by Damien Lewis
The watch officer, meanwhile, had ordered Judy to be quiet. Now they knew what threat they faced, her early warning had given the ship’s crew a perfect opportunity to get one over on their foremost adversaries—two large vessels packed full of fearsome Yangtze River pirates.
The pirates were making their attack approach in typical fashion—a pair of junks drifting silently abreast with a thick bamboo hawser slung between them. Once the rope snagged on the Gnat’s bows it would pull the pirate ships in toward her, and upon contact the waiting men would leap aboard the still-sleeping vessel, decimate the crew, and loot to their hearts’ content. At least that had been their intention until Judy had caught wind of their coming on the chill night air.
The tension aboard the Gnat was palpable as the seconds ticked by. Then there was a faint, barely audible thunk as the bamboo rope made contact with the Gnat’s prow. By then Captain Waldegrave was directing operations with gusto from the bridge. As the two pirate vessels swung in toward his ship, the river gurgling under their bulging wooden hulls, he had his men positioned at the ready. One of them, a stoker, only had time to don his scarlet pajama top before grabbing a fire ax with which to set about the approaching threat.
Before the first vessel had even made contact with the Gnat, the captain ordered those manning the Maxim machine guns mounted on a platform to the rear of the twin funnels to open fire. They let rip with ten-second bursts, raking the flanks of the pirate vessels, splinters of wood being blasted into the river. The Maxims were mounted three to each side of the ship, chiefly for antiaircraft use, but they were also the perfect weapons with which to signal the Gnat’s intent.
The river pirates knew for sure now that their target was forewarned, not to mention heavily armed, but there was no stopping the drift of their vessels as the rope dragged them in. The first craft bumped alongside. Shadowy figures reared up and attempted to board the Gnat. But they were met with a fusillade of gunfire—plus one roaring stoker with his manhood on show swinging an ax above his head and one ship’s dog barking and snarling furiously.
Battle had most surely been joined.
Two of the Gnat’s crewmen were stationed in the prow, and they were chopping furiously at the pirate’s hawser. As the final strands of the bamboo rope were sliced through, the pair of junks were dragged free by the current and slipped into the darkness. The last of the pirates turned tail and took a leap into the void in a desperate effort to rejoin their fast-disappearing ships.
Those who failed to make that jump faced a long swim in the rough waters churning through the Xling Gorge, a christening far more fraught with risk than the one suffered by Judy of Sussex a few days previously. As the pirate junks drifted away into the gloom, triumphant cheers rang out from the deck of the Gnat. The feeling aboard was unanimous: it was the early warning provided by their intrepid ship’s dog that had enabled them to vanquish their enemy so comprehensively.
Whether Judy would be of any use on the hunt no one yet knew, but tonight she had proved her worth ten times over—for her actions had been truly those of a lifesaver.
Prior to domestication dogs used their acute sense of hearing to track both prey and predators in the wild. They can hear a far greater range of frequencies than humans, they can do so over far greater distances, and they can pinpoint accurately the direction the sound is coming from—just as Judy had done. In fact, a dog’s hearing is ten times more effective than ours: a sound a human might hear at 20 meters they can hear at 200. Had there been a mouse living aboard the Gnat, Judy would have been able to hear it squeak from many meters away.
Using their large, movable ears, they can pinpoint the source of a sound pretty much instantaneously—in one six-hundredth of a second—hence Judy’s rapid-fire actions aboard the Gnat, which had allowed the ship’s crew to repel the river pirates without injury or loss of life. In the fight of the Xling Gorge, Judy’s canine senses truly had saved the day.
Over the coming week the diminutive British warship—the gunboats were among the smallest vessels in the Royal Navy’s fleet—pushed onward through the Wu and Qutang gorges and moved into the complex system of lakes, marshes, and tributaries of the Hunan province beyond. Prior to reaching her first major stopover and possible turn-around point—the bustling treaty port of Hankow (now Wuhan), some 900 kilometers inland—the Gnat was set to rendezvous with the flagship of the British gunboat flotilla, the Bee.
Being the flagship of the fleet, the Bee had lost some of her main guns so that more space could be given over to officers’ accommodation. In spite of this, on several patrols the illustrious Bee had pushed as far inland on the Yangtze as Yichang in the west and Changsha in the south, both approaching 1,500 kilometers from Shanghai and the sea. Those had been truly voyages into the wild and the unknown.
Unusually for Royal Navy ships, the Yangtze gunboats tended to sail—and to fight—as lone operators, cruising the river many days or weeks apart. Mostly, their commanders and crew had few if any senior officers watching over them. This tended to lead to a tight-knit familial atmosphere aboard ship and to a degree of independence of action rarely seen in the Royal Navy.
But without firmly enforced procedures to keep the gunboats shipshape, long weeks spent in isolation upriver could render such busy, crowded vessels decidedly unpleasant places to be. As with all gunboat commanders, Captain Waldegrave had a strict routine in place for keeping the Gnat spick and span. Hands were ordered daily to clean—sluicing down the decks, polishing brass, making good the paintwork, generally clearing up the decks, stowing gear, refreshing brightworks (the polished metal parts of the vessel), and servicing the Maxim machine guns.
As the captain of the Gnat knew well, a biannual Admiralty inspection could be sprung on any Yangtze gunboat at any time. Rear Admiral Reginald Holt, the senior naval officer (SNO) Yangtze Fleet, happened to be aboard the Bee when the Gnat docked alongside her, and he must have decided there was no time like the present to put the newly arrived gunboat through her paces. Needless to say, this would be the Gnat’s first such formal ship’s inspection with her new crew member, Judy of Sussex, aboard.
It was the crack of dawn when the rear admiral came aboard the Gnat, complete with his aide, to announce the surprise inspection. The ship’s officers and crew knew instantly what they were in for. The rear admiral would scour the vessel from stem to stern for the slightest infraction of ship’s rules. He’d put every man and ship’s department through its paces to ensure the Gnat was operating at peak performance and ready to wage war should such be necessary.
Or as Judy’s keeper, Tankey Cooper, put it, he’d come aboard to put them through “the works!”
First off came the inspection of the crew. The men were lined up on the main deck in two ranks, at so-called divisions. The rear admiral proceeded to check over their kit and bedding, all of which was supposed to be neatly laid out, each item labeled with the owner’s name. In due course he came to the newest crew member . . . Judy. She was positioned between Tankey Cooper and her ammunition box of a bed, ship’s blanket neatly folded before her.
The rear admiral stared down at the seated dog with a gimlet eye. She in turn gazed up at him, tongue lolling and with the signature silly grin that she seemed to reserve for any formal occasion aboard ship. At her feet were coiled two spare leashes, plus an extra collar displaying her name clearly—“Judy.” All appeared to be present and correct, so without a word or a twitch in his deadpan expression the rear admiral moved on, shadowed by his aide.
Similar inspections followed all over the ship as mess decks, storerooms, stores, engine rooms, galley, and all were given the once-over. Finally seeming to be satisfied, the rear admiral and his aide returned to where they had started—the ship’s bridge. From there he began to order the men through every drill known to the Yangtze gunboat flotilla, plus some seemingly yet to be invented.
To the casual observer the ship would have appeared a mass of chaos, but to Captain Waldegrave this was strictly ord
ered chaos in action. Every man knew his place and his duties as block and tackle groaned and pulleys whirred and the ship was “dressed”—involving a “washing line” of brightly colored flags being raised from stem to stern—then the topmast lowered, the ship’s generator stripped down and reassembled, and so on and so forth.
That done, the rear admiral gave the order to “land armed guard,” and the launch was manned and lowered and it motored away from the Gnat. No sooner had it left than he announced a “man overboard”—which left the crew in some confusion as to how they were to rescue the fictitious victim, with the launch already halfway to storming some unseen adversary ashore.
“He’ll just ’ave to swim until the ruddy boat gets back!” one of the sweating seamen muttered as he ran to a new task.
In quick succession came orders to “action stations,” then “fire all guns”—with quite spectacular results—and “away kedge anchor,” the kedge anchor being a light secondary anchor used to help a ship maneuver in narrow estuaries or rivers. The Gnat’s crew was becoming more than a little exasperated when Judy decided it was time for her to do something. As would prove to be the case many times in the future, whenever Judy sensed that her family was in distress, she’d find some means to come to their aid.
Without warning she raised her fine head to the skies above the bridge and began to bark. Aruuf-ruuf-ruuf-ruuf-ruuf. The barking was continuous and insistent, and the ship’s crew recognized it instantly for what it was—a warning. As the barking grew to a fierce crescendo, they felt certain they were facing some kind of imminent danger—though no pirate ships were likely to attack two British gunboats in broad daylight, and the threat appeared to be coming from the skies.
As for the rear admiral, the orders he’d been issuing had been drowned out by a madly barking dog, and he was turning a noticeable shade of puce. Just as it seemed he was about to lose control and vent his anger on Judy, the cause of her distress became clear. All of a sudden a Japanese warplane swooped out of the seemingly empty heavens and dived toward the British warships. It swooped low over the Gnat, flew across the Bee at little more than mast height, then pulled up into a steep climb and was gone.
No Japanese warplane had yet engaged a British or Allied ship on the Yangtze, but the meaning of the buzzing was all too clear. Had they wanted to, the Japanese air crew could have bombed or strafed the British gunboat pretty much at will. Japan had more or less total air superiority in the skies above China. The Chinese Air Force was pitifully ill equipped and manned, and no Allied aircraft were able to patrol this far into her territory.
Judy ceased her barking only once the Japanese plane had dwindled into an invisible speck on the horizon. Next, she did a very odd thing. She started to whirl around on the spot as if madly chasing her own tail, and once she was certain she’d completely monopolized the rear admiral’s attention, she proceeded to curl up on the floor at his feet.
The rear admiral stared at her for several seconds. She was wrapped comfortably around his gleaming toe caps, seemingly sound asleep after all the barking and whirling. He glanced at the rigid face of Captain Waldegrave and raised one bristly eyebrow.
“Remarkable ship’s dog you have here. Sound vibrations, presumably. That’s how she did it.” A weighty pause. “But the time is coming, I fear, when we all may need a dog like this stationed on the ship’s bridge.”
The rear admiral must have realized that he had nothing in his repertoire to compete with Judy’s early-warning demonstration, and the Admiralty inspection was promptly declared over. The officers and crew of the Gnat had passed with flying colors—all of them, including one very remarkable ship’s dog seemingly gifted with a miraculous form of canine radar.
Dogs possess eighteen separate muscles with which to raise, lower, or swivel their ears, ensuring they can pin down exactly which direction a sound is coming from. In detecting that Japanese warplane, Judy had demonstrated just how effectively those muscle-driven ears can be used to track distant sounds. But Judy’s ability to detect that aircraft—and the threat it embodied—went far deeper than purely physical attributes.
Somehow, Judy had also sensed that this thunderous noise in the sky equated to danger, and since she’d yet to suffer any air attacks, there was no obvious reason for her to do so. As with the pirate ships, she seemed able to sense danger itself—and it was that which had so impressed itself upon the rear admiral . . . not to mention all of her fellow crewmates.
A few days after she’d passed her Admiralty inspection the Gnat steamed into Hankow harbor, with no more pirates, or Japanese warplanes—or even cess ships!—having menaced her onward passage up the Yangtze. Here she joined the many other British, American, French, and Japanese gunboats floating at their moorings, plus the odd Italian and German ship that also patrolled these waters.
At Hankow the captain’s orders were simple. He was to show a presence and fly the flag, looking efficient and warlike to deter any trouble in this vitally important riverside city. Over the eight decades that the Yangtze had been patrolled by the foreign powers, Hankow had grown into the key treaty port and gunboat hub, largely because of its strategic location in the center of the navigable stretch of the great river. As a result, the city offered all the luxuries lacking aboard a ship like the Gnat.
The officers’ mess on an Insect class boat was fairly well appointed for a vessel her size. The Gnat even had a wardroom, set in the forward part of the hull, squeezed between the captain’s quarters and the oil fuel tanks. The wardroom was designed to resemble a miniature version of an English gentleman’s club, complete with comfortable armchairs draped in pristine cloth, yellowing copies of The Times newspaper on side tables, and white-coated Chinese stewards poised to top up the pink gins when required.
But in spite of such onboard comforts, Hankow promised the officers and men of the Gnat an exceptionally good time ashore. Hankow resembled a classic European city of the time in terms of its grand colonial-style architecture, its layout, and its atmosphere. The fashionable Hankow Club offered excellent dining and drinking, cabaret, bridge parties, and tennis, plus good hunting in the surrounding bush. Hankow even boasted a race club, one that resembled Royal Ascot as much as ever it could here in deepest darkest China.
The Hankow Bund—the riverside harbor area where the Gnat was tied up—was designed to appear like a waterside promenade at any fashionable European port city. It was dominated by the Chinese customs house clock tower and the splendid white colonnades of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. The ground floor of the bank had been converted into a wet bar and clubroom, complete with billiard table and English-speaking Chinese bar boys.
Once a fortnight the wet room would host a navy opera, to which the assorted Royal Navy crews would invite the public for a sing-along, one that was lubricated by copious quantities of a local beer called EWO Pilsner. Produced by the EWO brewery in Shanghai, the beer seemed to give off a peculiar smell of onions, and it was unusually potent.
The wet room had been nicknamed the Strong Toppers Club after the powerful onion-scented beer quaffed in there. New members could gain access to the club only after an exacting initiation ritual. The newbie had to stand before a panel of three while undergoing the Yangtze River variation of the popular drinking game Cardinal Puff.
Holding his beer in his left hand, he’d announce a toast “to the health of Cardinal Puff,” strike the table once with his right hand, stamp both feet, tap the glass on the table, then drain his beer. The sequence had to be repeated with a fresh beer, only now he had to drink to the health of “Cardinal Puff Puff” and repeat all the actions two times over. A third successful rendition—only now doing all actions three times over—and he was duly admitted to the club. But any mistake—reciting the lines wrong, getting the actions wrong, or drinking with the wrong hand—would be met with noisy jeers and jibes from the crowd. The unfortunate initiate would have failed, and he’d have to start all over again.
During the long voyage upr
iver Judy had grown somewhat partial to her beer. As she was by now a fully fledged member of the ship’s crew—she had even had the de rigueur christening in the Yangtze—her presence was required at such convivial evenings. Hence Tankey Cooper put together his own version of the Strong Toppers Club initiation ritual especially for her. Before the assembled throng Judy had to bark once, twice, then three times in succession, each outburst of yelping punctuated by a noisy bout of lapping from someone’s glass.
That completed, Judy of Sussex was declared in. She was now free to wander regally from face to familiar face, here and there taking a nibble from a handful of peanuts and a lap from a glass of onion-scented beer. Such riotous evenings ended in the traditional rendition of the Yangtze Anthem, to which Judy proved able to provide a remarkably soulful accompaniment as she threw back her head and howled along to the verses.
Strong Toppers are we
On the dirty Yangtze
“Gunboats” or “Cruisers”
We’re here for a spree.
The Strong Toppers Club was largely a male environment, and Judy was one of the few ladies permitted access. And in her own peculiar way, she seemed to understand what this signified in terms of her acceptance into the bosom of the all-male family that was the crew of the Gnat. She’d come a long way from that lonely back alleyway behind Soo’s shop on the tough streets of Shanghai, and in singing along with the ship’s company in the Strong Toppers Club, Judy had truly found her tribe.
Chief Petty Officer Jefferey, by now Judy’s closest companion, believed their ship’s dog was developing a “human brain,” or at least a means with which to view the world of the Yangtze River gunboats pretty much as the sailors did. She appeared to understand every word spoken to her and read every gesture and expression and seemed to have adapted to the nuances of gunboat life as easily as any human crew member had before her.