The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  ‘In the end,’ Verschoyle observed, ‘I suppose we can probably blame Fisher for it. He towered above everybody else but he split the Navy from top to bottom with such effect that for over a decade no officer dared disagree or express an opinion on a naval matter in a mess, club, ship or even a bloody drawing room. And with his blasted dreadnoughts he put the whole Navy out of date in a year because the Germans simply built better ones.’

  Kelly was startled at Verschoyle’s percipience. It was something that had begun to occur to him, too, but he was surprised to find Verschoyle agreed with him.

  ‘We could have lost another six ships without worrying,’ he growled. ‘We’ve got enough building, and it’d have been worth it in the end if we’d wiped ’em off the face of the sea. But it didn’t work that way. Someone was afraid to take the risk.’ He drew a deep rasping breath that hurt his chest. ‘One thing, we ought to have a better navy for the rest of the war. I would say the lesson’s written into the soul of everybody with any brains who was there: You can’t plan a naval battle from harbour, and if you don’t seize your chances you’ll never get ’em offered again.’

  Verschoyle stared at him shrewdly. ‘You know, Maguire,’ he said, ‘for the first time you sound like a bloody admiral. With luck you might actually make it. When I’m First Sea Lord I’ll take pleasure in giving you some obscure command in the Far East.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ Kelly said, and Verschoyle laughed.

  They reached Rosyth about midnight. They were towed stern-first down the reaches by the tug, the engines stopped, only the auxiliaries going to keep things turning. A few ships cheered them as they moved slowly past but not many because most of them were concerned with their own hurts and their own casualties.

  ‘I’m taking you alongside,’ Verschoyle said. ‘The place’s been astir all day waiting to help you chaps home.’

  ‘Good,’ Kelly said. ‘The troops’ll be able to get ashore. What there are left of the poor buggers.’

  Another tug appeared and the captain started yelling irritably across the intervening water.

  ‘If that bloody man doesn’t stop yelling at me,’ Kelly snarled, ‘I’ll turn a bloody machine gun on him. You’d better tell him so.’

  Verschoyle passed the message as it stood and the tug captain stopped shouting abruptly. Slowly, watched by silent dockyard workers and sailors from other ships, they were nudged shorewards.

  ‘You’ll be going into the basin,’ Verschoyle said. ‘As soon as we can clear it.’

  Kelly nodded. He was limp from lack of sleep and pain but he couldn’t imagine where he could go to rest. His cabin was wrecked. The captain’s cabin was wrecked and the wardroom was still full of wounded.

  ‘We’ll have the injured lifted out in cots for the Queensferry hospital,’ Verschoyle said. ‘I think I can safely attend to that for you. You’ll be going with them, of course.’

  ‘I’m staying here.’

  Verschoyle took a look at Kelly’s expression and didn’t press the point, and Kelly bit his lip, wondering if Wellbeloved’s shoring would survive the last few hundred yards. It would be too bloody bad, he thought, if it collapsed and they sank just as they went alongside. Especially with Verschoyle on board, to laugh like a drain at his discomfiture.

  The hospital drifter arrived. Kelly watched the wounded brought up and taken aboard. Verschoyle was no longer arguing with him and when a pinnace appeared with a message to say the basin was free, he simply passed on Kelly’s orders.

  As they were warped through the lock gates, watched by crowds of wharfies, men from Warspite, and survivors of Warrior in a mixture of uniform and civilian clothes, the heaving lines went ashore, dragging the hawsers and springs after them.

  ‘I think you ought to go down now,’ Verschoyle advised.

  ‘Yes,’ Kelly agreed. ‘Perhaps I will.’

  But as he spoke the dockside began to spin and the sky grew dark. His knees felt weak and his mouth felt like sandpaper. Little doors seemed to be shutting in his mind, one after the other, until finally the light began to disappear. There weren’t many left to go now and when the last one shut he knew he’d know no more.

  ‘I think I’ll lie down,’ he said, and as he did so he slipped quietly backwards into Verschoyle’s arms.

  Eight

  Lying on his side, propped up by pillows, with a whole ward of other wounded men in white enamelled beds like a regiment of horizontal white guardsmen, Kelly stared one-eyed from under a great wadding of cottonwool and bandage at the grey sky through the hospital window. The nurse fussed round the bed, full of harsh good cheer and Scottish banter.

  ‘Feeling better?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Kelly said. ‘Worse.’

  ‘Don’t despair. You’ll be with us for a long time yet.’

  His mother had been to see him but, with his grandfather appointed at last to a remount depot near Esher and in need of looking after and with the mare about to foal, she’d not stayed long. Kimister had also been. He’d looked faintly shamefaced. Collingwood had never been hit, and he’d never once been in the slightest danger and, looking at Kelly’s battered face under the wad of bandaging, he’d had a feeling that somehow he’d shirked his duty. He’d brought the newspapers containing the Admiralty’s communiqué. ‘The German fleet,’ it had said, ‘aided by low visibility, avoided prolonged action with our main forces, and soon after these appeared on the scene the enemy returned to port, though not before receiving severe damage from our battleships.’

  And not before dishing out a bit, too, Kelly thought.

  In the lunacy of the moment the penpushers seemed to have gone off their heads. ‘Glorious end of our cruisers,’ one of them announced, but there seemed nothing very glorious about being blown up and reduced to ashes in a fraction of a second. Nor was there anything very glorious about badly designed ships taking men to their deaths, or bad gunnery and bad signalling practice allowing the Germans to get away.

  It all seemed to have been so bloody pointless. A lot of lives had been lost and a lot of ships sunk to smash the Germans, and it seemed that the Germans hadn’t been smashed after all – because of all those old duffers like his father who had lived by paintwork and brass and chucked their blackleaded practice shells overboard as they conducted their unrealistic exercises and behaved as if they were the lords of creation. It had been the boast that Britannia ruled the waves and that all other world powers were land powers. They’d never realised that battleships were meant to fight battles and throughout the hundred years of peace since Trafalgar they’d been resting on Nelson’s laurels so that when the great moment came they’d not been up to the challenge.

  The lost ships were known now – Invincible, Queen Mary, Indefatigable, Defence, Warrior, Black Prince, Ardent, Fortune, Sparrowhawk, Tipperary, Turbulent, Shark, Nomad, Nestor – to say nothing of those which had crawled or been towed home badly damaged. The destroyers alone had taken an awful hammering as they’d tried to screen their bigger sisters, and grief had come home to households all over the country. Menfolk had been snatched away in an overnight cataclysm which, for the relationship of dead to wounded, was not even matched by the slaughter the old duffers from Aldershot were inflicting on the army in France. Only a few survivors had been found in Norwegian and Danish coastal villages after being hauled from the sea by fishermen.

  It was hard to find out the facts as far as the Germans were concerned. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary. The gaps in the British lines were too depressing to make it important, and some sections of the press were already hue and cry after the Admiralty for ‘making excuses’. No matter what had happened, they claimed, the German High Seas Fleet had been caught and allowed to get away. Even the fairest considered the outcome of the battle ‘disappointing,’ and claimed that the German Navy would have the assurance henceforth that it could cross swords with the British
Navy and survive.

  ‘Defeat must be admitted,’ the Manchester Guardian said, and ‘The result can’t be regarded with satisfaction’ was the Telegraph’s and the Mail’s view.

  Kelly scowled. The Germans had fought well, but they’d been driven from the field and that was something. The Grand Fleet was still in control of the exits and entrances to the North Sea and although it had snapped at its gaoler, the High Seas Fleet was still in prison.

  As Kelly looked up, he became aware of Rumbelo standing alongside the bed.

  ‘Hello, Rumbelo,’ he said. ‘You all right?’

  ‘I’m all right, sir. I managed to rescue some of your gear. Not much. But I brought it up for you. I wondered how you were and they said I could come in and see you.’

  Kelly forced a smile. ‘You deserve a putty medal, Rumbelo,’ he said. ‘For keeping me upright all that time. I bet your arms were aching.’

  ‘They were a bit, sir. Actually, though, I don’t think anybody could have pushed you over if they’d tried.’

  ‘That’s the best of having big feet. Are they giving you leave?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m going down to Esher.’

  ‘To see Biddy?’

  ‘She said I could, any time I wanted.’

  ‘Well, don’t be a damn’ fool and stay at a pub. That room over the stable’s there for you.’

  Rumbelo grinned. ‘Biddy don’t approve of that, sir. She thinks it’d be wrong, without a chaperone.’

  Kelly tried to shrug but caught his breath as the pain tore at his shoulders.

  ‘There’s no understanding women,’ he said. ‘How’re the troops?’

  Rumbelo’s face fell. ‘We were a bit bucked when we got in, sir,’ he said. ‘We thought we ’adn’t done so badly, but the papers say we’ve been licked and that the admirals were just a lot of bloody fools. They don’t seem to think much of the result and that’s a fact.’

  Kelly frowned. ‘All those chaps in Mordant didn’t die just to please the Hurrah Department of the Daily Mail,’ he growled.

  ‘It didn’t come up to expectations, though, did it, sir? We had ’em stone cold and we let ’em get away.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly the glorious victory we were expecting,’ Kelly agreed. ‘Partial, perhaps, because they did run away, but it wasn’t the big smash we’ve been looking forward to.’

  Rumbelo shifted uneasily. ‘They say they’re after Jellicoe’s blood, sir,’ he observed. ‘They reckon he threw his opportunity away.’

  Kelly grimaced. ‘It’s always easy to be wise when you’re sitting in an office in Fleet Street,’ he said. ‘All the same, perhaps we’d been waiting for it too long and the German taunts hurt. And, even if we didn’t lose, there’s still a bit of a loss of face.’

  When Rumbelo had gone, Kelly stared at the wall for a while. The nurse tried to make him smile with her brisk clattery laughter and pawky humour, but he was in a stubborn mood and didn’t reply. He wanted to be in a bad temper – the occasion seemed to demand it – and nobody was going to jerk him out of it. There must be something inside him, he decided, that would one day develop into the fuss and fury of the senior officer he’d made up his mind to become. He allowed her to give him a new injection in his backside but didn’t yield an inch to her jokes.

  ‘What’s that for?’ he demanded.

  ‘Put you to sleep. They want you to have a good rest. Those stitches in your back are all going to have to come out. It’s either that or a back corrugated like a rubbing board.’

  Kelly glared. ‘Oh, bloody charming,’ he said. ‘I’ll enjoy that.’

  She beamed at him. ‘My, we are in a bad temper, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  She laughed. ‘Yon’s a pity because there’s someone tae see you.’

  ‘Who?’ Now that Kimister and Rumbelo had been and gone, Kelly could only think of Hatchard or Wellbeloved – or, for God’s sake, not Verschoyle!

  The nurse laughed. ‘It’s a lady,’ she said. ‘She says she’s been travelling all night from London.’

  Kelly tried to sit up but she pushed him down again. ‘Young or old?’ he asked.

  ‘Young. Verra young. And verra pretty. A gey sight prettier than you anyway.’

  Kelly glowered. ‘Then why the blazes did you give me that bloody injection?’ he demanded indignantly.

  ‘So you’ll go to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to sleep! Especially if she’s come all this way to see me.’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll mind. She said they’d taken a room at the George and that they’ll be staying for a few days. All she wants at this moment is to see if you’re in one piece.’

  ‘And am I?’

  ‘Oh, aye! Pretty well.’

  ‘How long’s she been waiting?’

  ‘A few minutes.’

  ‘Then stop your damned chattering and wheel her in.’

  Charley came down the ward shyly, looking like a schoolgirl and conscious of the other wounded officers staring at her. She was dressed in pale blue, which made her dark hair seem darker, and she had a paper bag in her hand.

  Kelly grinned. ‘Grapes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tears sparkling on her lashes, she sat at the side of the bed, her anxious eyes on what she could see of Kelly’s face under the bandages. ‘Mabel brought me. She didn’t want to, but I made her.’

  ‘Don’t I get a kiss?’

  Without a word she leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek.

  ‘That the best you can do?’

  Cautiously, reaching under the wad of bandage, she transferred her attentions to his mouth and his hands came up and grasped her. She wrenched herself free.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I might hurt you.’

  ‘I’m not made of icing sugar. How long are you staying?’

  ‘A day or two.’

  ‘Thank God for that! If I pass out on you, it’s not because I’m dying, it’s because that fathead of a nurse has given me an injection to send me to sleep.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll be here tomorrow. Do you think they’ll let me sit here for a while if you do go to sleep?’

  ‘There can’t be much fun staring at a man snoring in bed. Unless you’re in there with him.’

  She blushed. ‘I shall be all right. How are you?’

  Kelly could feel himself becoming drowsy and he made an effort to stay awake.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Or fairly fine. I’m not going to lose my eye and that’s something, ain’t it? And they’ve fixed my cheekbone. They’re going to have another go at my back any day now.’

  He noticed the tears in her eyes. ‘What are you crying for?’ he demanded.

  She gave a choking sob. ‘Kelly, your poor face!’

  He managed a smile. ‘Well, it was never much to write home about, and they say I shall be quite pretty again when they’ve finished. An honourable scar or two but nothing to mar my beauty.’

  She drew a deep, painful breath. ‘You hardly seemed to have left London when we heard about the battle,’ she said.

  Kelly sighed. ‘I’d been there about nine weeks, Charley,’ he said slowly, wonderingly, thinking about Talbot. ‘Some people had been waiting for two years.’

  ‘Mother says the war seems to follow you about.’

  ‘She’s probably right.’

  Kelly’s breathing was becoming steady and he noticed that the pain in his back was fading. Another minute or two and that bloody injection would have him asleep.

  ‘Is that all?’ he asked. ‘I know that.’

  She managed a shy smile, almost as if she were a stranger. ‘I’m glad you’re safe, Kelly.’

  His smile was drowsy. ‘That’s the least I expect from you,’
he said.

  ‘When I heard there was a battle, I prayed for you.’

  ‘It seems to have taken.’

  ‘I’m so proud of you. I met Rumbelo outside. Did you know he and Biddy are thinking of getting married?’

  ‘Good luck to ’em.’ Kelly’s voice was growing slurred. ‘As neither of ’em seems to have a home, I suppose they’ll do it at our place. Mother’ll enjoy that.’

  ‘Rumbelo was proud of you, too. He said the whole ship was proud.’

  Kelly fought to keep his eyes open. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you got them home. And because of the other thing, too.’

  ‘What other thing?’

  ‘He said James Verschoyle came aboard and told them you’d get nothing less than a Victoria Cross for what you’d done.’

  Kelly’s vision was hazy now and Charley’s features were blurred. All he could see was a shy smile and dark hair, and a pale blue shape moving about in front of him. His heart felt full of warmth for her innocence and beauty and her belief in him, and he suddenly felt like crying. He swallowed, deciding that the injection was having a curious effect on his emotions, then what she’d said finally sank in and he gave a bark of cynical laughter.

  ‘I bet that made the envious bugger bite his lip a bit,’ he said cheerfully.

  As his vision twisted, he managed another faint smile before his eyes crossed, then, his eyelids drooping and his head sagging into the pillow, he fell fast asleep.

  ‘Kelly Maguire’ Titles

  (in order of first publication)

  These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

  1. The Lion at Sea 1977

  2. The Dangerous Years 1978

  3. Back to Battle 1979

  ‘Goff Family’ Titles

  (in order of first publication)

  These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

  1. Soldier of the Queen 1980