Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (9 page)

Resolved now to press on at best speed to Egypt, Nelson dealt peremptorily with the sighting reports of the “strange ships.” His own sent to follow them kept up a stream of signals. At 5:30 a.m.
Culloden
reported that they were running, with the wind behind them. At 6:46 a.m.
Leander
signalled “strange ships are frigates,” and
Orion
repeated it to the flagship so that there could be no mistake. Four frigates made a sizeable force, likely to be part of a larger one. It was not an unreasonable guess that they might belong to the Armament. Soon after 7 a.m., however, Nelson ordered the “chasing ships” to be called back. His thoughts, which he was outlining at the time to his five captains in
Vanguard
’s cabin, admitted only two lines of decision: to go back to Sicily or make for Malta; alternatively, to race to Egypt, with the favourable wind. He did not raise, perhaps even to himself, the option of disposing the fleet in scouting formation and running down the course taken by the “strange ships” to see if they were in company with others. Captain Thomas of the
Leander
clearly could not understand and scarcely bear his superior’s refusal to follow up such an obvious pointer to the enemy’s whereabouts. At 8:29 a.m. he signalled again, “ships seen are frigates.” Nelson was unmoved.
Leander
,
Orion
and
Culloden
were obliged to rejoin the fleet which crowded on sail for Alexandria.

The episode brings to mind the exchanges between Admiral Nagumo and the aircrew of the cruiser
Tone
’s reconnaissance aircraft in the early morning of the Battle of Midway, 4 June 1942—with this difference. Then it was the admiral who was desperate to know what sort of ships the airmen had spotted, they who were slow to respond. Their first signal reported that they had sighted the enemy, their second that the enemy ships were cruisers and destroyers, no threat to Nagumo at all, only their third, sent nearly an hour after the first, that “enemy is accompanied by what appears to be a carrier,” a very serious threat indeed. Despite the differences, there is this similarity: had the commander and his reconnaissance force in each case been in tune, the enemy would have been destroyed.

Nelson might nevertheless have heeded his scouting ships had he possessed one vital piece of information: the actual date of departure of Bonaparte from Malta. The “Ragusan brig” had said Saturday, 16 June. In fact he had not left until Tuesday the 19th, and on the 22nd, when the “strange ships” were sighted, had been at sea only three days. Nelson was harder on Bonaparte’s heels than Nelson guessed; may, indeed have been only thirty miles or so behind him. That night, in the mist, the French heard bells striking and signal guns firing, which surely must have been aboard Nelson’s ships. The French Armament, however, warned by the frigates seen earlier that day, was sailing in silence, closed up tight for mutual protection. By the time day broke, Nelson had passed ahead and was over the horizon. The chance of a decisive encounter had been lost.

BACK AND FORTH

The captain of the Ragusan brig may have been mistaken; he may equally have been misunderstood. We do not know what language he spoke, perhaps Italian, perhaps Serbo-Croat, perhaps another Mediterranean tongue. As Alfred Thayer Mahan suggests in his life of Nelson, had Nelson done the interrogation himself, he might have found out more, for he was a shrewd questioner, and his intellect was sharpened by anxiety, and by constant dwelling upon the elements of the intricate problem before him; but by the time Hardy came aboard
Vanguard,
it was two hours since he had stopped the Ragusan, which was then beyond reach. Nelson, in any case, was in a fever to get forward. The wind was in his favour and over the next six days he made exceptional progress, sometimes covering 150 miles in twenty-four hours. On 28 June he had Alexandria in sight and he spent the night taking soundings off shore; the Royal Navy had few charts of the eastern Mediterranean. It was disquieting, however, that there was no sign of the Armament, and when Hardy returned in
Mutine
next morning after a passage inshore, his fears were confirmed. Hardy had failed to find the British Consul, to whom Nelson had written, and could not have done, for he was absent on leave; but the Ottoman fortress commander, who eventually appeared, told him that the French had not arrived, that the Turks were not at war with France and that the British, though they might water and store their ships, according to custom, should go away. Nelson did not linger. On the morning of Saturday, 30 June, he set sail. He had decided he had made a mistake and that the Armament had gone elsewhere, perhaps to Turkey proper. Four days later, having left Cyprus to starboard, he was in the Gulf of Antalya.

Had Nelson only contained his impatience, the French would have sailed into his hands. Twenty-five hours after he departed Alexandria, the Armament anchored to the east of the city and began to send the army ashore. This was Nelson’s second, perhaps third, even fourth near-miss. But for the gale, he might have caught Bonaparte coming out of Toulon. But for his anxiety to protect Naples, he might have devastated the Armament at Malta. But for his refusal to follow the “strange ships,” he might have slaughtered the Armament at sea on 22 June. Had he but waited a day at Alexandria, he certainly would have destroyed it, or forced its surrender, in the delta of the Nile. As it was, he was now hastening away from his quarry, while Bonaparte and a clutch of his future battle-winning marshals—Berthier, Lannes, Murat, Davout, Marmont—were being rowed ashore to take possession of Egypt, more or less at their leisure.

Nelson, by contrast, was in a frenzy. “His anxious and active mind,” wrote Captain Ball, “would not permit him to rest for a moment in the same place.” Where to go? He decided first to “stretch over to the coast of Caramania” (southern Turkey), as he later wrote to Sir William Hamilton. His conclusion, made ten days earlier, that the French were going east, seems to have left him with the conviction that, if they were not in Egypt, then they must be somewhere else in the Turkish Sultan’s dominions. He had noticed the preparations the military commander at Alexandria had been making—“the Line-of-Battle Ship . . . landing her guns,” “the Turks preparing to resist,” as he later wrote to St. Vincent and Sir William Hamilton respectively—but in the absence of the French, he must have interpreted those signs as elements of a general Ottoman alert. That, or else his premature decision to depart implies an uncharacteristic moment of mental confusion, poor analysis, general jumpiness, not traits which he normally displayed.

He arrived in the Gulf of Antalya on 4 July and, seeing nothing, turned west again, heading first to cross the track of the Armament if it were still on its way to Egypt, then steering south of Crete, briefly north towards mainland Greece, eventually direct once more for Sicily, which he reached on the 20th. Off Syracuse, where he proposed to water and take on stores, he wrote three letters on 20 July, to his wife, to Sir William Hamilton, to St. Vincent. His few short words to Lady Nelson were a
cri de coeur
: “I have not been able to find the French Fleet . . . however, no person will say that it has been for want of activity.” To Hamilton he regretted again his “want of frigates,” from which “all my misfortune has proceeded,” and made arrangements for his letters to be forwarded to the Foreign Secretary and to St. Vincent. They, of course, had no more idea of his whereabouts than he of the French. To St. Vincent, supplementing a recapitulation and justification of his wandering since the
Vanguard
’s dismasting (written on 29 June, which Captain Ball had urged him not to send), he raised again the issue of lack of frigates, “to which must be attributed my ignorance of the movements of the Enemy,” and then outlined his next plan: “to get into the mouth of the Archipelago [the Aegean], where, if the Enemy are gone to Constantinople, we shall hear of them directly; if I get no information there, to go to Cyprus, when, if they are in Syria or Egypt, I must hear of them.”

He ended, however, by retailing “a report that on the 1st of July, the French were seen off Candia [Crete], but near what part of the Island I cannot learn.” Leaving Syracuse on 24 July, his last word to Hamilton was “No Frigates!—to which has been, and may again, be attributed the loss of the French Fleet.” Frigates or not, Nelson’s luck was about to change. On 28 July, when south of the Greek mainland, he sent the
Culloden
into the Gulf of Coron (modern Messenia, the large western inlet into the Peloponnese), from which he was brought news that “the Enemy’s Fleet had been seen steering to the S.E. from Candia about four weeks before.” The news came from the Turkish governor, who had heard, from Constantinople, that the French were in Egypt.
Culloden
also brought in a French brig, which hailed from Limassol in Cyprus and endorsed the Turkish governor’s report. It was further confirmed by the master of a merchantman stopped by the
Alexander
. Nelson’s fleet had by now stopped 41 merchant vessels during its toing and froing and would have stopped more had not the French admiral captured any stray ship he found in the Armament’s path, no doubt a fruitful counter-intelligence measure.

The visit to the Gulf of Coron effectively ended the intelligence famine. Nelson now had good reason for believing that Bonaparte was not at Corfu, the most likely destination had he headed for Greece, was not going to Constantinople and was not on the south coast of Turkey, nor in Cyprus. The Armament might possibly have landed in Syria, a term that contemporaneously embraced modern Israel and Lebanon as well, but if so, its ships would be within easy sailing distance of Alexandria and would certainly be heard of there. For Alexandria, on 29 July, he accordingly made all sail and during the next few days achieved very rapid passages; in the 24 hours of 31 July the fleet covered 161 miles, at an average speed of nearly eight knots, very fast going for line-of-battle ships.

Landfall on 1 August brought a brief repetition of the disappointment of 30 June. The harbour was empty. A short eastward cast along the coast set fears at rest. At 2:30 in the afternoon,
Goliath
’s signal midshipman, aloft in the foremast, spotted a crowd of masts in Aboukir Bay. Desperate to be first with the news, he slid to the deck to tell his captain but then broke a halyard as he made his flag hoist to
Vanguard.
So it was
Zealous
that got the signal first to Nelson: “Sixteen sail of the line at anchor bearing East by South.”

The report was not quite accurate. Admiral Brueys commanded 13 line-of-battle ships, but also four frigates, two brigs, two bomb vessels and a collection of smaller gunboats. It was the thirteen heavy ships that mattered, the enormous 120-gun
L’Orient,
three 80s and nine 74s. They were variously armed, one with 18-pounders instead of 32-pounders, and some were old, as much as fifty years old, and less strongly built than the British. Still,
Victory,
which was to be Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, was then forty years old. Neither age nor even weight of metal counted really among the decisive features. Seamanship, ship-handling and bloody-mindedness did. The British were masters of their craft, to a degree that the relatively inexperienced French, officers and men alike, were not; the code of revolutionary correctness had robbed the French navy of many good officers, conscription to the army of much of its manpower. The diet of victory on land in particular had sapped the French navy’s will to win. Victory at sea was not essential to France. It was crucial to the British as a people and to the Royal Navy as a service.

Bonaparte, as Sir Arthur Bryant, the great popular historian of Britain’s role in the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, was to remark, never saw and therefore could not imagine “the staggering destructive power of a British ship of the line in action.” The Royal Navy had been a ferocious instrument of war ever since the seventeenth century. Its defeat in the American War of Independence, however, had infused it with a ruthless killer instinct. It had been outraged by the French and Spanish seizure in 1780–81 of command of the sea, its birthright, as it saw it, and had not relented since the resumption of hostilities in 1793 in the determination to humble its enemies. Bonaparte, the mastermind of the Egyptian expedition, was now far from the fleet, winning new victories over feeble enemies in the interior of Egypt.* Had he been nearer, he might have sent his fleet away, to be out of danger, perhaps at Corfu, from which it could have been recalled quickly at need, and where it would have constituted a threat to Nelson’s lines of communication. The concept, however, of a “fleet in being,” affecting events by doing nothing, may have been alien to Bonaparte’s active and aggressive mind. He therefore ordered Brueys to remain in Egyptian waters but to put the fleet under the guns of Alexandria. It was then anchored in Marabout Bay, where the landings had been staged, a clearly unsatisfactory roadstead. Alexandria, however, was a difficult harbour, shallow and easily blocked. It was therefore eventually decided to transfer the ships to Aboukir Bay, nine miles to the east.

Brueys had anchored his ships in a position he thought made a successful attack by the British—which he expected—impossible. They lay in a shallow crescent formation, bows on to Aboukir Castle with Aboukir (Bequières) Island to starboard and shoal water between them and the land to port. They could be approached from only two directions: from below Aboukir Island, though the northerly wind denied the British that course; or through the gap between the island and the castle. Brueys had apparently judged the gap impracticable, believing that, even if negotiated, the water beyond was too shallow for the British to pass on either side of his ships; that is, between his line and Aboukir Island or between his line and the shoreward shoals. He had strengthened his defences by having cables run between most of his ships, which were about 175 yards apart, and by ordering springs to be attached to their anchor cables; springs, ropes taken to the capstan, could be tightened to swing the ship by the bow or stern, so that they were manoeuvrable even though at anchor. Not all the French captains, however, had attached springs by the time the battle began.