The Lion at Sea (12 page)

‘We’re in a minefield!’ the coxswain of the pinnace shouted.

‘Minefield be damned!’ Kelly snorted. ‘I’ll bet it’s a submarine and
Cressy
’s a sitting target.’ He turned to stare back at his ship, expecting her to get under way and move off, but she lay still, wallowing in the grey choppy water.

‘For God’s sake,’ he burst out, as though issuing orders himself. ‘Get going!’

Above the crash of the water, he could hear a sound from
Hogue
of breaking and splintering, as though every fragment of crockery, every chair and table, anything that wasn’t riveted to the bulkheads was being fragmented. She was already well over to starboard.

‘There must be half a dozen of the bastards,’ one of the seamen yelled, then guns started to fire over their heads from
Cressy
and they could see the shell splashes in the sea.

‘They got her,’ someone shouted.

‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Kelly yelled. ‘Pay attention to what you’re doing!’

Aboukir
was low in the water now, the sea lapping the bridge, and they could see men jumping from it into the waves.

‘She’s going!’

Slowly, with ponderous majesty,
Aboukir
began to turn turtle. The dark water heaved and great gouts of it shot upwards from open scuttles, then there was a rending sound as her boilers tore loose, and she fell over on her side and settled upside down, rocking gently, lifting to the surface again so that men started to climb back on to her slimy red keel. Not many succeeded because it was too steep and too slippery and those who did were cut by barnacles, begrimed and exhausted, and choking from the sea water and oil they’d swallowed. Then, slowly, she slipped beneath the waves, taking with her most of the wild-eyed survivors who clung to her keel.

Hogue
, also by this time heeling to port, was firing at shadows and from below, as the pinnace pushed through the wreckage and began to haul gasping men aboard, Kelly could see deadlights being closed and more mess stools, tables, timber and anything else which would float being thrown over the side. Boats were swung out on their davits and yelling petty officers were shouting a mixture of orders. Hammocks splashed into the sea and men began to jump.

At first it seemed that
Hogue
was not going to sink, but then they saw that the quarterdeck was awash and she, too, began to roll dizzily to starboard, flinging men across the broad decks to break arms and shoulders as they fetched up against bulkheads and stanchions. An explosion deep below water lifted her port side up and she lay almost on her beam ends, and as her gunners ceased their pointless firing they could hear shouts above them of ‘Abandon ship.’

Putting the pinnace astern to clear the great leaning bulk, Kelly stared upwards.
Hogue
made him think of some vast block of buildings slowly tilting sideways towards him, then, as they drew away, he saw the captain walk over the side of the bridge and on to the bilge keel where one of
Cressy
’s cutters took him off almost dry-shod. Falling heavily on to her side,
Hogue
set up a great swell that swept towards them, lifting them on its crest as it rolled past. For a moment, the water lashed at the sides of the pinnace then, as the huge keel showed, wet and red and barnacle-covered, swinging slightly as the ship settled, Kelly drove in among the swimming men again.

Awakening at last to the danger, Johnson had begun to take
Cressy
away at full speed in a zigzag past the area of wreckage and swimming men where her consorts had sunk. Her guns were still firing wildly and shells were dropping near her own boats.

‘Give her all she’s got,’ Kelly yelled to the pinnace’s engineer and they moved among the swimming men, dragging them aboard and distributing them among the cutters as they filled up.

One of
Hogue
’s
Dartmouth boys, wearing only a singlet, was shivering with cold and Kelly shook him to life.

‘Grab an oar, boy!’ he shouted at him. ‘Double bank! It’ll warm you up!’ and he saw the boy climb into a cutter and reach out to start heaving alongside a bearded, ear-ringed sailor.

Cressy
was firing over their heads now and he saw the splashes grow nearer. He turned to wave a hand in warning but at that moment the pinnace’s bows seemed to lift from a vast concussion below the sea and he saw seamen and planks and a brass ventilator hurled through the air. As the bows dipped again, he saw the timbers were shattered, then he was swept out of the boat by the rush of water that flooded along it, and was swimming for his life, the one thought in his mind the unfairness of it all – he seemed to be seeing more bloody war than was his share and to be sunk by his own side was just too much.

He came to the surface, spluttering furiously.
Cressy
was hurtling past, a vast black steel bulk towering above them, pushing men and wreckage aside with her bow wave. He could see her rivets picking up the light, and her ungainly turrets trained to port, the guns moving slowly like the antennae of a great steel beast, stupefied and worried, but without the intelligence to discover the whereabouts of her undersea tormentor. On the bridge officers were staring down at him over the steel coaming, and barefooted sailors were running along the decks with ropes. Then, as she moved past, he saw an explosion lift her stern and the shock came through the water like a blow from a fist. Once more, in a sickening repetition of the other two torpedoings, a great column of smoke, as thick and black as ink, shot skywards as high as the towering funnels, and, working up to her best speed, the great ship came to a halt like a charging rhinoceros hit by a high velocity bullet. As her bows went down, an angry wave of water foamed over the forecastle head and she stopped dead, steam roaring from the funnels in a shrieking din. Then she heeled, righted herself momentarily, and finally, like
Aboukir
and
Hogue
never designed to withstand torpedoes, began the same dismal, taunting sequence of keeling over to starboard.

Spitting water, almost weeping with rage, Kelly saw her start to dip below the waves like an oil drum split open at target practice, and men on her decks tossing over rolled hammocks to cling to as she began to sink. Slowly, she leaned over, checked, then went still further, the men at the guns still firing at an invisible foe. The Dartmouth boys, still in their pyjamas and looking like children, began to run for the side, and Captain Johnson, tall, wing-collared and old-fashioned- looking, appeared to be calming them as he walked among them, or instructing, directing, as though nothing had happened.

Then, as her boilers tore loose in a devastating explosion, she turned turtle in the same sickening manner as her sisters, leaning over like a ponderous pendulum to splash down on her side in the water and continue turning until she was upside down. As she floated keel-up, a few desperate men, gasping and shouting for help, tried to scramble aboard but then, still rocking after her wild swing, huge fountains of water driven upwards through her scuttles by the compressed air inside her, she slipped quietly below the sea.

As she disappeared, Kelly heard a rush of water like surf breaking on a beach and realised it was suction. He hardly had time to fill his lungs with air before it was upon him. His chest seemed to be bursting, and he had almost given up fighting when something told him to keep on trying and he started struggling afresh.

As he shot to the surface, something bumped against him in the icy water and he found it was a hammock. He looked round for something more substantial and as a coir fender bobbed up he grabbed it and pushed himself on it to a piece of floating timber which seemed to be the centre of one of the ship’s targets and managed to flop across it.

Clinging to the baulk of timber, he was consumed with angry bitterness. What bloody luck, he thought, to become a casualty after only six weeks of war!

He was cold and numb and quite certain that all the feeling was going from his limbs, and he had almost resigned himself to drowning when he came to life with a jerk. This was a damn silly way to behave, he decided – giving up the ghost before he was properly gone. Once, as a boy, he’d fallen out of a tree and knocked himself unconscious, and had come round staring at the sky, convinced he was already dead. Then his brother Gerald, worried at his stillness, had given a nervous little kick at his behind. He had heard his voice – ‘Come on, young ’un, you’re not hurt – and had literally forced himself back to consciousness.

Looking at his watch, he realised it had stopped exactly an hour after
Aboukir
had been hit. Only
Cressy
had launched her boats and the other two ships had gone down with nothing more in the water than a cutter or two. All round him were struggling men and he began to move among them, calming them, telling them not to try too hard, but to grab something that would float, and kick with their legs.

‘It’ll help keep you warm,’ he panted, ‘and it’s too bloody far to swim to England from here.’

A few weak grins answered him and some undefeated spirit yelled ‘Fuck the Kaiser!’ Treading water, he stared around him, unable to believe that three great armoured cruisers had disappeared so quickly. Gasping, shouting men were fighting their way through the wreckage to grab at anything substantial enough to float, trying as they swam to divest themselves of seaboots and the heavy wool clothing that was dragging them down into the darkness, and there were screams as huge spars, freed below water, shot to the surface to break limbs and backs.

Exposure was already taking its toll and the stokers, who had rushed on deck from the overheated confines of the boiler room, were the first to succumb, lying back in the water as if going to sleep. A headless body drifted past, and Kelly saw two Dartmouth boys, neither more than fifteen, swimming desperately towards a raft, terror in their eyes as they breasted the corpses in their path. One of them was Boyle and, heading for them, he grabbed him and towed him to a lattice-work target that had floated free as the ship sank. A crowd of sailors clung to it and he pushed them aside and handed the boy over to a bearded petty officer before setting off back for the other. By the time he arrived at the spot where he’d seen him, however, there was no sign of him.

The water seemed to be crowded with men clinging to withy fenders and Kelly passed the ship’s surgeon clutching the top of a small table and the chaplain hanging on to a lifebuoy. Beside him was the engineer commander, gasping in agony from two broken legs. Some of the swimmers seemed to have given up the ghost already and he called to them as he pushed among them, ‘Come on, you chaps, who’s for a dip?’ and a few of them managed a cheer and struck out for floating wreckage.

Moving away, struggling to remove his clothing so he could swim, he found a life raft and climbed aboard. As other men arrived, he tried to organise it so that wounded and injured could be laid flat on it while the unwounded clung to the sides. As more appeared, it was clear the raft couldn’t hold them all and he went over the side again to organise groups of men to cling to floating planks and spars.

How long he was in the water he didn’t know but eventually someone shouted that he could see a mast and Kelly saw a Dutch fishing smack to windward. Immediately, the men grouped round the raft started singing – that compelling hymn all sailors demanded, sometimes in cynical enjoyment when securely shorebound, but always somehow with the feeling at the back of their minds that its words were their appeal to the Almighty not to forget them.

‘Eternal Father, strong to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave…’

The tune welled up stronger and, driven by its plea, Kelly set off swimming towards the lifting mast. As it drew nearer, he became aware that he was surrounded by dead bodies that carpeted the surface of the sea in grisly groups. They were bent over the spars and fragments of splintered wreckage to which they clung or had lashed themselves for safety, some of them stokers who had died blinded or sobbing with pain after being enveloped in a scalding miasma of steam. Shouting and swimming alternately, he pushed through the crowding bodies until he caught the attention of the crew of the smack at last and a small boat was launched to drag him aboard.

Soon afterwards, two small Dutch steamers and an English trawler arrived and began to haul the dead and dying on deck. They were all practically naked and some were so exhausted that, with the rolling, it was impossible to lift them aboard and a tackle had to be hoisted out. The Dartmouth boy, Boyle, was among those huddled on deck and as Kelly handed him his own mug of tea, he gave him a grateful look and drank, only to be promptly sick into the scuppers. Unaware that all he wore was his underwear and his uniform cap, Kelly nagged the smack skipper to put him aboard the British trawler, where
Cressy
’s engineer commander lay on the deck, his broken legs at an odd angle, the ship’s chaplain alongside him.

He looked up as he saw Kelly. ‘Hello, my boy,’ he said. ‘I was watching you there with that raft. That was splendid work you did,’

The trawler was crowded now but no one seemed to be angry except Kelly. Poade appeared, covered with oil but still enthusiastic and, like so many others, apparently regarding the sinking as a good sporting event.

‘Bloody hard luck,’ he said. ‘And jolly well played, the Hun!’

Kelly turned on him furiously. ‘Hard luck be damned,’ he snorted. ‘And bugger this “Jolly well played” nonsense! We got what we asked for! It was too damn silly for words waiting there like that to be torpedoed!’

‘You couldn’t leave all those men to drown!’

‘By not leaving ’em, we added another seven hundred to the score!’

It was mid-morning when
Lowestoft,
flying Tyrwhitt’s broad pendant, arrived, and the survivors on the trawler were pushed aboard the destroyer,
Malice.
Someone handed Kelly a cup of cocoa and he found himself staring into a familiar face.