Brown on Resolution
Read Brown on Resolution Online
Authors: C. S. Forester
A man alone—
against the might
of a German cruiser
The autumn of 1914. In Europe, the warring nations are already locked in a bloody stalemate. But thousands of miles away, on the remote Pacific island of Resolution, a different—and very personal—battle is about to begin.
High among the island’s volcanic crags, a young English sailor gazes down on the German raider
Ziethen
, the battlecruiser whose guns had sunk his ship and sent his crewmates to their deaths. Armed only with a stolen rifle and stubborn, unquestioning courage, Leading Seaman Albert Brown is determined to stop
Ziethen
from making herself seaworthy and leaving Resolution before the searching British navy arrives. Even if it costs his twenty-year-old life . . .
Brown on Resolution
is an epic tale of individual courage in war, one of the incomparable C. S. Forester’s most stirring story-telling achievements.
Cecil Scott Forester was born in Cairo in 1899 and educated at Dulwich College and Guy’s Hospital, where he studied medicine. After successfully publishing his first novel,
Payment Deferred,
at the age of twenty-four, he went on to become the author of over forty books which have sold in millions all over the world, and been translated into many languages. His most popular books are undoubtedly his brilliant military-historical novels, of which the
Hornblower
naval adventures are best known.
Several of his novels have been made into films, including
The African Queen
which, with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in the lead roles, has become a cinema classic. After the war C. S. Forester settled in California, where he lived until his death in 1966.
Also by C. S. Forester
Novels
PAYMENT DEFERRED
PLAIN MURDER
THE GUN
DEATH TO THE FRENCH
THE AFRICAN QUEEN
THE GENERAL
THE EARTHLY PARADISE
THE CAPTAIN FROM CONNECTICUT
THE SHIP
THE SKY AND THE FOREST
RANDALL AND THE RIVER OF TIME
THE NIGHTMARE
THE GOOD SHEPHERD
MR. MIDSHIPMAN HORNBLOWER
LIEUTENANT HORNBLOWER
HORNBLOWER AND THE ‘HOTSPUR’
HORNBLOWER AND THE CRISIS
HORNBLOWER AND THE ‘ATROPOS’
THE HAPPY RETURN
FLYING COLOURS
THE COMMODORE
LORD HORNBLOWER
HORNBLOWER IN THE WEST INDIES
History
THE NAVAL WAR OF 1812 HUNTING THE BISMARK
Travel
THE VOYAGE OF THE ‘ANNIE MARBLE’
THE ‘ANNIE MARBLE’ IN GERMANY
Autobiography
LONG BEFORE FORTY
Biography
NELSON
Miscellaneous
MARIONETTES AT HOME
THE HORNBLOWER COMPANION
THE MAN IN THE YELLOW RAFT
For Children
POO-POO AND THE DRAGON
Published in 1977 by Triad/Mayflower Books
Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF
Triad Paperbacks Ltd is an imprint of
Chatto, Bodley Head and Jonathan Cape Ltd
and its associated companies.
First published by The Bodley Head Ltd 1929
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and Fakenham.
ISBN: 583 12818 1
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. This book is published at a net price and is supplied subject to the Publishers Association Standard Conditions of Sale registered under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956.
CHAPTER ONEL
EADING
S
EAMAN
A
LBERT
B
ROWN
lay dying on Resolution. He was huddled in a cleft in the grey-brown lava of which that desolate island is largely composed, on his back with his knees half drawn up in his fevered delirium. Sometimes he would mumble a few meaningless words and writhe feebly on to his side, only to fall back again a second later. He was dressed in what had once been a sailor’s suit of tropical white, but now it was so soiled and stained and draggled, so torn and frayed, as literally to be quite unrecognizable—it was now only a few thin, filthy rags feebly held together. His face was swollen and distorted, as were his hands, being quite covered with hideous lumps as a result of the poisoned bites of a myriad of flies—a little cloud of which hung murderously over him as he lay, combining with the shimmering reek of the sun-scorched rock almost to hide him from view. His feet, too, although a few fragments of what were once shoes still clung to them, were horribly swollen and bruised and cut. They were more like sodden lumps of raw horseflesh than human feet. Not the cruelest human being on earth could have contemplated those dreadful feet without a throb of pity.
Yet a very cursory inspection of Albert Brown’s dying body would be enough to show that he was not dying because of the biting flies, or even because of the hideous condition of his feet. For the dingy rags on his right shoulder were stained a sinister brown, and when he turned on his side he revealed the fact that those at his back were similarly stained, and a closer look through the tatters of cloth would discover that Brown’s right breast was covered with a black, oozing clot of blood like an empty football bladder hanging from a bullet wound over Brown’s third rib.
Brown lay at the edge of the central, lifeless portion of the island. Mounting up above him rose the bare lava of the highest point of Resolution, a distorted muddle of naked rock bearing a million million razor edges—razor edges which readily explained the frightful condition of his feet. Just at Brown’s level, stretching along at each side (for Resolution is a hog-backed island bent into a half-moon) began the cactus, ugly, nightmarish plants, like bottle-nosed pokers, clustering together thicker and thicker on the lower slopes, each bearing a formidable armament of spikes which explained the tattered condition of Brown’s clothes. Frequently, stretched out in the scanty line of shade cast by the cacti, there lay iguanas—mottled crested lizards—somnolently stupid. Overhead wheeled seabirds, and occasionally a friendly mocking bird, strayed up from the lower slopes, would hop close round Brown’s dying body and peer at him in seeming sympathy. Down at the water’s edge, where the Pacific broke against the lava boulders, there massed a herd of marine iguanas—fantastic creatures which bear only their Latin generic name—industriously gnawing the seaweed on which they live, while round them strayed marvellous scarlet crabs and the other representatives of the amphibious life of this last, almost unknown member of the Galapagos Islands.
The sky above was of a glaring, metallic blue, in which hung a burnished sun that seemed to be pouring a torrent of molten heat upon the tortured fragment of land beneath it. The sea was of a kindlier blue, and far out near the horizon could be seen a grey line stretching out of sight in both directions, which marked the edge of an ocean current, haunted by sea birds in hundreds, gathered there to revel in the food, living and dead, which clustered along this strange border.
No trace of human life could be seen around the whole wide horizon, save only for Leading Seaman Albert Brown, huddled in his cleft, and hunger and thirst and fever and loss of blood were soon to make an end even of him, the sole representative of the human race in all this wide expanse; perhaps in years to come some exploring scientist would happen across his bleached bones and would ponder over that broken rib and that smashed shoulder-blade. It is doubtful, though, whether he would explain them.
I
T ALL BEGAN
more than twenty years earlier, with Lieut-Commander R. E. S. Saville-Samarez,
RN
, seated in the train which was carrying him from the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and a not very arduous course of professional study therein, towards London and a not very closely planned week of relaxation therein. He sat in his first-class carriage and looked, now at his newspaper, now out of the window, now up at the carriage roof, now at the lady who was seated demurely in the diametrically opposite corner of the carriage. For the Commander was not much given to prolonged reading, nor to prolonged following of any one train of thought. He thought, as was only natural, of the influence of first-class certificates upon promotion, and from that he passed to the consideration of Seniority versus Selection, and the Zone System, and he wondered vaguely if he would ever attain the comfortable security and majestic authority of captain’s rank with its consequent inevitable climb upwards to the awesome heights of an admiral’s position. Admirals in one way were mere common-places to the Commander, for he came of a long line of naval ancestors, and an uncle of his was an Admiral at that moment, and his grandfather had commanded a ship of the line at Cronstadt during the Crimean War, and
his
grandfather had fought at the Nile and had been an Admiral during the reign of George IV.