ight in principle pass through
the intervals in the enemy's line without cutting off any part of
it. In principle, moreover, the new attack was a parallel attack in
line abreast or in line of bearing, whereas the old attack was a
perpendicular or oblique attack in line ahead.

Nothing perhaps in naval literature is more remarkable than the fact
that this fundamental difference is never insisted on, or even, it may
be said, so much as recognised. Whenever we read of a movement for
breaking the line in this period it is almost always accompanied with
remarks which assume that Rodney's manoeuvre is intended and not
Howe's. Probably it is Nelson who is to blame. At Trafalgar, after
carefully elaborating an attack based on Howe's method of line
abreast, he delivered it in line ahead, as though he had intended to
use Rodney's method. His reasons were sound enough, as will be seen
later. But as a piece of scientific tactics it was as though an
engineer besieging a fortress, instead of drawing his lines of
approach diagonally, were to make them at right angles to the
ditch. When the greatest of the admirals apparently (but only
apparently) confused the two antagonistic conceptions of breaking the
line, there is much excuse for civilian writers being confused in
fact.

The real interest of the matter, however, is to inquire, firstly, by
what process of thought Howe in his second code discarded Rodney's
manoeuvre as the primary meaning of his signal after having adopted it
in his first, and, secondly, how and to what end did he arrive at his
own method.

On the first point there can be little doubt. Sir Charles H. Knowles
gives us to understand that Howe still had Hoste's Treatise at his
elbow, and with Hoste for his mentor we may be sure that, in common
with other tactical students of his time, he soon convinced himself
that Rodney's manoeuvre was usually dangerous and always
imperfect. Knowles himself in his old age, though a devout admirer of
Rodney, denounced it in language of characteristic violence, and
maintained to the last that Rodney never intended it, as every one now
agrees was the truth. Nelson presumably also approved Howe's cardinal
improvement, or even in his most impulsive mood he would hardly have
called him 'the first and greatest sea officer the world has ever
produced.'[5]

As to the second point--the fundamental intention of the new
manoeuvre--we get again a valuable hint from Knowles. Upon his second