e heard from Beaulieu, through
the minister, that the Austrians had been repulsed at Montenotte; and
on the 16th he wrote to Collingwood that this reverse had been
inflicted by the aid of those who slipped by his ships. On the 18th
news had reached him of the affairs at Millesimo and Dego, as well as
of further disasters; for on that day he wrote to the Duke of Clarence
that the Austrians had taken position between Novi and Alessandria,
with headquarters at Acqui. Their loss he gave as ten thousand. "Had
the general's concerted time and plan been attended to," he repeats,
"I again assert, none of the enemy could have escaped on the night of
the 10th. By what has followed, the disasters commenced from the
retreat of those troops."

There now remained, not the stirring employment of accompanying and
supporting a victorious advance, but only the subordinate, though most
essential, duty of impeding the communications of the enemy, upon
which to a great extent must depend the issues on unseen and distant
fields of war. To this Nelson's attention had already been turned, as
one of the most important functions intrusted to him, even were the
allies successful, and its difficulties had been impressed upon him by
the experience of the previous year. But since then the conditions had
become far more onerous. The defeat of the Austrians not only left
Vado Bay definitively in the power of the French, but enabled the
latter to push their control up to the very walls of Genoa, where they
shortly established a battery and depot on the shore, at St. Pierre d'
Arena, within three hundred yards of the mole. Thus the whole western
Riviera, from the French border, was in possession of the enemy, who
had also throughout the previous year so multiplied and strengthened
the local defences, that, to use Nelson's own words, "they have
batteries from one end of the coast to the other, within shot of each
other." Such were the means, also, by which Napoleon, the true
originator of this scheme for securing these communications, insured
the concentration of the flotilla at Boulogne, eight or ten years
later, without serious molestation from the British Navy.

It may not unnaturally cause some surprise that, with the urgent need
Nelson had felt the year before for small armed vessels, to control
the coastwise movements of the enemy, upon which so much then
depended, no serious effort had been made to attach a flotilla of that
kind to the fleet. Th