[moscowexile]

When I said that the British Empire was the raison d'etre of the Royal Navy, I had in mind the twice-as-big-as-the-next-two-combined-fleets navy patrolling the sinews of British seaborne free enterpise trade and not King Harold the Great of Wessex's or Elizabeth I's wooden walls.


'We are entering a general European conflict because of German beastliness in its rape of poor little Belgium" was the cry of the British government in August 1914 and I still maintain that it was largely propagandist in nature: witness the British political cartoons of the time. Furthermore, Britain's noble defence of Belgium neutrality in 1914 was contradicted somewhat by the Salonika expedition of 1915 when French and British forces landed in Greece in order to bolster up Serbia by attacking Bulgaria. In that year, Serbia, whilst having bravely defended herself against the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the Serbs suffered the greatest losses in relation to population size of any participant in World War I), faced imminent defeat after having been attacked by Bulgaria, which had joined the Central Powers in order to expand, at Serbia's expense, in the Balkans. Problem was: Greece was neutral. Lloyd George disingeniously argued at the time that "there was no comparison between going through Greece and the German passage through Belgium."

The all too prescient Jackie Fisher hit the nail right on the head at the beginning of the 20th century when asked for a possible date for the outbreak of a general European conflict: his answer was that a general European war would start when the Kiel canal had been widened to facilitate the passage of dreadnoughts. He was almost spot on in his prediction. The canal widening began in 1907: it was completed in June 1914. A Royal Navy squadron was invited to the re-opening of the widened canal by Kaiser Wilhelm II, a grandson of Queen Victoria. The celebrations were cut short by the announcement of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg Empire, in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist.

The Royal Navy squadron promptly left Kiel to take up war stations. On leaving Kiel the squadron signalled to the Kaiser and his fleet: Friends today; friends in future; friends forever.

How tragic!