Wareham Andrew Скачать все книги 4 Количество книг

Peter Naseby is enjoying a leisurely naval career when his ship runs down the Admiral in Command at Portsmouth. On his watch. It is early 1915 and he had been looking forward to joining the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. Now he must accept a posting to obscurity or volunteer for hazardous duty. To save his career, he joins the Blimps of the Royal Naval Air Service – he becomes a Balloonatic. Sat in a flimsy cockpit under 70,000 cubic feet of inflammable hydrogen with a crew of one, a Lewis Gun, and a single bomb, he potters out every day to chase submarines in the English Channel. Occasionally, he catches one. Onshore, he juggles the demands of Josephine, a young English rose, and Charlie, much more of a hothouse flower, while he decides just what his future shall be.

April 1915, and it has become apparent that the war will be neither glorious nor short. England is changing, rapidly in some aspects, and the feuding between military and politicians is just beginning. The three remaining midshipmen, two successful, one disgraced, have survived so far. Simon Sturton is still with the destroyers of the Harwich Patrol, fighting in the unending series of minor actions that keep the Channel open for the troopships to cross to France. Christopher Adams, once the bright star of his year at Dartmouth, is sent from one temporary, insignificant posting to another, mostly in minesweeping trawlers manned by Reservists, managing to find action in the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Richard Baker, a failure at sea, finds his new life in the Army increasingly to his taste, enjoying the social prominence of his VC in London, while he trains his new battalion and takes them back to France.

October 1913 and the St Vincent is in Portsmouth harbour, where four midshipmen have come to the end of their first two-year cruise. Called to Captain Ironside’s cabin, they learn their fate. Three are made sublieutenant, the fourth is pushed out of the Navy, a failure. There was no tolerance in the Royal Navy for weaklings and incompetents who failed to master the basics. They were beaten for every infraction of the rules of seamanship, encouraging them to conform or to get out. Adams, born to the elite, is made sublieutenant and posted to Iron Duke, flagship of the Grand Fleet, and the latest and largest of superdreadnoughts. McDuff goes to Good Hope cruiser bound for the South Atlantic. An old ship, and he had hoped for better, but there were chances to specialise on an armoured cruiser. Sturton, able and slightly maverick, hoped to be sent to another battleship where he could become a gunnery specialist, but instead goes to Sheldrake, a destroyer joining the Mediterranean Fleet. Destroyers were wet, cold, and uncomfortable, but it could be the making of his career. Baker, the failure, had never fit in. He came from the wrong background and was ostracised aboard ship, left on his own to survive the best he could. Rejected by the Navy, he is forced to join the Territorial Army or be disowned by his rich, vulgar father. Nineteen years of age and dumped on the scrapheap. War comes in August and the four young men meet its challenges in surprising ways.

It’s late 1915 and the industrial nations still have not geared up for war. Shortages of munitions leave soldiers hanging on barbed wire in the fields. The war in France is at a stalemate, both sides finding it impossible to advance, and spending tens of thousands of lives on the discovery. Richard Baker is in the front line with his battalion, learning how to fight this new war. While the generals, well behind him, are only focussed on finding a way to let the cavalry loose in another Charge of the Light Brigade, reaching for glory. At sea, Simon Sturton continues to make a name for himself as one of the new breed of destroyermen, while Christopher Adams has overcome his fall from grace sufficiently to be posted to Black Prince cruiser, part of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow in the months leading up to the long-awaited ‘Great Smash’ in the North Sea.