Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (10 page)

Nevertheless, the French position was formidable enough to deter a cautious enemy; but the British were not cautions, nor were they unobservant. Foley, captain of
Goliath,
had one of the only two charts of the coast in the fleet, and a good one; it showed the depths of water right up to the shoreline.
¹³
More important, Foley made a snap judgement about the way the French were anchored. Nelson himself would shortly come to the same conclusion, saying to Berry, his flag captain in
Vanguard,
“where there was room for an enemy’s ship to swing, there was room for one of ours to anchor.”
¹⁴
Foley saw that instantly as he passed the gap between the castle and the shoals and so pointed
Goliath
inshore, to pass round the
Guerrier
at the head of Brueys’ line, and so down the inside of the anchored enemy.

Foley had intended to anchor alongside
Guerrier,
into which he fired as he rounded her bow, but his crew ran out too much cable.
Goliath
ended up farther down the French line, opposite
Conquérant
and
Spartiate.
The mistake did not really matter, for the British ships next astern were following fast,
Zealous, Audacious, Orion
and
Theseus.
They also joined in the cannonade against
Guerrier
—which collected fire from all of them as they passed by and was quickly dismasted—while
Theseus
positioned herself to fire into both
Spartiate
and
Aquilon;
Miller of
Theseus
was a New Yorker, one of two North American Loyalists among Nelson’s captains.

The head of the French line was now solidly engaged by anchored opponents.
Vanguard,
which was following
Theseus,
took a different course, steering to pass on the seaward rather than inshore side of the French and to anchor opposite
Spartiate,
which was thus taken between two fires.
Minotaur
engaged
Aquilon,
also caught between two fires, while
Defence
stopped opposite
Peuple Souverain,
which was being fired into by
Orion
on the other side.

The centre of the French line was composed of the heaviest ships,
Franklin,
80 guns,
L’Orient,
120, and
Tonnant,
80; the other 80,
Guillaume Tell,
was some distance away, third from rear. Darkness had fallen as the centre’s British opponents began to appear, first
Majestic,
which was mishandled and ended up opposite another 74 farther down, then
Bellerophon,
then
Alexander,
then
Swiftsure.
The last two, positioning themselves skilfully in the gaps astern of
Franklin
and
L’Orient
respectively, were able to do serious damage without suffering heavily themselves.
Bellerophon,
coming alongside
L’Orient,
suffered terrible damage and loss by choosing to engage the heaviest ship present. In an hour of fighting she lost her main and mizzen masts, while her foremast also was damaged. By ten o’clock her ordeal began to abate as fire from
Swiftsure
and
Alexander
raked the French flagship from bow and stern. They did terrible slaughter; Admiral Brueys, badly wounded, insisted on remaining on deck until struck by a shot that killed him. Below decks the spaces were full of wounded, including Captain Casabianca’s young son. They were also cluttered by flammable stores, Lieutenant Webley, of
Zealous,
noted when
L’Orient
took fire.
Swiftsure
’s captain ordered his crew to fire into the seat of the blaze to stop the French crew from fighting the flames. Soon it became obvious that
L’Orient
’s magazine would be set off, and both her British and French neighbours cut their anchor cables to reach what was hoped to be a safe distance.
Alexander
drifted off, so did
Tonnant, Heureux
and
Mercure,
either to anchor again or to ground in shallow water.
Swiftsure,
close ahead of
L’Orient,
was judged by its captain to be safer where it was; he calculated that the coming explosion would pass over his ship.

So it did; the enormous detonation sent the debris of broken timbers, masts, cordage and bodies hundreds of feet into the air, to rain down detritus into the waters of the bay for a mile around, while the noise, heard in Alexandria nine miles away, temporarily brought the battle to a stop. When it resumed, after a quarter of an hour, the scene of battle had been decisively altered. The disappearance of
L’Orient
and the shift of
Tonnant,
which had drifted dismasted towards the rear, left a large gap in the middle of the French line, widened by the falling away of
Heureux
and
Mercure,
which had cut their cables also and gone aground, though their crews continued to serve the guns. The French were thus in almost total disarray, with their admiral dead, flagship destroyed and surviving ships separated into two groups. In the forward group,
Guerrier,
whose crew had fought heroically while her captain had refused to surrender twenty times, at last struck after three hours, dismasted and devastated.
Conquérant,
after another valiant passage of resistance, had also at last struck.
Spartiate,
third in line, had surrendered after two hours, the first French ship to give up, but with 200 dead and wounded aboard and the survivors pumping to keep the ship afloat.
Aquilon
surrendered a little later, with 87 dead aboard and 213 wounded.
Peuple Souverain,
fifth in the order of battle, had drifted out of the line, perhaps because her cables had been severed by gunfire.
Franklin,
still in line, had ceased to fight after being set on fire four times, the last by burning debris from the explosion of
L’Orient.
By early in the morning of 2 August, therefore, the French fleet consisted of a shattered and defeated van, a central void and a rear in disarray.
Franklin,
anchored ahead of
L’Orient
’s original position, did recommence fire after the great explosion but was swiftly brought to surrender. Aft of the gap, some of the French ships continued resistance for several hours,
Hereux
and
Mercure,
which had gone aground after cutting their cables, from inshore. Admiral Villeneuve, in
Guillaume Tell,
eventually decided, however, that it was his duty to escape, cut his cable and sailed out of the bay, followed by
Généreux
and the frigates
Justice
and
Diane.
He left behind the dismasted
Tonnant
and
Timoléon,
which, with heroic but pointless obstinacy, continued to work their guns into the afternoon of 2 August.
Tonnant
eventually hauled down her colours but
Timoléon
’s crew left theirs flying when they set fire to the ship and rowed ashore to escape capture.

Nelson had won a crushing victory, in its completeness never exceeded during the days of sailing-ship warfare and equalled in naval history only by Japan’s annihilation of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Of the enemy’s thirteen line-of-battle ships, two had escaped, but two had blown up and the other nine had been captured in action or driven ashore. Nelson had lost none of his ships.
Culloden
, which had grounded during the approach, to the fire-eating Troubridge’s fury, had been floated off;
Bellerophon
and
Majestic,
the hardest hit, survived. Nelson’s casualties—he himself had suffered a nasty scalp wound early on—numbered 208 killed and 677 wounded. The French, by contrast, had surrendered more than a thousand wounded while their dead came to several thousand, a thousand in
L’Orient
alone.
¹⁵

It was the nature of the battle that determined the scale of the slaughter; ships anchored broadside to broadside, firing into each other at point-blank range, caused ghastly carnage among their crews. Engagements in the open sea, when ships had the freedom to manoeuvre, were much less costly in human life. Yet at Copenhagen, a battle Nelson was to fight in almost identical circumstances in 1801, Danish casualties were only 476 killed, 559 wounded. A killer instinct was at work at the Nile, a determination among the British to prevail, among the French not to be overcome.

What animated the French is the harder to estimate; revolutionary fervour no doubt, certainly Bonapartist inspiration, perhaps also the determination not to return to the traditional state of inferiority prevailing before their naval renaissance in the American War of Independence. Analysis of the British mood is more straightforward. Victory was a way of life for the Nelsonian sailor. He believed all races inferior to his own, and expected to beat them, and would fight unremittingly to ensure that he did. Moreover, the fleet had been led a merry dance by Brueys for nearly three months. Cornered at last, he and his sailors became the object of their enemy’s pent-up frustration.

No one in Nelson’s fleet had been more frustrated than Nelson himself, sleeping badly, eating little, railing in every letter he wrote against the bad luck which had him in its grip. Want of frigates, want of help from those he believed owed it him, were his constant themes. He also came to believe that the fates were against him, that he had consistently made the right choices, but that some malign spirit had intervened to disappoint his best intentions. In his letter to St. Vincent, composed at the nadir of the campaign, the letter Captain Ball had urged him not to send, he had itemised his setbacks. It was written off Alexandria during his first visit, when he found the harbour empty.

The only objection I can fancy to be stated is, “you should not have gone such a long voyage without more certain information of the Enemy’s destination”: my answer is ready—who was I to get it from? The Government of Naples and Sicily either knew not or kept me in ignorance. Was I to wait patiently till I heard certain accounts? If Egypt was their object, before I could hear of them they would have been in India. To do nothing, I felt, was disgraceful: therefore I made use of my understanding, and by it I ought to stand or fall. I am before your Lordship’s judgment (which in the present case I feel is the Tribunal of my Country), and if, under all circumstances, it is decided I am wrong, I ought, for the sake of our Country, to be superseded; for, at this moment, when I know the French are not in Alexandria, I hold the same opinion as off Cape Passaro (south-east point of Sicily,
21–22 June)—viz; that under all circumstances I was right in steering for Alexandria, and by that opinion I must stand or fall.
¹⁶

It is almost impossible not to sympathise with Nelson’s analysis of his own decisions and actions. He made mistakes during his seventy-three days of chase, between the great storm of 18 May and his bringing of Brueys to battle on 1 August, notably in deciding not to chase the French frigates sighted off Sicily on 22 June and in not waiting off Alexandria on the 29th when the signs were that the Turks expected trouble; had he then reined in his impatience for twenty-four hours, he would have won what might have been the most decisive naval battle in history. On the other hand, as an essay in pure intelligence operations by a commander on the spot, Nelson’s Nile campaign is difficult to fault. The restraints under which he worked are clear to enumerate: no reconnaissance force (“want of frigates”), no means of communication with land-based sources of information except by going to get it himself, no reassurance that any such information gleaned was reliable, even from friendly sources (Hamilton’s and Acton’s economy with the truth should be remembered), no access to the central intelligence resources of his own home base (three to five weeks’ delay in communication between the Mediterranean and London in the inward direction, therefore twice that two-way), no certain home intelligence even if sent. Other restraints were an active disinformation campaign conducted by the enemy (manipulation of the official press) and energetic denial of local sources of intelligence (Brueys’ commandeering of all merchant shipping encountered during the voyage to Alexandria).

Nelson had to work, therefore, by optimising local intelligence acquisitions (particularly the interrogation of Turkish officials in the Peloponnese and merchant captains off Crete after his first passage to Alexandria), which were offset by misinformation (the report that the French had left Malta three days earlier than was the case) and by his own “understanding.”

Can we reconstruct the picture of the strategic situation Nelson must have formed in his mind once he knew that Bonaparte had sailed from Toulon after the great storm of 18 May? He early and correctly discarded the idea that Bonaparte was making for Spain, to attack Portugal, or sailing out of the Mediterranean to invade Ireland (the presence of St. Vincent’s fleet at Gibraltar nullified that threat in any case). He therefore had to picture where Bonaparte might land his army once he was certain that he was heading eastward. There were really only three destinations. The Mediterranean is not one but two seas, separated from each other by the Sicilian–Tunisian narrows, where it is only 200 miles wide. In the political circumstances of 1798, the only objectives worthwhile to the French west of the narrows were Sicily itself and its parent kingdom of Naples; the capture of Malta was an alternative aim, but only as a preliminary to a descent on Sicily/Naples. East of the narrows the objectives widened, but not irreducibly. The dead end of the Adriatic could be discounted. Its waters were already controlled either by the French, or by Austria, with which France was not at war, or by Turkey, which was not an enemy.

The rest of the eastern Mediterranean was also Turkish and it might be, as Nelson calculated, possible that the French Republic, despite a historic alliance with the Ottoman emperor, had decided to invade his territory, not to overthrow his rule but to strike through his lands against British interests farther to the east. One route, if the French were to pass by the Dardanelles to his capital at Constantinople, lay across Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. The other, via Alexandria, gave on to the Red Sea and so to the Indian Ocean from another direction. In either case, Britain’s rich possessions in the Indian sub-continent were the objective.