Small Stones

by Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The gun had been at the foot of the gully since sunset, and at ten o'clock it was still there.

Jacob Thurlow sat on the trail of it with his back to the breech and ate the last of his biscuit in the dark, picking the weevils out by feel and flicking them at the rock. Below him the slope went down in stones and myrtle to the road the engineers had made, and the road went away round the shoulder of the hill in long easy bends, a mile and a quarter of it, to come up at last behind the new battery from the side where the French could not see it. That was the road for the gun. It said so on a piece of paper that the bombardier had in his coat.

Above him the gully went straight up, two hundred yards of broken rock, to the back of the same battery.

"Five hours by the road," said the bombardier. "Six if she's heavy on the bends. We'll do it by four."

His name was Coyle and he was of the Royal Artillery, a square man with a square face who had come out of Woolwich and had the drill of a siege gun by heart, every word of it, the way a parson has the Prayer Book. Thurlow had nothing against him. He had worked beside him for a fortnight and Coyle knew his trade. The trouble was that Coyle's trade was horses, and there were no horses, and the gun was on its travelling carriage with forty seamen of the Agamemnon in the drag-ropes instead.

"Daylight's at half after four," said Thurlow.

"Then we'll do it by four."

"We did the last mile of that road in three hours on Tuesday. With a lighter gun."

"The road's been mended since Tuesday."

Thurlow said nothing to that. He had helped to mend it. He knew what had been mended and what had been left, and where the soft place was at the second bend where a wheel had gone in to the axle on Tuesday and it had taken twenty men and a handspike and the best part of an hour to fetch it out. He finished his biscuit and put the bag inside his shirt.

Down the slope somebody was singing, low, one of the Wells men, a song about a girl in Holkham. It stopped when the lieutenant came by.

---

The Agamemnon had been commissioned at Chatham in the year ninety-three, and her captain, who was a Norfolk man himself, had sent round the Norfolk ports for seamen, so that half her people knew one another's mothers. Thurlow was a Wells man. He had been captain of the forecastle for a year and a half, and before that a collier's mate in the Newcastle trade for six, and before that a boy in a Blakeney fishing boat, and he had never in his life until this summer dragged a thing uphill. At sea you did not drag. At sea you put a block where you wanted the weight to go and a fall through the block and men on the fall, and the weight went. Every heavy thing in a ship was moved by a tackle, and every man in a ship knew how to rig one in the dark.

Ashore, for three weeks, they had dragged. It was what the army did. They had dragged from the beach at Port Agro up the first steep bit to the camp, three-quarters of a mile of it, and from the camp to the Madonna, and from the Madonna round to the batteries, in rain at first and then in heat that came off the rocks at night like the heat off a galley range. They had dragged guns and they had dragged shot and they had dragged powder in barrels and planks for the platforms, and they had dug and filled gabions and laid fascines, and men had gone down with the fever every day, and the fever tents behind the Madonna were full. Gotts, who had messed with Thurlow since Chatham, had been in there since Sunday, yellow, talking about herring.

And Captain Serocold had been killed at the guns on Monday, with six men, by grape from the fort, while they were running a gun up into the leading battery. Thurlow had not been there. He had been on the road. He had heard it, a long way off: the fort's guns, and then nothing, and then the fort's guns again.

So he looked up the gully.

It was dark. What moon there was stood behind the hill, and none of its light came into the gully, but Thurlow had been up and down it twice that afternoon carrying gabions on his back, and he knew it the way he knew a ship's waist. Stones, mostly loose, a man's height at the worst step. Myrtle and a kind of thorn. Halfway up, on the left side, a big rock, grey, rooted, as big as a cart, with a lip on its upper face where the rain had cut it.

He stood up off the trail and walked along the drag-rope to where Hosea Dack sat with his head on his knees.

"Hosea. You ever see that rock halfway up?"

Dack lifted his head. "The grey one."

"Would a strop go round it?"

Dack thought about it. He was the oldest man in the party and the best rigger in the ship, a slow, thin man from Cley who had been at sea since the American war and said very little and was nearly always right.

"Doubled," he said. "Two-fathom strop, doubled. And a bit of sheepskin under it on the lip, or it'll cut."

"And a treble block on the strop. And the long fall."

"We've got the long fall. It's in the cart."

"And the gun on the other block."

Dack looked up the gully into the dark. Then he looked at the gun.

"Wants a second purchase at the top," he said. "Or a snatch block at the rock and the fall led back down to the men. You don't want forty men hauling uphill in that. You want 'em hauling down."

Thurlow nodded. That was it. That was the whole thing. Men hauling downhill on a fall, the way they hauled on a fall in a ship, the gun going up the gully on its own wheels and on the tackle together, like a cask going up out of a lighter. Two hundred yards. They would have to shift the purchase once, at the rock, and once again near the top. He began to count it in his head: so many fathoms of fall, so many men, so many heaves, so long to shift the blocks.

"An hour and a half," he said.

"Two," said Dack.

"Still better than the road."

"I didn't say it weren't."

---

The bombardier would not hear of it.

He did not shout. He was not a shouting man. He stood by the wheel of the gun with his piece of paper in his hand, though he could not have read it in that light, and he said that the gun was to go to the battery by the road, which was the road laid out for it, and that the carriage was not built to be hoisted up a cliff like a sack of flour, and that if the gun went over on its side in that gully, there was no way on God's earth to right it before daylight, and it would lie there in full view of the fort, and the fort would knock it to pieces, and him and everybody near it.

All of which was true. Thurlow said so.

"Then there's an end," said Coyle.

"If she goes over."

"If she goes over is the whole of it."

"She won't go over if she's on a tackle. She'll go over on the road. At the second bend. Where she did on Tuesday."

Coyle looked at him. He was not a fool, and he had been there on Tuesday too.

"I've no orders for any gully," he said.

That was also true. Neither had Thurlow. Lieutenant Pakefield, who had the party, had gone back along the line an hour ago to find out where the carpenter had got to with the platform planks, and had not come back, and the midshipman with him had gone looking for him. Nobody in the party had any orders except the bombardier, and the bombardier's orders were on a piece of paper and said the road.

Thurlow was standing there thinking about that, with Dack beside him and forty men sitting in the drag-ropes listening, when somebody came down the gully.

They heard him first. A man coming down loose stones in the dark makes a noise like a cart unloading, and this one came fast, skidding and catching himself, and then a small figure came out of the bottom of the gully onto the level ground by the gun, and stopped, and said, "Who has this gun?"

Thurlow knew the voice. Half the ship had known it since Chatham. It was a thin voice, Norfolk underneath, and it carried.

"Bombardier Coyle has it, sir. Of the artillery. Mr Pakefield's gone back for the planks."

"Coyle. Good. Where is it going?"

"The new battery, sir. By the road."

"The road. Yes." The small figure turned round and looked back up the gully, though there was nothing to see. "I have just come down from the battery. The platform is laid and the merlons are up, and there is room for this gun and one more. General Stuart means to open on the Mozzello at daylight with every gun we have. With this one, every gun we have is four. Without it, three. Where will it be at daylight, Coyle?"

The bombardier was silent for a moment.

"On the road, sir. Very likely."

"Very likely. Thurlow, isn't it? The forecastle. What were you saying to the bombardier when I came down? You were saying something."

So Thurlow told him. Strop and treble block on the grey rock, snatch block for a leading part, men hauling downhill, shift the purchase twice. He did it badly, because he was not used to saying things to the captain in a long string, and he left out the sheepskin and had to go back for it. The captain did not interrupt. When he had finished the captain said:

"How long?"

"Hosea says two hours, sir."

"Dack. Does Dack say two hours?"

"I do, sir," said Dack.

"And by the road?"

Nobody answered. The captain did not seem to want an answer. He was standing with his head a little on one side, looking at the gun, a thin man in a shabby coat with his hat in his hand, and he looked, Thurlow thought, the way he looked on the quarterdeck when the ship was working up to windward along a lee shore and he was thinking about the next tack and the one after.

"Coyle," he said. "You know this gun. You know it better than any seaman here. When she is in battery at daylight, you will be the man who lays her. Will you see her up the gully? It is your gun. These men will hoist her for you. You tell them if she is wrong on the carriage. You tell them if she is going to go over. They will listen."

Coyle looked at the gun. He looked at the paper in his hand. Then he folded it and put it in his coat.

"She'll want her muzzle lashed down to the trail, sir," he said. "Or she'll come out of her trunnion beds when you cant her."

"There," said the captain, and put his hat on. "You see. You knew a thing nobody else here knew." He turned to Thurlow. "I'll send you twenty more men from the Madonna. Don't wait for them. I must go and find the carpenter before Mr Pakefield kills him."

And he went off along the foot of the slope toward the road, quickly, and they heard him a long time after they had stopped seeing him, asking someone the way.

---

Afterwards, when Thurlow told it, in the forecastle of the Agamemnon or in later years in the public houses of Wells, he left out most of the next two hours, because there was nothing in them that a seaman would want to hear. They rigged a tackle and they hauled on it. That is all a seaman does.

But he remembered them.

He remembered Dack going up the gully first with the strop over his shoulder and a lantern under his coat, and the light coming out in a thin line when he got to the rock and opened the coat to see the lip, and somebody below saying "Put that out," and Dack putting it out. He remembered the strop going round, doubled, with his own neckcloth under it on the lip because there was no sheepskin, and Dack swearing at him for a fool and then saying it would do. He remembered the long fall coming up out of the cart in a coil, and the weight of it on his shoulder going up, and the treble block knocking him in the back of the knees at every step.

He remembered the bombardier lashing the muzzle down with a length of spunyarn, kneeling on the stones, doing it slowly and right, and then going all round the carriage feeling every bolt with his hands as though it was a horse he was going to sell.

And he remembered the first heave. Forty men on the fall below the gun, facing downhill, the way you face on a fall in a ship, and Thurlow by the gun with his hand on the wheel, and Dack up at the rock to watch the strop, and the bombardier by the other wheel. And Thurlow saying, low, "Walk away with it," the way it is said in a ship, and the men leaning, and the fall coming taut and the blocks taking it, and then the gun moving. Not much. A foot. The near wheel going up over a stone and the carriage tilting and the bombardier saying sharp "Hold," and every man stopping, and the bombardier getting a handspike under the wheel and lifting, and saying "Now," and the gun going up again.

It went up like that. A foot. A yard. Hold. A stone in the way. A man with a handspike. Now. The men on the fall walking away down the slope as far as the slope would let them, and then a stopper clapped on and the fall overhauled and the men walking back up and taking a fresh hold and walking away again. Nobody spoke except to say hold and now and walk away. Somewhere in the second half-hour the twenty men from the Madonna came up the slope from the road with a midshipman, and went onto the fall without being told.

They shifted the purchase at the rock at about one o'clock, and that was the worst, because the gun had to be held on stoppers and chocks on the steepest part while the blocks came off and went up, and it hung there for twenty minutes with four men lying on the stones under the trail with their backs to the wheels and their feet braced, and if it had come down it would have killed them all. It did not come down. Coyle lay with them. Thurlow did not know why he did that, since it was no part of his duty, and he never asked him.

Above the rock the gully eased. They shifted once more where the battery's back wall stood up black against the sky, and on the last pull the gun came up over the lip of the gully and onto the flat ground behind the platform, and the men on the fall, who could not see it, felt it come easy and stopped, and somebody laughed, and the lieutenant, who had come back from the carpenter at some time nobody noticed, said "Silence there."

Thurlow looked at the sky. It was still dark, but it was not the same dark. Over the hills behind Calvi there was a grey line.

"What's the time?" he said to the midshipman.

"Twenty past three."

Two hours and ten minutes. Dack had been out by ten minutes. Thurlow went and told him so, and Dack said that he had not counted on Thurlow's neckcloth slipping, and Thurlow said that his neckcloth had not slipped, and Dack said it had, at the rock, and he had seen it, and they argued about that while they took the gun off its travelling carriage and the bombardier and his matross went to fetch the gun's proper carriage from the back of the battery.

---

The battery was seven hundred and fifty yards from the Mozzello. Thurlow knew that because he had heard an engineer say it. It was a long low bank of earth and gabions and fascines with a ditch in front of it and a platform of planks behind, and four gaps in the bank for the guns, and between each gap a merlon: a solid piece of the parapet built up out of gabions full of earth with sandbags on the top. Thurlow had filled some of those gabions himself, two days before, with earth he had dug out of the ditch, and carried sandbags up from the cart on his back. He had wondered at the time why anyone should want a wall so thick. He did not wonder now. He had seen what the French shot did to the old battery on the hill.

They got the gun onto its carriage and the carriage onto the platform and run up into its embrasure by four. The other three were already there. The artillery took them over. The seamen were sent back behind the bank to lie down in the ditch at the rear, and Thurlow lay down with his back against the gabions and his hat over his face and was asleep at once.

He woke because the French opened at daylight.

He had been fired at before, at sea, and this was not like it. At sea the noise came across the water and you saw the smoke first and had time to think. Here the noise came from the town and from the fort and from San Francesco on the point all at once, and it went on, and every shot that hit the bank shook the earth he was lying on so that he felt it in his teeth. He put his hat on and sat up. Men were sitting up all along the ditch. Then the four guns in the battery fired together, over his head, and he could not hear anything at all for a while.

He did not see the captain come into the battery. Nobody did. He was there, that was all, as he was always there. Thurlow saw him through the smoke a little after the sun came up, standing on the platform behind the second gun, the one they had brought up the gully, talking to Coyle and pointing. He had a glass under his arm. He went along behind the guns to the end of the battery and stood up on the firing step and put the glass to his eye, the right eye, and looked at the fort for a long time over the top of the merlon, with the shot going over him and into him, and Thurlow, who had been at sea with him for a year and a half, thought nothing of it.

He came back along the platform. He stopped behind the merlon between the second gun and the third, the one built of Thurlow's gabions, and stood there with his back to it and called to the lieutenant.

The French shot struck the merlon on the outside, low down, a hand's breadth from the top of the gabions. Thurlow saw it, as far as you can see such a thing, because he was looking at the captain. The merlon did not go. The gabions held. That was what they were for. But the shot threw the top of it up, the sandbags and the loose earth and everything that was in the earth, and it came over the top of the parapet like a wave coming over a bow, and the captain was standing under it.

He went down on one knee. He put both his hands over his face.

Thurlow was up out of the ditch and halfway to him before he knew he had moved, and Coyle was there first, and the lieutenant. The captain was saying something. When Thurlow got close enough to hear, through the noise of the guns, what he was saying was "Go on, go on, it is nothing, go on with the guns." Coyle went back to his gun. The captain took his hands away from his face. There was earth all down the front of his coat and in his hair and in the folds of his neckcloth, and his face was grey with it and running with water down the right side, and the eye on that side was shut, and there was blood coming out from under the lid.

"Sand," said the captain. "Sand and stones. It is nothing. Have you any water?"

Thurlow had a little in a canteen. He gave it. The captain poured it into his hand and washed his eye with it, carefully, and then he took the handkerchief the lieutenant gave him and held it to his eye, and stood up.

"Mr Pakefield," he said. "Thurlow. You will carry on with the party. There is shot to come up for these guns from the Madonna and the bombardier will want more by noon than you can bring him. Don't wait for me."

"Sir, the surgeon—"

"I am going to the surgeon. I am going to write a letter to Lord Hood, and then I am going to the surgeon." He looked at Thurlow with his good eye, and Thurlow saw that he was very angry, not with anyone there, but in the way a man is angry with a tool that has slipped. "Is that your merlon, Thurlow? I believe you filled it."

"Yes, sir."

"It held," said the captain. "I'm obliged to you."

And he went off down the back of the battery with the handkerchief to his face, upright, quickly, and stopped at the foot of the gully and looked down it for a moment, and went on.

---

Gotts died in the fever tent on the Tuesday after. They took Fort Mozzello on the eighteenth. The town did not give up until August, by which time there were more seamen sick than well, and the Agamemnon went back to sea short of fifty of her people and with her captain's right eye no good to him, though he never said so to the ship, and the ship did not know it for some time. When a man asked him about it, years later, Thurlow said the captain had always been able to see more with the one eye than the rest of them with two, which was the sort of thing a man says in a public house and does not mean very much.

But that was afterwards. On the morning of the twelfth, after the captain had gone, Thurlow did not go straight back to the Madonna for the shot.

He went to the merlon. The French were still firing, but they were firing at the guns, and the merlon stood between the guns, and the back of it was quiet. He got down on his knees in front of it. The shot had torn the sandbags off the top and spilled the earth out of the uppermost gabion and down over the platform, and the earth lay there in a heap, the earth he had dug out of the ditch two days before and carried and rammed, and he put his hands into it.

It was full of stones. He had never noticed. They were small, grey, flat, the size of a thumbnail or less, the ordinary stones of that country, and he had shovelled them up out of the ditch with the earth and rammed them into the gabion without a thought, because what were stones to a wall? A wall wants weight.

Coyle came along the platform behind him, between rounds, black to the elbows, and stopped.

"What are you at?"

"Stones," said Thurlow.

Coyle looked at the heap a moment. Then he went back to his gun. But when the bombardier came off his gun at noon, he came and knelt at the other end of the heap without a word, and the two of them sat there in the smoke with their backs to the French, and went through the earth handful by handful, and threw the stones out over the back of the battery into the gully, one at a time, before they filled the gabion again.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Novembrēs (31 October 2026), ab Horātiō Nelsōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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