Sharpe's Trafalgar

by Bernard Cornwell

  The Redoutable, still lashed to the Victory, was French no longer. She was scarcely even a ship, for all her masts were gone and her hull was mangled by cannon fire. A portion of her quarterdeck had collapsed and a British flag now hung over her counter. The Victory’s mizzen was gone, her fore- and mainmasts were mere stumps, but her guns were still manned and still dangerous. The vast Santisima Trinidad was silent, her ensign struck. The fiercest battle now was to the north of her where a few of the enemy vanguard had risked coming back to help their comrades and now opened fire on the battle-weary British ships that loaded and fired and rammed and fired again. To the south, where Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign had opened the battle, a ship burned. The flames leaped twice as high as the masts and the other ships, fearing the firebrands that must be spewed when her magazines exploded, set sail to move away from her, though some British ships, knowing what horrors the crew of the burning ship endured, sent small boats to pluck them to safety. The burning ship was French, the Achille, and the sound of her explosion was a dull thump that rolled across the wreckage-littered sea like the crack of doom. A cloud of smoke, black as night, boiled where the burning ship had floated while scraps of fire seared to the clouds, fell to the sea, hissed in the ocean, died.

  Nelson died.

  Fourteen enemy ships had struck so far. A dozen more still fought. One was burned and sunk, the rest were fleeing.

  Captain Montmorin, knowing that Chase intended to board him, had sent men with axes to cut away the fallen mainmast. Other men chopped through the grapnel lines that tied the Revenant to the Pucelle. Montmorin was trying to cut himself free, hoping he could limp away to Cadiz and live to fight another day.

  “I want those carronades busy!” Chase shouted, and the gunners who had helped repel the boarders now ran to the squat weapons and levered them around to fire at the men trying to free the Revenant, which now had more troubles, for her foresail had caught fire. The flames spread with extraordinary swiftness, engulfing the great spread of shot-punctured canvas, but Montmorin’s men were just as swift, cutting the halliards that held the sail’s spar and so dropping it to the deck where they risked the fire to hurl the burning sail over the side. “Let them be!” Chase bellowed at those of his men who were aiming muskets at the struggling French sailors. He knew the fire could spread to the Pucelle and both ships would then burn together and explode in horror. “Well done! Well done!” Chase applauded his opponent’s crew as they tipped the last burning wreckage overboard. Then the carronades recoiled on their slides and spat casks of musket balls which cut down the axemen still trying to free the two ships from their mutual embrace. A gun exploded on the Revenant, the sound echoing horribly as scraps of the shattered breech cut down Montmorin’s lower-deck gunners. There were more British guns firing now, for the Revenant had lost a dozen when she was raked, and the Pucelle was hurting the Frenchman relentlessly. A midshipman, commanding the Pucelle’s lower-deck guns, saw that the two hulls were so close together that the muzzle flames of his thirty-two-pounders were setting fire to the splintered wood of the Revenant’s lower hull, so he ordered a half-dozen men to throw buckets of water at the small fires in case the flames caught and spread to the Pucelle.

  “Marines!” Sharpe was shouting. “Marines!” He had gathered thirty-two marines and supposed the rest were dead, wounded or else guarding either the magazines or the French prisoners on the poop. These thirty-two would have to suffice. “We’re boarding her!” Sharpe shouted over the bellow of the guns. “You want pikes, axes, cutlasses. Make sure your muskets are loaded! Hurry!” He turned as he heard the sound of a sword scraping from a scabbard and saw Midshipman Collier, bright-eyed and still drenched in Lieutenant Haskell’s blood, standing under the fallen French mainmast that would be the boarding bridge. “What the hell are you doing here, Harry?” Sharpe asked.

  “Coming with you, sir.”

  “Like hell you are. Go and watch the bloody clock.”

  “There isn’t a clock.”

  “Then just go and watch something else!” Sharpe snapped. The weather-deck gunners, bare-chested, blood-streaked and powder-blackened, were assembling with pikes and cutlasses. The lower-deck guns still fired, shaking both ships with every shot. A few French guns answered, and one ball smashed through the gathering boarders, driving a path of blood across the Pucelle’s deck. “Who’s got a volley gun?” Sharpe shouted, and a marine sergeant held up one of the stubby weapons. “Is it loaded?” Sharpe asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then give it here.” He took the gun, exchanging it for his musket, then made sure his cutlass was not blood-crusted to its scabbard. “Follow me up to the quarterdeck!” Sharpe shouted.

  The fallen mast jutted across the weather deck, but was too high to be reached unless a man stood on a hot gun barrel and hauled himself up. It would be easier, Sharpe reckoned, to go to the quarterdeck, then return along the Pucelle’s starboard gangway. From there a man could step onto the mast. He would then have to run, balancing himself on the broken pine spar, before jumping down onto the Revenant’s deck, and because the two ships were moving unequally in the long high swells, the mast would be pitching and rolling. Jesus, Sharpe thought, sweet Jesus, but this was a terrible place to be. Like going through the breach of an enemy fortress, he reckoned. He ran up the quarterdeck steps, turned down the gangway and tried not to think of what was about to happen. There were French marines on the opposing gangway, and a horde of armed defenders waiting in the Revenant’s blood-drenched waist. Montmorin knew what was coming, but just then the forward carronade sent a shattering cask of musket balls into the Revenant’s belly and belched a pall of smoke above the ship.

  “Now!” Sharpe said, and clambered up onto the mast, but a hand held him back and he turned, cursing, to see that it was Chase.

  “Me first, Sharpe,” Chase chided him.

  “Sir!” Sharpe protested.

  “Now, boys!” Chase had his sword drawn and was running across the makeshift bridge.

  “Come on!” Sharpe shouted. He ran behind Chase, the heavy seven-barreled gun in his hands. It was like traversing a tightrope. He looked down to see the sea churning white between the two hulls and he felt dizzy and imagined falling to be crushed to death as the two hulls banged together, then a bullet spat past him and he saw Chase had jumped from the shattered stump of the mast and Sharpe followed, screaming as he leaped through the smoke.

  Chase had gone left, jumping into a space cleared by the carronade, though it was still cluttered with twitching bodies and the deck was slick with new blood. He stumbled on the corpses and the Frenchmen saw him, his gold braid bright in the smoke, and they shouted as they charged, but then Sharpe fired the volley gun from the spar and the bullets twitched the French back in a cloud of smoke. Sharpe jumped down, threw the volley gun aside and drew his cutlass. He had leaped into the smoking madness of battle, not the deliberate calm of disciplined fighting when battalions fired volleys or when stately ships exchanged cannon fire, but the visceral horror of the gutter fight. Chase had fallen between two of the Frenchman’s starboard guns, and they protected him, but Sharpe was exposed and he screamed at the enemy, flicked a pike aside with the cutlass, lunged at a man’s eyes, missed, then a marine jumped onto the Frenchman’s back, throwing him forward, and Sharpe stamped on the man’s head as the marine was piked in the back. He swung the cutlass to the right, inadvertently foiling another pike thrust, then reached and seized the French seaman’s shirt and pulled him forward, straight onto the cutlass blade. Sharpe twisted the steel in the man’s belly, wrenched it free. He was shrieking like a fiend. He used both hands to swing the cutlass back to his left, driving away a French officer who stumbled over the dying British marine and fell back out of range. The dead were making a barricade to protect Sharpe and Chase, but a French marine was climbing over one of the guns. Chase scrambled to his feet, lunged his slender sword at his attacker, then fired a pistol across the other cannon. Sharpe swung the cutlass again
, then cheered as a rush of British marines and seamen dropped to the deck.

  “This way!” Sharpe leaped the dead, carrying the fight toward the Revenant’s bows. The French defenders were numerous, but the way aft was blocked by just as many men. Muskets cracked from the quarterdeck and more fired from the forecastle and at least one defender was killed by his own side in that wild fire. The Revenant’s men far outnumbered the boarders, but the British numbers increased every second and the Pucelle’s crewmen wanted revenge for the raking the Revenant had given them. They slashed and lunged and screamed and hit and battered men down. A gunner was swinging a handspike, swatted aside a sword, crushed a Frenchman’s skull, then he was pushed on by the men behind. Chase was shouting at men to follow him aft toward the quarterdeck while Sharpe was leading a swarm of crazed men forward. “Kill them!” he shrieked. “Kill them!”

  Afterward he would remember little of that fight, but he rarely remembered such brawls. They were too confused, too loud, too full of horror, so full of horror, indeed, that he was ashamed when he remembered the joy of it, but there was a joy there. It was the happiness of being released to the slaughter, of having every bond of civilization removed. It was also what Richard Sharpe was good at. It was why he wore an officer’s sash instead of a private’s belt, because in almost every battle the moment came when the disciplined ranks dissolved and a man simply had to claw and scratch and kill like a beast. You did not kill men at long range in this kind of fighting, but came as close as a lover before you slaughtered them.

  To go into that kind of fighting needed a rage, or a madness or a desperation. Some men never found those qualities and they shrank from the danger, and Sharpe could not blame them, for there was little that was admirable in rage, insanity or despair. Yet they were the qualities that drove the fight, and they were fueled by a determination to win. Just that. To beat the bastards down, to prove that the enemy were lesser men. The good soldier was cock of a blood-soaked dunghill, and Richard Sharpe was good.

  His rage went cold in a fight. The fear might harass him before the fighting began, and for two blunt pins he might have found an excuse not to cross the trembling mast bridge that would drop him into a crowd of the enemy, but once there he fought with a precision that was lethal. It seemed to him that the very passage of time slowed, so that he could see clearly what every enemy intended. A man to his right was drawing back a pike, so that threat could be ignored because it would take at least a heartbeat for the pike to come forward, and meanwhile a bearded man in front was already swinging down a cutlass and Sharpe twisted the point of his own blade into that man’s throat, then whipped the cutlass to his right, parrying the pike thrust, though Sharpe himself was looking to his left. He saw no imminent danger, looked back to the right, flicked the blade up into the pikeman’s face, looked front again, then shoulder charged the pikeman, driving him back so that he fell against a cannon and Sharpe could raise the cutlass and, with both hands, drive it down into the man’s belly. The point stuck in the gun’s timber carriage and Sharpe wasted a second wrenching it free. British seamen pounded past him, forcing the French another two or three paces back down their deck, and Sharpe climbed the cannon and jumped down its other side. A Frenchman tried to surrender to him there, but Sharpe dared not leave a man in his rear so he slashed at the Frenchman’s wrist so he could not use the axe he had dropped, then kicked him in the groin before climbing the next cannon. The spaces between the cannon served as refuges for the French and Sharpe wanted to break them out and drive them onto the pikes and blades of the boarders.

  Captain Chase’s barge crew had followed him aft, fighting their own battle toward the quarterdeck steps, but Clouter had come late to the fight, for he had been the man who fired the Pucelle’s forward starboard carronade down into the mass of defenders just as Chase had led the charge across the mast. The big black man came across the fallen mainmast, leaped to the deck and headed aft, howling to be let through the crowded seamen. Once he was in the front rank he cleared the larboard side of the Revenant’s weather deck while Sharpe led the charge along the starboard side. Clouter was using an axe, swinging it one-handed, ignoring the men who tried to surrender, but just cutting them down in an orgy of killing. Men were surrendering now, throwing down axes or swords, holding up their hands or just throwing themselves to the deck where they pretended to be dead. Sharpe slashed a pike aside, cut his blade across a Frenchman’s eyes, then found no one to oppose him, but a musket ball plucked at the hem of his jacket as he turned to look for his marines. “Fire at those bastards!” he shouted, pointing up at the forecastle deck where some of Montmorin’s crew still fought back. One of the marines aimed a seven-barreled gun, but Sharpe snatched it from him. “Use a musket, lad.”

  He sheathed the cutlass, forcing the blood-clotted blade into the scabbard’s throat, then ran through the defeated Frenchmen to where the forward companionway led down to the lower deck. The Revenant was the Pucelle’s sister ship, indeed it felt to Sharpe that he was fighting on the Pucelle, so alike were the two vessels. He pushed his way through the enemy, going into the shadow of the forecastle. A gunner halfheartedly rammed a cannon swab at Sharpe, who thumped the volley gun’s butt onto the man’s head, then shouted at the bastards to get out of his way. Marines were following him. Two Frenchmen cowered in their galley where the big iron stove had been torn apart by gunfire. Sharpe could hear the big guns firing below, filling the ship with their thunderous pounding, though whether it was the Revenant’s guns that fired or the Pucelle’s, he could not tell. He swung down the companionway into the lower deck’s gloom.

  He slid down on his backside, landed with a thump and just pointed the volley gun down the lower deck. He pulled the trigger, adding to the smoke that writhed under the beams, then he drew the cutlass. “It’s over!” he shouted. “Stop firing! Stop firing!” He wished he knew French. “Stop firing, you bastards! Stop firing! It’s over!” A gunner, deaf to Sharpe’s shouts, and half blinded by the smoke, pushed a powder-filled reed into a cannon’s touch-hole and Sharpe slashed him with the cutlass. “Stop it, I said! Stop firing!”

  Two shots from the Pucelle hammered through the ship. Sharpe drew his pistol. The nearest French gunners just stared at him. Dozens of dead lay on the deck, some with great wooden splinters jutting from their bodies. The mainmast had a great bite gouged from one side. The deck was scorched where the cannon had exploded. “It’s over!” Sharpe screamed. “Get away from that gun. Get away!” The Frenchmen might not speak English, but they understood the pistol and cutlass well enough. Sharpe went to a gunport. “Pucelle! Pucelle!”

  “Who is it?” a voice called back.

  “Ensign Sharpe! They’ve stopped firing! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  One last cannon belched smoke and flame into the Revenant’s belly, then there was silence at last as the big guns ceased. A gunner crawled out of one of the Pucelle’s lower gunports and scrambled into the Revenant where Sharpe was walking down the deck, stepping over corpses, climbing a fallen cannon, gesturing that the French gunners should kneel or lie down. Three marines followed him, bayonets fixed. “Down!” Sharpe snarled at the wild-eyed, powder-blackened enemy. “Down!” He turned to see more marines and British seamen coming down the companion-way. “Disarm the bastards,” he shouted, “and get them on deck.” He stepped over the splintered remains of one of the ship’s pumps. A French officer faced him with a drawn sword, but he took one look at Sharpe’s face and let the blade clatter on the deck. More of the Pucelle’s gunners were crawling out of the British ship’s gunports and clambering into the French ports, coming to plunder what they could.

  Sharpe crossed a patch of blackened deck where one of his grenades had exploded. The French watched him warily. He pushed a man aside with his cutlass blade, then turned down the aft companionway into the ship’s cockpit which was lit with a dozen lanterns.

  He almost wished he had not come down the ladder for here there were scores of men bleeding and
dying. This was death’s kingdom, the red-wet belly of the ship, the place where foully wounded men came to face the surgeon and, in all likelihood, eternity. It smelled of blood and excrement and urine and terror. The surgeon, a white-haired man with a beard that was streaked with blood, looked up from the table where, with hands red to the wrists, he was delving into a man’s belly. “Get out of here,” he said in good English.

  “Shut your face,” Sharpe snarled. “I haven’t killed a surgeon yet, but I don’t mind starting with you.”

  The surgeon looked startled, but said nothing more as Sharpe walked into the gunroom where an officer and six men lay bandaged on the floor. He forced the cutlass into its scabbard, gently moved one wounded man aside, then seized the ring of the hatch leading into the Revenant’s lady hole. He hauled it up and pointed the pistol down into the lantern-lit space.

  A man and a woman were there. The woman was Mathilde, and the man was Pohlmann’s so-called servant, the man who claimed to be Swiss, but who was in truth a subtle enemy of Britain. Above Sharpe, up in the smoky daylight, cheers sounded as the Revenant’s tricolor, which had been draped over her shattered taffrail, was bundled up and presented to Joel Chase. The ghost had been hunted and the ship was taken. “Up,” Sharpe said to Michel Vaillard. “Up!” They had pursued this man across two oceans and Sharpe felt a livid anger at the betrayal of the Calliope.