ARTICLE XL.
Descents.
These are operations of rare occurrence, and may be classed as among the most difficult in war when effected in presence of a well-prepared enemy.
Since the invention of gunpowder and the changes effected by it in navies, transports are so helpless in presence of the monstrous three-deckers of the present day, armed as they are with a hundred cannon, that an army can make a descent only with the assistance of a numerous fleet of ships of war which can command the sea, at least until the debarkation of the army takes place.
Before the invention of gunpowder, the transports were also the ships of war; they were moved along at pleasure by using oars, were light, and could skirt along the coasts; their number was in proportion to the number of troops to be embarked; and, aside from the danger of tempests, the operations of a fleet could be arranged with almost as much certainty as those of an army on land. Ancient history, for these reasons, gives us examples of more extensive debarkations than modern times.
Who does not recall to mind the immense forces transported by the Persians upon the Black Sea, the Bosporus, and the Archipelago,—the innumerable hosts landed in Greece by Xerxes and Darius,—the great expeditions of the Carthaginians and Romans to Spain and Sicily, that of Alexander into Asia Minor, those of Cæsar to England and Africa, that of Germanicus to the mouths of the Elbe,—the Crusades,—the expeditions of the Northmen to England, to France, and even to Italy?
Since the invention of cannon, the too celebrated Armada of Philip II. was the only enterprise of this kind of any magnitude until that set on foot by Napoleon against England in 1803. All other marine expeditions were of no great extent: as, for example, those of Charles V. and of Sebastian of Portugal to the coast of Africa; also the several descents of the French into the United States of America, into Egypt and St. Domingo, of the English to Egypt, Holland, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Philadelphia. I say nothing of Hoche's projected landing in Ireland; for that was a failure, and is, at the same time, an example of the difficulties to be apprehended in such attempts.
The large armies kept on foot in our day by the great states of the world prevent descents with thirty or forty thousand men, except against second-rate powers; for it is extremely difficult to find transportation for one hundred or one hundred and fifty thousand men with their immense trains of artillery, munitions, cavalry, &c.