The Mirrors of Downing Street Part 2

LORD FISHER

BARON FISHER, ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET (JOHN ARBUTHNOT FISHER)

Born, 1841; entered Navy, 1854; took part in 1860 in the Capture of Canton and the Peiho Forts; Crimean War, 1855; China War, 1859-60; Egyptian War and Bombardment of Alexandria, 1882; Lord of the Admiralty, 1892-97; Commander-in-Chief, North American Station, 1897-99; Mediterranean Station, 1899-02; Commander-in-Chief, 1903-1904; 1st Sea Lord, 1904-10; 1914-15; died, 1920.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BARON FISHER]

CHAPTER III

LORD FISHER

_"Look for a tough wedge for a tough log."_

PUBLIUS SYRUS.

No man I have met ever gave me so authentic a feeling of originality as this dare-devil of genius, this pirate of public life, who more than any other Englishman saved British democracy from a Prussian domination.

It is possible to regard him as a very simple soul mastered by one tremendous purpose and by that purpose exalted to a most valid greatness. If this purpose be kept steadily in mind, one may indeed see in Lord Fisher something quite childlike. At any rate it is only when the overmastering purpose is forgotten that he can be seen with the eyes of his enemies, that is to say as a monster, a scoundrel, and an imbecile.

He was asked on one occasion if he had been a little unscrupulous in getting his way at the Admiralty. He replied that if his own brother had got in front of him when he was trying to do something for England he would have knocked that brother down and walked over his body.

Here is a man, let us be quite certain, of a most unusual force, a man conscious in himself of powers greater than the kindest could discern in his contemporaries, a man possessed by a daemon of inspiration.

Fortunately for England this daemon drove him in one single direction: he sought the safety, honour, and glory of Great Britain. If his contemporaries had been travelling whole-heartedly in the same direction I have no doubt that he might have figured in the annals of the Admiralty as something of a saint. But unhappily many of his a.s.sociates were not so furiously driven in this direction, and finding his urgings inconvenient and vexatious they resisted him to the point of exasperation: then came the struggle, and, the strong man winning, the weaker went off to abuse him, and not only to abuse him, but to vilify him and to plot against him, and lay many snares for his feet. He will never now be numbered among the saints, but, happily for us, he was not destined to be found among the martyrs.

He has said that in the darkest hours of his struggle he had no one to support him save King Edward. Society was against him; half the Admiralty was crying for his blood; the politicians wavered from one side to the other; only the King stood fast and bade him go on with a good heart. When he emerged from this tremendous struggle his hands may not have been as clean as the angels could have wished; but the British Navy was no longer scattered over the pleasant waters of the earth, was no longer thinking chiefly of its paint and bra.s.s, was no longer a pretty sight from Mediterranean or Pacific sh.o.r.es--it was almost the dirtiest thing to be seen in the North Sea, and quite the deadliest thing in the whole world as regards gunnery.

This was Lord Fisher's superb service. He foresaw and he prepared. Not merely the form of the Fleet was revolutionized under his hand, but its spirit. The British Navy was baptized into a new birth with the pea-soup of the North Sea.

When this great work was accomplished he ordered a s.h.i.+p to be built which should put the Kiel Ca.n.a.l out of business for many years. That done, and while the Germans were spending the marks which otherwise would have built wars.h.i.+ps in widening and deepening this channel to the North Sea, Lord Fisher wrote it down that war with Germany would come in 1914, and that Captain Jellicoe would be England's Nelson.

From that moment he lost something of the hard and almost brutal expression which had given so formidable a character to his face. He gave rein to his natural humour. He let himself go; quoted more freely from the Bible, a.s.serted more positively that the English people are the lost tribes of Israel, and waited for Armageddon with a humorous eye on the perturbed face of Admiral Tirpitz.

In July, 1914, he was out of office. A telegram came to him from Mr.

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, requesting to see him urgently. Lord Fisher refused to see him, believing that Mr. Churchill had jockeyed Mr. Reginald McKenna out of the Admiralty--Mr. McKenna who had most bravely, nay heroically, stood by the naval estimates in face of strong Cabinet opposition. On this ground he refused to meet Mr.

Churchill. But a telegram from Mr. McKenna followed, urging him to grant this interview, and the meeting took place, a private meeting away from London. Mr. Churchill informed Lord Fisher of the facts of the European situation, and asked him for advice. The facts were sufficient to convince Lord Fisher that the tug-o'-war between Germany and England had begun. He told Mr. Churchill that he must do three things, and do them all by telegram before he left that room: he must mobilize the Fleet, he must buy the Dreadnoughts building for Turkey, and he must appoint Admiral Jellicoe Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet. To do either of the first two was a serious breach of Cabinet discipline; to do the last was to offend a string of Admirals senior to Admiral Jellicoe. Mr.

Churchill hesitated. Lord Fisher insisted. "What does it matter," he said, "whom you offend?--the fate of England depends on you. Does it matter if they shoot you, or hang you, or send you to the Tower, so long as England is saved?" And Mr. Churchill did as he was bidden--the greatest act in his life, and perhaps one of the most courageous acts in the history of statesmans.h.i.+p. Lord Fisher said afterwards, "You may not like Winston, but he has got the heart of a lion."

Thus was England saved, and Germany doomed. Before war was declared the British Fleet held the seas, and in command of that Fleet was the quickest working brain in the Navy.

On one occasion, during the dark days of the war, I was lunching at the Admiralty with Lord Fisher, who had then been recalled to office. He appeared rather dismal, and to divert him I said, "I've got some good news for you--we are perfectly safe and Germany is beaten." He looked up from his plate and regarded me with lugubrious eyes. I then told him that Lord Kitchener had been down at Knole with the Sackvilles and had spent a whole day in taking blotting-paper impressions of the beautiful mouldings of the doors for his house at Broome. "Does that make you feel safe?" he demanded; and then, pointing to a maidservant at the sideboard, he added, "See that parlourmaid?--well, she's leaving; yesterday I spent two hours at Mrs. Hunt's registry office interviewing parlourmaids. Now, do you feel safe?"

His return to the Admiralty brought him no happiness--save when he sent Admiral St.u.r.dee to sea to avenge the death of Admiral Cradock. He was perhaps too insistent on victory, a crus.h.i.+ng and overwhelming victory, for a Fleet on which hung the whole safety of the Allies, and a Fleet which had experienced the deadly power of the submarine. He was certainly not too old for work. To the last, looking as if he was bowed down to the point of exhaustion by his labours, he outworked all his subordinates. As for energy, he would have hanged I know not how many admirals if he had been in power during the last stages of the war.

His experience of Downing Street filled him up to the brim with contempt for politicians. It was not so much their want of brains that troubled him, but their total lack of character. Only here and there did he come across a man who had the properties of leaders.h.i.+p in even a minor degree: for the most part they had no eyes for the horizon or for the hills whence cometh man's salvation; they were all ears, and those ears were leaned to the ground to catch the rumbles of political emergencies.

To find men at the head of so great a nation with no courage in the heart, with no exaltation of captaincy in the soul, without even the decency to make sacrifices for principle, made him bitterly contemptuous. At first he could scarcely bridle his rage, but as years went on he used to say that the politicians had deepened his faith in Providence. G.o.d was surely looking after England or she would have perished years agone. In his old age he ceaselessly quoted the lines of William Watson:

"Time, and the Ocean, and some fostering star In high cabal have made us what we are";

and d.a.m.ned the politician with all the vigour of the Old Testament vernacular.

I have often listened to a minister's confidential gossip about Lord Fisher; nothing in these interesting confidences struck me so much as the self-satisfaction of the little minister in treating the man of destiny as an amusing lunatic.

MR. ASQUITH

THE RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH

Born at Morley, Yorks.h.i.+re, 1852. Educ.: City of London School; Balliol College, Oxford; gained 1st cla.s.s, Lit. Hum. 1874; Barrister Lincoln's Inn, 1876; Q. C. 1890; Home Sec'y, 1892-95; Ecclesiastical Commissioner, 1892-95; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1905-8; Sec'y for War, 1914; 1st Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister, 1908-16; LL.D. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge, Leeds, St.

Andrews, and Bristol.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH]

CHAPTER IV

MR. ASQUITH

_"Not to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those of their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society they frequent: they come to look upon their most elevated objects as unpractical, or at least too remote from realization to be more than a vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep."_--JOHN STUART MILL.

Nothing in Mr. Asquith's career is more striking than his fall from power: it was as if a pin had dropped.

Great men do not at any time fall in so ignominious a fas.h.i.+on, much less when the fate of a great empire is in the balance.

The truth is that Mr. Asquith possesses all the appearance of greatness but few of its elements. He has dignity of presence, an almost unrivalled mastery of language, a trenchant dialectic, a just and honourable mind; but he is entirely without creative power and has outgrown that energy of moral earnestness which characterized the early years of his political life.

He has never had an idea of his own. The "diffused sagacity" of his mind is derived from the wisdom of other men. He is a cistern and not a fountain.

His scholars.h.i.+p has made no difference to scholars.h.i.+p. His moral earnestness has made no difference to morality. He acquired scholars.h.i.+p by rote, politics by a.s.sociation, and morality by tradition. To none of these things did he bring the fire of original pa.s.sion. The force in his youth was ambition, and the goal of his energy was success. No man ever laboured harder to judge between the thoughts of conflicting schools; few men so earnest for success ever laboured less to think for themselves. He would have made a n.o.ble judge; he might have been a powerful statesman; he could never have been a great man as Mazzini, Bismarck, and Gladstone were great men.

There are reasons for suspecting his moral qualities. When he allowed Lord Haldane to resign from the Cabinet at the shout of a few ignorant journalists he sacrificed the oldest of his friends to political exigencies. This was bad enough; but what made it worse was the appearance of heroic courage he a.s.sumed in paddling to Lord Haldane's rescue long after the tide of abuse had fallen. During the time he should have spoken to the whole nation, during the time he should have been standing sword in hand at the side of his friend, he was in negotiation with Sir Edward Carson.