Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  The earl never commented on the events of the day. But he had no need of victory or glory to advance his standing in British society. He was already possessed of all it might offer him. And Northesk’s holding back at Trafalgar did his name no harm. He became a Knight of the Bath, received the thanks of parliament, wore his gold medal, was given the freedom of the City of London, and its sword of honour, treasured his 300-guinea vase from Lloyd’s of London—Trafalgar made the life of British marine insurance brokers a great deal easier—and continued to advance smoothly up the lists of the admirals, as if he too had been ferociously and nobly engaged. Of all the commanders in the battle, only Northesk, when he died in 1835, joined Nelson and Collingwood in the crypt of St Paul’s, honoured as one of the three great Trafalgar men, simply because he had been an admiral and he was an earl. However apocalyptic an event Trafalgar might have been, certain social realities endured. Unlike nearly everyone else at Trafalgar, Northesk had more to lose—his life and limbs—than to gain. Secure in his position, he was not subject to the mechanics of honour. Dishonourable behaviour was for him a rational choice in a way it never would have been for the captains around and ahead of him, needing to stake all for glory and riches.

  At the same moment as Northesk was shortening sail, an equivalent scene was unfolding in the van of the French fleet. Early that morning, Villeneuve’s battle plan had fallen apart when Admiral Gravina’s Squadron of Observation had become muddled up with the rear of the Combined Fleet. Villeneuve had been left without a tactical reserve and the Franco-Spanish ships had as a result been exposed, one by one, to the overwhelming superiority of British gunnery and aggression. But Villeneuve had another option. The van of the Combined Fleet might itself have played the part of a tactical reserve. Nelson’s attack, just astern of the Bucentaure, had left the Combined van, under the command of Admiral Pierre le Pelley Dumanoir, untouched. As the battle developed, Dumanoir continued sailing blithely north. For nearly two hours, with the eight valuable ships of the van around him, in perfect, pre-battle condition, he did not turn. He was abandoning his admiral, his fellow captains and their cause. The logs of the British ships—heavily engaged and buried in gunsmoke—do not comment on Dumanoir’s departure. He is simply an absence.

  No one has ever resolved whether the reason for Dumanoir’s failure to come to the aid of the rest of the fleet was carelessness, cowardice or defeatism. Earlier in the year, he had been in command of the fleet when in Toulon and Villeneuve had been appointed over his head. Like Churruca, he too may have felt that Villeneuve was unsatisfactory as a commander and that to preserve the ships of the vanguard was in itself a practical if inglorious course.

  In Dumanoir’s column, sailing away from the realm of honour, was a captain for whom such behaviour was unthinkable. On the Intrépide, Captain Louis Antoine Cyprian Infernet’s eyes remained fixed on the masts of Dumanoir’s flagship, the Formidable, desperately searching for the signal which he wanted Dumanoir to make: to go about and take part in the Battle of Trafalgar. Infernet was a big man, thought to be as vastly tall as a drum-major (he was 5′ 10″) and ‘as fat as an abbot’, rough, uneducated and ferocious, born near Toulon, who bellowed at his crew in the broadest Provençal. He was in other words, a brigand fighter, precisely the sort of man the Revolution had brought to the fore, for whom the idealistic honour of the fight was its own form of nobility.

  Villeneuve, in the midst of the chaos and mayhem around the Bucentaure, had in fact made the signal for Dumanoir to return but, perhaps because of the gunsmoke, Dumanoir did not see it and continued northwards. Infernet could tolerate it no longer, and at about 2 o’clock wore ship without Dumanoir’s instructions, using one of his ship’s boats to bring the Intrépide around, as the winds had become so light that the ship would not respond to her helm. Soon afterwards, Dumanoir signalled the whole of the vanguard to reverse direction, and they too needed their ship’s boats to haul them round. The manoeuvre took an hour in the light airs. Five of them set off to leeward of the battle. Others including Dumanoir himself in the Formidable kept to windward.

  Why he should have turned when he did is as much of a conundrum as why he did not turn earlier. Perhaps one can see in it the slow influence of honour, which is not an on-off switch, but a moral force gradually applied. For an hour or so, fear, self-preservation and disdain for Villeneuve may have kept Dumanoir sailing north. But the slow application of honour, as a moral imperative, may by then have had its effect, and forced Dumanoir to turn.

  The Intrépide was already en route for the enemy. Infernet, when asked for instructions from the master, bellowed to the helmsman: ‘Lou capo sur lou Bucentauro!’—Lay the head on the flagship! With the density of gunsmoke, and the light winds doing little to disperse it, Infernet could not have seen the situation Villeneuve was in. But the pure geometry and mathematics of the day could have told him that the centre of the Combined Fleet, with the brutal firepower of British three-deckers now in among them, was in dire need of help.

  A young French aristocrat, Auguste Gicquel des Touches, was a sub-lieutenant stationed on the forecastle of the Intrépide. He left a graphic account of Infernet’s plunge into the midst of battle, driving down through the wreckage and violence in order to rescue Villeneuve. When they finally reached the flagship, both she and the Redoutable lay mashed by the guns of the British fleet. Fremantle in the Neptune and Bayntun in Leviathan had both slapped into both French ships. The masts were down in both of them, their fire almost silenced, just an occasional gun crew maintaining sporadic shots at the enemy around them. It was not a place, with any reason, that a French ship should go but the drive motivating Infernet was not subject to reason. He wished, Gicquel des Touches wrote,

  to rescue the Admiral, to take him on board, and to rally around us the vessels which were still in a fit state to fight. The plan was insane, and he himself did not believe in it; it was an excuse that he was giving himself in order to continue the fight, and so that no one could say that the Intrépide had left the battle while she still had a single gun and a single sail. It was a noble madness, which cost us dearly, but which we did with joy and alacrity: and which others should have imitated.

  That is a note which is not found among the British accounts of Trafalgar. For all the hazards associated with Nelson’s perpendicular drive at the iron teeth of the Combined Fleet’s broadside; for all the questioning among the officers of the Royal Navy of that tactical idea; there is never a suggestion that this way of conducting battle was ‘noble madness’. It was calculated risk, thriving on the sense that victory could only emerge from damage, and that annihilation of the enemy required an entry into the zone of acute danger. The difference between these mentalities, in other words, was the difference between death and destruction as a means to an end and as an end in itself. Selfsacrifice might have been accepted by Nelson and others in the British fleet as a possible cost; it was not the purpose of battle, as it had by now become for Infernet.

  Collingwood had formed something of a line to resist the ships of the French van now coming south towards him. Infernet drove past that line. The 64-gun Africa fired at him, but the Intrépide’s guns bellowed back and Africa was silenced. Gicquel des Touches found a young midshipman on the forecastle beside him. His face was calm and his bearing upright, maintaining, with his body, the language of honour. Gicquel offered him a glass of wine, which the boy took, but as he brought it up to his lips he could control himself no longer. His hand shook so much that the wine spilled all over the deck. Perhaps as any man would, Gicquel then grasped the boy’s hand and told him that he admired him, and that courage lay not in the absence of fear but in mastering it.

  British ships clustered around the Intrépide: Bayntun in the Leviathan, with rigging and rudder shot away after a bruisingly murderous encounter with the San Agustín, but still firing; Sir Edward Berry in the Agamemnon; Codrington in the Orion; even Northesk’s Britannia which had by now lumbered into battle. Is it possible to conceiv
e the degree of terror which such a sight would instil in any man, particularly those exposed on the deck of the Intrépide, as this ring of death closed around them? These moments on Intrépide represent one of the most desperate situations in the battle, entirely brought about by Infernet’s drive for self-sacrificial honour.

  Gicquel des Touches, frantically applying his men on the forecastle to repairing and reknotting the standing rigging by which the foremast was held up, was also keen—‘my ardent desire’—to use them to board a British ship. Codrington in the Orion, fighting the coolest-headed battle of all, saw that his friend Henry Bayntun was in trouble, with the beautiful Leviathan’s rig largely shot away, and manoeuvred to take on the Intrépide in his place. Bayntun hailed Codrington as he passed ‘and said he hoped, laughing, that I should make a better fist of it.’

  If there is something of the cricket match in that careless, gentlemanly, amused remark, a moment in which the ideal of the British naval officer seems to be fulfilled, as though a scene in a penny print entitled ‘The Gentleman Gives Way’ or perhaps ‘After You Sir’, nothing could be further from the atmosphere of extreme anguish on the Intrépide. Gicquel des Touches saw

  the English vessel Orion pass in front of us in order to fire a series of broadsides at us. I arranged my men ready to board, and pointing out to a midshipman the manoeuvres of the Orion, I sent him to the captain to beg him to steer so as to board.

  Savagery was being poured in the Intrépide. Two thirds of her men were now killed or wounded. The sea was hosing in below where shot had punctured the hull. The shrieking of the wounded was drowned by the bellowing of guns. The concentration of British firepower in the centre of the battle was focused on her.

  In the forecastle, Gicquel des Touches waited for the change of course which would drive her bow into the Orion amidships. But no change of course occurred. Codrington’s men fired broadside after broadside into the bow of the Intrépide as they passed. Alongside, half a pistol shot away, the Britannia slammed at her with her upper batteries. This was annihilation in action, precisely the devastation which Nelson had required. The Orion slipped beyond reach and Gicquel des Touches went back towards the quarterdeck to find out why his recommendation had not been followed.

  On his way there—and this may be the most poignant failure of courage in Trafalgar, a scene for a matching penny print, this one entitled the ‘The Midshipman’s Dread’—Gicquel des Touches found the boy he had sent back a few minutes earlier, lying down behind the bulwarks of the Intrépide, flat on his stomach, terrified by the sight of the Britannia alongside, unable to move, let alone stand up and walk as far as the quarterdeck to deliver his message. In all the accounts of Trafalgar as they have been preserved, this is the rarest of experiences: paralysing terror. Gicquel des Touches kicked him in the backside and then went on to find Infernet. The captain was breathing fire, slicing off the carved wooden balls on the rail with his sabre and threatening anyone who talked of surrender—undoubtedly the right course of action—with death.

  Dumanoir’s squadron, coming south, had divided in two, half of it passing to windward of the battle, half to leeward, neither having much effect on the outcome. One ship after another fired at them as they came past: the Mars, the Royal Sovereign, the Téméraire, the Bellerophon and the Victory. It was these guns firing at Dumanoir’s passing ships which Nelson in his last moments heard deep within the bowels of the flagship, shaken by their roaring, to which he muttered, as Beatty so carefully recorded, ‘Oh Victory, Victory, how you distract my poor brain.’ Dumanoir kept well to windward. ‘It is too late to push in now,’ he told his flag captain. ‘To join in the battle now would be only an act of despair. It would only add to our losses.’ The Victory’s log says they ‘fired our larboard guns at those they would reach.’ But even such long-distance fire was made to tell. The Formidable had 65 men killed and wounded on board and the hull was damaged enough for the water to be rising in her hold at the rate of four feet an hour. Her mainyard was broken, her sails shot through, her bowsprit and the mizzenmast shattered. This was damage enough for Dumanoir to claim he had played his part at Trafalgar. It didn’t impress Napoleon who after the news of the battle reached France expressed the desire to see Dumanoir either shot or ruined. He eventually escaped either fate and became a distinguished sailor after the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne.

  Dumanoir fired at those British ships that confronted him, and even at the French and Spanish prizes around them. It was a perfectly deliberate act. The Formidable was seen to back her topsails so that she would slow down while firing into the prizes, simply to give herself longer on the target. His gunfire killed and wounded several on board, French, Spanish and English, and scandalised the officers. This was not part of the manners of war. Perhaps it adds another possible reason for Dumanoir’s strange behaviour this day: panic. He soon made off to the south with his four sail-of-the-line. Eleven ships to leeward joined Admiral Gravina, who was gathering what remained of the fleet, to conduct them in to Cadiz. Several British ships began to chase them but were recalled by Collingwood.

  Battered in the midst of the battle, the Intrépide was now a mass of wreckage. She had been firing with both broadsides at once and even with her stern-chasers. No living Frenchman remained on her decks. All her masts had been shot away and had gone by the board. The guns were ‘clogged with the dead’. The ship itself was a corpse, leaking, all the lids of the gunports torn off. Most of the guns were disabled, eight feet of water was in the hold and rising, despite the efforts of the men at the pumps, 306 officers and men were killed and wounded, 45% of those on board. Even then, Infernet could not bring himself to surrender and his surviving officers had to hold him down while the colours were lowered.

  ‘Ah what will the Emperor say,’ he groaned as he watched, ‘after I told him that I could fight my way through ten battles and I have failed at the first?’ Napoleon, in fact, would honour him. But the crew of the Intrépide felt they had done enough. As Gicquel des Touches wrote in his memoir of the battle: ‘At least our honour was saved, the task accomplished, duty fulfilled to the uttermost.’ It was a demonstration of courage which impressed the British officers. On the Conqueror, Lieutenant Humphrey Senhouse said in a letter home that the defence of the Intrépide ‘deserves to be recorded in the memory of those who admire true heroism.’

  At this distance, it is worth interrogating this scene a little more. What was in control here? What drove Infernet to his suicidal mission, to risk all, not for any hope of a positive outcome, because it was surely clear by the time he arrived in the heart of Trafalgar that he could make no difference at all, but simply for the symbolism of martyrdom?

  The recent history of France had put a particular spin on the idea of heroism, idealism and self-sacrifice. In some ways, the French Revolution had been profoundly conservative. The modernising trends which had been in play in France throughout the 18th century were cut short in the new revolutionary ideology. In the third quarter of the 18th century, France had been making aggressive strides in the direction of an Anglo-style, commercial, Atlantic entrepreneurial culture. The French nobility, conventionally portrayed as affected, self-indulgent and out of touch, were in fact closely involved in finance, business and industry, especially in the booming Atlantic sugar and slave economy of the West Indies. Nor were they crusty old families, descended from the knights of the Middle Ages. Fully a quarter of all French aristocratic families, 6,000 of them, had been ennobled in the 18th century, bourgeois families who had joined the élite. In their hands, France’s foreign trade had increased tenfold in the 60 years before the Revolution.

  That entrepreneurial drive had been interrupted and destroyed at the Revolution and replaced with a far more static and Roman ideal of nobility. If the late-18th-century shift in England had been from the Virgilian to the Homeric ideals of manhood, as the dominant ideology of England turned towards market success, in France it went the other way. Paradoxically enough, revolu
tionary and Napoleonic France was dominated by Roman and even aristocratic ideals.

  Livy, Plutarch, the fierce demands and emotional appeal of Roman oratory, Cicero as ‘père de la Patrie’—these were the models to which the revolutionaries appealed. In them they saw the nobility of republicanism, fiercely dividing itself off from the luxury and corruption of the materialist world around them. Civic morality, a Rousseauesque rigour, an enthusiasm for liberty, stoic self-possession and an austere masculinity were all the ingredients of a Roman, republican integrity. The Corinthian enrichments of mid-18th-century Europe gave way to Doric rigour. Even hairstyles, led by the example of actors on the Paris stage, showed the world the sort of man you were. Unlike the elaborated curls of the aristocrats (in which Villeneuve appears, interestingly, in his portraits), straight, unpowdered hair, cropped short and brushed forward—modelled, it was said, on the hair of English roundheads—showed you were a true republican. An article appeared in Patriote français in October 1790:

  This coiffure is the only one that is suited to republicans: being simple, economical and requiring little time, it is trouble-free and so assures the independence of a person; it bears witness to a mind given to reflection, courageous enough to defy fashion.