While they were at breakfast, a signal arrived detaching Clarendon to Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt’s command at Harwich, and the wardroom cleared at once.
‘Pipe hands to prepare for sea!’
Pipes twittered and the master-at-arms and ship’s corporals went through the messes which immediately became a seething mass of running men. The sky was dark grey like the side of a battleship, with a lighter sword-stroke of pearl low on the horizon in the east. Beyond the muzzles of the forward turret Kelly could see the bustling activity of the cable party and an officer silhouetted against the guard rail. A bell jangled.
‘Engine room standing by!’
There was already excitement in the air. The war had only just begun and they still had no idea what to expect.
‘Pipe all hands for leaving harbour!’ The First Lieutenant glanced at his watch. ‘My respects to the captain. Tell him it’s ten minutes to slipping.’
The deck began to quiver and smoke began to curl down from the funnel in a dark plume like an ostrich feather in a woman’s hat. Everley appeared and placed himself in the centre of the bridge.
‘Special sea duty men closed up, sir. Ship ready for sea.’
‘Very well. Sound off.’
A bugle shrilled and there was the spatter of running feet.
‘Signal from ashore, sir! Proceed!’
Everley gave a small frown and Kelly wondered what he was thinking about. Why hadn’t he gone ashore himself to see his wife? Or did he, perhaps, prefer not to? God forbid, he thought, that I should end up like him, pretending, lying to myself. Thinking of Charley, he felt he never would.
Everley had moved to the front of the bridge now and was staring towards the bows. Suddenly his hangdog face seemed alive. Perhaps the poor devil preferred to be at sea. Perhaps at sea he felt safe. Perhaps at sea he didn’t have to look at his wife and realise what a mistake he’d made. As Fanshawe had said, the Navy was full of sad people like Everley, swept away by their emotions after serving too long in some torrid Far East port. The China Station where he’d come from was notorious as the graveyard of reputations, and men were always being sent home ruined by drink, speculative gambling, or women. Perhaps Everley was one.
One eye to port, Everley leaned on the bridge rail. At least, whatever else he’d lost, he’d not lost his touch. He made no gestures, just words spoken against a background hum from the ship’s generators, the occasional clatter of feet in the distance and low murmurs from the men on the deck waiting for him to give his orders.
‘Slow ahead together,’ he said quietly.
Bells jangled and the quivering that ran through the deck increased.
‘Slip!’
A harsh flurry of orders came from the forecastle with the rasping clatter of the wire. ‘All gone forrard, sir!’
Everley peered over the bridge coaming. ‘Watch her head, quartermaster. Half ahead port.’ There was a pause. ‘Slow ahead together.’
The white cliffs behind them began to swing and the oil-black water alongside slipped astern, littered with sagging armchairs, abandoned possessions, and the peacetime straw hats they’d worn ashore.
‘Forecastle secured for sea, sir!’
‘Very good. Fall out the hands and stand by to exercise action stations. I want every one checked.’ Everley permitted himself a small frosty smile. ‘After all, it is the first day of the war.’
As they turned west, heading towards the Outer Gabbard Light in the approaches to the Thames, the W/T office began to pick up signals from other ships and there was a stream of messages to the bridge.
‘I think the war’s started,’ Everley said with an unexpected cheerfulness, as if all his life he’d been waiting for this moment.
Fanshawe leaned across to Kelly. ‘Tyrwhitt’s out, and itching to draw the first blood of the war,’ he whispered. ‘Third Destroyer Flotilla’s making a sweep towards Holland.’
The sea was calm and the seamen moved about their duties quietly and efficiently. During the morning, the ship increased speed and the word was passed round that the destroyers were already being led into action by the light cruiser, Amphion. Immediately the air became electric.
‘That was quick,’ Kelly said. ‘What is it? High Seas Fleet come out?’
‘Nothing quite so important,’ Fanshawe said, ‘We’ve picked up a signal that a suspicious-looking steamer’s been seen throwing things overboard in the mouth of the Thames. The destroyers are searching for her and now, it seems, so are we, because they might be mines.’
At 10.30, they sighted Amphion through the haze, accompanied by the sleek shapes of several destroyers, one of which immediately swung round to challenge them. Recognising Clarendon, she took up a position alongside.
‘Steamer identified as Königin Luise seen laying mines,’ she flashed across the grey water. ‘Position west of longitude three east.’
Shortly afterwards, they came up on a converging course with other destroyers, and in the distance saw a small grey steamer heading eastwards at full speed, smoke pouring from her funnels. With Clarendon close behind and hauling up fast, the destroyers began to fire. Then Clarendon’s guns barked; the crash as the forward battery opened up seemed to be the signal for the start of their new life, and they caught their first whiff of cordite fumes in wartime.
‘By God, we’ve hit her!’ The First Lieutenant sounded amazed. ‘I do believe we’ve done our first war damage!’
The destroyers’ shells were driving home on the steamer now. Two more ships had arrived and, in the distance, still more were in sight, steering to the sound of the guns across the grey horizon.
Königin Luise was sinking as they came up with her, her decks and upperworks smashed, and Kelly was aware of the first shock of war. He’d never seen a ship sink before.
‘They’re abandoning,’ Everley said, and they saw men jumping overboard.
The German ship’s engines had not been stopped and she was still moving slowly ahead until, turning on to her side, she settled down and finally rolled over and disappeared beneath the waves. Everybody had come on deck to watch, and they were all chattering and pointing, half-clad stokers mixed with the deck crew and Marines. There was a cheer as Königin Luise vanished but no jeers or laughter and not much excitement, just a general quiet awe. Like Kelly, most of them had never seen a ship sink before and the thought that next time it might be their own was enough to silence the wags.
Watched by Amphion and Clarendon, the destroyers were lowering boats now and they could see men being dragged aboard, some of them obviously hurt. There was clearly nothing for Clarendon to do and she was obviously in the way.
‘Have the hands return to their stations,’ Everley said. ‘I think we’re somewhat de trop here and the destroyers’ll think we’re trying to steal their thunder.’
Bells clanged and the deck quivered as they resumed course. Nobody had anything much to say. It was as if they were all deep in thought, aware of the implications of what they’d seen. As the day advanced, however, spirits picked up and the sinking of the single little ship became a major victory so that there were laughter and shouts from the lower deck that lasted all the way to Harwich. They had barely arrived, however, when Fanshawe, ashore to pick up signals, brought news that stopped the excitement dead in its tracks.
‘Amphion’s gone,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘Struck one of Königin Luise’s mines on her way home. Practically everybody in the fore part of the ship was killed instantly.’
‘Tit for tat.’ Kelly looked at his watch. ‘If it’s going to be like this all the time, it’s going to be a bloody busy war.’
Fanshawe smiled. ‘Particularly for you, Maguire’ he said. ‘Orders have come through for you. You’re due for a torpedo specialist’s course at the end of the year, it seems. Something to do with joining submarines.’
‘Good God! I applied for that years ago. I’d forgotten all about it.’
‘When you sup with the Navy, you need a long spoon. Until the course comes up you’re posted to Cressy, Seventh Cruiser Squadron.’
‘Cressy!’ Kelly glared. ‘For God’s sake, Cressy’s a Third Fleet ship, a rotten old four-piper, and she’s supposed to be full of bloody reservists, isn’t she?’
Fanshawe’s smile widened. ‘There are a lot of elderly gentlemen aboard, I do believe,’ he agreed. ‘In fact, there are so many, they felt they had to lighten the mixture a bit with a few lively youngsters, and when the Old Man was asked to give up one of his watchkeepers, since you were going anyway, with the usual naval ingratitude, he decided it might as well be you. You go as soon as your relief arrives.’
It took Kelly’s relief a fortnight to appear and as he waited it seemed as if the whole world he’d ever believed in had begun to fall in on him.
The British Expeditionary Force had gone to France in a holiday spirit, cheering and singing and in high good humour despite the fact that they were crossing the Channel in the discomfort which had always characterised the seaborne transport of the British army. Since they’d already heard of the German general who was leading the advance through Belgium, they had devised a brand-new comic song that delighted everybody – ‘We don’t give a fuck for Old Von Kluck’ – and it could be heard on every dock and station platform. Despite their noise and their riotous behaviour, however, they were not all young men. There were the bald heads, greying moustaches and heavy paunches of reservists here and there, and their breasts sometimes bore the ribbons of the Sudan, South Africa and the North-West Frontier, because many of them were tattooed veterans with long service and many bad conduct marks, full of tall stories of Boers, Burmese, Chinese, Fuzzy-Wuzzies and Pathans.
Their age and experience had seemed to suggest confidence and skill but, unexpectedly, almost before they had arrived on the Continent, it seemed, from Belgium and northern France unexpected news of disaster arrived via an obscure little town called Mons that nobody had ever heard of. Those old soldiers, their backs still chafed by the rub of unaccustomed packs, were digging holes in the ground to avoid the shelling, and defeated British companies were actually straggling towards the rear. Beaten units that were the remains of famous regiments were trudging through the flood of refugees whose household goods were packed into carts and traps and barrows and perambulators, stumbling behind army wagons pulled by worn animals still galled by their brand-new harness. Limping into ugly little red-brick Belgian towns, khaki-clad men were falling asleep wherever they happened to stop, and the churches were full of wounded; while officers of the Guards, sons of titled families, gazed with dead eyes at the brassy sky from the fields where they lay sprawled.
When Kelly’s relief appeared, it was possible to slip up to London before joining Cressy and the difference in the place became obvious at once.
The brooding face of Lord Kitchener, the new Minister of War, stared over his pointing finger from every wall and hoarding, exhorting all unmarried men to rally round the flag and enlist in the army, and there was a strange sort of excitement in the air that was driving young men to church to get themselves married before rushing off to answer his appeal.
After the initial anxiety, however, London had taken the news of defeat calmly and Charley fell into Kelly’s arms as soon as he appeared at the door of Number 17, Bessborough Terrace.
‘Kelly!’ she yelled. Her young face went pink with pleasure and she hugged him delightedly, a little startled nevertheless that he looked so adult, so different from the boy she had known all her life, so stern, so responsible, yet somehow so vulnerable. In that moment she felt admiration, pride and a strange desire to mother him all at the same time.
‘I heard your ship had gone to the north of Scotland somewhere,’ she said and Kelly’s face darkened with indignation.
‘She’s not my ship any more,’ he growled. ‘They’ve posted me to a set of rotten old ships of the Reserve Fleet operating from Sheerness. They’re donkey’s years old, work up to about fifteen knots flat out and are full of fat old men from the reserve.’
She gave him a delighted grin. ‘Well, I’m glad you’ve turned up anyway. You’ll have heard your father’s back in the Navy, of course?’
Kelly’s eyebrows shot up. That would please his mother, he thought. He’d long since guessed that she preferred her life with his father away from home, following his own fancies in London, indulging his little dishonesties and pretences of importance, so that she could follow her own interests. For years, he suspected, she’d drawn far more pleasure from her horses and dogs than she had from her husband.
‘No, I hadn’t,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know where. And my father’s gone to France. He was given a brigade in the Second Division under General Smith-Dorrien. Your brother Gerald’s regiment’s somewhere near him.’
‘Good old Gerald!’ The words came out automatically because Kelly hardly knew his older brother. There were six years between them and Gerald had already left his prep school when Kelly had started there, so that they had seemed to bump into each other only at the end of term.
Charley was still chattering away, dancing excitedly round him like a cat on a hot pavement. ‘Mabel’s dragoon’s gone, too, and I hear your Uncle Paddy’s back in uniform and sitting with his fingers crossed outside the War Office, hoping they’ll give him one of the new Kitchener battalions.’
Kelly whistled. ‘Phew! What a change there is!’
‘Not half. Mabel’s dragoon was even sufficiently stirred by the war to propose to her before he left. Isn’t it ripping?’
‘Did she accept?’
‘No. I think she was pretty rotten. He turned out to be rather a duck in the end and she might have let him go off thinking she was itching to get spliced.’
‘Perhaps it’s best,’ Kelly said. ‘Being a bundleman’s not a good thing in wartime, and a girl ain’t going to be any better off if she suddenly finds herself widowed, is she? What else?’
‘Your mother’s in England.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Looking for a house near London. She felt she needed somewhere handier than Ireland for when you all came home on leave. She’s staying at Claridges until she can find somewhere. She and Mother got their heads together, because we’re staying here for the duration, too, and they thought it might be nice for them to be neighbours again.’
Kelly’s mother was drinking tea in the lounge of the hotel when he found her. She looked lost without her dogs; and her clothes, unfashionable and cut for the country, seemed quite out of place.
‘Everything’s changed so!’ she said. ‘Even your Uncle Paddy’s gone now! Though God knows why, because everybody says the war’s going to be over by Christmas!’
Kelly interrupted before she became too deeply involved in her complaints about the war. ‘I hear you’re looking for a house, Mother.’
She stopped dead. ‘Of course I am. What can a woman do in London? The only place you can ride is Rotten Row and there ain’t a fence in the whole length of it.’ She gave her son a delighted grin. ‘Got me eye on a place at Thakeham near Esher. It’ll cripple us financially but now your father’s been recalled there’ll be a bit more money to spare. It’s got eight bedrooms, so you’ll be able to bring your friends home, and there are rooms over the stables for the grooms, if you want to bring your sailor servants.’
‘Mother, isn’t it a bit on the big side?’
‘We can’t live like peasants, boy. I’ll be getting a couple of horses if you want to ride.’
‘If you remember, Mother, I don’t ride. I fall off.’
She shook her head. ‘Never could understand that. Always seemed so silly. We have no servants, of course. Can’t afford ’em. Only Bridget. She’s too young to want much money.’
Kelly smiled as he remembered the giggling little Irish housemaid with black hair and startlingly blue eyes who had appeared to do everything at Balmero House. ‘You made a mistake bringing Bridget, Mother,’ he said. ‘She’s too pretty by a long way. Some enterprising Londoner’ll snatch her up in no time, especially when they find she can cook.’
His mother shrugged. ‘Oh, well, we all have to make sacrifices for the war, don’t we? Especially with your father itching to get to sea and your brother Gerald complaining that his people haven’t been in action yet. What about you? Where’s your ship?’
‘I don’t know, Mother. I’ve left her, ain’t l?’
‘You don’t mean you’ve–?’
Kelly laughed. ‘Deserted her? Good Lor’, no, Mother! I’ve been sent to another. Cressy. A rotten old tub. Bacchante class.’
‘Weren’t you pleased with Clarendon?’
‘They didn’t ask me.’
‘You haven’t been doing anything you shouldn’t, have you?’
‘Why should you think that?’
‘Because I know you. Gerald, no, never. You, I’m not so sure about.’
It was raining at Sheerness when Kelly arrived and the station platform glistened greyly. He could see the greasy waters of the Medway and wondered why it always seemed to be raining when he joined a ship. Naval bases were never the most cheerful of places and they seemed to have their own particular set of clouds hanging over them ready to soak any wandering sailors trying to join their ships, always wetter than anywhere else, and wetter still on the quayside or the station where there was no shelter and the wind was at its fiercest.
A few men, peevish, frail-looking and red-eyed from booze, waited alongside a corrugated iron shed, their blue serge soaking up the rain like blotting paper. They were reservists and none too happy at being recalled when they’d been settling down comfortably into Civvie Street. Recruitment to the Navy had never presented a problem in the past, but now, with the war waking up, the vast mass of fleet reservists were less a help than a hindrance, because there were so many of them. They couldn’t be ignored, however, and it was for them that the Bacchantes had been brought out of retirement.
‘At least,’ Kelly heard one man say, ‘the bastards float, and it’s better than being sunk in the Merchant Service.’
Many of them were thickening round the middle and heavy with beer, and some of them were even elderly, stout and wheezing, reluctantly dragging behind them old kit bags stiff with deep sea salt.
None of them was in a particularly good temper because, to everyone’s surprise, instead of wiping the Germans from the face of the earth, Britain was being hard pressed even to fend them off, and both services had set off on the wrong foot. While the army reeled back in confusion in France, the Navy was smarting from a defeat of its own in the Mediterranean where a German 11-inch battle cruiser, Goeben, with her escort, the four-inch Breslau, had been caught in the dockyard at Pola by the outbreak of war and had been allowed by some fatuous idiot with gold on his hat to escape through the Dardanelles, to be handed over to Turkey who were expected at any moment to enter the war on Germany’s side. It had jarred the confidence of the country in the Navy because, apart from a meeting between two armed merchant cruisers off the South American coast, there had been little to show and none of the great fleet actions for which everyone had been waiting. The German High Seas Fleet had not come out as expected to meet the Grand Fleet, which was anchored in Scapa Flow, diligently practicing gunnery for the day when they did, and frightening itself to death with thoughts of torpedoes.
The officer who took Kelly’s papers was a middle-aged man with campaign medals on his chest that Kelly couldn’t even recognise. ‘Maguire, eh?’ he said. ‘Ah, now, wait a minute!’ He fished a paper from the shambles on his desk. ‘The admiral wants to see you.’
‘Which admiral?’ Kelly had visions of some of his past catching up with him.
‘He’s just along the corridor. He’s expecting you. I think you’d better go straight in.’
Halting outside a door that bore no name, rank, or official title, Kelly knocked with some trepidation and entered. Inside, he stopped dead as the man at the desk lifted his head.
‘Father!’
‘Kelly, my boy! How are you? Have you seen your mother?’
‘I’ve just left her!’
The admiral smiled, a big man, taller than his son but lacking his alertness. ‘Did she tell you she’s got her eye on a house near Esher?’
‘Yes, sir, she did.’
‘Handy for the duration. Be a hell of a job getting to Ireland every leave, after all. She’ll have to look after the horses herself, of course, because everybody’s volunteered for the army.’
Admiral Maguire looked well content, and the gloom that had filled him ever since his retirement had dropped away completely. ‘They had to call me back, boy, in the end,’ he was saying. ‘Like your Uncle Paddy. So you’re going to Cressy, eh? Fine ship. Bit old nowadays, of course, but she looks well. Know Johnson, the captain? Younger than me, of course. Got a cool head, though. Just the man to look after a lot of reservists.’
‘Father, are they all reservists?’
‘Most of ’em. Plus a few cadets from Dartmouth and boys from Ganges, with a few chaps off the regular list like yourself to take care of things. They had to go somewhere, after all. Some have even gone into a naval brigade to serve with the army in France and I gather they don’t like it very much. These chaps are lucky. At least they’re serving in their own element, and you’ve got heavy calibre guns.’
‘I hear they terrify their own gunners when they fire.’
The admiral smiled. ‘Well, they won’t need to fire much, will they? Size alone will frighten the enemy and submarines won’t dare come within a mile of ’em. It’s true, of course, that the Bacchantes need complements a bit out of proportion to their potential but no one’s trying to believe these Third Fleet ships are tip-top, because we all know they’re not. After all, they’re only for trade protection.’
‘Father, they’re no good to me! They’ll never see any action!’
The admiral gestured complacently. ‘Good place for a youngster to make his mark and learn his drill, all the same,’ he said. ‘None of this nonsense about small ship routine that’s running through the fleet. That’s just slovenliness.’ He rose to indicate that he was busy and that even as a father he had to bring interviews with junior officers to a brisk conclusion. ‘By the way, you’ve been promoted acting full lieutenant. It’ll be in the next list. And now I think you’d better cut along and report. Cressy’s coaling on her buoy in Kethole Reach and she’s due for sea this afternoon, so you’ll need time to find your way about her.’
Kethole Reach was no place to join a ship, because there was nothing on that stretch of the Medway but mudflats, and the thick black smoke belching from the funnel of the harbour launch covered Kelly with soot. Every now and then the stoker put his head through the boiler room hatch to look round, as though he were wondering where it was all coming from, and as he tipped ashes over the leeside into the flat oily current, the gulls swooped down, thinking it was garbage, before sheering off, screaming their disgust.
Kelly was still seething at what he considered his father’s obtuseness. How many more men were there, he wondered, who could not see that an entirely new era in naval warfare had arrived? He had been the guest of the German submarine service in Kiel and it had been very clear to him that this new weapon had come of age so that the size of a battleship was no longer important. Far from frightening away a good submarine captain, size was an actual invitation, and a vast battleship like Cressy would be regarded, not as a danger, but as a prize. It seemed to be a fact that not the simplest ship’s boy or saltiest admiral in the corridors of power could afford to overlook.
Conscious of his own silence, Kelly looked up. Perched on the canopy of the launch was a pale-faced boy who, up to that point, he’d barely noticed. He was small and with his cap flat-a-back, a cadet from Dartmouth who’d been in the sick bay with measles and was joining the ship after his term mates. Kelly thought he looked wretched. It was bad enough joining a ship like Cressy at any time; it was infinitely worse when you did it alone.
Realising that in his concentration he had probably presented a terrifying spectacle of age and experience, he tried to put things right by cheering the boy up.
‘What’s your name, youngster?’ he asked.
The boy swallowed, his eyes round and scared. ‘Boyle, sir,’ he said.
‘Worried?’
‘A bit, sir.’
‘I shouldn’t be if I were you. But I’d square off my cap and hoist up my tie two blocks, all the same. Your collar stud’s showing and I hear the captain of Cressy’s a stickler for smartness.’
At last, round a bend in the river, as a fat paddle-wheeled tug clawed her convoy of coal tenders past, Cressy hove into sight. Of 12,000 tons displacement, she was over four hundred feet long with four tall funnels and a colossally wide beam reminiscent of the brass-and-white-paint ships of the previous century. She had been laid down in 1899 and looked every day of her age, out of date, slow and useless; and far worse after Clarendon than Kelly had expected.
It was clear she’d been made ready for sea in a hurry, with traces of rust hidden by red lead. The black-grey paint of wartime had been daubed across her, but there had been no time to chip and scrape because, even as ammunition had been hoisted aboard, her crew had filed up the gangway. Since she was not expected to steam far out of sight of land she was considered safe.
Captain Johnson was a strong-featured man with absorbed serious eyes. Like so many senior officers who had grown up in the starchy era of Victoria, he looked faintly old-fashioned with his winged collar and the narrower cap he affected, but he radiated confidence and, stripped of his uniform and badges of rank, Kelly realised, he would still have been picked out as a man of consequence.
‘I understand you wish to serve in submarines’ he said as Kelly stood before him in his day cabin.
‘Yes, sir. That’s correct.’
‘Think you’re wise?’
‘Yes, sir. They get more pay for a start.’
The captain permitted himself a half smile. ‘You’ll have to get a first-class certificate in the torpedo examination.’
‘I have one, sir. From Clarendon.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Well, you’ll be placed at the bottom of the ladder, of course, but I hear they’re expanding the service, so you might be lucky. You’ll go to HMS Dolphin where you’ll be medically examined and after that you’ll spend three months learning the trade. Think you can manage it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, you might do well as a submariner. Since you’re not likely to be with us for long, however, I expect you to do just that little bit extra. Is that understood?’
It was easy to promise a little extra, but with the crew still awkward and only a few key officers and ratings from the active list to handle them, it was harder to provide it. The Marine detachment were half Royal Marine Light Infantry – Red Marines – and half Royal Marine Artillery – Blue Marines – and the reservists contained men from every civilian trade, with many ex-members of the Fire Brigade, which they’d joined after their sea time because many of them had seen service in sail and had a head for heights. The leading signalman was a tall man with a drooping moustache – which, as a reservist, he was allowed to keep – who’d been a policeman in London and had a scarred thumb which he claimed had been bitten by Sylvia Pankhurst when he was trying to arrest her during one of the Suffragette riots.
For the most part, they didn’t like Cressy. They were mostly from Chatham and therefore largely Londoners, townies – Cockneys to Devonport and Portsmouth crews – cheerful, quick-witted, fearless cock-sparrows, but limited by their gregariousness and their ability to be influenced by the bad characters that were always among them, and it occurred to Kelly that, ever since before Nelson, the inexplicable thing about the Navy was that its greatness had been built up by ill-used sailors in ill-found ships.
They were all crowded and the boys from Dartmouth had their gunroom separated from the CPOs’ mess only by a screen of canvas and wooden battens, which caused a certain amount of dissatisfaction from the older men.
‘It’s not the language we complain of, sir,’ one of them told Kelly indignantly. ‘It’s the bloody shindy they kicks up all the time.’
To cut down the risk of fire in action, they tried to strip off all the paint on the upper deck, especially where it was thick with the layers of years but, though the officers joined in, it was an impossible task and they had to let it go. With most of the officers older than himself, Kelly struck up a friendship with the navigator, a youngster like himself from the active list called Poade, a black-haired, enthusiastic, romantically- inclined young man with an occasional unexpected turn of cynicism.
‘We’re allocated to the southern force and we patrol the Broad Fourteens,’ he said. ‘In case you don’t know, that’s the term we use to designate the area of the Dutch Coast.’
‘I’ve done my navigation,’ Kelly said.
Poade grinned. ‘It’s supposed to be safe because they say the North Sea’s nothing but an English pond.’
‘It seems to me to be just as much a German pond.’
Poade smiled his enthusiastic smile. ‘Their Lordships of the Admiralty appear to have overlooked that fact,’ he agreed. ‘A point to you, Maguire. With a twenty-eight-foot draught and ageing engines, we struggle along at not much more than half our top speed, but it’s felt our bulk ought to deter the Germans from trying anything on around the mouth of the Thames, particularly with torpedo craft and minelayers; and we can bar the southern approaches to the North Sea and the eastern entrance to the Channel. We’ve maintained the patrol without incident since the war started.’ Poade smiled again. ‘It can’t go on, of course. We’re nothing but an invitation to the enemy to have a go at us – in fact, a few people have started calling us “the live bait squadron”, and I gather Winston at the Admiralty’s got himself into a fluff because he doesn’t like ships like us being risked.’
The hot weather of the summer ended abruptly in the uneasy area of the north Channel which drew its temperature as often as not from the arctic icepack, and by late September the shallow waters with their extensive areas of shoal were cut across by white-capped waves, running all the way from the Norfolk coast past the Dogger Bank to Scandinavia and Holland.
Because they could withstand weather that held the destroyer forces inshore, the Bacchantes seemed to spend all their time at sea in a dull routine of patrols. The crews were still lubberly after their long lay-off and, in the grey waters east of the Sunk Light the weary but heavyweight section of the Nore Command exercised its duties with an uneasy awareness that it was more than normally vulnerable.
With the waves frothing over the shoals and the wind coming up-Channel in a series of squally showers, to Kelly life seemed nothing but a long procession of cheerless days surrounded by the whirr of fans and the creak of the ship’s twelve thousand tons of steel and machinery, with only short intervals alongside which always brought the dreary inevitability of coaling. Even visits ashore produced little in the way of fun because the Medway towns, despite the fact that they watched the old ships come and go with a personal pride and lumpy throats, were never very decorative or blessed with much in the way of entertainment beyond the sailors’ level of utilitarian pubs.
To break the monotony, experiments were tried to increase the speed of coaling ship, paint was chipped again – with the same lack of success – and Kelly made his first hesitant steps as a camouflage expert. Camouflage was intended to make it harder for the Germans to take ranges, but his efforts, even if they pleased him, apparently didn’t please the admiral.
‘The object of camouflage,’ his signal read, ‘is not, as it would seem, to turn a ship into an imitation of a West African parrot but to give the impression that the head is where the stern really is.’
Then, unexpectedly, towards the end of the month the routine disagreeableness of beating into the iron-grey seas off the Hook of Holland came to an abrupt end, and the war came as abruptly to the Seventh Cruiser Squadron as it had to Clarendon and Amphion and the destroyers of Tyrwhitt’s Channel bailiwick on the first day of hostilities. As the alarm bells went and the clatter of feet on the deck filled the ship, Kelly fell from his bunk and rushed to the bridge, to be met by the grinning Poade.
‘The Germans are out!’ he announced. ‘We’re to head north. Tyrwhitt’s ships have left Harwich to meet ’em and Jellicoe’s ordered the battle cruisers south from Scotland in support.’ He smiled. ‘We’re at last about to offer our lives for our country!’
Kelly snorted. ‘I’d rather make the Germans offer theirs,’ he said.
There was an immediate air of tension about the old ship as they blundered north, cramming on every possible ounce of steam to get into the fight. Privately Kelly wasn’t sure that they’d be able to do much even if they got there in time, except perhaps put in a few heavyweight punches, but he found himself praying under his breath all the same.
Oh, Lord, look after us, he kept repeating to himself. A chance meeting with a German battle cruiser could mean the end of Cressy, of all the Bacchantes come to that, even of life itself, and he still wasn’t sure how he’d react to danger, because the undignified scuffle with Königin Luise could hardly be called a battle.
The day was calm, with a mist over the grey water. The old ships, punching into the sea and filling the sky with smoke that drifted low alongside in the squally weather to obscure their view towards the enemy coast, seemed as harmless as brontesauri.
‘Fog ought to help us a bit,’ Poade said. ‘It’ll add to the confusion of the Germans, and the Heligoland batteries won’t be able to see us.’
‘Perhaps we won’t be able to see the Germans either,’ Kelly said dryly. ‘Or even the ship in line ahead. Where are the Germans, anyway?’
‘Just to the north. They’ve been working a night patrol off Heligoland Bight and when the submarines spotted them it was decided to cut ’em off.’
As he spoke, the chief yeoman appeared with a signal for the captain. ‘Destroyers are in action, sir!’ His voice was brisk and excited. ‘There’s a signal, “Hostile cruisers latitude 54 N., longitude 4 E.” Heligoland Bight area, sir.’
‘Tyrwhitt’s found ’em,’ Poade whispered behind Johnson’s back. ‘Wait till we arrive.’
‘At this speed,’ Kelly said, ‘that’ll be when it’s all over.’
The mist grew thicker and the old ships wallowed through a heavy, oily sea, ponderous mastodons of steel heading north-east. At 11 a.m., the chief yeoman popped up again.
‘Harwich forces heavily engaged, sir, with light cruisers. They need assistance.’
Johnson turned to the voice pipe. ‘Engine room, can you give us more revolutions?’
‘No,’ Kelly whispered to Poade in reply. And ‘No’ it was, so that the old ships, in line ahead, stumbled hopelessly through the thickening weather, helpless to give assistance.
The sky seemed to descend during the early afternoon, pressing down on the horizon, grey and threatening. The sea was flat and greasy-looking, and though they drove the old engines to their limit, the ship creaking and groaning, the whole structure shuddering at the effort so that plates and glasses and knives and forks did a quivering fandango along the wardroom tables, Kelly was right and they saw none of the action. In the afternoon, they heard the distant thudding of heavy guns and through the mist saw the smoke of a burning German ship, and they all stared eagerly towards the horizon.
‘Beatty’s turned up with the heavy boys,’ Poade announced and, as bugles cleared the mess decks, men crouched behind the gun shields waiting tensely.
When they arrived two hours later, the battle was over and Kelly could feel the tension slipping away in a feeling of anticlimax. There was a little grumbling and a considerable amount of frustrated bad temper but there was nothing for the Bacchantes to do but for Hogue to take the damaged Arethusa in tow and for the rest of them to embark casualties from the destroyers. The little ships looked badly knocked about. The forecastle gun of one of them had received a direct hit and the bodies of its crew lay under a canvas screen, leaking blood which had run in rivulets down the ship’s side, while in another the second funnel leaned at an angle where a shell had knocked it off-balance, and the ship’s plates were scarred where splinters had clattered against her side.
The wounded, aware that three German light cruisers had been sunk, were in high spirits and didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of the German ships’ fighting qualities. ‘They haven’t inherited anything from the German army,’ a bandaged lieutenant-commander observed languidly as he was offered a cigarette. ‘Trouble is, of course, German sailors are made in Kiel harbour and that’s like the Serpentine. You can’t train sailors on the Serpentine.’
The surgeon was working in the wardroom and sick berth attendants were stacking amputated limbs near the captain’s cabin. With the wounded all aboard, they lowered boats to pick up German survivors. There were two or three hundred of them, wearing lifebelts and lifting their hands, shouting for help and trying to sing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ from their rafts. Their thin cries came over the lifting sea through the mist in a curious ullulating sound like the calling of seals as Cressy searched the wreckage-strewn water. Picking them up made Kelly feel vaguely as he once had when out shooting in Ireland when he’d brought down a couple of startled thrushes with a left and right in his excitement. The German survivors and the bodies floating in the water gave him the same feeling that some dreadful mistake had been made.
There were so many of them and so little room, some of their wounded had to be put in the gunroom under the Dartmouth cadets’ hammocks and, during the night, Boyle, the boy who’d joined ship at the same time as Kelly, appeared pale-faced outside his cabin to say one of them was calling out in pain. He was a young German officer, a military observer, who’d lost a hand. The pad over the stump had slipped but the sick berth attendant Kelly summoned rearranged it, and the young German nodded his gratitude to Kelly. He was a good-looking youngster with a little spiked moustache like the Kaiser’s still standing up despite his soaking. His eyes were defiant and proud, though, and Kelly offered him a cigarette, aware that another emotion had gone by the board. He reminded Kelly of his brother Gerald and it was quite impossible to hate him.
As they turned and lumbered back to Sheerness, Poade stared at the grey sea. ‘Always a bridesmaid, never a blushing bride,’ he said.
‘With the speed of this squadron,’ Kelly growled, ‘we couldn’t catch a ship’s boat pulled by a snotty-nosed boy. If we’re going to wage war with ships like these, it’ll be God help us.’