et the English out of France, and much
longer still to bring all parts of the British Isles under a single
king.

In the fourteenth century the population of France, including all the
French possessions of the English Crown, was four times the population
of England. One would suppose that the French could easily have driven
the English out of every part of France and have carried the war into
England, as the Romans carried their war into Carthage. But English
sea-power made all the difference. Sea-power not only kept Frenchmen
out of England but it helped Englishmen to stay in France and win many
a battle there as well. Most of the time the English fleet held the
command of the sea along the French as well as along the English coast.
So the English armies enjoyed the immense advantage of sea-transport
over land-transport, whenever men, arms, horses, stores, food, and
whatever else their armies needed could be moved by water, while the
French were moving their own supplies by land with more than ten times
as much trouble and delay.

Another and most important point about the Hundred Years War is this:
that it does not stand alone in history, but is only the first of the
two very different kinds of Hundred Years War which France and England
have fought out. The first Hundred Years War was fought to decide the
absolute possession of all the lands where Frenchmen lived; and France,
most happily, came out victorious. The second Hundred Years War
(1689-1815) was fought to decide the command of the sea; and England
won. When we reach this second Hundred Years War, and more especially
when we reach that part of it which was directed by the mighty Pitt, we
shall understand it as the war which made the British Empire of today.

The first big battle of the first Hundred Years War was fought in 1340
between the French and English fleets at Sluys, a little seaport up a
river in the western corner of what is Holland now. King Philip of
France had brought together all the ships he could, not only French
ones but Flemish, with hired war galleys and their soldiers and slave
oarsmen from Genoa and elsewhere. But, instead of using this fleet to
attack the English, and so clear the way for an invasion of England, he
let it lie alongside the mudbanks of Sluys. Edward III, the future
victor of Cressy, Poitiers, and Winchelsea, did not take long to seize
so good a chance. The French fleet was placed as if on purpose to
ensure it