The Dangerous Years (5 page)

That night Kelly sat down in his cabin to write to Charley. Ashore, the islanders were burning the heather and, through the twilit northern darkness, patches of flame flickered on the crofts. Explaining his departure was harder than he’d expected because what he could understand he couldn’t expect Charley to understand, and he had an uneasy feeling that somehow, somewhere, an element of unfairness had entered into their relationship. She’d got over the disaster at Bessborough Terrace but she needed reassurance about her future, which he felt he’d signally failed to give. To disappear into the blue might almost be too much.

The next morning was overcast but the cloud was high in a white sky as they passed the hospital ship anchored off Flotta and made a ninety-degree turn into the Pentland Firth.

Their guess that they were due to head further into the Mediterranean than Gibraltar was confirmed as soon as they dropped anchor in the shadow of the Rock, but as they arrived the place was humming not with news of the Middle East but of events at Scapa.

‘What the hell have you been doing?’ they were asked. ‘The German Fleet scuttled itself! Fifteen battleships and forty-six destroyers! The whole bloody guard squadron was at sea and there were only two destroyers, a depot ship and a bunch of drifters to stop them!’

The news was like a blow in the face. The Flow, it seemed, had looked like the aftermath of a great battle, with German ships disappearing in gouts of frothing sea water and escaping steam, watched only by helpless drifter crews and a boatload of children who’d been on a day’s excursion round the defeated fleet. All that was left, it seemed, were vast weed-grown bottoms lying on the surface like huge steel whales, and whole trots of destroyers huddled together like sorrowing girls clutching each other in woe.

Two days later they were passed on to Malta and from Malta to Alexandria en route for Constantinople. Kelly’s father was there, still a rear admiral. He’d served his whole career in the Navy through the years of Victorian peace without ever hearing a shot fired in anger and had been dragged out in 1914 for a desk job to which he still clung with the tenacity of a leech. He bought Kelly a dinner, introduced him to a few women he appeared to know, asked briefly about his wife, and vanished once more, obviously feeling he’d done his duty.

It was strange once more to see Constantinople through which in 1915 Kelly had marched as a prisoner of war. It was two distinct cities: to the north of the Golden Horn rose Pera, the city of the Christians where the British had established themselves; to the south it was Stambul, the Moslem city, where the French were, and to drive across the harbour by the Galata Bridge was to pass from one period of history to another. With its bright lights, Pera was a city of the present, a curious mixture of the businesslike West and the garishness of the East. With its ridge of domes and minarets, Stambul across the water was a mediaeval area tumbling into decay, a hive where human beings swarmed and lived as they had for centuries.

As they anchored among the British, French, Italian and Greek warships off the Dolma Bagtché, the Sultan’s white palace near the Galata Bridge, a lieutenant-commander called Orgill, who’d been at Dartmouth with Orrmont, stepped aboard to escort him to headquarters ashore.

‘It’s a listless bloody hole here,’ he announced heavily. ‘Touched with a sense of doom or something. They don’t like being defeated and there’s no coal to be had. The trams still aren’t running properly and the Bosphorus steamers are few and far between. The main streets are only dimly lit and the side streets not at all, so that criminals prosper and nobody moves at night without arms because the police are scarce, corrupt and universally mistrusted. Profiteering’s shameless, the currency’s valueless and the price of foodstuffs so high the Turks stay in their homes, except to buy bread. Some even pretend they’re not Turks at all, shed their fezzes and try to get jobs with us.’

When they went ashore, it was obvious that the difficulties sprang less from Turkish defiance than from Greek bombast. Greeks were everywhere, swaggering through the streets, flaunting their blue and white flag and expecting the Turks to salute it, so that they slunk down the side streets to avoid the shame.

‘Old Johnny Turk’s bowed under the follies of his rulers,’ Orgill said, ‘and decayed by misgovernment, beaten in battle and ground down by disastrous wars. But there’s been an unexpected germination of nationalist groups recently and, make no mistake, he’s still the fighter we knew in the Dardanelles; and if they had a man with some spirit to lead ’em, they could still show both the Greeks and Lloyd George that they can’t muck them about as they are doing.’

‘And what about us?’ Orrmont asked. ‘Where do we come in?’

Orgill smiled. ‘Lloyd George let the Greeks land twenty thousand troops in Smyrna in May,’ he said. ‘The Turks would probably have chucked them out again, defeated or not, given the chance, but some yellow-belly in their government told them not to resist and the Greeks went potty. One Turkish colonel, who refused to take his fez off and stamp on it, was shot on the spot, then the Greeks got out of hand and hundreds of Turks were killed. It’s quietened down a bit now but it won’t be long before the Turks chuck out their present government and start resisting. And when they do, I reckon the Greeks are in for a bit of a shock.
That’s
where you come in.’

Mail arrived the following week. There was a letter from Kelly’s mother suggesting that only ill health was preventing her return to Dublin, where she’d been born, to take up arms in the struggle for Irish freedom that had broken out, and one from Mabel saying simply and bleakly, ‘What in God’s name have you done to Charley?’ From Charley there was nothing, and her silence left Kelly feeling low. He’d once been told that any girl who fell for a sailor needed a bit of luck, and it occurred to him that perhaps sailors sometimes needed a bit of luck, too.

They awoke the following day to the noise of vehicles grinding through the streets ashore and the baying of an enormous crowd. Sailors had crowded up from below to stare shorewards where they could see thousands of people carrying black flags. They were led by white-turbanned hojas and were surging through the streets to mass near the Chamber of Deputies.

‘What in God’s name’s happening?’ Kelly demanded.

They soon found out. The Ottoman Parliament was in a state of collapse and a rebel government set up in Anatolia by a man called Mustafa Kemal had raised guerrilla bands and set fire to the Armenian quarter in Marash. Hundreds of women and children had died, while fanatical Moslems had rampaged round the town slaughtering any who escaped. A French column had already been sent to their relief and the allies were now busy occupying Constantinople to keep the status quo. Armoured cars patrolled the streets, and they could hear the tramp of British troops occupying police stations, military posts and the main public buildings.

Sunset came in a fabulous glow of colour over Stambul and the Golden Horn, with the great dome of St Sophia and the Seraglio like fairy palaces surrounded by the dark silhouettes of cypresses. The uproar ashore seemed to be over but at midnight they could still see the torch-carrying crowds surging down the street of the Sublime Porte to the Ministry of War and the Mosque of Suleimanyi.

Next day’s dawn came pearly-white from Angora, the flamboyant beauty softened by a veil of mist low over the land to hide the buildings and blend sea and sky together in an extraordinary opalescence. Though the anger seemed to have died down, there was still a great deal of ill-feeling about and when Orrmont was called on board the flagship that evening they all expected him to bring back orders for an evacuation of Greek civilians from Domlupinu or the Iskenderon Gulf. Instead they were for Sebastopol in South Russia.

‘We must be going to support the White Russians,’ Kelly decided.
‘Marlborough’
s been shelling railways and Bolshevik troop concentrations.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ Orrmont looked puzzled. ‘The admiral didn’t seem very interested in the guns. He only asked if the wardroom was well stocked with crockery and if we had plenty of knives and forks.’

The first sight of Russia was provided by the sheer cliffs of Balaclava where a tug was waiting to put aboard a pilot who was to lead them round Cape Kersonese into Sebastopol. The water was crisped by the breeze blowing into the landlocked harbour where a British squadron lay at anchor under the Ville Civile, and the day was clear, the white houses shining brightly in the sunshine. Across the water bells were ringing lustily on the warm air and, with its tall buildings running up the hillsides, Sebastopol had about it a faint look of Bath.

The pilot was accompanied by a British lieutenant-commander who jerked a contemptuous hand towards the shore, as if he found the whole business of having to take part in someone else’s civil war thoroughly distasteful. ‘Personally,’ he observed, ‘I’d have thought the Russians could manage to choose whatever government they wanted without our help, but it seems we have obligations to a variety of anti-Bolshevik movements. Here it’s Cossack Separatism, and it throws up the weirdest chaps. One leader used to be a Caucasian bandmaster and he’s given himself a title, a white uniform and a beltful of lethal weapons. Local commander’s called Denikin and there’s a Military Mission training the troops, though God knows why, because they all desert as soon as they see the enemy.’

It all seemed remarkably casual, and the lieutenant- commander went on cheerfully. ‘The French were at Odessa but they made an awful botch of the business and in the end they got out. They managed to evacuate around thirty thousand civilians and ten thousand troops, but they left a hell of a lot behind, too, and whole families committed suicide as the ships pulled away.’

Behind the lieutenant-commander’s back, Orrmont’s eyes met Kelly’s. It seemed they were involved here in a different kind of war.

‘Things have picked up a bit since they left,’ the lieutenant- commander went on. ‘Chap called Wrangel beat the Reds at a place with a name nobody can pronounce and finally got into Tsaritsyn. Denikin’s now up near Kharkov, and if we could only get all these blasted White leaders to work together, we could knock out the Bolshies easily.’ The lieutenant-commander sighed. ‘It’s such a bloody uncivil affair,’ he said. ‘If you’ll pardon the pun. Nobody seems to take prisoners. They just line ’em up and shoot ’em. I’d much rather be at home keeping an eye on the Germans. Do you think they’ll manage to persuade the Dutch to hand over the Kaiser so we can hang him as everybody seems to want?’

Neither Orrmont nor Kelly bothered to answer because, quite obviously, the lieutenant-commander wasn’t expecting an answer. He’d been working a long time with the Russian pilots who could only converse in very indifferent French and he was really only concerned with hearing his own voice.

‘We shall be putting you in the Southern Harbour,’ he said, pointing across the dark waters. ‘There’s the dockyard, and the Karabelnaia suburbs are just beyond the ravine. Nice park near the Malakov, and there are some good gardens alongside the water to walk a girl.’

The shore seemed to be littered with wrecks, and a three-funnelled destroyer lay canted at an angle on the rocks.

‘Captain ordered full astern,’ the lieutenant commander explained, ‘and when she went full ahead instead he decided there were Bolshies below so he rushed down and shot the engineer.’ He sighed wearily. ‘They stuffed him in the furnace. Rather a jolly lot. Officers burned or torn to pieces by their own men; some even chucked overboard with firebars attached to their feet. Have to be pretty careful about swimming, in fact, because occasionally they come to the surface and you find yourself staring one straight in the eye.’

Sebastopol seemed as tense as Constantinople. Fear still overshadowed the streets and the place was said to be swarming with Bolshevik agents. Terrible acts of barbarism had taken place when the Black Sea Fleet had mutinied, and food was difficult to obtain because the country people were fleeing into the city from the Red armies.

When Orrmont reappeared from the flagship, he had a startled look on his face. ‘We’re to become a private yacht, Number One,’ he announced. ‘We’re to go to Yalta and pick up four members of the Tsar’s family who seem to have dodged the general massacre of the Romanovs! Grand Duke Piotr Vjeskov; his grandson, Grand Duke Vissarion; his wife, Grand Duchess Evgenia; and her sister, Grand Duchess Yekaterina Seminov.’

Kelly grinned. ‘They said Russia was full of beautiful grand duchesses, sir.’

Orrmont sniffed. ‘
This
grand duke’s seventy-eight,’ he said. ‘And the grand duchesses match. We’re taking ’em to Malta or wherever someone will have ’em.’

There was little sign of the civil war in Yalta which still wore the look of a fashionable resort. Only in the gardens near the sea could they see wounded officers and nurses with gay ribbons fluttering from their caps. All the houses seemed to be occupied, and on the heights behind the gardens, magnificent pink-and-white turreted villas perched in terraced vineyards. Cars and carriages moved along the waterfront, many of them containing women carrying parasols.

A pier of booms and a special loading platform were hurriedly put together by the ship’s carpenter; and the following day a high-nosed individual in the uniform of a Russian staff captain appeared on board and looked down his nose at the gangway party drawn up on deck. Eventually, as they waited, a fleet of large motor cars appeared and an old man in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, accompanied by two elderly ladies and one supercilious youngster, tottered up the gangway. Bosuns’ whistles twittered and everybody stiffened to attention. As far as the Russians were concerned, they might as well not have been there.

‘Where are our quarters?’ the young man demanded.

Orrmont’s face stiffened. ‘There are no quarters, sir,’ he pointed out. ‘We’re only a small ship. You will be very welcome, of course, to use the wardroom.’

The Grand Duke Vissarion looked down his aristocratic nose. ‘My great-aunt, the Dowager Empress,’ he announced coldly, ‘was given a battleship. Very well, you may show us the way.’