Hornblower and the Hotspur. C. S. Forester

Hornblower’s glass swept the shores round the anchorage, questing for any further data. There were the rows of hutments that housed the troops. French soldiers were notoriously well able to look after themselves, to build themselves adequate shelter; the smoke of their cooking fires was clearly visible — today, of course, they would be cooking their Christmas dinners. It was from here that had come the battalion that had chased him back to the boats the day he blew up the battery. Hornblower’s glass checked itself, moved along, and returned again. With the breeze that was blowing he could not be certain, but it seemed to him that from two rows of huts there was no smoke to be seen. It was all a little vague; he could not even estimate the number of troops those huts would house; two thousand men, five thousand men; and he was still doubtful about the absence of cooking smoke.

“Captain, sir!” Bush was hailing from the deck. “The tide’s turned.”

“Very well. I’ll come down.”

He was abstracted and thoughtful when he reached the deck.

“Mr Bush, I’ll be wanting fish for my dinner soon. Keep a special look‑out for the Duke’s Freers.”

He had to pronounce it that way to make sure Bush under stood him. Two days later he found himself in his cabin drinking rum — pretending to drink rum — with the captain of the Deux Frères. He had bought himself half a dozen unidentifiable fish, which the captain strongly recommended as good eating. ‘Carrelets,’ the captain called them — Hornblower had a vague idea that they might be flounders. At any rate, he paid for them with a gold piece which the captain slipped without comment into the pockets of his scale‑covered serge trousers.

Inevitably the conversation shifted to the sights to be seen up the Goulet, and from the general to the particular, centring on the new arrivals in the anchorage. The captain dismissed them with a gesture as unimportant.

“Arme’s en flute,” he said, casually.

En flute! That told the story. That locked into place the pieces of the puzzle. Hornblower took an unguarded gulp at his glass of rum and water and fought down the consequent cough so as to display no special interest. A ship of war with her guns taken out was like a flute when her ports were opened — she had a row of empty holes down her side.

“Not to fight,” explained the captain. “Only for stores, or troops, or what you will.”

For troops especially. Stores could best be carried in merchant ships designed for cargo, but ships of war were constructed to carry large numbers of men — their cooking arrangements and water storage facilities had been built in with that in mind. With only as many seamen on board as were necessary to work the ship there was room to spare for soldiers. Then the guns would be unnecessary, and at Brest they could be immediately employed in arming new ships. Removing the guns meant a vast increase in available deck space into which more troops could be crammed; the more there were the more strain on the cooking and watering arrangements, but on a short voyage they would not have long to suffer. A short voyage. Not the West Indies, nor Good Hope, and certainly not India. A forty‑gun frigate armed en flute might have as many as a thousand soldiers packed into her. Three thousand men, plus a few hundred more in the armed escorts. The smallness of the number ruled out England — not even Bonaparte, so improvident with human life, would throw away a force that size in an invasion of England where there was at least a small army and a large militia. There was only one possible target; Ireland, where a disaffected population meant a weak militia.

“They are no danger to me, then,” said Hornblower, hoping that the interval during which he had been making these deductions had not been so long as to be obvious.

“Not even to this little ship,” agreed the Breton captain with a smile.

It called for the exertion of all Hornblower’s moral strength to continue the interview without allowing his agitation to show. He wanted to get instantly into action, but he dared not appear impatient; the Breton captain wanted another three-finger glass of rum and was unaware of any need for haste. Luckily Hornblower remembered an admonition from Doughty, who had impressed on him the desirability of buying cider as well as fish, and Hornblower introduced the new subject. Yes, agreed the captain, there was a keg of cider on board the Deux Frères, but he could not say how much was left, as they had tapped it already during the day. He would sell what was left.

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