mastery of the method of directing an army.  He became an officer in 1785, at the age of sixteen.  In 1793, as a young captain of artillery, he directed with remarkable insight and determination the operations by which the allied fleet was driven from Toulon.  In 1794 he inspired and conducted, though still a subordinate, a series of successful operations in the Maritime Alps.  In 1796, as commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy, he astonished Europe by the most brilliant campaign on record.  For these achievements he had prepared himself by assiduous study.  As a young officer of artillery he received the best professional training then to be had in Europe, while at the same time, by wide and careful reading, he gave himself a general education.  At some period before 1796, probably before 1794, he had read and thoroughly digested the remarkable treatise on the principles of mountain war which had been left in manuscript by General Bourcet, an officer who during the campaigns of half a century had assisted as Quartermaster-General a number of the best Generals of France.  Napoleon’s phenomenal power of concentration had enabled him to assimilate Bourcet’s doctrine, which in his clear and vigorous mind took new and more perfect shape, so that from the beginning his operations are conducted on a system which may be described as that of Bourcet raised to a higher power.

The “Nelson touch” was acquired by the Admiral through years of effort to think out, to its last conclusion, a problem the nature of which had never been adequately grasped by his professional predecessors and comrades, though it seems probable that he owed to Clerk the hint which led him to the solution which he found.  Napoleon was more fortunate in inheriting a strategical doctrine which he had but to appreciate to expand and to apply.  The success of both men is due to the habit of mind which clings tenaciously to the subject under investigation until it is completely cleared up.  Each of them became, as a result of his thinking, the embodiment of a theory or system of the employment of force, the one on sea and the other on land; and such an embodiment is absolutely necessary for a nation in pursuit of victory.

It seems natural to say that if England wants victory on sea or land, she must provide herself with a Nelson or a Napoleon.  The statement is quite true, but it requires to be rightly interpreted.  If it means that a nation must always choose a great man to command its navy or its army it is an impossible maxim, because a great man cannot be recognised until his power has been revealed in some kind of work.  Moreover, to say that Nelson and Napoleon won victories because they were great men is to invert the order of nature and of truth.  They are recognised as great men because of the mastery of their business which they manifested in action.  That mastery was due primarily to knowledge.  Wordsworth hit the mark when, in answer to the question “Who is the Happy Warrior?” he replied that it was he—­