H. G. WELLS-SEER

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3001, 12 February 1917, Page 4

H. G. WELLS-SEER

—. e——— ' HIS PROPHECY OF 1911. Though Mr. H. G. "Wells, the gifted! essayist and author, possesses an imagination as picturesque as that of thef lato Jules Verne. Hero ie what he wrote in 1911, about tho present and future of sea armaments and sea warfare:— ■; "In the popular imagination thd Dreadnought is still the ono instru' ment of war. Wo count our strength' in Dreadnoughts and Super-Dread-noughts, and so long as we are spending our national resources upon them faster than any other country, if we sink at least £160 for every £100 sunk in theso obsolescent monsters by Germany, we have a reassuring sense of keeping ahead and being thoroughly safe. This confidence in big, very expensive battleships is, I believe and hope, shared by the German Government and by Europe generally, but it is, nevertheless, a very reasonable confidence, and it may easily lead us into the most tragic of national disilhisionments. We of the general publio aro led to supposo that the nest naval war —if ever we engage in another naval war —will begin with a decisive Fleet action. The plan of action is presented with an alluring simplicity. _ Our adversary will come out to us, in a' ratio of 10 to 16, or iu some ratio still more advantageous to us, according as our adversary happens to be this Power or that, Power, there will be. some tremendous business with suns and torpedoes, and our Admirals will return victorious to discuss tho discipline and details of the battle, and each other's little- weaknesses in the monthly magazines. This is a desirable but improbable- anticipation. No hostile Power is tho least likely to send out any battleships at all against our invincible Dreadnoughts. They will promenade tho seas, always in the ratio of 16 to 10 or more, looking for fleets that are securtly tucked away out of reach. They will not, of courso, go too near tlie enemy's coast, on account of mines, and, meanwhile, our cruisers will hunt the (Uiemy's commerce into port. "Then other things will happen. "I'liociioniy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike devices against'.. our capital slu'ps. • Unless he is a lunatic, he will prove to bo much stronger in reality than he is on paper in the matter of submarines,■- torpedo boats, waler-planes, and aeroplanes. These aro things cheap lo make and easy to conceal. He will bo richly stocked with ingenious' devices for getting explosives up to these two-million, pound triumphs of naval engineering. On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent about these islands he will have extraordinary chances, and sooner or later, unless we beat bin thoroughly in the air above and in the waters beneath, for neither of which proceedings we are prepared, some of these chances will nojno off, and wo shall lose a Dreadnought. "It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and stranded Zeppelin or so. enlivens the quiet of the English countryside by coming down and capitulating. It will be a trifling countershock to wing an aeroplane or so, or blow a torpedo-boat out of the water. Our Dreadnoughts will ceaso to be a eourco of unmitigated confidence. A Eccond battleship disaster will excite the Press extremely. A third will probably lead to a retirement of the Battle Fleet to some East Coast harbour, a, refuge liablo to aeroplanes, or to the West Coast of Ireland—and the real naval war, a war of destroyers, submarines, and hydroplanes, will begin. Incidentally, a commerce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement of our Fleet to raid our trade -routes." The abovevis an extract from an essay of Weils's entitled "The Common Sense of Warfare."