Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [125]
The Cormorant’s guns were silent for minutes. They were closing on the cruiser.
Then they opened fire again, the noise mind-numbing. There seemed to be flame and smoke everywhere, searing the skin and hair, choking the lungs. The bridge and signal house were shrouded by it. Matthew had not the least idea whether anything was hit or not.
He stared to the east, straining until the smoke cleared. Ragland beside him seemed to be holding his breath, his face masklike in the glare of the lights.
Gradually the wind blew the smoke away, cold salt instead of burning cordite, and they saw the cruiser engulfed in flame. The magazines had taken a direct hit and exploded, breaking its back. It was listing already, in the first terrible throes of its long plunge to its tomb in the depths.
Matthew was speechless. The tactics had been brilliant. The Cormorant had sunk an enemy cruiser with more weight, more guns, and more men, but there was no sweetness in it at all. The fact that they were German, and would have sunk the Cormorant if they could, seemed almost irrelevant. They were close to a thousand living, breathing men, seamen like themselves, going to a fearful and certain death. It was all he could think of as he stood transfixed with pity watching as the great ship burned lower and lower in the water. Ammunition still exploded, tearing her apart until she slid beneath the black surface, shining in the flames of other gunfire, leaving the sea littered with struggling men and the debris of death.
There was no one there to help, and no one came. They were under the guns of the Cormorant. Please God, Archie would not have shot at a rescuer, but they could not know that, nor could the Cormorant risk going any closer to the array of German destroyers on the farther side, well within firing range.
Matthew turned away and saw Ragland’s face in the light. The same wrenching pity was in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth, although it was impossible to tell in the red and yellow glare of muzzle flames and the smeared darkness of drifting gun smoke, if he was as ashen as he looked. The noise had started again closer, others joining those of the injured ships around them. There was no time for shock or mourning. The battle raged on.
Midnight passed. In the signal room they heard that both the Ardent and the Fortune had been sunk.
At two o’clock news came that the armored cruiser Black Prince had blundered into the German firing line and been lost with all hands. For the first time Matthew began to believe that the British fleet might lose. It was a strange thought, alien and hard to grasp. Britain had not lost a crucial battle at sea since before the Spanish Armada in the reign of Elizabeth I, over three hundred years earlier. This would mean the end. Without a navy to guard the shipping lanes, to evacuate the army from France, to prevent the German army landing on the beaches of Britain, the war was lost. In a month, two months, the fields and trees of England could be trampled by German boots, burned, torn up, destroyed by an occupying army.
What then? Retreat to the hills of Wales, Scotland? Fight in the forests and fens until there was no one left? Or submit, sue for peace and some kind of survival? On what terms? Would that be to betray the dead who had already paid so high a price, only to have it thrown away now? Or the living, who had to make the best of what was left? At what point was it no longer worth fighting?
He listened to the signals coming in with a kind of grim despair. He thought of Hannah and the children, the village, the fields under the great, silent elms. Were they better destroyed in the last battle, or conquered, surviving, and changed forever?
He was still thinking of that, angry and tormented, his ears deadened by the noise, when