The Battle of Brittany

No Longer on Duty

Commander Hamilton-Stays walked across the deck and stared out to sea. The mist was rising, settling back and rising again, allowing occasional sight of the shore.

A shore that he didn't know despite twenty years in the Royal Navy. He contemplated that, in maritime terms, it was a stone's throw from England, making it all the more peculiar that it was his first time.

The Commander had a way to deal with the driving wind, leaning into it yet always keeping one foot firmly on deck. You didn't hurry with a wind like this for it would whip you up and throw you neatly overboard, sliding your body down between the waves.

He knew the wind and he knew the waves. He just didn't know the shore.

He wanted to ask how long to go but his pride wouldn't let him. It was the type of question a landlubber would put up between the blasts of wind, wondering if the sailors hurrying about their purpose had heard him; wondering self-consciously until the wind permitted a short and gruff answer. That wasn't his way.

"Be there before dark, Commander" the oldest of the half dozen on deck said. His voice wasn't loud yet seemed to punch through the gale, filling pockets of vacuum with sound, skipping across like skimming stones.

"I thought so," he replied, allowing a little fib. He didn't know this shore, had no way of telling when they would reach Bremarché. "How do you know I'm a commander?"

"You don't remember me, do you, sir?"

Commander Hamilton-Stays had to shake his head and mouth a 'no' while his mind went back over two decades. He had been on so many ships, shared with so many shipmates, always moving on, new comrades, new challenges, new wakes laid across the oceans of the world.

It was the life he had chosen at the age of seventeen. Even with what had happened, would he now choose another?

"Lion, '82." The way the old sailor talked was from another age. He might have been referring to the size of the broadside rather than the year of the war. The year when so much was on a knife edge. HMS Lion had been an antiquated frigate, in the process of being offered to the Chilean navy. It had been his first command. Now it lay at the bottom of the South Atlantic, settling gently on a sloping sandbank so that it listed to port.

Or so he imagined his ship, his charge.

"Bridges!" said the commander, thinking this old sailor was like a bridge to the past, feeling guilty that it was so recent and yet the name hadn't come immediately to mind. So much had happened since then, two years but a lifetime.

This was such a strange setting for a career Royal Navy sailor, hopping from port to port along the French coast rather than ranging out across the oceans.

"Yes sir," Bridges replied, settling for the prompted memory. "Proudly served in the Lion, but now reduced to this old lady."

"She's a serviceable freighter" the commander replied. "We would have been happy to see her steaming by when the Lion went down." The boat's engines gave a spurt of energy at that moment, as if objecting to mention of old-fashioned steam, not accepting it as a figure of speech, words one sailor used to another. The surge of power took the commander by surprise, making him lose his footing and collide with Bridges who somehow remained steady, as if roped to the deck.

"Careful there, sir, steady as she goes."

But nothing had been steady since the Lion had slipped beneath the waves, a magnificent sucking noise as sea displaced air. They were all in the boats by then, revving the engines less they be dragged back to the spiralling water with its peculiar circular gravity.

The Lion had sunk slowly while limping along in the hope of reaching St Helena. The missile had gone clean through the bows, entering on the portside and carrying straight through to starboard. It hadn't exploded but did kill eight with its driving, physical force. Another had skimmed along the stern, causing steel and aluminium to ripple and bow, scars on the once smooth hull.