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Patrol to the Golden Horn
By ALEXANDER FULLERTON SOHO
Copyright © 1978 Alexander Fullerton
All right reserved. ISBN: 1569473129
Chapter One
'Steady as you go!'
'Steady, sir ... South twenty-six east, sir!'
CPO Perry had flung the wheel back the other way; its brass-capped spokes flashed sunlight as they thudded through his palms and Terrapin steadied on her course across Kusu Bay, cleaving blue water under a cloudless sky. The bay mirrored a whitish crescent of beach framed in crumbly-looking rock; higher up on the island, patchy green slopes broken by rock outcrops rose to support the canopy of Mediterranean sky. There were more strikingly beautiful islands in the Aegean than Imbros - Nick had had his first sight of some of them during the fast passage from Malta - but even this, to his borne-waters' eye, was fairly stunning.
Truman, the destroyer's captain, glanced again at his coxswain. 'Steer two degrees to starboard. Stop both engines.'
One island they'd passed within sight of had been Skyros; and on Skyros Sub-Lieutenant Rupert Brooke of Hood Battalion in the Royal Naval Division lay buried, his grave heaped with the island's' pink-veined marble. Brooke's close friends had piled it over him - so Sarah had said, and Sarah knew everything about Rupert Brooke. Nick hoped that some opportunity might arise for him to visit Skyros.
Why? Because Sarah was so emotional on that subject? And he, NickEverard, even more so over Sarah?
It was a shocking thing. Of course it was. Objectively, one knew that - and at the same time thrilled, thinking of her. You could lose yourself in a dreamworld filled with pictures, echoes of her voice. And worry, too - the puzzle - her actions since, and that she'd said nothing ... As a passenger - he'd been sent out to assume command of Leveret, a five-year-old destroyer employed mainly as a despatch vessel between Mudros and Salonika - on passage, with nothing to do except sit and stand around, there'd been too much time for that kind of self-indulgence. He knew he'd surrendered to the temptation far too much, and he pulled himself back into the present and the sunlight now - to Cruickshank, the navigating lieutenant, at the binnacle and watching the transverse bearing as Terrapin slid up, with very little way on her now, towards her anchor berth; and to Truman, keenly aware - you could see it in his self-conscious manner - of the light cruiser two cables' lengths on his port beam, and the fact that Terrapin would be under close surveillance from that crowded quarterdeck. Truman was a stuffy, humourless lieutenant-commander. All the way from Plymouth he hadn't opened a single conversation, so far as Nick could recall, that hadn't borne directly on some Service matter.
A submarine lay alongside the cruiser, and a haze of smoke over her stern showed that she was charging her batteries. That would be E.57, presumably, the boat Jake Cameron was to join - in a hurry, which was the reason for Terrapin having been diverted here instead of going straight to Mudros, her original destination. Cameron was a passenger too, but he'd only joined in Malta. He was an immensely burly young RNR lieutenant - about Nick's age, but twice his weight. He was at the back of the bridge now, his wide frame squeezed into the corner between rail and flag-locker.
Cruickshank - bony, intent, crouched mantis-like at the binnacle - murmured, 'Five degrees to go, sir.'
'Stand by!' Truman had a rather plummy voice. Harriman, his first lieutenant, was at the bridge's front rail; he'd raised one stubby arm above his head, and Granger, down on the foc'sl with the cable party, waved acknowledgement. A languid wave: 'lounge-lizard Larry' was what the other officers called Terrapin's dark-eyed sub-lieutenant. They were a good crowd; better, Nick thought, than Truman deserved. Cruickshank called, 'Bearing on now!'
'Let go!'
Harriman dropped that arm. On the foc'sl a hammer swung to knock the Blake slip off the starboard cable and send its anchor splashing, plunging into clear-blue sea. As the cable roared away and then slowed its initial rush until you could hear the separate clank as each link banged out through the hawse, Nick did some elementary mental arithmetic: eight fathoms of water, and three eights were twenty-four, so-
Truman had made the same calculation. He told Harriman, 'Veer to two shackles, and secure.'
Two shackles added up to twenty-live fathoms, and three times the depth of water was minimal for safe mooring. In this flat calm the minimum was as safe as houses.
Terrapin floated like a model ship in a bed of blue-tinted glass; the air was motionless, smelling faintly of the nearby island. Such picture-book stillness: it seemed incongruous to come to such a place for any warlike purpose. But Nick reminded himself, as he pulled the strap of borrowed binoculars over his head and slung them on the binnacle, that climate and scenery had nothing at all to do with it. Three years ago, when he - and the rest of Jellicoe's Grand Fleet - had been dying of boredom in the frozen wilderness of Scapa Flow, on sun-kissed beaches only ten miles east of this island a million men had died.
Near enough a million - counting Turks as well.
Cruickshank told Truman, 'Signalling from Harwich, sir.'
Harwich was the light cruiser, now on their quarter. Four-funnelled, Bristol class, with two six-inch and ten four-inch guns. Where would she have been, Nick wondered, a couple of months ago, when Goeben had come crashing out of the Dardanelles and caught everyone with their trousers down? He was looking over towards the cruiser and seeing that there were two submarines alongside, not just the one he'd seen before. Harwich was lying bow-on and you could see them both, one each side of her; the rumble of diesels from that battery-charging was a deep mutter across the quiet bay.
From a wing of the cruiser's bridge, a light was still winking its dots and dashes. Truman bent to the engine-room voicepipe.
'Finished with main engines. Remain at immediate notice.'
'Aye aye, sir ... Shall we be fuelling, sir?'
That had been the voice of Mr Wilberforce, the commissioned engineer. And Truman evidently resented being asked a question he couldn't yet answer. It was a surprise that he'd been told to anchor; he'd brought Cameron to join his submarine, and the natural thing would have been to stop for long enough to drop him off and then push on to Mudros. He answered testily into the voicepipe, 'At present, Chief, I have not the slightest idea.' Now glancing round, he found Nick watching him, and raised his hooped, bushy eyebrows, his lips twisting in a smile inviting sympathy for the patience one had to exercise, tolerating unnecessary questions: one commanding officer to another ... And Nick's facial muscles had gone wooden. He hadn't found himself exactly seeking Truman's company, during the passage out from England; he thought the man was an idiot, and one of his own failings of which, he'd always been aware was an inability to hide such feelings. Awkward, particularly when dealing with officers senior to oneself; and this personal Achilles' heel of his was likely to prove even more of a handicap, he thought, now that the war looked like ending pretty soon ... Terrapin's leading signalman saved him from the battle to contort his features into some sort of smirk; the signalman was presenting his pad to Truman.
'Signal from Harwich, sir.'
'Indeed.' Truman took the pad casually, glanced down frowning at the message. His frown deepened: 'Bless my soul!' He'd looked up, at Nick, with those thick brows raised again: now he was re-reading the signal. He told the killick, 'Acknowledge, and VMT ... Everard, you and I are invited to luncheon over there. Eh?'
Nick shared the man's surprise. He didn't think he knew anyone in the cruiser; or that anyone aboard her knew of his, Nick Everard's, presence aboard Terrapin: of his existence, even. And the signalled invitation, to which the reply 'VMT', standing for 'very many thanks', was already being stuttered in rapid flashes from the back end of the bridge, would have come from Harwich's captain. Truman had called to Jake Cameron, the submariner, 'They're sending a boat for you and us at twelve-thirty, Cameron.'
'Aye aye, sir. Thank you.' Cameron nodded - cheerful, enthusiastic. He'd been in a submarine that was refitting in the Malta dockyard, and they'd needed him here urgently to join another - E.57, which presumably was one of the pair alongside the cruiser.
Harriman reported to Truman, 'Cable's secured, sir, at two shackles. May I pipe hands to dinner?' Truman began to waffle - about not knowing yet what was happening, how long they'd be here ... Nick checked the time, on his American wrist-watch. It was still a novelty; and it had been a present from his now famous uncle - Hugh Everard had become a rear-admiral after Jutland, but he was now a vice-admiral and Sir Hugh ... Wrist-watches had been almost unobtainable earlier in the war; officers destined for the trenches and other forms of active service had advertised for them, as well as for revolvers and field-glasses, in the 'Personal' columns of The Times. Nick had been a midshipman then: it was just a few years ago, but it felt like a whole lifetime. To Sarah he must have been just a little boy in a sailor-suit.
How did she think of him now?
Back to earth again: or rather, to Terrapin's bridge, where Truman had consented to his ship's company being piped to dinner and Harriman - thickset, monosyllabic - had passed the order to Trimble, the bosun's mate. Cruickshank, Nick saw, was taking a set of anchor bearings, noting the figures in his navigator's notebook; and Harriman was telling PO Hart, the chief buffer, to rig the port quarterdeck gangway. It still felt odd, to be a passenger, to see and hear the business of the ship being conducted all around one and just stand idly by: it wasn't at all a comfortable feeling.
The killick signalman reported to Truman, 'Your message passed to Harwich, sir.' A West Countryman, in voice and craggy features extraordinarily like another signalman, one named Garret with whom Nick had shared, at Jutland, certain rather hair-raising experiences; having survived them and returned, more by luck than good judgement, to the Tyne, he'd got himself and Garret into hot water by sending him off on a leave to which he had not been entitled. There'd been a stew over letting him have an advance of pay, too. The thing was - not that one had been able to explain it at the time - they'd found themselves home, and alive, when there'd been every reason for them to have stayed out there in the North Sea with six thousand others, dead ... And Garret had been a newly-married man, longing for the feel of his wife in his arms again: it had seemed right to send him off to her, and unlikely in the circumstances that anyone would give a damn.
One lived, and learned!
From Nick's angle, it hadn't been a case of a swollen head, of his achievement in bringing the ship home in its shattered state having left him cocky. It had been a weird feeling, in those early days of June 1916: as if that sort of rubbish didn't count now, as if the experience of battle had taken one out clear of the morass of petty restrictions and red-tape that he'd often fallen foul of. And in the two years since then he'd observed what had seemed to be similar reactions in other men, after action. Survivors of sunk ships, for instance, hauled half-drowned over a destroyer's side, recovering into surprise at being alive and immediately emptying their pockets, throwing away money and papers and small possessions ... He'd known how they'd felt.
After Jutland his uncle Hugh had suggested drily, 'Feeling your oats somewhat, Nick? That it?'
'No, sir, I-'
'Don't do anything so damn silly again, boy. You've a chance now. For heaven's sake make use of it!'
Before Jutland, Nick had not been reckoned to have any sort of chance. He'd been a failure, a sub-lieutenant 'under report' in a dreadnought's gunroom; and if there was such a place as hell, a Scapa Flow battleship's gunroom must surely come pretty close to it. Had done, anyway, in those days.
Uncle Hugh's star, of course, had risen even more dramatically than his nephew's. At Jutland as a post-captain he'd commanded the super-dreadnought Nile and earned promotion to flag rank; and now more recently his successful cruiser action resulting in the destruction of the Göttingen had won him the second promotion and a 'K'.
Nick joined the RNR submariner, Cameron, at the after end of the bridge. 'Which of those sinister-looking craft is yours?'
Jake Cameron pointed. 'Starboard side there. Other boat's French.' He rubbed his large hands together. 'Find out what all the flap's about presently, with luck!'
Obviously it was some kind of flap. Terrapin wouldn't have been diverted without good reason. En route from Devonport to Mudros she'd called at Malta for fuel and - hopefully - a day or two of shoregoing for her ship's company; but she'd only been alongside the oiler in Sliema Creek about ten minutes when a signal came informing Truman that he was required to sail again forthwith, taking one passenger to Mudros. One additional passenger, they'd meant. Later, when the ship had been well into the Aegean, another signal had changed the destination to Imbros. But alongside the oiler in Malta they'd been expecting some important personage to arrive on board - a general, or a politician - and what had turned up had been this outsize but otherwise very ordinary RNR lieutenant.
He and Nick had found they had a friend in common - Tim Rogerson, who'd helped to ram the old submarine C.3 and her cargo of high-explosive into the viaduct at Zeebrugge, to the considerable inconvenience of the Germans, at the same time as Nick in his 'oily-wad' destroyer Bravo had been playing Aunt Sally to Hun artillery inside the mole ... It was like something one might have done, lived through, in an earlier age, not just six months ago. But the 'Zeeb' raid had taken place on St George's Day of this year, 1918, and it was only October now; and another odd impression was that one felt as if it had been experienced by some other person, not by oneself but by someone who up to that time had occupied one's skin.
Punctured skin. He'd been knocked about a bit, in Bravo, and spent nine weeks afterwards in hospitals and another month convalescing at Mullbergh, his father's enormous, gloomy house in Yorkshire. Sarah, his father's young wife, ran Mullbergh as a recuperative centre for wounded officers, and it had seemed natural enough that he should go there. But given that decision to make again now - if he were back in Miss Keyser's private hospital in Grosvenor Gardens and Sarah in that funny little green hat had been asking 'Sister Agnes', 'Let me have him now? Let me fatten him up at Mullbergh, for a few weeks?' - given that situation again now, would one let it happen?
Well, it had seemed like an obvious move. And he didn't think - hard to turn the mind back, but he was fairly sure of this - he didn't think he'd ever regarded Sarah, up to that time, as anything more than a close, warm friend who happened also to be much nearer his own age than his father's, and yet his father's wife, and beautiful, and kind, and - well, nothing else. Not then.
He'd have given anything to know now, this minute, what she was thinking, feeling. When she'd written, she'd managed to say absolutely nothing; but almost immediately after he'd left Mullbergh she'd gone down to London to meet his father, who'd been sent home on an unexpected leave from France. Sarah had spent the ten days of it with him in some Mayfair house lent to them by friends. It had been an astonishing thing for her to have done: incredible, in the context of that miserable marriage. And in the letter when she'd told him, there'd been no explanation, no kind of comment. Nick had begun to think of her as suffering from remorse, as being less happy because of him, because of what they'd - well, become to each other; and thinking of her in that state it felt as if he, just like his father, had - oh, fed on her ... It was an agony to think of it in that way: he shut his eyes, certain that if he could have been with her now to put his arms round her, reassure her ... He asked himself, Reassure her of what? Of my feelings for her? What use can they be to her?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Patrol to the Golden Horn by ALEXANDER FULLERTON Copyright © 1978 by Alexander Fullerton
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
