Cecil Forester - The Commodore

Whatever might be the case, he was a man of ability and quick wit. As soon as he had seen that Lotus had cut him of from escape to the mainland he had resolutely taken the only course that gave him any chance of safety. He had steered the Maggie Jones as innocently as kiss-your-hand up to Nonsuch ; that suggestion of smallpox had been an ingenious one, an his conversation by speaking-trumpet had been very nearly natural.

“Is he going to live?” asked Bush of the surgeon.

“No, sir. The mandible is extensively comminuted on both sides—I mean his jaw is shattered, sir. There is some splintering of the maxilla as well, and his tongue—the whole glosso-pharyngeal region, in fact—is in rags. The haemorrhage may prove fatal—in other words the man may bleed to death, although I do not think he will, now. But I do not think anything on earth can stop mortification—gangrene, in other words, sir—which in this area will prove immediately fatal. In any event the man will die of inanition, of hunger and thirst that is to say, even if we could keep him alive for a while by injections per rectum.”

It was ghoulish to smile at the surgeon’s pomposity, to make the inevitable light speech.

“It sounds as if nothing could save him, then.”

It was a human life they were discussing.

“We must hang him, sir, before he dies,” said Bush, turning to Hornblower. “We can convene a court martial—”

“He cannot defend himself,” replied Hornblower.

Bush spread his hands in a gesticulation which for him was vastly eloquent.

“What defence has he to offer, sir? We have all the evidence we need. The prisoners have supplied it apart from the obvious facts.”

“He might be able to rebut the evidence if he could speak,” said Hornblower. It was an absurd thing to say. There could be no possible doubt of Clarke’s guilt—his attempt at suicide proved it even if nothing else did; but Hornblower knew perfectly well that he was quite incapable of hanging a man who was physically unable to make any defence.

“He’ll slip through our fingers if we wait, sir.”

“Then let him.”

“But the example to the men, sir—”

“No, no, no,” flared Hornblower. “What sort of example would it be to the men to hang a dying man—a man who would not know what was being done to him, for that matter?”

It was horrible to see the faint play of expression in Bush’s face. Bush was a kindly man, a good brother to his sisters and a good son to his mother, and yet there was that hint of the lust of cruelty, the desire for a hanging. No, that was not quite fair. What Bush lusted for was revenge—revenge on a traitor who had borne arms against their common country.

“It would teach the men not to desert, sir,” said Bush, still feebly raising arguments. Hornblower knew—he had twenty years of experience—how every British captain was plagued by desertion, and spent half his waking hours wondering first how to find men and second how to retain them.

“It might,” said Hornblower, “but I doubt it very much.”

He could not imagine any good being done, and he certainly could picture the harm, if the men were forced to witness a helpless man, one who could not even stand on his feet, being noosed about the neck and swung up to the yard-arm.

Bush still hankered for blood. Even though he had no more to say, there was still a look in his face, there were still protests trembling on his lips.

“Thank you, Captain Bush,” said Hornblower. “My mind is made up.”

Bush did not know, and might never learn, that mere revenge, objectless, retaliatory, was always stale and unprofitable.

The Blanchefleur would most likely still be hovering round the island of Rügen. Cape Arcona would be a profitable haunt—shipping coming down the Baltic from Russian and Finnish ports would make a landfall there, to be easily snapped up, hemmed in between the land and the two-fathom shoal of the Adlergrund. She would not know of the arrival of a British squadron, nor guess that the immediate recapture of the Maggie Jones had so quickly revealed her presence here.

“I think that is all perfectly plain, gentlemen?” said Hornblower, looking round his cabin at his assembled captains.

There was a murmur of assent. Vickery of the Lotus and Cole of the Raven were looking grimly expectant. Each of them was hoping that it would be his ship that would encounter the Blanchefleur –a successful single-ship action against a vessel of so nearly equal force would be the quickest way to be promoted captain from commander. Vickery was young and ardent—it was he who had commanded the boats at the cutting-out of the Sèvres –and Cole was grey-headed and bent. Mound, captain of the Harvey, and Duncan, captain of the Moth were both of them young lieutenants; Freeman, of the cutter Clam, swarthy and with long black hair like a gipsy, was of a different type; it would be less surprising to hear he was captain of a smuggling craft than captain of a King’s ship. It was Duncan who asked the next question.

“If you please, sir, is Swedish Pomerania neutral?”

“Whitehall would be glad to know the answer to that question, Mr. Duncan,” said Hornblower, with a grin. He wanted to appear stern and aloof, but it was not easy with these pleasant boys.

They grinned back at him; it was with a curious pang that Hornblower realized that his subordinates were already fond of him. He thought, guiltily, that if only they knew all the truth about him they might not like him so much.

“Any other questions, gentlemen? No? Then you can return to your ships and take your stations for the night.”

At dawn when Hornblower came on deck there was a thin fog over the surface of the sea; with the dropping of the westerly wind the cold water flowing out from the melting ice-packs of the Gulf of Finland had an opportunity of cooling the warm damp air and condensing its moisture into a cloud.

“It could be thicker, sir, but not much,” grumbled Bush. The foremast was visible from the quarter-deck, but not the bowsprit. There was only a faint breeze from the north, and the Nonsuch , creeping along before it, was very silent, pitching hardly at all on the smooth sea, with a rattle of blocks and cordage.

“I took a cast with the deep-sea lead at six bells, sir,” reported Montgomery. “Ninety-one fathoms. Grey mud. That’ll be the Arcona deep, sir.”

“Very good, Mr. Montgomery,” said Bush. Hornblower was nearly sure that Bush’s curt manner to his lieutenants was modelled on the manner Hornblower used to employ towards him when he was first lieutenant.

“Nosing our way about with the lead,” said Bush, disgustedly. “We might as well be a Dogger Bank trawler. And you remember what the prisoners said about the Blanchefleur, sir? They have pilots on board who know these waters like the palms of their hands.”

Groping about in a fog in shoal waters was not the sort of exercise for which a big two-decker was designed, but the Nonsuch had a special value in this campaign. There were few ships this side of the Sound which could match her in force; under her protection the flotilla could cruise wherever necessary. Danes and Swedes and Russians and French had plenty of small craft, but when Nonsuch made her appearance they were powerless to hinder.

“If you please, sir,” said Montgomery, touching his hat. “Isn’t that gunfire which I can hear?”

Everybody listened, enwrapped in the clammy fog. The only noises to be heard were those of the ship, and the condensed fog dripping from the rigging to the deck. Then a flat-sounding thud came faintly to their ears.