by Alan Evans
He asked Taggart, in a voice so low only the other could hear, “Who are these men? Why are they here?”
Taggart glanced at Smith, for a moment seemingly surprised by the question and asked cynically, “You mean, you care why?”
Smith said softly, savagely, “I saw Jutland and other actions before and since, a sight more than four hundred men killed and a lot of them were men I knew and liked. Always it’s the best. We’re sacrificing the cream of a generation and it sickens me. Now answer my question!”
The cynicism was wiped from Taggart’s face. He said, “It’s the bloody waste that frightens me.” He looked straight at Smith then said slowly, “When you’ve served with men for a long time — but I don’t need to tell you. I’d do anything for them but in fact I can do damn little. Of course you care. My apologies.”
“Not needed.” Smith thought Taggart was a good soldier and a good man, an instinctive judgment. But Taggart hesitated now, as if uncertain where to begin.
“We were ordered to attack —” He stopped and shook his head and after a moment started again. “It goes back before Salonika. In Flanders some regiments were so badly cut up they virtually ceased to exist, so sometimes they used the survivors to form composite battalions. This was a composite battalion, formed from men of a dozen different regiments. Survivors. From Flanders they sent it — us — to Gallipolli and at the end of that they took us across to Salonika.” He paused, then amended, “I took them across to Salonika. Our old colonel was killed in Gallipolli and so I was the only officer surviving from the original battalion. We went to Gallipolli with a strength of eight hundred and thirty-four all ranks and we left for Salonika with six hundred and two.”
The girl Adeline Brett had a bowl of water now and was swabbing at the torn hands of one of the men. He stood patiently, meekly, as she lectured him: “You should have more sense! All of you! Going mad like that! I can look after myself.” Smith believed it. Even so, she looked very small and very young.
Some of the men looked as young. One seemed little more than a boy but there was a bitterness about his young face, the corners of the mouth drawn down, and a cold, flat stare to his averted eyes. Smith noticed him because he sat a little apart from the others, despite the crowding in the hold.
Taggart said, “In Salonika we soon got a new colonel. We didn’t see much of him but even then it was too much. I ran the battalion. I’d come to it in ’fifteen when they started it, one of the original survivors, so it really was my battalion. Then we were in position on the Vardar river in Salonika and we were ordered to attack to straighten a salient in the line. It was hopeless, but we went in all the same. We were out on our own, assaulting prepared positions and under cross-fire from machine guns. The attack failed. We went in with nearly six hundred effectives and we came out with four hundred. They pulled us out of the line and in the back area the colonel came up from the rear where he’d been doing God knows what and called a conference of all officers. They assembled at an old farmhouse and the colonel rode up and told them to wait there while he spoke to the men. They were bivouacked a half-mile away and he rode down, called them out on parade and sat on his horse in front of them. He was so drunk he had to use both hands to hold on. He cursed and shouted at them and told them the attack had failed because they’d hidden in holes in the ground and not pressed it home. He called them cowards. And they stood there, what was left of them, dog-tired, some of them near asleep on their feet.”
Taggart stopped, his gaze distant now, looking far beyond the confines of the hold. He said. “We don’t leave men in the field, nor weapons if we can save them. We’d brought back thirty or forty rifles and pistols belonging to dead and wounded and the men had been told to bring them on to the next parade to hand them in. So. The colonel called them cowards. And someone used one of those pistols to shoot him.”
Smith had been watching the young man who sat alone, the only one who did not stare at the stranger. But now his gaze snapped back to Taggart, shocked. “You mean — dead?”
Taggart said sardonically, “Three shots in the chest at close range. They knocked him back off the horse and he was dead before he hit the ground.” And as Smith still stared, “That’s why they are all aboard this ship.”
Smith asked, “All? But surely only one man —”
“Fired the shot.” Taggart nodded. “Right. But nobody would admit he saw it. The weapon belonged to a dead man and there was no record of who carried it on to that parade. That’s why the whole battalion was put aboard the Morning Star and sent to Cyprus. But the people there didn’t want four hundred men who had been involved in mutiny and that is why they are still aboard and bound now for Port Said. The army doesn’t know what the hell to do with them.” The cynical smile was back on Taggart’s face but Smith watched him and thought he was not as hard as he pretended; he cared about these men. He was a year or two younger than Smith, but in the gloom of the hold the lines in his face caught shadows that deepened them.
Smith said, “The officers were at a farmhouse half a mile away?” Taggart nodded, stood with eyes on Smith’s face and waiting the next question. Smith asked it. “Then how do you know what happened?”
Taggart’s face was expressionless. “I was there, the only officer present because I had a horse and I’d followed the colonel. That’s why I’m here now: I didn’t see who shot the colonel, either. I’m as much a prisoner as my men.”
It was very quiet in the hold when Taggart finished speaking. Smith could hear their breathing, feel the eyes of all of them on him. Now he knew the reason for Taggart’s wariness, their watchfulness; they kept a secret to themselves and from the world.
*
“Commander Smith!” The hail came from Brand, leaning over the hatch. “The ship’s master is here, sir, Captain Jeavons.”
Smith answered, “I’m coming!”
“So am I,” Taggart said grimly. “I want to talk to him.” And Adeline Brett’s voice came softly but clearly. “You find it uncomfortable down here, Commander?”
She turned towards him and Smith thought she might be quite a pretty girl if she was not in that mannish get-up. He said, “I’ve known better places.”
“The first couple of days are the worst.” She too was watching him now. He wondered what it must be like to spend two days in this prison. She went on, “You are in command. Something must be done for these men.”
She was pushing Smith and he did not like it. He replied shortly, “As you say, I command. And I will decide what needs to be done.” He turned away from her and started to climb the ladder but her parting glance had told him she was not impressed.
He climbed out of the hold and picked his way through the barbed wire trampled on the deck. A party of four marines wearing leather gloves were starting to unroll a coil of barbed wire, sizing up the gap, working out how to repair it. Smith growled at them, “Belay that.” They halted in the work and glanced at Brand. He looked puzzled, but nodded.
Buckley waited anxiously beyond the wire. As Smith climbed the last rungs, he had seen the big seaman like a shadow above the open hatch but drifting away as Smith came up. Behind Buckley were the half-dozen seamen from the cutter, hefting their rifles and peering curiously at the wire, in a muttering group around the two injured marines.
Smith rasped at them, “Into the cutter!”
The ship’s master stood just clear of the shadows under the bridge. He was stocky, broad, the beginnings of a paunch pushing out the front of his old reefer jacket. He might have been fifty, no more, but he looked an elderly man, his wide shoulders sagging. He held out his hand. “Jeavons, sir. Master.” And before Smith had released the hand: “Bloody business! Thank God you turned up, sir. They sent us away from Salonika with an old destroyer for escort but a U-boat sank her the first night out. Come morning and we got a wireless. They said there was no escort available and we had to crack on at full speed. We were doin’ that already but the old Star can’t better twelve knots. Then t
he bloody engines broke down and there was reports of a U-boat in the area, and us lying stopped with that murdering gang below forward and the cargo we’ve got aft. If a torpedo hit that lot —” He ran out of breath and mopped at his sweating face with a handkerchief.
Smith was sorry for him, believed he saw here just one more man worn down by three years of war. Like Pearce? But there was a U-boat out somewhere in the darkness, the hawser had been taken aboard from Blackbird and soon she would be ready to take the tramp in tow. He asked only two questions.
“What is this cargo aft?”
“What’s left of what we brought out from England. They unloaded the two forward holds at Malta to fit them for the prisoners but the rest is still consigned to Port Said. Those two after holds are crammed with ammunition, high explosive.”
“And what’s wrong with your engines?”
Jeavons shrugged, indicating plainly that he left the engines to his engineer. “Just steamed too far too fast. The chief said he could get them going again by tomorrow but God only knows what might happen before then. Suppose a torpedo took us —”
“I see your point.” Smith cut him off. He thought of the U-boat lurking somewhere close by. “We’re taking you in tow and will escort you to Port Said. Send a signal to Dauntless, please, to take me off.”
Jeavons turned to another elderly officer at his elbow. “Do that, George.” George hurried stiffly away and Jeavons went on, “Will you leave a good-sized party aboard, sir? More marines?”
“No, I will not.” Smith put that one down decisively. “We’ll be escorting you and there’s no question of Major Taggart’s men trying to take over this ship.”
Jeavons burst out, “You weren’t on the bridge when they crashed through that wire! You didn’t see their faces! They get on my nerves. All the way from Salonika and never a sound out of them, just faces at the hatch watching you! Gives me the bloody creeps!”
Taggart said, hard-voiced, “I’ll answer for them. From now on I’ll sleep in the hold. But I want to talk to you about the attack on Miss Brett by one of your crew —”
Smith stamped on that, too. “It can wait till we reach port.” He turned on Captain Brand. “I want those men out on deck for the rest of the night. Rearrange your wire if you like and post every man you’ve got as sentries but those men come on deck and stay there.”
Brand said hesitantly, “I was given written orders, sir, and they were explicit —”
“No doubt. And you had to carry them out.” But Smith added, “Now I am the senior officer present and in the light of the conditions I’m giving you fresh orders.”
“Thank you, sir.” Brand sounded grateful and relieved. “I don’t like this job.”
Jeavons grumbled, “You’re taking a lot on yourself, Commander.”
Smith said pointedly, “Your ship, for one thing. Now I’m going back to mine.” He strode to the rail. Blackbird was ready to tow and Dauntless closing on the Morning Star.
Taggart appeared beside Smith and said simply, “Thank you.”
Smith shrugged. “The least I could do. They’ve had a bad time.”
Taggart said wryly, “You don’t know the half of it. All their food is out of tins and has to be cooked in the ship’s galley that was only designed to feed the crew by the ship’s cook and he’s only capable of feeding the crew. So it’s starvation rations and a mostly cold mess when they get it.”
The cutter was waiting alongside. Smith held out his hand. “Good night, Major Taggart.”
Taggart hesitated, still guarded, but gripped the hand.
Then the flash lit the northern horizon so that their heads whipped around to stare. Someone on deck said hoarsely, “God Almighty!”
The flash died away and the sound of the explosion came rumbling across the sea. Smith said softly, “There’s a convoy out there.” He dropped down the ladder to the cutter. Now they knew where the U-boat was at work. He could understand Jeavons’s overstrung nerves with that cargo of explosives. In July the Elaby had been torpedoed seventy miles south-east of Malta. She was loaded with munitions, three thousand tons of T.N.T., and ships a mile away had their bridge windows blown in by the blast.
Midshipman Bright swung the head of the cutter to point at Dauntless where she lay stopped less than a cable’s length away and the men bent to the oars, heaving the cutter across the swell. Once aboard Dauntless Smith went to the bridge. The cruiser was already under way and when he looked across at Blackbird and Morning Star he saw the tow tauten as the carrier’s screws threshed and both ships moved ahead.
Smith glanced at his watch and realised he had only been aboard Morning Star for ten minutes. How must it have been for the men of Taggart’s battalion trapped in the hold all those hours she lay disabled, and all the long hours since Morning Star sailed from Salonika? They had got away with it, though some poor devils had not. That thumping explosion to the north. ...
Ackroyd said, “Bit of a mystery ship, sir?”
She was. Smith wondered about the four hundred men aboard Morning Star, all that was left of a battalion of nearly nine hundred, and about Taggart. He must know the danger of his involvement in the plot, for plot it was, that could not be denied. An unknown number of men were lying to shield a murder and Major Taggart was a party to it. At the end of the day he would be lucky to be cashiered and dismissed, was more likely to end up behind bars and that was a tragedy because he was a good man.
Smith only said, “Tell you about it later.” This was neither the time nor the place. “We’ll be rid of her at Port Said.” And he would be glad of that.
Lieutenant Cherrett, the signals officer, came hurrying up from the wireless office aft with a signal he had decoded. It was from Braddock: ‘Make all speed Port Said. Report estimated time of arrival.”
Smith dictated his answer to Cherrett, then prowled out to the wing of the bridge. He could have sat in the high chair bolted to the deck just behind the bridge screen but Braddock had demanded: “Make all speed.” Why the sudden urgency when Braddock knew Smith was headed for Port Said anyway? Braddock must also know of the attacked convoy, yet Dauntless was not to go to its assistance. What had changed in a few brief hours? Smith was uneasy now and his apprehension kept him shifting restlessly about the bridge as the last of the light faded from the western horizon and night closed around the ships, hurrying as best they could.
3 — A Killing Machine
The three ships anchored in the outer harbour of Port Said before the dawn, a light from the shore stuttering instructions and signals as they stole in over the still water. The signal yeoman read them. “‘Admiral’s coming off now, sir ... accompanied by General Finlayson.’” And: “That one’s for Morning Star. ‘Stand by to receive engineering party to assist with engines’.” And “For Blackbird. ‘Stand by to receive Short’.” That would be the replacement for the seaplane they had lost.
Lieutenant Ackroyd said, as the yeoman read on, signal after signal, “That looks like the admiral’s picket-boat now, sir.”
It did. A steam pinnace was pushing out from the basin where lay Braddock’s armed yacht, Phoebe, which he used as his base afloat when running up and down the coast. Smith ordered, “Rig the accommodation ladder. I’ll see them in my cabin aft.”
The signals were still flickering out: times to be ready for ammunition and supply lighters, water tenders, the oiler for Dauntless and the coaling lighters for Blackbird and Morning Star.
Ackroyd said grimly, “They’re in a hurry.”
Smith nodded. The authorities were. The men aboard Dauntless or Blackbird had hoped for and expected leave ashore, but those hopes were to be dashed.
The yeoman was still reading but with a rising note of disbelief in his voice. “‘Reference your report of ammunition expended in two weeks to date. This far in excess of expenditure of previous four months. Please state reason.’”
Ackroyd glowered at the yeoman as if he had sent the signal himself. “What the hell?”
Smith grinned at the first lieutenant’s annoyance. But as the signal was addressed to Smith and as he and his operations of the past fortnight were responsible for it, he ordered, “Make: ‘Found there was a war on.’”
The laughter followed him as he dropped down the ladders from the bridge to fo’c’sle and then to the upper deck. He strode aft, past the parties gathering to receive the oiler, the fenders being slung over the side, the engine-room ratings coming up with spanners, hammers and other gear. Another party was rigging the accommodation ladder on the starboard quarter, close by where the marine sentry stood guard at the door of Smith’s main cabin in the superstructure. The ladder was rigged just in time for the admiral’s pinnace, swinging around the stern of Dauntless and slipping in alongside.
Braddock was first up the ladder, nearly seventy but climbing steadily, not stiffly. He was broad, solid, black-bearded, almost always stern and now grim. Smith saw that look and knew there was trouble.
General Finlayson followed Braddock. Smith had met him once at his headquarters in Deir el Belah where he commanded the army on the coast. He was a Scot, stocky, with a face burned brick-red by the sun, tough and competent, a fitting commander for an army that had fought hard and won. He did not like Smith, who sensed it. And Braddock had told him: “Because you’re too unorthodox. But he accepts men on results; he’s accepted the Australians. So don’t you worry.”
Smith remembered this as he met Finlayson’s cold stare, was certain the general had not yet changed his opinion of him.
Behind Finlayson came one more officer, a lieutenant-colonel of a line regiment, a man of Smith’s height, wiry, lean and brown.
Smith led them to his after cabin and saw them seated. This main cabin of his was V-shaped, as the superstructure tapered towards the stern but it widened to better than twenty feet. It was really a suite: a sleeping cabin and bathroom opened from it. There was a dining table, sideboard, desk, cupboards, several armchairs. Smith never saw it while at sea. The scuttles were closed now and, though whirring ventilators circulated the air, it was stuffy in the cabin; all of them sweated.
