Brown on Resolution

by C. S. Forester

  Captain Saville-Samarez went on to consider ways and means. The archipelago lay a little out of his direct course south from Panama. But Penzance’s most economical cruising speed was far in excess of Leopard’s. The ships would overlook far more water separated than in company. And Penzance’s speed was far larger than that of any one of von Spee’s squadron, except perhaps Dresden. She could look after herself and keep out of danger by herself unless she experienced the very worst of luck—and Captain Saville-Samarez was not of the type which makes mental pictures of what might happen in the very worst of circumstances. He reached his final decision with promptitude and did not think about it again. His signal flew for the Penzance’s Captain to come on board Leopard, and a few quite brief sentences explained to that officer what Captain Saville-Samarez wanted done.

  So that when the Captain of Penzance reached his own ship again he set a fresh course which gradually took his ship away from Leopard, diverging slightly away to the westward as the two ships headed south across the Bay of Panama. Leading Seaman Albert Brown at this moment was only slightly thirsty; Muller’s bullet did not hit him until sunset that day, when Penzance and Leopard had diverged until they were quite out of sight of each other.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NELSON ONCE WROTE that five minutes makes the difference between victory and defeat. It was hardly more than five minutes which made the difference between the detection of Ziethen and her possible escape from observation. Had Ziethen only sailed half an hour earlier she would have got away undetected to begin her career of destruction, and the history of the world—of the British Cabinet at any rate—would have been different. For as Penzance, detached by Captain Saville-Samarez to look round the Galapagos Archipelago, came down upon Resolution from the north-east, Ziethen was steering north-west away from the island. Just as Resolution came in sight a pair of keen eyes on Penzance detected a little trace of smoke far away on the westerly horizon. Smoke in that lost corner of the world was uncommon, and therefore suspicious, and Penzance headed after it in all the pride of her twenty-seven knots. In half an hour Ziethen was definitely identified, and the ether was thrilling with the news as Penzance broadcast her information.

  Vain it was now for Ziethen to try to jam Penzance’s messages. Leopard was only a hundred miles away; besides, the men who built and equipped Penzance had a very clear idea of the duties she was to perform, which is more than can be said of those who built Charybdis. Penzance was one of the most modern of cruisers, designed solely to be of the utmost service to battleships. She was a battleship’s eyes, a battleship’s message bearer, and her immense speed and her powerful wireless installation were given her solely for these ends. Her news trickled in to Leopard hardly mutilated, and that great ship swung her twenty thousand tons round in pursuit..

  The Captain of Penzance knew his duty. Although his ship could match Ziethen’s 6-inch guns with 6-inch guns of her own, it was not his business to put her fragile hull within reach when there was a battle cruiser no distance off who would do the business for him without any risk of damage. Ziethen was a bigger ship and carried armour far more effective than Penzance’s fragile protective deck. Penzance could only possess the speed she boasted by reason of abandoning nearly all other protection; Ziethen, built in an age when the naval mind was a little muddled, had tried to combine all factors, speed (twenty knots at the time of her launching was a high speed), hitting power (German authorities did not place the same value upon large calibres as did the English) and armour, with the result that now she was helpless against a specialist.

  She challenged action boldly enough; she wheeled, with her guns trained out upon Penzance and the range-takers eagerly chanting the ranges; she charged forward, but Penzance was not inclined to accept the challenge. Not a man on board who would not gladly have fought Ziethen to the death, but what was the use of incurring senseless losses when Leopard was pounding up behind with her 12-inch guns, which would settle the matter without Ziethen having the chance of scoring a hit? Penzance kept away. Her seven knots advantage in speed was overwhelming. No possible manoeuvre of Ziethen’s could inveigle her into range. It was not very long before Ziethen sullenly abandoned her attempt to make a fight of it and turned southwards at full speed in the hope of shaking off pursuit, or of closing in to a fight, when darkness came. And in reply to Penzance’s reports Leopard turned away to a converging course, working up to her full twenty-four knots, edging rapidly up to the two ships which were cleaving their way through the blue Pacific.

  It was then, perhaps, during the weary hours of that long pursuit, that Captain von Lutz tasted defeat and failure and self-contempt at their bitterest. One single man had caused this disaster; one man armed with a rifle had brought about the destruction of Ziethen. Captain von Lutz looked back over those three days at Resolution. A single one of them would have sufficed to repair Ziethen and set her off again upon her career of destruction. Emden had done ten million pounds’ worth of destruction, and was still loose upon the Indian Ocean. What of Ziethen, with her more powerful guns and armour? She had fought and sunk one miserable third-class cruiser thirty years old which mattered neither one way nor another in the clash of nations. Now, because one wretched English sailor had held her up at Resolution for forty-eight hours longer than was necessary, Ziethen’s career was being ended. Captain von Lutz had no illusions about that. He knew that a battle cruiser and a light cruiser had passed the Canal; the light cruiser had arrived and was keeping him under observation, so that the battle cruiser could not be far away. And a battle cruiser would have no difficulty at all in setting the final seal on the work which Albert Brown had achieved at the cost of his life. The tea ships and meat ships and sugar ships, the ships carrying troops and the ships carrying bullion, would pass to and fro across the southern waters without Ziethen to sink and burn them.

  Yet although Captain von Lutz was so convinced of the approaching destruction of his ship, he had no thought of giving up the game without at least a final struggle. Vigorous messages passed to the engine-room, and soon Ziethen’s boilers were filled up with every ounce of steam they could bear. Night was not far off, and if thick weather came with it Ziethen had a chance of escape, or, on the other hand, she, might have a chance of closing with her adversaries and doing as much damage as she herself received. The pursuit must be prolonged until dark, and it was with an anxious eye that Captain von Lutz scanned the horizon as he paced about the bridge, the while officers and men laboured furiously making every preparation for a fight for life, stripping the ship of every conceivable combustible material, handling ammunition, and testing range-finders and gunnery controls; such is the queer nature of mankind that the imminent prospect of a fight in which every single man of them might lose his life cheered them all up immensely, and the depression and indiscipline which had settled upon the ship after the ineffective attempts upon Resolution vanished like mist.

  Night came while Leopard was still out of sight, and Ziethen began her attempts either to throw off Penzance’s pursuit or else to close with her. But the night was clear and Penzance’s speed was one-third as much again as Ziethen’s. An hour after nightfall the moon rose, and it was an easy enough matter for the lookouts on Penzance to pick up the loom of the big cruiser in the darkness. Ziethen turned sixteen points and came charging back straight up her own wake, but Penzance saw her and kept out of her way. Ziethen resumed her old course, maintained it for half an hour, and then turned two points to starboard. That time Penzance nearly lost her, but her great speed enabled her to zigzag down the original course and find her quarry again. Before midnight the long expected help came—Leopard with her 12-inch guns and twenty-four knots. Then the two English ships were able to take up positions comfortably on Ziethen’s port and starboard quarters so that the wretched cruiser’s chances of escape, small enough to begin with, were now much less than half what they were.

  All through the night the three ships drove on southwards through the Pacific.
The Germans had no friends at sea within two thousand miles, and they were acutely and uncomfortably conscious of the menacing, silent presence of the British ships which were following after them, like Death on his pale horse. Twice already that night, in the hope that the shadowy cruiser which had hovered after them was within range, had they switched on searchlights and blasted the night with a salvo, but each time they had gained no profit from the performance save for the very definite comfort of noise and action. It seemed to temper down in their minds the terrible inevitability of the morrow.

  But it could not be said that discipline was faltering. German naval esprit de corps was of new but sturdy growth. Every single man on board (for the rumour had run round, as lower-deck rumours will) knew that a battle cruiser was close upon them and that further resistance was hopeless, yet no word was breathed of surrender and hardly a man would have given his vote in favour of surrender. A young navy cannot afford to begin its traditions with a record of that sort. German sailors must fight to the death, so that those that follow after might have at least a glorious failure to look back upon. Four hundred men must die for that sole purpose; at least let it be recorded that they died not unwillingly.

  With the first faint beginnings of daylight Captain Saville-Samarez gave orders to reduce speed below the nineteen knots at which Leopard had been ploughing through the sea since her junction with Penzance. He was going to take no chances, with those stringent passages from his instructions running in his mind. Daylight was not going to find him anywhere nearly in range of Ziethen’s 6-inch guns. Even he, phlegmatic and confident though he was, had found the tension and excitement too great for sleep. He had been pacing about all night, the while the crackling wireless was sending through the relay ships to the Admiralty in Whitehall the glad news that one at least of the German Pacific Squadron was within the grip of the British Navy. Before dawn a reply had reached him, and he knew that the KCB he desired would be his by the end of the year—if only he did what was expected of him.

  And when daylight was almost come Captain von Lutz on Ziethen’s bridge knew that his last hope was gone. Far away on the horizon, almost dead astern, his powerful glasses could make out through the clear atmosphere the unmistakable tripod mast of a Dreadnought battle cruiser. There was death in that insignificant little speck. Still there was some chance of doing damage. Penzance lay closer in, on the starboard quarter. Ziethen wheeled, with her guns reaching up to extreme elevation. As the sun’s disc cleared the sea a crashing salvo broke forth from her side, but the range was too great. The columns of water where the shells fell rose from the surface of the sea nearly half a mile from the target. Five seconds later Penzance, in obedience to an irritated signal from Leopard, had turned away and was racing out of danger at her full twenty-seven knots, clearing the range for the 12-inch guns.

  On Leopard’s bridge stood Captain Saville-Samarez. The conning tower was no place for him during this affair. The whole business would be as dangerous as shooting a sitting rabbit; and Captain Saville-Sarnarez had taken Leopard into Heligoland Bight astern of Lion, and from the bridge had seen Mainz blown to pieces by the shattering salvoes. Now he saw Ziethen swing eastwards, racing towards the level sun in one last hope of distracting the aim of the English gtmners. But Leopard turned eastward too, steering a parallel course with the sun dead ahead and her guns training out to port. Eight 12-inch guns composed Leopard’s main armament; and the 12-inch gun had twice the range of the 6-inch gun and fired a shell eight times as heavy, with a shattering effect twenty times as great.

  Leopard turned two points to port to get Ziethen comfortably within range, resumed her original course, and battle began. One gun from each turret volleyed forth in its deafening, appalling thunder, and four 12-inch shells went soaring forth on their ten-mile flight. Each shell weighed half a ton, and between them contained enough explosive to lay all the City of London in ruins. Woe betide Ziethen with her half-hearted attempt at armour plating and her fragile upper works!

  “Short,” said the Gunnery Commander up in the gunnery control tower, watching with detached professional interest the shooting of his beloved guns. “Up two hundred.”

  The other four guns bellowed in their turn, and the half-ton shells shrieked out on their flight—ten miles in half a minute, reaching two miles up in the air as they went.

  “Short,” said the Gunnery Commander again. The four immense columns of water were well this side of the racing armoured cruiser. “Up two hundred. This blasted climate’s played Old Harry with the cordite!”

  Punctually at twenty-five second intervals the salvoes blared forth from the fifty-foot-long turret guns.

  “Over,” said the Gunnery Commander. “Short. Hit. Hit. Hit. Over.”

  Three times in a minute and a half Ziethen was struck by a ton of steel containing a ton of high explosive. The wretched ship’s upper works were shattered and flung about, the steel plates were twisted and torn as though were sheets of paper in a giant’s hands. One shell burst fair and true on the breech of a starboard side 6-inch gun, wiped out the gun’s crew and pitched the gun overside. But there was still life in the ship; the black cross still streamed out on its white ground from the tottering mast. Round she came, trying feebly to close with the enemy—just as, five days before, Charybdis had tried to do. But Leopard did as Ziethen had done then; she turned away at full speed, keeping her distance while the target moved slowly back abaft the beam. It was a hopeless effort to seek to close even to 6-inch gun range; there was no chance at all of being able to use torpedoes with effect.

  “Hit,” said the Gunnery Commander. “Over. Hit. Hit. My God!”

  The 12-inch shells had blasted away great holes in the unarmoured upper works; one had blown a gap in the horizontal protective deck. The Gunnery Commander saw her lurching through the waves, smoke—furnace smoke, and shell fumes, and smoke from fires—pouring from every crevice; but she was still a ship; she still moved, she still floated; she might still fire her guns. But two shells from the last salvo crashed through the protective deck and burst amid her very vitals. Boilers and magazines alike exploded in one huge detonation. The rending flash was visible in the strong tropical sunshine for a tiny instant as the ship blew apart before the merciful black smoke bellied out and hid everything from view. Then, as this cleared before the fresh breeze, there was nothing to be seen, nothing. Ziethen had gone the way of Good Hope and Monmouth, the way Scharnhorst was to go, and Defence and Black Prince, armoured cruisers all, sunk with all hands by gunfire. Twelve salvoes had done it—hardly more than five minutes’ firing. Every man on board had perished, including two Englishmen, the leading signalman and Ginger Harris whom Brown had tended; but of course the English ships did not know of their existence on board—and never would.

  The black smoke eddied away, upward and to one side, and Leopard and Penzance raced for the spot where Ziethen had been. They found little enough: a dead man—half a man, rather—a few floating bits of wreckage, and nothing else. Iron ships stripped for action have little enough on board that will float. Then Leopard’s triumphant wireless proclaimed the news far and wide—a welcome little victory, come just in time to counter the depression resulting from the defeat of Coronel, the sinking of Cressy, Hague and Aboukir, and the depredations of Emden. It was England’s proclamation of the mastery of the seas, to be confirmed within a week by Sydney’s fortunate encounter with Emden, and within a month by Sturdee’s annihilation of von Spee, where once again 12-inch guns blew armoured cruisers to destruction.

  Then Captain Saville-Samarez was free to turn his ship back to England, to the misty North Sea for which he pined, and the prospects of ‘The Day’. He was to take Leopard into the clamorous, bloody confusion of Jutland when the battle cruisers raced into action with Lion leading, and he was to stand watch and ward with the others amid the tempestuous Shetlands, but that was his great day. As he had foreseen, he became known as ‘the man who sank the Ziethen’. But nobody was to know to whom the des
truction of that ship was really due.