Killigrew’s Run

by Jonathan Lunn

  Keppel glanced at the petty officer and nodded. ‘China, wasn’t it? But you were only an AB back then,’ he added, indicating the badge of distinction on the sleeve of Molineaux’s blue jacket.

  Turning back from the embrasure to face Keppel, Molineaux touched a finger to his bonnet in a casual salute. ‘Virtue rewarded, sir,’ he replied with a broad grin.

  Keppel returned his grin. ‘I dare say you have many fine qualities, Molineaux – but somehow I doubt virtue is one of them!’

  ‘Load!’ ordered Gatiss.

  The powder-man passed a fresh, flannel-wrapped cartridge to Joyner, who put it seam-sideways and bottom-first into the muzzle to prevent the seam of the cartridge getting under the vent, which would cause a misfire. He thrust it down the bore to the full extent of his arm. The assistant loader passed shell and wad to Joyner, who put them into the muzzle. He was about to uncover the fuse when the rising shriek of an incoming shell warned the men to throw themselves flat on the earth. Endicott ducked down by the side of the breech, and the enemy shell exploded immediately outside the fort, showering them all with clods of earth.

  Only Keppel and Killigrew had not ducked. ‘So, you’re Nose-Biter’s second in command, eh?’ Keppel remarked to Killigrew, flicking a clod of earth from one of his epaulettes. ‘How is the old rogue?’

  ‘Full of beans, as always.’ Killigrew removed his cap to brush dust from it with a kid-gloved hand. ‘Frustrated with the tedium of blockade duties, but then aren’t we all?’

  ‘I know how he feels. Why the Chief doesn’t attack Kronstadt I don’t know. He’s turning into an old woman in his dotage.’

  Joyner kept his hand over the head of the fuse until Powell had taken the rammer from the assistant sponger and thrust it into the muzzle. Assisted by Joyner, he forced cartridge, wad and shot home to the bottom of the bore. Endicott thrust the priming wire into the vent to prick cartridge. He nodded to Powell, who withdrew the rammer.

  ‘With all due respect, sir, attacking Kronstadt isn’t going to be like attacking this place,’ Killigrew told Keppel. ‘The Russians haven’t even finished the fortifications here. And we’ll need gunboats and mortar vessels to attack Kronstadt, if we’re not to run aground in the shoals. The Chief’s asked the Admiralty to commission some, but they keep fobbing him off.’

  ‘Your loyalty to the Chief does you more credit than your choice of patron.’ Keppel shook his head sorrowfully. ‘He’s lost his nerve. You know it, and I know it. We should have attacked the Russian fleet when we had the chance, while it was trapped outside Sveaborg by the ice.’

  ‘Run out!’ ordered Gatiss.

  The gun crew manned the tackles and ran the muzzle out through the embrasure.

  ‘That report was never confirmed, sir,’ Killigrew reminded Keppel.

  ‘But he should have ordered the fleet up to see for himself,’ the captain pointed out.

  Killigrew could not argue with that.

  ‘Prime!’ ordered Gatiss. Endicott inserted a quill tube in the vent.

  ‘Nevertheless, an attack on Kronstadt without gunboats and mortar vessels would have been foolhardy,’ said Killigrew.

  ‘We don’t need gunboats and mortar vessels to attack Kronstadt,’ Keppel opined. ‘We should have built rafts to carry our guns over the shoals to get in range of the Russian batteries.’

  Because of his linguistic skills – Killigrew spoke fluent Swedish and had a smattering of Russian besides – he had spent enough time on board the flagship to be aware of the various plans submitted to Napier when the fleet had reconnoitred Kronstadt six weeks earlier; and he knew the arguments against them. ‘Deuced difficult things to control, rafts. We might simply have provided targets for the Russian gunners. Increase range to twelve hundred and fifty yards,’ he added to Gatiss. ‘Same target as before.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. Point!’

  The handspike-men picked up their handspikes while the rest of the crew attended to the side-tackle tails.

  ‘Russian gunners couldn’t hit a barn door at point-blank range with a blunderbuss,’ snorted Keppel. ‘Anyhow, you don’t win wars by being cautious. I’d’ve thought you of all people would appreciate that.’

  ‘Me, sir? Why me?’

  ‘Right a bit,’ said Endicott, gazing along the barrel. ‘Bit more… no, that’s too much… well!’ he concluded, when the gun was lined up to his satisfaction. He placed the tube lanyard over the neck-ring and retreated as far from the gun as the length of the lanyard would permit, while the rest of the gun crew replaced the side tackles and resumed their former positions. Endicott stood with his feet spread, his weight distributed evenly.

  ‘I remember a time when you used to be a real fire-eater, just like your father.’

  Killigrew grinned ruefully. ‘Well, perhaps I’m an older and wiser man now.’

  ‘Elevate!’

  ‘Heaven forbid! I can understand Old Charlie turning into an old woman at his age, but a young feller like you has no excuse. Or did you lose your nerve in the Arctic?’

  Keppel said it genially enough – from anyone else, it would have sounded like an accusation of cowardice – but it gave Killigrew pause for thought. ‘I don’t think so, sir,’ he said dubiously.

  The handspike-men placed their handspikes on the steps of the gun carriage, under the breeching, and raised the gun off the quoin. Hughes withdrew the quoin. The handspike-men lowered the gun slowly and steadily until Endicott said: ‘Well!’

  Keppel clapped Killigrew on the shoulder. ‘Don’t be like that, dear boy! I was only joking. Surely you can’t tell me you prefer blockade duties to a chance to cross swords with the foe?’

  Hughes forced in the quoin. ‘Down!’

  Killigrew smiled wanly. ‘I wouldn’t argue with that, sir. By the way, I heard you had a little excitement the other day.’

  ‘Hmph? Oh, nothing much: just a run-in with a Russian two-decker off Hangö Head. The Ivan Strashnyi. She was in New York, of all places, the last I heard; must’ve been trying to get back to rejoin the fleet at Kronstadt. Managed to hull her in a few places, but she ran into a fog bank and gave us the slip. By the time the fog had lifted, she’d vanished completely.’

  ‘Sunk?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Couldn’t find a trace of flotsam.’

  ‘Ready!’ bawled Gatiss.

  Killigrew frowned. ‘She couldn’t have made it into Helsingfors or St Petersburg; our blockades would have caught her.’

  Hughes cocked the firing lock and withdrew. The right rearman attended the train tackle.

  ‘Galling, isn’t it?’ Keppel remarked. ‘Here we all are, itching for a fight, and the only Russian ship not protected by one of their fortresses has done a disappearing act!’

  ‘Fire!’

  Killigrew glanced at his watch before raising the telescope once more. He saw the shell explode against the side of the north fort.

  ‘Capital shooting, Mr Gatiss: bang on target. But too slow, my buckoes, much too slow. Imagine this was a gunnery exercise instead of the real thing: what would Captain Crichton say? Run in! Look lively, there! Come on, my buckoes, put your backs into it! Those Russkis are laughing at how slow your rate of fire is!’

  The bombardment continued through the morning. At eleven o’clock the Amphion and Bulldog joined the Edinburgh and Ajax in shelling the main fort to provide cover for the boat crews of the Blenheim, who landed the ten-inch pivot gun from the blockship’s bow at the earthwork fort at Grinkarudden. Captain Pelham accompanied the gun in person, and soon had it hurling shells past Rear Admiral Pénaud’s battery to pound the main fort.

  The west fort – captured by the Chasseurs de Vincennes in the early hours of the preceding day, but abandoned when the Russians themselves began to shell it to drive them out – exploded a short while afterwards. When the smoke cleared, only a charred and blackened ruin was left standing on the knoll.

  The paddle frigates Valorous and Hecla joined the fray shortly after that to support Pelham’s gun,
and fifteen minutes later – on the dot of noon to be precise – the ships anchored in the bay below fired broadsides in salute as a mark of respect to their French allies to commemorate the Emperor Louis Napoleon’s birthday; the ships engaged with the main fort fired with shotted guns. As the afternoon wore on, five more ships – three of them French – joined in the bombardment, and before long the engagement had become general.

  While the ships engaged the main fort, General Jones’s battery hammered away at the north fort, until one side was breached and the Russians within had no choice but to hang out a flag of truce. Without waiting for terms to be agreed, the marines and bluejackets coolly marched forward to take them prisoner.

  The prisoners – over a hundred of them – spent the night under guard in the British camp, and the next morning they were fed breakfast before being escorted to the north landing place with a strong escort of marines. Jones’s battery, meanwhile, had now turned its guns on the main fort and the bombardment was resumed with increased intensity. With two of the forts put out of action, and a third isolated to the east on Prästö Island, it was all over bar the shouting. Captain Pelham’s gun was doing the most damage and the Russians knew it: they concentrated their fire on his position, whereupon Napier promptly responded by ordering the ships in the bay to increase their fire to one round shot and one shell every five minutes. Combined with the effects of the mortars in the French breaching battery, this forced the Russians in the main fort to surrender at noon, and the men in the eastern fort capitulated shortly after that.

  The Allied losses at the end of the nine-day siege were astonishingly light: two bluejackets killed on the Penelope when she had run aground beneath the guns of the main fort, a colonel of the Royal Engineers and a marine in Jones’s camp, and a dozen or so wounded, including one of General Jones’s aides-de-camp, who had accidentally shot himself in the thigh while chasing a Russian spy who had infiltrated the camp disguised as a woman. The French losses were rather higher – a couple of dozen – which was not surprising seeing that they had done most of the hand-to-hand fighting; but not nearly so high as the Russian losses, not to mention the two thousand or so Russian soldiers who had been captured, along with the fortress of Bomarsund itself.

  As the prisoners were marched out, Killigrew went down to the fort to offer his services as an interpreter. He found that most of the Russians seemed to be drunk, either with defeat or vodka, perhaps a little of both, to judge from the bottles scattered about the place. Laughing, dancing and singing, they tore off their uniforms and spat and stamped on them, as if capture by the Allies was the best thing that could have happened to them. Suddenly, Killigrew was amazed: not that the fortress had fallen so quickly, but that it had taken so long. Apparently, the Russian soldiers feared their own officers and NCOs more than they did the enemy. He spent most of that night interrogating Russian rankers – the officers spoke French, and could be interrogated by others – but learned little from them that the Allies did not already know.

  Early the next morning, he found himself staring down at the corpses of some Russian soldiers awaiting burial. They had been arrayed on the ground in neat rows and covered with linen shrouds. Most of the men he had spoken to the previous evening had been ridiculously young or ridiculously old. He did not doubt that the faces beneath those shrouds were much the same; unless they had been torn open by bullets, or shredded by the percussive effects of an exploding shell. He felt a pang of guilt – not the guilt of a man who survives a battle and wonders why when so many of his comrades had fallen about him, which he had felt after the storming of Chinkiang-fu – but the guilt of a man who has taken life without knowing why. He knew all about the causes of the war: Christ knew, they had been debated long enough in the newspapers in the lead up to the war. So many reasons for fighting the Russians, so few of them good ones. He could not see how butchering old men and boys on an island in the middle of the Baltic prolonged the life of the Ottoman Empire; as if it needed prolonging, which he very much doubted. He had killed enough times in the course of his naval career, without so much as a qualm, but usually the men were pirates or slaves: scum without whom the world was a better place, not unwilling conscripts like these poor devils.

  ‘Reckon we did them a favour,’ said a familiar voice. Killigrew looked up to see ‘Plummy’ Vowles, the cutter’s coxswain, standing a short distance off, leaning on his musket.

  ‘How so?’ the commander asked sharply.

  ‘It ain’t much of a life, being a Russian serf, from what I hear, sir. Maybe they’re better off dead.’

  ‘And would you have been grateful to a man who took that decision on your behalf when you were living on the back streets of Portsmouth?’

  The petty officer thought about it, and grimaced. ‘I reckon not.’ His voice seemed to come from a long, long way away.

  Killigrew tried to reply, but then a wave of nausea swamped him and his legs turned to water. The fort spun around him, and the last thing he remembered was the ground rising up to meet him as his legs crumpled.

  Chapter 4

  Passage to Ekenäs

  Wednesday 16–Thursday 17 August

  Killigrew could not have been unconscious for more than a couple of minutes, but by the time he awoke the ever-efficient Vowles had him on board a boat carrying him back to the Ramillies.

  ‘I’m quite all right now,’ insisted Killigrew. ‘You can take me back ashore.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, you didn’t look all right when you passed out just now,’ said Vowles. ‘Besides, the cap’n wants to see you. And it couldn’t hurt to let the sawbones look you over.’

  As soon as he was on board the Ramillies, Killigrew made an oral report of his activities ashore – one that omitted any mention of his fainting – that Crichton accepted, pending a fuller written report. After dispatching the ship’s steward to fetch him a mug of coffee, Killigrew sat down in his cabin and began to work on his report. The first paragraph was always the toughest – once he got steam up, he could dash off reports in his sleep, almost – and he was still wrestling with it when he heard the marine sentry posted outside the door to Crichton’s quarters pass the word for Mr Killigrew.

  He presented himself in the captain’s day-room for the second time in half an hour. This time Dyson sat at the captain’s elbow.

  ‘I understand you fainted ashore shortly before you came back on board, Mr Killigrew,’ Crichton said sternly.

  Killigrew flushed. Thank you, Vowles. ‘I wouldn’t say “fainted”, sir. More of a dizzy spell. It soon passed.’

  ‘You lost consciousness for the best part of two minutes,’ grated Crichton. ‘What do you call that, if not fainting?’

  ‘I’m perfectly fine, sir, I assure you.’

  ‘Are you?’ said Crichton. ‘I wonder. Mr Dyson?’

  ‘How do you feel now, Killigrew?’ asked the surgeon.

  ‘Never felt better.’

  ‘No nausea, vomiting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How are your bowels?’

  ‘Answer the question,’ Crichton put in, when Killigrew hesitated and looked tempted to protest.

  ‘As well as can be expected, sir.’

  ‘Regular motions?’ asked Dyson. ‘Good, firm stools?’

  ‘Not that it’s any of your business, but—’

  ‘The health of the people on this ship is precisely Mr Dyson’s business, Mr Killigrew,’ Crichton said coldly. ‘It had occurred to us that you might have contracted cholera.’

  ‘Mr Dyson is more than welcome to examine a sample the next time I have cause to use my chamber pot, sir.’

  ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ the surgeon said hurriedly, and turned to Crichton. ‘I think we can rule out cholera, sir. How would you describe your health overall?’ he asked Killigrew.

  ‘As I said before, I never felt better.’

  ‘Except that’s not entirely true,’ said Crichton. ‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed how out of breath yo
u are when you reach the top of the accommodation ladder; and Dyson tells me that you fell asleep at the dinner table last Thursday.’

  Killigrew smiled. ‘It was a long day. You’ll recall we were rather busy helping to land the guns that day.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten. But while falling asleep at the dinner table is something to be expected in a man of my age, you’ll own it is unusual in a man not yet thirty.’

  ‘What’s this all about, sir?’

  ‘Everyone knows you had a hard time in the Arctic,’ said Dyson. ‘Frozen, half-starved, badly mauled by a polar bear, suffering from scurvy…’

  ‘It’s a year since I returned from the Arctic, sir,’ protested Killigrew. ‘I’m fully recovered from my ordeal, I can assure you.’

  ‘To be brutally frank, I have to disagree,’ said Dyson. ‘You don’t recover from an ordeal like that overnight; or even in months. It can take years. Some people never recover. It’s become increasingly apparent that your ordeal took a greater toll on your health than you’re prepared to admit. My diagnosis? Physical and mental exhaustion. The efforts of the past few days have simply proved too much for you.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, sir—’

  ‘Be quiet, Killigrew! What’s your recommendation, Mr Dyson?’

  ‘He needs rest, and lots of it. He should never have returned to full active duty so soon. If I were you, I’d have him shipped home on the next boat. The seat of war is no place for a man in his condition. Sorry, Killigrew, but it’s for your own good.’

  ‘All right, thank you, Mr Dyson,’ said Crichton. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The surgeon rose from his chair and left the day-room.

  ‘Sit down, Killigrew,’ said Crichton.

  ‘I’m quite comfortable as I am, sir.’

  ‘It wasn’t an invitation.’

  The commander pulled out a chair and sat down.

  ‘What am I to do with you, Killigrew? I don’t want you to think that I’m ungrateful. If it hadn’t been for your unceasing labours and your knack of organisation, we’d never had got the Ramillies ready in time to put to sea with the rest of the fleet, and no one knows better than I how much work you’ve been putting in over the past few days. It’s no wonder you’ve over-taxed yourself. But I need officers I can rely on. If we have to go into battle, I’ll have enough on my plate, without having to worry about whether or not my second in command is going to faint on me.’