Hornblower in the Indies

LIEUTENANT HORNBLOWER (306 pp.)--C. S. Forester--Little, Brown ($3.50).

Foul was the night, and black the situation. Four hundred desperate Spaniards, crammed captive in the hold, had rushed in dead of night upon their guards, seized bayonets, and sliced their way through British flesh to mastery of the H.M.S. Renown. The dawn lit a scarlet scene: human rubble on the decks, the scuppers running with gore, the Spaniards in command. Brave Lieut. Bush, bleeding from nine wounds, lay hidden after the melee behind a cannon's hulk. "What would England say?" he asked himself bitterly. "What would the navy say?" Ah God, if only Hornblower had been there!

And suddenly, with a grinding crash as two ships came together, "there was Hornblower, hatless, swinging his leg over and leaping down to the deck, sword in hand, the others leaping with him on either side." The charge was sweeping the deck; Bush tried to spring forward to join it but his legs would not move. Soon, hands were lifting his head. "'Bush! Bush!' That was Hornblower's voice, pleading and tender. 'Bush, please, speak to me.' "

It would appear from C. S. Forester's volumes on the subject that there were not many days in the early 19th century that Horatio Hornblower did not save. Doubtless he could have saved more, except that good manners ordained he should leave a little something for Admiral Nelson to do. However, Author Forester has long since carried his hero over the crests of his adventurous life, and in recent installments has been filling in the troughs.

Lieutenant Hornblower covers the period between Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) and the high tides of action in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1939). It takes the young officer on a raiding expedition to the West Indies. A few days out, the captain goes mad, and has to be straitjacketed in quarters. Off Santo Domingo, the Renown runs aground as a Spanish fortress pounds her with red-hot cannonballs, but the "uncontrollable vigour" of young Hornblower saves the day. At his suggestion, a broadside fired at the fort jars the ship loose from the sucking sands; a night attack reduces the fort itself, and a brilliant flanking movement captures the enemy fleet.

Yet at last, it would seem, Author Forester has run out of things for Hornblower to do. By page 210 the hero is putting in shore time and doing it rather badly. For one thing, as all his fans will remember, Hornblower has an unarmored spot over his heart. "The man who fired the broadside that shook the Renown off the mud when under the fire of red-hot shot was helpless when confronted by a couple of women." The heroic bounder slinks out on an affair of the heart with his landlady's daughter, and while the lass tearfully presses his uniform, spends the last 50 pages of the book at his club, playing whist.

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