It was a stump of a bridge, now, like a broken tooth. The after part of its deck ‒ which was also the roof of some of the chartroom and all the signals office ‒ was still there, but all the for’ard part had been peeled off. Apart from jagged edges, it had been done quite neatly, with no bits or pieces left behind. Nick was standing now in the steering-position between Glennie and MacIver; his head was in fresh air, cold wind, and he looked straight ahead over an edge of ripped steel at the destroyer’s bow thrusting through a low, black sea.
‘Does the engine-room voicepipe still work, MacIver?’
‘I’ll test it, sir.’
‘Well, get Mr Worsfold on it, if you can.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ The voicepipe was on the starboard bulkhead. MacIver put his mouth to it and shouted, ‘Engine-room!’
Nick asked Pilkington, ‘Is that last torpedo still in its tube?’
‘Course it is!’ The torpedo gunner squeezed up beside him. Space was tight in here: Nick thought perhaps MacIver could be dispensed with. He had a half-inclination to keep Pilkington here with him; but he had the other half, too, which was to keep him at a distance.
Pilkington asked him, ‘What d’you reckon on doin’ now, Sub?’
‘I’ll tell you when I’ve had a word to Chief… What about the midships four-inch ‒ is it still there?’
‘I told yer ‒ nothin’ touched us, aft!’
‘Engineer Officer’s on the voicepipe, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ Nick thought, as he squeezed over behind Glennie, no, I do not want Mr Pilkington with me… ‘Chief?’
‘Yes. What have you been doing up there?’
‘The Captain and Hastings have been killed, the top of the bridge has been shot off and we’ve lost the for’ard gun. Can you tell me if there’s any damage to machinery or hull?’
‘I’ve no reason to think there is, Sub.’
That was good news, indeed, and Worsfold sounded pretty cool, down there.
‘What d’you intend to do now?’
‘Carry on as before. Find our flotilla.’
He couldn’t see he had much choice, Lanyard had steam, and a gun and a torpedo. If there was action in the offing, that was where she ought to be. All he had to do was find it.
He turned to Pilkington.
‘You’re second-in-command, and I want you aft, where you can look after the gun as well as your own department. We’ll have to do something about communications—’
‘Action on the starboard bow, sir!’ CPO Glennie’s eyes were slits in his squarish face. He’d seen the start of another firework display. A flash, white like a magnesium flare, and the familiar flickering of guns. It was a long way off.
‘Come round a point to starboard.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Glennie’s hands moved on the wheel. Nick called out through the open corner of the wheelhouse. ‘Garret?’
‘Sir?’
‘There are some binoculars in the chartroom. If there are two pairs, bring them both, please.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Nick turned back to Pilkington. ‘Perhaps you could get some flexible hose and join it to the bridge voicepipe ‒ the one from the bridge to the after searchlight platform. It’ll have been cut through of course, you’ll have to find the end. Join up a length of hose and bring its other end down here.’
Pilkington nodded his large head. ‘I’ll ’ave a shot.’
‘The other thing, Mr Pilkington, is to let the ship’s company know what’s going on. Would you see to that?’
He wondered if he was being too polite; whether he should be telling, instead of asking. But he was, really; and at the moment he needed the gunner’s help, more than his obedience. He’d already gone; and Garret arrived now with the binoculars ‒ Johnson’s, and Reynolds’s.
There was no time to mourn the dead. You could only try to fill their places. As Mortimer had filled Johnson’s place with Hastings, so Nick was now replacing all three of them. Johnson had been killed about six hours ago, but he was already a name and a character from the past, his death eclipsed by the more recent ones.
‘Chief Petty Officer Glennie.’
‘Sir!’
Nick had cleaned and focused the binoculars, and he was sweeping the sea and horizon ahead. There was no clear-cut horizon: only a fuzz, a layer that could have been either sea or sky and might have been two miles deep or five. The unobstructed arc of lookout from here was roughly beam to beam.
‘I need Garret in here for signalling. We might be challenged, or need to challenge someone else.’ He thought, immediately he’d said it, I shan’t do that. Not with one gun. We’ll mind our P’s and Q’s… ‘But there’s not much room, is there. Could you manage the telegraphs as well as the wheel?’
‘Easy, sir.’
‘Fine. MacIver ‒ from here we can’t see abaft the beam. And there’s nothing left to stand on higher up. So take that pair of glasses and go aft to the searchlight platform and keep your eyes skinned. You’ll have a voicepipe to us as soon as Mr Pilkington’s got it rigged.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Off you go, then.’
Garret coughed. ‘No searchlight for’ard here, sir. For signalling. You said you want me here?’
He did need him here under his immediate control. Answering challenges at night was a split-second business.
Glennie suggested, ‘Use an ’and-lamp, sir?’
‘Garret?’
‘One in the signals office, sir. Well, there was—’
‘Get it, or get something else.’ He called after him, ‘Those recognition signals—’
‘I’ve got ’em, sir.’
He’d gone. Nick said, with binoculars at his eyes, ‘You did extremely well, Glennie. You probably saved the ship.’
‘Oh, I dunno, sir.’
‘That’s how it’ll read in my report.’
‘Let’s ’ope you get to write one then, sir.’
He’d half-smiled, with his eyes on the compass-card, on the lubber’s line shifting a degree or two each side of south-by-west. The wheel’s brass-capped spokes passed this way and that through his large, practised hands as he corrected, more by feel and instinct than by design, the ship’s tendency to roam.
Garret came back with a brass-cased hand lamp.
‘Is that going to be bright enough?’
‘Be all right while it’s dark, sir.’ The leading signalman moved round to Glennie’s other side, where MacIver had been. The space was about adequate, for three men. He added, ‘When it’s light we can use the after searchlight, sir.’
The priority now, Nick told himself, was to be prepared, to decide now, in advance of an emergency situation suddenly confronting him, what to do in this, that or the other circumstance. An unidentified ship there, coming straight for them; or a German there, broadside-on: or an enemy challenge on the beam. One knew nothing about the positions now of either one’s own or enemy forces; whatever turned up, it could be either friendly or hostile, and one or two seconds in making a correct identification could spell the difference between survival and extinction. It seemed, too, that the situation might be more complicated than Mortimer had thought it was. His view had been that the Grand Fleet was near enough due south, and the Germans in the south-west. But Lanyard had very recently passed the time of day ‒ in a manner of speaking with an enemy battleship and two cruisers, and they’d been steering south-east, across the rear of the south-bound Grand Fleet…
Well, it had been only one battleship; and as one swallow didn’t make a summer… But she might have been damaged, or suffered some machinery breakdown: she could have been detached to make her own way homewards with a cruiser escort.
It didn’t seem likely, on reflection. Would a fleet commander in Scheer’s position spare two cruisers to take a lame duck home?
It made no difference. Lanyard had no wireless; she couldn’t send reports, any more than she could receive them. There was only one plan of action, Nick told himself: to ge
t her back to her flotilla, add her one gun and one torpedo to its strength. En route, to attack any enemy that showed up, and to avoid either being taken by surprise by an enemy or attacked in error by one’s own side.
‘Garret, those recognition signals. Have you—’
‘All in my head, sir. I’ve a note of ’em, too.’
The sea ahead was blackish-grey, patched with mist and touched here and there with whitish flecks. It wasn’t a broken sea; there was just enough breeze to knock the edge off the little waves, and to whip a few drops of spray now and then from Lanyard’s stem to spray this rattling, foreshortened bulkhead. She was pitching just a little, but there was no roll on her at all. The slight wind, plus her progress through it, had the wreckage of the superstructure round them groaning as if it was in pain; the rattles had settled into a rhythm which one might have missed if it had stopped.
Something clanged suddenly, overhead, behind them.
‘Voicepipe ’ose, sir. Someone catch it an’ ’aul it in, can they?’
Garret grabbed its end and hauled in about a fathom of it; it dangled behind CPO Glennie’s head.
‘Shall I lash it to the bulkhead, sir?’
‘Yes. Leave a couple of feet loose at the end.’
With a voicepipe rigged to the gun and that tube, Lanyard would be fighting fit again. Nick thought, now it’s up to me.
* * *
Hanbury Pike, the engineer, spat out a mouthful of North Sea, and pointed.
‘She’s going.’
‘What? Who’s—’
‘Bantry, you damn fool!’
Everard seemed simple, child-like, and he didn’t appear to realise what was happening. He was like someone having a bathe for the fun of it. They’d been in the water half an hour; Pike was cold right through to his bones and he was wishing to God he’d refused Johnny West’s request that he should keep an eye on him.
Bantry was on her way to the bottom.
Black against dark-grey sea and a lighter shade of sky, the cruiser’s forepart was rising, tilting up as her stern went under deeper into the sea.
Cold… Pike groaned, ‘Oh, God in heaven…’
‘What’s the matter, Hanbury?’
The engineer began to swim away. Towards Bantry, as it happened, because he’d been watching her and therefore facing that way; his only purpose, apart from needing to use his muscles before they froze solid, was to get away from Everard. He wished he hadn’t said he’d stay with him: he was too tired, mentally and physically, to put up with him, let alone look after him.
* * *
They’d managed, half an hour or so ago, to cram all the badly wounded men into rafts and floats, and less serious cases had had to go in the water and hold on to the rafts’ sides. When they were all down there. West had told the fit men who’d been waiting on the upper deck, ‘I want two dozen strong swimmers to tow them clear and stay with them. Volunteers?’
There’d been too many. He’d picked men who had friends among the wounded. The padre and the surgeon commander had gone with them. They climbed down the net into the sea, and pushed and towed the rafts away into the darkness. West called after them. ‘Keep close together ‒ you’ll be easier to spot and pick up if you stay in a bunch. Good luck!’
Cheers had floated back to him. Someone shouted. ‘Lovely boatin’ wevver!’ Laughter mingled with fresh cheers. They began to sing:
Oh, a life on the ocean wave
Ain’t for a bloomin’ slave…
They weren’t only keeping their spirits up. There’d been a mood almost of carnival since Hanbury Pike and his party of artificers and stokers, helped by the fire brigade who’d worked with them, had brought seven men alive out of the starboard engine-room. The break-through had come within minutes of the pipe ‘All hands on deck’; they’d ignored it, because by that time they’d fought their way to one of the armoured hatches and got a tackle rigged to lift it. They’d dragged it up, and the men ‒ seven out of the nine who’d been trapped down there ‒ had been hauled out.
Pike had told West it was the first time in his life he’d seen a stoker petty officer cry. Not the one they’d rescued: the PO who’d been working with him.
Apparently the shell had burst in the port engine-room, wrecking it completely and killing everyone in there; and it had burst low down, close to the base of the centre-line bulkhead. The door between the two engine-rooms had been buckled, and couldn’t be shifted, and in the starboard engine-room the water began to rise quite fast. After a bit it was held down to some extent by pressure in the top of the compartment, but it was over the floor-plates, which were dislodged so that the ladders weren’t accessible. Two men were drowned; the other seven, before their rescue, had found themselves trapped with the gratings above their heads and the water still rising below.
West asked the men still waiting, ‘Any non-swimmers?’ A voice answered at once. ‘Sparks ’erbert ’ere can’t swim a stroke, sir!’
Telegraphist Herbert’s friends began pushing him about. Another man owned up ‒ a stoker… ‘I never made much of an ’and at it, sir.’
‘Petty Officer Toomey ‒ make sure they’ve got swimming collars on. Oh damn it here…’ West took off the inflatable waistcoat which he’d bought from Messrs Gieves in Bond Street. ‘One of ’em can wear this. I’ll use a swimming collar.’
‘No, sir, you don’t go givin’ me your—’
‘I don’t need it, Herbert, I’m like a fish in that stuff. And you should bloody well’ve learnt to swim, anyway, d’you hear? Toomey, the lifebuoys are abaft the second funnel. One each for these two men, and hand out the rest to weak swimmers.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Scrimgeour?’
The torpedo lieutenant came forward. ‘Yes?’
‘Is Commander Clark still on the bridge?’
‘Intends to remain there.’ Scrimgeour added, ‘For the time being, he says.’
Toomey was distributing lifebuoys. West heard David Everard refuse the offer of one. ‘My dear Toomey, I swim like a blooming otter!’ He had his inflatable waistcoat on, anyway. West sent Scrimgeour to sort out a group of snotties who seemed to have neither waistcoats nor collars. Everard told Hanbury Pike, ‘My brother Nick didn’t cry when our mother died. Can you believe that?’
Pike stared at him open-mouthed: West put in quickly, ‘David there you are, old man. Now look—’
‘Not even at the funeral. Not one tear! If that doesn’t prove he’s—’
West patted his shoulder. ‘Hang on a minute, David… Hanbury, a word with you?’ He beckoned the engineer, and they moved away from the group of waiting men. He told him, ‘Everard’s round the bend. Cracked. Would you keep an eye on him ‒ I mean in the ’oggin?’
‘If you think it’s necessary.’ Pike shrugged, without much enthusiasm. ‘Are we all set now?’
‘I want the rafts well clear first. Not that one expects there’d be competition for them but—’
‘Of course there wouldn’t be!’
‘No.’ West agreed. ‘Just playing safe. But I’ll go and see Nobby, before we leave her.’
Ten minutes later he’d come down from the bridge alone. Pike had been chatting to Clarence Chance, the paymaster. West told them, ‘Can’t budge him. He says he wants to see everyone away first. I think he means to go down with her.’
Chance removed the monocle from his left eye. ‘What would that achieve?’
West couldn’t tell him. Nobody had known Clark well; but he’d never seemed a happy man.
‘Come on. Time we went.’
* * *
Hanbury Pike watched Bantry hang for a moment with her stem pointing at the sky and her stern buried in the sea.
He hoped the four men in her after steering compartment, which it had not been possible to reach, had died before this. He tried not to think of the black water rushing through her. There was not only a dreadful sadness in the last throes of a great ship: there was also a terrible malignancy in the sea tha
t swallowed her. And he felt so damn tired…
She’d begun to slide. There was a roar of displaced air, like an enormous sigh.
* * *
‘Sub.’ It was Worsfold on the engine-room voicepipe. ‘We’ve been burning a deuce of a lot of oil. D’you think we might ease off a bit now and then?’
Nick thought about it. There was an argument for keeping Lanyard plugging along at thirty knots, and two at least against it.
‘All right. Chief. Make it three-six-oh revs.’
Twenty-five knots would still be eight knots faster than the speed Jellicoe had ordered for the night. So Lanyard ought still to be catching up. But one might have expected to have been up with the fleet by now, and if it hadn’t been for the repeated outbreaks of gunfire ahead and on the bows as they’d been steaming southwards he’d have been worried that he might somehow have passed by, diverged from the Grand Fleet’s course and missed that not inconsiderable target. The fleet could have altered course ‒ might easily have done ‒ and without wireless Lanyard wouldn’t know of it. The desire to link up as soon as possible with other destroyers astern of the battle fleet, which was an argument in favour of maintaining a good speed, was not entirely impersonal. Nick was conscious of feeling lonely; he had a strong inclination to be in company and have other ships to follow. But at the same time that nervousness made him glad, in another way, to reduce speed. He’d had a feeling of rushing into darkness and unseen dangers at a breathless, headlong pace; he wasn’t frightened, but he was unsure, aware of his inexperience and the responsibility which had dropped on him so suddenly. A few hours ago he’d felt a glow of satisfaction in being told he could have a watchkeeping certificate, for God’s sake: and here he was in command; not only in command in a detached situation and in action!
The Blooding of the Guns Page 24
