great British victory, won by splendid seamanship
and by magnificent courage, everybody knows. On October 21, 1805,
Nelson, with twenty-seven line-of-battle ships, attacked Villeneuve, in
command of a combined fleet of thirty-three line-of-battle ships. The
first British gun was fired at 12.10 o'clock; at 5 o'clock the battle
was over; and within those five hours the combined fleets of France and
Spain were simply destroyed. No fewer than eighteen ships of the line
were captured, burnt, or sunk; the rest were in flight, and had
practically ceased to exist as a fighting force. But what very few
people realise is that Trafalgar is only the last incident in a great
strategic conflict--a warfare of brains rather than of bullets--which
for nearly three years raged round a single point. For that long
period the warlike genius of Napoleon was pitted in strategy against
the skill and foresight of a cluster of British sailors; and the
sailors won. They beat Napoleon at his own weapons. The French were
not merely out-fought in the shock of battling fleets, they were
out-generalled in the conflict of plotting and warlike brains which
preceded the actual fight off Cape Trafalgar.

The strategy which preceded Trafalgar represents Napoleon's solitary
attempt to plan a great campaign on the tossing floor of the sea. "It
has an interest wholly unique," says Mahan, "as the only great naval
campaign ever planned by this foremost captain of modern times." And
it is a very marvellous fact that a cluster of British sailors--Jervis
and Barham (a salt eighty years old) at the Admiralty, Cornwallis at
Brest, Collingwood at Cadiz, and Nelson at Toulon--guessed all
Napoleon's profound and carefully hidden strategy, and met it by even
subtler plans and swifter resolves than those of Napoleon himself. The
five hours of gallant fighting off Cape Trafalgar fill us with exultant
pride. But the intellectual duel which preceded the shock of actual
battle, and which lasted for nearly three years, is, in a sense, a yet
more splendid story. Great Britain may well honour her naval leaders
of that day for their cool and profound strategy, as much as for the
unyielding courage with which such a blockade as, say, that of Brest by
Cornwallis was maintained for years, or such splendid daring as that
which Collingwood showed when, in the _Royal Sovereign_, he broke
Villeneuve's line at Trafalgar.

When in 1803 the war which brought to an end the bri