by Max Hennessy
Looking at his watch, he realised it had stopped exactly an hour after Aboukir had been hit. Only Cressy had launched her boats and the other two ships had gone down with nothing more in the water than a cutter or two. All round him were struggling men and he began to move among them, calming them, telling them not to try too hard, but to grab something that would float, and kick with their legs.
‘It’ll help keep you warm,’ he panted, ‘and it’s too bloody far to swim to England from here.’
A few weak grins answered him and some undefeated spirit yelled ‘Fuck the Kaiser!’ Treading water, he stared around him, unable to believe that three great armoured cruisers had disappeared so quickly. Gasping, shouting men were fighting their way through the wreckage to grab at anything substantial enough to float, trying as they swam to divest themselves of seaboots and the heavy wool clothing that was dragging them down into the darkness, and there were screams as huge spars, freed below water, shot to the surface to break limbs and backs.
Exposure was already taking its toll and the stokers, who had rushed on deck from the overheated confines of the boiler room, were the first to succumb, lying back in the water as if going to sleep. A headless body drifted past, and Kelly saw two Dartmouth boys, neither more than fifteen, swimming desperately towards a raft, terror in their eyes as they breasted the corpses in their path. One of them was Boyle and, heading for them, he grabbed him and towed him to a lattice-work target that had floated free as the ship sank. A crowd of sailors clung to it and he pushed them aside and handed the boy over to a bearded petty officer before setting off back for the other. By the time he arrived at the spot where he’d seen him, however, there was no sign of him.
The water seemed to be crowded with men clinging to withy fenders and Kelly passed the ship’s surgeon clutching the top of a small table and the chaplain hanging on to a lifebuoy. Beside him was the engineer commander, gasping in agony from two broken legs. Some of the swimmers seemed to have given up the ghost already and he called to them as he pushed among them, ‘Come on, you chaps, who’s for a dip?’ and a few of them managed a cheer and struck out for floating wreckage.
Moving away, struggling to remove his clothing so he could swim, he found a life raft and climbed aboard. As other men arrived, he tried to organise it so that wounded and injured could be laid flat on it while the unwounded clung to the sides. As more appeared, it was clear the raft couldn’t hold them all and he went over the side again to organise groups of men to cling to floating planks and spars.
How long he was in the water he didn’t know but eventually someone shouted that he could see a mast and Kelly saw a Dutch fishing smack to windward. Immediately, the men grouped round the raft started singing – that compelling hymn all sailors demanded, sometimes in cynical enjoyment when securely shorebound, but always somehow with the feeling at the back of their minds that its words were their appeal to the Almighty not to forget them.
‘Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave…’
The tune welled up stronger and, driven by its plea, Kelly set off swimming towards the lifting mast. As it drew nearer, he became aware that he was surrounded by dead bodies that carpeted the surface of the sea in grisly groups. They were bent over the spars and fragments of splintered wreckage to which they clung or had lashed themselves for safety, some of them stokers who had died blinded or sobbing with pain after being enveloped in a scalding miasma of steam. Shouting and swimming alternately, he pushed through the crowding bodies until he caught the attention of the crew of the smack at last and a small boat was launched to drag him aboard.
Soon afterwards, two small Dutch steamers and an English trawler arrived and began to haul the dead and dying on deck. They were all practically naked and some were so exhausted that, with the rolling, it was impossible to lift them aboard and a tackle had to be hoisted out. The Dartmouth boy, Boyle, was among those huddled on deck and as Kelly handed him his own mug of tea, he gave him a grateful look and drank, only to be promptly sick into the scuppers. Unaware that all he wore was his underwear and his uniform cap, Kelly nagged the smack skipper to put him aboard the British trawler, where Cressy’s engineer commander lay on the deck, his broken legs at an odd angle, the ship’s chaplain alongside him.
He looked up as he saw Kelly. ‘Hello, my boy,’ he said. ‘I was watching you there with that raft. That was splendid work you did,’
The trawler was crowded now but no one seemed to be angry except Kelly. Poade appeared, covered with oil but still enthusiastic and, like so many others, apparently regarding the sinking as a good sporting event.
‘Bloody hard luck,’ he said. ‘And jolly well played, the Hun!’
Kelly turned on him furiously. ‘Hard luck be damned,’ he snorted. ‘And bugger this “Jolly well played” nonsense! We got what we asked for! It was too damn silly for words waiting there like that to be torpedoed!’
‘You couldn’t leave all those men to drown!’
‘By not leaving ’em, we added another seven hundred to the score!’
It was mid-morning when Lowestoft, flying Tyrwhitt’s broad pendant, arrived, and the survivors on the trawler were pushed aboard the destroyer, Malice. Someone handed Kelly a cup of cocoa and he found himself staring into a familiar face.
‘Kimister!’
‘Ginger Maguire! Were you in one of them? The last I heard of you, you were in Clarendon.’
‘I’ve had rather a varied career since then,’ Kelly growled.
Kimister’s expression was one of mingled thankfulness and envy. He was never sure quite how he wished to be treated by the war, whether he wanted to be kept safely out of danger or be flung into the middle of the fray so he could find out about himself. Since he was very doubtful about how he’d behave if he were called on to prove himself, he was grateful that so far he’d not been involved in anything very risky. His ship had just arrived from the West Indies and he was still suffering from a certain amount of anxiety because Tyrwhitt, alone among the British admirals, seemed to be showing any eagerness to get at the Germans.
He waved a hand. ‘Look, come to my cabin. I can fit you up with my spare uniform.’
‘You don’t have to.’
Kimister smiled. ‘You stopped Verschoyle bullying me lots of times,’ he said. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have packed the whole thing in. I often thought in those days I wasn’t cut out for the Navy.’
‘What happened to Verschoyle anyway?’
Kimister’s expression changed. He had always been terrified of Verschoyle as a boy and now as a man he still was. Once it had been Verschoyle’s fists, now quite simply it was his tongue.
‘He’s at Gib, lucky devil,’ he said.
Kelly was unimpressed by Verschoyle’s luck. ‘I bet he’s crawling round the admiral,’ he said.
By the time they disembarked at Harwich, Kelly was looking reasonably respectable again in Kimister’s second-best uniform, but most of the men around him were shoeless, and still in shirts, pyjamas and underwear, clutching blankets or sacks to them. A few wore white canvas trousers and navy issue sweaters and a lot of the officers had saved their thick llama watch coats, but many wore nothing underneath.
The Great Eastern Hotel had been commandeered as a hospital and all those who could stand up and walk lined up for steaming baths. Already the news had got around the town, and outside the building and in the lobby women waited, weeping or frozen-faced, to hear what had happened to their men. Other women were handing out mugs of tea and cocoa laced with rum.
As Kelly shared his mug with a shivering grey-faced Dartmouth cadet, his father appeared. ‘Thank God you’re all right, my boy!’ he said. ‘What happened?’
Kelly turned an angry face towards him. ‘Some damned fool at the Admiralty left us out there like sitting ducks,’ he said. ‘They picked us of
f one by one.’
‘Cruisers?’
‘Cruisers be damned, Father! Submarines.’
‘Rubbish, boy.’ Admiral Maguire frowned. ‘Submarines can’t have done all that damage!’
Kelly stared at him. Up to adolescence, to George Kelly Maguire, God had been represented on earth by his father, a vague, gold-encrusted minor deity smelling of leather and tobacco and fine soap. When he was at home he had administered the law somewhere not far below Heaven, hearing everything, seeing everything, missing nothing; while the rest of the family, the dogs and the servants had hovered in the depths with nothing to lose but their chains. Now he could only regard him as a middle-aged, not very bright naval officer who had been indulged by his profession for far too long.
‘Submarines, Father,’ he insisted. ‘And I dare bet, just one.’
Some idea of the size of the disaster was filtering through now. Nearly fifteen hundred men had died within an hour and the war had come shatteringly home to the Navy. Weaned on the exploits of Drake and Nelson, the disaster seemed to have stunned everybody.
A few cheerful spirits still managed to smile. ‘One thing,’ Kelly heard a half-naked gunner say. ‘We’ll get survivors’ leave,’ and he immediately realised that the leave he’d been owed since before the outbreak of war might at last be possible.
He was just wondering where his father had gone so he could tap him for a loan, when someone touched his shoulder. It was a captain with black side whiskers who was carrying a large sheaf of papers.
‘You’re young Maguire, aren’t you?’
Kelly hadn’t the slightest idea how he knew but he admitted that he was.
‘Good. Come with me. I’ve got a little job for you. I didn’t know you were in Malice.’
‘Sir, I’m not–’
But the captain had turned away, striding on long legs down the stairs. It was clear he had assumed from his dry clothing that Kelly was not a survivor but part of the crew of the destroyer which had brought him ashore. He was talking to himself as he walked.
‘What a bloody way to conduct a war,’ he was growling. ‘Germans sinking every bloody ship we’ve got and Winston over in Antwerp playing at bloody soldiers with the army!’ He half-turned. ‘They’ll need to send in the Naval Brigade there, boy, did you know? Half of ’em still without equipment, too, with their bayonets down their gaiters and their ammunition stuffed into their pockets. Someone’s got to stop the Hun getting the place. It anchors our left and guards the Channel.’
Kelly hadn’t the slightest idea what the whiskered captain was talking about and he had to keep breaking into a run to keep up with him as he stalked along, throwing words over his shoulder.
‘There’s going to be a hell of an uproar in the press about sending all those kids from Dartmouth and Ganges to sea,’ he was saying. ‘No bloody landlubber’ll ever believe a boy can learn more in ten minutes about his profession at sea in wartime than he can learn in fifty years in a classroom.’
There’d be a few parents, all the same, Kelly thought, who might have preferred that their sons had had the chance to learn something about life first. His mind went back to the Dartmouth boys running across the deck of Cressy and Boyle’s terrified eyes as he’d towed him through the water towards the raft.
The captain was still arguing with himself. ‘They’ll all be writing to the papers,’ he was saying with the fine arrogance of a man allowed to live a life that was entirely separate in thinking, behaviour and standards from the rest of the country. ‘I wonder what those boys would have said if their parents had taken them out of the ships. They’d never have been able to face their friends again.’
He stopped dead abruptly and pointed. ‘Audacity’s down there,’ he said. ‘She’s got a whole slop room full of blankets and uniforms. I want ’em. Now! Tell ’em I sent you. They know who I am because I’ve just put the bloody things aboard.’
‘But, sir–’
‘Go on, boy! Don’t argue.’
Audacity was an old destroyer, and she was lying alongside the quay with a look of alertness about her, her springs taken in and held to the shore only by her bow and stern ropes. As Kelly searched for the lieutenant in charge of stores, he could hear the throbbing of her engines, smell the odour of hot oil and steam, and catch the hum of engine room fans. Whether the whiskered captain was known aboard or not, the lieutenant, who was a reservist, clearly had no intention of giving up his newly-acquired stores in a hurry.
‘We need ’em,’ he said. ‘We’re due for sea. We’ve been warned to stand by with steam up. Get ’em from your own ship.’
‘I haven’t got a ship. I’m from Cressy.’
Despite the urgency, the lieutenant was still not inclined to move quickly, and, unfamiliar with new procedures, was keen to keep his nose clean.
Kelly was almost hopping with rage at his casualness and pettiness. He’d obviously been brought up in the same school as his father, concerned with the ritual rather than the spirit, and he could well see why he’d been placed on the reserve.
As they talked, a motor car drew up alongside the ship, its brakes squealing, and Kelly heard shouted orders. Immediately, bumps and clangs above his head began to alarm him, then the quivering that had been running through the ship ever since he’d stepped on board increased.
‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.
The lieutenant looked up. ‘I told you. We’ve been warned to come to immediate notice for sea.’
Kelly’s head jerked round. ‘Then, look, please, for God’s sake, can we hurry?’ He endeavoured to bring home the urgency of his request. ‘There are eight hundred men standing round in their birthday suits at the Great Eastern in need of clothing. They’re cold. They don’t have a thing–’
The clanging above his head interrupted him. As it increased he heard running feet – a lot of running feet. It sounded only too familiar.
‘That’s the gangway!’ he bleated, and bolted for the deck.
He was just too late. The ship was already a yard from the quay. There was still time to jump but, as he cocked one leg over the rail, someone grabbed him by the neck. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you bloody fool?’
He crashed to the deck with another officer on top of him. Struggling free, he sat up at last and pushed aside the other man, a lieutenant like himself.
‘You benighted stupid idiot,’ he shrieked. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
‘I’ve saved your bloody life,’ the other officer snorted. ‘You ought to be grateful!’
‘Well, I’m not.’ Kelly yelled. ‘This isn’t my blasted ship! My ship’s at the bottom of the North Sea with two others when she ought not to be, if anyone had had any bloody sense!’
Almost weeping with fury, he stared at the quayside now twenty feet away and receding rapidly. ‘I think the Navy’s full of bloody fools!’ he stormed. ‘Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve ruined my survivor’s leave! I was swimming around in the bloody North Sea only a few hours ago and the only thing that kept me warm was the thought that I’d be able to go home and have everybody dance attendance on me. I’ve even got a girl to hold my hand and now I’m off to sea again because you’re a silly fathead with his brains in his backside. If this bloody ship gets sunk, I’ll never get my leave.’ His fury died abruptly. ‘Where are we going anyway?’ he asked.
‘Gibraltar.’
‘Gibraltar! For God’s sake, why?’
‘Well, after all, old man, there is a war on.’
‘Do you think I haven’t noticed? What the hell are we going to Gibraltar for?’
‘Take some bigwig, I understand. I’m damn sorry, of course, old fruit, but how was I to know you were a survivor? You don’t look like one.’
Kelly stared back at the receding port, cursing Kimister’s generosity. The ship was pa
ssing the seaplane base at Felixstowe now, her stern down in a welter of white water, her bows up as she headed for the Sunk Lightship.
‘Gibraltar,’ he said, faintly awed at the way the war was managing to sweep him along with it. ‘My God!’
Seven
Worms of fury writhing in his brain all the way to the Mediterranean, Kelly learned that there was no bigwig on board after all and that Audacity was merely heading south to replace a newer ship on the Mediterranean station which was needed for the big fleet battle that was confidently expected before long to take place in the North Sea. As soon as the wires were ashore in the shadow of the Rock he stormed on to the quay to see the admiral and within twelve hours was heading for the destroyer, Norseman, which was due to move north to join the Grand Fleet.
He seemed to have saved the situation entirely, but as he stepped aboard and was met by the officer of the watch, he recognised him at once as Verschoyle, by now like himself a full lieutenant.
The thin, hard face broke into a broad smile. ‘Ginger Maguire,’ Verschoyle said. ‘By all that’s wonderful! I heard we were taking a passenger but I thought it must at least be an admiral, not a bloody little pipsqueak like you. Ah, well, it’s all the same! We’re due for a refit so I expect there’ll be leave, and it’s all one whether it’s an admiral or you. Are you enjoying the war, Lieutenant Maguire?’
‘So far,’ Kelly admitted, ‘no. Are you?’
