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.
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.
Prisoners of war are generally released by exchange between fighting powers, rank for rank, man for man; but after five months Villeneuve was allowed to return to France. He pledged his honor that unless duly exchanged he would surrender again on the English coast at the end of ninety days. So, attended by Guillemard and his servant, he crossed the channel, and from the town of Rennes—the place where Dreyfus had his trial not long ago—he wrote despatches to the government in Paris. He was coming, he said in a private letter, to arraign most of his surviving captains on the charge of cowardice at Trafalgar.
Of this it seems the captains got some warning, and decided that for the sake of their own health Villeneuve should not reach Paris alive.
Anyway, Guillemard says that while the admiral lay in the Hotel de Bresil, at Rennes, five strangers appeared—men in civilian dress, who asked him many questions about Villeneuve. The secretary was proud of his master, glad to talk about so distinguished a man, and thought no evil when he gave his answers. The leader of the five was a southern Frenchman, the others foreigners, deeply tanned, who wore mustaches—in those days an unusual ornament.
That night the admiral had gone to bed in his room on the first floor of the inn, and the secretary was asleep on the floor above. A cry disturbed him, and taking his sword and candle, he ran down-stairs in time to see the five strangers sneak by him hurriedly. Guillemard rushed to the admiral’s room “and saw the unfortunate man, whom the balls of Trafalgar had respected, stretched pale and bloody on his bed. He ... breathed hard, and struggled with the agonies of death.... Five deep wounds pierced his breast.”
So it was the fate of the slayer of Nelson to be alone with Villeneuve at his death.