Napoleon's Nemesis

COMMODORE HORNBLOWER -- C. S. Forester -- Little, Brown ($2.50).

"Get out my best uniform and sword! Have the horses put to in my chariot!" bellowed Captain Sir Horatio Hornblower when the Admiralty summoned him back from shore leave. "It will take me away from you," he told his gorgeous wife Barbara (the future Duke of Wellington's sister). "Darling," she answered, "six months of the kind of happiness you have given me is more than any woman deserves." A few days later, Sir Horatio, flying a commodore's pendant, was beat ing up the Channel in the 900-man ship of the line Nonsuch, followed by two sloops, two bomb-ketches and a cutter.

That "the fate of Europe . . . the history of the world" hung upon the fictional Sir Horatio and his little squadron will come as no surprise to Hornblower fans. The Captain and his men have long since become one of Dictator Bonaparte's thorniest problems -- in three sparkling sea stories (Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line, Flying Colours) later reprinted in one volume as Captain Horatio Hornblower. The Captain's creator, C. S. For ester, has made his name as a first-rate observer of contemporary British military and naval life (The General; The Ship). The Hornblower series has made him one of the most popular adventure writers alive, ("I recommend Forester to everyone literate I know," said Ernest Hemingway.) Readers of Commodore Hornblower will find it built on the same lines as its predecessors: its topmast in a cloud of fantastic thrills, its keel afloat in Royal Navy lore.

Countess, Clausewitz & Tsar. Hornblower's new job was no less than to persuade Russia, Sweden and Prussia to join the war against Napoleon. The best way to persuade them, Hornblower decided, was to show the neutrals what the Royal Navy could do. French warships were soon frantically scuttling to safety. When they kept to the open sea, Hornblower's seamanship outmaneuvered them, his broadsides raddled them; when they holed up in neutral ports, Hornblower's bomb-ketches lay outside and .lobbed immense mortars onto their decks.

Soon, France's Baltic garrisons were aquake with jitters, and the neutrals were agape with admiration. Influential Russian Countess Canerine, whose "dark and liquid eyes" burned with "consuming fire," decided that Hornblower's manly chest was the place for her "bosom white as snow." Prussian Strategist von Clausewitz deserted from Napoleon's Prussian army, and learned, from Hornblower, what strategy really meant. Sweden joined the Allies. Tsar Alexander was so encouraged that he sent Napoleon a rude letter -- which, of course, resulted in the march on Moscow.

"To the Navy!" Despite all this, the world-according-to-Forester would be different today if Hornblower had not suddenly debarked at the port of Riga and, waving his zoo-guinea gold-hilted sword, led a "flank attack [that] thwarted Bonaparte's schemes to conquer the world." "To Commodore Sir Horatio Hornblower and the British Navy!" cried the Tsar, raising a noggin of Admiralty rum. "To the Navy," responded Hornblower, "guardian of the liberties of the world!"

Bluenoses who find all this too outrageously farfetched have no business reading historical romances.

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