Wide as was this distribution, and great as its reach, a high degree of cohesion was maintained not only between the parts of each concentration, but between the several concentrations themselves.  By means of a minor cruiser centre at the Channel Islands, the Downs and Ushant concentrations could rapidly cohere.  Similarly the Cadiz concentration was linked up with that of Ushant at Finisterre, and but for personal friction and repulsion, the cohesion between the Mediterranean and Cadiz concentrations would have been equally strong.  Finally, there was a masterly provision made for all the concentrations to condense into one great mass at the crucial point off Ushant before by any calculable chance a hostile mass could gather there.

For Napoleon’s best admirals, “who knew the craft of the sea,” the British fleet thus disposed was in a state of concentration that nothing but a stroke of luck beyond the limit of sober calculation could break.  Decres and Bruix had no doubt of it, and the knowledge overpowered Villeneuve when the crisis came.  After he had carried the concentration which Napoleon had planned so far as to have united three divisions in Ferrol, he knew that the outlying sections of our Western Squadron had disappeared from before Ferrol and Rochefort.  In his eyes, as well as those of the British Admiralty, this squadron, in spite of its dispersal in the Bay of Biscay, had always been in a state of concentration.  It was not this which caused his heart to fail.  It was the news that Nelson had reappeared at Gibraltar, and had been seen steering northward.  It meant for him that the whole of his enemy’s European fleet was in a state of concentration.  “Their concentration of force,” he afterwards wrote, “was at the moment more serious than in any previous disposition, and such that they were in a position to meet in superiority the combined forces of Brest and Ferrol,” and for that reason, he explained, he had given up the game as lost.  But to Napoleon’s unpractised eye it was impossible to see what it was he had to deal with.  Measuring the elasticity of the British naval distribution by the comparatively cumbrous and restricted mobility of armies, he saw it as a rash and unwarlike dispersal.  Its looseness seemed to indicate so great a tenderness for the distant objectives that lay open to his scattered squadrons, that he believed by a show of sporadic action he could further disperse our fleet, and then by a close concentration crush the essential part in detail.  It was a clear case of the enemy’s dispersal forcing us to adopt the loosest concentration, and of our comparative dispersal tempting the enemy to concentrate and hazard a decision.  It cannot be said we forced the fatal move upon him intentionally.  It was rather the operation of strategical law set in motion by our bold distribution.  We were determined that his threat of invasion, formidable as it was, should not force upon us so close a concentration as to leave our widespread interests open to his attack.