Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [167]
The United States’ position was made unequivocal by its hard realist, Captain Mahan, privately if not in the public meetings. His government, he told the British, would on no account even discuss naval limitation; on the contrary, the coming struggle for the markets of China would require a “very considerable” increase in the American squadron in the Pacific, which would affect the interests of at least five powers. In every commission and discussion Mahan made his presence felt like a voice of conscience saying “No”; it was, however, a conscience operating not in behalf of peace but in behalf of the unfettered exercise of belligerent power. He had “the deepest seriousness of all,” wrote one observer.
It led him to oppose his own government’s traditional position in favor of the immunity of private property at sea. What had been good for the United States as a weak neutral, Mahan believed, would no longer be good for her as a Great Power. The right of capture was the essence of sea power, especially of British sea power, with which he believed America’s interests were now united. He looked ahead to the rights of the belligerent rather than back to the rights of the neutral.
When White, according to instructions, attempted to have the matter put on the agenda, Fisher carried the opposition for Mahan. Take the case of neutral coal, he suggested: “You tell me that I must not seize these colliers. I tell you that nothing that you, or any power on earth, can say will stop me from seizing them or sending them to the bottom, if I can in no other way keep their coal out of the enemy’s hands.” For the opposite reason Germany, of course, supported the American proposal of immunity from capture. For once in favor of something, Count Münster jumped at the chance to put “our powerful influence behind this principle” and Bülow was delighted to approve a measure so obviously “in the interests of humanity in general.” Both were pulled up short by their own naval delegate, Captain Siegel, whose reasoning suggested the mind of a chess-player trained by a Jesuit. The purpose of a navy, he pointed out to his government, was to protect the seaborne commerce of its country. If the immunity of private property were accepted, the Navy’s occupation would be gone. The public would demand reduction in warships and refuse to support naval appropriations in the Reichstag. In short, Captain Siegel made it clear that if the German Navy was to have a raison d’être, property must be left open to seizure, even in the interest of the enemy.
Discussions of this kind stimulated and absorbed the participants. The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention. When the restriction of new weapons or prohibition of as yet undeveloped ones came up for discussion, the military and naval men, as alert as Captain Siegel, keenly defended their freedom of enterprise. The Russian proposal that the powers should agree “not to radically transform their guns or increase their calibres for a certain fixed period” was allowed to founder on the problem of inspection and control. Sir John Ardagh pointed out there would be nothing to prevent a state from constructing rifles of a new pattern and storing them in arsenals until needed. This caused a Russian delegate, M. Raffalovitch, to reply hotly that “public opinion and parliamentary institutions” should be adequate safeguard. Considering the source, this was not impressive. Mahan raised the same objection to proposals for limiting the calibre of naval guns, thickness of armor plate and velocity of projectiles. Any form of international control, he said, would be an invasion of sovereignty, to which all the delegates at once agreed.
In the debate on extending the rules of the Geneva Red Cross Convention of 1868 to naval warfare, the question was raised of rescuing sailors from the water after battle. This was the occasion that evoked Fisher’s explosion about feeding prisoners gruel. When the debate was over his chief was able to report, “Thanks to the energetic