If it is intended that the ships following those destined to engage the enemy's rear to windward shall bear up, and prevent the part of their rear which has been cut off from escaping to leeward, the same will be made known by a red pennant being hoisted over the Signal 21,[2] and the number of ships so ordered will be shown by numeral signals or pennants. If from the centre division, a white pennant will be hoisted over the signal.
If the rear ships are to perform this service by bearing up, the same will be made known by a red pennant under. The numeral signal or pennants, counting always from the van, will show the headmost ship to proceed on this service.[3] The ships not directed by those signals are to form in close order, to cover the ships engaged from the rest of the enemy's fleet.
When the enemy's ships are to be engaged by both van and centre, the rear will keep their wind, to cover the ships engaged from the enemy to windward, as circumstances may require.
When the signal shall be made to cut through the enemy's van from to-leeward, the same will be made known by Signal 27, &c. In this case, if the headmost ships are to tack and double upon the enemy's van, engaging their ships in succession as they get up, the blue pennant will be shown as already stated, and the numeral signal pointing out the last ship from the van which is to tack, which in general will be equal in number to the enemy's ships cut through. The rest of the ships will be prepared to act as the occasion may require, either by bearing up and attacking the enemy's centre and rear, or tacking or wearing to cut off the van of the enemy from passing round the rear of the fleet to rejoin their centre. And on this service, it is probable, should the enemy's ships bear up, that some of the rear ships will be employed—the signal No. 21 will be made accompanied with the number or pennants of the headmost ship—upon which she, with the ships in her rear, will proceed to the attack of the enemy.
When an attack is likely to be made by an enemy's squadron, by forcing the fleet from to-leeward, Signal 109 will be made with a blue pennant where best seen;[4] upon which each ship will luff up upon the weather quarter of her second ahead, so as to leave no opening for the leading ship of the enemy to pass through: this movement will expose them to the collected fire of all that part of the fleet they intended to force.[5]
It has been often remarked that Nelson founded no school of tactics, and the instructions which were issued with the new Signal Book immediately after the war entirely endorse the remark. They can be called nothing else but reactionary. Nelson's drastic attempt to break up the old rigid formation into active divisions independently commanded seems to have come to nothing, and the new instructions are based with almost all the old pedantry on the single line of battle. Of anything like mutually supporting movements there is only a single trace. It is in Article XIV., and that is only a resurrection of the time-honoured corps de réserve, formed of superfluous ships after your line has been equalised with that of a numerically inferior enemy. The whole document, in fact, is a consecration of the fetters which had been forged in the worst days of the seventeenth century, and which Nelson had so resolutely set himself to break.
The new Signal Book in which the instructions appear was founded on the code elaborated by Sir Home Riggs Popham, but there is nothing to show whether or not he was the author of the instructions. He was an officer of high scientific attainments, but although he had won considerable distinction during the war, his service had been entirely of an amphibious character in connection with military operations ashore, and he had never seen a fleet action at sea. He reached flag rank in 1814, and was one of the men who received a K.C.B. on the reconstitution of the order in 1815. Of the naval lords serving with Lord Melville at the time none can show a career or a reputation which would lead us to expect from them anything but the colourless instructions they produced. The controlling influence was undoubtedly Lord Keith. The doyen of the active list, and in command of the Channel Fleet till he retired after the peace of 1815, he was all-powerful as a naval authority, and his flag captain, Sir Graham Moore, had just been given a seat on the board. A devout pupil of St. Vincent and Howe, correct rather than brilliant, Keith represented the old tradition, and notwithstanding the patience with which he had borne Nelson's vagaries and insubordination, the antipathy between the two men was never disguised. However generously Keith appreciated Nelson's genius, he can only have regarded his methods as an evil influence in the service for ordinary men, nor can there be much doubt that his apprehensions had a good deal to justify them.
The general failure to grasp the whole of Nelson's tactical principles was not the only trouble. There are signs that during the later years of the war a very dangerous misunderstanding of his teaching had been growing up in the service. In days when there was practically no higher instruction in the theory of tactics, it was easy for officers to forget how much prolonged and patient study had enabled Nelson to handle his fleets with the freedom he did; and the tendency was to believe that his successes could be indefinitely repeated by mere daring and vehemence of attack. The seed was sown immediately after the battle and by Collingwood himself. 'It was a severe action,' he wrote to Admiral Parker on November 1, 'no dodging or manoeuvring.' And again on December 16, to Admiral Pasley, 'Lord Nelson determined to substitute for exact order an impetuous attack in two distinct bodies.' Collingwood of course with all his limitations knew well enough it was not a mere absence of manoeuvring that had won the victory. In the same letter he had said that although Nelson succeeded, as it were, by enchantment, it was all the effect of system and nice combination.' Yet such phrases as he and others employed to describe the headlong attack, taken from their context and repeated from mouth to mouth, would soon have raised a false impression that many men were only too ready to receive. So the seed must have grown, till we find the fruit in Lord Dundonald's oft-quoted phrase, 'Never mind manoeuvres: always go at them.' So it was that Nelson's teaching had crystallised in his mind and in the mind perhaps of half the service. The phrase is obviously a degradation of the opening enunciations in Nelson's memoranda, a degradation due to time, to superficial study, and the contemptuous confidence of years of undisputed mastery at sea.
The conditions which brought about this attitude to tactics are clearly seen in the way others saw us. Shortly after Trafalgar a veteran French officer of the war of American Independence wrote some Reflections on the battle, which contain much to the point. 'It is a noteworthy thing,' he says in dealing with the defects of the single-line formation, 'that the English, who formerly used to employ all the resources of tactics against our fleets, now hardly use them at all, since our scientific tacticians have disappeared. It may almost be said that they no longer have any regular order of sailing or battle: they attack our ships of the line just as they used to attack a convoy.'[6] But here the old tactician was not holding up English methods as an example. He was citing them to show to what easy victories a navy exposed itself in which, by neglect of scientific study and alert observation, tactics had sunk into a mere senile formula. 'They know,' he continues, 'that we are in no state to oppose them with well-combined movements so as to profit by the kind of disorder which is the natural result of this kind of attack. They know if they throw their attack on one part of a much extended line, that part is soon destroyed.' Thus he arrives at two fundamental laws: '1. That our system of a long line of battle is worthless in face of an enemy who attacks with his ships formed in groups (réunis en pelotons), and told off to engage a small number of ships at different points in our line. 2. That the only tactical system to oppose to theirs is to have at least a double line, with reserve squadrons on the wings stationed in such a manner as to bear down most easily upon the points too vigorously attacked.' The whole of his far-sighted paper is in fact an admirable study of the conditions under which impetuous attacks and elaborate combinations are respectively called for. But from both points of view the single line for a large fleet is emphatically condemned, while in our instructions of 1816 not a hint of its weakness appears. They resume practically the same standpoint which the Duke of York had reached a century and a half before.
Spanish tacticians seem also to have shared the opinion that Trafalgar had really done nothing to dethrone the line. One of the highest reputation, on December 17, 1805, had sent to his government a thoughtful criticism of the action, and his view of Nelson's attack was this: 'Nothing,' he says, 'is more seamanlike or better tactics than for a fleet which is well to windward of another to bear down upon it in separate columns, and deploy at gun-shot from the enemy into a line which, as it comes into action, will inflict at least as much damage upon them as it is likely to suffer. But Admiral Nelson did not deploy his columns at gun-shot from our line, but ran up within pistol-shot and broke through it, so as to reduce the battle to a series of single-ship actions. It was a manoeuvre in which I do not think he will find many imitators. Where two fleets are equally well trained, that which attacks in this manner must be defeated.'[7]