Losing Nelson Page 27

  You were magnificent. And to think that the later progeny of Badham have set this fortitude down to the effects of shock. No memory of that rotten apple in our class daring to say anything about it. Grigson would have come down on him heavily. We stood alone against a powerful continental aggressor. To the generations born since 1940 the situation is difficult to imagine.

  Long afterwards, in a Greenwich bookshop, perched on the top of a ladder to get at the dusty top shelf, I came upon a monograph: Eye-witness Accounts of Nelson’s Battles, by H. C. Grigson, M.A. (Leeds). It was the same man. I bought it and have it still. There is a brief biographical note at the back. Grigson was born in 1927. He was twelve when the war broke out; he would not have seen any fighting. That sense of crisis, of heroic isolation, he would have got it from others—parents, teachers …

  The arm was cut off high up, near the shoulder. It was thrown overboard, on your orders. More terrible than the pain of the cut, or perhaps it was the expression itself of this pain, was the bitter coldness of the surgeon’s blade. Always, afterwards, on any of your ships, you made sure that the surgeons warmed their blades before operating. It took them half an hour to sever the arm and bind the stump. Then—only then—they gave you opium to ease the dreadful pain.

  I have on one wall of my study a framed facsimile, enlarged to double size, of the first letter written with the left hand. This was two days after the loss of his arm. I got up now and went to look at it again, trying as I did so to avoid looking towards the glass-fronted bookcase, which I was now rather nervous of. Wavering, very variable as to the size and the slant of the letters, all the same it is not bad for a first attempt, when one considers that he was still sick and suffering and in a mood of deep discouragement. I am become a burden to my friends and useless to my country.

  This on the eve of his great victory at Aboukir Bay, with the triumphs of Copenhagen and Trafalgar to follow! He rose from the ashes of defeat like the fabulous bird. So could I too, I resolved there and then. I would rise with him, above failure and discouragement, above my psychic mutilation. I would fight on. My battle would be Naples 1799, and I would win it for him. In the glow of this determination I took a new exercise book from my drawer, one of my specials, with strong covers and good, smooth paper. This would be my left-handed journal. I would not begin it yet; I would begin when he began, two days after the wound.

  23

  The July of mutilations and maimings gives way to glorious August, the Battle of the Nile on the first day of the month, in 1798. Of all his battles before Trafalgar, this was the one I looked forward to most.

  A night battle, his only one. I was at my table in the ops room by 5 P.M., laying the ships out, a bottle of my father’s claret ready-opened at my elbow. I never drank before his battles, only after he had hoisted the order for close action.

  Forty minutes to go. The long hoped-for, long sought-for engagement about to begin. Since April, Horatio has been scouring the Mediterranean in search of the French fleet. His squadron has been brought up to a strength of twelve seventy-four-gun warships and three frigates. The situation is desperate. We have no base east of Gibraltar; the Mediterranean is a hostile sea. On land the French are everywhere dominant. We know they are about to leave Toulon with a fleet of transports and escorting warships commanded by Bonaparte in person. But we don’t know where he is intending to strike. It could be anywhere in the region. An attack on Portugal from the east, through Spain? A breakthrough into the Atlantic and a descent on Lisbon that way? A landing in Ireland, now in open revolt against us?

  It is our task to find out. A heavy responsibility on that great stretch of water, in those slow ships. In May we learn from a captured French corvette that the expedition is about to set sail. Fifteen enemy sail of the line and twelve thousand troops are already embarked. The warships are under the command of Vice-Admiral François de Brueys, whose flagship is the gigantic Orient, 120 guns.

  Still no-one knows where they are going. They are sighted north of Corsica, steering southeast. An attack on the Two Sicilies? But that would be easier by land. Or Malta, which dominates the central Mediterranean? But thirty-five thousand men, which Bonaparte’s strength is now believed to be, would be far more than needed for this. Some altogether more ambitious attempt it must be …

  Late in July, from a Genovese brig hailed off Cape Passaro, we learn that the French have been in Malta, that the Knights Templar have surrendered to them, that they have filled the army’s coffers with the treasures of the churches and then left again, destination unknown.

  In the solitude of the great cabin of our flagship, the Vanguard, with maps covering the table before us, we try to work it out, try to enter the mind of the enemy. Unlikely they have gone west; the prevailing winds of the season would make it difficult with transport ships. East, then. Corfu? Constantinople, where the Ottoman Empire could be smashed at the heart? But Bonaparte’s great enemy now is Britain, and the greatest threat to British interest lies farther east. We have detailed information about the French force now; in addition to troops and artillery it includes naturalists, astronomers, mathematicians. What would be the destination for specialists such as these? It could only be countries with ancient, esoteric civilizations. Egypt, the Red Sea ports. Then India, and a crippling blow to this most vital of our colonies. That must be it.

  We set off for Alexandria. But what if we are wrong? What if the slippery crappos have doubled back behind us, taken Sicily? Then the failure would be complete. Not a gallant failure, as Tenerife was regarded, but a failure of judgement with disastrous consequences for the whole conduct of the war. Mistakes like that are never forgotten, never forgiven. If we are wrong, our career is at an end. And we are handicapped, we are half blind in the metaphorical sense also—we have only three frigates, only three ships fast enough to scout ahead for information.

  We are not wrong, but for some terrible days it seems that we are. No sign of them at Alexandria when we get there; they are still on the way, we have outsailed them, but of course we do not know this at the time. Back to Sicily; no sign there either. Egypt again, but now there is no doubt: the French have been sighted from Greece, heading southeast for Egypt.

  Four days later, at ten o’clock on the morning of August 1, we sight once again the lighthouses and minarets of Alexandria. The harbour is crammed with empty transports, but there are no warships. Napoleon has landed. He is on his way to the destruction of the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids, and the conquest of Cairo.

  Some minutes of terrible disappointment. Then we give the order to steer east along the coast, towards the delta of the Nile. At two in the afternoon, roughly three and a half hours ago, we see at last, with joy and relief, the masts and yards of the French fleet at anchor. On the halyards of the Zealous, second ship in the British line, the signal is hoisted: Enemy in sight.

  You knew then that decisive action was a certainty. Before this time tomorrow, I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey. That is what you said. Why does it trouble me so now, after all these years? Is it because of her? Like the cypress-and-laurel remark before the attack on Tenerife. That was traditional, death or glory, the genuine heroic impulse. But this … All those men, all the blood and rending of the flesh that awaited only a few hours away. A peerage or a state funeral. If I were talking to Miss Lily, I would not mention this remark of yours; she would call it monstrous. Still theatre, she would say, but a one-man show now, the others lining the decks to kick their legs, make up the chorus. Why I had begun to subject you to her opinion at all, that was the mystery. She was miles away in Derbyshire; why did I give her so much say? How could Avon Secretarial Services be expected to appreciate your heroic sense of destiny, the patriotic identification of Britain’s interests with your own? Her face with that little frown on it, the slight flush that came to her cheeks when she was indignant about something.

  The French ships are set out now, all thirteen of them, anchored in their curving line. Their comm
ander, Admiral de Brueys, whose last day of life this is, is an experienced seaman, a former royalist officer, reinstated by Napoleon. He has fought the British before, during the American War of Independence. He has three 80-gun ships, the Franklin, the Tonnant, and the Guillaume Tell, and one of 120 guns, his flagship, the Orient. For ships as big as this, Alexandria Harbour is rather too narrow; he is afraid of jamming at the harbour mouth. So he has brought the ships eastward, here to Aboukir, and anchored them in a tight defensive line protected behind by the shoals and sandbanks of the bay.

  I always used the top left-hand corner of my table for this battle, a triangular space taking up almost half of the total surface. The right angle formed by the sides of the table represents the arms of the bay, with the peninsula of Aboukir to the north and the Nile delta to the south. The French line curves shallowly outwards toward the open sea, with the Guerrier in the van, the Timoléon in the rear, and the mighty Orient in the exact centre. They are anchored, but only by the bow; they swing with the current, there are spaces between them. An error on the part of de Brueys, yes, but who would have supposed Horatio would try to pass through, risk the shallows inside the bay, notoriously treacherous? And at night, in darkness, without maps!

  Other errors the French admiral has made, all springing from the assumption that his rear is secure. Believing that the attack must come from seaward, he has placed his strongest ships in the centre, his weakest and oldest in the van. And he has failed to ensure that his leading ship, the Guerrier, is anchored right up against the shoals, so as to prevent our ships from passing inside, between his line and the shore.

  Five twenty-two by my watch. There has been time to prepare for battle since that first sighting of the French, ample time—that leisurely preparation for mortal risk; as always I was troubled and excited by it as I set out the British ships in their rough grouping on the seaward side. Rarely can men have prepared to face death with more deliberation, more knowledge of it in every heart. The port lids are opened and the guns run out; hammocks are rolled up and packed in nets along the bulwarks as a shield against splinters and musket shot; the furled sails are wetted to reduce risk of fire; damp sand is strewn on the gundecks to prevent bare feet from slipping on blood. The gun crews, stripped to the waist, stand by the lines of cannon; the surgeons wait in the cockpit; the marines, in full uniform, troop with their muskets to the upper deck, watched by their lieutenants with drawn swords.

  Our ships are fortunate in the wind; a brisk northwesterly fills their sails as they bear down from the north. As they approach, they form a line in obedience to your general signal, number 31: Form line of battle ahead and astern of the admiral as most convenient.

  At a distance, from the open sea, the French line looks impregnable, set in a convex curve outward from the shoals, the sea behind seething white as it breaks against the sandbanks. The ten British seventy-fours, hauled sharp to the wind, are already in the shallower water, sounding as they go, fifteen fathoms, thirteen, eleven, nine … One is out of action already; Troubridge, in the Culloden, has run aground. Here he is, in a frenzy of frustration, at the tip of the shoal stretching east from the bay. I try not to think further of Troubridge; thoughts of him distress me, renew that sickness of doubt, inappropriate on the eve of such a glorious victory. Troubridge was one of the two captains—Ball was the other—that you sent to Cardinal Ruffo in Naples the following July, with your assurance that you would not oppose the embarkation of the rebels …

  But now you are innocent still. You scan the French line with the eye of a commander set on immediate attack. Landwards, behind them, the sun is setting in the magnificent summer dustglow of the Levant. Their masts and yards are fiery, they ride on a molten sea. You see their weakness together with their beauty. You will throw your whole weight on their van and crush it before help can come. But the shoals are dangerously close. The Zealous is still in the lead, sounding as she goes—eight fathoms, seven …

  The last moment for choice is approaching. You can stay outside, order your captains to anchor two by two opposite the enemy ships. This is what de Brueys expects. You can break through the gaps in the French line and attack from the inside. But how can you be sure there is enough water?

  It is exactly 5:40 P.M. You give the signal for close action. I pour out my first glass. Now it comes, the moment of pure and perfect opportunity. Can we outflank the French by rounding his line and attacking from inside? From our flagship, here in the centre of the line, we shout across to Hood in the Zealous. Can he take his ship round the end of the enemy line? Hood shouts back that he will try. So to the Zealous falls the honour of being the first to round the point of the shoals. But I have been too hasty—it is still only six minutes to six; I must wait six more minutes before taking her round. I have been rather hasty with the wine too, in my excitement; the glass is almost empty, and I am not due for another till 6:28, when the battle is joined.

  These are the last moments of the day, before the swift descent of that southern darkness. I have turned off the overhead light, left on only the lamps at the ends of the table. This is the poised moment—everything is at risk; we are entering a strange bay at nightfall, without pilots, without reliable charts, moving in narrow waters among invisible reefs and shoals. The progress of the Zealous is slow because of her need to take continual soundings. She is overtaken now by Captain Foley in the Goliath. Foley has made a deduction and acted on it with a boldness worthy of his great commander. If the French have anchored their ships by the bow only, there must be water enough to allow for the swing. If there is water enough to allow for the swing, there must be water enough for another ship to pass inside.

  Impeccable logic. The Goliath sweeps into the lead. Here she is. It is 6:28, time for another glass. The enemy have hoisted their colours and opened fire. Foley has crossed the bows of the Guerrier, raking her with a broadside as he does so, then passing on to anchor here, on the inner quarter of the Conquérant, next French ship in line. Hood takes up his station opposite the Guerrier. Our ships follow round in order of sail—the Orion, the Theseus, the Audacious. As the fires of that sunset are quenched in the sea, the five leading British ships are all inside and at closest possible quarters, bringing a concentrated fire to bear on the enemy van, the more deadly as the French can make no adequate reply. Their guns on the shoreward side have not been cleared for action, they are cluttered with rope and tackle and mess furniture—another disastrous consequence of the French assumption that attack was bound to come from the open sea.

  Our flagship, the Vanguard, is the sixth ship to come into action, the first to anchor on the seaward side. Here she is, abreast and within pistol shot of the Spartiate. Now she is hard pressed, fired upon by both the Spartiate and the Aquilon, next ship in the French line. The Minotaur, Captain Louis, relieves us, ranging up to draw off the Aquilon’s fire.

  Seven P.M. Night has fallen in a thunder of guns. In a pall of smoke, lit only by gunfire, the five seventy-four’s of the French van, undermanned and able to fire only on the starboard side, are being beaten into helplessness by eight of ours settled like a swarm about them. My lamps cannot match the glimmer and flicker of the gunfire and the lurid flaring of the smoke, and my room is hushed, only the slight sounds of my miniature hulls scraping on the glass; but my table is beautiful, reflections glinting on the dark surface, changing with the movements of my hands and arms as I direct the ships.

  The eighth and ninth in our line, coming into position opposite the enemy centre, sustain the heaviest damage. In the smoke-hung confusion, the Bellerophon misses her chosen foe, the Franklin, first of the French eighties—at present being very gallantly attacked by one of our frigates, the fifty-gun Leander—and fetches up abreast of the mighty Orient, a ship with double her armament. Within fifteen minutes her masts have been entirely shot away. She veers out of the line, completely disabled. I leave her here, over on the lee side of the bay. The Majestic also suffers heavy loss, her captain, Westcott, being fatally wo
unded in the throat by a musket ball.

  But we are gaining. Our ships are like a swarm—it is as if they are feasting on carcasses. No, not carcasses, bodies still twitching. Always the same tactic: pass along the line, gather on either side, concentrate the fire.

  Now, with battle fully joined, comes the wound. You are standing on the quarterdeck with Berry by your side when a flying piece of scrap shot slashes your brow to the bone. A flap of flesh falls over your good eye, and the blood flows thickly down, blinding you. Berry catches you as you fall. I am killed, he hears you say. Remember me to my wife.

  I see you as you are carried down to the cockpit, I see the lamps down there, swaying with the roll of the ship and thud of the gun carriages. There are seventy or so men already waiting there, in that shuddering heat, many of them gravely injured. You do not allow the surgeons to be told you are among them. Still blinded, your face a mask of blood, you wait your turn.

  The surgeon probes the wound, pronounces the damage not serious—the visible damage, that is. You are in total darkness; you send for the chaplain and dictate messages for Lady Nelson and for Louis, the captain of the Minotaur, who relieved your flagship from the dual fire of the enemy. Your support prevented me from being obliged to haul out of the line. This was before your wound had been dressed, while you lay waiting for the dressing. You could not see. That you should think of Fanny at such a time was natural enough. But a message of thanks to one of your captains …

  Once again, as I thought of you lying there, that familiar prickle of tears came to my eyes. How could this behaviour of yours be named? It was something more than courage or endurance. It was grace, springing like a flower from the hard ground of duty.

  Still blind, you hear cheering from above. The youthful Berry enters with what he announces as a “pleasing intelligence”—one of the great understatements of history, this must be regarded, considering that he brings news of the most notable British victory at sea since the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The French fleet is shattered. The Spartiate has altogether ceased to fire; the Aquilon and the Peuple Souverain have struck their colours; the Orient, the Tonnant, and the Heureux, though not yet captured, are no longer able to make effective reply to our shot.