The whole action was over in little more than half an hour, the British losing 600 men killed and wounded. The rest of the army landed in the afternoon and, on Sidney Smith's suggestion, set to work digging for water under the date trees that dotted the desolate landscape. Its position was precarious in the extreme. With Aboukir Castle untaken in its rear and dominating the only point at which it could draw supplies from the fleet, it had to advance along twelve miles of narrow isthmus under a burning sun towards Alexandria, a walled city held by an unknown number of French veterans. If repulsed, it must either perish of famine or take to its boats in the presence of a victorious enemy. On March 12th, having landed his guns, Abercromby, leaving two regiments to blockade Aboukir Castle, set out to fight his way to the port.
While these events, unknown to Englishmen, were proceeding in the Orient, the armament which was to strike at the other end of Britain's long sea reach was assembling amid snow and easterly gales at Yarmouth. Its command had been entrusted to a dapper, pedantic, highly-strung little Admiral of sixty-two years of age, with more seniority than active service. Sir Hyde Parker, who had
recently returned from four years on the lucrative Jamaica station, was known to his contemporaries as " old vinegar." Apart from personal bravery and his place on the Navy List, there was little to commend him for his appointment, for, as his friend, the Governor of Gibraltar, remarked, " he was getting old, getting rich and had married a young wife." 1 But with the curious unreason of Government Departments the Admiralty tried to offset these defects by appointing as his second-in-command the youngest and most daring Vice-Admiral in the Service, the forty-two-year-old Baron Nelson of the Nile.
This enigmatic character had arrived at Yarmouth after his long Continental tour three months earlier, attended by the now inevitable Hamiltons. At that time his reputation was much sunk from the meteoric height that it had reached two years before: the general belief in official and political quarters was that his career was over.2 He seemed to common eyes only " a little man without dignity." After a chilly meeting and a rather painful attempt to endear his new friends to her, he had parted with Lady Nelson to the tittering scandal of London Society. At the only Levee he attended, the King, after the briefest greeting, turned his back on him. The fallen hero had spent his Christmas in the appropriately histrionic atmosphere of Fonthill Abbey, where the eccentric Beckford had assembled a cosmopolitan party including, of course, Lady Hamilton, who displayed her attitudes. An artist present noticed that she was bold and unguarded, drank freely and had grown fat. He was unaware—as was every one else including probably her husband—that she was about to present her infatuated lover with a child.3
From this painful milieu Nelson was rescued by the exigencies of the Service he loved. After reporting fit for duty, he was appointed on January 17th, 1801, to a command in the Channel Fleet under his old chief, St. Vincent. A few days later every available man and ship was mobilised to meet the storm from the north. The effect on Nelson's spirit was electric. " We are now arrived," he wrote, " at that period we have often heard of but must now execute —that of fighting for our dear country." To Spencer he expressed
1Dyott, I, 146.
2 Mahan, Nelson, II, 42.
3Farington, I, 307.
his readiness to sail for the new theatre of war in anything, from a first-rate to a sloop.
On March 6th he reached Yarmouth, flying his flag in the St. George. He found his Admiral " a little nervous about dark nights and fields of ice. But we must brace up," he reported, " these are not times for nervous systems. I hope we shall give our northern enemies that hailstorm of bullets which gives our dear country the domination of the seas. All the devils in the north cannot take it from us if our wooden walls have fair play." For Nelson viewed England's new enemies with the same pugnacity and intensity as the old. " Down, down with the French! " had been his repeated cry in the Mediterranean, and he now applied it to their allies. " I am afraid," he had once truly written of himself, " I take all my services too much to heart."
Sir Hyde, worthy man, did not. His chief interest at the moment was a farewell ball which his young wife was preparing to give at Yarmouth on the 13 th. Nelson, who knew that every minute was precious if the Baltic Powers were to be disarmed in detail before they had time to prepare and unite their forces, was beside himself with impatience. " Strike home and quick," he urged. He dropped a hint of Parker's preoccupation to his old friend, St. Vincent, now suddenly called to the Admiralty to strengthen Addington's embryo Administration. Whereupon the fleet received orders to sail at once, the ball was abandoned and the two Admirals started on their mission on decidedly strained terms.
But when Nelson made up his mind, there was no resisting him. Between the sailing of the fleet on March 12th—two days before Pitt ceased to be Premier—and its arrival on the 19th at the Skaw, the northernmost point of Denmark, he had already half won over his superior—tradition has it with a timely turbot. There was something about Nelson's ardour and, when his imagination was aroused, his limitless dedication to his country's service that touched even the coldest hearr.
Not that he had yet succeeded in inspiring Parker with his own spirit. Eighteen miles north of Kronborg Castle and Helsingor (Elsinore), where the Kattegat narrows into the Sound between Sweden and the Danish island of Zealand, the fleet anchored to await the return of Vansittart, the Government envoy, who had been sent on in a frigate to Copenhagen with a 48-hour ultimatum.
Nelson was for pushing on at once into the Baltic before the Danes and their Russian and Swedish allies were ready. " I hate your pen and ink men," he wrote; " a fleet of British ships are the best negotiators in Europe. . . . While negotiation is going on, the Dane should see our flag waving every time he lifts up his head." But until Vansittart had a chance to accomplish his mission Parker would not face the double guns of the Elsinore Straits and the responsibility for precipitating war with countries still technically neutral. Nelson's strong, realist mind told him diplomacy was now useless, that the Danes having gone so far would not draw back without the compulsion of force and that they would merely use the delay to make themselves stronger. Every minute lost meant the certain death of more brave men and the endangering of England's purpose.
It was a sombre moment. The weather was bitterly cold and half the fleet seemed to be coughing.1 " Everything wears so dismal an appearance," Captain Fremantle had written a few days earlier to his wife on the political changes in England, " that I submit to Fate for the decision of this contest with all the world; I think the man or minority who can extricate us from such difficulties will be more than human." Certainly the new Prime Minister had little hope of doing so, for on March 21st, despairing of success, he and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury—known to the elect as " young Jenky " 2—made secret approaches to Bonaparte for peace.
The day chosen for this abasement was an ironic one, for unknown to Ministers the tide set in motion by their predecessors was already changing in England's favour. At that very hour a British army had just vanquished in equal encounter a picked force of French veterans outside the walls of Alexandria, and Abercromby, falling in a blaze of glory, was reading mankind a lesson —to be conned more closely in the next age—that, given a fair field, the soldiers of England were a match for the conquerors of Europe. And three days later Nelson, prevailing over the timid spirit of Parker, brought about the decision which led to the shattering of Bonaparte's hopes. On the same night, struck down by the hand of his own subjects, England's enemy,
1 Wynne Diaries, III, 31.
2 Afterwards Prime Minister as Lord Liverpool.
Paul of Russia, was assassinated in the Michael Palace at St-Petersburg.
On March 23 rd Vansittart returned to the fleet with the Crown Prince of Denmark's rejection of the British ultimatum. Nelson was thereupon summoned to the flagship. " Now we are sure of fighting," he wrote in jubilation to Lady Hamilton, " I am sent for! " He found all in the deepest gloom, V
ansittart expatiating on the strength of the Danish defences, and Parker, appalled by his account of great batteries erected by multitudes of defiant Danes, in favour of anchoring in the Kattegat till the united Baltic navies emerged to give battle. Nelson thereupon set to work, quietly and cheerfully, to argue the Council of War round: " to bring," as he put it, " people to the post." Pacing up and down the flagship's stateroom he pressed his reasons for attacking, and, lucidly, persuasively, yet with a flame which shamed all fears, showed how it might be done. After learning that the Copenhagen defences were strongest in the north where the Trekronor Battery barred the approach from the Sound, Nelson suggested that the fleet should follow the longer route by the Great Belt round Zealand and so fall on the enemy where he was least expecting attack, in the rear. The manoeuvre would have had the additional advantage of placing the British between the Danes and their Russian and Swedish allies. But the great thing, he insisted, was to attack at once. " Go by the Sound or by the Belt or anyhow," he said, " only lose not an hour."
It was not Nelson's habit to leave anything to chance. He had talked the Council round, but as soon as he returned to his ship he sat down to write a long letter to Parker emphasising the reasons for action. This document, dated March 24th, is the very quintessence of Nelson: daring, sagacious, winning. " The more I have reflected, the more I am confirmed in opinion that not a mqment should be lost in attacking the enemy. They will every day and hour be stronger; we shall never be so good a match for them as at this moment. ... By Mr. Vansittart's account their state of preparation exceeds what he conceives our Government thought possible, and the Danish Government is hostile to us in the greatest possible degree. Therefore here you are, with almost the safety, certainly with the honour of England more entrusted to you than
ever yet fell to the lot of any British officer. On your decision depends whether our Country shall be degraded in the eyes of Europe or whether she shall rear her head higher than ever. ... I am of opinion the boldest measures are the safest."
Parker's yielding nature could not resist such strength. He would not, as Nelson urged, press boldly on against the Russians—the heart of the Armed League—and smash half their fleet at Reval while it was still separated from the remainder by the ice. The thought of leaving the Danish ships in his rear was too much for his conventional mind. But he agreed to pass through the Belt and attack the Danes: on that point he argued no more. On the 26th, as soon as the wind allowed, the fleet weighed and steered towards the Belt. But on learning from his flag-captain something of the danger of those intricate waters, the Admiral changed his mind and decided to brave what he had refused before, the narrow entrance to the Sound between the Danish and Swedish guns. The one thing he would not face now was Nelson's scorn: he went on. As often happens when men boldy grapple with difficulties, the initial obstacles vanished as soon as tackled. When, after being detained by head winds for three days, the fleet entered the dreaded Straits of Elsinore on the 30th, the passage proved absurdly easy. Finding little opposition from the Swedish shore, where the batteries of Kronborg were not yet ready, the fleet inclined to the east of the channel and sailed southward with the Danish shot splashing harmlessly short of it.
That afternoon eighteen British sail of the line and thirty-five smaller vessels anchored five miles south of Copenhagen. The two Admirals at once made an inspection of the town's defences in a schooner. They found chat they had been still further strengthened during the days of waiting. But Nelson showed no sign of dismay. " It looks formidable," he wrote to Emma, " to those who are children at war, but to my judgment with ten sail of the line I think I can annihilate them; at all events I hope I shall be allowed to try." Next day at the Council of War he got his way, and when he asked for ten battleships, Parker gave him twelve. For the old gentleman, in spite of his longing for case and quiet, was almost coming to love Nelson.
How great was the need for speed was shown on the day the British passed the Sound. A hundred miles away Danish troops entered the Free Town of Hamburg, while the Prussians, scenting plunder, cast in their lot with the Baltic Powers and closed the mouths of the Elbe, Ems and Weser to British commerce. A few days later they invaded Hanover. Hesitation at that hour would have been fatal; England could only hold her place now in the world by courage and resolution.
At a second Council of War Nelson's plan was adopted for the destruction of the Danish fleet and floating batteries. About two miles to the east of Copenhagen the water in front of the city was broken by a great shoal known to pilots as the Middle Ground. Between this and the shore flats ran a swift current of deep water called the King's Channel, along the western or inner side of which nineteen hulks and floating batteries with a host of smaller vessels were anchored in an unbroken line whose head was protected by the famous Trekronor Battery. Instead of attacking it from its strongest end, Nelson proposed to take the twelve lightest battleships and the smaller vessels of the fleet round the Middle Ground and so sweep up the King's Channel from the south with the current. This would enable him, after crippling the enemy, to rejoin the rest of the fleet without turning. It involved, however, an intricate and dangerous piece of navigation, for the shoal waters round the Middle Ground ran like a mill race and the fleet had no charts. But Nelson spent the icy, foggy nights of March 30th and 31st in an open boat taking soundings, and he felt confident of his ability to take the battle fleet through the shoals. It was by now his only chance of overcoming the defences.
While Parker with the reserve moved up to the north end of the Middle Ground about four miles from the city, Nelson on the afternoon of the 1st skirted the west of the shoal and anchored at sundown some two miles to the south of the Danish line. That night he entertained his captains on board his temporary flagship, the Elephant—for the St. George was too large for his business—and afterwards, exhausted by his efforts of the past two nights, lay in his cot for several hours dictating orders while his flag-captain, Hardy, took soundings round the head of the Danish line. Nelson's instructions, unlike those issued before the Nile, were of the most detailed kind. There would be no room for manoeuvring on the morrow and little for individual initiative. Every ship was therefore allotted an exact task.
During the night the wind veered to the south as though to reward Nelson for his pains. He was up long before dawn making final preparations. At eight the captains came aboard for their final orders: at nine-thirty the fleet weighed. At the last moment the pilots panicked: masters of small Baltic traders, the thought of taking great battleships through such narrow, shallow waters was too much for them. In the subsequent confusion three of the four leading ships—or a quarter of the main British force—went aground. Disaster was only averted by Nelson's promptitude in putting the Elephant's helm a-starboard and so bringing her past the grounded Russell into the main channel which the pilots had lost. The rest of the fleet, following him, steered clear of the shoal.
As usual the British entered action without a sound. Both sides seemed to be awed by the solemnity of the scene: the great ships like enormous white birds, with rows of cannon bristling beneath their canvas, bearing down on the Danish line, and the waiting city tense with expectation. In that brooding silence the chant of the pilot and helmsman sounded to one listening midshipman like the responses in a Cathedral service. Then, as the leading ship came into range of the enemy batteries, the thunder began. For nearly four hours the Danes, with successive relays of volunteers from the shore taking the place of the fallen, kept up the cannonade. Along a mile and a half of water, with only a cable's length between them, fifteen hundred guns pounded away at one another. " I have been in a hundred and five engagements," wrote Nelson, " but that of to-day is the most terrible of them all." Twice the Danish Commodore was forced to shift his flag: in the Dannebrog, 270 of the crew of 336 were struck down. One or two of the British ships endured casualties almost as heavy: the Monarch lost over two hundred men. " Hard pounding," remarked Nelson to Colonel Stewart, " but mark you, I would
not be anywhere else for a thousand pounds." At one moment Parker, seeing from his distant anchorage that three of the British ships were aground, flew the signal "Cease Action." But Nelson, knowing that to break off at such a moment would be disastrous, disregarded it, symbolically putting his telescope to his blind eye. " Keep mine for closer battle still flying," he said, " Nail it to the mast." Only the frigates, which under the heroic Captain Riou had taken the place of the grounded battleships in front of the Trekronor Battery, noticed Parker's signal. Unable to see Nelson's and all but blown out of the water, they sadly broke off the engagement. " What," cried Riou, " will Nelson think of us? " Almost as he spoke a raking shot cut him in half.
About two o'clock in the afternoon, the Danes' fire slackened. Taken at a disadvantage by the unexpected direction of the attack, and, for all their courage, overborne by the deadly accuracy of the British fire, they could do no more. Nelson's own position was almost as precarious with the undefended Trekronor batteries dominating the treacherous channel between his battered ships and the main fleet to northward. With the sure psychological insight which was part of his greatness, he at once penned a letter addressed: " To the brothers of Englishmen, the Danes," and sent it under a flag of truce to the Crown Prince. For his instinct told him that he could now obtain what he had come for without further bloodshed.
The Years of Endurance Page 46
