It was dark as Mordant wallowed helplessly through the water but they could still hear heavy firing to the south-west where the horizon was lit by flickering lights as the German line was harassed by the light cruisers and forced further and further away from its bases into the North Sea. The thudding of guns seemed to be felt in every one of Mordant’s plates, as the flash, the display of searchlights, the glare of explosions and the blazing torches of burning destroyers marked the Germans’ retreat.
Kelly jerked to life at last. Iron claws seemed to be tearing at his forehead.
‘Rumbelo,’ he yelled. ‘Up here! Do you know the silhoutettes of the German navy?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Stand by the wheel then until we can get a relief quatermaster. Keep your eyes skinned.’
They were still moving ahead as Rumbelo swung their bows into the smoke, and thankfully, choking on the heavy fumes, they felt the relief as the shooting stopped. Then they were out at the other side into comparative peace and Kelly shouted down the voice pipe to reduce the revolutions.
The relief quartermaster appeared.
‘Take the wheel,’ Kelly snapped. ‘Rumbelo, get Mr Naylor up here and ask Mr Hatchard to let us have a report on damage and casualties.’
As Rumbelo vanished, he stared around him. Below on the deck, a man covered with blood stood with his feet apart, swaying slightly, his head hanging, his eyes wild like a calf in a slaughterhouse. Kelly sighed. The big smash that the lower deck had been praying for, for two years, had certainly arrived. With his own eyes he’d seen four proud ships die, as well as several smaller ones, both British and German. Blood had been shed and lives had been ended, including that of Talbot who had spent two weary, boring years staring at Scapa Flow, only to have everything blotted out for him in the first hours of the battle he’d waited for, like so many hundreds more dead men, over so many months. It was to be hoped that now the big ships had arrived, they would make all the slaughter of their smaller sisters worth while.
Naylor arrived, panting, white-faced and shaken, and Kelly lifted one hand to acknowledge him. ‘Better act as my eyes, Sub,’ he said. ‘I can’t see very well at the moment.’
‘Shall I get the SBA, sir?’
‘No, for God’s sake, stay where you are. Let’s stay at reduced speed until we know what we’re doing. Make it “slow ahead” until we hear what the engine room’s got to say.’
As they waited for Hatchard’s report, the bodies of the dead were laid out on the port side near the wreckage of the after gun. The atmosphere seemed to stink from the heavy coal smoke from the big ships’ funnels and the cordite and lyddite from the explosions.
‘Where do you think the fleet’s got to, Sub?’ Kelly asked.
Naylor tried to look intelligent and knowledgeable. ‘South-east by the look of it, sir.’
Kelly bent over the bridge rail, clinging to it grimly in his pain with one hand and holding to his eye with the other the towel he normally wore round his neck against the spray. He didn’t bother to reply. He had merely been making conversation, trying to reassure Naylor. The wounded had crawled into the lee of the funnels in a pitiful attempt to find shelter, and they were now having to drag themselves back again as other men pushed forward with collision mats to cover the shellholes. Kelly struggled to lift his head, but he could hardly see.
‘Where’s the ensign?’ he asked.
‘Shot away, sir.’
‘Hoist another, Sub. Got to look our best for the party.’
A flotilla of destroyers hurtled past in the growing gloom, dark shapes in the shadows, their funnel tops crowned with a vivid red glow so that a scarlet canopy seemed to hang over each vessel.
‘No signalling,’ Kelly rapped. ‘Let’s see who they are first.’
As the ships flashed past, the last one fired a solitary four-inch shell at Mordant, which whistled harmlessly overhead.
‘Some bloody gunlayer who was dozing and happened to wake up as they passed,’ Rumbelo growled.
Hatchard appeared with Wellbeloved. ‘Fifteen casualties,’ he reported. ‘Forward gun wrecked with most of its crew dead. Wireless office wrecked. Voice-pipes and electrical communications cut and steam pipes burst. There’s also a fuel pipe fire but it’s under control.’
‘We’ve lost steam on Number Two,’ Wellbeloved said. ‘I can give you fifteen knots on the others.’
‘How long before we can move off?’
‘You can move off now, but give me a few minutes and I can give you full power on both boilers.’
‘Make it fast. It seems bloody unhealthy round here.’
The engineer nodded. ‘We shan’t be long and then we’ll give you all the emergency speed you want.’
The bridge had been cleared now. The wood and steelwork were scorched and pitted with holes; the canvas dodger, fluttering in ribbons, was splashed with blood.
The pain in Kelly’s head seemed unbearable and the waiting seemed interminable but, after a while, he heard the thrumming of the boiler room fans, and a gout of black smoke was superseded first by grey then by a whitish, almost transparent gust of vapour.
The navyphone screeched. ‘Both engines ready, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ Kelly looked round him. The North Sea seemed suddenly empty. ‘Slow ahead together.’
A sick berth attendant arrived. He was very young and looked terrified. ‘Christ, sir,’ he said, peering at Kelly’s face with a torch.
‘What’s happened to it?’
Kelly was standing against the binnacle, his face covered with blood. The sick berth attendant peered at him with a worried look on his face.
‘You ought to be in your bunk, sir.’
‘No.’
‘A splinter’s caught your cheekbone, sir. It’s probably broken. It’s also cut open the left side of your forehead. There’s a flap of flesh hanging down over your eye.’
‘That’ll spoil my beauty, won’t it? Fix it.’
As the SBA nervously struggled to adjust a bandage over his eye, Kelly’s mind was roving ahead of their present situation. They still had the torpedo tubes and one gun amidships that would fire. As the SBA finished, he brushed him aside.
‘Let’s go,’ he said to Naylor. ‘Push her up to half revolutions. We’ll find out what’s happening before we shove our noses into it.’
As they headed south-west, steering by the remains of a patched-up chart, they passed the stern of a large ship sticking out of the water.
‘What ship’s that?’
It was impossible to tell and they circled the wreckage looking for survivors, but other ships had been there before them and they saw only floating bodies.
It was quite dark as they pushed up the revolutions again and searchlights began to criss-cross on the western horizon. On the port quarter a flash showed up over the horizon and a star shell hovered in the sky. Then another, greater flash followed and to starboard of it a great tower of flame flared up into the sky, died down and reared up afresh. The whole of the sea seemed to be rippling and flashing with fire. Then the searchlights, rising and falling like the antennae of a blinded animal, fixed their implacable light on a group of distant destroyers rushing up the bright path of the beams. White splashes lifted all round them, then a lurid fire started in one of them and spread to a vast explosion of fierce white flame that made even the searchlights seem pale. Immediately the lights were extinguished and the attack died out, and everything was dark again, except for the glowing point of fire.
Higgins, the wardroom steward, appeared with bully beef sandwiches and cocoa, and they were eating quietly when Rumbelo muttered. ‘Ships on the port quarter, sir.’
Kelly stared at them through his night glasses and there was a whispered discussion as to what they were. It didn’t occur to them for a minute that it was the wing tip of the German Fleet trying to break through the British line at its weakest point.
‘Light cruisers,’ Naylor said.
‘Yes,’ Kelly agreed. ‘But whose? Ours or theirs? Challenge.’
As the signal lamp began to clack, coloured lights appeared at the fore yardarms of the other ships and a searchlight snapped on. A gun fired and Mordant rolled as a shell smashed into her above the water line.
‘Full ahead!’ Kelly yelled as the solitary gun by the funnel crashed out.
The shell smashed into the opposing ship just below the bridge and seemed to tear her open even as Kelly rang for full revolutions and turned his tail to the Germans to present the smallest possible target. A second shell struck Mordant near the base of the funnel as they plunged into a bank of mist, riddling the metal, and Kelly spun round and fell as a searing pain scored across his back and the blast whipped away the bandage from his forehead.
Dragging himself to his feet, he saw the quartermaster had been hit. ‘Take the wheel, Rumbelo,’ he yelled. ‘And let’s have an SBA up here!’
Shells were still whistling past; as they emerged from the other side of the mist, they were illuminated once more by a searchlight and within two minutes a storm of fire swept the ship. The range was so close the German shots went high enough to burst on the upper deck, and round the superstructure of the bridge where all the flesh and blood was. An enormous blaze started just abaft the torpedo tubes where shell fragments had whipped across the deck and mowed men down like corn before a sickle. A second shell burst amidships and the fragments sliced across the waist like hail, scouring out the inside of the shield of the midships gun and igniting cordite charges.
The ship heeled as she turned away, empty brass cartridge cases rattling and rolling into the scuppers. The foredeck was a swirling mass of angry flames making an unearthly red glow in the darkness and giving a crimson tinge to the black smoke and white steam. A pillar of fire was roaring up the foremast from one blaze; a second reached above the top of the funnel.
Fortunately the German ships were more concerned with their own fleet than with doing damage and they thundered off into the darkness, leaving Mordant rolling on the swell, a wreck. The action had lasted no more than a minute then they had plunged thankfully into a fresh bank of white haze. Staring back, Kelly saw a huge flare of flame rising beyond the mist, lighting it with a red glow.
Hatchard appeared, grinning. ‘Torpedoed one of the sods,’ he yelled. ‘Let the whole salvo go. Couldn’t miss. Thanks for turning away when you did.’
‘I was thinking of my skin,’ Kelly said shortly. ‘Did you sink her?’
‘Probably not, but she’ll have an awful headache!’
‘What about casualties?’
Hatchard’s grin died. ‘We seem to have lost the last of our guns, together with all its crew, I’m afraid.’
‘Get a report from the engine room on their damage. They must have some this time.’
Hatchard stared at him. ‘You’re in need of attention,’ he said.
‘No, I can see now.’
Reports started coming to the bridge from other parts of the ship. Splinters had cut the freshly-repaired electric leads and steam pipes. Naylor appeared and, amid the deafening noise of steam escaping and the smoke and heat blowing back from the fires a few feet away, he had to shout to make himself heard.
‘There’s a fire amidships,’ he stammered. ‘It’s the motor boat.’
‘I can see it,’ Kelly snapped, his voice diamond-hard. ‘Put the bloody thing out!’
A splinter had severed the connection to the upper deck fire main and the flames were increasing.
‘Let’s have a good hose up here,’ Kelly yelled and Higgins, the wardroom steward, appeared dragging one with him. ‘Get up,’ he was yelling at the wounded men. ‘Get up and bloody help!’
Those who could dragged themselves to their feet, and a man with his clothes blown off and his skin hanging in strips led a file of blackened scarecrows away to the sick bay, one of them, with his ears charred off and burned from head to foot, dragged along by two of his shipmates. Lying by the funnel was a still-living gunner who had been ripped open by a splinter, his inside spilling out on to the deck, and the ship resounded with the mournful cry of ‘Stretcher bearers.’ A sailor who had lost both arms was begging his friends to throw him overboard, and all round the deck among the huge holes where fires flickered and grey smoke leaked men were vomiting with shock and disgust. A stoker trapped beyond a jammed hatch was burning to death, screaming his life out while his friends, who could do nothing to help him, could only try to shut their ears to his agony.
Naylor had already turned his attention to the fire by the foremast and Hatchard hurried to help him. There was no point in giving them orders or getting in their way. Hatchard had been in the Navy long enough to know what to do. As the sick berth attendant who had arrived finished bandaging the quartermaster, he looked up at Kelly. He was a petty officer this time and was unimpressed by Kelly’s rank.
‘You’ve been hit, sir,’ he said and turned him round without a by-your leave.
‘Good God, sir,’ he went on. ‘It’s ripped your bridge coat, jacket and shirt, even severed your bloody braces! You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.’
‘Bandage it,’ Kelly said.
The sick berth tiffy shook his head. ‘Bandaging won’t do any good to that, sir. It needs stitches. A lot of stitches. Your eye, too.’
He spoke with authority and confidence and Kelly longed to let him take over, but the pillar of flame was still roaring up the foremast and the ready ammunition for the midships gun kept exploding in a shower of sparks and shreds of blazing cordite. He noticed that the heat of the fire was strong enough to scorch his cheek and began to wonder what it would be like to be blown up. More than once that day he’d seen huge ships disintegrate and he wondered if Mordant, being smaller, would go more gently.
Then, beyond the struggling men, he saw the whiteness begin to go from the pillar of flame, and as it decreased, wavered, lengthened again, and finally began to die, he allowed himself to listen to the pleas of the sick berth tiffy.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Do as you like. Get the surgeon up here.’
‘Sir, the doctor’s dead. He was on deck attending to the wounded when that last lot got us.’
‘Very well. Can you stitch it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Put ’em in.’
As he spoke, Kelly was aware that he sounded like a Chums impression of a destroyer officer, brusque, rude and laconic. But it was chiefly because it was hard work thinking and harder still having to issue orders.
The sick berth tiffy frowned. ‘Sir, I’ll have to give you morphine.’
‘No!’ Kelly brushed him aside. ‘Do it without or not at all. Save the morphine for the others.’
Hatchard appeared. ‘It’ll hurt like hell,’ he said.
‘Rumbelo can sit on my head and you can sit on my feet. I expect we’ll manage. I’m not having morphine. There’s no one else and nobody’s putting me to sleep till I know we’re safe. Let’s go and see what’s happened.’
Leaving the bridge, he stumbled over a body at the bottom of the ladder and Hatchard dragged it aside. Before he could reach the fire by the funnel, it wavered and died away and they were in darkness again, a strange darkness full of heat and smoke and the groans of wounded men. The deck was strewn with bodies so that he kept falling over them as he moved about, but by the aid of matches and torches the deck was searched.
‘Keep those lights down,’ Kelly ordered. ‘We have no idea where the Germans are.’
He bent over a boy seaman torn by sickening injuries and covered with blood, splintered bones showing through his flesh. The boy smiled. ‘It’s no good worrying about me, sir,’ he said. ‘I can’t feel much pain, anyway.’
The cooks who had closed up as sick berth attendants had rigged up a temporary operating theatre in the stokers’ bathroom, using a table from the wardroom. The steel walls ran with sweat, but Wellbeloved had hung a cluster of lights from the shower and a bucket of water stood handy to swill the blood down the drain in the tiled floor. The sick berth tiffy had just cut off an unconscious stoker’s hand at the wrist and was tying up the ligaments. He looked up as he saw Kelly but didn’t stop.
‘Know how to do it?’ Kelly asked.
‘I’ve seen it done before, sir. If I don’t he’ll bleed to death.’
As the stoker was lifted off the table, Kelly lay down on it. The sick berth tiffy sounded apologetic.
‘Sir, this morphine–’
‘Get on with it!’
‘It’s going to be bloody painful, sir.’
‘Just get on with it, for God’s sake!’
Hatchard appeared. He seemed to pop up and down like the Demon King in a pantomime. ‘Better drink this,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘Rum. Nelson’s blood.’
‘I won’t say no to that.’
As Kelly swallowed the raw spirit, it burned his throat and made him cough. The spasms seemed to tear at the wound in his back but he felt better at once and almost ready to have himself sawn in two. ‘Who’s sitting on my head?’ he asked.
A cook with a bandaged head looked embarrassed. ‘Me, sir.’
‘I bet it’s the first time you’ve ever sat on your captain’s head,’ Kelly said and was pleased to see the cook grin.
They stripped him of his shirt and he felt the cook put his hands on his shoulders and press down with a weight that drove the breath out of his body. Someone else lay across his legs.
‘We’ll do your eye first,’ the sick berth tiffy said. ‘Hold him.’
As he felt the jab of the needle, it was as if they were trying to pierce him through with a cutlass. Biting at his lip until it bled, he refrained from making a noise until at last a great groan broke away from him.
‘Soon be finished, sir.’
They seemed to be sewing him up with marline spikes and wire hawser but at last the weight lifted off his legs.
‘Sorry if it hurt, sir.’
Someone stuck a lighted cigarette in his mouth, then they poured iodine on his shrinking flesh, bandaged him and helped him into his torn clothing. For a while he sat still, recovering his breath, then he dragged himself upright with an effort.
‘Since I’m here,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice steady, ‘I’ll have a word with the wounded.’
The wardroom, its door splintered and buckled, was full of men, all lying very still and very white. One of the cooks was at work there and four stokers were just lifting the body of a sailor from the bench. There was a hole in the ship’s side that admitted water which sloshed about their feet as the ship rolled, and in it swilled bloodstained bandages and debris. It was hard to move his arms but he managed to extract cigarettes from his pocket and hand them round. The worst cases were flash burns.
‘How many?’ Kelly asked.
‘Twenty-three dead, sir. Thirty wounded. Some seriously. There may be more. I’m not certain yet.’
‘That’s a lot for a ship this size.’
As Kelly struggled back to the bridge, one eye and half his face hidden by a great pad of lint, cotton wool and bandage, the ship appeared to be a wreck. It had no guns and the torpedo tubes were empty, but Hatchard had already turned to rigging up temporary communications and Wellbeloved appeared, his face full of optimism.
‘We’re all right below,’ he reported.
Rumbelo got the crew to muster under the bridge so that Kelly could tell them what was happening, and he tried to talk to them like a father, uneasily aware that most of them were older than he was.
‘I suspect we’re hardly in a fit state to try any more conclusions with the enemy,’ he said. ‘But we have both engines and we can manoeuvre. In case anything appears, I want all automatic weapons mounted and manned.’
As they dispersed, the destroyer began to move slowly through the black water, picking up speed as she went. ‘Take the ship, sub,’ Kelly said to Naylor. ‘At least you can see.’
A piece of heaving line round his waist to hold his trousers up in place of the severed braces, he stood on the bridge, clutching the rail. As Mordant lifted her forefoot, the horizon to the south was still lit by flashes and occasional searchlights.
‘If they’ve called out Tyrwhitt from Harwich we must have cut them off from their bases,’ Naylor said.
‘If,’ Kelly said. He had no great faith in the Admiralty. Pressed by the politicians in London who would be eager to protect the Thames estuary and the approaches to London, they’d be in no hurry to release the eager Tyrwhitt.
They were alone now. They had no idea where the Germans were, though the distant horizon was still full of flashes and the red glow of guns, and occasionally a bigger flare as some ship met its end. There was a strong suspicion growing in Kelly’s mind as they drove westwards that this great battle for which the Navy had been waiting for two years had not been the big smash that everyone had predicted. Over-caution, lack of training, foolhardiness, bad designs and damn bad signalling seemed to have snatched the victory from their grasp.
Occasionally they saw dimmed lights on the sea about them to show where darkened ships, more afraid than they were, crept past in an attempt to escape. Despite the wreckage along the decks, there was an atmosphere of satisfaction about Mordant, and despite their casualties, they had dealt some telling blows and had severely damaged one light cruiser.
Aware of a feeling of light-headedness, Kelly realised that his shoulders were growing stiff and that it was growing harder to stand upright. Someone brought him a stool and he sat down on it, clutching the bridge rail, his fingers knotted in his efforts to control himself. The sick berth tiffy appeared and once more suggested an injection but he shook his head. He was in command of a ship at last and he wasn’t going to relinquish it easily.
Curiously, at that moment he thought of Charley and wondered what she would think. Some time tomorrow or the next day they would learn at home that there’d been a tremendous battle and that the Navy had lost several fine ships. He had lapsed into a dazed darkness of pain when Naylor touched his arm.
‘Sir!’
A pointing finger jerked and in the blackness he could see the white glow of phosphorescence from the foam at a ship’s forefoot. The two vessels were converging gradually and he had come out of his lassitude at once, alert to avoid a collision.
‘I hope to God she’s not a German,’ he said.
Then, abruptly, as though she had not seen Mordant just off her quarter, the other ship turned to starboard right across their course so that there was no longer any hope of avoiding her.
‘Searchlight,’ Kelly snapped and, as the white beam of light leapt across the black sea, they saw at once that the other ship was a German torpedo boat, smaller than Mordant and carrying a large white number on her bow.
‘It’s a Hun!’ Naylor screamed.
‘Full ahead both!’ Kelly said. ‘Clear the forecastle! Stand by to ram!’
There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of missing. The German ship had increased speed and seemed to leap forward, and they saw white faces and a gun turning towards them and the flash as it fired. The shell screamed past and disappeared astern, and a second shell struck the bow a glancing blow, ricocheted downwards and exploded alongside, drenching them with water. Then Mordant’s bows smashed into the German’s side, just abaft the bridge and Kelly was flung forward. As his body struck the bridge rail, a blinding stab of hellish pain rolled over him, and someone fell on top of him, knocking the breath from his body. The damaged foremast came down with a crash, crushing the searchlight in a shower of electric-blue sparks, and the battered funnel bent and fell forward like the hinged stack of a river steamer.
‘Jesus,’ someone said. ‘Smack in the wardroom pantry! Right in the bloody breadbasket!’
For a second, Kelly decided he was dead and in hell as the German fired at Mordant with everything she possessed. All about him he could hear the grind and screech of tearing metal and wild shouts in English and German. Struggling to his feet, he dragged himself up to see the German ship lying below Mordant’s bow, rolling over on her beam ends, and German sailors, their cap ribbons fluttering, running along the twisted decks.
‘Full astern!’
Screeching and groaning, the two ships parted as Mordant backed off, her bows thrust upwards and buckled like a tin can.
‘Like the cork out of an effing bottle,’ a sailor below the bridge yelled exultantly.
The German was badly hurt, a great hole like a wedge of cheese carved in her side. As Mordant drew clear, Kelly saw two men standing in the opening among the torn metal, both of them yelling with fright, then the water rushed in and swept them away, and the German ship, released from the pressure, began to swing back, rolling to starboard as the sea engulfed her.
For a moment she straightened and a gun banged, but the barrel was cocked wildly askew and the shell screamed off into the air, then someone on Mordant opened fire with a Lewis gun and he saw men falling. The German began to heel over rapidly as she filled with water and, as they continued to back away, they saw her lay on her side, slowly as if she were tired, until the decks were awash, then she turned over, rolling a little as she settled, and finally disappeared.
‘God,’ Naylor said. ‘That was quick!’
There were only about a dozen men in the water. They were dragged on board, dripping and gasping, two of them dying almost at once. To everyone’s surprise, among them was Petty Officer Lipscomb, the yeoman of signals, who had been shot off the bridge by the collision. He was wearing two life jackets and was protesting he couldn’t swim, but he did a record twenty yards to the side of the ship to yells of encouragement from the crew.
Twisted with pain, Kelly stared at the forepeak. It was lifted high and wrenched to starboard. Wellbeloved appeared alongside him, his jaw dropped, his eyes bulging at the wreckage.
‘I think the next job,’ Kelly said flatly, ‘will be to get this damned ship home.’