The Dangerous Years (2 page)

Orrmont smiled. ‘We’d better let the ship’s company know first,’ he said. ‘If they don’t know already.’

As the lower deck was cleared and the sailors gathered aft in an atmosphere of barely-controlled excitement, Orrmont climbed on to the winch.

‘I’m no speechmaker,’ he said, ‘so I’ll just read to you a signal I’ve this minute received.’ He gestured with the sheet of paper. ‘“Admiralty General Message: Armistice is signed–”’

There was an immediate yell of delight which died abruptly as Orrmont held up his hand. ‘Don’t rush it,’ he said. ‘It gets better as it goes along: “Hostilities are to be suspended forthwith… Armistice to be announced at 1100. All general methods of demonstrations to be permitted – and encouraged – including bands.”’

Cheering started again but Orrmont held up his hand once more. ‘One more thing,’ he went on. ‘I have also received a signal to the effect that the customary method of celebrating an occasion by splicing the main brace may be carried out at 1900.’

The ship shook under the din, and as it died away they became aware of more cheering corning from other parts of the Flow. Tots of rum, saved specially for the occasion, began to appear below decks, and accordions, mouth organs and tin whistles were brought out of lockers for an impromptu concert.

That night, as the alcohol began to work, every siren in the harbour screamed and every bell was rung. Rockets crossed the sky, and flares and grenades went up in every direction under the moving searchlights, as each ship and each unit tried to celebrate the occasion in its own way in a pandemonium of noise. The big ships started it with their deep-throated bellows, and quickly every other ship, big and small, took up the racket. A deafening din rose over the flat waters of the Flow which, as though part of the celebrations, were lit by an enormous moon. Steam whistles shrieked, sirens split the air with shrill blasts, and foghorns joined in with their lower-pitched hootings in a tumultuous cacophony. Alternately falling then rising again to tremendous crescendos, the discordance resounded across the shores for three solid uninterrupted hours until 10 p.m., only to start again at midnight, while on deck the sailors danced, sang, shouted and cheered until they were hoarse or exhausted.

From the bridge, surrounded by brilliant stars, Kelly watched in silence. Instinctively his hand went to the pink scar that Jutland had left over his eye. That day the Navy had lost good ships and better men and had suffered a humiliation they hadn’t believed possible. At least, he thought, there’d be no more wounds, no more killing, no more grief. Yet, under the elation the thought induced, there was also a strange aching feeling of incompleteness. Despite Jutland, the Navy had won a victory greater than Trafalgar but only by denying the sea to the Germans; because they’d never thrashed them as they’d hoped and expected, the victory was far less spectacular.

‘Well, it’s over, Number One.’

He turned to find Orrmont standing alongside him.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’

‘But I think there’s a sense of failure.’ Orrmont was clearly thinking the same way as himself. ‘An armistice before a Trafalgar’s not the same as one afterwards.’

‘It’ll certainly seem to everybody that it was the army that polished off the Kaiser without us doing much of the fighting,’ Kelly agreed.

Orrmont shrugged. ‘They’d never have done it without us,’ he said. ‘They might have given ’em a few black eyes but in the end it wasn’t black eyes that finished ’em. It was the blockade and starvation, and it was the Navy that did that.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets and leaned on the bridge rail. ‘There’ll be leave eventually,’ he went on. ‘I expect you’re looking forward to it as much as anyone. Got a girl?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Going to marry her?’

‘Eventually, sir.’

‘Think she’ll wait?’

Kelly smiled. If there was one thing in the world he was sure about it was that. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sure.’

Orrmont smiled. ‘Well, I suspect you’ll have to hang on just a bit longer to see her,’ he said. ‘We have a job to do first. I gather the German Fleet’s coming in to surrender.’

‘Think they’ll come, sir?’

Orrmont smiled again. ‘Don’t think they have an option,’ he said. ‘They no longer control their ships. They’re being run, it seems, by sailors’ soviets and the red flag’s flying at all the naval ports. Mutiny’s a terrible thing.’

Kelly stared round the assembled ships and the bare lonely shapes of the islands. ‘Up here,’ he said. ‘I often felt like it myself.’

Ten days later the German ships appeared. There had been constant rumours that they might come out for a final battle or would try to get themselves interned in Holland, and even now no one knew how the end would be. Would they surrender tamely or go down with their colours flying in a ‘death ride’ against the Grand Fleet?

In an atmosphere of excitement and tension, the light forces led the way out, flotilla by flotilla, to meet them. In a tumult of churned water and the hum of boiler room blowers, they passed through the boom one after the other, watched by patrol boats and drifters, one hundred and fifty destroyers all steaming east.

The channel lay by Inch Garvie and Drum Sand. They’d used it many times before, in the dark, past bell and buoy, in fog and under the pale northern stars, clearing for action as they went, as they were cleared now, still prepared to do battle if the Germans decided on a Wagnerian gesture of self-immolation. Every ship in the Royal Navy that could be spared was there – from Dover, Harwich, Scapa and the Channel – three hundred and seventy of them and ninety thousand men, every ship flying as many white ensigns as possible as if they were going into action. Each column consisted of over thirty battleships, battle cruisers and cruisers, with a destroyer abreast each flagship. Heading the line was Beatty’s
Queen
Elizabeth
, wearing the flag the admiral had flown in
Lion
during the Battle of Jutland.

As the light increased the air seemed to grow cooler. The water, invisible during the night, now became long cold lines of grey movement, and the black loom of ships merged into the pale wash of day. There would be sixty-nine of the Germans, they’d heard – two of them missing because one had engine trouble and another had struck a mine – humiliated ships run by committees of sailors who claimed kinship with the International Proletariat and said they were the brothers of the mutinous men of the Russian Navy. They’d long since lost their fighting potential, because they’d been drained of their best men for the submarines and destroyers, and when the officers had wished to take them to sea in a last desperate attack, the desire for peace had erupted in a revolution and officers had had to escape in cars, on bicycles and on foot to avoid arrest. When
Königsberg
had brought senior naval officers to discuss the terms of surrender they had been accompanied by sailors claiming their admirals were only advisers. Their humiliated officers had had the satisfaction of seeing them told to go to hell.

‘Here they are!’

Smoke had appeared on the horizon, then one after the other, they began to pick out the masts and upperworks of the German ships; grey shapes still, but menacing in their blunt outlines. Kelly drew a deep breath. The last time he’d seen these ships, he’d come away from the encounter with a livid wound across his back, a flap of flesh hanging over his eye, a fractured cheekbone and the danger of losing his sight. Wellbeloved was on the deck below him and he saw him also catch at his breath.

‘Friedrich der Grosse
leading,’ Kelly pointed out flatly, recognising the outlines he’d been studying in books through four long years. ‘I can also see
Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger, Hindenburg
and
Von Der Tann.’

Orrmont turned. ‘How do they look, Number One?’

‘A lot tamer than when I last saw them, sir.’

‘Bring a lump to your throat?’

‘More like a flutter to the heart, sir.’

‘Well, you never know. We might still have to sink them. It needs only one chance shot to start the whole thing again.’

Silently, like grey ghosts, the outriders of the two fleets met. In gas masks, asbestos flame helmets, gauntlets and breast shields, the allied crews waited at action stations. But there was no hostility. The Germans were demoralised and they were coming without heroics. As they passed through the line of destroyers Kelly was aware of a deep depression and the aftermath of tension. Had they been held in check all these months by an error of judgement? Had they been deterred only by a myth? Had the threat they’d believed in been merely imaginary?

As the Germans approached, the men crowded the main deck and the spaces round the funnels and the gun platforms, pushing among the torpedo tubes and clinging to the boats for a better view. Every ship was stationed on a pre-selected enemy vessel, her guns trained across the narrow stretch of water. On the deck of the ship ahead of
Mordant
film makers were recording the scene, and the German sailors, scowling at the levelled cameras, mimicked the movements of the men cranking the handles and wigwagged unprintable messages in English.

The day was fair now, with a clear blue sky above the thin whitish mist that shrouded the outlines of masts and hulls and the restless sea swell. As the destroyers hurried by, the ocean was filled with their movement. There seemed no end to them, the air vibrating to their washes and the shudder and hum of machinery. Reaching the end of the German column, with a flutter of flags they wheeled and brought up short abreast the accompanying German destroyers. Three light cruisers,
Cardiff, Phaeton
and
Castor
, moved to a position ahead of the Germans. Over
Cardiff
a kite balloon jerked irregularly at its cable, the man in the basket staring through binoculars down at the German ships.

‘They look like minnows leading in a lot of whales.’ The bearded gunner with the DSM standing below the bridge spoke slowly, wonderingly.

Orrmont smiled. ‘They remind me,’ he said to Kelly, ‘for all the world of a herd of bullocks being brought in by a bunch of farm kids.’

The Germans were in single line ahead, nine battleships, five battle cruisers, seven light cruisers and forty-nine destroyers, and the curves of their turrets picked up the sunshine through the mist. Then from
Mordant’
s stern came an unexpected jeering cry and the triumphant sound of one of the cooks beating a wooden spoon on a metal baking tin in a wild tattoo.

‘Shut that bloody fool up!’ Kelly barked, and the clatter stopped at once.

The solitary celebrant was a man who had recently joined the ship. There was little sign of joy among the other men, especially those who’d survived the hammering they’d received at Jutland, and there was a deep underlying emotion running through the ship so that they were too full for words at the drama of defeat.

‘It can’t be true. It’s against human nature.’ The words came this time from Leading Seaman Rumbelo, standing near the forward gun, and as he stared at the phantom ships Kelly saw there was an odd look in his eyes of contempt, pity and mourning.

The German ships were a gloomy sight that Kelly found distasteful – as if he were a part of a crowd assembled for the funeral of some sordid individual who’d been murdered – and he found it incredible, too, that the second naval power in the world could surrender so tamely without attempting to strike a single blow in defence of its honour.

‘Anticlimax in large letters,’ Orrmont said. ‘I never really thought they’d submit. I never dreamed they’d accept disgrace in silence. It’s damned hard to find the right words.’

‘I expect the Hurrah Departments of the national press will find them for you, sir,’ Kelly said dryly.

The main fleet appeared through the mist, looking like huge shadows, silent, stretching for three miles on either hand. With their French and American accompanying units, there were fifty-six dreadnoughts, fifty-six vast ships, the water between their columns stirred to choppy foam as their wakes crossed and recrossed. As they reached the end of the German line, coloured squares and pennants fluttered aloft paused, then swept down. The leading ships began to turn outwards sixteen points, moving with elephantine slowness as Beatty reversed course. The manoeuvre was executed with exquisite precision, every ship and every man eager to show what they could do, to prove that the German claim of victory at Jutland had been nonsense from the beginning. The turn had placed Beatty’s ship abeam of
Friedrich der Grosse
, and for a while the sea seemed to be full of enormous ships, as the Grand Fleet countermarched to move with the Germans towards the Firth of Forth.

In every vessel, as in
Mordant
, men had been allowed from their action stations to stare at the grey shapes which had been mysterious for so long, grimy stokers shivering as the cold air struck their sweaty bodies. According to the terms of surrender, the Germans had been stripped of powder and shell, of breech mechanisms, sighting instruments and rangefinders. They moved in long lines –
Hindenburg
,
Derfflinger
,
Seydlitz, Moltke, Von der Tann, Bayern, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, Kronprinz Wilhelm, Kaiser, Kaiserin
, and many others. The mutinous sailors, Kelly had heard, had wanted to fly the red flag and had only been dissuaded by the information that it was also the flag of piracy and might be fired on, and the old imperial colours were fluttering at the masthead instead. Under their grey clothing, the German ships looked dingy and unkempt, their hulls streaked and rusted, only one,
Derfflinger
, looking as if she had recently been painted.

They cut through the water in a long slow-moving column in the funeral tread of a defeated nation, and as the two fleets approached the Forth, the excitement died. By the time they passed May Island, the reaction had set in, in an overwhelming weariness.

The sun had driven away the mist so that the day was clear, cold and fine and the Firth looked like a vast inland sea. The three parallel lines pressed close together, then the southern line of escorting ships turned once more upon itself and in a long backward sweep fell in behind the Germans.
Cardiff
led to a point halfway between Kirkaldy Bay and Aberlady Bay east of Inch Keith, while the destroyers moved to the Haddington shore by Cockenzie. As the German ships approached their prison anchorage, soldiers from the shore batteries lined the sea’s edge, watching, and boats of every description, steamers, row boats and yachts, all packed with civilians, milled about, savouring the triumph.