The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  Kelly was still seething at what he considered his father’s obtuseness. How many more men were there, he wondered, who could not see that an entirely new era in naval warfare had arrived? He had been the guest of the German submarine service in Kiel and it had been very clear to him that this new weapon had come of age so that the size of a battleship was no longer important. Far from frightening away a good submarine captain, size was an actual invitation, and a vast battleship like Cressy would be regarded, not as a danger, but as a prize. It seemed to be a fact that not the simplest ship’s boy or saltiest admiral in the corridors of power could afford to overlook.

  Conscious of his own silence, Kelly looked up. Perched on the canopy of the launch was a pale-faced boy who, up to that point, he’d barely noticed. He was small and with his cap flat-a-back, a cadet from Dartmouth who’d been in the sick bay with measles and was joining the ship after his term mates. Kelly thought he looked wretched. It was bad enough joining a ship like Cressy at any time; it was infinitely worse when you did it alone.

  Realising that in his concentration he had probably presented a terrifying spectacle of age and experience, he tried to put things right by cheering the boy up.

  ‘What’s your name, youngster?’ he asked.

  The boy swallowed, his eyes round and scared. ‘Boyle, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘A bit, sir.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be if I were you. But I’d square off my cap and hoist up my tie two blocks, all the same. Your collar stud’s showing and I hear the captain of Cressy’s a stickler for smartness.’

  At last, round a bend in the river, as a fat paddle-wheeled tug clawed her convoy of coal tenders past, Cressy hove into sight. Of 12,000 tons displacement, she was over four hundred feet long with four tall funnels and a colossally wide beam reminiscent of the brass-and-white-paint ships of the previous century. She had been laid down in 1899 and looked every day of her age, out of date, slow and useless; and far worse after Clarendon than Kelly had expected.

  It was clear she’d been made ready for sea in a hurry, with traces of rust hidden by red lead. The black-grey paint of wartime had been daubed across her, but there had been no time to chip and scrape because, even as ammunition had been hoisted aboard, her crew had filed up the gangway. Since she was not expected to steam far out of sight of land she was considered safe.

  Captain Johnson was a strong-featured man with absorbed serious eyes. Like so many senior officers who had grown up in the starchy era of Victoria, he looked faintly old-fashioned with his winged collar and the narrower cap he affected, but he radiated confidence and, stripped of his uniform and badges of rank, Kelly realised, he would still have been picked out as a man of consequence.

  ‘I understand you wish to serve in submarines’ he said as Kelly stood before him in his day cabin.

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s correct.’

  ‘Think you’re wise?’

  ‘Yes, sir. They get more pay for a start.’

  The captain permitted himself a half smile. ‘You’ll have to get a first-class certificate in the torpedo examination.’

  ‘I have one, sir. From Clarendon.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Well, you’ll be placed at the bottom of the ladder, of course, but I hear they’re expanding the service, so you might be lucky. You’ll go to HMS Dolphin where you’ll be medically examined and after that you’ll spend three months learning the trade. Think you can manage it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, you might do well as a submariner. Since you’re not likely to be with us for long, however, I expect you to do just that little bit extra. Is that understood?’

  It was easy to promise a little extra, but with the crew still awkward and only a few key officers and ratings from the active list to handle them, it was harder to provide it. The Marine detachment were half Royal Marine Light Infantry – Red Marines – and half Royal Marine Artillery – Blue Marines – and the reservists contained men from every civilian trade, with many ex-members of the Fire Brigade, which they’d joined after their sea time because many of them had seen service in sail and had a head for heights. The leading signalman was a tall man with a drooping moustache – which, as a reservist, he was allowed to keep – who’d been a policeman in London and had a scarred thumb which he claimed had been bitten by Sylvia Pankhurst when he was trying to arrest her during one of the Suffragette riots.

  For the most part, they didn’t like Cressy. They were mostly from Chatham and therefore largely Londoners, townies – Cockneys to Devonport and Portsmouth crews – cheerful, quick-witted, fearless cock-sparrows, but limited by their gregariousness and their ability to be influenced by the bad characters that were always among them, and it occurred to Kelly that, ever since before Nelson, the inexplicable thing about the Navy was that its greatness had been built up by ill-used sailors in ill-found ships.

  They were all crowded and the boys from Dartmouth had their gunroom separated from the CPOs’ mess only by a screen of canvas and wooden battens, which caused a certain amount of dissatisfaction from the older men.

  ‘It’s not the language we complain of, sir,’ one of them told Kelly indignantly. ‘It’s the bloody shindy they kicks up all the time.’

  To cut down the risk of fire in action, they tried to strip off all the paint on the upper deck, especially where it was thick with the layers of years but, though the officers joined in, it was an impossible task and they had to let it go. With most of the officers older than himself, Kelly struck up a friendship with the navigator, a youngster like himself from the active list called Poade, a black-haired, enthusiastic, romantically- inclined young man with an occasional unexpected turn of cynicism.

  ‘We’re allocated to the southern force and we patrol the Broad Fourteens,’ he said. ‘In case you don’t know, that’s the term we use to designate the area of the Dutch Coast.’

  ‘I’ve done my navigation,’ Kelly said.

  Poade grinned. ‘It’s supposed to be safe because they say the North Sea’s nothing but an English pond.’

  ‘It seems to me to be just as much a German pond.’

  Poade smiled his enthusiastic smile. ‘Their Lordships of the Admiralty appear to have overlooked that fact,’ he agreed. ‘A point to you, Maguire. With a twenty-eight-foot draught and ageing engines, we struggle along at not much more than half our top speed, but it’s felt our bulk ought to deter the Germans from trying anything on around the mouth of the Thames, particularly with torpedo craft and minelayers; and we can bar the southern approaches to the North Sea and the eastern entrance to the Channel. We’ve maintained the patrol without incident since the war started.’ Poade smiled again. ‘It can’t go on, of course. We’re nothing but an invitation to the enemy to have a go at us – in fact, a few people have started calling us “the live bait squadron”, and I gather Winston at the Admiralty’s got himself into a fluff because he doesn’t like ships like us being risked.’

  The hot weather of the summer ended abruptly in the uneasy area of the north Channel which drew its temperature as often as not from the arctic icepack, and by late September the shallow waters with their extensive areas of shoal were cut across by white-capped waves, running all the way from the Norfolk coast past the Dogger Bank to Scandinavia and Holland.

  Because they could withstand weather that held the destroyer forces inshore, the Bacchantes seemed to spend all their time at sea in a dull routine of patrols. The crews were still lubberly after their long lay-off and, in the grey waters east of the Sunk Light the weary but heavyweight section of the Nore Command exercised its duties with an uneasy awareness that it was more than normally vulnerable.

  With the waves frothing over the shoals and the wind coming up-Channel in a series of squally showers, to Kelly life seemed nothing but a long procession of cheerless days surrounded by the whirr of fan
s and the creak of the ship’s twelve thousand tons of steel and machinery, with only short intervals alongside which always brought the dreary inevitability of coaling. Even visits ashore produced little in the way of fun because the Medway towns, despite the fact that they watched the old ships come and go with a personal pride and lumpy throats, were never very decorative or blessed with much in the way of entertainment beyond the sailors’ level of utilitarian pubs.

  To break the monotony, experiments were tried to increase the speed of coaling ship, paint was chipped again – with the same lack of success – and Kelly made his first hesitant steps as a camouflage expert. Camouflage was intended to make it harder for the Germans to take ranges, but his efforts, even if they pleased him, apparently didn’t please the admiral.

  ‘The object of camouflage,’ his signal read, ‘is not, as it would seem, to turn a ship into an imitation of a West African parrot but to give the impression that the head is where the stern really is.’

  Then, unexpectedly, towards the end of the month the routine disagreeableness of beating into the iron-grey seas off the Hook of Holland came to an abrupt end, and the war came as abruptly to the Seventh Cruiser Squadron as it had to Clarendon and Amphion and the destroyers of Tyrwhitt’s Channel bailiwick on the first day of hostilities. As the alarm bells went and the clatter of feet on the deck filled the ship, Kelly fell from his bunk and rushed to the bridge, to be met by the grinning Poade.

  ‘The Germans are out!’ he announced. ‘We’re to head north. Tyrwhitt’s ships have left Harwich to meet ’em and Jellicoe’s ordered the battle cruisers south from Scotland in support.’ He smiled. ‘We’re at last about to offer our lives for our country!’

  Kelly snorted. ‘I’d rather make the Germans offer theirs,’ he said.

  There was an immediate air of tension about the old ship as they blundered north, cramming on every possible ounce of steam to get into the fight. Privately Kelly wasn’t sure that they’d be able to do much even if they got there in time, except perhaps put in a few heavyweight punches, but he found himself praying under his breath all the same.

  Oh, Lord, look after us, he kept repeating to himself. A chance meeting with a German battle cruiser could mean the end of Cressy, of all the Bacchantes come to that, even of life itself, and he still wasn’t sure how he’d react to danger, because the undignified scuffle with Königin Luise could hardly be called a battle.

  The day was calm, with a mist over the grey water. The old ships, punching into the sea and filling the sky with smoke that drifted low alongside in the squally weather to obscure their view towards the enemy coast, seemed as harmless as brontesauri.

  ‘Fog ought to help us a bit,’ Poade said. ‘It’ll add to the confusion of the Germans, and the Heligoland batteries won’t be able to see us.’

  ‘Perhaps we won’t be able to see the Germans either,’ Kelly said dryly. ‘Or even the ship in line ahead. Where are the Germans, anyway?’

  ‘Just to the north. They’ve been working a night patrol off Heligoland Bight and when the submarines spotted them it was decided to cut ’em off.’

  As he spoke, the chief yeoman appeared with a signal for the captain. ‘Destroyers are in action, sir!’ His voice was brisk and excited. ‘There’s a signal, “Hostile cruisers latitude 54 N., longitude 4 E.” Heligoland Bight area, sir.’

  ‘Tyrwhitt’s found ’em,’ Poade whispered behind Johnson’s back. ‘Wait till we arrive.’

  ‘At this speed,’ Kelly said, ‘that’ll be when it’s all over.’

  The mist grew thicker and the old ships wallowed through a heavy, oily sea, ponderous mastodons of steel heading north-east. At 11 a.m., the chief yeoman popped up again.

  ‘Harwich forces heavily engaged, sir, with light cruisers. They need assistance.’

  Johnson turned to the voice pipe. ‘Engine room, can you give us more revolutions?’

  ‘No,’ Kelly whispered to Poade in reply. And ‘No’ it was, so that the old ships, in line ahead, stumbled hopelessly through the thickening weather, helpless to give assistance.

  The sky seemed to descend during the early afternoon, pressing down on the horizon, grey and threatening. The sea was flat and greasy-looking, and though they drove the old engines to their limit, the ship creaking and groaning, the whole structure shuddering at the effort so that plates and glasses and knives and forks did a quivering fandango along the wardroom tables, Kelly was right and they saw none of the action. In the afternoon, they heard the distant thudding of heavy guns and through the mist saw the smoke of a burning German ship, and they all stared eagerly towards the horizon.

  ‘Beatty’s turned up with the heavy boys,’ Poade announced and, as bugles cleared the mess decks, men crouched behind the gun shields waiting tensely.

  When they arrived two hours later, the battle was over and Kelly could feel the tension slipping away in a feeling of anticlimax. There was a little grumbling and a considerable amount of frustrated bad temper but there was nothing for the Bacchantes to do but for Hogue to take the damaged Arethusa in tow and for the rest of them to embark casualties from the destroyers. The little ships looked badly knocked about. The forecastle gun of one of them had received a direct hit and the bodies of its crew lay under a canvas screen, leaking blood which had run in rivulets down the ship’s side, while in another the second funnel leaned at an angle where a shell had knocked it off-balance, and the ship’s plates were scarred where splinters had clattered against her side.

  The wounded, aware that three German light cruisers had been sunk, were in high spirits and didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of the German ships’ fighting qualities. ‘They haven’t inherited anything from the German army,’ a bandaged lieutenant-commander observed languidly as he was offered a cigarette. ‘Trouble is, of course, German sailors are made in Kiel harbour and that’s like the Serpentine. You can’t train sailors on the Serpentine.’

  The surgeon was working in the wardroom and sick berth attendants were stacking amputated limbs near the captain’s cabin. With the wounded all aboard, they lowered boats to pick up German survivors. There were two or three hundred of them, wearing lifebelts and lifting their hands, shouting for help and trying to sing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ from their rafts. Their thin cries came over the lifting sea through the mist in a curious ullulating sound like the calling of seals as Cressy searched the wreckage-strewn water. Picking them up made Kelly feel vaguely as he once had when out shooting in Ireland when he’d brought down a couple of startled thrushes with a left and right in his excitement. The German survivors and the bodies floating in the water gave him the same feeling that some dreadful mistake had been made.

  There were so many of them and so little room, some of their wounded had to be put in the gunroom under the Dartmouth cadets’ hammocks and, during the night, Boyle, the boy who’d joined ship at the same time as Kelly, appeared pale-faced outside his cabin to say one of them was calling out in pain. He was a young German officer, a military observer, who’d lost a hand. The pad over the stump had slipped but the sick berth attendant Kelly summoned rearranged it, and the young German nodded his gratitude to Kelly. He was a good-looking youngster with a little spiked moustache like the Kaiser’s still standing up despite his soaking. His eyes were defiant and proud, though, and Kelly offered him a cigarette, aware that another emotion had gone by the board. He reminded Kelly of his brother Gerald and it was quite impossible to hate him.

  As they turned and lumbered back to Sheerness, Poade stared at the grey sea. ‘Always a bridesmaid, never a blushing bride,’ he said.

  ‘With the speed of this squadron,’ Kelly growled, ‘we couldn’t catch a ship’s boat pulled by a snotty-nosed boy. If we’re going to wage war with ships like these, it’ll be God help us.’

  Six

  The popular press went overboard about the battle. ‘We’ve been to Heligoland and ba
ck,’ the Daily Express crowed with glee. ‘Please God we’ll go again.’

  ‘No great feat really, of course,’ Poade allowed casually. ‘But it was carried out under the Germans’ noses and that establishes our ascendancy. Once we can get their High Seas Fleet into the North Sea, they’ll be wiped off the face of the earth.’

  Within forty-eight hours they were back on their patrol, the Dartmouth boys still queasy from the smell of blood left behind by the wounded Germans, and, almost immediately, Poade’s enthusiasm was diminished by the news that a U-boat had shocked the Grand Fleet by penetrating the Firth of Forth as far as the railway bridge.

  ‘At this moment, I suspect,’ Kelly grinned, ‘there’ll be battleships and battle cruisers dashing in every direction for the safety of Scapa Flow.’

  Four days later they heard that another U-Boat had torpedoed the flotilla leader, Pathfinder, in the Channel, and Poade’s gloom increased.

  ‘These submarines are becoming a bit of a bloody nuisance,’ he decided heavily.

  Only Kelly seemed to lack surprise. He knew his father and had met many of his contemporaries, and he suspected that the setbacks they’d suffered so far could well be laid at their door.

  The Broad Fourteens patrol continued in increasingly bad weather. It was a curiously remote kind of life. Apart from the days in harbour, they were entirely out of touch with the world, keeping lonely company in the southern North Sea. The blazing excitement of action that they’d all anticipated, which had been encouraged by the sinking of Königin Luise in the first hours of war, had simply not materialised and the war had begun not with the almighty smash they’d all been expecting but with a mere shift of scenery. They’d expected to thunder into battle with smoke pouring from the funnels and the guns blazing in some dramatic action filled with the roar of high explosive and the smell of burnt cordite, but, instead, all they’d done was sink a few German trawlers in the Channel which, unaware that the war had even started, had cheered them as they’d approached. As they’d taken the crews on board, the only difference had seemed to be that they’d had fresh fish to eat for a change, and now all they’d got were humdrum patrols without anything positive to show for them. It was hard even to feel useful.