Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  Hardy called out, hoping Nelson was not too badly hurt. ‘They have done for me at last,’ Nelson said. ‘I hope not,’ Hardy said again. ‘Yes,’ Nelson said, ‘my backbone is shot through.’ A musket ball had entered the top of his left shoulder, burning through the front of the epaulette with such speed and force that some of the gold bullion cords of which it was made were fused to the lead of the ball. They, a piece of the blue serge of the coat, and fragments of gold lace were found attached to the musket ball when it was retrieved from deep in Nelson’s body several weeks later. A life-size drawing was done of the strange and potent relic, with its clustering attachments, an engraving was made of it and published, Beatty had a gold setting made for the ball and it was given to the King. It is still at Windsor Castle.

  From the geometry of the place of death, it is almost impossible that the French musketeer aimed at Nelson. The Bucentaure’s mizzen top was about 40 feet from where Nelson and Hardy walked. That was near the limit of an accurate range for a musket, although musket balls could kill more randomly at far greater distances. Even so, Nelson was almost certainly hidden from anyone in that top by Victory’s mainsail, which was brailed up to its yard but still hung beneath it. The musket ball was probably a ricochet, one of the pieces of metal with which the air was filled that afternoon. It broke the edge of his left shoulder blade, drove down through the body, broke two ribs, passed through his left lung and a branch of the pulmonary artery, cut downwards again and then across, breaking several vertebrae and lodged itself in the muscles of the back.

  The external wound from a musket is small, but it does massive internal damage. Around the ball, as it penetrates the body, a high-pressure shock wave develops, spreading out from the track which the ball takes. As it carves its way through the organs, a cavity forms behind it. The cavity is only temporary, and as the ball drives onwards, the tissues tend to snap back into their former position. Very rapidly, the cavity pulsates, collapsing and re-expanding a few times before it finally disappears. Wherever the musket ball goes, this sudden, repeated and local expansion has the effect of an explosion within the tissue. It is as if something the size of a fist has been fired through it. By the time the ball comes to rest—and in Nelson, its lead was chipped and dented where it had collided with his bones—the internal organs have been ploughed and scarified by its passage. The body cavity then begins to fill with blood.

  As the blood pumps out through the smashed tissues, the heart rate goes up and the veins constrict. The autonomic systems in the body are making their attempt to limit the damage and keep enough blood in circulation for the vital organs to continue to operate. Blood drains from the face and limbs, which soon turn pale and even bluish. But with anything approaching such a massive wound, there is nothing to be done. Blood pressure drops and the wounded man goes into shock. Without blood transfusion, a treatment unknown in 1805, he is now certain to die, within three hours at most. A tourniquet could be applied to an external wound, to staunch the flow of blood and preserve the man. Nothing could be done for widespread internal damage. Even in modern war, most soldiers suffering wounds that result in severe internal haemorrhaging die before they reach field hospital. The ‘shedding of blood’ is the way in which battle is conventionally and even politely described. The irony is that the shedding of blood—exsanguination—was precisely and dreadfully the mechanism by which battles such as Trafalgar were won and lost.

  Nelson knew exactly what had happened to him. He had intense pain in the back where the ball had come to rest. His lower legs were losing sensation. His spinal cord may well have been cut. ‘At every instant,’ as the ship’s surgeon William Beatty reported to the Admiralty in December, which means at every beat of the heart, ‘he felt a gush of blood in his breast.’ That was his life pumping out of him. He was carried below to the cockpit, with a handkerchief covering his face and lying across the stars on his coat, so as not to dishearten the men of Victory. As he was laid in the cockpit among the other wounded, the battle was coming to its climax around him. It is a measure of the raging violence and noise of battle that it was perfectly possible for Nelson to be mortally wounded on the Victory and for only a small proportion of the crew even to realise he was missing from the quarterdeck.

  A mile to the south, in the fight for the rear of the Combined Fleet, the Fougueux and the Belleisle had fought each other to a standstill. They drifted apart, mutually wrecked. The Mars was already out of the battle, drifting and dismasted, her captain dead, still lying where he had been decapitated, his body now covered in a Union flag. To the south, the Tonnant, after compelling one Spanish ship to surrender, went on to engage in a fearsome hand-to-hand fight with the flagship of Admiral Magon, the Algésiras. The two ships were clasped to each other in one inseparable mass, the French bowsprit tangled inextricably into the Tonnant’s main rigging. Captain Tyler of the Tonnant was shot in the leg and carried below. The Tonnant lost her main and mizzen topmasts, the Algésiras her entire foremast. The pair of them looked like a shipyard in chaos and covered in gore. On neither of their upper decks could men survive and the two ships’ companies fired destruction at each other from the great guns down below. The French attempted to board with most of the crew of the Algésiras climbing through the rigging. All but one of them were killed in the attempt, shot down by musket and clouds of grape shot fired at them from a few feet away. One Frenchman reached the Tonnant’s upper deck, to which an English sailor pinned him through the calf with a pike.

  Here, too, is an emblematic moment in the story of Trafalgar. The fighting is absolute, frenzied and horrifying. The scene is probably as intense a combination of the intimate and the bloody as any in the history of warfare. At this moment, a Frenchman lies held to the deck, screaming for his life, while other English sailors are making for him with their own cutlasses and pikes. But at that moment, a British officer intervened: the switch had flicked from violence to humanity, from one aspect of the Atlanticist Anglo-Saxon culture to another, and the Frenchman was saved, to be sent below to the surgeon to have his leg wound tended.

  That extraordinary moment, when uncompromising aggression suddenly reverts to care, comes to characterise the later stages of the battle. The ending of violence, its control, is even more mysterious a moment than its beginning. Tension can erupt into aggression; but how does aggression transmute into calm and even generosity? There is evidence from Trafalgar that this capacity for the humane was not simply a product of exhaustion or battle fatigue. More than that, it seems to be evidence of a mature understanding, which had emerged from 18th-century English culture, of the role and limits of violence. The Algésiras finally surrendered when her two remaining masts fell, shot through deep within the ship, always the sign of unspeakable devastation between decks. Admiral Magon was found dead on his own quarterdeck, lying in his blood at the foot of the poop ladder.

  At the fight between the Victory and the Redoutable, Hardy remained on deck as the admiral was carried below. It was a desperately anxious time. After the battle, his silver pencil case was found to have the impressions of his teeth deeply embedded in it, where quite unconsciously he had chewed on the silver in the heat of battle. All round him Captain Lucas’s musketmen in the tops were having a savage effect on the Victory’s upper deck. The French musket fire killed and wounded about fifty men there and those British sailors remaining unhurt left the deck for their own safety.

  The Victory’s great guns continued to fire below, but from the French there was a curious silence. As the Victory’s upper deck had no one left alive, the musketmen had no further targets to aim at. The Redoutable was now not firing at all with her own great guns. Hardy thought for a moment the Frenchman had struck. His own guns had been doing steady and uncompromising destruction below decks. Victory’s shot had been driving into the Redoutable, through the men and guns, and out again the other side. So close were the Victory’s muzzles to the French gunports that the British were afraid that the belch of flame from their own gun
s, and flaming wads which the detonating gunpowder blew out of the barrels after the shot, would set the Redoutable on fire. After each shot, men from the Victory threw buckets of water through the holes in the Redoutable which their shot had made, to extinguish any fire they might have ignited. A fire aboard the Redoutable would also have destroyed the Victory. This was a form of battle in which the enemy had to be nurtured if he was to be defeated. The possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction was perfectly available to them and had even been hinted at in Nelson’s suggestion that he would willingly have half of his fleet burnt to bring about the destruction of the French. But it was not a tactic which either the men of the lower deck or the lieutenants and midshipmen commanding them, were prepared to countenance. Hardy, having taken the care, now thought he had won this fight and ordered the Victory’s starboard battery to cease firing.

  A strange moment of silence descended between the two ships at the heart of the battle. Gunfire from other fights echoed around them. The banks of smoke hung like curtains above the slowly stirring sea. Both captains, their officers and crews were waiting for the other to surrender. Both thought they had won and Captain Lucas prepared to board the Victory. He ordered his mainsail yard cut down so that it would bridge the gap between the two ships. He prepared his men to rush up from below, armed quite literally to the teeth—a cutlass held between the teeth allowed one arm to hold on to the rigging, another a pistol—but at that very moment Nelson’s tactical conception paid off.

  This was not, as the old convention had ordained, a battle in which one ship would confront one other and duel with honour. This battle involved the massing of forces against enemy ships in order to bring about their surrender quickly and savagely. Just at the moment that Lucas’s boarding party was prepared on the Redoutable, 200 men gathered in a mass, the British Téméraire materialised on his port side. The Téméraire—98 guns, three-decker, under Captain Eliab Harvey—was as formidable a fighting machine as the Victory herself. The Redoutable, a two-decker, found herself sandwiched between these two terrifying opponents. As a fierce musketry fight developed between the men of the Redoutable and the men of the Victory, killing 19 Britons and wounding 22, Harvey coldly ordered his upper tier of guns to fire across the decks of the Redoutable. The two hundred men were all killed or wounded. Lucas himself was hit but not killed. In the Victory, the lieutenants in charge of the divisions on the lowest decks had their guns trebleshotted, with a reduced charge of powder, and ordered their muzzles to be lowered so that as the roundshot from each broadside hammered through the Redoutable, they wouldn’t drive on into the Téméraire beyond her.

  This was the savage centre of Trafalgar. On one side the Victory was still firing with her port guns into the Bucentaure, with her starboard guns into the Redoutable. The Redoutable herself was suffering massacre from the Victory on one side and from the Téméraire on the other. Men in the Redoutable’s tops, and even on her yard-arms, were throwing incendiary grenades down into both the Victory and the Téméraire. At the same moment, the Téméraire, on her far side, was getting ready to receive a

  collision from the French Fougueux, which had moved away from her earlier bloody encounter with the Belleisle. The Téméraire’s starboard broadside had yet to be fired in the battle. It was in its state of perfect pre-battle readiness. The Téméraire’s officers held their fire, waiting for the Frenchman to approach; 200 hundred yards was considered point-blank range. The Téméraire allowed the Fougueux to come within 100 yards before firing. It was the model of Nelsonian violence: the Fougueux was rocked back on her heels by the impact. The noise of it rolled across the ocean towards the rest of the fleet. ‘Crippled and confused’, the Fougueux now drifted down on to the Téméraire, where she was lashed alongside, as the Redoutable was on to the Téméraire’s other broadside, and destroyed.

  Four vast battle ships, with a total complement of some 3,000 men, every ship largely dismasted, laden with the dead and the dying, lay clasped to each other as the Atlantic swell rolled under them. None had yet surrendered. Yards and masts lay in a net of chaos over all four. Deep in all four, in the scarcely lit decks below the waterline, hidden sorrows and private catastrophes were being enacted. The wounded were being wounded again where they lay. One British sailor was killed by the head of his friend, blown off by a roundshot and sent careering towards him. The whole assemblage was gathered in an area not much larger than a football field.

  Two midshipmen from the Victory—one of them Edward Collingwood, the admiral’s nephew—were sent by Hardy in one of the flagship’s boats, along with six or seven seamen, to put out a fire which the Redoutable’s grenades or ‘stink-pots’ had started in her own forecastle. They climbed aboard the devastated Frenchman. It was another moment where savagery was folded back to allow the entrance of a shared humanity: the only way on to the Redoutable was through the stern ports and as the young British officers climbed in, they were greeted warmly and politely by the French sailors inside. Beyond those proffered hands they encountered, even on a day of such horror, a scene of which they were unable to leave a description.

  The Redoutable’s mainmast and mizzenmast had both gone by the board. Her bowsprit was shot through and her fore topmast gone. She lay rolling in the water, bedraggled and broken. Her rudder was destroyed and her massive oak hull was in pieces. Several guns had burst, killing everyone around them. The human damage was unconscionable. Of her complement of 643 men, 522 were dead, dying or unable to stand. Two hundred and twenty two of them were lying waiting to be operated on by the surgeons. Three hundred dead lay on the decks. Only those who had managed to spend the battle below the waterline were still in one piece. Everyone who had been on any one of the gundecks was dead or wounded. Neither the French nor the Spanish heaved the dead overboard, as the English practice was, and the sight on the Redoutable was of a blood-drenched chaos, the bewildered and bruised faces of young men, an unheroic scattering of limbs and bodies.

  No British image, drawn or painted, addressed the squalor of Trafalgar, in the way that Turner would paint the field of Waterloo on the evening of the battle, the ground surface itself merging with and even indistinguishable from the rippling, billowing landscape of the dead, a downland of corpses, lit by the flames of distant fires. But the accounts of those who saw these sights are, if anything, strangely ashamed, bemused, almost as if there were an embarrassment to battle, an awkwardness at the lowering of the cultural guard. In battle, in the sight that greeted these young midshipmen as they walked across the Redoutable, a level of human life had been exposed where humanity, in its dignified and socialised form, the most precious thing their civilisation possessed, had been for a while horribly suspended.

  It is not perhaps surprising that their urge to humanity was turned to so quickly and so warmly. The horrors of battle, not during it, when the adrenaline was running, but as it ended, created a need for that warmth, for a repairing of the rupture. By about 2.15, four of the six pumps on the Redoutable had been destroyed by shot and the water was now fast rising in the hold. The Téméraire was then in possession of her prize, as she was of the Fougueux on the other side of her. Together, they represented perhaps £100,000 of prize money, a good £5-6 million today, the equivalent of £20,000 for each of the lives taken in the winning of her.

  Victory was slipping away to the north, having pushed herself off from the Redoutable with giant booms. Over an hour had passed since Nelson had been carried below. The musket ball that had entered his shoulder was only part of a storm of metal then engulfing the Victory’s quarterdeck. Between forty and fifty men were carried down to the Victory’s orlop deck at the same time as the admiral. Several had died in the arms of the seamen on their way down, but still the cockpit to which the wounded were carried was crowded. As Nelson was brought in, the wounded seamen around him called to the surgeon, William Beatty, ‘Mr Beatty, Lord Nelson is here: Mr Beatty, the admiral is wounded.’ He was taken to a midshipman’s berth, and the men carrying him very
nearly dropped him as they tripped in the crowded dark. Nelson was laid on a bed, stripped of his clothes and covered with a sheet. His coat was rolled up and used as a pillow for a midshipman with a head wound beside him. The young man’s head was leaking so much blood that after the battle the coat had to be cut from his hair. Wounds to the lower back almost inevitably destroy any control of the bowel or bladder. In the sanctified atmosphere of Nelson’s last hours, this is never mentioned, but among the other horrors of that place, Nelson and those around him would certainly have been lying in his own urine and faeces.