First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [74]
This sorry tale was roughly debated in the House of Commons and, following severe criticism of the Admiralty, in a series of courts-martial which, with the irreproachable logic of men in uniform, punished Mathews, the man who fought, but acquitted Lestock, the man who did not. Mathews was condemned and dismissed from the service (on the ground of his having signaled for “line of battle” while by his own action making preservation of the line impossible), whereas Lestock, on his claim of obedience to signals, was held blameless.
At this point we must meet the paralyzing dragon known as Fighting Instructions, a tyrannical document that required each ship of the line to follow each other at a cable’s length (200 yards) and to engage its opposite number of the enemy’s line, van for van, center for center and rear for rear, and never to leave the line to do otherwise. The rule, called “line ahead,” was intended to prevent the confusion called a měleé, in which individual ships might come under the fire of their fellows, and to give a section of the line, if closely supported by the one next astern, a chance of destroying the enemy’s section opposite. Fighting Instructions was issued during the first Dutch wars under the regime of Oliver Cromwell, whose autocratic mentality it certainly reflected, although the instructions have also been attributed to that poor creature James I, who would not seem to have had the character to conceive a document of such intransigence. Because individual captains of the time had formerly used their own tactics, often resulting in unmanageable confusion, the Admiralty issued the Fighting Instructions to give a fleet greater effect by requiring its ships to act in concert under signaled orders of the commanding officer and prohibiting action on personal initiative. In general, the result did make for greater efficiency in combat, though in particular instances—as in Admiral Graves’s action in the crucial Battle of Chesapeake Bay preceding Yorktown—it could cause disaster by persuading a too submissive captain to stick by the rule when crisis in a situation could better have been met by a course determined by the particular circumstances. As deviations from the rule were always reported by some disgruntled officer and tried by a court-martial, the Instructions naturally reduced, if not destroyed, initiative except when a captain of strong self-confidence would act to take advantage of the unexpected. Action of this kind was not infrequent, even though no people so much as the British preferred to stay wedded to the way things had always been done before. In allowing no room for the unexpected that lies in wait in the waywardness of men, not to mention the waywardness of winds and ocean, Fighting Instructions was a concept of military rigidity that must forever amaze the layman.
Whether Lestock at Toulon held back from the rear of the battle line out of malice toward his commander, or whether, as he claimed at the subsequent court-martial, he had put on all possible sail but could not make up the distance, was not adjudicated. To the charge that he failed to attack later when he might have done so, he used the technicalities of the Fighting Instructions as a defense, saying that the signal for line ahead was flying at the same time as the signal to engage and that he could not leave the line to fight without disobeying the signal to form line.
As the core of naval battle, line ahead was conditioned by the structure of the ships themselves, whose main armament necessarily fired broadside. The line was necessary because it was the only formation that allowed all ships of a squadron to turn with beam facing the enemy and at the same time ensure that no one of its own would come between gun and target. The law of line ahead conditioned a battle of formal movements as of some massive minuet played upon the sea to the music of gunfire. The warships advanced, bowed and retreated while drums beat a tattoo summoning gun crews to their