The Passion and the Glory

by Christopher Nicole

  But as he stared into the screen, he became aware of a peculiar circumstance; Prince of Wales was turning, steadily, round and round in a circle. ‘Oh, shit,’ he commented.

  His apprehension was immediately confirmed by the quiet voice from above. ‘We have been hit aft, and have lost steering,’ it said. ‘You will have to do the best you can.’

  Clive could see other aircraft approaching, but he kept losing them, could only fire blind. Then the battleship shuddered again and again, like some huge beast being struck by a hunter’s bullets, and now, although the engine continued to throb beneath him, he could tell from the radar that they had lost most of their way through the water — even in circles.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve lost at least two screws,’ said the voice from above him. ‘These fellows are damnably accurate with their torpedoes.’

  A moment later the radar screens went dead as a bomb exploded on the deck above. The control room became filled with smoke and fumes, and Clive knew this was the end. The ship was lying virtually dead in the water, however much her guns continued to blaze. There was little he could do to control them now; he could only tell every man to keep firing to the last. ‘May as well get up top,’ he told his yeomen, and they filed out of the room.

  Clive was last, pausing to blink in the bright noon day glare, and to inhale the smoke with which he was surrounded. The sea looked oddly close at hand, and he realised that the ship was filling. Prince of Wales, that indestructible and so comfortable home on which he had spent a happy nine months, was sinking.

  But no orders had as yet been given to abandon ship. He climbed the ladder to the lower bridge, the better to see what was going on. The noise was tremendous, as both battleships and the four destroyers were all blazing away with everything they had, and as the Japanese planes came in to attack in wave after wave of concentrated fury; the cloudless sky was a mosaic of smoke and vapour trails and the tracks of tracer streams. The green water beneath was criss-crossed with torpedo wakes, and splattered with spray from bomb explosions. He looked astern for Repulse, felt his heart miss a beat as he realised she wasn’t there, turned to look forward, and saw her. She had steamed past Prince of Wales but was now turning to come back to the flagship’s aid. As she did so, several Japanese planes moved down on her. Clive watched huge explosions hurling metal and men skywards, and Repulse lost way, sagging to port.

  The sag increased. Clive held his breath as he watched men jump into the sea. Somehow this was more terrible than the instant destruction of Hood. That had taken the breath away, but the ship had been gone so very quickly it had taken several hours for the fact of the catastrophe to sink in. This seemed to be happening in slow motion, as Repulse turned on her side and with a huge gurgle, sank beneath the waves.

  Instinctively Clive looked at his watch, as if he would need to have the correct time to give to the police when they arrived to investigate this unthinkable disaster; it was twenty-seven minutes to one. He watched a great wave roll away from the sunken battleship, a huge swell because it was so smothered in oil it couldn’t break. It reached Prince of Wales and moved her to and fro; the battleship’s hull contained so much water it could only respond sluggishly.

  Behind the wave the destroyers moved in to pick up survivors. No Japanese attacked them; the planes were now gathering for the destruction of the chief prize. Clive went to one of his gun stations to encourage his men. ‘We got one of the bastards, sir,’ a gunner told him.

  ‘We got two,’ objected another.

  They were still full of fight, unaware that they were sitting on a corpse. But a corpse which was taking a long time to die. Clive inspected every one of his gun positions, saw to the removal of some of the wounded, gazed at teams with hoses dousing the fires caused by the bombs, listened to the clanging from below as the engineers vainly tried to produce some power out of the chaos down there, stepped over dead men, slipped on streams of blood … and watched the sea slowly rising about the hull. He climbed up to the bridge, listened to Admiral Phillips sending orders to Express, which was close alongside, to signal Singapore for a tug to tow them home. He didn’t yet seem able to grasp that they weren’t going home.

  Captain Leach knew better. He spoke to the telegrapher, and a moment later the tannoy blared, ‘Blow up your life jackets.’

  Clive obeyed the order mechanically. He had rehearsed this

  so many times, without truly expecting ever to do it. And still the enemy aircraft buzzed to and fro, and the ship trembled to the roar of the ack-ack guns, and the tracer streams cut across the sky, and the sun beamed upon the scene with glorious warmth.

  Suddenly the deck was tilting. ‘Abandon ship,’ said the quiet voice on the tannoy.

  Clive looked at Leach and Phillips, who stood together, gazing down at the foredeck. ‘Aren’t you coming, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘You get along, Lieutenant McGann,’ the captain said. ‘You get along.’

  Clive hesitated, then turned for the ladder. He was suddenly obsessed with the necessity to fetch some of the more personal items from his cabin. But that was impossible; the quarterdeck was awash. He slid down the ladder, gazed at a wounded sailor lying by one of the bulkhead doors. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘No time for lying about.’

  The sailor gazed at him with shocked, pain-filled eyes. There was a good deal of blood on the deck, and his life jacket was punctured. Clive knelt beside him, took off his own jacket, and inserted the man into it. The sailor groaned and swore. Men stumbled by them, and threw themselves into the sea. The angle of the deck was now acute.

  ‘Let’s hurry,’ Clive said. He stood up, the man in his arms. He had intended to make a dash for the rail, but it wasn’t necessary. The angle of heel had him sliding down before he could stop himself. The pair of them struck the rail and a moment later were in the water; Clive realised it couldn’t have been more than a few feet below them. He looked up, at the superstructure of the battleship looming above him, and began to swim with desperate energy. His tremendous strength enabled him to get well away from the ship, towing the sailor by the collar, before Prince of Wales fell on her side. Clive swam even more desperately, but even so it seemed a giant had hold of his ankles, and he went down and down and down. He lost the sailor, even as he realised that, without a life jacket, he would have to swim back to the surface. He struck out with all his strength and surged upwards. He broke the surface and gulped for air; with it came a mouthful of seawater which was mostly oil. He swallowed and choked, then vomited, again and again, only just managing to keep his head above water, wondering stupidly if his vomit would attract sharks. But sharks would surely realise they were out of their class in this man made cataclysm.

  If they did come, they would have a lot to do. The water was full of men, and not all of them were swimming, while there was blood everywhere. He looked up, and saw Express moving into the mass of swimmers and flotsam, as slowly as possible to avoid chopping anyone up in her propellors. Nets were strung from her side, and up these men were climbing. Now the other destroyers were also moving in. Clive looked up at the sky, which was strangely clear. The Japanese had done their work and were going home; this was the second major naval victory they had achieved in a week.

  He reached the destroyer’s side, grasped the rope, hung there while the men climbed past him. ‘Take your time,’ he said, as one or two fought each other for the way out of the water. ‘Hold on to me, sailor.’

  The men obeyed, and climbed up, hand over hand, man after man. Clive kept looking for Bryson, but didn’t see him. He kept thinking that the Japanese could have stayed and sunk the four destroyers, left every man to drown. So they couldn’t be that bad. Then it was his turn to leave the water. He reached the deck and was wrapped in a blanket. He looked back at the still disturbed water where Prince of Wales had gone down, thought of Dad and Oregon and Joan, and realised that he still hated the enemy, anyway.

  *

  ‘Great God in the morning,’ Captain Lewis McGann sa
id. ‘Us. And now the British. Do you realise this means there is not a single battleship on our side left in the Pacific?’

  ‘It’s just too terrible to be true,’ his wife said. ‘Lew, do you think Clive is all right?’

  They gazed at each other. Brenda Grant was Lewis McGann’s second wife, but they had known each other a very long time; they had actually been engaged to be married before the tempestuous May Gerrard had re-entered Lew’s life. May had been, unknown to Lew, pregnant. When he had learned that, honour had demanded he marry her, even if as time went

  by and he had come to know his wife better, he could have nothing but doubts as to whether that child was truly his. The boy had been named Clive.

  In fact, Clive had been in every way a McGann, and Lew had always loved him as much as he had loved Joan and Walter. That Clive had been taken to England by his mother — she had taken all the children — and been educated there, and thus had elected to join the Royal rather than the United States Navy had been a disappointment to his father, but it had not interfered with their friendship. And after May’s tragic death — defending Brenda herself from the kempei-tai, the Japanese secret police — that friendship had been extended by all the McGann children to their new stepmother. They knew nothing of the tortuous ins-and-outs of their parents’ lives, or of their father’s relationship with the beautiful intelligent agent, the adventures they had shared, the horrors they had seen. They accepted Brenda as the woman their father now loved, and in response, she had grown to love them equally.

  Now …

  ‘Clive will have survived,’ Lewis McGann said. He got up and went to the window to look down at the garden. Brenda watched him with anxious eyes. She came from a Navy family herself. Still crisply attractive at forty years old, with a world of horrifying experiences behind her, many shared with this man, she knew his strength, of mind as much as that contained in his giant body, but she knew too the pressure he had been under during this last week, the unutterable misery he had felt as he had watched his command, USS Oregon, sinking beneath the waves, the anger he had known as he had counted the dead amongst his crew, the anxiety he had experienced to be out and striking back at the enemy. ‘We’ll hit back at those bastards.’

  ‘All of you,’ Brenda said. ‘Even Wally.’

  He glanced at her. ‘I wish to God I could get hold of him. Just find out where he’s been posted, I wish to God I knew where I was going to be posted. I wish to God I knew anything.’

  ‘I wish to God we knew how Joan is,’ Brenda said. ‘In Hong Kong.’

  Chapter 2

  Hong Kong and the East Indies — 1941-42

  The noise of the guns was continuous, the screaming of the shells, the heavy crumps of the explosions, the rattle of small arms fire, the drone of the planes and the chatter of their cannon, all merged into a general cacophony which overwhelmed the misery of the humans beneath.

  There was enough of that. The Chinese too could scream, in terror and agony, as their houses and shops were blown flat. For the past half dozen years, Hong Kong had stood aside and watched the Japanese invasion of China, learned of the wholesale slaughter and unthinkable atrocities that were being perpetrated only a few miles away, taken in refugees fleeing from the terror that was the Rising Sun. Now, without any warning, the Rising Sun had loomed above the little island colony.

  It had begun at dawn on Monday morning, with the whine of the aircraft and the roar of guns too, for the Japanese had brought a whole division up against the defences of Kowloon on the mainland. Joan Grimmett had leapt from her bed in horror, rushed on to the verandah of her house and stood there in her nightie, staring at the marauders from the sky. Her husband had been with her, then, and they had both been too astounded to speak.

  Since then they had hardly seen each other. Long before the Japanese attack, the possibility of it had been canvassed, and like most of the English ladies in the colony, certainly the service wives, Joan had volunteered to do her part — in her case, as an auxiliary nurse — just as the male civilians had all enrolled in the Volunteers. She had thus pulled on her khaki uniform — shirt, tie, skirt, tunic, stockings and heavy brown shoes, and driven down to the hospital in Victoria to report for duty. That had been four days ago. She had neither showered nor paused properly to make up. That too had been four days ago, as the casualties had started arriving almost immediately, and then had followed in a steady stream.

  At least she had been kept too busy to worry, about what was happening to her house, to her friends, and above all, to her husband. John had been shore based, but he was still a naval officer, and had hurried off to join the sailors who with British, Canadian and Indian troops formed the twelve thousand man garrison under the command of Brigadier Maltby. She had not heard from him since, presumed he was on the mainland with the rest of the soldiers, trying desperately to hold back the Japanese onslaught. Her principal fear was that he would be on one of the stretchers which were continually being brought across the mile wide strip of water, and placed on the floor.

  Joan had not been trained as a nurse. As the daughter of May Gerrard and Lewis McGann she had been born to great wealth on the one hand, wealth which she and her brothers had largely inherited, and a concept of duty on the other. If she knew, more than her brothers, about her mother’s peccadilloes, she also knew what a gallant lady she had been. She was proud to have inherited more of May’s looks than her father’s — for a girl the reverse would have been a disaster. Any McGann could not help being tall — Joan stood five foot nine in her bare feet — but she was not grotesquely so, and her height was enhanced rather than accentuated by the full figure and flowing yellow hair she had gained from her mother, while she was also blessed with May Gerrard’s softly rounded features and pale blue eyes. She wore her hair short, now, and was glad of that in the blood and sweat and desperation of the hospital. Just as, for the first time in her brief married life, she was glad that she and John had not yet had any children. That had been worrying her down to just a month ago. Now it was the happiest thought she had, that at least there was no baby waiting to be blown up by a bomb.

  The reality of war was so much worse than she had expected. Her training as an auxiliary had been brief and perfunctory. She and her friends had joked about it. Bed pans and bottoms. Men seeking a fumble. Men, in fact, in every aspect of their masculinity.

  But not actually men dying, or worse, men fighting to live. Not actually blood, and guts, and screams of torment. Not actually seeing, hearing, smelling, experiencing masculinity for sixteen hours out of every twenty-four. Now they went about their duties mechanically. Joan dreamed of a hot bath and washing her hair. She wanted that more than anything else in the world.

  And now there was no time for bedpans. The casualties were coming in too fast for the regular staff to cope with, and even the auxiliary nurses had to assist at operations, while the supplies of anaesthetic and even antiseptic dwindled, and more and more men had to be treated without the benefit of either. They moaned, and cursed, and stared at her breasts with longing eyes. They were Indians as well as Caucasians. They were men. And they were dying.

  The nurses were allowed ten minutes every second hour. Joan sat on the ground in the warm December sunshine for a cup of coffee with her closest friend, Betty Lincoln. Betty was physically in the strongest contrast, small and dark, but full of vivacity. Or she had been full of vivacity, last week. Now she gave Joan a cigarette. Joan hadn’t smoked, down to last week. Now it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘The sergeant told me the relief will be here tomorrow,’ Betty said.

  ‘What relief?’ Joan asked.

  ‘Oh, the Navy, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, if the Navy would come.’ Clive was in the Navy. He served on Prince of Wales. To see that magnificent ship steaming up from the south would make it all worthwhile. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ she said, and raised her head to look at her husband.

  John Grimmett had lost his cap, and hi
s white tropical uniform was blackened with smoke and dirt; one stocking had slipped down round his ankle; Joan had never seen him looking other than trim and smart.

  ‘Johnnie!’ she shouted, and was in his arms. ‘Oh, Johnnie.’ She held herself away. ‘I’m sorry, I must stink like a drain.’

  ‘Join the club. Joan … his shoulders sagged. ‘Prince of Wales has been sunk.’

  She stared at him, listened to a gulp from Betty.

  ‘So has Repulse,’ John said. ‘They were caught by Japanese bombers, without air cover, only a few miles north of Singapore.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Joan said. ‘Oh, God. Were there … I mean … ‘

  ‘There’s no word, yet. But over two thousand men were rescued by the destroyers. Clive is sure to have been amongst them.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Thanks for coming over to tell me.’ Grimmett looked even more distressed than before. ‘I didn’t come just to tell you,’ he said. ‘We’ve abandoned the mainland.’

  Once again she stared at him.

  ‘We just can’t hold them. We’ve got to try to hold the island.’

  ‘Can we?’ Betty asked.

  ‘It’s not very likely, without assistance.’

  ‘And there’s no hope of relief?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘None at all. I came to say … ‘ he licked his lips. ‘We’ll fight as long as possible. Orders from London. No surrender. I may not see you again.’