The Steel Tsar Read Free

or twice while I was being pulled from the wreckage, but only really regained my senses when I woke up in St. Mary’s Hospital, Changi, Singapore. I had a few broken bones, which were mending, some minor internal injuries, which had been tended to, and I would soon be recovered, thanks to the Airshipmen’s Distress Fund which had paid for my medical treatment and the period during which I would recuperate.
    I had been lucky. There were only two other survivors. Five more had died in one of the native hospitals to which they had been taken.
    While I rested, somewhat relieved not to be worrying about work and glad to be in Singapore, where there was every chance of finding decent employment, I began to read about the tensions growing between several of the Great Powers. Japan was disputing territory with Russia. The Russians, even though they were now a republic, had quite as much imperial determination as the Japs. However, we knew nothing of the War until the night of 22nd February, 1941: the night of the attack by Japan’s Third Fleet: the night when a British dream of Utopia was destroyed perhaps for ever.
    * * *
    W e were trying to escape what was left of the colony. An ambulance ship was moored to an improvised mast and the vessel all but filled the blackened, ruined grounds of St. Mary’s: a huge airship silhouetted against a sky which was ruby red with the flames of a thousand fires. The scene was surreal. I think of it today as the flight from Sodom and Gomorrah, but in Noah’s Ark! Tiny figures of patients and staff rushed, panic-stricken, into the vessel’s swollen belly while everywhere overhead moved monstrous, implacable Japanese flying ironclads. They had come suddenly, mindless beasts of the upper regions, to seed Singapore with their incendiary spawn.
    Our resistance had been impotent. Far away a few searchlight beams wandered about the sky, sometimes showing a dense cloud of smoke from which could be glimpsed a section of one of the vast aerial men-o’-war. Then the three remaining anti-aircraft guns would boom and send up shells which either missed or exploded harmlessly against the side of the attacking craft. There were several of our monoplanes still buzzing through the blackness at speeds of over four hundred miles an hour, firing uselessly into hulls stronger than steel. They were picked off by tracer bullets shrieking from armoured gun-gondolas. I saw a hovergyro whirl like a frightened humming bird out of the flames, then it, too, was struck by magnesium bullets and went spinning into the flaming chaos below.
    Our ship was not the latest type. Few hospital ships ever were. The cigar-shaped hull protecting the gasbags was of strong boron-fibreglass, but the two-tiered gondola below was more vulnerable. This gondola contained crew and passenger accommodation, engines, fuel and ballast tanks, and into it we were packing as many human beings as we could. I, of course, almost fully recovered, was helping the doctors and medical staff.
    Without much hope of the ship’s being able to get away, I helped carry stretchers up one of the two folding staircases lowered from the bowels of the ship. This in itself was a hard enough task, for the vessel was insecurely anchored and it swayed and strained at the dozen or so steel cables holding it to the ground.
    The last terrified patient was packed in and the last nurses, carrying bundles of blankets and medical supplies, hurried aboard while airmen unpegged the gangways so they could be folded back into the ship. The stairs began to bounce like a cakewalk at a fair as, with the riggers, I managed to climb into the ship, losing my footing several times, shaken so much I felt my body would fall to pieces.
    Suddenly several incendiary bombs struck the hospital at once. The darkness exploded with shouting flame. More bombs burst in the grounds, but incredibly none hit the airship direct. For a moment I was blinded by brilliant silver light and a wave of intense