“I don’t care what anyone says. I have my orders and I did not ask for your opinion of them!” Lieutenant Brinkman thumped his desk with his fist, a gesture too careful for the intended effect. His audience did not mind in the least, would not have changed his placid expression had Brinkman screamed or snored. Sergeant DeGruyter had joined the army long before Brinkman and intended to be still in uniform long after this wet-eared young officer was gone.
“And we are at war with France, besides,” Lieutenant Brinkman thumped the desk again. “I have just had the cable.” A cable brought out to this remote outpost halfway between the Atlantic and nowhere in particular, peddled out in the dusk by a boy on a bicycle. A boy who at any other time would have stayed at home under his mother’s skirts, DeGruyter mused. DeGruyter had never lived anywhere but in the Seven Provinces and had no experience with the armed forces of other nations, but he would have bet money there was no more penny-pinching, old-fashioned and thoroughly screwed-up service than the Dutch army. War declared on France, he thought, and they send a child on a bicycle to tell us.
War made people do crazy things. Or – the idea struggled to climb over the well-worn ruts of thought that passed for DeGruyter’s brain – perhaps people doing crazy things made war. The sergeant wouldn’t know; he had never seen anything more stressful than a parade and the less he saw of them the happier was his too-too-abundant-flesh. The Coastal Artillery suited him; easy service, decent equipment – Krupp 105mm steel rifles, not new but good guns – and a posting far away from official eyes. DeGruyter was living for retirement, had been since the day he joined, and the Coastal Artillery and he were thus perfectly suited to one another.
Krupp 105mm guns, used by the Netherlands Army as mobile coastal defense batteries
“They have dared to insult the dignity of the King! Of the Republic!” Brinkman stared at the shuttered window as if it would open at any moment and reveal the gray and wizened visage of His Majesty King Louis III. “Hmph! The cat is among the turnips! War with France! And Germany, of course – on our side,” Brinkman added hurriedly. “Germany is on our side!”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I don’t see what any of this has to do with us.” Brinkman met his sergeant’s eyes in astonishment. Those round, innocent, guileless eyes – so limpid and clear and… He wrenched his gaze away and gathered up his ire as if to use it to shield himself. He thought DeGruyter had no more wits than a cow, and trying to stare him down was worse than useless. Like peering into an abyss, a man who spent too long looking into the sergeant’s eyes might see something uncomfortable looking back.
“War, you… War! War has to do with us! We are soldiers of His Majesty and we guard a vital waterway! We must man the guns this instant and bar it to the enemy!”
Anton DeGruyter raised a hand as if to argue and then – from long and settled habit – paused to reflect. “Yes, sir, I believe I have the war part, though I cannot understand what issue we have with France. Or they with us, though in the past there was that…” His pause encompassed the entire reign of Louis XIV without being able to say anything about it. “They’ve always seemed like nice enough people, sir.” Even DeGruyter could tell he had wandered far enough afield. “I only meant to ask, sir, why we must close the Scheldt. We are not at war with the Belgies, are we?”
Brinkman’s well-focused thoughts slipped a gear and lurched sideways. “Well. Well! Of course we are! It stands to reason… I mean, we must be… France would… “ He stood abruptly and clutched at the telegram paper. “We are at war, Sergeant! We man the guns for His Majesty, here in his fortress of Ellewoutsdijk. We were sent here by him, for one purpose – to defend our waters! And we are at war and therefore must do so!” A heavy breath, and then another. “This is m… our duty, and we will not shirk it!”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” DeGruyter nodded amiably and Brinkman, knowing the sign, braced himself. “I only was wondering who we were going to shoot at tonight – the French? Or the Belgians? Or both? Or…”
Brinkman clutched at his hair, then snatched his hands down to his sides. “Sergeant! You will call out the men. To man the guns! With ammunition. Real ammunition! Not the training stuff. With flare shells at the mortars.
Any ship attempting to pass up or down the Scheldt will be hailed, and if it does not stop we will fire a warning shot. A shot to miss, Sergeant DeGruyter! Across the bow!” He released his wispy locks and shot DeGruyter a look of black loathing. “That’s the pointy thing at the
front of the ship, Sergeant!”
DeGruyter nodded again, then pursed his lips.
“You have something
else to add, Sergeant DeGruyter?” Brinkman’s voice was brought low so that the men standing guard would not hear any more than they already had, but the menace in it was clear.
“No, Lieutenant. I will go and see to the manning of the batteries now.” There would be no shirking the duty, either, as one might do with a superior who was equally wrong-headed but less energetic than Brinkman. De Gruyter had served in the Army for decades and he had formulated a mental map. Officers were either competent or not, and energetic or not. Competent and energetic he could take, as those men did not stay in the Coastal Artillery for long. Competent and slack was less good as it put more of a burden on subordinates like DeGruyter to keep things running. Incompetent and indolent meant a subordinate could do as little as he liked until the dull superior was booted or promoted – about an equal chance, in DeGruyter’s experience. But incompetent and energetic was
dangerous. Brinkman would give stupid orders and insist they be carried out to the last detail, would come and personally inspect the men and the guns to see that his orders were followed. Brinkman was the sort who would push his men into folly and
never back up.
No, there was nothing for this but to resign or obey, and Sergeant DeGruyter would not let an ass like Hendrik Brinkman run him out of his comfortable cruise to a pension. He and his men and his guns – his! Not Brinkman’s! – might have been rousted out of their comfortable old barracks and shipped off to a provincial town on a sandspit at the end of nowhere, but quit he would not! He found himself outside the little timber structure that housed the fort’s offices, feet proceeding mechanically down the path to the parade ground. Corporal Hooft was smoking a cigar as methodically and with as little evidence of pleasure as ever, a wisp of greasy smoke visible before the man himself could be seen. Hooft appeared shapeless under a rubberized sheet designed for the army, rumor had it, by the King himself, but Hooft was shapeless even when standing at attention in full uniform in broad daylight. He was older than DeGruyter, even, and had risen and fallen many times before settling down at corporal. The sheet was supposed to protect against rain but the men of the seacoast batteries often wore one when the ocean spray was up, or when the weather was foggy or cold. The things were so hot that wearing one left the uniform as wet from sweat as it would have gotten from rain and spray, but they did keep off the cold wet and the chill. Hooft, he had learned, was often cold even in good weather.
“The Lieutenant directs that the batteries be fully manned, right now.” Hooft swore and spat, but so softly that DeGruyter could barely hear him. “Complete loads of live ammunition at each gun, including flare shell at the mortars.” Hooft’s face was expressionless until after the corporal had drawn deeply on his cigar, a face lined and whiskered like a medieval Satan twisting in disgust at the news. “We’re at war, apparently.” Hooft remained silent. “Put two good men on the parapet with binoculars. Men with good lungs – we’re to hail the ships passing and turn them around, then give ‘em a warning shot if they won’t.”
“Can’t turn them around.” Hooft’s voice was gravel ground under iron. “River’s not wide enough. Stupid –“
“Keep yer damned voice down,” DeGruyter said in a soft conversational tone, one he knew from experience would render words incomprehensible to a listener more than ten feet away. “Be just like him to pad-foot out here to make sure his orders get followed. He’s one of the ones that likes to keep
busy, Corporal Hooft. And he don’t like being told what shouldn’t be done – more so if you’re right and he’s wrong. So call up the men to the guns, but do it quiet-like. No drums or bugles.”
“Don’t have a bugler,” Hooft said. “Or a drummer neither, not since Modder…”
“Pay attention to what I’m saying and to what I am leaving unsaid also, Corporal Hooft,” DeGruyter said. Another man’s voice would have had a steely edge; if for DeGruyter it was more of a rusty scrape, Hooft still got the message. He dropped the cigarette and ground it beneath a heel.
“Right, Sergeant. Goin’ now.” Nevertheless he paused. “Van Wyck on the parapet?”
DeGruyter nodded. “That’s a good choice. He’s smart and he knows it, so we’ll let him suffer a bit, for his own good. Put Werder up there too; he was shirkin’ when we brought the guns down.” Hooft grinned, but when DeGruyter didn’t return it the corporal pulled his ratty coat around his thin frame and scuttled away.
The men were turned out without much fuss and soon stood ready beside the six guns of the battery. These were 105mm Krupp rifles on carriages, designed to be easily served and quickly moved to new firing positions. They would have no trouble ranging across the relatively narrow waters of the Scheldt estuary, and their rapid rate of fire would make it possible to lay a curtain of high explosive across the river. Van Wyck and Werder were given binoculars and sent to their posts, one exposed on the brick wall of the old fort and the other atop the seawall at the river. DeGruyter had a sudden, unexpected pang of longing for their old barracks at Den Helder, with its proper signal tower and the rangefinder that had been too heavy and delicate to bring along.
Then there was a half-hour of silence, the men restless in the cold autumn twilight. The river was broad and gleamed with a metallic shine, rippled with serpentine muscle. It was empty, eerily so, and De Gruyter permitted himself a small hope that it would remain so. That hope was dashed by the appearance of a large ship, brightly-lit, its escort of small tugs giving it the appearance of an elderly dowager with small dogs straining at their leashes. Lieutenant Brinkman climbed the crumbling brick steps to the top of the parapet to stand by Van Wyck, then lifted a megaphone and attempted to hail the ship. If anyone heard him they gave no sign.
“Sergeant, fire one warning shot!”
DeGruyter took a look at the angle of the oncoming ship and tilted his head in thought. The slightest deflection would send the shell too far ahead to be seen or plunge it into the body of the vessel. He shook his head dubiously – better to wait a bit longer for the target to be more nearly perpendicular.
“Sergeant! I gave you an order! Fire a warning shot!”
DeGruyter huffed – dangerous, with Brinkman looking on, but he couldn’t help it. A glance at Hooft and the crew swung smoothly into motion. The sergeant made sure his men were not polished enough to be posted overseas, but they knew their drill. The angle of the shot, now… The gun barked, sharp and hard, pneumatic recoil absorbers and a tail spade preventing it from going backwards. Despite every man craning his neck and straining his eyes, the most that could be said for certain was that the shell went… somewhere. An angry motion from Brinkman and number two gun boomed. This time they were more ready or the angle was simply better for a reflection of the waning sunlight and they were able to track the projectile. At the last possible instant it seemed to veer – a breath of wind out over the water, perhaps – and it dove directly into the oncoming ship, plunging deeply along its length before the fuse – the excellent Krupp fuse – detonated.
For an instant, nothing else happened. Then the ship’s whistle sounded, the bellow of a wounded bull, and the tugs put their helms hard over. As the ship began to wheel, Brinkman waved his arms excitedly – he had dropped the megaphone – but over the engines and the steam whistle and the after-effects of the cannon shots, DeGruyter could not make out what he was saying. Hooft evidently had no doubts, for he waved his hat and marked off the volley of guns three through six. The big ship had swung just enough that at least two of the shells went into her side, the others flying off to the far side of the river. DeGruyter dashed up the steps with an agility that would have astounded anyone who had ever served with him, seized the binoculars from Van Wyck’s nerveless hand and screamed to the boy to get to cover. He raised the glasses and swept them right-to-left, taking in the black hull, white upper works and black funnels with what appeared to be dark blue bands. The name on the bow was
Hudson. He could see a flag at the bow but not make out what it was, and the rear of the ship was hidden by its own bulk.
The ship continued to swing and the whistle continued to scream. Now someone was firing rockets from the foredeck, red and blue and white or yellow stars bursting in the darkening sky. Brinkman was pulling at his sleeve, declaring that the enemy was returning fire.
“Don’t be foolish,” DeGruyter said, not regretting the insolence for a second. “Those are distress flares. That ship is American!”
“American! That is not possible!” Brinkman screamed. They looked at each other for a long moment, DeGruyter wordlessly offering the binoculars. Brinkman snatched them up, put them to his eyes and turned just as the next salvo crashed out. The overpressure from gun number one – well, that and the sheer unexpectedness of the shock – tumbled them both off the parapet down into what had been a ditch and was now a muddy marsh. DeGruyter rolled onto his side and stared directly into Brinkman’s face, a mask of shock and horror, bruised from striking himself with the now-lost binoculars. He struggled up the parapet mostly on hands and knees, wanting to scream for Hooft but aware that he had no breath to waste. The guns boomed again and then – how? – incoming shells peppered the plain to the west, one spraying mud and water over number six gun.
He spared a glance over his shoulder as he went over the parapet and down the steps, nearly pitching head over heels on the uneven bricks. Out on the river the tugs were still gamely trying to turn their tow, but the ship had apparently stuck fast. Its own engines were still, the roar of the whistle joined by the banshee shriek of steam being blown off from the boilers. Her windows were still brightly lit though the whole scene was veiled in steam – or was it smoke? It was too dark and DeGruyter was too hurried to see the pockmarks of shell hits in her black side, but the white superstructure had missing windows, and gray and black streaks. Was that a flicker of fire, behind the glass? There were no people to be seen. He assumed they were on the opposite side, since any sensible person would be trying to get away, or at least hide.
He saw the tiniest red dot on the far shore, and as he hurried down the steps he knew. There is another battery on the opposite shore, he thought. We missed the ship and the shells landed there. And now they are shooting back. This madness must stop!
“Hooft!” he bellowed, caroming off a gun-layer. “Hooft! Cease firing! You men! Cease fire! Gun captains, pass the word to cease firing! We are shooting at our own people!” In the uproar he had no idea if anyone could hear him; struggling for breath, he could barely hear himself.
He had a glimpse of Hooft, standing down by number three gun with his perpetual and criminally reckless cigar alit. Then he went down, tangled in his own great stupid feet, and clipped his head on something, and lay very quietly in the dark and noisy night for a timeless while.
The burned out wreck of the Ward Line steamship ‘Hudson’, ashore on the bank of the Scheldt River near Ellewoutsdijk.