The July of mutilations and maimings gives way to glorious August, the Battle of the Nile on the first day of the month, in 1798. Of all his battles before Trafalgar, this was the one I looked forward to most.
A night battle, his only one. I was at my table in the ops room by 5 P.M., laying the ships out, a bottle of my father’s claret ready-opened at my elbow. I never drank before his battles, only after he had hoisted the order for close action.
Forty minutes to go. The long hoped-for, long sought-for engagement about to begin. Since April, Horatio has been scouring the Mediterranean in search of the French fleet. His squadron has been brought up to a strength of twelve seventy-four-gun warships and three frigates. The situation is desperate. We have no base east of Gibraltar; the Mediterranean is a hostile sea. On land the French are everywhere dominant. We know they are about to leave Toulon with a fleet of transports and escorting warships commanded by Bonaparte in person. But we don’t know where he is intending to strike. It could be anywhere in the region. An attack on Portugal from the east, through Spain? A breakthrough into the Atlantic and a descent on Lisbon that way? A landing in Ireland, now in open revolt against us?
It is our task to find out. A heavy responsibility on that great stretch of water, in those slow ships. In May we learn from a captured French corvette that the expedition is about to set sail. Fifteen enemy sail of the line and twelve thousand troops are already embarked. The warships are under the command of Vice-Admiral François de Brueys, whose flagship is the gigantic Orient, 120 guns.
Still no-one knows where they are going. They are sighted north of Corsica, steering southeast. An attack on the Two Sicilies? But that would be easier by land. Or Malta, which dominates the central Mediterranean? But thirty-five thousand men, which Bonaparte’s strength is now believed to be, would be far more than needed for this. Some altogether more ambitious attempt it must be …
Late in July, from a Genovese brig hailed off Cape Passaro, we learn that the French have been in Malta, that the Knights Templar have surrendered to them, that they have filled the army’s coffers with the treasures of the churches and then left again, destination unknown.
In the solitude of the great cabin of our flagship, the Vanguard, with maps covering the table before us, we try to work it out, try to enter the mind of the enemy. Unlikely they have gone west; the prevailing winds of the season would make it difficult with transport ships. East, then. Corfu? Constantinople, where the Ottoman Empire could be smashed at the heart? But Bonaparte’s great enemy now is Britain, and the greatest threat to British interest lies farther east. We have detailed information about the French force now; in addition to troops and artillery it includes naturalists, astronomers, mathematicians. What would be the destination for specialists such as these? It could only be countries with ancient, esoteric civilizations. Egypt, the Red Sea ports. Then India, and a crippling blow to this most vital of our colonies. That must be it.
We set off for Alexandria. But what if we are wrong? What if the slippery crappos have doubled back behind us, taken Sicily? Then the failure would be complete. Not a gallant failure, as Tenerife was regarded, but a failure of judgement with disastrous consequences for the whole conduct of the war. Mistakes like that are never forgotten, never forgiven. If we are wrong, our career is at an end. And we are handicapped, we are half blind in the metaphorical sense also—we have only three frigates, only three ships fast enough to scout ahead for information.
We are not wrong, but for some terrible days it seems that we are. No sign of them at Alexandria when we get there; they are still on the way, we have outsailed them, but of course we do not know this at the time. Back to Sicily; no sign there either. Egypt again, but now there is no doubt: the French have been sighted from Greece, heading southeast for Egypt.
Four days later, at ten o’clock on the morning of August 1, we sight once again the lighthouses and minarets of Alexandria. The harbour is crammed with empty transports, but there are no warships. Napoleon has landed. He is on his way to the destruction of the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids, and the conquest of Cairo.
Some minutes of terrible disappointment. Then we give the order to steer east along the coast, towards the delta of the Nile. At two in the afternoon, roughly three and a half hours ago, we see at last, with joy and relief, the masts and yards of the French fleet at anchor. On the halyards of the Zealous, second ship in the British line, the signal is hoisted: Enemy in sight.
You knew then that decisive action was a certainty. Before this time tomorrow, I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey. That is what you said. Why does it trouble me so now, after all these years? Is it because of her? Like the cypress-and-laurel remark before the attack on Tenerife. That was traditional, death or glory, the genuine heroic impulse. But this … All those men, all the blood and rending of the flesh that awaited only a few hours away. A peerage or a state funeral. If I were talking to Miss Lily, I would not mention this remark of yours; she would call it monstrous. Still theatre, she would say, but a one-man show now, the others lining the decks to kick their legs, make up the chorus. Why I had begun to subject you to her opinion at all, that was the mystery. She was miles away in Derbyshire; why did I give her so much say? How could Avon Secretarial Services be expected to appreciate your heroic sense of destiny, the patriotic identification of Britain’s interests with your own? Her face with that little frown on it, the slight flush that came to her cheeks when she was indignant about something.
The French ships are set out now, all thirteen of them, anchored in their curving line. Their commander, Admiral de Brueys, whose last day of life this is, is an experienced seaman, a former royalist officer, reinstated by Napoleon. He has fought the British before, during the American War of Independence. He has three 80-gun ships, the Franklin, the Tonnant, and the Guillaume Tell, and one of 120 guns, his flagship, the Orient. For ships as big as this, Alexandria Harbour is rather too narrow; he is afraid of jamming at the harbour mouth. So he has brought the ships eastward, here to Aboukir, and anchored them in a tight defensive line protected behind by the shoals and sandbanks of the bay.
I always used the top left-hand corner of my table for this battle, a triangular space taking up almost half of the total surface. The right angle formed by the sides of the table represents the arms of the bay, with the peninsula of Aboukir to the north and the Nile delta to the south. The French line curves shallowly outwards toward the open sea, with the Guerrier in the van, the Timoléon in the rear, and the mighty Orient in the exact centre. They are anchored, but only by the bow; they swing with the current, there are spaces between them. An error on the part of de Brueys, yes, but who would have supposed Horatio would try to pass through, risk the shallows inside the bay, notoriously treacherous? And at night, in darkness, without maps!
Other errors the French admiral has made, all springing from the assumption that his rear is secure. Believing that the attack must come from seaward, he has placed his strongest ships in the centre, his weakest and oldest in the van. And he has failed to ensure that his leading ship, the Guerrier, is anchored right up against the shoals, so as to prevent our ships from passing inside, between his line and the shore.
Five twenty-two by my watch. There has been time to prepare for battle since that first sighting of the French, ample time—that leisurely preparation for mortal risk; as always I was troubled and excited by it as I set out the British ships in their rough grouping on the seaward side. Rarely can men have prepared to face death with more deliberation, more knowledge of it in every heart. The port lids are opened and the guns run out; hammocks are rolled up and packed in nets along the bulwarks as a shield against splinters and musket shot; the furled sails are wetted to reduce risk of fire; damp sand is strewn on the gundecks to prevent bare feet from slipping on blood. The gun crews, stripped to the waist, stand by the lines of cannon; the surgeons wait in the cockpit; the marines, in full uniform, troop with their muskets to the upper deck, watched by their lieutenants with drawn swords.
Our ships are fortunate in the wind; a brisk northwesterly fills their sails as they bear down from the north. As they approach, they form a line in obedience to your general signal, number 31: Form line of battle ahead and astern of the admiral as most convenient.
At a distance, from the open sea, the French line looks impregnable, set in a convex curve outward from the shoals, the sea behind seething white as it breaks against the sandbanks. The ten British seventy-fours, hauled sharp to the wind, are already in the shallower water, sounding as they go, fifteen fathoms, thirteen, eleven, nine … One is out of action already; Troubridge, in the Culloden, has run aground. Here he is, in a frenzy of frustration, at the tip of the shoal stretching east from the bay. I try not to think further of Troubridge; thoughts of him distress me, renew that sickness of doubt, inappropriate on the eve of such a glorious victory. Troubridge was one of the two captains—Ball was the other—that you sent to Cardinal Ruffo in Naples the following July, with your assurance that you would not oppose the embarkation of the rebels …
But now you are innocent still. You scan the French line with the eye of a commander set on immediate attack. Landwards, behind them, the sun is setting in the magnificent summer dustglow of the Levant. Their masts and yards are fiery, they ride on a molten sea. You see their weakness together with their beauty. You will throw your whole weight on their van and crush it before help can come. But the shoals are dangerously close. The Zealous is still in the lead, sounding as she goes—eight fathoms, seven …
The last moment for choice is approaching. You can stay outside, order your captains to anchor two by two opposite the enemy ships. This is what de Brueys expects. You can break through the gaps in the French line and attack from the inside. But how can you be sure there is enough water?
It is exactly 5:40 P.M. You give the signal for close action. I pour out my first glass. Now it comes, the moment of pure and perfect opportunity. Can we outflank the French by rounding his line and attacking from inside? From our flagship, here in the centre of the line, we shout across to Hood in the Zealous. Can he take his ship round the end of the enemy line? Hood shouts back that he will try. So to the Zealous falls the honour of being the first to round the point of the shoals. But I have been too hasty—it is still only six minutes to six; I must wait six more minutes before taking her round. I have been rather hasty with the wine too, in my excitement; the glass is almost empty, and I am not due for another till 6:28, when the battle is joined.
These are the last moments of the day, before the swift descent of that southern darkness. I have turned off the overhead light, left on only the lamps at the ends of the table. This is the poised moment—everything is at risk; we are entering a strange bay at nightfall, without pilots, without reliable charts, moving in narrow waters among invisible reefs and shoals. The progress of the Zealous is slow because of her need to take continual soundings. She is overtaken now by Captain Foley in the Goliath. Foley has made a deduction and acted on it with a boldness worthy of his great commander. If the French have anchored their ships by the bow only, there must be water enough to allow for the swing. If there is water enough to allow for the swing, there must be water enough for another ship to pass inside.
Impeccable logic. The Goliath sweeps into the lead. Here she is. It is 6:28, time for another glass. The enemy have hoisted their colours and opened fire. Foley has crossed the bows of the Guerrier, raking her with a broadside as he does so, then passing on to anchor here, on the inner quarter of the Conquérant, next French ship in line. Hood takes up his station opposite the Guerrier. Our ships follow round in order of sail—the Orion, the Theseus, the Audacious. As the fires of that sunset are quenched in the sea, the five leading British ships are all inside and at closest possible quarters, bringing a concentrated fire to bear on the enemy van, the more deadly as the French can make no adequate reply. Their guns on the shoreward side have not been cleared for action, they are cluttered with rope and tackle and mess furniture—another disastrous consequence of the French assumption that attack was bound to come from the open sea.
Our flagship, the Vanguard, is the sixth ship to come into action, the first to anchor on the seaward side. Here she is, abreast and within pistol shot of the Spartiate. Now she is hard pressed, fired upon by both the Spartiate and the Aquilon, next ship in the French line. The Minotaur, Captain Louis, relieves us, ranging up to draw off the Aquilon’s fire.
Seven P.M. Night has fallen in a thunder of guns. In a pall of smoke, lit only by gunfire, the five seventy-four’s of the French van, undermanned and able to fire only on the starboard side, are being beaten into helplessness by eight of ours settled like a swarm about them. My lamps cannot match the glimmer and flicker of the gunfire and the lurid flaring of the smoke, and my room is hushed, only the slight sounds of my miniature hulls scraping on the glass; but my table is beautiful, reflections glinting on the dark surface, changing with the movements of my hands and arms as I direct the ships.
The eighth and ninth in our line, coming into position opposite the enemy centre, sustain the heaviest damage. In the smoke-hung confusion, the Bellerophon misses her chosen foe, the Franklin, first of the French eighties—at present being very gallantly attacked by one of our frigates, the fifty-gun Leander—and fetches up abreast of the mighty Orient, a ship with double her armament. Within fifteen minutes her masts have been entirely shot away. She veers out of the line, completely disabled. I leave her here, over on the lee side of the bay. The Majestic also suffers heavy loss, her captain, Westcott, being fatally wounded in the throat by a musket ball.
But we are gaining. Our ships are like a swarm—it is as if they are feasting on carcasses. No, not carcasses, bodies still twitching. Always the same tactic: pass along the line, gather on either side, concentrate the fire.
Now, with battle fully joined, comes the wound. You are standing on the quarterdeck with Berry by your side when a flying piece of scrap shot slashes your brow to the bone. A flap of flesh falls over your good eye, and the blood flows thickly down, blinding you. Berry catches you as you fall. I am killed, he hears you say. Remember me to my wife.
I see you as you are carried down to the cockpit, I see the lamps down there, swaying with the roll of the ship and thud of the gun carriages. There are seventy or so men already waiting there, in that shuddering heat, many of them gravely injured. You do not allow the surgeons to be told you are among them. Still blinded, your face a mask of blood, you wait your turn.
The surgeon probes the wound, pronounces the damage not serious—the visible damage, that is. You are in total darkness; you send for the chaplain and dictate messages for Lady Nelson and for Louis, the captain of the Minotaur, who relieved your flagship from the dual fire of the enemy. Your support prevented me from being obliged to haul out of the line. This was before your wound had been dressed, while you lay waiting for the dressing. You could not see. That you should think of Fanny at such a time was natural enough. But a message of thanks to one of your captains …
Once again, as I thought of you lying there, that familiar prickle of tears came to my eyes. How could this behaviour of yours be named? It was something more than courage or endurance. It was grace, springing like a flower from the hard ground of duty.
Still blind, you hear cheering from above. The youthful Berry enters with what he announces as a “pleasing intelligence”—one of the great understatements of history, this must be regarded, considering that he brings news of the most notable British victory at sea since the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The French fleet is shattered. The Spartiate has altogether ceased to fire; the Aquilon and the Peuple Souverain have struck their colours; the Orient, the Tonnant, and the Heureux, though not yet captured, are no longer able to make effective reply to our shot.
News to bring you back to life. Time for my third glass. Your brow stitched and bandaged, you are settled in the bread room in the hold, below the water line, as far removed as possible from the din of battle. You send for your secretary to take down a despatch to Earl Spencer, the first lord of the Admiralty. But the secretary is in a state of nervous collapse; at the sight of you, blinded by bandages and working the stump of your arm in a fury of impatience, he loses his nerve altogether and cannot write. There and then I dismiss him from my service. I push up the bandage, take the pen myself. My Lord, Almighty God has blessed His Majesty’s arms in the late Battle …
I am interrupted again by Berry, this time to report that the Orient is on fire. The surgeon has ordered me to stay quiet, but with the usual disobedience I demand to be helped up on deck. The night is soft and warm, thickly hung with smoke. A reddish glow is creeping over the expanse of the bay. My head throbs and aches, it hurts me to focus my eye, but as the glow strengthens I can distinguish the colours of the ships, make out the situation of the battle, see the leaping flames on the poop of the French flagship. I tell Berry to do what he can to save as many as possible of the crew. At the same time I give orders that our shot should be concentrated on the blaze so as to hinder the enemy from bringing it under control. Many of the Orient’s guns are now disabled, but some on the lower deck are still firing, the French gun crews serving them until the fire gets too close and they are driven off. I see the flames begin to race up her tarred rigging, flare blue along her newly painted sides. I know that the flames will be seeking paths downward, towards her powder magazine.
What I do not see—what no-one in the British fleet sees—is the appalling fate of the French wounded, trapped belowdecks with their surgeons, all burned alive together. Or Admiral de Brueys, who had made all the wrong assumptions, with both his legs shot away and tourniquets tied around the stumps, seated on a chair on his blazing deck, still facing his tormentors, still shouting orders to maintain fire, until another shot cuts him in two and puts him out of his misery.
A competent commander—not brilliant, not like you. The end he made has been a recurrent nightmare since I first read of it at the age of fifteen. Thoughts of it now wrenched me from the action. I was here, this was me in the basement, reaching for my glass. You were there on the deck of the Vanguard, pushing up your bandages for a sight of your beautiful, desolate victory.
The cannonade continues. Our ships aim their guns at the heart of the blaze. Swarms of sparks fly over the face of the water and in among the anchored ships. The British captains nearer the blaze cut their cables to get clear. At five minutes past ten, just at this moment, with a stunning detonation and a great flash of light, the Orient’s powder magazines explode. A fiery wreckage is flung high into the night sky, hangs in its own light for some moments, then descends in a rain of masts, yards, red-hot ammunition, charred fragments of corpses, thudding on the decks of the neighbouring ships or falling back into the sea in a hiss of mingled smoke and steam.
This mighty bang is heard in Alexandria, fifteen miles away. After it, for several minutes, an utter silence lies over the bay. Then the guns start up again. The French van and centre have been destroyed, it is now the turn of their rear. By sunrise, the full extent of our victory is apparent. Of the thirteen French warships lying at anchor the day before, ten have been captured, one has been blown up, and two have escaped. Aboukir Bay is a scene of utter desolation, with listing, smoking ships and scorched bodies drifting in the shallows. As you truly said, Victory is not a name strong enough for such a scene. Once again we rule the waves, control of the Mediterranean is restored to us. Bonaparte is stranded on shore, the threat to India is removed, the French losses are six times ours. The remains of the Orient are in the depths of the bay, together with her butchered admiral and her treasure—the enormous sum of £600,000 in gold bars and diamonds wrested from the Swiss republic and the Roman state to finance Bonaparte’s eastern expedition, along with the irreplaceable treasures of the Knights of St. John.
A great action, demonstrating yet again the truth of Grigson’s words to us so long ago and those of Bobby’s teacher so recently. He would be with his mother now, in Derbyshire. I thought of the boy’s face looking fixedly at me in the dim light of the Victory’s gundeck, a light similar to that here in my ops room, where shadows lay on all sides beyond the arena of the table. He says our sailors were the best in the world and we had better officers. Quite right, my boy, quite right. It wasn’t the ships, it was the men. They were better trained, more disciplined; they had superb morale. They cheered when they saw the Orient go up. What would Miss Lily say to that? She would go round it, she would find a question to which there was no answer. Something outside the records. Did a single one of them, officers or men, at the time or later, express pity for the crew of the Orient? Not as far as we know. The men cheered. The officers of course did not cheer, but they did nothing to check the men.
I couldn’t help it. All these years of celebrating the Battle of the Nile and now I had to listen to questions from Avon Secretarial Services, try to understand the way this woman associated things together. She had soured his great victory with this talk about pity. Now, because of her, I was obliged to remember the way he talked about the battle himself in Palermo a few months later, as related by Captain Gordon, a Scot who was there as travelling tutor to the invalid Lord Montgomerie. I could not remember the words in detail, but Gordon’s memoirs were up there in my study, on the shelf. It was only twenty to eleven, much too early to go to bed. I slept badly at night in any case, and I was stimulated now by the battle and the wine. I decided to go up and check the reference.
I was moving towards the wall, towards the light switch. I think I had begun to reach towards it, actually extended my arm. I glanced aside—some sense had come to me that I was being watched, that my movements were being noted, registered. I looked to the right, where I sensed this interest lay—looked through the open door of the ops room to the larger room beyond, my gallery of Nelsoniana so lovingly assembled over the years.
All the light there was came from the lamps at either end of my table. The farther of these cast a white pool, fringed by the pattern of the raffia lampshade, over the threshold of the door. The fringes seemed to shift, to eddy very slightly, as if prey to some remote disturbance. Beyond the door they drew together, made a narrow, wavering shaft into the next room, touched the straight outer side of the porcelain tankard commemorating Trafalgar, slid round the convex curve of the Copeland loving cup with the handpainted full-face portrait of him in one of its panels.
At the dim limits of this faint plank of light was the huge papier-mâché bust of him, roughly twice life-size, that stood in the centre of the floor. The face was turned directly towards me. Despite the dimness I was aware of the features, though I did not know whether I was seeing or remembering the yellowish complexion, the look of moisture given by the pulped and oiled paper, the heavy sweep of the cocked hat, the garish emblems painted on the breast. Whether seen or remembered, tonight he had a different, crueller face. That thick curl of the mouth … He looked like a god glutted with sacrifice. The eyes were not visible, they were shadowed by the hat as they always were in my dreams, but I knew that they would soon be levelled at me, that they would contain a deadly reproach. You have let me down, the eyes would say, you have failed to clear my name. An angel’s displeasure is horribly dangerous. I knew I had to get out before he showed his eyes.
I put the light on now, and that helped. My heart thumped and my breath caught as I passed him. I felt a feverish heat in the glands at the sides of my neck. But I did not look. At the top of the stairs I remembered that I had left the lamps on in the ops room, but I could not look behind me, let alone go back.