A. T. Mahan

“ The crucial fact at Leoben was that Austria then, as Sardinia a year before, treated alone,—without her ally. This Great Britain, to her honor, absolutely refused to do in 1796, and as long as her ally stood by her. There is, of course, a great difference between the position of a state which finds a victorious enemy in the heart of its territories, and that of an island empire; and great allowance must be made for Austria, even though the calm retrospect of history sees that she failed rightly to appreciate the extreme hazard of Bonaparte's situation. ”

“ Experience had not yet corrected the sanguine confidence of the republican government, based upon the wordy enthusiasm of the crews, nor taught it that, with the departure of the trained officers and the spread of license among the men, the navy had ceased to be the strong power which had faced Great Britain with success in the war of the American Revolution. The very measures which had most contributed to destroy its efficiency became, in the excitement and ignorance of the times, the sure gage of victory. ”

“ It is impossible to criticise adversely measures whose extreme severity was justified, if not imperatively demanded, by the appalling crisis of the mutinies of 1797; impossible to withhold admiration, not unmingled with awe, from the impressive figure of the chief who stood unmoved and unyielding amid the smothered discontent, revolt threatening from below, the enemy's coast in sight from the deck, knowing that in every other fleet the crews had taken the ships from their officers, but determined it should not be so in the Mediterranean. ”

“ In the navy there exists an abuse, the destruction of which is demanded by the Committee of Public Safety by my mouth. There are in the navy troops which bear the name of 'marine regiments.' Is this because these troops have the exclusive privilege of defending the republic upon the sea? Are we not all called upon to fight for liberty? Why could not the victors of Landau, of Toulon, go upon our fleets to show their courage to Pitt, and lower the flag of George? ”

“ With a widely scattered empire, with numerous exposed and isolated points, with a smaller population and an army comparatively insignificant in numbers, war with France threw her—and must inevitably always throw her—at first upon the defensive, unless she could at once lay her grasp firmly upon some vital chord of the enemy's communications, and so force him to fight there. She could not assume the offensive by landing on French soil. No force she could send would be capable of resisting the numbers brought against it, much less of injuring the enemy ”

“ That the navy is the first line of defence, both in order and in importance, by no means implies that there is or should be no other. This forced and extravagant interpretation, for which naval officers have been largely responsible, of the true opinion that a navy is the best protection for a sea frontier, has very much to do with that faulty strategy which would tie the fleet, whatever its power, to the home ports, and disseminate it among them. ”

“ To the citizen of the United States, the war whose results were summed up and sealed in the Treaty of Versailles is a landmark of history surpassing all others in interest and importance. His sympathies are stirred by the sufferings of the many, his pride animated by the noble constancy of the few whose names will be forever identified with the birth-throes of his country. ”

“ Yet his mistake, supreme genius that he was, is scarce to be wondered at; for after all the story of his career, of his huge power, of his unrelenting hostility, of his indomitable energy, unremittingly directed to the destruction of his chief enemy,—after all this and its failure,—we still find men harping on the weakness of Great Britain through her exposed commerce. Her dependence upon trade, and the apparent slackening of the colonial ties, foretell her fatal weakness in the hour of trial. So thought Napoleon; so think we. Yet the commercial genius of her people is not abated ”

“ As a point upon which insurrection could repose, by which it could be supported from without, Toulon was invaluable; but with rebellion put down, surrounded by a hostile army and shut up to itself, the city would become a useless burden, unbearable from the demands for men which its extended lines would make. Had La Vendée rested upon a Toulon, the task of the republic would have been well-nigh hopeless. ”

“ I have always thought that it is a great and important object in the contest between the French republic and the rest of Europe, that Italy, in whole or in part, should neither be annexed to France as dominion, nor affiliated in the shape of dependent republics; and I have considered a superior British fleet in the Mediterranean as an essential means for securing Italy and Europe from such a misfortune. ”

“ The only solution of the difficulty that the British government should have adopted was to maintain a reserve of ships, large enough to keep the necessary numbers of efficient vessels cruising in the proper station. The experience gained by such constant practice, moreover, improved the quality of the men more than it injured the ships. Historically, good men with poor ships are better than poor men with good ships; over and over again the French Revolution taught this lesson, which our own age, with its rage for the last new thing in material improvement, has largely dropped out of memory. ”

“ It was the inability to realize the might in this outburst of popular feeling, long pent up, that caused the mistaken forecasts of many statesmen of the day; who judged of the power and reach of the movement by indications—such as the finances, the condition of the army, the quality of the known leaders—ordinarily fairly accurate tests of a country's endurance, but which utterly misled those who looked to them only and did not take into account the mighty impulse of a whole nation stirred to its depths. ”

“ Having fully divined his chief's purpose, he saw it on the point of defeat, and, without waiting for orders, wore at once out of the line, and threw the "Captain," alone, in front of the enemy's leading ships. In this well-timed but most daring move, which illustrates to the highest degree the immense difference between a desperate and a reckless action, Nelson passed to the head of the British column, crossing the bows of five large Spanish vessels, and then with his seventy-four engaged the "Santisima Trinidad," of one hundred and thirty guns, the biggest ship at that time afloat. ”

“ It is right and wise to leave great discretion to the officer in command on the spot,—minute instructions fetter rather than guide him; but a man in Colpoys's situation, bewildered as to the enemy's objects, aware only that the first line of defence is forced, but ignorant where the second will be assailed, is entitled to know precisely what the government considers the most important among the interests threatened. ”

“ The new admiral brought to his duty the submissive devotion of a military man, and had not, as Villaret had, any counter-project of his own; but the radical defects of an organization, vitiated by years of neglect and false standards, could not be overcome by a man already advanced in years in the few short days of hurried preparation. Such as the French navy had become, through the loss of its heads and the vagaries of the legislature, such it sailed on the expedition to Ireland. "God keep me from having anything to do with the navy!" wrote Hoche. ”

“ In the great Mediterranean naval port, Toulon, things were quite as bad. "The new officers," says Chevalier, "obtained no more obedience than the old; the crews became what they had been made; they now knew only one thing, to rise against authority. Duty and honor had become to them empty words." It would be wearisome to multiply instances and details. Out of their own country such men were a terror rather to allies than foes. ”

“ Embittered words and feelings took material shape in acts as violent as themselves. On the 9th of March was decreed the Revolutionary Tribunal, the great instrument of the Terror, from whose decisions there was no appeal. On the 13th of the same month, La Vendée rose for its long and bloody struggle in the royal cause. On the 18th, the Army of the North, which only four weeks before had invaded Holland, was signally defeated at Neerwinden, and its general, Dumouriez, the victor of Valmy and Jemappes, the most successful leader the war had yet produced, was forced to retreat upon France. ”

“ Troubridge in the "Culloden" was soon right behind Nelson, to whom he was dear beyond all British officers, and three other ships followed in as close array as was consistent with the free use of their guns. The Spaniards, never in good order, lay before them in confusion, two or three deep, hindering one another's fire, and presenting a target that could not easily be missed. This closing scene of the battle raged round the rear ships of the Spanish main body, and necessarily became a mêlée, each British captain acting according to his own judgment and the condition of his ship. ”

“ Enough has now been said to show the general state of the French navy in the last ten years of the eighteenth century. The time and space thus used have not been wasted, for these conditions, which continued under the empire, were as surely the chief cause of the continuous and overwhelming overthrow of that navy, as the ruin of the French and Spanish sea-power, culminating at Trafalgar, was a principal factor in the final result sealed at Waterloo. Great Britain will be seen to enter the war allied with many of the nations of Europe against France. ”

“ One of the first acts of the war, before sending a vessel to the Mediterranean or increasing the Channel fleet, was to despatch a squadron of seven sail-of-the-line to the West Indies, where there were at that time, except a few small cruisers, but two fifty-gun ships, one at Jamaica and one to windward,—a thousand miles apart. No fact shows more strongly how unprepared Great Britain was for war than the naval destitution of this region, at a time when France had three or four ships-of-the-line continually in her colonies. ”

“ The prestige of success, the knowledge that he could command the services of a body of men superior in numbers as in disciplined action to any aggregation of units that could be kept steadily together to oppose him, was sufficient to insure for him the supremacy that concentrated force will always have over diffused force, organized power over unorganized. ”

“ But that such a course may be really effective,—that the inferior may, as in some of Bonaparte's wonderful campaigns, become ultimately superior,—there must be at some fitly chosen point of the sea frontier a concentrated body of ships; whose escape, if effected, may be the means of inflicting a great disaster upon the enemy by crushing one or more of the exposed fractions of his fleet. Unless there be such a central mass, mere dissemination is purposeless. Inferiority carried beyond a certain degree becomes impotence ”

“ An army powerful enough to hold in submission and reap the use of the fertile valley of the Nile, could never be reduced like the port of a rocky island, blocked by sea and surrounded by a people in successful insurrection. Nevertheless, the same cause that determined the loss of Malta operated effectually to make Egypt a worse than barren possession.
Bonaparte, though wielding uncontrolled sway over all the resources of France, found as great difficulty in getting news from his conquest or substantial succor to it as he had had, when in Egypt, to obtain intelligence from home. ”

“ The trade interests of the Baltic, as the outlet through which great rivers and the products of immense regions found their way to the world beyond, made its control also an object of importance to both the chief parties in the coming struggle,—to Great Britain who strove to drive her enemy off the sea, and to France who wished to shut out hers from the land. ”