The shock that Cotton was feeling in Kharasso Bay was reflected on Lieutenant-Commander Kennard’s face in Retimo.
‘Am being attacked by Messerschmitts—’
The message stopped abruptly and Kennard knew only too well what it meant. They had been receiving similar messages in Suda Bay all day from ships around the Piraeus and the Greek mainland.
He screwed the paper up and tossed it down alongside the operator who retrieved it, smoothed it out and began to copy it into his log book. Watching them, Ponsonby lit a cigarette and passed the packet to Kennard without a word. Kennard stared at him, then frowned at his own unhappy thoughts.
‘That,’ Ponsonby said, ‘seems to be that. We can say goodbye to our rifles and our money.’
Kennard looked at him bitterly. ‘To say nothing of a good ship and nine good men.’
Ponsonby nodded, as though from an afterthought. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Those too. I heard, by the way, that the Germans have reached Aeos. Perhaps we were too ambitious.’
Kennard scowled. ‘Perhaps we were,’ he agreed. ‘I wonder if they’ll manage to join up with the army. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it sounds.’
In fact, it was worse.
The heat from Claudia’s engines was drifting through the boat, making the stench of blood seem stronger. With it was mixed hot oil, petrol and the smell of burned wood.
Cotton stood in the lopsided wheelhouse, bracing himself against the tilt of the boat, one hand on the telegraphs, his feet wide apart, his head hanging, almost like a calf outside a slaughter-house. He was shocked, bewildered and horrified by what had happened and his stomach heaved at the smell of death and the sight of the mutilated bodies lying about him. As he recovered his wits, he saw Bisset lifting his head above the splintered wheelhouse from the well deck. He looked as scared and bewildered as Cotton.
‘You all right?’ Cotton asked in an uneven voice.
‘Yes. You?’
‘Yes. Anybody else down there?’
Gully’s head appeared. The carpenter looked grey with fright. He had arrived on board pot-brave and had remained full of confidence during the trip to and from Iros because all had gone well. By sheer luck, up to that moment the war for Gully had been only the rub-dub of guns over the horizon, and the sudden shock of the disaster and the deaths of the men around him had changed his views in a second.
Then Docherty stumbled into view, his face covered with blood.
‘You hurt?’ Cotton asked.
Docherty shook his head, his eyes shocked. ‘It was Duff,’ he said. ‘I was standing beside him.’ He was just about to light a cigarette when Bisset put a hand on his arm.
‘I should leave that,’ he pointed out. ‘There are a lot of holes and a smell of petrol. We might all go up if you strike a match.’
‘Yeh.’ Docherty took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘Yeh.’ He stopped. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ he said in an awed voice.
For a while, they all stood in silence. It was Docherty who had cut the engines, and round the stern Cotton could see the water, stirred up by the propellers before they’d stopped, turning into a brown clouded whirlpool that was just beginning to settle in dying whorls. He glanced along the narrow deck on the port side of the wheelhouse. All he could see was the bottom of Howard’s feet. The boy was jammed against one of the stanchions that held the lifeline, and was hanging half over the side of the boat, one arm out, blood dripping steadily from the finger ends into the water.
The Messerschmitt had caught Claudia as Patullo had swung her to port and had raked her right across the beam. A shell from the first attack had struck the radio cabin cutting short Bisset’s message and starting a small fire. Bisset had survived by a miracle in a shower of shell splinters and shards of black Bakelite. A second shell had hit the side of the forecastle, tearing a great hole in it, and a third had severed a petrol pipe. Fortunately, the drums of petrol in the well deck were untouched, though the smashing of the hull on to the rocks had flung them in a heap round the after door of the engine room. Two other shells had hit the boat. One in the wheelhouse had killed Patullo, Shaw and Coward outright and one in the engine room had killed Duff and wrecked the port engine. Howard was not dead but his left leg was torn open from thigh to knee by a splinter and there was a small hole in his stomach and a third wound in his left shoulder. Bisset, his face serious, bent over him.
‘Is he going to die?’ Cotton asked.
Bisset shrugged. From the way his fingers moved gently over the injured boy, he seemed to know what to do.
‘Got any morphine?’ he asked.
‘We can have a look in the safe.’
‘We’d better get the keys.’
Scrambling awkwardly on the tilted deck, they stretched Patullo out on the floor of the wheelhouse among the broken glass and splintered wood. His uniform was soaked with blood and sticky to the fingers, and as they probed inside his pockets his dead eyes stared fixedly at them all the time. Cotton couldn’t take his gaze off them. It seemed inconceivable that all those brains, all that knowledge, had just simply disappeared. Wondering where it went to when a man died and suspecting that death was only darkness, whatever the sin bosuns said at Sunday divisions, to Cotton it seemed tragic that a man like Patullo, who had acquired his experience all over the world, together with all those languages and a great deal of humour, could have it all blotted out in a second by death.
Gully was watching them from the door, still grey-faced and shocked at the destruction. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said in a shaky voice, ‘put something over his bloody face!’
Docherty turned, unable to resist a sneer. ‘Thought you were going to enjoy the war,’ he said.
‘I’m a civilian,’ Gully said. ‘I didn’t come to get shot at.’
‘What the hell do you expect the Germans to do?’ Docherty yelled, his fear breaking out suddenly in violence. ‘Kiss you, you daft bastard?’
Cotton scrambled to the captain’s cabin and, tearing down one of the plush curtains, laid it over Patullo’s head. The silence was what worried him most. The sound of the Messerschmitts’ engines had long since died; and all he could hear now was the rush and gurgle of a little stream that fell among the rocks close by, the lap of the little waves against the side of the boat, and the drag of pebbles on the beach. When Caernarvon had been bombed it had been just the opposite. There had been many more killed and injured but there had also been a great deal more noise – roaring steam, men running and the shouting of orders – and it had seemed somehow reassuring. The silence that surrounded Claudia seemed vaguely eerie. On Caernarvon, too, there had been someone to take control, to issue directions and co-ordinate the work of rescue and repair, and above all the presence of the captain, the Hon. Giles Troughton, calm, unflappable and knowledgeable because he’d been trained to know exactly what to do. Here there was no one – just Cotton, Joe Soap himself – and the disaster seemed more than ever complete as a result.
Unhappily, aware of the blood on their fingers, they searched Patullo’s pockets, producing cigarettes, a gold pencil, a wallet and other belongings. Then Bisset held up a bunch of keys.
‘These they?’
‘People don’t usually carry two bunches,’ Cotton said. They must be.’
They went back to the captain’s cabin. It was still luxuriously furnished with Panyioti’s special dark-blue blankets and pillows such as never normally found their way into naval vessels. The safe was under the bunk and there were two jars of rum in it. Docherty grabbed one of them at once. ‘Up spirits, stand fast the Holy Ghost,’ he muttered.
Cotton snatched it from his mouth.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ Docherty’s voice lifted in a whine.
‘When we’ve attended to the kid,’ Cotton said.
He wrenched the jar from Docherty’s hand, leaving him hot-eyed, the red-brown liquid still dribbling down his chin. For a moment he looked as though he might snatch it back, but in the end he gave a little sigh and turned away.
They found the first-aid kit in the safe under a wad of Greek money. It included a syringe and morphine ampoules. Bisset filled the syringe clumsily and they climbed back on deck to where Howard was beginning to whimper as the shock died and the pain came.
‘Give it to him, for God’s sake,’ Gully mumbled.
At first, Bisset found difficulty in inserting the needle but he managed it at last and they covered Howard with one of the lush blue blankets. Then they went down into the skipper’s cabin again and Cotton slopped rum into the mugs that Docherty had found. Gully was looking sick and old.
As they drank the spirit, it reached down into their insides, warming them, making them feel better, clawing at their stomachs with hot, biting fingers. Then Cotton noticed the list he’d made for Shaw lying on the floor among the blood-scattered glass and torn charts. He picked it up and, remembering that from now on it would be his duty to keep the log, he used the pencil they’d taken from Patullo’s pocket to put a stroke through the names of Shaw, Patullo, Duff and Coward. After Howard’s name he wrote ‘Wounded’.
‘We’d better get ’em ashore,’ he said. ‘Take their identity discs and let’s get on with it.’
They got a blanket under Patullo and, standing awkwardly on the lopsided deck, hoisted him out of the wheelhouse and up to the bow. Then, lowering a rope, Gully and Docherty climbed down to the beach and, with a blanket lashed round it, the body was lowered over the side to them. It was heavier than they’d expected and its limpness – like dough as it sagged in the sling – made Cotton feel sick. Docherty and Gully took the weight and carried the body up the sand towards the trees. Shaw and Duff followed and they laid the three corpses in a row under the branches. Climbing down to the beach, Cotton stared round him, oppressed by the steepness of the hill that rose from the rocks and the shadow it threw, and by the smell of death that mingled with the scent of foliage. His spirits were lowered further by the recurring thought that both the officers and the senior NCO had been killed and that he was now senior man. It was a daunting prospect, as heavy on his mind as the heat, the narrowness of the bay, and the crowding trees and rocks.
As they stood there, they heard the sound of aeroplane engines and they all darted for the rocks. The machine, a Messerschmitt, turned, low down as if it were looking for them. Then it disappeared beyond the cliff. A minute or two later it came back, flying the length of the narrow bay before disappearing once more over the cliffs.
They waited for a long time until they were certain it had gone, before climbing down to the beach again. Cotton stood a little apart from the others, still awed by the responsibility that had been thrust on him. Then he sighed and felt in his pockets for the identity discs and personal belongings they’d removed from the bodies.
‘We’ll bury ’em,’ he said.
‘Later,’ Gully urged, his face grey. ‘What happened to the other kid?’
Cotton indicated the bay. ‘He’s out there somewhere. About a mile back, I reckon. I saw him go over the side.’
‘Hurt?’
‘Dead.’
Climbing back on board, they stared at the unconscious Howard. His breathing was coming in snoring gasps now.
‘What’re we going to do about him?’ Gully mumbled.
‘We ought to get him into a bunk.’
Shaw’s bunk in the captain’s cabin was the only one to which they could move the injured boy without doing him more harm. They packed the angle of the cushioned seat with mattresses and manoeuvred him carefully into the wheelhouse and through the after door and laid him down.
‘What do we do for him now?’ Cotton asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Bisset admitted, his face worried. ‘I did a bit of first-aid before the war but that’s all I know. His shoulder ought to be fixed and his leg stitched but, like the one in the gut, that’s a job for an MO, not me.’
‘Can we get a message back to base?’ Cotton asked.
‘Have you seen the sets?’ Bisset looked white and shaken.
Cotton remembered the pigeons they’d taken aboard. ‘How about the birds?’ he said.
But the shell that had entered the forecastle had also done for the birds, which were now only a pulpy mess of flesh, blood, feathers and wickerwork cage.
‘Think we could get the kid ashore?’ Bisset asked. ‘There’d be more room and we might find someone to help.’
‘He’ll die if we don’t get him to a doctor.’
‘How do we do that?’
Cotton frowned. ‘Well, the Carley float seems to be all right.’
‘You can’t set off home on the Carley float,’ Bisset said.
‘Well, we can’t just sit here hoping, can we? What about the engines?’
Docherty gave him a disgusted look. ‘Port engine’s nothing but a lot of old iron,’ he said. ‘And I reckon the prop’s smashed.’
‘What about the starboard engine?’
Docherty shrugged. ‘’S’all right,’ he said. ‘But there was a lot of vibration as it stopped. I think the prop hit something. It’s probably bent.’
Bisset looked hard at Cotton. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What had you in mind?’
Cotton was staring in front of him, holding in his hands the ensign which he’d taken from the masthead. He was mesmerised by an idea he’d had. It had arrived slowly, through a variety of processes, but now it had taken root.
‘We’ve got a diving suit on board,’ he said. ‘And you’re a diver, Docherty.’
‘Not me!’ Docherty answered as he answered everybody, his voice full of indignation and aggression, as if he were being accused of lying or cheating.
‘Duff said you were.’
‘Duff was talking through his earholes. I’d just started the course, that’s all. I’m not going to do any diving.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m scared. I’d probably drown myself.’
‘Okay.’ Cotton frowned. ‘You’ll have to show me and I’ll do it.’ He spoke calmly, making no complaint, just shifting position, but it had the effect of shaming Docherty.
‘Well—’ he moved uneasily in his clothes ‘—I could probably manage.’
Cotton stared at him, coming to life abruptly. ‘The bloody boat’s only in a few feet of water,’ he said sharply. ‘And there are plenty of us to see you wouldn’t drown.’
‘What’s it for, anyway?’
‘To go under the boat to see if the prop is bent.’
‘Okay. I might do that. I might even do that without the bloody suit. Why?’
Cotton gestured. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘if we couldn’t repair her, drag her off and take her home.’