One of their mothers had the fever and the doctors wrapped her in flannel and fed her a mixture of brandy and gunpowder. More brandy and barrels of akvavit were being drunk in the city’s taverns which were full of sailors released from their duties on the walls. The city’s seven fire engines, great metal tanks mounted on four-wheeled carts with monstrous double-levered pumps on their tops, sat waiting at street corners. Another prayer meeting, this one in Holman’s Church, the sailors’ shrine, beseeched that the fire engines would not be needed, while in the arsenal on Tojhusgade the last refurbished muskets were handed out to the newest volunteers of the militia. If the British made a breach and assaulted the city then those brewery workers and clerks, carpenters and masons, would have to defend their homes. On Toldboden, in a small shop beside the Customs House Quay, a tattooist worked on a sailor’s back, making an intricate drawing of the British lion being drowned by a pair of Danish seamen.
“There are rules of war,” General Peymann told his supper guests, “and the British are a Christian nation.”
“They are, they are,” the university chaplain agreed, “but they’re also a very disputatious people.”
“But they will not treat women and children as combatants,” Peymann insisted. “Not Christian women and children. And this is the nineteenth century!” the General protested. “Not the Middle Ages.”
“These are very fine pilchards,” the chaplain said. “You get them from Dragsteds, I assume?”
In fifteen British batteries and on board sixteen bomb ships and in ten launches that had been specially fitted to hold smaller mortars, the officers consulted their watches. Rockets, launched from triangular frames, were set up beside the land batteries. It was not quite dark yet, but dark enough to conceal the batteries from the watchers on the city wall who did not see the heavy fascines protecting the long guns being dragged aside.
The clouds were breaking and the first stars showed above the city.
A linstock glowed red in a forward battery.
“They threaten to behave abominably,” General Peymann averred, “and hope we believe the threat. But common sense and humanity will prevail. Must prevail.”
“Christianity must prevail,” the university chaplain insisted. “A direct attack on civilians would be an offense against God himself. Is that thunder? And I thought the weather was clearing.”
No one answered and no one moved. It had sounded like thunder, but Peymann knew better. A gun had fired. It was far off, but the sound was heavy, the gut-pounding percussion of a heavy-caliber mortar. “God help us,” the General said softly, breaking the silence about his table.
The first bomb arced upward, its burning fuse trailing a thin red line of sparks and a tenuous trail of smoke. It was a signal, and from all around the city’s western edge and from the boats moored in the sound the other mortars fired. Howitzers slammed back on their trails to send their shells after the mortar bombs.
The burning fuses of the bombs reached up, red sparks curving in the night.
The gunners were reloading. The first bombs looked like livid shooting stars. Then, as they began their shrieking fall, the bomb trails converged. God had not shown mercy, the British possessed none and Copenhagen must suffer.
The first bomb broke through a roof with a cascade of splintering tiles, drove down through a plaster ceiling and lodged on an upper landing where, for an instant, it lay with a smoking fuse. Then, bumping and smoking, it rolled down a flight of stairs to lodge on a half landing. No one was in the house.
For a moment it seemed the mortar shell would not explode. The fuse burned into the hole of the wooden plug and the smoke just died away. Flakes of plaster dropped from the shattered ceiling. The bomb, a thirteen-inch black ball, just lay there, but the fuse was still alive, burning down through the last inch of saltpeter, sulphur and mealed powder until the spark met the charge and the bomb ripped the top story apart just as the other bombs of the first salvo came crashing down into the nearby streets. A seven-year-old girl, put to bed without supper for giggling during family prayers, was the first of the city’s inhabitants to die, crushed by an eleven-inch mortar shell that burst through her bedroom ceiling.
The first fires began.
Eighty-two mortars were firing. Their range was adjusted by varying the amount of powder in the charge and the gunners had specified the quantities of the different batteries to make sure the bombs all fell in the same areas of the city. In the north they were dropping the missiles into the citadel’s interior, while to the south the bombs were crashing into the streets closest to the wall. The crews of the fire engines trundled their heavy machines toward the first fires, but were obstructed by people trying to escape the bombs. A thirteen-inch shell cracked into a crowd, miraculously touching no one. Its fuse glowed red and a man attempted to extinguish it with his boot, but the bomb exploded and the man’s foot, trailing blood, arced over the screaming street. There was blood and flesh on the house fronts. Families tried to carry their valuables away from the threatened area, further congesting the alleys. Some folk took refuge in the churches, believing there would be sanctuary from the enemy in sacred walls, but the churches burned as easily as the houses. One bomb exploded in an organ loft, scattering pipes like straws. Another killed ten people in a nave. Some bombs failed to explode and lay black and malevolent where they fell. An artist, hurriedly assembling paper, pencils and charcoal, had a smaller shell plunge through his roof and lie smoking next to his unmade bed. He picked up the chamber pot, which he had still not emptied from the night before, and upended it on the missile. There was a hiss as the fuse was extinguished, then a vile stink.
A score of fires started. The fiercest broke up through the roofs as more bombs hammered down into the flames. The British had begun to fire carcasses now, hollow shells designed to burn rather than explode. The heaviest, fired from the big thirteen-inch mortars, weighed as much as a man and were stuffed with saltpeter, sulfur, antimony and pitch. They burned with a furnace-like intensity, the fire seething out of holes bored in their metal shells and no mere fire pump could quench such horrors. There was still a vestige of evening light in the watercolor sky through which the fuses of the plunging bombs left threads of smoke. The threads wavered, mingled in the wind and vanished, only to be renewed as more bombs and carcasses fell. Then the threads were touched with red as flame blossomed out of the thicker, boiling smoke that churned up from a city of cratered cobbles, broken rafters and burning homes. Scraps of shell casing whistled in city streets. The first fire came and the western edge of the city was ringed by the noise and flaring lights of the batteries. The bomb ships shuddered as their mortars fired, each flash illuminating the chain rigging with a deep red light shrouded in smoke. The British long guns fired at the wall, their targets conveniently outlined by the glare of the city fires, while the rockets flared and hissed to carry their explosive heads in wild trajectories that plunged indiscriminately into city streets.
Sharpe walked into the city. He carried the rifle on one shoulder and the seven-barreled gun on the other, but no one took any particular notice of him. Men were running toward the fires, families were fleeing them and the whole city reverberated to the thump of the bombs. Sharpe was going to Skovgaard’s warehouse because he did not know what else he could do. There was little point in visiting Bredgade for he was certain Lavisser would be with his General or else on the city walls, and Sharpe did not know how to find him.