Under a sky of blue and over an almost calm sea furrowed by a ponderous swell from the westward, the British fleet came down on the Combined Fleet in two loose groups, prevented from getting into any regular formation by the lightness of the westerly breeze. Drinkwater looked briefly round him to see the Franco-Spanish ships in almost as much disorder. The decision to wear, though two hours old, had thrown them into a confusion from which it would take them some time to recover. Instead of a single line with the frigates to leeward and Gravina's crucial detachment slightly to weather, the whole armada was a loose crescent, bowed away from the advancing British towards the distant blue outline of Cape Trafalgar on the horizon. The line had vast gaps in it, astern of the Bucentaure for instance, and in places the ships had bunched two and three abreast.
He turned his attention to the British again at the same time as Villeneuve lowered his glass and noticed his arrival. 'Ah, Captain Drinkwater. I desire your opinion as to the leading ships…' He handed Drinkwater his glass.
Drinkwater focused the telescope and the image leapt into the lenses with unbelievable clarity. The two groups of British ships were led by three-deckers. These ships were going to receive the brunt of the fire of several broadsides before they could retaliate and Drinkwater sensed a certain elation amongst the officers on Bucentaure's quarterdeck. They came on like a row of skittles, one behind the other. Knock the end one over and it would take them all down.
As he watched, flags soared up the mastheads and out to the yardarms of the leading British ships. Between the two groups he could see the frigates Naiad, Euryalus, Siruis and Phoebe, a cutter and schooner, standing by to repeat signals or tow a wounded battleship out of the line.
'Well, Captain?' Villeneuve was reminding him he was a prisoner and had been asked a question. He looked again at the leading ships. They had every stitch of sail set, their studding sails winged out on the booms, their slack sheets trailing in the water. The swell made the great ships pitch gently as they came on, their hulls black and yellow barred, their decorated figureheads bright with paintwork. The southern group was further advanced than the northern column. He closed the telescope with a snap.
'The southern column is led by Royal Sovereign, Your Excellency, flagship of Vice-Admiral Collingwood…'
'And Nelson?' Villeneuve's eagerness betrayed his anxiety.
'There, sir,' Drinkwater pointed with Villeneuve's telescope, the brass instrument gleaming in the sunshine, 'there is Victory, leading the northern column and bearing the flag of Lord Nelson.'
Villeneuve's hand was extended for his glass, but his eyes never left the black and yellow hull of Victory. As Drinkwater watched, the ship astern of Victory seemed to edge out of line, as if making to overtake. Then he saw her sails shake and she disappeared from view behind the flagship again. 'She seems to be supported by the Temeraire,' he added, 'of ninety-eight guns.'
Bucentaure's officers studied the menacing approach of the silent British ships. All along her own decks animated chatter had broken out. He noticed there was no check put to this and the men seemed in high spirits now that action was inevitable. Aware that at any moment he would be ordered below, he again looked round. The gap astern was a yawning invitation to the British, and Drinkwater's practised eye soon reckoned that Victory was heading for that gap. Collingwood, he judged, would strike the allied line well astern of the Bucentaure, somewhere about the position of the funereal black hull of the Spanish 112-gun Santa Ana with her scarlet figurehead of the saint. Ahead of the Bucentaure the mighty Santissima Trinidad, with her hull of red and white ribbands, seemed to wait placidly for the onslaught of the heretic fleet, a great wooden cross hanging over her stern beneath the red and gold ensign of Spain.
'Nelson attacks as I said he would, Captain,' Villeneuve remarked in English. And added, as his glass raked the following ships crowding down astern of their leaders, 'It is not that Nelson leads, but that every captain thinks he is Nelson…' Then, in his own tongue and in a tone of anguish he said, 'Où est Gravinar?'
Drinkwater realised the import of the remark, forgotten in the excitement of watching the British fleet approach. By wearing to the northward, Villeneuve had reversed his order of sailing. The van was led by Dumanoir now. Instead of commanding a detached squadron to windward, Gravina was tailing on the end of the immense line. Villeneuve's counterstroke was destroyed!
Drinkwater's eyes met those of the French Commander-in-Chief, then Villeneuve looked away; Magendie was speaking impatiently to him and at that moment smoke belched from a ship well astern of Bucentaure. The rolling concussion of a broadside came over the water towards them as white plumes rose around the Royal Sovereign. Collingwood had shifted his flag from the sluggishDreadnought to the swift and newly coppered Royal Sovereign as soon as she had come out from England. Now that speed carried her into battle ahead of her consorts and her chief. Soon other ships were trying the range along with the Fougeuex, smoke and flame belched from the side of the Santa Ana, and still the Royal Sovereign came on, her guns silent, her defiance expressed by the hoisting of additional colours in her rigging.
Drinkwater turned his attention to the other column. Much nearer now, Victory could be seen clearly, her lower fore-sheets trailing in the water as the lightness of the breeze wafted her down on the waiting Bucentaure.
Magendie barked something and Guillet tugged at Drinkwater's sleeve. He followed Guillet to the companionway. As he left the deck he heard the bells of several ships strike the quadruple double ring of noon.
'Tirez!'
As Drinkwater passed over the gun-deck, Lieutenant Fournier gave the order to one of Bucentaure's 24-pounder cannon. It rumbled inboard with the recoil after the explosion of discharge, snatching at its breeching while its crew ministered to it, stuffing sponge, cartridge wad and ball into its smoking muzzle. The lieutenant leaned forward, peering through the gun-port to see where the ranging shot had fallen, and Drinkwater knew he was aiming at Victory. The first coils of white powder smoke drifted innocently around the beams of the deck above and its acrid smell was pungent.
Drinkwater descended into the orlop and made his way back, where he was greeted by a ring of expectant faces. Masson and his staff as well as Gillespy awaited news from the upper world.
'M'sieur Masson, the allied fleets of France and Spain are being attacked by a British fleet under Lord Nelson…'
He heard the name 'Nelson' repeated as men looked at one another, and then all hell broke loose above them.
For the next hours the world was an immensity of noise. The stygian darkness of the orlop, pitifully lit with its faint lanterns whose flames struggled in the foul air, became in its own way an extension of hell. But it was the aural senses that suffered the worst assault. Despite twenty-six years in the Royal Navy, Nathaniel Drinkwater had never before experienced the ear-splitting horror of a sustained action in a ship larger than a frigate; never been subjected to the rolling waves of blasting concussion that reverberated in the confined space of a gun-deck and down into the orlop below. The guns belching their lethal projectiles leapt back on their carriages with an increasing eagerness as they heated up. They became like things with a life of their own. The shouts of their captains and the aspirants and officers who controlled them became nothing more than howls of servitude as the iron monsters spat smoke, fire and iron into the enemy. The stench of powder permeated the orlop, itself full of shuddering air, its shadows atremble from the vibrating lantern hooks as the Bucentaure flexed and quivered in response to her own violence. This was the moment for which she had been called into being, to resist force with force and pit iron against iron in a ruthless carnage of cacophonous death.
Initially the men stationed in the orlop had nothing to do. The surgeon and his mates waited for the first of the wounded to come down, the gunner and his staff peered from their shot and powder rooms, waiting for the first of the boys requiring more cartridges and shot. So far Bucentaure had shivered only from the discharge of her o
wn guns. In his imagination Drinkwater saw Victory looming ever larger as she made for that yawning gap astern of the French flagship. He tried to recall the two ships that were trying to fill it and thought that they should have been the Neptune and the Spanish San Leandro, but they were both to leeward, he remembered, and only Lucas in the Redoubtable was in direct line astern of the Bucentaure. Drinkwater felt a sympathy for Villeneuve. Gravina had let him down and now he went almost unsupported into action with a ship heavier than his own. Bucentaure was a new ship and Victory fifty years old, but the added elevation of her third gun-deck would make her a formidable opponent.
And then Drinkwater heard the most terrible sound of his life. The concussion was felt through the entire body rather than heard with the ears alone, a distant noise above the thunder of Bucentaure's cannon, a strange mixture of sounds that had about it the tinkle of imploding glass and the noise of a million bees driving down wind on the back of a hurricane. The whole of Bucentaure trembled, men standing were jerked slightly and the bees were followed by the whoosh and crash, the splintering, jarring shock of impact, as musket balls and double- and triple-shotted guns raked the whole length of the Bucentaure. It was over in a few seconds as Victory crossed their stern, pouring the pent-up fury of her hitherto silent guns through the Bucentaure's stern galleries and along her gun-decks, knocking men. over like ninepins. It took cannon off their carriages too, for above their heads they heard the crash of guns hitting the deck, but by this time the orlop had its own terrible part to play.
As the first wave of that raking broadside receded, Drinkwater released Gillespy whom he found himself clasping protectively. He could not stand idle and tore off his coat as the first wounded were stretched upon the canvas of the operating 'table'.
'Come, Mr Gillespy, come; let us do something in the name of humanity to say we were not idle when brave men did their duty.'
Ghostly pale, Gillespy came forward and held the arm of a man while Masson excised a splinter from his shoulder and shoved him roughly aside. It took four men to hold some of the wounded who were filling the space like a human flood so that for a second Drinkwater imagined they might drown under the press of bloody bodies that seemed to inundate them. Men screamed or whimpered or stared hollow-eyed. Pain robbed them of the last protest as their lives drained out into the stinking bilge beneath them.
'It is important we operate fast,' Masson shouted, the sweat pouring from him as he wiped a smear of blood across his forehead. 'Not him, Captain, he is too much gone… this man… ah, a leg… we must cut here…' The knife bit into the flesh, its passage marked by a line of blood, and Masson's practised wrist took the incision right around the limb, inclining the point towards the upper thigh.
'If I am quick, he is in shock… see how little his arteries bleed, they have closed, and I can do no more damage than his wound…' Masson nodded to the bunch of bleeding rags that had once been a leg. As he spoke his deft fingers tied thread around the blood vessels and then he picked up his saw, thrust it deep into the mess and quickly cut through the femur. He drew the skin together and swiftly sutured it. 'Do you know, Captain,' he bawled conversationally as he nodded and the wounded man was removed to be replaced by another, 'that the Russians and Prussians simply cut through, tie the ligatures and draw the flesh together, leaving the bone almost at the extremity of the amputation and the skin tight as a drum…' Masson glanced at his next patient, caught the eye of his assistant and made a winding motion with one finger. The assistant brought a roll of linen bandage and the great welling wound in the stomach was bound, the white quickly staining red. The man was moved to a corner, to lean against a great futtock and bleed out his life.
Drinkwater looked round. The wooden tubs were full of amputated limbs and still men arrived and were ministered to by Masson as he hacked and sawed, bound and bandaged. The surgeon was awash in blood and the foul air of the orlop was thick with the stink of it. Above their head Bucentaure was raked again, and then again at intervals as, following Victory, Tememire and then the British Neptune crossed her stern.
Another body appeared under the glimmer of the lanterns and Masson looked at his assistant busy amputating the arm of a negro. He called some instructions and then shouted at Drinkwater, 'Assistance, Captain. This one we will have to hold!' Masson tore the blood-soaked shirt off the frail body of the boy, a powder monkey or some such.
'Hold him, Captain! He is fully conscious! They are always difficult!'
The white body arched as Masson began his curettage. 'We may save him, it's a fragment from a ball, perhaps it burst when it hit a gun, but it is deep. Hold him!' There was demonic strength in the tiny body and it wailed pitifully. Drinkwater looked at the face. It was Gillespy.
'Dear God…' The boy was staring up at him, his eyes huge and dark and filled with tears. Blood seeped from his mouth and Drinkwater was aware that he was biting his lip. Masson's mate had seen it and as Gillespy opened his mouth to scream, he rammed a pad of leather into it. Masson wrestled bloodily with the fragment, up to his wrist in the boy's abdomen until Drinkwater found himself shouting at the boy to faint.
'He will not stand the shock…' Drinkwater could see Masson was struggling. 'Merde!' The surgeon shook his head. 'I cannot waste time… he is finished…'
They dragged Gillespy aside and Drinkwater picked him up. He made for the cot in his cabin, but it was already occupied and, as gently as he could, Drinkwater laid the boy down in a dark corner and knelt beside him.
'There, there, Mr Gillespy…' He felt desperately inadequate, unable even to give the midshipman water. He could not understand how it had happened. The boy had been helping them… and then Drinkwater recollected, he had withdrawn, his hand over his mouth as though about to vomit. He looked at Gillespy. He had spat the leather pad out and his mouth moved. Drinkwater bent to hear him.
'The… the pain has all gone, sir… I went on deck, sir… to see for myself. I wanted to see something… to tell my grandchildren… disobeyed you…' Gillespy's voice faded into an incoherent gurgle. Drinkwater knew from the blood that suddenly erupted from his mouth that he was dead.
Another broadside raked Bucentaure and Drinkwater laid the body down and straightened up. He was trembling all over, his head was splitting from the noise, the damnable, thunderous, everlasting bloody noise. He stumbled over the recumbent bodies of the wounded and dying. Reaching into the cabin he had occupied, he picked up his sword and made for the ladder of the lower gun-deck. Nobody stopped him and he was suddenly aware that Bucentaure's guns had been silent for some time, that the continued bombardment was the echo in his belaboured head.
The lower gun-deck was a shambles. Swept from end to end by the successive broadsides of British battleships, fully half its guns were dismounted, their carriages smashed. The decks were ploughed up by shot, the furrows lined by spikes of wood like petrified grass. Men writhed or lay still in heaps, their bodies shattered into bloody mounds of flesh, brilliant hued and lit by light flooding in through the pulverised and dismantled stern. Drinkwater could not see a single man on his feet throughout the whole space. He made for the ladder to the upper deck and emerged into a smoke-stifled daylight.
Drinkwater stared around him. Bucentaure was dismasted, the stumps of her three masts incongruous, their shattered wreckage hanging all about her decks, over her guns and waist where a vain attempt was being made to get a boat out. A man was shouting from the poop. It was Villeneuve.
'Le Bucentaure a rempli sa tâche: la mienne n'est pas encore achevée.' Amidships a lieutenant gestured it was impossible to get a boat in the water. Villeneuve turned away and nodded at a smoke-begrimed man whom Drinkwater realised was Magendie. All together there were only a handful of men on Bucentaure's deck. Magendie waved his arm and shouted something. Drinkwater was aware of the masts and sails of ships all around them, towering over their naked decks, and in the thick grey smoke the brilliant points of fire told where the iron rain still poured into Bucentaure. It was quite i
mpossible to tell friend from foe and Drinkwater stood bemused, sheltered by the wreckage of the mainmast which had fallen in a great heap of broken spars and rope and canvas.
A wraith of smoke dragged across Bucentaure's after-deck and Drinkwater saw Villeneuve again. He had been wounded and he stood looking forward over the wreckage of his ship. 'A Villeneuve died with Roland at the Pass of Roncesvalles,' Drinkwater remembered him saying as, behind him, the great tricolour came fluttering down on deck.
Bucentaure had struck her colours.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Surrender and Storm
21-22 October 1805
Drinkwater stood dazed. At times the surrounding smoke cleared and he caught brief glimpses of other ships. On their starboard quarter a British seventy-four was slowly turning—it had been she that had last raked Bucentaure—and, to windward, yet another was looming towards them. Beneath his feet the deck rolled and Drinkwater came to his senses, instinct telling him that the swell was building up all the time. He turned. Ahead of them another British battleship was swinging, presumably she too had raked Bucentaure, though now she was ranging up to leeward of the Santissima Trinidad. And still from the weather side British battleships were coming into action! Drinkwater felt his blood run chill.
'God!' he muttered to himself, 'what a magnificent bloody risk Nelson took!' And he found himself shaking again, his vision blurred, as around the shattered Bucentaure the thunder of battle continued to reverberate. Then suddenly a double report sounded from Bucentaure's own cannon. Two guns on the starboard quarter barked a continued defiance at the British ship that had just raked them. Drinkwater saw splinters dance from her hull and an officer point and shout, clearly outraged by such conduct after striking. He saw muzzles run out and the yellow and scarlet stab of flame. The shot tore over his head and, with a crash, what was left of the Bucentaure's foremast came down. The two quarter-guns fell silent.
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