Far from shirking the challenge and bemoaning their ill-luck the crew of the Ulysses, that strange and selfless crew of walking zombies whom Nicholls had left behind, welcomed the enemy gladly, even joyfully, for how can one kill an enemy if he does not come to you?
Fear, anxiety, the near-certainty of death-these did not exist.
Home and country, families, wives and sweethearts, were names, only names: they touched a man's mind, these thoughts, touched it and lifted and were gone as if they had never been.
"Tell them," Vallery had said, "tell them they are the best crew God ever gave a captain."
Vallery.
That was what mattered, that and what Vallery had stood for, that something that had been so inseparably a part of that good and kindly man that you never saw it because it was Vallery.
And the crew hoisted the shells, slammed the breeches and squeezed their triggers, men uncaring, men oblivious of anything and everything, except the memory of the man who had died apologising because he had let them down, except the sure knowledge that they could not let Vallery down.
Zombies, but inspired zombies, men above themselves, as men commonly are when they know the next step, the inevitable step has them clear to the top of the far side of the valley...
The first part of the attack was launched against the Stirling.
Turner saw two Heinkels roaring in in a shallow dive, improbably surviving against heavy, concentrated fire at point-blank range.
The bombs, delayed action and armour-piercing, struck the Stirling amidships, just below deck level, and exploded deep inside, in the boiler-room and engineroom.
The next three bombers were met with only pom-pom and Lewis fire: the main armament for'ard had fallen silent.
With sick apprehension, Turner realised what had happened: the explosion had cut the power to the turrets[4].
Ruthlessly, contemptuously almost, the bombers brushed aside the puny opposition: every bomb went home.
The Stirling, Turner saw, was desperately wounded.
She was on fire again, and listing heavily to starboard.
The suddenly lifting crescendo of aero engines spun Turner round to look to his own ship.
There were five Heinkels in the first wave, at different heights and approach angles so as to break up the pattern of A.A. fire, but all converging on the after end of the Ulysses.
There was so much smoke and noise that Turner could only gather confused, broken impressions.
Suddenly, it seemed, the air was filled with glider-bombs and the tearing, staccato crash of the German cannon and guns.
One bomb exploded in mid-air, just for'ard of the after funnel and feet away from it: a maiming, murderous storm of jagged steel scythed across the boat-deck, and all Oerlikons and the pom-poms fell immediately silent, their crews victim to shrapnel or concussion.
Another plunged through the deck and Engineers' Flat and turned the W.T. office into a charnel house.
The remaining two that struck were higher, smashing squarely into 'X' gun-deck and 'X' turret.
The turret was split open around the top and down both sides as by a giant cleaver, and blasted off its mounting, to lie grotesquely across the shattered poop.
Apart from the boat-deck and turret gunners, only one other man lost his life in that attack, but that man was virtually irreplaceable.
Shrapnel from the first bomb had burst a compressed air cylinder in the torpedo workshop, and Hartley, the man who, above all, had become the backbone of the Ulysses had taken shelter there, only seconds before....
The Ulysses was running into dense black smoke, now the Stirling was heavily on fire, her fuel tanks gone.
What happened in the next ten minutes, no one ever knew.
In the smoke and flame and agony, they were moments borrowed from hell and men could only endure.
Suddenly, the Ulysses was out in the clear, and the Heinkels, all bombs gone, were harrying her, attacking her incessantly with cannon and machine-gun, ravening wolves with their victim on its knees, desperate to finish it off.
But still, here and there, a gun fired on the Ulysses.
Just below the bridge, for instance-there was a gun firing there.
Turner risked a quick glance over the side, saw the gunner pumping his tracers into the path of a swooping Heinkel.
And then the Heinkel opened up, and Turner flung himself back, knocking the Kapok Kid to the deck.
Then the bomber was gone and the guns were silent.
Slowly, Turner hoisted himself to his feet, peered over the side: the gunner was dead, his harness cut to ribbons.
He heard a scuffle behind him, saw a slight figure fling off a restraining hand, and climb to the edge of the bridge.
For an instant, Turner saw the pale, staring face of Chrysler, Chrysler who had neither smiled nor even spoken since they had opened up the Asdic cabinet; at the same time he saw three Heinkels forming up to starboard for a fresh attack.
"Get down, you young fool!" Turner shouted. "Do you want to commit suicide?"
Chrysler looked at him, eyes wide and devoid of recognition, looked away and dropped down to the sponson below.
Turner lifted himself to the edge of the bridge and looked down.
Chrysler was struggling with all his slender strength, struggling in a strange and frightening silence, to drag the dead man from his Oerlikon cockpit.
Somehow, with a series of convulsive, despairing jerks, he had him over the side, had laid him gently to the ground, and was climbing into the cockpit.
His hand, Turner saw, was bare and bleeding, stripped to the raw flesh-then out of the corner of his eyes he saw the flame of the HeinkePs guns and flung himself backward.
One second passed, two, three, three seconds during which cannon shells and bullets smashed against the reinforced armour of the bridge, then, as a man in a daze, he heard the twin Oerlikons opening up.
The boy must have held his fire to the very last moment.
Six shots the Oerlikon fired-only six, and a great, grey shape, stricken and smoking, hurtled over the bridge barely at head height, sheared off its port wing on the Director Tower and crashed into the sea on the other side.
Chrysler was still sitting in the cockpit.
His right hand was clutching his left shoulder, a shoulder smashed and shattered by a cannon shell, trying hopelessly to stem the welling arterial blood.
Even as the next bomber straightened out on its strafing run, even as he flung himself backwards, Turner saw the mangled, bloody hand reach out for the trigger grip again.