The Blooding of the Guns

by The Blooding of the Guns (retail) (epub)

  ‘Good.’

  It wouldn’t do any harm to move ahead a little and gain fifty yards or so before the turn. No more than that because he’d want to put some speed on too, when the time came.

  ‘Three-two-five revolutions.’

  ‘Three-two-five, sir.’

  The farther ahead she started, the longer there’d be – in terms of seconds – before the torpedo sight came on. Nick wondered what the rest of the German ships would do, Turn and give chase? One reason he’d decided to take this action immediately was that in a couple of hours it would be dawn; in an hour, even, the sky might begin to lighten. After Lanyard had made her move, she’d be needing all the dark there was to hide in.

  But if she sank that cruiser, or crippled her, she’d have earned her keep, and he, Nick, would have made up for his idiocy. He’d passed it off rather well, he thought, in his explanation to the gunner ‒ and it was true that if he’d turned away they most likely would have sunk her. A point might be made, however, by a more agile brain than Pilkington’s that she shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place.

  The jury voicepipe squawked. Nick answered it. Wheel- house

  ‘Tube’s trained out an’ ready. Sub. ‘

  ‘With its pistol near armed?’

  ‘I said, ready.’

  Nick thought he could spare one minute, just to get a simple matter straight.

  ‘Mr Pilkington. In your Drill Book does the report “Ready” indicate anything whatsoever about that safety-vane being wound down?

  ‘Well, no but—’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid or so bloody insubordinate, then! Now stand by!’

  Mortimer, he thought, would be proud of me… He told Glennie, ‘Full ahead together!’

  ‘Full ahead together, sir!’ The chief buffer, Nick noticed, had a smile on his usually immobile features. He felt the surge of power as the destroyer’s screws bit into the sea and thrust her forward. He waited; the more speed she could pick up before he gave the helm order, the more sharply she’d answer her rudder when it banged over.

  But it would be a mistake to wait too long. For one thing, Lanyard would get too close to the ship ahead, and for another the piling foam under her counter would catch the eye of her next-astern.

  ‘Hard a-port!’

  ‘Hard a-port, sir!’

  The wheel span through Glennie’s fingers: Lanyard leaned hard as she sliced her bow into the sea to starboard.

  Already, at least the next astern and probably some of the others too would have seen her swing out of line.

  One had to hope they’d be tired, and not too quick-witted.

  Lanyard trembled, rattling like an old tin can as her engines thrust her forward and her rudder dragged at her stern. Nick, using his binoculars, saw that the five leading destroyers were holding on exactly as before: then, as Lanyard’s turn continued, he could see only four ‒ three ‒ two ‒ now only the leader… And then she was blanked-off from his sight. Ahead of Lanyard was dark, empty sea with the woolly greyness of drifting mist. He could feel the taut thrumming of her steel under his feet, the shake in her as she battered round. He checked the compass-card: her head was coming up now to due west ‒ past it now, and swinging on: west-north-west… He gave no orders, left it to Glennie, who knew his business and what was wanted. North-west by west; Glennie span the wheel to bring the rudder amidships as the ship still skidded round, and as the lubber’s line touched north-west by north he wrenched on opposite rudder to meet and check the swing. Now he was centring the wheel again. Nick put up his glasses, and out to starboard the last of the destroyers was just passing: Pilkington should be firing about now…

  ‘Course north by west, sir.’

  ‘Very good.’

  A shout in the voicepipe: ‘Wheel ’us!’

  Nick grabbed it. ‘Wheelhouse!’

  ‘Torpedo’s gone!’

  ‘Right.’ He told Glennie. ‘Starboard ten.’

  ‘Starboard ten, sir… Ten o’ starboard—’

  ‘Steer west-nor’-west.’

  ‘West-nor’-west, sir.’

  He held the cruiser’s dim shape in the circle of his glasses while Lanyard slewed round to port. His object was to point her stern at the enemy flotilla, so that she’d be more difficult to see. As she swung, and the Germans ploughed on southwards, he realised that the cruiser would almost certainly be out of his arc of visibility before the torpedo reached her. Or passed her…

  Please God, guide it!

  ‘Course west-nor’-west, sir.’

  The cruiser was out of his sight now. Could the Germans have guessed that a torpedo would be on its way across that strip of sea? In that situation, he asked himself, would one think of such a possibility? He thought probably not. They’d have first to cotton-on to the fact that Lanyard wasn’t one of their own side: and that idea would take a bit of getting to, to start with.

  A white flash, like a glimpse of sheet-lightning, lit sea and sky for a brief instant before the thudding, reverberating thump of the explosion reached them. The flash lingered, brightened, died away…

  ‘Nice work that, sir.’

  Nick glanced at Chief Petty Officer Glennie’s rock-like silhouette. He thought, The point now is do we get away with it…

  A crash of gunfire astern added weight to that question. ‘Starboard twenty!’

  ‘Starboard twenty, sir…’

  Glennie flung the spokes round. The voicepipe gurgled with a call and Nick snapped. ‘Garret, answer that.’ He heard the flight of a shell or shells overhead, and as the destroyer swung to port a fountain leapt within a few yards of her bow. She swung on into it as it collapsed, and stinking black water drenched down across her foc’sl; half a ton of it dropped into the roofless wheelhouse, soaking them ‒ and worse than that blinding, suffocating with its acrid reek: it was like a heavily concentrated stench of spent fireworks.

  All three of them were coughing, and streaming at the eyes: Nick breathed out to empty his lungs, and then held his breath, hoping the gas would clear by the time he had to breathe in again: but he was out of luck.

  The shell burst below them ‒ aft, but it felt as if it was close below their feet: one looked for the deck to bulge, split… A deep, ripping crash. It was almost like something tearing one’s own gut, the way you felt it. Its echoes rang through the ship, boomed away into the surrounding darkness. Lanyard had checked as if she’d steamed into a brick wall and through it and been slowed by it: it felt to Nick as if she was slumping, wallowing.

  ‘Midships.’

  ‘Midships, sir.’ Behind Nick, Garret shouted into the voicepipe. ‘Yes. I am still here… sir.’ Lanyard’s engines were slowing, and that roar from aft was the sound of escaping steam. Boiler-room, then. Nick thought, Finished… He told himself, hang on. May not be all that bad.

  He wanted to scream out to somebody to tell him what was happening, what had happened. But he knew he’d hear from Worsfold as soon as the engineer could manage it. Coping with damage had priority over talking about it.

  One waited, meanwhile, for the next salvo…

  ‘Garret, what the hell’s he—’

  ‘Sir.’ Garret let the free end of the flexible hose clang back against the bulkhead. ‘Mr Pilkington says we hit the cruiser under her bridge and she looked like sinking. But that was her stern guns that fired at us, and we’ve been hit in the after boiler-room, sir.’

  The racket of escaping steam was dying away. So was Lanyard’s speed. She wasn’t just slowing: both engines had stopped completely.

  Stopped, Nick thought. With one gun left.

  Might as well get her round, while she still had a bit of steerage-way.

  ‘Starboard fifteen. Steer due west.’

  ‘Steer west, sir.’

  Nick heard a call on the engine-room voicepipe: but Garret was there, and he held himself in check while the leading signalman moved over with what seemed like maddening slowness and answered it. He told Nick, ‘Engineer o
fficer wants a word, sir.’

  Now that the engines were silent, one noticed other sounds. The wind humming in the broken structure of the bridge, a rhythmic creaking as Lanyard rose and fell, and the slapping of the sea against her bow.

  If the Germans knew they’d disabled her, they’d be along, in minute.

  * * *

  Johnny West had been swimming slowly, without hurrying or using up much energy, from group to group, trying to jolly them all up a bit, have a chat and a joke and then paddle away to some other lot. He went by sound; if he heard voices, he swam towards them, or he’d call ‘Hello!’ and then head in the direction of any faint reply.

  In the last half-hour the incidence of men giving-up and allowing themselves to drown had increased alarmingly. Men seemed suddenly to lose their grip, the will to live.

  ‘Why, if it isn’t the mechanical genius himself!’

  Hanbury Pike revolved slowly in the water, and peered at him through the dark.

  ‘Johnny?’

  ‘Well done, Hanbury! And how’re you keeping?’

  ‘I’m damn tired, if you want to know.’

  ‘And that’s because you drink too much gin, you know, old lad’ West told him. ‘It weakens the muscles of the brain. I’d give it up, if I were you.’

  ‘Since when did—’ Pike spat ‒ ‘brains have muscles?’ He groaned. ‘Christ, but this stuff’s cold!’

  ‘I’m lucky, there. I’ve a few pounds of extra insulation.’

  ‘A few!’

  Pike had closed his eyes. West peered closely: ‘Hey!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t let yourself drop off, if you do, you won’t wake up. I’ve seen it happen ‒ just now, several—’

  ‘I have not the least intention of—’

  ‘Good. Is David Everard somewhere near us?’

  ‘Frankly, I hope not.’

  ‘I thought you were going to keep ‒ hey, what’s this, searchlights?’

  He tried to raise himself in the water to see better. It was like a moon rising; some huge source of approaching light…

  No moon: that was the leap of flames. A great concentration of ‒ of fire, lighting that part of the horizon, and growing fast, or—

  ‘What the devil?’

  He saw suddenly that it was a ship, in flames. Enveloped totally in fire. You could hear her now, roaring, crackling, pounding through the sea at twenty knots or more, and she’d pass close… Flames sprouted the whole length of her, from foretop to waterline. The roar of them, fanned by her speed, was like the noise from an open furnace door. The edges of the blaze were jet-black with smoke darker than the night, and streaked with trails of burning, flying debris, while the sea ‒ the waves on either side and the spreading wake astern ‒ was lit by the yellow flames so that she steamed in the centre of a brilliant circle of her own weird light. She was passing now ‒ a cable’s length away: West felt the heat of her, heard the flames eating her as she thundered by: she’d passed, and her wash was spreading, coming to them, a great round-topped swell with curling, breaking waves behind it. Close-to he saw the black blobs of men’s heads as the piling sea lifted them, rocked them and set them down again for the follow-up waves to play with. Within a few moments of her first appearing, the doomed ship was a rosette of fire dwindling northwards.

  Pike gaped after her. ‘Battle cruiser ‒ German?’

  ‘No. Black Prince—’

  ‘Oh, stuff and—’

  ‘‒ with her two middle funnels shot away.’

  And there could not, he thought, have been a soul left alive in her. For their sakes, he hoped to God there couldn’t be.

  A hundred yards away, David Everard had watched her pass. She’d come closer to him than she had to West and Pike; he’d had to shield his eyes from her heat, and lumps of burning wreckage had splashed into the sea all around him, hissing as they struck the water. Now from the direction in which she’d disappeared, he heard the thunderclap of an explosion.

  He was tired. Really exhausted. And so cold…

  He’d seen several men go off to sleep, and he’d envied them. What they’d done was simply to stop swimming or treading water, and lie back in the sea.

  They’d looked so restful. The thought that he might follow their example had infinite appeal.

  He pushed his long legs out in from of him. The Gieves waistcoat was an excellent support. He let his head fall back into the softest pillow he’d ever known.

  * * *

  ‘Bloody daylight!’

  He’d whispered it. Dawn, silvery-grey, was leaking from a quickly brightening sky to grey the black waste of sea in which Lanyard lay helpless. Mist drifted in shifting patterns and layers, like some kind of insulation adding to the surrounding quiet in which this ship, with men hammering and clattering down in her steel belly, was the only source of noise.

  Garret nodded, sharing Nick’s distaste for the approach of day. Another hour of darkness might have seen them through, Lanyard, disabled and almost defenceless, badly needed the cover which yesterday had twice saved the German battle fleet from destruction.

  She wasn’t entirely helpless: she did have the one four-inch left, and plenty of ammunition for it. Its crew were sitting and lying around it, muffled in coats and scarves and wool helmets. Some of them lay flat out, dozing. Hooper, the gunlayer, was on his feet, leaning against the shield and using the binoculars which Nick had given him so he could help with the looking-out. Nick and Garret were farther aft. There was a good all-round view from this position, and for extra height of eye one could get up on the torpedo tubes. Also, Garret was handy to the twenty-inch searchlight in case some friendly ship might appear and challenge.

  Nick had armed as many of the ship’s company as possible with small-arms and cutlasses. He was wearing a revolver himself, and Garret had a rifle beside him. Pilkington and Chief Petty Officer Glennie and a few hands with them up for’ard were similarly equipped: below decks, a couple of dozen sailors lay around or snoozed with cutlasses strapped to them. If any Germans should imagine Lanyard was done for and try to board, they’d get a warm reception.

  In fact, since she’d been crippled nothing had approached her. The destroyers must have gone on south-eastward. Either they’d been under orders not to deviate from their course ‒ and if that was the case it would suggest the High Seas Fleet was running for home ‒ or they hadn’t realised that Lanyard had been hit, and had thought it would be unprofitable to chase after her.

  The noise the engineers were making down there was getting on his nerves. He knew it couldn’t be helped ‒ and that unless a submarine picked it up on her hydrophones there was no enemy near enough to hear ‒ but it still seemed to aggravate the tension. One tended, oneself, to be ultra-quiet, speaking in whispers ‒ while that clattering and scraping got louder all the time. Nerves were jagged with the tension of inaction, the waiting.

  The cruiser’s shell had smashed in through the starboard side of the after boiler-room and exploded about amidships, further for’ard. The entry-hole was nothing to worry about, being small and well above the waterline, but the shell had wrecked the boiler-room, smashing both boilers and blowing a large piece of one of them out through the hull on the port side. The hole it had made was large, and extended almost to the waterline: it had to be plugged, patched and shored. The other job was longer and more complicated: the steampipes and other connections between the undamaged for’ard boiler-room and the engine-room passed through the wrecked after boiler-room, and a lot of them had been cut or damaged. Worsfold had forecast that the work would take him a good two hours ‒ if he ran into no unexpected snags; and that thereafter, all things being equal, and given continuing calm weather, Lanyard should be able to make eight or ten knots on her two for’ard boilers.

  They’d been working for an hour and a half already.

  ‘If we do get fixed up an’ away home, sir—’ Garret spoke quietly as be wiped his binoculars ‒ ‘if we go westward like you said—’
>
  Pilkington had asked Nick, when the issuing of arms had been in progress. ‘Sub ‒ you better tell me, ’case we get in some bust-up and you get ’it, what course we’d steer for ’ome. North-west, is it?’

  Nick had shrugged.

  ‘Can’t tell you, really.’

  ‘Fine navigator you are!’

  ‘I’ve never pretended to be a navigator.’ His inclination had been to add, you silly little shyster… He was sick of the torpedo gunner and his chip-on-the-shoulder manner. He added, ‘But even if I was a very good one. I couldn’t tell you where we are now. We’ve been all over the shop, haven’t we. With no plot kept and nothing to take a sight of…’ He’d glanced up at the overcast, starless sky, and thought, thank God for small mercies…

  ‘Tell you what you do, though. What I’ll do if Worsfold succeeds in getting us wound up again. Just steer west, until we hit something. When we hear a crunch, that’ll be dear old England.’ He’d thought, or Scotland.

  But with any luck, he might fall in with some other ship or ships which he’d be able to follow or take directions from. The first thing to think about was getting out of this hole, getting under way again. After that, one could start worrying about a course to steer.

  But Garret’s mind, as he reverted to the same subject, was more directional.

  ‘Any chance we’ll finish up in the Forth, sir?’

  ‘Not much, really. I think we’re probably too far south.’

  ‘Couldn’t we sort of point up a bit, sir?’

  ‘I think I’m bound to take the shortest route home, you know, now we’ve got that hole in our side. Could get tricky if a gale blew up, for instance. I should think the Tyne’s about our best bet, on that score. And you see, if I’m wrong and we’re farther north now than I think we are, and we ‒ as you say “point up a bit” well, that way we might miss Scotland even!’ Hopeless navigators he thought, have to plays safe.

  Garret had sighed and mumbled something in a gloomy tone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not much good to me, sir. The Tyne. I mean.’

  Nick caught on to the reason for the anxiety. He told him, ‘There’s a perfectly good train service to Edinburgh, you know!’