Silence now fell upon the listeners for a time, broken at last by the Second Captain of the Top.
“Noble Jack, I know you never brag, but tell us what you did yourself that day?”
“Why, my hearties, I did not do quite as much as my gun. But I flatter myself it was that gun that brought clown the Turkish Admiral’s main-mast; and the stump left wasn’t long enough to make a wooden leg for Lord Nelson.”
“How? but I thought, by the way you pull a lock-string on board here, and look along the sight, that you can steer a shot about right—hey, Jack?”
“It was the Admiral of the fleet—God Almighty—who directed the shot that dismasted the Turkish Admiral,” said Jack; “I only pointed the gun.”
“But how did you feel, Jack, when the musket-ball carried away one of your hooks there?”
“Feel! only a finger the lighter. I have seven more left, besides thumbs; and they did good service, too, in the torn rigging the day after the fight; for you must know, my hearties, that the hardest work comes after the guns are run in. Three days I helped work, with one hand, in the rigging, in the same trowsers that I wore in the action; the blood had dried and stiffened; they looked like glazed red morocco.”
Now, this Jack Chase had a heart in him like a mastodon’s. I have seen him weep when a man has been flogged at the gangway; yet, in relating the story of the Battle of Navarino, he plainly showed that he held the God of the blessed Bible to have been the British Commodore in the Levant, on the bloody 20th of October, A. D. 1827. And thus it would seem that war almost makes blasphemers of the best of men, and brings them all down to the Feejee standard of humanity. Some man-of-war’s-men have confessed to me, that as a battle has raged more and more, their hearts have hardened in infernal harmony; and, like their own guns, they have fought without a thought.
Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton. But war at times is inevitable. Must the national honour be trampled under foot by an insolent foe?
Say on, say on; but know you this, and lay it to heart, war-voting Bench of Bishops, that He on whom we believe himself has enjoined us to turn the left cheek if the right be smitten. Never mind what follows. That passage you can not expunge from the Bible; that passage is as binding upon us as any other; that passage embodies the soul and substance of the Christian faith; without it, Christianity were like any other faith. And that passage will yet, by the blessing of God, turn the world. But in some things we must turn Quakers first.