BOOKS.
WAR AT SEA.*
SIR THOMAS BROWNE used to recommend his son, a naval officer, to study the sea-fights of the ancients in Plutarch. Sir Reginald Custance evidently agrees with the famous physician, for he has gone back to Herodotus and Thucydides to exemplify his doctrine of naval strategy. His new book is a sketch of the campaign of Salamis and of the naval side of the Peloponnesian War, illustrated with excellent maps and informed by those technical criticising which an experienced naval officer can best supply. A few brief pages at the beginning and the end indicate the lesson in general terms—namely, " that war culminates in battle, and that the destruction of the armed force is the decisive att." But Sir Reginald Custance has abstained most carefully from pointing the moral. An innocent reader might suppose that the author was thinking only of Greek triremes. In the rally years of the ex-Kaiser's reign, Professor Quidde produced an elaborate monograph on Caligula which simple minds accepted as an interesting historical performance. It slowly dawned on them, when all Germany was reading the monograph with cynical amusement, that Calig,ula's career presented, or was made to present, an astonishingly close parallel to the flashy conduct of the All-Highest. We shall not be far wrong in sup- posing that, when Sir Reginald Custance described the decisive act of Salamis and the indecision which marked the sea-fighting during the Thirty Years' War between Athens and Sparta, he was thinking less of the Aegean than of the North Sea.
The author is well known as an expanent of the traditional British view that the business of a naval commander is to destroy the enemy's fleet. The rival view, which has of late been supreme, and which was at one time popularized by Mr. Churchill, is that a naval commander may be well satisfied with himself when he has inducedthe enemy to seek refuge in harbour. The difference between these views is the difference between a decision which means victory and a deadlock which may result at best in a half-hearted compromise. The conflict of opinion, which turns ultimately on a conflict of temperament, is as old as war. At the Greek Council before Salamis, which Herodotus describes so vividly, Themistocles was for fighting and Adimantus the Corinthian for temporizing, and the "wordy skirmish" will be repeated on similar occasions till wars cease. Yet experience is all on the side of the bolder spirits. At Salamis the Greeks forced Xerxes to fight them in a narrow channel where their smaller but more efficient fleet had the advantage. If he had declined the battle and sent his fleet to co-operate with the advance of his army against the fortified isthmus of Corinth, the Greek Fleet would have sallied forth and played havoc with the transports by which his army was fed from Asia. The author remarks that the principle, put into practice at Salamis, of limiting the movements of a hostile fleet by taking up a posi- tion flanking its advance is of first-rate importance, and has been often applied since that battle," as in the Armada fight or by Admiral Togo off Port Arthur and at Tsushima. If we apply this doctrine to the recent naval fighting, we must come to the conclusion that the true flanking position for our Navy was not further north than the Firth of Forth. Now if the Greeks had retreated from Salamis with a view to fighting near the isthmus, in more open waters, they would probably have found specious reasons for deferring battle again, and in the end would have been beaten both by sea and by land. The author reminds us, however, that Salamis, decisive as it was on Bea, did not end the war. The Persian host under Mardonius had first to be defeated on land. The victory at Plataea was the necessary complement to Salamis. The destruction of the defeated Persian Fleet at Mycale, about the same time, was a combined land and sea operation. The Persians declined to fight, but beached their ships within fortified lines, much as the German High Sea Fleet took shelter behind minefields and canal gates. The Greeks landed, stormed the lines, burnt the ships, and thus put an end to Persian sea-power. Boldness in action had justified itself to the full.
The Peloponnesian War with its many vicissitudes illustrates the folly of half-measures. Athens with her allies was supreme tt sea, to begin with, while Sparta was supreme on land. The kthenian Fleet at the outset showed itself far more skilful as well as more powerful than the enemy. Phormio with twenty
• War at Rea Modern Theory noir Amieitt Proetire. By Admiral Sir Reginald %atom, London W. Blackwood and SOD , neti ships, attacking in line ahead, defeated forty-seven Pelopon- nesian ships off Naupactlis in 429 no., mainly because his professional rowers could attain a speed of two knots more than the enemy crews were capable of, and thus enabled the Athenian Admiral to manoeuvre. Similar successes followed. But as the war dragged on, the Peloponnesian became as expert as the Athenians, or the Athenians lost their trained oarsmen, and the nava'. battles were settled as before by hand-to-hand fighting. Sir Reginald Custance traces the failure of Athens to the fact that " no direct and systematic action was taken against the weaker Peloponnesian Navy." The Athenians waged incessant war against the enemy's trade routes and engaged in numerous " side-shows," partly to guard their corn-ships from the Black Sea, partly to injure the Asiatic allies of Sparta and the Western allies of Corinth, partly also to prevent discontented members of the League from deserting. Some of these subsidiary opera- tions were highly successful ; others were disastrous. We are not sure that the author does not misjudge the famous Syracusan expedition. The policy was sound enough—namely, to ruin Corinth's trade connexion with Sicily and Italy. It was the generalship that was at fault. If Nicias had been a good soldier as well as a most respectable man, he might have walked into Syracuse, just as Lord Raglan might have walked into Sebastopol after the Alma, or just as the Allies in the early spring of 1915 might have landed troops and seized Gallipoli. But Nicias hesitated and was lost ; the whole conduct of the campaign and the misuse of the powerful fleet, cooped up in the Grand Harbour where it could not move freely, were deplorably bad. This is not to say that Athens was wrong in trying to capture Syracuse. Still, the author is right in his main contention that Athens neglected her primary military aim, by failing to wipe out the Peloponnesian Fleet when she might have done so. In the later years of the war, the dominant land Power—reversing the experience of our war—was able to draw upon the limitless wealth of the Greek cities in Asia and of the Persian Empire behind them, and could thus build up a fleet which ultimately overshadowed the Athenian Navy. Even then the last great sea-fight, off the Xrginustie Islands near Mitylene in 406 B.c., was a crushing victory for Athens, whose slightly superior fleet under Thrasybulus, by a manoeuvre not unlike that of Nelson's at Trafalgar, virtually destroyed the enemy fleet under Callicratidas, two-thirds of whose ships were sunk. Then followed the amazing trial and condemnation of the victorious commanders for failing to rescue the crews of their own disabled vessels: A wave of sentiment swept the Athenian democracy off its feet. It had soon to rue its ingratitude. A year later the whole Athenian Fleet, while beached at Aegospotami — a few miles below Gallipoli Town on the Dardanelles—was disgracefully surprised and destroyed by the Spartan Lysander, and the Athenian Empire crumbled into dust. The Laccdac- monian blockade of Athens now became effective and irresistible because the Athenian Fleet had ceased to be. But for Aegospo- tan3i the war might have lasted for years longer. That decisive affair ended the struggle. Sir Reginald Custance contents himself with a reference to the obvious lesson that a navy, however powerful, cannot win a war against a great land Power, any more than an army, however large, can overcome a great sea Power. He touches also on the fact that the naval battles were in the long run decided by "skill in throwing masses of ships into battle and by hard fighting," and not by new tactics and ingenious devices such as the Corinthian beak or armed prow. When the numbers were not hopelessly unequal, the personality of the commander, then, ultimately determined victory or defeat. That is true of all battles, as Marshal Foch has urged with great force. The spiritual kinship between the French Marshal and the British Admiral is manifest in many a page of this fascinating book, which we heartily commend to our readers who want to clear their thoughts on the underlying principles of warfare.
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