The Lion at Sea (27 page)

When they were just wondering why the sides of the submarine didn’t cave in under the pressure, the needle jumped back from its stop and the submarine began to rush stern-first to the surface.

‘That bloody gunboat!’ Lyster yelled, then they all felt the submarine lurch and there was a crash as the shell struck them astern.

‘Close watertight doors!’

There were two more bangs in quick succession and one of the stokers appeared from the engine room in a waft of hot oil and a cloud of blue smoke; beyond him Kelly could see balls of incandescent copper flying off the switches and wicked blue-green electric flames leaping and dancing.

‘We’re taking in water astern, sir,’ the stoker reported.

‘Much?’

‘A lot, sir.’

One of the shells had hit them on or near the conning tower and cascades of icy green sea were coming in from overhead, drenching the wardroom curtains. It was obvious, with the weight of water increasing all the time, that they would now never be able to hold
E19
on the surface but, holed as she was, they also dared not dive.

Lyster straightened up. He looked old and weary. They were finished. They all knew it.

For some reason the shells had stopped
E19
’s mad behaviour and she lay wallowing on the surface quite placidly.

‘All right,’ Lyster said wearily. He was in control of himself again, the old, imperturbable, odd-looking figure in knickerbockers and cricket sweater. ‘I’m going to scuttle. Stay with me, Number One, to attend to it. All hands on deck. Prepare to abandon ship. Where’s the Chief ERA?’

‘They’re bringing him forward, sir,’ one of the stokers said. ‘He’s been hurt.’

The sea continued to pour in on them with a terrible and relentless drenching noise, and the water round their feet crept higher every second. Electrical contacts spat venomously with little lightning flashes and Kelly wondered if he were about to be electrocuted.

The forward watertight door had been shut and one of the seaman was sobbing. ‘My pal’s in there, sir! My pal’s in there!’

Shivering with fear, Kelly was aware of men beginning to assemble in the control room, clutching a few personal possessions, even pictures of wives and girl friends. Their faces indicated that they were near to panic but they were still behaving calmly with solid naval discipline.

Two of the stokers appeared with the ERA. There was blood on his face and he was vomiting badly. There was dead silence and all they could hear was the monotonous, pitiless sound of water pouring in on them.

Lyster gave a heavy sigh. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Abandon. You go first, Pilot, and warn me when the water gets too high.’

As Kelly reached for the ladder, Bennett turned to Lyster.

‘Sorry, sir. There was nothing I could do.’

‘Not your fault, Number One. This bloody boat’s behaved like a fairground horse all its life. I always knew it’d finally do its stuff at the wrong moment. Let’s get on with it.’

As Kelly scrambled through the hatch, Rumbelo joined him and moved to the stern with another man. The water was already lapping against the conning tower.

‘Sir,’ Kelly yelled. ‘She’s going!’

Lyster’s voice came up. ‘I’ve just time to get my brief case. Get going, Number One!’

Food, clothing, flotsam and jetsam of all kinds were floating out of the submarine which now lay, bow down, and beginning to heel over to starboard, men pushing through the hatch one after another. The Turkish torpedo boat was still bearing down on them and one of the men on the stern of the submarine raised his hands. The water was lapping higher against the conning tower.

‘Hurry, sir, she’s going down!’

As Kelly yelled, the submarine lurched and the man on the stern with his hands in the air staggered, off-balance, and fell into the water. Rumbelo immediately went after him in a neat racing dive that impressed Kelly as he remembered how he’d last seen him enter the sea.

‘Sir, hurry, for God’s sake!’

No more than a few men had escaped and, as Kelly turned, he saw Bennett’s face appear at the top of the ladder. Kneeling down, he reached through the hatch to yank him to the surface, but as he did so the submarine lurched again and seemed to stand on its nose. In his mind’s eye he saw all the men still below hurled down the length of the centre passage, flung forward as if thrown down a lift shaft, followed by everything that was not fastened down. Momentarily, she steadied again, the stern going down, so that the boat straightened, then, as he clung to the binnacle for support, without a sound or a sigh, without even an eddy or a ripple on the surface of the water, the submarine slid away from under him.

For a second he had a glimpse of Bennett’s horrified eyes as he tried to fight his way through the water gushing through the open hatch to reach Kelly’s straining hand, then
E19
simply vanished from beneath his feet. There was a huge fountain of spray and a roaring sound like a gigantic whale blowing then he found himself swimming with no sign of the submarine and only a few heads around him in the
water to indicate what had happened to the crew.

Dripping and miserable, Kelly was dragged over the side of the torpedo boat’s dinghy, the water pouring from his seaboots and thick clothing.

The officer in command spoke English. ‘I regret we have not been able to save any more than these men you have with you, sir,’ he said.

Kelly nodded wretchedly.
E19
hadn’t run very much amuck, and their wartime career had been short and not very sweet.

A gentle drizzle of rain began to fall as they headed shorewards and as it touched the surface of the sea, it seemed to Kelly like a benediction that was unbelievably sad and sweet. Thinking of Lyster and Bennett and the others who were dead, life seemed so beautiful he couldn’t imagine himself ever being dissatisfied with it again.

Then the reaction came as he remembered he was a prisoner – a useless appendage to the war because the Turks didn’t want him and he was no good to the Allies. The realisation that he was facing jail like a common criminal came as a shock and he suddenly wondered how long it would be for.

Nobody was under any delusion any more that the war was going to be a short one. It hadn’t ended by Christmas, 1914, as they’d been promised, and there was little likelihood that it would end by Christmas 1915. For a moment, as he saw captivity and humiliation stretching away for years into the future, he felt like weeping. For God’s sake, he thought wildly, he’d be an old man when they let him free again!

All of them quiet and brooding on their ill-luck, they were taken to Scutari on the opposite side of the Bosphorus from Constantinople, and the next morning a military guard brought dry clothes consisting of the overcoat and trousers of an ordinary Turkish soldier’s uniform, a pair of slippers without socks, and a fez. What was left of their own uniforms was taken away, then, amidst a large crowd of spectators, they were fallen in on the wharf and, surrounded by guards with fixed bayonets, were marched through the town. People gathered on the sidewalk to watch them. Shopkeepers and their assistants crowded to their doors, trams and cabs stopped, and here and there from behind heavily-curtained windows they could see a female shape watching.

‘Even the bloody ’arem’s taking an interest,’ Rumbelo growled.

In perfect silence they marched along, the little gutter boys making faces at them and occasionally drawing their fingers across their throats. At the office of the town major they were marched in front of a tall good-looking man smoking a cigarette through a holder about a foot long.

‘You must not look on yourselves as prisoners,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But more as honoured guests of Turkey.’

They were escorted up several flights of stone stairs and pushed into a large empty room containing little else but portraits of Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey, the leaders of the Young Turks Party. It was dirty and stuffy but as they opened windows to let in air, the guards appeared and closed them all again.

‘It’s fifty feet down,’ Rumbelo announced indignantly. ‘I’m not going to jump out of
that
!’

Straw palliasses were brought but within an hour of lying down on them they discovered they were crawling with bedbugs and, by the dim light of a broken gas mantle, they started to do battle with them.

‘Makes you wonder whether it’s best to kill ’em when they’re young,’ Rumbelo said, ‘or leave ’em till they’re grandparents and likely to die of old age.’

The next day half a dozen Turks were pushed in with them and spent the morning spitting and emptying their bronchial tubes on the floor until Rumbelo, brought up in an orphanage and with the Navy’s entrenched ideas of tidiness and hygiene well drilled into him, threatened to knock their heads together and throw them out of the window. For the rest of the day they seemed to be gagging on their own phlegm but they didn’t spit any more.

The next morning they were informed that they were to be moved to Afion Kara Hissar, in the centre of Asia Minor, and a week later they stared up from the station at the ruin of a fortress situated on the summit of a sheer and precipitous rock.

‘Looks tough,’ Kelly observed.

‘More’n you can say for the town,’ Rumbelo said. ‘That only smells strong.’

The old fort, which also contained a few French and Russians, was cold enough for the sentries to snuggle into their boxes out of the wind that came out of the desert of mountain and rock, and food seemed to consist of little else but a wholewheat mush called porridge for breakfast with a lunch of wheat ‘pillao’ and duff. The rooms were comfortless and, to depress them further, there was the uncertainty of their future, because the Young Turk government was unreliable and erratic and might just as easily murder them as treat them with kindness.

Beginning that night, for their entertainment a band consisting of a big drum, a piccolo and three brass instruments serenaded them every evening in the square outside their quarters. It was purgatory because they were far from expert and after a fortnight of it, since the repertoire consisted of only five tunes, they always knew when the brass would be short of wind, the piccolo would play false notes and the big drum would come in late.

Driven almost to distraction, Kelly decided to retaliate. The Russian prisoners could sing magnificently and, led by an officer of the reserve who was said to be the tenor of the Moscow Opera, their haunting songs could always be guaranteed to silence everyone. Pitting themselves against the band, with everyone else joining in to lend weight, the soloist sang the lament then, gathering speed, the tune broke into a gallop, faster and faster until the Russians seemed to be flinging their tortured souls into a furnace where joy, sorrow and despair could be utterly consumed until, after a final frenzied chorus, they became silent. The band had crept away. They never returned.

At the end of the week they were taken to the bath-house in
the company of a lot of Turkish soldiers but on
return to their quarters, they realised the few belongings they’d collected had been searched and when Kelly objected they were simply moved to another room. They were bundled out, protesting, and razors, insect powder, toothbrushes and private letters were removed. Then the commandant appeared, wearing a uniform surtout of pearl grey and a hat that was a caricature of the one worn by Enver Pasha. His moustache hid a weak, cruel mouth and his expressionless face was pale because, like many wealthy Turks, he never took exercise. A pair of deep-set lustrous eyes brooded on them.

‘Your men are to be put into the dungeons,’ he announced. ‘Turkish officers in Egypt are being ill-treated and I have been ordered by my government to make retaliation.’

‘That’s damn silly,’ Kelly snorted.

‘I have no alternative.’

‘All right,’ Kelly said impulsively. ‘I’ll go in their place.’

Rumbelo tried to protest but Kelly shut him up.

‘You’re better outside,’ he said. ‘I need someone to keep an eye on things.’

The dungeon seemed completely dark but then he saw there was a bed and a small table, and high up in the wall a tiny hole as a window, through which he could feel the cold air. The floor was swimming in water. The day was drawing on and when Rumbelo brought his food it consisted of bread, water and three small potatoes soaked in oil. Hunger overcoming disgust, he started to eat, but the oil was stale and sour and the water was brackish.

‘This is a bloody fine kettle of fish, Rumbelo,’ he observed, trying to smile.

Rumbelo scowled. ‘The lads is narked, sir.’

‘Tell ’em not to do anything to jeopardise their own comfort. They haven’t got so bloody much.’

The mattress was so full of bedbugs Kelly had to sleep with the ends of his trousers tucked inside his socks as they swarmed all over him.

‘I’ve killed as many as I can,’ he told Rumbelo as he brought his food next morning, ‘but they’re remarkably quick movers. I’ve taken to sleeping on the floor.’

‘It’s wet, sir.’

‘Yes, but there aren’t any bedbugs there.’

The following evening a lamp was provided but was soon taken away and not returned and the floor remained wet. For twenty-four hours a day the wind blew through the single small window, making the place like an ice box so that at night he had to shiver in his greatcoat and blanket. He had started on the self-imposed torment with an attitude of nobility and high-minded duty, thinking it a sacrifice he could endure for a little while. It was the sort of thing he felt officers did for their men – at least they did in the
Boys’ Own Papers
of his youth – and he’d decided it would do him no harm. A fortnight later, with his clothes permanently damp and the diet consisting almost entirely of bread and water and half-cooked potatoes and grain in a tepid broth, he was so bored he’d have welcomed a book of multiplication tables as light reading matter and he was no longer sure that he hadn’t been a damn fool.

The commandant was suitably apologetic. ‘It is nothing personal, you understand. You should consider it in the light of an honour that you are suffering for the sins of your government.’