ABSTRACT
The army was ready for battle. But before Abercromby could take it to war it had still one lesson to learn: the opposed landing. Many of his officers knew the difficulties. Lord Dalhousie, for one, had taken part in three landing operations in the past eighteen months, and every one of them had been botched. On the Dutch coast in 1799 Admiral Mitchell had thrown the troops on to the beach without order, mingling battalions and even brigades so that as the line was forming to meet a possible counter-attack the men were running up and down the sand looking for their units. At Belle Ile the orders had changed with every contradictory report of the enemy's strength. And at Cadiz General Doyle had described the abortive landing attempt as 'most sadly bitched'. 1
Cadiz was the worst; and the naval commander, Lord Keith, whose incompetence there had appalled senior officers in both services, was still with the expedition. 'It is not to be described', General Moore told his father, 'the bad management and confusion which attended the assembling of the boats.' Dalhousie deplored Keith's want of method and arrangement; he had collected a useless staff in the flagship, and took all the detail on his own incapable shoulders. The future Lord Collingwood would have endorsed this judgement, for about this time he judged that Keith 'always has about him a set of very dull men, very incompetent to the aid a Commander-in-Chief needs'. There was a shortage of boats to land the first wave; and while the troops were being transferred from the ships Keith stormed up and down on the deck of the Foudroyant cursing, blaming, and talking 'incoherent nonsense' in his Doric accents, but doing nothing to sort out the muddle.
