1.

G2

JAMBOREE IS NO WAY TO CELEBRATE TRAFALGAR
By Adam Nicolson

Guardian (UK)
June 28, 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1516009,00.html

It's 2017, the centenary of the battle of Passchendaele. The army authorities have decided that one of the grisliest bloodbaths in British military history in which many thousands of young men died in the horrifying and unrelievedly squalid conditions of close-fought battle, should be commemorated with a re-enactment.

It will be a marvellous day out. The British army itself has shrunk, but we have many friends from around the world to share the festivities. Contingents will come from Serbia and Colombia, from Nigeria and Uruguay. The royal family will drive around the battlefield in Range Rovers, hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts will come in their own burnished armored cars. Fun will be had! It will be a carnage party to beat all carnage parties, fireworks will imitate the whizzbangs, mopeds will mimic the artillery limbers. Grass will stand in for mud.

Unthinkable? Maybe. But today's jamboree down at Portsmouth, the "Second Battle of Trafalgar" as the Daily Mail describes it, is a scarcely less weird bit of historical forgetting. It's an Oh What A Lovely Trafalgar Day, a party more like something to celebrate winning the World Cup than one of the most blood-soaked naval battles ever fought.

The reality of what the party today will be celebrating is as follows. A fleet of 27 British ships of the line, hardened by years of blockade duty and an epic chase across the Atlantic and back, battened on to a combined French and Spanish fleet whose commanders were without conviction, whose ships were poorly equipped and desperately thinly manned -- one Spanish sailor captured after the battle was still dressed in the clown's outfit he'd been wearing when the press gang had picked him up from the theater in Cadiz.

Everyone on all sides knew the result before the battle began: the British, described in the Spanish press as "los usurpadores de la libertad de los mares" (usurpers of the freedom of the seas), would destroy their enemies. Which is what they did: the figure you will not read in the Daily Mail graphics is the proportion of French and Spanish to British dead. In the battle and in the days afterwards some 650 British sailors and marines died. Over the same period, Nelson's fleet killed 6,500 of their enemies. That Everest of slaughter was no chance effect. Nor was the killing of sailors collateral damage in Nelsonian war. It was the only route to victory. The ships themselves were virtually unsinkable. You won by making the enemy bleed to death. British guns were double- and treble-shotted to slow down the cannonballs, allowing them to ricochet among the crews they were aimed at. Trafalgar was victory by exsanguination.

All ships carried on board the materials with which to efface the gore after the battle was over. In log after log, and in the pursers' accounts, you read of the quantities of whitewash and brushes used to repaint the ships, particularly the spaces between decks where the wounded were carried and the dying died. There was no washing away the blood. It had to be painted over. British officers taking over the captured ships were clearly appalled at the human damage. A British midshipman went on board the Santisima Trinidad: "She had between 300 and 400 killed and wounded, her Beams were covered with Blood, Brains, and pieces of Flesh and the afterpart of her Decks with wounded, some without Legs and some without an Arm; what calamities War brings on."

The real question, then, is: why has this dimension of Trafalgar -- which is after all its central quality -- been forgotten? What is it about naval warfare of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that makes it more suitable to the mythologizing and sanitizing tea-partification which lies behind the hoopla down at Portsmouth today? It is no coincidence that all the most popular sequences of historical fiction -- the Hornblowers, the Jack Aubreys and the Bolithos -- are set in this world. But why is this historical moment the one which is most easily processed and reconstituted as consumable, non-disturbing and even consoling history?

Certainly because we were winning. During the wars at sea with revolutionary and Napoleonic France as a whole, lasting from 1793 to 1815, we killed six times more of them than they killed of us. It is in that sense an anti-tragedy, a happy story with a happy ending. It is also, in some way intelligible. We can imagine ourselves from the cockpits of our fibreglass yachts in something of the same imaginative world as Nelson and his band of brothers. And its scale, measured against later wars, is tiny. Fewer people died in the whole of Trafalgar than in the first hour at the Somme.

But the effect this has is to turn the British relationship to the greatest and most ruthless sea victory into the sort of memory one has for a favorite toy. Trafalgar is a rather sweet and unthreatening national pet, a feelgood zone for a country in which feeling good has been at something of a premium over the past 50 years.

Everything to do with today's celebrations is either essentially trivial or essentially suspect. What is a Nigerian ship doing there? Or a Serbian? Two from Pakistan? And three from South Korea? To use Trafalgar as the great national consolation, inviting anyone and everyone to the picnic in recognition that the sight of the modern British fleet alone would look pitiable (25 destroyers and frigates, one-15th of its size in 1805) means, among other things, that the terrifying and rampaging violence of Nelson's fleet is forgotten and no longer seen for what it is. Today is a day for sentimentality; October 21, 1805, was dedicated to something altogether sterner: the uncompromising pursuit and annihilation of the enemy.

--Adam Nicolson is the author of Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero (HarperCollins).  [NOTE: Nicolson's book was published in the U.K. on June 5; it will be be released later this year in the U.S., significantly re-titled Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar for American readers. What fools these mortals be! --H.A.]

2.

UK News

RE-ENACTMENT OF TRAFALGAR ENDS BICENTENARY CELEBRATION
By Maev Kennedy

Guardian (UK)
June 29, 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1516947,00.html

The Battle of Trafalgar was fought again last night, the climax of a day and night of celebrations for the bicentenary of Nelson's victory and death -- only this time hostilities were suspended for half an hour so the French ferries could get out through the Solent channel.

The display used 12 tons of fireworks. More, Portsmouth boasted, than at the close of the Athens Olympics and the London millennium celebrations, creating a dome of fire hanging over the entire harbor.

The day -- which lurched from brilliant sunshine to heavy rain and back -- began with the Queen reviewing the most extraordinary fleet ever assembled for a British monarch: 167 ships loaned for the day by Britain and 35 other nations, including nuclear-powered warships, tugs, an oil tanker, submarines, dinghies, tall ships and a sand dredger -- plus a Spitfire, and the Red Arrows.

Although Nelson could never have conceived of a monarch reviewing a fleet from the deck of an ice-breaker, the Queen said the great assembly was a tribute to the high esteem in which he was still held by mariners.

"Admiral Lord Nelson's supreme qualities of seamanship, leadership with humanity, and courage in the face of danger are shared among our maritime community today. He could wish for no greater legacy," she said, in a written message to her fleet.

The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Alan West, was anxious to avoid any hint of triumphalism -- and in response, the French flagship, the vast nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, played Rule Britannia from its loudspeaker, as the Queen passed by with a wave of one gloved hand.

Although she recently had to cancel engagements because of a heavy cold, she stood for much of the three-hour review, while other members of her party were forced to take shelter from the whipping wind. The Duke of Edinburgh, who also holds the title of Admiral of the Fleet, was seen to study the charts mapping their labyrinthine course through the maze of ships and the many treacherous shoals and gravel banks in the Solent.

Most of the senior royals were dotted around the fleet, including Prince Charles, and the Duchess of Cornwall, who nearly lost her white hat. The Queen, with a lifetime's experience of these things, had secured her blue hat with a large gold hatpin.

From first cannon fire to last firework, the celebration lasted more than nine hours, and many of the estimated 150,000 spectators stayed the whole course, first baking and then soaking on the steep shingle beaches, finally rewarded with a mild and beautiful night.

But the event was never going to please everyone, and last night's climactic version of the Battle of Trafalgar, reincarnated as a son et lumière -- the lumière was unarguably stunning, though the son broke down completely at times in the heat of battle -- was dismissed by some Nelson descendants as pathetic.

However, Sir Alan, bearing in mind the 1,300 journalists who also turned up, was sure of his man. "Nelson would have approved of that, to get the maritime back in the public eye."