The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
certain. The Fleet had dispersed already some days past from the
great review at Spithead, and was, as we were told, in the Atlantic
at manœuvres. A night, a day, and now another night had passed; I had
heard no news.
Nothing was further from my mind than war and armament as the sun rose
on that glorious July morning, right out of a clean horizon, towards
which the wind blew fresh and cool. It was a light but steady wind of
morning that filled my sails as I sat at the tiller with a blanket
about me, and laying her head to the north.
We had just rounded the Start at dawn. My companion went below to
sleep. I watched, over the quarter, the Start Light flashing pale and
white in the broadening day, and at last extinguished. Then the sun
rose, as I have said. Immediately after its rising a sort of light haze
filled the air to eastward. It was denser than it seemed to be, for
it did not obscure the low disc of the sun, nor redden it, but, as you
will read in a moment, it performed a mystery. The little ship slipped
on, up past the Skerries Bank, and I could see far off the headland
which bounds Dart Bay. There was no sail in sight. I was alone upon
the sea; and the breeze, neither freshening nor lowering, but giving a
hearty line of course (along which we slipped, perhaps, five knots or
six), made the water speak merrily upon the bows and along the run of
our low sides. In this loneliness and content, as I sailed northward, I
chanced to look, after an hour’s steering or so, eastward again towards
the open sea—and then it was that there passed me the vision I shall
remember forever, or for so long as the longest life may last.
Like ghosts, like things themselves made of mist, there passed between
me and the newly risen sun a procession of great forms, all in line,
hastening eastward. It was the Fleet recalled.
The slight haze along that distant water had thickened, perhaps,
imperceptibly; or perhaps the great speed of the men-of-war buried them
too quickly in the distance. But, from whatever cause, this marvel was
of short duration. It was seen for a moment, and in a moment it was
gone.
Then I knew that war would come, and my mind was changed.
The bright air was the same around me and the heartening morning wind,
the happy course of the Nona, making for a known port with all in her
favour and something of youth in her and all round. What that war would
bring, its magnitude, its character, was veiled from us all; but the
advent of it, the mass of it coming, put a new face on everything I
saw and felt and heard; on the steady breeze, on the little lapping
of the salt sea-water, on the strong headlands of England. So went
I northward alone as the day grew, until by mid-morning, the breeze
having dropped somewhat and the boat running more sluggishly, we lay
abeam of the rock called the Druid’s Mare, and began to run up the
coast for Torbay. My companion wakened and came on deck. I told him
what I had seen.
These strong emotions, though they colour all the mind, soon lose
their edge, and we fell to talking of the coast we passed, and of the
chance of holding the wind, which declined a little and was not so
steady as we rounded the last headland. My mind turned nothing over of
the possibilities of what was to come. It was later, when I had come
ashore again, and had reached London, that I learnt of the prolonged
hesitation among the politicians, men by their petty trade unused to
and unfit for tasks of magnitude; of the French President’s letter and
the ambiguous reply to it, drafted and published; of the final voting
when, by a majority of one, the Cabinet decided upon war. Had the
virility of such a decision been known even four brief days earlier,
war would not have come. But it was too late.
Among the nine who gave their votes in favour of the neutrality of
Britain, some were actuated, as we know, by base, one, as we know too
well, by the basest of motives: mere trivial personal ambition for
success in the wretched tawdry game of professional politics, which was
the only craft he knew. But some also acted from the noblest motives
and rise for the moment above the fetid marsh-mist of Westminster.
These I shall always respect for the strength of their wills and the
clarity of their convictions in so awful a moment.
Still more did I then, and do I still, respect them for the deliberate
choice they made to accept what was certain to be a vivid, and might
be a very dangerous unpopularity, when the first shots should be
fired. These men were convinced that it would be to the advantage of
their country if the Continental forces should be left to thrash out
their own decisions. They were opposed, perhaps, to the majority of
their countrymen at the time (it is not so sure; for the mass of their
countrymen had hardly had time to decide, so swift was the last rush
of events). They would certainly be opposed, as they knew, to the vast
majority of their countrymen in a few days. They were the more English,
the more characteristic of the blood which they boasted, in that they
took such a decision fearlessly. I can believe that to this day the
best of them still thinks that his judgment was sound and that great
evils now passed, and other evils dreadfully threatening us now, more
than ten years after, would have been saved us altogether, if England
had refused war. But the best-instructed opinion, the opinion with the
widest view, was opposed to them. War followed; with what full fruits
only men now young can live to discover.
There is not perhaps in all history (of the sort which has full records
behind it) any group of days on which men will debate more and will
find it less easy to establish a permanent conclusion than those last
days of July and first days of August, 1914. But there are certain
structural lines supporting even the most confused and the most debated
of records. Thus, men will never be exactly certain what Harold did
at the Court of William, nor of how the first directive events of
that great quarrel lay. Men will never arrive at a fixed and general
conclusion upon the initiative responsible for the revolutionary
wars, nor even, perhaps, for the renewed attack upon Napoleon, or by
Napoleon, after Elba. But these debates are, for all that, built round
a solid skeleton of certain conclusions, and in this great matter
of the Great War I do not think that posterity will depart from the
general conclusion of our own times (which is certainly mine) that an
early declaration of the British attitude would have prevented war.
It is a question easily confused with a totally different one, and
the two must be kept carefully apart. The _right_ of Great Britain
to remain neutral should surely be admitted, not only in law but in
common sense. In law there was no definite agreement with the French.
There was no accepted obligation to support the French in the West
or elsewhere. A great number of acts had been accomplished which
could have had only such a support for their object; the military
situation had been studied, contingent military dispositions had been
carefully planned in detail. The general policy of the preceding
years, especially after Agadir, had pointed to the same end; but the
Government of this country had always, in the most insistent manner,
affirmed and provided for its freedom of choice when the crisis should
come. And the very fact that it had thus so continuously maintained
that freedom of choice, and specifically asserted it, is proof that
every other step, however obviously designed for common action in arms,
was _not_ to be given the interpretation of a binding alliance.
Since this great point in history involves a moral judgment quite as
much as the mere interpretation of texts, it should also, I think,
be laid down that, in matters of life and death, a nation, like an
individual, has the right to stretch even a formal text to the very
limits of interpretation.
I would say that even if a formal and solemn alliance had existed,
any one holding authority in England at that moment and conceiving
that participation in the Continental war would ultimately ruin Great
Britain, had a right to seek for any phrase in the written pact which
could save his country from disaster—and such phrases can always be
found. I will go further: I will say that the certitude of disaster
on such a scale would excuse even a breach of faith: but I know that
this is passing the bounds ordinarily allowed; and I say it only
because there seems to me an implied distinction between war for a
local object which could do no more than advantage or hurt a country
somewhat, and war of a sort which this war turned out to be, wherein
the whole structure of human society was imperilled. In the same way,
if I have promised to help a man and support him in various details of
his domestic life, even though I have taken good consideration for my
services, I have the right to fly from his house if it catches fire in
order to save my child from being burnt to death. A vast difference in
the scale between the reasonably expected effects of a compact and the
suddenly discovered real effects would seem to release a man from the
obligation of that compact.
But in this case there was not even a definite compact. Therefore,
no one could advance a moral plea against the hesitation which our
politicians showed in that grave moment. No, what is to be advanced
against the politicians who so lamentably bungled that affair is a
charge drawn from the intellectual, not from the moral side of our
nature. They acted stupidly, as indeed their trade leads men to act:
for professional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the
wise. It was bad judgment to leave the matter in doubt to the last;
and the decision was deferred and deferred again, simply because
your professional politician, always absorbed in a wretched personal
intrigue, blinked and was bewildered by a great issue suddenly thrust
upon him.
You will often hear it said war could not but come when once the three
great Continental Powers had mobilised. It has been repeated that the
act of mobilisation—of full mobilisation—renders war necessary. The
statement is untrue. Certainly the French mobilisation did not, even up
to the very last moment, render war necessary; and the same is true of
the German.
Again, it is still said by fanatics that the Russian Government
intended and provoked the war. And many men not fanatics, but ignorant
of Europe, or at issue with Christendom, repeat the myth. Those who
plead in favour of Prussia and of the German General Staff (they
are numerous in England to-day) still pretend, as do all the German
writers, that the mobilisation ordered from Berlin was but a reply to
the earlier orders issued from Saint Petersburg.
History will not accept that. There is altogether too much against it.
There is the connection between the ‘Lokal Anzeiger’ and the German
General Staff. Still more there is the nature of German mobilisation,
which was so designed that _preliminary_ orders were, to its general
scheme, what _final_ orders were in any other country. The Prussian
scheme of mobilisation may be compared to a loaded gun. If I know that
a man has his gun loaded and he aims it at me, my then loading mine is
not a provocation.
Much more is there, against so strained and distorted a piece of
special pleading, the truth obvious to any one, even the most
superficial, who had seen Germany since 1911: the whole mass of that
population supported its government in a determination for what was
believed would prove a short and highly lucrative campaign, and one not
only highly lucrative, but settling forever the security of that great
experiment which Prussia had not quite consolidated by her series of
rapid victories a lifetime before.