The Years of Endurance (53 page)

By now the British reserve was entering the fight. The
Culloden,
the finest ship in the fleet, had met with disaster, her brave Captain Troubridge, in his anxiety to arrive in time, having taken the island too close and struck on the tail of the shoal. Here he remained al
l night in full view of the battl
e and in a state of agitation impossible to conceive, suffering the pounding of the sea and struggling to clear his vessel. But he served as a beacon for the
Swiftsure
and
Alexander
hurrying up from the west. The two great ships, furiously fired at by the battery on the island, rounded the reef safely in the haze and darkness and swept down on the centre of the French line, guided by the flashes of the guns and the lanterns gleaming through the British gun ports. In both vessels absolute silence was preserved, no sound being heard but the helmsman's orders and the shout of the leadsman calling the depths.

At one moment a dark shape loomed up in front of the
Swiftsure.
It was the
Bellerophon,
dismasted after her duel with the
Orient,
drifting out of the fight with a third of her crew dead or disabled. Only Captain Hallowell's flawless discipline prevented her from being swept by the
Swiftsure
^’
s
guns before her identity was revealed. But, despite the suspense and the spasmodic fire of the French, not a shot was fired. At 8.
0
3 p.m. precisely the
Swiftsure
dropped into the
Bellerophon s
vacant berth two hundred yards from the French flagship. At 8.
0
5, anchored and with her sails clewed up, she opened out with a tremendous broadside. A few minutes later Captain Ball in the
Alexander
followed suit.

It was about nine o'clock that Hallowell, still fresh to
the
fight,, noticed flames pouring out of one of the cabins of the
Orient.
He at once directed every available gun on the spot. The fire spread quickly owing to the way that oil, paint and other combustibles had been left about the French flagship. As the great vessel, the finest in the Republican navy, blazed more fiercely, every British ship in the neighbourhood trained her guns on her. Down in the hold of the British flagship Nelson heard of the impending fatality and insisted on being led up on deck to watch: as soon as he saw her imminence of doom he ordered the
Vanguard's
only undamaged boat to be lowered to rescue the survivors. With the fire racing downwards towards
the
Orient's
magazine, the ships about her closed their hatches or drifted away to avoid the explosion. Only
Swiftsure
and
Alexander
remained firing grimly up to the last moment, with long lines of men
with
buckets stationed to extinguish the outburst when it came.

At a quarter to ten the
Orient
blew up with a terrifying detonation. The shock could be felt by French watchers at Rosetta ten miles away, and down in the magazine of the
Goliath
the
boys and women
¹
at their blind
monotonous task of passing up the powder thought that the after-part of their own vessel had exploded. The whole bay was lit as brightly as day by the expiring flame of the great ship as she rose into the air. After she vanished silence fell on the combatants: then after some minutes the guns opened out again. As they did so the moon rose dazzling in her Egyptian beauty over the wreckage and slaughter.

Yet though the night was still young the battle was losing momentum. With the great Admiral who had conceived it dazed and disabled by his wound, the soul was gone out of it. Five of the French ships had already struck: another, the 8o-gun
Franklin,
was failing fast. But the victors after sailing, and fighting all day were exhausted. They would fire for a time and then desist: all night the battle flared up and then died away. " My people were so extremely jaded," reported Captain Miller of the
Theseus
9
" that as soon as they had hove our sheet anchor up they dropped under the capstan bars and were asleep in a moment in every sort of posture."
²
After the surrender of the
Franklin
the second lieutenant of
Alexander
approached Ball to tell him that, though the hearts of his men were as good as ever, they could do no more and begged him to let them sleep for half an hour by their guns. Nelson's slightly disjointed messages speeding through the night were received rather
than obeyed: in that confused in
terminable nightmare of weariness n
othing was ever quite carried th
rough to an end.

As it began to grow light the magnitude of the victory became

¹
One
Scottish
woman
bore
a
son
in
the
heat
of
the
action.—Long,
198.

²
Mahan,
Nelson,
I,
335.

apparent. At 5.27 a.m. Captain Hallo well noted that six enemy battleships had struck their colours; on board his own ship " carpenters were busy stopping the shot holes . . . , people employed knotting and splicing the rigging." At six he heard the minute guns of the
Majestic
firing as she buried her captain. The whole bay was floating with charred wreckage and dead bodies, mangled and scorched. By this time it was light enough to see that three other battleships were at the victors' mercy: dismasted hulks aground or drifting. Only Villeneuve's three spectators in the rear remained uninjured. Presently these slipped their anchors and began to bear out to sea. But one of them, the
Timoleon,
in her haste to be gone ran on to the sandbanks. Her crew swam ashore and made off inland, a cloud of smoke revealing that her captain had fired her. Alone of the thirteen French ships of the line the
Guil
laume Tell
and the
Genereux
with two frigates escaped into the blue of the Mediterranean. For a while
Theseus,
the only British ship sufficiently undamaged to carry sail, pursued them till a signal from the Admiral recalled her.

In the first aftermath of battle Nelson and his men could scarcely conceive the fullness of what they had done. All day on August 2nd they were engaged in fishing naked prisoners from rafts and floating wreckage—sullen, downcast fellows very different from the merry Frenchmen some of the older sailors remembered capturing in the American war before the Tricolour had supplanted the Lilies.
¹
More than two thousand unwounded prisoners were taken and nearly fifteen hundred wounded: that night Nelson dined half a dozen wounded French captains in his cabin. Brueys, the first Admiral in France, had been cut in half by a British cannon ball before the
Orient
blew up. Two thousand more of his men had been killed or drowned, nine of his thirteen battleships captured, two more destroyed. Nothing like it had been known since the day when the Duke of Marlborough had entertained a French Marshal and two Generals in his coach after Blenheim.

For it was not so much defeat that the French had suffered as annihilation. Though superior to their assailants by thirty per cent in men and twenty per cent in weight of broadside, and fighting
m
a chosen position in a dangerous bay with the head of their line protected by shore batteries, they had been overwhelmed by the

¹
Long,
199.

skill and ferocity of the attack. In a few hours they had literally been blown out of the water. And the price paid by the victors had been scarcely 200 men killed and 700 wounded. It was an astonishing testimony to the intensity and accuracy of British gunfire, to Nelson's leadership and to the new school of close fighting he had initiated. Above all it revealed, in the hands of an inspired commander, the quality of British discipline. In his general order thanking his men Nelson, recalling the mutinies of the previous summer, emphasised this point. " It must strike forcibly every British seaman how superior their conduct is, when in discipline and good order, to the riotous behaviour of lawless Frenchmen."
¹
Nothing so deeply impressed the same lawless Frenchmen, many of them professed atheists, as the religious service which was held on the morrow of the battle on the splintered, bloodstained decks of the British flagship. It struck them as an extraordinary thing that six hundred men—the roughest of the rough—could be assembled for such a purpose amid the scene of so much carnage and profess their mild faith with such order and quietness.

The battle was evidence also of the inadequacy of Revolutionary France's administration and the selfishness of her General. Because of the corruption prevailing everywhere after nine years of social scramble, the great ships—triumphs of the marine builder's art— were neglected and rotten, short of essential stores and their crews ill-fed and discontented at the long arrears in their pay. These handicaps to French courage and
elan
had been increased by Bonaparte's conscienceless theft of skilled gunners and seamen for his land operations and by his utter disregard of the needs of the fleet since his landing. Only a week before the battle Brueys had urged that its security depended on an immediate return to Toulon to refit. This, though he afterwards endeavoured to conceal the fact, Bonaparte had forbidden. Wishing to retain the fleet for his private purposes, he ignored expert advice and jeopardised the existence of the force on which French mastery of the Mediterranean depended. For so long as the Republican battle fleet was in being, the incursion of the British into that, to them baseless, sea could be only temporary and precarious.

With its destruction the whole position had changed in a night. On August ist the French, as masters of Egypt, Corfu and Malta

¹
Mahan,
Nelson,
I,
359.

and—save for Naples—of the entire southern shore of Europe from Cadiz to the Turkish frontier, held the Mediterranean in their grip. On August 2nd they were themselves immobilised in all the lands and islands they had crossed its waters to conquer.

The full consequence of this only dawned on men gradually. The transformation wrought by the battle of the Nile was too sudden to be realised in a night. The first assessment came from the ignorant Arabs of the Egyptian shore, who prompdy cut the throats of every Frenchman within reach and, lighting bonfires on the dunes, illuminated the coastline for three nights. Only the courage and energy of Bonaparte saved the victorious French army from immediate disaster. " Ah well," he observed when the news was brought him, " we must either remain in this country or quit it as great as the ancients. .
..
These English will compel us to do greater things than we meant." But though he rallied his men and by ruthless terrorism suppressed an Arab revolt, the fact remained that he and his army were virtually prisoners in a remote land, encircled by sea and desert, with no possibility of either receiving supplies from, or returning to, France. Five months after the battle he wrote that no news of any kind had been received from the Directory since July 6th. Even his communications between Rosetta and Alexandria were cut by the British warships.

Through weaknesses inherent in the early conduct of the war the Navy had failed to blockade the enemy in his own ports and so keep an unbroken ring of water round his swelling power. It had failed through a shortage of frigates to destroy the enemy's offensive while at sea. But in the third resort, through the splendour of Nelson's offensive, it had succeeded gloriously. By destroying the enemy's communications it had paralysed Ins movements. By depriving him of stores, reinforcements and sea-borne transports it had stopped Bonaparte from advancing on either India or Asia Minor. It had re-established British control over two thousand miles of vital sea highway, making possible the expulsion of the French from Malta, Corfu and the Adriatic islands, the defence of Naples and Sicily, the capture of bases in the Balearics and the resurrection of all the dormant forces of Europe against the overgrown power of France.

For months past the cowed nations of the Continent had beea showing signs of revolt against the greed and overbearing tyranny of their conquerors. In April
a Viennese mob had torn the Tri
colour, insolently flaunted in the populace's face, from the French embassy, and, though the Imperial authorities had subsequently made an abject apology, the underswell of national feeling remained. In May the Neapolitan Crown, terrified by the presence of " the merciless French robbers " in the States of the Pope, had secretly concluded a defensive alliance with Austria. Three months later the Emperor Paul of Russia, enraged by the French seizure of Malta, signed a military convention
with
Austria.