Brown on Resolution (10 page)

“Bracketed, by God!” said the Gunnery Lieutenant, and then, in surprised admiration of a worthy opponent, “Good shooting! Dam’ good shooting!”

Charybdis
turned sharply to disconcert the German rangetakers, but the next salvo pitched close alongside, flooding the decks with water. Down below, below the level of the water, under the protective deck, the stokers were labouring like lunatics to supply the steam which was being demanded so insistently; but
Ziethen
’s stokers were labouring too, and proof of their efforts was displayed in the huge volumes of smoke pouring from her funnels. Victory might well incline to the ship which first reached her maximum speed; speed would enable
Charybdis
to close, or enable
Ziethen
to keep away and continue to blast her enemy with salvoes to which no reply was possible. Once only did the Gunnery Lieutenant see his beloved guns in action; once only. They fired at extreme range, on the upward roll, but it was a vain hope. The Gunnery Lieutenant groaned his bitter disappointment—the more bitter because the hope had been so frail—when he saw the tall columns of water leap half a mile on the hither side of the enemy. But the anguish of the Gunnery Lieutenant’s soul ended with his groan, for
Ziethen
’s next salvo, flickering down from the blue, came crashing fair and deadly upon the
Charybdis
’ deck; five 6-inch shells falling together. They blew the Gunnery Lieutenant into bloody and unrecognizable rags; they dashed to pieces the range-taking Petty Officer and his instrument; they wiped out the crew of No. 4 gun; they left the superstructure riddled and the funnels tottering; they started a blaze of fire here, there and everywhere so that the Executive Officer and his hose-party, choking in the smoke, could not cope with one half of the work before them. Nor was that one salvo all. Salvo followed salvo, with barely half a minute between them. The pitiless shells rained down upon the wretched ship, smashing and rending and destroying. The Zieihen’s gunners were toiling with the disciplined rapidity resulting from years of gun drill, heaving up the heavy hundred-pound shells and thrusting them home with a trained convulsive effort, training, firing, reloading, not even, thanks to their solid discipline, sparing a moment to view the ruin they were causing.
Charybdis
reeled beneath the blows; smoke poured from her in increasing volume, but her vitals, her motive power, were down below her protective deck, and she could still grind through the water with undiminished speed. The Captain was down and dying, torn open by a splinter, and it was the Commander who gave the orders now; dead men lay round the guns, and the stewards were bearing many wounded down below to where the Surgeon laboured in semi-darkness; but scratch crews manned the guns, which flamed and thundered at hopelessly long range. Yet fierce resolution, half a knot more speed and a slightly converging course all did their work. The high-tossed pillars of water crept nearer to
Ziethen
, and soon a shrill cheer from a gun-layer, cutting through the insane din, greeted
Charybdis
’ first hit. There were dead Germans now upon
Ziethen
’s deck.

But
Charybdis
was a dying ship, even though the thrust of her screws still drove her madly through the water. Her side was torn open; she would have been wrapped in flame were it not that the shells pitching close alongside sometimes threw tons of water on board and extinguished some of the fire. The merciless shells had riven and wrenched her frail upper works until the dead there outnumbered the living. Her guns still spoke spasmodically through the smoke; the White Ensign still flew overhead, challenging the interloping Black Cross on a white ground which flunted itself from
Ziethen
. When the oldest navy met the newest, pride left no room for surrender; barbaric victory or barbaric death were the only chances open to the iron men in their iron ships. Feebly spoke
Charybdis
’ guns, and for every single shell which was flung at
Ziethen
a full salvo came winging back, five shells at a time, directed by an uninjured central control, with the range known to a yard. Even as
Charybdis
made her last hit her death was in the air. It smote her hard upon her injured side; it reached and detonated the starboard magazine so that a crashing explosion tore the ship across. The hungry sea boiled in; the stokers and the artificers and the engineers whom the explosion had not killed died in their scores as the water trapped them below decks. Even as the boilers exploded, even as the ship drove madly below the surface,
Ziethen
’s last salvo smote her and burst amid the chaos caused by its predecessors. In thirty seconds
Charybdis
had passed from a living thing to a dead, from a fighting ship to a twisted tangle of iron falling through the sunlit upper waters of the Pacific down into the freezing darkness of the unfathomed bottom. Above her the circling whirlpools lived their scanty minute amid the vast bubbles which came boiling up to the surface; a smear of oil and coal dust marred the azure beauty of the Pacific, and at its centre floated a little gathering of wreckage, human and inhuman, living and dead—nearly all dead.

T
HE RECORD OF
Brown’s doings while
Charybdis
fought
Ziethen
is not material to this history. He was only a part of a whole, and whatever he did the credit belongs not to him, but to the Navy, the tremendous institution which had trained him and disciplined him. If in the last few desperate moments he fought his gun without superior direction, that was because handling a 4.7 under all conditions had been grained into his nature; the credit should rather go to the whiskered admirals of an earlier epoch who had laid down the instructions for gun drill. Brown was a brave man, and he did not flinch from his post, but many men less brave than he would have done the same had they been parts of the same whole. It was the Navy of the unrivalled past which gained glory from the defeat of this, an inconsiderable fraction of itself just as that same Navy must bear the blame, if blame there is. That is as it should be, but at the same time the argument hands over to Brown all the glory and honour for what he did on Resolution, and to Brown as an individual must be given the credit for the eventual destruction of
Ziethen
. For he acted on Resolution without orders, on his own keen initiative, under conditions where neither discipline nor training could help him.

That was all still in the future, however, and not one of the German boat’s crew which picked him up as they pulled through the scattered wreckage knew that they would soon meet their deaths through the agency of this shaken fragment of humanity. Very thoroughly did the boat’s crew search, rowing hither and yon over the oil-streaked water, but they found little. There were two dead men—one of them so shattered that he hardly appeared human—two or three wounded, and one merely half-stunned; this last was a stoutly-built fellow of medium height, very freckled, with hard grey eyes and light-brown hair, inclined to be as rebellious as was possible within the narrow limits of its close crop. He was very badly shaken, having been blown from the deck to the water when the magazine exploded and he was hardly conscious of holding on to a stray rolled hammock which came to the surface providentially near him when
Charybdis
sank. He lay limp in the bottom of the boat as it rowed back to
Ziethen
, and he had to be assisted to the ship’s deck.

All he wanted at that time was to allow his weakness to overcome him, to fall to the deck and sleep heavily, but the exigencies of war would not allow him that luxury. He was the only one of the three survivors of
Charybdis
who was even half conscious, and Captain Lutz, bearing on his shoulders the responsibility for
Ziethen
and her hundreds of men, must know at once how
Charybdis
came to be where she was; whether she had consorts near who could have heard her wireless, whether the meeting was intentional or accidental—everything, in fact, which would enable him to spin out his little hour in being. They did not treat Brown unkindly; they dried him and gave him spirits and wrapped him in a comfortable woollen nightshirt and allowed him to sit in a chair in the dispensary beside the sick-bay while he was being questioned.

Brown rolled dazed eyes over his questioners as he sat huddled in his chair. The bearded officer with the four rings of gold lace must be
Ziethen
’s captain, he knew; the young officer was a sub-lieutenant; the shirt-sleeved man was the Surgeon (who had been doing gory work on the half-dozen wounded
Charybdis
’ shells had injured), and the naval rating in the background was the sick-bay steward.

Fierce and keen were the Captain’s questions, uttered in a guttural and toneless English; occasionally the Captain would turn and speak explosively in German to the Sub-Lieutenant, who in turn would address Brown in an English far purer and without a trace of accent. Brown made halting replies, his eyelids drooping with weariness. He told of
Charybdis
’ slow progress through the Carolines and Marshalls, and steady course eastwards across the Pacific, No, he did not know of any other English ship near. He had heard nothing of any concentration against the German squadron. It was at this point that the Captain called upon the Sub-Lieutenant to interpret, and the Sub-Lieutenant duly informed Brown in passionless tones that a prisoner who made false statements was guilty of espionage, and as such was liable to be shot, and undoubtedly in this instance would be shot.

“Yes,” said Brown.

“Was
Charybdis
expecting to encounter
Ziethen
?”

“I don’t know,” said Brown.

“What was her course and destination at the time of meeting?”

“I don’t know,” said Brown.

Now, did he want to be well treated while he was on board?

“Yes,” said Brown.

Then let him answer their questions sensibly. Whither was
Charybdis
bound?

“I don’t know,” said Brown, and at this point the medical officer intervened, and Captain Lutz left him testily. Brown had been speaking the truth when he said he did not know; but he had a shrewd idea all the same, and had he told Captain Lutz of his suspicions he might have relieved that officer of a great burden of worry. But that was no way Brown’s business—on the contrary. Captain Lutz’s ill-timed threat had reminded him of the fact at the very moment when, in his half-dazed condition, he was likely in reply to kindly questioning to have told all he knew or thought.

The Surgeon spoke to the sick-bay steward, who summoned a colleague, and between them they tucked Brown into a cot in the sick-bay, put a hot bottle at his feet (shock had left him cold and weak) and allowed him to fall away into that deep, intense sleep for which his every fibre seemed to be clamouring. And while Brown slept
Ziethen
came round on her heel and headed back eastwards.

For
Charybdis
had not gone to the bottom quite without exacting some compensation. One of her 4.7-inch shells had struck
Ziethen
fair and true a foot above the waterline, and a yard forward of the limits of her armour belt. There the shell had burst, smashing a great hole through which the sea raced in such a volume that the pumps were hard put to it to keep the water from gaining until, after the battle, a sweating work party had got a collision mat over the hole, while inside the stokers cleared the bunker, into which the hole opened, of the coal which interfered with the work of the pumps. Examination of the damage showed it to be extensive. Nowhere else on all the side of the ship could a shell of that calibre have been put to better use. The forward armour plate, starboard side, was slightly buckled and loose on its rivets; there was a hole in the skin ten feet across, one-third of it below water, and, worst of all, the bulkhead and watertight door between the injured compartment and the next (the boiler compartment, and largest of all) were involved in the damage as well. The ship was actually in danger; in smooth water she had nothing to fear, but, given a Pacific gale and Pacific rollers, the collision mat inevitably torn off and the pumps choked with coal dust, two compartments might fill and
Ziethen
would go to join
Charybdis
on the bottom.

Clearly it meant the postponement of
Ziethen
’s projected raid. The New Zealand meat ships and the Australian convoys would be left in peace for the time. No captain would risk his ship on a long voyage in such a condition, least of all the captain of a German warship with no friends within five thousand miles, with the constant possibility of a battle at any moment, and the certainty of one sooner or later.
Ziethen
must find a harbour, a haven of some sort, where she could rest while her shattered hull was being patched and that without delay. A neutral port would mean almost certain internment, the most ignominious ending possible to a voyage; or if by any miracle she was not interned, her presence would be broadcast far and wide, and on her exit from neutral waters she would find awaiting her an overwhelming force of the enemy. So that ports with docks and stores and necessaries were barred to her. She must find somewhere a deserted piece of land from which news would not spread, where she would be able to find shelter while her own artificers forged and fixed new plates, and where it was unlikely that enemy warships would find her or inquisitive Government officials complain of breaches of neutrality. In the Pacific there was more than one such haven, but the nearest was far superior to all others; Captain Lutz knew the answer to the question he set himself before even he had found it by consultation of charts and sailing directions. Resolution Island, that last, most northerly outlier of the Galapagos Archipelago, would suit him best of all. So
Ziethen
set her course for Resolution Island, a thousand miles away, her pumps at work, while a relay of sweating artificers down in the Stygian depths of her toiled to keep them clear. Browne slept the heavy, exhausted sleep of profound shock the while
Ziethen
’s propellers beat their monotonous rhythm, driving her onwards to where Brown’s fate awaited him.