“Yes, sir. Let me just get precise coordinates for it… I shall take that to the gunners in person, sir, in case Roger forgets. He takes a pipe of opium occasionally, not as a habit, just to relax him. Relaxes him a bit too much sometimes. They keep talking about making the stuff illegal, I am told, sir, and cocaine and hashish as well! Damned stupid, if you ask me. Far less harmful than alcohol!”

  Richard claimed ignorant of the pharmaceutical intoxicants. They had not come in his way, though he had heard of them in his naval days.

  “Well, if they ban them, they will have to ban everything stronger than beer, to be fair. Haig’s millions will take a hit then.”

  “Perhaps so, sir. What else have the flying boys discovered?”

  There was a central kitchens block, and what looked much like a baths unit no more than half a mile behind the lines.

  “Delousing station and hot bath for men coming out of the line. Don’t bombard them. We can use them.”

  Two miles back and they came across a likely ready-use magazine, dug deep into the side of a low hill.

  “Daft buggers! They have dug in from the front, facing us. Had the entrance been to the rear, we could never have dropped shells into it. They would not have made that mistake a couple of years ago. The old professionals are gone.”

  The staff nodded, agreeing with their master’s every word.

  “A railhead here, sir. Thirteen miles back. Well within the accurate range of the nine point twos. Probably most active at night.”

  “Shell it during the whole of one night, Ignore it next day. Then return to it with repairs well on the way to being completed. Might kill their technical men as well as wasting their materials.”

  “Hit it on Friday night, sir, then again through Sunday morning. That should do the job! The nine point twos have a big enough shell to destroy railway tracks. Add to that, they are capable of precision fire, when well-handled.”

  “They did not do a lot of good at Coronel, I recall. One of the cruisers there carried a pair of them. Good Hope, that was. An acquaintance of mine went down in her.”

  “Bad business, that, sir. I suspect the problem was less the guns than the lack of readiness of the men firing them. I heard some suggestions that the Navy wanted to use its big guns like the carronades of Nelson’s day – a broadside, then come alongside and take them by boarding.”

  “Yes. If I had a penny for every time I heard the name Nelson during my years at Dartmouth and at sea, I would be a rich man now. Almost as bad as these bloody fools who want to let the cavalry loose!”

  Winchester and Moorcock both thought that the cavalry must be of value now. They were the gentry of England, after all, used to riding out to hounds and born to the martial tradition. Once given a fair chance, there was every reason to suppose they could end the war. Neither thought it politic say this to their master, who, for all his obvious virtues, was not of the right sort. When all was said and done, who were the Bakers? Ironmasters! Had Sir Richard only been born to a better family, he would undoubtedly have appreciated just what breeding must have to offer to this war. Winchester did just venture to suggest that the cavalry might have its place in open country.

  “On the sands of the desert? Possibly so. In Flanders, where there are clumps of trees that can hide a battery and hedges to every lane, any of which might conceal a Spandau? Not a chance. I took part in the ambush of a patrol of Uhlans in ’14. We wiped them out with riflemen concealed in a hedge and ditch. We didn’t have a Vickers with us, and didn’t need one. If cavalry were so useful, be sure the Hun would have released them onto us in the big retreat. No, the sole use for horse soldiers these days is as policemen, controlling crowds and breaking up strikes. They have no place on the battlefield.”

  Winchester did not think that one should dismiss the Blues, as an example, in quite so casual a fashion.

  “A guards regiment, on horseback and dressed up in tinplate? Useless! Their armour will not stop a musket bullet, let alone a three-o-three round. We saw that in ’14! The shops were full of ‘extras’ for soldiers – including armoured vests to be worn beneath the tunic. Hopeless! None of them worked. Armour plate to stop a rifle bullet needs be half an inch thick, at minimum. Work out the weight of that. More than one hundred and fifty pounds, roughly, to make up a front and back plated vest!”

  “I believe you miss the point, sir. The cuirass is designed to make the foot soldier quail! Seeing a great charger with an armoured soldier bearing a long, straight dragoon sword, riding at the gallop, must be terrifying.”

  “So it must. What does the soldier do then?”

  “Run away?”

  “Show your undefended back to the charging enemy? Not bloody likely! Pull rifle to shoulder and put five aimed rounds into him and his horse both – that’s what any trained man will do! What did you do during the retreat? Whenever the Boche came too close, you bellied down with your rifle and pushed him back again. If he is riding a great big charger, then he is a much better target.”

  Winchester and Moorcock were forced to agree. Showing one’s back to the enemy simply gave him a soft target. The sole answer to a charging Hun was to shoot him. Both had done so and knew it was not the most difficult of tasks.

  “What about us when we are charging forward, sir?”

  “Artillery first, tanks at our shoulder, aeroplanes raining bullets and bombs from the sky. Keep the Hun too damned busy to chop us up!”

  They hoped he was right.

  The bombardments started, two hours at a time of apparent harassing fire, aimed to be a nuisance and to damage observed targets. Intelligence, still able somehow to penetrate the German communications systems, let the word trickle upwards that the British factories were now producing so much that the guns were under orders to fire off barrages to avoid blockages in the chain of supply.

  Jolly Roger’s big guns targeted the railhead Richard had nominated and managed to deal out significant damage in the space of a night. The Germans displayed great efficiency in making repairs in the space of twenty-four hours. The second bombardment caught the yards filled with the trains that had not been able to come through in the previous day, doing massive damage to rollingstock and destroying food and munitions that were already in short supply.

  The Push came in upon a weakened enemy.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Small boat, sir. Fisherman. Port beam, four thousand yards. Signalling us.”

  There was a delay while the lookout tried to work out what the signal might be.

  “Yeoman?”

  The big telescope told them nothing. The fisherman was trying to attract their attention, but they could tell nothing more.

  “Weldon to close and speak fisherman. Remainder of half-section to execute submarine patrol in location.”

  It was highly unlikely that the fisherman was trying to lure them into a submarine ambush, but nothing was absolutely out of the question. Years of war had made Simon paranoid perhaps, but just occasionally the almost impossible occurred, and then it killed people.

  “Weldon signalling, sir.” The yeoman could see flags being bent onto the signal halliards.

  “Passenger captain, Coldstream Guards. In disguise. Smelly little man in sheepskin. Dubious.”

  “Aren’t Guardsmen supposed to be tall?”

  “Only the other ranks, sir. The officers just have to be rich.”

  “Why would a rich Guardee be running about the hills above Trieste dressed in a sheepskin?”

  Tremlett-Browne grinned.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary there for a Guards officer, sir. I wonder if he is wearing anything else?”

  Midshipman Harcourt giggled, attracting disapproving stares from his superiors.

  “Beg pardon, sir.”

  “Don’t do it again, Harcourt. And keep well clear of the Guardee – you are far too young and handsome for your own good.”

  The boy blushed scarlet, to their great entertainment.

  “Yeoman. ‘Guards officer to come aboard Cromwell’. I don’t know if we need his sheepskin, though I expect he will wish to wear it when he returns to the shore. Messenger! Tell Turner to prepare the shower and a large bar of soap, the gentleman may well need it.”

  Weldon picked up the figure in the sheepskin and made speed out to Cromwell, coming alongside the cruiser’s waist and assisting the gentleman to climb aboard from the forecastle, two of her largest hands effectively throwing him up and over. It was far quicker than dropping a boat and rarely ended up with an unfortunate in the water between the two hulls. When it went wrong there was a high chance of the fallen man dying, crushed between the two ships, but on this occasion it was swift and painless.

  The smelly little man was run up to the bridge and showed himself to be only slightly less than medium height but indeed to stink like a pig just out of the wallow.

  “Can I offer you the services of my bathroom, sir?”

  “I had rather not, Captain. I would have to find a pigsty to roll in as soon as I got ashore. My command of the local languages is less than perfect, old chap, so I have to play the part of the village idiot, and halfwits tend to reek, you know!”

  “The drawbacks of working for Intelligence, I must imagine. I am Captain Sturton, in command of this squadron. I am looking for partisans in need of some five hundred tons of small arms, and a field gun or two.”

  “Jolly good show! Captain Armitage-Fuller-Twine, Coldstreams, you know. Been hanging about here for a month or two trying to drum up trade among the local villains. Should be able to bring any number on side with the offer of modern rifles.”

  “Very good! What side, by the way?”

  “Oh, dozens of them, old chap! Thing is, they hate the Austrians’ guts, but no more than they detest each other. Give them guns and I calculate an eight-way civil war will break out within the week, seven different sets of partisans fighting each other and the Austrians equally. Ought to tie up a division or two of Austrian troops, possibly close down a harbour or two, as well. All to the jolly good, don’t you think?”

  “Very much so. Where do you want the guns?”

  “Got a little harbour just down the coast, old fellow. Just follow the boat in. I will lead you, don’t you know!”

  “An excellent idea! Jolly good show!”

  They put the Guardee back on his boat and signalled Athene to take station a cable off Cromwell’s stern.

  “Right, gentlemen! All hands to action stations. Weldon and half-section to escort sloops to a position at least fifteen miles offshore – give it to them, Number One. Victor and ‘V’ half-section to remain as close escort to Athene, ready for immediate action in case of shore fire.”

  Simon waited for the orders to be passed and acknowledged and for the ships to start moving to their assigned positions.

  “Guns!”

  Walker acknowledged the call.

  “I want a pompom and at least two machineguns trained on that fishing boat at all times. If possible, a pair of good shots with rifles to have that gentleman in the sheepskin in their sights. At the first shot from shore, kill him as dead as a dodo!”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Be ready with main armament to respond to shore batteries. Ready for torpedo boats as well.”

  Tremlett-Browne was smiling contentedly.

  “I thought I was simply allowing my dislike for a pansy to bias me against him, sir. Much too good to be true, don’t you think? An Austrian who has spent a year or two in London and almost has the insouciant, privileged air right?”

  “Something doesn’t ring true there, Number One. In part, of course, it’s as you said, he’s as queer as a pork chop in a synagogue, which don’t come over very well. But I think he might even be using that to try to fool us, overstating the case. The name is too much of a good thing, and if he didn’t have the languages, he wouldn’t be here. Add to that, he stank, but there was no ingrained dirt on his skin – he was recently dirty, not filthy.”

  “A pity we have to bring Athene in with us, but we can’t send her out of range without them knowing we have twigged them, sir.”

  “Agreed. It would be an awful shame if she was to be hit by gunfire, don’t you agree? We might well have to pull her crew off and scupper her out to sea, and get that bloody load of trouble off our back.”

  “Oh, yes… That would be most unfortunate, sir. I am sure we really want to do everything we can to assist the men from Intelligence.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The chart shows an inlet about a mile beyond that headland to our front, sir. Deep, a ria or a fjord, the former most likely in these parts. A fishing harbour a full mile inland. Limited turning room, sir. No guns on the headland – steep cliffs, eight hundred feet high, no roads from inland. They might have a machinegun nest up on top, but even that would be difficult. Valley widens out beyond the village and it would not be hard to bring artillery so far. No railway line shown, so unlikely to be heavy artillery; difficult to bring shells in.”

  “Torpedo boats of some sort. Do the Austrians have coastal motor boats?”

  “Dozens of them, sir. Ranging from small destroyers to hundred-tonners, bigger than our coastal motor boats. Not especially fast – twenty-six or -seven knots typically – and mostly poor sea boats. Badly designed. Typical Austrian problem – more important to be well-born than to be technically competent! Most of them carry a couple of small guns and two or four tubes, but no more than an eighteen inch torpedo. Good sailors aboard them, and bold, generally speaking, but commonly lacking the technical edge, sir, poorly trained. Like the dear boy in the sheepskin – brave but lacking in the final detail.”

  Simon nodded, not at all surprised that Tremlett-Browne had sat down with Jane’s and consigned the whole Austro-Hungarian fleet to memory. It was the sort of thing he had come to expect from him.

  “Mr Walker! There is a strong possibility of attack by light forces. Torpedoes.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Walker issued a stream of orders to his guns, assigning each a sector to cover.

  “Yeoman. ‘Victor, expect attack by light forces’.”

  Simon waited to see how Thomas would react, the signal having given him a free hand to dispose of his four destroyers.

  Tremlett-Browne watched with interest, reading off the orders as they went up on Victor’s mast.

  “Vanquisher to maintain close guard on Athene. Victor and the other two to take up a distant line at a mile at full speed. Very sensible. They will already be outpacing the Austrians when they come in sight, no delay in working up to thirty knots. Vanquisher to act as ratcatcher if any should escape them.”

  “Mr Walker, you may open fire at your discretion.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  All that remained now was to hold course for ten minutes. As soon as they cleared the tall headland they would know whether there was anything hoping to sink them. If the sea was empty and the little harbour disclosed partisans waiting hopefully for a supply of guns, Simon would look foolish. The general opinion would be that the Old Man was windy, seeing torpedoes where there were none. It would be more than embarrassing.

  Movement by the mast showed the yeoman ready with the battle ensign, prepared to hoist the great flag with the first shot. He had no doubts, this time; he might have, next.

  “Opening the river mouth, sir… There, sir, Red Ten! Four small ships, sir, on course to open our beam!”

  Walker roared and the guns fired as one, main armament swinging onto the torpedo boats, pompoms and Vickers concentrating on the fishing boat, the only target in their range.

  The boat with the sheepskin-clad spy disintegrated in seconds, chopped to pieces by the explosive shells, the wreckage swept by machinegun fire.

  “He won’t see Mayfair again, sir.”

  “Neither he will, Browne. Brave but foolhardy, one might say, thinking to put one over us.”

  “I wonder who he actually was, sir.”

  “Just a spy of some sort, Number One. Forget him! Six inch are making a good showing.”

  They turned their glasses on the torpedo boats, saw them turn away, surrounded by tall shell splashes.

  “Hit one. Not bad at eight thousand yards and twenty-five knots…”

  “Could be better, Browne! Walker will not be pleased.”

  “Destroyers closing, sir. I do hope Mr Walker has an eye on them.”

  “Second hit from the six inch. Two of the boats sunk. Too small to live through a hit by one of those big shells.”

  They heard Walker’s shout and the six inch ceased fire. The three destroyers targeted the two surviving torpedo boats at less than two cables, the four inch guns rapidly proving too much for the small craft.

  “Very satisfactory, Number One, in terms of results. I don’t know that it was necessary to come within range of those little forty-seven mil cannon on the torpedo boats. They may well have taken losses to them.”

  “Destroyers, sir! If they are not touching the foe, they aren’t close enough.”

  Remembering his own habits of previous years, Simon shrugged and said no more.

  “Mr Walker! Is there anything of interest inshore?”

  The bigger glasses of the gunnery top might disclose batteries or barracks or other valuable targets.

  “Nothing tied up, sir. A small dockyard flying the national flag. I can see naval personnel at the wharfside, sir. The yard is well inside the town, sir. Civilian housing close to. No sign of emplaced guns. Looks like a small police or naval barracks perhaps a cable inland, again with housing surrounding it, sir. A fishing dock and what looks like barges tied up, sir.”

  “Do not bombard, Mr Walker. The target is too unimportant for the civilian casualties that must ensue. Cease fire. Discontinue the action.”

  “No torpedoes fired, sir. Athene untouched and still full of rifles.”

  “Four torpedo boats destroyed. Not to be quibbled at. One fishing boat and an intelligence officer also removed from the scene. Minor but indisputable. But we are no damned closer to achieving our aim. We are supposed to put five hundred tons of munitions into the hands of partisans. We are assured those partisans actually exist, we merely cannot locate them. What are we to do?”

 

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