There are signs that during the later years of the war a very dangerous misunderstanding of his teaching had been growing up in the service.

In days when there was practically no higher instruction in the theory of tactics, it was easy for officers to forget how much prolonged and patient study had enabled Nelson to handle his fleets with the freedom he did; and the tendency was to believe that his successes could be indefinitely repeated by mere daring and vehemence of attack.

The seed was sown immediately after the battle and by Collingwood himself.

'It was a severe action,' he wrote to Admiral Parker on November 1, 'no dodging or manoeuvring.' And again on December 16, to Admiral Pasley, 'Lord Nelson determined to substitute for exact order an impetuous attack in two distinct bodies.' Collingwood of course with all his limitations knew well enough it was not a mere absence of manoeuvring that had won the victory.

In the same letter he had said that although Nelson succeeded, as it were, by enchantment, it was all the effect of system and nice combination.' Yet such phrases as he and others employed to describe the headlong attack, taken from their context and repeated from mouth to mouth, would soon have raised a false impression that many men were only too ready to receive.