On October 21st, 150 years ago, Horatio Viscount Nelson, Vice-Admiral of the White, was killed in action off Cape Trafalgar. At that moment he was already the great national hero of his countrymen, and it is not at all difficult to account for that fact.
The British people had long been a seafaring race, dependent upon their fleet for their security and prosperity; and they knew it. In 1805 they had been faced for twelve years with an uncomfortably plain threat to their liberty and way of life. That threat, in three words, was the French Revolutionary Army, the first truly national army of history and a tremendous force in the contemporary world, in its own element invincible. Europe lay at its feet. Only two things restrained it—the grey-green water of the English Channel, in places barely twenty miles wide, and—the British Navy. That great exponent of Sea Power, Captain A. T. Mahan, USN, summed up the situation in ever-memorable words:
Those storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between them and the dominion of the world.
Just then, it is true, it was Admiral Cornwallis, not Nelson, who was guarding the approaches of the Channel. But Nelson was already the people’s choice. It had all begun eight years before when he had captured the imagination of the world in general and of his own countrymen in particular by his conduct at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. Here, while still a post-captain, he had performed an act which was at once amazingly skillful, uniquely quick-thinking—and uniquely brave. Perceiving in a flash that the tactical situation demanded it, he left his place in the line in midfight, and without orders from his admiral, and thrust his ship, all by itself, between the two halves of the enemy’s fleet. His action was daring enough had he had to think only of the enemy. But the enemy might well be his least dangerous foe; for all the regulations governing the movement of ships in action were still emphatic on this particular point—no ship shall, under any circumstance, leave the Line without orders! So this move revealed not only courage, but moral courage of the highest order. He risked not only death in battle—the duty of every Service officer always—but professional ruin, court-martial, and even disgraceful execution: after all, it was only one year before his birth that a British admiral—Byng—had suffered that fate, for an offence technically less heinous. But Nelson’s daring triumphed. He turned a drawn battle into a remarkable victory; and he also showed his wonderful powers of fighting leadership by boarding two Spanish ships, both far stronger than his own, using the first as a gangway wherewith to take the second.
After this dramatic victory the British people took Nelson to their hearts, and he did not disappoint them. In the very next year, 1798, sent back into the Mediterranean, whence the British had recently been driven, he caught the French fleet, which had carried Bonaparte to Egypt, in Abou-kir Bay near Alexandria, and he all but totally destroyed it at the Battle of the Nile. This was about the most decisive action up till then in the annals of the Royal Navy. In 1801 he even increased Britain’s hero worship when, as second in command to an unenterprising if worthy man-—Hyde Parker—he performed the astonishingly difficult feat of destroying, under the guns of Copenhagen, a Danish fleet at anchor, whose units were more like floating forts than ships.
These three exploits all held the ingredients of highly popular appeal: they were essentially colorful, dramatic, out of the ordinary. Nor was his last exploit less so. When Napoleon’s most formidable invasion schemes of 1803-05 were reaching their climax, Nelson chased the Mediterranean half of the French fleet across the Atlantic and back, exposed the whole plan for what it was worth, and finally brought the combined fleets of France and Spain to action off Cape Trafalgar, utterly destroying them without himself losing a ship.
Yet it was not only his achievements, great as they were, which won the people’s love and admiration. It was also the astonishing contrast between those doughty deeds and the frail figure that performed them: the never-failing appeal of Jack-the- Giant-killer and David-and-Goliath. There was little of the heroic about the person of Nelson: nothing like that of his older contemporary Admiral Adam Duncan, a colossal Scotsman of Viking dimensions who could—and once did—hold a mutineer at arm’s length over the side of his ship while he told his Ship’s Company what he thought of him. In physique Nelson was small, even puny. Nowadays he would fail to qualify physically for most navies. Afloat, he was invariably seasick. He suffered all his life from the most indifferent health. His uncle, who first took him to sea, prophesied that he would not survive his first cruise. Modern medical opinion has assigned to him symptoms of malaria, typhoid, angina pectoris, dyspepsia, and gout. In 1794 he had lost the sight of his right eye, and thereafter had the threat of total blindness ever before him. In 1797 he lost his right arm, and thereafter endured constant pain from a bungled amputation. At the Nile he was seriously wounded in the head, and probably bruised internally. Yet this is the man who in his last years performed a feat of endurance never demanded of the modern sailor, even with all the comforts of a modern ship to solace him. He did not once set foot on shore for over two years, but was constantly at sea facing all the rigors of an 18th century line-ship. Evidently there was something pretty tough about this ramshackle little man. It was certainly not his ailing body; it must have been his unconquerable spirit. His whole career is a superb triumph of Mind over Matter.
To crown all, there was the manner of his death, at the peak of his fame, with no opportunity vouchsafed him to outlive his achievement or to tarnish his reputation.
These things amply account for the hero- worship. That survived, growing gradually into a tradition, the firmer because, for a whole century, there was little to supplant it, or to distract the people’s attention to possible rivals. No serious threat of invasion menaced the country. The Royal Navy’s next major action after Trafalgar was Jutland—in 1916! So Nelson became part and parcel of British life. How could the people forget him? Monuments and memorials to him arose all over the islands: there were, especially, the two main shrines. In the heart of London, towering on his column 185 feet above Trafalgar Square, he stood—and stands—in effigy seventeen feet high, looking out over the capital, and particularly, in the near foreground, over the Admiralty, whom he served with undivided devotion for 35 out of his 47 years on earth. In the Royal Navy’s principal home, the dockyard of Portsmouth, there lies, preserved in her Trafalgar state, the great three-decker that he made so essentially his own—H.M.S. Victory—still appropriately enough in commission, and carrying the Flag of C-in-C., Portsmouth.
Yet there are dangers inherent in being a public star of such a very superior magnitude. There is the risk, for instance, that such a phenomenon will shed humanity, and become a kind of graven image or idealised idol. Nelson has not altogether escaped that fate. Every soul in Great Britain knows of him; who—roughly—he was, and—-rather more roughly—the main things he did. But otherwise, even in Britain, folk tend to take him for granted. Others, however, products of this more critical age where “debunking” is quite a fashionable pastime, tend to say:— “Nelson? Always Nelson this and Nelson that! The Perfect Seaman: the heaven-sent Admiral: the Sailor who never put a foot wrong! Can there be such a super-paragon of all the naval virtues? We beg leave to question it!”
The present writer, some years ago, encountered a most illuminating instance of this. One of my students, a junior naval officer, when invited to suggest a subject for voluntary study, surprised me by saying, “I want to debunk Nelson!” True, these were not the exact words, but that was the exact meaning. Concealing my initial surprise, I did a little careful probing and soon diagnosed the trouble. Nelson, it seems, had always been presented to him as such a godlike (and therefore unmanlike) being that his reason had rebelled. His reaction—like that of the cockney dame when she saw her first giraffe—was “Garn! There ain’t no such thing!”
He was oddly right: and his reaction was not unhealthy. Perfection has a persistent way of eluding mortals. So I gave him all the available books and all possible assistance, knowing full well that, in debunking the Idol, he could not fail to discover in the process that there had lived on earth, and died some 150 years ago, an outstandingly attractive human being and a superlatively great seaman whose life, for a score of reasons, was well worth the study. And so it fell out.
Some such study, perforce of the briefest, is the main object of this paper. Having dubbed him “superlatively great seaman,” can we substantiate it by uncovering the true springs of his greatness? We shall certainly not be digging alone, but in a large, distinguished and all-but unanimous company. For it was not only “the Public” who thought—and think—thus highly of him. Practically everyone who either knew him personally, or who has since made any serious effort to investigate his career, has reached the same broad conclusions. In his own day his men adored him, his officers loved and trusted him implicitly: his equals, with one or two partial exceptions (in whom, perhaps, jealousy was not entirely absent) were equally enthusiastic: his Commanders in Chief while he had them and his permanent masters, the Admiralty, though sometimes (and pardonably) irritated by him—-he was no “yes-man”—yet supported him through thick and thin, and unhesitatingly gave him the most important and exacting jobs going. And informed posterity has not changed the verdict. Students of his life, whether naval officers or professional historians and biographers, though they have fortunately removed from him that unnatural “can’t-do-wrong” halo with which the idolaters surrounded him, are still unanimous on his essential greatness in his own chosen sphere. To give but one example: Mahan, whose Life of Nelson remains probably the best appreciation of Nelson the Sea Officer, deliberately chose as subtitle for that great work, “The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain”.
To scale the highest peaks of any fighting profession, an officer must have many strong suits, of which, perhaps, the most important are strategy, tactics, and leadership. In Leadership personality plays the principal role: in Strategy and Tactics intellectual gifts predominate. These shall come first.
STRATEGY. Nelson was a fine strategist. His over-all grasp in all his commands (save perhaps one, to be discussed later) was characterised by imaginative insight, quickness of perception, and meticulous attention to detail. He was not a kind of naval Hitler, relying largely upon his “intuition”—and here his uncritical worshippers, attributing such a gift to him, have sometimes done him grave disservice: for, in War, a claim to pure intuition should automatically disqualify a man from high command. The nearest that he ever came to it, perhaps, was in 1798, when he guessed that Napoleon, having left Toulon, was making for Egypt. He was young in command then, and he followed up his guess with such élan that he made straight for Egypt—and found no Napoleon: not because he was wrong, but because he had been so quick in his follow-up that he actually reached Alexandria first. Yet even this was far from “Hitlerian”. It was primarily the result of carefully weighing up many small clues: inspired detective-work, not intuition. There was nothing “sixth-sense” about it at all.
Again, when in March, 1805, Villeneuve escaped from Toulon, which Nelson was watching—not blockading—his movements were considerably less spectacular, yet still completely right. This campaign deserves more careful study, since it illustrates better than most the nature of Nelson’s strategic skill. What Villeneuve did, let us recall, was to leave the Mediterranean at once, obeying Napoleon’s order to rendezvous with other French squadrons at Martinique, if or when they could escape from their home ports. Naturally Nelson did not know Villeneuve’s destination: so what he did was to remain in the mid-Mediterranean area, refusing to leave it until he was certain that Villeneuve was not going that way. Once sure on this point, he, too, left that sea and followed his enemy, but a long way astern, across the Atlantic. For all this he has been praised by his fans, and blamed by his critics —for here he has had critics. The idolaters said, “Marvellous intuition! He knew by instinct whither Villeneuve had gone, and dashed after him!” Now if this were so, it would indeed be Hitlerian—and rank bad strategy. His critics, on the other hand, have taken a widely different, but rather better- informed line. “Poor Nelson,” they said, “was deceived. Having lost Villeneuve, he first groped blindly for him to the East—i.e. in the wrong direction—and then, in desperation, allowed himself to be lured into a wild-goose chase across the Atlantic—action which was not only wasted endeavor but also very dangerous, in that at a critical moment it deprived Britain of a strong squadron.”
Both these appreciations are radically wrong. Nelson was being neither brilliant, nor rash; nor was he being hoodwinked. He was just being thoroughly sound. The idolaters’ mistake lies in supposing that he achieved the impossible. He could not know, for certain, where Villeneuve had gone, unless someone told him: and to go without knowing for certain would have been most reprehensible. The critics err through ignorance, not so much of Nelson’s own orders as of the standing orders of all British Commanders-in-Chief, Mediterranean, already at least sixty years old. These orders, in effect, were:—“Your general duty is to protect British Mediterranean interests from the French Toulon fleet. But your particular objective is always that fleet itself. You will contain it when it is in harbor, and do your utmost to destroy it if it puts to sea.” This Nelson, in common with all his predecessors, interpreted rightly to mean that, once he located it, he was to follow it anywhere and bring it to action, even outside the Mediterranean: for, once outside it, it could not hurt British interests within it.
In the light of such instructions, Nelson’s movements now become clear. His first duty, obviously, was to cover both halves of the directive—to see that the enemy, now at large, did not assail British Mediterranean interests. So he covered the approaches to the eastern half of that sea first, and did not leave them until he had ascertained for certain that Villeneuve had not broken that way. Then, but only then, he worked westward till he reached the Straits of Gibraltar, and learnt that the French had passed into the Atlantic. But his general directive still left him in no doubt what he ought to do— obviously, destroy Villeneuve if he could. Even now, however, he was not to be stampeded. He did not plunge after Villeneuve on the “hunch” that he was making for the West Indies. He only moved when he was informed of it, privately but for certain, by the Senior Officer of the Portuguese Navy, a Scotsman named Campbell (who for this technical offence lost his job on the pre-emptory demand of Napoleon). Then at last he sailed for the west. He was, then, neither brilliant, rash, nor deceived. He was exceptionally level-headed, acting throughout on a sound general order based on experience, missing no chance to implement that order to the full.
Yet one typically “Nelson touch” remains to be recorded. The directive laid it down that any commander who lost the fleet he was marking was to fall back upon the Channel Fleet off Brest. His critics say that he should have done so. But that was not Nelson’s way. It would have been taking the easy option, and he was never one to evade responsibility while there was yet hope of greater things. For he had not lost Villeneuve: far from it. Misled by inaccurate information, he missed him in the West Indies, but he was on his tail all the time. He prevented him from doing any damage there; he flushed him from Martinique before any of his colleagues joined him. He discovered exactly when Villeneuve sailed and what was his homeward course, and warned the Admiralty by fast brig precisely where the enemy would make his European landfall. It was all very far from lost endeavor. In fact he was hammering the last nail into the coffin of Napoleon’s grandiose invasion-scheme. Only one item of it was causing the Admiralty any uneasiness. They suspected a secret rendezvous for such French squadrons as escaped, but they had not located it. This Nelson did for them, after which there was little to fear. That was the real strategic dividend paid by Nelson’s alleged “wild-goose chase”. It was a very substantial one.
At Copenhagen, too, he had shown great strategic insight. The Armed Neutrality of the northern nations threatened to cut Britain off from her naval stores, and Admiral Hyde Parker, with Nelson as his Second, was sent to break so dangerous an alliance. Parker was content to hover about the entrance to the Baltic, not committing himself to anything much, and, even so, threatening only Denmark, one of the weaker partners. But Nelson saw more clearly—that procrastination might be fatal, and that the correct objective was the fleet of the strongest enemy, Russia. It was beyond his powers to persuade Parker to allow this, but he did succeed, by a blend of charm, breezy confidence, and tact, in securing for himself the assignment of attacking the Danes. Having settled that business, he was appointed to the supreme Baltic command and instantly sailed east to tackle the Russians. As it happened, the Neutrality broke up before he arrived. But this in no way detracts from the soundness of his strategic thought.
Yet Strategy was not Nelson’s strongest suit. He made a few serious mistakes—what strategist, even the world’s greatest, an Alexander, a Marlborough, a Napoleon, has not? His worst, perhaps, was in 1799, when a strong French fleet, for once, escaped from Brest and entered the Mediterranean, upsetting all British dispositions there. Nelson was in the central Mediterranean, and when his C-in-C. ordered him to Minorca to help hold a combined fleet of forty sail, formed by the French joining the Spaniards, he flatly disobeyed orders and refused to leave the area of Naples and Sicily. Disobedience of orders is justifiable only if the disobeyer is clearly in the right. Nelson was, strategically, patently in the wrong and was deservedly censured for it by the Admiralty. But 1799 was Nelson’s worst year. He was not himself, either personally or professionally, and there is reason to believe that the head-wound received at the Nile was at least partly responsible. To 1799, too, belongs his confident assertion, sometimes quoted against him, that Malta was valueless, thereby revealing —in the light of subsequent history—that he was not the possessor of a magical mirror wherein the future was laid clear to him. But then only his idolaters ever hinted that he was.
TACTICS. No such lapses appear when Nelson the Tactician stands before the bar of History. He leaves that Court with the title “Genius”. The whole complex story of Sailing-ship Tactics, admittedly somewhat academic in mid-20th century, cannot be attempted here. Yet, to assess Nelson’s stature as a tactician something of it must be told. For here his ideas and successes were the zenith of those tactics: indeed, the final word in them.
The life of sailingship-broadside warfare was very long—approximately from 1550 to 1850, though the Royal Navy, its greatest exponent, fought no major action under sail after 1805. The basic problems of this type of warfare long defied solution, and were not really solved until very near the end of the whole period. Indeed, a case could be made, and a good one, for regarding the very last action—Trafalgar—as the very first in which they were completely solved. The main trouble in all sail-broadside actions was that the line of effective fire lay at right angles to the line of a ship’s—and a fleet’s— advance. This was not so in pre-sail-broad- side days, when the line of the effective offensive weapon, the Ram, was identical with the ship’s line of advance. Nor has it been so since the introduction of the Turret superseded the broadside and gave an ever-increasing arc of effective fire. It was just in that one period that neither ship nor fleet could sail straight at a foe, firing as it went. Out of this situation grew the practice of fighting in line-ahead, with course laid parallel to the enemy’s. All fleets, after the middle of the 17th century, adopted this basic tactic. It proved effective enough, and produced results, so long as both combatants were equally anxious to fight it out, as were the English and Dutch in their titanic encounters between 1652 and 1673. But when, in the 18th century, the principal wars were being fought between the British and the French or Spaniards, there supervened a curious stalemate, because, for reasons of policy in no way discreditable, neither of these countries normally wanted a fight to the death.
The British, however, did, and, over a startlingly long period, failed to achieve any worthwhile results at all, so long as they used the standard “line-ahead” as their norm. The only fights they did win were those in which they discarded the line-formation at the outset: indeed, at first, discarded all forms of organised tactics, and simply rushed at the enemy, seeking a melee—a more or less disordered mix-up. But so methodless a method had its obvious dangers and the British Admiralty soon forbade this Chase, as it was called, on all but those occasions when the enemy was clearly running away. It was these restrictive instructions, which came to be known as “Permanent Instructions”, that went far towards stultifying all the Royal Navy’s battle-endeavors. Condemned to approach the enemy in rigid, formal line, and thereafter always to retain it throughout the battle, British fleets were frustrated again and again by any foe who did not want to come to close or decisive action. For the latter had only to take the leeward station, aim at the Britons’ masts and sails, and at their own moment fall away downwind from their assailants, now crippled aloft. Such in fact was the frustration caused by this unimaginative adherence to “the Line” that, for the ninety years between 1692 and 1782, no British fleet in any stand-up (as opposed to chase) battle won even a tactical victory, still less a decisive one. It is true that no British fleet lost one either; but that was a very poor consolation for a country whose whole naval policy and maritime interests demanded sea-victories.
This hard shell of “formalism” was cracked at last in 1782, by Admiral Rodney at the Battle of the Saints toward the end of the American War for Independence. There, aided by considerable fortune, Rodney dared to defy the Instructions in the heat of a stand-up fight and to break his line-formation—also, incidentally, the enemy’s; and he succeeded in bringing on something of a melee. The result was a clear-cut tactical victory. At least there could be no doubt about it. The enemy was far from annihilated, but his formation was destroyed, his flagship and four others were captured, and two more in the pursuit which followed. It was the beginning of British tactical emancipation.
Now came the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and with them the resurgence of the Royal Navy as a battle-winner. 1782 was the turning-point. Earlier lay a dreary sequence of barren, spiritless engagements, all completely indecisive. Later, there came a sudden spasm of no less than six decisive actions, in all of which the inhibiting shackles of “formalism” and “the Line” were broken and flung aside.
Here Nelson comes in. In four of those six encounters he played a leading part, while in three of them he commanded in chief. He was the man, in fact, above all others who developed the new sailing-broadside tactics made possible by the passing of “formalism” and undue emphasis on “the Line”. It was primarily he who discovered how first to bring the enemy to action and then to keep him there until he was destroyed.
Lord Howe showed the way in the first of the six—his “Glorious First of June” victory of 1794. He maneuvered for the wind and, having won it, attacked, striving to pass every ship of his fleet through the intervals in the French line; when, now to leeward, he would be able to prevent their retreat. The result was a great tactical success, but again it fell far short of annihilation, six only of the enemy’s 26 being taken and one sunk. The main reason for this somewhat limited prize list was the complicated nature of the maneuver—the sheer navigational difficulty of getting 25 unwieldy sailing-ships through 25 small gaps. The only other of the series in which Nelson played no part was the third, Admiral Duncan’s tremendous onslaught off Camperdown in October, 1797. There was little finesse here, and nothing whatever of “the Line” complex. Duncan ran downwind upon the enemy in two ragged columns and secured his melee at once. But then he was fighting the Dutch who had, as ever, no thought of avoiding action. They simply stood and fought it out—and Duncan came away with nine of their sixteen line- ships, himself losing none. The fight was thus decisive; but, had his opponents been French, the result would probably have been very different.
The way is clear now for the four actions in which Nelson fought. The earliest—off Cape St. Vincent—has already been noted. It was—thanks mainly to him—a tactical victory of supreme importance. But, numerically speaking, it was by no means decisive. The British took only four Spanish ships. Yet that word “only” is fair neither to Nelson nor to his shrewd and talented old Chief, Admiral Jervis. For the Spaniards had 27 of the line, Jervis only fifteen, while their weight of fire was more than double his. Annihilation was quite impossible. As for Nelson’s memorable departure from the line, that, needless to say, was not in the Permanent Instructions! It represented true tactical initiative on an altogether higher plane than anything hitherto known. It was setting a new standard of tactical thought and naval achievement.
Of Nelson’s own three victories, Copenhagen was decisive enough. Denmark lost fifteen of her eighteen ships. But the situation hardly lent itself to free tactics because the enemy was completely immobile. Yet they had their place, and there was some scope for employing the well-known tactical factor of Surprise. There were only two ways of assailing the Danish ships, drawn up on the shallows edging a north-south channel. There was the obvious, relatively easy approach from the north; but the Danes, knowing this, had disposed their fleet south of their strongest defence, the Trekroner Castle. In order to get at them at all, the British must first run the gauntlet of the Castle. Probably the Danes thought it the only feasible way in, the other—from the south— being full of navigational difficulties which might well seem insurmountable. Yet Nelson and the Masters of the British ships overcame them without undue difficulty, and so could fight their action without going near the Trekroner bastion. This Surprise element was characteristic of Nelson throughout.
He had already used it at the Nile to destroy a French fleet in 1798. Here the enemy ships, though capable of mobility, were actually at anchor when attacked in the depths of Aboukir Bay near Alexandria. Nelson won this engagement by a combination of preparedness, surprise, speed, brilliant opportunism, and the highly intelligent backing of his captains: of which the last named, we shall see, was not mere luck, but an essential part of his system. He bore down upon the anchored French at close of day, taking the battle in his stride, without waiting even to assume battle-order. His leading captain, Foley, without succinct orders, yet fully aware that in using his initiative he was obeying his Chief’s general directive, nosed between the leading French ship and the shoalwater which formed a integral part of the French admiral’s defences. Thereafter, as night fell, half the British followed Foley inshore of the French, while the other half followed Nelson on the seaward side. Up the enemy line they worked in the darkness, overwhelming ship after ship from both sides. Meanwhile, the French lay motionless, paralysed: powerless to retaliate, ignorant of what was happening—until it happened. By dawn only the two rearmost ships survived to make good their escape—two out of thirteen: 85 per cent of the fleet lost! This was annihilation. There had never been anything quite like it before in sailing-ship warfare.
Even so, something was lacking. A major annihilation where British and French were both fully mobile and maneuverable had yet to take place. Nelson provided that too, this time in clear daylight, at Trafalgar. Outnumbered 27 to 33, by the Combined fleet, he designed his lee squadron of fifteen ships under his Second, Collingwood, to hold and destroy a similar number of the enemy’s rear, while he with the smaller windward squadron of twelve assumed the task of so menacing the enemy centre and van that they would not venture to come about to assist their rear. To achieve this he proposed to use again the weapon of Surprise; but surprise of a brilliantly opportunist type—even he, that is, could not foretell in detail how Surprise would manifest itself until the moment actually arrived. What happened in the event was that Collingwood played his part to perfection, annihilating the Combined Fleet’s unassisted rear, while Nelson, approaching in rough line-ahead, and roughly at right angles to the enemy, kept the unhappy Villeneuve guessing, up to the very last minute, whereabouts in his line Nelson’s blow would fall. So the whole Allied van held on rigidly unengaged, wasted, moving ever further away from their hard-stricken rear. Then, when quite near the enemy line, Nelson veered a point or two to starboard and aimed a knockout blow at the very brain of the Combined Fleet, overwhelming Villeneuve’s flagship and her immediate supporters in a full-blooded melee. Chaos overtook the enemy. In the action itself and in subsidiary actions immediately following, Britain lost no ship, France and Spain, 22. The rest reached Cadiz, but never put to sea again, all surrendering to the Spanish rebels three years later.
Here indeed is the climax of Sailing Warfare—total annihilation in the open sea of an enemy fully mobile and seeking to escape. It was at once the last fight and the last word in that kind of fighting: and it was wholly Nelson’s—his last word too, as it happened, since he was mortally wounded in the mêlée round Villeneuve’s flagship. Here is one final measure of his tactical stature, crude maybe, yet impossible to ignore. In all the pitched battles of the “fruitless” ninety years of the hundreds of enemy ships engaged, the British disposed of one, a mere fraction of one per cent. In Nelson’s three great victories, out of 64 enemy ships he disposed of 48—i.e. 75 per cent!
LEADERSHIP. In extolling their idol’s almost magnetic charm, his devotees have left little to chance. Yet in essence their case is true. He was a superlative leader of men. That characteristic was an integral part of his professional greatness and cannot be ignored here.
Successful war-leadership must always depend upon the personality of the leader. Its method of achievement, therefore, will differ from man to man. One factor, however, is common to all leaders: that is, firmness. This was perhaps particularly true in the British Navy of Nelson’s day, where the seamen were rough; unequal in experience and enthusiasm, many being enlisted unwillingly and by force. From such material every officer had, first, to establish for himself a wholesome respect, enforced where necessary by punishments which seem incredibly brutal to the modern mind. Yet this all-important basic discipline might be established in a variety of ways, of which the two extremes may be generalized as the way of Fear and the way of Love. These, of course, are extremes. No successful leader ever yet led by Fear alone—or by Love alone. But some gravitate instinctively towards one extreme and some towards the other. This is universal. Students of war everywhere can point to leaders in their own Services who have tended markedly one way or the other.
In the Royal Navy a good example of one who gravitated towards the Fear end was Nelson’s own well-loved Chief, Jervis (after his victory created Earl St. Vincent). He was no bully; he had a fine sense of fairness and humor. But he was essentially the man who obtained results by making people exceedingly anxious to do the right thing, and do it “just so”, for fear of what would happen if they did the wrong thing, or did it in an unseamanlike way: in fact, the Disciplinarian. He certainly got his results. But Nelson tended all the other way. His results came from making people anxious to please him; loth to let him down or forfeit his approbation. The two types are, psychologically, miles apart.
Now here again his idolaters have sometimes gone much too far, believing apparently that he did the impossible, and ruled an 18th century fleet entirely by Love. This merely creates a palpably false idol, insipid, even effeminate in its sweetness. No portent could be less true to life. Nothing could be further from the facts. He was down, as swiftly and as sharply, upon any dereliction of duty as St. Vincent himself. He stood no nonsense: he had no objection whatever to using the famous (or infamous) “cat” when he deemed it necessary. The only reason why he used it less than most was because, by virtue of his very character, his men deserved it less. They showed their admiration for him in many ways, even in •what was, then, the surest test of all. They volunteered, they even clamored, to serve with him. There was in those days one common and far from highminded lure which enabled some officers to obtain volunteers where others failed, and that was a reputation for hauling in the prize-money. But this “cupboard” love was not the operative motive in men who wished to serve with Nelson, because, full and by, he was rather markedly unsuccessful in his prize affairs.
The main reason for their zeal, more creditable to him but equally natural in them, was that they knew he would look after them and see that they had a fair deal and were made as comfortable as possible. Nor was even this done out of sheer philanthropy. He realised —was perhaps one of the first to realise—the relationship between Contentment, Health, and Efficiency in a fleet. During that long and boring period from 1803 to 1805 when he never set foot ashore, it goes without saying that the men did not either: and Nelson went to endless pains to alleviate that boredom and its accompanying dangers of staleness, insubordination, and even sickness. Here his methods have almost a 20th century ring about them. There were amateur bands, dancing, theatricals, variety entertainments, and intership contests and visiting. The result was contented Ship’s Companies and surprisingly healthy ones. A visiting physician, for instance, reports in January, 1805, that, out of the Victory’s 840 men, one was in sickbay. If Nelson was not the pioneer of “Welfare” afloat, he was a very early exponent of it.
His officers’ admiration and trust he invariably possessed, not because he treated them softly or cosseted them, but because he treated them as men, and good ones, and believed in them exactly as they believed in him. This is why he always was so well served in his officers. This was, perhaps, the essence of his leadership and a prime factor in his success. The captains whom he called his “band of brothers” were able men indeed, but they would not have been nearly so able under any other commander, as some of them showed when he was gone. He took them into his confidence at every turn and relied upon them to use their own initiative within the very widest limits of his orders; and from this policy he reaped over and over again the richest harvest. It is invidious, perhaps, to single out individuals, but his frigate captain, Riou, at Copenhagen, his leading captain, Foley, at the Nile, and his old friend and Second, Collingwood, at Trafalgar are outstanding examples of a policy which seemed to make so many of Nelson’s subordinates behave as though they were Nelson himself and with equally telling results. Here surely is Leadership at its highest.
In fine, at ordinary times Nelson was a great—but not unique—commander of fleets. His competence stemmed partly from natural aptitude shot with threads of genius, but not invariably endowed with it, and partly from intense application. For he was nothing if not the Professional Naval Officer. The Service was everything to him, his sense of duty to it the guiding flame of his life. Very likely he would not have shone in any other sphere. Ashore he fretted and often floundered like a fish in shallow water, a tempting prey to sirens and beachcombers. For such reasons, too, he might well have failed in an administrative post ashore, as a Lord of Admiralty for example, though certainly not through want of trying.
It was when action was in the air that his true stature was always revealed, for he was essentially a man of action. There lay his two great strengths. As a fighting admiral he was unique because, there, he could give free play to both facets of the genius within him—his unequalled tactical gift and his inspired leadership of men. And he was so uniformly and magnificently successful in battle because he could, first, plan the near-perfect way of handling it and, second, get that way near-perfectly implemented by men who had caught the spirit of his own inspiration. He was probably the greatest battle- winner in the history of the Sea.