The leadsman’s hail came up through the darkness: ‘By the mark, ten!’
At ten fathoms the mark was a piece of leather with a hole in it. Dwyer must have had two fathoms in hand; so he’d have the mark for thirteen – a strip of blue bunting – in the slack of his line.
‘Ship eighty on the starboard bow, sir!’
Charlie Pym sounded pleased with himself. Wyatt said, ‘Slow together.’
‘Flashing, sir!’
Porter was on to it. It was the challenge for the night, and he was already ending the reply on his hand-lamp. Wyatt told the coxswain, ‘Port ten.’
‘Port ten… Ten o’ port wheel on, sir!’
The ship that had challenged was flashing something else now: Nick read, and Porter called out for Wyatt’s information, Take station astern of ‘Musician’. She is now four cables on your port bow. Course will be east-north-east speed ten. Subsequent alterations of course and speed without signal according to operation orders.
‘Midships – meet her!’
‘Meet her, sir.’
‘Steady!’
Pym said, ‘I can see Musician, sir. More like three cables than four.’
‘Good.’ Wyatt told Leading Signalman Porter, ‘Make to Moloch, Ready to proceed.’ Porter’s lamp began to spurt its dots and dashes; Wyatt ordered, ‘Starboard five, half ahead together, two-five-oh revolutions.’ Bellamy repeated the helm order, the telegraph bell clanged, and Pym was passing the speed order to the engine-room; out of the darkness to starboard came an acknowledging ‘K’ from Moloch. Wyatt told the coxswain, ‘Midships, and steady on north-east.’ Moloch was moving off; you could see the froth of white under her counter as she put on speed to give the Frenchmen room to drop into station astern of her. After them would come Musician, and Mackerel would bring up the rear; which meant that when they reached the laying position in three hours’ time, Mackerel would be the first to get rid of her mines.
Nick wondered whether they’d allow him to volunteer for the RNAS. Learning to fly couldn’t be all that difficult. Vereker and his friends were a splendid bunch, but they weren’t particularly brainy. And flying would be a lot better than being sent back to big-ship life – with Wyatts lurking round every corner.
‘Musician’s signalling, sir.’
Pym getting in first again. Charlie Pym the blue-eyed boy. Now there was someone who’d be right for a battleship appointment – with half a dozen snotties to do his work for him, and plenty of senior officers to suck up to… Pym knew, of course, what had happened ashore last night and what Nick’s position was now; everyone in the ship must know it, by this time. It was more than likely that Charlie Pym would be nursing hopes of stepping into the first lieutenant’s job.
If Wyatt allowed that, he’d be showing rotten judgement. Pym was lazy, and he had no understanding of, or level of contact with, the lower deck. The impression you got of Pym was that what mattered to him was his own position instead of what he could make of that position as a contribution to the ship’s efficiency and happiness. The senior ratings – Chief Petty Officers Bellamy and Swan, for instance – disliked him; naturally they wouldn’t say so or consciously show signs of it, but when you knew them and lived among them, worked with them, you could sense it; and it was virtually certain, Nick considered, that if Pym became first lieutenant Mackerel would go to pot.
Perhaps Wyatt knew it? He might. Wyatt was no fool, behind that bullish stare and aggressive manner. Professionally he wasn’t, anyway. Might he be, in terms of personal judgement? Nick knew he didn’t understand his captain. And could half the trouble be that they were simply different kinds of animal? The Navy’s answer to that would be clear and blunt enough – and reasonably so – but perhaps for oneself it was something to give some thought to. Faced with authority in a form that seemed hostile or critical, did one tend towards a hedgehog attitude?
Nick had dim, approaching destroyer-shapes in the overlapping circles of his binoculars. The French destroyers. No need to report them: Wyatt had picked them up himself, and muttered something to Pym about them. Nick thought of himself as a boy at home at Mullbergh, and his father’s dislike of him, the long years of mutual hostility, with David the heir as favourite and himself as the unwanted lout: that was how he’d felt. And curled up, inside the defensive spines?
Musician had signalled, Let’s go. Follow father. Wyatt told Porter gruffly, ‘No reply.’ Moloch’s wake was a pale smudge in a black haze; the lean grey shapes of the French destroyers, closing in from eastward, shortened as they swung round to follow her. Musician was coming in from the opposite direction to take her place in the flotilla, but Mackerel was already where she had to be: Musician was therefore sliding into a gap in a formed line, as opposed to Mackerel tagging on astern of her. So much for ‘follow father’: that signal had been unnecessary in the first place, and Wyatt, without saying a word, had let Musician’s captain know it.
Able Seaman Dwyer’s singsong tones cut upwards through the dark: ‘And a quarter, ten!’ Mackerel must be passing over the deepish patch inside the Breedt bank. Nick asked Wyatt, ‘May we secure the lead, sir?’
‘Yes please.’
He leant over the rail: ‘Dwyer! Secure the lead!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Wyatt said tersely as Nick turned inboard, ‘We’ll remain at Action stations, Number One.’
* * *
In the chartroom, Midshipman Grant was preparing to keep a running check on Mackerel’s position, course and speed in relation to the operation orders, partly so as to be ready to give a dead-reckoning position quickly if Pym or the captain wanted one and also so as to be able to pass a warning up the voicepipe to the bridge when alterations of course or speed were to be expected.
The orders, in a heavily-sealed buff envelope, had arrived after they’d converted and oiled and embarked the mines – great red-painted eggs as high as a man’s shoulder as they sat on their wheeled, rectangular sinkers. Forty of them, twenty a side, brought in over the stern and hauled forward by winch, and each one then checked on the rails before the next was run up against it. It was rather scary, to imagine them as they would be in a few hours’ time, under water, tethered down in the cold and secret sea by the wire cables now coiled inside the sinkers: one could think of those great harmless-looking red things as monsters, evil, trying now to appear bland and stupid but ready at short notice to change into lurking, death-dealing horrors – which they would do within – what was it, half an hour? – when the soluble plugs on their firing-mechanisms melted in the water. Very different from the earlier British mines, the sort invented by the Italian Commander Elia. The Elias had had a mechanical firing device, a hinged lever that had to be tripped. As often as not, it struck, and failed to do its job. The Board of Admiralty had distrusted such new-fangled ideas as electric detonation, so they’d opted for the mechanical system; whereas the Germans had had mines that worked, right from the beginning of the war, and it had given them a considerable advantage.
Those days were fading into history now. Jellicoe had pressed hard for hugely increased supplies of the M-sinker type, a year ago, and they’d recently been coming through in thousands. (It was the same sort of thing in the Air Service; a year ago, naval pilots had taken their rations of bombs to bed with them, to prevent brother-pilots pinching them while they slept.) Supplies of all these things had been greatly helped by America’s joining in the war, this last April. But in any case this was a new Navy now, re-born out of war experience, and William Grant was extremely proud to have a place in it.
He put his face to the voicepipe.
‘Bridge?’
‘Bridge.’ Pym’s voice. Grant told him, ‘We should alter to north twenty-one degrees east in two minutes, sir, and increase to twenty knots.’
‘Very good.’
Grant lit a cigarette, taking it from a silver case that had his family’s crest on it. It had at one time been a cravat-pin case, the property of his great-grandfather, who’d
served at sea under Nelson. Grant’s grandfather had been an admiral, following in the same tradition; but his father had been in the Army in India, and had died of typhus when his son had been only three. One of the greatest puzzles in William’s mind, and one which he knew he’d never be able to solve, was what could possibly have induced his father to become a soldier – in India or anywhere else.
Perhaps he’d blotted his copybook, or the Navy for some reason hadn’t wanted him.
He heard, through the voicepipe from the bridge, Wyatt ordering the change of course and increase in revolutions. One could visualize the dark, slim shapes of the destroyers ahead already filing round to port, lengthening as they turned, the white churn of foam piling as they put on power… Expelling smoke, he looked down at the chart again, where the track stipulated in the orders had been laid-off in pencil, with distances and compass courses pencilled in beside it. He called the bridge again, and told Charlie Pym, ‘Forty-five minutes on this leg, sir.’
‘All right, Mid.’
There’d been a period, when Grant had been fourteen and fifteen years old, when he’d been terrified that the war might end before he could get to sea. In 1914, Dartmouth had been emptied of its cadets, boys of thirteen upwards all sent straight to ships; but subsequent terms, new arrivals from the prep schools, had been held back, tied to school desks and the parade-ground, while the sands of war had seemed to be running out. All those ‘big pushes’ that had been so certain to end the war: how they’d been dreaded, at Dartmouth! But they’d fizzled out, one after another, and now one wondered whether it would ever end. Certainly the Americans were in now which should help; but to counter-balance their weight had come the Russian collapse and the transfer of thousands of seasoned German troops from east to west. Some newspaper articles had suggested that it could go on for years yet.
Anyway, he’d made it. If he hadn’t, he’d have felt all through his life that he’d missed the greatest opportunity a man could ever have. And when one thought that some of one’s friends, contemporaries, were actually still at school…
‘Midshipman Grant, sir!’
The Leading Telegraphist, Wolstenholme, was peering at him through the hatch from the wireless office. A normally placid, quiet man, a Yorkshireman, Wolstenholme looked agitated.
‘Signal, sir – urgent!’
Grant leant over, and took the sheet of signal-pad on which the message had been scrawled in blue indelible.
It was from Flag Officer Dover to all ships and shore-stations in his command, and repeated for information to various other authorities; it said Enemy wireless activity suggests attack on straits by surface forces is to be expected.
Grant moved back quickly to the voicepipe. Wolstenholme was still craning through the hatch. He was a well-fed man, with small brown eyes set in a pale, roundish face. He said, nodding towards the signal, ‘An’ us wi’ mines aboard!’ Grant yelled into the voicepipe, ‘Bridge!’
* * *
Able Seaman Dwyer stowed his leadline and canvas apron in the appropriate locker on the upper deck, just abaft the foremost funnel, and then began to pick his way aft. You had to go carefully in the darkness, and an old hand like Dwyer went very carefully; all there was to see by was the faint glow of phosphorescence from the broken water from the destroyer’s black steel sides, and it wasn’t much.
Cockcroft, at the midships four-inch – which was between the second and third funnels – was in the process of detailing two men to take round cutlasses, rifles and revolvers. He looked up, and saw Dwyer’s grey head going by.
‘Who’s that? Dwyer?’
Dwyer admitted it. He explained. ‘Been in the chains, sir – now I’m goin’ aft to me action station.’
‘Good.’ Cockcroft handed him a .45 revolver on a webbing belt; a pouch on the belt held ammunition. ‘Give this to Chief Petty Officer Swan, would you, and wish him a happy Christ-mas?’
‘Aye aye, sir. An’ all the best for 1918 to you, sir.’ Dwyer went on aft. His station was in the emergency steering position, with Swan.
From the twenty-inch searchlight platform, where he was sitting with his boots dangling over his only remaining pair of torpedo tubes, Mr Gladwish watched him pass.
‘Oh, Dwyer!’
Easily recognizable, that grey head. Most of the Mackerels were youngsters; most destroyer men were young, these days. There were still some old sailors about, of course, but since the outbreak of war one destroyer had been lost every twenty-three days, on average, while hundreds had been built; it thinned out the old hands, rather. Dwyer had stopped, and he was staring up at the gunner (T) on the searchlight platform.
‘Sir?’
‘lssuing small-arms, are we now?’
‘I’ve a pistol ’ere for the Chief Buffer, sir, that’s all.’
‘Well, aft with it, and smartish, d’ye hear?’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ He shrugged to himself as he went on aft past the space where the other lot of tubes should have been. He knew what was agitating the gunner: Mr Gladwish didn’t like firearms near his mines. Couldn’t blame him, really; you only need to have one pistol dropped, and going off by accident. And you’d only to see Mr Gladwish and CPO Hobson, his torpedo gunner’s mate, when they’d been priming the things, just before the ship sailed from Dover. The gingerly way they’d handled the cylindrical primers, carrying them like babies then lowering them as gently as if they were objects of the finest crystal glass into the primer-cavities in the mines. The signal from shore Prime mines was always the last to come, when everything else had been seen to and the ship was ready to sail. Then Gladwish and the TI, trusting none of the other torpedomen to handle so delicate a job, would each unscrew twenty cover-plates, fit twenty primers, tighten forty retaining screws… Dwyer sympathized. It was bad enough having the mines aboard, let alone messing about with them. The sooner the last one clanked down the rails and out of the stern trap into the sea, the sooner Dwyer – and about ninety other men – would feel safe again.
Squatting on the deck of the stern superstructure were the crew of the after four-inch, the gun which had been landed. They were the mine-handling party now, they and the torpedomen who would normally man the after tubes. Dwyer stopped, and stirred the gunlayer with his foot.
‘Treat them ’orrors gently now, Archie lad!’
Archie Trew, who was also an AB but young enough to be Dwyer’s son, pulled his legs back out of the way.
‘Give each of ’em a good kick before we lets it go, don’t we, boys?’ Trotter, his sightsetter, commented, ‘’ighly disintegratin’, that might be.’ Dwyer went in through the screen door and down the ladder to the wardroom flat. Ammunition-supply ratings greeted him with a demand for news, information as to what was going on; he told them, ‘Windin’ up them mines, that’s what… Course, if you over-winds ’em – well…’ He gestured, rolling his eyes.
‘Bloody things!’
The young stoker who’d muttered that sounded as if he’d meant it. He looked it, too: over-wrought, or ill… Dwyer told him, ‘Keep your wool on, Sunny Jim. Steady does it…’ He went aft again at this lower level, past the wardroom pantry and store and through two more stores to the steering-compartment, right by the rudder-head.
CPO Swan, extraordinarily, was shaving. He’d used scissors first to remove the bulk of his ‘set’, and now he was scraping his lathered chin with a bone-handled cut-throat razor. A bucket of water steamed gently between his spread feet. In this aftermost compartment of the ship there was quite a lot of motion on her, but it seemed not to occur to Swan – any more than it did to Dwyer, who’d been at sea at least as long as the Chief Buffer had – that using a cut-throat while standing on a deck that rose and fell six feet or more five times a minute might involve some hazard. In fact his hand’s sureness seemed totally unaffected by the pitching.
Dwyer asked him, ‘Shavin’ off, then?’
An eyebrow rose. Swan said, without moving his lips, ‘Sick of ’aving me soup strained.’
/> Dwyer smiled. ‘You mean she’s sick of it?’
The eyebrow flickered again. Swan took soap off the blade with his forefinger, and started on the other cheek. You could see already how different he was going to look. Dwyer sat down on the casing of the steering motor, and delved in his oilskin pocket.
‘Brung me ’ome-work. They reckon we’ll be three or four hours closed up, on this lark.’ His home-work was the final binding of a new tobacco prick. Leaf tobacco, Admiralty-issue and of course duty-free: you spread the leaves, sprinkled them with rum every day for a couple of weeks or so – a few drops from the daily tot wasn’t much to spare – and then you rolled the leaves tightly into a hard-packed, rum-flavoured cylinder, which had then to be bound in a wrapping of tarry spunyarn. When it was finished and in its owner’s expert view fit for smoking, he’d shave his daily requirement from the end of it, slicing the cross-section of the prick with his seaman’s knife. He didn’t call it a seaman’s knife, though; he called it a pusser’s dirk.
Swan drew the razor rasping down his throat, and flicked lather off the blade again. Dwyer asked him, without looking up from his work, ‘True about Jimmy, is it?’
By ‘Jimmy’ he meant ‘the first lieutenant’. Swan murmured. ‘McKechnie’s the Scotch idiot as caused it, cox’n reckons. Wasn’t no need at all.’
‘Ah.’ Dwyer wrenched the yarn tighter, and snatched another turn. ‘Lose ’im, though, will we? Lose Jimmy, I mean?’ Swan didn’t answer. Dwyer went on, after a minute’s silence, ‘Always did seem daft, to me. If you got a good ’and aboard at sea, real good ’and, like – well, why bother ’im when ’e’s ashore?’ He gritted his teeth as he put more strain on the yarn. ‘I never did see the sense in that.’
Swan put his razor on a ledge, and squatted down to sluice his face. He told Dwyer, with water streaming off it, ‘That’s why you never made more ’n Able Seaman, Dwye ol’ lad.’
Sixty Minutes for St George Page 7
