“For what we are about to receive,” another man intoned, but before he could finish the prayer Lieutenant Holderby’s voice interrupted him. Holderby was at his station by the aft companionway.
“Open ports!” the fifth lieutenant shouted, and petty officers repeated the order to the forward part of the deck.
The lower deck’s thirty gunports were all raised, letting the daylight stream in to reveal the ship’s masts like three gigantic pillars about which was a seething mass of half-naked men. The long guns were all in their recoil position, hard back against their breeching ropes.
“Run them out!” Holderby ordered. “Run them out!”
Gunners heaved on the tackles and the thick deck quivered as the huge guns were hauled forward so that their barrels protruded beyond the ship’s sides. Holderby, elegant in silk stockings and gilded coat, ducked under the deck beams. “You’re to lie down between the guns. Between the guns! Lie down! Have a rest, gentlemen, before proceedings commence. Lie down!”
Chase had ordered his crew to lie down because the enemy’s shot, coming from directly forward, could scream down these decks and each one could easily knock down a score of men, but if the gun crews were in the intervals between the heavy cannons then they would be mostly protected. Up on the quarterdeck Chase shuddered and when Haskell raised an eyebrow, the captain smiled. “She’s going to be knocked to pieces, ain’t she?”
Haskell rapped a knuckle on the quarterdeck rail. “French-built, sir, well built.”
“Aye, they do make good ships.” Chase stood on tiptoes to see across the barrier of the hammock netting to where the Royal Sovereign was almost up to the enemy line. “She survived,” he said admiringly, “and she’s been under fire for twenty-three minutes! Dreadful gunnery, wouldn’t you say?”
The tip of the British right horn was about to tear into the enemy, but the Pucelle was in the left horn and that was still well short of the line, and the enemy could still fire without fear of any reply. Chase winced as a round shot smacked through his sails to open a succession of holes. The Pucelle’s ordeal had begun, and all he could do now was sail slowly on into an ever-increasing storm of gunnery. A fountain spewed up on the starboard side, spattering one of the carronade crews. “Water’s cold, eh, lads?” Chase remarked to the bare-chested gunners.
“We won’t be swimming in it, sir.”
A topsail shivered as a high shot slashed through. The ships ahead of the Pucelle were taking a more serious pounding, but the Pucelle was drawing closer and closer, heaved by the big swells and wafted by the ghosting wind, and every second took her nearer to the guns and soon, Chase knew, he would be under a much heavier cannonade, and just as he thought that so a heavy round shot struck the starboard cathead and whirled a wicked splinter of oak across the forecastle. Chase was suddenly aware that his fingers were drumming nervously against his right thigh and so he forced his hand to be still. His father, who had fought the French thirty years before, would have been appalled by these tactics. In Chase’s father’s day the ships of the line edged together, broadside to broadside, taking exquisite care never to expose their vulnerable bows and sterns to a raking, but this British fleet went bull-headed at the enemy. Chase wondered whether his father’s memorial stone had been delivered from the masons, and whether it had been placed in the church choir, and then he touched the prayer book in his pocket. “Hear us and save us,” he said under his breath, “that we perish not.”
“Amen.” Haskell had overheard him. “Amen.”
Sharpe climbed back to the forecastle where he found the marines crouching by the hammock netting and the carronade crews squatting behind their barrels. Sergeant Armstrong was standing by the foremast, scowling at the enemy line which suddenly seemed much nearer. Sharpe looked to his right and saw the Royal Sovereign had reached the enemy line. Her crew had hauled the fallen studdingsails inboard and her guns were at last firing as the vast ship pierced the enemy’s formation. A ripple of filthy smoke was traveling from her bows to her stern as she emptied her larboard broadside into the stern of a Spanish ship and her starboard guns into the bows of a Frenchman. One of the Royal Sovereign’s topmasts had fallen, but she had broken the enemy line and now she would be swallowed into their fleet. The next ship in Collingwood’s column, the two-decked Belleisle, was still a long way behind which meant the Royal Sovereign must fight the enemy single-handed until help arrived.
A slap overhead made Sharpe look up to see that a hole had been punched through the Pucelle’s foresail. The ball had then pierced all the lower sails, one after the other, before vanishing astern. Another crash, close to his feet, made him spin around. “Low on the bows, sir,” Armstrong said. “They hit the cathead earlier.” That would have been the first crash Sharpe had heard and he saw that the starboard cathead, a stout timber that jutted from the bows and from which the anchor was lowered and raised, was gouged almost halfway through.
His heart was thumping, his mouth was dry and a muscle twitched in his left cheek. He tried clamping his jaws shut to still the muscle, but it kept quivering. A shot landed close by the Pucelle’s bows and spattered water back over the beak and forecastle. The sprit-topsail yard under the reaching bowsprit twitched. one end flying into the air, then fell, broken, to hang close to the sea. This was worse than Assaye, Sharpe reckoned, for at least on land a soldier had the illusion that he could step left or right and so try to avoid the enemy’s shot, but here a man could only stand as the ship crawled toward the enemy line which was a row of massive batteries, each ship carrying more artillery than had marched with Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army. Sharpe could see the cannon balls looking like short pencil lines that flickered in the sky, and each pencil line meant a ball was coming more or less straight toward the Pucelle. A dozen enemy were firing at Nelson’s ships now. Another hole appeared in the Pucelle’s foresail, a studdingsail boom was shot away, a crash sounded close to the larboard water line and another enemy shot bounced across the swells to leave a trail of foam close on the starboard side. An odd whistling sound, almost a moan, but with a curious sharp rhythm, came from near the ship, then went silent. “Chain shot, sir,” Sergeant Armstrong said. “Sounds like the devil’s wings beating, it does.”
The Royal Sovereign had vanished, her position marked only by a vast cloud of smoke out of which the rigging and sails of a half-dozen ships stood against the cloudy sky. The noise of that battle was a continuous thunder, while the sound from the ships ahead of the Pucelle was of gun after gun, close together, unending, as the French and Spanish crews took this chance of firing at an enemy who could not fire back. Two shots struck the Pucelle close to the water line, another ricocheted from her larboard flank, gouging a splinter as long as a boarding pike, a fourth struck the mainmast and broke apart one of the newly painted hoops, a fifth screamed past the forward starboard carronade, decapitated a marine, threw two others back in a spray of blood, then whipped overboard to leave a trail of red droplets glistening in the suddenly warm air.
“Throw him overboard!” Armstrong screamed at his marines who appeared paralyzed by their comrade’s sudden death. Two of them took hold of the decapitated body and carried it to the rail beside the carronade, but before they could heave it overboard Armstrong told them to take the man’s ammunition. “And see what’s in his pockets, lads! Didn’t your bloody mothers teach you to waste not and want not?” The sergeant paced across the deck, picked up the severed head by its bloody hair and dropped it over the side. “Are they kicking?” He looked at the two men who lay like rag dolls in the sheet of blood that covered a quarter of the deck.