ish authorities to
supply his troops with food that he had to abandon the offensive for a
time and to retreat towards his own line of communication with the sea.
Caesar on the other hand abandoned the sea, which could not feed him, and
trusted to the resources of the country. The difference is vital. The
one risk that Caesar ran was the destruction of his army afloat, and that
he ran not because he chose but because he must. The risk of destruction
on land he was prepared to run, and this, at any rate, was, as the event
proved, a case of _bene ausus vana contemnere_.

Again, Napoleon's descent on Egypt is another exception which proves the
rule, and proves it still more conclusively. Napoleon evaded Nelson's
fleet and landed his army in Egypt. The army so landed left Egypt in
British transports, having laid down its arms and surrendered just
before the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens; and but for the timely
conclusion of that short-lived armistice, every French soldier who
survived the Egyptian campaign might have seen the inside of a British
prison. This was because Napoleon, who never fathomed the secrets of the
sea, chose to think that to evade a hostile fleet was the same thing as
to defeat it. He managed for a time to escape Nelson's attentions by the
skin of his teeth, and fondly fancied that because he had done so the
dominion of the East was won. He was quickly undeceived by the Battle of
the Nile. That victory destroyed the fleet which had escorted his army
to Egypt and thereby made it impossible for the army ever to return
except by consent of the Power which he never could vanquish on the sea.
The Battle of the Nile, wrote a Frenchman in Egypt, "is a calamity which
leaves us here as children totally lost to the mother country. Nothing
but peace can restore us to her." Nothing but the so-called Peace of
Amiens did restore them. If it be argued, as it often has been, that
Napoleon's successful descent on Egypt proves that military enterprises
of large moment may sometimes be undertaken without first securing the
command of the sea to be traversed, surely the Battle of the Nile and
its sequel are a triumphant refutation of such an argument. Such
enterprises are merely a roundabout way of presenting the belligerent
who retains the command of the sea with as many prisoners of war as
survive from the original expedition.

I need not labour the point which the unbroken testimony of history
from the time of the No