‘Stop both.’
‘Stop both, sir.’
Engine-noise, the thrum of vibrating steel, ceased. Bravo, in her station near the van of the assault force, rolled more heavily as she lost steerage-way and the northerly breeze slapped a choppy sea against her port side. More of a sea than there’d been when they’d sailed; but thank heaven the visibility had closed in at last. Cloud obscured the moon, and drizzle was an enclosing curtain.
Admiral Keyes’s armada of seventy-six assorted craft lay stopped while MLs embarked surplus crews from the blockships. Stokers, mostly, who’d been needed for the cross-Channel passage but had to be removed before the actual assault. The fewer men on board the blockships when they were run into the canal mouth and sunk, the fewer there’d be to rescue.
To attempt to rescue. Nobody was in much doubt as to how the odds lay. And yet there was gossip – Bravo’s chief stoker had mentioned it to Elkington – that a lot of those engine-room ratings weren’t intending to disembark at this point. Determined to be in on the attack itself, they were planning to lie low until the ships got under way again.
Nick moved out to the port wing of the twelve-pounder platform, which was a forward extension of the bridge, and trained his glasses aft. The CMB they’d been towing should slip now, and York, the sub-lieutenant, should be seeing to it. Elkington murmured at Nick’s elbow, ‘Slipping her now, sir. Starboard quarter.’ As he spoke, the cough and spluttering roar of the CMB’s engine proved he was right. And all through the mass of silent, rolling ships other CMBs would be casting off and getting away under their own power. They’d been brought this far under tow so as to conserve fuel. He could see a few of them now, in the lanes and gaps between bigger ships’ dark outlines, slinking off like wolves to gather in their various packs.
They’d be the first craft in, laying smoke in the Hun defenders’ faces to cover the attacking force’s approach. Then MLs, plugging up more slowly – Bell’s and Treglown’s among them – would take over most of the smoke-laying work.
‘Signal to proceed, sir!’
Leading Signalman Tremlett had been watching for it. Nick said, ‘Half ahead together.’
‘Half ahead together, sir!’ Clark, bosun’s mate, slammed the brass telegraphs over. There was a lot of brasswork in and on Bravo, and every bit of it gleamed like gold. Elkington and his chief buffer, PO Russell, made up for the ship’s antiquity by keeping her so spick-and-span anyone might think she’d been prepared for an admiral’s inspection, not for war. Every ventilator, for instance – and her upper deck was fairly dotted with them – had a brass rim which in sunlight was blinding to look at. Bravo was gathering way, responding to her helm again, and Chief Petty Officer Horace Garfield held her precisely in the centre of her next-ahead’s wake. Garfield’s cap was, as usual, slanted to the right, while his left eyebrow – also as usual – was cocked up. Whether he wore his cap at that angle to make room for the habitually raised eyebrow, or pushed the eyebrow up to fill some of the space left by the invariably askew cap, probably not even he himself knew.
Grebe, the thirty-knotter ahead of Bravo, was to be her partner in the inshore patrol. By way of contrast to these two relics, ahead of them steamed North Star and Phoebe, two new destroyers who were to patrol the area off the mole’s end; and ahead of Phoebe, Roger Keyes’s vast silk vice-admiral’s flag flaunted its St George’s Cross over the flotilla-leader Warwick.
Marker buoys had been laid with great accuracy to guide the attacking force and mark the stages of its approach. Where they’d just been stopped had been position ‘D', and now they were steering for ‘G’, just a few miles farther east.
Astern of this group of ships – Unit ‘L’ in Keyes’s operational orders – Unit ‘M’ consisted of two more destroyers towing the submarines C1 and C3. Seen bow-on – from here now, of course, they were quite invisible in the dark, and anyway hidden by the towing ships – seen end-on, they looked like nothing that anyone had even seen before. Spars had been mounted across the tops of their conning-towers, and motor-dinghies slung on each side from the spars. Rather like panniers slung on a donkey’s back. The boats were for the submarines’ crews to escape in, after they’d done their job of blowing the viaduct sky-high. But only an optimist could have believed they’d have much chance of launching those dinghies, let alone motoring away to safety in them.
Tim Rogerson was in C3.
The dark assembly of ships ploughed steadily, silently east-ward. Bravo rattled, groaned, hummed and moaned to herself as she thrust across the waves; the wind sang in her rigging overhead. She was entitled, Nick thought, at her age, to talk and mutter to herself. He was used to her now, and loved her. As others had before him; and he wondered suddenly, the thought springing out of the darkness and the tension, the knowledge that before long the night would turn to flame and thunder, whether anyone else would after him.
Idle, dangerous speculation. He dismissed it. He had his glasses on Grebe’s stern, and he thought Bravo was creeping up a bit, inside her station.
‘Come down ten revolutions, Bailey.’
‘Down ten, aye aye, sir!’
Astern of Unit ‘M’ steamed another pair of destroyers, one of them towing a picket-boat whose function would be to rescue the submariners after they’d transferred to their dinghies. Rogerson’s captain in C3 was a lieutenant named Sandford, and it was this Sandford’s elder brother, who was on Keyes’s staff, who’d brought the picket-boat along.
The centre column, the line of heavyweights, was led by Vindictive. She was an old cruiser – the same class originally as Arrogant – but she’d been substantially modified now for her role of assault ship. She was carrying the main body of the landing force, sailors and marines who were going to storm the mole and neutralize the gun-batteries on it – particularly on its end part, what was referred to in the orders as the mole extension – so that the blockships could get past it and on across the harbour into the canal mouth. The rest of the bayonet-and-bomb brigade were in Iris and Daffodil, two old Mersey ferry-steamers. Not well suited to long journeys in the open sea, they were being towed now by Vindictive.
Behind that assault group came the Zeebrugge blockships, the old cruisers Thetis, Intrepid and Iphigenia. They’d been fitted out during the last few months at Chatham. All their control equipment had been duplicated, with alternative conning and steering positions protected by steel plating and splinter-mats. Concrete had been built in to protect their boilers and machinery and steering equipment, and charges fitted for blowing the ships’ bottoms out, with firing keys in both conning positions. Their masts had been taken out of them, as had all their guns except those right for’ard, which they’d be able to use on their way through and in. Twenty rounds of ammunition for each gun were stowed in shot-ready racks. Every piece of unnecessary equipment had been removed, and so had all items of copper and brass, since the Hun was known to be short of both. Only just enough coal for the journey was carried in their bunkers; and finally all accessible and suitable below-decks spaces had been filled with cement blocks and cement in bags, and rubble and concrete.
All the blockship and submarine crews were volunteers – and there’d been hot competition for places in the ships. Command of Iphigenia had been given to a lieutenant of Nick’s own age, twenty-two, a man named Billyard-Leake: Keyes had approved the appointment for the same reason he’d approved Nick’s: Lieutenants Billyard-Leake and Everard had both acquired reputations for coolness, judgement and leadership in action. He’d said so. As a commanding officer, one actually met and talked with admirals!
Sarah had written,
Are you all puffed-up and important, with your medal and your ship, my famous stepson? If you are not, I shall be for you! I am! While your dear uncle – who so far forgot himself as to condescend to pay us a visit here last week – is so proud of his nephew that he can barely speak of him coherently!
She’d had other cause than that for writing, though. The main content of her letter had been news of her own, and sadness and thoughtfulness, and a need to tell him about it. It had left him no less thoughtful, but perhaps – wrongly, he thought – less sad. Much less sad? No point trying to hide it from oneself: her letter had made him happy.
Not for a man’s death, he tried to convince himself. By the fact she’d turned to him to confide in. And yet – one stranger, amongst the thousands dying…
Astern of the three Zeebrugge blockships steamed the pair that would be going to Ostend – Brilliant and Sirius.
‘Coming up to position “G", sir!’
Bailey, Bravo’s RNR midshipman who’d seemed so timorous, was becoming a useful navigator. The previous captain – an RNVR lieutenant-commander, and he’d developed heart trouble – had handled all the pilotage himself, but it had seemed a better idea to let the snotty earn his keep and gain experience.
‘G’ was the last checkpoint before they began the run-in to the target areas. It was also the point where the two forces would divide, the Ostend ships turning five points to starboard and heading almost due south to rendezvous with Commodore Lynes who’d be coming with small craft from Dunkirk. Lynes commanded the Dunkirk base, under Keyes, and the Ostend operation was being left to him.
Ahead, a shaded light flashed briefly. The Ostend blockships would be putting their helms over now, passing astern of this starboard column and disappearing into the night. Nick was watching Grebe, who seemed unable to maintain constant revs.
‘Up ten revolutions, Mid.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ He heard Bailey shout the order down the tube. Elkington reported, ‘Brilliant and Sirius passing astern, sir.’
‘Mid, what’s the time?’
‘Ten-thirty, sir.’
Perfect. And the visibility was still closing in as the drizzle thickened. This was ‘X’-hour, and in precisely ninety minutes, at midnight, Vindictive should be alongside the Zeebrugge mole with her assault force pouring ashore. She’d been fitted with special hinged gangways all down her length, which would be dropped to rest against the top edge of that massive stone barrier.
Elkington said, ‘Wind seems to be holding, sir.’
‘Yes. Touch wood.’
A change of wind from north to south had forced Keyes to cancel the operation and turn the force back to England when they sailed the first time, on April 11th. A northerly wind was an essential weather condition: the smoke-screens, vital to the whole business, had to be carried shoreward, not dissipated or blown back seaward. There’d been a second attempt on the 13th, but that had been abandoned too; wind and sea had risen to such an extent that a landing on the mole would have been impossible.
Third time, and third time lucky, Nick thought. This was the last chance they’d get, with high water falling in the right period of darkness; and if it had to be cancelled for a third time the Admiralty wouldn’t let Keyes try again. There was the matter of security, for one thing; you couldn’t go on for ever putting to sea and turning back again, and holding an assault force locked up in their ships in the Thames estuary, without some knowledge of it finally leaking to the enemy.
It could have happened already. Even now, the Germans could be waiting for them.
Nick asked Elkington, ‘Is McAllister all set up, aft?’
‘It’s a daunting sight, sir. You wouldn’t recognize your cabin.’
He’d got McAllister, who’d been Mackerel’s doctor, appointed to Bravo. She’d had no doctor, and Andy McAllister had proved his worth after that Christmas Eve action. He’d stayed in Dover when Mackerel had left for the London dockyard, and Nick on a visit to the hospital yacht to see Mackerel’s wounded had found him there still looking after them and hoping for a new destroyer job.
However well matters turned out in the next few hours, no hospital yacht would be much use. Whole wards of big hospitals in London and elsewhere were being held ready; special trains had been ordered, staffed by doctors. Even with total success, they’d all be needed.
The ruse of that letter from Admiral Wemyss to Keyes about a possible evacuation of Calais and Dunkirk, and perhaps having to block those two ports, had worked splendidly. Right up to the final briefings, everyone had believed it. And the German land offensive which Ludendorff had launched a month ago – with alarming success – had seemed to justify and support the fears of having to pull out. Now, with the German army still attacking and gaining ground, determined to make the most of their numerical superiority before enough American troops arrived to tilt the balance, this attack from the sea would be a timely diversion as well as a naval necessity.
Nick glanced round his bridge, at new steel plating that had been welded to its rails. There were splinter-mattresses outside that shielding steel. The guns – six-pounders-on the upper deck, and the torpedo tubes, had been given extra protection too. Bravo and Grebe were to be inside the mole, backing up the CMBs and MLs who’d be inshore to lay smoke and to rescue blockships’ crews. Things were likely to be fairly brisk, inside that mole.
‘There they go.’
Warwick – Keyes’s flagship – with Phoebe and North Star astern of her, and with Whirlwind and Myngs on their port beam, were all putting on speed, drawing ahead to act as vanguard and deal with any enemy patrols that might be encountered between here and Zeebrugge. Everything was happening exactly as planned and scheduled in the orders; and as each stage was reached there was a degree of relief in moving forward to the next.
Elkington said, his voice echoing Nick’s unspoken thoughts,
‘Be glad when we get to grips with it.’
What must it be like, Nick wondered, for the men in the landing parties, cooped up over there in Vindictive, Iris and Daffodil. For them, this raid would be something like Russian roulette – with five of the six chambers loaded.
He lowered his binoculars, and answered Elkington: ‘Better than sitting over that damn minefield, isn’t it?’
‘Mind you roast ’em, eh?’
Edward Wyatt, in Vindictive, nodded to Brock, the RNAS Wing-Commander whose smoke, smoke-floats, flame-throwers and other pyrotechnical products were to be much in evidence during the coming battle. Brock was planning to land on the mole with the storming parties, too, to try to find some new sound-ranging apparatus which the Germans were believed to have installed there. He’d smiled at Wyatt’s proposal: Wyatt added to it.
‘Or boil ’em in oil, while you’re at it?’
Brock was making adjustments to the after flame-thrower. Wyatt left him in the steel shelter they’d built for it, went down the ladder and over to the starboard side of the upper deck. There was plenty of time in hand, and he could still have been down in the old cruiser’s wardroom, where coffee and sandwiches were available; but it was difficult, he’d found, to sit about, doing nothing. Tension, expectancy: it stretched the nerves, made you want to move, crack jokes, flex your muscles! Plenty of other men were doing the same thing: prowling to and fro, joking, laughing: or alone, silent and deep in thought. He walked for’ard along the starboard side; there was open deck-space here, room to move – unlike the port side, which was a mass of fittings and equipment for the mole boarding operation.
Destroyers’ shapes were visible to starboard, and the white curls of their bow-waves. He stopped, leant with a shoulder against the cutter’s after davit, and stared across a jumping, loppy sea at the attacking force’s starboard column. Those two destroyers’ silhouettes were unmistakable, dark or no dark: they were thirty-knotters. For inshore work, he guessed – expendable, stern of them, just abaft Vindictive’s beam, were two much more modern boats – Trident and Mansfield – towing the submarines. Narrowing his eyes, he peered at them through the darkness. He could make out the destroyers well enough, but only one submarine. The leading one was there, in tow of Trident; but the other seemed to have disappeared.
The harder you looked, the less you saw. One needed binoculars to make sense of it. They must both be there. Otherwise surely both destroyers wouldn’t be.
He pushed himself off the damp, grey-painted steel, and strolled on for’ard. Hardly any motion on the ship: but plenty of squeaks and rattles. Well, she’d seen a bit of service in her time, had Vindictive.
Nothing to what she’d see in the next hour or two!
Up on the level of the false deck, on his left, loomed one of the 7.5-inch howitzers that had been installed to bombard gun positions on the mole after the ship was secured alongside. She’d be below the level of the parapet, so howitzers were the obvious things, for their high trajectory. There was an 11-inch one on the quarterdeck, and another of these 7.5s on the foc’sl.
It was going to be hellish noisy, alongside that mole.
A false deck had been built on the skid-beams – the supports on which seaboats normally rested – all down the port side from foc’sl to quarterdeck. Wide ramps from this starboard side sloped up to it: three of them, providing ample and easy access to that higher level, which would be almost as high as the mole’s parapet. Not quite, though; and there’d be a wide gap to be bridged as well, so there were eighteen gangways hinged to the false deck and triced up. Released, they’d crash down on to the parapet. The false deck provided cover, too; while they were waiting to be ordered up the ramps and over the gangways, the storming parties could take shelter under it.
Wyatt’s palm stroked the butt of the revolver at his side. He’d like to be moving now: leading his company of fifty sailors with their grenades and rifles and machine-guns in a swift, wild charge on to the mole and over that shed’s roof to the guns. Speed was the thing: speed and ruthlessness and the hell with what might be coming at you. Attack: and think of nothing else. Like a rugger dash, in a way; and as one who’d played rugger for the Navy, Edward Wyatt knew all about that.
Not quite as gentlemanly as rugger. Bullets and cold steel and high explosives and no handshakes either before or after. The training at Chatham had been rigorous and intensive: the men were hard as nails and they wouldn’t be looking for prisoners.
He saw Harrington Edwards strolling aft with Peshall, the padre. They were coming this way, and he didn’t feel like joining their conversation, so he turned away quickly and went up the nearest of the ramps to the false deck. Padre Peshall would be going ashore with the storming parties: he’d played rugger for England and he was unlikely to confine his activities to saving souls. Edwards, a bearded and one-eyed RNVR lieutenant-commander, had been all through the Gallipoli campaign and had since been wounded in France; it was odd, Wyatt thought, that a naval officer should be in a position to claim three years of trench fighting experience. But he was a good fellow. They all were: fighting-cocks, handpicked; it was just that he didn’t feel in the mood, at the moment, for chatting.
At each end of this false deck a ladder led up to a flame-thrower hut. And all along it were the brows, gangways with hand-rails and transverse ladder-grips for footholds; they were upright on their hinges, angled slightly outboard and held there by topping-lifts which were secured to eyebolts in the midships superstructure. The mole would be something like six feet higher than this raised deck, and the brows would lead upwards to it across a gap of twenty or thirty feet. As well as the flammenwerfers and howitzers, there were three pom-poms, ten Lewis guns and sixteen Stokes mortars on this side of the ship; and in the foretop, which of course would be high above the parapet of the mole, were three more pom-poms and another six Lewis guns to fire downwards and sweep the mole’s surface clear of Germans as the men rushed ashore.
Vindictive’s port side had been lined with huge fenders to protect her as she bumped alongside; and the mainmast had been lifted out of her, and laid horizontally across the quarterdeck with its heel embedded in concrete and its end projecting over the port quarter. It would fend the stern off and keep the port propeller clear of the mole’s underwater projection.
Wyatt heard someone coming up the ramp behind him. Glancing round, he saw that it was Cross, his second-in-command in E Company.
He frowned. ‘Looking for me, Cross?’
‘Not really, sir.’ Jimmy Cross smiled. He was one of the contingent lent to the operation from the Grand Fleet in Scapa. Beatty had called on Flag Officers commanding the battle-fleet’s squadrons to provide selected volunteers from their ships; they were to be ‘stout-hearted men, active and keen, who could be depended upon in emergency; and having regard to the hazardous nature of the enterprise, wherever possible, unmarried or without dependants.’ Officers were to be those whose powers of initiative and leadership were known to be high. Flag Officers were to select officers, and Captains the petty officers and men. And one of those selected under this edict had been Cross, who was a gunnery officer and a fleet boxing champion. He stopped at Wyatt’s side.
‘Just it’s getting a bit stuffy below, sir.’ He stared up at the tracery of wires, jackstays and topping-lifts above their heads. Black parallels against a background of night clouds that were faintly lighter because they had a full moon behind them. He said, ‘The Germans won’t believe we’d be such idiots as to attack with a moon that could show through at any time it feels like it, d’you think?’
Wyatt didn’t like that much. It sounded like a criticism of Keyes. He grunted, stared across a couple of hundred yards of sea at a whole pack of MLs keeping station on the beam. There was another horde of them, smoke-screen boats, further astern. Cross was looking aft, at the huge grappling-iron suspended from its derrick; there was another for’ard. He murmured, ‘They’ve done a pretty thorough job of disfiguring this poor old hooker, sir.’
Wyatt growled, ‘Dare say the Huns’ll add their tanner’s worth.’
‘Anyway—’ the younger man sighed – ‘not long to wait for it, now… The men seem to be in good heart, sir.’
‘Why shouldn’t they be, for God almighty’s sake!’
Explosive… You never knew, with Edward Wyatt. It was so easy to say the wrong thing, rub him up the wrong way. Crusty swine: worth his weight – which wasn’t inconsiderable – of course, but – Cross shrugged it off. There was a touch of nervous tension in them all, just now. Wyatt added, as if he wanted to justify that outburst, ‘They’ve all asked to be here, haven’t they?’
Every man in the storming parties, whether marines or sailors, had expressed a personal wish to take part in what had been described only as a ‘hazardous enterprise’. Then early this month Admiral Keyes had visited the ships at their anchorage in the Swin, the Thames estuary, described the operation in detail and told them that any of them who were married, or had other reasons to wish to withdraw, could do so without being thought the worse of. Not one man had expressed any such wish.
‘I’m off for a word with Halahan.’ Wyatt turned away. ‘Join you down there presently.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Not much later, Cross thought. It was past eleven o’clock. In less than an hour, they’d be leading their men up those gangways.
He turned his back on them, and went down to see if any of E Company might have last-minute queries. On the way down the ramp he glanced up at the clouds again. If they blew away, and the attack had to be carried out under a full moon, bright as day: phew… There’d be the smoke-screens, of course, and they were necessary in any case because of starshell and searchlights; but with the whole area lit up by a moon, old Brocky’s smoke would need to be five times as thick as smoke had ever been. And the wind must hold… A story had gone round, leaked by one of Keyes’s junior staff officers, that after the first two attempts to launch the operation had been abandoned the Admiralty had been about to call off the whole thing, pay off the ships and disband the marine battalion, send the Grand Fleet detachments back to Scapa. Keyes had pleaded with Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, the First Sea Lord, for his support in allowing a third sortie. Wemyss had said, ‘But you wanted a moonless night, as well as a high tide at midnight!’
‘No, sir.’ Keyes had told him, ‘I wanted a full moon. Couldn’t wait for it, that was all.’
Wemyss had stared at him incredulously. Then he’d grinned.
‘Roger, what a damned liar you are!’
Wyatt found Captain Halahan with Colonel Elliot of the Marines and Carpenter, who was commanding Vindictive but not her landing forces, in the cruiser’s chartroom just abaft the bridge.
Halahan was in command of the naval landing force. Until he’d volunteered for this job he’d had the siege guns on the Belgian coast. He and Elliot had worked closely together and with Keyes, in the last three months, planning the mole attack; Elliot’s Royal Marines had trained at Deal, and Halahan’s bluejackets at Chatham. At Deal they’d built a mock-up of the mole, and stormed it day after day, putting the story out that it was a replica of some position in France which in due course they’d be attacking.
Carpenter, although he was now Vindictive’s captain, was primarily a navigator and staff officer who’d been with Keyes in the Plans Division in London and since then had been the prime mover and chief coordinator of all the planning.
There was concern now in his bony, sharp-featured face as he looked up, saw Wyatt, glanced back at Halahan. Wyatt asked Elliot, ‘Something wrong?’
‘Monitors haven’t opened fire. They should have several minutes ago.’
Erebus and Terror, to the north-east of Zeebrugge, should have started their bombardment forty minutes after ‘X’-hour. And when they did start, those big guns would be audible. Wyatt said, ‘I saw three CMBs go tearing off, just as I came up here.’
‘Units A and B.’ Carpenter nodded. ‘Laying smoke ahead of us as we approach. Three waves of it.’ Halahan murmured, ‘Oh, what a fount of knowledge.’ He glanced at Wyatt. ‘Problems?’
‘None at all, sir.’
‘Good. It’s too late for problems.’
Carpenter had gone out on to the bridge. Lieutenant-Commander Rosoman, his first lieutenant, was at the binnacle, and Wyatt heard Rosoman’s shout of laughter ring out at some remark his captain made. A happy, lively fellow, Rosoman. And keen as mustard, another of Keyes’s personal selections. He’d had the responsibility of Vindictive’s fitting out, since Carpenter had been occupied with all the planning.
Osborne, the ship’s gunnery commander, walked in.
‘Shouldn’t the monitors be doing something by this time?’
Halahan glanced up, nodded, returned to his quiet conference with Elliot. They were studying a plan of the mole, checking over the details of which company would do what, and when. Osborne looked at Wyatt, raised his eyebrows, and stalked out again. Wyatt looked over Elliot’s shoulder at the mole plan.
The most vital objective was the capture or destruction of the guns on the end of it, where the blockships would have to pass. But there were other guns here and there, and a garrison with its living-quarters and other buildings on it; plus a seaplane base with four hangars, a railway station and two large goods sheds, and an overhanging submarine shelter. The mole itself was a massive stone construction just over one mile long, connected to the shore causeway by a 300-yard viaduct, a lattice-work construction of steel girders under which the tides raced and which carried a double railway line and a roadway to the mole. It was this viaduct that the submarines were intended to blow up, so that the Germans wouldn’t be able to rush reinforcements over it.
The mole was eighty yards wide. On its outer side where the assault ships would berth it had an outer wall twenty feet high; on top of this was a ten-foot roadway protected by a three-foot parapet. So the attackers would have to get over that little wall on to the roadway, then down the sixteen-foot drop to the broad surface that was concreted, dotted here and there with guns, buildings and so on.
Near the end of the mole a long building had been erected fairly recently, and its flat roof seemed to be more or less level with the raised roadway. This had been chosen as the place for the attack. The landing parties could rush over the flat roof and get close to the mole-end guns, thus avoiding the alternative of a painful advance up the mole itself against barbed wire and well-sited machine-guns. (There seemed to be trenches on the mole, too, with stone embankments protecting them.) The guns at the end, and on the extension – after the mole’s full width came to its end, the ten-foot roadway alone was carried on for another 360 yards to a lighthouse on its tip – those guns were in an extremely exposed situation, and once over the long building’s flat roof the landing force should be well placed to rush them.
The guns were thought to be 4.7-inch. Once they were taken, there was to be an advance westward down the mole, marines covering a demolition party of specially trained bluejackets whose orders were to do as much harm as possible to cranes, guns, the seaplane station and any ships or dredgers alongside. Sandford, Keyes’s staff officer who’d planned the submarine attack and was now in the rescue picket-boat, had also planned the demolition work – in such detail that he’d borrowed wicker baskets on wheels, from the Post Office in London, for the explosive charges to be wheeled along in.
Thunder, suddenly, in the north-east…
Elliot and Halahan looked up, and smiled. Halahan murmured, ‘Better late than never.’
Elliot ran a forefinger along his little clipped moustache: ‘Thank God for it, anyway!’
The monitors had opened fire fifteen minutes late. Captain Carpenter pushed in through the doorway from the bridge. ‘Hear that?’
‘Late.’ Halahan nodded. ‘Rotten staff-work.’ Carpenter opened his mouth to answer: but an aeroplane-like roar close by made speech impossible for the moment, drowned out the rumble of the cruiser’s engines and the multiple rattlings of her fabric. As the noise lessened Colonel Elliot asked, ‘What was that?’
‘CMBs.’ Carpenter had knitted this whole thing together, he knew each move, minute by minute. ‘Units C, D and E, to be precise.’ Halahan interrupted, teasing him again: ‘You’re showing off, Alfred.’ Carpenter’s deepset eyes smiled: he went on, ‘C lays a smoke-flat off Blankenberg and renews it with another every twenty minutes. D goes flat-out to the mole and lays smoke-floats in the western section, and patrols that line until he’s relieved by Unit I—’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake—’
'—which consists of eight MLs. And E does precisely the same thing in the eastern section.’ He bowed to Halahan. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me—’
‘Who wouldn’t.’ Halahan turned to the others. ‘But—’ he glanced at the clock on the bulkhead – ‘we’d better go down. Fun starts in half an hour.’
Tim Rogerson stopped beside Petty Officer Harner. Harner was on the stool behind C3’s wheel, in the dimly-lit control room, although he wasn’t doing anything about steering. Rogerson said, ‘Permission for me to go up, please, cox’n.’
Harner leant sideways to the voicepipe.
‘Lieutenant Rogerson on the bridge, sir, please?’
‘Wait a minute!’
Baldy Sandford’s voice. John Howell-Price, the submarine’s first lieutenant, was doing the steering from the bridge; down here, Harner was only standing by a disconnected wheel. In the engine-room, ERA Roxburgh and Stoker Bindall had just started the boat’s petrol engine; the rush of air through the control room, sucking down through the hatch and aft to the engine, was fierce.
Sandford called down, ‘In engine-clutch, half ahead!’
Rogerson moved to the telegraph on the after bulkhead, passed the order through to the ERA. He heard Dick Sandford’s voice in the tube again: ‘Cox’n ’ what’s the time now?’
‘Eleven twenty-six, sir!’
‘Very good.’
Rogerson wondered what was happening up top. They’d slipped the tow: that was obvious, from the fact that they were moving now under their own power. Altering to starboard, by the feel of her, the slight heel. They were supposed to wait, once they were clear of the main assault force, for C1 and the picketboat to join them when they’d slipped their tows.
‘Stop engine!’
Harner repeated the order as Tim whirled the handle of the telegraph. Stopping now to wait for the others, he thought. And then, I make a first-rate telegraphman… He was spare, really. If anything happened to Howell-Price he’d step into his place; or if Sandford was hit, and Howell-Price took over the command… But C1 had only two officers, and Rogerson wondered whether Sandford hadn’t issued him with the invitation to this party before he’d known he had Howell-Price with him anyway.
She was stopped now, wallowing, rolling like a tub. An ancient craft. Built in 1906, the Cs were almost replicas of the earlier Bs. Single-screw, 200 horsepower out of a 16-cylinder petrol motor, 135 feet long and displacing 300 tons. Entirely fit, he thought, for this conversion to floating bomb.
One was acutely aware of that Amatol up for’ard. Of what might happen, for instance, if a shell hit it, on their way inshore. But it was easier when one turned one’s mind elsewhere, and there were problems enough to come without considering the possibility of accidents, pure bad luck. Such misfortunes were insured against by having two submarines instead of only one; one would be enough to do the job, but the second was the back-up, making sure of it. Only one thing was sure, he thought: that within a very short time all this would be ripped apart, blown to shreds. He looked round the cramped, cave-like control-room. The two periscopes were down and housed; the single brass hydroplane-control wheel gleamed like dull gold. It was handy that in these old Cs and Bs there were no fore ’planes; it would have been necessary to have removed them, so as not to impede the boat’s penetration of the viaduct.
The idea was that her forepart would drive in between the girders, and explode right in the middle of it.
‘Time, cox ’n?’
‘Eleven-thirty and a half, sir!’
A moment’s pause: a muttered exchange up there on the bridge. Then: ‘Half ahead. And tell Lieutenant Rogerson he can come up.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Leading Seaman Cleaver’s seaboots came into sight at that moment, clumping down the ladder. Stepping off it, meeting the coxswain’s enquiring stare, he announced, ‘We’re on our tod. No sight o’ C1 and no bleedin’ picket-boat neither. I dunno.’ He shook sea off his oilskins. He’d been down on the fore casing, casting off the tow. Rogerson went behind him and stepped on to the ladder, hauled himself up through the lower hatch and then the dark, salt-smelling tube of the conning-tower and up from there into the rocking bridge.
Sandford, leaning in the front curve of the bridge beside Howell-Price, turned and nodded to him.
‘All well, below?’
‘No problems, sir.’
‘Well, we have one up here, old lad. The others ’ve gone the wrong way, or something. Silly cusses!’
A rumble of gunfire from astern somewhere. Turning, he saw flashes lighting a clouded horizon some miles off on the port quarter. Sandford murmured, ‘Erebus and Terror stirring the Hun up ready for us.’ He laughed. ‘But they’re used to it, they won’t think it’s anything special. The idea’s to make him keep his head down for a bit.’
Damp night air: drizzle and the stickiness of sea-salt. Swish of sea rushing aft over the saddle-tanks and washing through below this free-flood bridge. Racket of the engine, its exhaust drowned in the white-foaming wash. Rogerson thought, So we’re alone. All up to us.
How long now?
It hit him suddenly, the reality of it. This wasn’t something in the mind, a plan, something rather thrilling that one was thankful to have been let in on. It was now!
At least, in about twenty minutes…
In the circumstances, the need to make sure of it because the whole thing was in their hands alone, he didn’t think Baldy would use the gyro-steering device. Both submarines had been fitted with it. When they were a hundred yards or so from the viaduct they could, if they wished, take to the dinghies and leave the submarine to steer herself on the pre-set course.
He didn’t think Sandford would have used it anyway. Nobody had ever discussed doing so. And it would be frightful to get that close and then leave everything to a gadget that might let them down.
‘Lovely weather for a continental visit. Eh, you chaps?’ said ‘Uncle Baldy’.
‘Beautiful.’ Howell-Price was still concentrating on the steering, and looking at the white wake astern you could see that the boat’s track was ruler-straight. ‘This sort of drizzle makes a man feel he’s never left home.’
Sandford began to warble the Eton boating song. Rogerson wondered what the devil could have happened to the others. Might the picket-boat have been swamped? She’d very little freeboard. The people in C1 were pals, former shipmates and messmates. They’d be thoroughly fed up, to find themselves out of it. Engine-trouble, probably. It was sensible enough to use old scrap-iron ships for throw-away jobs, but there was that disadvantage, the element of unreliability.
He wondered how Nick Everard was getting on, in his old oily-wad. That was a throw-away job if there ever was one! And thinking of Nick, his mind turned to his own sister, Eleanor, who was – or thought she was – in love with him. Nick somehow held back: you could see he was attracted to Eleanor and that they got on well together, even got a bit spoony sometimes; but he was – oh, sort of detached, he acted like a man in love with someone else, or married, even… Strange fellow, in some ways. And mad keen – one might almost say a raving lunatic – these days about the Navy.
Howell-Price said suddenly, ‘I can smell Brockish vapour.’
‘Just as well.’ Sandford had stopped singing, which was kind of him. He said, ‘We’re going to need that smoke of his. Unless they don’t spot us at all, of course. And that could happen, don’t you know?’
Howell-Price nodded, watching his course. He muttered, ‘And pigs could fly.’ Rogerson thought of something: ‘Aren’t the birdmen supposed to be plastering ’em with bombs, by this time?’
‘So they are.’ Sandford removed his cap, and scratched his head. Even in this darkness, you could see how he’d acquired his nickname. ‘Weather, probably. Wets their feathers, or something. Shouldn’t think it’d make much odds.’ He stooped to the voicepipe: ‘Cox’n – time now?’
‘Fourteen to the hour, sir!’
‘Thanks.’
Smoke: they were running into the edges of it. Pungent, foul-smelling. It would be worse in a minute: you could see, ahead, a sort of bank of extra-thick darkness. A CMB had done that to it, pouring some chemical from its exhaust and depriving all the old ladies back home of their favourite sugar-substitute. Vindictive would be approaching the smoke-barrier too, Rogerson thought. The other side of it, they’d find the mole. Smoke – thick smoke – surrounded C3 now. Howell-Price called suddenly, ‘Hey! I say… D’you feel that?’
‘What?’ Sandford stopped, leaning to put an ear to whatever his first lieutenant had to say. ‘What’s that, John?’
‘Wind. Breeze. I’d swear its – off-shore!’
‘Oh, surely not…’
Rogerson felt it too. And realised what it meant. All the smoke the CMBs and MLs were laying to shroud the advance and the assault would be wafted out to sea: which meant total exposure to the German gunners on the shore and on the mole… But the shift in wind direction might not be permanent: it could be a fluke, a false alarm. Sandford called into the voicepipe, ‘Cox’n – send Cleaver up, please.’
Harner’s voice was thin in the copper tube: ‘Leading Seaman Cleaver on the bridge!’
He was there almost instantaneously, a dark figure hoisting itself out of the hatch. ‘Sir?’ Rogerson edged sideways and aft, squeezing round the after periscope-standard, to make room for him. Sandford said, ‘Go down on the fore casing, Cleaver, and turn on the smoke-canisters. Wait there and see how it drifts.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ The killick cocked a leg over the side of the bridge, swung over, clambered down the rungs welded to the outside of it. Sandford began, addressing Howell-Price, ‘If our own smoke could be persuaded to blow along with us—’
Westward, heavy guns crashed, flamed. Smoke made it confused, difficult to pinpoint them: but it was savage, continuous firing breaking suddenly out of silence, as if it had been held back, pent up and now suddenly released. Wreathing, eddying smoke watered the flashes still: but there were explosions of shells striking as well as the sharper spurts of gunfire: the roar of it spread, increased, thickened. A splitting crash, like close and vicious thunder, made them all look up; overhead, above the enshrouding smoke, a starshell burst into a source of brilliance that lit the clouds like daylight. The smoke was blowing past them faster than they were moving across the sea. Rogerson was sure of it. The wind had shifted: he thought of Vindictive suddenly exposed as she approached the mole at point-blank range. Sandford was shouting over the front of the bridge, ‘Pack it in, Cleaver!’ He raised his arms, fore-arms crossed, the visual signal meaning ‘belay’. Cleaver waved acknowledgement, bent to the canister to turn it off; its smoke had been streaming seawards, useless. Sandford was at the voicepipe now: ‘Cox’n?’
‘Sir!’
Gunfire to port was tremendous. Vindictive must be getting hell. But whoever was being shot at, it wasn’t C3. Not yet. Sandford shouted to the coxswain, ‘Come up, all of you!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Cleaver’s head appeared over the rim of the bridge. Sandford ordered, ‘After casing, old lad. Shelter behind the bridge. After we strike, take charge of the port dinghy’s for’ard fall.’
‘Port dinghy’s gone, sir.’
‘Gone?’
A great leaping flash to port: like a sheet of lightning. One could hear, between the thunder of big guns, the chattering of machine-guns and the steady thump-thump-thump of pom-poms. Sandford told Cleaver, ‘Starboard dinghy, then.’ Cleaver vanished, down on to the catwalk and aft round the conning-tower to the casing behind it. Stoker Bindall shot up out of the hatch, with Roxburgh the artificer behind him; Sandford told Rogerson, with glasses at his eyes and searching for the viaduct, ‘Send them down to the after casing and then join ’em there yourself, there’s a good chap.’ Suddenly it was light. Starshell breaking overhead, hanging, flooding the whole area with their harsh magnesium brilliance, and the smoke drawing off them, pulling aft, shredding away and leaving them naked to German eyes: the sea leapt, shell-spouts springing up right ahead of the submarine as she clawed in landwards, floodlit, an easy target for gunners on the mole, on the viaduct itself when they chose to open fire. Gun-flashes in a ripple of bright spurts to the westward of where the mole must be: where the mole was, by God! You could see it, the great black bulk of it – and the viaduct too – as clearly as if this was midday, not midnight, and Howell-Price was altering course by about five degrees, aiming her to strike it in the centre and at right-angles. More shells fell – abeam, this time, to starboard – grey spouts jumping, hanging, collapsing back into black rings on the sea, and the rush of others ripping overhead. Now a searchlight beam sprang out – from the viaduct – swung to them and fastened. A second one joined it: C3 was speared on their points, held between them as if she was a piece of chicken and the beams two chopsticks. Sandford shouted in Howell-Price’s ear, ‘Hold hard now, John! Smack in the centre now, old lad!’ Another shell plumped into the sea to starboard: and then the searchlights, to everyone’s astonishment and relief, switched off. Gunfire to port was rising to a crescendo, a continuous and rising roar. Sandford grabbed Tim’s arm: ‘Damn it, I told you to go down!’
‘Sorry!’
Not only had the searchlights switched off – which could have resulted from a power failure, that was the most likely explanation – but that western gun battery had ceased fire. No easy explanation covered that. C3 had the viaduct right ahead of her, she was cutting a dead-straight white track across the sea towards it: and a flare burst suddenly to hang over the harbour on the other side of it, silhouetting its struts and girders and the high roadway it carried: a vast, looming, criss-cross structure – and men moving about on top of it: still no shots aimed this way. What did they think-that she was harmless, mistaking the viaduct for a gap she hoped to pass through, so she’d get stuck there and be easy meat? Rogerson, climbing over the side of the bridge, saw that towering lattice-work of steel etched black against the brilliance of the flare, growing, expanding across the sky as it towered towards them, and men running about on the roadway like upright ants, and he thought brutally It’ll be German meat…
C3 plugged doggedly in towards it, her petrol engine hammering away: the Germans looked down, watched her come, did nothing at all to stop her. She had about a hundred yards to go.
Wyatt shouted back to Cross, ‘Tell ’em to wait there till we send for ’em! There’s no way up yet!’ He was on the false deck: he’d been there all the time, and although it was littered with bodies and slippery with blood it was safer now, protected by the sheer wall of the mole. Vindictive still rang with the noise of her own guns and the crashes of German shells ripping into her and exploding, showering her decks with steel splinters which in turn drummed on steel, screeched away in ricochets, but for the same reason-the mole’s protection – it was only in her upperworks now. The stone wall was a solid shield to her vitals – which, God knew, had suffered enough as she’d forged across the last few hundred yards of sea through a hail of shells. Now she was flinging herself about as if in agony, rising and falling and seesawing against the wall, rocking close to it and then away again, still nothing like close enough alongside. She’d come in at full speed and the surge had come in with her, her own following wash and the thrust of water from the bottom forcing up between herself and the mole: a maelstrom of her own making, and there was no escaping it. Half the gangways had been smashed against the wall: three-quarters of the others had been shot to matchwood before she’d got that close, during that last murderous three hundred yards. When they’d burst out of the smoke they’d been too far east: Carpenter had swung the wheel over and increased to full speed, to save the ship and the men in her more punishment than they needed to suffer: in the process, conning her from the port flame-thrower hut, he’d overshot the mark – engines were going full astern now, Wyatt noticed, and they were adding to the turbulence and motion – overshot by nearly four hundred yards: she was that distance from where she should have been. It wasn’t going to be at all easy to reach the guns at the mole’s end: they were a quarter of a mile away, there’d be a quarter-mile of exposed, shot-torn concrete to cover… Well, they’d do it, somehow, E Company’d do it – for the simple reason that it had to be done, it was what they’d come here for. And the first thing was to get ashore… Another shell had just burst in the bridge: but the guns from the foretop were still blazing, and the howitzers were in it now. (Not the for’ard one. The foc’sl howitzer had had two complete crews wiped out, and then the gun itself.) Wyatt, staring upwards as the ship rocked away from the mole again, realised that the derricks carrying the grappling-hooks weren’t tall enough: the hook on this for’ard one wouldn’t – couldn’t – be dropped to grab the parapet, which was what it was designed to do. If it could be got over, the ship could be secured – with the after one as well, of course: and the only way to effect it would be to put it there: to get up there and damn well do it! He pushed past Cross, dodged round a hurrying stretcher-party – below, the doctors were already inundated with work – reached the derrick and began to climb it. The ship’s superstructure was in ribbons, torn and shattered, sieve-like, and she was ringing like a gong – a cracked gong – from the ceaseless pounding she was getting. Bedlam: a screaming slaughterhouse. It would be all right, he told himself, deliberately steadying himself with the thought, once they could get ashore and sort things out a bit: this was just the awkward interval, the sort of thing you had to expect, should have expected, really. A sailor hurrying down the ladderway from the flammenwerfer hut suddenly sprang off it, crashed down, bounced once, hit the deck below it and lay still in a spreading pool of blood. The higher you were, the more exposed, of course. He was getting to the derrick’s curve, and this was the tricky part. He was no lightweight, no monkey, damn it. But it would be all right, everything would work out: a couple of the gangways were still intact and serviceable and several of the others could probably be repaired; when she was properly secured there’d be cover enough to do that, under the mole’s wall. A cracking sound and a sting on the back of his neck was a splinter or a bullet passing. They’d been in against the wall and trying to get secured for – how long, two minutes? Three? It had been much worse before she’d got in close. The bridge had been hit for the first time within seconds of the Huns opening fire; Elliot of the Marines and his second-in-command, Cordner, had both been killed by that shell. Less than a minute later Captain Halahan had been cut down. Wyatt had been standing within feet of him at the time, on the false deck. Most of the senior men, company commanders and others, had been waiting there ready to lead their men ashore the minute there was a gangway to get over. Halahan had gone down, and Edwards had been shot through both legs; Harrison, who by that time had inherited command of the naval landing force, had been shot in the jaw. He was below now, unconscious. Wyatt inched out along the derrick: it was an unpleasant thought that if he was hit he’d drop between the ship’s side and the mole and be squashed. The foretop must have been hit a few times but the chaps up there were still blazing away with their pom-poms and Lewis guns and, please God, killing Germans. He was in semi-darkness here, shadowed as the lower part of the ship was by the mole, but a few feet above his head her upperworks were lit by the glare of German searchlights and shells were bursting on and in her several times a minute, machine-gun and small-arms fire continuous. The sharply-etched dividing line between lower shadow and upper brilliance was the margin between life and death, and as he dragged himself out along the derrick and the ship rocked on the piling sea he was sometimes within inches of it. He had his legs behind him with their ankles crossed over the derrick’s curve while his arms took most of the strain of hauling his own weight out towards the wires with the hook dangling on them; suddenly there was a crash that had nothing to do with gunfire, and an almighty lurch: the ship rocked, and he and the derrick rocked too, over towards the parapet: at the same time she was shooting upwards, lifting on the surge: he’d thought he was about to be flung off but in the next second he saw his chance and grabbed it, swung and swivelled, launching his body out to hang by his arms and swing with his feet and legs extended towards the grappling-hook: and he’d got it… On deck they cast the wire loose as he forced the hook across: it dropped – over the parapet, and he was blinded, in the searchlight glare, hearing the slap-slap-slap of machine-gun bullets streaming past his ear: he didn’t wait for the gunner to adjust his aim, but slid down the derrick head-first, ended in a thumping somersault on the deck. Cross began trying to haul him up, grabbing at his shoulders and stuttering congratulations or something of the sort; Wyatt shook the idiot off, snarled at him to go down and see what casualties they’d had. There’d been plenty, he knew, on the way in; if any company was up to half strength by this time, it was lucky. So many shells had penetrated and burst in crowded spaces. He could see what had happened to cause that sudden lurch: Daffodil had arrived, at last, put her great rounded, heavily-fendered bow against Vindictive’s side and pushed her bodily against the mole. That hook was holding her, at this for’ard end. There was a tinny, rattling sound, what would have been a roar except for the bedlam of sound drowning it, as Carpenter let go his port anchor. And Daffodil was staying where she was, holding the cruiser hard against the wall. Plenty of movement still, though, on both ships. Where the hell was Iris? Those two brows crashed down: Wyatt heard a cheer, drowned in gunfire; he saw Bryan Adams – commander of A Company, and now after Halahan’s death and Harrison’s wounding Adams was in command of the whole bluejacket landing force – leading his men up and on to the mole. Running, cheering: Wyatt whipped round to tell Cross to get the men up, but Cross had already gone: reappearing, now, with Wheeler and about twenty men behind him.
‘All we have left, sir.’ Two dozen at most, out of fifty. Royal Marines were pouring up the second of the two surviving brows. Wyatt roared, ‘Forward!’ drew his revolver, and flung himself up in the middle of them: it wasn’t a time for ‘after you’s’. As he reached the top, Adams was leading one bunch of men straight down the roadway while others climbed down to the surface of the lower, broader mole; Brock was with the roadway lot. The guns in the ship’s foretop were jabbering and thudding, firing fast to cover the rush of men on to the mole and down it; then a shell came from heaven knew where and burst right in the foretop, a gush of flame and objects whining, trailing smoke, and now no covering fire. The flame-throwers would have been the thing: and Brock had even sworn that if Vindictive had been berthed in the right place – which everyone had assumed she would be – those flammenwerfers of his would even have wiped out the crews of the guns on the mole-end, without any other help from guns or landing-parties. In fact the oil-supply lines to both of them had been cut by German gunfire minutes before the ship had crunched against the wall. So there were no flame-throwers. The main body of the Marines was going westward: they had to ensure that no Huns could push up this way from the viaduct end and take control of the mole close to where Vindictive lay; if they did, the landing-parties would have been cut off. Adams had stopped to help Rosoman, the cruiser’s first lieutenant, settle the after grappling-hook across the parapet; they weren’t having much success. But the rush was slowing, bogging down, with mortars bursting here and there and machine-guns from the buildings farther up raking across the concrete. A, B, D and E companies were all earmarked to rush the mole-end guns, but 350 yards of open, flat concrete, enfiladed by machine-gun and mortar fire from half a dozen different places and directions – mostly at the moment from No. 3 shed, on the mole’s inner side, and from actually behind the advancing bluejacket companies – remnants of companies – from where two Hun destroyers were berthed on the mole’s inner curve almost opposite Vindictive – Wyatt admitted to himself, It isn’t going to be all plain sailing. Noise indescribable. Adams going forward now, to a small blockhouse on the raised roadway: Wyatt decided to go for No. 3 shed, to try to knock out those machine-guns. The mortar-fire might be coming from somewhere close behind it, too. If E Company could deal with that lot, others – A Company of the Marines, for instance, who were moving up in support of Adams – could push on through, eastward. There was one of the iron ladders just level with him now, leading down to the mole proper: stone chips were flying from the wall near it and from the parapet. He turned, looked back, saw Cross clasp both hands across his belly, sink down and double over in an attitude of prayer: Wyatt waved his revolver and screamed, ‘E Company, with me!’ and ducked down on to the ladder, half climbed down it and half fell, hit the concrete at its foot and started running, zigzagging towards No. 3 shed. It was about ninety yards long and he was aiming roughly for the centre of it. Behind him, Lieutenant Wheeler was limping as he ran, grasping the region of his hip with both hands and shouting to the men behind him. Shrapnel screamed from two successive mortar-bursts: Wyatt was halfway over, telling himself, They can’t hit everyone, the more of us there are the better the chance that some of us will get there. Poor old Cross: wasn’t a bad fellow, bit slow-witted sometimes but – nearly there: and an open window or embrasure right ahead of him with the barrel of a machine-gun spitting fire towards a group of Marines with Adams’s crowd; the Marines were setting up a mortar behind that little blockhouse on the higher level – well, they had been, the German gunner was scattering them now, he’d dropped two of them and the other three had dived for cover: Wyatt bent double as he ran and stopped zigzagging, aimed straight for the gun and pulled a grenade off its clip on his webbing: he tugged the pin out with his teeth, a sideways jerk of the head – and he was there, throwing himself flat then rising again to lob the grenade in the window. He’d dropped flat, heard it explode and a yell of pain or fear, sent another in after it to make sure. This was dead ground; he flattened himself against the wall while blue smoke eddied from the open window. Wheeler was still limping over, lumbering this way and that; there was a petty officer by the name of Shrewsbury with him, half a dozen E Company men and a mixed bag of others, including a Marine with a machine-gun. Wyatt grinned, waved his pistol, beckoning them to join him. The more the merrier, he thought. We’ll pull it off! By God we will! On an impulse he hoisted himself up, right up with his head and shoulders in that window: it was a sort of bunkhouse, and he could see two dead men sprawled against the far wall: below him, a German groaned, called something in his own brand of Hun-talk: Wyatt leaned right in, saw him, a boy of about sixteen, fair and pink-faced, scared stiff: he shot him in the head, and slid down again, turned to meet Wheeler who was only a dozen yards away: and it was at that moment that he saw it. Westward – a mile or so away – the biggest sheet of flame he’d ever seen in his life before. The place was bright with starshell anyway, but that great tongue of fire dimmed everything with its own fierce brightness. Now as it dimmed, smoke poured upwards: black, pluming up and the plumes bending, carried northwards on the wind. But no sound came, and none had; there was so much noise close-to and everywhere else as well that nothing had been audible in any separate way – and yet it must have been a bang like the crack of doom. Wyatt roared with pleasure, exultation: there was only one thing it could have been, and that was the viaduct, the submarines had pulled it off, God bless them! He was bellowing, as Wheeler reached his side and sank down at the end of a trail of blood he’d left across the concrete, ‘Well done, by God, well done!’
Shrewsbury said, ‘Goin’ to be tricky getting’ off this wall, sir.’
‘What?’
The petty officer pointed. Two of Adams’s party had just tried to rush across and join them there, carrying a mortar between them. They were both down: one lay still, sprawled on his face, and the other was trying to crawl in that way, dragging the mortar and using only his elbows for propulsion, his legs trailing and blood pouring from a black gash in his neck. Then as they watched the machine-gun found him again and the stream of its next burst of bullets bent him round in a sort of knot, eel-like: it stopped, moved on, leaving him to unwind slowly like a broken spring in a spreading, scarlet stain. Other men were joining Wyatt here against the wall, dodging as they ran, scrambling for the cover and diving, flopping into it. Over on the other side, the high-level roadway, a mortar-bomb landed and burst on the roof of the blockhouse behind which Adams’s bluejackets were gathering. Wyatt saw them crouching, trying to make more of its cover than it was capable of giving them: and Adams was sending a runner back, either for reinforcements or for covering fire. If Osborn could use his stern howitzer, Wyatt thought, to drop a few shells on the mole just here to the east of them: that, or if they could bring up some of the Marines with mortars? He scowled, staring round: it wasn’t in his nature to sit here and wait. They were wasting time: they hadn’t been trained for months on end and then brought here just to sit… He stared at Wheeler.
‘You fit? Eh?’
‘Only a scratch, sir.’
Wheeler was blood from the waist down. Wyatt nodded. ‘Good man.’ He looked round at the others. ‘We’ll make another move now. We’ve got to get to those damn trenches, that’s the first thing. All we’ve got to do is move fast, surprise ’em, rout ’em out like winkles…’
Nick, on Bravo’s bridge, saw the leap of flame as the viaduct went up. He put his glasses on it: and that – what he was seeing now – had to be some sort of mirage… Men on bicycles, in mid-air. Then, as they whirled like leaves in a high wind and fell like stones into the rising gush of smoke, he realized what he’d seen: a German army bicycle platoon, hurrying to reinforce the mole defenders, had pedalled to a sudden, devastating doom. It was all smoke there now, under the glare of starshells bursting intermittently. He looked at Garfield. ‘Starboard twenty.’
‘Starboard twenty, sir!’
Garfield was built like a GPO pillar-box. If you painted one navy blue and stuck a cap aslant on top of it, you’d have Horace Garfield, near enough. To knock him down you’d need to tie something like that charge of Amatol to his shortish, tree trunk legs. Nick had wondered briefly about Rogerson: now his attention, only a part of which had in fact been diverted, was concentrated entirely on Bravo’s current manoeuvrings, on the smoke off the mole’s tip, that gun battery on the extension which Bravo and Grebe had already engaged in passing – before they’d come across the moored barge with the gun on it, and sunk that… ‘Midships!’
‘Midships, sir.’ Cap tilted left, eyebrow cocked, flinging the wheel over. Bravo slewing to port still, leaving the floating net obstruction on her starboard beam, turning her stern to it now as she swung on. At any moment Thetis, the first of the three blockships, should emerge from that smoke which Welman’s and Annesley’s CMBs had laid. The CMBs were everywhere, racing in and out of their own and the MLs’ screens, replacing smoke-floats as they fizzled out or Hun gunners sank them; the screens had to be constantly renewed, since the wind had changed and was working in the enemy’s favour.
Grebe was inshore, three or four cables’ lengths to the south of Bravo, engaging and being shot at by the Goeben battery. Shell-spouts were round her almost constantly. Her own guns were toys compared to the battery’s, but she was a small target for them – and she was under constant helm, circling and zig-zagging, darting in and out, no doubt driving the Hun gunners berserk with fury. Foolhardy, Nick thought, much too close: Hatton-Jones was a poker player, and he was playing this like a game of chance too. But, at the same time, serving an undoubted purpose. The whole of this operation, everything, was aimed at one objective, namely getting the blockships into the canal mouth: and if guns that might interfere with that purpose could be kept busy, particularly now that the crucial phase was due to start at any second… Shell-spouts leapt close to Bravo’s stern: Nick told Garfield, ‘Port fifteen.’ He shouted to Elkington, ‘Where did those come from?’
‘End of the mole, I think!’
‘Midships.’
‘Midships, sir.’
Steering northwards, roughly. Mole-end fifty degrees on the port bow and about half a mile away. Smoke drifting clear of it: flaming onions – German flares – bursting brilliant above the smoke where it was thick offshore. Not brilliant enough to penetrate Brock’s smoke, though. He saw the flashes of the guns, and then Vindictive’s howitzer shells exploding like black, red-edged mushrooms. It was Vindictive’s rocket-barrage – rockets designed by Brock and fired almost horizontally from her stern ports to light the end of the mole extension, where the blockship would have to turn – making that firework display. Really very clever: to show them where to turn, and at the same time provide them with thick smoke-cover within yards of the same spot. Nick told Garfield, ‘Steady as you go… Number One – hold your fire!’
Thetis, plunging out of the smoke. He had his glasses on her. This was what really mattered, what the whole thing was for. A CMB raced in between Thetis and the mole extension, smoke belching from its stern. Brock-type smoke: what the hell would anyone be doing without Brock? He had no way of knowing, at this moment, that Brock was dead, killed on the mole. The mole-end guns were all flaming, and Thetis was shooting back at them. That CMB’s captain – either Welman or Annesley, it must be – was a brave man. Welman, only two years Nick’s senior, was commander of all the CMBs. Thetis had rounded the point: now she was swinging to port, either to avoid the barge boom or hit suddenly by the eastward-running tide. Nick wondered if her captain, Sneyd, knew there was a barrage of net obstructions just off his bow.
‘Starboard fifteen.’
‘Starboard fifteen, sir!’
Shell-splashes on the quarter, forty yards away. From the Goeben battery, probably. Elkington shouted, ‘Grebe’s been hit, sir!’
‘Midships.’
‘Midships, sir!’
‘Steady on north twenty west.’ He wanted to get closer to the end of the mole. Not much closer, but… He told Elkington, ‘When Thetis has cleared the range, try a few shots at the mole guns.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Elkington was trying to look impassive. It wasn’t easy for him; he had the sort of pale-skinned, fine-boned face that tends to show its owner’s state of mind. Grebe, inshore there, had a haze of smoke – or was it steam? – hanging over her amidships, and she’d slowed. It could have been a hit in one of her two boiler-rooms. If that was steam, it had been. But she was moving again, picking up speed, and her guns were still busy.
‘Tremlett!’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Make to Grebe, Are you all right?’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Shells falling all round Thetis now. Some – too many – hitting her. And she was still swinging to port. At any moment she’d be in that net. The mole-end guns were firing at her about as fast as guns could be fired and re-loaded. By this time the landing parties should have captured them. He focused his glasses on Thetis. She was in the net! Carrying it away with her. Fine for the two who’d be following her in – but if she got it round her screws… He saw that one of the two German destroyers alongside the mole was firing at her now, and he shouted to Elkington: ‘Number One!’ The first lieutenant turned, with a hand cupped to his ear: he’d been watching the mole-end and Thetis, waiting for a chance to get the four-pounder into action. Thetis herself was fairly well clear now but there was an ML there with her now, trailing her; her attendant rescue craft. Nick told Elkington, pointing at the Hun destroyer, ‘Try a torpedo shot!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Leading Signalman Tremlett reported, ‘From Grebe, sir: Thank you, but we Grebes are tough chickens.’
‘Right… Number One. Hold your fire till Thetis has gone by. I’ll go in closer and we’ll fire to starboard.’ Elkington went to the torpedo-control voicepipe and began shouting orders down to Raikes, the gunner (T). Nick had intended to save Bravo’s two torpedoes in case of attack from outside, German ships coming from other bases, and also because the CMBs were supposed to be taking care of any destroyers inside the mole. But if those Huns were going to shoot at the blockships as they steamed in past them, it seemed a good use for torpedoes here and now. He told Garfield, ‘Starboard twenty.’ Thetis was passing now, about halfway from the mole-end to the canal mouth; she’d been hit hard, mostly by the guns on the mole extension; she’d developed a list to starboard and she seemed to be slowing. Garfield reported, ‘Twenty o’ starboard wheel on, sir!’ Nick took a quick look at Grebe: he thought she’d been hit again, for’ard this time. Hatton-Jones might think of himself as a tough chicken, but he was a damn sight too close to that Goeben battery. On the other hand, if they were shooting at him they couldn’t also be shooting at poor old Thetis.
‘Midships! Stand by, Number One!’
Elkington was at the voicepipe, in touch with Raikes. They had a static target over there; it only needed a properly aimed torpedo that would run straight. You couldn’t shoot at those destroyers, because you might hit British sailors and Marines on the mole behind them. Thetis was past, heading directly for the canal, listing harder and moving rather slowly and still being hit: Nick saw gunflashes in a new location, suddenly – a little way back from the foreshore but to the west of the Goeben battery and quite near the eastern arm of the canal entrance. It would obviously be more than just a good idea to knock that lot out.
‘Steady!’
‘Steady, sir-south ten west, sir—’ Reversing the wheel… Nick heard Elkington yell, ‘Fire!’ Looking aft, he saw the splash of the torpedo’s entry. He told Garfield, ‘Steer that.’
Just off the mole extension, Intrepid burst out of the smoke.
Back at the binnacle, Nick beckoned to Elkington. He pointed out the position of that new battery: they were firing at Thetis now and the flashes were easy to see. Thetis was almost in the canal, just short of the two breakwater arms that made the approach to it funnel-shaped: he was thinking that it was a miracle she was still afloat when he saw that she was swinging off to starboard. He told Elkington, ‘Hit those guns. See if you can’t knock one or two off ’em—’
He’d seen a bloom of fire and a blossom of black smoke on Grebe. If she stayed where she was much longer, she’d be a cooked chicken. Elkington had rushed for’ard to the gun. It would have been nice, Nick thought, to have had Mackerel’s four-inch instead of these pea-shooters. Intrepid had cleared the barge boom – a string of barges linked by chains and probably with nets slung under them – and there was no net boom there now to impede her, since Thetis had towed it in. He looked back at Thetis: she’d stopped, aground, on the starboard side of the fairway, well short of the canal entrance. One down, two to play! That battery was raising spouts all round her. Bravo’s twelve-pounder fired: a surprisingly loud and penetrating crack for so small a calibre.
‘Captain, sir!’
Tremlett was pointing out to starboard.
Against the mole: a great gout of smoke and spray, debris flying. That German destroyer: Bravo’s torpedo had struck her right amidships, under her second funnel. Men were cheering – on the bridge and gundeck. Nick shouted, ‘Well done, Number One!’ The four-pounder fired again, recoiled: shell-splashes sprang up close to the ship’s port side almost simultaneously. The battery was answering their attack: and that was to the good, it might even give Intrepid a clear run in.
‘Grebe’s hit again, sir.’
Garfield said it; but his eyes were on the compass-card again now. They’d hit Grebe amidships again, as if they knew where it would hurt most and struck always at the same spot, like a cruel boxer inflicting a maximum of punishment.
‘Tremlett – make to him, Are you still all right?’
‘She’s calling us, sir!’ Tremlett jumped to the searchlight and gave them an answering flash. The four-pounder fired again. Garfield said, ‘We’re ’itting them guns, sir. Saw the muck fly, that last time.’
‘From Grebe, sir: Have been winged. A tow would help.’
‘Number One!’ He yelled into the engine-room voicepipe, ‘Full ahead together!’ Elkington came aft quickly. Nick shouted in his ear as the gun fired again, ‘Stand by to take Grebe in tow. Have to look slippy because we’ll be damn close to the battery. See that the other guns engage it as soon as they bear. Starboard ten, cox’n.’
Intrepid was more than halfway to the canal mouth. Intact, going strong, hardly touched. Thetis had two cutters in the water, packed with men, and two MLs were closing-in on them, Elkington had gone down. Nick told Garfield, ‘Steer for Grebe’s stern.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Grebe shouldn’t be there at all, he thought, let alone in an immobilized condition, which presumably was what Hatton-Jones meant by ‘winged’. She was right opposite that battery, no more than half a mile from it, and only a little more than that from the Goeben guns. She was being hit repeatedly and the sea all around her was a mass of leaping shell-spouts. Hatton-Jones, who in civilian life was some kind of art expert and an international yachtsman, and was now an RNVR lieutenant-commander, could reasonably be granted a third description – that of bloody fool. It wasn’t only his chicken’s neck he’d put on the butcher’s block.
‘Aim in towards her quarter now, cox’n.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
‘I’m afraid we may get knocked about a bit, in a minute.’
‘I wouldn’t bet against it, sir.’
C3 had hit the viaduct at nine and a half knots, right in the centre of a section between two rows of piers. Only her captain had been in the bridge by the time they’d struck it; he’d had all the others on the other casing, behind the bridge.
Striking, she’d ridden up out of water, on one of the submerged horizontal girders, smashed through the cross-braces and penetrated as far as the leading edge of the bridge. That had been the really solid point of impact, when the front of the bridge had slammed up against the lattice-work of steel and stopped her. So the Amatol charge had been thrust deep inside the structure of the viaduct, right in the centre of it and under the centre of the roadway overhead. When the bow had hit the underwater girder she’d jumped and jarred: on the casing they’d hung on, hearing the rush and scrape as steel struts snapped and ripped: then the final stop had knocked them off their feet, grabbing for fresh supports: above them in the darkness there’d been German shouts, yelled orders, then lights of torches, rifle-shots, bullets clanging and whirring off the casing. Tim Rogerson recalled a sense of confusion, of hardly knowing what had happened or was happening.
Sandford’s voice cut through it.
‘Get the dinghy in the water! Fast, now!’
Cleaver was at the for’ard fall. Rogerson cast off the after one, and the boat came down with a rush, its stern bouncing off the curve of No. 3 main ballast tank; the small, frail craft slid into the water almost on its beam-ends, then righted itself and floated.
‘Get aboard, all hands!’
There was a lot of shooting now from directly above their heads. Now a searchlight blazed down, and the shots came faster. Scrambling into the little rocking dinghy: six aboard, and Roxburgh trying to start its engine. Sandford came down the side of the bridge like a trapeze artiste; he swung, landed on his feet on the tank-top where the sea washed over it: the submarine was stuck fast but the tide still moved her, grinding her against the girders that held her and supported her explosive bow. They were more than conscious of that five-ton charge now, because Sandford had lit the fuse before he’d left the bridge. He was climbing into the boat, shouting ‘Come on, shove off!’ The searchlight was blinding, petrifying, and a machine-gun opened up and fired one long burst that sent bullets screaming, rattling and ricocheting through the girders. The sea leapt all around the boat and splinters, large ones, flew from its port side. Rogerson heard himself say, ‘She’s holed. There’s a great—’
The engine started. The machine-gun hadn’t fired again but the riflemen were hard at it, bullets singing through the struts and beams, clanging off C3’s tanks and sides and smashing into the boat’s planks. The engine whirred, screamed unnaturally, jarring oddly on the transom. Roxburgh shut it off.
‘Screw’s damaged.’ He shouted to Sandford, ‘Bloody propeller, sir. It’s no bloody good.’ Rogerson, feeling water round his ankles, asked the ERA ‘Where are the bilge pumps, can we—’ A whole section of the gunnel flew away. Sandford yelled over the noise of a fresh fusillade of shots, ‘Get the oars out! Tim—’ Rogerson’s ears were singing from the rifle-fire. He was already groping for the oars, bent over and trying to get his boots out of the way, tugging at the loom of one of them. He pushed at someone else’s legs that were in the light, got hold of the oar and dragged it up, and his own right forearm seemed to explode in front of his face. It felt as if it had been hit very hard with a hammer, but the skin and flesh had opened, tendons and bone flown out rather like the spines of a smashed umbrella: he was staring at it and thinking vaguely dumdums, then, almost impersonally as if it wasn’t his own arm he was looking at. Cleaver had snatched the oar and shipped it in the port-side crutch, and Harner had the other one out to starboard; Harner was pushing at 03’s black, wave-washed side with the blade of his, trying to shove off; there was a lot of water in the dinghy now, from the bullet-holes riddling her planks, but Roxburgh had just got the second of the two special bilge-pumps going and it didn’t seem to be getting any deeper at the moment. The boat was slewing, coming clear, both oarsmen trying to get her moving out against the flood of tide: at any time it would have been hard work. Harner grunted, let go of his oar and rolled sideways, he was covered in blood and Rogerson suspected he was dead. He tried to take his place, seeing no reason he couldn’t row with one good arm, but Bindall got it and slid into the coxswain’s place on the thwart. The boat began to move away from the viaduct, shots whistling round, ricochets whining, water leaping, more holes in the boat’s sides. Bindall cursed, fell backwards, letting go his oar: Roxburgh grabbed its loom just before it vanished, sliding away out of the crutch – there were no spare oars, oddly enough, and there was a five-ton pack of Amatol a few yards away with a fuse burning steadily towards it and only a few minutes left: Roxburgh and Cleaver knew it, and they pulled like fleet champions at a regatta. Howell-Price was dragging the wounded or dead men clear of the thwarts and Sandford was at the tiller. Rogerson felt two quick hammer-blows, one into the top of his left shoulder and the other lower, in his ribs on the same side: he remembered afterwards thinking at that moment, not actually feeling pain but knowing he’d been shot twice more and that it was against any sort of odds for any of them to live through this, Well, that’s it, we did know the chance: weren’t too bright… The boat was being forced out against the tide, half full of water, both oarsmen straining, grunting with the effort of moving her and her water-ballast and seven men’s weight: another searchlight joined the first, and the machine-gun opened up again, and most of the stern and the starboard gunnel flew away like chips off a high-speed lathe: Howell-Price was taking over one of the oars, Sandford at the tiller had been hit, and a second machine-gun joined in. Sandford shouted, ‘Keep it up just another half minute, boys, and the swine’ll be blown to—’ He’d been hit again. He was all blood and he couldn’t finish his sentence but he was keeping the boat on course with his teeth gritted and his eyes shut: what made him open them was the Amatol exploding. It was as if the air, the whole night round them, were inflammable and someone had put a match to it: they were part of it, a deafening roar and an engulfing wall of flame. Rogerson, stupefied but vaguely aware that he was cheering, saw a lot of men on bicycles falling into space: some of them appeared to catch fire as they tumbled over. He thought he might be dead, or delirious, or mad. No searchlights now: the power cables to them had been blown apart, of course. Things were dropping everywhere, heavy things and small things, splashing down all round them: a wave came against the tide, lifted the dinghy and rolled it on its way. No shooting any more. Just one small foundering boat with dead or near-dead men in it. Sandford croaked, ‘We’ve done it! Look!’
There was a hundred-foot gap in the viaduct. The mole was isolated from the shore. Howell-Price grinned sideways at ERA Roxburgh: ‘Come on, pull!’ Roxburgh complained, ‘I’m no sailor, sir…’ Howell-Price, Sandford, Rogerson, Roxburgh and Cleaver were all laughing, or making sounds that passed for it; Sandford told the rowers, ‘Save your breath, you loonies. Pull.’ There was starshell-light now, and flaming onions from this end of the mole, but nothing close or bright enough to show up details here in the boat. Just as well, Rogerson thought. We’d scare each other silly if we could see each other. We should all be dead. From the time they’d been dazzled in the beams of those filthy searchlights he had imprinted memories of what the others looked like. Sandford particularly, who’d been hit and hit again and still incredibly held the tiller and held it straight: Sandford, Uncle Baldy, should have a VG, he thought, and when he wore it he’d wear it for them all. His own numbness was wearing off and he was beginning to feel, to hurt: if it got much worse it might be difficult to keep quiet. But there was also a feeling of great tiredness, and in opposition to that a certainty that one should not give way to it, that it was imperative to stay awake. It was quite rough, out here, and he wondered where they were going; the little boat was sluggish with all the weight in her, and she must have sunk lower in the water because waves were lopping over the bow behind him.
‘Boat ahoy!’
A light trained on them, its beam dancing on the water. He thought, I’m delirious… On the picket-boat the elder Sandford shouted to his stoker, ‘Stop her! Slow astern!’ He hurried for’ard, beside himself with excitement and relief, and tossed a line across the dinghy. Roxburgh caught it. Howell-Price shouted, ‘We’ve several men quite badly hurt. Skipper needs attention urgently. So does—’
‘He’ll get it, don’t you worry.’ The skipper’s elder brother knelt, grabbed the dinghy’s gunnel; there were sailors behind him ready to get over and lift the wounded into the larger boat. Dick Sandford said in a surprisingly strong voice, ‘See to the others first. Cox’n’s worse than I am.’
‘All right, old chap. Here – easy, now…'
‘What happened to you?’
‘Tow broke. Damn near capsized first. Miles back, right out at sea… Never mind, we’re here now. We’ll get you fellows to a destroyer with a doctor. My God, what a splendid job you’ve—’
‘What about C1?’
‘Broke her tow, too. She’s all right, though. Fed up, I’ve no doubt, at missing it. Anyway, who cares, you did it! You did it, Dick!’
‘Tow’s fast, sir!’
Nick bent to the voicepipe as shells came whirring through thinning smoke and their splashes sprang up to port. ‘Slow ahead together.’ The twelve-pounder let off another round: target the Goeben battery. Vindictive’s howitzers were blasting at that battery too; without their help things might have been a great deal worse.
‘Slow ahead together, sir!’
‘Keep the helm amidships, cox’n.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Another salvo hurtled over: splashes all ahead, then one shell came late and short, burst on Bravo’s foc’sl: the capstan went up vertically, spinning like a huge top, splashed down a few feet clear of the bow as Bravo struggled to forge ahead with Grebe’s dead weight dragging at her stern. Bravo had lost her mainmast and the quarterdeck six-pounder; the superstructure that the after gundeck was built on, which was also the wardroom access door, had been smashed in and set alight, but the fire was out now and Elkington had reported that there was no internal damage. Just as well – and lucky: McAllister had a lot of wounded below there in the wardroom. Looking aft over the stern as the wire came taut again, Nick saw Intrepid, lit by starshell, settling inside the canal entrance; two cutters and a smaller boat – skiff, probably – were pulling away from her, out into the harbour. There was a lot of machine-gun fire from the shore, and shell-splashes that must be coming either from the mole’s inshore end or from that shore battery. An ML was laying smoke in there, and two others were heading to meet the blockship’s boats. Thetis had been abandoned, but they’d left a green light burning as a guide to help the other two past. Iphigenia had rounded the end of the mole, and was halfway across towards Thetis: she seemed to be getting in unmolested.
The wire was taut and straining. Two shells dropped short of Grebe’s starboard bow, throwing a heavy rain of foul-smelling water across both ships. A starshell burst right overhead: with the smoke gone, they’d be punished again now; the Goeben gunners would want to make up for lost time and they wouldn’t be pleased to see their prey escaping. The wire quivered, bar-taut, and Grebe’s bow hadn’t moved yet.
‘Starboard five.’
‘Starboard five, sir!’
Turning to port – or trying to – so as to head out at an angle and drag Grebe’s bow round, get her pointing out the way they had to go. Bravo’s engines were only at slow ahead, but to put on more power at this stage would be to risk parting the tow. Then they’d have to start from scratch again.
‘Damn…’
He’d whispered it, to himself, as a searchlight fastened on them. Grebe’s middle funnel exploded in a shower of steel. That damned light… But she was moving, just a little, and it was the start that counted. Once there was some way on her, the inertia overcome, you could put on more revs. It was a sudden strain on the wire that one had to guard against.
‘Bosun’s mate!’
Clark jumped forward. ‘Sir?’
‘Tell Maynard to shoot at that light until he hits it.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Maynard, leading seaman, was the layer of the twelve-pounder. ‘Midships.’
‘Midships, sir.’
‘One-five-oh revolutions.’
Flat out, for an oily wad, was about three-fifty. One-fifty would give her eight or ten knots on her own. Four or five perhaps with Grebe in tow. Straightening from the voicepipe he flinched as Grebe was hit again right aft. Smoke welled up from her quarterdeck. The twelve-pounder fired – going for the searchlight. Smoke was what they needed: not that sort, though. Stinking, blinding stuff, drifting seaward. Iphigenia was passing Thetis, and she was being hit: by the Goeben guns, probably, which would account for a slackening of the bombardment here. That was another hit on Iphigenia: the Huns had been getting too much practice, in the past hour, they were beginning to get the hang of it, God damn them! They’d cut a steam-pipe or something like that, in Iphigenia, you could see it pouring up, white in a searchlight’s beam. Grebe was coming round nicely now.
‘Starboard five, cox’n!’
‘Starboard five… Five o’ starboard wheel on, sir!’
Inching her round. Increasing the strain by degrees, getting her on the move, in the process turning her so she’d present a smaller target to the shore guns. The searchlight left them: swept across the harbour, lighting patches of drifting smoke – an abandoned ship’s boat – sweeping on: fastening on an ML that was coming out stern-first from the canal entrance with tracer streaming at her from all directions and towing a cutter from her bow. Cutter and launch were both black with men. Iphigenia was inside the canal mouth: from this angle she and Intrepid were one solid black mass against the light of flares.
‘Midships.’
‘Midships, sir.’
Elkington climbed into the bridge.
‘So far so good, sir.’
'What?’
He shouted, ‘Tow’s holding, sir, so far!’
‘You’ve done damn well.’ It was no more than fact. Elkington had got the line over, then the grass and the heavy wire, in half the time it might have taken. Under heavy fire that wasn’t as easy as the Manual of Seamanship Vol.1 made it sound.
‘What about casualties?’
‘Rotten, sir. Nine dead and—’ he hesitated – ‘about sixteen wounded.’
Almost half the ship’s company. And nowhere near out of this hole yet
The guns in the waist were silent now. Grebe was in their way, and there were no targets they could bear on. The twelve-pounder sent one last shell crashing into the darkness: then that one was out of it too, blanked-off from its enemies by the smoking, smouldering ship astern.
‘Steer north-east, cox’n.’
‘Steer north-east, sir…’
That would take them wide of the mole’s extremity, towards Phoebe’s and North Star’s patrol line to the east and north-east of it. Nick put his glasses up to see if either of them might be in sight, or even perhaps the flashes of their guns. He caught his breath: no more than four hundred yards off the lighthouse, one of them – impossible to see which – was stationary, and as he watched a sweeping searchlight gripped her, held her: shells burst all over her and all round her, for a moment she was hidden by their splashes and he thought, She’s done for… How the hell she’s got trapped in that position – she must have got lost in smoke perhaps, or – now he saw her partner, sister-ship, moving in at speed, laying a screen of smoke to hide her from that searchlight and the guns on the mole extension: he’d been stooping to the voicepipe while he watched it, all in the space of about four seconds: that smoke might save her, if she wasn’t already finished… He called down to the engine-room, ‘Two hundred revolutions.’
‘Two ’undred revs, sir!’
‘Number One, I think we’ll—’
A flight of shells came screaming down and burst across Bravo’s stern. She seemed to convulse – to flinch and shudder, recoiling from the blows: flames leapt, died back, smoke expanded and came flying for’ard on the wind. Elkington shouted, ‘The wire’s gone, sir!’
Something like a brick had hit his right shoulder. It had knocked him back, throwing him against the binnacle, and Garfield had reached out one arm to steady him. He heard himself order, ‘Starboard fifteen!’ He’d been about to say it when the thing had hit him.
‘Starboard fifteen, sir…’ Garfield spun the wheel round. ‘You all right, sir?’
'Yes… Stop port. Number One—’ he couldn’t feel his right arm, or move it – ‘I’m going to lay smoke inshore of Grebe again, then go alongside, port side to his starboard side, and we’ll lash him to us. Stand by on the upper deck, please.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
‘And I want a report on how things are below… Half ahead port, two-five-oh revolutions both engines…’ Bloody searchlight back again! He heard Garfield asking him, ‘Are you sure you’re all right, sir?’
‘Midships… Cox’n, don’t chatter at me.’
‘Midships. Sorry, sir.’
The twelve-pounder was back in action. Shooting at the searchlight, Nick hoped. He actually hated it, that light, quite personally and viciously. He bent over the voicepipe: ‘Engine-room – make smoke!’
‘Make smoke, sir!’
Bravo was on fire aft. But she still wasn’t as badly off as Grebe. Nick had to use his left hand to raise his binoculars. The right-hand side of his body was all wet: he could feel it running down. He told himself, pulling his thoughts together in order to clarify his intentions, his sense of direction and priorities, The blockships are in, our job’s done, in this state we can’t be of any practical use to the MLs in there, so the thing is simply to get out of it – with Grebe… The searchlight left them, swung to Grebe: there was a pom-pom firing at her from the beach. A starshell burst high over the middle of the mole: he saw a cutter pulling seaward, two MLs heading the same way, another stopped with a skiff alongside her and men being hauled up. He let his glasses drop on their strap and told Garfield, ‘Starboard ten.’ Black smoke had begun to flood out of both funnels. The top of the after one was shattered, and in the smoke you could see the glow from the furnace down below. For an old coal-burning oily wad there was nothing new in making smoke: only usually it wasn’t deliberate, it made senior officers curse and send offensive signals. All Bravo’s surviving guns were firing as she swung inshore. He thought, Better lay two lines of it, one parallel to the other… That way, it might last.
‘Midships.’
‘Midships, sir.’
He felt ill, suddenly. A sickly weakness spreading from the gut. If one could have been sick it might have helped. The racket of the guns was bewildering, deadening to the senses: something in his head told him Time to go round, lay smoke behind that lot… ‘Port fifteen.’
‘Port fifteen, sir.’
Garfield was very steady, very calm. Bravo was lucky in her coxswain, Nick thought. Russell was a good hand too. Not as good a chief buffer as Swan had been, but—
There’d been no mention of Swan in the list of ship’s company awards for Mackerel. Not that it would have made the slightest difference to Swan himself; but for his parents’ sake, his people: they should have been allowed some sign, some acknowledgement of the man’s quality. Too late now: and it all seemed so long ago. Shells screeched overhead; there were flames on Grebe’s iron deck. Her casualties must be terrible, much worse than Bravo’s. Now she’d vanished: the first line of smoke lay between them. It should be just as blinding to the Hun gunners. Nick thought he was falling: he held on with his left arm around the binnacle, bent his knees, slid down until the soft-iron correcting-sphere on this side was under his armpit. He let it take his weight, leaning towards it, resting for a moment with his eyes shut. It was amazing how the sick feeling drained away. Garfield boomed, ‘Captain, sir!’
‘Yes?’
Opening his eyes, and hoisting himself up.
‘We’ve fifteen o’ port wheel on still, sir!’
‘Midships!’ He checked the compass-card quickly. ‘Meet her!’
‘Meet her, sir…’
Gun-flashes ashore now. Bravo was inside her own smoke; it drifted seaward as it poured like black treacle from her funnels. And probably they’d made enough of it now: the next thing was to locate Grebe again.
‘Port ten.’
‘Port ten, sir.’ Garfield seemed to be watching him all the time, and Nick found it irritating. He took the chance of another rest as he leant against the voicepipe. ‘Slow together!’
‘Slow together, sir …’ The smell of the voicepipe increased the feeling of nausea. Bravo was turning to starboard into her own black, suffocating smoke. Elkington should have the wires and fenders ready down there by now. When they got through the smoke it should be easy enough to find Grebe, particularly if she was still on fire. He heard shells passing overhead, that cloth-ripping noise big ones made when they were passing masthead-high or higher. They must have been firing blind.
‘Midships.’
'Midships, sir.’
‘Bosun’s mate.’ Clark moved towards him. ‘Go down and tell the first lieutenant to stand by.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
‘Wheel’s amidships, sir.’
Able Seaman Clark had only got as far as the head of the ladder; he was coming back. Sub-lieutenant York was with him.
‘First lieutenant says he’s ready and standing by, sir.’
‘Good.’ He glanced round the bridge. ‘Where’s our snotty?’
‘Aft, sir. Shell-splinter in his back.’ York was goggling at Nick’s arm and shoulder; Nick scowled at him, and turned away. It was a peculiar and very unpleasant sensation, to have feeling in only about half one’s body and no control over one arm and hand. The limb just dangled. Bravo broke out suddenly into clear night air: starshells were drifting over the harbour and a flaming onion soared over the canal mouth. There were shells bursting on the mole extension and he thought those must be Vindictive’s howitzers still at it.
‘Forty on the bow, sir!’
Garfield was pointing. Grebe looked like a wreck, burnt out. Nick shouted, ‘Tremlett!’ The coxswain said, ‘He was hit just, now, sir, he’s been took down.’ It was like a dream one had had before: hadn’t Wyatt shouted at a dead yeoman? But he, Nick, hadn’t known anything about Tremlett.
‘Killed?’
‘I don’t think so, sir.’
That wasn’t so bad, then. Signalman Jowitt asked him, ‘Sir?’
‘Make to Grebe, Please stand by to take my wires on your starboard side.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Sub, go down and assist the first lieutenant… Bosun’s mate!’
‘Yessir?’
‘Go down to the chartroom and bring me up a stool,’ He moved to the port side of the bridge, hooked his left elbow over the new protective plating – dented and scorched in places, it looked less new now: half the splinter-mattresses had been ripped or scorched away – and leant his weight on it. He called to Garfield, ‘Port fifteen. Stop starboard.’ Behind him he heard the clatter of the searchlight as his message was flashed to Grebe. He was glad he’d started it with the word ‘please’: Hatton-Jones was a touchy sort of man, he’d have objected to a signal from a junior that read like an order. Nick’s head jerked towards the mole: that was a new sound altogether – the high shriek of a ship’s siren.
The recall?
Vindictive’s signal to the landing force. The order to start falling back to the ship. It meant the blocking had been completed, that the withdrawal would be starting now.
And consequently, that the howitzer plastering of the Goeben battery would be ceasing. Damn!
‘Ease to five. Stop port.’
He watched carefully as the gap between the two ships closed. ‘Midships.’
‘Midships, sir!’ Garfield unruffled, stoic.
Staring at Grebe’s battered, lacerated hulk, Nick thought Have we pulled it off, then? Really? But it was a detached, rather academic consideration. The smoke was already wafting out, surrounding them; Grebe was half hidden in it. All right, so there was another bank to drift up behind it, but that gave – what, five or ten minutes? To get two ships lashed together and under way, creep out of range?
Wyatt croaked, ‘Hold on, damn you…’ Crawling, sliding himself along with the Marine corporal on his back. This one seemed to have been shot in the lungs. His own wounds, Wyatt thought, were mostly superficial. His left leg was smashed from ankle to kneecap – that was bad enough… Whenever the pain of it reached his brain he had to stop, lie flat, press his face against the concrete and – he’d passed out, two or three times. It came in spasms, and when it ebbed – he said aloud, ‘The hell with it!’ His shoulder – no way of knowing whether that had been shrapnel or a bullet: and a bayonet-stab in the neck. Flesh-wounds, those. Bled a lot, but – nothing. He’d been stabbed when he’d led a rush of bluejackets over some wire – they’d thrown planks on it and dashed over them – and cleared out one end of the first lot of trenches. Huns back there now, damn them! A long time ago, that felt like, but it couldn’t have been, they’d only been on the mole an hour. He told the man on his back, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll live to have another crack at ’em! So’ll I, by God!’ Talking helped, now and then. One’s own voice reassured one. Almost as much as seeing Keyes’s flag had, just now: over the smoke out there, within a stone’s throw of the mole, he’d seen Warwick’s masthead go by with that great banner of a vice-admiral’s flag streaming from it – big because it had been made to fly from a dreadnought battleship, Keyes’s squadron flagship up in Scapa – the St George’s Cross and the single red ball in its upper canton: it had passed by floating above the smoke although the destroyer under it was hidden. Men had cheered to see it, there’d been a shout of ‘Here comes Roger!’ A few minutes before the recall signal, that had been; and now by unspoken agreement, without any order being given, they were bringing back the wounded and the dead. Wherever they could be got at: some, you couldn’t reach. Wyatt had passed Padre Peshall half a dozen times: Peshall, not even scratched so far – perhaps the Lord looked after his own lieutenants? – had an odd way of running in a crouched, bear-like shamble with a man across his shoulders. He kept delivering them and going back for more. Wyatt was doing the same, a lot of chaps were, but he couldn’t move as fast as the padre, with this damn leg. He’d saved three: this one would make four. It wouldn’t be fitting, to leave the dead for Huns to deal with; and the wounded, of course, had to be brought out. In the last hour, Wyatt thought he’d seen everything fine that there could be to see, he’d come to realize there was no standard to which the British sailor or Marine could not measure. Harrison, for instance, who’d been laid out half-dead by that shot in the jaw: he’d come-to, and immediately rushed ashore and taken over command from Adams. By that time Adams, who’d led an assault on the wire and trenches beyond No. 3 shed, had been hit several times himself and lost three-quarters of his men. He’d reinforced them with some of B Company, whose officers had all been killed, and led another rush along the parapet, but a machine-gun had pinned them down and another one from a destroyer moored on the inside of the mole had caught them in a cross-fire. They’d had to retire again, leaving a lot of men dead out in front. Harrison, taking over, had sent Adams back to ask for Marine reinforcements, and Major Weller, the senior surviving leatherneck – the Marines by this time had cleared two hundred yards of mole to the westward of the ship and were holding out down there in the face of particularly fierce attacks – sent up a platoon. Meanwhile Harrison, who couldn’t speak because of his smashed jaw, had led another dash along the roadway. He and every single man with him was either killed or wounded. Wyatt, who’d been flat at the time, temporarily knocked out by the shock of his leg-wound, had seen it, and helped some of them to crawl back. The half-dead leading the three-quarter dead. Able Seamen Eaves had tried to carry back Harrison’s body, but Eaves was knocked out himself while he was doing it. Another sailor, McKenzie, a machine-gunner, had gone on working his gun long after he’d been badly wounded: he’d caught a group of Germans running from a blockhouse to the destroyer – which had shortly afterwards blown up, hit by a torpedo from God knew where – and he’d polished them all off, like a row of skittles, one behind the other. Wyatt asked the man on his back, ‘Know your Captain Bamford, do you, eh?’ The corporal didn’t answer. Couldn’t: couldn’t hear, quite likely. Wyatt told him, not caring too much about being heard or not, ‘Man’s incredible. Never seen anything like it. Doesn’t know bullets kill a man – or doesn’t give a brass—’
‘Hello there, Edward!’ The padre crouched down beside him, staring at him anxiously. Probably thought he’d been talking to himself, gone off his head or something. He smiled. ‘Give you a hand with this fellow?’
‘No. You fetch your own.’ Wyatt thought that was funny. He said it again, because Peshall hadn’t laughed. The padre said, ‘Ought to pack it in now, Edward. Let ’em take you aboard this time. The recall’s sounded, did you hear it?’
Wyatt crabbed on towards the ship. A Royal Marine platoon was holding a small perimeter and providing covering fire, and there were scaling-ladders up to the higher roadway. Bluejackets were hauling the dead and wounded up as they were brought back from all directions, and carrying them across and lowering them down the brows. Four brows in commission now. Wyatt had one more chap he was determined to fetch: he had to, he’d actually told him he’d come back for him. He’d seen him sprawled in a half-sitting position in the doorway of a wrecked blockhouse or store near the Hun wire that started beyond No. 3 shed. There were some railway trucks lined up there, and they’d provide enough cover for a man on his own to crawl up under them and drag him away. The Germans were damn close by, since they’d reoccupied that trench: but if one was quiet, and as quick as this damned leg would allow… Wyatt had been almost within touching distance of the wounded man already: he’d put the Marine corporal down, crept under the trucks and inspected him from not more than ten feet away. An able seaman with three good-conduct badges. Badly hit – his face all black on one side with crusting blood. Wyatt had called to him, ‘Hold hard – I’ll come back for you!’ The recall wasn’t an order to be obeyed promptly, it only gave notice of withdrawal. You couldn’t just draw stumps and walk away. He lay flat while a machine-gun flamed and clattered from the left: there’d been too much light, one of their blasted flaming onions. God, he thought, How I hate the bloody Huns! There was quite a bunch of men in the shelter of No. 3 shed now. A young Marine sergeant was controlling them, sending them across the open mole in small groups between bursts of enemy machine-gun fire. On one’s own, keeping to the shadows and moving this slowly, as slowly as was necessitated by this damn-fool condition he was in, you had a certain advantage over men in groups legging it about. He grinned, muttered, Marvellous chaps. Thank God I’m an Englishman! Better cross over now. He’d been lucky with that parapet hook, he thought. That lift of the ship, just as Daffodil shoved her in, had done it. Wouldn’t have, otherwise. Bargained for a tide three or four feet higher than tonight’s. Last night’s. One minute after midnight, Vindictive had bumped alongside. Young Claud Hawkins of D Company hadn’t been so lucky, when they’d been struggling to get Iris tied-up alongside. Hawkins had used a scaling-ladder, got right up on the parapet to manhandle the hook over; he’d been on it when they opened up on him, and he’d started firing back at them with his revolver, and they’d killed him with the hook still not in place. Then George Bradford, Hawkins’s company commander, had tried going up the derrick, and a machine-gun firing across the mole had cut him off the top of it: he’d fallen – his body had fallen-between the mole and the old ferry-boat, and one of his petty officers had gone down after it and that had been his end, too. The hook tore away in any case, as soon as the weight of the steamer came on it. But you felt so damn proud, to have had such friends… Nearly there now. The shade under those trucks was deep: once he got under there, he’d be – Flattening, as a mortar thumped down somewhere behind him. Shrapnel lashed the trucks, splintering wood and striking sparks off metal, sang away into the flaming dark. Last trip, this. The ships wouldn’t be alongside much longer. He was dragging himself forward again. Never mind about it hurt-ing, you milksop, doctors’ll fix all that up. What they’re for. Had enough practice by this time to know how to set about it, too. That recall wasn’t sounded on Vindictive’s siren, but on Daffodil’s. Reason: poor old Vindictive’s had her whistle shot off. She’d been shot to bits, above the level of the parapet she was a smashed-up scarecrow of a ship. God bless her! And Carpenter, Rosoman, Osborn, Bramble – what a crowd! Hilton Young with an arm half off: Walker waving without a hand: Keyes knows how to pick men, all right. Any man Roger Keyes picks for a job of work is fit to know. Under the second truck now… Putting his face right down on the cold concrete between the lines he could see light – radiance of distant starshell and closer flares, constantly changing but always there to some extent – and the black outline of the wrecked building where his three-badger would be waiting for him. Told you I’d be back, my friend, eh? Movement: scrape of a boot on concrete, and then a metallic click. Something bounced, skittered towards him under the truck. It touched his face. In the half-second that was left to him he realized it was a grenade.
Grebe was on fire again, and all her guns had been knocked out. He could see just one man moving on her after-part. The stern itself was shattered, funnels split and torn, her bridge was a charred heap of scrap-iron on which Hatton-Jones, recognizable by a bandage round his head, had a helmsman and a snotty with him. The fires aft provided enough illumination for the occasional starshell to be superfluous, from the shore gunners’ point of view. Grebe was a dead weight to Bravo: it was probably only the fact that she was well down by the bow with her stern consequently raised high in the water that she hadn’t flooded aft and foundered.
Bravo’s twelve-pounder had been knocked to bits by a direct hit which had also killed all its crew; it was a miracle that shell hadn’t killed everyone on the bridge as well. At least with the gun finished one wasn’t obliged to go on bringing up more men to man it in the place of those already killed: stuck out there in front of the bridge, and with its protective screening shot away, it was about as exposed a position as one could imagine. Every shot that hit the foc’sl sent splinters screaming over it. More shells ripped overhead: Nick was tensed for new flame, blast, destruction, death: it hadn’t come. Not this time. They’d all gone over. The bastards have to miss sometime: … Bravo’s worst wound had been a hit in her for’ard boiler-room. Chief ERA Joseph had shut it off now: so long as the feed-water held out they could manage on the after boilers. She could make a few knots through the water; and while she could move, and float, and Grebe could float and move with her, there were lives in both ships that one could try to save.
‘Port five, cox’n.’
‘Port five, sir…’
To keep the for’ard wires taut. When they were slack, the sea’s movement drove the two ships together – thumping, scraping… He saw flashes from the Goeben battery: he’d had his glasses on it, holding them in his left hand with his elbow on the top edge of the port side plating, looking aft over Grebe’s smashed stern. With nothing shooting at those shore guns now – Vindictive and the others had left the mole some time ago – they were using the two old thirty-knotters for target-practice.
Wreaking some vengeance, perhaps, for the indignity their side had suffered, the rape of their stronghold.
Perhaps I’m being stupid? Perhaps there’s no point in this now?
No alternative, though. Badly wounded men drowned, when a ship sank. Bravo and Grebe had more dead and wounded now than they had fit and living. Less than half Bravo’s crew of sixty were on their feet.
Salvo scorching in now. He met Garfield’s impassive stare. Behind the coxswain, young York. York had taken over from Elkington, who was dead. There wasn’t anything one could do, except struggle on. At what – two knots? The only miracle that he could think of that anyone could have prayed for was the Goeben guns to run out of ammunition. It wasn’t really likely. Nick said, ‘One thing – they’ll have to give us a new ship, after this.’
Garfield’s raised eyebrow managed to climb another centimetre, then dropped back. He muttered, ‘Don’t make ’em like this no more, sir.’
‘You think that’s bad?’
Jowitt laughed. The shells came down in a hoarse rush ending in leaping fountains of black sea and a streak of flame across both ships, clap of thunder under your feet and inside your skull, stink of explosive and fried metal: on the starboard side abaft the bridge yellow flames danced, crackling and spurting, leaping to throw the foremast into silhouette. The yard had gone and most of the rigging with it, the rest hanging in a tangle of steel-wire rope, halyards and aerial wires, but the mast still stood. Nick realized that the yellow burning was a cordite fire; bits of it were springing in the air, landing elsewhere and continuing to burn. Ready-use cartridges at the starboard for’ard six-pounder. He called to York, ‘Sub – go round the guns and dump all the ready-use. Cartridges specially. Over the side.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
‘Bravo, ahoy!’
Hatton-Jones was bawling through a megaphone as the shellstink blew clear. Nick found his down by his feet. Moving was a strange business: you forced your limbs to travel in a desired direction, but when it started it felt like floating, lacking support or contact with the surroundings. He was up again, with the megaphone.
‘Everard here. You all right?’
Hatton-Jones shouted, ‘You’d better leave me. Cast off and get out of it.’
‘What about your wounded?’
Shouting hurt him. He looked aft. ‘Sub, wait here!’ York came back from the ladder; there was a considerable gap in the bridge screening there at its head. He asked Hatton-Jones, ‘Can you send them over to us?’
Garfield shouted, ‘Captain, sir!’
Nick turned, looked at him. The coxswain was pointing out to port, across Grebe’s smoking, shattered waist. Nick saw, by starshell light, a streak of white. Broken sea, some sort of—
‘CMB, sir!’
He let the megaphone drop and put his glasses up. Left arm doing all the work. It was a CMB. One’s mind was slow-moving, sluggish; one had to drive it, prod it. What could – well, take off some of the wounded, or—
Smoke!
Streaming from that racing, leaping boat’s exhaust: lovely, heavy, Brock-type smoke! Jowitt cheered suddenly, a cowboyish whoop of joy. Garfield snarled, ‘Quiet, you silly—’
‘Sub’ Nick told York, ‘Go down and empty all the shot-ready racks. Then see to the wires, see if anything needs adjusting or doubling-up. Look for fraying, and see the fenders are still in place. All right?’
Flashes of clarity. York was grinning as he turned away, looking at the CMB as she passed astern, rocketing by to spread her blessed smoke between these destroyers and the shore. Well inshore, plenty of room for it to drift out astern of them as they dragged themselves away like crippled animals. The CMB might even hang around, be at hand to lay another streak if that lot blew away.
It was all they’d needed. There’d been no hope of getting it, and the MLs had all been fully occupied getting the blockships’ crews away. The launches had been packed to capacity, and it was obvious that a lot of the blockships’ passage-crew stokers had defied orders and stayed on board… Shell-splashes sprang up way off on the quarter: the Hun gunners were trying to knock out the CMB now.
‘Grebe, ahoy!’
‘Yes, Everard?’
‘Shall we proceed now, sir?’
Waiting for the answer, he leant against the plating and shut his eyes, whispered in his brain, Thank you, God…
More motion on them now, as the linked ships struggled seawards in a stiffening breeze. Crashing together, lurching, scraping… ‘Like two junk-yards ’aving a go,’ Garfield had rumbled. York had nearly split his sides. York said now, with binoculars at his eyes, ‘Looks like Warwick coming back in, sir. The admiral.’
Nick was on the stool. They’d lashed it to the binnacle for him. He slid off it, moved to the side of the bridge and got his glasses up. He wasn’t certain, but he felt as if he might have been asleep. Perhaps only for a second? Otherwise he’d surely have toppled off the stool.
It was Warwick, all right. Garfield said approvingly, ‘Come to round us strays up, sir. Gath’ring ’is flock.’
Nick was remembering how a month or so ago, when he’d been getting to know his new coxswain and to like him, he’d asked him one day, ‘What year did you join the Navy?’ Gar-field had told him, ‘Nineteen-oh-three, sir.’ Nick had thought, When I was seven… He’d asked another question: ‘Why did you? What made you join?’ The coxswain had glanced down at his boots, frowned, looked up again. He’d answered with one word: ‘’unger, sir.’
The Navy was made of men like Garfield.
Warwick passing close… Daylight coming rapidly: the Belgian coast was a low black line with a haze of mauve-tinted dawn behind it. Nick had come back to the binnacle, but the stool seemed about twelve feet high. He let himself slide down, sat on the step and leant back against the binnacle’s round solidity. He shut his eyes. Garfield said quietly, ‘Sub-lieutenant, sir…’
Warwick had flashed, I am ordering Moloch to stand by you. What is your situation. Jowitt was using a hand-lamp; the twenty-inch had been blown overboard a long time ago. Raikes, the gunner (T), was crouching beside Nick. ‘You all right, sir?’ York looked down at him: ‘Get McAllister and a stretcher, gunner, would you?’ He turned to Jowitt, and told him, ‘Make to Warwick: Bravo towing Grebe. Believe can make Dover if weather holds. Very heavy casualties. Captain has just succumbed to wounds. Sub-lieutenant York assuming command.
Jowitt wanted to know how to spell ‘succumbed’.
Sarah had said in her letter,
There is something I must tell you, because I must share it with someone and I believe that you, my dearest Nick will at least try to understand. Please? You may remember that I introduced an old friend to you – Alastair Kinloch-Stuart, a major in one of the Highland regiments, here some months ago. Since then he has visited several times in this neighbourhood, and I cannot pretend otherwise than that his purpose has been to be close to me. I have not, I admit it and beg you to understand the circumstances, been as firm as I know I should have been in preventing this. He was such a very old friend, my family and his were on almost cousinly terms when he and I were only children. But – Nick, my dear, I should like to be speaking to you about this, not struggling to describe it so inadequately in a letter – he fell in love with me, and I have always had a high and warm regard for him; he was a good and honourable person and had no despicable intentions, indeed it was in some ways an agony for us both, and all the worse, that is to say more difficult for me at least to – oh, Nick, I am only saying what you know so well, that your father and I have not made the great thing of our marriage that I had hoped we should and intended. I must not ramble on, although I could scribble and scribble and still not tell you half of what I have in my heart and in my brain, of my feelings and deep sadness. But I did nothing wrong, Nick, ever. I promise you. And now poor Alastair has been killed in action. It was on March 22nd when the enemy broke through south of the Somme. Alastair had written a letter addressed to me, and it was brought to me here by his sister, to whom he had entrusted it. Now I have wept again. Nick, you are the one person on whose sympathy and love I place reliance: please come as soon as you can – please, Nick dear?
McAllister was crouching beside him. Two sailors were opening the folding stretcher, placing it where they could lift him on to it.
Garfield asked without moving his eyes from the lubber’s line, ‘Will he be all right, sir?’
The surgeon-probationer looked up. He gestured to the stretcher-bearers. Rising to his feet, he answered slowly, emphatically, ‘If he does not become “all right”, cox’n, you may shoot me.’
The coxswain looked at him, and nodded.
‘You said that, sir. There’s some might ’old you to it.’
Nick murmured, ‘Sarah. Oh, Sarah.’
McAllister and York exchanged glances. Nick spoke again; he’d been away somewhere, but for the moment he was back.
‘Sub.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘We’re supposed to rendezvous at Thornton Roads. North-west for fifteen miles. Don’t forget the tide. Transfer the tow when you get a chance.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ They were lifting the stretcher, with Nick on it. York added, ‘But now you – take it easy, sir, don’t—’
Garfield laughed. Sudden, explosive. Then he was himself again – stolid, not even smiling. McAllister and York were staring at him, wondering what had caused that uncharacteristic bark of mirth. He wasn’t bothering to explain.