Keeton struggled to his knees, his head humming, as though a swarm of bees had penetrated his skull and set up home. With one hand he held on to the low wire that circled the gun-deck while with the other he explored his body, half-surprised to discover that it was still all in one piece, that no parts of it appeared to have been broken.
He heard the sudden thunder of the 4-inch and felt the deck shudder beneath him with the shock of recoil. Then the barrel of the gun slid out again, smoothing the grease along the slideway, and smoke trailed from the muzzle and Hagan was yelling in his ear.
‘Get up, you slob! Get up and feed that gun. Get up, can’t you?’
He found that he could get up, and he did so. He reached down and picked up a shell. He rested the shell in the crook of his left arm as he had been taught to do, with the weight slightly towards the nose and his right hand resting on the base to balance it. The gun-deck came up and tilted as the ship rolled. He braced himself against the roll and saw that the gun barrel was now pointing dead astern and was still moving in a clockwise direction, so that in another moment it would be over the port quarter.
He was sure that the submarine could not be moving at such a speed as to make necessary this rapid training of the gun, and then he realized that it was the Valparaiso that was changing direction, apparently in an attempt to throw the enemy gunners off target. He could feel the deck shuddering, as the engines were put to full speed, finding some hidden reserve of energy in this final effort at self-preservation.
He pushed the shell into the open breech and helped to ram it home. He took another charge of cordite from Bristow and caught a glimpse of Bristow’s face, pale and ghostly in the murk, as though all the colour had been washed out of it by the driving rain.
The breech-worker swung the handle and the breech clanged shut, the threads of the metal twisting together to seal it. The cartridge was inserted.
‘Ready!’
‘Fire!’
And this was something else you never learned at school, something the training ship instructor never taught you: this confusion of battle, the half-seen enemy, the moving gun-deck, the human weakness that could make a man put the wrong setting on the sights and throw the whole operation out of line. The target was so small, so indistinct, no more than a shadow on the water, and night coming swiftly. And it could not come too swiftly, for in darkness the Valparaiso might find salvation.
And then he saw the funnel of the ship burst open like a blossoming flower, and the red petals of flame thrust out on every side before a black cloud of smoke gushed up and smothered them. In that moment he knew that the ship was dead, even before the propeller ceased revolving. They had put a shell into the Valparaiso’s heart and the heart had stopped beating for ever.
Mechanically he stooped for another shell and found that the racks were empty. Smoke was drifting aft and it seemed to clog his brain. He stood there with his hands hanging idly, unable to decide what he had to do now. He saw another flash of red fire in the distance and heard the high, angry screech of the shell. It went over like an express train and fell beyond the ship. A fountain of water spouted up and splashed on the decks; the ship, already stricken, reeled again.
Keeton felt a hand gripping his shoulder and found Hagan’s face glaring into his own. Hagan looked mad, and something had happened to his right ear; it was joined to his head by no more than a thin strip of skin. Blood was oozing from the place where the ear should have been and flowing down Hagan’s neck in a thick, dark stream.
‘Something’s happened to your ear‚’ Keeton said. He had a vague feeling that he had to make Hagan aware of this fact, because the petty officer himself was ignoring it, and the blood was there on his neck like the mark of a painter’s brush. ‘It’s bleeding.’
‘You’ll be bleeding‚’ Hagan yelled; and his breath was on Keeton’s face and his fingers were digging more cruelly into Keeton’s shoulder. ‘You’ll be bleeding dead if you don’t get some more ammo out of the magazine. Get down there. Move, boy, move.’
Keeton came out of his stupor and moved. He stepped over the edge of the gun-deck and went down the ladder. The ladder was leaning over to port and was not coming back to the vertical. This fact registered on Keeton’s brain and told him that the ship was listing. Probably the sea was coming in somewhere; perhaps they were already sinking.
Another billow of smoke came drifting back from the broken funnel, half-choking him as he left the ladder and braced himself against the erratic movement of the deck. The wind seemed to be stronger, and a flurry of spray dashed across the poop, flicking the stinging salt into Keeton’s eyes. He groped his way towards the steel-sided deck-house that was used as a magazine and found that the door was already open and that Bristow was inside.
Bristow had a shell in his hands. There was no helmet on his head and his red hair was drenched with water. Bristow looked scared. He was resentful too.
‘About time I had a hand. Expect me to do this all on my Jack? Where’s the others?’
Keeton stepped inside the magazine and removed his own steel helmet and put it on one side because it bothered him. He began to pull a 4-inch shell from the rack in which it was stowed. It was almost dark in the magazine; there were no windows, and the electric bulb that should have illuminated the interior was not working, either because it had burnt out or, more probably, because the ship’s electricity supply had been cut off by the explosion that had demolished the funnel. There was not a great deal of room for movement, for besides the 4-inch shells and cordite there were boxes of 20-millimetre ammunition for the Oerlikons, tins of small-arms cartridges, rockets of various kinds, a Lewis machine-gun, two Lee-Enfield rifles and a variety of tools and spare parts.
Some more men had now arrived and a chain was formed to pass the shells up to the gun-deck. Keeton could hear Hagan shouting: ‘Put a jerk in it. Come on, you lousy cripples. Get a move on.’
Hagan had a penetrating voice; it could be heard even through the wind and the lashing of the rain and the beating of the waves against the ship’s sides. Hagan, with his ear hanging by a thread, was a man possessed by a devil, and the devil was articulate in his voice as he drove his men to action.
Bristow got rid of his shell and came back into the magazine, still grumbling in a monotonous undertone. It was the way his fear showed through.
‘Damn Hagan. Damn the lot of ‘em. Can’t see a thing.’ The ship gave another lurch and flung him against Keeton, nearly knocking the shell out of Keeton’s hands.
‘Here we go‚’ Bristow muttered. ‘We oughter be in them boats. This crate’s had it. She’s had it sure enough. Five minutes more and we’ll be down among the dead men. You can feel her going.’
Listing to port and no longer urged forward by the restless thrusting of the propeller, the Valparaiso was moving at the will of the sea and the wind, now rising, now falling, see-sawing on the backs of the waves, floundering in the troughs.
Suddenly the heavy steel door of the magazine broke from its hook and swung shut with a clang that made Bristow jump and give an involuntary cry.
‘Now what? Who shut that door?’
Keeton, now in complete darkness, put his shoulder to the door and heaved. The door opened a little way, then the wind caught it and slammed it shut again.
The door struck Keeton’s shoulder and sent him sprawling. The shell slipped from his hands and hit Bristow on the knee before clattering to the deck. Bristow yelled with pain, but in the same instant his yell was drowned by something altogether louder — the tremendous blast of an explosion.