The guns on the upper deck of the _Victory_ speedily swept and silenced the upper deck of the _Redoutable_, and as far as its broadsides were concerned, that ship was helpless. Its tops, however, were crowded with marksmen, and armed with brass coehorns, firing langrage shot, and these scourged with a pitiless and most deadly fire the decks of the _Victory_, while the _Bucentaure_ and the gigantic _Santissima Trinidad_ also thundered on the British flagship. III. HOW THE VICTORY WAS WON "All is over and done. Render thanks to the Giver; England, for thy son Let the bell be toll'd. Render thanks to the Giver, And render him to the mould. Under the cross of gold That shines over city and river, There he shall rest for ever Among the wise and the bold." --TENNYSON. Nelson's strategy at Trafalgar is described quaintly, but with real insight, in a sentence which a Spanish novelist, Don Perez Galdos, puts into the mouth of one of his characters: "Nelson, who, as everybody knows, was no fool, saw our long line and said, 'Ah, if I break through that in two places, and put the part of it between the two places between two fires, I shall grab every stick of it.' That was exactly what the confounded fellow did. And as our line was so long that the head couldn't help the tail, he worried us from end to end, while he drove his two wedges into our body." It followed that the flaming vortex of the fight was in that brief mile of sea-space, between the two points where the parallel British lines broke through Villeneuve's swaying forest of masts. And the tempest of sound and flame was fiercest, of course, round the two ships that carried the flags of Nelson and Collingwood. As each stately British liner, however, drifted--rather than sailed--into the black pall of smoke, the roar of the fight deepened and widened until the whole space between the _Royal Sovereign_ and the _Victory_ was shaken with mighty pulse-beats of sound that marked the furious and quick-following broadsides. The scene immediately about the _Victory_ was very remarkable. The _Victory_ had run foul of the _Redoutable_, the anchors of the two ships hooking into each other. The concussion of the broadsides would, no doubt, have driven the two hulls apart, but that the _Victory's_ studding-sail boom iron had fastened, like a claw, into the leech of the Frenchman's fore-topsail. The _Temeraire_, coming majestically up through the smoke, raked the _Bucentaure_, and closed with a crash on the starboard side of the _Redoutable_, and the four great ships lay in a solid tier, while between their huge grinding sides came, with a sound and a glare almost resembling the blast of an exploding mine, the flash, the smoke, the roar of broadside after broadside.