Patrol to the Golden Horn

by Patrol to the Golden Horn (epub)

  From a wing of the cruiser’s bridge, a light was still winking its dots and dashes. Truman bent to the engine-room voicepipe.

  ‘Finished with main engines. Remain at immediate notice.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir … Shall we be fuelling, sir?’

  That had been the voice of Mr Wilberforce, the commissioned engineer. And Truman evidently resented being asked a question he couldn’t yet answer. It was a surprise that he’d been told to anchor; he’d brought Cameron to join his submarine, and the natural thing would have been to stop for long enough to drop him off and then push on to Mudros. He answered testily into the voicepipe, ‘At present, Chief, I have not the slightest idea.’ Now glancing round, he found Nick watching him, and raised his hooped, bushy eyebrows, his lips twisting in a smile inviting sympathy for the patience one had to exercise, tolerating unnecessary questions: one commanding officer to another … And Nick’s facial muscles had gone wooden. He hadn’t found himself exactly seeking Truman’s company, during the passage out from England; he thought the man was an idiot, and one of his own failings of which he’d always been aware was an inability to hide such feelings. Awkward, particularly when dealing with officers senior to oneself; and this personal Achilles’ heel of his was likely to prove even more of a handicap, he thought, now that the war looked like ending pretty soon … Terrapin’s leading signalman saved him from the battle to contort his features into some sort of smirk; the signalman was presenting his pad to Truman.

  ‘Signal from Harwich, sir.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Truman took the pad casually, glanced down frowning at the message. His frown deepened: ‘Bless my soul!’ He’d looked up, at Nick, with those thick brows raised again: now he was re-reading the signal. He told the killick, ‘Acknowledge, and VMT … Everard, you and I are invited to luncheon over there. Eh?’

  Nick shared the man’s surprise. He didn’t think he knew anyone in the cruiser; or that anyone aboard her knew of his, Nick Everard’s, presence aboard Terrapin: of his existence, even. And the signalled invitation, to which the reply ‘VMT’, standing for ‘very many thanks’, was already being stuttered in rapid flashes from the back end of the bridge, would have come from Harwich’s captain. Truman had called to Jake Cameron, the submariner, ‘They’re sending a boat for you and us at twelve-thirty, Cameron.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir. Thank you.’ Cameron nodded – cheerful, enthusiastic. He’d been in a submarine that was refitting in the Malta dockyard, and they’d needed him here urgently to join another – E.57, which presumably was one of the pair alongside the cruiser.

  Harriman reported to Truman, ‘Cable’s secured, sir, at two shackles. May I pipe hands to dinner?’ Truman began to waffle – about not knowing yet what was happening, how long they’d be here … Nick checked the time, on his American wrist-watch. It was still a novelty; and it had been a present from his now famous uncle – Hugh Everard had become a rear-admiral after Jutland, but he was now a vice-admiral and Sir Hugh … Wrist-watches had been almost unobtainable earlier in the war; officers destined for the trenches and other forms of active service had advertised for them, as well as for revolvers and field-glasses, in the ‘Personal’ columns of The Times. Nick had been a midshipman then: it was just a few years ago, but it felt like a whole lifetime. To Sarah he must have been just a little boy in a sailor-suit.

  How did she think of him now?

  Back to earth again: or rather, to Terrapin’s bridge, where Truman had consented to his ship’s company being piped to dinner and Harriman – thickset, monosyllabic – had passed the order to Trimble, the bosun’s mate. Cruickshank, Nick saw, was taking a set of anchor bearings, noting the figures in his navigator’s notebook; and Harriman was telling PO Hart, the chief buffer, to rig the port quarterdeck gangway. It still felt odd, to be a passenger, to see and hear the business of the ship being conducted all around one and just stand idly by: it wasn’t at all a comfortable feeling.

  The killick signalman reported to Truman, ‘Your message passed to Harwich, sir.’ A West Countryman, in voice and craggy features extraordinarily like another signalman, one named Garret with whom Nick had shared, at Jutland, certain rather hair-raising experiences; having survived them and returned, more by luck than good judgement, to the Tyne, he’d got himself and Garret into hot water by sending him off on a leave to which he had not been entitled. There’d been a stew over letting him have an advance of pay, too. The thing was – not that one had been able to explain it at the time – they’d found themselves home, and alive, when there’d been every reason for them to have stayed out there in the North Sea with six thousand others, dead … And Garret had been a newly-married man, longing for the feel of his wife in his arms again: it had seemed right to send him off to her, and unlikely in the circumstances that anyone would give a damn.

  One lived, and learned!

  From Nick’s angle, it hadn’t been a case of a swollen head, of his achievement in bringing the ship home in its shattered state having left him cocky. It had been a weird feeling, in those early days of June 1916: as if that sort of rubbish didn’t count now, as if the experience of battle had taken one out clear of the morass of petty restrictions and red-tape that he’d often fallen foul of. And in the two years since then he’d observed what had seemed to be similar reactions in other men, after action. Survivors of sunk ships, for instance, hauled half-drowned over a destroyer’s side, recovering into surprise at being alive and immediately emptying their pockets, throwing away money and papers and small possessions … He’d known how they’d felt.

  After Jutland his uncle Hugh had suggested drily, ‘Feeling your oats somewhat, Nick? That it?’

  ‘No, sir, I—’

  ‘Don’t do anything so damn silly again, boy. You’ve a chance now. For heaven’s sake make use of it!’

  Before Jutland, Nick had not been reckoned to have any sort of chance. He’d been a failure, a sub-lieutenant ‘under report’ in a dreadnought’s gunroom; and if there was such a place as hell, a Scapa Flow battleship’s gunroom must surely come pretty close to it. Had done, anyway, in those days.

  Uncle Hugh’s star, of course, had risen even more dramatically than his nephew’s. At Jutland as a post-captain he’d commanded the super-dreadnought Nile and earned promotion to flag rank; and now more recently his successful cruiser action resulting in the destruction of the Gottingen had won him the second promotion and a ‘K’.

  Nick joined the RNR submariner, Cameron, at the after end of the bridge. ‘Which of those sinister-looking craft is yours?’

  Jake Cameron pointed. ‘Starboard side there. Other boat’s French.’ He rubbed his large hands together. ‘Find out what all the flap’s about presently, with luck!’

  Obviously it was some kind of flap. Terrapin wouldn’t have been diverted without good reason. En route from Devonport to Mudros she’d called at Malta for fuel and – hopefully — a day or two of shoregoing for her ship’s company; but she’d only been alongside the oiler in Sliema Creek about ten minutes when a signal came informing Truman that he was required to sail again forthwith, taking one passenger to Mudros. One additional passenger, they’d meant. Later, when the ship had been well into the Aegean, another signal had changed the destination to Imbros. But alongside the oiler in Malta they’d been expecting some important personage to arrive on board – a general, or a politician – and what had turned up had been this outsize but otherwise very ordinary RNR lieutenant.

  He and Nick had found they had a friend in common – Tim Rogerson, who’d helped to ram the old submarine C.3 and her cargo of high-explosive into the viaduct at Zeebrugge, to the considerable inconvenience of the Germans, at the same time as Nick in his ‘oily-wad’ destroyer Bravo had been playing Aunt Sally to Hun artillery inside the mole … It was like something one might have done, lived through, in an earlier age, not just six months ago. But the ‘Zeeb’ raid had taken place on St George’s Day of this year, 1918, and it was only October now; and another odd impression was that
one felt as if it had been experienced by some other person, not by oneself but by someone who up to that time had occupied one’s skin.

  Punctured skin. He’d been knocked about a bit, in Bravo, and spent nine weeks afterwards in hospitals and another month convalescing at Mullbergh, his father’s enormous, gloomy house in Yorkshire. Sarah, his father’s young wife, ran Mullbergh as a recuperative centre for wounded officers, and it had seemed natural enough that he should go there. But given that decision to make again now – if he were back in Miss Keyser’s private hospital in Grosvenor Gardens and Sarah in that funny little green hat had been asking ‘Sister Agnes’, ‘Let me have him now? Let me fatten him up at Mullbergh, for a few weeks?’ – given that situation again now, would one let it happen?

  Well, it had seemed like an obvious move. And he didn’t think – hard to turn the mind back, but he was fairly sure of this – he didn’t think he’d ever regarded Sarah, up to that time, as anything more than a close, warm friend who happened also to be much nearer his own age than his father’s, and yet his father’s wife, and beautiful, and kind, and – well, nothing else. Not then.

  He’d have given anything to know now, this minute, what she was thinking, feeling. When she’d written, she’d managed to say absolutely nothing; but almost immediately after he’d left Mullbergh she’d gone down to London to meet his father, who’d been sent home on an unexpected leave from France. Sarah had spent the ten days of it with him in some Mayfair house lent to them by friends. It had been an astonishing thing for her to have done: incredible, in the context of that miserable marriage. And in the letter when she’d told him, there’d been no explanation, no kind of comment. Nick had begun to think of her as suffering from remorse, as being less happy because of him, because of what they’d – well, become to each other; and thinking of her in that state it felt as if he, just like his father, had — oh, fed on her … It was an agony to think of it in that way: he shut his eyes, certain that if he could have been with her now to put his arms round her, reassure her … He asked himself, Reassure her of what? Of my feelings for her? What use can they be to her?

  It was simply that he couldn’t help them. And that despite the misgivings and a kind of loneliness he’d never experienced before, constantly thrusting through the worry and concern was a sense of excitement and happiness that was like being half-drunk.

  Muffled piping from below decks broke into the jumble of his thoughts. The squeal of the pipe was followed by Trimble’s roar of ‘Ha-a-ands to dinner!’

  Cameron levered his bulk off the bridge rail.

  ‘I’m going down to see my gear’s packed.’ He jerked a thumb towards the cruiser. ‘You’re coming over too, did I hear?’

  ‘Apparently.’ Nick stared across bright water at Harwich and the submarine alongside her. He hadn’t the least idea how or why he’d been honoured with this invitation.

  * * *

  The boat, with its three passengers in the sternsheets, sheered away from Terrapin’s gangway and headed for the cruiser. Truman had told Harriman, ‘Get the ship cleaned up. If there’s any news I’ll give it to you by signal; otherwise assume we’re here for the night. After tea you can pipe hands to bathe and non-swimmers to instruction.’

  It was extraordinary how many non-swimmers there were in the Navy, and how many of them tried to shirk instruction.

  Cameron, beside Nick in the boat’s stern, was examining E.57 as they chugged down Harwich’s starboard side. She was just like any other submarine, Nick thought – a dirty, stinking tube, not in any sense a ship; he’d never understood submariners’ fascination with their wretched craft. Now, as the boat curved round the big ship’s stern, E.57 was out of sight and Cameron was studying the French one. Equally nasty … The boat’s coxswain, nosing her up towards the gangway on the cruiser’s port quarter, was slewing in too fast, and he’d put his engine astern too late: the boat thumped against the platform, bowman and sternsheetman struggling to fend off with their boathooks. From the quarterdeck up above their heads Nick heard the order, ‘Pipe!’ Truman glanced briefly at the somewhat chagrined coxswain.

  ‘Devil’s the matter with you, Markham?’

  Then he was climbing the gangway into that squeal of piping. The custom stemmed from days of sail when captains, admirals and other dignitaries had been hoisted aboard in a boatswain’s chair slung from a yardarm whip. Nick, hanging back to give Truman all the limelight, thought it must have been embarrassing for the gouty old men, to be dumped like sacks of spuds on their ships’ decks … As the second wail of the pipes died away he went quickly up the scrubbed oak steps and over the cruiser’s sides: saluting, finding himself on the edge of a group of officers, and having a quick first impression of a lot of gold-peaked caps; then, sorting wheat from chaff, he realised that actually there were only two of those: one was on the head of a small, pink-faced commander who was pumping Truman’s hand, and the other—

  Reaper!

  Commander Reaper: who, as a staff officer on Roger Keyes’s planning team at Dover before the Zeebrugge Raid, had sent Nick on a crackpot cross-channel raid in a coastal motor boat… Narrow head: deepset eyes: his expression was one of mild amusement as he stared back at Nick’s obvious surprise.

  ‘Didn’t I say we’d meet again, Everard?’

  ‘You did indeed, sir.’ Shaking his hand. Astonished: and pleased: but also puzzled … ‘Did you know I was a passenger in Terrapin?’

  Reaper nodded. ‘From our exchange of signals with Mudros when we needed to divert you to this place.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Last time we met, or thereabouts, I had the pleasant duty of telling you that you were getting a DSC. You’ve done better since, I hear.’

  ‘Thanks to you, I think, sir.’

  He’d won a DSO, at Zeebrugge — in a single hour when eleven other men had won VCs. But it could only have been on Reaper’s recommendation that Nick had got his first command – Bravo – and taken her on that wild excursion … He saw a tall, rather benign-looking lieutenant-commander come hurrying on to the quarterdeck: he was looking from one face to another. ‘Cameron?’ Over Nick’s head: ‘Are you Jake Cameron?’ Reaper, answering Nick’s last remark, waved a hand dismissively: ‘Nonsense. But I can tell you I’m extremely glad you’ve fallen into my hands again. You’re exactly what the doctor ordered!’

  ‘But I’m on my way to Mudros—’

  ‘You were on your way to Mudros. I’ve arranged to borrow you, for this operation. In point of fact, Everard, you’re the answer to my prayers.’ The other commander, the little tubby one, was in the act of joining them, interrupting Reaper: but he broke off again, seeing the newcomer, the tall man who was latching on to Cameron: ‘Ah, Wishart — wondered where the deuce you’d—’

  ‘Frightfully sorry.’ Wishart had quite a belly on him, for a man still under thirty. Reaper introduced Nick and the little commander: he was the executive officer of this cruiser, Harwich, and his name was Gillman. ‘Heard a great deal about you, Everard. And you’re Hugh Everard’s nephew, I’m told. Delighted …’ Rambling on, with a sort of boyish enthusiasm, as they shook hands: ‘Never met your uncle, unfortunately … But what a corker, eh? I mean, dishing the Gottingen, eh?’ Nick would have liked to listen only to Reaper, pump him, find out what he was being ‘borrowed’ for; but he was surrounded, getting bits and pieces of about three conversations at once, and having to respond politely to Gillman’s affability. He heard Wishart addressing Cameron just behind him … ‘Just in time, I may say. My navigator’s John Treat – know him? Well, he went and exploded his appendix, and I had to leave him behind in Mudros. Furious, of course, to be missing this show …’

  What show? And how could what was obviously a submarine operation concern him, Nick Everard?

  Reaper tapped the tall man, Wishart, on his shoulder. ‘Want you to meet Everard.’

  ‘Why, of course!’

  Wishart turned away from Jake Cameron, to shake Nick’s hand. ‘Very glad we’ll have you with us. We’
ll try to see you’re not too uncomfortable – but mind you, with two other passengers as well—’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything about it yet.’ Reaper told Nick, ‘Lieutenant-Commander Wishart is captain of E.57. You’ll be sailing in her tomorrow.’ He glanced over his shoulder: ‘But come on down now. We’re lunching with Captain Usherwood. We’ll see you later, Wishart.’

  Gillman and Truman had gone ahead.

  ‘I’m taking passage somewhere in E.57?’

  He could think of nothing he’d like less. The very thought of going inside a submarine sickened him. Reaper said, ‘A bit more than just taking passage. You’ll be going through the Dardanelles and into the Marmara, in order to sink or at any rate immobilise Goeben.’ He glanced sideways at Nick, just very briefly, as he led the way in through the port-side screen door. ‘All right?’

  One could hardly have given a quick affirmative to that question…

  Going through the Dardanelles would mean running the gauntlet of just about every submarine hazard that existed. And submarine hazards, one might reasonably feel, were things best reserved for the enjoyment of submariners. He certainly couldn’t see how or why Reaper wanted to involve him in it.

  Reaper had stopped at the top of a steel ladder that led down to the cruiser’s main deck. Truman and Commander Gillman were still on it, going down. Reaper seemed to guess Nick’s thoughts; he told him, ‘This is not at all a straightforward submarine operation, you see. Goeben is at Constantinople – inside the Golden Horn, well protected from torpedoes. So she has either to be winkled out – induced to put to sea so that our friend Wishart, or the French boat which will also be in the Marmara, can sink her — or alternatively, blown up where she’s lying.’