Evans was already signalling to her. Thank heavens he’d not slipped into a dazed trance as a host of masters might have done in the appalling circumstances. Subconsciously I listened to the clicks of the shutter as he slowly, unpractisedly, spelt ATHENIAN… U… U… U… U… the International Code warning—‘You are standing into danger’… KEEP WELL TO STARBOARD MY TRACK.
Then, suddenly, another noise. A bizarre, unfamiliar sound coming from somewhere below our feet. Where? What was it? The silence on the bridge still blanketed down, only broken by the purr of the muffled exhaust from our funnel, the laboured clicks of the Aldis in the Old Man’s hands, and the swish of the sea along our smooth hull… and that noise.
A sort of soft whup! Whup! WHUP…! Getting louder and louder as we slid quietly through the black water. A sound like the steady flagellation of an already dead corpse. Louder and louder…
Then I knew what it was. I rushed to the rail and looked out and down, out over the green-painted sidelight screens and down into the sea below, and I saw it. I saw the ship we’d just murdered.
Or… part of it.
I found myself staring down on the after part of Mallard. Slowly, ever so slowly, it was passing down the length of our towering sides. The impact of the collision must have slowed us more than I had at first estimated — that and the throbbing braking power of our engines during the short time they were full astern.
There was still the sound of engines, though… Mallard’s engines. That was the noise I had heard — the slash of her still-spinning propellers, driving the half ship against our side in a futile attempt to bury herself into our inch-thick steel plating. Almost as a last, defiant gesture of mutual destruction.
My hands gripped the rail in front of me as I stared, frozen to the spot, while the eviscerated corpse of the corvette tried to push into us as, at the same time, she bumped and grated blindly aft, shedding bits and pieces of ship and fittings into the hungry sea between us.
I remember seeing her White Ensign still streaming proudly from her box-like counter, and watching men jumping from under it with an unspeakable, goddamned unbelievingly disciplined silence, into the oil-fouled water. I remember watching an elderly petty officer moving methodically among the rows of black canisters on the depth-charge racks, moving almost as if he wasn’t aware of the horror around him, sparing us not a glance as he bent over the ugly drums, each packed with three hundred pounds of high explosive, and calmly removed the primers from as many as he could before…
Before…? Oh, dear Jesus! Those DEPTH-CHARGES! I swung to find the Old Man beside me, staring down too, with a terrible look of sadness on his suddenly much older face. His eyes caught mine and held for a long moment, then I said simply, ‘Her charges, Captain?’
I saw the lined features age even more in those few seconds as we stood there over the cadaver of a dying ship. There was only one decision he could take — we both knew that — but I had to leave it to him to make. I didn’t have the courage to accept responsibility for an act I knew would make me die a little more for every day I had left to live.
We could save a lot of those silent, jumping, fresh-faced seamen if we stayed. Already I could see our own crowd down on the after-well duck urgently preparing ropes to drop down to the oil-blackened survivors. But with thousands of pounds of high explosive liable to detonate under our keel at any second, could we really have extended their hold on life for more than another few, precious moments? And what about our cargo forward? Had Braid risked that when the Commandant Joffre had leaned over on her crewmen?
At my side the drooping shoulders squared resolutely and, turning quickly away, Evans strode deliberately to the wheelhouse. Behind me I heard the sharp clang of the telegraphs moving over to ‘Full ahead,’ then, from the depths below, a muffled acknowledgement. The first rope snaked over into the water from our well deck as the placid water under our stern suddenly whorled into a surging white froth and, slowly at first, we started to forge ahead with the throbbing, whirring after part of Mallard still almost pleadingly forcing into our side.
I saw a young, black-faced kid in the water grab imploringly at the rope’s end and hang on with the terror of death strengthening his grip; I watched three of our blokes trying to stop a fourth merchant sailor from climbing over the side to help before they all fell back struggling and cursing to the deck; I saw the bobbing heads in the water staring up at us as we surged faster and faster away from them, then, as they realised we were leaving them to die alone, the white eyes and the red mouths screaming hate and filth at our anonymous bulk. I saw the boy seaman on the end of the rope still hanging on as the force of the water smashed him time and time again into our steel plates until, almost drowned and brutally battered, he fell away in the welter of white water under our stern.
I saw the old petty officer on Mallard’s after end look up momentarily from his crouch over the depth-charge primers as his half ship fell away astern. His arm went up briefly to the lowering sky, then he bent back down again to his self-imposed task. Was it a gesture of supplication…? No. I closed my eyes in silent prayer as I realised he had been saluting us — a final absolution from a man who knew what war was all about… A Royal Navyman!
And I knew, too late, there was no room for the contempt of differences between Us and Them.
Evans came to stand beside me again and, together, we watched numbly as the forepart of Mallard slid into view from the previous shield of our port side. We didn’t speak as the two halves of the little ship almost incredibly met again in our wake. For one unbelievable moment it looked, in the distorted half light, as though she was about to rise whole from the waiting sea; to resurrect her cloven hull and her already dead, trapped, mangled sailors.
Then suddenly, without warning, the stern section seemed to fall forward, the still whirring propellers bit hard into the water, and the whole after end — with the old torpedoman still working under her White Ensign — drove down and down into the black depths below.
And, even yet, she wasn’t completely dead. I heard someone sobbing great gouts of indrawn breath until I realised that it was I who was crying, and then, fantastically, the bright stuttering beam of her Aldis blinked for the last time from the doomed forepart.
GOODBYE DO NOT STOP TO RESCUE SURVI…!
…before shadowy white columns of water rose high in the air as the smashing blast of the explosions thundered across the water towards us. Time after time the flashes spread through the sea, first the milli-second of bright yellow incandescence from the depths, then a sudden contraction of the brilliance followed by those terrible mushrooms of atomised spray climbing higher and higher. Then another convulsion, and another and another, until the whole sea between us and the black horizon seemed to be tortured and ripped by the hellish firestorm. I caught a never-forgotten glimpse of Athenian, a long grey bulk on our starboard quarter, flickering and illuminated by that awesome light while, all the time, the explosions went on and on an' bloody ON!