“Captain Jones! Warn everybody to be ready to retreat. At once, please. Give me that burning fuse, Black.”
“Let me do that, sir.”
“Shut your mouth.”
Hornblower took the smouldering slow match and blew on it to quicken its life. Then he looked down at the length of slow match knotted to the quick match. He took special note of a point an inch and a half from the knot; there was a black spot there which served to mark the place. An inch and a half. Three minutes.
“Get up on the parapet, Black. Now. Yell for them to run. Yell!”
As Black began to bellow Hornblower pressed the smouldering end down upon the black spot. After two seconds he withdrew it; the slow match was alight and burning in two directions — in one, harmlessly towards the inoperative excess, and in the other towards the knot, the quick match an inch and a half away. Hornblower made sure it was burning, and then he scrambled to his feet and leaped up on the parapet.
The marines were trooping past him, with Côtard and his seamen bringing up the rear. A minute and a half — a minute, now, and the French were following them up, just out of musket range.
“Better hurry, Côtard. Come on!”
They broke into a jogtrot.
“Steady, there!” yelled Jones. He was concerned about panic among these men if they ran from the enemy instead of retreating steadily, but there was a time for everything. The marines began to run, with Jones yelling ineffectually and waving his sword.
“Come on, Jones,” said Hornblower as he passed him, but Jones was filled with fighting madness, and went on shouting defiance at the French, standing alone with his face to the enemy.
Then it happened. The earth moved back and forth under their feet so that they tripped and staggered, while a smashing, overwhelming explosion burst on their ears, and the sky went dark. Hornblower looked back. A column of smoke was still shooting upwards, higher and higher, and dark fragments were visible in it. Then the column spread out, mushrooming at the top. Something fell with a crash ten yards away, throwing up chips of stone which rattled round Hornblower’s feet. Something came whistling through the air, something huge, curving down as it twirled. Selectively, inevitably, it fell, half a ton of rock, blown from where it roofed the magazine right on to Jones in his red coat, sliding along as if bestially determined to wipe out completely the pitiful thing it dragged beneath it. Hornblower and Côtard gazed at it in mesmerized horror as it came to rest six feet from their left hands.
It was the most difficult moment of all for Hornblower to keep his senses, or to regain them. He had to shake himself out of a daze.
“Come on.”
He still had to think clearly. They were at the final slope above the boats. The lieutenant’s party of marines, sent out as a flank guard, had fallen back to this point and were drawn up here firing at a threatening crowd of Frenchmen. The French wore white facings on their blue uniforms — infantry men, not the artillery men who had opposed them round the battery. And beyond them was a long column of infantry, hurrying along, with a score of drums beating an exhilarating rhythm — the pas de charge.
“You men get down into the boats,” said Hornblower, addressing the rallying group of seamen and marines from the battery, and then he turned to the lieutenant.
“Captain Jones is dead. Make ready to run for it the moment those others reach the jetty.”
“Yes, sir.”
Behind Hornblower’s back, turned as it was to the enemy, they heard a sharp sudden noise, like the impact of a carpenter’s axe against wood. Hornblower swung round again. Côtard was staggering, his sword and the books and papers he had carried all this time fallen to the ground at his feet. Then Hornblower noticed his left arm, which was swaying in the air as if hanging by a thread. Then came the blood. A musket bullet had crashed into Côtard’s upper armbone, shattering it. One of the axemen who had not left caught him as he was about to fall.