A Ship of the Line

Chapter XIV

Hornblower had shaken himself free from the company of Colonel Villena, who showed, now that he had told of his defeat, a hysterical loquacity and a pathetic unwillingness to allow him out of his sight. He had established him in a chair by the taffrail out of the way, and escaped below to the security of his cabin, to pore once more over the charts. There were batteries marked there—most of them apparently dated from the time, not so long ago, when Spain had been at war with England, and they had been erected to protect coasting vessels which crept along the shore from battery to battery. In consequence they were established at points where there was not merely deep water close in, but also a bit of shelter given by projecting points of land in which the fugitives could anchor. There had never been any thought in men’s minds then that marching columns might in the future be attacked from the sea, and exposed sections of the coast—like this twenty miles between Malgret and Arens de Mar—which offered no anchorage might surely be neglected. Since Cochrane was here a year ago in the Imperieuse no British ship had been spared to harass the French in this quarter.

The French since then had had too many troubles on their hands to have time to think of mere possibilities. The chances were that they had neglected to take precautions—and in any case they could not have enough heavy guns and trained gunners to guard the whole coast. The Sutherland was seeking a spot a mile and a half at least from any battery, where the water was deep enough close in for her to sweep the road with her guns. She had already hauled out of range of one battery, and that was marked on his chart and, moreover, was the only one marked along the stretch. It was most unlikely that the French had constructed others since the chart was last brought up to date. If Pino’s column had left Malgret at dawn the Sutherland must be nearly level with it now. Hornblower marked the spot which his instinct told him would be the most suitable, and ran up on deck to give the orders which would head the Sutherland in towards it.

Villena climbed hastily out of his chair at sight of him, and clinked loudly across the deck towards him, but Hornblower contrived to ignore him politely by acting as if his whole attention was taken up by giving instructions to Bush.

“I’ll have the guns loaded and run out, too, if you please, Mr. Bush,” he concluded.

“Aye aye, sir,” said Bush.

Bush looked at him pleadingly. This last order, with its hint of immediate action, set the pinnacle on his curiosity. All he knew was that a Dago colonel had come on board. What they were here for, what Hornblower had in mind, he had no means of guessing. Hornblower always kept his projected plans to himself, because then if he should fail his subordinates would not be able to guess the extent of the failure. But Bush felt sometimes that his life was being shortened by his captain’s reticence. He was pleasantry surprised this time when Hornblower condescended to make explanations, and he was never to know that Hornblower’s unusual loquaciousness was the result of a desire to be saved from having to make polite conversation with Villena.

“There’s a French column expected along the road over there,” he said. “I want to see if we can get in a few shots at them.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Put a good man in the chains with the lead.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Now that Hornblower actually wanted to be conversational he found it impossible—for nearly three years he had checked every impulse to say an unnecessary word to his second in command; and Bush’s stolid ‘Aye aye, sirs’, were not much help. Hornblower took refuge from Villena by gluing his eye to his telescope and scanning the nearing shore with the utmost diligence. Here there were bold grey-green hills running almost to the water’s edge, and looping along the foot of them, now ten feet up, and now a hundred feet, ran the road.

As Hornblower looked at it his glass revealed a dark tiny speck on the road far ahead. He looked away, rested his eye, and looked again. It was a horseman, riding towards them. A moment later he saw a moving smudge behind, which fixed his attention by an occasional sparkle and flash from the midst of it. That was a body of horsemen; presumably the advanced guard of Pino’s army. It would not be long before the Sutherland was up opposite to them. Hornblower gauged the distance of the ship from the road. Half a mile, or a little more—easy cannon shot, though not as easy as he would like.

“By the deep nine!” chanted the man at the lead. He could edge in a good deal closer at this point if, when he turned the ship about and followed Pino along the shore, they came as far as here. It was worth remembering. As the Sutherland proceeded to meet the advancing army, Hornblower’s brain was busy noting landmarks on the shore and the corresponding soundings opposite them. The leading squadron of cavalry could be seen distinctly now—men riding cautiously, their sabres drawn, looking searchingly on all sides as they rode; in a war where every rock and hedge might conceal a musketeer determined on killing one enemy at least their caution was understandable.

Some distance behind the leading squadron Hornblower could make out a longer column of cavalry, and beyond that again a long, long line of white dots, which puzzled him for a moment with its odd resemblance to the legs of a caterpillar all moving together. Then he smiled. They were the white breeches of a column of infantry marching in unison; by some trick of optics their blue coats as yet showed up not at all against their grey background. “And a half ten!” called the leadsman.

He could take the Sutherland much closer in here when he wanted to. But at present it was better to stay out at half gunshot. His ship would not appear nearly as menacing to the enemy at that distance. Hornblower’s mind was hard at work analysing the reactions of the enemy to the appearance of the Sutherland–friendly hat-waving by the cavalry of the advanced guard, now opposite him, gave him valuable additional data. Pino and his men had never yet been cannonaded from the sea, and had had no experience so far of the destructive effect of a ship’s heavy broadside against a suitable target. The graceful two-decker, with her pyramids of white sails, would be something outside their experience. Put an army in the field against them, and they could estimate its potentialities, but they had never encountered ships before. His reading told him that Bonaparte’s generals tended to be careless of the lives of their men; and any steps taken to avoid the Sutherland’s fire would involve grave inconvenience—marching back to Malgret to take the inland road, or crossing the pathless hills to it direct. Hornblower guessed that Pino, somewhere back in that long column and studying the Sutherland through his glass, would make up his mind to chance the Sutherland’s fire and would march on hoping to get through without serious loss. Pino would be disappointed, thought Hornblower.

The cavalry at the head of the main column were opposite them. The second regiment twinkled and sparkled in the flaming sunlight like a river of fire.

“Those are the cuirassiers!” said Villena, gesticulating wildly at Hornblower’s elbow. “Why do you not fire, Captain?”

Hornblower realised that Villena had probably been gabbling Spanish to him for the last quarter of an hour, and he had not heard a word he had said. He was not going to waste his surprise attack on cavalry who could gallop away out of range. This opening broadside must be reserved for slow-moving infantry.

“Send the men to the guns, Mr. Bush,” he said, forgetting all about Villena again in a flash, and to the man at the wheel “Starboard a point.”

“And a half nine,” called the leadsman.

The Sutherland headed closer into shore.

“Mr. Gerard!” hailed Hornblower. “Train the guns on the road, and only fire when I give you the signal.”

A horse artillery battery had followed the cavalry—popgun six-pounders whose jolting and lurching showed well how bad was the surface of the road, one of the great highways of Spain. Then men perched on the limbers waved their hands in friendly fashion to the beautiful ship close in upon them.

“By the mark six!” from the leadsman.

He dared not stand closer in.

“Port a point. Steady!”

The ship crept on through the water; not a sound from the crew, standing tense at their guns—only the faint sweet music of the breeze in the rigging, and the lapping of the water overside. Now they were level with the infantry column, a long dense mass of blue-coated and white-breeched soldiers, stepping out manfully, a little unreal in the haze of dust. Above the blue coats could be seen the white lines of their faces—every face was turned towards the pretty white-sailed ship creeping over the blue-enamel water. It was a welcome diversion in a weary march, during a war when every day demanded its march. Gerard was giving no orders for change of elevation at the moment—here the road ran level for half a mile, fifty feet above the sea. Hornblower put his silver whistle to his lips. Gerard had seen the gesture. Before Hornblower could blow, the centre maindeck gun had exploded, and a moment later the whole broadside followed with a hideous crash. The Sutherland heeled to the recoil, and the white, bitter-tasting smoke came billowing up.

“God, look at that!” exclaimed Bush.

The forty-one balls from the Sutherland’s broadside and carronades had swept the road from side to side. Fifty yards of the column had been cut to fragments. Whole files had been swept away; the survivors stood dazed and stupid. The guntrucks roared as the guns were run out again, and the Sutherland lurched once more at the second broadside. There was another gap in the column now, just behind the first.

“Give it ‘em again, boys!” yelled Gerard.

The whole column was standing stock still and silly to receive the third broadside; the smoke from the firing had drifted to the shore now, and was scattering over the rocks in thin wreaths.

“Quarter less nine!” called the leadsman.

In the deepening water Hornblower could close nearer in. The next section of the column, seeing the terrible ship moving down upon them implacably, about to blast them into death, was seized with panic and bolted wildly down the road.

“Grape, Mr. Gerard!” shouted Hornblower. “Starboard a point!”

Farther down the road the column had not fled. Those who stood firm and those who ran jammed the road with a struggling mass of men, and the Sutherland, under the orders of her captain, closed in upon them pitilessly, like a machine, steadied again, brought her guns to bear upon the crowd, and then swept the road clear with her tempest of grapeshot as though with a broom.

“God blast me!” raved Bush. “That’ll show ‘em.”

Villena was snapping his fingers and dancing about the deck like a clown, dolman flying, plume nodding, spurs jangling.

“By the deep seven!” chanted the leadsman. But Hornblower’s eye had caught sight of the little point jutting out from the shore close ahead, and its hint of jagged rock at its foot.

“Stand by to go about!” he rasped.

His mind was working at a feverish pace—there was water enough here, but that point indicated a reef—a ridge of harder rock which had not been ground away like the rest of the shore, and remained as a trap below the surface on which the Sutherland might run without warning between two casts of the lead. The Sutherland came up to the wind, and stood out from the shore. Looking aft, they could see the stretch of road which she had swept with her fire. There were dead and wounded in heaps along it. One or two men stood among the wreck; a few were bending over the wounded, but most of the survivors were on the hillside above the road, scattered on the steep slopes, their white breeches silhouetted against the grey background.

Hornblower scanned the shore. Beyond the little point there would be deep water close in again, as there had been on the other side of it.

“We will wear ship again, Mr. Bush,” he said.

At the sight of the Sutherland heading for them the infantry on the road scattered wildly upon the hillside, but the battery of artillery beyond had no such means of escape open to it. Hornblower saw drivers and gunners sitting helplessly for an instant; then saw the officer in command, his plume tossing, gallop along the line, calling the men to action with urgent gesticulations. The drivers wheeled their horses on the road, swinging their guns across it, the gunners leaning down from the limbers, unhooking the gun trails, and bending over their guns as they worked frantically to bring them into action. Could a battery of nine-pounder field pieces effect anything against the Sutherland’s broadside?

“Reserve your fire for the battery, Mr. Gerard,” shouted Hornblower.

Gerard waved his hat in acknowledgment. The Sutherland swung slowly and ponderously round. One gun went off prematurely—Hornblower was glad to see Gerard noting the fact so as to punish the gun’s crew later—and then the whole broadside was delivered with a crash, at the moment when the Italian artillerymen were still at work with the rammers loading the guns. The rush of smoke obscured the view from the quarterdeck; it did not clear until already one or two well-served guns were rumbling up into firing position again. By that time the wind had rolled it away in a solid bank, and they could see the hard hit battery. One gun had had a wheel smashed, and was leaning drunkenly over to one side; another, apparently hit full on the muzzle, had been flung back from its carriage and was pointing up to the sky. There were dead men lying around the guns, and the living were standing dazed by the torrent of shot which had delayed them. The mounted officer had just flung himself from his saddle and let his horse go free while he ran to the nearest gun. Hornblower could see him calling the men about him, determined on firing one shot at least in defiance of the thundering tormentor.

“Give ‘em another, men!” shouted Gerard, and the Sutherland heeled once more to the broadside.

By the time the smoke cleared away the Sutherland had passed on, leaving the battery behind. Hornblower could see it wrecked and ruined, another of its guns dismounted, and not a soul visible on his feet near the guns. Now the Sutherland was opposite more infantry—the second division of the column, presumably—which shredded away in a panic up the hillside section by section as the Sutherland neared them. Hornblower saw them scattering. He knew that it was as damaging to an army to be scattered and broken up like this as for it to be decimated by fire; he would as soon not kill the poor devils, except that his own men would be more delighted at casualties among the enemy than at a mere demoralisation whose importance they could not appreciate.

There was a group of horsemen on the hillside above the road. Through his telescope he could see that they were all splendidly mounted, and dressed in a variety of uniforms flashing with gold and diversified with plumes. Hornblower guessed them to be the staff of the army; they would serve well as a target in the absence of larger bodies of formed troops. He attracted Gerard’s notice and pointed. Gerard waved back. His two midshipmen-messengers went running below to point out the new target to the officers on the lower gun deck; Gerard himself bent over the nearest gun and squinted along it, while the gun captains set the tangent sights in accordance with the orders he bellowed through his speaking trumpet. Gerard stood aside and jerked the lanyard, and the whole broadside followed the shot he fired.

The blast of shot reached the group of horsemen. Men and horses went down together; there was hardly a rider left in his saddle. So universal was the destruction that Hornblower guessed that close under the surface soil must be rock, flying chips of which had scattered like grapeshot. He wondered if Pino were among those hit, and found himself to his surprise hoping that Pino had had both legs shot off. He told himself that until that morning he had not even heard Pino’s name, and he felt a momentary scorn for himself, for feeling a blind animosity towards a man merely because he was his opponent.

Some officer a little farther down the road had kept his men together, drawn up stubbornly in a mass along the road, refusing to allow them to scatter. It was small advantage that this stern discipline brought his men. Hornblower brought his ship steadily round until the guns bore, and then tore the steady regiment to fragments with a fresh broadside. As the smoke eddied around him a sharp rap on the rail at his side made him look down. There was a musket ball stuck there—someone had fired at long range, two hundred yards or more, and succeeded in hitting the ship. The ball must have been nearly spent when it arrived, for it was embedded to half its depth and had retained its shape. It was just too hot to touch; he picked it out with his handkerchief over his fingers, and juggled with it idly, as he had done, he told himself, with hot chestnuts when he was a boy.

The clearing smoke revealed the new destruction he had wrought, the slaughtered files and heaped up dead; he fancied that he could hear even the screaming of the wounded. He was glad that the troops were scattering up the hillside and presented no target, for he was sick of slaughter although Bush was still blaspheming with excitement and Villena still capering at his side. Surely he must reach the rear of the column soon—from advanced guard to rearguard the army could not occupy more than eight or nine miles of road. As the thought came into his head he saw the road here was full of stationary waggons—the baggage train of the army. Those squat vehicles with four horses apiece must be ammunition caissons; beyond was a string of country carts, each with its half-dozen patient oxen, duncoloured, with sheepskins hanging over their foreheads. Filling the rest of the road beside the carts were packmules, hundreds of them, looking grotesquely malformed with their ungainly burdens on their backs. There was no sign of a human being—the drivers were mere dots, climbing the hillside having abandoned their charges.

The ‘Account of the Present War in the Peninsula’ which Hornblower had so attentively studied had laid great stress on the difficulties of transport in Spain. A mule or horse was as valuable—several times as valuable, for that matter—as any soldier. Hornblower set his expression hard.

“Mr. Gerard!” he shouted. “Load with grape. I want those baggage animals killed.”

A little wail went up from the men at the guns who heard the words. It was just like those sentimental fools to cheer when they killed men and yet to object to killing animals. Half of them would deliberately miss if they had the chance.

“Target practice. Single guns only,” bellowed Hornblower to Gerard. The patient brutes would stand to be shot at, unlike their masters, and the gun layers would have no opportunity to waste ammunition. As the Sutherland drifted slowly along the shore her guns spoke out one by one, each one in turn hurling a hatful of grape, at extreme grapeshot range, on to the road. Hornblower watched horses and mules go down, kicking and plunging. One or two of the packmules, maddened with fear, managed to leap the bank out of the road and scrambled up the hill, scattering their burdens as they did so. Six oxen attached to a cart all went down together, dead simultaneously. Held together by their yokes they stayed, two by two, on their knees and bellies, their heads stretched forward, as if in prayer. The main deck murmured again in pity as the men saw the result of the good shot.

“Silence there!” roared Gerard, who could guess at the importance of the work in hand.

Bush plucked at his captain’s sleeve, daring greatly in thus breaking in on his preoccupation with a suggestion.

“If you please, sir. If I took a boat’s crew ashore I could burn all those waggons, destroy everything there.”

Hornblower shook his head. It was like Bush not see the objections to such a plan. The enemy might fly before guns to which they had no chance of replying, but if a landing party were put within their reach they would fall upon it fiercely enough—more fiercely than ever as a result of their recent losses. It was one thing to land a small party to attack fifty artillery men in a battery taken completely by surprise, but it was quite another to land in the face of a disciplined army ten thousand strong. The words with which Hornblower tried to soften his refusal were blown into inaudibility by the explosion of the quarterdeck carronade beside them, and when Hornblower again opened his mouth to speak there was a fresh distraction on the shore to interrupt him.

Someone was standing up in the next cart destined to receive fire, waving a white handkerchief frantically. Hornblower looked through his glass; the man appeared to be an officer of some sort, in his blue uniform with red epaulettes. But if he were trying to surrender he must know that his surrender could not be accepted in that it could not be put into effect. He must take his chance of the next shot. The officer suddenly seemed to realise it. He stooped down in the cart and rose again still waving his handkerchief and supporting someone who had been lying at his feet. Hornblower could see that the man hung limp in his arms; there was a white bandage round his head and another round his arm, and Hornblower suddenly realised that these carts were the ambulance vehicles of the army, full of the sick and of the wounded from yesterday’s skirmish. The officer with the handkerchief must be a surgeon.

“Cease fire!” bellowed Hornblower, shrilling on his whistle. He was too late to prevent the next shot being fired, but luckily it was badly sighted and merely raised a cloud of dust from the cliff face below the road. It was illogical to spare draught animals which might be invaluable to the French for fear of hitting wounded men who might recover and again be active enemies, but it was the convention of war, deriving its absurdity from war itself.

Beyond the waggon train was the rearguard, but that was scattered over the hillside sparsely enough not to be worth powder and shot. It was time to go back and harass the main body once more.

“Put the ship about, Mr. Bush,” said Hornblower. “I want to retrace our course.”

It was not so easy on a course diametrically opposite to the previous one. The wind had been on the Sutherland’s quarter before; now it was on her bow and she could only keep parallel to the shore by lying as close-hauled as she would sail. To make any offing at all when they reached the little capes which ran out from the shore the ship would have to go about, and the leeway she made might drift her into danger unless the situation were carefully watched. But the utmost must be done to harass the Italians and to demonstrate to them that they could never use the coast road again; Bush was delighted—as Hornblower could see from the fierce light in his eyes—that his captain was going to stick to his task and not sail tamely off after defiling once along the column, and the men at the starboard side guns rubbed their hands with pleasure at the prospect of action as they bent over the weapons that had stood unused so far.

It took time for the Sutherland to go about and work into position again for her guns to command the road; Hornblower was pleased to see the regiments which had re-formed break up again as their tormentor neared them and take to the hillside once more. But close-hauled the Sutherland could hardly make three knots past the land, allowing for the vagaries of the coast line and the wind; troops stepping out as hard as they could go along the road could keep their distance from her if necessary, and perhaps the Italian officers might realise this soon enough. He must do what damage he could now.

“Mr. Gerard!” he called, and Gerard came running to his beckoning, standing with face uplifted to hear his orders from the quarterdeck. “You may fire single shots at any group large enough to be worth it. See that every shot is well aimed.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

There was a body of a hundred men or so massed on the hillside opposite them now. Gerard himself laid the gun and estimated the range, squatting on his heels to look along the dispart sights with the gun at full elevation. The ball struck the rock in front of them and ricocheted into the group; Hornblower saw a sudden swirl in the crowd, which scattered abruptly leaving two or three white-breeched figures stretched on the ground behind them. The crew cheered at the sight of it. Marsh the gunner had been hurriedly sent for by Gerard to take part in this accurate shooting; the gun he was training killed more men in another group, over which flashed something on a pole which Hornblower, straining his eye through his telescope, decided must be one of the imperial eagles which Bonaparte’s bulletins so often mentioned, and at which British cartoonists so often jeered.

Shot after shot crashed out from the Sutherland’s starboard battery as she made her slow way along the coast. Sometimes the crew cheered when some of the scrambling midgets on the hillside were knocked over; sometimes the shot was received in chill silence when no effect could be noted. It was a valuable demonstration to the gunners on the importance of being able to lay their guns truly, to estimate range and deflection, even though it was traditional in a ship of the line that all the gunners had to do was to serve their guns as fast as possible with no necessity for taking aim with their ship laid close alongside the enemy.

Now that the ear was not deafened by the thunder of a full broadside, it could detect after each shot the flattened echo thrown back by the hills, returning from the land with its quality oddly altered in the heated air. For it was frightfully hot. Hornblower, watching the men drinking eagerly at the scuttle butt as their petty officers released them in turns for the purpose, wondered if those poor devils scrambling over the rocky hillsides in the glaring sun were suffering from thirst. He feared they were. He had no inclination to drink himself—he was too preoccupied listening to the chant of the man at the lead, with watching the effect of the firing and with seeing that the Sutherland was running into no danger.

Whoever was in command of the shattered field artillery battery farther along the road was a man who knew his duty. Midshipman Savage in the foretop attracted Hornblower’s attention to it with a hail. The three serviceable guns had been slewed round to point diagonally across the road straight at the ship, and they fired the moment Hornblower trained his glass on them. Wirra-wirra-wirra; one of the balls passed high over Hornblower’s head, and a hole appeared in the Sutherland’s main topsail. At the same time a crash forward told where another shot had struck home. It would be ten minutes before the Sutherland’s broadside could bear on the battery.

“Mr. Marsh,” said Hornblower. “Turn the starboard bowchasers on that battery.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Carry on with your target practice, Mr. Gerard.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

As part of the programme for training his men into fighting machines it would be invaluable to give them firing practice while actually under fire from the enemy—no one knew better than Hornblower the difference between being fired at and not being fired at. He found himself in the act of thinking that one or two unimportant casualties might be worth receiving in these circumstances as part of the crew’s necessary experience, and then he drew back in horror from the thought that he was casually condemning some of his own men to mutilation or death—and he might himself be one of those casualties. It was intolerably easy to separate mentally the academic theories of war from the human side of it, even when one was engaged in it oneself. To his men down below the little uniformed figures scrambling over the hillside were not human beings suffering agonies from heat and thirst and fatigue; and the still figures which littered the road here were not disembowelled corpses, lately fathers or lovers. They might as well be tin soldiers for all his men thought about them. It was mad that at that moment, irrelevantly in the heat, and the din of firing, he should start thinking about Lady Barbara and her pendant of sapphires, and Maria, who must now be growing ungainly with her child within her. He shook himself free from such thoughts—while they had filled his mind the battery had fired another salvo whose effect he actually had not noticed.

The bow-chasers were banging away at the battery; their fire might unsteady the men at the field guns. Meanwhile the broadside guns were finding few targets offered them, for the Italian division opposite them had scattered widely all over the hillside in groups of no more than half a dozen at the most—some of them were right up on the skyline. Their officers would have a difficult time reassembling them, and any who wished to desert—the ‘Account of the Present War in the Peninsula’ had laid stress on the tendency of the Italians to desert—would have ample opportunity today.

A crash and a cry below told that a shot from the battery had caused one at least of the casualties Hornblower had been thinking about—from the high-pitched scream of agony it must have been one of the ship’s boys who had been hit; he set his lips firm as he measured the distance the ship still had to sail before bringing her broadside to bear. He would have to receive two more salvoes; it was the tiniest bit difficult to wait for them. Here came one—it passed close overhead with a sound like an infinity of bees on an urgent mission; apparently the gunners had made inadequate allowance for the rapidly decreasing range. The main top gallant backstay parted with a crack, and a gesture from Bush sent a party to splice it. The Sutherland would have to swing out now in readiness to weather the point and reef ahead.

“Mr. Gerard! I am going to put the ship about. Be ready to open fire on the battery when the guns bear.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Bush sent the hands to the braces. Hooker was forward in charge of the headsail sheets. The Sutherland came beautifully up into the wind as her helm was put down, and Hornblower watched the field guns, now less than a quarter of a mile away, through his glass. The gunners saw the Sutherland swinging round—they had seen that before, and knew the tempest of shot that would follow. Hornblower saw one man run from the guns, and saw others follow him, clawing their way desperately up the bank on to the hillside. Others flung themselves flat on their faces—only one man was left standing, raving and gesticulating beside the guns. Then the Sutherland heaved to the recoil of her guns once more, the acrid smoke came billowing up, and the battery was blotted out of sight. Even when the smoke cleared the battery could not be seen. There were only fragments—shattered wheels, an axle tree pointing upwards, the guns themselves lying tumbled on the ground. That had been a well-aimed broadside; the men must have behaved as steadily as veterans.

Hornblower took his ship out round the reef and stood in again for the shore. On the road just ahead was the rear of an infantry column; the leading division must have been formed up again on the road while the Sutherland was dealing with the second one. Now it was marching off down the road at a great pace, embanked in a low, heavy cloud of dust.

“Mr. Bush! We must try and catch their column.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

But the Sutherland was a poor sailor close-hauled, and time and again when she was on the point of overtaking the rear of the column she had to go about and head out from the shore in order to weather a projecting point of land. Sometimes she was so close to the hurrying infantry that Hornblower could see through his glass the white faces above the blue tunics of the men looking back over their shoulders. And here and there along the road in the track of the division he saw men who had fallen out—men sitting by the roadside with their heads in their hands, men leaning exhausted on their muskets staring at the ship gliding by, sometimes men lying motionless and unconscious on their faces where they had fallen, overwhelmed by fatigue and heat.

Bush was fretting and fuming as he hastened about the ship trying to coax a little more speed out of her, setting every spare man to work carrying hammocks laden with shot from the lee side to the weather side, trimming the sails to the nicest possible degree of accuracy, blaspheming wildly whenever the gap between the ship and men showed signs of lengthening.

But Hornblower was well content. An infantry division which had been knocked about as badly as this one, and then sent flying helter skelter in panic for miles, dropping stragglers by the score, and pursued by a relentless enemy, would have such a blow to its self-respect as to be vastly weakened as a fighting force for weeks. Before he came into range of the big coastal battery on the farther side of Arens de Mar he gave over the pursuit—he did not want the flying enemy to recover any of its lost spirit by seeing the Sutherland driven off by the fire of the heavy guns there, and to circle round out of range would consume so much time that night would be upon them before they could be back on the coast again.

“Very good, Mr. Bush. You can put the ship on the starboard tack and secure the guns.”

The Sutherland steadied to an even keel, and then heeled over again as she paid off on the other tack.

“Three cheers for the cap’n,” yelled someone on the maindeck—Hornblower could not be sure who it was, or he would have punished him. The storm of cheering that instantly followed drowned his voice and prevented him from checking the men, who shouted until they were tired, all grinning with enthusiasm for the captain who had led them to victory five times in three days. Bush was grinning, too, and Gerard, beside him on the quarterdeck. Little Longley was dancing and yelling with an utter disregard for an officer’s dignity, while Hornblower stood sullenly glowering down at the men below. Later he might be delighted at the recollection of this spontaneous proof of the men’s affection and devotion, but at present it merely irritated and embarrassed him.

As the cheering died away the voice of the leadsman made itself heard again.

“No bottom! No bottom with this line!”

He was still doing the duty to which he had been assigned, and would continue to do it until he received orders to rest—a most vivid example of the discipline of the navy.

“Have that man taken out of the chains at once, Mr. Bush!” snapped Hornblower, annoyed at the omission to relieve the man.

“Aye aye, sir,” said Bush, chagrined at having been for once remiss in his work.

The sun was dipping in purple and red into the mountains of Spain, in a wild debauch of colour that made Hornblower catch his breath as he looked at the extravagant beauty of it. He was mazed and stupid now, in reaction from his exalted quickness of thought of the preceding hours; too stupid as yet even to be conscious of any fatigue. Yet he must still wait to receive the surgeon’s report. Someone had been killed or wounded today—he remembered vividly the crash and the cry when the shot from the field guns hit the ship.

The gunroom steward had come up on the quarterdeck and touched his forehead to Gerard.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” he said. “But Tom Cribb’s been killed.”

“What?”

“Yes indeed, sir. Knocked ‘is ‘ead clean off. Dretful, ‘e looks, laying there, sir.”

“What’s this you say?” interrupted Hornblower. He could remember no man on board of the name of Tom Cribb—which was the name of the heavyweight champion of England—nor any reason why the gunroom steward should report a casualty to a lieutenant.

“Tom Cribb’s been killed, sir,” explained the steward. “And Mrs Siddons, she’s got a splinter in ‘er—in ‘er backside, begging your pardon, sir. You could ‘ave ‘eard ‘er squeak from ‘ere, sir.”

“I did,” said Hornblower.

Tom Cribb and Mrs Siddons must be a pig and a sow belonging to the gunroom mess. It was a comfort to realise that.

“She’s all right now, sir. The butcher clapped a ‘andful o’ tar on the place.”

Here came Walsh the surgeon with his report that there had been no casualties in the action.

“Excepting among the pigs in the manger, sir,” added Walsh, with the deprecating deference of one who proffers a joke with his superior officer.

“I’ve just heard about them,” said Hornblower.

Gerard was addressing the gunroom steward.

“Right!” he was saying. “We’ll have his chitterlings fried. And you can roast the loin. See that you get the crackling crisp. If it’s leathery like the last time we killed a pig, I’ll have your grog stopped. There’s onions and there’s sage—yes, and there’s a few apples left. Sage and onions and apple sauce—and mark you this, Loughton, don’t put any cloves in that sauce. No matter what the other officers say. I won’t have ‘em. In an apple pie, yes, but not with roast pork. Get started on that at once. You can take a leg to the bos’n’s mess with my compliments, and roast the other one—it’ll serve cold for breakfast.”

Gerard was striking the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other to accentuate his points; the light of appetite was in his face—Hornblower fancied that when there were no women available Gerard gave all the thought he could spare from his guns to his belly. A man whose eyes could go moist with appetite at the thought of fried chitterlings and roast pork for dinner on a scorching July afternoon in the Mediterranean, and who could look forward with pleasure to cold leg of pork for breakfast next day should by right have been fat like a pig himself. But Gerard was lean and handsome and elegant. Hornblower thought of the developing paunch within his own waistband with momentary jealousy.

But Colonel Villena was wandering about the quarterdeck like a lost soul. Clearly he was simply living for the moment when he would be able to start talking again—and Hornblower was the only soul on board with enough Spanish to maintain a conversation. Moreover, as a colonel he ranked with a post captain, and could expect to share the hospitality of the captain’s cabin. Hornblower decided that he would rather be overfed with hot roast pork than have to endure Villena’s conversation.

“You seemed to have planned a feast for tonight, Mr. Gerard,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Would my presence be unwelcome in the gunroom to share it?”

“Oh no, sir. Of course not, sir. We would be delighted if you would honour us, sir.”

Gerard’s face lit with genuine pleasure at the prospect of acting as host to his captain. It was such a sincere tribute that Hornblower’s heart was warmed, even while his conscience pricked him at the memory of why he had invited himself.

“Thank you, Mr. Gerard. Then Colonel Villena and myself will be guests of the gunroom tonight.”

With any luck, Villena would be seated far enough from him to save him from the necessity for Spanish conversation.

The marine sergeant drummer had brought out all that the ship could boast of a band—the four marine fifers and the four drummers. They were marching up and down the gangway to the thunder and the rumble of the drums while the fifes squealed away bravely at the illimitable horizon.

The bald words and the trite sentiments seemed to please the crew, although every man-jack of it would have been infuriated if he had been called a ‘jolly tar’.

Up and down went the smart red coats, and the jaunty beat of the drums thrilled so that the crushing heat was forgotten. In the west the marvellous sky still flamed in glory, even while in the east the night was creeping up over the purple sea.