An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War (35 page)

“I suspect he'd much prefer triumph,” Fingal said.

Tom laughed. “He's very much regarded and tipped for even more senior command. Might even make admiral of the fleet one day, get a peerage.”

“And I reckon he'd deserve it,” Fingal said as he followed Tom to the upper bridge and compass platform.

Warspite
was steaming at twenty knots and the wind of her passage made Fingal's cheeks glow. Behind him, the fifteen-inch control tower reared up the height of two more decks. The crew in there would be using optical instruments to calculate range, speed, course, and bearing of any targets and then passing the information to the transmitting station deep in the ship's bowels where calculating machines would work out the coordinates and pass the aiming details to the big guns. Astern of the tower, flags were being run up the signal halliards of the fore signal yard. On this deck there were two searchlight sights and two target-bearing sights, all manned. Projections from the main part of the deck, platforms with guard rails, jutted out to port and starboard. Each bore twin, single-barreled Oërlikons mounted on one pedestal, manned by a gunner, and pointing up. The man wore a white asbestos antiflash balaclava, a steel helmet, and long gauntlets. Another helmeted rating armed with high-powered binoculars scanned the blue, cloud-spotted skies for enemy aircraft, ripe crops it was to be hoped, for the antiaircraft gunners' grim reaping. Fingal moved to the port platform astern of the gunner and looked to where the smoke from
Warspite
's boilers roiled down from the single funnel trunking inside which he knew were four exhaust stacks. The smoke lay in greasy black coils where the whitecapped sea was churned to a foaming wake by the ship's propellors. The stink of burnt fuel filled his nostrils.

“That's HMS
Eagle,
half a mile astern,” Tom said.

Fingal looked at the seemingly lopsided ship, her bridge structure and funnel offset to the starboard side of a flat flight deck. There, four Swordfish, their spinning propellors flashing in the sun, were at readiness.

“And that's HMS
Malaya,
another of our sisters astern of
Eagle,
” Tom said.

All around
Warspite,
a phalanx of cruisers and destroyers kept perfect station, ships in serious light-grey business suits striding purposefully across the sea, intent on showing the world that Britannia still ruled the waves.

“Thanks for fixing this up for me, Tom,” Fingal shouted, his ears filling with the wind's keening in the halliards above, the roaring of the turbines below. “It's not just because I think it's going to be fun seeing the guns fired. I think … I think it's important for their MO to understand what the crew are experiencing in battle.”

“It'll not be quite the same,” Tom said. “No one's firing back.”

Fingal laughed. “That's the only reason I can even be here. With the fleet not in the presence of any enemy, I can stay on deck unless the call comes to close up for action stations.”

“I think,” said Tom, “you may be in for a bit of a surprise. Those things really do make a hell of a racket.”

“That's all right,” Fingal said, and grinned. “I suspect all little boys and a great many grown-up men love things that go ‘bang.'”

“They'll be doing that soon enough,” Tom said. “Now look.” He pointed for'ard at what on a clock face would be ten o'clock. “The target's being towed by a destroyer about five miles off our port bow. See her?”

Fingal nodded.

“The other ships will leave a clear corridor between us and the target. Look, there they go now.”

Fingal saw a cruiser and three destroyers turning away, showing their sterns as they took up their new positions.

“Any minute now,” Tom said. “We'll only be able to see our shell splashes and we won't be firing live rounds.” He glanced down.

Fingal followed his friend's gaze. In unison, the gunhouses of A and B turrets began swinging smoothly, ponderously, to port before steadying on the bearing Tom had indicated. All four gun barrels moved from the horizontal until they were angled up, but not all to the same degree. Their rising and falling, until each had found its assigned elevation, reminded Fingal of the gentle rise and fall of kelp in a rolling sea. A quick glance astern confirmed that X and Y turrets had conformed.

“Ranging shots will be fired in salvoes,” Tom explained. “That's one gun of a pair at a time. They'll try to straddle the target by putting one shell over and one shell on this side of it. That gives the directors the information they need to calculate the exact settings to lay the guns accurately on the target. Get out your cotton wool and bung your ears.”

Fingal did as he was told.

Even with his ears blocked he was aware of a clanging of bells. Tom had told him that bells were the signal to—Holy Mother of God—

Fingal's world had become an insane maelstrom of light, noise, and stinking smoke. The firing of number-one gun was immediately followed by the number-two gun of A turret. From each barrel, a tongue of orange flame leapt from the muzzles for yards over the sea as four hundred pounds of the explosive cordite was transformed in a millisecond to a ball of superheated gas. Even as the flame persisted before dying, mahogany-coloured smoke poured from each gun, smoke in such quantities that Fingal had not believed could exist, so dense that some of it tumbled to the sea below. Nor had he been prepared for the intensity of the stink as part of the cloud was blown back to where he and Tom stood. Simultaneously he was engulfed by a chest-crushing roar that his body felt as much as heard. It was hard to breathe. And over the thunder came an audible hiss of the departing one-ton shells, which could be hurled to a maximum range of eighteen miles. For sheer spectacle, the sound and fury were as dramatically gripping as anything Fingal had ever witnessed and he wanted to cheer aloud before a more sobering thought struck. When fired in battle, the guns' sole purpose was to wreak death and destruction.

He stared along the line the shells must take to the target. He had been told that an observer standing behind the guns could follow the flight of the massive projectiles as they arced up into the blue sky at a velocity of 2,450 feet per second on their way to their target. He watched them fly and shuddered, thinking about what such engines of destruction would do to flesh and blood in a real fight.

Between the ship and the horizon he saw two towering white splashes near the target as the shells landed.

He clapped his hands over his ears. The barrels, which had slid back onto their recoil mechanisms with a force of four hundred tons, were now returned to firing position.
Warspite
's sixteen-man gun crews could maintain a rate of fire of two shots per minute from each barrel. But before A turret could fire again, the earlier shattering sequence was repeated exactly when B turret thundered.

How, he wondered, sneaking a look, how did they do it? How did the aircraft spotters and Oërlikon gunners who stood near him, how the hell did they tolerate the din and stink and total assault on the senses every time the ship went into action? All four men seemed to be quite unaware and were concentrating on their duties.

Fingal felt a tugging on his coat sleeve, and in the few moments before X turret spoke, managed half to hear, half to lip-read his friend saying, “Had enough?”

Fingal nodded and together they started to make their way below, neither bothering to speak as the gunnery exercise continued. His body was shaken physically by the sights, sounds, and sensations he'd experienced. He'd seen for himself the only reason that twelve hundred men and all the intricacies of the great ship
Warspite
existed. Everything was in place solely to bring those eight massive engines of destruction, the fifteen-inch rifles, to work against ships and shore installations of an enemy—and an enemy's personnel.

Half of him was proud of his ship, made more secure in the knowledge that his country had such weapons and would one day soon be bringing them to bear on the foe, each blast of the mighty rifles one tiny step closer to victory and the end of this lunacy called war.

But another part of him realized that watching what before he'd only heard and felt had brought back many of the feelings he'd had after Narvik. He had tried to stifle them then. Put them to the very back of his mind.

Now those memories came back of the destroyed German ships, the smell of burnt flesh, the mutilated men. He had vivid mental images of Doctor Fingal O'Reilly, supposedly inured by his training to the pain of others and the sights of injuries, turning his face away, choking back tears, and trying to be strong enough to comfort a sailor who had been a professional soccer player before the war. With only one leg there'd be no more goals for Aston Villa in that young lad's future.

“Impressive, aren't they? The guns,” Tom asked when they reached number two platform, where Tom had his cabin.

Fingal nodded, but said nothing.

“You all right?” Tom asked.

Fingal nodded. “Pretty much. I've seen what I wanted to. It's rocked me a bit.”

“You mean the physical concussion?”

Fingal shook his head. “No. I was thinking … about what our guns did at Narvik. I operated on a young German. I found out his name—Wilhelm Kaufmann. He was from Hamburg.”

Tom looked puzzled, but said nothing.

“He did very well for six days.” Fingal took a deep breath. “I suppose I should have kept a professional distance.” He looked Tom in the eye. “Then he had a relapse and the last thing he said on the seventh postoperative day was ‘
Mutti
'—Mummy.” We buried him at sea that night.” Fingal lowered his gaze and said in a low voice, “I should have heeded old Rudyard's advice.” He looked up at Tom. “‘If all men count with you, but none too much.' Wilhelm was an only son.”

“I couldn't do your job, Fingal,” Tom said. “And it's easier for me. I don't have to look at our handiwork like you do.” He stood close. “If it's any comfort, we didn't start the war, but we have to defend ourselves, and no matter what the cost we must, we must win.”

“Thanks, Tom,” Fingal said, and managed a small grin. “They don't actually train us in medical school to be dispassionate, but it is subtly encouraged; patients are referred to by their initials, not names; the senior staff all have an air of clinical detachment. With all you see in those years it just happens. Most students have built their own armour plating, just like
Warspite
's, by the time they've qualified, but I've always found it hard not to get upset. It's such—it's such a bloody awful waste.” He squared his shoulders. “Right. I'll be off. Thanks for showing it to me and just … thanks.”

“I'll see you before dinner,” Tom said. “I'm going to finish my letter to Carol, see how the bump's coming on.” Since it had been confirmed that Tom's “trying to have a baby” was so far successful, he and his wife referred to the unborn as “the bump.”

“Good idea. I'm going to write to Deirdre,” Fingal said, and wished, how he wished she were here so he could tell her—tell her what? That he was confused? That his job was to make people better, not to patch up the wreckage that his ship's guns and the enemy's guns were going to cause? That war was an obscenity, but that he must set that aside and do his duty—because he must? “I'll see you in the anteroom later,” Fingal said, “and thanks again for letting me watch.”

He walked along the same corridor, lips pursed, fists clenched. But, he asked himself, am I the same Fingal O'Reilly who passed along here earlier today excited at the prospect of watching the big guns in action? He shook his head. He simply did not know. But in the months to come he was sure the Italians would put to sea, and in the grappling of the fleets he was going to find out.

33

Requireth Further Comfort or Counsel

The village seemed deserted as the night drew in and the rooks, cawing and flapping overhead, tumbled down the sky and into their rookery in the old elms of the Ballybucklebo Hills.

O'Reilly had not held Kitty's hand nor felt much like talking, and as Kitty had remained silent he'd guessed neither had she. “Consuela wants to meet me and I'm not quite sure what to do,” she had said on the beach. The question still hung in the air between them like smoke on a still day.

Now, with Arthur put to bed in his kennel and the back door closed behind them, the normalcy of the everyday was reasserting itself. “Go on up and have your whiskey,” said Kitty. “I really don't want a drink tonight. I'll get dinner started. One of Kinky's steak and kidney pies. It'll take about twenty-five minutes to heat and do the spuds and veggies. One of your favourites, love.”

“Terrific,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic about the grub. He was relieved to be given the opportunity to think things out alone and suspected Kitty knew that. “I'll be down in twenty-five minutes then.”

At the sideboard in the upstairs lounge he poured and then walked, glass in hand, to stand in the bay window. In the gloaming, the steeple stood limned against the darker waters of the lough and the mellow softness of the distant Antrim Hills on its far shore. The three running lights on a freighter heading for the Irish Sea glimmered two white, one green, tiny jewels—diamonds and an emerald—set on the jet silhouette of the ship. It bore them to a rendezvous with the earliest diamante evening stars. Venus, goddess of love and beauty, brighter than all the rest, had risen over the ship's stern.

Venus might be rising, but O'Reilly's heart sank. Damn it all, he told himself, you're a grown man. You had no claim, none whatsoever, on Kitty O'Hallorhan after you parted in '36. That's crystal clear, so why the hell, thirty years later, are you— He realised how tightly he was clasping the Waterford glass and relaxed his grip. Why is it eating at you and why shouldn't this Consuela woman come to Ireland? He sipped his drink. Or, come to think of it, perhaps they could go to her. The Spanish government had since the '50s been developing a stretch of rugged Mediterranean coastline, the Costa Brava, as a cheap tourist destination. Cromie and his wife had gone on a package tour to Lloret de Mar last year and raved about it when they came home. Should he and Kitty meet the woman somewhere like that? Somehow Tenerife, which must have bittersweet memories for Kitty, did not appeal.