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Page 11
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 Sturdee to sea to avenge the death of Admiral Cradock. He was
perhaps too insistent on victory, a crushing 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 leadership 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. God 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 damned 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, Yorkshire, 1852. Educ.: City of London School;
Balliol College, Oxford; gained 1st class, 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.
[Illustration: RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH]
CHAPTER IV
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