skin. Their muskets, all of the heavy Sea Service pattern, seemed to grow heavier by the mile. Their chest straps, whitened and taut, constricted labouring lungs. It was a cold day, but sweat stung their eyes while the muscles at the backs of their legs burned like fire. Some of the men were burdened by ropes and grapnel hooks that they would use to scale the fort’s wall instead of the long ladders that Bampfylde had deemed unnecessary for the Marines.
“We shall call a halt.” Captain Bampfylde did not do it for the men’s benefit, but his own. If they laboured, he suffered. His handmade boots had rubbed his right heel raw and raised blisters on his toes. The leather band of his bicorne hat was like a ring of steel and his white breeches were cutting into his crotch like a sawhorse.
The captain was regretting his intrepidity. He had been eager to lead these men into battle, and that could not be done from the deck of the Vengeance any more than it could be done from the quarterdeck of the Scylla. That frigate, under Captain Grant, would nose into the Arcachon channel to draw the fire of what few defenders might infest the fort’s bastions. Once those defenders were occupied with the frigate, and while their gaze was fastened seawards, the Marines would assault the empty landward ramparts. It was that assault which would capture the imagination of the British public when it was printed in the Naval Gazette, not the old story of a ship bombarding a battery.
Captain of Marines Palmer saluted Bampfylde. “We’re behind time, sir.”
“God damn it, Palmer, if I require your contribution then I shall ask for it!”
“Sir!” Palmer was unmoved by Bampfylde’s anger. Neil Palmer was ten years older than Bampfylde and too experienced to be worried by the petulance of yet another ambitious young captain who resented the fame gained by Nelson’s band of brothers. “I’ll put picquets out, sir?”
“Do it!” Bampfylde subsided against the trunk of a tree. He wanted to haul offhis precious boots and dabble his sore feet in the shallows of the sea, but he dared not betray such weakness in front of his men.
“Water, sir?” Lieutenant Ford offered a canteen.
“After you, Ford.” Bampfylde knew such behaviour was proper, and he was a man eager to be seen to behave heroically in all things.
He consoled himself that his discomfort was a small price to pay for the renown that he would win this day. The Marines might come late to the fortress, but the fortress would fall just the same, and the blisters on his feet would be forgotten in the blaze of glory. He opened his watch, saw they had already rested ten minutes, but decided a few more minutes could not hurt. He stretched out tired legs, tipped his hat forward, and polished the news of victory that he would write this night.
While a hundred yards away, standing on a sudden rise of sandy soil that made a bare ridge through the thin pines, Captain Palmer stared at the countryside through a heavy, ancient telescope. Far to the north, beyond the fading ridges of sand and conifers, a rainstorm misted the land like a vast curtain. The rain lifted for a brief instant and Palmer thought he saw the malevolent, dark shape of the fort hull-down on the horizon, but, as the rain closed again on his view, he could not be certain of what he had seen.
He swung the glass inland. Two miles away, suddenly visible where the trees gave way to a stretch of marshy, glistening ground, he saw the tiny shapes of green jacketed Riflemen marching forward. Palmer was envious. He wished he was with them and not tied to Bampfylde’s apron strings, but then a bark of command from the dunes made him collapse his glass and turn back towards his men.
“We’ll attack,” Bampfylde told Ford and Palmer, “at dusk.”
“Yes, sir.” Both men knew that the Scylla had been ordered into the channel two hours before sundown, but there was no hope of meeting that rendezvous. They must just march, on blistering, aching feet, and be consoled that the night would bring them victory, supplies from the ships, and blessed rest in the shelter of a captured stronghold.
In the Teste de Buch Commandant Henri Lassan told his beads, yet somehow could not shift from his thoughts a line from an essay by Montaigne that he had read the night before. It had said something about a whole man’s life being nothing more than an effort to build a house of death, and he feared, without letting that fear affect his behaviour, that the Teste de Buch might be his house of death this day. He told himself that such fears were entirely natural in a man facing battle for the first time.
He knelt in the tiny whitewashed chapel that, in the early heady years of the Revolution, had been turned first into a Temple of Reason and then into a storeroom. The small red light of the Eternal Presence, that Lassan himself had caused to be placed in this shrine when he restored it as a chapel, took his thoughts back to prayer. If he should die today in this miserable, damp fort on the edge of France then that light was a sure promise of salvation. Beneath it a simple wooden crucifix stood on an altar that bore a frontal of plain white. It was an Easter frontal, used only because the fort had no other to put on the table beneath, yet somehow the Easter promise of resurrection was comforting to Commandant Henri Lassan as he rose from his knees.
He went into the courtyard. Rain had puddled the cobbles and streaked the inner walls dark. The fort seemed strangely empty. Lassan had sent the families of the garrison to the village so that no woman or child should be struck by enemy fire. The tricolour, that had not flown these past days, was wrapped on to the halyard ready to be hoisted when the first cannon slammed back on its carriage.
“Sir!” Lieutenant Gerard called from the western rampart.
Lassan walked up the stone ramp that made it easy for heated shot to be carried from the furnace to the guns. Not that he had enough men left to tend the fire, but cold shot should be sufficient for any vessel that tried to brave the narrow, shoal-ridden waters of the channel.
“There, sir.” The lieutenant pointed seawards where, westering from the horizon, came a British frigate. The warship’s new topsails were as white as the bone in her teeth that was flashing bright as the wind drove the boat towards the channel entrance.
“That’s the frigate that pursued the Thuella, isn’t it?” Lassan asked.
“Yes, sir,” Gerard said. „Scylla.“
Beyond the frigate were other ships. One, Lassan could see, was a ship of the line; one of the great vessels that had put a noose around the Emperor’s conquests. Lassan would rather be pouring his shot into that great belly than into the frigate’s slender and fragile beauty, but the Commandant would take what targets he could in this day’s fight for God and the Emperor. “Wait till she passes the outer mark.”
“Sir.”
The Scylla moved closer, the giltwork of her figurehead gleaming, and Lassan knew the frigate had come to make him look one way while the Marines came from his rear, but he had an American warrior hidden in the woods and Lassan must put his trust in that unexpected ally. He knew that no Marine could pass Killick without shots being fired, and even if the Americans were pushed back then the noise of their battle would give Lassan a chance to man the ramparts by the fortress gate. For the moment that rampart was only garrisoned by three sick men.
If the Scylla’s attack was timed properly, Lassan thought, then the Marines must be close. Lassan looked south, but could see nothing untoward beyond the village, then he turned back seawards in time to watch the frigate’s flying-jib shiver as it turned towards the channel. At the same time the Scylla’s great battle-ensign unfurled from an upper yard.
Lassan’s men crouched by their guns. Their portfires seeped grey smoke into the air and Lassan knew how dry their mouths were and how fragile their bellies felt. On the frigate’s forepeak he could see men clustered around the chasing guns. The officers on the quarterdeck, Lassan knew, would have donned their best uniforms in honour of their enemy while, deep in the frigate’s bowels, the surgeon would be waiting by his razor-sharp scalpels.
The fortress waited. A corporal stood by the flagpole ready, at the first bellow of the guns, to hoist the standard of France. A gull, wide wings still, rode the soft wind above the channel.
Lassan imagined the red coats of Marines in the Americans’ gunsights, then forgot what happened to his south because the frigate’s graceful profile was changing and the white wave at her bows was cutting into the fretted, churning tiderace of the channel.
The frigate seemed to shudder as she met the full force of the Arcachon ebb, then the bellying sails plunged her onwards and the long, reaching spar of the Scylla’s bowsprit bisected the tarred elm pole that marked the inner shoal and Lieutenant Gerard’s voice, harsh and proud, shouted the order to fire.
The French gunners touched portfires to vents, and the battle of Arcachon had begun.
