The Discovery Of Slowness

by Sten Nadolny

  The Bellerophon sailed to Cartagena, in Spain. The figurehead was painted afresh. Nelson himself came on board, too. A delicate, decisive gentleman who also knew how to smile. When he stood before the crew of the Bellerophon, he spoke in a whisper, almost beseeching. He appeared like a man filled with love – love of glory, and love for his own kind. And soon there was no one who didn’t want to be of Nelson’s kind.

  ‘I won’t be infected by this,’ said John. This man Nelson seemed to be utterly certain that they would all do what he loved them for, and they did so. He loved madmen, and so it seemed tempting to go mad for England. Suddenly the seamen pressed into service and the abused soldiers were all determined to become heroes. They now believed they were among the greatest of the earth. They had only to show it. Honour committed everyone to doing what he had already been praised for. Honour was a kind of proof to be furnished after the fact.

  ‘What’s the resistance in human flesh and ribs to the thrust of a sabre? How strong is the wall of the heart?’ These were the things fourteen-year-old Simmonds wanted to know. ‘You just have to want to do it. Then it’s child’s play,’ sixteen-year-old Walker assured him. They all felt very powerful and longed for the intensity of death and horror in order to see whether they could get through it, whether calmly or with an excess of spirit. Everyone who hadn’t yet had the experience wanted to know it. And new people were coming along all the time. John felt old. He watched young Simmonds closely because he would have liked to find out how quickly his patriotic zeal increased, whether it was stronger in the evenings than in the mornings, and whether it came from an inner or an outer compulsion.

  The French and Spanish ships were still lying under the protection of the batteries of Cadiz. The Bellerophon sailed there; the entire fleet converged in that place. One evening, John said in the mess, ‘With three hundred rotations per minute, I’m not well suited for combat.’ They didn’t like to hear that.

  ‘I don’t believe you’re a Quaker, Franklin,’ said Walford. ‘But you lack passion.’ What a quaker was John knew very well, for he knew everything on a ship: quakers were dummies used to fill gunports when guns were being repaired or taken ashore. A dummy he didn’t want to be! He now doubled his efforts at work. He was also signal ensign again. He was in perfect command of all regulations, of all errors and their corrections. He wanted to be so good that nobody would miss his passion.

  He heard a lieutenant say, ‘The noblest idea of mankind is self-sacrifice. We go into battle not to kill but to risk our lives for England.’ Those would have been precious sentences for his notebook of phrases, if John had still owned one. While he was talking, the lieutenant’s eyes went straight through his audience. His face showed a kind of fearful contentment, as if he were thinking: so far, so good; so far everything is clear; so far I haven’t made a mistake.

  There was much talk of courage. If the words were at all effective, men would implement them by showing this courage in battle. Many also wanted to be promoted, because they believed that then they would no longer be tormented when the time of heroism had passed. And they also thought that in a crew of a thousand men usually no more than two or three hundred would fall and that there were always survivors, even in burning and sinking ships.

  The British fleet now lay south-west of Cadiz; morning dawned. Breakfast; rum ration; ship cleared for battle. Bant put down his cup: ‘A glorious time! And we’re allowed to be with Nelson!’ So he now talked this way, too. But though he looked fervent, like a dog before the hunt, his words did not sound genuine. He simply came from Devonport. Simmonds was different. He really felt greatness; he thought he could sense the truth. ‘Now I want to know it for certain,’ he said. John believed him.

  John Cooke delivered his final oration. ‘We are on the way to immortality,’ he said, smiling. ‘Give even more of yourselves than usual, just a little more and you’ll be three times as good as the French.’

  How did he come up with that?

  A first-aid station was set up in the midshipmen’s mess. In his eagerness Simmonds could no longer walk normally; he could only run as if it were a matter of life or death. Perhaps frivolity transformed itself into strength and courage. John noticed something similar in the crew. Only here and there heroism seemed to grate a little, as if it hadn’t been greased enough. On the foredeck, John heard the words ‘The dead see it differently.’

  He memorised it, so he could say it fast, and then fired it at Walford. John was still confident that there would be no battle.

  But now the lookout shouted, ‘Foreign ships!’ It didn’t take long before the sea was white with sails as far as one could see. John stayed very calm, but it seemed to him for a moment as if he smelled snow in the air. His nose was cold. An irregular column of floating fortresses moving northwards took up one-third of the eastern horizon. They had left port, then had turned round, and were now trying to get back to Cadiz.

  The cold must be inside him. John stood on the poop with the third lieutenant. That’s where he should be. But he felt sick. ‘Signal from flagship, sir.’ ‘What’s the order?’ John noticed he was trembling again, after all. It was none of the signals he had learned. It started with ‘253’ – that meant ‘England.’ Surely an unclear signal would follow. John didn’t understand it; he had to keep his stomach under control. The usual fixed look didn’t bring the expected clarity. John barely breathed; he was on the defensive. He would never be like Nelson. He would never belong to that league of men who were prepared to believe in each other in everything, even courage, until victory. Just don’t puke on the deck, he thought, for that would be like spitting on the Crown. Above all he didn’t want that.

  A sparse wind blew from the north-west. ‘Quickly into battle!’ they all said. ‘Only quickly!’ They had no more time; they now needed glory, if only to get it over with. The heroic mood could not be sustained for ever. The worst that could happen now was that the battle would not take place. Twenty-seven British warships were swaying toward the enemy in an uncertain breeze, carried by the ongoing swell; thousands of men looking forward – bones, muscles, fat and nerves, skin, veins, sweat and brains, all committed to blind fury – they had already pledged their blood. From afar it looked imposing and threatening. From close by, the volunteer wanted to become a midshipman, the mate a quartermaster, the fifth to become a fourth lieutenant. John marvelled again at how strange people looked. But wasn’t this battle necessary? Nothing in it was mad. ‘To defend England,’ he said aloud, but that didn’t make it any better. What did the hills around Spilsby care whether the French were in the land? It was less fear that paralysed him than deep irresolution. What to do? He didn’t want to return to the state of defiance that had overcome him on the Earl Camden. To carry the dead and to view the world like a mountain? It was the trembling, after all. Another possibility was to see things like the Bishop of Cloyne: he, John Franklin, was the human spirit, and someone created everything for him as an illusion in order to see whether he flinched when it became uncomfortable. That’s what he wanted to try: nothing really existed; the only certainty was that everything was appearance.

  Still, he felt useless and isolated. Even the ships now looked quite alien to him. But he was a sailor on a man-of-war; he couldn’t change his profession in the midst of battle. With clenched teeth he hoisted the unclear signal up to the top. He breathed as deeply as possible and worked methodically. His eyes fixed in front of him, he followed the middle line of the ship and viewed all movements as though they took place only along the outer edges. It helped a little, and calm returned. But just then Rotherham, the first lieutenant, looked at him sharply.

  ‘Franklin, you’re actually trembling!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You’re trembling!’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’ He, too, now probably thought he was a Quaker. Why, if they all believed in each other’s courage, did they make an exception of him?

  The captain went below and announced Nelson’s signal. The men gri
nned, and cheered. They now wanted to hear the big words; they couldn’t get enough of them. With chalk left over from their navigation lessons they wrote on their gun barrels: BELLEROPHON – DEATH OR GLORY. Outside, a French two-decker was approaching. The first shot sounded from across the water.

  Someone started a rhythmic chant and they all joined in. The entire ship roared like a giant with a rattling voice: ‘NO FEAR OF THAT!’ again and again, menacing, imprecating, ‘NO FEAR OF THAT!’ John felt as if the menace were directed at him.

  The lower sails were furled high; they rose like curtains. The forward guns began to fire. With what happened now John was well acquainted – smoke, splinters, and two kinds of screams: the communal and the individual. And that cursed trembling! John stood on the quarterdeck only four steps from John Cooke, who wore epaulettes on his shoulders. Dear Lord, he could take them off by unbuttoning them. They made him into the best target.

  A dying man lay on the floor, whispering; ‘NO FEAR OF THAT!’ He was Overton, the boatswain. John carried him and an Irish boatswain down to the table into which Walford had rammed his fork every evening for the entire year. What the surgeon held in his hand was hardly better.

  ‘I’m going back to the others, Mr Overton; I can’t leave them alone.’ No answer. He seemed to prefer to die before the operation.

  Breathe calmly! Quarterdeck. Amidships. The glance fixed on everything and nothing: the larger view. The French had shot the sails to rags, and the enemy ship now lay with its port side directly along the starboard side of the Bellerophon, firing madly. Then the boarding attack. Two hundred men stormed, roaring toward them from the French forward deck, thin blades flashing in the light. For seconds the waves made the two ships drift apart, and the assault troops fell into the gap. They stumbled and vanished, clinging to one another like grape clusters, with surprised eyes even in falling. Only a bare twenty reached the foredeck of the Bellerophon, and they were killed at once. John looked in another direction. The ship was now under fire from three sides.

  John Cooke keeled over. ‘We’ll take you below, sir.’

  ‘No, let me rest for a few minutes,’ answered the captain.

  ‘There!’ shouted Simmonds. ‘Over there in the mizzen!’

  In the tangle of rigging on the other ship John saw the barrel of a rifle. He recognised a three-cornered hat and beneath it a narrow ruddy forehead, an eye at the gunsight. He decided to ignore this and lifted up the black sailor who had just been hit. As John and Simmonds were climbing into the companionway he bent over a second time. ‘It’s the one in the mizzen again!’ Simmonds shouted. ‘I know the sound by now.’ One could actually distinguish individual shots. The rifle fire had become sparse. ‘If we don’t shoot him, he’ll kill us all.’ One single man, then, threatened them all with a rifle and a wide-open sharp eye hidden among the tangled ropes. Anyone who tried to kill him would himself be the next victim.

  The black sailor had stopped breathing; his heart stood still. They let him lie there and turned round. ‘Let me run ahead, I’m faster,’ said Simmonds. He raced up the stairs but leaped suddenly, trampling back and forth like a frightened animal, missed the top step, and fell back towards John.

  There was a hole in the middle of Simmonds’s neck.

  The Frenchman must have the companionway constantly in his sights. Perhaps there were two up there – one to load, the other to fire. John bore Simmonds below in his arms. ‘Too much honour,’ whispered the little fellow. All of a sudden he says such things! Simmonds wasn’t old enough to crack jokes – or was he now, after all. For a moment John thought of the Irish bishop and his theory. It had let him down badly.

  The wounded man’s throat rattled; a long-drawn-out, plaintive sound came out of his gorge. In front of them a bullet had broken the rail. John had to use Simmonds’s body to push back the splinters like a trapdoor. But I can’t carry you all below, he thought. I won’t carry another one; I’ll stay above. In the first-aid station Simmonds still seemed to be alive. Cooke was already dead. John felt a pounding, oppressive rage. He tried to get a clear mind again by recapitulating the colours of the last four signals: ‘Four, twenty-one, nineteen, twenty-five.’ It was good to try the simplest way at every opportunity.

  Dr Orme had advised listening to one’s own inner voice, not to those of others. But what about that fear? John stood around for a while with his arms hanging down. I look stupid, he thought; I even look like a coward. The others laugh at me, and they’re right. This couldn’t go on; he couldn’t be a spectator any longer. Simmonds groaned and died. John tried to stare past him with his fixed look but he didn’t succeed.

  He had to do it! He had to go above! To stay out of it had been a dream. Gone was the irresolution induced by his mind. But now his body rebelled. His legs became lame; his tongue stuck; chin and hands trembled even more than before. John followed the mind’s command; he wanted to see how far he got. He loaded the first rifle on the lower deck. He vomited while doing it and soiled the weapon. He had to wipe it; then he climbed back to the middle deck. There he found a second rifle already loaded. A moaning Marine loaded the third one for him and passed it to him directly at the top stair. John had three rifles now. He knew he couldn’t fire as long as he trembled with fear and rage. He couldn’t be at odds with himself. He had to subdue his rage, allow his fear to subside, and suppress his disgust with his conscious will, and to stop all of this took time. What good would it do if he heaped all the guilt on himself and missed the target? He raised the first rifle outside his cover high above his head, pointing it toward the mizzen of the French ship without letting his hands be seen. Angles and distances had to be estimated from memory. Behind his right hand a pale cavity suddenly opened up in the wood of the companionway. He had also heard the shot and the ringing of the ricocheting projectile. Following that, he could determine the angle even more precisely. He corrected his direction.

  ‘Shoot, will you!’ someone shouted behind him. But John Franklin, who had held a rope in the air for hours, also had the time to take aim. He wanted to fire only if he was completely sure he could hit his target. Once more he assembled it all in his mind: the angles, the estimated height, the scruples he had overcome, the better future. Then he fired. He dropped the rifle, grabbed the second one, aimed it, and fired again, then took the third and padded up the stairs. Was the sharpshooter still there? The tangle of rigging was now even denser; the torn French topgallant concealed the exact position. Without cover, John fired once more at the mizzen. Nothing stirred there.

  Only Lieutenant Rotherham was standing on the quarterdeck. Walford had gone to the enemy ship with a boarding-party.

  Then he saw the wind under the ragged topgallant on the other side waft the three-cornered hat out to sea. Under the mizzen, one foot suddenly appeared dangling. It was only a tiny movement, a foot slipping a few inches lower because it no longer sought a hold. ‘There, see!’ cried one of the Irish sailors.

  The enemy sharpshooter had slid down, head first. It was as though the head had wanted to go down first and the body were following reluctantly, seeking footholds again and again on spars and masts until it had to get down into the sea.

  ‘It’s got him!’ exclaimed the boatswain.

  ‘No, I did,’ said John.

  On the poop and quarterdeck of the Bellerophon alone eighty men lay dead or mortally wounded. The survivors were too exhausted to cheer. On both ships there reigned silence. It stank.

  Simmonds was dead. He knew it now.

  ‘On that point you may be right,’ crowed Walford. ‘The dead see it differently.’ He alone seemed to want to regain his composure by making speeches. There was too much to do. Signals had to be deciphered. Admiral Nelson had been shot. Collingwood was now commander-in-chief. Walford went to the French ship L’Aigle with the fifth lieutenant and a prize detail, and Henry Walker to the Spanish ship Monarca, a ship manned mostly by Irishmen.

  A storm came up and raged more violently than the one John had gone thr
ough in the Bay of Biscay when he was fourteen, and it sank more ships than the guns had done. Above all, the prizes were lost. The sea had its say. There were leaks to caulk, and they had to pump until they collapsed. All night long they struggled to keep clear of the threatening shore.

  Early in the morning, the storm abated. John went to the orlop and sat down among the wounded, apathetically. He was too tired to think or to weep, even to sleep. He let the images come and go, faces of men to whom he had become accustomed in vain: Mockridge, Simmonds, Cooke, Overton, the black sailor – the French sharpshooter got in between and then, suddenly, Nelson. What a waste that was! ‘None of it for the honour of mankind.’ And what he himself had done he still had to ponder. One of the women saw him sitting there. She must have thought he was about to weep, and said, ‘Hey hey!’ John lifted his fist from his forehead and answered, ‘I can’t recall them all any more. They all went too fast.’