Cecil Forester - A Ship of the Line

Beyond the waggon train was the rearguard, but that was scattered over the hillside sparsely enough not to be worth powder and shot. It was time to go back and harass the main body once more.

“Put the ship about, Mr. Bush,” said Hornblower. “I want to retrace our course.”

It was not so easy on a course diametrically opposite to the previous one. The wind had been on the Sutherland’s quarter before; now it was on her bow and she could only keep parallel to the shore by lying as close-hauled as she would sail. To make any offing at all when they reached the little capes which ran out from the shore the ship would have to go about, and the leeway she made might drift her into danger unless the situation were carefully watched. But the utmost must be done to harass the Italians and to demonstrate to them that they could never use the coast road again; Bush was delighted—as Hornblower could see from the fierce light in his eyes—that his captain was going to stick to his task and not sail tamely off after defiling once along the column, and the men at the starboard side guns rubbed their hands with pleasure at the prospect of action as they bent over the weapons that had stood unused so far.

It took time for the Sutherland to go about and work into position again for her guns to command the road; Hornblower was pleased to see the regiments which had re-formed break up again as their tormentor neared them and take to the hillside once more. But close-hauled the Sutherland could hardly make three knots past the land, allowing for the vagaries of the coast line and the wind; troops stepping out as hard as they could go along the road could keep their distance from her if necessary, and perhaps the Italian officers might realise this soon enough. He must do what damage he could now.

“Mr. Gerard!” he called, and Gerard came running to his beckoning, standing with face uplifted to hear his orders from the quarterdeck. “You may fire single shots at any group large enough to be worth it. See that every shot is well aimed.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

There was a body of a hundred men or so massed on the hillside opposite them now. Gerard himself laid the gun and estimated the range, squatting on his heels to look along the dispart sights with the gun at full elevation. The ball struck the rock in front of them and ricocheted into the group; Hornblower saw a sudden swirl in the crowd, which scattered abruptly leaving two or three white-breeched figures stretched on the ground behind them. The crew cheered at the sight of it. Marsh the gunner had been hurriedly sent for by Gerard to take part in this accurate shooting; the gun he was training killed more men in another group, over which flashed something on a pole which Hornblower, straining his eye through his telescope, decided must be one of the imperial eagles which Bonaparte’s bulletins so often mentioned, and at which British cartoonists so often jeered.

Shot after shot crashed out from the Sutherland’s starboard battery as she made her slow way along the coast. Sometimes the crew cheered when some of the scrambling midgets on the hillside were knocked over; sometimes the shot was received in chill silence when no effect could be noted. It was a valuable demonstration to the gunners on the importance of being able to lay their guns truly, to estimate range and deflection, even though it was traditional in a ship of the line that all the gunners had to do was to serve their guns as fast as possible with no necessity for taking aim with their ship laid close alongside the enemy.

Now that the ear was not deafened by the thunder of a full broadside, it could detect after each shot the flattened echo thrown back by the hills, returning from the land with its quality oddly altered in the heated air. For it was frightfully hot. Hornblower, watching the men drinking eagerly at the scuttle butt as their petty officers released them in turns for the purpose, wondered if those poor devils scrambling over the rocky hillsides in the glaring sun were suffering from thirst. He feared they were. He had no inclination to drink himself—he was too preoccupied listening to the chant of the man at the lead, with watching the effect of the firing and with seeing that the Sutherland was running into no danger.

Whoever was in command of the shattered field artillery battery farther along the road was a man who knew his duty. Midshipman Savage in the foretop attracted Hornblower’s attention to it with a hail. The three serviceable guns had been slewed round to point diagonally across the road straight at the ship, and they fired the moment Hornblower trained his glass on them. Wirra-wirra-wirra; one of the balls passed high over Hornblower’s head, and a hole appeared in the Sutherland’s main topsail. At the same time a crash forward told where another shot had struck home. It would be ten minutes before the Sutherland’s broadside could bear on the battery.

“Mr. Marsh,” said Hornblower. “Turn the starboard bowchasers on that battery.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Carry on with your target practice, Mr. Gerard.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

As part of the programme for training his men into fighting machines it would be invaluable to give them firing practice while actually under fire from the enemy—no one knew better than Hornblower the difference between being fired at and not being fired at. He found himself in the act of thinking that one or two unimportant casualties might be worth receiving in these circumstances as part of the crew’s necessary experience, and then he drew back in horror from the thought that he was casually condemning some of his own men to mutilation or death—and he might himself be one of those casualties. It was intolerably easy to separate mentally the academic theories of war from the human side of it, even when one was engaged in it oneself. To his men down below the little uniformed figures scrambling over the hillside were not human beings suffering agonies from heat and thirst and fatigue; and the still figures which littered the road here were not disembowelled corpses, lately fathers or lovers. They might as well be tin soldiers for all his men thought about them. It was mad that at that moment, irrelevantly in the heat, and the din of firing, he should start thinking about Lady Barbara and her pendant of sapphires, and Maria, who must now be growing ungainly with her child within her. He shook himself free from such thoughts—while they had filled his mind the battery had fired another salvo whose effect he actually had not noticed.

The bow-chasers were banging away at the battery; their fire might unsteady the men at the field guns. Meanwhile the broadside guns were finding few targets offered them, for the Italian division opposite them had scattered widely all over the hillside in groups of no more than half a dozen at the most—some of them were right up on the skyline. Their officers would have a difficult time reassembling them, and any who wished to desert—the ‘Account of the Present War in the Peninsula’ had laid stress on the tendency of the Italians to desert—would have ample opportunity today.

A crash and a cry below told that a shot from the battery had caused one at least of the casualties Hornblower had been thinking about—from the high-pitched scream of agony it must have been one of the ship’s boys who had been hit; he set his lips firm as he measured the distance the ship still had to sail before bringing her broadside to bear. He would have to receive two more salvoes; it was the tiniest bit difficult to wait for them. Here came one—it passed close overhead with a sound like an infinity of bees on an urgent mission; apparently the gunners had made inadequate allowance for the rapidly decreasing range. The main top gallant backstay parted with a crack, and a gesture from Bush sent a party to splice it. The Sutherland would have to swing out now in readiness to weather the point and reef ahead.