Chapter VII: Preface (7)

Meanwhile the 92nd was launched again at Abbé's column. Cameron, its colonel, was a soldier of a very gallant type, and, himself a Highlander, he understood the Highland temperament perfectly. He dressed his regiment as if on parade, the colours were uncased, the pipes shrilled fiercely, and in all the pomp of military array, with green tartans and black plumes all wind-blown, and with the wild strains of their native hills and lochs thrilling in their ears, the Highlanders bore down on the French, their officers fiercely leading. On all sides at that moment the British skirmishers were falling back. The 50th was clinging desperately to a small wood that crowned the ridge, but everywhere the French were forcing their way onward. Ashworth's Portuguese were practically destroyed; Barnes, who commanded the centre, was shot through the body. But the fierce charge of the 92nd along the high-road, and of the 71st on the left centre, sent an electric thrill along the whole British front. The skirmishers, instead of falling back, ran forward; the Portuguese rallied. The 92nd found in its immediate front two strong French regiments, and their leading files brought their bayonets to the charge, and seemed eager to meet the 92nd with the actual push of steel. It was the crisis of the fight.

At that moment the French commander's nerve failed him. That steel-edged line of kilted, plume-crested Highlanders, charging with a step so fierce, was too much for him. He suddenly turned his horse, waved his sword; his men promptly faced about, and marched back to their original position. The French on both the right and the left drew back, and the battle for the moment seemed to die down. Hill's right was safe, and he drew the 57th from it to strengthen his sorely battered centre; and just at that moment the sixth division, which had been marching since daybreak, crossed the bridge over the Nive, which the British engineers with rare energy had restored, and appeared on the ridge overlooking the field of battle. Wellington, too, appeared on the scene, with the third and fourth divisions. At two o'clock the allies commenced a forward movement, and Soult fell back; his second counter-stroke had failed.

St. Pierre was, perhaps, the most desperately contested fight in the Peninsular war, a field almost as bloody as Albuera. Hill's ranks were wasted as by fire; three British generals were carried from the field; nearly the whole of the staff was struck down. On a space scarcely one mile square, 5000 men were killed and wounded within three hours. Wellington, as he rode over the field by the side of Hill after the fight was over, declared he had never seen the dead lie so thickly before. It was a great feat for less than 14,000 men with 14 guns to withstand the assault of 35,000 men with 22 guns; and, at least where Abbé led, the fighting of the French was of the most resolute character. The victory was due, in part, to Hill's generalship and the lion-like energy with which he restored his broken centre and flung back the Buffs and the 71st into the fight. But in a quite equal degree the victory was due to the obstinate fighting quality of the British private. The 92nd, for example, broke the French front no less than four times by bayonet charges pushed home with the sternest resolution, and it lost in these charges 13 officers and 171 rank and file.

The French, it might almost be said, lost the field by the momentary failure in nerve of the officer commanding the column upon which the 92nd was rushing in its last and most dramatic charge. His column was massive and unbroken; the men, with bent heads and levelled bayonets, were ready to meet the 92nd with a courage as lofty as that of the Highlanders themselves, and the 92nd, for all its parade of fluttering colours and wind-blown tartans and feathers, was but a single weak battalion. An electrical gesture, a single peremptory call on the part of the leader, even a single daring act by a soldier in the ranks, and the French column would have been hurled on the 92nd, and by its mere weight must have broken it. But the oncoming of the Highlanders proved too great a strain for the nerve of the French general. He wheeled the head of his horse backward, and the fight was lost.

Weeks of the bitterest winter weather suspended all military operations after St. Pierre. The rivers were flooded; the clayey lowlands were one far-stretching quagmire; fogs brooded in the ravines; perpetual tempests shrieked over the frozen summits of the Pyrenees; the iron-bound coast was furious with breakers. But Wellington's hardy veterans--ill-clad, ill-sheltered, and ill-fed--yet kept their watch on the slopes of the Pyrenees. The outposts of the two armies, indeed, fell into almost friendly relations with each other. Barter sprang up between them, a regular code of signals was established, friendly offices were exchanged. Wellington on one occasion desired to reconnoitre Soult's camp from the top of a hill occupied by a French picket, and ordered some English rifles to drive them off. No firing was necessary. An English soldier held up the butt of his rifle and tapped it in a peculiar way. The signal meant, "We must have the hill for a short time," and the French at once retired. A steady traffic in brandy and tobacco sprang up between the pickets of the two armies. A rivulet at one point flowed between the outposts, and an Irish soldier named Patten, on sentry there, placed a canteen with a silver coin in it on a stone by the bank of the rivulet, to be filled with brandy by the French in the usual way. Canteen and coin vanished, but no brandy arrived. Patten, a daring fellow, regarded himself as cheated, and the next day seeing, as he supposed, the same French sentry on duty, he crossed the rivulet, seized the Frenchman's musket, shook the amazed sentry out of his accoutrements as a pea is shaken out of its pod, and carried them off. The French outposts sent in a flag of truce, complained of this treatment, and said the unfortunate sentry's life would be forfeited unless his uniform and gun were restored. Patten, however, insisted that he held these "in pawn for a canteen of brandy," and he got his canteen before the uniform was restored.

On February 12 a white hard frost suddenly fell on the whole field of operations, and turned the viscid mud everywhere to the hardness of stone. The men could march, the artillery move; and Wellington, whose strategy was ripe, was at once in action.

Soult barred his path by a great entrenched camp at Bayonne, to which the Adour served as a Titanic wet ditch. The Adour is a great river, swift and broad--swiftest and broadest through the six miles of its course below the town to its mouth. Its bed is of shifting sand; the spring-tide rises in it fourteen feet, the ebb-tide runs seven miles an hour. Where the swift river and the great rollers of the Bay of Biscay meet is a treacherous bar--in heavy weather a mere tumult of leaping foam. Soult assumed that Wellington would cross the river above the town; the attempt to cross it near the mouth, where it was barred with sand, and beaten with surges, and guarded, too, by a tiny squadron of French gunboats, was never suspected. Yet exactly this was Wellington's plan; and his bridge across the Adour is declared by Napier to be a stupendous undertaking, which must always rank amongst "the prodigies of war." Forty large sailing-boats, of about twenty tons burden each, carrying the materials for the bridge, were to enter the mouth of the Adour at the moment when Hope, with part of Hill's division, made his appearance on the left bank of the river, with materials for rafts, by means of which sufficient troops could be thrown across the Adour to capture a battery which commanded its entrance.

On the night of February 22, Hope, with the first division, was in the assigned position on the banks of the Adour, hidden behind some sandhills. But a furious gale made the bar impassable, and not a boat was in sight. Hope, the most daring of men, never hesitated; he would cross the river without the aid of the fleet. His guns were suddenly uncovered, the tiny French flotilla was sunk or scattered, and a pontoon or raft, carrying sixty men of the Guards, pushed out from the British bank. A strong French picket held the other shore; but, bewildered and ill led, they made no opposition. A hawser was dragged across the stream, and pontoons, each carrying fifteen men, were in quick succession pulled across. When about a thousand men had in this way reached the French bank, some French battalions made their appearance. Colonel Stopford, who was in command, allowed the French to come on--their drums beating the _pas de charge_, and their officers waving their swords--to within a distance of twenty yards, and then opened upon them with his rocket brigade. The fiery flight and terrifying sound of these missiles put the French to instant rout. All night the British continued to cross, and on the morning of the 24th the flotilla was off the bar, the boats of the men-of-war leading.

The first boat that plunged into the tumult of breakers, leaping and roaring over the bar, sank instantly. The second shot through and was safe; but the tide was running out furiously, and no boat could follow till it was high water again. When high water came, the troops crowding the sandbanks watched with breathless interest the fight of the boats to enter. They hung and swayed like a flock of gigantic sea-birds on the rough and tumbling sea. Lieutenant Bloye of the _Lyra_, who led the way in his barge, dashed into the broad zone of foam, and was instantly swallowed up with all his crew. The rest of the flotilla bore up to right and left, and hovered on the edge of the tormented waters. Suddenly Lieutenant Cheyne of the _Woodlark_ caught a glimpse of the true course and dashed through, and boat after boat came following with reeling decks and dripping crews; but in the whole passage no fewer than eight of the flotilla were destroyed. The bridge was quickly constructed. Thirty-six two-masted vessels were moored head to stern, with an interval between each vessel, across the 800 yards of the Adour; a double line of cables, about ten feet apart, linked the boats together; strong planks were lashed athwart the cables, making a roadway; a double line of masts, forming a series of floating squares, served as a floating boom; and across this swaying, flexible, yet mighty bridge, Wellington was able to pour his left wing, with all its artillery and material, and so draw round Bayonne an iron line of investment.

This movement thrust back Soult's right, but he clung obstinately to the Gave. He held by Napoleon's maxim that the best way to defend is to attack, and Wellington's very success gave him what seemed a golden opportunity. Wellington's left had crossed the Adour, but that very movement separated it from the right.

Soult took up his position on a ridge of hills above Orthez. He commanded the fords by which Picton must cross, and his plan was to crush him while in the act of crossing. The opportunity was clear, but somehow Soult missed it. There failed him at the critical moment the swift-attacking impulse which both Napoleon and Wellington possessed in so high a degree. Picton's two divisions crossed the Gave, and climbed the bank through mere fissures in the rocks, which broke up all military order, and the nearest point which allowed them to fall into line was within cannon-shot of the enemy. Even Picton's iron nerve shook at such a crisis; but Wellington, to use Napier's phrase, "calm as deepest sea," watched the scene. Soult ought to have attacked; he waited to be attacked, and so missed victory.

By nine o'clock Wellington had formed his plan, and Ross's brigade was thrust through a gorge on Soult's left. The French were admirably posted: they had a narrow front, abundant artillery, and a great battery placed so as to smite on the flank any column forcing its way through the gorge which pierced Soult's left. Ross's men fought magnificently. Five times they broke through the gorge, and five times the fire of the French infantry on the slopes above them, and the grape of the great battery at the head of the gorge, drove the shattered regiments back. On Soult's right, again, Foy flung back with loss an attack by part of Picton's forces. On both the right and left, that is, Soult was victorious, and, as he saw the wasted British lines roll sullenly back, it is said that the French general smote his thigh in exultation, and cried, "At last I have him!"

Almost at that moment, however, the warlike genius of Wellington changed the aspect of the scene. He fed the attacks on Soult's right and left, and the deepening roar of the battle at these two points absorbed the senses of the French general. Soult's front was barred by what was supposed to be an impassable marsh, above which a great hill frowned; and across the marsh, and upon this hill, the centre of Soult's position, Wellington launched the famous 52nd.

Colborne plunged with his men into the marsh; they sank at every step above the knee, sometimes to the middle. The skirmishers shot fiercely at them. But with stern composure the veterans of the light division--soldiers, as Napier never tires in declaring, who "had never yet met their match in the field"--pressed on. The marsh was crossed, the hill climbed, and with a sudden and deafening shout--the cheer which has a more full and terrible note than any other voice of fighting men, the shout of the British regiment as it charges--the 52nd dashed between Foy and Taupin. A French battalion in their path was scattered as by the stroke of a thunderbolt. The French centre was pierced; both victorious wings halted, and began to ebb back. Hill, meanwhile, had crossed the Gave, and taking a wider circle, threatened Soult's line of retreat. The French fell back, and fell back with ever-quickening steps, but yet fighting sternly; the British, with deafening musketry and cannonade, pressed on them. Hill quickened his pace on the ridge along which he was pressing. It became a race who should reach first the single bridge on the Luy-de-Béarn over which the French must pass. The pace became a run. Many of the French broke from their ranks and raced forward. The British cavalry broke through some covering battalions and sabred the fugitives. A great disaster was imminent; and yet it was avoided, partly by Soult's cool and obstinate defence, and partly by the accident that at that moment Wellington was struck by a spent ball and was disabled, so that his swift and imperious will no longer directed the pursuit.

Orthez may be described as the last and not the least glorious fight in the Peninsular war. Toulouse was fought ten day afterwards, but it scarcely belongs to the Peninsular campaigns, and was actually fought after a general armistice had been signed.

THE BATTLE OF THE BALTIC

"Let us think of them that sleep
Full many a fathom deep
By thy wild and stormy deep,
Elsinore!"
--CAMPBELL.

"I have been in a hundred and five engagements, but that of to-day is the most terrible of them all." This was how Nelson himself summed up the great fight off Copenhagen, or the battle of the Baltic as it is sometimes called, fought on April 2, 1801. It was a battle betwixt Britons and Danes. The men who fought under the blood-red flag of Great Britain, and under the split flag of Denmark with its white cross, were alike the descendants of the Vikings. The blood of the old sea-rovers ran hot and fierce in their veins. Nelson, with the glories of the Nile still ringing about his name, commanded the British fleet, and the fire of his eager and gallant spirit ran from ship to ship like so many volts of electricity. But the Danes fought in sight of their capital, under the eyes of their wives and children. It is not strange that through the four hours during which the thunder of the great battle rolled over the roofs of Copenhagen and up the narrow waters of the Sound, human valour and endurance in both fleets were at their very highest.

Less than sixty years afterwards "thunders of fort and fleet" along all the shores of England were welcoming a daughter of the Danish throne as

"Bride of the heir of the kings of the sea."

And Tennyson, speaking for every Briton, assured the Danish girl who was to be their future Queen--

"We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee."

What was it in 1801 which sent a British fleet on an errand of battle to Copenhagen?

It was a tiny episode of the long and stern drama of the Napoleonic wars. Great Britain was supreme on the sea, Napoleon on the land, and, in his own words, Napoleon conceived the idea of "conquering the sea by the land." Paul I. of Russia, a semi-lunatic, became Napoleon's ally and tool. Paul was able to put overwhelming pressure on Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia, and these Powers were federated as the "League of Armed Neutrality," with the avowed purpose of challenging the marine supremacy of Great Britain. Paul seized all British ships in Russian ports; Prussia marched troops into Hanover; every port from the North Cape to Gibraltar was shut against the British flag. Britain, stood alone, practically threatened with a naval combination of all the Northern Powers, while behind the combination stood Napoleon, the subtlest brain and most imperious will ever devoted to the service of war. Napoleon's master passion, it should be remembered, was the desire to overthrow Great Britain, and he held in the palm of his hand the whole military strength of the Continent. The fleets of France and Spain were crushed or blockaded: but the three Northern Powers could have put into battle-line a fleet of fifty great ships and twenty-five frigates. With this force they could raise the blockade of the French ports, sweep triumphant through the narrow seas, and land a French army in Kent or in Ulster.

Pitt was Prime Minister, and his masterful intellect controlled British policy. He determined that the fleets of Denmark and of Russia should not become a weapon in the hand of Napoleon against England; and a fleet of eighteen ships of the line, with frigates and bomb-vessels, was despatched to reason, from the iron lips of their guns, with the misguided Danish Government. Sir Hyde Parker, a decent, unenterprising veteran, was commander-in-chief by virtue of seniority; but Nelson, with the nominal rank of second in command, was the brain and soul of the expedition. "Almost all the safety and certainly all the honour of England," he said to his chief, "is more entrusted to you than ever yet fell to the lot of a British officer." And all through the story of the expedition it is amusing to notice the fashion in which Nelson's fiery nature strove to kindle poor Sir Hyde Barker's sluggish temper to its own flame.

The fleet sailed from Yarmouth on March 12, and fought its way through fierce spring gales to the entrance of the Kattegat. The wind was fair; Nelson was eager to sweep down on Copenhagen with the whole fleet, and negotiate with the whole skyline of Copenhagen crowded with British topsails. "While the negotiation is going on," he said, "the Dane should see our flag waving every time he lifts up his head." Time was worth more than gold; it was worth brave men's lives. The Danes were toiling day and night to prepare the defence of their capital. But prim Sir Hyde anchored, and sent up a single frigate with his ultimatum, and it was not until March 30 that the British fleet, a long line of stately vessels, came sailing up the Sound, passed Elsinore, and cast anchor fifteen miles from Copenhagen. Nothing could surpass the gallant energy shown by the Danes in their preparation for defence, and Nature had done much to make the city impregnable from the sea.

The Sound is narrow and shallow, a mere tangle of shoals wrinkled with twisted channels and scoured by the swift tides. King's Channel runs straight up towards the city, but a huge sandbank, like the point of a toe, splits the channel into two just as it reaches the harbour. The western edge runs up, pocket-shaped, into the city, and forms the actual port; the main channel contracts, swings round to the south-east, and forms a narrow passage between the shallows in front of the city and a huge shoal called the Middle Ground. A cluster of grim and heavily armed fortifications called the Three-Crown Batteries guarded the entrance to the harbour, and looked right up King's Channel; a stretch of floating batteries and line-of-battle ships, a mile and a half in extent, ran from the Three-Crown Batteries along the edge of the shoals in front of the city, with some heavy pile batteries at its termination. The direct approach up King's Channel, together with the narrow passage between the city and the Middle Ground, were thus commanded by the fire of over 600 heavy guns. The Danes had removed the buoys that marked all the channels, the British had no charts, and only the most daring and skilful seamanship could bring the great ships of the British fleet through that treacherous tangle of shoals to the Danish front. As a matter of fact, the heavier ships in the British fleet never attempted to join in the desperate fight which was waged, but hung as mere spectators in the offing.

Meanwhile popular enthusiasm in the Danish capital was at fever-point. Ten thousand disciplined troops manned the batteries; but peasants from the farms, workmen from the factories, merchants from the city, hastened to volunteer, and worked day and night at gun-drill. A thousand students from the university enrolled themselves, and drilled from morning till night. These student-soldiers had probably the best military band ever known; it consisted of the entire orchestra of the Theatre Royal, all volunteers. A Danish officer, sent on some message under a flag of truce to the British fleet, was required to put his message in writing, and was offered a somewhat damaged pen for that purpose. He threw it down with a laugh, saying that "if the British guns were not better pointed than their pens they wouldn't make much impression on Copenhagen." That flash of gallant wit marked the temper of the Danes. They were on flame with confident daring.

Nelson, always keen for a daring policy, had undertaken to attack the Danish defences with a squadron of twelve seventy-fours, and the frigates and bomb-vessels of the fleet. He determined to shun the open way of King's Channel, grope through the uncertain passage called the Dutch Deep, at the back of the Middle Ground, and forcing his way up the narrow channel in front of the shallows, repeat on the anchored batteries and battleships of the Danes the exploit of the Nile. He spent the nights of March 30 and 31 sounding the channel, being himself, in spite of fog and ice, in the boat nearly the whole of these two bitter nights. On April 1 the fleet came slowly up the Dutch Deep, and dropped anchor at night about two miles from the southern extremity of the Danish line. At eleven o'clock that night, Hardy--in whose arms Nelson afterwards died on board the _Victory_--pushed off from the flagship in a small boat and sounded the channel in front of the Danish floating batteries. So daring was he that he actually sounded round the leading ship of the Danish line, using a pole to avoid being detected.

In the morning the wind blew fair for the channel. Nelson's plans had been elaborated to their minutest details, and the pilots of the fleet were summoned at nine o'clock to the flagship to receive their last instructions. But their nerve failed them. They were simply the mates or masters of Baltic traders turned for the moment into naval pilots. They had no charts. They were accustomed to handle ships of 200 or 300 tons burden, and the task of steering the great British seventy-fours through the labyrinths of shallows, with the tide running like a mill-race, appalled them. At last Murray, in the _Edgar_, undertook to lead. The signal was made to weigh in succession, and one great ship after another, with its topsails on the caps, rounded the shoulder of the Middle Ground, and in stately procession, the _Edgar_ leading, came up the channel. Campbell in his fine ballad has pictured the scene:--

"Like leviathans afloat
Lay their bulwarks on the brine,
While the sign of battle flew
On the lofty British line.
It was ten of April morn by the chime;
As they drifted on their path
There was silence deep as death,
And the boldest held his breath
For a time.
But the might of England flushed
To anticipate the scene,
And her van the fleeter rushed
O'er the deadly space between."

The leading Danish ships broke into a tempest of fire as the British ships came within range. The _Agamemnon_ failed to weather the shoulder of the Middle Ground, and went ignobly ashore, and the scour of the tide kept her fast there, in spite of the most desperate exertions of her crew. The _Bellona_, a pile of white canvas above, a double line of curving batteries below, hugged the Middle Ground too closely, and grounded too; and the _Russell_, following close after her, went ashore in the same manner, with its jib-boom almost touching the _Bellona's_ taffrail. One-fourth of Nelson's force was thus practically out of the fight before a British gun was fired. These were the ships, too, intended to sail past the whole Danish line and engage the Three-Crown Batteries. As they were _hors de combat_, the frigates of the squadron, under Riou--"the gallant, good Riou" of Campbell's noble lines--had to take the place of the seventy-fours.

Meanwhile, Nelson, in the _Elephant_, came following hard on the ill-fated _Russell_. Nelson's orders were that each ship should pass her leader on the starboard side, and had he acted on his own orders, Nelson too would have grounded, with every ship that followed him. The interval betwixt each ship was so narrow that decision had to be instant; and Nelson, judging the water to the larboard of the _Russell_ to be deeper, put his helm a-starboard, and so shot past the _Russell_ on its larboard beam into the true channel, the whole line following his example. That sudden whirl to starboard of the flagship's helm--a flash of brilliant seamanship--saved the battle.

Ship after ship shot past, and anchored, by a cable astern, in its assigned position. The sullen thunder of the guns rolled from end to end of the long line, the flash of the artillery ran in a dance of flame along the mile and a half of batteries, and some 2000 pieces of artillery, most of them of the heaviest calibre, filled the long Sound with the roar of battle. Nelson loved close fighting, and he anchored within a cable's length of the Danish flagship, the pilots refusing to carry the ship nearer on account of the shallow depth, and the average distance of the hostile lines was less than a hundred fathoms. The cannonade raged, deep-voiced, unbroken, and terrible, for three hours. "Warm work," said Nelson, as it seemed to deepen in fury and volume, "but, mark you, I would not be elsewhere for thousands." The carnage was terrific. Twice the Danish flagship took fire, and out of a crew of 336 no fewer than 270 were dead or wounded. Two of the Danish prams drifted from the line, mere wrecks, with cordage in rags, bulwarks riddled, guns dismounted, and decks veritable shambles.

The battle, it must be remembered, raged within easy sight of the city, and roofs and church towers were crowded with spectators. They could see nothing but a low-lying continent of whirling smoke, shaken with the tumult of battle, and scored perpetually, in crimson bars, with the flame of the guns. Above the drifting smoke towered the tops of the British seventy-fours, stately and threatening. The south-east wind presently drove the smoke over the city, and beneath that inky roof, as under the gloom of an eclipse, the crowds of Copenhagen, white-faced with excitement, watched the Homeric fight, in which their sons, and brothers, and husbands were perishing.

Nothing could surpass the courage of the Danes. Fresh crews marched fiercely to the floating batteries as these threatened to grow silent by mere slaughter, and, on decks crimson and slippery with the blood of their predecessors, took up the fight. Again and again, after a Danish ship had struck from mere exhaustion, it was manned afresh from the shore, and the fight renewed. The very youngest officer in the Danish navy was a lad of seventeen named Villemoes. He commanded a tiny floating battery of six guns, manned by twenty-four men, and he managed to bring it under the very counter of Nelson's flagship, and fired his guns point-blank into its huge wooden sides. He stuck to his work until the British marines shot down every man of his tiny crew except four. After the battle Nelson begged that young Villemoes might be introduced to him, and told the Danish Crown Prince that a boy so gallant ought to be made an admiral. "If I were to make all my brave officers admirals," was the reply, "I should have no captains or lieutenants left."

The terrific nature of the British fire, as well as the stubbornness of Danish courage, may be judged from the fact that most of the prizes taken in the fight were so absolutely riddled with shot as to have to be destroyed. Foley, who led the van at the battle of the Nile, was Nelson's flag-captain in the _Elephant_, and he declared he burned fifty more barrels of powder in the four hours' furious cannonade at Copenhagen than he did during the long night struggle at the Nile! The fire of the Danes, it may be added, was almost as obstinate and deadly. The _Monarch_, for example, had no fewer than 210 of its crew lying dead or wounded on its decks. At one o'clock Sir Hyde Parker, who was watching the struggle with a squadron of eight of his heaviest ships from the offing, hoisted a signal to discontinue the engagement. Then came the incident which every boy remembers.

The signal-lieutenant of the _Elephant_ reported that the admiral had thrown out No. 39, the signal to discontinue the fight. Nelson was pacing his quarterdeck fiercely, and took no notice of the report. The signal-officer met him at the next turn, and asked if he should repeat the signal. Nelson's reply was to ask if his own signal for close action was still hoisted. "Yes," said the officer. "Mind you keep it so," said Nelson. Nelson continued to tramp his quarter-deck, the thunder of the battle all about him, his ship reeling to the recoil of its own guns. The stump of his lost arm jerked angrily to and fro, a sure sign of excitement with him. "Leave off action!" he said to his lieutenant; "I'm hanged if I do." "You know, Foley," he said, turning to his captain, "I've only one eye; I've a right to be blind sometimes." And then putting the glass to his blind eye, he exclaimed, "I really do not see the signal!" He dismissed the incident by saying, "D---- the signal! Keep mine for closer action flying!"

As a matter of fact, Parker had hoisted the signal only to give Nelson the opportunity for withdrawing from the fight if he wished. The signal had one disastrous result--the little cluster of frigates and sloops engaged with the Three-Crown Batteries obeyed it and hauled off. As the Amazon, Riou's ship, ceased to fire, the smoke lifted, and the Danish battery got her in full sight, and smote her with deadly effect. Riou himself, heartbroken with having to abandon the fight, had just exclaimed, "What will Nelson think of us!" when a chain-shot cut him in two, and with him a sailor with something of Nelson's own genius for battle perished.

By two o'clock the Danish fire began to slack. One-half the line was a mere chain of wrecks; some of the floating batteries had sunk; the flagship was a mass of flames. Nelson at this point sent his boat ashore with a flag of truce, and a letter to the Prince Regent. The letter was addressed, "To the Danes, the brothers of Englishmen." If the fire continued from the Danish side, Nelson said he would be compelled to set on fire all the floating batteries he had taken, "without being able to save the brave Danes who had defended them." Somebody offered Nelson, when he had written the letter, a wafer with which to close it. "This," said Nelson, "is no time to appear hurried or informal," and he insisted on the letter being carefully sealed with wax. The Crown Prince proposed an armistice. Nelson, with great shrewdness, referred the proposal to his admiral lying four miles off in the _London_, foreseeing that the long pull out and back would give him time to get his own crippled ships clear of the shoals, and past the Three-Crown Batteries into the open channel beyond--the only course the wind made possible; and this was exactly what happened. Nelson, it is clear, was a shrewd diplomatist as well as a great sailor.

The night was coming on black with the threat of tempest; the Danish flagship had just blown up; but the white flag of truce was flying, and the British toiled, as fiercely as they had fought, to float their stranded ships and take possession of their shattered prizes. Of these, only one was found capable of being sufficiently repaired to be taken to Portsmouth. On the 4th Nelson himself landed and visited the Crown Prince, and a four months' truce was agreed upon. News came at that moment of the assassination of Paul I., and the League of Armed Neutrality--the device by which Napoleon hoped to overthrow the naval power of Great Britain--vanished into mere space. The fire of Nelson's guns at Copenhagen wrecked Napoleon's whole naval policy.

It is curious that, familiar as Nelson was with the grim visage of battle, the carnage of that four hours' cannonade was too much for even his steady nerves. He could find no words too generous to declare his admiration of the obstinate courage shown by the Danes. "The French and Spanish fight well," he said, "but they could not have stood for an hour such a fire as the Danes sustained for four hours."

KING-MAKING WATERLOO

"Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,
The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife;
The morn the marshalling in arms--the day
Battle's magnificently stern array!
The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent
The earth is cover'd thick with other clay,
Which her own clay shall cover, heap'd and pent,
Rider and horse--friend, foe--in one red burial blent!"
--BYRON.

"I look upon Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo as my three best battles--those which had great and permanent consequences. Salamanca relieved the whole south of Spain, changed all the prospects of the war, and was felt even in Prussia. Vittoria freed the Peninsula altogether, broke off the armistice at Dresden, and thus led to Leipsic and the deliverance of Europe; and Waterloo did more than any other battle I know of towards the true object of all battles--the peace of the world."--WELLINGTON, _Conversation with Croker_.

On June 18, 1815, the grey light of a Sunday morning was breaking over a shallow valley lying between parallel ridges of low hills some twelve miles to the south of Brussels. All night the rain had fallen furiously, and still the fog hung low, and driving showers swept over plain and hill as from the church spires of half-a-dozen tiny villages the matin bells began to ring. For centuries those bells had called the villagers to prayers; to-day, as the wave of sound stole through the misty air it was the signal for the awakening of two mighty armies to the greatest battle of modern times.

More ink has, perhaps, been shed about Waterloo than about any other battle known to history, and still the story bristles with conundrums, questions of fact, and problems in strategy, about which the experts still wage, with pen and diagram, strife almost as furious as that which was waged with lance and sword, with bayonet and musket, more than eighty years ago on the actual slopes of Mont St. Jean. It is still, for example, a matter of debate whether, when Wellington first resolved to fight at Waterloo, he had any express promise from Blücher to join him on that field. Did Wellington, for example, ride over alone to Blücher's headquarters on the night before Waterloo, and obtain a pledge of aid, on the strength of which he fought next day? It is not merely possible to quote experts on each side of this question; it is possible to quote the same expert on both sides. Ropes, for example, the latest Waterloo critic, devotes several pages to proving that the interview never took place, and then adds a note to his third edition declaring that he has seen evidence which convinces him it did take place! It is possible even to quote Wellington himself both for the alleged visit and against it. In 1833 he told a circle of guests at Strathfieldsaye, in minute detail, how he got rid of his only aide-de-camp, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, and rode over on "Copenhagen" in the rain and darkness to Wavre, and got from Blücher's own lips the assurance that he would join him next day at Waterloo. In 1838, when directly asked by Baron Gurney whether the story was true, he replied, "No, I did not see Blücher the day before Waterloo." If Homer nodded, it is plain that sometimes the Duke of Wellington forgot!

Clearness on some points, it is true, is slowly emerging. It is admitted, for example, that Napoleon took the allies by surprise when he crossed the Sambre, and, in the very first stage of the campaign, scored a brilliant strategic success over them. Wellington himself, on the night of the famous ball, took the Duke of Richmond into his dressing-room, shut the door, and said, "Napoleon has humbugged me, by ----; he has gained twenty-four hours' march on me." The Duke went on to explain that he had ordered his troops to concentrate at Quatre Bras; "but," he added, "we shall not stop him there, and I must fight him here," at the same time passing his thumb-nail over the position of Waterloo. That map, with the scratch of the Duke's thumb-nail over the very line where Waterloo was afterwards fought, was long preserved as a relic. Part of the surprise, the Duke complained, was due to Blücher. But, as he himself explained to Napier, "I cannot tell the world that Blücher picked the fattest man in his army (Muffling) to ride with an express to me, and that he took thirty hours to go thirty miles."

The hour at which Waterloo began, though there were 150,000 actors in the great tragedy, was long a matter of dispute. The Duke of Wellington puts it at ten o'clock. General Alava says half-past eleven, Napoleon and Drouet say twelve o'clock, and Ney one o'clock. Lord Hill may be credited with having settled this minute question of fact. He took two watches with him into the fight, one a stop-watch, and he marked with it the sound of the first shot fired, and this evidence is now accepted as proving that the first flash of red flame which marked the opening of the world-shaking tragedy of Waterloo took place at exactly ten minutes to twelve.

As these sketches are not written for military experts, but only pretend to tell, in plain prose, and for younger Britons, the story of the great deeds which are part of their historical inheritance, all the disputed questions about Waterloo may be at the outset laid aside. It is a great tale, and it seems all the greater when it is simply told. The campaign of Waterloo, in a sense, lasted exactly four days, yet into that brief space of time there is compressed so much of human daring and suffering, of genius and of folly, of shining triumph and of blackest ruin, that the story must always be one of the most exciting records in human history.