Trafalgar and “England expects”

Some victories are won by a fleet, and some are won by a sentence. The fleet does the work of years, drilling at sea in all weathers, learning each other's hand on the helm until the line moves as one body. The sentence does the work of a single morning. It travels up a halyard in coloured bunting, is read along forty quarterdecks in eight minutes, and fixes in the mind of every man at his gun the thing he is about to do. The man who finds that sentence at the right hour, in the right wind, has done more than command a battle. He has given the navy a phrase to live inside for two centuries.

THE ADMIRAL OF THE WHITE

He is forty-seven years old on the morning of the twenty-first of October 1805, and he has been at sea, in one ship or another, since he was twelve. He is Horatio Nelson, Viscount Nelson of the Nile, Duke of Bronte in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, vice-admiral of the white. He has lost the sight of his right eye at Calvi, his right arm at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, most of his front teeth at one place or another. He has broken the French at Aboukir Bay and the Danes at Copenhagen. For two years he has held a station off Toulon in all weathers, then chased Villeneuve's fleet across the Atlantic to the West Indies and back, then waited for him outside Cadiz. The combined fleet of France and Spain now lies between him and the harbour, thirty-three ships of the line to his twenty-seven. If Villeneuve gets clear of him into the Channel, Bonaparte's army at Boulogne crosses to Kent. The whole long unfinished argument of the wars rests on this one morning's wind.

THE LONG SWELL

The wind is very light from the west-north-west, the swell long and Atlantic, the sky clearing. The combined fleet lies in a ragged crescent two miles distant on the port bow, the great three-deckers visible by their hulls, the Santissima Trinidad with her four tiers of guns showing red against the haze. He has divided his own ships into two columns to cut the enemy line at right angles, the weather column under his own flag, the lee column under Cuthbert Collingwood three cables to the south. It is unorthodox. The line of battle has been the doctrine of every navy for a hundred and fifty years and he is throwing it away. The columns will come on bows-first into a wall of broadsides and take whatever the French and Spanish gunners can give them for twenty minutes before a single British gun bears. He has explained the plan to his captains over dinner in the great cabin of Victory a fortnight ago, and watched them understand it, and seen tears in some of their eyes. He has called it, in writing, the Nelson touch. He is wearing his number-one undress coat with all four orders embroidered on it, the Bath, the Crescent, the Joachim, the St Ferdinand, in tarnished bullion against a dark blue ground. Hardy has twice this morning suggested he change the coat. He has not changed the coat.

A SIGNAL TO AMUSE THE FLEET

At twenty minutes to twelve he turns to John Pasco, his signal-lieutenant, and says, by Pasco's later record, I will now amuse the fleet with a signal. He wishes, he says, to say to the fleet: England confides that every man will do his duty. Pasco must be quick, for there is one more to make after this, which is for Close Action. Pasco answers that if his Lordship will permit the word expects in place of confides, the signal will be sooner sent, because the word expects is in the vocabulary, and confides must be spelt. Nelson says: That will do, Pasco. Make it directly. Twelve flags go up the mizzen halyard at a quarter to twelve. The fleet reads them down the line. Collingwood, on the quarterdeck of Royal Sovereign leading the lee column, mutters that he wishes to God Nelson would make no more signals, they all know what to do, and then the meaning reaches him and he is quiet. Along the line, gun-captains straighten and look up. The sentence is in the air for perhaps three minutes before another set of flags replaces it. It does not need to stay up. It is already inside every man who saw it. He stands by the rail and looks along his own column and feels the small calculation begin, the one he has made before every action of his life: the wind is light, they will be twenty minutes opening the gap, the enemy will rake them as they come on, the first ten minutes after striking the line will cost him a hundred men, and somewhere in the calculation, without ceremony, the other thought arrives, if I do my duty I will not see the evening, and stays. The fleet has him. The fleet does not need him past the moment of striking the line. After that the captains take it. He goes below for ten minutes to write a codicil to his will, commending Lady Hamilton and his daughter Horatia to the protection of his country, signs it Nelson and Bronte, has Hardy and Blackwood witness it, and goes back on deck.

YARD-ARM TO YARD-ARM

At twelve minutes past noon Victory strikes the French line astern of Bucentaure, Villeneuve's flagship, and rakes her with a double-shotted broadside down the length of her gun-deck that dismounts twenty pieces and kills or wounds four hundred men in a single discharge. At the same moment Redoutable under Captain Lucas closes from the other side, and the two ships come to a stop yard-arm to yard-arm and lock together, their gun-muzzles touching. Lucas has trained his marines to clear an enemy quarterdeck with musketry from the tops. The Redoutable's mizzen-top is forty-five feet above Victory's deck. In it stands a French marine whose name was never recorded, with a Charleville musket and a clear sight of the dark-blue coat with the embroidered orders walking the windward side of the deck below. He fires at fifteen yards. The ball enters Nelson's left shoulder, breaks the second rib, severs the pulmonary artery, lodges in the spine. He goes down on the deck face-forward at a quarter past one. Hardy is six feet from him and does not at first see him fall. The marines who carry him below cover his face with a handkerchief so the men at the guns shall not know who they are carrying.

THE COCKPIT

They lay him in the cockpit on the orlop deck, by lantern-light, among the wounded and the dying. He is conscious. He tells the surgeon Beatty he can feel his back broken. Beatty cuts the coat off him, examines him, tells him there is nothing to be done. He says he knows. The action goes on overhead, the Victory's guns running in and out with a noise that shakes the timbers above him. He asks Hardy, every quarter-hour, how the day is going. Hardy comes down at half past two and says ten or twelve of the enemy line are taken. Nelson says, by Beatty's record, that is well, but I bargained for twenty. Hardy goes back up. He comes down again at half past three and says fourteen or fifteen are taken. Nelson is thinking already about the weather, about the long Atlantic swell, about a fleet of crippled prizes drifting onto a lee shore in the night, and he says: anchor, Hardy, anchor. Hardy says yes. He says, kiss me, Hardy, and Hardy kisses him on the forehead, and again on the cheek, and goes back on deck. To Beatty and the chaplain Scott, who are still beside him, he says, thank God I have done my duty. He says it again. He dies at twenty minutes past four. The action has lasted four hours and a quarter. Eighteen of the combined fleet are taken or sunk. None of the British line is lost.

A CASK OF BRANDY, A COFFIN OF L'ORIENT

The body was preserved in a cask of brandy for the voyage home, transferred at Gibraltar to spirits of wine, and lay in state at Greenwich for three days at the beginning of January 1806 in a coffin made from the timbers of L'Orient, the French flagship he had blown up at the Nile seven years earlier. The funeral procession through the City to St Paul's on the ninth of January was three miles long. The body lies in the crypt under the dome on a black sarcophagus that had been carved for Cardinal Wolsey two centuries before and had stood unused at Windsor since the dissolution. The threat of a French invasion of Britain ended that afternoon off Cape Trafalgar and did not return in his century or the next. The phrase he gave Pasco at twenty to twelve, with the wind very light and the line two miles off, is still the first thing taught to a midshipman about what a signal can do. On Trafalgar Day each year the same twelve flags go up the mizzen halyard of HMS Victory in dry dock at Portsmouth, in the order he sent them, and the Charleville musket-ball, with a fragment of the gold lace it carried into him still attached, lies under glass in the Royal Collection.