The Baltic Prize

Chapter 20

The two friends picked their way through the bleak emptiness, only a shattered cask, cast-aside debris and untidy fakes of worn rope left to show of a great navy. They paced slowly past the vacant docks where only a short time before there had been rows of battleships and frigates with names remembered from the Swedish wars when Denmark had shown how it was to be a great power.

Now nothing. Just the last sullen smoking from the ruins of Copenhagen, their capital city, bombarded to surrender by the British in order to seize that same fleet.

With a swelling anger in his heart Kommandorkaptajn Krieger trudged past the empty storehouses, the silent workshops, the emptiness and desolation. What was in Denmark’s future now? What was in his own?

‘I wish to hell that I’d done it, Johannes, orders be damned,’ muttered Kommandor Steen Bille beside him, kicking at a broken bucket.

As commander of the fleet, Bille had been thwarted in torching it to prevent it falling into the hands of the all-conquering British. The ineffective military commander, Peymann, now on court-martial for his life, had forbidden it. Instead, the city had been silent witness to the humiliating scene of their entire navy being towed away in procession, storehouses ransacked, everything that floated confiscated.

They walked on, wrapped in bitter thoughts.

‘What now, old friend?’ Krieger muttered bleakly. ‘Officers without a navy, sailors without a ship, like to be cast up on the beach.’

The thick-set, hard-jawed Bille didn’t reply for a moment, then said quietly, ‘Johannes, it’s not what becomes of us, but what of the Helstat, our honour? Are the Danes to be cast out from history?’

Krieger choked back a reply, and Bille continued, ‘Not all is adverse, my friend. Our fleet is no more, true, but the English have gone, too – they didn’t treat us as a conquered nation and left us still a sovereign people.’

‘Who are now weak and unprotected, damn their blood!’

‘We’re at war with them but that doesn’t mean we are friends now of the French. Crown Prince Frederick holds the line in Holstein only to deter the French from “protecting” us. We’re still free to set our own destiny.’

‘Steen, that is well, but what sticks in my throat is leaving the bastards to crow over their victory. Denmark is down but not finished.’

‘So what do you want to do to ’em? Throw stones?’ Bille said, then seeing the desolation on Krieger’s face, clapped a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re in the right of it, Johannes. Denmark is down but, if I’ve anything to do with it, she’s not out.’

They came to an end of the dockyard and took a boat across the water to Nyhavn for the taverns and bustling humanity to be found there, by unspoken agreement wanting to get away from the derelict sadness of Holmen.

‘Where are they all?’ Krieger said in astonishment, seeing the deserted tables and stillness.

A pot-boy told them, ‘They’s all gone off to Vor Frue Kirke to hear Schack Bissen give ’em heart.’ He was a fiery poet, known for his nationalism, but how could this be possible? The old cathedral had been spectacularly brought down in a consuming blaze during the bombardment.

Soon, at the ruin, they saw that the tumbled rubble and melted copper had been dragged away and in a roughly levelled area a swelling crowd – hundreds, a thousand or more, stood together in the stink of ash and charred timbers in shared despair.

There was a simple lectern where the altar had been. A tall, bearded man in severe black was holding forth, the crowd still and respectful.

The two edged in. Not in uniform, no particular notice was taken of them, and quickly within earshot they listened to the powerful oration. Of the long history of their Nordic forefathers, who had suffered before them but had gone on to voyage far and conquer. Who had taken heart from calamity, had risen above affliction and placed their traditional ways before all. And never should it be forgotten, in this time of self-doubt and humiliation, Denmark could hold to its heart that those same men had once seized a crown – the Crown of England itself!

It was stirring, moving, and gave perspective and meaning to what was happening to them.

‘Holger Danske may be a myth,’ Bissen intoned, invoking the hulking Viking celebrated by medieval Danish minstrels, ‘but in his very existence he carries the torch of liberty and courage for all Danes! Let us take strength from the past as we cross into our future and-’

‘Strike back!’ roared a red-faced man at the front of the crowd. ‘Show the English how we value our honour!’

Another shouted, ‘Or lie down and die!’

Bissen listened sorrowfully, then held up his hand. ‘Your true-hearted feelings do you credit, friends. But it is our fate that while the English were on our soil the army was far away and our navy was trapped in harbour. Now it is no more. They are a sea race and the largest army can do nothing to touch them.’

‘So we give up, crawl back to our homes?’

This was met by a frustrated roar.

Bissen waited for it to subside. ‘This is a time for enduring, for holding to our breasts that we have done what we could while the violators of our land were wreaking their worst. But now we must accept that there’s nothing more we can do to confront them – nothing!’

His words provoked a tide of dissatisfaction and resentment.

Bille stiffened and bellowed, ‘Hold!’

Heads turned and the commotion died. He pushed through to the speaker and hailed up as if to the main-top in a storm. ‘This is not so! There is a way to strike out and recapture our honour.’

Bissen’s eyes narrowed. ‘And who are you to state this, sir?’

‘Does it matter? I tell you now that there’s a way to take just revenge. The British – they have a weak spot, a vulnerability.’

‘Oh? Pray enlighten us, sir.’

‘Their Baltic trade! All of our misery comes from their desperate necessity to keep open their last artery of trade to Europe. If we fall on this with all the force we can muster, it will be sweet vengeance indeed.’

‘Sir, I’m a poet, no military man, and I can see no possible way we can do this. I beg you will accept our galling condition without repine until the Good Lord sees fit to visit peace upon us once more.’

‘I say again, there is a way. And I will tell you. In all our time of affliction under the bombardment there was one body of men who took the fight directly to the enemy. I had the honour to command those men – the valiant seamen who manned mere gunboats to face a great fleet and who did so much to wring honour from defeat. These will be the instruments of revenge we shall wield!’

‘Boldly said, sir. But I do not think I’m mistaken when I say that all our gunboats were taken from us, none left. How then will your men – gallant as well they may be – how can they inflict anything of consequence upon the enemy without the means to do so?’

There were scattered titters and frowns but Bille gave a grim smile. ‘We build ’em. Start now, and by the time the ice goes in spring, we will have a great fleet of the same gunboats that brought ruin and death to the English before. And we will use these to sow terror and dismay among their merchantmen, which will cause them to flee rather than dare the Sound.’

‘Build them? His Majesty will never countenance the expenditure. The navy is finished, gone. Why throw good money after it?’

‘Hr Bissen,’ Bille roared, ‘you underestimate the heart of the Danish people, who long for retribution.’

He moved up to join Bissen and addressed the crowd: ‘Fellow Danes! I stand before you to make supplication. The honour of Denmark is in your hands – I’m no orator or rouser of people but this day I offer you a course of action as will keep the flame of Danish valour alive! I ask you humbly to contribute your means in a public subscription as will see those gunboats built. When that is done, leave it to me and I will crew them with brave sons of Denmark who will take them into the very heart of the enemy!’

An outcry of fervent cheering swept over the crowd: here was a positive action that any might join and know they were doing their part for Danish honour. It went on and on until, with a pitying smile, Bissen held up his hands for quiet.

‘A gallant and spirited gesture – with but one fatal flaw.’

‘Sir?’

‘With all the will in the world, it cannot be done. We might throw in our skillings but what of that when Danzig deal and Prussian fir are denied us? We’re at war with England. They will not let it pass and without timber we cannot build our gunboats.’

A baffled hush fell but a strident voice could be heard from the back. ‘My house is to be repaired. I’d gladly sleep in the fields and know the timber’s going to a better cause!’

Another bellowed an offer, and more came until the meeting broke down into bedlam. That Copenhagen’s devastation must wait was nothing compared to the surging spirit that had come over them all at the realisation that they were no longer helpless.

They would have their gunboats.

Krieger knew just where to go in the deserted Holmen: the drawing office where the plans of all Denmark’s ships had been stored from the glory years past.

A curious doorman watched as he drew out those of the celebrated Swedish naval architect, af Chapman. These were the basis for the Danish gunboat force that Krieger had taken into action against the English not so long before.

Stout and clean-lined, they were, weight for weight the most powerful naval vessels ever designed. Their lethal effectiveness was in their gun: not a small-bore cannon but a single great gun of a calibre only ever seen in a ship-of-the-line. In a flotilla together, these would have the formidable fire-power of a battleship.

And they were designed for Baltic service: no hardy sea-keeping qualities that the English favoured but more the deadly speed that forty oars could give, the impetuous united rush on an unsuspecting prey from behind any one of the myriad islands of the archipelago.

While Bille saw to the organising of the public subscription he would study the plans carefully.

The gifted Chapman had a multitude of designs, large and small, but mostly for the sole purpose of defence. The fleet that defended Stockholm had been famously successful but that was not what Krieger wanted. Not defence – attack! A form of swift, well-armed galley that could be readily deployed and which would find haven and hiding in the many little ports around Denmark’s coast. A host of tiny assailants that in sum would cut the artery of trade and let the life-blood of England spill uselessly into the sea.