COAST DEFENCE IN RELATION TO WAR. 
537 
of recent advances, armour, effective for a brief period, is overmatched, 
in the sense that invulnerability can be conferred only upon small 
portions of the target presented by a sea-going vessel. Steam enables 
selected positions to be taken up with certainty and promises the 
means of timely retreat, but does not materially alter actual fighing 
conditions. It appears clear, therefore, that while strategic considera¬ 
tions call for no increased application of Coast Defence, the ship in a 
contest with the shore battery now suffers from greater disabilities than 
at the beginning of the century. Squadrons or single ships, however, 
possess the unquestioned advantage that, when once equipped for sea, 
they can be immediately employed. In peace time they are organised 
and ready in a higher degree than any military force; at the outbreak 
of war they are in part distributed over the world and able to act at 
once. This peculiar readiness of the naval weapon points to its employ¬ 
ment in the future as in the past, while speed and the certainty with 
which movement can now be timed will probably be turned to account 
in dealing unexpected blows. Where the operation falls within the 
limit of the potency of the naval weapon, as at Algiers (1816), Acre 
(1840), Sfax (1881), or in the chastisement of an African coast tribe, 
success will be attained. Where the task lies outside the sphere of 
purely naval action, there will be failure, either absolute, as at Santa 
Cruz (1797), Charleston (1863), Lissa (1866), Alicante (1873), Tamsui 
(1884); or comparative, as at Sebastopol (1854), Fort Fisher (1864-5), 
and Foochow (1884). 
Thus the nature and standard of necessary Coast Defence depends 
upon the potency of the naval weapon; but the question is complicated 
by further considerations where each of the two combatants possesses 
a navy. In such a case, the superior naval power can devote to the pur¬ 
poses of coast attack only the balance after deducting force sufficient to 
deal effectively with its antagonist's navy on the high seas; while the 
weaker power can so operate only on condition of accepting grave 
initial risks, of an inevitable weakening of its already inadequate naval 
strength, and of abandoning the hope of more than temporary success. 
Here lies the explanation of the relatively unimportant part which 
Coast Defence, pure and simple, has always played in great wars, and 
of the extremely little need of its support which Great Britain has felt. 
Our many enemies were not in a position to undertake purely naval 
attacks, even at a time so apparently critical as that following the 
battle of Beachy Head, and when our naval abandonment of such 
waters as the Mediterranean occurred, those enemies naturally resorted 
to combined operations and attacked the back door. “ Fortresses," 
wrote Napoleon to Soult, u are nothing in themselves when the enemy, 
having command of the sea, can collect as many shells and bullets as 
he pleases to crush them." 
Conversely, our great naval leaders had a well-founded objection to 
committing their ships to doubtful operations which, even if successful, 
diminished their fighting value on their own element. Nelson's letters 
give us the views of the greatest of Admirals as to the disadvantage 
of the purely naval attack upon Coast Defences of so comparatively 
feeble as those of Bastia and Calvi. On the other hand, when it was 
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