Thunder at Dawn

by Alan Evans

  *

  In the conning-tower the reports came in. “Hit forward, sir! Torpedo flat and prison flat flooded!”

  Smith acknowledged the report, it was just one more blow, and altered course again in that continual erratic weave trying to out-guess the enemy guns. Occasionally he saw Kondor through the drifting smoke that surrounded her and saw she was badly mauled. As a raider she was finished; she needed a dockyard and that meant internment. Wolf was in at least as bad a case and probably worse, lying crippled, miles away.

  But as Thunder fired her remaining guns, there were only three now, and as Smith strove to evade the salvoes that rained down in reply, it was evident that Kondor had the whip hand. She was firing more guns, four or five, in regular salvoes, the flashes rippling down her side.

  The beating went on. An explosion right over the conningtower sent them sprawling for the twentieth time, there was a rending crash and as Smith dragged to his feet with blood running from his nose he saw that the mast had gone, fallen back along the length of Thunder’s deck, thrusting the tilted, riddled funnels to an even crazier angle.

  Garrick’s voice, hoarse and urgent, no longer echoed down the voice-pipe because the fore-top was now just part of the wreckage heaped in the waist.

  The beating went on.

  Thunder swerved under Smith’s orders and twice salvoes fell alongside, while he saw that Kondor was hit and that she had fires of her own, flames licking yellow through the smoke, but her firing did not falter.

  Thunder had only one six-inch gun still in action besides the forward-turret. She took a direct hit on the turret. The orange flash split the smoke-filled drum of the conning-tower. As the flame blinded them, the blast rattled them around the drum but Smith held on and kept his feet as did the Coxswain at the wheel. As Wakely rolled to his knees Smith grabbed at him and hauled him upright, croaked, “Get a fire party on that turret!” And thrust him, staggering, on his way. That was the most Smith could do. The turret and the men in it he must now forget. He looked again for the enemy.

  Thunder’s speed was falling away. Kondor was head-reaching on her and he saw she was starting to turn, slowly, to creep across ahead of Thunder and so out to sea. She was trying again to make it a big gun battle and Thunder did not have a big gun. She would haul out of range of the lone six-inch and then smash Thunder to pieces. Smith could not stop it.

  “Steer four points to port!”

  Thunder started to turn so that at least that one six-inch would bear.

  Reports had built on themselves to tell him of a ship so battered that it seemed not an inch of her but had been torn by high-explosive, ripped by splinters or scourged by fire, a ship that still fought with a solitary gun, that still functioned only by the courage and the dogged discipline of the men who manned her. He did not need reports. He could see some of the havoc from the conning-tower, feel the sluggish response with the ship’s speed down below ten knots and falling still.

  She was dying beneath his feet.

  XVI

  When the hit smashed the mast below Garrick it threw him up in the air to fall on his back in the fore-top, that was itself already falling. For a second it hung as stays parted, then it fell and Garrick fell with it. He clung on with arms wrapped around the mast as the fore-top smashed against the funnel and then on to the boat-deck. He was hurled loose to roll and almost plunge the ten feet to the upper deck but he grabbed half-dazed for handhold, found one and held and checked that rolling as he hung on the edge.

  He was winded, bruised, disorientated. His left arm hurt and he could not move it. He collected his scattered thoughts slowly but with instinctive sense of priority realised his danger out there on the boat-deck where splinters whined with every hit that Thunder took. So he rolled over the edge, this time of his own volition and at his own speed, lowered to the length of his good arm and dropped to the deck. His legs gave under him and he collapsed in that illusion of shelter as Thunder was hit forward.

  Flame reached back a long tongue to lick at the conningtower, blinding him. When he opened his eyes he was staring down at the deck below his face, clinging to it. His legs felt numb, useless. He rolled over and rubbed at them, flexed them, until he felt the numbness running away and instead the pain of a huge bruise across the backs of his knees. He tried to stand and succeeded at the third attempt. He had to reach the Captain. He took a step and Thunder was hit aft and he skidded once more across the deck. He climbed to his feet blaspheming, sobbing at the pain in his arm then stopped and stood with breath held. Then he turned and started to stumble aft, felt the shock and slam of a six-inch firing and thought that there was one gun still firing, and then somehow broke into a shambling trot.

  The engine …

  *

  Albrecht’s little party consisted of Gabriel, the sick-berth Petty Officer, and Purkiss, with half-a-dozen cooks detailed as assistants and gruesomely, the butcher. Through the first few minutes of the action they waited scattered around the sick-bay. The ventilation was still working then and the air was tolerably clean but they sweated. The scuttles were closed so they could see nothing of the dark world outside. They rocked and braced themselves as Thunder heeled and rolled in those tight turns and shuddered as her guns fired and jerked at the nerves of all of them.

  They waited, Albrecht with hands resting on the operating table, shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbows. His eyes checked once again the knives and saws, the gag and the drop-bottles of chloroform and ether.

  Until Thunder shook to shock that was not recoil and a crash that was no discharge. She had been hit.

  The horror began. The casualties came down; vicious splinter wounds, the flesh cloven to the bone; hideous burns. Albrecht saw the shock on the faces of his raw amateurs and even, carefully concealed but obvious in its stiff-faced absence, on Gabriel and Purkiss. This was new to all of them. Albrecht seized on his expression of professional detachment and stamped it on his face and on his mind. Feeling he would banish until later when it would hurt no one but himself. From now until it was over he would not feel. It was a determination hardly held.

  The trickle of casualties became a stream, the wounds more terrible, the task impossible. The sick-bay filled as Albrecht operated with Gabriel’s assistance, Purkiss stitched and treated and the amateurs wound on dressings. As the ship rocked and lurched around them the light flickered and returned, went out and gave way to the emergency lighting. The ventilator sucked down smoke and fumes now, and vomit added to the stench. The stream of shattered men became a river, overflowing the cots and carpeting the deck with their bodies.

  Then the firing ceased. Albrecht thought, ‘Maybe he’s surrendered. He must have surrendered.’ But he did not believe it. Or was Smith dead? Were all of them dead up there — it was incredible that they should survive — were all the survivors here, around him in this abattoir?

  Looking up for an instant he saw Daddy Horsfall and a stoker black with coal dust stumble in, a body between them. They found a space and carefully, gently laid him down and Purkiss went to them.

  Albrecht called, “Horsfall!”

  He came over, looked once, quickly, at the thing on the table then up at Albrecht. Who asked, “Has the action ended?”

  “Dunno, sir.”

  “If it has I want to move out of this. Find out what you can: I want a place with light and air —” Thunder came out of a turn and the smoke and opened fire. The ship shook. Albrecht finished: “— as soon as it’s over.’’

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Daddy went away, thinking: ‘You’ll be bloody lucky, old cock. D’yer suppose some referee’ll blow fer time? More like the first you’ll know’ll be the water round your balls.’

  Albrecht worked on. The hit just forward sent him to the deck and Gabriel sprawling, clawing over the table to hold the latest victim from following the surgeon. The emergency lighting failed totally. Gabriel produced a torch then others flicked on and bobbed around them. The ship still shook but Albrecht knew his shaking c
ame from inside now and clamped down on that weakness to keep his hands steady until the job was done. And the next one. And the next …

  Until he stopped. Everything stopped. He stared across at Gabriel, similarly frozen, as the sick light of the torches made greasy yellow masks of their faces.

  Gabriel said dully, “Stopped, sir.” And: “Engines have stopped, sir.”

  *

  Gibb had worked lost to the world outside the clanging, reeking turret. Fletcher, and the trainer and the layer through their telescopes, saw something: smoke, spray, a blurred and lurching, distant target that was lost, seen and lost again. Everyone else sweated in ignorance of how the battle went. Until they were hit.

  Gibb returned to hazy half-consciousness to realise numbly that a great weight lay across his legs, pinning him to the deck. He had been hurled against the side of the turret and lay there. Now besides fumes, smoke rolled in the turret and flame danced. Hit in the instant of loading, the shell lay on the deck below the open breech and the charge was scattered around the turret and blazed in a dozen places. It blazed around Gibb. The crew, like the charge, were tossed about the turret. Through weeping eyes he saw that the weight on his legs was Farmer Bates.

  He had to move. He shoved feebly at Farmer’s bulk but could not shift it. He choked on fumes and then he saw the figure that blundered through the smoke and stooped over him. He recognised him by the bandage. Rattray glared at him. He carried a bucket of sand and he dumped it on a flaming fragment of charge. Then he knelt and rolled Farmer Bates away, worked a hand into Gibb’s collar and dragged him across the turret.

  Gibb’s legs hurt him. They screamed with pain at the slightest movement and he almost fainted again on the rough passage across the turret. At the door Rattray let him down. The door was jammed and Rattray had to kick at it until it swung heavily open. He fell out on to the deck, scrambled around on hands and knees and hauled Gibb out after him. Still-on all fours he dragged him clear of the turret to lay him down by the conning-tower, then collapsed beside him.

  Rattray lay for a full minute, chest heaving, coughing, eyes narrowed on Gibb, then he pushed up on his hands and crawled back to the turret and in. Gibb saw him standing, a bucket in his hands, and saw another flame doused. When Rattray came out again he brought Bates with him.

  After another minute of retching and coughing Rattray went to the turret again and Gibb watched him, vague in the smoke, before his eyes closed. He slumped against the conning-tower and sucked in the air that was tainted with smoke on the deck of this smoke-wreathed ship, but sweet compared to the murderous reek in the turret. When he opened his eyes again smoke still oozed from the turret but there was no longer the flicker of flame. Rattray did not come out.

  He looked beyond the turret and saw the enemy cruiser and the flashes along her hull and he knew that another salvo had been fired at Thunder, at him.

  He tried to get away from it, dragging his body around the conning-tower and somehow dragging Farmer Bates as well. He cried at the pain in his legs but strove frantically for shelter. As he went the random thought flicked through his mind that Thunder had not fired a gun for a minute or more, but when he reached the dubious shelter to port of the conning-tower, and slumped there with Farmer beside him, he felt and heard the thump and bang of a six-inch firing and thought, ‘We’re not finished yet.’

  But he knew he was finished.

  He should try, somehow, to reach the sick-bay but he was just too tired. Somebody might find him and Farmer and take them there. He doubted it but he could do nothing about it.

  He wondered if there was a sick-bay any longer. He could see no one forward of the conning-tower. No fire party. Young Mr. Wakely lay not far away, scalp bloody and eyes closed. He still breathed. Gibb could see the rise and fall of his chest, would have liked to help him but he just could not move.

  Thunder was hit as the salvo fell, the deck lifted beneath him and splinters whanged and whined around the conningtower. As he started to breathe again a seaman’s sense warned him that something was amiss. He groped for it, woolly-minded and then it came to him: the engines had stopped.

  *

  Just feet way, Smith felt the heart stop, as they all did. Now Thunder lay inert to be destroyed at will.

  Another salvo shrieked in.

  *

  Nobby Clark, eye glued to the layer’s telescope, squeezed the trigger and the gun recoiled and spat flame, the smoke blew back and fumes swirled. The gun’s crew at his back rocked to the recoil, recovered then fell yet again as Thunder was hit.

  Nobby rubbed at his forehead where it had slammed against the telescope and snarled back at them, “Come on, you lot! They’ve just dropped another brick on us. Let’s ’ave another one for them!” And under his breath: Bastard’s too bloody good!

  He held that breath, feeling the heart-stop, and the sightsetter croaked, “Engines have stopped.”

  Nobby sighed. Oh, Christ. He bellowed, “Where’s that flaming round?” He half-fell from the layers seat, stumbled back to the hoist and bawled down into the darkness, “Where’s the ammunition? What’re you doing down there, for Gawd’s sake?”

  There was silence, only the ringing in his sound-battered ears, then he heard movement in the passage below and saw at the bottom of the hoist a face turned up to him, just a smudge, unrecognisable under the filth and in the gloom but the voice was unmistakable. It came up, gravelly, calm, “Noisy bastard, ain’t you.” Burton the indestructible.

  “Just give us the round,”

  The hoist creaked and the round came up, was rammed. The charge was inserted. As the breech clanged shut Nobby slipped back into his seat, rubbed at blood-shot eyes and peered through the telescope again. This was one of the main deck guns, close to the waterline, and unthinking he muttered another old jest of Thunder’s crew: “Like being in a submarine!”

  He could see the cruiser as a ghost ship almost hidden by the smoke she made and trailed; he could see she was burning, great gouts of flame leaping through holes in her hull. He thought that Thunder was sinking but she had savaged the cruiser. Or Smith had. Got the first one in and a few more. Like he laid for them down some dark alley and turned them over afore they could help themselves.

  He laid the gun. The way had fallen off Thunder and she was still in the water so that he was firing from a rock-steady platform. He squeezed the trigger.

  Recoil. Flame and smoke and fumes.

  With his eye glued again to the telescope, watching, he ordered automatically, “Load!”

  “No bloody round to load.”

  He heard them shouting huskily down the black steel well of the hoist.

  It was now too terribly easy to watch. Thunder lay still, dead still, so that he and the trainer kept the ship in the scopes easily, hardly touching the wheels. Thunder was a sitting target and they both knew it.

  He saw the flash on the hull of the distant ship and thought, ‘Hit her —’

  Blinded, he recoiled from the telescope, hands to his eyes. A flash like a great burning sun had blotted out the cruiser. He rubbed at his eyes, blinked at the wheeling lights. The explosion came rocking across the sea in great shock waves and he clawed at the telescope, pulled his watery eye to it, spun the wheel till the gun was laid and he glared at the cruiser. A ball of smoke climbed up from the cruiser, rolled up and up, shot with sparks and debris soared in that smoke, soared and then fell.

  He whispered, “She’s blown up.”

  Kondor sank.

  XVII

  Sunlight sparked on a quiet sea. Smith stood forward of the conning-tower, clear of the twisted wreckage of the bridge. He was numbed. The deck on which he stood was unrecognisable as that of any ship let alone his. Forward of him the turret smoked thinly, the barrel of the gun askew; the fore part of the ship was a moonscape of craters. Aft was a scene of tangled wreckage laced with licking pools of flame fought by men who stumbled over and around the wreckage, weaving like drunken men. It was a cat’s-cradle of twisted
steel, riven plates. Of the three funnels remaining to Thunder only one stood, riddled. The two aftermost had fallen in on each other, joined by the mast and the whole steel mountain sagged over the port side, canting the deck. She was down by the stern.

  Garrick was alive. His face was streaked with black blood from his scalp, one arm hung limp and his face was drawn with pain but he had reported and returned to his duty. So had Davies, his boiler-suit half-burned from him, his grizzled hair singed. And the long Miles, who seemed to bear the mark of every fire aboard.

  And Smith had gone to see for himself. The steering compartment was wrecked and flooded; she was flooded right forward to the engine room bulkhead. She was also flooded in several compartments forward. There was no power at all.

  Davies summed it up, hugely understated the obvious: “It’s a dockyard job.”

  That meant a tow. No doubt a tug would come, hurrying, a vulture. It meant internment. For the ship and her crew, for Smith himself.

  But the fires were under control and Thunder was not sinking.

  Wolf was sinking.

  They could see her by squinting red-weary eyes against that sun that was still low, across the miles of sea. Smith, with his glasses, could see her better. He looked again and again during the swift-flying minutes of his tour of inspection. A man here and there would lift his head to pause and breathe and stare before working again. Watching as she sank. They were all still, watching, when her stern lifted and her bow went under and she slid down. A rush of steam, and smoke from the funnels hung in a spreading pall like a shroud.

  It covered the men in the water. Smith could not see them with the glasses but they would be there. There were no boats to be seen and Smith had none to send. The pinnace had crabbed alongside to weak cheers, Manton at the wheel and all hands bailing. When Manton stood swaying before Smith he had explained, “One dropped rather close, sir.” She leaked in a dozen places and now she hung in the water, not floating, where they had made her fast at Thunder’s side. She was no more seaworthy than a colander.