hulks if firing did not stop, ordered hostilities to cease without consulting the Admiral of the fleet, and the battle was over.  Denmark’s honor was saved.  “Nothing,” wrote our own Captain Mahan, “could place a nation’s warlike fame higher than did her great deeds that day.”  All else was lost; for “there had come upon Denmark one of those days of judgment to which nations are liable who neglect in time of peace to prepare for war.”  It had been long coming, but it had overtaken her at last and found all the bars down.

Alongside the Dannebrog throughout her fight with Nelson’s flag-ship, and edging ever closer in under the Elephant’s side until at last the marines were sent to man her rail and keep it away with their muskets, lay a floating battery mounting twenty guns under command of a beardless second lieutenant.  The name of Peter Willemoes will live as long as the Danish tongue is spoken.  Barely graduated from the Naval Academy, he was but eighteen when the need of officers thrust the command of “Floating Battery No. 1” upon him.  So gallantly did he acquit himself that Nelson took notice of the young man who, every time a broadside crashed into his ship or overhead, swung his cocked hat and led his men in a lusty cheer.  When after the battle he met the Crown Prince on shore, the English commander asked to be introduced to his youthful adversary.  “You ought to make an admiral of him,” he said, and Prince Frederik smiled:  “If I were to make admirals of all my brave officers, I should have no captains or lieutenants left.”  When the Dannebrog drifted on the shoals, abandoned and burning, Willemoes cut his cables and got away under cover of the heavy smoke.  Having neither sails nor oars, he was at the mercy of the tide, but luckily it carried him to the north of the Tre Kroner battery, and he reached port with forty-nine of his crew of one hundred and twenty-nine dead or wounded.  The people received him as a conqueror returning with victory.  His youth and splendid valor aroused the enthusiasm of the whole country.  Wherever he went crowds flocked to see him as the hero of “Holy Thursday’s Battle.”  Especially was he the young people’s idol.  Sailor that he was, he was “the friend of all pretty girls,” sang the poet of that day.  He danced and made merry with them, but the one of them all on whom his heart was set, so runs the story, would have none of him, and sent him away to foreign parts, a saddened lover.

Meanwhile much praise had not made him vain.  “I did my duty,” he wrote to his father, a minor government official in the city of Odense where four years later Hans Christian Andersen was born on the anniversary day of the battle, “and I have whole limbs which I least expected.  The Crown Prince and the Admiral have said that I behaved well.”  He was to have one more opportunity of fighting his country’s enemy, and this time to the death.