A NAVAL SCARE LOOMING

Lake County Press, Issue 976, 22 August 1901, Page 2

A NAVAL SCARE LOOMING

GREAT BRITAIN’S POSITION IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. [From the Evening Star’s Correspondent. , "LONDON, July 5. “If a naval war breaks out in your time, and reveals the true condition of our fleet, there’s the lamp-post on which you’ll be hanged.” This is said to have been a frequent remark of an eminent naval officer to a certain First Lord of the Admiralty ten years ago, and, according to Mr Arnold 'White’s ‘ Message from the Mediterranean,’ which occupies many pages of the July ‘National Review,' the condition of the navy of to-day is quite as unsatisfactory as it was when the sea captain hinted that his over-lord wanted his neck stretching. Lord Charles Beresford has already hinted ominously that all is not well with our fleet, and Mr White now tells us plainly that Britannia rules the waves only on sufferance, or words to that effect. His message contains many statements of gravest importance, and if they can be proved to be true it would seem that moi'e than one lamppost in Whitehall ought to be requisitioned. Our boasted Mediterranean Squadron, it appears, is a galaxy of fighting ships and nothing more. It has no fleet auxiliaries, no provision has been made for hospital ships, repairing ships, mother ships for destroyers, no efficient colliers, no telegraph ships, and no provision has been made lor the use of wireless telegraphy. But this is not all. No adequate has been made for the first essentials of fighting. The big guns on several of our battleships have no telescopic sights, gyroscopes, armor-piercing shells, or smokeless powder. Black powder and blunt-nosed shells, Mr White tells us, are still in use on several of the Mediterranean ships, and he asks us to consider the advantage to a smart French admiral of firing armorpiercing shell into the fog made by one of the Ramillies’s big guns. “ The captain of the Ramillies will be unable to see his enemy for some minutes after each discharge of his own guns, and when he does see him, and hits him, a blunt-nosed shell will break up harmless against the Krupp armor of the new French ships. The allocation of Britain’s naval strength is such (he declares) that nowhere is it supreme; everywhere it is weak or outmatched. In 'the Mediterranean Admiral Fisher’s ten battleships are confronted by fourteen French vessels of the same class, while Russia has one in the Levant and nine in the Black Sea. “So persuaded are the French General Staff of the unreadiness of the British fighting fleets for instant war that the traditional French naval strategy has recently been deliberately changed from the defensive to the offensive. When war breaks out it is the enemy,* not we, who will select the time and occasion for hostilities. The time may come on a Saturday afternoon in summer when the nights are moonless. Public offices and the telegraphic service are shut on Sunday in England. The occasion for the great coup against the British position in the Mediterranean will be when the Brest and Toulon squadrons have united in time of peace, and when the French admiral finds himself in a position, with his whole force sandwiched between the weak British fleet and its base at Malta.” Malta, the base of our fleet, has no breakwater; Egypt is practically undefended, and, if we accept Mr Whites conclusions, our position in the Mediterranean is about as bad as it can be. But our officials go on blithely writing reams of despatches about buttons, socks, and the treacle supplied to naval cadets, and the Government is apparently well content to let greater matters slide so long as Parliament will blindly vote millions for the construction of new warships. •he Commons, as a whole, seem anxious to inquire into the truth of the allegations made regarding the condition of the Mediterranean Fleet and its adjuncts, but for some reason or other the Ministry appear anxious to baulk discussion on the points raised by Mr White and Lord Charles Beresford. That is, however, only the " Hotel Cecil’s ” little way. They go on for a time trying to persuade the people that they believe everything is all right. Then comes a day when they are forced to acknowledge that the reverse is the case. Then, with feverish, spasmodic energy, they set to work to right things in twenty-four hours, and as a consequence the whole caboodle is turned upside down, millions are spent in hasty, ill-considered experiments and useless work, and then the public, having been persuaded that the Government is fully alive to their duty and are doing it, the old “let it rip” policy supervenes, and the last condition of our army or navy is a trifle worse than it was before. Alternations of cheese-paring economy and frantic expenditure mark the course of Lord Salisbury’s Ministry. Yesterday, so to speak, they plunge into a scheme which may give us a terribly expensive Yeomanry force of problematic value, to-day they are imperilling the safety of the Empire for the sake of saving the few thousands extra necessary to give the navy an adequate supply of trained stokers and Jack sufficient good grub to keep him up to fighting trim. They will spend a couple of hundred thousand pounds in a vain effort to convert an obsolete mau-o’-war into a decent third-rate fighting vessel, but a demand for telescopic sights for big guns, costing perhaps ten pounds a piece, is received with turned-up eyes and upraised hands. There is a disposition on the part of the Press at Home to force an inquiry into naval matters at present. I can foresee the result. We shall have a commission of seme sort, which will cost thousands, and a grand scheme for the redistribution of responsibility among the heads of Jre department in Whitehall. Then will come a new naval programme, accompanied by a demand for more ships, more men, and more money. At the end of three years the Ramillies will still be using black powder and blunt-nosed shells, or whatever style of ammunition and projectiles are then as much out of date as those things are to-day.