“He’s had one but I’ll give him another. Aye, sir.”
Smith left the stink of the wardroom and climbed to Sparrow’s deck and thence to her bridge. Dunbar turned his head with its turban of bandage but Smith looked blankly through him. ‘Schwertträger…Hinterrücks anfallen.’ A threat, no doubt about that. But of what? A threat uttered by a U boat commander whose boat was headed for the Channel or the Atlantic beyond. So — a new submarine weapon, or a new submarine tactic that would send the figures of shipping losses soaring even higher?
That would do it. That would end the war.
Braddock had said so and he was neither pessimist nor scaremonger but a man who dealt in hard facts.
Smith brooded over it, standing at the back of the bridge with Buckley a yard behind him and looming like his shadow.
And then he thought about Morris and his report. Four aircraft destroyed on abortive reconnaissance missions to Ostende and the coast north of it. They had been getting a bit of a pasting lately! But that mystery had nothing to do with U-boats. De Haan was hardly more than a village. There was no harbour, not even a stream. The coast from Ostende to De Haan was shallow, shelving beach running up into dunes. A fishing boat could well be hauled up on, or launched from that beach, but that was all. There was nowhere on that coast between Ostende and Zeebrugge that could be used as a base by submarines or destroyers. The anti-aircraft batteries in the wood were new. Why? And why the continued patrol of Albatross V-strutters that reacted so quickly, that pursued the RE8 and sent it down in flames into the sea?
He thought of Morris, Bill and the young men like Bill in the other three aircraft who had not returned…
He swore and saw Dunbar glance at him quickly. There was another lonely man now, with thoughts, memories to bedevil him. Smith took a pace forward to stand by the Lieutenant and said, “I’m a new boy around here, newer even than Sanders. There are things I need to learn, need to know.”
So he talked with Dunbar and set him talking as Sparrow picked her way through the shoals and the dying night. Among other things Dunbar told him about Victoria Baines, praising her until Smith was almost won over.
They talked until Dunbar said, “Should be getting light soon. We’ll be up with the monitors and should be able to get that German to a doctor aboard one of them.”
Smith only grunted and fell silent. He doubted that any doctor would help the Kapitänleutnant. And with the first grey light Sanders came to the bridge. He looked older now, the night in the wardroom had done that. He reported to Smith: “He’s dead, sir.” He held out a notebook.
Smith took it. “Did he say anything new?”
Sanders shook his head wearily. “No, sir. He babbled a lot but his speech got more and more slurred. There was very little I could make out and that was stuff we’d heard before. He was never really conscious again.”
Smith put the notebook in his pocket and stood in silence looking out at the tendrils of mist that wisped across the cold sea in the pre-dawn light. Then he said, “I’m sorry.” He was. The man was an enemy but the enemy had been a man. And Smith had killed him.
Part Two — To a Check…
Chapter Three
They came up with the rest of the bombarding force as that first grey light spread across the sea from the French coast. Sparrow, with the West Deep and the shoal water of the Smal Bank astern of her was about to turn on to a northerly course that would take her out to the Cliffe d’Islande Bank. Dunkerque was seven miles off the port bow, just seen from Sparrow’s bridge as a jumble of roof-tops with the finger of the Belfroi tower pointing at the sky.
To starboard steamed the Dunkerque Squadron, already heading out to sea on a northerly course for the rendezvous before the bombardment. The drifters were leading the way and sweeping a channel free of mines for the rest of the Squadron. There were British minefields to starboard of the drifters and off Sparrow’s starboard quarter, and the drifters themselves ceaselessly swept for mines that might have been laid by U-boats in the night. The monitors followed directly behind them while motor launches patrolled on either flank. These were petrol-engined boats, acting now as light anti-submarine escorts, seventy-five feet long and each armed with a three-pounder gun in the bow. And then there were the destroyers, from the thirty-knotters to the fairly new and bigger Tribal class boats, still too slow and underarmed however to meet the new German boats on equal terms.
The ships were all worn and workmanlike. They had held the Straits for three years by a mixture of determination and bluff; the Germans saw the British daring to patrol off the Belgian coast, a bare thirty minutes’ steaming from the destroyers based at Ostende and Zeebrugge, and believed the Dover Patrol and the Dunkerque Squadron to be far more powerful than in fact they were.
Smith watched them, grey ships under a grey sky, and felt a familiar justifiable pride. The depression of reaction had left him now and he was cheerful to match the elation of Sparrow’s crew. Hadn’t they sunk a U-boat?
Erebus, Trist’s flagship for the day, led the line of monitors and her searchlight blinked orders at Sparrow. In obedience to those orders Dunbar took Sparrow in a long, sweeping quartercircle to starboard to take station astern of the last monitor in the line: Marshall Marmont. Just ahead of her the tug Lively Lady plugged steadily on. There Sparrow stayed as the day grew and the sun climbed the sky. At the Cliffe d’lslande Bank the force turned north-east to steam along the outside of the mine-net barrage that Bacon, Vice-Admiral commanding the Dover Patrol, had laid along the Belgian coast. By mid-morning they were off Ostende, the main force steamed on and Smith and his two ships were left with six motor-launches.
At twelve miles distance the coast could not be seen from the bridge of a little ship like Sparrow but the gunnery officer in Marshall Marmont would see it from her fore-top high above the deck. Smith could only see the buildings of Ostende as a ragged edging to the horizon. North of Ostende, about where the village of De Haan lay beyond that horizon, an aircraft patrolled. He could just make it out with Lorimer’s glasses and decided it had to be German or there would be anti-aircraft fire. He let the glasses hang on their strap. So that was the standing patrol that Morris, the airman, had spoken of.
There was a light breeze out of the north-west and that was what he wanted. So far the weather forecast was right. But the sky to seaward was clouding. The weather was turning bad as he’d guessed it would, and the wind would bring it down on them. But later. Meanwhile he had his orders.
To the signalman he said, “Make to Marshall Marmont: ‘Anchor and prepare for action. Report when ready.’ And tell the motor-launches: ‘Anchor to leeward of Marshall Marmont.’ And to Lively Lady: ‘Patrol to seaward of Marshall Marmont.’”
The tug would be inside the line of Sparrow’s patrol but he did not want her to anchor. If a submarine appeared and slipped past Sparrow — God forbid! — then at least the tug would be moving. But it was a small point. A submarine would undoubtedly go for the monitor tethered like a helpless beast. She had to be. Bombardment of the port and its installations had to be highly accurate because the town was set close around it and its people must not suffer. Apart from common humanity there was the need not to antagonise them. So the monitor had to be anchored to provide a stationary, exact firing-platform for her two big guns.