The rip of air again … And propellers passing over now: fast, loud, reaching a peak of sound and then – fading, into the blowing sound … ‘Stop blowing! Slow ahead together!’
Jake yelled the orders down, and the noise cut off; he heard Ellery pass the slow-ahead order, and almost immediately after that the first charge exploded. A ringing crash: as if the submarine was a gong and they’d belted her with a hammer. The crash of the explosion reverberated away in jerky throbs as the boat flung over to starboard: lights flickered, went out, came on again. The launch, obviously, had dropped that charge, and Jake guessed that the larger ship had brought charges up, that the peaceful interval had been the time she’d taken to issue them to the launches.
‘Stop together!’
Jake and Ellery in chorus …
‘Open five and six main vents!’
McVeigh grabbed the levers and jerked them back, and Jake heard the thuds of the vents dropping open in the tank-tops.
‘Blow one and two main ballast!’
Getting a bow-up angle now, so as to slide the gun’s barrel out of its enclosing wires … The second launch – or the first one making a second run – passed overhead. Jake realised that Wishart must have got the breech-end of the gun clear in that first bit of joggling around; otherwise he wouldn’t be angling her the other way now, he’d still be trying to shed the first lot. He had the shadowed, greenish picture of it in his mind, the net draped down over the jumping-wire, its starboard-side folds caught in and around the gun. She must have struck not quite at right-angles, for it to have swung in under the wire like that.
‘Stop blowing!’
‘Stop—’
The second charge was closer than the first. The boat rattled like an old tin can as the echoes of it boomed around her, through her. The lights went out: Wishart’s voice called down into pitch darkness, ‘Slow astern together!’ Jake heard Ellery pass that aft. Looking upwards he saw greenish light glowing through the little oblong window and illuminating the top half of his captain’s face. That was daylight filtered through thirty feet of Dardanelles. He felt movement: she was responding, coming astern, pulling herself out of the net’s grasp. He told himself, Easy – don’t count your chickens… Lights came on: the emergency ones, fewer and less bright than the main ones. He moved down one rung on the ladder; he’d gone up one at some point without being aware of doing so.
‘Stop together!’
But there’d been a flat, angry tone in that order. And if she’d been clear of the net, he wouldn’t have stopped her, he’d have gone on, got her right out away from it; the net, after all, had to be the Turks’ point of aim with their depth-charges. So what now? Jake stared up at his captain’s dark bulk half-filling the tower; and distantly, but rapidly getting louder, he heard one of the launches starting another attacking run. A moment ago he’d thought they were free, on the move … Wishart told him, ‘There’s still some net caught round the trainer’s handwheel, the base of it.’ The enemy’s screws were pounding closer, louder. If the launch passed close over the submarine’s forepart, Jake realised, Wishart might actually see it, see the dark hull rush past and the whirring silver of its screws. He shouted upwards. ‘Mightn’t it part with some weight on it, sir?’ Then he understood, while Wishart still peered out through the port and didn’t answer, what his objection would be. They’d heard the strain coming on the gundeck earlier, and much more of it might wrench rivets loose in the pressure-hull. The gun was bolted to its deck, but the gundeck in turn was riveted to the hull; if the bolts held, the strain would come on the actual plates. The enemy launch was about to pass right overhead: the peak of its propeller noise was coming – now …
‘Half astern together!’
Ellery had shouted it aft: Jake felt, through the rungs of the ladder, the vibration from the boat’s motors. He looked up towards Wishart in the tower, and at that moment the charge exploded. He saw Wishart blinded by its flash and thrown backwards against the far side of the tower. Signal flares cascaded from a locker, rained down on him: everything was coming down, including Wishart, and he grabbed the ladder tightly, braced himself just in time to receive his captain’s not by any means puny weight. The boat meanwhile seemed to have shot astern with a steep and increasing stern-down angle and a sharpish list to port: she was righting herself from the list now. Wishart roared beside Jake’s ear, ‘Open one, two, three, four main vents! Fifty feet!’ Main vents thudding open: Wishart had hauled himself off Jake: he was up there shutting the deadlight on the observation port. He shouted, ‘Go on down, pilot!’ Jake dropped through the hatch. The submarine was on an even keel athwartships but still had stern-down angle. He glimpsed the needles in the gauges passing forty-two, forty-four feet, then he was at the chart table and Wishart, tumbling through the hatch, panted, ‘Stop together. Half ahead together. Signalman, shut the hatch. Pilot, what was our last course?’
‘North sixty-east six east, sir.’ It felt like a hundred years since they’d run into the net. Wishart told Roost, ‘Steer that.’ Gathering way forward, the boat was levelling and the ’planesmen weren’t having to work so hard. Fifty-four feet on the gauges. Hobday saw Wishart looking at them critically and said, ‘Rather not change the trim until I have to, sir. I think she’s settling down.’
‘Sixty feet.’
‘Sixty feet, sir …’ Now he would have to pump some out. Jake was thinking that sixty feet was fine so far as passing under the net was concerned, but there was still the possibility of mines at lower levels. Wishart might have been considering the same point: he told Hobday, ‘Three minutes, to make sure we’re under, then we’ll come up to forty.’ These next few seconds, Jake thought, were surely the ones that counted. But you couldn’t have it both ways: you either risked catching the bottom of the net in the periscope standards or you made sure of passing below it. They could have ripped it, too, and there might be pieces trailing.
‘Slow ahead together.’ Wishart had glanced at Agnew: Hobday told him, ‘Telegraphs.’ With the motors running, the surface craft could hear them anyway. If they stopped rushing about and listened; and not even Turks would be so daft as to have headphones on while they were dropping charges.
‘Both motors slow ahead, sir.’
‘Any damage, Number One?’
‘Slight leaks under the gun-mounting, sir.’
Wishart went quickly to the for’ard end of the control room, and Jake turned from the chart table and stared up at the deckhead. At first he couldn’t see anything at all; the softness of the emergency lighting didn’t help. Then he spotted it: the smallest trickle, from one in a line of rivet-heads.
He reached up, touching it. ‘Here, sir.’
‘Couple here, too.’ Wishart said as he walked away, ‘We’ll see to it in the Marmara. At least, our gallant engineers will.’ McVeigh grinned at him wolfishly. Wishart asked, ‘Dixon doing something about the lights?’
‘Yessir.’ Hobday turned and looked at him; he’d got the trim right, at last. He said, ‘By the way, sir – congratulations.’
‘Eh?’
CPO Crabb growled, with his eyes on the gauge in front of him, ‘Lads ’d say the same, sir, I reckon.’
‘Oh.’ Wishart shook his head. ‘That last charge did it. There was a double loop round the trainer’s handwheel, and the charge snapped it like a bit of string … God knows what shape your gun’ll be in, Roost.’
‘We’ll find out by an’ by, sir.’
The lights came on. Seconds later, the emergency ones went out. A long way astern, a charge exploded. Laughter exploded too. It seemed hilariously funny, in that moment, that the Turks might be thinking they still had a submarine in their net.
‘Forty feet.’
‘Forty feet, sir!’
‘How long on this course, pilot?’
‘Two miles, sir – then north forty-one east.’
‘We’ll alter by log reading.’ It would be full daylight up there now, and silly to shove up a periscope if you
didn’t have to. If they wanted to imagine they still had her trapped – well, that was fine! Wishart added, ‘We’ll go to a hundred feet when we alter, and catch the current. Meanwhile, Number One, let’s spare the box. When you’re happy with the trim, stop one motor.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
The battery would be just about at its last gasp, by this time. There was no point in taking readings, though; however flat it was, it would be flatter before they reached the Marmara.
The leaking deckhead, Jake thought, might not be quite so small a trickle when they went deeper. In about half an hour they’d find out.
‘Forty feet, sir.’ Hobday told Agnew, ‘Stop starboard.’
‘Stop starboard, sir.’
Wishart moved for’ard, in the direction of the chart table. ‘All right, Stone?’
Leading Stoker Stone nodded. ‘Thank you, sir.’ He was a railwayman from Newhaven. His job at diving stations was looking after the starboard ballast pump – the pump itself, not the starter and motor, which McVeigh had charge of. A thin, worried-looking man. He’d told Jake – the night before they’d sailed, when Jake had been nosing around, trying to get to know the ship’s company in a hurry – how he’d come to ‘volunteer’ for submarines. He’d had a cushy number in HMS Vernon, the Portsmouth torpedo and mine school, and the drafting PO had remarked to him one day, ‘Time you made killick, Stone. Make a right good killick, you would.’
‘Killick’ meant, in this context, leading hand; a killick was the fouled-anchor badge that a leading seaman wore on his left arm. Stone, flattered, had listened; the PO had flannelled him along and told him, ‘They’re cryin’ out for killick stokers, down the road.’ He’d let his name go forward – and a few days later found himself in Fort Blockhouse, learning about submarines.
‘Dahn the road, ’e says! If ’e meant acrorss the bloody ’arbour whyn’t the bugger say so?’
Wishart asked him, pulling in his belly in order to squeeze by, ‘Heard from that young lady of yours lately?’
‘Writes reg’lar, sir.’ He looked pleased about that. Wishart propped himself in the doorway of the wireless cabinet. ‘Anything happening up there?’
‘Confused HE astern, sir. Reckon they’re chasin’ their tails, sir.’ Wishart nodded. He backed out of the cabinet and told Hobday, ‘Fall out diving stations, Number One. Let’s have a cup of tea.’
Chapter 6
‘When you were briefing Cameron the other day, remember you mentioned the Flag Officer Aegean being sent home after Goeben’s breakout?’
Hobday was in the armchair, addressing Wishart, who was on his bunk. Robins was on the other bunk, Cameron was on watch, and Nick and Burtenshaw were across the table from Hobday. Wishart asked, ‘What of it?’
‘Were you joking when you said he dribbles?’
‘By no means.’ Wishart shuddered. ‘It’s no joking matter. He smokes a pipe continuously, and slobbers down his chin. Politeness demands that one should look at him when he’s mumbling at you, and looking at him makes one feel sick. Anyway he’s back in London now. Dribbling over the Board of Admiralty, no doubt.’ He nodded. ‘Some justice in that, too.’
‘C-in-C sent him home?’
‘Yes. First-class man, Calthorpe.’ He was referring to the Honourable Sir Somerset A. Gough-Calthorpe, Vice-Admiral. He shut his eyes. ‘Look here, I think I’ll try for a bit of shut-eye now.’
‘Right. Sorry.’
Robins spoke from the other bunk. ‘Want to use this one, Hobday?’
Hobday glanced up, startled. Nick and Burtenshaw looked just as surprised. He chuckled. ‘Most kind. But I’ll wait until we’re in the Marmara, thanks all the same. Not much good at cat-naps.’
‘I’d’ve thought you’d have to be.’ Burtenshaw asked him, ‘D’you expect we’ll be undisturbed, in the Marmara?’
‘You lot won’t be. That’s when you start earning your pay, isn’t it?’
Robins chipped in again. ‘At what time will we get there?’
‘Cameron?’ Hobday twisted round in his armchair. ‘What’s ETA Marmara?’
Jake came over. Like a bear, Nick thought. It was that shambling walk of his. He told them, ‘Can’t be certain of the tide – but allowing three knots for it, plus the one or one-and-a-half we’re getting from slow speed on one screw – well, eighteen miles from where we altered and went deep at four-twenty … Say eight-thirty, well clear?’
Robins observed that thirteen hours was a great deal longer than the passage had been expected to take. Nobody answered him. The assertion was undeniable, and his voicing it might have been intended as a criticism or might not. Nobody cared much, either way. Nick was conscious of a peculiar sensation of timelessness, of being shut off, of having left the world behind and no longer belonging to it. Even Sarah: he frowned, at the suggestion of disloyalty, desertion which came in with that thought. But in Sarah’s case it wasn’t only the cutoff feeling that the submarine and its situation gave him, it was also the lack of contact with her earlier, the sparsity and sterility of her letters.
‘What?’
Jake Cameron had said something about having supper in the Marmara. He repeated it now. Nick thought, If it’s all plain sailing from here on. He was beginning to get the shape of things – which included a certain unwisdom in taking anything for granted.
Supper in the Marmara … And then, as Hobday had just said, the business of the landing. It was an extremely vague briefing that Reaper had given him. What it amounted to was that Robins would introduce him and Burtenshaw to certain contacts ashore, and they – Turks, or at any rate local residents – would provide the information and guidance for an attack on Goeben. Nick was to take Burtenshaw and Burtenshaw’s explosives under his command and see the thing through to the best possible conclusion, adjusting his plans according to the situation and developments ashore. Robins would be going his own devious, foreign-office way, politicking either with or in competition with the French. Reaper knew very little about that side of the business; his only instructions so far as Robins was concerned were that he was to be put ashore in company with the Frenchmen. But the outcome of the landing, of the political string-pulling or arm-twisting, and hopefully of the destruction of the Goeben - which was the piece de resistance – all this superimposed on the wider strategic developments, was expected to take the form of a Turkish surrender, and Reaper wanted to have Nick ashore in Constantinople when and if this came about. He’d be in communication with Reaper, and through Reaper with the C-in-C, by clandestine wireless links now operated by the people to whom Robins would be introducing him. These included an English woman to whom Reaper had referred as the Grey Lady. Nick would be expected to report on what was happening ashore, and might be required later to make arrangements of one sort or another for the arrival and safe reception of the Fleet.
Tall orders, Reaper had admitted. Tall, and vague. They could hardly, in the shifting circumstances, be more definite. And the situation might well be complicated by Robins, who had his own instructions from London and would almost certainly want to throw his weight about. But Robins wasn’t truly a naval man – Reaper seemed to expect to have his cake and eat it too, on this point – he wasn’t a professional, and Reaper didn’t trust him. Nick was basically to confine himself to the naval aspects of the situation; it was in areas where naval considerations overlapped political ones that he might find problems. He’d find problems anyway, and he was to act as he thought best in whatever circumstances arose.
‘Whatever you do,’ Reaper had told him, ‘you’ll have my support.’ Nick had nodded, liking that assurance. The commander had added, ‘But if you make a mess of it, we’ll both be for the high-jump.’
* * *
Jake Cameron had gone back to the centre of the control room. He had Rowbottom at the wheel, Finn on the fore ’planes and Anderson on the after ’planes. Rowbottom stolid, slow of speech: Finn, stocky and curly-haired, a complete contrast, one of the boat’s humorists. Anderson, the tall to
rpedoman, was a close friend and shore-going partner of Finn’s; he was nicknamed ‘Close-’aul’ Anderson, which had something to do with the belief that he sailed close to the wind in his dealings with the fair sex. He was alleged, certainly, to have one fiancée in Liverpool and another, a Greek girl, in Corfu town. E.57 had left Corfu only three weeks ago; until this Goeben flap had started she’d been part of the flotilla employed in blockading the Adriatic, keeping the Austrian fleet bottled up.
Dull work; but the general view was that having Corfu as their base compensated for it. And they hadn’t been out from England long enough to get bored by the uneventful patrols.
ERA Percy Bradshaw leant against the panel of vent and blow controls. ‘Polecate’ Bradshaw had worked for Cammell Laird at Birkenhead until early in the war. He could still have been there, if he’d wanted to be, earning big money in a ‘reserved occupation’. Bradshaw’s beard; Jake noticed, had grown during the night to a remarkable extent. He ran a hand over his own jaw; he was in a similar condition. Anderson was looking fairly rough too; but on Finn and Rowbottom, who were fairhaired, the stubble didn’t show so much.
‘Bit light for’ard, are we, Anderson?’
‘TI went aft, sir, did’n ’e?’
‘Close-’aul’ glanced over his shoulder as he said it. Most of his length was legs; he had trouble finding room for them when he was on the ’planesman’s stool.
Jake had forgotten about Rinkpole having gone aft. At this slow speed through the water – hopefully the boat was moving faster in relation to the land — the trim was easily upset. He glanced at the clock; ten minutes to five. About three-and-a-half more hours in the straits, that meant. He felt hungry. It would be marvellous to be out in open water, to sit down to a meal, relax, have a smoke … He crossed over to the chart table and leant on it, studying the Marmara, the entrance to it where the Gallipoli Strait widened out from this miserable crack between two land-masses. Quite a sizeable piece of water, the Marmara. About 120 miles long and 50 wide, with these straits at its western end and Constantinople and the Bosphorus at the other, and various islands in the middle. Fascinating to look at it and think how, in 1915, British submarines had forced their way in through these straits and virtually ruled the area, sunk everything warlike that had moved on the Marmara’s surface, closed it as a waterway to the nation who owned the land all around it. In the process, lost some ships and lives and made some reputations. When you considered the achievements of those early submarines, what was being asked of this one didn’t seem so much. It also made it imperative that she should score her own success.
Patrol to the Golden Horn Page 13
