‘I can’t see a damned thing,’ Frey complained, crossing the deck and passing close to Ashton as he bent to stare out of one of his own larboard battery gun-ports. Ah, here she comes. Looks as though it’s your turn for it first.’ Frey smiled and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good luck.’
‘Good luck,’ Ashton replied with more duty than true sincerity.
A moment later one of the gun-captains called out, ‘Here she comes, me lads!’ and a ripple of expectation ran through the waiting men, like a breeze through dry grass.
‘Lay your guns,’ Ashton commanded. He waited until, like statues, the crews stood back from their loaded and primed pieces, their captains behind the breeches, lanyards in hand. Eventually, all along the deck the bare arms were raised in readiness.
‘Fire!’ Ashton yelled, and the gun captains jerked the lanyards and jumped aside as the still-warm guns leaped inboard with their recoil, and their crews fussed round them again.
On the deck above, Sergeant McCann had ensured each marine checked his flint and filled his cartouche box. Worn flints would cause misfires, and most of his men had fired profligately.
‘Make every shot count,’ McCann warned them, ‘and every bullet find its mark.’
His men muttered about grandmamas and the sucking of eggs, but they tolerated Meticulous McCann. He was a thoughtfully provident man and though few knew him enough to like him, for he had too many of the ways of an officer to enjoy popular appeal, they all respected him.
When the captain’s warning to stand-to and prepare to receive fire came, Hyde merely nodded to McCann, who repeated the order. It was then, in the idle, fearful moment before action, McCann thought of Ashton, and as he lowered his weapon and lined foresight and backsight on a small cluster of gilt just forward of L’Aigle’s mizen mast, it was Josiah Ashton’s image that his imagination conjured up beyond the muzzle of his Tower musket.
It was almost three bells when Ashton’s guns barked again, beating the enemy by a few seconds. Although the range was short, Drinkwater had Birkbeck edge Andromeda away from L’Aigle, to prevent Lejeune running up too close and attempting to board and exploit his greater numbers. Even so, the storm of enemy musketry was prodigious, and the rows of hammocks were destroyed by lead shot ripping into them, fraying the barricade they made, so that the shredded canvas fluttered in the breeze. Those balls which passed over the hammocks in their nettings, either buzzed harmlessly overhead, or found a target. Most passed by, but a few struck the masts, or the boats, and a few knocked men down.
As for the enemy’s round shot, they thudded into the hull or struck the lighter bulwarks, sending up an explosion of splinters. Occasionally a ball came in through a port, struck a carronade and ricocheted away with a strident whine. Others flew higher, aimed to bring down Andromeda’s upper spars, discommode those on the upper deck and rob the British frigate of the ability to manoeuvre which she had thus far so brilliantly exploited to avoid such a fate. The cries of the dying and the wounded filled the air again, and a large pool of blood formed at the base of the mizen mast, pouring in a brief torrent from the shattered body of a topman lying across the trestle-tree boards of the mizen top high above.
The action had reached its crisis, and Drinkwater, increasingly assailed by the agony of his wounded arm, knew it. He fought the excruciating ache and the desire to capitulate to its demand to lie down and rest; his mouth was dry as dust and his voice was growing hoarse from shouting, though he could not recall much of what he had said in exhorting his men.
He knew too, that whatever the shortcomings of his ship and her company, they could not have fought her with more skill and vigour. From Birkbeck masterfully conning her, to the men who put the master’s orders into practice; from the solicitous and grateful
Marlowe running about the upper-deck directing the carronades, to the lieutenants and gunners below, he could not have asked for more. Nor should he forget Kennedy and his mates, labouring in the festering stink of the orlop, plying scalpel and saw, curette and pledget to save what was left of the brutalized bodies of the wounded. His own mortality irked him: he would have to submit to the surgeon’s ministrations if he survived the next hour, for his bandaged arm oozed blood.
The thunder of their own guns bespoke a furious cannonade; the decks trembled with the almost constant rumblings of recoil and running out of the 12-pounders of the main armament, and it was clear to Drinkwater’s experienced ear that Frey’s unengaged gunners had crossed the deck to help fight the larboard battery. In fact Frey had assumed command of the forward division, an order Ashton had not liked receiving, though he could not avoid obeying it, for to do so would have been to have transgressed the Articles of War in refusing to do his utmost in battle.
But Ashton could not deny the effectiveness of the reinforcement, and so furious did the gunfire become that not even the brisk breeze could now clear the smoke and the gap between the two ships became obscure. Neither the officers in the gun-deck nor those upon the quarterdeck could now see very much. L’Aigle was marked by her lines of flashing muzzles and the tops of her masts above the cloud of powder-smoke. Then they heard a cheer ripple along the upper-deck and watched as, in an almost elegant collapse, L’Aigle’s main topmast went by the board. Within a quarter of an hour, however, Andromeda had lost her own mizen mast and the wreckage brought down her main topgallant. Two carronades on the quarterdeck were also dismounted in the general destruction of her bulwarks adjacent to the mizen channels. A moment later she had lost her wheel and all those who manned it as her upper-deck was swept by a hail of grape-shot.
Marlowe was nowhere to be seen in the confusion as Drinkwater summoned a hatless and dishevelled Birkbeck who seemed otherwise unscathed. ‘She’ll get alongside us now, by God!’ the sailing master bellowed above the din.
‘We must have given as good as we’ve got!’ Drinkwater roared back.
For a few moments there was utter confusion, then L’Aigle loomed close alongside and through the clearing smoke they could hear cries of ‘Vive L’Empereur!’ and ‘Mort a l’Anglais!’ as the French soldiers whipped themselves into a frenzy.
‘Prepare to repel boarders!’ Drinkwater shouted, his voice cracking with the effort as his head reeled, and then the two ships came together with a sudden lurching thud and a long, tortured grinding. Above their heads on the quarterdeck, L’Aigle’s mainyard thrust itself like a fencer’s extended and questing epee, wavering as the two ships moved in the seaway. Shapes like ghosts appeared over the rail as veterans of Austerlitz and Borodino, of Eylau, Friedland, Jena and Wagram prepared to launch themselves across the gap between the two frigates, on to Andromeda’s deck.
Lower down, beneath the pall of smoke that lay in the gulf between the two ships, Frey had seen the approach of L’Aigle and heard the excited shouting of the battle-mad troops. The cry to repel boarders came down through the thick air in the gun-deck and passed along the lines of cannon in shouted warnings.
Frey withdrew from his observation post and hurried aft to where Ashton was scurrying up and down his guns, half bent as he squinted along first one and then another as they jumped inboard for reloading. Steam sizzled as the wet sponges went in, adding a warm stickiness to the choking atmosphere. Frey tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Josh!’ Frey bellowed until he had attracted his colleague’s attention. ‘Josh! I’m taking my fellows to reinforce the upper-deck.’
‘What?’ Ashton was almost deaf from the concussion of the cannon and Frey had to shout in his filthy ear before Ashton understood.
‘No, let me. You fight the guns.’ The words were uttered before Ashton realized the implications: he had given voice to his thoughts and wavered briefly, half-hoping Frey would contradict the suggestion.
‘If you want to go fire-eating good luck to you.’ Frey nodded assent, straightened up and hastened back up the deck, half bent to avoid collisions with the beams. ‘Starbowlines!’ he bellowed, ‘Small arms from the racks and follow Mr Ashton
on deck! D’ye hear there? Starbowlines with Mr Ashton to the upper-deck! We’re about to be boarded!’ Men came away from the guns and helped themselves to cutlasses, withdrawing across the deck to where Ashton hurriedly mustered them while Frey turned back to invigorate the now flagging port gun-crews.
‘Bear up, my boys, we can still blow their bloody ship to Old Harry!’
As Ashton led his men off, Frey’s guns continued to engage L’Aigle’s cannon muzzle to muzzle.
On the quarterdeck Hyde came into his own. In a few seconds, he had concentrated his lobsters into a double line of men behind which Drinkwater and Birkbeck could gather their wits and attempt to avert disaster. By passing messages to the steering flat, Andromeda might yet break free of L’Aigle’s deadly embrace, but they had first to clear away the wreckage of fallen masts and throw back the wave of invaders.
Birkbeck’s gaze ran aft and he clutched with thoughtless violence at Drinkwater’s wounded arm. ‘By God, sir! Look! There’s the Russian!’
He pointed and Drinkwater, shaking from the pain of Birkbeck’s unconscious gesture, turned to see above their stern the taut canvas of the Gremyashchi as she bore down into the action.
CHAPTER 18
The Last Candle
May 1814
Drinkwater felt the chill of foreboding seize him. The game was up.
He was conscious of having fought with all the skill he could muster, of having done his duty, but the end was not now far off. He saw little point in delaying matters further, for it would only result in a further effusion of blood, and he had done everything the honour of his country’s flag demanded. Besides, he was wounded and the effect of the laudanum was working off; spent ball or not, it had done for his left arm and he could no longer concentrate on the business in hand. He was overwhelmed with pain and a weariness that went far beyond the urgent promptings of his agonizing wound. He was tired of this eternal business of murder, exhausted by the effort to outmanoeuvre other equally intelligent men in this grim game of action and counter-action. The effort to do more was too much for him and he felt the deck sway beneath his unsteady feet.
‘Here the bastards come!’
It was Marlowe waving his sword and roaring a warning beside him. The first lieutenant had lost his hat like Birkbeck, and his sudden appearance seemed magical, like a djinn in a story, but it was a Marlowe afire with a fighting madness. Both his amazing presence and his words brought about a transformation in Drinkwater.
To strike at that moment would have resulted in utter confusion: Napoleon’s veterans were after a revenge greater than the mere capture of a British frigate and the thought, flashing through Drinkwater’s brain in an instant, compelled him to a final effort.
‘God’s bones! The game is worth a last candle …’
But his words were lost as, with a roar, the boarders poured in a flood over the hammock nettings and aboard Andromeda. They were answered by a volley from Hyde’s rear rank of marines who promptly reloaded their muskets in accordance with their drill. Beside Drinkwater, Birkbeck drew his sword in the brief quiet. The rasp of the blade made Drinkwater turn as the front rank of marines discharged their pieces from their kneeling position.
‘Stand fast, Birkbeck! I promised you a dockyard post. Hyde, forward with your bayonets!’
Drinkwater had his own hanger drawn now and advanced through the marines with Marlowe at his side. He distinctly heard Marlowe say ‘Excuse me,’ as he shouldered his way through the rigid ranks, and then they were shuffling forward over the resultant shambles of the marines’ volleys.
Only the officers had been protected by Hyde’s men; as the Frenchmen scrambled over the hammock nettings and down upon Andromeda, they had encountered the upper-deck gunners, topmen and waisters, the afterguard and those men whose duties required them to be abroad on the quarterdeck, forecastle and the port gangway. At Drinkwater’s cry to repel boarders, most of these had seized boarding pikes, or drawn their cutlasses if they bore them.
L’Aigle’s party had not been unopposed, but they outnumbered the defenders and while some were killed or remained detained in the hand-to-hand fighting, more swept past and were darting like ferrets in their quest for an enemy to overcome, in order to seize the frigate in the name of their accursed Emperor. Hyde’s marines had fired indiscriminately into the mass of men coming aboard, hitting friend and foe alike, aided by discharges of langridge from the swivel guns in the tops that now swept L’Aigle’s rail and inhibited further reinforcement of the first wave of boarders.
All this had taken less than a minute, and then, after their third volley, Hyde’s men were stamping their way across the deck, their bright, gleaming steel bayonets soon bloodied and their ranks wavering as they stabbed, twisted and withdrew, butted and broke the men of the Grand Army who had the audacity to challenge them at sea, on their own deck. They were all slithering in blood and the slime that once constituted the bodies of men; the stink of it was in their nostrils, rousing them to a primitive madness which fed upon itself and was compounded into a frenzied outpouring of violent energy.
White-faced, Drinkwater advanced with them, his left shoulder withdrawn, his right thrown forward. With shortened sword arm, he stabbed and hacked at anything in his way. He was vaguely conscious of the jar of his blade on bone, then the point of a curved and bloody sabre flashed into his field of view and he had parried it and cut savagely at the brown dolman which bore it. A man’s face, a thin, lined and handsome face, as weather-beaten as that of any seaman, a face disfigured with a scar and sporting moustachios of opulent proportions and framed by tails of plaited hair, grimaced and opened a red mouth with teeth like a horse. Drinkwater could hear nothing from the hussar whose snarl was lost in the foul cacophony to which, hurt and hurting, they all contributed in their contrived and vicious hate.
The hussar fell and was shoved aside as he slumped across the breech of a carronade. The enemy were checked and thrust back. Men were pinioned to the bulwarks, crucified by bayonets, their guts shot out point-blank by pistol shot, or clubbed with butts or pike-staves, and then with a reinforcing roar Ashton’s gun crews came up from the waist, eager to get to closer grips with an enemy they had shortly before been blowing to Kingdom Come with their brutal artillery.
Drinkwater sensed rather than saw them. It was all that was needed to sweep the remaining able-bodied French, soldiers and seamen alike, back over the side of Andromeda and across the grinding gap between the two heaving ships. Drinkwater was up on the carronade slide himself, trying to get over the rail one-handed. Frustrated, he put the forte of his hanger in his mouth, afterwards recalling a brief glimpse of dark water swirling between the tumble-home of L’Aigle and Andromeda. He leaned outwards and seized an iron crane of L’Aigle’s hammock nettings as Ashton’s men joined Hyde’s marines and their combined momentum bore the counterattack onward.
Sergeant McCann had been the right-hand marker as Lieutenant Hyde ordered the marines to advance. They had only to move a matter of feet; less than half the frigate’s beam, but every foot-shuffling step had been fiercely contested, and McCann felt his boots crunch unmercifully down upon the writhings of the wounded and dying. The pistols in his belt felt uncomfortable as he twisted and thrust, edging forward all the time, but they reminded him of his resolve.
Suddenly he was aware of movement on his extreme right. As the flanker, he turned instinctively and saw Lieutenant Ashton lead the gunners up out of the gun-deck. He grinned as his heart-beat quickened and Ashton, casting about him to establish his bearings and the tactical situation, caught sight of Sergeant McCann appearing in the smoke to his left.
‘Forward Sergeant!’ he cried exuberantly, engaging the first Frenchman he came across, a dragoon officer who had shed his cumbersome helmet and fought in a forage cap and a short stable coat. The dragoon slashed wildly, but Ashton was supported by two sailors and the three of them cut the man to his knees in a second. The dragoon fell, bleeding copiously. Lieutenant Ashton felt a surge
of confidence as he swept his men forward.
Smoke enveloped them and Ashton half turned, again shouting ‘Come on, Sergeant!’ his voice full of exasperation. Unable to see the full fury of the action on the quarterdeck, Ashton hacked a path forward and then, as the pressure eased, McCann advanced at a quickening pace. The line of marines began to gain momentum as the column of gunners continued to emerge from the gloom of the gun-deck. Below, their remaining colleagues carried on adding their remorseless thunder to the air as they fired indiscriminately without aiming, into the wooden wall that heaved and surged alongside.
Sergeant McCann followed Lieutenant Ashton as he clambered over the bulwark amidships, and stretched out for the fore chains of L’Aigle. He could have killed Ashton at that moment, stabbed him ignominiously in the arse as he had sworn to do, but he faltered and then Ashton had gone, and with him the opportunity.
Further aft Lieutenant Marlowe had reached L’Aigle’s mizen chains and was hacking his way down upon the quarterdeck of the French frigate. Between the two British officers, the line of defenders bowed back, but it had already transformed itself as the French attack was repulsed and the tide turned. As Marlowe struck a French aspirant’s extended arm and deflected the pistol ball so that it merely grazed his cheek, the whole line began to scramble aboard L’Aigle.
Carried forward by this madness, Drinkwater felt his ankle twist as he landed on the enemy deck, and he fell full length, cushioned by the corpse of a half-naked French gunner who lay headless beside his gun. The stink of blood, dried sweat and garlic struck him and he dragged himself to his feet as a fellow boarder knocked him over again. The seaman paused, saw whom he had hit and gave Drinkwater a hand to rise.
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