I was soaked in other men’s blood from head to foot, and looked and felt like a man in a slaughterhouse.  I was drawing into a corner, as decently as I could, the mangled remnants of a man who had died as they laid him down.  I straightened my stiff back for a second and stood with my hands on my hips, and at that moment Captain Duchatel came running down the stairway, with a face like stone and a pistol in his hand.

He glanced at me.  I saluted.  He knew me through my stains.

“Sauvez-vous, mon brave!  C’est fini!” he said quietly through his teeth.

A great thing to do!—­a most gracious and noble thing!  In his own final extremity to think of another’s life as not rightly forfeit to necessity or country.

I understood in a flash, and sped up the decks—­with not one second to spare.  The upper deck was a shambles.  I scrambled up the bulwark straight in front and sprang out as far as I could.  Before I struck the water I heard the roar of a mighty explosion behind, and dived to avoid the after effects.  When I came up, the sea all round was thrashing under a hail of falling timbers and fragments, but mostly beyond me because I was so close in to the ship.  I took one big breath and sank again, and then a mighty swirling grip, which felt like death itself, laid hold on me and dragged me down and down till I looked to come up no more.

It let me go at last, and I fought my way up through fathomless heights of rushing green waters, with the very last ounce that was in me, and lay spent on my back with bursting head and breaking heart, staring straight up into a great cloud of smoke which uncoiled itself slowly like a mighty plume and let the blue sky show through in patches.

After the thunder of the guns, and that awful final crash, everything seemed strangely still.  The water lapped in my ears, but I felt it rather than heard.  Without lifting my head I could see, not far away, the ship we had fought, gaunt, stark, the ruins of the masterful craft that had raced so boldly for us two hours before.  Her rigging was a vast tangle of loose ropes and broken spars, and some of her drooping sails were smouldering.  Her trim black-and-white sides were shattered and scorched and blackened.  It looked as though she had sheered off just a moment before the explosion, and so had missed the full force of it, but still had suffered terribly.  Some of her lower sails still stood, and her crew were busily at work cutting loose the raffle and beating out the flames.  But damaged as their own ship was, they still had thought for possible survivors of their enemy, and two boats dropped into the water as I looked, and came picking their way through the floating wreckage, with kneeling men in the bows examining everything they saw.

They promptly lifted me in, and from their lips I saw that they spoke to me.  But I was encased in silence and could not hear a sound.

I had long since made up my mind that if we were captured I would take my chance as prisoner of war rather than risk being shot as a renegade or pressed into the King’s service.  For it seemed to me that the chances of being shot were considerable, since none would credit my story that I had been five months aboard a French warship except of my own free will.  And as to the King’s forced service, it was hated by all, and my own needs claimed my first endeavours.