Churchill liked to work late at night, Fisher in the early morning. Thus there was a continuous control at the Admiralty; a stream of minutes, notes and letters passed between the two, and no move of any consequence was made by one man without the other having given his agreement. Fisher, coming to work at four or five in the morning, would find the fruits of Churchill’s labour of the previous night on his desk; and Churchill, arriving at his office later in the day, was sure to have a letter waiting for him with the famous green F scrawled on the bottom.

They quarrelled at times — as when Fisher in an outburst of rage against the Zeppelin raids wanted to take reprisals among the Germans interned in England — but these commotions were soon over, and at the beginning of 1915 Fisher was still ending his letters to his friend, ‘Yours to a cinder’, ‘Yours till hell freezes over’.

One wonders, naturally, how far Churchill’s very forceful personality may have pushed Fisher and the other admirals beyond the point where they themselves really wanted to go. In the Navy especially men were trained since boyhood to believe in the established system and to obey orders; one did not argue, the senior officer knew best. Discipline and loyalty — those were the two imperative things. Fisher and his brother admirals considered it their duty never to express any open disagreement with their Minister in a cabinet or War Council meeting. No matter whether they agreed with him or not they sat silent: and this silence was accepted as assent. Inside the Admiralty the admirals were of course free to state their views, but it may not always have been easy to do this. Churchill was young while they were older, he made the pace hot and the very brilliance and energy of his mind may not have encouraged his colleagues to express those half-formed ideas, those vague inconsequential questionings which sometimes contain the beginnings of an understanding of the real truth, the truth that is not always revealed by logic.

This, at any rate, is the real core of the mistrust of Churchill over the Dardanelles — that he bamboozled the admirals — and no matter how much he proves that he was right and they were wrong there will always be an instinctive feeling among some people that somehow or other he upset the established practices of the Navy at this time, and not in the Nelson manner, but as a politician. It is the old story of the conflict between the experimenter and the civil servant, the man of action and the administrator, the ancient dilemma of the crisis where, for the moment, the trained expert is dumbfounded and only the determined amateur seems to know the way ahead.

Churchill himself, in The World Crisis, makes it clear that he was perfectly well aware of this issue. He says, ‘The popular view inculcated in thousands of newspaper articles and recorded in many so-called histories is simple. Mr. Churchill, having seen the German heavy howitzers smash the Antwerp forts, being ignorant of the distinction between a howitzer and a gun, and overlooking the difference between firing ashore and afloat, thought that the naval guns would simply smash the Dardanelles forts. Although the highly competent Admiralty experts pointed out these obvious facts, this politician so bewitched them that they were reduced to supine or servile acquiescence in a scheme which they knew was based upon a series of monstrous technical fallacies.’

‘These broad effects,’ he adds pleasantly, ‘are however capable of refinement.’

Refine them he does, and with devastating force. Yet still, against all logic, the doubt remains: somewhere, one feels, there was a break in the flow of ideas between the young Minister and the sailors.

Up to the middle of January the admirals certainly had nothing to complain of. They had been consulted about the Dardanelles plan at every step of the way. They never liked the idea of going ahead without the backing of the Army, yet they gave their consent. But now, all at once, after the January 13 meeting, Fisher is beset with the deep empirical misgivings of old age. He cannot explain precisely what it is that causes this change of mind, but he is not Kitchener, he cannot just bluntly say, ‘No, I have decided not to go ahead with the matter’; he must give reasons. Moreover, he must give them to Churchill whom he likes and with whom he is on terms of almost emotional intimacy and to whom he must be loyal. There can be no half-measures between them: they must go into the thing wholeheartedly together or they must part.

And so, within the narrow room of his own conscience, caught as he is between his respect and friendship for Churchill and his loyalty to his own ideas, the old Admiral suffers a considerable strain. He chops and changes. He tries to fix his vague forebodings about the Dardanelles adventure on some logical argument, on any convenient pretext which will establish his general sense of danger and uneasiness. And Churchill, naturally, has no difficulty in proving him wrong.

The argument began over the strength of the Grand Fleet in the North Sea. Fisher’s point was that it was being so seriously weakened by the demands of the Dardanelles that it was losing its superiority over the German Fleet, and might find itself exposed to an attack under disadvantageous conditions. Churchill was able to reply that, far from this being the case, the Grand Fleet had been so strengthened since the outbreak of the war that its superiority over the Germans had been actually increased; and this would continue to be so after all the requirements of the Dardanelles had been met.

Fisher still persisted; he suggested that a flotilla of destroyers should be brought back from the Dardanelles, a move which in Churchill’s opinion would have crippled the venture at the outset. Then there was the question of the Zeebrugge Canal. For some time past there had been under discussion a plan for the Navy to sail in and block the canal to German shipping. Fisher began to express his doubts about this operation as well. He was indeed, he now revealed, against aggressive action of any kind, until the German Fleet had been defeated.

Matters came to a head on January 25, when Fisher put down his views in writing and sent them to Churchill with this note: ‘First Lord: I have no desire to continue a useless resistance in the War Council to plans I cannot concur in, but I would ask that the enclosed may be printed and circulated to members before the next meeting. F.’

The document expressed complete opposition to the whole Dardanelles scheme. In it Fisher wrote, ‘We play into Germany’s hands if we risk fighting ships in any subsidiary operations such as coastal bombardments or the attack of fortified places without military co-operation, for we thereby increase the possibility that the Germans may be able to engage our Fleet with some approach to equality of strength. The sole justification of coastal bombardments and attacks by the Fleet on fortified places, such as the contemplated prolonged bombardment of the Dardanelles Forts by our Fleet, is to force a decision at sea, and so far and no further can they be justified.’

The fact that it was intended only to use semi-obsolete battleships to force the Dardanelles, he went on, was no reassurance; if they were sunk the crews would be lost and these were the very men who were needed to man the new vessels coming out of the dockyards.

So then, Fisher argued, Britain should revert to the blockade of Germany and be content with that. ‘Being already,’ he concluded, ‘in possession of all that a powerful fleet can give a country we should continue quietly to enjoy the advantage without dissipating our strength in operations that cannot improve the position.’

Here then was a fundamental difference on policy, a reversal, it seemed to Churchill, of the whole spirit in which they had planned the Dardanelles operation together.