The Happy Return. C. S. Forester

“Galbraith?” said Hornblower. That piece of news prevented him from beginning to wonder what would be the reward of a casualty list of a hundred and seventeen, when frigate captains had been knighted before this for a total of eighty killed and wounded.

“Badly, sir. Both legs smashed below the knees.”

Galbraith had met the fate which Hornblower had dreaded for himself. The shock recalled Hornblower to his duty.

“I shall go down and visit the wounded at once,” he said, and checked himself and looked searchingly at his first lieutenant. “What about you, Bush? You don’t look fit for duty.”

“I am perfectly fit, sir,” protested Bush. “I shall take an hour’s rest when Gerard comes up to take over the deck from me.”

“As you will, then.”

Down below decks in the orlop it was like some canto in the Inferno. It was dark; the four oil lamps whose flickering, reddish yellow glimmer wavered from the deck beams above seemed to serve only to cast shadows. The atmosphere was stifling. To the normal stenches of bilge and a ship’s stores were added the stinks of sick men crowded together, of the sooty lamps, of the bitter powder smell which had drifted in yesterday and had not yet succeeded in making its way out again. It was appallingly hot; the heat and the stink hit Hornblower in the face as he entered, and within five seconds of his entry his face was as wet as if it had been dipped in water, so hot was it and so laden was the atmosphere with moisture.

As complex as the air was the noise. There were the ordinary ship noises — the creaking and groaning of timber, the vibration of the rigging transmitted downward from the chains, the sound of the sea outside, the wash of the bilge below, and the monotonous clangour of the pumps forward intensified by the ship-timbers acting as sounding boards. But all the noises acted only as accompaniment to the din in the cockpit, where seventy-five wounded men, crammed together, were groaning and sobbing and screaming, blaspheming and vomiting. Lost souls in hell could hardly have had a more hideous environment, or be suffering more.

Hornblower found Laurie, standing aimlessly in the gloom.

“Thank God you’ve come, sir,” he said. His tone implied that he cast all responsibility, gladly, from that moment on the shoulders of his captain.

“Come round with me and make your report,” snapped Hornblower. He hated this business, and yet, although he was completely omnipotent on board, he could not turn and fly as his instincts told him to do. The work had to be done, and Hornblower knew that now Laurie had proved his incompetence he himself was the best man to deal with it. He approached the last man in the row, and drew back with a start of surprise. Lady Barbara was there; the wavering light caught her classic features as she knelt beside the wounded man. She was sponging his face and his throat as he writhed on the deck.

It was a shock to Hornblower to see her engaged thus. The day was yet to come when Florence Nightingale was to make nursing a profession in which women could engage. No man of taste could bear the thought of a woman occupied with the filthy work of a hospital. Sisters of Mercy might labour there for the good of their souls; boozy old women might attend to women in labour and occasionally take a hand at sick nursing, but to look after wounded men was entirely men’s work — the work of men who deserved nothing better, either, and who were ordered to it on account of their incapacity or their bad record like men ordered to clean out latrines. Hornblower’s stomach revolted at the sight of Lady Barbara here in contact with dirty bodies, with blood and pus and vomit.

“Don’t do that!” he said, hoarsely. “Go away from here. Go on deck.”

“I have begun this work now,” said Lady Barbara indifferently. “I am not going to leave it unfinished.”

Her tone admitted no possibility of argument; she was apparently talking of the inevitable — much as she might say that she had caught cold and would have to bear with it until it had run its course.

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