WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 120, 15 February 1926, Page 6

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

America has settled its coal dispute, but Britain’s coal dispute may settle it.

An optimist is a man who is willing to wager money on Wellington’s central station being built before tlie motors have put the railways out of business.

The successful man can tell you tiuths of nothing but his specialty as a rule—but the confirmed failure can advise you about a hundred things.

Like most other people we have read this man’s ideas about the Battle of Jutland, and that man’s, and the other fellow’s,' 1 and the net result has been that we gave up tlie Battle of Jutland, and took to something that wasn’t surrounded mentally by so much North Sea fog. The other day we came across something that really did seem to shed light on this famous episode in the history of British arms, the subject of so much acrimonious discussion. Our illumination came from the last place one would look tor it—the “Oxford. Book of English Prose.” *» * * This book is a compilation of what its author, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, considers to be purple patches in the prose writings of Englishmen—or rather English-speaking people. He lets Americans in, atid it is an American who gets his say on the Battle of Jutland. And yet not a true dyed-in-the-wool American, for he was the son of a Scottish gardener, and was born and reared in a Kirkcudbrightshire village. He was not writing about the Battle of Jutland either, for he wrote before either it or even the Battle of Trafalgar had been fought. Nor was it as an American he' wrote, for he had left the American naval service for that of France, and had later left that for the Russian sendee, and from the Russian navy he had retired as a rear-admiral to spend obscurely his last year on earth in Paris, a circumstance which Paris noticed hardly at all in the excitement of running that famous affair since known as the French Revolution.

In short, the document which Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch reprints is a letter written in 1791 by John Paul Jones to his friend Vice-Admiral Count Armand de Kersaint. A few months later Paul Jones died, and in the turmoil his burial place was forgotten, but over a century later an American ambassador discovered it, and, in the way that Americans have, the bones of this choleric sailor were thereupon dug up and escorted in honour across the Atlantic by a fleet of United States warships to be re-interred in the crypt of the chapel of the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Paul Jones’s friend, de Kersaint, when he received tlie letter was earnestly advocating the reorganisation of the French navy, but he quickly fell from favour with the revolutionaries, and liis was soon among tlie seventeen thousand heads ' lopped off by the guilotine during the Reign of Terror. « V « “In my judgment,” wrote Paul Jones, “there has never been an occasion in all the naval wars between Franco and England when the opportunity was bo distinctly and so overwhelmingly on tho side of France as in those few October days in 1781, off the Capes of the Chesapeake—when France actually had, for tho moment, command of the sea. “Now, my dear Kersaint, you know ine too well to accuse me of self-vaunt-ing. You will not consider mo vain, in view ot your knowledge of what happened in the past off Carrickfergue, off Old Flaniboro Head, and off the Liman in the Black Sea, if I say that, had I stood—fortunately or unfortunately— Li the shoes of de Grasse, there would have been disaster to toms one off tho Capes of the Chesapeake; disaster of more significance than an orderly retreat of a beaten fleet to a safe port. To put it a little more strongly, there was a moment when the chance to destroy the enemy's fleet would have driven from me all thought of the conjoint strategy of the campaign ns a whole. “I could not have helped it. "And I have never since ceased to mourn tho failure of the Count de Grasse to be as imprudent, as I could not have helped being on that grandest of all occasions.

“Howbeit, as I have already said, the object of grand strategy on that occasion was accomplished by the manoeuvring of the Count de Grasse without general action-in-line. But I confess that under similar conditions the temptation to destroy as well as repulse the fleet of the enemy would have been resistless had I been the commander. It would have cost more men and perhaps a ship or two; but in my opinion success in naval warfare is measured more perfectly by the extent to which you can capture or sink the ships and kill the seamen of tlie enemy than by the promptness with which you can force him, by skilful manoeuvre or distant cannonade, to sheer off and thereby, 1 with your consent, avoid a conflict that could hardly result otherwise than in conquest for you and destruction to him.

"You will by no means infer from these cursory observations that I fail to appreciate, within my limited capacity, the grandeur of tactical combinations, the skill of intricate manoeuvres, and the far-sighted, long-thought-out demonstrations by which the Count de Toulouse drove Rooke out of the Mediterranean in August, 1704, with no more ado than the comparatively bloodless battle of Malaga; or the address with which La Galissoniere repulsed Byng from Minorca in 1756 by a longrange battle, of which the only notable casualty was the subsequent execution of Byng by his own Government for the alleged crime of failing to destroy the fleet opposed to him; or the brilliant campaign of my noble friend, the Count D’Orvilliers, off Ushant in July, 1778. when he forced Keppel to retreat ignominiously to England; not by stress of -defeat, but by the cunningly planned and adroitly executed expedient of

avoiding, on any terms but his own, the battle which Keppel vainly tried to force upon him. Let mo assure you that none of ’these great events has been,lost upon my sense of admiration. "And yet, my dear Kersaint. one reflection persecutes me, to mar all my memories and baffle all my admiration. This is the undeniable fact that the English ships and English sailor* whom La Galissoniere manoeuvred away from Minorca, under Byng, in 1756, remained intact and lived to ruin ConHans in Quiberon Bay three years later under Sir Edward Hawke; and that the sliips and the seamen of Graves, whom ile Grasso permitted to escape from his clutches off the Capes of the Chesapeake in October, 1781, were left intact and lived to discomfort de Grasse himself off Santa Lucia and Dominica in April. 1782. under "You know, of course, my dear Kersaint, that my own opportunities in naval warfare have ’been but few and feeble in comparison with such as I have mentioned. But Ido not doubt your ready agreement with me if I say that the hostile ships and commanders that I have thus far enjoyed the opportunity of meeting did not give anyone much trouble thereafter. True, this has been on a small scale; but that was no fault of mine. I did my best with the weapons given to me. The rules of conduct, the maxims of action, and the tactical instincts that serve to gain small victories may always be expanded into the winning of great ones with suitable opportunity; because in human affairs the sources of success are ever to be found in the fountains of quick resolve and swift stroke; and it seems to be a law inflexible and inexorable that he who will not risk ennnot win.” And that’s that