Battle of Trafalgar

Today, October 21, is a day that will live... in glory. It was this day two hundred years ago
that the British Royal Navy squadron under the command of Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined
fleets of France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar.

The victory was a great military triumph in operational terms, for it was a bold attempt to
suprise and confuse the French with unexpected and unorthodox tactics. As
Brett M. Decker writes:

Nelson aimed his ships strait at the middle of the enemy line to break the force
in two. It was a very risky strategy because the massive cannons were positioned on the sides
of their great ships. Heading straight ahead into the enemy line meant Nelson’s side-mounted
guns were useless and exposed Nelson’s fleet to pounding from the broadsides of his targets,
which were
stretched in a long line with their gun ports facing Nelson’s advance.

This tactic of suprise is today the basic modus operandi of all armies: to suprise and disorient
the enemy and keep moving faster than he is able to react.

But the battle had another consequence. It meant that Napoleon could not deploy the invasion
force he had assembled across the English Channel from Britain. Instead of becoming “French-occupied
Britain” the British entered upon a century of global dominance in which they exported their politics,
their culture, and their industry to the world.

One of the things that Napoleon would have done would have been to sweep away Britain’s common
law and replace it with the Code Napoleacute;on, writes
Tom Utley.

The trouble with Britain’s common law is that it is an organic growth, based not on
first principles, but on human nature and accumulated experience.

Tidy-minded continental rationalists have never liked that sort of thing.

But now, two hundred years after its victory against mindless
continental rationalism, Britain is succumbing to the embrace of the universal European superstate,
the centralized, one-size-fits-all European Union.

Was all that brilliance and all that glory two
hundred years ago for nothing?