Word: trajalgar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Trajalgar (261 pp.)-Rene Maine-Scrlbner...
Mahan's works, Trajalgar will not be a classic, but French Author Maine's broad, historical approach, coupled with a brisk style, would win an approving nod from his great U.S. predecessor. Like Mahan, Maine is obsessed by a historical drama in which one of the principal characters, Horatio Nelson, was "specially gifted with qualities" demanded by the times and the other, Napoleon Bonaparte, decidedly...
...next important reason was the state of the French navy. For decades it had been treated like the ugly stepsister of the glamorous Grande Armee. On the eve of Trajalgar, Admiral Villeneuve summed up in a few words: "We have bad masts, bad sails, bad rigging, bad officers and bad seamen." Worst of all were the French admirals, who suffered from bad inferiority complexes. "Terrified of being condemned [by Napoleon] for the most trifling actions," the admirals preferred to take no action...
...Trajalgar, when it came, was an act of Napoleonic desperation-a sort of exasperated suicide. Napoleon's invasion concentration, the work of years, had reached its peak point: it must be used or broken up. Ready to go, by Historian Maine's account, was "the fantastic total of 2,343 vessels, capable of transporting 167-590 men and 9,149 horses." It was to guard these that Napoleon sent his fatal order to Admiral Villeneuve, then in port in Spain, just above Gibraltar: "Wherever you find the enemy in inferior strength you will attack him without hesitation." Against...
...irrevocable disaster" which not only rendered impossible Napoleon's invasion of England, but made inevitable England's invasion of France. "Trajalgar was the prelude to Waterloo," concludes Maine, and in memory of it, "French and English sailors to this day wear a black cravat round their necks; the latter mourn for their leader who fell in the thick of the fight, and the former mourn for their shattered illusions...
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