Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [124]
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