The Young Hornblower Omnibus

by C. S. Forester

  Round on the other face of the fort on his right the marines would be trying to burst in through the embrasures of the guns; Bush turned to his left to see what could be done there. Almost instantly he found his reward; here was the sally port into the fort—a wide wooden door bound with iron, sheltered in the angle of the small projecting bastion at the corner of the fort. Two idiots of seamen were firing their muskets up at the heads that were beginning to show above—not a thought for the door. The average seaman was not fit to be trusted with a musket. Bush raised his voice so that it pealed like a trumpet above the din.

  “Axemen here! Axemen! Axemen!”

  There were still plenty of men down in the ditch who had not yet had time to scale the scarp; one of them, waving an axe, plunged through the crowd and began to climb up. But Silk, the immensely powerful bosun’s mate who commanded a section of seamen in Bush’s division, came running along the shelf and grabbed the axe. He began to hew at the door, with tremendous methodical blows, gathering his body together and then flinging the axehead into the wood with all the strength in his body. Another axeman arrived, elbowed Bush aside, and started to hack at the door as well, but he was neither as accomplished nor as powerful. The thunder of their blows resounded in the angle. The iron-barred wicket in the door opened, with a gleam of steel beyond the bars. Bush pointed his pistol and fired. Silk’s axe drove clean through the door, and he wrenched the blade free; then, changing his aim, he began to swing the axe in a horizontal arc at the middle part of the door. Three mighty blows and he paused to direct the other axeman where to strike. Silk struck again and again; then he put down the axe, set his fingers in the jagged hole that had opened, his foot against the door and with one frightful muscle-tearing effort he rent away a whole section of the door. There was a beam across the gap he had opened; Silk’s axe crashed onto it and through it, and again. With a hoarse shout Silk plunged, axe in hand, through the jagged hole.

  “Come along, men!” yelled Bush, at the top of his lungs, and plunged through after him.

  This was the open courtyard of the fort. Bush stumbled over a dead man and looked up to see a group of men before him, in their shirts, or naked; coffee-coloured faces with long disordered moustaches; men with cutlasses and pistols. Silk flung himself upon them like a maniac, the axe swinging. A Spaniard fell under the axe; Bush saw a severed finger fall to the ground as the axe crashed through the Spaniard’s ineffectual guard. Pistols banged and smoke eddied about as Bush rushed forward too. There were other men swarming after him. Bush’s sword clashed against a cutlass and then the group turned and fled. Bush swung with his sword at a naked shoulder fleeing before him, and saw a red wound open in the flesh and heard the man scream. The man he was pursuing vanished somewhere, like a wraith, and Bush, hurrying on to find other enemies, met a red-coated marine, hatless, his hair wild and his eyes blazing, yelling like a fiend. Bush actually had to parry the bayonet-thrust the marine made at him.

  “Steady, you fool!” shouted Bush, only conscious after the words had passed his lips that they were spoken at the top of his voice.

  There was a hint of recognition in the marine’s mad eyes, and he turned aside, his bayonet at the charge, and rushed on. There were other marines in the background; they must have made their way in through the embrasures. They were all yelling, all drunk with fighting. And here was another rush of seamen, swarming down from the ramparts they had scaled. On the far side there were wooden buildings; his men were swarming round them and shots and screams were echoing from them. Those must be the barracks and storehouses, and the garrison must have fled there for shelter from the fury of the stormers.

  Whiting appeared, his scarlet tunic filthy, his sword dangling from his wrist. His eyes were bleary and cloudy.

  “Call ’em off,” said Bush, grasping at his own sanity with a desperate effort.

  It took Whiting a moment to recognize him and to understand the order.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  A fresh flood of seamen came pouring into view beyond the buildings; Hornblower’s division had found its way into the fort on the far side, evidently. Bush looked round him and called to a group of his own men who appeared at that moment.

  “Follow me,” he said, and pushed on.

  A ramp with an easy slope led up the side of the ramparts. A dead man lay there, half-way up, but Bush gave the corpse no more attention than it deserved. At the top was the main battery, six huge guns pointing through the embrasures. And beyond was the sky, all bloody-red with the dawn. A third of the way up to the zenith reached the significant colour, but even while Bush halted to look at it a golden gleam of sun showed through the clouds on the horizon, and the red began to fade perceptibly; blue sky and white clouds and blazing golden sun took its place. That was the measure of the time the assault had taken; only the few minutes from earliest dawn to tropical sunrise. Bush stood and grasped this astonishing fact—it could have been late afternoon as far as his own sensations went.

  Here from the gun platform the whole view of the bay opened up. There was the opposite shore; the shallows where the Renown had grounded (was it only yesterday?), the rolling country lifting immediately into the hills of that side, with the sharply defined shape of the other battery at the foot of the point. To the left the peninsula dropped sharply in a series of jagged headlands, stretching like fingers out into the blue, blue ocean; farther round still was the sapphire surface of Scotchman’s Bay, and there, with her backed mizzen topsail catching brilliantly the rising sun, lay the Renown. At that distance she looked like a lovely toy; Bush caught his breath at the sight of her, not because of the beauty of the scene but with relief. The sight of the ship, and the associated memories which the sight called up in his mind, brought his sanity flooding back; there were a thousand things to be done now.

  Hornblower appeared up the other ramp; he looked like a scarecrow with his disordered clothes. He held sword in one hand and pistol in the other, just as did Bush. Beside him Wellard swung a cutlass singularly large for him, and at his heels were a score or more of seamen still under discipline, their muskets, with bayonets fixed, held before them ready for action.

  “Morning, sir,” said Hornblower. His battered cocked hat was still on his head for him to touch it, and he made a move to do so, checking himself at the realization that his sword was in his hand.

  “Good morning,” said Bush, automatically.

  “Congratulations, sir,” said Hornblower. His face was white, and the smile on his lips was like the grin of a corpse. His beard sprouted over his lips and chin.

  “Thank you,” said Bush.

  Hornblower pushed his pistol into his belt and then sheathed his sword.

  “I’ve taken possession of all that side, sir,” he went on, with a gesture behind him. “Shall I carry on?”

  “Yes, carry on, Mr. Hornblower.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  This time Hornblower could touch his hat. He gave a rapid order posting a petty officer and men over the guns.

  “You see, sir,” said Hornblower, pointing, “a few got away.”

  Bush looked down the precipitous hillside that fell to the bay and could see a few figures down there.

  “Not enough to trouble us,” he said; his mind was just beginning to work smoothly now.

  “No, sir. I’ve forty prisoners under guard at the main gate. I can see Whiting’s collecting the rest. I’ll go on now, sir, if I may.”

  “Very well, Mr. Hornblower.”

  Somebody at least had kept a clear head during the fury of the assault. Bush went on down the farther ramp. A petty officer and a couple of seamen stood there on guard; they came to attention as Bush appeared.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “This yere’s the magazine, zur,” said the petty officer—Ambrose, captain of the foretop, who had never lost the broad Devon acquired in his childhood, despite his years in the navy. “We’m guarding of it.”

  “Mr. Hornblower’s or
ders?”

  “Iss, zur.”

  A forlorn party of prisoners were squatting by the main gate. Hornblower had reported the presence of them. But there were guards he had said nothing about: a sentry at the well; guards at the gate; Woolton, the steadiest petty officer of them all, at a long wooden building beside the gate, and six men with him.

  “What’s your duty?” demanded Bush.

  “Guarding the provision store, sir. There’s liquor here.”

  “Very well.”

  If the madmen who had made the assault—that marine, for instance, whose bayonet-thrust Bush had parried—had got at the liquor there would be no controlling them at all.

  Abbott, the midshipman in subordinate command of Bush’s own de-division, came hurrying up.

  “What the hell d’ye think you’ve been doing?” demanded Bush, testily. “I’ve been without you since the attack began.”

  “Sorry, sir,” apologized Abbott. Of course he had been carried away by the fury of the attack, but that was no excuse; certainly no excuse when one remembered young Wellard still at Hornblower’s side and attending to his duties.

  “Get ready to make the signal to the ship,” ordered Bush. “You ought to have been ready to do that five minutes ago. Clear three guns. Who was it who was carrying the flag? Find him and bend it on over the Spanish colours. Jump to it, damn you.”

  Victory might be sweet, but it had no effect on Bush’s temper, now that the reaction had set in. Bush had had no sleep and no breakfast, and even though perhaps only ten minutes had elapsed since the fort had been captured, his conscience nagged at him regarding those ten minutes; there were many things he ought to have done in that time.

  It was a relief to turn away from the contemplation of his own shortcomings and to settle with Whiting regarding the safeguarding of the prisoners. They had all been fetched out of the barrack buildings by now; a hundred half-naked men, and at least a score of women, their hair streaming down their backs and their scanty clothing clutched about them. At a more peaceful moment Bush would have had an eye for those women, but as it was he merely felt irritated at the thought of an additional complication to deal with, and his eyes only took note of them as such.

  Among the men there was a small sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, but most of them were Spaniards. Nearly all the dead men who lay here and there were fully clothed, in white uniforms with blue facings—they were the sentinels and the main guard who had paid the penalty for their lack of watchfulness.

  “Who was in command?” asked Bush of Whiting.

  “Can’t tell, sir.”

  “Well, ask them, then.”

  Bush had command of no language at all save his own, and apparently neither had Whiting, judging by his unhappy glance.

  “Please, sir—” This was Pierce, surgeon’s mate, trying to attract his attention. “Can I have a party to help carry the wounded into the shade?”

  Before Bush could answer him Abbott was hailing from the gun platform.

  “Guns clear, sir. May I draw powder charges from the magazines?”

  And then before Bush could give permission here was young Wellard, trying to elbow Pierce on one side so as to command Bush’s attention.

  “Please, sir. Please, sir. Mr. Hornblower’s respects, sir, an’ could you please come up to the tower there, sir. Mr. Hornblower says it’s urgent, sir.”

  Bush felt at that moment as if one more distraction would break his heart.

  X

  At each corner of the fort there was a small bastion built out, to give flanking fire along the walls, and on top of the southwest bastion stood a little watch-tower which carried the flagstaff. Bush and Hornblower stood on the tower, the broad Atlantic behind them and before them the long gulf of the bay of Samaná. Over their heads waved two flags: the White Ensign above, the red and gold of Spain below. Out in the Renown they might not be able to make out the colours, but they would certaiply see the two flags. And when having heard the three signal guns boom out they trained their telescopes on the fort for they must have seen the flags slowly flutter down and rise again, dip and rise again. Three guns; two flags twice dipped. That was the signal that the fort was in English hands, and the Renown had seen it, for she had braced up her mizzen topsail and begun the long beat back along the coast of the peninsula.

  Bush and Hornblower had with them the one telescope which a hasty search through the fort had brought to light; when one of them had it to his eye the other could hardly restrain his twitching fingers from snatching at it. At the moment Bush was looking through it, training it on the farther shore of the bay, and Hornblower was stabbing with an index finger at what he had been looking at a moment before.

  “You see, sir?” he asked. “Farther up the bay than the battery. There’s the town—Savaná, it’s called. And beyond that there’s the shipping. They’ll up anchor any minute now.”

  “I see ’em,” said Bush, the glass still at his eye. “Four small craft. No sail hoisted—hard to tell what they are.”

  “Easy enough to guess, though, sir.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Bush.

  There would be no need for big men of war here, immediately adjacent to the Mona Passage. Half the Caribbean trade came up through here, passing within thirty miles of the bay of Samaná. Fast, handy craft, with a couple of long guns each and a large crew, could dash out and snap up prizes and retire to the protection of the bay, where the crossed fire of the batteries could be relied on to keep out enemies, as the events of yesterday had proved. The raiders would hardly have to spend a night at sea.

  “They’ll know by now we’ve got this fort,” said Hornblower. “They’ll guess that Renown will be coming round after ’em. They can sweep, and tow, and kedge. They’ll be out of the bay before you can say Jack Robinson. And from Engano Point it’s a fair wind for Martinique.”

  “Very likely,” agreed Bush.

  With a simultaneous thought they turned to look at the Renown. With her stern to them, her sails braced sharp on the starboard tack, she was making her way out to sea; it would be a long beat before she could go about in the certainty of being able to weather Cape Samaná. She looked lovely enough out there, with her white sails against the rich blue, but it would be hours before she could work round to stop the bolt hole. Bush turned back and considered the sheltered waters of the bay.

  “Better man the guns and make ready for ’em,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Hornblower. He hesitated. “We won’t have ’em under fire for long. They’ll be shallow draught. They can hug the point over there closer than Renown could.”

  “But it won’t take much to sink ’em, either,” said Bush. “Oh, I see what you’re after.”

  “Red-hot shot might make all the difference, sir,” said Hornblower.

  “Repay ’em in their own coin,” said Bush, with a grin of satisfaction. Yesterday the Renown had endured the hellish fire of red-hot shot. To Bush the thought of roasting a few Dagoes was quite charming.

  “That’s right, sir,” said Hornblower.

  He was not grinning like Bush. There was a frown on his face; he was oppressed with the thought that the privateers might escape to continue their depredations elsewhere, and any means to reduce their chances should be used.

  “But can you do it?” asked Bush suddenly. “D’ye know how to heat shot?”

  “I’ll find out, sir.”

  “I’ll wager no man of ours knows how.”

  Shot could only be heated in a battery on land; a sea-going ship, constructed of inflammable material, could not run the risk of going into action with a flaming furnace inside her. The French, in the early days of the Revolutionary War, had made some disastrous experiments in the hope of finding a means of countering England’s naval superiority, but after a few ships had set themselves on fire they had given up the attempt. Seagoing men now left the use of the heated weapon to shore-based garrison artillery.

  “I’ll try and find out for myself,
sir,” said Hornblower. “There’s the furnace down there and all the gear.”

  Hornblower stood in the sunshine, already far too hot to be comfortable. His face was pale, dirty, and bearded, and in his expression eagerness and weariness were oddly at war.

  “Have you had any breakfast yet?” asked Bush.

  “No, sir.” Hornblower looked straight at him. “Neither have you, sir.”

  “No,” grinned Bush.

  He had not been able to spare a moment for anything like that, with the whole defence of the fort to be organized. But he could bear fatigue and hunger and thirst, and he doubted if Hornblower could.

  “I’ll get a drink of water at the well, sir,” said Hornblower.

  As he said the words, and the full import came to him, a change in his expression was quite obvious. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips; Bush could see that the lips were cracked and parched and that the tongue could do nothing to relieve them. The man had drunk nothing since he had landed twelve hours ago—twelve hours of desperate exertion in a tropical climate.

  “See that you do, Mr. Hornblower,” said Bush. “That’s an order.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Bush found the telescope leaving his hand and passing into Hornblower’s.

  “May I have another look, sir, before I go down? By George, I thought as much. That two-master’s warping out, sir. Less than an hour before she’s within range. I’ll get the guns manned, sir. Take a look for yourself, sir.”