tion by his unsurpassed
genius, he could for a moment obtain the particular combination which
would, to use his own phrase, make him master of the world. What if
the soldiers of the Grand Army never returned from England? There were
still in France men enough, as good as they were before his energizing
spirit wrought them into the force which in its might trod the
Continent under foot. Like Nelson dying at Trafalgar, it too would
have laid down its life, leaving its work finished. Neither man nor
army could have a prouder memorial.

The particular combination upon which Napoleon was willing to stake
everything was a naval control of the Straits of Dover for a very few
days, coincident with the presence there of an army ready and equipped
to cross at once. The latter condition was merely a question of
preparation--long, tedious, and expensive, but perfectly feasible. In
the early months of 1805 it was realized. The army, a substantial,
absolute fact, was there, awaiting only the throwing of the bridge.
The naval part of the problem was far more difficult. In the face of
the naval supremacy of Great Britain, the sought-for control could
only be casual and transient--a fleeting opportunity to be seized,
utilized, and so to disappear. Its realization must be effected by
stratagem, by successful deception and evasion. The coveted
superiority would be not actual, but local,--the French fleet in force
there, the British fleet, though the greater in force, elsewhere; the
weight of the former concentrated at one point by simultaneous
movements of its different detachments, which movements had been so
calculated and directed that they had misled the British divisions,
and, of themselves, diverted them from the decisive centre. Subsidiary
to this main effort, Napoleon also contemplated a simultaneous landing
of some twenty thousand men in Ireland, which, like the naval
movements, would distract and tend to divide the unity of the British
resistance. The British admirals considered this project to be easier
than the invasion of Great Britain, and it engaged their much more
serious attention.

There were three principal French detachments to be united,--in Brest
twenty ships, in Toulon ten, in Rochefort five. To these the outbreak
of the war between Great Britain and Spain added the forces of the
latter kingdom, in Ferrol and Cadiz, aggregating fifteen serviceable
ships; but this was not until March, 1805. Of the three French
con