Andrew Wareham - The Death of Hope

Richard took quick notes, nodded his satisfaction.

“Only one loss, and that by bad luck. A good raid, Thomas. Captain Holmes, how did you get on?”

“Got a prisoner, sir. He’s a bit cut up from dragging him behind us, tied up, through the wire, in the aid post at the moment. Nothing serious.”

“Well done! Intelligence are forever asking for prisoners to talk to. Hawkeswill, can you telephone them for me?”

“Immediately, sir.”

Hawkeswill scurried off, making a show of being busy.

“Makes us show up in a good light, Holmes, taking a prisoner. The news will go up to Corps, for sure, possibly to Army. I’ll make sure your name is attached, Holmes.”

“Thank you, sir. Apart from that, we took minor cuts and bruises, nothing serious. My sergeant found what must have been a battalion rations store. He left it well alight.”

Richard had no doubt that he would have looted it first – D Company would be chewing on German sausage for the next day or two, and quite right that they should.

“Found their aid post, as well, sir. Looked like nothing more than another dugout and the men threw a grenade in first, checked it afterwards.”

“Bad luck, Holmes. Wouldn’t expect to find an aid post in the front line of trenches. Couldn’t expect the men to look for one or to examine each dugout before they bombed it. Sort of thing that happens. Don’t mention it in your report.”

“No warning to the men to be more careful in future, sir?”

“No. Definitely not. Anything in the front line is fair game, especially at night. As far as I am concerned, you acted perfectly correctly.”

Richard wrote up his report next day, made no mention of the aid post, simply including the figures for dead in the estimated total.

Brigadier Braithwaite appeared in person that afternoon, reaching as far as the second line of trenches and creating a precedent – most senior officer to have penetrated so far forward.

“Your Captain Draper, Baker. He is to come back with me. Promote up a man in his place and set Orpington into the vacancy. There is a battalion of Hampshires, the 11 th, currently in Marseille, due to board a trooper for Mombasa in East Africa, to join the campaign there. In the bush, chasing German askaris, unsuccessfully so far. Not a lot of action, other than long marches though appalling terrain. The figures for fevers alone are higher than we are losing here on the Western Front.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap, sir. I shall have the greatest of pleasure in personally informing him that he is to return to his own people.”

“Do that, Baker. The bulk of the battalion is in Marseille already. He can join the baggage party which is entraining this afternoon. No chance of him getting lost on the journey south, that way. I shall have a word with their adjutant, who is with the baggage, just to make sure he does not wander off by accident.”

“Excellent! Thank you, sir.”

“Atkinson is pleased with the raids, Baker, the prisoner especially. He has instructed there are to be no more this month. He thinks the Hun will be too alert and in any case we should be preparing for the big push, which now seems a certainty. Towards the end of September, around Loos, aiming to drive the Germans back out of France and set us up for the final victory next summer when Kitchener’s New Army arrives.”

“End of September, sir. Weather might not be ideal just then.”

“The sun will shine on the righteous, Baker! Or so the staff hopes!”

Black Prince armoured cruiser made her way out of the Mediterranean on orders to rejoin the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow.

Christopher Adams stood on her bridge, calling the course change to take her through the Straits of Gibraltar and then out into the Atlantic to go westabout Ireland and around the north of Scotland through the Pentland Firth.

The big ship responded slowly to the wheel, turning in her own time, increasing to the set cruising speed only slowly, her four funnels giving off a huge black mass of coal smoke, hundreds of feet high and tailing off behind for almost a mile. At more than thirteen thousand five hundred tons, she was almost as large as the predreadnought capital ships, though far less heavily armed with six nine point two inch rifles and a mass of six inch set low in broadside sponsons and unusable in anything other than a flat calm. If she had been designed at all, which many doubted, it was for long voyages on the Imperial sea lanes, policing the oceans of the world for the benefit of British trade. She was to be used with the Grand Fleet, was off to join the First Cruiser Division, whose possible function was to protect the battleships from torpedo attack by destroyers and light cruisers, all of which would be faster and handle far more easily.

“Awful waters, sir, northabout Scotland.”

The Captain nodded gravely.

“There is a possibility of commerce raiders in the eastern Atlantic – we are to watch for anything out of the ordinary, Adams. Doubt we shall see much. Policy is not to make the passage of the Channel and the North Sea. Full of submarines. Just starting to clear them, using airships, of all things! Don’t know what the Navy’s coming to! Flapping about in the air! What would Nelson have said to that?”

Christopher could not imagine, shook his head in dismay. Wise lieutenants did not argue with their captain, particularly those in his peculiar position. He suspected that Nelson would have enthusiastically supported anything that led to the confusion of his enemies – he had espoused new tactics and the innovation of the carronade in his day, would probably have demanded to fly in an airship. Not for him to say so on his captain’s bridge.

“Set additional lookouts, sir, on submarine watch?”

“Yes, the First will be setting double lookouts in daylight hours. No point to doing so at night – they can’t see anything then.”

“How close inshore on the Irish coast, sir?”

Intelligence reports insisted that German submarines had made contacts with Irish insurgents, delivering small arms and ammunition to them at the smaller fishing ports.

“I do not believe these tales of a great network of traitors in Ireland, Adams. A few madmen, that is all. We can ignore the very concept of whole villages seeing a German submarine and saying nothing. Remain twenty to forty miles distant from the coast, as convenient for keeping our course.”

Orders were to be obeyed and Christopher had no reason to suppose that Intelligence were particularly clever. Some remarkably strange officers gravitated into their ranks; he had been surprised not to have been contacted himself, being an obvious recruit, his career destroyed and himself potentially an embarrassment.

He was acting navigator, waiting on the formal confirmation of his promotion to the role, had every expectation of receiving the news quickly. His period as a pariah was over and he was accepted back into the hierarchy of the genteel. His career would never recover and he would be gently requested to send in his papers when the war ended, as part of the process of reducing the size of the wartime Navy; he was, however, no longer formally disgraced. He would leave with a respectable wartime record that might permit him to return to Town.

Only since he had been accepted again had he realised just how important his place in Society had been to him. His father would see to a career, he did not doubt. He wondered just how he would be able to serve the family, and whether they would actually permit him to remain in London. It might be that he would be acknowledged but sent off out of public view, banished to work in Ireland or France or some even more distant location where the family had interests. St Petersburg was a possibility, where there was at least a semblance of Society, or out to India, said to have some civilisation under the Raj; at worst Canada, known to be boring, or Australia which had still to recover from its convict days.