This form of the signification shows that the intention of the signal was something different from what is usually understood in naval literature by ‘breaking the line.’  By that we generally understand the manoeuvre practised by Lord Rodney in 1782, a manoeuvre which was founded on the conception of ‘leading through’ the enemy’s line in line ahead, and all the ships indicated passing through in succession at the same point.  Whereas in Lord Howe’s signal the tactical idea is wholly different.  In his manoeuvre the conception is of an attack by bearing down all together in line abreast or line of bearing, and each ship passing through the enemy’s line at any interval it found practicable; and this was actually the method of attack which he adopted on June 1, 1794.  In intention the two signals are as wide as the poles asunder.  In Rodney’s case the idea was to sever the enemy’s line and cut off part of it from the rest.  In Howe’s case the idea of severing the line is subordinate to the intention of securing an advantage by engaging on the opposite side from which the attack is made.  The whole of the attacking fleet might in principle pass through the intervals in the enemy’s line without cutting off any part of it.  In principle, moreover, the new attack was a parallel attack in line abreast or in line of bearing, whereas the old attack was a perpendicular or oblique attack in line ahead.

Nothing perhaps in naval literature is more remarkable than the fact that this fundamental difference is never insisted on, or even, it may be said, so much as recognised.  Whenever we read of a movement for breaking the line in this period it is almost always accompanied with remarks which assume that Rodney’s manoeuvre is intended and not Howe’s.  Probably it is Nelson who is to blame.  At Trafalgar, after carefully elaborating an attack based on Howe’s method of line abreast, he delivered it in line ahead, as though he had intended to use Rodney’s method.  His reasons were sound enough, as will be seen later.  But as a piece of scientific tactics it was as though an engineer besieging a fortress, instead of drawing his lines of approach diagonally, were to make them at right angles to the ditch.  When the greatest of the admirals apparently (but only apparently) confused the two antagonistic conceptions of breaking the line, there is much excuse for civilian writers being confused in fact.

The real interest of the matter, however, is to inquire, firstly, by what process of thought Howe in his second code discarded Rodney’s manoeuvre as the primary meaning of his signal after having adopted it in his first, and, secondly, how and to what end did he arrive at his own method.