Thunder at Dawn (25 page)

XVII

Sunlight sparked on a quiet sea. Smith stood forward of the conning-tower, clear of the twisted wreckage of the bridge. He was numbed. The deck on which he stood was unrecognisable as that of any ship let alone his. Forward of him the turret smoked thinly, the barrel of the gun askew; the fore part of the ship was a moonscape of craters. Aft was a scene of tangled wreckage laced with licking pools of flame fought by men who stumbled over and around the wreckage, weaving like drunken men. It was a cat’s-cradle of twisted steel, riven plates. Of the three funnels remaining to
Thunder
only one stood, riddled. The two aftermost had fallen in on each other, joined by the mast and the whole steel mountain sagged over the port side, canting the deck. She was down by the stern.

Garrick was alive. His face was streaked with black blood from his scalp, one arm hung limp and his face was drawn with pain but he had reported and returned to his duty. So had Davies, his boiler-suit half-burned from him, his grizzled hair singed. And the long Miles, who seemed to bear the mark of every fire aboard.

And Smith had gone to see for himself. The steering compartment was wrecked and flooded; she was flooded right forward to the engine room bulkhead. She was also flooded in several compartments forward. There was no power at all.

Davies summed it up, hugely understated the obvious: “It’s a dockyard job.”

That meant a tow. No doubt a tug would come, hurrying, a vulture. It meant internment. For the ship and her crew, for Smith himself.

But the fires were under control and
Thunder
was not sinking.

Wolf
was sinking.

They could see her by squinting red-weary eyes against that sun that was still low, across the miles of sea. Smith, with his glasses, could see her better. He looked again and again during the swift-flying minutes of his tour of inspection. A man here and there would lift his head to pause and breathe and stare before working again. Watching as she sank. They were all still, watching, when her stern lifted and her bow went under and she slid down. A rush of steam, and smoke from the funnels hung in a spreading pall like a shroud.

It covered the men in the water. Smith could not see them with the glasses but they would be there. There were no boats to be seen and Smith had none to send. The pinnace had crabbed alongside to weak cheers, Manton at the wheel and all hands bailing. When Manton stood swaying before Smith he had explained, “One dropped rather close, sir.” She leaked in a dozen places and now she hung in the water, not floating, where they had made her fast at
Thunder’s
side. She was no more seaworthy than a colander.

Smith came on Gibb where he sprawled blank-eyed and gasping by the conning-tower, Bates at his side. He had them carried to the upper-deck abaft the bridge where Albrecht had contrived to clear a space to which he was evacuating his wounded. They carried them up, coughing, from below.

Albrecht glanced at him coldly. Albrecht was devoid of emotion; professionally he had no time for it but in any event he was drained of it. He had seen too many men die, was glutted with pain. “I’m setting up here. The sick-bay is impossible. Everything smashed. A hit —”

“I know. Do what you can.”

“I’ve blankets, bandages and cold water for one-hundredand-forty-seven cases of everything from concussion to amputation, to severe scalding, to burns. The burns —” He shook his head. “There are more. They’re still coming in, they’re still finding them. Young Thorne has a broken leg, young Vincent is dead. Knight is dead.”

He stopped at sight of Smith’s face, who knew that Lieutenant Day was dead. He had commanded in the afterturret which was a total loss. Lieutenants Knight and Day, who had been the coster and his missus at the ship’s concerts. No longer a comic turn. He knew that
Thunder
had seventythree dead — so far.

Albrecht sighed and went on wearily, “I’m not blaming you. I know that if you hadn’t fought those cruisers they’d have run wild all along this coast, and all the rest of it. I know. It had to be done. You did it and still saved most of us and the ship though only God knows how. I still can’t believe it. The surgeon’s knife. I only wish my surgery was as successful as yours, but we both have to live with it.”

Smith knew that; he had laid one ghost only to raise another. He said, “Anything you want, anything I can do …”

“I know. If you have time, later, you ought to come and talk to the men.” Albrecht smiled wryly. “They call you all kinds of a tough, mad bastard, but they love you, all of them.”

That silenced Smith, daunted him while he simply could not understand it. But he looked at the men where they lay uncomplaining, silent or weakly joking on the deck and beyond them to the others who laboured like filthy spectres, and beyond them in his mind’s eye to the others below, out of his sight in the smoke-filled reeking darkness. And he wondered for the thousandth time or more in his life how he could deserve men like this.

Albrecht cleared his throat. “And I’d like to see that boy Wakely. One of my lads put a dressing on him but I want him as soon as you can spare him.” Smith had seen him working on the deck below, the once plump and pink Wakely now haggard and grey, skull wrapped in a bloody bandage.

Albrecht started to turn away and the shell shrieked in and landed aft in the centre of a working-party. Smith winced against the flash, rocked by the burst and saw men tossed like bloody dolls. He stared stupidly then his eyes searched as be cursed himself for forgetting, knowing what he would find.

The
Leopard
was coming in from the sea.
Thunder
had left her behind guarding the mouth of the river, a cork in an empty bottle, but she had followed the cruisers. He had forgotten her. She was coming in from the sea because she would have set that course while
Kondor
still fought, not risking going inshore of the bigger ships. Now she was left with nothing but vengeance and she would take it. She must know
Thunder
hadn’t a gun that would fire seaward. She only had two four-inch guns herself and they would not sink
Thunder
quickly but they would steadily tear her to pieces.

There was nothing to stop her. Garrick was trying with a party to clear a midships twelve-pounder that looked as if it
might
have survived. If he succeeded that pop-gun would not stop
Leopard
. The men were ready to fight again but they stumbled with fatigue. Near one-hundred-and-fifty wounded and not a boat.

He saw Benks standing among the wounded where they lay in rows on the deck. “Benks!” He spoke briefly, tonelessly, to the hollow-eyed steward and Benks disappeared below and Smith climbed to the fore-deck to stand by the conningtower, eyes fixed on the gunboat. Like a rich man’s yacht. He flinched as her forward gun fired again. The round burst close alongside.

Smith had thrown himself to the deck but he scrambled up as Benks called to him and he took the bundle from the steward. He jammed it inside his jacket to leave his hands free and started to climb painfully slowly, wearily up through the tangle of wreckage to the top of the conning-tower. A shell burst on the useless fore-turret and blast plucked at him, splinters droned and snarled through the wreckage. He hung on, looked down and saw Garrick standing by the twelve-pounder that was abandoned, unworkable, staring dumbly up at him, agony in his face. Smith turned away from him and climbed again. The gunboat was only nine hundred tons, not a tenth of
Thunder’s
bulk. She had only ten knots of speed and was manned by a rusty, unhandy crew but she carried
Thunder’s
certain death in that gun.

He stood up on top of the conning-tower, blinking at the gunboat as he fumbled at the big, white tablecloth tucked inside his jacket. Garrick’s face showed agony but Garrick knew as well as he that Smith had no choice. The gunboat came on. She would turn soon so that she could fire both the fore and aft guns, and then …

The water-spouts rose in white towers, a line of them that hid the
Leopard
behind a curtain of water that hung for seeming seconds as the sound of that salvo came rumbling across the sea. As the water fell and the spray blew away he could see her turning on her heel, but turning away from that sudden enormous salvo from out of the blue. The soundwave rumbled in bass over the sea and staring aft he saw
Kansas
, unmistakable, huge, roaring up from the south.

*

Aboard
Kansas
the messenger from the wireless-room said, “Signal, sir.”

Donoghue took it, read it and handed it to Corrigan who muttered the words as he read: “… ‘commence hostilities’ … Came just a trifle late.”

Donoghue growled, “I didn’t commence hostilities. I said we would come out in case survivors needed assistance but once here I wasn’t going to sit on my butt and watch murder done. However. Order that gunboat to heave to or we’ll sink her. And make to
Thunder
: United States at war with Germany. Where are the enemy cruisers?”

On the signal bridge a yeoman with a telescope to his eye drawled, “Feller on top of — the bridge — I think. Signalling with a couple of white flags. He’s hellish slow, even for a limey.”

Smith was rusty.

The answer came to Donoghue. “
Thunder
replies, sir: ‘Sunk. Can you tow me?’

Corrigan said quietly, “Jesus Christ.”

Donoghue groped for some noble phrase, some stirring reply but this was an exercise alien to him and he remembered the slight, filthy, lonely figure on the quay naming himself simply, “Smith.”

And Donoghue said, “Affirmative.”

*

Smith fought off the lassitude of reaction and started the climb down to the deck. There was work for him to do but there would be help for all of them now, for Garrick, for Davies, for Albrecht and the men. For the ship. His mind already worked on the details of the tow, of the bulkheads that needed to be shored up.
Kansas
could lend them divers …

He found himself wondering about Sarah Benson and the destruction wrought this day. There was a good reason for that destruction, for him at least. When she had raised the pistol at arm’s length and fired — what was the reason? He had never asked her …

The battered hulk that was
Thunder
wallowed in the seaway. “One long roll …” On
Kansas
as she swept down on her every man who could find a spot where he was able to stare at that hulk, in silence.

The guns were silent.

Arnold Phizackerly stood in the stern of the dinghy at the mouth of the channel. He had waited there listening to the rumble of the distant guns and peering out at the far flaming that marked them. Now with the sun warm on his back he stared at the smoke on the horizon, unable to make out any ship, and wondered.

*

Sarah Benson listened to that silence, cold. And waited.

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to many people who helped me with this book and in particular David Lyon of the National Maritime Museum, Derek Pilley and Lieutenant Michael Pilley, R. N.

But any mistakes are mine!

If you enjoyed
Thunder at Dawn
you may be interested in
The Secret Battle
by A P Herbert, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
The Secret Battle
by A P Herbert

Foreword by Sir Winston Churchill

This story of a valiant heart tested to destruction took rank when it was first published a few months after the Armistice, as one of the most moving of the novels produced by the war. It was at that time a little swept aside by the revulsion of the public mind from anything to do with the awful period just ended. But on rereading it nine years later it seems to hold its place, and indeed a permanent place, in war literature. It was one of those cries of pain wrung from the fighting troops by the prolonged and measureless torment through which they passed and like the poems of Siegfried Sasson should be read in each generation, so that men and women may rest under no illusion about what war means. In 1919 it was first and foremost a chronicle valued for the sober truth of its descriptions and its narration of what might happen to a gallant soldier borne down by stresses incredible to those who have not endured them, and caught in the steel teeth of the military machine.

The tale is founded on fact. Nevertheless, as the writer has been careful to make clear, it is not an authentic account. All the facts on which it rests happened, and many of them happened in combination to a very large number of young men who fought for us or who fought against us, and to those who loved them. But they did not all happen to the same man or in so far as they fell upon one individual, the emphasis and setting were not the same. It can now be judged from a more detached, and in some respects more exacting, standpoint as a work of art. It is a monument of the agony, not of one but of millions, standing impassive in marble to give its message to all wayfarers who pass it. It speaks to the uninformed, to the unimaginative, to the headstrong, and to the short-memoried folk who need a word of warning on their path. It speaks also with that strange note of consolation, often underlying tragedy, to those who know only too well and can never forget. To a new generation of ardent, virile youth it can do no harm. They will not be deterred by its story from doing their duty by their native land, if ever the need should come. They will face terrors and tortures, if need be, with the simple faith that “What man has done, man can do”. Nothing but good can come in future years to those older people—if such there be—who contemplate in sluggish acquiescence and airy detachment wars in which they will themselves bear no part. And piercing complacency with barbed dart, it drives home the bitter invocation:

“Pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.”

The author, who himself passed not unscathed but undaunted through much and some of the worst of what he describes, develops his tale with the measured fatefulness of a Greek tragedy. But here the pathos is all the greater because there is no element of Nemesis. The hero-victim is never anything but modest and dutiful: he always tries his best to do his bit. It is only the cruelty of chance which finally puts his life and his honour in the hands of the two men whose vanity he had offended. He had much to give. He gave it all. But a blind Fate declared it was not enough.

The restraint with which the author bridles his mercilessly gathered argument at every stage enables him to produce the climax in the very lowest key; and the reader is left to bear or express his own feelings as best he may. It is a soldier’s tale cut in stone to melt all hearts.