Angels in the Gloom

relied on him to be in place and keep the communications open at all times.

They were past where the cruiser was sinking. He swiveled to look, but he couldn’t see it. It must be behind the smoke.

Another shot fell five hundred yards short of them and again the bridge and signal house were drenched with black, foul-smelling water.

“It’s gone!” Ragland told him.

Matthew was stunned.

“It was German!” Ragland added. “Pay attention to what you’re doing!”

“Yes, sir.”

Again they changed course sharply and this time Matthew could see that they were steering straight into the area where the previous shots had landed. It seemed to work. He looked ahead to the bridge but he could not see Archie. He must be there, knowing everything depended on his judgment.

There were ships all around them. One moment he could see the German ships ahead and the British fleet to the port and starboard—dreadnoughts, hard gray outlines knifing through the water, spurting flame. The next moment he was blinded again.

The noise was almost unbearable—the roar and crash of shot, the churning of the sea, and the screaming vibration of the engines. There was oil and water everywhere, towering into the air, crashing on the deck, splinters of shell flying from shots exploded on the sea, and clouds of mist and smoke.

Matthew worked in the signal house, hearing the intermittent bleep of the radio, voices on the telephone, shouts. He had to concentrate to make sense of it, disentangle one message from another.

Then came one that turned his stomach cold. The British battle cruiser Indefatigable had been sunk, all hands lost. It was hideously real. In the noise and the violence men were dying, crushed, torn apart, burned, and drowned.

Time passed in violence, half-blindness, and mind-bruising noise. The ships moved with what seemed like agonizing slow motion, the sea dragging at everything, pulling against escape, against change, against turning or maneuvering of every sort. It was a chaos of destruction. Matthew had no idea what was going on, or even if they were winning or losing.

It was growing dusk. They took several more hits, one shell going straight through the armor plating but failing to explode. There was a bad fire aft, and Matthew was sent to help get control of it. The blast of the shell had momentarily put out the lights, but candles were lit. There seemed to be shards of broken glass everywhere, and the resin out of the corticine covered everything with a black, sticky gluelike substance that smelled ghastly, filling the throat and churning the stomach. His own stomach was too empty to be sick now.

Some men were struggling to extinguish the flames, others to pad and block the hole in the plating, more to help the injured. Matthew had no experience, no skills. He could see in his mind’s eye the zeppelin, a sheet of flame, descending out of the sky on top of him, feel the heat of it, Detta beside him.

He wished he knew what to do, anything to help. He knew nothing about fire, or the force of water trying to crush a steel hull from the outside. He moved, lifted, passed, everything he was told, carried bleeding men, staggering under their weight.

He was up on the deck again before dark, his skin singed, eyes aching and gritty with smoke. As it cleared in the wind he could see a burned-out gun turret, charred wood, broken rigging, and a German battle cruiser ahead, just within range. The starboard guns fired from the good turrets one after another and he saw at least half a dozen plumes of water spout up. They were just short of the battle cruiser, but closing.

There was another destroyer to the port side, about two thousand yards away, as near as he could judge, and beyond it, almost obscured by smoke, another. The battle cruiser was firing. A salvo of shells landed almost on them, sending up mountains of water, drenching the entire ship. They veered across rapidly to avoid the range, hull shuddering under the strain, and then swerved again, coming closer.

All the starboard guns fired. The noise was a kind of hell in itself. A gun turret on one of the other destroyers was hit and Matthew knew the men in it would all have been killed. He found himself praying it had been outright, not slow burning to death. He had seen the men’s white faces when they saw it happen a hundred yards away, and knew that even if they had been on board, there was nothing they could have done.

Was this how Joseph felt, battered and deafened by sound, watching men being torn apart, struggling to fight, to survive, to do all that was asked of them? Matthew had experienced it for a few hours, not yet even twelve. Joseph saw it every night, and knew it would go on, maybe for years. You knew men, you cared for them, laughed with them, shared jokes and memories and family pictures—all the time knowing the chances that sooner or later they would be killed or mutilated beyond recognition.

How did Joseph bear it and keep sane? Or Archie? Above all, how did Joseph find something to say that was anything but idiotic in the face of such reality? The kind of courage that it demanded amazed him and awoke a staggering admiration. He would never be able to look at Joseph, or even think of him again in the same casual, familiar way as before. As a child he had regarded Joseph as a hero because he was his elder brother, but this was entirely different. The Joseph he had known all his life was only part of it, the core of it was a stranger that until now he could not have seen.

There was incessant gunfire from huge steel monstrosities—ten, twenty feet long, firing shells it took two men to lift and load. When they struck, they tore apart plate steel, and if they hit magazines, they exploded in sheets of white-hot fire that engulfed whole decks, burning men to death in minutes.

The sky and sea were lit up by muzzle flashes all around them. He knew it must be nearing midnight by now. They were still firing at the German cruiser. Radio signals were stuttering from all directions, some making sense, others too broken to read. The losses were appalling—innumerable ships and thousands of men. The sea was rough, choppy; the wind swung around to the west.

The Cormorant’s guns were silent for minutes. They were closing on the cruiser.

Then they opened fire again, the noise mind-numbing. There seemed to be flame and smoke everywhere, searing the skin and hair, choking the lungs. The bridge and signal house were shrouded by it. Matthew had not the least idea whether anything was hit or not.

He stared to the east, straining until the smoke cleared. Ragland beside him seemed to be holding his breath, his face masklike in the glare of the lights.

Gradually the wind blew the smoke away, cold salt instead of burning cordite, and they saw the cruiser engulfed in flame. The magazines had taken a direct hit and exploded, breaking its back. It was listing already, in the first terrible throes of its long plunge to its tomb in the depths.

Matthew was speechless. The tactics had been brilliant. The Cormorant had sunk an enemy cruiser with more weight, more guns, and more men, but there was no sweetness in it at all. The fact that they were German, and would have sunk the Cormorant if they could, seemed almost irrelevant. They were close to a thousand living, breathing men, seamen like themselves, going to a fearful and certain death. It was all he could think of as he stood transfixed with pity watching as the great ship burned lower and lower in the water. Ammunition still exploded, tearing her apart until she slid beneath the black surface, shining in the flames of other gunfire, leaving the sea littered with struggling men and the debris of death.

There was no one there to help, and no one came. They were under the guns of the Cormorant. Please God, Archie would not have shot at a rescuer, but they could not know that, nor could the Cormorant risk going any closer to the array of German destroyers on the farther side, well within firing range.

Matthew turned away and saw Ragland’s face in the light. The same wrenching pity was in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth, although it was impossible to tell in the red and yellow glare of muzzle flames and the smeared darkness of drifting gun smoke, if he was as ashen as he looked. The noise had started again closer, others joining those of the injured ships around them. There was no time for shock or mourning. The battle raged on.

Midnight passed. In the signal room they heard that both the Ardent and the Fortune had been sunk.

At two o’clock news came that the armored cruiser Black Prince had blundered into the German firing line and been lost with all hands. For the first time Matthew began to believe that the British fleet might lose. It was a strange thought, alien and hard to grasp. Britain had not lost a crucial battle at sea since before the Spanish Armada in the reign of Elizabeth I, over three hundred years earlier. This would mean the end.