iscussion 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 Bea