The Normandy Privateer

by David McDine

  Hoover nodded. It gave him no pleasure to see young men cut down, friend or foe.

  The list of French casualties complete, the sergeant indicated the dead Englishmen and asked: ‘Et les Rosbifs?’ The officer pondered for a moment whether he should try to identify the enemy fallen, but dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. Their ship would know who had been lost.

  However, perhaps he should at least see if the dead English officer was carrying any identification or indeed any papers of interest for intelligence purposes. So he ordered the sergeant to extricate the officer from the English dead on the cart and search him.

  The sergeant grabbed Anson’s ankles, pulled his body to the back of the cart and, studiously avoiding looking at his blood, bone and brain-splattered head, began going through his pockets.

  But to his astonishment the corpse stirred and groaned and the Frenchman started back in alarm exclaiming: ‘Mon dieu, il vive!’

  4

  The raiding party survivors were treated with the same rough care as the French casualties but even here revolutionary égalité gave way to the privileges of rank and the English officer was assessed first.

  A pitcher of water thrown over Anson washed away the worst of the gore and skull fragments that had splattered him when the joker Robson was struck by the musket ball, and the shock of the drenching brought him back to consciousness briefly before he drifted away again.

  The surgeon tutted over a triangular flap of skin that had been gouged out above the English lieutenant’s left eye by a piece of flying bone, pulled it back into place with a pair of tweezers he had first cleaned with spit and a rub on his jacket, and deftly stitched the wound. While the surgeon was at work his orderly cleaned and bandaged the gory furrow that had been ploughed in Anson’s thigh by another musket ball.

  The two other English casualties awaited their turn after the French wounded had been assessed and treated.

  Sam Fagg had been brought down by a ricocheting musket ball that had broken his ankle. The torn flesh was cleaned up by the orderly and the fracture splinted by the surgeon. It hurt like hell but at least the bleeding had stopped. The surgeon told him in broken English that he must keep off it for at least six weeks.

  Corporal Hoover’s shoulder was painful but not too serious. The ball that felled him had also been partially spent. Once the uniform fragments had been fished out of the wound all should be well, though no doubt the bruising would be spectacular.

  The garlic-breathed orderly who helped him remove his jacket and shirt got to work with tweezers probing the hole in the marine’s shoulder just below the collar bone, first for the musket ball and then the small pieces of scarlet cloth that had been punched into the wound.

  With some of the French wounded watching, the marine endured the ordeal in silence, only an occasional wince recording the pain necessarily being inflicted. The torture over, his left arm was put in a sling to avoid shoulder movement.

  All three prisoners were then left to rest on straw-filled mattresses along with the French wounded who totally ignored them, muttering only occasionally among themselves.

  On board the frigate, marines tended to keep aloof from the seamen they regarded as lesser mortals, but here, with no-one else to talk to, Fagg attempted to cross that barrier by asking: ‘You’re from Amerikey, ain’t yer?’

  Hoover nodded. ‘Was once.’

  ‘Thought you lot was agin us?’

  ‘Some are, some ain’t.’

  ‘So what are y’now, ’merican or English?’

  ‘I’m a marine.’

  There was no answer to that and Fagg shrugged and lapsed into silence.

  After a few hours all the wounded were fed with bread, soup and watered wine. Fagg examined his bowl for snail shells. Finding none, he tasted the soup gingerly and announced with obvious relief, ‘Onion, thank gawd. Not snails or bleedin’ frogs.’

  When he had wolfed his own ration he crawled across to the half-conscious officer and spooned some of the soup into his mouth, muttering: ‘Surprising how ’ungry these ’ere early mornin’ larks make yer innit, sir?’

  Hoover, chewing on a lump of bread, raised his eyebrows heavenwards. Some lark …

  The officer lapsed into unconsciousness again and Fagg did his best to make him more comfortable by removing his sea boots. As he eased the right one off he felt Anson’s dirk, still tucked inside.

  He turned conspiratorially to Hoover: ‘Blimey, look at this mate. They’ve missed ’is little sword thingey.’

  ‘Dirk – it’s his dirk,’ muttered Hoover. ‘And don’t wave it about – they’ll all want one.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Fagg nodded. And looking round to make sure none of the Frenchmen were watching, he secreted the weapon in his own shirt.

  *

  They passed the rest of the day dozing in silence, not wishing to draw attention to themselves, and trying to avoid movement that would trigger pain from their injuries. Anson still appeared semi-comatose.

  The only breaks came with meals – more soup, bread and a kind of fish stew – and the struggle to cope with the bucket supplied for calls of nature.

  With night came the sleep of exhaustion accompanied by a chorus of Anglo-French snores, groans and still less musical sounds from the wounded in the temporary sick bay with its overpowering odour of fish.

  *

  After they had spent two days and nights in the fish hall, the French surgeon adjudged the English casualties fit enough to travel. He explained to Hoover and Fagg that they were to be sent to the citadel at Arras, maybe a week by wagon. ‘From there, peut-etre …’ He shrugged, searching for the English word. ‘Perhaps … yes, perhaps to a prison for navy men.’

  Indicating a wizened commissariat corporal and a youngster with a vacant stare, the doctor assured the prisoners: ‘These imbeciles ’ave been ordered not to mistreat you. Your officer is not bad hurt. It look bad but it is just a surface wound. No ball in ’ead. And his leg? C’est la meme chose, not bad.’

  Fagg was still concerned. ‘So ’e’ll live will ’e, monsewer?’

  The doctor, who shared the Englishman’s habit of dropping aitches, shrugged. ‘Of course. He will ’ave a sore ’ead for some days, but you are all young and strong …’

  He gesticulated at the filthy makeshift sick bay. ‘All will ’ave a better chance anywhere than ’ere.’

  And as further reassurance, he added: ‘These guards will ’ave rations for you and papers for billeting en route. It will not be a race, but what you English say, a long ’aul.’

  *

  A long haul it was. Orderlies carried the English officer to a wagon hitched to two docile carthorses, laid him on a pile of grain sacks and hay and helped Fagg and Hoover aboard.

  An elderly wagoner watched proceedings and when all were embarked he clicked his tongue, flicked his whip, and they were off at a gentle pace.

  At first they followed the coast road north, busy with both military and civilian traffic, and in mid-afternoon reached the port of Dieppe. Leaving the simpleton on guard while the wagoner fed and watered the horses, the be-whiskered old soldier disappeared into a fishermen’s drinking den.

  After a while he emerged, wiping his moustaches with his cuff, and resumed his seat on a sack of horse feed in the back of the wagon, feet hanging over the backboard.

  ‘All right for some,’ Fagg muttered. ‘The old sweat smells like a bleedin’ brewery. Me, I’d give me left bollock fer a tot right now.’

  Eventually satisfied that his horses were ready to roll, the wagoner clicked, flicked, and they were off again.

  But now, on reaching the outskirts of the port, he took a road that led away from the coast and headed into the Normandy countryside.

  ‘We’re ’eading nor-east, I reckon,’ Fagg suggested.

  Corporal Hoover grimaced as he eased his shoulder and adjusted the sling. ‘We’re going away from the coast, that’s for sure.’

  The wagon climbed slowly up a long incline, eventua
lly reaching undulating fields and woods. The soil here was reddish, brick-earth perhaps.

  The two French soldiers guarding them were sprawled on sacks at the back of the wagon, cradling their muskets and dozing in the warm sunshine. They appeared to speak no English and took no interest in their prisoners’ desultory conversation.

  Their only communication with the wagon driver was when the older of the two, the whiskery veteran, called for a halt and climbed down to relieve himself against a tree. Adjusting his breeches, he remounted, called ‘Allez’, and on they rumbled.

  Fagg had already dubbed the hairy veteran ‘Whiskers’ – and his feeble-minded sidekick ‘Simple Simon’.

  After a while Hoover pulled himself across to the young officer. A bloodied bandage round the temple covered the wound inflicted when the musket ball exited Robson’s head.

  ‘Mister Anson, sir, can you hear me?’ But there was no response.

  Although now conscious, albeit with a pounding head, the officer feigned sleep – determined to keep quiet in case the guards were listening. Escape would be easier if they thought him incapable.

  ‘How is he?’ Fagg asked.

  ‘Sure looks a mess. But those French loblolly boys didn’t seem to think he was about to snuff it, did they?’

  Anson had noted both his fellow-prisoners on board Phryne. As an American, Hoover had stood out. Sailors from the new world, pressed or volunteers of necessity, were not unusual in His Majesty’s navy. But Americans happy to wear a redcoat uniform were rare. To do so, willingly, almost certainly made him a loyalist, which indeed Hoover was. However far from home, the marines did not care where you came from. They were his family now. And, as a corporal, he had already won respect on board for his quiet courage, skill at arms and immaculate turn-out.

  Fagg was altogether a different kettle of fish – a stocky, chirpy, confident foretopman dragged up in the seamier streets of Chatham, where survival depended on a quick wit and nimble feet. On board he was one of the elite able seamen whose part of ship was the most perilous. They had to be fit, alert and courageous to ascend to the tops in a blow and had to have the stamina to endure long stints as look-outs from the mastheads. Ashore or afloat he was an expert scrounger and, without a word of French, had already managed to wheedle a fill of tobacco from the whiskery corporal for his clay pipe that had survived the raid, battered but still smokable.

  In moments of wakefulness, Anson told himself he could not have chosen two better companions for the escape he was already certain he would attempt.

  As the day wore on the cart passed occasional wayside inns, timber-framed farmhouses and barns with high-pitched roofs. From time to time church spires could be seen in the distance.

  At times they were on a dead flat plain. Then the country undulated again, making the horses labour slowly on the up-slopes, pushing on marginally faster downhill.

  The trundling, swaying motion made Anson drift in and out of sleep and consciousness. In his dreams he was ratting again as he had hunted for vermin as a child with a terrier called Jack in the outbuildings at the back of the rectory and in the huge tithe barn near the church. Or he was re-living his time as a midshipman, attempting to complete impossible tasks ordered by a succession of villainous superior officers.

  His efforts to set his dreams off on a more satisfying tack, by recalling the charms of various females as he lay half awake, never seemed to work. The minute he drifted off he was chasing rats or dashing aloft again rather than resting his head on a soft and ample bosom.

  Vivid while dreamed, the images and incidents were elusive and soon faded in moments of wakefulness.

  Drained from the sheer physical effort they had put into the abortive raid and the shock of their wounds, Fagg and Hoover sprawled as comfortably as possible in the wagon and they, too, lapsed into an exhausted sleep.

  A sudden jolt when the iron-shod wheels hit a particularly deep rut jerked both back into full consciousness and Fagg took the opportunity to check the officer again.

  Lieutenant Anson lay on grain sacks between hay bales the French had placed either side of him to prevent his apparently near-lifeless body from rolling with the ship-like motions of the wagon as it negotiated the pitted road like a man-of-war crossing a stormy Bay of Biscay.

  Fagg lifted the blood-soaked bandage to examine the officer’s head-wound, but could deduce little. ‘Still too much blood in ’is ’air to see anyfink,’ he told Hoover. ‘Soon as this ’ere bleedin’ wagon stops for long enuff I’ll try washin’ the blood orf.’

  Hoover nodded. ‘Hope he makes it. He’s the best of the Phryne bunch.’

  ‘He is that,’ Fagg agreed. ‘Always had a word fer us – and ’e knew our names. Like you wasn’t just a number, know what I mean?’ Fagg reflected for a moment. ‘Mind you, that ain’t necessarily a good fing. Sometimes ’tis better t’be … what’s it called … anonymouse.’

  He shook his head sagely. ‘Nah, it don’t always pay to ’ave yer name on everyone’s lips. Meself, I’ve got out of more’n a few scrapes by bein’ anonymouse.’ And he leaned back against one of the hay bales contemplating the undoubted wisdom of his last remark.

  Darkness fell before the French corporal woke up to the fact that they needed somewhere to harbour up for the night. They trundled along for a while in faint moonlight as he looked for a wayside auberge. But none appeared.

  Finally he spotted a small farmhouse with adjoining barn and the driver urged the horses off the road and down a track towards it.

  Whiskers dismounted and rapped at the door of the shabby, single-storey house. A hoary old peasant appeared and, after much gesticulation, what the prisoners guessed was some sort of billeting ticket changed hands and the wagon was driven into the barn.

  The driver unhitched the horses and he and the peasant fetched buckets of water and armfuls of hay.

  Whiskers fished a sack of rations from the front of the wagon and a few coins encouraged their host to produce a flagon of what proved to be rough cider.

  The French corporal swigged long and hard before passing it on and although Fagg treated it with great suspicion, Hoover reassured him: ‘It’s more’n likely safer than the local water.’

  Fagg gulped some down, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and announced: ‘Ain’t all that bad for a Froggie drink, long as y’don’t fink too much abaht what’s in it.’

  Bread and cheese were produced from the ration sack and they settled down for a restless night on their make-shift hay beds, sleep frequently interrupted by creepy-crawlies, the rustling of rats, the hoots of owls – and the screams of amorous foxes.

  It was something of a relief to set off on the road again next day, ploughing steadily on with only occasional farm and military traffic to break the monotony.

  5

  Stunned disbelief greeted the arrival of Captain Phillips’ letter at Hardres Minnis rectory.

  Distraught, Anson’s mother swooned and took to her chaise longue in a despair only a parent can know on losing a child.

  HMS Phryne had fallen in with a Sheerness-bound sloop two days after the abortive raid, so the news had not been long delayed.

  The Reverend Thomas Anson was himself used to dealing with death as an inevitable part of his calling. But he, too, was dreadfully grieved at the loss of his second, but secretly favourite, son – the son he had encouraged into the navy out of admiration for his distant kinsman.

  Commodore George Anson’s heroic endurance of extreme hardships while circumnavigating the globe in HMS Centurion half a century before – losing two of his accompanying ships and all but a third of his men, yet trumping it all by capturing a Spanish treasure galleon – was the stuff of legends. The hero’s subsequent rise to become an admiral, First Sea Lord and reformer of the navy, made his name renowned throughout the service and the country.

  Being himself the eldest son of a clergyman, Thomas Anson had been given the martyred Becket’s Christian name, and to his own intense disappointment had been dest
ined from birth not for the navy but to follow his father’s footsteps into a career in the church.

  Like his father, he was a great one for lumbering his male offspring with the names of his heroes and made sure that his own first son Augustine, pointedly named after the saint who brought Christianity to England, likewise followed him into the church as family custom required.

  So it was, vicariously, that the rector’s own frustrated seafaring dreams were acted out through his second son. To have called him George after the famous Anson would in his view have been too obvious, so he named him Oliver after another character from history that he rather surprisingly admired – the Lord Protector, Cromwell.

  The rector had enjoyed young Oliver’s occasional ink-splotched letters and even rarer home visits. But all along he had been fully aware of the fact that life at sea was at best precarious. The possibilities of death by enemy action, disease and natural disaster were ever-present threats in the navy. The war with France magnified the dangers.

  So the loss of his son was a terrible blow, but not an unimaginable surprise.

  And, of course, there was the third son, young Abraham. He was named not after the Biblical patriarch, but to honour General James Wolfe’s famous – if personally fatal – taking of the Heights of Abraham in Canada during the Seven Years’ War.

  Wolfe Anson, the rector had reluctantly conceded, would have been a little too much to swallow. So the youngest son rejoiced under the name of the battlefield rather than the victor. And it suited the rector if most of his parishioners assumed that the boy was named after the biblical patriarch.

  Abraham, still at school, was pre-destined to go into the army. There had not been a soldier in the family since great uncle Hannibal Anson, who, rather than crossing the Alps with elephants like his namesake, had been thrown from a howdah when tiger-hunting in Uttar-Pradesh while serving with the East India Company Army and been trampled to death by one.