by Max Hennessy
The visibility grew worse until they could see only the flash of salvoes, and Talbot glared into the growing darkness.
‘If we’re landed with a night action,’ he said, ‘it’ll be a proper Donnybrook Fair. Every night exercise I was ever on was pandemonium.’
The din seemed to be part of some heavenly battle, yet above it they could hear the thin sound of cheering across the darkening water as the great ships continued to thunder past them. Talbot was staring towards the German line, his expression tense, then he brought his fist down on the bridge rail.
‘They’re turning away!’ he said. ‘By God, they are! They’re running!’
Red flashes and smoke ahead of Mordant indicated a separate conflict between destroyers and cruisers moving at the speed of an express train, but by the time they reached the spot it had all cleared except for a three-funnel cruiser, lying inert between the lines, the target for every British battleship which could not see her own target. The cruiser Southampton tore in to give the German ship the coup de grâce but other Germans lying beyond the cripple opened a rapid fire on her and she turned tail and fled, zigzagging like a snipe.
Twilight was coming down on them now and the visibility was further spoiled by the low-lying clouds of smoke and cordite fumes which hung like a gloomy shadow over the sea. The British ships had worked to the eastward of the Germans by this time and were trying to edge into a semi-circle with the enemy in the middle. Then a few German destroyers crept out from the head of their line and began to make smoke. As the dense screen of oily black rolled along the surface of the water, they could see only the topmasts of the German capital ships.
‘They’re changing course, sir,’ Kelly said, glancing into the dimly-lit binnacle.
‘Sir!’ Lipscomb appeared. ‘Message from the flagship. “Where is enemy’s battle fleet?” Southampton’s replying “Have lost sight.”’
‘Then, for God’s sake, make a signal, Number One! Tell ’em we can see ’em. We’re not here just to get involved in a life and death struggle with German torpedo boats. Give ’em their course and our position.’
But, as Kelly moved away and they raced along outside the smoke, four German destroyers emerged right across their bows. As Mordant jinked to starboard, the forward gun banged and there was a sharp glow and a flare of flame on the leading German, then all four Germans opened fire at once and Mordant was swamped in splashes that flooded the deck as they fell across her. There was a tremendous crash as a shell hit the forward gun and the whole ship seemed to stagger in its stride. Splinters slashed the bridge and funnel and hundreds more, blasted into razor-sharp slivers of red-hot steel, were flung into the W/T office to smash equipment and cut aerials. Then another salvo fell round them and the wireless office itself dissolved in a sheet of flame, and sparks flew upwards in a golden rain as if someone had taken a flying kick at a bonfire.
For a second Kelly seemed to be surrounded by a terrible noise and there was an agonising pressure on his eardrums and a searing pain over his right eye. A bright ball of fire exploded only a few feet away from his face like a blue-green flare, with a yellow-white centre like phosphorous. Vaguely through the glare, he saw a man about to jump over the side, but he disappeared in the flash of the burst, and as the smoke blew clear he saw his lower torso and legs had vanished and the shoulders and chest were just turning slowly in the air before splashing into the sea. A panicking man running along the deck disappeared into a gaping hole where fire was roaring and his screams came through the rumble of the flames until abruptly they died.
Picking himself up, Kelly found that blood was filling his right eye and he couldn’t see, and his nostrils were full of the stink of fumes. The burned and tattered body of a wireless operator lay sprawled among the wreckage. A second wireless operator was just dragging himself to his feet.
There was no point in asking if repairs could be made. There was nothing to make repairs with, and he brushed the blood from his eyes and stumbled towards the bridge. The ship was still moving through the water, smoke and steam escaping from her both midships and aft.
Vaguely, his eyes still dazzled by the icy-yellow glare of the shell-burst, he saw Rumbelo standing by the bottom of the ladder, with blood on his face.
‘You all right?’ he mumbled.
‘I think, so, sir.’ Rumbelo’s voice came only faintly to his bruised eardrums. ‘I was just dead lucky. I think everybody else’s gone.’
The bridge was a shambles. What was left of it was splashed with blood and for a moment Kelly stood dazedly among the debris, waiting for someone to give him orders. Then it dawned on him through the shock of the explosion that had deafened and half-blinded him that the helmsman and Talbot were lying together in a heap, their bodies leaking blood. Beyond them, Heap was sprawled near the compass, and there was no sign of his head.
The binnacle was pitted with holes but the wheel seemed to be intact, and Kelly stared dully round him, still shocked but slowly recovering his senses. At last the completeness of the disaster struck him and he shook his head and forced himself to concentrate.
There was no one to give him orders, no one at all. It was he who was captain of the ship.
Six
It was dark as Mordant wallowed helplessly through the water but they could still hear heavy firing to the south-west where the horizon was lit by flickering lights as the German line was harassed by the light cruisers and forced further and further away from its bases into the North Sea. The thudding of guns seemed to be felt in every one of Mordant’s plates, as the flash, the display of searchlights, the glare of explosions and the blazing torches of burning destroyers marked the Germans’ retreat.
Kelly jerked to life at last. Iron claws seemed to be tearing at his forehead.
‘Rumbelo,’ he yelled. ‘Up here! Do you know the silhoutettes of the German navy?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Stand by the wheel then until we can get a relief quatermaster. Keep your eyes skinned.’
They were still moving ahead as Rumbelo swung their bows into the smoke, and thankfully, choking on the heavy fumes, they felt the relief as the shooting stopped. Then they were out at the other side into comparative peace and Kelly shouted down the voice pipe to reduce the revolutions.
The relief quartermaster appeared.
‘Take the wheel,’ Kelly snapped. ‘Rumbelo, get Mr Naylor up here and ask Mr Hatchard to let us have a report on damage and casualties.’
As Rumbelo vanished, he stared around him. Below on the deck, a man covered with blood stood with his feet apart, swaying slightly, his head hanging, his eyes wild like a calf in a slaughterhouse. Kelly sighed. The big smash that the lower deck had been praying for, for two years, had certainly arrived. With his own eyes he’d seen four proud ships die, as well as several smaller ones, both British and German. Blood had been shed and lives had been ended, including that of Talbot who had spent two weary, boring years staring at Scapa Flow, only to have everything blotted out for him in the first hours of the battle he’d waited for, like so many hundreds more dead men, over so many months. It was to be hoped that now the big ships had arrived, they would make all the slaughter of their smaller sisters worth while.
Naylor arrived, panting, white-faced and shaken, and Kelly lifted one hand to acknowledge him. ‘Better act as my eyes, Sub,’ he said. ‘I can’t see very well at the moment.’
‘Shall I get the SBA, sir?’
‘No, for God’s sake, stay where you are. Let’s stay at reduced speed until we know what we’re doing. Make it “slow ahead” until we hear what the engine room’s got to say.’
As they waited for Hatchard’s report, the bodies of the dead were laid out on the port side near the wreckage of the after gun. The atmosphere seemed to stink from the heavy coal smoke from the big ships’ funnels and the cordite and lyddite from the explosions.
‘Where do you think the fleet’s got to, Sub?’ Kelly asked.
Naylor tried to look intelligent and knowledgeable. ‘South-east by the look of it, sir.’
Kelly bent over the bridge rail, clinging to it grimly in his pain with one hand and holding to his eye with the other the towel he normally wore round his neck against the spray. He didn’t bother to reply. He had merely been making conversation, trying to reassure Naylor. The wounded had crawled into the lee of the funnels in a pitiful attempt to find shelter, and they were now having to drag themselves back again as other men pushed forward with collision mats to cover the shellholes. Kelly struggled to lift his head, but he could hardly see.
‘Where’s the ensign?’ he asked.
‘Shot away, sir.’
‘Hoist another, Sub. Got to look our best for the party.’
A flotilla of destroyers hurtled past in the growing gloom, dark shapes in the shadows, their funnel tops crowned with a vivid red glow so that a scarlet canopy seemed to hang over each vessel.
‘No signalling,’ Kelly rapped. ‘Let’s see who they are first.’
As the ships flashed past, the last one fired a solitary four-inch shell at Mordant, which whistled harmlessly overhead.
‘Some bloody gunlayer who was dozing and happened to wake up as they passed,’ Rumbelo growled.
Hatchard appeared with Wellbeloved. ‘Fifteen casualties,’ he reported. ‘Forward gun wrecked with most of its crew dead. Wireless office wrecked. Voice-pipes and electrical communications cut and steam pipes burst. There’s also a fuel pipe fire but it’s under control.’
‘We’ve lost steam on Number Two,’ Wellbeloved said. ‘I can give you fifteen knots on the others.’
‘How long before we can move off?’
‘You can move off now, but give me a few minutes and I can give you full power on both boilers.’
‘Make it fast. It seems bloody unhealthy round here.’
The engineer nodded. ‘We shan’t be long and then we’ll give you all the emergency speed you want.’
The bridge had been cleared now. The wood and steelwork were scorched and pitted with holes; the canvas dodger, fluttering in ribbons, was splashed with blood.
The pain in Kelly’s head seemed unbearable and the waiting seemed interminable but, after a while, he heard the thrumming of the boiler room fans, and a gout of black smoke was superseded first by grey then by a whitish, almost transparent gust of vapour.
The navyphone screeched. ‘Both engines ready, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ Kelly looked round him. The North Sea seemed suddenly empty. ‘Slow ahead together.’
A sick berth attendant arrived. He was very young and looked terrified. ‘Christ, sir,’ he said, peering at Kelly’s face with a torch.
‘What’s happened to it?’
Kelly was standing against the binnacle, his face covered with blood. The sick berth attendant peered at him with a worried look on his face.
‘You ought to be in your bunk, sir.’
‘No.’
‘A splinter’s caught your cheekbone, sir. It’s probably broken. It’s also cut open the left side of your forehead. There’s a flap of flesh hanging down over your eye.’
‘That’ll spoil my beauty, won’t it? Fix it.’
As the SBA nervously struggled to adjust a bandage over his eye, Kelly’s mind was roving ahead of their present situation. They still had the torpedo tubes and one gun amidships that would fire. As the SBA finished, he brushed him aside.
‘Let’s go,’ he said to Naylor. ‘Push her up to half revolutions. We’ll find out what’s happening before we shove our noses into it.’
As they headed south-west, steering by the remains of a patched-up chart, they passed the stern of a large ship sticking out of the water.
‘What ship’s that?’
It was impossible to tell and they circled the wreckage looking for survivors, but other ships had been there before them and they saw only floating bodies.
It was quite dark as they pushed up the revolutions again and searchlights began to criss-cross on the western horizon. On the port quarter a flash showed up over the horizon and a star shell hovered in the sky. Then another, greater flash followed and to starboard of it a great tower of flame flared up into the sky, died down and reared up afresh. The whole of the sea seemed to be rippling and flashing with fire. Then the searchlights, rising and falling like the antennae of a blinded animal, fixed their implacable light on a group of distant destroyers rushing up the bright path of the beams. White splashes lifted all round them, then a lurid fire started in one of them and spread to a vast explosion of fierce white flame that made even the searchlights seem pale. Immediately the lights were extinguished and the attack died out, and everything was dark again, except for the glowing point of fire.
Higgins, the wardroom steward, appeared with bully beef sandwiches and cocoa, and they were eating quietly when Rumbelo muttered. ‘Ships on the port quarter, sir.’
Kelly stared at them through his night glasses and there was a whispered discussion as to what they were. It didn’t occur to them for a minute that it was the wing tip of the German Fleet trying to break through the British line at its weakest point.
‘Light cruisers,’ Naylor said.
‘Yes,’ Kelly agreed. ‘But whose? Ours or theirs? Challenge.’
As the signal lamp began to clack, coloured lights appeared at the fore yardarms of the other ships and a searchlight snapped on. A gun fired and Mordant rolled as a shell smashed into her above the water line.
‘Full ahead!’ Kelly yelled as the solitary gun by the funnel crashed out.
The shell smashed into the opposing ship just below the bridge and seemed to tear her open even as Kelly rang for full revolutions and turned his tail to the Germans to present the smallest possible target. A second shell struck Mordant near the base of the funnel as they plunged into a bank of mist, riddling the metal, and Kelly spun round and fell as a searing pain scored across his back and the blast whipped away the bandage from his forehead.
Dragging himself to his feet, he saw the quartermaster had been hit. ‘Take the wheel, Rumbelo,’ he yelled. ‘And let’s have an SBA up here!’
Shells were still whistling past; as they emerged from the other side of the mist, they were illuminated once more by a searchlight and within two minutes a storm of fire swept the ship. The range was so close the German shots went high enough to burst on the upper deck, and round the superstructure of the bridge where all the flesh and blood was. An enormous blaze started just abaft the torpedo tubes where shell fragments had whipped across the deck and mowed men down like corn before a sickle. A second shell burst amidships and the fragments sliced across the waist like hail, scouring out the inside of the shield of the midships gun and igniting cordite charges.
The ship heeled as she turned away, empty brass cartridge cases rattling and rolling into the scuppers. The foredeck was a swirling mass of angry flames making an unearthly red glow in the darkness and giving a crimson tinge to the black smoke and white steam. A pillar of fire was roaring up the foremast from one blaze; a second reached above the top of the funnel.
Fortunately the German ships were more concerned with their own fleet than with doing damage and they thundered off into the darkness, leaving Mordant rolling on the swell, a wreck. The action had lasted no more than a minute then they had plunged thankfully into a fresh bank of white haze. Staring back, Kelly saw a huge flare of flame rising beyond the mist, lighting it with a red glow.
Hatchard appeared, grinning. ‘Torpedoed one of the sods,’ he yelled. ‘Let the whole salvo go. Couldn’t miss. Thanks for turning away when you did.’
‘I was thinking of my skin,’ Kelly said shortly. ‘Did you sink her?’
‘Probably not, but she’ll have an
awful headache!’
‘What about casualties?’
Hatchard’s grin died. ‘We seem to have lost the last of our guns, together with all its crew, I’m afraid.’
‘Get a report from the engine room on their damage. They must have some this time.’
Hatchard stared at him. ‘You’re in need of attention,’ he said.
‘No, I can see now.’
Reports started coming to the bridge from other parts of the ship. Splinters had cut the freshly-repaired electric leads and steam pipes. Naylor appeared and, amid the deafening noise of steam escaping and the smoke and heat blowing back from the fires a few feet away, he had to shout to make himself heard.
‘There’s a fire amidships,’ he stammered. ‘It’s the motor boat.’
‘I can see it,’ Kelly snapped, his voice diamond-hard. ‘Put the bloody thing out!’
A splinter had severed the connection to the upper deck fire main and the flames were increasing.
‘Let’s have a good hose up here,’ Kelly yelled and Higgins, the wardroom steward, appeared dragging one with him. ‘Get up,’ he was yelling at the wounded men. ‘Get up and bloody help!’
Those who could dragged themselves to their feet, and a man with his clothes blown off and his skin hanging in strips led a file of blackened scarecrows away to the sick bay, one of them, with his ears charred off and burned from head to foot, dragged along by two of his shipmates. Lying by the funnel was a still-living gunner who had been ripped open by a splinter, his inside spilling out on to the deck, and the ship resounded with the mournful cry of ‘Stretcher bearers.’ A sailor who had lost both arms was begging his friends to throw him overboard, and all round the deck among the huge holes where fires flickered and grey smoke leaked men were vomiting with shock and disgust. A stoker trapped beyond a jammed hatch was burning to death, screaming his life out while his friends, who could do nothing to help him, could only try to shut their ears to his agony.
