The Sultan's Daughter (28 page)

‘We all know that he has unshakable faith in his star; but had things gone wrong and our Army been defeated, its plight, marooned here in a strange land without either reinforcements or supplies, would have been too terrible to think upon. I could not possibly reconcile myself to any other course than to remain here, so that, did the worst happen, I might take off what remained of the Army and so save it from complete destruction.'

Roger smiled. ‘Pray accept my compliments on your decision,
Monsieur I'Amiral
. It was in the highest traditions of your Service, and thousands of us soldiers might well owe our lives to you. But now the Mamelukes have been signally defeated, their remnants scattered and the General-in-Chief
is firmly established in Cairo; the situation is very different.'

‘Indeed, yes; and I thank God for it. Yet we are desperately short of supplies, for we have been supplying General Kléber this past month instead of he us. We'll still have to secure a sufficiency of food and water, but once that is done I'll feel no scruples in setting sail for Malta. I see, though, Colonel, that you have obviously ridden hard and need rest and refreshment. It is just on our dinner hour. You must join us and afterwards I'll have a cabin prepared for you so that you can spend the night on board.'

‘I thank you, Admiral,' Roger replied. ‘I should be most happy to dine, but I am promised to sup with General Kléber and intend to start back for Cairo in the cool of the early morning.'

By now his appearance was very different from the gallant figure he had cut in Paris. His fine uniform had become sadly stained during the campaign and after his recent journey he looked like a scarecrow. He was covered with dust from head to foot, his hair was a bush and his face begrimed. But a marine was detailed to brush his clothes while he had a good wash and a quarter of an hour later, when he was conducted to the spacious stern cabin, he looked fairly presentable.

With the Admiral now were Commodore Casabianca, the Captain of
L'Orient
, and a number of other officers. When Roger had been presented to those he had not met on the voyage out they sat down at the big oval table to dine. During the early part of the meal Brueys and the others asked him many questions about the campaign, and listened eagerly to his accounts of the desert march, the Battle of the Pyramids and fabulous Cairo. But soon after two o'clock this pleasant party was suddenly interrupted. The door burst open and a young Lieutenant tumbled into the room, shouting:

‘Les Anglaisl Monsieur l'Amiral! Les Anglais
!' It then transpired that Nelson's Fleet had just been sighted and was bearing down upon them.

Chairs were thrust back and, with Brueys leading, they all rushed up on deck. There a hundred eyes were glued to telescopes. Roger followed the Admiral up to the poop and
shaded his eyes with his hand to cut out the glare of the brilliant sunlight. Even without a glass he could make out, just above the distant horizon, the tips of more topmasts than he could count. It was no false alarm. After his ten-week fruitless search back and forth across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean Nelson had, at last, run the enemy to earth.

Roger stood there cursing himself. If only he had started an hour earlier from Damanhûr that morning. If only he had ridden straight on to Aboukir, instead of stopping in Alexandria to talk with Kléber. If only he had refused Brueys's invitation to dinner. Had he done any of those things he would be safely back on shore by now. But here he was, in the French flagship, with battle imminent; and, above all, a battle against his own countrymen. To ask to be put ashore now would look like rank cowardice. Yet he considered it. Perhaps it would not appear too bad if he said that it was imperative that he should rejoin the General-in-Chief with the least possible delay. But he was not taking back any despatch, so such an excuse for turning tail would not be looked on as valid. While his mind was still racked with awful indecision, Brueys settled the matter for him by saying:

‘Of course, Colonel, you will now wish to remain with us, to share our dangers and our glory. I shall be happy to count you as a military member of my personal Staff.'

Rarely had Roger spent a more miserable afternoon. There had been no possible reply to Brueys other than, ‘I am honoured,
Monsieur I'Amiral
, and will do my utmost to be of service'. After that there was nothing for him, as a land-lubber, to do but await the battle, and he had a horror of such desperate encounters.

It was not that he lacked courage. At Sherborne he had several times fought George Gunston, the bully of the school, although each time he knew he would get a licking. He had fought duels with sword and pistol, taken part in many affrays and would not have hesitated to fight anyone on any grounds that justified a resort to weapons. It was the terribly impersonal nature of battles that he hated: to be one of a group of men firing at and being fired at by another, without the faintest knowledge of the man you might wound or be wounded by; or to be cut in half by a bounding cannon ball, fired by an artilleryman whom you could not even see and who, if you had met him, might have proved to be the most charming fellow. Indeed although every Frenchman was technically his enemy, he counted many friends among them and there were several to whose rescue he would have gone at the peril of his life. He would have been the last man to suggest that his country should not go to war in defence of her liberty and rights, but that did not make the indiscriminate slaughter involved any the less horrifying to him.

He had been lucky in the present campaign, as Bonaparte and his Staff had come under fire only during the brief skirmish at Chebreïss and had not even participated personally in the great Battle of the Pyramids. But now he was fated to
spend several terrifying hours and, perhaps, meet his death in a head-on clash between some twenty thousand men, the majority of whom passionately hated each other's country and were thirsting for one another's blood.

And it was not even as if it were to be a land battle. Roger would have defended a post to the last if he had been charged with doing so; but, as a general principle, he was a great believer in the old adage, ‘He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day'. In a conflict on land one could at least add to the chance of survival by using judgment about when to lie down and when to stand up. If things went badly it was generally possible, by keeping ones wits about one, to avoid getting mixed up with any mass of routed infantry that would attract the enemy's artillery fire or pursuing cavalry. It was also possible to sham dead and lie in a ditch until the coming of night enabled one to creep away from the battlefield.

But none of these ruses to save oneself was possible in a naval battle. A man was just as liable to be wounded or killed whether he stood up or lay down. And it was not only the enemy's cannon balls that were to be feared. A falling mast or yard might shatter his head like an eggshell and, as the shot crashed through bulwarks and decks, great splinters of jagged wood, which could cause the most ghastly wounds, whizzed through the air to right, left and centre. Last but not least, if the ship he was in got the worst of the action there could be no galloping away from her, and it was pointless to lie in the scuppers pretending to be dead. If badly holed below the water-line she would sink, carrying him down with her to Davy Jones's Locker, or, if she had been set on fire, blow up. In either case there would be no morning after.

Roger knew the composition of the French Fleet without having to run his eye down the line of ships. Apart from four frigates and other smaller craft, Brueys had
L'Orient
, the mightiest ship afloat, with one hundred and twenty guns, three eighties and nine seventy-fours. That made a total of over one thousand guns, in comparison with which the one hundred and seventy-four pieces of artillery that Bonaparte had brought for his land battles were a mere pittance. Roger thought it reasonable to assume that Nelson's Fleet carried
about the same number as the French. That meant that as soon as battle was joined some two thousand cannon would be blazing away as fast as men could load them. Even at only twenty rounds per gun, forty thousand murderous lumps of iron—not to mention innumerable bullets from muskets—would be flying in all directions; and he was in the flagship, to which it was certain that the enthusiastic British would give their very special attention.

He would have felt even gloomier about his chances of survival could he have known of Nelson's declaration to his Captains, ‘When we do come up with the enemy I'll not be content with victory. It must be annihilation.'

During the afternoon there was nothing he could do but watch, while officers, marines and sailors bustled about the decks preparing for action. Had Brueys's Squadron been caught while transporting the Army, it could not possibly have driven off the enemy. Despite the Admiral's protests, such a mass of equipment—field guns, wagons, crates of saddles for the dismounted cavalry, officers' baggage, ammunition and other stores—had been stacked on the decks that it would have proved next to impossible for his ships to run out and fight their guns.

In consequence, it had been decided that if the British came upon the armada the French should endeavour to close with and board them, as all Brueys's ships-of-the-line had at least three hundred and fifty troops packed like sardines in them; it was hoped that they, by sheer weight of numbers, would overwhelm the enemy.

Now, there were no soldiers in the ships; but at least they had been disembarrassed of a great part of their strangling top-hamper, so they could have put to sea and met the British in a battle of manoeuvre. For some while Brueys discussed the possibility with his senior Captains; but the prevailing opinion was that they would do better to remain where they were because the seamanship of the men was so indifferent, and they had neither food nor water aboard for a cruise of more than a few hours.

The northern end of Aboukir Bay, in which the French lay, ended in a hook, on the point of which stood a small castle. From the point a shoal ran out to Aboukir Island and
some way beyond it. Brueys's ships were anchored in a long line behind this protection and, moreover, in the bay itself there were many other shoals and shallows. It was thought most unlikely, therefore, that Nelson would risk bringing his ships into such dangerous waters after dark and, although they had been steadily approaching all through the long, hot afternoon, they still had some distance to cover.

Nevertheless, preparations for action went ahead. Bulkheads were taken down, cannon balls and powder charges brought up, buckets of water placed beside the guns, hoses coupled to pumps ready for fire-fighting, and all the supplies, crates, bales and boxes that remained on deck shifted to the landward sides of the ships because it was taken for granted that no sane Admiral would risk sending his ships into the shallows that lay between the French Fleet and the shore.

As the British rounded the distant point it became possible to assess their strength accurately. There were eleven seventy-fours, one fifty-gun ship and a brig. Then, to the delight of the French, it was seen that one of the seventy-fours had gone aground on the hidden sandspit beyond Aboukir Island, thus making the odds—by this reduced to less than nine hundred guns against over a thousand—still further in their favour.

At about five-thirty the British began to form line of battle, showing that, although twilight would soon be falling, they did intend to attack that night. Majestically, under full sail, they came on in an irregular line, Captain Sam Hood in
Zealous
and Captain Foley in
Goliath
striving to outdistance one another for the honour of being the first to enter the battle.

Goliath
won and, to Brueys's horror, came up on the inshore side of his vanguard, followed by four other British seventy-fours. Nelson and his leading Captains had swiftly realised that, as the French ships lay to the wind, there must be at least their own length of water deep enough to keep them afloat when, still at anchor, they swung with their sterns to the shore. Where one seventy-four could swing another could pass without running aground. As the guns of the
French ships on the shoreward side lay under piles of impediments, they could not be fired.

After firing a broadside into
Guerrier
, the ship at the head of the French line,
Goliath
overshot her and came to anchor opposite the second French ship,
Conquérant
. But
Zealous
anchored opposite
Guerrier
, while
Orion, Theseus
and
Audacious
sailed on, pouring broadsides into
Guerrier
and
Conquérant
as they passed then concentrating their fire on the next in line;
Spartiate, Aquilon
and
Peuple Souverain
.

Nelson's orders had been to attack the French van and centre, and now he came up in his flagship
Vanguard
with the remaining six British ships on the seaward side of the French line. Caught between two fires as the sun sank below the horizon, the five enemy ships first to be attacked suffered terrible damage.

The French line was nearly two miles long, and
L'Orient
was stationed exactly in the centre of its thirteen ships; so little could be seen from her during the first part of the action except dense clouds of smoke. But by seven o'clock it was fully dark and every minute the smoke pall was stabbed by the bright flashes from hundreds of guns. Slowly but inexorably, like a vast burning taper, the smoke and fire spread along the line as ship after ship came into action.

Vanguard
was the first ship to anchor outside the enemy line, and Nelson had her brought to within pistol shot of
Spartiate
, which was being attacked by
Theseus
on her other side. Even so, the flagship was hard pressed until
Minotaur
came up and drew the fire of
Aquilon
, which had also been engaging
Vanguard
. Meanwhile, losing station owing to the smoke and darkness,
Majestic
and
Bellerophon
had got too far ahead. The latter, finding herself opposite
L'Orient
, took on alone this mighty ship-of-war which had nearly double her own gunpower.