d. The Admiral expresses his agreement,
and says that it was a fatal blunder of the German Highest Command not
to use their submarine power at the very outbreak of the war to prevent
our Expeditionary Force from crossing the Channel and co-operating in
resisting the German advance towards Calais. From there Germany could
have commanded the Channel and bombarded London.

So he says, and we were quite aware all along that he might well think
so. The other thing that he makes plain by implication is that the
direct invasion of England was never contemplated by Germany in the face
of our command of the sea. I had long ago satisfied myself that this was
the German view, by a study of their military textbooks and from
conversations with high German officers. But, what was more important
than what I personally thought, the Committee of Imperial Defense, on
which I sat regularly during eight years, was clear about it, and this
after close study, and after hearing what the most eminent exponents in
this country of a different view had to urge before them.

Consequently our military policy was not doubtful. No doubt it would
have been a nice thing could we have possessed in 1914 a great army
fashioned and trained, not for firing rifles on the seashore, but for a
struggle on French and Belgian soil. But such an army would have taken
two generations at least to raise and train in peace time, and if we had
laid out our money on it after 1870 instead of on ships, we should not
have had the sea power which Tirpitz says gave us "bulldog" strength. In
strategy and in military organization you can not successfully bestride
two horses at once. He who would accomplish anything has to limit
himself. Possibly it was because this was not clearly kept in view even
in Germany that the volume before us is an exposition of a thesis which
is novel in these islands, that it was not England that was unprepared,
but Germany herself. For the confusion of objectives that led to this
Tirpitz blames Bethmann's peace policy, the parsimony of the Reichstag,
and the Emperor's failure to attain to clear notions about war aims.

He criticizes me for saying that there was in Germany before 1914 a war
party alongside of a peace party. It was really only the Bethmann
group, he declares, that believed in peace being built on anything else
than preponderance in armed power. The tradition of the German nation
and the view of all sensible statesmen in Germany, _e.g