Note 27 — Chapter XIII
Reading edition
If Nelson had an arrière pensée in sending the flag, he never admitted it, before or after, to friend or foe. "Many of my friends," he wrote a month after the battle, "thought it a ruse de guerre and not quite justifiable. Very few attribute it to the cause that I felt, and which I trust in God I shall retain to the last moment,—humanity." He then enlarges upon the situation, and says that the wounded Danes in the prizes were receiving half the shot fired by the shore batteries. (Nels. Disp., vol. iv., p. 360.)