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  ‘Shoot!’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant, and he marked up the next fall of shot.

  And O’Flaherty at the director still kept the sights steady on the base of the Italian flagship’s foremast, pressing the trigger as he was ordered, while the shells roared over him or burst in front of him and the guns thundered below him. That sensitive mouth of his – there was a girl in Southsea who still dreamed about that mouth occasionally – was smiling.

  14

  From the Captain’s Report

  … until I turned back again into the smoke screen…

  On the bridge the sudden crash of the guns made Jerningham jump, the way it always did. He told himself that if he had any means of knowing just when that crash was coming he would not jump, but up here on the bridge there was no warning. He felt the hot blast of the explosion, and looked towards the enemy to see if he could spot the fall of the shot; so the crash of the next broadside caught him off his guard again and made him jump and miss it. He hoped none of the ratings on duty up here had seen him jump – that second time he was sure his feet had left the deck. The third crash came at that moment and he jumped again. The din was appalling, and with every broadside he was shaken by the blast of the guns.

  He straightened his cap, which had fallen perilously lopsided: and tried to stiffen himself against the next broadside. It was hard to think in these conditions; those explosions jumbled a man’s thoughts like shaking up a jigsaw puzzle. He felt envy, almost hatred, for the Officer of the Watch and the Torpedo Lieutenant and the Navigating Lieutenant standing together like a group of statuary. By the time he pulled himself together half a dozen broadsides had been fired; Artemis had been out of the smoke bank a full minute, Jerningham looked again to starboard in time to see the first Italian salvo fling up the sea before his eyes; then he heard another rumble terrifyingly close over his head. He saw the whole Italian line a-sparkle with gunfire. Every one of those ships was firing at him.

  He gulped, and then with one last effort regained his self-control, panic fading out miraculously the way neuralgia sometimes did, and he was left savouring, almost doubtingly, his new-won calm, as, when the neuralgia had gone, he savoured doubtingly his freedom from pain. Remembering the notes he had to take regarding the course of the battle he took out pad and pencil again, referring to his wrist watch and making a hasty average of the time which had elapsed since his last entries and now. When he looked up again he saw the sea boiling with shell-splashes. It seemed incredible that Artemis could go through such a fire without being hit.

  But the Captain was turning and giving an order to the Navigating Lieutenant, and then speaking into the voice pipe; the din was so terrific that Jerningham at his distance could hear nothing that he said. Artemis heeled and turned abruptly away from the enemy, and the gunfire ended with equal abruptness. Only a second or two elapsed before they were back again in the comforting smoke and darkness and silence; the smoke bank took the ship into its protection like a mother enfolding her child.

  ‘God!’ said Jerningham aloud, ‘we’re well out of that.’

  He heard, but could not see, another salvo strike the water close alongside; some of the spray which it threw up spattered on to the bridge. He wondered if the Italians were purposefully firing, blind, into the smoke, or if this was a salvo fired off by a shaken and untrained ship unable to check its guns’ crews; as it became apparent that this was the only salvo fired it seemed that the second theory was the correct one.

  The smoke was beginning to thin.

  ‘Hard-a-starboard!’ said the Captain, suddenly and a trifle more loudly than was his wont.

  Artemis leaned steeply over, so steeply that the empty ammunition cases went cascading over the decks with a clatter that rang through the ship. The Navigating Lieutenant was saying the name of God as loudly as Jerningham had done, and was grabbing nervously at the compass before him. Jerningham looked forward. Dimly visible on the port bow were the upper works of a light cruiser, and right ahead was another, old Hera, the companion of Artemis in so many Mediterranean sallies. The ships were approaching each other at seventy miles an hour.

  ‘Jesus!’ said the Navigating Lieutenant, his face contorted with strain.

  Jerningham saw Hera swing, felt Artemis swing. The two ships flashed past each other on opposite courses not twenty yards apart; Jerningham could see the officers on Hera’s bridge staring across at them, and the set faces of the ratings posted at Hera’s portside Oerlikon gun.

  ‘Midships,’ said the Captain. ‘Steady!’

  Artemis went back to a level keel, dashing along the windward edge of the smoke bank away from the rest of the squadron. The Navigating Lieutenant put two fingers into his collar and pulled against its constriction.

  ‘That was a near thing, sir,’ he said to the Captain; the calmness in his voice was artificial.

  ‘Yes, pretty close,’ replied the Captain simply.

  It must have been very shortly after Artemis had turned into the smoke to attack the enemy that the Admiral had led the rest of the squadron back again on an opposite course, so that Artemis turning back through the smoke had only just missed collision with the last two ships in the line. But because of good seamanship and quick thinking no collision had taken place; that was the justification of the risk taken.

  The Captain smiled, grimly and secretly, as he reconstructed the encounter in his mind. When ships dash about at thirty knots in a fogbank surprising things are likely to happen. A twenty-yard margin and a combined speed of sixty-two knots meant that he had given the order to starboard the helm with just half a second to spare. As a boy he had been trained, and as a man he had been training himself for twenty years, to make quick decisions in anticipation of moments just like that.

  Back in 1918 the Captain had been a midshipman in the Grand Fleet, and he had been sent in his picket-boat with a message to the Fleet Flagship one day when they were lying at Rosyth. He had swung his boat neatly under Queen Elizabeth’s stern, turning at full speed, and then, going astern with his engines, had come to a perfect stop at the foot of Queen Elizabeth’s gangway. He had delivered his message and was about to leave again when a messenger stopped him.

  ‘The Admiral would like to see you on the quarterdeck, sir.’

  He went aft to where Acting-Admiral Sir David Beatty, GCB, commanding the Grand Fleet, was pacing the deck.

  ‘Are you the wart who brought that picket-boat alongside?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you see my notice?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You’ve flooded my damned cabin with your damned wash. The first time the scuttles have been open for weeks. I go to the trouble of putting out a notice to say “slow” and the first damned little wart in his damned little picket-boat that comes alongside sends half the damned Firth of Forth over my damned furniture. My compliments to your Lieutenant, and you’re to have six of the best. Of the best, remember.’

  The midshipman displayed quickness of thought and firmness of decision to save himself from the pain and indignity of a beating. He stood his ground stubbornly.

  ‘Well?’ snapped the Admiral.

  ‘That notice isn’t hung so that anyone can see it coming under the ship’s stern, sir. It’s quite invisible from there.’

  ‘Are you arguing with me?’

  ‘Yes, sir. If the notice had been visible I should have seen it.’

  That was a downright statement of fact, addressed boldly by a sixteen-year-old midshipman to the Commander-in-Chief. Beatty looked the boy up and down keenly, realizing that in this particular case a midshipman was sure of what he was saying. If his statement were to be put to the test it would probably prove to be correct; and to make the test would be a most undignified proceeding for an Admiral.

  ‘Very good, then. I’ll cancel my order. Instead you will report to your Lieutenant that you have been arguing with the Commander-in-Chief. I’ll leave the verdict to him. Carry on.’

  That was Beatty’s
quickness of decision. He could not be guilty of an act of injustice, but discipline might suffer if some unfledged midshipman would be able to boast of having bested him in an argument. He could rely on the Lieutenant to see to it that discipline did not suffer, to administer a beating for the purpose of making sure that the midshipman did not get too big for his boots. And in the end, the midshipman had escaped the beating by simply disobeying the Admiral’s order. He had made no report to the Lieutenant, thereby imperilling his whole professional career and running the risk of dire punishment in addition; a big stake. But the odds were so heavy against the Commander-in-Chief inquiring as to whether a midshipman had made an obviously trivial report to his Lieutenant that it was a safe gamble which had succeeded.

  In the mind of a boy of sixteen to argue with an Admiral and to disobey an order was as great a risk as it was for a captain to face the fire of the Italian navy and to charge through a smoke screen at thirty knots. There was risk in exposing a light cruiser to the fire of battleships. But, carefully calculated, the odds were not so great. Artemis emerged from the smoke screen ready to open fire. The Italians had to see her first, and then train their guns around, ascertain the range, open fire. Their instruments would not be as carefully looked after, nor as skilfully handled. It would take them much longer to get on to the target. And the more ships which fired upon Artemis the better; the numerous splashes would only serve to confuse the spotters and gunnery officers – a ship that tried to correct its guns’ elevations by observing the fall of another ship’s shells was lost indeed. The greatest risk to be run was that of pure chance, of a fluke salvo hitting the target, and against that risk must be balanced the utter necessity of hitting the Italians. The Captain had calculated the odds to a close approximation.

  15

  From the Captain’s Report

  … I then returned to continue the action…

  ‘That was a near one,’ said Leading Seaman Harris. He sat in the gunner’s seat at the portside pompom and swung his legs as Hera tore past them. He grinned hugely, for Harris was of the graceless type that refuses to be impressed.

  ‘Wonder ’ow old Corky’s feeling,’ said Able Seaman Ryder. ‘D’you remember old Corky, Nibs? You know, the crusher. I ’eard ’e was in ’Era now.’

  A crusher is a member of the ship’s police, and Ryder was a seaman familiar with those officials, like the majority of the pompom’s crew. The ship’s bad characters seemed to have gravitated naturally to the pompom. Leading Seaman Harris had been disrated more than once, and only held his responsible position because of a special endowment by nature, for Harris was a natural marksman with a pompom. To handle the gun accurately called for peculiar abilities – one hand controlling elevation and the other hand traversing the gun round, like playing the treble and the bass on a piano. And it had to be done instinctively, for there was no time to think when firing at an aeroplane moving at three hundred miles an hour. The complex four-barrelled gun, a couple of tons of elaborate machinery, had to be swung forward and back, up and down, not to keep on the target but to lead it by fifty yards or more so as to send its two-pound shells to rendezvous with the flying enemy. Even with a gun that fired four shells in a second, each with a muzzle velocity of unimaginable magnitude, and even with the help of tracer shells, it was a difficult task – the gunner had to be a natural shot and at the same time flexible enough of mind to submit to the necessary artificial restrictions of the training gear, lightning quick of hand and eye and mind – with the more vulgar attribute of plain courage so as to face unflurried the appalling attack of the dive bombers.

  In Artemis, as in every ship, there was courage in plenty, but the ship had been combed unavailingly to find another pompom gunner as good as Leading Seaman Harris. He handled that gun of his as though it were a part of himself, looking along the sights with both eyes open, his unique mind leaping to conclusions where another would calculate. And experience had improved even Harris, because now he could out-think the bomber pilots and anticipate with equal intuition just what manoeuvres they would employ to throw off his aim. He was a virtuoso of the two-pounder pompom; this very morning he had increased his score by five – five shattered aeroplanes lay a hundred miles back at the bottom of the Mediterranean torn open by the shells Harris had fired into them.

  So his crew were in higher spirits even than usual, like a successful football team after a match – it was a matter of teamwork, for the crew had to work in close coordination, supplying ammunition and clearing jams, like the half-backs making the openings for Harris the gifted centre-forward who shot the goals. Exultation rose high in their breasts, especially as the starboard side pompom could only claim one victim, and that doubtful. If the opportunity were to present itself before the exultation had a chance to die down the success would be celebrated in the way the gang celebrated every success, in indiscipline and lack of respect for superior officers – along with drunkenness and leave-breaking, these offences kept the port-side pompom crew under punishment with monotonous consistency.

  ‘Convoy’s copping it,’ remarked Able Seaman Nye; a sudden burst of gunfire indicated that the convoy and its depleted escort were firing at the aeroplanes which had renewed the attack now that the cruisers, and destroyers, screen was out of the way.

  ‘They won’t come to no ’arm,’ said Ryder. ‘We got the cream of the Eyeties ’smorning.’

  ‘Remember that one wiv the red stripes on ’is wings?’ said Nibs. ‘You got ’im properly, Leader.’

  Harris nodded in happy reminiscence.

  ‘How’re you getting on, Curly?’ he asked, suddenly.

  Able Seaman Presteign smiled.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  Presteign was the right-handed loader of the pompom, his duty being to replace regularly the short heavy belts of shells on that side, a job he carried out accurately and unfailingly; that goes without saying, for if he had not he would never have remained entrusted with it, Harris’s friendship notwithstanding. It was odd that he and Harris were such devoted friends. It was odd that Presteign was so quick and efficient at his work. For Presteign was a poet.

  Not many people knew that. Jerningham did – one evening in the wardroom the Gunnery Lieutenant had tossed over to him one of the letters he was censoring, with a brief introduction.

  ‘Here, Jerningham, you’re a literary man. This ought to be in your line.’

  Jerningham glanced over the sheet. It was a piece of verse, written in the typical uneducated scrawl of the lower deck, and Jerningham smiled pityingly as he first observed the shortness of the lines which revealed it to be lower-deck poetry. He nearly tossed it back again unread, for it went against the grain a little to laugh at someone’s ineffective soul-stirrings. It was a little like laughing at a cripple; there are strange things to be read occasionally in the correspondence of six hundred men. But to oblige the Gunnery Lieutenant, Jerningham looked through the thing, reluctantly – he did not want to have to smile at crude rhymes and weak scansion. The rhymes were correct, he noted with surprise, and something in the sequence of them caught his notice so that he looked again. The verse was a sonnet in the Shakespearian form, perfectly correct, and for the first time he read it through with attention. It was a thing of beauty, of loveliness, exquisitely sweet, with a honeyed rhythm; as he read it the rhymes rang in his mental ear like the chiming of a distant church bell across a beautiful landscape. He looked up at the Gunnery Lieutenant.

  ‘This is all right,’ he said, with the misleading understatement of all the wardrooms of the British Navy. ‘It’s the real thing.’

  The Gunnery Lieutenant smiled sceptically.

  ‘Yes it is,’ persisted Jerningham. He looked at the signature. ‘Who’s this A. B. Presteign?’

  ‘Nobody special. Nice-looking kid. Curly, they call him. Came to us from Excellent.’

  ‘Hostilities only?’

  ‘No. Joined the Navy as a boy in 1938. Orphanage boy.’

  ‘So that he’s t
wenty now?’

  ‘About that.’

  Jerningham looked through the poem again, with the same intense pleasure. There was genius, not talent, here – genius at twenty. Unless – Jerningham went back through his mind in search of any earlier recollection of that sonnet. The man might easily have borrowed another man’s work for his own. But Jerningham could not place it; he was sure that if ever it had been published it would be known to him.

  ‘Who’s it addressed to?’

  ‘Oh, some girl or other.’ The Gunnery Lieutenant picked out the envelope from the letters before him. ‘Barmaid, I fancy.’

  The envelope was addressed to Miss Jean Wardell, The Somerset Arms, Page Street, Gravesend; most likely a barmaid, as the Gunnery Lieutenant said.

  ‘Well, let’s have it back,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant. ‘I can’t spend all night over these dam’ letters.’

  There had been three other sonnets after that, each as lovely as the first, and each addressed to the same public house. Jerningham had wondered often about the unknown Keats on board Artemis and made a point of identifying him, but it was some time before he encountered him in person; it was not until much later that this happened, when they found themselves together on the pier waiting for the ship’s boat with no one else present. Jerningham was a little drunk.

  ‘I’ve seen some of your poetry, Presteign,’ he said, ‘it’s pretty good.’

  Presteign flushed slightly.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said.

  ‘What started you writing sonnets?’ asked Jerningham.

  ‘Well, sir – ’

  Presteign talked with a restrained fluency, handicapped by the fact that he was addressing an officer; also it was a subject he had never discussed before with anyone, never with anyone. He had read Shakespeare, borrowing the copy of the complete works from the ship’s library; he gave Jerningham the impression of having revelled in Shakespeare during some weeks of debauch, like some other sailor on a drinking bout.