Sparrow’s Chief grinned at them comfortably, “Well, if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t ha’ joined.”
Sparrow ran down the channel in the last of the light with her crew manning the side. McGraw’s head thumped with every turn of Sparrow’s screws but like the rest of the men on her deck he peered up at the bridge. Faintly on the wind came the sound of a mouth-organ. Smith was on the bridge and Galt was playing at his orders. ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the sea-side!’
McGraw held his head. “Mad bastard!”
The next day Trist had a word with Smith. “That was a disgraceful business! I had a full report from the Provost Marshall. Disgraceful! The offenders have been dealt with?”
“Yes, sir. I took a very serious view of the affair.” Smith slipped the question. He doubted whether Trist’s view of suitable punishment coincided with his own.
Garrick had spoken to all of the offenders on the quay after Smith had gone, spoken in a voice tight with suppressed rage in a way that left them stiff-faced and silent. “You have commanding this flotilla the finest seaman and sea-fighter I’ve ever known. A man who will lead you and fight for you and never let you down. I won’t let him down if I can help it and, by God, neither will you!”
So Sparrow entered again the grind of patrol work. But they were lucky. Sparrow had steamed her seventeen days and came up for boiler-clean, so they got a break early on. She was laid up for three days and her crew sent on leave.
Smith was explicit on that. He told Garrick and Dunbar, “The punishments I leave to you. Work them as much as you like but I want no man’s leave stopped.”
So the men got their leave.
Smith got a summons. Naval Intelligence wanted to talk to Sanders and himself about Schwertträger. Smith thought it would prove a waste of time but with Sanders he crossed to Dover and took a train to London. He was right. Intelligence appropriated Sanders’s notebook with its record of the Kapitänleutnant’s last words, and questioned the pair of them to see if there was any scrap of information that had been forgotten or overlooked and so omitted from Smith’s report. There was none.
Sanders hurried off to his home in Wimbledon and a girl. Smith went to see Rear-Admiral Braddock — at Braddock’s request. “Heard you were in the building and visiting Intelligence.” He grinned at Smith. “I have an intelligence system of my own. A lot of people talk to me. Sometimes they even listen.” He scowled at that. Then he said, eyeing Smith, “That reminds me. We’re still pushing the convoy system and we’re gaining ground. The counter-argument now is that we can’t find enough ships for escorts. Rubbish! It’s just a delaying tactic.” He got up and took a turn around the room, stumping bad-temperedly.
Smith shifted restlessly in the chair.
Braddock said, “I hear you sank a U-boat.”
“Sparrow did, sir.”
“You didn’t waste much time. Trist claims it proves that his idea of an anti-submarine flotilla works. Did you know that?”
Smith blinked “No, sir.”
Braddock grumbled, “Lloyd George does. It got back to him, somehow. He wants my opinion. I want yours as the man commanding the anti-submarine flotilla, the man who sank the Uboat.”
Smith hesitated, trying to pick his words because they might be repeated to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister! But the careful, chosen words would not come and so he spoke his mind, harshly. “We found the U-boat by sheer luck; just ran across her. And she nearly got away, might as easily have sunk us. The flotilla is doing good work patrolling and bombarding — we have to hold the Straits and hit their bases — but it can’t and won’t stop the U-boats. Nor would a hundred anti-submarine flotillas. The ships would be better used escorting convoys, and convoys must come and soon.”
Braddock stared at him for several seconds, as if letting the words soak in so as to repeat them later. Then he stirred, started prowling again. “And how is the flotilla?”
“I’ve no complaints, sir.” Smith’s face was blank now.
Braddock thought, so it’s like that. He said slowly, “I know Trist. I knew the kind of flotilla it would be when I got you the appointment, but there were other suggestions designed to bury you alive in some shore job with a big title and no command. I thought you’d prefer the flotilla.”
“Yes, sir.” That was definite.
“Can you make something of them?”
“They can. There’s good stuff there, sir.”
“What? Wildfire and Bloody Mary?”
Smith blinked again. Braddock’s intelligence system was impressive. “Yes. To start with there’s Garrick and Dunbar…” He told Braddock about the ships and their men, at first stiffly, self-consciously, but soon his enthusiasm set him talking freely.
Braddock listened until Smith talked himself out and only then said dryly, as he opened the door to end the interview, “It’s a good job Beatty can’t hear you.” Beatty now commanded the Grand Fleet. “If he believed you he’d want to swap for your paragons.”
Smith went to his hotel. Sanders had diffidently invited Smith to spend the short leave at the house in Wimbledon but Smith knew about Sanders’s girl and he wasn’t going to get in the way there. Smith had no home to go to. The CPO and his wife who had brought up Smith had both died in his first year as a cadet in Britannia. But he had always managed happily enough in a hotel before. Now he stared out of the window and wasn’t so sure. He had three days to get through. Get through? That was hardly the way to look at a short leave after a gruelling period of service in the Channel. He was used to being alone but now he felt lonely, a very different thing. He scowled moodily out at the rain that spotted the panes and thought about the ships.
She was fast and modern, slim and strong. Not a ship. Eleanor Hurst was twenty-four years old, with money of her own, and the man she wanted and could not get had been killed on the Somme. She sat at the table in the Savoy, between the subaltern and the young Lieutenant-Colonel with the red tabs of the Staff, and watched Smith. He was aware of her: pretty, blonde, the dress low-cut, the eyes watching him coolly. Not challenging, just watching. He wondered whether she was too cool; was there a tenseness about her?
The big room was brilliantly lit by the chandeliers, the orchestra played ragtime and the dance floor was filled with young officers and girls. The supper party was given by the subaltern’s mother who was in a nervous state because he was returning to France and the Front the next day. The average life-span of a subaltern at the Front was three months. Smith sat between her and a Mrs. Pink — he couldn’t remember her name but thought of her as Mrs. Pink. She was large and pink-faced and pink bosomed, expensively dressed and she kept laying her hand on his thigh under the table. Her shadowy, absent husband was making a lot of money, she was vocally patriotic and got on Smith’s nerves.