Until the Colours Fade (56 page)

‘Stop your vents,’ he heard Seymour roaring, and, as the smoke billowed away to port, saw the gun crews labouring with their sponges and the powdermen handing fresh charges to the loaders. Two shots crashed back from the fort, one smashing into the hull just aft of the boiler room, the other tearing through the fore-mast back-stays. Forward, three men were hacking at the wrecked bowsprit, now trailing alongside. The smoke cleared very slowly from the fort, but when it did, Sir James saw that three casemates had become a single cavernous hole.
Hesperus
had surely knocked out three of the five guns. No sooner had Sir James congratulated the gun crews than he felt the deck tilting under his feet. All available hands were ordered to the pumps and the carpenter and his mate ran below to try to plug the hole. The list was only improved by moving one of the 24-pounders to port and heaving the damaged pivot gun overboard.

Her starboard broadside now reduced to three guns,
Hesperus
steamed on. Looking astern, Sir James watched
Recruit,
the next gunboat in the line, open fire on the fort and clearly saw large lumps of masonry flying as the shots slammed home. Highly
satisfied
with events, he was turning his attention to the next
battery
, three hundred yards ahead, when he heard a muted blast, and then, after several staccato detonations, a deep prolonged roar. Where seconds before
Recruit
had been steaming
purposefully
forward was an orange-white inferno of flames crowned by a black mushroom of smoke filled with fragments of timber;
forward
of the main-mast she had simply ceased to exist. Her stern, with the mizzen still somehow standing, remained upright for a moment, and then tilting sharply, sank with a boiling hiss. The disaster had been so sudden, and the silence so complete after the explosion of the ship’s magazine and shell room, that Sir James could not take it in for several seconds. By then
Hesperus
’s gig was being slung out to pick up any survivors from the stern.

‘Mr Seymour,’ he shouted, ‘reduce to four knots until
Sphinx
is in station astern.’

‘Aye aye, sir.’

Altering course to avoid the floating wreckage,
Sphinx
came on steadily, and opened fire on the fort, bringing down a
dust-laden
avalanche of stones and dirt. No answering shots were fired.

The next batteries were a half-moon shaped earthwork on a low cliff, easily visible since the grass had not grown over the
recently
thrown-up parapet, and a far more formidable stone fort
on a slight promontory. From its size, Sir James thought it would mount at least a dozen guns.

Approaching the half-moon work,
Hesperus
was hulled again, this time more seriously and just below the waterline.
Immediately
after firing her broadside, she began to list so dangerously that it was obvious she was sinking.

‘Hard a port,’ yelled Seymour, running up onto the poop, and then, through his speaking-trumpet to the men still cranking the pumps: ‘Belay that nonsense and hoist out the cutter.’ He looked around him at the remains of the spanker-boom. ‘And get this rubbish overboard. Quartermaster, make to
Sphinx
“Admiral coming aboard”.’

Hesperus
grounded hard twenty yards from the shore, and, as she hit the shelving bottom, steaming at five knots, every man on her not holding fast to something was flung to the deck. Seymour and Sir James fell side by side, and the younger man helped his admiral to his feet.

‘This won’t be your last ship, Mr Seymour.’

‘I hope not, sir.’

Sir James glanced up at the wrecked mizzen-gaff and the empty halyards streaming out above it.

‘No need to strike my flag.’

As the cutter pulled away from the stricken gunboat,
Sphinx
came level with the half-moon battery and discharged her
broadside
. Fountains of earth sprung up all along the parapet as the shells exploded. When the smoke cleared, nothing, but the
bleeding
bodies of the gunners and the debris of shattered carriages and overturned cannons, remained of what moments ago had been an ordered battery. Never having seen 68-pounders in action against an earthwork at such short range, Sir James was stunned by what he saw.

Only the last and largest stone fort remained.

Two minutes after the admiral had gone aboard
Sphinx,
a shell burst on her gun-deck instantly killing twelve of her
forty-strong
crew, and knocking one of her 68-pounders clean off its slide mountings. Only two guns were left in action. Sir James had only just exchanged courtesies with
Sphinx
’s commander, and now, along with the boatswain, the master’s mate and the quartermaster, the man was dead. If he had not gone aft seconds before, Crawford realised that he would have shared the same fate. After the sheeting flash of the explosion, yellow and black spots were dancing in front of his eyes. As if waking from a dream, he saw a hideously maimed man dragging himself to one
of the guns. The deck was running with blood. Grabbing the First Lieutenant by the arm, he shouted:

‘Cease firing…. Engines full ahead.’

Astern,
Amphion
silenced two guns with her first broadside, before she was holed and started to list sickeningly to starboard. Just clearing the channel she went aground immediately under the battery. Sir James screwed up his eyes in anguish as her decks were raked from stem to stern with canister and grape, dashing men to the deck like paper figures in a wind.
Simoon,
the next in line, engaged the fort seconds too late to prevent a second murderous volley mowing down the few men left alive on
Amphion’s
gun-deck.

Sir James was not looking at the precise moment when
Simoon
’s second broadside roared out, bringing down a long section of the fort’s wall, and sending up the magazine – not a large one to judge by the explosion, but large enough. The terrible slaughter caused by shells bursting in the confined space behind the casemates was better not imagined. No shots troubled
Leopard,
the last gunboat, as she lowered boats to take the wounded off the sinking
Amphion.

Under ten minutes after
Hesperus
had fired her first broadside, the straits lay open for the marines. The cost had been three gunboats and just over a hundred lives. As the
rockets
soared upwards requesting the steamers to come in, Sir James looked around him in astonishment; the coastline just the same, the sails of the windmill still turning, no smoke, no gun-fire, a clear sky, some men killed. Everything he had expected and yet as always quite different. He felt numbed rather than elated. The losses had been trivial in comparison with those of any large land battle, but the small size of the ships had reduced them to a
comprehensible
scale. Certain sights in the past had left scars in his mind, which had closed but never quite healed. The
simultaneous
death of
Recruit
’s entire crew at the centre of that
glowing
ball of fire would leave just such a mark.

Leaving
Leopard
in the straits to pick up men from
Amphion
and
Hesperus,
and to stop the enemy righting guns in the ruined batteries,
Sphinx
and
Simoon
steamed on towards the bridge, their crews still standing to the undamaged guns and the
leadsman
calling out the depth.

Beyond the next point the straits widened rapidly, forming a long tongue of sparkling water a mile across, stretching almost out of sight. With his telescope Sir James could see a distant mass of shimmering whiteness – the ice over the shallower water – and
even further away, where two low headlands almost met, the thin black horizontal line of the bridge and beneath it, no thicker than match-sticks, the supporting uprights. To the left were flat salt marshes, to the right of the ships, two miles of low-lying
agricultural
land rising gently to a chain of grey-green hills. A
thousand
yards from the water’s edge a dyke, running parallel with the shore as far as the eye could see, aroused Sir James’s interest; looking back in the direction of the town, he saw on its surface what at first looked like long dark patches of vegetation. Keeping the telescope on them he waited and within thirty seconds was sure that they were two dense columns of marching infantry. The sunshine and the crisp clearness of the air had brought no warmth but a far greater blessing: a perfect field of vision. Besides protecting the farms from flooding during easterly gales, the dyke was also the principal road linking Genichesk with the Tchongar Bridge. A moment later some shouts from the look-out in the mainmast shrouds confirmed Sir James’s discovery. The enemy was marching to protect the bridge. Let them march, he thought, imagining how harmless and small the gunboats would look to these men on the road. Few soldiers had any conception of the range of ships’ guns, their own heaviest field-pieces being mere pop-guns in comparison with 68-pounders. Even if they were coming on at the double, they would still not be a good target for another twenty minutes, but then the survivors would be left a good deal wiser about the effects of a well-directed broadside fired at a range of just over half a mile. Sir James hoped to kill a number of them, but his principal concern was to get them off the road. Marching across fields they would be
enormously
delayed and would have no hope of bringing any field guns up in time to oppose the landings. Having shelled the
advancing
troops, the road itself could be reduced to rubble at its nearest point to the shore. Ideally it would be best to wait till the infantrymen reached that point, but Sir James did not like that idea. Time was still important. The tugs and steamers with their string of boats would get through, but he also had to guarantee that they would get out once the bridge had been destroyed.

Soon Sir James could see the columns quite clearly, and the frequent glint and flash of bayonets catching the sun. The men’s usual long grey greatcoats hid their legs and made their
movement
seem unnaturally smooth, as though they were sliding rather than marching along the road. Two hundred yards ahead of the infantry was a troop of cavalry and behind them two or three batteries of horse-artillery, the slight swing of the gun-barrels
behind the limbers just perceptible through a steadily held glass.

The two gunboats anchored in a carefully angled line fifty yards from the shore, with additional stern anchors to prevent them swinging. Their guns were loaded with shell and elevated for nine hundred yards. As the marching men entered the line of fire,
Sphinx
and
Leopard
discharged their broadsides together with a hideous crash. Through breaks in the smoke, glimpses could be caught of jets of earth and stones springing up around the road quite silently, for it was several seconds before the explosions were heard by the gun crews and by then they were
reloading
. Two wide gaps had appeared in the first column of
infantry
, but for a moment the men on the road seemed frozen. Shouts of triumph went up from officers who had been watching through glasses. Sir James was glad to be distanced from the
carnage
; when the men started to hurl themselves from the road down the banks on either side, he saw them as dots no larger than match-heads. With a more dispersed target, shots going too long or falling short would kill at random. He reckoned that three or perhaps four of the shells had exploded on the road. As the guns thundered again, he could imagine the terror of the men hearing the approaching tearing shriek of the shells; many of them would only just have realised that the two small smoke-shrouded ships on the shimmering sheet of water were responsible for what was happening to them. Sir James could not rid himself of a vision of Charles advancing on the Quarries under a similar rain of shells from the Redan and Malakoff. After each ship had fired four broadsides, he turned to the First Lieutenant:

‘Signal: “Discontinue”.’

Already the tugs and steamers were rounding the point, with the ships’ boats strung out astern.

He had thought the first diversionary attack a failure, but he had been mistaken. Without it, the men now dead and dying on the road, would have marched from the town half-an-hour
earlier
, and would already have reached a position from which they would have been able to cut off any force attempting to get to the bridge overland. Now the survivors would arrive too late, and the worst the marines could expect to encounter would be an
isolated
company stationed in a guardhouse at the bridge; perhaps not even that. Nothing could go wrong now, and Sir James knew it.

For the first time he could feel a little warmth from the sun on his cheeks. The sky was dappled with small white clouds, which
cast racing shadows on the sage-green hills. Small waves
ruffled
the water, sparkling like thousands of tiny mirrors. Across the salt-marshes the black smoke from the tall stacks of the tugs was dispersing in thin floating streaks. Yet at the back of his mind a vague discontent.

I’m a vainglorious fool, he thought, as he realised with a shock that he had half hoped that the landing would be opposed. For what would almost certainly be his last close action with an enemy, he had imagined a spectacular ending: landing with his men under fire to encourage them, the water around them ploughed up by grape and round-shot…. He shook his head, suddenly ashamed of the contradictions in his thoughts. Disgust with war one moment and then infantile dreams of romantic heroism. At any moment passing through the straits he could have been killed or mutilated, and instead of being thankful, he had wanted more. Dear God, at my age. He thought of the letters he had written to his family. Now only the most extraordinary misfortune would make their despatch necessary. For a moment he thought of sending a boat for Magnus once the marines had landed, but a little later the first waves of tiredness hit him and he remembered the many other things that would have to be done after the bridge was destroyed. In imagination he was already back in the
Sampson
’s captain’s cabin bent over the mahogany table.