her claim was so scornfully denied were greater perhaps than has yet been realised; certainly she was better able to have prevented Trafalgar than Villeneuve. Scores of books have been written on the strategies and tactics of the Trafalgar campaign, scores of lessons have been drawn therefrom, yet never a one has sought to pierce through the tactical embroidery and see that the Trafalgar campaign resulted as it did, because a clever woman accentuated instead of diminished Nelson's fitness to win and through Nelson the fitness to win of the British Navy.
It is probable that Fitness to Win embodies little else besides the fixed desire to kill the enemy. Good seamanship, good gunnery, good torpedo, good engineering—all these things may aid it, but apparently all are not absolutely essential. If essential, or in so far as they are essential, the desire to kill the enemy will produce them. If good gunnery be essential to fitness to win, the fittest to win will of necessity be good practical gunners, compelled thereto by instinct, though good gunnery will not of itself make them fit to win. Russian target practice, before the war was as good as or better than the Japanese.
For instance, a few years before the war Russian gunners trained by Admiral Rogestvensky fired under weigh at 12 knots at targets towed at 10 knots through the gaps of a squadron that steamed between them and the target at full speed in the opposite
