The Lion at Sea (36 page)

There was another day when they dashed across the North Sea to converge on the Dogger Bank in search of a collier that was adrift, a salt-caked, rust-streaked old tub wallowing in a heavy leaden sea.

‘Nanny to a bleedin’ collier,’ a wag in the waist of the ship yelled. ‘Eight soddin’ knots! Come on, you ocean bloody greyhound, you, keep up!’

‘With the rotten stuff they give us to burn–’ the answering yell came thinly on the wind from a man on the collier’s bridge wearing a green jersey and a bowler hat ‘–we couldn’t even keep up with the bleedin’ times!’

On other occasions they escorted the cruisers north for firing practice, and returned to Rosyth in a large detour to avoid minefields; and once, with one of the light cruiser squadrons, they went out to find a mythical minesweeper, and the buzz went round that this time they were really the bait to bring out the High Seas Fleet. It ended up with condenser trouble and a brush with a zeppelin, in which shots were exchanged for bombs, but entirely without damage to either side.

Finally they escorted Beatty himself to sea, seven huge ships led by
Lion
, the flagship, all silhouetted against the sky, each one of them with a plume of smoke rising like a dusky feather. As they zigzagged, the sunlight caught their sides so that they appeared to change colour as they altered course, on one tack bright and silvery, on the other black. A stab of white rising at their ram-bows and another at their stern contrasted with the deep blue of the sea as they moved in two solemnly portentous lines, at the head of each one and down the flanks the black smudges of the destroyers, all of them oil burners that threw off little smoke except when some careless stoker changed the width of the air inlet baffles on the boilers.

On the starboard beam, there was another group of ships and, five miles away, units of the Third Light Cruiser Squadron, pearl-grey shapes in the distance, with, just visible beyond them, the raking masts of the First Light Cruiser Squadron, their hulls below the horizon. At intervals a light winked on the flagship, to be repeated right and left, and as it grew dusk, the light cruisers closed in to become three lines, each ship following the pale blue stern light of the shadowy form ahead in their stately march across the darkening sea.

Coming back was different as they laboriously staggered homewards in the teeth of a south-westerly gale with the wind shrilling in the rigging and the sky a dull grey broken only by the never-ending procession of low clouds scooting along to the north-east. Monotonously, as the ship dipped her forecastle into a maelstrom of leaping seas, a mass of seething foam rushed aft and broke against the conning tower then, as she lifted up again, was caught by the wind and flung upwards to fall in sheets across the upper bridge.

Ducking behind the canvas dodger to avoid the weather, his bones crying out for mercy from the hammering of the sea, Kelly began to wonder what on earth had prompted him to ask for destroyers. Talbot’s mouth, clenched on his pipe, was sour. ‘The rocking horse motion of a ship whose waterline length seems to have been designed deliberately to make the worst of steep waves isn’t in my opinion the best way of passing the time,’ he complained. ‘We live in conditions that would make a fakir’s bed of nails seem comfortable.’

Blinking the salt out of his eyes, Kelly was aware that his feet felt like blocks of ice. He could only see about a mile in the spindrift and spume, and all this, he thought bitterly, was just to give the battle cruisers a blow because they hadn’t been out for weeks.

‘It’s different for them,’ Talbot said, fighting to apply a match to charred tobacco. ‘A gale can’t wreck their cabins and mess decks, and they think it’s rough if they get a spot of spray on their waistcoats.’

As Kelly went below to eat, the water was running down his neck and a playful sea filled his boots. In his cabin all his personal effects were sloshing about the deck and all the drawers were full of water. A dirty trickle from a faulty pipe had soaked his bunk and Charley’s photograph was floating in the wash basin in the splinters from a bottle of shampoo. He couldn’t have cared less at that moment if
Mordant
had sunk.

‘I often wonder why I didn’t join the army,’ he said to Chambers, the surgeon.

He had long since grown bored with Talbot, who seemed to enjoy subscribing to the legend that all destroyer captains were mad. He was sour, depressed and perpetually grumbling through his pipe, and for an incurable optimist like Kelly was hard to live with. When I’m captain, Kelly thought often, I’ll not be like that. So far, he seemed to have gathered round him quite a list of naval captains he’d served under whom he preferred not to emulate – Acheson, Lord Charles Everley, Talbot. Perhaps it was a good thing, he decided. At least he’d be himself. And in any case, it would be a long time before he had command of a ship – even a small one like a destroyer.

Yawing wildly, they rounded the Old Man of Hoy in a gleam of wintry sunshine,
Mordant
snarling and straining in every plate, hinging her bows into the yeasty foam of rolling water from the north Atlantic, then sweeping drunkenly upwards again from the valleys of the ocean, streaming green-white pennants of water from her stem, before reeling corkscrew-wise into the seething turmoil of another trough. Lifelines rigged, deadlights screwed down over scuttles, the sweating hull ran with condensed breath, and there was a permanent slosh of seawater across the corticene where the plates leaked when the port side was the weather side. Metal and glass clinked inside the lockers, and all the hanging gear leaned drunkenly from the bulkhead as the ship sliced through the waves, the water lifting in green walls around the bows and sheets of spray shooting overhead like heavy rain. The other destroyers were often quite invisible beneath the water they displaced, and even the battle wagons rose and fell with the sound of thunder as they pressed majestically on, jettisoning great streams of ocean from around their cable chains and steaming round their hawseholes like a set of angry dragons.

A zeppelin raid on Edinburgh served to make them resentfully happy that other people were having to endure a measure of discomfort, too, but the war seemed no nearer ending. Fisher and Churchill had gone from the Admiralty after the Dardanelles disaster, and there was nothing but stalemate in France. Kut had held out longer than anyone had expected but half the Indian Army seemed to have gone into captivity with its fall. On the credit side, the Germans continued to put their foot in it. They’d already angered the Americans by shooting Nurse Cavell in Brussels and sinking the
Lusitania
off
the Old Head of Kinsale. And, with their country beginning to chafe under the naval blockade, it was firmly believed that the Big Push that was to come on the Somme was going to end the war. Everybody talked about it openly in the pubs.

Only in the North Sea was there no news. The raid on Lowestoft remained unforgotten and there was still an angry murmuring going on that the Navy was letting such ‘insults’ be inflicted with impunity. If they had a Grand Fleet – and some people were actively beginning to doubt it – then what was it doing swinging at anchor in the north instead of getting out and retaliating? There was a rash of bloody noses and split lips among the liberty men returning aboard, and Kelly came face to face with Rumbelo who was sporting a black eye.

‘Hello, Rumbelo,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think there was anybody big enough to give
you
a shiner.’

Rumbelo grinned. ‘Probably there isn’t, sir. I let him get away with it.’

‘Let
him get away with it?’

Rumbelo sighed. ‘It’s not easy having a pint these days, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s always trouble with the dockies and the chaps back on leaf from France.’

‘Is that what it was? A dockie?’

‘No, sir. A Gordon Highlander. Just a little feller. But he’d been shot at in the mud round Ypres ever since 1914. He’d lost all his pals and was fed up. And he looked it. Coat plastered with dried mud and eyes like somebody had been peeing in snow. He wanted to know if the fleet needed any assistance from his mob.’

Kelly frowned. ‘And you? What did you do?’

‘Tried to talk him round, sir. Only he didn’t fancy being talked round and he took a swing at me.’

‘Hit him back?’

Rumbelo gave a wry gentle smile. ‘No, sir. I thought he’d been through enough.’

Talbot was not unaware of what was going on. Only a deaf man could have been, because the criticism of Jellicoe could be heard everywhere. ‘It’s about time,’ he said, ‘that somebody organised a plan to bring out the High Seas Fleet.’

As it happened, he hadn’t long to wait.

A royal command round of golf with his captain on the Queensferry links took Kelly ashore and they were just returning aboard when he noticed a flag hoist on the signal bridge of the flagship.

‘“
Lion
to battle cruiser force and Fifth BS,”’ he read. ‘“Raise steam for 22 knots and report when ready to proceed.”’

Talbot applied a match to his pipe, unperturbed. ‘Another false alarm, I expect,’ he said.

But as they went aboard, the signal was also addressed to the destroyers and Talbot raised his eyebrows.

‘Inform the engineer officer, Number One,’ he said.

Shortly afterwards, Talbot was called aboard the flotilla leader, the cruiser,
Champion.
When he returned he looked more bored than ever.

‘What’s on, sir?’

‘Gather we’re supporting a minelaying expedition in the Bight. Our destination’s a rendezvous near the Horns Reef. Another routine show. Tell the engine room to get a move on with raising steam.’

‘We’re
raising
steam,’ Wellbeloved snarled in answer to the message.

‘The owner requests “as fast as possible.”’

‘We’re not just practising!’

The sky was full of blazing red and orange, striking out in rays from behind storm clouds. It looked foreboding and Kelly was reminded of what Fanshawe had said aboard
Clarendon
as they’d reached Kiel – all those years ago in 1914. There had been a vermilion sunset then and Fanshawe had said it looked like blood. He wondered what had happened to Fanshawe. He’d never heard a word from him since the beginning of the war and somehow it seemed to accentuate the briefness of naval friendships, perhaps even their existence.

The buzz had already gone round the lower deck – as though they could read the admiral’s thoughts.

‘Are they out?’ Hatchard asked Kelly. ‘Is it the big smash?’

‘Captain says it’s only routine,’ Kelly insisted. ‘But we’ll run a check on the guns all the same.’

The afternoon was quiet and Kelly noticed that, despite Talbot’s gloom, Hatchard called the gun captains to his cabin and demanded a check on every inch of the weapons systems. ‘If the Germans
are
coming out,’ he told Kelly, ‘then I’ll take back a lot of rude remarks I’ve made about them in the past. It’s been bloody uphill work keeping the chaps up to scratch for nothing.’

Wellbeloved reported the engine room ready and the glare of the afternoon light was just changing to the muted shades of evening when a steam pinnace arrived from
Champion
. An officer climbed aboard – without a word to any of them and they watched with interest as he disappeared to the captain’s cabin. He left in exactly the same way, causing a great deal of speculation about his errand, and as they talked, Lieutenant Heap, his telescope to his eye, pointed out that the battle cruisers appeared to be preparing to slip.

‘Heavy stuff for a minelaying expedition,’ he observed drily.

Talbot appeared, his pipe between his teeth and dressed in his best uniform. He looked as though he were ready to dine with the admiral. ‘Let’s get under way,’ he snapped. ‘Send the town criers round.’

As the bosun’s mates went through the ship, on the messdecks everything became purposeful confusion. Stokers struggled to get below to the boiler rooms. Pulling on jumpers, seamen struggled to get up the hatch and fall in on deck. Guard rails were taken down and life lines rove and the accommodation ladder hoisted inboard and stowed. Rumbling noises aft and the clanging of bells indicated that the engineers were trying the steering engine and telegraphs.

‘They think the Germans might be coming out,’ Talbot finally admitted. ‘Torpedo boats and seaplanes sniffing round the North Sea have decided that there are more submarines about than usual. A whole lot sailed on the 17th and, ever since, they’ve been sighting wakes, periscopes and flocks of seagulls following things that aren’t wholly visible. In addition, Admiralty direction finders have established from W/T traffic that the High Seas Fleet’s moved one and a half degrees west, which takes them from Wilhelmshaven to the Jade Estuary. And
that
means something’s afoot.’

The evening lights were shining palely along the Firth, and the teatime fires were glowing in the cottages and bothies along the water’s edge as the battle cruisers, vast castles of steel, slipped their moorings and began to move under the humps of the Forth Bridge towards the sea, each following the stern light of the ship ahead.

Hatchard was already on the forecastle waiting the order to slip. Aft on the quarter deck, Sub-lieutenant Naylor waited with a pair of red and green flags to indicate whether the propellers were in danger of fouling anything or not. On the bridge, Petty Officer Lipscomb, the yeoman of signals, handed Talbot a megaphone.

‘“Proceed” bent on, sir,’ he reported.

‘Carry on.’

Flag hoists fluttered up to the yardarm and an answering flag went aloft from
Champion.

‘Approved, sir.’

Talbot turned his head, sending a shower of sparks from his pipe. ‘All ready, Number One?’

‘Ready on the forecastle, sir,’ the gunner announced.

‘All ready, sir,’ Kelly said.

‘Slip.’

As the tide swept
Mordant
clear of the buoy, Talbot spoke quietly. ‘Half ahead together.’

The First Destroyer Force led the way down the harbour, followed by the Ninth and Tenth and then the Thirteenth. As they moved forward,
Mordant,
waiting with engines idling just sufficiently to beat the tide, edged into the stream to take up her position. Watching the destroyers, counting them – thirty of them – Kelly saw the flat-topped shape of a seaplane carrier in the dusk.