The Dangerous Years

I

Part One

One

The rumours had been gathering strength for days. Even in late October stories of a mutiny in the German High Seas Fleet had begun to trickle through and now, finally, news had arrived that the German Kaiser had gone into exile. After four years of discomfort, hardship and sudden death, after four years of grief, misery and deprivation, it was almost over.

Ever since August, 1914, Europe had been engulfed in the greatest war the world had ever seen, but, at last – suddenly, unexpectedly after the setbacks of the spring – the end was now surely at hand. The past month had seen the collapse of Bulgaria, Turkey and Austro-Hungary, and a signal had been received only that morning to say that the war was finally dying.

Sitting in the motorboat of the destroyer, Mordant, as it chugged its way back from Stromness, Lieutenant George Kelly Maguire stared round at the wide expanse of Scapa Flow. Scapa was an amazing place, big enough to house all the navies of the world, yet, in its silences, its incredible colours and the extraordinary quality of its northern light, bewitching – a place you either loved or hated. Most people managed to do both.

Somehow, in his strength and stillness, Kelly Maguire resembled Scapa – as if he’d acquired some of its qualities. His gaze reflected the sea, grey, steady, and faraway with years of looking over great distances. His square face was older than his twenty-six years, with narrow crow’s-feet of concentration round his eyes and small tight lines at the corners of his mouth. Unruly red hair curled beneath his cap, only partially obscuring the fading pink line of the wound he’d received at Jutland two years before.

He looked again at the land, silent, lonely, and lovely in the crisp northern air. The shadows of the anchored ships of the Grand Fleet suggested a maritime Valhalla full of ghostlike shapes frozen into a crystal silence in which the leaden water was the only thing that stirred.

The ships were of all sizes, from huge battle cruisers down to destroyers, among them now French ships, and American vessels newly arrived to help defeat the Germans, who twice within forty-five years had thrown Europe into a turmoil with their restless armies. Though Kelly had seen the sight a hundred times since he had rejoined Mordant and Mordant had rejoined the fleet, it still left him a little awed.

He glanced towards his ship over the lifting bow of the motorboat. The destroyer lay quietly at her buoy. Apart from a period at Rosyth and a long refit to repair the grievous wounds she’d received at Jutland, she’d spent nearly four years at Scapa. And, unlike the big ships, the destroyers had always done long spells at sea, and the morale of their crews was high, despite the damp stickiness of their quarters, the smell of fuel oil and the fear of floating mines that gave them constant nightmares. They felt their sense of responsibility keenly and the bored big ship men had watched them come and go with envy, because to relieve the years-long monotony there had been only collisions on dark nights, fierce northern gales and the holocaust when Valiant had blown up to shower the rest of the fleet with debris and mutilated corpses.

As the motorboat approached Mordant’s stern, Kelly sat up. The thin November sun had appeared between two banks of cloud over Hoy and had flooded the Flow with light that caught the sides of the destroyer, to exaggerate her slimness and etch the lines of her guns. At Jutland, that scrambled battle in the murk two and a half years before, when they’d failed to annihilate the German High Seas Fleet, she had been left without a single one of them able to fire, and minus her bows and half her crew.

A pair of divers crossed the path of the motorboat, big black birds with outstretched necks, honking as they flew, their heavy bodies undulating to the beat of their wings. Knowing them to be the harbingers of winter, Kelly found himself crossing his fingers in a silent prayer that the promised peace would soon arrive. Another winter with the wind lashing the seas across the Sound so they could neither move nor go ashore, driving the spray in grey sheets over the iron-bound cliffs and bringing darkness in the middle of the afternoon, was almost more than he could bear.

As the boat bumped alongside Mordant’s companionway, the sun disappeared again over the hills of Hoy and night came abruptly. The wardroom was gloomy. The signal they’d received that morning that an armistice had been signed with Germany had been cancelled.

‘False alarm,’ Wellbeloved, the engineer officer, said. ‘And I put up drinks all round on the strength of having won the end-of-the-war sweep.’

Kelly accepted a gin. Wellbeloved had helped him fight the ship back from Jutland, a scarred, charred heap of wreckage on the point of sinking. The only two other surviving officers had long since gone. The gunner had vanished to a light cruiser and the sub had been replaced by Seamus Boyle whom Kelly had first met as a newly-joined cadet when he’d dragged him from the sea as the armoured cruiser, Cressy, had sunk under them in 1914.

Wellbeloved placed the glass in Kelly’s hand. ‘It must end soon, mustn’t it?’ he asked.

‘It’s my earnest prayer,’ Kelly said.

As it happened, they hadn’t long to wait. Thirty-six hours later the signal came that the Armistice really had been signed. The news was brought by Mordant’s captain, Lieutenant-Commander James Peter Orrmont, who had arrived to take the place of the man who had nursed the ship through her refit. He had spent most of the war sunning himself aboard the battleship Glory in the Mediterranean and had a somewhat flippant attitude to the North Sea. He was clever and shrewd and was a born staff man, with a sharp appreciation of everything and a manner Kelly knew it would take him, Kelly, years to acquire. He was smooth and confident and, though his ship-handling experience was not extensive and he’d seen little of the war, it was quite clear he didn’t expect it to be a drawback since he fully intended his future to be in planning rather than seafaring.

‘The party’s over,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The signal’s finally arrived and this time the Germans really have thrown in their hand.’

The wardroom erupted in a wild cheer and Wellbeloved grinned all over his face. ‘Do we break out the champagne, sir?’ he asked.

Orrmont smiled. ‘We’d better let the ship’s company know first,’ he said. ‘If they don’t know already.’

As the lower deck was cleared and the sailors gathered aft in an atmosphere of barely-controlled excitement, Orrmont climbed on to the winch.

‘I’m no speechmaker,’ he said, ‘so I’ll just read to you a signal I’ve this minute received.’ He gestured with the sheet of paper. ‘Admiralty General Message: Armistice is signed—’

There was an immediate yell of delight which died abruptly as Orrmont held up his hand. ‘Don’t rush it,’ he said. ‘It gets better as it goes along: Hostilities are to be suspended forthwith… Armistice to be announced at 1100. All general methods of demonstrations to be permitted – and encouraged – including bands.’

Cheering started again but Orrmont held up his hand once more. ‘One more thing,’ he went on. ‘I have also received a signal to the effect that the customary method of celebrating an occasion by splicing the main brace may be carried out at 1900.’

The ship shook under the din, and as it died away they became aware of more cheering coming from other parts of the Flow. Tots of rum, saved specially for the occasion, began to appear below decks, and accordeons, mouth organs and tin whistles were brought out of lockers for an impromptu concert.

That night, as the alcohol began to work, every siren in the harbour screamed and every bell was rung. Rockets crossed the sky, and flares and grenades went up in every direction under the moving searchlights, as each ship and each unit tried to celebrate the occasion in its own way in a pandemonium of noise. The big ships started it with their deep-throated bellows, and quickly every other ship, big and small, took up the racket. A deafening din rose over the flat waters of the Flow which, as though part of the celebrations, were lit by an enormous moon. Steam whistles shrieked, sirens split the air with shrill blasts, and foghorns joined in with their lower-pitched hootings in a tumultuous cacophony. Alternately falling then rising again to tremendous crescendos, the discordance resounded across the shores for three solid uninterrupted hours until 10 p.m., only to start again at midnight, while on deck the sailors danced, sang, shouted and cheered until they were hoarse or exhausted.

From the bridge, surrounded by brilliant stars, Kelly watched in silence. Instinctively his hand went to the pink scar that Jutland had left over his eye. That day the navy had lost good ships and better men and had suffered a humiliation they hadn’t believed possible. At least, he thought, there’d be no more wounds, no more killing, no more grief. Yet, under the elation the thought induced, there was also a strange aching feeling of incompleteness. Despite Jutland, the Navy had won a victory greater than Trafalgar but only by denying the sea to the Germans; because they’d never thrashed them as they’d hoped and expected, the victory was far less spectacular.

‘Well, it’s over, Number One.’

He turned to find Orrmont standing alongside him.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’

‘But I think there’s a sense of failure.’ Orrmont was clearly thinking the same way as himself. ‘An armistice before a Trafalgar’s not the same as one afterwards.’

‘It’ll certainly seem to everybody that it was the army that polished off the Kaiser without us doing much of the fighting,’ Kelly agreed.

Orrmont shrugged. ‘They’d never have done it without us,’ he said. ‘They might have given ’em a few black eyes but in the end it wasn’t black eyes that finished ’em. It was the blockade and starvation, and it was the navy that did that.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets and leaned on the bridge rail. ‘There’ll be leave eventually,’ he went on. ‘I expect you’re looking forward to it as much as anyone. Got a girl?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Going to marry her?’

‘Eventually, sir.’

‘Think she’ll wait?’

Kelly smiled. If there was one thing in the world he was sure about it was that. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sure.’

Orrmont smiled. ‘Well, I suspect you’ll have to hang on just a bit longer to see her,’ he said. ‘We have a job to do first. I gather the German Fleet’s coming in to surrender.’

‘Think they’ll come, sir?’

Orrmont smiled again. ‘Don’t think they have an option,’ he said. ‘They no longer control their ships. They’re being run, it seems, by sailors’ soviets and the red flag’s flying at all the naval ports. Mutiny’s a terrible thing.’

Kelly stared round the assembled ships and the bare lonely shapes of the islands. ‘Up here,’ he said, ‘I often felt like it myself.’

Ten days later the German ships appeared. There had been constant rumours that they might come out for a final battle or would try to get themselves interned in Holland, and even now no one knew how the end would be. Would they surrender tamely or go down with their colours flying in a ‘death ride’ against the Grand Fleet?

In an atmosphere of excitement and tension, the light forces led the way out, flotilla by flotilla, to meet them. In a tumult of churned water and the hum of boiler room blowers, they passed through the boom one after the other, watched by patrol boats and drifters, 150 destroyers all steaming east.

The channel lay by Inch Garvie and Drum Sand. They’d used it many times before, in the dark, past bell and buoy, in fog and under the pale northern stars, clearing for action as they went, as they were cleared now, still prepared to do battle if the Germans decided on a Wagnerian gesture of self-immolation. Every ship in the Royal Navy that could be spared was there – from Dover, Harwich, Scapa and the Channel – 370 of them and 90,000 men, every ship flying as many white ensigns as possible as if they were going into action. Each column consisted of over thirty battleships, battle cruisers and cruisers, with a destroyer abreast each flagship. Heading the line was Beatty’s Queen Elizabeth, wearing the flag the admiral had flown in Lion during the Battle of Jutland.

As the light increased the air seemed to grow cooler. The water, invisible during the night, now became long cold lines of grey movement, and the black loom of ships merged into the pale wash of day. There would be sixty-nine of the Germans, they’d heard – two of them missing because one had engine trouble and another had struck a mine – humiliated ships run by committees of sailors who claimed kinship with the International Proletariat and said they were the brothers of the mutinous men of the Russian Navy. They’d long since lost their fighting potential, because they’d been drained of their best men for the submarines and destroyers, and when the officers had wished to take them to sea in a last desperate attack, the desire for peace had erupted in a revolution and officers had had to escape in cars, on bicycles and on foot to avoid arrest. When Königsberg had brought senior naval officers to discuss the terms of surrender they had been accompanied by sailors claiming their admirals were only advisers. Their humiliated officers had had the satisfaction of seeing them told to go to hell.

‘Here they are!’

Smoke had appeared on the horizon, then one after the other, they began to pick out the masts and upperworks of the German ships; grey shapes still, but menacing in their blunt outlines. Kelly drew a deep breath. The last time he’d seen these ships, he’d come away from the encounter with a livid wound across his back, a flap of flesh hanging over his eye, a fractured cheekbone and the danger of losing his sight. Wellbeloved was on the deck below him and he saw him also catch at his breath.

‘Friedrich der Grosse leading,’ Kelly pointed out flatly, recognising the outlines he’d been studying in books through four long years. ‘I can also see Seydlitz, Moltke, Derfflinger, Hindenburg and Von der Tann.’