“Commodore to Captain. Why did you not obey my order?”
Hornblower’s glass had detected that Raven had not fully secured her guns—she had not bolted her gun-ports so as to open them more quickly if the order should come, but Hornblower could see the ports opening slightly with the roll of the ship; moreover, judging by the little of the action of the guns’ crews that he could see she had not uncoupled and stowed her train-tackles, giving her a clear five seconds’ start over the other ships. It was foolish of Cole to try an old trick like that, and one so easily detected; it was right that Raven’s shame should be proclaimed to the rest of the squadron. Half the object of manoeuvres was to sharpen the captains’ wits; if they could manage to outguess the Commodore, well and good, for there would be more likelihood of their outguessing a Frenchman should they meet one.
Raven hastily secured gun-ports and train-tackles; to rub the lesson in Hornblower waited until he was sure the order had just been passed on her decks and then sent up the signal for running out the guns. The counter-order following so quickly upon the order caught Raven unready—Hornblower could imagine the cursing officers on her main-deck—and she was seven full seconds behind any other ship in hoisting the ‘evolution completed’ signal. There was no need to comment on the fact, however—everybody in the Raven would be aware of what had happened and a further reprimand might weaken Cole’s authority over his ship’s company.
It was an active busy morning for all hands in the squadron, and Hornblower, looking back to the time when he was a midshipman, could well imagine the sigh of relief that must have gone round when at noon he signalled for the order of sailing and gave the men a chance to get their dinners. He watched the Nonsuch’s crew form up to receive their ration of spirits; the eager, skylarking hands each carrying his wooden piggin; the guard over the grog tub—the latter with its painted inscription ‘The King, God bless him’; Montgomery and two master’s mates watching the issue. Hornblower saw one hand come up to the tub and be indignantly hustled away; evidently he was a defaulter who had been sentenced to lose his ration and who had nevertheless tried to obtain it. Such an attempt would earn a man at least two dozen lashes in some ships but, judging by Montgomery’s actions, it would mean no more than a further deprivation or a spell at the pumps or perhaps a turn at cleaning out the heads.
The liveliness and high spirits of everyone were reassuring. He could rely on these men to fight as desperately as any occasion could demand; equally important, he could rely on them to endure the long tedious days of beating about at sea, the wearisome monotony of life in a ship of the line, without more complaint than one need expect. But he must drop a hint to Bush to see that this happy condition endured. A hornpipe competition—theatricals—something of that sort would be necessary soon, unless there should happen to be enough action to keep the men’s minds busy. And with that decision he turned and went below, having managed, as a result of this morning’s activity, to drive out of his own mind any worry about what to do with Braun when the latter should recover from his wound. After all, he might yet die.
Besides, there were the charts of the Frisches Haff and the approaches to Königsberg to study, and plans to be made for assailing Bonaparte’s communications in the neighbourhood, should that be possible. If this fair wind should persist he had no more than three days in which to think out some method of attack there. He had the charts got out for him and he pored over them, irritably calling for lamps to light his dim cabin so as to make it possible to read the little figures scattered over them. The soundings were fantastically complex, and the problem of studying them was not made easier by the fact that he had three different charts to study—a Swedish one with the soundings marked in Swedish feet, a new French one with the soundings in metres, and only a sketchy English one in fathoms. It was a toilsome business comparing them, and perfectly unsatisfactory in the end, seeing that they did not agree.
Yet the desirability of striking a blow there was perfectly obvious. In roadless Poland and East Prussia the only way of distributing provisions and munitions to Bonaparte’s swelling armies was by water. His main advanced base was Danzig, whence the troops in Central Poland could be supplied by the Vistula. But the large forces in East Prussia and in eastern Poland were dependent on the other river systems, radiating from Königsberg and Elbing on the Frisches Haff. This Frisches Haff, a long narrow lagoon almost cut off from the Baltic by a long sand spit, would quite obviously be the scene of extensive barge traffic from Elbing to Königsberg. Fifty miles long, a dozen miles wide, shallow—three or four fathoms at most—with the narrow entrance guarded by the guns of the fortress of Pillau, from the French point of view it would be a perfectly safe route for water-borne supplies, sheltered both from storms and from the English. Danzig was the best objective, of course, for a stroke anywhere along this Baltic coast, but Danzig was safe, several miles from the sea up the Vistula, and heavily fortified to boot. If it took Bonaparte and a hundred thousand men three months to capture Danzig Hornblower was not likely to effect anything against the place with a couple of hundred marines. Danzig was impregnable to him. For that matter, so were Königsberg and Elbing. But it was the communications between them that he wanted to break; no more than that need be done. The wind was fair, too—a Roman would look on that as a good omen.
Chapter Fifteen
This was an ideal night in which to reconnoitre the entrance to the Frisches Haff. Overcast, so that not much light came from the summer sky with the sun only just below the horizon, and a strong breeze blowing—the sloop Hornblower had just quitted had single-reefed her topsails earlier in the evening. A strong breeze and a choppy sea meant that there would be far less chance of guard-boats—guard-boats manned by landsmen—rowing a close watch over this boom that Hornblower was setting out to investigate.
But at the same time Hornblower was suffering considerable personal inconvenience from the choppy sea. The cutter in whose sternsheets he sat was rearing and plunging, standing first on her bows and then on her stern, with the spray flying across her in a continuous sheet, so that a couple of hands had to bale all the time. The spray was finding its way remorselessly through the interstices of his boat-cloak, so that he was wet and cold, and the cold and the violent motion inevitably turned his mind towards seasickness. His stomach felt as uneasy as his body felt uncomfortable. In the darkness he could not see Vickery, beside him at the tiller, nor Brown tending the sheet, and he felt a poor sort of relief at the thought that his pallor and uneasiness were not apparent to them. Unlike some victims he had met he could never be seasick unselfconsciously, he told himself bitterly, and then with his usual rasping self-analysis he told himself that that should not surprise him, seeing that he was never unselfconscious at all.
He shifted his position in the stern of the cutter, and clutched his cloak more tightly round him. The Germans and Frenchmen guarding Pillau had as yet no knowledge that an English squadron was so close to them; it was less than an hour ago that he had come up in the darkness with the two sloops, leaving Nonsuch and the bomb-vessels over the horizon. A soft-hearted senior officer in Königsberg might easily hesitate before giving orders that a guard-boat should toilsomely row guard up and down the boom on such a blustery night, and even if the orders were given there was every chance that the petty officer in charge of the boat might shirk his duty—especially as there could not be much love lost between French who would occupy the higher ranks and the Germans who would fill the lower ones.