The general failure to grasp the whole of Nelson’s tactical principles was not the only trouble.  There are signs that during the later years of the war a very dangerous misunderstanding of his teaching had been growing up in the service.  In days when there was practically no higher instruction in the theory of tactics, it was easy for officers to forget how much prolonged and patient study had enabled Nelson to handle his fleets with the freedom he did; and the tendency was to believe that his successes could be indefinitely repeated by mere daring and vehemence of attack.  The seed was sown immediately after the battle and by Collingwood himself.  ‘It was a severe action,’ he wrote to Admiral Parker on November 1, ‘no dodging or manoeuvring.’  And again on December 16, to Admiral Pasley, ’Lord Nelson determined to substitute for exact order an impetuous attack in two distinct bodies.’  Collingwood of course with all his limitations knew well enough it was not a mere absence of manoeuvring that had won the victory.  In the same letter he had said that although Nelson succeeded, as it were, by enchantment, it was all the effect of system and nice combination.’  Yet such phrases as he and others employed to describe the headlong attack, taken from their context and repeated from mouth to mouth, would soon have raised a false impression that many men were only too ready to receive.  So the seed must have grown, till we find the fruit in Lord Dundonald’s oft-quoted phrase, ’Never mind manoeuvres:  always go at them.’  So it was that Nelson’s teaching had crystallised in his mind and in the mind perhaps of half the service.  The phrase is obviously a degradation of the opening enunciations in Nelson’s memoranda, a degradation due to time, to superficial study, and the contemptuous confidence of years of undisputed mastery at sea.

The conditions which brought about this attitude to tactics are clearly seen in the way others saw us.  Shortly after Trafalgar a veteran French officer of the war of American Independence wrote some Reflections on the battle, which contain much to the point.  ’It is a noteworthy thing,’ he says in dealing with the defects of the single-line formation, ’that the English, who formerly used to employ all the resources of tactics against our fleets, now hardly use them at all, since our scientific tacticians have disappeared.  It may almost be said that they no longer have any regular order of sailing or battle:  they attack our ships of the line just as they used to attack a convoy.’[6] But here the old tactician was not holding up English methods as an example.  He was citing them to show to what easy victories a navy exposed itself in which, by neglect of scientific study and alert observation, tactics had sunk into a mere senile formula.  ‘They know,’ he continues, ’that we are in no state to oppose them with well-combined movements so as to profit by the kind of disorder which is the natural result of this kind of attack.  They know