the eminent French naval critic, Contre-amiral Degouy. He named it ' Les Opérations Conjuguées.' The French admiral's purpose was to show that the ' passive pressure' now applied by the allied naval forces could not be relied on to reduce Germany by cutting off food and other necessaries soon enough to save the Allies themselves from being crippled by 'l'épuise'ment matériel' and 'l'abatement moral.' The British member of Parliament was content to pose the question, and wait for the answer which was not given. The French admiral pointed out what, in his opinion, would be a more excellent way, but did so in terms so vague that only a very indistinct impression of what it is he wished to see done was left on the reader's mind. A great ox treads on the tongues of British members of Parliament and French naval critics alike. Yet they make their meanings sufficiently clear. In their opinions enough has not been done with our fleet, and more remains to do. When such a belief prevails, and is avowed by responsible and competent voices, it is surely not superfluous to look behind us, and around us, for such evidence as we can find for our guidance before we make up our own minds.

Nothing in the conduct of discussion is more commendable, not even good humour and fair play, than to make the meaning of your questions and your statements clear. Indeed, there is no fair play when you fail to comply with that condition. The best security that you will succeed is to be very careful in using your terms in a definite sense, and always in the same sense. We shall clear the ground if we can decide what is meant by our 'traditional naval strategy,' which it seems has broken down. The much-employed word strategy, which, as it is now commonly used, came late from the land which 'produced one Kant with a K and the many cants with a C,' is not so true a term of art that it can be safely assumed to bear a definite meaning, and the same definite meaning, to all. I will predicate that it means-the use of our naval resources so as to develop their power to the utmost for the purpose of defeating that part of the enemy's power which it is most profitable for us to overthrow; so that it shall, either directly or incidentally, protect what must be safeguarded in the whole body of our national activity and possessions under penalty of crippling loss; so that victory shall give its full harvest; so that defeat in any particular operation shall not VOL. 226. NO. 462.

of need amount to more than a check or temporary set back, and shall not entail disaster as its inevitable consequence. Since it is said that there has been failure, it is not irrelevant to try to show, in the fewest possible words, what has been done in former ages. When we have done that we shall be in a better position to gauge how far there has been a breakdown of our traditional strategy' in this war.

Well, to begin with, Englishmen have always understood that the most effectual way to prevent an enemy from damaging us by invasion, or otherwise, was to attack and destroy him wherever he could be found. The tendency, natural to human nature, to seize upon some particular man and deck him with the glory of creative wisdom-the tendency which made our fathers credit Alfred the Great with the foundation of the University of Oxford and the invention of the English juryhas misled some among us into seeing wonderful originality in the advice which Drake gave in the years before the Armada. Drake saw nothing which had not been as clear as the light of an unclouded sun to those Englishmen who in the reign of King John sailed with William Longsword to prevent Philippe Augustus from invading England by assailing and destroying his ships at Damme. The men of the Cinque Ports who, by the guidance of their mother-wit, saw instinctively that the most effectual way of making sure that Eustace the Monk should do no harm in their country was to fall on him and make an end of him before he got there, knew in 1217 the essentials of all that was known to Drake, to Hawke, or to Nelson. They manoeuvred to gain the weather gauge so that their arrows and the lime they threw in front of them should fly with the wind. They, in fact, made a rational estimate of the conditions in which they had to work, and having first calculated, they then bore down on the enemy with Upright Will and Downright Action.'

Individual officers and particular governments have failed, but the prevailing spirit has ever been that of William Longsword, of Hubert de Burgh, and of the men of the Cinque Ports. To destroy the enemy's forces wherever they could be reached was, save in stupid intervals, known to be the great point which carried the little points with it. How the work was to be carried out, with what wealth or lack of means, with what measure of continuity, and with what approach to

completeness, those were details which depended on the nature of the ship and the resources of the nation. The ship developed slowly through the centuries, and the nation grew from generation to generation and by degrees. But the principle was always the same, though the seamen of later times have been provided with instruments which allowed them to make an incomparably better application thereof than was possible in earlier ages. When the enemy could not be found and beaten at sea, or when though defeated he was not destroyed and might still be dangerous, then he must be watched and kept in port as closely as the sea-keeping powers of the ship of each age allowed.

Given that the great point has been achieved, then the little points have been incidentally gained. The free movement of our commerce is in itself a very great matter, but the task of giving it direct protection was a subordinate part of the Navy's work. The great fleets made it possible that the main streams of commerce should continue to flow, because by driving the adversary into port they prevented him from cutting a trade route permanently. At the same time, and incidentally, they blocked the road to the main streams of the enemy's commerce. It might creep along the coast from the protection of one battery to another, but it was suspended on the ocean save for some scattered and fortunate adventurers. Voltaire says in his 'History of Louis 'XV.' that French privateers were far more successful in taking English and Dutch vessels than their privateers were in taking the French-but then he goes on, there were far more English and Dutch merchant ships at sea than French to be taken. That is the whole Iliad in a nutshell. We drove French commerce off the sea. They vexed and injured ours, but without stopping its flow.

It is very necessary to bear this in mind when we are told that the successes of German submarines demonstrate the breakdown of our traditional strategy.' The implication is that in former times we escaped all such loss. Nothing is less true. We can put aside for a moment the question of the degree of our present loss and the reasons why it is greater than was the case in past times. The immediate point is that we always did lose in that way even when our 'traditional strategy' was most successful. If command of

the sea means that you can prevent any single ship from reaching the open sea and doing harm, we never had it save in the very exceptional case of the Crimean War.

Our command was never more complete than in the closing years of the Seven Years War, and after Hawke had destroyed the Maréchal de Conflans' fleet in Quiberon Bay on the 20th of November 1759. Yet in 1762 a vigorous French naval officer, the Chevalier de Tiernay, passed the blockade of Brest in a fog with a small squadron, escaped pursuit, reached St. John's in Newfoundland in June, and landed a detachment of French troops, commanded by the Comte D'Haussonville. He took the town, burnt fishing stations, and did much damage. If he had been content to reship his soldiers and be off quickly, it is possible that he would have got back without loss. But the French Government probably wished to hold the place for the purpose of having something to exchange when peace should be made. D'Haussonville was left at St. John's till British forces collected, and he was compelled to lay down his arms. Yet in September Tiernay eluded the watch of the British ships which had collected to pin him in—again in a fog-and returned safe. He claimed that coming, staying, and returning, he destroyed 460 British merchant ships, and one corvette he caught at St. John's. The total was swollen by including a fritter of fishing boats, but he undoubtedly did considerable harm.

If we had not other matter to attend to it would be easy to quote a score of similar commerce-destroying cruises carried out in spite of our command of the sea to the fall of Napoleon. Before we conclude that our 'traditional strategy' has broken down, we have to prove that the undeniably large, and to us painful, measure of success attained by the German submarines has been due to some misuse of, or some failure to make full use of, our fleet. If such failure as there has been can be accounted for (as I propose to endeavour to show that it can) by another cause, then there has been no 'breakdown' in that

sense.

It is common property that certain combined operations undertaken in the present war have ended in defeat. The Antwerp gamble and the Dardanelles failure are notorious. But can anyone lay the blame for the first on the Navy? As for the second, may we not say that it was a repetition of

many passages in our history of the failure of the Duke of York in the Low Countries; of Nelson's useless attack on Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which was useless because he was not allowed the co-operation of the troops he well knew to be necessary; of the loss of General Fraser's soldiers in Egypt; of the successive surrenders of Beresford and Whitelocke .t Buenos Ayres; of the idle parade of Duckworth at Constantinople? All these undertakings were of the same kind as the Gallipoli expedition, though none were on the same scale. We need not go into these examples of ill-thought-out and illadapted tries for successes, and that for a very simple reason. The failure of twenty combined operations in which the function of the Navy is to carry troops to a coast, land them, supply them, and if retreat becomes necessary, then to bring them away, does not in the least affect our command of the sea. Antwerp and Gallipoli had no more effect in that way than had the surrenders of Fraser, Beresford, and Whitelocke. And we are here concerned only with the command of the sea. Have we fallen short of maintaining it? If so, to what extent? And for what reason? These are the questions.

The answer to the first is easily given. We have maintained that command, not indeed to the unprecedented degree of fullness that we have prevented our enemy from getting to sea at all, but in the only rational sense the term has ever borne. There has never been an interval in which we have not been able to transport troops oversea, supply them, and where we believed withdrawal to be necessary, then to bring them away. That the sending was ill-advised, and the retreat not justified, may or may not be the fact. It is relevant when we are to discuss the general conduct of the war. It is irrelevant when we are considering the command of the sea. The most silly of combined operations is impossible without that command. Meanwhile the main streams of our commerce have never been dammed, while the oversea trade of Germany on the great oceans is at an end.

Yet command is not an absolute term. Or to put the case in another and perhaps more accurate way, command and the use made of command are distinct. A power may be timidly employed, and therefore not operative to the full possible extent. It is open to anyone to maintain that our handling of our undeniable superiority has not been so energetic, so