Ramage's Signal (2 page)

Ramage was surprised that despite the scorching strength of the noon sun the colours were not harsh; an artist would probably choose watercolours in preference to oils—except, ironically, for the water itself, which was a strong blue. But the heat … there was barely enough breeze to give the
Calypso
steerage-way and from time to time the wind collapsed the slight curves of her sails with a flap like a rheumatic washerwoman folding damp sheets.

Although standing under the quarterdeck blue-and-white-striped awning—which stopped him being cooled by an occasional downdraught from the mainsail—Ramage found the sun's glare dazzling because the wavelets reflected it everywhere, like the diamond-shaped pendants of a chandelier, and the muscles controlling his eyebrows ached from squinting. The planking of the deck was scorching, so his feet were swollen from the heat and tight in his shoes. He longed for the West Indies: the Tropics were hotter—but they had the regular cooling Trade winds.

He realized he was dozing although standing up, a trick learned by most midshipmen, when he heard Southwick, the Master, bellowing aloft in reply to a lookout's hail, and roused himself sufficiently to listen to the report—not that it would be anything interesting: this part of the French coast was typically “in between,” one of those tedious stretches of uninteresting land on the way to somewhere else.

“The village on the beam, sir: there's a sort of tall framework tower at the western end, an' begging yer pardon, sir, it's movin'.”

“The tower or the village?” demanded the practical Master, who was already looking round for his telescope.

“The tower, sir. There! It's—well sir, it looks as though it's
winking!
”

The disbelief in the seaman's voice, as though he was reporting a ghost, made Ramage snatch up his own telescope, pull out the two brass tubes until the eyepiece end lined up with a mark filed on the second, and steady the glass by leaning his elbows on the quarterdeck rail. With so little wind and sea the ship was not rolling and using a glass needed no feat of balancing.

There, encircled by the lens, was the tower. And close to it four or five new wooden buildings which seemed to be more than huts but less than regular barracks. This was what the lookout meant by “the village,” and the tower did appear to be winking. He gripped the telescope firmly and stared harder. Or blinking.

He heard Southwick's puzzled grunts and a moment later an exclamation from the Scots First Lieutenant, Aitken. “If there were hills and trees I'd say it was an enormous, great hide for shooting deer,” Aitken murmured as though talking to himself, “but here, where it's more like a desert …”

As the
Calypso
moved slowly along the coast the tower's angle changed, and Ramage suddenly realized that what at first seemed to be a square, wooden tower was simply a large rectangle of wood perhaps forty feet high, like a door without a frame or wall, its edge at right angles to the sea. As you approached you saw one side as a rectangle and assumed it was a cube. As you came abreast of it, all you saw was something that looked like a pine tree stripped of its branches, and as you passed and looked back you saw the other side of the rectangle.

It was a rectangle which looked like a section of a chess board and in which, even as he watched, one or two squares winked or blinked—or just moved.

Then he realized that it must be one of the new French semaphore towers, and at this very moment it was passing a message along the coast. But which way? The nearest village to this tower was Foix. But where were the other towers? The
Calypso
must have passed several, but unless the angle was right the lookouts would have seen them end-on—and this coast was littered with the bare trunks of pine trees which had died among the sand dunes, killed by harsh winds or goats or rats gnawing the bark.

Southwick and Aitken had both given up looking at the tower and were watching him, puzzled.

“It's one of the new semaphore towers,” Ramage explained. “The winking is the shutters opening and closing as they pass a message.”

“What are they signalling, I wonder,” Aitken mused.

“It shows either that they must have a powerful glass and can see our colours, or they recognize a French ship,” Southwick commented.

“More important, no general warning has been passed to them—or any French forces—to watch for a French frigate captured by the British,” Ramage said.

“They might be passing the warning now,” Southwick said with a chuckle that set his bulging stomach trembling and was a sign that he hoped action was on its way. “Telling someone else along the coast that they've sighted us.”

“How far could you distinguish the pattern of those squares if you had a powerful glass on a tripod and good light?” Ramage asked Aitken, who put his telescope back to his eye.

“I reckon it's two miles away now, sir. I can just see the wavelets on the beach. Ah—there's a man walking, so the shutters are about six feet square. Say a dozen miles, sir.”

“Well, I doubt if they're warning anyone about us,” Ramage said briskly, “because we must have passed several of these towers already without recognizing them, and each would have seen us and could have reported it.”

“Perhaps this one is just reporting that we're passing now?” Aitken ventured.

Ramage shook his head. “What are we making? Perhaps two knots. We've been in sight—close enough for them to identify us as a frigate—for more than an hour. They'd have passed such a message a long time ago.”

“They've stopped signalling now,” Aitken said. “Two men are walking away from the base of the tower, making for a hut. Ah, now there's a third who seems to have come down a ladder from the top of the tower.”

“Where are they going?” Ramage asked sharply. “Note which hut.”

“The third man is carrying something rather carefully.”

“A telescope?”

“Yes, sir, it could be.”

“He was probably watching the next tower acknowledging each word of the signal.”

“Ah, I can see a little platform on top,” Aitken said. “The ladder goes up to it. Even has an awning. Trust the French. A shelf for a flask of wine, too, I'll be bound.”

From the tone of Aitken's voice, with its soft Perthshire accent, it was hard to know whether the sin was in the luxury of the awning, the drinking of wine, or being French. Ramage finally decided it was probably all three.

“Two are going to the first hut on the west side of the headland and which has a flagpole outside; one—the man with the telescope—is going to the next farther inland, probably reporting to the garrison commander. Now another man has just walked round the base of the tower and gone to the third on the east side. The fourth and fifth huts are the same size. There's a sixth, much smaller and with a chimney. Probably the kitchen.”

Ramage looked through his telescope. Each hut could accommodate at least a dozen men. What size would the garrison be? Three men were needed to pass a signal, so a signal watch would comprise three men. They would be on duty only during daylight, which in summer lasted about sixteen hours. Four hours on and four off meant two watches a day for six men. Plus a cook. Plus sentries—two on duty at any one time throughout the twenty-four hours. Two hours on and six off. Eight men.

The province's Army commander would hardly have welcomed the setting up of the semaphore stations if each one needed six signalmen, eight infantrymen and a cook. And knowing how expert were soldiers (and sailors, too!) in getting authorization to have the largest complement to do the least work, there'd be a lieutenant as the commanding officer, a quartermaster and probably even a carpenter and his mate to do repairs when an extra strong gust from a
mistral
or Levanter blew out some panels of the semaphore shutters. At least nineteen or twenty men; more counting sergeants and corporals. It seemed absurd but, to be fair, a soldier would never understand why the official complement of the
Calypso,
a 32-gun frigate, was 230 men—not that she was ever lucky enough to have that many, in the same way that any battalion was usually short of men.

Ramage looked up to find Southwick watching him, his chubby, suntanned face wrinkled in an unspoken question. The old man had taken off his hat, and his white hair, in need of a trim and soaked with perspiration, looked like a new mop just dipped in a bucket of water and shaken. Aitken had closed his telescope and was waiting too. Rennick, the Marine Lieutenant, had joined them, anxious not to miss anything.

In the meantime the
Calypso
was stretching along to the westward, a few miles short of the little town of Foix, flying French colours as a legitimate
ruse de guerre,
and Captain the Lord Ramage had, in a lead-weighted canvas pouch in the drawer of his desk, written orders from the Admiralty suitable for one of the few King's ships (if not the only one) left in the Mediterranean, and certainly the sort of orders that one of the most junior on the list of post captains dreamed about.

“What now, sir?” Southwick finally asked. He had served with Ramage for four or five years, was old enough to be his father, and had been in action with him a couple of dozen times, regarding fate as being unfair because while Captain Ramage had been wounded four or five times so far, Southwick had not received a scratch.

“What now, Mr Southwick? Why, we just sail past, dipping our colours politely if the signal station salutes us. I trust you have a lookout watching particularly in case they extend that courtesy, and a man at the halyard?”

Ramage turned away to hide a smile as Southwick's face fell and the old man, utterly dumbfounded, glanced questioningly at Aitken and Rennick. Ramage went below to find his cabin reasonably cool—more than anywhere else it benefited from the quarterdeck awning—and unlocked the bottom drawer.

He took out a canvas pouch, along the bottom of which was sewn a thick strip of lead, heavy enough to sink it if it was thrown over the side in an emergency, and which was held closed like an old woman's purse by a heavy line passing through grommets. He undid the knot and slid out a small book, little more substantial than a pamphlet and printed on cheap, greyish paper.

Boldly printed on the front was a bare oval with an anchor in the middle, and the words
Liberté
on the left and
Egalité
on the right. Inside the oval and surrounding the anchor was
Rep. Fran. Marine.
Beneath, in bolder type and also in French, were the words:
Secret. The Signal Book for Ships of War, third edition.

Ramage had often used the book since finding it on board a captured French prize a few weeks earlier, and by now knew most of the flag signals by heart. He had been puzzled by a long list of place names in the back, against each of which was a man's name, with no rank hinting that he was, say, a garrison commander. He had recognized several of the places—they were all between Cartagena and Toulon, some six hundred miles of enemy coastline.

Suddenly, when Southwick had named the nearest village a mile or so inland of the tower as Foix, Ramage had finally recognized it as a name on that long list. And here it was, on the next to last page of the book, in very small type,
Foix
…
J-P Louis.
So … that was the answer: the list gave the positions of all the French semaphore stations on the Mediterranean coast and, presumably, the commanding officers.

The list began with Toulon and went westward along the coast in steps of ten or twelve miles to Cartagena, more than sixty numbered place names. Some were of ports or anchorages—Sète, Collioure (that was a tiny fishing village near Perpignan), Port Vendres, Rosas and round to Barcelona—then on through names he did not know (probably of headlands) to Tarragona, Valencia, Alicante and finally Cartagena, Spain's greatest base in the Mediterranean.

Damn, the point of looking at the list was to locate the next tower to the west. Foix was followed in the list by Aspet. He reached up to the rack over his head, selected a rolled-up chart, and took it out, holding it flat with unusual-coloured, flat-sided pebbles which some of the crew had found on a beach and polished so that they looked like egg-sized gems. They were his birthday present from them—handed over with much ceremony two weeks ago. They must have consulted someone like Southwick or Aitken, because few people knew that the Captain normally used rough lead castings as weights to hold charts flat.

Aspet … He reached for the dividers, opened them so that one arm rested on Foix and the other on Aspet, and then measured the distance against the latitude scale. Eight miles. It seemed a long way, but that was a tall tower, and very visible with the clear Mediterranean light—and probably they did not use it unless the sun was bright. What about urgent messages on rainy, dull days? In places where the towers were widely spaced, a galloping horse could always bridge a gap, although often the distance by land between two headlands enclosing a large bay was considerable.

He rolled up the chart and put it back in the rack, gathered up the pebbles, and then went up on deck, and from the way Southwick, Aitken and Rennick suddenly stopped talking and looked embarrassed, they had been discussing their Captain's extraordinary apparent lack of interest in French semaphore towers.

“Mr Southwick, using your glass as best as you can, and helped by Mr Aitken, who no doubt would get a better view from the mainmasthead, I want as accurate a sketch-map of the headland, tower, buildings round it and its position in relation to the beach each side as soon as the two of you can manage.”

Both the Master and First Lieutenant gave a grin of relief, obviously anticipating action.

“As you know,” Ramage could not resist adding, “the Admiralty encourages its officers to record unusual sights and views in their logs and journals: ‘Instructions for the Master,' if I remember correctly, says: ‘He is duly to observe the appearances of coasts; and if he discovers any new shoals or rocks under water, to note them down in his journal …'”