Losing Nelson Page 15

  Sir Hyde Parker continues irresolute. He summons one conference after another. He cannot decide whether to fight or not. Horatio sums up his feelings in a letter home: If a man considers whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting …

  Finally he has his way: they will attack from the south, approaching by the narrower channel, avoiding the Trekroner guns. He shifts his flag into the shallower-draft Elephant and takes command of about half the fleet: twelve sail of the line with shallow draft, a squadron of frigates, some bomb ketches and fireships. He will make a direct attack on the city. Hyde Parker remains with his heavy ships here, six miles to the north, eighteen inches on my table.

  The wind turns fair, veers to the south. On this day 196 years ago, at just this time in the morning, the first signal flew from the Elephant’s halyards: weigh anchor and make sail. With this order, the action begins. The English ships under topsails move majestically into the attack. I place them in their order of sail, the Edgar leading. The plan is simple: they will pass down the enemy line, concentrating their fire, battering the moored gunships into silence one by one.

  The opening phase is disastrous. The Agamemnon, which should have followed the Edgar, fails to do so; she cannot weather the shoals. Here she is at the entrance to the channel, signalling her inability to proceed. Then the Bellona goes aground on the east side of the Middle Ground. The Russell, mistakenly following her in the smoke of battle, suffers the same fate. I place them together here, one just south of the other, almost touching. Horatio’s twelve ships are reduced to nine. However, he keeps the signal to advance flying, the remaining ships take up position, the action becomes general. It is a static, murderous battle now, with great slaughter on both sides, a series of thunderous, half-blind duels at cable-length range. On the main deck of the Monarch, immediately ahead of Horatio, not a man is left standing the whole length of the ship. Our gun crews, as always, are superbly trained and disciplined, but the ships are on the light side because of the shoals, and the Danish floating batteries are strongly built, low-lying; some of their guns are forty-four-pounders, heavier than anything on our side. A thousand dead and wounded on the English side in the first three hours of fighting.

  My Monarch rested on her glinting artificial sea, with no sound, no motion other than what I gave her. As far from the bloody pandemonium of those decks as my body was from risk of wounds …

  Just at this moment, in the midst of these thoughts, I had a terrible sensation of having been wounded myself, somewhere low in the leg or in the foot. There was no pain, but I could feel the wetness of the blood. For a moment I braced myself for the pain to come. But the wetness was cold, too cold for blood. When I looked down, I saw that I was standing with one slippered foot in water, the other just out of it. A stream about two feet wide was running from under the door.

  I was forced to abandon Horatio in the midst of the battle, the issue still in doubt, something I had never done before. The water was flowing in a shallow stream down the basement passage, fortunately not spreading much, as the floor slanted slightly towards the skirting board. It was coming from above, shining and murmuring in a sort of ecstasy as it dropped down the stairs. When I went up, I found the kitchen floor completely submerged; water was brimming over the sink and splashing down. In my sleepy haste I had left the cold tap running, and somehow the sink had got clogged.

  Slippers and socks and trouser bottoms were now completely soaked. I splodged my way to the sink, turned off the tap, scrabbled to clear the paste of bread crumbs and coffee grounds from the plughole. A bucket and mop were the only answer. For some nightmarish moments I waded here and there, trying to remember where Mrs. Watson kept them. I found them in the cupboard adjoining the pantry. Then I began swabbing—a task that was to take up all my afternoon and most of my evening.

  Mop and squeeze, mop and squeeze. I was still in the kitchen at 1 P.M., when Sir Hyde Parker began to grow alarmed—or rather, when the state of alarm he had been in from the beginning began to intensify—and sent his historic signal of recall. Quite understandable, in a way. From six miles off he couldn’t see much—a thick pall of smoke lay over the battle. He could hear the thunder of the guns, apparently unabated. He could make out the distress signals flying from the grounded ships. He was an old man, and he subscribed to the old maxims, one of which said that ships could not stand and fight against fortifications. In his heart, he did not believe Horatio could carry the day. So he sent signal number 39, the signal of recall.

  At this historic moment, one of the highlights of Horatio’s career, I was still miserably mopping and squeezing. I hadn’t even got as far as the basement stairs. My feet were soaked. Nevertheless, on this day of his triumph I fixed my mind on him, I gave him his due of homage. He sees the signal, of course. What is his first reaction? He asks if his own signal is still in place, his favourite, the signal for close action. He is told that it is. Mind you keep it so. Then he turns to Captain Foley at his side—Foley, superb seaman and pilot, his battle companion at the Nile. You know, Foley, I have only one eye—I have a right to be blind sometimes. He puts the telescope to his blind eye. I really do not see the signal!

  This is the moment when legend is born. The path of the hero cannot be smooth; he must show disregard for all restraints of prudence, he must not stop short; he must always struggle to thrust aside impediment, to break through into pure freedom, absolute success. Those around him on board the ship never forgot this moment: the lieutenant who brought him the news of the signal; Foley, to whom the words were said; Colonel Stewart, the commander of marines, who recorded them for posterity. And so they have come to generation after generation of British schoolchildren, as they came to me. The quintessential act of heroic insubordination, the ultimate rejection of half-measures. And he, the hero—he understood completely the value of that gesture, the moment when acting the part and realizing the self meet and blend together. And to use his infirmity to reinforce his strength! I really do not see the signal. Wonderful, wonderful. At 1:40 P.M., when these words were uttered, I stood with mop suspended, quite still there in the kitchen, observing a minute’s silence.

  However, fear somehow entered this silence, or foreboding rather, making it difficult to sustain: I had not been properly present in these moments of his triumph, I had failed in my role of witness and shadow. There would be a price to pay. Again that yearning for freedom came to me. I thought then it was his freedom I wanted—all fear conquered. Someday, and perhaps soon, I would prove worthy of him. I vowed it as I stood there. But then I began to worry about my wet feet; I was afraid I might catch cold and be unable to deliver my talk, only a week away now. The kitchen floor was still wet but no longer awash. I went to my bedroom and changed my socks. I had no idea which of my shoes might be waterproof or whether any of them were, but I put on the stoutest I had. Then I went back to my mopping.

  It was nearly eight in the evening before I got things back in some sort of order, and by that time I was tired out. In my anxiety to deal with the flood I had neglected to eat. The Italian takeaway on Haverstock Hill had a delivery service, and I phoned them and ordered a pizza margherita, which came very promptly—it took twenty-two minutes from the phone call to the ring at the door. I had some claret with it. Sitting in my study afterwards, I felt reasonably at peace—to begin with, at least.

  I was thinking about the battle as it had developed after Horatio’s inspired disobedience. The firing had begun to slacken off after an hour or so. By about four in the afternoon, most of the Danish gunships were smoking wrecks. Their dead and wounded amounted to more than two thousand. But they still had not capitulated, still maintained a sporadic fire on our ships. It was then that Horatio showed the other essential side of the untrammelled angel; to courage and panache is added the ruthless will to victory. He sent for writing materials. Spreading the paper on the wooden casing over the rudder head, he wrote a message to Crown Prince Frederick
. He would spare the Danes if they no longer resisted, but if resistance were continued, he would be obliged to set on fire all the floating batteries he had taken, without having the power to save the men who had defended them.

  And he would have done it! He would have sent his fireships in among the defenceless hulks and burned the whole line, men and ships together. And if this had not been enough to bring them to a cease-fire, he would have pounded into ruins the beautiful city of Copenhagen, whose steep-pitched roofs and copper-green spires were clearly visible to him.

  The Danes knew it was no bluff; their remaining guns fell silent. After a week of negotiations, an armistice was signed; Denmark was detached from her alliance with Russia. By an irony of history, one of those parallel courses I always found so fascinating, none of all this was necessary; none of those thousands of dead and maimed need have received a scratch. Unknown to either Danes or English at the time, an event had taken place that made the bloodshed and the bargaining equally superfluous. A week before the battle, a group of Russian officers who had dined rather too well made their way to the Mikhailovsky Palace and strangled the lunatic Czar Paul, choking the life out of the Scandinavian alliance at the same time.

  But this, in a sense, was beside the point. Horatio would have done it—he would have burned Copenhagen to the ground if necessary. There was only one portrait of him I had seen which reflected this capacity for extreme measures, that painted by Heinrich Füger, court painter of Austria. Both Emma and Horatio sat to him in his Vienna studio in the course of their return from Naples to England in 1800. By training he was a miniaturist, but failing eyesight had obliged him to take up the larger scale.

  I felt an urge to look at this portrait again. The only form in which I had it was as a colour plate in the Nelson Companion. I found the book on the shelf and took it over to my table. This was covered with papers—notes about Horatio in Naples in 1799, discarded sheets from my forthcoming talk at the club. I pushed them aside, feeling distaste at these reminders of my labours. I felt again that longing for freedom, for the removal of my doubts. To be his chronicler was not enough, it never had been …

  I found the portrait, brought the arm of the lamp closer down to it. He is in full-dress uniform and encrusted with silver and gold: gold collar, gold facings and epaulettes, the silver rays and gold suns of his three orders—the Bath, St. Ferdinand, the Turkish Crescent—pinned to his breast on the left side, with the three gold discs of his naval medals one below the other down his front.

  I stared at his face, under the strong light. Füger had caught something no other artist had, perhaps because of his training as a miniaturist, a technique that requires close observation. Not caught, detected: there was a ruthlessness here, a capacity for intense concentration. But it was a borrowed face, it was not his … Eyes a greenish brown, an expression cold, pitiless, but not as though native to him—it was induced, laid on his face. The cruelty was something he was bleakly resigned to, as he was resigned to his role. Not the travelling player now. This was Horatio in the part of killer.

  Always a mistake to look at anything too long. Already in childhood I knew this. In the days of my illness it was a kind of frightening game. Any object can become dangerous when detached by the violence of the eyes from everything else in the world. A pencil, an elastic, a light switch. And how much more the pictured human face—and his, of all faces! I looked too long at this face of a necessary killer and I felt my being dissolved in his stronger one, I felt the terror of this necessity, there was a darkness at the edges of my vision. I raised my hand to my face, but I could feel nothing that made this face my own. I shut my eyes and clutched at the front of my jacket and felt the rough tweed and knew it was mine. I closed the book without glancing again at the picture. I stood there at the table for a time that seemed short but may not have been, striving to keep my eyes unfocused. By degrees I came to myself again, a self that was clammy: I had been sweating all over my body, and the sweat was cold.

  14

  As I have said, Miss Lily had broken through into a zone of immunity; she had crossed the line. I still felt hostility when she spoke against Horatio, but there had been no impulses of violence after that first. She had changed too in these few months. She had taken to reading about him, she argued, she stayed on longer than the two hours without charging me extra. Her hair was longer, and she wore it in a softer style, with a fringe over the forehead. Now that the weather was milder, she had lost that shiny look and her skin seemed paler. I looked forward now to the evenings when she came. I even looked forward to getting her view of things, limited as this invariably was. By that time I had begun to neglect my appearance rather, but on Tuesdays and Fridays, knowing she was coming in the evening, I made a point of washing and shaving and cleaning my nails.

  However, she seriously annoyed me that Friday evening, two days after Copenhagen, by what she said about his conduct during the battle. Where she had got it from I don’t know. I had been repeating the story of how he clapped the telescope to his blind eye. One of the great moments in our island story. The impulse, the improvisation—

  “Well,” she said, “there are them that say the importance of this incident has been very much exaggerated.”

  “Exaggerated? How can it be exaggerated?” She sounded as if she had lifted the words straight from some book; they were not like her words at all.

  “There is reason to believe that this Parker had a private understanding with Nelson that if he hoisted the signal at a certain point, it was to be considered optional.”

  “Are you saying it was all arranged in advance?”

  “I am not saying anything, I am just remarking.”

  “And Foley and the others?”

  “They were all in the know.”

  By this time I had begun to experience the usual symptoms of rage: a sense of impaired vision, a feeling that the skin of my face was too tight. But the unusual and surprising thing was that I did not try to hide this from Miss Lily, did not turn away or make any diversionary gesture. That evening, with Miss Lily, I broke my lifelong habit of concealment.

  “And the telescope?” I said. “That putting the telescope to his blind eye? Just playing to the gallery, according to you.”

  I saw her eyes widen, become somehow more alert, more watchful. But she went on looking at me steadily enough.

  “It’s not according to me. That is what they say about it—that he knew beforehand.”

  Whatever blood had been left in my face must have drained away at this. “What they say? What they say? How can you repeat such lies? Do you realize what you are doing? You are adding to the slanders about him, you are joining the ranks …”

  I had to pause to control my voice. My vision was narrowed to her face, the dark hair over the brows, the soft, undefended-looking, obstinate eyes, the wide mouth with its sharp corners.

  “You are joining in the conspiracy against him,” I said, too loudly for that small room. “Two hundred years it’s been going on. It’s the same people that talk about his conduct in Naples in 1799, trying to make out that he committed a fraud there.”

  “What people are those?”

  Her tone had not changed; she was still looking closely at me. This steadiness had a chastening effect; my voice was more under control when I answered. “Those who cannot bear to think that anyone so great could ever have existed, who always have to undermine him, to take the lowest view of everything he did. This man who saved our country from the vile French, who had a lion’s heart inside his frail body …”

  Uttering this praise of him, my voice broke a little. I turned away from Miss Lily and began to shuffle with the papers on my table, but stopped almost at once because my hands were trembling.

  There was silence for some moments. Then she said, “You only say the French are vile because you know he didn’t like them. I know it means a lot to you, Charles, and it’s a very good thing to have a hobby, but he was only a man, that’s all I’m saying. Don�
��t take offence, but I think myself that you are too wrapped up in him. As far as I can see, nobody knows the truth of that telescope business and nobody ever will. You can think one thing or another. I mean to say, there are lots of things like that, aren’t there? I know it isn’t my place to say it, but you really need a bit more variety in your life.”

  Variety, when I had his life to look at!

  “I know we are going out on Sunday,” she said. “But it is still Nelson, isn’t it?”

  When I turned back towards her, I found her eyes fixed on me with a serious and quite unmistakable solicitude. That she was in her own way concerned about me I had sometimes felt before. Misguided, of course; I was managing well enough. But I understood now for the first time that the way she expressed this concern was by undermining Horatio. She wanted me to think less of him, but this did not put her among the ranks of his slanderers, because she did it for my sake. In this brief moment of humility I saw—glimpsed, rather—how much less selfish Miss Lily was than I, who had wanted her to admire Horatio, not for her sake but my own, so I could share the glory with him, bask in the same sunshine.

  The mood, as I say, did not last long, but a certain obscure prospect of change had come with it, and the last of my anger was cleared away. And then I broke my second rule—I told a story detrimental to myself. I told her of my frantic mopping while Horatio thundered at the gates of Copenhagen, and she laughed. I laughed too—I remember that I laughed too.