"Uprose the soul of him a star
On that brave day of Ocean days;
It rolled the smoke from Trafalgar
To darken Austerlitz ablaze.
Are we the men of old, its light
Will point us under every sky
The path he took; and must we fight,
Our Nelson be our battle-cry!
He leads: we hear our Seaman's call
In the roll of battles won;
For he is Britain's Admiral
Till setting of her sun."
--GEORGE MEREDITH.
That Trafalgar was a great British victory, won by splendid seamanship
and by magnificent courage, everybody knows. On October 21, 1805,
Nelson, with twenty-seven line-of-battle ships, attacked Villeneuve, in
command of a combined fleet of thirty-three line-of-battle ships. The
first British gun was fired at 12.10 o'clock; at 5 o'clock the battle
was over; and within those five hours the combined fleets of France and
Spain were simply destroyed. No fewer than eighteen ships of the line
were captured, burnt, or sunk; the rest were in flight, and had
practically ceased to exist as a fighting force. But what very few
people realise is that Trafalgar is only the last incident in a great
strategic conflict--a warfare of brains rather than of bullets--which
for nearly three years raged round a single point. For that long
period the warlike genius of Napoleon was pitted in strategy against
the skill and foresight of a cluster of British sailors; and the
sailors won. They beat Napoleon at his own weapons. The French were
not merely out-fought in the shock of battling fleets, they were
out-generalled in the conflict of plotting and warlike brains which
preceded the actual fight off Cape Trafalgar.
The strategy which preceded Trafalgar represents Napoleon's solitary
attempt to plan a great campaign on the tossing floor of the sea. "It
has an interest wholly unique," says Mahan, "as the only great naval
campaign ever planned by this foremost captain of modern times." And
it is a very marvellous fact that a cluster of British sailors--Jervis
and Barham (a salt eighty years old) at the Admiralty, Cornwallis at
Brest, Collingwood at Cadiz, and Nelson at Toulon--guessed all
Napoleon's profound and carefully hidden strategy, and met it by even
subtler plans and swifter resolves than those of Napoleon himself. The
five hours of gallant fighting off Cape Trafalgar fill us with exultant
pride. But the intellectual duel which preceded the shock of actual
battle, and which lasted for nearly three years, is, in a sense, a yet
more splendid story. Great Britain may well honour her naval leaders
of that day for their cool and profound strategy, as much as for the
unyielding courage with which such a blockade as, say, that of Brest by
Cornwallis was maintained for years, or such splendid daring as that
which Collingwood showed when, in the _Royal Sovereign_, he broke
Villeneuve's line at Trafalgar.
When in 1803 the war which brought to an end the brief peace of Amiens
broke out, Napoleon framed a great and daring plan for the invasion of
England. French plans for the invasion of England were somewhat
numerous a century or so ago. The Committee of Public Safety in 1794,
while keeping the guillotine busy in the Place de la Révolution, had
its own little plan for extending the Reign of Terror, by means of an
invasion, to England; and on May 27 of that year solemnly appointed one
of their number to represent the Committee in England "when it was
conquered." The member chosen was citizen Bon Saint André, the same
hero who, in the battle of the 1st of June, fled in terror to the
refuge of the French flagship's cock-pit when the _Queen Charlotte_,
with her triple lines of guns, came too alarmingly near. But
Napoleon's plans for the same object in 1803 were definite, formidable,
profound. Great Britain was the one barrier in the path of his
ambition. "Buonaparte," says Green, in his "Short History of the
English People," "was resolute to be master of the western world, and
no notions of popular freedom or sense of popular right ever interfered
with his resolve. . . . England was now the one country where freedom
in any sense remained alive. . . . With the fall of England, despotism
would have been universal throughout Europe; and it was at England that
Buonaparte resolved to strike the first blow in his career of conquest.
Fifteen millions of people, he argued, must give way to forty millions."
So he formed the vast camp at Boulogne, in which were gathered 130,000
veterans. A great flotilla of boats was built, each boat being armed
with one or two guns, and capable of carrying 100 soldiers. More than
1000 of such boats were built, and concentrated along twenty miles of
the Channel coast, and at four different ports. A new port was dug at
Boulogne, to give shelter to the main division of this flotilla, and
great and powerful batteries erected for its protection. The French
soldiers were exercised in embarking and disembarking till the whole
process could be counted by minutes. "Let us," said Napoleon, "be
masters of the Straits for six hours, and we shall be masters of the
world."
When since the days of William the Conqueror were the shores of Great
Britain menaced by such a peril? "There is no difficulty," said
Moltke, "in getting an army into England; the trouble would be to get
it out again." And, no doubt, Englishmen, fighting on their own soil
and for their own hearths, would have given an invader a very rough
time of it. But let it be remembered that Napoleon was a military
genius of the first order, and that the 130,000 soldiers waiting on the
heights above Boulogne to leap on British soil were, to quote Mahan,
"the most brilliant soldiery of all time." They were the men who
afterwards won Austerlitz, who struck down Prussia with a single blow
at Jena, who marched as victors through the streets of Vienna and of
Berlin, and fought their way to Moscow. Imagine such an army, with
such a leader, landed on the green fields of Kent! In that case there
might have been an English Austerlitz or Friedland. London might have
shared the fate of Moscow. If Napoleon had succeeded, the fate of the
world would have been changed, and Toronto and Cape Town, Melbourne and
Sydney and Auckland might have been ruled by French prefects.
Napoleon himself was confident of success. He would reach London, he
calculated, within four days of landing, and then he would have issued
decrees abolishing the House of Lords, proclaiming a redistribution of
property, and declaring England a republic. "You would never have
burned your capital," he said to O'Meara at St. Helena; "you are too
rich and fond of money." The London mob, he believed, would have
joined him, for, as he cynically argued, "the _canaille_ of all nations
are nearly alike."
Even Napoleon would probably have failed, however, in subduing Great
Britain, and would have remained a prisoner where he came intending to
be a conqueror. As he himself said when a prisoner on his way to St.
Helena, "I entered into no calculation as to the manner in which I was
to return"! But in the battles which must have been fought, how many
English cities would have perished in flames, how many English rivers
would have run red with the blood of slain men! "At Waterloo," says
Alison, "England fought for victory; at Trafalgar for existence."
But "the streak of silver sea" guarded England, and for more than two
years Napoleon framed subtle plans and organised vast combinations
which might give him that brief six hours' command of the Strait which
was all he needed, as he thought, to make himself the master of the
world. The flotilla could not so much as get out of the ports, in
which the acres of boats lay, in a single tide, and one half of the
army of invasion must lie tossing--and, it may be suspected, dreadfully
sea-sick--for hours outside these ports, waiting for the other half to
get afloat. Then there remained forty miles of sea to cross. And what
would happen if, say, Nelson and Collingwood, with a dozen 74-gun
ships, got at work amongst the flotilla? It would be a combat between
wolves and sheep. It was Nelson's chief aspiration to have the
opportunity of "trying Napoleon on a wind," and the attempt to cross
the Straits might have given him that chance. All Napoleon's resources
and genius were therefore strained to give him for the briefest
possible time the command of the Channel; and the skill and energy of
the British navy were taxed to the utmost to prevent that consummation.
Now, France, as a matter of fact, had a great fleet, but it was
scattered, and lying imprisoned, in fragments, in widely separated
ports. There were twelve ships of the line in Toulon, twenty in Brest,
five in Rochefort, yet other five in Ferrol; and the problem for
Napoleon was, somehow, to set these imprisoned squadrons free, and
assemble them for twenty-four hours off Boulogne. The British policy,
on the other hand, was to maintain a sleepless blockade of these ports,
and keep the French fleet sealed up in scattered and helpless
fragments. The battle for the Straits of Dover, the British naval
chiefs held, must be fought off Brest and Ferrol and Toulon; and never
in the history of the world were blockades so vigilant, and stern, and
sleepless maintained.
Nelson spent two years battling with the fierce north-westers of the
Gulf of Lyons, keeping watch over a great French squadron in Toulon,
and from May 1803 to August 1805 left his ship only three times, and
for less than an hour on each occasion. The watch kept by Cornwallis
off Brest, through summer and winter, for nearly three years, Mahan
declares, has never, for constancy and vigilance, been excelled,
perhaps never equalled, in the history of blockades. The hardship of
these long sea-watches was terrible. It was waging an fight with
weariness and brain-paralysing monotony, with cold and scurvy and
tempest, as well as with human foes. Collingwood was once twenty-two
months at sea without dropping anchor. In seventeen years of sea
service--between 1793 and 1810--he was only twelve months in England.
The wonder is that the seamen of that day did not grow web-footed, or
forget what solid ground felt like! Collingwood tells his wife in one
letter that he had "not seen a green leaf on a tree" for fourteen
months! By way of compensation, these long and stern blockades
developed such a race of seamen as perhaps the world has never seen
before or since; exhaustless of resource, hardy, tireless, familiar
with every turn of sea life, of iron frame and an iron courage which
neither tempest nor battle could shake. Great Britain, as a matter of
fact, won her naval battles, not because she had better ships or
heavier guns than her enemies, but only because she trained a finer
race of seamen. Says Brenton, himself a gallant sailor of the period,
"I have seen Spanish line-of-battle ships twenty-four hours unmooring;
as many minutes are sufficient for a well-manned British ship to
perform the same operation. When, on any grand ceremony, they found it
necessary to cross their top-gallant yards in harbour, they began the
day before; we cross ours in one minute from the deck."
But it was these iron blockades that in the long-run thwarted the plans
of Napoleon and changed the fate of the world. Cornwallis off Brest,
Collingwood off Rochefort, Pellew off Ferrol, Nelson before Toulon,
fighting the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay and the fierce
north-westers of the Gulf of Lyons, in what Mahan calls "that
tremendous and sustained vigilance which reached its utmost tension in
the years preceding Trafalgar," really saved England. "Those
far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never
looked," says Mahan, "stood between it and the dominion of the world."
An intellect so subtle and combative as Napoleon's was, of course,
strained to the utmost to break or cheat the British blockades, and the
story of the one crafty ruse after another which he employed to beguile
the British leaders is very remarkable. Even more remarkable, perhaps,
is the manner in which these plain-minded, business-like British
seamen, for whose mental powers Napoleon cherished the deepest
contempt, fathomed his plans and shattered his combinations.
Napoleon's first plot was decidedly clever. He gathered in Brest
20,000 troops, ostensibly for a descent upon Ireland. This, he
calculated, would preoccupy Cornwallis, and prevent him moving. The
Toulon fleet was to run out with the first north-west wind, and, as
long as a British look-out ship was in sight, would steer east, as
though making for Egypt; but when beyond sight of British eyes the
fleet was to swing round, run through the Straits, be joined off Cadiz
by the Rochefort squadron, and sweep, a great fleet of at least sixteen
sail of the line, past the Scilly Islands to Boulogne. Napoleon
calculated that Nelson would be racing in the direction of Egypt,
Cornwallis would be redoubling his vigilance before Brest, at the exact
moment the great Boulogne flotilla was carrying its 130,000 invading
Frenchmen to Dover! Napoleon put the one French admiral as to whose
resolve and daring he was sure--Latouche Treville--in command of the
Toulon fleet; but before the moment for action came Treville died, and
Napoleon had to fall back upon a weaker man, Villeneuve.
He changed his plans to suit the qualities of his new admiral--the
Toulon and Rochefort squadrons were to break out, sail separately to a
rendezvous in the West Indies, and, once joined, spread havoc through
the British possessions there. "I think," wrote Napoleon, "that the
sailing of these twenty ships of the line will oblige the English to
despatch over thirty in pursuit." So the blockades everywhere would be
weakened, and the Toulon and Rochefort squadrons, doubling back to
Europe, were to raise the blockade off Ferrol and Brest, and the Brest
squadron was to land 18,000 troops, under Augereau, in Ireland, while
the Grand Army of Boulogne was to cross the Straits, with Napoleon at
its head. Thus Great Britain and Ireland would be invaded
simultaneously.
The trouble was to set the scheme going by the release of the Toulon
and Rochefort squadrons. Nelson's correspondence shows that he guessed
Napoleon's strategy. If the Toulon fleet broke loose, he wrote, he was
sure its course would be held for the Atlantic, and thither he would
follow it. In the meanwhile he kept guard so steadfastly that the
great French strategy could not get itself started. In December 1804
war broke out betwixt Britain and Spain, and this gave Napoleon a new
ally and a new fleet. Napoleon found he had nearly sixty
line-of-battle ships, French or Spanish, to weave into his
combinations, and he framed--to use Mahan's words--"upon lines equal,
both in boldness and scope, to those of the Marengo and Austerlitz
campaigns, the immense strategy which resulted in Trafalgar." The
Toulon and Rochefort squadrons, as before, were to break out
separately, rendezvous in the West Indies, return by a different route
to European waters, pick up the French and Spanish ships in Ferrol, and
then sweep through the narrow seas.
The Rochefort squadron duly escaped; Villeneuve, too, in command of the
Toulon squadron, aided by the weather, evaded Nelson's watchfulness and
disappeared towards the east. Nelson, however, suspected the real
plan, and with fine insight took up a position which must have
intercepted Villeneuve; but that admiral found the weather too rough
for his ships, and ran back into Toulon. "These gentlemen," said
Nelson, "are not accustomed to a Gulf of Lyons gale. We have faced
them for twenty-one months, and not lost a spar!" The Rochefort
squadron was, of course, left by its own success wandering in space, a
mere cluster of sea-vagrants.
By March 1805, Napoleon had a new combination prepared. In the ports
between Brest and Toulon were scattered no less than sixty-seven French
or Spanish ships of the line. Ganteaume, with his squadron, was to
break out from Brest; Villeneuve, with his, from Toulon; both fleets
were to rendezvous at Martinique, return by an unusual route, and
appear off Boulogne, a great fleet of thirty-five French ships of the
line.
About the end of June the Toulon fleet got safely out--Nelson being,
for once, badly served by his frigates--picked up additional ships off
Cadiz, and disappeared on its route to the West Indies. Nelson, misled
by false intelligence, first went eastward, then had to claw back
through the Straits of Gibraltar in the teeth of strong westerly gales,
and plunged over the horizon in fierce pursuit of Villeneuve. But the
watch kept by Cornwallis over Ganteaume in Brest was so close and stern
that escape was impossible, and one-half of Napoleon's combination
broke down. Napoleon despatched swift ships on Villeneuve's track,
summoning him back to Ferrol, where he would find a squadron of fifteen
French and Spanish ships ready to join him. Villeneuve, Napoleon
believed, had thoroughly deceived Nelson. "Those boasted English," he
wrote, "who claim to know of everything, know nothing of it," _i.e._ of
Villeneuve's escape and course. But the "boasted English," as a matter
of fact, did know all about it, and in place of weakening their forces
in the Bay of Biscay, strengthened them. Meanwhile Nelson, with ten
ships of the line, was hard on the track of Villeneuve with eighteen.
At Barbadoes, Nelson was sent a hundred miles out of his course by
false intelligence, and that hundred miles just enabled Villeneuve to
double back towards Europe.
Nelson divined this plan, and followed him with the fiercest energy,
sending off, meanwhile, his fastest brig to warn the Admiralty.
Villeneuve, if he picked up the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons, would
arrive off Brest with forty line-of-battle ships; if he raised the
blockade, and added Ganteaume's squadron to his own, he might appear
off Boulogne with sixty great ships! Napoleon calculated on British
blunders to aid him. "We have not to do with a far-sighted, but with a
very proud Government," he wrote. The blunder Napoleon hoped the
British Admiralty would make was that of weakening the blockading
squadrons in order to pursue Villeneuve's fleet, and thus release the
imprisoned French squadrons, making a great concentration possible.
But this was exactly the blunder into which the Admiralty refused to be
tempted. When the news that Villeneuve was on his way back to Europe
reached the Admiralty, the First Lord, Barham, an old sailor, eighty
years of age, without waiting to dress himself, dictated orders which,
without weakening the blockades at any vital point, planted a fleet,
under Sir Robert Calder, west of Finisterre, and right in Villeneuve's
track; and if Calder had been Nelson, Trafalgar might have been fought
on July 22, instead of October 21. Calder fought, and captured two of
Villeneuve's ships, but failed to prevent the junction of Villeneuve's
fleet with the squadron in Ferrol, and was court-martialled for his
failure--victory though he called it. But this partial failure does
not make less splendid the promptitude shown by the British Admiralty.
"The English Admiralty," Napoleon reasoned, "could not decide the
movements of its squadron in twenty-four hours." As a matter of fact,
Barham decided the British strategy in almost as many minutes!
Meanwhile Nelson had reached the scene; and, like his ship, worn out
with labours, sailed for Portsmouth, for what proved his last visit to
England. On August 13, Villeneuve sailed from Ferrol with twenty-nine
ships. He had his choice between Brest, where Cornwallis was keeping
guard, with Boulogne beyond, and where Napoleon was watching eagerly
for the white topsails of his fleet; or Cadiz, where Collingwood with a
tiny squadron held the Spanish fleet strictly bottled up.
Villeneuve's true course was Boulogne, but Cornwallis lay in his path
with over thirty sail of the line, and Villeneuve's nerve failed him.
On August 21 he swung round and bore up for Cadiz; and with the turn of
the helm which swung Villeneuve's ship away from Boulogne, Napoleon's
last chance of invading England vanished. Villeneuve pushed
Collingwood's tiny squadron aside and entered Cadiz, where the combined
fleet now numbered nearly forty ships of the line, and Collingwood,
with delightful coolness, solemnly resumed his blockade--four ships,
that is, blockading forty! Napoleon gave way to a tempest of rage when
his fleet failed to appear off Boulogne, and he realised that the
British sailors he despised had finally thwarted his strategy. A
French writer has told how Daru, his secretary, found him walking up
and down his cabinet with agitated steps. With a voice that shook, and
in half-strangled exclamations, he cried, "What a navy! What
sacrifices for nothing! What an admiral! All hope is gone! That
Villeneuve, instead of entering the Channel, has taken refuge in
Ferrol. It is all over. He will be blockaded there." Then with that
swift and terrible power of decision in which he has never been
surpassed, he flung the long-cherished plan of invading England out of
his brain, and dictated the orders which launched his troops on the
road which led to Austerlitz and Jena, and, beyond, to the flames of
Moscow and the snows of the great retreat, and which finally led
Napoleon himself to St. Helena. Villeneuve's great fleet meanwhile lay
idle in Cadiz, till, on October 20, the ill-fated French admiral led
his ships out to meet Nelson in his last great sea-fight.