The Landward Side

by Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The water came up into the hole at a little after noon, and Yves Kerjean got down on his knees in the wet sand and put his mouth to it like a dog, because there was nobody to see but his own men and they had all done the same at the other wells.

Salt. Not so salt as the sea, but salt enough to sting the cracks in his lips. He spat, and drank a second mouthful anyway, because it was cool and it was the first cool thing he had touched since six in the morning.

"Well, maître?"

"It will do for the pigs," he said, and got up.

The hole was the fourth they had dug in two days among the palms behind the beach, a long half-league east of the castle at Aboukir. Twenty-six men of the Guerrier with spades and buckets, eleven soldiers of the line sitting in the shade of the trees with their muskets across their knees, and a young gentleman in command: the aspirant Ferrand, nineteen years old, who had a good straw hat he had bought in Alexandria and who was writing down in a little book how many buckets each well gave. He was a careful young man. Kerjean had nothing against him. The book was for the commissary, and the commissary was a thief, but that was not the aspirant's fault.

Kerjean was master gunner of the Guerrier, seventy-four, and had no business on a beach at all. But a third of every crew in the fleet was ashore that week, digging or foraging or standing sentry over those that dug, and the captain had said that a petty officer must go with each party who could keep the men from wandering, and Kerjean's guns, said the captain, were not going anywhere.

That was true. They were not. He had gone round them all on the Monday before he came ashore, both batteries, from the bow-chasers to the stern, and he knew exactly where every one of them was going, which was nowhere, and why.

The Guerrier lay at the head of the French line, the first of thirteen ships of the line moored in a long curve across the bay, every one of them with her head to the north-west and her starboard side to the open sea. Inshore of them, to larboard, was the shoal. The admiral had placed the line as close to it as the leadsmen would allow, so that no enemy could come round inside, and since no enemy could come round inside, the larboard guns would not be wanted. So the larboard side of the lower deck had become a warehouse. There were bread-bags lashed against the gun-carriages. There were casks of wine from the transports, with the officers' names chalked on them. There were three hen-coops and the purser's private chests and a great deal of rope that nobody had found time to stow, and the larboard ports had been closed and the guns behind them secured, because the decks must be swept, and a gun with a heap of bread-bags against it cannot be swept around.

He had said to the first lieutenant, on the Monday: "If they do come inside us, it will take me an hour to clear those guns."

And the first lieutenant had said, not unkindly, because he was tired too and the men were on short water and three were down with the flux: "If they come inside us, Kerjean, they will be aground on the shoal, and you can clear your guns at your leisure and shoot them to pieces where they lie."

Kerjean had not been able to think of an answer to that, and he could not think of one now. He was a gunner, not a pilot. He did not know how much water there was inside the line. Nobody did, exactly. That was rather the point.

---

The Bedouin had taken a man from the Spartiate's party on the Tuesday, a boy who went a little way inland after a melon. They found him in the evening without his clothes. He was not dead; they had only taken his clothes, and his shoes, and his spade, which was the King's spade or the Republic's spade or whosever it was now, and somebody would have to sign for it. After that the soldiers sat closer to the wells and the men did not go after melons.

So at about two o'clock, when the man digging the fifth hole straightened up and shaded his eyes and said "Sails," Kerjean's first thought was of horsemen, because men who had been listening for horsemen for two days turned that way first. Then he saw where the man was looking, which was not inland at all but out to the north-west, over the low dun line of the point and the castle, and he looked too.

Topsails. The tops of topsails, very small and white, two of them and then a third, standing up over the land like teeth.

"Ours," said somebody. "The frigates from Alexandria."

"Frigates do not carry topsails like that," said Kerjean.

He did not say what did, because the aspirant had come up beside him with his little book shut on his finger, and the aspirant was looking at the sails with an expression that Kerjean had seen before on young men, a kind of cleanness of attention, as though they were doing a sum in their heads and the answer was going to be very interesting.

"English," said the aspirant.

"Yes, sir."

"How many?"

"I can see five now. There will be more behind the point."

They stood and watched them come. Nobody dug. The soldiers had got up from under the palms and were standing in a row along the edge of the beach as though they were on parade, their muskets grounded, and one of them, a corporal from somewhere in the south with a voice like a cart, was explaining to the others that it was the English fleet, that it had been chasing them all round the Mediterranean for a month and never found them, and that it had found them now.

That was all true, and nobody thanked him for it.

Out in the bay a gun went off from the Orient, the admiral's ship, in the centre of the line, and a moment later the flags went up her mizzen, very bright in the sun. Kerjean could not read them at that distance, and did not need to. Every ship in the line was hoisting the same thing, or answering it, and every boat in the bay was turning for the beaches.

"The recall," said the aspirant, and opened his book, and wrote the time in it.

---

The Guerrier's chaloupe had gone off to the ship at noon with the full casks, and was to come back at four with empty ones. That was the arrangement. It had been the arrangement on the Monday and on the Tuesday, and on both days the boat had come at four, or a little after, and taken off the men and the empties and gone back to the ship by dark. There was no other boat on this part of the beach that belonged to the Guerrier.

There were, however, three Arab fishing boats drawn up on the sand two hundred yards to the east, under a ragged bit of awning, with their masts down and their nets spread out to dry. Kerjean had looked at them on the Monday, out of habit, as a gunner looks at anything that floats, and had thought them dirty but sound. The fishermen had gone away inland when the French came, as fishermen do, and had not come back.

He walked over to the aspirant, who was standing at the water's edge now, looking out at the line.

"Sir," he said. "The boats."

The aspirant followed his eyes. He understood at once; he was not stupid. He looked at the fishing boats for a long moment, and Kerjean could see him working it out: how many men in each, and whether they would swim or sink, and who owned them, and what the fishermen would say, and what the captain would say. And then the other sum, the larger one, the one with the topsails in it.

"Our boat will be here at four, maître."

"Yes, sir. If they send her."

"They will send her. They have made the recall. That is what the recall is for."

"Yes, sir. And when she comes she must go back again against the breeze, sir, and it is three miles, and she will be deep with near forty men in her. That is two hours. They will be in the bay before we are aboard."

The aspirant took his hat off and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and put it on again.

"They will be in the bay," he said, "by six. Perhaps a little after. And then it will be dark, and they have no pilots, and they do not know the shoal. The admiral does not think they will engage tonight. Nobody thinks so. They will anchor out there, and look at us, and in the morning they will come in. And by the morning every man of the fleet will be aboard."

It was very reasonably put. Kerjean had heard the same thing said in the wardroom pantry and on the forecastle and in the bread-room, in a dozen different voices, all that week. The English could not come at night. Nobody fought at anchor at night in an unknown bay. It would be madness. It was not done.

"And if they do not wait, sir?"

"Then we shall not get there any faster in a fishing boat, maître, with our men falling out of it and the soldiers firing at Arabs who come down to ask for their boats back. And the wells will be left with nobody at them, and the Bedouin will fill them in by morning, as they did at the first well, and we shall have dug them for nothing. And my orders are to remain with the party until the boat comes." He said it without heat. "I will not take the men off the beach in stolen boats because some English captain may or may not be a madman. If the boat does not come by five, we will see."

Kerjean said, "Yes, sir," and went back up the beach to the wells.

He did not argue it any further, and it was not because he thought the young man was right. It was because he could not have said, if anybody had asked him, what he thought the young man ought to do instead, and why. A gunner does not know about shoals. A gunner knows about guns. And all he could say about the guns was that there were fourteen of them on the larboard side of the Guerrier's lower deck with bread-bags against them, and that every one of those bread-bags had been put there because somebody, months ago, had worked out very carefully where the enemy could not come.

---

He kept the men digging, because men who are digging do not stand in a row on the beach saying my God, look at them. He sent four to fill the buckets at the second well, and four to carry them down to the water's edge, ready for the boat, and the rest to go on with the fifth hole, which was coming up wet already. He went from one to the other. He swore at a man from Lorient who dropped a bucket. He took a spade himself for a while, for the look of it, and found that his hands were shaking a little on the shaft, which annoyed him very much, because he was forty-four years old and had been at sea since he was eleven and had been in action four times and had never once shaken before the guns were firing. It was the waiting. On a ship there is always something to do with your hands.

He looked up every few minutes. Everybody did.

By three the English were round the point, and there were thirteen of them, ships of the line, all seventy-fours as far as he could tell, and a smaller one a long way behind. They did not form up. That was the first thing Kerjean noticed, and it frightened him more than the number did. A fleet that means to anchor and look at you for the night shortens sail, and closes up, and gets into its proper order, and takes its time. These ships did not take their time. They came round the point in a straggle, under all plain sail, with the wind fair for them, the leading ships well ahead of the rest, as though whoever commanded them had told them to come on as they were and not wait for each other.

By four they were rounding the shoal off the island, well out, keeping their distance from the battery, and the leading ships were standing in towards the head of the line, towards the Guerrier, and they had still not shortened sail.

By four there was no boat.

The aspirant stood at the water's edge with his book in his hand. He had stopped writing in it. Kerjean came and stood beside him and did not say anything, and after a while the aspirant said, without turning his head:

"She will be coming."

"Yes, sir."

"They will have had to clear for action. Every boat will have had to be got in."

"Yes, sir."

That was true too, and Kerjean thought of it with a kind of sickness: the boats hoisted in, or towing astern on long painters, and the decks crowded with men who had come back from the other beaches, and the larboard side of the lower deck full of bread-bags, and nobody with the time to send a chaloupe three miles to fetch a gunner and twenty-five men and eleven soldiers and a young gentleman with a book.

"Sir," he said. "It is past four."

The aspirant looked at the fishing boats. He looked at the sea. Then he looked at Kerjean properly, for the first time that day, and Kerjean saw that he was frightened, and that he was not frightened of the English at all. He was frightened of being wrong in front of a petty officer twenty-five years older than himself, and of being wrong in a report, and of having to sign for three Arab boats.

"Five o'clock," said the aspirant. "I said five o'clock, maître."

---

At a quarter to five the boat came. They saw her a long way off, low and black, crawling towards them over the glare with her oars rising and falling much too slowly, and the men gave a cheer that died away quickly, because by then the leading English ship was so close to the head of the line that from the beach the two seemed to overlap.

It was another aspirant of the Guerrier in the stern-sheets, a boy named Le Roux, scarlet with sun and haste, and he had six men at the oars instead of twelve, because the rest had been kept aboard. He said the captain's compliments, and they were to come off at once, every man, and leave the casks. He said it twice. He said the ship was clearing for action. He said the English would not engage tonight, the admiral had said so, but they were to come at once.

"Leave the casks," said the aspirant. "Into the boat. Soldiers last."

They went off with near fifty men in a boat built for thirty, so deep that the water came over the gunwale at every stroke, and Kerjean pulled an oar himself, as did the aspirant, as did everyone who could find room at a loom, and the soldiers sat packed in the bottom with their muskets held up out of the wet and baled with their hats. Nobody spoke. The breeze was foul for them, as he had said it would be, and the sea was short and choppy over the shoal water, and every time Kerjean looked over his shoulder the Guerrier was no closer.

The English did not anchor. That was the thing. They came on in the evening light, the leading ship and the one behind her and the one behind her, under topsails now, with their courses clewed up and their guns run out, and they went on past the point at which any sensible officer would have anchored for the night, and they went on past the point at which Kerjean thought they must take the ground. He watched the leading ship cross the head of the Guerrier, close under her bows, so close that from the boat she seemed to be going straight through her, and he waited for her to strike the shoal.

She did not strike. She went round. She went down the inside of the line, between the Guerrier and the shore, between the Guerrier and the boat, on the side where there was no water, with the sun going down red behind her and every one of her lower-deck ports open; and as she drew level with the Guerrier's larboard bow she fired.

Kerjean felt it in the oar. Not the sound, which came a moment later, but a shudder up through the water and the wood, as though the whole bay had been struck with a hammer.

Then the second ship came round, and fired, and the third.

From where they were, low on the water half a mile inshore, they could see the whole of the Guerrier's larboard side, the side that faced them, the side that did not matter. Her ports were shut. Two of them opened while he watched, raggedly, one forward and one aft, and a gun fired from the forward one, high and wild, and then nothing. Kerjean knew the men who had opened that port as though he were among them: some quartermaster with a cutlass hacking through the lashings on a heap of bread-bags, and a few men heaving the bags and the purser's chests up and away from the carriage, in the smoke, with the round-shot coming in through the side at them, and getting one gun clear, and loading it, and firing it, and starting on the next.

An hour, he had told the first lieutenant. He had been wrong. It would be longer than an hour, with the shot coming in.

"Pull," said the aspirant, very quietly. "Pull, all of you."

They pulled. There was nothing else for them to do. Ahead of them the Guerrier was taking it from both sides now, because more English ships had come down the outside of the line as well, and anchored there, and they had her between them like a nut in a cracker. The smoke had come down over everything and the sun had gone and the whole length of the bay was lit by the flashes of the guns. Behind them on the beach, where the wells were, the Bedouin had already come down out of the palms with the dark; Kerjean could see small figures moving against the pale sand, quite unhurried, gathering up the empty casks that the French had left there for the boat.

They came under the Guerrier's quarter at a little after seven, on the larboard side, the only side they could come to. Nobody threw them a line. Nobody on that deck had time. Le Roux hooked on to the mizzen chains himself and the men went up her side however they could, by the chains and the dead-eyes and the shot-holes, the soldiers first now, then the seamen, while the English shot came in over their heads and through her timbers a few feet from their hands.

Kerjean went up last but one. The aspirant was behind him. At the top of the side he turned and gave the young man his hand and pulled him in through the entry port, and the aspirant's good straw hat came off and went down into the dark water between the ship and the boat, and neither of them looked to see where it went.

"Your guns, maître," said the aspirant.

"Yes, sir," said Kerjean.

He went down the ladder to the lower deck, into the smoke and the noise and the lantern-light, and turned to larboard, and took out his knife, and began to cut.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ab Horātiō Nelsōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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

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