Page:Heresies of Sea Power (1906).djvu/289

Rh is no shelter. With forces of 10 to 9 engaged there is no deducting one from each till 1 is left one side and the other. The winner has always won by the eternal practical principle of two to one, the 'whole of his force on part of the enemy's'—tactics have always been the eternal and unchanging thing, simple and unobscured, and at Tsushima as at Trafalgar two (that is 'two' in every way) has annihilated one (that is in every way 'one' only) and continued to do so in ever-increasing superiority up to the end. If 9 fight 10 and the 9 (or the 10) are concentrated on 5 for a little while, the result is obvious.

But whether the eternal principle of the past that 'nearly equal' is an essential to annihilation of one side is an eternal principle of the future—and, therefore, an eternal principle at all—is another matter. Men now fight with two weapons—gun and torpedo; in the past they had virtually but one. In the early days of the gun, the ram co-existed with it but gun and ram were virtually very akin. It is easy enough to draw a parallel; to say the ram being of shorter range represented the torpedo, and the galleys which used to ram sailing ships torpedo-boats. Really the galley had little in common with the torpedo-boat—neither had the fire-ship which has also been likened to the torpedo-boat. It is easier to see the likeness than the difference, but the difference exists. It exists in the fact that the torpedo-boat does not have to make actual contact as the galley-ram and the fire-ship