Men of Honour (30 page)

Four vast battle ships, with a total complement of some 3,000 men, every ship largely dismasted, laden with the dead and the dying, lay clasped to each other as the Atlantic swell rolled under them. None had yet surrendered. Yards and masts lay in a net of chaos over all four. Deep in all four, in the scarcely lit decks below the waterline, hidden sorrows and private catastrophes were being enacted. The wounded were being wounded again where they lay. One British sailor was killed by the head of his friend, blown off by a roundshot and sent careering towards him. The whole assemblage was gathered in an area not much larger than a football field.

Two midshipmen from the
Victory
—one of them Edward Collingwood, the admiral's nephew—were sent by Hardy in one of the flagship's boats, along with six or seven seamen, to put out a fire which the
Redoutable
's grenades or ‘stink-pots' had started in her own forecastle. They climbed aboard the devastated Frenchman. It was another moment where savagery was folded back to allow the entrance of a shared humanity: the only way on to the
Redoutable
was through the stern ports and as the young
British officers climbed in, they were greeted warmly and politely by the French sailors inside. Beyond those proffered hands they encountered, even on a day of such horror, a scene of which they were unable to leave a description.

The
Redoutable
's mainmast and mizzenmast had both gone by the board. Her bowsprit was shot through and her fore topmast gone. She lay rolling in the water, bedraggled and broken. Her rudder was destroyed and her massive oak hull was in pieces. Several guns had burst, killing everyone around them. The human damage was unconscionable. Of her complement of 643 men, 522 were dead, dying or unable to stand. Two hundred and twenty two of them were lying waiting to be operated on by the surgeons. Three hundred dead lay on the decks. Only those who had managed to spend the battle below the waterline were still in one piece. Everyone who had been on any one of the gundecks was dead or wounded. Neither the French nor the Spanish heaved the dead overboard, as the English practice was, and the sight on the
Redoutable
was of a blood-drenched chaos, the bewildered and bruised faces of young men, an unheroic scattering of limbs and bodies.

No British image, drawn or painted, addressed the squalor of Trafalgar, in the way that Turner would paint the field of Waterloo on the evening of the battle, the ground surface itself merging with and even indistinguishable from the rippling, billowing landscape of the dead, a downland of corpses, lit by the flames of distant fires. But the accounts of those who saw these sights are, if anything, strangely ashamed, bemused, almost as if there were an embarrassment to battle, an awkwardness at the lowering of the cultural guard. In battle, in the sight that greeted these young midshipmen as they walked across the
Redoutable
, a level of human life had been exposed where humanity, in its dignified and socialised form, the most precious thing
their civilisation possessed, had been for a while horribly suspended.

It is not perhaps surprising that their urge to humanity was turned to so quickly and so warmly. The horrors of battle, not during it, when the adrenaline was running, but as it ended, created a need for that warmth, for a repairing of the rupture. By about 2.15, four of the six pumps on the
Redoutable
had been destroyed by shot and the water was now fast rising in the hold. The
Téméraire
was then in possession of her prize, as she was of the
Fougueux
on the other side of her. Together, they represented perhaps £100,000 of prize money, a good £5-6 million today, the equivalent of £20,000 for each of the lives taken in the winning of her.

Victory
was slipping away to the north, having pushed herself off from the
Redoutable
with giant booms. Over an hour had passed since Nelson had been carried below. The musket ball that had entered his shoulder was only part of a storm of metal then engulfing the
Victory
's quarterdeck. Between forty and fifty men were carried down to the
Victory
's orlop deck at the same time as the admiral. Several had died in the arms of the seamen on their way down, but still the cockpit to which the wounded were carried was crowded. As Nelson was brought in, the wounded seamen around him called to the surgeon, William Beatty, ‘Mr Beatty, Lord Nelson is here: Mr Beatty, the admiral is wounded.' He was taken to a midshipman's berth, and the men carrying him very nearly dropped him as they tripped in the crowded dark. Nelson was laid on a bed, stripped of his clothes and covered with a sheet. His coat was rolled up and used as a pillow for a midshipman with a head wound beside him. The young man's head was leaking so much blood that after the battle the coat had to be cut from his hair. Wounds to the lower back almost inevitably destroy any control of
the bowel or bladder. In the sanctified atmosphere of Nelson's last hours, this is never mentioned, but among the other horrors of that place, Nelson and those around him would certainly have been lying in his own urine and faeces.

The received image of Nelson's deathbed is of a place of quiet and privacy, surrounded by his chosen companions, as if in a shrine. It cannot have been like that. The thumping and shuddering battle was still shaking
Victory
to her bones. Just above his head the 32-pounder battery was still bellowing and roaring at the enemy. ‘Oh
Victory
,
Victory
,' Nelson said, murmuring to himself as the recoil from another broadside shocked the air inside the battleship, ‘how you distract my poor brain.' The cockpit was full of the
Victory
's eighty wounded men. The shouts of those above reached down into the flickering dark. Nelson, even from the beginning, was able only to whisper, knowing he was dying, full of anxiety, repeating himself, returning to the great secret of his life. He told Beatty he was ‘gone' and then whispered to him, ‘Remember me to Lady Hamilton. Remember me to Horatia. Remember me to all my friends. Doctor, remember me to Mr Rose; tell him I have left a will and left Lady Hamilton and Horatia to my country.'

As one by one the French and Spanish ships around
Victory
struck their flags, the men cheered and at each new shout Nelson asked what the noise meant. On one of these occasions, the flag lieutenant John Pasco, who was also lying wounded in the cockpit, said it was the surrender of a Frenchman. Nelson must have known that but it betrays his frame of mind, something that has also been forgotten in our knowledge of the British victory. Nelson was intensely anxious about the battle's outcome. ‘He evinced great solicitude for the event of the battle.' Doctor Alexander Scott and the purser, Walter Burke, a cousin of the great Edmund Burke, tried to calm him. The two of
them supported his back so that he lay in a semi-recum bent position, which was how he felt least discomfort. The huge internal loss of body fluids made him thirsty. He asked again and again for ‘drink, drink' and ‘fan, fan' and they gave him sips of lemonade, as was given to the other wounded, as well as water and wine. They fanned him with a paper. He became desperate for cool air. Their reassuring words irritated him. Burke told him he would carry the news of the great victory to England. ‘It is nonsense, Mr Burke,' Nelson said, ‘to suppose I can live.' Dr Scott, the ship's chaplain, told him he should trust to Providence to restore him to his friends and to his country. ‘Ah Doctor!' Nelson said, ‘it is all over; it is all over.'

These are the words people say on their deathbeds. They murmur and repeat. Sharpness turns hazy, and present reality gives way to drift and uncertainty. The dying man is with the people who surround him and then profoundly alone. He thinks urgently of present needs and then just as suddenly moves into a much longer perspective, scarcely tethered to this life. Sudden moments of the old self appear, as if floating up in the mist. A young midshipman brought a message down from Hardy, desperately busy on the quarterdeck. Nelson asked who the boy was. It was Hardy's aide-de-camp, a young midshipman called Richard Bulkeley. ‘It is his voice,' Nelson said, his eyes clearly closed, and then: ‘Remember me to your father.' Lieutenant Richard Bulkeley had been an army officer with Nelson in a desperate campaign in Nicaragua twenty years before, and had remained his friend ever since. It was to Lieutenant Bulkeley that he had told the story of his teenage vision, in which the radiant orb of heroism and glory had come to him on board the
Dolphin.

Nelson wanted Hardy and called for him again and again, thinking his absence must mean that the captain had also been killed. They were undoubtedly friends. Hardy
loved and revered his admiral and Nelson loved being loved by him. Their friendship contained within it their difference in rank, but when Hardy came down to see him, over an hour after Nelson had been wounded, what they said was the conversation between friends. Its every nuance was recorded, as though this friendship and this evidence of friendship was somehow what this battle was for.

As he was told Hardy was coming to see him, Nelson clearly summoned strength from within him, opened his eyes and sat up. They shook hands and Nelson said, ‘Well, Hardy, how goes the battle? How goes the day with us?' That is the bright public man speaking, not the haunted, wounded figure, muttering half to himself of Emma and Horatia and the need for drink. ‘Very well, my Lord,' Hardy said. ‘We have got twelve or fourteen of the enemy's ships in our possession.' ‘I hope,' Nelson said, ‘none of
our
ships have struck, Hardy?'—surely a smile attached to that? ‘No, my Lord,' Hardy said, ‘there is no fear of that.' Then Nelson has him come nearer, the public moment quite suddenly giving way to the private. ‘I am a dead man Hardy. I am going fast: it will be all over with me soon. Come nearer to me. Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair, and all other things belonging to me.' Just as much as the public commander, the unexampled imposer of British violence on British enemies, this quiet and tender Nelson is the figure who stands in granite eighteen feet tall on his column in Trafalgar Square. He is the hero humanised.

Nelson comes and goes. He wants to die. He knows he is dying, but he regrets his death. He imagines Emma Hamilton there with him and feels distressed at the distress she must feel. He compares his situation to other sailors he had known who had been wounded in the spine. He talks to Beatty and tells Beatty that he is dying. ‘I know it,' he said. ‘I feel something rising in my breast which tells me I am gone.' It was, in all likelihood, the tide of his own
blood. Beatty tells him that nothing can be done for him and, with the emotion released by expressing the words, the surgeon is then forced to turn away to hide the tears in his own eyes. Again and again, reflecting on his life, Nelson dwells on its two poles, his private and public selves. Between the sips of lemonade and watered wine, he says, almost alternately, ‘God be praised, I have done my duty' and to the Rev. Dr Scott, ‘Doctor, I have
not
been a
great
sinner,' the smile in that quite audible now, two hundred years later.

Overhead, the battle continued. In front of
Victory
, the
Bucentaure
had been raked in turn by the
Téméraire
,
Neptune
,
Leviathan
and
Conqueror.
The ship scarcely existed any longer. Almost every ally around her either sailed onwards, deserting their flagship, or fell away to leeward where they could play no part in defending her. The British savagery descended on the
Bucentaure.
Her captain was wounded in the mouth; her first lieutenant lost a leg. The senior unwounded officer was the second lieutenant and the surgeons could not cope. In all, some 450 men were killed or wounded out of a ship's complement of about 800. Men bled to death in the dark. No seamen were left on the upper deck; there was no rigging left for them to handle and none of the upper deck guns were serviceable. Villeneuve sent the few remaining men below to save their lives.

The admiral alone, aware of the catastrophe happening to his ship and fleet, stayed above, walking to and fro on his quarterdeck. But no piece of flying metal saved him from ignominy. By about 1.40, half an hour after Nelson had been shot, all three of the
Bucentaure
's masts went over the side. All the boats had been destroyed by gunfire. There was nothing Villeneuve could do but surrender. The imperial eagle was thrown into the Atlantic and the French admiral struck his flag. Within the remains of his ship, the dead were no longer recognisable but lay along the middle
of each deck in rough piles of blood and guts through which the roundshot and the splinters had ploughed again and again. The British officers who went aboard to take command of the ships picked their way past these sights which left them with memories of little but disgust.

The fire of the huge 136-gun
Santísima Trinidad
, the only four-decker in the world, with a crew of 1,115 men, just ahead of the
Bucentaure
, was doing terrible damage to those around her, shots removing the stomachs and arms of the British gunners. One shot, striking one of the great guns, split into jagged pieces, each one of which killed or wounded its man. But for all that, it was only a question of time before the
Santísima Trinidad
, surrounded by five or six British ships, surrendered. First, as an officer on the
Conqueror
described it, the vast vessel ‘gave a deep roll with the swell to leeward, then back to windward, and in her return every mast went by the board, leaving an unmanageable hulk on the water.' Every sail in the
Santísima Trinidad
was deployed to its fullest extent, as she had been trying in the lightest of airs to make her way out of the encircling pack of British ships: ‘her immense topsails had every reef out, her royals were sheeted home but lowered, and the falling mass of the squaresails and rigging, plunging into the water at the very muzzles of our guns, was one of the most magnificent sights I ever beheld.' It is something of the effect, but tripled and quadrupled, which Turner painted in his depiction for George IV of
Victory
losing her foremast: beauty in the destruction of beauty, the summit and depths of the sublime.