by Max Hennessy
Naylor had already turned his attention to the fire by the foremast and Hatchard hurried to help him. There was no point in giving them orders or getting in their way. Hatchard had been in the Navy long enough to know what to do. As the sick berth attendant who had arrived finished bandaging the quartermaster, he looked up at Kelly. He was a petty officer this time and was unimpressed by Kelly’s rank.
‘You’ve been hit, sir,’ he said and turned him round without a by-your leave.
‘Good God, sir,’ he went on. ‘It’s ripped your bridge coat, jacket and shirt, even severed your bloody braces! You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.’
‘Bandage it,’ Kelly said.
The sick berth tiffy shook his head. ‘Bandaging won’t do any good to that, sir. It needs stitches. A lot of stitches. Your eye, too.’
He spoke with authority and confidence and Kelly longed to let him take over, but the pillar of flame was still roaring up the foremast and the ready ammunition for the midships gun kept exploding in a shower of sparks and shreds of blazing cordite. He noticed that the heat of the fire was strong enough to scorch his cheek and began to wonder what it would be like to be blown up. More than once that day he’d seen huge ships disintegrate and he wondered if Mordant, being smaller, would go more gently.
Then, beyond the struggling men, he saw the whiteness begin to go from the pillar of flame, and as it decreased, wavered, lengthened again, and finally began to die, he allowed himself to listen to the pleas of the sick berth tiffy.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Do as you like. Get the surgeon up here.’
‘Sir, the doctor’s dead. He was on deck attending to the wounded when that last lot got us.’
‘Very well. Can you stitch it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Put ’em in.’
As he spoke, Kelly was aware that he sounded like a Chums impression of a destroyer officer, brusque, rude and laconic. But it was chiefly because it was hard work thinking and harder still having to issue orders.
The sick berth tiffy frowned. ‘Sir, I’ll have to give you morphine.’
‘No!’ Kelly brushed him aside. ‘Do it without or not at all. Save the morphine for the others.’
Hatchard appeared. ‘It’ll hurt like hell,’ he said.
‘Rumbelo can sit on my head and you can sit on my feet. I expect we’ll manage. I’m not having morphine. There’s no one else and nobody’s putting me to sleep till I know we’re safe. Let’s go and see what’s happened.’
Leaving the bridge, he stumbled over a body at the bottom of the ladder and Hatchard dragged it aside. Before he could reach the fire by the funnel, it wavered and died away and they were in darkness again, a strange darkness full of heat and smoke and the groans of wounded men. The deck was strewn with bodies so that he kept falling over them as he moved about, but by the aid of matches and torches the deck was searched.
‘Keep those lights down,’ Kelly ordered. ‘We have no idea where the Germans are.’
He bent over a boy seaman torn by sickening injuries and covered with blood, splintered bones showing through his flesh. The boy smiled. ‘It’s no good worrying about me, sir,’ he said. ‘I can’t feel much pain, anyway.’
The cooks who had closed up as sick berth attendants had rigged up a temporary operating theatre in the stokers’ bathroom, using a table from the wardroom. The steel walls ran with sweat, but Wellbeloved had hung a cluster of lights from the shower and a bucket of water stood handy to swill the blood down the drain in the tiled floor. The sick berth tiffy had just cut off an unconscious stoker’s hand at the wrist and was tying up the ligaments. He looked up as he saw Kelly but didn’t stop.
‘Know how to do it?’ Kelly asked.
‘I’ve seen it done before, sir. If I don’t he’ll bleed to death.’
As the stoker was lifted off the table, Kelly lay down on it. The sick berth tiffy sounded apologetic.
‘Sir, this morphine–’
‘Get on with it!’
‘It’s going to be bloody painful, sir.’
‘Just get on with it, for God’s sake!’
Hatchard appeared. He seemed to pop up and down like the Demon King in a pantomime. ‘Better drink this,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘Rum. Nelson’s blood.’
‘I won’t say no to that.’
As Kelly swallowed the raw spirit, it burned his throat and made him cough. The spasms seemed to tear at the wound in his back but he felt better at once and almost ready to have himself sawn in two. ‘Who’s sitting on my head?’ he asked.
A cook with a bandaged head looked embarrassed. ‘Me, sir.’
‘I bet it’s the first time you’ve ever sat on your captain’s head,’ Kelly said and was pleased to see the cook grin.
They stripped him of his shirt and he felt the cook put his hands on his shoulders and press down with a weight that drove the breath out of his body. Someone else lay across his legs.
‘We’ll do your eye first,’ the sick berth tiffy said. ‘Hold him.’
As he felt the jab of the needle, it was as if they were trying to pierce him through with a cutlass. Biting at his lip until it bled, he refrained from making a noise until at last a great groan broke away from him.
‘Soon be finished, sir.’
They seemed to be sewing him up with marline spikes and wire hawser but at last the weight lifted off his legs.
‘Sorry if it hurt, sir.’
Someone stuck a lighted cigarette in his mouth, then they poured iodine on his shrinking flesh, bandaged him and helped him into his torn clothing. For a while he sat still, recovering his breath, then he dragged himself upright with an effort.
‘Since I’m here,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice steady, ‘I’ll have a word with the wounded.’
The wardroom, its door splintered and buckled, was full of men, all lying very still and very white. One of the cooks was at work there and four stokers were just lifting the body of a sailor from the bench. There was a hole in the ship’s side that admitted water which sloshed about their feet as the ship rolled, and in it swilled bloodstained bandages and debris. It was hard to move his arms but he managed to extract cigarettes from his pocket and hand them round. The worst cases were flash burns.
‘How many?’ Kelly asked.
‘Twenty-three dead, sir. Thirty wounded. Some seriously. There may be more. I’m not certain yet.’
‘That’s a lot for a ship this size.’
As Kelly struggled back to the bridge, one eye and half his face hidden by a great pad of lint, cotton wool and bandage, the ship appeared to be a wreck. It had no guns and the torpedo tubes were empty, but Hatchard had already turned to rigging up temporary communications and Wellbeloved appeared, his face full of optimism.
‘We’re all right below,’ he reported.
Rumbelo got the crew to muster under the bridge so that Kelly could tell them what was happening, and he tried to talk to them like a father, uneasily aware that most of them were older than he was.
‘I suspect we’re hardly in a fit state to try any more conclusions with the enemy,’ he said. ‘But we have both engines and we can manoeuvre. In case anything appears, I want all automatic weapons mounted and manned.’
As they dispersed, the destroyer began to move slowly through the black water, picking up speed as she went. ‘Take the ship, sub,’ Kelly said to Naylor. ‘At least you can see.’
A piece of heaving line round his waist to hold his trousers up in place of the severed braces, he stood on the bridge, clutching the rail. As Mordant lifted her forefoot, the horizon to the south was still lit by flashes and occasional searchlights.
‘If they’ve called out Tyrwhitt from Harwich we must have cut them off from their bases,’ Naylor said.
‘If,’ Kelly said. He had no great faith in the Admiralty. Pressed by the politicians in London who would be eager to protect the Thames estuary and the approaches to London, they’d be in no hurry to release the eager Tyrwhitt.
They were alone now. They had no idea where the Germans were, though the distant horizon was still full of flashes and the red glow of guns, and occasionally a bigger flare as some ship met its end. There was a strong suspicion growing in Kelly’s mind as they drove westwards that this great battle for which the Navy had been waiting for two years had not been the big smash that everyone had predicted. Over-caution, lack of training, foolhardiness, bad designs and damn bad signalling seemed to have snatched the victory from their grasp.
Occasionally they saw dimmed lights on the sea about them to show where darkened ships, more afraid than they were, crept past in an attempt to escape. Despite the wreckage along the decks, there was an atmosphere of satisfaction about Mordant, and despite their casualties, they had dealt some telling blows and had severely damaged one light cruiser.
Aware of a feeling of light-headedness, Kelly realised that his shoulders were growing stiff and that it was growing harder to stand upright. Someone brought him a stool and he sat down on it, clutching the bridge rail, his fingers knotted in his efforts to control himself. The sick berth tiffy appeared and once more suggested an injection but he shook his head. He was in command of a ship at last and he wasn’t going to relinquish it easily.
Curiously, at that moment he thought of Charley and wondered what she would think. Some time tomorrow or the next day they would learn at home that there’d been a tremendous battle and that the Navy had lost several fine ships. He had lapsed into a dazed darkness of pain when Naylor touched his arm.
‘Sir!’
A pointing finger jerked and in the blackness he could see the white glow of phosphorescence from the foam at a ship’s forefoot. The two vessels were converging gradually and he had come out of his lassitude at once, alert to avoid a collision.
‘I hope to God she’s not a German,’ he said.
Then, abruptly, as though she had not seen Mordant just off her quarter, the other ship turned to starboard right across their course so that there was no longer any hope of avoiding her.
‘Searchlight,’ Kelly snapped and, as the white beam of light leapt across the black sea, they saw at once that the other ship was a German torpedo boat, smaller than Mordant and carrying a large white number on her bow.
‘It’s a Hun!’ Naylor screamed.
‘Full ahead both!’ Kelly said. ‘Clear the forecastle! Stand by to ram!’
There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of missing. The German ship had increased speed and seemed to leap forward, and they saw white faces and a gun turning towards them and the flash as it fired. The shell screamed past and disappeared astern, and a second shell struck the bow a glancing blow, ricocheted downwards and exploded alongside, drenching them with water. Then Mordant’s bows smashed into the German’s side, just abaft the bridge and Kelly was flung forward. As his body struck the bridge rail, a blinding stab of hellish pain rolled over him, and someone fell on top of him, knocking the breath from his body. The damaged foremast came down with a crash, crushing the searchlight in a shower of electric-blue sparks, and the battered funnel bent and fell forward like the hinged stack of a river steamer.
‘Jesus,’ someone said. ‘Smack in the wardroom pantry! Right in the bloody breadbasket!’
For a second, Kelly decided he was dead and in hell as the German fired at Mordant with everything she possessed. All about him he could hear the grind and screech of tearing metal and wild shouts in English and German. Struggling to his feet, he dragged himself up to see the German ship lying below Mordant’s bow, rolling over on her beam ends, and German sailors, their cap ribbons fluttering, running along the twisted decks.
‘Full astern!’
Screeching and groaning, the two ships parted as Mordant backed off, her bows thrust upwards and buckled like a tin can.
‘Like the cork out of an effing bottle,’ a sailor below the bridge yelled exultantly.
The German was badly hurt, a great hole like a wedge of cheese carved in her side. As Mordant drew clear, Kelly saw two men standing in the opening among the torn metal, both of them yelling with fright, then the water rushed in and swept them away, and the German ship, released from the pressure, began to swing back, rolling to starboard as the sea engulfed her.
For a moment she straightened and a gun banged, but the barrel was cocked wildly askew and the shell screamed off into the air, then someone on Mordant opened fire with a Lewis gun and he saw men falling. The German began to heel over rapidly as she filled with water and, as they continued to back away, they saw her lay on her side, slowly as if she were tired, until the decks were awash, then she turned over, rolling a little as she settled, and finally disappeared.
‘God,’ Naylor said. ‘That was quick!’
There were only about a dozen men in the water. They were dragged on board, dripping and gasping, two of them dying almost at once. To everyone’s surprise, among them was Petty Officer Lipscomb, the yeoman of signals, who had been shot off the bridge by the collision. He was wearing two life jackets and was protesting he couldn’t swim, but he did a record twenty yards to the side of the ship to yells of encouragement from the crew.
Twisted with pain, Kelly stared at the forepeak. It was lifted high and wrenched to starboard. Wellbeloved appeared alongside him, his jaw dropped, his eyes bulging at the wreckage.
‘I think the next job,’ Kelly said flatly, ‘will be to get this damned ship home.’
Seven
Mordant sagged like a wounded animal as her frantic crew struggled to remove the debris of the mast and shore up the funnel.
The deck below the forecastle had been pushed back for nearly a quarter of the ship’s length. A great stretch of steel had been peeled off and trailed its jagged edges in the water, while the cable locker had gone completely and the anchor chain hung down in a steel tangle like an old lady’s knitting.
‘What a bloody horrible sight,’ Wellbeloved said.
The bow was now only half its original length with some twenty feet crumpled, twisted and forced bodily aft. Through the jagged holes in the plating, it was possible to look into the forward mess deck and see the stools and tables. The fore part of the forecastle deck had collapsed downwards until the stemhead was nearly touching the water, forming a vertical wall, over the top of which the muzzle of the wrecked four-inch gun protruded at an odd angle.
‘Looks as if it were mounted on the edge of a cliff,’ Kelly said.
‘We’ll have to be towed home stern-first,’ Naylor observed.
‘Who by?’ Kelly turned with difficulty. ‘Seems to me, we’re all alone, Sub. Let’s hope the mist holds and then, at least, the Hun won’t see us creeping off.’
‘Can we creep off?’
‘We can try.’
It was now midnight and the flickering of flames along the horizon still continued with the glare of searchlights and the thunder of gunfire. Wellbeloved was already below, struggling with baulks of timber, mattresses and rope to prop up the forward bulkhead. On that one bulwark of steel depended the ship’s safety, and he and his men were struggling in waist-high water to strengthen it so they could move.
‘We could wait for daylight,’ Hatchard suggested. ‘I dare bet there won’t be any Germans around to sink us by then.’
Kelly winced at the pain across his shoulders. ‘There probably won’t be any of our ships around either,’ he said. ‘Not that we could call for help, anyway, because we’ve got neither searchlight nor wireless.’
Wellbeloved appeared. He was filthy dirty and soaked to the skin, his clothes clinging to his thick body.
‘You can try her now,’ he said. ‘Dead slow.�
��
For a while they made way through the sea, but it was difficult to steer without any knife-edge to cleave the water. Plates were hanging loose and clanging and clattering as they moved, and with every yard they were shoving against the hundreds of tons of water that flooded into the open bows. Wellbeloved returned from a tour of inspection.
‘Bulkhead’s starting to go,’ he said. ‘Looks as if it might collapse. It’s pushing the whole ocean in front of it. We’re down by the bows and the oil tank’s leaking into the sea.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘Stop engines for a kick-off. It’ll diminish the strain.’
‘Right. And we’ll adjust the weight to bring the bows out of the water a bit.’
Everything movable was shifted aft to lift the shattered bows, and the forward bulkheads were shored up by more spars, planks, mess stools and tables. The same was done to the top of the oil tank which was showing signs of bulging upwards, and the ammunition from the forward shell room was carried aft while the anchor chain was cut away and allowed to splash into the sea.
They finished the work as first light came to reveal the extent of the damage to the ship. The funnels that still stood, like the ventilators, were riddled through with hundreds of small gashes and the decks were slashed and ripped by splinters. All the officers’ cabins and the charthouse had been set on fire and the navigational instruments destroyed, while there were three holes in the ship’s side and the main topmast, charred and blackened by the flames, hung down over the wrecked searchlight. The rigging, signal lockers, everything, were a mass of torn steel and timber.
‘Well, that settles it,’ Kelly said. ‘It seems we’ve got to get her home. We can’t abandon because we’ve got no boats.’
