Floating Madhouse

by Floating Madhouse

  Zakharov to Michael, low-voiced, in Ryazan’s chartroom while bugle-calls were sending the ships’ companies to their stations for leaving harbour: ‘They could hang him for this.’

  ‘But in all the circumstances – and his own judgement—’

  ‘You mean thank God we’re at last getting out of this hell-hole.’

  ‘That, yes. But it’s a case of either go on or go back, isn’t it?’

  ‘And if we were to go back, we’d have lost the war. All right, may have lost it already – but there’s still a chance, Mikhail Ivan’ich. Given an ounce of the luck the Japanese have had so far—’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  A glance downward, at a chart of the whole Indian Ocean. ‘Given half a pound of luck then. Including the gunlayers learning even the rudiments of their job!’

  The recent exercises, in which some of the squadron’s precious live ammunition had been fired, had not been much of a success. In particular the gunners hadn’t yet come to terms with their new Barr and Stroud rangefinders; with an actual range of twenty-four cables (forty-eight hundred yards) they’d made it six – twelve hundred yards. Ammunition hoists had jammed. The new telescopic sights had the layers and trainers baffled. From Rojhestvensky’s Order of the Day number 42 of January 27th for instance:

  The expensive 12-inch shell were fired without showing anything like the proportion of hits as guns of other calibres… Practice with the 12-pounder Q.F. (quick-firing) guns was very bad… As regards the firing of the 6-pounder Q.F. guns, which are intended to repel torpedo attacks, one really feels ashamed to speak of it. We keep men at these guns every night for that express purpose, and by day the entire squadron did not score one single hit on the targets which represented the torpedo boats, although these targets differed, from the Japanese torpedo boats to our advantage, inasmuch as they were stationary.

  (As a sequel to this – the expenditure of ammunition – the transport Irtysh, which had been expected to bring replenishments of shells of all calibres from Odessa, had arrived on March 2nd – from Djibouti – with twelve thousand pairs of boots and a consignment of fur-lined overcoats. No shot or shell at all.)

  Zakharov glanced round as Radzianko pushed in. The navigator hadn’t lost any weight – as many had, in this debilitating climate. Civilians ashore, living mostly in small white houses around the aptly named settlement of Hellville – named in fact after the French Admiral Hell who half a century earlier had taken possession of the place – reckoned that life-expectation here for a white man was three years – if he stayed that long. The killers were malaria, dysentery, boils, infections of many kinds, mental breakdown often leading to suicide, poisonous spiders and snakes, flies by the hundred million… Radzianko pulled off his cap and mopped his forehead, on which the dark hair had begun noticeably to recede: ‘Do we know yet which way we’re going, sir?’

  ‘We’ll be told when we get outside, I dare say.’

  The course set by the admiral would make it obvious anyway. Although one did naturally want to know where one was and where one was going. In case of separation through breakdown or foul weather for instance. In the present case, to get past Singapore into the Pacific meant passing through either the Sunda or the Malacca Strait – round either the bottom or the top end of Sumatra, in fact, which right from the start would mean a difference in course of twenty or twenty-five degrees. Sunda, the narrow passage between Sumatra and Java, would be the shortest route, but might seem to the Japanese to be the obvious way for the squadron to go and therefore where they’d lay mines. Not that Malacca would be much less dangerous. Zakharov asked Michael, ‘Which way would you go?’

  ‘Sunda. Because it’s the most direct. I don’t believe the Japs will bother to meet us halfway. I still think they’ll wait for us to come to them.’

  ‘By which time we’ll have worn ourselves out a bit more.’

  He nodded to Radzianko. ‘Staying close to their own ports, too. Refitted. Clean bottoms. Whereas ours, by this time…’

  Foul with weed and barnacles. You didn’t have to say it. With no dry dock within a thousand miles and the difficulty and danger of sending divers down in shark-infested water, even in netting enclosures – for the little they might achieve in any case, except in repairing specific damage to rudders or propellers for instance. But another thing one didn’t need to mention was that Togo’s refitted and well-found ships would be manned by officers and crews who were seasoned, battle-experienced and self-confident.

  Zakharov must have been thinking along similar lines. ‘You should have taken up my suggestion, Mikhail Ivan’ich. You’d have been well on your way home by now.’

  In the old Malay, who’d been sent home to the Black Sea in company with another old tub which had had more or less constant engine trouble, the Knyaz Gortchakov. When Zakharov had made the suggestion Michael had thought of Tasha’s letter, that impassioned plea, and of the convenience of being landed probably in Odessa: contacting her from comparatively close range and within three or four weeks, say, getting her to England with him either overland or by sea. Imagining her happiness: and the thrill of it – give or take a few minor hurdles here and there, a classic happy ending!

  A pipe-dream, though. For some reason. Such as belonging here now? Having to see it through? He’d done his best to rationalize it, in more than one of the four or five letters he’d sent from this place. Had not mentioned the Malay – who, in any case, a fortnight before she’d been due to leave had had a mutiny on board, which had been serious enough for the Suvarov to train her guns on her and send over an armed boarding party. Part of the cause of the mutiny, anyway a factor in it, had been that they’d been filling her with homebound passengers who didn’t have much to lose – prisoners being sent home to face courts-martial, malcontents regarded as bad influences on the messdecks, quite a few who’d gone mad, including some officers; and other incurably sick – incurably here, in this climate, in the opinion of the Orel’s doctors – as well as an unspecified number of men who’d contracted diseases ashore in Hellville which were regarded as inappropriate for the young volunteer nurses to have anything to do with or even hear about.

  But all right, the mutiny had been dealt with, as had another in the Nachimov – where sailors had been demanding fresh bread – one could have taken passage home in the Malay – or in the Gortchakov, for that matter.

  Hadn’t – that was all.

  Burmin pushed in, reporting to Zakharov that the ship’s company were at their stations for leaving harbour, cable party on the foc’sl, ready to weigh anchor. Radzianko followed him and the skipper out on to the bridge, and Michael on his way to the flagdeck stopped to light a cigarette – a German variety called Elmas. They weren’t bad. Narumov had bought a thousand from one of the colliers’ captains for a hundred roubles, and sold half of them to Michael for the same amount, telling him what the original cost had been only after their transaction had been completed. The German collier skipper had been scraping up cash to settle gambling debts; stakes in the Hellville gambling shacks – literally shacks, native-built huts with signboards over their doorways, one reading Café de Paris – where the game was usually macao, had been frighteningly high, as had the cost of liquor and the prices charged by whores of a dozen different nationalities who’d come flocking to the easy pickings – a seller’s market, ten thousand Russians half out of their minds, spending money like water having as an excuse the fact they couldn’t send any home to Russia even if they’d wanted to.

  Michael had explained to Tasha, in a letter in early January replying to the one she’d written in something like panic – or to wake him up to this being their great chance, if he could get back to her now – all that – he’d told her that whatever she’d been hearing or reading, defeat of this squadron by the Japanese was no means a foregone conclusion. She was right in saying that Rojhestvensky was not a man to turn back from his avowed purpose: the only difference now was that purpose was to fight his wa
y through to Vladivostok.

  As far as my own position is concerned, I embarked on this with the encouragement of my own naval superiors, and my strong inclination is to see the task through to its conclusion. If I left the squadron now – yes, I could – I’d be failing in my task, and no matter what anyone else thought about it I’d feel I’d run away. I wouldn’t want to have such a thing on my mind or record. I suspect that in the course of time you’d come to wish I hadn’t; it would mean I was not the man with whom you fell in love, only a creature determined not to take risks with his own life. The truth is that I will return to you, my sweet darling, but please God by way of Vladivostok and the trans-Siberian railway; and you will receive that telegram begging you to meet me – as you say, in Paris or in London. Just remember that your father won’t be slow to react and is far from ineffectual; you (and your mother if she’s so inclined, as I very much hope she will be) should move quickly and secretly to whatever rendezvous we’ll have arranged – ultimately of course to Wiltshire.

  In a more recent letter he’d told her that he was as worried for her safety as she was for his. Russian newspapers received on board during the past month had reported growing unrest all over the country – including a general strike of workers in Sevastopol, a lot too close to Yalta for one’s peace of mind. Newspapers and journals which arrived in February on board the formerly ‘missing’ cruisers Oleg and Izumrud – also the destroyers Gromky and Grozhny and auxiliaries Rion and Dniepr, a detachment commanded not by the Daily Telegraph’s, mythical Rear-Admiral Botrovosky but by a Captain Dobrotvorsky – had included accounts of the terrible events of January 22nd, the Winter Palace Massacre. A peaceful demonstration by two hundred thousand men, women and children, led by a priest and carrying ikons and portraits of Tsar Nicholas, the young priest also bearing a Loyal Address for presentation to His Imperial Majesty, imploring him to institute reforms in many areas including the working people’s starvation wages and crippling taxation, lack of civil rights or political expression:

  We come to you, Sire, seeking truth, justice and protection. We have been made beggars; we are oppressed, we are near to death.

  Nearer than they’d anticipated. In the snow-covered square in front of the Winter Palace – the Tsar himself had been spirited away to Tsarskoye Selo – troops opened fire, and within minutes hundreds lay dead. Three thousand were wounded. January 22nd had become known across the empire as Bloody Sunday, and the Tsar was no longer seen as the people’s ‘little father’. It hadn’t done much to improve morale in the Second Pacific Squadron either.

  * * *

  The sun was a blow-torch boring its way through the smoke-laden fug: except for the smoke it was the same swelter they’d lived in for the past two months – and now longed to get out of. As far as Ryazan was concerned, they were having to be patient, with the anchorage only very slowly clearing. The first division of battleships had gone on out and the second division (Felkerzam’s) was now on the move – not all of them seemingly in the same direction – and the transports as usual drifting around, somehow just managing not to collide with each other. There were more transports than they’d brought here with them, several of which had arrived quite recently. Cruisers – Enqvist’s now fairly substantial body of them – were farther out there, in no clear formation at this moment but all moving seaward, while Ryazan with the hospital-ship on her port quarter was simply holding her position. She’d be following astern again, as the Orel’s close escort.

  Strains of music came thinly across the flat blue water. Michael put his glasses up, in the direction of the Suvarovs – and at the same time recognizing the tune as the Marseillaise. The flagship’s band, for sure – but the tune suggesting a presence of French warships… Which he saw now – two white-painted torpedo-boat destroyers, which one had seen around here from time to time and which were now escorting the admiral and his first division out to sea. And the colliers were under way now – ten of them. They’d be steaming in a separate group but in company with the squadron. Rojhestvensky had chanced his arm in that area too – in a big way, at that. The Hamburg-Amerika Line had notified him that they were breaking the terms of their contract, wouldn’t send their ships any closer than this to the war zone, and St Petersburg when he called on them for help had failed to respond in any effective way. Nick Sollogub’s guess, which he’d mentioned in an undertone one day when he and Michael had been ashore together – playing vint, Russian whist, as it happened, in the Café de Paris – was that it might have suited the Naval General Staff to have Rojhestvensky immobilized here at least until Nyebogatov joined him. If that was the case it would mean they’d anticipated some show of independence from Zenovy Petrovich: in fact they’d have been stupid if they hadn’t, knowing how he felt about Klado and his crazy theories and the so-called Third Squadron. In any case Rojhestvensky had out-manoeuvred them, negotiated a deal with the German supercargo – the top dog with the collier fleet here on the spot – contracting to buy these ten colliers, fully laden, on behalf of the Russian government, and as part of the deal arranging to charter another four – an additional thirty thousand tons – who’d rendezvous with the squadron at Saigon.

  Might make them a bit peevish back in St Petersburg, but there they were. They weren’t dealing with any simpleton or lickspittle but with a wild man – yes, and by now they’d know it. Coaling, anyway, would take place at sea, every four or five days.

  Travkov, the grey-headed chief yeoman, paused beside Michael. He was a pleasant fellow and good at his job, exercising a quiet but extremely effective control over his numerous signal staff. One of Zakharov’s Black Sea people, he had a wife and three children at Nikolayev and had had a letter from her in every mail that had so far been received on board.

  ‘All right, Chief?’

  A nod. ‘If I may say so, your honour, it’s good that you’re still with us. When you don’t have to be. An experienced officer, they say, knows a thing or two – must reckon we got a chance.’

  ‘Let’s hope he’s right.’

  A tight smile. ‘I’m sure he is, sir.’ A moment later Michael heard him reporting to Zakharov, ‘Message passed to Orel, sir.’ Warning her, by semaphore no doubt, that they’d be moving shortly. Michael put his glasses on her, saw that her foc’sl was clear, bridge manned. Still and pretty, her whiteness reflected in the glassy surface. One tended when looking at her and wondering about the girls on board, how they were standing up to the ghastly climate and other hardships, homesickness etc., to think also of Radzianko and his obsessive interest in them: and here and now, of Burmin’s recent shark demonstration, which in a way was connected – although not in Burmin’s thinking, which would have related only to Radzianko’s foolhardy early-morning dips. The circumstances anyway had been that a lot of meat had been going rotten and had had to be ditched, largely because of breakdowns of refrigeration machinery in the transport Espérance, and when a whole beef carcase was about to be put over the side, Burmin had sent a message to Radzianko to come up on deck. He – Burmin – obviously recalling exchanges in the wardroom when Galikovsky had been trying to persuade the navigator that there was very little danger, why not go swimming; Michael remembered Burmin having intervened in some way, and it must have stuck in his mind so that he made a point of having him up there with him when the stinking mess of a carcase was dragged to the side and levered over by several men with planks. It splashed in, and within seconds sharks were tearing at it, others coming from all directions, dorsal fins scything the surface – and the sea alongside boiling into a red froth, the carcase rolling and jerking this way and that as the frenzied monsters tore hunks and streamers from it.

  Burmin had glared at Radzianko. ‘Don’t ever be such a damn fool again – eh?’

  ‘No.’ Radzianko’s face filmed with sweat. ‘No. My God…’

  A really huge shark struck then. The size and power of a train-engine – ferocious impact – right alongside, you actually felt it – and for a few seconds the
enormous creature was half out of water; then submerging in another burst of extraordinary power, taking about a ton of food down with it.

  Gone: leaving only the stain and the violently disturbed sea settling. Burmin telling a petty officer, ‘Get this deck and the side hosed down, Kostin.’

  * * *

  First night out, the 16th, the squadron was in no sort of formation: a disorganized pack covering a vast area of sea, floundering northward to clear first Cape St Sebastian and then Cape Ambre, the island’s northernmost point. Distance to round that point about a hundred and fifty miles; Ryazan and the hospital-ship hanging back well astern of the confusion which the admiral must have spent the whole night trying to sort out. Michael had the middle watch, midnight to 0400, Zakharov with him most of the time, as was Michman Dukhonin. It was pleasantly cool, after the clammy heat of Nossi-Bé, and there were several heavy downpours of rain which left the ship’s iron decks steaming and might eventually have a cooling effect below. Between the rain-spells, a half-moon lit the sea ahead and the squadron’s constantly changing shape: ships sometimes dropping back, sometimes closing up and bunching, necessitating quick avoiding-action. There’d been breakdowns right from the start, sometimes total stoppages, sometimes periods of a few hours at five knots or less.

  Despite which they were out of the Mocambique Channel by 0800, and the flagship led round to a course of about northeast by east. To pass south of the Seychelles therefore, but north of Peras Banhas, northernmost of the Chagos Archipelago. Which suggested eventually passing around the top of Sumatra into the Malacca Straits. Three thousand miles to that point, say, and then another six hundred or so to Singapore and into the South China Sea.