Page images
PDF
EPUB
[graphic]

no ships and guns, there cannot be any operations; if the operations are badly conducted, the best gunnery will be of no avail; a new technical design may revolutionise operations; and all operations must rest on a basis of sound discipline and good administration.

Two other functions attach themselves to a staffHistory and Staff Training. The object of History is to observe what has been done and reduce it to clear and simple expression. This is an absolute necessity. It is the ledger of the business. There is no greater stimulus to efficiency than an accurate record of the work actually done and the method of its execution; and the want of such a record greatly increases the difficulty of staff work. A Training and Staff Duties Division has therefore been found necessary, to deal with principles of training and staff organisation, and to supervise staff training and the compilation of a staff history and manuals.

In peace, the work of a staff is mainly directed towards the collection of information, the study of operations of war, staff training, and investigation and research. It has been suggested in some quarters that the Naval Staff might be reduced. It has been reduced. The Mercantile Movements Division, the Anti-Submarine Division, the Minesweeping Division, have all been closed; but a Staff must at the very least consist of an Operations Division, an Intelligence Division, and a Secretariat. Moreover, the Naval Staff must have a Planning Division or Section attached to it and detached from current work (witness the experience of 1911-the Agadir incident; also that of 1917 in Convoy and AntiSubmarine work, and Minelaying). These divisions must not be independent, or they will work in opposition to one another (as was shown in 1909-12). They must be co-ordinated under a Chief of the Naval Staff. The C.N.S. must evidently see eye to eye with the First Sea Lord, and must possess weight and authority sufficient to meet the Chief of the Imperial General Staff on the same plane. In fact, he must be the First Sea Lord; witness the experience of 1912-16 and the appointment of Lord Jellicoe as First Sea Lord and C.N.S. in 1917. But the First Sea Lord has other functions to perform, and must therefore be assisted by a Deputy C.N.S., and, if the amount of work requires it, by an

[graphic]
[graphic]

Assistant C.N.S. This is the system which has gradual evolved itself from the Naval Intelligence Departme of the eighties, as the outcome of actual war experien It consists at present of eight divisions. Of these, fiv namely, Operations, Plans, Naval Intelligence, Trade ( questions of maritime trade), and Local Defence (loc defences, booms, mine-laying and mine-sweeping), a associated with strategy and the conduct of operation two, the Gunnery Division and Torpedo Division, repr sent the principal weapons of offence and form a lin with the technical departments; one, the Training an Staff Duties Division, deals with general principles o training and staff co-ordination, staff training and th compilation of historical monographs and manuals. It essential form is based on two principles, namely, distinction between 'Operations' and 'Administration and the attachment of the Office of Chief of the Nava Staff to that of First Sea Lord.

To regard this organisation merely as a naval o military one would be a narrow-minded point of view It has a far wider aspect. It is a system of control which is found operative to some extent in all great houses o business, and whose study, with a view to its application not merely to particular branches of industry, but t forms of government, will wonderfully repay study and investigation. It is to the credit of Sir Eric Geddes and Lord Jellicoe that they initiated rapidly and in time o stress a system which brought the war to a successfu conclusion. On that great day in November 1918 (very different from Der Tag' as miraged in German toasts) when Admiral Beatty stood on the bridge of the 'Queer Elizabeth' watching in silence the German fleet being led captive into the mouth of the river inseparably associated with his name and fame-in that cloud of thought hovering around him, full of the battle-smoke of four long years of war, there must have loomed, bulky and immense in the background, the shadow, reaching out over all the oceans, of the Office of the Admiralty and the workings of its Staff.

ALFRED C. DEWAR.

Art. 8.-THE NEW GERMAN CONSTITUTION.

1. Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches Vom 11 August 1919. Taschenausgabe; Erläutert von Dr F. Giese. Zweite, verbesserte Auflage: Berlin, 1920.

2 The German Constitution. Translated into English. H.M. Stationery Office, 1919.

In undertaking to provide themselves with a republican constitution, the Germans have assumed a task which, in the happiest circumstances, would have been one of great difficulty. But the document which they have elaborated in adverse circumstances holds the field at present as the constitution under which the largest incorporated state in Europe is organised; and it is of more than passing interest to inquire into the forces which have shaped it, and the form which it has actually assumed under the impact of those forces.

Among the most obvious of the difficulties under which the framers of this document laboured was the extreme pressure of time. The abdication of the Kaiser was officially announced in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1918, and was signed by him at Spa on the following day. The reins thus dropped by the monarch were not taken up by the Bundesrath or Reichstag, but were seized by anarchic committees, self-appointed and exercising local authority only, which arose, as if by magic, in every part of the land. These were the so-called Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils, formed on the model of the Russian Soviets, and aiming at a dissolution of society, similar to that which Lenin had brought about in Russia. The effective opposition to these Red Republicans came from the Majority Socialists, who, joining in the formation of the Councils, laboured from within to ameliorate the system, and eventually succeeded in bringing about the calling together of a National Assembly on the footing of universal suffrage. The elections for that Assembly were held on Jan. 19, 1919. The Assembly met at Weimar on Feb. 8 following, and proceeded at once to regularise the position by adopting a provisional constitution for the new German State. After two days' debate that provisional constitution was adopted by the Assembly, promulgated by its President and treated as

the fundamental law on which the Assembly co ground its authority, and by which it could regulate proceedings for determining the provisions of permanent constitution.

The consideration of that more elaborate constituti made, of course, larger demands upon the time of Assembly. But the work was carried out with astonis ing despatch. It was on Feb. 24 that the subject w brought forward in an introductory speech by t Secretary of State for Internal Affairs, Dr Preuss; a the completed document was signed by the President Aug. 11, 1919, so that less than six months was co sumed by the Assembly in discussing and revising t draft and in coming to an agreement upon the fin form of the law. This rapid rate of progress was ma possible by the concurrence of three conditions whi it is not unimportant to bear in mind when passin judgment upon the work of the Assembly.

In the first place, there was something like unanimit upon the main features of the change to be effected i the constitution. In the next place, the universall entertained desire to be clear of the war and to mak a fair start with the work of repairing the havoc i had produced was felt by the German people of ever class with overmastering urgency. In the third place the Assembly was provided with a set of drafts em bodying all the views it was necessary to take int account, two of which, having some sort of officia character, became, naturally and in fact, the centre about which the elaborated document could crystallise Thanks to these facilitating influences a result wa reached within the time limit of an ordinary session o the British Parliament, which, in terms at least, remade the German State, converting it from a crowned federa tion of German States into a democratic organisation of the German folk.

It probably is not generally appreciated in this country how profoundly the political outlook of the German people changed in the course of the war. All shades of political opinion were, of course, entertained in that country before the war; and in the scheme of Government now adopted there is no feature for which

[graphic]

a powerful party did not contend in those far-off days. But the reputation of the administrators of the old Imperial system stood very high; and aspirations towards a fuller comprehension by the Government of the views of the people and of a fuller participation of the people's organ, the Reichstag, in the acts and responsibilities of Government were held as pious opinions Even those who held them did not then expect to see them become effective. But the pressure of the war, and especially the adverse turn of events which heralded its termination, produced a revolution in this point of view; and, when it became plain that not the joys of triumph but the labour of rebuilding a ruined state would furnish the programme of the immediately ensuing years, the governing classes hastily divested themselves of the desire to preside over the course of public events, and their chief representative, the Kaiser, came forward with a project for shifting on to the Reichstag the responsibility for policy and administration, which, in happier days, had been monopolised by an aristocratic Bundesrath and an autocratically governed administration. When, under the influence of the blows which shattered Germany's military power, the last of her militarist chancellors, Count Hertling, tendered his resignation, the Kaiser, in accepting it, announced a scheme for 'parliamentarising' the Government by making ministers responsible, not, as under the then existing system, to the Kaiser, but to the people in the Reichstag. The liberal Prince Max of Baden was installed as Chancellor to carry through the change; and, although the administration to which he succeeded was too discredited in public opinion to be able to carry out the reform, the fact that it was made the chief feature of his policy is evidence of the extent to which public opinion, even in the governing circles, had been converted to the view that henceforth the German people must take the control of their public affairs into their own hands and exercise the power of selecting as public servants the men who had won their confidence.

Thus the great obstacle to radical reform, the natural unwillingness to part with authority of the class which had held political power, and had exercised it during the years of peace to public satisfaction, had disappeared of

[graphic]
« PreviousContinue »