by Alan Evans
The motors hummed and the MAS turned away from the mole and headed seaward, the other boats following. Smith towelled himself dry and dragged on his clothes and boots. Lombardo, cursing steadily in American, had dressed and gone back to his engine-room. Now he appeared with a thermos and two enamel mugs, poured into them, slopped in something from a flask he took from his pocket and handed them to Smith and Buckley.
Smith gulped at the steamy mug of coffee laced thickly with grappa and said, ‘Thanks.’
Lombardo grunted, asked, ‘See what you wanted?’
Smith said, ‘Not what I wanted. But I saw.’
Buckley was smacking his lips over his own big mug of coffee and grappa. Smith said. ‘Well done, both of you. Thank you.’ Lombardo only grunted, went back to his engines. That had to be said because they had earned it, but Smith’s thoughts about what he had seen were bitter.
He was not left to brood on them. A hail came from the machine-gunner in the forward cockpit, his arm outstretched, pointing out on the starboard beam. Smith stared in that direction and saw the silhouette of a ship under its trailing plume of funnel smoke — a near shapeless hump in the darkness bracketed by the white water of bow-wave and wash. He thought it was less than a mile away and did not look big enough for a destroyer, was more likely one of the old torpedo-boats the Austrians used on coastal patrols. She would be nearly as fast as the MAS boats when she worked up to full speed but that would take her some time. She was broadside on, her course nearly parallel to their own. A light flickered out from the ship. The challenge. She had seen them!
Smith swung on Zacco but the lieutenant had already given the order. The hum of the motors ceased, the petrol engines roared into life and boat surged forward. Smith glanced astern and saw Gallina’s boat following suit. But Pagani? The third boat lay still in the sea and was being rapidly left astern.
Smith shouted, ‘Pagani’s engines haven’t fired!’
Zacco glanced astern and as he did so a searchlight’s beam flashed out from the Austrian ship and settled on Pagani’s boat. Smith swore. The torpedoes of the MAS boats were not swung out for a torpedo attack and by the time they were Pagani’s boat would be shot to pieces.
He shouted, ‘Tell Gallina to tow Pagani!’ He waited as Zacco yelled the order at the forward cockpit. A seaman stood up with the lamp and as it began to flicker the signal, Smith ordered, ‘Hard astarboard! Open fire!’
The boat heeled, turning tightly, stern skidding. ‘Midships!’ Zacco had anticipated that and now the bow pointed at the torpedo-boat and the MAS raced in at her, accelerating with every second. A gun flashed aboard the Austrian ship and Smith saw the shell burst short of Pagani’s boat and Gallina’s. He had turned and was running down to Pagani, as ordered. The machine-guns hammered and tracer curved out in lazy arcs towards the torpedo-boat, arcs that wavered as the MAS bucked at near full speed now. The gun mounted on the port side of the cockpit was close by Smith and Zacco, deafening. Zacco was bellowing above the din and at his order the torpedoman and the seamen climbed out of the forward cockpit. They balanced spread-legged on the leaping deck, hauling on the tackles to swing the starboard torpedo out into its firing position. Smith looked beyond him. The boat was closing fast on the Austrian. Despite the darkness and the driving spray he could see that she was an old torpedo-boat, a little like one of the old thirty-knot destroyers with her turtleback bow. Old she might be, but she was three times the size of the MAS, nearly ten times her tonnage and she carried two 4.7cm guns. They were both in action and firing rapidly. A direct hit or two from those guns could put an end to an MAS boat with its fragile wooden hull.
Now the searchlight’s beam slid away from Pagani’s boat and jerked across the surface of the sea seeking Zacco’s boat, seeing her as a threat. The guns also shifted their aim. So Smith’s tactic had worked to that extent; he had bought Pagani and Gallina a brief breathing space. But what would it cost?
The searchlight’s beam fastened on the boat and lit all aboard her. He heard the rip of shells overhead, turned and saw them burst astern in the frothing wake. He faced forward as the starboard torpedo settled into its firing position with a solid clunk! It hung over the sea held only by its pincer-like clamps. He squinted against the light, one hand held up against it, and saw the torpedo-boat had turned away, the silhouette foreshortening, the two funnels blending into a single stack as she showed her stern. She was clear now, barely a quarter mile away and she had swerved away from a threatened torpedo attack. Stern on like that she showed no target to shoot at.
Smith ordered, ‘Starboard ten!’
Zacco turned the wheel, the boat’s head swung and she went racing out wide of the torpedo-boat but still gaining on her rapidly till they were abeam of her. And all the time the machine-guns hammered at the limit of their range, and the searchlight held them, the Austrian guns flashing and shells falling astern but creeping closer. Forward in the boat they were hauling on the tackles of the port-side torpedo. Smith shouted, ‘Fire at the searchlight!’
He heard Zacco’s bellow, passing on the order, heard also the yelled answers, guessed from their frustration that the machine-gunners were already trying to put out the light that harassed them. He ordered, ‘Hard aport!’
The boat’s head swung in again, stern skidding, to point once more at the torpedo-boat and go charging down at her. There was a crash! forward and the boat shook through her length. Something droned past Smith’s head. They had been hit, there was a ragged hole in the curved foredeck but somehow the boat held on. Again the torpedo-boat turned away to show her stern and at Smith’s order the MAS swerved away, went bucking across the churned water of the torpedo-boat’s wake then turned to race up on her port side, trying again for a torpedo attack.
The searchlight went out and the machine-gunners yelled and cheered — then resumed firing. The MAS went charging in once more and the torpedo-boat turned away. A shell fell close alongside the MAS and hurled seawater into the cockpit, flying into their faces as if hurled from a bucket. Buckley was at Smith’s shoulder as he wiped at his streaming face, shouting and pointing. ‘They’re under way, sir.’
Smith turned and saw the blaze of white water, the two little low shapes of Gallina’s boat with Pagani’s hauled up close astern in tow. They were moving at speed. He faced forward, shouted, ‘Hard aport!’The boat turned tightly. ‘Midships!’
They headed away from the torpedo-boat on a course to meet Gallina and Pagani. He turned to look astern at the torpedo-boat but she was almost out of range of the machine-guns and had not turned to follow, her own torpedoes virtually useless against the darting MAS boats. ‘Cease fire!’
He did not intend to chase. Her captain was obviously not going to give him the chance of a torpedo shot and in a gunfight the MAS was hopelessly out-matched. As it was they had been lucky. They had been hit once but without serious damage. If that near miss by the after cockpit had been six feet to the right then the cockpit and all in it would have gone. Besides, there was the lame duck to think of, Pagani’s boat.
The deep snarl of the engines was comparative silence after the ear-ripping rattling of the machine-guns. His ears still rang from the din but he could hear the cheering of the boat’s crew. Zacco was grinning widely, delighted. They came up on Gallina’s boat, towing Pagani, and slipped into station ahead of them. Their crews cheered too. Smith realised he had been sweating from excitement and felt it chilling on his body now. He was cold and drained of emotion, saw the turn of Zacco’s head and managed to return the smile, but his face felt stiff. Reaction had him now, as always when the danger past, and as always he found no cause for self congratulation. They had shot-up the torpedo-boat and its crew would not forget it for a long time. But he had survived by bluff and luck; all three of the boats could have been blown to pieces by the Austrian guns.
He asked, ‘Any casualties?’
The signal lamps flickered between the boats and the answer came to him from Zacco. ‘No casualties.’
He was not. The boom defences at Trieste would not be broken by hydraulic shears. He knew no way to penetrate them and was certain it was no coincidence that they had been thus strengthened since the arrival of Voss. Their sudden installation carried the stamp of his energy, drive and foresight. Smith’s joke about gatecrashers had recoiled upon him and he told himself bitterly that he still had to learn to hold his tongue.
Forward they had hauled on the tackles and swung the torpedoes inboard again to rest in their clamps on the deck. He shifted away from Zacco, managed to stand apart from all of them in that small well, silent and brooding. He merely grunted acknowledgment when it was reported that Pagani’s motorista had got the boat’s engines firing and she had dropped the tow, was proceeding under her own power. Only when they came to Venice and entered the lagoon, the three boats slipping slowly across the glassy surface, engines muttering, did Zacco ask, ‘The booms. They are bad, yes?’
Smith replied flatly, ‘They are bloody awful. We can’t break through or slip under. The only thing that would pass those booms is a flying-fish.’
Smith and Buckley climbed aboard Hercules and only then he remembered there was no bunk aboard for Menzies. They would have to arrange something.
But Menzies called up from where he stood in the cockpit of Gallina’s boat, ‘If you please, sir, Mr Gallina can fix me up with a berth for the night.’ Menzies was obviously getting on well with the men of the MAS. Now he went on excitedly, ‘That was some scrap, sir!’
Some scrap! The boy still talked as if it was a game when he might well have died this night. Smith answered drily, ‘I’m glad you weren’t bored, Mr Menzies. Good night to you all.’
The night was turning grey, it would be light soon. The three boats went away across the lagoon with a low rumble of engines, headed for the island of the Giudecca and their crews’ quarters. Smith looked around at Venice, the city seeming in that first light as soft-edged and insubstantial as the mist that furred the water. There was an atmosphere of mystery about it now, as there was about that girl. He was curious to know more about her but doubted that he would ever learn much.
He went down to his cabin, stripped off his clothes and fell on the bunk, dragged the blankets around him. The face of the girl floated before his eyes, then the heaving timber baulks and massive chains of the boom. He jerked briefly awake as the Austrian torpedo-boat roared down on him, guns blazing. He groaned and turned over.
‘The only thing that would pass those booms is a flying-fish.’
Seek out and destroy.
His objective was as far away as ever.
6. ‘What the hell is that?’
In the house on the Riva Ca’di Dio the old housekeeper woke Helen Blair before it was light. She breakfasted on coffee and rolls then bathed quickly and dressed in the clothes laid out for her. The dress was pale blue silk, as were the stockings that clothed the slender legs showing under the hem of the skirt. She made up her face carefully, pinned up her dark hair and set atop of it a wide-brimmed hat that tied with ribbons in a bow under her chin. Her map went in a pocket of her cloak and she checked that the small notebook with its pencil was in her bag, snapped it shut. She was ready.
She stood at the window for a minute looking out over the lagoon as the sky paled in the east. It was clear. For once it would be a fine day. Each morning she treasured this moment of quiet because going to the front was dangerous, became more dangerous with every passing day of the war. From the window she could not see San Elena where the three MAS boats lay. The face of the young English naval officer was clear in her mind. He, too, was alone. She did not want to go but knew that she must, turned from the window and went down and out of the house.
From the quay she took one of the vaporetti, the little steamboats that plied up and down the Grand Canal. The vaporetto, crowded with people on their way to work, carried her up the winding course of the canal. She got off at the railway station and took a train to Mestre. The engine puffed along the causeway joining Venice to the mainland, the smoke from its chimney coiling back along the train and over the still waters of the lagoon and marshes.
Mestre was busy. She saw a hospital train in the station that was headed south and another loaded with troops, reinforcements, bound for the north. The soldiers were mainly bersaglieri, light infantrymen. They stood by the open doors of the train, their hats rakish with the plumes of green cock’s feathers. They were young, handsome men and their eyes followed her admiringly as she walked by. She smiled at them. There was a full battalion or more, close on a thousand men.
The house she sought in Mestre was close to the station, shabby but standing in its own little plot of land. There was a shed, a lean-to built on to the side of the house and its doors were open to show the car. Luigi waited there. He was short and fat, too old for military service. He was a mechanic and he owned the house that had been his mother’s but the car belonged to Helen Blair. He told her that it was all ready; he had checked it himself. He also showed her the two baskets on the back seat of the car, one packed with chocolate bars and the other with packets of cigarettes. She paid him from her purse and thanked him. He swung the handle of the car and as its engine started he said as he always did, ‘Take care. It is dangerous.’
She knew that, thanked him again then left him looking worriedly after her as she drove out of Mestre on the road to San Dona di Piave.
She crossed the Piave river at San Dona and drove on northwards. Twice she passed columns of soldiers and several times troops of field-guns drawn by teams of plodding horses, the drivers sitting slackly in their saddles. The road had dried under the sun and the cold wind from the mountains so dust rose around the marching men and lay finely on the polished coachwork of the car. Before noon she crossed the Livenza river, roaring in space. Far away to her left lifted the mountains, snow-capped. This was the road to Portogruaro.
The road was very busy now, crowded with supply wagons and more bodies of troops moving north-eastward towards the front. There were also empty wagons returning and a lot of civilian traffic, carts loaded high with sticks of furniture, the women sitting in front dressed in black and their heads covered with shawls, a man plodding along at the head of the donkey hauling each cart. There were peasants shoving wheelbarrows and a wizened woman had an old perambulator with a big blanket-wrapped bundle squeezed into it.
Just south of Portogruaro, Helen Blair was forced to stop at the tail of a convoy of supply trucks, the road ahead of them blocked. A regiment of bersaglieri had pulled off the road to let the convoy pass and now they lounged under the spread branches of the trees that lined the road. Further up the column the whips of the drivers of the horse-drawn wagons cracked and the engines of the trucks roared then subsided into a frustrated grumble. The light infantrymen waited patiently and stared up at the black remains of the trees. Despite the sun the day was cold with the wind from the mountains but their faces were sweat-streaked from the marching.
The convoy moved slowly on and Helen Blair engaged low gear and slowly followed. She smiled and waved at the bersaglieri as she passed and they sat up, startled at the sight of her, then smiled back. There was hunger in the eyes of many of them but only once did she detect lust that forced her gaze away. She thought there must be close on two thousand of them.
A minute or so later the convoy halted, to roll forward a few yards and halt again. The rumble of gunfire was loud now, a constant thunder that over-rode the muttering engines of the creeping column. She conformed to its stop-start progress for some minutes before it dawned on her that there was no civilian traffic on the road here, that the trucks and wagons coming down on the other side were still fully loaded like those she followed. She heard
the drivers of the two columns shouting across at each other as they passed. She opened the door and stood up, leaning out and holding on to the leather roof of the car. Now she could just see over the wagons ahead to a field a quarter-mile up the road where trucks ground around in a circle, churning up the soft earth. She frowned, puzzled, then realised the convoy was being directed into the field, turned around and sent back. She sat down and carefully marked her position on the map then edged the car forward again as the convoy moved.
She came to a house that stood back from the road, its courtyard crowded with troops and these were not fresh replacements like the bersaglieri she had seen. Dried mud coated their uniforms from head to boots. They were tired and their bloodshot eyes stared out of slack-jawed faces. Helen Blair eased the car off the road and into the courtyard, stopped the engine. She got down and took the baskets from the back of the car and began to move through the crowd.
‘Would you like some chocolate? A smoke, signore?’
She held up the baskets, smiled into their faces and spoke to them. At first they just stood and watched her pass, stared disbelievingly at this vision of a slender, fresh-faced girl in a pale blue silken dress as they crammed the chocolate into their mouths, or sucked deep on the cigarettes, answering her in monosyllables if at all. But after a time they moved to group around her, careful not to touch her with their mud and filth. They talked more freely, though still slowly, having to think about it. They were survivors of a battalion and there were only two hundred of them. They had lost many killed and wounded but some others — they looked away, embarrassed.
Helen Blair realised they were talking of deserters. She asked if the other units in the line were suffering as badly. They answered that many had fared worse; whole regiments had vanished, swallowed up by the enemy advance. As they crowded about her the sour stench of them closed her in, a smell compounded of stale sweat and foul bodies, dirt, smoke and cordite. Her stomach rebelled as it always did and as always she controlled it, did not allow her smile to flicker or her body to flinch away from them. It was the smell of war that revolted her, not these men. They were war’s victims.