Patrick O'Brian - The Nutmeg of Consolation

'I am heartily sorry for it, Mr Fielding,' said Jack in a voice intended as a public communication - a score of men were within earshot. 'I am sure you and all hands did their best, but it was a hopeless blaze by the time we reached it: they had certainly spread tar fore and aft. However, here we are alive, and most of us fit for duty. We have many of poor Mr Hadley's tools; there is timber all around us; and I have no doubt we shall find a solution.'

He hoped the words sounded cheerful and that they carried conviction, but he could not be sure. As it usually happened after an engagement, a heavy sadness was coming down over his spirits. To some degree it was the prodigious contrast between two modes of life: in violent hand-to-hand fighting there was no room for time, reflexion, enmity or even pain unless it was disabling; everything moved with extreme speed, cut and parry with a reflex as fast as a sword-thrust, eyes automatically keeping watch on three or four men within reach, arm lunging at the first hint of a lowered guard, a cry to warn a friend, a roar to put an enemy off his stroke; and all this in an extraordinarily vivid state of mind, a kind of fierce exaltation, an intense living in the most immediate present. Whereas now time came back with all its deadening weight -a living in relation to tomorrow, to next year, a flag promotion, children's future - so did responsibility, the innumerable responsibilities belonging to the captain of a man-of-war. And decision: in battle, eye and sword-arm made the decisions with inconceivable rapidity; there was no leisure to brood over them, no leisure at all.

Then again there were all the ugly things to be done after a victory; and the sad ones too. He looked round for a midshipman, for by now most of the people had come up the hill again; but seeing none he called Bonden, the invulnerable Bonden, and told him to ask the Doctor whether a visit would be convenient. 'Aye aye, sir,' said Bonden, and hesitated. 'Which you have a nasty trough up there' - tapping his scalp - 'that did ought to be looked to at the same time.'

'So I have,' said Jack, feeling his head, 'but it don't signify. Cut along now.'

Before Bonden could come back Richardson limped up to say that the Dyaks had taken the heads not only of the carpenter and his mate but of all those killed on the lower or middle ground. Some could not be identified: should the bodies be brought up? Were our own dead by the camp to be separated by religion? What was to be done with the dead natives?

'Sir,' said Bonden, with a queer look on his face, 'Doctor's compliments and in five minutes, if you please.'

Every man has his own five minutes: Jack's was shorter than Stephen's and he came into the tent too early. Stephen was carrying a slender arm to a heap of amputated limbs and the bodies of patients who had already died; he put it down on a shattered foot and said 'Show me your scalp, will you now? Sit on this barrel.'

'Whose was that arm?' asked Jack.

'Reade's,' said Stephen. 'I have just taken it off at the shoulder.'

'How is he? May I speak to him? Will he be all right?'

'With the blessing, he may do well,' said Stephen. 'With the blessing. That swivel-gun flung him down with his head against a rock and he is still stunned entirely. Sit on the barrel. Mr Macmillan, hot water and the coarse shears, if you please.' As he mopped and snipped he said 'Of course I have not a full list for you since not all the dead have been counted and there are still some wounded to be brought up the hill; but I am afraid it will be a long one. The midshipmen's berth has suffered very heavily. Your clerk was killed in the charge; so was little Harper; Bennett was virtually disembowelled and though we have sewn him up I doubt he sees tomorrow.'

Butcher, Harper, Bennett, Reade: dead or maimed. As Jack sat there with his head bowed to the swab, the shears and the probe, tears fell steadily on his folded hands.

The first sad, weary days of mass burial - more dead men, both sides taken together, than living - and the visiting of the wounded, seeing faces he had known all this commission, good, decent faces almost all of them, yellow and thin with pain, sometimes with fatal infection, lying there in the heat and the dreadful familiar smell. Then the later funerals as the worst cases dropped off, one, two and even three a day. And all this with extremely little food. Stephen had shot only one small babirussa; the apes were no longer worth his remaining charges; and of the few fishes caught by casting from the rocks or hauling the seine most were scaleless lead-coloured things that even the gulls would not eat.

On the morning after the last patient on the danger-list died - a young Dyak who had borne resection after resection of his gangrenous leg with admirable fortitude - Stephen was late in obeying the pipe of All hands on deck - all hands aft that preceded the Captain's address to the ship's company. By the time he slipped into his place Jack was still dealing with naval law, the perennity of commissions, the Articles of War and so on: all hands listened attentively, with grave, judicial expressions as he repeated his main points once again, particularly that which had to do with the continuance of their pay, each according to his rating, and the compensation in lieu of spirits not served out. They stood there close-packed, confined between imaginary rails, exactly as though they were still aboard the Diane, and they weighed every word. Stephen, who had heard the essence before, paid little attention; in any case his mind was elsewhere. He had been attached to the Dyak, who showed unlimited trust in his skill and benevolent intent, who would take food only from him, and whom he really thought he had saved as he had in fact saved young Reade, now sitting there wraith-like on a carronade-slide, his empty sleeve pinned across his chest, and as he had saved Edwards, who stood alone, there where the envoy and his suite had always had their place.

'But now, shipmates,' said Jack in his strong deep voice, 'I come to another point. You have all heard of the widow's cruse.' No single officer, seaman or Marine showed the least sign of having heard of the widow's cruse, nor any sign whatsoever of intelligence. 'Well,' continued Captain Aubrey, 'Diane shipped no widow's cruse. And by that I mean tomorrow is St Famine's Day.' Comprehension, alarm, despondency, extreme displeasure showed in the faces of all the old man-of-war's men present; and the hum of whispered explanation kept Jack silent for a long moment. 'But it is not the worst St Famine I have ever known,' he went on. 'Although it is true that today's is the last issue of grog and the last cheese-paring scrap of tobacco, we still have a little biscuit and a cask of Dublin horse not very badly spoilt and there is always the chance the Doctor may knock down another of the island gazelles. And there is this point too. The officers and I are not going to sit on silk cushions swilling wine and brandy. The gunroom steward and Killick are going to put all our stores into a general pool, under double guard, and as long as it lasts each mess will draw its share by lot. That is what the gunroom steward and Killick are going to do, whether they like it or not.' This was very well received. Killick's extreme jealousy of the Captain's stores, even the oldest heel-taps of his wine, had always been notorious, and the gunroom steward's hardly less so. Both looked pinched and intensely disapproving, but the ship's company in general laughed as they had not laughed since before the battle. 'Then again,' said Jack, 'God helps those that help themselves. We still have Ned Walker and two others who were rated carpenter's crew. We still have plenty of sailcloth and a fair amount of cordage. We can save many of the nails and spikes from the schooner's ashes, and my plan is to run up a six-oared cutter to replace the one they burnt, pick a crew of our best seamen with an officer to navigate and send them off to Batavia for help. I shall stay here, of course.'