‘Ready, sir, they’re wantin’ it!’
Whipping round. Nick found two of the ammunition supply party; they must have just returned from delivering shot to the midships gun. He’d thought of them all as being dead. Nick told the stoker down below, ‘Come on then, get it moving!’ He stood up, and one of the two sailors said, ‘It all begun to come up fast, sudden like, faster ’n we could take it from ’em. I reckon a shell hit a lot of ’em as was stood there, sir.’ The other man looked winded, sick. Nick grasped his arm, and told them both, ‘Only two of you now. You’ll just have to damn well run with it.’ The surgeon’s helpers, one sick berth attendant and one cook, had come up to help; they were carrying the wounded torpedo man down through the hatch, all three of them soaked already in his blood. As Nick started for’ard a shell dropped alongside, exploding as it hit the water. He heard the rattle of splinters on the ship’s side and the whirr of others whizzing past and overhead, but all that hit him was a douche of black, foul-smelling water. He located the fire-main, and shut it off. He headed for Pilkington now, who had the use of the searchlight crew’s voicepipe to the bridge. The noise had slackened, there was still a lot of gunfire but it seemed to be all astern. ‘Mr Pilkington!’
‘What, you still alive?’ Crouching on the platform, the torpedo gunner had only glanced down briefly. He had his torpedo-firing disc in his hand. Nick asked him, ‘Would you tell the first lieutenant ‒ stern four-inch blown overboard, crew all killed and—’
‘Bloody ’ell I will!’ Mr Pilkington’s small eyes gleamed with anger under the jammed-down peak of his cap. ‘Fill up the voicepipe wi’ bloody chatter?’ He stood up, pointing out on the port bow and yelling down to his beefy TGM. ‘Port side only, one an’ two tubes only, get ’em round!’ Looking round just as the midships four-inch fired, Nick saw a shell-splash leap up astern of what must have been the last of the German flotilla. Farther back and broader on the quarter he could see two others stopped and sinking; the after part of one of them was on fire. How long had the whole action taken, from start to finish? Four, five minutes? Lanyard was still steaming flat out, the roar of her fans unchanged, funnel-smoke pouring astern thick and black. He could see three, four ‒ no, five more destroyers following astern there, their guns still engaging the German boats: and the Germans seemed to be fanning out, disengaging. They’d still have the thirteenth flotilla’s starboard division ahead of them, of course, and it was possible they’d had enough. He climbed up behind the midships gun; there was nothing for it to shoot at now, and as the supply party came panting to and fro with charges and projectiles they were refilling the ready-racks. Nick told Hooper. ‘Train round to the other side. We’ll be turning to starboard in a minute to fire torpedoes.’ The Barr and Stroud, he saw, was showing a range of 080. He told the gunlayer as the four-inch pivoted round through the stern bearing and up the other side. ‘Set range oh-eight-oh—’ Shells screeched overhead. He finished. ‘And deflection zero.’ Shell-splashes went up astern. Shellfire was thickening now, the noise of it rising and the sea spouting like a pond from heavy rain, the air alive with the scrunch and screech of overs. He felt Lanyard begin her turn, deck tilting, screws pounding, wake curving crescent-like to starboard. A range of 080 meant eight thousand yards, four sea miles; good torpedo range but hardly a comfortable distance at which to loiter round five German battle cruisers whose secondary armament of six-inch guns was reserved exclusively for just such moments. Each of those ships had six six-inch on each side, which meant that now Nestor and Nicator had made their runs there’d be no less than thirty six-inch banging away at Lanyard. A clanging crash came from the foc’sl and a smoke-cloud that flew aft and left a stink of high-explosive as it passed told of a hit for’ard. Now water rained down from some near miss or misses, and Nick saw the Germans suddenly as the destroyer’s bow swung and they came into view while her turn continued until she was broadside-on to all of them ‒ a sitting duck, and the deck’s slant lessening as Mortimer eased her helm, levelling her for the convenience of Mr Pilkington and his torpedoes. The enemy was five vast silver-grey juggernauts with what looked like a hundred guns spitting fire and fury under a long, unbroken shroud of funnel-smoke; Hooper was firing steadily as Lanyard still swung and his gunsight travelled from the third in the line, past the second, to the leader ‒ Hipper’s flagship. Nick shouted in the gunlayer’s ear. ‘Bridge! Aim at her bridge!’ A hit on the person of Vice-Admiral Hipper with a four-inch QF Mark IV might be worth scoring. But it was hard to see now through the density of shell-spouts and falling spray. A piece of the for’ard funnel suddenly flared, smoked, flew away in the wind and fell astern, and the gun was training slowly aft now ‒ faster ‒ Hooper keeping the flagship’s bridge as his point of aim. There’d been no sign of any torpedo hit, but Nick realised that while ten seconds ago the big ships’ firing had been rising to a hideous, merciless crescendo ‒ he’d thought, as they hit that funnel, Now this can’t last ‒ it had just as suddenly slackened off. And the German ships were turning! Swinging away together to port, to avoid Lanyard’s torpedo. Lanyard, eight hundred tons, making a whole squadron of twenty-five-thousand-ton battle cruisers turn away! Then he saw the error in that boast, for it wasn’t only Lanyard, but here were three ‒ no, four others racing in, perhaps more, at this moment out of his view. The situation wasn’t orderly, there were ships here, there and everywhere… and Petard seemed about to cross astern as she swung over to make her attack; Nick shouted to Hooper to hold his fire.
* * *
Nile’s broadsides roared again: and since the Fifth Battle Squadron had opened fire fifteen minutes ago there was little doubt that the enemy were suffering. To start with, the screening cruisers had been sent scurrying: now Moltke and Von der Tann had both been hard hit and their rates of fire reduced, and it looked as if the leading ships of the squadron were reaching Seydlitz now as well. Hugh Everard swung his glasses to the left, to what had been the battlefield and was now once again just a grey acreage of North Sea. There, well abaft the battle squadron’s port beam now, a sailing barque ‒ tall, square-rigged ‒ lay becalmed with all sails set. A lovely craft: a peaceful, restful and utterly incongruous sight, a total contrast to the destructive violence which during the last half-hour had thundered past on either side of her, shells hurtling in their low trajectory over her white, idle sails. With his glasses resting on her for a moment, Hugh found himself thinking of Sarah. No, not thinking of her, but forming a picture of her in his mind; her smile and her calm, friendly manner; a combination of vulnerability and quiet self-confidence. The vulnerability was something one saw oneself, of course, because when one thought of her one tended to have him in mind. How she’d accepted him in the first place was ‒ well, there was no answer to it! John could turn on his charm, of course, and hide his more natural attributes. And he was a baronet, which would have delighted Buchanan, who would have used his influence…
Nile’s guns crashed out again, just as a close pattern of German shells thumped into the sea sixty yards short. Nothing had touched Nile yet, and there’d been no hits so far on any of the ships ahead of her. All the shells fired at this squadron had fallen short, while their own fifteen-inch guns had had the range to hit the two rearmost Germans time and time again. The range was closing now, though, as the lines converged, and before long one might expect a taste of one’s own medicine, a share of the hammering which Beatty’s ships had been enduring for about forty minutes ‒ a hammering which Beatty had positively invited by rushing in without waiting for this squadron. But meanwhile, with Rathbone piloting Nile in Malaya’s wake, and Brook up in the control top sending salvo after salvo thundering from her guns, there wasn’t a great deal for her captain to be doing.
He thought he might tell Sarah, one day, how the sight of that becalmed sailing-ship had turned his thoughts to her in the middle of a battle…
Extraordinary, that one could reach years of discretion and still behave like an adolescent. Blurting that out to her, as he
had yesterday…
Damn it, I meant it! I feel it now!
As she must too. Otherwise, would she have telegraphed an answer to his letter, to arrange a meeting? Well, would she?
He bit his lip. He’d got cold feet, that was all. He’d begun to express a fraction of what he felt for her, and then baulked at it, backed off. Career? And the idea of stealing his brother’s wife? Morality? Where was the morality in leaving her in John’s hands, for God’s sake?
Tom Crick touched his arm.
‘Sir.’
Drawing his attention, privately, to something on the starboard bow… To Beatty’s ships ‒ fine on the bow, almost right ahead. Hugh raised his glasses and focused them on the battle cruisers ‒ still some five miles distant, still pressing southward, their guns flinging out a brownish cordite haze that mingled with clouds of heavier funnel-smoke.
He saw what Crick was showing him. Twenty minutes ago, Indefatigable had blown up. Now he was watching the same thing happen to Queen Mary. A dull, red glow faded almost before he’d seen it: another glow spread for’ard: her hull was opening, expanding outwards, and as he watched ‒ hardly letting himself believe he was seeing it ‒ her masts and funnels toppled inward, as if a great pit had been opened for them to fall into. Then the eruption: he saw the roofs of all four turrets blow up like corks from bottles: smoke spread, built up, a column piling, rising in great circling folds to a height of about a thousand feet. The ship astern of her had vanished into that vast cloud’s base: they’d be in darkness, pieces of their sister-ship would be raining down around them as they steamed through the stench of her destruction.
Like Indefatigable, Queen Mary would have taken about a thousand men with her to the bottom. Some would have been trapped, and at this moment still alive, not even knowing yet what had happened…
Jellicoe, Hugh thought, must be getting close now. Please God, lend him speed: Beatty has already lost his battle.
‘Signal, sir!’
Hugh took the clip-board from his chief yeoman’s hand.
Jellicoe had given Beatty this Fifth Battle Squadron to support him, and Beatty had stupidly or arrogantly (or both adverbs might apply) left it astern and taken Hipper on alone. All right, so there must obviously be some structural defect that allowed the battle cruisers to fall such easy victims to a few hits, but they were lightly armoured, as Beatty well knew, and if the Queen Elizabeths had been with them the German fire would have been spread over more targets, and the German gunners would have had a much less easy time of it, because there’d have been fifteen-inch salvoes pouring down on them.
Over there in the German line, they’d be cheering themselves hoarse now.
Sick at heart, he gave his attention to the signal. It was from senior officer Second Light Cruiser Squadron ‒ which meant Commodore Goodenough in Southampton and addressed to C-in-C and FO, BCF. The message, prefixed URGENT read:
Have sighted enemy battle fleet bearing approximately south-east. Course of enemy north. My position lat 56 degs 34’ N long 6 degs 20’ E. Time 4.38 pm.
Hugh looked up at Crick. He told him ‘Scheer’s coming north with the High Seas Fleet. He’s already almost on top of Beatty.’
‘Flag signal flying from Lion, sir!’
Midshipman Ross-Hallet had reported it. The chief yeoman whipped his telescope to his eye as he hurried out to the bridge’s starboard wing. It wasn’t an easy string of flags to read, at a distance of five miles and with the flags blowing this way, end-on, and in smoke.
‘What’s he saying, Peppard?’
More shells were falling just short of them.
‘Can’t quite make—’ The chief yeoman’s face was screwed up in concentration. Yeoman Brannon, one of his four assistants, was beside him with another telescope. ‘Looks like an alter-in-succession signal, sir, but—’
‘It’s coming down.’ Hugh was behind the binnacle, where Rathbone had made room for him, and he had his binoculars trained on Beatty’s ships. ‘Doesn’t matter. Peppard. He is turning.’
The battle cruisers were going-about, reversing course, by the looks of it. And in the circumstances. Hugh thought, that was wise enough. In fact there was nothing else Beatty could have done ‒ short of committing suicide with all his ships and men. But there was more to it than just survival. Just as Jellicoe, misled by the Admiralty, hadn’t known Scheer was at sea, so the probability was that Admiral Scheer had not the slightest idea that Jellicoe was either. Certainly not that the Grand Fleet was only fifty miles away, and coming closer at every minute. He couldn’t know, because if he did he’d be steaming south, not north!
Jellicoe steaming south at, say, twenty knots ‒ of which his slowest battleships were capable – and the ships here going north at twenty-five: in an hour, there’d be no gap! But Scheer and Hipper must be thinking they had Beatty trapped and running for his life; they could hardly guess he’d be leading them into a British trap.
The four surviving battle cruisers had completed their northwards turn; they were returning this way, now, towards the Fifth Battle Squadron, which Evan-Thomas was still leading south. Beatty had had quite a mauling’; no doubt he wanted the more powerful battleships astern of him, where the brunt of the fighting would now be. That was reasonable and fair. Unlike the battle cruisers, these super-dreadnoughts were armoured to take punishment as well as gunned to hand it out.
‘Rathbone.’ Hugh passed his navigator the clip of signals. ‘Put the last one on the plot, will you.’
‘Sir.’
‘You know. Tom—’ he kept his eyes on Malaya, the next ahead ‒ ‘this is an odd situation. Scheer thinks he’s got Beatty’s goose cooked. Whereas with any sort of luck, he’s practically in the oven himself!’
Crick pulled thoughtfully at an ear. ‘Let’s hope so, sir.’
* * *
Geoff Garret held on to the rail in the starboard after corner of Lanyard’s bridge and wondered how long he’d live.
It was necessary, vitally necessary now, that he should survive; but could Fate or the Almighty be counted on to recognise the necessity?
Blood ‒ not just stains, but pools of it ‒ in certain parts of the bridge suggested that no particular element of Divine protection was being extended over this destroyer. Against that, one might take comfort from the theory that lightning never struck twice in the same place. He told himself, Best not to think about it. Me going soft won’t help her.
Ahead of Lanyard, Nestor and Nicator zigzagged to and fro, dodging like snipe; Lanyard followed in the water they’d slashed and churned, whipping to and fro just as wildly, under almost constant helm one way or the other, salvo-dodging, flinging herself from tack to tack so savagely that she was permanently on her beam ends, her deck bucking as she flung herself from side to side while the pair ahead were often hidden from sight in foam, spray, the height of their own wakes and the spouts of German shells ‒ and battleships’ shells now. The Hun dreadnoughts had only hove into sight ten minutes ago, when Lanyard and her two N-class consorts had been heading westward to rejoin Beatty’s force, and Geoff Garret had read in other faces that he wasn’t the only one who felt distinctly relieved, at that point, to be getting out from under. But relief hadn’t lasted long. Nestor had suddenly veered out to port and begun flashing to the two boats astern of her. Garret, as he concentrated on reading the first words of Nestor’s Morse, had heard Sub-Lieutenant Hastings exclaim: ‘It’s the Fifth Battle Squadron, sir. They’re off on our port bow now!’ After the attack, the turning and twisting to and fro, he’d been confused, as most were; whichever way you looked the sea was grey, planted here and there with groups of ships or single ships at varying distances, with patches and streaks of smoke. Those three German destroyers, for instance, two of them sinking, and Nomad, whom they’d had to leave, shrouded in steam escaping from her shattered boiler-rooms… Hastings had thought that line of big ships which had just shown themselves out of the mistier section of the horizon were the Queen Elizabeths, but the miscon
ception was quickly dispelled. Nestor’s signal said: Enemy battle fleet bearing S.S.E. Intend attacking with remaining torpedoes.
Garret had read it, calling the words out one by one as he clashed the shutter of the searchlight to acknowledge them; and during the recital of the last few words, he’d begun to wonder whether the intention which was being expressed could possibly be in his own best interests.
He’d never thought in such terms before. He’d been in action three or four times, in another boat down in the Harwich flotilla, and he’d always rather enjoyed it, same as most of the lads did. You couldn’t swing round an anchor or prop up a jetty and hope to win the war; fighting was what the fleet was for. But he’d changed. He felt entirely different. Part of his unease was that he recognised the change and disliked it; he was uncomfortable, and the fact he was uncomfortable made him more uncomfortable.
Returning a wink from Blewitt. Garret hoped his fear didn’t show. He wished he could recover the sense of excitement and anticipation he’d felt when they’d had the signal about altering course to go after the enemy. He wasn’t the same man now that he’d been then.
There was a six-foot hole in the port fore corner of the bridge. There’d been steps there and a door; now it was just a pit. And three men were dead. Two of the for’ard gun’s crew had been wounded, and soon after that there’d been an enormous explosion aft. It had felt and sounded like a torpedo hit. Number One had tried to find out what had happened but the voicepipes didn’t work, and then he’d been busy with the for’ard gun and Blewitt’s machine. It had been during the run-in to fire torpedoes that a German light cruiser’s shell had smashed into that corner where the bridge connected, with three steps down and a wooden door and a short ladder inside, with the steering position. The blast went both ways: it killed the coxswain, CPO Cuthbertson, at the wheel, and Lieutenant Johnson and Lieutenant Reynolds in the bridge, and a splinter from it had cut the throat of the bridge messenger, aft on the other side.
The Blooding of the Guns Page 11