An officer? Coaling? The man had stripped off his jacket and his cover, so Garret couldn’t see his rank, but he had the air of a line officer. He was middle aged, though probably in better shape than Garret. Garret watched dumbly as the man began to shovel coal double time.
An officer is coaling. What?
Garret blinked down the line in shock. All along the dock, enlisted men like Garret had stopped dumbly as officers began shucking their jackets and even shirts, grabbing shovels and heaving coal as if their lives depended on it. It looked like twenty officers had joined them.
That’s probably half of Kearsarge’s officer corps.
Sailors were famous for their fish stories—the four hundred foot tall typhoon waves their ship had ridden out in the Azores, or the quarter mile long whales they’d seen spouting in the Arctic, or the bloodthirsty tiger sharks they’d fought off with nothing but their lanyard. But an officer with a coal shovel in hand was a more absurd story than any of those.
In the modern Navy of 1914, parts of the ship were off limits to the enlisted men, and often guarded by the ship’s complement of marines. Behind those closed hatches and portholes, the officers lived in a different world. Each night on the Columbia, Garret and his buddies hung their hammocks around their gun. There, sandwiched in with a hundred other men, they snored and swung to the rhythm of the ship. The officers, on the other hand, each had a small cabin that they did not share with anyone. The cabins were wood paneled and furnished with a bureau, a writing desk, and a small bed. The officers had a library on ship, complete with leather furniture, and a wardroom, which was a more boring way of saying they had a private banquet hall furnished well enough for a small mansion. In short, the class division between the have’s and the have-not’s was stronger at sea than it was on land.
In Garret’s opinion, officers never did any work. Ever. Unless you counted haranguing the enlisted guys who were actually working.
Yet, here the man was, standing right beside Garret, shovel in hand. “With me, men,” the officer said evenly, lifting a heap of coal that probably weighed as much as Garret did. The officer’s voice was as solid and unbreakable as the armor on his battleship. “You men have done well, and we’re almost there.”
The officer had shoveled three more heaps into the bag before Garret had his shovel back into the coal again. It wasn’t because Garret was slow. It was because the older man was that fast. Lordy, the man’s intense, Garret thought. Determination was radiating off of him in waves, charging the air around him. Garret found himself shoveling faster without meaning to.
The rest of the enlisted guys joined together again in the rhythm of task, and found a little more strength they didn’t know they possessed. The officer didn’t say a word for the rest of the coaling. He just shoveled at a rapid, unvarying pace, his knuckles wrapped around the wooden handle as tightly as the iron rivets that held his ship together.
At the end of it all, hours later, Garret’s head was fuzzy from lack of sleep and from the aches and pains reporting from every part of his body. The mountain of coal still loomed, though it was visibly diminished. Someone on deck was shouting “Bunkers at capacity, sir!” Garret’s legs were tingling with pins and needles.
My back’s fine, he told himself.
Garret leaned on his shovel like a creaky old man. The other young men around him were standing, sitting, and lying in the coal. Off to Garret’s left, Theo was curled up, his face tight with pain. Garret stumbled towards him to make sure as he was alright. The officer had disappeared some moments before. Garret didn’t see where he went, but Garret had the distinct impression that even if the officer had started at the same time as the rest of them, he still would have worked circles around them all.
Chapter 7
Four AM the same night
Bells went wild, trilling, ringing, bonging as if demons had invaded the earth. The clangor jarred Garret from sleep. He flailed to a sitting position, rocking his hammock wildly. Everyone around him was doing something similar. Twitch’s reaction was spectacular enough that he flipped his hammock and fell several feet to the deck. The bo’sn was piping somewhere beneath the din of alarms. Garret took a couple breaths to steady himself and slow his heart. He focused on the bo’sn’s pipe. He was playing the tune for general quarters.
Battle stations? Garret wondered groggily. God, it’s another drill.
Theo curled tightly in his hammock as if the bells were fists, beating on his slight frame. Pun’kin slept right through it. Fishy rose from beneath his blankets like a small sea monster surfacing. He had blood-shot eyes, and was growling metaphors about all manner of improbably sexual activities.
Garret inhaled to clear his head. It didn’t work very well because of how badly the ship stank like sweat. But the smell of sweat was a small matter while alarm bells were clanging. Garret squinted owlishly around, confused. The harsh electric lights always bothered his eyes when he first awoke. Where am I? He was in his hammock, but not on a berth deck. He was on a battleship gundeck. Or at least that was what he had to assume based upon the gigantic gun poking out the side of the ship beneath him. His hammock was strung above it like a little awning.
Garret blinked slowly and rubbed his head. Why am I sleeping over top of a 5”/40? Wait, this isn’t the Columbia. I’m on the USS Kearsarge now, inside the citadel, and we’re underway. Have been since we finished coaling.
The ship was headed down the Delaware River for the Atlantic Ocean. That was one of the last things Garret heard before he and his friends had climbed into their hammocks and fallen into a coma-like sleep. The master chief had told them. What was his name? Damn, Garret had already forgotten his name. He seemed quite a bit nicer than Chief Dodson, Garret remembered that, at least.
To Garret’s right, Twitch was on his knees on the deck. Unlike everyone else, he seemed to be fully awake. He had a thoughtful, resigned look on his face. Alarms began to switch off one at a time, but the bo’sn was still piping. Floyd was sitting up, one eye open, the other only halfway. “Whass? Whazz?”
Their new chief burst into the citadel from the main deck. He was an older man, ancient, to Garret’s young eyes. “All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill,” he barked, so down out of his hammock Garret crawled. His back punished him mercilessly.
So this is what it feels like to be old.
Twitch was already moving for the gun beside Garret. “Lover Boy, get your hammock out of the way,” he said.
That, at last, woke Garret up. Oh shit. Do they expect us to man this gun? We haven’t been trained yet.
“Twitch, what’s going on?” Garret asked as he stretched up on his tip toes to unhook each end of his hammock. “Where are we?” Garret’s entire body was cramped from shoveling coal a couple hours before, so the stretching brought a relieving pain to his muscles. Most of the other guys looked hobbled up, too.
Twitch shrugged and grimaced as he grabbed a handle on the rear of the gun and began turning it as quickly as he could in big circles. “We’re still on the Delaware River. Other than that, you know as much as I do,” he said.
Boy I wish I did, Garret thought as he watched Twitch haul the rear of the gun open and inspect the inside of the breech. I don’t even know what you’re doing.
Floyd, who was unhooking the other end of Garret’s hammock said it aloud. “They don’t expect us to run this gun do they?”
“There’s eight of us.” Twitch replied shortly. “We need nine, but we’ll make it work. Curtis, grab a ramrod off the rack. That rack over there.” He pointed. Then he frowned at the big empty steel rack secured to the blast shield. “Not one shell at the ready,” he griped.
Garret rolled his hammock up, tucked it into a corner of the rack and prayed an officer wouldn’t skin him for it. Fishy ducked under his and Curtis’s hammocks on his way towards Twitch. “Twitch, we’re not a gunnery crew. We can’t just—”
“We are now,” Twitch interrupted. “Only
a gun crew sleeps with a gun. They assigned us here. I had hoped we weren’t as short-handed as it looked like last night, but if we’re manning this gun, then they’re desperate. Kearsarge must not have anywhere near a full crew.”
Twitch pointed to the steel hatches that closed over the wide gun port to keep the weather out when the gun wasn’t in use. “Minnow, get those port covers open.”
Theo did as he was told, deliberately and with focus.
Twitch turned to Garret. “Lover Boy, Floyd, unhook just the near ends of our hammocks and hook them to the far ends. That should clear a path between the gun and the ammo hoist. We don’t have time to trice up and stow. Curtis, Sweet Cheeks, Pun’kin, Fishy, you guys are the biggest, so you’re our ammo crew.”
Sweet Cheeks nodded and Pun’kin, Curtis, and Fishy stood there dumbly. Sweet Cheeks and Twitch were the only two guys with any experience at sea.
“I once knew a guy who was so big he didn’t need a shell to load a thirteen inch gun,” Sweet Cheeks said, then patted Curtis and Pun’kin on the shoulders. “Come on.”
Fishy flashed his patented girl-swooner grin and followed. Curtis squinted in confusion. Pun’kin stood there for a second, then guffawed. Maybe he got it, maybe he didn’t. Who knew.
Garret looked around. Where’s the ammo hoist? Oh right, I’m supposed to be unhooking hammocks. He started with the end of Sweet Cheeks’s hammock that was nearest to the gun. Floyd was doing the same with the near end of Fishy’s hammock.
Twitch was talking quickly to Curtis, Sweet Cheeks, Fishy, and Pun’kin as he ran his hands around inside of the gun breech. “You guys need a fifth man so you can have a separate ramrodder, but we’ll have to improvise. Sweet Cheeks, unlock the ammo hoist. Curtis and Pun’kin, you’ll be carrying the shells.”
Twitch apparently didn’t like what he felt inside the breech, because he was shaking his head as he turned away. “God, this ship’s old,” he said.
Garret had moved on to Theo’s hammock. Thanks to Twitch’s instructions, everyone else was moving too, sort of like a team, if not exactly a well-oiled one. We’d be lost without Twitch.
Twitch was now talking to a couple guys who had poked their heads around the steel bulkhead that served as a divider between their gun area and the next one down.
“Does somebody in your gun crew know what to do?” Twitch asked them.
The guys blinked at each other, then one of them said, “We’re a gun crew?”
Twitch gritted his teeth. “This is going to be a fun morning. Figure out how to get your breech block open and get your hammocks out of the way like this,” Twitch pointed to what Garret and Floyd had nearly finished. “And I’ll be there in a second.”
The guys disappeared to do as Twitch had said. Garret could feel their relief as they went. A Navy man without an order to fulfill was a lost soul indeed.
“Lover Boy,” Twitch said to Garret as he pointed, “get on train and then on elevation and turn those big brass wheels a bit. Get a feel for how they move the gun and then explain it to the other guys.”
Garret swallowed. “Uh, okay…”
Twitch jogged away from him towards the divider. He called over his shoulder to Sweet Cheeks, Curtis, and Fishy, “When the ammo comes up, start stocking our rack. Armor piercing rounds up top.”
“What’s an armor pier—?”
Twitch went around the divider out of sight to help the next gun crew. As near as Garret could remember from what he’d seen while they were coaling, Kearsarge had seven guns like theirs protruding in a row down each of her flanks. That would mean there were five such dividers down the inside of Kearsarge’s citadel.
Right, I remember this from basic training. They’re blast shields… I think. The heavy steel dividers also provided semi-separate work areas for the crews that manned each gun. Unfortunately that also meant the crews couldn’t see each other. In other words, unless most of the other crews had proper training, or had a Twitch of their own, Twitch would be gone for a while.
We might have to figure out how to load this thing by ourselves.
Garret stepped out around the divider for a better look. The citadel was the armored central third of the ship’s body. Basically, the inside of the citadel was a big steel rectangle with guns and their associated items around the edges, and machinery and work spaces lined down the center. Despite the huge guns, ammo hoists, hatches, equipment, and even offices, the inside of the citadel felt roomy.
The gun that Garret and his friends were supposed to man was 5”/40 gun Number One, on the starboard side. He felt Sweet Cheeks beside him. Sweet Cheeks spoke in a low voice and pointed as he named things. “That huge thing in the middle is one of the funnels from the engines below. The bakery is around on the other side of the funnel, then moving further down, you’ve got the officer’s galley, then the crew’s galley, then the blacksmith’s shop around the stern funnel, then you’ve got the Executive Officer’s office and the Paymaster’s office, and that really nice looking enclosed area at the far end is the junior officer’s dining room. We won’t be allowed in there.”
Theo appeared between Garret and Sweet Cheeks. “Where’s Twitch?” Theo asked.
“Went to help the next gun crew,” Garret said. And probably the next and the next and the next. Garret glanced at the gun port, the vast window-like opening through which the gun could swing. Theo had opened all three of the heavy port covers and lowered them without letting any of them slam against the ship’s sides. Garret wondered how he’d managed it by himself.
Theo nodded and went after Twitch.
Garret stepped up to “train,” which was one of the two small platforms mounted on either side of the gun. A large brass wheel, like an oversized valve on a water main, was connected to a turntable gear, six feet in diameter, on which rode the entire gun. Garret grabbed the brass wheel and began turning. It spun easily enough, but didn’t seem to be changing anything.
The gun’s not moving. Then he noticed the degree marks around the turntable gear. No, it is moving. Garret turned the brass wheel faster. The monstrous gun began to turn beneath Garret, taking him, his brass wheel, and his pedestal with it as it went. At the moment, the gun was pointed as far towards stern as it could go, which was about three-quarters of the way. He continued to turn the wheel, and the gun pivoted glacially towards Kearsarge’s bow.
Lordy, it’s a good thing warships can’t change direction very fast. We’d never be able to aim this thing in time if they could.
Fishy stepped up on the other platform on the opposite side of the gun. Another well-greased whir came from Fishy’s side. Apparently he had found another wheel. As he turned it, the long heavy barrel of the gun, ten feet of which protruded from the side of the ship, began to lift.
That must be “elevation,” Garret thought. So Fishy and I are the guys who are gonna aim this thing. Maybe this won’t be so hard.
“Uh, guys,” Floyd asked, “is it supposed to be doing that?”
Garret stared stupidly at the gun for a moment before realizing that Floyd and the rest of them were looking out the gun port.
“What wrong?” Pun’kin asked loudly, breathing down Garret’s neck.
“Look at the shoreline, Pun’kin,” Sweet Cheeks said.
They all leaned forward and stared into the dark. Night was still an hour from twilight, so other than a few low lying stars, there was little to separate the black shoreline from the black sky. Kearsarge’s deck lights shed some illumination on the dark river around them, but they didn’t reach the shore. After a lot of staring, Garret began to pick out an occasional house along the treeline. Rarely, a lamp was lit in a window. Together, it was enough to get a rough idea of where the shore lay. They appeared to be drifting towards it.
“Unless they’re doing some weird maneuver, we’re listing to starboard,” Fishy said, crossing his arms with concern. “That must be what all the alarms were about.”
They were still on the
Delaware River, as Twitch had surmised. Garret hadn’t yet learned much about on-ship life, but the shoreline was close enough to their heavy man-o-war to make him nervous, and it was getting closer with each passing moment, as if Kearsarge had decided to ram the shore with all of her unimaginable weight. It brought an imminent sense of catastrophe, like watching two continents about to collide.
“We’re not having our first battle tonight, boys,” Fishy said leaning against their gun. “You can give your murdering-boners a rest.”
“This isn’t much better,” Floyd said nervously. “If they run this thing aground…” Even as he said it, Kearsarge’s engines cut out.
If the steam engines in Kearsarge’s belly were as big as the one’s Garret had seen aboard Columbia, then they were two stories tall. Their operation produced an omnipresent chuffing cacophony that was felt as much as heard. The sudden absence of it made the ship feel empty.
Still they drifted forward, borne by the momentum of Kearsarge’s immense size and the weight of all her armor and guns. Garret felt Curtis’s imposing bulk step up behind him.
“But if the ship runs aground, it just… runs aground, right?” Garret asked. “I mean nobody’s going to get killed, right?”
Twitch was gone, so everybody looked around for Sweet Cheeks. He was gone too, without a word.
“Where did he go?” Curtis asked.
No one replied. All they could do was wait. Garret found himself tugging at his earlobe distractedly. He felt his back tightening up as he began to make out individual trees and even an occasional house or farm on the shore.
Floyd was wound up tighter than a banjo string. Even Fishy was getting tense as he leaned against the gun. “We’re not going to stop in time, are we?” he asked.
Floyd shrugged, with eyes a bit wider than normal. “Battleships are heavy,” he said.
A thick bearish Russian accent interrupted them. “Stop lollygagging and get to your work, men. That problem is the engineers’ job, this gun is yours.”
Ironclad Page 6