Page:Heresies of Sea Power (1906).djvu/74

58 show which of these two was the principal reason, but we do know that the Roman was the better man, compared with the Carthaginian fighting man, when it came to a hand-to-hand struggle. How much better the Roman was we cannot say. On land, however, the Carthaginian forces fought well enough to suggest that the disparity was not insuperable, at any rate, hardly enough to account for the crushing nature of the naval defeats inflicted. All that the Romans with the corvi did was to turn the sea into land for the purposes of the battle, even as the Syracusans did when they defeated the Athenians, and this was simply a reversion to past methods. The ship originally was nothing but a machine whereby soldiers could fight soldiers on the water as well as on land.

We are compelled, therefore, to imagine that over and above the question of fitness between the combatants, there was also the fact that the Carthaginian sailors, either from pure conservatism to the best existing methods when they were trained, or from the numbing effect of being suddenly faced with novel conditions, found their very proficiency in naval war a la mode, fatal to war by unorthodox methods. However, the point of interest is that the Romans, like the Syracusans, despairing of equalling their enemies in a special technical field, reverted to old conditions in which no technical skill was necessary.