Losing Nelson (36 page)

The walls and ceiling of the study were shadowed. The only light came from the lamp on my desk. Your words, as spoken by Grigson, were in my mind. Then a surprising thing happened. After all these years of recalling the wound, remembering Grigson and his billiard cue and coloured chalks, it came to me that there had been one boy in that class at odds with the rest of us. Strange that I had not remembered him before. A picture of him came now into my mind, gradually, detail by detail. It was like peering at something under water that has been stirred, waiting for the tremors of the surface to subside. A sallow boy, large but not athletic. Heavy brows. Rather adenoidal. The nature of his questions came similarly slowly to my mind. A nasal voice. I think he wore rimless glasses. At that moment, when Grigson’s theme was honour, this boy actually asked if it hadn’t been wrong of Nelson to try again. This to Grigson, whose bristles of hair seemed to issue sparks, who perhaps misunderstood the question, not thinking any boy could be so lacking in
esprit de corps
. Well, certainly it was wrong of him to lead this second attack in person, he was a
rear-admiral and commander of the whole squadron, he was wrong to risk himself, but of course it was gallant too …

But no, that was not what this boy meant. I could not remember his name. What about the thousand officers and men Nelson took with him, only half of whom returned? This boy had been reading other texts than those furnished by Grigson. We were all against him, we shared our teacher’s disdain for this insinuating outsider.

But he would not be silenced. The sea was rough, there were powerful batteries on the heights above the shore, the chances of success were almost nil. Is that what honour means? Was it the hope of Spanish gold that made you throw those lives away?
A kind of serial killer
. No, he didn’t say that, the Badham boy didn’t say that, Miss Lily said that. This boy had a limited existence. Why couldn’t I remember his name? Why had I no memory of him in any other class, questioning any other teacher?

Wiped off the slate for all these years between. I tried not to think of him anymore, but only of that doomed, gallant second attempt. Quarter to one now, fifteen minutes to go, you are already pulling for shore, you and the thousand others. Shortly before you have written a hasty letter to Sir John Jervis.
Tomorrow my head will probably be crowned with either laurel or cypress
.

Grigson approved of this too, but I was not in his class now, I was alone in my study, the class had gone, that boy had gone, who could tell where Grigson was? As the moment of the wound drew nearer, I was quite alone. Laurel or cypress. You knew, you must have known, how expensive in lives it would be, how slight the chances of success. Even to get ashore under fire like that, let alone to storm the heights. A thousand men, all with a hope of life, and you wrote to Jervis as if there were only one. What was it for? Miss Lily’s favorite question. No use as a base, too far away—the Mediterranean was the vital zone.
The point was the treasure. You were the commander of the squadron, you were entitled to one quarter.
No, boys, personal greed did not enter into it; the objective was to cripple the Spanish by depriving them of the means to continue the war
. Yes, he was right, the times were desperate, the Spanish could not be brought to a battle, it was the only way. Think of the times they lived in, think of the men they were.

Three minutes to one. A heavy sea running. The boats are too crowded, many of them do not reach the shore, they capsize, and the men in them are drowned. The Spaniards have seen us; the shore batteries open up while the boats are still hundreds of yards from land. However, you reach the harbour mole, you draw your sword, prepare to leap ashore. At that moment, as you raise your sword, your right arm is shattered by grapeshot. You make an attempt to pick up the sword with your left and continue, but your strength fails and you fall. Bleeding heavily, you are laid in the bottom of the boat, and they begin to row you back to the ships. But you will not allow them to return in an empty boat. Half fainting as you are, you will not let them proceed, you order as many men as possible to be gathered into the boat from the sea.

Thinking of this, I felt the familiar smart of tears. Tears always came to restore my feeling for him. That stoicism, that forbearance, that care for others. The same man, the author of the letter to Jervis …

The first ship they came up with was the
Seahorse
, commanded by your friend Fremantle, still out there in the night somewhere, taking part in that disastrous landing. But his wife, Betsey, is still aboard—she has been given special permission to accompany her husband. By now your arm is pumping blood in spite of the tourniquet, but you refuse to quit the boat.
I would rather suffer death than alarm Mrs. Fremantle by her seeing me in this state, when I can give her no tidings whatever of her husband
. You order them to go on, to find
your own ship, the
Theseus
. At last they do so, but you will not be helped aboard.
Let me alone. I have yet my legs left and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and get his instruments
.

You were magnificent. And to think that the later progeny of Badham have set this fortitude down to the effects of shock. No memory of that rotten apple in our class daring to say anything about it. Grigson would have come down on him heavily.
We stood alone against a powerful continental aggressor. To the generations born since 1940 the situation is difficult to imagine
.

Long afterwards, in a Greenwich bookshop, perched on the top of a ladder to get at the dusty top shelf, I came upon a monograph:
Eye-witness Accounts of Nelson’s Battles
, by H. C. Grigson, M.A. (Leeds). It was the same man. I bought it and have it still. There is a brief biographical note at the back. Grigson was born in 1927. He was twelve when the war broke out; he would not have seen any fighting. That sense of crisis, of heroic isolation, he would have got it from others—parents, teachers …

The arm was cut off high up, near the shoulder. It was thrown overboard, on your orders. More terrible than the pain of the cut, or perhaps it was the expression itself of this pain, was the bitter coldness of the surgeon’s blade. Always, afterwards, on any of your ships, you made sure that the surgeons warmed their blades before operating. It took them half an hour to sever the arm and bind the stump. Then—only then—they gave you opium to ease the dreadful pain.

I have on one wall of my study a framed facsimile, enlarged to double size, of the first letter written with the left hand. This was two days after the loss of his arm. I got up now and went to look at it again, trying as I did so to avoid looking towards the glass-fronted bookcase, which I was now rather nervous of. Wavering, very variable as to the size and the slant of the letters, all the same it is not bad for a first attempt, when one considers that he was still sick and suffering
and in a mood of deep discouragement.
I am become a burden to my friends and useless to my country
.

This on the eve of his great victory at Aboukir Bay, with the triumphs of Copenhagen and Trafalgar to follow! He rose from the ashes of defeat like the fabulous bird. So could I too, I resolved there and then. I would rise with him, above failure and discouragement, above my psychic mutilation. I would fight on. My battle would be Naples 1799, and I would win it for him. In the glow of this determination I took a new exercise book from my drawer, one of my specials, with strong covers and good, smooth paper. This would be my left-handed journal. I would not begin it yet; I would begin when he began, two days after the wound.

T
he July of mutilations and maimings gives way to glorious August, the Battle of the Nile on the first day of the month, in 1798. Of all his battles before Trafalgar, this was the one I looked forward to most.

A night battle, his only one. I was at my table in the ops room by 5
P.M.
, laying the ships out, a bottle of my father’s claret ready-opened at my elbow. I never drank before his battles, only after he had hoisted the order for close action.

Forty minutes to go. The long hoped-for, long sought-for engagement about to begin. Since April, Horatio has been scouring the Mediterranean in search of the French fleet. His squadron has been brought up to a strength of twelve seventy-four-gun warships and three frigates. The situation is desperate. We have no base east of Gibraltar; the Mediterranean is a hostile sea. On land the French are everywhere dominant. We know they are about to leave Toulon with
a fleet of transports and escorting warships commanded by Bonaparte in person. But we don’t know where he is intending to strike. It could be anywhere in the region. An attack on Portugal from the east, through Spain? A breakthrough into the Atlantic and a descent on Lisbon that way? A landing in Ireland, now in open revolt against us?

It is our task to find out. A heavy responsibility on that great stretch of water, in those slow ships. In May we learn from a captured French corvette that the expedition is about to set sail. Fifteen enemy sail of the line and twelve thousand troops are already embarked. The warships are under the command of Vice-Admiral François de Brueys, whose flagship is the gigantic
Orient
, 120 guns.

Still no-one knows where they are going. They are sighted north of Corsica, steering southeast. An attack on the Two Sicilies? But that would be easier by land. Or Malta, which dominates the central Mediterranean? But thirty-five thousand men, which Bonaparte’s strength is now believed to be, would be far more than needed for this. Some altogether more ambitious attempt it must be …

Late in July, from a Genovese brig hailed off Cape Passaro, we learn that the French have been in Malta, that the Knights Templar have surrendered to them, that they have filled the army’s coffers with the treasures of the churches and then left again, destination unknown.

In the solitude of the great cabin of our flagship, the
Vanguard
, with maps covering the table before us, we try to work it out, try to enter the mind of the enemy. Unlikely they have gone west; the prevailing winds of the season would make it difficult with transport ships. East, then. Corfu? Constantinople, where the Ottoman Empire could be smashed at the heart? But Bonaparte’s great enemy now is Britain, and the greatest threat to British interest lies farther east. We have detailed information about the French force now; in addition to troops and artillery it includes naturalists, astronomers, mathematicians.
What would be the destination for specialists such as these? It could only be countries with ancient, esoteric civilizations. Egypt, the Red Sea ports. Then India, and a crippling blow to this most vital of our colonies. That must be it.

We set off for Alexandria. But what if we are wrong? What if the slippery crappos have doubled back behind us, taken Sicily? Then the failure would be complete. Not a gallant failure, as Tenerife was regarded, but a failure of judgement with disastrous consequences for the whole conduct of the war. Mistakes like that are never forgotten, never forgiven. If we are wrong, our career is at an end. And we are handicapped, we are half blind in the metaphorical sense also—we have only three frigates, only three ships fast enough to scout ahead for information.

We are not wrong, but for some terrible days it seems that we are. No sign of them at Alexandria when we get there; they are still on the way, we have outsailed them, but of course we do not know this at the time. Back to Sicily; no sign there either. Egypt again, but now there is no doubt: the French have been sighted from Greece, heading southeast for Egypt.

Four days later, at ten o’clock on the morning of August 1, we sight once again the lighthouses and minarets of Alexandria. The harbour is crammed with empty transports, but there are no warships. Napoleon has landed. He is on his way to the destruction of the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids, and the conquest of Cairo.

Some minutes of terrible disappointment. Then we give the order to steer east along the coast, towards the delta of the Nile. At two in the afternoon, roughly three and a half hours ago, we see at last, with joy and relief, the masts and yards of the French fleet at anchor. On the halyards of the
Zealous
, second ship in the British line, the signal is hoisted:
Enemy in sight
.

You knew then that decisive action was a certainty.
Before this
time tomorrow, I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey
. That is what you said. Why does it trouble me so now, after all these years? Is it because of her? Like the cypress-and-laurel remark before the attack on Tenerife. That was traditional, death or glory, the genuine heroic impulse. But this … All those men, all the blood and rending of the flesh that awaited only a few hours away. A peerage or a state funeral. If I were talking to Miss Lily, I would not mention this remark of yours; she would call it monstrous. Still theatre, she would say, but a one-man show now, the others lining the decks to kick their legs, make up the chorus. Why I had begun to subject you to her opinion at all, that was the mystery. She was miles away in Derbyshire; why did I give her so much say? How could Avon Secretarial Services be expected to appreciate your heroic sense of destiny, the patriotic identification of Britain’s interests with your own? Her face with that little frown on it, the slight flush that came to her cheeks when she was indignant about something.