Indeed, generally the bulk of the
force to be employed was ultimately to be composed of native
sympathisers, who were also to provide--at least at the
beginning--all the supplies and transport, both vehicles and
animals, required. Every plan, no matter to which class it might
belong, was based upon the assumption that the British naval
force could be avoided. Until we come to the time when General
Bonaparte, as he then was, dissociated himself from the first
'Army of England,' there is no trace, in any of the documents
now printed, of a belief in the necessity of obtaining command
of the sea before sending across it a considerable military
expedition. That there was such a thing as the command of the sea
is rarely alluded to; and when it is, it is merely to accentuate
the possibility of neutralising it by evading the force holding
it. There is something which almost deserves to be styled comical
in the absolutely unvarying confidence, alike of amateurs and
highly placed military officers, with which it was held that
a superior naval force was a thing that might be disregarded.
Generals who would have laughed to scorn anyone maintaining that,
though there was a powerful Prussian army on the road to one city
and an Austrian army on the road to the other, a French army
might force its way to either Berlin or Vienna without either
fighting or even being prepared to fight, such generals never
hesitated to approve expeditions obliged to traverse a region
in the occupation of a greatly superior force, the region being
pelagic and the force naval.
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