he situation we have to confront.
Our true policy was to secure permanent command by a great naval decision.
So long as the enemy remained divided, no such decision could be expected.
It was not, in fact, till he attempted his concentration, and its last
stage had been reached, that the situation was in our hands. The intricate
problem with which we had been struggling was simplified down to closing up
our own concentration to the strategical centre off Ushant. But at the last
stage the enemy could not face the formidable position we held. His
concentration was stopped. Villeneuve fell back on Cadiz, and the problem
began to assume for us something of its former intricacy. So long as we
held the mass off Ushant which our great concentration had produced, we
were safe from invasion. But that was not enough. It left the seas open to
sporadic action from Spanish ports. There were convoys from the East and
West Indies at hand, and there was our expedition in the Mediterranean in
jeopardy, and another on the point of sailing from Cork. Neither Barham at
the Admiralty nor Cornwallis in command off Ushant hesitated an hour. By a
simultaneous induction they both decided the mass must be divided. The
concentration must be opened out again, and it was done. Napoleon called
the move an _insigne betise_, but it was the move that beat him, and must
have beaten him, whatever the skill of his admirals, for the two squadrons
never lost touch. He found himself caught in a situation from which there
was nothing to hope. His fleet was neither concentrated for a decisive blow
nor spread for sporadic action. He had merely simplified his enemy's
problem. Our hold was surer than ever, and in a desperate attempt to
extricate himself he was forced to expose his fleet to the final decision
we required.

The whole campaign serves well to show what was understood by concentration
at the end of the great naval wars. To Lord Barham and the able admirals
who interpreted his plans it meant the possibility of massing at the right
time and place. It meant, in close analogy to strategic deployment on land,
the disposal of squadrons about a strategical centre from which fleets
could condense for massed action in any required direction, and upon which
they could fall back when unduly pressed. In this case the ultimate centre
was the narrows of the Channel, where Napoleon's army lay ready to cross,
but there was no massing there. So crude a distribution would