ments, by taking the lead in reducing our own, has so far met with no response. The diagrams facing this page are interesting in that connexion. They show, on the one hand, the complete failure of the 'Dreadnought' policy, whereby we hoped to steal a march upon other nations but soon found ourselves worse off than before; and, on the other hand, the result, in relative sea-power, of the opposite policy, which we adopted immediately after the Armistice, of scrapping the great Navy from which we derived our salvation during the momentous years of warfare.

So far we have touched only upon the relationship, in recent years, between Sea-Power and Diplomacy in time of peace. Our next object will be to find some illustration of the methods by which the men of words have affected the achievements of the men of deeds at sea in time of war. In the Battle of Trafalgar, we find an object lesson ready to our hands. First, it provides an illustration of the futility of trying to use words to belittle the effects of an event such as the destruction of a fleet. On that point let us take the description of the battle which appeared in the 'Moniteur,' in the form of a dispatch from the 'grand naval army secured in the Atlantic.' The extract is to be found in vol. XIV, p. 377, of the Naval Chronicle' for the year 1805. It purports to emanate from 'Headquarters, Cadiz, October 25' [1805], and it runs thus:

'The English fleet is annihilated!-Nelson is no more!— Indignant at being inactive in port, whilst our brave brethren in arms were gaining laurels in Germany, Admirals Villeneuve and Gravina resolved to put to sea, and gave the English battle. They were superior in number, forty-five* to our thirty-three; but what is superiority in numbers to men determined to conquer ?-Admiral Nelson did everything to avoid a battle; he attempted to get into the Mediterranean, but we pursued, and came up with him off Trafalgar.' . . And so on. The extract concludes in these words:

...

'After having acquired so decisive a victory, we wait with impatience the Emperor's order to sail to the enemy's shore, annihilate the rest of his navy, and thus complete the triumphant work we have so brilliantly begun.'

*True number, 24.

In these days of anti-British propaganda, both in the East and in the West, some consolation can be derived from reading that old extract. It is, I believe, a fact that the description of the Battle of Trafalgar which I have quoted was believed over large areas in France as late as the year 1814, but truth which lay inherent in so decisive a deed as Nelson's victory was bound to prevail in the end, whatever course the men of words might adopt. The practical result cannot be described better than it has been by Prof. Callender of the Naval College at Greenwich. After 1815, he writes:

'The sea supremacy of Great Britain was at once so tremendous and so benevolent that the world came to regard the discharge of a British broadside as an almost superfluous exhibition. . . . Whether this view was fundamentally sound is a theme which no historian has yet put to the test. It may be said to have slept upon the political shelf until Mahan propounded his celebrated doctrine that the State which covets power on land must first command the sea. This view, which has been instinct in the British “Admiralty" at least as far back as the "Libelle of English Policy" (1436?), was, as a philosophy, novel to the rest of the world; and, finding wide acceptance, awoke in Germany a response which was to shatter the peace of two hemispheres.

"The Influence of Sea-Power" was published in 1890. Within ten years Germany began to put its precepts into practice; and in so doing issued the first unmistakable challenge to the century-old predominance of Britain' (Leaflet No. 61, Historical Association, p. 19).

The main features of the actual Battle of Trafalgar and of Nelson's manoeuvres, from the time when the Allied Fleet began to come out of Cadiz harbour on Oct. 19, 1805, until twenty out of their thirty-four ships of the line had been sunk or captured on the 21st, are familiar to all students of history. This aspect of the battle comes outside the influence of diplomacy on sea-power. The points to be accentuated, in connexion therewith, are that, unless Villeneuve had left the security conferred upon him by the defences of the harbour of Cadiz, the Battle of Trafalgar would not have taken place, and that the reason of Villeneuve's putting to sea can be traced to Pitt's diplomacy.

When Nelson left Merton for the last time, on his

way to join the 'Victory' at Spithead, he was depressed at the prospect of spending the winter months at sea off Cadiz, buffeted by Atlantic gales. No one realised better than he did, from prolonged and bitter knowledge, the helplessness of a sea-commander, when faced with the difficult problem of destroying a hostile fleet which refused to leave the shelter of a defended harbour. His own feeble physique had been worn, almost to breaking point, by such experiences, though his spirit remained undaunted. It is on such occasions that the man of words can find his true function in aiding the man of action in time of war; not by hurling empty insults at the enemy-such as threats to dig out like rats' a hostile fleet-but by bringing about some situation elsewhere which will cause that fleet to put to sea.

It is in Corbett's Campaign of Trafalgar'* that we find the clue to the mystery why Villeneuve put to sea from Cadiz; and we can do more than that, we can trace, amongst the papers of that fine old seaman, Lord Barham, the impetus that caused our diplomatists, who were working for Pitt's third Coalition against Napoleon, to bring matters to a crisis in 1805. It was Barham who impressed upon Pitt the value of troops when used in conjunction with a Navy, a procedure which had been strongly advocated in a book called 'Conjunct Expeditions,' published in 1759, from which we will take two typical extracts. The first runs: 'The Fleet and Army, acting in concert, seem to be the natural Bulwark of these Kingdoms.'

This is the second extract:

'The conjunct armament goes against the enemy like an Arrow from a Bow. It gives no warning where it is to come, and leaves no traces where it has passed. It must wound, too, where it hits, if rightly pointed at a vulnerable part. When this is done, a new aim is directed. The enemy in the meantime, like a man in the dark labouring under an unwieldly shield, moves slowly to and fro, distracted and at a loss which way to go to guard against the stroke of the invisible hand.'

May of the year 1805 was a momentous month in England, with the bogey of invasion brooding over the

• 'The Campaign of Trafalgar,' Julian S. Corbett (Longmans).

land; with strong enemy squadrons at sea, and unlocated. Barham, who became First Lord in April, wisely pressed for action as a cure for widespread fear, for behaving like a man who 'moves slowly to and fro, distracted and at a loss where to go to guard against the stroke of the invisible hand.' The situation demanded some cessful deed, to raise the moral of the nation.

Among the Barham papers, proved by internal evidence to have been written in May, we find the draft of a memorandum believed to have been sent by him to Pitt. It runs: 'If the fleet is not kept in motion and adequate to our growing demands, we must sink under the preparations that are making against us.' Then he proceeds to recommend some offensive action in the Mediterranean, such as an attack upon Minorca (which had been a practicable proposition ever since Villeneuve had left the Mediterranean in April), but only if troops were available for the purpose. Barham wrote: 'Something must be done, and that right soon; defensive operations, with such a force as we have collected on shore, must end in bankruptcy; and if that force is not sufficient to defend the [British] islands without keeping two-thirds of the fleet employed in assisting them, the contest cannot last long.' He added that the ships that were left in the Mediterranean were sufficient for such a purpose as an attack upon Minorca, if troops could be found.

By this date (May 1805) an expeditionary force of a few light dragoons and six battalions of infantry under Sir James Craig had reached the Tagus on the way to the Mediterranean. Corbett describes that force as the insidious drop of poison-the little sting-that was to infect Napoleon's Empire with decay and to force his hand with so tremendous a result.' Diplomatic negotiations had been proceeding between Pitt and the Czar. During the previous March the draft of a proposed Anglo-Russian Treaty had been dispatched to Lord G. Leveson-Gower (afterwards the first Lord Granville) at St Petersburg, the object being to obtain Russian co-operation against Napoleon. The Czar was known to be touchy about the retention of Malta by Britain, and Pitt used the information supplied by Barham about the importance of Minorca to alleviate

this touchiness. The following passage dispatch to Leveson-Gower, dated June 7:

occurs in a

"The King will be satisfied to place, after a time to be limited, the harbour of Malta under the protection of a Russian garrison, due provision being at the same time made for the civil government of the Island, in a way satisfactory to the inhabitants, provided an arrangement can be made by which His Majesty shall be put in possession of the Island of Minorca as the substituted Naval Station for the Fleets of Great Britain, although the relative security of that Island against invasion and capture can bear no comparison with that of Malta.'

Pitt's real object was to obtain Russian co-operation in a military enterprise on a larger scale. It was in the boot of Italy, where French troops under St Cyr were dangerously isolated, that he was seeking for Napoleon's vulnerable heel. Apart from soreness about Malta, the Russians were waiting for ocular evidence of British co-operation in this enterprise, and negotiations had been hanging fire. The arrival of Craig's expedition at Malta, of which Pitt heard on Sept. 17, three days after Nelson had left England, brought matters to a climax. In Corbett's words, it was in Napoleon's apprehension for St Cyr, and particularly in the threat from Malta, that we get the key of the rest of the campaign, and how it was that Pitt, by his little expedition, forced Napoleon to sacrifice his fleet to Nelson.

As soon as Napoleon received definite information from Italy of the danger that threatened St Cyr, he at once ordered Villeneuve to leave Cadiz and 'to proceed to Naples and disembark on some point of the coast the troops you carry on board to join the army under the orders of General St Cyr.' Villeneuve did not obey even this definite order; but Napoleon had considered the matter too important to leave anything to chance. He had appointed another admiral, Rosily, to take command of the Cadiz Fleet. Rosily arrived at Madrid on Oct. 12, but the road to Cadiz was unsafe, infested by brigands. Villeneuve heard the news on Oct. 18, and hardened his heart for the venture. The allied fleet began to put to sea on the 19th, to meet its fate off Cape Trafalgar on the 21st. It would be difficult to find a more convincing Vol. 250.-No. 496.

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