The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  He slept most of the way to London and in the train to Esher he was surprised to bump into Rumbelo.

  ‘Hello, Rumbelo,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’

  Rumbelo coughed and looked faintly embarrassed. ‘Just going down for the day to see Biddy, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Biddy? Not our Biddy?’

  Rumbelo smiled. After a lifetime of grey orphanage rooms and grey orphanage helpers, after a service life full of the harsh interiors of ships and the sometimes harsher interiors of seamen’s mission halls, the little Irish girl at Thakeham had brought some colour to his life. For the first time he had sat at a table and eaten off a tablecloth, and for the first time had slept in a bed with sheets and been regarded with an unexpected affection.

  ‘Why not, sir?’ he said. ‘She’s a very presentable young lady. Thought I might go and help her turn the mangle and do the ironing again.’

  ‘Good God, Rumbelo, have you got a crush on her?’

  Rumbelo was silent for a moment. There hadn’t been a lot of love in his life and he was touched and flattered to be the recipient of admiration. He and Bridget had already exchanged laboriously-written ill-spelt letters which he kept in his ditty box and read and re-read when his shipmates weren’t looking. Rumbelo had discovered that life was twice as meaningful when you had someone to share it with and at Thakeham it seemed he had a whole houseful of people from Bridget upwards.

  ‘Well, I dunno yet, sir,’ he admitted. ‘But I never will have, will I, if I don’t sort of investigate, as you might say?’

  Kelly grinned. ‘Good for you, Rumbelo. Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the YMCA at Waterloo, sir.’

  ‘Can’t you find somewhere nearer?’

  ‘There’s nowhere in Esher, sir.’

  ‘That room over the garage’s still empty.’

  Rumbelo grinned, ‘Couldn’t do that, sir. Got to do this sort of thing proper.’

  ‘You mean you need a bloody chaperone?’

  ‘Sort of, sir. Biddy don’t think it ought to be done without, and no more do I.’

  ‘Right. From now on I’m your chaperone. You can’t court a girl in Esher while you’re based in London.’

  It was a strange sort of leave. Kelly had half-expected to spend it having a riotous time but, with spring just beginning, all he wished to do was walk with Charley. Perhaps the very unexpectedness of the leave gave the days a quality of brilliance against the darkening mood of the country, which had settled down to the humdrumness of wartime life after the blazing excitement of the first few weeks. Perhaps also it was that Rumbelo was conducting a serious courtship just round the corner, and when Kelly went to catch the train to London, he was busy down the platform talking in urgent whispers to Bridget.

  The occasion was a solemn one, and the leave-taking was a curiously subdued affair. Charley’s mother had given her permission to say goodbye at the station and she was taking it seriously, as though she felt she represented the whole of British womanhood. She’d grown up a lot in the eight months since the war had started, her face narrower but still filled with the same fierce strength and honesty, gentle but full of cheerful pugnacity, wry humour and kindness.

  As the guard started pushing people aboard, Kelly kissed her gently. ‘Well, here goes,’ he said. ‘Off for the chopper.’

  Her eyes blazed and she was suddenly terribly afraid. ‘Don’t say that,’ she said harshly. ‘Don’t ever say it! It makes it sound as though the whole thing’s ordained!’ Her small features were taut and strained behind her anger and it sobered Kelly at once.

  He pulled a face. Everybody aboard ship said things that were more fatalistic than normal, because of the sure knowledge that some of them might not be alive in a year’s time. But they didn’t brood much over it. They were normal healthy young men far more concerned with enjoying the present than dwelling on the future.

  She stared at him with worried eyes. ‘I’ll pray for you, Kelly,’ she said, and the words seemed to knock the stuffing out of him.

  Two days later, with the wind north-west and the barometer falling, the submarine depot ship, Adamant, led four of Britain’s newest submarines, E11, E14, E15 and E19, across the Bay of Biscay in line ahead. There was no other shipping in sight and the empty world of long green rollers was streaked with white under a heavy sky. Adamant looked like a steam yacht and rolled heavily enough to show the anti-fouling below her waterline. Because of the demands of fighting ships, she had no means of defence except for a dummy gun her engineers had made out of a stove pipe.

  The submarines, all of them identical in design, pitched and rolled with a livelier movement, E19 bringing up the rear, and every shower of spray that flew over them slopped water into the control room through the open hatch, to be mopped up by a waiting sailor with a rag and bucket. On the diminutive bridge Commander Lyster stood beside the helmsman and gave orders through the voice pipe to the engine room or to the first lieutenant in the control space below. Crammed alongside him, Kelly stared into the compass, swathed in a leather coat and sea boots, watching as the hissing crests of the seas, approaching from the starboard quarter, foamed round the base of the conning tower and receded to show the black bulging cylinder of the pressure hull beneath. The dockyard mateys who had replaced the air induction valve had announced that there was now nothing wrong with E19. Lyster had nevertheless insisted on a full series of exercises but there had been no further sign of the odd maverick behaviour beyond a little unsteadiness when they dived, and somewhat reluctantly, he had signed all the necessary documents that shifted the responsibility for her from them to him.

  The wind eased as they passed Cape St Vincent and altered course for Gibraltar. The sea was dark blue now and the sky was lighter but clouds were massing in the east.

  ‘We’re off Cape Trafalgar now,’ Lyster pointed out dryly to Kelly. ‘Where Horace Nelson, patron saint of the Royal Navy was martyred in 1805. I hope you’re duly affected, Pilot.’

  ‘I’m overcome with aggressive spirit, sir,’ Kelly grinned. ‘One almost expects to see wreckage floating about.’

  A French cruiser passed them, heading into the Atlantic, crashing through the seas on some urgent mission, the spray lifting high over her masthead. Entering the straits, they kept to the African side to take advantage of the inflowing current and entered Gibraltar in the evening to make fast to the north mole. As they coiled the ropes and the deck party wiped their hands, Kelly found Rumbelo alongside him.

  ‘Well, Rumbelo,’ he said. ‘Here we go again.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Here we go again.’

  ‘Come to any arrangement with Bridget?’

  ‘Not exactly, sir. But, on the other ’and, not exactly not, neither. We thought we’d wait a bit. Wartime doesn’t seem to be the time to hurry into marriage.’

  Kelly shrugged. ‘With people being killed right and left, Rumbelo, I’d have thought that it was just the time.’

  The next morning was bright, with the mountains of Africa showing shadowed and purple across the straits, and there was a Mediterranean warmth in the air that was a pleasant change after the North Sea. That evening, they saw the lights of Algiers, but two mornings later the weather deteriorated again, and they were glad to reach the harbour of Malta and head towards the ramparts of St Angelo. With the crew lining the superstructure as the boatswain’s pipe sounded the ‘Still’, a bugle replied from high up on the ramparts, and they threaded their way among the harbour service craft, pinnaces, shining Maltese gondolas, dghaisas, and feluccas that passed like white birds. In the largest dry dock they could see the towering superstructure of Inflexible.

  ‘What’s she doing here?’ Bennett asked.

  ‘Damaged, in the recent vulgar scuffle in the Dardanelles,’ Lyster said shortly. ‘Seems the bigger they are the harder they fall. Four battleships for the price of a few Turkish
mines seems to me a damn good bargain.’

  Staring at the high steel tower of the battle cruiser, Kelly wondered if Verschoyle were still aboard her. Not for one minute did he feel any relaxation of his dislike and distrust of him. Verschoyle was Verschoyle, bland, privileged, moneyed, with influential relations who would see that he received all the right steps up the naval ladder without undue delay. There was a faint tinge of envy as he thought of him. Somehow Verschoyle was always with him, always unreservedly untrustworthy, always dangerous, always unpleasant and coldly tricky, and probably clever enough to have wangled a transfer to a home-based ship.

  They made fast alongside HMS Egmont, an old wooden man-o’-war converted into a depot ship, and were joined the following day by AE2, an Australian E class boat, which had just had a hurried and tricky passage through the Suez Canal at a time when the Turks had been massing for an attempt to capture it.

  They had all set their hearts on getting through the Dardanelles. It was firmly believed that the Turkish fleet was intending to make a sortie through the straits backed by Goeben and Breslau which, now officially Turkish, were expected to support any movement of troops south caused by the landing of an allied army. They all knew they were there for no other reason than to try to force a passage through the Narrows before the army’s landing took place, and the hazards were clear to every man among them. Most submarine losses were due to mines, and the winding waters of the Dardanelles were known to be thick with them.

  As they waited for orders, they discussed how they might tackle them. Bennett had the wardroom gramophone grinding out a crackling version of ‘Put On Your Tata, Little Girlie,’ but it didn’t detract from the sobriety of the occasion.

  ‘If we dive below them, of course,’ Lyster said, ‘we’ll probably catch their mooring wires, but that ought not to explode them, unless we drag the damn things down on top of us.’

  Kelly spread the chart on the table among the coffee cups. ‘How about nets, sir?’ he asked.

  Lyster was sitting on the only chair, his feet up on the bunk, staring at his shoes. He forced himself to pay attention. ‘We’ve got a jumping wire and a cutting edge on the bows,’ he said. ‘We ought to be able to go through them.’

  ‘How about shore batteries?’

  ‘We can dive.’

  They couldn’t answer back, however, because they had no gun, but they had to take a risk somewhere and the current would be the biggest problem. It ran at up to six knots and the distance they had to cover was thirty-five miles. They couldn’t pass through the Narrows against it submerged all the way. Somewhere en route they would have to surface to recharge the batteries. The problem was how to do it without being spotted and shot at.

  They had plenty of time to think about their difficulties because E11 had been having trouble on passage with her starboard propeller shaft and, detailed to stand by her in Malta when the other boats left, E19 followed with her and arrived off the island of Lemnos three days later.

  Close to the entrance to the Dardanelles, the island had been yielded by Turkey to Greece at the end of the Balkan Wars and its use had been granted to the Allies by the Greek prime minister, Venizelos. Mudros Harbour, a vast expanse of water with two or three miles of good holding ground, contained two small islands that divided the outer harbour from the inner harbour and formed narrow passages which made them safe against U-boats. Near the entrance and a mile or so inshore, four hills rose drably out of the shimmering landscape. All supplies came from Alexandria or Port Said and the one disadvantage of the place was that it was open to southerly gales which blew through the entrance to make boatwork impossible.

  The shining sheet of dark water was overflowing with ships, and they counted a dozen battleships, with cruisers, destroyers, transports crowded with troops, hospital ships, supply ships and swarms of smaller craft and foreign vessels, among them Greek sailing ships and the Russian five-funnelled cruiser, Askold, which was immediately christened The Packet of Woodbines. The harbour was surrounded by a flat plain, bare of anything but low scrub, rising to the inland hills in arid contours. White dots of tents, ammunition dumps and military encampments were spread everywhere, and they could distinguish a column of marching men moving along the coast by the cloud of dust they trailed along behind them.

  ‘I always thought the Aegean was a thing of beauty and a joy for ever,’ Lyster said as he stood with Bennett and Kelly on the casing. ‘Wine-dark seas and cool islands full of sloe-eyed houris and that sort of thing.’

  ‘What are houris, sir?’ Bennett asked.

  Lyster gestured airily. ‘Girls. Much the same as the model you get in Worthing and Brighton when they’re stripped to the buff, I understand.’

  ‘One thing,’ the coxswain observed from behind them. ‘It’s a long way from my old woman.’

  Stations were made out at once for the sacking of Constantinople.

  ‘The captain, of course,’ Lyster said cheerfully, ‘will have to proceed immediately in search of rare and priceless gems. Only to add to the Allied coffers for the war effort, of course.’

  ‘As second officer,’ Bennett pointed out, ‘I think my job will be to inspect the ladies of the harem. Yours, Pilot, had better be to engage the attention of the Chief Eunuch by occupying him with polite conversation.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ Kelly shook his head. ‘Regret to say I show a great distaste for the duty allotted me. Better let the coxswain do it.’

  The coxswain grinned. ‘If the fall of Constantinople don’t take place, sir,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to put it down to a lack of patriotism on the part of the non-commissioned officers. I reckon the First Lieutenant will need an assistant when he inspects the harem. You can put me down as a volunteer for that.’

  Five

  Ringed by bare hills, they seemed to be in the crater of an extinct volcano, and dead dogs and cats, even dead horses and mules, floated among the ships, their legs sticking up like the periscopes of adventurous submarines.

  As soon as they made fast alongside Adamant, they realised something was wrong and they soon learned that E15, which had reached Mudros while they had been escorting E11 from Malta, had started for the Sea of Marmara two days before but had run aground near Kephez and been shot up by shore batteries. Casualties were not yet known but a seaplane had seen the boat high and dry and attempts to destroy her before the Turks could salvage her and use her against the Allies had failed.

  ‘They think she was caught in a flow of fresh water coming down from the Sea of Marmara,’ Lyster informed them as he returned aboard. ‘They lost control and were swept on the rocks. And she’s not the first, it seems, because the French have also lost Saphir, one of their boats. There are other problems, too, I’m told – an old iron bridge dumped off Nagara Point, north of Chanak, for example.’

  ‘Together, doubtless,’ Bennett observed, ‘with an assortment of rusty perambulators, bedsteads and old Turkish tramcars.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to make some attempt to find out where exactly this fresh water flows?’ Kelly said. ‘Somebody must have some information. If the differing densities are what caused E15’s troubles, we ought to find out where the currents run.’

  ‘We can certainly try.’ Lyster smiled. ‘Look it up, Pilot. Roger Keyes is out here as Chief of Staff and he’ll already have thought of it, if I know him. He might even have some information on the subject and he’s the last chap in the world to deny anybody a bit of aggression against the Bashi Bazouks.’ He studied his shoes and smiled. ‘In fact, I heard a funny story aboard Adamant about the currents. It seems some member of the Sultan’s household was once dropped in a weighted sack into the Marmara when he was no longer considered necessary to the smooth functioning of the household – probably been trying to take one of the ladies of the harem for a dirty week-end to Scutari or something – and ten days later, when they all imagined he was well
on his way south to the Mediterranean, they heard a great deal of screaming from the ladies of the seraglio and there the old boy was, bursting out of his sack and bumping against the shore under the windows. See if you can find out why.’

  It didn’t take long to discover that there was a deep current setting strongly towards Kephez where E15 had run aground and that the submarine B6, an old boat without bow planes, had behaved very oddly during her attempt to salvage her. On the other hand, Holbrook, in B11, had reported an entire absence of anti-submarine nets.

  Lyster rubbed his nose as he listened. ‘Seems to require a lot of thought,’ he commented dryly. ‘In the meantime, my shoes have finally fallen apart and I think I ought to go ashore and buy something to replace them. What language do they speak here, Number One?’

  ‘God knows, sir.’ Bennett shrugged. ‘But I suppose you ought to be able to get across with French.’

  ‘You speak French, Pilot, don’t you?’

  ‘Not for a minute, sir.’

  ‘I thought you did.’

  ‘Somebody’s got it wrong, sir. It follows me around.’

  ‘Ah, well.’ Lyster shrugged. ‘I expect you’ll manage.’

  Despite the spring flowers and the sweet-smelling air, Mudros town was nothing but a wretched collection of red-roofed houses dominated by a large white church, mostly inhabited by Levantines who scraped a living from petty commerce and offered goats, fish and olives to the fleet, any one ship of which could have bought up their whole wealth in a week.

  There were no shoes for sale because the army had been there first and Lyster had to be satisfied with a pair of Levantine sandals. Instead they decided to try a bathe and hired a pair of miniature donkeys with made-up saddles. But the going was hard and there was a strong wind full of grit. As they left the town for the beach, they passed a funeral, and, as they pulled to one side, the wind blew back the pall. Beneath it was the body of a naked old woman and the guide they’d hired explained that as there were no trees on the island there was no wood for coffins either.