The landing of the army in Walcheren ten years later may be disregarded. Except in the capture of Flushing, there was practically no fighting. The real enemy was fever, and out of the forty thousand men who had been disembarked, thirty-five thousand had been in hospital. The plan of operation was initially bad, the carrying out worse. Between Chatham on shore and Strachan at sea there was so little intelligent co-operation that each abused the other for what was clearly the fact, that “The Earl of Chatham, with his sword drawn, Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan; Sir Richard, longing to be at ’em, Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.” As Napoleon himself remarked at one time, “Before six weeks, of the fifteen thousand troops which are in the Isle of Walcheren not fifteen hundred will be left, the rest will be in hospital. The expedition has been undertaken under false expectations and planned in ignorance.” This is the grim and gruesome truth. With the above exception, then, the theatre of war after the expedition to the Helder was, for many a year, as far as the British army was concerned, changed. The increasing importance of India was beginning to be felt. Napoleon, far seeing, had recognised this, and first put into French minds the value of Egypt. Though there was no canal, as there is now, it was still geographically the shortest road to the East. Then, as now, Egypt was a station on the line that united Great Britain with Eastern possessions that were but embryos of what they are now. The one striking point in the vast and ambitious intellect of the greatest soldier the world has seen, Alexander and Cæsar not excepted, is his grasp of the political future of the nations of Europe. Intuitively he saw the worth of Egypt to the great dominant naval powers, England and France. His views were almost prophetic, his ideas magnificent. Notwithstanding the disaster to the French of Aboukir Bay, he decided on contending in Africa for the possession of Asia. What a stupendous genius the man had! How astounding the rise of the young officer of artillery, who fought against his fellow-patriots of Corsica, who drove the British out of Toulon, and who was soon to be the dominant soul in all Europe! “Who could have believed that a simple sub-lieutenant of artillery, a stranger to France by name and by birth, was destined to govern that great Empire and to give the law in a manner to all the Continent, in defiance of reason, justice, the hereditary rights of the legitimate princes of the realm, and the combined efforts of so great a number of loyalists in the interior of the kingdom, and all the Great Powers of Europe.”