Killing Ground Read Online Free

thing to do, taken for granted.
    Apart from various training courses in larger warships, he had spent most of his service in destroyers and could visualise nothing else. At the outbreak of war he had hastily taken command of an old V & W class destroyer from the Kaiser’s war, andwithin no time had been involved in the first shattering defeat in France, and the bitterness of Dunkirk.
    Now it seemed a million years ago, the war as different from those early days as Agincourt. Immediately after Dunkirk he was ordered to take his elderly V & W,
Winsby,
into the Battle of the Atlantic. He had been in the same fight ever since, and in command of
Gladiator
for eighteen months. That, too, felt like years.
    He stood up suddenly, light-footed as a cat, and walked to one of the few pictures which hung in the day cabin: the place he could only dream about when he was at sea. His sea cabin on the bridge was little more than a steel cupboard with a narrow bunk and a telephone. When you hit the damp blankets, fully dressed if you had any sense left, you did not sleep; you just died. The place of escape, beyond the anxious eyes on the bridge; away from the heaving grey sea, the pathetic lines of rusty freighters and tankers following like sheep. He smiled bitterly. To the slaughter.
    He reached out and straightened the picture of his first command. Relics from the Great War about which his father rarely spoke, but the V and Ws were excellent sea-boats, and had a sort of jaunty confidence which more than made up for their outdated machinery and overcrowded quarters. Without them, this war might have been lost before it had really begun in earnest.
Winsby
had been a happy ship, although it was becoming harder to remember all the faces, most of whom had been regulars like himself.
    He turned his head to glance through one of the polished scuttles towards the land, and considered how this ship rated now. Every time she entered harbour, for whatever reason, he lost more and more of his skilled hands. Officers too, for promotion or advanced courses to try and keep pace with the war’s mounting ferocity. It took time to train new ones; and when you did they were taken too.
    All ships were like that now. Bakers and postmen, clerks and errand-boys. Only half of the whole ship’s company of onehundred and forty-five souls were old enough to draw their tot. It made you sweat when you found time to think about it.
    He half-listened to the muted beat of a generator deep in the engine-room and pictured the engineer officer, Lieutenant (E) Evan Price, who had been in this ship since before the outbreak of war. What would happen if they took
him?
The ship might fall apart. He smiled and groped for his pipe but it was still in the jacket slung carelessly on the back of a chair.
    His was a young face, which might turn any woman’s head; his dark unruly hair needed cutting badly, something else which Captain (D) would most certainly mention when next they met.
    He stared hard at the glass scuttle, which was streaked with salt like frost, but saw only his reflection. Brown eyes, lines at the corners of his mouth, the haunted look which had not left his face since that last convoy from Newfoundland, and which this brief overhaul, at Leith and here, had failed to disperse.
    Some captains would have gone straight ashore after a convoy like that. To hide in some hotel, to get drunk, to seek the company of some bored tart; anything. But here, in this littleused cabin, was his escape. Hot baths whenever he chose; eating alone; listening to music; pacing the cabin to go over it all again as if to punish himself in some way.
    Forty ships had sailed from St John’s on that terrible convoy. They had been attacked by a complete U-Boat pack when they had barely covered a third of the passage. When they had passed the Liverpool Bar there had been only thirteen left. He had seen it all before, but somehow that convoy had affected him more than anything. A