if they throw their attack on one part of a much extended line, that part is soon destroyed.’  Thus he arrives at two fundamental laws:  ’1.  That our system of a long line of battle is worthless in face of an enemy who attacks with his ships formed in groups (reunis en pelotons), and told off to engage a small number of ships at different points in our line. 2.  That the only tactical system to oppose to theirs is to have at least a double line, with reserve squadrons on the wings stationed in such a manner as to bear down most easily upon the points too vigorously attacked.’  The whole of his far-sighted paper is in fact an admirable study of the conditions under which impetuous attacks and elaborate combinations are respectively called for.  But from both points of view the single line for a large fleet is emphatically condemned, while in our instructions of 1816 not a hint of its weakness appears.  They resume practically the same standpoint which the Duke of York had reached a century and a half before.

Spanish tacticians seem also to have shared the opinion that Trafalgar had really done nothing to dethrone the line.  One of the highest reputation, on December 17, 1805, had sent to his government a thoughtful criticism of the action, and his view of Nelson’s attack was this:  ‘Nothing,’ he says, ’is more seamanlike or better tactics than for a fleet which is well to windward of another to bear down upon it in separate columns, and deploy at gun-shot from the enemy into a line which, as it comes into action, will inflict at least as much damage upon them as it is likely to suffer.  But Admiral Nelson did not deploy his columns at gun-shot from our line, but ran up within pistol-shot and broke through it, so as to reduce the battle to a series of single-ship actions.  It was a manoeuvre in which I do not think he will find many imitators.  Where two fleets are equally well trained, that which attacks in this manner must be defeated.’[7]

So it was our enemies rightly read the lesson of Trafalgar.  The false deductions therefore which grew up in our own service are all the more extraordinary, even as we find them in the new instructions and the current talk of the quarter-deck.  But this is not the worst.  It is not till we turn to the Signal Book itself that we get a full impression of the extent to which tactical thought had degenerated and Nelson’s seed had been choked.  The movements and formations for which signals are provided are stubbornly on the old lines of 1799.  The influence of Nelson, however, is seen in two places.  The first is a group of signals for ’attacking the enemy at anchor by passing either outside them or between them and the land,’ and for ’anchoring and engaging either within or outside the enemy.’  Here we have a rational embodiment of the experience of the Nile.  The second is a similar attempt to embody the teaching of Trafalgar, and the way it is done finally confirms the failure to understand what Nelson meant.  So extraordinary is the signification of the signal and its explanatory note that it must be given in full.