Sea-Power and Other Studies

by Sir Cyprian Bridge

Had the expression 'real war' been introduced into the title of this chapter, its introduction would have been justifiable. The sources—if not of our knowledge of combat, at least of the views which are sure to prevail when we come to actual fighting—are to be found in two well-defined, dissimilar, and widely separated areas. Within one are included the records of war; within the other, remembrance of the exercises and manoeuvres of a time of peace. The future belligerent will almost of a certainty have taken a practical part in the latter, whilst it is probable that he will have had no personal experience of the former. The longer the time elapsed since hostilities were in progress, the more probable and more general does this absence of experience become. The fighting man—that is to say, the man set apart, paid, and trained so as to be ready to fight when called upon—is of the same nature as the rest of his species. This is a truism; but it is necessary to insist upon it, because professional, and especially professorial, strategists and tacticians almost invariably ignore it. That which we have seen and know has not only more, but very much more, influence upon the minds of nearly all of us than that of which we have only heard, and, most likely, heard but imperfectly. The result is that, when peace is interrupted and the fighting man—on both sea and land—is confronted with the problems of practical belligerency, he brings to his attempts at their solution an intellectual equipment drawn, not from knowledge of real war, but from the less trustworthy arsenal of the recollections of his peace training.

When peace, especially a long peace, ends, the methods which it has introduced are the first enemies which the organised defenders of a country have to overcome. There is plenty of evidence to prove that—except, of course, in unequal conflicts between highly organised, civilised states and savage or semi-barbarian tribes—success in war is directly proportionate to the extent of the preliminary victory over the predominance of impressions derived from the habits and exercises of an armed force during peace. That the cogency of this evidence is not invariably recognised is to be attributed to insufficient attention to history and to disinclination to apply its lessons properly. A primary object of the _Naval_Annual_—indeed, the chief reason for its publication—being to assist in advancing the efficiency of the British Navy, its pages are eminently the place for a review of the historical examples of the often-recurring inability of systems established in peace to stand the test of war. Hostilities on land being more frequent, and much more frequently written about, than those by sea, the history of the former as well as of the latter must be examined. The two classes of warfare have much in common. The principles of their strategy are identical; and, as regards some of their main features, so are those of the tactics followed in each. Consequently the history of land warfare has its lessons for those who desire to achieve success in warfare on the sea.

That this has often been lost sight of is largely due to a misapprehension of the meaning of terms. The two words 'military' and 'army' have been given, in English, a narrower signification than they ought, and than they used, to have. Both terms have been gradually restricted in their use, and made to apply only to the land service. This has been unfortunate; because records of occurrences and discussions, capable of imparting much valuable instruction to naval officers, have been passed over by them as inapplicable to their own calling. It may have been noticed that Captain Mahan uses the word 'military' in its right sense as indicating the members, and the most important class of operations, of both land- and sea-forces. The French, through whom the word has come to us from the Latin, use it in the same sense as Mahan. _Un_militaire_ is a member of either a land army or a navy. The 'Naval and Military Intelligence' of the English press is given under the heading 'Nouvelles Militaires' in the French. Our word 'army' also came to us direct from the French, who still apply it equally to both services—_armée_de_ _terre,_armée_de_mer_. It is a participle, and means 'armed,' the word 'force' being understood. The kindred words armada in Spanish and Portuguese, and armata in Italian—equally derived from the Latin—are used to indicate a fleet or navy, another name being given to a land army. The word 'army' was generally applied to a fleet in former days by the English, as will be seen on reference to the Navy Records Society's volumes on the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

This short etymological discussion is not inappropriate here, for it shows why we should not neglect authorities on the history and conduct of war merely because they do not state specially that they are dealing with the naval branch of it.

A very slight knowledge of history is quite enough to make us acquainted with the frequent recurrence of defeats and disasters inflicted on armed forces by antagonists whose power to do so had not been previously suspected. It has been the same on the sea as on the land, though—owing to more copious records—we may have a larger list of events on the latter. It will not be denied that it is of immense importance to us to inquire how this happened, and ascertain how—for the future—it may be rendered highly improbable in our own case. A brief enumeration of the more striking instances will make it plain that the events in question have been confined to no particular age and to no particular country.

It may be said that the more elaborately organised and trained in peace time an armed force happened to be, the more unexpected always, and generally the more disastrous, was its downfall. Examples of this are to be found in the earliest campaigns of which we have anything like detailed accounts, and they continue to reappear down to very recent times. In the elaborate nature of its organisation and training there probably never has been an army surpassing that led by Xerxes into Greece twenty-four centuries ago. Something like eight years had been devoted to its preparation. The minute account of its review by Xerxes on the shores of the Hellespont proves that, however inefficient the semi-civilised contingents accompanying it may have been, the regular Persian army appeared, in discipline, equipment, and drill, to have come up to the highest standard of the most intense 'pipeclay' epoch. In numbers alone its superiority was considerable to the last, and down to the very eve of Platæa its commander openly displayed his contempt for his enemy. Yet no defeat could be more complete than that suffered by the Persians at the hands of their despised antagonists.

As if to establish beyond dispute the identity of governing conditions in both land and maritime wars, the next very conspicuous disappointment of an elaborately organised force was that of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse. At the time Athens, without question, stood at the head of the naval world: her empire was in the truest sense the product of sea-power. Her navy, whilst unequalled in size, might claim, without excessive exaggeration, to be invincible. The great armament which the Athenians despatched to Sicily seemed, in numbers alone, capable of triumphing over all resistance. If the Athenian navy had already met with some explicable mishaps, it looked back with complacent confidence on the glorious achievements of more than half a century previously. It had enjoyed many years of what was so nearly a maritime peace that its principal exploits had been the subjection of states weak to insignificance on the sea as compared with imperial Athens. Profuse expenditure on its maintenance; the 'continued practice' of which Pericles boasted, the peace manoeuvres of a remote past; skilfully designed equipment; and the memory of past glories;—all these did not avail to save it from defeat at the hands of an enemy who only began to organise a fleet when the Athenians had invaded his coast waters.

Ideal perfection as a regular army has never been so nearly reached as by that of Sparta. The Spartan spent his life in the barrack and the mess-room; his amusements were the exercises of the parade ground. For many generations a Spartan force had never been defeated in a pitched battle. We have had, in modern times, some instances of a hectoring soldiery arrogantly prancing amongst populations whose official defenders it had defeated in battle; but nonesuch could vie with the Spartans in the sublimity of their military self-esteem. Overweening confidence in the prowess of her army led Sparta to trample with ruthless disdain on the rights of others. The iniquitous attack on Thebes, a state thought incapable of effectual resentment, was avenged by the defeat of Leuctra, which announced the end of the political supremacy and the military predominance of Sparta.

In the series of struggles with Carthage which resulted in putting Rome in a position enabling her eventually to win the dominion of the ancient world, the issue was to be decided on the water. Carthage was essentially a maritime state. The foundation of the city was effected by a maritime expedition; its dominions lay on the neighbouring coast or in regions to which the Carthaginians could penetrate only by traversing the sea. To Carthage her fleet was 'all in all': her navy, supported by large revenues and continuously maintained, was more of a 'regular' force than any modern navy before the second half of the seventeenth century. The Romans were almost without a fleet, and when they formed one the undertaking was ridiculed by the Carthaginians with an unconcealed assumption of superiority. The defeat of the latter off Mylæ, the first of several, came as a great surprise to them, and, as we can see now, indicated the eventual ruin of their city.

We are so familiar with stories of the luxury and corruption of the Romans during the decline of the empire that we are likely to forget that the decline went on for centuries, and that their armed forces, however recruited, presented over and over again abundant signs of physical courage and vigour. The victory of Stilicho over Alaric at Pollentia has been aptly paralleled with that of Marius over the Cimbri. This was by no means the only achievement of the Roman army of the decadence. A century and a quarter later—when the Empire of the West had fallen and the general decline had made further progress—Belisarius conducted successful campaigns in Persia, in North Africa, in Sicily, and in Italy. The mere list of countries shows that the mobility and endurance of the Roman forces during a period in which little creditable is generally looked for were not inferior to their discipline and courage. Yet they met with disastrous defeat after all, and at the hands of races which they had more than once proved themselves capable of withstanding. It could not have been because the later Roman equipment was inferior, the organisation less elaborate, or the training less careful than those of their barbarian enemies.