NAVAL PATIENCE.
WE are in full agreement with a clear and far- seeing article by the Naval Correspondent of the Westminster Gazette published on Wednesday. The lesson derivable from that article is that as a nation we shall be very foolish if we do anything to urge the Navy into premature activity, or if we forget those virtues of naval patience which were so well known to our ancestors—virtues which are very often ignored by superficial students of history. The public iemember the great Fleet actions, the sudden swoop of our ships to war, the great hammer-strokes, but forget altogether the long patient waiting of the Fleet till the right moment came, and the iron determination of our great sailors and naval strategists not to be hurried into delivering their blow till the full hour had struck. When we say this we are, of course, not suggesting for a moment that we should fall into the even worse folly of holding the arm of our Fleet commanders, and of preventing them from taking action when they deem that the time has come for it. Happily, however, there is little real danger of this. When once those responsible for naval action really feel that they ought to move nothing will prevent them from taking the offensive. Meanwhile it is clearly the duty of the landsmen and the politicians to keep their heads cool and their tongues still, and remember the need of naval patience. After all, as Mr. Pollen puts it, there is not the slightest reason why we should let ourselves be led into premature action, and so play the game of the Germane. All the advantages of the status quo in the ocean, and even in the North Sea, are with um. The situation no doubt has its local inconveniences, its local trials, even, if you will, its local dangers ; but when they have all been taken into account they are as nothing compared to the inconveniences, trials, and dangers endured by our enemy. We could, if necessary, endure the statue quo in the North Sea for, say, four years without anything approaching disaster. The Germans will not be able to endure it for half that time without consequences of the most terrible kind. What we can survive by the aid of patience, self-restraint, and vigilance must be their destruction. If impatience is to cloud the minds of the controllers of one of the opposing fleets and drive them to some reckless act, to putting all to the touch, to acting on the principle of "get it over quickly," that impatience must come not from the Power which is the less hard pressed by the status quo, but from that which is the more hard pressed—from the Germans and not from us. It may well be that they will be compelled by the force of circumstances to make the blind rush with which the hungry and maddened tiger finally leaves its lair. It would be a disgrace to us if we made such a rush simply because we had not the nerve to stand the strain of waiting any longer. Our attitude ought to be that of the man who, lighting his pipe, waits quietly and says: " This work is a bit anxious, but I would have you to know, my friend, that I can stick it ten times longer and ten times better than you can. If it's to be a waiting game, it'll be mine." Certain injudicious persons in the public Press and elsewhere have been inclined to talk about the Germans "skulking in their ditch," of our "digging them out," and so forth and so on—talk that proceeds on the assump- tion that the Germans will never come out, but have gone permanently to earth, and are most anxious not to bring us to action. That, of course, as the naval critic of the Westminster Gazette points out, is a very great mistake. The policy of the Germans now, as at the beginning of the war, is the policy of attrition. They want, by every means in their power, to wear us down, both in the matter of ships and of nerves and moral, till, if they can, they have produced some sort of equality between our forces and theirs. But attrition by the occasional explosion of a mine or by lucky accidents of submarine action is, as the Germans know, much too slow for any real results. They may account every half-year for three or four units, most of them of no great strength, but they Bee very well that after nearly six months the attrition has been on the whole quite as great on their side as on ours. Even if we make the widest possible allowance for the new units added to the German Fleet owing to quick construction, our Fleet is relatively in a better position now than it was on August 1st. If the policy of attrition is to succeed, it must be on a much bigger scale. To put the matter quite plainly, the Germans realize that if they are to weaken our Fleet preparatory to a great stroke on their part, they must decoy a considerable squadron of our ships out to attack them, and then, if they can, deal a blow which will be of a very serious character. That is the policy which undoubtedly lies behind such action as the " runaway ring " at Hartlepool and Scarborough. No doubt it was a great satisfaction to the Germans to water the " spires of English grass " with English blood, but that was only a side-issue. Their essential object was to stir up the domestic establish- ment and to get the servants thrush out aftertheir tormentors in the hope of being able to punish them. The runaway ships after they had "rung the bell" expected to be followed up by a big and important British squadron, and they expected also to be able to throw out, and no doubt did throw out, as they fled a great many floating mines into which our ships might very easily have run headlong. Of course they ran some risks in doing so, perhaps a great many, but they also stood a very fair chance of getting away themselves while at the same time reducing our Fleet by three or four units of real importance.
The "runaway ring" strategy will clearly be persisted in, and we shall very soon see some other attempt made to draw us into a minor action. That the Navy will be able to deal adequately with such attempts we do not doubt, provided only that our Fleet commanders are not made to feel—for Fleet commanders, like other people, are human—that the nation expects them to do -something striking, something sensational, something with immediate and visible results, and that they must therefore obey their natural instinct to strike, and not consider solely what we may term the scientific aspects of the case. Of course let them respond to a " runaway ring," or any other tactics of that kind, when they are sure that they are doing the right thing in retorting. They must not, however, out of pride or the imagined impatience in the country, play the German game. Once again, we can afford to wait. The Germans cannot. They want to see us stung into some reckless and mistaken action by what they think
will be the unbearable nuisance of perpetual naval scares, excursions, and alarms. We, on the other hand, want to
see them forced into reckless action on the grand scale by the steady pressure of our naval superiority and the irre- sistible squeeze of time. Somebody will have to break
covert one day or another, probably with momentous results, but we certainly are not going to throw away the advantage we possess in the present statue quo merely out of what Bacon called "niceness and satiety," or, to use a more modern phrase, from want of naval patience. And here we desire to say a word to all those respon- sible for the action of our Fleets. We would urge them in the strongest way we can not to imagine that the greater public, the mass of their countrymen, are as stupid and unbalanced as the flightier section of the Press or the politicians. These frothy journals and persons sometimes talk about the need of the offensive, ask what the Navy is doing, and demand what is the good of ships if they are not' used. That is no doubt very irritating to our sailors, but they must not be affected by such cheap sneers and parrot cries. Above all, they must not mistake the mutterof a few nervous," rattled," and ignorant blusterers for the authentic voice of the nation. The nation in its curious, dumb, instinctive way recognizes quite as well now as it did a hundred and twenty years ago the incomparable virtues of naval patience. It is quite willing to sit quiet and give the Navy all the law it needs. It will not be alarmed when the Navy signals to it that the supreme moment has come. Again, the British people will not be alarmed, or anxious, or impatient, or fussy if they are told that it is still a long way in time and space to Wilhelmshaven, and that for the present we must possess our souls in confidence and quietness. Naval commanders, no doubt, like every one else, must think of, and in the very last resort obey, the will of the people. Let them be sure, however, that the influence they acknowledge, and respect, is what it professes to be. Burke, in one of the sublimest passages in all his writings, tells how the grasshoppers in a field will make far more noise and be much more audible than " the stately cattle that are grazing in silence." The minds of our Navy and those who lead it must not be influenced by the fussy and irrelevant insects of the Press, the platform, or even of Parliament, but must keep their eyes upon the leas vocal, but far more important, denizens of the field. Till the hour strikes let patience be our motto. When it does strike let it be "Boldness, Bold- ness, and again Boldness I "
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