Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [174]
In 1900 the German Naval Law precipitated the abandonment of isolation by England. Providing for nineteen new battleships and twenty-three cruisers in the next twenty years, it made explicit Germany’s challenge to British supremacy at sea, the fulcrum of Britain’s existence. It convinced Britain that she needed friends. In 1901 the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty put a bottom under good relations with the United States. In 1902 the isolation of self-sufficient strength, once so splendid and confident, was ended forever by a formal alliance with Japan. In 1903 the new King of England, Edward VII, prepared the ground for reconciliation with France by a visit of ceremony to Paris carried out with tact and aplomb. In 1904 the new policy culminated in an Anglo-French Entente, disposing of old quarrels, establishing a new friendship and fundamentally defining the balance of Europe.
At the same time, England set about refitting her physical forces to meet a world full of new challenges. Her Army having been revealed in action as something less than in step with modern times, Balfour, now Prime Minister, set up a Committee of Imperial Defence to formulate strategy and reorganize and modernize the armed forces. He appointed Sir John Fisher as one of its three members and would have appointed Captain Mahan to succeed Lord Acton as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge but that King Edward objected on the ground that English historians were available. For all his rarefied pose, Balfour’s appreciation of the two hard-headed veterans of The Hague revealed a bent parallel to theirs. In 1904 he appointed Fisher First Sea Lord. The new head of the Navy had momentous plans in mind.
In the same year, Russia went to war with Japan, soon to become mired in a series of losing campaigns marked by the surrender of Port Arthur in January, 1905, and a humiliating, although not decisive, defeat at the Battle of Mukden in March. Three weeks later the alarm bell rang for Europe in Morocco.
To Germany’s intense resentment, the Anglo-French Entente had recognized a French sphere of influence in Morocco. Now that Russia could not come to France’s aid, Bülow and Holstein determined on a test of strength that would expose the weakness, as they believed, of the Entente. On March 31, 1905, the Kaiser stunningly, if nervously, descended upon Tangier in a challenge that every nation recognized. Europe shook under the impact and the gesture succeeded too well. It completed the work of the Kruger telegram, convincing Germany’s neighbors of her ultimate belligerent intent and of the need for more specific preparations than a mere Entente. “Roll up the map of Europe,” Pitt had said in despair ninety-nine years before when Napoleon won at Austerlitz. In a different spirit England unrolled it now. She entered into military conversations with France, underpinning their partnership with arms and envisioning, for the first time since Waterloo, an expeditionary force to the Continent in aid of a specific ally against a specific enemy.
In May, 1905, the Russian Baltic Fleet met its fatal rendezvous in the Straits of Tsushima in the world’s first head-on clash of modern capital ships on the high seas. Though the Russian fleet was annihilated, its defeat did not end the war, thus proving Bloch’s thesis, though few realized it, that against the total resources of a nation, victories on the battlefield were no longer decisive.