The same Winston Churchill, always longing for a fight, and in love with Dreadnoughts, was probably involved in the crazy decision to send two giant battleships, HMS Barham and HMS Ramillies, to the same estuary during the General Strike of 1926. Again, they never actually did anything. Merseysiders are, I would guess, quite proud at having been taken so seriously, though there is no evidence that the tactic made any difference. One has to wonder what would have happened if their ships’ companies had been ordered to open fire on Liverpool. I guess it would have gone badly for whoever gave the order. The famous Kronstadt sailors, who helped out in Lenin and Trotsky’s Petrograd putsch of 1917, may have been fooled by the Bolsheviks at the start. But they rebelled against them in 1921 when they found out what Lenin was really like. And it was to Trotsky’s lasting shame and disgrace that he massacred them that March.

Our own Royal Navy is famous for its mutinies, in HMS Bounty in 1789, at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, and most recently at Invergordon in 1931. It is a curious organization, its hammocks once filled by the cruel Press Gangs kidnapping innocent men and forcing them to sea and possible death, its discipline for many years enforced by the cruel cat o’ nine tails and the occasional shooting of an admiral to encourage the others. But it stood between us and the world, without trying to take over the state, and it was very beautiful, and many of us loved it. In London and the big seaport cities, bluejackets in their Edwardian uniforms were still a common sight in my childhood. They were reassuring, not overbearing. Since 1901, when horses failed at the task, Navy men have pulled the gun carriage on which Royal coffins (and Churchill’s) have rested at state funerals, an extraordinarily moving sight. These were our defenders, upon whom, as Charles II’s Articles of War first proclaimed, “under the Good Providence of God, the safety, honor and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend.”

In an era when soldiers were often despised, or even feared, sailors were not. Think of Kipling’s 1890 poem “Tommy”, intended to change the drunken delinquent reputation of Queen Victoria’s redcoats:

For it’s “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

In George Orwell’s perfect novel Coming Up for Air, Edwardian civilians are appalled when a young man signs up for the Army: “‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A fine young fellow like that!’ It just shocked them. Listening for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets.”

But sailors, possibly because they were at sea so much, were idealized as “hearts of oak” manning the wooden walls (and later the steel walls) of England. And the same was true for officers, credited above all with the great victory at Trafalgar in 1805, which secured national safety and prosperity for the rest of that century. They had a reputation for taciturnity and bluffness, which never does anyone any harm, and they often lived up to it. The fictional Jack Aubrey, in Patrick O’Brian’s witty and clever books about the Napoleonic wars, is a perfect rendering of this type. They tell terrible jokes. They don’t say much, just “Kiss me, Hardy” (Nelson as he died); “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield” (Beatty at Jutland, as British warships repeatedly blew up under German fire); and “Continue to engage the enemy” (Warburton-Lee at Narvik, dying on his bridge after smashing up Hitler’s destroyer fleet and so making a cross-Channel invasion impossible).

And so the word “Navy” had, for many years, a useful commercial magic if you were selling something a bit manly and bluff, such as Navy Cut tobacco and Navy Rum, or even Senior Service cigarettes. But it did not have the yelling, martinet character of the Army. I have never yet seen a naval officer’s uniform that fits properly, and when sailors are marched aboard their ships (does this still happen?), the drill is far from pernickety. Close contact with the Navy — both my parents were in it, and so were most of their friends, some of my schoolteachers and many of the parents of my schoolfellows — revealed a dry, faintly sarcastic view of the outside world which had never been to sea. Even my mother, an ocean-going snob who would die of shame if she heard me use the word “toilet”, had mastered the sarcasm of the fleet. More than once I jumped with surprise when I heard her icily remarking about some inadequate if feeble attempt at recompense. “Well, that’s damned nice of him”, she’d say, which, for a Fifties married middle-class woman in a respectable suburb, was going it a bit.

This reputation was kept alive just a little longer by two films. The first, The Cruel Sea, is one of the best movies ever made and shows, among other things, how the spirit of the Navy, stretching back through centuries, embraces and takes hold of ordinary men and turns them into something very nearly heroic. The other, In Which We Serve, features a speech by Celia Johnson, playing a naval wife, and explains the privations of this role. It can reliably reduce me to tears, and not just because of the way she says “sloop”, so upper-middle-class that nobody could get away with it nowadays. During one scene, at a 1939 Christmas dinner, she is wearing a small brooch, in a shape worn by my mother and known to her as the “Crown of Neptune”.

Few will ever notice this, but the little shiny badge betokened membership of a secret society. It was a sign to other such navy wives of a great unknown sisterhood, familiar with the grim features of married quarters and rented lodgings in glum seaports or remote colonial stations, the endless disruption of life by emergencies and distant postings, the miserable pay, and the infuriating tussle with their great permanent love rivals: their husbands’ ships. In Which We Serve also features the glorious Navy Prayer, one of the Church of England’s “Forms of Prayer to Be Used At Sea”, written when the Navy was recognized as an indispensable part of the nation. It is a plea for a safe return from danger, and opens with the words, “O Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea, who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end…”

And this is one of the beauties of the Navy which once endeared it to so many. For it was beautiful. Great warships, which we no longer possess, are beautiful, as such engines of destruction should probably not be. The boxy, enclosed modern vessels of today’s piddling navies lack this magic, as do the two giant car parks we call aircraft carriers. But in the early Sixties, I couldn’t get from my home in the village of Alverstoke to Portsmouth without crossing the harbor by ferry, under the immense 15-inch guns of the last British battleship, HMS Vanguard. There is something uplifting and thrilling about great guns, and the swooping lines of the ship itself, 814 feet long, that expressed power as few other works of man can do. It made our hearts swell a bit, to know we possessed such an instrument. And many hearts, including my own, have shriveled, as that lovely fleet has melted away.

Of course, all this is also wrapped in England’s deep love of the sea. One sign of this can be found in Arthur Ransome’s books about children sailing in the Lake District. It is now impossible to imagine the hold these stories had on hundreds of thousands of English childhoods, lived far from the shore. Michael Frayn, who grew up in the Surrey suburbs, has confessed that he read them over and over again, and tried to write one of his own. Eventually, the children in the series escape from their lake and actually go to sea, in reality and in fantasy. Towards the end of Peter Duck, one of the strangest of these remarkable novels, the children sing their way up the Channel to the words of the sea shanty “Spanish Ladies”, a favorite of my naval father, marking the ancient landmarks known to homecoming Englishmen since the time of Grenville and Hawkins:

And the First land we made, it is called the Dodman,
Next Rame Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight;
And we sailed by Beachy, 
By Fairlight and Dungeness,
Until we brought to by the South Foreland Light. 

Those who still savor the “inshore waters” part of the Shipping Forecast, as I do, were probably brought up in a maritime Britain, where there was still a bit of salt in everything and the sea was a friend and fortification, not, as it seems now, a door left wide open. Modern Britain is now so turned away from the sea that it brings to mind a passage in C.S.Lewis’s Prince Caspian, one of the Narnia books. The new rulers of Narnia fear the sea and what might come over it, and have deliberately allowed thick woods to grow along the coast. Lewis, who also grew up in more naval days, though he lived far from the sea, understood, like any British person of his time, that the ocean is a source of power and inspiration and a great highway to the world and all that is in it. But only if you have a Navy.

It is understandable that nations and alliances would want to minimise the harm and insist that, whatever happens, defence capability will be unimpaired — a part of defence, after all, is credibility. Even from published reports, however, it can be deduced that this is not quite true: there have been disruptions, some quite serious, to the plans and operations of many armed forces — and there may well be more to come.

Among the most vulnerable are maritime forces, which is logical, given that naval vessels share many characteristics with cruise ships, or “floating petri dishes” as they’ve been described. Crew live in close and often cramped quarters and use communal facilities for weeks on end.

An early alert was sounded in March, when the US Naval authorities faced a near-mutiny after the captain of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt went public with a warning that there were several hundred cases of coronavirus among the sailors on board and that there could be multiple deaths unless action was taken. The captain, Brett Crozier, was summarily dismissed, but has become something of a folk hero and could be reinstated following an ongoing inquiry. The aircraft carrier was evacuated and is docked at the US naval base in Guam. Of a crew of more than 4,000, more than 1,100 cases have been recorded.

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The UK has taken precautions of its own. The new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth — one of two controversially commissioned by the Royal Navy — had to delay its first extensive sea trials for two weeks so that all the crew could be tested for coronavirus. It set sail from Portsmouth on 29 April, but only after securing the agreement of what were described as “senior leaders across Defence”, and its operations appear to have been adjusted, with the Navy saying that “as a further precaution” the carrier would “conduct a period of isolation at sea” before training begins, it would be operating in waters close to the UK coast, and the commanding officer had “the discretion to cease the training if it is deemed necessary”.

The French aircraft carrier, Charles de Gaulle, is also smitten by the virus and currently quarantined at the port of Toulon, with a reported 600 cases. This means that of the 15 carriers (11 of them US) available to the Nato alliance, three are out of commission — 20% — and these are only the instances that have been reported.

Nor is it only navies that are affected. The UK is one of several countries that has not divulged the extent of the infection in the military, but there have been reports of unhappiness at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst with how social distancing and other precautions are, or are not, being observed. Sports and weekend leave have been cancelled, and suspected Coronavirus cases housed in separate accommodation.

Some army deployments have been reduced. The UK’s training mission in Iraq has been “paused”, with most of the UK’s 400-strong contingent there being recalled. Troops have also returned from Germany. And while the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, insists that the UK’s defence capability has not been harmed, there has been some evidence of increased Russian probing — by air and sea — in recent weeks, suggesting that Moscow is testing what it might see as a new vulnerability.

Russia, though, has its own problems with coronavirus. Although the country as a whole has not so far been as badly affected as major West European countries or the United States, outbreaks have been reported in several Russian military units and academies, and the Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, who said he had contracted the virus last month, is reported to be in hospital.

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The virus has also dealt a big political blow to President Putin. He had planned a massive Victory Day parade to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War — known as the Great Fatherland War in Russia — on 9 May. He had also hoped for a big turn-out of international leaders to signal Russia’s return from the diplomatic cold, six years after its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.

The spread of coronavirus, however, has put paid to all that. Putin waited until mid-April before finally conceding the inevitable. The anniversary commemoration has now been provisionally moved to September, but it will not have the same resonance then.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of the pandemic in the military sphere, however, is the effective cancellation of one of the North Atlantic alliance’s biggest sets of manoeuvres in Europe since the end of the Cold War. The exercises — named Defender-Europe 20 — were planned to last several weeks during April and May. They were due to involve 37,000 troops from 18 countries, including 20,000 from the United States, and to demonstrate not only the US’s ability to deploy rapidly across continents, but the continuing US commitment to the security of Europe.

The purpose was to practise deploying a Nato force sufficient to combat an (unspecified, but clearly Russian) attack on an ally (also unspecified, but clearly one of the Baltic States). As such, Defender-Europe 20 was conceived as an unambiguous signal to Russia to keep its hands off eastern and central Europe and to those more recent Nato members that Article 5 — an attack on one is treated as an attack on all — would, and could, be honoured. (The US President’s lukewarm attitude to Nato had sometimes placed that in doubt.)

There was an additional purpose, too. The crossing of borders by foreign military personnel and hardware — even within the European Union’s Schengen Zone and between Nato allies — remains a sensitive issue, with convoys requiring advance permission, which limits speed of deployment. Defender-Europe 20 was also in part intended to show that this difficulty could be surmounted.

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Except that, as the Coronavirus swept through Europe and then reached the United States, everything proved too complicated. President Trump banned all travel to the US for European nationals, while the EU closed the Schengen Zone. In mid-March, the US European Command downgraded US participation and announced the recall of most of the thousands of troops, vehicles and equipment already dispatched. Those who stayed would be redeployed to help individual Nato countries combat the pandemic.

Officially, the exercises have only been scaled back. What remains, however, are little more than fragments of the original grand design that had spanned 10 countries, with the main action in Germany, Poland and the Baltic States.

The extent of Nato’s change of plan came across starkly from an unusually gnomic “special” media briefing given by General Tod Wolters, Commander of the US European Command and Nato Supreme Allied Commander Europe on 16 April. In it, he made almost no direct reference to the disintegration of Defender-Europe 20, insisting repeatedly that the alliance would be “laser-focused” on delivering “effective deterrence and defence” and that forces remained at the ready.

There was no need to read between the lines, though, to conclude that the Defender-Europe 20 was now a shadow of its former self. A separate, Baltic-based exercise planned for June-July would at best be “adjusted” in its scope and scale and, at worst, cancelled.

It was a comprehensive admission that the best of plans, laid over many months by the leader of the world’s foremost military power and the world’s most powerful military alliance, had been totally derailed — not by an enemy assault, but because of a disease.

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It is clear that coronavirus is having a direct and widespread impact on military operations in many parts of the world. Of those countries reporting the incidence of infection in their militaries, France had confirmed 600 as of early April, Spain and Germany more than 200 each, and the United States more than 1,500.

But it is not just the debilitating threat that disease poses to human capital that militaries will need to confront in future. Disease has the potential to exacerbate other vulnerabilities. Morale is one. If crew who have spent months at sea have no opportunity on return to reconnect with family without delay, how effective will they be as a fighting force when they next go to sea? If, to the usual privations of service is added lockdown or quarantine, how will officers motivate their teams?

This was the dilemma that faced John Lewis, the commander of HMS Trenchant, one of the UK’s three nuclear-powered submarines last month. He ignored the advice of superiors to cancel an end-of-voyage party at the Devonport base at Plymouth — and paid for that decision with his command. It can be seen as an isolated incident, but similar dilemmas will arise all the time.

The other, not unrelated, concerns propaganda. The fear and uncertainty that surround illness make it natural material for enemy propaganda to make a bad situation worse. A recent example was a faked communication from Nato Secretary-General to the Defence Minister of Lithuania, saying that the US was withdrawing all its troops from May, because of the strain on capacity from Coronavirus. The context of the cancelled Nato manoeuvres made this all the more credible.

***

It is hard to see how there will not also be profound reviews in military and defence establishments around the world. Doubtless the potential threat from biological weapons will be subject to renewed scrutiny; but the debilitating effects of a new disease on military capability — a disease with as yet no cure and no vaccine — will soar up the hierarchy of official concerns.

In recent decades, the top brass across the world have set great store by procuring the last word in military technology, from ships to fighter planes to weaponry. One of the reasons some senior officers are so wary of the defence and foreign policy review announced by Boris Johnson after he won the December election is that it lumps military capability along with diplomacy and aid policy — it considers “soft” power as well as “hard”. They fear that that this could reduce the emphasis on prestigious state-of-the-art hardware that would be assumed in a defence-only review.

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In fact, the emphasis of defence leaders was already shifting towards new technology, especially cyber capability and unmanned drones. Now, the more insidious threat from disease will have to be added. If humans are seen as more vulnerable than they were, could this accelerate moves towards conflict by remote control?

That is for the longer term, though. In the short-term, the pandemic may be having an effect not only on military capability but, because of that, also on actual wars. An attempt by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Gutterez, to call a global truce during the pandemic was blocked by the US and Russia. But the scaling back of Turkish operations in northern Syria and of Saudi-backed operations in Yemen have led to welcome lulls in the fighting. France has repatriated some troops from West Africa after they became infected with Coronavirus, and decided not to dispatch others. It is not impossible either that the spread of the pandemic in Libya and the emergencies declared in Russia and Ukraine could not only reduce the fighting in the Donbass, but force cooperation across battle-lines.

Which might just suggest a perverse side-effect from this otherwise destructive pandemic. Just as the lockdowns have brought unforeseen environmental benefits, could it be that, by reducing even slightly the capacity of armies to fight, the virus is offering some respite from conflict? Realism would dictate, however, that neither will last.

The rankings suggest a pattern: that in our tougher, fiercer, poorer regions support for such freedom is strongest, whereas in the tree-shaded southern and midland suburbs (and also, oddly, in Scotland, which is, for the most part, not very soft and bosky) it is at its weakest. Why ever would this be? By all means ask a statistician, or a sociologist, for the answer. But I have a different theory: let me explain it to you.

Rudyard Kipling, in my view rightly, put a lot of our national class division down to the deep remaining bitterness between the invaders of 1066 and their resentful subjects, and to the lingering Saxon belief in ancient liberties once held, now lost, and one day to be restored, in what has often been a common belief in this country.

It peeps out from the Robin Hood legend, of an exiled nobleman beloved by the people, but driven from his true title, and from many ancient local stories of poachers who are really the true owners of the land from which they are now driven by gamekeepers. One such tale, of a sort once common in country districts, lies at the heart of M.R. James’s troubling ghost story “The Mezzotint“, about a picture which comes alive, and shows a terrible dynastic murder in progress, far away and a long time ago.

In Kipling’s clever poem “Norman and Saxon” a dying Norman baron is warning his arrogant young heir to be careful when dealing with his Saxon peasants.

“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing”, my son, leave the Saxon alone.

“You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears;
But don’t try that game on the Saxon; you’ll have the whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the field,
They’ll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you will yield.”

Arthur Conan Doyle touched on something similar in his glorious but largely forgotten historical novel The White Company (words most people now associate with a firm that makes bedding).

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The book’s hero, Alleyne Edricson, is heir to a great Saxon noble name, now down on its luck. But “he knew enough of the ancient greatness of his own family to be aware that the time had been when they had held undisputed and paramount sway over all that tract of country. His father could trace his pure Saxon lineage back to … the time when the Norman first set mailed foot upon English soil.”

With their lands seized and confiscated over 300 years, their wealth and power had dwindled to a crumbling manor, two small farms and a wood full of pigs. But even so, “above all, the owner of the soil could still hold his head high as the veritable Socman of Minstead — that is, as holding the land in free socage, with no feudal superior, and answerable to no man lower than the King”.

My grandfather, a proud son of Portsmouth with a rolling, deep, soft Hampshire burr that I seldom hear nowadays, often seemed like one of Doyle’s untameable Saxons (though the name Hitchens actually originates from Cornwall, whose inhabitants have an even more ungovernable pedigree).

More than once I heard him rumble, when he heard or read of some aristocrat claiming that his forebears had come over with the Conqueror: “Yes, and my ancestors were here on the shore, waiting for them.” He was not entirely joking. I don’t think he was any kind of socialist, though he worshipped the crippled cobbler John Pounds, who had founded some of the first schools for the children of the poor, in the desperate, squalid backstreets of Old Portsmouth.

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But he was a pioneer of the National Union of Teachers, and held to the same sort of blood and fire Protestantism that helped Cromwell’s Ironsides to sweep through their decadent foes like a sickle through the wheat. I have little doubt which side he would have taken at Edgehill or Naseby. He never read a work of fiction, so far as I know, in his life; the Bible contained all the stories he needed.

From this fierce, cross-tempered, deliberately eccentric old patriarch, as I believe, I have inherited things which came to surprise me in later life, especially a furious prejudice in favour of liberty, an inability even to understand those who would give it away, and an accompanying suspicion of authority. I know jury trial is good. I know the presumption of innocence is beyond price. I loathe the sight of an armed police officer. I watch TV reports of police smashing down people’s doors (however wicked they may allegedly be) with suspicion and shock. I can easily provide good reasons for these positions.

But I do not really need them, except in attempts to persuade others. And I can rather easily tell when these others are not interested. These legacies only really flowered in my mind as I came to maturity. My education and upbringing provided the knowledge and understanding. But my first encounter with Macaulay’s History of England awoke something in me which was not theoretical.

As I read his account of the great defiance of 1688, I remembered that Liberty was my inheritance. And now I had to pass it on unharmed. Much as I hated the prospect, after a lifetime of comfortable cowardice, I might even have to take risks to do so. The piston and the cylinder already existed, but a profound cultural heritage filled it with the steam which actually moved the mechanism.

Talking of cultural heritage, I will mention here a curious experience which causes me to think that we inherit more than we think from our forebears. Some years ago I was privileged to spend a night aboard one of the warships of the Royal Navy, in which my father spent 30 years of his life. Between waking and sleeping, I heard the call to hands at the change of the watches, broadcast over the ship’s Tannoy quite softly. I knew, factually, that I had never heard the words before. But simultaneously, I also knew, instinctively, that I had heard them before in exactly the same order and intonation.

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I wonder what else, among my thoughts and desires, comes down from farther and farther back, so far back its origin can only be guessed at until its origin can no longer be seen. As Thomas Hardy described it in his extraordinarily moving short poem “Old Furniture”:

“Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.”

Well, if it has happened to me, why not to others? How far does it go back? Is there some inherited division? Has it faded in the South, among the Normanised middle classes, descendants of those who made their peace with the invader, and persisted beyond that persistent line of division that still runs from the Mersey to the Humber? On its far side are the lands subjected to the Conqueror’s terrible “harrying“, a repression as bloody and merciless as anything in the Thirty Years War.

I expect most educated people of my generation are embarrassed by Wordsworth’s talk of the “Flood of British freedom” which “to the open sea of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity hath flowed”. And since the massacre of the grammar schools, I do not suppose it is very well-known among the bleak, salty and wind-scoured housing estates of, for example, Hull. A pity.

But something else has perhaps been passed on, and survives, even if it does not rhyme or scan. And perhaps it may save us yet from the enemies of free speech and thought, though I must admit I have yet to see any sign of it.