Brown on Resolution (18 page)

T
HE BEGINNINGS OF
Herr Schmidt’s urgent calls had reached
Ziethen
soon after sunrise, but they were in a very mutilated form and so distorted that it could not even be guessed what cypher was being employed. The wireless telegraphist declared he could recognize the touch on the key of the main American agent, but this thin bit of evidence carried no weight. Only later was clear proof obtained that the message was in the Most Secret code, and from Schmidt himself, and it was nearly noon before the fragments of successive messages could be pieced together so that Captain von Lutz could read their dread import—that a British battle cruiser and light cruiser had passed the Panama Canal into the Pacific. As soon as he was sure of it there no hesitation about his decisions. With certain death cruising after him in this fashion he was not going to be within sight of land. He issued immediate orders for the recall of the landing party.

Nevertheless, as has been seen, those orders were more easily issued than obeyed. It was past three o’clock by the time that the inner landing party had reached the ship with a fresh load of wounded and dead to madden those who stayed on board, and by the time night fell on Resolution only the smallest driblets of the other force had trickled down to the boats; there were still nearly two hundred men hopelessly entangled on the slope. And with the coming of darkness the task of getting the weary men to imperil necks and limb by continuing the descent became hopeless. The petty officers blew their whistles and bellowed orders through megaphones into the night, but they did small enough good. Now and again a little group or a stray individual would come sliding down the last descent to where the boats lay, but the hours went by and the numbers on the cliff had not diminished very much. Messages flashed to
Ziethen
did nothing to allay the impatience of Captain von Lutz as he strode about fuming. With very little additional motive he would have taken the ship out and abandoned what was left of the landing party, but it was really too much to risk. Even if he had them all back,
Ziethen
would be perceptibly shorthanded, thanks to the casualties Brown had caused and the innumerable cut feet and sprained ankles incurred. The loss of another fifty men would be extremely serious, for Captain von Lutz had to bear in mind the prospect of strenuous coaling at sea and of sending away prize crews, to say nothing of having to fight further battles against hostile ships. He could not bring himself to abandon the stragglers, especially as it meant leaving them to certain death on a waterless island. He could only fret and fume and send orders to get the men into the boats as soon as possible, the while he calculated the chances of the British battle cruiser setting a course for the Galapagos and the time it would take her to get there.

The night wore through and morning came, and the broad light of day was pouring upon the tortured rocks before the last worn straggler came stumbling into the boats; it was almost high noon before
Ziethen
had her anchors up and was heading out of that accursed lagoon to the open sea with a depressed, weary crew and exasperated officers. For once the magnificent German efficiency had come to grief; the stern German discipline had failed. Much may be made of the rocks and thorns of Resolution, but some people are inclined to take most of the credit for the achievement away from these natural and incidental circumstances and bestow it upon Leading Seaman Brown, who had voluntarily opposed himself to the might of an armoured cruiser, who had foreseen that the enterprise would cost him his life, and who had gladly paid this price. without hope of applause for the sake of the Navy in which he served.

For Brown was dying surely enough. A night of torture had followed his wound. The pain came steadily, growing stronger and stronger as the crushing numbness following the initial shock had died away. He was in a high fever, and the dreadful pain made him heave and toss in pitiful, childlike efforts to get away from what was tormenting him. He had been thirsty enough before, but that thirst was nothing compared to the suffering he was now experiencing. Several times that night he had smuggled back to consciousness, obsessed by an overwhelming thought that there might be a little water left in one of his two water-bottles. Each time he had writhed himself about until his left hand could grasp them and draw the corks and raise each in turn to his cracked and swollen lips. Once only—the first time—had this agonizing effort encountered success; three or four drops of fluid, cool and delightful, trickled out of the bottle’s iron neck into his furred mouth, but that was all. There was never anything in either of the bottles afterwards, but Brown always hoped there was.

And as Brown held his left hand to his riven shoulder a troubled memory drifted into his mind of the German he had shot through the shoulder the day before yesterday. Brown’s regretful mind recalled just how that boy had rolled out from behind his cover, trying to hold his shoulder together just as Brown was doing now. He remembered the frown of pain upon the boy’s pleasant face, and he remembered how all day afterwards he had lain in the torturing sun with the flies thick upon him, calling feebly in his unknown tongue for what Brown guessed must be water. Water! Of course it was water for which he was asking. No one would dream of asking for anything else; there was nothing else in all this world one-millionth part as valuable as water. The heartbroken cries of the German boy echoed in Brown’s ears with pathetic persistence; he heard them so long that he felt he must rouse himself to satisfy them. Once he had made up his mind to the effort it was easy enough. There had descended upon him a God-given ability to float quietly and without effort through the air; it was so easy Brown was surprised he had not discovered it before. He floated down to where the German boy was lying, with the sun on his pale hair; he took his hand, and the boy opened his eyes and smiled. It was such a friendly smile; Albert loved him from that moment for the niceness of his blue, childlike eyes and his golden sunburn. Brown lifted him ever so easily just by the hand he held, and together they drifted away from the ugly sharp rocks into a place where there was a pleasant shade. The boy turned to him and made a gentle inquiry, and Brown nodded his head and said “Presently.” So they went on to where tall trees reared themselves up over a meadow of green grass, and there, beside the trees, there was a little, deep river of clear water; you could see it winding away over the green plain. And they drank of the water, and it was perfectly cool and wonderful. They drank and they drank, and they turned to each other and laughed with their happiness, and then they lowered themselves into the clear depths and drifted with the stream, lapped about with water, in companionable nakedness. Everything was very friendly and happy and most blissfully perfect.

Then Brown turned and smiled to the pale-haired boy again, but he did not smile back. Instead his face was contorted with pain again, and he menaced Brown with his fists and glared at him with wild eyes, and Brown writhed back from him and found that the cool water had fallen away from around him, leaving him on the rocky bottom. And it was hot again, and the rocks beneath him were sharp—oh, and his shoulder hurt him so! With a start and a groan Brown came back to consciousness, to a dark world wherein flaming wheels hovered on his eyelids—a world of torment and agony and thirst, thirst, thirst.

The good things of this world had passed him by. He had never had an eye for the joy and wonder of a woodland triumphant with primroses or mysterious with bluebells. He had never known woman’s love, not even bought love, and he had never known the love of a child, the touch of a tiny soft palm upon his cheek and fairy laughter. He knew nothing of the grim majesty of Lear nor of the sunny happiness of Twelfth Night. Good food and good wine the glory of Rembrandt had alike passed him by. Never even had he known liberty; he had been all his life the slave either of a mother’s ambition or of a Navy which demands her servitors’ all to bestow upon unthinking ingrates. All his happiness, all his talents, his life itself, had been swept away in the tide of the Iron Age, the Age of the Twelve-Inch Gun. The achievements of Brown at twenty embraced nothing older than death and destruction. Brown might have died at eighty in a better-adjusted world and left behind him a long record of steady addition to the sum of human happiness, and the test of that might be whether he had not left behind any materials for a story. Yet if Brown had had the choice, just before his landing on Resolution, he would undoubtedly have selected for himself the career which has been outlined in these pages, and other people would have chosen the same for him too.

Brown never knew the satisfaction of success; he never knew what stupendous results eventually crowned his efforts. Later on that last day he came back to consciousness; he swept the flies from his face and, under the impulse of his one consuming motive, he edged himself to the brink of the rock and peered out over the lagoon. The blue, blue water luxuriated in the drenching sunshine; the grim surround of cliffs danced and wavered in the shimmering heat before his reeling eyes. At the water’s edge the marine iguanas browsed upon the seaweed as their Stone Age great-grandfathers had done. Far out at sea the gulls wheeled and sank over the grey line that marked the ocean currents’ edge. But of
Ziethen
Brown could see nothing; the jagged cliffs cut off from his view the smudge of smoke which marked where she was heading out for the horizon. She had gone; she had got clear, and all Brown’s efforts to detain her had only ended in a trivial forty-eight hours’ delay, of no importance at all in a six months’ cruise. Brown fell forward on to the rock again with a groan of broken-hearted despair, and flaming thirst and dreadful pain wrapped him about once more. They killed him between them, did pain and thirst, before the end of that day. He had been a plaguy long time dying, but he was dead at last.

C
APTAIN
R
ICHARD
E. S. S
AVILLE
-S
AMAREZ
,
CB
,
MVO
, sat alone in his cabin at his desk pondering the problems set before him by the terse Admiralty instructions received by wireless and cable, by the small Pacific chart before him bearing the estimated positions of von Spee and his squadron, and by the various possibilities which had gradually accumulated in his not highly imaginative brain. Of a surety his passage of the Panama Canal in HMS
Leopard
with
Penzance
in company had caused very considerable stir. The Canal authorities had been dubious enough about letting him through, despite the fact that His Britannic Majesty’s representative on the spot had made preparations for his arrival twenty-four hours before, quoting terms and treaties which declared the Canal open to all shipping whether in peace or war. Cables everywhere had been alive with the news when he entered the Canal, excited American papers would on the morrow be informing their readers that at last the British Navy had shown a sign of life instead of leaving hapless squadrons to be exterminated by von Spee. Already
Leopard
’s presence would be notified to Berlin, and German diplomatists would protest the while the German Admiralty noted the information and weighed anxiously the effect of this slight dispersion upon the crushing superiority of the Grand Fleet at Scapa, where thirty Dreadnoughts awaited the emerging of the High Sea Fleet from its minefields and protected harbours.

Captain Saville-Samarez was not very different in appearance from what he had been twenty years before; he was not of the type that alters greatly with age. There were grey hairs now among his irrepressible brown ones, and authority and responsibility had brought character into his face; there were two firm vertical lines between his eye-brows, and his eyes seemed deeper set, and there was a grim line or two about his mouth, but he still seemed extra-ordinarily young, with his fresh complexion and upright, carriage. Truth to tell, responsibility and authority sat lightly on his shoulders; he was never a man for deep thought or of much imagination, and the steadiness of his nerve had brought him out of whatever difficulties he had found himself in without any ageing flurry or worry. Little jobs like picking up moorings in a twenty-thousand-ton battleship in a crowded harbour with a full gale blowing he had simply accepted and carried through with automatically acquired skill, and without any frightening picture of what might happen if he made a mistake.

But just at present he was thinking deeply and trying his utmost to use all the imagination he possessed. He realized how fortunate he had been; the command of a battle cruiser was perhaps the biggest plum in the Service open to one of his rank. Moreover, he held an independent command at present, and the exigencies of the Service had put
Penzance
under his command as well. He grinned to himself at the recollection of the series of chances which had kept
Leopard
free from admirals—there were dozens of admirals who might have received the chance, and been glad of it, under some slight variation of circumstances. And an admiral would of course have gained the credit of any exploits
Leopard
might achieve, and Captain Saville-Samarez would be forgotten, forced to be content with a casual, inevitable reference in the official report.

Nevertheless, an admiral, while receiving the credit of success, would also have to bear the responsibility for failure, and in the absence of an admiral that responsibility would belong to Captain Saville-Samarez, and the Captain was almost worried about it. His instructions gave him a free enough hand; what he had to do was to hunt down von Spee and his squadron, concerting for that purpose with the other officers on the spot. The only tie upon him was the emphasis laid in his orders upon the necessity to keep
Leopard
from damage, no destruction of armoured cruisers would be worth the loss of a battle cruiser. To a staff officer such a condition would appear natural enough, as
Leopard
had an advantage of at least four knots in speed over any of von Spee’s armoured cruisers, and her guns outranged any of von Spee’s by a couple of miles or more. But if
Leopard
by herself encountered von Spee with his three armoured cruisers all at once—
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau
, and
Ziethen
—things might not be so easy. Two cruisers might close into range while he was sinking the third, or they might all scatter and he would be lucky to bag one of them, while the light cruisers would make themselves unpleasant simultaneously by trying to torpedo him.
Penzance
might get badly hit too, and that would be his fault as well. The rage of the British public if it heard that a damaged British ship had had ignominiously to seek internment in a neutral port would be unbounded.