In the Line of Fire (A Donald Cameron Naval Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘Magazines flooded, sir,’ the communications number reported.

  ‘Thank you.’ Seymour moved to the engine-room voice-pipe. ‘Chief!’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Magazines flooded. I can’t say if it’s done the trick. I want you to turn over the main engines… gently, just for a trial run, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ came Matthews’ voice, grudging and surly. Seymour stepped back. Within the next few moments he could feel the subdued throb of the main engines as the shafts were geared in and began to turn at dead slow astern. He let out a long breath of relief and mopped at his forehead which was damp with sweat despite the intense cold: there had been no sudden surge, no racing of the screws, and that must mean they had bitten into water. The engine-room voice-pipe whined and Seymour answered it.

  ‘Captain here.’

  ‘Chief. She’s all right, anyway for now.’

  ‘So it paid off, Chief.’

  ‘Right, it did. I’ll still not speak for the buoyancy if the weather worsens again.’

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ Seymour said tightly. ‘Obey telegraphs, Chief.’ He slammed down the voice-pipe cover and spoke down the tube to the wheelhouse. ‘Cox’n, telegraphs to slow astern together, wheel amidships.’

  ‘Slow astern together, wheel amidships, sir,’ the Torpedo-Coxswain repeated. The engines throbbed, and very slowly Carmarthen began inching astern through the water, coming back to life. That life spread throughout her company: there were smiles in the wheelhouse and along the upper deck, even though the sea was now so close that the swell was surging inboard from time to time, rushing along below the searchlight platform and pouring past the engineers’ store to pound against the bulkhead of the galley flat, where the after watertight door had now been clipped down. The ship was moving once again; but she had a far from healthy feel — she was sluggish and wallowing as the swell took her and flung her about, the kind of reaction that said she might not rise to it if the weather should deteriorate again. One of those off watch who now thought she might not was Able-Seaman Tomkins.

  ‘She’s buggered if you ask me,’ he said, although no one had. ‘What are we making, eh? You, Your Lordship. You’ve just come off the bridge, right?’

  Cameron said, ‘Three knots maximum is the Captain’s estimate.’

  ‘An’ all that bleedin’ way to go,’ Tomkins said in disgust. ‘It’s askin’ too much. One whopper of a sea would send us under if we don’t die of cold first. Or if the ‘Uns don’t get us.’ After this he lapsed into silence and soon was snoring loudly. He was, Cameron thought, only too right about the bitter cold. Down here in the galley flat it was only a degree or so warmer than the compass platform, for the fires still remained drawn, the only warmth coming from the physical proximity of the packed, sleeping bodies. The atmosphere was almost fetid, with a fug that came from unwashed personnel and the foul condition of the seamen’s heads with their doorless openings. It was a miracle that human beings could suffer it all and not mutiny; but hard-lying, as it was known officially, brought a small amount of extra pay called hard-lying money, and the discomforts were accepted as paid for and as a part of naval life, part of the normal lot of the lower deck while the wardroom officers lived in comparative luxury in their cabins aft — except when, as now, those cabins were occupied by the less fortunate survivors of the convoy attack. Lower-deck conditions aboard Carmarthen were worse than Cameron had known in his father’s trawlers, though the same didn’t go for all trawlers. Cameron grinned to himself as he thought of his father: the old man wasn’t too well liked by his brother owners. They complained that he made his boats too soft, thus spoiling the trawlermen and encouraging them to expect similar conditions from other fleets. That had never worried Captain Henry Cameron: one of his sayings was that the labourer was worthy of his hire.

  Next time off watch, Cameron had his self-promised word with Lavington and found total opposition. Lavington was oddly adamant; there would be no reporting sick, because he wasn’t sick and would be seen through at once. There was a curious underlying insistence that somehow spoke of an inner knowledge that he was on the brink of a breakdown but didn’t want anyone to know it. He wanted a commission at all costs; he couldn’t go on taking the lower deck, it was bestial and his messmates were morons, working class to a man. Cameron realized it was useless; he was more worried than ever as a result and a little diffidently — the CW label was often inhibiting — he asked Petty Officer Thomas if he might raise a problem.

  ‘Go ahead, lad,’ Thomas said, holding one nostril closed and blowing hard down the other to leeward. ‘What’s it all about, then, eh?’

  ‘Ordinary Seaman Lavington, PO.’

  ‘Him, eh.’ Thomas sniffed and adjusted his sou’wester. ‘Well?’

  ‘I think he’s sick,’ Cameron said.

  ‘What of?’

  ‘I don’t know, PO, but I think he’s going to crack up and that may mean trouble. I was wondering…’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Perhaps he should report to the sick-bay.’

  Thomas laughed. ‘Up to him, isn’t it? Why not say so to him?’

  ‘I have,’ Cameron answered, and told Thomas the result. ‘I’m worried both for him and everyone else.’

  ‘It’s not your concern, young Cameron,’ Thomas said admonishingly. ‘His leading hand should raise it if he wants to. You’re not a bloomin’ officer yet, you know.’

  ‘No.’ Cameron found himself flushing. ‘Nor am I a do-gooder, normally! I’m sorry, PO. I expect I should have gone to Leading-Seaman Farrow if anyone —’

  ‘It’s not up to you! It’s Farrow’s job to see for himself, and he won’t thank you for doing it for him, will he now?’ Thomas laid a hand on Cameron’s shoulder. ‘All right, lad, you’ve done what you thought best, now leave it, all right? I’m not blind either… maybe I’ll talk to Farrow and then drop a word in Jimmy the One’s ear. Off you go now.’

  He had to leave it there; Jimmy the One — the First Lieutenant, now the RNR Sub — might act or he might not. It would be in his lap. Cameron had his dinner of cold bully beef and turned into his billet in the galley flat. It was two bells in the afternoon watch, and Cameron was dead asleep when the alarm came. The urgent rattlers jarred him awake and he scrambled with the others out from the galley flat to the iron-deck and his action station. It was almost a repeat of the last surface attack: as Cameron went fast up the bridge ladder he saw the U-boat just coming to the surface on the port bow with the water cascading from her casing and her close-range weapons coming into action already. A stream of machine-gun bullets zipped across the span of water and ricocheted off the steel-work of the bridge and midships superstructure, a sweeping arc of fire that scattered the men as they ran to their stations and left a dozen dead or wounded. Cameron watched helplessly as the inboard-sweeping swell took three men, dead or alive he knew not, and swept them willy-nilly into the sea to vanish. There was no time to think about them, however: as he climbed the ladder, a body crashed down from one of the four Lewis guns, then another. Blood poured; Cameron, climbing on, dashed for the Lewis gun which was swinging, crewless, on its mounting. As machine-gun bullets flew about him he seated himself at the Lewis, brought his sights on, and fired a sustained burst towards the U-boat’s conning-tower. He seemed to have taken the Germans by surprise: a cap flew, and a body slumped over the side of the conning-tower. Cameron sent another burst on to the same target. Simultaneously, as the U-boat’s casing-mounted 3.5-inch gun opened, another Lewis crew caught the German gunners fair and square and sent them reeling over the side. They were not quite in time: the shell from the U-boat smashed into the Carmarthen’s searchlight platform, and shell fragments scattered fore and aft. The Lewis gunners, joined now by the pom-pom crews, depleted their ready-use ammunition in keeping up a sustained fire over the German’s conning-tower and gun-mounting. Unable to send men to man the gun, and unable to use the machine-gun in the conning-tower, the German captain evident
ly decided to retreat. There was a swirl of water and the casing began to vanish.

  Seymour ordered, ‘Cease firing!’

  The U-boat disappeared beneath the surface. Seymour leaned over the compass platform guard-rail and called down. ‘Well done, Cameron. Quick thinking on your part.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Stock was taken of the situation: fifteen men dead, twenty wounded. It was a heavy toll and there was more bad news to come: an unwelcome quantity of the ready-use ammunition had been expended. With the after magazines now flooded as well as the forward ones, Carmarthen’s teeth were being drawn. She would soon be able to fight no more.

  *

  Making her three knots’ sternway, wallowing in the swell that would not leave her, Carmarthen moved slowly eastward. The galley fires had been flashed up again when the weather had moderated further and the off-watch surroundings were that much more bearable. The hot food was welcome: bangers and mash were a sight better than cold bully beef, and thick, hot cocoa went down well too. Cooked food in the stomach lifted spirits and revived optimism, though by now there was little to be really optimistic about. On the compass platform Seymour, who had had only briefly-snatched sleep for many days — a sum total of maybe four hours, no more — still stared bleakly from his corner, wrapped in oilskins and duffel-coat, the hood of the latter pulled well down around his unshaven cheeks. Constantly he did his sums, praying always that he was wrong. Three knots meant something like a hundred hours of steaming — it was a simple enough sum to do, but the result was unreliable since so many imponderables could intervene and extend the voyage almost to infinity. The weather was one imponderable, the Germans were another, the chance of rescue from the United Kingdom yet another and not to be counted upon. The Navy was over-stretched, badly. Certainly no fighting ship could be spared to search, locate and tow a battered destroyer across upwards of three hundred miles of the U-boat infested convoy lanes, though an ocean tug might be despatched — perhaps. Carmarthen would not be the only damaged warship in northern waters, and if, say, a battleship or cruiser was in similar difficulties then all efforts would be directed towards her rather than towards Carmarthen. Carmarthen had seen better days; she was elderly, having been completed just in time to see service in the last war. If it hadn’t been for Hitler’s war, she would have been scrapped by now. As it was, she had been withdrawn from the Reserve Fleet to be refitted and sent again to sea. She was expendable if more valuable ships called; that was a simple fact of war and the exigencies of the service. Seymour, as his eyes searched the sea for either trouble or assistance, found his mind drifting back to the piping days of peace. The peace-time Navy manned by the caretakers, as the reservists liked to call the RN, had been a very different service. The youthful Seymour — and by God he felt pretty aged now at the age of twenty-three — had emerged from the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, to join the Fleet as a midshipman and had been appointed for sea training to the great battleship, HMS Nelson, wearing the flag of the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet, a ship that swarmed with gunner’s mates afloat on a Whale Islandish sea of gas and gaiters. Everything aboard the flagship was immaculate, from the Admiral’s summer-season white cap cover to the pipe-clayed turks’-heads on the hatchway guard-rail stanchions. Everything was done by the bugle calls of the Royal Marines; and when the Home Fleet came to anchor, perhaps in Scottish waters, perhaps off Portland or in Spithead, everything was done to split-second timing: the great bower anchors went down, all ships together, to smash into the water as the brakes came off the cable-holders, and in the exact same instant the duty boats were lowered on the falls and the lower- and quarter-booms were swung out. Woe betide any officer or man who reacted a second late to the Admiral’s order. The Home Fleet was a proud institution; so was the Mediterranean Fleet, in which Mr Midshipman Seymour next served on appointment to the Renown, also wearing a flag, this time that of the Vice-Admiral Commanding the Battle-Cruiser Squadron, under the overall command of Admiral Sir William Fisher, Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, whose flag flew in HMS Queen Elizabeth. None of this meant a total unbendingness; the Navy was reasonably tolerant of, for instance, a seaman’s sense of humour: when Nelson, undergoing dry-docking in Portsmouth Dockyard, found herself a main exhibit of one Navy Week, her telegraphists dreamed up sample telegrams that could be sent from her transmitting room to the relatives of the visitors to the ship. The best-seller was the one that read: HAVING A LOVELY TIME WATCHING NELSON’S BOTTOM BEING SCRAPED.

  There had been happy, carefree days in Malta and Gibraltar; combined manoeuvres of the Home and Mediterranean Fleets when the harbour had been crammed with British warships of all sizes and the air had been vibrant with the bugle calls from the Army barracks as well as from the ships themselves. There had been regattas, there had been cruises to strange ports to show the flag and give the ships’ companies a run ashore. There had been women and there had been drink, although a young officer was well advised, for the sake of his career, to treat both the latter with reserve. There had been sport — cricket and football, shooting, sometimes hunting in the right sort of country: Seymour had borrowed a horse and hunted with the Calpe hounds in Andalusia in Spain, just across the isthmus joining the rock of Gibraltar to the mainland. There had been dances aboard the quarterdecks of the Fleet, romantic affairs under scrubbed white awnings with the Royal Marine band playing softly around the great fifteen-inch or sixteen-inch turrets of the Queen Elizabeth or the Nelson.

  There had been odd interludes, infuriating at the time but laughable at in retrospect: Mr Midshipman Seymour had an uncle who owned a coal-mine in Fife, and while serving in the Nelson, visiting the Firth of Forth, his uncle had invited him ashore to have a look around his coal-mine. After this interesting visit, Seymour had returned to the Rosyth dockyard to embark aboard the officers’ boat for his ship — and had met the battleship’s Commander who had been playing golf. The Commander, bound for a night’s entertainment and not wishing to be encumbered with his golf clubs, had asked Seymour to take them back to the ship for him; Seymour had naturally done so.

  Upon his return to the quarterdeck, he had met the majesty of the Commander-in-Chief pacing for his evening exercise.

  ‘Ah, Snotty,’ the great man said genially. ‘Been playing golf, I see.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Seymour corrected in all innocence. ‘I’ve been down a coal-mine, sir.’

  The result had been a fourteen-day stoppage of leave for impertinence, and no mumbled explanations accepted. Officers never made excuses and that was that, at any rate until the Commander put it right. It had been, all in all, a happy time and a hard one, with much work to be done, but Seymour wondered, as he stared from his shattered command, whether it had really fitted a man for modern war.

  It was a totally different service by now: it had been flooded out by the Royal Naval Reserve and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. RN stripes were becoming a rarity ashore and afloat. The RNR, both officers and men, were of course professional seamen though they didn’t necessarily know a lot about RN methods; the RNVR were certainly enthusiastic, but basically they were Saturday-afternoon sailors. The time-honoured saying had it that the RNR were sailors pretending to be gentlemen, the RNVR were gentlemen pretending to be sailors, and the RN were neither pretending to be both. No one took it seriously, of course, but there was a basis of some truth. The plain fact was that the reserve officers had risen to the challenge and were every bit as good as the straight stripers of the RN, without the supposed benefit of the peace-time bull and bugles and all that went with them. The lower deck was a rather different kettle of fish: the volunteers among the hostilities-only men were first-class material, but the majority of the intakes were conscripts, as was inevitable in the case of those who, when war had been declared, had been over the minimum age and automatically liable to call-up; and a number of them were unwilling ones. The peace-time Navy had not contained conscripts since the evil days of the press gangs and it didn’t take all that kindl
y to them now. The unwilling ones among them stood much in need of the stiffening provided by the long-service men, especially the chief and petty officers, as ever the real backbone of the Navy, many of them comparatively elderly men called back from the Royal Fleet Reserve to which all naval lower-deck pensioners were attached on retirement from active service. And they were the salt of the earth; many had served in the Grand Fleet under Jellicoe and Beatty. It was they, not the officers, who turned raw green youths into seamen.

  Then there was that new fish, the CW candidate, the White Paper rating, such as Cameron. Seymour, coming back from the past and once again facing the tense reality of war, thought about Cameron. Hewson, his dead Captain, had been impressed from the start and had fully intended giving Cameron his necessary recommend for his commission. He, Seymour, would honour that, and with pleasure, if nothing happened in the future to make him decide the other way. Cameron was reliable and could think for himself without waiting for orders: that was one of the attributes of an officer, or should be. Then there was Ordinary Seaman Lavington, and Seymour’s mouth turned down at the corners as he thought about him. An unforgivable mistake on someone’s part that he should ever have been given his first recommend, and that recommend would not be repeated. Lavington didn’t pull his weight and appeared to be as soft as soap. He was also a little obsequious, a quality that Seymour didn’t admire; arse-crawlers were not to be trusted. However, this was not the time to be worrying about that sort of thing. Proper consideration of Ordinary Seaman Lavington would have to wait till this lot was sorted out; it was essential to be fair, and before making a final decision the other officers, and Lavington’s divisional petty officer, would have to be consulted. But as it turned out, events were to force Seymour’s hand.