The Baltic Prize

Chapter 53

Morning broke with a most unwelcome cast from a Baltic fog, visibility down to fifty yards in a damp, woolly miasma that lay unmoving in every direction.

‘At least it’ll slow ’em down,’ Dillon said, for with fog there were calms and no one was sailing anywhere in the Kattegat in these conditions, but gunboats?

The daybreak patrol left. A single horseman – there were only five mounts on the whole island – and four marines trying to march in the soft and now sticky sand.

With luck the fog would burn off in a few hours but it might linger as it sometimes did in these parts, a dismal pall on the day. In Tyger it would be trying, fog droplets forming on every sail surface and ropes hundreds of feet up, keeping up a continuous but irregular bombardment of fat, cold drops that-

A distant flat pop. Another two close together, out in the impenetrable whiteness.

Shots? How …?

‘To quarters! Stand to! All hands close up to your stations!’ Kydd blared.

Men raced to ramparts and outworks to face the distant threat. With their small numbers it took bare minutes.

Kydd stood in the centre, sword drawn; beside him was Clinton.

They waited grimly, then out of the whiteness figures began to form, stumbling towards them.

‘Hold your fire!’ roared Kydd.

His instinct was right. These were what remained of the patrol.

‘S-sir, Danskers are ashore!’ panted a corporal. ‘We sees ’em come over the hill from th’ south. More’n hundreds.’ He broke off to take breath. ‘They’s got gunboats with ’em, too.’

In the fog and darkness the Danes had executed a successful landing in the same place as they had themselves and were now established on land.

Kydd cocked an eye. ‘Mr Clinton?’

‘Send out patrols to reconnoitre and give ’em pause in their advance,’ the marine answered crisply. ‘Once we’ve their dispositions and strength we’ll know what to do.’

Parties of marines disappeared into the mist. A blanketing silence descended as Kydd and Clinton strained to catch betraying sounds.

After some time, a sudden flurry of muffled reports to the left, the south, showed that contact with the enemy had been made.

Nothing from the right, the northern shore.

More shots.

Kydd felt for the marines. It must be unnerving out there, shuffling about, senses at a screaming alert for shapes suddenly emerging from behind, in front, anywhere, that could just as well be friend as enemy.

The one priceless advantage they were gaining was that time was on their side. While the fog lingered, no one in their right senses would move forward against a prepared position and an alert defence, so they were safe until it lifted.

The patrols returned as a general lightening above told of the mist thinning, dissipating, but they had only scant information about the dispositions of the Danes.

‘Stand to!’ All along the ramparts and parapet a pitiful number of redcoats and nondescripts lay beside their weapons, tensely waiting.

The sun burst through in a shaft of brilliant light and in minutes the last of the white blanket had gone. As though in edgy watchfulness the scene held still and silent. Kydd could see nothing of the enemy, but then caught a scurrying off to the left, along the line of the dune top – and more in the scrub to the centre.

Clinton borrowed his pocket glass. ‘I see. Hmm. And there.’ He traversed the ground slowly, left to right, then pronounced, ‘What we have here is the positioning for a general advance. I do believe I will annoy them. Sergeant!’

A body of marines assembled and made off to the left, out of sight to the seaward side of the long dune formation that ran the length of the southern shoreline.

‘They’ll have to pull back or risk being cut off,’ Clinton said. ‘As long as we can keep it up we’ll be-’

He was interrupted by the most disturbing sound Kydd could conceive of – the heavy, gut-thumping sound of big guns. It could only be the gunboats, so close in they were out of sight below the sand hill’s skyline. And bringing doom with them. In a bitterly ironic twist the very thing that the Royal Navy prided itself on, command of the seas, was now with the enemy and, by this one stroke, they had ensured victory for themselves. Whatever manoeuvre Clinton could think of to outflank or drive a wedge by going around the dunes, his men would be under unendurable fire from close range. All that could be done now was to fall back into their flimsy defences and fight off the inevitable frontal attack.

The sergeant and his men straggled back. ‘Not good news, I fear, sir.’

Kydd waited for the man to go on.

‘All infantry, no guns to speak of in this terrain. Regular troops and-’

‘Numbers?’

‘Not above a thousand, sir.’

There was an appalled quiet as the news was digested. Outnumbered four, five to one. Only a miracle would see any standing at the end of day.

Unless Kydd treated for terms now.

‘This is because there’s been landings on the north shore, their forces dug in atop the dunes,’ the marine added.

Kydd took it in: at each side of the island the line of dunes converging at the lighthouse was now thick with enemy about to make their move, the relatively flat middle ground, scrubby and featureless giving little cover. He was no soldier but he could see what they’d be up against.

‘Strip the centre of men, send ’em to the ends. They’ll be coming in off the long dunes,’ he ordered.

‘Yes, sir,’ Clinton said, with just the tiniest trace of impatience. Kydd grinned awkwardly: he should have realised that the seasoned officer knew what to do.

The ramparts were banks thrown up on the only rising ground that was worthy of the name and would make for a cruel uphill slog in the soft going for any wave of attackers. Once they left the shelter of the dunes they had twenty-five yards of open ground, then the steep slope of the ramparts – Kydd felt they had a chance if the marines held steady, kept them at bay in the open ground.

The hoarse braying of a trumpet, startlingly close, was the signal.

On both sides it seemed as if the dunes were suddenly alive with moving forms, rising to advance for the kill, the gleam of blades and forest of muskets a heart-chilling sight.

The marines opened fire: a deliberate, aimed volley that found its mark. Here and there, among the stumbling figures, bodies dropped. Some writhed in agony, others lay as anonymous humps.

The Danes pressed on, the least disciplined wildly throwing off shots at their tormentors but soon it became clear that it was not going to plan. The loose sand was making it impossible to move at more than a shambling stagger and, without waiting for the order for the advance, they broke up and retreated before they’d left the shelter of the dunes.

As the smoke dispersed, Kydd looked along their lines. None of the marines appeared hit and, reassured, he surveyed the field. The advantage was theirs – for now.

‘They’ll have to take us from the front.’ Clinton said. ‘Their gunboats can’t reach us here and while we’re in possession …’

Then it would be a very bloody affair.

‘How would you do it?’ Kydd asked Clinton.

‘Not sure I’d like to try. He’s got the numbers right enough, but that’s only of consequence if he can get them here. I don’t envy him the decision.’

The uneasy quiet to their front lengthened with an unbearable tension until utterly unexpectedly men poured over the top of the nearest sand hill – more, until the ground was thick with struggling figures heading for the middle ground.

Within minutes muskets were banging up and down the line, but the wave of attackers pressed on and reached the more hard-packed sand between the converging dunes. Then with harsh battle cries they hurled themselves forward into the thinly held British centre.

Clinton had the marines by twos racing inwards, but the dunes had now become firing pits and the enemy’s greater numbers told as a storm of bullets hammered into their puny defences, smothering the defensive fire.

‘Hold your fire!’ Clinton roared.

Kydd glanced at the Royal Marines captain in perplexity, then saw what he was about. In breathless exultation the first wave of the enemy had reached the base of the glacis, the slope at the base of the ramparts leading up to the parapet – and now faced the defenders themselves.

It was a master-stroke. As the fire from the dunes slackened and stopped for fear of hitting their own men, the attackers had to face what must come alone. The glacis was no hard-packed earthen slope to storm up to the final clash: it was that same deadly, slowing sand and it took its toll.

At point-blank range the marines poured in fire and men fell – but others in a paroxysm of despair and courage fought up towards where Kydd and his ragged band of last-ditch defenders waited. At the forefront was the Danish commander – Holstein, his sword a-main, face split by a rictus of screaming as he urged his men on the final yards – behind him others of the same raging desperation, more still behind.

It was madness but of a bravery that tore at Kydd, even as he met the man in a brutal smash at the lip of the glacis, the eyes wild and his blade a swinging bludgeon. Kydd easily parried it and quickly became aware that the man was out of breath and faltering. Another heavy sweep ended in a clash and slither of steel and he knew Holstein was near the end of his strength.

‘Yield!’ he shouted, against the din of battle around them.

The man looked at him as though he was demented and drew his sword back for a belly lunge but Kydd stepped nimbly aside and, as it whipped by, came down on the wrist but, jostled from behind, it failed. With a snarl, Holstein spun around in a savage lunge to the head. Kydd dropped to his knees to avoid it and the Dane triumphantly lifted up his blade two-handed for the settler.

More in sorrow than anger, Kydd’s Toledo steel flashed out and sank into flesh and bone. As the man gasped and fell, Kydd snatched it clear, sparing only an instant for the dying moments of a gallant but reckless foe, then scrabbling to his feet in the whirl of combat.

And before him in an insane charge a bull of a man was ramming a pike towards his stomach. Before he could move there was the ear-splitting crack of a gun by his ear and the man dropped the pike, caught in the stomach. Kydd spun around – there was Tysoe, his empty pistol dangling, a look of comical astonishment on his features. ‘Get out of it, you fool!’ he yelled hoarsely, and turned back to the fray. There were bodies now on both sides but the attack was thinning. Royal Marines had formed two lines across the top and were crashing out disciplined volleys, which told mercilessly, and the numbers locked in hand-to-hand combat fell away.

Not far distant Kydd saw that one was Dillon, his mechanical thrust and parry against a terrified young soldier who had an insane fit of giggling as he met the blows. At the same time Dillon was trying to end the fight but clearly could not bring himself to kill his assailant.

‘Let him go, Mr Dillon!’ he bawled. At Dillon’s step backwards and lowering of his sword, the panic-stricken youngster ran for his life.

There was now a general retreat, men streaming urgently for the safety of the dunes, and then, quite suddenly, the field of battle was quiet.

It was a stalemate. Kydd could not make an outflanking manoeuvre: the gunboats would slaughter them with grape. The Danes could not go for a frontal assault on the fortification without suffering unacceptable casualties.

It would now be a waiting game. Totally surrounded, the British must rely on what they had. Powder and shot were mustered and found perilously low, but more pressing was the discovery that their water casks had been pierced in the fighting and the contents lost into the sand. The spring to refill them was behind enemy lines. With no water, it was hours rather than days before the torment of thirst did what all the heroics of the day had not.

The Danes could be supplied by sea but sooner or later Tyger or another would come on the scene. Right now, though, would the new commander of the Danish forces accept defeat and slink away or would he dig in and send for an overwhelming reinforcement from Denmark, just an overnight sail away?

As the day drew to a close it became evident that the decision had been made. Camp fires sprang into life up and down the sand hills. They were staying.

With two dead and eight wounded, Kydd drew in his lines and did what he could to shore up their pitiful defences but there could be no doubt: at daybreak would come a final reckoning.

There did – but in an unexpected way. A wan morning light stole in and Kydd took in the unreal and wonderful sight of Tyger and Riposte safely some miles offshore, lying to anchor beyond the reefs where they’d prudently moored during the dark hours.

In a delirium of cheering, Kydd ordered their colours struck, then hoisted again upside-down, the universal signal of distress at sea.

The frigates caught on at once. Sail blossomed, and to one side of the island headed a vengeful Tyger and to the other Riposte.

Frantic work at the oars took the gunboats clear but there was no reprieve for the soldiers.

‘Sir, may I …?’

‘Certainly, my dear fellow.’

Clinton led his flanking column out to the seaward side of the dunes, another sent to the opposite foreshore, the threat of gunboat cannon fire now banished. The enemy had no alternative other than to retreat to avoid a wedge being driven in but, with the dunes now no hiding place, they were forced into the flat, open middle ground.

When the two-pounders were dragged up and began a fusillade of grape there was nowhere left to go. One by one white flags appeared and the reversal of fortune was complete.

As if in sympathy with the Danish woe, a thin rain began to fall, turning the sandy ground into a sticky sludge and adding to the misery of the defeated, who stood about in sullen groups.

More came down from the dunes, adding to the numbers, until Kydd realised that the prisoners were beginning to outnumber the captors. If they rose in revolt over the few guards that Kydd could spare, they would be overwhelmed leaving the mass free to occupy the fortifications and turn the situation right around.

That realisation must have sunk in, for an ugly ripple of unrest spread through the throng of prisoners. More came down from the dunes – it was inconceivable that there would not be a mass rising.

The crowd began spreading, moving. Marines with bayonets tried to stop them but what could they do – transfix helpless prisoners?

Then, one by one, several, many, tore themselves from the mass and stumbled hastily away, making for the western end of the island. Soon a sizeable number was heading that way in an incomprehensible dash for … what?

There was nothing Kydd could think of to stop the flight and he had to let them go.

Then it penetrated: the reason for the break was to get to the far end of the island and the landing place – and a reef-strewn shoal extensive enough to prevent his frigates entering but not gunboats. If they reached there safely, there would be gunboats a-plenty to pluck them off to freedom.

Climbing to the highest point of the parapet with his pocket spy-glass Kydd watched it all play out. Two, three gunboats curving in for the pick-up, the prisoners piling aboard, then the boats making off into the wind where the frigates could not go.

It was galling but the main object had been achieved: Bornholt was now securely in the hands of the British, who need fear no longer a night-time wrecking on it.

He swung the glass around. There was Tyger, a magnificent sight in the keen breezes and, as he watched, paying off to a broad reach out to sea. What was Bray up to?

It wasn’t long before he saw: the gunboats were making good speed into the wind but in the open sea the great driving sails of a frigate would tell. Even though her track was an extended zigzag to either side as she tacked into the wind, she was hauling in a frenzied gunboat in an effortless surge. Aboard, they must have known their fate was sealed but to the last they were stroking away, like demons, towards the distant coast of Denmark.

And all in vain. Her last board placed Tyger squarely across their path and the cruelly exhausted seamen collapsed on their oars and accepted defeat. Further off, Riposte was doing the same to another.

Victory could not have been more complete.