On the one hand, many senior officers were content to be guided by the shining Victorian lodestar of chivalry, with its quixotic approach to combat. There was much more to Nelson than merely ‘engaging the enemy more closely’ – “Do not imagine that I am one of these hotheaded people who fight at an immense disadvantage without an adequate object” – but the Edwardian Navy, with its anti-intellectual tradition, still sheltered and promoted men whose repertoire of military skill (when explicit orders defaulted, and sometimes even when they did not) amounted to gallantry, muscle and frontal
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