Wars to End All Wars: Alternate Tales from the Trenches Page 8

  How many hours ahead were they? If they pressed on as quickly as possible and Goeben did not speed up, they would be a clear eight hours ahead . . . she could not possibly spot them. What then? His fingers traced the familiar contours of the Morean coast. If Goeben held on the shortest course for the east, she would pass between Cythera and Elafonisi. But that provided the obvious place for a trap, and if she chose to go south of Cythera—or worse, south of Cerigotto—his ships could not catch her. He must not head his fox; he trusted that Gloucester’s pressure would keep Souchon running a straight course.

  Behind the rocky coast of the Peloponnese, the rosy fingered dawn broadened in classical design over a wine-dark sea. Westward, day’s arch ran to a distant horizon unblemished by German smoke. They had passed Navarino, where almost 90 years before the British had—with grudging help from their French and Russian allies—scotched a Turkish fleet. Under the cliffs to the east, little villages hugged narrow beaches. Spears of sunlight probed between the rough summits, alive with swallows’ wings.

  As they cleared the point of Sapienza, the squadron came out of the shadows of the heights, and into a sea spangled with early sun. To port, the Gulf of Messenia opened, long golden beaches between rocky headlands; the old Venetian fort at Korona pushed into the water like a beached ship. Ahead, the longer finger of Cape Matapan reached even farther south. Water more green than blue planed aside from the bows; Cradock felt his heart lift to the change in the air, the light, the old magic of the Aegean reaching even this far west.

  He glanced aloft at the lookout searching for the smoke of German ships. One of the destroyers had already peeled off to investigate the gulf for a German collier in concealment; another had gone ahead to investigate the Gulf of Kolokythia. Here he could have ambushed Goeben in the dark, but in daylight these gulfs were traps for slower ships.

  “You must signal Admiral Milne,” Wray said.

  “And let the Goeben hear how close we are? I think not,” Cradock said. “Admiral Milne is . . . cruising somewhere around Sicily. He will follow when he thinks it convenient, when he feels certain of events.” Cradock smiled, that wry smile which had won other captains’ loyalties. “We are the events. We will sink Goeben—or, failing that, we will turn her back toward him, and the 12-inch guns of the battle cruisers.”

  “But if we don’t—” Wray was clearly prepared to argue the whole thing again.

  “I had a hunter once,” Cradock said, meditatively. He gazed at the cliffs rising out of the sea as if he had no interest in anything but his story. “A decent enough horse, plenty of scope. But—he didn’t like big fences. Every time out, the same thing . . . you know the feeling, I suppose, the way a reluctant hunter backs off before a jump.”

  “I don’t hunt,” Wray said, repressively.

  “Ah. I thought perhaps you didn’t.” Cradock smiled to himself. “Well, there was only one thing to do, you see, if I didn’t want to spend all day searching for gaps and gates.”

  “And what was that, sir?” asked Wray, in the tone of one clearly humoring a superior.

  Cradock turned and looked at him full face. “Put the spurs to him,” he said. “Convince him he had more to fear from me than any fence.” Wray reddened. “I thought you’d understand,” Cradock said, and turned away. He hoped that would be enough.

  By 0730, they were clearing Cape Matapan; Cythera lay clear on the starboard bow. Cradock peered up at the cliffs of the Mani, at the narrow white stone towers like fangs . . . still full of brigands and fleas, he supposed. Some of the brigands might even be spying for the Germans. They would do anything for gold, except, possibly, spy for the Turks.

  The German ships were likely to pass Matapan fairly close, if they wanted to take the passage north of Cythera . . . plenty of places along that coast to hide his cruisers. But none of them were close enough, especially if the Germans went south. He dared not enter those gulfs, to be trapped by the longer reach of the German guns.

  No. The simplest plan was the best, and he had time for it. Ahead now was the meeting of the Aegean, the white sea with its wind-whipped waters, and the deeper blue Ionian. This early on a fair summer’s day, the passage went smoothly; the treacherous currents hardly affected the warships on their steady progress past Elafonisi’s beaches, the fishing village of Neapolis, and the steep coast of Cythera, that the Venetians had called Cerigo.

  Around the tip of Cape Malea, he found the first proof that Souchon intended to use that northern passage. Off the port bow, a smallish steamer rocked uneasily in the Aegean chop.

  “Greek flag, sir,” the lookout reported. “The Polymytis.”

  “If I were Souchon,” Cradock said, “this is where I would want to find a collier. I would want one very badly.”

  “But it’s Greek.”

  “Souchon flew a Russian flag at Phillipeville,” Cradock said. “And our destroyers could use more coal.” He sipped his tea. “I think we will have a word with this collier. An honest Greek collier—if that is not a contradiction in terms—should be willing to sell the Royal Navy coal, in consideration of all the English did to free Greece . . .” He peered at the ship. Something tickled his memory . . . something about the way her derrick was rigged, her lines. The German ship General had appeared in Messina tarted up like a Rotterdam-Lloyd mail steamer, though she belonged to the German East Africa Line.

  “From where, and where bound?” he asked; Wray passed on his questions.

  The dark-haired man answered in some foreign gibberish that sounded vaguely Turkish or Arabic, not Greek.

  “He says he doesn’t understand,” he heard bawled up from below.

  “He understands,” Cradock said quietly. His eye roved over the steamer again. Ignore the paint (too new for such a ship), the unseamanlike jumble of gear on the deck, the derrick . . . and she looked very much like a ship he had seen less than a year before putting out from Alexandria, when she had flown the German ensign. He even thought he could put a name to her.

  “We’ll have a look at her,” he said to Wray.

  Wray swallowed. “Yes, sir, but—if I may—she is flying a neutral flag.”

  “She’s a German Levant Line ship—imagine her in the right colors. She’s no more neutral than Goeben. She is most likely old Bogadir with her face made up. If, as I suspect, she’s carrying coal, then—one of our problems is solved. Possibly two.”

  Under the guns of the secondary battery, Polymytis’s captain submitted to a search.

  “She’s not a very good collier,” the sub-lieutenant remarked when he came back aboard, much smudged. “Her bunkers are even harder to get at than ours . . . but she’s bung full of coal, and her engineering crew is German, I’d swear. White men, anyway.”

  “Take her crew into custody, and put a prize crew aboard.” Collecting the collier might be enough. But it might not. The Goeben still might have enough coal to reach the Dardanelles, and she would surely be able to call on other colliers. Even a lame fox could kill chickens. He would have to bring her to battle.

  The sea was near calm, but that wouldn’t last, not here at the meeting of the two seas. Already he could see the glitter off the water that meant the Aegean was about to live up to its name. The Etesian wind off Asia Minor crisped little waves toward him . . . and at day’s end it would blow stronger.

  Unfortunately, it would blow his smoke to the south; if he stayed here, off Cape Malea, that black banner across the channel would reveal his presence to the Germans. How could he make them come this way, the only place where he could be sure his guns would reach them?

  They must see nothing to alarm them. He would position three cruisers south of the passage, behind the crook of Cythera’s northeast corner, where the smoke would blow away behind that tall island, invisible. The other, with the destroyers, would wait well around the tip of Cape Malea, far enough north that their smoke would be dispersed up its steep slopes. He would put parties ashore who could signal when the Germans were well into the channel.
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br />   The signal flashed, and flashed again. Cradock smiled at the charts, and then at his flag captain. Souchon was as bold and resolute as his reputation. He had chosen the direct route, after shaking off Gloucester back at Matapan. Cradock had fretted over the signals from above that told of exchange of shots between Gloucester and Breslau; the minutes when Goeben turned back to support Breslau—when he feared she might turn away from the northern passage altogether—had racked his nerves, the more so as he could not see for himself what was going on.

  But the Germans had gone straight on when Gloucester turned away, and now—now they were well into the passage.

  Defence grumbled beneath him, power held in check like a horse before the start of a run. Below, stokers shoveled more coal into the maws of the furnaces; boilers hissed as the pressure rose. Thicker smoke oozed from the funnels, whirled away in dark tendrils by the wind. Cradock could almost see the engineering officers and engine crew, alert for every overheated bearing, every doubtful boiler tube. Gun crews were at their stations, the first rounds already loaded and primed, waiting only the gunlayers’ signals.

  But ships could not reach racing speed as fast as horses; he had to guess, from the positions signalled to him, the moment to begin the run-up. He wanted the cruisers to be moving fast when they cleared the island. So much depended on things he could not know—how fast Goeben was, how fast she could still go, how Souchon would react to the sudden appearance of hostile ships in front of him.

  Signals flashed down, translated quickly into Goeben’s position on the chart in front of him. She was not racing through; she was up to 19 knots now, but keeping a steady course, well out from either side of the channel, Breslau trailing her. When . . . when . . . ? He felt it, more than saw it in the figures on the chart. Now.

  Defence surged forward, behind Black Prince, and ahead of Warrior. Cradock squinted up at the lookout. The Germans would be watching carefully; they had the sun over their shoulders, perfect viewing. But surprise should still gain Black Prince the first shot. She had won her vanguard position on the basis of an extra knot of speed and her gunnery record. He put into his ears the little glass plugs the Admiralty provided.

  Across the passage, fourteen sea miles, he saw dark smoke gush from the funnels of the Duke of Edinburgh and the destroyers. In minutes, it would drift out across the passage, but by then they would be visible anyway.

  For an instant, the beauty of the scene caught him: on a fair summer afternoon, the trim ships steaming in order under the rugged cliffs. Then his vision exploded in fire and smoke, as Black Prince fired her port 9.2-inch guns; the smoke blew down upon Defence coming along behind, and obscured his vision for an instant. Then Defence was clear of the point, and at that moment he saw the raw fire of Goeben’s forward turrets, just as Defense rocked to the recoil of her own. White spouts of water near Goeben showed that Black Prince’s gunners had almost found her range.

  Too late now for fear or anxiety; his heart lifted to the raw savagery of the guns, shaking every fiber, the heart-stopping stink of cordite smoke, chocolate in the afternoon sun, blowing over him. Black Prince’s port guns fired again, and behind, he heard the bellow of Warrior’s, as she too cleared the point. The shells screamed on their way like harpies out of Greek legend.

  Then Goeben’s first shots rocked the sea nearby, sending up spouts of white. Had she picked out the Defence? She would surely try to sink the flagship, but he trusted his captains to carry on. His orders had been clear enough: “Our objective is to sink the Goeben, first, and the Breslau second.”

  The German ship’s guns belched again; she could bring six of her ten eleven-inch guns to bear on any of the three ships on her starboard bow. Cradock hoped her gun crews were not as good as he had been told.

  White flashes of water, and then an explosion that was surely on Goeben herself. She steamed on, but another hit exploded along her starboard side, even as her guns belched flame. Then a curtain of water stood between him and the German ships, and Defence rocked on her side, screws shuddering.

  “Very close, sir,” Wray said. He looked pinched and angry. Cradock looked away.

  “Yes, excellent shooting.” But his own crews were doing well, maintaining a steady round per minute per gun. Where were the destroyers in all this? They were supposed to have raced around the tip of Malea, laying smoke that would blow into the battle area and confuse the Goeben—he hoped. He looked ahead, to find dark coils of smoke already rolling over the afternoon sea, and the flash of Duke of Edinburgh’s guns . . . she was finally out from behind Malea, moving more slowly than his own ships. They had not wanted Souchon to see all that smoke until he was well into the trap.

  Defence bucked a little as the sea erupted behind her, another near miss that dumped a fountain over Warrior’s bows. The guns rocked the ship again. Cradock looked at the chart, and his stopwatch. Black Prince should be near the point at which she was to start her turn, bringing her end on to Goeben. He had worried over that point, on which so much depended. For three of his ships, it reduced by one the 9.2-inch guns that could bear on the Goeben . . . but it reduced the range more quickly, and that would, he hoped, be sufficient advantage.

  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 27 knots, he would have tried to run the gantlet. 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 20 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 tim
ber, 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.