Admiral Hornblower

by C. S. Forester

  ‘No. Steer for the firing.’

  The dark shape of the sloop was just visible ahead; Brown put his helm over a little to lay the barge on a course that would take her past the sloop at a cable’s length’s distance, heading for the gunfire. They had drawn up abeam of the sloop when there came a flash and a roar from her side, and a shot howled close overhead.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Brown. ‘Ain’t the fools got eyes in their heads?’

  Presumably the sloop had hailed the passing boat, and, receiving no reply – the hail being carried away by the wind – had incontinently fired. Another shot came from the Raven, and someone in the barge squawked with dismay. It was demoralising to be fired upon by one’s own side.

  ‘Turn towards her,’ ordered Hornblower. ‘Burn a blue light.’

  At any moment the sloop might fire a full broadside, with every chance of blowing the barge out of the water. Hornblower took the tiller while Brown wrestled, cursing under his breath, with flint and steel and tinder. The hand pulling at the stroke oar said something to try to quicken his movements.

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ snapped Hornblower.

  Everything was in a muddle, and the men knew it. Brown caught a spark on the tinder, jabbed the fuse of the blue light upon it, and then blew the fuse into a glow. A moment later the firework burst into an unearthly glare, lighting up the boat and the water round it, and Hornblower stood up so that his features and his uniform should be visible to the sloop. It was poor revenge to think of the consternation in the Raven when they saw that they had been firing on their own Commodore. Hornblower went up the sloop’s side in a state of cold fury. Cole was there to receive him, of course.

  ‘Well, Mr Cole?’

  ‘Sorry I fired on you, sir, but you didn’t answer my hail.’

  ‘Did it occur to you that with this wind blowing I could not hear you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But we know the French are out. The boats fired on them an hour back, and half my crew is away in the boats. Supposing I were boarded by two hundred French soldiers? I couldn’t take chances, sir.’

  It was no use arguing with a man as jumpy and as nervous as Cole evidently was.

  ‘You sent up the alarm rocket?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I had to inform you that the barges were at sea.’

  ‘You did that the first moment you knew?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’

  ‘Did it occur to you that you would alarm the French as well?’

  ‘I thought that was what you wanted, sir.’

  Hornblower turned away in disgust. The man in his excitement had clean forgotten every order given him.

  ‘Boat approaching from to wind’ard, sir,’ reported someone, his white shirt just visible in the gathering dawn. Cole ran forward excitedly, with Hornblower striding after him, catching up to him as he stood at the knightheads staring at the boat.

  ‘Boat ahoy!’ yelled Cole through his speaking trumpet.

  ‘Aye aye,’ came the answering hail downwind. That was the correct reply for an approaching boat with officers on board. She was a ship’s cutter under a dipping lugsail; as Hornblower watched she took in the sail with considerable clumsiness and came drooping down to the sloop under oars. Level with the bow she turned, clumsily again, and headed in to lie alongside the sloop. Hornblower could see she was crammed with men.

  ‘Soldiers!’ suddenly exclaimed Cole, pointing at the boat with an excited forefinger. ‘Stand to your guns, men! Sheer off, there!’

  Hornblower could see shakoes and crossbelts; it must be just the kind of vision Cole’s imagination had been toying with all through the night. A reassuring English voice came back to them from overside.

  ‘Avast, there! This is Lotus’s cutter with prisoners.’

  It was Purvis’s voice without a doubt. Hornblower walked to the waist and looked down. There was Purvis in the stern, and British seamen in check shirts at the oars, but every inch of space was filled with soldiers, sitting in attitudes of apprehension or dejection. Right up in the eyes of the boat, round the boat’s gun, four red-coated marines held their muskets at the ready; that was the way Purvis had prepared to deal with any attempt by the prisoners to regain their freedom.

  ‘Let ’em come up,’ said Hornblower.

  They climbed the side, greeted by the grinning seamen as they reached the deck, and stared round in the growing light. Purvis swung himself up and touched his hat to Hornblower.

  ‘They’re all Dutchmen, I think, sir. Not Frogs. We got ’em off the barge we caught. Had to fire into ’em a long time – just shot the barge to pieces, us an’ the other boats. They’re following us, sir, with the other prisoners.’

  ‘You only caught one barge?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The others ran for home the moment the rocket went up. But we got two hundred prisoners, I should think, an’ we had to kill nigh on a hundred more.’

  One single barge taken, with two hundred men, when Hornblower had hoped for a dozen barges at least and three thousand men! But Purvis in his innocence was obviously delighted with his capture.

  ‘Here’s one of their officers, sir.’

  Hornblower turned on the blue-coated man who was wearily climbing over the side.

  ‘Who are you, sir?’ he asked in French, and after a moment’s hesitation the officer replied haltingly in the same language.

  ‘Lieutenant von Bulow, of the Fifty-first Regiment of Infantry.’

  ‘French infantry?’

  ‘Of the King of Prussia,’ said the officer, sternly, with a Teutonic explosiveness in the word ‘Prusse’ which indicated his annoyance at the suggestion that he would be a Frenchman.

  So Macdonald had not risked French lives in this highly dangerous venture; that was to be expected, of course. Bonaparte had made war largely at the expense of his allies for the last ten years.

  ‘I will see that you are given refreshment,’ said Hornblower, politely. ‘Please order your men to sit down against the rail there.’

  The officer barked the order. It was significant how at the first warning ‘achtung’ the dispirited soldiers came instantly to attention, standing stiff and straight. Most of them were wet and bedraggled, apparently having been in the water before surrendering. Hornblower gave orders for them to be fed, at the same time as the other boats came back downwind, each with its quota of prisoners. On the cramped decks of the Raven the two hundred prisoners made a fine show; Cole had the two foremost chase-guns run inboard and trained round upon them, a round of canister in each gun, the gun-captains posted with lighted matches ready to fire into them. Seamen, still grinning, went along their ranks handing out bread and beer.

  ‘See how they eat, sir!’ said Purvis. ‘Look at that one, layin’ into his biscuit like a wolf with a bone. God damme, it’s gone a’ready. It’s true what they say, sir, about Boney never feedin’ his men.’

  An Imperial army was wont to gather its food from the countryside as it marched; Macdonald’s sixty thousand had been stationary now for over two weeks, and in a thinly populated country. They must be on short commons. Every day the siege of Riga could be prolonged would cost lives in plenty to Bonaparte, and although he was ever prodigal with lives there must come a time at last when he would have no more to spare, not even Prussian ones, or Italian ones. The greater the pity, then, that the whole division that had tried to pass the river had not been wiped out. Hornblower told himself that was his fault; he should not have entrusted any vital part of the operation to a nervous old woman like Cole. He ought instead to have stayed on board Raven himself. Yet it was hard to be sure of that; the other end of the line, which he had entrusted to Vickery in Lotus, was just as important, and it was desirable that he should be in the centre in Nonsuch to co-ordinate the activities of his two wings. If Vickery and Cole had had their positions interchanged – as would have to be done – although Vickery could have been relied upon not to spring the trap too soon could Cole have been relied upon to keep it closed? There might be five thousand Prussian
s on the farther bank of the Dwina at this moment if it had been up to Cole to head them off. Hornblower found himself wishing that he had known exactly which night Macdonald would make the attempt; he might as well have wished for the moon.

  ‘Mr Cole,’ said Hornblower, ‘make a signal to Nonsuch, “Commodore to Captain. Am proceeding to Riga with prisoners.” Then the guard-boats can return to their respective ships, and if you will kindly up anchor we’ll start.’

  XX

  Hornblower was once more up in the gallery that encircled the dome of the church of Daugavgriva.

  ‘You see what I was telling you about, sir,’ said Clausewitz, pointing.

  Out beyond the Russian works stretched a long line, brown against the green, the parapet of the trench the French had thrown up during the night. Macdonald must be a general with energy, for he had had this work done at the same time as he had sent the Prussians on their risky endeavour to cross the river, so that while one attempt had failed he had made a solid gain, profiting by the dark and rainy night to throw up this entrenchment far forward unobserved.

  ‘That is his first parallel, sir, and in the centre of it is the battery he is constructing. And see there, sir? That is where he is sapping forward.’

  Hornblower stared through his telescope. At a point towards the end of the face of the first parallel he could see something that looked like a wall constructed of bundles of timber. The guns in the Russian works far below him were firing at it; he could see earth flying as the shots struck round it. At the end of the wall of timber was something that looked strange – a sort of shield on wheels. He was studying it when he saw it moved out suddenly, leaving a narrow gap between it and the end of the timber wall, in which for a fleeting moment he saw a couple of men in blue uniforms. It was only a fleeting moment, for immediately the gap was filled with a new bundle of timber. Above the new bundle he could see the blades of spades rising and then disappearing; apparently the bundle of timber was hollow, barrel-shaped, and as soon as it was in position the men sheltering behind it set to work to fill it up with earth dug from behind it. Hornblower realised that he was witnessing the classic method of sapping towards an enemy’s position with ‘gabion’ and ‘fascine’. That big timber basket was a gabion, now being filled with earth. Farther back, under cover of the line of filled gabions, the besiegers were revetting their breastwork with fascines, six-foot bundles of wood, and farther back still they were building the whole thing solid with earth dug from a trench behind the breastwork. As he watched, the shield was suddenly pushed forward another yard, and another gabion was put in position; the French were three feet nearer the earthworks which guarded Daugavgriva. No, not a yard, a little less, because the sap was not pointing straight at its objective, but out at its flank so that it could not be enfiladed. Soon it would change its direction, and point towards the other flank, approaching the fortress in zigzag fashion, ruthlessly and remorselessly. Of all operations of war a scientific siege was the most certain if relief did not arrive from the outside.

  ‘See there, sir!’ said Clausewitz suddenly.

  From behind a high embankment had suddenly emerged a long string of horses, looking like ants at that distance, but the white breeches of the men who led them showed up clearly in the sunshine. The horses were dragging a cannon, a big piece of artillery when its apparent size was compared with that of the horses. It crawled towards the battery in the centre of the first parallel, a myriad white-breeched specks attending it. The high breastwork of the first parallel screened the operation from the sight of the Russian gunners and shielded it from their fire. When the guns had all been brought into the battery, Hornblower knew, openings – ‘embrasures’ – would be made in the breastwork through which the guns would open fire on the village, silencing the return fire of the defence, and then hammering a breach; meanwhile the sap would be expanded into a wide trench, the ‘second parallel’, from which, or if necessary from a ‘third parallel’, the stormers would rush out to carry the breach.

  ‘They will have that battery armed by tomorrow,’ said Clausewitz. ‘And look! There is another gabion put in place.’

  Siege operations had the remorseless cold inevitability of the advance of a snake on a paralysed bird.

  ‘Why do your guns not stop the work on the sap?’ asked Hornblower.

  ‘They are trying, as you see. But a single gabion is not an easy target to hit at this range, and it is only the end one which is vulnerable. And by the time the sap approaches within easy range their battery-fire will be silencing our guns.’

  Another siege-gun had made its appearance from behind the high embankment, and was crawling towards the battery; its predecessor was at that moment being thrust finally into its position at the breastwork.

  ‘Can you not bring your ships up, sir?’ asked Clausewitz. ‘See how the water comes close to their works there. You could shoot them to pieces with your big guns.’

  Hornblower shook his head; the same idea had already occurred to him, for the long glittering arm of the Gulf of Riga which reached into the land there was very tempting. But there was less than a fathom of water in it, and even his shallow bomb-ketches drew nine feet – seven at least if he emptied them of all their stores save those necessary for the action.

  ‘I would do so if I could,’ said Hornblower, ‘but at the present moment I can see no means of getting my guns into range.’

  Clausewitz looked at him coldly, and Hornblower was conscious that goodwill between allies was a frail thing. Earlier that morning British and Russians had been the best of friends; Essen and Clausewitz had been thoroughly elated at the turning back of Macdonald’s attempt to cross the river, and – tike the unthinking junior officers in the squadron – had thought the annihilation of a half-battalion of Prussians a notable success, not knowing of the far more far-reaching plan which Hornblower had made and which Cole’s nervousness had brought to almost naught. When affairs went well, allies were the best of friends, but in adversity each naturally tended to blame the other. Now that the French approaches were moving towards Daugaygriva he was asking why the Russian artillery did not stop them, and the Russians were asking why his ships’ guns did not do the same.

  Hornblower made his explanation as fully as he could, but Clausewitz turned an unsympathetic ear, and so did Essen when the matter came up for discussion as Hornblower was saying goodbye to him. It was a poor showing for a Navy whose boast was that nothing was impossible; Hornblower was irritable and snappy when he returned that afternoon to the Nonsuch, and he had no word for Bush who came hastily to greet him as he came up the side. His cabin was unfriendly and inhospitable to his jaundiced eye when he entered it, and it was ‘make and mend’ day on board, with the hands skylarking noisily on the deck, so that he knew that if he went up to walk the quarterdeck his train of thought would be continually interrupted. He toyed for a moment with the idea of ordering Bush to cancel his order for make and mend and instead to put the hands to some quiet labour. Everyone would know that it was because the Commodore wanted to walk the deck in peace, and might be properly impressed with his importance, but there was never a chance of his acting on the notion. He would not deprive the men of their holiday, and the thought of swelling his importance in their eyes acted as a positive deterrent.

  Instead, he went out into the quarter gallery, and, bowed below the overhanging cove above, he tried to stride up and down its twelve-foot length. It was indeed a pity that he could not bring his ships’ guns to bear on the siege-works. Heavy guns at close range would play havoc with the French breastworks. And behind the high dyke from which he had seen the guns being dragged must lie the French park and train – a few shells from the bomb-vessels would wreak havoc there, and if only he could get the ketches up the bay it would be easy to drop shells over the dyke. But over most of the bay there was only three or four feet of water, and nowhere more than seven. The thing was impossible, and the best thing he could do was to forget about it. To distract himself he ste
pped over the rail into the other quarter gallery, and peeped through the stern window into Bush’s cabin. Bush was asleep on his cot, flat on his back with his mouth open, his hands spread wide at his sides and his wooden leg hanging in a becket against the bulkhead. Hornblower felt a twinge of annoyance that his captain should be sleeping so peacefully while he himself had so many cares on his shoulders. For two pins he would send a message in to Bush and wreck his nap for him. But he knew he would never do that, either. He could never bring himself to a wanton abuse of power.

  He stepped back into his own quarter gallery, and as he did, as he stood with one leg suspended and with the rudder gudgeons creaking a little in their pintles in the stream below him, the idea came to him, so that he stood stock still for a space, with one leg in mid-air. Then he brought his leg over and walked into his cabin and shouted for a messenger.

  ‘My compliments to the officer of the watch, and will he please signal to Harvey for Mr Mound to come on board at once.’

  Mound came down into the cabin, young and expectant, and yet with his eagerness thinly overlaid with assumed nonchalance. It suddenly dawned upon Hornblower as he greeted him that that careless lackadaisical air of Mound’s was assumed in imitation of himself. Hornblower realised that he was something of a hero – more than that, very much of a hero – to this young lieutenant who was paying him the sincerest flattery of imitation. It made him grin wryly to himself even while he motioned Mound to a chair, and then it was forgotten as he plunged into the vital discussion.

  ‘Mr Mound, do you know of the progress of the French siege-works?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then look at this chart with me. They have a line of trenches here, with a battery here. Their main flank and stores are behind a dyke, here. If we could bring the bomb-vessels up the bay we could shell them out of both places.’

  ‘Shoal water, sir,’ said Mound regretfully.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hornblower, and for the life of him he could not stop himself from making a dramatic pause before uttering the crucial word. ‘But with camels we could reduce the draught.’