He was alive. Mortimer and Hastings were dead.
Lanyard was still afloat, and for the time being, so far as one could tell, out of any immediate danger.
So far as one could tell: the qualification was a real one. Uncertainty, a sense of detachment and confusion, was the residue of shock, upheaval. It had to be fought against. It was as if one’s mind had been switched off for several seconds, or minutes ‒ a period of indeterminate length during which one had seemed to be struggling to retain awareness of one’s surroundings, and making no headway. Now the struggle was for renewed power of thought, judgement, decision.
He was in command!
‘Four hundred revolutions.’
‘Four hundred—’ MacIver gulped — ‘revolutions, sir.’ MacIver’s mouth was open, and his breath whistled through the gap of a missing tooth. He looked dazed still.
‘Port ten.’
‘Port ten, sir.’ CPO Glennie, the chief bosun’s mate, span the wheel. After Cuthbertson’s death earlier in the day Glennie had become the destroyer’s senior rating. Steady as a rock: he was built like one, too. Nick told him, ‘Ease to five, and steady on south.’
Lanyard’s sudden lurch to starboard had sent Nick and Garret flying across the chartroom. Nick had hauled himself up the slanting deck to the starboard-side door, got out through it and started climbing the ladder to the bridge. He’d been some of the way up when the German dreadnought’s port batteries – her secondary armament of six-inch guns ‒ had crashed out a broadside at point-blank range and maximum depression. For him and Garret the blast had been an incredible volume of sound and a great sheet of flame which swept across above their heads as the ship lurched back against the natural heel of her swing. For about two seconds a scorching heat radiated downwards. Then she’d heeled back again, and she’d still been turning; he’d climbed a few more rungs, and stopped again when he’d discovered that Lanyard no longer had an upper bridge. The top part of it ‒ with binnacle, railings, flag-lockers, everything ‒ had been shorn off.
The steering position ‒ lower bridge ‒ was roofless but otherwise intact and operable as a wheelhouse. The search-light had gone ‒ simply wiped off. So had the for’ard gun, both boats, and several feet of the already damaged top of the for’ard funnel. The roof of the galley, the superstructure between the boats, had been stove in. Mr Pilkington, who’d arrived in the steering-position a minute ago, had told him about the funnels and the boats, and apparently that was as far aft as the area of damage extended.
Nick and Garret owed their lives first to Mortimer having sent them down to the chartroom, and second to their having been below the reach of the guns’ blast, and sheltered from it by the superstructure. Otherwise they would have been dead, blown away in that blast of flame ‒ like Mortimer, Hastings, Blewitt and the entire crew of the for’ard four-inch.
The only shell to have hit Lanyard had sheered through her foremast without exploding, and passed on. The foremast had toppled, snapped, and crashed overboard. All the other projectiles had passed overhead too; the battleship’s six-inch guns hadn’t been able to depress far enough to reach her. According to Pilkington, the two ships had been almost alongside each other at that moment.
There’d been only that one broadside. The Germans must have thought they’d finished her; she’d reeled away, and they’d steamed on into the night.
Nick’s first question to Chief Petty Officer Glennie, when he’d reached the steering-position ‒ climbing into it, through the now completely open corner where Lanyard had been hit during the torpedo attack in the afternoon ‒ had been. ‘Does she answer her helm?’
‘Aye, sir, she does.’ Glennie had shown considerable initiative in the seconds after the cataclysm. He and MacIver, the telegraphman, had been lifted off their feet and thrown at the starboard bulkhead. Recovering, with his head ringing from the explosions and from being bounced off a steel wall, the chief buffer had put the starboard telegraph to full ahead and then grabbed the wheel to steady the ship on a north-easterly course. Finding himself on his own, with nobody up there to direct him, it had seemed sensible to steer her away from the source of trouble.
It was a stump of a bridge, now, like a broken tooth. The after part of its deck ‒ which was also the roof of some of the chartroom and all the signals office ‒ was still there, but all the for’ard part had been peeled off. Apart from jagged edges, it had been done quite neatly, with no bits or pieces left behind. Nick was standing now in the steering-position between Glennie and MacIver; his head was in fresh air, cold wind, and he looked straight ahead over an edge of ripped steel at the destroyer’s bow thrusting through a low, black sea.
‘Does the engine-room voicepipe still work, MacIver?’
‘I’ll test it, sir.’
‘Well, get Mr Worsfold on it, if you can.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ The voicepipe was on the starboard bulkhead. MacIver put his mouth to it and shouted, ‘Engine-room!’
Nick asked Pilkington, ‘Is that last torpedo still in its tube?’
‘Course it is!’ The torpedo gunner squeezed up beside him. Space was tight in here: Nick thought perhaps MacIver could be dispensed with. He had a half-inclination to keep Pilkington here with him; but he had the other half, too, which was to keep him at a distance.
Pilkington asked him, ‘What d’you reckon on doin’ now, Sub?’
‘I’ll tell you when I’ve had a word to Chief… What about the midships four-inch ‒ is it still there?’
‘I told yer ‒ nothin’ touched us, aft!’
‘Engineer Officer’s on the voicepipe, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ Nick thought, as he squeezed over behind Glennie, no, I do not want Mr Pilkington with me… ‘Chief?’
‘Yes. What have you been doing up there?’
‘The Captain and Hastings have been killed, the top of the bridge has been shot off and we’ve lost the for’ard gun. Can you tell me if there’s any damage to machinery or hull?’
‘I’ve no reason to think there is, Sub.’
That was good news, indeed, and Worsfold sounded pretty cool, down there.
‘What d’you intend to do now?’
‘Carry on as before. Find our flotilla.’
He couldn’t see he had much choice, Lanyard had steam, and a gun and a torpedo. If there was action in the offing, that was where she ought to be. All he had to do was find it.
He turned to Pilkington.
‘You’re second-in-command, and I want you aft, where you can look after the gun as well as your own department. We’ll have to do something about communications—’
‘Action on the starboard bow, sir!’ CPO Glennie’s eyes were slits in his squarish face. He’d seen the start of another firework display. A flash, white like a magnesium flare, and the familiar flickering of guns. It was a long way off.
‘Come round a point to starboard.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Glennie’s hands moved on the wheel. Nick called out through the open corner of the wheelhouse. ‘Garret?’
‘Sir?’
‘There are some binoculars in the chartroom. If there are two pairs, bring them both, please.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Nick turned back to Pilkington. ‘Perhaps you could get some flexible hose and join it to the bridge voicepipe ‒ the one from the bridge to the after searchlight platform. It’ll have been cut through of course, you’ll have to find the end. Join up a length of hose and bring its other end down here.’
Pilkington nodded his large head. ‘I’ll ’ave a shot.’
‘The other thing, Mr Pilkington, is to let the ship’s company know what’s going on. Would you see to that?’
He wondered if he was being too polite; whether he should be telling, instead of asking. But he was, really; and at the moment he needed the gunner’s help, more than his obedience. He’d already gone; and Garret arrived now with the binoculars ‒ Johnson’s, and Reynolds’s.
There was no time to mourn the dead. You could only try to fill their places. As Mortimer had filled Johnson’s place with Hastings, so Nick was now replacing all three of them. Johnson had been killed about six hours ago, but he was already a name and a character from the past, his death eclipsed by the more recent ones.
‘Chief Petty Officer Glennie.’
‘Sir!’
Nick had cleaned and focused the binoculars, and he was sweeping the sea and horizon ahead. There was no clear-cut horizon: only a fuzz, a layer that could have been either sea or sky and might have been two miles deep or five. The unobstructed arc of lookout from here was roughly beam to beam.
‘I need Garret in here for signalling. We might be challenged, or need to challenge someone else.’ He thought, immediately he’d said it, I shan’t do that. Not with one gun. We’ll mind our P’s and Q’s… ‘But there’s not much room, is there. Could you manage the telegraphs as well as the wheel?’
‘Easy, sir.’
‘Fine. MacIver ‒ from here we can’t see abaft the beam. And there’s nothing left to stand on higher up. So take that pair of glasses and go aft to the searchlight platform and keep your eyes skinned. You’ll have a voicepipe to us as soon as Mr Pilkington’s got it rigged.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Off you go, then.’
Garret coughed. ‘No searchlight for’ard here, sir. For signalling. You said you want me here?’
He did need him here under his immediate control. Answering challenges at night was a split-second business.
Glennie suggested, ‘Use an ’and-lamp, sir?’
‘Garret?’
‘One in the signals office, sir. Well, there was—’
‘Get it, or get something else.’ He called after him, ‘Those recognition signals—’
‘I’ve got ’em, sir.’
He’d gone. Nick said, with binoculars at his eyes, ‘You did extremely well, Glennie. You probably saved the ship.’
‘Oh, I dunno, sir.’
‘That’s how it’ll read in my report.’
‘Let’s ’ope you get to write one then, sir.’
He’d half-smiled, with his eyes on the compass-card, on the lubber’s line shifting a degree or two each side of south-by-west. The wheel’s brass-capped spokes passed this way and that through his large, practised hands as he corrected, more by feel and instinct than by design, the ship’s tendency to roam.
Garret came back with a brass-cased hand lamp.
‘Is that going to be bright enough?’
‘Be all right while it’s dark, sir.’ The leading signalman moved round to Glennie’s other side, where MacIver had been. The space was about adequate, for three men. He added, ‘When it’s light we can use the after searchlight, sir.’
The priority now, Nick told himself, was to be prepared, to decide now, in advance of an emergency situation suddenly confronting him, what to do in this, that or the other circumstance. An unidentified ship there, coming straight for them; or a German there, broadside-on: or an enemy challenge on the beam. One knew nothing about the positions now of either one’s own or enemy forces; whatever turned up, it could be either friendly or hostile, and one or two seconds in making a correct identification could spell the difference between survival and extinction. It seemed, too, that the situation might be more complicated than Mortimer had thought it was. His view had been that the Grand Fleet was near enough due south, and the Germans in the south-west. But Lanyard had very recently passed the time of day ‒ in a manner of speaking with an enemy battleship and two cruisers, and they’d been steering south-east, across the rear of the south-bound Grand Fleet…
Well, it had been only one battleship; and as one swallow didn’t make a summer… But she might have been damaged, or suffered some machinery breakdown: she could have been detached to make her own way homewards with a cruiser escort.
It didn’t seem likely, on reflection. Would a fleet commander in Scheer’s position spare two cruisers to take a lame duck home?
It made no difference. Lanyard had no wireless; she couldn’t send reports, any more than she could receive them. There was only one plan of action, Nick told himself: to get her back to her flotilla, add her one gun and one torpedo to its strength. En route, to attack any enemy that showed up, and to avoid either being taken by surprise by an enemy or attacked in error by one’s own side.
‘Garret, those recognition signals. Have you—’
‘All in my head, sir. I’ve a note of ’em, too.’
The sea ahead was blackish-grey, patched with mist and touched here and there with whitish flecks. It wasn’t a broken sea; there was just enough breeze to knock the edge off the little waves, and to whip a few drops of spray now and then from Lanyard’s stem to spray this rattling, foreshortened bulkhead. She was pitching just a little, but there was no roll on her at all. The slight wind, plus her progress through it, had the wreckage of the superstructure round them groaning as if it was in pain; the rattles had settled into a rhythm which one might have missed if it had stopped.
Something clanged suddenly, overhead, behind them.
‘Voicepipe ’ose, sir. Someone catch it an’ ’aul it in, can they?’
Garret grabbed its end and hauled in about a fathom of it; it dangled behind CPO Glennie’s head.
‘Shall I lash it to the bulkhead, sir?’
‘Yes. Leave a couple of feet loose at the end.’
With a voicepipe rigged to the gun and that tube, Lanyard would be fighting fit again. Nick thought, now it’s up to me.
Hanbury Pike, the engineer, spat out a mouthful of North Sea, and pointed.
‘She’s going.’
‘What? Who’s—’
‘Bantry, you damn fool!’
Everard seemed simple, child-like, and he didn’t appear to realise what was happening. He was like someone having a bathe for the fun of it. They’d been in the water half an hour; Pike was cold right through to his bones and he was wishing to God he’d refused Johnny West’s request that he should keep an eye on him.
Bantry was on her way to the bottom.
Black against dark-grey sea and a lighter shade of sky, the cruiser’s forepart was rising, tilting up as her stern went under deeper into the sea.
Cold… Pike groaned, ‘Oh, God in heaven…’
‘What’s the matter, Hanbury?’
The engineer began to swim away. Towards Bantry, as it happened, because he’d been watching her and therefore facing that way; his only purpose, apart from needing to use his muscles before they froze solid, was to get away from Everard. He wished he hadn’t said he’d stay with him: he was too tired, mentally and physically, to put up with him, let alone look after him.
They’d managed, half an hour or so ago, to cram all the badly wounded men into rafts and floats, and less serious cases had had to go in the water and hold on to the rafts’ sides. When they were all down there. West had told the fit men who’d been waiting on the upper deck, ‘I want two dozen strong swimmers to tow them clear and stay with them. Volunteers?’
There’d been too many. He’d picked men who had friends among the wounded. The padre and the surgeon commander had gone with them. They climbed down the net into the sea, and pushed and towed the rafts away into the darkness. West called after them. ‘Keep close together ‒ you’ll be easier to spot and pick up if you stay in a bunch. Good luck!’
Cheers had floated back to him. Someone shouted. ‘Lovely boatin’ wevver!’ Laughter mingled with fresh cheers. They began to sing:
Oh, a life on the ocean wave
Ain’t for a bloomin’ slave…
They weren’t only keeping their spirits up. There’d been a mood almost of carnival since Hanbury Pike and his party of artificers and stokers, helped by the fire brigade who’d worked with them, had brought seven men alive out of the starboard engine-room. The break-through had come within minutes of the pipe ‘All hands on deck’; they’d ignored it, because by that time they’d fought their way to one of the armoured hatches and got a tackle rigged to lift it. They’d dragged it up, and the men ‒ seven out of the nine who’d been trapped down there ‒ had been hauled out.
Pike had told West it was the first time in his life he’d seen a stoker petty officer cry. Not the one they’d rescued: the PO who’d been working with him.
Apparently the shell had burst in the port engine-room, wrecking it completely and killing everyone in there; and it had burst low down, close to the base of the centre-line bulkhead. The door between the two engine-rooms had been buckled, and couldn’t be shifted, and in the starboard engine-room the water began to rise quite fast. After a bit it was held down to some extent by pressure in the top of the compartment, but it was over the floor-plates, which were dislodged so that the ladders weren’t accessible. Two men were drowned; the other seven, before their rescue, had found themselves trapped with the gratings above their heads and the water still rising below.
West asked the men still waiting, ‘Any non-swimmers?’ A voice answered at once. ‘Sparks ’erbert ’ere can’t swim a stroke, sir!’
Telegraphist Herbert’s friends began pushing him about. Another man owned up ‒ a stoker… ‘I never made much of an ’and at it, sir.’
‘Petty Officer Toomey ‒ make sure they’ve got swimming collars on. Oh damn it here…’ West took off the inflatable waistcoat which he’d bought from Messrs Gieves in Bond Street. ‘One of ’em can wear this. I’ll use a swimming collar.’
‘No, sir, you don’t go givin’ me your—’
‘I don’t need it, Herbert, I’m like a fish in that stuff. And you should bloody well’ve learnt to swim, anyway, d’you hear? Toomey, the lifebuoys are abaft the second funnel. One each for these two men, and hand out the rest to weak swimmers.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Scrimgeour?’
The torpedo lieutenant came forward. ‘Yes?’
‘Is Commander Clark still on the bridge?’
‘Intends to remain there.’ Scrimgeour added, ‘For the time being, he says.’
Toomey was distributing lifebuoys. West heard David Everard refuse the offer of one. ‘My dear Toomey, I swim like a blooming otter!’ He had his inflatable waistcoat on, anyway. West sent Scrimgeour to sort out a group of snotties who seemed to have neither waistcoats nor collars. Everard told Hanbury Pike, ‘My brother Nick didn’t cry when our mother died. Can you believe that?’
Pike stared at him open-mouthed: West put in quickly, ‘David there you are, old man. Now look—’
‘Not even at the funeral. Not one tear! If that doesn’t prove he’s—’
West patted his shoulder. ‘Hang on a minute, David… Hanbury, a word with you?’ He beckoned the engineer, and they moved away from the group of waiting men. He told him, ‘Everard’s round the bend. Cracked. Would you keep an eye on him ‒ I mean in the ’oggin?’
‘If you think it’s necessary.’ Pike shrugged, without much enthusiasm. ‘Are we all set now?’
‘I want the rafts well clear first. Not that one expects there’d be competition for them but—’
‘Of course there wouldn’t be!’
‘No.’ West agreed. ‘Just playing safe. But I’ll go and see Nobby, before we leave her.’
Ten minutes later he’d come down from the bridge alone. Pike had been chatting to Clarence Chance, the paymaster. West told them, ‘Can’t budge him. He says he wants to see everyone away first. I think he means to go down with her.’
Chance removed the monocle from his left eye. ‘What would that achieve?’
West couldn’t tell him. Nobody had known Clark well; but he’d never seemed a happy man.
‘Come on. Time we went.’
Hanbury Pike watched Bantry hang for a moment with her stem pointing at the sky and her stern buried in the sea.
He hoped the four men in her after steering compartment, which it had not been possible to reach, had died before this. He tried not to think of the black water rushing through her. There was not only a dreadful sadness in the last throes of a great ship: there was also a terrible malignancy in the sea that swallowed her. And he felt so damn tired…
She’d begun to slide. There was a roar of displaced air, like an enormous sigh.
‘Sub.’ It was Worsfold on the engine-room voicepipe. ‘We’ve been burning a deuce of a lot of oil. D’you think we might ease off a bit now and then?’
Nick thought about it. There was an argument for keeping Lanyard plugging along at thirty knots, and two at least against it.
‘All right. Chief. Make it three-six-oh revs.’
Twenty-five knots would still be eight knots faster than the speed Jellicoe had ordered for the night. So Lanyard ought still to be catching up. But one might have expected to have been up with the fleet by now, and if it hadn’t been for the repeated outbreaks of gunfire ahead and on the bows as they’d been steaming southwards he’d have been worried that he might somehow have passed by, diverged from the Grand Fleet’s course and missed that not inconsiderable target. The fleet could have altered course ‒ might easily have done ‒ and without wireless Lanyard wouldn’t know of it. The desire to link up as soon as possible with other destroyers astern of the battle fleet, which was an argument in favour of maintaining a good speed, was not entirely impersonal. Nick was conscious of feeling lonely; he had a strong inclination to be in company and have other ships to follow. But at the same time that nervousness made him glad, in another way, to reduce speed. He’d had a feeling of rushing into darkness and unseen dangers at a breathless, headlong pace; he wasn’t frightened, but he was unsure, aware of his inexperience and the responsibility which had dropped on him so suddenly. A few hours ago he’d felt a glow of satisfaction in being told he could have a watchkeeping certificate, for God’s sake: and here he was in command; not only in command in a detached situation and in action!
Inactivity made it worse. One had time to think. He wished he could feel more confident. And the one thing which was absolutely imperative was that nobody should be allowed to see or guess how unconfident he did feel.
He chuckled as he came back to his position on the port side of the wheelhouse. ‘Odd how engineers hate their engines being used.’
The chief buffer nodded. His eyes rose from the compass-card to glance for’ard at Lanyard’s short, punching bow.
‘Think of ’em like mothers with babies, don’t they, sir.’
The course was due south again. Nick had given up the business of altering this way and that whenever some distant exchange of gunfire illuminated the horizon. The battle fleet’s ordered course, or at any rate the last one they’d heard of, had been south, so that was the heading one should stick to. Those sporadic actions, almost surely clashes between scouting and screening forces, were sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another; there was no point zig-zagging about like a donkey constantly switching carrots.
Another aspect of Nick’s current feeling of having lost his bearings was that the sensation was entirely new to him. The start of his naval career hadn’t been exactly brilliant, but he’d never had any sense of fright or personal inadequacy in any given situation. He’d often dug his heels in, or slacked, when he’d found surroundings or subjects irksome, but he’d never thought to himself I doubt if I can see this through… To be unsure, off-balance, was foreign to him and extremely uncomfortable, and it was making him think again now, from time to time and in the back of his mind while he tried to concentrate it on the immediate situation, of David and what Johnson had said about him. Because if Johnson had been right, this might be how David had felt pretty well all his life. And what it felt like ‒ this situation, now ‒ was being on a horse which you knew you wouldn’t be able to stop if it decided it didn’t want you to.
‘Starboard—’
Nick had jerked his glasses up; since he’d seen it, CPO Glennie saved his breath.
‘Hell…’
To start with there’d been some stabs of gunfire; just three or four. But within seconds the sea and sky out there to starboard were ablaze with action; with a barrage of noise and flame, the sea spouting geysers of white water and the black shapes of destroyers darting, thrashing through them and between them, racing like greyhounds through a deluge of shellfire towards a solid line of flaming guns. The impressions – the picture which had sprung up out of nothing, out of a dark void of night and sea and mist ‒ registered and resolved themselves into the fact that a flotilla or part-flotilla of destroyers was making an attack on a line of five, or six, much larger ships… Which were in line ahead on a south-easterly course. Seven or eight thousand yards on Lanyard’s bow, and the head of the enemy line about right ahead: the gunfire was continuous, spouting and rippling the whole length of the line as the destroyers raced in towards it; one saw them in flashes and as they appeared for no more than seconds between the leaping columns of white water. They were British destroyers, obviously… Well, check… Focusing on one of the enemy he made out a battleship; she was too big to be anything else. It was misty, though, down there, one felt one should be wiping the lenses of the binoculars twice a minute, but it was sea-mist, not the glasses fogging-up. That could only be a squadron of Scheer’s High Seas Fleet beating off a determined destroyer attack.
‘Four hundred revolutions!’
‘Four hundred revolutions, sir.’
‘Garret, tell the gun and tubes to stand by. Then get ready with that lamp.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
It looked like the fiercest engagement of the night. The Germans were using every sort of gun they had ‒ turret guns and beam armament and quick-firing weapons flickering higher up. The destroyers were turning, Nick saw, to starboard, to a course opposite to the enemy’s; when they’d fired they’d be heading west or north-west. Consequently if he altered Lanyard’s course to starboard there might be a danger of collision when the shooting stopped and the night went dark again, with lookouts and captains half-blinded temporarily by the flashes of their own guns and the enemy’s.
‘Starboard ten.’
‘Starboard ten, sir.’
He was taking her round to port: to steer south-east, in order to converge on to the enemy battle squadron. They’d hardly be expecting a new attack from one solitary, shaved-off destroyer. Come to think of it, there wasn’t much of Lanyard to see now, with no foremast and no top to her bridge.
‘Midships. Steer south-east by south.’
‘Sou’east by south, aye aye, sir.’ Glennie sounded as calm as ever, not in the least excited.
‘Garret. Tell Mr Pilkington we may be firing his torpedo at a battleship in five or ten minutes’ time. I can’t say which side.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Garret did sound excited.
‘And tell him the gun is not to open fire without my order.’
He caught his breath…
In the middle of that display of fireworks, he’d seen a sudden splash of dark-red flame on one of the battleships; the third in the German squadron’s line. The flame gushed upwards; now it had shot back the whole length of her, and in its savagely bright light he saw that she had three funnels and a large crane-derrick between the centre one and the third. She was German, certainly, and he thought Deutschland-class. The red blaze leapt higher, a soaring mass of incredibly bright fire, and sparks were flying out of it like rockets; sparks, and burning debris tracing arcs into the darker sky. Smoke grew at the fire’s base and billowed upwards, folding itself outwards and around the ship, engulfing the brilliant flames, darkening the night by stages until it was all smoke and the shooting from the other ships had stopped dead, totally, as if at one signal ‒finis.
Nick still had his glasses at his eyes, but all he could see now was the thick, grey blanket of the mist. CPO Glennie allowed himself a comment.
‘They done ’er, all right, sir.’
‘Let’s see if we can’t get another.’
Glennie nodded, with his eyes on the steering-compass. ‘Never know till you try, sir.’
On this slightly converging course, Nick reckoned, he ought to pick up the Germans at about thirty or forty degrees on the bow and at reasonably close range in perhaps five minutes. He’d first seen them at about three-and-a-half miles; the next meeting should be at a distance of perhaps one mile. Allowing for a further slight closing of the range, he might be able to fire the torpedo at something like fifteen hundred yards. This, of course, depended on the battleships having held their course, not turned away to avoid the other torpedoes which must have been fired at about the same time as the one which had hit.
What would Mortimer have done, or be doing now, if he was in command?
Nick put his mind to it. The only alternative to going after the enemy as he was doing now would, he thought, have been to try to join that flotilla after they’d fired and broken off the action. But they’d vanished ‒ to start with in a north-westerly direction, but they could afterwards have gone round astern of the enemy, or northwards, or any other way. But the Germans had been on what had looked like a straight, determined course.
Why did one have that impression? Because their course had been south-east ‒ the same course as that of the battleship which had blown Lanyard’s bridge off. And south-eastward was the course for Germany via Horns Reef.
Nick wiped his glasses’ lenses and put them back up to his eyes. At any second, those battleships might reappear. He decided he’d fire to starboard: close in, turn away to port, firing on the turn. But if he’d miscalculated and they should turn out to be abaft the beam, he’d turn towards, close in to a good killing range, and then put her round to starboard, firing to port as those others had done.
He was pleased to find that he could think coolly and logically. It would surely make it a lot easier, when one saw the enemy, to have the alternatives clearly in one’s mind.
Still nothing in sight. He was beginning to think that the squadron must have altered course, after the torpedo hit.
Well, which way?
South, most likely. But he decided he’d hold on, steer this course for another five minutes. If by that time he hadn’t—
There they were!
0n the starboard bow, and in line ahead, steering just east of south. So Lanyard was coming up astern of them, but with about one point of difference between their course and hers, so that if she held on without any alteration she’d cross their wakes.
Peculiar. How they’d got into this position, and on that course…
‘I’ll be damned!’
He’d seen it suddenly. He’d assumed these were the ships he’d been expecting to find, and he hadn’t until this moment looked at them at all closely. These weren’t battleships at all, they were destroyers. This was the bunch who’d carried out that attack!
Whatever the Germans had done – and it was still puzzling ‒ these five ships must have swung around to port, right round, and then steered due east, and had now altered to something like south by east. They must have been searching for the Germans, too; most likely had torpedoes left, and aimed to make a second attack ‒ encouraged, no doubt by having knocked out one battleship half an hour ago.
‘Steer five degrees to starboard. Three six-oh revolutions.’
Glennie was repeating the orders. Nick’s slight adjustments of course and speed were designed to add Lanyard to the tail-end of that flotilla.
‘Garret, tell Mr Pilkington we’re approaching friendly ships. Train the tube fore-and-aft.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Then stand by with your lamp.’
In a minute, they’d have to identify themselves. Lanyard was closing-up and edging-in, still a bit out on the other destroyers’ starboard quarter About half a mile between her and the boat she was going to tag on to.
Garret had passed that message aft. He told Nick, ‘Ready with the lamp, sir.’
‘They’re bound to challenge soon.’ He was surprised they hadn’t before this. He kept his glasses on them. Three-four-oh revs.’
‘Three-four-oh, sir.’
A light flashed: from the head of the destroyer line. Lanyard wasn’t tucked-in astern of them yet; in another minute she would have been, and that challenge wouldn’t have been visible.
‘Give ’em the answer, Garret.’
‘Sir, that can’t be one of our—’
From about sixty degrees on the starboard bow, an answering light flashed. Garret was right: all Nick had seen was the letter ‘K’. He hadn’t thought about it… But they hadn’t been challenging Lanyard; they’d been talking to that other ship ‒ whatever ship it might be ‒ almost on the beam now. Nick swung his glasses on to her.
Not ‘her‘. Them. There were three ships, closing-in at right-angles, more or less. Meanwhile Lanyard had fallen into station astern of the main bunch.
‘Three-two-oh revolutions.’
‘Three-two-oh, sir.’
Nick’s mind seemed suddenly to jump, to come alive… Inside his skull, a voice screamed protest.
Holding his breath ‒ his hands had begun to shake and his breathing had become rapid, short ‒ he focused on the new arrivals as they came slanting in under helm to add themselves one by one to the line astern of Lanyard.
He’d seen the possibility when he’d realised that the challenge was that single letter ‘K‘, the long-short-long; then Garret’s cut-off cry had put substance to the wild suspicion. It had still been a long moment of resistance before he’d surrendered to the truth of it.
Now he saw each of the three ships clearly, in profile as they turned to slip in astern. The first was a destroyer with two funnels rather far apart, the for’ard one seeming to be almost a structural part of the stunted bridge. The second funnel was set much farther aft ‒ almost as far as the mainmast, which was just about amidships and had a boom-derrick mounted on it. He looked at her bridge again; there was hardly any foremast.
It made her a ‘G’ class destroyer. One of the Krupp-built boats. And the second ‒ turning now behind the leader ‒ was another of the same class.
The third ship was a three-funnelled light cruiser. Rather a pretty ship, with delicate, yacht-like lines. Twin search-lights on her foremast, at funnel-top height above the bridge, and another pair on the mainmast, a bit lower.
A Stettin-class cruiser.
All three of them had formed astern now. And the destroyer ahead of Lanyard seemed to have accepted her without question. Nick realised ‒ guessed ‒ that they wouldn’t have been examining her closely because they’d known they were being joined by other ships anyway: and to the newcomers Lanyard would have been just one of that flotilla who’d fallen slightly astern of station. Also, with her shorn-off foremast, low bridge superstructure, cut-down funnel and clean-swept stern she might well, to a careless eye, pass for one of the German ‘G’s.
His heart was beating so hard that he thought Glennie, beside him, might be hearing it.
‘Three-one-oh revolutions.’
Might as well keep good station. The last thing one wanted was to attract the attention of the other ships.
This was a nightmare. The worst he’d ever had…
‘Three-one-oh revs on, sir.’
Chief Petty Officer Glennie’s voice was low and even. Nick looked at him, wondering if he’d caught on to the situation. Glennie must have seen his head turn; he glanced at Nick fleetingly, expressionlessly, before his eyes went back to watching the stern of the German destroyer ahead. He murmured. ‘Bound for Wilhelmshaven, are we, sir’?’