Meanwhile much praise had not made him vain. "I did my duty," he
wrote to his father, a minor government official in the city of
Odense where four years later Hans Christian Andersen was born on
the anniversary day of the battle, "and I have whole limbs which I
least expected. The Crown Prince and the Admiral have said that I
behaved well." He was to have one more opportunity of fighting his
country's enemy, and this time to the death.
In the summer of 1807, England was advised that by the treaty of
Tilsit Russia and Prussia had secretly joined Napoleon in his
purpose of finally crushing his mortal enemy by uniting all the
fleets of Europe against her, Denmark's too, by compulsion if
persuasion failed. Without warning a British fleet swooped down upon
the unsuspecting nation, busy with the pursuits of peace, bombarded
and burned Copenhagen when the Commandant refused to deliver the
ships into the hands of the robbers as a "pledge of peace," and
carried away ships, supplies, even the carpenters' tools in the
navy-yard. Nothing was spared. Seventy vessels, sixteen of them
ships of the line, fell into their hands, and supplies that filled
ninety-two transports beside. A single fighting ship was left to
Denmark of all her fleet,--the _Prince Christian Frederik_ of
sixty-eight guns.
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