Perhaps in this cursory view of Nelson one may be permitted to seize on what appears to me the central incident of his life, which so peculiarly illustrates his extraordinary genius for War. His audacity! His imagination! His considered rashness! I think myself the Battle of the Nile is that incident—for this reason: that it has been recorded in writing what actually occurred to Lord Nelson and to the French Admiral at the very same instant of time—each having at his side the very same officer in each Fleet. It was sunset. Nelson was walking the deck with the Navigating Officer of the Fleet—the “Master of the Fleet” was his technical title. The look-out man at the mast-head reports seeing on the horizon the mast-heads of a mass of ships at anchor—it was the French Fleet in Aboukir Bay. Nelson instantly stops in his walk and orders the signal to the Fleet to make all possible sail and steer for the enemy. He is remonstrated with, both by his own officers on board and by his favourite Captain of the Fleet at going in to fight the French Fleet without any charts. If he waited till the sun rose, they would be able to see from aloft the shoal water and so steer with safety alongside the enemy. Nelson answers his favourite Captain that if that Captain’s ship does get on shore, as he fears, then she’ll be a buoy to show him where anyhow one shoal is. Troubridge did get on shore, and he was a buoy. Nelson went in. The French Admiral blew up at midnight in his flagship the “Orient” and Casabianca, his Captain, and his son are the theme of a great poem: “The boy stood on the burning deck.”
The French Admiral was walking up and down the deck with his Master of the Fleet, when his look-out man at the mast-head reported on the horizon the topmast sails of a number of ships. The French Admiral stopped in his walk as abruptly as Nelson and at the very same instant that Nelson stopped in his walk; but he said “It’s the English Fleet, but they won’t come in to-night. They have no charts!” So he did not recall his men from the shore—and in the result his fleet was destroyed, and the one or two ships that did escape under Admiral Dumanoir were captured. And Napoleon wrote, “But for Nelson at the Nile I would have been Conqueror of the World”—or words to that effect. And yet Nelson was only made a common or garden Lord for this great battle, and spent two years on the Continent kicking his heels about to pass the time before returning to England. Imagine! he wasn’t wanted! I think Lord Rosebery was right—Nelson being slighted has led to his greater appreciation.
Again—even a greater slight, a slight he feels more—when he looks down from his monument in Trafalgar Square, does he see anywhere those splendid Captains of his? But let alone those Captains of his—does he see anywhere a single Admiral? Not one. And yet who made England what she is? Those splendid Sea Heroes are in very deed “England’s forgotten worthies”! Yes! Nelson looks down from his isolated column, and looks in vain for Hawke, Dundonald, Howe, Hood, Rodney, Cornwallis, Benbow, “and a great multitude which no man can number”—all Seamen of Deathless Fame, fighting single frigate actions, cutting out the enemy’s ships from under the guns of forts, sending in fire ships and burning the enemy’s vessels thought to be safe in harbour under the guns of their forts—Doers of Imperishable Deeds![13] Death found them fighting. We have heaps of statues to everybody else. Indeed such a lot of them that they reach down as far off as Knightsbridge. But who knows about Quiberon—one of the greatest of sea fights? And if you mention Hawke, your friend probably thinks only of his worthy descendant—the cricketer.
An old woman eating a penny bun asked a friend of mine called Buggins, when she was passing through Trafalgar Square, “What are them lions a-guarding of?” Buggins told her that her penny bun would have cost her threepence if it hadn’t been for the man them lions were a-guarding of.
When I see the Duke of York’s Column still allowed to rear its futile head, and scores of other fifth-rate nonentities glorified by statues, I thank God I’m a sailor—we don’t want to be in that galley!
I began my sea life with the last of Nelson’s Captains, through Nelson’s own niece; and I fitly, I think, among my last words may ask the Nation to do justice to Nelson’s Trade! This country owes all she has to the sea, it was the sea that won the late war, and if we’d stuck to the sea we should not now be thinking of bankruptcy and some of us imagining Carthage! We were led away by Militarist folly to be a conscript Nation and it will take us all we know to recover from it. We shall recover, for England never succumbs!
CHAPTER XII
LETTERS TO LORD ESHER
Lord Esher has kindly sent me three bulky volumes of letters I wrote him from 1903 onwards—I have others also. Many of them are unquotable, so blasting are they in their truth to existing reputations. It’s not my business to blast reputations—so the real gems are missing.
Somebody felt in 1903 that the War Office was wrong, and so a Committee was set up with Lord Esher as President, Sir George Clarke and myself the other two members; and that very able and not sufficiently recognised man, now General Sir C. Ellison, was Secretary. How I got there is still a mystery; but it was a great enjoyment as Generals came to stay with me at Admiralty House, Portsmouth—I was the Port Admiral. I always explained to them I was Lord Esher’s facile dupe and Sir George Clarke’s servile copyist, and thereby avoided odium personally (I was getting all the odium I wanted from the Admirals!).
As usual, when we reported, the Government didn’t appreciate those inestimable words “Totus Porcus” (No Government—anyhow no English Government—ever yet went “the whole hog”—“Compromise” is the British God!).[14]