Pilkington’s wizened face was pale.
‘D-ye know what you bloody done?’
Nick said quietly, ‘Three-one-five revolutions.’
‘Three-one-five. Aye aye, sir.’
‘Sub—’
‘If you’re thinking of swearing at me again, Mr Pilkington, you can get back aft and quick.’
‘Sub.’ The gunner pointed. ‘Those are ’uns. Those are bl—’ He checked himself. The next bit came in a hoarse whisper: ‘Germans, Sub. We’re poncin’ along with a whole pack—’ His control broke; he ended in a shout ‒ ‘of bloody Germans!’
Nick lowered his binoculars.
‘If we’d done anything but take station here quietly as we did, Mr Pilkington, they would have looked at us. And if they had, they’d have seen who we are and blown us out of the water. That happened to be the situation we were in.’
Pilkington nodded. ‘So now we’re up the creek. What ’appens when they start signalling at us? Which way’re we bloody goin’, anyway?’
Glennie glanced sideways at Nick, as if he too had some interest in the questions. Or perhaps he was wondering how much criticism Nick would take from the warrant officer before he shut him up.
‘If you’d remained at your action station, Mr Pilkington, you’d have had orders from me by now. Don’t come for’ard again without my permission, please. But since you are here, just stop belly-aching and bloody well listen, will you?’
He’d shouted that last bit. Now he leant over, checked the compass-card. Their course was south by east; so the reciprocal would be north by west. He told Garret. ‘Warn the engineer officer that in a few minutes I’ll be calling for full power, and when I do I want him to give us everything he’s got.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
By the way Garret glanced at Pilkington, you could see he didn’t think much of him.
‘Listen. You too. Glennie. Remember that if I get knocked out, Mr Pilkington here would take command and you’re next in line. So you’d better have a grasp of what‘s happening.’
CPO Glennie nodded. His eyes didn’t leave that German destroyer’s wake.
‘When you go aft, Mr Pilkington, train your tube out to starboard and stand by, and report to me when you’re ready. When I hear that from you I’ll crack on full power and put the wheel hard a-port. We should take ’em by surprise ‒ they’d hardly be expecting an attack from one of their own ships would they.’
Pilkington just stared at him.
‘We’ll circle out to starboard and you Glennie, will steady the ship on north by east. That’s the reverse of this present course. When your tube sight comes on Mr Pilkington, you’re to fire at the last ship in the line, which is the light cruiser. I want a report down the voicepipe as soon as you’ve fired, so I can alter course again as necessary. We’ll be close enough for you to make sure of a hit. I imagine?’
Pilkington nodded. ‘Should be.’
‘Very close… So what about the safety range?’
‘Oh…‘ Pilkington scratched his head. ‘That’s a problem, ain’t it.’
The pistol in the warhead of a torpedo wasn’t armed until the fish had travelled far enough for a small vane, propeller-shaped, to wind down, bringing the firing-pin to within one sixteenth of an inch from the detonator.
‘Only one answer. You’ll have to wind it halfway down before you train the tube out. Dangerous but—’
‘Christ!’ A yelp… ‘I’ll say it’s bloody—’
‘How long will it take you?’
‘Couple o’ minutes. But—’
‘Once we start to turn out, you’ll have to be damn quick. We’ll be in the firing position in no time at all. And once we’ve passed it that’s the chance gone, finished. Right?’
‘Aye, aye.’
The stroppy little bastard wasn’t going to say ‘sir’, Nick noticed. But that was the last and least thing he’d time to worry about now
‘Go back aft then and report when you’re ready. And tell Hooper he’d not to fire unless someone shoots at us first.’
Pilkington left. Nick asked the chief bosun’s mate, ‘Make sense to you, does it?’
‘Clear enough, sir.’
‘Garret, did you warn Mr Worsfold?’
‘Yessir. Says he’ll be ready sir.’
‘Good.’
It wouldn’t do any harm to move ahead a little and gain fifty yards or so before the turn. No more than that because he’d want to put some speed on too, when the time came.
‘Three-two-five revolutions.’
‘Three-two-five, sir.’
The farther ahead she started, the longer there’d be – in terms of seconds – before the torpedo sight came on. Nick wondered what the rest of the German ships would do, Turn and give chase? One reason he’d decided to take this action immediately was that in a couple of hours it would be dawn; in an hour, even, the sky might begin to lighten. After Lanyard had made her move, she’d be needing all the dark there was to hide in.
But if she sank that cruiser, or crippled her, she’d have earned her keep, and he, Nick, would have made up for his idiocy. He’d passed it off rather well, he thought, in his explanation to the gunner ‒ and it was true that if he’d turned away they most likely would have sunk her. A point might be made, however, by a more agile brain than Pilkington’s that she shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place.
The jury voicepipe squawked. Nick answered it. Wheel- house
‘Tube’s trained out an’ ready. Sub. ‘
‘With its pistol near armed?’
‘I said, ready.’
Nick thought he could spare one minute, just to get a simple matter straight.
‘Mr Pilkington. In your Drill Book does the report “Ready” indicate anything whatsoever about that safety-vane being wound down?
‘Well, no but—’
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid or so bloody insubordinate, then! Now stand by!’
Mortimer, he thought, would be proud of me… He told Glennie, ‘Full ahead together!’
‘Full ahead together, sir!’ The chief buffer, Nick noticed, had a smile on his usually immobile features. He felt the surge of power as the destroyer’s screws bit into the sea and thrust her forward. He waited; the more speed she could pick up before he gave the helm order, the more sharply she’d answer her rudder when it banged over.
But it would be a mistake to wait too long. For one thing, Lanyard would get too close to the ship ahead, and for another the piling foam under her counter would catch the eye of her next-astern.
‘Hard a-port!’
‘Hard a-port, sir!’
The wheel span through Glennie’s fingers: Lanyard leaned hard as she sliced her bow into the sea to starboard.
Already, at least the next astern and probably some of the others too would have seen her swing out of line.
One had to hope they’d be tired, and not too quick-witted.
Lanyard trembled, rattling like an old tin can as her engines thrust her forward and her rudder dragged at her stern. Nick, using his binoculars, saw that the five leading destroyers were holding on exactly as before: then, as Lanyard’s turn continued, he could see only four ‒ three ‒ two ‒ now only the leader… And then she was blanked-off from his sight. Ahead of Lanyard was dark, empty sea with the woolly greyness of drifting mist. He could feel the taut thrumming of her steel under his feet, the shake in her as she battered round. He checked the compass-card: her head was coming up now to due west ‒ past it now, and swinging on: west-north-west… He gave no orders, left it to Glennie, who knew his business and what was wanted. North-west by west; Glennie span the wheel to bring the rudder amidships as the ship still skidded round, and as the lubber’s line touched north-west by north he wrenched on opposite rudder to meet and check the swing. Now he was centring the wheel again. Nick put up his glasses, and out to starboard the last of the destroyers was just passing: Pilkington should be firing about now…
‘Course north by west, sir.’
‘Very good.’
A shout in the voicepipe: ‘Wheel ’us!’
Nick grabbed it. ‘Wheelhouse!’
‘Torpedo’s gone!’
‘Right.’ He told Glennie. ‘Starboard ten.’
‘Starboard ten, sir… Ten o’ starboard—’
‘Steer west-nor’-west.’
‘West-nor’-west, sir.’
He held the cruiser’s dim shape in the circle of his glasses while Lanyard slewed round to port. His object was to point her stern at the enemy flotilla, so that she’d be more difficult to see. As she swung, and the Germans ploughed on southwards, he realised that the cruiser would almost certainly be out of his arc of visibility before the torpedo reached her. Or passed her…
Please God, guide it!
‘Course west-nor’-west, sir.’
The cruiser was out of his sight now. Could the Germans have guessed that a torpedo would be on its way across that strip of sea? In that situation, he asked himself, would one think of such a possibility? He thought probably not. They’d have first to cotton-on to the fact that Lanyard wasn’t one of their own side: and that idea would take a bit of getting to, to start with.
A white flash, like a glimpse of sheet-lightning, lit sea and sky for a brief instant before the thudding, reverberating thump of the explosion reached them. The flash lingered, brightened, died away…
‘Nice work that, sir.’
Nick glanced at Chief Petty Officer Glennie’s rock-like silhouette. He thought, The point now is do we get away with it…
A crash of gunfire astern added weight to that question. ‘Starboard twenty!’
‘Starboard twenty, sir…’
Glennie flung the spokes round. The voicepipe gurgled with a call and Nick snapped. ‘Garret, answer that.’ He heard the flight of a shell or shells overhead, and as the destroyer swung to port a fountain leapt within a few yards of her bow. She swung on into it as it collapsed, and stinking black water drenched down across her foc’sl; half a ton of it dropped into the roofless wheelhouse, soaking them ‒ and worse than that blinding, suffocating with its acrid reek: it was like a heavily concentrated stench of spent fireworks.
All three of them were coughing, and streaming at the eyes: Nick breathed out to empty his lungs, and then held his breath, hoping the gas would clear by the time he had to breathe in again: but he was out of luck.
The shell burst below them ‒ aft, but it felt as if it was close below their feet: one looked for the deck to bulge, split… A deep, ripping crash. It was almost like something tearing one’s own gut, the way you felt it. Its echoes rang through the ship, boomed away into the surrounding darkness. Lanyard had checked as if she’d steamed into a brick wall and through it and been slowed by it: it felt to Nick as if she was slumping, wallowing.
‘Midships.’
‘Midships, sir.’ Behind Nick, Garret shouted into the voicepipe. ‘Yes. I am still here… sir.’ Lanyard’s engines were slowing, and that roar from aft was the sound of escaping steam. Boiler-room, then. Nick thought, Finished… He told himself, hang on. May not be all that bad.
He wanted to scream out to somebody to tell him what was happening, what had happened. But he knew he’d hear from Worsfold as soon as the engineer could manage it. Coping with damage had priority over talking about it.
One waited, meanwhile, for the next salvo…
‘Garret, what the hell’s he—’
‘Sir.’ Garret let the free end of the flexible hose clang back against the bulkhead. ‘Mr Pilkington says we hit the cruiser under her bridge and she looked like sinking. But that was her stern guns that fired at us, and we’ve been hit in the after boiler-room, sir.’
The racket of escaping steam was dying away. So was Lanyard’s speed. She wasn’t just slowing: both engines had stopped completely.
Stopped, Nick thought. With one gun left.
Might as well get her round, while she still had a bit of steerage-way.
‘Starboard fifteen. Steer due west.’
‘Steer west, sir.’
Nick heard a call on the engine-room voicepipe: but Garret was there, and he held himself in check while the leading signalman moved over with what seemed like maddening slowness and answered it. He told Nick, ‘Engineer officer wants a word, sir.’
Now that the engines were silent, one noticed other sounds. The wind humming in the broken structure of the bridge, a rhythmic creaking as Lanyard rose and fell, and the slapping of the sea against her bow.
If the Germans knew they’d disabled her, they’d be along, in minute.
Johnny West had been swimming slowly, without hurrying or using up much energy, from group to group, trying to jolly them all up a bit, have a chat and a joke and then paddle away to some other lot. He went by sound; if he heard voices, he swam towards them, or he’d call ‘Hello!’ and then head in the direction of any faint reply.
In the last half-hour the incidence of men giving-up and allowing themselves to drown had increased alarmingly. Men seemed suddenly to lose their grip, the will to live.
‘Why, if it isn’t the mechanical genius himself!’
Hanbury Pike revolved slowly in the water, and peered at him through the dark.
‘Johnny?’
‘Well done, Hanbury! And how’re you keeping?’
‘I’m damn tired, if you want to know.’
‘And that’s because you drink too much gin, you know, old lad’ West told him. ‘It weakens the muscles of the brain. I’d give it up, if I were you.’
‘Since when did—’ Pike spat ‒ ‘brains have muscles?’ He groaned. ‘Christ, but this stuff’s cold!’
‘I’m lucky, there. I’ve a few pounds of extra insulation.’
‘A few!’
Pike had closed his eyes. West peered closely: ‘Hey!’
‘What?’
‘Don’t let yourself drop off, if you do, you won’t wake up. I’ve seen it happen ‒ just now, several—’
‘I have not the least intention of—’
‘Good. Is David Everard somewhere near us?’
‘Frankly, I hope not.’
‘I thought you were going to keep ‒ hey, what’s this, searchlights?’
He tried to raise himself in the water to see better. It was like a moon rising; some huge source of approaching light…
No moon: that was the leap of flames. A great concentration of ‒ of fire, lighting that part of the horizon, and growing fast, or—
‘What the devil?’
He saw suddenly that it was a ship, in flames. Enveloped totally in fire. You could hear her now, roaring, crackling, pounding through the sea at twenty knots or more, and she’d pass close… Flames sprouted the whole length of her, from foretop to waterline. The roar of them, fanned by her speed, was like the noise from an open furnace door. The edges of the blaze were jet-black with smoke darker than the night, and streaked with trails of burning, flying debris, while the sea ‒ the waves on either side and the spreading wake astern ‒ was lit by the yellow flames so that she steamed in the centre of a brilliant circle of her own weird light. She was passing now ‒ a cable’s length away: West felt the heat of her, heard the flames eating her as she thundered by: she’d passed, and her wash was spreading, coming to them, a great round-topped swell with curling, breaking waves behind it. Close-to he saw the black blobs of men’s heads as the piling sea lifted them, rocked them and set them down again for the follow-up waves to play with. Within a few moments of her first appearing, the doomed ship was a rosette of fire dwindling northwards.
Pike gaped after her. ‘Battle cruiser ‒ German?’
‘No. Black Prince—’
‘Oh, stuff and—’
‘‒ with her two middle funnels shot away.’
And there could not, he thought, have been a soul left alive in her. For their sakes, he hoped to God there couldn’t be.
A hundred yards away, David Everard had watched her pass. She’d come closer to him than she had to West and Pike; he’d had to shield his eyes from her heat, and lumps of burning wreckage had splashed into the sea all around him, hissing as they struck the water. Now from the direction in which she’d disappeared, he heard the thunderclap of an explosion.
He was tired. Really exhausted. And so cold…
He’d seen several men go off to sleep, and he’d envied them. What they’d done was simply to stop swimming or treading water, and lie back in the sea.
They’d looked so restful. The thought that he might follow their example had infinite appeal.
He pushed his long legs out in from of him. The Gieves waistcoat was an excellent support. He let his head fall back into the softest pillow he’d ever known.
‘Bloody daylight!’
He’d whispered it. Dawn, silvery-grey, was leaking from a quickly brightening sky to grey the black waste of sea in which Lanyard lay helpless. Mist drifted in shifting patterns and layers, like some kind of insulation adding to the surrounding quiet in which this ship, with men hammering and clattering down in her steel belly, was the only source of noise.
Garret nodded, sharing Nick’s distaste for the approach of day. Another hour of darkness might have seen them through, Lanyard, disabled and almost defenceless, badly needed the cover which yesterday had twice saved the German battle fleet from destruction.
She wasn’t entirely helpless: she did have the one four-inch left, and plenty of ammunition for it. Its crew were sitting and lying around it, muffled in coats and scarves and wool helmets. Some of them lay flat out, dozing. Hooper, the gunlayer, was on his feet, leaning against the shield and using the binoculars which Nick had given him so he could help with the looking-out. Nick and Garret were farther aft. There was a good all-round view from this position, and for extra height of eye one could get up on the torpedo tubes. Also, Garret was handy to the twenty-inch searchlight in case some friendly ship might appear and challenge.
Nick had armed as many of the ship’s company as possible with small-arms and cutlasses. He was wearing a revolver himself, and Garret had a rifle beside him. Pilkington and Chief Petty Officer Glennie and a few hands with them up for’ard were similarly equipped: below decks, a couple of dozen sailors lay around or snoozed with cutlasses strapped to them. If any Germans should imagine Lanyard was done for and try to board, they’d get a warm reception.
In fact, since she’d been crippled nothing had approached her. The destroyers must have gone on south-eastward. Either they’d been under orders not to deviate from their course ‒ and if that was the case it would suggest the High Seas Fleet was running for home ‒ or they hadn’t realised that Lanyard had been hit, and had thought it would be unprofitable to chase after her.
The noise the engineers were making down there was getting on his nerves. He knew it couldn’t be helped ‒ and that unless a submarine picked it up on her hydrophones there was no enemy near enough to hear ‒ but it still seemed to aggravate the tension. One tended, oneself, to be ultra-quiet, speaking in whispers ‒ while that clattering and scraping got louder all the time. Nerves were jagged with the tension of inaction, the waiting.
The cruiser’s shell had smashed in through the starboard side of the after boiler-room and exploded about amidships, further for’ard. The entry-hole was nothing to worry about, being small and well above the waterline, but the shell had wrecked the boiler-room, smashing both boilers and blowing a large piece of one of them out through the hull on the port side. The hole it had made was large, and extended almost to the waterline: it had to be plugged, patched and shored. The other job was longer and more complicated: the steampipes and other connections between the undamaged for’ard boiler-room and the engine-room passed through the wrecked after boiler-room, and a lot of them had been cut or damaged. Worsfold had forecast that the work would take him a good two hours ‒ if he ran into no unexpected snags; and that thereafter, all things being equal, and given continuing calm weather, Lanyard should be able to make eight or ten knots on her two for’ard boilers.
They’d been working for an hour and a half already.
‘If we do get fixed up an’ away home, sir—’ Garret spoke quietly as be wiped his binoculars ‒ ‘if we go westward like you said—’
Pilkington had asked Nick, when the issuing of arms had been in progress. ‘Sub ‒ you better tell me, ’case we get in some bust-up and you get ’it, what course we’d steer for ’ome. North-west, is it?’
Nick had shrugged.
‘Can’t tell you, really.’
‘Fine navigator you are!’
‘I’ve never pretended to be a navigator.’ His inclination had been to add, you silly little shyster… He was sick of the torpedo gunner and his chip-on-the-shoulder manner. He added, ‘But even if I was a very good one. I couldn’t tell you where we are now. We’ve been all over the shop, haven’t we. With no plot kept and nothing to take a sight of…’ He’d glanced up at the overcast, starless sky, and thought, thank God for small mercies…
‘Tell you what you do, though. What I’ll do if Worsfold succeeds in getting us wound up again. Just steer west, until we hit something. When we hear a crunch, that’ll be dear old England.’ He’d thought, or Scotland.
But with any luck, he might fall in with some other ship or ships which he’d be able to follow or take directions from. The first thing to think about was getting out of this hole, getting under way again. After that, one could start worrying about a course to steer.
But Garret’s mind, as he reverted to the same subject, was more directional.
‘Any chance we’ll finish up in the Forth, sir?’
‘Not much, really. I think we’re probably too far south.’
‘Couldn’t we sort of point up a bit, sir?’
‘I think I’m bound to take the shortest route home, you know, now we’ve got that hole in our side. Could get tricky if a gale blew up, for instance. I should think the Tyne’s about our best bet, on that score. And you see, if I’m wrong and we’re farther north now than I think we are, and we ‒ as you say “point up a bit” well, that way we might miss Scotland even!’ Hopeless navigators he thought, have to plays safe.
Garret had sighed and mumbled something in a gloomy tone.
‘What?’
‘Not much good to me, sir. The Tyne. I mean.’
Nick caught on to the reason for the anxiety. He told him, ‘There’s a perfectly good train service to Edinburgh, you know!’
Garret’s head shook in the gloom. His gloom, too. ‘They’d likely keep us there, sir. An s’pose they don’t, s’pose we pay off. I’m a Devonport rating, sir, they might send me down there.’
He stopped talking about it: it was too much for him. He muttered, ‘I’d ‒ skin off, sir. I would.’
‘Don’t be bloody daft. Garret. Talking to me about deserting?’
‘Well. I’m sorry, sir, but—’
‘After we dock. I’ll send you on leave. How’s that?’
Beside him the signalman took a deep, hard breath.
‘Can you do that, sir’?’
‘I’m in command, aren’t l?’
‘I’ve no leave due, sir, that’s the trouble. Before I got married I took it all.’
‘If your commanding officer says you have leave due, you have leave due. You’ll be issued with a railway warrant ‒ and the base paymaster’ll come up with an advance of pay.
‘D’you mean this, sir?’
‘No skin off my nose, Garret.’
And where, he wondered, would he go?
First ‒ when they let him ‒ to Mullbergh. See Sarah. Try first to see Uncle Hugh, and ask him to help with wangling a permanent appointment to some destroyer, anything rather than getting shanghai’d back into some battle-wagon… Have to put it a bit tactfully: the old boy was proud of that vast thing he drove around.
Nick wondered how the day and night had gone with Hugh Everard and Nile, and how things had been for David, too. There’d been a new line of thought, hadn’t there, about David. Coupling what Johnson had said about him with the undoubted fact that their father had always looked to David, as his eldest son and the future baronet, to do brilliantly ‒ or at least do well ‒ at everything he was supposed to do… Well, hence the horsemanship. Scared half to death ‒ still an accomplished horseman, much better in the saddle than he, Nick, was ‒ but nervous, which Nick had never been. Had David ever really enjoyed a day’s hunting?
Nick wondered whether he could persuade David to listen to some advice ‒ if he suggested to him, for instance, that instead of forcing himself to continue riding to hounds, he should tell their father, ‘I don’t enjoy it. I don’t intend to hunt in future.’
He couldn’t be disinherited. He was the first-born, and the estate was entailed, and the principle of primogeniture protected him completely. Their father wouldn’t like a non-hunting eldest son ‒ he’d raise hell ‒ but did that matter? If David could be encouraged to face up to him ‒ or in a way, face up to himself ‒ mightn’t he find himself a lot happier and perhaps in the process become easier to get on with?
The biggest ‘if’ of all was if David could screw up enough guts to face his father. He’d never done so yet. The old man had him cowed. Whereas he’d realised years ago he’d never scare his younger son into subservience, and as a result got into a habit of ignoring him.
The last time he and his father had faced each other in mutual anger had been a couple of years ago, at Mullbergh. Two o’clock in the morning: Nick had been woken by a succession of loud crashes: they’d been part of some dream, but as he’d woken he’d heard another and realised they’d been real: and as the realisation had taken root, he’d heard Sarah scream. He’d sprung out of bed and raced down the long, ice-cold corridor, stone-flagged and about as cheerful as a crypt: then into the central part of the house where his father and Sarah slept. He’d rushed down the half-flight of stairs to their floor.
‘What the blazes are you doing here?’
His father was still in evening clothes: he was also half-drunk, and crazy-looking. Behind him, the top half of a bedroom door had been smashed in. A heavy case ‒ it was the dumpy leather one in which the shoe and boot cleaning things were kept ‒ lay on the floor there. Obviously his father had just used it to break down the door.
‘Oh, Nick…’
He saw Sarah, as she came out into the passage. The shoulder of her dark-green evening dress had been ripped, and she was holding it up on that side.
‘Is there—’ he ignored his father, who was in a rage and shouting at him to go back to his room ‒ ‘anything I can do?’
‘No. I ‒ no, Nick, there isn’t, thank you.’ She’d smiled at him. Brown hair, all loose, fell across her face and had to be brushed back. ‘I promise you. I’ll be all right now. You go back to bed before you catch cold.’
Nick remembered ‒ relived this incident every time his thoughts turned to Sarah and his father: the torn dress and her hair flopping loose and the half-frightened, half-defiant expression… It had marked a turning-point in his relationship with his father. From then on, his father had stopped bullying him and taken to ignoring him: as if he’d realised suddenly that Nick wasn’t going to change or, in anything that really mattered, give way to him.
But whether he’d stopped bullying Sarah was another matter.
Watching the sea, the coming of the dawn, he sighed…
The light wasn’t grey now, it was silver. Overhead there was a vaguely pearly colour which became brighter, sharper in its reflection in the sea; this was probably what was producing the silvery effect. There were no waves now, only ripples, which in the middle-distance had a streaky look ‒ one side silver, the other black. Mackerel-colour. Mist hung over everything: compared to the radiance of the sea’s surface it looked dirty, colourless like sheep’s wool in a thorn hedge.
Cold… Nick checked that the collar of his reefer was still turned up. It was, but it hadn’t felt like it. And he had a sweater on, but he wished he’d put on two, now.
Worsfold had exceeded his ration of two hours, but the hammering was still going on. Nick pulled out his watch; it was light enough now to see the positions of the hands. He told Garret, ‘Two thirty-five.’ And at that precise moment, the noise stopped. Nick stood still with the watch in the palm of his hand, thinking, any second, they’ll start again.
Garret murmured, ‘Got it done, sir, by the sound of it.’
Garret had grown a lot of beard, for one night. Nick touched his own jaw, it felt about as bad. He remembered Reynolds warning him, referring to Mortimer’s idiosyncrasies, “informality is not encouraged in his officers…”
Forty-eight hours ago, Reynolds had said that! It felt as if half a lifetime had passed. For Reynolds and Mortimer a whole one had.
‘I think I’ll go below and see what’s what.’ Nick stretched, yawned, and moved out towards the ship’s side. There still wasn’t any noise emanating from the boiler-room. He warned himself, don’t count your chickens!
Chief might have run into one of those snags he’d mentioned. He might be squatting there staring at it, wondering what to do about it. Nick stared out over the quarter, at the beginnings of a purple-ish glow, low down where the horizon must have been ‒ if one could have seen it ‒ and blanketed in the mist. That glow would harden, redden, flush upwards and resolve itself eventually into the brilliance of a sunrise, and probably that would be all they’d see of the sun all day.
But it was none too soon, he thought, for Lanyard to be getting under way.
He told Garret, ‘I’ll be back in a few—’
His mouth stayed open.
Out of that tinted mist astern, a ship was looming up towards them.
German.
At a glance, and beyond a doubt. German light cruiser.
Well, that’s that…
She was bigger than the cruiser they’d torpedoed. She had the typically low bridge and the pair of searchlights on her foremast; the searchlights looked like a crab’s eyes stuck up on stalks above its head. She might be one of the Karlsrühe class ‒ Germany’s latest in light cruisers.
Not a damn thing, he thought, that one could do. The ball would be in that Hun’s court, entirely. He edged back into the shadow of the searchlight platform and told Garret. ‘Hun cruiser, coming up astern.’ He’d whispered it. Silly, really: she was still a mile and a half or two miles away. Coming up from the quarter, steering to pass close on Lanyard’s starboard side.
He put his glasses on her again. She was closing at a slow, steady speed: unhurried, purposeful. She’d have a broadside ‒ he delved into his memory ‒ of five or six four-point-ones.
‘Leading Seaman Hooper!’
‘Sir?’
‘Enemy light cruiser approaching on the starboard quarter. Keep your gun’s crew out of sight. Everyone, keep down!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’ There was a quick scurry of movement across the destroyer’s deck up near the gun.
‘Hooper: load, set deflection six knots left and range…’ He thought, she’ll pass within spitting distance… ‘Set range five hundred yards.’ He told Garret. ‘Go for’ard and tell Mr Pilkington what’s happening. Then below, and tell Mr Worsfold I don’t want a pin dropped anywhere. I’ll be at the gun.’
Garret shot away. Nick called after him. ‘No movement on deck either, tell ’em.’ He joined Hooper on the gun platform, and crouched down beside him. ‘If they think we’re a wreck it’s just possible they may decide to leave us alone.’ The gunlayer raised an eyebrow, as if to say fat chance of that. Nick added. ‘Or they might send a boat, a boarding party.’
He thought of the men he had waiting below with cutlasses. He hoped the cruiser might send a boarding party.
In a greenish, cold-looking sea, bodies in lifebelts rose and fell amongst other flotsam. The areas of dead came infre-quently but there’d be as much as an acre or two of them at a time: sometimes the black and sodden uniforms were British, sometimes German. When you saw them through binoculars at a distance, the humped shapes had the look of drifting mines. One saw them always on the bow, because by the time Nile was close to them they’d been caught in the bow-waves of Barham, Valiant and Malaya and lifted, pushed aside to form an avenue of clear sea through which the Grand Fleet’s battle squadrons in line ahead and led by these Queen Elizabeths steamed north in search of the enemy.
An hour ago Jellicoe had wheeled his dreadnoughts round and disposed them in line of battle; since 2 am the fleet had been closed up at action stations.
Rathbone was conning the ship. Hugh left him, and joined his second-in-command in the port wing of the bridge.
‘I’m sorry to say it, Tom, but I think Scheer’s got away.’ He pointed out towards a scattering of black dots, the last colony of drowned men they’d passed, still visible on the quarter. ‘Those are the only Huns we’re likely to see today.’
Crick nodded.
‘It’s a ‒ a disappointment, sir.’
Understatement was a habit, with Tom Crick.
Nile still had no wireless, so one couldn’t know what reports had reached Jellicoe during the night, or on what knowledge or lack of it he’d based his decision to hold on southwards. Hugh knew only that throughout the dark hours there’d been flare-ups of action astern, and that there was no sign of any enemy in the area now. The two observations weren’t difficult to link.
All right ‒ the Grand Fleet held the ring, kept the sea. Here they were, close to the German coast, ready and more than willing to resume the battle, while Scheer had run home to safety. Wisely, even cleverly; but running was still running. The victors were those left in the field. But by escaping homewards, Scheer had denied to Jellicoe the kind of victory which the Grand Fleet had sought and which it had been expected to achieve.
‘Best keep the hands closed-up, Tom, for the time being. You could send ’em to breakfast by watches?’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Hugh was hungry, too. Bates, no doubt, would have something ready for him.
There’d be post-mortems, he thought, till the cows came home. The loss of ships wouldn’t be well received: and there had to be some structural defect that had led to the battle cruisers blowing up. Flash to their magazines, almost certainly. By comparison it was extraordinary how much punishment the German capital ships had been able to absorb without blowing up or sinking. And it could be that there was some deficiency in the British shells or in their fuses. One had seen so many explode on impact instead of penetrating.
It might be asked why Beatty had rushed into action without the support of this battle squadron; whether it had resulted from the same lack of control of his ships which had made the Dogger Bank action such a fiasco, or whether Sir David’s over-confidence and pursuit of fame had urged him to hog the glory for himself and his battle cruisers. But when it came to post-mortem time, the biggest question that would be asked would be how had the Germans been permitted to escape, why it hadn’t ended as a twentieth-century Trafalgar.
The public wouldn’t understand that at Trafalgar Nelson had drifted into action at about two knots, that once the fleets had grappled the battle had had to be fought out to its conclusion: they might not want to understand that it was a different matter to annihilate an enemy who couldn’t move from the mouths of your cannon than it was to smash one who could turn and run away into fog at twenty knots.
The Navy would know what had been proved, and so would the Germans. Twice Scheer had thrown his squadrons against Jellicoe’s, and twice they’d had to turn and run. What had been proved was that the High Seas Fleet was no match for the Grand Fleet.
But still ‒ Hugh thought ‒ if he, Everard, had been in Jellicoe’s shoes, and seen the night-fighting in the north, wouldn’t he have steered for Horns Reef and shut off that escape route?
Hugh remembered the post-mortems inside the Admiralty after the Falklands victory. The arguments had all been of Jacky Fisher’s making. Fisher, giving Admiral Sturdee command of the operation, had had his own personal, Fisher-type aim in mind; his hope had been that Sturdee, whom he regarded as an enemy, should fail. Doveton Sturdee had been Lord Charles Beresford’s Chief-of-Staff in the Mediterranean and in the Channel, and had naturally shared his chief’s anti-Fisher attitude. So Fisher still wanted Sturdee broken, and to have Hugh Everard go along on the same operation made it even better ‒ two birds with one stone!
But Sturdee had had luck ‒ which at one stage he’d surely needed ‒ and he’d destroyed Von Spee’s squadron. So Fisher had tried to prove he should have done it better, or more quickly, than he had. Hours, days, weeks had been wasted on an exercise of malice.
Of course, Hugh thought, for years I’ve loathed Fisher! Who wouldn’t ‒ unless he was some kind of saint ‒ who’d been a victim of that brand of hate?
Fisher had broken him, in 1907, because he’d suspected him of having a foot in the Beresford camp. The Navy had been split into factions by the mutual loathing between Fisher and Beresford who’d virtually provoked mutiny in other senior officers against the thrusting, forceful First Sea Lord who’d come up from nothing and rode rough-shod over anyone who opposed him. Fisher was the son of a planter in Ceylon and he looked as if he had more than a dash of Singhalese blood; ‘the gentleman from Ceylon’ had been Admiral Beresford’s way of referring to his First Sea Lord. It hadn’t been unnatural for a man of Beresford’s stamp to have loathed Fisher’s methods and manners; he’d done his best to thwart him, destroy him. So when the Beresfords appeared as guests at the wedding of Commander Hugh Everard, Royal Navy, and Lady Alice Cookson-Kerr, Fisher discovered that he’d been harbouring in his ‘fish pond’ an officer who consorted with his enemies and had therefore to be eliminated.
The Beresfords had been invited, of course, by the parents of the bride. Hugh, hearing at the last moment of their inclusion in the guest-list, had seen the danger; but it would have been impossible to have done anything about it. Even then he hadn’t ‒ or so it seemed now, looking back on it ‒ appreciated the depth of Fisher’s paranoia. But he should have known what to expect; Fisher had boasted openly of his readiness to break rivals or opponents; he’d make widows of their wives, he’d promised, and dung-heaps of their houses. The Bible had always been a source of his verbal inspiration. And he’d decided within a week of Hugh’s wedding that Commander Everard had “run out of steam”. Hugh found himself shunted off, and offered appointments which the most dead-beat officers would have regarded as insulting. Within a year he’d resigned his commission. Within a further year, Alice had made it plain that being his wife was no longer to her taste. She’d married a rising star, a future Nelson, and now she found herself with a husband who worked for a firm of shipbuilders. Her friends’ husbands, if they did anything except hunt foxes, were in politics or the Services.
Hugh gave her the divorce she wanted. But the story went about ‒ and it still held water in the minds of some of his contemporaries ‒ that his fall from grace in the Service as well as the reason for his wife divorcing him had been ‘woman trouble’. Technically, a woman had provided the grounds for the divorce; and before his marriage he’d made no pretence of being a plaster saint. After the divorce ‒ well, he’d been his own man, and there’d been some advantages in that unlooked ‒ for ‘freedom’.
Fisher had done him more harm than it should have been possible for one man to do another. For nearly ten years, one had been constantly aware of it.
He’d kept his feelings to himself, though, knowing that protests and recriminations couldn’t improve his situation in any way, certainly wouldn’t add to his chances of recovery, and could only be counted on to make him look ridiculous and sound a bore. And now that Fisher had gone, and was himself ridiculous in his senility, he could actually feel sorry for the old man, feel the sadness of former greatness lapsed into impotence, and remember the great achievements. The reforms of sailors’ pay and conditions of service were probably the most important; and this ‒ Hugh looked astern at the line of dreadnoughts extending southwards into the morning mists ‒ this was Jacky’s creation. One could recall too that Fisher, whose own nomination to naval service when he’d joined in 1854 had been signed by the last of Nelson’s admirals, had been personally responsible for the grooming and appointment of Sir John Jellicoe as C-in-C of the Grand Fleet.
The torch came from hand to hand. Ships, weapons, tactics changed. Nothing else did. Oh, conditions, certainly. One could remember Fisher’s own account of joining his first ship, at the age of thirteen, in that year 1854. On the day he joined, he saw eight men flogged, and he fainted. Hugh could still hear the gruff, disjointed reminiscences emerging from that ugly, even brutish face: Midshipman of four-foot nothing ‒ keeping night watches, and always hungry. No baths ‒ belly always empty… He’d remembered a quartermaster of the watch once giving him a maggoty biscuit, and a lieutenant of the watch who’d sometimes let him have a sardine, or an onion, or a glass of rum…
‘Spot o’ breakfast, sir?’
Hugh nodded to his coxswain.
‘Thank you. Bates. I’m ready for it.’
Lanyard drifted; silent, inert, misshapen, wreck-like.
The gun’s crew, and others with weapons in their hands, lay motionless, almost held their breaths as they watched the German cruiser approaching steadily across the dawn-lit sea.
She’d closed to about a thousand yards, half a sea mile, off Lanyard’s quarter. She still slid closer at the same slow speed; she’d pass about two cables’ lengths to starboard.
Pass ‒ or stop.
If she saw no sign of life, and sent a boat across. Lanyard might have a hope? If one let the boarding party come aboard, and then captured them, would a German captain fire on his own men?
No. He’d probably send more men.
It was the tension of this waiting, and the fact of being so utterly at that ship’s mercy, that made one clutch at straws.
Nick put his glasses on her again. She might have been a ghost-ship creeping up, slipping closer through a silvery-greenish sea with a feather of white at her stem and only ripples spreading where she’d passed. There was no sound at all from her; all that could be heard here was the slap of water against Lanyard’s sides and the creak of loose gear shifting as she moved to the sea’s own movement. But nothing shifted or even seemed to live on that cruiser’s bridge or about her decks; she only came on steadily with her air of purpose and those twin crab’s-eyes up above her bridge as if she herself was some kind of monster watching them. He shook the fantasy out of his mind. He wondered whether there might in fact be men in that bridge who were invisible from here but who’d have binoculars trained on Lanyard ‒ German optical instruments being far better than British ones ‒ revealing these men lying doggo around the gun. If so, this would be their point of aim when they opened fire; and since Hooper had built up a large reserve of cartridges and projectiles handy to the gun, it wouldn’t be a healthy place to be.
In about a minute the cruiser would be abeam. About then, one might expect the ordeal to begin.
‘Layer ‒ you there, ’Oops?’
Hooper looked to his left without moving his head.
‘What’s up, Pratt?’
‘I been thinkin’.’ Pratt sounded like a Londoner. ‘I never did learn to play the ’arp. Teach you when you reports aboard do they?’
‘They’ll give you a shovel, mate, where you re goin’. Now be a good boy’n shurrup, eh?’
Nick glanced aft, at the ensign drooping from the mainmast. Wet from the night’s mist, in the almost windless air it hung straight down, limp as a dead bird hanging in a tree. The gamekeepers at Mullbergh hung vermin like that… But it would be visible and identifiable, he thought, from the cruiser, and it would be all the justification they’d need to open fire.
Hooper hissed suddenly. ‘Sir ‒ she listin’, would you say?’
Nick raised his glasses and focused on her again. He couldn’t see any list.
But she was very nearly abeam now. The range was about six or seven hundred yards ‒ farther than he’d expected. And she was moving more slowly than he’d reckoned earlier. He told Hooper, ‘Deflection three left.’
‘Three left ‒ aye aye, sir… Look there!’
‘What?’
‘She – just sort o’ leaned over, sir—’
She’d lurched to port: a definite movement, which he’d seen quite clearly. He strained his eyesight now: the lenses of his binoculars were slightly fogged and he couldn’t spare the time to clean them… ‘Layer ‒ am I dreaming, or is she down by the bow?’
Hooper laughed shortly. ‘Don’t reckon you’re the dreamin’ sort, sir.’
The cruiser’s stern was rising as her bow dug lower in the sea, and she was listing so far to port now that one could see right into her bridge. It was empty. He thought, They’ve abandoned her… But ‒ left her engines going?
Perhaps they left a few hands aboard, and they’d left her bridge now because they’d realised she was about to sink? It was all theory ‒ and not counting chickens: he thought suddenly, there could still be a torpedo coming…
They could have struggled this far with that intention; in such a condition wasn’t it exactly what one would do?
She was going, though. Her screws were out of water, reflecting the light of sunrise as their blades turned slowly, lazily in the air.
Nick stood up. He told the gun’s crew, ‘All right. She’s done for. Pratt give ’em a shout below, tell ’em all to come up and see this.’
The cruiser was standing on her nose, with nearly half her length ‒ including bridge and foremast and the first of her four funnels ‒ buried in the sea. A German ensign hung vertically downwards, banner-like, from her mainmast which was now parallel to the sea’s surface. Nick heard cheering and whoops of joy as Lanyard’s ship’s company came pouring up on deck. He put one hand out, leant against the gun, and at that moment the enemy cruiser seemed to lift a little in the water and then slip down into it.
She’d gone. Quietly, with no fuss at all. And Lanyard was alone again.
Through the pandemonium of sailors cheering, dancing, going mad, one had to take this in, take stock of an entirely new situation, the abrupt removal of what had seemed like certain doom.
He realised that since he’d stood up he’d been feeling wind on his face. He looked at the sea, and saw a flurry spreading across its surface, a sort of graining with white flecks in it. He looked at the ensign, and saw that stirring too.
Coming up so suddenly out of the dawn calm, one could expect a blow. With three hundred miles of sea to cross, and Lanyard with only two boilers and a hole in her side.
One enemy removed itself, and another took its place.
‘Sub!’
He looked down at the upper deck. He saw Worsfold, the engineer, peering up at him. Worsfold looked as if he’d spent the night working at a coal-face.
‘You can take us all home now, Sub. But listen ‒ no more ’n five knots, d’you hear?’