Dispatches On War (Part IX)

continued from The age of greed

In the ninth decade of the nineteenth century, Alfred Thayer Mahan, an admiral in the United States’ navy, would pen a tribute to Britain’s Royal Navy’s struggle against Napoleonic France in form of a book titled “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History”. The book would be Mahan’s personal ode to Britain’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar over the combined fleets of France and Spain. In his book, Mahan would eulogize the Royal Navy and would credit Britain’s rise as a global power to the ability of its navy to dominate the oceans. According to Mahan, there were certain vital sea lanes upon which the majority of the world’s commerce passed and any nation, which could control these sea lanes, would influence the affairs of the world. According to Admiral Mahan, any nation wishing to aspire to the status of a global power needed a powerful navy, which could exert the nation’s political influence on the world stage. Mahan’s book, when it was published, would be politely received in the United States and in Britain, it would be overlooked to the point that it seemed that Mahan would quietly fade into the mists of history without making any impressions upon it.

Mahan would be rescued from an obscure fate by a personality none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II. When Mahan’s book was published, Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II was in the midst of building a modern navy and to the Kaiser; Mahan’s thesis offered the perfect recipe for creating a strong maritime force and in the process, announcing Germany’s imperial pretensions. Since Mahan had voiced the opinion that Great Britain was a great power due to its navy, the German Kaiser was of the view that Germany would never be considered as a great power without a powerful navy. The algebra of political power, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was pegged to rationalizations of imperialism and the German imperial dreams, according to the Kaiser, could only be realized with the help of a strong navy. In the process of building a German navy, the Kaiser would set in motion a series of events, which would culminate in a naval arms race with Great Britain and set the stage for the events, which would play an instrumental role in outbreak of the First World War.

In order to understand the reason behind Mahan’s tribute to the Royal Navy, which would inspire a German emperor’s dream of world power; it becomes necessary to turn the time backwards to one particular day in the autumn of 1805. Europe in 1805 was in the sixth year of a historic period that would be known as the age of Napoleonic wars and France, by the virtues of its military successes, was politically dominating Europe. European powers were helpless against the ever increasing sphere of French influence and power on the continent and as the majority of the European powers had suffered an unbroken string of military defeats, they were not in a position to resist the power of France. The Europeans, despite all their defeats at the hands of the French, were still struggling against the power of France and were still interested in defeating ideals of the French Revolution, which were seen as a threat to the very existence of the European monarchial regime in Europe. Towards this purpose, the Europeans had created a military-political alliance, but Napoleon using a mixture of diplomatic skills and military bluster had managed to cause rifts in the European alliance against France and thus, had effectively destroyed it.

France was able to negotiate a peace settlement with Great Britain in 1802, which would force Great Britain to leave the alliance and thus, Napoleon had adroitly defeated the European alliance arrayed against France via diplomatic means. The tensions between France and Great Britain remained tangible in spite of an existence of a peace treaty between them, as France was always weary of British intentions in Europe and for its part; Great Britain had no wish to see France dominate Europe. In order to make sure that French power would be checked, Great Britain had maintained its diplomatic ties, with the European powers resisting France; Russia, Austria and Prussia. This British diplomatic overture in Europe was resented by France, but France was not willing to instigate another crisis with Great Britain, which could spill over into a European war. Napoleon, when the peace treaty was signed with Great Britain, needed a period of political stability in Europe in hopes of consolidating his own power in France and therefore, was not too eager to get embroiled in another series of wars fought in the name of European balance of power.

The uneasy peace between France and Great Britain ended in 1804, with coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte as the emperor of France. The ascension of Napoleon to an imperial power in France coincided with the understanding reached between Paris and the Vatican over the issue of religion in France. The signing of the Concordat, whereby France had officially reinstated Catholicism as the official religion of France meant that the Vatican had been politically neutralized and it had no more reason to diplomatically oppose France. Furthermore, by stating that the French recognition of Catholicism did not imply a return of church properties confiscated during revolution of 1789, Napoleon reassured the people, who had benefited from the sale of church properties that they would not be asked to return those lands and thus, was also able to better secure his domestic influence within France.

Through the twin instruments of the Concordat and by the plebiscite, which made him the emperor of France, Napoleonic France’s domination of Europe seemed a distinct possibility. Even though Great Britain was taken aback by the audacity of Napoleon crowning himself as the emperor of France, it was visibly distraught at the proclamation, by Napoleon, which announced that France was an imperial power and this to the British, in principle, meant Napoleon had ambitions to dominate Europe. In this sense, the British political instincts were correct, because by making himself an emperor Napoleon was suggesting to monarchies of Europe that France, after its revolutionary republican experiment, was reverting to a monarchy and was no longer interested in upsetting the traditional monarchial power in Europe. The return of France back to a monarchy was to appease the European fears of revanchist republicanism, but more crucially it was intended to remove the British influence and meddling in European politics. Napoleon had correctly surmised that if France agreed to a balance of power based on a status quo, the Europeans would be willing to accept it. Napoleon was also of the view, that a French domination of Europe had to be predicated on a status quo and the only feasible manner of achieving such an arrangement was to deny the British any political role in Europe. The European acceptance of France as an imperial power and of Napoleon, as an emperor, indicated that the Europeans were willing to accept a French dominated status quo in Europe.

The growing political isolationism of Great Britain in Europe in 1804, which would peal the alarm bells in London, has to be understood in the context of the economic situation in Europe, as it existed prior to the events of 1804. As Napoleon was busy consolidating his power in France, and in Europe, he was mindful of British influence and power in Europe and was determined to end it. Napoleon identified the source of British power in Europe and the world as its ability to dominate the mercantilist trade of the time and according to Napoleon, the secret to British power was not its navy or its army but rather its political hegemony of a European, and increasingly a global, economy. In hopes of evicting the British economic influence in Europe, Napoleon would create an economic regime for Europe, known as the Continental System, and would use French military power to enforce it in Europe. Under the stipulations of the Continental System, any European nation allied with France could not trade with Great Britain and any nation, which traded with Great Britain, would face the wrath of France’s military might in Europe.

The Continental System was, basically, an economic blockade of Great Britain by France and since Napoleon did not have a navy to blockade the English coast; he decided to end Great Britain’s economic influence in Europe, inversely, by preventing Europe from trading with London. In retaliation, Great Britain would impose an economic blockade of France and would use its navy to interdict international trade, with France and the British Royal Navy would be tasked with the mission to ensure the success of the naval blockade against France. Hence, in a theoretical sense both Great Britain and France were in a state of war, because according to the admiralty laws and the diplomatic convention of the time, an economic blockade, by one nation against another nation, was considered as an act of war. Even though both London and Paris had signed a peace treaty ending their political-military disagreements in Europe in 1802, they were engaged in a proxy European economic war to determine whose political influence would ultimately triumph in Europe.

To maintain this economic blockade of French influenced and dominated Europe, the ships of the Royal Navy had placed themselves strategically from the Arctic waters off the coast of Norway in the north to the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea in the south. The British blockade was stifling the French trade, because the British not only stopped trade from reaching and leaving France; they also hindered other nations from trading with France. In terms of logistics, the entire fleet of the Royal Navy was committed to stopping the French trade, with the outside world, and this in turn meant that in order to guarantee the success of the blockade the Royal Navy was forced to vacate its primary responsibility, which was guarding Great Britain against an invasion. Therefore, the political cost of blockading Napoleonic France was that Great Britain had opened itself up to a possible French invasion and was now caught in a dilemma. If, Great Britain wanted to maintain a credible defense of the British Isles, it would need to re-deploy some of its naval vessels from the blockade duty to guard the British Isles, but that would have meant a weakening of the blockade; a result which was not palatable to London.

The choice before the British government was a stark one, because the traditional role of the Royal Navy had always been a defensive one protecting the British home islands and protecting British trade routes with its colonies. The deployment of the Royal Navy, as a manifestation of an aggressive minded British foreign policy, off the European coast was a worrying prospect because Great Britain did not have a significant military force to defend the home islands in case the Royal Navy failed as the last line of defense. In the case that the Royal Navy failed to stop an invasion of Great Britain from the continent, it was the accepted conventional wisdom, in England, that the British army would not be able to withstand an attack by a numerically superior continental army. In the end, Great Britain would opt to keep the Royal Navy off the coast of Europe in hopes that it would be able to prevent the French from crossing the English Channel.

There was another facet to this equation, which was also exerting its own dynamics on this looming confrontation, between Great Britain and France and this was the economic performance of British industrial mills. While this struggle was unfolding and all of Europe was waiting with abated breaths to witness the final outcome, the process of industrialization in Great Britain was also gathering steam. The Industrial Revolution had arrived in Great Britain, nearly half a century ago in the 1750s, and due to the rapid mechanization of British industry, Great Britain was producing a surplus of finished products on a vast scale. The efficiency of this industrial output was such that London’s wharfs were being over crowded with goods that had to be delivered to the colonies and the failure to deliver these industrial goods was eating into the profits of British industries. As if to add more to the worries of the British government, the financial costs of maintaining the economic embargo of Europe was becoming too heavy for the British government and there were increasing doubts as to how long Great Britain could sustain this massive naval deployment off the European coast.

The problem resulted due to the fact that British government in order to finance the deployment had used the facility of the Bank of England to raise money by selling bonds, but even though it was meeting its financial obligations in the maintenance of the blockade, it was also increasing its overall national debt in the process. This was causing untold concern with the British public, because they were expecting an increase in their taxes if this stalemate continued any longer and coupled with this, the indefinite loss of the European markets to British goods was also creating sentiments in England towards a peace with France. The idea of the British publics’ growing opinion favoring a rapprochement with France perturbed the government in London, because such an understanding would have left France with a complete dominion over Europe and this was one option to the crisis, which Great Britain was not prepared to accept. The British government was well aware of the fact that it was reaching a policy Rubicon in the sense that it could not delay a possible military confrontation with France, because the peace lobby in Great Britain was becoming more vocal and the costs of keeping the Royal Navy in a state of war, would eventually reach a point of diminishing returns.

The fact to remember is that the Royal Navy was in a state of a continuous deployment since 1803 and for two years, from 1803 to 1805, the ships of the Royal Navy did not see the English coast or docked in England for supplies. The Royal Navy could not be refurbished from European ports, because those ports were all under the control of the French army and thus, supplies had to be brought to the ships on duty from England, in fast frigates, so that the effectiveness of the blockade would not be compromised by ships returning to England for re-supplies. The French navy, in the mean time, was scattered between French and Spanish ports (Spain was an ally of France) and the job of the Royal Navy was to keep an eye on the French ships, bottled up in European harbors, and prevent them from unifying into a combined fleet, which could threaten the British home islands. It was an understood proposition, in the Royal Navy, that in order to mount an invasion of the British Isles, the French navy and the ships of its Spanish allies would have to venture into the open sea. The primary task of the French navy was not to fight the Royal Navy, but to prevent it from interdicting a French crossing of the English Channel, which meant that prior to any invasion of England; the French navy would have to win the control of the channel from the British navy so that the French army could land on the British shores.

For two years, in periods of suffocating summer heat below the decks; to freezing gales of an Arctic winter to the long bored stretches of idle glassy waters, the ships of the Royal Navy kept an untiring vigil on the French ships and waited for the French ships to leave port. The problem facing the French navy was it would have to venture out and risk running the British blockade in lieu of organizing itself into an invasion fleet and this invariably meant that it would have to fight. If the French navy had its way, it would have simply waited in the ports of Europe, because it was quite confident that the British could not maintain an unending blockade of Europe and would eventually have to end their deployment. The only logic, which was not amenable to the idea of the French navy sitting in ports waiting for the British to call a retreat, was the patience of the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon had assembled an invasion force of nearly 130,000 soldiers; all battle hardened French veterans and a vast assemblage of river barges to ferry the soldiers across the English Channel. The French invasion force had gathered in Boulogne and all that was need to make the invasion successful was for the French navy to wrest the control of the channel for a limited time and thus, allow Napoleon to move his regiments across the narrow of strip of water separating England from the continent.

Napoleon Bonaparte was painfully aware that a commitment of over a hundred thousand French soldiers on the periphery of Europe could not be needlessly prolonged, because with the majority of the French army deployed in Western Europe, for the invasion of England, the central European powers of Prussia and Austria were beginning to get restless. Hence, Napoleon was eager to embark on the invasion of the British Isles at the first available opportunity and was constantly urging the French navy to seize the control of English Channel. The French naval reply to Napoleon was, as always, that its squadrons were scattered and all its ships needed to be coordinated to an assembly point and once this maneuver was successfully completed, the French navy would be in a position to challenge the Royal Navy in the English Channel. With autumn approaching and with it the seasonal storms in the English Channel, there was a growing possibility that any further delay would see the potential invasion of Great Britain postponed till 1806. This was unacceptable to Napoleon, as Austria and Prussia were already showing signs of a renewed confidence to challenge Napoleon in Europe. Finally, unable to bear the procrastinations of the French navy anymore, Napoleon ordered Admiral Pierre Villeneuve to leave port, which he did with a combined French and Spanish fleet of nearly thirty-three ships. Waiting for Admiral Villeneuve, with nearly twenty-seven ships of the line, was Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson of the Royal Navy abroad H.M.S. Victory and his second-in-command, Admiral Lord Cuthbert Collingwood in H.M.S. Royal Sovereign.

The dawn of the greatest day in the annuals of British naval traditions, October 21, 1805, would be remarkably ordinary. The Battle of Trafalgar would get its name from a small unimportant coastal bay, half way between the Spanish port of Cadiz and the western end of the Straits of Gibraltar, where the battle would be fought in a narrow stretch of water. The battle would become famous for Nelson’s order of the day expecting every British sailor to do his duty, but it would also be historic in the simplicity of the British plans to fight the French. In fact, what ensured the final victory for the British was the pedestrian nature of Nelson’s instructions to his captains and therein lay the naval genius of Nelson’s, which is yet to be surpassed. Realizing that the fog of war would descend upon both the French and British once the guns started to fire, Nelson’s command to the British officers was to simply engage the enemy ships at every opportunity and at all times. In simpler words, Nelson’s battle instructions to his officers were that they should place British ships alongside the enemy ships and fight till the end.

The Battle of Trafalgar, perhaps greatest and the most consequential battle in naval history, would commence on a clear day, with light winds and hardly any swells. The actual engagement, with the first shots between the Franco-Spanish fleet and the Royal Navy, as noted in the war diary of H. M. S. Royal Sovereign would be fired around half past noon, and the carnage would continue unstopped till nearly five in the afternoon when the guns would finally fall silent. In all, nearly sixty ships of war would fight relentlessly, with no quarter asked or given at point blank ranges. With the traditions of salvo fire, each ship would maneuver next to the enemy ship and fire a broadside at close quarters shattering both the timbers and the limbs of the opposing ships and its crew. The legacy of Trafalgar would be the excellence of British gunnery skills and iron discipline of British sailors gang-pressed into the service of the Royal Navy and resilience of the English captains. British ships badly mauled with raking French fire, would still improvise make-shift sails and rigs and with limited mobility would still engage enemy ships.

The battle was hard fought at close ranges and with hardly any wind, the smoke from the naval guns lingered over the battle like a hovering ghost and ships would suddenly appear from no where and disappear into this literal fog of war. With broadsides lashing the decks of the ships with an unmatched lethality, the ships would be strewn with broken masts and collapsed riggings, which would trail in the wakes of still maneuverable man-of-wars. Below the destroyed decks the crews, unmindful of the unleashed hell above, would go through the motions of loading their cannons; tilting them up to blast the top decks or lowering them to shoot below the water line and would fire shattering salvos and re-load and re-fire. The Royal Marines and the French naval marines would snipe the opposing decks with musket fire, from their locations in the high mast riggings, and from all the murderous fire which was being poured into enemy ships, the decks would be coated with a thick layer of blood, which would spill overboard into the waters of the Mediterranean, but would also make the decks slippery and slick for men still alive and fighting. An unending stream of broken and dying men would be carried below the gun-decks and placed on the operating tables of the naval surgeons, who would operate on the wounded in midst of the deafening din of the battle raging above the decks; frantically sawing off devastated limbs without any anesthesia. Beneath the feet of the surgeons and the operating tables, the decks were covered with layers of saw-dust to soak up the blood, but would become saturated with so much spilled blood that the saw-dust itself would turn into a blood soaked pulp.

When the guns would mercifully fall silent in the lengthening shadows of the dusk, nearly half of the Franco-Spanish fleet had been destroyed by fighting tenacity and the resilience of Nelson’s captains and the French commander-in-chief would be taken as prisoner of war himself. In fact, Villeneuve would be a surprised man at the surrender ceremony, where the vanquished had to hand over their sword to the victor, because instead of Nelson, whom he expected to give his sword, the sword would be received by another British naval officer. Villeneuve at the time was not aware of the fact that Nelson, while walking the deck of his flag-ship had been recognized by a French sniper, because contrary to the concerns of his officers, Nelson chose to wear his uniform with all his decorations. The French sniper’s shot had placed a musket ball in the back of the British admiral and had shattered his spine and a fatally wounded Nelson would be carried below the decks to the surgeon’s table. However, before he died of his wounds, Nelson would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had defeated the combined Franco-Spanish fleet when he was informed that the remaining French ships were all striking their colors. Villeneuve, who was not aware that Nelson was dying, would return to France a broken man thinking that he had been snubbed by the British admiral and would eventually commit suicide as a result of this imagined affront to his honor.

Trafalgar did not seal the fate of Napoleon in Europe and another ten bitter and conflicted years would pass before Napoleon would be permanently exiled to St. Helena in the South Atlantic. In a way, Trafalgar was an embodiment of what the German philosopher Karl Jung would refer to as “synchronicity”; where the right things happened in the correct sequence to create the desired outcome. If Napoleon had not urged the French admirals to take the gamble, the British might have been forced to end their blockade of Europe due to ever increasing costs and a steadily growing public sentiment for peace. Europe would have been dominated by a French political and military hegemony, and history would have been differently enacted as a consequence and to persist with a historic speculation, Great Britain’s meddlesome role in European affairs would have been at end.

On the other hand, if Napoleon had been successful in crossing the English Channel and dictating the peace terms in London, it would have meant that a good portion of the French army and some of its best regiments would have been committed to garrison duty in England and might not have been available to put down European challenges to Napoleonic rule in Europe. As mentioned earlier, the Prussian and the Austrians, not to mention the Russians, were getting restive and were once again showing signs to resist the French influence in Europe. If Trafalgar had been a British defeat, Napoleon might have been faced with a weakened hold over Europe and in hindsight, the French loss at Trafalgar was a fortunate event, because it freed the nearly 130,000 men of the French invasion force and would allow Napoleon to use these troops in 1806 to defeat the Austrians and the Russians at Ulm; and the Prussians at Jena. In a sense, it was the French naval defeat at Trafalgar, which allowed Napoleon to continue to dominate Europe and had Napoleon been successful in attacking England; it is doubtful how long he might have politically and militarily endured in Europe.

Even though it would require another decade to defeat Napoleon, the salient point of the British victory at Trafalgar was that the threat of Great Britain facing a French invasion was removed and Great Britain would not face a similar threat for nearly a hundred years. With the security of the home islands secured, and while Napoleon was busy campaigning in Central Europe, the Royal Navy was able to provide escort to a British expeditionary army, which landed in the Iberian Peninsula under the command of the Duke of Wellington in 1806. The start of the Peninsular Wars, as the campaigns of the British army in Portugal and Spain would be known, from 1806 to 1814, would witness uprisings against the French rule in Iberia and Napoleon would be forced to deploy nearly 200,000 French soldiers to fight Wellington and his marauding British forces. Wellington would utilize an unorthodox manner of fighting, which was not to engage in combat with the French troops, but to bog down a significant number of French troops, while the government in London fashioned another coalition of European nations against Napoleon. The Peninsular Wars were the first instance of an organized, armed and coherent insurgency movement supported by a major nation (Great Britain) against an occupying power (France).

The arrival of the French army in Spain, to hoist a French influence on the Spanish throne, had also brought with it the ideas of French Revolution and nationalism to Spain. The alien rule of France upon Spain had helped in igniting a sense of a republican nationalism in the Spanish population and the argument was made that Spain should be allowed to exercise the French ideals of politics; equality, fraternity and liberty which the French had introduced to Spain. The French refusal to agree to this demand would create a popular revolt against the French rule, which allowed Great Britain the opportunity to deploy its army in Iberia to take advantage of the situation. The nature of the war would be in the shape of a Spanish insurgency against the French and even though the British army was present in Iberia; it was fighting the French in a proxy manner through the Spanish resistance to the French rule. Since the war was fought in an unconventional manner; the French were sniped and ambushed by a small group of Spanish partisans, the French reaction would be hostile and repressive and out of this popularly supported insurgency against the French, a new word would be added to the lexicon of war – la gurilla and history would learn to recognize this new form of war as guerilla warfare.

Though the Peninsular Wars would shake the foundations of Napoleon’s Continental System, it would be ineffective in causing its demise, but the end result was that Napoleon would be forced to suffer a “military over reach”. Great Britain was still politically viable in the affairs of Europe and the European coalitions against Napoleonic France were still being created and with the bulk of the French army isolated in Iberia, European nations, for example, Russia, were probing the limits of the French economic blockade. Russia, seeing the French military bogging down in the quagmire of the Iberian wars, revived its trade with Great Britain, which must have annoyed Napoleon Bonaparte to a considerable extent. Napoleon’s lack of financial resources in Europe to sustain his military power and his wish to punish Russia for violating the Continental System would encourage Napoleon to offer a favorable response to the offer by Thomas Jefferson, the American president, to buy the French colony of Louisiana. The monies, which he would gain from the sale of Louisiana to the Americans, Napoleon would equip his Grand Army of nearly 600,000 men to invade Russia. It is interesting to note that vast majority of soldiers, who made up the ranks of the Grand Army, for the invasion of Russia, were not French and this suggests, that Napoleon must have viewed the presence of the British army in Iberia as a serious threat, because he kept the majority of the French army deployed against the British and did not use them in his invasion of Russia in 1812.

While Russian trade with Great Britain was irritating Napoleon Bonaparte, the American trade in cotton, with France, against the British blockade, was infuriating the British. To the American mind, the British decision to prevent and thus, influence American trade with France was highly reminiscent of the British attitude during the period of American revolutionary wars. The Americans, having won their independence from Great Britain less fifty years ago over the issue of the freedom of commerce amongst others, were resentful of the British restricting their trade with France and in the process, blamed the British for violating the Treaty of Paris of 1783, by which Great Britain had accepted the sovereign independence of the United States. The American claims of sovereignty did not impress the British, because in 1812, as Napoleon was marching east to invade Russia; the British sailed west to fight a war with the Americans over the issue of American trade with France. The War of 1812-14 between the United States and Great Britain, as it would be known, was a farcical affair. Parenthetically speaking, perhaps the only historic importance of the War of 1812-1814 was that it offered a credible foil to the contemporary arguments suggesting that democracies do not fight democracies, because in 1812 the United States was a constitutional democracy and Great Britain was a parliamentary democracy. In terms of an historic caveat, this was the probably the only time, when two democracies fought each other, and the fact that they did fight would seem to invalidate the hypothesis that democracies never fought a war against each other.

Napoleon’s defeat in Russia would set the stage for his eventual fall three years later in 1815, but in 1805 when the Battle of Trafalgar ended, the British public’s reaction would be more pronounced that it would be at the news of the British victory at the Battle of Waterloo. The British public would receive the news of the naval victory over the French and as it was celebrating it; it would learn of the death of Horatio Nelson and hence, its mood would sway between the heights of a national euphoria to the depths of a national sorrow within a short span of time and in an ironic sense, this emotional variance of the British public would be tragically recreated in the year marking the second bicentennial of the Battle of Trafalgar. In 2005, as London was celebrating the award of being a host city to the Olympic Games, the bomb blasts of July 7, 2005 would end those celebrations by imposing a pall of sadness over them and just like the Londoners of 1805; the Londoner of 2005 would experience the most visible extremes of human emotions possible in the shortest time. At the very moment of its great naval triumph, Great Britain would enter a period of national mourning to show its respect for the ultimate sacrifice of made by Nelson towards his nation and the British sailors, who had survived Trafalgar, to show their respect and commemorate the death of Nelson, would tie a black handkerchief on to their tunics.

In the years that would pass after the Battle of Trafalgar, the Royal Navy would become the standard of excellence, which other navies would copy and as other nations created their own navies, they would borrow the traditions of the Royal Navy and one of the traditions, which they adopted, maybe unthinkingly, was the black handkerchief worn by the British sailors to mark the death of Nelson. More than two hundred years after Trafalgar, every naval uniform in the world still has the black handkerchief ceremonially knotted over a white tunic, but hardly anyone remembers that the origins of this naval tradition lay in the symbolic, and spontaneous, act of gratitude displayed by the British seamen towards their fallen hero.

One of the people, who would be deeply impressed by the traditions of the Royal Navy was Kaiser Wilhelm II and his admiration of the Royal Navy would find an eloquent expression in the book by Alfred Thayer Mahan, which would immortalize the Royal Navy and the German emperor, determined to create a navy for Germany as grand as the Royal Navy, would order that a copy of Mahan’s book be placed on every warship in the German navy. Amusingly, Admiral Mahan was more-well known and appreciated in Berlin than he was in London or Washington. The German Kaiser’s dream of building a powerful navy would threaten the legacy of Trafalgar, which had been Great Britain’s uncontested mastery of the seas since 1805 and once that criteria was seen as being undermined by the German naval program, Great Britain would be forced to enter the arena of European politics after a period of nearly one hundred years to counter the growing power of Germany and the result would be the military alliances with Russia and France, which would tragically manipulate the outbreak of the First World War.