The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  ‘You’re bloody persuasive, Number One,’ Talbot said. ‘It’s all highly unorthodox.’

  But it put Rumbelo on one of the ‘Jellicoes’ heading north, all the same.

  Occasionally they slipped out through the Hoxa Gate, always hoping against hope that they were going south after the German High Seas Fleet. But they never were and they were always back within forty-eight hours.

  ‘These bloody big ships are nothing but a drag,’ Talbot said bitterly, biting on the stem of his pipe. ‘There hasn’t been a major naval battle since Trafalgar and the way things are going there never will be. We scared the Germans so much at Heligoland and the Dogger Bank they’re afraid to shove their noses out beyond the Jade.’

  Then Verschoyle turned up. A new Verschoyle noticeably less arrogant towards Kelly since their last meeting, but now wearing the aiguillette of a flag lieutenant.

  He studied Kelly warily, even with a certain amount of uncertainty. He was not unaware of Kelly’s new medal or how he’d acquired it and he had a feeling that despite his own poise and cool cynicism, despite his cleverness, he was being left miles behind.

  Kelly was staring at him with disconcerting, unyielding hostility.

  ‘I thought you might still be in Inflexible,’ he said bluntly. ‘In fact, I’d almost hoped you’d slipped out through the hole the Turks made in her at the Dardanelles.’

  Verschoyle smiled to indicate that he accepted the comment as a joke. ‘Left her before then,’ he said. ‘When Sturdee transferred his flag to Benbow I went with him. Rather a good idea, I thought. Naval blue blood tends to congregate in the flagship. Kimister’s up here, too, did you know? In Collingwood, and wet-henning about in his usual vigorous manner. How are you, young Maguire, anyway? Up to snuff? Heard you’d been getting yourself into trouble in the Middle East.’

  ‘Nothing I couldn’t handle,’ Kelly said coolly. ‘And don’t call me “young Maguire.”’

  ‘What’ll happen if I do? Another bloody nose?’ Verschoyle’s eyes hardened. ‘You know, you did break my nose.’

  ‘I’m not very sorry.’

  ‘I had to have surgery.’

  ‘Afraid it might spoil your looks?’

  Verschoyle smiled. ‘When a chap’s good with the girls, it’s a pity to have to put up with difficulties of that sort,’ he said. ‘How’s Mabel Upfold?’

  ‘Thinking of getting engaged.’

  ‘Household Cavalry again?’

  ‘No. Much more ordinary. Flying Corps.’

  ‘Not much future in that. I’m told their life span’s about three weeks in France. How about you and the Little ’Un? Misbehaved yourselves yet?’

  Kelly’s eyes narrowed. The fact that they very nearly had had nothing to do with Verschoyle.

  ‘Funny, that,’ Verschoyle went on placidly. ‘Hard to understand. She’s been in love with you as long as I can remember. Sticks out like the proverbial chapel hat peg. God help her when she finally gets you. With the energy you’ve got, she’ll think she’s nesting with a railway accident. You’ll have her doubling round the bedroom like a Whale Island gunnery instructor, I’ll be bound.’

  He smiled, wondering again what quirks of character were essential to produce such devotion and why, despite money, poise and position, there was so little of it in his own home and so little to cherish in his loveless affairs with girls.

  ‘Actually, Maguire,’ he said, ‘you ought to get moving. Kaiser Bill’s bound to grow tired eventually of watching the High Seas Fleet rusting in Kiel and give it a shove out into the North Sea. Then the big smash’ll come and, in a destroyer, your chances of survival will be pretty slender.’

  Kelly was giving nothing away. ‘I’ll chance it,’ he growled.

  ‘Of course–’ Verschoyle waved a hand ‘–Silent Jack Jellicoe’s not really the man for the job. Too cautious. Too plodding. Too bloody small for that matter. He’s a bit of a ditherer underneath, I reckon, and he’ll probably miss his chance, anyway, unless David Beatty drags him into it. Haig told my father he thought he was a bit of an old woman and that he’d probably not know what to do with a battle if he had one tossed in his lap.’

  Kelly had always assumed the Commander-in-Chief to be all-powerful and all-wise. He was one of Jacky Fisher’s choices and, though it was obvious he lacked Fisher’s drive, the idea that he was far from perfect had never occurred to him before.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he know what to do with it?’ he asked.

  ‘Lacking in the gift of insubordination.’ Verschoyle shrugged. ‘Something Nelson had in abundance. I know. I see a lot of him these days. Goes by the book. Has all the Nelsonic virtues but that one. Believes in blind obedience to orders and has an obsession about submarines.’

  ‘Aren’t you behind him?’

  ‘I’m behind my admiral and my admiral ain’t commander-in-chief. He doesn’t go along with Jellicoe’s belief that half his fleet might be disabled by torpedoes before action’s joined.’

  ‘He could lose the war in an afternoon.’

  Verschoyle sneered. ‘He could also win it in an afternoon, too,’ he said. ‘But he won’t. He treats the Fleet as if it were the Crown Jewels and Grand Fleet Battle Orders all subordinate the offensive spirit to defensive precautions, especially against the torpedo. Besides which, there’s too much centralised command, and signalling every bloody movement from the flagship will only produce an acute form of tactical arthritis. Still–’ Verschoyle gestured ‘ – I doubt if some of our senior officers could act without them, anyway. They’re not exactly Nelson’s band of brothers. Burney’s a solid piece of wood, Arbuthnot’s an ass, Evan-Thomas is dull, Jerram lacks initiative, and Sturdee’s so bloody conceited you have to drop on one knee every time you see him. Pakenham’s a gentleman, of course, and Horace Hood’s probably the best brain in the service, but they’re only in subordinate commands so they can’t do much.’

  Even to Kelly, who was far from enchanted by his superior officers, it sounded like blasphemy, but Verschoyle had the bit between his teeth now, and Kelly unwillingly offered him a pink gin to keep him talking.

  Thanking him with elaborate courtesy, Verschoyle went on. ‘Suspect the thinking’s all wrong,’ he said. ‘The battle plan surmises that the Germans’ll wish to stand and fight. But suppose they prefer to run away?’ He took a sip of his gin. ‘If they do, there won’t be any big gun duel and then all these plans – all these bloody great ships, too – will be useless, won’t they?’

  Despite their wary dislike for each other, they were both experienced officers now and able to talk rationally of service matters without hatred, and Kelly became aware once more of something that had never escaped him – Verschoyle had a sharp, incisive brain. Right or wrong, he’d clearly been thinking deeply.

  ‘Is all this why you’ve turned up here?’ he asked. ‘To let us know what’s wrong with the Grand Fleet?’

  Verschoyle finished his gin. He would never have admitted it but he was beginning to wonder if his attitude of looking after himself and leaving his advancement in rank to his influential relatives was a sound one. There seemed about Kelly a hard-headed assurance, an awareness of himself and his capabilities that came entirely from experience. The Falklands had been too much of a walk-over for anyone, however well he’d done, to feel that he’d gained much from it.

  Despite his thoughts, Verschoyle’s face didn’t slip. He couldn’t ever have admitted his envy. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve brought orders. Mordant’s to move down to Rosyth to join the Thirteenth Destroyer Force. They’re with Beatty so perhaps he’ll manage to get you killed.’

  Three

  Rosyth was certainly an improvement on Scapa, and Edinburgh a vast change from the grey streets of Kirkwall, but the destroyers’ berth was not a great deal more comfortable than Gutter Sound and getting out was never a pleasure trip. The light cru
isers were off Charlestown, with the battle cruisers between them and the bridge, while the destroyers lay higher up at Bo’ness in a welter of colliers, provision ships and other fleet auxiliaries; and the shape of the harbour made it necessary for everybody at the western end of the anchorage to thread their way through the lines of battleships and battle cruisers – the ‘Behemoths’ and ‘Sea Cows’, as they were contemptuously called by the destroyermen – every time they moved.

  For the battle cruiser people, it was possible to spend every afternoon in Edinburgh, but for the destroyers Edinburgh was always too far away and, ashore, all they could do was walk or visit Dunfermline by the Charlestown express, which the driver let them drive for a shilling tip. Once they managed to get up a game of hockey with the young ladies of the physical training college there, every one of whom seemed to be frustrated by the lack of men and panting to get them in dark corners, but it all came to a stop just when it was beginning to look promising because the directors of the college took a jaundiced view of it, and they had to go to the cinema instead.

  At Rosyth, also, the eagerness for battle was even worse. Admiral Beatty was a lot less patient than Admiral Jellicoe and it was obvious throughout the Battle Cruiser Squadron that it wouldn’t require much to send them all to sea. But there was doubt even about Beatty. Square-jawed and broad-shouldered, he seemed the epitome of a fighting admiral but there was still more than a suspicion that while Jellicoe could do with some of Beatty’s drive, Beatty could probably do with some of Jellicoe’s technical knowledge.

  ‘He’s more of a swashbuckler than an admiral,’ Lieutenant Shakespeare insisted in a wardroom argument. ‘Like Drake. He’s not the tactician Nelson was.’

  ‘He’s self-assured,’ Heap countered. ‘And he works hard. I hear that he and Jellicoe have concocted a scheme to bring the Germans out. Expose light units off the Danish, Dutch and German coasts as a bait.’

  ‘Suppose the Germans are scheming along the same lines,’ Kelly said dryly. ‘And this bombarding of British towns is an attempt to lure us out.’

  It was almost as if a fleet battle in the North Sea were a psychological necessity because nobody was enjoying themselves and more than likely neither were the Germans. With the war still rolling bloodily across northern France, there was a great feeling of guilt that they were lying in comparative idleness, and every man who returned from leave came back with dark stories of people asking ‘But what the hell does the fleet do?’ And while it was easier to get ashore than at Scapa, there wasn’t very much joy in it. Complete strangers were in the habit of approaching officers in hotel lounges and sailors in pub bars demanding to know when they were going to fetch the Germans out, and an uneasy feeling was growing in Kelly that that affection with which the Navy had been regarded before the war was beginning to give way to something not far removed from contempt.

  Occasionally they justified their existence by putting to sea with the aircraft carrier, Engadine, to exercise her aeroplanes, Mordant a few cables astern like a faithful spaniel ready to retrieve anyone who fell in the drink. Mostly the weather was too bad to achieve much but once there was a grisly crash when an aircraft landed in front of the carrier and emerged horrifyingly mutilated by the ship’s propellers and with the pilot mercifully stone dead. They fished him out quickly and a young sailor about to heave his heart up at the sight got a quick nudge from Rumbelo as Kelly appeared. He was always looked at somewhat askance for the medal ribbons that graced his chest and the knowledge of what he’d done to get them, and the young sailor managed with an effort to hang on to the contents of his stomach.

  When they returned with the wreckage and the remains of the pilot, it was a pitch dark night and was raining persistently with a sullen quality only possible in Scotland. Four cruisers without lights were just aweigh when the destroyers arrived, under the impression they were a mile further down the anchorage, and they all had to go full astern and lie inert, in a galaxy of signalling, megaphoning, bad language and narrow shaves, with a picket boat caught in the middle hooting on its klaxon like a cock pheasant gone mad.

  There was another day when they dashed across the North Sea to converge on the Dogger Bank in search of a collier that was adrift, a salt-caked, rust-streaked old tub wallowing in a heavy leaden sea.

  ‘Nanny to a bleedin’ collier,’ a wag in the waist of the ship yelled. ‘Eight soddin’ knots! Come on, you ocean bloody greyhound, you, keep up!’

  ‘With the rotten stuff they give us to burn–’ the answering yell came thinly on the wind from a man on the collier’s bridge wearing a green jersey and a bowler hat ‘–we couldn’t even keep up with the bleedin’ times!’

  On other occasions they escorted the cruisers north for firing practice, and returned to Rosyth in a large detour to avoid minefields; and once, with one of the light cruiser squadrons, they went out to find a mythical minesweeper, and the buzz went round that this time they were really the bait to bring out the High Seas Fleet. It ended up with condenser trouble and a brush with a zeppelin, in which shots were exchanged for bombs, but entirely without damage to either side.

  Finally they escorted Beatty himself to sea, seven huge ships led by Lion, the flagship, all silhouetted against the sky, each one of them with a plume of smoke rising like a dusky feather. As they zigzagged, the sunlight caught their sides so that they appeared to change colour as they altered course, on one tack bright and silvery, on the other black. A stab of white rising at their ram-bows and another at their stern contrasted with the deep blue of the sea as they moved in two solemnly portentous lines, at the head of each one and down the flanks the black smudges of the destroyers, all of them oil burners that threw off little smoke except when some careless stoker changed the width of the air inlet baffles on the boilers.

  On the starboard beam, there was another group of ships and, five miles away, units of the Third Light Cruiser Squadron, pearl-grey shapes in the distance, with, just visible beyond them, the raking masts of the First Light Cruiser Squadron, their hulls below the horizon. At intervals a light winked on the flagship, to be repeated right and left, and as it grew dusk, the light cruisers closed in to become three lines, each ship following the pale blue stern light of the shadowy form ahead in their stately march across the darkening sea.

  Coming back was different as they laboriously staggered homewards in the teeth of a south-westerly gale with the wind shrilling in the rigging and the sky a dull grey broken only by the never-ending procession of low clouds scooting along to the north-east. Monotonously, as the ship dipped her forecastle into a maelstrom of leaping seas, a mass of seething foam rushed aft and broke against the conning tower then, as she lifted up again, was caught by the wind and flung upwards to fall in sheets across the upper bridge.

  Ducking behind the canvas dodger to avoid the weather, his bones crying out for mercy from the hammering of the sea, Kelly began to wonder what on earth had prompted him to ask for destroyers. Talbot’s mouth, clenched on his pipe, was sour. ‘The rocking horse motion of a ship whose waterline length seems to have been designed deliberately to make the worst of steep waves isn’t in my opinion the best way of passing the time,’ he complained. ‘We live in conditions that would make a fakir’s bed of nails seem comfortable.’

  Blinking the salt out of his eyes, Kelly was aware that his feet felt like blocks of ice. He could only see about a mile in the spindrift and spume, and all this, he thought bitterly, was just to give the battle cruisers a blow because they hadn’t been out for weeks.

  ‘It’s different for them,’ Talbot said, fighting to apply a match to charred tobacco. ‘A gale can’t wreck their cabins and mess decks, and they think it’s rough if they get a spot of spray on their waistcoats.’

  As Kelly went below to eat, the water was running down his neck and a playful sea filled his boots. In his cabin all his personal effects were sloshing about the deck and all the drawers were full of w
ater. A dirty trickle from a faulty pipe had soaked his bunk and Charley’s photograph was floating in the wash basin in the splinters from a bottle of shampoo. He couldn’t have cared less at that moment if Mordant had sunk.

  ‘I often wonder why I didn’t join the army,’ he said to Chambers, the surgeon.

  He had long since grown bored with Talbot, who seemed to enjoy subscribing to the legend that all destroyer captains were mad. He was sour, depressed and perpetually grumbling through his pipe, and for an incurable optimist like Kelly was hard to live with. When I’m captain, Kelly thought often, I’ll not be like that. So far, he seemed to have gathered round him quite a list of naval captains he’d served under whom he preferred not to emulate – Acheson, Lord Charles Everley, Talbot. Perhaps it was a good thing, he decided. At least he’d be himself. And in any case, it would be a long time before he had command of a ship – even a small one like a destroyer.

  Yawing wildly, they rounded the Old Man of Hoy in a gleam of wintry sunshine, Mordant snarling and straining in every plate, hinging her bows into the yeasty foam of rolling water from the north Atlantic, then sweeping drunkenly upwards again from the valleys of the ocean, streaming green-white pennants of water from her stem, before reeling corkscrew-wise into the seething turmoil of another trough. Lifelines rigged, deadlights screwed down over scuttles, the sweating hull ran with condensed breath, and there was a permanent slosh of seawater across the corticene where the plates leaked when the port side was the weather side. Metal and glass clinked inside the lockers, and all the hanging gear leaned drunkenly from the bulkhead as the ship sliced through the waves, the water lifting in green walls around the bows and sheets of spray shooting overhead like heavy rain. The other destroyers were often quite invisible beneath the water they displaced, and even the battle wagons rose and fell with the sound of thunder as they pressed majestically on, jettisoning great streams of ocean from around their cable chains and steaming round their hawseholes like a set of angry dragons.