Men of Honour (32 page)

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, revolutionary 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.

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 sense 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.