FATHER OF THE DREADNOUGHT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16277, 9 January 1915, Page 5

FATHER OF THE DREADNOUGHT

iiy llolbhook Jackson. But thou, though the world should misdoubt thee, Bo as strong a3 the seas at thy side; Bind on but tliiuc amour alxmt thee, That girds theo with power and with pride. Where iJralte etood, where Blake stood, Where lame sees Nelson stand, .Stand thou, too, and now, toj, Tako thou thy fate in hand. —Swinburne. The return of Ixird Fisher to the post relinquished by him a little over lour yea re ago restores one's confidence in Destiny. Now is the appointed hour, and he, beyond all our naval supermen, is the man. His retirement from the Admiralty was a loss to the Umpire, a loss recognised by all eave those who were displaced or disgruntled by his desire for a modern and an efficient navy. But the past is past, and the momentous present is for action, not recrimination. Tne important fact is that the supreme nuvv, which keeps sleepless guard over the North Sea, remains, and the man who did more than any other living man to make it what it is returns to the post which the nation should not have allowed him to leave. The First Sea Lord was admitted to the navy by Admiral Sir W. Parker, the last of Nekon's captains, and he served his apprenticeship as a midshipman on board the Victory. He is thus a traditional link with our last great naval period. Doubtless he would have achieved his destiny had the circumstances of his introduction to the navy been otherwise. But, whether or not, the circumstance has poetic justification in the image of Nelson's old captain, the last of that brave companionship of the sea, handing on to Midshipman Fisher the lamp which Nelson kept alight, to be kept shining as brightly os of old in sea fights more wonderful than kelson's wildest dream.

Lord Fisher, like Lord Roberts, who was born at Cawnpore, is a son of the Empire. He was born in Ceylon in 1841. His father was a captain of the 78th Highlanders, and his mother was a Londoner, lie entered tha navy at the age of 13, under the circumstances stated above. The actual moment is enshrined in an anecdote which reveals the early development of a self-confidence which has been as useful to Fisher as a similar gift was to Nelson. Here is the story, from Mr Gardiner's excellent study: —

One day, far back in the fifties of last century, a sailing ship came round from Portsmouth into Plymouth Sound, where the fleet lay. Among the passengers was a little midshipman fresh from hi 6 apprenticeship in the Victory. He scrambled aboard the Admiral's ship, and with the assurance of 13 marched up to a splendid figure in blue and gold, and said, handing him a letter.: "Here, my man, give this to the Admiral." The man in blue and gold smiled, took the letter, and opened it. "Are you the Admiral?" said the boy. "Yes, I'm the Admiral." He read the letter, and, patting the boy on the head, said: "You must stay and have dinner with me." "I think," said the boy, "I should like to be getting on to my ship." He spoke as though the British navv had fallen to his chame. The Admiral laughed and took him down to dinner. That night the boy slept aboard the Calcutta. a vessel of 84 guns, given to the British navy hv an Indian merchant at a co -t of £84,000. It was the day of small tilings and of sailing ships. To-day i.« the day of big things, and the most formidable of modern big things, the floating fortress of iron, known as the Dreadnought, was, in after life, invented by the boy who boarded the Calcutta 60 years ago. —A Transition Period.— It is not necessary to tell in detail the story of the self-confident middy's promotion. All that need be said is that he rose on the stepping stones of his own perseverance and grit, and as rapidly as such qualities, none too popular at the time, would permit. He was a tireless worker and a, bold naval thinker, when brains in the, navy wore not considered respectable. The suspicions of impotent authority and incapacity, raised by. this young man's determination to master his job, grew with the passage of time and the progress of his own ability and power into a hostility born of jealous hatred. But Fisher was undeterred in hie task. He found the navy a chaos of outmoded ships, hampering customs and incompetences, and he set to work to evolve order out of chaos. He is a naval Kitcheneronly more so. He speeded up the slacker, weeded out the dolt; and played havoc with the sinecurists. Ideas were encouraged ; so was thinking. A new type of officer began to come into existence : smart, brainy, keen. This new type combined the seaman and the engineer. Fisher hod vision. He saw on the horizon the gods of steam-power and electricity; and he set forth to conciliato them—to malie them British possessions. No wonder the old boys thought him dangerous. Why, it was not fio many years ago that these same old fellows thought a steam navy as undignified as a brainy navy. Here "is a copy of the minute in which the rulers of the" Queen's Navee repudiated the horrid suggestion: — They felt it their bounden duty, upon national and professional grounds, to discourage, to the utmost of their ability, the employment of srteam-vessels, as they considered that the introduction of steam was calculated to strike a fatal blow at the naval -supremacy of the Empire; and to concede to the request preferred would be simply to let in the thin end of the wedge, and would unquestionably lead to similar demands being made upon the Admiralty from other departments. It was not quite so bad as that when Fisher began to get hold of things, but it was bad enough, and the famous old minute may be taken as symbolical. The fact is the navy was at the crossroads. It was passing through a period c.f transition. Ships of oak had been replaced by ships of steel; sail power by steam power; many small guns by a few large guns. As recently as the eighteeneighties sails were considered part of the nece.-sa-ry equipment of battleships. The result was that even the early type of armoured cruiser looked and was an unsatisfactory hybrid. Gradually, however, the idea of the modern battleship was evolved as an engine of the sea, which defied the wind and justified itself on purely mechanical grounds. But the idea was not confined to a more ship; it was applied to the whole navy. .Lord Fisher was not the sole inventor of the idea; he was its perfecter. The vast and powerful machine which is the Royal navy of to-day represents the genius of the British people, guided and, when guidance failed, forced to triumph by the First Sea Lord. The Dreadnought is the triumphant climax of the mechanical idea applied to fighting ships. It is more than that. The Dreadnought, true child of Lord Fisher's genius, represents perhaps the close of an era in naval construction and naval methods. Sir Percy Scott, second only to Fisher as a modernist of naval affairs, has expressed the view that the future of sea fighting is with the submarine and the destroyer, the torpedo and the mine, in partnership with craft of the air. Certain events of the last few months would seem to favour the view. But it is too soon to pronounce an opinion. The mighty Dreadnoughts still keep terrible vigil, and their father now paces the quarterdeck nf the navy in Whitehall. Amid the endless discussions which followed the construction of the first Dreadnought, many suggested that the launching of such an engine of war was a provocation to Germany and an unwarranted tax upon the nation. Lord Fisher's reply to these criticisms was simple and conclusive :— All the developments of science and of naval necessity made the discovery of | the Dreadnought inevitable. . . . England got the lead, instead of having to follow. You talk of commotion. Think of the commotion if C'ermany had forestalled us. You talk of cost. The Dreadnought is the cheapest ship afloat. It has got rid of the wastefulness that put your seamen in ships that would be worthless in war. It has not only given you efficiency of material, but the maximum efficiency of men. Tt is, as I say, too early for judgment. The world still awaits the battle of the Dreadnoughts with confidence. —The Man.— Lord Fisher, the man, is of the engine type. At work he is tireless and emotion-

less. His days -would begin at 4, and everybody near him or within reach of hia rule had to hustle. If he could not get permission to carry out reforms he would cairv them out without permission and r.sk the consequences. Nelson at Copenhagen was his model. The installation of wireless at the Admiralty is a cage in point. Fisher wanted to make the Admiralty the hub of the navy—the oonning tower of the Empire. Now the only way to do that was by wireless. The G.P.O. objected. The First Sea Lord has a habit of looking upon the navy as the premier national service, and is not to be checked when acting in its interests by any mere civil service ; he therefore ordered the work of installation to be carried out. When the G.P.O. saw the domes of the Admiralty bristling with the now familiar masts and aerials, it asked upon whose authority this violation of its rights had been carried out. "Oh," said Admiral Fisher, "it is only run up as a trial, to see how it will work in ease permission ia given." It was found to work very well and still remains in position, though, it ia said, permission has never been given. The only tradition about the navy which appealed to Lord Fisher was its traditional greatness. He lost no chance of making that tradition secure, and he did not caTe what he reformed away in the process. Before he was anything but plain John Fisher, and even when the prefix Sir was added, naval circles referred to him as "Radical Jack." and it is said that King Edward was disturbed by thia reputation in an Admiral: — "I am told you are a Radical ," King Edward is reported to have said to him on one occasion. "Well," replied Fisher, "I never believed that all the brains went with a white shirt." "But you are so violent," said the King. '"Tha Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence,** he replied, "and the violent man take* it by force." "But you don't look at all sides." "Why should I waste my time looking at all sides when I know my side is the right side? The cleverest man we ever had at the Admiralty was Goschen, and he was the worst failure of all. He was always looking at all sides, and we never got anything done."* Lord Fisher believes in the three R's of war—"Ruthless, Relentless, end Remorseless," and his reforms in the navy have had to be carried out on the same lines. 17e has no illusions about war and the way it should be carried on. W. T. Stead called him "a bit of a barbarian who talked like a savage at times." But war is barbarous and savage, and to talk about it in any other terms is to deceive oneself and others. At The Hague Conference in 1899 he scandalised many ardent pacificists by his frankness: — "The humanising of war!" he declared! "You might as well talk of humanising hell! When a silly ass at The Hague got up and talked about the amenities of civilised warfare, and putting your prisoners' feet in hot water and giving them gruel, my reply, I regret to say, was considered totally unlit for publican tion. As if war could be civilised! If I am in command when war breaks out 1 shall issue as my orders : — THE ESSENCE OF WAR IS VIOLENCE. MODERATION IN WAR IS IMBECILITX. HIT FIRST. HIT HATUS, HIT EVERYWHERE. That is splendid honesty and invincible truth. There are only two things to be done with war—pursue it with the utmost violence, or pursue it not at all. Lord Fisher simply echoes the authorities of all time. His first order is pure Clausewits. "War," said that eminent authority, "i< an act of violenoe which in its application knows no bounds." And elsewhere he says: ' 'Let us not hear of generals who conquer without bloodshed; if a bloody slaughter is a horrible sight, then it is a ground for paying more respect to war (for avoiding unnecessary wars), but not for making the sword we wear blunt and blunter by degrees from feelings ol humanity, till someone steps in with * sword that is sharp and lops off the arm from our body." Those are not only the sentiments of Clausewitz; they were Nel« son's and Napoleon's. Even Lord Fisher's words are not new. Macaulay used them years ago, when describing Hampden as on officer. "He knew," said the great historian, "that the essence of war is violence and that moderation in war is imbecility. —No Dour Martinet. — Withal, Lord Fisher is no dowr martinet. In action—that is, at work—he has alwavs been a martinet because he haa always teen Armageddon lurking ahead. He has devoted the ripe years of his life to preparing the navy for The Day. The Kaiser is known to have feared Fisher beyond any other Briton. A friend once expostulated with Wilhelm for taking too much to heart an after-dinner speech delivered some five years ago by Mr Arthur Lee, in the course of which the enthusiastic politician told his fellow-diners that if war broke out the German fleet would be at the bottom of the sea before break--fast. Tha Kaiser was asked not to lay ! stress on these words, as the speaker was not the Government. "Admitted," said the Kaiser, "but Fisher is still in the Government, and I understand his standpoint. He is so much stronger than me that it is a great temptation to use that strength." There is a merry twinkle within the stern eye of his lordship, which the discerning may note in his photographs. But that twinkle is reserved for playtime. The stern work of building up a navy which, as may be seen from the above story, got on the Kaiser's nerves, left no room for fun. Yet Lord Fisher gets much fun out of life. "I will only believe in a god who can dance," said Nietzsche, and as the philosopher's god was a superman, he would have believed in Lord Fisher, for the First Sea Lord has been a mighty dancer in his time. Indeed, he was once known as the "Dancing Admiral." He is a mighty wielder of phrases, and he has a knack of putting his thoughts into words that stick and kick. "Life ' is phrases," he says. If so, then he has added to life. Here are a few of his additions: "Armour is vision"; "Keiteration is the secret of conviction" ; "Favouritism is the secret of efficiency"; "To excel one's fellows it is needful to be circumscribed" ; "Never spare the butterboat, keep your bearings well greased." He has small regard for politicians, and refers to the House of Parliament as tho "Westminster Gasworks," and he avera that he has voted consistently for both parties according to which he thought would give rrost money to the navy. He al?o admits that much of his language s quite unfit for publication. Be sure that unfitness grew also out of his zeal for the navy. I do not think any other thing exists for him. "I think the finest epitaph I know," he wrote, "is that of one of' Nelson's captains, 'Death found him fighting.'" Let us hope that Death will find Lord Fisher, not fighting, but resting on his honours, after the New Trafalgar haa won peace for the world.