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.
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.
Sicily/Naples (with Malta as a subordinate target); Constantinople; Egypt: those were the three destinations which Nelson had to juggle in his mind. By 22 June, when he knew that the French had taken Malta but passed on, he had convinced himself that Bonaparte’s point of disembarkation must be Egypt. Sicily/Naples required a retrogression, which the winds and the intelligence had argued against. Constantinople was too roundabout a route to the Indian sub-continent. From Alexandria, however, the path stretched forward. After the conference with his captains aboard Vanguard on 22 June, he knew that he would find the French fleet in Egypt, and he was right. Only contingencies, and two misjudgements, denied him the decisive fruit of his intelligence assessment.
Nelson’s chase to the Nile compares well with another chase in Mediterranean waters 116 years later, when the French and British Mediterranean fleets tried to bring the German battlecruiser Goeben and its escorting cruiser Breslau to action and allowed both to escape to the Turks in Constantinople. Technology had, over a century, altered the conditions of chase greatly to the pursuers’ advantage, allowing intelligence to be passed almost instantaneously, always supposing it was accurate, which, in 1914, proved to be scarcely more so than in 1798, and discounting, too, unhelpful intervention by admiralties. The speed of pursuit had greatly increased, tripling from about 8 to over 24 knots. On the other hand, the need to refuel, often at a few days’ interval, tied ships to ports or to rendezvous with coalers, limiting their freedom of action to a degree which Nelson, taking his means of motion from the wind, would have found frustrating. Even allowing for the tendency of winds to fail or blow in the wrong direction, sailing-ship fleets had an operational autonomy not to be regained by automotive navies until the development of nuclear power.
Admiral Souchon, commanding Goeben and Breslau, had been in the Mediterranean since 1912, using Austrian Adriatic ports as his friendly bases and otherwise resupplying at Italian or Spanish ports. Early on 4 August 1914, Souchon bombarded the French North African ports of Philippeville and Bône, doing little damage but reminding Lapeyrène, the French Mediterranean commander, that he had the ability to interrupt the transport of the XIX Army Corps from Algeria to France. Souchon then made off for the Straits of Messina (where Nelson had missed Brueys’ fleet in June 1798), intending to coal. En route he encountered the main elements of the British Mediterranean fleet, the battlecruisers Indefatigable and Indomitable. Their orders were to close the Straits of Gibraltar to hostile ships, as pressing a concern to the British government in 1914 as it had been when Ireland was under threat of invasion by the Toulon Armament in 1798.
Captain Kennedy, the battlecruiser squadron commander, at once reversed course but, since Britain was not yet at war with Germany (or would not be until midnight), kept his distance. Souchon cracked on all speed and shook Kennedy off. As the British ships had made 28 knots on trials, and Goeben was limited by boiler defects to 24 or even 22 knots, that was not a creditable outcome.
It was even less creditable that, with Souchon coaling at Messina in the twenty-four hours’ grace custom allowed (what Nelson had got at Alexandria on his first visit in June 1798), the commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Berkeley Milne, so disposed his forces as to allow Souchon a bolt hole. With a correct but over-scrupulous regard for Italian neutrality, he kept his ships away from the Strait of Messina, deploying them west of Sicily against a resumption of their interference with the French troop convoys. He recognised that Souchon might turn in the other direction, to join the Austrian fleet in the Adriatic, but counted on a subordinate squadron, Admiral Ernest Troubridge’s four armoured cruisers, currently off the west coast of Greece, to block a move in that direction; unfortunately, he passed on to Troubridge (a descendant of Nelson’s Troubridge) an Admiralty warning not to attack a “superior force.”
The Admiralty, which in this case was synonymous with its political chief, Winston Churchill, meant that Milne’s fleet should not engage the dreadnoughts of Austria or Italy, the latter a signatory of the Austro-German-Italian Triple Alliance (from which it was not yet disengaged). Milne, and so Troubridge, unfortunately took the signal to mean that they should fight shy of the Goeben, a very powerful unit in its own right. As a result, Troubridge delegated the duty of following Goeben first to the light cruiserGloucester—which was hopelessly outgunned, though it bravely attacked all the same—then to another light cruiser, Dublin, which failed to find the Germans. Troubridge had a clear picture of Souchon’s options: he knew, from Gloucester, that Souchon was steaming towards Greece and the Aegean; he calculated, correctly, that the Germans would either continue on that course or turn tack towards the Adriatic and junction with the Austrians. Worried that his obsolete armoured cruisers might meet and be outgunned by Goeben,Troubridge called off the chase and steered away.
It was a disastrous misjudgement; the consequences were heightened by further misleading signals from the Admiralty and more bad decisions by Milne. Although on the night of 6 August he learnt that the French were now organised to prevent any attack by Souchon on the troop convoys, so freeing him to crack on all speed after the enemy, he decided to coal Indomitable in Malta. While there, he heard from the British naval attaché in Greece on 8 August that Souchon was already in the Aegean (where he, too, was coaling). That gave him the chance to make up lost ground. Almost simultaneously, however, a signal arrived from the Admiralty stating that Austria had declared war on Britain; the signal was wrong: Austria would not do so until the 12th. Milne accordingly decided that the priority was to guard the exit from the Adriatic, by which Austrian dreadnoughts could enter the Mediterranean, and turned back. A further passage of order, counter-order and misinformation from the Admiralty ensued. It was not until 9 August that Milne got clear instructions “to chase the Goeben which passed Cape Matapan [southern Greece] on the 7th steering north-east.”
Shades of 22 June 1798, when Nelson was misinformed by three days of the date of Bonaparte’s departure from Malta. Nelson had then, all the same, pressed forward at best possible speed. Milne, toying with the possibilities that Souchon might have doubled back to renew his attacks on the French North African ports, to enter the Adriatic, to make for Gibraltar or even to raid Alexandria and the Suez Canal, did not accelerate. As a result, Souchon enjoyed sixty trouble-free hours in the Aegean and eventually anchored in the mouth of the Dardanelles on 10 August. Milne, believing that the Dardanelles was mined against the passage of any warship, was subsequently astounded to learn that the Goeben and Breslau had been conducted by the Turks to Constantinople where, by a diplomatic device, they would become units of the Turkish navy and the agency by which the Ottoman empire was brought into the war on Germany and Austria’s side.17
By strict comparison, the management of the chase to the Nile was a superior, even if more protracted and intermittent, exercise in the use of intelligence than the pursuit of Souchon. The absence of intervention by the Admiralty, which in 1914 twice seriously misled commanders on the spot, was a positive advantage; Nelson was not bothered by London or by intermediate authorities and, though he made his own mistakes, was spared the misjudgements of others. The Admiralty of 1914, although having available to it information in quantities and of an accuracy denied to eighteenth-century governments, together with the means to communicate with subordinates almost instantaneously, by wireless, instead of at a delay of weeks by courier or sailing despatch vessel, first sent Milne an ambiguous order—to avoid contact with a superior force which deflected him from engaging Goeben when he could have done so—then wrongly informed him that Austria had entered the war, when it was not to do so for another five days, so turning his back towards the Adriatic when he should have been making best speed into the Aegean.
Milne also seems to have lacked Nelson’s ruthless ability to stick to the main issue. By 22 June 1798, when he knew of Bonaparte’s capture of Malta and departure for another destination, Nelson discounted every other consideration that had distracted him thus far—Spain? Portugal? Ireland?—and decided, correctly, that the enemy was heading for Alexandria. His reasoning was that Egypt, and beyond it India, was the object of the highest strategic value and an intention to land the army there the only explanation of the voyage of the Toulon Armament to the central Mediterranean. Milne, by contrast, after having lost the Goeben, continued to confuse his thinking with the possibilities of the Adriatic, the French troop convoys and Egypt as well as the Aegean. He was a man in a muddle which, after 22 June, Nelson never was. Nelson’s failure to find Bonaparte in Egypt the first time caused him acute anxiety but not doubt of his reasoning. Milne appears not to have thought rigorously at all.
The Nile campaign demonstrates that, to Nelson’s many other qualities, which included inspirational powers of leadership, lightning tactical verve, ruthless determination in battle, incisive strategic grasp and a revolutionary capacity for operational innovation, all combined with complete disregard for his own personal safety in any circumstances, must be added the abilities of a first-class intelligence analyst. Few dispute that Nelson was the greatest admiral who ever lived. The range and depth of his powers suggests that he would have dominated in any age.