H.M.S Saracen (1965)

by Reeman, Douglas

  Royston-Jones said flatly: ‘We have a surgeon, I believe? Right, assemble all boats and prepare to carry out instructions.’

  Lieutenant Travis climbed down from the compass platform and tested his legs. Gingerly he removed his earplugs and peered through the smoke. ‘We are a bit vulnerable here, sir?’

  Royston-Jones levered himself from the chair. ‘Anchored fore and aft, you mean?’

  ‘Well, yes, sir.’

  ‘Quite so, Pilot.’

  The ship had been virtually stationary during the bombardment, a sitting target had the Turks been able to bring a gun to bear. But protected by her own heavy fire and the close proximity of the high cliff she had remained undisturbed and wreathed in the smoke and fumes of her bombardment.

  Royston-Jones shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do about that. Must maintain a good position for Hogarth’s sake. He did very well to all accounts.’

  Travis smiled. ‘So did the young snotties, sir.’

  ‘Yes.’ The Captain stretched like a small bird. ‘Pity about Lieutenant Thornton. Good officer. Must write to his father. Such a waste.’

  Hogarth appeared, gaunt but grinning. ‘Guns secured, sir. Permission to fall out crews?’

  Godden nodded, his eye on Royston-Jones. ‘Very well.’

  ‘Ah, Hogarth.’ The Captain turned slowly. ‘Quite a good shoot, I thought.’

  Hogarth beamed. ‘Eighty rounds of fifteen-inch.’ He turned down his mouth. ‘Mostly shrapnel, of course, but you can’t have everything!’

  Royston-Jones nodded gravely. ‘I am sorry we hadn’t enough time to get you a more experienced spotting officer, but we were rather pressed!’

  Hogarth smiled in spite of his weariness. While the whole ship had waited with frustration and anxiety for the landing party to get into position an unexpected Turkish battery had started to drop shells in the small bay, some very close to the monitor. The battery was shooting blind, but they must have known what they were after. A cheer had rippled throughout the ship when a signalman had excitedly reported contact with Midshipman Beaushears on the beach. Within a quarter of an hour the Turkish guns had fallen silent beneath a hailstorm of shrapnel and a few high-explosive shells for good measure. From that moment the Saracen had obediently hurled her shells inland, each salvo within minutes of the urgent signals from the beach.

  Godden pulled at his lower lip. So Thornton was dead. But he was not the first casualty. Midshipman Maintland and his pinnace had been blasted to fragments by one stray shell from the shore even as he was returning to the ship. His crew of three had vanished also, and like a memorial the severed stem of the boat still drifted near the anchored monitor.

  Pipes twittered below decks and within seconds the ship blossomed with seamen. Men who had stayed hidden and watchful behind guns and steel shutters, their ears deafened by the bombardment, scampered like children with a new-found freedom.

  Royston-Jones frowned. ‘Turn to both watches, Commander. Rig tackles for hoisting the wounded inboard, and have a constant guard rowed round the ship.’ He yawned elaborately. ‘Send for my steward. I’m going to my sea-cabin for a few moments.’

  Godden fumed inwardly. That meant that he would have to stay on the bridge himself. He desperately needed to sit down, to have a drink, to think. The fierce and sudden events had left him feeling old and helpless, and the knowledge had almost unnerved him.

  Hogarth was about to leave the bridge. ‘Shall I signal for the shore party to return for the night?’

  Godden tore his mind from his wave of self-pity. ‘No. Let them bloody well stay there! It’ll do ’em good!’

  Hogarth showed his long teeth. ‘I say, sir, bit savage, isn’t it?’

  But Godden had turned away, tired and fuddled like an elephant at the end of a long charge. Already the voice-pipes were at it again, and far below the bridge the impatient, cutting voices of the petty officers could be heard mustering their men.

  Hogarth shrugged and lowered himself over the screen. He paused for a moment and stared at the silent turret. It had been a triumph. From start to finish it had been a copybook bombardment. He thought of Godden’s brooding face and wondered. Perhaps that generation were already too staid and steeped in peacetime routine to be able to accept this sort of warfare. Except the Captain, of course. Hogarth shook himself and continued his passage to the deck. That would be unthinkable.

  The Quarters Officer, his round face blackened with powder, waited for him on the deck where seamen with hoses and scrubbers were at work removing the dirt of war. His teeth shone. ‘Pretty good, eh, Guns?’

  Hogarth smothered his sense of well-being and satisfaction and frowned. ‘Bloody awful, Lucas!’ He watched the other man’s face lengthen. ‘You’ll have to do better tomorrow!’

  Hogarth strode along the deck, his lips pursed in a silent whistle. It did not do to share one’s laurels, he thought happily.

  * * * * *

  The tiny dugout was almost airless, so that Chesnaye awoke with the suddenness of a man suffocating in his sleep. For a few wild seconds he blinked at Robert Driscoll’s bowed figure as he sat awkwardly beside a crude table of ammunition boxes, and saw that although the young soldier was staring fixedly at a worn map his eyes were empty and unfocused. The dugout measured less than eight feet by six, and the low roof, crudely supported by duckboards and wooden props, sloped steeply at the rear, where Pickles lay in a restless bundle, his head on his cap. A blanket covered the narrow entrance, and two candles, their air-starved flames short and guttering, cast weird and unnatural shadows around the hastily hewn walls. The place was crowded with ammunition cases, signals equipment and a pile of entrenching tools, and Chesnaye stared dazedly at each article in turn as understanding and memory returned to his sleep-fuddled brain.

  Driscoll turned his head, his eyes in shadow. ‘You’ve been snoring for a good three hours,’ he said quietly.

  Chesnaye sat up, every bone protesting violently. The earth was cool and damp yet his face still tingled from the blazing sunlight, and his eyes felt raw as if he had only just discarded the long spotting telescope.

  He licked his dry lips. ‘Have you just come in?’

  Driscoll shrugged. ‘An hour ago.’ He fished in an open box at his feet. ‘Have a drink?’ He did not wait for an answer but carefully poured something into two enamel mugs. The liquid shone like amber in the candlelight. ‘Brandy,’ Driscoll said shortly. ‘The last. From tomorrow we’ll have rum like the lads. If we’re lucky!’

  Chesnaye swallowed a mouthful and felt the heat coursing through him. ‘It’s good,’ he said.

  ‘Carried it all the way from Gib.’ Driscoll toyed with the empty bottle. ‘God, what a long way off it seems!’

  ‘Anything happening outside?’ Chesnaye gestured with the mug towards the curtain.

  ‘Quiet. A bloody wilderness!’ He stood up, his shadow leaping across the dugout like a phantom. ‘Come and take a look. I can’t sleep.’

  Together they ducked through the low entrance and stared up at the black hillside behind the makeshift trench. Somewhere up there the spotting post and its big boulders would be cool and deserted. But tomorrow . . . Chesnaye shuddered involuntarily.

  Their feet scraped the pebbles as they walked, and occasionally Chesnaye caught sight of a dark figure huddled on the firing step, his shoulders and naked bayonet outlined against the stars. Other men lay unmoving like the dead, wrapped in greatcoats or blankets, their rifles nearby, but the war momentarily excluded from their minds.

  Chesnaye had seen the stretchers going down the cliff path in the heat of the afternoon when there had been an ordered lull in the Saracen’s fire. Stretchers carried casually and clumsily by the Red Cross orderlies on their journey back from the vague front line. For the occupants of the stretchers were past care and beyond caring. So the living stayed in the trench and slept. Tomorrow the stretchers would take more of them away. For ever.

  Chesnaye followed Driscoll as he climbed up on to the firing step nea
r one of the sentries.

  Chesnaye spoke quietly. ‘There’s a wiring party out tonight.’ His arm moved like a shadow. ‘Somewhere in front of us. Nasty job. The ground’s too hard for staples or digging—’

  Chesnaye gasped as a bright blue flare erupted slightly to his left and hung in the air apparently unmoving.

  ‘Turkish flare,’ said Driscoll calmly.

  The unearthly light turned the night to day, yet gave the surrounding landscape the colour and texture of something illusory. Small objects stood out starkly, whilst the hillside and the black gaping slit of trench mingled and joined as if covered by vapour.

  Chesnaye felt naked and exposed as he stood on the firing step, the thin layer of sandbags barely reaching his chest. The flare glistened along the teeth of the wire and the blackened mounds which marked the edges of the day’s shell craters. Out there, Chesnaye thought, men are crouching or standing, caught and mesmerised in the unblinking glare. Even the smallest movement could be fatal. The slightest moment of fear might bring instant attention from the enemy line. The flare dipped and died. Far to the right the dark sky flickered sullenly and then blossomed into a red glow. A rumble like thunder rolled around the gully and down into the deserted valley. It went on and on, so that Chesnaye found himself staring not at the glow but at the stars themselves, as if he expected to find the answer there.

  ‘Somebody’s getting it down south,’ Driscoll commented. ‘Night attack. It’ll be our turn soon.’ He stepped down into the trench and the rumble seemed to fade. ‘How these Aussies can sleep!’ His teeth gleamed faintly. ‘They think it’s a real joke to have the Navy and me here!’

  Chesnaye smiled. ‘What is your job exactly?’

  ‘Well, apart from looking after you, I’m a jack of all trades. Communications, bit of sapping, all the usual stuff.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a man’s life in the modern Army!’

  They re-entered the dugout, and Chesnaye lowered himself gingerly on to his pile of empty sandbags. ‘A few more hours yet,’ he said.

  As he turned on to his side he heard Driscoll’s voice, brittle and sharp. ‘Are you in love with my sister, Dick?’ Then, as Chesnaye tried to turn: ‘No, don’t look. Just answer.’

  Chesnaye stared at the earth wall by his face. All at once he felt very calm. A girl he hardly knew, but remembered so clearly—‘Yes, Bob.’

  There was a silence. The dugout vanished into darkness as the candles were extinguished, and Driscoll added quietly: ‘Good. I just wanted to know.’

  Chesnaye tried to laugh. ‘Why did you ask?’

  He heard the other man sliding into a corner of the dugout. ‘I just wanted to know. Out here you need something to hold on to.’

  Chesnaye lay for long afterwards, his eyes wide in the darkness, half listening to Driscoll’s breathing and half to the sullen mutter of gunfire.

  * * * * *

  The first shell landed on the hillside above the trench even as the first light of dawn felt its way across the floor of the valley. Richard Chesnaye felt the dugout’s floor buck beneath his back so that real pain shot through his limbs which seconds before had been relaxed in sleep. He awoke coughing and choking in a thick vapour of dust and smoke, his head reeling from the shattering explosion, as the blanket curtain across the entrance was ripped from its frame as if by an invisible hand.

  The narrow confines of the trench were alive to running feet and loud cries, and even as Chesnaye struggled to his feet a second shell exploded somewhere overhead. His shocked hearing returned with startling suddenness so that he was all at once aware of a sharp, intermittent sobbing. He turned blinking in the dust to see Pickles on his hands and knees like a blinded animal, his round face wrinkled with shock and stark terror. For an instant he imagined that somehow Pickles had been hit by a splinter, but as he moved towards the scrabbling figure he heard Pickles scream: ‘God, help me! I must get away!’

  Chesnaye gripped his tunic and dragged him to his feet so that their faces were almost pressed together. They swayed in a struggling embrace as the dugout rocked and shivered and more explosions thundered along the side of the hill. Chesnaye felt suddenly calm and ice-cold. The sickness of fear and despair which had held him in the shock-wave of the first detonation had gone with the quickness of night, and in its place he could feel only a quiet desperation and an urgent need to get out of the quivering dugout.

  A harsh Australian voice yelled above the bombardment: ‘Keep down, you lot! They’ll be comin’ over after this!’

  Pickles whimpered and pressed his head into Chesnaye’s shoulder. ‘I can’t go on, Dick! Please don’t make me!’

  Chesnaye peered down at him, his racing thoughts torn between disgust and pity. He prised Pickles’ fingers from his arm. ‘Snap out of it, for heaven’s sake! It’s a bombardment. The Turks’ll be coming over as soon as it drops!’ He thought of Driscoll’s calm words the night before. It’ll be our turn next. Attack and counter-attack. The probe and the follow-up. Generals of both armies had tried it so often on the Western Front where a glut of manpower made up for their own lack of knowledge.

  Pickles shrank back, small and shivering. ‘I won’t go. It’s not fair!’ He peered round the dust-covered floor. ‘We shouldn’t be here!’ He stared fixedly at Chesnaye with something like hatred. ‘We don’t belong here at all!’

  Chesnaye had a brief picture of the monitor, clean and untouched by all this disorder and sudden danger. Her guns would be helpless and impotent. Incapable of firing a single shot without the signals from the shore. From him.

  He groped for his cap and then slung his telescope and leather case over his shoulder. ‘We’re going now, Keith,’ he said quietly. ‘They’re depending on us.’

  Without another word Pickles allowed himself to be led out into the distorted light of the trench. Dust and smoke were everywhere, and the narrow, crudely hacked defences were filled with crouching khaki figures, their bodies and weapons cluttering the bottom of the trench in a dust-covered tangle. It seemed impossible to believe that only hours before this same place had been quiet and deserted, the only furtive movement being that of a hidden wiring party.

  A tall Australian lieutenant, wild-eyed and unshaven, cannoned into Chesnaye as he peered up and behind the stone-strewn defences to the high rounded shoulder of the hill. Somewhere up there was the abandoned spotting post. Chesnaye felt his arm seized and watched the angry snapping movements of the soldier’s mouth.

  ‘You’d better get the hell out of it, sailor!’ The lieutenant glanced briefly at Pickles’ stricken face. ‘The bastards will be having a go in a moment!’ He held his breath and ducked as a shell screamed overhead and burst on the hillside.

  The air seemed thick with whimpering, hissing splinters, and somewhere beyond the black smoke Chesnaye heard a chorus of unearthly screams. A loud, urgent voice called, ‘Stretcher bearers!’ And the cry was carried on and away by other unknown, unseen men along the battered trench.

  Chesnaye started as he felt sand running across his hand, and looked up to see a smoking slit in a nearby sandbag. The splinter must have missed him by inches.

  He heard himself say: ‘I must get up there! We’re the only artillery support you’ve got in this sector!’

  The lieutenant wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘What about the rest of the Fleet?’

  Chesnaye shrugged. ‘Withdrawn. To support the other landing areas.’

  The Australian laughed bitterly. ‘Jesus, what a bloody mess!’

  Nearby, a soldier was being sick while his comrades stared at him with empty, glassy eyes. They all seemed shocked and dazed by the shellfire, their faces devoid of expression.

  ‘You’ll never make it, sailor!’ The Australian peered upwards, his eyes following Chesnaye’s gaze. ‘Johnny Turk knows what we’re about. He’s spraying the whole damned area with shrapnel and anything else he can get!’ Angrily he added, ‘I thought the Navy was supposed to have knocked out all their batteries?’

  Chesnaye caught sight
of Leading Seaman Tobias’s tanned features at a bend in the trench and he beckoned him with sudden urgency. It was all quite clear what had to be done. In a strange voice he said: ‘We’re going up, Tobias. The second the barrage lifts we’ll make a run for it!’ He watched for some sign, but Tobias merely grunted. Chesnaye added, ‘Get the rest of our men and check their rifles.’

  Tobias pressed himself against the firing step as two shells tore into the hillside and sent a cascade of loose boulders clattering into the trench. A man cried out sharply, like an animal, and then fell silent. Tobias said thickly: ‘Our lads won’t like it, Mister Chesnaye. They’re not soldiers.’

  Chesnaye said savagely: ‘They don’t have to like it! Now go and tell them!’

  He watched Tobias go, and then turned back to the lieutenant, who was crouching down and reading a signal pad which a panting runner had just delivered.

  He looked up at Chesnaye’s grim features. ‘Worse than I thought. The Turks have overrun Hill Seventy-Five. The whole of the right flank is a bloody shambles.’

  Chesnaye started to grope for his range map and then remembered. Hill Seventy-Five was directly on their right, the end-piece of a long ridge of narrow hills. The hill above this trench was the only one left in a commanding position now. If that fell, the way to the beach would be cut, and the enemy might roll up the flimsy defences like a carpet. He swallowed hard. ‘It’s as I said, then?’

  The Australian eyed him with surprise. ‘Well, it’s been nice knowing you, kid!’ He broke off, choking as an impenetrable cloud of smoke billowed round the curve in the trench. ‘What th’ hell?’

  A brown-faced sergeant pushed his way through the crouching soldiers. His angry eyes swept across the two midshipmen and settled on his own officer. ‘Bastards ’ave set the bloody gorse on fire, sir!’ He waved his rifle as if it were a mere toy. ‘The whole hillside is alight!’

  The lieutenant shrugged. ‘Accident or design, it’s a cunning move. Our lads will be half blind in a second!’

  Tobias appeared, followed by a bearded A.B. called Wellard. ‘Ready, sir.’ As if in response to his words, the barrage dropped, the echoes passing down the valley like a receding typhoon.