did. As the day advanced and the battle raged, the wind dropped and the

tide began to ebb. Torrington, taking advantage of this, anchored his fleet, while the French drifted away to the westward. When the tide again began to flow he again took advantage of it and retreated to the eastward. The French made some show of pursuit, but Torrington made good his retreat into the Thames, where, the buoys having been taken up, the French could not follow him. Finally, the French withdrew from the Channel, having accomplished nothing beyond an insignificant raid on Teignmouth. Torrington was tried by Court Martial and acquitted, though he was never again employed afloat. But the fact remains that, as Admiral Bridge says, "most seamen were at the time, have been since, and still are in agreement with Torrington." As to his conduct of the battle, which has so unjustly involved him in lasting discredit with the historians, though not with the seamen, he said in his defence before the Court Martial: "I may be bold to say that I have had time and cause enough to think of it, and that, upon my word, were the battle to be fought over again, I do not know how to mend it, under the same circumstances." Again, as to his general conduct of the campaign, he said: "It is true that the French made no great advantage of their victory though they put us to a great charge in keeping up the militia; but had I fought otherwise, our fleet had been totally lost, and the whole kingdom had lain open to an invasion. What, then, would have become of us in the absence of his Majesty and most of the land forces? As it was, most men were in fear that the French would invade; but I was always of another opinion; for I always said that, _whilst we had a fleet in being_, they would not dare to make an attempt."

This is the first appearance of the phrase "a fleet in being" in the terminology of naval warfare. Its reappearance in our own day and its frequent employment in naval discussion are due to the masterly analysis of Torrington's strategy and tactics which the late Admiral Colomb gave in his illuminating work on _Naval Warfare_. In order to avoid giving it the extreme expression which, according to Admiral Mahan, it has received from some writers, and involving it in that extreme misconception which he thinks it has undergone at the hands of others--or it may be of the same--I have thought it worth while to examine at some length the campaign which gave rise to it so as to ascertain exactly what was in the mind of Torrington when he first used it. It is plain that Torrington held, as all great seamen have held, that the primary object of every belligerent is to destroy the armed forces of the enemy. He was so circumstanced that he could not do that himself, because the forces which might have been at his disposal for the purpose, had the circumstances been other than they were, were so divided and dispersed that the enemy might overcome them in detail. That the enemy would do this, if he could, he did not doubt, and it was equally certain that it must be his immediate object to prevent his doing it. His own force being by far the strongest of the three opposed to Tourville, it must be upon him that the brunt of the conflict would fall. Nothing would suit him better than that Tourville should turn back and attempt to force a battle on either Killigrew or Shovel to the westward, because in that case he could hang upon Tourville's rear and flanks and take any opportunity that offered to get past him and concentrate the British forces to the westward of him. But Tourville gave him no such opportunity. He pressed him hard and might have pressed him back even to the Gunfleet if Torrington had not been ordered by Mary and her advisers to give battle "upon any advantage of the wind." But even in fighting the battle, which his own judgment told him ought not to be fought, he never lost sight of the paramount necessity of so fighting it as to give Tourville no decisive advantage. The victory was a barren one to Tourville. It gave him no command of the sea and for that reason he was unable to prosecute any enterprise of invasion. The command of the sea remained in dispute, and unless the dispute could be decided in Tourville's favour he would have fought and won the battle of Beachy Head in vain, as the event showed that he did. Torrington held that his "fleet in being," even after the reverse at Beachy Head, was a sufficient bar to the further enterprises of Tourville, nor can Tourville's subsequent action be explained on any other hypothesis than that he shared Torrington's opinion and acted on it.

The truth is, that the doctrine of the fleet in being, as understood and illustrated by Torrington, is in reality the counterpart and complement of the doctrine of the command of the sea as expounded above. "I consider," said the late Sir Geoffrey Hornby, a strategist and tactician of unrivalled authority in his time, "that I have command of the sea when I am able to tell my Government that they can move an expedition to any point without fear of interference from an enemy's fleet." This condition cannot be satisfied so long as the enemy has a fleet in being, that is a fleet strategically at large, not itself in command of the sea, but strong enough to deny that command to its adversary by strategic and tactical dispositions adapted to the circumstances of the case. Thus command of the sea and a fleet in being are mutually exclusive terms. So long as a hostile fleet is in being there is no command of the sea; so soon as the command of the sea is established there is no hostile fleet in being. Each of these propositions is the complement of the other.

Nevertheless, the mere statement of these abstract propositions solves none of the concrete problems of naval warfare. War is not governed by phrases. It is governed by stern and inexorable realities. The question whether a particular fleet in any particular circumstances is or is not a fleet in being is not a question of theory, it is a question of fact. The answer to it depends on the spirit, purpose, tenacity, and strategic insight of those who control its movements. No fleet is a fleet in being unless inspired by what may be called the _animus pugnandi_, that is, unless, if and when the opportunity offers, it is prepared to strike a blow at all hazards. For this reason the Russian fleet in Sebastopol at the time of the invasion of the Crimea was not a fleet in being, although it had a splendid opportunity, which a Nelson would assuredly have found too tempting to be resisted, of showing its mettle when the French warships were employed as transports; and the allies might have been made to pay heavily for their neglect to blockade it had it been inspired by an effective _animus pugnandi_. On the other hand, the four ill-fated Spanish cruisers which crossed the Atlantic to take part in the Cuban war were a true fleet in being, however inferior and forlorn, and were so regarded by the United States authorities so long as they remained strategically at large. Even when two of them and two destroyers were known to be in Santiago, the Secretary of the United States Navy telegraphed to Admiral Sampson, "Essential to know if all four Spanish cruisers in Santiago. Military expedition must wait this information." The same thing happened in the war between Russia and Japan. The first act of Japan in that war was by a torpedo attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, so to depress the _animus pugnandi_ of the latter as practically to deprive it for a time of the character of a fleet in being--a character which it only partially recovered afterwards under the brief influence of the heroic but ill-fated Makaroff. This being accomplished, the invasion of Manchuria ensued as a matter of course. The ascendency thus established by the Japanese fleet at the outset, though assailed more than once, was nevertheless maintained throughout the subsequent operations until the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, deprived of the little character it ever possessed as a true fleet in being, was reduced to the condition of what Admiral Mahan has aptly called a "fortress fleet," and was surrendered at the fall of the fortress. Many other illustrations of the principle of the fleet in being might be given. The history of naval warfare is full of them. But they need not be multiplied as they all point the same moral. That moral is, that a fleet in being to be of any use must be inspired by a determined and persistent _animus pugnandi_. It must not be a mere "fortress fleet." Torrington can never have imagined for a moment that the fleet which, in spite of the disastrous orders of Mary and her council, he had saved from destruction, would by its mere existence prevent a French invasion. He had kept it in being in order that he might use it offensively whenever occasion should arise, well knowing that so long as it maintained that disposition Tourville would be paralysed for offence. "Whilst we observe the French," he said, "they cannot make any attempt on ships or shore without running a great hazard." Such hazards may be run for an adequate object, and to determine rightly when they may be run and when they may not is perhaps the most searching test of a naval commander's capacity and insight. It is a psychological question rather than a strategic one. Such a commander must know whether his adversary's _animus pugnandi_ is so keen and so unflinching as to invest his fleet, albeit inferior, with the true character of a fleet in being, or whether, on the other hand, it is so feeble as to turn it into a mere fortress fleet. But that is only to say that in war the man always counts for far more than the machine, that the best commander is a man "with whom," as Admiral Mahan says of Nelson, "moral effect is never in excess of the facts of the case, whose imagination produces to him no paralysing picture of remote contingencies." _Bene ausus vana contemnere_, as Livy says of Alexander's conquest of Darius, is the eternal secret of successful war.