king
distance of a naval fortress which contained an army of unknown strength,
and a fleet not much inferior in battle power and undefeated. It was an
operation comparable to the capture of Louisburg and the landing of the
Japanese in the Liaotung Peninsula, but the conditions were far more
difficult. Both those operations had been rehearsed a few years previously,
and they had been long prepared on the fullest knowledge. In the Crimea
everything was in the dark; even steam was an unproved element, and
everything had to be improvised. The French had practically to demobilise
their fleet to supply transport, and so hazardous did the enterprise
appear, that they resisted its being undertaken with every military
argument. We had in fact, besides all the other difficulties, to carry an
unwilling ally upon our backs. Yet it was accomplished, and so far at least
as the naval part was concerned, the methods which achieved success mark
the culmination of all we had learnt in three centuries of rich experience.

The first of the lessons was that for operations in uncommanded or
imperfectly commanded seas there was need of a covering squadron
differentiated from the squadron in charge of transports. Its main function
was to secure the necessary local command, whether for transit or for the
actual operations. But as a rule transit was secured by our regular
blockading squadrons, and generally the covering squadron only assembled in
the theatre of operations. When therefore the theatre was within a defended
terminal area, as in our descents upon the northern and Atlantic coasts of
France, then the terminal defence squadron was usually also sufficient to
protect the actual operations. It thus formed automatically the covering
squadron, and either continued its blockade, or, as in the case of our
attack on St. Malo in 1758, took up a position between the enemy's squadron
and the expedition's line of operation. If, however, the theatre of
operation was not within a terminal area, or lay within a distant one that
was weakly held, the expedition was given its own covering squadron, in
which the local squadron was more or less completely merged. Whatever, in
fact, was necessary to secure the local control was done, though, as we
have seen, and must presently consider more fully, this necessity was not
always the standard by which the strength of the covering squadron was
measured.

The strength of the covering squadron being determined,