194 THE STRATEGICAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE—APPENDIX. 
APPENDIX. 
The Command of the Sea. 
The following extract from the great work by Capt. Mahan, United 
States Navy, shows how the command of even distant seas affects the 
chances of invasion. 
Meanwhile that period of waiting from May, 1803, to August, 1805, 
when the tangled net of naval and military movements began to 
unravel, was a striking and wonderful pause in the world’s history. 
On the heights above Boulogne, and along the narrow strip of beach 
from Etaples to Vimereux, were encamped 130,000 of the most brilliant 
soldiery of all time, the soldiers who had fought in Germany, Italy, and 
Egypt, soldiers who were yet to win, from Austria, Ulm and Austerlitz, 
and from Prussia, Auerstadt and Jena, to hold their own, though barely, 
at Eylau against the army of Russia, and to overthrow it also, a few 
months later, on the bloody field of Friedland. Growing daily more 
vigorous in the bracing sea air and the hardy life laid out for them, 
they could on fine days, as they practised the various manoeuvres which 
were to perfect the vast host in embarking and disembarking with 
order and rapidity, see the white cliffs fringing the only country that 
to the last defied their arms. Far away, Cornwallis off Brest, Collingwood 
off Rochefort, Pellew off Ferrol, were battling the wild gales of the 
Bay of Biscay, in that tremendous and sustained vigilance which 
reached its utmost tension in the years preceding Trafalgar, concerning 
which Collingwood wrote that admirals need to be made of iron, but 
which was forced upon them by the unquestionable and imminent 
danger of the country. Farther distant still, severed apparently from 
all connexion with the busy scene at Boulogne, Nelson before Toulon 
was wearing away the last two years of his glorious but suffering life, 
fighting the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyon and questioning, 
questioning continually with feverish anxiety, whether Napoleon’s 
object was Egypt again or Great Britain really. They were dull, weary, 
eventless months, those months of watching and waiting of the big 
ships before the French arsenals. Purposeless they surely seemed to 
many, but they saved England. The world has never seen a more 
impressive demonstration of the influence of sea power upon its history. 
Those far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army 
never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world. 
Holding the interior positions they did, before—and therefore between— 
the chief dockyards and detachments of the French navy, the latter 
could unite only by a concurrence of successful evasions, of which the 
failure of anyone nullified the result. Linked together as the various 
British fleets were by chains of smaller vessels, chance alone could 
secure Bonaparte’s great combination, which depended upon the covert 
concentration of several detachments upon a point practically within 
the enemy’s lines. Thus, while bodily present before Brest, Rochefort, 
and Toulon, strategically the British squadrons lay in the Straits of 
Dover barring the way against the army of invasion. 
