by Tim Pears
When it came to the jumps, however, Jamie Watt leaned right back, his spine almost touching that of the horse. The boy hung on to the filly’s mouth.
‘All your weight’s over the pony’s loins,’ Leo told him. ‘You’re interferin with her liftin and with her spread, and makin it more difficult for her to get her quarters over. And then when she lands she wants to use the muscles of her loins to push off again. You needs to lean forward.’
Once Jamie put this novel instruction into practice, Leo could see that the horse was appreciative and the boy could feel it too. He began to lean forward before he made his mount accelerate for the last strides of their approach to a fence. Leo told him that he should aim to time his own movements in exact conformity to those of the horse, but until this stage of perfection was reached it would be better to be a little in advance of the horse than to be left behind. After a couple of hours the filly began to tire and Leo brought the lesson to an end, despite the boy’s protests.
‘She won’t learn if her’s weary,’ Leo told him. ‘She’ll revert to old habits.’
‘I thought it was me who was doing things different,’ Jamie said.
Leo smiled and said the horse was as much a pupil as the boy was, if a little smarter. Jamie asked the seaman to hold the reins while he pulled on a single upper garment over his bare torso, a thick blue woollen pullover.
Leo said that to understand a horse you had to appreciate how its senses differed from those of man. The boy said surely a horse had five senses just like us.
Leo nodded. ‘They do. Your filly sees but she is colour blind.’ He turned and with a sweep of his arm indicated the wide vista before them. ‘She does not see this landscape as we do. Green fields, blue sky, grey water. All is grey to her, a patchwork, a mosaic of grey. Some parts darker, others lighter. If I stood in the field and my clothes were of the same shade as the grass, she would not see me unless I moved.’
The boy listened intently. ‘Can they all see the same, then?’ he asked. Were horses not like men, unique?
Leo said that naturally each horse was different. Yet it was useful to know the strong and weak points common to all or most members of a species. Many horses suffered from astigmatism to a greater or lesser extent, for neither the corneas nor the lenses of their eyes were shaped with a true curvature. ‘She can hear much better than we can, though. Like a dog, there are many sounds she can hear that we cannot. The officer on my last ship told me that his hunters would sometimes get all excited in their stables for no reason anyone could see. They neighed, broke out in a lather of sweat, and refused to settle until night fell. Why? Because they’d heard the sound of a horn and the calls of the hounds, from miles away.’
The boy nodded, to show he was listening but also to encourage Leo to speak more.
‘And, of course, a horse can detect vibrations in the ground in a way we no longer can, if us ever could.’ He gestured in the direction of the road down which he had come. ‘Another horse walks along that road. Your filly is standing still on her four feet. Her front limb bones, the radius and ulna, the knee bones, canons and pasterns, are locked. So vibrations rise through them, are carried to the skull, and register in the ear.’
‘Will you come again?’ Jamie Watt asked.
Leo said that he would like to but could not. He had to rejoin his ship and would not get another shore leave for some time. He wished the boy good fortune in the forthcoming race. Leo turned and walked away towards the road, but the boy called after him, ‘Sir.’
Leo turned back and Jamie Watt said, ‘What’s a horseman doing in the Royal Navy?’
‘That’s a good question,’ Leo said. ‘A very good question.’ He turned away again and waved goodbye to the boy behind him.
2
The Battle of Jutland was seen as a failure by the civilian population, who had been hoping for another Trafalgar. The Royal Navy lost more ships and many more men than the Germans did. But after the battle, the German High Seas Fleet did not emerge from their base at Wilhelmshaven, to brave engaging again with the British Grand Fleet on open water. As the war drew to a close, Jutland was viewed in a new, more positive light.
Under the terms of the Armistice of 11 November 1918, the German High Seas Fleet was disarmed. At 8 a.m. on 21 November, this convoy of six mighty battlecruisers, ten battleships, eight light cruisers and fifty destroyers, or torpedo boats, seventy-four ships in total, was met at a rendezvous point off the Isle of May. The British Grand Fleet, comprising over two hundred and fifty Royal Navy ships, went out in two lines. When they met the German Fleet, the British ships turned about one hundred and eighty degrees and escorted their surrendered enemy into the Firth of Forth.
On HMS Benbow, the crew were allowed up on deck one at a time from their action stations. Leo watched the ships cover the Forth, before and aft, as far as the eye could see, miles of them upon the grey waters. This was the fleet they had met two and a half years earlier, whose guns had killed his friends and comrades. Now they were brought into captivity.
That night the German flags were hauled down. Over the following days the ships were taken north, in units, and passed through the Pentland Skerries and the triple boom defences, into Scapa Flow. There they were moored in pairs to large buoys, the big ships in the west of the Flow, around Cava Island, destroyers south, in Gutter Sound. British boats were moored at strategic points. A battle squadron that included HMS Benbow was moored on the east side of the Flow.
The Germans were not permitted to go ashore, nor to visit each other’s ships. All their food and other supplies were sent from Germany. These were unloaded to the Seydlitz, largest of their battlecruisers. A single rating was taken from each German ship by a British drifter to the Seydlitz to draw rations.
The twenty thousand men who had brought the fleet from Wilhelmshaven were gradually reduced to fewer than five thousand, the remainder sent back to Germany on the empty supply ships. The battleships and their skeleton crews remained interned, while the terms of a peace treaty were being negotiated at Versailles.
Fraternisation was forbidden. But when Leo’s turn for guard duty came, on one of the armed trawlers, he discovered that there was much contact between the internees and the crews of the Royal Navy drifters that ferried the German doctors, pursers and chaplains to and fro. A black market arose supplying the German sailors with tobacco, soap and meat, in return for medals and items of uniform and small fittings off the ships themselves.
He discovered how monotonous the Germans’ diet was. Their home country, from where it was sent, was under blockade. Their food consisted mainly of turnips. So the German sailors fished. Unlike their British counterparts they did so mainly at night, using lamps to lure swarms of small fish which they scooped out in makeshift nets. Many of the men had bad teeth but there was no dentist. The worst sufferers were put on the steam ship home. Scurvy became widespread, as in a navy from an earlier age.
In the mornings, the German sailors maintained and cleaned their ships, with generally poor discipline. Leo learned that engine maintenance was rarely carried out properly. The water for the boilers turned salty. In the afternoons, Sailors’ Councils on some ships arranged lessons, in languages, geography and history, mathematics. As the weather improved, they whiled away the hours on deck. They could be heard playing music or singing. Alcohol somehow remained in plentiful supply. Leo sometimes saw men chasing each other round the funnels and masts. It was hard to tell from a distance whether they were involved in violence, or passion, or simply playing a game of tag.
‘I don’t know who to feel more sorry for,’ Victor Harris said. ‘Them Huns, or us here keeping an eye on them.’
Leo had been diving from a small pinnace, Victor held his breathing tube and rope line. Leo pulled off his diving suit. ‘What are you complaining about?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve less than a month left.’
His friend grinned. ‘You can picture me, can you, pulling pints behind the bar?’
Leo gestured tow
ards the great ships across the Flow. ‘I feel sorry for their commander,’ he said.
‘They’ll be gone within the month too, one way or another.’
‘I’ve heard Sir Sydney don’t afford him the courtesy of official visits. His mail is censored. The Admiralty’s decent enough to give him a copy of The Times only four days out a date.’
Victor shrugged. ‘I shouldn’t reckon anyone up here gets a newspaper quicker than that.’
Leo ignored the Welshman. ‘He must know the peace terms have been delivered,’ he said. ‘If his government accepts them, we’ll take his ships.’
‘I don’t know, I reckon the Frogs’ll bag a few.’
‘And if they don’t accept, we’ll take the ships anyway, and if the unarmed sailors resist, we’ll shoot them. Either way, he’s going to be handin over his fleet in the next day or two.’
Victor Harris coiled the rope and placed it in a canvas bag. ‘That’s war, Lofty. We won, they lost.’
Leo shook his head. ‘With the sense of honour they Germans have, I wouldn’t be surprised if he kills himself before he ever hands over his fleet.’
3
Midsummer’s Day, Saturday 21 June 1919. Leo and Victor Harris were on guard duty aboard Flying Kestrel, a big tender. The boat had been brought up to the Orkneys from Liverpool under contract to the Admiralty as a water supply and general duties vessel for the internment. The surrendered German Fleet had been anchored in Scapa Flow for seven months. Captain Davies explained to the two seamen that today as on most days his boat’s task was to carry water to the Germans from the Pump Well in Stromness. It took him eight days to make a complete circuit of the seventy-four vessels in the German Fleet.
‘Unlike Royal Navy vessels, they’re not equipped with desalination plants,’ he said. ‘To distil drinking water from seawater. Do you know why?’
Leo suggested Germans did not drink water but only beer. Victor Harris laughed and declared Leo’s answer a good one, but he knew full well that British sailors liked their beer just as much as Germans. Captain Davies said that whereas a Royal Navy ship was built for her men to live in, serving as their home on long voyages around the Empire, German sailors had no Empire and only sailed on short forays. They did not sleep on board and ate only snacks, sleeping and dining in barracks on shore.
Flying Kestrel crossed the channel between Stromness and Hoy and headed down through the boom gates at Houton, and on south across the Flow. The sun was shining and there was only a light breeze. The British Fleet was almost entirely absent today, out on exercise somewhere in the North Sea.
Captain Davies steered the tender at a leisurely pace, to the east of the small Island of Cava. Soon they began to pass between the lines of the great battleships and battlecruisers. One ship was taking on supplies from a British drifter moored alongside. They saw German sailors on the decks of the warships towering above them. Some of the sailors thumbed their noses at the crew of the tender. Victor said he wished Leo had brought his catapult, but Captain Davies said that perhaps they would do the same if they were prisoners-of-war, being gawped at by the enemy.
‘We should feel sorry for those poor fellows,’ he said, ‘who can no more help the misfortune of having been born German than we can claim credit for the privilege of being British.’
The Flying Kestrel continued on its course through the German Fleet, towards the destroyers to be supplied that day. Captain Davies told the two seamen that he liked to observe goings-on in the Flow. He knew most of the German ships and called out the names, the tonnage and the gun power of each of them as they passed. ‘SMS Bayern there, with her sister ship SMS Baden – the largest in the German Imperial Navy. Thirty-two thousand tons. Eight fifteen-inch guns in those four turrets.’ Victor Harris rolled his eyes, but Leo listened to the skipper. SMS ‘Markgraf. Twenty-five thousand tons. Ten twelve-inch guns in five turrets.’
They carried on south between the Islands of Rysa and Fara, to the destroyers, or torpedo boats, as the captain said they were called by the enemy. Some of the German sailors were fishing from the decks, improvising wooden sticks or staves for rods and string for lines such as children use. The destroyers were low enough in the water for the men to do this. The clothes they wore were filthy, and hardly looked like uniforms any more. Many sported impressive moustaches. One man sat atop a gun turret playing a mouth organ. They passed close enough to hear it, faintly, above the noise of the Kestrel ’s engines. Captain Davies said he was like a siren, perhaps luring them.
When they reached Lyness, Captain Davies said that the destroyers ahead of them constituted the final flotilla, and he ordered his crew to make ready the water tanks. Victor leaned his Lee Enfield .303 rifle against the wall of the bridge and unwrapped the sandwiches, oatcakes, cheese and dried fish they’d been given.
‘Sun shining, decent grub,’ he said to Leo. ‘The rest of our lot’s out there on another exercise. We done all right today, Lofty.’
The Flying Kestrel chugged along between the destroyers.
‘They’ve all stopped fishing,’ Leo noted. ‘Must a got a catch and gone to fry it.’
‘They’ll have caught nothing with that tackle,’ Victor told him.
The captain said he’d often seen them fishing, and they caught all sorts.
They approached the last destroyers, anchored off the tiny Island of Rysa, and Captain Davies steered to the west of Cava, into the channel between that island and Hoy. Victor Harris pointed at the final destroyer. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a bloody cheek. The Germans are flying their ensigns!’
Leo looked up. Ships were hoisting a white flag with a black cross. In its upper-left quarter was the marine jack, Captain Davies said, and he had not seen it before. In the middle of the cross was another shape but as the flag was billowing in the breeze they could not make out what it was.
‘That’s the eagle,’ Victor said. ‘The German bloody eagle!’
Victor said they should go up close and find out what the hell was going on, but Captain Davies said that he wasn’t going to risk his old boat in any ruckus, with just two armed sailors carrying a single rifle each. He ordered the boat to continue past the destroyer and head out into the Flow.
They came towards a huge ship. ‘The Seydlitz,’ the captain said. ‘Look at her armour. Cemented and nickel steel. We hit her twenty-one times at Jutland and she never went down.’
As they watched, a lifeboat was lowered to the water. Men embarked and pushed off. Further along sailors threw a raft down. Some jumped over the side and plummeted into the water, then scrambled to the raft.
‘What do the krauts think they are doing?’ Victor asked.
Captain Davies was mute. Leo said, ‘They look like they’re escaping.’ As they passed the battlecruiser she seemed to shudder. Then she shuddered again. It was as if this huge ship was feeling the cold and shivering. Then one of Flying Kestrel ’s crew yelled, ‘Jesus Christ! She’s turning turtle,’ and the men watched open-mouthed as the Seydlitz toppled over onto her side. Water came streaming out of the seacocks.
The next ship’s stern rose slowly into the air, so that the bows sank first and the rest of the hull slid smoothly into the water, as if the ship were performing an exemplary dive.
Captain Davies ordered Flying Kestrel to slacken speed. They passed a battleship whose quarterdeck was awash. They watched her gradually lift her bows out of the water, roll over, and disappear beneath the surface, leaving nothing but a vast patch of bubbling foam.
‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ Victor Harris asked.
‘They’re sinking,’ Captain Davies said. ‘They’re scuttling their own damned ships.’
German sailors were abandoning their crafts, dragging kit and throwing it into lifeboats. The sea became littered with boats and hammocks, lifebelts and chests, spars and items of clothing. Debris from the scuttled ships. And in amongst it, hundreds of men. Some floated, others made for the nearest shore. Those who could, hauled themselves onto raft
s.
A couple of crew members of Flying Kestrel who were not currently needed stood spellbound on the deck. A lifeboat drifted by full of Germans cheerfully singing.
They passed a ship and heard issue from it loud single strokes of her bell. Leo knew this to mean ‘Abandon Ship’. What was happening in front of him was awesome. It was impossible to believe that the Germans were doing it themselves, to their own fleet. It made no sense. The ship wobbled, then it upended and plunged down quickly, enveloped in clouds of steam.
The great ships were leviathans. They seemed to have altered their constitution, steel made flesh, to have come alive, like whales, vast grey creatures saying farewell to the upper air and leaving the world of men to sink into the deeps of the ocean.
The bulk of the British Fleet was out on its exercise, but the Flow came alive now with drifters and trawlers, picket boats, pinnaces and ships’ tenders. Some began picking German sailors out of the water. Others tried to reach a ship before its sailors had left it and force them to curtail the scuttle. Shots could be heard.
From a ship they passed came sullen rumblings, and the crashing of chains, then its great hull lurched giddily over and slid with a horrible sucking and gurgling sound under the water. Weird and terrible noises the ship made in its death throes. The proud vessel slowly disappeared with a long-drawn-out sigh. On the surface all that remained was a whirlpool dotted with dark objects swirling round and round. These were drawn inwards until they too sank from sight. Captain Davies yelled orders to his crew, afraid perhaps that the Kestrel would be caught in the churning turbulence. The whirlpool subsided, then oil rose to the surface, a black stain hugely spreading, as if the lifeblood of some ocean monster were oozing up from the seabed.
Leo watched a British drifter towing a German lifeboat full of sailors. Suddenly one of them stood up in the bow of the boat. He had a knife in his hand. He leaned forward and tried to cut the tow rope. A Royal Marine in the drifter raised his rifle. They saw a puff of smoke and the German drop his knife. Then they heard the crack of the rifle, and watched the sailor fall back into the boat. The other men stood up unsteadily with their arms in the air.