This was, in other words, Infernet hair. It was evidence not of particular actions, but of the condition of your soul, of being in a state of republican grace. The outcome of any action mattered less than your moral wholesomeness when you engaged in them.
Of course there are many echoes in France of changes in England. The Rousseauist ideas which form such a potent backdrop to Trafalgar—that the good man is not the affected dandy posing at court and lying his way into luxuries of a hypocritical world, but standing foursquare in his honest simplicity, sobriety, stoicism and directness—that is a common European inheritance. But in France, it fed straight into the dazzlingly powerful exporting of the Revolution to the rest of Europe, seen in France not as an act of imperialism but of revolutionary idealism. France was like a citadel of freedom besieged on all sides. Her rampage through Europe had been a break-out from that citadel, releasing a tidal wave of liberty to the benighted: Belgium and Savoy in 1792, the Rhineland and the Netherlands in 1794, northern Italy and Venice in 1797, Switzerland in 1798, followed by Rome, Malta, Naples and Egypt. The people of Europe, and even of the world, were being shown the light.
That is not, of course, how it was seen in England nor by her allies on the continent of Europe, but it is central to the fighting idealism of Infernet’s drive into the blood and destruction of Trafalgar. In November 1792, the French National Convention had declared ‘in the name of the French nation that she will bring help and brotherhood to all people who want to recover their freedom.’ Goethe, witnessing the arrival of the French armies in Germany, thought ‘they seemed to be bringing only friendship, and really they did bring it. All of them were in a state of heightened exhilaration, with great enthusiasm they planted trees of freedom, to everyone they promised self-government and the rule of law. In front of our eyes, hope was floating in the air of the future and drew our gaze towards new ways, newly open…’
For all the often-remembered horrors and brutalisations of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, there is this underlayer of heroic republican idealism, a sense that the perfect vision of humanity had been glimpsed, before sinking under the blood, shock and terror of a pan-European war. The death and wounding of so many on the Intrépide was in the service of that ideal, whose goal was not victory but a state of mind, an honourable freedom, complete in itself, beyond any thought of survival or gain. That was not an English idea. The English wanted victory, but, in that sense, Auguste Gicquel des Touches’s words were a precise description of the French: their honour had been saved.
The battle was nearly over and devastation lay afloat on the Atlantic. The mastless hulks, no longer with any sails aloft to act as a stabilising vane, rolled in the swell. On the Santísima Trinidad, a Spanish officer surveyed his surroundings.
The English shot had torn our sails to tatters. It was as if huge invisible talons had been dragging at them. Fragments of spars, splinters of wood, thick hempen cables cut up, as corn is cut by the sickle, fallen blocks, shreds of canvas, bits of iron, and hundreds of other things that had been wrenched away by the enemy’s fire, were piled about the deck, where it was scarcely possible to move. Blood ran in streams about the deck, and in spite of the sand, the rolling of the hull carried it hither and thither until it made strange patterns on the planks. The enemy’s shot, fired as they were from very short range, caused horrible mutilations. The ship creaked and groaned as she rolled, and through a thousand holes and crevices in her hull the sea spurted and began to flood the hold.
At 6.30, the English took possession of her and began to heave the dead overboard, 254 killed, and others dying among the 173 wounded. In the Combined Fleet as a whole, the number of dead has never been established. It might well have been in the region of 4,000 men. Perhaps twice that number had been wounded and just over 11,000 had been taken prisoner. Between two and three thousand more would be drowned or die of their wounds in the coming days: a total perhaps of 6,500 dead. The number of British casualties is strikingly low and exact: 449 dead, 1,214 wounded, several hundred of whom would also die in the coming weeks, perhaps a total of 650 dead. That was the winning ratio: ten to one.
In one French ship, with only her foresail set, the captain stood on the poop, holding the lower corner of a small French flag, while he pinned the upper corner with his sword to the stump of the mizzenmast. She fired two or three guns, probably to provoke some return fire, and to spare the crew the shame of a tame surrender. The Conqueror was alongside her and the British broadside was ready to destroy the Frenchman. Then the Conqueror’s Captain Israel Pellew shouted, ‘Don’t hurt the brave fellow; fire a single shot across his bow.’ Her captain immediately lowered his sword, thus dropping the colours, and, taking off his hat, bowed his surrender.
Courtesy and humanity eased into the spaces which battle had opened up. Far down at the southern end of the battle zone, the Prince, one of the heavy slow sailers at the rear of Collingwood’s division—she was said to have approached the battle like a haystack and her captain, Richard Grindall, was another who was said to have behaved ‘notoriously ill’—had come up with the French Achille, which had already received the attentions of three British ships. A fire had already broken out in the chest containing arms and cartridges in the top on the foremast. The Achille’s fire pumps had already been smashed in the battle and the fire blazed up into the sails above it. Then the Prince fired a high broadside into the vessel and cut the foremast in two. The topmast fell with its fire into the waist of the ship, setting fire to the boats and spars that were stored there.
The whole ship was soon ablaze and the Prince ceased firing when her captain saw men on the Achille jumping overboard. Deep within her, below the waterline, there was a woman on board, Jeannette Caunant, stationed in the passage of the fore-magazine, working to assist in handing up the powder to the men in the batteries. When the firing ceased, she tried to make her way up to the lower deck and then to the main deck, looking for her husband. But passage was impossible. All the ladders joining the decks had either been removed or shot away. It was a desperate situation. Surrounded by the mangled, the wounded, the dead, the body parts, she could see the fire burning down through the decks to reach her. As the flames weakened each deck, the guns themselves burst down through the burning planks on to the decks below, each gun three tons of red-hot metal smashing down like depth charges around her. She climbed out through a gunport and then hung above the water, at the stern of the wreck, awaiting her fate. The little British schooner, the Pickle and a cutter, the Entreprenante, along with boats from the Prince and the Belleisle ran in as close as they could to the wreck, ‘to save the people which were floating on different spars belonging to the ship’, even though the already-shotted guns, as the fire reached them, were blowing off uncontrollably and unpredictably. In all, in a fore-echo of the rescues of the days to come, between two and three hundred Frenchmen were rescued by the British from the Achille. Jeannette Caunant was also pulled from the sea, naked, and taken to the Pickle, where she was dressed and her wounds tended.
Then the ship blew up. A British officer on the Defence watched it:
It was a sight the most awful and grand that can be conceived. In a moment the hull burst into a cloud of smoke and fire. A column of vivid flame shot up to an enormous height in the atmosphere and terminated by expanding into an immense globe, representing for a few seconds, a prodigious tree in flames, speckled with many dark spots, which the pieces of timber and bodies of men occasioned while they were suspended in the clouds.
It was a vision of explosive war, of the victims of war tossed like the black leaves of a tree radiant with fire and light, fulfilling all the expectations of apocalypse. As the fragments fell back into the Atlantic, and the shattered remains of the Achille sank, a black pig was seen swimming strongly through the swell. The men on the Euryalus caught, killed, butchered, roasted and ate it that evening.
The battle was nearly at its end. The fervour of the morning had given way not to triumph nor to any sen
se of glory, but to desperation among the defeated, and to both exhaustion and dejection among those who had won. Very few people knew what had happened to Nelson and it was not his death which governed the final reactions to battle; it was the nature of the battle itself, an experience of bruising mutual destruction from which those involved emerged deadened.
Thomas Hardy, Nelson’s flag captain on the Victory, when he later returned to England with all ‘the Ships Flags and Pendants half Mast on the melancholly occasion’ and his admiral’s body preserved in the biggest water butt they could find, a leaguer, lashed in the heart of the ship, and stood over night and day by an armed marine, had one thing to tell his navy friends. ‘You have often talked of attacking a French line-of-battle ship with two frigates,’ he said to Captain Parker of the Amazon who came aboard at Spithead. ‘Now, after what I have seen at Trafalgar, I am satisfied it would be mere folly, and ought never to succeed.’
‘Mere folly’ is a phrase which in early-19th-century English still means ‘total and utter folly’: and Hardy’s remark is in the voice of sobriety and battle-shock, a measure of what had occurred at Trafalgar, of the cold sluice of horror delivered to his appetite for battle. The enemy had responded with a ferocity and obstinacy which neither he nor his friends had been prepared for. The last two major fleet actions had been at the Nile in 1798, when the French had been surprised at anchor, half the crews were ashore and the unprepared gundecks were cluttered with stores and baggage; and at Copenhagen in 1801, when the Danes, also at anchor, had never considered themselves a match for the British fleet. The resistance they had met at Trafalgar had come as some shock.
Hardy’s remarks are also astonishingly modern in their tone, full of a sense of battle reality which, we assume too easily, was scarcely known before the twentieth century. But it was known, and the condition that became known as shell shock or battle fatigue could be found in Georgian England. In a fragment written in 1798 and later included in the Prelude, the young Wordsworth described how he had met a discharged soldier on the road and walked alongside him:
While thus we travelled on I did not fail
To question him of what he had endured
From war and battle and the pestilence.
He all the while was in demeanour calm,
Concise in answer: solemn and sublime
He might have seemed, but that in all he said
There was a strange half-absence and a tone
Of weakness and indifference, as of one
Remembering the importance of his theme,
But feeling it no longer.
This half-absence, this dejected disconnection, which Wordsworth later described as ‘the ghastly mildness in his look’, is the result of horror undergone. The last phase of Trafalgar, and the storm which followed it, both contributed as much to that experience as anything that had gone before.
Lieutenant Philibert on the Tonnant surveyed the appalling scene. In the quiet of the early evening, all order had gone. All the beauty of the morning had been shot away. The wounded sobbed as they were moved and shrieked as they had their clothes stripped from them. For all that, a kind of silence had descended.
The smoke which had enveloped us up to then having cleared, our first glances searched for our fleet; there no longer existed any line on either side; we could see nothing more than groups of vessels in the most dreadful condition, in the place more or less where we thought our battle fleet ought to be. We counted 17 ships from the two navies totally dismasted—their masts gone right down to the deck, and many others partially dismasted.
On the Conqueror, Lieutenant Senhouse saw it all as ‘a melancholy instance of the instability of human greatness.’ Those beautiful fleets which only a few hours previously had been ‘towering in all their pride on their destined element’ were now these shattered hulks, ‘lying like logs on the water, the surface of which was strewed with wreck.’ On the Belleisle Lieutenant Nicolas thought ‘Nothing could be more horrible than the scene of blood and mangled remains with which every part was covered, and which, from the quantity of splinters, resembled a shipwright’s yard covered in gore.’ Nicolas’s comparison was exact: battle was a dismantling yard, a place in which the elaborate assembling of ten thousand separate particulars was disassembled, in which order was converted into disorder and an act of civility turned into pandaemonium, a version of hell drenched in blood, like a gravy. No beauty in this violence, just dis-orientating and re-orientating damage.
Admiral Gravina, that morning, had called the Argonauta ‘the most beautiful flower in my garden’. Now officers from the Belleisle made their way across to her in a pinnace to take the Spaniards’ surrender. They could hardly find a living person aboard. It was another wrecking yard of dismantled bodies and disintegrated gear. What remained of the crew was hiding below. The captain was wounded. The men from the Belleisle took the second captain, Pedro Albarracin, back to their ship, where they brought him to the cabin of their own captain, Edward Hargood. There Hargood accepted Albarracin’s sword and in return offered him what hospitality he could. He gave him a cup of tea. As he and other officers from the Belleisle were drinking the tea, exhausted, melancholic, dwelling on the day of chaos and destruction, the death of friends, the shrieks of pain still coming from the wounded far below them in the ship, a lieutenant from the Naiad came into the captain’s cabin. He had news: Nelson was dead.
On the Royal Sovereign, Collingwood was seen in tears. One of his sailors wrote home: ‘Our dear Admiral Nelson is killed! So we have paid pretty sharply for licking em. I never set eyes on him, for which I am both sorry and glad; for to be sure, I should like to have seen him—but then, all the men in our ships who have seen him are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed.’ Those ships that did not receive the news directly looked out in the evening to the Victory. She was lightless and no Commander-in-Chief’s nightsignal burned in her rigging. After the Battle of the Nile, on that very evening, after the terror and anguish of battle, the British captains held a long, loud and celebratory dinner. Nothing of the kind happened after Trafalgar and the British fleet ended the day sunk in gloom.
From the Mars, where her Captain George Duff had been killed by a roundshot which decapitated him, his 13-year-old son Norwich was transferred into the care of Henry Blackwood on the Euryalus, along with his schoolmaster William Dalrymple. In a sea of grief, the collection of letters now written to Sophia Duff, expresses the full range of the aftershock. These letters are, in miniature, a model of the British frame of mind in victory, surrounded by death.
First, Norwich sat down to write to his mother at home in 30 Castle St, Edinburgh. His big, open handwriting carefully followed the lines he had ruled on the paper, occasionally striking through a spelling mistake or an unnecessary word. For the battle, his father had sent him off the quarterdeck and down into the lower gundecks, where according to his schoolmaster he and the other boys ‘had fought like young Nelsons.’ Now this particular boyman comforted his mother, to whom his father had been in the habit of writing every day, with words of stoic heroism:
My dear Mama
You cannot possibly imagine how unwilling I am to begin this melancholy letter: however as you must unavoidably hear of the fate of dear papa I write you these few lines to request you to bear it as patiently as you can he died like a hero having gallantly led his Ship into Action and his memory will every be dear to his King his Country & his friends.
But Norwich cannot keep up this Roman face for long. Now on board the Euryalus, Blackwood had been ‘very polite & kind to me’. The frigate captain wanted to keep the boy with him, as one of his young gentlemen. But Norwich longed for home:
I would much rather wish to see you & to be discharged into the guard Ship at Leith [outside Edinburgh] for two or three months. My Dear Mamma I have again to request you to endeavour to make yourself as happy and as easy as possible. It has been the will of heaven & it is our duty to subm
it.
Believe me your obedient and affectionate Son N. Duff.
It is difficult to believe that receiving such a letter would do anything but exacerbate the pain. Norwich survived into the age of photography to become a Victorian Vice-Admiral. There is a photograph of him looking crusty, be-whiskered and bald, in a frock-coat sitting on a pompous chair, taken in 1860, two years before he died, a version of the world for which Trafalgar was fought and his father died.
At the foot of Norwich’s words, the schoolmaster Dalrymple added his own note, hand-wringingly aware of the pain of loss but at the same time wavering between anguish and congratulation, the 19th-century cult of the martyr vying for space in these few lines with the 18thcentury cult of sensibility, proud of the dead man, gapingly open to the reality of grief.
Mrs Duff, Dear Madam
It is with sincere uneasiness and regret that I have occasion to offer my condolence to you on the late unfortunate but glorious and honourable fate of our worthy generous and brave captain, whose name will ever be revered and whose character will ever be esteemed. Believe me, I am your ever respectful and obedient humble Servant W. Dalrymple
Duff’s first lieutenant, William Hennah, who had commanded the Mars in the battle with skill and distinction after Duff had been killed, wrote to Sophia on 27 October, when still off Cadiz. His letter can lay claim to being the most dignified and loving document to emerge from Trafalgar. In all its hesitations, and quivering on the brink of pomposity, in its deep sense of hurt and sympathy, its reticence and reluctance to intrude, its own grief and tender care for Sophia’s grief, its half-articulateness, relying at its crucial point on the most commonplace phrases and ideas, it is, to use a word that should only rarely be used, replete with nobility:
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