And yet the fact remains that, had the wind failed and the fleet lost
steerage way, or, worse still, had it been taken aback from the eastward,
with its leaders within short range of the enemy’s guns, nothing, it
seems, could have saved the headmost ships from capture or destruction.
No skill of a great sea officer would have availed in such a contingency.
Lord Nelson was more than that, and his genius would have remained
undiminished by defeat. But obviously tactics, which are so much at the
mercy of irremediable accident, must seem to a modern seaman a poor
matter of study. The Commander-in-Chief in the great fleet action that
will take its place next to the Battle of Trafalgar in the history of the
British navy will have no such anxiety, and will feel the weight of no
such dependence. For a hundred years now no British fleet has engaged
the enemy in line of battle. A hundred years is a long time, but the
difference of modern conditions is enormous. The gulf is great. Had the
last great fight of the English navy been that of the First of June, for
instance, had there been no Nelson’s victories, it would have been
wellnigh impassable. The great Admiral’s slight and passion-worn figure
stands at the parting of the ways. He had the audacity of genius, and a
prophetic inspiration.
The modern naval man must feel that the time has come for the tactical
practice of the great sea officers of the past to be laid by in the
temple of august memories. The fleet tactics of the sailing days have
been governed by two points: the deadly nature of a raking fire, and the
dread, natural to a commander dependent upon the winds, to find at some
crucial moment part of his fleet thrown hopelessly to leeward. These two
points were of the very essence of sailing tactics, and these two points
have been eliminated from the modern tactical problem by the changes of
propulsion and armament. Lord Nelson was the first to disregard them
with conviction and audacity sustained by an unbounded trust in the men
he led. This conviction, this audacity and this trust stand out from
amongst the lines of the celebrated memorandum, which is but a
declaration of his faith in a crushing superiority of fire as the only
means of victory and the only aim of sound tactics. Under the
difficulties of the then existing conditions he strove for that, and for
that alone, putting his faith into practice against every risk. And in
that exclusive faith Lord Nelson appears to us as the first of the
moderns.
Against every risk, I have said; and the men of to-day, born and bred to
the use of steam, can hardly realize how much of that risk was in the
weather. Except at the Nile, where the conditions were ideal for
engaging a fleet moored in shallow water, Lord Nelson was not lucky in
his weather. Practically it was nothing but a quite unusual failure of
the wind which cost him his arm during the Teneriffe expedition. On
Trafalgar Day the weather was not so much unfavourable as extremely
dangerous.
It was one of these covered days of fitful sunshine, of light, unsteady
winds, with a swell from the westward, and hazy in general, but with the
land about the Cape at times distinctly visible. It has been my lot to
look with reverence upon the very spot more than once, and for many hours
together. All but thirty years ago, certain exceptional circumstances
made me very familiar for a time with that bight in the Spanish coast
which would be enclosed within a straight line drawn from Faro to
Spartel. My well-remembered experience has convinced me that, in that
corner of the ocean, once the wind has got to the northward of west (as
it did on the 20th, taking the British fleet aback), appearances of
westerly weather go for nothing, and that it is infinitely more likely to
veer right round to the east than to shift back again. It was in those
conditions that, at seven on the morning of the 21st, the signal for the
fleet to bear up and steer east was made. Holding a clear recollection
of these languid easterly sighs rippling unexpectedly against the run of
the smooth swell, with no other warning than a ten-minutes’ calm and a
queer darkening of the coast-line, I cannot think, without a gasp of
professional awe, of that fateful moment. Perhaps personal experience,
at a time of life when responsibility had a special freshness and
importance, has induced me to exaggerate to myself the danger of the
weather. The great Admiral and good seaman could read aright the signs
of sea and sky, as his order to prepare to anchor at the end of the day
sufficiently proves; but, all the same, the mere idea of these baffling
easterly airs, coming on at any time within half an hour or so, after the
firing of the first shot, is enough to take one’s breath away, with the
image of the rearmost ships of both divisions falling off, unmanageable,
broadside on to the westerly swell, and of two British Admirals in
desperate jeopardy. To this day I cannot free myself from the impression
that, for some forty minutes, the fate of the great battle hung upon a
breath of wind such as I have felt stealing from behind, as it were, upon
my cheek while engaged in looking to the westward for the signs of the
true weather.
Never more shall British seamen going into action have to trust the
success of their valour to a breath of wind. The God of gales and
battles favouring her arms to the last, has let the sun of England’s
sailing-fleet and of its greatest master set in unclouded glory. And now
the old ships and their men are gone; the new ships and the new men, many
of them bearing the old, auspicious names, have taken up their watch on
the stern and impartial sea, which offers no opportunities but to those
who know how to grasp them with a ready hand and an undaunted heart.