H.M.S. Ulysses Part 16

How she ever survived the insensate fury of that first attack, G.o.d only knew. The great wind caught her on the bow and flung her round in a 45 arc and pressed her far over on her side as she fell-literally fell-forty heart-stopping feet over and down the precipitous walls of a giant trough. She crashed into the valley with a tremendous concussion that jarred every plate, every Clyde-built rivet in her hull. The vibration lasted an eternity as overstressed metal fought to re-adjust itself, as steel compressed and stretched far beyond specified breaking loads. Miraculously she held, but the sands were running out. She lay far over on her starboard side, the gunwales dipping: half a mile away, towering high above the mast-top, a great wall of water was roaring down on the helpless s.h.i.+p.

The "Dude" saved the day. The "Dude," alternatively known as "Persil," but officially as Engineer-Commander Dodson, immaculately clad as usual in overalls of the most dazzling white, had been at his control position in the engine-room when that tremendous gust had struck. He had no means of knowing what had happened. He had no means of knowing that the s.h.i.+p was not under command, that no one on the bridge had as yet recovered from that first shattering impact: he had no means of knowing that the quarter-master had been thrown unconscious into a corner of the wheel-house, that his mate, almost a child in years, was too panic-stricken to dive for the madly-spinning wheel. But he did know that the Ulysses was listing crazily, almost broadside on, and he suspected the cause.

His shouts on the bridge tube brought no reply. He pointed to the port controls, roared "Slow "in the ear of the Engineer W.O., then leapt quickly for the starboard wheel. Fifteen seconds later and it would have been too late. As it was, the accelerating starboard screw brought her round just far enough to take that roaring mountain of water under her bows, to dig her stern in to the level of the depth-charge rails, till forty feet of her airborne keel lay poised above the abyss below. When she plunged down, again tnat same shuddering vibration enveloped the entire hull. The fo'c'sle disappeared far below the surface, the sea flowing over and past the armoured side of 'A'turret. But she was bows on again. At once the "Dude" signalled his W.O. for more revolutions, cut back the starboard engine.

Below decks, everything was an unspeakable shambles. On the mess decks, steel lockers in their scores had broken adrift, been thrown in a dozen different directions, bursting hasps, and locks, spilling their contents everywhere. Hammocks had been catapulted from their racks, smashed crockery littered the decks: tables were twisted and smashed, broken stools stuck up at crazy angles, books, papers, teapots, kettles and crockery were scattered in insane profusion. And amidst this jumbled, sliding wreckage, hundreds of shouting, cursing, frightened and exhausted men struggled to their feet, or knelt, or sat, or just lay still.

Surgeon-Commander Brooks and Lieutenant Nicholls, with an inspired, untiring padre as good as a third doctor, were worked off their feet.

The veteran Leading S.B.A. Johnson, oddly enough, was almost useless-he was violently sick much of the time, seemed to have lost all heart: no one knew why, it was just one of these things and he had taken all he could.

Men were brought in to the Sick Bay in their dozens, in their scores, a constant trek that continued all night long as the Ulysses fought for her life, a trek that soon overcrowded the meagre s.p.a.ce available and turned the wardroom into an emergency hospital. Bruises, cuts, dislocations, concussions, fractures-the exhausted doctors experienced everything that night. Serious injuries were fortunately rare, and inside three hours there were only nine bed-patients in the Sick Bay, including A.B. Ferry, his already mangled arm smashed in two places-a bitterly protesting Riley and his fellow-mutineers had been unceremoniously turfed out to make room for the more seriously injured.

About 2330, Nicholls was called to treat the Kapok Kid. Lurching, falling and staggering in the wildly gyrating s.h.i.+p, he finally found the Navigator in his cabin. He looked very unhappy.

Nicholls eyed him speculatively, saw the deep, ugly gash on his forehead, the swollen ankle peeping out below the Kapok Kid's Martian survival suit. Bad enough, but hardly a borderline case, although one wouldn't have thought so from the miserable, worried expression.

Nicholls grinned inwardly.

"Well, Horatio," he said unkindly, "what's supposed to be the matter with you? Been drinking again?"

"It's my back, Johnny," he muttered. He turned facedown on the bunk.

"Have a look at it, will you?"

Nicholl's expression changed. He moved forward, then stopped short.

"How the h.e.l.l can I," he demanded irritably, "when you're wearing that d.a.m.ned ugly suit of yours?"

"That what I mean," said the Kapok Kid anxiously. "I was thrown against the searchlight controls, all k.n.o.bs and nasty, sharp projections.

Is it torn? Is it ripped, cut in any way? Are the seams------"

"Well, for G.o.d's sake! Do you mean to tell me------?"

Nicholls sank back incredulously on a locker.

The Kapok Kid looked at him hopefully.

"Does that mean it's all right?"

"Of course it's all right! If it's a blasted tailor you want, why the h.e.l.l------"

"Enough!" The Kapok Kid swung briskly on to the side of his bunk, lifting an admonitory hand. "There is work for you, sawbones." He touched his bleeding forehead. "St.i.tch this up and waste no time about it. A man of my calibre is urgently needed on the bridge... I'm the only man on this s.h.i.+p who has the faintest idea where we are."

Busy with a swab, Nicholls grinned. "And where are we?" "I don't know," said the Kapok Kid frankly. "That's what's so urgent about it... But I do know where I was back in Henley. Did I ever tell you...?"

The Ulysses did not die. Time and again that night, hove to with the wind fine of her starboard bow, as her bows crashed into and under the far shoulder of a trough, it seemed that she could never shake free from the great press of water. But time and again she did just that, shuddering, I quivering under the fantastic strain. A thousand times before dawn officers and men blessed the genius of the Clyde s.h.i.+p-yard that had made her: a thousand times they cursed the blind malevolence of that great storm that put the Ulysses on the rack.

Perhaps "blind" was not the right word. The storm wielded its wild hate with an almost human cunning. Shortly after the first onslaught, the wind had veered quickly, incredibly so and in defiance of all the laws, back almost to the north again. The Ulysses was on a lee sh.o.r.e, forced to keep pounding into gigantic seas.

Gigantic, and cunning also. Roaring by the Ulysses, a huge comber would suddenly whip round and crash on deck, smas.h.i.+ng a boat to smithereens.

Inside an hour, the barge, motor boat and two whalers were gone, their shattered timbers swept away in the boiling cauldron. Carley rafts were broken off by the sudden hammer-blows of the same cunning waves, swept over the side and gone for ever: four of the Balsa floats went the same way.

But the most cunning attack of all was made right aft on the p.o.o.p-deck.

At the height of the storm a series of heavy explosions, half a dozen in as many seconds, almost lifted the stern out of the water. Panic spread like wildfire in the after mess-decks: practically every light abaft the after engine-room smashed or failed. In the darkness of the mess-decks, above the clamour, high-pitched cries of "Torpedoed!" "Mined!"

"She's breaking up!" galvanised exhausted, injured men, even those-more than half-in various degrees of prostration from seasickness, into frantic stampeding towards doors and hatches, only to find doors and hatches jammed solidly by the intense cold. Here and there, the automatic battery lamps had clicked on when the lighting circuits failed: glowing little pin-points, they played on isolated groups of white, contorted faces, sunken-eyed and straining, as they struggled through the yellow pools of light. Conditions were ripe for disaster when a voice, harsh, mocking, cut cleanly through the bedlam. The voice was Ralston's: he had been released before nine o'clock, on the Captain's orders: the cells were in the very forepeak of the s.h.i.+p, and conditions there were impossible in a head sea: even so, Hastings had freed him only with the worst possible grace.

"It's our own depth charges! Do you hear me, you b.l.o.o.d.y fools, it's our own depth charges!" It was not so much the words as the biting mockery, that stopped short the panic, halted dazed, unthinking men in their tracks. "They're our depth charges, I tell you! They must have been washed over the side!"

He was right. The entire contents of a rack had broken adrift, lifted from their cradles by some freak wave, and tumbled over the side.

Through some oversight, they had been left set at their shallow setting, those put on for the midget submarine in Scapa, and had gone off almost directly under the s.h.i.+p. The damage, it seemed, was only minor.

Up in 'A' mess deck, right for'ard, conditions were even worse. There was more wreckage on the decks and far more seasickness-not the green-faced, slightly ludicrous malaise of the cross-channel steamer, but tearing rendering conversions, dark and heavy with blood-for the bows had been rearing and plunging, rearing and plunging, thirty, forty, fifty feet at a time for endless, hopeless hours; but there was an even more sinister agent at work, rapidly making the mess-deck untenable.

At the for'ard end of the capstan flat, which adjoined the mess-deck, was the battery-room. In here were stored, or on charge a hundred and one different batteries, ranging from the heavy lead-acid batteries weighing over a hundred pounds to the tiny nickel-calmium cells for the emergency lighting. Here, too, were stored earthenware jars of prepared acid and big, gla.s.s carboys of undiluted sulphuric. These last were permanently stored: in heavy weather, the big batteries were lashed down.

No one knew what had happened. It seemed likely-certain, indeed-that acid spilt from the batteries by the tremendous pitching had eaten through the las.h.i.+ngs. Then a battery must have broken loose and smashed another, and another, and another, and then the jars and carboys until the entire floor-fortunately of acid-resisting material-was awash to a depth of five or six inches in sulphuric acid.

A young torpedoman, on a routine check, had opened the door and seen the splas.h.i.+ng sea of acid inside. Panicking, and recalling vaguely that caustic soda, stored in quant.i.ties just outside, was a neutraliser for sulphuric, he had emptied a forty-pound carton of it into the battery-room: he was in the Sick Bay now, blinded. The acid fumes saturated the capstan flat, making entry impossible without breathing equipment, and was seeping back, slowly, insidiously, into the mess-deck: more deadly still hundreds of gallons of salt water from sprung deck-plates and broken capstan speaking tubes were surging crazily around the flat: already the air was tainted with the first traces of chlorine gas. On the deck immediately above, Hartley and two seamen, belayed with ropes, had made a brief, hopelessly gallant attempt to plug the gaping holes: all three, battered into near senselessness by the great waves pounding the fo'c'sle, were dragged off within a minute.

For the men below, it was discomfort, danger and desperate physical illness: for the bare handful of men above, the officers and ratings on the bridge, it was pure undiluted h.e.l.l. But a h.e.l.l not of our latter-day imagining, a strictly Eastern and Biblical conception, but the h.e.l.l of our ancient North-European ancestors, of the Vikings, the Danes, the Jutes, of Beowulf and the monster-haunted meres-the h.e.l.l of eternal cold.

True, the temperature registered a mere 10 below zero, 42 of frost.

Men have been known to live, even to work in the open, at far lower temperatures. What is not so well known, what is barely realised at all, is that when freezing point has been pa.s.sed, every extra mile per hour of wind is equivalent, in terms of pure cold as it reacts on a human being, to a 1 drop in temperature. Not once, but several times that night, before it had finally raced itself to destruction, the anemometer had recorded gusts of over 125 m.p.h., wave-flattening gusts that sundered stays and all but tore the funnels off. For minutes on end, the shrieking, screaming wind held steady at 100 m.p.h. and above, the total equivalent, for these numbed, paralysed creatures on the bridge, of something well below a 100 below zero.

Five minutes at a time was enough for any man on the bridge, then he had to retire to the Captain's shelter. Not that manning the bridge was more than a gesture anyway, it was impossible to look into that terrible wind: the cold would have seared the eyeb.a.l.l.s blind, the ice would have gouged them out. And it was impossible even to see through the Kent Clear-view windscreens. They still spun at high speed, but uselessly:

the ice-laden storm, a gigantic sand-blaster, had starred and abraded the plate gla.s.s until it was completely opaque.

It was not a dark night. It was possible to see above, abeam and astern.

Above, patches of night-blue sky and handfuls of stars could be seen at fleeting intervals, obscured as soon as seen by the scudding, shredded cloud-wrack. Abeam and astern, the sea was an inky black, laced with boiling white. Gone now were the serried ranks of yesterday, gone, too, the decorative white-caps: here now were only ma.s.sive mountains of water, broken and confused, breaking this way and that, but always tending south. Some of these moving ranges of water-by no stretch of the imagination, only by proxy, could they be called waves-were small, insignificant-in size of a suburban house: others held a million tons of water, towered seventy to eighty feet, looming terrifyingly against the horizon, big enough to drown a cathedral... As the Kapok Kid remarked, the best thing to do with these waves was to look the other way. More often than not, they pa.s.sed harmlessly by, plunging the Ulysses into the depths: rarely, they curled over and broke their tops into the bridge, soaking the unfortunate Officer of the Watch. He had then to be removed at once or he would literally have frozen solid within a minute.

So far they had survived, far beyond the expectation of any man. But, as they were blind ahead, there was always the worry of what would come next. Would the next sea be normal-for that storm, that was-or some nameless juggernaut that would push them under for ever? The suspense never lifted, a suspense doubled by the fact that when the Ulysses reared and crashed down, it did so soundlessly, sightlessly. They could judge its intensity only by movement and vibration: the sound of the sea, everything, was drowned in the Satanic cacophony of that howling wind in the upper works and rigging.

About two in the morning-it was just after the depth-charge explosions-some of the senior officers had staged their own private mutiny. The Captain, who had been persuaded to go below less than an hour previously, exhausted and shaking uncontrollably with cold, had been wakened by the depth-charging and had returned to the bridge. He found his way barred by the Commander and Commander Westcliffe, who bundled him quietly but firmly into the shelter. Turner heaved the door to, switched on the light. Vallery was more puzzled than angry.

"What, what in the world does this mean?" he demanded.

"Mutiny!" boomed Turner happily. His face was covered in blood from flying splinters of ice. "On the High Seas, is the technical term, I believe. Isn't that so, Admiral?"

"Exactly," the Admiral agreed. Vallery swung round, startled: Tyndall was lying in state on the bunk. "Mind you, I've no jurisdiction over a Captain in his own s.h.i.+p; but I can't see a thing."