Read Online The Flag of Freedom by Seth Hunter - Free Book Online

say. ‘If your damned mortar can be brought to bear.’
    It was dawn when Nathan climbed aboard the
Theseus
. The effort opened up his wound again but he was not the first to soil those holystoned decks with blood. He followed a trail of it to the cockpit and found it groaning with the night’s harvest, most in far worse shape than he.
    In the cut and thrust of battle there was little thought of the damage that you might inflict on another human being – any more than of the damage he might inflict on you. It was kill or be killed, a frenzied shambles of an affair; there was even a fierce kind of joy in it. If you thought of anything at all, it was not life or death; it was of victory or defeat.
    But here it all was. Laid out, as if for his inspection, by the light of the smoking lanterns: the faces slashed to the bone, the missing ears and noses, the severed and halfsevered limbs, the bleeding stumps … The men who, if they lived, would never be whole again.
    Nathan stood for a moment taking it in: a detail from a painting of Hell by one of the Dutch masters, even down to the demon winding someone’s entrails round a stick, or was he merely some loblolly boy trying to stuff them back in again? Then he found a corner with a patch of still unbloodied sawdust and lowered himself carefully to the floor, his left leg stretched out stiffly in front of him. He felt desperately tired and depressed – a deflation that came to him in the wake of every battle. Victory or defeat, it was all the same afterwards. Blood on his hands, blood on his clothes, the stench of it in his nostrils, and an infinite self-disgust.
    He leaned back against the solid oak timbers and closed his eyes, and despite the pain of his throbbing hip, the ache behind his eyes, the images in his head and the screams of the men under the surgeon’s knife, he was instantly asleep.
    It was not a bad wound, the surgeon told him, he had seen far worse – as he sniffed it and swabbed it and sewed it up. ‘Report sick,’ he said. ‘Do nothing for a few days, rest up.’
    It was wise advice. Nathan wished he had taken it, and not only for the sake of his wound. But some stubborn wilfulness or pride led him to report for duty. Perhaps because he had seen so many worse wounds than his own. Perhaps because he was on Nelson’s ship and it seemed like the right thing to do. Though later he did wonder if he was entirely in his right mind. Men were maddened, it was said, by the noise of battle alone, never mind the sights they saw, the things they did. Their minds were numbed, incapable of rational thought. He should have drunk a pint of rum and slept for a day or two.
    But he was pure gunpowder from the neck up, and it was the news from Cadiz that lit the fuse.
    The attack had been a failure. Only a few shells had landed on the port. A few houses had been demolished, and a convent. Several priests had been killed. Also a child, a baby girl. And the child’s mother had lost an arm.
    Nathan was appalled.
    So was Admiral Jervis, though for a different reason. He was appalled that the
Thunder
had not gone closer inshore, appalled that the boats had cast off the tow,appalled that the mortar had failed. He had ordered a new attack as soon as it was mended. The honour of the service demanded no less.
    â€˜Be damned to him,’ Nathan swore, ‘and his honour. I’ll have none of it.’
    â€˜Well, you have done your bit,’ declared Fremantle, when Nathan’s decision was imparted to him, ‘and may safely plead incapacity on account of your wound.’
    But this would not do for Nathan, not in his present mood. Whether from light-headedness due to loss of blood, or weakness of intellect, or some deeper, more pervasive cause, he must needs write a letter to the Admiral protesting that his own sense of honour – and the honour due to his country – would not permit him to make war upon women and