29 September: Boreham on Horatio Nelson

The Hour and the Man
Never does the twenty-ninth of September return to us without our being reminded afresh of the birth and the imperishable lustre that enshrines the name of Lord Nelson. It is clear that:

Wherever the track of our British ships
Lies white on the ocean foam,
His name is sweet to our British lips
As the names of the flowers at home.
Wherever brave deeds are treasured and told,
In the tales of the days of yore;
Like jewels of price in a chain of gold
Are the name and the fame he bore.

The Personal Element
In connection with the stupendous happening that we today celebrate, as with every outstanding event in our annals, there are two distinct elements—the essentially historic and the purely personal. As a rule, the personal element fades with the passage of time, until at length it becomes a negligible quantity: it is the historic viewpoint that ultimately becomes emphatic and dominant. In the case of Trafalgar, however, a reverse principle holds. Every year less and less is said about the issues at stake in the memorable struggle, but every year more and more is said concerning the part played in the famous battle by its central hero, Horatio Nelson. The question arises; is this as it should be? Are we keeping things in their right proportion and in their true perspective when we allow the personal to wax and the national to wane? At first blush it would scarcely seem so, yet some of the most eminent authorities would justify such a course. Mr. John R. Spears, for example, has written a textbook on "Master Mariners" for the Home University Library. In his survey of the Napoleonic era he stoutly maintains that the thing best worth remembering is the magnetic personality of Nelson. He argues that "the destruction of the allied fleet, however needful it may have been, was, in a broad view, only a secondary feature of Trafalgar. The important fact is that the battle brought to an end in a blaze of glory the story of the life of a nation's hero. It was necessary that this mariner, whom his countrymen would set up as an example for all time, should die fighting afloat in the manner pleasing to the gods of his ancestors, and that he should show, as those ancestors did, that understood in his heart that it was indispensable to be brave." This is very striking: and the impression that it creates is deepened and intensified by the fact that an eminent naval commander, in lecturing in Australia recently, insisted that the greatest factor in the greatest sea fight of our history is, quite easily, the personal one.

When The World Needed Him
Nelson is fortunate is being a memory of a very select circle—the circle that embraces those illustrious men whose lifework received fitting recognition alike from their immediate contemporaries and from their remote successors. The temper of the time lent itself to the formation of an adequate conception of Nelson by men who actually saw his face and heard his voice. "There is such a universal bustle and cry about invasion," wrote Lord Radstock, some time before Trafalgar, "that no other subject will be listened to. I found London almost a desert and no good news stirring to animate it." The nation was paralysed with apprehension: and not our nation only: for the overwhelming ambition and resolute aggression of Napoleon cast a sinister gloom over the entire world. His restless and insatiable craving for universal empire stole the sleep from the eyes of all responsible statesmen in Europe. No throne was secure: no nation was safe. "Rarely," says Mahan, "has a man been more favoured than Nelson in the hour of his appearing." He burst into history just when the world needed him, and, moreover, just when the world knew that it needed him. And when, in its crowning hour, he laid down his life, the people whose hearts had for months been failing them for fear were not slow to express their unbounded gratitude and admiration. "The people of England," Southey tells us, "grieved that funeral ceremonies, public monuments and posthumous rewards were all that they could now bestow upon him whom the King, the Legislature and the nation would have alike delighted to honour, whom every tongue would have blessed, whose presence in every village through which he might have passed would have awakened the church bells, would have given the students a holiday, would have drawn children from their sports to gaze upon his face, and would have enticed old men from the chimney-corner to look upon Nelson ere they died." Nelson did not, it is true, survive the greatest of his triumphs, but he lived to find himself the idol of the populace and to receive at their hands the homage which they revelled in pouring at his feet. When he passed through Portsmouth for the last time, on his way to join his ship, the streets were so congested with the throngs of people who desired to see his face tbat the police, unable to control the crowds, were compelled to smuggle the hero through alleys, back lanes and private property in order to convey him safely to the quay. He was the darling of the nation; and succeeding generations have never shown any disposition to challenge that contemporary judgement.

A Golden Tradition
Least of all has our own generation felt disposed to regard those distant plaudits as exaggerated. Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, who is the third son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan and the grand-nephew of Lord Macaulay, declares, in one of his most recent historical works, that the Great War resulted in a heightened and intensified appreciation of the personality and prowess of Lord Nelson. In one sense, of course, the Great War made Trafalgar look ridiculous. We became so accustomed to thrilling accounts of great naval engagements in which huge battleships raced through crimson seas at express speed, annihilating their antagonists by hurling the most terrific explosives across the intervening leagues, that we could but smile at the quaint memory of those old wooden sailing ships that crawled painfully towards each other at a mile an hour, and that fought in the grip of a terrible embrace, the crews leaping from deck to deck as the grim hand-to-hand struggle proceeded. Yet if, in that one sense, the Great War made Trafalgar look ridiculous, there is another sense in which it made Nelson look sublime. His name was continually on the lips of the officers and men of the Grand Fleet: the magic of his subtle personality pervaded every quarter-deck. Mr. Trevelyan argues that, so far from his having suffered any eclipse, the titanic struggle of our own time has only made us feel, more deeply than we ever felt before, how much we owe to him. Nelson, he says, won for us, not only the memorable battles that he fought, but the unknown and unrecorded battles that he rendered superfluous and impossible. "Copenhagen," says Mr. Trevelyan, "Copenhagen, together with the Nile and Trafalgar, gave such a triple sanction to the international creed of British naval invincibility that it carried us through the nineteenth century with security unchallenged. When, in our own day, England was again in danger, these memories, graven deeply into the world's consciousness, did much to paralyse the initiative of our foes, who vaguely and intuitively felt, before a single battle was fought, that our hold on the sea, do what they would, could never be loosened." Nelson bequeathed to posterity a golden tradition: and, in the day of our need, that tradition was of greater value to us than a hundred battleships.

Brilliance of a Single Brain
Trafalgar, then, is simply another name for Nelson. The battle was to all intents and purposes won—and won by him—before a shot was fired. From the moment at which the enemy discovered the disposition of the British ships as they crept slowly into action, the result was never for a moment in doubt. As the French and Spanish officers watched the two parallel lines of ships approaching their own powerful and crescent-shaped fleet at right angles, they knew that their mighty combination was about to be cut into three distinct parts, and each part smashed separately. With every advantage in respect of the size and number of their ships, they recognised that they were doomed to irretrievable disaster. The brilliance of a single brain had already ensured their overthrow. The deathlessness of men like Nelson is more than a poetic fiction. As long as Great Britain has a navy—and even if the advocates of disarmament see all their dreams come true, it will probably be Britain's task to police the seas—the influence of Nelson will always be one of the most potent and dominant factors in its control. The realm with which he was most familiar has changed out of all recognition since his time, and the days to come must witness transformation equally sensational; but, come what may, nothing is more certain than that his name will ever be held in proud and grateful remembrance.

F W Boreham

Image: Horatio Nelson