Page:Heresies of Sea Power (1906).djvu/282

256 the admiral had both in their first big sea fight with the Romans, and they sustained total defeat. Defeat was the direct result of the Roman corvi perhaps, the flying bridges over which the hordes of unexpected soldiers, men of fierce courage and discipline, poured on to the relatively unprotected decks. A new invention, which the Carthaginians were powerless to anticipate, powerless to train against, rendered worthless all their skill, naval efficiency and sea aptitude. Yet as they sighted the Roman fleet they had every logical reason to expect an easy victory and the wisest and cleverest among them could have foretold no other result.

Of course the Roman fleet, thanks to its corvi, was infinitely the superior in power, and what really happened was that Carthaginian strategy sent a totally inadequate force to meet the enemy. By no possible means, however, could they understand this before-hand. The truth that the stronger and in every way superior would defeat the inferior remained eternal: but all that they could have regarded as eternal in the way of principles proved an unstable Will-o'-the-wisp.

Suppose Captain Mahan to have lived in that age and that he had employed himself in writing criticisms of the operations, full of all knowledge of what history has had to teach since so far as strategical operations are concerned, could he have written otherwise than to suggest that the move of the Romans would be as the move of Rogestvensky in A.D. 1905? By all the canons