War & Peace Quote by William Falconer

Beneath the tidy seamanship is a poet’s obsession with order: the sea, that famously indifferent force, becomes something you can count, split, and command. Falconer’s line reads like a manual because it is trying to be one - but it’s also quietly staking a claim that knowledge can domesticate chaos. The phrase “of whatsoever number” has the sweep of an epic opening, only to funnel into the reassuring bureaucracy of “usually divided.” Even war, even the vastness of a fleet, is rendered legible through an almost soothing taxonomy: squadrons, then divisions, a nested hierarchy that promises control.

The intent is practical instruction, likely drawn from Falconer’s maritime expertise and the 18th-century appetite for systems. Britain’s naval power depended not just on ships, but on coordination: signaling, formation, chain of command. So the sentence performs the very discipline it describes - long, balanced, methodical, with clauses that break and subdivide like the fleet itself. It’s syntax as strategy.

The subtext is social as much as nautical. The language of partition implies an ideal state: the many made governable by being arranged into units, each unit answerable to the larger whole. In an era when empires were administered through lists, ranks, and ledgers, Falconer’s division of ships doubles as a worldview. The ocean may be boundless, but authority prefers it in threes.