‘Bridge!’
Charlie Pym answered the voicepipe from the chartroom.
‘Bridge.’
‘Signal, sir.’ Grant’s voice. ‘Flag Officer Dover to SO minefield patrol: Have you anything to report?’
Wyatt had heard it. He muttered, ‘Might well ask.’ Pym cleared his throat; ‘Does seem to be rather a dearth of information, sir… I suppose SO patrol will be the duty monitor.’
The heavyweights of the Dover force, were the monitors. They were also the tortoises: five knots, and less than that into any kind of tide. Admiral Bacon used them for bombarding the enemy-held coast, as cover to inshore operations such as mine-net laying, and now apparently as searchlight platforms. Although a monitor with her twelve-inch guns should have been some deterrent to surface raiders, too. Chief Petty Officer Bellamy reported, ‘Next ahead’s altering to port, sir.’
Wyatt turned to look at her. He’d been staring out over the port beam, southwards, where a moment ago yet another pair of red and white Very lights had soared, hung, disappeared. Bellamy was right: they were about to file round to port again. It was a toss-up for Moloch’s captain; he could only cover as much sea as possible, trust to luck. The enemy might be creeping up inshore of them: or he might already have got by: or be over on the Dover side.
‘Follow him round, cox’n.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Bridge?’
Pym answered it. ‘Yes, Mid?’
‘SO patrol to Flag Officer, sir: Drifter at No. 30 buoy reports trawler fired green Very light. Have had no report about recent firing south-eastward and on bearing of Folkestone.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Pym turned from the voicepipe. ‘Did you hear, sir?’
Wyatt grunted. Then he struck the binnacle with his fist, and shouted, ‘What the blazes is the matter with ‘em? God help us what’s wireless for?’
‘Red and white Very lights, sir, starboard bow!’
Porter, the Leading Signalman, had reported it. The lights dimmed, and vanished; and that was another U-boat through. In October – November figures hadn’t appeared yet – about 290,000 tons of shipping had been sunk in the Atlantic and another 60,000 in the Channel: those soaring Very lights were like markers to German success in the form of Britain’s slow strangulation. Pym was answering Wyatt: ‘Some of the patrol vessels don’t have wireless, do they, sir?’
Pym’s smarmy manner with Wyatt could get on Nick’s nerves, sometimes… Wyatt, in any case, seemed to have been irritated by the observation. He snapped, ‘All the thirty-knotters have it, so’ve the P-boats. Some of the drifters – most of the trawlers—’
‘Red and white Very’s, sir!’
CPO Bellamy reported, ‘Steady, sir, on south-west.’
Down-straits, in fact, parallel to the coastline, with Calais about three or four miles on the beam. Nick’s suspicion that the night’s work was amounting to a fairly thorough-going mess was hardening into certainty: and he guessed, from Wyatt’s tone to Charlie Pym, that his captain was feeling the same way. He tried to reassure himself: he thought, We could still run into them: they can’t just vanish…
Couldn’t they?
On a night as dark as this – stealing away cautiously, at half speed to show no tell-tale bow-waves, dead silent and alert and keeping a stringent lookout: making in fact a burglar’s exit?
Herr Heinecke could be halfway home by now. Laughing himself sick.
Chapter 2
Dawn was silvering the sky to starboard and putting a polish on the sea as Mackerel followed Musician and Moloch north-eastward at ten knots between the Outer Ratel and East Dyck banks. Against that growing light Nick – leaning on the bridge rail while behind him at the binnacle Midshipman Grant performed the routine duties of an officer of the watch – could see quite clearly the low, black silhouette of the Belgian coast. From La Panne a searchlight poked at the sea like a nervous, probing finger; there’d be a monitor anchored inshore there, a nightly guardship with an attendant destroyer, watching and protecting with her guns the few miles of flat coast that lay immediately behind the Front – in case of a German landing or an attempt at one, a quick strike to turn the British Army’s flank. The Huns guarded their backyard similarly, but with an armed trawler known to the destroyer men as ‘Weary Willie’. Willie came out of Zeebrugge each evening at dusk and pottered the ten miles down-coast to drop his hook three miles off Middelkerke, on the eastern edge of the Nieuwpoort Bank; and just about now, as daylight arrived, he bumbled back again. Ostend would have been a more convenient base for him, but the Germans had abandoned Ostend as a port now, used it only as an entrance and exit for Bruges, the inland base to which like Zeebrugge it was linked by waterways and locks. Ostend had been too hard hit too often, for the Germans’ liking, by Admiral Bacon’s monitors.
That searchlight had been switched off. Dawn pressed up, streaked the sky: the line of the land was darkening, its edges hardening under a pinkish glow. Starshell still broke intermittently over Nieuwpoort’s eastern perimeter. Nieuwpoort itself was only ruins now. Artillery fire was a steady mutter with occasional pauses and crescendos: like, Nick thought, a malfunctioning wireless receiver with erratic volume-control. Directly east, German ack-ack guns were providing a firework display over Qstend, engaging aircraft from naval squadrons which must either be attacking Ostend itself or returning over it from raids elsewhere. St Pol, the main RNAS airfield at Dunkirk, had been badly strafed a month or two ago by Hun bombers and there’d been some dispersal to other airfields and to RFC squadrons; in any case the naval fliers worked a great deal with the RFC. But they were still part of the Dover Patrol. Eight squadrons of fighters – Sopwith Camels had replaced Pups now – and four of Handley Pages and two of daylight bombers; plus odds and ends, including one huge American flying-boat that spent its time on anti-submarine patrols. That ack-ack fire might have been at RNAS fighters on their early-morning Zeppelin hunt: pilots got up there early after pre-dawn take-offs to intercept Zeppelins returning from attacks on London. Nick, watching the little sparks of fire puncturing a still half-dark sky over Belgium, wondered whether Johnny Vereker, who a few months back had bagged a Zeppelin of his own, was with his squadron or on leave again. When Vereker was in Flanders, Nick and another of Johnny’s friends, Tim Rogerson, had the use of his motor-car in Dover, and if Mackerel was going to be allowed her boiler-clean and three-day rest period now it might come in handy.
If on the other hand Johnny was on leave, he and his motor – a 1909 Swift, with a two-cylinder water-cooled engine – would be in London. He was going great guns with a girl who called herself Lucy L’Ecstase; she was a dancer in the musical show ‘Bric-a-Brac’, which was still showing to packed houses at the Palace Theatre.
If Johnny was not on leave – might one motor up to Town oneself, take the lovely Lucy out to supper?
Intrigued by the idea – it was already almost a decision – Nick turned from the rail to glance ahead and check that Grant was keeping Mackerel in her proper station; at the same moment, Wyatt stepped into the bridge from the port-side ladder.
Wyatt had been down in the chartroom, eating breakfast. But an intake of food and hot coffee hadn’t helped his mood. Grant jumped back smartly from the binnacle: just in time, since if he hadn’t Wyatt would have walked through him or over him, as if the boy was non-existent or at least invisible.
A quick, testy glance ahead…
‘You’re astern of station, Number One!’
Nick didn’t agree, but there was no point disputing it. Wyatt glanced round, small eyes and bull-head swivelling like a rhino suspecting the presence of some enemy on its flank, towards Grant.
‘Who has the ship? You or Grant?’
‘I have, sir,’ Nick said it quickly before the midshipman could answer. He reached the voicepipe: ‘Engine-room!’
‘Engine-room…’
‘Two-seven-five revolutions.’ He looked at Musician’s stern
again. The revs would have to be reduced again pretty quickly, he realised, or they’d be running up on her quarterdeck. Wyatt said bitterly. ‘More signals have been coming through. Looks as if we lost seven drifters and a trawler sunk, with two drifters and a P-boat damaged. Hardly a shot fired from our side, and not a single report that could’ve been any use to anyone.’
Nick frowned. Quite a few U-boats must have got through, too, while all that was going on. It was difficult to understand how such a shambles could have come about.
He called the engine-room: ‘Two-six-oh revs.’
Wyatt muttered, turning his shoulder to the helmsman, ‘And yet I come up here and find you practically laughing your head off.’ His voice was low, but his eyes were vicious. ‘Some-thing to be pleased about?’
‘It was – a personal thought, sir. Nothing connected with the Service.’
‘Indeed.’
Wyatt’s breath smelt of kippers. Mick glanced at Musician’s stern and at the compass-card, then back at the small, censorious eyes. Wyatt told him, ‘Last night was a damned disgrace. A shame on every man-jack of us. The Patrol’s in disgrace – and the Patrol includes this ship. There’s no making light of it and no time for personal thoughts, Everard. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want this ship smartened up. In every way. You’ve been allowing things to slack off – and I shan’t stand for it, d’you hear?’
If one hadn’t been at Dartmouth and then in a battleship for a few years, one wouldn't have believed a man could talk such hot air and rubbish. He nodded politely. 'I’m sorry, sir.’
* * *
He thought he knew what part of the trouble was. Wyatt had made himself a reputation in the Dardanelles campaign; first as a destroyer captain, and then, after his ship had been sunk under him, commanding a naval landing-party. He’d won himself a DSC leading a bayonet attack on some vital Turkish gun battery. It had left him – Nick thought – with the impression that he was Francis Drake reborn in the hour of his country’s need.
He’d brought Mackerel down from Harwich about six months ago, at a time when M-class boats were taking over at Dover from the older L-class. This had been partly as a result of America coming into the war in April and, by accepting her share of Atlantic convoy escort work, releasing dozens of British destroyers for other duties. Wyatt’s own first lieutenant had been invalided; he’d been going deaf, with flattened eardrums from the effects of gun-blast, and it had reached a stage where he couldn’t hide it any longer. Nick, appointed in his place, had moved over from one of the departing L’s, where for the previous twelve months he’d been navigator. He’d been delighted to get a No, 1’s job so soon – particularly as he’d blotted his copybook somewhat, just after the rather startling success – for him personally – at Jutland.
Jutland had won him promotion to lieutenant. ‘Noted for early promotion’ had been the official phrase; and promotion had come within weeks. They’d also given him a Mention-in-Despatches, and its oak-leaf emblem was on his shoulder now. If he hadn’t fouled things up just afterwards – a piffling business, no more than sending a man on leave when he’d no leave due to him, but it had raised the roof – they’d have awarded him a DSC. So someone at the Admiralty had confided to Nick’s uncle, Hugh Everard, who’d also distinguished himself at Jutland and now had his own cruiser squadron in the Grand Fleet… But a week before Jutland Nick had been in the gunroom of a battleship: bored to distraction, and marked down as a failure, a useless sub-lieutenant who’d almost certainly never be promoted. Loathing just about everything about the Service: sure, by that time, that the Navy he’d dreamt of all through his childhood and adolescence – the Navy which Uncle Hugh had told him about with such pride – didn’t exist, even if conceivably it had many years ago.
And then he found it, at Jutland.
But there was another navy too. He could see it in Wyatt’s eyes, hear it in his tone of voice. It reminded him of that Scapa gunroom, and of Dartmouth. Pomposity: more than a hint of sadism: and so much sham…
But one could not afford to fall foul of Wyatt. To be here, second in command of a modern, quite powerful destroyer in what was the most active and hard-worked sector of naval operations – one had, finally, a sense of one’s own worth and competence and of a job worth doing. And Wyatt, if he felt so inclined, could destroy all that with one ‘adverse report’. He had, naturally, all his officers’ Service documents; he knew that Nicholas Everard had been a flop at Dartmouth, a misery as a midshipman and – until Jutland – a dead loss as a sub-lieutenant. One really bad report could make Nick’s performance at Jutland look like a flash in the pan, a circumstance where luck had shown him up in an entirely false light. He’d be back to where he’d started, then. A failure. Wyatt knew it, knew he knew it. He also knew that nothing was ‘slack’ in Mackerel, that she was run about as smartly as a destroyer in Dover Patrol conditions could be run.
He stumped heavily across the bridge. The wind was astern on this course and the funnel-smoke was acrid in one’s eyes and nostrils. He muttered, ‘You’d better go down to breakfast, Number One.’
* * *
McAllister had wrapped Skipper Barrie’s leg like a limb of an Egyptian mummy. He’d also given him Nick’s old woollen dressing-gown to wear. Well, someone had.
Barrie was a thickset man of about fifty, with grey hair, grey eyes and a square-shaped, weather-darkened face.
Nick leant against the doorway, inside the hanging curtain. Admiralty-issue, blue… He nodded at the trussed-up leg. ‘How’s it feel? Doc done you any good?’
Barrie said, without smiling, ‘I’d as soon have a vet to it.’
‘What?’
‘Pullin’ your leg, lad… This your cabin, eh?’
‘Not really. According to the builders’ plans it’s spare, for cases of serious illness. I use it, but I’m supposed to bunk with the others in the wardroom.’
‘First lieutenant, eh?’
‘Right.’ The skipper’s thick eyebrows were black, not grey, and hooped; they gave him a permanently enquiring look. The other thing Nick had noticed was that when he spoke his lips hardly opened, hardly seemed to move at all.
‘Where you from? Your home, I mean?’
‘Yorkshire. West Riding… Are your men being looked after all right, skipper?’
‘Look after ’emselves, my crew can… Yorkshire, eh?’
‘Yes.’ He didn’t want to have to talk about Mullbergh, that great mausoleum of a house with its seven thousand acres of keepered shooting and stables for thirty or forty horses, and more gaunt, freezing-cold rooms than anyone had ever bothered to count. Sarah, Nick’s young stepmother, had turned part of it into a hospital; Nick thought it might have been kinder to wounded soldiers to leave them in their Flanders trenches.
He was heir to Mullbergh, now that his elder brother David was dead. David had drowned at Jutland.
He asked Barrie, ‘Where are you from?’
‘Tynemouth. Know it?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘You’d be afraid, all right. We eat Yorkshiremen, up there.’
Nick stared at the deadpan, grey-stubbled face. He nodded. ‘That explains why you have vets instead of doctors.’
Barrie chuckled. Nick pushed himself off the bulkhead. ‘They given you any breakfast yet?’ The grey head shook, briefly. He said, ‘I’ll see you get some.’ He was hungry, suddenly, in need of his own. He added, ‘I expect the captain’ll be down to see you presently.’
‘Oh, aye?’ He hesitated: as if he’d been about to add something, and then changed his mind, He asked Nick, ‘Know Teddy Evans, do you?’
‘Captain Evans?’
‘Aye, if ye like… He’s a right ’un, is Teddy.’
Evans of the Broke, he was talking about. He added, ‘No damn side to him. You could do with more like that one!’
‘Yes.’ Another Evans, perhaps, and one less Wyatt. But the drifter crews and trawlermen all liked Captain Evans. He a
lways had a word for them, or a joke over the loud-hailer, and his cheery, forthright manner appealed to them. That and his alarming way of bringing a destroyer alongside a jetty at twenty-five knots while he himself made a show of lighting a cigarette before murmuring ‘Full astern together…’ Seamanship: and style… The skipper patted the dressing-gown: ‘This your’n?’
‘What?’ Trying to look as if he hadn’t noticed. ‘You’re welcome. Keep it to use in the hospital ship, if you like.’
‘Hospital ship, be buggered!’
‘Eh?’
‘They’ll not keep George Barrie laid up, lad!’ Nick glanced at the wrapped-up leg: the skipper shook his head. ‘I’ll hop about, all right… Listen – you brought a ship back from Jutland, did you? Everard, is it?’
He nodded. Everyone in Dover knew everything about everyone else, of course. One tended to forget it.
‘Yes. Destroyer – Lanyard. I had a lot of luck.’
‘Know Snargate Street?’
The conversation seemed to leap about, somewhat. But of course he knew Snargate Street; you could hardly be in Dover for half an hour without knowing it, and he’d been based there for some eighteen months. He nodded, wondering what might come next.
‘Know the Fishermen’s Arms?’
‘I know where it is.’
The only pub Nick and his friends used much was called The First and Last. It was handy to the naval pier.
Barrie said, ‘Back o’ the Fishermen’s, lad, there’s a bit on its own – a bar hid away, you wouldn’t see it if you didn’t know to look. It’s – well, you might say it’s us drifter skippers’ club.’
‘Ah.’
The skipper stared at him. Then he nodded. ‘Welcome, any time.’
‘Very kind of you. Thanks.’
Sixty Minutes for St George Page 3
