oportions
in the strength of other nations was treated as being the outcome of a
weak-minded apprehension of the foreigner."

When I was in Berlin in 1912, the last year in which, as I have already
said, I visited Germany, there were those who thought that Bethmann
Hollweg would shortly be superseded as Chancellor by his powerful rival,
Admiral von Tirpitz. But in these days the peace party in that country
was pretty strong, and the then Chancellor was regarded as a cautious
and safe man. It was later on, in 1913, when the new Military Law, with
L50,000,000 of fresh expenditure, was passed, that the situation became
much more doubtful. But the hesitation that existed in Government
circles in Berlin earlier was never shared by the author of the
"_Erinnerungen_," to which I now pass. One has only to look at the
portrait at the beginning of that volume to see what sort of a man the
author is. A strong man certainly, a descendant of the class which
clustered round the great Moltke, and gave much anxiety at times to
Bismarck himself.

[Illustration: ADMIRAL ALFRED P. VON TIRPITZ

LORD HIGH ADMIRAL OF THE GERMAN IMPERIAL NAVY FROM 1911 TO 1916.]

The Admiral possesses a "General Staff" mind of a high order. A mind of
this type has never been given a chance of systematic development in the
English Navy, where the distinction between strategy and tactics, on the
one hand, and administration on the other, has never been so sharply
laid down as it has been, following the great Moltke, in Germany. Even
Moltke himself was not satisfied with what had been accomplished in
Germany in this direction by the Army. He is said to have complained
that the General Staff building, which was put in the Thiergarten, while
the War Office was in Berlin itself, near the corner of the
Wilhelmstrasse, was only one mile distant from the War Office, when it
should have been two. For he held that the exactness of demarcation of
function, which was only to be attained if strategy and tactics were
studied continuously by a specially chosen body of experts, could not be
made complete if the War Office could get too easily at the General
Staff. But what he accomplished at least gave rise to a school of exact
military thought far in advance of any that had preceded it. The fruits
of this were reaped in the war with Austria in 1866, and still more in
that with France in 1870. And when the navy was first organized this
principle was introduced into its or