The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) (17 page)

My attention went back to the two battleships whose searchlights had picked us up. Our decks were suddenly flooded with light and almost immediately the enemy guns began to go off. This time we were not so lucky. An explosive shell hit us somewhere amidships and I was flung backwards by the force of the blast. A fire-fighting team ran past me, paying out a hose behind it, and I saw the fire flicker out in what must have been seconds. I pulled myself to my feet and climbed the companionway to the bridge, where the captain, peering through a pair of night-glasses, was rapping out orders through an electrical loud-hailer which amplified his clicking, harshly accented speech (it was an Ivory Coast dialect with which I was unfamiliar). Again the
Dingiswayo
went about, taking evasive action, all her port guns firing at once and scoring at least two hits on the vessel which had damaged us. We saw her lurch heavily over to one side and settle in the water, part of her hull glowing red-hot and a shower of sparks streaming into the air from a point near her afterbridge. We must have hit some vital part of her, for a moment later there came an awesome explosion which flung me backwards once again so that this time my spine struck the rail and winded me horribly. Oily black smoke was borne on the wind of the explosion and blinded us, and the
Dingiswayo
was buffeted as badly as if she had been seized suddenly by a hurricane, but then the smoke cleared and we saw little of the other ship, just something which might have been her top-mast standing out for a second above the waterline and then this, too, disappeared.

Her sister ship now commenced a heavy cannonade and again we were hit, though not badly, and were able to fire back until the enemy evidently thought better of continuing the engagement, turned about and sped at its maximum rate of knots back into the darkness.

This cautious action on the part of the enemy skipper had a considerable effect on our own morale and a huge cheer went up from our decks while our forward gun fired one last, contemptuous shot at the stern of the retreating vessel.

It seemed to me (and I was later proved correct) that for all its superiority of speed and fire-power, the Australasian-Japanese navy had little stomach for fighting. They had had no direct experience of naval warfare, whereas the Ashanti had been fighting now for several years and were used to risking death almost daily. Faced with the terrible implications of actual battle, our enemy began to lose its nerve. This was the pattern, also, above and below the waves.

But by dawn we were still fighting. For miles in all directions battleship met battleship, steering through a veritable Sargasso Sea of wreckage (in many places it was virtually impossible to see the water at all), and the air continued to be filled with the booming of the guns, the whine of the shells and, less audible but far more chilling to my ears, the screams and the wails of the wounded, the drowning, the abandoned of both sides. Parts of the water were on fire, sending sooty smoke into the cold, grey sky, and now the cloud had come down so low that it was rare to catch sight of an aerial ironclad as it manoeuvred overhead, though we could hear the guns sounding like thunder and see occasional flashes of light, like lightning, every so often split those clouds. A couple of times I saw a blazing hull fall suddenly from out of the grey, boiling canopy above us.

We were soon engaged again, with a ship called the
Iwo Shima,
which had already seen some pretty fierce fighting by the look of her. Part of her bows, above the waterline, had been blown away and there was a great pile of miscellaneous junk in her starboard scuppers which had either been washed or blown there by whatever had damaged her bridge. But she was plucky and she still had a considerable amount of fire-power, as she proved. I think she felt that she was doomed anyway, and was determined to take the
Dingiswayo
to the bottom with her, for she showed no concern for her own safety, steaming directly at us, apparently with the intention of ramming us full on if her guns didn’t sink us first.

In the distance there were a hundred ships of varying tonnage locked in similar struggles, but I saw no sign of the great hull we had been protecting, nor of the ships which had been assigned to tow her, and it seemed to me then that she had gone down.

The
Iwo Shima
did not waver in her course and we were forced to do what we could to avoid her, giving her everything we had left from our forward guns and, for the first time, using every machine-gun that we had behind armour in the fighting tops. This manoeuvre brought us so close to the enemy that we almost touched and neither of us could use any of our big guns at such close range, nor risk using torpedoes. I got a good view of the Japanese seamen, their elaborate and somewhat unfunctional uniforms torn and dirty, their faces begrimed with blood, soot and sweat, watching us grimly as they sped past us, already beginning to turn in the hope of taking us in our stern. But we were turning, too, and a few minutes later the manoeuvre was all over. On our captain’s orders, we released our starboard torpedoes the instant we were broadside of the
Iwo Shima,
at the same time pouring the last of our fire-power into her, every starboard gun firing at once. She was fast enough to escape most of what we sent, but her speed told against her, for her retaliatory fire went wide of us, scoring only one minor hit in our starboard bow. We had managed to upset most of the big guns in her battery, but she turned again, much slower now, for our torpedoes had damaged at least one of her screws. But now the sea had begun to rise, making it much more difficult to aim or, indeed, to see our enemy. Everywhere I looked there were walls of water containing all varieties of flotsam—metal, wood and flesh jostling together in some ghastly minuet—and then the sea would sink for a moment, revealing the
Iwo Shima
, and we would fire hastily until, momentarily, she disappeared again.

Our own damage was not slight. From somewhere below, our pumps were working full out to clear many of the compartments which were flooded. In several places the superstructure of the ship had fused into strange, jagged shapes, and corpses hung limply from damaged positions in the fighting tops, where medical staff had been unable to reach them. We had two big holes above the waterline and a smaller one below, amidships, and we had lost at least thirty men. In ordinary circumstances we might have retired with perfect honour, but all of us knew that this battle was crucial, and there was nothing for it but to fight on. We were closing on the
Iwo Shima
now, letting the sea carry us broadside on to the enemy ironclad, going about so that, with luck, we should be able to take her with our port battery which was in better condition and better equipped to deal with her.

We rose on the crest of a great wave and saw the
Iwo Shima
below us. She had taken in more water than her pumps could cope with and she was already beginning to list astern and to starboard. As the huge wave carried us down, we commenced firing.

The
Iwo Shima
went down without letting go another shot. The water foamed and hissed; and we saw her bows jutting stubbornly out of the green-grey ocean for a second or two and then she was gone. Immediately we went full astern, to avoid being dragged down by her undertow, and there came a massive, grumbling series of explosions from below, immediately followed by a roaring water-spout which shot at least a hundred feet into the air and rained our decks with tiny pieces of shrapnel.

Again, cheering broke out all over the ship, but was swiftly stifled as a heavy black shape emerged from the clouds overhead. The
Iwo Shima
must have signaled to one of her sister airships for help just before she went down. We had hardly anything left with which to defend ourselves. Machine-gunners in the fighting tops aimed their guns upwards, pouring round after round into the hull of the flying ironclad. I could hear a steady
ping ping
as our bullets struck metal, but they had about as much effect as a cloud of midges on a charging rhinoceros. It was our good fortune that this monster had evidently dropped all her bombs and spent her heavy artillery, for she answered us with a chatter of steam-gatlings, raking our decks where our men were thickest and wreaking immediate havoc so that in one moment where there had been proud, cheering individuals, citizens of the Ashanti Empire, there was now a horrible mass of writhing, bloody flesh.

I could read the name emblazoned on the airship’s dark hull—the R.A.A.
Botany Bay
—and made out her insignia. This gave me a peculiar lurching sensation in the pit of my stomach, for she was flying the good old Union Jack inset with the crimson chrysanthemum of Imperial Japan! Half of me wanted to hail the ship as a friend, while the other half shared the emotions of my fellows aboard the
Dingiswayo
as they fought desperately and hopelessly back. Only our stern gun, a sort of latter-day Long Tom, was operational, and as the
Botany Bay
went past, we managed to get off three or four shots at her, holing her astern, just above her main propellers, but it was the best we could do. Apparently careless of the damage we had done to her, she made a graceful turn in the air and fell upon us again. This time I barely managed to get down behind the shield of one of our useless 9-inch guns before the bullets hailed across our decks.

When I next raised my head, I was fully expecting death, but saw instead the black-and-white markings of one of our own aerial cruisers, dropping down almost as if out of control, so swiftly did she move, clouds of grey smoke puffing from the length of her slender hull as she gave off a massive cannonade. Shell after shell struck the top of the
Botany Bay
’s armoured canopy, piercing it so that her buoyancy tanks were thoroughly holed. She turned first on one side and then on the other and it was a horrifying as well as an awe-inspiring sight to see such a huge beast rolling in the air almost directly above our heads! I have witnessed the death-agonies of more than one airship, but I have never seen anything quite like the death of the
Botany Bay.
She shuddered. She tried to right herself. She lost height and then shot into the air again, almost to the base of the clouds, then her nose dipped, her convulsions ceased and she smashed down into the sea, disappearing beneath the waves and bobbing up again on her side, steam hissing from her ports, to lie upon the face of the ocean like a dying whale. Few inside her could have survived that awful shaking and we made no attempt to discover if there were survivors. Our own flying cruiser dipped her tail to us by way of salute and climbed back into the clouds.

A few minutes later, as we moved among our wounded, trying to save those we could, news came over the wireless apparatus, telling us to rejoin the main fleet at a position which would put us only a few miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The Battle of the Atlantic was over, the enemy fleet having retired, but the Battle of America had not yet begun.

W
hat remained of our fleet regrouped the next morning. For all that we had defeated the Australasian-Japanese fleet, we had probably sustained greater losses. There were scarcely a dozen flying ironclads left, perhaps five underwater ships operational, and of the surface fleet half had been sunk, while most of the fifty or so surviving craft had all sustained damage, some of it crippling. The
Dingiswayo,
pumps still working full out, was perhaps in better condition than most of its sister craft, and the only ships to have received minimal damage were those which, under cover of the darkness, had towed the huge floating hull out of danger. I saw Hood’s
Chaka
flying overhead, inspecting us as we rose and fell on a moderately heavy sea. A misty rain was falling, adding to the gloomy atmosphere permeating the whole fleet. Somehow the proud black-and-scarlet lion banners we flew did not look so splendid in the wintry, North Atlantic light as they had done under the blazing skies of Africa. Clad in heavy jerseys and sea-cloaks, our caps pulled well down to protect us from the worst of the drizzle, we stood on our decks, shivering, weary and pessimistic. Messages of approval began to come down from the
Chaka
, but could not break our mood. It was the first experience many of the Africans had had of real cold, the sort of cold which cuts into the marrow and threatens to freeze the blood, and liberal amounts of hot toddy seemed to have no effect at all against the weather.

I was standing on the bridge, discussing the conditions with the skipper, Captain Ombuto, who was dismayed to learn that temperatures seemed to me to be somewhat high for the time of year, when a message came through from the
Chaka
which directly concerned me. He read the message, raising his eyebrows and handing it to me. A decent sort, Captain Ombuto had shown me none of the prejudice I had experienced from some of his brother officers. He spoke English with a strong French accent (he had served for a while in the Arabian navy before the war). “The top brass seems concerned for your safety, Bastable.”

The message was unsigned, save with the name of the flagship, and read: “Urgent you give details of officers killed and wounded. How is Bastable? Report immediately.” The message was in English, although French was also used, pretty indiscriminately, as the
lingua franca
of Ashanti.

Captain Ombuto waited until he had a full list of his dead and wounded before relaying the details to the flagship, adding: “Bastable unharmed” at the end of his reply. A little later there came a second message: “Please relay my sympathy to those who lost so many comrades. You fought well and honourably. Send Bastable to flagship. Boat coming.” It was signed simply “Hood”. Ombuto read the message aloud to me, shrugged and removed his cap, scratching his head. “Until now Mrs. Persson has been the only member of your race allowed aboard the flagship. You’re going up in the world, Bastable.” He jerked his thumb in the air. “Quite literally, eh!”

A short while later an airboat landed on the crippled deck of the
Dingiswayo
and I climbed into it, returning the smart salute of the shivering officer of the Lion Guard who commanded it. The poor man looked wretched and I reflected a little cynically that if Hood intended to drive through America into the Southern States, his men could not have a better incentive than the promise of warmer weather!