The next thing I became aware of – again, some hours later – was the sound of an aircraft approaching. I had no idea at that point if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I quickly had my answer. No sooner had it flown past us than I could hear firing from the shore again, and, after another burst of orders, shouts and clattering urgent footfalls, it was gone almost as quickly as it had arrived.
Fully awake again, I tried to take stock of things more clearly. To try to tease out the facts from the clues. We were motionless, but not docked, so we were obviously just anchored, presumably at some point further up the river. Though there was activity – hostile activity – from the north shore of the river, I could see or hear no other ships or sampans, so we seemed to be alone. And as it seemed that no other boat (or aircraft) was able to get close to us, I could only assume it was either because the Amethyst was physically unable to slip her mooring, or was being prevented from doing so in some other way.
I didn’t have to think much to reach a single, obvious question. Were we stuck here because we were prisoners?
The day grew warm by increments, and very soon it was too hot to stay where I was. With the sun rising high in the sky, albeit partly masked by clouds, I knew the heat would shortly become intolerable. But I had another, much greater motivation to try to move. With so much going on that I was unable to see or hear properly, it was curiosity, as well as anxiety, which eventually dragged me from behind the rope coils – not least concerning the identity of a new arrival on the Amethyst an hour or so later. I’d heard a craft come alongside (probably a landing craft, I decided, due to the soft, purring engine) and, as I couldn’t see it, I was anxious to know who or what it contained.
I made my way haltingly around the snakes of rope – stiff again from the long period of immobility – and tried to forget about my missing whiskers. But all my small trek achieved was to place me a little further along the gun deck, where I flopped down close to the guard rail, my back legs unable to carry me further, where I could at least pick up a little of what was happening.
It seemed as though an officer was coming aboard – I couldn’t see him, but could tell from the tone of his voice, and the tone of voice of the man who was receiving him – another that I couldn’t quite place. And as they headed inside – perhaps to the wireless room or the wardroom? – all I could pick up was that there was some sort of dispute going on. I heard the name Weston, and a while later, heard Lieutenant Weston himself, sounding strange and as if he was struggling to get his words out. ‘We’ve destroyed everything,’ he kept saying, over and over. ‘All the papers and the charts…’ ‘I know, man. Calm yourself,’ the stranger reassured him. ‘I am calm,’ Weston kept saying. He was anything but.
Whoever had arrived hadn’t been inside long, for in no time there were men back on the deck below me, their hushed exchanges floating up to me only in part. But then they moved, and I heard someone say very clearly, ‘There’s no choice, man. If you don’t get that shrapnel removed, you’ll die!’
I lay back again then, trying to makes sense of it. Was that the ‘doc’ I had heard talking? Hard to say, but it was another voice I couldn’t seem to place, and soon after, it was joined by the throb of the landing craft engine, which was presumably leaving us again. It was only when it had travelled some distance that I was able to catch sight of it. Though I couldn’t be sure, I had enough of a glimpse to think it true – the landing craft was taking away Lieutenant Weston.
My first proper sighting of our new captain, a tall man called Lieutenant Commander Kerans, was when I limped onto one of the gun decks a few hours later, feeling compelled to find my friends again. And I found the ship’s company (such as it was, for by now I knew many of my friends were probably missing, or injured and down in the sick berth) had been mustered to attend what was clearly a very sombre gathering. Judging from the light – a murky charcoal, which the sun struggled to penetrate – it was now late in the afternoon. It was the first time I’d seen most of them in three days.
It had been a long walk to rejoin my company, every step sending knives of pain shooting through my hindquarters, and I’d had to sink down and catch my breath often. My skin stung – it was now clear that I’d lost quite a lot of fur – and I was so parched that I’d been driven to cast around the deck and try to lick up any beads of moisture I could find. But the sound of voices drove me on, and after I had no idea how long, I was rewarded by the first glimpse of my friends.
I would make it to the end guardrail above the gun deck, I decided. I kept my eyes on it, as if it were some kind of prize, limping slowly along the hull, keeping close to the bulkhead, feeling my back legs at every step quivering and protesting beneath me, and eventually found myself looking down at a dizzying blur of white.
I blinked painfully, trying to reconcile what I was seeing with what had happened. To square what I’d heard and learned with what I gazed down upon now. The remaining crew – much reduced – were all decked out in their white uniforms. They looked crisp and impossibly shipshape in their finery, and, to a man, they stood rigid and unsmiling.
It was impossible not to contrast them with the post-attack Amethyst: wounded, broken, lying up – licking its own wounds. Yet here were so many of my dear friends, gathered upon her battered deck, almost like a flock of beautiful white birds. Yes, they were bent and broken too, but they were also standing tall, managing to find strength and dignity from somewhere.
All thoughts of my own pain were spirited away then, because it was only now that I realised what I was witnessing. For in his hands, our new captain held what I knew to be the ship’s Bible.
Seeing that particular book lying open in his hands, I couldn’t help but find my eyes drawn behind him, where a line of low, sheet-covered mounds stretched along the gun deck. My friends’ bodies.
I couldn’t take my eyes off them, not for a long time, struck by the precision with which they had been arranged, by their shape, by their stillness. Which were they? Who was missing from the assembly?
There were so many men missing – many more than this number, surely? – that, apart from those I knew about, it would be impossible to work out who had died these past three days. I would find out; that wretched information would all too soon be known to me. In the meantime, I must do the same as my friends below me. Pay my respects and wish them peace where they were going.
Heads were lowering now, and a new solemnity fell upon the gathering. As I watched and listened, the captain speaking in tones mostly too low for me to catch them, the first body was committed to the river by a burial party of four ashen-faced men. Familiar faces, one I recognised as one of the ordnance men, Leighton, whose job today was to lash one of his shells to each sailor, to weigh them down – a bitter irony indeed. By the time they were done, the sun had dipped below the horizon.
And the sailors laid to rest at the bottom of the Yangtse River had numbered seventeen.
Chapter 12
Though it seemed unimaginable for such a thing to happen, in the grim days that followed that terrible funeral service, I found myself grateful for the rats. For it was undoubtedly the rats – now my mortal enemy and my naval duty – that gave me the will to recover. I knew I must recover, at least enough to find the strength to hunt them down and, hopefully, kill enough of them to make it clear to the rest that they were not going to take over the Amethyst.