Men of Honour (10 page)

Napoleon wanted to destroy Britain, whose government was funding the continental alliances against him. ‘There are in Europe many good generals but they see too many things at once,' he had said. ‘I see only one thing, namely the enemy's main body. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves.' The central matter was the invasion of England, or at least its destruction as a world power. ‘Bah!' Marshal Masséna was said to have remarked years later when asked about the conquest of Britain. ‘Conquer it? No one even dreamt of it. It was just a question of ruining it; of leaving it in a condition that no one would even have wanted to possess it.' Napoleon thought that once in England he could destroy it in three weeks: ‘Invade, enter London, wreck the shipyards and demolish the arsenals of Portsmouth and Plymouth.' Then he could march on Vienna. His army for the task, when fully arrayed, stretched nine miles along the sands of Boulogne.

The heart of the problem for the French is that France has few good deep-water ports. Unlike England, which in the harbours of Falmouth, Plymouth and Portsmouth, and in the capacious anchorages of the Nore (in the estuary of the Medway, just south of the Thames) the Downs (just
east of Dover) and Spithead (off the Isle of Wight) has room for several world-dominating battle-fleets; France on its Atlantic and Channel coasts has only Brest, and to a lesser extent Rochefort; and on its Mediterranean coast, Toulon. Extravagant attempts before the Revolution to construct a fleet-holding harbour at Cherbourg in Normandy had been abandoned for lack of money.

That geography had governed the naval strategy of the European powers throughout the 18th century. The British need was to pin the French inside their ports; the French to escape the blockades imposed upon them, unite and come in force to dominate the Channel where an invasion could be made. The line connecting Brest to Toulon, via the Strait of Gibraltar, was the battleground on which the naval contest between the great European powers was fought out. Cape Trafalgar is on that line, at one of its hinges, just west of the Strait of Gibraltar, and just south of the great southern Spanish port of Cadiz.

Those were the unchangeable facts. There were of course many more wings and complexities to them: the eastern Mediterranean and the role of the Turks and the Russians there; the position of Egypt as the gateway to India; in the North Sea the role of the Dutch and Danes, and of the Russians in the Baltic; the need for the British to protect Ireland on their Atlantic flank; the inviting vulnerability of the French and British possessions in the Caribbean; the power added to the French naval position by the Spanish coming into the war against the British in January 1805, adding—on the all-important Brest-Toulon route—the outstanding deep-water harbours at Vigo, Ferrol and Cadiz.

Despite those many added complexities, the essence of the strategic situation remained constant. The British Channel Fleet, under Admiral Cornwallis, held the French clamped into Brest; the British Mediterranean Fleet, commanded by Nelson, held the French clamped into Toulon.
The third British fleet, commanded by Admiral Keith, and based at the Downs, controlled the Channel and the North Sea. The British had a lockhold on any French maritime ambitions.

Napoleon's brilliantly lateral idea was to break open the British grip by applying to these maritime circumstances a strategy which he employed on land, with an unbroken string of profoundly bloody successes—he is thought to have been responsible for the death of some 1.5 million Frenchmen and uncounted others—over 30 times between 1796 and 1815. The
manoeuvre sur la derrière
was not his invention—it was the favoured method of Frederick the Great—but Napoleon made it his own.

There was nothing conservative about Napoleon's attitude to war. Large ambitions involved high risks, and the essence of the risky Napoleonic plan, which went through many changes and permutations, was this: both the Toulon fleet under Villeneuve and the fleet at Rochefort on the French Atlantic coast, under Ganteaume, would slip out past the blockading British. That was quite possible: both had done it before. An easterly over the Atlantic coast of France would drive the British out to sea and allow the French in Rochefort to emerge. A northerly in Provence would have the same effect for the Toulon fleet. Villeneuve would make for the Strait of Gibraltar, the Spanish fleets at Cadiz and Cartagena would join him, the Rochefort squadron would drive south and west, and this huge accumulation of firepower—each man-of-war carried the weight of artillery that usually accompanied an entire land army—would be hidden in the immensities of the Atlantic Ocean. The rendezvous would be in the West Indies, from where they would return in force, gather more Spanish ships from Ferrol, push up to Brest, drive off the English Channel Fleet and with the French Brest fleet now accompanying them, would sweep the Channel (Napoleon's
phrase—
balayer la Manche
), push on to control the Straits of Dover and enable the invasion flotilla to cross.

The plan relied on the absorbent secrecy of the Atlantic and the desperate slowness of communications across it. The enemy could know nothing. He would be thrown back on to guesswork. A state of acute anxiety would be induced in him. There would be no telling where the French forces were, how they had dispersed or where they might recombine. Napoleon had hints published in the
Moniteur
, the government news organ, that India was the target, as it had been notionally in 1798. As he had done often enough on land, and was to do often again, the long trans-Atlantic feint to the Caribbean was to draw the defending forces out to it, leaving the main target—England itself—horribly exposed. The re-assembling fleets, in the plan Napoleon made, were to cut straight back from the Caribbean to the English Channel, and take up a position between the Straits of Dover and the British fleets pursuing them. Napoleon's veterans, 150,000 of them, would pour across the Channel, England would be ruined and as Napoleon told his soldiers ‘six centuries of insult would be avenged and freedom would be given to the seas.'

Wellington thought that ‘The whole art of war consists in getting at what lies on the other side of the hill, or, in other words, in deciding what we do not know from what we do.' Napoleon's
manoeuvre sur la derrière
was the opposite of that: using the vastness of the ocean itself as a cloak (his term was ‘the curtain of manoeuvre') behind which to concentrate his forces for the attack. The whole secret of Napoleonic war on land was the deceit and confusion brought about by dispersal, sudden appearance in the rear of the enemy, his flank turned, followed by rapid concentration and delivery of the blow. It is what he brought about in the Austerlitz campaign in the autumn of 1805 and it is what he planned for the Battle of the Atlantic too.

The account survives by Denis Decrès, the Minister of Marine, of the moment when he told Villeneuve of the scheme. It was in Boulogne in August 1804. ‘Sire,' Decrès wrote to Napoleon, ‘Vice-Admiral Villeneuve and Rear-Admiral Missiessy [of the Brest fleet] are here. I have laid before the former the great project. Villeneuve listened to it coldly and remained silent for some moments. Then, with a very calm smile, he said to me “I expected something of that sort.” Going on, he said'—quoting Racine—

Mais pour être approuvés,
De semblables projets ont besoin
d'être achevés.

'To meet with approval, such plans need to have succeeded.' It was a pivotal moment and a diagnostic remark: the French admiral, a product of the pre-revolutionary French royal navy, is not taken up by the blaze of inspiration in which the Napoleonic plan was conceived; nor rushes to salute the genius of the Emperor, but remains cautious, controlled, knowing and rational, the reaction of a practised and ordered mind. Nevertheless, and inevitably, the imperial vision prevailed. Villeneuve responded to the inducements dangled before him: once promoted vice-admiral and appointed Grand Officier of the Légion d'Honneur, he became, as Decrès described him,
un homme tout nouveau
. It was, Villeneuve had told Decrès, the prospect of glory which had changed his mind. He would ‘deliver himself entire' to the project.

These were the sources of the drama that had then unfolded over the spring and summer of 1805: Napoleon's radical military vision; a French navy out of sympathy with that vision (and a Spanish navy even more so) but doing the best to fulfil the imperial orders; the British Establishment and its naval servants intent on bringing the French fleet to battle. For all sides, it was a period of acute anxiety. If you
read the file of correspondence received by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty from the captains and flag officers who were part of the command structure of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1805, the beautifully organised pages are thick with worry and trouble, with the sense of incipient failure and inadequate resources, with the desperate mismatch between the sort of coherence which the tradition expected and the realities of sea and war.

Villeneuve broke out of Toulon on 30 March 1805 but in the persistent and disturbing fog of non—or partialcommunication, Nelson missed him. His blockade had been set too loosely and Villeneuve escaped to the south along the Mediterranean coast of Spain. French spies in Paris got the news to London, where it soon appeared in the newspapers, with the added (true) detail that a combined French and Spanish fleet was bound for the West Indies. But it would take at least a month to get any such information to Nelson off Toulon. Within a week, Nelson heard that they had got out. But where to? For the best part of a month, Nelson failed to guess that Villeneuve and the Toulon fleet were heading for the Atlantic. Instead, he pursued him eastwards towards Egypt. Endlessly, besieged by worry, Nelson searched for him, or for news of him, desperate not to leave the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt unprotected, not even imagining the complexities of Napoleon's Atlantic strategy. English agents in Madrid, Cadiz, Ferrol and Cartagena scurried for news, but to no avail. ‘I wish it were in my power to furnish you with more satisfactory intelligence,' one of them wrote, ‘but the object of the Enemies Expeditions have been hitherto kept a profound Secret.' Only on 16 April did Nelson hear that Villeneuve had been seen off the southeastern tip of Spain nine days earlier, and had probably passed through the Strait of Gibraltar the next day. Nelson was horrified: ‘If this account is true, much mischief may be apprehended. It kills me, the very thought.'

Other British officers, on guard along the peripheries of the European mainland, were equally susceptible to the possibility of failure destroying their careers. Any hint of inadequacy in battle was to invite a hailstorm of loathing from a well-informed public at home. Rear-Admiral Sir John Orde had been stationed off Cape Trafalgar with a small squadron as the French Mediterranean fleet joined Gravina with the Spanish from Cadiz and set off for the Caribbean. Hugely outnumbered, Orde had made no attempt to stop them. Summoned home, in disgrace, to strike his flag, he was never employed as an admiral again and was subject to virulent loathing from the public, particularly merchants in the City of London who considered their trade put at risk by his behaviour.

The possible rewards of naval life might have been huge, but the penalties—in public humiliation if nothing else—were appalling. Even when Nelson finally guessed and then heard the truth, it took weeks for his news to reach the Admiralty. Nelson's dispatch written on 5 May from off Cape St Vincent, finally announcing that Villeneuve had left the Mediterranean, was received in London only on 3 June, more than two months after Villeneuve had left Toulon. Even then it was unclear if the French were headed for the Caribbean or Ireland. All Barham could do in London was station curtains of warships across the entire width of the western approaches of the English Channel, from Cape Clear in southwest Ireland, across to Scilly off Land's End, to Ushant off the western tip of Brittany and then down to Rochefort and Cape Finisterre at the northwest tip of Spain. With an invisible enemy, the only possible option was to wait, armed and ready. This was the received strategy, but it was one based, essentially, on a condition of ignorance.

Added to the problems of a hidden enemy were the sheer uncertainties of navigation. Great improvements had
been made in the course of the 18th century in the instruments and theories by which a ship could calculate its position at sea but still it was as much art as science. It was all very well to know the theory by which noon sun sights could establish your latitude, but they were no good when the sky remained cloudy for weeks at a time, and when maps and charts were far from the reliable documents they are today. The magnetic variation of the earth itself, which disrupts the workings of a ship's compass differently in different parts of the ocean, could only be guessed at. The log lines, which measured a ship's speed through the water, were often found to be inaccurately measured out and subject to wide operator error. Besides, all that such a line could measure was speed through the water. It could not take account of the many unknown currents in the sea by which speed over the ground was radically affected. Taking a log-line measurement when the weather was bad and the seas high was an exercise more in guesswork than in science. The navigator had to rely as much on a far older and more intuitive level of understanding of the sea—its colour, even its smell, the nature of the seabed which soundings brought up on the end of the lead line, or even the behaviour of seabirds. For a great deal of the time, Nelson's fleet had to guess as much where they were as where the enemy was.

The strain told on everyone. Nelson finally left for the West Indies on 11 May. Villeneuve was now a month ahead of him. No one in England, despite the many varied reports about enemy fleets in Ireland, off Ferrol, approaching the Channel, had any idea where either Villeneuve or Nelson had got to. On passage, Nelson began to draft a plan of the battle he hoped for, encouraging his captains and their crews to race the French across the Atlantic, urging his ships to shave two weeks off the French fleet's lead. On 4 June, he finally arrived in Carlisle Bay, Barbados
and immediately wrote to William Marsden, Secretary of the Admiralty: ‘I am anxious in the extreme to get at their 18 sail of the line.' It was, as Nelson calls it, ‘a laudable anxiety of mind', but the nervous exhaustion is palpable. Letter after letter from the Caribbean is full of this urgency and worry: ‘My heart is almost broke,' ‘the misery I am feeling', ‘all is hurry'.