In defending his failure to tack sooner to Villeneuve's relief, he says, 'Au commencement du combat, la colonne du Nord [_i.e._ Nelson's] se dirigea sur l'avant-garde qui engagea avec elle pendant quarante minutes.'[36] In partial corroboration of this there is the statement in the log of the Temeraire, the ship that was immediately behind Nelson, that she opened her fire on the Santisima Trinidad and the two ships ahead of her; that is, she engaged the ships ahead of where Nelson broke the line, so that Captain Harvey as well as Dumanoir may have believed that Nelson intended his real attack to be on 'the end of the line.' In the face of these facts it is impossible to say categorically that Nelson intended nothing but a feint on the van.

It is equally impossible to say he intended a real attack.

The point perhaps can never be decided with absolute certainty, but it is this very uncertainty that brings out the true merit and the real lesson of Nelson's attack.

As we now may gather from his captains' opinions, its true merit was not that he threw his whole fleet on part of a superior enemy--that was a commonplace in tactics.

It was not concentration on the rear, for that also was old; and what is more, as the attack was delivered, so far from Nelson concentrating, he boldly, almost recklessly, exposed himself for a strategical object to what should have been an overwhelming concentration on the leading ships of his two columns.