'The mainyard!' he screamed.
Finch's face bore its foolish smile. Although instinct or training kept him gripping the swivel gun he seemingly had no fear, no desire to gain the safety of the mainyard.
'Finch, you fool!' yelled Hornblower.
He locked a desperate knee round the swivel so as to free a hand with which to gesticulate, but still Finch made no move.
'Jump, damn you!' raved Hornblower. 'The shrouds — the yard. Jump!'
Finch only smiled.
'Jump and get to the maintop! Oh, Christ—!' Inspiration came in that frightful moment. 'The maintop! God's there, Finch! Go along to God, quick!'
Those words penetrated into Finch's addled brain. He nodded with sublime unworldliness. Then he let go of the swivel and seemed to launch himself into the air like a frog. His body fell across the mizzen-topmast shrouds and he began to scramble along them. The mast rolled again, so that when Hornblower launched himself at the shrouds it was a longer jump. Only his shoulders reached the outermost shroud. He swung off, clung, nearly lost his grip, but regained it as a counterlurch of the leaning mast came to his assistance. Then he was scrambling along the shrouds, mad with panic. Here was the precious mainyard, and he threw himself across it, grappling its welcome solidity with his body, his feet feeling for the footrope. He was safe and steady on the yard just as the outward roll of the Indefatigable gave the balancing spars their final impetus, and the mizzen-topmast parted company from the broken mizzen-mast and the whole wreck fell down into the sea alongside. Hornblower shuffled along the yard, whither Finch had preceded him, to be received with rapture in the maintop by Midshipman Bracegirdle. Bracegirdle was not God, but as Hornblower leaned across the breastwork of the maintop he thought to himself that if he had not spoken about God being in the maintop Finch would never have made that leap.
'Thought we'd lost you,' said Bracegirdle, helping him in and thumping him on the back. 'Midshipman Hornblower, our flying angel.'
Finch was in the top, too, smiling his fool's smile and surrounded by the crew of the top. Everything seemed mad and exhilarating. It was a shock to remember that they were in the midst of a battle, and yet the firing had ceased, and even the yelling had almost died away. He staggered to the side of the top — strange how difficult it was to walk — and looked over. Bracegirdle came with him. Foreshortened by the height he could make out a crowd of figures on the Frenchman's deck. Those check shirts must surely be worn by British sailors. Surely that was Eccles, the Indefatigable's first lieutenant on the quarterdeck with a speaking trumpet.
'What has happened?' he asked Bracegirdle, bewildered.
'What has happened?' Bracegirdle stared for a moment before he understood. 'We carried her by boarding. Eccles and the boarders were over the ship's side the moment we touched. Why, man, didn't you see?'
'No, I didn't see it,' said Hornblower. He forced himself to joke. 'Other matters demanded my attention at that moment.'
He remembered how the mizzen-top had lurched and swung, and he felt suddenly sick. But he did not want Bracegirdle to see it.
'I must go on deck and report,' he said.
The descent of the main shrouds was a slow, ticklish business, for neither his hands nor his feet seemed to wish to go where he tried to place them. Even when he reached the deck he still felt insecure. Bolton was on the quarterdeck supervising the clearing away of the wreck of the mizzenmast. He gave a start of surprise as Hornblower approached.
'I thought you were overside with Davy Jones,' he said. He glanced aloft. 'You reached the mainyard in time?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Excellent. I think you're born to be hanged, Hornblower.' Bolton turned away to bellow at the men. ''Vast heaving, there! Clynes, get down into the chains with that tackle! Steady, now, or you'll lose it.'
He watched the labours of the men for some moments before he turned back to Hornblower.
'No more trouble with the men for a couple of months,' he said. 'We'll work 'em 'til they drop, refitting. Prize crew will leave us shorthanded, to say nothing of our butcher's bill. It'll be a long time before they want something new. It'll be a long time for you, too, I fancy, Hornblower.'
'Yes, sir,' said Hornblower.
CHAPTER SIX
The Frogs And The Lobsters
'They're coming,' said Midshipman Kennedy.
Midshipman Hornblower's unmusical ear caught the raucous sounds of a military band, and soon, with a gleam of scarlet and white and gold, the head of the column came round the corner. The hot sunshine was reflected from the brass instruments; behind them the regimental colour flapped from its staff, borne proudly by an ensign with the colour guard round him. Two mounted officers rode behind the colour, and after them came the long red serpent of the half-battalion, the fixed bayonets flashing in the sun, while all the children of Plymouth, still not sated with military pomp, ran along with them.
The sailors standing ready on the quay looked at the soldiers marching up curiously, with something of pity and something of contempt mingled with their curiosity. The rigid drill, the heavy clothing, the iron discipline, the dull routine of the soldier were in sharp contrast with the far more flexible conditions in which the sailor lived. The sailors watched as the band ended with a flourish, and one of the mounted officers wheeled his horse to face the column. A shouted order turned every man to face the quayside, the movements being made so exactly together that five hundred boot-heels made a single sound. A huge sergeant-major, his sash gleaming on his chest, and the silver mounting of his cane winking in the sun, dressed the already perfect line. A third order brought down every musket-butt to earth.
'Unfix — bayonets' roared the mounted officer, uttering the first words Hornblower had understood.
Hornblower positively goggled at the ensuing formalities, as the fuglemen strode their three paces forward, all exactly to time like marionettes worked by the same strings, turned their heads to look down the line, and gave the time for detaching the bayonets, for sheathing them, and for returning the muskets to the men's sides. The fuglemen fell back into their places, exactly to time again as far as Hornblower could see, but not exactly enough apparently, as the sergeant-major bellowed his discontent and brought the fuglemen out and sent them back again.
'I'd like to see him laying aloft on a stormy night,' muttered Kennedy. 'D'ye think he could take the maintops'l earring?'
'These lobsters!' said Midshipman Bracegirdle.
The scarlet lines stood rigid, all five companies, the sergeants with their halberds indicating the intervals — from halberd to halberd the line of faces dipped down and then up again, with the men exactly sized off, the tallest men at the flanks and the shortest men in the centre of each company. Not a finger moved, not an eyebrow twitched. Down every back hung rigidly a powdered pigtail.
The mounted officer trotted down the line to where the naval party waited, and Lieutenant Bolton, in command, stepped forward with his hand to his hat rim.
'My men are ready to embark, sir,' said the army officer. 'The baggage will be here immediately.'
'Aye aye, major,' said Bolton — the army title and the navy reply in strange contrast.
'It would be better to address me as "My lord"' said the major.
'Aye aye, sir — my lord,' replied Bolton, caught quite off his balance.
His Lordship, the Earl of Edrington, major commanding this wing of the 43rd Foot, was a heavily built young man in his early twenties. He was a fine soldierly figure in his well-fitting uniform, and mounted on a magnificent charger, but he seemed a little young for his present responsible command. But the practice of the purchase of commissions was liable to put very young men in high command, and the Army seemed satisfied with the system.
'The French auxiliaries have their orders to report here,' went on Lord Edrington. 'I suppose arrangements have been made for their transport as well?'
'Yes, my lord.'
'Not one of the beggars can speak English, as far as I can make out. Have you g
ot an officer to interpret?'
'Yes, sir. Mr Hornblower!'
'Sir!'
'You will attend to the embarkation of the French troops.'
'Aye aye, sir.'
More military music — Hornblower's tone-deaf ear distinguished it as making a thinner noise than the British infantry band — heralded the arrival of the Frenchmen farther down the quay by a side road, and Hornblower hastened there. This was the Royal, Christian, and Catholic French Army, or a detachment of it at least — a battalion of the force raised by the émigré French nobles to fight against the Revolution. There was the white flag with the golden lilies at the head of the column, and a group of mounted officers to whom Hornblower touched his hat. One of them acknowledged his salute.
'The Marquis of Pouzauges, Brigadier General in the service of His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVII' said this individual in French by way of introduction. He wore a glittering white uniform with a blue ribbon across it.
Stumbling over the French words, Hornblower introduced himself as an aspirant of his Britannic Majesty's Marine, deputed to arrange the embarkation of the French troops.
'Very good,' said Pouzauges. 'We are ready.'
Hornblower looked down the French column. The men were standing in all attitudes, gazing about them. They were all well enough dressed, in blue uniforms which Hornblower guessed had been supplied by the British government, but the white crossbelts were already dirty, the metalwork tarnished, the arms dull. Yet doubtless they could fight.
'Those are the transports allotted to your men, sir,' said Hornblower, pointing. 'The Sophia will take three hundred, and the Dumbarton—that one over there — will take two hundred and fifty. Here at the quay are the lighters to ferry the men out.'
'Give the orders, M. de Moncoutant,' said Pouzauges to one of the officers beside him.
The hired baggage carts had now come creaking up along the column, piled high with the men's kits, and the column broke into chattering swarms as the men hunted up their possessions. It was some time before the men were reassembled, each with his own kit-bag; and then there arose the question of detailing a fatigue party to deal with the regimental baggage, and the men who were given the task yielded up their bags with obvious reluctance to their comrades, clearly in despair of ever seeing any of the contents again. Hornblower was still giving out information.
'All horses must go to the Sophia,' he said. 'She has accommodation for six chargers. The regimental baggage—'
He broke off short, for his eye had been caught by a singular jumble of apparatus lying in one of the carts.
'What is that, if you please?' he asked, curiosity overpowering him.
'That, sir,' said Pouzauges, 'is a guillotine.'
'A guillotine?'
Hornblower had read much lately about this instrument. The Red Revolutionaries had set one up in Paris and kept it hard at work. The King of France, Louis XVI himself, had died under it. He did not expect to find one in the train of a counter-revolutionary army.
'Yes,' said Pouzauges, 'we take it with us to France. It is in my mind to give those anarchists a taste of their own medicine.'
Hornblower did not have to make reply, fortunately, as a bellow from Bolton interrupted the conversation.
'What the hell's all this delay for, Mr Hornblower? D'you want us to miss the tide?'
It was of course typical of life in any service that Hornblower should be reprimanded for the time wasted by the inefficiency of the French arrangements — that was the sort of thing he had already come to expect, and he had already learned that it was better to submit silently to reprimand than to offer excuses. He addressed himself again to the task of getting the French aboard their transports. It was a weary midshipman who at last reported himself to Bolton with his tally sheets and the news that the last Frenchman and horse and pieces of baggage were safely aboard, and he was greeted with the order to get his things together quickly and transfer them and himself to the Sophia, where his services as interpreter were still needed.
The convoy dropped quickly down Plymouth Sound, rounded the Eddystone, and headed down channel, with H.M.S. Indefatigable flying her distinguishing pennant, the two gun-brigs which had been ordered to assist in convoying the expedition, and the four transports — a small enough force, it seemed to Hornblower, with which to attempt the overthrow of the French republic. There were only eleven hundred infantry; the half battalion of the 43rd and the weak battalion of Frenchmen (if they could be called that, seeing that many of them were soldiers of fortune of all nations) and although Hornblower had enough sense not to try to judge the Frenchmen as they lay in rows in the dark and stinking 'tweendecks in the agonies of seasickness he was puzzled that anyone could expect results from such a small force. His historical reading had told him of many small raids, in many wars, launched against the shores of France, and although he knew that they had once been described by an opposition statesman as 'breaking windows with guineas' he had been inclined to approve of them in principle, as bringing about a dissipation of the French strength — until now, when he found himself part of such an expedition.
So it was with relief that he heard from Pouzauges that the troops he had seen did not constitute the whole of the force to be employed — were indeed only a minor fraction of it. A little pale with seasickness, but manfully combating it, Pouzauges laid out a map on the cabin table and explained the plan.
'The Christian Army,' explained Ponzauges, 'will land here, at Quiberon. They sailed from Portsmouth — these English names are hard to pronounce — the day before we left Plymouth. There are five thousand men under the Baron de Charette. They will march on Vannes and Rennes.'
'And what is your regiment to do?' asked Hornblower.
Pouzauges pointed to the map again.
'Here is the town of Muzillac,' he said. Twenty leagues from Quiberon. Here the main road from the south crosses the river Marais, where the tide ceases to flow. It is only a little river, as you see, but its banks are marshy, and the road passes it not only by a bridge but by a long causeway. The rebel armies are to the south, and on their northward march must come by Muzillac. We shall be there. We shall destroy the bridge and defend the crossing, delaying the rebels long enough to enable M. de Charette to raise all Brittany. He will soon have twenty thousand men in arms, the rebels will come back to their allegiance, and we shall march on Paris to restore His Most Christian Majesty to the throne.'
So that was the plan. Hornblower was infected with the Frenchmen's enthusiasm. Certainly the road passed within ten miles of the coast, and there, in the broad estuary of the Vilaine, it should be possible to land a small force and seize Muzillac. There should be no difficulty about defending a causeway such as Pouzauges described for a day or two against even a large force. That would afford Charette every chance.
'My friend M. de Moncoutant here,' went on Pouzauges, 'is Lord of Muzillac. The people there will welcome him.'
'Most of them will,' said Moncoutant, his grey eyes narrowing. 'Some will be sorry to see me. But I shall be glad of the encounter.'
Western France, the Vendée and Brittany, had long been in a turmoil, and the population there, under the leadership of the nobility, had risen in arms more than once against the Paris government. But every rebellion had ended in defeat; the Royalist force now being convoyed to France was composed of the fragments of the defeated armies — a final cast of the dice, and a desperate one. Regarded in that light, the plan did not seem so sound.
It was a grey morning — a morning of grey sky and grey rocks — when the convoy rounded Belle Ile and stood in towards the estuary of the Vilaine river. Far to the northward were to be seen white topsails in Quiberon Bay — Hornblower, from the deck of the Sophia, saw signals pass back and forth from the Indefatigable as she reported her arrival to the senior officer of the main expedition there. It was a proof of the mobility and ubiquity of naval power that it could take advantage of the configuration of the land so that two blows could be struc
k almost in sight of each other from the sea yet separated by forty miles of roads on land. Hornblower raked the forbidding shore with his glass, reread the orders for the captain of the Sophia, and stared again at the shore. He could distinguish the narrow mouth of the Marais river and the strip of mud where the troops were to land. The lead was going in the chains as the Sophia crept towards her allotted anchorage, and the ship was rolling uneasily; these waters, sheltered though they were, were a Bedlam of conflicting currents that could make a choppy sea even in a calm. Then the anchor cable rumbled out through the hawsehole and the Sophia swung to the current, while the crew set to work hoisting out the boats.
'France, dear beautiful France,' said Pouzauges at Hornblower's side.
A hail came over the water from the Indefatigable.
'Mr Hornblower!'
'Sir!' yelled Hornblower back through the captain's megaphone.
'You will go on shore with the French troops and stay with them until you receive further orders.'
'Aye aye, sir.'
So that was the way in which he was to set foot on foreign soil for the first time in his life.
Pouzauges' men were now pouring up from below; it was a slow and exasperating business getting them down the ship's side into the waiting boats. Hornblower wondered idly regarding what was happening on shore at this moment — without doubt mounted messengers were galloping north and south with the news of the arrival of the expedition, and soon the French Revolutionary generals would be parading their men and marching them hurriedly towards this place; it was well that the important strategic point that had to be seized was less than ten miles inland. He turned back to his duties; as soon as the men were ashore he would have to see that the baggage and reserve ammunition were landed, as well as the horses, now standing miserably in improvised stalls forward of the mainmast.
The first boats had left the ship's side; Hornblower watched the men stagger up the shore through mud and water, the French on the left and the red-coated British infantry on the right. There were some fishermen's cottages in sight up the beach, and Hornblower saw advance parties go forward to seize them; at least the landing had been effected without a single shot being fired. He came on shore with the ammunition, to find Bolton in charge of the beach.
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