action.... In less than half an hour our vessel, without having hauled down her colors, had in fact, surrendered. Her fire had gradually slackened and then had ceased altogether.... Not more than one hundred fifty men survived out of a crew of about eight hundred, and almost all those were more or less severely wounded.” When these were taken on board the _Victory_, Guillemard learned how the bullet which struck down through Lord Nelson’s shoulder and shattered the spine below, had come from the fighting tops of the _Redoubtable_, where he had been the only living soul. He speaks of his grief as a man, his triumph as a soldier of France, who had delivered his country from her great enemy. What it meant for England judge now after nearly one hundred years, when one meets a bluejacket in the street with the three white lines of braid upon his collar in memory of Nelson’s victories at Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar, and the black neckcloth worn in mourning for his death. It seemed at the time that the very winds sang Nelson’s requiem, for with the night came a storm putting the English shattered fleet in mortal peril, while of the nineteen captured battle-ships not one was fit to brave the elements. For, save some few vessels that basely ran away before the action, both French and Spaniards had fought with sublime desperation, and when the English prize-crews took possession, they and their prisoners were together drowned. The _Aigle_ was cast away, and not one man escaped; the _Santissima Trinidad_, the largest ship in the world, foundered; the _Indomitable_ sank with fifteen hundred wounded; the _Achille_, with her officers shooting themselves, her sailors drunk, went blazing through the storm until the fire caught her magazine. And so with the rest of eighteen blood-soaked wrecks, burned, foundered, or cast away, while only one outlived that night of horror. [Illustration: LORD NELSON] When the day broke Admiral Villeneuve was brought on board the _Victory_, where Nelson lay in state, for the voyage to England. Villeneuve, wounded in the hand, was unable to write, and sent among the French prisoners for a clerk. For this service Guillemard volunteered as the only uninjured soldier who could write. So Guillemard attended the admiral all through the months of their residence at Arlesford, in Devon, where they were at large on parole. The old man was treated with respect and sympathy.