You cannot employ at the same time
two different and opposed tactical systems.
It is not necessary to the line of argument above indicated to
ignore the merits of the battleship class. Like their predecessors,
the ships of the line, it is really battleships which in a naval
war dominate the situation. We saw that it was so at the time
of Trafalgar, and we see that it has been so in the war between
Russia and Japan, at all events throughout the 1904 campaign.
The experience of naval war, down to the close of that in which
Trafalgar was the most impressive event, led to the virtual
abandonment of ships of the line[92] above and below a certain
class. The 64-gun ships and smaller two-deckers had greatly
diminished in number, and repetitions of them grew more and more
rare. It was the same with the three-deckers, which, as the late
Admiral Colomb pointed out, continued to be built, though in
reduced numbers, not so much for their tactical efficiency as
for the convenient manner in which they met the demands for the
accommodation required in flag-ships. The tactical condition
which the naval architects of the Trafalgar period had to meet
was the employment of an increased number of two-deckers of the
medium classes.
[Footnote 92: Experience of war, as regards increase in the number
of medium-sized men-of-war of the different classes, tended to the
same result in both the French Revolutionary war (1793 to 1801)
and the Napoleonic war which began in 1803.
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