Victory (18 page)

It was near the middle of the day and the air was hot
down on our gundeck. I was sitting on a coil of rope with Stephen, who was now powder monkey to the next gun in line. We were waiting, waiting, keeping our balance as the ship pitched on toward the enemy. The massive black guns on our deck were to be double-shotted, loaded with twice the amount they usually fired.

“England expects us to do our duty?” said Andrew Scott a little peevishly to Jonathan. “Of course we'll do our duty, don't we always?”

“He knows that,” Jonathan said soothingly—though he had to say it loud too, for all of us had scarves bound round our heads and over our ears, against the noise that would swallow us when the firing began.

“Tha heard what he said about my notch,” said George Harris, our gun captain—a big man, with massive shoulders browned by the West Indian sun. He ran a finger over a V-shaped scar he had cut into the surface of the gun carriage, and I ached to have been there when he was cutting it, as I had ached for the last hour after hearing the story. Earlier, I had been sent down to the orlop deck, to check yet again my route to the next man in line from the magazine, and while I was gone the Admiral had passed by our gun. With the marine band playing cheerfully up on deck, he was touring all the gun crews, and he had come up behind George as he was cutting into the wood, the men told me. George had leapt to attention, stiff and straight, dropping his knife with a clatter.

“What's this, George Harris?” said Lieutenant Quilliam, at the Admiral's side.

“A notch for each great British victory, Your Honor,” George said. He pointed to the line of dark notches carved over the years into the old gun carriage. “I want this one done now, in case I'm not here to do it after.”

Nelson had laughed. He sounded really happy, they said, as he always did before a battle. “You'll make notches enough in the enemy's ships,” he said, and he clapped George on the back with his one arm, and moved on down the row of guns.

“I
wish
I'd been there!” I said now, again—but then all our heads went up, for somewhere out on the sea there was the deep sound of gunfire. Stephen and I jumped to our feet, and he ran back to his gun.

“Old Coll's reached them!” Andrew said. Word gets around a ship fast; even down on our dark gundeck we knew that the French and Spanish fleets were drawn up in a long line and that we were launching a double attack, one led by
Victory
and the other by Lord Collingwood's
Royal Sovereign
.

The rumbling and thumping came closer over the sea. We were all wound tight with waiting: sweating, bare-backed, some men rhythmically chewing tobacco, some laughing together, some quietly praying. The noise grew, until we could hear shouting up on deck; then there was a crash right overhead, as from somewhere a first shot hit
Victory
. Orders were shouted down to us to change the shot for our first broadside from double to single; the rest of the gun crew swung into action and I scrambled to keep out of their way.

It seemed like an age before the order came to fire. All the time through the gunport and the nearest hatchway we were hearing the mounting thunder of cannon, the horrid whine of shot passing overhead, and the crashes as cannonballs struck the ship. Up on deck, in the smoke and the roar, enemy fire was shredding our sails, smashing our spars, killing and wounding dozens and dozens of our men. Battle under sail is not like a prizefight, with two men hammering each other from the first moment to the last. It becomes so in the end, but before that, it is a long slow matter of sailing your ship into danger, enduring heavy fire, until you are in the right place to have all your guns at once smash away at the enemy.

And at last that moment came. There was another crash
overhead, the biggest so far—it must have been the shot that brought our mizzenmast down—and the whole ship shuddered. But above the cries and screams from the main deck we heard: “Make ready to fire!”—and we began. Even before our great gun first thundered and leapt back I was on my frantic way to fetch the next cartridge.

After that it was a blur of running and stumbling through the noise and smoke, to and fro between gun and orlop hatchway. And that space was made into the gateway of Hell, by something nobody could have warned me to expect.

You can be told about war, about death and wounds and pain, but nothing you are ever told will be like what you see and hear when it is all around you, real. On every run I made to fetch a new cartridge for the gun, I passed men on their way down to the surgeons in the forward part of the orlop deck; wounded men staggering as the ship rose and fell in the swells; screaming men being carried on swags of canvas, with great gaping wounds or with an arm or a leg shot away; silent white-faced men, unconscious, dragged by a desperate friend. And everywhere there was blood, bright red, running like water, dripping from one ladder step to another. Blood is slippery, you can slip in it, and then you yourself will bleed.

Once, swinging round with a new cartridge I found myself face to face with Oliver Pickin, his tanned face grey from strain or perhaps a wound, his white trousers splashed red with blood; he was holding in his arms
another midshipman, George Westphal, bleeding dreadfully from a huge gash in his head. Pickin slipped, and nearly dropped Westphal on the deck.

“Sam—” he said urgently, jerking his head at a bucket of sand beside me, and hearing him, the man who had just put a new salt box in my hand snatched it back for an instant so that I could upend the bucket and spill sand all round our feet. Then I was gone again, flying off with my cartridge, but leaving Pickin able to carry his burden safely in spite of the blood. Enemies who have a common enemy are made friends, I suppose.

The air was full of huge thunder and black smoke. Another explosion shook the ship, and she seemed to stand still. It was the shot that smashed our wheel and its tiller-ropes, so that a frenzied commotion began on the after end of our gundeck, where before long twenty men would be pushing the great tiller to steer
Victory
.

Out of our gunport, through the billowing smoke I caught a glimpse of another ship very close, and saw the flash of its guns. Then
Victory
must have slammed into her, for there was a thunderous crash like the world ending, and the impact lifted our huge gun up from its carriage and back again, and knocked us off our feet.

I was not thinking about anything now, nothing at all; I was just running.
Run, run, for a new cartridge; run, Sam, through the stinking smoke and the bloody sand. Run for your life, for your friends, for your ship, for your country, for your Admiral. . . .

The ship lurched as all the guns on our side fired a broadside, and right after it came a tremendous explosion abovedecks from our huge sixty-eight-pound carronade, the biggest gun in the fleet. Then fast after that
Victory
lurched again as the starboard guns on the other side of our deck fired a broadside into another French ship. All was noise and smoke and destruction, deafening, terrible.

And then it was all suddenly even worse.

There was a blinding flash of light as a shot or a grenade crashed through our gunport, blowing up as it came. Everyone was flung about. Something hit my arm and spun me round to face the next gun in line, and in that instant I saw Stephen seem to explode. One instant he was a boy; the next, a bloody unrecognizable heap on the deck, beyond help, beyond hope.

George Harris's face came close to mine out of the smoke as he picked himself up. “Get down to the surgeon, boy!” he yelled, and I saw that half my right hand was shot away. For a moment I felt nothing, and then pain hit me like a fierce blow. Someone grabbed my arm and wound a rag round my hand, and down I stumbled over the sand, bleeding into it myself now, down to that part of the orlop deck that was the worst small hell of all in our pain-filled ship, being lined with the bodies of wounded and dying men.

The ceiling was low, down there, and the dark space was lit only by candles flickering in horn lanterns. I could just make out our chief surgeon Mr. Beatty, and two helpers, busy in one corner sawing off the shattered leg of a man
who seemed to be mercifully unconscious. Closer by, the other surgeon Mr. Smith was sewing up a long gash in another seaman's back. His hand went up in the air with the needle in it and for a wild moment I was reminded of my mother sewing at home—but Mr. Smith was sewing a man's flesh, and like Mr. Beatty he was covered in blood, up his arms past his elbows and all over the long apron he wore.

I stood with a group of men waiting to be attended to, and another of the helpers looked at our wounds to see who should come first. When he came to me he made me drink a tot of rum, which stung my throat and made me fearful, because I had heard they gave you rum to dull the pain of having some part of you cut off.

“Way! Make way!” came a voice over the awful endless chorus of groans and pleas for help, and two men came slowly past me dragging a dead man by his arms. I looked down at the grey dead face as it went by, and I saw that it was Uncle Charlie.

I let out a great stricken cry. “My uncle! That's my uncle!” And though nobody in that terrible place had any time to care whether a corpse was a boy's uncle, one of the men carrying him glanced at me sorrowfully for a moment, out of black eyes in a dark brown face.

“Pray for his soul,” he said—and they were gone, up toward the deck and the sea.

I don't know whether I prayed. I know I was sobbing, so hard that I barely noticed the pain of whatever the surgeon's assistant did to my hand, when it was my turn.

“Easy, boy,” he said, bandaging me. “You're in luck—you lose two fingers but you keep your hand. Go sit over there, and hold thine arm in the air—the bleeding will stop presently.”

So there I was, squatting in a haze of pain and misery, with the blood drying all over my bare chest, when they brought our Admiral down. And all my self-pity dissolved itself into shame.

That blue coat was unmistakable, with the bright stars and orders glimmering through the bloodstains, though his face was covered with a handkerchief at first. They said he had put it there himself, to hide himself from the men so as not to discourage them. From above us, there was continuous noise, as enemy shot crashed into our ship and the guns roared like angry animals.

They put him gently down not far from where I was. The chaplain Mr. Scott came to him, and very soon Mr. Beatty. In a little gap between bursts of gunfire I heard the Admiral say to him, “Ah, Mr. Beatty, you can do nothing for me. I have but a short time to live. My back is shot through.”

Then another roaring broadside shook the ship, and figures gathered round him, and I saw and heard no more for a long time. I could think of only one thing. All the pain and loss, even the loss of my uncle, had retreated behind this one fact that was changing the whole world: the fact that we were losing Admiral Lord Nelson.

I must have been unconscious for a while after that. It was almost as if the world had become so bleak that I no
longer wanted to be in it. But I was young and strong and my body had a will of its own. When I opened my eyes again, into the stuffy air of the orlop deck and the thunderous noise all around, I could see the Admiral once more. He was lying with a sheet draped over his waist and legs, and his bare chest was very white. He looked suddenly very small. The surgeons had gone to cope with the constant flow of new wounded men carried down from the deadly racket abovedecks, and for the moment only a small group remained round Nelson. Mr. Burke the purser was holding a pillow to prop up his shoulders and head. Someone was fanning the Admiral with a folded paper, and Mr. Scott was holding a cup to his lips from time to time.

I could just make out the Admiral's voice. “Fan . . . fan . . .” he was saying faintly. “Drink . . . drink . . .”

Mr. Scott tipped a cup that was clearly nearly empty, and looked around as if to ask for more, but nobody was close by. Next to me on the deck was a mug of lemonade someone had given me before I had passed out. I scrambled clumsily to my feet and carried it to him, in my good hand. Mr. Scott took it without noticing who was handing it to him, but I saw the Admiral's blue eyes move in my direction. He could only see out of one of them, of course, but he was looking at me.

He blinked, as if he were trying to focus, and he said softly, “Good boy.”

Then Mr. Scott held the mug to his lips, and he sipped the lemonade.

Above the thunder from outside, and all the sounds of pain from around us, there was a sudden ruckus from the far corner of the orlop where Mr. Beatty was working on another amputation; a shriek, and several shouts. Mr. Beatty called loudly, urgently, “Mr. Benbow—I need you!” And the man who was fanning the Admiral jumped up, put the fan into my hand and ran.

So there I stood behind the Admiral's head, fanning him with my left hand, trying to ignore the throbbing of my right. I shall never know whether he knew I was Sam Robbins, or whether I was just a good boy, but that's of no consequence. It was the greatest privilege of my whole life, happening on the worst day of my whole life, and it went on for quite a while. Then the Admiral's steward Mr. Chevallier came running down to the orlop with tears all over his face, and thanked me, and took over the fanning.

The Admiral was dying.

I went back to my corner, and I cried too.