Page:The Next Naval War - Eardley-Wilmot - 1894.djvu/37

 hopeless. The First Lord plainly declared that unless the admiral was supported he must ask to be relieved of his office, and the Prime Minister, seeing the urgency of the case, directed that the supreme control should be vested in the naval authority. This was nowhere received with greater satisfaction than at the ports, for in the meantime the generals in command had arrived at a sense of the anomalous position in which they had been placed. Men had been allotted to complete the manning of the forts, but they had not the slightest idea of what constituted friends or foes. They could be with difficulty restrained from firing at everything that approached. At the request of the officers in command a naval party was sent to each fort who could pronounce upon the character of every craft that came near. It was found that forts, lights and submarine mines could be efficiently worked as a single organisation, but under dual control it must result in chaos and probably disaster. Barely a year before the French Minister of War had pointed this out in the Chamber, and every other nation had adopted the policy we now found essential. But such a change cannot be perfected in a few hours, and the enemy was not blind to experience of the past, which had always found us unready in the early stages of a conflict. He knew that give us time and all these defects would disappear. Everything depended on striking immediate blows. These were about to fall.