The argument of the preceding chapters points to the conclusion that if Great Britain is to maintain her position as a great Power, probably even if she is to maintain her independence, and certainly if she is to retain the administration of India and the leadership of the nations that have grown out of her colonies, her statesmen and her people must combine to do three things:

1. To adopt a policy having due relation to the condition and needs of the European Continent.

2. To make the British navy the best possible instrument of naval warfare.

3. To make the British army strong enough to be able to turn the scales in a continental war.

What are for the navy and for the army the essentials of victory? If there had never been any wars, no one would know what was essential to victory. People would have their notions, no doubt, but these notions would be guesses and could not be verified until the advent of a war, which might bring with it a good deal of disappointment to the people who had guessed wrong. But there have already been wars enough to afford ample material for deductions as to the causes and conditions of success. I propose to take the two best examples that can be found, one for war at sea and the other for war on land, in order to show exactly the way in which victory is attained.

By victory, of course, I mean crushing the enemy. In a battle in which neither side is crippled, and after which the fleets part to renew the struggle after a short interval, one side or the other may consider that it has had the honours of the day. It may have lost fewer ships than the enemy, or have taken more. It may have been able and willing to continue the fight, though the enemy drew off, and its commander may be promoted or decorated for having maintained the credit of his country or of the service to which he belongs. But such a battle is not victory either in a political or a strategical sense. It does not lead to the accomplishment of the purpose of the war, which is to dictate conditions of peace. That result can be obtained only by crushing the enemy’s force and so making him powerless to renew the contest.

A general view of the wars of the eighteenth century between Great Britain and France shows that, broadly speaking, there was no decision until the end of the period. The nearest approach to it was when Hawke destroyed the French fleet in Quiberon Bay. But this was hardly a stand-up fight. The French fleet was running away, and Hawke’s achievement was that, in spite of the difficulties of weather on an extremely dangerous coast, he was able to consummate its destruction. The real decision was the work of Nelson, and its principal cause was Nelson himself.

The British navy had discovered in its conflicts with the Dutch during the seventeenth century that the object of naval warfare was the command of the sea, which must be won by breaking the enemy’s force in battle. This was also perfectly understood by the Dutch admirals, and in those wars was begun the development of the art of fighting battles with sailing vessels. A formation, the line of battle, in which one ship sails in the track of the ship before her, was found to be appropriate to the weapon used, the broadside of artillery; and a type of ship suitable to this formation, the line-of-battle ship, established itself. These were the elements with which the British and French navies entered into their long eighteenth century struggle. The French, however, had not grasped the principle that the object of naval warfare was to obtain the command of the sea. They did not consciously and primarily aim, as did their British rivals, at the destruction of the enemy’s fleet. They were more concerned with the preservation of their own fleet than with the destruction of the enemy’s, and were ready rather to accept battle than to bring it about. The British admirals were eager for battle, but had a difficulty in finding out how a decisive blow could be struck. The orthodox and accepted doctrine of the British navy was that the British fleet should be brought alongside the enemy’s fleet, the two lines of battleships being parallel to one another, so that each ship in the British fleet should engage a corresponding ship in the French fleet. It was a manoeuvre difficult of execution, because, in order to approach the French, the British must in the first place turn each of their ships at right angles to the line or obliquely to it, and then, when they were near enough to fire, must turn again to the left (or right) in order to restore the line formation. And during this period of approach and turning they must be exposed to the broadsides of the French without being able to make full use of their own broadsides. Moreover, it was next to impossible in this way to bring up the whole line together. Besides being difficult, the manoeuvre had no promise of success. For if two fleets of equal numbers are in this way matched ship against ship, neither side has any advantage except what may be derived from the superior skill of its gunners. So long as these conditions prevailed, no great decisive victory of the kind for which we are seeking was gained. It was during this period that Nelson received such training as the navy could give him, and added to it the necessary finishing touch by never-ceasing effort to find out for himself the way in which he could strike a decisive blow. His daring was always deliberate, never rash, and this is the right frame of mind for a commander. “You may be assured,” he writes to Lord Hood, March 11, 1794, “I shall undertake nothing but what I have moral certainty of succeeding in.”

His fierce determination to get at the ultimate secrets of his trade led him to use every means that would help him to think out his problem, and among these means was reading. In 1780 appeared Clerk’s “Essay on Naval Tactics.” Clerk pointed out the weakness of the method of fighting in two parallel lines and suggested and discussed a number of plans by which one fleet with the bulk of its force could attack and destroy a portion of the other. This was the problem to which Nelson gave his mind how to attack a part with the whole. On the 19th of August 1796 he writes to the Duke of Clarence:

“We are now 22 sail of the line, the combined fleet will be above 35 sail of the line.... I will venture my life Sir John Jervis defeats them; I do not mean by a regular battle but by the skill of our Admiral, and the activity and spirit of our officers and seamen. This country is the most favourable possible for skill with an inferior fleet; for the winds are so variable that some one time in the 24 hours you must be able to attack a part of a large fleet, and the other will be becalmed, or have a contrary wind.”

His opportunity came in 1798, when in the battle of the Nile he crushed the French Mediterranean Fleet. In a letter to Lord Howe, written January 8, 1799, he described his plan in a sentence:

“By attacking the enemy’s van and centre, the wind blowing directly along their line, I was enabled to throw what force I pleased on a few ships.”

We know that Nelson’s method of fighting had for months before the battle been his constant preoccupation, and that he had lost no opportunity of explaining his ideas to his captains. Here are the words of Captain Berry’s narrative:

“It had been his practice during the whole of the cruise, whenever the weather and circumstances would permit, to have his captains on board the Vanguard, where he would fully develop to them his own ideas of the different and best modes of attack, and such plans as he proposed to execute upon falling in with the enemy, whatever their position or situation might be, by day or by night. There was no possible position in which they might be found that he did not take into his calculation, and for the most advantageous attack on which he had not digested and arranged the best possible disposition of the force which he commanded.”

The great final victory of Trafalgar was prepared in the same way, and the various memoranda written in the period before the battle have revealed to recent investigation the unwearying care which Nelson devoted to finding out how best to concentrate his force upon that portion of the enemy’s fleet which it would be most difficult for the enemy to support with the remainder.

Nelson’s great merit, his personal contribution to his country’s influence, lay first and foremost in his having by intellectual effort solved the tactical problem set to commanders by the conditions of the naval weapon of his day, the fleet of line-of-battle ships; and secondly, in his being possessed and inspired by the true strategical doctrine that the prime object of naval warfare is the destruction of the enemy’s fleet, and therefore that the decisive point in the theatre of war is the point where the enemy’s fleet can be found. It was the conviction with which he held this principle that enabled him in circumstances of the greatest difficulty to divine where to go to find the enemy’s fleet; which in 1798 led him persistently up and down the Mediterranean till he had discovered the French squadron anchored at Aboukir; which in 1805 took him from the Mediterranean to the West Indies, and from the West Indies back to the Channel.

So much for Nelson’s share of the work. But Nelson could neither have educated himself nor made full use of his education if the navy of his day had not been inspired with the will to fight and to conquer, with the discipline that springs from that will, and had not obtained through long experience of war the high degree of skill in seamanship and in gunnery which made it the instrument its great commander required. These conditions of the navy in turn were products of the national spirit and of the will of the Government and people of Great Britain to devote to the navy as much money, as many men, and as vigorous support as might be necessary to realise the national purpose.

The efforts of this nature made by the country were neither perfect nor complete. The Governments made mistakes, the Admiralty left much to be desired both in organisation and in personnel. But the will was there. The best proof of the national determination is to be found in the best hated of all the institutions of that time, the press-gang, a brutal and narrow-minded form of asserting the principle that a citizen’s duty is to fight for his country. That the principle should take such a shape is decisive evidence no doubt that society was badly organised, and that education, intellectual and moral, was on a low level, but also, and this is the vital matter, that the nation well understood the nature of the struggle in which it was engaged and was firmly resolved not only to fight but to conquer.

The causes of the success of the French armies in the period between 1792 and 1809 were precisely analogous to those which have been analysed in the case of the British navy. The basis was the national will, expressed in the volunteers and the levy en masse. Upon this was superimposed the skill acquired by the army in several years of incessant war, and the formal cause of the victories was Napoleon’s insight into the art of command. The research of recent years has revealed the origin of Napoleon’s mastery of the method of directing an army. He became an officer in 1785, at the age of sixteen. In 1793, as a young captain of artillery, he directed with remarkable insight and determination the operations by which the allied fleet was driven from Toulon. In 1794 he inspired and conducted, though still a subordinate, a series of successful operations in the Maritime Alps. In 1796, as commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy, he astonished Europe by the most brilliant campaign on record. For these achievements he had prepared himself by assiduous study. As a young officer of artillery he received the best professional training then to be had in Europe, while at the same time, by wide and careful reading, he gave himself a general education. At some period before 1796, probably before 1794, he had read and thoroughly digested the remarkable treatise on the principles of mountain war which had been left in manuscript by General Bourcet, an officer who during the campaigns of half a century had assisted as Quartermaster-General a number of the best Generals of France. Napoleon’s phenomenal power of concentration had enabled him to assimilate Bourcet’s doctrine, which in his clear and vigorous mind took new and more perfect shape, so that from the beginning his operations are conducted on a system which may be described as that of Bourcet raised to a higher power.

The “Nelson touch” was acquired by the Admiral through years of effort to think out, to its last conclusion, a problem the nature of which had never been adequately grasped by his professional predecessors and comrades, though it seems probable that he owed to Clerk the hint which led him to the solution which he found. Napoleon was more fortunate in inheriting a strategical doctrine which he had but to appreciate to expand and to apply. The success of both men is due to the habit of mind which clings tenaciously to the subject under investigation until it is completely cleared up. Each of them became, as a result of his thinking, the embodiment of a theory or system of the employment of force, the one on sea and the other on land; and such an embodiment is absolutely necessary for a nation in pursuit of victory.

It seems natural to say that if England wants victory on sea or land, she must provide herself with a Nelson or a Napoleon. The statement is quite true, but it requires to be rightly interpreted. If it means that a nation must always choose a great man to command its navy or its army it is an impossible maxim, because a great man cannot be recognised until his power has been revealed in some kind of work. Moreover, to say that Nelson and Napoleon won victories because they were great men is to invert the order of nature and of truth. They are recognised as great men because of the mastery of their business which they manifested in action. That mastery was due primarily to knowledge. Wordsworth hit the mark when, in answer to the question “Who is the Happy Warrior?” he replied that it was he

“Who with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn.”

The quality that made them both so valuable was that they knew the best that was known and thought in regard to the art of war. This is the quality which a nation must secure in those whom it entrusts with the design and the conduct of the operations of its fleets and its armies.

There is a method for securing this, not by any means a new one, and not originally, as is commonly supposed, a German invention. It consists in providing the army and the navy with a General Staff or Department for the study, design, and direction of operations. In such a department Bourcet, Napoleon’s master, spent the best years of his life. In such a department Moltke was trained; over such a department he presided. Its characteristic is that it has one function, that of the study, design, and direction of the movements in fighting of a fleet or an army, and that it has nothing whatever to do with the maintenance of an army, or with its recruiting, discipline, or peace administration. Its functions in peace are intellectual and educational, and in war it becomes the channel of executive power. Bourcet described the head of such a department as “the soul of an army.” The British navy is without such a department. The army has borrowed the name, but has not maintained the speciality of function which is essential. In armies other than the British, the Chief of the General Staff is occupied solely with tactics and strategy, with the work of intellectual research by which Nelson and Napoleon prepared their great achievements. His business is to be designing campaigns, to make up his mind at what point or points, in case of war, he will assemble his fleets or his armies for the first move, and what the nature of that move shall be. The second move it is impossible for him to pre-arrange because it depends upon the result of the first. He will determine the second move when the time comes. In order that his work should be as well done as possible, care is taken that the Chief of the Staff shall have nothing else to do. Not he but another officer superintends the raising, organising, and disciplining of the forces. Thus he becomes the embodiment of a theory or system of operations, and with that theory or system he inspires as far as possible all the admirals or generals and other officers who will have to carry out his designs.

In the British system the Chief of the General Staff is the principal military member of the Board which administers the army. Accordingly, only a fraction of his time can be given to thinking out the problems of strategy and tactics. At the Admiralty the principal naval member of the Board is made responsible not only for the distribution and movements of ships a definition which includes the whole domain of strategy and tactics but also for the fighting and sea-going efficiency of the fleet, its organisation and mobilisation, a definition so wide that it includes the greater part of the administration of the navy, especially as the same officer is held responsible for advice on all large questions of naval policy and maritime warfare, as well as for the control of the naval ordnance department. Thus in each case the very constitution of the office entrusted with the design of operations prevents the officer at its head from concentrating himself upon that vital duty. The result is that the intellectual life both of the army and of the navy lags far behind that of their German rivals, and therefore that there is every chance of both of them being beaten, not for lack of courage or hard work, but by being opposed to an adversary whose thinking has been better done by reason of the greater concentration of energy devoted to it.

The first reform needed, at any rate in the navy, is a definition of the functions of the First Sea Lord which will confine his sphere to the distribution and movement of ships and the strategical and tactical training of officers, so as to compel him to become the embodiment or personification of the best possible theory or system of naval warfare. That definition adopted and enforced, there is no need to lay down regulations giving the strategist control over his colleagues who administer materiel and personnel; they will of themselves always be anxious to hear his views as to the methods of fighting, and will be only too glad to build ships with a view to their being used in accordance with his design of victory. But until there is at the Admiralty department devoted to designing victory and to nothing else, what possible guarantee can there be that ships will be built, or the navy administered and organised in accordance with any design likely to lead to victory?