‘Bridge. Captain.’
‘Crick here sir. Shouldn’t you be coming down, sir?’
‘I’m on my way. Tom, we had a shell hit us aft, just then. It might have been below the waterline.’
‘I’ll find out, sir.’
Against twice their own number of ships, the Queen Elizabeths were hitting at least as often as they were being hit themselves. Beatty had been out of the action for the last twenty or thirty minutes; with Hipper’s ships hidden in the mist, there’d been nothing for his guns to shoot at. No doubt he’d have been using the respite well, getting fires under control and repairing damage. Hugh focused his glasses on the battle cruisers and saw they’d just altered to starboard again, steering north, by the looks of it. To head off Hipper, or perhaps just to get back in sight of him. A salvo plunged just short, its tall spouts lashing a black salt rain across Nile’s forepart; then came two explosions in quick succession down near SI and S2 casemates. He realised he’d forgotten that intention of going down to the tower.
‘Captain, sir!’
Crick, at the top of the ladder, had a look of disquiet on his normally unruffled features.
‘It must have been a near-miss aft, sir, the one you mentioned. It seems it—’ He had to shout, as a salvo crashed overhead and raised spouts thirty yards from Nile’s side – ‘didn’t hurt us, sir!’ That close, on the disengaged side and with the flat trajectory of ships’ guns, those shells must have passed between her masts. Hugh hadn’t looked out to port much in the last ten minutes, but he did so now, and paused to watch destroyers streaming up on the squadron’s beam and bow. This must be the flotilla which had been across and made a torpedo attack on the enemy battle cruisers, an hour or so ago. And the nearest boat seemed to have lost her stern gun, so that her oddly levelled afterpart gave her the look of an attenuated tug. Training his glasses on her, he saw the rips and scars in her quarterdeck. She was one of the half-dozen L-class boats that had only two funnels instead of three: and it looked, from the lump which had been shot out of her for’ard funnel, as though she’d done her best to get down to one.
Crick, judging his moment for it between shell-bursts and gunfire, cleared his throat loudly, Hugh glanced round at him, and nodded.
‘Yes. Tom. You’re right.’ He turned aft and went down the steps to the lower end of the bridge. Five forty-five now. On his way down to the next level of the superstructure, he thought that it would be as well for Jellicoe to get here soon. Otherwise he wouldn’t have enough hours of daylight left in which to do the job for which his Grand Fleet had been built and trained… He was two levels down with one more to go when he heard the crash, felt the shock and the reverberation of an explosion somewhere close below the bridge; then a sound like hail lashing a tin roof – splinters from that shell-burst, raking the compass platform. He didn’t bother to look round at Crick, who’d be wearing his told-you-so expression.
* * *
Bantry pitched rhythmically to the low swell as she followed astern of Warrior and the First Cruiser Squadron’s flagship, Defence. A grey, faintly lumpy sea, and greyish, rather hazy light with clearer patches here and there. The cruiser screen had fallen back closer to the battle fleet on account of the deteriorating visibility. Bantry was less than five miles ahead of the fleet’s starboard column and looking back over her port quarter David could see quite clearly that concentrated mass of armoured and destructive power, as Jellicoe held on grimly south-eastward at the speed of his slowest dread-nought.
His ships were still in their cruising disposition of six columns. Soon – if they were to come into contact with the enemy, which David was convinced they would not – that solid phalanx of ships would have to be re-formed into a single line ahead, which was the only way a fleet could bring all its guns to bear. But in order to deploy in the way which would give him the most advantage when he met the enemy, Jellicoe needed the one thing he wasn’t getting: information.
There’d been a smattering of it, which Bantry’s W/T operators had picked up. It amounted to only the facts that Scheer’s as well as Hipper’s ships were coming north, and that the battle cruisers and the Fifth Battle Squadron and the light forces with them had been heavily engaged.
Bantry ploughed on south-eastward behind the other two. Four miles on the starboard beam was Duke of Edinburgh, and four or five beyond her, Black Prince. If anyone was going to sight the enemy or establish contact with Beatty’s cruiser screen as he came northwards, it would be Black Prince. But for half an hour now, there’d been no reports at all. Nothing. All the earlier information, sketchy and even conflicting as it had been, had been put on the chart – by David ‒ and he’d set Midshipman Porter, his ‘tanky’, to work producing a large-scale plot of it. It still made very little sense.
Not, David thought, that it mattered. There’d be no action, for the Grand Fleet. It was too late now; he felt sure of it.
Wilmott came forward and stopped beside Nobby Clark. He said irritably, ‘C-in-C must be beside himself. Why don’t they tell him what they can see, for heaven’s sake?’
Clark shrugged agreement. David was at the binnacle, conning the ship while Wilmott drifted about the bridge like a cat on hot bricks and paid visits to the chartroom and signals office. Bantry had been at action stations for nearly four hours, now, and the only intelligible enemy reports had come from Commodore Goodenough in the light cruiser Southampton. Goodenough must have been almost alongside Scheer’s battleships, at one point, to have sent back as much information as he had!
But in the jumble of reports from this source and that, positions and bearings and reported courses conflicted ‒ confused, more than informed. Beatty, for instance, had told Jellicoe nothing that could be of any real use to him… But then, Beatty would be in the thick of it ‒ as he always was, which made one wonder about Nick: might he have been in the thick of it too?
A few minutes ago Jellicoe had betrayed his impatience by signalling his own position to Beatty; and long ago he’d sent Hood away with his three battle cruisers to join Beatty and support him. There’d been no word of Hood since then ‒ he might as well have vanished into thin air. Or – David thought, taking a look round the horizon ‒ thickening air. The light was getting very patchy indeed. Drifting mist kept changing things: one minute it was clear in one direction and hazy in another, and next time you looked the conditions might be reversed. Visibility might drop to four or five miles, or open out to twelve. It wouldn’t be the first time the North Sea’s unpredictability had helped Germans out of the way of British guns. He looked astern again. As well as this squadron of armoured cruisers, and Rear-Admiral Heath’s Second Squadron, with which Bantry had sailed from Scapa, there were ten light cruisers and thirty-nine destroyers in Jellicoe’s inner screen. One could imagine him, in the centre of that mass of steel, the fleet he’d created, trained, prepared, pacing his bridge, cloaking anxiety behind a mask of imperturbability, silence and sangfroid, and knowing that with an armada of this size whichever of the methods of deployment he chose, it would from the moment that he ordered it become irreversible, unstoppable. It had to be not a gambler’s throw, but a tactician’s masterstroke.
Or if he acted on incomplete or wrong information, a tactician’s blunder.
At four fifty-one ‒ getting on for an hour ago ‒ he’d wirelessed four words to the Admiralty: Fleet action is imminent. That pre-arranged message would have resulted by now in an alert being flashed to dockyards, tugs, hospitals, all the emergency services which large-scale damage and casualties would call for.
Action imminent. They’d be saying it excitedly even in London now, let alone on this cruiser’s bridge; but David couldn’t believe in it; his instincts denied it, he couldn’t feel it as something that could ever happen.
Not to himself. If anything happened to David Everard ‒ it wouldn’t, but just imagining it, supposing ‒ and with one’s father in France, with the big push intended to relieve the pressure on Verdun expected any day now… Even a b
rigadier couldn’t last for ever, you’d only to glance at the daily Roll of Honour in The Times. Just thinking about what could, but wouldn’t, happen ‒ well, young Nick would inherit the title, Mullbergh, everything!
The idea of that was simply – grotesque… One could only dismiss it, put it out of mind and replace it with an entirely contrary thought ‒ that Nick, having through Hugh Everard’s influence got himself to a destroyer, might well get his come-uppance. The torpedo craft did tend to get knocked about, and it was a fact that Nick was behind steel plating one-eighth of an inch thick, instead of the twelve-inch amour belt worn by the battleship he’d left. Nick’s destroyer might well be in action at this moment. It was a tantalising thought!
‘Duke of Edinburgh flashing, sir!’
From four miles to the south a rapid series of dots and dashes cut through the haze. In fact the visibility down there looked better, at the moment.
‘W/T signal, sir.’ It was a leading signalman who’d come pelting up from the office. ‘To C-in-C from Black Prince, sir.’ Commander Clark took the clip-board and passed it straight to Wilmott ‒ who scanned it, raised his thick eyebrows and told Clark, ‘Black Prince is in contact with Falmouth, in Beatty’s screen.’ He let the signalman take the board out of his hand. Narrow-eyed, beard jutting very much like a wire-haired terrier’s, he was watching that distant, flashing light. He murmured, ‘We’ll be at ’em soon.’
A snapshot of Nick flashed suddenly in David’s memory, of Nick staring at him: an accusing, condemning stare, not only judgement but dislike, contempt even, in his steady scrutiny. Insufferable little ‒ pig! What did he know about—’
‘Pilot!’
Snapping out of nightmare: ‘Sir?’
‘What’s the—’
Wilmott had checked, with his question unasked. Every head in the bridge had jerked round, faces turning to the sound that had come rumbling on the south-east wind. The sound of heavy guns.
It was so loud that it was surprising it hadn’t been audible before. A voice squawked distantly, metallically. ‘Bridge!’ It was the voicepipe from the fore top, and Commander Clark was nearest to it. He bent his thickset body jerkily, like a tubby marionette, and barked. ‘Bridge!’
‘Ships in action on the starboard bow, sir! Looks like battle cruisers and cruisers!’
Another voicepipe call: from the wireless office, this time, and Porter took it.
‘Commander-in-Chief to Admiral Beatty, sir: Where is the enemy battle fleet?’
Wilmott muttered something angrily into his beard. Defence was flashing a signal to Iron Duke, reporting ships in action south-south-west, course northeast. Wilmott began a conversation over the navyphone to Johnny West, the gunnery lieutenant, in the control top, asking him what he could see, and where, and what it was doing; and that whole southern sector of the horizon was suddenly full of ships and the flashes of their guns. Petty Officer Sturgis, the yeoman, reported to Wilmott, ‘C-in-C to SO, BCF by W/T sir ‒ Where is the enemy battle fleet?’
‘We’ve already had that one, Yeoman.’
‘No, sir,’ Sturgis looked hurt. ‘He’s asked it again, sir. Repetition, sir.’
Bedlam increasing, as reports flowed in…
Wilmott had moved up close to the binnacle; he was staring ahead at Warrior and Defence. He extended his left arm with the hand open, and said to David without looking at him. ‘Hand me my glasses, Pilot.’ David unslung them from the brass cylinder that enclosed the flinder’s bar, and placed them in the outstretched hand. Midshipman Porter, straightening from the fore top’s voicepipe reported, ‘Fore top can see shells falling close to the light cruisers, sir, but they can’t see where they’re coming from.’ They were referring, presumably, to light cruisers in Beatty’s screen.
David felt quite calm ‒ not so much disinterested as detached, waiting for the visibility to clamp down. He was still sure it would.
Wilmott snapped suddenly, with the binoculars still at his eyes, ‘Revolutions for twenty-three knots, Pilot!’
‘Searchlight signalling starboard, sir!’
It was on the bow; a distant, winking light… David called down for maximum revs, full speed. And now he saw why Wilmott had ordered it. Defence and Warrior had surged forward, pushing out ahead, and from out to starboard Duke of Edinburgh and Black Prince were converging to join up with them. Sir Robert Arbuthnot was gathering his squadron together and speeding to close the enemy, leaving the battle fleet astern. South-eastward at full speed, towards the sound and flashes of the guns. There was an impression suddenly of things speeding up, a sense of urgency and impending action developing; David resisted it, feeling that it was only a kind of hysteria in which one should not allow oneself to become involved. The yeoman was reporting to Wilmott with a touch of excitement in his voice that the searchlight flashing from the south was Beatty’s, Lion’s, and that the message was one answering that repeated question about the enemy battle fleet. Beatty was telling his commander-in-chief, Have sighted enemy battle fleet bearing south-south-west.
So now Jellicoe knew the direction of his enemy, even though he’d no information at all about distance, course or speed. And Bantry was picking up speed now, her steel trembling as she pressed forward, her bow rising and falling as it cut through the combined wakes of the other cruisers.
Arbuthnot, David guessed, must be watching the falling visibility and trying to hurry his squadron into action. One had not foreseen this, but had thought rather in terms of the cruisers remaining in company with the battle fleet.
‘All right. Pilot.’ Wilmott nodded. ‘I’ll take her.’
‘Sir.’
Turning away and looking astern towards the broad front of the battle fleet as they began to draw away from it, he saw specks of colour sliding up to the flagship’s yardarm. The yeoman had seen it too, and he whipped up his telescope. David, using binoculars, identified the blue-and-white stripes of the equal-speed pendant above the quartered black, red, blue and yellow of flag C and the red St Andrew’s cross of flag L. The yeoman confirmed his accuracy.
‘Equal-speed, Charlie, London, sir… Battle fleet deploying on—’ he hesitated, staring astern still ‒ ‘on the port column sir!’
Twenty-four dreadnought battleships were about to form into a single fighting line. Deploying on the port column meant that the leading ships of the six columns would all turn simultaneously ninety degrees to port: each division would follow its leader round, until the six divisions had thus fallen into line-ahead Finally, the battleships would file round to starboard, a follow-my-leader turn which would bring the whole line back on to their course towards the enemy. It meant that Scheer, coming north-eastward, would find several miles of dreadnoughts across his intended line of advance: Jellicoe would have ‘crossed Scheer’s T’, and the Grand Fleet’s massed broadsides would be able to hammer Scheer’s leading division into scrap-iron before more than a few German guns could be brought to bear. And Jellicoe would have the light-gauge; the westering sun would throw the German line into sharp relief while the British battleships remained invisible in the mist!
The light had not failed, after all. It was patchy, but Jellicoe had seen how he could take advantage of it. David was beginning to realise that his instincts had tricked him. Meanwhile, he had nothing to do except stand ready in case Wilmott wanted him to take over at the binnacle again.
A navyphone buzzed and flashed: he snatched it up, forestalling the commander who’d started towards it.
‘Bridge.’
It was Johnny West, calling from the control top again. David turned his eyes up towards that swaying, box-like construction on the foremast as he listened to West telling him, ‘Our own light cruisers bearing south course north-east, and the battle cruisers are in sight astern of them, same course, and in action. They’re under fire from an enemy I can’t see. Look as if they’re going to pass ahead of us.’
David passed the message verbatim to Wilmott. Wilmott glanced at his second-in-command.
/> ‘It’s going to be like a bloody circus ring, in a minute.’
David thought about it; Beatty, storming up from the south, steering north-east now to head-off Hipper’s battle cruisers and force him round ahead of the deploying battle fleet. It was rather spectacular, really; Beatty was doing his job perfectly, he’d not only led the Germans up to Jellicoe but now he’d be screening the sight of Jellicoe from them until the very last moment, and Wilmott’s meaning was clear: in a few minutes there’d be something like a hundred ships all rushing in different directions as Beatty with his screening cruisers and destroyers ahead and around him raced across the front of the battle fleet.
With binoculars, you could even see it all developing from the bridge now. The light cruisers, and behind them the dark mass of the bigger ships. Shells falling among them, and more than anywhere round the battle cruisers, No sign of where they came from; just that great spread of ships all racing north-eastward, bow-waves flaring, guns flashing. They must have an enemy in sight. And Defence was under helm, swinging to port, with flags rushing to her yardarm.
‘Defence to squadron, sir: Engage enemy starboard.’
‘Tell West to open fire when he has a target.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ David passed the order. Warrior was going round astern of the flagship. Wilmott, stooped awkwardly at the binnacle, watching Warrior’s piled wake gleaming as it flowed curving away behind her, kept his face low beside the voicepipe’s copper rim, waiting for the exact moment to put the helm over; crouched like that, he looked to David as if he was about to defecate.
There’d hardly been time to think about how wrong he’d been. It was only about six o’clock, there were several hours of daylight left, and Bantry would shortly be in action.
‘Starboard fifteen!’
The Blooding of the Guns Page 14
