The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  One after the other they put their faces to the rubber eyepiece of the periscope. Crossing their bows was a big ship crammed with soldiers and equipment that were clearly being rushed as reinforcements for the fighting on the peninsula.

  Lyster bent again to the eyepiece. ‘They’re not even keeping a look-out,’ he said. ‘There are two elderly gentlemen on the bridge, both stout and wearing fezzes, smoking and leaning on the compass. I think we’ll stir ’em up a bit. Hard a starboard. Forty feet. Slow ahead port.’

  As they increased speed, the familiar thud of propellers came down on them.

  ‘Up periscope!’

  ‘We have to be careful here, sir,’ Kelly warned, one eye on the chart. ‘We need to give Nagara a wide berth. There’s a treacherous shoal and a strong set across it and probably fresh water currents.’

  ‘We’ll be all right.’ Lyster seemed indifferent. ‘Bring her up, Number One.’

  As the air rumbled into the tanks, the boat tilted, and then steadied.

  ‘Hold her there! Stand by starboard tube.’ Lyster suddenly grinned. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘the old gentlemen have seen us. One of ’em’s jumped about three feet in the air. He knocked the other chap’s fez off when he swung his arm round to point. There are what you might call hurryings and scurryings and wavings of arms going on. Chaps rushing in all directions and the two stout gents looking as if they’ll fall off the bridge at any minute. All vastly entertaining. Pity we have to spoil it all. I think they’re going to try and ram us. Hold her there. Stand by starboard tube. We’ve plenty of time before she turns.’

  There was a long silence and Kelly realised he was holding his breath. Bennett was breathing through his nose and it was making a faint snoring sound in the silence.

  ‘Fire!’

  The familiar lurch came as the torpedo clattered from the tube, and the diving hands spun their wheels to stop the boat rising. The seconds ticked by, then there was a heavy thud and Lyster’s face broke into a grin. He reached for the periscope.

  ‘We’ve got her!’ His voice was high with excitement. ‘Come and take a look at this!’

  The troopship had stopped. There was a fierce fire burning, and the deck had filled with a heaving mass of figures which seemed to cover the whole ship, running from the flames and scurrying across the hatch covers. They were on every ladder, fighting to pass each other, and the whole ship seemed to be one pulsating mass of humanity. The panic was obvious and in the confusion some of the men were jumping into the sea, making small splashes round the ship’s side as they hit the water.

  ‘She’s going, sir!’ Kelly could see the ship keeling to starboard and he was reminded vividly of Hogue as she had leaned over him in the pinnace. Then he saw another shape beyond the trooper, hidden by its bulk. It was coming up fast, a white bone of foam at its bow.

  ‘Sir, there’s a gunboat! They’re on to us!’

  Lyster shouldered him aside and grabbed for the eyepiece.

  ‘Hard a starboard! Take her down, Number One! Let’s get away from here!’

  But as Bennett flooded the tanks, the submarine lurched violently and, as he tried to correct, the bow dipped.

  Lyster’s voice came sharply. ‘Hold her, Number One!’

  But the tilt grew steeper and they had to grab for handholds as they began to slide forward. The parallel rules fell off the chart table with a clatter and Kelly stumbled as he stooped to pick them up.

  ‘Blow One and Two!’

  Staring across the control room past the gleaming column of the periscope to the port bulkhead where the dial of the depth gauge gaped into the compartment like the eye of a sea monster, Kelly held his breath. The men at the diving and blowing panel were watching their spirit levels intently, their hands on the complex of levers and wheels. From aft the hum from the motors sank to a lower pitch and he caught a strong smell of hot diesel, oil, sweat, unwashed bodies and fear. At the helm, the coxswain was wearing a nagged look, and Bennett’s eyes were narrow in a taut face. The cramped atmosphere of the control room seemed to enfold them. They hadn’t shaved or washed for days and, as he studied the tense hairy faces, Kelly felt his chest muscles tighten.

  Heads turned uneasily. Bennett’s eyes were wide now, uncertain and angry. Trying to relax and force himself to breathe more slowly, Kelly was only aware of the tinny clicking sound of the gyro compass, loud in the silence, that seemed to beat like a metronome in his brain. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, the dormant lunacy that had always controlled E19 started to work its evil again.

  ‘She’s rising, sir!’

  ‘Hold her!’

  ‘Eighty feet! Seventy feet! Sixty! Fifty!’

  ‘What’s wrong with this bloody boat?’ Lyster snapped. ‘Hold her, Number One, for God’s sake!’

  His voice cracked with tension. ‘Bring her down, Number One! Bring her down! The conning tower’s out of the water! Hard a starboard, helmsman! Flood One, Two and Three!’

  Immediately every mind had gone back to the tense half-hour when E19 had run away with them in the Channel before they’d left England. This was infinitely worse because above on the surface now there were enemy craft intent not on saving them but on destroying them.

  As Bennett struggled, there were two enormous clangs like hammer blows on the pressure hull so that they knew shells were exploding in the water alongside. As he flooded the tanks, the bow dipped once more and for a moment E19 steadied, then started to plunge terrifyingly downwards again. At ninety feet, Lyster called out.

  ‘Half ahead port engine! Perhaps that’ll help.’

  The boat steadied once more but they had only just drawn deep relieved breaths when she lurched and began to dive again, bucking like a wild horse as she settled towards the bottom.

  ‘She’s heavy, sir,’ the man at the hydroplanes yelled.

  ‘How’s the bubble?’

  ‘Horizontal now, sir.’

  ‘Start the pump on the auxiliary! What’s causing the negative buoyancy, Number One?’

  ‘Can’t find a thing, sir, unless we’ve sprung a leak.’

  ‘Must be fresh water here with a different density,’ Kelly said. ‘It’s affecting the trim.’

  Even as he spoke, E19 began to rise again and Lyster cursed. ‘One of those bloody shells must have damaged the forward planes,’ he decided. ‘If we can make it round Nagara Point, we’ll be all right. Those damn’ destroyers spot us every time the periscope breaks surface. The water’s like a millpond.’

  By the light in the eyepiece of the periscope, Kelly saw they had broken surface again and Lyster tried a quick glance round. Immediately, he slammed the handles up. The ‘clack’ was loud in the silence of the control room. ‘Down periscope!’

  He swung round as the periscope hissed into its well, his voice breaking the tension. ‘For God’s sake, Number One, get us down! There’s a torpedo boat heading straight for us! Crack the outboard vent.’

  As the planesmen leaned on their wheels, the bow went down once more and they heard the thud-thud-thud of propellers as the destroyer roared over them, then suddenly E19 took a steep inclination by the bows and started to rise yet again. All efforts at regaining control were useless and the diving planes made not the slightest effect.

  ‘Down, man,’ Lyster yelled. ‘Flood One, Two and Three! Flood Four! Flood Auxiliary!’

  Again the submarine dipped under and, closing off the forward tank and stopping the movement of water ballast from aft to forward, Bennett endeavoured to catch her at fifty feet, but now the planes seemed unable to hold her at all and she went on down – eighty feet, ninety, one hundred. This was the limit of their guages and what happened after that God alone knew.

  The strained plates creaked and a light bulb suddenly popped, and the man on the forward diving plane started to mutter a prayer, his words loud in the silen
ce.

  ‘Full astern!’ Lyster snapped. ‘Blow the auxiliary!’

  ‘She’s coming up, sir!’

  The needle jerked itself reluctantly from the hundred feet mark and began to rise rapidly. The submarine leapt to the surface with increasing speed. While Bennett struggled with the trim, Lyster kept his eyes glued to the periscope.

  ‘That bloody torpedo boat’s circling us and there’s another coming up from the south!’

  As Bennett poured in the ballast again, his face haggard with the strain, the bows went down once more and immediately he had to start to expel it again in a desperate attempt to regain control. But down and down E19 went, faster even than before, the inclination becoming more pronounced until the boat seemed to be trying to stand on its nose. Eggs, bread, food of all sorts, knives, forks, plates, came showering forward from the petty officers’ mess, and everything that could fall over fell over. The men, slipping and struggling, grasped hold of valves, gauges, rods, anything to hold them at their posts.

  When they were just wondering why the sides of the submarine didn’t cave in under the pressure, the needle jumped back from its stop and the submarine began to rush stern-first to the surface.

  ‘That bloody gunboat!’ Lyster yelled, then they all felt the submarine lurch and there was a crash as the shell struck them astern.

  ‘Close watertight doors!’

  There were two more bangs in quick succession and one of the stokers appeared from the engine room in a waft of hot oil and a cloud of blue smoke; beyond him Kelly could see balls of incandescent copper flying off the switches and wicked blue-green electric flames leaping and dancing.

  ‘We’re taking in water astern, sir,’ the stoker reported.

  ‘Much?’

  ‘A lot, sir.’

  One of the shells had hit them on or near the conning tower and cascades of icy green sea were coming in from overhead, drenching the wardroom curtains. It was obvious, with the weight of water increasing all the time, that they would now never be able to hold E19 on the surface but, holed as she was, they also dared not dive.

  Lyster straightened up. He looked old and weary. They were finished. They all knew it.

  For some reason the shells had stopped E19’s mad behaviour and she lay wallowing on the surface quite placidly.

  ‘All right,’ Lyster said wearily. He was in control of himself again, the old, imperturbable, odd-looking figure in knickerbockers and cricket sweater. ‘I’m going to scuttle. Stay with me, Number One, to attend to it. All hands on deck. Prepare to abandon ship. Where’s the Chief ERA?’

  ‘They’re bringing him forward, sir,’ one of the stokers said. ‘He’s been hurt.’

  The sea continued to pour in on them with a terrible and relentless drenching noise, and the water round their feet crept higher every second. Electrical contacts spat venomously with little lightning flashes and Kelly wondered if he were about to be electrocuted.

  The forward watertight door had been shut and one of the seaman was sobbing. ‘My pal’s in there, sir! My pal’s in there!’

  Shivering with fear, Kelly was aware of men beginning to assemble in the control room, clutching a few personal possessions, even pictures of wives and girl friends. Their faces indicated that they were near to panic but they were still behaving calmly with solid naval discipline.

  Two of the stokers appeared with the ERA. There was blood on his face and he was vomiting badly. There was dead silence and all they could hear was the monotonous, pitiless sound of water pouring in on them.

  Lyster gave a heavy sigh. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Abandon. You go first, Pilot, and warn me when the water gets too high.’

  As Kelly reached for the ladder, Bennett turned to Lyster.

  ‘Sorry, sir. There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘Not your fault, Number One. This bloody boat’s behaved like a fairground horse all its life. I always knew it’d finally do its stuff at the wrong moment. Let’s get on with it.’

  As Kelly scrambled through the hatch, Rumbelo joined him and moved to the stern with another man. The water was already lapping against the conning tower.

  ‘Sir,’ Kelly yelled. ‘She’s going!’

  Lyster’s voice came up. ‘I’ve just time to get my brief case. Get going, Number One!’

  Food, clothing, flotsam and jetsam of all kinds were floating out of the submarine which now lay, bow down, and beginning to heel over to starboard, men pushing through the hatch one after another. The Turkish torpedo boat was still bearing down on them and one of the men on the stern of the submarine raised his hands. The water was lapping higher against the conning tower.

  ‘Hurry, sir, she’s going down!’

  As Kelly yelled, the submarine lurched and the man on the stern with his hands in the air staggered, off-balance, and fell into the water. Rumbelo immediately went after him in a neat racing dive that impressed Kelly as he remembered how he’d last seen him enter the sea.

  ‘Sir, hurry, for God’s sake!’

  No more than a few men had escaped and, as Kelly turned, he saw Bennett’s face appear at the top of the ladder. Kneeling down, he reached through the hatch to yank him to the surface, but as he did so the submarine lurched again and seemed to stand on its nose. In his mind’s eye he saw all the men still below hurled down the length of the centre passage, flung forward as if thrown down a lift shaft, followed by everything that was not fastened down. Momentarily, she steadied again, the stern going down, so that the boat straightened, then, as he clung to the binnacle for support, without a sound or a sigh, without even an eddy or a ripple on the surface of the water, the submarine slid away from under him.

  For a second he had a glimpse of Bennett’s horrified eyes as he tried to fight his way through the water gushing through the open hatch to reach Kelly’s straining hand, then E19 simply vanished from beneath his feet. There was a huge fountain of spray and a roaring sound like a gigantic whale blowing then he found himself swimming with no sign of the submarine and only a few heads around him in the water to indicate what had happened to the crew.

  Seven

  Dripping and miserable, Kelly was dragged over the side of the torpedo boat’s dinghy, the water pouring from his seaboots and thick clothing.

  The officer in command spoke English. ‘I regret we have not been able to save any more than these men you have with you, sir,’ he said.

  Kelly nodded wretchedly. E19 hadn’t run very much amuck, and their wartime career had been short and not very sweet.

  A gentle drizzle of rain began to fall as they headed shorewards and as it touched the surface of the sea, it seemed to Kelly like a benediction that was unbelievably sad and sweet. Thinking of Lyster and Bennett and the others who were dead, life seemed so beautiful he couldn’t imagine himself ever being dissatisfied with it again.

  Then the reaction came as he remembered he was a prisoner – a useless appendage to the war because the Turks didn’t want him and he was no good to the Allies. The realisation that he was facing jail like a common criminal came as a shock and he suddenly wondered how long it would be for.

  Nobody was under any delusion any more that the war was going to be a short one. It hadn’t ended by Christmas, 1914, as they’d been promised, and there was little likelihood that it would end by Christmas 1915. For a moment, as he saw captivity and humiliation stretching away for years into the future, he felt like weeping. For God’s sake, he thought wildly, he’d be an old man when they let him free again!

  All of them quiet and brooding on their ill-luck, they were taken to Scutari on the opposite side of the Bosphorus from Constantinople, and the next morning a military guard brought dry clothes consisting of the overcoat and trousers of an ordinary Turkish soldier’s uniform, a pair of slippers without socks, and a fez. What was left of their own uniforms was taken away, the
n, amidst a large crowd of spectators, they were fallen in on the wharf and, surrounded by guards with fixed bayonets, were marched through the town. People gathered on the sidewalk to watch them. Shopkeepers and their assistants crowded to their doors, trams and cabs stopped, and here and there from behind heavily-curtained windows they could see a female shape watching.

  ‘Even the bloody ’arem’s taking an interest,’ Rumbelo growled.

  In perfect silence they marched along, the little gutter boys making faces at them and occasionally drawing their fingers across their throats. At the office of the town major they were marched in front of a tall good-looking man smoking a cigarette through a holder about a foot long.

  ‘You must not look on yourselves as prisoners,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But more as honoured guests of Turkey.’

  They were escorted up several flights of stone stairs and pushed into a large empty room containing little else but portraits of Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey, the leaders of the Young Turks Party. It was dirty and stuffy but as they opened windows to let in air, the guards appeared and closed them all again.

  ‘It’s fifty feet down,’ Rumbelo announced indignantly. ‘I’m not going to jump out of that!’

  Straw palliasses were brought but within an hour of lying down on them they discovered they were crawling with bedbugs and, by the dim light of a broken gas mantle, they started to do battle with them.

  ‘Makes you wonder whether it’s best to kill ’em when they’re young,’ Rumbelo said, ‘or leave ’em till they’re grandparents and likely to die of old age.’

  The next day half a dozen Turks were pushed in with them and spent the morning spitting and emptying their bronchial tubes on the floor until Rumbelo, brought up in an orphanage and with the Navy’s entrenched ideas of tidiness and hygiene well drilled into him, threatened to knock their heads together and throw them out of the window. For the rest of the day they seemed to be gagging on their own phlegm but they didn’t spit any more.

  The next morning they were informed that they were to be moved to Afion Kara Hissar, in the centre of Asia Minor, and a week later they stared up from the station at the ruin of a fortress situated on the summit of a sheer and precipitous rock.