A PAGE OF HISTORY.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 April 1919, Page 4

A PAGE OF HISTORY.

In one of his articles in the London Daily Chronicle, Mr Harold Begbie pays a tribute in his enthusiastic way to the services that Lord Fisher rendered to his country, and in the course of it he tells again the extraordinarily interesting story of the Dreadnought. Everyone knows that when the all-big gun ship was commissioned it was hailed as an innovation destined to revolutionise naval warfare, and that if it did not revolutionise warfare it .certainly revolutionised the naval construction programmes of the world. That was what it was intended to do. In a sense it was an experiment, but there was a deliberate intention 'behind it, apart from the fact that a ship that had no intermediate armament was bound to possess a great advantage over the mixed-calibre ship in a long-range engagement. The Dreadnought was primarily an expression of the view that modern naval battles would be fought at long range, but it also gave Britain the initiative, the power, that it is to say, to determine that battles should be fought at long jange, where the advantage would lie with the fleet that had the superiority in big guns. Britain, in fact, was counting on her ability to outbuild any other Power or probable combination of Powers. When the Dreadnought was commissioned the principal features of her design -were published for all the world to read, and all the world had been delaying construction until'it knew what her design was. In the meantime Britain was already planning bigger, faster and more powerful ships, and while foreign Powers were constructing their Dreadnoughts Britain was already constructing her super-Dreadnoughts. Germany was obviously the possible enemy that the Admiralty had in mind. The training ground of the British Fleet used to be the Mediterranean, and it was Lord Fisher who, following out a maxim of Nelson's, that "your battle-ground should be your drilling ground," transferred the training from the pleasant surroundings of the Mediterranean to the pea-soup of the North Sea, which he knew was destined to be Britain's real naval battle-ground. AN INTERESTING ANECDOTE. Lord Fisher himself tells an interesting little anecdote of a hint that he conveyed to the Germans. King Edward was going on a visit to the Tsar, and two cruisers accompanied him as escort. "When wo entered the Kiel canal," said Lord Fisher, "we left them behind. Off Kiel there were other cruisers waiting for us to continue the journey. A German naval officer came to see me at Kiel, clicked his heels, saluted and bowed. I did the same. He then presented Admiral Tirpitz's apologies for not being present, and offered me a handsome compliment in the Admiral's name. He then clicked, saluted, bowed; and I did the same. He was like a tin toy. All of a sudden he became human. He grinned and said, "You came with two cruisers?' "Yes,' I replied, pretending no interest. 'And you have two more cruisers waiting for you out there?' 'Yes.' 'Ah! he exclaimed, 'you are very clever. These little cruisers of yours are too big to go through the Kiel canal, so you left two behind you in the North Sea and have two more waiting for you in the Baltic. That is a hint for us, is it not?' I tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'You are a very clever fellow to see it.' We parted on excellent terms." The hint that Lord Fisher thus conveyed to the Germans was that their canal was useless, that they had been outbuilt, tllat their shallow water fleet was out of date and their harbor defences valueless. Before there could

be any thought of "The Day" millions of money would have to be spent on the deepening and widening of the canal and the dredging of the harbors, and an entirely new navy would have to be constructed. That, Mr Begbie says, was what was accomplished by the Dreadnought and the policy for which it stood. It postponed war for years—the war that Lord Fisher has seen in preparation and that he felt to be inevitable.