Читать книгу Kerrell - Henry Taprell Dorling - Страница 8

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“SHE looks to me to be in a pretty bad way,” said Toby, gazing at the Lion with a rueful expression.

The great ship, obviously badly damaged, was listing heavily to port, as, surrounded by destroyers zigzagging to and fro at high speed in case of an unexpected attack by submarines, she steamed westward at only twelve knots. Twelve knots—with one engine hors de combat. Not so very long before, still in action, she had been crashing along at nearly twenty-nine. Now, crippled by one unlucky shell, she was a lame duck.

“How far are we off Heligoland?” Hendry asked.

Toby measured the distance on the chart. “About seventy miles, sir, more or less,” he replied.

“Then it’s a bad business,” said the lieutenant-commander. “It’ll be a light night unless I’m mistaken, and if this weather holds there’s nothing on earth to prevent the Germans from sending out every light-cruiser and destroyer they possess. If they sweep to the west-nor’-west they can hardly avoid tumbling across us.”

“That’s just what I was thinking, sir.”

“I don’t like it,” Hendry continued, shaking his head. “Nobody minds a scrap at night, for that’s what we exist for. But I’m shot if I want a scrap with a rotten great target like a battle-cruiser paddling along at the speed of a bath-chair! The Lion carries twelve hundred men, or so. If she gets torpedoed it’ll be a sticky business—damn sticky, if you ask me.”

He was only voicing the opinion of everyone else in the ships present who knew something of the real situation. It was fraught with danger and anxiety. The enemy surely must know that the British flagship had been damaged. And, if they did, they must be aware that she was limping home at slow speed across the 400 odd miles of sea that separated her from the Firth of Forth. She was in a position about 100 miles from the mouth of the Elbe and slightly less from the Jade. At both of these places there were probably torpedo craft. Even now they might be getting under way. It seemed a heaven-sent opportunity for a successful destroyer attack, a chance which comes only once in a lifetime. The enemy, not being fools, must surely take advantage of it.

Transferring to a destroyer amid the cheers of his men and shouts of “Good Old David!” soon after his flagship had fallen out of the line, the admiral had hastened after his squadron to resume the command and continue the action. At noon, however, to his intense mortification, he had met the Princess Royal, Tiger, and New Zealand steaming north-north-west after having discontinued the pursuit. Hoisting his flag in the first-named he had immediately ordered the chase to be resumed.

But it was already too late. Half an hour or more had been lost, and half an hour in time meant a loss in range of nearly 30,000 yards. The enemy were out of sight over the rim of the horizon, their presence only betrayed by a dwindling cloud of smoke in the south-east. Long before they could possibly be overtaken and again brought to action they would be in safety. There were minefields to be considered—behind the minefields, the German High Seas Fleet.

Another thirty minutes of battle might well have seen the sinking of one or more of the escaping ships, two out of three of which were already damaged. But it was not to be. The opportunity had come and passed. Instead of a great victory, Beatty and his men must content themselves with the Blücher, which was not a battle-cruiser at all, merely an armoured cruiser which had temporarily taken the place of the Von der Tann.

It was exasperating, a bitter and hideous disappointment. A shattering victory at sea was so badly needed, if only to quieten the senseless cry of the uneducated public at home who asked “What is the Navy doing?” when German battle-cruisers bombarded Hartlepool, Scarborough, and Whitby, and succeeded in making their escape without being brought to action.

To the public, looking at their maps, the North Sea seemed the size of a duckpond. Little did they realize the fogs and uncertainties of war, the difficulty of finding an enemy in thick weather and on dark nights, and the fact that the east coasts of England and Scotland afforded a choice of targets spread over a distance of roughly 500 miles. The Navy obviously could not be everywhere.

At this stage of hostilities, moreover, it was futile to instruct an unthinking public as to what the Navy really existed for, useless to stem the tide of popular opinion voiced by the cheaper and sensation-loving Press. People could not be told that the Navy existed not to protect the coast from senseless tip-and-run bombardments which, though they involved loss of life and damage to property, had no effect on the real course of the war, but to bring the enemy main fleet to action, to ensure the country’s food supplies from abroad, and to keep open the seas for the passage of men and munitions and stores to the different theatres of war in France and elsewhere. This could only be done by watching and guarding, watching the exits from the North Sea.

It was galling, to say the least of it, to have this spate of uninstructed criticism; to have letters signed ‘Briton’ and the like appearing in certain newspapers demanding to know why the Navy existed if not ‘to protect our shores’; to have officers and men in naval uniform hissed in the streets and taunted with the cry “Why don’t you go out and fight the Germans?”

The vast bulk of the population took their food for granted. They did not realize that, without the Navy, starvation would have stared them in the face. A shattering and spectacular blow to the enemy’s sea power on January 24th, 1915, in what is commonly called the Battle of the Dogger Bank, would have served a most useful purpose.

But one unlucky shot, combined with an understandable misinterpretation of Sir David Beatty’s signals, had made that blow impossible. And early in the afternoon, returning to the westward, the admiral had set about making arrangements for the safety of his flagship. Every available destroyer was sent to screen her against submarine attack as she started to crawl homewards at twelve knots.

As the afternoon wore on, however, the Lion’s heel increased and her speed dwindled to eight knots. Finally, unable to steam at all, she had to be taken in tow by the Indomitable. And all through that night, a night of brilliant moonlight, expecting every moment to be attacked, the Libyan and her consorts kept ceaseless watch and ward round the damaged ship which was towed at seven knots. “If submarines are seen,” ran Commodore Tyrwhitt’s signal to his destroyers, “shoot and ram them without regard to your neighbours.” If an attack had come, it would have been a bloody business.

Dawn on the 25th came clear with full visibility. The horizon was free, and a force of light-cruisers sent back to search along the track reported nothing in sight. It seemed almost too good to be true. Of what could the enemy be thinking?

The day passed and the night came. Early on the morning of the 26th the Lion, passing by St. Abb’s Head and the Bass Rock, was safely in the Firth of Forth after a perilous passage of over thirty-six hours.

“Thank God she’s home!” muttered Hendry with a sigh of heartfelt relief, when he realized the great ship was finally out of danger, and turned to leave the bridge which he had hardly vacated for three days.

He had every reason to be grateful. The expected submarine or destroyer attack had not come to pass. The enemy had missed their chance, though their wireless communiqué was shouting to the world that the Lion had been sunk.

“The cheek of the blighters!” snorted Pardoe, full of righteous indignation, when, after tea in the wardroom on the day of the Libyan’s return to Harwich, he read this titbit of information in an English newspaper. The newly arrived mail, several bags of it, had just been sorted and served out.

“And what’s biting you, young man?” Mutters queried, looking up from a letter.

“The Germans are saying they’ve sunk the Lion,” the sub exclaimed. “They’re nothing but ruddy liars!”

“Lucky for us they did think so,” Kerrell said.

“Lucky?” said Pardoe, rather mystified. “I don’t understand, Number One.”

The first-lieutenant proceeded to explain.

“If they’d realized we were steaming home at the staggering speed we did,” he said, “they’d have sent out every destroyer or submarine they possessed. Even if we’d got the best of them, we’d have had a pretty rotten time, taking things all round.”

“But why on earth didn’t they?” Pardoe wanted to know.

“Because, you chump, they honestly thought the Lion had gone west.”

The gunner and ‘young doc’ looked up from their letters.

“For mercy’s sake spit it out, Number One,” growled the engineer-lieutenant-commander. “How the deuce do you expect me to read the latest from my missus if you blokes persist in having an argument, hey?”

Kerrell grinned in friendly fashion.

“All right, chief,” he said. “Keep your wool on. Look here, sub, the Lion, like the rest of our battle-cruisers and battleships, has a tripod mast, hasn’t she?”

Pardoe nodded.

“You and your tripod masts!” Mutters grumbled. “What the devil are you driving at now?”

“The only German ship with tripod masts was the poor old Blücher,” Kerrell continued, ignoring the interruption. “That Zeppelin we saw probably noticed the Lion fall out of the line towards the end of the scrap. It was a thickish day overhead with low clouds, you’ll remember, and presently old man Zepp loses sight of the Lion. Some time later, though, she saw a ship with a tripod mast sinking, the Blücher, in point of fact. She thought it was the Lion, and coming along with that cursed aeroplane, they showered bombs on what they thought were our boats rescuing her ship’s company. They hadn’t the ghost of an idea they were strafing their own men. Then the German Admiralty, taking the Zepp’s evidence, announces that the Lion was sunk. If they didn’t honestly think she was done in, why didn’t they attack us on the way home?”

“Search me!” said the chief. “But to tell the truth, old boy, I don’t give a tuppenny damn one way or another. Here’s my missus telling me that little Willy’s probably sickenin’ for measles, curse it all! That’s far more important than your perishin’ Zepps and things.”

Mutters resumed his letter. He was a much-married man.