Battlecruiser (1997) Read Online Free PDF Page A

admiral with royal connections and little else to recommend him, while they had all pulled his leg for missing a chance at proper sea-duty.
    As he had been in London, it was strange that he had not turned up at the funeral of his own flag captain.
    He heard Long humming to himself, and the cheerful rattle of yet another tray.
    Tomorrow was Sunday. He examined his feelings. There would be Divisions;
Reliant
even carried her own chaplain, the Reverend Beveridge. Sherbrooke had already heard that he was nicknamed ‘Horlicks’ by the lower deck.
    It would be the first real test. All those faces, watching, assessing him, considering how they might be affected by the man who stood alone before them, under the scrutiny of thousands of eyes. And in the afternoon, the rear-admiral would come aboard.
    ‘Ready, sir?’
    Sherbrooke touched the ship’s crest.
We will never give in.
It was somehow apt.
    He looked at the tray. There was a bottle of wine on it, opened and ready.
    Long shrugged glumly. ‘From the wardroom, sir. Welcome aboard.’
    Sherbrooke sat down, and tried not to watch as the balding steward poured.
    It was a small thing: it might even have been only Frazier’s personal gesture. But to the new captain, as he raised his glass to the ship’s crest, it meant everything.
    Any visitor or guest in
Reliant
’s wardroom would usually receive a first impression of size, and an austere dignity. But, like all ships of war, the wardroom had severalpersonalities, rarely seen by strangers or the casual observer. Rowdy mess nights when the young bloods went wild, turning the place into a mock battlefield or practising field-gun drill, with chairs and anything else movable used to charge across tables laid down as barricades. The aftermath of huge mess bills and punishing hangovers acted as some deterrent, until the next time. Birthdays and engagements, toasts to scarcely remembered victories, and to lost friends too soon forgotten. And those other grim times at sea, when this same wardroom became a hospital for sick and wounded, men picked up from yet another butchered convoy. Men burned and poisoned with fuel oil, men without hope, and beyond fear. A different face.
    But Sunday in harbour showed the other side. It was, after all, rare enough.
    Officers who might be seen only occasionally, because of their varied watchkeeping schedules or their stations deep in the hull or behind armour plate, were free on this one day to meet and share an hour or so of normality: men who were scarcely recognizable in their best uniforms and dazzlingly clean white shirts, instead of the usual scuffed Wellington boots, grey flannel trousers, and old seagoing reefer jackets, with rank markings so tarnished and worn by salt and wind that they often looked like survivors themselves.
    The stewards, too, were different on Sundays, bustling around amongst the various groups with a quiet efficiency reminiscent of some pre-war hotel.
    One corner of the wardroom retained a semblance of privacy because of what appeared to be a curved pillar, like a partition. It was, in fact, the casing of a shell-hoist, which led directly from one of the lower magazines to a triple four-inch gun mounting on the after superstructure,far above the din of voices and the enclosing fog of pipe and cigarette smoke.
    Any member of the wardroom mess, no matter how senior or lowly, was entitled to sit anywhere he liked, except on special occasions. Officially, the mess was democratic. But this particular space, known to
Reliant
’s officers as
The Club
, was, unofficially, for the ship’s senior officers, the heads of departments, where they could sit, talk, drink and complain, without any chance of a word being overheard or misinterpreted.
    In a corner, close to a sealed scuttle, one armchair was occupied by Commander (E) Hugh Onslow, ‘the Chief’ as he was known here, as in most ships. He was a large, heavy man with a round, jowled face, and bushy eyebrows which were almost