Pasco appeared out of the smoke, his face working in agony before he crumpled, blood smearing the deck. But Bowden couldn’t help him – he and King were frantically reloading muskets for Midshipman Pollard, who’d ransacked the marines’ arms-chest for any remaining weapons.
As the wounded signal-lieutenant was dragged away they kept up a furious fire on Redoutable in a mechanical frenzy, aiming at the darting figures in the tops that were making a slaughter-house of Victory’s decks. This drew venomous fire in return, and as King handed over a loaded musket he was killed instantly with a bullet to the forehead.
The main-yard of the French ship jerked, teetered and then fell – hacked away by quick-thinking matelots who had made for themselves a perfect bridge across the chasm. With incredulous cheers the French swarmed up onto the yard and began racing across.
It was a complete about-face in fortunes: with so many of Victory’s upper-deck defenders brought down there was now the unthinkable possibility that the English flagship herself would be taken.
Captain Adair sprinted up with a file of marines and took position directly opposite to open fire. The leaders of the boarding fell into the yawning crevasse to a hideous death, crushed by the working together of the two hulls.
Those following hesitated – fatally. The boatswain had forced the starboard sixty-eight-pounder carronade around and blasted five hundred musket balls into their midst. They fell back, their triumphant battle-cries turning instantly to the screams of the dying. And at that moment Adair took a ball in the neck and pitched forward, dead.
Then a miracle came in the looming shape of Temeraire, which had been the next ship astern of Victory and now came up against the other side of Redoutable with a ponderous crash. Her carronades immediately took dreadful toll and then, together with Victory, her great guns in broadside smashed together into the vitals of the hapless ship.
It was a brutal slaughter but insanely the brave Frenchmen fought on until the blood-soaked hulk was in ruins – and her colours were struck.
A full-throated cheer roared out, redoubled when Victory’s men came to realise the perilous margin of their triumph. Bowden, stunned by the impact of the last hour, reeled over to the poop rail to watch Nelson taking the surrender. He couldn’t see him in the cheering crowds so he turned back wearily to the three men remaining standing on the poop.
Then urgent shouts came from the fo’c’sle – bearing down on them was the van of the enemy, fresh ships that were at last turning back to come to the aid of their centre. Yet Victory’s sacrificing had successfully pierced the line and other British ships, Neptune, Britannia, Leviathan, all had crowded through and now steered to face them. There would be no rescue.
Another burst of wild cheering broke out – it was the Bucentaure hauling down her colours, the commander-in-chief Villeneuve now a prisoner. And ahead the giant Santissima Trinidad, mauled by three English battleships was battered into submission and capitulated.
A wide-eyed seaman hurried up the ladder and blurted breathlessly, ‘L’tenant Pasco desires ’e should be told, how is y’ signals crew?’
‘He needs to know if we’re able to work signals,’ Robins said, looking about him. ‘Er, I’m senior hand. We’re still flagship and will need signals – I’ll see he gets ’em.’ He paused and added with gravity, ‘Mr Bowden, I’d be obliged should you inform L’tenant Pasco as we shall close up a team directly.’
The poop was a ruin of draped ropes and wreckage from aloft but the flag locker was still intact and somewhere signal halliards not shot away would be found. Bowden clattered down the ladder to the quarterdeck. It was in name and appearance a battlefield – decks torn up, shattered guns, wreckage and sanded blood-stains everywhere, but the men were still serving their guns and in the rigging passing stoppers to hold together vital shot-torn lines.
It took cold courage of an exceptional quality to leave the relative safety of the deck and mount the shrouds to expose their bodies in full view of snipers, staying to work there while a tempest of lethal langrel and chain-shot ripped through in an attempt to disable their ship.
At the main-hatchway the only ladder left in action was slippery with blood – it was by this route that the unfortunates were carried below.
On the gun-deck there was a different kind of helclass="underline" in the reeking, thunderous dimness it was the remorseless pain and labour of loading and heaving out the massive guns in a never-ending cycle. At any moment there could be the sudden eruption of a round-shot through the side in unstoppable killing violence.
In these acrid, smoke-filled confines the battle was being fought – and won – by the same gunners whose skill and tenacity had kept up a deadly fire the enemy could never match.
Bowden paused, awestruck at so much violence and noise in a confined space. The visceral rumble of the guns as they were run out, the squeals of their trucks as a counterpoint, their iron, now truly hot after hours of action, producing a violent recoil, some leaping insanely to strike the deckhead beams, their tons weight falling again with an appalling crash at extreme hazard to the tired men serving them.
The middle gun-deck was the same, a torment of clamour and darkness, and then to the lower gun-deck with the biggest guns of all, three-ton monsters chest-high to a man, bellowing out with a lightning flash and clap of thunder that hammered at the senses.
But nothing prepared Bowden for the Hades that was the orlop. No smoke hid the reality of suffering. The pitiless gleam of lanthorns played on the carpet of maimed bodies, the retching, moaning, bloody humanity waiting for their turn on stage – the concentration of light on the midshipmen’s mess table, where Surgeon Beatty was working on a spreadeagled man, who writhed and shrieked.
He finished his task. Bowden saw a brief glimpse of a piece of limb tossed into a tub with a meaty thump while the raw, pulsing stump was dealt with and the body, mad with pain, carried off by the loblolly boys. Straightening, Beatty wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and moved off to select the next, resembling an angel of death in his black smock, caked with blood and body fluids.
Bowden gulped, and in the gloom began stepping over the wretches in every state of agony, from uncontrollable convulsions to a deadly pale stillness. One man lay panting, his hands over the obscenity of his entrails, patiently waiting to die; another was propped up, his brutally mangled face unrecognisable, sobbing quietly. Everywhere Bowden looked, others were heroically controlling their suffering.
The blast and thunder of the guns on deck above was mercifully drowning the inhuman screeches and tormented moaning, but it was a scene that would stay with him for ever.
‘Er, L’tenant Pasco?’ he asked weakly, of a passing surgeon’s assistant.
‘There,’ the man said irritably, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. Bowden gingerly made his way over to the larboard side where a pair of lanthorns glimmered.
He saw Pasco by their light – but something about the tension in the group next to him caused him to hesitate. He made out Scott, the chaplain, and Burke, the purser, supporting someone against a broad knee at the ship’s side, one in a lace shirt with no indication of rank.
It was Nelson. Bowden’s gaze froze. Their cherished commander-in-chief was wounded. He couldn’t look away from the slight form, clearly in agony but with his eyes closed, Scott rubbing his chest and others hovering.