The Lion at Sea (42 page)

‘How many?’ Kelly asked.

‘Twenty-three dead, sir. Thirty wounded. Some seriously. There may be more. I’m not certain yet.’

‘That’s a lot for a ship this size.’

As Kelly struggled back to the bridge, one eye and half his face hidden by a great pad of lint, cotton wool and bandage, the ship appeared to be a wreck. It had no guns and the torpedo tubes were empty, but Hatchard had already turned to rigging up temporary communications and Wellbeloved appeared, his face full of optimism.

‘We’re all right below,’ he reported.

Rumbelo got the crew to muster under the bridge so that Kelly could tell them what was happening, and he tried to talk to them like a father, uneasily aware that most of them were older than he was.

‘I suspect we’re hardly in a fit state to try any more conclusions with the enemy,’ he said. ‘But we have both engines and we can manoeuvre. In case anything appears, I want all automatic weapons mounted and manned.’

As they dispersed, the destroyer began to move slowly through the black water, picking up speed as she went. ‘Take the ship, sub,’ Kelly said to Naylor. ‘At least you can see.’

A piece of heaving line round his waist to hold his trousers up in place of the severed braces, he stood on the bridge, clutching the rail. As
Mordant
lifted her forefoot, the horizon to the south was still lit by flashes and occasional searchlights.

‘If they’ve called out Tyrwhitt from Harwich we must have cut them off from their bases,’ Naylor said.

‘
If
,’ Kelly said. He had no great faith in the Admiralty. Pressed by the politicians in London who would be eager to protect the Thames estuary and the approaches to London, they’d be in no hurry to release the eager Tyrwhitt.

They were alone now. They had no idea where the Germans were, though the distant horizon was still full of flashes and the red glow of guns, and occasionally a bigger flare as some ship met its end. There was a strong suspicion growing in Kelly’s mind as they drove westwards that this great battle for which the Navy had been waiting for two years had not been the big smash that everyone had predicted. Over-caution, lack of training, foolhardiness, bad designs and damn bad signalling seemed to have snatched the victory from their grasp.

Occasionally they saw dimmed lights on the sea about them to show where darkened ships, more afraid than they were, crept past in an attempt to escape. Despite the wreckage along the decks, there was an atmosphere of satisfaction about
Mordant,
and despite their casualties, they had dealt some telling blows and had severely damaged one light cruiser.

Aware of a feeling of light-headedness, Kelly realised that his shoulders were growing stiff and that it was growing harder to stand upright. Someone brought him a stool and he sat down on it, clutching the bridge rail, his fingers knotted in his efforts to control himself. The sick berth tiffy appeared and once more suggested an injection but he shook his head. He was in command of a ship at last and he wasn’t going to relinquish it easily.

Curiously, at that moment he thought of Charley and wondered what she would think. Some time tomorrow or the next day they would learn at home that there’d been a tremendous battle and that the Navy had lost several fine ships. He had lapsed into a dazed darkness of pain when Naylor touched his arm.

‘Sir!’

A pointing finger jerked and in the blackness he could see the white glow of phosphorescence from the foam at a ship’s forefoot. The two vessels were converging gradually and he had come out of his lassitude at once, alert to avoid a collision.

‘I hope to God she’s not a German,’ he said.

Then, abruptly, as though she had not seen
Mordant
just off her quarter, the other ship turned to starboard right across their course so that there was no longer any hope of avoiding her.

‘Searchlight,’ Kelly snapped and, as the white beam of light leapt across the black sea, they saw at once that the other ship was a German torpedo boat, smaller than
Mordant
and carrying a large white number on her bow.

‘It’s a Hun!’ Naylor screamed.

‘Full ahead both!’ Kelly said. ‘Clear the forecastle! Stand by to ram!’

There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of missing. The German ship had increased speed and seemed to leap forward, and they saw white faces and a gun turning towards them and the flash as it fired. The shell screamed past and disappeared astern, and a second shell struck the bow a glancing blow, ricocheted downwards and exploded alongside, drenching them with water. Then
Mordant
’s
bows smashed into the German’s side, just abaft the bridge and Kelly was flung forward. As his body struck the bridge rail, a blinding stab of hellish pain rolled over him, and someone fell on top of him, knocking the breath from his body. The damaged foremast came down with a crash, crushing the searchlight in a shower of electric-blue sparks, and the battered funnel bent and fell forward like the hinged stack of a river steamer.

‘Jesus,’ someone said. ‘Smack in the wardroom pantry! Right in the bloody breadbasket!’

For a second, Kelly decided he was dead and in hell as the German fired at
Mordant
with everything she possessed. All about him he could hear the grind and screech of tearing metal and wild shouts in English and German. Struggling to his feet, he dragged himself up to see the German ship lying below
Mordant
’s
bow, rolling over on her beam ends, and German sailors, their cap ribbons fluttering, running along the twisted decks.

‘Full astern!’

Screeching and groaning, the two ships parted as
Mordant
backed off, her bows thrust upwards and buckled like a tin can.

‘Like the cork out of an effing bottle,’ a sailor below the bridge yelled exultantly.

The German was badly hurt, a great hole like a wedge of cheese carved in her side. As
Mordant
drew clear, Kelly saw two men standing in the opening among the torn metal, both of them yelling with fright, then the water rushed in and swept them away, and the German ship, released from the pressure, began to swing back, rolling to starboard as the sea engulfed her.

For a moment she straightened and a gun banged, but the barrel was cocked wildly askew and the shell screamed off into the air, then someone on
Mordant
opened fire with a Lewis gun and he saw men falling. The German began to heel over rapidly as she filled with water and, as they continued to back away, they saw her lay on her side, slowly as if she were tired, until the decks were awash, then she turned over, rolling a little as she settled, and finally disappeared.

‘God,’ Naylor said. ‘That was quick!’

There were only about a dozen men in the water. They were dragged on board, dripping and gasping, two of them dying almost at once. To everyone’s surprise, among them was Petty Officer Lipscomb, the yeoman of signals, who had been shot off the bridge by the collision. He was wearing two life jackets and was protesting he couldn’t swim, but he did a record twenty yards to the side of the ship to yells of encouragement from the crew.

Twisted with pain, Kelly stared at the forepeak. It was lifted high and wrenched to starboard. Wellbeloved appeared alongside him, his jaw dropped, his eyes bulging at the wreckage.

‘I think the next job,’ Kelly said flatly, ‘will be to get this damned ship home.’

Mordant
sagged like a wounded animal as her frantic crew struggled to remove the debris of the mast and shore up the funnel.

The deck below the forecastle had been pushed back for nearly a quarter of the ship’s length. A great stretch of steel had been peeled off and trailed its jagged edges in the water, while the cable locker had gone completely and the anchor chain hung down in a steel tangle like an old lady’s knitting.

‘What a bloody horrible sight,’ Wellbeloved said.

The bow was now only half its original length with some twenty feet crumpled, twisted and forced bodily aft. Through the jagged holes in the plating, it was possible to look into the forward mess deck and see the stools and tables. The fore part of the forecastle deck had collapsed downwards until the stemhead was nearly touching the water, forming a vertical wall, over the top of which the muzzle of the wrecked four-inch gun protruded at an odd angle.

‘Looks as if it were mounted on the edge of a cliff,’ Kelly said.

‘We’ll have to be towed home stern-first,’ Naylor observed.

‘Who by?’ Kelly turned with difficulty. ‘Seems to me, we’re all alone, Sub. Let’s hope the mist holds and then, at least, the Hun won’t see us creeping off.’

‘Can
we creep off?’

‘We can try.’

It was now midnight and the flickering of flames along the horizon still continued with the glare of searchlights and the thunder of gunfire. Wellbeloved was already below, struggling with baulks of timber, mattresses and rope to prop up the forward bulkhead. On that one bulwark of steel depended the ship’s safety, and he and his men were struggling in waist-high water to strengthen it so they could move.

‘We could wait for daylight,’ Hatchard suggested. ‘I dare bet there won’t be any Germans around to sink us by then.’

Kelly winced at the pain across his shoulders. ‘There probably won’t be any of our ships around either,’ he said. ‘Not that we could call for help, anyway, because we’ve got neither searchlight nor wireless.’

Wellbeloved appeared. He was filthy dirty and soaked to the skin, his clothes clinging to his thick body.

‘You can try her now,’ he said. ‘Dead slow.’

For a while they made way through the sea, but it was difficult to steer without any knife-edge to cleave the water. Plates were hanging loose and clanging and clattering as they moved, and with every yard they were shoving against the hundreds of tons of water that flooded into the open bows. Wellbeloved returned from a tour of inspection.

‘Bulkhead’s starting to go,’ he said. ‘Looks
as if it might collapse. It’s pushing the whole ocean in front of it. We’re down by the bows and the oil tank’s leaking into the sea.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Stop engines for a kick-off. It’ll diminish the strain.’

‘Right. And we’ll adjust the weight to bring the bows out of the water a bit.’

Everything movable was shifted aft to lift the shattered bows, and the forward bulkheads were shored up by more spars, planks, mess stools and tables. The same was done to the top of the oil tank which was showing signs of bulging upwards, and the ammunition from the forward shell room was carried aft while the anchor chain was cut away and allowed to splash into the sea.

They finished the work as first light came to reveal the extent of the damage to the ship. The funnels that still stood, like the ventilators, were riddled through with hundreds of small gashes and the decks were slashed and ripped by splinters. All the officers’ cabins and the charthouse had been set on fire and the navigational instruments destroyed, while there were three holes in the ship’s side and the main topmast, charred and blackened by the flames, hung down over the wrecked searchlight. The rigging, signal lockers, everything, were a mass of torn steel and timber.

‘Well, that settles it,’ Kelly said. ‘It seems we’ve
got
to get her home. We can’t abandon because we’ve got no boats.’

A slight breeze had risen, as yet without malice but enough to ripple the water into minute corrugations, and as the temporary repairs were completed, they began once more to steam westwards. The North Sea looked grey and forbidding. There was no sign of the German fleet, just melancholy acres of dead men on the flat calm water, floating in their life jackets among the debris from their lost ships. All around them, over the horizon out of sight, other ships were also making their way home, ghostly in the mist, some of them wallowing under hundreds of tons of water.

Then they passed the wreckage of a German ship and bodies of drowned German sailors, including two officers lying across a spar, floating about with caps and clothing and pieces of timber among the smear of oil and scraps of charred hammocks; and finally a drawer full of seamen’s documents and a raft with
Black Prince
painted on its sides.

Nobody spoke. Nobody had time to speak. Every movement of the sea caused
Mordant
to sway and groan and, as the wind freshened, she gave a little lurch and Wellbeloved stared anxiously at the scar in case it was lengthening to expose her flanks still further. Once it extended beyond an upright riveted rib he’d marked, yet another compartment would be flooded.

By this time Kelly’s back felt as if it were in a straightjacket, and his fingers ached with being clamped to the bridge rail.

Wellbeloved appeared. ‘We’re making it,’ he grinned. He looked exhausted and blackened with dirt, his eyes red-rimmed, his tongue pink in the hole of his mouth.

Below deck in an atmosphere stinking of scorched paintwork and burnt cordite, the first aid parties were still labouring over the wounded, and the dead were being collected and laid in rows on the stern. Their injuries were terrible. Some of them had been literally torn in half, or had limbs
ripped from their bodies; some had been stripped naked by the blast. But the less injured were lying below on the mess deck tables now and those who could sit or recline were propped up with lifebelts.

Despite the groans of the burned and wounded, the spirit of the unhurt vas excellent. They were all exhausted and hungry because the galley had disappeared and they’d eaten nothing but sandwiches for thirty-six hours. Nevertheless, as they collected the empty shell cases and cleared the decks of wreckage, one of the torpedomen produced an accordion and began to play ‘Keep The Home Fires Burning.’

‘How about “Anybody Here Seen Kelly?”’ one of the gunners shouted and, as he changed tunes, Kelly saw faces turned towards the bridge.

‘Good old Ginger,’ someone yelled. Kelly’s face twisted into a grimace of a smile, and he lifted his hand in an acknowledgement that seemed to wrench at the stitches in his back.