Admiral Hornblower

by C. S. Forester

  Moth had two red swallowtails hoisted, and two were hoisted in reply by Clam. Hornblower had foreseen the possibility of confusion, and had settled that signals to do with Moth should always be doubled. Then there would be no chance of Harvey making corrections for Moth’s mistakes, or vice versa. Moth’s mortar roared out, its report echoing over the water. From the Harvey they could see nothing of the flight of the shell.

  ‘Double yellow flag from Clam, sir.’

  ‘That means Moth’s shell dropped short,’ said Mound. ‘Hoist our red swallowtail.’

  Again he fired the mortar, again the spark of the fuse soared towards the sky and disappeared, and again nothing more happened.

  ‘White pendant from Clam, sir.’

  ‘Too long again?’ said Mound, a little puzzled. ‘I hope they’re not cross-eyed over there.’

  Moth fired again, and was rewarded by a double white pendant from Clam. This shell had passed over, when her preceding one had fallen short. It should be easy for Moth to find the target now. Mound was checking the bearing of the target.

  ‘Still pointing straight at her,’ he grumbled. ‘Mr Jones, take one half a quarter-pound from that pound and a half.’

  Hornblower was trying to imagine what the captain of the Blanchefleur was doing at that moment on his own side of the sandspit. Probably until the very moment when the bomb-ketches opened fire he had felt secure, imagining that nothing except a direct assault on the battery could imperil him. But now shells must be dropping quite close to him, and he was unable to reply or defend himself in any active way. It would be hard for him to get under way; he had anchored his ship at the far end of the long, narrow lagoon. The exit near him was shoal water too shallow even for a skiff – as the breakers showed – and with the wind as it was at present it was impossible for him to try to beat up the channel again closer to the battery. He must be regretting having dropped so far to leeward before anchoring; presumably he had done so to secure himself the better from the claws of a cutting-out attack. With boats or by kedging he might be able to haul his ship slowly up to the battery, near enough for its guns to be able to keep the bomb-ketches out of mortar range.

  ‘Red swallowtail at the dip, sir!’ reported the master’s mate excitedly.

  That meant that the shell had fallen short but close.

  ‘Put in two pinches more, Mr Jones,’ said Mound.

  Moth’s mortar roared out again, but this time they saw the shell burst, apparently directly above the Blanchefleur’s mastheads. They saw the big ball of smoke, and the sound of the explosion came faintly back to them on the wind. Mound shook his head gravely; either Duncan over there had not cut his fuse correctly or it had burnt away more rapidly than usual. Two blue flags at Clam’s peak indicated that the fall of Moth’s shot had been unobserved – the signalling system was still functioning correctly. Then Mound bent his gangling body over and applied the linstock to fuse and touch-hole. The mortar roared; some freak of ballistics sent a fragment of blazing wad close over Hornblower’s head, making him duck while the smoke billowed round him, but as he looked up again he just caught sight of the spark of the fuse high up against the sky, poised at the top of its trajectory, before it disappeared from sight in its swift downward swoop. Hornblower, Mound, Jones, the whole mortar’s crew stood waiting tensely for the shell to end its flight. Then over the rim of the sand-dune they saw a hint of white smoke, and the sound of the bursting shell came back to them directly afterwards.

  ‘I think we’ve hit her, sir,’ said Mound, with elaborate carelessness.

  ‘Black ball at Clam’s masthead, sir!’ shouted the master’s mate.

  That meant a hit. A thirteen-inch shell, soaring that immense distance into the air, had come plunging down on to Blanchefleur’s decks and had exploded. Hornblower could not imagine what destruction it might cause.

  ‘Both mortars together, now,’ snapped Mound, throwing aside all lackadaisical pose. ‘Jump to it, you men.’

  Two white pendants at the dip from Clam meant that Moth’s next shot had fallen close but too far. Then both of Harvey’s mortars roared – the little ketch dipped and plunged as the violence of the recoil forced her bows down. Up went the black ball to Clam’s masthead.

  ‘Another hit!’ exulted Mound.

  Blanchefleur’s topmasts, seen over the dunes, suddenly began to separate. She was turning round – her desperate crew was trying to tow her or kedge her back up the channel.

  ‘Please God we wreck her before she gets away!’ said Mound. ‘Why in hell doesn’t Moth fire?’

  Hornblower watched him closely; the temptation to fire his mortars the moment they were loaded, without waiting for Moth to take her turn, was powerful indeed, but to yield to it meant confusion for the observer over in Clam and eventual losing of all control. Moth fired, and two black balls at Clam’s masthead showed that she, too, had scored a hit. But Blanchefleur had turned now; Hornblower could see the tiniest, smallest movement of her topmast against the upper edge of the dunes, only a yard or two at most. Mound fired his two mortars, and even while the shells were in the air his men leaped to the capstan and flung themselves on the bars. Clank – clank! Twice the pawl slipped over the ratchet as they hauled in on the spring and swung the ketch round to keep her mortars trained on the target. At that instant Blanchefleur’s foretopmast fell from view. Only main and mizzen were in sight now.

  ‘Another hit, by God!’ shouted Hornblower, the words forced from him like a cork from a popgun. He was as excited as a schoolboy; he found he was jumping up and down on the deck. The foremast gone; he tried to picture the frightful destruction those shells must be causing, crashing down on the frail wooden decks. And there was smoke visible over the crest of the dunes too, more than could be accounted for by the bursting of the shells, and blacker, too. Probably she was on fire. Mizzen-mast and mainmast came into line again – Blanchefleur was swinging across the channel. She must be out of control. Perhaps a shell had hit the cable out to the kedge, or wrecked the towing boats.

  Moth fired again; and two red swallowtails at the dip showed that her shells had fallen close and short – Blanchefleur must have swerved appreciably across the channel. Mound had noticed it, and was increasing the propelling charge in his mortars. That was smoke; undoubtedly it was smoke eddying from Blanchefleur. She must be on fire. And from the way she lay, stationary again – Hornblower could see that her topmasts made no movement at all to the sand-dunes – she must have gone aground. Mound fired again, and they waited. There went the mizzen-topmast, leaning over slowly, and the maintopmast disappeared as well. There was nothing to see now, except the smoke rising ever more thickly. Mound looked at Hornblower for orders.

  ‘Better keep on firing,’ said Hornblower, thickly. Even if the crew were roasting alive in her it was his duty to see that Blanchefleur was utterly destroyed. The mortars roared out again, and the shells made their steep ascent, climbing upwards for ten full seconds before swooping down again. Clam signalled ‘close and over’. Moth fired again, and Clam signalled a hit for her; Hornblower’s inner eye was seeing mental pictures of the shells plunging from the sky in among the crew of the Blanchefleur as they laboured amid the flames to save their ship, burning, dismasted, and aground. It took only the briefest interval of time for those pictures to form, for the moment the signal was seen in Clam Mound bent to fire the mortars, and yet the fuses had not taken fire when the sound of a violent explosion checked him. Hornblower whipped his glass to his eye; an immense gust of smoke showed over the sand-dunes, and in the smoke Hornblower thought he could make out flying specks – corpses or fragments of the ship, blown into the air by the explosion. The fire, or one of Moth’s last shells, had reached Blanchefleur’s magazines.

  ‘Signal to Clam, Mr Mound,’ said Hornblower. ‘“What do you see of the enemy?”’

  They waited for the answer.

  ‘“Enemy – totally – destroyed”, sir,’ read off the master’s mate, and the crew gave a ragged cheer.r />
  ‘Very good, Mr Mound. I think we can leave these shallows now before daylight goes. Hang out the recall, if you please, with Clam’s number and Lotus’s number.’

  This watery northern sunshine was deceptive. It shone upon one but it gave one no heat at all. Hornblower shivered violently for a moment – he had been standing inactive, he told himself, upon the Harvey’s deck for some hours, and he should have worn a greatcoat. Yet that was not the real explanation of the shudder, and he knew it. The excitement and interest had died away, leaving him gloomy and deflated. It had been a brutal and cold-blooded business, destroying a ship that had no chance of firing back at him. It would read well in a report, and brother officers would tell each other of Hornblower’s new achievement, destroying a big French privateer in the teeth of the Swedes and the French amid shoals innumerable. Only he would know of this feeling of inglorious anticlimax.

  X

  Bush wiped his mouth on his table napkin with his usual fussy attention to good manners.

  ‘What do you think the Swedes’ll say, sir?’ he asked, greatly daring. The responsibility was none of his, and he knew by experience that Hornblower was likely to resent being reminded that Bush was thinking about it.

  ‘They can say what they like,’ said Hornblower, ‘but nothing they can say can put Blanchefleur together again.’

  It was such a cordial reply compared with what Hornblower might have said that Bush wondered once more what it was which had wrought the change in Hornblower – whether his new mellowness was the consequence of success, of recognition of promotion, or of marriage. Hornblower was inwardly debating that very question at that very moment as well, oddly enough, and he was inclined to attribute it to advancing years. For a few moments he subjected himself to his usual pitiless self-analysis, almost morbidly intense. He knew he had grown blandly tolerant of the fact that his hair was thinning, and turning grey over his temples – the first time he had seen a gleam of pink scalp as he combed his hair he had been utterly revolted, but by now he had at least grown accustomed to it. Then he looked down the double row of young faces at his table, and his heart warmed to them. Without a doubt, he was growing paternal, coming to like young people in a way new to him; he suddenly became aware, for that matter, that he was growing to like people young or old, and was losing – temporarily at least, said his cautious spirit – that urgent desire to get away by himself and torture himself.

  He raised his glass.

  ‘I give you a toast, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘to the three officers whose careful attention to duty and whose marked professional ability resulted in the destruction of a dangerous enemy.’

  Bush and Montgomery and the two midshipmen raised their glasses and drank with enthusiasm, while Mound and Duncan and Freeman looked down at the tablecloth with British modesty; Mound, taken unawares, was blushing like a girl and wriggling uncomfortably in his chair.

  ‘Aren’t you going to reply, Mr Mound?’ said Montgomery. ‘You’re the senior.’

  ‘It was the Commodore,’ said Mound, eyes still on the tablecloth. ‘It wasn’t us. He did it all.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Freeman, shaking his gypsy locks.

  It was time to change the subject, thought Hornblower, sensing the approach of an awkward gap in the conversation after this spell of mutual congratulation.

  ‘A song, Mr Freeman. We have all of us heard that you sing well. Let us hear you.’

  Hornblower did not add that it was from a Junior Lord of the Admiralty that he had heard about Freeman’s singing ability, and he concealed the fact that singing meant nothing to him. Other people had this strange desire to hear music, and it was well to gratify the odd whim.

  There was nothing self-conscious about Freeman when it came to singing: he simply lifted his chin, opened his mouth, and sang.

  When first I looked in Chloe’s eyes

  Sapphire seas and summer skies –

  An odd thing this music was. Freeman was clearly performing some interesting and difficult feat; he was giving decided pleasure to these others (Hornblower stole a glance at them), but all he was doing was to squeak and to grunt in different fashions, and drag out the words in an arbitrary way – and such words. For the thousandth time in his life Hornblower gave up the struggle to imagine just what this music was which other people liked so much. He told himself, as he always did, that for him to make the attempt was like a blind man trying to imagine colour.

  Chloe is my o-o-o-only love!

  Freeman finished his song, and everyone pounded on the table in genuine applause.

  ‘A very good song, and very well sung,’ said Hornblower.

  Montgomery was trying to catch his eye.

  ‘Will you excuse me, sir?’ he said. ‘I have the second dogwatch.’

  That sufficed to break up the party; the three lieutenants had to return to their own ships, Bush wanted to take a look round on deck, and the two midshipmen, with a proper appreciation of the insignificance of their species, hastened to offer their thanks for their entertainment and take their departure. That was quite the right sort of party, thought Hornblower, watching them go – good food, lively talk, and a quick ending. He stepped out into the stern gallery, stooping carefully to avoid the low cove overhead. At six o’clock in the evening it was still broad daylight; the sun had not nearly set, but was shining into the gallery from right aft, and a faint streak beneath it showed where Bornholm lay just above the horizon.

  The cutter, her mainsail pulled aft as flat as a board, passed close beneath him as she turned closehauled under the stern with the three lieutenants in the sternsheets going back to their ships – the wind was northwesterly again. The young men were skylarking together until one of them caught sight of the Commodore up in the stern gallery, and then they promptly stiffened into correct attitudes. Hornblower smiled at himself for having grown fond of those boys, and he turned back into the cabin again to relieve them of the strain of being under his eye. Braun was waiting for him.

  ‘I have read through the newspapers, sir,’ he said. Lotus had intercepted a Prussian fishing-boat that afternoon, and had released her after confiscating her catch and taking these newspapers from her.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘This one is the Königsberger Hartunsche Zeitung, sir, published under French censorship, of course. This front page is taken up with the meeting at Dresden. Bonaparte is there with seven kings and twenty-one sovereign princes.’

  ‘Seven kings?’

  ‘The kings of Holland, Naples, Bavaria, Württemberg, Westphalia, Saxony, and Prussia, sir,’ read Braun. ‘The Grand Dukes of—’

  ‘No need for the rest of the list,’ said Hornblower. He peered at the ragged sheets and found himself, as usual, thinking what a barbaric language German was. Bonaparte was clearly trying to frighten someone – it could not be England, who had faced Bonaparte’s wrath without flinching for a dozen years. It might be his own subjects, all the vast mass of western Europe which he had conquered. But the obvious person for Bonaparte to try to cow was the Czar of Russia. There were plenty of good reasons why Russia should have grown restive under the bullying of her neighbour, and this supreme demonstration of Bonaparte’s power was probably designed to frighten her into submission.

  ‘Is there anything about troop movements?’ asked Hornblower.

  ‘Yes, sir. I was surprised at the freedom with which they were mentioned. The Imperial Guard is at Dresden. There’s the First, the Second,’ – Braun turned the page – ‘and the Ninth Army Corps all mentioned. They are in Prussia – headquarters Danzig – and Warsaw.’

  ‘Nine army corps,’ reflected Hornblower. ‘Three hundred thousand men, I suppose.’

  ‘There’s a paragraph here which speaks of Murat’s reserve cavalry. It says, “there are forty thousand men, superbly mounted and equipped”. Bonaparte reviewed them.’

  An enormous mass of men was obviously accumulating on the frontier between Bonaparte’s Empire and Russia. Bonaparte would
have the Prussian and Austrian armies under his orders too. Half a million men – six hundred thousand men – the imagination failed to grasp the figures. A vast tide of humanity was piling up here in eastern Europe. If Russia failed to be impressed by the threat, it was hard to believe that anything could survive the onrush of such a mass of men. The doom of Russia appeared to be sealed; she must either submit or be destroyed. No continental nation yet had successfully opposed Bonaparte, although every single one had felt the violence of his attack; only England still withstood him, and Spain still fought on although his armies had ravaged every village and every valley in the unhappy peninsula.

  Doubt came back into Hornblower’s mind. He could not see that Bonaparte would derive any benefit from the conquest of Russia proportionate to the effort needed, or even proportionate to the slight risk involved. Bonaparte ought to be able to find a far more profitable employment for the men and the money. Probably there would be no war. Russia would submit, and England would face a Europe every square mile of which would be in the tyrant’s hands. And yet –

  ‘This one is the Warsaw Gazette, sir,’ went on Braun. ‘A little more official, from the French point of view, even than the other one, although it’s in the Polish language. Here is a long article about Russia. It speaks of “the Cossack menace to Europe”. It calls Alexander “the barbarian ruler of a barbarian people”. “The successor of Genghis Khan.” It says that “St Petersburg is the focus of all the potential anarchy of Europe” – “a menace to the peace of the world” – “deliberately hostile to the benefits conferred upon the world by the French people”.’

  ‘And that must be published with Bonaparte’s consent,’ commented Hornblower, half to himself, but Braun was still deep in the article.

  ‘“The wanton ravisher of Finland”,’ read Braun, more than half to himself. He raised his green eyes from the sheet. There was a gleam of hatred in them that startled Hornblower; it reminded him of what he was in a fair way to forget, that Braun was a penniless exile on account of Russia’s attack on Finland. Braun had taken service with England, but that was at a time when Russia was at least England’s nominal enemy. Hornblower made a mental note that it might be as well not to trust Braun with any confidential business regarding Russia; of her own free will Russia would never restore Finnish independence, and there was always the chance that Bonaparte might do so – that he might restore what Bonaparte would call Finnish independence, for what that was worth. There were still people who might be deceived by Bonaparte’s professions, despite his record of deceit and broken faith, of cruelty and robbery.