XLVIII.
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.
