Rules of War (18 page)

Since then of course the British had played at the game too. The names of Dieppe and Le Havre were written in the annals of infamy. Other attacks had followed, on Calais and Dunkirk. And now it seemed they were about to do it again.

Forbes was still speaking: ‘At the moment, d'you see, Captain, what is happening is that the artillerymen, your fellows, on board the ships out there, are doing what we call “laying the ordnance”. That is to say they are ensuring that each of the mortars is sitting properly in its bed. Very soon they will trim the fuses on each shell and then they will wait.'

Yes, thought Steel. Then we will all wait. His attack was not due to go in against the town until after the bombardment had lifted. But already he was feeling a little sick with apprehension. Clearly Forbes did not share his grasp of reality; had somehow, at the age of twenty-one, still not made the connection between his beautiful engines of war out there on the sea and the dreadful carnage which they were about to cause within the town. God, thought Steel. Was there no silencing the boy?

‘Of course the only problem with the mortars is their accuracy. Or rather their lack of it. I suppose that's why I'm here. Of course it's inevitable that some civilians will be killed. But
it's the pirates we're really after. Must stop them taking our shipping. They're all in the pay of the French you know. Caught one four years ago, Jean Bart. Dreadful fellow. Escaped in a rowing boat. They say that the one they call Duglay Trouin is in there. King Louis' favourite. What a triumph it will be if we can take him, sir. Of course, that will be up to you and your men, that's the army's job, isn't it? Actually, I'm rather fond of the army. Wouldn't mind serving on land one day myself. See action on the field so to speak. Brother was a soldier. Perhaps you knew him, sir. Lord Forbes. Pleasant chap. Died at Blenheim.'

Steel had not known him, although he knew his name, knew him to have been respected by the staff and much loved by his men. Steel had heard that Forbes had fallen at Blenheim itself, in the last attack.

‘I'm sorry to say Lieutenant that I never had the privilege of making your brother's acquaintance. Which is I am sure to my detriment. I heard that he died a hero, though. I sympathize with your family's loss.'

‘Thank you, sir. Bound to happen though. Altogether too impetuous, poor James. Pays to be cautious in war, if you ask me. You have to know just where and when to go. Am I right, sir? Would you agree with that?'

Steel smiled: ‘Oh yes, Lieutenant. Most certainly. It's all a question of caution. All about being in the right place at the right time. That's really all there is to it.'

Forbes beamed: ‘I knew it. I'm awfully keen to meet your commander here, sir, General Argyll. Great admirer of the man. Splendid thing he carried off at Ramillies. Did you see it?'

Steel spoke quietly: ‘Yes. I saw it.'

‘How I envy you. Absolutely first-class feat of arms. Took a village single-handed. Fought off an entire regiment of damned Irishmen. Can't wait to meet him.'

I'm sure you can't, thought Steel. And I am sure that he will enjoy meeting you, an Irishman so inclined to praise the cold-blooded murder that Steel had witnessed of a fellow Irishman ten times his equal as a man. Religion, he presumed, lay behind Forbes' bigotry. Steel had no real love of it. It was religion, and the vices it brought in its wake, which kept him away for the most part from any house of God. Although on occasion, when circumstances demanded it, he had been known to pray.

Forbes was speaking again: ‘I do hope that you are able to take this Trouin fellow. It would be a great service to the navy – and indeed to yourselves. He is the scourge of merchant shipping – all shipping. With him in command of the Channel the duke shall surely have no provisions.'

‘Rest assured, Mr Forbes. We'll take him, or kill him in the attempt.'

Oh, they would take this French pirate, thought Steel. But he wondered how many innocent civilians would have to die to ensure that they did so?

One of Forbes' men was reading a message from the flagship. He turned to the lieutenant: ‘Signal from the admiral, sir. Make ready.'

‘I believe that we are about to fire, sir. I presume that you are well used to cannon fire, Captain. But I wonder whether even you will have ever seen anything quite like this. It ought to be quite a spectacle. Something I'll wager you'll never forget, sir.'

‘Thank you, Lieutenant Forbes. I can assure you that you will have my full attention.' Of that there could be no denying.

Steel looked to his right, to where, ranged along the edge of the marsh, behind the Steene Trench, pointing eastwards, directly towards Ostend, the allied artillery stood waiting for the order to open fire. He could make out the gunners around
their pieces; the dozens of portfire men poised over the touch-holes with their smouldering linstocks. Marlborough had ordered that the siege train – the huge twenty-four-pounders – should be brought up as close as possible before the marshes and even though it would be at long range, that the cannon should be set at their highest trajectory to attempt to lob their shot over the ramparts. To the east of the town, too, Dutch cannon had taken up position and were concealed behind basketwork gabions.

Out on the water, as Forbes had envisaged, the artillerymen on temporary transfer from the army to the bombships were putting the final touches to their charges. The mortars lay ready and the fuses had been cut to what the gunners reckoned was the correct length to allow them to land in the town before they burnt down through their cases to the explosive charge within.

The men-of-war, the forty-and sixty-gunners in Admiral Fairborne's squadron had drawn as close as they could to the shore and the gunners of ten vessels now stood ready by the open portholes. Twenty guns apiece were loaded: ten broadsides' worth and although their shot would not do anything like the damage of the bombships' weoponry, much of it falling out of range, their combined impact was sure to be terrifying.

And Steel knew that was what Marlborough must be hoping for at this moment. That the terror instilled by this tumultuous barrage would be enough to make the people of Ostend, or at least the garrison, open the gates without further struggle, without further bloodshed. And Steel too prayed to himself that it would happen and that their entry into the town would be clean and bloodless. But deep within he knew that his prayers would not be answered.

* * *

Marius hurried back through the quiet streets towards his house. He was barely thirty yards from his front door when he heard it. At first he thought that it must be a great clap of thunder, somewhere in the distance and instinctively he stopped. For this was the deepest thunder that he had ever heard and instantly, Marius Brouwer knew the terrible noise for what it truly was and ran, desperately, towards his door and his family.

The first six shells flew up from the bombketches and towards the town in an arc two hundred feet high and the townspeople gazed up at them in wonder. Within seconds though the more level-headed among them had realized fully what was happening. Mothers gathered their children into their arms and ran instinctively towards their homes rather than to the cellars, blockhouses, casemates and other shelters where they had been drilled to go in just such an eventuality. Vauban had planned for this very scenario many years ago and the drill had been practised diligently every month. But it did not prevent their panic. The great marshal himself had witnessed at first hand the effect of the bombardment of Le Havre by the British in 1694, had seen the people blown to pieces and the streets covered in blood and body parts. He had sworn that it would not happen again on French soil or in a French-held town.

But the shelters that he had so carefully designed were not now sufficient to embrace the growing population of a thriving sea port. Indeed they were barely large enough to contain the garrison and when that was swollen by two full crews of privateers, it was clear that Vauban's efforts to protect the population would be all in vain. And now the unthinkable was happening.

Realizing their initial mistake, the townspeople finally began to make for the protective casemates which lay under
the bastions, beneath thirty feet of solid stone. But before anyone had reached shelter the great iron balls came crashing down into the town. The first to land fell to earth in the Grote Place, its fuse still sputtering. It rolled across the cobbles towards the town hall and lay motionless, smoking. Those people who had been unlucky enough to be in the square reacted in very different ways. Three men began to run towards side alleys. A peasant girl threw herself to the ground and four other men and a woman just stood and stared at the spinning, sputtering ten-inch-diameter iron globe. One of them began to move towards it, intent on picking it up and hurling it away.

Then the fuse burnt down and within the casing, as the flame made contact with the saltpetre and the powder, the charge caught and abruptly the man's world and that of the people about him came to an abrupt and violent end. The force of the explosion plucked cobbles from the street and hurled the girl high in the air. Of the three men nothing remained but shards of cloth and flesh. The woman alone remained. Blinded by the blast and with a bloody stump where her right arm had been severed by flying debris, she stumbled through the thick smoke and still descending stones and iron fragments. Mute. Shocked. Dying.

Then a fresh salvo of shells began to land and the great siege guns opened up from the fields and the cannon from on board the warships off the coast and Ostend recoiled in shock at the bite of modern war.

Standing on the strand, Steel gazed at the obscene, pyrotechnic beauty of the bombardment and the jarring, orange-red explosions as the shells found their targets. It always amazed him how any human being was able to live through such a storm of fire. But live they did. Some were maimed,
some blinded, others barely recognizable as human. But they lived. George Forbes too was watching, with a keen interest, diligently marking the fall of each of the shells, noting any that came down too short. From time to time he called across to the signallers and as the bombs began to fall with greater accuracy, Steel felt an uncharacteristic rising nausea at what he imagined must be taking place within the walls and knew that the time had come to take his leave. He half-walked, half-skidded back down the dune, where a few minutes earlier Hansam had preceded him.

Slaughter was standing beside the lieutenant, and both men were staring at the town from which thick plumes of dirty black smoke had now begun to rise.

The sergeant was the first to find words: ‘Poor buggers. Doesn't seem right, sir. Women and children.'

‘No, Jacob. It's not right. But we have no alternative. We are assured that the people have shelters. Let's hope that they have had time to find them.'

He thought again of Major van Cutzem's words. ‘Please God that we never have to witness such things again … that we never again have to descend into that hell.'

Well, at least poor, dead van Cutzem had been spared the sight of the fresh hell that was unfolding this day in Ostend.

Seated at a stout oak table in casemate number four on the west side of the citadel, directly beneath the Florida Bastion, Major Claude Malbec of the feared Grenadiers Rouges, chewed on the stale tobacco in his mouth and spat. He drew a silk handkerchief out of the pocket of his waistcoat and dabbed gently at the corners of his mouth and the sweat on his forehead. The sweet scent of lavender pomade was curiously both comforting and disquieting. It reminded him instantly of easier times, in Paris. Of a girl he had kept as his
lover, in a house behind the Place Royale. Of the gaming tables at the Palais Royal and of the carnival atmosphere of those nights in the capital when you would wake up next morning with each of your arms around a naked girl and with dried blood on your sword blade and would not remember and not care how it, or they, or you, had got there. But with that evocative fragrance there came another memory. The haunting image of his dead wife. And as always when he thought of her, and their murdered children, he thought too of the British and his mind became lost in a red sea of hate.

With the heel of his ammunition boot Malbec ground the orange spit from the tobacco hard into the straw-covered floor and turned to his sergeant who stood by the door with his arm around a serving-girl, one of the
filles du regiment
who had marched in here with the garrison a year ago.

From outside their sealed shelter the scream of incoming shells crept into the room followed by the crash as they impacted. The walls shook regularly, with each fresh explosion, sending dust down from the eaves. The air though, save for the ubiquitous odours of sweat and tobacco, was surprisingly fresh. Marshal Vauban had thought of that, installing complex ventilation systems in each of Ostend's casemates, so that their inhabitants could last inside for days on end. There were latrines too, discreetly hidden behind a curtain wall, and storerooms for food and wine. A tamper-proof draw-well in the corner provided the all-important supply of fresh water.

Malbec called across to the sergeant: ‘Müller. How long has it been now?'

‘Half an hour, sir. Perhaps longer.'

‘How long do you think they'll go on?'

‘That's anyone's guess, sir. But I think they mean business.'

Malbec laughed. There was a hammering at the door.
Voices; first a man, then women. Pleading voices. The sergeant and his girl edged away from the door. The soldiers, who previously had been talking through the bombardment, became silent. Malbec sat motionless. At another table, across the room, his second-in-command, a captain who had joined the regiment before the recent defeat at Ramillies, looked anxiously towards the door.

‘Major Malbec, sir, with respect, d'you suppose that we should let them in? They're being torn to pieces, sir.'

Malbec frowned and shook his head. ‘My dear Captain Lejeune. How much you have to learn about war. And how much about life.'