The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2

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Coming when it did, _The British Army_ made an impression on the
educated public. It followed soon after the report of Sir James
Stephen's Commission, which had exposed the chaotic condition of the
administration of the army. Dilke revealed a grasp of every branch of
the subject. His criticisms reflected the judgment of officers familiar
with the branch of service discussed. His proposals were modest and
intelligible, and in every case represented some body of competent
military opinion. He told the public much that none of his readers fully
appreciated at the time. The German army had been largely increased in
the spring of 1887, and in the beginning of 1888 a Bill passed the
Reichstag which increased by a further 700,000 men the numbers available
in case of war. Dilke explained in one of his chapters that, "according
to the calculations of the French Staff, the total number of armed men
upon which Germany would be able to draw for all purposes would exceed
7,000,000." [Footnote: The British Army, p. 161.] This and other
forecasts may startle those readers whose curiosity tempts them to read
the volume again in 1917. But the work produced no practical result
except to put Dilke into the front rank of army reformers. The
Government took no action to remedy the military weakness which everyone
recognized. The report of the Stephen Commission remained a dead letter.
In June, 1888, a new Royal Commission was issued, in which the Marquis
of Hartington, associated with a number of colleagues of Cabinet rank
and with a General and an Admiral, was instructed to inquire into the
administration of the naval and military departments. The attempt at
reform was postponed until these Commissioners should have made their
report.

CHAPTER LV

IMPERIAL DEFENCE

I.

Sir Charles Dilke's visit to India in 1888-1889 convinced him that he
had been right in believing the Indian army to be better prepared for
war than the portion of the army which was kept at home. A great
difficulty he now saw was that there were two rival plans of campaign,
the one cherished in India, the other by officers at home. "The greater
number of Indian officers expect to march with a large force into
Afghanistan to meet the Russians, and believe that reinforcements will
be sent from England to swell their armies and to make up for losses in
the field. On the other hand, the dominant school in England expect to
send an expedition from England, in combination with Turkey or some
other allied Power, to attack Russia in other quarters." Dilke was led
accordingly to the general conclusion that the one thing needful was
"that we should try to remove the consideration of these subjects from
the home or the Indian or the Canadian point of view, and should take a
general view of the possibilities of Imperial defence."

The attempt to take this imperial view was made in _Problems of Greater
Britain_, which Dilke wrote during the remainder of the year 1889. In
this work he discussed the defence of the North-West Frontier of India
as a prelude to the examination of the defence of the British Empire.
His reason for this separate treatment was that "only on this one of all
the frontiers of the Empire the British dominion is virtually
conterminous with the continental possessions of a great military
Power." He showed that the serious import of this condition was
understood by all who knew India well and by both the political parties
in England. He dissented from the view that security could be obtained
by an agreement with Russia, because it was not easy to see "how Russia
could put it out of her own power at any moment to threaten us on the
North-West Frontier." The suggestion that Russia should be allowed to
occupy the northern portion of Afghanistan he rejected, first because it
would have been a flagrant breach of faith with the Amir, and secondly
because it would give to Russia territory which she could quickly
transform into a base of operations against India.

He thought that Russia could not invade India with a good chance of
success if she started from her present frontier, but that if she were
allowed to occupy the northern portion of Afghanistan the Indian
Government would be put to ruinous expense for the defensive
preparations which would then be required. [Footnote: 'Lord Dufferin
wrote to me from the Embassy at Rome to express his satisfaction with
the Indian portion of my book, and especially those passages in which I
demonstrated the exceeding folly of which we should be guilty if ever we
consented to a partition of Afghanistan with Russia.'] He noted that the
policy of advance upon our left, which he had recommended in 1868, had
been adopted with success, chiefly by the efficacy of the Sandeman
system of recognizing and supporting the tribal chiefs and requiring
them to maintain order, and also by the occupation and fortification of
the position of Quetta and by the opening of roads from Quetta through
the Gomul and other passes to the Indus at Dera Ismail Khan and Dera
Ghazi Khan. This would enable an Indian army to attack the right flank
of any Russian force attempting to advance along the Khyber line, which
would be resisted in the Khyber hills and at Attock, and be stopped at
the fortress of Rawal Pindi. Generally speaking, he held that Indian
"defence must be by the offensive with the field army, and the less we
have to do with fortifications, the better." He urged the extension
northwards of the Sandeman system to all the independent tribes between
the Indian and the Afghan borders. If the separate armies for the
Presidencies were to be united under a single Commander-in-Chief, as the
Indian Government had long desired, and if the principle of enlisting in
the native army only men of fighting races were fully adopted, and the
native Princes induced to place effective contingents at the disposal of
the Government, he thought that India with reinforcements from home
would be well able to resist a Russian attack starting from the frontier
that Russia then possessed.

But if Russia should once be established at Herat, with railway
communications to that point, there would be hardly any limit to the
force with which it would become necessary to resist her. He therefore
urged that the Russian Government should be given to understand that any
advance of her forces into Afghanistan would be regarded by England as a
hostile act. At the same time he admitted that it was difficult to see
how Russia was in that event to be fought. He still thought that she
would be vulnerable at Vladivostock--at any rate until her railway to
the Pacific should be completed [Footnote: He considered that, with a
view to any future struggle with Russia, the abandonment of Port
Hamilton in 1886 by Lord Salisbury had been unfortunate. See, as to Port
Hamilton, _Life of Granville_, ii. 440; _Europe and the Far East_, by
Sir Robert Douglas, pp. 190, 248]--but he was aware that this view was
shared neither by the Indian nor the British officers likely to be
heard.

In his chapter on Indian Defence Dilke had exhausted the subject from
the Indian point of view. He was fully acquainted with the ideas of all
those who had been seriously concerned with the problem, of which he had
discussed every aspect with them, and his exposition was complete. When
in his last chapter he came to "examine the conditions of the defence of
the Empire as a whole, and to try to find some general principle for our
guidance," he was to a great extent breaking new ground. The subject had
been treated in 1888 by Colonel Maurice, afterwards General Sir
Frederick Maurice, in his essay on the Balance of Military Power in
Europe, but Maurice based his scheme on the assumption of a Continental
alliance which Dilke thought impracticable. It had also been treated
with great insight as early as 1880 by Sir John Colomb in his _Defence
of Great and Greater Britain_. His brother Admiral Philip Colomb had
more recently expounded the view that the right plan was to make the
enemy's coasts our frontier, and to blockade the whole of his ports, so
that it would be impossible for his fleets to issue forth. This seemed
to Dilke to imply a superiority of naval force which England did not
possess, and was not then intending to create. But Sir John Colomb in
1880 had admitted the absolute necessity of being prepared to render
invasion impossible by purely military forces. "It was necessary," he
had said, "that invasion be efficiently guarded against, so that, should
our home fleet be temporarily disabled, we may, under cover of our army,
prepare and strengthen it to regain lost ground and renew the struggle
for that which is essential to our life as a nation and our existence as
an Empire."

Sir Charles Dilke thought this sound sense, and that it was rash, in
view of the inadequate strength of the actual navy and of the
uncertainty as to the effect of new inventions on naval warfare, to
count upon beginning a future war with a repetition of Trafalgar. He
admitted that the navy, if concentrated in home waters, would be fully
able to defend the United Kingdom, but that the fleets if so
concentrated must abandon the remainder of the Empire, and that this
would involve the destruction of our commerce and would be as severe a
blow to the Empire as the invasion of England. He inferred that the navy
must be the chief agent in defence, but backed by fortification and by
land forces. There ought to be squadrons in distant seas strong enough
to hold their own, without reinforcements, against probable enemies on
the same stations. The coaling ports must be suitably fortified and have
all the troops necessary for their garrisons on the spot in time of
peace. [Footnote: Autumn of 1889: 'Among those with whom I corresponded
about my book was Lord Charles Beresford, who gave me a great deal of
information about coaling-stations for my chapter on Imperial Defence,
in which I also had Charles Brackenbury's help to a considerable
extent.'] He carefully considered the question of food-supply at home
and the possibility of a commercial blockade of the United Kingdom. He
did not think that such a blockade could be established or maintained.
"Our manufactures would be seriously assailed, our food-supply would
become precarious, but we should not be brought to the point of
surrender by absolute starvation, and the possibility of invasion is not
excluded, as some of the naval school pretend, by the fact that it would
be unnecessary."

"On the other hand, a defeat or a temporary absence of the fleet
might lead to bombardments, attacks upon arsenals, and even to
invasion, if our mobile land forces, our fortifications and their
garrisons, were not such as to render attacks of any kind too
dangerous to be worth attempting. In the absence of the fleet a
landing could not be prevented. But the troops landed ought to be
attacked. For this purpose we do not need an immense number of
ill-trained, badly-equipped, and unorganized troops, but an army
completely ready to take the field and fight in the open, supplied
with a well-trained field artillery."

But the mere protection of Great and Greater Britain was not enough. "It
is idle to suppose that war could be brought to a termination unless we
are prepared in some way to obtain advantages over the enemy such as to
cause him to weary of the struggle. The _riposte_ is as necessary in
warfare as in fencing, and defence must include the possibility of
counter-attack." "In view of almost any conceivable hostilities, we
ought to be prepared to supply arms and officers to native levies which
would support our Empire in various portions of the globe." But we had
too few officers for our own troops at home, in India, and in the
auxiliary forces. The stocks of arms ought to be larger than they were,
and there ought to be centres of production for them in various parts of
the Empire. "The moneys that the British Empire spends upon defence are
immensely great, and what is wanted is that those moneys should be spent
as is decided by the best advisers who can be obtained." "The main thing
needed for a joint organization of the whole of the defensive forces of
the Empire is the creation of a body of men whose duty it would be to
consider the questions raised, and to work out the answers." For this
purpose he thought the one thing needful was a General Staff, an
institution of which he gave a brief account, based on Mr. Spenser
Wilkinson's essay _The Brain of an Army_, of which the author had sent
him the proofs. "A General Staff," Dilke wrote, "would neither inspect
troops nor regulate the promotion of the army, but it would decide the
principles which would arrange the distribution of the Imperial
forces.... The very existence of a General Staff would constitute a form
of Imperial military federation."

II.

In December, 1890, Dilke read before the Statistical Society a paper on
the Defence Expenditure of the Chief Military and Naval Powers. He had
taken great pains to ascertain what each Power spent on its army and
navy, and what return it obtained for its money. The net result was
that, while France and Germany for an expenditure of about 28 millions
sterling could each of them put into the field a mobile force of two
million men, the British Empire, at a cost of 35-1/2 millions, had "a
nominal force of 850,000 of various degrees of training wholly
unorganized, and supplied only with the professional artillery needed
for a force of about 150,000 men." The British navy was more formidable
than the French, and "the German navy does not as yet exist. I say 'as
yet,' for the Germans mean business with their navy, and have begun, in
a businesslike manner, at the top, putting at the head of it their best
administrators." The French were spending altogether on defence a total
of 36 to 36-1/2 millions, the Germans 38, and the British Empire 57
millions. The moral was that, "whatever the peace expenditure, war
cannot be commenced with a fair chance of winning by a nation which
waits until war to make her organization perfect. Germany before 1870
prepared in time of peace her corps, her armies, and provided them all
with officers for the various commands, who knew what their duties would
be in war. All countries spending much on their armies now do the same,
except the United Kingdom, which stands alone in having still
practically little but a regimental system in existence. But although we
are old-fashioned, to the point of being utterly unprepared (except in
India) for the stress of war, we nevertheless spend sums so vast as to
stagger and amaze even the French and German critics, who ought to be
pretty well used, one would think, to large sums for military
expenditure." [Footnote: Sir Charles notes in 1893: 'Sir William
Harcourt on the British Army: "One knows a man who has ten thousand a
year, sixteen horses, and ten carriages, and yet if one guest comes he
has difficulty to find a dogcart to meet him, and if two come a fly has
to be hired. The British nation also spends its money freely, and has
equal difficulty in meeting the slightest emergency."']

Early in 1891 Dilke proposed to Spenser Wilkinson that they should join
in writing a new popular book on Imperial Defence. During that year the
two men kept up a constant correspondence, and Wilkinson was frequently
Dilke's guest in London, at Dockett and Pyrford, and in the Forest of
Dean. At Whitsuntide Dilke stayed at Aldershot (where Wilkinson was in
camp with his old volunteer battalion, the 2nd Manchester), and went
every day to see the regiment at work.

In September, on the eve of Dilke's starting for the French manoeuvres,
Wilkinson sent him the draft of an introduction to the proposed book. It
challenged the widely-held opinion that war is wicked in itself, and
might by political arrangement be rendered unnecessary, and deprecated
the abstention from inquiry into its methods which this opinion
encouraged. It challenged the maxim 'No foreign policy,' which meant
either having no relations with other countries, or, having such
relations, conducting them without system. War should be conceived of as
imposed upon States by an irreconcilable opposition of purposes, and was
always a means to an end. Peace could not be secured by a policy which
adopts it as a supreme end. The confusion between defence as a political
attitude and defence as an operation of war had led to the neglect, by
English public opinion, of all naval and military preparations that
might be available for attack. But the essential elements of defensive
strength, fleets and armies, were mobile and equally available for
offensive operations, and no efficient preparation for defence was
possible that would not also serve for attack. Without a clear and true
conception of the character of war as a conflict of national purposes,
proper conduct of military operations and of defensive preparations was
impossible, and to its absence was due the unorganized condition of the
defence of the Empire. Dilke, in acknowledging the manuscript, wrote:
"I've read it all and like it, but shall shorten it a little," and in
returning the manuscript, with his modifications, wrote: "The
introduction is most excellent--stately and interesting: I can say this,
as it is almost all yours." Wilkinson then sent a chapter entitled "The
Primacy of the Navy."

"An attack on land conducted across the sea is a most hazardous
speculation so long as there exists anywhere a hostile fleet that is
able to fight. In order to make such an attack safe, it is
indispensable that the attacker should secure himself from all
interruption by destroying or driving from the sea any hostile
fleet. The Power which should succeed in doing this would have 'the
command of the sea' as against its particular enemy.... The
territories of the Power having command of the sea are virtually
safe against attack by sea.... The British navy, then, so long as it
maintains the superiority at sea is a sufficient protection against
invasion for every part of the Empire except India and Canada. If,
however, the navy were to suffer decisive defeat, if it were driven
to seek the shelter of its fortified harbours and kept there, or if
it were destroyed--then, not only would every part of the Empire be
open to invasion, but the communication between the several parts
would be cut, and no mutual succour would be possible.

"The defeat of the British fleet or fleets would, of course, be
effected by purely naval operations; but the acquiescence in its
destruction could, perhaps, only be secured by a blow affecting the
British power at its source, and therefore the establishment by an
enemy of his naval superiority would almost certainly be followed by
an invasion of Great Britain. So long, then, as the British navy can
be maintained invincible, the Empire could be adequately defended
against attack of any European Power other than Russia, and for such
a defence, therefore, no more is needed than complete naval
preparation, and such military preparation as is required for the
full efficiency of the navy. Any additional military preparation is,
as against attack of this nature, merely an insurance to cover the
possibility of the failure of the navy. After such failure, it might
save the British Islands, but it could not save the Empire."

Dilke wrote that this doctrine was the opposite of what he had
previously held and preached, and expressed a doubt whether, that being
the case, the book could go on as a joint work. Wilkinson replied that
the first question was whether the doctrine of the chapter was sound,
and that the question of the names on the title-page could wait till the
work was done.

In _Problems of Greater Britain_ Dilke had discussed the view of Sir
John Colomb and of his brother, Admiral Colomb. The Admiral appeared to
rely upon "blockade," which required a navy much stronger than Great
Britain possessed, and might, with modern weapons and the torpedo, be
impracticable of execution, while Sir John Colomb appeared to admit the
necessity of purely military forces to prevent invasion. Dilke, looking
at the extent of the Empire to be defended, had thought that the
concentration of the navy in home waters must involve the abandonment of
the rest of the Empire. This is the view usually held by those who are
thinking of what they have to protect. Wilkinson thought first of the
enemy's forces and how to destroy them. If they can be destroyed, the
enemy is helpless and the territories of the victor are safe, because
the enemy has no force with which to molest them. On the appearance of
_Problems_, Dilke, as the extracts from his Diary at that time show, had
begun to doubt whether this view was not the right one; Wilkinson's
exposition and the discussion which accompanied it completed his
conversion. This was the turning-point of his studies of Imperial
Defence.

The next chapter was headed "The Command of the Sea." Here the debated
doctrine was applied.

"The purpose of Great Britain to render her territories secure would
be perfectly accomplished by the destruction of the enemy's navy, as
this would render any attempt at the transport of troops
impracticable. The destruction of the enemy's navy would, of course,
also be the best possible protection for England's sea-borne trade
(though, no doubt, for this purpose additional measures would be
required), and for her communications with every part of her Empire.
Thus, in every possible war in which Great Britain could engage, the
prime function of the British navy is to attack, and if possible to
destroy, the organized naval forces of the enemy."

Suppose the enemy sought battle, the question would soon be decided, but
if he wished to avoid it the difficulty would be to find him and to
compel him to accept it. For this purpose the best plan was that adopted
in 1803 by Lord St. Vincent, which consisted in placing at the outset,
in front of every one of the enemy's military ports, a British squadron
superior to that which the enemy had within it. This was incorrectly
termed "blockade," as the object was not to prevent the issue of the
French fleets from their ports, but to prevent their exit unwatched and
to fight them when they should come out. This plan must be supplemented
by a reserve fleet, and by numerous cruisers to hunt such of the enemy's
cruisers as might be at large. The alternative plan of Lord Howe, of
concentrating the fleet at one of the home ports, was also discussed,
but considered less advantageous, as it left the enemy's fleet free to
proceed to sea. But it was shown that the navy of 1891 was twenty
battleships short of the number believed by naval officers to be
required for the successful adoption of St. Vincent's plan against the
French navy alone.

The defence of India was treated in two chapters entitled "The Peace of
India" and "The North-West Frontier," which were in substance a
restatement of the view expressed in _Problems of Greater Britain_.

The chapter on "The Armies" was a translation into specific shape, with
full details and calculations, of Dilke's idea of a separation between
the British and Indian systems. It was argued that the militia and
volunteers should be organized into army corps with permanent fully paid
commanders and the necessary auxiliary troops, and it was pointed out
that the volunteer department of the War Office ought to be entrusted to
volunteer officers. A chapter on "The Management of the Home Army"
asserted that "Any system proposed for the better management of the army
must satisfy three distinct conditions: It must be framed with a view to
the preparation of the army for war; it must secure unimpaired the
authority of the Cabinet; and it must provide for an efficient control
over expenditure by the House of Commons." The first requirement of a
sound system was a general who could be entrusted with the duty of
advising the Cabinet upon the conduct of war and with the actual
management of campaigns. He ought to have a proper general staff and the
field troops at home should be organized into localized autonomous army
corps. "The British army at home has no generals, and can have none
until its battalions are settled and grouped into brigades, divisions,
and army corps." There must be a second general charged with all
branches of supply.

Any satisfactory Admiralty system, it was pointed out, would provide a
competent naval adviser for the Cabinet. But it was doubted "whether it
will be possible to secure unity of design in defence so long as the War
Office and the Admiralty are separately represented in the Cabinet. The
difficulty would be overcome if it became the practice for one Minister
to hold both offices." Dilke had long had the common-sense idea that a
single Minister ought to have general charge of all the preparations for
war and its conduct by sea and land.