Captain Hornblower R. N.

by C. S. Forester

  ‘Today is Sunday, sir,’ said Bush, simply.

  So it was. Sunday was the day of the captain’s inspection, when he went round every part of the ship examining everything, to see that the first lieutenant was doing his duty in keeping the ship efficient. On Sunday the ship had to be swept and garnished, all the falls of rope flemished down, the hands fallen in by divisions in their best clothes, divine service held, the Articles of War read – Sunday was the day when the professional ability of every first lieutenant in His Britannic Majesty’s Navy was tried in the balance.

  Hornblower could not fight down a smile at this ingenious explanation.

  ‘Sunday or no Sunday,’ he said, ‘you have done magnificently, Mr Bush.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And I shall remember to say so in my report to the Admiralty.’

  ‘I know you’ll do that, sir.’

  Bush’s weary face was illuminated by a gleam of pleasure. A successful single ship action was usually rewarded by promotion to Commander of the first lieutenant, and for a man like Bush, with no family and no connections, it was his only hope of making that vitally important step. But a captain who was anxious to enhance his own glory could word his report so that it appeared that he had won his victory despite of, instead of by the aid of, his first lieutenant – instances were known.

  ‘They may make much of this in England, when eventually they hear about it,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘I’m certain of it, sir. It isn’t every day of the week that a frigate sinks a ship of the line.’

  It was stretching a point to call the Natividad that – sixty years ago when she was built she may have been considered just fit to lie in the line, but times had changed since then. But it was a very notable feat that the Lydia had accomplished, all the same. It was only now that Hornblower began to appreciate how notable it was, and his spirit rose in proportion. There was another criterion which the British public was prone to apply in estimating the merit of a naval action, and the Board of Admiralty itself not infrequently used the same standard.

  ‘What’s the butcher’s bill?’ demanded Hornblower, brutally, voicing the thoughts of both of them – brutally because otherwise he might be thought guilty of sentiment.

  ‘Thirty-eight killed, sir,’ said Bush, taking a dirty scrap of paper from his pocket. ‘Seventy-five wounded. Four missing. The missing are Harper, Dawson, North, and Chump the negro, sir – they were lost when the launch was sunk. Clay was killed in the first day’s action—’

  Hornblower nodded; he remembered Clay’s headless body sprawled on the quarterdeck.

  ‘—and John Summers, master’s mate, Henry Vincent and James Clifton, boatswain’s mates, killed yesterday, and Donald Scott Galbraith, third lieutenant, Lieutenant Samuel Simmonds of the Marines, Midshipman Howard Savage and four other warrant officers wounded.’

  ‘Galbraith?’ said Hornblower. That piece of news prevented him from beginning to wonder what would be the reward of a casualty list of a hundred and seventeen, when frigate captains had been knighted before this for a total of eighty killed and wounded.

  ‘Badly, sir. Both legs smashed below the knees.’

  Galbraith had met the fate which Hornblower had dreaded for himself. The shock recalled Hornblower to his duty.

  ‘I shall go down and visit the wounded at once,’ he said, and checked himself and looked searchingly at his first lieutenant. ‘What about you, Bush? You don’t look fit for duty.’

  ‘I am perfectly fit, sir,’ protested Bush. ‘I shall take an hour’s rest when Gerard comes up to take over the deck from me.’

  ‘As you will, then.’

  Down below decks in the orlop it was like some canto in the Inferno. It was dark; the four oil lamps whose flickering, reddish yellow glimmer wavered from the deck beams above seemed to serve only to cast shadows. The atmosphere was stifling. To the normal stenches of bilge and a ship’s stores were added the stinks of sick men crowded together, of the sooty lamps, of the bitter powder smell which had drifted in yesterday and had not yet succeeded in making its way out again. It was appallingly hot; the heat and the stink hit Hornblower in the face as he entered, and within five seconds of his entry his face was as wet as if it had been dipped in water, so hot was it and so laden was the atmosphere with moisture.

  As complex as the air was the noise. There were the ordinary ship noises – the creaking and groaning of timber, the vibration of the rigging transmitted downward from the chains, the sound of the sea outside, the wash of the bilge below, and the monotonous clangour of the pumps forward intensified by the ship-timbers acting as sounding boards. But all the noises acted only as accompaniment to the din in the cockpit, where seventy-five wounded men, crammed together, were groaning and sobbing and screaming, blaspheming and vomiting. Lost souls in hell could hardly have had a more hideous environment, or be suffering more.

  Hornblower found Laurie, standing aimlessly in the gloom.

  ‘Thank God you’ve come, sir,’ he said. His tone implied that he cast all responsibility, gladly, from that moment on the shoulders of his captain.

  ‘Come round with me and make your report,’ snapped Hornblower. He hated this business, and yet, although he was completely omnipotent on board, he could not turn and fly as his instincts told him to do. The work had to be done, and Hornblower knew that now Laurie had proved his incompetence he himself was the best man to deal with it. He approached the last man in the row, and drew back with a start of surprise. Lady Barbara was there; the wavering light caught her classic features as she knelt beside the wounded man. She was sponging his face and his throat as he writhed on the deck.

  It was a shock to Hornblower to see her engaged thus. The day was yet to come when Florence Nightingale was to make nursing a profession in which women could engage. No man of taste could bear the thought of a woman occupied with the filthy work of a hospital. Sisters of Mercy might labour there for the good of their souls; boozy old women might attend to women in labour and occasionally take a hand at sick nursing, but to look after wounded men was entirely men’s work – the work of men who deserved nothing better, either, and who were ordered to it on account of their incapacity or their bad record like men ordered to clean out latrines. Hornblower’s stomach revolted at the sight of Lady Barbara here in contact with dirty bodies, with blood and pus and vomit.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ he said, hoarsely. ‘Go away from here. Go on deck.’

  ‘I have begun this work now,’ said Lady Barbara indifferently. ‘I am not going to leave it unfinished.’

  Her tone admitted no possibility of argument; she was apparently talking of the inevitable – much as she might say that she had caught cold and would have to bear with it until it had run its course.

  ‘The gentleman in charge here,’ she went on, ‘knows nothing of his duties.’

  Lady Barbara had no belief in the nobility of nursing, to her mind it was a more degrading occupation than cooking or mending clothes (work which had only occasionally, when the exigencies of travel demanded it, engaged her capable fingers) but she had found a job which was being inefficiently done when there was no one save herself to do it better, at a time when the King’s service depended in part on its being done well. She had set herself to work with the same wholehearted attention to detail and neglect of personal comfort with which one of her brothers had governed India and another had fought the Mahrattas.

  ‘This man,’ went on Lady Barbara, ‘has a splinter of wood under his skin here. It ought to be extracted at once.’

  She displayed the man’s bare chest, hairy and tattooed. Under the tattooing there was a horrible black bruise, stretching from the breast bone to the right armpit, and in the muscles of the armpit was a jagged projection under the skin; when Lady Barbara laid her fingers on it the man writhed and groaned with pain. In fighting between wooden ships splinter wounds constituted a high proportion of the casualties, and the hurtling pieces of wood could never be extracted by the
route by which they entered, because their shape gave them natural barbs. In this case the splinter had been deflected by the ribs so as to pass round under the skin, bruising and lacerating, to its present place in the armpit.

  ‘Are you ready to do it now?’ asked Lady Barbara of the unhappy Laurie.

  ‘Well, madam—’

  ‘If you will not, then I will. Don’t be a fool, man.’

  ‘I will see that it is done, Lady Barbara,’ interposed Hornblower. He would promise anything to get this finished and done with.

  ‘Very well, then, Captain.’

  Lady Barbara rose from her knees, but she showed no sign of any intention of retiring in a decent female fashion. Hornblower and Laurie looked at each other.

  ‘Now, Laurie,’ said Hornblower, harshly. ‘Where are your instruments? Here, you, Wilcox, Hudson. Bring him a good stiff tot of rum. Now, Williams, we’re going to get that splinter out of you. It is going to hurt you.’

  Hornblower had to struggle hard to keep his face from writhing in disgust and fear of the task before him. He spoke harshly to stop his voice from trembling; he hated the whole business. And it was a painful and bloody business, too. Although Williams tried hard to show no weakness, he writhed as the incision was made, and Wilcox and Hudson had to catch his hands and force his shoulders back. He gave a horrible cry as the long dark strip of wood was dragged out, and then fell limp, fainting, so that he uttered no protest at the prick of the needle as the edges of the wound were clumsily sewn together.

  Lady Barbara’s lips were firmly compressed. She watched Laurie’s muddled attempts at bandaging, and then she stooped without a word and took the rags from him. The men watched her fascinated as with one hand firmly behind Williams’ spine she passed the roll dexterously round his body and bound the fast-reddening waste firmly to the wound.

  ‘He will do now,’ said Lady Barbara, rising.

  Hornblower spent two stifling hours down there in the cockpit going the round with Laurie and Lady Barbara, but they were not nearly such agonising hours as they might have been. One of the main reasons for his feeling so unhappy regarding the care of the wounded had been his consciousness of his own incompetence. Insensibly he came to shift some of his responsibility on to Lady Barbara’s shoulders; she was so obviously capable and so unintimidated that she was the person most fitted of all in the ship to be given the supervision of the wounded. When Hornblower had gone round every bed, when the five newly dead men had been dragged out, he faced her under the wavering light of the last lamp in the row.

  ‘I don’t know how I can thank you, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I am as grateful to you as any of these wounded men.’

  ‘There is no gratitude needed,’ said Lady Barbara, shrugging her slim shoulders, ‘for work which had to be done.’

  A good many years later her ducal brother was to say ‘The King’s government must be carried on,’ in exactly the same tone. The man in the bed beside them waved a bandaged arm.

  ‘Three cheers for her leddyship,’ he croaked. ‘Hip hip, hurrah!’

  Some of the shattered invalids joined him in his cheers – a melancholy chorus, blended with the wheezing and groaning of the delirious men around them. Lady Barbara waved a deprecating hand and turned back to the captain.

  ‘We must have air down here,’ she said. ‘Can that be arranged? I remember my brother telling me how the mortality in the hospital at Bombay declined as soon as they began to give the patients air. Perhaps those men who can be moved can be brought on deck?’

  ‘I will arrange it, ma’am,’ said Hornblower.

  Lady Barbara’s request was strongly accented by the contrast which Hornblower noticed when he went on deck – the fresh Pacific air, despite the scorching sunshine, was like champagne after the solid stink of the orlop. He gave orders for the immediate re-establishment of the canvas ventilating shafts which had been removed when the decks were cleared for action.

  ‘And there are certain of the wounded, Mr Rayner,’ he went on, ‘who would do better if brought up on deck. You must find Lady Barbara Wellesley and ask her which men are to be moved.’

  ‘Lady Barbara Wellesley, sir?’ said Rayner, surprised and tactless, because he knew nothing of the last development.

  ‘You heard what I said,’ snapped Hornblower.

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Rayner hurriedly, and dived away below in fear lest he should say anything further to annoy his captain.

  So that on board H.M.S. Lydia that morning divisions were held and divine service conducted a little late, after the burial of the dead, with a row of wounded swaying in hammocks on each side of the maindeck, and with the faint echo of the horrible sounds below floating up through the air shafts.

  XIX

  Once more the Lydia held her course along the Pacific coast of Central America. The grey volcanic peaks, tinged with pink, slid past her to the eastward, with the lush green of the coastal strip sometimes just visible at their feet. The sea was blue and the sky was blue; the flying-fish skimmed the surface, leaving their fleeting furrows behind them. But every minute of the day and night twenty men toiled at the pumps to keep her from sinking, and the rest of the able bodied crew worked all their waking hours at the task of refitting.

  The fortnight which elapsed before she rounded Cape Mala went far to reduce her list of wounded. Some of the men were by then already convalescent – the hard physical condition which they had enjoyed, thanks to months of heavy work at sea, enabled them to make light of wounds which would have been fatal to men of soft physique. Shock and exhaustion had relieved the ship of others, and now gangrene, the grim Nemesis which awaited so many men with open wounds in those pre-antiseptic days, was relieving her of still more. Every morning there was the same ceremony at the ship’s side, when two or three or six hammock-wrapped bundles were slid over into the blue Pacific.

  Galbraith went that way. He had borne the shock of his wound, he had even survived the torture to which Laurie submitted him when, goaded by Lady Barbara’s urgent representations, he had set to work with knife and saw upon the smashed tangle of flesh and bone which had been his legs. He had bade fair to make a good recovery, lying blanched and feeble in his cot, so that Laurie had been heard to boast of his surgical skill and of the fine stumps he had made and of the neatness with which he had tied the arteries. Then, suddenly, the fatal symptoms had shown themselves, and Galbraith had died five days later after a fortunate delirium.

  Hornblower and Lady Barbara drew nearer to each other during those days. Lady Barbara had fought a losing battle for Galbraith’s life to the very end, had fought hard and without sparing herself, and yet seemingly without emotion as if she were merely applying herself to a job which had to be done. Hornblower would have thought this was the case if had not seen her face on the occasion when Galbraith was holding her hands and talking to her under the impression that she was his mother. The dying boy was babbling feverishly in the broad Scots into which he had lapsed as soon as delirium overcame him, clutching her hands and refusing to let her go, while she sat with him talking calmly and quietly in an effort to soothe him. So still was her voice, so calm and unmoved was her attitude, that Hornblower would have been deceived had he not seen the torment in her face.

  And for Hornblower it was unexpectedly painful when Galbraith died. Hornblower always looked upon himself as a man content to make use of others, pleasingly devoid of human weaknesses. It was a surprise to him to find how hurt and sorry he was at Galbraith’s death, and to find his voice trembling and tears in his eyes as he read the service, and to feel a shudder of distress at the thought of what the sharks were doing to Galbraith’s body, down there below the blue surface of the Pacific. He told himself that he was being weak, and then hastened to assure himself that he was merely annoyed at the loss of a useful subordinate, but he could not convince himself. In a fury of reaction he flung himself into the business of driving his men harder in their task of refitting the Lydia, and yet now when his eyes met Lady Barba
ra’s on deck or across the dinner table, it was not with the complete lack of sympathy which had previously prevailed. There was a hint of understanding between them now.

  Hornblower saw little enough of Lady Barbara. They dined together on some occasions, always with at least one other officer present, but for the most part he was busy with his professional duties and she with her care of the sick. They neither of them had the time, and he at least had not the superfluous energy to spare for the flirtations that those mild tropic nights should have brought in their train. And Hornblower, as soon as they entered the Gulf of Panama, had sufficient additional worries for the moment to drive away all possibility of a flirtation.

  The Pearl Islands were just in view over the port bow, and the Lydia, close hauled, was heading for Panama one day’s sail ahead when the guarda-costa lugger which had encountered them before hove up over the horizon to windward. At sight of the Lydia she altered course and came running down wind towards her, while Hornblower kept steadily on his course. He was a little elated with the prospect of making even such a fever-ridden port as badly equipped as Panama, because the strain of keeping the Lydia afloat was beginning to tell on him.

  The lugger hove-to a couple of cables’ lengths away, and a few minutes later the same smart officer in the brilliant uniform came clambering on to the Lydia’s deck as had boarded from her once before.

  ‘Good morning, Captain,’ he said, bowing profoundly. ‘I trust Your Excellency is enjoying the best of health?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Hornblower.

  The Spanish officer was looking curiously about him; the Lydia still bore many marks of her recent battle – the row of wounded in hammocks told a good part of the story. Hornblower saw that the Spaniard seemed to be on his guard, as though determined to be non-committal at present until something unknown had revealed itself.