Decoy by Dudley Pope

Author:Dudley Pope
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-04-26T23:00:00+00:00

never heard of the sea, a few Sten guns greased and wrapped in oiled canvas, a few metal boxes with 'black bangers' sitting in them like emu eggs - this miserable bunch were Britain's champions in the contest against Germany. Hitler had pitted Commodore - no, Admiral, he had recently been promoted - Dönitz and all his U-boats, about five hundred by now, and all his Enigma makers and cipher experts, and electric torpedoes with magnetic pistols which exploded the torpedo when triggered off by a ship's magnetic field, against them. Laughable. Had history juggled the time so that instead of the Armada, Spain sent Don Quixote astride his spavined Rosinante, to be met by the Black Prince on the playing fields of Eton, the whole affair to be reported by Beachcomber? What a one-sided tourney that would have been. Yet as the British crowd prefers supporting the underdog, they'd probably have cheered the Don and hooted so loud against the Black Prince that his charger would have bolted, although his wife Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, would certainly have then gone on to the field and put the crowd to flight.

There was some comfort in thinking about jousting, because the heavy armour must have kept the wind out, and presumably one had armourers ready to clean the armour and polish it after the battle - and grease it, too: a squeaky visor or one which stuck open, exposing one's cowardly grin to swift dentistry from an opponent's sword, could be troublesome.

Knightly combat - now all that was left of it was proof of some of Newton's laws, and phrases used mostly in heraldry. A coat of arms - how many realized that it was originally a way of identifying yourself? A dozen knights in a dozen suits of shining armour sitting on a dozen heavy horses also clad in armour looked as alike as a dozen wine glasses. So each wore a sleeveless silk coat, like the colours a modern jockey wears to distinguish his horse's owner, and on the silk his lady embroidered the arms of his family. Some Yorke forebears five hundred years ago must have pulled on their silken coats of arms, been hoisted up on to their horses (a knight in full armour was done for if he fell: some wretched fellow could creep up, flip open the visor and cut his throat!), raised their lances to their wives or mistresses, and galloped off to find glory or a clangorous end. They certainly never thought that one of their descendants would be pulling down the hood of his duffel coat as he sat in a lifeboat, the tiller tucked under his arm as a vastly foreshortened lance. Gentlemen of England now abed shall think themselves accurs'd . . . Well, perhaps, but he was prepared to swear that the twenty-three gentlemen of England (and Scotland, Wales and Ireland) now in this boat wished they were abed at this moment - as no doubt was Hitler's champion, B der U himself.

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