simply because a power greater than can be brought to the attack can be employed for their defence. Success in such a war, then, can simply be measured in terms of trade or of sea supply; defeat by the economic loss that its cessation must cause. There have been purely naval wars in the past and, could a combination be formed of countries whose aggregate sea-power was gr

re overwhelming; and our possession of it adversely to any other country must be52 d

es and its fleets from abroad. It can ally itself with continental nations and send its military forces away in ships and land them in friendly ports. It can prevent the sea invasion of its own, of its allies' territory, and of its colonial possessions. It can stop not only the enemy's own sea trade, but all neutral sea trade that directly or indirectly can benefit him, so that he is cut off from all supplies, whether raw material, food, or manufacture, not produced in his own territories or in those with which he has land communications. If the sea force of the side p

es to postpone it, he thereby to a great extent surrenders the sea command to the stronger. And if the stronger knows his business, he at once uses this command to subject his opponent to the economic disadvantages set out above. Siege by sea, then, like siege on land, may be the consequence of, but is always the alternative t

e already seen. But so long as the enemy possesses forces that actually disturb the tranquil enjoyment of sea communications, command is certainly qualified, and if he have in reserve unused and unimpaired forces for attacking and defeating the fleet which secures co

d. It sought to find the most perfect methods of using weapons, because it realized that it was only from the evolution of these that right tactics could be deduced. It studied the campaigns of the past to discover the two great groups of doctrine that our fighting ancestors have bequeathed to us, the first dealing with the science of strategy, the second with the principles of command. They realized that weapons and the ships that carry them do not fight themselves, but must be fought by men; and they wished th

ack, why then battle would be made altogether superfluous, and no further worry over so unlikely a contingency was necessary. They did not,55 therefore, trouble to inquire either into the processes needed

uld be conceived, must-so long as any serious lowering of its force by attrition was avoided-be the military equivalent to one which had already defeated the enemy; that "invincible" and "victorious" were, in short, interchangeable terms. So masterful was this obsession that their apologists-shutting their eyes to the obvious and appalling consequences of thi

n, just this, that when an enemy refuses56 battle, the stronger navy's sole remaining offensive is to cut him off from communication with the sea. It must do this, as we have seen, to restrict his supplies, to weaken his armed forces, to strike at his prosperity and the comfort of his civil population, and thus obtain that partial paralysis of his national life, the completion of which can only be got by a victory that disarms him. And these things, which are the resu

ls between nations is settled by a conflict of their armed forces-it is almost the primary object of siege to bring this conflict about and so

esult of the Jutland deployment and the inconclusive character of so many of the artillery encounters which have occurred, and the extraordinary prolongation of those which were not inconclusive. It brought about what is, at first sight, something57 even more as

tish army to France. Our merchantmen continued their sea trading almost as if nothing had happened. But, though the German flag vanished from the seas, neutral vessels were free to use the German ports until the following March, and for another six months the

igation to Belgium which Germany had violated, predisposed America, for the first time since the colonies proclaimed their independence, to an active sympathy with the British ideal, perhaps because for the first time that ideal appeared to them to be one that was purely chivalrous. It was then everything that the psychological moment should have been seized. Nor could it have been difficult to see that, if the opportunity was allowed to slip by, the mere fact that a half measure-to wit, the suspense of German shipping-had been enforced, must lead to a new condition, namely, a hugely magnified trade through the neutral ports. This trade, it is true, was nominally confined to goods that were not contraband of war. But contraband is an elastic term, and, to make things worse, the British Government proclaimed its intention-so little had war-trained thought prepared its policy-of accepting the provisions of the unexecuted Declaration of London as defining what con

so relentlessly that he would have no choice but to fight for relief from it, we actually permitted him to draw, through sources absolutely under our control, for essentials in the form of overseas supplies that he needed in a war which all the world realized must now be a pro

ea war without realizing that the control of communications is the result of victory, that is, setting up a consequence as an aim while ignoring its cause, inevitably led to the inverted error, an unwillingness so to employ the control of communications, when60 the enemy ceded them without victory, as to force the enemy into battle as the only hope of escaping an intolerable condition. Not having contemplated