Chase joined him at the stern rail. “You’ve got some leave coming, haven’t you?”
“A month, sir. I’m not due at Shorncliffe till October.”
“Then you’ll come to Devon with me. It’s time you met Florence, a dear soul! We can go shooting, perhaps? I won’t take a refusal, Richard.”
“Then I won’t offer you one, sir.”
“There, look! Kronborg Castle.” Chase pointed at the green copper roofs that shone in the sunset. “Know what happened there, Richard?”
“Hamlet.”
“My God, you’re right.” Chase tried to hide his surprise. “I asked young Collier when we were coming the other way and he didn’t have the first idea!”
“Did he die?”
“Who? Collier? Of course not, he’s right as rain.”
“Hamlet, sir.”
“Of course he died. Don’t you know the play? Maybe you don’t,” Chase added in a hurry. “Not everyone does.”
“What’s it about?”
“A fellow who can’t make up his mind, Sharpe, and dies of indecision. A lesson to us all.”
Sharpe smiled. He was remembering Lavisser’s fulsome friendliness when they had sailed past Kronborg, and how Lavisser had quoted some words from the play, and how Sharpe had liked the guardsman then. And he remembered how tempted he had been on the burning balcony. Part of him had wanted to take Lavisser’s friendship, to take the gold and the opportunity and the adventure, but in the end he had pulled the trigger because he had to live with himself. Though God alone knew where that would take him.
Night fell. The smoke of a broken city vanished in the dark.
And Sharpe sailed home, a soldier.
Historical note
The British attack on Copenhagen in April 1801 is remembered (by the British), while the far more devastating attack of September 1807 is largely forgotten. Perhaps the former is distinguished by the presence of Nelson, for it was during the Battle of Copenhagen that he famously placed a telescope to his blind eye and declared he could not see the signal to discontinue the action.
The battle of April 1801 was between a British fleet and the Danish fleet which was reinforced by floating batteries and the formidable seaward defenses of the city. Some 790 Danish sailors and soldiers were killed and another 900 wounded, but all those men, like the 950 British casualties, were troops. In 1807 the British killed 1,600 Danish civilians inside Copenhagen (British losses in the whole campaign amounted to 259 men) and the Danish defeat was far more comprehensive, yet the campaign has been largely forgotten in Britain.
The cause of it was the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit between France and Russia which agreed, among many other things, that the French could take the Danish fleet. The Russians had no right to grant such a thing, nor the French to take it, but Denmark was a small country (though not so small as she is today; in 1807 she still possessed Holstein, now in northern Germany, and all of Norway). She did, however, possess the second largest merchant fleet in the world and, to protect it, a very large navy, with powerful ships which the French wanted to replace those they had lost at Trafalgar in 1805. The British, whose intelligence service was remarkably efficient, heard about the secret clause in the treaty and, to prevent its implementation, demanded that the Danes send their fleet into protective custody in Britain. The Danes, quite properly, refused, and so the 1807 expedition was launched to force their hand. When the Danes still rejected the British demands the gunners opened fire and bombarded Copenhagen until the city, unwilling to take more casualties, surrendered. The Danish fleet, instead of being taken into protective custody, was simply captured.
It was not a campaign in which the British can take particular pride. The Danish army was mostly in Holstein so the only action of any note was the one described in the novel, the Battle of Koge, between Sir Arthur Wellesley’s forces and the scratch army assembled by General Castenschiold. The Danes call it “the battle of the wooden shoes” because so many of their militiamen were wearing farm clogs. It seems rather tough luck on the Danes that at a time when the British army had many mediocre generals they should have run up against the future Duke of Wellington, not to mention the 95th Rifles. Companies from the regiment had served in a couple of actions before, but Koge was the first time that the whole 1st Battalion fought together. There was no attempt to bribe the Danish Crown Prince, though the “golden cavalry of Saint George” was one of Britain’s most potent weapons in the long wars against France and was used to subvert, bribe and persuade countless rulers. Between 1793 and 1815 the British Treasury spent no less than œ52,000,000 on such “subsidies.”