Читать книгу Kerrell - Henry Taprell Dorling - Страница 6

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WITH the greyish light of approaching dawn slowly creeping over the sea, the light-cruisers started to move out to their stations. By six-forty-five, when the first signs of full daylight came out of the east in a glare of sulphurous yellow through the rifts in the cloud masses banked up on the horizon, they were in a long line ahead, covering a wide area. The destroyers followed astern of them in groups, the whole force still steering a northerly course at a speed of twenty-five knots. At seven o’clock it was full daylight—a calm, clear morning with an overcast sky and hardly sufficient breeze to ruffle the grey sea.

On board the Libyan officers and men were already at their action stations. The ship had woken up. Guns and torpedo-tubes were fully manned, their crews standing easy round them smoking their pipes and cigarettes. From the galley on the upper deck the smell of kippers frying for someone’s breakfast ascended to the bridge. It was not until the ship was really in action that the ship’s cook and his mates would leave their galley and go to their stations in shell-rooms and magazines. Meanwhile, hungry men must live, and the North Sea air gave them healthy appetites. So, for awhile, cookie and his myrmidons still had their being among their frying-pans and kettles of water boiling for tea.

Hendry, from the starboard end of the bridge, slowly swept the horizon with his glasses from right ahead to the beam, and back again.

“What’s he expecting to see?” Pardoe asked in a whisper, looking out on the starboard bow to where, perhaps two miles away, the slim grey shape of a British three-funnelled light-cruiser drove steadily through the water with the sea creaming round her sharp forefoot and her white wash heaped up astern.

“God knows!” Kerrell muttered with a shrug of his shoulders, remembering his rebuff of two hours before. “But it’s a fiver to a farthing we’re expecting to sight something. Why else are we spread out like this? If you ask me we’re——”

His sentence remained unfinished, for at that instant there came a tawny-golden flash and a cloud of dun-coloured cordite smoke from the ship they were both looking at. She had fired a gun.

Then another, and another—ranging shots, evidently. Next, a whole salvo. The deep concussion of the reports came to their ears across the water.

“What the devil’s she firing at?” asked the lieutenant-commander, coming to Kerrell’s side. “Her guns are trained over on the starboard bow; but I can’t see a thing.”

“Nor can I, sir,” the first-lieutenant answered, his heart palpitating with excitement—excitement which became almost unbearable when a cluster of tall white spray fountains, an enemy salvo, leapt out of the sea close to the cruiser’s side.

An instant later there came a whistle from the voice-pipe to the wireless office. The leading signalman went to it.

“Hullo?” he said. “Hullo?... Yes ... Yes. I’ve got that. Is that all?—Right you are.”

“Aurora’s reporting enemy in sight, sir,” the man reported to Hendry.

“Right,” the captain nodded without the wink of an eyelid. “Tell them to let me know of anything else they intercept. We ought to be meeting our battle-cruisers before long.—But where the deuce are the enemy?” he added, lifting his glasses again.

Battle-cruisers, thought Kerrell to himself. So Sir David Beatty’s battle-cruisers from Rosyth, Commodore Tyrwhitt’s light-cruisers and destroyers from Harwich, and the enemy, seemed all to be meeting at a point. And even now the fun was starting!

“Watch your steering, coxswain!” Hendry cautioned sharply, as the leader of the Libyan’s group altered course slightly to starboard towards the Aurora, which was still firing intermittently, and round which the enemy shell were still occasionally pitching. “Not too much helm! Steady, man. Steady!”

A moment later, some distance ahead of the British light-cruiser, a faint smudge of smoke appeared on the clear horizon to the north-east. It thickened fast. The captain and first-lieutenant levelled their binoculars simultaneously. In less than a minute they could make out the light-grey hull and three upright funnels and two masts of a hostile light-cruiser. She was fully seven miles away, 14,000 yards, steaming fast on a north-easterly course with her thick smoke drifting down in the Aurora’s direction. Even as they watched the golden sparkle of gun flashes showed that she had fired again.

“There are three or four destroyers with her,” Kerrell observed.

Hendry, intent upon conning the ship, nodded in reply.

Before long the enemy cruiser turned and made off to the south-eastward, the increasing smoke from her funnels and heavy bow-wave showing she was travelling at high speed. Almost at the same time Hendry and Kerrell, indeed, everyone on the Libyan’s bridge, saw the heavy shapes of four large vessels looming up over the horizon farther to the right. A number of light-cruisers and destroyers accompanied them. They were steering north-east with the smoke pouring from their funnels. There was no mistaking their appearance. Without a doubt they were German.

The excitement became intensified when, two or three minutes later, more heavy ships were sighted right ahead, steaming fast to the southward.

Hendry examined them. “Those,” he grunted, “are our battle-cruisers, the Lion and her lot.”

For a time nobody spoke. The eyes of all were riveted on the one squadron or the other. Those two sets of rushing grey shapes, the one of five ships and the other of four, were approaching each other at the rate of about fifty miles an hour, the speed of a fast railway train. Another few minutes would see them in sight of each other, and a few minutes more within gun range. Were the Germans deliberately seeking battle, or were they blundering blindly into an engagement with a superior force?

It was the sub-lieutenant who broke the silence.

“Oh, curse!” he suddenly exclaimed. “They’re altering course!”

“Who?” the captain demanded, wheeling round.

“The Germans, sir!” said Pardoe, pointing. “Look, sir. Look!”

He spoke the truth. The leading enemy vessel, the great Seydlitz, blackening the sky with her smoke, was turning to port. The second ship followed, then the third, and the fourth, until the whole squadron, with the light-cruisers and destroyers almost out of sight ahead, were steaming hard to the eastward—for Heligoland.

Hendry tapped his foot on the deck with annoyance. Two minutes—a minute ago, an engagement seemed certain. Now that the Germans had altered course, however, it seemed unlikely that the British could overtake them.

Signals fluttered from the masthead of the little Arethusa, which flew the broad pendant of the Commodore of the Harwich Force, as she collected her light-cruisers and scattered destroyers and steamed at full speed to the eastward after the enemy. Reginald Tyrwhitt was not the man to hesitate with the Germans in sight. Where the enemy were, there must he be also. It was not for nothing that he had earned his nickname of ‘Blood-red Bill.’

Even Hendry seemed excited and pleased when the pursuit started.

“By Gad!” he exclaimed, his usually glum face lit up in a smile as the engine-room telegraphs jangled and the Libyan, throbbing to the thrust of her turbines, leapt ahead with two great plumes of whitened water standing up on either bow. “This is the goods!”

“And there go our battle-cruisers after ’em!” Toby suddenly exclaimed, clutching his commanding officer by the arm in his excitement.

He pointed to where the great hulls of Sir David Beatty’s five ships almost obliterated the horizon. They, too, had swung east after the retreating enemy. They were increasing speed, crashing through the calm sea with a pall of dense smoke trailing in the sky astern, and their heavy bow-waves and humped-up wakes testifying to their speed.

It was a gloriously exciting moment, madly exhilarating. Upwards of fifty British ships, big and little, were now in full cry after a flying enemy. The whole day lay before them, and the visibility was extreme.

But there was also a grave element of doubt, and everybody on the Libyan’s bridge was thinking the same thing. Would the British succeed in bringing the German squadron to action?

Ship for ship, as everyone knew, the former had no very great superiority in speed, and the enemy were practically hull down over the horizon—at least 28,000 yards, or fourteen sea miles, from Beatty’s flagship, the Lion. And about 150 miles away, more or less, lay the minefields of the Heligoland Bight—minefields which it was dangerous for heavy ships to penetrate unless they knew the swept channels, which the British did not.

It was before the days of paravanes, and 150 miles meant six hours’ steaming at twenty-five knots. And in this time would it be possible for the British, by using every ounce of steam, so to reduce the distance as to enable them to come within effective gun range? A stern chase is ever a long one.

“My God! Will they do it?” Kerrell muttered, half to himself, his fists clenched in his anxiety. “Drive on, you big devils! Drive on, for heaven’s sake!”

Hendry put down his glasses with a grunt.

“It’ll be touch and go,” he said. “First-lieutenant?”

“Sir?”

“You can send the hands to breakfast by watches. It’ll be some time before anything much can happen now.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Breakfast, so far as the Libyan’s were concerned, was a scratch meal, a picnic meal eaten on the upper deck—stale bread and margarine and some of the jam left over from tea the evening before, odorous kippers eaten with the fingers, leathery fried eggs, washed down with mugs of unspeakable tea, tea with a real bite to it, and a dollop of condensed milk to give it the proper colour and consistency. Were the ship’s company going off the upper deck when they occupied, so to speak, the front row of the stalls in what might develop into a spectacular battle between heavy ships? Not they!

Despondency was forgotten in the fierce excitement as their ship sped along. Officers and men greeted each other with cheerful smiles. Even Hendry became rather more human and refrained from his usual strictures. The chance of action has a wonderful stabilizing effect in moulding a body of men into one cohesive whole.

Going aft along the upper deck in search of food in the wardroom, Kerrell came upon Mutters, the engineer-lieutenant-commander, solemnly eating sandwiches and sipping a cup of coffee while seated on the casing by the after hatch of the engine-room.

“Hi, Number One!” he shouted cheerily. “What’s the latest from the front?”

Kerrell told him what he knew in a few breathless sentences. “D’you think they’ll catch ’em, chief?” he went on to ask, waving a hand towards the battle-cruisers.

“Catch ’em or bust!” Mutters opined, lifting the bread from a ham sandwich and peering at its contents with disgust on his face. “At least they would if I were drivin’ ’em. The Lion’s good for jolly near thirty if they really push her.”

“I hope to God they do, then,” said Kerrell. “Everything depends on speed to-day.”

The chief laughed as he flung the remains of his sandwich overboard.

“Everything depends on speed on all days,” he said. “And who gives you speed, I should like to know?—Why,” he went on, tapping himself on the chest as he answered his own question, “it’s us, my bloodthirsty warrior, the officers and men of the blinkin’ engine-room department, and don’t you damn well forget it! You can call us ‘scissor grinders’ and other nasty names——”

“I’m sure I never have,” Kerrell broke in.

“Well, you can put on a face like a sea-boot and curse us in your heart when we’re oilin’ and the hoses leak over your sacred corticene, likewise when we go full speed, as we are now, and oil-fuel comes up the funnel in black dollops. But when there’s a job to be done, we’re the boys who get you there, aren’t we now? Without us, where would your blessed guns be, hey?”

“Nowhere, you old reprobate,” the first-lieutenant laughed good-naturedly. “Did I ever deny that you and your brigade were the most useful people in the ship?”

“You did not, my young scapegrace, though sometimes, like all you upper-deck people, you seem to imagine the works go round by themselves. You aren’t properly grateful, I’m thinking.—By the way, are you going to the wardroom?”

Kerrell nodded.

“Then you might tell that lop-eared steward to send me up a couple of boiled eggs and some toast and butter,” said Mutters. “D’you call this a man’s breakfast?” he went on to ask, displaying a meagre ham sandwich. “The man’s mad. I’m not a bloomin’ canary! I refuse to go into action with a stomach as hollow as the inside of a drum!—And while you’re at it, you might tell him to bring me up a tin of gaspers—gaspers, mind, not those beastly Egyptian things the sub stinks out the mess with. I’ll be needing ’em before the day’s out.”

“Why on earth don’t you come aft and have a proper meal in the wardroom?” Kerrell suggested.

Mutters looked up with a smile.

“What, leave my little box of tricks when the old hooker’s going all out? No, my boyo. Not in these trousers.”