Black Prince’s stern yawed starboard as her bow swung into the turn. Cradock felt Defence heel to the same evolution. Then, just as he glanced aft to look at Warrior, he saw the aft 9.2 turret erupt in flame, like a column of fire. Defence bucked and slewed, like a horse losing its grip on slick ground. Black smoke poured from the turret. If they had not turned—he was sure that salvo would have hit Defence amidships.
Even as he watched, Warrior’s forward turret exploded in a gout of flame—seconds later, the starboard turret blew, and then the next… as if some demon artificer had laid a fuze from one to the other. In his mind’s eye, he saw what had happened, the flash along the passages. Another vast explosion that showered Defence and the sea around with debris, and the Warrior disappeared forever beneath the restless sea.
“I told you,” Wray was saying, fists clenched, when he could hear again. They watched as shell after shell struck the Goeben without apparent effect. “We don’t have the weight of guns to damage her even this close; she’ll sink one after another… the whole squadron lost to no purpose.”
“He’s slowing,” Cradock said, peering through the curls and streamers of smoke. The only possible reply to what Wray had said would disrupt his command. He concentrated instead on the battle. If he had been Souchon, in that ship, and if she could still make twenty-seven knots, he would have tried to run the gauntlet. Was Souchon, instead, turning to run away westward? Or had he suffered damage? No ship, however armored, could withstand a steady barrage of 380-pound shells forever. One of them would have to hit something vital. Enough of them, and she must, eventually, go under.
Minute by minute, the ships converged through a hell of smoke and fire and spouting water, battered and battering with every gun that might possibly bear. Despite the blown turret, Defence’s boilers and engines drove her forward at twenty knots, a nautical mile every three minutes, and the interception became a matter of interlocking curves, the Goeben weaving to bring her undamaged guns to bear, the British responding as they could. From fourteen thousand yards to twelve, to ten, to eight. Destroyers darted in and out, zigging wildly from Goeben’s secondary batteries. Three were gone already, blown from the water by shells too small to hole the cruisers.
Cradock, eyes burning with smoke and sweat, struggled to keep his gaze on the Goeben, to distinguish her smoke from the rest. A stronger gust of wind lifted the smoke, and there she was. One funnel blown askew, and the smoke from its opening unhealthily pallid with escaping steam, most of her secondary guns on this side dismounted… but the big guns still swung on their mounts to aim directly at Defence. His mouth dried. Below him, Defence fired, and he saw the flare from Goeben’s guns just as someone jerked him off his feet and flung him down. The bridge exploded around him; he felt as if he had been thrown from a horse at high speed into timber, and then nothing.
He could not catch his breath; his sight had gone dark.
Voices overhead… a weight lifted off him, and someone said, “Here’s the admiral!” How much time had gone by? What had happened? He struggled to open his eyes, and someone said, “Easy, sir…” More weight came off; he could breathe but the first breath stabbed him. Ribs, no doubt. Wetness on his face, stinging fiercely, then he got his eyes open to see a confusion of bundles he knew for bodies, blood, steel twisted like paper.
“Goeben,” he managed to say.
They didn’t answer, struggling with something that still pinned his legs. He couldn’t feel it, really, but he could see a mass of metal. Shouts in the distance, something about boats away. His mind put that together. Was the ship sinking?
“Is—?” he started to ask, but a sudden explosive roar drowned out his words. He felt the tilt of the deck beneath him. No need to ask. “You’d better go,” he said instead, to the faces that hovered around him.
“No, sir,” said one, in the filthy rags of what had been a Royal Marine uniform. “We’re not leaving you, Admiral.”
He didn’t have the strength to argue. He couldn’t focus on what they were saying, what they were doing; his vision darkened again. Then he felt himself lifted, carried, and eased into a boat that rocked in the choppy water. He could see Defence’s stern lifting into the sky.
“Goeben?” he asked again. The men in his boat looked at each other.
“She’s still making for the Aegean, sir. Slow, but so far she’s not sunk.”
“Captain Wray?” he asked.
“Got off in another boat, sir.”
For the first time in years, the motion of the sea made him feel sick. He asked one of the men to hold his head up, and over the gunwale saw the Goeben in the distance, battered, listing a little, but still whole, limping eastward almost to the tip of Cape Malea. Behind her, hanging on like bulldogs, were two destroyers. Somewhere, big guns still roared; he saw one shell explode on the cliff face, spouts of water.
He could not see the torpedo that, after so many misses, exploded under the Goeben’s stern and jammed one of her rudders. But he saw the sag of her bow toward the Cape, and he knew what that meant.
“Dear God,” he said softly. “She’s going to hit the rocks.”
“Admiral?” The face bent over his looked worried; Cradock tried to point and managed only a weak flap of his hand. But they looked… as the Goeben yawed in the current, her bow swinging more and more to port, into the rocks that had claimed, over thousands of years, that many ships and more.
Another half-mile and she would have been well beyond Cape Malea, with sea room to recover from steering problems. Instead, her remaining steam and the current dragged her abraded hull along the rocks, and the destroyers fired their last torpedoes into her. With a vast exhalation of steam, like the last breath of a dying whale, the Goeben settled uneasily, rolling onto her side.
August 8, aboard H.M.S. Black Prince
Cradock lay sweating in his bandages in the captain’s cabin, more than a little amazed that he was alive. Too many were not. Warrior gone with all hands. Defence sunk, and only 117 of her crew recovered. Six of eight destroyers… Scorpion and Racoon were still afloat, but of the others only a very few hands had survived. Only eighty-three of the Germans, Admiral Souchon not among them. Black Prince and Duke of Edinburgh were both in need of major repairs, unable to do more than limp back to Malta. Admiral Milne had already expressed his displeasure with the loss of so many ships and men, and, as he had put it, “reckless disregard of his duty to his superior.” He foresaw that Milne would take credit for the success, and condemn the method by which it had been achieved. Like Codrington at Navarino, he would be censured for having exceeded his orders, while the Admiralty shed no tears over the vanquished enemy. Well, they would have retired a one-legged admiral anyway.
A tap at his door introduced yet another problem.
“Sir.” Wray stood before him like a small boy before a headmaster.
“Captain Wray,” Cradock said mildly.
“I was… wrong, sir.”
“It happens to all of us,” Cradock said. “I’ve been wrong many times.”