Floating Madhouse Read online

  ‘Ah. Well…’

  ‘What are your thoughts on the subject now?’

  ‘Well, sir – with the greatest respect – if you feel such precautions are necessary—’

  ‘Great God in heaven!’ A bellow, from a distance of about four feet. ‘After getting these reports, should I be doing nothing?’

  ‘Not if you believe them, sir. As I can see you have to… May I ask – will we be anchoring off Bornholm tomorrow, as I heard?’

  ‘No, we will not! We’ll be anchoring tomorrow evening, off Langeland – where we have a rendezvous with colliers. Know what or where Langeland is?’

  ‘Danish island, in the southern approaches to the Great Belt. The fairway leads slightly east of north between Langeland and Lolland.’

  ‘You’re familiar with these waters then.’ The admiral was levering himself up. ‘And I respect deeply what you’ve told me about your father. But as to your view of the dangers we’re facing, I have to conclude that you have a naïve quality about you, a defensive attitude towards your country’s alliance with our enemies, and more than a streak of obstinacy. Well, we’ll see, we’ll see…’

  * * *

  Telling Count Sollogub later that evening about his interview with Rojhestvensky, Michael asked him what highlights in the man’s career had won him the Tsar’s approbation and hence this appointment as c-in-c.

  ‘Did he tell you he’s a favourite of His Majesty’s?’

  ‘No. Someone, in the last day or so. Selyeznov, perhaps.’ Glancing round the crowded wardroom. But no Selyeznov, of course – senior members of the staff messed with their lord and master, and he would presumably be dining with him now. In any case the source of that information had been Captain White of the Admiralty in London. White hadn’t in fact known much else about him, except that he was a gunnery specialist. Sollogub drained his wine-glass and put it down: ‘Did you hear the shooting this afternoon?’

  ‘Two practice rounds from one of the for’ard six-inch, was it?’

  ‘Our admiral firing blanks at the poor old Oryol, who’d failed to acknowledge a flag-hoist telling her to pay better attention to her steering. She’d been weaving all over the place, that’s a fact. Narumov thinks her steering gear’s probably defective. But Zenovy Petrovich has been known to fire live rounds on such occasions. Not directly at ships but close enough to them, so one’s heard. Answering your question, however, he made himself a reputation as a fire-eater in the Turkish war. He’s brave, no doubt of that – as well as forceful and – well, intemperate, at times. But there was a scandal from which he emerged – strangely enough – triumphant: his captain – the ship’s name I forget, but our man was its second-in-command – claimed to have sunk a Turkish battleship when actually he’d run away from it. Zenovy Petrovich kept his mouth shut for a while but then blew the gaff before the truth became public knowledge – he wrote a letter to Novoye Vremya, confessing all – and as I say survived, with a reputation for fearless adherence to the truth, while his former C.O. received the order of the boot, of course. Rojhestvensky had been caught in an awkward situation, and it was seen as a brave act – you know, facing the music. Even if it might also be called saving his own bacon. He came out of it well, in any case.

  ‘And then – oh, the year before last, this was – we were honoured with a visit by Kaiser Wilhelm and his Grand Admiral Tirpitz – invited by Tsar Nikolai to Reval to witness a gunnery demonstration under the aegis of the then Captain Rojhestvensky – and the shooting was absolutely top-hole. So impressive that the Kaiser said he only wished he had a few commanders of such brilliance in his fleet. Which the Tsar loved, of course. God knows how Zenovy Petrovich had done it: must have had his gunners practising day and night for months. He can go days and nights without sleep himself, and he drives his underlings just as hard. He’s a harsh disciplinarian, you know. Can be brutal. Fact remains, every shot struck its target – moving targets too, floats towed by torpedo-boats – whereas this lot with us now can’t even hit static ones. Result of that success, however, Z.P. Rojhestvensky promoted to chief of naval staff in the rank of rear-admiral.’ Sollogub beckoned to a steward: ‘Another bottle, please.’ He turned back to Michael. ‘What a man needs, to get to the top in our navy, Mikhail Ivan’ich, is either powerful family connections, or some fluke chance that attracts the notice of His Majesty. But whether this adventure now won’t be the end of the road for him: whether in the first place he’ll get us there, or in the second be any match for Togo – which I suppose is tantamount to saying it may well be the end of the road for all of us – huh?’

  ‘Togo may be a little over-rated. He won the battle at Round Island, but going by what I’ve heard he should have made a much more thorough job of it. Had the most amazing luck – which if he’d taken full advantage of—’

  ‘Didn’t he, though? Sent ’em all scuttling back into Port Arthur, surely?’

  ‘Not all of them, Some got clean away. Only to Chinese ports, admittedly – where they’re interned, of course. But in any case, if he’d really seized his opportunity—’

  ‘Look – talk about it another time, perhaps. Getting a bit crowded in here.’ Shake of the head. ‘He beat us hollow, anyway. To say he might have done it more completely still—’

  ‘All right.’ Glancing round… ‘I’m surprised there is such a crowd. The admiral said you’d all be at action stations from sunset on.’

  ‘Guns are manned, for sure. And searchlights, and extra lookouts posted. Any alarm, we’d all be up there within seconds. But a lot of these are staff, not ship’s officers. In any case, one does have to eat – and if one is not a gunnery man… And they seek each other’s company, you know. Lonely up there – and nothing to drink, unless they have a brandy or two sent up – keep the chill out, or sharpen the Dutch courage.’

  ‘I’ve noticed there is a – well, a degree of anxiety, here and there.’

  ‘Blue funk, you mean. What a diplomat you are.’ Sollogub chuckled, fiddling with his empty glass. ‘High degree of anxiety, indeed – they’re mostly shivering in their boots! They are – literally – and for all sorts of reasons, not only this expectation of attack… Ah, good!’ The wine: a Tokay, also from the Crimea. Sollogub resumed. ‘The men know as well as we do that they’re at best half-trained, that quite a few of the ships are really fit only for breakers’ yards, and – for instance – even in these modern battleships the gunnery-control equipment is out-dated. As you saw, they’re only now cutting holes in gunshields in order to fit telescopes. Our Russian gunlayers have never had telescopes. Oh, and the guns are fired by jerking lanyards – with consequent delay between the order or resolve to fire and the implementation of it – whereas in your ships and I’ll bet the Japanese too, the triggering is by electric impulse. Isn’t that the case?’

  ‘In our ships, has been for some years.’

  ‘Crews, again.’ The count glanced around for eavesdroppers: but there was a high level of sound, and no one all that close. He said quietly, ‘Some are straight off the streets or fields, virtually shanghai’d, while a significant number of them are revolutionists – who of course don’t want us to win this war. Perhaps when the time comes – if it does - they’ll fight as best they can, simply because they’ll see that the alternative is to be blown up or drowned; but if for instance we were stuck in some hell-hole on the coast of Africa – for lack of coal for instance, which is quite a possibility – or arrive out East too late to be of any use… Well, wars that are lost tend to promote or assist revolution, while victory has the opposite effect – cheers for the Tsar, the last thing those fellows want!’

  ‘You paint a black picture, Nikolai Sergei’ich.’

  ‘Wishing you hadn’t come?’

  ‘Not really…’

  ‘Well, here’s to you. Although you must be crazy.’

  ‘And to you. But I had to come. Couldn’t have turned down such an invitation – especially from Prince Igor.’

  ‘Although he’s only one o
f the two thousand princes we have in Russia?’

  ‘He does happen to be an old friend of my father’s. And still at the top of things – having the ear of the Tsar, for instance.’

  ‘Does that really concern you so much?’

  ‘Well – all right. I suppose the truth is I wanted to come. To see modern fleets in action, as much as anything.’

  ‘That’s another thing entirely. Only yourself to blame, you might say. Incidentally – regarding that statistic of two thousand princes, I should quickly admit there are roughly the same number of counts littering our fair land. Returning however to the more serious topic, and to give you the full flavour of our national predicament, I’ll tell you another thing-very much between ourselves.’ Glancing round again, as he sipped at his wine. ‘You’ll have heard, I imagine, that our army out there – Generak Kuropatkin’s, in the Liaotang Peninsula – is on the run?’

  ‘In retreat at the moment – one’s gathered from newspaper reports.’

  ‘Well, yes, it’s true he’s waiting for his reinforcements to build up – reaching him by way of the Trans-Siberian railway, of course, but not fast enough. There’s still a gap in that line at Lake Baikal, which has to be crossed by steamer, or in winter on the ice in sleds. And meanwhile although Kuropatkin is commander-in-chief, he has the deadweight of Viceroy Alexeyev on his shoulders – interfering, countermanding orders and so forth. But this other thing, Mikhail Ivan’ich – I happen to know for a certainty that the best of our troops, the ones who should be going to Kuropatkin, are being kept at home, mainly around St Petersburg and Moscow where they may be needed sooner or later to quell riots. That’s God’s truth – but don’t say I told you…’

  5

  He’d written a letter to Tasha – in Russian – and enclosed it with one in English to Jane; telling Tasha that she was in his mind night and day, and a lot more that was much more intimate, emotions and images that had interrupted his sleep night after night, set his brain and body on fire even to think about, let alone put down on paper; but also prosaically informing both of them that the squadron was at sea and on its way. Which it was again now, after spending two days at anchor off Langeland, the mass of ships then filing up through the Belts and into the Kattegat. Sea calm, rain still about but with fine spells in between, barometer happily a bit higher than it had been.

  On arrival off Langeland the whole squadron had coaled, from colliers of the Hamburg-Amerika Line who’d been waiting for them. Sollogub, who as assistant navigator heard a lot of what was going on or being planned, had said he thought this would be the shape of it all the way round the world, rendezvous after rendezvous with German colliers under no doubt highly lucrative contract to St Petersburg and in constant wireless contact with this flagship.

  If the wireless worked. That was German too, and there were doubts about it, apparently.

  After coaling, a day and a half had been spent trying to set up a minesweeping operation. Selyeznov had persuaded Rojhestvensky to give him his head on this, since danger from mines was so obvious, and he, Selyeznov, had apparently organized sweeping off Port Arthur with great success. In the Great Belt, however, it hadn’t worked. For one thing the ships allocated to it were of such disparate size and power; the large ice-breaker Yermak and the small tug Roland were required to drag between them a considerable length of chain cable with small grapnels trailing from it on lighter chains. Each of the major vessels in the squadron had been told to have their engineers work all night forging grapnels, but only a few had filled their quota, and the fleet repair ship Kamchatka which should have supplied fifty had made none at all. Asked by semaphore from Selyeznov Why not? the reply had been Because no written order was received. Eventually Selyeznov, fuming, had embarked in the tug to take command of the sweep, which of course was intended to precede the squadron all the way through the danger area, but he ended up being towed into the Great Belt stern-first, signalling in panic to the Yermak Stop your engines. What are you doing? At about the same time the chain cable snapped, while the looming mass of the squadron under a pall of black funnel-smoke was closing up remorselessly astern. Rojhestvensky then saved the day by signalling The passage is to be considered as having been swept, and the Second Pacific Squadron ploughed on by, ancient battleships dwarfing the two small craft and collision after collision being narrowly avoided, tug and ice-breaker pitching and rolling helplessly in the great ships’ spreading wakes and bow-waves.

  ‘Zenovy Petrovich was spitting blood,’ Sollogub had remarked later, joining Michael in the after bridge. ‘And I’d guess your friend Selyeznov might have been in tears.’

  Michael had had his own binoculars up there with him – a pair of Messrs Heath’s Prism Binocular Glasses which had been an extravagant present years ago from brother George – and although with the restricted view forward from this after bridge he hadn’t been able to see it all, he’d had a fair notion of what had been going on. Even in the Royal Navy one had on occasion been privileged to witness snarl-ups, and seeing some of it, one could guess at underlying causes; although a disadvantage from which Michael suffered was that he couldn’t read Russian semaphore, let alone Tabulevich.

  What he had been able to do while in that anchorage was sort out some ship detail, especially in regard to the cruisers and to the still absent Ryazan. The Oleg was apparently Ryazan’s only sister-ship, and theoretically belonged in this squadron but had been left behind in Reval or Kronstadt for the repair or replacement of machinery that was thought to have been sabotaged. She was expected to overtake and rejoin at some later stage. The Aurora on the other hand was a sister to the Diana – the ship Selyeznov had left in a wrecked condition in Saigon – while the other two ‘first-class’ cruisers, Zemchug and Izumrud, were of only half that displacement, definitely light-cruisers and accordingly more lightly armed – with 4.7-inch instead of the others’ 6-inch – and slower.

  Most of this information came from Captain Ignatzius who, to Michael’s surprise, in contrast to the ancient RN tradition of captains messing in solitary grandeur, had all his meals in the wardroom and was a most relaxed and companionable messmate: from Michael’s point of view in fact he had been helping to break the social ice. Suvarov’s executive officer or second-in-command, for instance – Captain Second Rank Makedomsky – was a contrastingly morose individual with whom it was virtually impossible to have any sort of conversation. Whereas even on the evening after the minesweeping debacle, when there were also serious worries about the squadron’s wireless communications, Ignatzius wasn’t letting anything get him down. He’d been making fun of Selyeznov and his slapstick performance in the tug, and from this the chat had turned to the Oryol’s breakdown: her steering had failed, she’d had to drop astern and anchor in the middle of the Great Belt, and the admiral had found he couldn’t communicate with her by wireless and had had to contrive a way of doing so through the tug Roland, which having been left astern of the main body, with Selyeznov still on board, had gone to stand by the Oryol. Wireless messages were then sent via the tug, which passed them to and from the Oryol by semaphore. Ignatzius had found this screamingly funny too – that the much-vaunted Second Squadron should have been sent on its way with ships unable to communicate with each other, let alone with the outside world.

  ‘Some German system, they were saying?’

  Sollogub had nodded. ‘Bogdanov and Leontiev have been grousing about it day and night.’

  Bogdanov was the torpedo lieutenant, also the ship’s wireless expert. The two jobs went together, apparently. Leontiev was the flag torpedo lieutenant – and wireless expert – on Rojhestvensky’s staff. Michael asked them, ‘Why couldn’t you have had Marconi?’

  ‘Much too simple. The Marconi system works!’ Ignatzius threw a crust of bread for Flagmansky to chase. Two other dogs seemed to have been adopted by the wardroom now, one a smaller edition of Flagmansky, dachshund-shaped, and the other a smooth fox-terrier puppy. Sollogub told Michael, ‘This German gear is called
Slaby-Arco. Untried, experimental and, according to Bogdanov, bloody useless. Just happens the technical committee in Petersburg plumped for it – for the entire squadron. It’s the Central Administration who issue the contract – and of course one asks oneself who’s paying out how much to whom!’

  ‘But couldn’t the admiral—’

  ‘He’d have had no say in it at all. We’re talking about the Central Administration for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘But to be steaming halfway round the world, and unable to communicate—’

  ‘They may yet get the hang of it.’ Ignatzius crossed his thick fingers. ‘We have German technicians with us, squarehead bastards must be capable of something.’