British sailors would board through them. No fewer, indeed,
than five French line-of-battle ships during the fight, finding
themselves grinding sides with British ships, adopted the same course--an
expressive testimony to the enterprising quality of British sailors. The
_Victory_, however, with her lower-deck guns actually touching the side
of the _Redoutable_, still kept them in full and quick action; but at
each of the lower-deck ports stood a sailor with a bucket of water, and
when the gun was fired--its muzzle touching the wooden sides of the
_Redoutable_--the water was dashed upon the ragged hole made by the shot,
to prevent the Frenchman taking fire and both ships being consumed.

The guns on the upper deck of the _Victory_ speedily swept and silenced
the upper deck of the _Redoutable_, and as far as its broadsides were
concerned, that ship was helpless. Its tops, however, were crowded with
marksmen, and armed with brass coehorns, firing langrage shot, and these
scourged with a pitiless and most deadly fire the decks of the _Victory_,
while the _Bucentaure_ and the gigantic _Santissima Trinidad_ also
thundered on the British flagship.

III. HOW THE VICTORY WAS WON

"All is over and done.
Render thanks to the Giver;
England, for thy son
Let the bell be toll'd.
Render thanks to the Giver,
And render him to the mould.
Under the cross of gold
That shines over city and river,
There he shall rest for ever
Among the wise and the bold."
--TENNYSON.

Nelson's strategy at Trafalgar is described quaintly, but with real
insight, in a sentence which a Spanish novelist, Don Perez Galdos, puts
into the mouth of one of his characters: "Nelson, who, as everybody
knows, was no fool, saw our long line and said, 'Ah, if I break through
that in two places, and put the part of it between the two places
between two fires, I shall grab every stick of it.' That was exactly
what the confounded fellow did. And as our line was so long that the
head couldn't help the tail, he worried us from end to end, while he
drove his two wedges into our body." It followed that the flaming
vortex of the fight was in that brief mile of sea-space, between the
two points where the parallel British lines broke through Villeneuve's
swaying forest of masts. And the tempest of sound and flame was
fiercest, of course, round the two ships that carried the flags of
Nelson and Collingwood. As each stately Briti