Alexander Kent - Honour This Day

Bolitho crawled to Midshipman Mirnelees and dragged at his shoulder to turn him on to his back. His eyes were shut tight, and there was moisture like tears beneath the lids. He was dead. He saw Allday crouching on his knees, his mouth wide as he sucked in the air. Their eyes met and Allday tried to grin.

Bolitho felt someone pulling him to his feet, his eyes blinded again by the sunlight as it laid bare the destruction.

Then the smoke drifted lower and hid San Mateo from view.

Sir Piers Blachford steadied himself against the makeshift table while the guns thundered out yet again and shook the whole ship. He wiped his streaming face and said, 'Take this man away. He's dead.'

The surgeon's assistants seized the naked corpse and dragged it away into the shadows of the orlop deck.

Blachford reached up and felt the massive beam by his head. If there was really a hell, he thought, it must surely look like this.

The swinging lanterns which dangled above the table made it worse, if that were possible, casting shadows up the curved sides of the hull one moment, and laying bare the huddled or inert shapes of the wounded who were being brought down to the orlop with hardly a let-up.

He looked at his companion, George Minchm, Hyperion's own surgeon, a coarse-faced man with sprouting grey hair. His eyes were red-rimmed, and not only from fatigue. There was a huge jug of rum beside the table, to help ease the agony or the passing moments of the pitiful wounded who were brought to the table, stripped, then held like victims under torture until the work was done. Minchm seemed to drink more than his share.

Blachford had seen the most terrible wounds. Men without limbs, with their faces and bodies burned, or clawed by flaying splinters. The whole place, which was normally the midshipmen's berth, where they slept, ate and studied their manuals by the dim light of their glims, was filled with suffering. It stank of blood, vomit and pain. Each thundering roar of a broadside, or the sickening crash of enemy balls hitting the ship around them, brought cries and groans from the figures who waited to be attended.

Blachford could only guess what was happening up there, where it was broad daylight. Here on the orlop, no outside light ever penetrated. Below the waterline it was the safest place for this grisly work, but it revolted him none the less.

He gestured to the obscene tubs below the table, partly filled with amputated limbs, a stark warning to those who would be the next to be carried to endure what must be an extension of their agony. Only death seemed like a blessed relief here. 'Take them out!'

He listened to the beat of hammers in the narrow carpenter's walks, which ran around the ship below the waterline. Like tiny corridors between the inner compartments and the outer hull, where the carpenter and his mates repaired shot holes or leaks as the iron smashed again and again into the side.

There was a long drawn out rumbling directly overhead, and Blachford stared at the red-painted timbers as if he expected them to cave in.

A frightened voice called from the shadows. 'What's that, Toby?'

Someone replied, 'They're runnm' in the lower battery, that's what!'

Blachford asked quickly, 'Why would they do that?'

Minchin took a cupful of rum and wiped his mouth with a blood-stained fist.

'Clearing it. We're alongside one o' the buggers. They'll need every spare Jack to fight 'em off!'

He shouted hoarsely, 'Next one, Donovan 1'

Then he eyed Blachford with something like contempt. 'Not quite what you're used to, I expect? No fancy operating rooms, with lines of ignorant students hanging on your every word.' He blinked his red-rimmed eyes as smoke eddied through the deck. 'I hope you learn something useful today, Sir Piers. Now you know what we have to suffer in the name of medicine.'

A loblolly boy said, 'This one's an officer, sir.'

Blachford leaned over the table as the lieutenant was stripped of his torn shirt and pressed flat on the table.

It was the second lieutenant, Lovering, who had been shot down by a Spanish marksman.

Blachford studied the terrible wound in his arm. The blood looked black in the swinging lanterns, the skin ragged where the ball had split apart upon hitting the bone.

Lovering stared at him, his eyes glazed with pain. 'Oh God, is it bad?'

Mmchin touched his bare shoulder. It felt cold and clammy. 'Sorry, Ralph.' He glanced at Blachford. 'It's got to come off.'

Lovering closed his eyes. 'Please God, not my arm!'

Blachford waited for an assistant to bring his instruments. He had had to order them to to be cleaned again and again. No wonder men died of gangrene. He said gently, 'He's right. For your own sake.'

The lieutenant rolled his head away from the nearest lantern. He was about twenty-two, Blachford thought.

Lovering said in a whisper, 'Why not kill me? I'm done for.'

More crashes shook the hull and several instruments fell to die deck. Blachford stooped to retrieve one of them and stared, sickened, as a rat scurried away into the shadows.

Mmchin saw his disgust and set his teeth. Coming here with all his high-and-mighty talk. What did he know about war?

From one corner of his eye he saw the lamplight glint on Blachford's knife.

'Here, Ralph.' He placed a wedge of leather between his jaws before he could protest. 'I'll give you some proper brandy after this.'

A voice yelled through the misty smoke. 'Another officer, sir!'

An assistant held up his lantern and Blachford saw Lieutenant Quayle slipping down against one of the massive umbers, trying to cover his face with his coat.

A seaman protested angrily,' 'E's not even marked!'

Lieutenant Lovering struggled on the table, and but for the assistant holding his uninjured arm, and Mmchm's hands on his shoulders, would have fought his way to his feet.

'You bloody bastard! You cowardly -' His voice trailed away as he fell back in a faint on the table.

Blachford glanced again at Quayle; he was gripping his fingers and whimpering like a child.

'Call him what you will, but he's as much a casualty as any of them!'

Minchin replaced the leather wedge between Lovering's jaws. Brutal, callous; they were the marks of his trade. He held Lovering's shoulders and waited for him to feel the first incision of the knife. With luck he might lose consciousness completely before the saw made its first stroke.

Minchin could dismiss what Blachford and others like him thought about the navy's surgeons. He could even ignore Love-ring's agony, although he had always liked the young lieutenant.

Instead he concentrated on his daughter in Dover, whom he had not seen for two years.

'Next.' Lovering was carried away; the amputated limb fell into the tub. The wings and limbs tub as most of them called it. Until it was their turn.

Blachford waited for a seaman whose foot had been crushed beneath a careering gun-truck to be laid before him. Around him the loblolly boys and their helpers held the flickering lanterns closer. Blachford looked at his own arms, red to the elbows, like Minchm's and the rest. No wonder they call us butchers.

The man began to scream and plead but sucked greedily on a mug of rum which Minchin finished before laying bare the shattered foot. The hull quivered again, but it felt as if the battle had drawn away. There seemed to be cannon fire from all directions, occasional yells which were like lost spirits as they filtered through the other decks.

Hyperion might have been boarded, Blachford thought, or the enemy could have drawn away to reform. He knew little about sea-warfare other than what he had been told or had read about in the Gazette. Only since his travels around the fleet had he thought about the men who made victories and defeats real, into flesh and blood like his own.