The first major example in what would become a long line of popular pre-1914 British invasion-scare narratives was the inflammatory 1871 tale The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. Through its vivid depiction of a German invasion and conquest of Britain, this story was designed to serve as a warning to Britons about the necessity of securing the nation's defenses. The dramatic impact of this work on the Victorian reading public and the political culture of the era has been treated by a number of scholars, most notably I. F. Clarke.Footnote ¹ Yet little attention has been accorded to the reaction it elicited from the professional peers of its author, Lieutenant-Colonel George Chesney. This interdisciplinary essay – which joins the study of literature with military history and politics – seeks to shed new light on the circumstances surrounding this extraordinarily influential tale, as well as on the genre it popularized, in large part by examining its reception by British officers. It begins by describing the tale's prehistory and emergence into widespread popularity and then evaluates the work's reception within armed forces circles. Some of the most trenchant assessments of this literary text, it turns out, were delivered within the austere confines of the Royal United Service Institution, a body whose meetings functioned as the crucible in which British military and naval judgments were forged.

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In 1862, Liberal Member of Parliament Richard Cobden, the most renowned antimilitarist British statesman of the mid-nineteenth century, published the book The Three Panics: An Historical Episode. A critical review of the invasion alarms from the previous fifteen years, Cobden's work is the principal Victorian counter-text to the innumerable invasion-scare tracts of this period, forerunners of the pre-1914 invasion-scare narrative. In it, one may trace the origins of the debates over military and naval spending that would flourish over the subsequent half-century. Cobden's central claims are that interested parties have manipulated public and governmental perceptions of potential threats to Britain and that elevations in armaments expenditures have been stimulated by such manipulations. He copiously supplies evidence in support of these contentions, primarily from the records of Parliamentary proceedings. He also describes the palpably illiberal political climate that accompanied these xenophobic episodes. During them, “To contend against the probability of invasion was to take the side of the enemy, to be called anti-English, or accused of being for peace at any price; nay, to require even proofs or arguments to show the reality of the danger, was to invite suspicion of want of patriotism” (648).

The first substantial invasion panic to occur in the four decades since the crisis brought on by amassed French forces on the Channel coast (before the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar set Perfidious Albion out of Napoleon's reach), Cobden observes, was precipitated in late 1847, and it continued into the following year. The cause was the unauthorized publication of a letter written by the Duke of Wellington to Major-General Sir John Burgoyne, the Inspector General of Fortifications. The letter expressed the concerns of the nation's foremost military authority over what was presumed to be the newly diminished state of the country's defenses, given “the alteration produced in maritime warfare and operations by the application of steam to the propelling of ships at sea.”Footnote ² The appearance of the letter “led to an immediate ‘invasion panic,’ and furnished a never-failing argument to successive Governments for increased warlike expenditure” (548).

What Cobden identifies as having provided “the occasion for the outburst of the second invasion panic” was the December 1851 coup d'état in France by Louis Napoleon, which was followed by “the usual eruption of pamphlets, written chiefly by military and naval officers, containing projects for every variety of defensive armament” (556–57). Under these circumstances, “The traditional terror connected with the name of Bonaparte was revived; people began again to talk of invasion, and before Christmas [of 1852] the alarmists had more complete possession of the field than at any previous time” (568). After this episode had run its course, several years of calm followed, to the point where in 1858 “the pamphlet literature scarcely takes note of the topic of a French invasion” (593–94). Following this state of relative quiescence, the third panic erupted in 1859 in response to allegations of a radical modernization and augmentation of the French fleet, and it continued through 1861. Cobden identifies Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, as the primary instigator in this instance. During many debates in the House of Commons about national security, Palmerston had repeatedly opined, following the Duke of Wellington's lead, “that the application of steam to navigation has supplied greater facilities for offence than defence; that it has, in fact, deprived us of our great bulwark, by throwing . . . a ‘steam bridge’ over the Channel” (658). He subsequently became the principal advocate of a massively expensive project to fortify the Portsmouth area, the site of England's chief naval base. This endeavor was termed “the Palmerston follies” by the prime minister's detractors generally and a “panic-begotten scheme” by Cobden specifically (671).Footnote ³

The common element to each of the three episodes Cobden chronicles is that they resulted, he suggests, in tremendous and unnecessary costs to the British taxpayer as well as to the prospects for peace. His exasperation is captured in a statement he cites as having been made in Parliament by the Earl of Derby in 1852, shortly before the latter's ascension to the role of prime minister:

Nineteen years after this pronouncement and nine years after the publication of The Three Panics, Lieutenant-Colonel (later General Sir and Member of Parliament) George Tomkyns Chesney of the Royal Engineers entered the public debate on the invasion question with his daring narrative The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer, and he would speak of subjugation. Chesney was one of the militaristically inclined armed forces professionals of the sort Cobden believed to pose a threat to British public discourse. Yet his contribution to the debate would not be at all in line with what Cobden had characterized as “the usual eruption of pamphlets, written chiefly by military and naval officers, containing projects for every variety of defensive armament.”

Set fifty years after a successful German invasion of England, The Battle of Dorking, which was anonymously published, was designed to draw public attention to what its author viewed as a deplorable combination of foolishness and indifference, among British governmental officials and the public, toward defense matters. The text recounts a sordid tale of national defeat and disgrace by an English member of the Volunteers who has been wounded during the conflict. (The Volunteers consisted of a part-time, non-professional defense force that had been disbanded in 1814 and reconstituted in 1859.) The story he tells to his grandchildren, who are about to emigrate from their now impoverished homeland, details the sundry inadequacies of the “helpless mob” of poorly trained and ill-equipped English land forces against the “disciplined invaders,” who have been in possession of both superior armaments and superior strategy (570). The vast spread of the Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets has thinned out the army and the navy alike: a second Mutiny in India, tensions with America over Canada, and incipient rebellion in Ireland have all drained the army while “the fleet was scattered abroad” in the West Indies, the China seas, and the northern Pacific shore of America, “where . . . we continued to retain possessions we could not possibly defend” (541). The outcome has been a temporary occupation of England, the exacting of a crippling indemnity necessitating a rate of taxation “which keep[s] us paupers to this day” (570), and a dismembering of the British Empire.

Aside from the general goal of firming up the resolve of what he represents as an enervated British populace, Chesney had a number of specific aims in mind for The Battle of Dorking. Most of these aims pertain to what he took to be an over-confidence in the Royal Navy and a corresponding neglect of the nation's military forces. The narrator recalls that before the German invasion, “[t]he fleet and the Channel” had been regarded as “sufficient protection. So the army was kept down, and the militia and volunteers were left untrained” (541). As a career army officer himself, Chesney especially strove to demonstrate the limited utility of the Volunteers. During the hostilities, these amateur troops are led by “officers who did not know their work, without ammunition or equipment, or staff to superintend,” and the result is that “[o]ur handful of regular troops was sacrificed almost to a man” (570). Thus does Chesney promote the conviction that training for the Volunteers must be enhanced and that the professional army must be bolstered. The story is also designed to make readers aware of a number of other problems associated with national defense. The need for multiple arsenals, for example, is illustrated with the reported capture of Woolwich (“our only arsenal”) and the realization that there is consequently “[n]o hope . . . of saving the country” (566). Given the straightforwardness of these sorts of polemical intentions, texts such as The Battle of Dorking tend to be constructed of a limited number of stock components. Indeed, so structurally static was this genre that all of what would become its standard motifs were already in evidence in Chesney's story.Footnote ⁵ Further, while there had earlier been abortive forays into the invasion-scare genre,Footnote ⁶ the circumstances in 1871 proved conducive for its emergence as a sustained literary form. In fact, the tale was so widely read and discussed that the chief successor to the pacific legacy of Cobden, Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, was obliged to denounce it publicly.

One wonders how Cobden would have responded to the public row over The Battle of Dorking (he died six years before its publication), but what is certain is that when his followers updated his work they overlooked it entirely in assessing the period. The Three Panics would actually be updated twice, in 1905 and 1913. The first time, the project was written by a group terming itself “The Cobden Club” and consisting of nine men, including the Radical Member of Parliament Murray Macdonald, the editor of the peace-advocacy journal Concord G. H. Perris, and the antimilitarist journalist and editor F. W. Hirst. The product was the book The Burden of Armaments: A Plea for Retrenchment. In this study, the authors suggest that The Three Panics “produced a most powerful effect on public opinion. It reduced the panic-mongers to silence. It was mainly instrumental in bringing about the movement in favour of economy which began in 1863, and was maintained by successive Governments, irrespective of party, for more than twenty years” (6). Much the same account would be given of this period in the second updating of Cobden's study, the 1913 volume The Six Panics and Other Essays, which was written by one member of the committee that had authored the 1905 volume, F. W. Hirst: “to Cobden's scathing exposure of these senseless frights and of the fabrications accompanying them, we may trace the fact that from 1862 to 1884 there was no recurrence of panics, and no expansion of armaments” (38–39).

One should note the presupposition in both The Burden of Armaments and The Six Panics that invasion alarms, political controversy, and armaments expenditures generally overlap – an assumption Cobden himself had not made. Insofar as the barometer of Hirst and the other Cobden Club members is specifically governmental expenditures, as distinct from public discussion (or the even less readily calculable quantity of public anxiety), they are correct. But this measure hardly tells the whole story. Nor is it the case that public debate stimulated by invasion-scare fiction was excluded from these accounts. Hirst, in fact, notes the influence of Major Guy du Maurier's popular 1909 invasion-scare play An Englishman's Home. (The play was observed in a London Times review of its opening performance to be the “sort of thing . . . familiar enough ever since ‘The Battle of Dorking’” [“Wyndham's Theatre” 10], and its propagandistic aims were transparently demonstrated in a recruiting booth set up in the theater for those inspired to enlist in the new Territorial Army on the spot.) He complains that this drama “was patronized by the Court, and the Censor refused to allow it to be parodied” (67). He also goes so far as to assert sweepingly,

For someone who has complained about the influence of du Maurier's invasion-scare play, kept his finger on the pulse of public debate (as the editor of the prominent journal the Economist), and closely examined the previous half-century of British history, this last point is a curiously egregious error to make. Published in the immediate aftermath of the startling display of German military might in the Franco-Prussian War, The Battle of Dorking was conceived and written specifically in response to the lessons of this epochal conflict, the failure of which to heed is cited as the cause of the imagined German conquest of England. Further, the story was without a doubt one of the most heavily read and discussed works of the Victorian era. The May 1871 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, in which it first appeared, was reprinted six times, after which the tale was reissued as a six-penny pamphlet, and by July 110,000 copies had been sold. The story also had a wide international readership in English-speaking areas (including the United States, New Zealand, and Canada) as well as elsewhere in the form of Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Swedish translations (Clarke, The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914 14–15).

In addition to the story's astonishing publication figures, another indication of its fame is the fact that a number of tales were written to debunk its contentions in the months following its initial appearance. The narrator of the short counter-text After the Battle of Dorking; or, What Became of the Invaders! claims, “Everybody has read it” (5), and the assertion is, indeed, corroborated by the historical evidence.Footnote ⁷ In several other such texts, the signal devices of The Battle of Dorking are adapted while its representation of the events is repudiated. In The Siege of London: Reminiscences of “Another Volunteer,” the narrator, as in Chesney's version, has been a member of the Volunteers who has fought against the invaders and is asked decades later by his grandchildren for an account of the events. In this rendering, however, Chesney's seemingly authoritative speaker is represented as cowardly and delusional: the reader is informed that “from the moment the actual narrator received that blow on his skull, whilst hiding himself in the shed, the detail of his history becomes a tissue of absurdity” (J. W. M. 3).Footnote ⁸ Similarly, The Other Side at the Battle of Dorking; or, The Reminiscences of an Invader – which purports to be a translation from the German of “Herr Moltruhn, one of our late ‘Prisoners of War’” – “is a close parallel to, and often almost a literal reproduction of the narration contained in the notorious ‘Battle of Dorking,’” yet “it corrects or rejects the curious hallucinations” of the original version (Moltruhn 4).Footnote ⁹

Given the extraordinary renown of The Battle of Dorking, the fact that it goes unmentioned in both The Burden of Armaments and The Six Panics is difficult to understand. Yet while the historical account of Cobden's successors is thus somewhat selective, and is apparently based on an inflated estimation of what Hirst terms “the efficacy of Cobden's medicine,” it is important to bear in mind that although there seems to have been a fairly strong correlation between widespread fears and the content of invasion-scare narratives, that correlation was densely mediated by political and financial interests. Such texts did not mirror but rather were designed to manipulate British public opinion. Further, however the oversights in the historical record by Cobden's followers are to be explained, and however one generally assesses the relationship between popular texts and social history, what is clear is that whether one detects a “panic” to be occurring at any given moment in history is largely a function of where one takes one's readings. This fact has important implications for how one evaluates the role of invasion-scare fiction in public debate and governmental policy matters. In fact, insofar as immediate results in the form of expenditures and recruiting figures for the Volunteers are concerned, The Battle of Dorking appears to have had little discernible effect. As John Gooch has noted in The Prospect of War: Studies in British Defence Policy 1847–1942, the tale “was inventive and popular, but its importance has probably been over-emphasized. The public bought invasion stories but did not swallow their message unquestioningly: the years from 1868 to 1872 were disastrous for Volunteer recruiting, despite Chesney's efforts” (5).Footnote ¹⁰ As for the question of public controversy, irrespective of policy and public spending, whereas Cobden's successors overlook the effects of The Battle of Dorking and similarly inclined narratives from this era, I. F. Clarke assesses the public mood largely based on the story's publication figures and an evaluation of the Blackwood's archives. Based on this information, Clarke concludes that “By the end of September [1871] sales of The Battle of Dorking pamphlet editions had gone into a terminal decline. By April 1872, when Chesney received his last cheque from John Blackwood, the British had begun to forget the panic and the alarm of The Dorking Episode” (“Before and After The Battle of Dorking” 44).Footnote ¹¹

Yet while the public debate was subsiding, and although expenditures on the military remained generally moderate during this period (the price of the extensive army reforms overseen at this time by Secretary of State for War Edward Cardwell notwithstanding), the professional debate appears to have been just heating up. In fact, several weeks after the last payment for The Battle of Dorking was received by its author, one Lieutenant-Colonel Chesney of the Royal Engineers attended a lecture at the Royal United Service Institution, which, to judge from the fallout, constituted the professional equivalent of the public quarrel over the story. The address was delivered by a Liberal Member of Parliament, William Vernon Harcourt, on May 15, 1872, one year after the initial publication of The Battle of Dorking and eight months after Gladstone's denunciation of it. The following year, Harcourt would be appointed by Gladstone to be the country's solicitor general, and he would later serve in Gladstone's cabinet as home secretary and then as chancellor of the exchequer. Over a span of more than two decades, he would be the prime minister's chief ally in opposing armaments spending. Although in 1872 Harcourt was not as politically prominent as he would later become, he had already earned a reputation as one of the keenest legal minds of the era and as one of the most skillful and tenacious debaters in the House of Commons. Having recently waged a public campaign against those who warned of the alleged designs on Britain of rival powers, he had been invited to speak on a topic of his own choosing associated with naval and military matters. He selected “Our Naval and Military Establishments Regarded with Reference to the Dangers of Invasion.”

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The Royal United Service Institution, where Harcourt delivered his talk, had been founded by the Duke of Wellington in 1831 as a forum for the most informed and qualified assessors of national and imperial defense subjects to share their thoughts with one another. From 1857 onward, the organization's proceedings were published in the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution in the form of transcripts of the lectures and the ensuing discussions. The transcripts, like those published of Parliamentary proceedings in Hansard, were apparently edited for grammar but were otherwise printed verbatim. The meetings took place at Whitehall Yard, and during these events the most eminent army and navy officers of the era engaged in the competition for first premises and for lines of analysis and argumentation. Indeed, these proceedings likely had a longer-term effect on governmental policy than did the short-term spikes of public debate stimulated by such texts as The Battle of Dorking, which evidently did not immediately translate into policy changes. Although the essays, lectures, and discussions published in the RUSI journal tend to be arcane and highly detailed (on such matters as tonnage of warships and food supplies for troops), they are among the most edifying sources of primary material available.

This particular RUSI event, pitting a distinguished antimilitarist Liberal politician against the combined forces of the army and navy at the beginning of the mass popularity of the invasion-scare genre, serves to illuminate the contours of the debate and the fracture lines between groups that competed for public and governmental support. A renowned public speaker, Harcourt delivered a masterful rhetorical exercise in irony, beginning with his opening observations:

His Socratic protestations notwithstanding, Harcourt did have a thesis: that claims lately made as to an alleged danger to Britain, and subsequent calls for an expansion of the army in particular, were without basis. He observed early in his address that “a question [that has] very much agitated public attention [has been that of] the invasion of this country” (577), and that “[t]here have been many popular publications which have agitated the public mind,” most notably “the well-known publication called ‘The Battle of Dorking’” (579). He then proceeded to contest the assumptions upon which the tale is based. This lecture, delivered to an audience of the country's foremost representatives of the armed forces, was thus specifically designed as a response to the controversy stirred up over the publication of The Battle of Dorking. Indeed, in an extensive letter published four months earlier in the London Times, Harcourt had claimed that “You will never have an end to panics or a limit to expenditure till you have Governments courageous enough to tell the people that their fears are unfounded,” and he went on to accuse “the ingenious author of The Battle of Dorking” of being one of “the apostles of panic” who had incited a “shameful and chronic state of public alarm” (“England in 1802 and 1872” 4).

While the guidelines of the RUSI meetings forbade political discussion (the chairman, General Sir William Codrington, reminded the participants of this rule at the outset of the lecture [575]Footnote ¹²), the bristly exchanges that ensued make clear that the armed forces members vehemently opposed Harcourt's presuppositions and analytical method – so much so that they required two full sessions in order to air their grievances. Moreover, the records of the organization's proceedings for the subsequent years illustrate that the resentments engendered within this forum by the Liberal politician were substantial and enduring. As Major-General T. B. Collinson would peevishly recall in his 1877 lecture titled “On the Present Facilities for the Invasion of England, and for the Defence Thereof,” the “able lawyer” Harcourt had “turned the discussion into the form rather of a contest in a court of law, than a debate on the best mode of defending these islands” (6). And during the follow-up discussion, General Sir Percy Douglas, noting that he had been present five years earlier during Harcourt's lecture, would concur with this sentiment and pronounce himself “delighted on this occasion to find a lecture given in a totally opposite sense” (81).Footnote ¹³

The collective ire of Britain's joint services against Harcourt would culminate twenty years after his 1872 presentation in the important, and in many respects prescient, novel The Great War of 1892, which depicts a world war ensuing from hostilities that break out in the Balkan states. Serialized in 1892 and published in revised form the following year under the title The Great War of 189 –: A Forecast, this text was written by a group of well-known authorities on warfare, including several military and naval officers, and the endeavor was led by the renowned figure Rear-Admiral Philip Colomb.Footnote ¹⁴ The relative importance of this novel among the many other future-war fictions published during this era is indicated in the fact that it was singled out for censure by peace advocates. While the story was being serialized, a letter about it written by the Austrian Baroness Bertha von Suttner – whose landmark antiwar novel Die Waffen nieder (1889) would be published in an English translation later that year under the title Lay Down Your Arms – was read at an Executive Committee of the London-based International Arbitration and Peace Association. In this letter, she characterized the tale as “calculated to inflame international passions” and inquired as to “whether anything could be done to stop its publication.” The committee subsequently passed a resolution condemning the story as “adapted to incite and exaggerate international animosities” (Concord 58).Footnote ¹⁵

Early in the fictitious war chronicled in The Great War of 1892, a German occupation of Belgian territory appears to be imminent, and apprehensions abound as to “the uncertain future of Antwerp,” which will become a “menace to Britain . . . if it pass[es] into other hands than those of the Belgians” (Colomb et al. 67). In order to understand the momentousness of this state of affairs, one must be aware of the centrality to Britain's defense plans of the British-engineered international 1839 treaty guaranteeing the independence and neutrality of Belgium. France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain were signatories, and it was the German violation of the treaty's terms that would ultimately bring the politically ambivalent island-nation into World War One. As Frank McLynn observes in Invasion: From the Armada to Hitler, 1588–1945, “the persistent British obsession with Flanders” is captured in the slogan “‘He who holds Flanders holds a pistol at England’” (6–7). (A variant of this phrase appears, for example, in the 1876 tale The Invasion of 1883: A Chapter from the Book of Fate, in which an occupation of Belgium by German troops leads “England . . . [to recognize] that a ‘pistol was pointed at her own head’” [9].) McLynn goes on to note, “The importance of Flanders lay in its superb and intricate inland waterway system of canals and rivers. An enemy in possession of the land of the Belgians could assemble a vast army inland and then convey it to Antwerp for immediate embarkation for England” (7).Footnote ¹⁶ It is consistent with these longstanding strategic assumptions that Harcourt, in his January 16, 1872, letter to the Times on British invasion scares, identified Antwerp as “the favourite bugbear of panic-mongers.”

In The Great War of 1892, during a scene depicting a discussion in the House of Commons over how to respond to the emergency posed by the threat to Belgium, William Harcourt (the Liberal leader) is portrayed as evincing “complacency” in requesting a debate over the matter, he is made an object of laughter, and in the ensuing exchanges on the House floor with Arthur Balfour (the Conservative leader) he “display[s] a truculent aggressiveness which startled all listeners, so foreign was it to his previously disclosed nature” (68–69). Subsequently, Balfour reveals that there is, in fact, a contingency plan: the Conservative administration has prudently extracted from the Belgian authorities a secret agreement to permit British troops “to occupy and garrison the great fortress of Antwerp” under these circumstances (70). (In 1914 there would, of course, be no such definitive plan.) The Conservatives having thus dealt with the crisis with foresight, the scene concludes with cheering for Balfour while Harcourt retreats “with the best grace he could assume” (71).

The fact that Harcourt was singled out for lampooning in The Great War of 1892 indicates the extent to which his political influence was recognized by armed forces members. Indeed, it had been widely anticipated that he would succeed Gladstone as prime minister when the latter resigned in 1894 over what were viewed by some as exorbitant navy estimates. He was at the time the chancellor of the exchequer, although he would be passed over for the top post in favor of the more congenial Lord Rosebery.Footnote ¹⁷ Like Harcourt, so too had Gladstone been excoriated in tendentious militaristic fiction, including several follow-up texts to The Battle of Dorking. In The Suggested Invasion of England by the Germans, Gladstone and his Secretary of State for War Cardwell, having “the look of highly respectable commercial clerks,” are manifestly unfit to hold office (6). In After the Battle of Dorking; or, What Became of the Invaders! the events conclude with Gladstone and Cardwell imprisoned and awaiting trial and likely execution for their mismanagement of the nation's defenses (18). And in The Commune in London; or, Thirty Years Hence: A Chapter of Anticipated History, during a German invasion of Britain a London mob destroys a statue of Gladstone, the politician who has been “to blame for the misfortunes which have recently befallen our arms on our own soil” (Hemyng 9).Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, when Gladstone, in September of 1871, condemned the “famous article called ‘The Battle of Dorking’” with the claim that “such follies . . . make us ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world,”Footnote ¹⁹ the subtext of his remarks may well have been these other tales in which he is so humiliatingly featured.Footnote ²⁰ It also bears noting that such portrayals were not limited to the immediate fallout from Chesney's story. In the 1885 novel The Siege of London, which depicts a French conquest of Britain, a London mob, yet again, destroys “every public statue of Mr. Gladstone” (“Posteritas” 32). The reader is pointedly informed that the names of such “sham patriots” and “place-seeking demagogues . . . would be remembered through all time, and sucking babes would be taught to curse them” (40).

Apropos of the activities of these exemplars of Victorian-era antimilitarism Gladstone and Harcourt, Alfred Vagts in A History of Militarism notes the paradox that, “Strange as it may seem, Great Britain originated the modern terror created by the dread of insecurity.” For the first of the nineteenth century's “spasmodic war panics . . . with a military significance arose in [Britain,] the country which was per se the safest.” The persistence of this disposition, Vagts observes, elicited the consternation of the members of Gladstone's administration generally, particularly Harcourt:

Long before Harcourt made this assertion, his reputation as a formidable opponent of vested armed forces interests had been established. Indeed, attitudes among army and navy officers had clearly hardened toward him already by the time he addressed the RUSI forum in 1872. The first meeting, on May 15, was adjourned in response to a motion from Captain Jasper Selwyn, who observed there had been insufficient time for the “great number of Naval Officers and others present who are quite ready to prove, to Mr. Harcourt's satisfaction, that many of his bases are utterly fallacious and ungrounded” (603). And, summing up the audience's posture toward Harcourt near the second discussion's end, on June 5, one Colonel Baker noted that the Liberal politician had entered into “a hot-bed of opposition” (622). Significantly, none of the officers present was more impassioned in his rebuttals than Colonel Chesney, who attended both sessions.

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The essence of Harcourt's argument resided in his suggestion that “the real question with reference to invasion is[:] . . . has the power of bringing men to England increased in the last 20 years relatively to the power of resisting their power of coming here, or has it diminished?” (578–79). Pointing out that The Battle of Dorking takes as a given the passage of the enemy troop transports, he asserted that “that is begging the whole question” (579) and, further, that such invasion-scare texts generally “have altogether passed by this consideration, and have declined to discuss it.” In short, Harcourt contended, no matter how formidable the armies of other powers may have been, the Royal Navy was able to prevent their being transported to English shores, and the concerns over invasion were thus without foundation.Footnote ²²

In the meeting's transcript, “Lieut.-Colonel CHESNEY, R. E. [Royal Engineers]” is recorded as having been the third to speak in response to Harcourt's presentation, following two other officers, and he evidently rose to the bait. Claiming that technology has “infinitely increased the advantages of those who make war,” he asserted, defending the presuppositions of the tale,

It may strike one as curious that Chesney, while freely speaking of himself in the first person, refers to the author of The Battle of Dorking in the third person. One could account for his choice of words by supposing he was sustaining the pretense that he had not written the anonymously published narrative. In fact, however, his reason for having drawn this distinction was quite straightforward: there were at the time two Lieutenant-Colonels named Chesney in the Royal Engineers – George Tomkyns Chesney and his elder brother Charles Cornwallis Chesney – and, as one explores the evidence beyond the record of the May and June 1872 RUSI gatherings, one learns that it was actually Charles who spoke in defense of The Battle of Dorking.Footnote ²³

Although the transcript of the 1872 RUSI meetings identifies the officer in question as only “Lieut.-Colonel CHESNEY, R. E.” (601), the text of Major-General Collinson's 1877 lecture on the invasion subject specifies that the speaker from five years earlier had been “Colonel C. Chesney” (12). The detailed knowledge of recent affairs in Germany – including of the new torpedo boat construction program – is also consistent with Charles Chesney's visit the previous year to Germany, where he had been sent by the British government to report on the circumstances surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. Among the trip's events that he recounted while responding to Harcourt's lecture was a conversation he had with a German who noted there had been “a great deal of talk in our newspapers frequently about the invasion of England” and who asked him for his “professional opinion as to the possibility of its being accomplished should such a thing be tried” (602).

Given Harcourt's earlier condemnation in the Times of the “author of The Battle of Dorking” as one of Britain's “apostles of panic,” Charles Chesney had presumably arrived at the meeting on May 15 prepared to vindicate the family honor.Footnote ²⁴ It is consistent with this proposition that his allusion to his brother's story took the form of an endorsement of what had been widely regarded as its least plausible aspect, as well as its enabling premise: the sudden destruction of that portion of the British fleet stationed in home waters. Positing the existence of “fatal engines [i.e., mines or torpedoes] which sent our ships, one after the other, to the bottom,” the tale charges that “The Government, it appears, had received warnings of this invention; but to the nation this stunning blow was utterly unexpected” (544). While responding to Chesney's contentions, Harcourt took up this matter again:

Harcourt would expand on these points in a pair of letters published in the London Times between the two RUSI meetings dedicated to his account of the invasion question. (The first of these letters appeared on May 24, nine days after the first meeting, and the second appeared on June 5, the very day of the second meeting.Footnote ²⁶) When the forum was reconvened, the new chairman, Major-General Eardley Wilmot, ruled that “the discussion should be confined to the points brought forward in Mr. Harcourt's address, and not be extended to the letters which had appeared in the Times between the 15^th May and that evening” (609). Chesney, however, irately observed of this technicality that “if we were, as suggested, to totally ignore all that has been said and written on this subject since we last met – not only in this country, for it has been largely discussed over in Germany – we shall be committing ourselves to a sham which might well send us all away ashamed of the unreality of such a proceeding” (625).Footnote ²⁷

It is understandable that Chesney was vexed by these procedural constraints. In the first of these two letters to the Times, Harcourt had specifically challenged the army officer's defense of the scenario sketched in his brother's tale: “What I should like Colonel Chesney to do,” he goaded the military professional, “would be to give us not a popular but a scientific version of the campaign of Dorking,” for “Nobody can be satisfied with the petitio principii [fallacious premise] of ‘The Battle of Dorking.’” Among those who found the premise of the Royal Navy's sudden eradication implausible, it bears adding, were a number of armed forces professionals. For example, Major-General Collinson, in his 1877 RUSI lecture, would suggest, “It is not necessary to call in the aid of submarine volcanoes, as did the ingenious author of the ‘Battle of Dorking’, to get rid of the omnipresent British fleet” (23).Footnote ²⁸ In the 1871 story The Suggested Invasion of England by the Germans, it is similarly asserted that the scenario of “the landing of a considerable army on the coasts of England . . . does not require the hypothesis of the clever author of the ‘Battle of Dorking,’ nor does it want his torpedoes to disable the English fleet” (16). George Chesney's sensitivity over this point may be inferred from the way in which he would return to it in his later future-set narrative The New Ordeal (1879): “It had come to be understood for some time back that it was impossible to foresee the future conditions of naval warfare. All that could be told with certainty seemed to be that, between torpedoes and ramming, all the ships on both sides would probably go to the bottom” (13).Footnote ²⁹

Harcourt's challenge to Charles Chesney in the Times was the sequel to the heated exchange between them over the impact of technological advancements on the country's defenses at the May 15 RUSI meeting. Harcourt had then responded to Chesney's defense of the premise of The Battle of Dorking by pointing out that if one believed the fleet could be “destroyed by one of those sudden developments which Colonel Chesney referred to” – that is, he quipped, if one granted that “a Vesuvius arose all round the British Islands and blew up all the British Fleet” – then one would have to conclude that the army would need to be preemptively enlarged beyond what even the most militaristic of Britons then regarded as conceivable proportions. He proceeded to explain his reasoning:

* * *

It is at this point – with the leveling of the charge of sophistry against “the military profession” – that the disagreement aired between William Harcourt and Charles Chesney in 1872 at the Royal United Service Institution may be discerned to illustrate the central difference in outlook between the opposing factions that would provide the impetus for the invasion-scare genre over the subsequent decades. The controversy basically resolved down to one issue identified by Colonel Baker toward the end of the second meeting. (It had been a letter by Baker to the Times to which Harcourt's second letter had responded. In his previous letter, Harcourt had stipulated that his lecture had been based on a gauging of “the force which must be provided to undertake an invasion of [Britain] with a reasonable probability of success.”Footnote ³¹) While elucidating the contention of Commander W. Dawson that “The defeat of the British Fleet may at this moment be an improbable contingency, but looking forward to futurity, we have no reason to suppose it to be an impossibility” (611), Baker concluded,

This claim was essentially a restatement of what George Chesney had written a year earlier in a letter published in the June 3, 1871, issue of the Spectator, as the public controversy about his story swirled. In this missive, which is headed “The Battle of Dorking” and teasingly signed “The Writer of the Tale in ‘Blackwood’ [sic],” he observed,

This logic would be taken a step further by Colonel F. N. Maude in the novel The New Battle of Dorking (1900), an updating of Chesney's tale in which it is pointed out that the limits of possibility should not be gauged based on assumptions about the rationality of potential aggressors. Remarking that “it is just as impossible to convince a foreigner that a surprise raid [on Britain] is doomed to failure, as it is to shake the faith of our own naval authorities in their power to prevent it,” Maude contends that “there exists in France a very strong party who believe emphatically that the stakes are well worth playing for; and we must always remember that the decision depends on what the French think, not on what we know” (x).Footnote ³⁴ His novel, which like its predecessor was anonymously published, is designed to illustrate this allegation by depicting a failed but horribly destructive French invasion of Britain.

The general continuities of the invasion debate's parameters in the decades before 1914, as well as the fact that the two positions here staked out represent its basic antitheses, are illustrated in an essay titled “Invasion and the Laws of Probability” that appeared thirty-eight years after The Battle of Dorking. In this essay, which was published in 1909 in National Defence (the short-lived journal of the National Defence Association), Colonel S. A. Einem Hickson would make much the same point as George Chesney while targeting civilian politicians such as Harcourt.Footnote ³⁵ Hickson asserts that, because “other nations are prepared to pursue a policy of boldness and risk,” Field-Marshal Lord Roberts (the president of the National Service League, which advocated for the creation of a million-man army) is correct to claim that, in declining to augment the army by adopting conscription, the people of Britain “are wilfully gambling with the safety of the country and Empire, and that invasion is not only possible, but far more easily possible than is usually supposed” (429, 431):

Contending that “[c]hance can never be effectively counterbalanced except by predominating strength” (432), Hickson proceeds to reinforce his point by sketching the likely consequences of a successful invasion of Britain.

It is in similar terms that Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell, in the opening passage of Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (1908), draws an analogy between the seven-month Siege of Mafeking by Boers in 1899–1900 (for service during which he became a national hero) and a potential siege of Britain. In what amounts to a flexibly adaptable script for Boy Scout leaders to convey to their young charges in Britain while they inculcate the message that “Every boy ought to learn how to shoot and to obey orders,” he asserts,

The fundamental question that invariably arose in debates about national defense, in short, was that of the extent to which Britons ought to take precautionary measures against low-probability, high-impact military events. What those who were deemed “invasionists” typically claimed was that even highly unlikely eventualities must be thoroughly prepared for and in some cases actively forestalled, as the consequences of any given scenario coming to fruition are absolute – that is, unrelated to the degree of probability of its occurrence. In terms of war planning, and thus in terms of fiction based on such planning, this observation has important implications. Individuals charged with this anticipatory task often pointed out that it was not their role to prejudge the outcome of future diplomacy but rather to envision and prepare for all contingencies. As Jack Snyder assesses this outlook in The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914, while detailing the various “sources of bias” of war planners and specifically the cognitive effects of the “Hobbesian world” in which they are socialized, “The professional training and duties of soldiers force them to focus on threats to the state's security and on the conflictual side of international relations. Necessarily preoccupied with the prospect of armed conflict, they see war as a pervasive aspect of international life” (27–28). He goes on to note that, “Indeed, military officers often consider it their professional duty to assume the worst case” (203), a disposition that carries deeply self-fulfilling tendencies.Footnote ³⁸

Recognizing the conditioning power of this milieu is basic to making intelligible the utter irreconcilability of the disputants in the pre-1914 invasion debate as well as the specific approach adopted by George Chesney in The Battle of Dorking and by his imitators. Such narratives were essentially exercises in worst-case thinking that were designed to provide a vivid, concrete basis for establishing what their hawkish authors regarded to be sound thresholds of defensive preparation and anticipatory action. Accordingly, whereas Harcourt and his allies charged proponents of militarism with obscuring the distinction between the plausible and the fantastic, the Chesney brothers and their allies charged civilian lawmakers and the public generally with insufficient imagination for danger and hence a potentially catastrophic lack of vigilance. This would be the central point of difference in the contentious exchanges over the ensuing years, and the primary aim of the invasion-scare form was to advocate for the latter position. The May and June 1872 Royal United Service Institution meetings, during the first phase of the genre's mass popularity, thus provided the theme upon which the subsequent generations of controversy essentially comprised variations.