The Blooding of the Guns

by The Blooding of the Guns (retail) (epub)

  Garret’s head shook in the gloom. His gloom, too. ‘They’d likely keep us there, sir. An s’pose they don’t, s’pose we pay off. I’m a Devonport rating, sir, they might send me down there.’

  He stopped talking about it: it was too much for him. He muttered, ‘I’d ‒ skin off, sir. I would.’

  ‘Don’t be bloody daft. Garret. Talking to me about deserting?’

  ‘Well. I’m sorry, sir, but—’

  ‘After we dock. I’ll send you on leave. How’s that?’

  Beside him the signalman took a deep, hard breath.

  ‘Can you do that, sir’?’

  ‘I’m in command, aren’t l?’

  ‘I’ve no leave due, sir, that’s the trouble. Before I got married I took it all.’

  ‘If your commanding officer says you have leave due, you have leave due. You’ll be issued with a railway warrant ‒ and the base paymaster’ll come up with an advance of pay.

  ‘D’you mean this, sir?’

  ‘No skin off my nose, Garret.’

  * * *

  And where, he wondered, would he go?

  First ‒ when they let him ‒ to Mullbergh. See Sarah. Try first to see Uncle Hugh, and ask him to help with wangling a permanent appointment to some destroyer, anything rather than getting shanghai’d back into some battle-wagon… Have to put it a bit tactfully: the old boy was proud of that vast thing he drove around.

  Nick wondered how the day and night had gone with Hugh Everard and Nile, and how things had been for David, too. There’d been a new line of thought, hadn’t there, about David. Coupling what Johnson had said about him with the undoubted fact that their father had always looked to David, as his eldest son and the future baronet, to do brilliantly ‒ or at least do well ‒ at everything he was supposed to do… Well, hence the horsemanship. Scared half to death ‒ still an accomplished horseman, much better in the saddle than he, Nick, was ‒ but nervous, which Nick had never been. Had David ever really enjoyed a day’s hunting?

  Nick wondered whether he could persuade David to listen to some advice ‒ if he suggested to him, for instance, that instead of forcing himself to continue riding to hounds, he should tell their father, ‘I don’t enjoy it. I don’t intend to hunt in future.’

  He couldn’t be disinherited. He was the first-born, and the estate was entailed, and the principle of primogeniture protected him completely. Their father wouldn’t like a non-hunting eldest son ‒ he’d raise hell ‒ but did that matter? If David could be encouraged to face up to him ‒ or in a way, face up to himself ‒ mightn’t he find himself a lot happier and perhaps in the process become easier to get on with?

  The biggest ‘if’ of all was if David could screw up enough guts to face his father. He’d never done so yet. The old man had him cowed. Whereas he’d realised years ago he’d never scare his younger son into subservience, and as a result got into a habit of ignoring him.

  The last time he and his father had faced each other in mutual anger had been a couple of years ago, at Mullbergh. Two o’clock in the morning: Nick had been woken by a succession of loud crashes: they’d been part of some dream, but as he’d woken he’d heard another and realised they’d been real: and as the realisation had taken root, he’d heard Sarah scream. He’d sprung out of bed and raced down the long, ice-cold corridor, stone-flagged and about as cheerful as a crypt: then into the central part of the house where his father and Sarah slept. He’d rushed down the half-flight of stairs to their floor.

  ‘What the blazes are you doing here?’

  His father was still in evening clothes: he was also half-drunk, and crazy-looking. Behind him, the top half of a bedroom door had been smashed in. A heavy case ‒ it was the dumpy leather one in which the shoe and boot cleaning things were kept ‒ lay on the floor there. Obviously his father had just used it to break down the door.

  ‘Oh, Nick…’

  He saw Sarah, as she came out into the passage. The shoulder of her dark-green evening dress had been ripped, and she was holding it up on that side.

  ‘Is there—’ he ignored his father, who was in a rage and shouting at him to go back to his room ‒ ‘anything I can do?’

  ‘No. I ‒ no, Nick, there isn’t, thank you.’ She’d smiled at him. Brown hair, all loose, fell across her face and had to be brushed back. ‘I promise you. I’ll be all right now. You go back to bed before you catch cold.’

  Nick remembered ‒ relived this incident every time his thoughts turned to Sarah and his father: the torn dress and her hair flopping loose and the half-frightened, half-defiant expression… It had marked a turning-point in his relationship with his father. From then on, his father had stopped bullying him and taken to ignoring him: as if he’d realised suddenly that Nick wasn’t going to change or, in anything that really mattered, give way to him.

  But whether he’d stopped bullying Sarah was another matter.

  * * *

  Watching the sea, the coming of the dawn, he sighed…

  The light wasn’t grey now, it was silver. Overhead there was a vaguely pearly colour which became brighter, sharper in its reflection in the sea; this was probably what was producing the silvery effect. There were no waves now, only ripples, which in the middle-distance had a streaky look ‒ one side silver, the other black. Mackerel-colour. Mist hung over everything: compared to the radiance of the sea’s surface it looked dirty, colourless like sheep’s wool in a thorn hedge.

  Cold… Nick checked that the collar of his reefer was still turned up. It was, but it hadn’t felt like it. And he had a sweater on, but he wished he’d put on two, now.

  Worsfold had exceeded his ration of two hours, but the hammering was still going on. Nick pulled out his watch; it was light enough now to see the positions of the hands. He told Garret, ‘Two thirty-five.’ And at that precise moment, the noise stopped. Nick stood still with the watch in the palm of his hand, thinking, any second, they’ll start again.

  Garret murmured, ‘Got it done, sir, by the sound of it.’

  Garret had grown a lot of beard, for one night. Nick touched his own jaw, it felt about as bad. He remembered Reynolds warning him, referring to Mortimer’s idiosyncrasies, “informality is not encouraged in his officers…”

  Forty-eight hours ago, Reynolds had said that! It felt as if half a lifetime had passed. For Reynolds and Mortimer a whole one had.

  ‘I think I’ll go below and see what’s what.’ Nick stretched, yawned, and moved out towards the ship’s side. There still wasn’t any noise emanating from the boiler-room. He warned himself, don’t count your chickens!

  Chief might have run into one of those snags he’d mentioned. He might be squatting there staring at it, wondering what to do about it. Nick stared out over the quarter, at the beginnings of a purple-ish glow, low down where the horizon must have been ‒ if one could have seen it ‒ and blanketed in the mist. That glow would harden, redden, flush upwards and resolve itself eventually into the brilliance of a sunrise, and probably that would be all they’d see of the sun all day.

  But it was none too soon, he thought, for Lanyard to be getting under way.

  He told Garret, ‘I’ll be back in a few—’

  His mouth stayed open.

  Out of that tinted mist astern, a ship was looming up towards them.

  German.

  At a glance, and beyond a doubt. German light cruiser.

  Well, that’s that…

  She was bigger than the cruiser they’d torpedoed. She had the typically low bridge and the pair of searchlights on her foremast; the searchlights looked like a crab’s eyes stuck up on stalks above its head. She might be one of the Karlsrühe class ‒ Germany’s latest in light cruisers.

  Not a damn thing, he thought, that one could do. The ball would be in that Hun’s court, entirely. He edged back into the shadow of the searchlight platform and told Garret. ‘Hun cruiser, coming up astern.’ He’d whispered it. Silly, really: she was still a mile and a half or two miles away. Coming up from th
e quarter, steering to pass close on Lanyard’s starboard side.

  He put his glasses on her again. She was closing at a slow, steady speed: unhurried, purposeful. She’d have a broadside ‒ he delved into his memory ‒ of five or six four-point-ones.

  ‘Leading Seaman Hooper!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Enemy light cruiser approaching on the starboard quarter. Keep your gun’s crew out of sight. Everyone, keep down!’

  ‘Aye aye, sir!’ There was a quick scurry of movement across the destroyer’s deck up near the gun.

  ‘Hooper: load, set deflection six knots left and range…’ He thought, she’ll pass within spitting distance… ‘Set range five hundred yards.’ He told Garret. ‘Go for’ard and tell Mr Pilkington what’s happening. Then below, and tell Mr Worsfold I don’t want a pin dropped anywhere. I’ll be at the gun.’

  Garret shot away. Nick called after him. ‘No movement on deck either, tell ’em.’ He joined Hooper on the gun platform, and crouched down beside him. ‘If they think we’re a wreck it’s just possible they may decide to leave us alone.’ The gunlayer raised an eyebrow, as if to say fat chance of that. Nick added. ‘Or they might send a boat, a boarding party.’

  He thought of the men he had waiting below with cutlasses. He hoped the cruiser might send a boarding party.

  * * *

  In a greenish, cold-looking sea, bodies in lifebelts rose and fell amongst other flotsam. The areas of dead came infre-quently but there’d be as much as an acre or two of them at a time: sometimes the black and sodden uniforms were British, sometimes German. When you saw them through binoculars at a distance, the humped shapes had the look of drifting mines. One saw them always on the bow, because by the time Nile was close to them they’d been caught in the bow-waves of Barham, Valiant and Malaya and lifted, pushed aside to form an avenue of clear sea through which the Grand Fleet’s battle squadrons in line ahead and led by these Queen Elizabeths steamed north in search of the enemy.

  An hour ago Jellicoe had wheeled his dreadnoughts round and disposed them in line of battle; since 2 am the fleet had been closed up at action stations.

  Rathbone was conning the ship. Hugh left him, and joined his second-in-command in the port wing of the bridge.

  ‘I’m sorry to say it, Tom, but I think Scheer’s got away.’ He pointed out towards a scattering of black dots, the last colony of drowned men they’d passed, still visible on the quarter. ‘Those are the only Huns we’re likely to see today.’

  Crick nodded.

  ‘It’s a ‒ a disappointment, sir.’

  Understatement was a habit, with Tom Crick.

  Nile still had no wireless, so one couldn’t know what reports had reached Jellicoe during the night, or on what knowledge or lack of it he’d based his decision to hold on southwards. Hugh knew only that throughout the dark hours there’d been flare-ups of action astern, and that there was no sign of any enemy in the area now. The two observations weren’t difficult to link.

  All right ‒ the Grand Fleet held the ring, kept the sea. Here they were, close to the German coast, ready and more than willing to resume the battle, while Scheer had run home to safety. Wisely, even cleverly; but running was still running. The victors were those left in the field. But by escaping homewards, Scheer had denied to Jellicoe the kind of victory which the Grand Fleet had sought and which it had been expected to achieve.

  ‘Best keep the hands closed-up, Tom, for the time being. You could send ’em to breakfast by watches?’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  Hugh was hungry, too. Bates, no doubt, would have something ready for him.

  There’d be post-mortems, he thought, till the cows came home. The loss of ships wouldn’t be well received: and there had to be some structural defect that had led to the battle cruisers blowing up. Flash to their magazines, almost certainly. By comparison it was extraordinary how much punishment the German capital ships had been able to absorb without blowing up or sinking. And it could be that there was some deficiency in the British shells or in their fuses. One had seen so many explode on impact instead of penetrating.

  It might be asked why Beatty had rushed into action without the support of this battle squadron; whether it had resulted from the same lack of control of his ships which had made the Dogger Bank action such a fiasco, or whether Sir David’s over-confidence and pursuit of fame had urged him to hog the glory for himself and his battle cruisers. But when it came to post-mortem time, the biggest question that would be asked would be how had the Germans been permitted to escape, why it hadn’t ended as a twentieth-century Trafalgar.

  The public wouldn’t understand that at Trafalgar Nelson had drifted into action at about two knots, that once the fleets had grappled the battle had had to be fought out to its conclusion: they might not want to understand that it was a different matter to annihilate an enemy who couldn’t move from the mouths of your cannon than it was to smash one who could turn and run away into fog at twenty knots.

  The Navy would know what had been proved, and so would the Germans. Twice Scheer had thrown his squadrons against Jellicoe’s, and twice they’d had to turn and run. What had been proved was that the High Seas Fleet was no match for the Grand Fleet.

  But still ‒ Hugh thought ‒ if he, Everard, had been in Jellicoe’s shoes, and seen the night-fighting in the north, wouldn’t he have steered for Horns Reef and shut off that escape route?

  * * *

  Hugh remembered the post-mortems inside the Admiralty after the Falklands victory. The arguments had all been of Jacky Fisher’s making. Fisher, giving Admiral Sturdee command of the operation, had had his own personal, Fisher-type aim in mind; his hope had been that Sturdee, whom he regarded as an enemy, should fail. Doveton Sturdee had been Lord Charles Beresford’s Chief-of-Staff in the Mediterranean and in the Channel, and had naturally shared his chief’s anti-Fisher attitude. So Fisher still wanted Sturdee broken, and to have Hugh Everard go along on the same operation made it even better ‒ two birds with one stone!

  But Sturdee had had luck ‒ which at one stage he’d surely needed ‒ and he’d destroyed Von Spee’s squadron. So Fisher had tried to prove he should have done it better, or more quickly, than he had. Hours, days, weeks had been wasted on an exercise of malice.

  Of course, Hugh thought, for years I’ve loathed Fisher! Who wouldn’t ‒ unless he was some kind of saint ‒ who’d been a victim of that brand of hate?

  Fisher had broken him, in 1907, because he’d suspected him of having a foot in the Beresford camp. The Navy had been split into factions by the mutual loathing between Fisher and Beresford who’d virtually provoked mutiny in other senior officers against the thrusting, forceful First Sea Lord who’d come up from nothing and rode rough-shod over anyone who opposed him. Fisher was the son of a planter in Ceylon and he looked as if he had more than a dash of Singhalese blood; ‘the gentleman from Ceylon’ had been Admiral Beresford’s way of referring to his First Sea Lord. It hadn’t been unnatural for a man of Beresford’s stamp to have loathed Fisher’s methods and manners; he’d done his best to thwart him, destroy him. So when the Beresfords appeared as guests at the wedding of Commander Hugh Everard, Royal Navy, and Lady Alice Cookson-Kerr, Fisher discovered that he’d been harbouring in his ‘fish pond’ an officer who consorted with his enemies and had therefore to be eliminated.

  The Beresfords had been invited, of course, by the parents of the bride. Hugh, hearing at the last moment of their inclusion in the guest-list, had seen the danger; but it would have been impossible to have done anything about it. Even then he hadn’t ‒ or so it seemed now, looking back on it ‒ appreciated the depth of Fisher’s paranoia. But he should have known what to expect; Fisher had boasted openly of his readiness to break rivals or opponents; he’d make widows of their wives, he’d promised, and dung-heaps of their houses. The Bible had always been a source of his verbal inspiration. And he’d decided within a week of Hugh’s wedding that Commander Everard had “run out of steam”.
Hugh found himself shunted off, and offered appointments which the most dead-beat officers would have regarded as insulting. Within a year he’d resigned his commission. Within a further year, Alice had made it plain that being his wife was no longer to her taste. She’d married a rising star, a future Nelson, and now she found herself with a husband who worked for a firm of shipbuilders. Her friends’ husbands, if they did anything except hunt foxes, were in politics or the Services.

  Hugh gave her the divorce she wanted. But the story went about ‒ and it still held water in the minds of some of his contemporaries ‒ that his fall from grace in the Service as well as the reason for his wife divorcing him had been ‘woman trouble’. Technically, a woman had provided the grounds for the divorce; and before his marriage he’d made no pretence of being a plaster saint. After the divorce ‒ well, he’d been his own man, and there’d been some advantages in that unlooked ‒ for ‘freedom’.

  Fisher had done him more harm than it should have been possible for one man to do another. For nearly ten years, one had been constantly aware of it.

  He’d kept his feelings to himself, though, knowing that protests and recriminations couldn’t improve his situation in any way, certainly wouldn’t add to his chances of recovery, and could only be counted on to make him look ridiculous and sound a bore. And now that Fisher had gone, and was himself ridiculous in his senility, he could actually feel sorry for the old man, feel the sadness of former greatness lapsed into impotence, and remember the great achievements. The reforms of sailors’ pay and conditions of service were probably the most important; and this ‒ Hugh looked astern at the line of dreadnoughts extending southwards into the morning mists ‒ this was Jacky’s creation. One could recall too that Fisher, whose own nomination to naval service when he’d joined in 1854 had been signed by the last of Nelson’s admirals, had been personally responsible for the grooming and appointment of Sir John Jellicoe as C-in-C of the Grand Fleet.