Admiral Hornblower

by C. S. Forester

  Hornblower, compelling himself to look, was vaguely reminded of the knuckle end of a roast leg of mutton; the irregular folds of flesh were caught in by half-healed scars, but out of the scars hung two ends of black thread.

  ‘When Monsieur le Lieutenant begins to walk again,’ explained the surgeon ‘he will be glad of an ample pad of flesh at the end of the stump. The end of the bone will not chafe—’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said Hornblower, fighting down his squeamishness.

  ‘A very beautiful piece of work,’ said the surgeon. ‘As long as it heals properly and gangrene does not set in. At this stage the surgeon has to depend on his nose for his diagnosis.’

  Suiting the action to the word the surgeon sniffed at the dressings and at the raw stump.

  ‘Smell, monsieur,’ he said, holding the dressings to Hornblower’s face. Hornblower was conscious of the faintest whiff of corruption.

  ‘Beautiful, is it not?’ said the surgeon. ‘A fine healthy wound and yet every evidence that the ligatures will soon free themselves.’

  Hornblower realised that the two threads hanging out of the scars were attached to the ends of the two main arteries. When corruption inside was complete the threads could be drawn out and the wounds allowed to heal; it was a race between the rotting of the arteries and the onset of gangrene.

  ‘I will see if the ligatures are free now. Warn your friend that I shall hurt him a little.’

  Hornblower looked towards Bush to convey the message, and was shocked to see that Bush’s face was distorted with apprehension.

  ‘I know,’ said Bush. ‘I know what he’s going to do – sir.’

  Only as an afterthought did he say that ‘sir’; which was the clearest proof of his mental preoccupation. He grasped the bedclothes in his two fists, his jaw set and his eyes shut.

  ‘I’m ready,’ he said through his clenched teeth.

  The surgeon drew firmly on one of the threads and Bush writhed a little. He drew on the other.

  ‘A-ah,’ gasped Bush, with sweat on his face.

  ‘Nearly free,’ commented the surgeon. ‘I could tell by the feeling of the threads. Your friend will soon be well. Now let us replace the dressings. So. And so.’ His dexterous plump fingers rebandaged the stump, replaced the wicker basket, and drew down the bed coverings.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ said the surgeon, rising to his feet and brushing his hands one against the other. ‘I will return in the morning.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better sit down, sir,’ came Brown’s voice to Hornblower’s ears as though from a million miles away, after the surgeon had withdrawn. The room was veiled in grey mist which gradually cleared away as he sat, to reveal Bush lying back on his pillow and trying to smile, and Brown’s homely honest face wearing an expression of acute concern.

  ‘Rare bad you looked for a minute, sir. You must be hungry, I expect, sir, not having eaten nothing since breakfast, like.’

  It was tactful of Brown to attribute this faintness to hunger, to which all flesh might be subject without shame, and not merely to weakness in face of wounds and suffering.

  ‘That sounds like supper coming now,’ croaked Bush from the stretcher, as though one of a conspiracy to ignore their captain’s feebleness.

  The sergeant of gendarmerie came clanking in, two women behind him bearing trays. The women set the table deftly and quickly, their eyes downcast, and withdrew without looking up, although one of them smiled at the corner of her mouth in response to a meaning cough from Brown which drew a gesture of irritation from the sergeant. The latter cast one searching glance round the room before shutting and locking the door with a clashing of keys.

  ‘Soup,’ said Hornblower, peering into the tureen which steamed deliciously. ‘And I fancy this is stewed veal.’

  The discovery confirmed him in his notion that Frenchmen lived exclusively on soup and stewed veal – he put no faith in the more vulgar notions regarding frogs and snails.

  ‘You will have some of this broth, I suppose, Bush?’ he continued. He was talking desperately hard now to conceal the feeling of depression and unhappiness which was overwhelming him. ‘And a glass of this wine? It has no label – let’s hope for the best.’

  ‘Some of their rotgut claret, I suppose,’ grunted Bush. Eighteen years of war with France had given most Englishmen the notion that the only wines fit for men to drink were port and sherry and Madeira, and that Frenchmen only drank thin claret which gave the unaccustomed drinker the bellyache.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Hornblower as cheerfully as he could. ‘Let’s get you propped up first.’

  With his hand behind Bush’s shoulders he heaved him up a little; as he looked round helplessly, Brown came to his rescue with pillows taken from the bed, and between them they settled Bush with his head raised and his arms free and a napkin under his chin. Hornblower brought him a plate of soup and a piece of bread.

  ‘M’m,’ said Bush, tasting. ‘Might be worse. Please, sir, don’t let yours get cold.’

  Brown brought a chair for his captain to sit at the table, and stood in an attitude of attention beside it; there was another place laid, but his action proclaimed as loudly as words how far it was from his mind to sit with his captain. Hornblower ate, at first with a distaste and then with increasing appetite.

  ‘Some more of that soup, Brown,’ said Bush. ‘And my glass of wine, if you please.’

  The stewed veal was extraordinarily good, even to a man who was accustomed to meat he could set his teeth in.

  ‘Dash my wig,’ said Bush from the bed. ‘Do you think I could have some of that stewed veal, sir? This travelling has given me an appetite.’

  Hornblower had to think about that. A man in a fever should be kept on a low diet, but Bush could not be said to be in a fever now, and he had lost a great deal of blood which he had to make up. The yearning look on Bush’s face decided him.

  ‘A little will do you no harm,’ he said. ‘Take this plate to Mr Bush, Brown.’

  Good food and good wine – the fare in the Sutherland had been repulsive, and at Rosas scanty – tended to loosen their tongues and make them more cheerful. Yet it was hard to unbend beyond a certain unstated limit. The awful majesty surrounding a captain of a ship of the line lingered even after the ship had been destroyed; more than that, the memory of the very strict reserve which Hornblower had maintained during his command acted as a constraint. And to Brown a first lieutenant was in a position nearly as astronomically lofty as a captain; it was awesome to be in the same room as the two of them, even with the help of making-believe to be their old servant. Hornblower had finished his cheese by now, and the moment which Brown had been dreading had arrived.

  ‘Here, Brown,’ he said rising, ‘sit down and eat your supper while it’s still hot.’

  Brown now, at the age of twenty-eight, had served His Majesty in His Majesty’s ships from the age of eleven, and during that time he had never made use at table of other instruments than his sheath knife and his fingers; he had never eaten off china, nor had he drunk from a wineglass. He experienced a nightmare sensation as if his officers were watching him with four eyes as large as footballs the while he nervously picked up a spoon and addressed himself to this unaccustomed task. Hornblower realised his embarrassment in a clairvoyant flash. Brown had thews and sinews which Hornblower had often envied; he had a stolid courage in action with Hornblower could never hope to rival. He could knot and splice, hand, reef, and steer, cast the lead or pull an oar, all of them far better than his captain. He could go aloft on a black night in a howling storm without thinking twice about it, but the sight of a knife and fork made his hands tremble. Hornblower thought about how Gibbon would have pointed the moral epigrammatically in two vivid antithetical sentences.

  Humiliation and nervousness never did any good to a man – Hornblower knew that if anyone ever did. He took a chair unobtrusively over beside Bush’s stretcher and sat down with his back almost turned to the table, and plunged desperately into co
nversation with his first lieutenant while the crockery clattered behind him.

  ‘Would you like to be moved into the bed?’ he asked, saying the first thing which came into his head.

  ‘No, thank you, sir,’ said Bush. ‘Two weeks now I’ve slept in the stretcher. I’m comfortable enough, sir, and it’d be painful to move me, even if – if—’

  Words failed Bush to describe his utter determination not to sleep in the only bed and leave his captain without one.

  ‘What are we going to Paris for, sir?’ asked Bush.

  ‘God knows,’ said Hornblower. ‘But I have a notion that Boney himself wants to ask us questions.’

  That was the answer he had decided upon hours before in readiness for this inevitable question; it would not help Bush’s convalescence to know the fate awaiting him.

  ‘Much good will our answers do him,’ said Bush, grimly. ‘Perhaps we’ll drink a dish of tea in the Tuileries with Maria Louisa.’

  ‘Maybe,’ answered Hornblower. ‘And maybe he wants lessons in navigation from you. I’ve heard he’s weak at mathematics.’

  That brought a smile. Bush notoriously was no good with figures and suffered agonies when confronted with a simple problem in spherical trigonometry. Hornblower’s acute ears heard Brown’s chair scrape a little; presumably his meal had progressed satisfactorily.

  ‘Help yourself to the wine, Brown,’ he said, without turning round.

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Brown cheerfully.

  There was a whole bottle of wine left as well as some in the other. This would be a good moment for ascertaining if Brown could be trusted with liquor. Hornblower kept his back turned to him and struggled on with his conversation with Bush. Five minutes later Brown’s chair scraped again more definitely, and Hornblower looked round.

  ‘Had enough, Brown?’

  ‘Aye aye, sir. A right good supper.’

  The soup tureen and the dish of stew were both empty; the bread had disappeared all save the heel of the loaf; there was only a morsel of cheese left. But one bottle of wine was still two-thirds full – Brown had contented himself with a half bottle at most, and the fact that he had drunk that much and no more was the clearest proof that he was safe as regards alcohol.

  ‘Pull the bellrope, then.’

  The distant jangling brought in time the rattling of keys to the door, and in came the sergeant and the two maids; the latter set about clearing the tables under the former’s eye.

  ‘I must get something for you to sleep on, Brown,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘I can sleep on the floor, sir.’

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  Hornblower had decided opinions about that; there had been occasions as a young officer when he had slept on the bare planks of a ship’s deck, and he knew their unbending discomfort.

  ‘I want a bed for my servant,’ he said to the sergeant.

  ‘He can sleep on the floor.’

  ‘I will not allow anything of the kind. You must find a mattress for him.’

  Hornblower was surprised to find how quickly he was acquiring the ability to talk French; the quickness of his mind enabled him to make the best use of his limited vocabulary and his retentive memory had stored up all sorts of words, once heard, and was ready to produce them from the subconscious part of his mind as soon as the stimulus of necessity was applied.

  The sergeant had shrugged his shoulders and rudely turned his back.

  ‘I shall report your insolence to Colonel Caillard tomorrow morning,’ said Hornblower hotly. ‘Find a mattress immediately.’

  It was not so much the threat that carried the day as long-ingrained habits of discipline. Even a sergeant of French gendarmerie was accustomed to yielding deference to gold lace and epaulettes and an authoritative manner. Possibly the obvious indignation of the maids at the suggestion that so fine a man should be left to sleep on the floor may have weighed with him too. He called to the sentry at the door and told him to bring a mattress from the stables where the escort were billeted. It was only a palliasse of straw when it came, but it was something infinitely more comfortable than bare and draughty boards, all the same. Brown looked his gratitude to Hornblower as the mattress was spread out in the corner of the room.

  ‘Time to turn in,’ said Hornblower, ignoring it, as the door was locked behind the sergeant. ‘Let’s make you comfortable, first, Bush.’

  It was some obscure self-conscious motive which made Hornblower select from his valise the embroidered nightshirt over which Maria’s busy fingers had laboured lovingly – the nightshirt which he had brought with him from England for use should it happen that he should dine and sleep at a Governor’s or on board the flagship. All the years he had been a captain he had never shared a room with anyone save Maria, and it was a novel experience for him to prepare for bed in sight of Bush and Brown, and he was ridiculously self-conscious about it, regardless of the fact that Bush, white and exhausted, was already lying back on his pillow with drooping eyelids, while Brown modestly stripped off his trousers with downcast eyes, wrapped himself in the cloak which Hornblower insisted on his using, and curled himself up on his palliasse without a glance at his superior.

  Hornblower got into bed.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked, and blew out the candle; the fire had died down to embers which gave only the faintest red glow in the room. It was the beginning of one of those wakeful nights which Hornblower had grown by now able to recognise in advance. The moment he blew out the candle and settled his head on the pillow he knew he would not be able to sleep until just before dawn. In his ship he would have gone up on deck or walked his stern gallery; here he could only lie grimly immobile. Sometimes a subdued crackling told how Brown was turning over on his straw mattress; once or twice Bush moaned a little in his feverish sleep.

  Today was Wednesday. Only sixteen days ago and Hornblower had been captain of a seventy-four, and absolute master of the happiness of five hundred seamen. His least word directed the operations of a gigantic engine of war; the blows it had dealt had caused an imperial throne to totter. He thought regretfully of night-time aboard his ship, the creaking of the timbers and the singing of the rigging, the impassive quartermaster at the wheel in the faint light of the binnacle and the officer of the watch pacing the quarterdeck.

  Now he was a nobody; where once he had minutely regulated five hundred men’s lives he was reduced to chaffering for a single mattress for the only seaman left to him; police sergeants could insult him with impunity; he had to come and to go at the bidding of someone he despised. Worse than that – Hornblower felt the hot blood running under his skin as the full realisation broke upon him again – he was being taken to Paris as a criminal. Very soon indeed, in some cold dawn, he would be led out into the ditch at Vincennes to face a firing party. Then he would be dead. Hornblower’s vivid imagination pictured the impact of the musket bullets upon his breast, and he wondered how long the pain would last before oblivion came upon him. It was not the oblivion that he feared, he told himself – indeed in his present misery he almost looked forward to it. Perhaps it was the finality of death, the irrevocableness of it.

  No, that was only a minor factor. Mostly it was instinctive fear of a sudden and drastic change to something completely unknown. He remembered the night he had spent as a child in the inn at Andover, when he was going to join his ship next day and enter upon the unknown life of the Navy. That was the nearest comparison – he had been frightened then, he remembered, so frightened he had been unable to sleep; and yet ‘frightened’ was too strong a word to describe the state of mind of someone who was quite prepared to face the future and could not be readily blamed for this sudden acceleration of heartbeat and prickling of sweat!

  A moaning sigh from Bush, loud in the stillness of the room, distracted him from his analysis of his fear. They were going to shoot Bush, too. Presumably they would lash him to a stake to have a fair shot at him – curious how, while it was easy to order a party to shoot an upright figure, however helple
ss, every instinct revolted against shooting a helpless man prostrate on a stretcher. It would be a monstrous crime to shoot Bush, who, even supposing his captain were guilty, could have done nothing except obey orders. But Bonaparte would do it. The necessity of rallying Europe round him in his struggle against England was growing ever more pressing. The blockade was strangling the Empire of the French as Antaeus had been strangled by Hercules. Bonaparte’s unwilling allies – all Europe, that was to say, save Portugal and Sicily – were growing restive and thinking about defection; the French people themselves, Hornblower shrewdly guessed, were by now none too enamoured of this King Stork whom they had imposed on themselves. It would not be sufficient for Bonaparte merely to say that the British fleet was the criminal instrument of a perfidious tyranny; he had said that for a dozen years. The mere announcement that British naval officers had violated the laws of war would carry small enough weight, too. But to try a couple of officers and shoot them would be a convincing gesture, and the perverted statement of facts issued from Paris might help to sustain French public opinion – European public opinion as well – for another year or two in its opposition to England.

  But it was bad luck that the victims should be Bush and he. Bonaparte had had a dozen British naval captains in his hands during the last few years, and he could have trumped up charges against half of them. Presumably it was destiny which had selected Hornblower and Bush to suffer. Hornblower told himself that for twenty years he had been aware of a premonition of sudden death. It was certain and inevitable now. He hoped he would meet it bravely, go down with colours flying; but he mistrusted his own weak body. He feared that his cheeks would be pale and his teeth chatter, or worse still, that his heart would weaken so that he would faint before the firing party had done their work. That would be a fine opportunity for a mordant couple of lines in the Moniteur Universel – fine reading for Lady Barbara and Maria.

  If he had been alone in the room he would have groaned aloud in his misery and turned over restlessly. But as it was he lay grimly rigid and silent. If his subordinates were awake they would never be allowed to guess that he was awake, too. To divert his mind from his approaching execution he cast round in search of something else to think about, and new subjects presented themselves in swarms. Whether Admiral Leighton were alive or dead, and whether, if the latter were the case, Lady Barbara Leighton would think more often or less often about Hornblower, her lover; how Maria’s pregnancy was progressing; what was the state of British public opinion regarding the loss of the Sutherland, and, more especially, what Lady Barbara thought about his surrendering – there were endless things to think and worry about; there was endless flotsam bobbing about in the racing torrent of his mind. And the horses stamped in the stable, and every two hours he heard the sentries being changed outside window and door.