Collingwood was careful not to allow his existential angst to surface. If ever there was a time for cool heads and reasoned judgements, this was it.
Back in England, the twenty-thousand-ton assault ships Delhi and Madras were loading war stores and over two thousand elite Royal Marine Commandos at Devonport, as he ruminated on the next phase of operations. The Admiralty had already promised him another clutch of cruisers and destroyers, although frankly, he had enough to be going on with as things stood. Moreover, his seaborne logistics train was adequate to maintain approximately two-thirds of his present ships at sea, regardless of the intensity of operations; so, he had no need of the extra fuel, provisions or the ammunition demands inherent in rushing reinforcements to a theatre of war in which at present he felt himself to be adequately supplied.
Obviously, if hostilities went on for a protracted period those reinforcements would allow other fleet units to rest, refit and take on board new drafts; but that was several weeks down the line. Right now, he had what he needed to hand and he intended to concentrate on the most effective, and ruthless employment of those forces.
Losing Indomitable was unfortunate; it was in no way critical.
Whereas, losing one of his big fleet carriers…
Well, his admirals knew better than to unnecessarily put either the Ulysses or the Perseus in harm’s way.
Not that any of the pre-planned war missions now rapidly coming to fruition required any of his big ships to operate in narrow, possibly submarine or mine-infested waters. Once clear of the Mississippi Delta, Indomitable would have been out of reach of submarines and operating in waters too deep for bottom anchored mines.
Indomitable had just been unlucky.
“Sir, this has just come in,” an aide apologised, hesitantly, almost guiltily, holding out a message flimsy.
Collingwood took the note.
He read it, inwardly digested its contents in silence.
The land offensive in the South West had begun.
Several, multi-division or brigade sized incursions across the demilitarized zone south of the Border had been reported and confirmed at places tens and hundreds of miles apart. The scale of the attack was massive, unprecedented and defied all previous intelligence assessments. Colonial forces were falling back all along the Border and a number of CAF airfields had already been heavily bombed.
Worse, there was another flimsy awaiting the C-in-C’s attention.
Collingwood read it.
“Jamaica has fallen,” he said, looking up. “The garrison commander surrendered the island to prevent further civilian deaths at zero-nine-three-zero hours local this morning.”
Nobody really wanted to meet the C-in-C’s eye.
He understood why, and thought no less of any man for doing whatever he might to conceal his shame… and his shock.
“Gentlemen,” Collingwood said, his tone oddly upbeat.
Several of the men around him bore the scars, physical and psychic of one or other of the Empire’s ‘little colonial wars’, of clashes in the Hindu Kush along the North West Frontier, or from cutting out operations in the Sunda Strait, sharp actions with pirates in the Indian Ocean, or from thankless peacekeeping duties in the wilds of Africa. The Pax Britannia was a thing best experienced in Northern Europe, elsewhere the price of Empire was paid, more often than not, in blood and grief. There were mutinies to be put down, riots to quell, insurgents to be rooted out, ‘policing duties’ to be performed, frequently onerously at no little moral peril. And then there was the constant training, preparing for wars that mercifully, usually never came to pass. So, what with one thing and another, the men in the Situation Room at the heart of the great, sprawling Norfolk Navy base, were not ‘Imperial Virgins’, unsullied by the reality of military life in the Empire: to do or die was the unspoken motto of all who served the Crown, and everybody present knew men, sometimes close friends, or brothers, uncles, cousins, who had already paid the ultimate price in some godforsaken place nobody had ever heard of before, invariably in glad sacrifice in the service of a thing greater than themselves which they had been sworn to protect and defend since boyhood.
Therefore, everybody in the room was a member of the same brotherhood; and right now, each man was wondering what it must have cost their brothers, and sisters, in Jamaica to lay down their arms.
The fate of the Achilles, and of those men who had died on board the Indomitable was simply the price of Empire; surrender was another thing. In yester year it would have damned a man’s name in perpetuity but today, well, had the World really changed so much of late?
Possibly, yet the stain of surrender, of not fighting to the death that was, well, quixotic, a bad precedent which risked giving the King’s enemies the mistaken impression that the Empire was not quite what it once was. Nobody in the Situation Room was prepared to concede that notion for a single moment, it was unthinkable.
“Gentlemen,” Collingwood repeated, waiting until each man had snapped out of his understandable introspection. “We shall not dwell on these setbacks. Nor will we apportion blame, culpability of any colour, or speak ill of brothers who have acted as they honestly, in good faith thought best in circumstances which only they were in a position to fully appreciate. In times such as these it is ever-more important that we trust in each other. We serve to preserve civilisation and to confound the King’s enemies. This we shall do.”
He looked around the circle of faces, making unhurried eye contacts.
“We will hear more bad news in the days to come,” he sighed, smiled wanly, “but in the end we shall prevail.”
This said the Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet turned to practical matters.
He clapped his hands together.
The navel gazing was over for the rest of the war.
“I think that what the situation calls for,” he declared, “is a nice soothing cup of tea!”
Chapter 22
Monday 10th April
Little Inagua, West Indies
Twice the Dominicans had tried to send launches through the gap in the reef to put men ashore to find and outflank Abe. Both times he had fired into the oarsmen, one shot killing or wounding two, sometimes three men. The first boat had turned away, the second had carried on with its dead, wounded and living coming to grief on the unforgiving reef as the wind picked up from the south east and dashed them on the razor-sharp coral. Several of the bodies had now washed up on the beach, others were floating in the surf.
One five-round stripper clip loaded.
Three spare bullets left in my pocket…
The first flurry of sniping and shooting on the two boats attempting to pass through the reef apart, Abe had spent most of the day taking occasional shots from new concealments, some as far as half-a-mile distant from his original scrape in the dunes.
Many times, sustained bursts of machine gun and rifle fire from the Reina Eugenie had raked the sand near him, more often the shooting had been blind, directed hundreds of yards down the beach.
Twice during the day, he had sought rain pools, puddles from which to slake his raging thirst, each time giving the Spaniards an uneasy, hour or so long, fraught respite.
About an hour ago, with the sun setting, one of the ironclad cruisers had anchored astern of the battleship and begun to systematically hose bullets along the shoreline. Now and then rounds whispered over Abe’s head as he slid back into the undergrowth and crawled back to where Ted Forest had, hopefully, safely spent the day.