Raging Sea, Searing Sky

by Christopher Nicole

  ‘Queen Mary, was it?’ asked the petty officer chief cook, Mr Wilkins. ‘Saw her go. You have to admit those bastards can shoot straight.’

  ‘Straighter than us,’ muttered one of his assistants.

  No, Lew wanted to protest. Those must all have been lucky shots. Three lucky shots?

  He was found a white overall to wear, and began carrying cans of soup to the men on duty, more dangerous work than actually having a post, for although the destroyers were forming a screen to either side and in front of the racing battleships, and were not actually firing or really being fired at, they were constantly doused in sheets of spray, and sometimes in whole waves, while every man on board was aware that a single shell from one of the battleships falling short would blow them to pieces, and equally aware that the slightest failure of any of their mechanism would leave them to be run down by their own ships.

  The evening was drawing in quite rapidly now, and the German battle fleet was all but invisible. It was racing south in the hopes of escaping, but the British fleet was keeping station on its eastern flank. In the murk Lew could see the blaze of several fires on board enemy vessels to show that at least some of the British shot had struck home. He couldn’t make out the battlecruisers behind them, but obviously they had re-joined the Grand Fleet and were a part of the huge armada surging through the seas.

  Then the alarm went. ‘Prepare to fire,’ came the command. ‘Destroyer attack.’

  Lew and the cooks hurried up from the gallery to see what was happening, and out of the mist could make out the long line of small ships coming at them.

  ‘Schleer’s trying to slow Jellicoe up with torpedoes,’ the petty officer said.

  But this was what the destroyer screen was for. The little ships increased speed, and now the four-inch gun on the foredeck opened fire, sending its small shells hurtling into the gloom. Then the destroyer turned first one way and then the other, and Lew saw again the deadly white lines under the surface. Torpedoes! The very thought of them made his skin crawl.

  Now they were close to the enemy, firing continually, and being fired at in turn; the sea was dotted with splashes. But the movement of the destroyers was so violent, as was the twisting and turning, that very few hits were scored on either side. And the attack had done its work. The Grand Fleet was turning away as Jellicoe would not risk exposing his great ships to torpedoes. Thus the Germans in turn withdrew, and the cease fire was given. Indeed, strangely, almost uncannily, now all the firing stopped, save for an occasional distant outburst. The destroyer flotillas regrouped, and Hazard fell back with her sisters to their more normal station of covering the British rear, against submarines. The huge ships steamed by into the night, altering course now to the south.

  ‘He means to cut the bastards off,’ Wilkins said. ‘Oh, we’ll have them come morning. Tomorrow is the First of June. Hell, we beat the French on the Glorious First of June, back in 1794. We’ll do it again.’

  Tomorrow, Lew thought. It would be dawn in another eight hours; the time was just eight o’clock, or twenty hundred in naval terminology. And there were hungry men to be fed. The galley crew tramped to and fro, as no one was piped down for dinner. It was now very gloomy, and even the Grand Fleet was only a distant hum in the mist, but at least they knew they were there, and they also knew they were travelling too fast for any submarines to keep them company.

  ‘I think we can have a rest,’ Petty Officer Wilkins decided, when at nine o’clock the watch below was finally dismissed from the deck. ‘There isn’t nothing more going to happen tonight.’

  He was desperately wrong. Lew had just gratefully sank to the deck in a corner of the galley, his eyes immediately flopping shut, when there came that hum again, but much closer at hand.

  Wilkins heard it too, and sat up. ‘Hell, they must be slowing down,’ he remarked.

  ‘That’s coming from starboard, Mr Wilkins,’ said one of the assistant cooks.

  They rose as one man and made for the deck, where officers and ratings were staring into the gloom. The Grand Fleet was still lost ahead of them, but now, from the west, and behind the British came this fresh sound.

  ‘There!’ Wilkins shouted. ‘Jesus Christ, look there!’

  Coming up just astern of them, and thus steaming right into the centre of the flotilla, was a huge ship, and then another, and another.

  ‘It’s Jerry!’ Wilkins bellowed. ‘He’s done a U-turn. He’s coming straight for us.’

  Chapter Four

  England, 1916

  For a few minutes all was total confusion. The destroyers scattered, several nearly colliding as helms were put hard either to port or starboard, while the great ships drove straight on. With their gunpower they could have blown the entire flotilla out of the water, but they were more concerned with getting through, and were also perhaps reluctant to give away their positions to the Grand Fleet. One or two of the destroyers fired their four-inch, but there was no hope of doing any damage with such tiny shells against the massive armour of the battleships, and there was no time to line themselves up for a torpedo attack.

  ‘You have to hand it to those Jerries,’ Wilkins commented. ‘To turn back like that, in the dark, not knowing where anybody is...they could have sailed right into the middle of the Grand Fleet.’

  ‘The courage of desperation,’ suggested the assistant cook.

  The flotilla was reforming, as no doubt radio messages were screaming back and forth to inform the commander-in-chief of what had happened, and that the Germans had stolen a march, and soon the destroyers were also steering east, shadowing the enemy fleet. Obviously after such an alarm any further sleep was out of the question, the seamen were all recalled to duty, and Wilkins got to work to brew up huge quantities of tea which Lew and the other assistants carried around.

  The ships raced on into the darkness, thudding into troughs and rearing over crests, while on the bridge binoculars were constantly levelled for a first sight of the enemy. In fact they were caught up pretty smartly, and then it was a case of reducing speed; the destroyers meant to keep in contact, but not to get close enough to be blown out of the water.

  Until, about an hour after midnight, there came the jangle of the alarm. Then the lieutenant-commander addressed them through a megaphone. ‘We have been ordered to stop the enemy by a torpedo attack,’ he said. ‘This means we will be approaching them to within a range of five thousand yards. I wish you all God speed.’

  Lew looked at Wilkins, who looked back at him. ‘Holy Jesus Christ,’ the cook remarked. ‘Five thousand yards of a battleship?’

  ‘They won’t be able to depress their guns enough to hit us,’ his assistant argued.

  ‘They have five-inch secondary,’ Wilkins pointed out. ‘Are you a praying man, Yank?’

  Lew had no intention of praying, except that one of their torpedoes should strike home. This was what he had waited for, all these long months. He listened to the engine revolutions being increased, felt the vibration growing as the little ship was hurled forward. The huge forms of the Germans seemed to be coming closer at an alarming rate.

  Like the enemy, the British ships were in darkness, and for a few minutes it seemed as if their approach had not been observed. Then the entire night burst into flaming light and sound. The deep explosions of the big guns was accompanied by the lighter cracks of the secondary armaments, and the surface of the sea became a maelstrom of shot-whipped water. It seemed inexplicable that the entire flotilla was not sunk in the first discharge, but the ships careered on, half lost to sight beneath the flying spray and cascading waves, while the German battleships loomed enormous above them, their searchlights began criss-crossing the water in search of their antagonists, and their own destroyers emerged to challenge the foe.

  It was the wildest, most desperate fifteen minutes Lew had ever imagined could be possible. There was no way he was staying in the galley, and as the shot screamed overhead and the waves broke on the foredeck he made his way to the forward gun t
urret. There he was quickly at work passing the shells from the hoist to the eager gunners, for the lieutenant in command was firing just as quickly as he could, straight ahead as the ship plunged on, then swinging the gun to starboard as the entire flotilla executed a left turn and released their torpedoes. The huge silver fish entered the water with a gigantic hiss, and Lew looked back to see how many of the German ships would go down like the Lusitania, and for the second time in that unforgettable night had the sensation of being alone in a world of space.

  This time the sensation remained, until it seemed he had never known another. And this time it was overlaid with pain, which seared his body but especially his legs, and with choking, and with cold. Then these all merged together in kaleidoscopic noise and activity, only half observed. The activity persisted, save when he was again whirling through space, which happened regularly. But yet when he regained full consciousness he felt the comforting motion of a ship at sea, and supposed he must have been dreaming it all the time.

  Until he opened his eyes, and discovered he was in a far larger sick bay than any on a destroyer, and that there were quite a few men in there with him, and that the doctors were all strange, and there were several of them as against just one.

  ‘Conscious, are we?’ asked an orderly. ‘No you don’t,’ he added, as Lew tried to sit up, and pushed him back into the bunk.

  Lew had in fact already fallen back, because the movement had started the pain all over again, more severe than before. He moaned, and thrashed to and fro, and hands held him still.

  ‘Some more morphine,’ a voice said, and a glass was held to his lips.

  ‘Did we win the battle?’ he begged. ‘Did we win the battle?’

  ‘Of course we won the battle, son,’ the surgeon said. But he did not look so elated as he should have done.

  *

  ‘Some headlines,’ Father said. ‘Yankee volunteer sunk three times. They’re talking about giving you a medal.’

  ‘What for?’ Lew asked.

  ‘Well...’ Joe McGann grinned. ‘It’s not every night that the same guy gets sunk twice in the same battle. Especially when he’s not even British. It’s good propaganda, I guess.’

  Just happy to see his son alive, he had caught a train north the moment the results of the battle had started coming in. Lew was only aware of pain, and uncertainty. ‘Did we win, Father?’ he asked.

  ‘Tactically, no. The Royal Navy lost damn near twice the tonnage of the Germans, and about three times the men, so far as I can gather.’

  ‘Oh, hell,’ Lew said. ‘Oh, hell. But why? I thought the Royal Navy could lick any fleet afloat.’

  ‘Once, perhaps. As far as I have been able to learn, the trouble with this Royal Navy is that it hasn’t had to lick anyone for too long. The mistakes are almost unbelievable. We won’t talk about the lack of sufficient armour on the battlecruisers. You know that always bothered me, and what really found them out was the almost total absence of deck armour, which left them entirely vulnerable to plunging shot. That’s what did for all three, you know. But those are design faults. What really showed up in the battle was that the Germans can shoot straighter, and what is more, they have the better shells. Apparently time and again your chaps would hit one of the Jerries, and the shell would either fail to explode at all or would explode prematurely, thus causing a minimum of damage. Queen Mary went up because she was hit by five shells at once, and every one both penetrated and exploded. Your shell problem just has to be put right. So has your signalling, which was apparently abysmal. On every side. The Admiralty failed to give either Jellicoe or Beatty accurate information, although they had access to the German signals; in fact, just three hours before Beatty made contact with the High Seas Fleet, he was informed by the Admiralty that it was still in port! And then, in the battle itself, the signalling, and navigational errors were unbelievable. Ship captains saw the Germans at almost every stage of the night battle, but failed to report to either admiral; when Beatty did report he gave his position seven miles out, so his support arrived in the wrong place...it was a total foul-up in every direction. All compounded by Jellicoe’s caution, of course. He seems to have been more concerned about losing a couple of ships to torpedo or mine attack than about destroying the German fleet. There’s a tremendous outcry about it.’ He grinned. ‘They’re saying Nelson would have handled it differently.’

  ‘Oh, heck,’ Lew said again. He felt utterly crushed.

  ‘On the other hand,’ Joe went on. ‘One appreciates Jellicoe’s position. If he had kept rushing straight at the Germans, lost half a dozen more ships, and failed to destroy at least an equal number of the enemy, he could seriously have weakened Great Britain’s position at sea. And in fact, strategically you did win. It was the Germans that fled back to port, and the Royal Navy still rules the waves. So they suffered the heavier casualties; they kept the field, as it were. The Grand Fleet is still the Grand Fleet. So I wouldn’t worry too much about German trumpetings of victory. Your next business is to get well.’

  ‘Am I going to get well, Father?’

  Joe McGann’s face was serious. ‘I reckon you are, boy, if you want to. So your leg has been torn open by that piece of shell which blew Hazard apart. They were muttering about taking it off, but I talked them out of that idea in a hurry. Now they’ve got it back together, and they reckon they can save it. It’s going to take time, and guts, but you have both of those.’

  He squeezed his son’s hand. ‘You were present at the greatest naval battle in history, boy. You don’t ever want to forget that.’

  *

  Father’s admiration, and indeed his envy, was obvious. Just as his professional judgement on what had happened was immensely reassuring. And Lew supposed he was right. Whenever he closed his eyes, whenever the nurses at the Edinburgh hospital gave him pain killing drugs which sent him drifting away through space, his mind became filled with memory, of the tremendous noise of the battle, of the parade of great ships, of the smoke and the flames, of the coldness of the water, and of the faces which passed before his mind, from Tommy Rollins to the captain to the surgeon lieutenant on Hazard to Petty Officer Wilkins. All dead, along with the two ships on which he had served, one so briefly. And they were going to give him a medal.

  Because apparently they were. Admiral Beatty himself came to the hospital to pin the Distinguished Conduct Medal on his breast. ‘Is it true you’re only sixteen?’ the admiral asked.

  Father had clearly let the news out. ‘I’ll be seventeen in September, sir,’ he protested.

  His wife was with him, and she shook Lew’s hand warmly. ‘You are a tribute to American youth, Mr McGann,’ she said. ‘And to America’s future.’

  Because not all Americans, he gathered, were as enthusiastic about the British non-victory at Jutland, as the battle was being called, as those who recognised the true significance of what had happened during that misty night.

  After a month in hospital in Edinburgh, he was transferred south, to a convalescent home. The muscles in his right thigh had been severed, and although the surgeons had been able to stitch them back together, it was going to be a long haul before he could walk again with any freedom — whether he ever did so, he was told very bluntly, was up to his own will, his own determination to exercise and regain the full use of the limb. He travelled on a stretcher, and Father was there to meet him at the other end, and drove with him down to the peaceful, leafy Gloucester village where the converted stately home was situated, and where Matron, a jolly woman in blue uniform with a white cap, greeted him with a smile and a kiss. ‘We’ll soon have him right as rain again, Captain McGann,’ she said. ‘That’s what we’re here for.’

  Father could only stay just long enough to see him settled into his bed, and have a cup of tea with Matron, and then he had to return to his duties in London. Lew found himself in a ward with eleven other sailors, but none of them had been at Jutland. They wanted to hear about it, and he was happy to tell them, until he was exhau
sted, and was grateful for the arrival of Matron with the afternoon platoon of nurses to serve them supper and tuck them up for the night. ‘I have a friend of yours here, Lewis,’ she said. ‘Nurse Gerrard especially asked to be transferred here so that she could have the privilege of looking after you.’

  *

  May wore a figure-concealing blue uniform, and her hair was pinned up beneath her white cap, and yet she contrived to look as pretty as a picture. ‘Oh, Lewis,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you hated me,’ he said.

  ‘Hated you, Lewis? How could I do that. And now you’re a hero.’

  Being thoroughly suspicious of her, and because of her of all women, he imagined that had a good deal to do with her determination to be seen to be his friend. But she had managed to make him even more of a hero by telling the other nurses how he had saved her from the Lusitania. Some of them remembered the newspaper reports, and he was immediately the most popular young man in the ward, if not in the hospital.

  And it was sheer heaven having May looking after him, even if it was tremendously embarrassing as well. The other girls were strangers, but May Gerrard, changing his bedclothes and pyjamas, sponge bathing him...the first time she did that, for all his weakness and to his consternation, he had an erection, but she merely smiled and said, ‘Down, Rover.’ Clearly she had bathed a lot of men since the last time they had met. And it was May holding the bottle and the bedpan for him as well. ‘I thought you’d be married by now,’ he said, desperately trying to take his mind off their sudden intimacy.

  ‘Oh,’ she shrugged. ‘There was a boy. But Uncle Clive didn’t think he was good enough. So I joined the nurses instead.’

  ‘Uncle Clive approved of that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s patriotic. Uncle Clive is all for patriotism. He’s doing awfully well, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t ever know what your dad and your uncle were in.’

  ‘Munitions,’ she explained. ‘He sells shells to the government. There’s talk he may get a peerage. He’s becoming awfully important.’ She smiled. ‘I’m good for his image, working like this.’