SV - 03 - Sergeant Verity Presents His Compliments (3 page)

'What in God's name was that?' he asked, shivering.

Ransome picked himself up from the littered fragments of glass and the overturned furniture.

'Get your bitch dressed!' he said, brushing down his
tunic vigorously. 'Get on deck!
'

But Morant-Barham was peering into the wrecked cabin, kneeling and fumbling in the gloom.

'The sovs, Jack, the sovs! All on the floor somewhere!'

'Damn the money!
Get up, unless
you want this brig for a coffin!
'

The hull of the ship was coming alive again with voices and footsteps in the passageway. Ransome pushed Morant-Barham through the shuffling files of men, along narrow passages and up iron ladders in the warren of the
Birkenhead.
They moved almost in silence, the majority of them having been shaken from their deepest sleep by the blow. A party of foot soldiers, moving at the double, crossed the path of the escapers. Steam hissed from the safety-valves as the hull moved again under their feet, wallowing in the ocean surges like a dead whale. Deep in the ship's entrails they heard the funere
al clang! clang! Clang!
of the first iron hand-pump which the soldiers had manned.

'Now,' said Ransome, pushing forward, 'sharp's the word and quick's the motion!'

As the ominous tolling of the pumps echoed through the emptying hull, Captain Salmond, commander of the
Birkenhead,
and Colonel Seton, as senior military officer on board, reached the quarter-deck. On the main deck, below them, where the tall thin funnel breathed its smoke and sparks into the night air, the depot companies were pushing and mingling as they strove to assemble by regiments. The officer of the watch presented the charts to Salmond.

'Point Danger five miles to port, sir,' he said, gesturing through the darkness towards the African coast. Salmond looked at the chart briefly and then waved it away. There was nothing marked in the ship's path but any East India captain knew that a hundred reefs off the coast of Cape Colony had never been charted. Danger Rock, several miles off the Point, was the unmarked grave of a dozen vessels but thousands had passed it in safety. It was a remote chance, not even a chance in a thousand, but HMS
Birkenhead
had hit the saw-toothed ridge of the reef at 2 am, bows-on, and full speed ahead.

On the main deck, below Salmond and his officers, the troops swarmed like bees from an overturned hive, surging from the hatches and companionways. The junior officers, the first on the scene, endeavoured to restore order,

'De
pot Company, 73rd Foot, fall in!
...
12th Lancers! Fall in, lads! Fall in!'

'She'll tear herself open on the rock if she stays fast in this tide,' said the officer of the watch, not quite out of Salmond's hearing. The men on the quarter-deck could feel the ocean swell and the strong night-wind pulling the stern of the ship round and then swinging it back again. At each movement there was the shrill bird-shriek of metal twisting against rock.

Salmond called sharply,

'Mr Hetherington!
Two turns slow astern, if you please!'

'Two turns slow astern, sir!' Hetherington's voice echoed down the speaking-tube. The engine-room telegraph rang its familiar and reassuring code. Among the steam released by the safety mechanism during the ship's immobility, the engineer officer wiped his forehead with his sleeve and closed the valve. The mighty pistons of the paddle-axle recoiled once and then twice. The finned wheels threshed the water in two precise strokes.

The
Birkenhead
seemed to glide clear of the obstruction and there was a subdued cheer from some of the troops on the deck. But no sooner had the paddles stopped than the sea carried the hull forward again. The grinding of metal on rock and the rending of timbers rang hideously loud in the stillness of the night air. In the forward troop-deck, the last of the riflemen to push their way towards the companion-ladders heard the sound at their backs and turned to see with horror the entire bulkhead buckle and burst under the thundering weight of sea. Far below the ship's waterline, there was no escape for them. Men and their equipment were caught in the swirl of dark water, clutching at chairs or tables as the foul bilge water reached them first. It was no sudden death. Ten or fifteen minutes might pass before the last obstinate pocket of air was driven out and the few survivors were forced against the upper deck-beams, holding their breath against the cold flood overwhelming them until their lungs burst.

On the main deck, Colonel Seton had established order among the survivors of the depot companies, his company commanders taking up the cry, 'Fall in, in drill stations!' Seton himself was with his 74th Highlanders when Frank Chamberlain slipped across to take his farewell of young Joey Morant-Barham.

'Well, old fellow, I don't suppose we shall all of us come out of this with our feet dry. But if you do, and I don't, and if there should be a court of inquiry, do tell them that the drivelling old idiot commanding the ship sank us by going astern off a rock, when the only thing that might save us was slow ahead. I ain't
a wet-bob but I know that much!’

They shook hands Firmly, and Chamberlain marched away to his regiment.

On the bridge, Captain Salmond heard the inrush of water at the bows swelling to a mighty flood. Belatedly, he came to the same conclusion as Frank Chamberlain.

'Let go the bower cable, Mr Hetherington! Keep her on the rock, if you can. Once she slips off now, there's no holding her."

But the tone of the messages brought by runners from the lower decks was hardly encouraging. The forward holds were under water and there was nothing for it but to draw the soldiers and their hand-pumps back, abandoning part of the ship to the sea. It was ten minutes since the
Birkenhead
had struck the reef and already the stern was beginning to lift clear of the water as the bows settled. The paddle-wheels hung idle and the trail of smoke from the thin black funnel was replaced by the whistle of escaping steam.

'Mr Archibald,' said Salmond softly to his gunner, 'fire the pivot-guns. They may be seen by some of the settlements or by another ship.'

As the gunner doubled away, Salmond's officers looked down and saw the troopers of the 12th Lancers herding their chargers from the horse-boxes on the main deck, driving them towards the port gangway-opening. One after another the terrified animals were half-pushed and half-thrown by the men over the side of the ship and into the dark surges.

'Poor brutes!' said Hetherington.

'Those poor brutes can swim, Mr Hetherington,' said Salmond tersely. 'They don't like it, but they may
reach land long before you or I.’

The gunner reappeared, breathless.

"The entire foredeck is awash, sir! No way through to the magazine and in any case the shells for the pivot guns must be under water already.'

A great weariness appeared to settle on Captain Salmond.

'Very well,' he said. 'Mr Hetherington, order the firing of the distress rockets.'

The officers on the quarter-deck busied themselves in letting off the flares. The dark blue flash of the rockets lit the surrounding water in a garish pyrotechnic display.

A score of the sputtering missiles rose in their long arc and then glided down, settling on the sea like so many malevolent birds, continuing to burn with a slow blue fire which cast its sickly light over the wreck of the
Birkenhead.

The last of the horses, hysterical with fear, had been pushed into the purplish gloom with a floundering splash. Regimental companies waited in drill order, their commanders before them and a group of women and children huddled close to each formation.

'Mr Hetherington!' called Salmond, "an account of the ship's boats, if you please.'

Hetherington consulted the list which had been brought him.

'Both main pinnaces wrecked by falling spars, sir, at the moment of striking the rock. Port and starboard paddle-box boats ready for lowering, Ship's cutter pre
pared, and two small gigs, sir.’

'And the complement now?'

'Four hundred men mustered, sir, all others lost below decks. Fifty crew, including Royal Marines on guard. All women and children safe, sir, one hundred and thirty of them all told.'

Salmond straightened up from the rail on which he had been leaning.

'My compliments to Colonel Seton. The boats must be lowered at once. Will he have the goodness to see the women and children safely into them? The men must stand fast or their numbers will swamp the boats.'

As he spoke, the hull shifted again under their feet and there was a distant sound of crumbling wood and metal. Steam from the boilers was now escaping in a deafening hiss but Salmond was so absorbed in his task that he hardly seemed to notice such distractions. His officers looked down on the scene below where their men scurried to lower the two boats carried on the paddle-boxes. Ropes had been hoisted over one of the yard-arms to form makeshift davits for the port boat. Teams of pig-tailed sailors hauled on the lines until the boat swung up and over the ship's rail, suspended with the swell of the sea below it. As the little craft hung just under the level of the yard-arm there was an abrupt crack and the makeshift tackle snapped. The stem of the boat fell with a splintering of board on to the rail of the
Birkenhead.
Like actors in a grim farce, the sailors left the wrecked lifeboat and raced across to the starboard paddle-box to assist in lowering the other boat. The soldiers of the depot companies stood impassively at attention, their faces lit by the faint blue light of the rocket-floats.

Salmond watched them swing the starboard boat up from its paddle-box and clear of the ship's rail. But he could see that the ropes were too thick and the blocks too small. This might not have mattered so much if the crane-pins and sheave-pins of the lowering gear had been scraped free of rust regularly and coated with tallow and black lead to preserve and lubricate the mechanism. But there was no time for such luxuries in the routine of a ship like the
Birkenhead.
The starboard lowering-gear creaked and then jammed hopelessly, leaving the lifeboat suspended at a steep angle half-way down the ship's side. There seemed no question of being able to free it in the time that was left.

On the other side, however, the cutter had been lowered. Even there, when the boat was ten feet above the waves, the forward tackle gave, parting with a loud snap, so that the bows crashed to the water, spilling into the breakers the four men who had been paying out the tackle within the boat itself. By the time that the angle of the boat had been righted, there was no sign of the heads which had bobbed briefly among the waves.

The gangway was open, the rope ladder thrown down the wet and pitching plates of the hull. Colonel Seton strode across to the rail with two of his officers and, to the surprise of the onlookers, the three of them drew their swords.

'Let the women and children through,' he said Firmly. 'The women and children first.'

Salmond heard him and thought to himself that the cutter would not hold a quarter of the women and children. One or two smaller boats might be got away in the time left. Perhaps they would hold the remainder of the men's families but it would be a damn close-run thing. For the men themselves there was nothing but to remain as they were on the sloping deck of the doomed ship, in regimental order as precise and well-disciplined as if it had been a review at Woolwich or in Windsor Park.

The cutter was already full and pulling away from the ship's side under the command of a youthful midshipman. A huddle of women and crying children who had been left behind attracted Cornet Morant-Barham's attention. He watched them miserably. Presently a small pinnace was lowered and Colonel Seton, glancing down once to see that it was secured, called softly,

'Down you go then! Smartly as you can!'

When the women and their children had already overloaded the frail craft, he held his sword across the gangway opening.

'No more in this one,' he said gently.

Morant-Barham saw to his horror that one of the distraught women who had been turned back was Janet, and that she was coming towards him, weeping incoherently with fright. He moved to her, not knowing what to do. At that moment, the last of the fugitives to be permitted through, tousled, grimy and aged beyond her years, turned and saw the weeping girl. She ducked back under Seton's sword.

'Ah'm staying wi' Atherton’
she said firmly, and limped away to find the Fusiliers so that she might take up her vigil as close to him as possible.

Morant-Barham caught Janet by the arm, thrusting her forward. As he did so, he drew from his pocket a little wash-leather bag, heavy with the weight of sovereigns, and pressed it into her hand.