What are we something … Paul was climbing the ladder and getting out of the ammo hatch. “B” gun was a twisted wreck and the gun platform itself was slimy, slippery. At first glance it looked like oil but it was blood. He saw bodies and parts of bodies wrapped in the shreds of clothes, and everything burnt black. And some more or less intact. Baldy was one of them: but he wouldn’t be putting stickers in any more library books. Guns were firing: a lot of them at a distance, and one much closer. One of the after guns here on Hoste, he thought. Over the flare, the leading edge of the gundeck, he saw that “A” gun had become scrap. One body had been smashed against its breech, which itself had been knocked sideways; it dripped, festooned with what had been the fabric of a man. He saw a leg sticking out of a seaboot, and part of a torso like something on a butcher’s slab wrapped in blood-soaked cloth, and one body intact but flattened as if something huge had stamped on it. Turning away, glancing upwards—for relief, perhaps, the only safe direction you could look—he saw Hoste’s bridge blackened and smoking, a flicker of flames appearing here and there as the wind fanned them up. Then disappearing, flickering up again …
“Yank?”
He whipped round. The voice had come from down there below him, on “A” gundeck. But they were all—
“Yank …”
He jumped from the edge of the flare to the distorted top of “A” gunshield and from there in another two-footed hop to land jarringly on the foc’sl deck. Then he came round to the rear end of the gun. It was worse at close quarters, and that voice he’d thought he’d heard could only have been a grisly joke perpetrated by whoever arranged this kind of thing … Then—inside the shield, port side—something moved and caught his eye.
A hand. He saw the arm attached to it and a body attached to that, and blood all over everything. Crumpled, flung into that corner; and a dead body which had evidently been smashed down across the layer’s handwheel was right above this live one, the corpse’s arms dangling down to it and blood flowing in a thick, black-looking, and quite slow-moving stream. The hand which had moved and caught his attention was the living man’s, attempting to push those dead hands away from his face where they swung to and fro with the ship’s motion. Paul knew he had to get in there, get the live one out. The part one had to play. It wasn’t the kind you’d choose. He’d stepped over an intervening horror and he was dragging the broken and crushed remnants of a human being off the handwheel. Moving it was less difficult than he’d expected it to be. But to be able to reach the man who was alive and pull him out of the corner he’d been jammed into, he’d have to get this one right outside the gunshield, out past two others. The explosion must have been behind the gun, at the base of “B” gundeck’s superstructure; that and the jutting flare above, the angled projection of the gundeck’s front edge, would have contained it so that the whole blast would have been into “A” gunshield. Paul let his burden down on the deck and went back inside.
It was Blackie Proudfoot. He rasped, as Paul knelt to get hold of him, “Can’t move me fuckin’ legs. Can’t feel ‘em.”
“Okay. I’ll get you to the Doc.”
“Good lad, good—”
“Try to hang on round my neck?”
Prising him up out of it. Blackie was coated in blood—that other man’s. Probably shouldn’t be moving him: but the doctor couldn’t have got to him in that corner, he had to be brought out. Blood—clothes saturated—except where he’d been lying, his back on the steel deck. And even there—as he began to edge out, dragging the heavily-built gunlayer with his arms locked round him and Blackie’s hands clasped together behind his own neck—Paul felt a damp hollow in the small of the man’s back. The greatcoat was torn and sticky round the edges of the tear. That was Blackie’s own blood.
Christ, but I’m lucky to be alive!
The thought hit him so suddenly and strongly that it just about made him stagger. The realisation that he shouldn’t be alive … He got Proudfoot up in a fireman’s lift, without having had to look at the wound in his back. The layer had groaned once, and muttered something; either he was incredibly tough or there was some failure of the nervous system and he wasn’t feeling anything. Shuffling aft with the heavy body across his shoulders Paul thought not only had the list increased, but Hoste’s forepart was higher in the water. Meaning she was down by the stern? Well, obviously there must be some flooding somewhere, or she wouldn’t have the list.
Screen door just ahead. Where the hell were the doctor’s first-aid parties, he wondered. Weren’t they supposed to—
“Who’s that?” Someone stopping in front of him, peering into his face. Lieutenant Mathieson, the first lieutenant. Tall, fair-haired … “Everard?”
“Yes, sir. I—” His voice was like a croak—”this is ‘A’ gunlayer, Able Seaman Proudfoot. I’m taking him down to sickbay for—”
“The doctor’s in the waist, Everard, by the searchlight platform. We’re mustering all wounded there. She won’t float long now, I’m afraid.”
Not float?
“Are you all right, Everard?”
“Yes, I’m—”
“We thought everyone on ‘A’ and ‘B’ was killed.” Mathieson jerked his head. “Get him along there quickly now. They’ll find a job for you.”
He went in through the screen door. Paul moved on—to the head of the foc’sl-break ladder, and slowly, awkwardly down it to the iron deck. Then continuing aft … “Hang on, Blackie. The doc’ll fix you up.” Maybe. The for’ard funnel was all chewed up. No fires seemed to be burning now: just smoking, smouldering wreckage. Passing the engineers’ store. The point-fives were a tangle of junk on a burnt-out pedestal. Past the second funnel, which had only one shell-hole in it that he could see, to the tubes. They were turned out: but not to fire, because there were no torpedoes in them. To make space on the deck between the two quintuple mountings, he realised. Wounded men lay or sat around. There was a Carley float longside to port; Petty Officer Rowbottom and a few seamen with him were lowering a stretcher-case down into it.
“Sir—doctor—”
Graham-Jones was fixing a splint to a broken leg. Glancing up, he snapped sharply, “Put him down, man, put him down!”
A couple of other wounded sailors pulled aside to make room. And Mr Stuart, the gunner (T), came to help. Stocky, red-faced, ginger-headed. Blackie Proudfoot slid into a bloodstained heap which had then to be straightened out. The doctor asked, “What’s his trouble?”
“Hit in the back, I think, sir. He said he couldn’t feel his legs.”
“X” gun was still in action, in local control. Sub-Lieutenant Peters was up there, standing out on the side of the gundeck and giving visual spotting directions, watching the fall of shot through binoculars. Paul heard him yell, “Right eight—shoot!“ The gun flamed, flung back, and the black-faced men around it went into a spasm of the dance and then froze to the cry of “Ready!” Paul wished he’d been kinder to Baldy, swapped places with him after half an hour or so of the action, switched to handling the projectiles and given Baldy a break with the much lighter charges—nine pounds a time instead of 45. Sorry, Baldy … Graham-Jones had checked Blackie Proudfoot’s heart and breathing, after one look at the hole in his back. He told Paul flatly, “This man is dead.”
Peters howled, “Up four hundred, shoot!” Stuart had asked Paul something, and now he’d grasped his arm: “Eh?”
“Sorry, sir, I didn’t hear—”
The hair was red but the stubble on the jaw was grey. Eyes grey too and rather close together. Stuart must have been about Paul’s father’s age but he looked ten, fifteen years older. Up the hard way and a lifetime of naval service, one of the tiny minority who by the standards of the lower deck had made it, to warrant rank … “I asked can you swim, lad?”
“I’m a very strong swimmer, sir.”
“Aye, well, you’ll have a chance to prove it now. One bloody float’s all we’ve got. We could fill the bastard three times over wi’ just wounded men, but
she’ll sink long before that, d’you see. Most of ‘em’s going to have to swim, an’ it’s a hell of a long bloody way and colder’n that—so they’ll need help, right?”
“Right—” he corrected himself—”Aye aye, sir.”
Staring at the rocky, snow-covered coastline. Three or four hundred yards, he thought. Ice-water, and then snow. Then what—Germans?
Stuart told him, “Check they’re all wearing lifebelts and see they’re inflated—right?”
Rowan, the skipper, was dead. Everyone on the bridge and in the director tower had been killed. Hardy had run ashore, five or six miles east of here, and Hunter had sunk out in the deep water. The other ships of the Second Flotilla had withdrawn westward now, and Mr Stuart had said he didn’t think the Huns had followed up very far. The Huns had their own problems, he’d said; he reckoned they’d lost three destroyers sunk and at least another three badly damaged, as well as half a dozen store-ships sunk inside the harbour.
So it was a victory, after all. Paul, looking round at the waiting wounded and the discarded dead, had thought of the Duke of Wellington’s much-quoted words about battles lost and won. Here was vivid proof of it. Hoste sinking, while Stuart, Mathieson, and Peters chatted to the men, keeping spirits up. And they had been up: there’d been singing, jokes, leg-pulling.
The loaded Carley float was clear of the ship’s side, being paddled slowly shorewards.
“Right then. You lot with webbed feet—over the side, and we’ll get these lads down to you.” He remembered stripping off his greatcoat and sweaters and the tennis shoes. A scrambling-net had been rigged over the side, for men to climb down. Paul and about a dozen others who reckoned they were better-than-average swimmers were going to shepherd a whole crowd of poorer swimmers and lightly wounded men to the shore. He was going to take one man, a torpedoman with a broken arm, on his back.
Now this was his third trip. Third and a half, really. He’d got his first man ashore and then swum out again about a third of the way to help with stragglers from the group. Two had given up, and drowned; several others had died on the beach. The cold was unimaginable: in the first minutes of the first swim he’d thought he’d die of it, then he’d become used to it and stuck it out more easily, and now it was right inside him, killing … Don’t think about it. He’d told himself more than once that the sole survivor of two guns’ crews didn’t have much to complain about. On his second trip he’d been out to the ship and brought back that fellow Cringle, the man he’d had the barney with. Cringle had a head wound and some cracked ribs, and he hadn’t seemed to know who or where he was, what was happening. Third trip now. Hoste was slanted steeply in the water, stern right down. She’d be gone soon. Lieutenant Mathieson and Mr Stuart had still been on board, making a final search for anyone left alive, last time he’d been out to her. They’d be able to look after themselves, he guessed, but there’d been men in the water here and there, two or three who’d dropped out, or rescuers who’d gone out again and not come back.
This bloody cold. The other thing that was slowing him was the pain in his back—where whatever-it-was had hit him before he’d fallen into the hatch. He’d be bruised all over from that fall, he knew, but it was his back that worried him.
He saw her going. Bow rising slowly and then faster as her afterpart filled, up-ending her … He saw a body in the water—about three yards ahead. Frozen black water, liquid ice. Like swimming in a cocoon of ice, a tight skin of it, and it was inside you too, in bone-marrow and veins, all through. The body was hunched, suspended in its lifebelt. Face grey and shiny, like a seal’s. Graham-Jones’s voice echoed in his brain: This man’s dead. Looking away from him, seeking others who might not be dead, Paul saw that Hoste had gone.
He didn’t realise at first that she’d been his marker, giving him direction, and that now he’d lost her. He swam slowly to his left. Slow, painful breast-stroke, slower than he wanted it to be. Cold put a brake on you. And he was lower in the water than he had been: to see any distance he needed to get his head up higher. Tremendous effort—just for one second—down again with sheer agony in his back. Can’t do that again too soon. Relaxing thankfully now in the icy strait-jacket. Arms and legs moving so slowly that it was like swimming in frozen treacle. The mind swam slowly too. It asked him, Take a rest? Just a little one?
He wasn’t sure which way the coast was. He’d been circling to the left, but he didn’t know how much of a circle he’d completed. He tried again to get his head up, catch a glimpse of that snowbound hillside.
No. Not this time. Only falling snow.
Rest. Try again in a minute. He’d strained his back and he had to rest it and gather some strength by relaxing just for a little while: a short rest in this black enclosing ice. Come to terms with it, don’t fight it. Facedown, arms outspread—like gliding. Only for a minute.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dawn had come, poking over the low hills, spreading greyish light across Sundsråsa, fingering the southern shore of Hoddoy and applying the beginnings of a shine to the flat, quiet surface of Totdalbotn. Nick had been on deck in plenty of time to watch it happening. Pacing his ship’s quarterdeck, hearing an occasional thump or clatter from the engine-room where work had been going on all night, and from time to time still having to push the girl out of his thoughts.
She did have an excuse for getting into them. The plan he was forming in his mind had to involve Valkyrien and Claus Torp, and so it had to involve her too.
This wasn’t a very extensive deck to pace. About sixty feet each way, from the stern where a sentry with a rifle stood beside the bare ensign-staff, via a slightly curving track to skirt around “Y” gun and the after superstructure on which “X” gun stood, to a turning-point at the port-side depthcharge thrower. He’d been up since 4:00 and it was getting on for 6:00 now. Subtracting from those two hours one short visit to the engine-room—from which he’d learnt precisely nothing—and a much longer spell in the chartroom, allowing for those intervals he must have been pounding this strip of deck for at least an hour. The officers whose cabins were directly under the area of perambulation, if they weren’t exceptionally sound sleepers, would be cursing him; their bad luck in having him on their side of the ship was the result of Valkyrien being secured alongside to starboard and having a quartermaster of sorts lounging on her stern, hawking and spitting and crunching what sounded like lumps of coal. When Nick had appeared once on that side the man had gone to great efforts to engage him in conversation, despite the fact that he spoke no English and Nick spoke no Norwegian.
Enough distraction without that. The girl kept slipping into his mind, getting between him and the things he had to think about. A replay, over and over again, of the impact she’d had on him, and the reflection of it that he’d seen at once in her eyes. Blue eyes, rather wide apart—just like her father’s, he’d realised afterwards. But he’d been somehow caught offbalance, taken by surprise, and he’d seen that same reaction, mirrored.
It was partly why he’d turned out this early. There’d come a time, and probably quite soon, when he’d need more sleep than he could get, and then he’d look back with regret on this waste of opportunity. But the girl wasn’t the only reason he’d come up on deck. His mind was jumpy, he’d felt an urge to be up and doing. Prowling around, churning the part-formed plan in his brain. The crux of it being that, Germans or no Germans, there was fuel in Namsos.
She’d probably felt nothing at all, he told himself. He’d imagined it. But even if she had, even if she’d been stirred by the most outrageous emotional or sexual upheaval at the mere sight of him—which he didn’t flatter himself was likely—this would be neither the place nor time to respond to it. Perhaps one was suffering from the malady to which Fiona Gascoyne sometimes referred as “sex starvation”: which incidentally was something he felt sure she’d never had much trouble with. But watch out, he thought: or you’ll make an idiot of yourself …
He had enough on his plate already. His own share of
responsibility for Gauntlet’s end, for instance, still nagged him. This present situation was what one had to concentrate on, but—Hustie’s action had been crazy. If he’d been alone—all torpedoes gone, no hope of his ship surviving, ramming the only way left to him of inflicting damage on the enemy: then his action would have been justified, even heroic. But he had not been alone.
So Nick as senior officer should have held him back, taken him under his orders, and coordinated the attack?
However much he thought about it, the conclusion he came to was that in similar circumstances again he’d act as he’d done two days ago. Basically because if he’d held Gauntlet back and as a result they’d lost contact with a still unidentified enemy, he’d undoubtedly have been called to answer for it … So then they’d ask why he hadn’t stopped Hustie making his last attack, signalled him to wait behind the smoke: and the answer was that no order should have been necessary. It had been natural to assume certain intentions on Hustie’s part: and inessential signals in action were only a distraction, to be avoided if they could be.
But men had been hauled over the coals before this, for doing the right thing. One could think of a dozen cases …
Claus Torp’s quartermaster had begun to sing some frightful Scandinavian dirge. Nick tried not to hear it. There were quite a few things to keep one’s mind off: including the question of what might or might not have been happening up at Narvik, if Warburton-Lee had carried out the attack. There’d been an Admiralty signal in the early hours telling him that the decision was his own, and that he’d be backed whichever way he decided. Nick thought Warburton-Lee would have gone ahead, as long as the odds were reasonable. He didn’t know, and there must have been a lot of signals that Intent’s operators had missed; but what might reasonable odds be, to himself, say, if he were in that position? Two to one against? It obviously hadn’t looked like even odds, or the Admiralty wouldn’t have sent that up-to-you signal.
Storm Force to Narvik: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 1 Page 16