The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  ‘By God, we’ve hit her!’ The First Lieutenant sounded amazed. ‘I do believe we’ve done our first war damage!’

  The destroyers’ shells were driving home on the steamer now. Two more ships had arrived and, in the distance, still more were in sight, steering to the sound of the guns across the grey horizon.

  Königin Luise was sinking as they came up with her, her decks and upperworks smashed, and Kelly was aware of the first shock of war. He’d never seen a ship sink before.

  ‘They’re abandoning,’ Everley said, and they saw men jumping overboard.

  The German ship’s engines had not been stopped and she was still moving slowly ahead until, turning on to her side, she settled down and finally rolled over and disappeared beneath the waves. Everybody had come on deck to watch, and they were all chattering and pointing, half-clad stokers mixed with the deck crew and Marines. There was a cheer as Königin Luise vanished but no jeers or laughter and not much excitement, just a general quiet awe. Like Kelly, most of them had never seen a ship sink before and the thought that next time it might be their own was enough to silence the wags.

  Watched by Amphion and Clarendon, the destroyers were lowering boats now and they could see men being dragged aboard, some of them obviously hurt. There was clearly nothing for Clarendon to do and she was obviously in the way.

  ‘Have the hands return to their stations,’ Everley said. ‘I think we’re somewhat de trop here and the destroyers’ll think we’re trying to steal their thunder.’

  Bells clanged and the deck quivered as they resumed course. Nobody had anything much to say. It was as if they were all deep in thought, aware of the implications of what they’d seen. As the day advanced, however, spirits picked up and the sinking of the single little ship became a major victory so that there were laughter and shouts from the lower deck that lasted all the way to Harwich. They had barely arrived, however, when Fanshawe, ashore to pick up signals, brought news that stopped the excitement dead in its tracks.

  ‘Amphion’s gone,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘Struck one of Königin Luise’s mines on her way home. Practically everybody in the fore part of the ship was killed instantly.’

  ‘Tit for tat.’ Kelly looked at his watch. ‘If it’s going to be like this all the time, it’s going to be a bloody busy war.’

  Fanshawe smiled. ‘Particularly for you, Maguire’ he said. ‘Orders have come through for you. You’re due for a torpedo specialist’s course at the end of the year, it seems. Something to do with joining submarines.’

  ‘Good God! I applied for that years ago. I’d forgotten all about it.’

  ‘When you sup with the Navy, you need a long spoon. Until the course comes up you’re posted to Cressy, Seventh Cruiser Squadron.’

  ‘Cressy!’ Kelly glared. ‘For God’s sake, Cressy’s a Third Fleet ship, a rotten old four-piper, and she’s supposed to be full of bloody reservists, isn’t she?’

  Fanshawe’s smile widened. ‘There are a lot of elderly gentlemen aboard, I do believe,’ he agreed. ‘In fact, there are so many, they felt they had to lighten the mixture a bit with a few lively youngsters, and when the Old Man was asked to give up one of his watchkeepers, since you were going anyway, with the usual naval ingratitude, he decided it might as well be you. You go as soon as your relief arrives.’

  It took Kelly’s relief a fortnight to appear and as he waited it seemed as if the whole world he’d ever believed in had begun to fall in on him.

  The British Expeditionary Force had gone to France in a holiday spirit, cheering and singing and in high good humour despite the fact that they were crossing the Channel in the discomfort which had always characterised the seaborne transport of the British army. Since they’d already heard of the German general who was leading the advance through Belgium, they had devised a brand-new comic song that delighted everybody – ‘We don’t give a fuck for Old Von Kluck’ – and it could be heard on every dock and station platform. Despite their noise and their riotous behaviour, however, they were not all young men. There were the bald heads, greying moustaches and heavy paunches of reservists here and there, and their breasts sometimes bore the ribbons of the Sudan, South Africa and the North-West Frontier, because many of them were tattooed veterans with long service and many bad conduct marks, full of tall stories of Boers, Burmese, Chinese, Fuzzy-Wuzzies and Pathans.

  Their age and experience had seemed to suggest confidence and skill but, unexpectedly, almost before they had arrived on the Continent, it seemed, from Belgium and northern France unexpected news of disaster arrived via an obscure little town called Mons that nobody had ever heard of. Those old soldiers, their backs still chafed by the rub of unaccustomed packs, were digging holes in the ground to avoid the shelling, and defeated British companies were actually straggling towards the rear. Beaten units that were the remains of famous regiments were trudging through the flood of refugees whose household goods were packed into carts and traps and barrows and perambulators, stumbling behind army wagons pulled by worn animals still galled by their brand-new harness. Limping into ugly little red-brick Belgian towns, khaki-clad men were falling asleep wherever they happened to stop, and the churches were full of wounded; while officers of the Guards, sons of titled families, gazed with dead eyes at the brassy sky from the fields where they lay sprawled.

  When Kelly’s relief appeared, it was possible to slip up to London before joining Cressy and the difference in the place became obvious at once.

  The brooding face of Lord Kitchener, the new Minister of War, stared over his pointing finger from every wall and hoarding, exhorting all unmarried men to rally round the flag and enlist in the army, and there was a strange sort of excitement in the air that was driving young men to church to get themselves married before rushing off to answer his appeal.

  After the initial anxiety, however, London had taken the news of defeat calmly and Charley fell into Kelly’s arms as soon as he appeared at the door of Number 17, Bessborough Terrace.

  ‘Kelly!’ she yelled. Her young face went pink with pleasure and she hugged him delightedly, a little startled nevertheless that he looked so adult, so different from the boy she had known all her life, so stern, so responsible, yet somehow so vulnerable. In that moment she felt admiration, pride and a strange desire to mother him all at the same time.

  ‘I heard your ship had gone to the north of Scotland somewhere,’ she said and Kelly’s face darkened with indignation.

  ‘She’s not my ship any more,’ he growled. ‘They’ve posted me to a set of rotten old ships of the Reserve Fleet operating from Sheerness. They’re donkey’s years old, work up to about fifteen knots flat out and are full of fat old men from the reserve.’

  She gave him a delighted grin. ‘Well, I’m glad you’ve turned up anyway. You’ll have heard your father’s back in the Navy, of course?’

  Kelly’s eyebrows shot up. That would please his mother, he thought. He’d long since guessed that she preferred her life with his father away from home, following his own fancies in London, indulging his little dishonesties and pretences of importance, so that she could follow her own interests. For years, he suspected, she’d drawn far more pleasure from her horses and dogs than she had from her husband.

  ‘No, I hadn’t,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know where. And my father’s gone to France. He was given a brigade in the Second Division under General Smith-Dorrien. Your brother Gerald’s regiment’s somewhere near him.’

  ‘Good old Gerald!’ The words came out automatically because Kelly hardly knew his older brother. There were six years between them and Gerald had already left his prep school when Kelly had started there, so that they had seemed to bump into each other only at the end of term.

  Charley was still chattering away, dancing excitedly round him like a cat on a hot pavement. ‘Mabel’s dragoon’s gone, too, and I hea
r your Uncle Paddy’s back in uniform and sitting with his fingers crossed outside the War Office, hoping they’ll give him one of the new Kitchener battalions.’

  Kelly whistled. ‘Phew! What a change there is!’

  ‘Not half. Mabel’s dragoon was even sufficiently stirred by the war to propose to her before he left. Isn’t it ripping?’

  ‘Did she accept?’

  ‘No. I think she was pretty rotten. He turned out to be rather a duck in the end and she might have let him go off thinking she was itching to get spliced.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s best,’ Kelly said. ‘Being a bundleman’s not a good thing in wartime, and a girl ain’t going to be any better off if she suddenly finds herself widowed, is she? What else?’

  ‘Your mother’s in England.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Looking for a house near London. She felt she needed somewhere handier than Ireland for when you all came home on leave. She’s staying at Claridges until she can find somewhere. She and Mother got their heads together, because we’re staying here for the duration, too, and they thought it might be nice for them to be neighbours again.’

  Kelly’s mother was drinking tea in the lounge of the hotel when he found her. She looked lost without her dogs; and her clothes, unfashionable and cut for the country, seemed quite out of place.

  ‘Everything’s changed so!’ she said. ‘Even your Uncle Paddy’s gone now! Though God knows why, because everybody says the war’s going to be over by Christmas!’

  Kelly interrupted before she became too deeply involved in her complaints about the war. ‘I hear you’re looking for a house, Mother.’

  She stopped dead. ‘Of course I am. What can a woman do in London? The only place you can ride is Rotten Row and there ain’t a fence in the whole length of it.’ She gave her son a delighted grin. ‘Got me eye on a place at Thakeham near Esher. It’ll cripple us financially but now your father’s been recalled there’ll be a bit more money to spare. It’s got eight bedrooms, so you’ll be able to bring your friends home, and there are rooms over the stables for the grooms, if you want to bring your sailor servants.’

  ‘Mother, isn’t it a bit on the big side?’

  ‘We can’t live like peasants, boy. I’ll be getting a couple of horses if you want to ride.’

  ‘If you remember, Mother, I don’t ride. I fall off.’

  She shook her head. ‘Never could understand that. Always seemed so silly. We have no servants, of course. Can’t afford ’em. Only Bridget. She’s too young to want much money.’

  Kelly smiled as he remembered the giggling little Irish housemaid with black hair and startlingly blue eyes who had appeared to do everything at Balmero House. ‘You made a mistake bringing Bridget, Mother,’ he said. ‘She’s too pretty by a long way. Some enterprising Londoner’ll snatch her up in no time, especially when they find she can cook.’

  His mother shrugged. ‘Oh, well, we all have to make sacrifices for the war, don’t we? Especially with your father itching to get to sea and your brother Gerald complaining that his people haven’t been in action yet. What about you? Where’s your ship?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mother. I’ve left her, ain’t l?’

  ‘You don’t mean you’ve–?’

  Kelly laughed. ‘Deserted her? Good Lor’, no, Mother! I’ve been sent to another. Cressy. A rotten old tub. Bacchante class.’

  ‘Weren’t you pleased with Clarendon?’

  ‘They didn’t ask me.’

  ‘You haven’t been doing anything you shouldn’t, have you?’

  ‘Why should you think that?’

  ‘Because I know you. Gerald, no, never. You, I’m not so sure about.’

  It was raining at Sheerness when Kelly arrived and the station platform glistened greyly. He could see the greasy waters of the Medway and wondered why it always seemed to be raining when he joined a ship. Naval bases were never the most cheerful of places and they seemed to have their own particular set of clouds hanging over them ready to soak any wandering sailors trying to join their ships, always wetter than anywhere else, and wetter still on the quayside or the station where there was no shelter and the wind was at its fiercest.

  A few men, peevish, frail-looking and red-eyed from booze, waited alongside a corrugated iron shed, their blue serge soaking up the rain like blotting paper. They were reservists and none too happy at being recalled when they’d been settling down comfortably into Civvie Street. Recruitment to the Navy had never presented a problem in the past, but now, with the war waking up, the vast mass of fleet reservists were less a help than a hindrance, because there were so many of them. They couldn’t be ignored, however, and it was for them that the Bacchantes had been brought out of retirement.

  ‘At least,’ Kelly heard one man say, ‘the bastards float, and it’s better than being sunk in the Merchant Service.’

  Many of them were thickening round the middle and heavy with beer, and some of them were even elderly, stout and wheezing, reluctantly dragging behind them old kit bags stiff with deep sea salt.

  None of them was in a particularly good temper because, to everyone’s surprise, instead of wiping the Germans from the face of the earth, Britain was being hard pressed even to fend them off, and both services had set off on the wrong foot. While the army reeled back in confusion in France, the Navy was smarting from a defeat of its own in the Mediterranean where a German 11-inch battle cruiser, Goeben, with her escort, the four-inch Breslau, had been caught in the dockyard at Pola by the outbreak of war and had been allowed by some fatuous idiot with gold on his hat to escape through the Dardanelles, to be handed over to Turkey who were expected at any moment to enter the war on Germany’s side. It had jarred the confidence of the country in the Navy because, apart from a meeting between two armed merchant cruisers off the South American coast, there had been little to show and none of the great fleet actions for which everyone had been waiting. The German High Seas Fleet had not come out as expected to meet the Grand Fleet, which was anchored in Scapa Flow, diligently practicing gunnery for the day when they did, and frightening itself to death with thoughts of torpedoes.

  The officer who took Kelly’s papers was a middle-aged man with campaign medals on his chest that Kelly couldn’t even recognise. ‘Maguire, eh?’ he said. ‘Ah, now, wait a minute!’ He fished a paper from the shambles on his desk. ‘The admiral wants to see you.’

  ‘Which admiral?’ Kelly had visions of some of his past catching up with him.

  ‘He’s just along the corridor. He’s expecting you. I think you’d better go straight in.’

  Halting outside a door that bore no name, rank, or official title, Kelly knocked with some trepidation and entered. Inside, he stopped dead as the man at the desk lifted his head.

  ‘Father!’

  ‘Kelly, my boy! How are you? Have you seen your mother?’

  ‘I’ve just left her!’

  The admiral smiled, a big man, taller than his son but lacking his alertness. ‘Did she tell you she’s got her eye on a house near Esher?’

  ‘Yes, sir, she did.’

  ‘Handy for the duration. Be a hell of a job getting to Ireland every leave, after all. She’ll have to look after the horses herself, of course, because everybody’s volunteered for the army.’

  Admiral Maguire looked well content, and the gloom that had filled him ever since his retirement had dropped away completely. ‘They had to call me back, boy, in the end,’ he was saying. ‘Like your Uncle Paddy. So you’re going to Cressy, eh? Fine ship. Bit old nowadays, of course, but she looks well. Know Johnson, the captain? Younger than me, of course. Got a cool head, though. Just the man to look after a lot of reservists.’

  ‘Father, are they all reservists?’

  ‘Most of ’em. Plus a few cadets from Dartmouth and boys from Ganges, with a few chaps off
the regular list like yourself to take care of things. They had to go somewhere, after all. Some have even gone into a naval brigade to serve with the army in France and I gather they don’t like it very much. These chaps are lucky. At least they’re serving in their own element, and you’ve got heavy calibre guns.’

  ‘I hear they terrify their own gunners when they fire.’

  The admiral smiled. ‘Well, they won’t need to fire much, will they? Size alone will frighten the enemy and submarines won’t dare come within a mile of ’em. It’s true, of course, that the Bacchantes need complements a bit out of proportion to their potential but no one’s trying to believe these Third Fleet ships are tip-top, because we all know they’re not. After all, they’re only for trade protection.’

  ‘Father, they’re no good to me! They’ll never see any action!’

  The admiral gestured complacently. ‘Good place for a youngster to make his mark and learn his drill, all the same,’ he said. ‘None of this nonsense about small ship routine that’s running through the fleet. That’s just slovenliness.’ He rose to indicate that he was busy and that even as a father he had to bring interviews with junior officers to a brisk conclusion. ‘By the way, you’ve been promoted acting full lieutenant. It’ll be in the next list. And now I think you’d better cut along and report. Cressy’s coaling on her buoy in Kethole Reach and she’s due for sea this afternoon, so you’ll need time to find your way about her.’

  Kethole Reach was no place to join a ship, because there was nothing on that stretch of the Medway but mudflats, and the thick black smoke belching from the funnel of the harbour launch covered Kelly with soot. Every now and then the stoker put his head through the boiler room hatch to look round, as though he were wondering where it was all coming from, and as he tipped ashes over the leeside into the flat oily current, the gulls swooped down, thinking it was garbage, before sheering off, screaming their disgust.