Dudley Pope - The Ramage Touch

The carpenter and his mates were repairing the damaged gun carriage while the gunner made checks with his callipers to ensure that the gun itself had not been damaged. Aitken was on the quarterdeck and pointed to the xebec, which was barely a mile off. Southwick was scanning the wavetops with a telescope and moving across to the other side of the quarterdeck when he saw Ramage.

"Just making sure we aren't missing any survivors, sir," he explained, and Ramage saw that the wreckage now covered a large area. "The boats are going to everything that's floating. One silly fellow clinging to a yard hid himself under a piece of the sail - apparently thought we were cutting everyone's throat, until some of his mates shouted to him. He bobbed out quick enough then!"

Ramage nodded and left Southwick to his search as he walked forward to where all the French prisoners were herded together on the fo'c'sle. They would soon be taken below and a gun loaded with canister shot trained on the hatch, but for the moment it was easier to guard them up in the bow.

They were a classic cross-section of seamen serving in a man o' war, whatever their allegiance, but Ramage thought that among the pinched faces, sea-soaked and bedraggled hair, and torn clothing, he could hear various regional accents. One man grumbled in the deep, slow accents of the Camargue; another, excited, angry, and frightened, came from the north, probably Artois, among the flat fields of Flanders. A third, from his behaviour a petty officer trying to restore discipline, was almost certainly from Alsace or Lorraine.

Ramage knew he was deliberately wasting time: there was only one Frenchman he needed to talk to and he would be down below, being patched up by Bowen, who had so few wounded to attend to that he had turned the gunroom into a surgery, with a piece of canvas stretched across the table with short lengths of rope ready, if necessary, to strap down a patient if the pain became too bad: there was no rum yet distilled that could deaden the rasp of a saw if a limb was being amputated.

As Ramage walked into the gunroom he saw that the tub, conveniently placed to hold "wings and limbs", was empty. There were perhaps two dozen wounded Frenchmen waiting outside the gunroom door, but they were patiently sitting on the deck.

The sheet of canvas was soaked with blood; Bowen, the man who had been one of Wimpole Street's finest surgeons until his practice was ruined when he became a drunkard and was forced into the navy - to be cured of drinking by a ruthless Ramage - looked up, apron stained red, as Ramage spoke to him.

"Ah, sir; a most successful action: my congratulations. A frigate sunk and hardly any work for me. One funeral for you, and there's a young Frenchman I'm worried about."

Ramage nodded, already experiencing the familiar nausea that always made him feel faint at the sight of all the medical instruments laid out on another piece of canvas stretched on the deck, with a loblolly man kneeling beside it, ready to pass in a moment whatever Bowen called for.

"Let me have your report when you've finished treating everyone. Now, that French officer . . ."

"Ah, leg wound. Nothing serious - lacerations of the gastrocnemius and the tibialis anticus muscles. Pieces of splinter - I've extracted them all. Plenty of blood at the time but he's been bandaged up and given a stiff tot of rum. Apart from changing the dressings in a day or two, he's quite all right. He can walk, but I've put him in Martin's cabin until I had time to get orders from you, sir."

"Very well, Bowen, thank you. I'll take him away because I want to talk to him."

"He's still weak from the loss of blood, sir," Bowen said cautioningly. "I must still consider him my patient."

"I have a terrible reputation for torturing wounded prisoners," Ramage said dryly, and Bowen grinned. "I know, sir; you tortured me enough!"

"But you can give a man a tot of rum now, and never feel the need . . ."

"Oh yes, sir, the torture was effective enough!"

"Right, now which is Martin's cabin?"

He walked over to the tiny hutch Bowen pointed at as he called for an instrument and turned back to the seaman lashed down on the table. "Keep still, you oaf," he said in appalling French. "Because of my skill you will keep the arm. But not, certainly not, if you wriggle like an eel."

The little cabin was lit only by the gunroom skylight, and Ramage saw the man lying in the cot, the lower part of his left leg swollen by the dressings and the trouser leg cut away almost to the crotch. The grey-haired man was lying almost at attention, but he looked defeated. Not defeated in battle, Ramage thought, but defeated by life. He had good, almost fine features, and Ramage wondered whether he was what the Revolutionaries would have called an aristo who, to save his life, land or because of a change of heart, had joined the Revolutionaries but had never become of the Revolution because someone who had not fought or shouted at the barricades or howled at the guillotine platforms was never fully accepted. What, apart from losing his ship, which was a risk any naval officer took, made his face sag and his body look, even recumbent on the cot, as though it had just received five hundred lashes?

"Admiral Poitier," Ramage said quietly from the doorway, "can you walk up to my cabin or shall I get a couple of men to carry you?"

The man had gone rigid for a moment, a movement which brought another stab of pain to his leg, but he slowly relaxed when he realized that there were many ways by which Ramage could have learned his name and rank.

"I can walk slowly," Poitier said, sitting up in the swinging cot and putting his right leg on the deck as he looked round for something to grip. Ramage held out a hand and a moment later, with a deep grunt, Poitier was standing beside him. He was not as tall as Ramage remembered, and there was the smell of rum on his breath, but he was sober enough.

"Your surgeon," he muttered, "he did a fine job. Just cuts, from splinters. No permanent damage - if I understood his French correctly."

Ramage stood back as the man hobbled from the cabin, glanced at the seaman stretched on the table and murmured a few words of encouragement, and then made his way up the companionway, able to walk more easily than Ramage expected because the kneecap had not been damaged.

Ramage led the way to his cabin, then stood back at the top of the companionway, noting Poitier's obvious familiarity with this type of ship: the duck of the head at the fifth step of the companionway to avoid a deck beam, sharp turn aft at the bottom to enter the captain's cabin, the nod to the Marine sentry who came to attention and was obviously about to challenge Poitier until he saw Ramage following.

Inside the cabin, Ramage twisted the armchair round until it faced the desk, and gestured towards it. Poitier sat down carefully, as though expecting it to be some trick chair with arms that would seize him, and then he sighed as it gave him relief from the pain in his leg. Ramage tossed his hat on to the settee and sat in the straight-backed chair at the desk. He took a key from his pocket, opened the lower drawer and took out the documents, putting them squarely in front of him on the desk.

"Admiral," he said quietly, "I must congratulate you on your recent promotion -"

Poitier inclined his head in acknowledgement. This too was information the Englishman had obviously obtained from some of the men.

"- which I imagine you never expected. You are a Breton, no?"

Poitier nodded. "You speak very good French, Captain. Fluent, in fact. I would have -" he paused for a moment, his eyes searching Ramage's face warily. "Do you come from Paris? Are you a royalist?"

Ramage shook his head. "You flatter me. No, I am English. I must apologize for not introducing myself: my name is Ramage, Nicholas Ramage." He pronounced the name in the French way, and Poitier seemed to freeze.