Nelson and other naval studies

Front matter

R A FALSA ft

NELSON

AND OTHER NAVAL STUDIES

Preface

WITH one exception the essays here collected have appeared previously at different times during the last few years in various serial publications. I have to thank the conductors of The Times, The Quarterly Review, The Naval Annual, The United Service Magazine, and The National Review for permission to reprint them. I should add that I do not claim the authorship of the first paper in the volume. It originally appeared in The Times as a leading article on the hundredth anniversary of Trafalgar, and it so well represents the spirit in which, as I think, Englishmen should celebrate an anniversary of the kind that I have obtained the permission of the conductors of The Times to reprint it as a fitting introduction to a volume which deals so largely with Nelson and his crowning victory at Trafalgar.

The exception is the essay on Paul Jones. This has been written specially for the present volume. It is at once a duty and a pleasure to acknowledge that it is very largely based on what is now the standard American biography of Paul Jones by Mr. A. C. Buell. Readers of Mr. Buell's work will perceive at once how deeply my own essay is indebted to it at almost every point. I have however consulted other authorities, more especially a biography published in 1825, and written, as I am assured by my friend Mr. John Murray, by no less famous a person than Benjamin Disraeli, afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield. The volume is anonymous, and it is now, I believe, very rare. Probably it was never viii PREFACE

well known, nor was its authorship ever avowed in Disraeli's lifetime. But on the authority of Mr. Murray I attribute it with confidence to Disraeli, if not as the writer of every word, at any rate as the responsible and largely contributory editor. I have quoted several passages from it. My readers will judge for themselves how far these passages betray the authorship I have claimed for them.

Disraeli is the only English biographer of Paul Jones known to me who has attempted to do him justice. He evidently felt for him a certain affinity of temperament, a certain sympathy of soul. His youthful motto, "Adventures are to the adventurous," would have been as congenial to Paul Jones as it was to himself. When he says of him, " that to perform extraordinary actions, a man must often entertain extraordinary sentiments, and that in the busiest scenes of human life, enthusiasm is not always vain, nor romance always a fable," he is anticipating a vein of reflection with which Englishmen were afterwards to be made very familiar in the character and career of the statesman who made Queen Victoria an Empress and realized the dreams of his own " Tancred " by annexing Cyprus to her dominions.

It is because Paul Jones has been so often misjudged in this country that I too have sought to bespeak for him a rehearing of the whole case. I may have mistaken his character. It may have been as " detestable " as Sir John Laugh ton says it was. But his acts speak for themselves. The man who founded the American Navy and showed it how to fight ; who set before it the high standard of conduct, attainment, and efficiency which still inspires it ; who propounded views of naval warfare and its conduct which anticipated the teaching of Clerk of Eldin in the eighteenth century, and that of Captain Mahan in our own days, and were conceived in the very spirit of Nelson himself; who baffled all the diplomacy of England at the Texel, and alone achieved a diplomatic triumph

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of which even Franklin had despaired, is certainly not a man to be dismissed from the court of history as a mere adventurer, a person of no importance, even if he cannot leave it without a stain upon his character. I would hardly go so far as Disraeli and say, " As to his moral conduct, it would seem that few characters have been more subject to scrutiny and less to condemnation." I do not take Paul Jones to have been a Galahad or even a Lancelot. But whatever his moral delinquencies may have been, I have discovered none to make me ashamed of avowing a profound admiration for his extraordinary gifts and astonishing achievements.

The papers on " Trafalgar and the Nelson Touch " were written in 1905, and published in The Times during the early autumn of that year. I had previously enjoyed an opportunity of talking the matter over with Colonel Desbriere, of the French General Staff, the distinguished author of a monumental work, well known to all students of the subject, entitled Projets et tentatives de debarquement aux lies Britanniques, 1793-1805. But I found that at the time of my visit to Colonel Desbriere at the French War Office he had not completed those studies and researches which have since borne such abundant fruit in his supplementary volume, entitled Trafalgar, which was only published in 1907. This will explain why no mention was made of Colonel Desbriere's work in my articles as they originally appeared. The importance of his researches and of the conclusions he has drawn from them lies not merely in his profound acquaintance with the whole subject, and the singularly acute and detached judgment he has brought to its discussion, but in the fact that he alone has had access to all the documents bearing on the subject which are preserved in the French and Spanish archives, the most important of them being printed in his volume for the first time. It is for this reason extremely gratifying to me to find that working on lines in x PREFACE

no sense suggested by myself — for the very slight assistance I was able to afford him in his study of the subject is more than generously acknowledged in his preface — and on materials entirely inaccessible to me, he has reached conclusions so closely akin to my own. He and I have reached our respective conclusions by different and independent paths. But how closely those conclusions coincide may be seen from the following sentences which I quote from his final chapter :

Quant au dispositif d'attaque des Anglais, il semble demontre qu'il differa tout a fait des deux colonnes generalement admises. Pour la division du Sud, celle de Collingwood, aucun doute ne peut subsister et Fengagement sur tout le front des allies prouve bien que l'ordre de former la ligne de relevement fut execute. Pour la division du Nord, celle de Nelson, la ligne de file se transforma au moment de l'engagement en un ordre semi-deploye sur un front de quatre ou cinq vaisseaux. L'amiral attaqua bien le premier mais il fut immediatement soutenu a sa droite et a sa gauche.

There are a few points of detail concerning which I am more or less at variance with Colonel Desbriere, but they are none of them of primary importance, and there are others in respect of which his analysis corroborates mine in a very remarkable manner. These I have duly indicated in the notes appended at their proper place in the present volume. I would here add that the most striking corroboration of all is that furnished by three pictorial diagrams, representing three successive stages of the battle, which are preserved in the archives of the Captain-General at Cadiz, and are reproduced in black-and-white facsimile by Colonel Desbriere. Coloured facsimiles of these diagrams were presented in 1907 by the Spanish Government to the British Admiralty, and now hang in the room of the Permanent Secretary of the Admiralty. I am informed that the original drawings were made

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by the Chief of the Staff of the Spanish Admiral Gravina, who commanded the rear of the allied line, his flag flying in the Principe dAsturias. The first of these diagrams represents the moment when Collingwood, in the Royal Sovereign, had just broken the allied line astern of the Santa Ana, and the remaining ships of his line were about to follow his example. But they are not shown in the diagram as ranged in a line astern of the Royal Sovereign, and therefore perpendicular to the enemy's line. That is the traditional representation in this country, but it finds no countenance whatever from the diagram prepared by Gravina's Chief of the Staff. The rear ships of Collingwood's line are shown in a position which runs in a direction approximately parallel to the rear of the allied line, and all engaged simultaneously. There may be some pictorial exaggeration in this, though it may be noted that the Swiftsure recorded in her log " At half-past noon, the whole fleet in action, and Royal Sovereign had cut through the enemy's line " ; but, in any case, the draughtsman, from his position on board the Principe dAsturias, must certainly have known as well as any one whether the line of the attacking fleet was perpendicular or parallel to that of the allied rear during the first phase of the onslaught. He represents it as parallel, or nearly so ; and his testimony on this point seems to me well-nigh conclusive in itself, and at any rate quite incontrovertible when taken in connection with all the other evidence to the same effect. As to the character of Nelson's attack his testimony is of course far less weighty, because his position in the line was far removed from that of the Bucentaure and the ships ahead of her. But it is worthy of note that he represents the Victory and two ships astern of her firing their port broadsides, as I have shown they must have done when they first opened fire, and steering direct for a gap in the allied line between the Bucentaure and the Redoutable. No other ships in Nelson's xii PREFACE

column are shown as having opened fire at this period of the action. A reproduction of this diagram will be found at page 68.

I have to thank the authorities of the Admiralty for their kindness in allowing me to reproduce, I believe for the first time, and to use as a frontispiece to this volume, the very remarkable portrait of Nelson which hangs in the Board Room at the Admiralty. This portrait was painted at Palermo in 1799 by Leonardo Guzzardi. It is not one of the more attractive portraits of Nelson, but, as I have explained on page 96, it has a special significance in the evidence it seems to afford as to Nelson's state of health and of mind at this critical period of his career. My best thanks are also due to the Earl of Camperdown for his permission to reproduce, at page 133, the beautiful portrait of his illustrious ancestor by Hoppner, which stands as the frontispiece of his valuable biography of that great seaman.

My readers will bear in mind that the essays collected in this volume were originally written at different dates, some of them several years ago. They are all of them, therefore, necessarily affected by the " psychological atmosphere " which prevailed when they were written. I have so far revised them as to correct statistics and other statements of fact which the lapse of time has rendered obsolete, and even this has proved to be far from easy in the case of an essay like that on " The Strategy of Position," where I have attempted not, I fear, with entire success, to describe the strategic disposition of the Fleet which was initiated at the end of 1904 in terms of the kaleidoscopic developments of more recent years. But I have not otherwise attempted to modify the psychological atmosphere of their original date. That would have been quite impossible without rewriting them altogether. This remark applies especially to the lecture on "The Higher Policy of Defence" with which the volume concludes. It now has to reappear in a

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psychological atmosphere very different from that in which it was originally written. For this reason, were I to deliver another lecture on the same subject to-day, I daresay I should express myself very differently as regards the order, stress, and application of the arguments employed. Nevertheless, I remain a convinced and wholly unrepentant adherent of the doctrines I enunciated in 1902. They were not my doctrines. I was merely the unworthy mouthpiece of the lessons I learnt many years ago at the feet of the late Admiral Colomb and of other naval officers, most of whom are happily still living, who were associated with him in his life-long endeavour to bring back to his countrymen a renewed sense of the things which belong to their peace. Even the title which I gave to the lecture, " The Higher Policy of Defence," was not of my own invention. It was, I believe, first employed, many years ago, by my friend Sir George Clarke, the present Governor of Bombay, with whom it was my high privilege to be associated, in 1897, *n the publication of a volume of collected essays, entitled The Navy and the Nation. If I have any claim to speak with authority on the matters I have discussed in this present volume, I should certainly base it myself mainly on the fact that Sir George Clarke did not disdain twelve years ago to link his name with mine in the publication of a former volume, which has assuredly owed whatever influence it has exercised far more to his contributions than to mine. That volume was saturated from its first page to its last with the higher policy of defence. In the preface which Sir George Clarke and I drafted together — though it is only right to say now that its composition was mainly the work of his pen — we wrote :

That the sea communications of the Empire must be held in war; that if they are so held, territorial security against serious attack both at home and abroad is, ipso facto, provided ; that if they are not so held, no army of any assigned magnitude, and xiv PREFACE

no fortifications of any imagined technical perfection, can avert national ruin ; these are the cardinal principles of Imperial Defence.

Yet these cardinal principles are now once more being impugned on the highest military authority — that of the great soldier whose long and brilliant career, whose lofty and disinterested patriotism, whose splendid achievements in India and South Africa, have endeared him to every Englishman, and have invested him with a right to speak on all questions of national defence which no one would presume to dispute, least of all a mere civilian student like myself. I have said, " on all questions of national defence." But the fact remains that, for an insular Power like England — a Power which can neither attack its enemies nor be attacked by them except across the sea — no question of national defence can ever be either a purely military question or a purely naval question. Lord Roberts is a soldier; one of the greatest of living soldiers. On the military issues involved in any large question of national defence, I, for one, should never dream of disputing his authority ; but on the naval issues involved in the same question, I would point out, with all respect, that, apart from his immense personal prestige, his authority is not in kind greater than that of any other amateur student of the subject. He is not an expert in the theory and practice of naval warfare any more than I am myself. In that respect he and I stand on the same footing, if I may say so without presumption, and on that ground alone do I venture to dispute some of the premisses he has lately advanced in respect of the naval aspects of the question of invasion.

Now I understand the school of which Lord Roberts is the illustrious leader to contend that we cannot rely on naval force alone, however superior to that of the supposed enemy, to prevent an invader landing on these shores in such force as, in the present condition of our military defences, might afford the preface xv

enemy a reasonable prospect of bringing us to submission. The incapacity of the Navy to " impeach " the invader on the sea is thus represented as due, not to any deficiency of strength at any given point or moment, but to some indefeasible defect inherent in the nature of naval force as such and in the nature of the element on which it operates. If it were due to a mere deficiency of naval strength, the obvious and infallible remedy would seem to be to make good that deficiency at any cost and with as little delay as possible. But that is not the remedy recommended by Lord Roberts and his school. They would forthwith increase, and very largely increase, the military forces of the Crown available for the defence of these shores. At the risk of seeming presumptuous, I must insist once more that, if the sailors are to be trusted in a matter which especially concerns their profession, this is emphatically the wrong way to go to work. I do not here pose as an adherent of what is called, for some reason never intelligible to me, the " Blue Water School." I have never willingly used that phrase, for frankly, I do not in the least know what it means. I have learnt from the sailors that the function of a naval force adequate to prevent invasion is to operate neither in the blue waters of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean as such, nor in the grey waters of the North Sea as such, but in all those waters, whether blue or grey, whether deep or shallow, from which any menace of invasion can, on any reasonable calculation of contingencies, be expected to come. But I am an adherent— as I have said, a convinced and wholly unrepentant adherent — of what I would call the "naval" school, the school, that is, that holds as the cardinal principle of its creed, that with a sufficiency of naval force the invader can and will be impeached at sea, and that without a sufficiency of naval force he cannot be impeached at all. Am I then an adherent of what has been called — merely pour rire perhaps — the " dinghy " school, the school which is supposed xvi PREFACE

to hold, though I never met a disciple of it, that not a dinghy full of foreign soldiers could ever land on these shores so long as our naval defence on the seas is sufficient ? By no manner of means. I hold what is now the official doctrine as quite recently expounded in Parliament by the Secretary of State for War that the military forces of the Crown available for home defence should at all times be sufficient in numbers — and, of course, efficient enough in training, equipment, and organization — to compel any enemy who projects an invasion of this country to come in such force that he cannot come by stealth. Of course 1 presuppose an effective command by this country of the seas to be traversed by the invader ; but that is not to beg the question. It surely must be common ground with all disputants in this controversy that this country must never surrender the command of the sea to its enemies. That is the very meaning of the naval supremacy at which we aim, and must always aim as a condition absolutely indispensable to our national security and our Imperial integrity. If there is any room for doubt, or even for any reasonable feeling of insecurity, on this vital point, the one and only way to remove it is instantly to set about increasing our naval forces to any extent that may be necessary to re-establish our imperilled supremacy at sea. If I entertained any such doubt, I would not add a single man to the Army until 1 had once more brought the Navy to its required strength of unchallengeable supremacy at sea. For I hold now, as I held with Sir George Clarke twelve years ago, that if the sea communications of the Empire are not securely held in war, "no army of any assigned magnitude, and no fortifications of any imagined technical perfection can avert national ruin."

Now I do not attempt to determine either the numbers of the military forces that must be available for home defence, nor the character of the training, equipment, and organization that ought to be given

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to them if they are to discharge the function that I have assigned to them ; that I leave entirely to competent military experts of whom assuredly I am not one. Neither am I a naval expert, for I hold that none but sailors are entitled to be so called ; but I know what the sailors think, for, as I am about to show, we have it on official record. Is it too much to ask the soldiers to withdraw from the naval province, in which they are not experts, and to confine themselves to the military province in which their authority is no more to be disputed than that of the sailors is in their province ? There are, indeed, some sailors whose authority I, at least, have no title to dispute, who follow the lead of Lord Roberts. But I suspect they do so mainly on the ground that they hold " national service " of the character advocated by him to be a good thing in itself, rather than on the assumption which his main argument presupposes, namely, that no sufficiency of naval force can insure this country from invasion. I repeat that his main argument must rest on that assumption, because, if mere insufficiency of naval force were alleged, the plain logic of the situation would imperatively insist that any and every such alleged insufficiency should be made good before any other form of national defence were even so much as attempted. But this will not serve the turn of Lord Roberts and his school. Soldiers, and the disciples of soldiers themselves, they insist on telling the sailor and his disciples that, whatever they may think to the contrary, no sufficiency of naval force can insure this country against invasion. I, of course, am no sailor, and therefore it is not for me to answer them. They, on the other hand, albeit experts, and experts not to be challenged by me at any rate, in their own province, are just as little experts in the sailors' province as I am. Fortunately there exists a tribunal, composed largely of experts in both provinces, to which we can both appeal. That tribunal is the Committee of Imperial Defence as constituted by Mr.

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Balfour. One of the first problems to which the Committee of Imperial Defence addressed itself was that of invasion, its risks and its possibilities, and some four years ago, on May u, 1905, Mr. Balfour expounded in the House of Commons the conclusions it had then reached. In unfolding his exposition he said :

Though every one must recognize that this is the central problem of Imperial and national defence, we see year by year the continuance of a profitless wrangle between the advocates of different schools of military and naval thought to which the puzzled civilian gives a perplexed attention, and which leaves in the general mind an uneasy sense that, in spite of the millions we are spending on the Navy and the Army, the country is not, after all, secure against some sudden onslaught which might shatter the fabric of Empire. This, be it remembered, is no new state of things. It reaches far back into a historic past. The same controversy in which we are now engaged was raging in the time of Drake ; and then, as now, it was in the main the soldiers who took one side; in the main, the sailors who took the other. The great generals in the sixteenth century believed the invasion of England possible, the great admirals did not believe it possible. If you go down the stream of time, you come to an exactly similar state of things during the Napoleonic wars. ... It is certain that Napoleon believed invasion to be possible ; and it is equally certain that Nelson believed it to be impossible. Forty years later you find the Duke of Wellington, in a very famous letter, expressing, in terms almost pathetic in their intensity, his fears of invasion — fears which naval opinion has never shared, provided our fleets be adequate. We found, when we took up the subject, that the perennial dispute was still unsettled ; and it appeared to us — I do not say that full agreement could be come to, but something nearer than ever had been reached before—if we could avoid barren generalities, and devise a concrete problem capable of definite solution, yet based on suppositions so unfavourable to this country, that if, in this hypothetical case, serious invasion was demonstrably impossible, we

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might rest assured that it need not further enter into our practical calculations. Following out this idea, we assumed that our regular Army was abroad upon some oversea expedition, and that our organized fleets in permanent commission were absent from home waters. Frankly I do not see that we could be expected to go further.

Mr. Balfour then proceeded to define more precisely the suppositions, as unfavourable to this country as they could with any show of reason be made, on which the conclusions of the Committee were based. He assumed, "for the sake of argument, that the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Channel Fleets are far away from these shores, incapable of taking any part in repelling invasion, though of course still constituting a menace to the communications of any invader fortunate or unfortunate enough to have effected a landing." He assumed further, that the military forces at home had been reduced to the lowest ebb they had reached during the crisis of the war in South Africa. Then he proceeded to inquire what was the smallest force with which a foreign Power would be likely to invade this country. " That," he said, "may seem a paradoxical way of putting the question, but it is the true way. . . . The difficulty which our hypothetical invader has to face is not that of accumulating a sufficient force on his side of the water, but the difficulty of transferring it to ours; and inasmuch as that difficulty increases in an increasing ratio with every additional transport required and every augmentation in the landing force, it becomes evident that the problem which a foreign general has to consider is not, ' How many men would I like to have in England in order to conquer it ? ' but ' With how few men can I attempt its conquest ? ' " To the question so propounded the answer given by all the military authorities consulted, including Lord Roberts himself, was that it would not be possible to make the attempt with less than 70,000 men. " With a xx PREFACE

force even of this magnitude Lord Roberts was distinctly of opinion that for 70,000 men to attempt to take London — which is, after all, what would have to be done if the operation were in any sense to be conclusive — would be in the nature of a forlorn hope." Finally, taking France to be the invading Power, not in the least because it is at all likely that France would be the invading Power, but because, being nearer to this country than any other Power, France could, if she were so minded, invade this country more easily than any other Power, Mr. Balfour showed, and declared that it was the conviction of the Committee, that even on these extreme assumptions, " unfavourable as they are, serious invasion of these islands is not a possibility which we need consider."

That was, only four years ago, the considered judgment of the only tribunal competent to decide between soldiers and sailors when they disagree, delivered from his place in the House of Commons by the Minister who was at the time primarily and finally responsible for the security of the Empire and the inviolability of these shores. Has anything occurred since to disallow the judgment then delivered or to show cause why the appeal of Lord Roberts and his school against it should be entertained ? I am not aware that the Committee of Imperial Defence has shown any disposition to reverse its judgment, or even to revise it in any essential respect. It has indeed been alleged, I believe, that Mr. Balfour's estimate of the tonnage required for the transport of a given number of troops was excessive, and that the tonnage then alleged to be available at any given time for France was far below the estimate that would have to be made of the tonnage available at any given time for another Power, more distant than France from these shores, which, if we were at war with it, or if its ambitions prompted it to a sudden and unprovoked attack, might seek to invade this country.

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But the revision of these factors to the extent required — for the sake of precision let us say to the extent of enabling the Power in question to embark 150,000 or even 200,000 men — does not in any way impair the capacity claimed by Mr. Balfour and the Committee of Imperial Defence for the depleted naval force of their fundamental assumption to impeach that enlarged embarkation. On the contrary, it enhances the capacity to make invasion impossible then claimed for the residual naval forces in home waters and not at the time disputed in any authoritative quarter ; for, as Mr. Balfour insisted, the difficulties of embarkation, transit, and landing increase in an increasing ratio with every additional transport required, and every augmentation in the landing force transported. I would add that the hypothesis on which Mr. Balfour and the Committee proceeded in 1905, namely that our organized fleets in permanent commission were absent from home waters, is no longer a tenable or even a thinkable one. The Mediterranean Fleet is likely to be absent in any case. The Atlantic Fleet is just as likely, or as unlikely, to be absent in the future as it was in the past. But the Channel Fleet has now become a detached division of the Home Fleet and, as such, it is, for the future, very unlikely to be beyond striking distance at the hour of need. These were all the fleets in permanent commission which Mr. Balfour had to consider in 1905, and he assumed them all to be away. Even so he declared, on the authority of the Committee of Imperial Defence, that serious invasion was not a possibility which we need consider. But the Home Fleet as we now know it had not then been constituted. It is now, or shortly will be, by far the strongest single fleet in the world, and it is practically inconceivable that it should ever be absent from home waters. If the Committee held that without the Home Fleet as now constituted, and with all the other fleets in permanent commission away, we were safe against the invasion xxii PREFACE