The Redeemed Read online

  The men roared their approval and said they would waste no opportunity to welcome the enemy to the party. All Huns were invited. They described exactly what any German ship that came within range could expect. A bomb shoved down its gob. A shell rammed up its arse. Leo looked around at the other fourteen seamen inside this steel box. The atmosphere today was different from on any of their many drills. He inhaled a peculiar smell. Musky, rank. It came from the men, sweating from deeper pores, primitive glands, some true authentic depth of their being, preparing them for battle, turning them into warriors.

  Altogether one turret held across its four floors almost a hundred men, each allotted his own task. The order came to load the guns with common shell. Down in the shell room the projectile for the left gun was clamped and guided onto the tray in the cage. Each projectile weighed over half a ton. The cage rose hydraulically to the magazine room. There, four quarter charges were manhandled into compartments of the steel box above the projectile. Each quarter charge weighed a little over fifty pounds, the weight of a bushel of barley. Leo’s father had carried sacks of four bushels. Few men could. The cage rose again, into the gun room.

  When the cage reached the open mouth of the gun a rammer shot out, butting the tail of the projectile and propelling it into the breech. Then the rammer flicked back, and as soon as it was clear of the tray the flap door of the cage sprang open and the two lower quarter charges of cordite dropped down into the tray. These were rammed in, then the upper quarter charges dropped likewise and they too were rammed into the gun. The rammer withdrew, the cage dropped, the breech door slammed shut, and one of the sight-setters unlocked a bolt that had been holding the left gun steady. The crew stood down. Then the right gun was loaded likewise.

  Leo had no idea what was going on outside the confines of their turret. There were no windows in the gun room. The guns were loaded there but fired by the gunnery officer from his position on high, up above the bridge. His crew had rangefinders and trigonometrical calculating machines to assess the trajectory of the shells, bearing in mind the distance, course and speed of the target. They passed directions to the turrets, via a transmitting station deep down in the ship, of the guns’ required elevation and angles.

  The order came through on Lieutenant Pyne’s headphones and he said, ‘Bring the guns to the ready.’

  The trainer moved the whole barbette or upper part of the turret with a single handwheel that operated hydraulic controls. The gun layers and the sight-setters inside the gun room aligned the guns. They followed a system of electrically controlled pointers on dials, and when each gun was in the correct position, electric circuits were closed and Leo knew that the ‘gun ready’ light would come on in the director tower. The gunnery officer there could now press a trigger and fire when he wished.

  In the gun room the crews waited. Sergeant Nutley broke a small piece of cotton wool off a wad and rolled it into a tight ball and stuffed it in his left ear, then did likewise for his right. He saw Leo watching him and offered the wad to the boy, but Leo shook his head. PO Jeffers and one or two of the older men accepted. The two five-man crews stood by. Lieutenant Pyne and PO Jeffers watched and waited.

  The lieutenant’s eyes were wide in concentration and excitement, lids drawn back, like a horse’s. ‘I do believe, PO,’ he said, catching Leo’s eye as he did so, ‘we’re about to blood our guns.’

  5

  3.50 p.m., Wednesday 31 May

  The guns were once more brought to the half-cock. Each hand was concentrated, like men at a shoot, though they could see nothing of what the big guns were aiming at. Leo observed the sweat breaking out on their faces. Already half the crew had removed their upper garments. The gun room smelled of grease and oil and men. Then it seemed to Leo as if not only himself but everyone else around him held his breath, as if all knew that the gunnery officer far above them had decided to fire. Sound ceased, movement stilled, time stopped. Then Leo heard or thought he heard the warning bell in the transmitting station ring in the distance, and both guns fired together with a great crashing concussive explosion.

  Leo flinched. When he opened his eyes the men were already working. Now the routine began, with new shells and charges sent up and the guns loaded, and reset as necessary, and fired. The sweet smell of cordite was added to the stink of men in the steel room. The PO told the guns’ crews to go steady, for he thought them a little too swift, as if each crew was trying to outdo the other, and they settled to a concerted, synchronous rhythm.

  Leo watched the men. They performed their tasks with mesmeric repetition. They got off each round in under a minute, sending the projectiles, each a thousand pounds in weight, at a muzzle velocity of over two thousand feet per second, pounding into the midst of German ships up to ten miles away. Amid the din of guns and smoke there was much yelling of information and orders. The crews were like tiny models of men, serving the huge guns of this ship that was a great monster of war. Leo heard a scattering percussion and realised it was the rattle of a hail of shell splinters on the ship’s side. So the enemy were straddling them too. He had forgotten they might do so. But the day had come at last and Leo knew, as all did, one thing with certainty. We will win, because our ships are better, our guns bigger, our crews more skilled.

  How fortunate he was to be in a turret. His mate Willy Burd was down below, barrowing coal to the boilers. When the big guns went off, Willy had said, he could feel the ship sink down and rise up in a shudder. Dust was shaken out of crevices. The air was filled with black dust. It was surely Hades, the worst place to be.

  It was true that you could not see out of a turret except through the periscopes, to which only Lieutenant Pyne, PO Jeffers and the turret-trainer had access. Some said gunners were moles just not underground, but still, it was good to know you were close to the open air. Outside, the barbette was protected by thick armoured plating. PO Jeffers sat watching his sweating men at their gleaming oiled machinery. He had told Leo he’d marked him down as a gunnery lad; the boy had only to watch and listen and his chance would soon come to join a crew.

  The PO took a look through his periscope, and stepping closer Leo heard him say quietly to himself, ‘Good God above.’ Then he leaned away from the periscope. He blinked and looked around, and seeing the boy right there beside him said, ‘Take a look, lad.’

  Leo peered through the periscope, amazed at the privilege. It took him some seconds to make sense of what he was seeing. At first he thought it was a kind of optical illusion, like some naval version of a what-the-butler-saw machine. He could see in the smoky distance enemy ships, the red flashes of their guns firing. And lying becalmed between the Queen Mary and the far-off German line, both sides’ shells hurled over her, salvo after salvo, lay a three-masted barque with full sail. Leo recalled once as a small child seeing such a ship; it must have been in Watchet Harbour. But this one was bigger and more beautiful. The poor merchant seamen aboard her were trapped in the middle of this modern conflagration, their ship somehow sailing into the battle from another century.

  6

  4.10 p.m., Wednesday 31 May

  A shout went up that something was wrong. The regular sounds of loading ceased. The left gun rammer wasn’t working. One of the crew had opened the breech too soon after the gun had gone off. The PO took a lever to the rammer and twisted and shifted then rushed it back and forth until it ran true once more, and they resumed firing the guns.

  They fired constantly for many minutes, one deafening twin salvo after another from their thirteen-and-a-half-inch guns, and with each salvo the ship shook. ‘Right gun?’ ‘Ready!’ ‘Left gun?’ ‘Ready!’ Leo watched the clock above the cabinet. Almost two salvoes a minute. He could not believe how much more intensity the crews attained than during training. Shells came up from the shell room with messages chalked upon their sides. This one for Kaiser Bill, read one. Sink the bastards, another. The noise of each explosion inside the turret was so loud it gave those close to it a percussive shock and resounded w
ith a great ringing boom. Leo saw that some of the gun crew had blood trickling out of their ears. He fingered his own and although they felt dry he now regretted not taking the cotton wool Sergeant Nutley had offered him.

  A request came up from the magazine. The quarter charges were filled with cordite, a blend of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, gelatinised with petroleum jelly to lubricate the bore of the gun. Men in the magazine had to remove the charges’ sealed lids, and the fumes of the cordite, acrid and sweet, like putrefying meat, were released into the room. The petty officer in charge down there asked for permission for his men to go out on deck. Lieutenant Pyne said they could come up as long as the firing rate was not affected. They ascended in pairs and Leo watched them climb out of the hatch. As soon as they reached the fresh air they threw up their lunch on the deck. Then they came back in and went down to make way for the next pair.

  Leo felt a sudden unsteadiness in his feet. He flexed his knees to keep upright. Above the crash of the turret guns, and the roar of the smaller four-inch guns being fired in between, he wondered if he had heard, faintly in the distance, a sound like a dresser full of crockery falling over and all smashing at once. He looked around. No one else seemed to have noticed anything. Then he caught the eye of one of the sight-setters, who was frowning at him, and said or perhaps mouthed the words, ‘Ship’s been hit.’

  There seemed to be a fault in one of the air blasts, for when the crew opened the gun, smoke was still in the barrel. It hung in the already stuffy air of the gun room, the smell strong and unpleasant. The PO ordered the breech-blocks open, to let the smoke out. Now they could hear enemy shells hitting the water close to the ship, with a crashing that jarred Leo’s eardrums.

  Suddenly Lieutenant Pyne came rushing through from the cabinet and announced that the control top reported their target, the third ship of the German line, was dropping out. All the men in the turret cheered.

  PO Jeffers had a look through of the periscope. ‘She’s goin down by the bows,’ he called out.

  They resumed firing, presumably at a new target. Then all of a sudden the whole turret seemed to tremble and the ship beneath them shook. The roof of the turret was pulverised with all manner and size of metal. Leo choked with dust that blew into the gun room. The turret-trainer reported the front glass of his periscope fouled or blocked up.

  Another explosion shook the turret. Someone yelled that the bastards had found their bloody range. Leo went over to the pressure gauge and saw that the pressure had failed. At that moment came another explosion, far larger than the ones before. Leo was thrown off his feet and tossed around the gun room. It was like being thrown from a horse but worse, for it was as if the earth had tossed the horse. He felt at any second his head or limbs would be smashed. By some miracle they were not. Leo came to rest, winded, dazed. His breath came back slowly, and he climbed carefully to his feet. The PO and a few others were dangling in the air on bowlines. The left gun appeared to have fallen through its trunnions and smashed up the crew members behind it. The floor of the gun room was bulged and warped. There was utter silence, an incongruent atmosphere of peace that did not make sense. Then sounds returned and Leo realised it had been not silence after all but his own temporary deafness.

  Petty Officer Jeffers unhooked himself and went back to the cabinet. Leo followed him. The PO asked, ‘What do you think has happened, sir?’

  Lieutenant Pyne said he had no idea. The PO said the guns were useless and they might as well get to the four-inch guns outside and offer any help they could. It was better than staying and being sitting ducks.

  ‘We don’t know what’s out there,’ said Lieutenant Pyne.

  Leo volunteered to take a look. The PO said, ‘Go on, lad.’ Leo climbed up and put his head out of the roof of the turret. The four-inch battery below him was all smashed up. A shell landed in the water and sent a great spout of liquid into the air, which fell into where the battery had been. Then, as the ship tilted, the water flowed back out, freshly red.

  There was fire all around. A cloud of smoke blew past, leaving a stink of high explosive. He turned and looked amidships and saw dead men being laid out on deck, side by side. He saw burned men with their heads and hands wrapped in cotton wool, and bandages with slits for their eyes, wandering about the deck like ghosts. Then the ship lurched and these walking cases and other men on deck fell over, all ten or twenty of them, and rolled and skittled down to the port side.

  Leo climbed down and reported that the small guns were no good. ‘The ship’s got herself a terrible list to port, sir,’ he said. He realised now that a number of men were groaning. Either Leo could not hear them before or they were too shocked by their injuries at first to cry out. Lieutenant Pyne told PO Jeffers to clear the turret, the PO yelled the order, and those men who could climbed out. Leo waited. He watched the PO go across and give a hand to a seaman coming up from below. Jeffers asked the man why there were no more coming up behind him from the magazine or the shell room and the man said it was no use, the water was right up, and Leo saw then that the man’s clothes were sodden and he understood that the ship’s hull was breached beneath them and all the men in the magazine and the shell room were drowned.

  And if water was flooding into the engine rooms then stokers were surely drowning. Willy Burd was down there.

  The PO told Leo to go on up through the cabinet and out through the top. He and Lieutenant Pyne would follow. Leo climbed out of the turret and as he descended the ladder at the back the ship listed further to port. He gripped the rungs tightly and hung on. The man before him, the drenched seaman who had climbed up from below, stepped off the ladder and slid down the deck to the port side, smashing against a hawser and bouncing off it. Leo froze, clutching the ladder. He had no idea what to do.

  ‘Here, lad.’

  He looked up and saw Sergeant Nutley, holding on to the rail on the starboard side. Next to him was the sight-setter who had told Leo the ship was hit. The setter looked from the sergeant to the boy and took hold of Sergeant Nutley’s hand and let go of the rail. Sergeant Nutley held the rail with his right hand and clasped the sight-setter’s hand with his left, at full stretch.

  ‘You can do it, lad,’ the sergeant yelled.

  Leo dropped from the ladder and kicked off it and caught the sight-setter’s leg. He scrambled up his body. Then he clambered up and across Sergeant Nutley too, clutching his trousers, grip slipping on his sweaty torso, till he reached the rail. The sight-setter followed likewise and the three of them clung to the rail together. Leo saw that many others were doing so too, all along the starboard side.

  There was another explosion at the far end of the ship, forward. Smoke billowed from fierce flames. Above the smoke, a boat – a dinghy or pinnace – soared, spinning like a little toy.

  Leo held tight to the rail. Men were coming out of hatchways and slipping and sliding down the steeply inclined deck to the port side, where they slammed into a scrum of bodies pressed against the rail or toppled over them and flipped into the water. The sight was grotesque and the boy felt something like laughter lift from his stomach; it rose in his throat and came out of his mouth as vomit. He saw a man stagger out of the smoke, his clothes and face and hands as black as a chimney sweep’s. Then he too lost his balance and fell. Leo prayed that he would see Jimmy White or Willy Burd, then he prayed that he would not. Blood pooled and swilled across the deck. The decks were all warped from the heat beneath them, and where they were still dry the resin under the corticene linoleum crackled with a noise like burning holly. One of the cats, Leo could not tell which one, flew out of a smoking doorway and disappeared behind a lifeboat. A man limped into view, and Leo saw that his right foot was hanging off his leg by no more than a single tendon or muscle. He looked up at the man’s bespattered face and recognised the chaplain. The horsemen who had been foretold had come. Fire and smoke and sulphur would issue from the horses’ mouths. The second angel would pour his bowl into the sea, and it would be like blood, and
every living thing in the sea would die. Seven angels with seven bowls of the wrath of God.

  More men emerged from the smoke. Some had managed to put on respirators, but it would not save them. They clung to whatever they could on the listing decks. Most fell and tumbled as the others had before them.

  ‘The bow’s going into the drink,’ someone said.

  When he heard this, the boy understood that their great ship was sinking. What he could not understand was why the enemy was still firing. Heavy shells landed in the sea alongside, raising enormous spouts so close that tons of stinking water crashed onto the ship, a wet stench like spent fireworks, soaking and suffocating all the men there. Or he heard shells shrieking and tearing the air like ripping canvas as they passed overhead. Could the German gunnery range-finders not see that their target was doomed, their mission completed? Why fire at dead men? Why bomb the drowned? Leo cowered, trying to shield himself even as he hung on to the rail. His comrades flinched as shells landed and splinters careened all over the ship. The air was full of them. When they flew close the boy heard their ominous hum. He caught glimpses of polished steel as it flashed past. Men let go of the rail as they were hit and fell abruptly backwards into the water or down across the deck.

  Still more of the crew crawled out of turrets and hatches, coming out of the fires as the ship burned. The boy could hear her now, roaring, crackling, new flames sprouting here and there and joining the one great conflagration. She still pounded forward, her very speed fanning the flames that devoured her. The sound was like the roaring from an open furnace door. Perhaps the boilers down below were all out of control and powering the inferno, gutting their ship with fire. The boy remembered stories of Viking funerals. The bodies of warriors put to sea on their burning ships. Perhaps he and all his fellow crew had been already dead when they launched. There was a new smell in the noxious fumes. Like meat roasting.