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The first is a November day in London in the year 1612. There is a curious hush in the city. Men and women go about with soft feet and grave faces. People whisper anxiously at street corners; even the noise in the taverns is stilled. The only sound is a melancholy wind howling up the river. Suddenly above the wind rises the tolling of a bell, and at the sound women cover their heads and weep, and men uncover theirs and pray. For it is the Great Bell of Paul’s, which tolls only for a royal death. It means that Henry, Prince of Wales, at the age of eighteen is dead.... He died of a malignant fever which puzzled the doctors. It was an age of strange diseases, but a prince was jealously guarded against them, and I think he must have caught the infection on one of his visits to Sir Walter Raleigh in the Bloody Tower, when he went to talk of high politics and hear tales of the Indies, and admire the model ship called The Prince, which Raleigh and Keymis had made for him. Prisons in those days, even prisons reserved for grandees, were haunts of pestilence, and in some alley of the Tower, in that heavy autumn weather, he may have caught the germ which brought him to his death. A chance breath drew the malignant micro-organism into his body, and he was doomed.

Suppose that breath had not been drawn, and that the Prince had lived the full span of life, for there was uncommon tenacity in his stock. So far as we can judge, he resembled his sister, Elizabeth of the Palatine, who was for many years the star to adventurous youth. In no respect did he resemble his brother Charles. He was a revenant from the Elizabethan Age, and his chief mentor was Walter Raleigh himself. He was a Protestant enthusiast, to whom Protestantism was identified with patriotism, after the stalwart fashion of Cromwell thirty years later. Not for him any philandering with Spain. He would have gladly warned England as Cromwell did in 1656: ‘Truly your great enemy is the Spaniard! He is naturally so—by reason of that enmity which is in him against whatsoever is of God.’ When a French marriage was proposed to him he told his father that ‘he was resolved that two religions should not lie in his bed.’

Had Henry lived, what might have happened? In European politics he would have made Britain the leader of the struggle against the Counter-Reformation. We cannot assess his abilities in the field, but, judging from the respect in which Raleigh held his brains, it is possible that he might have taken the place of Gustavus Adolphus. In any case Britain was a greater power than Sweden, and almost certainly he would have led the Continental Protestants. As for domestic affairs, it is clear that he had that indefinable magnetism which his sister had, and which attracted easily and instantly a universal popularity. He would have been a people’s king. More, he would have shared the politics of the vast bulk of his subjects, their uncompromising Protestantism, their nascent imperialism. In ecclesiastical matters he would have found the via media which Charles missed. He would not have quarrelled with his Parliaments, for his views were theirs. They would have followed him voluntarily and raised no question of rights against the Crown, because the Crown thought as they did, and one does not question the rights of a willingly accepted leader. The change from the Tudor to the modern monarchy would have been of a very different kind. There would have been no Civil War. Cromwell might have died the first general in Europe and Duke of Huntingdon, while the guide of the monarchy into new constitutional paths might have been a great Scotsman, James Graham, the first Duke of Montrose, who some time about the year 1645 effected the union of the Scottish and English Parliaments.

Let us slip a hundred years and take the summer of 1711, when Marlborough was facing Villars before the famous Ne Plus Ultra line of trenches. His classic victories were behind him, and the campaign of that summer is not familiar to the world like the campaigns of Blenheim and Ramillies and Malplaquet. Yet I think the most wonderful of all the great Duke’s exploits fell in that year, when he outwitted Villars and planted himself beyond the Scheldt at Oisy, between Villars and France, and within easy reach of Arras and Cambrai. Had he had his country behind him, I cannot but believe that he was in a position to take Paris and bring the French monarchy to its knees. But, as all the world knows, his country was not behind him. He had lost the Queen’s favour. Some small thing—an increasing arrogance in the manners of the Duchess Sarah, an extra adroitness in the diplomacy of Mrs. Masham—had wrought the change. Marlborough saw his triumphant career in the field cut short, and two years later came the Peace of Utrecht.

What might have happened had Mrs. Masham been less persuasive and the Duchess Sarah less domineering? As I have said, I do not think that anything could have kept Paris from Marlborough. With its capture would have come the degradation of the French monarchy, and the downfall from his pedestal of the Grand Monarque. With such a cataclysm there was bound to be a complete revision of the French system of government. There would also have come one of those stirrings of national pride which have always made France one of the most formidable nations in the world, and, I think, a rallying of her people to some sort of national and popular kingship. After that? Well, there would have been no French Revolution, for there would have been no need for it. But something akin to the French Revolution was inevitable somewhere in Europe towards the close of the eighteenth century, for it was the only way to get rid of a certain amount of mediaeval lumber. Where would it have taken place? Possibly in Britain. It was fortunate, perhaps, that in the intrigues of Queen Anne’s bedchamber, Mrs. Masham got the better of the Duchess Sarah.

My next scene is in the last year of the century. I pass with reluctance over the intervening years, for they include many critical hours. In particular there was that hour some time during a December night in the year 1745, in the town of Derby, when it was decided that Prince Charles should not march on London, but should retreat with his Highland army across the Border. Had the decision been otherwise, the Rebellion of the Forty-five might have succeeded, and much in British history might have been different. But I pass to a greater issue than the dynastic settlement of Britain—the French Revolution and the career of Napoleon. Professor Trevelyan, in a delightful essay, has expounded what might have been the course of history had Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo. That is not quite the kind of case we are in quest of, for the loss or winning of Waterloo was not a small thing. Let us go further back in Napoleon’s career, to a day when the issue was not less momentous and the balance hung on a hair—the 19th day of Brumaire—the 9th day of November in the year 1799. The Government of the Directory was rotten; France was ripe for a change, for any policy or any leader that would give her what, after the first day or two, every revolution yearns for, order and peace. Napoleon, with his dubious Egyptian laurels fresh upon him, had arrived in Paris. The plot had been hatched and the conspirators assembled. The two Councils, the Council of the Ancients and the Council of the Five Hundred, had been summoned on that day, the 19th day of Brumaire, to meet at Saint-Cloud, and Sieyès and Napoleon had decided that by these assemblies the new Consulate should be formally authorised.

It is never wise to protract a coup d’état, and this one had been staged to occupy two days. On the afternoon of November 9, at Saint-Cloud, Napoleon was in a fever of impatience. His journey from Egypt, and the strain he had lately gone through, had caused an irritation in the skin of his sallow face, and now and then, in his excitement, he scratched it. He was a strange figure as he paced the little room facing on the park, while the Ancients assembled upstairs in the Salle Apollo, and the Five Hundred in the Orangerie below. At half-past three he made a silly, rambling speech to the Ancients, which none of them understood, and Bourrienne had to drag him away in the midst of general laughter. Then he proceeded to the Five Hundred, accompanied by a handful of grenadiers. He was shouted down, hustled about, and only extricated by his bodyguard. The game seemed irretrievably lost.... But in the meantime he had been scratching his inflamed face, and had caused it to bleed. Leaving his brother, Lucien, in the presidential chair to watch his interests, he went out of doors, and showed himself with his bleeding face to the soldiers. At once the rumour flew that there had been daggers used on the General, and that his life was in danger from loquacious civilians. It was enough. Presently Lucien joined him, and in a burning harangue to the troops made the most of that bleeding cheek. Murat, with a file of Guards, cleared out the Five Hundred, and, ere the November evening fell, Napoleon was not only the leader of the French Army, but the civilian head of the French people.

On one point among the wild events of that day all authorities are agreed. Napoleon fumbled and blundered, and the situation was saved by Lucien. But would Lucien have succeeded in his appeal to the troops but for the blood on his brother’s face? It seems to me unlikely, as I read the story of that day. I am inclined to think that it was that fortunate affection of the skin, and the nervous excitement that caused him to scratch his face, which at a critical moment made plain Napoleon’s path to the control of France.

Let us make another leap—to the hour of nine o’clock on the evening of May 2 in the year 1863. The place is among the scrub and the rough meadows of that part of Virginia called the Wilderness, near the hamlet of Chancellorsville. General Hooker, ‘Fighting Joe Hooker,’ is in command of the Federal Army of the Potomac, which comprises something like 130,000 men. He is the last hope of the Government in Washington, who have not been having much luck with their generals. He has promised them a crushing victory, and Lincoln, in the War Department there, is sitting anxiously at the end of the telegraph wire. Hooker has crossed the Rappahannock, and believes that the road is open before him to Richmond. In front of him lies a Confederate Army, the Army of Northern Virginia; it numbers not much more than 62,000 men, less than half the Federal force, but its commander is Robert Lee, and his chief lieutenant is Stonewall Jackson.

Hooker has followed a dangerous plan. He has divided his big army into two separate wings, thereby giving the small Confederate force the advantage of the interior lines. Jeb Stuart with his cavalry has given Lee prompt information about every Federal move.... Very early it became clear that Hooker intended to turn the Confederate left. Lee, with the audacity of supreme genius, decided that, on the contrary, he would turn the Federal right, and make the outflanker the outflanked. Secretly, silently, Jackson made his way through the thick bush and the swamps of the Wilderness forest, and by the late afternoon of May 2, Hooker’s right, utterly unsuspicious, suddenly became aware, by the rush of small deer and birds from the woods, that Jackson was upon them.... By seven o’clock the battle of Chancellorsville had been won. Hooker was in full retreat.... But in a rout strange things may happen. Detachments of the Federals straggled about in the darkness, and in the gloom of the woods came into conflict with Confederate detachments, and there was much wild firing. Jackson and his staff, galloping to direct the pursuit, ran into the 18th North Carolina regiment, and were taken for the enemy. The Carolinians fired a volley in the confusion, and Jackson fell with three bullets in him. Eight days later he died.

It was the blindest mischance, but it had momentous consequences. In Jackson, Lee lost his right hand and a third of his brains. Two months after Chancellorsville he fought the indecisive action of Gettysburg, an action in which the absence of complete victory meant defeat. Lee always said that if he had had Jackson with him he would have won the battle, and I believe that he was right. If Lee had won Gettysburg then I am convinced that there would have been a negotiated peace. The North was sick to death of the war, and a Southern victory in Pennsylvania would have broken the last remnant of Washington’s nerve. Lincoln’s stern determination to accept nothing less than complete victory and unconditional surrender would have been overruled.... What would have happened then? Lincoln would not have been assassinated; there would have been little bitterness left over on either side, since neither was the conqueror. In the inevitable reconstruction which must have followed it is difficult to believe that two such men as Lincoln and Lee would not have achieved a reasonable compromise, and a reconstituted United States. There must have been drastic, and probably beneficial, changes in that most cumbrous instrument, the American Constitution. Slavery would have been abolished on equitable terms, for Lee was at least as eager in that cause as Lincoln. Beyond that we need not penetrate. But we can at least say that America’s development, economic, political, constitutional and spiritual, would have been very different from what it is to-day. That North Carolina volley, fired blindly in the woodland dusk on that May evening, was one of the most fateful in history.

Half a century more and we come to the Great War. I suppose we must rank the First Battle of the Marne as one of the two or three decisive battles of the world. If Germany had won, she would have attained the victory of which she dreamed ‘before the leaves fell.’ What was the causa causans, the little extra weighting of the scales, which turned the balance on that long battle front between the suburbs of Paris and the hills of Nancy? It is impossible to be certain. The Germans say that it was the disastrous visit of Colonel Hentsch, the plenipotentiary of Great Headquarters, to Bülow and Kluck at noon on Wednesday, September 9. The French say that it was the march of the French 42nd Division under Foch on the evening of the 8th. It may also be argued that it was the advance of the British 2nd Corps north of the Marne early on the 9th, which by good fortune touched the most sensitive portion of the German front. I think that the right answer is that there was no one such cause; there were half a dozen.

But let us take a moment seven months later—the attack of the British fleet on the Dardanelles. On Thursday, March 18, Admiral John de Robeck launched his assault on the Narrows. He silenced most of the forts, and the attack seemed to be proceeding well, until suddenly he began to lose ships from mines; first the Bouvet, then the Irresistible, then the Ocean. But when he broke off the action he intended to resume it later, and he and the Government in London were still confident that it would be carried presently to a successful issue.

Then something happened to change his view. In the second volume of his book, The World Crisis, Mr. Winston Churchill has told dramatically the tale of that see-saw of hopes and fears. On the 23rd Admiral de Robeck, after a talk with Sir Ian Hamilton, telegraphed to London that he could not continue the naval attack till the army was ready to co-operate, and that that would not be before April 14. Lord Fisher promptly swung round to his side, his argument being that we need not lose any more ships when Britain was bound to win in any case, seeing that the British were the lost ten tribes of Israel! The other Admirals, as Mr. Churchill says, ‘stuck their toes in.’ Mr. Asquith, though inclined to Mr. Churchill’s view, was not prepared to intervene and override naval opinion both at home and on the spot. The naval attack was dropped, and we waited for a month to land an army, with results which are only too well remembered. Turkey was at her last gasp, and to her amazement was given a breathing-space, of which she made brilliant use.

What made Admiral de Robeck change his mind, for it is clear that it was his change of mind which was the determining factor? It may have been his talk with Sir Ian Hamilton which opened to him a prospect of combined operations against the Gallipoli Peninsula, a prospect which he had not realised before, and which relieved him of a share of his heavy responsibilities. But we can narrow down the cause to something still smaller. What made his responsibilities seem so heavy? It was the presence of unsuspected mines in the Narrows on March 18 that caused our losses and thereby shook the nerve of the naval staff. How did the mines get there? Ten days earlier a little Turkish steamer called the Nousret had dodged the British night patrol of destroyers, and laid a new line of twenty mines in Eren Kui Bay. On March 16 three of these mines were destroyed by our sweepers, but we did not realise that they were part of a line of mines, and so we did not look for more. If we had made a different deduction there would have been no casualties on the 18th, and de Robeck on the 19th or 20th must have taken his fleet into the Sea of Marmora.

The officer in charge of the little Nousret did not know, probably—if he is still alive—does not yet know, the fatefulness of his deed. It altered the whole course of the War, for at that moment Turkey was in the most literal truth at her last gasp. We have the evidence of Enver; we have the evidence of half a dozen Germans on the spot. She was almost out of munitions, and her resistance in the Narrows that day was the last effort of which she was capable in defence. Her Government had its papers packed, and was about to leave for the uplands of Asia Minor. I have talked to a distinguished German diplomatist who was then in Constantinople, and he has described to me the complete despair of the Turkish Government and their German advisers. They believed that it was mathematically certain that in a day or two Constantinople would be in British hands. When they heard that the British fleet had given up the attack they could not believe their ears; it seemed to them the most insane renunciation of a certain victory.

The occupation of Constantinople would have meant that Turkey fell out of the War. It would have meant much more. Bulgaria would never have become an ally of the Central Powers. The way would have been prepared to supply the needs of Russia, and Russia would have been kept in close touch with her Western allies. There would have been no Russian Revolution, or, if revolution had come, it would have taken a very different form. Austria would have been caught in flank and presently put out of action. It would have meant that in all human likelihood the Allies would have been victorious early in the year 1916. What oceans of blood and treasure would have been saved, what a different world we should be living in to-day, had an obscure Turkish sailorman not laid his mines in the way he did on that March evening!