Spain and again under the first Napoleon. “It is the point,” continues the historian, “from which in every age the independence of these kingdoms has been seriously menaced. Sensible of her danger, it had been the fixed policy of Great Britain for centuries to prevent this formidable outwork from falling into the hands of her enemies, and the best days of her history are chiefly occupied with the struggle to ward off such a disaster.” In ascribing, however, every great war in which Great Britain has been engaged to this cause alone he has gone too far. The security of India has been a motive of equal strength. Nevertheless, it was to protect Antwerp from the French that Charles II. sided with the Dutch in 1670; that Anne declared war on Louis XIV. in 1704; that Chatham supported Prussia in 1742; that Pitt, fifty years later, took up arms against the Revolution.
The trophies of the British army in the great war with France were characteristic of the amphibious power. The troops took Interactions of naval and military operations. more battleships than colours, and almost as many actions of naval arsenals as land fortresses. Many were the blows they struck at the maritime strength of France and her allies; but had the expedition which landed on the Isle of Walcheren in 1809 been as vigorously conducted as it was wisely conceived, it would have hit Napoleon far harder than even the seizure of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. The great dockyard that the emperor had constructed on the Scheldt held the nucleus of a powerful fleet. Eight line-of-battle ships and ten frigates lay in mid-channel. Twenty vessels of different classes were on the slips, and in the magazines and storehouses had been accumulated sufficient material to equip all these and twenty more. The destruction of Antwerp—and for a full week it was at Lord Chatham's mercy—would have freed scores of British frigates to protect British commerce; Wellington, in his great campaign of 1813, could not have had to complain that, for the first time, the communication by sea of a British army was insecure; the Americans, in the war which broke out in 1812, would have been more vigorously opposed; and Napoleon, who, while Antwerp was his, never altogether abandoned hope of overmastering Great Britain on her own element, might, on his own confession, have relinquished the useless struggle with the great sea power. The expedition failed, and failed disastrously. But for all that, fulfilling as it did the great maxim that the naval strength of the enemy should be the first objective of the forces of the maritime power, both by land and sea, it was a strategical stroke of the highest order.
The predominant part played by the army under Wellington in Spain and Belgium has tended to obscure the principle that governed its employment in the war of 1793-1815. The army, in the opinion of the country, was first and foremost the auxiliary of the fleet; and only when the naval strength of the enemy had been destroyed was it used in the ordinary manner, i.e. in the invasion of the hostile territory and in lending aid to the forces of confederate powers. Events proved that these principles were absolutely sound. It was not in the narrow seas alone that the army rendered good service to the navy. Depriving France of her colonies, occupying her ports in foreign waters, ousting her from commanding posts along the trade routes, it contributed not only to her exhaustion, but to the protection of British commerce and to the permanent establishment of maritime supremacy. Few of these operations are of sufficient magnitude to attract much notice from the ordinary historian, yet it is impossible to overrate their effect. To the possession of the dominant positions that were captured by the army, Great Britain, in no small degree, is indebted for the present security of her vast dominions. The keynote of the fierce struggle with the French Empire was the possession of India. Before he became First Consul, Napoleon had realized that India was the throne of Asia; that whoever should sit on that throne, master of the commerce of the East, of the richest and most natural market for the products of the West, and of the hardiest and most enlightened nations of the golden hemisphere, would be master of more than half the globe. But his prescience was not surer than the instinct of the British people. Vague and shadowy indeed were their dreams of empire, yet the presentiment of future greatness, based on the foothold they had already gained in Hindustan, seems always to have controlled the national policy. They knew as well as Napoleon that Malta and Egypt, to use his own phrase, were merely the outworks of their stronghold in the East; and that if those outworks fell into the hands of France, a great army of warlike Mahommedans, led by French generals, stiffened by a French army corps, and gathering impetus from the accession of every tribe it passed through, might march unopposed across the Indus. So, from first to last, the least threat against Egypt and Malta sufficed to awaken their apprehensions; and in their knowledge that India was the ultimate objective of all his schemes is to be found the explanation of the stubbornness with which they fought Napoleon. It is not to be denied that in thwarting the ambition of their mighty rival, or perhaps in furthering their own, the navy was the chief instrument; but in thrusting the French from Egypt, in adding Ceylon, Mauritius and Cape Colony to the outworks, the army, small as it was then, compared with the great hosts of the Continent, did much both for the making and the security of the British Empire.
But the scope of the military operations of a maritime stale is by no means limited to the capture of colonies, naval arsenals and coaling-stations. Timely diversions, by attracting a large portion of the enemy's fighting strength on the mainland, may give valuable aid to the armies of an ally. The Peninsular War is a conspicuous example. According to Napoleon, the necessity of maintaining his grip on Spain deprived him of 180,000 good soldiers during the disastrous campaign of 1813; and those soldiers, who would have made Dresden a decisive instead of a barren victory, were held fast by Wellington. Again, it was the news of Vittoria that made it useless for the emperor to propose terms of peace, and so escape from the coils that strangled him at Leipzig.
Nor is the reinforcement supplied by a small army based upon the sea to be despised. In 1793 a British contingent under the duke of York formed part of the allied forces which, had the British government forborne to interfere, would in all probability have captured Paris. Twenty-two years later, under wiser auspices, another contingent, although numbering no more than 30,000 men, took a decisive part in the war of nations, and the blunders of the older generation were more than repaired at Waterloo. Nevertheless, the strength of the amphibious power has been more effectively displayed than in the campaign of 1815. Intervention at the most critical period of a war has produced greater results than the provision of a contingent at the outset. In 1781 the disembarkation of a French army at Yorktown, Virginia, rendered certain the independence of the United States; and in 1878, when the Russian invaders were already in sight of Constantinople, the arrival of the British fleet in the Dardanelles, following the mobilization of an expeditionary force, at once arrested their further progress. Had the British Cabinet of 1807 realized the preponderating strength which even a small army, if rightly used, draws from the command of the sea, the campaign of Eylau would in all probability have been as disastrous to Napoleon as that of Leipzig. The presence of 20,000 men at the great battle would have surely turned the scale in favour of the allies. Yet, although the men were available, although a few months later 27,000 were assembled in the Baltic for the coercion of Denmark, his Majesty's ministers, forgetful of Marlborough's glories, were so imbued with the idea that the British army was too insignificant to take part in a Continental war, that the opportunity was let slip. It is a sufficiently remarkable fact that the successive governments of that era, although they realized very clearly that the first duty of the army was to support the operations and complete the triumph of the navy, never seemed to have grasped the principles which should have controlled its use when the command of the sea had been attained. The march of the Allies on Paris in 1793 was brought to a standstill because the British Cabinet considered that the contingent would be better employed in besieging Dunkirk. After the failure of the expedition
