Men of Honour (33 page)

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 submit.

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:

Madam,

I believe that a more unpleasant task, than what is now imposed upon me, can scarcely fall to the lot of a person, whose feelings are not more immediately connected by the nearer ties of kindred, but from a sense of duty, (as first Lieutenant of the Mars,) as being myself the husband of a beloved partner, and the father of children; out of the pure respect and esteem to the memory of our late gallant Captain, I should consider myself guilty of a base neglect, should you only be informed of the melancholy circumstances attending the late glorious, though unfortunate victory to many, by a public gazette. The consequences of such an event, while it may occasion the rejoicings of the nation, will in every instance be attended with the deepest regrets of a few.

Alas! Madam, how unfortunate shall I think myself, should this be the first intimation you may have of the irreparable loss you have met with! what apology can I make for entering on a subject so tender and so fraught with sorrow, but to recommend an humble reliance on this great truth, that the ways of Providence, although sometimes inscrutable, are always for the best.

By this, Madam, you are in all probability acquainted with the purport of my letter. Amongst the number of heroes who fell on that ever-memorable 21st inst. in defence of their King and Country; after
gloriously discharging his duty to both; our meritorious and much respected Commander, Captain George Duff, is honourably classed; his fate was instantaneous; and he resigned his soul into the hands of the Almighty without a moment's pain.

Poor Norwich is very well. Captain Blackwood has taken him on board the Euryalus, with the other young gentlemen that came with him, and their schoolmaster.

The whole of the Captain's papers and effects are sealed up, and will be kept in a place of security until proper persons are appointed to examine them. Meanwhile, Madam, I beg leave to assure you of my readiness to give you any information, or render you any service in my power.

And am, Madam, with the greatest respect,

Your most obedient and most humble servant,

W
ILLIAM
H
ENNAH
.

That tender tone of voice, which does not seek to obscure the dreadful realities of war but understands the value of life beyond and outside them, might also be seen as the quality for which Trafalgar was fought. It is the opposite of a raging, militaristic delight in violence. It is a return to the world of children, home, quiet and settled ease, in which, as Hennah imagines with a painful reality, the events of 21 October had in the Duff household created such a searing wound. The irony of Trafalgar is that such a world could only be reached through a battle as intense and allabsorbing as the one in which George Duff had died. Even here, almost entirely buried below the level of conscious thought, the deep pattern is steadily at work of millenarian peace reached through apocalyptic violence.

On the evening of the battle, the men could take stock. In the log of the
Swiftsure
, Thomas Cook, the master, wrote that evening:

British ships taken sunken or destroyed—none Of Combined fleet taken sunk burnt or distroyed—22 of the line

Cook had overestimated slightly. The true total was 17 taken, one blown up, but that, by any measure, was a victory. But the damage was horrific and in all ships the men now had to make their vessels workable. On
Victory
, at 5 o'clock that evening, the mizzenmast fell about ten feet above the poop, ‘the lower masts, yards & Bowsprit all crippled, rigging and sails very much cut, the Ships around us very much crippled.' The men set up emergency rigging, runners and tackles, to prevent the other masts from falling over. She got under way ‘under the remnants of Foresail and maintopsail', the men deep into the night ‘employed Knotting the Fore and Main Rigging and Fishing [reinforcing with an extra timber] and Securing the Lower masts.' The carpenters stopped the shot holes. On the
Mars
all the masts were tottering—‘cut half asunder'—and they had ‘no sails fit to set'. Every brace and piece of running rigging had been shot away and not a single shroud was left standing. On the
Africa
, hundreds of feet of oak, elm and deal planking were brought up from the stores for repairs. Three copper sheets and 400 feet of sheet lead were nailed over shot holes in the hull. An anchor stock was used as a ‘fish', a reinforcing timber, for the shot bowsprit. Booms and spars were used to fish the mizzenmast. In other less damaged ships, such as the late arriving
Britannia
, it was running rigging that needed repair. On her, buoy rope was used to replace a fore topmast stay shot away. Thousands of feet of rope were rove through the blocks to replace halyards and braces shot away during the action.