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Authors: Max Hennessy
Tags: Back To Battle
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The sky was filled from one horizon to the other with close banks of cloud that looked like old hard-packed snow, grey, dirty and ugly, and the rain fell in squally flurries in a steep, slanting drizzle that blew across the ship, blurring the horizon, so that the point where the watery sky met the sea was ill-defined, as if the two elements ran into each other and they were steaming into a sombre moving mass that curved down ahead of them and swept back below.
From Feudal’s bridge, Kelly stared back at the convoy he was leading. As the long steely waves from the south-west swept by in a never-ending succession, the ships bobbed their heads, bowing in obeisance to the gale before lifting them again and falling once more, to raise their sterns as they slid into the trough ready for the next act of obeisance. The smaller ships seemed to vanish entirely in the vast valleys of water until only their funnels and mastheads were visible and they seemed at times to be on their last long journey down to the immemorial ooze two miles below.
Behind Feudal, beyond the commodore ship, there was a forest of moving masts, funnels, samson posts and cargo booms, as freighters, tankers and passenger ships rolled and pitched and danced eastwards towards Britain. As the convoy executed its change of course, it was not at first noticeable, just that the ships appeared to be showing a different profile, and where Kelly had been looking at their bows now he was on the starboard beam as they swung to port. Every ship did the same thing, swinging slowly, adjusting position so that they simply changed lines and faced the stern of a different ship.
As the watery sun sent an unexpected ray down from the packed clouds, the light caught the curve of wet bows. The change of course put the wind in a different direction and instead of the spray swinging back on either side of the bridge, it now slashed directly across it, soaking the men who stood there so that they hitched at the towels they wore round their necks as scarves.
Though to other ships her decks seemed empty and she seemed to be devoid of crew, in fact Feudal was humming with activity. Throughout her length, auxiliary machinery, dynamos and ventilating fans filled the alleyways with background noise, and the cooking smells that pervaded the ship mingled with the smell of oil, vomit, and that curious acrid blend of steam and electricity which was always present where there was marine machinery.
Despite the curious passivity of the front in France – what the Americans with their gift for apt phrases were calling the Phoney War – nobody aboard was kidding himself that Britain had taken advantage of the lull. At home there were still plenty of holidays, and even with the war privilege had not vanished. Though the wealthy younger elements were rushing to the services, their parents were carefully establishing themselves in comfort in safe areas, determined to survive, and there had been little increase in war production. The Air Force was still short of aeroplanes, and the Army was still short of tanks, and there was a story, probably apocryphal, about a staff course at Camberley where an officer had been criticised for an overdeveloped sense of humour for mounting an imaginary anti-tank gun up a tree. He had defended himself briskly with the information that he had no idea what the weapon was like because he’d never seen one and, so it seemed, neither had anybody else.
The Navy was as short of ships. Though Britain had the largest and most professional navy in the world, it was desperately in need of reinforcements. Its strength on paper was misleading because half its ships had been designed for the earlier war, and though some had been refitted, many were obsolescent and some positively obsolete. Of those commissioned between the wars, some were magnificent but there were others, designed in a penny-pinching era, that were useless for fighting yet too slow to runaway.
Though the Navy
From Feudal’s bridge, Kelly stared back at the convoy he was leading. As the long steely waves from the south-west swept by in a never-ending succession, the ships bobbed their heads, bowing in obeisance to the gale before lifting them again and falling once more, to raise their sterns as they slid into the trough ready for the next act of obeisance. The smaller ships seemed to vanish entirely in the vast valleys of water until only their funnels and mastheads were visible and they seemed at times to be on their last long journey down to the immemorial ooze two miles below.
Behind Feudal, beyond the commodore ship, there was a forest of moving masts, funnels, samson posts and cargo booms, as freighters, tankers and passenger ships rolled and pitched and danced eastwards towards Britain. As the convoy executed its change of course, it was not at first noticeable, just that the ships appeared to be showing a different profile, and where Kelly had been looking at their bows now he was on the starboard beam as they swung to port. Every ship did the same thing, swinging slowly, adjusting position so that they simply changed lines and faced the stern of a different ship.
As the watery sun sent an unexpected ray down from the packed clouds, the light caught the curve of wet bows. The change of course put the wind in a different direction and instead of the spray swinging back on either side of the bridge, it now slashed directly across it, soaking the men who stood there so that they hitched at the towels they wore round their necks as scarves.
Though to other ships her decks seemed empty and she seemed to be devoid of crew, in fact Feudal was humming with activity. Throughout her length, auxiliary machinery, dynamos and ventilating fans filled the alleyways with background noise, and the cooking smells that pervaded the ship mingled with the smell of oil, vomit, and that curious acrid blend of steam and electricity which was always present where there was marine machinery.
Despite the curious passivity of the front in France – what the Americans with their gift for apt phrases were calling the Phoney War – nobody aboard was kidding himself that Britain had taken advantage of the lull. At home there were still plenty of holidays, and even with the war privilege had not vanished. Though the wealthy younger elements were rushing to the services, their parents were carefully establishing themselves in comfort in safe areas, determined to survive, and there had been little increase in war production. The Air Force was still short of aeroplanes, and the Army was still short of tanks, and there was a story, probably apocryphal, about a staff course at Camberley where an officer had been criticised for an overdeveloped sense of humour for mounting an imaginary anti-tank gun up a tree. He had defended himself briskly with the information that he had no idea what the weapon was like because he’d never seen one and, so it seemed, neither had anybody else.
The Navy was as short of ships. Though Britain had the largest and most professional navy in the world, it was desperately in need of reinforcements. Its strength on paper was misleading because half its ships had been designed for the earlier war, and though some had been refitted, many were obsolescent and some positively obsolete. Of those commissioned between the wars, some were magnificent but there were others, designed in a penny-pinching era, that were useless for fighting yet too slow to runaway.
Though the Navy
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