from aloft.  Nelson was too humane a man to use this method of warfare from the lower tops, and too practical, lest the ropes and sails should be damaged.  The writer is of opinion that he was wrong in this view, as was clearly shown by the deadly execution the French musketeers did from aloft before their masts were shot away by the British big artillery.  It can never be wrong to outmatch an enemy in the methods they employ, no matter what form they take.  Although the victory was all on the British side at Trafalgar, it would have been greater and with less loss of life on our side had musketeers been employed in the same way as the French and Spanish employed them.  The men on the upper deck of the Victory were shot down by these snipers without having an equal chance of retaliating.  The Redoubtable’s mizzen-top was full of sharpshooters when the two ships fell alongside of each other, but only two were left there when Nelson was shot and dropped on his left side on the deck a foot or two from Captain Hardy.  The Frenchman who shot him was killed himself by a shot fired from the Victory’s deck, which knocked his head to pieces.  His comrade was also shot dead while trying to escape down the rigging, and fell on the Redoubtable’s poop.  The other sharpshooters had been previously killed by the musketry from the Victory’s deck.

Nelson told Hardy, when he expressed the hope that he was not seriously hurt, that “they had done for him at last, and that he felt his backbone was broken.”  He was hit on the left shoulder; the ball had pierced his left lung.  The snipers from the tops of the other enemy ships killed a large number of the Victory’s officers and men who were on deck.  The French made an attempt to board, but were thrown back in confusion and with tremendous loss.  The instinct of domination and the unconquerable combativeness of our race is always more fiercely courageous when pressed to a point which causes others to take to their heels or surrender.

It was not an exaggeration on the part of the French and Spanish to declare that the British sailors and soldiers were not ordinary men but devils, when the real tussle for mastery began, and when they were even believed to be beaten.  The French and Spanish conclusions were right then, and the ruthless Germans, stained with unspeakable crimes, should know they are right now, for they have had many chances in recent days of realizing the power of the recuperating spirit they are up against, just at a time when they have become imbued with the idea that they have beaten our forces on land and destroyed our ships and murdered their crews at sea.  The Kaiser and his advisers, military and naval, have made the German people pay dearly for the experiment of stopping our supplies by sea, for the loss of life by the sinking of their own submarines must have been enormous.  But only those to whom they belong will ever know that they have not returned, and that they must have been sent to the bottom of the sea.