Men of Honour (29 page)

Hardy called out, hoping Nelson was not too badly hurt. ‘They have done for me at last,' Nelson said. ‘I hope not,' Hardy said again. ‘Yes,' Nelson said, ‘my backbone is shot through.' A musket ball had entered the top of his left shoulder, burning through the front of the epaulette with such speed and force that some of the gold bullion cords of which it was made were fused to the lead of the ball. They, a piece of the blue serge of the coat, and fragments of gold
lace were found attached to the musket ball when it was retrieved from deep in Nelson's body several weeks later. A life-size drawing was done of the strange and potent relic, with its clustering attachments, an engraving was made of it and published, Beatty had a gold setting made for the ball and it was given to the King. It is still at Windsor Castle.

From the geometry of the place of death, it is almost impossible that the French musketeer aimed at Nelson. The
Bucentaure
's mizzen top was about 40 feet from where Nelson and Hardy walked. That was near the limit of an accurate range for a musket, although musket balls could kill more randomly at far greater distances. Even so, Nelson was almost certainly hidden from anyone in that top by
Victory
's mainsail, which was brailed up to its yard but still hung beneath it. The musket ball was probably a ricochet, one of the pieces of metal with which the air was filled that afternoon. It broke the edge of his left shoulder blade, drove down through the body, broke two ribs, passed through his left lung and a branch of the pulmonary artery, cut downwards again and then across, breaking several vertebrae and lodged itself in the muscles of the back.

The external wound from a musket is small, but it does massive internal damage. Around the ball, as it penetrates the body, a high-pressure shock wave develops, spreading out from the track which the ball takes. As it carves its way through the organs, a cavity forms behind it. The cavity is only temporary, and as the ball drives onwards, the tissues tend to snap back into their former position. Very rapidly, the cavity pulsates, collapsing and re-expanding a few times before it finally disappears. Wherever the musket ball goes, this sudden, repeated and local expansion has the effect of an explosion within the tissue. It is as if something the size of a fist has been fired through it. By the time the ball comes to rest—and in Nelson, its lead was chipped and dented
where it had collided with his bones—the internal organs have been ploughed and scarified by its passage. The body cavity then begins to fill with blood.

As the blood pumps out through the smashed tissues, the heart rate goes up and the veins constrict. The autonomic systems in the body are making their attempt to limit the damage and keep enough blood in circulation for the vital organs to continue to operate. Blood drains from the face and limbs, which soon turn pale and even bluish. But with anything approaching such a massive wound, there is nothing to be done. Blood pressure drops and the wounded man goes into shock. Without blood transfusion, a treatment unknown in 1805, he is now certain to die, within three hours at most. A tourniquet could be applied to an external wound, to staunch the flow of blood and preserve the man. Nothing could be done for widespread internal damage. Even in modern war, most soldiers suffering wounds that result in severe internal haemorrhaging die before they reach field hospital. The ‘shedding of blood' is the way in which battle is conventionally and even politely described. The irony is that the shedding of blood—exsanguination—was precisely and dreadfully the mechanism by which battles such as Trafalgar were won and lost.

Nelson knew exactly what had happened to him. He had intense pain in the back where the ball had come to rest. His lower legs were losing sensation. His spinal cord may well have been cut. ‘At every instant,' as the ship's surgeon William Beatty reported to the Admiralty in December, which means at every beat of the heart, ‘he felt a gush of blood in his breast.' That was his life pumping out of him. He was carried below to the cockpit, with a handkerchief covering his face and lying across the stars on his coat, so as not to dishearten the men of
Victory.
As he was laid in the cockpit among the other wounded, the battle was coming to its climax around him. It is a measure
of the raging violence and noise of battle that it was perfectly possible for Nelson to be mortally wounded on the
Victory
and for only a small proportion of the crew even to realise he was missing from the quarterdeck.

A mile to the south, in the fight for the rear of the Combined Fleet, the
Fougueux
and the
Belleisle
had fought each other to a standstill. They drifted apart, mutually wrecked. The
Mars
was already out of the battle, drifting and dismasted, her captain dead, still lying where he had been decapitated, his body now covered in a Union flag. To the south, the
Tonnant
, after compelling one Spanish ship to surrender, went on to engage in a fearsome hand-to-hand fight with the flagship of Admiral Magon, the
Algésiras.
The two ships were clasped to each other in one inseparable mass, the French bowsprit tangled inextricably into the
Tonnant
's main rigging. Captain Tyler of the
Tonnant
was shot in the leg and carried below. The
Tonnant
lost her main and mizzen topmasts, the
Algésiras
her entire foremast. The pair of them looked like a shipyard in chaos and covered in gore. On neither of their upper decks could men survive and the two ships' companies fired destruction at each other from the great guns down below. The French attempted to board with most of the crew of the
Algésiras
climbing through the rigging. All but one of them were killed in the attempt, shot down by musket and clouds of grape shot fired at them from a few feet away. One Frenchman reached the
Tonnant
's upper deck, to which an English sailor pinned him through the calf with a pike.

Here, too, is an emblematic moment in the story of Trafalgar. The fighting is absolute, frenzied and horrifying. The scene is probably as intense a combination of the intimate and the bloody as any in the history of warfare. At this moment, a Frenchman lies held to the deck, screaming for his life, while other English sailors are making for him
with their own cutlasses and pikes. But at that moment, a British officer intervened: the switch had flicked from violence to humanity, from one aspect of the Atlanticist Anglo-Saxon culture to another, and the Frenchman was saved, to be sent below to the surgeon to have his leg wound tended.

That extraordinary moment, when uncompromising aggression suddenly reverts to care, comes to characterise the later stages of the battle. The ending of violence, its control, is even more mysterious a moment than its beginning. Tension can erupt into aggression; but how does aggression transmute into calm and even generosity? There is evidence from Trafalgar that this capacity for the humane was not simply a product of exhaustion or battle fatigue. More than that, it seems to be evidence of a mature understanding, which had emerged from 18th-century English culture, of the role and limits of violence. The
Algésiras
finally surrendered when her two remaining masts fell, shot through deep within the ship, always the sign of unspeakable devastation between decks. Admiral Magon was found dead on his own quarterdeck, lying in his blood at the foot of the poop ladder.

At the fight between the
Victory
and the
Redoutable
, Hardy remained on deck as the admiral was carried below. It was a desperately anxious time. After the battle, his silver pencil case was found to have the impressions of his teeth deeply embedded in it, where quite unconsciously he had chewed on the silver in the heat of battle. All round him Captain Lucas's musketmen in the tops were having a savage effect on the
Victory
's upper deck. The French musket fire killed and wounded about fifty men there and those British sailors remaining unhurt left the deck for their own safety.

The
Victory
's great guns continued to fire below, but from the French there was a curious silence. As the
Victory
's upper deck had no one left alive, the musketmen had no further targets to aim at. The
Redoutable
was now not firing at all with her own great guns. Hardy thought for a moment the Frenchman had struck. His own guns had been doing steady and uncompromising destruction below decks.
Victory
's shot had been driving into the
Redoutable
, through the men and guns, and out again the other side. So close were the
Victory
's muzzles to the French gunports that the British were afraid that the belch of flame from their own guns, and flaming wads which the detonating gunpowder blew out of the barrels after the shot, would set the
Redoutable
on fire. After each shot, men from the
Victory
threw buckets of water through the holes in the
Redoutable
which their shot had made, to extinguish any fire they might have ignited. A fire aboard the
Redoutable
would also have destroyed the
Victory.
This was a form of battle in which the enemy had to be nurtured if he was to be defeated. The possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction was perfectly available to them and had even been hinted at in Nelson's suggestion that he would willingly have half of his fleet burnt to bring about the destruction of the French. But it was not a tactic which either the men of the lower deck or the lieutenants and midshipmen commanding them, were prepared to countenance. Hardy, having taken the care, now thought he had won this fight and ordered the
Victory
's starboard battery to cease firing.

A strange moment of silence descended between the two ships at the heart of the battle. Gunfire from other fights echoed around them. The banks of smoke hung like curtains above the slowly stirring sea. Both captains, their officers and crews were waiting for the other to surrender. Both thought they had won and Captain Lucas prepared to board the
Victory.
He ordered his mainsail yard cut down so that it would bridge the gap between the two ships. He prepared his men to rush up from below, armed
quite literally to the teeth—a cutlass held between the teeth allowed one arm to hold on to the rigging, another a pistol—but at that very moment Nelson's tactical conception paid off.

This was not, as the old convention had ordained, a battle in which one ship would confront one other and duel with honour. This battle involved the massing of forces against enemy ships in order to bring about their surrender quickly and savagely. Just at the moment that Lucas's boarding party was prepared on the
Redoutable
, 200 men gathered in a mass, the British
Téméraire
materialised on his port side. The
Téméraire
—98 guns, three-decker, under Captain Eliab Harvey—was as formidable a fighting machine as the
Victory
herself. The
Redoutable
, a two-decker, found herself sandwiched between these two terrifying opponents. As a fierce musketry fight developed between the men of the
Redoutable
and the men of the
Victory
, killing 19 Britons and wounding 22, Harvey coldly ordered his upper tier of guns to fire across the decks of the
Redoutable.
The two hundred men were all killed or wounded. Lucas himself was hit but not killed. In the
Victory
, the lieutenants in charge of the divisions on the lowest decks had their guns trebleshotted, with a reduced charge of powder, and ordered their muzzles to be lowered so that as the roundshot from each broadside hammered through the
Redoutable
, they wouldn't drive on into the
Téméraire
beyond her.

This was the savage centre of Trafalgar. On one side the
Victory
was still firing with her port guns into the
Bucentaure
, with her starboard guns into the
Redoutable.
The
Redoutable
herself was suffering massacre from the
Victory
on one side and from the
Téméraire
on the other. Men in the
Redoutable
's tops, and even on her yard-arms, were throwing incendiary grenades down into both the
Victory
and the
Téméraire.
At the same moment, the
Téméraire
, on her far side, was getting ready to receive a

collision from the French
Fougueux
, which had moved away from her earlier bloody encounter with the
Belleisle.
The
Téméraire
's starboard broadside had yet to be fired in the battle. It was in its state of perfect pre-battle readiness. The
Téméraire
's officers held their fire, waiting for the Frenchman to approach; 200 hundred yards was considered point-blank range. The
Téméraire
allowed the
Fougueux
to come within 100 yards before firing. It was the model of Nelsonian violence: the
Fougueux
was rocked back on her heels by the impact. The noise of it rolled across the ocean towards the rest of the fleet. ‘Crippled and confused', the
Fougueux
now drifted down on to the
Téméraire
, where she was lashed alongside, as the
Redoutable
was on to the
Téméraire
's other broadside, and destroyed.