s. By means of a minor
cruiser centre at the Channel Islands, the Downs and Ushant concentrations
could rapidly cohere. Similarly the Cadiz concentration was linked up with
that of Ushant at Finisterre, and but for personal friction and repulsion,
the cohesion between the Mediterranean and Cadiz concentrations would have
been equally strong. Finally, there was a masterly provision made for all
the concentrations to condense into one great mass at the crucial point off
Ushant before by any calculable chance a hostile mass could gather there.

For Napoleon's best admirals, "who knew the craft of the sea," the British
fleet thus disposed was in a state of concentration that nothing but a
stroke of luck beyond the limit of sober calculation could break. Decres
and Bruix had no doubt of it, and the knowledge overpowered Villeneuve when
the crisis came. After he had carried the concentration which Napoleon had
planned so far as to have united three divisions in Ferrol, he knew that
the outlying sections of our Western Squadron had disappeared from before
Ferrol and Rochefort. In his eyes, as well as those of the British
Admiralty, this squadron, in spite of its dispersal in the Bay of Biscay,
had always been in a state of concentration. It was not this which caused
his heart to fail. It was the news that Nelson had reappeared at Gibraltar,
and had been seen steering northward. It meant for him that the whole of
his enemy's European fleet was in a state of concentration. "Their
concentration of force," he afterwards wrote, "was at the moment more
serious than in any previous disposition, and such that they were in a
position to meet in superiority the combined forces of Brest and Ferrol,"
and for that reason, he explained, he had given up the game as lost. But to
Napoleon's unpractised eye it was impossible to see what it was he had to
deal with. Measuring the elasticity of the British naval distribution by
the comparatively cumbrous and restricted mobility of armies, he saw it as
a rash and unwarlike dispersal. Its looseness seemed to indicate so great a
tenderness for the distant objectives that lay open to his scattered
squadrons, that he believed by a show of sporadic action he could further
disperse our fleet, and then by a close concentration crush the essential
part in detail. It was a clear case of the enemy's dispersal forcing us to
adopt the loosest concentration, and of our comparative dispersal tempting
the enemy to