Sea-Hounds
by Lewis R. Freeman · English · Gutenberg #33438 · 457,070 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Sea-Hounds
Author: Lewis R. Freeman
Release date: August 15, 2010 [eBook #33438]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEA-HOUNDS ***
Produced by Greg Bergquist, David J. Cole and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
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SEA-HOUNDS
[Illustration: BRITISH BATTLE-SHIPS ON PATROL]
SEA-HOUNDS
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN
Lieut. R.N.V.R.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1919
PUBLISHED IN THE U.S.A 1919
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
=To=
Commodore Sir DOUGLAS BROWNRIGG, Bart.
C.B., R.N., Chief Censor, Admiralty
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE MEN WHO CHANGED SHIPS 1
II "FIREBRAND" 35
III "BACK FROM THE JAWS" 59
IV HUNTING 82
V THE CONVOY GAME 112
VI YANK BOAT _VERSUS_ U-BOAT 135
VII ADRIATIC PATROL 157
VIII PATROL 173
IX "Q" 199
X THE _WHACK_ AND THE _SMACK_ 232
XI BOMBED! 250
XII AGAINST ODDS 268
XIII ROUNDING UP FRITZ 287
ILLUSTRATIONS
British Battleships on Patrol _Frontispiece_
PAGE
German Shells Striking the Water at the Battle of Jutland 12
A Broadside at Night at the Battle of Jutland 12
"Kamerading" with Uplifted Paws 90
Helping the Cook to Peel Potatoes 90
Where the Great Liner Plowed Along 128
We Had Collided with the "Brick Wall" 128
Now She Was Back at Base 128
A Limit to the Number of "Cans" a Destroyer Can Carry 152
A Depth Charge 188
Disabled Destroyer in Tow 188
The Lookout on a Destroyer, and Part of His View 242
She Came Bowling Along Under Sail 284
SEA HOUNDS
CHAPTER I
THE MEN WHO CHANGED SHIPS
Between the lighter-load of burning beeves that came bumping down along
their line at noon, a salvo of bombs slapped across them at one o'clock
from a raiding Bulgar air squadron, a violent Levantine squall which all
but broke them loose from their moorings at sundown, and a signal to
raise steam for full speed with all dispatch at midnight, it had been a
rather exciting twelve hours for the destroyers of the First Division of
the ----th Flotilla, and now, when at dawn the expected order to proceed
to sea was received, it began to look as though there might be still
further excitement in pickle down beyond the horizontal blur where the
receding wall of the paling purple night-mist was uncovering the Gulf's
hard, flat floor of polished indigo.
"It's probably the same old thing," said the captain of the _Spark_,
repressing a yawn after he had given the quartermaster his course to
enter the labyrinthine passage where puffing trawlers were towing back
the gates of the buoyed barrages, "a U-boat or two making a bluff at
attacking a convoy. They've been sinking a good deal more than we can
afford to lose; last week they got an oiler and another ship with the
whole summer's supply of mosquito-netting aboard--but that was off the
south peninsula of Greece or up Malta way. Here they haven't more than
'demonstrated' about the mouth of the Gulf for two or three months. They
know jolly well that if they once come inside, no matter if they do sink
a ship or two, that it's a hundred to one--between sea-planes, 'blimps,'
P.B.s, and destroyers--against their ever getting out again. There's
just a chance that they may try it this time, though, for they must know
how terribly short the whole Salonika force is of petrol, and what a
real mess things will be left in if they can pot even one of the two or
three oilers in this convoy. You'll see a merry chase with a kill at the
end of it if they do, I can promise you, for the convoy is beyond the
neck of the bag even now, and if a single Fritz has come in after them,
the string will be pulled and the rest of the game will be played out
here in the 'bull-ring.'"
The captain had just started telling me how the game was played, when
the W.T.[A] room called him on the voice-pipe to say that one of the
ships of the convoy had just been torpedoed and was about to sink, and
shortly afterwards a radio was received from the C.-in-C. ordering the
flotilla to proceed to hunt the submarine responsible for the trouble.
Then the officer commanding the division leader flashed his orders by
"visual" to the several units of the flotilla, and presently these were
spreading fan-wise to sweep southward toward where, sixty to a hundred
miles away, numerous drifters would be dropping mile after mile of light
nets across the straits leading out to the open Mediterranean.
Northeastward, where the rising sun was beginning to prick into vivid
whiteness the tents of the great hospital areas, several sea-planes were
circling upwards; and southeastward, above the dry brown hills of the
Cassandra peninsula, the silver bag of an air-ship floated across the
sky like a soaring tumble bug. The hounds of the sea and air had begun
to stalk their quarry.
[Footnote A: Wireless Telegraph]
"It's a biggish sort of a place to hunt over," said the captain, as the
_Spark_ stood away on a course that formed the outside left rib of the
flotilla's "fan," and took her in to skirt the rocky coast of Cassandra;
"and there's so many in the hunt that the chances are all in favour of
some other fellow getting the brush instead of you. And unless we have
the luck to do some of the flushing ourselves, I won't promise you that
the whole show won't prove no end of a bore; and even if we do scare him
up--well, there are a good many more exciting things than dropping
'ash-cans' on a frightened Fritzie. It won't be a circumstance, for
instance, to that rough house we ran into at the 'White Tower' last
night when that boxful of French 'blue-devils' wouldn't stop singing
'Madelon' when the couchee-couchee dancer's turn began, and her friend,
the Russian colonel in the next box, started to dissolve the Entente
by----"
The captain broke off suddenly and set the alarm bell going as a
lynx-eyed lookout cut in with "Connin' tower o' submreen three points on
port bow," and, with much banging of boots on steel decks and ladders,
the ship had gone to "Action Stations" before a leisurely mounting
recognition rocket revealed the fact that the "enemy" was a friend,
doubtless a "co-huntress."
Although we were still far from where there was yet any chance of
encountering the U-boat which had attacked the convoy, there were two or
three alarms in the course of the next hour. The first was when we
altered our course to avoid a torpedo reported as running to strike our
port bow, to discover an instant later that the doughty _Spark_ was
turning away from a gambolling porpoise. The second was when some kind
of a long-necked sea-bird rose from a dive about two hundred yards on
the starboard beam and created an effect so like a finger-periscope with
its following "feather" that it drew a shell from the foremost gun which
all but blew it out of the water. It was my remarking the smartness with
which this gun was served that led the captain, when a floating mine was
reported a few minutes later, to order that sinister menace to be
destroyed by shell-fire rather than, as usual, by shots from a rifle.
All the guns which would bear were given an even start in the race to
hit the wickedly horned hemisphere as we brought it abeam at a range of
six or eight hundred yards; but the lean, keen crew of the pet on the
forecastle--splashing the target with their first shot and detonating it
with their second--won in a walk and left the others nothing but a
hundred-feet-high geyser of smoke-streaked spray tumbling above a heart
of flame to pump their tardier shells into.
The captain gazed down with a smile of affectionate pride to where the
winners, having trained their gun back amidships, were wiping its smoky
nose, sponging out its mouth, polishing its sleek barrel, and patting
its shiny breech, for all the world as though they were grooms and
stable-boys and jockeys performing similar services for the Derby winner
just led back to his stall.
"There's not another such four-inch gun's crew as that one in any ship
in the Mediterranean," he said, "which makes it all the greater pity
that they have never once had a chance to fire a shot at anything of the
enemy's any larger than that Bulgar bombing plane they cocked up and
took a pot at after he had gone over yesterday. I mean that they never
had a chance as a crew. Individually, I believe there are two or three
of them that have been through some of the hottest shows in the war.
That slender chap there in the blue overall was in the _Killarney_ when
she was shot to pieces and sunk by German cruisers at Jutland, and I
believe his Number Two--that one in a singlet, with his sleeves rolled
up and just a bit of a limp--was in the _Seagull_ when she was rammed,
right in the middle of an action with the Huns, by both the _Bow_ and
the _Wreath_. A number of ratings from the _Seagull_ clambered over the
forecastle of the _Bow_ while the two were locked together, evidently
because they thought their own ship was going down, while two or three
men from the _Bow_ were thrown by the force of the collision on to the
_Seagull_. When the two broke loose and drifted apart men from each of
them were left on the other, and by a rather interesting coincidence, we
have right here in the _Spark_ at this moment representatives of both
batches. They, with two or three other Jutland 'veterans' who chance
also to be in the _Spark_, call themselves the 'Black Marias.' Just why,
I'm not quite sure, but I believe it has something to do with their all
being finally picked up by one destroyer and carried back to harbour
like a lot of drunks after a night's spree. And, to hear them talk of it
when they get together, that is the spirit in which they affect to
regard a phase of the Jutland battle which wiped out some scores of
their mates and two or three of the destroyers of their flotilla.
Talking with one of them alone, he will occasionally condescend to speak
of the serious side of the show, but their joint reminiscences, in the
constant by-play of banter, are more suggestive of tumultuous 'nights of
gladness' on the beach at Port Said or Rio than the most murderous spasm
of night fighting in the whose course of naval history. You've got a
long and probably tiresome day ahead of you. Perhaps it might ease the
monotony a bit if you had a yarn with two or three of them. They'll be
bored stiff standing by in this blazing sun with small prospects of
anything turning up, and probably easier to draw out than at most times.
Gains, there by the foremost gun, would be a good one for a starter.
There is no doubt of his having seen some minutes of the real thing in
the _Killarney_. Only don't try a frontal attack on him. Just saunter
along and start talking about anything else on earth than Jutland and
the _Killarney_, and then lead him round by degrees."
* * * * *
We were just passing the riven wreck of a large freighter as I sidled
inconsequently along to the forecastle, and the strange way in which the
stern appeared to be stirring to the barely perceptible swell gave ample
excuse for turning to the crew of the foremost gun for a possible
explanation. It was Leading Seaman Gains, as incisive of speech as he
was quick of movement, who replied, and I recognized him at once as a
youth of force and personality, one of the type to whom the broadened
opportunities for quick promotion offered the Lower Deck through the
war has given a new outlook on life.
"She was a tramp with a cargo of American mules for the Serbs, sir," he
said, "and she was submarined two or three miles off shore. The mouldie
cracked her up amidships, but her back didn't break till she grounded on
that sand spit there. At first her stern sank till her poop was awash at
high tide--there's only a few feet rise and fall here, as you probably
know, sir--but when the bodies of the mules that had been drowned 'tween
decks began to swell they blocked up all the holes and finally generated
so much gas that the increased buoyancy lifted the keel of the stern
half clear of the bottom and left it free to move with the seas. I have
heard they intend to blow out her bottom and sink her proper for fear
that end of her might float off in a storm and turn derelict."
That story was, as I learned later, substantially true, but it had just
enough of the fantastic in it to tempt the twinkling eyed "Number Two"
to a bit of embroidery on his own account. He was the one with the
muscular forearms and the slight limp. The suggestion of "New World"
accent in his speech was traceable, he subsequently told me, to the many
years he had spent on the Esquimault station in British Columbia.
"They do say, sir," he said solemnly, rubbing hard at an imaginary patch
of inferior refulgency on the shining breech of his gun, "that she's
that light and jumpy with mule-gas, after the sun's been beating on her
poop all day, that she lifts right up in the air and tugs at her
moorings like a kite balloon. And there's one buzz winging round that
they're going to run a pipe-line to her end and use the gas for
inflating----"
Gains, evidently feeling that there were limits to which the credulity
of a landsman should be imposed upon, cut in coldly and crushingly with:
"She's not the only old wreck 'round here that they could draw on for
'mule-gas' if there's ever need of it, my boy; and as for her rising
under her own power--well, if she ever goes as far as you did under
yours the night you jumped from the _Seagull_ to the _Bow_ I'll----"
The gusty guffaw that drowned the rest of Gains' broadside left us
all on good terms, and, by a happy chance, with the "Jutland ice"
already broken. Number Two, joining heartily in the laugh, said that,
"nifty" as was his jump from the _Seagull_ to the _Bow_, it wasn't a
"starter" to the "double back-action-summerset" with which Jock
Campbell was chucked from the _Bow_ to the _Seagull_. "We played a
sort of 'Pussy-Wants-a-Corner' exchange, Jock and me," he said, "for
Jock was Number Four or 'Trainer' of the crew of one of the fo'c'sle
guns of the _Bow_, and I was the same in the _Seagull_. We didn't
quite land in each other's place when the wallop came, but it wasn't
far from it; and we each finished the scrap in the other guy's ship.
You might pike aft and try to get a yarn out of Jock when 'Pack up!'
sounds. He's a close-mouthed tyke, though, and if you can get him to
tell how he played the human proj, you'll be doing more'n anyone else
has been able to pull off down to now. He's half clam and half sphinx,
I think Jock is, and that makes a 'dour lad' when crossed with a
'Glasgie' strain. Which makes it all the sadder to have him qualify
for membership in the 'Black Marias,' and me, because I finished in
the _Bow_, froze out."
I told him that I would gladly have a try at Jock later, provided only
that he would first tell me what happened in his own case, adding that
it wasn't every British sailor who could claim the distinction of
fighting the Hun from two different ships within the hour.
"It would have been a darned sight better for me if I'd confined my
fighting to _one_ ship," he replied with a wry smile, "and it was mighty
little fighting I got out of it anyhow. But sure, I'll tell you what I
saw of the fracas, and then you can take a chance at Jock. It was along
toward midnight, and the _Seagull_ was steaming in 'line ahead' with her
half of the flotilla. The _Killarney_ and _Firebrand_ was leading us,
with the _Wreath_ and one or two others astern. I was at 'action
station' with the crew of the foremost gun, and keeping my eye peeled
all round, for some of the ships astern had just been popping away at
some Hun destroyers they had reported. All of a sudden I saw the
officers on the bridge peering out to starboard, and there, coming up
astern of us and steering a converging course, I saw the first, and
right after, the second and third, of a line of some big lumping
ships--some kind of cruisers. All of the flotilla must have thought they
was our own ships, for no one challenged or fired all the time they came
drawing up past us, making four or five knots more than the seventeen we
were doing.
"When the leader was about abreast the _Killarney_ and inside of half a
mile range, she flashed on some red and green lights, switched on her
searchlights and opened fire. Ship for ship, the Huns were just about
even with our line now, and the _Firebrand_ and _Seagull_ must have
launched mouldies at the second and third cruisers at near the same
moment. Hitting at that range ships running on parallel courses was a
cinch, and both slugs slipped home. It was some sight, those two spouts
of fire and smoke shooting up together, and by the light of 'em I could
see that the _Firebrand's_ bag was a four-funneller, and ours a three.
The first one keeled right over and began to sink at once, but the one
our mouldie hit went staggering on, though down by the stern and with a
heavy list to port.
"We would sure have put the kibosh on this one with the next torpedo if
we hadn't had to turn sharp to port to avoid the _Killarney_ just then,
and so missed our last chance to do something in 'the Great War.' I lost
sight of the _Firebrand_ and took it for granted she had been blown up.
It was not till a week afterwards that we learned she had turned the
other way, engaged one Hun cruiser with gunfire, rammed another, just
missed being rammed by a third, and finally crawled into port under her
own steam.
"The _Seagull_ came under the searchlights of the leading Hun cruiser
for a few seconds as she came up abreast of the burning _Killarney_, and
then the smoke and steam cut off the beam and I was blind as a bat for a
minute. The _Killarney_ had been left astern when I looked for her
again, and seemed all in, with fires all over her and only one gun
yapping away on her quarter-deck. I didn't know it at the time, but it
was my old college friend, Gains, here, who was passing the projes, for
that pert little piece. You'd never think it to look at him, would you?"
Gains, feigning to discover something which needed adjustment in the
training mechanism, ducked his head behind the breech of his gun at this
juncture, and did not bob up again until a resumption of the yarn
deflected the centre of interest back to Number Two.
[Illustration: GERMAN SHELLS STRIKING THE WATER AT THE BATTLE OF
JUTLAND]
[Illustration: A BROADSIDE AT NIGHT AT THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND]
"Turning to port took us over into the line of the other Division, and
the first thing I knew the _Seagull_ had poked in and taken station
astern of the _Bow_, which was leading it. Just then some Hun
ship, I think it was the same one that strafed the _Killarney_, opened
on the _Bow_ from starboard, the bursting shell splashing all over her
from the funnels right for'ard. _Bow_ turned sharp to port to try to
shake off the searchlights, and _Seagull_ altered at same time to keep
from turning in her wake and running into the shells she was
side-stepping. All of a sudden I saw another destroyer steering right
across our bows, and to keep from ramming her the captain altered back
to starboard. That cleared her stern by an eyelash, but the next second
I saw that it was now only a question of whether _Seagull_ would ram
_Bow_, or _Bow_ would ram _Seagull_. How a dished and done-for
quartermaster, falling across his wheel as he died, decided it in favour
of _Bow_ I did not learn till later.
"The Hun shells were tearing up the water astern of the _Bow_ for half a
minute as she began to close us; then they stopped, and the smash came
at the end of five or ten seconds of dead quiet. It was pitchy dark,
with the flicker of fires on the deck of the _Bow_ making trembly red
splotches in the smoke and steam. A sight I saw by the light of one of
those fires just before the wallop is my main memory of all the hell I
saw in the next quarter hour. It has lasted just as if it was burned
into my brain with a hot iron, and it figures in one way or other in
every nightmare I've had since."
The humorous twinkle in the corner of the man's eye, which had persisted
during all of his recital up to this point, suddenly died out, and he
was staring into nothingness straight ahead of him, where the picture
his memory conjured up seemed to hang in projection.
"It was just before we struck," he went on, speaking slowly, and in an
awed voice strangely in contrast to the rather bantering tone he had
affected before; "and the bows of the _Bow_ were only ten or fifteen
yards off, driving down on us in the middle of the double wave of
greeny-grey foam they were throwing on both sides. By the light of a
fire burning in the wreck of her bridge I saw a lot of bodies lying
round on her fo'c'sl', and right then one of them picked itself up and
stood on its feet. It was a whole man from the chest up, and from a bit
below the waist down, but--for all that I could see--nothing between. Of
course, there must have been an unbroken backbone to make a frame that
would stand up at all, but all the shot-away part was in shadow, so I
saw nothing from the chest to the hips. It was just as if the head and
shoulders were floating in the air. I remember 'specially that it held
its cap crushed tight in one of its hands. The face had a kind of a calm
look on it at first. Then it turned down and seemed to look at what was
gone, and I could see the mouth open as if to holler. Then the crash
came, and I didn't see it again till they were stitching it up in canvas
with a fire-bar before dropping it overside the next day. I learned then
that an 8-inch shell had done the trick--rather a big order for one man
to try to stop."
He took a deep breath, blinked once or twice as though to shut out the
gruesome vision, and when he resumed the corners of a sheepish grin were
cutting into and erasing the lines of horror that had come to his face
in describing it.
"There's no use of my claiming that I was thrown over to the _Bow_ by
the shock," he continued, the twinkle flickering up in his eye again,
"like Jock was pitched over to the _Seagull_. That _did_ happen to three
or four ratings from the _Seagull_, though, one signalman and a chap
standing look-out being chucked all the way from the fore bridge. But in
the case of most of the twenty-three of us who found ourselves adorning
the _Bow's_ fo'c'sl' when the ships broke away, it was the result of a
'flap' started by some ijits yelling that we were cut in two and going
down. What was more natural, then, with the _Bow_ looming up there big
and solid--she was a good sight larger than the _Gull_--that the 'rats'
should leave the sinking ship for one that looked like she might go on
floating for a while. I'm not trying to make an excuse for what
happened, but only explaining it. The Lord knows we paid a big enough
price for it, anyhow.
"The _Bow_ hit us like a thousand o' bricks just before the bridge, and
cut more than half-way through to the port side. The shock seemed to
knock the deck right out from under my feet, and I was slammed hard
against the starboard wire rail, which must have kept me from being
ditched then and there. A lot of the wreckage from the _Bow's_ shot-up
bridge showered down on the _Seagull's_ fo'c'sl', but my friend, Jock
Campbell, floated down on the side toward the bridge, so I had no chance
to welcome him. From where I was when I pulled up to my feet, it looked
as if the _Bow_ only lacked a few feet from cutting all the way through
us, and as soon as I saw her screws beating up the sea as she tried to
go astern, I had the feeling that the whole fo'c'sl' of the _Gull_ must
break off and sink as soon as the 'plug' was pulled out. I was still
sitting tight, though, when that howl started that we were already
breaking off and going down, and--well, I joined the rush, and it was
just as easy as stepping from a launch to the side of a quay. I'm not
trying to make out a case for anybody, but the little bunch of us who
climbed to the _Bow_ from that half-cut-off fo'c'sl' sure had more
excuse than them that swarmed over from aft and leaving the main solid
lump of the ship. But we none of us had no business clambering off till
we were ordered. In doing that we were only asking for trouble, and we
sure got it.
"The fo'c'sl' of the _Bow_ was all buckled up in waves from the
collision, and there was a slipperiness underfoot that I twigged didn't
come from sea water just as soon as I stumbled over the bodies lying
round the wreck of the port foremost gun where I climbed over. We
couldn't get aft very well on account of the smashed bridge, and so the
bunch of us just huddled up there like a lot of sheep, waiting for some
one to tell us what to do. The captain had already left the bridge and
was conning her from aft--or possibly the engine-room--at this time.
From the way she was shaking and swinging, I knew they were trying to
worry her nose out, putting the engines astern, now one and now the
other. The clanking and the grinding was something fierce, but pretty
soon she began to back clear.
"It was just a minute or two before the _Bow_ tore free from her that
the poor old _Gull_ got the wallop that was finally responsible for
doing her in. This was from a destroyer that came charging up out of the
night and wasn't able to turn in time to clear the _Gull's_ stern, with
the result that she went right through it. Her sharp stem slashed
through the quarterdeck like it was cutting bully beef, slicing five or
ten feet of it clean off, so that it fell clear and sank. The jar of it
ran through the whole length of the _Seagull_, and I felt the quick kick
of it even in the _Bow_. In fact, I think the shock of this second
collision was the thing that finally broke them clear of the first, for
it was just after that I saw the wreck of the _Seagull's_ bridge begin
to slide away along the _Bow's_ starboard bow, as what was left of it
wriggled clear.
"It wasn't much of a look I had at this last destroyer, but I had a
hunch even then that she was the _Wreath_, who had been our next astern.
It wasn't till a long time afterward that I learned for certain that
this was a fact. The _Wreath_ had followed us out of line when we turned
to clear the stopped and burning _Killarney_, and then, when we messed
up with the _Bow_, not having time to go round, she had to take a short
cut through the tail feathers of the poor old _Seagull_. Then she tore
right on hell-for-leather hunting for Huns, for it's each ship for
herself and the devil take the hind-most in the destroyer game more than
in any other.
"I saw the water boiling into the hole in the side of the _Seagull_ as
the _Bow_ backed away, and expected every minute to see the for'rard end
of her break off and sink. But beyond settling down a lot by the head,
she still held together and still floated. Bulkheads fore and aft were
holding, it looked like, and there was still enough 'ship' left to carry
on with. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the blurred wreck of
her begin to gather stern way. But it was a fact. Though her rudder, of
course, was smashed or carried away, and though she couldn't go ahead
without breaking in two, she was still able to move through the water,
and perhaps even to steer a rough sort of course with her screws. As it
turned out, it wouldn't have made no difference whether we was in her or
no; but just the same it was blooming awful, standing there and knowing
that you'd left her while she still had a kick in her. The ragged line
where some of the wrecked stern of her showed against the phosphorescent
glow of the churn of her screws--that was my good-bye peep at all that
was left of the good old _Seagull_. Gains here, or Jock Campbell, can
tell you what her finish was. I don't like to talk about it.
"Some of us tried to get aft as soon as we were clear of the _Seagull_,
but couldn't make the grade over the wreck of the bridge. As all the
officers and men who had been there had either been killed or wounded,
or had gone to the after steering position they were now conning her
from, we were as much cut off from them as though we were on another
craft altogether. All the crews of her fo'c'sl' guns--or such of them as
were still alive--were in the same fix. So we just bunched up there in
the dark and waited. Some of the wounded were in beastly shape, but
there wasn't much to be done for them, even in the way of first aid.
Some shipmates of other times drifted together in the darkness, and I
remember 'specially--it was while I was trying to tie up some guy's
scalp with the sleeve of my shirt--hearing one of them telling another
of a wool mat he had just made, all with ravellings from 'Harry
Freeman.'[B] Funny how it's the little things like that a man
remembers. The gunner whose head I bound up was telling me just how the
_Bow_ happened to be strafed, but it went in one ear and out of the
other.
[Footnote B: The bluejackets' name for knitted woollen gifts from
friends on the beach.]
"But the queerest thing was me hearing some guy lying all messed up on
the deck muttering something about _skookum kluches_, and some more
Chinook _wa-wa_ that I knew he couldn't have picked up anywhere else but
from serving in a 'T.B.D.' working up and down the old Inland Passage
from Vancouver Island. I felt my way to where he was huddled up in the
wreck of a smashed gun, told him that I was another _tilicum_ from the
'Squimalt Base, and asked him what ship he had been there in. I knew
there was a good chance that we'd been mates in the old _Virago_, and
there even seemed a familiar sound to his voice. But I wasn't fated ever
to find out. He just kept on muttering, slipping up on some words as if
something was wrong with his mouth, and I didn't dare light a match, of
course. When I tried to ease him up a bit by lifting so he'd lie
straight--well, all of him didn't seem to come along when I started
dragging by his shoulders. I never did find what was wrong with him, for
right then new troubles of my own set in.
"I was still down on my knees trying to locate what was missing with
this poor guy, when--out of the corner of my eye, for it was near behind
me--I spotted the flash of a ship challenging. _Bow_ challenged
back--from somewhere aft--and then what I piped at once for a Hun
destroyer switched on searchlights and opened fire. She was about two
cables off on our port quarter, heading right for us and blazing away
with one or two guns, probably all that would bear on that course. A
second destroyer, right astern her, didn't seem to be firing. I heard
the bang and saw the flash of two or three shells bursting somewhere
amidships, and then the _Bow's_ port after gun began to reply. The crews
of all the others were knocked out, and so were the searchlights.
"Between the twenty-three from the _Seagull_ and what were left of the
_Bow's_ fo'c'sl' guns' crews, there must have been thirty-five to forty
men bunched together there for'rard of the wreck of the bridge. When the
firing started, the whole kaboodle of us did what you're always under
orders to do when you have nothing to stand up for--laid down. Or,
rather, we just tumbled into a heap like a pile of dead rabbits.
"I went sprawling over the poor devil I was trying to help, and there
were two or three on top of me. Into that squirming hump of human flesh
one of the Hun's projes landed kerplump. It didn't hit me at all, that
one, but I can feel yet the kind of heave the whole bunch gave as it
ploughed through. Then it was like warm water was being thrown on the
pile in buckets, but it wasn't till I had scrambled out and found it
sticky that I twigged it was blood.
"Bad as it was, it might have been a lot worse. There hadn't been enough
resistance to explode the proj, and so it killed only four or five and
wounded, maybe, twice that, where it would have scoured every man jack
of us into the sea and Kingdom Come if it had gone off. The next one
found something in the wreck of the bridge hard enough to crack it off
though, and it was a ragged scrap of its casing that drove in to the
point of my hip and put a kink in my rolling gait that I've never quite
shaken out yet. It wasn't much of a hurt to what it gave some, though,
'specially a lad that caught the main kick of it and got ditched to
starboard, some of him going under the wire rail, and some over.
"The Huns couldn't have known how down and out the _Bow_ really was, for
there was nothing in the world but that one port gun to prevent their
closing and polishing her off. The chances are they recognised her
class, knew she was more than a match for the pair of them if she was
right, and were glad to get off with no more'n an exchange of shots in
passing. That was the end of the fighting for the _Bow_, and about time,
too. Her bows were stove in, all the fore part of her was full of water,
her bridge was smashed and useless, her W.T. and searchlights were
finished, all but one gun was out of action, and--when they came to
count noses next day--forty-two of her crew were dead. Far from looking
for more trouble, it was now only a question of making harbour, and
even that--as it turned out--was touch-and-go for two days.
"It was about one in the morning when that brush with the destroyers
came off, and after that there was nothing to do but hang on till
daylight and they could clear a way to reach us from abaft the wreckage
of the bridge. It was pretty awful, ticking off the minutes there in the
darkness. A good many of the worst knocked about were talking a bit
wild, but I never heard the guy with the Chinook _wa-wa_ again. He must
have died and been pitched over while I was being bandaged up. I _did_
hear the 'wool-mat-maker' yapping again, though, saying how 'target
cloth' was better to work on than canvas, and describing how to pull the
stuff through in a loose loop, and then cut them so that they bunched up
in 'soft, puffy balls.' Seems like I was cussing him when I dropped off
to sleep.
"I must have bled a good deal, for I slept like a log for four or five
hours, and woke up only when some one turned me over and began to finger
my hip. It was broad daylight, but hazy, and the sun just showing
through. Some of the wounded had already been carried aft, and they were
mostly dead ones that were lying around. These were being sewed up in
canvas to get ready to bury. I thought there was something familiar in
the face of one guy I saw them laying out and sort of collecting
together, but it wasn't till later that it suddenly came to me that he
was the one I had seen by firelight when he stood up and looked at
himself where he'd been shot in two.
"The two guys who bundled me up in a 'Neil Robertson' stretcher and
packed me aft, picking their way over and through the wreckage, were
both all bound up with rags, and so was about every one else I saw. They
took me below into the wardroom, and then, because that was full up, on
to some officer's cabin, where they found a place for me on the deck.
After a while, a little dark guy--he was also a good deal bandaged, and
so splashed with blood that I didn't notice at the time he was a sick
bay steward--came in, washed my wound out with some dope that smarted
like the devil, and tied it up. He worked like a streak of greased
lightning, and then went on to some one else. That chap was Pridmore,
and, let me tell you, he was the real 'top-liner' of all the heroes of
the _Bow_. The surgeon had been killed at the first salvo the night
before, leaving no one but him to carry on through all the hell that
followed. And some way--God knows how--he did it; yes, even though he
was wounded three or four times himself, and though he had to go without
sleep for more'n two days to find time to dress and tend the thirty or
forty crocks he had on his hands. He was sure the star turn, that
Pridmore, and I was glad to read the other day that they had given him
the D.S.M. Not that he'd have all he deserved if they hung medals all
over him; but--well, a guy likes to have something to show that what
he's done hasn't been lost in the shuffle entirely."
I made an entry of "Pridmore, sick bay steward, _Bow_," in my notebook
for future reference, and as I was returning it to my pocket a sudden
list to starboard, accompanied by a throbbing grind of the helm,
heralded a sharp alteration of course. Round she went through ten or
twelve points, finally to steady and stand away on a course that seemed
to lead toward the dip in the skyline between the jagged range of
mountains back of Monastir and the point where a lowering bank of
cirro-cumuli hid the ancient abode of the gods on the snow-capped summit
of Olympus. On Number Two assuring me that his yarn was spun, that there
was nothing more to it save an attempt he had made, in spite of his
wound, to get into a fight that started when some of the wounded were
hissed by a gang of dockyard "mateys"--I clambered back to the bridge to
learn the significance of the new move. I still wanted to hear Gains'
story of the _Killarney_, but I had already sized him up sufficiently to
know that he was not the type of man who would unbosom himself before
his mates. With him, I knew, I should have to watch my chances, and
endeavour to have a yarn alone. Number Two's parting injunction was to
"try and have a go at Jock Campbell, 'the human proj.' Jock's the guy at
the after gun that looks like he was rigged out for deep-sea diving," he
said. "Most likely he'll only growl at you at first, but if he won't
warm up any other way, try him with a yarn about a skirt. He's 'verra
fond o' a braw lass,' is Jock Campbell."
Our alteration of course, the captain told me, was the consequence of an
order received by wireless directing him to cross over and hunt down a
strip along the western shore of the gulf which was not being covered by
the present formation of the division. "I've had a signal stating that
they're on the track of one U-boat, and there may be something to make
them think another has slipped further along and is lying in ambush for
the convoy about off Volo. They're evidently keeping the rest of the
division heading in to meet the convoy itself."
* * * * *
The _Spark_ stood on to the north-west until the Vardar marshes showed
as an olive-green rim around the bend of the gulf, before turning
southward again to skirt the steep shingle-strewn beach along the
alluvial "fans" spreading down to the sea from the base of Olympus. The
wild-looking Thessalian shepherds were just driving their motley flocks
down to the open foreshore to freshen up in the rising midday sea
breeze, and it was when I assured Jock Campbell (where I found him
leaning on the breech of the after gun and staring landwards with his
bushy brows puckered in the incredulous scowl of a man who can't credit
the evidence of his own eyes) that it was an actual fact that the fuzzy
black sheep were wading in and drinking--if sparingly--of the salt
water, that a basis of conversation was finally established. Up to that
moment he had given no sign that any of my carelessly thrown out
tentatives had penetrated to his ears through the "telepad" rig-out
which established his connection with the gunnery control. But when,
bringing my lips close to his nearest "ear-muff," I shouted that I had
come up along that coast from Lharissa but a few weeks previously by
motor and pack-train, and that, in lieu of any fresh water for many
miles in either direction, I had actually seen the sheep and goats
drinking in flocks from the sea, the look of hostile suspicion in his
eyes was replaced by one of friendly interest.
"Weel, weel, y'u dinna say so?" he ejaculated, easing away the edge of
the helmet over one ear; "the puir wee beasties!" Then he volunteered
that he had once kept from freezing to death in a snowstorm on Ben Nevis
by curling up among his sheep, and I told how I had once sheared sheep
(not mentioning it was for only half a day, and that my "clip" was
composed of about equal parts mutton and wool) on a back blocks station
in Queensland. Then he described how he had seen a big merino ram butt a
Ford car off the road up Thurso way, and I--with more finesse than
veracity--capped that with a yarn of how I had seen a flock of
Macedonian sheep blown up by a Bulgarian air-bomb, and how one of them
had landed unhurt upon a passing motor lorry load of forage--and gone
right on grazing! I reckoned that might be calculated to remind Jock of
something of the same character which had befallen him on a certain
memorable occasion, and I was not disappointed.
"'Twas verra like wha' cam ma way on the nicht the _Bow_ rammed the
_Seagull_ at the fecht aff Jutland," he commented instantly, with no
trace of suspicion in his voice. "Wad ye care to hear aboot it? Ye wud?
Weel, then----." As brief, as direct and to the point was the plain
unvarnished tale Jock Campbell told me the while a noon-day storm awoke
reverberant echoes of the Jovian thunders in the snow-caverns of Olympus
and the _Spark_ hunted down through the jade green waters of the
Thessalian coast for a U-boat that was supposed to be lurking in their
lucent depths "somewhere off Volo."
"Ah was at ma action station at the port foremost gun," he began, wiping
his perspiring brow with a wad of greasy waste, which left an undulant
trail of oil from the recoil cylinder in its wake, "when we gaed bang
into a line o' big Hun cru'sers, and we lat blaze at them and them at
us. The range was short, and wi' their serchlichts lichten us up oor
position wasna that Ah wad ca' verra pleasant. Up gaed a Hun cru'ser in
a spoort o' flame and reek, hit, Ah thocht, by a mouldie launched by
oor next astern. Ah was fair jumpin' wi' joy at the sicht, when a hale
salvo o' screechin' projes cam bang inta the fo'c'sl. Ah minded the
licht o' them mair than the soun', which was na great.
"The Huns had switched aff their serchlichts when they opened fire, so
that noo the projes was bursting in inky mirk. I doubtna oor midships
and after guns was firing, but na the foremost, for Ah dinna mind being
blinded by their licht afore the Hun projes gan bursting. My ain gun
wudna bear on the Huns, so Ah was just standing by for the time, ready
to train if we turned.
"Twa salvos cam--maybe frae twa different cru'sers--ane after the ither,
wi' aboot half a meenit atween. Ye ken that the licht o' a shell-burst
is ower afore ye can even think, and a' the furst ane showed me was just
the gun crews, standin', and bracin' themsel's like when a big sea braks
inboard. It was ower like a flash o' lichtnin, and the licht had gone
oot afore Ah saw anybody blown up or knocked oot. But Ah felt a michty
blast o' air and an awfu' shaikin o' the deck, and then the bang o'
lumps o' projes dingin' 'gainst the bridge and smackin' through bodies.
"The flash o' the burst o' the second salvo tellt me what havoc the
first had wrocht, but by noo ma een was licht-blind and Ah cudna see
weel. The sta'bo'd gun was twisht oot o' shape, and a' the crew but ane
were strechit on the deck. To a' appearance that lad had been laid oot
wi' the ithers, but noo he was puin himsel' to his feet and crawlin' up
the wreck o' the gun when a proj frae the second salvo burst richt alow
him. By the flash Ah saw him flyin' inta the air, and--by the licht o'
anither flash a bittie efter--then his corp, wi' twa or three ithers,
gang ower the side. A lump o' that last proj carried awa' the Number Wan
o' ma ain gun, and, onlike some o' the ithers, not a bit o' him was left
ahint. Ah mesel' was knockit flat, but wasna much the worse for a' that.
"That was the hinmost Ah saw o' the Huns for that nicht, and the last I
mind o' the _Bow_ was the dead and deein' wha covert the fo'c'sl', wi'
the licht o' the fires burnin' aft flickerin' ower them. Then cam' a cry
frae the bridge that a 'stroyer was closin' us to port, and then Ah mind
hearin' the captain shoutin' an order ower and ower, like he wasna bein'
answered frae the ither end o' the voice-pipe. 'Hard-a-port!' he roared,
but weel micht he shout for ay, for the qua'termaster, wi' a' on the
signal bridge, was dead by noo, and the helm was left jammed
hard-a-sta'bo'd.
"Then Ah felt her shudder as the engines went full speed astern, and Ah
got to ma feet in time to see she was headin' straicht for the fo'c'sl'
o' a T.B.D. that was steerin' cross her bows. And richt after that she
must ha' struck wi' a michty crash. The next thing Ah mindit--weel, Ah
didna mind much save that I was lyin' on ma back in a sort o' narrow
way atween twa high wa's, wi' a turrible pain in ma back and mony
sea-boots trampin' ower ma face. The bashin' o' the boots didna hurt me,
for Ah was kind o' dazed; but Ah seem to mind turnin' ma face to the
wa', just like ye do whan the flees are botherin' ye in the mornin'.
"What brocht me roun', I'm thinkin', was the shock that Ah got whan that
wa' 'gan to shak' up and doon, and then slid richt awa', leavin' me
hingin' ower the brink o' a black hole, wi' water souchin' aboot the
bottom o't. 'Twas like wakin' oot o' a bad dream and findin' that the
warst o' it was true.
"Ah was too groggy to ken richt awa' that the _Bow_ had rammed anither
ship and that Ah had been pitched oot o' her into the wan she'd hit.
Quite natteral, Ah thocht masel' still in the _Bow_, seem' that Ah cud
be nae mair use on the fo'c'sl', which was a' smashed and rippit up and
drappin' to bits, Ah thocht that Ah ought to run aft to see if Ah could
gie a haun.
"But when Ah tried to get up, Ah fund the bane o' ma spine was so sair
that Ah cudna stand straicht, and a' Ah cud do was to craw' and stagger
alang. Every mon Ah knockit agin, and every bit of wreck Ah felt ower,
sent me sprawlin'. Whan I fund that there was no so mony funnels as Ah
minded afore, and whan Ah cudna find the W.T. hoose, Ah thocht that
they had been shot awa'. Findin' a crew at stations by a midships gun,
Ah speired if they was short o' hauns. They said they werna, so Ah gaed
alang aft, lookin' for a chance to be useful.
"Ah was thinkin' to masel', 'she's awfu' little shot up' (for ye ken Ah
had expectit her to be a' to bits frae the way Ah'd heard the projes
burstin' ahint the bridge), whan a syren gae a michty shriek a' most at
ma lug, and Ah turned to see anither T.B.D., spootin' fire frae her
funnels and throwin' a double bow wave higher'n her fo'c'sl', headin'
richt inta us. Ah cud see that her helm was hard-a-port by the way her
wake was boilin', but it was nae guid. She turned enough to keep frae
rammin' us midships, but she cudna miss oor stern.
"Ah had just been tellt by ane o' the after gun's crew to get oot o' the
wa' (they not bein' short o' hauns), whan this new craft hove inta
sicht. At first it lookit like she wad cut thro' for'ard o' me, leavin'
me ahint to drown in the wreck o' the stern. Then Ah thocht she was
comin' richt at me, and Ah started crawlin' back to whaur Ah had come
frae. But she keepit turnin' and turnin', so that she hit at last richt
abaft the after gun. Ah fell a' in a heap at the shock, and, tho' Ah was
a guid ten feet frae whaur her stem cut in, the bulge o' her crunched
into the quarterdeck till she passed sae close that suthin' stickin' oot
frae her side--it micht hae been the lip o' a mouldie-tube, Ah'm
thinkin'--gae ma puir back a sair dig, and there Ah was amang the mess
left o' the gun and its crew. Ah was near to bein' dragged owerboard
after that T.B.D., and when she was gone Ah fund masel'--for the second
time in ane night--hangin' ower the raggit edge o' a black hole
listenin' to the swish o' ragin' waters.
"And then, gin that and ma half-broken back werna enough for ony mon, Ah
hear some ane shoutit that they thocht that last rammin' had done in the
auld _Seagull_, and that the time wad soon come to 'bandon ship.
"'_Seagull!_' says Ah; 'dinna ye ken this ship is the _Bow_?' Ah kind o'
went groggy after that, and Ah have a sort o' dim remembrance that some
ane flashit an 'lectric torch in ma face and said that Ah must have been
pitchit ower whan the _Bow_ rammed the _Seagull_, and that Ah prob'ly
hadna shaken doon to ma new surroundin's. Ah tried hard to speir what
kind o' a shakin' doon they meant gin this hadna been ane. But Ah didna
seem to have the power to mak' ma words come straicht, and they said,
'He's gane a bit off his chuck,' and ca'd some ane to carry me below.
"The pains runnin' up and doon ma spine when Ah was lowered doon the
ladder were ower much for me, and Ah passed off for a bit. Whan Ah cam
roun' Ah was bein' shoved along the ward-room table--whaur Ah had been
lyin'--to mak' room for a lad wi' bandages roun' his head and a'
drippin' wi' salt water. His ship had gone doon twa hours syne, and
maist o' the time he had been in the water or roostin' on a Carley
Float. That lad's name was Gains, noo the gun-layer o' the fo'most gun
o' the _Spark_--him Ah saw ye talkin' wi' just noo. He was strong and
cheery himsel', but fower o' his mates were chilled to the bane, and Ah
wacht 'em shiver to death richt afore ma een.
"It was aboot daylicht when we pickit up a' that was left o' the crew o'
the _Killarney_, and aboot an hour efter we fell in wi' the _Sportsman_,
wha passed us a hawser and tried to tow, stern-first, what was left o'
the _Seagull_. Ah didna see what was wrang, but they tellt me that the
wreck o' the stern and the helm bein' jammed hard a-sta'bo'd made sae
much drag that the cable partit. Then there was naithing else to
do--sin' the _Seagull_ cudna steam--but to sink her wi' gun-fire. The
captain askit permission for this by W.T., and when it came they ditched
the books and signals, transferred abody to the _Sportsman_, and then
gae her a roun' or twa at the water-line wi' the _Sportsman's_ guns.
Doon she gaed, and that," he concluded with a grin, "is the true yarn o'
the sinkin' o' the _Seagull_. If only o' ma mates try to mak' ye b'lieve
that she foundert 'count o' bein' hit and holed by a 'human proj' kent
as Jock Campbell, I'm hopin' ye'll no listen to 'em."
CHAPTER II
"FIREBRAND"
It was a little incident which occurred one night when the Grand Fleet
was returning to Base from one of its periodical sweeps through the
North Sea that set Able-seaman Melton talking of the things he had seen
and felt and heard the time he was standing anti-submarine watch in the
_Firebrand_, when her flotilla of destroyers mixed itself up with a
squadron of German cruisers in the course of the "dog-fight" which
concluded the battle of Jutland.
I had found him, muffled to the eyes and dancing a jangling jig on a
sleet-slippery steel plate to keep warm, when I picked my precarious way
along the coco-matted deck and climbed up to the after searchlight
platform of the Flotilla Leader I chanced to be in at the time. A fairly
decent day was turning into a dirty night, and the steadily thickening
mistiness which accompanied a sodden rain in process of transformation
into soft snow had reduced the visibility to a point where the
Commander-in-Chief deemed it safer for the Fleet to put back to open sea
and take no further chances among the treacherous currents and rocky
islands that beset the approaches to the Northern Base.
The Flagship, which had received the order by wireless, flashed
"Destroyers prepare to take station for screening when Fleet alters to
easterly course at nine o'clock," and shortly before that hour the
Flotilla Leader made the signal to execute. Almost immediately I felt
the hull of the _Flyer_ take on an accelerated throb as her speed was
increased, and a moment later the wake began to boil higher as the helm
was put hard-a-starboard to bring her round. We were steaming a cable's
length on the starboard bow of the _Olympus_, the leading ship of the
squadron at the time, and the carrying out of the manoeuvre involved
the _Flyer's_ leading her division across the head of the battleship
line and down the other side on an opposite course, so that the
destroyers would be in a position to resume night-screening formation
when the fleet had finished turning.
Just how the captain of the _Flyer_ happened to cut his course so fine I
never learned, but the patchiness of the drifting mist must have had a
good deal to do with making him misjudge his distance. At any rate, just
as we had turned through nine or ten points, I suddenly saw the
ominously bulking bows of the _Olympus_ come juggernauting out of the
night, with the amorphous loom of the bridge and foretop towering
monstrously above. The _Flyer_ seemed fairly to jump out of the water
at the kick her propellers gave her as the turbines responded to the
bridge's call for "More steam," and a spinning puff of smoke darkened
the glow above the funnels for a moment as fresh oil was sprayed upon
the fires beneath the boilers.
It was a good deal like a cat scurrying in front of a speeding
motor-car, and the consequences would have been more or less similar had
not one of the _Olympus's_ swarming lookouts, peering into the darkness
from his screened nest, gathered hint of the disaster that menaced in
time to warn the forebridge. The great super-dreadnought responded to
her helm very smartly considering her tonnage, and she turned just far
enough to starboard to avoid grinding us under. I could almost look up
through the port hawse-pipe as the flare of her bow loomed above my
head, and the man standing by the depth-charges on the all-but-grazed
stern of the _Flyer_ might well have been pardoned even if the story his
mates afterwards told of his action on this occasion were true--that he
had tried to fend off one of the largest battleships afloat with a
boat-hook.
A silhouette against the barely perceptible glow at the back of the
forebridge of a "brass-hatted" officer shaking his fist as though in the
act of ramping and roaring like a true British sailor moved by righteous
anger; a forty or fifty degree heel to starboard as the curling bow-wave
of the _Olympus_ thwacked resoundingly along her port side, and the
_Flyer_ drove on into the sleet-shot darkness to blow off accumulated
steam in rolling clouds, allow her fluttering pulse to become normal,
and resume the even tenor of her way.
Melton, A.B., whistling over and over the opening bars of the chorus of
"Do You Want Us to Lose the War?" started his metallically clanking jig
again, but presently, like a man with something on his mind, sidled over
and shoved his Balaklava-bordered face against the outside of the
closely-reefed hood of my "lammy" coat, and muttered thickly something
about being afraid he had got himself into trouble. When I had pulled
loose a snap and improved communications by unmuffling a lee ear, I
learned that it had just occurred to the good chap that he failed to
report to the bridge the battleship he had sighted "fifty yards to the
port beam," and he was wondering whether there would be a "strafe"
coming from the skipper about it.
"Fact is, sir," he said, speaking brokenly as the galloping gusts every
now and then forced a word back into his mouth, "that that rip-rarin'
stem, with the white foam flyin' off both sides of it, bearing down
right for where I was standin'--all that was so like what I saw the
night of Jutland in the _Firebrand_ that--that the turn it give me took
my mind right back and--and I wasn't thinkin' o' anything else till the
_'Lympus_ was gone by."
I assured him that, since the _Olympus_ had doubtless been sighted from
the bridge several winks before she had been visible from his
less-favourable vantage, they would probably have been too busy to
respond to his call at the voice-pipe even had he tried to report what
he saw.
"If I were you," I said, "I would forget all about that, and try to
explain how a cruiser that the _Firebrand_ was about to ram bow-to-bow"
(I had, of course, already heard something of that dare-devilish
exploit) "could have looked to you like the _Olympus_ ramping down on a
right-angling course and threatening to slice off the _Flyer's_ stern
with all her depth-charges. I quite understood that one ramming is a
good deal like another, as far as a big ship hitting a destroyer fair
and square is concerned, but----"
"'Twasn't that _first_ cru'ser 'tall, sir," Melton interrupted, nuzzling
into my "lammy" hood again to make himself heard. "Twas 'nother 'un,
sir--a wallopin' big un. The seas was stiff wi' cru'sers fer a minit,
sir, an' no sooner was we clear o' the first un than the second come
tearin' down on us, tryin' to cut us in two amidships. An' that last un
was a battl' cru'ser nigh as big as the _'Lympus_, all shot up in the
funnels and runnin' wild an' bloody-minded like a mad bull. We were
pretty nigh to bein' stopped dead, an' if she hadn't been slower'n cold
grease wi' her helm she'd ha' eat us right up."
There had been nothing of malice aforethought in my action in cornering
Melton on the searchlight platform that night, for, as it chanced, I
had failed to learn up to that moment that he had been in the famous
_Firebrand_ at Jutland. Nor, with the wind and sea getting up as fast as
the glass and the thermometer were going down, was the time or the place
quite what a man would have chosen for anything in the way of cosy
fireside reminiscence. But, both these facts notwithstanding, I felt
that, since I was leaving the _Flyer_ to go to another base directly she
arrived in harbour on the morrow, it would be criminal to neglect the
opportunity of hearing what was perhaps the most sportingly spectacular
of all the Jutland destroyer actions related by one who was actually in
it. I did not dare to distract Melton's attention from his lookout by
drawing him into talking while he was still on watch, but, when he was
relieved at ten o'clock, I waylaid him at the foot of the ladder with a
pot of steaming hot ship's cocoa (foraged from the galley by a
sympathetic ward-room steward) and both pockets of my "lammy" coat
filled with the remnants of a box of assorted Yankee "candy" looted from
the American submarine in which I had been on patrol the week before.
Melton rose to the lure instantly--or perhaps I should say "fell to the
bribe"--for the British bluejacket, if only he were given a chance to
develop, is quite as sweet of tooth as his brother Yank. Because I could
hardly take him to the captain's cabin, which I was occupying for the
moment, for a yarn, and because he, likewise, could not take me down to
the mess deck to disturb the off-watch sleepers with our chatter, there
was nothing to do but carry on as best we could in the friendly lee of
one of the funnels.
It was a night of infernal inkiness by now, and only clinging patches of
soft snow and their blanker blankness revealed the dimly guessable lines
of whaler and cowls and torpedo tubes and the loom of the loftier
bridge. The battleship line was masked completely by the double curtain
of the darkness and the snow, and only a tremulous greyness, barely
discernible in the intervals of the flurries of flakes where the
starboard bow-wave curled back from the _Olympus_, gave an intermittent
bearing to help in keeping station. Underfoot was the blackness of the
pit, not the faintest gleam reflecting from the waves washing over the
weather side to swirl half-knee high about our sea boots. Even overhead
all that was visible were fluttering patches of snow flakes dancing
through the haloes of pale rose radiance that crowned the tops of the
funnels. The wail of the wind in the wireless aerials, the crash of the
surging beam seas, the throb of the propellers, and the pussy-cat purr
of the spinning turbines--these were the fit accompaniment to which
Melton A.B. recited to me the epic of the _Firebrand_ at Jutland.
The cocoa I quaffed mug for mug with Melton, down to the last of the
sweet, sustaining "settlings" in the bottom of the pot; but the candy I
kept in reserve to draw on from time to time as it was needed to
lubricate his tongue and stoke the smouldering fires of his memory. I
started him off with a red-and-white "barber's pole" stick, which took
not a little fumbling with mittened hands to extract from its greased
tissue paper wrapper, and the seductive fragrance of crunched peppermint
mingled with the acrid fumes of burning petroleum as he leaned close and
began to tell how the ----th Flotilla, to which the _Firebrand_
belonged, screening the ----th B.S. of the Battle Fleet, came upon the
scene toward the end of the long summer afternoon. He had witnessed
Beatty's consummate manoeuvre of "crossing the T" of the enemy line
with the four that remained of his battered First Battle Cruiser
Squadron, and he had seen the main Battle Fleet baulked of its action
the lowering mists and the closing in of darkness; but it was not until
full night had clapped down its lid that the fun for the _Firebrand_
really began.
"It was just 'twixt daylight an' dark," he said, reaching me a steadying
hand in the darkness as the _Flyer_ teetered giddily down the back of a
receding sea, "that the flotilla dropped back to take stashun 'stern the
battl'ships we was screenin'. The _Killarney_ was leadin' an' after her
came the _Firebran'_, _Seagull_, _Wreath_, an' _Consort_, makin' up the
First Divishun. _Wreath_ an' _Consort_ sighted some Hun U-boats and
'stroyers while this move was on, an' plunk'd off a few shots at 'em.
Don't think wi' any fatal consequence. Then there come the rattle of
light gun fire from the south'ard, like from cru'sers or battleships
repellin' T.B.D.'s. Then it was all serene for mor'n an 'our, an' then
all hell opens up."
I suspected, from the sounds he made, that Melton had bitten into a
block of milk chocolate without removing its wrapping of foil and paper,
but presently his enunciation grew less explosive and more intelligible.
"It was Hun cru'sers drivin' down on us from the starboard quarter that
started the monkey-show," he said, "an' that bein' the nor'west it was
hardly where we'd reason to expect 'em from. It looks like we had 'em
clean cut off, wi' the 'hole Battl' Fleet steamin' 'tween 'em an' their
way back home, an' that they was tryin' to sneak through in the
darkness. The _Wreath_, at the end o' the line nearest 'em, spotted 'em
first, and she, 'cause she didn't want to give herself 'way wi'
flashin', reported what she'd seen by low-power W.T. to the rest o' the
flotilla. Course I--standin' watch aft--didn't know nothin' 'bout that
signal, so that the first I hears o' the Huns was when they all opened
up on the poor ol' _Killarney_, 'cause she was the leader. I s'pose, and
she started firin' back at their flashes.
"The leadin' Hun flashed his searchlight on the _Killarney_ as he opened
up, but shut off sharp when _Killarney_ came back at him. I could see
some o' the projes flittin' right down the light beam until it blinked
off, an' it was a flock of two or three of these that I kept my eye on
all the way till they bashed into the _Killarney's_ bridge and busted.
She was zigzaggin' a coupl' o' points on _Firebrand's_ starboard bow
just then, so my standin' aft didn't prevent my gettin' a good look at
what was happenin'. I could see the bodies o' four or five men flyin' up
wi' the wreckage o' the explosion, an' then, all in a minnit, she was
rollin' in flames from the funnels right for'ard. By the light o' it I
could see the crews o' the 'midships and after guns workin' 'em like
devils, an' twice anyhow, an' I think three times, I saw a bright, shiny
slug slip over the side, an' knew they were loosin' mouldies to try to
get their own back from the Hun.
"The sea was boilin' up red as blood where the light from the burnin'
_Killarney_ fell on the spouts the Huns' projes was throwin' up all
round her. She was the fairest mark ever a gun trained on, and p'raps
that was what tempted the Hun to keep pumpin' projes at her instead o'
givin' more attenshun to the rest of the divishun trailin' astern. That
was what gave _Firebran'_ her first chance o' alterin' the Hun navy list
that night.
"The second cru'ser in the Hun line was bearin' right abeam to starboard
by now, an' I could see by her gun-flashes she was of good size, wi'
four long funnels fillin' up all the deck 'tween her two masts. She was
firing fast in salvoes wi' all the guns that would bear on the burnin'
_Killarney_. I could just make out by the light from the _Killarney_,
which was growin' stronger every minnit, that the crew of our after
torpedo tube was gettin' busy, an' while I was watchin' 'em, over flops
the mouldie and starts to run. I knew it was aimed for one or t'other o'
the two leadin' Huns, but wasn't dead sure which till I saw the after
funnels an' mainmast o' the second toppl' over an' a big flash o' fire
take their place. Then it looked like there was exploshuns right off
fore an' aft, and then fires broke out all over her from stem to stern.
Next thing I knows, she takes a big list to starboard, an' over she
goes, wi' more exploshuns throwin' up spouts o' steam, as she rolls
under. The second mouldie--it got away right after the first--was never
needed to finish the job. The _Firebran'_ had evened up the score for
the _Killarney_, wi' a good margin over.
"The captain turned away to reload mouldies after that, an' just as we
swung out o' line I saw a salvo straddle the _Killarney_, and two or
three shells hit square 'tween her funnels an' after sup'rstruct'r'.
They must have gone off in her engine room, for there was more steam
than fire risin' from her as we turned an' left her astern, an' she
looked stopped dead. A Hun cru'ser was closin' the blazin' wreck o' her,
firm' hard; but, by Gawd, what d'you think I saw. The only patch on the
ol' _Killarney_ that was free o' the ragin' fires was her stern, an'
from there the steady flashes of her after gun showed it was bein'
worked as fast an' reg'lar as ever I seen it done at any night-firin'
practice. I looked to see her blow up every minnit, but she was still
spittin' wi' that littl' after gun when the sudden flashin' up of the
fightin' lights for'ard turned my attenshun nearer home.
"I could just make out a line of what looked like 'stroyers headin'
cross our bows, an' thought we'd stumbled into 'nother nest o' Huns till
they answered back wi' the signal o' the day, an' I knew it was one of
our own flotillas we'd been catchin' up to. That flashin' up o' lights
come near to doin' for us tho', for it showed us up to a big Hun
steamin' three or four miles off on the port beam, an' he claps a
searchlight on us an' chases it up wi' a sheaf o' shells. The only proj
that hit us bounced off wi'out doin' much hurt to the ship, but some
flyin' hunks o' it smashed the mouldie davit and knocked out most o' the
crews o' the after tubes, includin' the T.G.M.[C] That put a stop to
reloadin' operashuns wi' a mouldie in only one o' the tubes. By good
luck we managed to zigzag out o' the searchlight beam right after that,
an' was free to turn back an' try to start a divershun for the poor ol'
_Killarney_.
[Footnote C: Torpedo Gunner's Mate.]
"Her fires looked to be dyin' down when we first picked her up, but
right after that some more projes bust on her an' she started blazin'
harder than ever. I watched for the spittin' o' that littl' after gun,
but when it come it looked to spurt right out o' the heart o' a blazin'
furnace, showin' the fire was now burnin' from stem to stern. One more
salvo plastered over her, an' that one got no reply. The good ol'
'_Killy_' had shot her bolt, an' her finish looked a matter o' minnits.
"It was plain enough if anyone was still livin' they was goin' to need
pickin' up in a hurry, an' the captain put the _Firebran'_ at full speed
to close her an' stan' by to give a han'. Just then I saw a Hun
searchlight turned on and start feelin' its way up to where the
_Killarney_ was burning, wi' a cru'ser followin' up the small end o' the
beam, seemin' to be nosin' in to end the mis'ry. She did not bear right
for a mouldie, but we opened up wi' the foremost gun, an' I saw the
shells bustin' on her bridge and fo'c'sl' like rotten apples chucked
'against a wall. The light blinked off as the first proj hit home, but
there was no way to tell if it was shot away or no. It was the second
time that night that we'd done our bit to ease off the hell turned loose
on the _Killarney_. Likewise it was the last. From then on we had our
own partic'lar hell to wriggle out of, wi' no time left to play 'Venging
Nemisus' to our stricken sisters. Just a big bonfire sittin' on the sea
an' lickin' a hole in the night wi' its flames--that was the last I saw
of the ol' _Killarney_."
Melton paused for a moment as if engrossed in the memories conjured up
by his narrative, and I took advantage of the interval to hand him one
of those most loved lollipops of Yankee youngster-hood, a plump, hard
ball of toothsome saccharinity called--obviously from its resistant
resiliency--an "All-Day Sucker." When he spoke again I knew in an
instant that a sure instinct had led him to make the proper disposition
of the succulent dainty--that it was stowed snugly away in a bulging
cheek like a squirrel's nut, to melt away in its own good time.
"'Tween the glare of the burnin' _Killarney_," Melton went on after
thrashing his hands across his shoulders for a minute to warm them up,
"the gleam o' the Hun cru'ser's searchlight an' the flash o' our own
gun-fire, we must all have been more or less blinded in the _Firebrand_,
for we had run close to what may have been a part of the main en'my
battl' line wi'out nothin' bein' reported. Our firin' had give us away,
o' course, an' the nearest ships must have had their guns trained on us,
waitin' to be sure what we was. One o' 'em must have made up his mind we
was en'my even before we spotted 'em at all, for the first thing I saw
was the white o' the bow wave an' wake as she turned toward us, prob'ly
to ram. She'd have caught us just about midships if the bridge hadn't
sighted her an' done the only thing open to do--turned to meet her head
on.
"I don't remember that either she or us switched on recognition lights,
but the Hun opened with ev'rything that would bear just before we
slammed together. It must have been by the gun-flashes that I saw she
had three funnels, wi' what looked like some kind o' marks painted on
'em in red. I saw our second funnel give a jump and crumple up as a proj
hit it, an' then a spurt o' flame--from a big gun fired almost
point-blank--looked to shoot right on to the bridge. I thought that it
must have killed ev'ry man there an' carried away all the steering gear.
But no.
"The old _Firebrand_ wi' helm hard-a-port, went swingin' right on thro'
the point or two more that saved her life. I could feel by the way she
jumped an' gathered herself that last second that the ol' girl was still
under control. Then we struck wi' a horrible grind an' crash, an' I went
sprawlin' flat.
"If the Hun had hit us half a wink sooner, or if we had turned half a
point less, we'd have been swallowed alive and split up in small hunks.
As it was, we didn't have a lot the worst o' it, an' p'raps we more than
broke even. It was like a mastiff an' terrier runnin' into each other in
the dark, an' the terrier only gettin' run over an' the mastiff gettin'
a piece bit clean out o' his neck. It was our port bows that come
together, an' for only a sort o' glancin' blow. But it was the stem o'
the _Firebran'_ that was turned in sharpest, an' it was her that was
hittin' up--by a good ten knots--the most speed. She was left in a
terribl' mess, but most o' the damage was from her rammin' the Hun, not
from the Hun rammin' her. While as for what she did to the Hun, the best
proof o' it was the more'n twenty feet of her side-platin'--an upper
strake, wi' scuttl' holes in it an' pieces o' gutterway deck hangin' to
it--that we found in the wreck of our fo'c'sl'. If the hole that hunk of
steel left behind it didn't put that Hun out o' bus'ness as a fightin'
unit till she got back to port an' had a refit, I'll eat it."
I wasn't quite clear in my mind whether Melton meant to imply that he
would eat the hole in the Hun cruiser or the hunk of steel that came out
of it, but there _was_ no room for doubt that the violent crunch with
which he emphasised the assertion had put a period to the life of his
"All-Day Sucker," which was never intended to be treated like chewing
toffy. Dipping into the grab-bag of my "lammy" coat pocket for something
with which to replace it, therefore, I brought up a stick of chewing
gum, and he resumed his story in an atmosphere sweet with the ineffable
odour of spearmint and escaping steam.
"How much the Hun was shook up by that smash," Melton continued, "you
can reckon from this: We was almost dead stopped for some minnits, an'
all out o' control from the time of rammin' till they started connin'
her from the engine-room. There was one fire flickerin' in the wreckage
o' the forebridge, an' another somewhere 'midships, while there was also
a big glare throwin' up where the foremost funnel was shot away. We was
as soft an' easy a target as even a Hun could ask for; an' yet that one
was in too much of a funk wi' his own hurts to let off a singl' other
gun at us in all the time that he must have been flounderin' on at not
much more'n point-blank range. Mebbe he was knocked up even more'n we
thought. Nothin' else would account for him not havin' 'nother go at us.
"Just one wild bally mess--that was what the _Firebran'_ looked like
when I got to my feet again an' cast an eye for'ard. There was too much
smoke an' steam to see clear, an' it was mostly flickers o' red light
where the fires were startin', an' big, black shadows full o' wreckage.
As it looked to _me_ from aft--tho', o' course, the full effects wasn't
vis'bl' till daylight, the bridge an' searchlight platform an' mast was
shoved right back an' piled up on the foremost funnel. The whaler an'
dingy was carried away, an' my first thought, for I was sure she was
sinkin', was that we had no boats to put off in. I could see two or
three wounded crawlin' out o' the raffle, but I knew that the most to be
dished would be in the wreck o' the bridge. The queerest thing o' all
was the flashes o' green an' blue light flutterin' thro' the tangled
steel o' the wreckage. At first I thought I was sort o' seein' things;
but fin'lly I figgered it out as the juice from the busted 'lectric
wires short-circuitin'. It meant, I tol' myself, that the men under them
tons o' steel was bein' 'lectrocuted on top o' bein' crushed.
"It looked like any one o' three or four things would be enough to
finish the ol' _Firebran'_. I remember thinkin' that if she didn't blow
up, she was sure to burn up; an' that if, by chance, she missed doin'
one o' them, she was goin' to founder anyhow. She was already well down
by the head, an'--leastways, it looked so to me at the time--still
settlin' fast. An' I was just reflectin' that, even if she was lucky
enough not to burn up, or blow up, or founder, she was still too easy
pickin' for the Huns to miss doin' her in one way or 'nother, when,
thunderin' out o' the darkness an' headin' up to crumpl' underfoot what
was left o' the stopped an' helpless _Firebran'_, come a hulkin' big
battl' cru'ser, the one I was just tellin' you the _'Lympus_ set me
thinkin' on a while back.
"Starin' at our own fires must have blinded me a good bit, or I'd have
seen him sooner'n I did. He looked like he been gettin' no end o' a
hammerin', for his second funnel was gone, an' out of the hole it left a
big spurt o' flame an' smoke was rushin' that would have showed him up
for miles. There was a red hot fire ragin' under his fo'c'sl', too, an'
I saw the flames lashin' round thro' some jagged shell holes in his port
bow. Lucky for us, he was runnin' for his life, an' had no time to more
than try to run us down in passin'.
"It must have been just from habit I yelled down my voice-pipe, for I
knew they was no longer controllin' her from the bridge; but the roarin'
o' a fire an' the clank of bangin' metal was the only sounds that come
back. When I looked up again the Hun was right on top of us, an' I must
have just stood there--froze--like to-night wi' the _'Lympus_. By the
grace o' Gawd, he hadn't been abl' to alter course enough to do the
trick. His stem shot by wi' twenty feet or more clearance, an' it was
only the fat bulge of him that kissed us off in passin'. It was by the
glare o' his fires, not ours, which throwed no light abaft the
superstructure I was on, that I saw some of the hands was already
workin' to rig a jury steerin' gear aft. Then he was gone, an' much too
full o' his own troubles to turn back, or even send the one heavy proj
that would have cooked us for good an' all. A few minutes more, an' the
wreck o' the _Firebran'_ begun gatherin' way again, an' when I saw her
come round to her nor'westerly course an' push ahead wi'out settlin' any
deeper, I knew that the bulkheads were holdin' an' that--always
providin' we run into no more Huns--there was a fightin' chance o'
pullin' thro'.
"There was about a hundred jobs that needed doin' all at once, an'
'tween the loss o' dead an' wounded--only about half the reg'lar ship's
company was fit for work. The bulkheads had to be shored, for, wi' the
fo'c'sl' crumpled up like a concertina an' the deck an' side platin'
ripped off from the stem right back to the capstan engine, she was open
to the whole North Sea from the galley right for'ard. This made the
first an' second bulkheads o' no use, an' made the third bulkhead all
that stood 'tween us an' goin' to the bottom. Then there was the
fires--'bove deck an' 'tween decks--that had to be put out 'fore they
got to the magazines, an' the engines to be kept goin', an' the ship to
be navigated, an' the wounded to be looked to. An' on top o' all this,
the ship had to be got into some kind o' fightin' trim in case any more
Huns come pokin' her way. I won't be havin' to tell you it was one bally
awful job, carryin' on like that in the dark, an' wi' half the ship's
company knocked out.
"When I saw it was the first lieutenant that seemed to be directin'
things, I took it the captain was done for, an' that was what everyone
thought till, all o' a sudden, he come wrigglin' out o' the wreck o' the
bridge--all messed up an' covered wi' blood, but not much hurt
otherways--an' began carryin' on just as if it was 'Gen'ral Quarters.'
Some cove wi' the stump o' his hand tied up wi' First Aid dressin' was
sent up to relieve me on the lookout, an' I was put to fightin' fires
an' clearin' up the wreck 'bove decks. As there ain't much to burn on a
'stroyer if the cordite ain't started, we were not long gettin' the
fires in hand, even wi' havin'--cause the hoses an' the fire-mains was
knocked out--to dip up water in buckets throwed over the side. Wi' the
wreckage, the most we could do was to dig out the dead an' wounded an'
rig up for connin' ship from aft.
"It was a nasty job when we started in on the wreck o' the forebridge,
for the witch-lights o' the short-circuit were still dancin' a cancan in
the smashed an' twisted steel plates an' girders, an' it kept a cove
lookin' lively to keep from switchin' some of the blue-green lightnin'
into his own frame by way o' his ax or saw. No one that had been on any
part o' the bridge was wi'out some kind o' hurt, but the three dead was
a deal less than was to be expected. There was also three very bad
knocked up, an' on one o' them the surgeon--a young probasuner
R.N.V.R.--performed an operashun in the dark. It was a cove he was
'fraid to move wi'out tinkerin' up a bit, an' he pulled him thro' all
right in the end. One o' the crew of the foremost gun never turned up,
an' we figured he must have been lost overboard when she rammed.
"Pois'nous as it was workin' on deck, that wasn't a circumstance to what
it must have been carryin' on below. I didn't see nothin' o' that end o'
the show, thank Gawd, but every man as came out o' it alive said it was
just one livin' bloomin' hell, no less. There was a good number o' coves
who did things off han' that saved the ship from blowin' up, or burnin'
up, or sinkin', an' three o' the best o' 'em was a engine-room
artif'cer, a stoker P.O., and a stoker that was in the fore stokehold
when the bridge was pushed back an' carried away that funnel. They
ducked into their resp'rators, stuck to their posts a' kept the fans
goin' till the fumes was all cleared away. Nothin' else would have saved
the foremost boiler--an' wi' it the ship herself--blowin' up right then
an' there. Same way, gettin' on the jump in backin' up Number 3
bulkhead--the one that was holding back the whole North Sea--was all
that kept it from bulgin' in an' floodin' right back into the
stokeholds. It was the chief art'ficer engineer that took on that job,
an' it was him, too, that stopped up the gaps left by the knocking down
o' the first and second funnels.
"Even after it at last seemed like we was goin' to keep her from sinkin'
or blowin' up, things still looked so bad to the captain that he ditched
the box o' secret books for fear o' their fallin' into the hands o' the
Hun. As we'd have been more hindrance than help to the Fleet, he did not
try to rejoin the flotilla, but turned west an' headed for the coast o'
England on the chance of makin' the nearest base while she still hung
together. All night she went slap-bangin' along, wi' the engines shakin'
out a few more rev'lushuns just as fast as it seemed the bulkhead was
shored strong enough to stand the push o' the sea.
"Mornin' found her still goin', but what a sight she was! My first good
look at what was left o' her give me the same kind o' a shock I got the
first time I had a peep at my mug in a glass after havin' small-pox in
Singapore. She wasn't a ship at all, any more'n my face was a face. She
was just a mess, that's all, an' clinkin' an' clankin' an' wheezin' and
sneezin' an' yawin' all over the sea. An' the sea was empty all the way
roun', wi' no ship in sight to pass us a tow-line or pick us up if she
chucked in her hand an' went down.
"We had our hands so full keepin' her afloat an' under weigh, that it
wasn't till four in the afternoon--more'n sixteen hours after we rammed
the Hun cru'ser--that we found time to bury our dead. It was like
gettin' a turribl' load off your chest when we dropped 'em over in their
hammocks wi' a fire-bar stitched in alongside 'em to take 'em down.
Nothin' is so depressin' to a sailor as bein' shipmates wi' a mate that
ain't a mate no longer. Even the ol' _Firebran'_ 'peared to ride easier
an' more b'oyant after the buryin' was over, as if she knowed the worst
o' her sorrer was left behind.
"Luck took a turn against us again just after dark, for the wind shifted
six or seven points an' started blowin' strong from dead ahead. We had
to alter course some to ease off the bang o' the seas a bit, an' fin'ly
the speed had to be slowed even slower'n before to keep the bulkhead
from being driv' in. But she weathered it, by Gawd she did, an' next
mornin' the goin' was easier. We made the Tyne at noon. It was just a
heap o' ol' scrap-iron so far as the eye could see, that they let into
the Middle Dock the next day, but it was scrap-iron that had come all
the way from Jutland under its own steam, an' wi' no help from no one
save what was left o' the lads as once manned a 'stroyer called the
_Firebran'_.
"It hadn't taken long to reduce her from a 'stroyer to scrap-iron, an'
it didn't seem like it took much longer--time goes fast on home
leave--to turn that scrap-iron back into a 'stroyer again. The ol'
_Firebran's_ got many a good kick in her yet, so they say, an' I'd ask
for nothin' better'n to be finishin' the war in her."
I thanked Melton for his yarn, bade him good night, and was about to
start picking my way to my cabin to turn in, when I sensed rather than
saw that there was something further he wanted to say, perhaps some
final tribute to his officers and mates of the _Firebrand_, I thought.
There was a shuffling of sea-booted feet on the steel deck, a nervous
pulling off and on of woollen mittens, and it was out.
"I just wanted to say, sir," he said, "that I likes the Yankee Jackies
very much; 'specially their candy an' chewin' gum. I was just wonderin'
if that last stick you give me was all----"
I emptied both pockets before I renewed my thanks to Melton and bade him
a final good night. There are strange ingredients entering into the
composition of the cement that is binding Britain and America together,
and if there is any objection to chewing gum it certainly cannot be on
the ground that it lacks adhesiveness.
CHAPTER III
"BACK FROM THE JAWS"
I had gone to the _Nairobi_, not because the rather routine stunt her
flotilla was on promised any excitement, but rather because of the
notable part she had played in the Jutland action and the fact that I
had been assured that there was still in her an officer who was said to
have figured prominently in the splendid account she had given of
herself on that occasion. As luck would have it, however, this officer
had been appointed to another destroyer only a day or two previously, so
that no veteran of the great action remained in the ward room. A canvass
of the ship's company revealed that one of the stoker petty officers was
a Jutland survivor, but before I could run him to cover some kind of a
light cruiser affair had occurred down Heligoland Bight way which called
for destroyer work in that direction, and the next two days, with the
flotilla creasing up the brine at high speed and everyone at Action
Stations most of the time, were not favourable for the "intimate
reminiscence" I was bent on drawing out.
It was not until the flotilla, salt-frosted and low in fuel, was
lounging along in the leisurely dalliance of half-speed on the way back
to base that I cornered Stoker Petty Officer Prince in the angle between
the foremost torpedo tubes and the starboard rail, and engaged him in
serious discussion of the shamefulness of supplying worn-out films to
the Depôt Ship kinema. The second dog watch was only half gone, but in
the hour that elapsed before it was over there was no mention of
Jutland, or anything else connected with the war for that matter, though
the talk ran the full gamut from cabbages to kings. I mean this quite
literally, for he began by telling me of what his mother had raised in
her allotment at Ipswich, and was describing how, when he was on a
cruise in the _Clio_ ten years before the war, he had once shaken hands
with the King of Fiji, as eight bells went to call him on watch. It was
a happy inspiration which prompted me to volunteer to go down and stand
a part of his watch with him in the stokehold, for once on his own
"dung-hill," his restraint fell away from him and he spoke easily and
naturally of the things which had befallen him there and on the deck
above.
There is little in the small, neat compartment from which the oil fires
of a modern destroyer are fed and controlled to suggest the picture
which the name "stokehold" conjures up in the popular mind. There is no
coal, no grime, no sweating shovellers, no clanging doors. Under
ordinary conditions two leisurely moving men do all there is need of
doing, and with time to spare, and there are occasions at sea, in the
winter months, when the stokehold is a more comfortable refuge than the
chill fireless ward room. It was my remarking upon the grateful warmth
of the stokehold after the cold wet wind that was sweeping the deck,
which finally turned the current of Prince's reminiscence in the
direction I had been vainly endeavouring to deflect it for the last
hour.
"It's all comfy enough, sir, when she's loafing along at fifteen or
twenty knots," he said, slipping aside a "flap" and peering in at his
fires with the critical eye of a housewife surveying her oven of bread,
"but just tumble in some time when, while she already plugging away at
full speed, the engine-room rings up more steam. That's the time she's
just one little bit of hell down here, sir, with the white sizzle of the
fires turning the furnaces to a red that shows even with the lights on,
and the plates underfoot getting so hot that you have to keep dancing to
prevent the soles of your boots from catching fire. Why, long toward
morning of the night after Jutland----"
It didn't take much manoeuvring from that vantage to back him up to
the beginning for a fresh start of the story of what is unquestionably
one of the most remarkable, as it was one of the most successful, phases
of the Jutland destroyer action. The fact that, during the daylight
action between the battle cruisers, he had ample opportunity for
observation (through his being on deck standing by in the event of
emergency and without active duties to perform) makes him undoubtedly
one of the most valuable witnesses of the opening phase of this the
greatest of all naval battles. The story which I am setting down
connectedly, he told me in the comfortable intervals of his leisurely
fire-trimming, and, once he was warmed up to it, with little prompting
or questioning from myself. Much of it was punctuated with frequent
stabs and slashes with one of the short-handled pokers which perform for
the stoker of an oil-burner a service similar to that rendered his
brother of the coal-burner by his mighty "slice" of iron.
"Big as the difference is between being on deck and in the stokehold at
ordinary times," said Prince, turning round with glare-blinded eyes
closed to narrow slits after cracking off the accumulating carbon from
an oil-sprayer with his poker, "it is ten times more so when a fight is
on, and I'll always be jolly thankful that it was my luck not to be
caged up down here during the daylight part of the Jutland show. I had
my turn of it at night, and it was bad enough then, even though I knew
it was blacker'n the pit above; but, in daylight, with everything in
full view outside, I'm not sure I wouldn't have gone off my chuck if I'd
had to go 'squirrel-caging' on here with one eye on the fires and the
other on the Kilroy. But I didn't. It was my luck to be off watch when
the ball opened, so that my 'action station' was just loafing round the
deck and keeping a stock of leak-stopping gear--mushroom-spreaders and
wooden plugs--ready to use as soon as we got holed. Not having anything
to do with navigating the ship, or signalling, or serving the guns or
torpedo tubes--though I did get a bit of a chance with a mouldie as it
turned out--I not only had time to see, but also to let the sights 'sink
in' like. For that reason, when it was all over, I was probably able to
give a more connected yarn of what happened than anyone else in the
ship, not excepting the captain. They'll take a lot of forgetting, some
of the things I saw that day."
Prince went over and settled down at ease on the steel steps of the
ladder. "The worst grudge I had against Jutland--save for the way it
whiffed out the lives of some of my friends in some of the other
destroyers--" he continued with a grin, "was for making me miss my tea
that afternoon. We left base the night before, and about daybreak joined
up with the 'battlers,' which was our way of speaking of the First
Battle Cruiser Squadron, to which the flotilla was attached. It was a
fairly decent day, and we were able to make good weather of it with the
light wind and easy swell. I had stood the forenoon watch, had a bit of
a doss in my hammock in the early part of the afternoon one, and had
just gone down to tea before going on for the 'First Dog.' There had
been some buzz in the morning about the Huns being out; but that was so
old a story that no one paid much attention to it. I was just getting
my nose over the edge of a mug of tea when I heard the bos'un growling
'Hands exercise action stations,' and tumbled out on deck to go through
the motions of getting ready for a fight that would never come off, or
leastways that was how we felt about it. The 'battlers' were speeding up
a bit, but there was not even a smudge of smoke on the horizon to hint
of Huns. After rigging the fire-hoses and getting out my 'plugs,' I
stood by for 'what next,' but nothing happened. At the end of half an
hour the order 'Hands fall out' was passed, and, leaving everything
rigged, down we went to tea again. The mugs we had left were stone cold
by this time, and we were just raising a howl for a fresh lot when,
'Bing!' off goes the alarm bells, and up we rushes again, this time to
find signs of what we had been looking and hoping for. A good many hours
went by before we went below again, and all through the fight--when
things would ease off a bit now and then--I would hear the 'matlos'
grousing about missing their afternoon tea.
"The old _Nairobi_ was nosing along under the port bow of the _Lion_ as
I came up, and so close that we saw her guns--trained out abeam with a
high elevation, right above us. We seemed to be speeding up to take
station farther ahead. There was nothing at all in sight (from the deck,
at least; though probably there was a better look-see from the bridge)
in the direction the _Lion's_ guns were trained, and it was almost as if
a bomb had been dropped from the sky when a shell came plumping down
about half-way between our starboard quarter and her port bow. The fact
is, having heard no sound of gunfire, I was so surprised that I
foolishly asked someone if the _Lion_ hadn't blown out one of her
tompions testing a circuit. The spout of foam should have told me
better, but it goes to show what crazy things run through a man's mind
when he can only see effect without the cause. A few moments later I saw
unmistakable gun-flashes blinking along the skyline to south'ard and
knew that at last we were under the fire of the Huns. The next two or
three shots fell singly, and were plainly merely attempts to get the
range. Following the first 'short,' there were one or two 'over,' and
then a fair hit. This one, falling almost straight, struck the fo'c'sl'
of the _Lion_, penetrated the deck and came out on the starboard side. I
don't think it exploded, and we were just far enough ahead to see past
her bows to where it struck the water with a kind of spattery splash,
not at all like the clean spout thrown by a shell which goes straight
into the sea.
"Then there was a big spurt of flame from the _Lion_, and the screech of
shells reached my ears, even before the heavy crash of her four-gun
salvo. Watch as I would, I could not make out the distant fall of shot,
but the fluttering flashes of the Hun guns to the south'ard told where
the target was. Firing opened up all along the line of our battle
cruisers after that, and the racket from that and the fast falling enemy
shells increased till it was a steady unbroken roar. The Hun shells were
falling so straight that many of the 'overs' missed by only a few yards.
The hits, of which there were quite a number on the leading ships,
looked rather awful at the moment of exploding. There would be a wild
gush of flame that seemed to be eating up everything it touched, and
then, all of a sudden, it was gone, and only a few little fires would be
left flickering on the deck. The shells which struck against the sides
seemed to nip on into the sea almost before they began to explode.
Neither these, nor even those which struck the decks and turrets, seemed
to be doing much damage at this stage, and our own firing never
slackened in the least. I think none of the destroyers were hit up to
now, though there were a number of very near things from some of the
'overs.' Our turn was coming.
"This sort of a give-and-take fight had been going on for some time,
when there was a sudden increase of the enemy's fire. From the way the
fresh fall of shot came ranging up, it was very plain that new ships
were coming into action, while the fact that the splashes were higher
and heavier than those from the first salvoes seemed to make it likely
that some of the Hun battleships had now arrived at the party. As it
turned out, this was just what had happened, and, although we could not
see them from the low decks of the destroyers, the first B.C.S. was soon
under the fire of the whole Hun High Seas Fleet. It was to draw these on
into action with our approaching Battle Fleet that Beatty now turned
away to the north'ard.
"Right here was where the big moment of this part of the fight came. The
Huns must have scented the chance of catching our battle cruisers on the
'windy corner' as they turned, for suddenly their fire slackened on the
ships down the line and concentrated on the point where that line began
to bend. It must have been something like the barrage they make at the
Front, for at times the water thrown up by the bursting shell made a
solid wall which completely cut off my view of the ships beyond it. The
way it seemed to boil up and quiet down looked like there was some sort
of general control over the bunched fire, though that sort of thing
would be pretty hard to handle.
"The _Lion_ caught only a corner of the 'boil,' and left it on her
starboard quarter, but the shell or two that struck her started a fierce
fire burning 'midships, and I did not see the guns of that turret again
in action. The 'P.R.'--the _Princess Royal_--turned in a quiet interval
of the barrage, and seemed not to be hit, but the _Queen Mary_ steamed
right into it, and just seemed to dissolve in a big puff of smoke and
steam. I have no special memory of the noise or shock of the explosion,
but the pillar of smoke shot up as sudden and solid as a
'Jack-in-the-box.' It was black underneath, but always with a crown of
flame at the top, as though the gases were spouting up inside and taking
fire as they met the air. Some of my mates said they saw big pieces of
flying wreckage, such as plates from turrets and decks, but I only
remember smoke and flame. I never saw a bit of the 'Q.M.' again. When
the smoke cloud lifted she was gone completely, with nothing but a gap
in the line to mark the place where she had been. The thing looked so
impossible that the 'T.I.' (that was what we called the torpedo gunner's
mate, because he was also torpedo instructor), who was standing beside
me, kept saying over an over again, 'She's not gone up! She's not gone
up!'
"Perhaps it was no more than a coincidence, but it has always struck me
as being just a bit uncanny the way that barrage on the 'windy corner'
seemed to 'work by threes.' The 'Q.M.' was third in line, and up she
went after the _Lion_ and 'P.R.' had passed unhurt. Then the _Tiger_ and
_New Zealand_ weathered the turn safely, but the poor old
_Indefat_.--Number three again--got hers. She went up under a rain of
shells plumping down on her deck, just as the 'Q.M.' did, and I remember
specially watching the top of a turret go spinning up into the air, till
it almost disappeared, and then came slowly down again, till it was lost
in the rising smoke of the explosion.
"The fire of the Huns began to be divided more equally among the four
surviving battle cruisers now, and the _Nairobi_ was led a lively dance
dodging about among the 'overs.' It was the big fire raging amidships
that turned my eyes to the _Lion_ again. One of the guns of the
'midships turret had a sickly droop to it, but the other three turrets
were blazing away as merry as ever. We were close enough to see men on
the bridge with the naked eye, and it suddenly occurred to me that one
of the quietly moving figures there must be Admiral Beatty, who I knew
hated to be cooped up in a conning tower in action. I could not be sure
which he was, but everyone in sight looked no more concerned than if
they had been steaming out for target practice. I didn't have time to
think of it then, but every time since that I've felt surer and surer
that no man since the world began ever showed more real guts than Beatty
in that part of the Jutland show."
Prince stood up, and put a forty-five degree kink in his poker by
slamming it over the steel rail of the ladder to emphasise his words,
and then stopped talking for a minute or two while he worried it
straight with a hammer.
"It was just about this time," he resumed, squinting approvingly down
the straightened bar, "that the _Nectar_ hoisted the signal, 'Second
Division prepare for torpedo attack,' and a few minutes later I saw the
whole flotilla start streaming out, some ahead of the battle cruiser
line, and some through it, toward the Huns. I also have some memory of
seeing the ----th flotilla, smoking like young factory chimneys, coming
out astern of the line, but I had no chance to see what became of them.
"The range between us and the Huns had been decreasing for some time,
and the battle cruisers at the head of the line loomed up pretty big and
awful as we started to close them. I've never made quite sure yet
whether we were sent out to repel an attack of the Hun destroyers, or
whether they were sent out to repel our attack. Anyhow, there they were,
filtering out through their battle cruisers just as we had filtered
through ours. We met and turned them back something more than half-way
between the lines, but before we got to that point we had to pass, first
through the fire of the Hun heavies, and then through a still hotter
zone where their secondaries were slapping down a barrage that took some
fancy side-stepping to avoid coming to grief in. The _Onward_ was the
first of our division to fall by the wayside. She stopped a 'leven-inch
shell with her engine-room, and got stopped in turn herself. Luckily it
didn't explode, or she would have been blown out of the water then and
there. I saw her fall out of line and disappear in a cloud of steam, and
that was the last peep we had of her for many weeks. When she finally
rejoined the flotilla, we learned that she and another cripple--the
_Fencer_, I think it was--had limped back home together. I don't
remember just where the _Wanderer_ got hers, but I think it must have
been from the Hun's secondaries. Anyhow, the first thing I remember was
that she was gone, and that the _Nectar_ was leading the _Nairobi_--all
that was left of the division--on a course to cross the bows of the
enemy battle cruisers. The Hun destroyers, which had no chance with us
in a gun fight, had now turned tail and were heading back for the
shelter of their battle line. Several of them appeared on fire, but I
didn't see any sinking.
"I am not quite sure what orders were made to the flotilla at this time,
but I rather think that after the Hun attack had been stopped the signal
was hoisted to return to the battle cruisers. I think that is what the
other divisions did do, but for our division--or what remained of
it--things were looking too promising just then to turn our backs on. I
was standing by the foremost tubes at the time, and all of a sudden the
Hun line began to turn away, and I saw that the leading ship was being
heavily hit and that she was afire in two or three places. As she turned
she presented us a fine broadside target at about three thousand yards,
and the order came from the bridge to 'Stand by foremost tubes and fire
when sights come on.'
"The turning of the Hun battle cruiser line exposed us to the fire of a
number of his light cruisers which had been seeking shelter behind it,
and some smashing salvoes from these began to plump down all around us
just as we got ready to launch the torpedoes. Though there was not one
direct hit, we were 'straddled' a dozen times, and the foam spouts
tossed up by the shells exploding on striking the water made a wall of
smoke and spray that almost shut off a view of our target. Shell
fragments were slamming up against the funnels and tinkling on the
decks, and I believe two or three men were hit by them, though not much
hurt. It was this sudden savage shelling that spoiled the only chance we
had at the Hun big 'uns. Just as the sights were coming on to the
leading ship a salvo came down kerplump right abreast of the foremost
tubes, throwing a solid spout of green water all over them. I saw both
mouldies start to slide out, but only one struck the water and began to
run. A moment later I saw that the other, for some reason we never found
out, but probably because it had been knocked sideways by the rush of
water or perhaps a fragment of shell, was hanging by its tail to the lip
of the tube, with its war-head full of gun-cotton trailing in the sea.
It cleared itself when the next sea slapped it against the side, and
started diving and jumping about like a wounded porpoise, most likely
because its propellers had been knocked out. Luckily, our speed carried
us on before it had a chance to 'boomerang' back and blow up the old
_Nairobi_. We could not watch the first torpedo run on account of the
spouts from the falling shells, but though it started right to cross the
enemy's line, there was nothing to make us believe it scored a hit.
"Before there was time to grieve over losing our chance at the battle
cruisers the 'T.I.' called me to give him a hand with the 'midships'
tubes, as one of his men had been knocked out. 'There's a light cruiser
just going to bear for a shot,' he yelled from his seat between the
tubes as I ran round to the breech; 'jump up and tell me what speed
she's making. I can't see her fair from here.' The trouble was that the
awful speed the _Nairobi_ was going at settled her down so low that,
anywhere abaft the bridge, a man couldn't see over the bow wave from the
deck. But, standing on top of the tubes, I was high enough to get a good
look at the Hun, when he wasn't shut off by the spouts from the fall of
shot. He was a small three-funnelled light cruiser, and every gun he had
looked to be training on us. Another cruiser astern of him was also
firing on the _Nairobi_, while two or three others were concentrating on
the _Nectar_. She was getting it even hotter than we were, and all I
could see of her--when one of her zigzags brought her to one side or the
other so the bridge didn't cut her off from my view--was some masts and
funnels sliding along in the middle of a dancing patch of foam
fountains. Both _Nectar_ and _Nairobi_ were replying for all they were
worth with their foremost guns; the after ones were too low down to fire
at such close range with much effect. I saw one of our shells bursting
on the Huns, and why their shooting at us was so bad I have never quite
understood. The fact we were settled so deep aft from our speed was
plainly making a lot of shells ricochet over what would otherwise have
been hits, but, at the same time, the bows being so much higher out of
the water offered all the more target for'ard. It was more 'Joss' than
anything else, I suppose. Besides, the _Nectar_ was just on the edge of
getting hers anyhow.
"I saw all these things out of the corner of my eye like, for my mind
was centred on getting what the 'T.I.' wanted to know about his cruiser.
I knew just what this was to a 't,' for I'd taken many a turn of drill
at the tubes. 'Parallel courses, thousand yards range, speed about
twenty-five,' I shouted, jumping down again; 'and you'll have to slip
her right smart or you'll miss your chance.' Right then the seas
flattened down for a few seconds, and the 'T.I.', giving me an order of
how to train her, set his sights and pulled the cocking lever. A moment
later he fired, and the mouldie slipped out smooth and easy and started
running straight and true for a point the Hun was going to arrive at
about a minute later."
Prince had been poking away at a sprayer as he talked, with the
fluttering light-mote from the fire in the heart of the furnace playing
on one of his squinting eyes in a way that, with the other quenched in
shadow, gave his face a look of Cyclopean fierceness. "I jumped up on
the tubes again to follow our little tin fish on its swim," he resumed.
"There seemed to be a bit of a flap on the cruiser, for its next salvo
fell a long way short of us. One of the shells--a five-or
six-incher--did not explode, but bounced off the water and came
'skip-jacking' along straight for us. It kicked into the water twice
before it reached us, the second time right at the base of the wave that
was rolling up and hiding our sunken stern, and that seemed to give it
just enough of an up-flip to make it clear the _Nairobi's_ shivering
hull. It came so slow that I caught the glint of the copper band round
its base, and so low that the after superstructure blotted it off from
my sight as it passed over the stern. One of the after gun's crew told
me he could have reached up and patted it as it tumbled along over his
head. He said it was going so slow that he hardly felt any wind at all
from it. Perhaps that was because he had his own wind up, though, for it
was making a great buzz, and must have been carrying a big 'tail' of air
in its wake.
"I lost track of our mouldie when I ducked--no, I don't mind admitting
that's just what I did, though it missed me by a mile--and before I
could get my eye on its wake again it had gone home. I think they must
have spotted it coming on the cruiser, for I saw her begin to alter
course away just about the time I figured it was due to arrive. If they
were altering to avoid the mouldie, they turned the wrong way, for it
only brought right abreast the funnels what'd 'a' been a hit somewhere
about the bridge. I've got a picture in my mind of what happened that
I'm dead certain is as true as a photograph, and the spout of water
that went up must have been almost exactly amidships. If the hit had
been anywhere for'rard it would never have broken her back the way it
did, and she might have got away. The funny part of it was that it was
not the 'midships section of her, where the mouldie hit, that seemed to
be lifted by the explosion. That part of her seemed just to go to pieces
and begin to sink all at once, while the bow and stern halves started to
come up and close together like a jack-knife. She must have gone down
inside of a minute or two, but things were happening so fast I don't
think I was looking when she disappeared."
Prince, engrossed in his story, forgot that the end of his poker had a
sheet of flame playing upon it, and the heat which crept back from the
rosy-red tip gave his palm a sharp singe as he clutched the handle
preparatory to executing one of his sweeping gestures. From then on to
the end of his narrative he paused frequently to lick with his tongue
the blistered cuticle, the stoker's sovereign remedy for a slight burn.
"I was just starting to give the 'T.I.' an account of what I had had a
lot better chance to see than he had," he went on thickly, still
touching the blisters gingerly with an extended tongue-tip, "when I
heard him growl, 'Stand by! here's another one. What speed d'you think
she's making?' I was still standing up on top of the tubes, and--to get
a better view--right in front of the 'T.I.', with my waist on just
about the level of his face. As I turned my head to look at the second
Hun he straddled us fair with a full salvo. Most of it went over, but
one proj struck right alongside and just about flooded us out. But there
was something heavier than water that it sent aboard. I felt a sharp
sting across my stomach, as if someone had given me a cut with a whip.
As I put my hand down to it the whole front of my overall dropped away
where a fragment of shell casing had shot across it. A few threads--I
found out later--had been started on my singlet, but my hide was not
even scratched. I heard the 'T.I.' give a yell, and when I looked round
saw his face covered with blood, and a flap of skin from his forehead
hanging down over one eye like a skye terrier's ear. The piece of proj
had caught him a nasty side-swipe, though without hurting anything but
his looks in the least. And it wasn't that he was yelling about, either,
but at me for not giving him the course and speed of the second cruiser.
He had the flap of skin tied up out of his eye--using a strip of my
overall because neither of us could find a handkerchief--by the time I
was back at the handle. I saw the blood dribbling over his sights, but
he seemed to be seeing through them all right, for he was telling me how
to train when I felt the helm begin to grind as it was thrown hard over
to make a sudden alteration of course. She heeled fifteen or twenty
degrees as she turned six points to starboard, and the boil of her wake
flooded across her stern three or four feet deep. The sudden heel threw
me off my feet, and I pulled up just in time to see us rushing by, and
just missing by a few yards, a stopped destroyer that was nothing but
spurts of fire flashing under a rolling cloud of steam and smoke.
"She seemed to be afire all over, and about ready to blow up; yet, from
the quick flashes of some of the spurts of fire, I knew they came from a
hard-pumped gun that some stout-hearted lads were working to the last.
There was nothing in the look of that spouting volcano of smoke and
steam that would help a man to tell whether it was a battleship or a
trawler, but I knew that it could be only the _Nectar_, our Division
leader. We never saw her nor anyone in her again. She must have gone
down within a few minutes, and anyone that survived fell into the hands
of the enemy. She led us a fine dance while it lasted, and the only pity
was that she couldn't trip it to the end.
"That left the old _Nairobi_ as the last of the Division, and I haven't
any recollection of any of the rest of the flotilla being in sight by
then. Not that I had any time to look for them, though. Our sudden
change of course to keep from ramming the _Nectar_ spoiled our chance at
the second Hun cruiser, but we were left no time to mourn that any more
than the finish of the _Nectar_. Hardly had we left the wreck of her
astern than a full salvo of large shells--I think they must have come
from one of the battle cruisers, for they were much heavier than
anything the light cruisers were firing--struck only thirty or forty
yards short of us. The shells were bunched together like a salvo of
air-bombs kicked loose all at once. The wall of water they threw up shut
everything on that side off from sight for a few seconds, and when the
spouts settled down there was a Hun destroyer inside of a mile away. I
jumped up to give her course and speed to the 'T.I.', but before I had
time more than to see that she had two funnels and many tubes the
bursting projes from our foremost and midships guns began knocking her
to pieces so fast that I soon saw there was no use of wasting a mouldie
on the job.
"I saw the captain waving encouragement from the bridge to the crew of
the midships guns, and, when the noise died down for a moment, I heard
him shout, 'You've got her! Give it to her!' Just then another salvo was
plastered a-straddle of us, and I saw a fragment of shell knock the
sight-setter of the midships gun out of his seat. He looked a little
dazed as he climbed back, but his eye must have been as good as ever,
for I saw his next shot make a hit square on a whaler they were lowering
from the sinking Hun and blow it to bits. A minute or two more, and the
destroyer itself blew up and disappeared under a column of steam and
smoke.
"That," continued Prince, beginning to prod anew his neglected sprayers,
"just about concluded our day's work. As there was no longer any
prospect of getting in mouldie-range of any of the big Huns, and as none
of the little Huns were in sight to fight with gun-fire, it must have
occurred to the captain that it was time he was rejoining the flotilla.
There was only some dark blurs on the north'ard skyline to steer for at
first, and the Huns did all they knew to keep us from getting there,
too. For a while we were doing nothing but playing 'hide-and-seek' among
the salvoes they tried to stop us with, and I have heard since that the
way the captain used his helm to avoid being hit at this stage of the
show was rated as about the cleverest work of the kind in the whole
battle.
"It was the Fifth B.S.--the _Queen Elizabeth_ class--that we caught up
to first, and a grand sight it was, the four of them standing up and
giving battle to about the whole of the High Sea Fleet. They were taking
a heavy pounding without turning a hair, so far as a man could see, and
even when the _Warspite_ had her steering gear knocked out and went
steaming in circles it didn't seem to upset the other three very much.
We sighted our own Battle Fleet about six, and rejoined the flotilla in
good time to be back with the battle cruisers when Beatty took them
round the head of the Hun line and only failed to cut off their retreat
through night coming on.
"Compared with what the next six or eight hours held for some of our
destroyers--or even with what we had just been through ourselves--the
night for us was fairly quiet. We were in action once or twice, and I
saw several ships--mostly enemy, but one or two of our own--go up in
flame and smoke before I went on watch down here at midnight. But
through it all the devil's own luck which had been with us from the
first held good. Although we were through the very hottest of the day
action, and not the least of the night, the old _Nairobi_ did not
receive one direct hit from an enemy shell. She accounted for at least
two Hun ships, saw the other three destroyers of her division sunk or
put out of action, and returned to base with almost empty oil tanks and
perhaps the largest mileage to her credit of any craft in the Jutland
battle--all without a serious casualty or more than a few scratches to
her paint. On top of it all, on the way back to harbour, by the queerest
fluke you ever heard of, she rammed and exploded the air-chamber of a
mouldie that had been fired by a Hun U-boat at the destroyer next in
line ahead of her. As the Yanks say, 'Can you beat it?'"
CHAPTER IV
HUNTING
"If it's destroyer work you want, there are five of them getting under
weigh at four o'clock," said the "Senior Officer Present," looking at
his watch. "You'll have just about time to pick up your luggage and
connect if you want to go. I can't tell you what they're going to
do--they won't know that themselves till they get to sea, and their
orders may be changed from hour to hour, and things may happen to send
them to the Channel, France, or to several other places, on and off the
chart, before they put in here again. But there'll be work to do--plenty
of it. That's the best part of this corner of the North Atlantic in
which our Allies have done the American destroyers the honour of setting
them on the U-boats. Whatever else you may suffer from, it won't be from
ennui." It was luck indeed, on two hours' notice, to have the chance of
getting out in just the way I had planned, where I had been quite
prepared to stand-by for twice as many days, and I fell in with the
arrangement at once.
Captain X---- ran his eye down a board where the names of a number of
destroyers were displayed against certain data indicating their
whereabouts and disposition. "_Zop_, _Zap_, _Zip_, _Zim_, _Zam_," he read
musingly. "_Zip_--yes, I don't think I can do better than send you on
the _Zip_. Her skipper is as keen as he is able, and the _Zip_ herself
has the reputation of having something of a nose for U-boats on her own
account. I'll advise him you're coming. Pick up your sea togs and put
off to her as soon as you can. Good luck." The American naval officer,
like the British, never says "Good-bye" if it can possibly be avoided.
They were already preparing to unmoor as I clambered over the side of
the _Zip_, and by the time I had shifted to sea-boots and oilskins in
the captain's cabin--which, unoccupied by himself during that strenuous
interval, was to be mine at sea--she was swinging in the stream and
nosing out into the creaming wakes of the two of her dazzle-painted
sisters who were preceding her down the bay.
* * * * *
There are several things that strike one as different on going to an
American warship after a spell in a British ship of the same class, but
the one which surges to meet you and goes to your head like wine is the
all-pervading spirit of vibrant, sparkling, unquenchable youthfulness.
Everything you see and hear seems to radiate it--every throb of the
engines, every beat of the screws--and at first you may almost get the
impression that it comes from the ship herself. But when you start to
trace it down, you find it bubbles from a single fount, the men, or
rather the boys--the lounging, laughing, devil-may-care boys. Theirs the
alchemy to transform every one and everything that comes near them into
the golden seeming of themselves.
This youthfulness of the American destroyers is in the crew rather than
the officers, for the latter--especially the captain and executive--will
average, if anything, a shade older than their "opposite numbers" in a
British destroyer. There is a certain minimum of highly specialised work
in navigating and fighting a destroyer which must be in the hands of
officers and men who can have only attained the requisite training in
long years of technical study and practical experience. Given these, and
the remainder of the ship's company--provided only that they have
digestive organs that will continue to function when tilted through a
dozen different slants and angles in as many seconds--can be trained to
perfection in an astonishingly short time. Here it is that America has
scored, for there is no doubt that the youngsters that have rushed to
enrol themselves for her destroyer service are better educated and
quicker in mind and body than those available for any other navy in the
war. It is the incomparable adaptability these advantages have conspired
to give him that has made the Yankee destroyer rating a combination of
keenness and efficiency that leaves little, if anything, to be desired
on either score.
Here is the way a British naval officer who is familiar with the work of
the American destroyer flotilla expressed himself in this connection:
"The ship's company of any one of these American destroyers," he said,
"will average a good five years younger than that of a British
destroyer. Off hand, one would say that this would tell against them,
but, as a matter of fact, quite the contrary is the case.
"Given that the command and the technical operations are in the hands of
highly trained and fairly serious-minded officers, you can't have too
much slapbang, hell-for-leather, devil-take-the-consequences spirit in
the ship's company. And where will you find that save in the
youngsters--tireless, fearless, careless boys. They've found that out in
the air services, and we're finding it out in the destroyers. And right
there--in these quick-headed, quick-footed super-boys of theirs--is
where the Yankee destroyers have the best of us. It is they--working
under consummately clever officers--that enabled the American destroyer
flotilla to reach in a stride a working efficiency which we had been
straining up to for three years."
* * * * *
The green hills astern had turned grey and dissolved in mist and
darkness before the captain was able to announce what work was afoot for
us. The _Zim_ and _Zam_, it appeared, were to be detached on some
mission of their own, while the _Zop_, _Zap_, and _Zip_, after
"hunting" submarines for some time, were to proceed to a certain port,
pick up the _Lymptania_, and escort her through the danger zone on her
westward voyage. The captain was grinning as he finished reading the
order. "I can't give you any definite assurance," he said, "that the
hunt part of the stunt is going to scare up any U-boats, although the
prospects this week are more promising than for some time; but"--he
turned his level gaze to the westward, where the in-rolling Atlantic
swells were blotting with undulant humps the fading primrose of the
narrow strip of after-glow--"if this wind and sea keep the same force
and direction for three or four days more, I'll promise you all the
excitement your heart can desire when we take on our escort duties. The
last time we took out the old _Lymptania_--well, I've got marks on me
yet from the corners I got banged up against, and as for the poor little
_Zip_--but she's had a refit since and most of the scars have been
removed. As you will have ample chance to see for yourself, there isn't
a lot of _dolce far niente_ in any of this life we lead in connection
with our little game here, but if there is one phase of our activities
that is farther removed from 'peace, perfect peace' than any other, it
is trying to screen an ex-Atlantic greyhound that is boring at umpty-ump
knots into a head wind and sea. Strafing U-boats is a Sunday-school
picnic in comparison at any time; but it will be worse this week because
they have just put down a couple of big liners, and the skipper of the
_Lymptania_, knowing they will be laying for him, will force her like he
was trying to get his company the trans-Atlantic mail subsidy. For us to
cut zigzags around that kind of a thing--but you'll be able to judge for
yourself. I only hope we can catch you a U-boat or two by way of
preliminary, so as to lead up to the climax by slow degrees."
Things were fairly comfy that night--that is, as comfort goes in a
destroyer. There was a good stiff wind and a good deal more than a lop
of sea running; but as both were coming on the quarter and we were
plodding along at no great speed, the _Zip_ made very passable weather
of it. The bridge, save for occasional showers of light spray where a
sea slapped over the side, was quite dry, and even on the long run of
low deck amidships there were several havens of refuge where the men off
watch could foregather to smoke and yarn without fear of more than an
occasional spurt of brine. A dry deck does not chance every day that a
destroyer is on business bent at sea, and when it does, like sunshine in
Scotland, is a thing to luxuriate in.
As the twilight deepened and melted into the light of a moon that was
but a day or two from the full--"bad luck for the _Lymptania_ convoy,
that moon," the captain had said as he noted how it was waxing on his
chart--I came down from the bridge and worked along from group to group
of the sailor men where, lounging and laughing, they sheltered in the
lee of funnel and boat and superstructure. The first one I pushed into
was centred round a discussion, or rather an argument, between two boys,
the one from Kansas and the other from Oklahoma, as to which had raised
the best and biggest corn in the course of some sort of growing
competitions they had once taken part in. Several others standing about
also appeared to have come from one or other of those fine
naval-recruiting States of the Middle West, and seemed to know not a
little about intensive maize culture themselves. I was just ingratiating
myself with this party by nodding assent and voicing an emphatic "Sure!"
to one's query of "Some corn that, mister, hey?" when I discovered a
cosmopolitan group (two Filipino stewards, the coloured cook, and three
or four bluejackets in sleeveless grey sweaters) collaborating in the
arduous task of teaching a very sad-faced white mongrel to sit up on his
haunches and beg. Or rather it was an elaboration of that classic trick.
On drawing nearer I perceived that the lugubrious-visaged canine already
had mastered begging for food, and that now they were endeavouring to
teach him to beg for mercy. At the order "Kamerad!" instead of sitting
with down-drooping paws, he was being instructed to raise the latter
above his head and give tongue to a wail of entreaty. He was a brighter
pup than his looks would have indicated, and had already become letter
perfect in the wail. "Kamerading" properly with uplifted paws, however,
was rather too much for his balance, at least while teetering on the
edge of a condensed milk case which was itself sliding about the deck of
a careening destroyer. The dog had been christened "Ole Oleson," one of
the sailors told me, both because he was "some kind of a Swede" and
because, like his famous namesake, he had tried to come aboard in "two
jumps" the day they found him perched on a bit of wreckage of the
Norwegian barque to which he had belonged, and which had been sunk by a
U-boat an hour previously. The men seemed to be very fond of him, and I
overheard the one who picked him up off the box to make a place for me
to sit on, whisper into his cocked ear that they were going to try to
catch a Hun in the next day or two for him to sharpen his teeth on.
* * * * *
These boys told me a number of stories in connection with the survivors
they had rescued, or failed to rescue, from ships sunk by U-boats. Most
of them were the usual accounts of firing on open boats in an attempt to
sink without a trace, but there was one piquant recital which revealed
the always diverting Hun sense of humour at a new slant. This was
displayed, as it chanced, on the occasion of the sinking of "Ole's"
ship, the Norwegian barque. After this unlucky craft had been put down
by shell-fire and bombs, the U-boat ran alongside the whaler containing
the captain and mate, and they were ordered aboard to be interrogated.
Under the pretence of preventing any attempt to escape on the part of
the remainder of those in this boat, the Germans made them clamber up
and stand on the narrow steel run-way which serves as the upper deck of
a submarine. No sooner were they here, however, than the Hun humorist on
the bridge began slowly submerging. When the water was lapping round the
necks of the unfortunate Norwegians, and just threatening to engulf
them, the nose of the U-boat was slanted up again, this finely finessed
operation being repeated during all of the time that the captain and
mate were being pumped below by the commander of the submarine. No great
harm--save that one of the sailors, losing his nerve when the U-boat
started down the first time, dived over, struck his head on one of the
bow-rudders and was drowned--was done by this little pleasantry, but it
is so illuminative of what the Hun is in his lightsome moods that I have
thought it worth setting down.
[Illustration: "KAMERADING" WITH UPLIFTED PAWS]
[Illustration: HELPING THE COOK TO PEEL POTATOES]
The American is more violent in his feelings than the Briton, and much
more inclined to say what he thinks; and I found these boys--to use the
expressive phrase of one of them--"mad clean through" at the Hun pirate
and all he stands for. America--with more time to do that sort of
thing--has undoubtedly gone farther than any other country in the war in
trying to give her soldiers and sailors a proper idea of the beast
they have been sent out to slay. These lessons seem to have sunk home
with all of them, and when it has been supplemented--as in the case of
the sailors in the destroyers--by the first-hand teachings of the Huns
themselves, it generally leaves a man in something like the proper state
of mind for the task in hand. Not that I really think any of the
Americans, when they have the chance, as happens every now and then,
will carry out all the little plans they claim to be maturing,
but--well, if I was an exponent of the U-boat branch of German kultur,
and my _unterseeboot_ was depth-charged by a British and an American
destroyer, and I came sputtering up to the surface midway between them,
I don't think I would strike out for the lifebuoy trailing over the
quarter of the one flying the Stars and Stripes. I may be wrong, but
somehow I have the feeling that the Briton--be he soldier, sailor, or
civilian--hasn't quite the same capacity as the Yank for keeping up the
temperature of his passion, for feeling "mad clean through."
Joining another group bunched in the lee of a tier of meat-safes, I
chanced upon a debate which threw an illuminative beam on the feelings
of what might once have been classified as hyphenated Americans. At
first the whole six or eight of them, in all harmony and unanimity, had
been engaged in cursing Sinn Feiners, with whom it appeared they had
been having considerable contact--physical and otherwise--in the course
of the last few months. Then one of the more rabid of them on this
particular subject--he and one of his mates had been waylaid and beaten
by a dozen hulking young Irishmen who resented the attentions the
Yankees were receiving from the local girls--threw a bone of dissension
into the ring by declaring that a Sinn Feiner was as bad as a Hun and
ought to be treated the same way.
The most of them could hardly bring themselves to agree to this, but in
the rather mixed argument which followed it transpired that the lad who
had led the attack on Sinn Fein was named Morarity and had been born in
Cork, and that the one who maintained that nothing on two legs, not even
a Sinn Feiner, was as "ornery as a Hun," was named Steinholz, and had
been born in St. Louis of German parents.
The wherefore of this they explained to me severally presently, when it
turned out that their views--as regards their duties as Americans--were
precisely similar. Like all good Yankees, they said, they had it in for
both the Hun and the Sinn Feiner; but, because each of them had a _name_
to live down, he felt it incumbent on himself to out-strafe his mates in
the direction from which that name came. It was a bit naïve, that
confession, but at the same time highly instructive; and I wouldn't care
to be the Hun or Sinn Feiner that either of those ex-hyphenates had a
fair chance at.
A very domestic little party I found cuddled up aft among the
depth-charges. One lad--he had been a freshman at Cornell, I learned
later, and would not wait to train for a commission, so keen had he been
to get into the war--was just back from a week's leave in London, and
was telling about it with much circumstance. There were many things that
had interested and amused him, but the great experience had been three
days spent as a guest in an English home at Wimbledon. The head of the
family, it appeared, was some kind of a City man, and, encountering the
doubtless aimlessly wandering Yank at Waterloo, had forthwith carried
him home. Everything had bristled with interest for the young visitor,
from the marmalade at breakfast and the port at dinner to croquet on the
lawn and a punt on the Thames at Richmond. But the best of it all had
been that he had brought a standing invitation from the same family to
any of his mates who might be coming up to London while the war was on.
During the refit, which was supposed to be imminent, two of these, who
had plumped for the great London adventure, had screwed up their courage
to following up the invitation to the hospitable home in question. Out
of his broader experience, their worldly mate was tipping them off
against possible breakers. This is the only one I remember: "You'll
find," he said, gesturing with an admonitory finger that could just be
dimly guessed against the phosphorescence of the tossing wake, "that
they don't seem to have any great grudge 'gainst us for licking them and
going on our own in '76; but go easy on rubbing it in just the same,
'cause you're a guest in the house. Best forget the Revolution while
you're over here. That scrap was more'n a hundred years ago, and we've
got another on now. Half the people you meet here never heard of it,
anyhow, and when you mention it to them they think you refer to another
Revolution in France which came off about the same time."
It was at about this juncture that a change of course brought seas which
had been quartering a couple of points forward of the beam, and in a
jiffy the swift spurts of brine had searched out the last dry corner of
the deck and sent scurrying to shelter every man who had not a watch to
stand. Three times I was completely drenched in groping forward from the
after-superstructure to the ward-room, under the bridge, so that I was a
good deal inclined to take it as a joke--and a rather ill-timed one at
that--when an ensign about to turn in on one of the transoms muttered
something about being thankful that we were going to have _one_ quiet
night when a man could snatch a wink of sleep. I asked him if he
referred to the night we expected to be in port waiting for the
_Lymptania_, but the fact that he had already dozed off proved that he
really had not been trying to be funny at my expense. Indeed, it was a
fairly quiet night, as nights go in destroyers; but, even so, I needed
a good high sideboard to keep from rolling out of the captain's bunk,
and then two sofa pillows and my overcoat to keep from pulping my
shoulder against the sideboard.
We were still sliding easily along at the same comfortable umpteen knots
in the morning, but with the breaking of the new day a subtle change had
come over the spirit of the ship. It was just such a change as one might
observe in a hunter as he passes from a plain, where there is little
cover, to a wood where every tree and bush may hide potential quarry.
And that, indeed, was precisely the way it was with us. The night before
we were "on our way"; this morning we were ploughing waters where
U-boats were _known_ to be operating. It was only a couple of days
previously that the good old _Carpathia_ had been put down, and not many
hours had passed since then but what brought word, by one or another of
the almost countless ways that have been devised to trace them, of an
enemy submarine working in those waters. We were ready enough the night
before, ready for anything that might have turned up; but this morning
we were more than that.
There was a new tenseness now, and a feeling in the air like that which
follows the click-click after a trigger is set to "hair." It was as
though everyone, everything, even the good little _Zip_ herself, was
crouched for a spring.
There was an amusing little incident I chanced to see which illustrates
the keenness of the spirit animating the men even in the moments of
waiting. A favourable course had left the deck unswept by water for an
hour, and a half-dozen boys, off watch, but too restless to turn in,
were trying to kill time by helping the cook peel potatoes. It was one
of these whom I saw stand up, take several swift strides forward across
the reeling deck, draw a rag from the pocket of his "jeans," and then,
with great care and deliberation, begin to polish a patch of steel plate
that was exposed in the angle of two strips of coco-matting. "Wha' cher
holystoning deck yetawhile fer, Pete?" one of his mates shouted.
"Can'cher wait till we gets back to port? We may have to foul your
pretty work with greasy Huns any minnit." Unperturbed, Pete went right
on rubbing, testing the footing every now and then with the sole of his
boot. Only when the job, whatever it was, was done to suit his
fastidious taste did he return to his seat on the reversed water-bucket
and start peeling potatoes again. Not till a full dozen or more neatly
skinned Murphies had passed under his knife did he vouchsafe to reply to
the half-curious, half-pitying looks and remarks his mates had continued
to direct at him. Then his explanation was as crushing as complete.
"It don't look much as if you guys wants to get a Hun," he observed
finally, running a critical eye over them. "Oh, you do, do you? My
mistake. Well, then, don't try to be funny with another guy that's
doing his best to effect that same good end. Now looka here. From where
I sits to my gun-station is just six steps. Six for me, I mean; it'd be
more for most of you 'shorties.' Now I just figures that step number
four lands my foot square in the dribble of oil on that patch where
there ain't no matting; so what was more natural than for me to go and
swab it up. Last time the gong binged I hit half a preserved peach, and
sprained a wrist and ankle so bad that I woulda been dead slow on the
gun if we'd had to fire it. Keeping my eye peeled for another piece of
peach, I pipes that gob of oil, and so goes and gets rid of it. It's
painful having to explain a simple thing like that to you bone-heads,
but, now that you got it, p'raps you'll ease off on your beefing, and
peel spuds. _That_ don't take no brains."
Two or three times in the course of the morning the look-out's shout of
"Sail!" bearing this way or that, brought those in sound of it to their
feet in the expectation that it would be followed by the welcome
clanging of the alarm bell; and once or twice the wireless picked up the
S.O.S.--they do not send it out that way now, but these letters are
still the common term in use to describe the call of a ship in
distress--of a steamer that had been torpedoed. But the sails turned out
to be friends in every case, while both of the ships reported sinking
were too far away for us to be of any use to them. Early in the
afternoon a suspiciously cruising craft, which proved presently to be a
friend, got a high-explosive shell under her nose as a consequence of
her deliberation in revealing that fact. The smartness with which the
men tumbled to quarters, and the almost uncanny speed with which the
forecastle gun was served, boded well for developments in case the real
thing turned up.
"Do you always fire a blank across their bows when you don't quite like
the look of 'em?" I asked the captain innocently, as he gazed dejectedly
through his glass at certain unmistakable evidences proving that he had
been cheated of his quarry. "Blank!" indignation and half the look that
sits on the face of a terrier who discovers that he has cornered his own
family's "Tabby" instead of the neighbour's "Tom"; "blank!--did you ever
see a blank 'X-point-X' that threw up a spout as high as a masthead, and
all black with smoke? That was the worst punisher we have in our
lockers; and, what's more, it was meant to be a hit. And the next one
would have been," he added. "You can't afford to waste any time where
five or ten seconds may make all the difference between bagging and
losing a Hun."
"But how about bagging something that isn't a Hun?" I protested. "I told
you, I think, that I had arranged to go out next week on patrol in one
of the American submarines; but after what I've just seen----"
"The burden of proof is up to the craft under suspicion," cut in the
captain, "and they ought to have no trouble in supplying it if they have
their wits about them." Then, with a grin, "But if you're really going
out on submarine patrol next week, why--I'll promise to look twice
before turning loose one of those--those 'blanks.'" How he kept his word
is another story.
It was about an hour or two later that the wireless winged word that
seemed at last to herald the real thing. It was the S.O.S. of a steamer,
and conveyed merely the information that she had just been torpedoed,
with her latitude and longitude. The position given was only thirty or
forty miles to the northward, and though the name in the message--it was
_Namoura_ or something similar--could not be found on any of our
shipping lists, the _Zop_, as senior ship, promptly ordered course
altered and full speed made in the hope of arriving on the scene in time
to be of some use. With every minute likely to be of crucial importance,
it was not an occasion to waste time by waiting or asking for orders. A
swift exchange of signals between ships, a hurried order or two down a
voice-pipe, an advancing of the handle of the engine-room telegraph, a
throwing over of the wheel, and we had spun in the welter of our tossing
wake and were off on a mission that might prove one of either mercy or
destruction, or, quite conceivably, both. The formation in which we had
been cruising when the signal was received gave the _Zip_ something
like a mile lead at the get-away, and this--though one of the others was
a newer and slightly faster ship--she held gallantly to the end of the
race. By a lucky chance, though there was a snoring wind and a lumpy sea
running, the course brought both abaft the beam and permitted us to run
nearly "all out" without imposing a serious strain on the ship. The
difference between running before and bucking into seas of this kind I
was to learn in a day or two. For the moment, conditions were all that
could be asked to favour our getting with all dispatch into whatever
game there was to be played.
Many a so-called express train has travelled slower than any one of
those three destroyers was ploughing its way through solid green water.
For a few seconds after "Full speed!" had been rung down to their
engine-rooms, swift-spinning smoke rings had shot up from their funnels
and gone reeling off down to leeward; then, with perfect synchronisation
of draught and oil, the duskiness above the mouths of the stumpy stacks
had cleared, and only the mirage on the horizon astern betrayed the
up-spouting jets of hot gases. Only the vibrant throb of the speeding
engines--so pervading that it seemed to pulse like heart-beats through
the very steel itself--gave hint of the mightiness of the effort that
speed was costing. With that throb stilled--and the mounting wake
quenched--the progress of that thousand tons or so of steam-driven
steel would have seemed scarcely less effortless than that of an
aeroplane.
An order from the Commander-in-Chief--which was picked up presently--to
go to the assistance of the torpedoed ship and to "hunt submarine" had
been anticipated; but the real name of the steamer--finally transmitted
correctly--brought to me at least a distinct shock. It was H.M.S.
_Marmora_, and the _Marmora_, the former P. & O. Australian liner, was
an old friend. To anyone who loves the sea a ship, no matter of what
kind, has a personality. But in the case of a ship in which he has
sailed--lived in, worked and played in, been happy in, perhaps gone
through certain dangers in--has more than a personality, it has a place
in his heart. Many and many a morning since the first U-boat campaign
was started I had read--and never without a lump rising in my throat--of
the passing of just such a friend, of the going out of the world of
something--almost of "some one"--which I had always looked forward to
seeing again. _Afric_, _Arabic_, _Aragon_, I knew their names well
enough to compile the list alphabetically. It would have run to some
score in length, and from every name would have led a long train of
treasured memories. But the blow had never come quite this way before,
never fallen quite so near at home. An especially dear friend had just
been stricken less than a degree of latitude away; but the poignancy of
that realisation was tempered by the thought that I was in a ship
rushing to her assistance, a ship that could be as swift to succour as
to avenge.
I must confess to a queerly mixed state of mind that next half-hour.
Consumed as I was with interest in our terribly purposeful progress
leading up to the entrance into that grim drama approaching its
climacteric act just beyond the sky-line, there were also vivid
flare-backs of memory to the days of my friendship with the _Marmora_,
arresting flashlights of the swift refreshing morning dive into the
canvas pool on her forecastle, of lounging chairs ranged in long rows
'twixt snowy decks and awnings, of a phosphorescent bow-wave curling
back and blotting the reflections of stars in a tropical sea. There was
a picture of the clean sweet lines of her as--buff, black, and
beautiful--she lay at the north end of the horseshoe of the Circular
Quay at Sydney, with a rakish Messageries liner moored astern of her and
a bluff Norddeutscher Lloyd packet ahead. It was her maiden voyage, and
Australia, which had never seen so swift and luxurious a liner before,
was receiving her like a newly arrived _prima donna_. I took passage in
her back as far as Colombo. That fortnight's voyage had been diverting
in a number of ways, I recalled, but most of all, perhaps, as a
consequence of the throwing together of a large party of Wesleyan
missionaries from Fiji and the members of a London musical comedy
company returning from its Australian "triumphs." I was just beginning
to chuckle inwardly at the recollection of what one of the missionary
ladies had said to a buxom chorus-girl who tripped out to the fancy
dress cricket-match in her pink tights and a ballet skirt, when the
ting-a-ling of a bell brought the captain to the radio-room voice-pipe.
"Message just received," I heard him repeat. "All right. Send it up." He
slapped down the voice-pipe cover, and a messenger had handed him the
signal before he had paced twice across the bridge.
"_Marmora_ just sunk," he read; "survivors picked up by P.B.'s _X_ and
_Y_."
The sinking made no immediate change in our plans. There was still a
chance we might be of use with the survivors, and also the matter of the
U-boat to be looked after. With no abatement of speed, all three
destroyers drove on. The navigating officer reckoned that in another
fifteen minutes we should be sighting the rescuing craft, and probably
wreckage; but when twice that time still left a clear horizon ahead, it
began to appear as though there had been a mistake of some kind. And so
there had, but it was a lucky mistake for us. It was some time later
before they figured just how it had chanced, but what had happened was
this. The _Marmora's_ last despairing call--doubtless sent out by a
breaking-down radio--gave her position as some ten or twelve miles out
from what it really was. The consequence was that, heading somewhat wide
of the sinking ship, to which, however, on account of the presence of
the patrol boats, which had evidently been close enough to come to her
immediate assistance, we could have been of small use, we had steered
directly for the one point where it was most desirable we should make
our appearance at that psychological moment: for the point, in short, at
which the coolly calculative skipper of the U-boat responsible for the
outrage, after running submerged for an hour or more and doubtless
figuring he had come sufficiently far from the madding crowd that would
throng the immediate vicinity of the wreckage to be at peace, had come
up to smoke his evening pipe and cogitate upon the Freedom of the Seas.
It was just as it began to become apparent that we were badly adrift as
regards the point where the _Marmora_ had gone down that a whine from
the lookout's voice-pipe reported to the bridge that it had sighted a
"sail--port, ten."
"What is it?" asked back the captain.
"Looks like subm'rine," came the reply; and with one quick movement the
captain had started the alarm-bell sounding "General quarters!" in every
part of the ship. With every man knowing precisely what he had to do,
and how to do it, there was incredible speed without confusion. Tumbling
to their stations like hounds on a hot scent, they yet managed to avoid
getting in each other's way, even in the narrow passages and on the
ladders. The loom of the conning-tower was plain to the naked eye, now
that one knew where to look for it, but only for a few minutes. Even as
a swiftly passed shell was thrown into the open breech of the forecastle
gun, came the look-out's whine through the voice-pipe, "She's going
down, sir; she's gone!" The breech of the gun spun shut, but the eye of
the sightsetter groped along an empty horizon.
"Never mind," muttered the captain grimly. "Couldn't have croaked him
with one shot anyhow. Got something better'n shells for him. Now for
it," and his hand went back to pull the wire of a gong which gave
certain orders to the men standing-by with the depth-charges. That, a
word down the engine-room voice-pipe, and a fraction of a point's
alteration in the course--and there was only one thing left to be done.
The time for that had not quite arrived.
Because a destroyer's engine-room telegraph-hand points to "Full speed!"
it does not necessarily mean that there are not ways of forcing more
revolutions from the engines, of driving her still faster through the
water should the need arise. Such a need now confronted the _Zip_, and,
like the thoroughbred she was, her response was instant and generous.
The pulsing throb of her quickened till it was almost a hum; the
quivering insistency of it struck straight to the marrow of the bones,
drummed in the depths of one's innermost being. If there is anything to
stir the blood of a man like a destroyer beginning to see red and go
Berserk, I have yet to encounter it.
There must have been something like three miles to go from the point
where the U-boat had been sighted to the point where the inevitable
patch of grease would mark the place where it had submerged, and rather
less than twice that many minutes had elapsed when the cry of "Oil
slick--starboard bow!" came almost simultaneously from the look-outs in
the foretop and on the bridge. Over went the helm a spoke or two, and
the executive officer, in his hand a thin piece of board with a table of
figures pasted on it, moved up beside the captain. Straight down the
wobbly track of iridescent film drove the _Zip_, and when a certain
length of it had been put astern, the captain turned and drew a lever to
him with a sharp pull.
Three, four seconds passed, and then, simultaneously with a heavy
knocking thud, a round patch of water a hundred yards or so astern
quivered and fizzed up sharply like the surface of a glass of
whisky-and-soda after the siphon has ceased to play on it. Following
that by a second or two, a smooth rounded geyser of foam boiled up a
dozen feet or so, and then gradually subsided. That one, plainly, was a
deep-set charge, whose force was expended far beneath the surface. A
second one threw a geyser twice as high as the first, and a third, which
fizzed and spouted almost simultaneously, blotted out a great patch of
sternward sky with its smoke-shot eruption.
Presently the _Zop_ "struck oil," and then the _Zap_. Soon the muffled
booms of their rapidly scuttled depth-charges began to drum, while
astern of them the foam-spouts nicked the sky-line like a stubby picket
fence.
Perhaps the lad whom I later overheard describing that bombardment by
saying that "'tween the three of us, we was scattering 'cans' like rice
at a wedding" was guilty of some exaggeration; but it is a fact that
they were spilling over very fast and, there is little doubt, with
telling effect. The savageness of the bolts of wrath released by the
exploding charges was strikingly disclosed when two of them chanced to
be dropped at nearly the same time by destroyers a mile or more apart,
when the under-sea "jolts" would meet half-way and form weird evanescent
"rips" of dancing froth strongly suggestive of chain-lightning. The way
in which even the most distant of the detonations made a destroyer "bump
the bumps," quite as though it was striking a series of solid
obstructions, gave some hints of the bolts that were descending upon the
lurking pirate.
At the end of a minute or two a quick order from the captain sent the
wheel spinning over, and, with raucous grinding of helm, round we swung
through sixteen points to head back in reverse over the path of
destruction we had just traversed. Just as the steel runners of a
racing skater throw ice when he makes a sudden turn, so the screws of a
speeding destroyer hurl water. The stern sank deep into the
propeller-scooped void, so that the high-tossed side-slipping wake
buried it beneath a frothing flood. Through several long seconds I saw
the water boiling above the waists of the men at the depth-charges,
without appearing to disturb them in the least; then the wheel was spun
back 'midships--and a spoke or two beyond to meet and steady her--the
bow wave resumed its curled symmetry and the wake began trailing off
astern again.
It was into a peaceful sea, indolently rolling, sunset tinged and
slightly sleeked with a thin streak of oil, that we had raced five
minutes before; it was a troubled sea, charge-churned and wave-slashed,
that we now nosed back into to see what good our coming had wrought. The
grey-blue-black of the long oil wake had been scattered into broken
patches by the explosions. Most of these were pale, sickly, and highly
anæmic in colour, and of scant promise; but for one, where fresh oil
rising spread rainbow-bright upon the surface, the _Zip_ headed full
tilt. The explosion here appeared to have been an unusually heavy one,
for the sea was dotted with the white bellies of stunned fish, most of
them floating high out of the water, with trickles of blood running from
their upturned mouths and distended gills. A six or eight-foot shark,
wriggling drunkenly along the surface with a broken back, was hailed
with a howl of delight by the men, who claimed to see in the fact that
the unlucky monster could not submerge his telltale dorsal, a sign that
their Fritz might be in the same difficulty.
Another "can" or two was let go as we dashed through that iridescent
"fount of promise"; and when we turned back to it again the wounded
shark had ceased to wriggle and now floated inertly among his hapless
brothers. But of Fritz--save for a glad new gush of oil--no sign.
Prisoners or wreckage are rated as the only indubitable evidence of the
destruction of a U-boat, and neither of these were we able to woo to the
surface in that busy hour which elapsed before the descending pall of
darkness put a period to our well-meant efforts. During that time not
the most delicate instrument devised by science for that purpose
revealed any indication of life or movement in the depths below. As the
water at this point was far too deep to allow a submarine to descend and
lie on the bottom without being crushed, this fact appeared morally
conclusive. It was this I had in mind when I tried to draw the captain
out on the subject. "Of course there's no doubt we bagged him?" I
hazarded, in a quiet interval when we were watchfully waiting for
something to turn up, or rather come up. He smiled a rather tired smile.
"Oh, very likely we have," he replied. "But, unluckily, there's nothing
we can lay our hands on to carry away and prove it. In case this
particular Fritz doesn't come to life and sink another ship in the
course of the next few days, there is just a chance that we may be
credited with a 'Possible.' They never err on the optimistic side in
sizing up a little brush of this kind, and perhaps it's just as well.
Anyhow, a game like this is worth playing on its own account, whether
you come in with a scalp at your belt every time or not."
It was just as darkness was slowing down our anti-U-boat operations,
that a signal came through stating that there were believed to be
several survivors still alive among the wreckage of the _Marmora_, and
ordering us to proceed to the scene of her sinking with all dispatch.
The moon was rising as we began to nose among the pathetic litter of
scraps that was all that remained afloat of what, five or six hours
previously, had been a swift and beautiful auxiliary cruiser.
There was enough light for us to be reasonably sure, at the end of an
hour's search, that our mission was in vain; that there remained no
living man to pick up. There was something strangely familiar, though,
in the lines of a cutter which, in spite of a smashed gunwale, was still
afloat, and I was just thinking of how grateful a lee, in the monsoon,
the windward side of the old _Marmora's_ lifeboats had furnished for a
deck-chair or two, when the captain, advancing the handle of the
engine-room telegraph, turned to me with: "We're off to rendezvous with
the _Lymptania_ now; I think we can promise you some real excitement in
the course of the next day or two."
CHAPTER V
THE CONVOY GAME
The fantastic pile of multi-coloured slabs blotting out a broken patch
of sky above the seaward end of the estuary, if it had been on land,
might have been anything from a row of hangars, viewed in slant
perspective, to the scaffolding of a scenic railway, or a "Goblin's
Castle" in Luna Park. But there in the middle of the channel, the
mountainous bulk could only be one thing, the _Lymptania_, the ship
which our division of American destroyers had been ordered to escort on
that part of its westbound voyage in which there was reckoned to be
danger of submarine attack. Distorted by the camouflage, the tumbled
mass of jumbled colours continued to loom in jagged indefinitiveness as
we closed it from astern, and it was only when we had come up well
abreast of it that the parts settled down into "ship-shapeliness," and
the silhouette of perhaps the most famous of the world's great steamers
sharpened against the sunlit afternoon clouds.
The change which had been wrought in the appearance of the _Lymptania_
since last I had seen her was almost beyond belief. Then she had been a
hospital ship, with everything about her, from snowy whiteness to red
crosses in paint and coloured lights, calculated to establish her
character, to give her the protection of conspicuousness. Now she sought
protection in quite the opposite way. Every trick of scientific
camouflage had been employed to render her inconspicuous; while, if that
failed, there were the destroyers. The protection of these big liners is
a considerable undertaking, but it has its redeeming features. As U-boat
bait they are unrivalled, and the number of German submarines which have
been sent to the bottom as a direct consequence of attempting to sink
one of them will make a long and interesting list when the time comes to
publish it.
There was something almost awesome in the emptiness of the great ship,
in the lifelessness of the decks, in the miles of blinded ports. The
heads of a few sailors "snugging down" on the forecastle, a knot of
officers at the end of the bridge, and two stewardesses in white
uniforms leaning over the rail of one of the upper decks--that was all
there was visible of human life on a ship which a few days before had
been packed to the funnels with its thousands of American soldiers. A
lanky destroyer gunner lounging by a ladder, described her exactly when
he said to one of his mates: "Gee, but ain't she the lonesome one!"
The captain of the _Zip_ turned his glasses back to cover the little
group of officers on the liner's bridge. "There's the skipper," he said
presently. "I only hope he's well ahead of the game on the sleeps, for I
wouldn't mind betting that he won't be leaving that bridge for a cup of
coffee for some time. It's going to be an anxious interval for him--very
anxious. It's quite beyond calculation, the value to the Allies at this
moment of a ship of the size and speed of the _Lymptania_, and her
skipper must know from what has happened the last week, that the Huns
are all out to bag her this time, and he can hardly be able to extract
any too much comfort out of the fact that it's about a hundred to one
that we'll bag the Fritz that tries it--either before or after the
event. Yes, it will be an anxious time for him--but," a grimly wry smile
coming to his face as he turned his eyes to the opening seaward horizon,
"even so, it'll be nothing to the time we're in for in the _Zip_ and all
the rest of the escort. _He'll_ be able to sleep if he happens to take a
notion to; _we_ won't, at least, not during the time we've got _her_ to
shepherd. Again, he's only got the _chance_ of being hit by a torpedo to
worry about; we've got the _certainty_ of being hit by head-seas that
have as much kick in them to a driven destroyer as a tin-fish full of
gun-cotton. Unless the weather gets either a good deal better or a shade
worse, we're sure up against the real thing this time.
"The fact is," continued the captain, taking up the slack in the hood of
his weather-proof jacket as a slight alteration of course brought a new
slant of wind; "the fact is, I'd much rather see it get worse than
better. If it would only kick up enough sea so that there was no chance
of a submarine operating in it, she could drive right along on her own
without any need of destroyers. But so long as we've this weather
there's a possibility of a torpedo running in, we've got to hang on to
the last shiver, and there are two or three things which are going to
make 'hanging on' this particular trip just a few degrees worse than
anything we've stacked up against before. This is about the way things
stand: The _Lymptania's_ best protection is her speed; but while she is
just about the fastest of the big ships, she is also just about the
biggest of the fast ships. This means that the size of the target she
presents goes a long way toward offsetting the advantage of her speed;
so that the presence of destroyers--in any kind of weather a submarine
can work in--is very desirable, and may be vital.
"Now the escorting of any steamer that makes over twenty knots an hour
is a lively piece of business, no matter what the weather, for
destroyers, to screen most effectively, should zigzag a good deal more
sharply than their convoy, and that, of course, calls for several knots
more speed. This can be managed all right in fair weather, or even in
rough, where there is only a following or a beam sea; but where the seas
come banging down from more than a point or two for'ard of the beam it
is quite a different matter. In that event, the speed of the whole
procession depends entirely on how much the destroyers can stand without
being reduced to scrap-iron. Naturally, the ship under escort endeavours
to make her speed conform to the best the destroyers can do under the
circumstances; but since an extra knot or two an hour might well make
all the difference in avoiding a submarine attack, the tendency always
is to keep the escorting craft extended to just about their limit of
endurance.
"Just how the mean will be struck between what a fast steamer thinks its
escorting destroyers _ought_ to stand, and what the destroyers really
_can_ stand, depends upon several things. Perhaps the principal factor
is the state of mind of the skipper of the steamer, and that, in turn,
is influenced by the value of his ship--both actual and potential--and
the danger of submarine attack at that particular time in the waters
under traverse. When the destroyers set out to escort a very fast and
valuable ship, steering into heavy head seas in waters where there are
known to be a number of U-boats operating, they've got the whole
combination working against them, and the result is--just what you're
slated to see this trip. Best take a good look at the _Zip_ while you've
got a chance; she may be quite a bit altered by the time we get back to
port again. And you might take a squint at the _Flossie_ over there,
too. She's our latest and swiftest, the Fotilla's pride. But this is
her first experience of taking out an ex-ocean greyhound, and if, in a
burst of fresh enthusiasm, she chances to tap any of these several extra
knots of speed she is supposed to have--well, the _Flossie's_ sky-line
in that case will be modified more than those of all the rest of her
older and wiser sisters put together."
Those were prophetic words.
"The one thing that makes it certain that we'll be put to the limit
to-night," resumed the captain, after he had rung up more speed on our
coming out into opener water, "is the news in this morning's official
announcement of the sinking of the _Justicia_. We seem just to have
struck the peak of the midsummer U-boat campaign. It was scarcely a week
ago that they got the _Carpathian_. Then, a few days later, came the
_Marmora_ (you won't forget for a while the strafe we had at the U-boat
which put her down), and now it's the _Justicia_, the biggest ship
they've sunk in a year or so. That's the thing that must be worrying the
skipper of the _Lymptania_, for it shows they're after the great
troop-carriers. The way they stuck to the _Justicia_ proves they're not
yet beyond taking some risk if the stake is high enough. Now and then
some Fritz is found desperate enough to commit hari-kari by coming up
close (if the chance offers) and making sure of getting his torpedo
home. He gets what's coming to him, of course, but there is also a fair
chance of his getting the ship he is after; and a fast liner for a
U-boat is a poor exchange--from our standpoint. Naturally, these things
all make the skipper of the _Lymptania_ anxious to minimise his risks by
hitting up just as hot a pace as he can, and that, with her size and her
power, will be just about full speed. I can't tell you to a knot how
fast that is, but I can tell you this: if you were on the bridge of a
destroyer going at that speed when it hit a good heavy head-sea, the
only thing that would tell you it wasn't a brick wall she had collided
with would be the sort of moist feeling about the pile-driver that
knocked you over the side. So it looks like the rub is going to come in
getting the _Lymptania_ to content herself with a speed at which--well,
at which you can detect some slight difference between a head-sea and a
brick wall from the bridge of the destroyer doing the butting. Whatever
that proves to be, you'll have such a chance as you may never get again
to see what stuff your Uncle Sam's destroyers are made of."
We made screening formation as soon as we were well clear of the
barraged waters of the estuary, though the sea we had to traverse before
entering the open Atlantic was considered practically empty of menace.
The _Lymptania_, making astonishingly little smoke for a coal-burner,
worked up to somewhere near her top speed in a very short time; but,
with the light-running seas well abaft the beam, the destroyers cut
their zigzags round and about her with many knots in reserve. The big
liner, with much experience to her credit, knew precisely what to do and
how to do it, and the whole machine of the convoy worked as though
pulled by a single string. Her very movements themselves seemed to give
the various units of the escort their cues, for, though she steered a
course so devious and irregular that no submarine could have possibly
told how to head in order to waylay her, she was never "uncovered."
Ahead and abreast of her, going their own way individually, but still
conforming their general movements to hers, the destroyers wove their
practically impenetrable screen.
Whatever there was ahead, it was ideal destroyer weather for the moment,
and all hands came swarming out on the dry sun-warmed deck to make the
most of it while it lasted. An importunate whine from a nest of arms and
legs sprawling abreast the midships torpedo-tubes attracted my attention
for a moment as I sauntered aft to see what was afoot, and presently the
rattle of dice on the deck and an imploring "Come on, you Seven!" told
me they were "shooting Craps," with, I shortly discovered, bars of milk
chocolate and sticks of chewing-gum for stakes. Several others were
playing "High, Low, Jack," and here and there--using elbows and knees to
keep the bellying pages from blowing away--were little knots clustered
about the latest Sunday Supplement from New York.
But quite the best thing of all was two brown-armed youngsters going
through a proper battery warming-up with a real baseball. I had seen
enthusiasts on two or three of the American units with the Grand Fleet
playing catch right up to the moment "General Quarters" was sounded for
target practice; but that was on the broad decks of battleships, with
some chance of saving a ball that chanced to be muffed. But here the
pitcher had to wind-up with a sort of a corkscrew stoop to keep from
hitting his hand against a stay, while the catcher braced himself with
one foot against a depth-charge and the other against the mounting of
the after-gun. There were four or five things that the ball had to clear
by less than a foot in its flight from one to the other, but the only
ones of these I recall now are a searchlight diaphragm and a gong which
sounded from the bridge a standby signal to the men at the
depth-charges. I actually saw that skilfully directed spheroid make two
complete round-trips, from the pitcher to the catcher and back, before
it struck the gong a resonant bing! caromed against the side of an
out-slung boat and disappeared into the froth of the wake.
The pitcher and catcher were in a hot argument as to whether that was
the twenty-sixth or the twenty-seventh ball they had lost overboard
since the first of the month, but they fell quiet and turned sympathetic
ears to my description of a net I had seen rigged on one of the
American battleships to prevent that very trouble.
"Nifty enough," was the pitcher's comment when I had finished describing
how the net was drawn taut right under the stern to prevent all leakage.
"Only thing is, the captain might rule it off on the score that it'd
catch the 'cans' we was trying to drop on Fritz as well as the 'wild
pitches.' Might do for harbour use, though. Lost balls is a considerable
drain even there."
It was just before dinner-time that the lengthening life of the seas
gave warning that we were coming out into the Atlantic. The force of
them was still abaft the beam, however, and their principal effect was
to add a few degrees of roll, with an occasional deluge dashing in
admonitory flood across the decks. But it was enough to make the Ward
Room untenable, so that dinner had to be wolfed propped up on the
transoms, one nicely balanced dish at a time. There would be about an
hour more of this comparative comfort, the captain said, before we
reached a position where the full force of the seas would be felt, but
things would not really "begin to drop" till the _Lymptania_ altered
course and headed westerly. "If you have any writing, reading, sleeping,
or anything except just existing to do," he warned, as he kept his soup
from overflowing by an undulant gesture of the hand which poised it,
"better do it now. It's your last chance."
The forty winks I managed to snatch as a result of following up the
sleeping part of that recommendation stood me in good stead in the times
ahead. It took no little composing to doze off even as it was, and it
was the sharp bang my head got from the siderail of my bunk that put a
period to the nap I did get. The rolling had increased enormously, and
though it was apparent we were not yet bucking into it, the swishing of
the water on the forecastle overhead indicated that there had been
enough alteration of course to bring the seas--on one leg of the zigzags
at least--well forward of the beam. I climbed out, pulled on my
weather-proof suit and sea-boots, and clambered up to the bridge.
There were still a couple of hours to go before dark, and in the
diffused light of a bright bank of sunset clouds the gay dazzle colours
of all the ships showed up brilliantly as they ploughed the
whitecap-plumed surface of a sea which now stretched unbrokenly to the
westward horizon. There was a world of power behind the belligerent bulk
of swells which had been gathering force under the urge of a
west-nor'-west wind that had chased them all the way from Labrador, and
the destroyers, teetering quarteringly along their foam-crested tops,
were rolling drunkenly and yawing viciously ahead of jagged wakes.
Still driving on at express speed, however, they continued to maintain
perfect formation on the swiftly steaming _Lymptania_. The latter,
apparently as steady as though "chocked up" in a dry-dock, drove
serenely on in great swinging zigzags.
The captain came up from the chart-room and took a long look around.
"It's just about as I expected," he said, shaking his head dubiously.
"It isn't so rough but what a submarine might stage an attack if her
skipper had the nerve; and it's a darn sight too rough for destroyers to
screen the _Lymptania_ with her holding to anything like full speed.
It's all up now to _what_ speed she will try to hold us to."
"But what's the matter with this?" I protested. "We're still hitting the
high places for speed, and, while I wouldn't call this exactly
comfortable, we still seem to be making pretty good weather of it."
The captain smiled indulgently. "You're right," he said, "as far as you
go. We are indeed hitting the high places, but--the high places haven't
started hitting us yet. Wait just about five or ten minutes," he added,
turning his glasses to where the great liner, silhouetted for the moment
against the sunset clouds, ploughed along on our port beam, "and you'll
see the difference. Ah!" this as he steadied his glasses on where the
boiling wake of the _Lymptania_, beginning to bend away in a sharp curve
indicating a considerable alteration of course. "There she goes now.
Hold tight!"
With his hand on the engine-room telegraph, the captain gave the men at
the wheel a course to conform to that of the _Lymptania_. Quick as a
cat on her helm, the _Zip_ swung swiftly through eight points and
plunged ahead. This brought on her bows seas that had been rolling up
abeam, and we were up against the real thing at last.
The first sea, which she caught while she was still turning, the _Zip_
contented herself with slicing off the truculently-tossing top of before
crunching it underfoot. It was a smartly-executed performance, and
seemed to promise encouragingly as to the way she might be expected to
dispose of the next ones. The second in line, however, which she met
head-on and essayed the same tactics with, dampened her ardour--and just
about everything and everybody else below the foretop--by detaching a
few tons of its bumptious bulk and raking her fore-and-aft with its
rumbling green-white flood. The bridge was above the main weight of that
blow, but 'midships and aft I saw men bracing themselves against a
knee-deep stream. One bareheaded and bare-armed man, who had evidently
been surprised in making his way from one hatch to another, I saw rolled
fifteen or twenty feet and slammed up against the torpedo-tube which
prevented his going overboard. He limped out of sight, rubbing his
shoulder, and probably never knew how lucky he was in being caught by
_that_ wave instead of one which came along a minute later.
The slams which she received from the next two or three seas left the
_Zip_ in a somewhat chastened mood, and rather less sanguine respecting
her ability to go on pulling off that little stunt of surmounting waves
by biting them in the neck and then trampling their bodies under foot.
She was beginning to realise that she had a body of her own, and that
there was something else around that could bite--yes, and kick, and
gouge, and punch below the belt, and do all the other low-down tricks of
the underhand fighter.
Languid and uncertain of movement, like a dazed prize-fighter, she was
just steadying herself from the jolt a bustling brute of a comber had
dealt her in passing, when the skyline ahead was blotted out by the
imminent green-black loom of a running wall of water which, from its
height and steepness, might well have been kicked up by a Valparaiso
"Norther" or a South Sea hurricane.
It may have been the chastened state of mind the last sea had left her
in which was responsible for _Zip's_ deciding to take this one "lying
down"; or again, it may be that she was acting, in reverse, after the
example set by the rabbit who, because he couldn't go under the hill,
went over it. At any rate, after one shuddering look at the mountainous
menace tottering above her bows, she made up her mind that she was
better off under the sea than on the surface, and deliberately dived. Of
course, it was the Parthian kick the last sea had given her stern that
was really responsible for her bows starting to go down at the very
instant those of every other ship that one had had experience of would
have been beginning to point skyward, but to all intents and purposes
she looked, from the bridge, to be submerging of her own free and
considered decision. The principal thing which differentiated it from
the ordinary dive of a submarine was the fact that it was made at a
sharper angle and at about four times the speed.
There was something almost uncanny in the quietness with which that
plunge began; though, on the latter score, there was nothing to complain
of by about half a second later. I have seen at one time or another
almost every conceivable kind of craft, from a Fijian war canoe to the
latest battlecruiser, trying to buck head seas, and invariably the wave
that swept it had the decency to announce its coming by a warning knock
on the bows. This time there was nothing of the kind. The retreating sea
had lifted her stern so high that the forecastle was under water even
before the coming one had begun to topple over on to it. The consequence
was that there was no preliminary bang to herald the onrush of the
latter.
The base of the mountainous roller simply flooded up over the diving
forecastle and crashed with unbroken force against the bridge. We had
collided with the "brick wall" right enough, and for the next few
seconds at least the result was primal chaos.
I have a vivid but detached recollection of two or three things in the
instant that the blow impended. One is of the helmsman, crouching low,
with legs wide apart, locking his arms through the slender steel spokes
of the wheel the better to steady her in the coming smash. Another is of
the captain, with hunched shoulders and set jaw, throwing over the
telegraph to stop the engines. But the clearest picture of all is of the
submarine lookout on the port side--a black-eyed, black-haired boy with
a profile that might have been copied from an old Roman coin--who was
leaning out and grinning sardonically into the very teeth of the
descending hydraulic ram. It was his savagely-flung anatomy, I believe,
though I never made sure, which bumped me in the region of the solar
plexus a moment later and broke my slipping hold on the buckling
stanchion to which I was trying to cling.
There was nothing whatever suggestive of water--soft, fluent, trickling
water--in the first shattering impact of that mighty blow. It was as
solid as a collision between ship and ship; indeed, the recollection I
have of a railway wreck I was once in on a line in the Argentine Pampas
is of a shock less shattering. It is difficult to record events in their
proper sequence, partly because they were all happening at once, and
partly because the self-centred frame of mind I was in at the moment was
not favourable for detached observation. The noise and the jar of the
crash were stupendous, yet neither of these has left so vivid a mental
impression as the uncanny writhing of the two-inches-thick steel
stanchion to which I was endeavouring to hold, and the nerve-racking
sound of rending metal. I have no recollection of hearing the clink of
broken glass, nor of being struck by pieces of it; yet all the panes of
heavy plate which screened the forward end of the bridge--of a
thickness, one had supposed, to withstand anything likely to assail
them--were swept away as though they had been no more than the
rice-paper squares of a Japanese window.
[Illustration: WHERE THE GREAT LINER PLOWED ALONG]
[Illustration: WE HAD COLLIDED WITH THE "BRICK WALL"]
[Illustration: NOW SHE WAS BACK AT BASE]
The rush of water, of course, followed instantly upon the crash, yet, so
vivid are my impressions of the things intimately connected with the
blow itself that it seems as though there was an appreciable interval
between the fall of that and the time when the enveloping cataclysm
transformed the universe into a green-white stream of brine. From ahead,
above and from both sides the flood poured, to meet and mingle in a
whirling maelstrom in the middle of the bridge. There was nothing of
blown spindrift to it; it was green and solid and flowed with a heave
and a hurl that made no more of slamming a man to the deck than of
tossing a life-buoy. I went the whole length of the bridge when I lost
my grip on the port stanchion, brought up against the after-rail, and
then went down into a tangle of signal flags. I remember distinctly,
though, that the walls of water rushing by completely blotted out sea
and sky to port and starboard, and that there was all the darkness of
late twilight in the cavern of the engulfed bridge. Then the great sea
tumbled aft along the main deck, and it grew light again.
The captain and the helmsman had both kept their feet, and the latter,
dripping from head to heel, was just throwing over the engine-room
telegraph as I shook off my mantle of coloured bunting and crawled back
to my moorings at the stanchion. Immediately afterwards I saw him jump
on to the after-rail and make some sort of negative signal to a couple
of half-drowned boys who, waist-deep in swirling water, were pawing
desperately among the depth-charges. Then he came over and joined me for
a few moments.
"Some sea, that," he said, slipping down his hood and throwing back the
brine-dripping hair from his forehead. "It's happened before, but never
like that. Lord only knows what it's done to her. S'pose we'll begin to
hear of that in a minute." He pointed to a string of porcelain
insulators dangling at the end of twisted bits of wire in front of one
of the paneless windows. "That's the remains of our auxiliary radio," he
said, grinning; "and look at the fo'c'sle. Swept clean, pretty near.
Thank heaven, the gun's left. But, do you remember that heavy iron bar
the muzzle rested on? Gone! It was probably that, with some of the
shells in the rack, that made all that rat-a-tat. But what of it? Look
how she rides 'em now that she's eased down a bit. Only trouble is,
she's got to go it again. Look how we've dropped back." And he gave the
engine-room, by voice-pipe, a new "standard" speed, and threw the
telegraph over to "Full."
The pulsing throb began anew, and under the urge of speeding propellers
the _Zip_, steering in narrowed zig-zags quickly regained her station.
All of the destroyers, and the _Lymptania_ as well, had eased down
slightly, and the reduced speed meant also a reduction of the danger of
another of those deep-sea dives, something no craft but a submarine is
built to stand the strain of. But even as it was we were driving right
up to the limit of endurance all the time, and the sea that did not come
rolling up green right over the bows was the exception rather than the
rule. From the forecastle right away aft there was never more than a few
seconds at a time when the main deck was free of rollicking cascades of
boiling brine, and there were moments when only the funnels and the
after superstructure, rearing up like isolated rocks on a storm-beaten
coast, were visible above the swirling flood. There were times when the
men standing-by at the guns and torpedo-tubes seemed almost to be
engulfed; yet none of them was swept away, and they even--from the way
they kept joking each other in the lulls--appeared to be getting a good
deal of sport out of the thing.
The barometer was falling, and both wind and waves gained steadily in
force as the afternoon lengthened and merged into a twilight that was
itself already melting before the rising moon. Clouds were few and
scattering, and it was plain there were to be no hours dark enough to
offer any protection from submarine attack. Looming as large as ever,
the big liner offered scarcely a better target on the side she was
illuminated by the moonlight than on the one from which she was
silhouetted against it. From either side a fifth of a mile of steel
would "take a lot of missing," and her captain, sensibly enough, would
not ease his engines by a revolution more than was necessary to keep
within his destroyer screen. It was plainly up to the destroyers to
stick it to the limit, and that is just what they did. As I heard one of
the men put it, it was the "bruisiest" bit of escort-work they had ever
been--or probably ever will be--called upon to face, but every one of
those Yankee destroyers stayed with it to the finish.
Now it would be the _Zop_ that would emerge from under a mountainous sea
and come drifting back without steerage weigh, rolling drunkenly in the
trough, and now it would be the _Zap_. And now this or that result of a
"hydraulic ramming" would disable one of the others temporarily. But,
game to the last flake of brine-frosted camouflage, back they came to it
again, and again, and yet again. Sunrise of the next day found them
plugging on in station, and in station they remained until the
_Lymptania_, beyond the zone of all possible submarine danger, made a
general signal of "Thank you," and headed off to the westward on her
own.
* * * * *
Out of the dim grey dawn of the morning after the night before, battered
and buckled, but still unbroken, the wearily waggling line of the
_Lymptania's_ late escort trailed back into harbour. The mussed-up
silhouette of every one of them bore mute testimony to the way she had
been put "through the mill," and, in most cases, the things that met the
eye were not the worst. The _Zop_ needed every yard of the channel as
she zig-zagged up it under a jury steering-gear, and the _Zap_, like a
man dazed from a blow, would have sudden "mental hiati" in which she
would straggle carelessly out of line with an inconsequential
going-to-pick-flowers-by-the-roadside sort of air. The _Zim's_
idiosyncrasies had more of an epileptic suddenness about them, and her
hectic coughing plainly indicated some kind of "lung trouble." Our
little _Zip_ presented a very brave front to the outer world, but I
heard hollow clankings punctuating the erstwhile even hum of the
engines, while the drip, drip, drip and the drop, drop, drop through the
crinkled sheet-steel sheathing of my cabin told that the deck-plates of
the forecastle fitted a good deal less snugly than before they had
played anvil to the lusty head-sea hammer.
But the _Flossie_, the "latest, the swiftest, the flotilla's pride"--the
wounds of all the rest of us put together were as nothing to those of
the _Flossie_. In trying to maintain her pride of place at the head of
the escort, she _had_, for a brief space, unleashed those extra knots of
speed the captain had spoken of, and all that, and even more than, he
had prophesied had come to pass. It was just such a swaggerer of a sea
as that first one that _Zip_ had dived into which did the trick, only,
as the _Flossie_ was going faster, the impact was somewhat more severe.
She was a mile or more distant from us when it happened, and, watching
from the bridge of the _Zip_, we simply saw her dissolve into a
sky-tossed spout of foam. When she reappeared she was floating, beam-on,
to the seas, and, for the moment, an apparently helpless hulk.
The captain's instant diagnosis of a couple of muffled detonations which
followed was entirely correct.
"That sea must have 'jack-knifed' the _Flossie_ so sharply," he said,
"that the recoil took up the slack in the wires, releasing two 'cans'
she seems to have had set and ready. It's about the same thing as just
happened to us, except that the tautened wire only rang the stand-by
bell, the signal for the men to set the depth-charges. First thing I did
after we came to the surface was to negative that supposed order. That
was what I was doing when I waved to those boys who were clawing at the
'cans,' with their heads under water. Lucky they weren't carried away."
It was a chastened _Flossie_ which had gone floundering back to station
a few minutes later, but somehow or other she had managed to carry on,
and now she was back at Base. I won't "give comfort to the enemy" by
trying to describe her appearance, but some hint of it may be gleaned
from the laconic comment of one of the _Zip's_ signalmen, as the
"Flotilla's Pride" was warping in to moor alongside the mother ship.
"Gee whiz!" he ejaculated. "See the old _Vindictive_ limpin' home from
Zeebruggy! S'pose they'll fill her up with concrete now an' block a
channel."
The captain grinned as he overheard the remark where he waited by the
starboard rail for the last of the mooring lines to be made fast. "It's
not quite so bad as that," he said. "If need be, they'll have her, and
all the rest of us, right as trivets in three or four days, and quite
ready to take the sea again when our turn comes. It's all in the convoy
game, anyhow, and not such bad fun after all, 'specially when it's
behind you, and you've got a bath, and a change, and a lunch at the
Club, and an afternoon of tennis in immediate prospect. Come along."
CHAPTER VI
YANK BOAT _versus_ U-BOAT
It was the turn of the tide and the turn of the day on the "quiet waters
of the River Lee." Pale blue columns of smoke rose above the verdant
boskiness which masked the squat brown cabins where the peat fires
smouldered, and along the straggling stone wall which crowned the ridge
the swaying heads of home-returning cows showed intermittently against
the glowing western sky. The peacefulness of it was almost palpable. You
seemed to breathe it, and could all but reach out with the hand and
touch it.
It permeated even to the long lines of lean destroyers in the stream,
and it was the subtly suggestive influence of it which had deflected
homeward the minds of the motley-clad sailors who were lounging at ease
about the stern of the first of a "cluster" of three of these--like a
sheaf of bright multi-coloured arrows the trim craft looked, with the
level rays of the setting sun striking across them where they lay moored
alongside each other--and set tongues wagging of the little things
which, magnified by distance, loom large in the imaginations of men in
exile.
They were deep in the "old home town" stuff when I sauntered
inconsequently aft on the off-chance of picking up a yarn or two, but as
there appeared to be no one present from my part of the country, no
immediate opportunity to break in presented itself. Equally an outsider
was I when the flow of discussion turned to woollen sweaters and socks
and mufflers, and the golden trails of romance leading back from the
names and messages sewed or knitted into them.
No fair unknowns had ever sent _me_ any of these soft comforts, and
after I had heard a lusty youngster from Virginia tell how a "sweater
address" he had written what he described as a "lettah that was good and
plenty w'am, b'lieve me," replied that she was "jest goin' twelve
years," and that her mother didn't think she ought to be thinking of
marriage just yet--after that I didn't feel quite so bad over not having
had a chance to open one of these "woolly" correspondences. There was
some solace, too, in hearing a pink-cheeked young ex-bank clerk tell how
the "abdominal bandage" (they name them, as a rule, after the garment
that starts the correspondence), with whom he had exchanged something
like a dozen letters of cumulative passion, brought the affair to a
sudden and violent end by some indirect and inadvertent admission which
showed that she remembered when Grant was President.
But when the talk drifted, as it always does in the end, to baseball
and baseballers, I knew that there was going to be an opening for me
presently, and stood by to take advantage of it. A three-year absentee
from the bleachers, I was not sufficiently up on last season's pennant
race "dope" to do more than make frequent sapient observations on this
or that big-leaguer's stickwork or fielding as he was mentioned; but
when they began to discuss, or rather to wrangle over, for discuss is
far too polite a term, the theory of the game and to grow red in the
face over such esoterics (or "inside stuff," to put it in "Fanese") as
how and when a "squeeze" ought to be pulled off, I showed them the
bulbous first joint of the little finger of my right hand--which there
is no other way of acquiring than by the repeated telescopings of many
seasons on the diamond--and was welcomed at last on equal terms. A seat
was offered me on a depth-charge, across the business end of which an
empty sack had been thrown to prevent a repetition of what came near
happening the time a stoker, who was proving that Hans Wagner could
never again be a popular idol now that we were at war with the Huns,
punctuated his argument by hammering with a monkey-wrench on the firing
mechanism.
They were not as impressed as they should have been when I told them
that I learned the game under the tutelage of the mighty Bill Lange
(this, of course, because the incomparable "Big Bill" was at his zenith
long before their time); but they were duly respectful when I said I
had played three years' Varsity baseball, and became quite deferential
when I assured them I had also survived a season of bush-league in the
North-West. There was some kind of electrician rating in the crowd who
had been a bush-league twirler before his "wing went glass," as he put
it, and he, it soon transpired, had played in one place or another with
a number of my old team mates of the Montana League. Deep in
reminiscence of those good old days, I quite forgot my subtle scheme of
using baseball as a stalking-horse for destroyer yarns, when the arrival
of some callers from a British sloop lying a mile or two farther down
the harbour recalled it to me. They had been in the _Moonflower_, the
man next me said, when she put a U-boat out of business not long before,
and one of them--he had some sort of decoration for his part in the
show--spun a cracking good yarn about it if you got him started. This
latter I managed to do by asking him how it chanced that the
_Moonflower_ was allowed to sport a star on her funnel. The story he
told, the while he rolled cigarettes and worked his jaws on Yankee
chewing-gum, revealed rather too much that may be used in some future
surprise party to make it possible to publish just yet, but it had the
desired effect of turning the current of re
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