Alan Evans - Ship of Force

There was no billowing cloud of smoke now though a blue haze still hung around her. Smith could see no flames. It was impossible to tell whether she lay lower in the water; she was always low. Her silhouette was changed because the tall mast and control top had gone and the bridge was a heap of wreckage. The turret was there but twisted at a crazy angle, the long barrels of the guns pointing at the sky. He said huskily, “Ask her condition.”

Johnson found himself room to stand on the deck and worked the hand signal lamp. They waited.

Smith’s eyes drifted around the horizon, seeing the smoke far off and the tiny specks of ships beneath that were the limping battlecruiser and her escort. Closer, much closer and inshore was the tug Lively Lady , bustling up and making plenty of smoke about it.

Eleanor Hurst…

A light winked rapidly from the monitor’s deck and Johnson spelled it out: “Fires out. Stopped making water. Ready for tow as usual. Ingram in command.”

Smith sat in silence a moment. ‘Ready for tow as usual.’ ‘As usual!’ Ingram had a sense of humour. But he was in command? Whatever had happened to Garrick, there were two other officers senior to Ingram who should have taken command. What had happened to them? And Garrick? Smith had to know. He said, “Ask condition of captain.”

And waited for an eternity until the light winked again from Marshall Marmont that was closer now so he could see a great hole torn in her, right forward of the bow, and the men working on her deck in that blue haze.

Johnson reported, “Multiple wounds. Condition fair.”

That explained the delay. Ingram had sent a messenger scurrying down to the surgeon for a report on Garrick. He felt not relief, but hope. Garrick was alive at any rate.

They were closing Marshall Marmont . He had lost his glasses but he reached for those of Curtis that he saw hanging in the cockpit, stood up and carefully swept a full circle of the sea around them. The battlecruiser was hull-down. She would get home but she would never attack the convoy, crippled as she was. There was smoke to the south-east and that meant that help was racing towards them from Dunkerque and Dover. He lowered the glasses wearily, the sun hot on his shoulders, and saw the clothes of the men crowded on the CMB were steaming. He was aware of cheering and that the motorboat was sliding gently, slowly in alongside Marshall Marmont .

He stepped over the gap to grab at the dangling ladder and climbed slowly to the deck to stand and stare at the destruction he found there. Everything on the monitor’s deck was smashed down so she looked more like a battered pontoon than a ship. But the men on her deck were cheering. So were those in the CMB and those climbing aboard from it. He saw Buckley at their head. He saw Curtis with his cap in his up-stretched hand leading the cheering and yelling himself hoarse.

The tug Lively Lady was passing close alongside with Victoria Baines on her deck but Victoria was stooped now and suddenly a very old woman. He saw Eleanor Hurst…

They were bringing the wounded aboard. There was a man they had sat in the cockpit by Curtis’s knees. He was naked to the waist and his chest was swathed in bandages. His face was deathly white, his eyes closed, his lips moved as he mumbled in delirium and his chest heaved as he fought for each breath. He was dying as another man had died aboard Sparrow a hundred years ago.

Eleanor Hurst stared into Smith’s face, into his eyes. She knew that she could never hold him, that he would leave her as he left her before but she accepted that. He needed her now and she wanted him back if only for now.

He stood lonely on the torn deck as the cheering beat about him, with the sun, he was sure it was the sun, setting his eyes to blinking.