Brown on Resolution (11 page)

He slept all the rest of the day and most of the night. And though he had the sailor’s habit of sound sleep and the readiness of sleep of the strong-minded, towards morning he was wakened more than once by a painful, unexplainable noise, a bubbling howl which in his sleepy condition appeared to him to be neither human nor connected with the ship. It died away each time, however, and he slept again, but in the morning, when he was fully awake, he heard it again. It seemed to come from the other side of the bulkhead, and he could not explain it to himself. He looked about him; he was alone, although there was another empty cot in the cabin. The interior was a cool white, and a whirling electric fan helped out the portholes in their business of ventilation, but the air which came in hardly seemed to cool the cabin. For
Ziethen
was almost on the Equator, and iron decks and iron bulkheads mean a sweltering heat, under a vertical sun. The heat was dry and redolent of hot metal, but Brown was used to it; two years on the lower deck in the tropics had made such a state of affairs almost normal to him.

Brown had not much time to think before the sick-bay steward he remembered from yesterday entered the cabin. His jolly German face creased into a smile as he saw Brown normal and conscious again. He put a thermometer into Brown’s mouth, and smiled again as he read it and noted the result on the chart at the head of the cot. He spoke to him amicably, and grinned as he realized that Brown did not understand a word he said. He made Brown comfortable as dexterously as a nurse might, twitched the blankets into place and smoothed the bedclothes and waddled away with a friendly look over his shoulder. Ten minutes later he returned with the Surgeon.

“Bedder, eh?” said that officer with a glance at the chart. Automatically he took Brown’s wrist and produced his watch simultaneously, felt his pulse and nodded.

“Any bain any blace?” he asked.

“No, sir,” said Brown.

“Feeling all right, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can haf breagfast, den.”

The Surgeon spoke to the steward, who vanished and returned almost at once. He brought good grey bread and tinned butter, and coffee which was not as good as either; but Brown relished it all. As the Surgeon retired the steward brought him a bundle of clothes—shirt and jumper and loose trousers, and socks and shoes; they were the white duck uniform of a German sailor, and Brown put them on, a little troubled by the minor differences between it and the English naval uniform—the collar, for example, had to be buttoned awkwardly inside—but the general fit was not too bad. The plump steward still grinned in elephantine friendliness.

The rest of the morning passed. The Commander, cold-eyed and detached, came in on a round of inspection, ran his eye over him and went his way without a word. Then he was led once more into the presence of the Captain and searchingly questioned. Brown did his best not to give information; he fell back when hard-pressed upon a stolid, brainless stupidity, and the most penetrating questions rattled harmlessly from his ‘I don’t knows’. And since it was extremely probable that a mere leading seaman from an isolated cruiser should know nothing, the Captain in the end dropped the inquisition. And, after all, it is doubtful if anything Brown could have told him would have added to Captain von Lutz’s information. The Captain was about to dismiss him when the Sub-Lieutenant interposed with a respectful question. The Captain thought for a moment, exchanged a few sentences with the Sub-Lieutenant, and uttered his verdict. It was a verdict settling Brown’s fate—and the fate of
Ziethen
too, but no one was to know that.

Brown heard of the decision on his return to the sick bay.

“You are to helb here,” said the Surgeon to him.

Brown could only stare without understanding, and the Surgeon (with enormous condescension on the part of an officer towards a man in ordinary seaman’s uniform) explained in a fatherly manner.

“What are we to do wit you on board here?” he asked. “Pud you in prison? Prison is not good in the dropigs. You gan ztay and helb nurse your vrients. You will not run away, we know.”

And he laughed throatily; Brown did not realize how exceedingly condescending it was on the part even of a non-combatant German officer to crack a joke with a seaman.

It was thus that Brown learned the explanation of the groaning noise of the night before. The plump steward led him into the adjoining ward of the sick-bay. There on two cots lay two wrecks of men. One had his head half swathed in bandages, through which once more a red stain was beginning to show. He lay on his back in the cot with his fingers writhing, and through a shapeless hole in the bandages over his mouth there came a continued low, bubbling groan—low now, but clearly likely to rise at any moment to that higher penetrating pitch Brown remembered so well. Half a forehead and one eye remained uncovered to show Brown that beneath the bandages lay what had once been the homely, friendly features of Ginger Harris, a messmate of his and a bosom friend of two years’ standing. There was no hint of recognition in that one eye of Ginger’s when it opened; all Ginger’s thoughts were at present concentrated upon himself. Later, when Brown saw what was beneath the bandages, he was not surprised.

The second cot was occupied by a leading signalman whom Brown did not know at all well, and he hardly recognized him because of the marble-like pallor which had overspread his face; he was so thin and so exceedingly pale—even his lips were white—that he was more like a soulless visitor from another world as he lay motionless in the cot. Brown wondered what was the injury from which he was suffering, and looked inquiringly at the fat steward. The latter soon enlightened him; he indicated a bulge beneath the bedclothes, whirled his arms round like a windmill, said ‘Sh-sh,’ and tapped his leg. Brown grasped his meaning; the leading signalman had come within reach of one of
Charybdis
’ gigantic propellers as she sank and had lost his leg. Perhaps he had been lucky in that the whirling blades had not cut him to mincemeat instead of merely hacking off a limb, but Brown realized that there could be two opinions about that.

So that he and these two wrecks were the sole survivors of the four hundred and odd men who had constituted the crew of
Charybdis
. Four hundred dead men were drifting in the middle depths of the Pacific, a prey for the shark and the squid. It had been a vain, frantic sacrifice, part of the price the Navy must pay for the glory of keeping the bellies of an unthinking population charged with their accustomed meat and bread. Brown could picture back in England, the arrival of the news of the loss of
Charybdis
with all-hands. The tea parties would say, ‘Dear me, how sad!’ and go on talking about cancer of the womb; and the business offices would say, ‘Mismanagement somewhere, of course,’ and revert to the Cesarewitch or the delinquencies of office boys. Brown had no illusions about that. He knew how little the people for whom he was fighting appreciated his services and those of his fellows. They might inflate themselves with pride over having the largest Navy in the world, and sing little songs about ‘Britannia, the Pride of the Ocean,’ and stand a bluejacket a drink, and the better read might talk hazily about ‘the command of the sea’; but of the irresistible strength of sea power, of the profundity of study and research and self-sacrifice necessary to employ it—or of what lay beneath Ginger Harris’s bandages—they knew nothing. Brown’s upper lip rose a little, and his blunt chin came forward at the same time. None of that affected his determination to do his duty; his duty to the Navy, to himself and (although he would not think of it in those words) to the memory of his mother. He would help feed the babbling mob of civilians, if he could, but not for the civilians’ sake.

Later he found himself jeering bitterly at himself for his highfalutin determinations. He was a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, and helpless. He could think of no means to hold back
Ziethen
from her mission of destruction. As soon as her side was repaired she would go off capturing and sinking British ships, just as
Emden
was doing. Five million pounds was a small estimate of the cost of her probable sinkings. And he would be forced to witness them—or else, with contemptuous carelessness, he might be put on board a neutral vessel to find his way home while
Ziethen
continued her career. There was nothing he could do. He knew too much about the internal discipline of a ship to hope to disable the engines or bring off any other boy’s adventure book coup, although it must be admitted that he tried to think of some scheme to achieve some such end. Helplessness and despair and loneliness combined to force him into frightful despondency—the utter black misery of the twenty-year-old during the three days that
Ziethen
was ploughing her crippled way to Resolution.

T
HE
G
ALAPAGOS
A
RCHIPELAGO
is a group of volcanic islands, bisected by the Equator, seven hundred miles from the American coast. They support no inhabitants—mainly because they have little water—and they are sufficiently distant from the ordinary trade routes (at least until the opening of the Panama Canal) to have remained comparatively unvisited. Their flora and fauna have followed their own lines of evolution without interference from the mainland, so that they boast their own special species of insects and reptiles and cacti. The monstrous Galapagos tortoises gave the Archipelago its collective name, but the individual islands were christened by the Englishmen who called there on sundry occasions; Albemarle, Indefatigable, Chatham, Barrington, Resolution and the rest are all reminiscent of ships or admirals or statesmen. Hither came Woodes, Rogers and Dampier, privateering, and Anson with King George’s commission. The Pacific whalers—Herman Melville among them—called to stock their ships with tortoises. HMS
Beagle
came here a hundred years ago with a young naturalist of an inquiring turn of mind on board, by name Charles Darwin, who was so struck by the evidence of evolution among the living creatures there that his thoughts were directed to the consideration of the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.

Resolution Island is the loneliest and least visited of them all. Once it was a volcanic crater, but it has been extinct for a thousand years or more, and the Pacific has broken in at one point so that in shape it is an incomplete ring of towering cliffs surrounding a central lagoon half a mile across. The entrance gives twenty fathoms of water; the centre of the lagoon is of unplumbed depth. The cliffs themselves (the ring is nowhere more than a quarter of a mile thick) are of lava in huge tumbled jagged blocks with edges like knives, the lower slopes covered thinly with spiky cactus, the upper slopes a naked tangle of rock. The extreme highest ridge, however, where the wind had full play, has been somewhat weathered down, so that the lava edges have been blunted, and are disguised by a layer of smaller pumice.

One glimpse of that central lagoon convinced Captain von Lutz that here indeed was the haven he desired. It was a land-locked harbour which would give shelter in any wind that blew, and already in his mind’s eye he could see
Ziethen
’s side repaired and the ship herself free to traverse the Pacific and wreak confusion and destruction among the helpless British mercantile marine. Cautiously he made his entrance, for the sailing directions are excessively vague regarding Resolution. He sent a picket boat on ahead, and followed her cautiously, sounding as he went.
Ziethen
breasted gallantly the race of the tide through the gap (for at the ebb the piled-up water in the lagoon comes surging out through the narrow exit like a mill-race), made her way through with the naked cliffs close on either hand and emerged safely into the lagoon. As she entered the stifling heat of the place closed in upon her with crushing force, for the cliffs cut off the wind and the sun beats down all day upon their sloping surfaces and is pitilessly reflected inwards to a central focus. But heat must be endured; cautiously and very, very slowly
Ziethen
swung sideways. An anchor roared from her hawsehole and took grip of the bottom away from the vast depths of the central throat of the old crater. Tide and propellers and rudder were balanced against each other while another anchor was got away from the stern, and soon
Ziethen
was riding safely and comfortably in the heart of Resolution. It was a sound piece of seamanship, which Brown thoroughly appreciated, despite the fact that his view of the proceedings was limited to what he could see from portholes.

And as soon as mooring was completed,
Ziethen
’s crew sprang into furious action. Alone on a sea where every man’s hand was against them, it was dangerous to linger within sight of land however deserted. The work must be done at once, so that
Ziethen
could emerge from her concealment with sea room to fight if necessary, and her injured side healed, so that she could fight or run or capture as occasion dictated. The stokers were set to work clearing the starboard bunkers as far as might be and transferring their contents to the port side. The Gunnery Lieutenant supervised the activity of a party which laboured to empty the starboard magazines and fill the port ones. Even the starboard battery twelve-pounders were unshipped, with infinite labour, and taken across, and the central guns were trained out to port. For a modern ship in fighting trim is not so easy to careen as were the tiny wooden ships of the buccaneers. To expose a foot of the ship’s bottom necessitates the transference of hundreds of tons of weight—and even that is a dangerous and chancy matter in a ship whose sides are plastered with armour plate. Small wonder that
Ziethen
needed the shelter of Resolution for the business.

All this dawned upon Brown as he looked round him during the dog watches that evening when he was allowed upon deck under the friendly chaperonage of the fat steward. He looked up at the towering cliffs, and felt the increasing heel of the deck. If those cliffs were in the possession of an enemy with a gun—a six-inch—a twelve-pounder even!
Ziethen
, heavily listed, would be helpless. Her decks could be swept, the repairing party overside could be wiped out, and the mending of the side could be postponed indefinitely, until either the ship was sunk or she remedied her list again and cleared off in disgust to some new refuge; and refuges as good as Resolution were necessarily few. He scanned the desolate cliffs again, warily. They were barely more than a quarter of a mile away at any point, within easy rifle-shot, in fact. Rifle-shot! An idea sprang into pulsing life in Brown’s brain, and the blood surged hot beneath his skin. He turned away from the fat steward lest he should betray his sudden agitation. But again and again he peered up at the cliffs, turning over in his mind the details of his plan, searching for flaws in it and debating consequences. He could find no flaws; he could foresee possibly profound consequences.