The Battle of the Nile

Some battles are won by the weight of metal and the courage of gun crews. A few are decided earlier, in the half hour before the first broadside, by a single commander who looks at an enemy line and sees not what is there but what is not there. The gap, the unguarded flank, the assumption the other admiral has made and will not unmake before sundown. The art of such a man is not to be braver than his peers. It is to see, in failing light and on an uncharted coast, the one thing the enemy has forgotten to be afraid of.

THE CHASE

For seventy-three days Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson has been hunting a fleet across an inland sea. He is thirty-nine. He has one eye, taken at Calvi in '94. He has, since the night action under the walls of Santa Cruz de Tenerife thirteen months past, no right arm; the stump is dressed each morning by his steward and gives him pain in the cold watches. He has missed Bonaparte at Toulon. He has missed him at Malta. He has stood off Alexandria in late June with the French already there beneath the horizon, seen nothing, and turned away. The Admiralty in London has spent the summer composing the letters that will recall him. He is, by his own admission in correspondence to Lord St Vincent, half mad with the want of frigates and the want of news. Yesterday at noon, the first of August, the look-out of the Zealous under Captain Hood saw the upper masts of thirteen French sail of the line at anchor in Aboukir Bay, in a line drawn from the shoal of the island south-east toward the village. Vice-Admiral Brueys has moored close inshore, in two and three cables of water, on ground he believes no English captain will dare.

THE GREAT CABIN AT NOON

His captains have come aboard the Vanguard for their dinner. They eat standing in his great cabin because there is no time to sit. They are young men, most of them, and they have sailed under him long enough to know his trick of putting a question as though the answer were already in the room. The question is whether to attack a moored line of thirteen, with thirteen of his own under sail, in the last two hours of daylight, on a coast for which he has no chart that he trusts. Troubridge, Hood, Foley, Saumarez, Ball, Hallowell, the rest. Each one says yes. He notes that none of them mentions the shoals. He thanks them and sends them back to their ships. The wind is north-westerly and steady. The glass is rising. He has perhaps four hours of useful light.

THE QUARTERDECK, SIX O'CLOCK

From the quarterdeck of the Vanguard, glass to his good eye, he reads the enemy line as he would read a hand of cards another man has dealt face up. Brueys is anchored on a single cable; no spring set to swing the broadside; the bow of the leading ship, the Guerrier, lies close to the shoal of Aboukir Island but, he thinks, not so close. A ship that can swing at anchor on a single cable can be rounded by a ship under sail, if the water under the bow of the leading Frenchman is the same water the Frenchman himself rode in upon. Brueys has anchored close because he believes the inshore side closed; he has not put a spring on his cables because he believes there will be no fight tonight; he has therefore moored as a man moors who does not expect to be attacked from two sides at once. The thought is not exhilaration. It is the cold, narrow attention of a man who has chased the same fleet for seventy-three days and now sees, at the end of a long Mediterranean afternoon, that the enemy admiral has made one assumption and one only, and that the assumption is wrong. He says to Captain Berry, quietly, that he will go in. Foley sails the closest of any of them. Let Foley find the water at the head of the line. If there is no water there, he will know within the half hour, and reform on the seaward side. He does not put it more strongly than that. He does not need to. By his despatch to St Vincent written three days later he records only that the utmost alacrity prevailed throughout the squadron. The alacrity is already aboard the Goliath.

THE LINE GOES IN

Foley of the Goliath leads at twenty minutes past six. He shaves the head of the French line on the inshore side, finds the water under his bow, and drops anchor opposite the Conquérant, third in the French order, on her unengaged side. The Zealous follows him. The Orion, the Audacious, the Theseus follow the Zealous. Five British ships of the line stand inside the French anchorage on the side from which no fight has been expected, and the French gun-crews on that side are firing their lashings clear as the first British broadsides come in across their unrigged ports. Nelson on the Vanguard takes the seaward side and anchors abreast of the Spartiate. The remainder of the line takes station beside him. By a quarter past seven the French centre is engaged on both sides at once and the last of the day is gone.

BRUEYS ON THE ORIENT

Vice-Admiral Brueys d'Aigalliers, on the quarterdeck of the Orient, one hundred and twenty guns, the largest sail of the line in the world, is hit in the thigh in the first hour and refuses to be carried below. He is hit again in the other thigh and still refuses. At half past eight a round shot nearly cuts him in two. He has himself propped against a sea-chest on his own quarterdeck and, by the account of his surviving officers, gives the order that he will die at his post. He dies at a quarter to nine. Fire takes hold forward on the Orient a little before ten o'clock, in paint and oakum the painters have left on her gun deck. The boats of the Alexander see the smoke first and pull off; every British captain who can see her burning cuts his cables and stands clear of her radius. She blows up at twenty-two minutes past ten. The shock is felt at Rosetta, twenty miles away. The bay, by the entries in half a dozen British logbooks, is lit as bright as noon for ten seconds. Burning timber falls on every ship within half a mile. The action stops, by no signal and no order, for ten minutes after the explosion, and then resumes, slower, into the small hours.

THE WOUND AND THE WORD

He has himself been struck across the forehead by a piece of langridge shot late in the action; the flap of skin falls into his good eye and he believes for some minutes that he is blind. He is taken below to the orlop. Mr Jefferson the surgeon tells him he will live. He waits his turn among the wounded seamen, which is his habit, and only then has the wound dressed. When the first reports come down that the French line is breaking, he calls for his secretary and dictates the opening of the despatch. Almighty God has blessed His Majesty's arms in the late battle, by a great victory over the fleet of the enemy. The phrase about Bonaparte's correspondence, which he has used twice already that summer in private letters, he uses again now to those around him: I have given Bonaparte's letters home a long swim. It is not coined for the moment. It is, however, the truth. By dawn eleven of the thirteen French sail of the line are taken or destroyed. Two have slipped to seaward under Villeneuve, who will meet him again at Trafalgar. Two hundred and eighteen British dead. Approximately one thousand seven hundred French.

THE LONG REACH

The Army of the Orient, set ashore at Alexandria a month before, is now an army without a fleet. Bonaparte will march into Syria, fail at Acre, and come home in a frigate, alone, to make himself First Consul; his men he will leave in the sand. The Mediterranean closes against France and stays closed for the rest of the war, seven years unbroken. The Sultan, hearing the news in Constantinople, sends the chelengk, a diamond plume taken from his own turban, and a pelisse of sable. The King of the Two Sicilies, in gratitude for the deliverance of his coasts, creates him Duke of Bronte in Sicily, in his own right and in perpetuity. An exhausted Pitt government in London makes him Baron Nelson of the Nile, which he considers insufficient to the day and which is, by the lights of his biographers, the reason for the strange titular flourish of the codicil he will dictate aboard the Victory in October 1805: Nelson and Bronte. The dukedom his line will carry until 1981.

Some victories are won in the hour and forgotten in the year. This one was won in the half hour before the first gun, on a quarterdeck off an Egyptian shore, by a one-armed admiral who looked at an enemy line and saw a gap his enemy had not seen. The chelengk is in a museum case in Norfolk. The dukedom of Bronte is extinct. The bay at Aboukir is silted and quiet, and the keel of the Orient lies under fifty feet of water with the bronze of her guns still on her gun deck.