England and Other Stories

ARTICLES OF WAR

HE HAD THE wretchedest of coach journeys, a grey relentless drizzle shrouding everything, clogging the roads when they should have been at their firmest and denying him any farewell visions of apple-hung orchards or golden stooks. Harvest time and every field sodden. And all the while the familiar desolation claiming him, like some awful return to school.

They changed horses late in Totnes, and night had fallen when they arrived. It had been falling all day. So, he would have to wait now till dawn. It was always some small relief when you first saw the ships. He saw a distant twinkle of lanterns, through the gloom, out on the Sound.

So, he must wait. And then no doubt — he must wait. It was his experience that you sped upon their lordships’ bidding only to languish indefinitely pending further orders. His chest was taken into the Bell. He had intended making some better arrangement for his shore quarters only to fall back on the known devil. It was convenient. It was convenient to say, ‘I am at the Bell.’ He had no money for grandeur.

He was shown to his chamber. He knew it — or one like it. He had been confined here before, as had God knows how many others like him. It was strange that it felt so immediately incarcerating when it was bigger by far than any pitching cabin.

He took off his hat and cloak and at once felt chilly. He inspected the supply of candles. There was a meagre fire that appeared to have been unwillingly lit. It was only just September after all. September, 1805. In August, three weeks ago, he had passed his twenty-fifth birthday. So — he would not have to note it solely to himself at sea. Was it noteworthy?

He removed his gloves. He resisted an attack of the ancient urge to chew his fingertips. He pissed into the chamber pot. It was too early to sup, and if he supped — then what? He would sit by this skulking fire with this cheerless companion who was himself. He would commence the melancholy business of writing letters — letters as if written on the eve of sailing, though the eve of sailing might be three weeks hence.

If he made himself visible and if he were lucky (or unlucky) some other soul in blue and gold might hail him and invite him to dine. This might allay or aggravate his dejection. ‘Wives and sweethearts — may they never meet.’ But he had neither. He was the Navy’s wholly. So (he always told himself) he was spared the much-sung pangs. He had only these other pangs that came from some deep and solitary place within him.

Or, not to mince the matter: he had his mother and his two older sisters, Emily and Jane. His two older brothers, Arthur and George, moved in spheres beyond him and were both of an age, it sometimes seemed, to have been his father. And then there was his father. .

He was, in short — and he would only dwell on it in these dire intervals before embarkation — the youngest: the late and unexpected addition, the afterthought (though no thought could have gone into it), a plaything for his sisters, a thing of no account to his brothers and a conundrum to his parents.

Yet to the womenfolk at least he would write his fond, unmanning, still shore-bound letters — disguising his real misery — as if he were still the weeping schoolboy who had forgotten to pack his handkerchief. My Dearest Emily. . My Dearest Jane. .

How little they knew how their pet rag-doll could rasp out an order. He had sea legs (if he were allowed to find them) and sea lungs to go with them. And of what should he write to them now, long as it was since he had last beheld them? Of a perilous expedition by coach from Bridgwater?

One day his father had summoned him to the library and had spoken to him as if from an immense and patient height. It was so that he would be told the modest nature of his allowance, but it was also so that he would be given words of general advice. He had trembled before this seldom-seen figure as he would one day tremble before admirals. He would remember — as he remembered now — how his father’s face briefly softened as if in recognition of his discomfort.

His father had said, ‘My dear Richard, you are a member of the Longridge family. You are neither a king nor a commoner. You will understand all you need to know for your conduct in this world if you understand these words: know your place.’ His father’s features had hardened again and his eyes had seemed to probe him, as though behind the words, clear and implacable enough, were some other message.

The library clock had chimed, painfully, the morning hour. So distant had he felt from his father at this point that his father might as well have been a king and he himself the lowest of commoners. Or his father’s bastard child. It had dawned on him afterwards — gradually but with a nagging lucidity — that, though the matter was apparently being charitably concealed, this might indeed be the truth of it. It was not in his interest to question anything. It was in his interest to conspire in the deception and be grateful — to write milksop letters to his mother and sisters.

He was perhaps, though it was not in his interest ever to verify it, what his schoolfellows had called a ‘fitz’.

He prodded the disobliging fire with the poker. He recalled his mother’s once constant refrain to the maid, like some further, if unwitting, piece of parental advice: ‘A feeble fire, Betty, is worse than an empty grate.’

He saw again his schoolfellows, remembered their plaintive names. Ashmole, Palgrave, Wilkes. .

Since he had not, even with the advantages of education, overcome by his own ingenuity the problem of his essential superfluity, it came down to the Army, the Navy or the Church. He preferred blue to red, and preferred either to the black-and-white absurdity of being a parson in a pulpit.

He hadn’t thought much, strangely, about a thing called the sea. He was acquainted with it now. And he hadn’t known that service in the King’s Navy, even when he was commissioned and sea-seasoned (even more so then) would involve these vile periods of limbo and of dismal self-exposure — a creature neither of land nor sea, caught between a dubious homesickness and three or four days, depending on the course and the weather, of actual vomiting.

There was no evil in the world but uselessness and no good but its opposite. This he understood, if he would never, precisely, understand his father’s words. He knew that his present disease could only be cured by a series of remedies. It would be eased, a little, by the first sight of his ship, then, more so, by first stepping upon it, but it would only be fully purged (and only then with much retching and wishing to be dead) once that ship had drawn up its chain. Now he was denied even the weakest of those medicines. He did not even know if his ship was at anchor.

He might have enquired at once of the innkeeper, he might enquire of anyone, but he did not want to suffer the naval indignity of having to ask the whereabouts of his vessel. He went to the window and, craning his neck, saw the lights across the water. He imagined himself foolishly asking, ‘Is any one of those the Temeraire?’

He would surely know at dawn anyway by the evidence of his own eyes. A Second Rate would be unmistakable. And the sight of it, the pride of it, even under veiling drizzle, would surely chase away this malady. He had never served before in anything so mighty. Even his sisters had understood. And the fact that their lordships had assigned him to a ship of the line must mean that he had not gone entirely unnoticed and was deemed to have some worth. It might even be the preliminary to a captaincy and a frigate.

But he had heard of the Temeraire. The name itself was an audacity. Quite so. A French name when they were fighting the French. Napoleon himself might be styled ‘téméraire’. More to the point, and as everyone knew (even his sisters knew and forbore to mention it), mutiny had been committed on this ship. Men had dangled from its yardarms. And for all its guns and its belligerent name, the Temeraire had never seen action. Its timbers had been damaged by storm and dishonoured by sedition, but never been struck by shot.

Well, it was like him then. He had not seen action either. Action: it was the very word of validated existence. He had received such promotion as he had neither by grace and favour (perhaps the whole fleet knew who, or what, he really was) nor by exploit. Their lordships must have dispatched him to the Temeraire because of his competence at gun practice. What else was there to do on the blockade? Gun practice, and more gun practice.

Now he would command a bigger battery of guns on a bigger gun deck. But as a proportion of the ship’s sum of guns his command would be less than what it had been on a Fourth Rate. And on the same gun deck, commanding the other battery, might be another lieutenant — call him Lieutenant Lanyard — and Lieutenant Lanyard might be a squeak of eighteen, and have seen action.

But the Temeraire had seen no action save mutiny.

Why, every time, must he suffer these forebodings, like Jonah going down to Joppa — and now be posted to a ship accordingly?

He turned from the window back to the fire. He might go out into the dripping lamp-lit darkness, to stretch his coach-cramped legs, to breathe at least the salt-flavoured air, to soothe his spleen. But he did not want, for some reason, to walk, as he would have to, among seamen, though he would walk among them continually soon — let it be soon — on a heaving deck. He had noticed, even as the coach rolled in, that there were many of them. He had not before seen Plymouth so crowded, nor felt — but this was some sixth sense and not a matter of the eyes — the place so pregnant with preparation. So, it would not be so long perhaps.

His reluctance was not from any cocked-hatted nicety. They would of course make way for him and touch their temples, and should he wish (but he would not) to snap at them they would jump. As sailors ashore they were not technically under the full articles of war, but it was not in their interest not to look lively. Everyone minded their interest.

It was more that such contact, or non-contact, might only make him think of his hidden respect for them, or even — and this was mutinous thinking indeed — his kinship. Aboard ship it was different. You acted within timber bounds and iron laws. A sea creature? More a sea mechanism. You did not think. This was precisely his affliction now. He was thinking.

But it was one thing the Navy had taught him, or confirmed in him. He was not, essentially, different from them. Mutinous meditation indeed. Perhaps his competence in the matter of gunnery, his quality of leadership in this regard, his ability at least to achieve what others achieved, but without threats of the lash or other fulminations — with only firmness of voice and no other tyranny than that of his pocket watch — owed itself to this inadmissible fact. Again, boys, and again! And yet again, till you are but part of your guns. As if, as he commanded them, he were really proclaiming: Know your place, know your place. Neither God nor man will find any other place or use for you than this. It is what you are for.

But he had not known action. He knew about noise and smoke and hissing steam that became as great as the smoke. He knew about powder in the mouth and nostrils. But he did not know about splinters. He trusted that, should the occasion arise and they were flying about, he would not lose his power of command. He would not lose his voice. He would not flinch or duck or wish to cover his face, not just because this would be unexemplary, but because he had been led to understand that whatever you did it made no difference.

He had not seen action, but some other sixth sense — a seventh sense — told him that this time might be the occasion. He trusted, simply, that he would do his duty. As he had done his careful, grateful, unmutinying duty to his father and (if such she was) his mother.

My dearest Mama. . My dearest. .

He stabbed the fire. All boldness and lustre had fled from his heart. He chewed his fingers savagely. He was himself like one of his mother’s empty grates.

Temeraire. It was a mocking name, it was an inglorious, ill-fated ship.