Men of Honour (21 page)

Delight in easy gradients had been replaced by a passion for suddenness. The sudden was integral to the sublime. As the young Burke had described it,

Whatever, either in sights or sounds, makes the transition from one extreme to the other easy, causes no terror, and consequently can be no cause of greatness. In everything sudden and unexpected, we are apt to start; that is, we have a perception of danger, and our nature rouses us to guard against it.

That rousing of the inner nature was the source of sublime pleasure, and the new delight in the ‘great' feelings which suddenness produces had penetrated very deeply into English society. Throughout the summers of the 1790s, the British royal family spent their time at Weymouth on the Dorset coast. At night there was dancing and in the daytime expeditions into the Dorset countryside. Far more exciting, though, was sailing in the bay. A 74-gun ship-of-the-line, the
Magnificent
and, faster and more fun, a frigate, the
Southampton
, stood by every day, one for royal protection, the other for royal pleasure. The favourite game was for the
Magnificent
and the
Southampton
to approach each other under full sail on opposite tacks, with a combined speed of twenty knots or even more and to rush past one another, almost brushing sides. At the moment of climax, when the gunports of the two ships were inches apart, the entire crew of the
Magnificent
would cheer the rapidly passing royals. The experience was said to have ‘had a charming effect on the whole party' and at the end of the summer Captain Douglas of the
Southampton
was knighted.

There is a cluster of new ideas here: the beauty in sudden change; the admirableness of the man whose character is authentically his and stands out from his surroundings; the flaccid nature of the courteous quadrille; the possibility of the heroic in the sublime; the delight in roughness rather than high finish. Perhaps the most intriguing question about Trafalgar is how this deep transformation in sensibility and in the sense of what was valuable played itself out in the conduct of naval war.

Eighteenth-century naval war had been based on the line of battle and the line of battle was founded on two unavoidable facts: a ship is longer than it is broad; and it cannot always manoeuvre where required. Its most defended and its most aggressive aspects are along its length;
the most vulnerable its bow and stern where there are no or few guns and the structure is weakest. The essential idea of the line of battle, first used by the English in 1653 against the Dutch, is that the fleet lines up bow to stern, and presents those long armed broadsides to the enemy. This arrangement protects individual ships from both the raking fire of an enemy firing from ahead or astern and the possibility of being outnumbered and ‘doubled'—with an enemy on both sides. It also avoids the danger of friendly fire. Ships in line ahead cannot by mistake fire into each other, something which had often happened in the chaotic mêlées of the 16th and 17th centuries. The line of battle, in theory, combines the force of many ships into a single fighting instrument.

But it had its problems. It was most effective as a defensive posture: it minimised one's own risk but it also minimised the potential of damage to the enemy. It was a flock or a shoal of fish, bristling with violence, but concerned to look after itself, hugging itself for protection. In attack, in ships which anyway could not sail closer than 67° to the wind, and only sailed happily with the wind on the quarter, it was cumbersome and stiff. The line had to sail at the speed of the slowest ship and to turn a line without ships losing position, creating dangerous gaps, could only be done slowly and steadily. The ballet of naval warfare was a stately business.

Until the 1780s, when new gun-training tackles were introduced to the British fleet, allowing guns to be trained 45° both ahead and abaft of the beam, the broadside could only be fired at 90° to the direction in which the ship was sailing. To bring the guns of a fleet to bear on a mobile enemy in shifting conditions of wind and sea, with the possibilities of gear failing, ships running into each other or falling off to leeward, was an extraordinarily demanding task, only rarely achieved with anything like conclusive
effect. What is called ‘decisive action'—in other words one ship battering another for long enough for its crew to be killed or its rig destroyed—usually required broadsides to be fired into the enemy for at least half an hour at a distance of no more than 200 yards, closer if possible. ‘Hailing distance' was Nelson's favoured range for the ideal moment at which to open fire.

Inevitably, by the mid-18th century, there was an element of stalemate to line-of-battle fighting. Admirals became concerned above all to preserve their forces to fight another day and not to allow their captains to expose themselves to danger. Exactness was all. Admiral Edward Vernon, in 1740, for example, ordered that ‘During the time of engagement every ship is to appoint a proper person to keep an eye upon the admiral and to observe signals.' No free spirits there. Captains needed to obey. In some ways, the ethic and aesthetic of order, propriety and communality which shaped so much of mid-18th-century life, also dictated the behaviour of fleets, the mentality of admirals and the fighting instructions they issued.

Battle as a result remained something of a quadrille. Lord Augustus Hervey, watching from the quarterdeck of a frigate in Admiral Byng's fleet as they manoeuvred against the French outside Port Mahon in Minorca, considered the ‘evolutions' of the enemy ‘pretty and regular'. Even the terrifying Admiral Boscawen, known to his sailors as ‘Old Dreadnought', who when woken as a young captain by the officer of the watch and asked what to do with two large Frenchmen then seen to be bearing down on them, asked famously, standing in his night shirt on the quarterdeck, ‘Do? Do? Damn ‘em and fight ‘em,'—even this termagant could in 1759 (in written instructions they all carried on board) address his captains like a dancing master:

If at any time while we are engaged with the enemy, the admiral shall judge it proper to come to a closer engagement than at the distance we then are, he will hoist a red and white flag on the flagstaff at the main topmast-head, and fire a gun. Then every ship is to engage the enemy at the same distance the admiral does.

When I think the ship astern of me is at too great a distance, I will make it known to him by putting abroad a pennant at the cross-jack yard-arm, and keep it flying till he is in his station; and if he finds the ship astern of him is at a greater distance than he is from the [flagship] he shall make the same signal at the cross-jack yard-arm, and keep it flying till he thinks that the ship is at a proper distance, and so on to the rear of the line.

This insistence on orderliness and on the stately meeting of equally matched forces began to break down in the last quarter of the 18th century. One after another, leading admirals and naval theorists, looking for battle advantage, started to abandon the old sense of regularity as the underlying principle of the well-conducted battle. Roughness, imbalance, asymmetry, concentration on one part of the enemy, the breaking open of accepted norms: this, increasingly, became the intellectual pattern of British naval battle in the last part of the 18th century. Classical forms had started to take on Romantic intonations.

By 1780 a system of tactics had been developed in which the idea of crushing part of the enemy had replaced the earlier intention of coming alongside, fleet to fleet, and hoping for the best. A swift and vigorous attack had replaced the slow and watchful defensive. Above all, naval tacticians had come to realise that concentrating as much of the attacking force as possible on the rear of the enemy meant that a devastating victory could be achieved. The
leading ships in the enemy's van could do nothing to help their beleaguered rear, at least not quickly, and that period of advantage for the attacker would bring victory before any help arrived. Battle had moved over from something that had seemed essentially fair to an action which was founded on the idea of initial and shocking advantage. From a matter of regular beauty, it had become a question of the devastating sublime.

Three leading British admirals, Hawke, Rodney and Howe, were largely responsible for the change. All, despite their age, Hawke born in 1705, Rodney in 1719, Howe in 1726, stood outside the acceptable mid-century courteous norm. Hawke's victory at Quiberon Bay during the Seven Years War in 1759 off the Breton coast, in a thrashingly wild northwesterly November gale, had broken all the rules. Hawke's blockading squadron heard that the French Brest fleet was at sea and it was spotted by one of his scouts when 40 miles west of Belle Isle. They were making for shelter, hoping to avoid an engagement. Hawke made the signal ‘for the seven ships nearest to them to chase, and draw into a line of battle ahead of the Royal George [his flagship], and endeavour to stop them until the rest of the squadron should come up, who were also to form as they chased.' Forming as they chase, pursuing a reluctant enemy on to a wild lee shore: there are pre-echoes here of Trafalgar.

Hawke had no reliable charts of the reef-strewn bay into which he pursued the French. He simply assumed the French themselves would avoid the rocks and shoals and followed them. He used the enemy as his pilot, chasing up behind them as the shore and the night both approached. Two French ships surrendered, two sank, two ran ashore and burnt, seven others ran ashore deliberately, of which four broke their backs. Another nine escaped either into the mouth of the Loire or southwards to Rochefort, where they
spent the rest of the war, imprisoned behind the British blockade. It was a model of victory achieved through wild and unregulated pursuit.

Hawke gleams as a Nelsonian hero
avant la lettre
, but he had his heirs. Rodney was intemperate, a gambler, falling so deeply in debt that in the 1770s he had to escape to Paris for four years, a man famed for a dashing attack against the Spanish, on a lee shore, at night and in a storm, always quick to seize an opportunity, and far from polished. He had the habit of ‘making himself the theme of his own discourse. He talked much and freely upon every subject, concealed nothing in the course of conversation, regardless who were present, and dealt his censure as well as his praises with imprudent liberality. Through his whole life two passions—the love of women and of play—carried him into many excesses.'

For the first time, at the Battle of the Saints off St Lucia in 1782, this wild womanising gambler of an admiral took the shocking and unprecedented step of leading his fleet
through
the enemy to the other side, an action which won him the battle, ‘pulverising' the French and turning the world of naval tactics upside down. To go through the enemy was to become British orthodoxy.

Where Rodney was garrulous, Howe was silent, ‘a man universally acknowledged to be unfeeling in his nature, ungracious in his manner and, upon all occasions, discovers a wonderful attachment to the dictates of his own perverse impenetrable disposition.' His courage was famous—Horace Walpole described him as ‘undaunted as a rock and as silent'—and his appearance forbidding, but ‘Black Dick' was loved by both officers and the men of the lower deck. When the mutinies erupted in 1797, it was the aged Howe whom the supervising committee at Spithead chose as the one admiral they trusted and would deal with. These were the precursors, both of them heroes to the common man,
on whom the daring, mould-breaking aspect of the Nelsonian method was based.

In Lord Howe's signal book issued in 1790, there is an entirely new signal, applicable when the British fleet was on the attack either from upwind of the enemy or to leeward of them:

If, when having the weather-gage of the enemy, the admiral means to pass between the ships of their line for engaging them to leeward or, being to leeward, to pass between them for obtaining the weather-gage. N.B.—the different captains and commanders not being able to effect the specified intention in either case are at liberty to act as circumstances require.

Lines broken through and captains at liberty to act as circumstances require: the world of the orderly dance was over. In the next edition of the signal book, the degree of individual freedom for ships was enhanced still further. Howe included a signal which told the ships of the fleet: ‘To break through the enemy's line in all parts where practicable, and engage on the other side.' A manuscript note is added in the Admiralty copy of the signal book: ‘If a blue pennant is hoisted at the fore topmast-head, to break through the centre; if at the mizzen topmast-head, to break through the rear.' In either case, the van is to be left to sail away ignored. At the Battle of the Saints, Rodney had led his fleet in line ahead through the enemy line. At the Glorious First of June in 1794, Howe instructed his captains to approach the enemy in line abreast, break through wherever they could and ‘for each ship to steer for, independently of each other, and engage respectively the ship opposed in situation to them in the enemy's line.'

There is a deep historical and geographical pattern at work here. The essential disposition of British and French fleets over the whole of the 18th century was governed by
geography and the prevailing winds. The strategic position of the British was to be out at sea, to windward, holding their blockading station to the west of the European mainland. Their leeward guns faced the French. The French, emerging from port, approached the British from downwind. Their windward guns faced the British. This essential historical structure had a shaping effect on the way in which each side engaged in battle. The British guns, brought down towards the surface of the sea by the heeling of the ships, were habitually aimed at the hulls of the enemy. The French guns, lifted by the heeling of the ships, were usually aimed at the rigging of the ships.

More significantly than that, the French had developed the habit during battle of slipping off to leeward, avoiding the decisive contact, dancing away in front of the British eyes, compelling the British ships to turn towards them and allowing the French to rake their enemy on the approach. The great innovation of the Howe method in particular was to slip through the gaps in the enemy to leeward and then to hold them between the mouths of the British guns and the wind, since a fleet to windward cannot slip away. It is seized in a murderous grasp, the coherence of the fleet broken into fragments over which the French admiral has no control. The Howe method, in other words,
dared
to recreate the mêlée which 150 years previously the invention of the line of battle had been designed to avoid. It is, like so much of what was happening in European consciousness at the time, a return to the primitive, to the essential brutal realities of battle in which deep and violent energies are released by dispensing with the carapace of courtliness which the 18th century had done so much to cultivate. It is, in a phrase, Romantic battle, in which, as tacticians describe it, there is ‘the utmost development of fire-surface'. It was the method by which a fleet could develop an overwhelming attack of the most violent kind. And it released
the possibilities of heroism. This morning, off Trafalgar, Nelson made a signal to the fleet, expressing an intention which in all likelihood his captains had already assumed: he would break through the enemy line and engage them on their leeward side.