estion 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.

CHAPTER V

DISPUTED COMMAND IN GENERAL

The condition of disputed command of the sea is the normal condition at
the outbreak of any war in which operations at sea are involved between
two belligerents of approximately equal strength, or indeed between any
two belligerents, the weaker of whom is sufficiently inspired by the
_animus pugnandi_--or it may be by other motives rather political than
strategic in character--to try conclusions with his adversary in the
open. This follows immediately from the nature of command of the sea,
which is, it will be remembered, the effective control over the maritime
communications of the waters in dispute. I must here repeat, that the
phrase command of the sea has no definite meaning in time of peace. No
nation nowadays seeks in time of peace to control maritime
communications, that is, to exercise any authority or constraint over
any ships, whether warships or merchant vessels--other than those flying
its own flag--which traverse the seas on their lawful occasions. There
was, indeed, a time when England claimed what was called the
"sovereignty of the seas," that is, the right to exact at all times
certain marks of deference to her flag, in the form of certain salutes
of ceremony, from all ships traversing the seas surrounding the British
Islands, the narrow seas as they were called. But that is an entirely
different thing from the command of the sea in a strategic sense, and
has in fact no connection with it. It has long been abandoned and it
need only be mentioned here in order to be carefully distinguished from
the latter. Any nation seeking to exercise or secure the command of the
sea in this sense would in so doing engage in an act of war, and w