Deeds that Won the Empire
Historic Battle Scenes (2024)

HISTORIC BATTLE SCENES

BY W. H. FITCHETT, LL. D.

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY

FIRST EDITION (Smith, Elder & Co.)... November 1897
Twenty-ninth Impression .............. October 1914
Reprinted (John Murray) .............. September 1917
Reprinted ......................... February 1921

PREFACE

The tales here told are written, not to glorify war, but to nourishpatriotism. They represent an effort to renew in popular memory thegreat traditions of the Imperial race to which we belong.

The history of the Empire of which we are subjects—the story of thestruggles and sufferings by which it has been built up—is the bestlegacy which the past has bequeathed to us. But it is a treasurestrangely neglected. The State makes primary education its anxiouscare, yet it does not make its own history a vital part of thateducation. There is real danger that for the average youth the greatnames of British story may become meaningless sounds, that hisimagination will take no colour from the rich and deep tints ofhistory. And what a pallid, cold-blooded citizenship this must produce!

War belongs, no doubt, to an imperfect stage of society; it has a sideof pure brutality. But it is not all brutal. Wordsworth's daring lineabout "God's most perfect instrument" has a great truth behind it.What examples are to be found in the tales here retold, not merely ofheroic daring, but of even finer qualities—of heroic fortitude; ofloyalty to duty stronger than the love of life; of the temper whichdreads dishonour more than it fears death; of the patriotism whichmakes love of the Fatherland a passion. These are the elements ofrobust citizenship. They represent some, at least, of the qualities bywhich the Empire, in a sterner time than ours, was won, and by which,in even these ease-loving days, it must be maintained.

These sketches appeared originally in the Melbourne Argus, and arerepublished by the kind consent of its proprietors. Each sketch iscomplete in itself; and though no formal quotation of authorities isgiven, yet all the available literature on each event described hasbeen laid under contribution. The sketches will be found to behistorically accurate.

CONTENTS

THE FIGHT OFF CAPE ST. VINCENT

THE HEIGHTS OF ABRAHAM

THE GREAT LORD HAWKE

THE NIGHT ATTACK ON BADAJOS

THE FIRE-SHIPS IN THE BASQUE ROADS

THE MAN WHO SPOILED NAPOLEON'S "DESTINY"

GREAT SEA-DUELS

THE BLOOD-STAINED HILL OF BUSACO

OF NELSON AND THE NILE

THE FUSILEERS AT ALBUERA

THE "SHANNON" AND THE "CHESAPEAKE"

THE GREAT BREACH OF CIUDAD RODRIGO

HOW THE "HERMIONE" WAS RECAPTURED

FRENCH AND ENGLISH IN THE PASSES

FAMOUS CUTTING-OUT EXPEDITIONS

MOUNTAIN COMBATS

THE BLOODIEST FIGHT IN THE PENINSULA

THE BATTLE OF THE BALTIC

KING-MAKING WATERLOO—

I.The Rival Hosts

II.Hougoumont

III.Picton and D'Erlon

IV."Scotland for Ever!"

V.Horsem*n and Squares

VI.The Fight of the Gunners

VII.The Old Guard

VIII.The Great Defeat

THE NIGHT ATTACK OFF CADIZ

TRAFALGAR—

I.The Strategy

II.How the Fleets Met

III.How the Victory was Won

LIST OF PLANS

THE BATTLE OFF CAPE ST. VINCENT

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC

THE SIEGE OF BADAJOS

THE BATTLE OF THE NILE

THE BATTLE OF ALBUERA

THE SIEGE OF CIUDAD RODRIGO

THE COMBAT OF RONCESVALLES

THE BATTLE OF ST. PIERRE

THE BATTLE OF THE BALTIC

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO

THE ATTACK OF TRAFALGAR

THE FIGHT OFF CAPE ST. VINCENT

THE SCEPTRE OF THE SEA.

"Old England's sons are English yet,
Old England's hearts are strong;
And still she wears her coronet
Aflame with sword and song.
As in their pride our fathers died,
If need be, so die we;
So wield we still, gainsay who will,
The sceptre of the sea.

We've Raleighs still for Raleigh's part,
We've Nelsons yet unknown;
The pulses of the Lion-Heart
Beat on through Wellington.
Hold, Britain, hold thy creed of old,
Strong foe and steadfast friend,
And still unto thy motto true,
'Defy not, but defend.'

Men whisper that our arm is weak,
Men say our blood is cold,
And that our hearts no longer speak
That clarion note of old;
But let the spear and sword draw near
The sleeping lion's den,
Our island shore shall start once more
To life, with armèd men."
—HERMAN CHARLES MERIVALE.

On the night of February 13, 1797, an English fleet of fifteen ships ofthe line, in close order and in readiness for instant battle, was undereasy sail off Cape St. Vincent. It was a moonless night, black withhaze, and the great ships moved in silence like gigantic spectres overthe sea. Every now and again there came floating from the south-eastthe dull sound of a far-off gun. It was the grand fleet of Spain,consisting of twenty-seven ships of line, under Admiral Don Josef deCordova; one great ship calling to another through the night, littledreaming that the sound of their guns was so keenly noted by the eagerbut silent fleet of their enemies to leeward. The morning of the14th—a day famous in the naval history of the empire—broke dim andhazy; grey sea, grey fog, grey dawn, making all things strangelyobscure. At half-past six, however, the keen-sighted British outlookscaught a glimpse of the huge straggling line of Spaniards, stretchingapparently through miles of sea haze. "They are thumpers!" as thesignal lieutenant of the Barfleur reported with emphasis to hiscaptain; "they loom like Beachy Head in a fog!" The Spanish fleet was,indeed, the mightiest ever sent from Spanish ports since "that greatfleet invincible" of 1588 carried into the English waters—but not outof them!—

"The richest spoils of Mexico, the stoutest hearts of Spain."

The Admiral's flag was borne by the Santissima Trinidad, a floatingmountain, the largest ship at that time on the sea, and carrying on herfour decks 130 guns. Next came six three-deckers carrying 112 gunseach, two ships of the line of 80 guns each, and seventeen carrying 74guns, with no less than twelve 34-gun frigates to act as a flyingcordon of skirmishers. Spain had joined France against England onSeptember 12, 1796, and Don Cordova, at the head of this immense fleet,had sailed from Cadiz to execute a daring and splendid strategy. Hewas to pick up the Toulon fleet, brush away the English squadronblockading Brest, add the great French fleet lying imprisoned there tohis forces, and enter the British Channel with above a hundred sail ofthe line under his flag, and sweep in triumph to the mouth of theThames! If the plan succeeded, Portugal would fall, a descent was tobe made on Ireland; the British flag, it was reckoned, would be sweptfrom the seas.

Sir John Jervis was lying in the track of the Spaniards to defeat thisingenious plan. Five ships of the line had been withdrawn from thesquadron blockading Brest to strengthen him; still he had only fifteenships against the twenty-seven huge Spaniards in front of him; whilst,if the French Toulon fleet behind him broke out, he ran the risk ofbeing crushed, so to speak, betwixt the upper and the nether millstone.Never, perhaps, was the naval supremacy of England challenged so boldlyand with such a prospect of success as at this moment. The northernpowers had coalesced under Russia, and only a few weeks later theEnglish guns were thundering over the roofs of Copenhagen, while theunited flags of France and Spain were preparing to sweep through thenarrow seas. The "splendid isolation" of to-day is no novelty. In1796, as it threatened to be in 1896, Great Britain stood singlyagainst a world in arms, and it is scarcely too much to say that herfate hung on the fortunes of the fleet that, in the grey dawn of St.Valentine's Day, a hundred years ago, was searching the skyline for thetopmasts of Don Cordova's huge three-deckers.

Fifteen to twenty-seven is enormous odds, but, on the testimony ofNelson himself, a better fleet never carried the fortunes of a greatcountry than that under Sir John Jervis. The mere names of the shipsor of their commanders awaken more sonorous echoes than the famouscatalogue of the ships in the "Iliad." Trowbridge, in the Culloden,led the van; the line was formed of such ships as the Victory, theflagship, the Barfleur, the Blenheim, the Captain, with Nelson ascommodore, the Excellent, under Collingwood, the Colossus, underMurray, the Orion, under Sir James Saumarez, &c. Finer sailors andmore daring leaders never bore down upon an enemy's fleet. The pictureoffered by the two fleets in the cold haze of that fateful morning, asa matter of fact, reflected the difference in their fighting andsea-going qualities. The Spanish fleet, a line of monsters, straggled,formless and shapeless, over miles of sea space, distracted withsignals, fluttering with many-coloured flags. The English fleet, grimand silent, bore down upon the enemy in two compact and firm-drawncolumns, ship following ship so closely and so exactly that bowspritand stern almost touched, while an air-line drawn from the foremast ofthe leading ship to the mizzenmast of the last ship in each columnwould have touched almost every mast betwixt. Stately, measured,threatening, in perfect fighting order, the compact line of the Britishbore down on the Spaniards.

Nothing is more striking in the battle of St. Vincent than the swiftand resolute fashion in which Sir John Jervis leaped, so to speak, athis enemy's throat, with the silent but deadly leap of a bulldog. Asthe fog lifted, about nine o'clock, with the suddenness and dramaticeffect of the lifting of a curtain in a great theatre, it revealed tothe British admiral a great opportunity. The weather division of theSpanish fleet, twenty-one gigantic ships, resembled nothing so much asa confused and swaying forest of masts; the leeward division—six shipsin a cluster, almost as confused—was parted by an interval of nearlythree miles from the main body of the fleet, and into that fatal gap,as with the swift and deadly thrust of a rapier, Jervis drove his fleetin one unswerving line, the two columns melting into one, shipfollowing hard on ship. The Spaniards strove furiously to close theirline, the twenty-one huge ships bearing down from the windward, thesmaller squadron clawing desperately up from the leeward. But theBritish fleet—a long line of gliding pyramids of sails, leaning overto the pressure of the wind, with "the meteor flag" flying from thepeak of each vessel, and the curving lines of guns awaiting grim andsilent beneath—was too swift. As it swept through the gap, theSpanish vice-admiral, in the Principe de Asturias, a greatthree-decker of 112 guns, tried the daring feat of breaking through theBritish line to join the severed squadron. He struck the English fleetalmost exactly at the flagship, the Victory. The Victory wasthrown into stays to meet her, the Spaniard swung round in response,and, exactly as her quarter was exposed to the broadside of theVictory, the thunder of a tremendous broadside rolled from that ship.The unfortunate Spaniard was smitten as with a tempest of iron, and thenext moment, with sails torn, topmasts hanging to leeward, ropeshanging loose in every direction, and her decks splashed red with theblood of her slaughtered crew, she broke off to windward. The ironline of the British was unpierceable! The leading three-decker of theSpanish lee division in like manner bore up, as though to break throughthe British line to join her admiral; but the grim succession ofthree-deckers, following swift on each other like the links of a movingiron chain, was too disquieting a prospect to be faced. It was not inSpanish seamanship, or, for the matter of that, in Spanish flesh andblood, to beat up in the teeth of such threatening lines of iron lips.The Spanish ships swung sullenly back to leeward, and the fleet of DonCordova was cloven in twain, as though by the stroke of some giganticsword-blade.

As soon as Sir John Jervis saw the steady line of his fleet drawn fairacross the gap in the Spanish line, he flung his leading ships up towindward on the mass of the Spanish fleet, by this time beating up towindward. The Culloden led, thrust itself betwixt the hindmostSpanish three-deckers, and broke into flame and thunder on either side.Six minutes after her came the Blenheim; then, in quick succession,the Prince George, the Orion, the Colossus. It was a crash ofswaying masts and bellying sails, while below rose the shouting of thecrews, and, like the thrusts of fiery swords, the flames shot out fromthe sides of the great three-deckers against each other, and over allrolled the thunder and the smoke of a Titanic sea-fight. Nothing moremurderous than close fighting betwixt the huge wooden ships of thosedays can well be imagined. The Victory, the largest British shippresent in the action, was only 186 feet long and 52 feet broad; yet inthat little area 1000 men fought, 100 great guns thundered. A Spanishship like the San Josef was 194 feet in length and 54 feet inbreadth; but in that area 112 guns were mounted, while the three deckswere thronged with some 1300 men. When floating batteries like theseswept each other with the flame of swiftly repeated broadsides at adistance of a few score yards, the destruction may be better imaginedthan described. The Spanish had an advantage in the number of guns andmen, but the British established an instant mastery by their silentdiscipline, their perfect seamanship, and the speed with which theirguns were worked. They fired at least three broadsides to every twothe Spaniards discharged, and their fire had a deadly precisioncompared with which that of the Spaniards was mere distractedspluttering.

Meanwhile the dramatic crisis of the battle came swiftly on. TheSpanish admiral was resolute to join the severed fragments of hisfleet. The Culloden, the Blenheim, the Prince George, and theOrion were thundering amongst his rearmost ships, and as the Britishline swept up, each ship tacked as it crossed the gap in the Spanishline, bore up to windward and added the thunder of its guns to thestorm of battle raging amongst the hindmost Spaniards. But naturallythe section of the British line that had not yet passed the gapshortened with every minute, and the leading Spanish ships at last sawthe sea to their leeward clear of the enemy, and the track open totheir own lee squadron. Instantly they swung round to leeward, thegreat four-decker, the flagship, with a company of sister giants, theSan Josef and the Salvador del Mundo, of 112 guns each, the SanNicolas, and three other great ships of 80 guns. It was a bold andclever stroke. This great squadron, with the breeze behind it, had butto sweep past the rear of the British line, join the lee squadron, andbear up, and the Spanish fleet in one unbroken mass would confront theenemy. The rear of the British line was held by Collingwood in theExcellent; next to him came the Diadem; the third ship was theCaptain, under Nelson. We may imagine how Nelson's solitary eye wasfixed on the great Spanish three-deckers that formed the Spanish van asthey suddenly swung round and came sweeping down to cross his stern.Not Napoleon himself had a vision more swift and keen for the changingphysiognomy of a great battle than Nelson, and he met the Spanishadmiral with a counter-stroke as brilliant and daring as can be foundin the whole history of naval warfare. The British fleet saw theCaptain suddenly swing out of line to leeward—in the direction fromthe Spanish line, that is—but with swift curve the Captain doubledback, shot between the two English ships that formed the rear of theline, and bore up straight in the path of the Spanish flagship, withits four decks, and the huge battleships on either side of it.

The Captain, it should be remembered, was the smallest 74 in theBritish fleet, and as the great Spanish ships closed round her andbroke into flame it seemed as if each one of them was big enough tohoist the Captain on board like a jolly-boat. Nelson's act was likethat of a single stockman who undertakes to "head off" a drove of angrybulls as they break away from the herd; but the "bulls" in this casewere a group of the mightiest battleships then afloat. Nelson's suddenmovement was a breach of orders; it left a gap in the British line; todash unsupported into the Spanish van seemed mere madness, and thespectacle, as the Captain opened fire on the huge SantissimaTrinidad, was simply amazing. Nelson was in action at once with theflagship of 130 guns, two ships of 112 guns, one of 80 guns, and two of74 guns! To the spectators who watched the sight the sides of theCaptain seemed to throb with quick-following pulses of flame as itscrew poured their shot into the huge hulks on every side of them. TheSpaniards formed a mass so tangled that they could scarcely fire at thelittle Captain without injuring each other; yet the English shipseemed to shrivel beneath even the imperfect fire that did reach her.Her foremast was shot away, her wheel-post shattered, her rigging torn,some of her guns dismantled, and the ship was practically incapable offurther service either in the line or in chase. But Nelson hadaccomplished his purpose: he had stopped the rush of the Spanish van.

At this moment the Excellent, under Collingwood, swept into the stormof battle that raged round the Captain, and poured three tremendousbroadsides into the Spanish three-decker the Salvador del Mundo thatpractically disabled her. "We were not further from her," the domesticbut hard-fighting Collingwood wrote to his wife, "than the length ofour garden." Then, with a fine feat of seamanship, the Excellentpassed between the Captain and the San Nicolas, scourging thatunfortunate ship with flame at a distance of ten yards, and then passedon to bestow its favours on the Santissima Trinidad—"such a ship,"Collingwood afterwards confided to his wife, "as I never saw before!"Collingwood tormented that monster with his fire so vehemently that sheactually struck, though possession of her was not taken before theother Spanish ships, coming up, rescued her, and she survived to carrythe Spanish flag in the great fight of Trafalgar.

Meanwhile the crippled Captain, though actually disabled, hadperformed one of the most dramatic and brilliant feats in the historyof naval warfare. Nelson put his helm to starboard, and ran, or ratherdrifted, on the quarter-gallery of the San Nicolas, and at onceboarded that leviathan. Nelson himself crept through thequarter-gallery window in the stern of the Spaniard, and found himselfin the officers' cabins. The officers tried to show fight, but therewas no denying the boarders who followed Nelson, and with shout andoath, with flash of pistol and ring of steel, the party swept throughon to the main deck. But the San Nicolas had been boarded also atother points. "The first man who jumped into the enemy'smizzen-chains," says Nelson, "was the first lieutenant of the ship,afterwards Captain Berry." The English sailors dropped from theirspritsail yard on to the Spaniard's deck, and by the time Nelsonreached the poop of the San Nicolas he found his lieutenant in theact of hauling down the Spanish flag. Nelson proceeded to collect theswords of the Spanish officers, when a fire was opened upon them fromthe stern gallery of the admiral's ship, the San Josef, of 112 guns,whose sides were grinding against those of the San Nicolas. Whatcould Nelson do? To keep his prize he must assault a still biggership. Of course he never hesitated! He flung his boarders up the sideof the huge San Josef, but he himself had to be assisted to climb themain chains of that vessel, his lieutenant this time dutifullyassisting his commodore up instead of indecorously going ahead of him."At this moment," as Nelson records the incident, "a Spanish officerlooked over the quarterdeck rail and said they surrendered. It was notlong before I was on the quarter-deck, where the Spanish captain, witha bow, presented me his sword, and said the admiral was dying of hiswounds. I asked him, on his honour, if the ship was surrendered. Hedeclared she was; on which I gave him my hand, and desired him to callon his officers and ship's company and tell them of it, which he did;and on the quarterdeck of a Spanish first-rate—extravagant as thestory may seem—did I receive the swords of vanquished Spaniards,which, as I received, I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen,who put them with the greatest sang-froid under his arm," a circle of"old Agamemnons," with smoke-blackened faces, looking on in grimapproval.

This is the story of how a British fleet of fifteen vessels defeated aSpanish fleet of twenty-seven, and captured four of their finest ships.It is the story, too, of how a single English ship, the smallest 74 inthe fleet—but made unconquerable by the presence of Nelson—stayed theadvance of a whole squadron of Spanish three-deckers, and took twoships, each bigger than itself, by boarding. Was there ever a finerdeed wrought under "the meteor flag"! Nelson disobeyed orders byleaving the English line and flinging himself on the van of theSpaniards, but he saved the battle. Calder, Jervis's captain,complained to the admiral that Nelson had "disobeyed orders." "Hecertainly did," answered Jervis; "and if ever you commit such a breachof your orders I will forgive you also."

THE HEIGHTS OF ABRAHAM

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."
—SIR WALTER SCOTT.

The year 1759 is a golden one in British history. A great French armythat threatened Hanover was overthrown at Minden, chiefly by the heroicstupidity of six British regiments, who, mistaking their orders, chargedthe entire French cavalry in line, and destroyed them. "I have seen,"said the astonished French general, "what I never thought to bepossible—a single line of infantry break through three lines of cavalryranked in order of battle, and tumble them into ruin!" Contades omittedto add that this astonishing infantry, charging cavalry in openformation, was scourged during their entire advance by powerful batterieson their flank. At Quiberon, in the same year, Hawke, amid a tempest,destroyed a mighty fleet that threatened England with invasion; and onthe heights of Abraham, Wolfe broke the French power in America. "We areforced," said Horace Walpole, the wit of his day, "to ask every morningwhat new victory there is, for fear of missing one." Yet, of all thegreat deeds of that annus mirabilis, the victory which overthrewMontcalm and gave Quebec to England—a victory achieved by the genius ofPitt and the daring of Wolfe—was, if not the most shining in quality,the most far-reaching in its results. "With the triumph of Wolfe on theheights of Abraham," says Green, "began the history of the United States."

The hero of that historic fight wore a singularly unheroic aspect.Wolfe's face, in the famous picture by West, resembles that of a nervousand sentimental boy—he was an adjutant at sixteen, and only thirty-threewhen he fell, mortally wounded, under the walls of Quebec. His foreheadand chin receded; his nose, tip-tilted heavenwards, formed with his otherfeatures the point of an obtuse triangle. His hair was fiery red, hisshoulders narrow, his legs a pair of attenuated spindle-shanks; he was achronic invalid. But between his fiery poll and his plebeian andupturned nose flashed a pair of eyes—keen, piercing, and steady—worthyof Caesar or of Napoleon. In warlike genius he was on land as Nelson wason sea, chivalrous, fiery, intense. A "magnetic" man, with a strangegift of impressing himself on the imagination of his soldiers, and of sopenetrating the whole force he commanded with his own spirit that in hishands it became a terrible and almost resistless instrument of war. Thegift for choosing fit agents is one of the highest qualities of genius;and it is a sign of Pitt's piercing insight into character that, for thegreat task of overthrowing the French power in Canada, he chose whatseemed to commonplace vision a rickety, hypochondriacal, and veryyouthful colonel like Wolfe.

Pitt's strategy for the American campaign was spacious, not to saygrandiose. A line of strong French posts, ranging from Duquesne, on theOhio, to Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, held the English settlements onthe coast girdled, as in an iron band, from all extension westward; whileQuebec, perched in almost impregnable strength on the frowning cliffswhich look down on the St. Lawrence, was the centre of the French powerin Canada. Pitt's plan was that Amherst, with 12,000 men, should captureTiconderoga; Prideaux, with another powerful force, should carryMontreal; and Wolfe, with 7000 men, should invest Quebec, where Amherstand Prideaux were to join him. Two-thirds of this great plan broke down.Amherst and Prideaux, indeed, succeeded in their local operations, butneither was able to join Wolfe, who had to carry out with one army thetask for which three were designed.

On June 21, 1759, the advanced squadron of the fleet conveying Wolfe cameworking up the St. Lawrence. To deceive the enemy they flew the whiteflag, and, as the eight great ships came abreast of the Island ofOrleans, the good people of Quebec persuaded themselves it was a Frenchfleet bringing supplies and reinforcements. The bells rang a welcome;flags waved. Boats put eagerly off to greet the approaching ships. Butas these swung round at their anchorage the white flag of Francedisappeared, and the red ensign of Great Britain flew in its place. Thecrowds, struck suddenly dumb, watched the gleam of the hostile flag withchap-fallen faces. A priest, who was staring at the ships through atelescope, actually dropped dead with the excitement and passion createdby the sight of the British fleet. On June 26 the main body of the fleetbringing Wolfe himself with 7000 troops, was in sight of the lofty cliffson which Quebec stands; Cook, afterwards the famous navigator, master ofthe Mercury, sounding ahead of the fleet. Wolfe at once seized theIsle of Orleans, which shelters the basin of Quebec to the east, anddivides the St. Lawrence into two branches, and, with a few officers,quickly stood on the western point of the isle. At a glance thedesperate nature of the task committed to him was apparent.

Quebec stands on the rocky nose of a promontory, shaped roughly like abull's-head, looking eastward. The St. Lawrence flows eastward under thechin of the head; the St. Charles runs, so to speak, down its nose fromthe north to meet the St. Lawrence. The city itself stands on loftycliffs, and as Wolfe looked upon it on that June evening far away, it wasgirt and crowned with batteries. The banks of the St. Lawrence, thatdefine what we have called the throat of the bull, are precipitous andlofty, and seem by mere natural strength to defy attack, though it wasjust here, by an ant-like track up 250 feet of almost perpendicularcliff, Wolfe actually climbed to the plains of Abraham. To the east ofQuebec is a curve of lofty shore, seven miles long, between the St.Charles and the Montmorenci. When Wolfe's eye followed those seven milesof curving shore, he saw the tents of a French army double his own instrength, and commanded by the most brilliant French soldier of hisgeneration, Montcalm. Quebec, in a word, was a great natural fortress,attacked by 9000 troops and defended by 16,000; and if a daring militarygenius urged the English attack, a soldier as daring and well-nigh asable as Wolfe directed the French defence.

Montcalm gave a proof of his fine quality as a soldier within twenty-fourhours of the appearance of the British fleet. The very afternoon theBritish ships dropped anchor a terrific tempest swept over the harbour,drove the transports from their moorings, dashed the great ships of waragainst each other, and wrought immense mischief. The tempest dropped asquickly as it had arisen. The night fell black and moonless. Towardsmidnight the British sentinels on the point of the Isle of Orleans sawdrifting silently through the gloom the outlines of a cluster of ships.They were eight huge fire-ships, floating mines packed with explosives.The nerve of the French sailors, fortunately for the British, failedthem, and they fired the ships too soon. But the spectacle of theseflaming monsters as they drifted towards the British fleet was appalling.The river showed ebony-black under the white flames. The glare lit upthe river cliffs, the roofs of the city, the tents of Montcalm, theslopes of the distant hills, the black hulls of the British ships. Itwas one of the most stupendous exhibitions of fireworks ever witnessed!But it was almost as harmless as a display of fireworks. The boats fromthe British fleet were by this time in the water, and pulling with steadydaring to meet these drifting volcanoes. They were grappled, towed tothe banks, and stranded, and there they spluttered and smoked and flamedtill the white light of the dawn broke over them. The only mischiefachieved by these fire-ships was to burn alive one of their own captainsand five or six of his men, who failed to escape in their boats.

Wolfe, in addition to the Isle of Orleans, seized Point Levi, oppositethe city, and this gave him complete command of the basin of Quebec; fromhis batteries on Point Levi, too, he could fire directly on the city, anddestroy it if he could not capture it. He himself landed the main bodyof his troops on the east bank of the Montmorenci, Montcalm's position,strongly entrenched, being between him and the city. Between the twoarmies, however, ran the deep gorge through which the swift current ofthe Montmorenci rushes down to join the St. Lawrence. The gorge isbarely a gunshot in width, but of stupendous depth. The Montmorencitumbles over its rocky bed with a speed that turns the flashing watersalmost to the whiteness of snow. Was there ever a more curious militaryposition adopted by a great general in the face of superior forces!Wolfe's tiny army was distributed into three camps: his right wing on theMontmorenci was six miles distant from his left wing at Point Levi, andbetween the centre, on the Isle of Orleans, and the two wings, ran thetwo branches of the St. Lawrence. That Wolfe deliberately made such adistribution of his forces under the very eyes of Montcalm showed hisamazing daring. And yet beyond firing across the Montmorenci onMontcalm's left wing, and bombarding the city from Point Levi, theBritish general could accomplish nothing. Montcalm knew that winter mustcompel Wolfe to retreat, and he remained stubbornly but warily on thedefensive.

On July 18 the British performed a daring feat. In the darkness of thenight two of the men-of-war and several sloops ran past the Quebecbatteries and reached the river above the town; they destroyed somefireships they found there, and cut off Montcalm's communication by waterwith Montreal. This rendered it necessary for the French to establishguards on the line of precipices between Quebec and Cap-Rouge. On July28 the French repeated the experiment of fire-ships on a still moregigantic scale. A vast fire-raft was constructed, composed of someseventy schooners, boats, and rafts, chained together, and loaded withcombustibles and explosives. The fire-raft is described as being 100fathoms in length, and its appearance, as it came drifting on thecurrent, a mass of roaring fire, discharging every instant a shower ofmissiles, was terrifying. But the British sailors dashed down upon it,broke the huge raft into fragments, and towed them easily ashore. "Hangit, Jack," one sailor was heard to say to his mate as he tugged at theoar, "didst thee ever take hell in tow before?"

Time was on Montcalm's side, and unless Wolfe could draw him from hisimpregnable entrenchments and compel him to fight, the game was lost.When the tide fell, a stretch of shoal a few score yards wide was leftbare on the French side of the Montmorenci. The slope that covered thiswas steep, slippery with grass, crowned by a great battery, and swept bythe cross-fire of entrenchments on either flank. Montcalm, too, holdingthe interior lines, could bring to the defence of this point twice theforce with which Wolfe could attack it. Yet to Wolfe's keen eyes thisseemed the one vulnerable point in Montcalm's front, and on July 31 hemade a desperate leap upon it.

The attack was planned with great art. The British batteries thunderedacross the Montmorenci, and a feint was made of fording that river higherup, so as to distract the attention of the French, whilst the boats ofthe fleet threatened a landing near Quebec itself. At half-past five thetide was at its lowest, and the boat-flotilla, swinging round at asignal, pulled at speed for the patch of muddy foreshore alreadyselected. The Grenadiers and Royal Americans leaped ashore in the mud,and—waiting neither for orders, nor leaders, nor supports—dashed up thehill to storm the redoubt. They reached the first redoubt, tumbled overit and through it, only to find themselves breathless in a semi-circle offire. The men fell fast, but yet struggled fiercely upwards. A furiousstorm of rain broke over the combatants at that moment, and made thesteep grass-covered slope as slippery as mere glass. "We could not seehalf-way down the hill," writes the French officer in command of thebattery on the summit. But through the smoke and the driving rain theycould still see the Grenadiers and Royal Americans in ragged clusters,scarce able to stand, yet striving desperately to climb upwards. Thereckless ardour of the Grenadiers had spoiled Wolfe's attack, the suddenstorm helped to save the French, and Wolfe withdrew his broken butfurious battalions, having lost some 500 of his best men and officers.

The exultant French regarded the siege as practically over; but Wolfe wasa man of heroic and quenchless tenacity, and never so dangerous as whenhe seemed to be in the last straits. He held doggedly on, in spite ofcold and tempest and disease. His own frail body broke down, and for thefirst time the shadow of depression fell on the British camps when theyno longer saw the red head and lean and scraggy body of their generalmoving amongst them. For a week, between August 22 and August 29, he layapparently a dying man, his face, with its curious angles, white withpain and haggard with disease. But he struggled out again, and framedyet new plans of attack. On September 10 the captains of the men-of-warheld a council on board the flagship, and resolved that the approach ofwinter required the fleet to leave Quebec without delay. By this time,too, Wolfe's scanty force was diminished one-seventh by disease or lossesin battle. Wolfe, however had now formed the plan which ultimately gavehim success, though at the cost of his own life.

From a tiny little cove, now known as Wolfe's Cove, five miles to thewest of Quebec, a path, scarcely accessible to a goat, climbs up the faceof the great cliff, nearly 250 feet high. The place was so inaccessiblethat only a post of 100 men kept guard over it. Up that track, in theblackness of the night, Wolfe resolved to lead his army to the attack onQuebec! It needed the most exquisite combinations to bring the attackingforce to that point from three separate quarters, in the gloom of night,at a given moment, and without a sound that could alarm the enemy. Wolfewithdrew his force from the Montmorenci, embarked them on board hisships, and made every sign of departure. Montcalm mistrusted thesesigns, and suspected Wolfe would make at least one more leap on Quebecbefore withdrawing. Yet he did not in the least suspect Wolfe's realdesigns. He discussed, in fact, the very plan Wolfe adopted, butdismissed it by saying, "We need not suppose that the enemy have wings."The British ships were kept moving up and down the river front forseveral days, so as to distract and perplex the enemy. On September 12Wolfe's plans were complete, and he issued his final orders. Onesentence in them curiously anticipates Nelson's famous signal atTrafalgar. "Officers and men," wrote Wolfe, "will remember what theircountry expects of them." A feint on Beauport, five miles to the eastof Quebec, as evening fell, made Montcalm mass his troops there; but itwas at a point five miles west of Quebec the real attack was directed.

At two o'clock at night two lanterns appeared for a minute in the maintopshrouds of the Sunderland. It was the signal, and from the fleet, fromthe Isle of Orleans, and from Point Levi, the English boats stolesilently out, freighted with some 1700 troops, and converged towards thepoint in the black wall of cliffs agreed upon. Wolfe himself was in theleading boat of the flotilla. As the boats drifted silently through thedarkness on that desperate adventure, Wolfe, to the officers about him,commenced to recite Gray's "Elegy":—

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

"Now, gentlemen," he added, "I would rather have written that poem thantake Quebec." Wolfe, in fact, was half poet, half soldier. Suddenlyfrom the great wall of rock and forest to their left broke the challengeof a French sentinel—"Qui vive?" A Highland officer of Fraser'sregiment, who spoke French fluently, answered the challenge. "France.""A quel regiment?" "De la Reine," answered the Highlander. As ithappened the French expected a flotilla of provision boats, and after alittle further dialogue, in which the cool Highlander completely deceivedthe French sentries, the British were allowed to slip past in thedarkness. The tiny cove was safely reached, the boats stole silently upwithout a blunder, twenty-four volunteers from the Light Infantry leapedfrom their boat and led the way in single file up the path, that ran likea thread along the face of the cliff. Wolfe sat eagerly listening in hisboat below. Suddenly from the summit he saw the flash of the muskets andheard the stern shout which told him his men were up. A clear, firmorder, and the troops sitting silent in the boats leaped ashore, and thelong file of soldiers, like a chain of ants, went up the face of thecliff, Wolfe amongst the foremost, and formed in order on the plateau,the boats meanwhile rowing back at speed to bring up the remainder of thetroops. Wolfe was at last within Montcalm's guard!

When the morning of the 13th dawned, the British army, in line of battle,stood looking down on Quebec. Montcalm quickly heard the news, and cameriding furiously across the St. Charles and past the city to the scene ofdanger. He rode, as those who saw him tell, with a fixed look, anduttering not a word. The vigilance of months was rendered worthless bythat amazing night escalade. When he reached the slopes Montcalm sawbefore him the silent red wall of British infantry, the Highlanders withwaving tartans and wind-blown plumes—all in battle array. It was not adetachment, but an army!

The fight lasted fifteen minutes, and might be told in almost as manywords. Montcalm brought on his men in three powerful columns, in numberdouble that of Wolfe's force. The British troops stood grimly silent,though they were tormented by the fire of Indians and Canadians lying inthe grass. The French advanced eagerly, with a tumult of shouts and aconfused fire; the British moved forward a few rods, halted, dressedtheir lines, and when the French were within forty paces threw in onefierce volley, so sharply timed that the explosion of 4000 musketssounded like the sudden blast of a cannon. Again, again, and yet again,the flame ran from end to end of the steadfast hue. When the smokelifted, the French column were wrecked. The British instantly charged.The spirit of the clan awoke in Fraser's Highlanders: they flung asidetheir muskets, drew their broadswords, and with a fierce Celtic sloganrushed on the enemy. Never was a charge pressed more ruthlessly home.After the fight one of the British officers wrote: "There was not abayonet in the three leading British regiments, nor a broadsword amongstthe Highlanders, that was not crimson with the blood of a foeman." Wolfehimself charged at the head of the Grenadiers, his bright uniform makinghim conspicuous. He was shot in the wrist, wrapped a handkerchief roundthe wound, and still ran forward. Two other bullets struck him—one, itis said, fired by a British deserter, a sergeant broken by Wolfe forbrutality to a private. "Don't let the soldiers see me drop," saidWolfe, as he fell, to an officer running beside him. An officer of theGrenadiers, a gentleman volunteer, and a private carried Wolfe to aredoubt near. He refused to allow a surgeon to be called. "There is noneed," he said, "it is all over with me." Then one of the little group,casting a look at the smoke-covered battlefield, cried, "They run! Seehow they run!" "Who run?" said the dying Wolfe, like a man roused fromsleep. "The enemy, sir," was the answer. A flash of life came back toWolfe; the eager spirit thrust from it the swoon of death; he gave aclear, emphatic order for cutting off the enemy's retreat; then, turningon his side, he added, "Now God be praised; I die in peace."

That fight determined that the North American continent should be theheritage of the Anglo-Saxon race. And, somehow, the popular instinct,when the news reached England, realised the historic significance of theevent. "When we first heard of Wolfe's glorious deed," writes Thackerayin "The Virginians"—"of that army marshalled in darkness and carriedsilently up the midnight river—of those rocks scaled by the intrepidleader and his troops—of the defeat of Montcalm on the open plain by thesheer valour of his conqueror—we were all intoxicated in England by thenews." Not merely all London but half England flamed into illuminations.One spot alone was dark—Blackheath, where, solitary amidst a rejoicingnation, Wolfe's mother mourned for her heroic son—like Milton'sLycidas—"dead ere his prime."

THE GREAT LORD HAWKE

THE ENGLISH FLAG

"What is the flag of England? Winds of the world, declare!
********
The lean white bear hath seen it in the long, long Arctic night,
The musk-ox knows the standard that flouts the Northern light.
********
Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone,
But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag has flown.
I have wrenched it free from the halliard to hang for a wisp on the Horn;
I have chased it north to the Lizard—ribboned and rolled and torn;
I have spread its folds o'er the dying, adrift in a hopeless sea;
I have hurled it swift on the slaver, and seen the slave set free.
********
Never the lotos closes, never the wild-fowl wake,
But a soul goes out on the East Wind, that died for England's sake—
Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maid—
Because on the bones of the English, the English flag is stayed.
********
The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it—the frozen dews have kissed—
The naked stars have seen it, a fellow-star in the mist.
What is the flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare;
Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!"
—KIPLING.

"The great Lord Hawke" is Burke's phrase, and is one of the best-earnedepithets in literature. Yet what does the average Englishman to-dayremember of the great sailor who, through the bitter November gales of1759, kept dogged and tireless watch over the French fleet in Brest,destroyed that fleet with heroic daring amongst the sands of Quiberon,while the fury of a Bay of Biscay tempest almost drowned the roar ofhis guns, and so crushed a threatened invasion of England?

Hawke has been thrown by all-devouring Time into his wallet as mere"alms for oblivion"; yet amongst all the sea-dogs who ever sailedbeneath "the blood-red flag" no one ever less deserved that fate.Campbell, in "Ye Mariners of England," groups "Blake and mighty Nelson"together as the two great typical English sailors. Hawke stands midwaybetwixt them, in point both of time and of achievements, though he hadmore in him of Blake than of Nelson. He lacked, no doubt, the dazzlingelectric strain that ran through the war-like genius of Nelson.Hawke's fighting quality was of the grim, dour home-spun character; butit was a true genius for battle, and as long as Great Britain is asea-power the memory of the great sailor who crushed Gentians offQuiberon deserves to live.

Hawke, too, was a great man in the age of little men. The fame of theEnglish navy had sunk to the lowest point. Its ships were rotten; itscaptains had lost the fighting tradition; its fleets were paralysed bya childish system of tactics which made a decisive battle almostimpossible. Hawke describes the Portland, a ship of which he was incommand, as "iron-sick"; the wood was too rotten, that is, to hold theiron bolts, so that "not a man in the ship had a dry place to sleepin." His men were "tumbling down with scurvy"; his mainmast was sopulverised by dry rot that a walking-stick could be thrust into it. Ofanother ship, the Ramilies—his favourite ship, too—he says, "Itbecame water-logged whenever it blowed hard." The ships' bottoms grewa rank crop of grass, slime, shells, barnacles, &c., till the sluggishvessels needed almost a gale to move them. Marines were not yetinvented; the navy had no uniform. The French ships of that day werebetter built, better armed, and sometimes better fought than Britishships. A British 70-gun ship in armament and weight of fire was onlyequal to a French ship of 52 guns. Every considerable fight waspromptly followed by a crop of court-martials, in which captains weretried for misconduct before the enemy, such as to-day is unthinkable.Admiral Matthews was broken by court-martial for having, with an excessof daring, pierced the French line off Toulon, and thus sacrificedpedantic tactics to victory. But the list of court-martials heldduring the second quarter of the eighteenth century on British captainsfor beginning to fight too late, or for leaving off too soon, would, ifpublished, astonish this generation. After the fight off Toulon in1744, two admirals and six post-captains were court-martialled.Admiral Byng was shot on his own deck, not exactly as Voltaire's motdescribes it, pour encourager les autres, and not quite forcowardice, for Byng was no coward. But he had no gleam of unselfishpatriotic fire, and nothing of the gallant fighting impulse we havelearned to believe is characteristic of the British sailor. He lostMinorca, and disgraced the British flag because he was too dainty toface the stern discomforts of a fight. The corrupt and ignoble temperof English politics—the legacy of Walpole's evil régime—poisoned theblood of the navy. No one can have forgotten Macaulay's picture ofNewcastle, at that moment Prime Minister of England; the sly, greedy,fawning politician, as corrupt as Walpole, without his genius; withouthonour, without truth, who loved office only less than he loved his ownneck. A Prime Minister like Newcastle made possible an admiral likeByng. Horace Walpole tells the story of how, when the much-enduringBritish public broke into one of its rare but terrible fits of passionafter the disgrace of Minorca, and Newcastle was trembling for his ownhead, a deputation from the city of London waited upon him, demandingthat Byng should be put upon his trial. "Oh, indeed," repliedNewcastle, with fawning gestures, "he shall be tried immediately. Heshall be hanged directly!" It was an age of base men, and thenavy—neglected, starved, dishonoured—had lost the great traditions ofthe past, and did not yet feel the thrill of the nobler spirit soon tosweep over it.

But in 1759 the dazzling intellect and masterful will of the first Pittcontrolled the fortunes of England, and the spirit of the nation wasbeginning to awake. Burns and Wilberforce and the younger Pitt wereborn that year; Minden was fought; Wolfe saw with dying eyes the Frenchbattalions broken on the plains of Abraham and Canada won. But thegreat event of the year is Hawke's defeat of Conflans off Quiberon.Hawke was the son of a barrister; he entered the navy at fourteen yearsof age as a volunteer, obtained the rating of an able seaman atnineteen years of age, was a third lieutenant at twenty-four, andbecame captain at thirty. He knew the details of his profession aswell as any sea-dog of the forecastle, was quite modern in the keen andhumane interest he took in his men, had something of Wellington'shigh-minded allegiance to duty, while his fighting had a stern butsober thoroughness worthy of Cromwell's Ironsides. The British peoplecame to realise that he was a sailor with the strain of a bulldog inhim; an indomitable fighter, who, ordered to blockade a hostile port,would hang on, in spite of storms and scurvy, while he had a man leftwho could pull a rope or fire a gun; a fighter, too, of the type dearto the British imagination, who took the shortest course to the enemy'sline, and would exchange broadsides at pistol-shot distance while hisship floated.

In 1759 a great French army threatened the shores of England. At Havreand Dunkirk huge flotillas of flat-bottomed boats lay at theirmoorings; 18,000 French veterans were ready to embark. A great fleetunder the command of Conflans—one of the ablest seamen France has everproduced—was gathered at Brest. A French squadron was to break out ofToulon, join Conflans, sweep the narrow seas, and convoy the Frenchexpedition to English shores. The strategy, if it had succeeded, mighthave changed the fate of the world.

To Hawke was entrusted the task of blockading Conflans in Brest, and agreater feat of seamanship is not to be found in British records. TheFrench fleet consisted of 25 ships, manned by 15,200 men, and carrying1598 guns. The British fleet numbered 23 ships, with 13,295 men, andcarrying 1596 guns. The two fleets, that is, were nearly equal, theadvantage, on the whole, being on the side of the French. Hawketherefore had to blockade a fleet equal to his own, the French shipslying snugly in harbour, the English ships scourged by November galesand rolling in the huge seas of the Bay of Biscay. Sir CloudesleyShovel, himself a seaman of the highest quality, said that "an admiralwould deserve to be broke who kept great ships out after the end ofSeptember, and to be shot if after October." Hawke maintained hisblockade of Brest for six months. His captains broke down in health,his men were dying from scurvy, the bottoms of his ships grew foul; itwas a stormy season in the stormiest of seas. Again and again the wildnorth-west gales blew the British admiral off his cruising ground. Buthe fought his way back, sent his ships, singly or in couples, to Torbayor Plymouth for a moment's breathing space, but himself held on, with agrim courage and an unslumbering vigilance which have never beensurpassed. On November 6, a tremendous westerly gale swept over theEnglish cruising-ground. Hawke battled with it for three days, andthen ran, storm-driven and half-dismantled, to Torbay for shelter onthe 10th. He put to sea again on the 12th. The gale had veered roundto the south-west, but blew as furiously as ever, and Hawke was oncemore driven back on the 13th to Torbay. He struggled out again on the14th, to find that the French had escaped! The gale that blew Hawkefrom his post brought a French squadron down the Channel, which raninto Brest and joined Conflans there; and on the 14th, when Hawke wasdesperately fighting his way back to his post, Conflans put to sea,and, with the gale behind him, ran on his course to Quiberon. There hehoped to brush aside the squadron keeping guard over the Frenchtransports, embark the powerful French force assembled there, and swoopdown on the English coast. The wild weather, Conflans reckoned, wouldkeep Hawke storm-bound in Torbay till this scheme was carried out.

But Hawke with his whole fleet, fighting his way in the teeth of thegale, reached Ushant on the very day Conflans broke out of Brest, and,fast as the French fleet ran before the gale, the white sails ofHawke's ships, showing over the stormy rim of the horizon, came on theFrenchman's track. Hawke's frigates, outrunning those heavysea-waggons, his line-of-battle ships, hung on Conflans' rear. Themain body of the British fleet followed, staggering under theirpyramids of sails, with wet decks and the wild north-west gale on theirquarter. Hawke's best sailers gained steadily on the laggards ofConflans' fleet. Had Hawke obeyed the puerile tactics of his day hewould have dressed his line and refused to attack at all unless hecould bring his entire fleet into action. But, as Hawke himself saidafterwards, he "had determined to attack them in the old way and makedownright work of them," and he signalled his leading ships to attackthe moment they brought an enemy's ship within fire. Conflans couldnot abandon his slower ships, and he reluctantly swung round his vanand formed line to meet the attack.

As the main body of the English came up, the French admiral suddenlyadopted a strategy which might well have baffled a less daringadversary than Hawke. He ran boldly in shore towards the mouth of theVilaine. It was a wild stretch of most dangerous coast; the graniteBreton hills above; splinters of rocky islets, on which the huge searollers tore themselves into white foam, below; and more dangerousstill, and stretching far out to sea, wide reaches of shoal andquicksand. From the north-west the gale blew more wildly than ever;the sky was black with flying clouds; on the Breton hills thespectators clustered in thousands. The roar of the furious breakersand the shrill note of the gale filled the very air with tumult.Conflans had pilots familiar with the coast, yet it was bold seamanshipon his part to run down to a lee shore on such a day of tempest. Hawkehad no pilots and no charts; but he saw before him, half hidden in mistand spray, the great hulls of the ships over which he had kept watch solong in Brest harbour, and he anticipated Nelson's strategy forty yearsafterwards. "Where there is room for the enemy to swing," said Nelson,"there is room for me to anchor." "Where there's a passage for theenemy," argued Hawke, "there is a passage for me! Where a Frenchmancan sail, an Englishman can follow! Their pilots shall be ours. Ifthey go to pieces in the shoals, they will serve as beacons for us."

And so, on the wild November afternoon, with the great billows that theBay of Biscay hurls on that stretch of iron-bound coast ridingshoreward in league-long rollers, Hawke flung himself into the boilingcaldron of rocks and shoals and quicksands. No more daring deed wasever done at sea. Measured by mere fighting courage, there werethousands of men in the British fleet as brave as Hawke. But the ironnerve that, without an instant's pause, in a scene so wild, on a shoreso perilous, and a sea sown so thick with unknown dangers, flung awhole fleet into battle, was probably possessed by no other man thanHawke amongst the 30,000 gallant sailors who fought at Quiberon.

The fight, taking all its incidents into account, is perhaps asdramatic as anything known in the history of war. The British shipscame rolling on, grim and silent, throwing huge sheets of spray fromtheir bluff bows. An 80-gun French ship, Le Formidable, lay in theirtrack, and each huge British liner, as it swept past to attack the mainbody of the French, vomited on the unfortunate Le Formidable adreadful broadside. And upon each British ship, in turn, as it rolledpast in spray and flame, the gallant Frenchman flung an answeringbroadside. Soon the thunder of the guns deepened as ship after shipfound its antagonist. The short November day was already darkening;the thunder of surf and of tempest answered in yet wilder notes thedeep-throated guns; the wildly rolling fleets offered one of thestrangest sights the sea has ever witnessed.

Soon Hawke himself, in the Royal George, of 100 guns, came on, sternand majestic, seeking some fitting antagonist. This was the great shipthat afterwards sank ignobly at its anchorage at Spithead, with "twicefour hundred men," a tale which, for every English boy, is made famousin Cowper's immortal ballad. But what an image of terror and of battlethe Royal George seemed as in the bitter November storm she bore downon the French fleet! Hawke disdained meaner foes, and bade his pilotlay him alongside Conflans' flagship, Le Soleil Royal. Shoals werefoaming on every side, and the pilot warned Hawke he could not carrythe Royal George farther in without risking the ship. "You have doneyour duty," said Hawke, "in pointing out the risk; and now lay mealongside of Le Soleil Royal."

A French 70-gun ship, La Superbe, threw itself betwixt Hawke andConflans. Slowly the huge mass of the Royal George bore up, so as tobring its broadside to bear on La Superbe, and then the English gunsbroke into a tempest of flame. Through spray and mist the masts of theunfortunate Frenchman seemed to tumble; a tempest of cries was heard;the British sailors ran back their guns to reload. A sudden gustcleared the atmosphere, and La Superbe had vanished. Her top-mastsgleamed wet, for a moment, through the green seas, but with her crew of650 men she had sunk, as though crushed by a thunderbolt, beneath asingle broadside from the Royal George. Then from the nearer hillsthe crowds of French spectators saw Hawke's blue flag and Conflans'white pennon approach each other, and the two great ships, withslanting decks and fluttering canvas, and rigging blown to leeward,began their fierce duel. Other French ships crowded to their admiral'said, and at one time no less than seven French line-of-battle shipswere pouring their fire into the mighty and shot-torn bulk of theRoyal George.

Howe, in the Magnanime, was engaged in fierce conflict, meanwhile,with the Thesée, when a sister English ship, the Montague, wasflung by a huge sea on the quarter of Howe's ship, and practicallydisabled it. The Torbay, under Captain Keppel, took Howe's placewith the Thesée, and both ships had their lower-deck ports open, soas to fight with their heaviest guns. The unfortunate Frenchman rolledto a great sea; the wide-open ports dipped, the green water rushedthrough, quenched the fire of the guns, and swept the sailors fromtheir quarters. The great ship shivered, rolled over still morewildly, and then, with 700 men, went down like a stone. The Britishship, with better luck and better seamanship, got its ports closed andwas saved. Several French ships by this time had struck, but the seawas too wild to allow them to be taken possession of. Night wasfalling fast, the roar of the tempest still deepened, and no less thanseven huge French liners, throwing their guns overboard, ran forshelter across the bar of the Vilaine, the pursuing English followingthem almost within reach of the spray flung from the rocks. Hawkethen, by signals, brought his fleet to anchor for the night under thelee of the island of Dumet.

It was a wild night, filled with the thunder of the surf and the shriekof the gale, and all through it, as the English ships rode, madlystraining at their anchors, they could hear the sounds of distressguns. One of the ships that perished that night was a fine Englishseventy-four, the Resolution. The morning broke as wild as thenight. To leeward two great line-of-battle ships could be seen on therocks; but in the very middle of the English fleet, its masts gone, itshull battered with shot, was the flagship of Conflans, Le SoleilRoyal. In the darkness and tempest of the night the unfortunateFrenchman, all unwitting, had anchored in the very midst of his foes.As soon as, through the grey and misty light of the November dawn, theEnglish ships were discovered, Conflans cut his cables and driftedashore. The Essex, 64 guns, was ordered to pursue her, and hercaptain, an impetuous Irishman, obeyed his orders so literally that hetoo ran ashore, and the Essex became a total wreck.

"When I consider," Hawke wrote to the Admiralty, "the season of theyear, the hard gales on the day of action, a flying enemy, theshortness of the day, and the coast they were on, I can boldly affirmthat all that could possibly be done has been done." History confirmsthat judgment. There is no other record of a great sea-fight foughtunder conditions so wild, and scarcely any other sea-battle hasachieved results more decisive. Trafalgar itself scarcely exceeds itin the quality of effectiveness. Quiberon saved England from invasion.It destroyed for the moment the naval power of France. Its politicalresults in France cannot be described here, but they were of the firstimportance. The victory gave a new complexion to English navalwarfare. Rodney and Howe were Hawke's pupils, Nelson himself, who wasa post-captain when Hawke died, learned his tactics in Hawke's school.No sailor ever served England better than Hawke. And yet, such is theirony of human affairs, that on the very day when Hawke was adding thethunder of his guns to the diapason of surf and tempest off Quiberon,and crushing the fleet that threatened England with invasion, a Londonmob was burning his effigy for having allowed the French to escape hisblockade.

THE NIGHT ATTACK ON BADAJOS

"Hand to hand, and foot to foot;
Nothing there, save death, was mute:
Stroke, and thrust, and flash, and cry
For quarter or for victory,
Mingle there with the volleying thunder,
Which makes the distant cities wonder
How the sounding battle goes,
If with them, or for their foes;
If they must mourn, or must rejoice
In that annihilating voice,
Which pierces the deep hills through and through
With an echo dread and new.
******
From the point of encountering blades to the hilt,
Sabres and swords with blood were gilt;
But the rampart is won, and the spoil begun,
And all but the after carnage done."
—BYRON.

It would be difficult to find in the whole history of war a morethrilling and heroic chapter than that which tells the story of the sixgreat campaigns of the Peninsular war. This was, perhaps, the leastselfish war of which history tells. It was not a war of aggrandisem*ntor of conquest: it was waged to deliver not merely Spain, but the wholeof Europe, from that military despotism with which the genius andambition of Napoleon threatened to overwhelm the civilised world. Andon what a scale Great Britain, when aroused, can fight, let thePeninsular war tell. At its close the fleets of Great Britain rodetriumphant on every sea; and in the Peninsula between 1808-14 her landforces fought and won nineteen pitched battles, made or sustained tenfierce and bloody sieges, took four great fortresses, twice expelledthe French from Portugal and once from Spain. Great Britain expendedin these campaigns more than 100,000,000 pounds sterling on her owntroops, besides subsidising the forces of Spain and Portugal. This"nation of shopkeepers" proved that when kindled to action it couldwage war on a scale and in a fashion that might have moved the wonderof Alexander or of Caesar, and from motives, it may be added, too loftyfor either Caesar or Alexander so much as to comprehend. It is worthwhile to tell afresh the story of some of the more picturesqueincidents in that great strife.

On April 6, 1812, Badajos was stormed by Wellington; and the storyforms one of the most tragical and splendid incidents in the militaryhistory of the world. Of "the night of horrors at Badajos," Napiersays, "posterity can scarcely be expected to credit the tale." Notale, however, is better authenticated, or, as an example of whatdisciplined human valour is capable of achieving, better deserves to betold. Wellington was preparing for his great forward movement intoSpain, the campaign which led to Salamanca, the battle in which "40,000Frenchmen were beaten in forty minutes." As a preliminary he had tocapture, under the vigilant eyes of Soult and Marmont, the two greatborder fortresses, Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos. He had, to use Napier'sphrase, "jumped with both feet" on the first-named fortress, andcaptured it in twelve days with a loss of 1200 men and 90 officers.

But Badajos was a still harder task. The city stands on a rocky ridgewhich forms the last spur of the Toledo range, and is of extraordinarystrength. The river Rivillas falls almost at right angles into theGuadiana, and in the angle formed by their junction stands Badajos,oval in shape, girdled with elaborate defences, with the Guadiana 500yards wide as its defence to the north, the Rivillas serving as a wetditch to the east, and no less than five great fortifiedoutposts—Saint Roque, Christoval, Picurina, Pardaleras, and afortified bridge-head across the Guadiana—as the outer zone of itsdefences. Twice the English had already assailed Badajos, but assailedit in vain. It was now held by a garrison 5000 strong, under asoldier, General Phillipson, with a real genius for defence, and theutmost art had been employed in adding to its defences. On the otherhand Wellington had no means of transport and no battery train, and hadto make all his preparations under the keen-eyed vigilance of theFrench. Perhaps the strangest collection of artillery ever employed ina great siege was that which Wellington collected from every availablequarter and used at Badajos. Of the fifty-two pieces, some dated fromthe days of Philip II. and the Spanish Armada, some were cast in thereign of Philip III., others in that of John IV. of Portugal, whor*igned in 1640; there were 24-pounders of George II.'s day, andRussian naval guns; the bulk of the extraordinary medley being obsoletebrass engines which required from seven to ten minutes to cool betweeneach discharge.

Wellington, however, was strong in his own warlike genius and in thequality of the troops he commanded. He employed 18,000 men in thesiege, and it may well be doubted whether—if we put the question ofequipment aside—a more perfect fighting instrument than the forceunder his orders ever existed. The men were veterans, but the officerson the whole were young, so there was steadiness in the ranks and firein the leading. Hill and Graham covered the siege, Picton and Barnard,Kempt and Colville led the assaults. The trenches were held by thethird, fourth, and fifth divisions, and by the famous light division.Of the latter it has been said that the Macedonian phalanx of Alexanderthe Great, the Tenth Legion of Caesar, the famous Spanish infantry ofAlva, or the iron soldiers who followed Cortes to Mexico, did notexceed it in warlike quality. Wellington's troops, too, had a personalgrudge against Badajos, and had two defeats to avenge. Perhaps nosiege in history, as a matter of fact, ever witnessed either morefurious valour in the assault, or more of cool and skilled courage inthe defence. The siege lasted exactly twenty days, and cost thebesiegers 5000 men, or an average loss of 250 per day. It was wagedthroughout in stormy weather, with the rivers steadily rising, and thetempests perpetually blowing; yet the thunder of the attack neverpaused for an instant.

Wellington's engineers attacked the city at the eastern end of theoval, where the Rivillas served it as a gigantic wet ditch; and thePicurina, a fortified hill, ringed by a ditch fourteen feet deep, arampart sixteen feet high, and a zone of mines, acted as an outwork.Wellington, curiously enough, believed in night attacks, a sure proofof his faith in the quality of the men he commanded; and on the eighthnight of the siege, at nine o'clock, 500 men of the third division weresuddenly flung on the Picurina. The fort broke into a ring of flame,by the light of which the dark figures of the stormers were seenleaping with fierce hardihood into the ditch and struggling madly upthe ramparts, or tearing furiously at the palisades. But the defenceswere strong, and the assailants fell literally in scores. Napier tellshow "the axemen of the light division, compassing the fort likeprowling wolves," discovered the gate at the rear, and so broke intothe fort. The engineer officer who led the attack declares that "theplace would never have been taken had it not been for the coolness ofthese men" in absolutely walking round the fort to its rear,discovering the gate, and hewing it down under a tempest of bullets.The assault lasted an hour, and in that period, out of the 500 men whoattacked, no less than 300, with 19 officers, were killed or wounded!Three men out of every five in the attacking force, that is, weredisabled, and yet they won!

There followed twelve days of furious industry, of trenches pushedtirelessly forward through mud and wet, and of cannonading that onlyceased when the guns grew too hot to be used. Captain MacCarthy, ofthe 50th Regiment, has left a curious little monograph on the siege,full of incidents, half tragic and half amusing, but which show thetemper of Wellington's troops. Thus he tells how an engineer officer,when marking out the ground for a breaching-battery very near the wall,which was always lined with French soldiers in eager search of humantargets, "used to challenge them to prove the perfection of theirshooting by lifting up the skirts of his coat in defiance several timesin the course of his survey; driving in his stakes and measuring hisdistances with great deliberation, and concluding by an extra shake ofhis coat-tails and an ironical bow before he stepped under shelter!"

On the night of April 6, Wellington determined to assault. No lessthan seven attacks were to be delivered. Two of them—on thebridge-head across the Guadiana and on the Pardaleras—were merefeints. But on the extreme right Picton with the third division was tocross the Rivillas and escalade the castle, whose walls rosetime-stained and grim, from eighteen to twenty-four feet high. Leithwith the fifth division was to attack the opposite or western extremityof the town, the bastion of St. Vincente, where the glacis was mined,the ditch deep, and the scarp thirty feet high. Against the actualbreaches Colville and Andrew Barnard were to lead the light divisionand the fourth division, the former attacking the bastion of SantaMaria and the latter the Trinidad. The hour was fixed for ten o'clock,and the story of that night attack, as told in Napier's immortal prose,is one of the great battle-pictures of literature; and any one whotries to tell the tale will find himself slipping insensibly intoNapier's cadences.

The night was black; a strange silence lay on rampart and trench,broken from time to time by the deep voices of the sentinels thatproclaimed all was well in Badajos. "Sentinelle garde à vous," thecry of the sentinels, was translated by the British private as "All'swell in Badahoo!" A lighted carcass thrown from the castle discoveredPicton's men standing in ordered array, and compelled them to attack atonce. MacCarthy, who acted as guide across the tangle of wet trenchesand the narrow bridge that spanned the Rivillas, has left an amusingaccount of the scene. At one time Picton declared MacCarthy wasleading them wrong, and, drawing his sword, swore he would cut himdown. The column reached the trench, however, at the foot of thecastle walls, and was instantly overwhelmed with the fire of thebesieged. MacCarthy says we can only picture the scene by "supposingthat all the stars, planets, and meteors of the firmament, withinnumerable moons emitting smaller ones in their course, weredescending on the heads of the besiegers." MacCarthy himself, atypical and gallant Irishman, addressed his general with the exultantremark, "Tis a glorious night, sir—a glorious night!" and, rushingforward to the head of the stormers, shouted, "Up with the ladders!"The five ladders were raised, the troops swarmed up, an officerleading, but the first files were at once crushed by cannon fire, andthe ladders slipped into the angle of the abutments. "Dreadful theirfall," records MacCarthy of the slaughtered stormers, "and appallingtheir appearance at daylight." One ladder remained, and, a privatesoldier leading, the eager red-coated crowd swarmed up it. The bravefellow leading was shot as soon as his head appeared above the parapet;but the next man to him—again a private—leaped over the parapet, andwas followed quickly by others, and this thin stream of desperate menclimbed singly, and in the teeth of the flashing musketry, up thatsolitary ladder, and carried the castle.

In the meanwhile the fourth and light divisions had flung themselveswith cool and silent speed on the breaches. The storming party of eachdivision leaped into the ditch. It was mined, the fuse was kindled,and the ditch, crowded with eager soldiery, became in a moment a sortof flaming crater, and the storming parties, 500 strong, were in onefierce explosion dashed to pieces. In the light of that dreadful flamethe whole scene became visible—the black ramparts, crowded with darkfigures and glittering arms, on the one side; on the other the redcolumns of the British, broad and deep, moving steadily forward like astream of human lava. The light division stood at the brink of thesmoking ditch for an instant, amazed at the sight. "Then," saysNapier, "with a shout that matched even the sound of the explosion,"they leaped into it and swarmed up to the breach. The fourth divisioncame running up and descended with equal fury, but the ditch oppositethe Trinidad was filled with water; the head of the division leapedinto it, and, as Napier puts it, "about 100 of the fusiliers, the menof Albuera, perished there." The breaches were impassable. Across thetop of the great slope of broken wall glittered a fringe ofsword-blades, sharp-pointed, keen-edged on both sides, fixed inponderous beams chained together and set deep in the ruins. For tenfeet in front the ascent was covered with loose planks, studded withsharp iron points. Behind the glittering edge of sword-blades stoodthe solid ranks of the French, each man supplied with three muskets,and their fire scourged the British ranks like a tempest.

Hundreds had fallen, hundreds were still falling; but the British clungdoggedly to the lower slopes, and every few minutes an officer wouldleap forward with a shout, a swarm of men would instantly follow him,and, like leaves blown by a whirlwind, they swept up the ascent. Butunder the incessant fire of the French the assailants melted away. Oneprivate reached the sword-blades, and actually thrust his head beneaththem till his brains were beaten out, so desperate was his resolve toget into Badajos. The breach, as Napier describes it, "yawning andglittering with steel, resembled the mouth of a huge dragon belchingforth smoke and flame." But for two hours, and until 2000 men hadfallen, the stubborn British persisted in their attacks. Currie, ofthe 52nd, a cool and most daring soldier, found a narrow ramp beyondthe Santa Maria breach only half-ruined; he forced his way back throughthe tumult and carnage to where Wellington stood watching the scene,obtained an unbroken battalion from the reserve, and led it towards thebroken ramp. But his men were caught in the whirling madness of theditch and swallowed up in the tumult. Nicholas, of the engineers, andShaw, of the 43rd, with some fifty soldiers, actually climbed into theSanta Maria bastion, and from thence tried to force their way into thebreach. Every man was shot down except Shaw, who stood alone on thebastion. "With inexpressible coolness he looked at his watch, said itwas too late to carry the breaches," and then leaped down! The Britishcould not penetrate the breach; but they would not retreat. They couldonly die where they stood. The buglers of the reserve were sent to thecrest of the glacis to sound the retreat; the troops in the ditch wouldnot believe the signal to be genuine, and struck their own buglers whoattempted to repeat it. "Gathering in dark groups, and leaning ontheir muskets," says Napier, "they looked up in sullen desperation atTrinidad, while the enemy, stepping out on the ramparts, and aimingtheir shots by the light of fireballs, which they threw over, asked astheir victims fell, 'Why they did not come into Badajos.'"

All this while, curiously enough, Picton was actually in Badajos, andheld the castle securely, but made no attempt to clear the breach. Onthe extreme west of the town, however, at the bastion of San Vincente,the fifth division made an attack as desperate as that which wasfailing at the breaches. When the stormers actually reached thebastion, the Portuguese battalions, who formed part of the attack,dismayed by the tremendous fire which broke out on them, flung downtheir ladders and fled. The British, however, snatched the ladders up,forced the barrier, jumped into the ditch, and tried to climb thewalls. These were thirty feet high, and the ladders were too short. Amine was sprung in the ditch under the soldiers' feet; beams of wood,stones, broken waggons, and live shells were poured upon their headsfrom above. Showers of grape from the flank swept the ditch.

The stubborn soldiers, however, discovered a low spot in the rampart,placed three ladders against it, and climbed with reckless valour. Thefirst man was pushed up by his comrades; he, in turn, dragged othersup, and the unconquerable British at length broke through and swept thebastion. The tumult still stormed and raged at the eastern breaches,where the men of the light and fourth division were dying sullenly, andthe men of the fifth division marched at speed across the town to takethe great eastern breach in the rear. The streets were empty, but thesilent houses were bright with lamps. The men of the fifth pressed on;they captured mules carrying ammunition to the breaches, and theFrench, startled by the tramp of the fast-approaching column, andfinding themselves taken in the rear, fled. The light and fourthdivisions broke through the gap hitherto barred by flame and steel, andBadajos was won!

In that dreadful night assault the English lost 3500 men. "Let it beconsidered," says Napier, "that this frightful carnage took place inthe space of less than a hundred yards square—that the slain died notall suddenly, nor by one manner of death—that some perished by steel,some by shot, some by water; that some were crushed and mangled byheavy weights, some trampled upon, some dashed to atoms by the fieryexplosions—that for hours this destruction was endured withoutshrinking, and the town was won at last. Let these things beconsidered, and it must be admitted a British army bears with it anawful power. And false would it be to say the French were feeble men.The garrison stood and fought manfully and with good discipline,behaving worthily. Shame there was none on any side. Yet who shall dojustice to the bravery of the British soldiers or the noble emulationof the officers?… No age, no nation, ever sent forth bravertroops to battle than those who stormed Badajos."

THE FIRE-SHIPS IN THE BASQUE ROADS

"Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame.
For some were sunk and many were shattered, and so could fight us no more—
God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?"
—TENNYSON.

On the night of April 11, 1809, Lord Cochrane steered his floating mineagainst the gigantic boom that covered the French fleet lying in AixRoads. The story is one of the most picturesque and exciting in thenaval annals of Great Britain. Marryat has embalmed the greatadventure and its chief actor in the pages of "Frank Mildmay," and LordCochrane himself—like the Earl of Peterborough in the seventeenthcentury, who captured Barcelona with a handful of men, and Gordon inthe nineteenth century, who won great battles in China walking-stick inhand—was a man who stamped himself, as with characters of fire, uponthe popular imagination.

To the courage of a knight-errant Cochrane added the shrewd andhumorous sagacity of a Scotchman. If he had commanded fleets he wouldhave rivalled the victories of Nelson, and perhaps even have outshonethe Nile and Trafalgar. And to warlike genius of the first orderCochrane added a certain weird and impish ingenuity which his enemiesfound simply resistless. Was there ever a cruise in naval history likethat of Cochrane in his brig misnamed the Speedy, a mere coasting tubthat would neither steer nor tack, and whose entire broadside Cochranehimself could carry in his pockets! But in this wretched little brig,with its four-pounders, Cochrane captured in one brief year more than50 vessels carrying an aggregate of 122 guns, took 500 prisoners, keptthe whole Spanish coast, off which he cruised, in perpetual alarm, andfinished by attacking and capturing a Spanish frigate, the Gamo, of32 heavy guns and 319 men. What we have called the impish daring andresource of Cochrane is shown in this strange fight. He ran the littleSpeedy close under the guns of the huge Gamo, and the Spanish shipwas actually unable to depress its guns sufficiently to harm its tinyantagonist. When the Spaniards tried to board, Cochrane simply shovedhis pigmy craft a few yards away from the side of his foe, and thiscurious fight went on for an hour. Then, in his turn, Cochraneboarded, leaving nobody but the doctor on board the Speedy. But heplayed the Spaniards a characteristic trick. One half his men boardedthe Gamo by the head, with their faces elaborately blackened; and when,out of the white smoke forward, some forty demons with black facesbroke upon the astonished Spaniards, they naturally regarded the wholebusiness as partaking of the black art, and incontinently fled below!The number of Spaniards killed and wounded in this fight by the littleSpeedy exceeded the number of its own entire crew; and when the fightwas over, 45 British sailors had to keep guard over 263 Spanishprisoners.

Afterwards, in command of the Impérieuse, a fine frigate, Cochraneplayed a still more dashing part on the Spanish coast, destroyingbatteries, cutting off supplies from the French ports, blowing up coastroads, and keeping perspiring battalions of the enemy marching to andfro to meet his descents. On the French coast, again, Cochrane heldlarge bodies of French troops paralysed by his single frigate. Heproposed to the English Government to take possession of the Frenchislands in the Bay of Biscay, and to allow him, with a small squadronof frigates, to operate against the French seaboard. Had this requestbeen granted, he says, "neither the Peninsular war nor its enormouscost to the nation from 1809 onwards would ever have been heard of!""It would have been easy," he adds, "as it always will be easy in caseof future wars, so to harass the French coasts as to find fullemployment for their troops at home, and so to render operations inforeign countries impossible." If England and France were once moreengaged in war—absit omen!—the story of Cochrane's exploits on theSpanish and French coasts might prove a very valuable inspiration andobject-lesson. Cochrane's professional reward for his great servicesin the Impérieuse was an official rebuke for expending more sails,stores, gunpowder and shot than any other captain afloat in the sametime!

The fight in the Basque Roads, however—or rather in the Aix Roads—hasgreat historical importance. It crowned the work of Trafalgar. Itfinally destroyed French power on the sea, and gave England an absolutesupremacy. No fleet actions took place after its date between "themeteor flag" and the tricolour, for the simple reason that no Frenchfleet remained in existence. Cochrane's fire-ships completed the workof the Nile and Trafalgar.

Early in 1809 the French fleet in Brest, long blockaded by LordGambier, caught the British napping, slipped out unobserved, raised theblockades at L'Orient and Rochefort, added the squadrons lying in thesetwo places to its own strength, and, anchoring in the Aix Roads,prepared for a dash on the West Indies. The success with which theblockade at Brest had been evaded, and the menace offered to the WestIndian trade, alarmed the British Admiralty. Lord Gambier, with apowerful fleet, kept guard outside the Aix Roads; but if the blockadefailed once, it might fail again. Eager to destroy the last fleetFrance possessed, the Admiralty strongly urged Lord Gambier to attackthe enemy with fire-ships; but Gambier, grown old, had visibly lostnerve, and he pronounced the use of fire-ships a "horrible andunchristian mode of warfare." Lord Mulgrave, the first Lord of theAdmiralty, knowing Cochrane's ingenuity and daring, sent for him, andproposed to send him to the Basque Roads to invent and execute someplan for destroying the French fleet. The Scotchman was uppermost inCochrane in this interview, and he declined the adventure on the groundthat to send a young post-captain to execute such an enterprise wouldbe regarded as an insult by the whole fleet, and he would have everyman's hand against him. Lord Mulgrave, however, was peremptory, andCochrane yielded, but on reaching the blockading fleet was met by atempest of wrath from all his seniors. "Why," they asked, "wasCochrane sent out? We could have done the business as well as he. Whydid not Lord Gambier let us do it?" Lord Gambier, who had fallen intoa sort of gentle and pious melancholy, was really more occupied indistributing tracts among his crews than in trying to reach hisenemies; and Harvey, his second in command, an old Trafalgar sea-dog,when Cochrane arrived with his commission, interviewed his admiral,denounced him in a white-heat on his own quarter-deck, and ended bytelling him that "if Nelson had been there he would not have anchoredin the Basque Roads at all, but would have dashed at the enemy atonce." This outburst, no doubt, relieved Admiral Harvey's feelings,but it cost him his flag, and he was court-martialled, and dismissedfrom the service for the performance.

Cochrane, however, set himself with characteristic daring and coolnessto carry out his task. The French fleet consisted of one huge ship of120 guns, two of 80 guns, eight seventy-fours, a 50-gun ship, and two40-gun frigates—fourteen ships in all. It was drawn up in two linesunder the shelter of powerful shore batteries, with the frigates asout-guards. As a protection against fire-ships, a gigantic boom hadbeen constructed half a mile in length, forming two sides of atriangle, with the apex towards the British fleet. Over this hugefloating barrier powerful boat squadrons kept watch every night.Cochrane's plan of attack was marked by real genius. He constructedthree explosion vessels, floating mines on the largest scale. Each ofthese terrific vessels contained no less than fifteen hundred barrelsof gunpowder, bound together with cables, with wedges and moistenedsand rammed down betwixt them; forming, in brief, one gigantic bomb,with 1500 barrels of gunpowder for its charge. On the top of this hugepowder magazine was piled, as a sort of agreeable condiment, hundredsof live shells and thousands of hand grenades; the whole, by every formof marine ingenuity, compacted into a solid mass which, at the touch ofa fuse, could be turned into a sort of floating Vesuvius. These wereto be followed by a squadron of fire-ships. Cochrane who, better,perhaps, than any soldier or sailor that ever lived, knew how to strikeat his foes through their own imagination, calculated that when thesethree huge explosion vessels, with twenty fire-ships behind them, wentoff in a sort of saltpetre earthquake, the astonished Frenchmen wouldimagine every fire-ship to be a floating mine, and, instead of tryingto board them and divert them from their fleet, would be simply anxiousto get out of their way with the utmost possible despatch. The French,meanwhile, having watched their enemy lying inert for weeks, andconfident in the gigantic boom which acted as their shield to thefront, and the show of batteries which kept guard over them on eitherflank and to the rear, awaited the coming attack in a spirit ofhalf-contemptuous gaiety. They had struck their topmasts and unbenttheir sails, and by way of challenge dressed their fleet with flags.One ship, the Calcutta, had been captured from the English, and byway of special insult they hung out the British ensign under thatship's quarter-gallery, an affront whose deadly quality only a sailorcan understand.

The night of the 9th set in stormily. The tide ran fast, and the skieswere black and the sea heavy—so heavy, indeed, that the boats of theEnglish fleet which were intended to follow and cover the fire-shipsnever left the side of the flagship. Cochrane, however, had called theofficers commanding the fire-ships on board his frigate, given themtheir last instructions, and at half-past eight P.M. he himself,accompanied only by a lieutenant and four sailors, cut the moorings ofthe chief explosion vessel, and drifted off towards the French fleet.Seated, that is, on top of 1500 barrels of gunpowder and a sort ofhaystack of grenades, he calmly floated off, with a squadron offire-ships behind him, towards the French fleet, backed by great shorebatteries, with seventy-three armed boats as a line of skirmishers."It seemed to me," says Marryat, who was an actor in the scene, "likeentering the gates of hell!"

The great floating mine drifted on through blackness and storm till,just as it struck the boom, Cochrane, who previously made his fiveassistants get into the boat, with his own hand lit the fuse and inturn jumped into the boat. How frantically the little crew pulled toget clear of the ignited mine may be imagined; but wind and sea wereagainst them. The fuse, which was calculated to burn for twelveminutes, lasted for only five. Then the 1500 barrels of gunpowder wentsimultaneously off, peopling the black sky with a flaming torrent ofshells, grenades, and rockets, and raising a mountainous wave thatnearly swamped the unfortunate boat and its crew. The fault of thefuse, however, saved the lives of the daring six, as the missiles fromthe exploding vessel fell far outside them. "The effect," saysCochrane, who, like Caesar, could write history as well as make it,"constituted one of the grandest artificial spectacles imaginable. Fora moment the sky was red with the lurid glare arising from thesimultaneous ignition of 1500 barrels of powder. On this giganticflash subsiding the air seemed alive with shells, grenades, rockets,and masses of timber, the wreck of the shattered vessel." Then cameblackness, punctuated in flame by the explosion of the next floatingmine. Then, through sea-wrack and night, came the squadron offire-ships, each one a pyramid of kindling flame. But the firstexplosion had achieved all that Cochrane expected. It dismissed thehuge boom into chips, and the French fleet lay open to attack. Thecaptain of the second explosion vessel was so determined to do his workeffectually that the entire crew was actually blown out of the vesseland one member of the party killed, while the toil of the boats inwhich, after the fire-ships had been abandoned, they and their crewshad to fight their way back in the teeth of the gale, was so severethat several men died of mere fatigue. The physical effects of thefloating mines and the drifting fire-ships, as a matter of fact, werenot very great. The boom, indeed, was destroyed, but out of twentyfire-ships only four actually reached the enemy's position, and not onedid any damage. Cochrane's explosion vessels, however, were addressednot so much to the French ships as to the alarmed imagination of Frenchsailors, and the effect achieved was overwhelming. All the Frenchships save one cut or slipped their cables, and ran ashore in wildconfusion. Cochrane cut the moorings of his explosion vessel athalf-past eight o'clock; by midnight, or in less than four hours, theboom had been destroyed, and thirteen French ships—the solitary fleetthat remained to France—were lying helplessly ashore. Never, perhaps,was a result so great achieved in a time so brief, in a fashion sodramatic, or with a loss so trifling.

When the grey morning broke, with the exception of two vessels, thewhole French fleet was lying helplessly aground on the Palles shoal.Some were lying on their bilge with the keel exposed, others werefrantically casting their guns overboard and trying to get afloatagain. Meanwhile Gambier and the British fleet were lying fourteenmiles distant in the Basque Roads, and Cochrane in the Impérieuse waswatching, with powder-blackened face, the curious spectacle of theentire fleet he had driven ashore, and the yet more amazing spectacleof a British fleet declining to come in and finally destroy its enemy.For here comes a chapter in the story on which Englishmen do not loveto dwell. Cochrane tried to whip the muddy-spirited Gambier intoenterprise by emphatic and quick-following signal. At six A.M. hesignalled, "All the enemy's ships except two are on shore," but thisextracted from drowsy Gambier no other response than the answeringpennant. Cochrane repeated his impatient signals at half-hourintervals, and with emphasis ever more shrill—"The enemy's ships canbe destroyed"; "Half the fleet can destroy the enemy"; "Thefrigates alone can destroy the enemy"; but still no response save theindifferent pennant. As the tide flowed in, the French ships showedsigns of getting afloat, and Cochrane signalled, "The enemy ispreparing to heave off", even this brought no response from thepensive Gambier. At eleven o'clock the British fleet weighed and stoodin, but then, to Cochrane's speechless wrath, re-anchored at a distanceof three and a half miles, and by this time two of the Frenchthree-deckers were afloat.

Gambier finally despatched a single mortar-vessel in to bombard thestranded ships, but by this time Cochrane had become desperate. Headopted a device which recalls Nelson's use of his blind eye atCopenhagen. At one o'clock he hove his anchor atrip and drifted, sternforemost, towards the enemy. He dare not make sail lest his trickshould be detected and a signal of recall hoisted on the flagship.Cochrane coolly determined, in a word, to force the hand of hissluggish admiral. He drifted with his solitary frigate down to thehostile fleet and batteries, which Gambier thought it scarcely safe toattack with eleven ships of the line. When near the enemy's positionhe suddenly made sail and ran up the signal, "In want of assistance";next followed a yet more peremptory message, "In distress." EvenGambier could not see an English frigate destroyed under the very gunsof an English fleet without moving to its help, and he sent some of hisships in. But meanwhile, Cochrane, though technically "in distress,"was enjoying what he must have felt to be a singularly good time. Hecalmly took up a position which enabled him to engage an 80-gun ship,one of 74 guns, and, in particular, that French ship which, on theprevious day, had hung the British flag under her quarter-gallery. Forhalf-an-hour he fought these three ships single-handed, and theCalcutta actually struck to him, its captain afterwards beingcourt-martialled and shot by the French themselves for surrendering toa frigate. Then the other British ships came up, and ship after shipof the French fleet struck or was destroyed. Night fell before thework was completed, and during the night Gambier, for some mysteriousreason, recalled his ships; but Cochrane, in the Impérieuse, clung tohis post. He persuaded Captain Seymour, in the Pallas, to remainwith him, with four brigs, and with this tiny force he proposed toattack L'Ocean, the French flagship of 120 guns, which had just gotafloat; but Gambier peremptorily recalled him at dawn, before the fightwas renewed. Never before or since was a victory so complete and sonearly bloodless. Five seamen were killed in the fire-ships, and fivein the attack on the French fleet and about twenty wounded; and withthis microscopic "butcher's bill" a great fleet, the last naval hope ofFrance, was practically destroyed. For so much does the genius anddaring of a single man count!

That the French fleet was not utterly destroyed was due solely toGambier's want of resolution. And yet, such is the irony of history,that of the two chief actors in this drama, Gambier, who marred it, wasrewarded with the thanks of Parliament; Cochrane, who gave to it allits unique splendour, had his professional career abruptly terminated!

That wild night in the Aix Roads, and the solitary and daring attack onthe French fleet which followed next day, were practically Cochrane'slast acts as a British sailor. He achieved dazzling exploits under theflag of Chili [Transcriber's note: Chile?] and Brazil; but the mostoriginal warlike genius the English navy has ever known, fought no morebattles for England.

THE MAN WHO SPOILED NAPOLEON'S "DESTINY"!

"Oh, who shall lightly say that Fame
Is nothing but an empty name!
Whilst in that sound there is a charm
The nerves to brace, the heart to warm.
As, thinking of the mighty dead,
The young from slothful couch will start,
And vow, with lifted hands outspread,
Like them to act a noble part?"
—JOANNA BAILLIE.

From March 18 to May 20, 1799—for more than sixty days and nights,that is—a little, half-forgotten, and more than half-ruined Syriantown was the scene of one of the fiercest and most dramatic siegesrecorded in military history. And rarely has there been a struggle soapparently one-sided. A handful of British sailors and Turkishirregulars were holding Acre, a town without regular defences, againstNapoleon, the most brilliant military genius of his generation, with anarmy of 10,000 war-hardened veterans, the "Army of Italy"—soldiers whohad dared the snows of the Alps and conquered Italy, and to whomvictory was a familiar experience. In their ranks military daring hadreached, perhaps, its very highest point. And yet the sailors insidethat ring of crumbling wall won! At the blood-stained trenches of AcreNapoleon experienced his first defeat; and, years after, at St. Helena,he said of Sir Sidney Smith, the gallant sailor who baffled him, "Thatman made me miss my destiny." It is a curious fact that one Englishmanthwarted Napoleon's career in the East, and another ended his career inthe West, and it may be doubted which of the two Napoleon hatedmost—Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or SidneySmith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny,"and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of rock inthe Atlantic.

Sidney Smith was a sailor of the school of Nelson and of Dundonald—aman, that is, with a spark of that warlike genius which begins wheremechanical rules end. He was a man of singular physical beauty, with acertain magnetism and fire about him which made men willing to die forhim, and women who had never spoken to him fall headlong in love withhim. His whole career is curiously picturesque. He became a middy atthe tender age of eleven years; went through fierce sea-fights, and wasactually mate of the watch when fourteen years old. He was afellow-middy with William IV. in the fight off Cape St. Vincent, becamecommander when he was eighteen years of age, and captain before he wasquite nineteen. But the British marine, even in those tumultuous days,scarcely yielded enough of the rapture of fighting to this post-captainin his teens. He took service under the Swedish flag, saw hardfighting against the Russians, became the close personal friend of theKing, and was knighted by him. One of the feats at this period of hislife with which tradition, with more or less of plausibility, creditsSidney Smith, is that of swimming by night through the Russian fleet, adistance of two miles, carrying a letter enclosed in a bladder to theSwedish admiral.

Sidney Smith afterwards entered the Turkish service. When war brokeout betwixt France and England in 1790, he purchased a tiny craft atSmyrna, picked up in that port a hybrid crew, and hurried to join LordHood, who was then holding Toulon. When the British abandoned theport—and it is curious to recollect that the duel between Sidney Smithand Napoleon, which reached its climax at Acre, began here—SidneySmith volunteered to burn the French fleet, a task which he performedwith an audacity and skill worthy of Dundonald or Nelson, and for whichthe French never forgave him.

Sidney Smith was given the command of an English frigate, and fought adozen brilliant fights in the Channel. He carried with his boats afamous French privateer off Havre de Grace; but during the fight on thedeck of the captured ship it drifted into the mouth of the Seine abovethe forts. The wind dropped, the tide was too strong to be stemmed,and Sidney Smith himself was captured. He had so harried the Frenchcoast that the French refused to treat him as an ordinary prisoner ofwar, and threw him into that ill-omened prison, the Temple, from whoseiron-barred windows the unfortunate sailor watched for two years thehorrors of the Reign of Terror in its last stages, the tossing crowds,the tumbrils rolling past, crowded with victims for the guillotine.Sidney Smith escaped at last by a singularly audacious trick. Twoconfederates, dressed in dashing uniform, one wearing the dress of anadjutant, and the other that of an officer of still higher rank,presented themselves at the Temple with forged orders for the transferof Sidney Smith.

The governor surrendered his prisoner, but insisted on sending a guardof six men with him. The sham adjutant cheerfully acquiesced, but,after a moment's pause, turned to Sidney Smith, and said, if he wouldgive his parole as an officer not to attempt to escape, they woulddispense with the escort. Sidney Smith, with due gravity, replied tohis confederate, "Sir, I swear on the faith of an officer to accompanyyou wherever you choose to conduct me." The governor was satisfied,and the two sham officers proceeded to "conduct" their friend with theutmost possible despatch to the French coast. Another English officerwho had escaped—Captain Wright—joined Sidney Smith outside Rouen, andthe problem was how to get through the barriers without a passport.Smith sent Wright on first, and he was duly challenged for his passportby the sentinel; whereupon Sidney Smith, with a majestic air ofofficial authority, marched up and said in faultless Parisian French,"I answer for this citizen, I know him;" whereupon the deluded sentinelsaluted and allowed them both to pass!

Sidney Smith's escape from the Temple made him a popular hero inEngland. He was known to have great influence with the Turkishauthorities, and he was sent to the East in the double office ofenvoy-extraordinary to the Porte, and commander of the squadron atAlexandria. By one of the curious coincidences which marked SidneySmith's career, he became acquainted while in the Temple with a FrenchRoyalist officer named Philippeaux, an engineer of signal ability, andwho had been a schoolfellow and a close chum of Napoleon himself atBrienne. Smith took his French friend with him to the East, and heplayed a great part in the defence of Acre. Napoleon had swept norththrough the desert to Syria, had captured Gaza and Jaffa, and was aboutto attack Acre, which lay between him and his ultimate goal,Constantinople. Here Sidney Smith resolved to bar his way, and in hisflagship the Tigre, with the Theseus, under Captain Miller, and twogunboats, he sailed to Acre to assist in its defence. Philippeaux tookcharge of the fortifications, and thus, in the breaches of a remoteSyrian town, the quondam prisoner of the Temple and the ancient schoolfriend of Napoleon joined hands to wreck that dream of a great Easternempire which lurked in the cells of Napoleon's masterful intellect.

Acre represents a blunted arrow-head jutting out from a point in theSyrian coast. Napoleon could only attack, so to speak, the neck of thearrow, which was protected by a ditch and a weak wall, and flanked bytowers; but Sidney Smith, having command of the sea, could sweep thefour faces of the town with the fire of his guns, as well as commandall the sea-roads in its vicinity. He guessed, from the delay of theFrench in opening fire, that they were waiting for their siege-train toarrive by sea. He kept vigilant watch, pounced on the French flotillaas it rounded the promontory of Mount Carmel, captured nine of thevessels, carried them with their guns and warlike material to Acre, andmounted his thirty-four captured pieces on the batteries of the town.Thus the disgusted French saw the very guns which were intended tobatter down the defences of Acre—and which were glorious with thememories of a dozen victories in Italy—frowning at them, loaded withEnglish powder and shot, and manned by English sailors.

It is needless to say that a siege directed by Napoleon—the siege ofwhat he looked upon as a contemptible and almost defenceless town, thesingle barrier betwixt his ambition and its goal—was urged withamazing fire and vehemence. The wall was battered day and night, abreach fifty feet wide made, and more than twelve assaults delivered,with all the fire and daring of which French soldiers, gallantly led,are capable. So sustained was the fighting, that on one occasion thecombat raged in the ditch and on the breach for twenty-fivesuccessive hours. So close and fierce was it that one half-ruinedtower was held by both besiegers and besieged for twelve hours insuccession, and neither would yield. At the breach, again, the twolines of desperately fighting men on repeated occasions clashedbayonets together, and wrestled and stabbed and died, till thesurvivors were parted by the barrier of the dead which grew beneaththeir feet.

Sidney Smith, however, fought like a sailor, and with all the coolingenuity and resourcefulness of a sailor. His ships, drawn up on twofaces of the town, smote the French stormers on either flank till theylearned to build up a dreadful screen, made up partly of stones pluckedfrom the breach, and partly of the dead bodies of their comrades.Smith, too, perched guns in all sorts of unexpected positions—a24-pounder in the lighthouse, under the command of an exultant middy;two 68-pounders under the charge of "old Bray," the carpenter of theTigre, and, as Sidney Smith himself reports, "one of the bravest andmost intelligent men I ever served with"; and yet a third gun, a Frenchbrass 18-pounder, in one of the ravelins, under a master's mate. Braydropped his shells with the nicest accuracy in the centre of the Frenchcolumns as they swept up the breach, and the middy perched aloft, andthe master's mate from the ravelin, smote them on either flank withcase-shot, while the Theseus and the Tigre added to the tumult thethunder of their broadsides, and the captured French gunboatscontributed the yelp of their lighter pieces.

The great feature of the siege, however, was the fierceness and thenumber of the sorties. Sidney Smith's sorties actually exceeded innumber and vehemence Napoleon's assaults. He broke the strength ofNapoleon's attacks, that is, by anticipating them. A crowd of Turkishirregulars, with a few naval officers leading them, and a solid mass ofJack-tars in the centre, would break from a sally-port, or rushvehemently down through the gap in the wall, and scour the Frenchtrenches, overturn the gabions, spike the guns, and slay the guards.The French reserves hurried fiercely up, always scourged, however, bythe flank fire of the ships, and drove back the sortie. But theprocess was renewed the same night or the next day with unlessened fireand daring. The French engineers, despairing of success on thesurface, betook themselves to mining; whereupon the besieged made adesperate sortie and reached the mouth of the mine. Lieutenant Wright,who led them, and who had already received two shots in his sword-arm,leaped down the mine followed by his sailors, slew the miners,destroyed their work, and safely regained the town.

The British sustained one startling disaster. Captain Miller of theTheseus, whose ammunition ran short, carefully collected such Frenchshells as fell into the town without exploding, and duly returned themalight, and supplied with better fuses, to their original senders. Hehad collected some seventy shells on the Theseus, and was preparingthem for use against the French. The carpenter of the ship wasendeavouring to get the fuses out of the loaded shells with an auger,and a middy undertook to assist him, in characteristic middy fashion,with a mallet and a spike-nail. A huge shell under his treatmentsuddenly exploded on the quarter-deck of the Theseus, and the othersixty-nine shells followed suit. The too ingenious middy disappearedinto space; forty seamen, with Captain Miller himself, were killed; andforty-seven, including the two lieutenants of the ship, the chaplain,and the surgeon, were seriously wounded. The whole of the poop wasblown to pieces, and the ship was left a wreck with fire breaking outat half-a-dozen points. The fire was subdued, and the Theseussurvived in a half-gutted condition, but the disaster was a severe blowto Sir Sidney's resources.

As evening fell on May 7, the white sails of a fleet, became visibleover the sea rim, and all firing ceased while besiegers and besiegedwatched the approaching ships. Was it a French fleet or a Turkish?Did it bring succour to the besieged or a triumph to the besiegers?The approaching ships flew the crescent. It was the Turkish fleet fromRhodes bringing reinforcements. But the wind was sinking, andNapoleon, who had watched the approach of the hostile ships withfeelings which may be guessed, calculated that there remained six hoursbefore they could cast anchor in the bay. Eleven assaults had beenalready made, in which eight French generals and the best officers inevery branch of the service had perished. There remained time for atwelfth assault. He might yet pluck victory from the very edge ofdefeat. At ten o'clock that night the French artillery was brought upclose to the counterscarp to batter down the curtain, and a new breachwas made. Lannes led his division against the shot-wrecked tower, andGeneral Rimbaud took his grenadiers with a resistless rush through thenew breach. All night the combat raged, the men fighting desperatelyhand to hand. When the rays of the level morning sun broke through thepall of smoke which hung sullenly over the combatants, the tricolourflew on the outer angle of the tower, and still the ships bringingreinforcements had not reached the harbour! Sidney Smith, at thiscrisis, landed every man from the English ships, and led them, pike inhand, to the breach, and the shouting and madness of the conflict awokeonce more. To use Sidney Smith's own words, "the muzzles of themuskets touched each other—the spear-heads were locked together." ButSidney Smith's sailors, with the brave Turks who rallied to their help,were not to be denied.

Lannes' grenadiers were tumbled headlong from the tower, Lannes himselfbeing wounded, while Rimbaud's brave men, who were actually past thebreach, were swept into ruin, their general killed, and the Frenchsoldiers within the breach all captured or slain.

One of the dramatic incidents of the siege was the assault made byKleber's troops. They had not taken part in the siege hitherto, buthad won a brilliant victory over the Arabs at Mount Tabor. On reachingthe camp, flushed with their triumph, and seeing how slight were theapparent defences of the town, they demanded clamorously to be led tothe assault. Napoleon consented. Kleber, who was of gigantic stature,with a head of hair worthy of a German music-master or of a Soudandervish, led his grenadiers to the edge of the breach and stood there,while with gesture and voice—a voice audible even above the fierce andsustained crackle of the musketry—he urged his men on. Napoleon,standing on a gun in the nearest French battery, watched the sight witheager eyes—the French grenadiers running furiously up the breach, thegrim line of levelled muskets that barred it, the sudden roar of theEnglish guns as from every side they smote the staggering Frenchcolumn. Vainly single officers struggled out of the torn mass, rangesticulating up the breach, and died at the muzzles of the Britishmuskets. The men could not follow, or only died as they leapedforward. The French grenadiers, still fighting, swearing, andscreaming, were swept back past the point where Kleber stood, hoarsewith shouting, black with gunpowder, furious with rage. The lastassault on Acre had failed. The French sick, field artillery, andbaggage silently defiled that night to the rear. The heavy guns wereburied in the sand, and after sixty days of open trenches Napoleon, forthe first time in his life, though not for the last, ordered a retreat.

Napoleon buried in the breaches of Acre not merely 3000 of his bravesttroops, but the golden dream of his life. "In that miserable fort," ashe said, "lay the fate of the East." Napoleon expected to find in itthe pasha's treasures, and arms for 300,000 men. "When I have capturedit," he said to Bourrienne, "I shall march upon Damascus and Aleppo. Ishall arm the tribes; I shall reach Constantinople; I shall overturnthe Turkish Empire; I shall found in the East a new and grand empire.Perhaps I shall return to Paris by Adrianople and Vienna!" Napoleonwas cheerfully willing to pay the price of what religion he had toaccomplish this dream. He was willing, that is, to turn Turk. HenriIV. said "Paris was worth a mass," and was not the East, said Napoleon,"worth a turban and a pair of trousers?" In his conversation at St.Helena with Las Cases he seriously defended this policy. His army, headded, would have shared his "conversion," and have taken their newcreed with a Parisian laugh. "Had I but captured Acre," Napoleonadded, "I would have reached Constantinople and the Indies; I wouldhave changed the face of the world. But that man made me miss mydestiny."

Las Cases dwells upon the curious correspondence which existed betweenPhilippeaux, who engineered the defences of Acre, and Napoleon, whoattacked it. "They were," he says, "of the same nation, of the sameage, of the same rank, of the same corps, and of the same school." Butif Philippeaux was in a sense the brains of the defence, Sidney Smithwas the sword. There was, perhaps, it may be regretfully confessed, astreak of the charlatan in him. He shocked the judgment of more sobermen. Wellington's stern, sober sense was affronted by him, and hedescribed him as "a mere vaporiser." "Of all the men whom I ever knewwho have any reputation," Wellington told Croker "the man who leastdeserved it is Sir Sidney Smith." Wellington's temperament made itimpossible for him to understand Sidney Smith's erratic and dazzlinggenius. Napoleon's phrase is the best epitaph of the man who defendedAcre. It is true Napoleon himself describes Sidney Smith afterwards as"a young fool," who was "capable of invading France with 800 men." Butsuch "young fools" are often the makers of history.

GREAT SEA-DUELS

"The captain stood on the carronade: 'First Lieutenant,' says he,
'Send all my merry men after here, for they must list to me.
I haven't the gift of the gab, my sons, because I'm bred to the sea.
That ship there is a Frenchman, who means to fight with we.
And odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, long as I've been to sea,
I've fought 'gainst every odds—but I've gained the victory!
********
That ship there is a Frenchman, and if we don't take she,
'Tis a thousand bullets to one, that she will capture we.
I haven't the gift of the gab, my boys; so each man to his gun;
If she's not mine in half-an-hour, I'll flog each mother's son.
For odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, long as I've been to sea,
I've fought 'gainst every odds—and I've gained the victory!'"
—MARRYAT.

British naval history is rich in the records of what may be calledgreat sea-duels—combats, that is, of single ship against single ship,waged often with extraordinary fierceness and daring. They resemblethe combat of knight against knight, with flash of cannon instead ofthrust of lance, and the floor of the lonely sea for the trampled lists.

He must have a very slow-beating imagination who cannot realise thepicturesqueness of these ancient sea-duels. Two frigates cruising forprey catch the far-off gleam of each other's topsails over the rim ofthe horizon. They approach each other warily, two high-sniffingsea-mastiffs. A glimpse of fluttering colour—the red flag and thedrapeau blanc, or the Union Jack and the tricolour—reveals to eachship its foe. The men stand grimly at quarters; the captain, withperhaps a solitary lieutenant, and a middy as aide-de-camp, is on hisquarter-deck. There is the manoeuvring for the weather-gage, thethunder of the sudden broadside, the hurtle and crash of the shot, thestern, quick word of command as the clumsy guns are run in to bereloaded and fired again and again with furious haste. The ships driftinto closer wrestle. Masts and yards come tumbling on to theblood-splashed decks. There is the grinding shock of the great woodenhulls as they meet, the wild leap of the boarders, the clash of cutlasson cutlass, the shout of victory, the sight of the fluttering flag asit sinks reluctantly from the mizzen of the beaten ship. Then thesmoke drifts away, and on the tossing sea-floor lie, little better thandismantled wrecks, victor and vanquished.

No great issue, perhaps, ever hung upon these lonely sea-combats; butas object-lessons in the qualities by which the empire has been won,and by which it must be maintained, these ancient sea-fights have realand permanent value. What better examples of cool hardihood, ofchivalrous loyalty to the flag, of self-reliant energy, need beimagined or desired? The generation that carries the heavy burden ofthe empire to-day cannot afford to forget the tale of such exploits.

One of the most famous frigate fights in British history is thatbetween the Arethusa and La Belle Poule, fought off Brest on June17, 1778. Who is not familiar with the name and fame of "the saucyArethusa"? Yet there is a curious absence of detail as to the fight.The combat, indeed, owes its enduring fame to two somewhat irrelevantcirc*mstances—first, that it was fought when France and England werenot actually at war, but were trembling on the verge of it. The soundof the Arethusa's guns, indeed, was the signal of war between the twonations. The other fact is that an ingenious rhymester—scarcely apoet—crystallised the fight into a set of verses in which there issomething of the true smack of the sea, and an echo, if not of thecannon's roar, yet of the rough-voiced mirth of the forecastle; and thesea-fight lies embalmed, so to speak, and made immortal in the sea-song.

The Arethusa was a stumpy little frigate, scanty in crew, light inguns, attached to the fleet of Admiral Keppel, then cruising off Brest.Keppel had as perplexed and delicate a charge as was ever entrusted toa British admiral. Great Britain was at war with her Americancolonies, and there was every sign that France intended to add herselfto the fight. No fewer than thirty-two sail of the line and twelvefrigates were gathered in Brest roads, and another fleet of almostequal strength in Toulon. Spain, too, was slowly collecting a mightyarmament. What would happen to England if the Toulon and Brest fleetsunited, were joined by a third fleet from Spain, and the mighty arrayof ships thus collected swept up the British Channel? On June 13,1778, Keppel, with twenty-one ships of the line and three frigates, wasdespatched to keep watch over the Brest fleet. War had not beenproclaimed, but Keppel was to prevent a junction of the Brest andToulon fleets, by persuasion if he could, but by gunpowder in the lastresort.

Keppel's force was much inferior to that of the Brest fleet, and assoon as the topsails of the British ships were visible from the Frenchcoast, two French frigates, the Licorne and La Belle Poule, withtwo lighter craft, bore down upon them to reconnoitre. But Keppelcould not afford to let the French admiral know his exact force, andsignalled to his own outlying ships to bring the French frigates underhis lee.

At nine o'clock at night the Licorne was overtaken by the Milford,and with some rough sailorly persuasion, and a hint of broadsides, herhead was turned towards the British fleet. The next morning, in thegrey dawn, the Frenchman, having meditated on affairs during the night,made a wild dash for freedom. The America, an English 64—double,that is, the Licorne's size—overtook her, and fired a shot acrossher bow to bring her to. Longford, the captain of the America, stoodon the gunwale of his own ship politely urging the captain of theLicorne to return with him. With a burst of Celtic passion theFrench captain fired his whole broadside into the big Englishman, andthen instantly hauled down his flag so as to escape any answeringbroadside!

Meanwhile the Arethusa was in eager pursuit of the Belle Poule; afox-terrier chasing a mastiff! The Belle Poule was a splendid ship,with heavy metal, and a crew more than twice as numerous as that of thetiny Arethusa. But Marshall, its captain, was a singularly gallantsailor, and not the man to count odds. The song tells the story of thefight in an amusing fashion:—

"Come all ye jolly sailors bold,
Whose hearts are cast in honour's mould,
While England's glory I unfold.
Huzza to the _Arethusa_!
She is a frigate tight and brave
As ever stemmed the dashing wave;
Her men are staunch
To their fav'rite launch,
And when the foe shall meet our fire,
Sooner than strike we'll all expire
On board the _Arethusa_.

On deck five hundred men did dance,
The stoutest they could find in France;
We, with two hundred, did advance
On board the _Arethusa_.
Our captain hailed the Frenchman, 'Ho!'
The Frenchman then cried out, 'Hallo!'
'Bear down, d'ye see,
To our Admiral's lee.'
'No, no,' says the Frenchman, 'that can't be.
'Then I must lug you along with me,'
Says the saucy _Arethusa_!"

As a matter of fact Marshall hung doggedly on the Frenchman's quarterfor two long hours, fighting a ship twice as big as his own. TheBelle Poule was eager to escape; Marshall was resolute that it shouldnot escape; and, try as he might, the Frenchman, during that fierce twohours' wrestle, failed to shake off his tiny but dogged antagonist.The Arethusa's masts were shot away, its jib-boom hung a tangledwreck over its bows, its bulwarks were shattered, its decks weresplashed red with blood, half its guns were dismounted, and nearlyevery third man in its crew struck down. But still it hung, withquenchless and obstinate courage, on the Belle Poule's quarter, andby its perfect seamanship and the quickness and the deadly precisionwith which its lighter guns worked, reduced its towering foe to acondition of wreck almost as complete as its own. The terrier, infact, was proving too much for the mastiff.

Suddenly the wind fell. With topmasts hanging over the side, andcanvas torn to ribbons, the Arethusa lay shattered and moveless onthe sea. The shot-torn but loftier sails of the Belle Poule,however, yet held wind enough to drift her out of the reach of theArethusa's fire. Both ships were close under the French cliffs; butthe Belle Poule, like a broken-winged bird, struggled into a tinycove in the rocks, and nothing remained for the Arethusa but to cutaway her wreckage, hoist what sail she could, and drag herself sullenlyback under jury-masts to the British fleet. But the story of that twohours' heroic fight maintained against such odds sent a thrill of grimexultation through Great Britain. Menaced by the combination of somany mighty states, while her sea-dogs were of this fighting temper,what had Great Britain to fear? In the streets of many a Britishseaport, and in many a British forecastle, the story of how theArethusa fought was sung in deep-throated chorus:—

"The fight was off the Frenchman's land;
We forced them back upon their strand;
For we fought till not a stick would stand
Of the gallant _Arethusa_!"

A fight even more dramatic in its character is that fought on August10, 1805, between the Phoenix and the Didon. The Didon was oneof the finest and fastest French frigates afloat, armed with guns ofspecial calibre and manned by a crew which formed, perhaps, the veryélite of the French navy. The men had been specially picked to formthe crew of the only French ship which was commanded by a Bonaparte,the Pomone, selected for the command of Captain Jerome Bonaparte.Captain Jerome Bonaparte, however, was not just now afloat, and theDidon had been selected, on account of its great speed and heavyarmament, for a service of great importance. She was manned by thecrew chosen for the Pomone, placed under an officer of special skilland daring—Captain Milias—and despatched with orders for carrying outone more of those naval "combinations" which Napoleon often attempted,but never quite accomplished. The Didon, in a word, was to bring upthe Rochefort squadron to join the Franco-Spanish fleet underVilleneuve.

On that fatal August 10, however, it seemed to Captain Milias thatfortune had thrust into his hands a golden opportunity of snapping up aBritish sloop of war, and carrying her as a trophy into Rochefort. AnAmerican merchantman fell in with him, and its master reported that hehad been brought-to on the previous day by a British man-of-war, andcompelled to produce his papers. The American told the French captainthat he had been allowed to go round the Englishman's decks and counthis guns—omitting, no doubt, to add that he was half-drunk while doingit. Contemplated through an American's prejudices, inflamed with grog,the British ship seemed a very poor thing indeed. She carried, theAmerican told the captain of the Didon, only twenty guns of lightcalibre, and her captain and officers were "so co*cky" that if they hada chance they would probably lay themselves alongside even the Didonand become an easy prey. The American pointed out to the eagerlylistening Frenchmen the topgallant sails of the ship he was describingshowing above the sky-line to windward. Captain Milias thought he sawglory and cheap victory beckoning him, and he put his helm down, andstood under easy sail towards the fast-rising topsails of theEnglishman.

Now, the Phoenix was, perhaps, the smallest frigate in the Britishnavy; a stocky little craft, scarcely above the rating of a sloop; andits captain, Baker, a man with something of Dundonald's gift for ruse,had disguised his ship so as to look as much as possible like a sloop.Baker, too, who believed that light guns quickly handled were capableof more effective mischief than the slow fire of heavier guns, hadchanged his heavier metal for 18-pounders. The two ships, therefore,were very unequal in fighting force. The broadside of the Didon wasnearly fifty per cent. heavier than that of the Phoenix; her crew wasnearly fifty per cent. more numerous, and she was splendidly equippedat every point.

The yellow sides and royal yards rigged aloft told the "co*cky"Phoenix that the big ship to leeward was a Frenchman, and, with allsails spread, she bore down in the chase. Baker was eager to engagehis enemy to leeward, that she might not escape, and he held his firetill he could reach the desired position. The Didon, however, aquick and weatherly ship, was able to keep ahead of the Phoenix, andthrice poured in a heavy broadside upon the grimly silent British shipwithout receiving a shot in reply. Baker's men were falling fast attheir quarters, and, impatient at being both foiled and raked, he atlast ran fiercely at his enemy to windward. The heads of both shipsswung parallel, and at pistol-distance broadside furiously answeredbroadside. In order to come up with her opponent, however, thePhoenix had all sail spread, and she gradually forged ahead. As soonas the two ships were clear, the Didon, by a fine stroke ofseamanship, hauled up, crossed the stern of the Phoenix, and rakedher, and then repeated the pleasant operation. The rigging of thePhoenix was so shattered that for a few minutes she was out of hand.Baker, however, was a fine seaman, and his crew were in a high state ofdiscipline; and when the Didon once more bore up to rake herantagonist, the British ship, with her sails thrown aback, evaded theFrenchman's fire. But the stern of the Didon smote with a crash onthe starboard quarter of the Phoenix; the ships were lying parallel;the broadside of neither could be brought to bear. The Frenchmen,immensely superior in numbers, made an impetuous rush across theirforecastle, and leaped on the quarter-deck of the Phoenix. The marinesof that ship, however, drawn up in a steady line across the deck,resisted the whole rush of the French boarders; and the Britishsailors, tumbling up from their guns, cutlass and boarding-pike inhand, and wroth with the audacity of the "French lubbers" daring toboard the "co*cky little Phoenix," with one rush, pushed fiercelyhome, swept the Frenchmen back on to their own vessel.

On the French forecastle stood a brass 36-pounder carronade; thiscommanded the whole of the British ship, and with it the French openeda most destructive fire. The British ship, as it happened, could notbring a single gun to bear in return. Baker, however, had fitted thecabin window on either quarter of his ship to serve as a port, inpreparation for exactly such a contingency as this; and the aftermostmain-deck gun was dragged into the cabin, the improvised port thrownopen, and Baker himself, with a cluster of officers and men, waseagerly employed in fitting tackles to enable the gun to be worked. Asthe sides of the two ships were actually grinding together theFrenchmen saw the preparations being made; a double squad of marineswas brought up at a run to the larboard gangway, and opened a swift anddeadly fire into the cabin, crowded with English sailors busy riggingtheir gun. The men dropped in clusters; the floor of the cabin wascovered with the slain, its walls were splashed with blood. But Bakerand the few men not yet struck down kept coolly to their task. The gunwas loaded under the actual flash of the French muskets, its muzzle wasthrust through the port, and it was fired! Its charge of langrageswept the French ship from her larboard bow to her starboard quarter,and struck down in an instant twenty-four men. The deadly fire wasrenewed again and again, the British marines on the quarter-deckmeanwhile keeping down with their musketry the fire of the great Frenchcarronade.

That fierce and bloody wrestle lasted for nearly thirty minutes, thenthe Didon began to fore-reach. Her great bowsprit ground slowlyalong the side of the Phoenix. It crossed the line of the secondaftermost gun on the British main-deck. Its flames on the instantsmote the Frenchman's head-rails to splinters, and destroyed thegammoning of her bowsprit. Gun after gun of the two ships was broughtin succession to bear; but in this close and deadly contest thePhoenix had the advantage. Her guns were lighter, her men betterdrilled, and their fierce energy overbore the Frenchmen. Presently theDidon, with her foremast tottering, her maintopmast gone, her decks ablood-stained wreck, passed out of gunshot ahead.

In the tangle between the two ships the fly of the British white ensignat the gaff end dropped on the Didon's forecastle. The Frenchmentore it off, and, as the ships moved apart, they waved it triumphantlyfrom the Didon's stern. All the colours of the Phoenix, indeed, inone way or another had vanished, and the only response the exasperatedBritish tars could make to the insult of the Didon was to immediatelylash a boat's ensign to the larboard, and the Union Jack to thestarboard end of their cross jack yard-arm.

The wind had dropped; both ships were now lying a in a semi-wreckedcondition out of gunshot of each other, and it became a question ofwhich could soonest repair damages and get into fighting conditionagain. Both ships, as it happened, had begun the fight with nearly allcanvas spread, and from their splintered masts the sails now hung onewild network of rags. In each ship a desperate race to effect repairsbegan. On the Frenchman's decks arose a babel of sounds, the shouts ofofficers, the tumult of the men's voices. The British, on the otherhand, worked in grim and orderly silence, with no sound but the cool,stern orders of the officers. In such a race the British were sure towin, and fortune aided them. The two ships were rolling heavily in thewindless swell, and a little before noon the British saw the woundedforemast of their enemy suddenly snap and tumble, with all its canvas,upon the unfortunate Didon's decks. This gave new and exultantvigour to the British. Shot-holes were plugged, dismounted gunsrefitted, fresh braces rove, the torn rigging spliced, new canvasspread. The wind blew softly again, and a little after noon thePhoenix, sorely battered indeed, but in fighting trim, with gunsloaded, and the survivors of her crew at quarters, bore down on theDidon, and took her position on that ship's weather bow. Just whenthe word "Fire!" was about to be given, the Didon's flag flutteredreluctantly down; she had struck!

The toils of the Phoenix, however, were not even yet ended. The shipshe had captured was practically a wreck, its mainmast tottering to itsfall, while the prisoners greatly exceeded in numbers their captors.The little Phoenix courageously took her big prize in tow, and laidher course for Plymouth. Once the pair of crippled frigates werechased by the whole of Villeneuve's fleet; once, by a few chance wordsoverheard, a plot amongst the French prisoners for seizing thePhoenix and then retaking the Didon was detected—almost toolate—and thwarted. The Phoenix, and her prize too, reachedGibraltar when a thick fog lay on the straits, a fog which, as thesorely damaged ships crept through it, was full of the sound of signalguns and the ringing of bells. The Franco-Spanish fleet, in a word, aprocession of giants, went slowly past the crippled ships in the fog,and never saw them!

On September 3, however, the Phoenix safely brought her hard-won andstubborn-guarded prize safely into Plymouth Sound.

The fight between the two ships was marked by many heroic incidents.During the action the very invalids in the sick-bay of the Phoenixcrept from their cots and tried to take some feeble part in the fight.The purser is not usually part of the fighting staff of a ship, but theacting purser of the Phoenix, while her captain was in thesmoke-filled cabin below, trying to rig up a gun to bear on theDidon, took charge of the quarter-deck, kept his post right oppositethe brazen mouth of the great carronade we have described, and, with afew marines, kept down the fire. A little middy had the distinction ofsaving his captain's life. The Didon's bowsprit was thrust, like theshaft of a gigantic lance, over the quarter of the Phoenix, and aFrenchman, lying along it, levelled his musket at Captain Baker, notsix paces distant, and took deliberate aim. A middy named Phillips,armed with a musket as big as himself, saw the levelled piece of theFrenchman; he gave his captain an unceremonious jostle aside just asthe Frenchman's musket flashed, and with almost the same movementdischarged his own piece at the enemy. The French bullet tore off therim of Captain Baker's hat, but the body of the man who fired it fellwith a splash betwixt the two ships into the water. Here was a story,indeed, for a middy to tell, to the admiration of all the gun-rooms inthe fleet.

The middy of the period, however, was half imp, half hero. Anotheryouthful Nelson, aetat. sixteen, at the hottest stage of thefight—probably at the moment the acting-purser was in command on thequarter-deck—found an opportunity of getting at the purser's stores.With jaws widely distended, he was in the act of sucking—in thefashion so delightful to boys—a huge orange, when a musket ball, afterpassing through the head of a seaman, went clean through both theyouth's distended cheeks, and this without touching a single tooth.Whether this affected the flavour of the orange is not told, but thehistorian gravely records that "when the wound in each cheek healed, apair of not unseemly dimples remained." Happy middy! He wouldscarcely envy Nelson his peerage.

[Transcriber's note: The word "aetat." in the above paragraph is anabbreviation of the Latin "aetatis", meaning "aged".]

THE BLOOD-STAINED HILL OF BUSACO

"Who would not fight for England?
Who would not fling a life
I' the ring, to meet a tyrant's gage,
And glory in the strife?
*****
Now, fair befall our England,
On her proud and perilous road;
And woe and wail to those who make
Her footprints red with blood!
Up with our red-cross banner—roll
A thunder-peal of drums!
Fight on there, every valiant soul,
And, courage! England comes!
Now, fair befall our England,
On her proud and perilous road;
And woe and wail to those who make
Her footprints red with blood!

Now, victory to our England!
And where'er she lifts her hand
In Freedom's fight, to rescue Right,
God bless the dear old land!
And when the storm has passed away,
In glory and in calm
May she sit down i' the green o' the day,
And sing her peaceful psalm!
Now, victory to our England!
And where'er she lifts her hand
In Freedom's fight, to rescue Right,
God bless the dear old land!"
—GERALD MASSEY.

Busaco is, perhaps, the most picturesque of Peninsular battles. In thewild nature of the ground over which it raged, the dramatic incidentswhich marked its progress, the furious daring of the assault, and thestern valour of the defence, it is almost without a rival. The Frenchhad every advantage in the fight, save one. They were 65,000 strong,an army of veterans, many of them the men of Austerlitz and Marengo.Massena led; Ney was second in command; both facts being pledges ofdaring generalship. The English were falling sullenly back in the longretreat which ended at Torres Vedras, and the French were in exultantpursuit. Massena had announced that he was going to "drive the leopardinto the sea"; and French soldiers, it may be added, are never sodangerous as when on fire with the élan of success.

Wellington's army was inferior to its foe in numbers, and of mixednationality, and it is probable that retreat had loosened the fibre ofeven British discipline, if not of British courage. Two days beforeBusaco, for example, the light division, the very flower of the Englisharmy, was encamped in a pine-wood about which a peasant had warned themthat it was "haunted." During the night, without signal or visiblecause, officers and men, as though suddenly smitten with frenzy,started from their sleep and dispersed in all directions. Nor couldthe mysterious panic be stayed until some officer, shrewder than therest, shouted the order, "Prepare to receive cavalry," when theinstinct of discipline asserted itself, the men rushed into rallyingsquares, and, with huge shouts of laughter, recovered themselves fromtheir panic.

But battle is to the British soldier a tonic, and when Wellington drewup his lines in challenge of battle to his pursuer, on the great hillof Busaco, his red-coated soldiery were at least full of a grimsatisfaction. One of the combatants has described the diverse aspectsof the two hosts on the night before the fight. "The French were allbustle and gaiety; but along the whole English line the soldiers, instern silence, examined their flints, cleaned their locks and barrels,and then stretched themselves on the ground to rest, each with hisfirelock within his grasp." The single advantage of the British lay intheir position. Busaco is a great hill, one of the loftiest and mostrugged in Portugal, eight miles in breadth, and barring the road bywhich Massena was moving on Lisbon. "There are certainly," saidWellington, "many bad roads in Portugal, but the enemy has takendecidedly the worst in the whole kingdom."

The great ridge, with its gloomy tree-clad heights and cloven crest,round which the mists hung in sullen vapour, was an ideal position fordefence. In its front was a valley forming a natural ditch so deepthat the eye could scarcely pierce its depths. The ravine at one pointwas so narrow that the English and French guns waged duel across it,but on the British side the chasm was almost perpendicular.

From their eyrie perch on September 27, 1810, the English watchedMassena's great host coming on. Every eminence sparkled with theirbayonets, every road was crowded with their waggons; it seemed not somuch the march of an army as the movement of a nation. The vision of"grim Busaco's iron ridge," glittering with bayonets, arrested themarch of the French. But Ney, whose military glance was keen and sure,saw that the English arrangements were not yet complete; an unfilledgap, three miles wide, parted the right wing from the left, and he waseager for an immediate attack. Massena, however, was ten miles in therear. According to Marbot, who has left a spirited account of Busaco,Massena put off the attack till the next day, and thus threw away agreat opportunity. In the gloomy depths of the ravines, however, a warof skirmishers broke out, and the muskets rang loudly through theechoing valleys, while the puffs of eddying white smoke rose throughthe black pines. But night fell, and the mountain heights above werecrowned with the bivouac fires of 100,000 warriors, over whom theserene sky glittered. Presently a bitter wind broke on the mountainsummits, and all through the night the soldiers shivered under its keenblast.

Massena's plan of attack was simple and daring. Ney was to climb thesteep front on the English left, and assail the light division underCraufurd; Regnier, with a corps d'élite, was to attack the Englishleft, held by Picton's division. Regnier formed his attack into fivecolumns while the stars were yet glittering coldly in the morning sky.They had first to plunge into the savage depths of the ravine, and thenclimb the steep slope leading to the English position. The vigour ofthe attack was magnificent. General Merle, who had won fame atAusterlitz, personally led the charge. At a run the columns went downthe ravine; at a run, scarcely less swift, they swept up the hostileslope. The guns smote the columns from end to end, and the attack leftbehind it a broad crimson trail of the dead and dying. But it neverpaused. A wave of steel and fire and martial tumult, it swept up thehill, broke over the crest in a spray of flame, brushed aside aPortuguese regiment in its path like a wisp of straw, and broke on thelines of the third division.

The pressure was too great for even the solid English line to sustain;it, too, yielded to the impetuous French, part of whom seized the rocksat the highest point of the hill, while another part wheeled to theright, intending to sweep the summit of the sierra. It was anastonishing feat. Only French soldiers, magnificently led and in amood of victory, could have done it; and only British soldiers, it maybe added, whom defeat hardens, could have restored such a reverse.

Picton was in command, and he sent at the French a wing of the 88th,the famous Connaught Rangers, led by Colonel Wallace, an officer inwhom Wellington reposed great confidence. Wallace's address was briefand pertinent. "Press them to the muzzle, Connaught Rangers; press onto the rascals." There is no better fighting material in the worldthan an Irish regiment well led and in a high state of discipline, andthis matchless regiment, with levelled bayonets, ran in on the Frenchwith a grim and silent fury there was no denying. Vain was resistance.Marbot says of the Rangers that "their first volley, delivered atfifteen paces, stretched more than 500 men on the ground"; and thethreatening gleam of the bayonet followed fiercely on the flame of themusket.

The French were borne, shouting, struggling, and fighting desperately,over the crest and down the deep slope to the ravine below. In awhirlwind of dust and fire and clamour went the whole body of furioussoldiery into the valley, leaving a broad track of broken arms anddying men. According to the regimental records of the 88th, "Twentyminutes sufficed to teach the heroes of Marengo and Austerlitz thatthey must yield to the Rangers of Connaught!" As the breathlessRangers re-formed triumphantly on the ridge, Wellington galloped up anddeclared he had never witnessed a more gallant charge.

But a wing of Regnier's attack had formed at right angles across theridge. It was pressing forward with stern resolution; it swept beforeit the light companies of the 74th and 88th regiments, and unless thisattack could be arrested the position and the battle were lost. Pictonrallied his broken lines within sixty yards of the French muskets, afeat not the least marvellous in a marvellous fight, and then sent themfuriously at the exulting French, who held a strong position amongstthe rocks. It is always difficult to disentangle the confusion whichmarks a great fight. Napier says that it was Cameron who formed linewith the 38th under a violent fire, and, without returning a shot, ranin upon the French grenadiers with the bayonet and hurled themtriumphantly over the crest. Picton, on the other hand, declares thatit was the light companies of the 74th and the 88th, under Major Smith,an officer of great daring—who fell in the moment of victory—thatflung the last French down over the cliff. Who can decide when suchexperts, and actors in the actual scene, differ?

The result, however, as seen from the French side, is clear. TheFrench, Marbot records, "found themselves driven in a heap down thedeep descent up which they had climbed, and the English lines followedthem half-way down firing murderous volleys. At this point we lost ageneral, 2 colonels, 80 officers, and 700 or 800 men." "The English,"he adds in explanation of this dreadful loss of life, "were the bestmarksmen in Europe, the only troops who were perfectly practised in theuse of small arms, whence their firing was far more accurate than thatof any other infantry."

A gleam of humour at this point crosses the grim visage of battle.Picton, on lying down in his bivouac the night before the battle, hadadorned his head with a picturesque and highly coloured nightcap. Thesudden attack of the French woke him; he clapped on cloak and co*ckedhat, and rode to the fighting line, when he personally led the attackwhich flung the last of Regnier's troops down the slope. At the momentof the charge he took off his co*cked hat to wave the troops onward;this revealed the domestic head-dress he unconsciously wore, and theastonished soldiers beheld their general on flame with warlike furygesticulating martially in a nightcap! A great shout of laughter wentup from the men as they stopped for a moment to realise the spectacle;then with a tempest of mingled laughter and cheers they flungthemselves on the enemy.

Meanwhile Ney had formed his attack on the English left, held byCraufurd and the famous light division. Marbot praises thecharacteristic tactics of the British in such fights. "After having,as we do," he says, "garnished their front with skirmishers, they posttheir principal forces out of sight, holding them all the timesufficiently near to the key of the position to be able to attack theenemy the instant they reach it; and this attack, made unexpectedly onassailants who have lost heavily, and think the victory already theirs,succeeds almost invariably." "We had," he adds, "a melancholyexperience of this art at Busaco." Craufurd, a soldier of fine skill,made exactly such a disposition of his men. Some rocks at the edge ofthe ravine formed natural embrasures for the English guns under Ross;below them the Rifles were flung out as skirmishers; behind them theGerman infantry were the only visible troops; but in a fold of thehill, unseen, Craufurd held the 43rd and 52nd regiments drawn up inline.

Ney's attack, as might be expected, was sudden and furious. TheEnglish, in the grey dawn, looking down the ravine, saw three hugemasses start from the French lines and swarm up the slope. To climb anascent so steep, vexed by skirmishers on either flank, and scourged bythe guns which flashed from the summit, was a great and most daringfeat—yet the French did it. Busaco, indeed, is memorable as showingthe French fighting quality at its highest point. General Simon ledLoison's attack right up to the lips of the English guns, and in thedreadful charge its order was never disturbed nor its speed arrested."Ross's guns," says Napier, "were worked with incredible quickness, yettheir range was palpably contracted every round; the enemy's shot camesinging up in a sharper key; the English skirmishers, breathless andbegrimed with powder, rushed over the edge of the ascent; the artillerydrew back"—and over the edge of the hill came the bearskins and thegleaming bayonets of the French! General Simon led the attack sofiercely home that he was the first to leap across the Englishentrenchments, when an infantry soldier, lingering stubbornly after hiscomrades had fallen back, shot him point-blank through the face. Theunfortunate general, when the fight was over, was found lying in theredoubt amongst the dying and the dead, with scarcely a human featureleft. He recovered, was sent as a prisoner to England, and wasafterwards exchanged, but his horrible wound made it impossible for himto serve again.

Craufurd had been watching meanwhile with grim coolness the onward rushof the French. They came storming and exultant, a wave of martialfigures, edged with a spray of fire and a tossing fringe of bayonets,over the summit of the hill; when suddenly Craufurd, in a shrill tone,called on his reserves to attack. In an instant there rose, as if outof the ground, before the eyes of the astonished French, the serriedlines of the 43rd and 52nd, and what a moment before was empty spacewas now filled with the frowning visage of battle. The British linesbroke into one stern and deep-toned shout, and 1800 bayonets, in onelong line of gleaming points, came swiftly down upon the French. Tostand against that moving hedge of deadly and level steel wasimpossible; yet each man in the leading section of the French raisedhis musket and fired, and two officers and ten soldiers fell beforethem. Not a Frenchman had missed his mark! They could do no more."The head of their column," to quote Napier, "was violently thrown backupon the rear, both flanks were overlapped at the same moment by theEnglish wings, and three terrible discharges at five yards' distanceshattered the wavering mass." Before those darting points of flame thepride of the French shrivelled. Shining victory was converted, inalmost the passage of an instant, into bloody defeat; and a shatteredmass, with ranks broken, and colours abandoned, and disciplineforgotten, the French were swept into the depths of the ravine out ofwhich they had climbed.

One of the dramatic episodes of the fight at this juncture is that ofCaptain Jones—known in his regiment as "Jack Jones" of the 52nd.Jones was a fiery Welshman, and led his company in the rush on GeneralSimon's column. The French were desperately trying to deploy, achef-de-bataillon giving the necessary orders with great vehemence.Jones ran ahead of his charging men, outstripping them by speed offoot, challenged the French officer with a warlike gesture to singlecombat, and slew him with one fierce thrust before his own troops, andthe 52nd, as they came on at the run, saw the duel and its result, werelifted by it to a mood of victory, and raised a sudden shout ofexultation, which broke the French as by a blast of musketry fire.

For hours the battle spluttered and smouldered amongst the skirmishersin the ravines, and some gallant episodes followed. Towards evening,for example, a French company, with signal audacity, and apparently onits own private impulse, seized a cluster of houses only half a musketshot from the light division, and held it while Craufurd scourged themwith the fire of twelve guns. They were only turned out at the pointof the bayonet by the 43rd. But the battle was practically over, andthe English had beaten, by sheer hard fighting, the best troops and thebest marshals of France.

In the fierceness of actual fighting, Busaco has never been surpassed,and seldom did the wounded and dying lie thicker on a battlefield thanwhere the hostile lines struggled together on that fatal September 27.The melée at some points was too close for even the bayonet to beused, and the men fought with fists or with the butt-end of theirmuskets. From the rush which swept Regnier's men down the slope theConnaught Rangers came back with faces and hands and weapons literallysplashed red with blood. The firing was so fierce that Wellington,with his whole staff, dismounted. Napier, however—one of the famousfighting trio of that name, who afterwards conquered Scinde—fiercelyrefused to dismount, or even cover his red uniform with a cloak. "Thisis the uniform of my regiment," he said, "and in it I will show, orfall this day." He had scarcely uttered the words when a bulletsmashed through his face and shattered his jaw to pieces. As he wascarried past Lord Wellington he waved his hand and whispered throughhis torn mouth, "I could not die at a better moment!" Of such stuffwere the men who fought under Wellington in the Peninsula.

OF NELSON AND THE NILE

"Britannia needs no bulwarks,
No towers along the steep;
Her march is o'er the mountain waves,
Her home is on the deep.
With thunders from her native oak,
She quells the floods below,
As they roar on the shore
When the stormy winds do blow;
When the battle rages loud and long,
And the stormy winds do blow.

The meteor flag of England
Shall yet terrific burn,
Till danger's troubled night depart,
And the star of peace return.
Then, then, ye ocean warriors,
Our song and feast shall flow
To the fame of your name,
When the storm has ceased to blow;
When the fiery fight is heard no more,
And the storm has ceased to blow."
—CAMPBELL.

Aboukir Bay resembles nothing so much as a piece bitten out of theEgyptian pancake. A crescent-shaped bay, patchy with shoals,stretching from the Rosetta mouth of the Nile to Aboukir, or, as it isnow called, Nelson Island, that island being simply the outer point ofa sandbank that projects from the western horn of the bay. Flatshores, grey-blue Mediterranean waters, two horns of land six milesapart, that to the north projecting farthest and forming a lowisland—this, ninety-eight years ago, was the scene of what mightalmost be described as the greatest sea-fight in history.

On the evening of August 1, 1798, thirteen great battleships lay drawnup in a single line parallel with the shore, and as close to it as thesandbanks permitted. The head ship was almost stern on to the shoalwhich, running out at right angles to the shore, forms Aboukir Island.The nose of each succeeding ship was exactly 160 yards from the sternof the ship before it, and, allowing for one or two gaps, each ship wasbound by a great cable to its neighbour. It was a thread of beads,only each "bead" was a battleship, whose decks swarmed with brave men,and from whose sides gaped the iron lips of more than a thousand heavyguns. The line was not exactly straight; it formed a very obtuseangle, the projecting point at the centre being formed by the Orient,the biggest warship at that moment afloat, a giant of 120 guns.

Next to her came the Franklin, of 80 guns, a vessel which, if not thebiggest, was perhaps the finest sample of naval architecture inexistence. The line of ships was more than one mile and a half long,and consisted of the gigantic flagship, three ships of the line of 80guns, and nine of 74 guns. In addition, it had a fringe of gunboatsand frigates, while a battery of mortars on the island guarded, as witha sword of fire, the gap betwixt the headmost ship and the island.This great fleet had convoyed Napoleon, with 36,000 troops crowded into400 transports, from France, had captured Malta on the voyage, andthree weeks before had safely landed Napoleon and his soldiers inEgypt. The French admiral, Bruéys, knew that Nelson was comingfuriously in his track, and after a consultation with all his captainshe had drawn up his ships in the order which we have described, aposition he believed to be unassailable. And at three o'clock on theafternoon of August 1, 1798, his look-outs were eagerly watching thewhite topsails showing above the lee line, the van of Nelson's fleet.

Napoleon had kept the secret of his Egyptian expedition well, and thegreat Toulon fleet, with its swarm of transports, had vanished roundthe coast of Corsica and gone off into mere space, as far as abewildered British Admiralty knew. A fleet of thirteen 74-gun shipsand one of 50 guns was placed under Nelson's flag. He was ordered topursue and destroy the vanished French fleet, and with characteristicenergy he set out on one of the most dramatic sea-chases known tohistory. With the instinct of genius he guessed that Napoleon'sdestination was Egypt; but while the French fleet coasted Sardinia andwent to the west of Sicily, Nelson ran down the Italian coast toNaples, called there for information, found none, and, carrying allsail, swept through the straits of Messina.

On the night of June 22 the two fleets actually crossed each other'stracks. The French fleet, including the transports, numbered 572vessels, and their lights, it might be imagined, would have lit up manyleagues of sea. Yet, through this forest of hostile masts the Englishfleet, with keen eyes watching at every masthead, swept and sawnothing. Nelson, for one thing, had no frigates to serve as eyes andears for him; his fleet in sailor-like fashion formed a compact body,three parallel lines of phantom-like pyramids of canvas sweeping in thedarkness across the floor of the sea. Above all a haze filled thenight; and it is not too much to say that the drifting grey vapourwhich hid the French ships from Nelson's lookout men changed the faceof history.

Nelson used to explain that his ideal of perfect enjoyment would be tohave the chance of "trying Bonaparte on a wind"; and if he had caughtsound of bell or gleam of lantern from the great French fleet, andbrought it to action in the darkness of that foggy night, can any onedoubt what the result would have been? Nelson would have done off thecoast of Sicily on June 22, 1798, what Wellington did on June 18, 1815;and in that case there would have been no Marengo or Austerlitz, noretreat from Moscow, no Peninsular war, and no Waterloo. For so much,in distracted human affairs, may a patch of drifting vapour count!

Nelson, in a word, overran his prey. He reached Alexandria to find thecoast empty; doubled back to Sicily, zigzagging on his way by Cyprusand Candia; and twelve hours after he had left Alexandria the topsailsof the French fleet hove in sight from that port. Napoleon's troopswere safely landed, and the French admiral had some four weeks in whichto prepare for Nelson's return, and at 3 P.M. on August 1 the glidingtopsails of the Swiftsure above Aboukir Island showed that thetireless Englishman had, after nearly three months of pursuit,overtaken his enemy.

The French, if frigates be included, counted seventeen ships tofourteen, and ship for ship they had the advantage over the Britishalike in crew, tonnage, and weight of fire. In size the English shipsscarcely averaged 1500 tons; the French ships exceeded 2000 tons.Nelson had only seventy-fours, his heaviest gun being a 32-pounder.The average French 80-gun ship in every detail of fighting strengthexceeded an English ninety-eight, and Bruéys had three such ships inhis fleet; while his own flagship, the Orient, was fully equal to twoEnglish seventy-fours. Its weight of ball on the lower deck aloneexceeded that from the whole broadside of the Bellerophon, the shipthat engaged it. The French, in brief, had an advantage in guns ofabout twenty per cent., and in men of over thirty per cent. Bruéys,moreover, was lying in a carefully chosen position in a dangerous bay,of which his enemies possessed no chart, and the head of his line wasprotected by a powerful shore battery.

Nothing in this great fight is more dramatic than the swiftness andvehemence of Nelson's attack. He simply leaped upon his enemy atsight. Four of his ships were miles off in the offing, but Nelson didnot wait for them. In the long pursuit he had assembled his captainsrepeatedly in his cabin, and discussed every possible manner ofattacking the French fleet. If he found the fleet as he guessed, drawnup in battle-line close in-shore and anchored, his plan was to placeone of his ships on the bows, another on the quarter, of each Frenchship in succession.

It has been debated who actually evolved the idea of rounding the headof the French line and attacking on both faces. One version is thatFoley, in the Goliath, who led the British line, owed the suggestionto a keen-eyed middy who pointed out that the anchor buoy of theheadmost French ship was at such a distance from the ship itself as toprove there was room to pass. But the weight of evidence seems toprove that Nelson himself, as he rounded Aboukir Island, and scannedwith fierce and questioning vision Bruéys' formation, with thatswiftness of glance in which he almost rivalled Napoleon, saw hischance in the gap between the leading French ship and the shore."Where a French ship can swing," he held, "an English ship can eithersail or anchor." And he determined to double on the French line andattack on both faces at once. He explained his plan to Berry, hiscaptain, who in his delight exclaimed, "If we succeed, what will theworld say?" "There is no 'if' in the case," said Nelson; "that weshall succeed is certain; who will live to tell the story is a verydifferent question."

Bruéys had calculated that the English fleet must come downperpendicularly to his centre, and each ship in the process be raked bya line of fire a mile and a half long; but the moment the English shipsrounded the island they tacked, hugged the shore, and swept through thegap between the leading vessel and the land. The British ships were soclose to each other that Nelson, speaking from his own quarter-deck,was able to ask Hood in the Zealous, if he thought they had waterenough to round the French line. Hood replied that he had no chart,but would lead and take soundings as he went.

So the British line came on, the men on the yards taking in canvas, theleadsmen in the chains coolly calling the soundings. The batteryroared from the island, the leading French ships broke into smoke andflame, but the steady British line glided on. The Goliath by thistime led; and at half-past five the shadow of its tall masts cast bythe westering sun fell over the decks of the Guerrier, and as Foley,its captain, swept past the Frenchman's bows, he poured in a furiousbroadside, bore swiftly up, and dropped—as Nelson, with that minuteattention to detail which marks a great commander, had ordered all hiscaptains—an anchor from the stern, so that, without having to "swing,"he was instantly in a fighting position on his enemy's quarter. Foley,however, dropped his anchor a moment too late, and drifted on to thesecond ship in the line; but Hood, in the Zealous, coming swiftlyafter, also raked the Guerrier, and, anchoring from the stern at theexact moment, took the place on its quarter Foley should have taken.

The Orion came into battle next, blasted the unfortunate Guerrier,whose foremast had already gone, with a third broadside, and sweptoutside the Zealous and Goliath down to the third ship on theFrench line. A French frigate, the Sérieuse, of thirty-six guns,anchored inside the French line, ventured to fire on the Orion as itswept past, whereupon Saumarez, its commander, discharged his starboardbroadside into that frigate. The Sérieuse reeled under the shock ofthe British guns, its masts disappeared like chips, and the unfortunateFrenchman went down like a stone; while Saumarez, laying himself on thelarboard bow of the Franklin and the quarter of the Peuple Sovrain,broke upon them in thunder. The Theseus followed hard in the trackof the Orion, raked the unhappy Guerrier in the familiar fashionwhile crossing its bows, then swept through the narrow water-lanebetwixt the Goliath and Zealous and their French antagonists,poured a smashing broadside into each French ship as it passed, thenshot outside the Orion, and anchored with mathematical nicety off thequarter of the Spartiate. The water-lane was not a pistol-shot wide,and this feat of seamanship was marvellous.

Miller, who commanded the Theseus, in a letter to his wife describedthe fight. "In running along the enemy's line in the wake of theZealous and Goliath, I observed," he says, "their shot sweep justover us, and knowing well that at such a moment Frenchmen would nothave coolness enough to change their elevation, I closed them suddenly,and, running under the arch of their shot, reserved my fire, every gunbeing loaded with two, and some with three round shot, until I had theGuerrier's masts in a line, and her jib-boom about six feet clear ofour rigging. We then opened with such effect that a second breathcould not be drawn before her main and mizzen-mast were also gone.This was precisely at sunset, or forty-four minutes past six."

The Audacious, meanwhile, was too impatient to tack round the head ofthe French line; it broke through the gap betwixt the first and secondships of the enemy, delivered itself, in a comfortable manner, of araking broadside into both as it passed, took its position on thelarboard bow of the Conquerant, and gave itself up to the joy ofbattle. Within thirty minutes from the beginning of the fight, thatis, five British line-of-battle ships were inside the French line,comfortably established on the bows or quarters of the leading ships.Nelson himself, in the Vanguard, anchored on the outside of theFrench line, within eighty yards of the Spartiate's starboard beam;the Minotaur, the Bellerophon, and the Majestic, coming up inswift succession, and at less than five minutes' interval from eachother, flung themselves on the next ships.

How the thunder of the battle deepened, and how the quick flashes ofthe guns grew brighter as the night gathered rapidly over sea, must beimagined. But Nelson's swift and brilliant strategy was triumphant.Each ship in the French van resembled nothing so much as a walnut inthe jaws of a nut-cracker. They were being "cracked" in succession,and the rear of the line could only look on with agitated feelings andwatch the operation.

The fire of the British ships for fury and precision was overwhelming.The head of the Guerrier was simply shot away; the anchors hangingfrom her bows were cut in two; her main-deck ports, from the bowspritto the gangway, were driven into one; her masts, fallen inboard, laywith their tangle of rigging on the unhappy crew; while some of hermain-deck beams—all supports being torn away—fell on the guns. Hood,in the Zealous, who was pounding the unfortunate Guerrier, says,"At last, being tired of killing men in that way, I sent a lieutenanton board, who was allowed, as I had instructed him, to hoist a light,and haul it down as a sign of submission." But all the damage was noton the side of the French. The great French flagship, the Orient, bythis time had added her mighty voice to the tumult, and theBellerophon, who was engaged with her, had a bad time of it. It wasthe story of Tom Sayers and Heenan over again—a dwarf fighting agiant. Her mizzen-mast and mainmast were shot away, and aftermaintaining the dreadful duel for more than an hour, and having 200 ofher crew struck down, at 8.20 P.M. the Bellerophon cut her cable anddrifted, a disabled wreck, out of the fire.

Meanwhile the four ships Nelson had left in the offing were beatingfuriously up to add themselves to the fight. Night had fallen, by thetime Troubridge, in the Culloden, came round the island; and then, infull sight of the great battle, the Culloden ran hopelessly ashore!She was, perhaps, the finest ship of the British fleet, and theemotions of its crew and commander as they listened to the tumult, andwatched through the darkness the darting fires of the Titanic combatthey could not share, may be imagined. "Our army," according towell-known authorities, "swore terribly in Flanders." The expletivesdischarged that night along the decks and in the forecastle of theCulloden would probably have made even a Flanders veteran open his eyesin astonishment.

The Swiftsure and the Alexander, taking warning by the Culloden'sfate, swept round her and bore safely up to the fight. TheSwiftsure, bearing down through the darkness to the combat, cameacross a vessel drifting, dismasted and lightless, a mere wreck.Holliwell, the captain of the Swiftsure, was about to fire, thinkingit was an enemy, but on second thoughts hailed instead, and got for ananswer the words, "Bellerophon; going out of action, disabled." TheSwiftsure passed on, and five minutes after the Bellerophon haddrifted from the bows of the Orient the Swiftsure, comingmysteriously up out of the darkness, took her place, and broke into atempest of fire.

At nine o'clock the great French flagship burst into flame. Thepainters had been at work upon her on the morning of that day, and hadleft oil and combustibles about. The nearest English shipsconcentrated their fire, both of musketry and of cannon, on the burningpatch, and made the task of extinguishing it hopeless. Bruéys, theFrench admiral, had already been cut in two by a cannon shot, andCasablanca, his commodore, was wounded. The fire spread, the flamesleaped up the masts and crept athwart the decks of the great ship. Themoon had just risen, and the whole scene was perhaps the strangest everwitnessed—the great burning ship, the white light of the moon above,the darting points of red flame from the iron lips of hundreds of gunsbelow, the drifting battle-smoke, the cries of ten thousandcombatants—all crowded into an area of a few hundred square yards!

The British ships, hanging like hounds on the flanks of the Orient,knew that the explosion might come at any moment, and they made everypreparation for it, closing their hatchways, arid gathering theirfiremen at quarters. But they would not withdraw their ships a singleyard! At ten o'clock the great French ship blew up with a flame thatfor a moment lit shore and sea, and a sound that hushed into stillnessthe whole tumult of the battle. Out of a crew of over a thousand menonly seventy were saved! For ten minutes after that dreadful sight thewarring fleets seemed stupefied. Not a shout was heard, not a shotfired. Then the French ship next the missing flagship broke intowrathful fire, and the battle awoke in full passion once more.

The fighting raged with partial intermissions all through the night,and when morning broke Bruéys' curved line of mighty battleships, amile and a half long, had vanished. Of the French ships, one had beenblown up, one was sunk, one was ashore, four had fled, the rest wereprizes. It was the most complete and dramatic victory in navalhistory. The French fought on the whole with magnificent courage; but,though stronger in the mass, Nelson's strategy and the seamanship ofhis captains made the British stronger at every point of actual battle.The rear of the French line did not fire a shot or lose a man. Thewonder is that when Nelson's strategy was developed, and its fatalcharacter understood, Villeneuve, who commanded the French rear, andwas a man of undoubted courage, did not cut his cables, make sail, andcome to the help of his comrades. A few hundred yards would havecarried him to the heart of the fight. Can any one doubt whether, ifthe positions had been reversed, Nelson would have watched thedestruction of half his fleet as a mere spectator? If nothing betterhad offered, he would have pulled in a wash-tub into the fight!

Villeneuve afterwards offered three explanations of his owninertness—(1) he "could not spare any of his anchors"; (2) "he had noinstructions"! (3) "on board the ships in the rear the idea of weighingand going to the help of the ships engaged occurred to no one"! Injustice to the French, however, it may be admitted that nothing couldsurpass the fierceness and valour with which, say, the Tonnant wasfought. Its captain, Du Petit-Thouars, fought his ship magnificently,had first both his arms and then one of his legs shot away, and diedentreating his officers not to strike. Of the ten French shipsengaged, the captains of eight were killed or wounded. Nelson took theseven wounded captains on board the Vanguard, and, as they recovered,they dined regularly with him. One of the captains had lost his nose,another an eye, another most of his teeth, with musket-shots, &c.Nelson, who himself had been wounded, and was still half-blind as aresult, at one of his dinners offered by mischance a case of toothpicksto the captain on his left, who had lost all his teeth. He discoveredhis error, and in his confusion handed his snuff-box to the captain onhis right, who had lost his nose!

What was the secret of the British victory? Nelson's brilliantstrategy was only possible by virtue of the magnificent seamanship ofhis captains, and the new fashion of close and desperate fighting,which Hood and Jarvis and Nelson himself had created. It is a Frenchwriter, Captain Gravière, who says that the French naval habit ofevading battle where they could, and of accepting action from an enemyrather than forcing it upon him, had ruined the morale of the Frenchnavy. The long blockades had made Nelson's captains perfect seamen,and he taught them that close fighting at pistol-shot distance was thesecret of victory. "No English captain," he said, "can do wrong who,in fight, lays a ship alongside an enemy." It was a captain ofNelson's school—a Scotchman—who at Camperdown, unable, just as theaction began, to read some complicated signal from his chief, flung hissignal-book on the deck, and in broad Scotch exclaimed, "D—— me! upwith the hellem an' gang in the middle o't." That trick of "ganginginto the middle o't" was irresistible.

The battle of the Nile destroyed the naval prestige of France, madeEngland supreme in the Mediterranean, saved India, left Napoleon andhis army practically prisoners in Egypt, and united Austria, Russia,and Turkey in league against France. The night battle in Aboukir Bay,in a word, changed the face of history.

THE FUSILEERS AT ALBUERA

"And nearer, fast and nearer,
Doth the red whirlwind come;
And louder still, and still more loud,
From underneath that rolling cloud,
Is heard the trumpet's war-note proud,
The trampling and the hum.
And plainly, and more plainly,
Now through the gloom appears,
Far to left and far to right,
In broken gleams of dark-blue light,
The long array of helmets bright,
The long array of spears."
—MACAULAY.

Albuera is the fiercest, bloodiest, and most amazing fight in the mightydrama of the Peninsular war. On May 11, 1811, the English guns werethundering sullenly over Badajos. Wellington was beyond the Guadiana,pressing Marmont; and Beresford, with much pluck but little skill, wasbesieging the great frontier fortress. Soult, however, a master of war,was swooping down from Seville to raise the siege. On the 14th hereached Villafranca, only thirty miles distant, and fired salvos from hisheaviest guns all through the night to warn the garrison of approachingsuccour. Beresford could not both maintain the siege and fight Soult;and on the night of the 13th he abandoned his trenches, burnt his gabionsand fascines, and marched to meet Soult at Albuera, a low ridge, with ashallow river in front, which barred the road to Badajos. As the morningof May 16, 1811, broke, heavy with clouds, and wild with gustyrain-storms, the two armies grimly gazed at each other in stern pause,ere they joined in the wrestle of actual battle.

All the advantages, save one, were on the side of the French. Soult wasthe ablest of the French marshals. If he had not Ney's élan in attack,or Massena's stubborn resource in retreat, yet he had a military genius,since Lannes was dead, second only to that of Napoleon himself. He hadunder his command 20,000 war-hardened infantry, 40 guns, and 4000magnificent cavalry, commanded by Latour Maubourg, one of the mostbrilliant of French cavalry generals. Beresford, the British commander,had the dogged fighting courage, half Dutch and half English, of his nameand blood; but as a commander he was scarcely third-rate. Of his army of30,000, 15,000 were Spanish, half drilled, and more than halfstarved—they had lived for days on horse-flesh—under Blake, a generalwho had lost all the good qualities of Irish character, and acquired allthe bad ones peculiar to Spanish temper. Of Beresford's remaining troop8000 were Portuguese; he had only 7000 British soldiers.

Beresford ought not to have fought. He had abandoned the siege atBadajos, and no reason for giving battle remained. The condition ofBlake's men, no doubt, made retreat difficult. They had reached thepoint at which they must either halt or lie down and die. The real forcedriving Beresford to battle, however, was the fighting effervescence inhis own blood and the warlike impatience of his English troops. They hadtaken no part in the late great battles under Wellington; Busaco had beenfought and Fuentes de Onoro gained without them; and they were in themood, both officers and men, of fierce determination to fight somebody!This was intimated somewhat roughly to Beresford, and he had not thatiron ascendency over his troops Wellington possessed. As a matter offact, he was himself as stubbornly eager to fight as any private in theranks.

The superiority of Soult's warlike genius was shown before a shot wasfired. Beresford regarded the bridge that crossed the Albuera and thevillage that clustered at the bridge-head as the key of his position. Heoccupied the village with Alten's German brigade, covered the bridge withthe fire of powerful batteries, and held in reserve above it his bestBritish brigade, the fusileers, under Cole, the very regiments who, fourhours later, on the extreme right of Beresford's position, were actuallyto win the battle. Soult's sure vision, however, as he surveyed hisenemies on the evening of the 15th, saw that Beresford's right was hisweak point. It was a rough, broken table-land, curving till it lookedinto the rear of Beresford's line. It was weakly held by Blake and hisSpaniards. Immediately in its front was a low wooded hill, behind which,as a screen, an attacking force could be gathered.

In the night Soult placed behind this hill the fifth corps, under Gerard,the whole of his cavalry, under Latour Maubourg, and the strength of hisartillery. When the morning broke, Soult had 15,000 men and 30 gunswithin ten minutes' march of Beresford's right wing, and nobody suspectedit. No gleam of colour, no murmur of packed battalions, no ring ofsteel, no sound of marching feet warned the deluded English general ofthe battle-storm about to break on his right wing. A commander with suchan unexpected tempest ready to burst on the weakest point of his line wasby all the rules of war pre-doomed.

At nine o'clock Soult launched an attack at the bridge, the point whereBeresford expected him, but it was only a feint. Beresford, however,with all his faults, had the soldierly brain to which the actual thunderof the cannon gave clearness. He noticed that the French battalionssupporting the attack on the bridge did not press on closely. As amatter of fact, as soon as the smoke of artillery from the battle ragingat the bridge swept over the field, they swung smartly to the left, andat the double hastened to add themselves to the thunderbolt which Soultwas launching at Beresford's right. But Beresford, meanwhile, hadguessed Soult's secret, and he sent officer after officer ordering andentreating Blake to change front so as to meet Soult's attack on hisflank, and he finally rode thither himself to enforce his commands.Blake, however, was immovable through pride, and his men through sheerphysical weakness. They could die, but they could not march or deploy.Blake at last tried to change front, but as he did so the French attacksmote him. Pressing up the gentle rise, Gerard's men scourged poorBlake's flank with their fire; the French artillery, coming swiftly on,halted every fifty yards to thunder on the unhappy Spaniards; whileLatour Maubourg's lancers and hussars, galloping in a wider sweep,gathered momentum for a wild ride on Blake's actual rear.

Beresford tried to persuade the Spaniards to charge as the French werethus circling round them. Shouts and gesticulations were in vain. Hewas a man of giant height and strength, and he actually seized a Spanishensign in his iron grip, and carried him bodily, flag and all, at a runfor fifty yards towards the moving French lines, and planted him there.When released, however, the bewildered Spaniard simply took to his heelsand ran back to his friends, as a terrified sheep might run back to theflock. In half-an-hour Beresford's battle had grown desperate.Two-thirds of the French, in compact order of battle, were perpendicularto his right; the Spaniards were falling into disorder. Soult saw thevictory in his grasp, and eagerly pushed forward his reserves. Over thewhole hill, mingled with furious blasts of rain, rolled the tumult of adisorderly and broken fight. Ten minutes more would have enabled Soultto fling Beresford's right, a shattered and routed mass, on the onlypossible line of retreat, and with the French superiority in cavalry hisarmy would have been blotted out.

The share of the British in the fight consisted of three great attacksdelivered by way of counter-stroke to Soult's overwhelming rush on thehill held by Blake. The first attack was delivered by the seconddivision, under Colborne, led by General Stewart in person. Stewart wasa sort of British version of Ney, a man of vehement spirit, with a daringthat grew even more flame-like in the eddying tumult and tempest ofactual battle. He saw Soult's attack crumpling up Blake's helplessbattalions, while the flash of the French artillery every moment grewcloser. It was the crisis of the fight, and Stewart brought onColborne's men at a run. Colborne himself, a fine soldier with cooljudgment, wished to halt and form his men in order of battle beforeplunging into the confused vortex of the fight above; but Stewart, fullof breathless ardour, hurried the brigade up the hill in column ofcompanies, reached the Spanish right, and began to form line bysuccession of battalions as they arrived.

At this moment a wild tempest of rain was sweeping over the British as,at the double, they came up the hill; the eddying fog, thick and slabwith the smoke of powder, hid everything twenty yards from the pantingsoldiers. Suddenly the wall of changing fog to their right sparkled intoswiftly moving spots of red; it shone the next instant with the gleam ofa thousand steel points; above the thunder of the cannon, the shouts ofcontending men, rose the awful sound of a tempest of galloping hoofs.The French lancers and hussars caught the English in open order, and infive fierce and bloody minutes almost trampled them out of existence!Two-thirds of the brigade went down. The 31st Regiment flung itselfpromptly into square, and stood fast—a tiny island, edged with steel andflame, amid the mad tumult; but the French lancers, drunk withexcitement, mad with battle fury, swept over the whole slope of the hill.They captured six guns, and might have done yet more fatal mischief butthat they occupied themselves in galloping to and fro across the line oftheir original charge, spearing the wounded.

One lancer charged Beresford as he sat, solitary and huge, on his horseamid the broken English regiments. But Beresford was at least amagnificent trooper; he put the lance aside with one hand, and caught theFrenchman by the throat, lifted him clean from his saddle, and dashed himsenseless on the ground! The ensign who carried the colours of the 3rdBuffs covered them with his body till he was slain by a dozenlance-thrusts; the ensign who carried the other colours of the sameregiment tore the flag from its staff and thrust it into his breast, andit was found there, stiff with his blood, after the fight. TheSpaniards, meanwhile, were firing incessantly but on general principlesmerely, and into space or into the ranks of their own allies as mighthappen; and the 29th, advancing to the help of Colborne's broken men,finding the Spaniards in their path and firing into their lines, brokesternly into volleys on them in turn. Seldom has a battlefield witnesseda tumult so distracted and wild.

The first English counter-stroke had failed, but the second followedswiftly. The furious rain and fog which had proved so fatal toColborne's men for a moment, was in favour of Beresford. Soult, thougheagerly watching the conflict, could not see the ruin into which theBritish had fallen, and hesitated to launch his reserves into the fight.The 31st still sternly held its own against the French cavalry, and thisgave time for Stewart to bring up Houghton's brigade. But this timeStewart, though he brought up his men with as much vehemence as before,brought them up in order of battle. The 29th, the 48th, and the 57thswept up the hill in line, led by Houghton, hat in hand. He fell,pierced by three bullets; but over his dead body, eager to close, theBritish line still swept. They reached the crest. A deep and narrowravine arrested their bayonet charge; but with stubborn valour they heldthe ground they had gained, scourged with musketry fire at pistol-shotdistance, and by artillery at fifty yards' range, while a French columnsmote them with its musketry on their flask. The men fell fast, butfought as they fell. Stewart was twice wounded; Colonel Dutworth, of the48th, slain; of the 57th, out of 570 men, 430, with their colonel,Inglis, fell. The men, after the battle, were found lying dead in ranksexactly as they fought. "Die hard! my men, die hard!" said Inglis whenthe bullet struck him; and the 57th have borne the name of "Die hards"ever since. At Inkerman, indeed, more than fifty years afterwards, the"Die hard!" of Inglis served to harden the valour of the 57th in a fightas stern as Albuera itself.

But ammunition began to fail. Houghton's men would not yield, but it wasplain that in a few more minutes there would be none of them left, savethe dead and the wounded. And at this dreadful moment Beresford,distracted with the tumult and horror of the fight, wavered! He calledup Alten's men from the bridge to cover his retreat, and prepared toyield the fatal hill. At this juncture, however, a mind more masterfuland daring than his own launched a third British attack against thevictorious French and won the dreadful day.

Colonel Hardinge, afterwards famous in Indian battles, acted asquartermaster-general of the Portuguese army; on his own responsibilityhe organised the third English attack. Cole had just come up the roadfrom Badajos with two brigades, and Hardinge urged him to lead his menstraight up the hill; then riding to Abercrombie's brigade, he orderedhim to sweep round the flank of the hill. Beresford, on learning of thismovement, accepted it, and sent back Alten's men to retake the bridgewhich they had abandoned.

Abercrombie's men swept to the left of the hill, and Cole, a gallant andable soldier, using the Portuguese regiments in his brigade as a guardagainst a flank attack of the French cavalry, led his two fusileerregiments, the 7th and 23rd, straight to the crest.

At this moment the French reserves were coming on, the fragments ofHoughton's brigade were falling back, the field was heaped with carcases,the lancers were riding furiously about the captured artillery, and witha storm of exultant shouts the French were sweeping on to assuredvictory. It was the dramatic moment of the fight. Suddenly through thefog, coming rapidly on with stern faces and flashing volleys, appearedthe long line of Cole's fusileers on the right of Houghton's staggeringgroups, while at the same exact moment Abercrombie's line broke throughthe mist on their left. As these grim and threatening lines becamevisible, the French shouts suddenly died down. It was the old contest ofthe British line—the "thin red line"—against the favourite Frenchattack in column, and the story can only be told in Napier's resonantprose. The passage which describes the attack of the fusileers is one ofthe classic passages of English battle literature, and in its syllablescan still almost be heard the tread of marching feet, the shrill clangourof smitten steel, and the thunder of the musketry volleys:—

"Such a gallant line," says Napier, "arising from amid the smoke, andrapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,startled the enemy's masses, which were increasing and pressing forwardas to assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and then, vomiting fortha storm of fire, hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front, while thefearful discharge of grape from all their artillery whistled through theBritish ranks. Myers was killed. Cole and the three colonels—Ellis,Blakeney, and Hawkshawe—fell wounded, and the fusileer battalions,struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking ships.Suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies,and then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldierfights. In vain did Soult, by voice and gesture, animate his Frenchmen;in vain did the hardiest veterans break from the crowded columns andsacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open on such a fairfield; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and, fiercely striving, fireindiscriminately on friends and foes, while the horsem*n, hovering on theflanks, threatened to charge the advancing line.

"Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No sudden burst ofundisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm weakened the stability oftheir order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in front,their measured tread shook the ground, their dreadful volleys swept awaythe head of every formation, their deafening shouts overpowered thedissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd asslowly and with a horrid carnage it was driven by the incessant vigour ofthe attack to the farthest edge of the hill. In vain did the Frenchreserves mix with the struggling multitude to sustain the fight; theirefforts only increased the irremediable confusion, and the mighty mass,breaking off like a loosened cliff, went headlong down the ascent. Therain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and 1800 unwoundedmen, the remnant of 6000 unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphanton the fatal hill."

The battle of Albuera lasted four hours; its slaughter was dreadful.Within the space of a few hundred feet square were strewn some 7000bodies, and over this Aceldama the artillery had galloped, the cavalryhad charged! The 3rd Buffs went into the fight with 24 officers and 750rank and file; at the roll-call next morning there were only 5 officersand 35 men. One company of the Royal Fusileers came out of the fightcommanded by a corporal; every officer and sergeant had been killed.Albuera is essentially a soldier's fight. The bayonet of the private,not the brain of the general, won it; and never was the fighting qualityof our race more brilliantly shown. Soult summed up the battle in wordsthat deserve to be memorable. "There is no beating those troops," hewrote, "in spite of their generals!" "I always thought them badsoldiers," he added, with a Frenchman's love of paradox; "now I am sureof it. For I turned their right, pierced their centre, they wereeverywhere broken, the day was mine, and yet they did not know it, andwould not run!"

THE "SHANNON" AND THE "CHESAPEAKE"

"The signal to engage shall be
A whistle and a hollo;
Be one and all but firm, like me,
And conquest soon will follow!
You, Gunnel, keep the helm in hand—
Thus, thus, boys! steady, steady,
Till right ahead you see the land—
Then soon as you are ready,
The signal to engage shall be
A whistle and a hollo;
Be one and all but firm, like me,
And conquest soon will follow!"
—C. DIBDIN.

On the early morning of June 1, 1813, a solitary British frigate,H.M.S. Shannon, was cruising within sight of Boston lighthouse. Shewas a ship of about 1000 tons, and bore every mark of long and hardservice. No gleam of colour sparkled about her. Her sides were rusty,her sails weather-stained; a solitary flag flew from her mizzen-peak,and even its blue had been bleached by sun and rain and wind to a dingygrey. A less romantic and more severely practical ship did not float,and her captain was of the same type as the ship.

Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke was an Englishman pur sang, and of atype happily not uncommon. His fame will live as long as the Britishflag flies, yet a more sober and prosaic figure can hardly be imagined.He was not, like Nelson, a quarter-deck Napoleon; he had no gleam ofDundonald's matchless ruse de guerre. He was as deeply religious asHavelock or one of Cromwell's major-generals; he had the frugality of aScotchman, and the heavy-footed common-sense of a Hollander. He was asnautical as a web-footed bird, and had no more "nerves" than a fish. Adomestic Englishman, whose heart was always with the little girls atBrokehall, in Suffolk, but for whom the service of his country was apiety, and who might have competed with Lawrence for his self-chosenepitaph, "Here lies one who tried to do his duty."

A sober-suited, half-melancholy common-sense was Broke'scharacteristic, and he had applied it to the working of his ship, tillhe had made the vessel, perhaps, the most formidable fighting machineof her size afloat. He drilled his gunners until, from the swayingplatform of their decks, they shot with a deadly coolness and accuracynothing floating could resist. Broke, as a matter of fact, owed hisfamous victory over the Chesapeake to one of his matter-of-factprecautions. The first broadside fired by the Chesapeake sent a32-pound shot through one of the gun-room cabins into the magazinepassage of the Shannon, where it might easily have ignited somegrains of loose powder and blown the ship up, if Broke had not takenthe precaution of elaborately damping that passage before the actionbegan. The prosaic side of Broke's character is very amusing. In hisdiary he records his world-famous victory thus:—

"June 1st.—Off Boston. Moderate."

"N.W.—W(rote) Laurence."

"P.M.—Took Chesapeake."

Was ever a shining victory packed into fewer or duller words? Broke'sscorn of the histrionic is shown by his reply to one of his own menwho, when the Chesapeake, one blaze of fluttering colours, wasbearing down upon her drab-coloured opponent, said to his commander,eyeing the bleached and solitary flag at the Shannon's peak, "Mayn'twe have three ensigns, sir, like she has?" "No," said Broke, "we havealways been an unassuming ship!"

And yet, this unromantic English sailor had a gleam of Don Quixote inhim. On this pleasant summer morning he was waiting alone, under easysail, outside a hostile port, strongly fortified and full of armedvessels, waiting for an enemy's ship bigger than himself to come outand fight him. He had sent in the previous day, by way of challenge, aletter that recalls the days of chivalry. "As the Chesapeake," hewrote to Laurence, its captain, "appears now ready for sea, I requestthat you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon with her, ship toship." He proceeds to explain the exact armament of the Shannon, thenumber of her crew, the interesting circ*mstance that he is short ofprovisions and water, and that he has sent away his consort so that theterms of the duel may be fair. "If you will favour me," he says, "withany plan of signals or telegraph, I will warn you should any of myfriends be too nigh, while you are in sight, until I can detach themout of the way. Or," he suggests coaxingly, "I would sail under a flagof truce to any place you think safest from our cruisers, hauling itdown when fair, to begin hostilities.… Choose your terms," heconcludes, "but let us meet." Having sent in this amazing letter, thismiddle-aged, unromantic, but hard-fighting captain climbs at daybreakto his own maintop, and sits there till half-past eleven, watching thechallenged ship, to see if her foretopsail is unloosed and she iscoming out to fight.

It is easy to understand the causes which kindled a British sailor ofeven Broke's unimaginative temperament into flame. On June 18, 1812,the United States, with magnificent audacity, declared war againstGreat Britain. England at that moment had 621 efficient cruisers atsea, 102 being line-of-battle ships. The American navy consisted of 8frigates and 12 corvettes. It is true that England was at war at thesame moment with half the civilised world; but what reasonable chancehad the tiny naval power of the United States against the mighty fleetsof England, commanded by men trained in the school of Nelson, and richwith the traditions of the Nile and Trafalgar? As a matter of fact, inthe war which followed, the commerce of the United States was swept outof existence. But the Americans were of the same fighting stock as theEnglish; to the Viking blood, indeed, they added Yankee ingenuity andresource, making a very formidable combination; and up to the Junemorning when the Shannon was waiting outside Boston Harbour for theChesapeake, the naval honours of the war belonged to the Americans.The Americans had no fleet, and the campaign was one of single shipagainst single ship, but in these combats the Americans had scored moresuccesses in twelve months than French seamen had gained in twelveyears. The Guerrière, the Java, and the Macedonian had each beencaptured in single combat, and every British post-captain betwixtPortsmouth and Halifax was swearing with mere fury.

The Americans were shrewd enough to invent a new type of frigate which,in strength of frame, weight of metal, and general fighting power, wasto a British frigate of the same class almost what an ironclad would beto a wooden ship. The Constitution, for example, was in size to theaverage British frigate as 15.3 to 10.9; in weight of metal as 76 to51; and in crew as 46 to 25. Broke, however, had a well-founded beliefin his ship and his men, and he proposed, in his sober fashion, torestore the tarnished honour of his flag by capturing single-handed thebest American frigate afloat.

The Chesapeake was a fine ship, perfectly equipped, under a daringand popular commander. Laurence was a man of brilliant ingenuity andcourage, and had won fame four months before by capturing in theHornet, after a hard fight, the British brig-of-war Peaco*ck. Forthis feat he had been promoted to the Chesapeake, and in his briefspeech from the quarterdeck just before the fight with the Shannonbegan, he called up the memory of the fight which made him a popularhero by exhorting his crew to "Peaco*ck her, my lads! Peaco*ck her!"The Chesapeake was larger than the Shannon, its crew was nearly ahundred men stronger, its weight of fire 598 lbs. as against theShannon's 538 lbs. Her guns fired double-headed shot, and bars ofwrought iron connected by links and loosely tied by a few rope yarns,which, when discharged from the gun, spread out and formed a flyingiron chain six feet long. Its canister shot contained jagged pieces ofiron, broken bolts, and nails. As the British had a reputation forboarding, a large barrel of unslacked lime was provided to fling in thefaces of the boarders. An early shot from the Shannon, by the way,struck this cask of lime and scattered its contents in the faces of theAmericans themselves. Part of the equipment of the Chesapeakeconsisted of several hundred pairs of handcuffs, intended for thewrists of English prisoners. Boston citizens prepared a banquet inhonour of the victors for the same evening, and a small fleet ofpleasure-boats followed the Chesapeake as she came gallantly out tothe fight.

Never was a braver, shorter, or more murderous fight. Laurence, themost gallant of men, bore steadily down, without firing a shot, to thestarboard quarter of the Shannon. When within fifty yards he luffed;his men sprang into the shrouds and gave three cheers. Broke foughtwith characteristic silence and composure. He forbade his men tocheer, enforced the sternest silence along his deck, and ordered thecaptain of each gun to fire as his piece bore on the enemy. "Fire intoher quarters," he said, "main-deck into main-deck, quarter-deck intoquarter-deck. Kill the men, and the ship is yours."

The sails of the Chesapeake swept betwixt the slanting rays of theevening sun and the Shannon, the drifting shadow darkened the Englishmain-deck ports, the rush of the enemy's cut-water could be heardthrough the grim silence of the Shannon's decks. Suddenly therebroke out the first gun from the Shannon; then her whole side leapedinto flame. Never was a more fatal broadside discharged. A tempest ofshot, splinters, torn hammocks, cut rigging, and wreck of every kindwas hurled like a cloud across the deck of the Chesapeake, and of onehundred and fifty men at stations there, more than a hundred werekilled or wounded. A more fatal loss to the Americans instantlyfollowed, as Captain Laurence, the fiery soul of his ship, was shotthrough the abdomen by an English marine, and fell mortally wounded.

The answering thunder of the Chesapeake's guns, of course, rolledout, and then, following quick, the overwhelming blast of theShannon's broadside once more. Each ship, indeed, fired two fullbroadsides, and, as the guns fell quickly out of range, part of anotherbroadside. The firing of the Chesapeake was furious and deadlyenough to have disabled an ordinary ship. It is computed that fortyeffective shots would be enough to disable a frigate; the Shannonduring the six minutes of the firing was struck by no less than 158shot, a fact which proves the steadiness and power of the Americanfire. But the fire of the Shannon was overwhelming. In those samesix fatal minutes she smote the Chesapeake with no less than 362shots, an average of 60 shots of all sizes every minute, as against theChesapeake's 28 shots. The Chesapeake was fir-built, and theBritish shot riddled her. One Shannon broadside partly raked theChesapeake and literally smashed the stern cabins and battery to meresplinters, as completely as though a procession of aerolites had tornthrough it.

The swift, deadly, concentrated fire of the British in twoquick-following broadsides practically decided the combat. Thepartially disabled vessels drifted together, and the Chesapeake fellon board the Shannon, her quarter striking the starboard main-chains.Broke, as the ships ground together, looked over the blood-splasheddecks of the American and saw the men deserting the quarter-deck guns,under the terror of another broadside at so short a distance. "Followme who can," he shouted, and with characteristic coolness "stepped"—inhis own phrase—across the Chesapeake's bulwark. He was followed bysome 32 seamen and 18 marines—50 British boarders leaping upon a shipwith a crew of 400 men, a force which, even after the dreadfulbroadsides of the Shannon, still numbered 270 unwounded men in itsranks.

It is absurd to deny to the Americans courage of the very finestquality, but the amazing and unexpected severity of the Shannon'sfire had destroyed for the moment their morale, and the British werein a mood of victory. The boatswain of the Shannon, an old Rodneyman, lashed the two ships together, and in the act had his left armliterally hacked off by repeated strokes of a cutlass and was killed.One British midshipman, followed by five topmen, crept along theShannon's foreyard and stormed the Chesapeake's foretop, killingthe men stationed there, and then swarmed down by a back-stay to jointhe fighting on the deck. Another middy tried to attack theChesapeake's mizzentop from the starboard mainyard arm, but beinghindered by the foot of the topsail, stretched himself out on themainyard arm, and from that post shot three of the enemy in succession.

Meanwhile the fight on the deck had been short and sharp; some of theAmericans leaped overboard and others rushed below; and Laurence, lyingwounded in his steerage, saw the wild reflux of his own men down theafter ladders. On asking what it meant, he was told, "The ship isboarded, and those are the Chesapeake's men driven from the upperdecks by the English." This so exasperated the dying man that hecalled out repeatedly, "Then blow her up; blow her up."

The fight lasted exactly thirteen minutes—the broadsides occupied sixminutes, the boarding seven—and in thirteen minutes after the firstshot the British flag was flying over the American ship. The Shannonand Chesapeake were bearing up, side by side, for Halifax. Thespectators in the pleasure-boats were left ruefully staring at thespectacle; those American handcuffs, so thoughtfully provided, were onAmerican wrists; and the Boston citizens had to consume, with whatappetite they might, their own banquet. The carnage on the two shipswas dreadful. In thirteen minutes 252 men were either killed orwounded, an average of nearly twenty men for every minute the fightlasted. In the combat betwixt these two frigates, in fact, nearly asmany men were struck down as in the whole battle of Navarino! TheShannon itself lost as many men as any 74-gun ship ever lost inbattle.

Judge Haliburton, famous as "Sam Slick," when a youth of seventeen,boarded the Chesapeake as the two battered ships sailed into Halifax."The deck," he wrote, "had not been cleaned, and the coils and folds ofrope were steeped in gore as if in a slaughter-house. Pieces of skinwith pendent hair were adhering to the sides of the ship; and in oneplace I noticed portions of fingers protruding, as if thrust throughthe outer walls of the frigate."

Watts, the first lieutenant of the Shannon, was killed by the fire ofhis own ship in a very remarkable manner. He boarded with his captain,with his own hands pulled down the Chesapeake's flag, and hastilybent on the halliards the English ensign, as he thought, above theStars and Stripes, and then rehoisted it. In the hurry he had bent theEnglish flag under the Stars and Stripes instead of above it, and thegunners of the Shannon, seeing the American stripes going up first,opened fire instantly on the group at the foot of the mizzen-mast, blewthe top of their own unfortunate lieutenant's head off with a grapeshot, and killed three or four of their own men.

Captain Broke was desperately wounded in a curious fashion. A group ofAmericans, who had laid down their arms, saw the British captainstanding for a moment alone on the break of the forecastle. It seemeda golden chance. They snatched up weapons lying on the deck, andleaped upon him. Warned by the shout of the sentry. Broke turnedround to find three of the enemy with uplifted weapons rushing on him.He parried the middle fellow's pike and wounded him in the face, butwas instantly struck down with a blow from the butt-end of a musket,which laid bare his skull. He also received a slash from the cutlassof the third man, which clove a portion of skull completely away andleft the brain bare. He fell, and was grappled on the deck by the manhe had first wounded, a powerful fellow, who got uppermost and raised abayonet to thrust through Broke. At this moment a British marine camerunning up, and concluding that the man underneath must be anAmerican, also raised his bayonet to give the coup de grace. "Pooh,pooh, you fool," said Broke in the most matter-of-fact fashion, "don'tyou know your captain?" whereupon the marine changed the direction ofhis thrust and slew the American.

The news reached London on July 7, and was carried straight to theHouse of Commons, where Lord Cochrane was just concluding a fiercedenunciation of the Admiralty on the ground of the disasters sufferedfrom the Americans, and Croker, the Secretary to the Admiralty, wasable to tell the story of the fight off Boston to the wildly cheeringHouse, as a complete defence of his department. Broke was at oncecreated a Baronet and a Knight of the Bath. In America, on the otherhand, the story of the fight was received with mingled wrath andincredulity. "I remember," says Rush, afterwards U.S. Minister at theCourt of St. James, "at the first rumour of it, the universalincredulity. I remember how the post-offices were thronged forsuccessive days with anxious thousands; how collections of citizensrode out for miles on the highway to get the earliest news the mailbrought. At last, when the certainty was known, I remember the publicgloom, the universal badges of mourning. 'Don't give up the ship,' thedying words of Laurence, were on every tongue."

It was a great fight, the most memorable and dramatic sea-duel in navalhistory. The combatants were men of the same stock, and fought withequal bravery. Both nations, in fact, may be proud of a fight sofrank, so fair, so gallant. The world, we may hope, will never witnessanother Shannon engaged in the fierce wrestle of battle with anotherChesapeake, for the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes are knittedtogether by a bond woven of common blood and speech and politicalideals that grows stronger every year.

For years the Shannon and the Chesapeake lay peacefully side byside in the Medway, and the two famous ships might well have beenpreserved as trophies. The Chesapeake was bought by the Admiraltyafter the fight for exactly L21,314, 11s. 11 1/4d., and six yearsafterwards she was sold as mere old timber for 500 pounds, was brokenup, and to-day stands as a Hampshire flour-mill, peacefully grindingEnglish corn; but still on the mill-timbers can be seen the marks ofthe grape and round shot of the Shannon.

THE GREAT BREACH OF CIUDAD RODRIGO

"Attend, all ye who list to hear our noble England's praise,
I tell of the thrice famous deeds she wrought in ancient days."
—MACAULAY.

The three great and memorable sieges of the Peninsular war are those ofCiudad Rodrigo, Badajos, and San Sebastian. The annals of battlerecord nowhere a more furious daring in assault or a more gallantcourage in defence than that which raged in turn round each of thesethree great fortresses. Of the three sieges that of Badajos was themost picturesque and bloody; that of San Sebastian the most sullen andexasperated; that of Ciudad Rodrigo the swiftest and most brilliant. Agreat siege tests the fighting quality of any army as nothing else cantest it. In the night watches in the trenches, in the dogged toil ofthe batteries, and the crowded perils of the breach, all the fripperyand much of the real discipline of an army dissolves. The soldiersfall back upon what may be called the primitive fighting qualities—thehardihood of the individual soldier, the daring with which the officerswill lead, the dogged loyalty with which the men will follow. As anillustration of the warlike qualities in our race by which empire hasbeen achieved, nothing better can be desired than the story of how thebreaches were won at Ciudad Rodrigo.

At the end of 1811 the English and the French were watching each otherjealously across the Spanish border. The armies of Marmont and ofSoult, 67,000 strong, lay within touch of each other, barringWellington's entrance into Spain. Wellington, with 35,000 men, of whomnot more than 10,000 men were British, lay within sight of the Spanishfrontier. It was the winter time. Wellington's army was wasted bysickness, his horses were dying of mere starvation, his men hadreceived no pay for three months, and his muleteers none for eightmonths. He had no siege-train, his regiments were ragged and hungry,and the French generals confidently reckoned the British army as, forthe moment at least, une quantité négligeable.

And yet at that precise moment, Wellington, subtle and daring, wasmeditating a leap upon the great frontier fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo,in the Spanish province of Salamanca. Its capture would give him asafe base of operations against Spain; it was the great frontier placed'armes for the French; the whole siege-equipage, and stores of thearmy of Portugal were contained in it. The problem of how, in thedepth of winter, without materials for a siege, to snatch a place sostrong from under the very eyes of two armies, each stronger than hisown, was a problem which might have taxed the warlike genius of aCaesar. But Wellington accomplished it with a combination of subtletyand audacity simply marvellous.

He kept the secret of his design so perfectly that his own engineersnever suspected it, and his adjutant-general, Murray, went home onleave without dreaming anything was going to happen. Wellingtoncollected artillery ostensibly for the purpose of arming Almeida, butthe guns were trans-shipped at sea and brought secretly to the mouth ofthe Douro. No less than 800 mule-carts were constructed withoutanybody guessing their purpose. Wellington, while these preparationswere on foot, was keenly watching Marmont and Soult, till he saw thatthey were lulled into a state of mere yawning security, and then, inNapier's expressive phrase, he "instantly jumped with both feet uponCiudad Rodrigo."

This famous fortress, in shape, roughly resembles a triangle with theangles truncated. The base, looking to the south, is covered by theAgueda, a river given to sudden inundations; the fortifications werestrong and formidably armed; as outworks it had to the east the greatfortified Convent of San Francisco, to the west a similar buildingcalled Santa Cruz; whilst almost parallel with the northern face rosetwo rocky ridges called the Great and Small Teson, the nearest within600 yards of the city ramparts, and crowned by a formidable redoubtcalled Francisco. The siege began on January 8. The soil was rockyand covered with snow, the nights were black, the weather bitter. Themen lacked entrenching tools. They had to encamp on the side of theAgueda farthest from the city, and ford that river every time thetrenches were relieved. The 1st, 3rd, and light divisions formed theattacking force; each division held the trenches in turn fortwenty-four hours. Let the reader imagine what degree of hardihood ittook to wade in the grey and bitter winter dawn through a half-frozenriver, and without fire or warm food, and under a ceaseless rain ofshells from the enemy's guns, to toil in the frozen trenches, or tokeep watch, while the icicles hung from eyebrow and beard, over theedge of the battery for twenty-four hours in succession.

Nothing in this great siege is more wonderful than the fierce speedwith which Wellington urged his operations. Massena, who had besiegedand captured the city the year before in the height of summer, spent amonth in bombarding it before he ventured to assault. Wellington brokeground on January 8, under a tempest of mingled hail and rain; hestormed it on the night of the 19th.

He began operations by leaping on the strong work that crowned theGreat Teson the very night the siege began. Two companies from eachregiment of the light division were detailed by the officer of the day,Colonel Colborne, for the assault. Colborne (afterwards Lord Seaton),a cool and gallant soldier, called his officers together in a group andexplained with great minuteness how they were to attack. He thenlaunched his men against the redoubt with a vehemence so swift that, tothose who watched the scene under the light of a wintry moon, thecolumn of redcoats, like the thrust of a crimson sword-blade, spannedthe ditch, shot up the glacis, and broke through the parapet with asingle movement. The accidental explosion of a French shell burst thegate open, and the remainder of the attacking party instantly sweptthrough it. There was fierce musketry fire and a tumult of shoutingfor a moment or two, but in twenty minutes from Colborne's launchinghis attack every Frenchman in the redoubt was killed, wounded, or aprisoner.

The fashion in which the gate was blown open was very curious. AFrench sergeant was in the act of throwing a live shell upon thestorming party in the ditch, when he was struck by an English bullet.The lighted shell fell from his hands within the parapet, was kickedaway by the nearest French in mere self-preservation; it rolled towardsthe gate, exploded, burst it open, and instantly the British broke in.

For ten days a desperate artillery duel raged between the besiegers andthe besieged. The parallels were resolutely pushed on in spite ofrocky soil, broken tools, bitter weather, and the incessant pelting ofthe French guns. The temper of the British troops is illustrated by anincident which George Napier—the youngest of the threeNapiers—relates. The three others were gallant and remarkablesoldiers. Charles Napier in India and elsewhere made history; William,in his wonderful tale of the Peninsular war, wrote history; and George,if he had not the literary genius of the one nor the strategic skill ofthe other, was a most gallant soldier. "I was a field-officer of thetrenches," he says, "when a 13-inch shell from the town fell in themidst of us. I called to the men to lie down flat, and they instantlyobeyed orders, except one of them, an Irishman and an old marine, but amost worthless drunken dog, who trotted up to the shell, the fuse ofwhich was still burning, and striking it with his spade, knocked thefuse out; then taking the immense shell in his hands, brought it to me,saying, 'There she is for you now, yer 'anner. I've knocked the lifeout of the crater.'"

The besieged brought fifty heavy guns to reply to the thirty lightpieces by which they were assailed, and day and night the bellow ofeighty pieces boomed sullenly over the doomed city and echoed faintlyback from the nearer hills, while the walls crashed to the stroke ofthe bullet. The English fire made up by fierceness and accuracy forwhat it lacked in weight; but the sap made no progress, the guns showedsigns of being worn out, and although two apparent breaches had beenmade, the counterscarp was not destroyed. Yet Wellington determinedto attack, and, in his characteristic fashion, to attack by night. Thesiege had lasted ten days, and Marmont, with an army stronger than hisown, was lying within four marches. That he had not appeared alreadyon the scene was wonderful.

In a general order issued on the evening of the 19th Wellington wrote,"Ciudad Rodrigo must be stormed this evening." The great breach was asloping gap in the wall at its northern angle, about a hundred feetwide. The French had crowned it with two guns loaded with grape; theslope was strewn with bombs, hand-grenades, and bags of powder; a greatmine pierced it beneath; a deep ditch had been cut betwixt the breachand the adjoining ramparts, and these were crowded with riflemen. Thethird division, under General Mackinnon, was to attack the breach, itsforlorn hope being led by Ensign Mackie, its storming party by GeneralMackinnon himself. The lesser breach was a tiny gap, scarcely twentyfeet wide, to the left of the great breach; this was to be attacked bythe light division, under Craufurd, its forlorn hope of twenty-five menbeing led by Gurwood, and its storming party by George Napier. GeneralPack, with a Portuguese brigade, was to make a sham attack on theeastern face, while a fourth attack was to be made on the southernfront by a company of the 83rd and some Portuguese troops. In thestorming party of the 83rd were the Earl of March, afterwards Duke ofRichmond; Lord Fitzroy Somerset, afterwards Lord Raglan; and the Princeof Orange—all volunteers without Wellington's knowledge!

At 7 o'clock a curious silence fell suddenly on the battered city andthe engirdling trenches. Not a light gleamed from the frowningparapets, not a murmur arose from the blackened trenches. Suddenly ashout broke out on the right of the English attack; it ran, a wave ofstormy sound, along the line of the trenches. The men who were toattack the great breach leaped into the open. In a moment the spacebetwixt the hostile lines was covered with the stormers, and the gloomyhalf-seen face of the great fortress broke into a tempest of fire.

Nothing could be finer than the vehement courage of the assault, unlessit were the cool and steady fortitude of the defence. Swift as was theupward rush of the stormers, the race of the 5th, 77th, and 94thregiments was almost swifter. Scorning to wait for the ladders, theyleaped into the great ditch, outpaced even the forlorn hope, and pushedvehemently up the great breach, whilst their red ranks were torn byshell and shot. The fire, too, ran through the tangle of broken stonesover which they climbed; the hand-grenades and powder-bags by which itwas strewn exploded. The men were walking on fire! Yet the attackcould not be denied. The Frenchmen—shooting, stabbing, yelling—weredriven behind their entrenchments. There the fire of the housescommanding the breach came to their help, and they made a gallantstand. "None would go back on either side, and yet the British couldnot get forward, and men and officers falling in heaps choked up thepassage, which from minute to minute was raked with grape from two gunsflanking the top of the breach at the distance of a few yards. Thusstriving, and trampling alike upon the dead and the wounded, thesebrave men maintained the combat."

It was the attack on the smaller breach which really carried CiudadRodrigo; and George Napier, who led it, has left a graphic narrative ofthe exciting experiences of that dreadful night. The light divisionwas to attack, and Craufurd, with whom Napier was a favourite, gave himcommand of the storming party. He was to ask for 100 volunteers fromeach of the three British regiments—the 43rd, 52nd, and the RifleCorps—in the division. Napier halted these regiments just as they hadforded the bitterly cold river on their way to the trenches."Soldiers," he said, "I want 100 men from each regiment to form thestorming party which is to lead the light division to-night. Those whowill go with me come forward!" Instantly there was a rush forward ofthe whole division, and Napier had to take his 300 men out of a tumultof nearly 1500 candidates. He formed them into three companies, underCaptains Ferguson, Jones, and Mitchell. Gurwood, of the 52nd, led theforlorn hope, consisting of twenty-five men and two sergeants.Wellington himself came to the trench and showed Napier and Colborne,through the gloom of the early night, the exact position of the breach.A staff-officer looking on, said, "Your men are not loaded. Why don'tyou make them load?" Napier replied, "If we don't do the business withthe bayonet we shall not do it all. I shall not load." "Let himalone," said Wellington; "let him go his own way." Picton had adoptedthe same grim policy with the third division. As each regiment passedhim, filing into the trenches, his injunction was, "No powder! We'lldo the thing with the could iron."

A party of Portuguese carrying bags filled with grass were to run withthe storming party and throw the bags into the ditch, as the leap wastoo deep for the men. But the Portuguese hesitated, the tumult of theattack on the great breach suddenly broke on the night, and the forlornhope went running up, leaped into the ditch a depth of eleven feet, andclambered up the steep slope beyond, while Napier with his stormerscame with a run behind them. In the dark for a moment the breach waslost, but found again, and up the steep quarry of broken stone theattack swept. About two-thirds of the way up Napier's arm was smashedby a grape-shot, and he fell. His men, checked for a moment, liftedtheir muskets to the gap above them, whence the French were firingvehemently, and forgetting their pieces were unloaded, snapped them."Push on with the bayonet, men!" shouted Napier, as he lay bleeding.The officers leaped to the front, the men with a stern shout followed;they were crushed to a front of not more than three or four. They hadto climb without firing a shot in reply up to the muzzles of the Frenchmuskets.

But nothing could stop the men of the light division. A 24-pounder wasplaced across the narrow gap in the ramparts; the stormers leaped overit, and the 43rd and 52nd, coming up in sections abreast, followed.The 43rd wheeled to the right towards the great breach, the 52nd to theleft, sweeping the ramparts as they went.

Meanwhile the other two attacks had broken into the town; but at thegreat breach the dreadful fight still raged, until the 43rd, comingswiftly along the ramparts, and brushing all opposition aside, took thedefence in the rear. The British there had, as a matter of fact, atthat exact moment pierced the French defence. The two guns thatscourged the breach had wrought deadly havoc amongst the stormers, anda sergeant and two privates of the 88th—Irishmen all, and whose namesdeserve to be preserved—Brazel, Kelly, and Swan—laid down theirfirelocks that they might climb more lightly, and, armed only withtheir bayonets, forced themselves through the embrasure amongst theFrench gunners. They were furiously attacked, and Swan's arm was hewedoff by a sabre stroke; but they stopped the service of the gun, slewfive or six of the French gunners, and held the post until the men ofthe 5th, climbing behind them, broke into the battery.

So Ciudad Rodrigo was won, and its governor surrendered his sword tothe youthful lieutenant leading the forlorn hope of the light division,who, with smoke-blackened face, torn uniform, and staggering from adreadful wound, still kept at the head of his men.

In the eleven days of the siege Wellington lost 1300 men and officers,out of whom 650 men and 60 officers were struck down on the slopes ofthe breaches. Two notable soldiers died in the attack—Craufurd, thefamous leader of the light division, as he brought his men up to thelesser breach; and Mackinnon, who commanded a brigade of the thirddivision, at the great breach. Mackinnon was a gallant Highlander, asoldier of great promise, beloved by his men. His "Children," as hecalled them, followed him up the great breach till the bursting of aFrench mine destroyed all the leading files, including their general.Craufurd was buried in the lesser breach itself, and Mackinnon in thegreat breach—fitting graves for soldiers so gallant.

Alison says that with the rush of the English stormers up the breachesof Ciudad Rodrigo "began the fall of the French Empire." That siege,so fierce and brilliant, was, as a matter of fact, the first of thatswift-following succession of strokes which drove the French in ruinout of Spain, and it coincided in point of time with the turn of thetide against Napoleon in Russia. Apart from all political results,however, it was a splendid feat of arms. The French found themselvesalmost unable to believe the evidence of their senses. "On the 16th,"Marmont wrote to the Emperor, "the English batteries opened their fireat a great distance. On the 19th the place was taken by storm. Thereis something so incomprehensible in this that I allow myself noobservations." Napoleon, however, relieved his feelings with some veryemphatic observations. "The fall of Ciudad Rodrigo," he wrote toMarmont, "is an affront to you. Why had you not advices from it twicea week? What were you doing with the five divisions of Souham? It isa strange mode of carrying on war," &c. Unhappy Marmont!

HOW THE "HERMIONE" WAS RECAPTURED

"They cleared the cruiser from end to end,
From conning-tower to hold;
They fought as they fought in Nelson's fleet—
They were stripped to the waist, they were bare to the feet,
As it was in the days of old."
—KIPLING.

The story of how the Hermione was lost is one of the scandals and thetragedies of British naval history; the tale of how it was re-won isone of its glories. The Hermione was a 32-gun frigate, cruising offPorto Rico, in the West Indies. On the evening of September 21, 1797,the men were on drill, reefing topsails. The captain, Pigot, was arough and daring sailor, a type of the brutal school of naval officerlong extinct. The traditions of the navy were harsh; the despoticpower over the lives and fortunes of his crew which the captain of aman-of-war carried in the palm of his hand, when made the servant of aferocious temper, easily turned a ship into a floating hell. Theterrible mutinies which broke out in British fleets a hundred years agohad some justification, at least, in the cruelties, as well as thehardships, to which the sailors of that period were exposed.

Pigot was rough in speech, vehement in temper, cursed with asemi-lunatic delight in cruelty, and he tormented his men to the vergeof desperation. On this fatal night, Pigot, standing at the break ofhis quarter-deck, stormed at the men aloft, and swore with many oathshe would flog the last man off the mizzentop yard; and the men knew howwell he would keep his word. The most active sailor, as the men layout on the yard, naturally takes the earing, and is, of course, thelast man off, as well as on, the yard. Pigot's method, that is, wouldpunish not the worst sailors, but the best! The two outermost men onthe mizzen-top yard of the Hermione that night, determined to escapethe threatened flogging. They made a desperate spring to get overtheir comrades crowding into the ratlines, missed their foothold, fellon the quarter-deck beside their furious captain, and were instantlykilled. The captain's epitaph on the unfortunate sailors was, "Throwthe lubbers overboard!"

All the next day a sullen gloom lay on the ship. Mutiny was breeding.It began, as night fell, in a childish fashion, by the men throwingdouble-headed shot about the deck. The noise brought down the firstlieutenant to restore order. He was knocked down. In the jostle offierce tempers, murder awoke; knives gleamed. A sailor, as he bentover the fallen officer, saw the naked undefended throat, and thrusthis knife into it. The sight kindled the men's passions to flame. Theunfortunate lieutenant was killed with a dozen stabs, and his bodythrown overboard. The men had now tasted blood. In the flame ofmurderous temper suddenly let loose, all the bonds of discipline werein a moment consumed. A wild rush was made for the officers' cabins.The captain tried to break his way out, was wounded, and driven back;the men swept in, and, to quote the realistic official account, "seatedin his cabin the captain was stabbed by his own coxswain and threeother mutineers, and, forced out of the cabin windows, was heard tospeak as he went astern." With mutiny comes anarchy. The men made nodistinction between their officers, cruel or gentle; not only thecaptain, but the three lieutenants, the purser, the surgeon, thelieutenant of marines, the boatswain, the captain's clerk weremurdered, and even one of the two midshipmen on board was hunted like arat through the ship, killed, and thrown overboard. The only officersspared were the master, the gunner, and one midshipman.

Having captured the ship, the mutineers were puzzled how to proceed.Every man-of-war on the station, they knew, would be swiftly on theirtrack. Every British port was sealed to them. They would be pursuedby a retribution which would neither loiter nor slumber. On the opensea there was no safety for mutineers. They turned the head of theHermione towards the nearest Spanish port, La Guayra, and, reachingit, surrendered the ship to the Spanish authorities, saying they hadturned their officers adrift in the jolly-boat. The Spaniards were notdisposed to scrutinise too closely the story. A transaction which putinto their hands a fine British frigate was welcomed with rapture. TheBritish admiral in command of the station sent in a flag of truce withthe true account of the mutiny, and called upon the Spanishauthorities, as a matter of honour, to surrender the Hermione, andhand over for punishment the murderers who had carried it off. Theappeal, however, was wasted.

The Hermione, a handsome ship of 715 tons, when under the Britishflag, was armed with thirty-two 12-pounders, and had a complement of220 men. The Spaniards cut new ports in her, increased her broadsidesto forty-four guns, and gave her a complement, including a detachmentof soldiers and artillerymen, of nearly 400 men. She thus became themost formidable ship carrying the Spanish flag in West Indian waters.

But the Hermione, under its new flag, had a very anxious existence.It became a point of honour with every British vessel on the station tolook out for the ship which had become the symbol of mutiny, and make adash at her, no matter what the odds. The brutal murders whichattended the mutiny shocked even the forecastle imagination, while theBritish officers were naturally eager to destroy the ship whichrepresented revolt against discipline. Both fore and aft, too, thefact that what had been a British frigate was now carrying the flag ofSpain was resented with a degree of exasperation which assured to theHermione, under its new name and flag, a very warm time if it cameunder the fire of a British ship. The Spaniards kept the Hermionefor just two years, but kept her principally in port, as the moment sheshowed her nose in the open sea some British ship or other, sleeplesslyon the watch for her, bore down with disconcerting eagerness.

In September 1799 the Hermione was lying in Puerto Cabello, while theSurprise, a 28-gun frigate, under Captain Edward Hamilton, waswaiting outside, specially detailed by the admiral, Sir Hyde Parker, toattack her the instant she put to sea. The Surprise had less thanhalf the complement of the Hermione, and not much more than half herweight of metal. But Hamilton was not only willing to fight theHermione in the open sea against such odds; he told the admiral that ifhe would give him a barge and twenty men he would undertake to carrythe Hermione with his boats while lying in harbour. Parker pronouncedthe scheme too desperate to be entertained, and refused Hamilton theadditional boat's crew for which he asked. Yet this was the very planwhich Hamilton actually carried out without the reinforcement for whichhe had asked!

Hamilton, to tempt the Hermione out, kept carefully out of sight ofPuerto Cabello to leeward, yet in such a position that if the Hermioneleft the harbour her topsails must become visible to the look-outs onthe mastheads of the Surprise; and he kept that post until hisprovisions failed. Then, as the Hermione would not come out to him,he determined to go into the Hermione. Hamilton was a silent,much-meditating man, not apt to share his counsels with anybody. Inthe cells of his brooding and solitary brain he prepared, down to theminutest details, his plan for a dash at the Hermione—a ship, itmust be remembered, not only more than double his own in strength, butlying moored head and stern in a strongly fortified port, under thefire of batteries mounting nearly 200 guns, and protected, in addition,by several gunboats. In a boat attack, too, Hamilton could carry onlypart of his crew with him; he must leave enough hands on board his ownship to work her. As a matter of fact, he put in his boats less than100 men, and with them, in the blackness of night, rowed off to attacka ship that carried 400 men, and was protected by the fire, includingher own broadsides, of nearly 300 guns! The odds were indeed so greatthat the imagination of even British sailors, if allowed to meditatelong upon them, might become chilled. Hamilton therefore breathed nota whisper of his plans, even to his officers, till he was ready to putthem into execution, and, when he did announce them, carried them outwith cool but unfaltering speed.

On the evening of October 24, Hamilton invited all the officers not onactual duty to dine in his cabin. The scene may be easily pictured.The captain at the head of his table, the merry officers on eitherside, the jest, the laughter, the toasts; nobody there but the silent,meditative captain dreaming of the daring deed to be that nightattempted. When dinner was over, and the officers alone, with agesture Hamilton arrested the attention of the party, and explained ina few grim sentences his purpose. The little party of brave men abouthim listened eagerly and with kindling eyes. "We'll stand by you,captain," said one. "We'll all follow you," said another. Hamiltonbade his officers follow him at once to the quarter-deck. A roll ofthe drum called the men instantly to quarters, and, when the officersreported every man at his station, they were all sent aft to where, onthe break of the quarter-deck, the captain waited.

It was night, starless and black, but a couple of lanterns shed a fewbroken rays on the massed seamen with their wondering, upturned faces,and the tall figure of the silent captain. Hamilton explained in adozen curt sentences that they must run into port for supplies; that ifthey left their station some more fortunate ship would have the gloryof taking the Hermione. "Our only chance, lads," he added, "is tocut her out to-night!" As that sentence, with a keen ring on its lastword, swept over the attentive sailors, they made the natural response,a sudden growling cheer. "I lead you myself," added Hamilton,whereupon came another cheer; "and here are the orders for the sixboats to be employed, with the names of the officers and men."Instantly the crews were mustered, while the officers, standing in acluster round the captain, heard the details of the expedition. Everyseaman was to be dressed in blue, without a patch of white visible; thepassword was "Britannia," the answer "Ireland"—Hamilton himself beingan Irishman.

By half-past seven the boats were actually hoisted out and lowered, themen armed and in their places, and each little crew instructed as tothe exact part it was to play in the exciting drama. The orders givenwere curiously minute. The launch, for example, was to board on thestarboard bow, but three of its men, before boarding, were first to cutthe bower cable, for which purpose a little platform was rigged up onthe launch's quarter, and sharp axes provided. The jolly-boat was toboard on the starboard quarter, cut the stern cable, and send two menaloft to loose the mizzen topsail. The gig, under the command of thedoctor, was to board on the larboard bow, and instantly send four menaloft to loose the fore topsail. If the Hermione was reached withoutany alarm being given, only the boarders were to leap on board; theordinary crews of the boats were to take the frigate in tow. Thus, ifHamilton's plans were carried out, the Spaniards would find themselvessuddenly boarded at six different points, their cables cut, theirtopsails dropped, and their ship being towed out—and all this at thesame instant of time. "The rendezvous," said Hamilton to his officers,as the little cluster of boats drew away from the Surprise, "is theHermione's quarter-deck!"

Hamilton himself led, standing up in his pinnace, with his night-glassfixed on the doomed ship, and the boats followed with stern almosttouching stern, and a rope passed from each boat to the one behind.Can a more impressive picture of human daring be imagined than thesesix boats pulling silently ever the black waters and through the blacknight to fling themselves, under the fire of two hundred guns, on a foefour times more numerous than themselves! The boats had stolen towithin less than a mile of the Hermione, when a Spanish challengerang out of the darkness before them. Two Spanish gunboats were onguard within the harbour, and they at once opened fire on the chain ofboats gliding mysteriously through the gloom. There was no longer anypossibility of surprise, and Hamilton instantly threw off the rope thatconnected him with the next boat and shouted to his men to pull. Themen, with a loud "Hurrah!" dashed their oars into the water, and theboats leaped forward towards the Hermione. But Hamilton's boats—twoof them commanded by midshipmen—could not find themselves so close toa couple of Spanish gunboats without "going" for them. Two of the sixboats swung aside and dashed at the gunboats; only three followedHamilton at the utmost speed towards the Hermione.

That ship, meanwhile, was awake. Lights flashed from every port; aclamour of voices broke on the quiet of the night; the sound of thedrum rolled along the decks, the men ran to quarters. Hamilton, in thepinnace, dashed past the bows of the Hermione to reach his station,but a rope, stretched from the Hermione to her anchor-buoy, caughtthe rudder of the pinnace and stopped her in full course, the coxswainreporting the boat "aground." The pinnace had swung round till herstarboard oars touched the bend of the Hermione, and Hamilton gavethe word to "board." Hamilton himself led, and swung himself up tillhis feet rested on the anchor hanging from the Hermione's cat-head.It was covered with mud, having been weighed that day, and his feetslipping off it, Hamilton hung by the lanyard of the Hermione'sforeshroud. The crew of the pinnace meanwhile climbing with theagility of cats and the eagerness of boys, had tumbled over their owncaptain's shoulders as well as the bulwarks of the Hermione, and wereon that vessel's forecastle, where Hamilton in another moment joinedthem. Here were sixteen men on board a vessel with a hostile crew fourhundred strong.

Hamilton ran to the break of the forecastle and looked down, and to hisamazement found the whole crew of the Hermione at quarters on themain-deck, with battle-lanterns lit, and firing with the utmost energyat the darkness, in which their excited fancy saw the tall masts of atleast a squadron of frigates bearing down to attack them. Hamilton,followed by his fifteen men, ran aft to the agreed rendezvous on theHermione's quarter-deck. The doctor, with his crew, had meantimeboarded, and forgetting all about the rendezvous, and obeying only thenatural fighting impulse in their own blood, charged upon the Spaniardsin the gangway.

Hamilton sent his men down to assist in the fight, waiting alone on thequarter-deck till his other boat boarded. Here four Spaniards rushedsuddenly upon him; one struck him over the head with a musket with aforce that broke the weapon itself, and knocked him semi-senseless uponthe combings of the hatchway. Two British sailors, who saw theircommander's peril, rescued him, and, with blood streaming down from hisbattered head upon his uniform, Hamilton flung himself into the fightat the gangway. At this juncture the black cutter, in command of thefirst lieutenant, with the Surprise's marines on board, dashed up tothe side of the Hermione, and the men came tumbling over the larboardgangway. They had made previously two unsuccessful attempts to board.They came up first by the steps of the larboard gangway, the lieutenantleading. He was incontinently knocked down, and tumbled all his menwith him as he fell back into the boat. They then tried the starboardof the Hermione, and were again beaten back, and only succeeded on athird attempt.

Three boats' crews of the British were now together on the deck of theHermione. They did not number fifty men in all, but the marines wereinstantly formed up and a volley was fired down the after hatchway.Then, following the flash of their muskets, with the captain leading,the whole party leaped down upon the maindeck, driving the Spaniardsbefore them. Some sixty Spaniards took refuge in the cabin, andshouted they surrendered, whereupon they were ordered to throw downtheir arms, and the doors were locked upon them, turning them intoprisoners. On the main-deck and under the forecastle, however, thefighting was fierce and deadly; but by this time the other boats hadcome up, and the cables fore and aft were cut, as had been arranged.The men detailed for that task had raced up the Spaniard's rigging, andwhile the desperate fight raged below, had cast loose the topsails ofthe Hermione. Three of the boats, too, had taken her in tow. Shebegan to move seaward, and that movement, with the sound of therippling water along the ship's sides, appalled the Spaniards, andpersuaded them the ship was lost.

On the quarter-deck the gunner and two men—all three wounded—stood atthe wheel, and flung the head of the Hermione seaward. They werefiercely attacked, but while one man clung to the wheel and keptcontrol of the ship, the gunner and his mate kept off the Spaniards.Presently the foretopsail filled with the land breeze, the waterrippled louder along the sides of the moving vessel, the ship swayed tothe wind. The batteries by this time were thundering from the shore,but though they shot away many ropes, they fired with signalill-success. Only fifty British sailors and marines, it must beremembered, were actually on the deck of the Hermione, and amongstthe crowd of sullen and exasperated Spaniards below, who hadsurrendered, but were still furious with the astonishment of the attackand the passion of the fight, there arose a shout to "blow up theship." The British had to fire down through the hatchway upon theswaying crowd to enforce order. By two o'clock the struggle was over,the Hermione was beyond the fire of the batteries, and the crews ofthe boats towing her came on board.

There is no more surprising fight in British history. The mereswiftness with which the adventure was carried out is marvellous. Itwas past six P.M. when Hamilton disclosed his plan to his officers, theHermione at that moment lying some eight miles distant; by twoo'clock the captured ship, with the British flag flying from her peak,was clear of the harbour. Only half a hundred men actually got onboard the Hermione, but what a resolute, hard-smiting, strong-fistedband they were may be judged by the results. Of the Spaniards, 119were killed, and 97 wounded, most of them dangerously. Hamilton's 50men, that is, in those few minutes of fierce fighting, cut down fourtimes their own number! Not one of the British, as it happened, waskilled, and only 12 wounded, Captain Hamilton himself receiving no lessthan five serious wounds. The Hermione was restored to her place inthe British Navy List, but under a new name—the Retribution—and thestory of that heroic night attack will be for all time one of the moststirring incidents in the long record of brave deeds performed byBritish seamen.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH IN THE PASSES

"Beating from the wasted vines
Back to France her banded swarms,
Back to France with countless blows,
Till o'er the hills her eagles flew
Beyond the Pyrenean pines;
Follow'd up in valley and glen
With blare of bugle, clamour of men,
Roll of cannon and clash of arms,
And England pouring on her foes.
Such a war had such a close."
—TENNYSON.

"In both the passes, and on the heights above them, there was desperatefighting. They fought on the mountain-tops, which could scarcely havewitnessed any other combat than that of the Pyrenean eagles; theyfought among jagged rocks and over profound abysses; they fought amidstclouds and mists, for those mountain-tops were 5000 feet above thelevel of the plain of France, and the rains, which had fallen intorrents, were evaporating in the morning and noon-day sun, weresteaming heavenward and clothing the loftiest peaks with fantasticwreaths." These words describe, with picturesque force, the mostbrilliant and desperate, and yet, perhaps, the least known chapter inthe great drama of the Peninsular war: the furious combats wagedbetween British and French in the gloomy valleys and on themist-shrouded summits of the Western Pyrenees. The great campaign,which found its climax at Vittoria, lasted six weeks. In that briefperiod Wellington marched with 100,000 men 600 miles, passed six greatrivers, gained one historic and decisive battle, invested twofortresses, and drove 120,000 veteran troops from Spain. There is nomore brilliant chapter in military history; and, at its close, to quoteNapier's clarion-like sentences, "the English general, emerging fromthe chaos of the Peninsular struggle, stood on the summit of thePyrenees a recognised conqueror. From those lofty pinnacles theclangour of his trumpets pealed clear and loud, and the splendour ofhis genius appeared as a flaming beacon to warring nations."

But the great barrier of the Pyrenees stretched across Wellington'spath, a tangle of mountains sixty miles in length; a wild table-landrough with crags, fierce with mountain torrents, shaggy with forests, alabyrinth of savage and snow-clad hills. On either flank a greatfortress—San Sebastian and Pampeluna—was held by the French, andWellington was besieging both at once, and besieging them withoutbattering trains. The echoes of Vittoria had aroused Napoleon, thenfighting desperately on the Elbe, and ten days after Vittoria theFrench Emperor, acting with the lightning-like decision characteristicof his genius, had despatched Soult, the ablest of all his generals, tobar the passes of the Pyrenees against Wellington. Soult travelled dayand night to the scene of his new command, gathering reinforcements onevery side as he went, and in an incredibly short period he hadassembled on the French side of the Pyrenees a great and perfectlyequipped force of 75,000 men.

Wellington could not advance and leave San Sebastian and Pampeluna oneither flank held by the enemy. Some eight separate passes pierce thegiant chain of the Pyrenees. Soult was free to choose any one of themfor his advance to the relief of either of the besieged fortresses, butWellington had to keep guard over the whole eight, and the forceholding each pass was almost completely isolated from its comrades.Thus all the advantages of position were with Soult. He could pour hiswhole force through one or two selected passes, brush aside therelatively scanty force which held it, relieve San Sebastian orPampeluna, and, with the relieved fortress as his base, fling himselfon Wellington's flank while the allied armies were scattered over theslopes of the Pyrenees for sixty miles. And Soult was exactly thegeneral to avail himself of these advantages. He had the swift vision,the resolute will, and the daring of a great commander. "It is onSpanish soil," he said in a proclamation to his troops, "your tentsmust next be pitched. Let the account of our successes be dated fromVittoria, and let the fête-day of his Imperial Majesty be celebrated inthat city." These were brave words, and having uttered them, Soult ledhis gallant troops, with gallant purpose, into the gloomy passes of thePyrenees, and for days following the roar of battle sank and swelledover the snow-clad peaks. But when the Imperial fête-dayarrived—August 15—Soult's great army was pouring back from those samepasses a shattered host, and the allied troops, sternly following them,were threatening French soil!

Soult judged Pampeluna to be in greater peril than San Sebastian, andmoved by his left to force the passes of Roncesvalles and Maya. Therain fell furiously, the mountain streams were in flood, gloomy mistsshrouded the hill-tops; but by July 24, with more than 60,000 fightingmen, and nearly seventy guns, Soult was pouring along the passes he hadchosen. It is impossible to do more than pick out a few of the purplepatches in the swift succession of heroic combats that followed: fightswaged on mountain summits 5000 feet above the sea-level, in shaggyforests, under tempests of rain and snow. D'Erlon, with a force of20,000 men, took the British by surprise in the pass of Maya. Ross, aneager and hardy soldier, unexpectedly encountering the French advanceguard, instantly shouted the order to "Charge!" and with a handful ofthe 20th flung himself upon the enemy, and actually checked theiradvance until Cole, who had only 10,000 bayonets to oppose to 30,000,had got into fighting form. A thick fog fell like a pall on thecombatants, and checked the fight, and Cole, in the night, fell back.The French columns were in movement at daybreak, but still the fog hidthe whole landscape, and the guides of the French feared to lead themup the slippery crags. At Maya, however, the French in force brokeupon Stewart's division, holding that pass. The British regiments, asthey came running up, not in mass, but by companies, and breathlesswith the run, were flung with furious haste upon the French. The 34th,the 39th, the 28th in succession crashed into the fight, but were flungback by overpowering numbers. It was a battle of 4000 men against13,000.

The famous 50th, fiercely advancing, checked the French rush at onepoint; but Soult's men were full of the élan of victory, and sweptpast the British flanks. The 71st and 92nd were brought into thefight, and the latter especially clung sternly to their position tilltwo men out of every three were shot down, the mound of dead and dyingforming a solid barrier between the wasted survivors of the regimentand the shouting edge of the French advance. "The stern valour of the92nd," says Napier, "principally composed of Irishmen, would havegraced Thermopylae." No one need question the fighting quality of theIrish soldier, but, as a matter of fact, there were 825 Highlanders inthe regiment, and 61 Irishmen. The British, however, were steadilypushed back, ammunition failed, and the soldiers were actuallydefending the highest crag with stones, when Barnes, with a brigade ofthe seventh division, coming breathlessly up the pass, plunged into thefight, and checked the French. Soult had gained ten of the thirtymiles of road toward Pampeluna, but at an ominous cost, and, meanwhile,the plan of his attack was developed, and Wellington was in swiftmovement to bar his path.

Soult had now swung into the pass of Roncesvalles, and was on the pointof attacking Cole, who held the pass with a very inadequate force,when, at that exact moment, Wellington, having despatched his aides invarious directions to bring up the troops, galloped alone along themountain flank to the British line. He was recognised; the nearesttroops raised a shout; it ran, gathering volume as it travelled downall the slope, where the British stood waiting for the French attack.That sudden shout, stern and exultant, reached the French lines, andthey halted. At the same moment, round the shoulder of the hill on theopposite side of the pass, Soult appeared, and the two generals, nearenough to see each other's features, eagerly scrutinised one another."Yonder is a great commander," said Wellington, as if speaking tohimself, "but he is cautious, and will delay his attack to ascertainthe cause of these cheers. That will give time for the sixth divisionto arrive, and I shall beat him." Wellington's forecast of Soult'saction was curiously accurate. He made no attack that day. The sixthdivision came up, and Soult was beaten!

There were two combats of Sauroren, and each was, in Wellington's ownphrase, "bludgeon work"—a battle of soldiers rather than of generals,a tangle of fierce charges and counter-charges, of volleys delivered soclose that they scorched the very clothes of the opposing lines, andsustained so fiercely that they died down only because the lines ofdesperately firing men crumbled into ruin and silence. Nothing couldbe finer than the way in which a French column, swiftly, sternly, andwithout firing a shot, swept up a craggy steep crowned by rocks likecastles, held by some Portuguese battalions, and won the position.Ross's brigade, in return, with equal vehemence recharged the positionfrom its side, and dashed the French out of it; the French in stillgreater force came back, a shouting mass, and crushed Ross's men. ThenWellington sent forward Byng's brigade at running pace, and hurled theFrench down the mountain side. At another point in the pass the Frenchrenewed their assault four times; in their second assault they gainedthe summit. The 40th were in reserve at that point; they waited insteady silence till the edge of the French line, a confused mass oftossing bayonets and perspiring faces, came clear over the crest; then,running forward with extraordinary fury, they flung them, a broken,tumultuous mass, down the slope. In the later charges, so fierce andresolute were the French officers that they were seen dragging theirtired soldiers up the hill by their belts!

It is idle to attempt the tale of this wild mountain fighting. Soultat last fell back, and Wellington followed, swift and vehement, on histrack, and moved Alten's column to intercept the French retreat. Thestory of Alten's march is a marvellous record of soldierly endurance.His men pressed on with speed for nineteen consecutive hours, andcovered forty miles of mountain tracks, wilder than the Otway Ranges,or the paths of the Australian Alps between Bright and Omeo. Theweather was close; many men fell and died, convulsed and frothing atthe mouth. Still, their officers leading, the regiment kept up itsquick step, till, as evening fell, the head of the column reached theedge of the precipice overlooking the bridge across which, in all theconfusion of a hurried retreat, the French troops were crowding. "Weoverlooked the enemy," says Cook in his "Memoirs," "at stone's-throw.The river separated us; but the French were wedged in a narrow road,with inaccessible rocks on one side, and the river on the other." Whocan describe the scene that followed! Some of the French firedvertically up at the British; others ran; others shouted for quarter;some pointed with eager gestures to the wounded, whom they carried onbranches of trees, as if entreating the British not to fire.

In nine days of continual marching, ten desperate actions had beenfought, at what cost of life can hardly be reckoned. Napier, afterroughly calculating the losses, says: "Let this suffice. It is notneedful to sound the stream of blood in all its horrid depths." Butthe fighting sowed the wild passes of the Pyrenees thick with thegraves of brave men.

Soult actually fought his way to within sight of the walls ofPampeluna, and its beleaguered garrison waved frantic welcomes to hiscolumns as, from the flanks of the overshadowing hills, they lookeddown on the city. Then broken as by the stroke of a thunderbolt, anddriven like wild birds caught in a tempest, the French poured backthrough the passes to French soil again. "I never saw such fighting,"was Wellington's comment on the struggle.

For the weeks that followed, Soult could only look on while SanSebastian and Pampeluna fell. Then the allied outposts were advancedto the slopes looking down on France and the distant sea. It isrecorded that the Highlanders of Hill's division, like Xenophon'sGreeks 2000 years before them, broke into cheers when they caught theirfirst glimpse of the sea, the great, wrinkled, azure-tinted floor,flecked with white sails. It was "the way home!" Bearn and Gasconyand Languedoc lay stretched like a map under their feet. But theweather was bitter, the snow lay thick in the passes, sentinels werefrozen at the outposts, and a curious stream of desertions began. Thewarm plains of sunny France tempted the half-frozen troops, and Southeycomputes, with an arithmetical precision which is half-humorous, thatthe average weekly proportion of desertions was 25 Spaniards, 15 Irish,12 English, 6 Scotch, and half a Portuguese! One indignant Englishcolonel drew up his regiment on parade, and told the men that "if anyof them wanted to join the French they had better do so at once. Hegave them free leave. He wouldn't have men in the regiment who wishedto join the enemy!"

Meanwhile Soult was trying to construct on French soil lines of defenceas mighty as those of Wellington at Torres Vedras; and on October 7,Wellington pushed his left across the Bidassoa, the stream that marksthe boundaries of Spain and France. On the French side the hills riseto a great height. One huge shoulder, called La Rhune, commands thewhole stream; another lofty ridge, called the "Boar's Back," offeredalmost equal facilities for defence. The only road that crossed thehills rose steeply, with sharp zigzags, and for weeks the French hadtoiled to make the whole position impregnable. The British soldiershad watched while the mountain sides were scarred with trenches, andthe road was blocked with abattis, and redoubt rose above redoubt likea gigantic staircase climbing the sky. The Bidassoa at its mouth iswide, and the tides rose sixteen feet.

But on the night of October 7—a night wild with rain andsleet—Wellington's troops marched silently to their assigned posts onthe banks of the river. When day broke, at a signal-gun seven columnscould be seen moving at once in a line of five miles, and before Soultcould detect Wellington's plan the river was crossed, the Frenchentrenched camps on the Bidassoa won! The next morning the heightswere attacked. The Rifles carried the Boar's Back with a singleeffort. The Bayonette Crest, a huge spur guarded by battery abovebattery, and crowned by a great redoubt, was attacked by Colborne'sbrigade and some Portuguese. The tale of how the hill was climbed, andthe batteries carried in swift succession, cannot be told here. It wasa warlike feat of the most splendid quality. Other columns movingalong the flanks of the great hill alarmed the French lest they shouldbe cut off, and they abandoned the redoubt on the summit. Colborne,accompanied by only one of his staff and half-a-dozen files ofriflemen, came suddenly round a shoulder of the hill on the wholegarrison of the redoubt, 300 strong, in retreat. With great presenceof mind, he ordered them, in the sharpest tones of authority, to "laydown their arms," and, believing themselves cut off, they obeyed!

A column of Spanish troops moving up the flanks of the great Rhunefound their way barred by a strong line of abattis and the fire of twoFrench regiments. The column halted, and their officers vainly stroveto get the Spaniards to attack. An officer of the 43rd namedHavelock—a name yet more famous in later wars—attached to Alten'sstaff, was sent to see what caused the stoppage of the column. Hefound the Spaniards checked by the great abattis, through whichflashed, fierce and fast, the fire of the French. Waving his hat, heshouted to the Spaniards to "follow him," and, putting his horse at theabattis, at one leap went headlong amongst the French. There is aswift contagion in valour. He was only a light-haired lad, and theSpaniards with one vehement shout for "el chico blanco"—"the fairlad"—swept over abattis and French together!

FAMOUS CUTTING-OUT EXPEDITIONS

"We have fed our sea for a thousand years,
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead;
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

There's never a flood goes shoreward now
But lifts a keel we manned;
There's never an ebb goes seaward now
But drops our dead on the sand.
******
We must feed our sea for a thousand years,
For that is our doom and pride,
As it was when they sailed with the Golden Hind,
Or the wreck that struck last tide—
Or the wreck that lies on the spouting reef
Where the ghastly blue lights flare.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' bought it fair!"
—KIPLING.

As illustrations of cool daring, of the courage that does not countnumbers or depend on noise, nor flinch from flame or steel, few thingsare more wonderful than the many cutting-out stories to be found in thehistory of the British navy. The soldier in the forlorn hope,scrambling up the breach swept by grape and barred by a triple line ofsteadfast bayonets, must be a brave man. But it may be doubted whetherhe shows a courage so cool and high as that of a boat's crew of sailorsin a cutting-out expedition.

The ship to be attacked lies, perhaps, floating in a tropic haze fivemiles off, and the attacking party must pull slowly, in a swelteringheat, up to the iron lips of her guns. The greedy, restless sea isunder them, and a single shot may turn the eager boat's crew at anyinstant into a cluster of drowning wretches. When the ship is reached,officers and men must clamber over bulwarks and boarding-netting,exposed, almost helplessly, as they climb, to thrust of pike and shotof musket, and then leap down, singly and without order, on to the deckcrowded with foes. Or, perhaps, the ship to be cut out lies in ahostile port under the guard of powerful batteries, and the boats mustdash in through the darkness, and their crews tumble, at three or fourseparate points, on to the deck of the foe, cut her cables, let fallher sails, and—while the mad fight still rages on her deck and thegreat battery booms from the cliff overhead—carry the ship out of theharbour. These, surely, are deeds of which only a sailor's courage iscapable! Let a few such stories be taken from faded naval records andtold afresh to a new generation.

In July 1800 the 14-gun cutter Viper, commanded by acting-LieutenantJeremiah Coghlan, was attached to Sir Edward Pellew's squadron off PortLouis. Coghlan, as his name tells, was of Irish blood. He had justemerged from the chrysalis stage of a midshipman, and, flushed with thejoy of an independent command, was eager for adventure. The entranceto Port Louis was watched by a number of gunboats constantly onsentry-go, and Coghlan conceived the idea of jumping suddenly on one ofthese, and carrying her off from under the guns of the enemy's fleet.He persuaded Sir Edward Pellew to lend him the flagship's ten-oaredcutter, with twelve volunteers. Having got this reinforcement, andhaving persuaded the Amethyst frigate to lend him a boat and crew,Mr. Jeremiah Coghlan proceeded to carry out another and very differentplan from that he had ventured to suggest to his admiral. A Frenchgun-brig, named the Cerbère, was lying in the harbour of St. Louis.She mounted three long 24 and four 6-pounders, and was moored, withsprings in her cables, within pistol-shot of three batteries. A Frenchseventy-four and two frigates were within gunshot of her. She had acrew of eighty-six men, sixteen of whom were soldiers. It was uponthis brig, lying under three powerful batteries, within a hostile anddifficult port, that Mr. Jeremiah Coghlan proposed, in the darkness ofnight, to make a dash. He added the Viper's solitary midshipman,with himself and six of his crew, to the twelve volunteers on board theflagship's cutter, raising its crew to twenty men, and, with theAmethyst's boat and a small boat from the Viper, pulled off in theblackness of the night on this daring adventure.

The ten-oared cutter ran away from the other two boats, reached theCerbère, found her with battle lanterns alight and men at quarters,and its crew at once jumped on board the Frenchman. Coghlan, as wasproper, jumped first, landed on a trawl-net hung up to dry, and, whilesprawling helpless in its meshes, was thrust through the thigh with apike, and with his men—several also severely hurt—tumbled back intothe boat. The British picked themselves up, hauled their boat a littlefarther ahead, clambered up the sides of the Cerbère once more, andwere a second time beaten back with new wounds. They clung to theFrenchman, however, fought their way up to a new point, broke throughthe French defences, and after killing or wounding twenty-six of theenemy—or more than every fourth man of the Cerbère's crew—actuallycaptured her, the other two boats coming up in time to help in towingout the prize under a wrathful fire from the batteries. Coghlan hadonly one killed and eight wounded, himself being wounded in two places,and his middy in six. Sir Edward Pellew, in his official despatch,grows eloquent over "the courage which, hand to hand, gave victory to ahandful of brave fellows over four times their number, and the skillwhich planned, conducted, and effected so daring an enterprise." EarlSt. Vincent, himself the driest and grimmest of admirals, was sodelighted with the youthful Irishman's exploit that he presented himwith a handsome sword.

In 1811, again, Great Britain was at war with the Dutch—a tiny littleepisode of the great revolutionary war. A small squadron of Britishships was cruising off Batavia. A French squadron, with troops tostrengthen the garrison, was expected daily. The only fortified portinto which they could run was Marrack, and the commander of the Britishsquadron cruising to intercept the French ships determined to make adash by night on Marrack, and so secure the only possible landing-placefor the French. Marrack was defended by batteries mounting fifty-fourheavy guns. The attacking force was to consist of 200 seamen and 250troops, under the command of Lieutenant Lyons of the Minden. Justbefore the boats pushed off, however, the British commander learnedthat the Dutch garrison had been heavily reinforced, and deeming anassault too hazardous, the plan was abandoned. A few days afterwardsLyons, with the Minden's launch and cutter, was despatched to landnineteen prisoners at Batavia, and pick up intelligence. Lyons, a verydaring and gallant officer, learned that the Marrack garrison was in astate of sleepy security, and, with his two boats' crews, countingthirty-five officers and men, he determined to make a midnight dash onthe fort, an exploit which 430 men were reckoned too weak a force toattempt.

Lyons crept in at sunset to the shore, and hid his two boats behind apoint from which the fort was visible. A little after midnight, justas the moon dipped below the horizon, Lyons stole with muffled oarsround the point, and instantly the Dutch sentries gave the alarm.Lyons, however, pushed fiercely on, grounded his boats in a heavy surfunder the very embrasures of the lower battery, and, in an instant,thirty-five British sailors were tumbling over the Dutch guns and uponthe heavy-breeched and astonished Dutch gunners. The battery wascarried. Lyons gathered his thirty-five sailors into a cluster, and,with a rush, captured the upper battery. Still climbing up, theyreached the top of the hill, and found the whole Dutch garrison formingin line to receive them. The sailors instantly ran in upon thehalf-formed line, cutlass in hand; Lyons roared that he "had 400 men,and would give no quarter;" and the Dutch, finding the pace of eventstoo rapid for their nerves, broke and fled. But the victorious Britishwere only thirty-five in number, and were surrounded by powerfulforces. They began at once to dismantle the guns and destroy the fort,but two Dutch gunboats in the bay opened fire on them, as did a heavybattery in the rear.

At daybreak a strong Dutch column was formed, and came on at a resoluteand laborious trot towards the shattered gate of the fort. Lyons hadtrained two 24-pounders, loaded to the muzzle with musket balls, on thegate, left invitingly open. He himself stood, with lighted match, byone gun; his second in command, with another lighted match, by theother. They waited coolly by the guns till the Dutch, their officersleading, reached the gate, raising a tumult of angry guttural shouts asthey came on. Then, from a distance of little over ten yards, theBritish fired. The head of the column was instantly smashed, its tailbroken up into flying fragments. Lyons finished the destruction of thefort at leisure, sank one of the two gunboats with the last shot firedfrom the last gun before he spiked it, and marched off, leaving theBritish flag flying on the staff above the fort, where, in the fury ofthe attack, it had been hoisted in a most gallant fashion by thesolitary middy of the party, a lad named Franks, only fifteen yearsold. One of the two boats belonging to the British had been bilged bythe surf, and the thirty-five seamen—only four of them wounded—packedthemselves into the remaining boat and pulled off, carrying with themthe captured Dutch colours. Let the reader's imagination illuminate,as the writer's pen cannot, that midnight dash by thirty-five men on aheavily armed fort with a garrison twelve times the strength of theattacking force. Where in stories of warfare, ancient or modern, issuch another tale of valour to be found? Lyons, however, was notpromoted, as he had "acted without orders."

A tale, with much the same flavour in it, but not so dramaticallysuccessful, has for its scene the coast of Spain. In August 1812, theBritish sloop Minstrel, of 24 guns, and the 18-gun brig Philomel,were blockading three small French privateers in the port of Biendom,near Alicante. The privateers were protected by a strong fort mounting24 guns. By way of precaution, two of the ships were hauled on shore,six of their guns being landed, and formed into a battery manned byeighty of their crews. The Minstrel and her consort could notpretend to attack a position so strong, but they kept vigilant watchoutside, and a boat from one ship or the other rowed guard every nightnear the shore. On the night of the 12th the Minstrel's boat, withseven seamen, was in command of an Irish midshipman named MichaelDwyer. Dwyer had all the fighting courage of his race, with almostmore of the gay disregard of odds than is natural to even an Irishmidshipman. It occurred to Mr. Michael Dwyer that if he could carry bysurprise the 6-gun battery, there would be a chance of destroying theprivateers. A little before ten P.M. he pulled silently to the beach,at a point three miles distant from the battery, and, with his sevenfollowers, landed, and was instantly challenged by a French sentry.Dwyer by some accident knew Spanish, and, with ready-witted audacity,replied in that language that "they were peasants." They were allowedto pass, and these seven tars, headed by a youth, set off on the threemiles' trudge to attack a fort!

There were eighty men in the battery when Michael and his amazing sevenrushed upon it. There was a wild struggle for five minutes, and thenthe eighty fled before the eight, and the delighted middy found himselfin possession of the battery. But the alarm was given, and twocompanies of French infantry, each one hundred strong, came resolutelyup to retake the battery. Eight against eighty seemed desperate odds,but eight against two hundred is a quite hopeless proportion. Yet Mr.Dwyer and his seven held the fort till one of their number was killed,two (including the midshipman) badly wounded, and, worst of all, theirammunition exhausted. When the British had fired their last shot, theFrench, with levelled bayonets, broke in; but the inextinguishableDwyer was not subdued till he had been stabbed in seventeen places, andof the whole eight British only one was left unwounded. The Frenchamazement when they discovered that the force which attacked themconsisted of seven men and a boy, was too deep for words.

Perhaps the most brilliant cutting-out in British records is thecarrying of the Chevrette by the boats of three British frigates inCameret Bay in 1801. A previous and mismanaged attempt had put theChevrette on its guard; it ran a mile and a half farther up the bay,moored itself under some heavy batteries, took on board a powerfuldetachment of infantry, bringing its number of men up to 339, and thenhoisted in defiance a large French ensign over the British flag. Sometemporary redoubts were thrown up on the points of land commanding theChevrette, and a heavily armed gunboat was moored at the entrance ofthe bay as a guard-boat. After all these preparations theChevrette's men felt both safe and jubilant; but the sight of thatFrench flag flying over the British ensign was a challenge not to berefused, and at half-past nine that night the boats of the threefrigates—the Doris, the Uranie, and the Beaulieu—fifteen inall, carrying 280 officers and men, were in the water and pulling offto attack the Chevrette.

Lieutenant Losack, in command, with his own and five other boats,suddenly swung off in the gloom in chase of what he supposed to be thelook-out boat of the enemy, ordering the other nine boats to lie ontheir oars till he returned. But time stole on; he failed to return;and Lieutenant Maxwell, the next in command, reflecting that the nightwas going, and the boats had six miles to pull, determined to carry outthe expedition, though he had only nine boats and less than 180 men,instead of fifteen boats and 280 men. He summoned his little squadronin the darkness about him, and gave exact instructions. As the boatsdashed up, one was to cut the Chevrette's cables; when they boarded,the smartest topmen, named man by man, were to fight their way aloftand cut loose the Chevrette's sails; one of the finest sailors in theboats, Wallis, the quartermaster of the Beaulieu, was to take chargeof the Chevrette's helm. Thus at one and the same instant theChevrette was to be boarded, cut loose, its sails dropped, and itshead swung round towards the harbour mouth.

At half-past twelve the moon sank. The night was windless and black;but the bearing of the Chevrette had been taken by compass, and theboats pulled gently on, till, ghost-like in the gloom, the doomed shipwas discernible. A soft air from the land began to blow at thatmoment. Suddenly the Chevrette and the batteries overhead broke intoflame. The boats were discovered! The officers leaped to their feetin the stern of each boat, and urged the men on. The leading boatscrashed against the Chevrette's side. The ship was boardedsimultaneously on both bows and quarters. The force on board theChevrette, however, was numerous enough to make a triple line ofarmed men round the whole sweep of its bulwarks; they were armed withpikes, tomahawks, cutlasses, and muskets, and they met the attack mostgallantly, even venturing in their turn to board the boats. By thistime, however, the nine boats Maxwell was leading had all come up, andalthough the defence outnumbered the attack by more than two to one,yet the British were not to be denied. They clambered fiercely onboard; the topmen raced aloft, found the foot-ropes on the yards allstrapped up, but running out, cutlass in hand, they cut loose theChevrette's sails. Wallis, meanwhile, had fought his way to thewheel, slew two of the enemy in the process, was desperately woundedhimself, yet stood steadily at the wheel, and kept the Chevretteunder command, the batteries by this time opening upon the ship a fireof grape and heavy shot.

In less than three minutes after the boats came alongside, althoughnearly every second man of their crews had been killed or wounded, thethree topsails and courses of the Chevrette had fallen, the cableshad been cut, and the ship was moving out in the darkness. She leanedover to the light breeze, the ripple sounded louder at her stern, andwhen the French felt the ship under movement, it for the momentparalysed their defence. Some jumped overboard; others threw downtheir arms and ran below. The fight, though short, had been so fiercethat the deck was simply strewn with bodies. Many of the French whohad retreated below renewed the fight there; they tried to blow up thequarter-deck with gunpowder in their desperation, and the British hadto fight a new battle between decks with half their force while theship was slowly getting under weigh. The fire of the batteries wasfurious, but, curiously enough, no important spar was struck, thoughsome of the boats towing alongside were sunk. And while the batteriesthundered overhead, and the battle still raged on the decks below, theBritish seamen managed to set every sail on the ship, and even gottopgallant yards across. Slowly the Chevrette drew out of theharbour. Just then some boats were discovered pulling furiously upthrough the darkness; they were taken to be French boats bent onrecapture, and Maxwell's almost exhausted seamen were summoned to a newconflict. The approaching boats, however, turned out to be thedetachment under Lieutenant Losack, who came up to find the work doneand the Chevrette captured.

The fight on the deck of the Chevrette had been of a singularlydeadly character. The British had a total of 11 killed and 57 wounded;the Chevrette lost 92 killed and 62 wounded, amongst the slain beingthe Chevrette's captain, her two lieutenants, and three midshipmen.Many stories are told of the daring displayed by British seamen in thisattack. The boatswain of the Beaulieu, for example, boarded theChevrette's taffrail; he took one glance along the crowded decks,waved his cutlass, shouted "Make a lane there!" and literally carvedhis way through to the forecastle, which he cleared of the French, andkept clear, in spite of repeated attacks, while he assisted to cast theship about and make sail with as much coolness as though he had been onboard the Beaulieu. Wallis, who fought his way to the helm of theChevrette, and, though wounded, kept his post with iron coolnesswhile the fight raged, was accosted by his officer when the fight wasover with an expression of sympathy for his wounds. "It is only aprick or two, sir," said Wallis, and he added he "was ready to go outon a similar expedition the next night." A boatswain's mate named Warehad his left arm cut clean off by a furious slash of a French sabre,and fell back into the boat. With the help of a comrade's tarryfingers Ware bound up the bleeding stump with rough but energeticsurgery, climbed with his solitary hand on board the Chevrette, andplayed a most gallant part in the fight.

The fight that captured the Chevrette is almost without parallel.Here was a ship carried off from an enemy's port, with the combinedfleets of France and Spain looking on. The enemy were not taken bysurprise; they did not merely defy attack, they invited it. TheBritish had to assail a force three times their number, with everyadvantage of situation and arms. The British boats were exposed to aheavy fire from the Chevrette itself and from the shore batteriesbefore they came alongside. The crews fought their way up the sides ofthe ship in the face of overwhelming odds; they got the vessel underweigh while the fight still raged, and brought her out of a narrow anddifficult roadstead, before they had actually captured her. "All thiswas done," to quote the "Naval Chronicle" for 1802, "in the presence ofthe grand fleet of the enemy; it was done by nine boats out of fifteen,which originally set out upon the expedition; it was done under theconduct of an officer who, in the absence of the person appointed tocommand, undertook it upon his own responsibility, and whoseintrepidity, judgment, and presence of mind, seconded by the wonderfulexertions of the officers and men under his command, succeeded ineffecting an enterprise which, by those who reflect upon its peculiarcirc*mstances, will ever be regarded with astonishment."

MOUNTAIN COMBATS

"At length the freshening western blast
Aside the shroud of battle cast;
And first the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears;
And in the smoke the pennons flew,
As in the storm the white sea-mew.
Then marked they, dashing broad and far,
The broken billows of the war,
And plumèd crests of chieftains brave
Floating like foam upon the wave,
But nought distinct they see."
—SCOTT.

The brilliant and heroic combats on the Nive belong to the later stagesof the Pyrenean campaign; and here, as on the Bidassoa, Soult had allthe advantages of position. He had a fortified camp and a greatfortress as his base; excellent roads linked the whole of his positionstogether; he held the interior lines, and could reach any point in thezone of operations in less time than his great opponent. Wellington,on the other hand, had almost every possible disadvantage. The weatherwas bitter; incessant rains fell; he had to operate on both sides of adangerous river; the roads were mere ribbons of tenacious clay, inwhich the infantry sank to mid-leg, the guns to their axles, thecavalry sometimes to their saddle-girths. Moreover, Wellington'sSpanish troops had the sufferings and outrages of a dozen campaigns toavenge, and when they found themselves on French soil the temptationsto plunder and murder were irresistible. Wellington would not maintainwar by plunder, and, as he found he could not restrain his Spaniards,he despatched the whole body, 25,000 strong, back to Spain. It was agreat deed. It violated all military canons, for by it Wellingtondivided his army in the presence of the enemy. It involved, too, arare sacrifice of personal ambition. "If I had 20,000 Spaniards, paidand fed," he wrote to Lord Bathurst, "I should have Bayonne. If I had40,000 I do not know where I should stop. Now I have both the 20,000and the 40,000,… but if they plunder they will ruin all."Wellington was great enough to sacrifice both military rules andpersonal ambition to humanity. He was wise enough, too, to know that apolicy which outrages humanity in the long-run means disaster.

Wellington's supreme advantage lay in the fighting quality of histroops. The campaigns of six years had made them an army of veterans."Danger," says Napier, "was their sport," and victory, it might also beadded, was their habit. They fought with a confidence and fiercenesswhich, added to the cool and stubborn courage native to the Britishcharacter, made the battalions which broke over the French frontierunder Wellington perhaps the most formidable fighting force known inthe history of war. To quote Napier once more: "What Alexander'sMacedonians were at Arbela, Hannibal's Africans at Cannae, Caesar'sRomans at Pharsalia, Napoleon's Guards at Austerlitz, such wereWellington's British soldiers at this period."

On November 10, 1813, was fought what is called the battle of Nivelle,in which Wellington thrust Soult roughly and fiercely from the strongpositions he held on the flanks of the great hills under which theNivelle flows. The morning broke in great splendour; three signal-gunsflashed from the heights of one of the British hills, and at once the43rd leaped out and ran swiftly forward from the flank of the greatRhune to storm the "Hog's Back" ridge of the Petite Rhune, a ridgewalled with rocks 200 feet high, except at one point, where it wasprotected by a marsh. William Napier, who commanded the 43rd, has toldthe story of the assault. He placed four companies in reserve, and ledthe other four in person to the attack on the rocks; and he was chieflyanxious not to rush his men—to "keep down the pace," so that theywould not arrive spent and breathless at the French works. The menwere eager to rush, however; the fighting impulse in them was on flame,and they were held back with difficulty. When they were still nearly200 yards from the enemy, a youthful aide-de-camp, his blood on fire,came galloping up with a shout, and waving his hat. The 43rd broke outof hand at once with the impulse of the lad's enthusiasm and the strokeof his horse's flying hoofs, and with a sudden rush they launchedthemselves on the French works still high above them.

Napier had nothing for it but to join the charging mass. "I was thefirst man but one," he says, "who reached and jumped into the rocks,and I was only second because my strength and speed were unequal tocontend with the giant who got before me. He was the tallest and mostactive man in the regiment, and the day before, being sentenced tocorporal punishment, I had pardoned him on the occasion of anapproaching action. He now repaid me by striving always to placehimself between me and the fire of the enemy. His name was Eccles, anIrishman." The men won the first redoubt, but simply had not breathand strength enough left to reach the one above it, and fell gaspingand exhausted in the rocks before it, the French firing fiercely uponthem. In a few minutes, however, they had recovered breath; theyleaped up with a shout, and tumbled over the wall of the castle; andso, from barrier to barrier, as up some Titanic stairway, the 43rdswept with glittering bayonets. The summit was held by a powerful workcalled the Donjon; it was so strong that attack upon it seemed madness.But a keen-eyed British officer detected signs of wavering in theFrench within the fort, and with a shout the 43rd leaped at it, andcarried it. It took the 43rd twenty minutes to carry the whole chainof positions; and of the eleven officers of the regiment, six werekilled or desperately wounded. The French showed bravery; they fought,in fact, muzzle to muzzle up the whole chain of positions. But the43rd charged with a daring and fury absolutely resistless.

Another amazing feature in the day's fight was the manner in whichColborne, with the 52nd, carried what was called the Signal Redoubt, astrong work, crowning a steep needle-pointed hill, and overlooking thewhole French position. Colborne led his men up an ascent so sharp thathis horse with difficulty could climb it. The summit was reached, andthe men went in, with a run, at the work, only to find the redoubtgirdled by a wide ditch thirty feet deep. The men halted on the edgeof the deep cutting, and under the fire of the French they fell fast.Colborne led back his men under the brow of the hill for shelter, andat three separate points brought them over the crest again. In eachcase, after the men had rested under shelter long enough to recoverbreath, the word was passed, "Stand up and advance." The men instantlyobeyed, and charged up to the edge of the ditch again, many of theleading files jumping into it. But it was impossible to cross, andeach time the mass of British infantry stepped coolly back into coveragain.

One sergeant named Mayne, who had leaped into the ditch, found he couldneither climb the ramparts nor get back to his comrades, and he flunghimself on his face. A Frenchman leaned over the rampart, tookleisurely aim, and fired at him as he lay. Mayne had stuck thebillhook of his section at the back of his knapsack, and the bulletstruck it and flattened upon it. Colborne was a man of infiniteresource in war, and at this crisis he made a bugler sound a parley,hoisted his white pocket-handkerchief, and coolly walked round to thegate of the redoubt and invited the garrison to surrender. The veteranwho commanded it answered indignantly, "What! I with my battalionsurrender to you with yours?" "Very well," answered Colborne inFrench, "the artillery will be up immediately; you cannot hold out, andyou will be surrendered to the Spaniards." That threat was sufficient.The French officers remonstrated stormily with their commander, and thework was surrendered. But only one French soldier in the redoubt hadfallen, whereas amongst the 52nd "there fell," says Napier, "200soldiers of a regiment never surpassed in arms since arms were firstborne by men." In this fight Soult was driven in a little more thanthree hours from a mountain position he had been fortifying for morethan three months.

Amongst the brave men who died that day on the side of the British weretwo whose portraits Napier has drawn with something of Plutarch'sminuteness:—

"The first, low in rank, for he was but a lieutenant; rich in honour,for he bore many scars; was young of days—he was only nineteen—andhad seen more combats and sieges than he could count years. So slightin person and of such surpassing and delicate beauty that the Spaniardsoften thought him a girl disguised in man's clothing; he was yet sovigorous, so active, so brave, that the most daring and experiencedveterans watched his looks on the field of battle, and, implicitlyfollowing where he led, would, like children, obey his slightest signin the most difficult situations. His education was incomplete, yetwere his natural powers so happy that the keenest and best-furnishedshrank from an encounter of wit; and every thought and aspiration wasproud and noble, indicating future greatness if destiny had so willedit. Such was Edward Freer of the 43rd. The night before the battle hehad that strange anticipation of coming death so often felt by militarymen. He was struck by three balls at the first storming of the Rhunerocks, and the sternest soldiers wept, even in the middle of the fight,when they saw him fall."

"On the same day, and at the same hour, was killed Colonel ThomasLloyd. He likewise had been a long time in the 43rd. Under him Freerhad learned the rudiments of his profession; but in the course of thewar, promotion placed Lloyd at the head of the 94th, and it was leadingthat regiment he fell. In him also were combined mental and bodilypowers of no ordinary kind. Graceful symmetry, herculean strength, anda countenance frank and majestic, gave the true index of his nature;for his capacity was great and commanding, and his military knowledgeextensive, both from experience and study. Of his mirth and wit, wellknown in the army, it only need be said that he used the latter withoutoffence, yet so as to increase the ascendency over those with whom heheld intercourse; for, though gentle, he was ambitious, valiant, andconscious of his fitness for great exploits. And he, like Freer, wasprescient of and predicted his own fall, but with no abatement ofcourage, for when he received the mortal wound, a most painful one, hewould not suffer himself to be moved, and remained to watch the battle,making observations upon its changes until death came. It was thus, atthe age of thirty, that the good, the brave, the generous Lloyd died.Tributes to his memory have been published by Wellington, and by one ofhis own poor soldiers, by the highest and by the lowest. To theirtestimony I add mine. Let those who served on equal terms with him saywhether in aught it has exaggerated his deserts."

A pathetic incident may be added, found in Napier's biography, butwhich he does not give in his History. The night before the battleNapier was stretched on the ground under his cloak, when young Freercame to him and crept under the cover of his cloak, sobbing as if hisheart would break. Napier tried to soothe and comfort the boy, andlearnt from him that he was fully persuaded he should lose his life inthe approaching battle, and his distress was caused by thinking of hismother and sister in England.

On December 9, Wellington, by a daring movement and with some fiercefighting, crossed the Nive. It was a movement which had manyadvantages, but one drawback—his wings were now separated by the Nive;and Soult at this stage, like the great and daring commander he was,took advantage of his position to attempt a great counter-stroke. Itwas within his power to fling his whole force on either wing ofWellington, and so confident was he of success that he wrote to theMinister of War telling him to "expect good news" the next day.Wellington himself was on the right bank of the Nive, little dreamingthat Soult was about to leap on the extremity of his scattered forces.The country was so broken that Soult's movements were entirely hidden,and the roads so bad that even the cavalry outposts could scarcelymove. On the night of the 9th Soult had gathered every availablebayonet, and was ready to burst on the position held by Sir John Hopeat Arcanques.

In the grey dawn of the 10th the out-pickets of the 43rd noticed thatthe French infantry were pushing each other about as if in sport; butthe crowd seemed to thicken and to eddy nearer and nearer the Britishline. It was a trick to deceive the vigilance of the British outposts.Presently the apparently sportive crowd made a rush forwards andresolved itself into a spray of swiftly moving skirmishers. The Frenchcolumns broke from behind a screen of houses, and, at a running pace,and with a tumult of shouts, charged the British position. In a momentthe crowd of French soldiers had penetrated betwixt the 43rd and 52nd,and charging eagerly forward, tried to turn the flanks of both. Butthese were veteran regiments; they fell coolly and swiftly back, firingfiercely as they went. It was at once a race and a combat. The roadswere so narrow and so bad that the British could keep no order, and ifthe French outpaced them and reached the open position at the rearfirst, the British line would be pierced. The 43rd came through thepass first, apparently a crowd of running fugitives, officers and menjumbled together. The moment they had reached the open ground,however, the men fell, as if by a single impulse, into military form,and became a steadfast red line, from end to end of which ran, and ranagain, and yet again, the volleying flame of a sustained musketry fire.The pass was barred!

The troops to the right of the French were not quite so quick or sofortunate, and about 100 of the British—riflemen and men of the43rd—were intercepted. The French never doubted that they wouldsurrender, for they were but a handful of men cut off by a wholecolumn. An ensign of the 43rd named Campbell, a lad not eighteen yearsof age, was in the front files of the British when the call tosurrender was heard. With a shout the boy-ensign leaped at the Frenchcolumn. Where an officer leads, British soldiers will always follow,and the men followed him with a courage as high as his own. With arush the column was rent, and though fifty of the British were killedor taken, fifty, including the gallant boy who led them, escaped.

The fighting at other points was of the sharpest, and was strangelyentangled and confused. It was a fight of infantry against infantry,and the whole field of the combat was interlaced by almost impassablehedges. At one point, so strangely broken was the ground, and soobscured the fight with smoke and mist, that a French regiment passedunseen betwixt the British and Portuguese, and was rapidly filing intoline on the rear of the 9th, fiercely occupied at that moment against astrong force in front. Cameron, its colonel, left fifty men of hisregiment to answer the fire in his front, faced about, and went at arun against the French regiment, which by this time had commencedvolley-firing. Cameron's men fell fast—eighty men and officers, infact, dropped in little more than five minutes—but the rush of the 9thwas irresistible. The Frenchmen wavered, broke, and swept, adisorganised mass, past the flank of the Royals, actually carrying offone of its officers in the rush, and disappeared.

The sternest and most bewildering fighting took place round a buildingknown as the "mayor's house," surrounded by a coppice-wood. Coppiceand outbuildings were filled with men of all regiments and all nations,swearing, shooting, and charging with the bayonet. The 84th was caughtin a hollow road by the French, who lined the banks above, and lost itscolonel and a great proportion of its rank and file. Gronow tells anamusing incident of the fight at this stage. An isolated Britishbattalion stationed near the mayor's house was suddenly surrounded by aflood of French. The French general galloped up to the British officerin command and demanded his sword. "Upon this," says Gronow, "withoutthe least hesitation the British officer shouted out, 'This fellowwants us to surrender! Charge! my boys, and show them what stuff weare made of.'" The men answered with a shout, sudden, scornful, andstern, and went with a run at the French. "In a few minutes," addsGronow, "they had taken prisoners or killed the whole of the infantryregiment opposed to them!"

On the 11th desperate fighting took place on the same ground, but theBritish were by this time reinforced—the Guards, in particular, comingup after a rapid and exhausting march—and Soult's attack had failed.But on the night of the 12th the rain fell fast and steadily, the Nivewas flooded, the bridge of boats which spanned it swept away, and Hillwas left at St. Pierre isolated, with less than 14,000 men. Soult sawhis opportunity. The interior lines he held made concentration easy,and on the morning of the 13th he was able to pour an attacking forceof 35,000 bayonets on Hill's front, while another infantry division,together with the whole of the French cavalry under Pierre Soult,attacked his rear. Then there followed what has been described as themost desperate battle of the whole Peninsular war.

THE BLOODIEST FIGHT IN THE PENINSULA

"Then out spoke brave Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
'To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?'"
—MACAULAY.

Hill's front stretched through two miles; his left; a wooded craggyridge, was held by Pringle's brigade, but was parted from the centre bya marshy valley and a chain of ponds; his centre occupied acrescent-shaped broken ridge; his right, under General Byng, held aridge parallel with the Adour. The French gathered in great masses ona range of counter-heights, an open plain being between them and Hill'scentre. The day was heavy with whirling mist; and as the wind tore itoccasionally asunder, the British could see on the parallel roadsbefore them the huge, steadily flowing columns of the French.

Abbé led the attack on the British centre. He was "the fightinggeneral" of Soult's army, famous for the rough energy of his characterand the fierceness of his onfall. He pushed his attack with suchardour that he forced his way to the crest of the British ridge. Thefamous 92nd, held in reserve, was brought forward by way ofcounter-stroke, and pushed its attack keenly home. The head of Abbé'scolumn was crushed; but the French general replaced the brokenbattalions by fresh troops, and still forced his way onward, the 92ndfalling back.

In the meanwhile on both the right and the left of the British positionan almost unique disaster had befallen Hill's troops. Peaco*ck, thecolonel of the 71st, through some bewitched failure of nerve or ofjudgment, withdrew that regiment from the fight. It was a Highlandregiment, great in fighting reputation, and full of daring. How blackwere the looks of the officers, and what loud swearing in Gaelic tookplace in the ranks, as the gallant regiment—discipline overcominghuman nature—obeyed the mysterious order to retire, may be imagined.Almost at the same moment on the right, Bunbury, who commanded the 3rdor Buffs, in the same mysterious fashion abandoned to the French thestrong position he held. Both colonels were brave men, and theirsudden lapse into unsoldierly conduct has never been explained. Both,it may be added, were compelled to resign their commissions after thefight.

Hill, surveying the spectacle from the post he had taken, commandingthe whole field of battle, hastened down, met and halted the Buffs,sent them back to the fight, drew his whole reserves into the fray, andhimself turned the 71st and led them to the attack. With what joy theindignant Highlanders of the 71st obeyed the order to "Right aboutface" may be imagined, and so vehement was their charge that the Frenchcolumn upon which it was flung, though coming on at the double, in allthe élan of victory, was instantly shattered.

Meanwhile the 92nd was launched again at Abbé's column. Cameron, itscolonel, was a soldier of a very gallant type, and, himself aHighlander, he understood the Highland temperament perfectly. Hedressed his regiment as if on parade, the colours were uncased, thepipes shrilled fiercely, and in all the pomp of military array, withgreen tartans and black plumes all wind-blown, and with the wildstrains of their native hills and lochs thrilling in their ears, theHighlanders bore down on the French, their officers fiercely leading.On all sides at that moment the British skirmishers were falling back.The 50th was clinging desperately to a small wood that crowned theridge, but everywhere the French were forcing their way onward.Ashworth's Portuguese were practically destroyed; Barnes, who commandedthe centre, was shot through the body. But the fierce charge of the92nd along the high-road, and of the 71st on the left centre, sent anelectric thrill along the whole British front. The skirmishers,instead of falling back, ran forward; the Portuguese rallied. The 92ndfound in its immediate front two strong French regiments, and theirleading files brought their bayonets to the charge, and seemed eager tomeet the 92nd with the actual push of steel. It was the crisis of thefight.

At that moment the French commander's nerve failed him. Thatsteel-edged line of kilted, plume-crested Highlanders, charging with astep so fierce, was too much for him. He suddenly turned his horse,waved his sword; his men promptly faced about, and marched back totheir original position. The French on both the right and the leftdrew back, and the battle for the moment seemed to die down. Hill'sright was safe, and he drew the 57th from it to strengthen his sorelybattered centre; and just at that moment the sixth division, which hadbeen marching since daybreak, crossed the bridge over the Nive, whichthe British engineers with rare energy had restored, and appeared onthe ridge overlooking the field of battle. Wellington, too, appearedon the scene, with the third and fourth divisions. At two o'clock theallies commenced a forward movement, and Soult fell back; his secondcounter-stroke had failed.

St. Pierre was, perhaps, the most desperately contested fight in thePeninsular war, a field almost as bloody as Albuera. Hill's ranks werewasted as by fire; three British generals were carried from the field;nearly the whole of the staff was struck down. On a space scarcely onemile square, 5000 men were killed and wounded within three hours.Wellington, as he rode over the field by the side of Hill after thefight was over, declared he had never seen the dead lie so thicklybefore. It was a great feat for less than 14,000 men with 14 guns towithstand the assault of 35,000 men with 22 guns; and, at least whereAbbé led, the fighting of the French was of the most resolutecharacter. The victory was due, in part, to Hill's generalship and thelion-like energy with which he restored his broken centre and flungback the Buffs and the 71st into the fight. But in a quite equaldegree the victory was due to the obstinate fighting quality of theBritish private. The 92nd, for example, broke the French front no lessthan four times by bayonet charges pushed home with the sternestresolution, and it lost in these charges 13 officers and 171 rank andfile.

The French, it might almost be said, lost the field by the momentaryfailure in nerve of the officer commanding the column upon which the92nd was rushing in its last and most dramatic charge. His column wasmassive and unbroken; the men, with bent heads and levelled bayonets,were ready to meet the 92nd with a courage as lofty as that of theHighlanders themselves, and the 92nd, for all its parade of flutteringcolours and wind-blown tartans and feathers, was but a single weakbattalion. An electrical gesture, a single peremptory call on the partof the leader, even a single daring act by a soldier in the ranks, andthe French column would have been hurled on the 92nd, and by its mereweight must have broken it. But the oncoming of the Highlanders provedtoo great a strain for the nerve of the French general. He wheeled thehead of his horse backward, and the fight was lost.

Weeks of the bitterest winter weather suspended all military operationsafter St. Pierre. The rivers were flooded; the clayey lowlands wereone far-stretching quagmire; fogs brooded in the ravines; perpetualtempests shrieked over the frozen summits of the Pyrenees; theiron-bound coast was furious with breakers. But Wellington's hardyveterans—ill-clad, ill-sheltered, and ill-fed—yet kept their watch onthe slopes of the Pyrenees. The outposts of the two armies, indeed,fell into almost friendly relations with each other. Barter sprang upbetween them, a regular code of signals was established, friendlyoffices were exchanged. Wellington on one occasion desired toreconnoitre Soult's camp from the top of a hill occupied by a Frenchpicket, and ordered some English rifles to drive them off. No firingwas necessary. An English soldier held up the butt of his rifle andtapped it in a peculiar way. The signal meant, "We must have the hillfor a short time," and the French at once retired. A steady traffic inbrandy and tobacco sprang up between the pickets of the two armies. Arivulet at one point flowed between the outposts, and an Irish soldiernamed Patten, on sentry there, placed a canteen with a silver coin init on a stone by the bank of the rivulet, to be filled with brandy bythe French in the usual way. Canteen and coin vanished, but no brandyarrived. Patten, a daring fellow, regarded himself as cheated, and thenext day seeing, as he supposed, the same French sentry on duty, hecrossed the rivulet, seized the Frenchman's musket, shook the amazedsentry out of his accoutrements as a pea is shaken out of its pod, andcarried them off. The French outposts sent in a flag of truce,complained of this treatment, and said the unfortunate sentry's lifewould be forfeited unless his uniform and gun were restored. Patten,however, insisted that he held these "in pawn for a canteen of brandy,"and he got his canteen before the uniform was restored.

On February 12 a white hard frost suddenly fell on the whole field ofoperations, and turned the viscid mud everywhere to the hardness ofstone. The men could march, the artillery move; and Wellington, whosestrategy was ripe, was at once in action.

Soult barred his path by a great entrenched camp at Bayonne, to whichthe Adour served as a Titanic wet ditch. The Adour is a great river,swift and broad—swiftest and broadest through the six miles of itscourse below the town to its mouth. Its bed is of shifting sand; thespring-tide rises in it fourteen feet, the ebb-tide runs seven miles anhour. Where the swift river and the great rollers of the Bay of Biscaymeet is a treacherous bar—in heavy weather a mere tumult of leapingfoam. Soult assumed that Wellington would cross the river above thetown; the attempt to cross it near the mouth, where it was barred withsand, and beaten with surges, and guarded, too, by a tiny squadron ofFrench gunboats, was never suspected. Yet exactly this wasWellington's plan; and his bridge across the Adour is declared byNapier to be a stupendous undertaking, which must always rank amongst"the prodigies of war." Forty large sailing-boats, of about twentytons burden each, carrying the materials for the bridge, were to enterthe mouth of the Adour at the moment when Hope, with part of Hill'sdivision, made his appearance on the left bank of the river, withmaterials for rafts, by means of which sufficient troops could bethrown across the Adour to capture a battery which commanded itsentrance.

On the night of February 22, Hope, with the first division, was in theassigned position on the banks of the Adour, hidden behind somesandhills. But a furious gale made the bar impassable, and not a boatwas in sight. Hope, the most daring of men, never hesitated; he wouldcross the river without the aid of the fleet. His guns were suddenlyuncovered, the tiny French flotilla was sunk or scattered, and apontoon or raft, carrying sixty men of the Guards, pushed out from theBritish bank. A strong French picket held the other shore; but,bewildered and ill led, they made no opposition. A hawser was draggedacross the stream, and pontoons, each carrying fifteen men, were inquick succession pulled across. When about a thousand men had in thisway reached the French bank, some French battalions made theirappearance. Colonel Stopford, who was in command, allowed the Frenchto come on—their drums beating the pas de charge, and their officerswaving their swords—to within a distance of twenty yards, and thenopened upon them with his rocket brigade. The fiery flight andterrifying sound of these missiles put the French to instant rout. Allnight the British continued to cross, and on the morning of the 24ththe flotilla was off the bar, the boats of the men-of-war leading.

The first boat that plunged into the tumult of breakers, leaping androaring over the bar, sank instantly. The second shot through and wassafe; but the tide was running out furiously, and no boat could followtill it was high water again. When high water came, the troopscrowding the sandbanks watched with breathless interest the fight ofthe boats to enter. They hung and swayed like a flock of giganticsea-birds on the rough and tumbling sea. Lieutenant Bloye of theLyra, who led the way in his barge, dashed into the broad zone offoam, and was instantly swallowed up with all his crew. The rest ofthe flotilla bore up to right and left, and hovered on the edge of thetormented waters. Suddenly Lieutenant Cheyne of the Woodlark caughta glimpse of the true course and dashed through, and boat after boatcame following with reeling decks and dripping crews; but in the wholepassage no fewer than eight of the flotilla were destroyed. The bridgewas quickly constructed. Thirty-six two-masted vessels were mooredhead to stern, with an interval between each vessel, across the 800yards of the Adour; a double line of cables, about ten feet apart,linked the boats together; strong planks were lashed athwart thecables, making a roadway; a double line of masts, forming a series offloating squares, served as a floating boom; and across this swaying,flexible, yet mighty bridge, Wellington was able to pour his left wing,with all its artillery and material, and so draw round Bayonne an ironline of investment.

This movement thrust back Soult's right, but he clung obstinately tothe Gave. He held by Napoleon's maxim that the best way to defend isto attack, and Wellington's very success gave him what seemed a goldenopportunity. Wellington's left had crossed the Adour, but that verymovement separated it from the right.

Soult took up his position on a ridge of hills above Orthez. Hecommanded the fords by which Picton must cross, and his plan was tocrush him while in the act of crossing. The opportunity was clear, butsomehow Soult missed it. There failed him at the critical moment theswift-attacking impulse which both Napoleon and Wellington possessed inso high a degree. Picton's two divisions crossed the Gave, and climbedthe bank through mere fissures in the rocks, which broke up allmilitary order, and the nearest point which allowed them to fall intoline was within cannon-shot of the enemy. Even Picton's iron nerveshook at such a crisis; but Wellington, to use Napier's phrase, "calmas deepest sea," watched the scene. Soult ought to have attacked; hewaited to be attacked, and so missed victory.

By nine o'clock Wellington had formed his plan, and Ross's brigade wasthrust through a gorge on Soult's left. The French were admirablyposted: they had a narrow front, abundant artillery, and a greatbattery placed so as to smite on the flank any column forcing its waythrough the gorge which pierced Soult's left. Ross's men foughtmagnificently. Five times they broke through the gorge, and five timesthe fire of the French infantry on the slopes above them, and the grapeof the great battery at the head of the gorge, drove the shatteredregiments back. On Soult's right, again, Foy flung back with loss anattack by part of Picton's forces. On both the right and left, thatis, Soult was victorious, and, as he saw the wasted British lines rollsullenly back, it is said that the French general smote his thigh inexultation, and cried, "At last I have him!"

Almost at that moment, however, the warlike genius of Wellingtonchanged the aspect of the scene. He fed the attacks on Soult's rightand left, and the deepening roar of the battle at these two pointsabsorbed the senses of the French general. Soult's front was barred bywhat was supposed to be an impassable marsh, above which a great hillfrowned; and across the marsh, and upon this hill, the centre ofSoult's position, Wellington launched the famous 52nd.

Colborne plunged with his men into the marsh; they sank at every stepabove the knee, sometimes to the middle. The skirmishers shot fiercelyat them. But with stern composure the veterans of the lightdivision—soldiers, as Napier never tires in declaring, who "had neveryet met their match in the field"—pressed on. The marsh was crossed,the hill climbed, and with a sudden and deafening shout—the cheerwhich has a more full and terrible note than any other voice offighting men, the shout of the British regiment as it charges—the 52nddashed between Foy and Taupin. A French battalion in their path wasscattered as by the stroke of a thunderbolt. The French centre waspierced; both victorious wings halted, and began to ebb back. Hill,meanwhile, had crossed the Gave, and taking a wider circle, threatenedSoult's line of retreat. The French fell back, and fell back withever-quickening steps, but yet fighting sternly; the British, withdeafening musketry and cannonade, pressed on them. Hill quickened hispace on the ridge along which he was pressing. It became a race whoshould reach first the single bridge on the Luy-de-Béarn over which theFrench must pass. The pace became a run. Many of the French brokefrom their ranks and raced forward. The British cavalry broke throughsome covering battalions and sabred the fugitives. A great disasterwas imminent; and yet it was avoided, partly by Soult's cool andobstinate defence, and partly by the accident that at that momentWellington was struck by a spent ball and was disabled, so that hisswift and imperious will no longer directed the pursuit.

Orthez may be described as the last and not the least glorious fight inthe Peninsular war. Toulouse was fought ten day afterwards, but itscarcely belongs to the Peninsular campaigns, and was actually foughtafter a general armistice had been signed.

THE BATTLE OF THE BALTIC

"Let us think of them that sleep
Full many a fathom deep
By thy wild and stormy deep,
Elsinore!"
—CAMPBELL.

"I have been in a hundred and five engagements, but that of to-day isthe most terrible of them all." This was how Nelson himself summed upthe great fight off Copenhagen, or the battle of the Baltic as it issometimes called, fought on April 2, 1801. It was a battle betwixtBritons and Danes. The men who fought under the blood-red flag ofGreat Britain, and under the split flag of Denmark with its whitecross, were alike the descendants of the Vikings. The blood of the oldsea-rovers ran hot and fierce in their veins. Nelson, with the gloriesof the Nile still ringing about his name, commanded the British fleet,and the fire of his eager and gallant spirit ran from ship to ship likeso many volts of electricity. But the Danes fought in sight of theircapital, under the eyes of their wives and children. It is not strangethat through the four hours during which the thunder of the greatbattle rolled over the roofs of Copenhagen and up the narrow waters ofthe Sound, human valour and endurance in both fleets were at their veryhighest.

Less than sixty years afterwards "thunders of fort and fleet" along allthe shores of England were welcoming a daughter of the Danish throne as

"Bride of the heir of the kings of the sea."

And Tennyson, speaking for every Briton, assured the Danish girl whowas to be their future Queen—

"We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee."

What was it in 1801 which sent a British fleet on an errand of battleto Copenhagen?

It was a tiny episode of the long and stern drama of the Napoleonicwars. Great Britain was supreme on the sea, Napoleon on the land, and,in his own words, Napoleon conceived the idea of "conquering the sea bythe land." Paul I. of Russia, a semi-lunatic, became Napoleon's allyand tool. Paul was able to put overwhelming pressure on Sweden,Denmark, and Prussia, and these Powers were federated as the "League ofArmed Neutrality," with the avowed purpose of challenging the marinesupremacy of Great Britain. Paul seized all British ships in Russianports; Prussia marched troops into Hanover; every port from the NorthCape to Gibraltar was shut against the British flag. Britain, stoodalone, practically threatened with a naval combination of all theNorthern Powers, while behind the combination stood Napoleon, thesubtlest brain and most imperious will ever devoted to the service ofwar. Napoleon's master passion, it should be remembered, was thedesire to overthrow Great Britain, and he held in the palm of his handthe whole military strength of the Continent. The fleets of France andSpain were crushed or blockaded: but the three Northern Powers couldhave put into battle-line a fleet of fifty great ships and twenty-fivefrigates. With this force they could raise the blockade of the Frenchports, sweep triumphant through the narrow seas, and land a French armyin Kent or in Ulster.

Pitt was Prime Minister, and his masterful intellect controlled Britishpolicy. He determined that the fleets of Denmark and of Russia shouldnot become a weapon in the hand of Napoleon against England; and afleet of eighteen ships of the line, with frigates and bomb-vessels,was despatched to reason, from the iron lips of their guns, with themisguided Danish Government. Sir Hyde Parker, a decent, unenterprisingveteran, was commander-in-chief by virtue of seniority; but Nelson,with the nominal rank of second in command, was the brain and soul ofthe expedition. "Almost all the safety and certainly all the honour ofEngland," he said to his chief, "is more entrusted to you than ever yetfell to the lot of a British officer." And all through the story ofthe expedition it is amusing to notice the fashion in which Nelson'sfiery nature strove to kindle poor Sir Hyde Barker's sluggish temper toits own flame.

The fleet sailed from Yarmouth on March 12, and fought its way throughfierce spring gales to the entrance of the Kattegat. The wind wasfair; Nelson was eager to sweep down on Copenhagen with the wholefleet, and negotiate with the whole skyline of Copenhagen crowded withBritish topsails. "While the negotiation is going on," he said, "theDane should see our flag waving every time he lifts up his head." Timewas worth more than gold; it was worth brave men's lives. The Daneswere toiling day and night to prepare the defence of their capital.But prim Sir Hyde anchored, and sent up a single frigate with hisultimatum, and it was not until March 30 that the British fleet, a longline of stately vessels, came sailing up the Sound, passed Elsinore,and cast anchor fifteen miles from Copenhagen. Nothing could surpassthe gallant energy shown by the Danes in their preparation for defence,and Nature had done much to make the city impregnable from the sea.

The Sound is narrow and shallow, a mere tangle of shoals wrinkled withtwisted channels and scoured by the swift tides. King's Channel runsstraight up towards the city, but a huge sandbank, like the point of atoe, splits the channel into two just as it reaches the harbour. Thewestern edge runs up, pocket-shaped, into the city, and forms theactual port; the main channel contracts, swings round to thesouth-east, and forms a narrow passage between the shallows in front ofthe city and a huge shoal called the Middle Ground. A cluster of grimand heavily armed fortifications called the Three-Crown Batteriesguarded the entrance to the harbour, and looked right up King'sChannel; a stretch of floating batteries and line-of-battle ships, amile and a half in extent, ran from the Three-Crown Batteries along theedge of the shoals in front of the city, with some heavy pile batteriesat its termination. The direct approach up King's Channel, togetherwith the narrow passage between the city and the Middle Ground, werethus commanded by the fire of over 600 heavy guns. The Danes hadremoved the buoys that marked all the channels, the British had nocharts, and only the most daring and skilful seamanship could bring thegreat ships of the British fleet through that treacherous tangle ofshoals to the Danish front. As a matter of fact, the heavier ships inthe British fleet never attempted to join in the desperate fight whichwas waged, but hung as mere spectators in the offing.

Meanwhile popular enthusiasm in the Danish capital was at fever-point.Ten thousand disciplined troops manned the batteries; but peasants fromthe farms, workmen from the factories, merchants from the city,hastened to volunteer, and worked day and night at gun-drill. Athousand students from the university enrolled themselves, and drilledfrom morning till night. These student-soldiers had probably the bestmilitary band ever known; it consisted of the entire orchestra of theTheatre Royal, all volunteers. A Danish officer, sent on some messageunder a flag of truce to the British fleet, was required to put hismessage in writing, and was offered a somewhat damaged pen for thatpurpose. He threw it down with a laugh, saying that "if the Britishguns were not better pointed than their pens they wouldn't make muchimpression on Copenhagen." That flash of gallant wit marked the temperof the Danes. They were on flame with confident daring.

Nelson, always keen for a daring policy, had undertaken to attack theDanish defences with a squadron of twelve seventy-fours, and thefrigates and bomb-vessels of the fleet. He determined to shun the openway of King's Channel, grope through the uncertain passage called theDutch Deep, at the back of the Middle Ground, and forcing his way upthe narrow channel in front of the shallows, repeat on the anchoredbatteries and battleships of the Danes the exploit of the Nile. Hespent the nights of March 30 and 31 sounding the channel, beinghimself, in spite of fog and ice, in the boat nearly the whole of thesetwo bitter nights. On April 1 the fleet came slowly up the Dutch Deep,and dropped anchor at night about two miles from the southern extremityof the Danish line. At eleven o'clock that night, Hardy—in whose armsNelson afterwards died on board the Victory—pushed off from theflagship in a small boat and sounded the channel in front of the Danishfloating batteries. So daring was he that he actually sounded roundthe leading ship of the Danish line, using a pole to avoid beingdetected.

In the morning the wind blew fair for the channel. Nelson's plans hadbeen elaborated to their minutest details, and the pilots of the fleetwere summoned at nine o'clock to the flagship to receive their lastinstructions. But their nerve failed them. They were simply the matesor masters of Baltic traders turned for the moment into naval pilots.They had no charts. They were accustomed to handle ships of 200 or 300tons burden, and the task of steering the great British seventy-foursthrough the labyrinths of shallows, with the tide running like amill-race, appalled them. At last Murray, in the Edgar, undertook tolead. The signal was made to weigh in succession, and one great shipafter another, with its topsails on the caps, rounded the shoulder ofthe Middle Ground, and in stately procession, the Edgar leading, cameup the channel. Campbell in his fine ballad has pictured the scene:—

"Like leviathans afloat
Lay their bulwarks on the brine,
While the sign of battle flew
On the lofty British line.
It was ten of April morn by the chime;
As they drifted on their path
There was silence deep as death,
And the boldest held his breath
For a time.
But the might of England flushed
To anticipate the scene,
And her van the fleeter rushed
O'er the deadly space between."

The leading Danish ships broke into a tempest of fire as the Britishships came within range. The Agamemnon failed to weather theshoulder of the Middle Ground, and went ignobly ashore, and the scourof the tide kept her fast there, in spite of the most desperateexertions of her crew. The Bellona, a pile of white canvas above, adouble line of curving batteries below, hugged the Middle Ground tooclosely, and grounded too; and the Russell, following close afterher, went ashore in the same manner, with its jib-boom almost touchingthe Bellona's taffrail. One-fourth of Nelson's force was thuspractically out of the fight before a British gun was fired. Thesewere the ships, too, intended to sail past the whole Danish line andengage the Three-Crown Batteries. As they were hors de combat, thefrigates of the squadron, under Riou—"the gallant, good Riou" ofCampbell's noble lines—had to take the place of the seventy-fours.

Meanwhile, Nelson, in the Elephant, came following hard on theill-fated Russell. Nelson's orders were that each ship should passher leader on the starboard side, and had he acted on his own orders,Nelson too would have grounded, with every ship that followed him. Theinterval betwixt each ship was so narrow that decision had to beinstant; and Nelson, judging the water to the larboard of the Russellto be deeper, put his helm a-starboard, and so shot past the Russellon its larboard beam into the true channel, the whole line followinghis example. That sudden whirl to starboard of the flagship's helm—aflash of brilliant seamanship—saved the battle.

Ship after ship shot past, and anchored, by a cable astern, in itsassigned position. The sullen thunder of the guns rolled from end toend of the long line, the flash of the artillery ran in a dance offlame along the mile and a half of batteries, and some 2000 pieces ofartillery, most of them of the heaviest calibre, filled the long Soundwith the roar of battle. Nelson loved close fighting, and he anchoredwithin a cable's length of the Danish flagship, the pilots refusing tocarry the ship nearer on account of the shallow depth, and the averagedistance of the hostile lines was less than a hundred fathoms. Thecannonade raged, deep-voiced, unbroken, and terrible, for three hours."Warm work," said Nelson, as it seemed to deepen in fury and volume,"but, mark you, I would not be elsewhere for thousands." The carnagewas terrific. Twice the Danish flagship took fire, and out of a crewof 336 no fewer than 270 were dead or wounded. Two of the Danish pramsdrifted from the line, mere wrecks, with cordage in rags, bulwarksriddled, guns dismounted, and decks veritable shambles.

The battle, it must be remembered, raged within easy sight of the city,and roofs and church towers were crowded with spectators. They couldsee nothing but a low-lying continent of whirling smoke, shaken withthe tumult of battle, and scored perpetually, in crimson bars, with theflame of the guns. Above the drifting smoke towered the tops of theBritish seventy-fours, stately and threatening. The south-east windpresently drove the smoke over the city, and beneath that inky roof, asunder the gloom of an eclipse, the crowds of Copenhagen, white-facedwith excitement, watched the Homeric fight, in which their sons, andbrothers, and husbands were perishing.

Nothing could surpass the courage of the Danes. Fresh crews marchedfiercely to the floating batteries as these threatened to grow silentby mere slaughter, and, on decks crimson and slippery with the blood oftheir predecessors, took up the fight. Again and again, after a Danishship had struck from mere exhaustion, it was manned afresh from theshore, and the fight renewed. The very youngest officer in the Danishnavy was a lad of seventeen named Villemoes. He commanded a tinyfloating battery of six guns, manned by twenty-four men, and he managedto bring it under the very counter of Nelson's flagship, and fired hisguns point-blank into its huge wooden sides. He stuck to his workuntil the British marines shot down every man of his tiny crew exceptfour. After the battle Nelson begged that young Villemoes might beintroduced to him, and told the Danish Crown Prince that a boy sogallant ought to be made an admiral. "If I were to make all my braveofficers admirals," was the reply, "I should have no captains orlieutenants left."

The terrific nature of the British fire, as well as the stubbornness ofDanish courage, may be judged from the fact that most of the prizestaken in the fight were so absolutely riddled with shot as to have tobe destroyed. Foley, who led the van at the battle of the Nile, wasNelson's flag-captain in the Elephant, and he declared he burnedfifty more barrels of powder in the four hours' furious cannonade atCopenhagen than he did during the long night struggle at the Nile! Thefire of the Danes, it may be added, was almost as obstinate and deadly.The Monarch, for example, had no fewer than 210 of its crew lyingdead or wounded on its decks. At one o'clock Sir Hyde Parker, who waswatching the struggle with a squadron of eight of his heaviest shipsfrom the offing, hoisted a signal to discontinue the engagement. Thencame the incident which every boy remembers.

The signal-lieutenant of the Elephant reported that the admiral hadthrown out No. 39, the signal to discontinue the fight. Nelson waspacing his quarterdeck fiercely, and took no notice of the report. Thesignal-officer met him at the next turn, and asked if he should repeatthe signal. Nelson's reply was to ask if his own signal for closeaction was still hoisted. "Yes," said the officer. "Mind you keep itso," said Nelson. Nelson continued to tramp his quarter-deck, thethunder of the battle all about him, his ship reeling to the recoil ofits own guns. The stump of his lost arm jerked angrily to and fro, asure sign of excitement with him. "Leave off action!" he said to hislieutenant; "I'm hanged if I do." "You know, Foley," he said, turningto his captain, "I've only one eye; I've a right to be blindsometimes." And then putting the glass to his blind eye, he exclaimed,"I really do not see the signal!" He dismissed the incident by saying,"D—— the signal! Keep mine for closer action flying!"

As a matter of fact, Parker had hoisted the signal only to give Nelsonthe opportunity for withdrawing from the fight if he wished. Thesignal had one disastrous result—the little cluster of frigates andsloops engaged with the Three-Crown Batteries obeyed it and hauled off.As the Amazon, Riou's ship, ceased to fire, the smoke lifted, and theDanish battery got her in full sight, and smote her with deadly effect.Riou himself, heartbroken with having to abandon the fight, had justexclaimed, "What will Nelson think of us!" when a chain-shot cut him intwo, and with him a sailor with something of Nelson's own genius forbattle perished.

By two o'clock the Danish fire began to slack. One-half the line was amere chain of wrecks; some of the floating batteries had sunk; theflagship was a mass of flames. Nelson at this point sent his boatashore with a flag of truce, and a letter to the Prince Regent. Theletter was addressed, "To the Danes, the brothers of Englishmen." Ifthe fire continued from the Danish side, Nelson said he would becompelled to set on fire all the floating batteries he had taken,"without being able to save the brave Danes who had defended them."Somebody offered Nelson, when he had written the letter, a wafer withwhich to close it. "This," said Nelson, "is no time to appear hurriedor informal," and he insisted on the letter being carefully sealed withwax. The Crown Prince proposed an armistice. Nelson, with greatshrewdness, referred the proposal to his admiral lying four miles offin the London, foreseeing that the long pull out and back would givehim time to get his own crippled ships clear of the shoals, and pastthe Three-Crown Batteries into the open channel beyond—the only coursethe wind made possible; and this was exactly what happened. Nelson, itis clear, was a shrewd diplomatist as well as a great sailor.

The night was coming on black with the threat of tempest; the Danishflagship had just blown up; but the white flag of truce was flying, andthe British toiled, as fiercely as they had fought, to float theirstranded ships and take possession of their shattered prizes. Ofthese, only one was found capable of being sufficiently repaired to betaken to Portsmouth. On the 4th Nelson himself landed and visited theCrown Prince, and a four months' truce was agreed upon. News came atthat moment of the assassination of Paul I., and the League of ArmedNeutrality—the device by which Napoleon hoped to overthrow the navalpower of Great Britain—vanished into mere space. The fire of Nelson'sguns at Copenhagen wrecked Napoleon's whole naval policy.

It is curious that, familiar as Nelson was with the grim visage ofbattle, the carnage of that four hours' cannonade was too much for evenhis steady nerves. He could find no words too generous to declare hisadmiration of the obstinate courage shown by the Danes. "The Frenchand Spanish fight well," he said, "but they could not have stood for anhour such a fire as the Danes sustained for four hours."

KING-MAKING WATERLOO

"Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,
The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife;
The morn the marshalling in arms—the day
Battle's magnificently stern array!
The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent
The earth is cover'd thick with other clay,
Which her own clay shall cover, heap'd and pent,
Rider and horse—friend, foe—in one red burial blent!"
—BYRON.

"I look upon Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo as my three bestbattles—those which had great and permanent consequences. Salamancarelieved the whole south of Spain, changed all the prospects of thewar, and was felt even in Prussia. Vittoria freed the Peninsulaaltogether, broke off the armistice at Dresden, and thus led to Leipsicand the deliverance of Europe; and Waterloo did more than any otherbattle I know of towards the true object of all battles—the peace ofthe world."—WELLINGTON, Conversation with Croker.

On June 18, 1815, the grey light of a Sunday morning was breaking overa shallow valley lying between parallel ridges of low hills some twelvemiles to the south of Brussels. All night the rain had fallenfuriously, and still the fog hung low, and driving showers swept overplain and hill as from the church spires of half-a-dozen tiny villagesthe matin bells began to ring. For centuries those bells had calledthe villagers to prayers; to-day, as the wave of sound stole throughthe misty air it was the signal for the awakening of two mighty armiesto the greatest battle of modern times.

More ink has, perhaps, been shed about Waterloo than about any otherbattle known to history, and still the story bristles with conundrums,questions of fact, and problems in strategy, about which the expertsstill wage, with pen and diagram, strife almost as furious as thatwhich was waged with lance and sword, with bayonet and musket, morethan eighty years ago on the actual slopes of Mont St. Jean. It isstill, for example, a matter of debate whether, when Wellington firstresolved to fight at Waterloo, he had any express promise from Blücherto join him on that field. Did Wellington, for example, ride overalone to Blücher's headquarters on the night before Waterloo, andobtain a pledge of aid, on the strength of which he fought next day?It is not merely possible to quote experts on each side of thisquestion; it is possible to quote the same expert on both sides.Ropes, for example, the latest Waterloo critic, devotes several pagesto proving that the interview never took place, and then adds a note tohis third edition declaring that he has seen evidence which convinceshim it did take place! It is possible even to quote Wellington himselfboth for the alleged visit and against it. In 1833 he told a circle ofguests at Strathfieldsaye, in minute detail, how he got rid of his onlyaide-de-camp, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, and rode over on "Copenhagen" inthe rain and darkness to Wavre, and got from Blücher's own lips theassurance that he would join him next day at Waterloo. In 1838, whendirectly asked by Baron Gurney whether the story was true, he replied,"No, I did not see Blücher the day before Waterloo." If Homer nodded,it is plain that sometimes the Duke of Wellington forgot!

Clearness on some points, it is true, is slowly emerging. It isadmitted, for example, that Napoleon took the allies by surprise whenhe crossed the Sambre, and, in the very first stage of the campaign,scored a brilliant strategic success over them. Wellington himself, onthe night of the famous ball, took the Duke of Richmond into hisdressing-room, shut the door, and said, "Napoleon has humbugged me, by——; he has gained twenty-four hours' march on me." The Duke went onto explain that he had ordered his troops to concentrate at QuatreBras; "but," he added, "we shall not stop him there, and I must fighthim here," at the same time passing his thumb-nail over the position ofWaterloo. That map, with the scratch of the Duke's thumb-nail over thevery line where Waterloo was afterwards fought, was long preserved as arelic. Part of the surprise, the Duke complained, was due to Blücher.But, as he himself explained to Napier, "I cannot tell the world thatBlücher picked the fattest man in his army (Muffling) to ride with anexpress to me, and that he took thirty hours to go thirty miles."

The hour at which Waterloo began, though there were 150,000 actors inthe great tragedy, was long a matter of dispute. The Duke ofWellington puts it at ten o'clock. General Alava says half-pasteleven, Napoleon and Drouet say twelve o'clock, and Ney one o'clock.Lord Hill may be credited with having settled this minute question offact. He took two watches with him into the fight, one a stop-watch,and he marked with it the sound of the first shot fired, and thisevidence is now accepted as proving that the first flash of red flamewhich marked the opening of the world-shaking tragedy of Waterloo tookplace at exactly ten minutes to twelve.

As these sketches are not written for military experts, but onlypretend to tell, in plain prose, and for younger Britons, the story ofthe great deeds which are part of their historical inheritance, all thedisputed questions about Waterloo may be at the outset laid aside. Itis a great tale, and it seems all the greater when it is simply told.The campaign of Waterloo, in a sense, lasted exactly four days, yetinto that brief space of time there is compressed so much of humandaring and suffering, of genius and of folly, of shining triumph and ofblackest ruin, that the story must always be one of the most excitingrecords in human history.

I. THE RIVAL HOSTS

"Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands,
And of armèd men the hum;
Lo! a nation's hosts have gathered
Round the quick alarming drum,—
Saying, 'Come,
Freeman, come,
Ere your heritage be wasted,' said the quick alarming drum.

******

'Let me of my heart take counsel:
War is not of life the sum;
Who shall stay and reap the harvest
When the autumn days shall come?'
But the drum
Echoed, 'Come!
Death shall reap the braver harvest,' said the solemn-sounding drum.

What if, 'mid the cannons' thunder,
Whistling shot and bursting bomb,
When my brothers fall around me,
Should my heart grow cold and numb?'
But the drum
Answered, 'Come!
Better there in death united, than in life a recreant,—Come!'"
—BRET HARTE.

For weeks the British and Prussian armies, scattered over a district100 miles by 40, had been keeping guard over the French frontier.Mighty hosts of Russians and Austrians were creeping slowly acrossEurope to join them. Napoleon, skilfully shrouding his movements inimpenetrable secrecy, was about to leap across the Sambre, and bothBlücher and Wellington had to guess what would be his point of attack;and they, as it happened, guessed wrongly. Napoleon's strategy wasdetermined partly by his knowledge of the personal characters of thetwo generals, and partly by the fact that the bases of the alliedarmies lay at widely separate points—the English base at Antwerp, thePrussian on the Rhine. Blücher was essentially "a hussar general"; thefighting impulse ran riot in his blood. If attacked, he wouldcertainly fight where he stood; if defeated, and driven back on hisbase, he must move in diverging lines from Wellington. That Blücherwould abandon his base to keep touch with Wellington—as actuallyhappened—Napoleon never guessed. Wellington, cooler and moremethodical than his Prussian fellow-commander, would not fight, it wascertain, till his troops were called in on every side and he was ready.Blücher was nearer the French frontier. Napoleon calculated that hecould leap upon him, bar Wellington from coming to his help by plantingNey at Quatre Bras, win a great battle before Wellington could joinhands with his ally, and then in turn crush Wellington. It wassplendid strategy, splendidly begun, but left fatally incomplete.

Napoleon fought and defeated Blücher at Ligny on June 16, attackingQuatre Bras at the same time, so as to occupy the English. Wellingtonvisited Blücher's lines before the fight began, and said to him, "Everygeneral knows his own men, but if my lines were drawn up in thisfashion I should expect to get beaten;" and as he cantered back to hisown army he said to those about him, "If Bonaparte be what I suppose heis, the Prussians will get a —— good licking to-day." Captain Bowleswas standing beside the Duke at Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th,when a Prussian staff-officer, his horse covered with sweat, gallopedup and whispered an agitated message in the Duke's ear. The Duke,without a change of countenance, dismissed him, and, turning to Bowles,said, "Old Blücher has had a —— good licking, and gone back to Wavre,eighteen miles. As he has gone back, we must go too. I suppose inEngland they will say we have been licked. I can't help it! As theyhave gone back, we must go too." And in five minutes, without stirringfrom the spot, he had given complete orders for a retreat to Waterloo.

The low ridge on which the Duke took up his position runs east andwest. The road from Brussels to the south, just before it crosses thecrest of the ridge, divides like the upper part of the letter Y intotwo roads, that on the right, or westward, running to Nivelles, that onthe left, or eastward, to Charleroi. A country road, in parts only acouple of feet deep, in parts sunk from twelve to fifteen feet,traverses the crest of the ridge, and intersects the two roads justnamed before they unite to form the main Brussels road. Twofarmhouses—La Haye Sainte, on the Charleroi road, and Hougoumont, onthat to Nivelles—stand out some 250 yards in advance of the ridge.Thus the cross-road served as a ditch to Wellington's front; the twofarmhouses were, so to speak, horn-works guarding his right centre andleft centre; while in the little valley on the reverse side of thecrest Wellington was able to act on his favourite tactics of keepinghis men out of sight till the moment for action arrived. The ridge, infact, to the French generals who surveyed it from La Belle Allianceseemed almost bare, showing nothing but batteries at intervals alongthe crest, and a spray of skirmishers on the slopes below.

Looked at from the British ridge, the plain over which the great fightraged is a picture of pastoral simplicity and peace. The crops thatSunday morning were high upon it, the dark green of wheat and cloverchequered with the lighter green of rye and oats. No fences intersectthe plain; a few farmhouses, each with a leafy girdle of trees, and thebrown roofs of one or two distant villages, alone break the level floorof green. The present writer has twice visited Waterloo, and the imageof verdurous and leafy peace conveyed by the landscape is still mostvivid. Only Hougoumont, where the orchard walls are still pierced bythe loop-holes through which the Guards fired that long June Sunday,helps one to realise the fierce strife which once raged and echoed overthis rich valley with its grassy carpet of vivid green. Waterloo is abattlefield of singularly small dimensions. The British front did notextend for more than two miles; the gap betwixt Hougoumont and La HayeSainte, through which Ney poured his living tide of cavalry, 15,000strong, is only 900 yards wide, a distance equal, say, to a couple ofcity blocks. The ridge on which Napoleon drew up his army is less than2000 yards distant from that on which the British stood. It slopedsteadily upward, and, as a consequence. Napoleon's whole force wasdisclosed at a glance, and every combination of troops made inpreparation for an attack on the British line was clearly visible, afact which greatly assisted Wellington in his arrangements for meetingit.

The opposing armies differed rather in quality than in numbers.Wellington had, roughly, 50,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, a little lessthan 6000 artillerymen; a total of 67,000 men and 156 guns. Napoleonhad 49,000 infantry, nearly 16,000 cavalry, over 7000 artillery; atotal of, say, 72,000 men, with 246 guns. In infantry the two armieswere about equal, in cavalry the French were superior, and in gunstheir superiority was enormous. But the French were war-hardenedveterans, the men of Austerlitz and of Wagram, of one blood and speechand military type, a hom*ogeneous mass, on flame with warlikeenthusiasm. Of Wellington's troops, only 30,000 were British andGerman; many even of these had never seen a shot fired in battle, andwere raw drafts from the militia, still wearing the militia uniform.Only 12,000 were old Peninsula troops. Less than 7000 of Wellington'scavalry were British, and took any part in the actual battle.Wellington himself somewhat ungratefully described his force as an"infamous army"; "the worst army ever brought together!" Nearly 18,000were Dutch-Belgians, whose courage was doubtful, and whose loyalty wasstill more vehemently suspected. Wellington had placed some battalionsof these as part of the force holding Hougoumont; but when, an hourbefore the battle actually began, Napoleon rode through his troops, andtheir tumultuous shouts echoed in a tempest of sound across to theBritish lines, the effect on the Dutch-Belgians in Hougoumont was soinstant and visible that Wellington at once withdrew them. "The merename of Napoleon," he said, "had beaten them before they fired a shot!"The French themselves did justice to the native fighting quality of theBritish. "The English infantry," as Foy told the Emperor on themorning of Waterloo, "are the very d—— to fight;" and Napoleon, fiveyears after, at St. Helena, said, "One might as well try to chargethrough a wall." Soult, again, told Napoleon, "Sire, I know theseEnglish. They will die on the ground on which they stand before theylose it." That this was true, even of the raw lads from the militia,Waterloo proved. But it is idle to deny that of the two armies theFrench, tried by abstract military tests, was far the stronger.

The very aspect of the two armies reflected their differentcharacteristics. A grim silence brooded over the British position.Nothing was visible except the scattered clusters of guns and theoutposts. The French army, on the other side, was a magnificentspectacle, gay with flags, and as many-coloured as a rainbow. Elevencolumns deployed simultaneously, and formed three huge lines of serriedinfantry. They were flanked by mail-clad cuirassiers, with glitteringhelmets and breast-plates; lines of scarlet-clad lancers; and hussars,with bearskin caps and jackets glittering with gold lace. The blackand menacing masses of the Old Guard and of the Young Guard, with theirhuge bearskin caps, formed the reserve. As Napoleon, with a glitteringstaff, swept through his army, the bands of 114 battalions and 112squadrons poured upon the peaceful air of that June Sunday the martialcadences of the Marseillaise, and the "Vive l'Empereur!" which brokefrom the crowded host was heard distinctly by the grimly listeningranks of the British. "As far as the eye could reach," says one whodescribes the fight from the French ranks, "nothing was to be seen butcuirasses, helmets, busbies, sabres and lances, and glittering lines ofbayonets."

As for the British, there was no tumult of enthusiasm visible amongthem. Flat on the ground, in double files, on the reverse side of thehill, the men lay, and jested in rough fashion with each other, whilethe officers in little groups stood on the ridge and watched the Frenchmovements. Let it be remembered that many of the troops had foughtdesperately on the 16th, and retreated on the 17th from Quatre Bras toWaterloo under furious rain, and the whole army was soddened andchilled with sleeping unsheltered on the soaked ground. Many of themen, as they rose hungry and shivering from their sleeping-place in themud, were so stiff and cramped that they could not stand upright.

II. HOUGOUMONT

"The trumpets sound, the banners fly,
The glittering spears are rankèd ready,
The shouts o' war are heard afar,
The battle closes thick and bloody."
—BURNS.

The ground was heavy with the rains of the night, and Napoleon lingeredtill nearly noon before he launched his attack on the British lines.At ten minutes to twelve the first heavy gun rang sullenly from theFrench ridge, and from the French left Reille's corps, 6000 strong,flung itself on Hougoumont. The French are magnificent skirmishers,and as the great mass moved down the slope, a dense spray oftirailleurs ran swiftly before it, reached the hedge, and broke intothe wood, which, in a moment, was full of white smoke and the redflashes of musketry. In a solid mass the main body followed; but themoment it came within range, the British guns keeping guard overHougoumont smote it with a heavy fire. The French batteries answeredfiercely, while in the garden and orchard below the Guards and theFrench fought almost literally muzzle to muzzle.

Hougoumont was a strong post. The fire from the windows in the mainbuilding commanded the orchard, that from the orchard commanded thewood, that from the wood swept the ridge. The French had crossed theridge, cleared the wood, and were driving the Guards, fightingvehemently, out of the orchard into the hollow road between the houseand the British ridge. But they could do no more. The light companiesof the Foot Guards, under Lieut.-Colonel Macdonnell, held the buildingsand orchard, Lord Saltoun being in command of the latter. Muffling,the Prussian commissioner on Wellington's staff, doubted whetherHougoumont could be held against the enemy; but Wellington had greatconfidence in Macdonnell, a Highlander of gigantic strength and coolestdaring, and nobly did this brave Scotsman fulfil his trust. All daylong the attack thundered round Hougoumont. The French masses movedagain and again to the assault upon it; it was scourged with musketryand set on fire with shells. But steadfastly under the roar of theguns and the fierce crackle of small-arms, and even while the roofswere in flames above their heads, the gallant Guardsmen held theirpost. Once the main gateway was burst open, and the French broke in.They were instantly bayoneted, and Macdonnell, with a cluster ofofficers and a sergeant named Graham, by sheer force shut the gateagain in the face of the desperate French. In the fire which partiallyconsumed the building, some of the British wounded were burned todeath, and Mercer, who visited the spot the morning after the fight,declared that in the orchard and around the walls of the farmhouse thedead lay as thick as on the breach of Badajos.

More than 2000 killed and wounded fell in the long seven hours' fightwhich raged round this Belgian farmhouse. More than 12,000 infantrywere flung into the attack; the defence, including the Dutch andBelgians in the wood, never exceeded 2000 men. But when, in the tumultof the victorious advance of the British at nightfall, Wellington foundhimself for a moment beside Muffling, with a flash of exultation rarein a man so self-controlled, he shouted, "Well, you see Macdonnell heldHougoumont after all!" Towards evening, at the close of the fight,Lord Saltoun, with the wreck of the light companies of the Guards,joined the main body of their division on the ridge. As they came upto the lines, a scanty group with torn uniforms and smoke-blackenedfaces, the sole survivors of the gallant hundreds who had foughtcontinuously for seven hours, General Maitland rode out to meet themand cried, "Your defence has saved the army! Every man of you deservespromotion." Long afterwards a patriotic Briton bequeathed 500 poundsto the bravest soldier at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington to be thejudge. The Duke named Macdonnell, who handed the money to the sergeantwho was his comrade in the struggle at the gate of Hougoumont.

III. PICTON AND D'ERLON

"But on the British heart were lost
The terrors of the charging host;
For not an eye the storm that view'd
Changed its proud glance of fortitude.
Nor was one forward footstep staid,
As dropp'd the dying and the dead."
—SCOTT.

Meantime a furious artillery duel raged between the opposing ridges.Wellington had ordered his gunners not to fire at the French batteries,but only at the French columns, while the French, in the main,concentrated their fire on the British guns. French practice underthese conditions was naturally very beautiful, for no hostile bulletsdisturbed their aim, and the British gunners fell fast; yet their fireon the French masses was most deadly. At two o'clock Napoleon launchedhis great infantry attack, led by D'Erlon, against La Haye Sainte andthe British left. It was an attack of terrific strength. Fourdivisions, numbering 16,000 men, moved forward in echelon, withintervals between them of 400 paces; seventy-two guns swept as with abesom of fire the path along which these huge masses advanced withshouts to the attack, while thirty light guns moved in the intervalsbetween them; and a cavalry division, consisting of lancers andcuirassiers, rode on their flank ready to charge the broken masses ofthe British infantry. The British line at this point consisted ofPicton's division, formed of the shattered remains of Kempt's andPack's brigades, who had suffered heavily at Quatre Bras. They formeda mere thread of scarlet, a slender two-deep line of about 3000 men.As the great mass of the enemy came slowly on, the British line was"dressed," the men ceased to talk, except in monosyllables, theskirmishers lying flat on the trampled corn prepared to fire. Thegrape of the French guns smote Picton's red lines with fury, and themen fell fast, yet they closed up at the word of command with the mostperfect coolness. The French skirmishers, too, running forward withgreat speed and daring, drove in the British skirmishers, who camerunning back to the main line smoke-begrimed and breathless.

As the French masses began to ascend the British slope, the French gunshad to cease their fire for fear of striking their own forces. TheBritish infantry, too, being drawn slightly back from the crest, wereout of sight, and the leading French files saw nothing before them buta cluster of British batteries and a this line of quickly retreatingskirmishers. A Dutch-Belgian brigade had, somehow, been placed on theexterior slope of the hill, and when D'Erlon's huge battalions came on,almost shaking the earth with their steady tread, the Dutch-Belgianssimply took to their heels and ran. They swept, a crowd of fugitives,through the intervals of the British lines, and were received withgroans and hootings, the men with difficulty being restrained fromfiring upon them.

A sand-pit lay in the track of the French columns on the left. Thiswas held by some companies of the 95th Rifles, and these opened a fireso sudden and close and deadly that the huge mass of the French swungalmost involuntarily to the right, off its true track; then with fierceroll of drums and shouts of "En avant!" the Frenchmen reached thecrest. Suddenly there rose before them Picton's steady lines, alongwhich there ran, in one red flame from end to end, a dreadful volley.Again the fierce musketry crackled, and yet again. The Frenchmen triedto deploy, and Picton, seizing the moment, ordered his lines to charge."Charge! charge!" he cried. "Hurrah!"

It is yet a matter keenly disputed as to whether or not D'Erlon's menactually pierced the British line. It is alleged that the Highlanderswere thrown into confusion, and it is certain that Picton's last wordsto his aide-de-camp, Captain Seymour, were, "Rally the Highlanders!"Pack, too, appealed to the 92nd. "You must charge," he said; "all infront have given way." However this may be, the British regimentscharged, and the swift and resolute advance of Picton's lines—thoughit was a charge of 3000 men on a body four times their number—wasirresistible. The leading ranks of the French opened a hurried fire,under which Picton himself fell shot through the head; then as theBritish line came on at the double—the men with bent heads, the levelbayonets one steady edge of steel, the fierce light which gleams alongthe fighting line playing on them—the leading battalions of the Frenchhalted irresolute, shrunk back, swayed to and fro, and fell into ashapeless receding mass.

There were, of course, many individual instances of great gallantryamongst them. Thus a French mounted officer had his horse shot, andwhen he struggled from beneath his fallen charger he found himselfalmost under the bayonets of the 32nd. But just in front of theBritish line was an officer carrying the colours of the regiment, andthe brave Frenchman instantly leaped upon him. He would capture theflag! There was a momentary struggle, and the British officer at thehead of the wing shouted, "Save the brave fellow!" but almost at thesame moment the gallant Frenchman was bayoneted by the colour-sergeant,and shot by a British infantryman.

The head of the French column was falling to pieces, but the main bodywas yet steady, and the cuirassiers covering its flank were comingswiftly on. But at this moment there broke upon them the terrificcounterstroke, not of Wellington, but of Lord Uxbridge, into whosehands Wellington, with a degree of confidence quite unusual for him,had given the absolute control of his cavalry, fettering him by nospecific orders.

IV. "SCOTLAND FOR EVER!"

"Beneath their fire, in full career,
Rush'd on the ponderous cuirassier,
The lancer couch'd his ruthless spear,
And hurrying as to havoc near,
The cohorts' eagles flew.
In one dark torrent, broad and strong,
The advancing onset roll'd along,
Forth harbinger'd by fierce acclaim
That, from the shroud of smoke and flame,
Peal'd wildly the imperial name!"
—SCOTT.

The attack of the Household and Union Brigades at Waterloo is one ofthe most dazzling and dramatic incidents of the great fight. Forsuddenness, fire, and far-reaching results, it would be difficult toparallel that famous charge in the history of war. The HouseholdBrigade, consisting of the 1st and 2nd Life Guards, and the DragoonGuards, with the Blues in support, moved first. Lord Uxbridge,temporarily exchanging the functions of general for those of asquadron-leader, heading the attack. They leaped the hedge, or burstthrough it, crossed the road—at that point of shallow depth—and metthe French cuirassiers in full charge. The British were bigger men onbigger horses, and they had gained the full momentum of their chargewhen the two lines met. The French, to do them justice, did notshrink. The charging lines crashed together, like living and swiftlymoving walls, and the sound of their impact rang sharp, sudden, deep,and long drawn out, above the din of the conflict. The French worearmour, and carried longer swords than the British, but they were sweptaway in an instant, and went, a broken and shattered mass of men andhorses, down the slope. Some of them were tumbled into the sand-pit,amongst the astonished Rifles there, who instantly bayoneted them.Others were swept upon the masses of their own infantry, fiercelyfollowed by the Life Guards.

The 2nd Life Guards and the Dragoons, coming on a little in the rear,struck the right regiment of the cuirassiers and hurled them across thejunction of the roads. Shaw, the famous Life Guardsman, was killedhere. He was a perfect swordsman, a man of colossal strength, and issaid to have cut down, through helmet and skull, no fewer than nine menin the mêlée. How Shaw actually died is a matter of dispute.Colonel Marten says he was shot by a cuirassier who stood clear of themêlée, coolly taking pot-shots at the English Guardsmen. CaptainKelly, a brilliant soldier, who rode in the charge beside Shaw, saysthat Shaw was killed by a thrust through the body from a French colonelof the cuirassiers, whom Kelly himself, in return, clove through helmetand skull.

Meanwhile the Union Brigade on the left, consisting of the Royals andthe Inniskillings, with the Scots Greys in support, had broken into thefight. The Royals, coming on at full speed over the crest of theridge, broke upon the astonished vision of the French infantry at adistance of less than a hundred yards. It was an alarming vision ofwaving swords, crested helmets, fierce red nostrils, and gallopinghoofs. The leading files tried to turn, but in an instant the Royalswere upon them, cutting them down furiously. De Lacy Evans, who rodein the charge, says, "They fled like a flock of sheep." Colonel ClarkKennedy adds that the "jamb" in the French was so thick that the mencould not bring down their arms or level a musket, and the Dragoonsrode in the intervals between their formation, reaching forward withthe stroke of their long swords, and slaying at will. More than 2000Frenchmen flung down their arms and surrendered; and on the nextmorning the abandoned muskets were still lying in long straight linesand regular order, showing that the men had surrendered before theirlines were broken. The charge of the Inniskillings to the left of theRoyals was just as furious and just as successful. They broke on thefront of Donzdot's divisions and simply ground them to powder.

The Scots Greys were supposed to be "in support"; but coming swiftlyup, they suddenly saw on their left shoulder Marcognet's divisions, theextreme right of the French. At that sight the Greys swung a littleoff to their left, swept through the intervals of the 92nd, and smotethe French battalions full in front. As the Greys rode through theintervals of the footmen—Scotch horsem*n through Scotch infantry—theScotch blood in both regiments naturally took fire. Greetings inbroadest Doric flew from man to man. The pipes skirled fiercely."Scotland for ever!" went up in a stormy shout from the kilted lines.The Greys, riding fast, sometimes jostled, or even struck down, some ofthe 92nd; and Armour, the rough-rider of the Greys, has told how theHighlanders shouted, "I didna think ye wad hae saired me sae!" Many ofthe Highlanders caught hold of the stirrups of the Greys and racedforward with them—Scotsmen calling to Scotsmen—into the ranks of theFrench. The 92nd, in fact, according to the testimony of their ownofficers, "went half mad." What could resist such a charge?

The two British cavalry brigades were by this time riding roughlyabreast, the men drunk with warlike excitement and completely out ofhand, and most of their officers were little better. They simply rodeover D'Erlon's broken ranks. So brave were some of the French,however, that again and again a solitary soldier or officer would leapout of the ranks as the English cavalry came on, and charge themsingle-handed! One French private deliberately ran out as theInniskillings came on at full gallop, knelt before the swiftlygalloping line of men and horses, coolly shot the adjutant of theInniskillings through the head, and was himself instantly trodden intoa bloody pulp! The British squadrons, wildly disordered, but drunkwith battle fury, and each man fighting for his "ain hand," sweptacross the valley, rode up to the crest of the French position, stormedthrough the great battery there, slew drivers and horses, and socompletely wrecked the battery that forty guns out of its seventy nevercame into action again. Some of the men, in the rapture of the fight,broke through to the second line of the French, and told tales, afterthe mad adventure was over, of how they had come upon French artillerydrivers, mere boys, sitting crying on their horses while the tragedyand tumult of the mêlée swept past them. Some of the older officerstried to rally and re-form their men; and Lord Uxbridge, by this timebeginning to remember that he was a general and not a dragoon, lookedround for his "supports," who, as it happened, oblivious of the duty of"supporting" anybody, were busy fighting on their own account, and wereriding furiously in the very front ranks.

Then there came the French counter-stroke. The French batteries openedon the triumphant, but disordered British squadrons; a brigade oflancers smote them on the flank and rolled them up. Lord EdwardSomerset, who commanded the Household Brigade, was unhorsed, and savedhis life by scrambling dexterously, but ignobly, through a hedge. SirWilliam Ponsonby, who commanded the Union Brigade, had ridden his horseto a dead standstill; the lancers caught him standing helpless in themiddle of a ploughed field, and slew him with a dozen lance-thrusts.Vandeleur's Light Cavalry Brigade was by this time moving down from theBritish front, and behind its steady squadrons the broken remains ofthe two brigades found shelter.

Though the British cavalry suffered terribly in retiring, neverthelessthey had accomplished what Sir Evelyn Wood describes as "one of themost brilliant successes ever achieved by horsem*n over infantry."These two brigades—which did not number more than 2000 swords—wreckedan entire infantry corps, disabled forty guns, overthrew a division ofcuirassiers, took 3000 prisoners, and captured two eagles. The moraleffect of the charge was, perhaps, greater than even its materialresults. The French infantry never afterwards throughout the battle,until the Old Guard appeared upon the scene, moved forward with realconfidence against the British position. Those "terrible horsem*n" hadstamped themselves upon their imagination.

The story of how the eagles were captured is worth telling. CaptainClark Kennedy of the Dragoons took one. He was riding vehemently inthe early stage of the charge, when he caught sight of the cuirassierofficer carrying the eagle, with his covering men, trying to breakthrough the mêlée and escape. "I gave the order to my men," he says,"'Right shoulders forward; attack the colours.'" He himself overtookthe officer, ran him through the body, and seized the eagle. He triedto break the eagle from the pole and push it inside his coat forsecurity, but, failing, gave it to his corporal to carry to the rear.The other colour was taken by Ewart, a sergeant of the Greys, a veryfine swordsman. He overtook the officer carrying the colour, and, toquote his own story, "he and I had a hard contest for it. He made athrust at my groin; I parried it off, and cut him down through thehead. After this a lancer came at me. I threw the lance off by myright side, and cut him through the chin and upwards through the teeth.Next, a foot-soldier fired at me, and then charged me with his bayonet,which I also had the good luck to parry, and then I cut him downthrough the head. Thus ended the contest. As I was about to followthe regiment, the general said, 'My brave fellow, take that to therear; you have done enough till you get quit of it.'"

V. HORsem*n AND SQUARES

"But yet, though thick the shafts as snow,
Though charging knights like whirlwinds go,
Though bill-men ply the ghastly blow,
Unbroken was the ring;
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
Each stepping where his comrade stood,
The instant that he fell.
No thought was there of dastard flight;
Linked in the serried phalanx tight,
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well."
—SCOTT.

Napoleon's infantry had failed to capture either Hougoumont or La HayeSainte, which was stoutly held by Baring and his Hanoverians. Thegreat infantry attack on the British left had failed, and though thestubborn fight round the two farmhouses never paused, the main battlealong the ridge for a time resolved itself into an artillery duel.Battery answered battery across the narrow valley, nearly four hundredguns in action at once, the gunners toiling fiercely to load and firewith the utmost speed. Wellington ordered his men to lie down on thereverse of the ridge; but the French had the range perfectly, andshells fell thickly on the ranks of recumbent men, and solid shot torethrough them. The thunder of the artillery quickened; the Frenchtirailleurs, showing great daring, crept in swarms up the British slopeand shot down the British gunners at their pieces. Both Hougoumont andLa Haye Sainte were on fire at this stage of the battle. The smoke ofthe conflict, in an atmosphere heavy with moisture, hung like a lowpall of blackest crape over the whole field; and every now and again,on either ridge, columns of white smoke shot suddenly up and fell backlike gigantic and vaporous mushrooms—the effect of explodingammunition waggons. "Hard pounding this, gentlemen," said Wellington,as he rode past his much-enduring battalions. "Let us see who willpound longest."

At four o'clock came the great cavalry attack of the French. Throughthe gap between, not merely the two farmhouses, but the two farmhousesplus their zone of fire—through a gap, that is, of probably not morethan 1000 yards, the French, for two long hours, poured on the Britishline the whole strength of their magnificent cavalry, led by Ney inperson. To meet the assault, Wellington drew up his first line in along chequer of squares, five in the first line, four, covering theirintervals, in the second. In advance of them were the British guns,with their sadly reduced complement of gunners. Immediately behind thesquares were the British cavalry brigades; the Household Brigade,reduced by this time to a couple of squadrons; and behind them, inturn, the Dutch-Belgian infantry, who had fortitude enough not to runaway, but lacked daring sufficient to fill a place on the fire-scourgededge of actual battle. When the British front was supposed to besufficiently macadamised by the dreadful fire of the French batteries,Ney brought on his huge mass of cavalry, twenty-one squadrons ofcuirassiers, and nineteen squadrons of the Light Cavalry of the Guard.

At a slow trot they came down the French slope, crossed the valley,and, closing their ranks and quickening their stride, swept up to theBritish line, and broke, a swirling torrent of men and horses, over thecrest. Nothing could be more majestic, and apparently resistless, thantheir onset—the gleam of so many thousand helmets and breastplates,the acres of wind-blown horse-hair crests and many-coloured uniforms,the thunder of so many galloping hoofs. Wellington had ordered hisgunners, when the French cavalry reached their guns, to abandon themand run for shelter beneath the bayonets of the nearest square, and thebrave fellows stood by their pieces pouring grape and solid shot intothe glittering, swift-coming human target before them till the leadinghorses were almost within touch of the guns, when they ran and flungthemselves under the steady British bayonets for safety.

The French horsem*n, as they mounted the British slope, saw nothingbefore them but the ridge, empty of everything except a few abandonedguns. They were drunk with the rapture of victory, and squadron aftersquadron, as it reached the crest, broke into tempests of shouts and amad gallop. All the batteries were in their possession; they looked tosee an army in rout. Suddenly they beheld the double line of Britishsquares—or, rather, "oblongs"—with their fringe of steady steelpoints; and from end to end of the line ran the zigzag of fire—a firethat never slackened, still less intermitted. The torrent and tumultof the horsem*n never checked; but as they rode at the squares, theleading squadron—men and horses—smitten by the spray of lead, tumbleddead or dying to the ground. The following squadrons parted, sweptpast the flanks of the squares, scourged with deadly volleys, struggledthrough the intervals of the second line, emerged breathless and brokeninto the space beyond, to be instantly charged by the British cavalry,and driven back in wreck over the British slope. As the strugglingmass left the crest clear, the French guns broke in a tempest of shoton the squares, while the scattered French re-formed in the valley, andprepared for a second and yet more desperate assault.

Foiled in his first attack, Ney drew the whole of Kellerman'sdivision—thirty-seven squadrons, eleven of cuirassiers, six ofcarabineers, and the Bed Lancers of the Guard—into the whirlpool ofhis renewed assault, and this time the mass, though it came forwardmore slowly, was almost double in area. Gleaming with lance and swordand cuirass, it undulated as it crossed the broken slopes, till itseemed a sea, shining with 10,000 points of glancing steel, in motion.The British squares, on the reverse slope, as they obeyed the order,"Prepare to receive cavalry!" and fell grimly into formation, couldhear the thunder of the coming storm—the shrill cries of the officers,the deeper shouts of the men, the clash of scabbard on stirrup, thefierce tramp of the iron-shod hoofs. Squadron after squadron came overthe ridge, like successive human waves; then, like a sea broken loose,the flood of furious horsem*n inundated the whole slope on which thesquares were drawn up. But each square, a tiny, immovable island ofred, with its fringe of smoke and steel and darting flame, stooddoggedly resolute. No French leader, however daring, ventured to ridehome on the very bayonets. The flood of maddened men and horses swungsullenly back across the ridge, while the British gunners ran out andscourged them with grape as they rode down the slope.

From four o'clock to six o'clock this amazing scene was repeated. Noless than thirteen times, it was reckoned, the French horsem*n rodeover the ridge, and round the squares, and swept back wrecked andbaffled. In the later charges they came on at a trot, or even a walk,and they rode through the British batteries and round the squares, inthe words of the Duke of Wellington, "as if they owned them." So densewas the smoke that sometimes the British could not see their foesuntil, through the whirling blackness, a line of lances and crestedhelmets, or of tossing horse-heads, suddenly broke. Sometimes a singlehorseman would ride up to the very points of the British bayonets andstrike at them with his sword, or fire a pistol at an officer, in thehope of drawing the fire of the square prematurely, and thus giving hiscomrades a chance of breaking it. With such cool courage did theBritish squares endure the fiery rush of the French cavalry, that atlast the temper of the men grew almost scornful. They would growl out,"Here come these fools again," as a fresh sweep of horsem*n came on.Sometimes the French squadrons came on at a trot; sometimes their"charge" slackened down to a walk. Warlike enthusiasm had exhausteditself. "The English squares and the French squadrons," says LordAnglesey, "seemed almost, for a short time, hardly taking notice ofeach other."

In their later charges the French brought up some light batteries tothe crest of the British ridge, and opened fire at point-blank distanceon the solid squares. The front of the 1st Life Guards was broken by afire of this sort, and Gronow relates how the cuirassiers made a dashat the opening. Captain Adair leaped into the gap, and killed with oneblow of his sword a French officer who had actually entered the square!The British gunners always ran swiftly out when the French cavalryrecoiled down the slope, remanned their guns, and opened a murderousfire on the broken French. Noting this, an officer of cuirassiers drewup his horse by a British battery, and while his men drew off, stood onguard with his single sword, and kept the gunners from remanning ittill he was shot by a British infantryman. Directly the broken cavalrywas clear of the ridge, the French guns opened furiously on the Britishlines, and men dropped thick and fast. The cavalry charges, as amatter of fact, were welcomed as affording relief from the intolerableartillery fire.

For two hours 15,000 French horsem*n rode round the British squares,and again and again the ridge and rear slope of the British positionwas covered with lancers, cuirassiers, light and heavy dragoons, andhussars, with the British guns in their actual possession; and yet nota square was broken! A gaily dressed regiment of the Duke ofCumberland's (Hanoverian) Hussars watched the Homeric contest from theBritish rear, and Lord Uxbridge, as the British cavalry were completelyexhausted by their dashes at the French horsem*n as they broke throughthe chequer of the squares, rode up to them and called on them tofollow him in a charge. The colonel declined, explaining that his menowned their own horses, and could not expose them to any risk ofdamage! These remarkable warriors, in fact, moved in a body, and withmuch expedition, off the field, Seymour (Lord Uxbridge's aide) takingtheir colonel by the collar and shaking him as a dog shakes a rat, byway of expressing his view of the performance.

VI. THE FIGHT OF THE GUNNERS

"Three hundred cannon-mouths roar'd loud;
And from their throats with flash and cloud
Their showers of iron threw."
—SCOTT.

One of the most realistic pictures of the fight at this stage is givenby Captain Mercer, in command of a battery of horse artillery. Mercerwas on the extreme British right during the first stage of the battle,and only got occasional glimpses of the ridge where the fight wasraging—intermittent visions of French cavalry riding in furiouscharges, and abandoned British batteries with guns, muzzle in air,against the background of grey and whirling smoke. About threeo'clock, in the height of the cavalry struggle, Fraser, who was inchief command of the horse artillery, galloped down the reverse slopeto Mercer's battery, his face black with powder, his uniform torn, andbrought the troop at full gallop to the central ridge, explaining asthey rode the Duke's orders, that, when the French cavalry chargedhome, Mercer and his men should take refuge under the bayonets of thenearest square.

As they neared the crest at a gallop, Mercer describes the humming asof innumerable and gigantic gnats that filled the bullet-torn air. Hefound his position betwixt two squares of Brunswickers, in whose ranksthe French guns were making huge gaps, while the officers and sergeantswere busy literally pushing the men together. "The men," says Mercer,"were like wooden figures, semi-paralysed with the horrors of the fightabout them;" and to have attempted to run to them for shelter wouldcertainly have been the signal for the whole mass to dissolve. Throughthe smoke ahead, not a hundred yards distant, were the French squadronscoming on at a trot. The British guns were swung round, unlimbered,loaded with case-shot, and fire opened with breathless speed. Stillthe French came on; but as gun after gun came into action, their paceslowed down to a walk, till the front files could endure the terrificfire no longer. They turned round and tried to ride back. "I actuallysaw them," says Mercer, "using the pommels of their swords to fighttheir way out of the mêlée." Some, made desperate by findingthemselves penned up at the very muzzles of the British guns, dashedthrough their intervals, but without thinking of using their swords.Presently the mass broke and ebbed, a flood of shattered squadrons,down the slope. They rallied quickly, however, and their helmets couldbe seen over the curve of the slope as the officers dressed the lines.

The French tirailleurs, meanwhile, crept up within forty yards of thebattery, and were busy shooting down Mercer's gunners. Mercer, to keephis men steady, rode slowly to and fro in front of the muzzles of hisguns, the men standing with lighted port-fires. The tirailleurs,almost within pistol-shot, seized the opportunity to take pot-shots athim. He shook his glove, with the word "Scélérat," at one of them; thefellow grinned, and took a leisurely aim at Mercer, the muzzle of hisgun following him as he turned to and fro in his promenade before hisown pieces. The Frenchman fired, and the ball passed at the back ofMercer's neck into the forehead of the leading driver of one of hisguns.

But the cavalry was coming on again in solid squadrons, a column sodeep that when the leading files were within sixty yards of Mercer'sguns the rear of the great mass was still out of sight. The pace was adeliberate trot. "They moved in profound silence," says Mercer, andthe only sound that could be heard from them, amidst the incessant roarof battle, was the low, thunder-like reverberation of the groundbeneath the simultaneous tread of so many horses, through which ran ajangling ripple of sharp metallic sound, the ring of steel on steel.The British gunners, on their part, showed a stern coolness fully equalto the occasion. Every man stood steadily at his post, "the guns readyloaded with round-shot first, and a case over it; the tubes were in thevents, the port-fires glared and sputtered behind the wheels." Thecolumn was led on this time by an officer in a rich uniform, his breastcovered with decorations, whose earnest gesticulations were strangelycontrasted with the solemn demeanour of those to whom they wereaddressed. Mercer allowed the leading squadron to come within sixtyyards, then lifted his glove as the signal to fire. Nearly the wholeleading rank fell in an instant, while the round shot pierced thecolumn. The front, covered with struggling horses and men, wasimpassable. Some of the braver spirits did break their way through,only to fall, man and horse, at the very muzzles, of the guns. "Ourguns," says Mercer, "were served with astonishing activity, and men andhorses tumbled before them like nine-pins." Where the horse alone waskilled, the cuirassier could be seen stripping himself of his armourwith desperate haste to escape. The mass of the French for a momentstood still, then broke to pieces and fled. Again they came on, withexactly the same result. So dreadful was the carnage, that on the nextday, Mercer, looking back from the French ridge, could identify theposition held by his battery by the huge mound of slaughtered men andhorses lying in front of it. The French at last brought up a battery,which opened a flanking fire on Mercer's guns; he swung round two ofhis pieces to meet the attack, and the combat raged till, out of 200fine horses in Mercer's troop, 140 lay dead or dying, and two men outof every three were disabled.

Ney's thirteen cavalry charges on the British position weremagnificent, but they were a failure. They did not break a singlesquare, nor permanently disable a single gun. Both Wellington andNapoleon are accused of having flung away their cavalry; butWellington—or, rather, Uxbridge—by expending only 2000 sabres,wrecked, as we have seen, a French infantry corps, destroyed a batteryof 40 guns, and took 3000 prisoners. Ney practically used up 15,000magnificent horsem*n without a single appreciable result. Napoleon, atSt. Helena, put the blame of his wasted cavalry on Ney's hot-headedimpetuosity. The cavalry attack, he said, was made without his orders;Kellerman's division joined in the attack without even Ney's orders.But that Napoleon should watch for two hours his whole cavalry forcewrecking itself in thirteen successive and baffled assaults on theBritish squares, without his orders, is an utterly incrediblesupposition.

If two hours of cavalry assault, punctuated as with flame by the fireof 200 guns, did not destroy the stubborn British line, it cannot bedenied that it shook it terribly. The British ridge was strewn withthe dead and dying. Regiments had shrunk to companies, companies tomere files. "Our square," says Gronow, "presented a shocking sight.We were nearly suffocated by the smoke and smell from burnt cartridges.It was impossible to move a step without treading on a wounded or slaincomrade." "Where is your brigade?" Vivian asked of Lord EdwardSomerset, who commanded the Life Guards. "Here," said Lord Edward,pointing to two scanty squadrons, and a long line of wounded ormutilated horses. Before nightfall the two gallant brigades that madethe great cavalry charge of the morning had contracted to a singlesquadron of fifty files. Wellington sent an aide-de-camp to askGeneral Hackett, "What square of his that was which was so far inadvance?" It was a mass of killed and wounded men belonging to the30th and 73rd regiments that lay slain, yet in ranks, on the spot thesquare had occupied at one period of the fight, and from which it hadbeen withdrawn. Seen through the whirling smoke, this quadrangle ofcorpses looked like a square of living men. The destruction wrought bythe French guns on the British squares was, in brief, terrific. By asingle discharge of grape upon a German square, one of its sides wascompletely blown away, and the "square" transfigured into a triangle,with its base a line of slaughtered men. The effect produced bycannon-shot at short range on solid masses of men was sometimes veryextraordinary. Thus Croker tells how an officer received a severewound in the shoulder, apparently from a jagged ball. When the missilewas extracted, however, it turned out to be a huge human double-tooth.Its owner's head had been shattered by a cannon-ball, and the veryteeth transformed into a radiating spray of swift and deadly missiles.There were other cases of soldiers being wounded by coins drivensuddenly by the impact of shot from their original owners' pockets.The sustained fire of the French tirailleurs, too, wrought fatalmischief.

La Haye Sainte by this time had been captured. The brave men who heldit for so many hours carried rifles that needed a special cartridge,and supplies of it failed. When the French captured the farmhouse,they were able to push some guns and a strong infantry attack close upto the British left. This was held by the 27th, who had marched fromGhent at speed, reached Waterloo, exhausted, at nine A.M., on the veryday of the battle, slept amid the roar of the great fight till threeo'clock, and were then brought forward to strengthen the line above LaHaye Sainte. The 27th was drawn up in square, and the Frenchskirmishers opened a fire so close and fatal, that, literally, in thespace of a few minutes every second man was shot down!

VII. THE OLD GUARD

"On came the whirlwind—like the last,
But fiercest sweep of tempest blast—
On came the whirlwind—steel-gleams broke
Like lightning through the rolling smoke;
The war was waked anew."
—SCOTT.

Napoleon had expended in vain upon the stubborn British lines hisinfantry, his cavalry, and his artillery. There remained only theGuard! The long summer evening was drawing to a close, when, athalf-past seven, he marshalled these famous soldiers for the finalattack. It is a curious fact that the intelligence of the comingattack was brought to Wellington by a French cuirassier officer, whodeserted his colours just before it took place. The eight battalionsof the immortal Guard formed a body of magnificent soldiers, the tallstature of the men being heightened by their imposing bearskin caps.The prestige of a hundred victories played round their bayonets. Theirassault had never yet been resisted. Ney and Friant led them on.Napoleon himself, as the men marched past him to the assault, spokesome fiery words of exhortation to each company—the last words he everspoke to his Guard.

It is a matter of keen dispute whether the Guard attacked in twocolumns or in one. The truth seems to be that the eight battalionswere arranged in echelon, and really formed one mass, though in twoparallel columns of companies, with batteries of horse artillery oneither flank advancing with them. Nothing could well be more majestic,nothing more menacing, than the advance of this gallant force, and itseemed as if nothing on the British ridge, with its disabled guns andshot-torn battalions, could check such an assault. Wellington,however, quickly strengthened his centre by calling in Hill's divisionfrom the extreme right, while Vivian's Light Cavalry, surrendering theextreme left to the advancing Prussians, moved, in anticipation oforders, to the same point. Adams's brigade, too, was brought up to thethreatened point, with all available artillery. The exact point in theline which would be struck by the head of the Guard was barred by abattery of nine-pounders. The attack of the Guard was aided by ageneral infantry advance—-usually in the form of a dense mass ofskirmishers—against the whole British front, and so fierce was thisthat some Hanoverian and Nassau battalions were shaken by it intoalmost fatal rout. A thread of British cavalry, made up of the scantyremains of the Scots Greys and some of Vandeleur's Light Cavalry, alonekept the line from being pierced.

All interest, however, centred in the attack of the Guard. Steadily,on a slightly diagonal line, it moved up the British slope. The gunssmote it fiercely; but never shrinking or pausing, the great doublecolumn moved forward. It crossed the ridge. Nothing met the eyes ofthe astonished French except a wall of smoke, and the battery of horseartillery, at which the gunners were toiling madly, pouring case-shotinto the approaching column. One or two horsem*n, one of whom wasWellington himself, were dimly seen through the smoke behind the guns.The Duke denied that he used the famous phrase, "Up Guards, and at'em!" "What I may have said, and possibly did say," he told Croker,"was, 'Stand up, Guards!' and then gave the commanding officers theorder to attack."

An officer who took part in the fight has described the scene at thecritical moment when the French Old Guard appeared at the summit of theBritish ridge: "As the smoke cleared away, a most superb sight openedon us. A close column of the Guard, about seventies in front, and notless than six thousand strong, their drums sounding the pas decharge, the men shouting 'Vive l'Empereur!' were within sixty yards ofus." The sudden appearance of the long red line of the British FootGuards rising from the ground seems to have brought the French Guard toa momentary pause, and, as they hesitated, along the whole line of theBritish ran—and ran again, and yet again—the vivid flash of atremendous volley. The Guard tried to deploy; their officers leaped tothe front, and, with shouts and waving swords, tried to bring them on,the British line, meanwhile, keeping up "independent" firing. Maitlandand Lord Saltoun simultaneously shouted the order to "Charge!" Thebayonets of the British Guards fell to level, the men came forward at arun, the tramp of the charging line sounded louder and louder, the lineof shining points gleamed nearer and yet nearer—the bent andthreatening faces of the British came swiftly on. The nerve of theFrench seemed to fail; the huge battalion faltered, shrank in uponitself, and tumbled in ruin down the hill!

But this was only the leading battalion of the right segment of thegreat column, and the left was still moving steadily up. The BritishGuards, too, who had followed the broken battalion of the French downthe hill, were arrested by a cry of "Cavalry!" and fell back on theridge in confusion, though the men obeyed instantly the commands of theofficers. "Halt! Front! Re-form!" Meanwhile the left section of thehuge column was moving up, the men as steady as on parade, the loftybearskins of the Grenadiers, as they mounted the ridge, giving them agigantic aspect. The black, elongated shadows, as the last rays of thesetting sun smote the lines, ran threateningly before them. But thedevoted column was practically forcing itself up into a sort oftriangle of fire. Bolton's guns crossed its head, the Guards, thrownslightly forward, poured their swift volleys in waves of flame on itsright shoulder, the 52nd and 71st on its left scourged it with fire,beneath which the huge mass of the French Guard seemed sometimes topause and thrill as if in convulsion.

Then came the movement which assured victory to the British. Colborne,a soldier with a singular genius for war, not waiting for orders, madehis regiment, the 52nd, bring its right shoulder forward, the outercompany swinging round at the double, until his whole front wasparallel with the flank of the French Guard. Adams, the general incommand of the brigade, rode up and asked him what he was going to do.Colborne replied, "To make that column feel our fire," and, giving theword, his men poured into the unprotected flank of the unfortunateGuard a terrific volley. The 52nd, it should be noted, went intoaction with upwards of one thousand bayonets, being probably thestrongest battalion in the field. Colborne had "nursed" his regimentduring the fight. He formed them into smaller squares than usual, andkept them in shelter where possible, so that at this crisis theregiment was still a body of great fighting force, and its firing wasof deadly volume and power. Adams swiftly brought the 71st to sustainColborne's attack, the Guards on the other flank also moved forward,practically making a long obtuse angle of musketry fire, the two sidesof which were rapidly closing in on the head of the great French column.

The left company of the 52nd was almost muzzle to muzzle with theFrench column, and had to press back, while the right companies wereswinging round to bring the whole line parallel with the flank of theGuard; yet, though the answering fire of the Frenchmen was broken andirregular, so deadly was it—the lines almost touching eachother—that, in three minutes, from the left front of the 52nd onehundred and fifty men fell! When the right companies, however, hadcome up into line with the left, Colborne cried, "Charge! charge!" Themen answered with a deep-throated, menacing shout, and dashed at theenemy. Napoleon's far-famed Guard, the victors in a hundred fights,shrank, the mass swayed to and fro, the men in the centre commenced tofire in the air, and the whole great mass seemed to tumble, break intounits, and roll down the hill!

The 52nd and 71st came fiercely on, their officers leading. Somesquadrons of the 23rd Dragoons came at a gallop down the slope, andliterally smashed in upon the wrecked column. So wild was theconfusion, so dense the whirling smoke that shrouded the whole scene,that some companies of the 52nd fired into the Dragoons, mistaking themfor the enemy; and while Colborne was trying to halt his line to remedythe confusion, Wellington, who saw in this charge the sure pledge ofvictory, rode up and shouted, "Never mind! go on! go on!"

Gambier, then an officer of the 52nd, gives a graphic description ofhow that famous regiment fought at this stage:—

"A short time before, I had seen our colonel (Colborne), twenty yardsin front of the centre, suddenly disappear, while his horse, mortallywounded, sank under him. After one or two rounds from the guns, hecame striding down the front with, 'These guns will destroy theregiment.'—'Shall I drive them in, sir?'—'Do.'—'Right section, leftshoulders forward!' was the word at once. So close were we that theguns only fired their loaded charges, and limbering up, went hastily tothe rear. Reaching the spot on which they had stood, I was clear ofthe Imperial Guard's smoke, and saw three squares of the Old Guardwithin four hundred yards farther on. They were standing in a line ofcontiguous squares with very short intervals, a small body ofcuirassiers on their right, while the guns took post on their left.Convinced that the regiment, when it saw them, would come towards them,I continued my course, stopped with my section about two hundred yardsin front of the centre square, and sat down. They were standing inperfect order and steadiness, and I knew they would not disturb thatsteadiness to pick a quarrel with an insignificant section. Ialternately looked at them, at the regiment, and up the hill to myright (rear), to see who was coming to help us.

"A red regiment was coming along steadily from the British position,with its left directly upon me. It reached me some minutes before the52nd, of which the right came within twenty paces of me. ColonelColborne then called the covering sergeants to the front, and dressedthe line upon them. Up to this moment neither the guns, the squares ofthe Imperial Guard, nor the 52nd had fired a shot. I then saw one ortwo of the guns slewed round to the direction of my company and fired,but their grape went over our heads. We opened our fire and advanced;the squares replied to it, and then steadily facing about, retired.The cuirassiers advanced a few paces; our men ceased firing, and, boldin their four-deep formation, came down to a sort of elevated bayonetcharge; but the cuirassiers declined the contest, and turned. TheFrench proper right square brought up its right shoulders and crossedthe chaussée, and we crossed it after them. Twilight had manifestlycommenced, and objects were now bewildering. The first event ofinterest was, that getting among some French tumbrils, with the horsesattached, our colonel was seen upon one, shouting 'Cut me out!' Thenwe came upon the hollow road beyond La Belle Alliance, filled withartillery and broken infantry. Here was instantly a wild mêlée: theinfantry tried to escape as best they could, and at the same time turnand defend themselves; the artillery drivers turned their horses to theleft and tried to scramble up the bank of the road, but the horses wereimmediately shot down; a young subaltern of the battery threw his swordand himself on the ground in the act of surrender; his commander, whowore the cross of the Legion of Honour, stood in defiance among hisguns, and was bayoneted, and the subaltern, unwisely making a run forhis liberty, was shot in the attempt. The mêlée at this spot placedus amid such questionable companions, that no one at that moment couldbe sure whether a bayonet would be the next moment in his ribs or not."

It puts a sudden gleam of humour into the wild scene to read howColonel Sir Felton Harvey, who led a squadron of the 18th, when he sawthe Old Guard tumbling into ruins, evoked a burst of laughter from hisentire squadron by saying in a solemn voice, "Lord Wellington has wonthe battle," and then suddenly adding in a changed tone, "If we couldbut get the d——d fool to advance!" Wellington, as a matter of fact,had given the signal that launched his wasted and sorely triedbattalions in one final and victorious advance. Vivian's cavalry stillremained to the Duke—the 10th and 18th Hussars—and they, at thisstage, made a charge almost as decisive as that of the Household andUnion Brigades in the morning. The 10th crashed into some cuirassierswho were coming up to try and relieve the flank of the Guard, overthrewthem in a moment, and then plunged into the broken French Guard itself.These veterans were retreating, so to speak, individually, allformation wrecked, but each soldier was stalking fiercely along withfrowning brow and musket grasped, ready to charge any too audacioushorsem*n. Vivian himself relates how his orderly alone cut down fiveor six in swift succession who were trying to bayonet the Britishcavalry general. When Vivian had launched the 10th, he galloped backto the 18th, who had lost almost every officer. "My lads," he said,"you'll follow me"; to which the sergeant-major, a man named Jeffs,replied, "To h——, general, if you will lead us!" The wreck ofVandeleur's brigade, too, charged down the slope more to the left;batteries were carried, cavalry squadrons smashed, and infantrybattalions tumbled into ruin. Napoleon had an entire light cavalrybrigade still untouched; but this, too, was caught in the reflux of thebroken masses, and swept away. The wreck of the Old Guard and thespectacle of the general advance of the British—cavalry, artillery,and infantry—seemed to be the signal for the dissolution of the wholeFrench army.

Two squares of the French Guard yet kept their formation. Somesquadrons of the 10th Hussars, under Major Howard, rode fiercely atone. Howard himself rode home, and died literally on the Frenchbayonets; and his men rivalled his daring, and fought and died on twofaces of the square. But the Frenchmen kept their ranks, and theattack failed. The other square was broken. The popular traditionthat Cambronne, commanding a square of the Old Guard, on being summonedto surrender, answered, "La Garde meurt, et ne se rend pas," is purefable. As a matter of fact, Halkett, who commanded a brigade ofHanoverians, personally captured Cambronne. Halkett was heading somesquadrons of the 10th, and noted Cambronne trying to rally the Guard.In his own words, "I made a gallop for the general. When about cuttinghim down, he called out he would surrender, upon which he preceded meto the rear. But I had not gone many paces before my horse got shotthrough his body and fell to the ground. In a few seconds I got him onhis legs again, and found my friend Cambronne had taken French leave inthe direction from which he came. I instantly overtook him, laid holdof him by the aiguillette, and brought him back in safety, and gave himin charge of a sergeant of the Osnabruckers to deliver to the Duke."

Napoleon himself, from a spot of rising ground not far from La HayeSainte, had watched the advance of his Guard. His empire hung on itssuccess. It was the last fling of the dice for him. His cavalry waswrecked, his infantry demoralised, half his artillery dismounted; thePrussian guns were thundering with ever louder roar upon his right. Ifthe Guard succeeded, the electrifying thrill of victory would runthrough the army, and knit it into energy once more. But if the Guardfailed——!

VIII. THE GREAT DEFEAT.

"And while amid their scattered band
Raged the fierce riders' bloody brand,
Recoil'd in common rout and fear,
Lancer and Guard and Cuirassier,
Horsem*n and foot—a mingled host,
Their leaders fall'n, their standards lost."
—SCOTT.

Napoleon watched the huge black echelon of battalions mount the slope,their right section crumbled under the rush of the British Guards.Colborne and the 52nd tumbled the left flank into ruin; the Britishcavalry swept down upon them. Those who stood near Napoleon watchedhis face. It became pale as death. "Ils sont mêlés ensemble" ("theyare mingled together"), he muttered to himself. He cast one hurriedglance over the field, to right and left, and saw nothing but brokensquadrons, abandoned batteries, wrecked infantry battalions. "Tout estperdu," he said, "sauve qui peut," and, wheeling his horse, he turnedhis back upon his last battlefield. His star had set!

Napoleon's strategy throughout the brief campaign was magnificent; histactics—the detailed handling of his troops on the actualbattlefield—were wretched. "We were manoeuvred," says the disgustedMarbot, "like so many pumpkins." Napoleon was only forty-seven yearsold, but, as Wolseley says, "he was no longer the thin, sleek, activelittle man he had been at Rivoli. His now bloated face, large stomach,and fat and rounded legs bespoke a man unfitted for hard work onhorseback." His fatal delay in pursuing Blücher on the 17th, and hisequally fatal waste of time in attacking Wellington on the 18th, provedhow his quality as a general had decayed. It is a curious fact that,during the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon remained for hours motionlessat a table placed for him in the open air, often asleep, with his headresting on his arms. One reads with an odd sense of humour the answerwhich a dandy officer of the British Life Guards gave to the inquiry,"How he felt during the battle of Waterloo?" He replied that he hadfelt "awfully bored"! That anybody should feel "bored" in the vortexof such a drama is wonderful; but scarcely so wonderful as the factthat the general of one of the two contending hosts found it possibleto go to sleep during the crisis of the gigantic battle, on which hunghis crown and fate. Napoleon had lived too long for the world'shappiness or for his own fame.

The story here told is that of Waterloo on its British side. Noattempt is made to describe Blücher's magnificent loyalty in pushing,fresh from the defeat of Ligny, through the muddy cross-roads fromWavre, to join Wellington on the blood-stained field of Waterloo. Noaccount, again, is attempted of Grouchy's wanderings into space, with33,000 men and 96 guns, lazily attacking Thielmann's single corps atWavre, while Blücher, with three divisions, was marching at speed tofling himself on Napoleon's right flank at Waterloo. It is idle tospeculate on what would have happened to the British if the Prussianshad not made their movement on Napoleon's right flank. The assuredhelp of Blücher was the condition upon which Wellington made his standat Waterloo; it was as much part of his calculations as the fightingquality of his own infantry. A plain tale of British endurance andvalour is all that is offered here; and what a head of wood and heartof stone any man of Anglo-Saxon race must have who can read such a talewithout a thrill of generous emotion!

Waterloo was for the French not so much a defeat as a rout. Napoleon'sarmy simply ceased to exist. The number of its slain is unknown, forits records were destroyed. The killed and wounded in the British armyreached the tragical number of nearly 15,000. Probably not less thanbetween 30,000 and 40,000 slain or wounded human beings were scattered,the night following the battle, over the two or three square mileswhere the great fight had raged; and some of the wounded were lyingthere still, uncared for, four days afterwards. It is said that foryears afterwards, as one looked over the waving wheat-fields in thevalley betwixt Mont St. Jean and La Belle Alliance, huge irregularpatches, where the corn grew rankest and was of deepest tint, markedthe gigantic graves where, in the silence and reconciliation of death,slept Wellington's ruddy-faced infantry lads and the grizzled veteransof the Old Guard. The deep cross-country road which coveredWellington's front has practically disappeared; the Belgians have cutaway the banks to build up a huge pyramid, on the summit of which isperched a Belgian lion, with tail erect, grinning defiance towards theFrench frontier. A lion is not exactly the animal which bestrepresents the contribution the Belgian troops made to Waterloo.

But still the field keeps its main outlines. To the left liesPlanchenoit, where Wellington watched to see the white smoke of thePrussian guns; opposite is the gentle slope down which D'Erlon's troopsmarched to fling themselves on La Haye Sainte; and under thespectator's feet, a little to his left as he stands on the summit ofthe monument, is the ground over which Life Guards and Inniskillingsand Scots Greys galloped in the fury of their great charge. Right infront is the path along which came Milhaud's Cuirassiers andKellerman's Lancers, and Friant's Old Guard, in turn, to flingthemselves in vain on the obstinate squares and thin red line of theBritish. To the right is Hougoumont, the orchard walls still piercedwith loopholes made by the Guards. A fragment of brick, blackened withthe smoke of the great fight, is one of the treasures of the presentwriter. Victors and vanquished alike have passed away, and, since theOld Guard broke on the slopes of Mont St. Jean, British and French havenever met in the wrestle of battle. May they never meet again in thatfashion! But as long as nations preserve the memory of the great deedsof their history, as long as human courage and endurance can send athrill of admiration through generous hearts, as long as British bloodbeats in British veins, the story of the brave men who fought and diedat their country's bidding at Waterloo will be one of the greattraditions of the English-speaking race.

Of Wellington's part in the great fight it is difficult to speak interms which do not sound exaggerated. He showed all the highestqualities of generalship, swift vision, cool judgment, the sure insightthat forecasts each move on the part of his mighty antagonist, theunfailing resource that instantly devises the plan for meeting it.There is no need to dwell on Wellington's courage; the rawest Britishmilitia lad on the field shared that quality with him. But in thetemper of Wellington's courage there was a sort of ice-clear qualitythat was simply marvellous. He visited every square and battery inturn, and was at every point where the fight was most bloody. Everymember of his staff, without exception, was killed or wounded, while itis curious to reflect that not a member of Napoleon's staff was so muchas touched. But the roar of the battle, with its swift chances of lifeand death, left Wellington's intellect as cool, and his nerve assteady, as though he were watching a scene in a theatre. One of hisgenerals said to him when the fight seemed most desperate, "If youshould be struck, tell us what is your plan?" "My plan," said theDuke, "consists in dying here to the last man." He told at adinner-table, long after the battle, how, as he stood under thehistoric tree in the centre of his line, a Scotch sergeant came up,told him he had observed the tree was a mark for the French gunners,and begged him to move from it. Somebody at the table said, "I hopeyou did, sir?" "I really forget," said the Duke, "but I know I thoughtit very good advice at the time."

Only twice during the day did Wellington show any trace of rememberingwhat may be called his personal interest in the fight. Napoleon hadcalled him "a Sepoy general." "I will show him to-day," he said, justbefore the battle began, "how a Sepoy general can defend himself." Atnight, again, as he sat with a few of his surviving officers about himat supper, his face yet black with the smoke of the fight, herepeatedly leaned back in his chair, rubbing his hands convulsively,and exclaiming aloud, "Thank God! I have met him. Thank God! I havemet him." But Wellington's mood throughout the whole of the battle wasthat which befitted one of the greatest soldiers war has ever producedin the supreme hour of his country's fate. The Duke was amongst theleading files of the British line as they pushed the broken FrenchGuard down the slope, and some one begged him to remember what his lifewas worth, and go back. "The battle is won," said Wellington; "my lifedoesn't matter now." Dr. Hulme, too, has told how he woke the Dukeearly in the morning after the fight, his face grim, unwashed, andsmoke-blackened, and read the list of his principal officers—nameafter name—dead or dying, until the hot tears ran, like those of awoman, down the iron visage of the great soldier.

As Napoleon in the gathering darkness galloped off the field, with thewreck and tumult of his shattered army about him, there remained to hislife only those six ignoble years at St. Helena. But Wellington wasstill in his very prime. He was only forty-six years old, and thereawaited him thirty-seven years of honoured life, till, "to the noise ofthe mourning of a mighty nation," he was laid beside Nelson in thecrypt of St. Paul's, and Tennyson sang his requiem:—

"O good grey head, which all men knew,
O voice from which their omens all men drew,
O iron nerve, to true occasion true;
O fall'n at length that tower of strength
Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew."

THE NIGHT ATTACK OFF CADIZ

"'Captain,' they cry, 'the fight is done,
They bid you send your sword!'
And he answered, 'Grapple her stern and bow.
They have asked for the steel. They shall have it now;
Out cutlasses, and board!'"
—KIPLING.

On the morning of July 3, 1801, a curious scene, which might almost bedescribed as a sea comedy, was being transacted off the coast ofAlicante. Three huge French line-of-battle ships were manoeuvring andfiring round a tiny little British brig-of-war. It was like threemastiffs worrying a mouse. The brig was Lord Cochrane's famous littleSpeedy, a craft so tiny that its commander could carry its entirebroadside in his own pockets, and when he shaved himself in his cabin,had to put his head through the skylight and his shaving-box on thequarter-deck, in order to stand upright.

Cochrane was caught by Admiral Linois' squadron, consisting of twoships of eighty guns and one of seventy-four, on a lee shore, whereescape was impossible; but from four o'clock till nine o'clock Cochraneevaded all the efforts of his big pursuers to capture him. The Frenchships separated on different tacks, so as to keep the little Speedyconstantly under the fire of one or the other; and as the British brigturned and dashed at one opening of the moving triangle or the other,the great ships thundered their broadsides at her. Cochrane threw hisguns and stores overboard, and by the most ingenious seamanship evadedcapture for hours, surviving some scores of broadsides. He could tackfar more quickly than the gigantic ships that pursued him, and againand again the Speedy spun round on its heel and shot off on a newcourse, leaving its particular pursuer with sheet shivering, andnothing but space to fire into. Once, by a quick turn, he shot pastone of the 80-gun ships occupied in trying to tack, and got clear. TheDesaix, however, a seventy-four, was swiftly on the track of theSpeedy; its tall canvas under the growing breeze gave it anadvantage, and it ran down to within musket-shot of the Speedy, thenyawed, bringing its whole broadside to bear, intending to sink its tinyfoe with a single discharge. In yawing, however, the Desaix shot alittle too far, and the weight of her broadside only smote the water,but the scattered grape cut up the Speedy's rigging and canvas soterribly that nothing was left but surrender.

When Cochrane went on board his captor, its gallant captain refused totake his sword, saying he "could not accept the sword of an officer whohad struggled for so many hours against impossibility." Cochrane andhis gallant crew were summarily packed into the Frenchman's hold, andwhen the French in their turn were pursued by the Britishline-of-battle ships, as every broadside crashed on the hull of theship that held them captive, Cochrane and his men gave a round ofexultant cheers, until the exasperated Frenchmen threatened to shootthem unless they would hold their tongues—an announcement which onlymade the British sailors cheer a little louder. The fight betweenSaumarez and Linois ended with a tragedy; but it may be said to havebegun with a farce.

The presence of a French squadron in the Straits of Gibraltar at thisparticular moment may be explained in a few sentences. Napoleon hadwoven afresh the web of those naval "combinations" so often torn tofragments by British seamanship and daring. He had persuaded orbullied Spain into placing under the French flag a squadron of sixline-of-battle ships, including two leviathans of 112 guns each, lyingin the harbour of Cadiz. With haughty, it might almost be said withinsolent daring, a couple of British seventy-fours—sometimes, indeed,only one—patrolled the entrance to Cadiz, and blockaded a squadron often times their own force. Napoleon's plan was to draw a strong Frenchsquadron, under Admiral Linois, from Toulon, a second Spanish squadronfrom Ferrol, unite these with the ships lying in Cadiz, and thus form apowerful fleet of at least fifteen ships of the line, with a garnishingof frigates.

Once having got his fleet, Napoleon's imagination—which had a strongpredatory bias—hesitated betwixt two uses to which it could be turned.One was to make a dash on Lisbon, and require, under threat of aninstant bombardment, the delivery of all British ships and goods lyingthere. This ingenious plan, it was reckoned, would fill French pocketswith cash and adorn French brows with glory at one stroke. The amountof British booty at Lisbon was computed—somewhat airily—at200,000,000 pounds; its disappearance would send half the mercantilehouses of Great Britain into the insolvency court, and, to quote aFrench state paper on the subject, "our fleet, without being buffetedabout the sea, would return to Brest loaded with riches and coveredwith glory, and France would once more astonish Europe." Thealternative scheme was to transport some 32,000 new troops to Egypt andrestore French fortunes in that country.

Meanwhile Great Britain took energetic measures to wreck this newcombination. Sir James Saumarez, in the Caesar, of eighty guns, withsix seventy-fours, was despatched to keep guard over Cadiz; and he hadscarcely reached his station there when a boat, pulling furiously overfrom Gibraltar, reported that Admiral Linois' squadron had made itsappearance off the Rock, beating up westward. The sails of theCaesar were instantly swung round, a many-coloured flutter of buntingsummoned the rest of the squadron to follow, and Saumarez began hiseager chase of the French, bearing away for the Gut under a lightnorth-west wind. But the breeze died down, and the current swept thestraggling ships westward. All day they drifted helplessly, and thenight only brought a breath of air sufficient to fan them through theStraits.

Meanwhile Linois had taken refuge in the tiny curve of the Spanishcoast known as the roadstead of Algeciras. Linois was, perhaps, thebest French seaman of his day, having, it is true, very little Frenchdash, but endowed with a wealth of cool resolution, and a genius fordefensive warfare altogether admirable. Algeciras gave Linois exactlywhat he wanted, an almost unassailable position. The roadstead isopen, shallow, and plentifully besprinkled with rocks, while powerfulshore batteries covered the whole anchorage with their zone of fire.The French admiral anchored his ships at intervals of 500 yards fromeach other, and so that the lines of fire from the batteries north andsouth crossed in front of his ships. The French squadron carried some3000 troops, and these were at once landed, and, manning the batteries,raised them to a high degree of effectiveness. Some fourteen heavySpanish gunboats added enormously to the strength of the Frenchposition.

The French never doubted that Saumarez would instantly attack; theprecedents of the Nile and of Copenhagen were too recent to make anydoubt possible. And Saumarez did exactly what his enemies expected.Algeciras, in fact, is the battle of the Nile in miniature. ButSaumarez, though he had the swift daring of Nelson, lacked his warlikegenius. Nelson, in Aboukir Bay, leaped without an instant's pause onthe line of his enemy, but then he had his own ships perfectly in hand,and so made the leap effective. Saumarez sent his ships into the fightheadlong, and without the least regard to mutual support. At 7.50 onthe morning of July 6, an uncertain gust of air carried the leadingBritish ship, the Pompée, round Cabrita; Hood, in the Venerable,lay becalmed in the offing; the flagship, with the rest of thesquadron, were mere pyramids of idle canvas on the rim of the horizon.

The Pompée drifted down the whole French line, scorched with the fireof batteries and of gunboats, as well as by the broadsides of the greatFrench ships, and at 8.45 dropped her anchor so close to theFormidable—a ship much bigger than itself—that the Frenchman's buoylay outside her. Then, deliberately clewing up her sails and tauteningher springs, the Pompée opened a fire on her big antagonist sofierce, sustained, and deadly, that the latter found it intolerable,and began to warp closer to the shore. The Audacious and Venerablecame slowly up into their assigned positions, and here was a spectacleof three British ships fighting four French ships and fourteen Spanishgunboats, with heavy shore batteries manned by 3000 troops thrown intothe scale! At this stage, too, the Pompée's springs gave way, orwere shot away, the current swung her round till she lay head on to thebroadside of her huge antagonist, while the batteries smote her with adeadly cross-fire. A little after ten o'clock the Caesar droppedanchor three cables' lengths from the Indomptable, and opened a firewhich the French themselves described as "tremendous" upon herantagonist.

Linois found the British fire too destructive, and signalled his shipsto cut or slip their cables, calculating that a faint air from the sea,which was beginning to blow, would drift them closer under the shelterof the batteries. Saumarez, too, noticed that his topsails werebeginning to swell, and he instantly slipped his cable and endeavouredto close with the Indomptable, signalling his ships to do the same.The British cables rattled hoarsely through their hawse-holes along thewhole line, and the ships were adrift; but the breeze almost instantlydied away, and on the strong coast current the British ships floatedhelplessly, while the fire from the great shore batteries, and from thesteady French decks, now anchored afresh, smote them heavily in turn.The Pompée lay for an hour under a concentrated fire without beingable to bring a gun to bear in return, and then summoned by signal theboats of the squadron to tow her off.

Saumarez, meanwhile, had ordered the Hannibal, under Captain Ferris,to round the head of the French line and "rake the admiral's ship."Ferris, by fine seamanship, partly sailed and partly drifted into thepost assigned to him, and then grounded hopelessly, under a plungingfire from the shore batteries, within hail of the Frenchman, itselfalso aground. A fire so dreadful soon reduced the unfortunateHannibal to a state of wreck. Boats from the Caesar and theVenerable came to her help, but Ferris sent them back again. Theycould not help him, and should not share his fate. Saumarez, as a lastresource, prepared for a boat attack on the batteries, but in the wholesquadron there were not enough uninjured boats to carry the marines.The British flagship itself was by this time well-nigh a wreck, and wasdrifting on the reefs. A flaw of wind from the shore gave the shipssteerage-way, and Saumarez drew off, leaving the Hannibal to its fate.

Ferris fought till his masts were gone, his guns dismounted, hisbulwarks riddled, his decks pierced, and one-third of his crew killedor wounded. Then he ordered the survivors to the lower decks, andstill kept his flag flying for half-an-hour after the shot-torn sailsof the shattered British ships had disappeared round Cabrita. Then hestruck. Here was a French triumph, indeed! A British squadron beatenoff, a British seventy-four captured! It is said that when the newsreached Paris the city went half-mad with exultation. Napoleon readthe despatch to his ministers with eyes that danced, and almost wept,with mere gladness!

The British squadron—officers and men in such a mood as may beimagined—put into Gibraltar to refit; the Caesar, with her mainmastshot through in five places, her boats destroyed, her hull pierced;while of the sorely battered Pompée it is recorded that she had "nota mast, yard-spar, shroud, rope, or sail" which was not damaged byhostile shot. Linois, meanwhile, got his grounded ships and hissolitary prize afloat, and summoned the Cadiz squadron to join him. Onthe 9th these ships—six sail of the line, two of them giants of 112guns each, with three frigates—went triumphantly, with widespreadcanvas and many-coloured bunting, past Gibraltar, where the shatteredBritish squadron was lying, and cast anchor beside Admiral Linois inAlgeciras Bay.

The British were labouring, meanwhile, with fierce energy, to refittheir damaged ships under shelter of the guns of Gibraltar. ThePompée was practically destroyed, and her crew were distributedamongst the other ships. Saumarez himself regarded the condition ofhis flagship as hopeless, but his captain, Brenton, begged permissionto at least attempt to refit her. He summoned his crew aft, and toldthe men the admiral proposed to leave the ship behind, and asked them"what they thought about it." The men gave a wrathful roar,punctuated, it is to be feared, with many sea-going expletives, andshouted, "All hands to work day and night till she's ready!" The wholecrew, down to the very powder-boys, actually worked while daylightlasted, kept it up, watch and watch, through the night, and did thisfrom the evening of the 6th to the noon of the 12th! Probably no shipthat ever floated was refitted in shorter time. In that brief period,to quote the "Naval Register," she "shifted her mainmast; fished andsecured her foremast, shot through in several places; knotted andspliced the rigging, which had been cut to pieces, and bent new sails;plugged the shot-holes between wind and water; completed with stores ofall kinds, anchors and cables, powder and shot, and provisions for fourmonths."

On Sunday, July 12, 1801, the French and Spanish ships in Algeciras Bayweighed anchor, formed their line of battle as they came out, offCabrita Point, and, stately and slow, with the two 112-gun Spaniards asa rearguard, bore up for Cadiz. An hour later the British ships warpedout of the mole in pursuit. It was an amazing sight: a squadron offive sail of the line, which had been completely disabled in an actiononly five days before, was starting, fresh and refitted, in pursuit ofa fleet double its own number, and more than double its strength! AllGibraltar crowded to watch the ships as, one by one, they cleared thepier-head. The garrison band blew itself hoarse playing "Britons,strike home," while the Caesar's band answered in strains as shrillwith "Come, cheer up, my lads, 'tis for glory we steer." Both tunes,it may be added, were simply submerged beneath the cheers which rang upfrom mole-head and batteries and dock-walls. Just as the Caesardrifted, huge and stately, past the pier-head, a boat came eagerlypulling up to her. It was crowded with jack-tars, with bandaged headsand swathed arms. A cluster of the Pompée's wounded, who escapedfrom the hospital, bribed a boatman to pull them out to the flagship,and clamoured to be taken on board!

Saumarez had strengthened his squadron by the addition of the Superb,with the Thames frigate, and at twenty minutes to nine P.M., vainlysearching the black horizon for the lights of the enemy, he hailed theSuperb, and ordered its captain, Keats, to clap on all sail andattack the enemy directly he overtook them. Saumarez, in a word,launched a single seventy-four against a fleet! Keats was a daringsailor; his ship was, perhaps, the fastest British seventy-four afloat,and his men were instantly aloft spreading every inch of canvas. Then,like a huge ghost, the Superb glided ahead and vanished in thedarkness. The wind freshened; the blackness deepened; the lights ofthe British squadron died out astern. But a wide sprinkle of lightsahead became visible; it was the Spanish fleet! Eagerly the daringSuperb pressed on, with slanting decks and men at quarters, but withlights hidden. At midnight the rear ships of the Spanish squadron wereunder the larboard bow of the Superb—two stupendous three-deckers,with lights gleaming through a hundred port-holes—while a Frenchtwo-decker to larboard of both the Spanish giants completed the line.

Keats, unseen and unsuspected, edged down with his solitaryseventy-four, her heaviest guns only 18-pounders, on the quarter of thenearest three-decker. He was about to fling himself, in the gloom ofthe night, on three great ships, with an average of 100 guns each! Wasever a more daring feat attempted? Silently through the darkness theSuperb crept, her canvas glimmering ghostly white, till she waswithin some 300 yards of the nearest Spaniard. Then out of thedarkness to windward there broke on the astonished and drowsy Spaniardsa tempest of flame, a whirlwind of shot. Thrice the Superb pouredher broadside into the huge and staggering bulk of her antagonist.With the second broadside the Spaniard's topmast came tumbling down;with the third, so close was the flame of the Superb's guns, theSpanish sails—dry as touch-wood with lying for so many months in thesunshine of Cadiz—took fire.

Meanwhile a dramatic incident occurred. The two great Spaniardscommenced to thunder their heavy broadsides into each other! Many ofthe Superb's shots had struck the second and more distant three-decker.Cochrane, indeed, says that the Superb passed actually betwixt thetwo gigantic Spaniards, fired a broadside, larboard and starboard, intoboth, and then glided on and vanished in the darkness. It is certainthat the San Hermenegildo, finding her decks torn by a hurricane ofshot, commenced to fire furiously through the smoke and the night atthe nearest lights. They were the lights of her own consort! She, inturn, fired at the flash of the guns tormenting her. So, under theblack midnight skies, the two great Spanish ships thundered at eachother, flame answering flame. They drifted ever closer. The fire ofthe Real Carlos kindled the sails of the sister ship; the flamesleaped and danced to the very mast-heads; and, still engaged in a fierywrestle, they blew up in succession, and out of their united crews of2000 men only a little over 200 were picked up!

The Superb, meanwhile, had glided ahead, leaving the three-deckers todestroy each other, and opened fire at pistol-shot distance on theFrench two-decker, and in thirty minutes compelled her to strike. Inless than two hours of a night action, that is, this single Englishseventy-four had destroyed two Spanish three-deckers of 112 guns each,and captured a fine French battle-ship of 74 guns!

The British ships by this time were coming up in the rear, with everyinch of canvas spread. They swept past the amazing spectacle of thetwo great Spaniards destroying each other, and pressed on in chase ofthe enemy. The wind rose to a gale. In the grey dawn the Caesarfound herself, with all her sister ships, far astern, except theVenerable, under Hood, which was hanging on the quarter of therearmost French ship, the Formidable, a magnificent ship of 80 guns,with a gallant commander, and carrying quite too heavy metal for Hood.Hood, however, the most daring of men, exchanged broadsides atpistol-shot distance with his big antagonist, till his ship wasdismasted, and was drifted by the current on the rocky shoals off SanPedro. The Caesar came up in time to enable its disgusted crew tosee ship after ship of the flying enemy disappear safely within thesheltering batteries of Cadiz.

TRAFALGAR

I. THE STRATEGY

"Uprose the soul of him a star
On that brave day of Ocean days;
It rolled the smoke from Trafalgar
To darken Austerlitz ablaze.
Are we the men of old, its light
Will point us under every sky
The path he took; and must we fight,
Our Nelson be our battle-cry!

He leads: we hear our Seaman's call
In the roll of battles won;
For he is Britain's Admiral
Till setting of her sun."
—GEORGE MEREDITH.

That Trafalgar was a great British victory, won by splendid seamanshipand by magnificent courage, everybody knows. On October 21, 1805,Nelson, with twenty-seven line-of-battle ships, attacked Villeneuve, incommand of a combined fleet of thirty-three line-of-battle ships. Thefirst British gun was fired at 12.10 o'clock; at 5 o'clock the battlewas over; and within those five hours the combined fleets of France andSpain were simply destroyed. No fewer than eighteen ships of the linewere captured, burnt, or sunk; the rest were in flight, and hadpractically ceased to exist as a fighting force. But what very fewpeople realise is that Trafalgar is only the last incident in a greatstrategic conflict—a warfare of brains rather than of bullets—whichfor nearly three years raged round a single point. For that longperiod the warlike genius of Napoleon was pitted in strategy againstthe skill and foresight of a cluster of British sailors; and thesailors won. They beat Napoleon at his own weapons. The French werenot merely out-fought in the shock of battling fleets, they wereout-generalled in the conflict of plotting and warlike brains whichpreceded the actual fight off Cape Trafalgar.

The strategy which preceded Trafalgar represents Napoleon's solitaryattempt to plan a great campaign on the tossing floor of the sea. "Ithas an interest wholly unique," says Mahan, "as the only great navalcampaign ever planned by this foremost captain of modern times." Andit is a very marvellous fact that a cluster of British sailors—Jervisand Barham (a salt eighty years old) at the Admiralty, Cornwallis atBrest, Collingwood at Cadiz, and Nelson at Toulon—guessed allNapoleon's profound and carefully hidden strategy, and met it by evensubtler plans and swifter resolves than those of Napoleon himself. Thefive hours of gallant fighting off Cape Trafalgar fill us with exultantpride. But the intellectual duel which preceded the shock of actualbattle, and which lasted for nearly three years, is, in a sense, a yetmore splendid story. Great Britain may well honour her naval leadersof that day for their cool and profound strategy, as much as for theunyielding courage with which such a blockade as, say, that of Brest byCornwallis was maintained for years, or such splendid daring as thatwhich Collingwood showed when, in the Royal Sovereign, he brokeVilleneuve's line at Trafalgar.

When in 1803 the war which brought to an end the brief peace of Amiensbroke out, Napoleon framed a great and daring plan for the invasion ofEngland. French plans for the invasion of England were somewhatnumerous a century or so ago. The Committee of Public Safety in 1794,while keeping the guillotine busy in the Place de la Révolution, hadits own little plan for extending the Reign of Terror, by means of aninvasion, to England; and on May 27 of that year solemnly appointed oneof their number to represent the Committee in England "when it wasconquered." The member chosen was citizen Bon Saint André, the samehero who, in the battle of the 1st of June, fled in terror to therefuge of the French flagship's co*ck-pit when the Queen Charlotte,with her triple lines of guns, came too alarmingly near. ButNapoleon's plans for the same object in 1803 were definite, formidable,profound. Great Britain was the one barrier in the path of hisambition. "Buonaparte," says Green, in his "Short History of theEnglish People," "was resolute to be master of the western world, andno notions of popular freedom or sense of popular right ever interferedwith his resolve.… England was now the one country where freedomin any sense remained alive.… With the fall of England, despotismwould have been universal throughout Europe; and it was at England thatBuonaparte resolved to strike the first blow in his career of conquest.Fifteen millions of people, he argued, must give way to forty millions."

So he formed the vast camp at Boulogne, in which were gathered 130,000veterans. A great flotilla of boats was built, each boat being armedwith one or two guns, and capable of carrying 100 soldiers. More than1000 of such boats were built, and concentrated along twenty miles ofthe Channel coast, and at four different ports. A new port was dug atBoulogne, to give shelter to the main division of this flotilla, andgreat and powerful batteries erected for its protection. The Frenchsoldiers were exercised in embarking and disembarking till the wholeprocess could be counted by minutes. "Let us," said Napoleon, "bemasters of the Straits for six hours, and we shall be masters of theworld."

When since the days of William the Conqueror were the shores of GreatBritain menaced by such a peril? "There is no difficulty," saidMoltke, "in getting an army into England; the trouble would be to getit out again." And, no doubt, Englishmen, fighting on their own soiland for their own hearths, would have given an invader a very roughtime of it. But let it be remembered that Napoleon was a militarygenius of the first order, and that the 130,000 soldiers waiting on theheights above Boulogne to leap on British soil were, to quote Mahan,"the most brilliant soldiery of all time." They were the men whoafterwards won Austerlitz, who struck down Prussia with a single blowat Jena, who marched as victors through the streets of Vienna and ofBerlin, and fought their way to Moscow. Imagine such an army, withsuch a leader, landed on the green fields of Kent! In that case theremight have been an English Austerlitz or Friedland. London might haveshared the fate of Moscow. If Napoleon had succeeded, the fate of theworld would have been changed, and Toronto and Cape Town, Melbourne andSydney and Auckland might have been ruled by French prefects.

Napoleon himself was confident of success. He would reach London, hecalculated, within four days of landing, and then he would have issueddecrees abolishing the House of Lords, proclaiming a redistribution ofproperty, and declaring England a republic. "You would never haveburned your capital," he said to O'Meara at St. Helena; "you are toorich and fond of money." The London mob, he believed, would havejoined him, for, as he cynically argued, "the canaille of all nationsare nearly alike."

Even Napoleon would probably have failed, however, in subduing GreatBritain, and would have remained a prisoner where he came intending tobe a conqueror. As he himself said when a prisoner on his way to St.Helena, "I entered into no calculation as to the manner in which I wasto return"! But in the battles which must have been fought, how manyEnglish cities would have perished in flames, how many English riverswould have run red with the blood of slain men! "At Waterloo," saysAlison, "England fought for victory; at Trafalgar for existence."

But "the streak of silver sea" guarded England, and for more than twoyears Napoleon framed subtle plans and organised vast combinationswhich might give him that brief six hours' command of the Strait whichwas all he needed, as he thought, to make himself the master of theworld. The flotilla could not so much as get out of the ports, inwhich the acres of boats lay, in a single tide, and one half of thearmy of invasion must lie tossing—and, it may be suspected, dreadfullysea-sick—for hours outside these ports, waiting for the other half toget afloat. Then there remained forty miles of sea to cross. And whatwould happen if, say, Nelson and Collingwood, with a dozen 74-gunships, got at work amongst the flotilla? It would be a combat betweenwolves and sheep. It was Nelson's chief aspiration to have theopportunity of "trying Napoleon on a wind," and the attempt to crossthe Straits might have given him that chance. All Napoleon's resourcesand genius were therefore strained to give him for the briefestpossible time the command of the Channel; and the skill and energy ofthe British navy were taxed to the utmost to prevent that consummation.

Now, France, as a matter of fact, had a great fleet, but it wasscattered, and lying imprisoned, in fragments, in widely separatedports. There were twelve ships of the line in Toulon, twenty in Brest,five in Rochefort, yet other five in Ferrol; and the problem forNapoleon was, somehow, to set these imprisoned squadrons free, andassemble them for twenty-four hours off Boulogne. The British policy,on the other hand, was to maintain a sleepless blockade of these ports,and keep the French fleet sealed up in scattered and helplessfragments. The battle for the Straits of Dover, the British navalchiefs held, must be fought off Brest and Ferrol and Toulon; and neverin the history of the world were blockades so vigilant, and stern, andsleepless maintained.

Nelson spent two years battling with the fierce north-westers of theGulf of Lyons, keeping watch over a great French squadron in Toulon,and from May 1803 to August 1805 left his ship only three times, andfor less than an hour on each occasion. The watch kept by Cornwallisoff Brest, through summer and winter, for nearly three years, Mahandeclares, has never, for constancy and vigilance, been excelled,perhaps never equalled, in the history of blockades. The hardship ofthese long sea-watches was terrible. It was waging an fight withweariness and brain-paralysing monotony, with cold and scurvy andtempest, as well as with human foes. Collingwood was once twenty-twomonths at sea without dropping anchor. In seventeen years of seaservice—between 1793 and 1810—he was only twelve months in England.

The wonder is that the seamen of that day did not grow web-footed, orforget what solid ground felt like! Collingwood tells his wife in oneletter that he had "not seen a green leaf on a tree" for fourteenmonths! By way of compensation, these long and stern blockadesdeveloped such a race of seamen as perhaps the world has never seenbefore or since; exhaustless of resource, hardy, tireless, familiarwith every turn of sea life, of iron frame and an iron courage whichneither tempest nor battle could shake. Great Britain, as a matter offact, won her naval battles, not because she had better ships orheavier guns than her enemies, but only because she trained a finerrace of seamen. Says Brenton, himself a gallant sailor of the period,"I have seen Spanish line-of-battle ships twenty-four hours unmooring;as many minutes are sufficient for a well-manned British ship toperform the same operation. When, on any grand ceremony, they found itnecessary to cross their top-gallant yards in harbour, they began theday before; we cross ours in one minute from the deck."

But it was these iron blockades that in the long-run thwarted the plansof Napoleon and changed the fate of the world. Cornwallis off Brest,Collingwood off Rochefort, Pellew off Ferrol, Nelson before Toulon,fighting the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay and the fiercenorth-westers of the Gulf of Lyons, in what Mahan calls "thattremendous and sustained vigilance which reached its utmost tension inthe years preceding Trafalgar," really saved England. "Thosefar-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army neverlooked," says Mahan, "stood between it and the dominion of the world."

An intellect so subtle and combative as Napoleon's was, of course,strained to the utmost to break or cheat the British blockades, and thestory of the one crafty ruse after another which he employed to beguilethe British leaders is very remarkable. Even more remarkable, perhaps,is the manner in which these plain-minded, business-like Britishseamen, for whose mental powers Napoleon cherished the deepestcontempt, fathomed his plans and shattered his combinations.

Napoleon's first plot was decidedly clever. He gathered in Brest20,000 troops, ostensibly for a descent upon Ireland. This, hecalculated, would preoccupy Cornwallis, and prevent him moving. TheToulon fleet was to run out with the first north-west wind, and, aslong as a British look-out ship was in sight, would steer east, asthough making for Egypt; but when beyond sight of British eyes thefleet was to swing round, run through the Straits, be joined off Cadizby the Rochefort squadron, and sweep, a great fleet of at least sixteensail of the line, past the Scilly Islands to Boulogne. Napoleoncalculated that Nelson would be racing in the direction of Egypt,Cornwallis would be redoubling his vigilance before Brest, at the exactmoment the great Boulogne flotilla was carrying its 130,000 invadingFrenchmen to Dover! Napoleon put the one French admiral as to whoseresolve and daring he was sure—Latouche Treville—in command of theToulon fleet; but before the moment for action came Treville died, andNapoleon had to fall back upon a weaker man, Villeneuve.

He changed his plans to suit the qualities of his new admiral—theToulon and Rochefort squadrons were to break out, sail separately to arendezvous in the West Indies, and, once joined, spread havoc throughthe British possessions there. "I think," wrote Napoleon, "that thesailing of these twenty ships of the line will oblige the English todespatch over thirty in pursuit." So the blockades everywhere would beweakened, and the Toulon and Rochefort squadrons, doubling back toEurope, were to raise the blockade off Ferrol and Brest, and the Brestsquadron was to land 18,000 troops, under Augereau, in Ireland, whilethe Grand Army of Boulogne was to cross the Straits, with Napoleon atit* head. Thus Great Britain and Ireland would be invadedsimultaneously.

The trouble was to set the scheme going by the release of the Toulonand Rochefort squadrons. Nelson's correspondence shows that he guessedNapoleon's strategy. If the Toulon fleet broke loose, he wrote, he wassure its course would be held for the Atlantic, and thither he wouldfollow it. In the meanwhile he kept guard so steadfastly that thegreat French strategy could not get itself started. In December 1804war broke out betwixt Britain and Spain, and this gave Napoleon a newally and a new fleet. Napoleon found he had nearly sixtyline-of-battle ships, French or Spanish, to weave into hiscombinations, and he framed—to use Mahan's words—"upon lines equal,both in boldness and scope, to those of the Marengo and Austerlitzcampaigns, the immense strategy which resulted in Trafalgar." TheToulon and Rochefort squadrons, as before, were to break outseparately, rendezvous in the West Indies, return by a different routeto European waters, pick up the French and Spanish ships in Ferrol, andthen sweep through the narrow seas.

The Rochefort squadron duly escaped; Villeneuve, too, in command of theToulon squadron, aided by the weather, evaded Nelson's watchfulness anddisappeared towards the east. Nelson, however, suspected the realplan, and with fine insight took up a position which must haveintercepted Villeneuve; but that admiral found the weather too roughfor his ships, and ran back into Toulon. "These gentlemen," saidNelson, "are not accustomed to a Gulf of Lyons gale. We have facedthem for twenty-one months, and not lost a spar!" The Rochefortsquadron was, of course, left by its own success wandering in space, amere cluster of sea-vagrants.

By March 1805, Napoleon had a new combination prepared. In the portsbetween Brest and Toulon were scattered no less than sixty-seven Frenchor Spanish ships of the line. Ganteaume, with his squadron, was tobreak out from Brest; Villeneuve, with his, from Toulon; both fleetswere to rendezvous at Martinique, return by an unusual route, andappear off Boulogne, a great fleet of thirty-five French ships of theline.

About the end of June the Toulon fleet got safely out—Nelson being,for once, badly served by his frigates—picked up additional ships offCadiz, and disappeared on its route to the West Indies. Nelson, misledby false intelligence, first went eastward, then had to claw backthrough the Straits of Gibraltar in the teeth of strong westerly gales,and plunged over the horizon in fierce pursuit of Villeneuve. But thewatch kept by Cornwallis over Ganteaume in Brest was so close and sternthat escape was impossible, and one-half of Napoleon's combinationbroke down. Napoleon despatched swift ships on Villeneuve's track,summoning him back to Ferrol, where he would find a squadron of fifteenFrench and Spanish ships ready to join him. Villeneuve, Napoleonbelieved, had thoroughly deceived Nelson. "Those boasted English," hewrote, "who claim to know of everything, know nothing of it," i.e. ofVilleneuve's escape and course. But the "boasted English," as a matterof fact, did know all about it, and in place of weakening their forcesin the Bay of Biscay, strengthened them. Meanwhile Nelson, with tenships of the line, was hard on the track of Villeneuve with eighteen.At Barbadoes, Nelson was sent a hundred miles out of his course byfalse intelligence, and that hundred miles just enabled Villeneuve todouble back towards Europe.

Nelson divined this plan, and followed him with the fiercest energy,sending off, meanwhile, his fastest brig to warn the Admiralty.Villeneuve, if he picked up the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons, wouldarrive off Brest with forty line-of-battle ships; if he raised theblockade, and added Ganteaume's squadron to his own, he might appearoff Boulogne with sixty great ships! Napoleon calculated on Britishblunders to aid him. "We have not to do with a far-sighted, but with avery proud Government," he wrote. The blunder Napoleon hoped theBritish Admiralty would make was that of weakening the blockadingsquadrons in order to pursue Villeneuve's fleet, and thus release theimprisoned French squadrons, making a great concentration possible.

But this was exactly the blunder into which the Admiralty refused to betempted. When the news that Villeneuve was on his way back to Europereached the Admiralty, the First Lord, Barham, an old sailor, eightyyears of age, without waiting to dress himself, dictated orders which,without weakening the blockades at any vital point, planted a fleet,under Sir Robert Calder, west of Finisterre, and right in Villeneuve'strack; and if Calder had been Nelson, Trafalgar might have been foughton July 22, instead of October 21. Calder fought, and captured two ofVilleneuve's ships, but failed to prevent the junction of Villeneuve'sfleet with the squadron in Ferrol, and was court-martialled for hisfailure—victory though he called it. But this partial failure doesnot make less splendid the promptitude shown by the British Admiralty."The English Admiralty," Napoleon reasoned, "could not decide themovements of its squadron in twenty-four hours." As a matter of fact,Barham decided the British strategy in almost as many minutes!

Meanwhile Nelson had reached the scene; and, like his ship, worn outwith labours, sailed for Portsmouth, for what proved his last visit toEngland. On August 13, Villeneuve sailed from Ferrol with twenty-nineships. He had his choice between Brest, where Cornwallis was keepingguard, with Boulogne beyond, and where Napoleon was watching eagerlyfor the white topsails of his fleet; or Cadiz, where Collingwood with atiny squadron held the Spanish fleet strictly bottled up.

Villeneuve's true course was Boulogne, but Cornwallis lay in his pathwith over thirty sail of the line, and Villeneuve's nerve failed him.On August 21 he swung round and bore up for Cadiz; and with the turn ofthe helm which swung Villeneuve's ship away from Boulogne, Napoleon'slast chance of invading England vanished. Villeneuve pushedCollingwood's tiny squadron aside and entered Cadiz, where the combinedfleet now numbered nearly forty ships of the line, and Collingwood,with delightful coolness, solemnly resumed his blockade—four ships,that is, blockading forty! Napoleon gave way to a tempest of rage whenhis fleet failed to appear off Boulogne, and he realised that theBritish sailors he despised had finally thwarted his strategy. AFrench writer has told how Daru, his secretary, found him walking upand down his cabinet with agitated steps. With a voice that shook, andin half-strangled exclamations, he cried, "What a navy! Whatsacrifices for nothing! What an admiral! All hope is gone! ThatVilleneuve, instead of entering the Channel, has taken refuge inFerrol. It is all over. He will be blockaded there." Then with thatswift and terrible power of decision in which he has never beensurpassed, he flung the long-cherished plan of invading England out ofhis brain, and dictated the orders which launched his troops on theroad which led to Austerlitz and Jena, and, beyond, to the flames ofMoscow and the snows of the great retreat, and which finally ledNapoleon himself to St. Helena. Villeneuve's great fleet meanwhile layidle in Cadiz, till, on October 20, the ill-fated French admiral ledhis ships out to meet Nelson in his last great sea-fight.

II. HOW THE FLEETS MET

"Wherever the gleams of an English fire
On an English roof-tree shine,
Wherever the fire of a youth's desire
Is laid upon Honour's shrine,
Wherever brave deeds are treasured and told,
In the tale of the deeds of yore,
Like jewels of price in a chain of gold
Are the name and the fame he bore.

Wherever the track of our English ships
Lies white on the ocean foam,
His name is sweet to our English lips
As the names of the flowers at home;
Wherever the heart of an English boy
Grows big with a deed of worth,
Such names as his name have begot the same,
Such hearts will bring it to birth."
—E. NESBIT.

It was the night of October 20, 1805, a night moonless and black. In thenarrow waters at the western throat of the Straits of Gibraltar, atregular intervals of three minutes through the whole night, the deepvoice of a gun broke out and swept, a pulse of dying sound, almost toeither coast, while at every half-hour a rocket soared aloft and broke ina curve of stars in the black sky. It was one of Nelson's repeatingfrigates signalling to the British fleet, far off to the south-west,Villeneuve's movements. Nelson for more than a week had been trying todaintily coax Villeneuve out of Cadiz, as an angler might try to coax amuch-experienced trout from the cool depths of some deep pool. He keptthe main body of his fleet sixty leagues distant—west of Cape St.Mary—but kept a chain of frigates within signalling distance of eachother betwixt Cadiz and himself. He allowed the news that he haddetached five of his line-of-battle ships on convoy duty to the eastwardto leak through to the French admiral, but succeeded in keeping him inignorance of the fact that he had called in under his flag five ships ofequal force from the westward.

On October 19, Villeneuve, partly driven by hunger, and by the news thata successor was on the road from Paris to displace him, and partlytempted by the belief that he had before him a British fleet of onlytwenty-one ships of the line, crept out of Cadiz with thirty-three shipsof the line—of which three were three-deckers—and seven frigates.Nelson had twenty-seven sail of the line with four frigates. The windwas light, and all through the 20th, Villeneuve's fleet, formed in sevencolumns—the Santissima Trinidad towering like a giant amongstthem—moved slowly eastward. Nelson would not alarm his foe by makingtoo early an appearance over the sky-line. His frigates signalled to himevery few minutes, through sixty miles of sea-air, the enemy's movements;but Nelson himself held aloof till Villeneuve was too far from Cadiz tomake a dash back to it and safety. All through the night of the 20th,Villeneuve's great fleet—a procession of mighty phantoms—was dimlyvisible against the Spanish coast, and the British frigates sent the newsin alternate pulses of sound and flame to Nelson, by this time eagerlybearing up from Cape St. Mary.

The morning of the 21st broke misty, yet bright. The sea was almost likea floor of glass. The faintest of sea-airs blew. A lazy Atlantic swellrolled at long intervals towards the Straits, and the two fleets at lastwere visible to each other. Villeneuve's ships stretched a waving andslightly curved line, running north and south, with no regularity oforder. The British fleet, in two compact and parallel columns, half amile apart, came majestically on from the west. The ships in each columnfollowed each other so closely that sometimes the bow of one was thrustpast the quarter of the ship in advance of it. Nelson, in the Victory,headed one column, Collingwood, in the Royal Sovereign, led the other,and each flagship, it was to be noted, led with a clear interval betweenitself and its supports.

Villeneuve had a tactician's brain, and his battle-plan was admirable.In a general order, issued just before leading out his fleet, he told hiscaptains, "There is nothing to alarm us in the sight of an English fleet.Their 64-gun ships have not 500 men on board; they are not more bravethan we are; they are harassed by a two-years' cruise; they have fewermotives to fight well!" Villeneuve explained that the enemy would attackin column, the French would meet the attack in close line of battle; and,with a touch of Nelson's spirit, he urged his captains to take everyopportunity of boarding, and warned them that every ship not under firewould be counted a defaulter.

Nelson's plan was simple and daring. The order of sailing was to be theorder of battle. Collingwood leading one column, and he the other, wouldpierce the enemy's lines at points which would leave some twelve of theenemy's ships to be crushed betwixt the two British lines. Nelson, whosebrooding genius forecast every changing eddy of battle, gave minuteinstructions on a score of details. To prevent mistakes amid the smokeand the fight, for example, he had the hoops on the masts of everyBritish ship painted yellow; every ship was directed to fly a St.George's ensign, with the Union Jack at the fore-topmast, and anotherflying from the top-gallant stays. That he would beat the enemy's fleethe calmly took for granted, but he directed that every effort should bemade to capture its commander-in-chief. Nelson crowned his instructionswith the characteristic remark, that "in case signals were obscure, nocaptain can do wrong if he places his ship alongside of an enemy."

By twelve o'clock the two huge fleets were slowly approaching each other:the British columns compact, grim, orderly; the Franco-Spanish lineloose, but magnificently picturesque, a far-stretching line of loftyhulls, a swaying forest of sky-piercing masts. They still preserve theremark of one prosaic British sailor, who, surveying the enemy through anopen port, offered the comment, "What a fine sight, Bill, yon ships wouldmake at Spithead!"

It is curious to reflect how exactly both British and French invert onsea their land tactics. French infantry attack in column, and are met byBritish infantry in line; and the line, with its steadfast courage andwide front of fire, crushes the column. On sea, on the other hand, theBritish attack in column, and the French meet the attack in line; but thecolumn wins. But it must be admitted that the peril of this method ofattack is enormous. The leading ship approaches, stern on, to a line offire which, if steady enough, may well crush her by its concentration offlame. Attack in column, in fact, means that the leading ships aresacrificed to secure victory for the ships in the rear. The risks ofthis method of attack at Trafalgar were enormously increased by the lightand uncertain quality of the wind. Collingwood, in the RoyalSovereign, and Nelson, in the Victory, as a matter of fact, driftedslowly rather than sailed, stern on to the broadsides of their enemy.The leading British ships, with their stately heights of swelling canvas,moved into the raking fire of the far-stretching Franco-Spanish line at aspeed of about two knots an hour. His officers knew that Nelson's ship,carrying the flag of the commander-in-chief, as it came slowly on, wouldbe the mark for every French gunner, and must pass through a tempest offlame before it could fire a shot in reply; and Blackwood begged Nelsonto let the Téméraire—"the fighting Téméraire"—take the Victory'splace at the head of the column. "Oh yes, let her go ahead," answeredNelson, with a queer smile; and the Téméraire was hailed, and orderedto take the lead. But Nelson meant that the Téméraire should take theVictory's place only if she could, and he watched grimly to see thatnot a sheet was let fly or a sail shortened to give the Téméraire achance of passing; and so the Victory kept its proud and perilous lead.

Collingwood led the lee division, and had the honour of beginning themighty drama of Trafalgar. The Royal Sovereign was newly coppered,and, with every inch of canvas outspread, got so far ahead of herfollowers, that after Collingwood had broken into the French line, hesustained its fire, unhelped, for nearly twenty minutes before theBelleisle, the ship next following, could fire a gun for his help.

Of Collingwood, Thackeray says, "I think, since Heaven made gentlemen, itnever made a better one than Cuthbert Collingwood," and there was, nodoubt, a knightly and chivalrous side to Collingwood worthy of KingArthur's round table. But there was also a side of heavy-footedcommon-sense, of Dutch-like frugality, in Collingwood, a sort ofwooden-headed unimaginativeness which looks humorous when set against thebackground of such a planet-shaking fight as Trafalgar. Thus on themorning of the fight he advised one of his lieutenants, who wore a pairof boots, to follow his example and put on stockings and shoes, as, inthe event of being shot in the leg, it would, he explained, "be so muchmore manageable for the surgeon." And as he walked the break of his poopin tights, silk stockings, and buckled shoes, leading, in his singleship, an attack on a fleet, he calmly munched an apple. To be able tomunch an apple when beginning Trafalgar is an illustration of what may becalled the quality of wooden-headed unimaginativeness in Collingwood.And yet Collingwood had a sense of the scale of the drama in which he wastaking part. "Now, gentlemen," he said to his officers, "let us dosomething to-day which the world may talk of hereafter." Collingwood, inreality, was a great man and a great seaman, and in the battle whichfollowed he "fought like an angel," to quote the amusingly inappropriatemetaphor of Blackwood.

The two majestic British columns moved slowly on, the great ships, withports hauled up and guns run out, following each other like a processionof giants. "I suppose," says Codrington, who commanded the Orion, "noman ever before saw such a sight." And the element of humour was addedto the scene by the spectacle of the tiny Pickle, a duodecimo schooner,gravely hanging on to the quarter of an 80-gun ship—as an actor in thefight describes it—"with the boarding-nettings up, and her tompions outof her four guns—about as large and as formidable as two pairs ofWellington boots."

Collingwood bore down to the fight a clear quarter of a mile ahead of thenext ship. The fire of the enemy, like so many spokes of flameconverging to a centre, broke upon him. But in silence the great shipmoved ahead to a gap in the line between the Santa Anna, a huge blackhulk of 112 guns, and the Neptune, of 74. As the bowsprit of theRoyal Sovereign slowly glided past the stern of the Santa Anna,Collingwood, as Nelson had ordered all his captains, cut hisstudding-sails loose, and they fell, a cloud of white canvas, into thewater. Then as the broadside of the Royal Sovereign fairly covered thestern of the Santa Anna, Collingwood spoke. He poured with deadly aimand suddenness, and at pistol-shot distance, his whole broadside into theSpaniard's stern. The tempest of shot swept the unhappy Santa Annafrom end to end, and practically destroyed that vessel. Some 400 of itscrew are said to have been killed or wounded by that single discharge!At the same moment Collingwood discharged his other broadside at theNeptune, though with less effect; then swinging round broadside tobroadside on the Spanish ship, he swept its decks again and again withhis guns. The first broadside had practically done the Spaniard'sbusiness; but its captain, a gallant man, still returned what fire hecould. All the enemy's ships within reach of Collingwood had meanwhileopened on him a dreadful fire; no fewer than five line-of-battle shipswere emptying their guns upon the Royal Sovereign at one time, and itseemed marvellous that the British ship was not shattered to meresplinters by the fire poured from so many quarters upon her. It was likebeing in the heart of a volcano. Frequently, it is said, the British sawthe flying cannon-balls meet in mid-air. The seamen fell fast, the sailswere torn, the bulwarks shattered, the decks ran red with blood. It wasat that precise moment, however, that Collingwood said to his captain,"What would not Nelson give to be here!" While at the same instantNelson was saying to Hardy, "See how that noble fellow Collingwood takeshis ship into action!"

The other ships of Collingwood's column were by this time slowly driftinginto the fight. At a quarter past twelve the Belleisle, the next ship,ranged under the stern of the unfortunate Santa Anna, and fired herlarboard guns, double shotted, into that ship, with the result that herthree masts fell over the side. She then steered for the Indomptable,an 80-gun ship, and sustained at the same moment the fire of two Spanishseventy-fours. Ship after ship of Collingwood's column came steadily up,and the roar of the battle deepened as in quick-following crashes eachnew line-of-battle ship broke into the thunder of broadsides.

Nelson, leading the weather column, steered a trifle to the northward, asthe slowly moving line of the enemy pointed towards Cadiz. Nelson hadgiven his last orders. At his mainmast head was flying, fast belayed,the signal, "Engage the enemy more closely." Nelson himself walkedquietly to and fro on the little patch of clear plank, scarcely sevenyards long, on the quarter-deck of the Victory, whence he could commandthe whole ship, and he wore the familiar threadbare frock uniform coat,bearing on the left breast four tarnished and lack-lustre stars. Thencame the incident of the immortal signal. "We must give the fleet," saidNelson to Blackwood, "something by way of a fillip." After musing awhile, he said, "Suppose we signal, 'Nelson confides that every man willdo his duty'?" Some one suggested "England" instead of "Nelson," andNelson at once caught at the improvement. The signal-officer explainedthat the word "confide" would have to be spelt, and suggested instead theword "expects," as that was in the vocabulary. So the flags on themasthead of the Victory spelt out the historic sentence to the slowlymoving fleet. That the signal was "received with cheers" is scarcelyaccurate. The message was duly acknowledged, and recorded in the log ofevery ship, but perhaps not one man in every hundred of the actors atTrafalgar knew at the moment that it had been sent. But the messagerings in British ears yet, across ninety years, and will ring in the earsof generations yet unborn.

Nelson led his column on a somewhat slanting course into the fight. Hewas bent on laying himself alongside the flagship of the enemy, and heknew that this must be one of the three great line-of-battle ships nearthe huge Santissima Trinidad. But there was no sign to show which ofthe three carried Villeneuve. At half-past twelve the ships upon whichthe Victory was moving began to fire single shots at her slowlydrifting hulk to discover whether she was within range. The seventh ofthese shots, fired at intervals of a minute or so, tore a rent throughthe upper canvas of the Victory—a rent still to be seen in thecarefully preserved sail. A couple of minutes of awful silence followed.Slowly the Victory drifted on its path, and then no fewer than eight ofthe great ships upon which the Victory was moving broke into such atempest of shot as perhaps never before was poured on a single ship. Oneof the first shots killed Scott, Nelson's secretary; another cut downeight marines standing in line on the Victory's quarter-deck; a thirdpassed between Nelson and Hardy as they stood side by side. "Too warmwork to last long, Hardy," said Nelson, with a smile. Still theVictory drifted majestically on its fiery path without an answering gun.

The French line was irregular at this point, the ships lying, in someinstances, two or three deep, and this made the business of "cutting" theline difficult. As Nelson could not pick out the French flagship, hesaid to Hardy, "Take your choice, go on board which you please;" andHardy pointed the stern of the Victory towards a gap between theRedoutable, a 74-gun ship, and the Bucentaure. But the ship movedslowly. The fire upon it was tremendous. One shot drove a shower ofsplinters upon both Nelson and Hardy; nearly fifty men and officers hadbeen killed or wounded; the Victory's sails were riddled, herstudding-sail booms shot off close to the yard-arm, her mizzen-topmast,shot away. At one o'clock, however, the Victory slowly moved past thestern of the Bucentaure, and a 68-pounder carronade on its forecastle,charged with a round shot and a keg of 500 musket balls, was fired intothe cabin windows of the French ship. Then, as the great ship moved on,every gun of the remaining fifty that formed its broadside—some of themdouble and treble loaded—was fired through the Frenchman's cabin windows.

The dust from the crumpled woodwork of the Bucentaure's stern coveredthe persons of Nelson and the group of officers standing on theVictory's quarter-deck, while the British sailors welcomed with afierce shout the crash their flying shot made within the Frenchman'shull. The Bucentaure, as it happened—though Nelson was ignorant ofthe fact—was the French flagship; and after the battle its officersdeclared that by this single broadside, out of its crew of nearly 1000men, nearly 400 were struck down, and no less than twenty guns dismounted!

But the Neptune, a fine French 80-gun ship, lay right across thewater-lane up which the Victory was moving, and it poured upon theBritish ship two raking broadsides of the most deadly quality. TheVictory, however, moved on unflinchingly, and the Neptune, fearing tobe run aboard by the British ship, set her jib and moved ahead; then theVictory swung to starboard on to the Redoutable. The French shipfired one hurried broadside, and promptly shut her lower-deck ports,fearing the British sailors would board through them. No fewer, indeed,than five French line-of-battle ships during the fight, findingthemselves grinding sides with British ships, adopted the same course—anexpressive testimony to the enterprising quality of British sailors. TheVictory, however, with her lower-deck guns actually touching the sideof the Redoutable, still kept them in full and quick action; but ateach of the lower-deck ports stood a sailor with a bucket of water, andwhen the gun was fired—its muzzle touching the wooden sides of theRedoutable—the water was dashed upon the ragged hole made by the shot,to prevent the Frenchman taking fire and both ships being consumed.

The guns on the upper deck of the Victory speedily swept and silencedthe upper deck of the Redoutable, and as far as its broadsides wereconcerned, that ship was helpless. Its tops, however, were crowded withmarksmen, and armed with brass coehorns, firing langrage shot, and thesescourged with a pitiless and most deadly fire the decks of the Victory,while the Bucentaure and the gigantic Santissima Trinidad alsothundered on the British flagship.

III. HOW THE VICTORY WAS WON

"All is over and done.
Render thanks to the Giver;
England, for thy son
Let the bell be toll'd.
Render thanks to the Giver,
And render him to the mould.
Under the cross of gold
That shines over city and river,
There he shall rest for ever
Among the wise and the bold."
—TENNYSON.

Nelson's strategy at Trafalgar is described quaintly, but with realinsight, in a sentence which a Spanish novelist, Don Perez Galdos, putsinto the mouth of one of his characters: "Nelson, who, as everybodyknows, was no fool, saw our long line and said, 'Ah, if I break throughthat in two places, and put the part of it between the two placesbetween two fires, I shall grab every stick of it.' That was exactlywhat the confounded fellow did. And as our line was so long that thehead couldn't help the tail, he worried us from end to end, while hedrove his two wedges into our body." It followed that the flamingvortex of the fight was in that brief mile of sea-space, between thetwo points where the parallel British lines broke through Villeneuve'sswaying forest of masts. And the tempest of sound and flame wasfiercest, of course, round the two ships that carried the flags ofNelson and Collingwood. As each stately British liner, however,drifted—rather than sailed—into the black pall of smoke, the roar ofthe fight deepened and widened until the whole space between the RoyalSovereign and the Victory was shaken with mighty pulse-beats ofsound that marked the furious and quick-following broadsides.

The scene immediately about the Victory was very remarkable. TheVictory had run foul of the Redoutable, the anchors of the twoships hooking into each other. The concussion of the broadsides would,no doubt, have driven the two hulls apart, but that the Victory'sstudding-sail boom iron had fastened, like a claw, into the leech ofthe Frenchman's fore-topsail. The Téméraire, coming majestically upthrough the smoke, raked the Bucentaure, and closed with a crash onthe starboard side of the Redoutable, and the four great ships lay ina solid tier, while between their huge grinding sides came, with asound and a glare almost resembling the blast of an exploding mine, theflash, the smoke, the roar of broadside after broadside.

In the whole heroic fight there is no finer bit of heroism than thatshown by the Redoutable. She was only a 74-gun ship, and she had theVictory, of 100 guns, and the Téméraire, of 98, on either side. Itis true these ships had to fight at the same time with a whole ring ofantagonists; nevertheless, the fire poured on the Redoutable was sofierce that only courage of a steel-like edge and temper could havesustained it. The gallant French ship was semi-dismasted, her hullshot through in every direction, one-fourth of her guns weredismounted. Out of a crew of 643, no fewer than 523 were killed orwounded. Only 35, indeed, lived to reach England as prisoners. Andyet she fought on. The fire from her great guns, indeed, soon ceased,but the deadly splutter of musketry from such of her tops as were yetstanding was maintained; and, as Brenton put it, "there was witnessedfor nearly an hour and a half the singular spectacle of a French 74-gunship engaging a British first and second rate, with small-arms only."

As a matter of fact, the Victory repeatedly ceased firing, believingthat the Redoutable had struck, but still the venomous and deadlyfire from the tops of that vessel continued; and it was to thiscirc*mstance, indeed, that Nelson owed his death. He would never putsmall-arms men in his own tops, as he believed their fire interferedwith the working of the sails, and, indeed, ran the risk of ignitingthem. Thus the French marksmen that crowded the tops of theRedoutable had it all their own way; and as the distance was short,and their aim deadly, nearly every man on the poop, quarter-deck, andforecastle of the Victory was shot down.

Nelson, with Hardy by his side, was walking backwards and forwards on alittle clear space of the Victory's quarter-deck, when he suddenlyswung round and fell face downwards on the deck. Hardy picked him up."They have done for me at last, Hardy," said Nelson; "my backbone isshot through." A musket bullet from the Redoutable'smizzen-top—only fifteen yards distant—had passed through the forepartof the epaulette, smashed a path through the left shoulder, and lodgedin the spine. The evidence seems to make it clear that it was a chanceshot that wrought the fatal mischief. Hardy had twice the bulk ofNelson's insignificant figure, and wore a more striking uniform, andwould certainly have attracted the aim of a marksman in preference toNelson.

Few stories are more pathetic or more familiar than that of Nelson'slast moments. As they carried the dying hero across the blood-splasheddecks, and down the ladders into the co*ck-pit, he drew a handkerchiefover his own face and over the stars on his breast, lest the knowledgethat he was struck down should discourage his crew. He was stripped,his wound probed, and it was at once known to be mortal. Nelsonsuffered greatly; he was consumed with thirst, had to be fanned withsheets of paper; and he kept constantly pushing away the sheet, thesole covering over him, saying, "Fan, fan," or "Drink, drink," and oneattendant was constantly employed in drawing the sheet over his thinlimbs and emaciated body. Presently Hardy, snatching a moment from thefight raging on the deck, came to his side, and the two comradesclasped hands. "Well, Hardy, how goes the battle?" Nelson asked. Hewas told that twelve or fourteen of the enemy's ships had struck."That is well," said Nelson, "but I had bargained for twenty." Thenhis seaman's brain forecasting the change of weather, and picturing thebattered ships with their prizes on a lee shore, he exclaimedemphatically, "Anchor! Hardy, anchor!" Hardy hinted that Collingwoodwould take charge of affairs. "Not while I live, I hope, Hardy," saidthe dying chief, trying to raise himself on his bed. "No! do youanchor, Hardy."

Many of Nelson's expressions, recorded by his doctor, Beatty, arestrangely touching. "I am a dead man, Hardy," he said, "I am goingfast. It will all be over with me soon." "O Victory, Victory," hesaid, as the great ship shook to the roar of her own guns, "how youdistract my poor brain!" "How dear is life to all men!" he said, aftera pause. He begged that "his carcass might be sent to England, and notthrown overboard." So in the dim co*ck-pit, with the roar of the greatbattle—bellow of gun, and shout of cheering crews—filling all thespace about him, and his last thoughts yet busy for his country, thesoul of the greatest British seaman passed away. "Kiss me, Hardy," wasone of his last sentences. His last intelligible sentence was, "I havedone my duty; I praise God for it."

It may interest many to read the prayer which Nelson wrote—the lastrecord, but one, he made in his diary—and written as the final act ofpreparation for Trafalgar: "May the great God, whom I worship, grant tomy country, and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great andglorious victory; and may no misconduct in any one tarnish it; and mayhumanity after victory be the predominant feature in the British fleet.For myself individually, I commit my life to Him that made me, and mayHis blessing alight on my endeavours for serving my country faithfully.To Him I resign myself, and the just cause which is entrusted to me todefend. Amen, Amen, Amen."

Nelson's plan allowed his captains a large discretion in the choice oftheir antagonists. Each British ship had to follow the wake of herleader till she reached the enemy's line, then her captain was free tochoose his own foe—which, naturally, was the biggest Frenchman orSpaniard in sight. And the huge Santissima Trinidad, of course,attracted the eager attention of the ships that immediately followedthe Victory. The Spaniard carried 140 guns, and in that swayingcontinent of fighting ships, towered like a giant amongst dwarfs. TheNeptune, the Leviathan, and the Conqueror, in turn, hung on thequarter or broadside of the gigantic Spaniard, scourged it with fire,and then drifted off to engage in a fiery wrestle with some otherantagonist. By half-past two the Spanish four-decker was a mastlesswreck. The Neptune at that moment was hanging on her bow, theConqueror on her quarter. "This tremendous fabric," says an accountwritten by an officer on board the Conqueror, "gave a deep roll, with aswell to leeward, then back to windward, and on her return every mastwent by the board, leaving her an unmanageable hulk on the water. Herimmense topsails had every reef out, her royals were sheeted home butlowered, and the falling of this majestic mass of spars, sails, andrigging plunging into the water at the muzzles of our guns, was one ofthe most magnificent sights I ever beheld." Directly after this aSpaniard waved an English union over the lee gangway of the SantissimaTrinidad in token of surrender; whereupon the Conqueror, scorning towaste time in taking possession of even a four-decker that had nolonger any fight in it, pushed off in search of a new foe; while theNeptune's crew proceeded to shift the tattered topsails of their shipfor new ones, with as much coolness as though in a friendly port.

The Africa, sixty-four, less than half the size of the Spaniard,presently came slowly up through the smoke, and fired into the Spanishship; then seeing no flag flying, sent a lieutenant on board themastless hulk to take possession. The Englishman climbed to thequarterdeck, all black with smoke and bloody with slaughter, and askedthe solitary officer he found there whether or not the SantissimaTrinidad had surrendered. The ship, as a matter of fact, was driftinginto the centre of a cluster of French and Spanish ships; so theSpaniard replied, "Non, non," at the same time pointing to the friendlyships upon which they were drifting. The Englishman had onlyhalf-a-dozen men with him, so he coolly returned to his boat, and theSantissima Trinidad drifted like a log upon the water till half-pastfive P.M., when the Prince put a prize crew on board.

Perez Galdos has given a realistic picture—quoted in the CornhillMagazine—of the scenes within the gloomy recesses of the greatSpanish four-decker as the British ships hung on her flanks and wastedher with their fire: "The English shot had torn our sails to tatters.It was as if huge invisible talons had been dragging at them.Fragments of spars, splinters of wood, thick hempen cables cut up ascorn is cut by the sickle, fallen blocks, shreds of canvas, bits ofiron, and hundreds of other things that had been wrenched away by theenemy's fire, were piled along the deck, where it was scarcely possibleto move about. From moment to moment men fell—some into the sea; andthe curses of the combatants mingled with groans of the wounded, sothat it was often difficult to decide whether the dying wereblaspheming God or the fighters were calling upon Him for aid. Ihelped in the very dismal task of carrying the wounded into the hold,where the surgeons worked. Some died ere we could convey them thither;others had to undergo frightful operations ere their worn-out bodiescould get an instant's rest. It was much more satisfactory to be ableto assist the carpenter's crew in temporarily stopping some of theholes torn by shot in the ship's hull.… Blood ran in streamsabout the deck; and, in spite of the sand, the rolling of the shipcarried it hither and thither until it made strange patterns on theplanks. The enemy's shot, fired, as they were, from very short range,caused horrible mutilations.… The ship creaked and groaned as sherolled, and through a thousand holes and crevices in her strained hullthe sea spurted in and began to flood the hold. The Trinidad'speople saw the commander-in-chief haul down his flag; heard theAchille blow up and hurl her six hundred men into eternity; learntthat their own hold was so crowded with wounded that no more could bereceived there. Then, when all three masts had in succession beenbrought crashing down, the defence collapsed, and the SantissimaTrinidad struck her flag."

The dreadful scenes on the decks of the Santissima Trinidad mightalmost have been paralleled on some of the British ships. Thus theBelleisle, Collingwood's immediate supporter, sustained the fire oftwo French and one Spanish line-of-battle ships until she wasdismasted. The wreck of her mizzen-mast covered her larboard guns, hermainmast fell upon the break of the poop; her larboard broadside wasthus rendered useless; and just then another French line-of-battleship, the Achille, took her position on the Belleisle's larboardquarter, and opened on her a deadly fire, to which the British shipcould not return a shot. This scene lasted for nearly an hour and ahalf, but at half-past three the Swiftsure came majestically up,passed under the Belleisle's stern—the two crews cheering eachother, the Belleisle's men waving a Union Jack at the end of a piketo show they were still fighting, while an ensign still flew from thestump of the mainmast—and the fury with which the Swiftsure fellupon the Achille may be imagined. The Defiance about the same timetook off the Aigle, and the Polyphemus the Neptune, and themuch-battered Belleisle floated free. Masts, bowsprit, boats,figure-head—all were shot away; her hull was pierced in everydirection; she was a mere splintered wreck.

The Téméraire fought a battle almost as dreadful. The Africa, alight ship carrying only sixty-four guns, chose as her antagonist theIntrépide, a French seventy-four, in weight of broadside and numberof crew almost double her force. How dreadful were the damagessustained by the British ship in a fight so unequal and so stubborn maybe imagined; but she clung to her big antagonist until, the Orioncoming up, the Intrépide struck.

At three P.M. the firing had begun to slacken, and ship after ship ofthe enemy was striking. At a quarter past two the Algeziras struckto the Tonnant, and fifteen minutes afterwards the San Juan—theTonnant was fighting both ships—also hailed that she surrendered.Lieutenant Clement was sent in the jolly-boat, with two hands, to takepossession of the Spanish seventy-four, and the boat carrying thegallant three was struck by a shot and swamped. The sailors couldswim, but not the lieutenant; the pair of tars succeeded in strugglingback with their officer to the Tonnant; and as that ship had notanother boat that would float, she had to see her prize drift off. TheColossus, in like manner, fought with the French Swiftsure and theBahama—each her own size—and captured them both! The Redoutablehad surrendered by this time, and a couple of midshipmen, with a dozenhands, had climbed from the Victory's one remaining boat through thestern ports of the French ship. The Bucentaure, Villeneuve'sflagship, had her fate practically sealed by the first tremendousbroadside poured into her by the Victory. With fine courage,however, the French ship maintained a straggling fire until both theLeviathan and the Conqueror, at a distance of less than thirtyyards, were pouring a tempest of shot into her. The French flagshipthen struck, and was taken possession of by a tiny boat's crew from theConqueror consisting of three marines and two sailors. The marineofficer coolly locked the powder magazine of the Frenchman, put the keyin his pocket, left two of his men in charge of the surrenderedBucentaure, put Villeneuve and his two captains in his boat with histwo marines and himself, and went off in search of the Conqueror. Inthe smoke and confusion, however, he could not find that ship, and socarried the captured French admiral to the Mars. Hercules Robinsonhas drawn a pen picture of the unfortunate French admiral as he came onboard the British ship: "Villeneuve was a tallish, thin man, a verytranquil, placid, English-looking Frenchman; he wore a long-taileduniform coat, high and flat collar, corduroy pantaloons of a greenishcolour with stripes two inches wide, half-boots with sharp toes, and awatch-chain with long gold links. Majendie was a short, fat, jocundsailor, who found a cure for all ills in the Frenchman's philosophy,"Fortune de la guerre" (though this was the third time the goddess hadbrought him to England as a prisoner); and he used to tell our officersvery tough stories of the 'Mysteries of Paris.'"

By five o'clock the roar of guns had died almost into silence. Ofthirty-three stately battle-ships that formed the Franco-Spanish fleetfour hours earlier, one had vanished in flames, seventeen were capturedas mere blood-stained hulks, and fifteen were in flight; whileVilleneuve himself was a prisoner. But Nelson was dead. Night wasfalling. A fierce south-east gale was blowing. A sea—such a sea asonly arises in shallow waters—ugly, broken, hollow, was rising fast.In all directions ships dismantled, with scuppers crimson with blood,and sides jagged with shot-holes, were rolling their tall, huge hulksin the heavy sea; and the shoals of Trafalgar were only thirteen milesto leeward! The fight with tempest and sea during that terrific nightwas almost more dreadful than the battle with human foes during theday. Codrington says, the gale was so furious that "it blew away thetop main-topsail, though it was close-reefed, and the fore-topsailafter it was clewed up ready for furling." They dare not set a stormstaysail, although now within six miles of the reef. The Redoutablesank at the stern of the ship towing it; the Bucentaure had to be cutadrift, and went to pieces on the shoals. The wind shifted in thenight and enabled the shot-wrecked and storm-battered ships to claw offthe shore; but the fierce weather still raged, and on the 24th the hugeSantissima Trinidad had to be cut adrift. It was night; wind and seawere furious; but the boats of the Ajax and the Neptune succeededin rescuing every wounded man on board the huge Spaniard. The boats,indeed, had all put off when a cat ran out on the muzzle of one of thelower-deck guns and mewed plaintively, and one of the boats pulledback, in the teeth of wind and sea, and rescued poor puss!

Of the eighteen British prizes, fourteen sank, were wrecked, burnt bythe captors, or recaptured; only four reached Portsmouth. Yet neverwas the destruction of a fleet more absolutely complete. Of thefifteen ships that escaped Trafalgar, four were met in the open sea onNovember 4 by an equal number of British ships, under Sir RichardStrahan, and were captured. The other eleven lay disabled hulks inCadiz till—when France and Spain broke into war with each other—theywere all destroyed. Villeneuve's great fleet, in brief, simplyvanished from existence! But Napoleon, with that courageous economy oftruth characteristic of him, summed up Trafalgar in the sentence: "Thestorms occasioned to us the loss of a few ships after a battleimprudently fought"! Trafalgar, as a matter of fact, was the mostamazing victory won by land or sea through the whole Revolutionary war.It permanently changed the course of history; and it goes far tojustify Nelson's magnificently audacious boast, "The fleets of Englandare equal to meet the world in arms!"

THE END