A single splash whose root he could see, white against the dark grey of the battleship; two more tiny white tips beyond, and a reddish-yellow gleam, at the base of the foremost funnel.
‘Straddle,’ muttered Home, marking it up.
He had to keep his head clear despite the din and the excitement. Artemis might have the most perfect instruments, the finest guns, the best ammunition ever made, but they were useless without clear heads and steady hands and keen eyes. It took a keen eye to see an ‘over’, so that it usually called for a bold decision to mark it up, and the three buttons were temptingly close to each other; a nervous man or a clumsy man or a shaken man could easily signal ‘over’ when he meant to signal ‘short’. Home was only twenty years old; a mature man would smile at the idea of buying a house on Home’s recommendation, or investing his money on Home’s advice, or even backing a horse that Home might fancy. The women who might meet him in drawing-rooms or at cocktail parties would think of him – if they thought of him at all – as a ‘nice boy’; even the girls younger than him would hardly bother their heads about a penniless sub-lieutenant – someone they could dance with, a convenient escort on an otherwise empty evening, perhaps, but not someone to be taken seriously. Moreover, Sub-Lieutenant Home was not a young man with social graces, and he had an inborn tendency to mild stupidity; hostesses found him heavy in the hand.
He was not a man of active and ingenious mind, and people who knew him well would predict for him only the most undistinguished future – retirement from the Navy in twenty years or so with the rank of Lieutenant-Commander, presumably. It might in consequence be considered strange to find him in such a responsible position as captain of ‘B’ turret, but there was really nothing strange about it. Home was a man with all the dogged courage of the society whence he came. He could be relied upon to die where he stood – where he sat, rather – sooner than desert his post. His quiet unimaginative mind was unmoved by fear or by fear of responsibility; as he pressed those buttons he did not dwell mentally on the consequences of pressing the wrong one – the broadside that might miss, the defeat that might ensue from that, the fall of Malta as a consequence of the defeat, the loss of Egypt as a result of the fall of Malta, the victory of Germany, the enslavement of the world. Home may have been worried a little at the thought of a ‘ticking-off’ from the Gunnery Lieutenant, but beyond that his imagination did not stray. He merely made sure that he pressed the right button and observed the fall of the successive broadsides in their proper sequence. He would go on doing that until the end of time; and if evil fortune should wipe out the Gunnery Control Tower and the Gunnery Lieutenant he was perfectly prepared to take over the direction of the three turrets from where he sat and carry the responsibility of the whole ship’s armament.
The bearded ruffians who manned ‘B’ turret accorded him the respect due to his rank and the devotion they were ready to give anyone who could be relied upon come what might to direct their endeavours to destroy the Eyeties. They knew him well after all these months of service, could predict with complete certainty what would be his attitude towards any of the usual crimes or requests. Even though he still only had to shave alternate days while their beards had grey hairs in them, he wore a gold stripe on his sleeve and he could (with discreet aid from tables) work out problems in ballistics or navigation which they never had any hope of solving – the two attributes were very much on a par with each other in their estimation; in other words they knew him to be a major cog in the complex machine in which they were minor cogs, but they also knew that the major cog would never break under the strain or jam through some unpredictable flaw.
17
From the Captain’s Report
… a hit started a small fire…
Artemis was shooting superbly. The Captain could see that, with his own eyes, as he turned his binoculars upon the Italian flagship. With the shortened range it was possible to see not merely whether the splashes fell this side or the other of the target, but how close they fell, and they were raining so densely round the battleship that there must be many more hits being scored than were revealed by the fleeting gleams of the bursting shells which he could see; others were being obscured by the splashes or were bursting inside plating. It was impossible that they could do any serious damage to the big battleship with her vitals encased in twelve-inch steel, but they must be discommoding, all the same. The Captain experienced a feeling of elation which was extraordinarily pleasant. He was a man who was profoundly interested in the art of living. Rembrandt gave him pleasure, and so did the Fifth Symphony; so did bouillabaisse at Marseilles or southern cooking at New Orleans or a properly served Yorkshire pudding in the north of England; so did a pretty girl or an elegant woman; so did a successful winning hazard from a difficult position at billiards, or a Vienna coup at bridge; and so did success in battle. These were the things that gilded the bitter pill of life which everyone had to swallow. They were as important as life and death; not because they were very important, but because life and death were not very important. So the Captain allowed himself to enjoy both the spectacle of shells raining down upon the Italian flagship, and the knowledge that it was his own achievement that they should rain down like that.
The enemy’s salvoes were creeping closer; it was nearly time to retire again. A mile away Hera had emerged from the smoke screen, spitting fire from all her turrets. It seemed for a moment as if she were on fire herself, for during her passage through the smoke screen she had breathed the smoke in through her ventilators, and now her forced ventilation system was blowing it out again in wreathes that curled round her superstructure so that she looked like a ghost ship. Artemis must have presented the same appearance when she came through the screen; the Captain was a little annoyed with himself for not having thought of it and borne it in mind – it would be of some importance in hampering the Italian rangefinders and gunlayers.
But with Hera out of the screen, and the other cruisers beginning to show beyond her, it was for Artemis to withdraw and leave the Italians to their weary task of getting the range of these new elusive targets. It would be ideal if the English ships were only to show themselves for so long that the Italians had no chance of firing on them at all, but that was a council of perfection, and impractical; what was to be aimed at was to strike an exact balance between rashness and timidity, to stay out as long as possible so as to do the most damage and yet not to run undue risks from the enemy’s fire.
‘Port ten,’ said the Captain, waiting until a broadside did not drown his voice, and Artemis plunged back into the protecting smoke.
‘Gawd!’ said Leading Seaman Harris down at the portside pompom, ‘back in the smoke again! Slow, I call it.’
Not many of the ship’s company of Artemis would have called her proceedings slow, but Harris had something of the spoilt prima donna about him. He wanted to be in action with his gun against dive bombers, and he faintly resented the main battery of the ship having a turn at all.
‘It’s this blasted smoke I can’t stand,’ grumbled Nibs. ‘It makes me feel filthy under my clothes.’
An Italian salvo rumbled overhead and plunged unseen into the sea beyond.
‘Wouldn’t call it slow meself,’ said Ryder.
‘Where’s Curly?’ asked Harris. ‘You all right, Curly?’
‘Yes,’ said Presteign. He was all right. The sonnet on the falling bomber, plummetting in flames into the sea, was nearly fully shaped in his mind, and he knew it to be good. ‘I’m all right, Leader.’
Then it happened. No one can explain it. Fifty salvoes had been fired at Artemis without scoring a hit, and now, when she was invisible in the fog, a chance shell hit her. It struck full on the portside pompom, smashing it into jagged splinters of steel as swift as rifle bullets, plunged on and down, through the deck, and there it burst. On the edge of the huge crater it opened in the deck lay what was left of Presteign and Harris, and their blood mingled in the scuppers, so that in their deaths they were join
ed together.
Artemis staggered under the blow. In the engine-room, in the turrets, on the bridge, men grabbed for handhold to preserve their footing. That shell had struck Artemis with the force of an express train travelling at sixty miles an hour, with nothing to cushion the shock, nothing to resist it save the frail plating. But a trifle had saved her from utter destruction; the fact that in its plunging course the shell had struck the heavy pompom, five feet above the deck. The gun had been smashed into unrecognizable fragments by the blow, all its tons of steel torn into splinters, but on the other hand the fuse of the shell had been started into action. The ingenuity of man has progressed so far that as well as being able to throw a shell weighing a ton at a speed of two thousand feet a second, he can divide that second into thousandths, and arrange for the shell to explode either on impact or one two-hundredth of a second later, when it might be expected to be inside any armour plate it might strike. Having struck the pompom, the shell burst only just beneath the upper deck; had it not done so, it would have burst below the main deck, and it would have torn Artemis in two.
What it did was bad enough. It tore open a huge crater in the deck – a vast hole ringed round with a rough edge – long jagged blades of steel, blown vertical by the explosion. It tore huge holes in the ship’s side, and drove red-hot fragments here, there and everywhere, forward through the frail bulkheads, down through the main deck, aft through the plating into the
handing-room of ‘X’ turret. The mere force of its impact, the conversion of its energy of motion into heat, was sufficient to make steel white hot, and within the shell were hundreds of pounds of high explosive which turned the middle of the ship into a raging furnace. Below the upper deck, at the point where the shell burst, was the wardroom, where were the Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander and his men, and two casualties hit by bomb splinters earlier in the morning. One moment they were alive, and the next they were dead, one moment they were men, and then the shell burst right in their midst, and they were nothing – nothing.
The heat of the explosion was like the heat of an oxy-acetylene flame, like the heat of an electric furnace. The paint on the bulkheads of the wardroom was only the thinnest possible layer – kept thin with this particular emergency in view – but it burst into raging flames, as if the very plating had caught fire. The scant covering of linoleum on the deck burst into flames. The padding of the chairs caught fire. The bulkhead forward, dividing the wardroom from its stores, had been torn open, and the stores caught fire, all the sparse pitiful little things which brought some amenity into the lives of the officers: tablecloths and table-napkins, newspapers and spirits, the very bread and sugar, all blazed together. On the starboard side of the ship beside the wardroom were the senior officers’ cabins. They blazed as well – bedding and desks and clothing, paint and woodwork, and photographs of their wives and children, hockey sticks and tennis rackets. From side to side of the ship, from ‘X’ turret aft beyond the warrant officers’ mess forward, the ship was a raging furnace, with flames and smoke pouring out of her riddled hull. Cascading into the flames fell the ammunition of the shattered pompom – deadly little shells, bursting in a devil’s tattoo of explosions and feeding the flames which blazed luridly in the gloom of the smoke screen.
The Commander – Commander James Hipkin Rhodes, DSO, DSC – had been squatting on the boat deck aft, complaining bitterly to himself. When he had been a young lieutenant it had appeared such an unattainable apothesis to become a Commander even when he attained the unattainable and won the vital promotion – the most difficult and most significant in a naval officer’s career – from lieutenant-commander to commander it had been delightful and gratifying. But to be Commander in a light cruiser in action was to be a fifth wheel to a coach: it meant squatting here on the boat deck doing nothing at all, waiting merely for unpleasantness – waiting in case the Captain should be killed (and the Commander would rather be killed himself, with no sort of pose about that option) and waiting for the ship to be hit (and the Commander loved Artemis more dearly than most men love their wives).
On active service it was hard enough to keep the ship at all clean and presentable, the way any self-respecting commander would have his ship appear. He groaned each time Artemis dashed into the smoke screen – he knew too well the effect that oily vapour would have on paint and bedding and clothing. A commander’s duty in a big ship is largely one of routine, and after two years of that duty it can be understood that Rhodes had become too deeply involved in it, was liable to think too much about details and not about the broad outline of the fact that England was fighting for her life. As Artemis went into action he had been wondering what damage would be done to his precious paint, just as a woman’s first reaction when she and her husband receive an invitation to some important function might be to wonder what she should wear. Rhodes, in fact, was in grave danger of becoming an old woman.
The shell burst, and the blast of the explosion flung him from his seat sprawling on the deck. His chin was lacerated, and when he got to his feet blood poured down his chest, but he paid no attention to it. He staggered to the rail, sick and shaken, and gazed down at the ruin six feet below him. The heat of the flames scorched his face. Then he rallied.
‘Hoses, there!’ he bellowed; the crew of the starboard side pompom – those who had not been mown down by the splinters – were picking themselves up out of the fantastic attitudes into which they had been flung, and the light of the flames lit them vaguely in the artificial darkness of the smoke. The voice of an officer pulled them together. Without knowing what they did they got out the hoses, going like automatons through the drill that had been grained into them. Artemis came out of the smoke screen, and the flames paled almost into invisibility against the sunshine, masked by the thick grey smoke pouring up through the deck – foul, stinking smoke, for many things were burning there.
Rhodes half fell, half ran down the ladder to the upper deck, calling together the fire-fighting parties in the waist. The pumps began to sing; the prescience of the Commander (E) had provided ample steam for them. Rhodes plunged down to the mess flat below; it was full of smoke both from the screen and from the fire, and pitchy-black with the failure of the electric circuits – so dark that he could see, as he looked aft, the afterbulkhead glowing lurid red with the heat beyond it.
Rhodes was an old woman no longer. The explosion of a fifteen-inch shell had been sufficient to shake him at least temporarily out of his old-womanishness. He organized the fire-fighting arrangements here, and then dashed up again to the boat deck where he could have the clearest view of the damage. There was no way of getting aft from here direct – the ship was ablaze from side to side – and the only way left would be to go down into the boiler-room and aft from there, under the fire. That would take a long time. He caught sight of Richards on the quarterdeck; he was in charge of damage control in the after part of the ship, and as Richards was alive and had a working party with him there was no urgent need for Rhodes’s presence. He turned to the telephone.
‘Forebridge,’ he said, and then when Jerningham answered, ‘Commander to Captain.’
The two brief waits, of a second or two each time, gave him time to get his breath and steady himself. For Rhodes there was some advantage about being old-maidish and fussy about detail. Being deeply immersed in his job shut out other considerations from his mind. He had to make a formal report, and it had to be done exactly right.
‘Yes, Commander?’ said the Captain’s voice.
Rhodes reported what he had seen and done.
‘Is it a bad fire?’ asked the Captain.
The Commander let his eyes roam back aft, to the smoke and flame. From a commander’s point of view it was a very bad fire indeed, but Rhodes still had some common sense left to save him from exaggeration. He made himself look at the flames with a dispassionate eye, the eye of a fighting man and not that of the ship’s head housemaid.
‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘Not a bad fire. It’ll be und
er control directly.’
He put back the receiver and the instrument squealed at once so that he took it up again. The damage reports were coming in from the different compartments – a small leak here, a shattered bulkhead there. Nothing to call for a serious transference of his damage-control strength. Jerningham showed up beside him, a little white about the gills, but his manner was quite composed. Jerningham and the Commander disliked each other for a variety of reasons, and there was no pretence of cordiality as they spoke to each other. The Commander hastily recapitulated the reports which had come in to him, and Jerningham made notes on his pad, before they turned back to look at the fire.
A score of hoses were pouring water into the flaming crater; one or two pompom shells were still exploding down below, each explosion sending up a torrent of sparks like some vast firework. Another hose party came running down the waist on the portside; the man who held the nozzle dragged Presteign’s dead body viciously out of the way. The jets would have mastered the fire soon enough, but a more powerful agency came into play. Artemis put her helm over, and as she heeled the hole torn in her side was brought below the surface, and the sea rushed in. Even on the upper deck they could hear the crackling as the water quenched the red-hot surfaces, and steam poured in a huge cloud up through the crater, enwreathing the whole stern of the ship. Then she righted herself as she took up her new course, then leaned a little the other way as the rudder steadied her, sending fifty tons of water washing through the compartment into every corner and cranny before it poured down in sooty warm shower-baths through the few holes torn in the main deck by the shell fragments. Only a little steam and smoke came up through the deck now; Richards stood on the jagged edge of the crater and looked down, while a petty officer beside him jumped down into the wrecked wardroom amid the unspeakable mess inside. Richards with his hands to his mouth bellowed the result of his inspection to the Commander – the holes in both sides of the ship above the water line, the minor holes in the deck.