no ships to fight, having no troops to land, and giving a wide berth to fortifications with which they were ill-equipped--as ships always are and always must be--to contend without support from the military arm, their presence was little more than an idle and futile demonstration. In the Boer War the influence of England's unchallenged supremacy at sea, albeit latent, was decisive. The Boers had no naval force of any kind; but no nation not secure in its dominion of the seas could have undertaken such a war as England then had to wage, and it was perhaps only the paramount sea power of this country that prevented the conflict taking a form and assuming dimensions that would have taxed British endurance to the uttermost and must almost certainly have entailed the loss of South Africa to the Empire. Certain naval features of the Cuban War between Spain and the United States, and of the War in the Far East between Russia and Japan, will be more conveniently considered in subsequent chapters of this manual. The normal correlation and interdependence of naval and military forces in the armed conflict of national wills is sufficiently illustrated by the foregoing examples. In certain abnormal and exceptional cases each can act and produce the desired effect without the other. In a few extreme cases it is hard to see how either could act at all. If, for instance, Spain and Switzerland were to fall out, how could either attack the other? They have no common frontier, and though Spain has a navy, Switzerland has no seaboard. Cases where naval conflict alone has decided the issue are those of the early wars between England and Holland. Neither could reach the other except across the sea, there was no territorial issue directly involved, and the object of both combatants was to secure a monopoly of maritime commerce. But as territorial issues, and territorial issues involving the sea and affected by it directly or indirectly, are nearly always at stake in great wars, history affords few examples of great international conflicts in which sea power does not enter as a factor, often of supreme importance. It must of course enter as a factor of paramount importance in any war between an insular State and a continental one--as in the war between Russia and Japan--or between two continental States which--as in the war between Spain and the United States--have no common frontier on land. War being the armed conflict of national wills, it is manifest that the opposing wills cannot in cases such as these be brought into armed conflict unless one State or the other is in a position to operate on the sea. The first move in such a conflict must of necessity be made, by one belligerent or the other, on the sea. This involves the conception of "the command of the sea," and as this is the fundamental conception of naval warfare as such, our analysis of naval warfare must begin with an exposition of what is meant by the command of the sea. CHAPTER II