Stories of the Ships
by Lewis R. Freeman · English · Gutenberg #42604 · 434,614 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Stories of the Ships
Author: Lewis R. Freeman
Release date: April 27, 2013 [eBook #42604]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STORIES OF THE SHIPS ***
Transcriber's Note:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible, including inconsistent hyphenation. Some changes have been
made. They are listed at the end of the text.
Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
OE ligatures have been expanded.
STORIES OF THE SHIPS
DEDICATED
TO
CAPT. ELLERTON
STORIES OF THE SHIPS
BY
LIEUT LEWIS R. FREEMAN, R.N.V.R.
OFFICIAL PRESS REPRESENTATIVE WITH THE GRAND FLEET
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1919
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
I. STORIES OF THE SHIPS
PAGE
THE STORY OF THE _CORNWALL_ 3
i. PLYMOUTH TO THE FALKLANDS 3
ii. THE BATTLE OF THE FALKLANDS 28
THE STORY OF THE _SYDNEY_ 53
i. THE SIGNALMAN'S TALE 53
ii. NAVAL HUNNISM 85
II. LIFE IN THE FLEET
A BATTLESHIP AT SEA 107
A NORTH SEA SWEEP 130
A VISIT TO THE BRITISH FLEET 157
THE HEALTH OF THE FLEET 169
ECONOMY IN THE GRAND FLEET 178
CHRISTMAS IN A "HAPPY" SHIP 194
IN A BALLOON SHIP 203
COALING THE GRAND FLEET 216
THE STOKERS 232
III. AMERICA ARRIVES
THE U.S. NAVY 247
"GETTING TOGETHER" 259
i. HOW THE OFFICERS OF THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN
SHIPS THAT ARE WORKING TOGETHER IN EUROPEAN
WATERS ARE MAKING EACH OTHER'S ACQUAINTANCE 259
ii. WHAT THE BRITISH BLUEJACKET THINKS OF THE
AMERICAN 268
iii. WHAT THE AMERICAN BLUEJACKET THINKS OF
BRITAIN AND THE BRITISH 278
I. STORIES OF THE SHIPS
THE STORY OF THE _CORNWALL_
I. PLYMOUTH TO THE FALKLANDS
Of the countless stories of naval action which I have listened to in the
course of the months I have spent with the Grand Fleet, I cannot recall
a single one which was told as the consequence of being asked for with
malice aforethought. I have never yet found a man of action who was
enamoured of the sound of his own voice raised in the recital of his
own exploits, and if there is one thing more than another calculated
to throw an otherwise not untalkative British Naval Officer into a
state of uncommunicativeness, in comparison with which the traditional
silence of the sphinx or the proverbial close-mouthedness of the clam
are alike sheer garrulity, it is to ask him, point blank, to tell you
(for instance) how he took his submarine into the Baltic, or what his
destroyer did at Jutland, or how he fought his cruiser at Dogger Bank,
or something similar.
The quiet-voiced but always interesting and often dramatic recitals
of such things as these which I have heard have invariably been led
up to quite incidentally--at dinner, on the bridge or quarter-deck,
around the wardroom fire, or through something else that has just been
told. Several times I have found in officers' diaries--little records
never meant for other eyes than those of the writers' own friends
or families--which have been turned over to me to verify some point
regarding which I had inquired, laconic references to incidents and
events of great human and even historic interest, and one of the most
amusing and dramatic yarns I have ever listened to was told me in a
"kite" balloon--plunging in the forty-mile wind against which it was
being towed like a hooked salmon--by a man who had assured me before we
went up that nothing really exciting had ever fallen to his experience.
It was in this way--an anecdote now and then as this or that incident
of the day recalled it to his mind--that Captain ---- came to tell me
the story of the _Cornwall_ during those eventful early months of the
war when he commanded that now famous cruiser. He mentioned her first,
I believe, one night in his cabin when, referring to a stormy midwinter
month, most of which had been spent by his Division of the Grand Fleet
on some sort of work at sea, I spoke of the "rather strenuous interval"
we had experienced.
"If you think life in a battleship of the Grand Fleet strenuous,"
laughed the Captain, extending himself comfortably in his armchair
before the glowing grate, "I wonder what you would have thought of the
life we led in the old _Cornwall_. Not very far from a hundred and
twenty thousand miles of steaming was her record for the first two years
of the war, and in that time she ploughed most of the Seven Seas and
coasted in the waters of all but one of the Six Continents. Always on
the lookout for something or other, coaling as we could, provisioning as
we might--let me tell you that coming to the Grand Fleet after that (at
least until a few months had elapsed and the contrast wore off) was like
retiring on a pension in comparison."
He settled himself deeper into the soft upholstery, extended his
feet nearer the fire, lighted a fresh cigar, and, in the hour which
elapsed before the evening mail came aboard, told me of the work of the
_Cornwall_ in those first chaotic weeks of the war which preceded the
battle of the Falklands.
"We were at Plymouth when the war began," said he, "and our first work
was in connexion with protecting and 'shepherding' safely to port
several British ships carrying bullion which were still on the high
seas. It was a baffling sort of a job, especially as there were two or
three German raiders loose in the North Atlantic, the favourite ruse
of each of which was to represent itself as a British cruiser engaged
in the same benevolent work the _Cornwall_ was on. Warned of these
'wolves-in-shepherds'-clothing,' the merchantmen we sought to protect
were afraid to reveal their whereabouts by wireless, the consequence
being that our first forerunning efforts to safeguard the seas resolved
themselves into a sort of marine combination of 'Blind-Man's Buff' and
'Hide-and-Seek,' played pretty well all over the Atlantic. All the ships
with especially valuable cargoes got safely to port ultimately, though
none of them, that I recall, directly under the wing of the _Cornwall_.
It was our first taste of the 'So-near-and-yet-so-far' kind of life
that is the inevitable lot of the cruiser which essays the dual rôle of
'Commerce Protector' and 'Raider Chaser.'
"After a few hours at 'Gib,' we were next sent across to Casa Blanca,
where the appearance of the _Cornwall_ was about the first tangible
evidence that French Africa had of the fact that England was really
coming into the war in earnest. There was a good deal of unrest in
Morocco at the time, for the Germans were even then at work upon their
insidious propaganda among the Moslems of all the colonies of the
Allies. The 'buzz' in the bazaars that the appearance of a British
warship started must have served a very useful purpose at this critical
juncture in carrying to the Arabs of the interior word that France was
not going to have to stand alone against Germany. Our reception by both
the French and native population of Casa Blanca was most enthusiastic,
and during all of our stay a cheering procession followed in the wake of
every party of officers or men who went ashore.
"Leaving Casa Blanca, we were sent back to the Atlantic to search for
commerce destroyers, ultimately working south by the Canaries and Cape
Verde Islands to South American waters, where the _Karlsruhe_ was then
at the zenith of her activities. The chase of this enterprising and
elusive raider, whose career was finally brought to an inglorious end by
her going aground on a West Indian Island, kept the _Cornwall_--along
with a number of other British cruisers--steadily on the move, until
the ominous and painful news of the destruction of Craddock's fleet off
Coronel suddenly brought us face to face with the fact that there was
soon going to be bigger game than a lone pirate to be stalked.
"We never had the luck to sight even so much as the smoke of
the _Karlsruhe_, although--as I only learned too late to take
advantage of the information--the _Cornwall_ was within an hour
or two's steaming of her on one occasion. I _did_ think we had her
once, though--a jolly amusing incident it was, too. I was getting
uncomfortably short of food at the time--a very common experience in the
'here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow' sort of life we were leading;--so that
when the welcome news reached me by wireless one morning that a British
ship--Buenos Aires to New York with frozen beef--was due to pass through
the waters we were then patrolling, I lost no time in heading over to
intercept her on the chance of doing a bit of marketing.
"We picked her up promptly as reckoned, but, while she was still hull
down on the horizon, her skipper began to signal frantically, '_I am
being chased by the "Karlsruhe"!_' Here was luck indeed. I ordered
'Action Stations' to be sounded, and the course of the ship to be
altered toward the point where I figured the smoke of the pursuing
pirate would begin to smudge the sky-line as she came swooping down
upon her prey. Sighting nothing after holding on this course for a
while, I came to the conclusion that the raider must be hidden by the
impenetrable smoke-pall with which the flying beef-ship had masked
a wide arc of the western horizon, and headed up in that direction,
begging the fugitive in the meantime to give me the bearing of her
pursuer as accurately as possible.
"Her only reply to this, however, was to belch out 'smoke-screen'
faster than ever and continue rending the empyrean ether with renewed
'_I am being chased by the "Karlsruhe"!_' In vain I assured her that
we were the H.M.S. _Cornwall_, and would take the greatest delight in
seeing that the chase was put an end to, if she would only tell us from
which direction the _Karlsruhe_ was coming, and cease to throw out a
bituminous blanket for the enemy to hide behind. Blacker and blacker
rolled the smoke, heavier and heavier piled the screen to leeward, and
still more frantically shrilled the appeals for help. At the end of my
patience at actions which it now began to dawn upon me looked more than
a little suspicious, I headed the _Cornwall_ straight after the runaway
and soon reduced the interval separating us sufficiently to reach her
with 'Visual.' She brought up sharp at my 'Stop instantly!' and a
quarter of an hour later my boarding party was clambering over her side.
"'Where's the _Karlsruhe_?' I shouted impatiently to the Boarding
Officer as his boat came back alongside again. I knew something of the
accuracy of German long range naval gunnery, and was far from being easy
in mind regarding the kind of surprise packet that might at any moment
be wafted out of that slowly thinning smoke-blur to leeward.
"'There,' he replied with a comprehensive sweep of the arm in quite the
opposite direction from the one I had been expecting the enemy. 'Right
there, Sir.' That old lunatic of a skipper thought the _Cornwall_ was
the _Karlsruhe_!"
"Did you get your frozen beef?" I asked.
The Captain smiled the pleased smile of one who recalls something that
has given him great satisfaction.
"I think that afternoon marked the beginning of the 'Food Economy'
campaign in the Navy," he replied. "If the Admiralty had been able to
continue buying frozen beef at the rate that crestfallen but highly
relieved skipper--quite of his own free will--charged for the lot we
loaded up after he had found it was not to be his fate to be sunk by
the _Karlsruhe_,--well, the Government could have probably built a new
battleship or two and never missed the money out of the saving."
The recollection of the treat that fresh meat was after a long period on
"bully beef" ration turned the Captain's thoughts to another time of
plenty he had experienced after the _Cornwall_ had helped the wounded
_Carmania_ limp back to Base following her successful engagement with
the _Cap Trafalgar_.
"In these times of food economy and restricted rations," he said,
"it fairly makes my mouth water to think of the feasts Captain G----
spread for us during the days we were devising a way to get the
battered _Carmania_ back to England. You see, when the war started
she was just about to sail on one of her transatlantic voyages with
the usual midsummer cargo of American millionaires, and her cuisine
was of a character calculated to satisfy their Epicurean tastes.
When they converted her to an auxiliary cruiser, it was the usual
sledge-hammer, crow-bar, and over-the-side procedure with the mirrors,
the upholsteries, and the mahoganies, but they left the stores, God
bless them, they left the stores. Can you fancy how things such as
truffled quail, and asparagus tips with mayonnaise--_iced_--and _café
parfait_, and Muscat dates, and California oranges--with the big gold
labels on--tasted to men who had been for weeks pretty nearly down to
the classic old wind-jammer ration of 'lobscouse' and 'dog's-body'? And
those plump, black, five-inch-long Havanas in the silver foil (I can
smell the soothing fumes of them yet), and that rarely blended Mocha,
and those bottles of 1835 Cognac--the pungent bouquet of them scents
the memories of the long evenings I sat with G---- in the wreck of his
fire-swept cabin while he yarned to me of the ripping fight he had just
come out of. And how we all envied G---- his luck--getting as sporting
a show as a man could ask for in that half-converted liner while we
cruisers were vainly chasing smoke and rumours over most of the South
Atlantic. Nothing less than the banquets he gave us would have salved
our heart-burnings."
And so it was that the Captain was led on to speak of what he had
heard--from those who took part in it, and only a few hours from the
time it happened--of the first great duel ever fought between modern
armed merchantmen, a conflict, indeed, which is still practically unique
in naval history.
"There was not much to choose between the ships," he said. "The _Cap
Trafalgar_--one of the latest of the Hamburg Sud Amerika liners--had
a good deal the best of it on the score of age, and the _Carmania_
probably something on the score of size. The latter had been hastily
converted at Liverpool immediately after the outbreak of the war, while
the former turned herself from sheep into wolf about the same time by
arming herself with the guns of a small German gun-boat. This craft, by
the way, steamed to the nearest Brazilian port and, with true Hunnish
logic, claimed the right to intern as a peaceful German Merchantman
on the strength of the fact that it was no longer armed! The largest
guns that either ship had were four-inch, the _Carmania_ having slight
advantage on the score of number. The _Carmania_ would have been no
match for the _Karlsruhe_, just as the _Cap Trafalgar_ would have
fallen easy prey to the _Cornwall_ or another of the British cruisers
in those waters. Under the circumstances, it was a happy fatality that
let these two ex-floating palaces fight with each other and in their own
class.
"The first word we had of the engagement was a wireless Captain G----
sent out saying, in effect, that he had sunk the _Trafalgar_, but, as
his bridge was burned up, his steering gear shot away, and all his
navigating instruments destroyed, that he would be glad to have some
one come and tell him where he was and lead him to a place where he
could, so to speak, lie down and lick his wounds for a while. It took a
jolly good bit of searching to find a ship that couldn't tell any more
about itself than that, but we finally sighted her ragged silhouette
and gave her a lead to such a haven as the practically open seas of our
rendezvous afforded.
"Poor G---- had lost a good deal more than his steering gear it soon
transpired, for the fire which had consumed his bridge had also gutted
his cabin, and reduced everything in it to cinders except an old Norfolk
jacket. How _that_ escaped we never could figure out, for of garments
hanging on pegs to the left and right of it no trace was left. As G----
was of about three times the girth of any other British officer in
those waters at the time, the wardrobe we tried to get together for him
was a grotesque combination; indeed, so far as I recall now, the old
Norfolk had to serve him as everything from pyjamas and bath-robe to
dinner-jacket and great-coat during that trying period. It was a weird
figure he cut presiding at those Gargantuan feasts he spread for us on
the bruised and battered old _Carmania_, but there wasn't a one of us
who wouldn't have changed places with him--Norfolk and all--for the
assurance of half his luck. Such is the monotony of this patrol work in
the outer seas, that, after your first enthusiasm wears off, you get
into a state of mind in which you can never conceive that anything is
ever going to happen. That we had the one most decisive naval battle of
the war just ahead of us, no one dreamed at this time.
"The fight between the _Carmania_ and _Cap Trafalgar_," he continued,
"has well been called 'The Battle of the Haystacks,' for never before
(or since, for that matter) have two ships with such towering upper
works stood off and tried to batter each other to pieces with gunfire.
Indeed, I well recall G----'s saying that, up to the very end, he could
not conceive that either ship could sink the other, and of how--even
after the _Carmania_ had been struck three or four-score times and a
raging fire forward had driven him from the bridge--he kept wondering in
the back of his brain what sort of a fight the duel would resolve itself
into when both had exhausted their shells. Luckily, he did not have to
face that problem.
"Both ships, according to G----'s account, began blazing at each other
as soon as they came in range, and, as each was eager to fight it out
to a finish, the distance separating them was, for a while, reduced as
rapidly as possible. At something like three thousand yards, however,
some sort of a rapid-fire gun burst into action on the _Trafalgar_.
'It didn't appear to be doing me much harm,' said G---- in telling of
it, 'but the incessant "pom-pom" of the accursed thing got so much on
my nerves that I drew off far enough to dull the edge of its infernal
yapping.'
"A thing which came near to putting the _Carmania_ out of the running
before she had completed the polishing off of her opponent was the
shell which I have spoken of as violating the sanctity of the Captain's
cabin--the one that burned everything but the Norfolk jacket. This
projectile--a four-inch--though (probably owing to the small resistance
offered by the light upper works) it did not explode, generated enough
heat in its passage to start a fire. Beginning on G----'s personal
effects, this conflagration spread to the bridge, destroying the
navigating instruments and ultimately making it impossible to remain
there--the latter a serious blow in itself. What made this fire
especially troublesome was the difficulty, because of the cutting of the
main, of bringing water to bear upon it. As it was, it was necessary
to head the _Carmania_ 'down the wind' to reduce the draught fanning
the flames. Nothing else would have saved her. Except for one thing,
this expedient would have enabled the now thoroughly worsted (though
G---- didn't know it) _Trafalgar_ to withdraw from the action, and
this was that the latter was herself on fire and had to take the same
course willy-nilly. From that moment on the battle was as irretrievably
joined as one of those old Spanish knife-duels in which the opponents
were locked together in a room to fight to a finish. Often as not, so
they say, the victor in one of these fights only survived the loser by
minutes or hours, and so would it have been in this instance had they
not finally been able to extinguish the fire on the _Carmania_.
"G----'s account of the way he had to carry on after being driven from
the bridge--it was really a splendid bit of seamanship--was funny in
the extreme, but the reality must have been funnier still, that is, if
that term can be applied to anything happening while shells are bursting
and blowing men to bits every few seconds. G---- is one of the biggest
men in the Navy--around the waist, I mean--so it wasn't to be expected
of him to be very shifty on his feet. And yet, by the irony of Fate, it
was he of all men who was suddenly confronted with a task that required
only less 'foot-work' than it did 'head-work.' With the battle going on
all the time, they rigged up some sort of a 'jury' steering gear, or it
may be that they steered her by her screws. At any rate, G---- had to
con her from the most commanding position he could find on one of the
after decks, or rather, as he had no longer voice-pipe communication
with the engine-room, he had to keep dashing back and forth (it must
have been for all the world like a batsman running in cricket) between
two or three commanding positions. 'If I wanted to open the range a
bit,' he said, 'I had to nip for'ard, wait till there was an interval in
both gun-fire and shell-burst, and yell down a hatchway' (or was it a
ventilator?) 'to the engine-room to "Slow port!" or if I suddenly found
it imperative to open the distance, I had to make the same journey and
pass the word down to "Stop starboard!" The very thought of that mad
shuttling back and forth under the equatorial sun used to make poor
G---- mop his forehead and pour himself a fresh drink every time he told
the story.
"Battered and burning fiercely as both ships were, G---- confessed that
even at this juncture he could not rid himself of the feeling that
neither of them had enough shells to sink the other. 'I was racking my
brain for some plan of action to follow when that moment arrived,' he
said, 'when suddenly the _Trafalgar_ began to heel sharply and started
to sink. It was our second or third salvo, which had holed her badly
at the water-line, that did the business. She had kept steaming and
fighting for close to an hour and a quarter afterwards, though.'
"G---- told us one very good story about his Gunnery officer. 'It was
just before the shell which started the fire struck us,' he said, 'that
Y----'s sun helmet was knocked off--I don't remember whether it was by
the wind or the concussion of the firing. Seeing it fall to the deck
below, he ran to the rail of the bridge and began shouting for some
one to bring it back to him. Before long, luckily, a seaman who had
heard the shouting in a lull of the firing, poked his head out to see
what it was about, and presently came puffing up the ladder with the
fugitive head-piece. I say _luckily_, because the gun-control for the
whole ship was suspended while Y---- waited for that infernal helmet.
And the funniest thing about it all was that, when I ventured to suggest
a few days later that it might be well if he made use of the chin-strap
of his helmet the next time he was in action, he claimed to have no
recollection whatever of the incident--thought he had been "sticking to
his guns" all the time. Just shows how a man's brain works in air-tight
compartments when he is really busy.'
"The Surgeon of the _Carmania_ (continued the Captain)--a splendid chap
who had given up a lucrative West-end practice and sworn he was under
forty (although he was really fifty-two) in order to get a chance to do
something for his country--told me many stories to prove the splendid
spirit of the men that passed under his hands during and after the
fight. Though most of the crew were only Royal Naval Reservists, with no
experience of and but little training for fighting, it appears that they
stood what is perhaps the hardest of all trials--that of seeing their
mates wounded and killed beside them--like seasoned veterans.
"'There was one stout-hearted young Cockney,' said the Surgeon, 'whom,
after I had finished removing a number of shell fragments from various
parts of his anatomy, I asked what he thought of the fight. "Rippin',
Sir," he replied, grinning ecstatically through the bandage that held up
the flap of a torn cheek; "rippin', never been in one like it before."
Then, as his eye caught the smile which I could not quite repress at the
lifetime of naval battling suggested by that "nev'r afore," he concluded
with "Not ev'n in Whitechapel."'
"The Surgeon came across one man who insisted that the blood flowing
from a ragged tear in his arm was really spattered there when one of his
mates--whose mangled body he bestrode--had been decapitated by a shell
a few minutes before; and there was one lot of youngsters who went on
cheerily 'Yo-heave-ho-ing' in hoisting some badly needed shells which
were so slippery with blood that they had to be sanded before they could
be handled. Grimly pathetic was the story he told me of a gunner whose
torn hand he had just finished amputating and bandaging when some one
shouted into the door of the dressing station that the _Trafalgar_ was
going down.
"'He crowded to a port I had had opened,' said the Surgeon, 'just in
time to see one of the last salvoes from the _Carmania_ go crashing
into the side of the heeling enemy. "Huroor, boys," he shouted; "give
'em beans," and as he cheered he started (what had evidently been a
favourite gesture of approval and excitement with him) to smite mightily
with his right fist into the palm of his left hand. But the blow fell
upon air; there was no answering thwack. The gnarled, weather-beaten
fist shot past a bandaged stump. He drew back with surprise for a
moment, and then, grinning a bit sheepishly, like a boy surprised in
some foolish action, edged back beside me at the port. "Quite forgot
there was su'thin' missin'," he said half apologetically, trying to
wriggle the elbow of the maimed arm back into the sling from which it
had slipped. "S'pose I'll be havin' to get used to it, won't I?" As the
_Trafalgar_ took a new list and began rapidly to settle he burst into
renewed "Huroors." "By Gawd, Sir," he cried, when she had finally gone,
"if I 'ad as many 'ands as an oktypuss, I'd 'a giv'n 'em all fer the joy
o' puttin' that blinkin' pyrit down to Davy Jones."'"
The Captain gazed long at the coals of the grate, on his face the
pleased smile of one who recalls treasured memories. "I can't tell you
how sorry we were to see the _Carmania_ go," he said finally. "My word,
how we _did_ enjoy those feasts good old G---- spread for us!" With a
laugh he roused himself from the pleasant reverie and took up again the
narrative of the _Cornwall_.
"The first intimation we had" (he resumed) "of the sinking of Admiral
Craddock's fleet came in the form of a wireless from the _Defence_
asking if I had heard of the disaster at Coronel. Details which came in
the course of the next day or two brought home to us the astonishing
change in the whole situation which the appearance of Von Spee in South
American waters had wrought. The blow fell like a bolt from the blue.
"As rapidly as possible the various British warships in the South
Atlantic rendezvoused off Montevideo to discuss a plan of action. What
the next move of the victorious Von Spee would be we could only surmise.
German prisoners picked up after the Falklands battle said his ultimate
plan--after seizing Port Stanley for a base, and undergoing such a
refit there as was practicable with the means at his disposal--was to
scatter his ships as commerce raiders all over the Atlantic, cutting, if
possible, the main sea arteries of England to North America. The Germans
figured, according to these prisoners, that the suspension of the North
Atlantic traffic for even a month (no impossible thing for five speedy
cruisers in the light of the delays to sailings caused by the _Emden_
and _Karlsruhe_ working alone) would practically paralyse England's war
efforts and reduce her military effort in France to almost negligible
proportions. I am much more inclined to believe that this--rather than
escorting a fleet of German merchantmen, bearing German reservists from
Argentina, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil, to South-West Africa from
Buenos Aires and Montevideo--was the real plan of Von Spee.
However, it was the immediate rather than the ultimate plans of the
Germans that was our chief--in fact, our only--concern. Whether Von
Spee intended heading for the North Atlantic later or South Africa,
or up the Thames--the only way he could clear the road to any of these
objectives was by first destroying such British warships as still
remained in South American waters. It was these ships which had hurried
to get together off Montevideo, in order to make the path of the enemy
as thorny and full of pitfalls as possible.
"They had no illusions respecting what the immediate future held for
them, that little group of cruiser captains that gathered in the
Admiral's cabin of the _Defence_ to formulate a plan of action. We knew
nothing at that time of what had been decided upon at the Admiralty;
indeed, we were quite in agreement that it would be deemed inexpedient
to send any battle cruisers away from the North Sea, where they might
be imperatively needed any day, on a voyage to the South Atlantic that
might easily resolve itself into a months'-long wild-goose chase. Our
plans, therefore, were laid entirely on the assumption that we should
have to do the best we could with the ships already available.
"There was not a man of us who was not keen on the chance of a fight
at even the prohibitive odds under which it appeared inevitable that
the one ahead of us must be fought, but the prospects of success were
anything but alluring. Every day that passed had brought reports
revealing the completeness of the enemy's victory at Coronel, and all of
these were more than confirmed when the _Glasgow_--whose captain had had
the good sense to retire from a battle in which there was no longer a
chance for him to be of any use--came in and joined us.
"It would be easy to suggest conditions under which one naval force,
faced by another as much stronger than itself as the Germans were than
the British at this time, would be justified in avoiding an action. The
present was not such an occasion, however; in fact, I don't think it
ever occurred to any of us to bring up a discussion of that phase of
the question at all. This, briefly, was the way the matter presented
itself to us: The measure of the power of the Germans to inflict harm
to the Allies was their supply of shells. These gone--always provided
no new supply reached them--the menace, even though the ships were yet
unsunk, was practically at an end. We knew that they had already used
up a considerable quantity of their munition in a foolish bombardment
of the little tropical port of Papeete, in the French Societies, and
we knew that a very large amount had been expended at Coronel. They
still probably had enough, we figured, to see them through many months
of commerce raiding if only they could avoid another general action
against warships, and such an action, even if it was a losing one from
our standpoint, it was our manifest rôle to provoke, and at the earliest
possible moment.
"This point decided, about all that remained to be considered was how
to make the most effective disposition of such ships as we had at our
disposal when once the enemy was in sight. We knew just what ships we
would have to meet. We also knew, practically to a gun, how they were
armed. Moreover, with Coronel as an object lesson, we knew how well
those ships were handled, and with what deadly effectiveness those guns
were served. Now that it is all ancient history, I think there is no
reason why I should not tell you how we arranged that our ships should
'take partners' for the little 'sea-dance' they were expecting to shake
their heels at.
"The _Defence_--an armoured cruiser of the _Minotaur_ type, subsequently
sunk at Jutland--was to tackle the _Scharnhorst_, Von Spee's flagship.
The former was the only ship we had that was anywhere nearly a match for
either of the larger German cruisers. She exceeded them in displacement
by several thousand tons, and her four nine-point-twos and ten
seven-point-fives had a comfortable margin of metal over that fired from
the _Scharnhorst's_ eight eight-point-twos and six five-point-nines. In
a fair duel with either of the larger Germans, I think there is little
doubt she would have had the best of it. In the battle we expected to go
into, however, there could be no certainty that she was going to be able
to give her undivided attention to the _vis-à-vis_ we had picked for her
during a sufficient interval to finish up the job.
"The _Carnarvon_ and the _Cornwall_ were to be given the formidable
task of keeping the _Gneisenau_ so busy that she could not help her
sister fight the _Defence_. Our combined displacement was about equal
to that of our prospective opponent, but the four seven-point-fives
and twenty six-inch (all we had between us) could hardly have prevented
her pounding us to pieces with her eight-point-twos, in the event that
she elected to use her speed to keep beyond the effective range of our
lighter guns. By dashing into close range we might have had a chance
with her, or, again there was the possibility we might lead her a dance
that would take her out of the way long enough to give the _Defence_
time to finish polishing off the _Scharnhorst_, in which event the
former might have been able to intervene in our favour.
"Small as would have been our chance of carrying through our part of the
programme successfully, the _Gneisenau_ was the one opponent I desired
above all the others, on account of the way I knew it would buck up the
ship's company to feel that they were having a whack at the ship that
sunk the _Monmouth_. There were a good many men in the _Monmouth_ who
had gone to her from the _Cornwall_, and our men never tired cursing the
Hun for letting their mates drown at Coronel without making any effort
to save them. They had something to say on that score when their turn
came at the Falklands.
"The _Glasgow_ we were going to give a chance to wipe out her Coronel
score by sending her in against the _Nürnberg_. With her superior speed,
and her two six-inch and ten four-inch guns against the latter's ten
four-point ones, she would probably have had the best of what could not
but have been a very pretty fight if no one had interfered with it.
Here again, unluckily, the chances were against a duel to the finish.
Against the _Dresden_--a very worthy sister of the _Emden_--the very
best we could muster was the armed merchantman, _Orama_. This (unless
another armed merchantman--the _Otranto_, which had escaped with the
_Glasgow_ from Coronel--became available) left us nothing to oppose
to the _Leipzig_, which, in that event, would have been a sort of a
'rover,' free to bestow her attention and shells wherever they appeared
likely to do the most harm. And (from the way she was fought at the
Falklands, where she was my 'opposite number') let me tell you that a
jolly troublesome 'rover' she would have been.
"That, in a few words, was our little plan for making Von Spee use up
the remainder of his ammunition. That was our principal object, and
there can be no doubt that we would have come pretty near complete
success in attaining it. For the rest, you can judge for yourself what
our chances would have been. As the Fates would have it, however, that
battle was never to be fought, save on paper in the Admiral's cabin of
the old _Defence_. Before ever we had completed preparations for our
'magazine-emptying' sally against Von Spee, word was winged to us that
the Admiralty had a plan of its own in process of incubation, and that
we were to standby to co-operate.
"Sturdee and his battle cruisers were well on their way to the South
Atlantic, however, before even an inkling of what was afoot was
vouchsafed us, and even then my orders were simply to rendezvous with
him at the 'Base' I have spoken of before--the one where we foregathered
and feasted with the _Carmania_. I breathed no word of where and why
we were going until the muddy waters of the Plate estuary were left
behind and the last least possibility of a 'leak' to the shore was out
of the question. Then I simply passed it on to the men by posting some
word of it on the notice-board. There was no cheering, either then or
even a few days later, when the _Inflexible_ and the _Invincible_, the
latter flying Admiral Sturdee's flag, came nosing in from the Atlantic
and dropped anchor at the 'Base'; but the promise of action in the
immediate future was like wine to the men. They were simply tumbling
over themselves to carry out the most ordinary routine duties, and so
it continued right up to the moment that Von Spee's foretops, gliding
along above the low promontory of Port William, brought them to 'Action
Stations' with real work to do at last.
"Sturdee had his plans all laid, and we repaired to the _Invincible_
shortly after her arrival to familiarise ourselves with them. All in
all, it wasn't so very different a gathering as that one which took
place on the _Defence_, off Montevideo, to plan another battle--the one
which was never to take place. I don't mind admitting though, that there
was a bit more 'buoyancy' to the atmosphere of this second conference,
the natural consequence of our 'improved prospects.' There is no use
denying that it gives a man a more comfortable feeling to know that he
is in a ship that has reasonable expectation of sending its 'opposite'
to the bottom of the sea, than to be faced with the prospect of going
out as a sort of animated lure to wheedle the enemy out of his shells.
"With the _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ Sturdee had sufficient force
to be able to dispense with the _Defence_, which was, I believe, sent
to African water to join a force that was gathering there on the
off-chance that the Germans slipped through the net that was being
flung off South America. For scouting purposes, the _Bristol_ and the
_Kent_--both of which had foregathered with us at the 'Base'--were
added to our 'punitive expedition,' which finally got under weigh for
the Falklands on November 28. Steaming in a formation best calculated
to sweep a wide range of seas, we held our southerly course for nine
days, sighting, so far as I recall, no ship of any description except
those of our own force. On the eighth day we weathered a heavy blizzard,
but it was out of a clear dawn that the low, rounded hills of the
Falklands--so suggestive in many respects of the Orkneys and the north
of Scotland--took shape the following morning. We dropped anchor in the
double harbour of Port William and Port Stanley at nine o'clock of the
forenoon of December 7. Before another twenty-four hours had passed Von
Spee--hurrying as though to a rendezvous--had made his appearance, and
we were raising steam to go out and even up Craddock's account with
him."
II. THE BATTLE OF THE FALKLANDS
The Captain had come for a breath of fresh air on the quarter-deck at
the end of a grey winter's day, and it was the memories called up by
the resemblance of the low, rounded, treeless hills which ringed the
Northern Base to some other hills which he had good reason to carry a
vivid mental picture of that set him talking of the Falklands.
"They're very much like these," he said, "those wind-swept hills around
Port Stanley; indeed, I know of few other parts of the world so far
apart geographically that have so much in common topographically and
climatically. Their people, too, are a good deal like the northern Scots
and Orcadians, with a dry sense of humour that usually manifests itself
at your first meeting with them, when they tell you that the Falklands
have two seasons, the cold and the snowy. The latter, they tell
you,--because the snow stops up the chinks and keeps out the wind--is
rather the warmer of the two. They are a sturdy, resolute lot, too, and
we found that, quite expecting the coming of the German fleet and with
no sure knowledge that British naval help would arrive in time, they had
made all preparations to fight the enemy to the limit of their very
primitive resources.
"And a jolly good fight they would have put up, too. The old _Canopus_
(the battleship which did not come up in time to help Craddock at
Coronel) had been grounded in the inner harbour and turned into a 'land
fort.' Her heavy turret guns had been left aboard her, while those
of her secondary batteries had been mounted at the most favourable
positions on the hills. The 'standing army'--of something like
thirty-five, I believe--had been recruited up to several times that
figure, and all over the island firearms, ancient and modern, had been
taken down and made ready for use. Von Spee's sailors and marines would
have had many a ridge-to-ridge skirmish on their hands before they
completed the conquest of the Falklands.
"The coming of Sturdee put an entirely different face on things,"
continued the Captain, smartly side-stepping the flying "grummet"
which had been flicked across his path from out of a howling pack of
flannelled "snotties" deep in the throes of hockey on the opposite
side of the quarter-deck. "'When are the Huns coming?' was still the
question on every tongue; but it was now put anticipatively rather than
apprehensively. They had not long to wait.
"I shall never forget that morning they appeared. It was scarcely twenty
hours from the time we had dropped anchor, and most of the ships of the
squadron were rushing those odd and ends of cleaning up, overhauling,
revictualling, and the like that always follow arrival in port. The
_Cornwall_, with some repairs on one of her engines to be effected,
was at six hours' notice, and the _Bristol_, for similar reasons, at
somewhat longer. Only the _Kent_ was ready to put to sea at once.
"I was in my bath when a signal reading 'Raise steam for full speed with
all despatch' was handed me, and it did not need another signal, which
arrived a few minutes later, to tell me that, by some amazing stroke of
'joss,' the enemy was near at hand. How near I did not dream until the
guns of the old _Canopus_ began to boom. Luckily, I was already shaved"
(I liked that little touch), "but, even so, my finishing dressing and
breakfasting within twelve minutes was a very creditable performance of
its kind. I can't say much for the toilet I made, but the breakfast was
a good hearty one, with porridge, eggs, and marmalade. With an action in
the offing, and no knowing when you are going to have time to eat again,
it is only common sense to fortify against an indefinite fast.
"By the time I reached the bridge the topmasts of an armoured and a
light cruiser were visible, slipping along above the headland which cut
off the harbour from the open sea. The events of the next few hours were
to etch the profile of the latter ship indelibly upon my memory, for it
was the _Leipzig_, coming up with the _Gneisenau_ to destroy the Port
Stanley Wireless Station. From the foretop of the _Canopus_ they were
able to see the Huns clearing for action; and the _Glasgow_ and the
_Bristol_, both of which were in the inner harbour, also had a clear
view across the depressed neck of the peninsula. The other ships of
the squadron saw no more than topmasts until they had raised steam and
reached the open sea.
"Just how the Huns came to make the disconcerting discovery that there
were modern battle cruisers concealed by the higher seaward end of the
peninsula I learned from an officer who had been saved from the sinking
_Gneisenau_, who told me the story in his guttural broken English. They
had expected to find the _Canopus_ at Port Stanley, he said, and perhaps
the _Cornwall_ and _Carnarvon_ and other light cruisers; but anything of
the class of the _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_--'Mein Gott, Nein! Wen
der Gunnery Ludenant sent word from der foredop down' (he sputtered)
'dot he zwei ships mit dreipodt madsts gesehen had, mein Kapdtin he
say, "Nein, nein, es ist eempossibl. Ich will ein man mit der gut eyes
up senden." Wen this man say, ya, he see zwei dreipodt madsts, mein
Kapdtin, he say, "Der Teufel, now Ich must go quickt. Ein hour, zwei
hour, we run, sehr schnell. Den komen aus der Inglish ships, und preddy
soon Ich see dem komen mehr schell von uns." Den Ich say: "Mein Kapdtin,
you must der mehr schnell gehen, or you must der fight machen." He say,
"Ya, ya," und he mehr schnell try zu gehen. Nicht gut. No good. Den we
up mit der _Scharnhorst_ gekommen, und der Admiral, he say, "Nun will we
der fight gemachen. Den we machen der fight. Nichts, no good. Kaput!
Feenish!"'"
The Captain stopped at the windward end of the deck and let the breeze
fan a brow that had grown red during his effort at literal rendition. A
grin of pleased reminiscence sat on his face. "My word, but it must have
given the Hun a jolly good jolt, that first sight of those 'dreipodt
madsts!'" he explained finally, as he put on his cap and fell into step
beside me again.
"If Von Spee ever had any time for _arrière pensée_ before the sea
closed over him," he resumed, "he must have reproached himself bitterly
for not pushing on in force and attacking us in the harbour before we
had steam up. If his whole squadron had come up as the _Gneisenau_ and
_Leipzig_ did, they could undoubtedly have given us a very unpleasant
hour or two while we were raising steam. We would have polished them off
in the end, of course, but they would have done us a deal more harm than
by the tactics they did follow. Again, there is a chance that, if the
two armoured cruisers had pressed the attack alone--as they eventually
were forced to do--they might have inflicted enough damage to our light
cruisers to have made the escape of all three (instead of only one) of
theirs a possibility. However, Von Spee's star of good fortune, which
had been at its zenith at Coronel, was now sinking to near the horizon,
and it was ordained that at the Falklands he should meet an enemy who
was both faster and heavier armed than he, under conditions of sea and
light which favoured him no whit.
"The battle of the Falklands was really won in the harbour of Port
Stanley. It was all a question of how soon we could get out. If we could
reach the enemy in anything like full force there was little doubt
of the result. A delay of an hour or two, however, might have easily
resulted in their scattering so effectually that the running down of the
last of them would have been a matter of months, and months, too, marked
with great losses of, and greater delays to, the merchant shipping of
two hemispheres. Nothing short of the truly splendid efforts of the
engine-room and stokehold personnel of Sturdee's ships would have given
their gunners their chance to win the battle of the Falklands.
"Of the _Cornwall's_ achievement in this respect I am especially proud.
With one of the engines partially dismantled, we would have been doing
all that was expected of us if we had been under full steam in six
hours. Indeed, that was the very notice we had gone under, in order to
do the overhauling desired. And now let me tell you what happened. It
was ten minutes after eight when the signal to raise steam for full
speed was received, and before half-past ten she was steaming out of
the harbour. We could have got under weigh some minutes earlier than
we did but for having to let the _Invincible_ and the _Inflexible_,
which had been lying inshore of us, pass out ahead. And before the day
was over the old _Cornwall_, with the heartiest lot of lads that ever
swung a scoop throwing coal under her boilers, covered a wide stretch
of the South Atlantic at a speed a good knot or two better than she had
averaged on her trial trip, or at any other time since then.
"There was one trivial but amusing little incident in connexion with
the departure of the battle cruisers which stands out particularly
clearly among my otherwise rather jumbled memories of those two hours of
rush and hurry. We had been leading our usual hand-to-mouth existence
in the matter of food for some weeks previous to this, and one of the
things we had most looked forward to our call at Port Stanley for was
revictualling. We were losing no time in getting provisions aboard,
and at the moment the signal to raise steam was received a lighter
containing, among other things, a large cask of beer and a lot of salt
pork had just moored alongside. We were really in great need of the salt
pork, and--well, there seemed to be a considerable desire for the beer
also. However, when the Devil drives, or a reckoning is to be settled
with the Hun, one can't wait for such incidentals as food and drink.
Knowing that we had enough aboard to keep going on until the game was
played out, I ordered the lighter to cast off and turned my attention to
more pertinent matters. I recalled later that I heard the winch grinding
once or twice after I gave the order, but, seeing the lighter floating
away with the tide presently, thought no more about it for the moment.
"Carried hither and thither by the conflicting harbour currents, the
lighter was half a cable's length or so off our port bow when the battle
cruisers, spouting smoke like young volcanoes, came charging out to
take up the chase of the Hun, and, by a strange chance, it was lounging
indolently square athwart the course of the Flagship. The sharp bows of
the _Invincible_ shore it through like a knife, and her propellers, with
those of the _Inflexible_, quickly reduced boat and cargo to bobbing
bits dancing in their bubbling wake.[A]
"It really hurt me to see that good food and drink snatched almost out
of our mouths, as it were, but I tried to put on a brave front and turn
the matter off as a joke. 'Beer and pork sausage,' I remarked to one of
my officers who had just come up to the bridge to report; 'the battle
cruisers seem to have a good appetite for Hun diet this morning. I only
hope they'll have as good luck gulping down the Huns themselves.'
"'It's only "sausage" they put their teeth in, I'm glad to say, sir,' he
replied with a grin. 'The men managed to hoist the beer aboard somehow
before casting off the lighter, and as I came along just now I heard
some one ordering that the cask be put down in a "syfe plyce wher' it
won't be 'oled if th' 'Un 'its us."'
"'My word!' said the Captain, with the same look on his face that it
had worn on another occasion when he had told me of the 'banquets' that
had been served on the _Carmania_ when the _Cornwall_ had foregathered
with her at a certain mid-Atlantic rendezvous after the former had
sunk the _Cap Trafalgar_. 'My word! but we _did_ enjoy that beer when
the time came to drink it. Yes, they shared and shared alike with the
officers. Good old pirate law as to loot and salvage, you know.'
"The _Kent_, which was at five minutes' notice, was the first ship to
get under weigh, probably with orders to keep the enemy in sight but
not, of course, to try to engage them. The _Glasgow_ was the next out,
and then the _Carnarvon_. The _Cornwall_ was ready to follow close on
the heels of the latter, but, as I have told you, had to wait for the
battle cruisers, which were now under weigh. We went out not far astern
of the _Inflexible_, and the _Bristol_, which had been on long notice in
the inner harbour, was last, at a considerable interval.
"The battle cruisers, with their turbines, worked up to full speed a
great deal more rapidly than the ships with reciprocating engines, and,
heading straight down the wake of the retreating Germans--now showing
their fore-shortened silhouettes in 'Line Ahead' on the south-western
horizon--they quickly drew away from all but the _Glasgow_. The latter,
not long out of the dry dock and swiftest of the lot in any event, had
passed the _Kent_ and was holding a southerly course, evidently with
the intention of keeping the Hun light cruisers in sight and reporting
their movements.
"It took something like two hours after the British ships were out to
convince Von Spee that all his efforts to go 'mehr schnell' were going
to be of no avail. There was nothing left for him to do but to 'der
fight gemachen.' In this he had two alternatives--to fight with all of
his ships, or to fight a delaying action with a part of them and give
the others a chance to escape. His choice was the one that any other
sailor as gallant and able as Von Spee had proved himself to be would
inevitably have taken. He plumped to fight with the _Scharnhorst_ and
_Gneisenau_, and let the _Nürnberg_, _Leipzig_, and _Dresden_ make
the most of their chances of scattering to safety. His signal, as we
learned it later from prisoners, was substantially this: 'Light cruisers
will make every endeavour to escape to South American ports. Armoured
cruisers will engage enemy, and endeavour to delay.'
"It was just about noon that I saw the tower-like, smoke-crowned
silhouettes of the German ships gradually begin to lengthen, and when
they held steady more or less beam-on I knew that the turn of eight
points meant that Von Spee had made his decision. As the dark profiles
began to draw apart--the two longest heading to port and the three
shortest to starboard--I realised at once what that decision was. The
armoured cruisers were going to try to draw the pursuit to the south,
while the light cruisers sought safety by 'starring' on divergent
courses to the south and south-west.
"I think there will be no harm in my telling you that in all the
possible contingencies we had discussed under which we might meet the
enemy, there was none which roughly approximated to the conditions
imposed upon us by the fact that he had unexpectedly come upon us in
harbour--surprising us no less than himself--and forcing us to tumble
out in pursuit of him in much the same order as a farmer and his family
sallying forth following an alarm in their hen roost. What we had
generally agreed would happen was that we--ourselves spread over a wide
expanse of sea in 'Line Abreast'--would sight the enemy steaming in
similar formation, and in that event it was understood that our battle
cruisers should attend to the two German armoured cruisers, while the
rest of us took on such of his light cruisers as we could most readily
bring to action. Though already scattered over many miles of sea, our
problem was really only that of conforming this 'elastic' general plan
to present conditions.
"The battle cruisers altered course instantly to continue the chase of
the enemy armoured cruisers, but the Admiral, doubtless realising that,
scattered as we were, each of the rest of us (already conversant with
his general instructions) would be his own best judge as to where he
could be most useful, left us to pick our own quarries. I made up my
mind at once to go after the light cruisers, and, signalling 'Come on,
_Kent_' (the Captain of the _Kent_ was my junior, and therefore subject
to my orders in a case of this kind), headed off in the direction of
what were still little more than three dark blurs on the south-westerly
horizon. The _Glasgow_, which was a long way ahead to port, also decided
(in view of instructions) in favour of going after the light cruisers,
and, altering course sharply, passed astern of the battle cruisers and
converged with the _Kent_ and _Cornwall_ in the chase. The _Carnarvon_,
which for some reason was not steaming her best, and had been left a
good distance astern, held on after the battle cruisers. The _Bristol_,
which had been delayed in getting out of harbour, had been ordered to
look after some steamers which had been following Von Spee, and which we
believed to carry coal and provisions. We afterwards learned that one
of them had a cargo of potatoes, and as potatoes chanced to be another
of the many things which the _Cornwall_ was short of at this time, I
have always harboured the same kind of grudge against the _Bristol_ for
sinking these as I have against the _Invincible_ for putting down my
salt pork.
"As soon as it became evident what courses the Hun ships were steering,
I signalled to the _Kent_ to go after the port ship, which turned out to
be the _Nürnberg_, while I gave my attention to the middle one of the
three, the _Leipzig_. This would have left the _Glasgow_ free to pursue
and engage the third ship, the _Dresden_, which her twenty-six knots
of speed should have enabled her to do handily. This plan, if it could
have been carried out, would have made a clean sweep of Von Spee's
squadron then and there, instead of giving the _Dresden_ a new lease on
life, and some weeks more of uncertainty for merchant vessels of both
the South Atlantic and Pacific. Where it slipped up was through the fact
that the _Glasgow_ could not avoid engaging the _Leipzig en passant_
while endeavouring to get within range of the _Dresden_, and, once
having taken on the latter, she was, bulldog-like, reluctant to draw off
until her opponent was finished. As there was no other ship fast enough
to catch up the _Dresden_, her escape was inevitable.
"It was a little after four in the afternoon--almost to a minute the
time I had reckoned it would be--that the fine burst of speed the
_Cornwall_ had been putting on brought the _Leipzig_ well within
range, and I gave the order to open fire. Previous to this the latter
had been engaging in a very lively little running fight with the
_Glasgow_, neither appearing to be inflicting serious damage to the
other. The Hun's four-point-ones were about balanced by the _Glasgow's_
equal number of four-inch, but the latter's two six-inch gave her a
comfortable margin that would have decided the issue in her favour in
the end. The German gunners, always at their best at the beginning of an
action, were making good practice, however, and the _Glasgow_ would have
known she had had a fight on her hands before it was over.
"At the intervention of the _Cornwall_, with her fourteen six-inch guns,
the _Leipzig_--very pluckily and properly--turned her attention to the
heavier armed, and therefore the more dangerous, of her two adversaries.
We began hitting her at our third salvo, and it must have been about the
same time that a shell from one of her well-served four-point-ones came
crashing into the _Cornwall_. I must say it was jolly good work for such
comparatively small guns. The extremely high angle they had to be fired
at, though, reduced their chances of hitting, and I recall especially
one beautifully bunched salvo which struck the water so close to the far
side of the ship that it might almost have been dropped from an
air-ship.
"One of the gunners told me an amusing incident in connexion with that
first hit. A boy, engaged in passing six-inch shells, was inclined to
be rather nervous at the outset, and was coming in for a good deal of
chaffing from his more callous mates. When the bang and jar of that
first explosion ran through the ship, a shell had just been handed
him to shove along, but, quivering all over, he stood rooted in his
tracks and demanded to know what the noise was. A guffaw of laughter
ran round, at the end of which an old gunner replied, 'That, me son,
is our fust vaxinashun mark.' Gradually a grin of comprehension and
reassurance replaced the look of terror on the lad's face as he realised
that it isn't necessarily so serious a thing after all to have a shell
burst above your head. 'Right-o!' he cried, passing the shell smartly
on; ''and this proj. on to the 'Un an' prevent a small-pox epidemic
breakin' out 'board _'is_ ship.' The joke had passed all the way round
the ship before the fight was over, and there was red-hot rivalry to
the end to keep the Hun's small-pox rate down by 'vaxinashun.' When you
think of it, there's nothing funny about the joke at all; but there's
nothing equal to the roughest of chaff to keep men's spirits up and
their nerves steady in a fight, and it's because these lads of ours
take fighting in the same happy-go-lucky spirit that they take their
sport that they're such incomparable stayers--that they're always going
stronger at the finish than when they started, no matter what the
course.
"I remember another amusing little incident which occurred at about
this stage of the game. Owing to the fact that there was no voice-pipe
connexion from the bridge to the foretop and other 'nerve-centres,' it
was imperative that I should fight the ship from the conning tower--an
irksome necessity on account of the circumscribed vision. I found
myself making occasional rounds of 'afternoon calls' to the various
places with which I wanted to keep in closer touch, or from where I
had a better chance to see how things were progressing than from the
box of the conning tower, and one of these took me to the bridge,
whose sole occupant was the signalman at the range-finder. Silhouetted
black against the sky and with not enough cover to protect him from a
pea-shooter, he was still going quietly about his work and apparently
having the time of his young life.
"The _Liepzig's_ gunnery had not begun to go to pieces at this juncture,
and every little while one of those beautifully bunched little salvoes
of four-point-ones would throw up its pretty nest of foam jets in the
near-by water. A shell from one of these struck somewhere amidships as I
came out upon the bridge, and I found the man at the range-finder just
throwing an appraising glance over his shoulder to where the fragments
of a whaler were mounting skyward in a cloud of smoke. 'My word, sir,'
he greeted me with, 'but it's jolly glad I am I ain't back ther' w'ere
the projers catch you 'tween decks. Now, up 'ere it's diff'rent--they
just passes straight on into the water.'
"'They pass straight through!' I repeated. 'What do you mean by that?'
'Jest wot I sez, sir,' he replied. 'Look w'ere you're standin', sir! The
canvas ain't 'arf stiff enuf to stop 'em.'
"I looked. On my left the canvas wind-shield was punctured with a smooth
round hole at about the level of my waist, while on my right a similar
strip had been pinked about even with the calf of my leg. From the upper
hole the ragged ends of the painted canvas were bent inwards: from the
lower hole, outwards.
"''Twas from the 'Uns' last salvo but one, sir,' said the signalman,
grinning down at me over the range-finder. ''Twould 'a' jest about
plugged you in the knees. You was jest too late in comin' up, sir.'
"I believe I told him," said the Captain with a laugh, "that, while I
should hate to be setting an example for unpunctuality on my own ship,
I sincerely hoped and trusted that I should continue being equally late
for 'appointments' of that kind. He was a brave chap, that one, and
I'm glad to say my recommendation brought him a D.C.M. for the way he
carried on that afternoon.
"It's very funny the things one 'imagines' in the course of an action,
one in which you are being hit, I mean. There isn't a lot of your
ship that you can see from a conning-tower, and so when anything
happens--like the explosion of a shell, for instance--you (generally
more or less sub-consciously, for your whole active mind is engrossed
with fighting the ship) have to speculate on where it struck and what
damage it did. Here is an example of one of my efforts in this line
that afternoon. A terrific smashing-banging followed the explosion of a
shell somewhere amidships, and from the nature of the racket I instantly
jumped to the conclusion that it could be only one thing. 'After funnel
carried away,' I announced to my Staff Paymaster, whom I had kept
standing by to take notes and the time of any incidents I thought worth
recording, though just why I concluded it was the _after_ one I don't
remember. 'After funnel carried away,' he repeated, and jotted down the
entry against the time the disaster had occurred.
"Well, I carried on for the next hour or two with the distinct idea in
my mind that one of the funnels was gone, and I even recall wondering
several times in the course of the next hour or two whether any damage
had been caused in the engine-room, or whether the wreckage was likely
to get afire, or whether the smoke would be getting in the way of the
guns. Indeed, it is quite possible I tried to get some assurance on
these points by voice-pipe. I don't remember precisely. At any rate, it
was quite definitely fixed in my mind that that funnel was gone, so that
when the next time I poked out to have a look round, I found that it was
not even dented, I could hardly believe my eyes. I really am not quite
sure to this day what it was that made the infernal banging which I took
to be that funnel going over the side.
"Everything considered, the _Leipzig_ made as gallant a fight as it is
possible to conceive. Under the fire of two ships, either of which was
faster and more heavily gunned than herself, knowing all the time that
her sister ships--almost as completely outclassed as herself--could
never be counted upon to come to her aid, and, finally, desperately
short of ammunition, the way in which she carried on to the end was
worthy of the traditions of any navy. Indeed, it has often occurred
to me that Von Spee and his officers--from their long service on the
China station--had kept themselves entirely free of the contaminating
influences of Potsdam which have made the names of the High Sea and the
U-boat fleet words anathema. British Naval Officers who had met those of
the _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_ in the Orient still speak of them with
kindness, and even occasionally with affection, and certainly no one
could have faced defeat and death with a finer or more resolute spirit
than they did at the Falklands. Perhaps, for the sake of their souls, it
was fortunate that they never got nearer home than the South Atlantic.
"As I have told you, it was about our third salvo which made our first
hit upon the _Leipzig_, a shell of this carrying away her topmast. The
latter, in falling, appears to have killed the Gunnery Lieutenant, which
must inevitably have made it at least a temporary interference with the
control. The Torpedo Lieutenant, whom we picked up among the survivors,
took over the direction of the firing from the foretop from that time
on.
"There was no appreciable falling off in the _Leipzig's_ firing until
the fight had been in progress about two hours. Then the hammering from
our shells began to tell rapidly, and at about six-thirty, when I noted
that both her mainmast and after funnel had been carried away, and that
she was blazing with heavy fires in several places--the firing became
spasmodic, and finally, with the exception of a single gun, ceased
altogether. At this juncture, as I learned subsequently, there were but
eighteen unwounded men left in the ship, and it was a 'scratch' crew of
these who, bringing up odd shells from wherever they could find them,
continued the fight as long as they had anything to fire. Then they lit
their pipes, sat down on the deck and waited for the end.
"At seven-fifteen, seeing her engines had failed her and that she was
lying an apparently helpless hulk in the trough of the now rising sea,
I gave the order to cease firing. Scarcely had I done so, however,
when there came another flash from that one unsilenced gun, and its
well-placed shell pierced the paint-room in the _Cornwall's_ forepeak.
The ensuing clouds of smoke were so dense that I gave orders for the
fire to be extinguished with all despatch. Luckily, the fumes proved to
have come almost entirely from the shell itself. It was only afterwards,
of course, that I learned in what desperate straits the _Leipzig_ was at
this moment. At the time, as she still appeared desirous of carrying on
the fight, I had no choice but to commence firing again. This last salvo
or two was quite thrown away, however, that is, so far as settling the
fate of the enemy was concerned. Indeed, the injury done to her in the
first two hours of the fighting would ultimately have sent her to the
bottom, while the fact that her shells--except for the odd ones chivvied
together for the one gun--must have been at an end about the same time
would have left her quite incapable of doing us much harm save with a
torpedo. As I have said, however, I did not know these things then, and
so could only continue trying to inflict the heaviest damage possible as
long as she kept firing.
"That shot through my paint-lockers was the last fired by the _Leipzig_,
and I have good reason to believe that the shell was literally the last
four-point-one left on the ship. Two or three of Von Spee's ships
had wasted a good bit of their quite irreplaceable munitions in what
must have been an almost useless bombardment of Papeete, in the French
Societies, while on their way across the Pacific, and Coronel made
still further inroads into the magazines. I do not know whether any
other ship, like the _Leipzig_, exhausted all its heavy shells before
being sunk, but all of them must have been very low in any case. This
fact fully vindicates the decision (which I told you of some time ago)
resolved upon by those responsible for the disposition of the greatly
inferior force of British ships in South American waters before the
intention of sending out the battle cruisers was known, to seek out and
fight Von Spee, regardless of the odds, in the hope of clipping his
claws for the future by compelling him to fire away as many as possible
of his remaining shells.
"As soon as it became evident that the _Leipzig_ was incapable of
further resistance, the _Glasgow_ (as the senior ship) signalled 'Do
you surrender?' but to this there was no reply. Whether this failure
to respond was fortuitous or deliberately intentional I was never able
to learn definitely, but, from the fact that her flag was kept flying
to the last, I am inclined to the belief that it was the latter. It is
still possible, however, that she had no halyards, flags, lights, or
anything else to signal with, even had she so desired. She _did_ send up
a Verey light at this juncture, but whether that was intended to convey
some message to us, in lieu of any other means of doing so, or whether
it was a sort of gesture of farewell to any of her sisters that might
still be afloat, we never knew. If the latter, it failed of its purpose,
for the _Dresden_, the only one of Von Spee's ships still above water,
had melted into the mists of the horizon hours before.
"On the chance that the rocket was meant as a distress signal, we
steamed in as close as seemed wise, considering the fact that even a
sinking ship may launch a torpedo most effectively, and lowered away
our boats with all despatch. The fact that, with a seven per cent. list
to port due to being holed twice below the water-line on that side,
it was difficult to lower the boats to starboard, as well as the fact
that several of our port boats had been smashed by shellfire, hampered
the work of relief, and the _Leipzig_ had gone down, while the nearest
whaler was still some distance away. Any of the wounded that may have
got clear of the sinking ship succumbed quickly to the icy coldness of
the water, but of the eighteen unwounded men remaining after the action
closed, sixteen were picked up--eleven by the boats of the _Glasgow_,
and five by those of the _Cornwall_.
"One burly Hun, picked up by my coxswain whom I had sent in charge of
my galley, gave the lad the surprise of his life, when he exclaimed (in
impeccable Cockney English), the instant he was safe aboard: 'G'blyme,
myte, but ein't it bally cold?' I found out later that he had been for a
number of years an interpreter in the Law Courts of Sydney, Australia.
An extremely significant admission that he made me in the burst of
confidence induced by thankfulness at finding himself safe and sound
after the hell he had been through, was to the effect that he had
received notice of mobilisation toward the end of June. One could not
ask for better evidence than that of the deliberation with which Germany
prepared for the war which she has made such frantic efforts to delude
the world into thinking was 'forced' upon her by the Allies--in August!
"My greatest surprise of the day, and certainly the most welcome, came
when I asked for a report on our casualties. There were none, or rather
only one--the ship's canary, killed in its cage when a shell exploded in
the wardroom pantry. This, considering the fact that the _Cornwall_ had
been hit eighteen times by four-point-one shell, was indeed good luck,
and fully vindicated the plan I had followed of fighting the earlier
stages of the battle at a range which, while short enough to allow my
heavier guns to do deadly execution, was still somewhat extreme for the
lighter ones of the enemy. The latter, it is true, were sighted up to a
very considerable range, but both their accuracy and effectiveness fell
off greatly as the angle at which they had to be elevated to carry these
long distances was increased.
"The battle cruisers had opened fire on the enemy armoured cruisers
somewhere about noon. As it was not for an hour or two after that time
that our divergent courses had taken us out of sight of each other,
we had a good view of the early stages of the action. Here again the
Huns opened with their usual spectacularity, and I think I am correct
in saying that I saw one of their eight-point-twos crash home on the
_Invincible_ before either of them had been struck by a twelve-inch
shell from the battle cruisers. The balance was redressed a few
minutes later, and long before the action became to us four lines of
flame-splashed smoke on the distant horizon, it was plain that the Huns
were already beaten. The _Scharnhorst_, Von Spee's Flagship, which had
come in for rather more than her share of the fire up to that time,
went down with her flag flying at about four o'clock. The _Gneisenau_
kept up a brave but unequal fight for two hours longer, which gave the
_Carnarvon_ time to come up and help administer the _coup de grâce_.
"Until our closing up on the _Leipzig_ made it necessary to call the
men to action stations, those who were free to do so had swarmed over
the ship in search of the best points of vantage from which to watch
the fight between the heavy cruisers. They couldn't have cheered with
more enthusiasm if it had been a football game and the flame-shot
smoke-spurts when the battle cruisers' shells exploded on the Huns
were goals for the ship's team. They went down eagerly enough when
'Action Stations!' sounded, but it was because I knew that, even in
the heat of their own fight, they must be wondering how that other one
was progressing that I had the word passed round to them when, about
six-thirty, the wireless brought the stirring news that the battle
cruisers had finished their work and the _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_
were no more. Well--it was a great moment when the _Leipzig_ went down
an hour later, but I am not sure that even that sight stirred me more
deeply than did those muffled but still ringing cheers that came welling
up to my ears from those brave lads, sweating in their stuffy 'tween
decks stations, when they heard of the success of the _Invincible_ and
_Inflexible_.
"When the last of the survivors of the _Leipzig_ had been picked up in
the gathering darkness, we put the old _Cornwall_ about and headed back
to Port Stanley. Short of coal, and with a heavy list to port where the
_Leipzig's_ shells had let water into the bunkers, ten knots was about
as fast as I cared to steam her. That, and a thick fog for a part of the
time, was responsible for the fact that we were twenty-four hours in
returning a distance we had negotiated, with all our zigzaging, in less
then ten on the way to the fight. The day following our arrival I found
'rest and change' in a wild-goose hunt in the marshes not far from Port
Stanley."
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Admiral Sturdee has since assured me that he distinctly recalls
seeing his Flagship cut down a drifting lighter as he put to sea in
pursuit of Von Spee.
THE STORY OF THE _SYDNEY_
I. THE SIGNALMAN'S TALE
It may be that it is because, since the outbreak of the war, the British
sailor has constantly been riding the crest of the wave of great events,
that he is so prone to regard even the most dramatic and historic
actions in which he has chanced to figure as little or nothing removed
from the ordinary run of his existence, as only a slightly different
screening of the regular grist of the mill of his daily service. Thus,
I once heard a young officer describing a night destroyer action in
which he had played a notable part as having been "like a hot game of
rugger, only not quite so dirty," and another assert that his most vivid
recollection of a day in which he had performed a deed of personal
daring that had carried his name to the end of the civilised world was
of how "jolly good" his dinner tasted that night.
It was this attitude which was largely responsible for the fact that,
although there were upwards of the three or four score officers and men
who had taken part in the sinking of the _Emden_ still in her, I spent
several days in the _Sydney_ before I found any one who appeared to
consider that stirring action as anything other than the mustiest of
ancient history, and, as such, of no conceivable interest at a time when
every thought was centred upon the vital present and the pregnant future
rather than upon the irrevocably buried past. And in the end it was more
by luck than deliberate design that the two actors in the historic drama
which I had set myself the task of learning something of at the first
hand came to tell me of the parts they had played. That they were the
two who had had what were perhaps more comprehensive opportunities for
observation than any others was my sheer good fortune.
It was toward midnight of a day of light-cruiser "exercises" that
I first stumbled upon the trail which I had hitherto sought vainly
to uncover. With all hands at "Night Defence" stations and steaming
at half speed through the almost impenetrable blackness, we were
groping blindly for an uncertainly located target in an endeavour
to reproduce the conditions under which enemy destroyers might be
expected to be encountered in the darkness. Suddenly the sharp bang
of a small calibre gun sounded, followed by the shriek of a speeding
projectile, and presently the glare of a down-floating star-shell
shed its golden-grey radiance over the misty surface of the sea.
Instantly the unleashed searchlight beams leapt to a distant little
patch of rectangular canvas gliding along through the luminous fog on
our port beam, and the fraction of a second later--following the red
flame-stabs and the thunderous crashes of a broadside--it disappeared
in the midst of ghostly green-white geysers of tossing spray. It was
while--flash-blinded and gun-deafened--I fumbled about on the deck of
the signal bridge for the "ear-defender" that the nervous jerk of my
head had flirted loose, that I heard a quiet voice speaking in the
darkness beside me as a hard hand brushed mine in the search.
"You'll find, sir, that cotton wool's a good sight better than one of
them patent ear protectors," it said. "I suppose it was one of them
'Mallet-Armours' that you plug in. I had a pair of that kind when we
went after the _Emden_, and they kicked out just like yours did at
the first salvo. You can bet I was deaf as a toad before we finished
polishing her off.
"I was watching the whole of that show, sir, from just where you're
standing now," the voice went on after the lost "defender" had been
found and replaced, "and it was just behind you that the shell that
sheared off our range-finder and killed the range-taker passed on
through the screen and into the sea. It was either that shell or the
fragment of another (I could never quite make sure which) that cut off
and carried away one half of a pair of prism glasses hanging there,
leaving the other just as good as ever. We still have the remnant in our
mess as a memento."
Flash and roar and that spectral upheaving of foam-fountains in the
converging rays of the searchlights crowded most other things out of the
next hour or two, and it was only when the night-firing was over and we
were headed back for our anchorage in the cold light of the early dawn
that I discovered that it was a young signalman who had been standing
watch beside me during the exercises. Keen and alert he looked in spite
of the sleepless night behind him, and it was easy to believe him when
he told me that his had been the honour of being the first man in the
_Sydney_ to sight the "strange ship" which subsequently turned out to be
the long-sought-for _Emden_.
"It was just the luck of my chancing to be on watch with a good pair
of glasses," he said modestly; "but that was by no means the limit of
my luck in connexion with the _Emden_ show. When we went to 'Action
Stations,' I was ordered to come up here and do nothing but keep an eye
on the collier that had been standing-by the _Emden_ at first, but which
got away under full steam just as soon as it was plain we were going to
give her 'whats for.' I carried out orders all right as far as keeping
an eye on the collier was concerned, but my other eye, and my mind, were
on the _Emden_ ring of the circus. I don't really suppose there was
another man on the _Sydney_ who had as little to do, and therefore as
much time to see what was going on, as I did. But that wasn't the end of
my luck, for I was one of the party that went ashore the next morning to
round up the Huns that had landed on Direction Island, and then, after
that, I was in the first boat that went to bring off prisoners from the
_Emden_. So you see I had a fairly good-all-round kind of a 'look see.'
My training as a signalman made it natural for me to jot down things as
I saw them, and I think that I still have a page of memorandum where I
made notes during the fight of what time some of the things happened. If
you'd like to see it, sir----"
Then I knew that I at last had the sort of story I had been looking
for in prospect, and before going below for my cup of ship's cocoa as
a preliminary to turning in I had arranged for a yarn in the first Dog
Watch that evening. It was indeed good luck to hear the account of
the historic action from one who, besides having had such exceptional
opportunities for seeing the various phases of it, also appeared to be
well educated and a trained observer.
* * * * *
"I'm sorry I couldn't find one of the _Emden's_ cat-o'-nine-tails," were
my visitor's first words when he appeared at the door of the Captain's
sea-cabin where I awaited him after tea; "but the fact is that the most
of us have taken the best of our little remembrances of that show ashore
for safe-keeping, and those 'dusters' were the things we prized more
than anything else as showing the Hun up for the bully he really is.
"What did they use them for? Well, if you'd believe their story, it was
to dust their togs after coaling ship. We brought back about twenty of
them, with the rest of the salvage, and at first we were rather inclined
to take it for straight when they said they used them for dusters.
Then one of our prisoners got hold of more than his share of our beer
one night, and became drunk and truthful at the same time. He confessed
that they had been used on the men time and time again, just in ordinary
routine, to keep them up to the mark on discipline. He also said that
they had been used freely during the fight with the _Sydney_, and that
when the lashes failed to give sufficient 'encouragement,' something
more drastic was used. But I'll tell you about that in its place. But
you see what real prizes those 'cats' were, sir, in the way of holding
the Hun up to the light so you could see through him, so to speak. _My_
'cat' was a brand new one, but the most of the lot were black and stiff
with blood.
"We'd been rather playing at war up to the time we fought the _Emden_,"
he went on, "having spent most of the opening months purifying the
Marshalls, Carolines, New Britain, and New Guinea by cleaning the Huns
out of them. There had been a few skirmishes ashore, but nothing at all
at sea, nor did the prospects of anything of the kind seem any better
in early November than they had been right along up to then. We missed
our big fight when, with the _Australia_, _Melbourne_, and the French
cruiser, _Montcalm_, we came within twenty-four hours of connecting with
Von Spee's squadron when they swept through the South Pacific on their
way to South American waters. With that gone, there didn't seem much to
look forward to until we were sent to the North Sea, and we were rather
hoping, when we set out from Australia with a convoy in the first week
of November, that we might keep going right on to Europe.
"We knew, of course, that the _Emden_ was still in business, but we
also knew that any one ship had about as much chance of finding her in
the Indian Ocean as you have of finding the finger-ring you lose in the
coal bunkers. Certainly we didn't expect that going out in force with a
convoy would be the means of bringing her to the end of her tether.
"The first and only word we had that a raider was in our vicinity was
in the form of a broken message from the Cocos station, which never got
further than 'Strange cruiser is at entrance of harbour----.' At that
point the 'strange cruiser' managed to work an effective 'jam,' and it
was not long before the Cocos call ceased entirely. Although we did not
learn it till a couple of days later, this was caused by the destruction
of the station by a landing party from the _Emden_ under Lieut. Mucke.
"The escorting warships were the _Sydney_, her sister, the _Melbourne_,
and a Japanese cruiser, larger and with bigger guns, but slower than we.
The Jap, without waiting for orders from the Captain of the _Melbourne_,
who was the senior officer of the convoy, dashed off at once, and was
only recalled with difficulty. A message which the Japanese captain sent
to account for his break was most amusing, 'We do not trust the skipper
ship _Emden_,' it read, 'he is one tricky fellow, and must be watched.'
"As the job was one for a fast light cruiser, the choice was between
the _Sydney_ and _Melbourne_, and it was because the skipper of the
_Melbourne_, who was the senior officer, did not feel that he had
authority to leave the convoy that the _Sydney_ had the call. We worked
up to top speed quickly, and were soon tearing through the water headed
for Cocos Island at over twenty-six knots an hour.
"I don't remember that there was any especial excitement in the _Sydney_
that morning. We had dashed off on too many wild-goose chases already to
feel that there was very much of a chance of finding our bird this time.
In fact, I don't remember being as nervous at any stage of this _Emden_
show as in a night attack we made upon Rabaul, in New Britain, where
never a shot was fired. There had been some 'Telefunken' messages in
the air during the night (undecipherable, of course), but that was only
to be expected. Every one seemed even more inclined to crack jokes than
usual, and that is saying a good deal. I remember especially that some
of the officers were making very merry over the fact that Lieut. G----
prepared for action by going to the barber and having his hair cut,
something that he didn't do very often.
"It was about seven in the morning when the broken message was picked
up, and at eight I was sent aloft to relieve the lookout. It was
nine-fifteen when the ragged fringe of the cocoa-nut palms of Direction
Island--the main one of the Cocos-Keeling group--began to poke up over
the horizon, and perhaps ten minutes later that my glasses made out the
dim but unmistakable outline of three funnel tops.
"Although we hadn't studied silhouettes at that stage of the game
to anything like as much as we've had a chance to since, that trio
of smoke-stacks marked her for a Hun, and probably the _Emden_ or
_Königsberg_. Just which it was we never knew for certain till after
we'd put her out of action and picked up the crew of the collier that
accompanied her.
"Just before I went aloft I heard one of the officers make an offer of
a pound to the Boy that was first to sight the enemy. I didn't come
under that rating myself, but it occurred to me instantly that it would
never do to let all that money go unearned. So I leaned over, broke the
news to a pukka Boy who was aloft with me, and told him to sing it out.
He got the quid all right, and, for a long time at least, he got all
credit and kudos of actually being the first to sight the _Emden_. When
I finally told the Captain about the way it really happened, he laughed
and said it served me right for trying to dabble in 'high finance.' I
never understood quite what he meant, but always fancied 'high' had some
reference to me being aloft, and 'finance' referred to the quid.
"The first sign of life I saw on the _Emden_ was when she started
blowing her syren. This, although we did not know it at the time, was
an attempt to call back the party she had sent ashore to destroy the
wireless station. Luckily for that lot there was no time for them to
come off. The _Emden_ did not, as I have read in several accounts of
the action, attempt to close immediately, but rather headed off in what
appeared to be an endeavour to clear the land and make a run of it to
the south'ard. It was only when her skipper saw that the converging
course we were steering was going to cut him off in that direction that
he took the bull by the horns and tried to shorten the range to one at
which his four-point-ones would have the most effect.
"There is no use denying that we were taken very much by surprise when
the enemy fired his ranging shot at 10,500 yards, for we had hardly
expected him to open at over seven or eight thousand. Still more
surprising was the accuracy of that shot, for it fell short only by
about a hundred yards, and went wobbling overhead in a wild ricochet.
"His next was a broadside salvo which straddled us, and his third--about
ten minutes after his 'opener'--was a hit. And a right smart hit it was,
too, though its results were by no means so bad as they might have been.
I had the finest kind of a chance to see everything that that first
shell did to us. It began by cutting off a pair of signal halyards on
the engaged side, then tore a leg off the range-taker, then sheared off
the stand supporting the range-finder itself, went through the hammocks
lining the inside of the upper bridge, and finally down through the
canvas screen of the signal bridge (behind where you were standing last
night) and on into the sea. If it had exploded it could hardly have
failed to kill the Captain, Navigator, and Gunnery Lieutenant, and
probably pretty well all the rest of us on both bridges.
"You may well believe, sir, that we were rather in a mess for some
minutes following that smash, but I remember that the officers--and
especially the Captain and Navigator--were as cool as ice through it
all. The Captain went right on walking round the compass, taking his
sights and giving his orders, while the 'Pilot' was squatting on top of
the conning tower and following the _Emden_ through his glasses, just
as though she had been a horse-race. I even remember him finding time
to laugh at me when I ducked as one or two of the first shells screamed
over. 'No use trying to get under the screen, Seabrooke,' he said; 'that
canvas won't stop 'em.'
"It was almost immediately after this that the after-control--located
about amidships--met with even a worse disaster through being hit
squarely with two or three shells from a closely bunched salvo. I had
a clear view in that direction from where I stood, and chanced to be
looking that way when the crash came. I saw a lot of arms and legs mixed
up in the flying wreckage, but the sight I shall never forget was a
whole body turning slowly in the air, like a dummy in a kinema picture
of an explosion. As the profile of the face showed sharp against the sky
for an instant, I recognised it as that of a chap who had been rather a
pal of mine, and so knew that poor old M---- had 'got his' a couple of
hours before I heard it from the Surgeon.
"It was some minutes before there was any chance to look after the
range-taker whose leg had been taken off by that first shell. They
bundled the mangled fragments of his body together as best they could in
one of those Neil Robertson folding stretchers, and I helped the party
get it down the ladders. As the leg was cut off close up to the body the
poor chap had bled terribly, and there was no chance of saving him.
"While I was edging along the deck with the stretcher-party, I saw, out
of the corner of my eye, what appeared to be a very funny sight--one of
the gun crew of 'S2,' which was not engaged at the time, dabbling his
foot in a bucket of water. When I came back I saw that it was anything
but funny.
"Two of the crews of starboard guns had been badly knocked about by
the explosion of shells striking the deck at the end of their long
high-angle flight. Among these was the chap I had seen apparently
cooling his feet in a water-bucket. As a matter of fact, it was no
foot at all he was dabbling, but only a maimed stump. The foot had
been carried away by a shell fragment, and the brave chap, not wanting
to be put on the shelf by going down to the Surgeon, had--all on his
own--scooped up a canvas bucket full of salt water and was soaking his
stump in it in an endeavour to stop the flow of blood. He was biting
through his lip with the smart of the brine on the raw flesh as I came
up, but as I turned and looked back from the ladder leading up to the
bridge I saw him hobble painfully across the deck and climb back into
his sight-setter's seat behind his gun. I have forgotten now whether it
was another wound, or further loss of blood from this one, which finally
bowled him over and put him out of the fight he wanted so much to see
through to a finish.
"These I have mentioned were the several shots from the _Emden_ which
were responsible for our total casualties of four killed and eleven
wounded. Of other hits, one took a big bite out of the mainmast, but
not quite enough to bring it down. Another scooped a neat hollow out of
the shield of the foremost starboard gun and bounced off into the sea,
leaving two or three of the crew who had been in close contact with the
shield half paralysed for a few moments from the sharp shock.
"Still another ploughed through a grating, two bulkheads and the
Commander's cabin, and finally nipped into the sea, all without
exploding. Next to the knocking out of the range-finders, perhaps our
most troublesome injury was from a shell-hole in the fo'c'sle deck,
through which the water from the big bow wave the _Sydney_ was throwing
up entered and flooded the Boys' Mess deck. By means of the water-tight
doors we managed to confine the flooding to that flat only.
"There is no doubt that for the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the
fight the _Emden_ had the best of it. This was probably due mainly to
her luck in putting both our range-finders out of action in what were
practically her opening shots.
"It took her three ranging shots to find us, though, and, once we
started, we did the same with her. Our first salvo fell beyond her, the
next both short and wide, but two or three shells from the third found
their mark. And we were no less lucky than the _Emden_ with our first
hits, for where she knocked out our gunnery control by disabling our
range-finders, we did the same to her by shooting away the voice-pipes
of her conning tower, from which Captain Von Müller directed the action.
"Just as soon as we started hitting the _Emden_ she stopped hitting
us. In fact, I don't think from then on to the end she dropped another
shell aboard us. Going aft to see if a small cordite fire had been put
out, I noticed the crew of one of the port guns--'p. 3,' I think it was,
which was not in a position to train at that moment--amusing themselves
by chalking messages on their shells. I don't remember all of them, as
there was a good deal of a variety. One shell had 'Emden' on it, to
make sure it would go to the right 'address,' I suppose. Another had
'Cheerio' and 'Good Luck' on it, and another simply 'Kaiser.' They were
a proper lot of 'don't-give-a-hangs,' that crew.
"With the _Emden's_ shell no longer bursting about our ears, I had a
better chance to watch the effect of our fire upon her. I still have the
page of memorandum on which I noted the time that a few things happened
during the next hour. I will run through it so you can see just the way
the show went. At ten o'clock the range was about 8000 yards, a distance
which the Captain evidently reckoned our guns would do the most harm to
the _Emden_, and hers the least to us. She was trying to close this for
some time, but the _Sydney_ was using her superior speed to keep her
right there, so that, in a way, she was chasing us at this stage of the
game.
"The effect of our fire upon the _Emden_ first began to show just after
ten, and at 10.4 I made a note that her fore funnel had disappeared. At
10.30 our lyddite caused a big explosion at the foot of her mainmast,
making a fire which never was entirely got under control. At 10.34 her
foremast, and with it the fore-control, collapsed under a hard hit
and disappeared over the far side. At 10.41 a heavy salvo struck her
amidships, sending the second funnel after the first, and starting a
fierce fire in the engine-room. At 11.8 the third funnel went the way of
the other two, and when I looked up from writing that down I saw that
the fore-bridge had done the disappearing act.
"Almost immediately the _Emden_ altered course and headed straight for
the beach of North Keeling Island, which she had been rapidly nearing
during the last hour. The _Sydney_ fired her last salvo at 11.15, and
then, the Captain seeing that the enemy was securely aground, turned
away and started in hot pursuit of the collier.
"This collier, as we learned presently, was a former British ship, the
_Buresk_, which had been captured by the _Emden_ some time before and
put in charge of a German prize crew. If her skipper had not felt sure
that the _Emden_ was going to do for us, he could have easily steamed
out of sight while the engagement was on. As it was, he lingered too
long, and we had little difficulty in pulling up to a range from which
we could put a warning shell across the runaway's bows. That brought her
up, but the Hun naval ensign was kept flying until a signal was made for
it to be struck. That brought the rag down on the run, but her skipper
prevented it falling into our hands by burning it.
"No sooner was our boarding officer over her side than a mob of Chinese
stokers crowded about him shouting in 'pidgin' English that 'puff-puff
boat gottee biggee holee. No more top-side can walkee.' Rushing below,
our men found the sea-cocks open, with their spindles bent in a way to
make closing impossible. As the ship was already getting a list on,
there was nothing to do but take the prisoners off and let her go down.
"To make sure that there was no trick about the game--that no concealed
crew had been left behind to stop the leaks by some prearranged
contrivances and steam away with her as soon as it was dark--the
_Sydney_ pumped four shells into her at short range, and she was burning
fiercely from fires started by these when the water closed over her.
Then, at a somewhat more leisurely gait, we steamed back to see how it
fared with the _Emden_.
"It was now about the middle of the afternoon, and the first thing we
noticed--standing out sharp in the rays of the slanting sun--was the
naval ensign flying at the still upright mainmast of the _Emden_.
"The instant he saw this, the Captain made the signal, by flag, 'Do you
surrender?' To this _Emden_ made back, by Morse flag, 'Have no signal
books,' which meant, of course (if it was true), that she couldn't read
our first signal. Then, using Morse flag, which they had already shown
they understood, we repeated the signal, 'Do you surrender?' There was
no answer to this, and again we repeated it. As there was still no
answer, and as there was no sign whatever of anything in the way of a
white flag being shown anywhere, the Captain had no alternative but to
continue the action. I have always been glad that I heard the Captain's
orders to the Gunnery Lieutenant at this time, for the point is one on
which the Hun survivors were even then ready to start lying.
"We were at fairly close range, and I heard Lieut. Rahilly ask the
Captain upon what part of the ship he should direct his fire. The
Captain studied the _Emden_ through his glass for a few moments and
then, remarking that most of the men appeared to be bunched at opposite
ends of the ship--on the fo'c'sle and quarterdeck--said he thought that
there would be less chance of killing any one if the fire was directed
somewhere between those two points. Then I heard him give the definite
order, 'Open fire, and aim for foot of mainmast,' and that was the word
that was passed on to the guns.
"The port guns fired (if I remember right) three quick salvoes, and we
were just turning to give the starboard ones a chance, when a man was
seen clambering up the solitary stick of the _Emden_, and the word was
passed, 'Don't fire without further orders.' At the same time a white
flag, which I later learned was a tablecloth, was displayed from the
quarterdeck. A moment later the naval ensign fluttered down, and shortly
I saw the smoke of new fire on the quarterdeck. I surmised rightly that
they were following the example of the _Buresk_ in burning their flag to
prevent its capture, but what else was going up in that fire I did not
learn until I swarmed up to that deck the next day.
"It was an unfortunate fact that our guns, which there had been no time
to overhaul, were suffering a good deal from the strain of their hard
firing during the battle. As a consequence their shooting was by no
means as accurate as at the beginning of the action, and several of the
shells went wide of the point at which it was endeavoured to direct
them.
"There is no doubt that they wrought sad havoc among the crowd on the
fo'c'sle, and I don't think our prisoners were exaggerating much when
they said that those three last salvoes killed sixty and wounded a good
many more, and also that a number of others were drowned by jumping
into the surf in the panic that followed. One could feel a lot worse
about it, though, if the whole thing hadn't been due to the sheer
pig-headedness of their skipper in trying to bluff us into letting him
keep his flag up. He has the blood of every man that was killed by those
last unnecessary shots on his hands, just as much as his brother Huns
have those of the women and children they have murdered in France and
Belgium.
"Von Müller was brave all right. There's nothing against him on that
score. But it was nothing but his pride and a selfish desire to keep
his face with his superiors whenever he got back to Germany that led
him to force us to fire those entirely needless shots into his ship. He
thought that he would cut a better figure at his court-martial if his
colours were shot down rather than lowered in surrender. But if he was
so anxious to make a proper naval finish, why did he run his ship ashore
instead of fighting it out on the seas the Huns make such a shouting
about battling for the freedom of? If he had done that instead of trying
to bluff us like the bully the Hun always is, he'd have saved a good
many lives that he sacrificed in trying to save his own name. There
would have been a few wounded drowned in that case that were saved by
beaching the _Emden_, but these were more than offset by his forcing us
to fire those last shots that there was no need in the world for firing
if Von Müller hadn't tried to bluff about the flag.
"I've never had any patience, sir, with all that has been said and
written about Von Müller being a sportsman. That reputation was gained
wholly through the sportsmanship of the _Sydney's_ officers who, because
they'd given the _Emden_ a licking in a fair give-and-take fight, didn't
think it was quite the proper thing to speak ill of her captain, even if
it was the truth.
"And one other thing, sir, while I'm speaking of this incident. Every
time I hear any one talk about negotiating with the Huns I tell them,
that story of Von Müller's bluff about his flag. He pretended not
to understand our signals just because it served his purpose not to
understand them. But when our guns began to talk he had no difficulty in
translating _their_ language. Well, sir, the Huns are all alike. They
never will understand any language but that of guns until their bully
streak is knocked out of them with guns. It's a dirty job, sir, but
that's the only way to finish it."
The lad's fine blue eyes were flashing, and his face red with
excitement, and he took out a handkerchief and wiped the perspiration
from his brow before resuming his narrative.
"It was getting too late in the day to start rescue work on the
_Emden_," he went on more quietly, "and so we did the best we could for
her for the present by sending in a boat, manned by prisoners from the
_Buresk_, with food and water, and a message to the effect that we would
return early in the morning. Then we put out to sea, for we thought we
still had to reckon with the _Königsberg_ turning up at any moment, and
didn't want her to surprise us as we had surprised the _Emden_.
"Crossing the track of the battle, we sighted and picked up three Hun
seamen, who claimed to have been blown from the deck of the _Emden_ by
the explosion of one of our shells, none of them much the worse for
their experience. Indeed, the fact that they were not in worse shape
rather led us to suspect that they had jumped overboard to _avoid_
the explosion of our shell rather than as a direct consequence of an
explosion.
"I don't exactly remember whether it was one of these chaps, or one of
the English-speaking prisoners from the _Buresk_, who, by blurting out
something about how lucky were his mates who got ashore before the fight
started, gave us our first inkling that the _Emden_ had sent a landing
party to Direction Island to destroy the Wireless station. There were
three officers and forty men, he told us, and this we later learned to
be the truth.
"What he did not tell us--quite possibly because he did not know of
it--was the fact that, besides being armed with rifles, this party also
carried three machine guns. It was only by chance that our failure
to reckon with this latter fact did not get us into serious trouble.
Indeed, I think it is more than likely that I would not be here talking
to you now but for the happy fact that the little schooner _Ayesha_
lying in Direction Harbour offered a chance of escape too promising for
the officer in command of the party to resist.
"The rounding up of this lot, of course, had the call over everything
else, and at first the Captain appeared to be considering putting
back to Direction at once and landing in the night. Lucky, indeed,
it was for us that we didn't, for that--as we learned later from the
Wireless-station people--was just what the Germans had expected and
prepared for. Had we gone in in the night we would have found the only
landing-place covered by machine guns, and we would probably have
stepped off into an ambush that would have wiped the lot of us out in
a minute or two. Landing at dawn, however, we found our birds flown,
and I, for one, was jolly glad to hear it after they had told us what
a resolute fellow the German officer leading the party was, and how
determined he had been to make a resistance. This chap, by the way, was
Lieut. Mucke, who later found his way back to Germany by way of Turkey.
When I read, three or four months later, of how well he had used those
same machine guns he had mounted to receive us against the Arabs in
fighting his way up the coast of the Red Sea, I realised the extent to
which we had been asking for trouble in landing armed only as we were.
Not expecting any resistance, we had no machine guns, and I think there
were several others who, like myself, had been given only revolvers.
Since the _Sydney's_ lucky star was in the ascendant for the whole show,
however, no harm came of it.
"You may be sure that the Wireless-station people were glad to see us,
for they had never been sure until they had seen the last of Mucke and
his men just how the Huns might use them in case the latter determined
to fight it out to the last ditch on Direction Island. One of them told
me that he had visions of being used as a human shield against the
_Sydney's_ shells, like the Huns used the women and children in Belgium.
They were a proper devil-may-care lot, those ones, and I can quite
believe the story that they asked the Huns to come and play tennis with
them when they got tired of watching the one-sided fight between the
_Sydney_ and _Emden_.
"As we were in a hurry to get back to the _Emden_, we did not remain
long ashore on Direction. Their doctor came off with us to help with the
wounded, and with him came two or three others of the Wireless people
to have a hurried 'look-see' at the _Sydney_. These latter intended to
return to shore at once in their own boat, but, by some mistake, the
whaler was cast off and the _Sydney_ got under weigh while the Inspector
was still in conversation with the Captain. They were about to ring
down to stop the engines, when the chap, with a good-bye wave of his
hand, ran to the port rail and disappeared in a header over the side.
A moment later he reappeared, settled his helmet back upon his head,
and struck out in a leisurely way for the boat which was pulling back
to meet him. It was quite the coolest thing of the kind I ever saw, but
I didn't appreciate it fully until an hour or so later when I saw the
black triangular fins of countless 'tiger' sharks converging from every
direction upon where the _Emden_ had been casting her dead into the surf
of North Keeling Island.
"Scarcely had we entered again the waters through which the battle had
been fought than we began to sight floating bodies. This was only to be
expected, of course, but what did surprise us was to come upon a wounded
man, in a lifebelt, being pushed slowly shoreward by an unwounded mate
who had nothing whatever to keep him up. Although they had been in the
water all of twenty-four hours, both were in fairly good shape when we
picked them up, and the unwounded chap was quite his own Hunnish self
again after he had had a night's sleep and a couple of square meals.
In fact, if I remember right, he was one of the worst of several of
the prisoners who seemed to think it was their privilege to keep the
stewards told off to look after them running day and night after 'bier.'
"As we neared the _Emden_ I saw that she was flying the International
signal for 'In want of immediate assistance.' We lowered two boats, and
in the one of these under Lieut. G---- I was sent along in case there
was any signalling to be done. It was a nasty job getting aboard her,
for she was lying partly inside the surf and the swells were running
high even under her stern. As she was at right angles to the seas, there
was no lee side to get under, and so we had to do the best we could
boarding her as she was. Lieut. G---- had a hard scramble for it, and
only the hands extended him by a couple of the German officers saved him
from a ducking. Watching our chances, the rest of us swarmed up between
swells, but it was touch-and-go all the time and took a long while.
"Frightful as the wreck of the _Emden_ looked from the sea, it was
nothing to the sheer horror of it as you saw it aboard her. The picture
of it is still as clear in my memory as if photographed there. I will
tell you first about the ship itself. The great and growing hole in her
bows, where she was pounding the reef, could be seen by leaning over
the side. Of the fore-bridge, only the deck remained. The chart-house
was gone completely. The foremast, though more or less intact to the
fore-top, had been shattered at the base by shells, and was lying over
the port side, shrouded with wreckage.
"The fore-control top I could not find at all, and the fore-topmast
had also disappeared completely. From the foremast to the main, which
was still standing, was one tangled mass of wreckage, and of this the
Wireless room, which looked like a curio shop struck by lightning,
was the worst mess. Two of the funnels were knocked flat over the
port battery, crushing several bodies under them, and a third--the
foremost one--was leaning against the wreck of the bridge. All about the
starboard battery the deck was torn with gaping holes, and through these
one could see that the whole inside of her was no more than a blown-out
and burnt-out shell. There was one place where it was a straight drop
from the quarterdeck to the inner skin of the bottom.
"But it was the men--the dead and wounded--that provided the real
horror. In the first place, there had been something over 350 officers
and men in the _Emden_. When we boarded her, 185 of these were alive,
but something like half of them were wounded, most of them very
badly. This number included a score or so who had jumped or been
blown overboard, and had swum, waded, or been washed by the surf on
to the beach of the island. Even the unwounded were very cowed and
apathetic, the only exceptions I remember being the Captain and one or
two other officers. By no means all of the dead had been thrown over
in the twenty-four hours that had now passed since the battle, and
not nearly as much had been done for the wounded as might have been
done, even considering the difficulties. Some of the wounded had not
even been dragged out of the sun, and it was the wounds of these (as
I learned later from one of our sick bay stewards) that were much the
worst infested with the maggots, which the tropical heat had started
breeding almost immediately because no antiseptics had been applied.
A considerable quantity of medical stores had been uninjured by the
fighting, I was told, and the proper use of these would have made the
greatest difference in saving lives and preventing a lot of suffering.
I could tell you just what swine it was that was responsible for this,
but I'd rather you got the facts from one of the officers. I think our
Surgeon could tell you something of the way things were.
"Horrible as were some of the mutilations from shell fragments, by
far the most shocking injuries seemed to have been inflicted by our
lyddite. The hair and clothes were entirely burnt from some of the
bodies, and the sides of these which had been exposed to the blast of
the flame-spurts were cooked to the colour of cold mutton. Most of the
bodies that had been thrown or blown overboard were being washed in to
the beach by the surf, and there was a fringe of them lying in rumpled
heaps above high-water mark. This was only about a hundred yards from
the bow of the _Emden_, and some of our men said that they saw the big
land-crabs crawling and fighting over them, and also worrying some of
the wounded who had crawled a little further inshore under the coco
palms. These men ashore had most of them jumped overboard when those
three last salvoes were pumped into her, and as it was not possible for
us to reach and bring them off till the following day, their sufferings
from thirst and from the attacks of the crabs must have been very
terrible indeed. All of this would, of course, have been avoided but for
Von Müller's trying to bluff us into leaving his flag flying after his
ship was beached and out of action.
"Most of the unwounded men who jumped overboard were probably washed
ashore before the sharks had a chance to get to them, but the more
helpless of the wounded who went over outside of where the surf was
breaking must have been attacked almost at once. The sea tigers were
still fighting over some of the fragments even after rescue work had
commenced, and I still shudder when I think of the shock it gave me
the first time I saw a floating body start to wriggle as a shark nosed
into it from beneath. It was a seaman in a white suit and sun-helmet,
floating face down, and as the monster seized it, the jerks made it give
two or three quick overhead flops of the arms, for all the world like
a man striking out to swim the 'Australian Crawl.' There were sharks
following along astern of every boat-load of wounded we pulled back to
the _Sydney_, just as if they thought we were robbing them of something
that belonged to them by rights.
"But perhaps the thing that shocked me most of all, terrible as were the
sights on every hand, was something one of the surviving officers (I
think he was of 'Warrant' rank) said to me shortly after I came over the
side. Although he was quite unwounded, he was lolling in the shade of a
blanket thrown over some wreckage, and making no effort to help in the
thousand and one things that might have been done to ease the sufferings
of his mates. He spoke fairly good English, and I learned afterwards he
had been a steward on a 'Nordeutscher Lloyd' liner on the Australian
run. Raising himself on his elbow, but not leaving his comfortable
retreat, he called out to me, 'I say, my poy, vy vos it der _Zydny_
ev'ry time turn to us stern on 'stead of bows on?' There was the Hun for
you. That little point about the way the _Sydney_ happened to turn once
or twice had evidently puzzled him, and the question had been occupying
his Hunnish mind at a moment when any other kind of a human being but a
German would have been working his head off to make life a little less
of a hell for the men who had fought beside him and under him. Sickened
by the shambles all round, and half-choked as I was by the horrible reek
from the bodies of the dead and wounded, it took all the control I had
to keep from putting my foot in the ruffian's bloated face.
"I learned a good many things in those few hours I spent in the
_Emden_ of the way of the Hun officers with their men, and the
'cat-o'-nine-tails' I have told you of were not the worst.
"A rather decent sort of chap, who said that he had learned his English
working on a Scotchman's farm in Argentina, took me to a doorway leading
to a flat from which a ladder had descended to the engine-room and
stokeholds. Across that doorway was lying the body of an officer, which
nobody seemed to have taken the trouble to move. He was the Gunnery
Lieutenant, the chap said, and had been driving up stokers at the point
of his revolver to serve a gun whose crew had been knocked out when he
was killed. The officer's body was somewhat scorched by lyddite, but
from the line of the burns it looked as if they were made after he fell.
"What looked to me very much like a bullet wound in the side of the head
struck me at once as the likely cause of his death. 'Did one of his own
men shoot him?' I asked; but the chap--seeing a young officer who, I
later learned, was Prince Franz Joseph Hohenzollern, a relative of the
Kaiser, approaching--only shrugged his shoulder and raised his eyebrows
and walked away. I didn't like to ask about the incident after the men
were prisoners on the _Sydney_, but just the same there has never been
any doubt in my mind as to what occurred.
"Most of my time on the _Emden_ was put in standing by on the
quarterdeck in case there was any signalling to be done, and this gave
me a good chance to get a line on a little ceremony which had been
carried out there just after she sent her flag down.
"We had seen them burn that flag, but just what other things went into
that fire we never knew exactly. The nature of some of them, however, I
began to surmise when I came upon charred fragments of Bank of England
notes lying about among the wreckage and sticking in the cracks of the
warped deck. Several coins which I picked up turned out to be English
shillings and German marks. I noticed that some of our lads were pushing
the search with much energy whenever they had a chance, paying especial
attention to the cracks between the charred planking and the deck. When
fire-blackened gold sovereigns began to make their appearance in the
_Sydney_, and kept appearing even after we had been for months in the
West Indies and South Atlantic, I understood the reason for their
energy.
"When the prisoners were searched on board the _Sydney_ several of them
were found to be in possession of English sovereigns (one of them gave
the Paymaster a bag containing over a hundred for safe keeping), which
they claimed to be their own. It was not until they had been disembarked
at Colombo that it turned out that one of them had confessed that among
other things thrown into that fire on the quarterdeck of the _Emden_ was
all the treasure she had seized from the British merchant ships she had
sunk during her career as a raider. This included sixty thousand pounds
in gold sovereigns and an unknown amount in bank notes. The latter were
consumed, and the gold, after the bags had been burned away from it, was
swept into the sea. It was in this way that the few stray coins picked
up lingered behind in the gaping cracks opened up by shells bursting in
the enclosed spaces under the quarterdeck."
At this juncture a messenger came to summon my young friend to the
signal bridge, but he lingered at the door long enough to say that he
had fully made up his mind to go back to North Keeling Island after the
war and have a try at raking up some of that scuttled treasure.
"There's no sand where she was lying, sir; only hard coral reef that
ought to catch the coins in the holes and prevent them from being
washed away. My only fear is that the coral may grow over and cover
it up before I am free to get out there. Do you know how fast a coral
island grows, sir?"
I replied that I was not sure about it, but that I seemed to have some
kind of an impression that the coral insect couldn't erect much more
than a thirty-second of an inch of island a year, adding that I didn't
think that a few inches of coral could make much difference with a big
heap of gold like that in any case.
"Perhaps not, sir," he assented; "but all the same I'm hoping that it
won't have had time to grow even _one_ inch before the war's over. The
stuff's no use to a chap unless he can have it while he's young."
II. NAVAL HUNNISM
SOME INSIDE HISTORY FROM THE FALKLAND AND COCOS ISLAND BATTLES
Perhaps there is nothing about which the German has been more
contemptuous of the Briton than in the matter of the way the latter has
of treating war as he does his sport, of fighting his battles in the
same spirit with which he plays his games. Yet it has been this very
desire of the latter to play the game at all stages that is responsible
for the fact that the German, for a time at least, was given credit in
the popular mind of even the neutral and Allied countries for a great
deal that never should have been credited to him. This is especially
true of two or three of the earlier naval actions of the war. The fact
that a German captain fought his ship gallantly seemed to his British
opponent of that period sufficient reason for forgetting, or at least
forgiving, him for not fighting fairly, and so it was that the bravery
of Von Spee at the Falkland, and the skill and pluck of Von Müller
in the _Emden_ at Cocos Island, had the effect of mitigating in the
minds of the officers of the British ships, which emerged as victors
from those battles, the impression of a number of things, ranging all
the way from "not playing the game" to downright treachery. And so it
chances that in the eyes of even the civilised world the Germans have
been given a clean sheet for these earlier encounters, and one hears
them spoken of to-day in London as though they stood apart in this
respect from every battle the German has fought on sea--or on land for
that matter--since then. It is regrettable to record that this popular
belief has no more to base itself on than the sportsmanlike reticence
of the British officer in refusing to broadcast the real facts. One had
a sort of pleasure, as the record of the Hun grew blacker and blacker
the more chance he had to give expression to his real self, in hugging
that delusion that the sailors of the _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_ and
_Emden_ were at worst only a dull grey in comparison with their infamous
mates of the High Sea Fleet who were drawn upon to man the U-boats.
But that they were all of a kind one has only to talk with any of the
British officers and men who came in contact with them in and after
battle to learn beyond dispute. I will cite a single instance from the
Falklands before going on to the _Emden_, on which latter even more
false sentiment has been wasted on the score of the supposed "sporting"
behaviour of her officers than on any other of the German ships which
were in the limelight of publicity during the opening months of the war.
After the _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_ had been sunk off the
Falklands by the _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_, the latter ships made
every possible effort to pick up all the Germans who had survived the
fighting and were floating in the water. A considerable number of these
were brought aboard Admiral Sturdee's Flagship, the _Invincible_.
Among the few German shells which had struck the latter battle cruiser
was an "eight-point-one" which had failed to explode. Knowing that
Von Spee had been near the end of his munition, but wishing to gain
indisputable evidence on that point by establishing beyond a doubt
whether the shell in question contained an explosive charge or was
only a practice projectile fired for want of anything better, Admiral
Sturdee decided to have it taken to pieces. Thinking it might be useful
to get the testimony of the prisoners on the matter first, the Admiral,
after having the shell in question brought to his cabin, ordered that
the captured Germans be sent in for interrogation. Without exception
they all declared that the projectile before them was made only for
practice, and that, as it carried no explosive charge, there would be
no risks whatever in knocking it apart to prove that fact. Questioned
specifically as to whether any special precautions need be taken in
handling it, they replied with equal unanimity in the negative.
As the prisoners began to file out, however, one of them caught the
Admiral's eye and shook his head slightly, as though to convey--without
his mates observing it--a warning that the shell was dangerous. On
calling this man back, the Admiral was informed that the projectile
really contained a full charge of high explosive, and that tinkering
with it before certain precautions were observed would inevitably result
in detonating it. A keen student of human nature, Admiral Sturdee
recognised at once the unparalleled opportunity to test German honour
and study a phase of the then imperfectly understood German psychology.
The prisoners were ordered to be brought in separately, and in such a
manner that those who passed out after interrogation should have no
chance to communicate with their mates who were waiting their turn. To
each man as he appeared it was pointed out that he owed his life to the
fact that the British had not followed (as they well might have) the
precedent set by the Germans at Coronel of making no effort to pick up
the survivors from the ships they had sunk. It was also pointed out
to him that his failure to tell the truth would probably be attended
with serious loss of life among those to whom he owed his own. Then the
question respecting the nature of the shell was again put. Without a
single exception (the man who had confessed was not, of course, examined
again) they reiterated most emphatically their former statements that
the shell contained no explosive and might therefore be disassembled
with impunity.
After providing adequate safeguards, the shell was taken to pieces,
and at once proved to be everything that all but one of the several
score of rescued Huns had declared it was not, which meant, of course,
that if it had been handled in the way these had insisted would be
perfectly safe, all near it would have been killed. Since there is no
punishment provided for this brand of treachery, no action was taken
against the prisoners, and the incident was remembered principally for
the illuminative sidelight it threw on the unexpected moral obliquity of
the German sailor. It was something quite new in the annals of civilised
naval warfare, and Sturdee's officers were scarcely less grieved than
shocked that men who had fought so bravely could behave so despicably.
Yet that (to the Germans) incomprehensible sporting code of the British,
by which it reckoned as not "playing the game" to speak ill of a brave
foe after he is beaten, has prevented the story from finding its way
to the public, and it is only now, when four years more of war have
established the fact that the action of the Huns on this occasion was
characteristic rather than (as so many of Sturdee's officers tried so
hard to persuade themselves at the time) exceptional, that I am given
permission (by one who observed at first hand all that took place) to
publish it.
Perhaps (doubtless on account of the greater spectacularity of the
lone-hand game she played) the _Emden_ and her able and resourceful
Captain came in for more of this misplaced credit than any other of the
German cruisers of similar career. In one instance this even went so far
as to prompt the people of the sporting Australian city from which the
ship which brought the _Emden's_ career to a finish took her name to
request that the doughty Von Müller and his surviving officers should
be sent to Sydney that they might be tendered a public reception. This
kindly but misdirected instance of sportsmanship on the part of a people
who--at this stage of the war at least--saw nothing incongruous in
treating an enemy who had put up a good fight in precisely similar a way
to which they had been accustomed to treat a visiting cricket eleven,
was occasioned largely by the fact that the officers of the _Sydney_,
in their eagerness to do full justice to a beaten foe, laid stress in
their accounts of the fight on his bravery and said little or nothing
of anything else. Yet, when one comes to learn the real facts of this
historic battle (as I have done recently, by talking at length with a
number of the British officers and men who took part in it), he finds
evidences of "Hunnisms" splashing with muddy spots a record which might
have been golden bright on the score of physical courage and devotion to
duty.
It is no pleasure to write what I have to set down here, for I am quite
frank to confess that the story of the _Emden_, according to the first
accounts that were published of it, in connexion with the classic
exploit of Lieutenant Mucke in escaping from Cocos Island in a small
sloop and ultimately reaching Constantinople by way of Arabia, stirred
my imagination as few episodes of the war have done. The time is long
past, however, when the German has a right to expect anything further
in the way of chivalrous reticence in the recording of his deeds and
misdeeds. What I am setting down here was told me by an officer of the
_Sydney_ who boarded the beached _Emden_, and was also entrusted with
the task of rounding up and bringing off the men from the latter that
had jumped overboard and made their way to the beach of North Keeling
Island.
As regards the battle itself, no one in the _Sydney_ has anything
but admiration for the pluck and skill with which the _Emden_ fought
a losing battle against a faster and more heavily gunned ship. But
perhaps the one thing which they do hold most heavily against Von Müller
personally is for the characteristically Prussian way he tried to bluff
them, after he had run his ship aground, into allowing him to leave his
flag flying when the _Emden_ had been put completely out of action and
was out of the running for good and all. I have already written of this
historic incident in considerable detail as it appeared to a signalman
of the _Sydney_ who had unusually favourable opportunity for observing
just what transpired, so that it will suffice here merely to summarise
it and record that this man's version is fully borne out by what was
subsequently told me by officers.
When the _Sydney_ returned to the grounded _Emden_ after pursuing and
sinking the latter's collier, it was seen that the German Naval ensign
was still flying at her maintopmast. Nothing in the nature of a white
flag was displayed anywhere upon her. After making three times the
signal, "Do you surrender?" and each time receiving only an evasive
reply, or none at all, the Captain of the _Sydney_ had reluctantly to
give the order to reopen fire. The three broadsides which were required
to convince Von Müller that his bluff would not go down are estimated
to have killed sixty men in the _Emden_ and to have caused a number of
others to jump over into the surf. These lives were nothing more or
less than a sacrifice on the altar of Von Müller's Prussian pride, and
under the circumstances he was just as blood-guilty for causing them to
be snuffed out in a typically Hunnish attempt to "put one over" on the
ship that had beaten him and make the report of his defeat read better
in Potsdam as if he had ordered them to be mown down by the guns of the
_Emden_.
Lieutenant X----'s account of the work he had charge of in the _Emden_
shows Von Müller in a better light, but reveal a terrible callousness
and negligence on the part of his medical officers. As he must always be
the most weighty witness as to how things were on the stricken ship at
this juncture, I shall set down his account of what he saw and did in
some detail.
"It was the morning after the fight before we had cleaned up all the
other incidental business and were free to give our attention to
looking after what was left of, or rather who was left in, the _Emden_.
Fortunately, her stern was lying out beyond where the surf broke, so
that, with a line they threw us from the deck, it was possible to ride
under one quarter, with the boat's bow to seaward. I had rather a hard
time getting aboard, once nearly falling into the water through getting
a hawser between my legs, but I finally managed it through a hand which
one of the German officers standing aft reached down to me. I told
Von Müller that the Captain of the _Sydney_ was prepared to take the
surviving officers and men to Colombo provided they would give their
parole. At first he rather stuck over the word, as though he would
like to make out that he did not understand it, a perfectly absurd
bluff in the light of the fact that he was fluent in both English and
French, and that the term is in common use by the Germans themselves.
He quickly came round, however, when I hastened to explain exactly what
the Captain would require of him. Ultimately he signed a paper agreeing
that for such time as all officers and men of the _Emden_ remained in
the _Sydney_ they would cause no interference with ship or fittings,
and would be amenable to the ship's discipline. This parole was
substantially observed.
"The surgeon of the _Emden_, though unwounded, was doing nothing at
the time of our arrival, and, from the appearance of the wounded, it
was evident that he had done very little during the twenty-four hours
which had elapsed since the action. By way of excuse, he claimed that
his staff were all killed and his dressings and instruments destroyed.
Accepting this as the literal truth, we made a signal for more medical
supplies to supplement those already brought, and Dr. Ollerhead, the
Eastern Extension Telegraph Company's surgeon, who had come with
us from Cocos Island, set to work to get the wounded ready to be
transferred. Neither at that time, nor during the three days in which
the surgeon of the _Sydney_ worked without rest to save as many as
possible of the _Emden's_ eighty wounded, did the German surgeon render
anything like the assistance that might have been expected from him
under the circumstances.
"What disgusted us most, however, was to find before we left the _Emden_
that there _had_ been ample supplies of uninjured dressings all the
time. The action station of Dr. L----, the surgeon in question, had
been in the stokehold, which was quite undamaged. A bent and twisted
ladder or two formed the only obstacles to reaching and utilising the
considerable stores of dressings, lotions, etc., which were still
available there. Although it was true that the assistant surgeon was
missing (he had come on deck after his station in the tiller flat aft
had been struck, and was blown overboard by an exploding shell), it was
_not_ true by a long way that there was not ample help, skilled and
unskilled, available for at least first-aid dressing all around, and on
this they had hardly made a beginning."
A brief quotation or two from the report of the surgeon of the _Sydney_
may be interesting while on the question of the neglect of the _Emden's_
wounded by their own surgeon. Referring to the wounded which had just
been brought aboard, he says:
"In cases where large vessels of the leg or arm had been
opened, we found torniquets of pieces of spun yarn, or a
handkerchief, or piece of cloth bound around the limb above the
injury. In some cases, I believe the majority, they had been put on
by the patients themselves. One man told me he had put one on his
arm himself. They were all in severe pain from the constriction,
and in all cases where amputation was required, the presence of
these torniquets made it necessary to amputate much higher than
one would otherwise have done. _There was little evidence of any
skilled treatment before they arrived aboard._"
Again he writes:
"Some of the men who were brought off to the _Sydney_
presented horrible sights, and by this time the wounds were
practically all foul and stinking, and maggots 1/4 inch long were
crawling over them, only 24 to 30 hours after injury. _Practically
nothing had been done to the wounded sailors_, and they were
roughly attended to by our party and despatched to us as quickly as
possible."
Professional etiquette evidently operated to restrain the surgeon of
the _Sydney_ from stating in his report what he thought of these very
palpable evidences of neglect on the part of his "opposite number" in
the _Emden_. When I met him in the _Sydney_ last winter I heard him
express himself in no uncertain language on the subject, but I do
not feel at liberty to quote him without his permission, and he has
recently returned to Australia. I take it that he reckoned that to his
medical brethren, to whom his report was especially addressed, the plain
statements of the facts were sufficient to speak for themselves.
Lieutenant X---- credits the German officers with doing the best they
could in helping him transfer the wounded. "Shortly after I came over
the side," he said, "I took the opportunity to tell Von Müller that
we reckoned he had fought very well. To this he merely answered with
a rather surly 'No,' and turned away as though to hide his chagrin.
Presently, however, he came up to where I was standing, and, speaking in
a rather apologetic tone, said: 'Thank you very much for saying that,
but I was not satisfied. We should have done better. You were very lucky
in shooting away all my voice-pipes at the beginning.' I do not remember
whether or not I told him that this was hardly enough to balance his own
luck in getting both our range-finders in the first five minutes.
"The best of the whole lot of officers, however--indeed, the only one
who showed anything like the spirit one would expect a British officer
to display under similar circumstances--was Lieutenant ----, whom
I encountered in connexion with my 'sweep' of North Keeling Island
after the lot of Huns who landed there through the surf. I was a
good deal puzzled to account for the sporting spirit of ---- on this
occasion--until he chanced to tell me that his mother was English!
I had this little Keeling Island roundup all to myself, and, grim as
some features of it were, it had also its amusing side, and you may be
interested in hearing something of it.
"When we fired those last three broadsides into the _Emden_ a good many
men either jumped or were blown into the water, and of these a score or
more were carried to the beach by the surf. Most of these, as I found
later, were wounded in one way or another, and having no food or water,
their sufferings during the day and a half before help reached them were
unspeakable.
"From the _Emden_ the bodies of men--some of which appeared to have
life in them--were visible on the beach above high-water mark, and just
before we left the wreck for good I noticed a party setting off along
the shore to the right. If I had only _failed_ to notice this move, my
rescue party would have reached the poor wretches eight or ten hours
earlier than it did, and probably have saved several more lives than we
saved. The unfortunate delay was also largely due to my ignorance of the
fact that North Keeling Island was a coral atoll.
"When we got back to the _Sydney_ with the last of the wounded from the
_Emden_ I learned that our galley had already been sent away to take
food and water to the men on the beach, but that, for some reason, it
had gone in no further than the line of the outer reef where the surf
began to break. I volunteered to go in the whaler to find what the
trouble was, and if possible, make a landing with both boats. Just as
I was about to go over the side, a young Australian lad--some kind of
a Boy rating--came and asked to be taken along. I refused him rather
shortly, as I thought it would be of more hindrance than help in the
kind of job we had on hand. He disappeared quickly, and I did not see
him again until we had taken the galley in through the surf and were
pulling it up on the beach. Then he was discovered, curled up under the
thwarts, where he had managed to stow himself away before we pulled
off from the _Sydney_. It was a lucky thing he came along, for, as it
turned out, he was the only one of the lot of us who knew how to climb a
coconut palm in true native fashion.
"It was impossible to take a boat through the surf anywhere near the
point where the _Emden_ had grounded, but some miles up the beach there
appeared to be an opening in the reef through which a landing might be
made. Watching our chances, we managed to shoot the whaler in without
an upset, incidentally showing the way to the galley, which had been on
the point of giving up the job after staving a hole in its bottom in
attempting a passage at a less favourable point. Mustering my men, I set
out to find the Huns. It was here that I went wrong.
"Knowing that the island was but a small one, and having seen a number
of the _Emden's_ men making off to the right from the point where she
was grounded, I figured that I would be likely to intercept them more
quickly if I circled round to the left and met them face to face than
by trying to overtake them. As it was late, I was anxious to lose no
time in getting them together and into the boats while there was still
daylight to see to getting the latter through the surf. If the island
had been anything but a coral atoll my reckoning would have worked out
all right; as it was it upset things completely.
"The island was covered with coco palms, under which there was a thick
growth of pandanus and some sort of salt grass, the latter forming a
tangle which made walking extremely difficult, and ultimately forced me
to take to the beach to get opener going. Even here progress was slow on
account of the sand and coral clinkers, and it was already getting dark
when we suddenly found our way barred by a swift-flowing tidal passage
connecting the open sea and what I now saw for the first time--the
lagoon in the heart of the coral atoll. The island, like all others of
its kind, was in the shape of a rough letter 'C,' with water between the
two tips, and therefore quite impossible to walk around.
"As it was out of the question trying to swim what was probably a
shark-infested passage in the dark, especially as there was no certainty
of finding our men on the other side, there was nothing to do but turn
back. Here again I made the mistake of trying to take a short cut by
striking straight across the island instead of sticking to the beach.
I never saw the place in daylight which we stumbled into, and so can't
say just what it was; it seemed, however, to be a sort of wilderness of
reeds peopled with a million seabirds, many of them nesting. The roar
of our guns in the battle was as nothing to the bedlam of screams which
arose when I went slithering through a lot of eggs and flopped full
length into a rising mass of beating wings. They came batting against us
in the darkness throughout the several minutes we were groping our way
back to the open of the beach.
"It was well after midnight when we got back to where the boats were,
and so quite out of the question trying to do anything further in the
way of searching for the Huns till daylight. Several of the latter had
struggled in and given themselves up, and they told us that the rest
were all at the point where they had first come ashore from the _Emden_,
and suffering greatly from hunger and thirst. As we had expected to
be putting back to the _Sydney_ within an hour or two of the time we
landed, we had little food and water save that in the boats, and this
wouldn't have gone very far with the lot of us if it had not been
supplemented by the coconuts our young stowaway brought down for us.
"There was not much chance to rest that night on account of the small
land-crabs which kept crawling over you the moment you dropped off
to sleep, and it was not pleasant to think of how those more or less
helpless Huns were faring a few miles farther down the beach. We started
off at the first streak of dawn, and reached them by sun-up. The most
of them were in even worse condition than I had feared, for it seemed
inconceivable to me that they should not have contrived in some way or
other to get hold of some coconuts to eat and drink. It turned out that
they had not done so, however, and that, as a consequence, a number
of them had died of thirst. The worst case, perhaps, was that of the
assistant surgeon, whom I told you of as having been wounded and blown
overboard by a shell. Delirious from thirst, he had managed to induce
a sailor to fetch him a drink of salt water, and had died shortly
afterwards as a result of drinking it. All the open wounds, since they
had gone from twelve to eighteen hours longer without attention, were in
even more terrible condition than those of the men we had found on the
_Emden_ the previous day.
"The only one of the lot who seemed to have any hold on himself was
the Lieutenant ---- I have mentioned. Luckily, he was not injured, and
he appeared to have been doing everything he could to help those that
were. It must have kept the plucky chap's hands full, for several of
them were crazy, and a number of the wounded were too helpless to keep
the crabs away. He and one or two of the least knocked out of the seamen
had managed to keep these vermin pretty well away from the bodies of the
living, but with the dead down along the water's edge they were already
having their way.
"Finally, we got all the helpless of the wounded on to stretchers
and started on their way to the boats. ---- was the greatest help
throughout, but I can't say as much for many of the others of the
unwounded, who were very grudging in the way they lent a hand. ---- put
up a stiff protest against going off without burying the dead, declaring
that he was not going to leave them there for the crabs to eat up. When
I pointed out that we had no implements for digging, and that I needed
his help in getting the living off, he saw the reason of it and said he
would come along. We did the best we could for the dead by covering them
with palm leaves and coral clinkers.
"I made a wide circle around before we left, trying to be sure that none
of the living was left behind. The Huns were not quite sure of their
numbers, so there was no checking up the thing that way. I am quite
positive that no living man was left in that immediate vicinity, and
---- felt equally certain that none had strayed away. This must have
been just what _did_ happen, however, for, many weeks later, we had word
from the Telegraph people to the effect that, when they landed on North
Keeling Island to bury the dead, one of the crab-picked skeletons they
found was in a sitting position against the bole of a palm tree. I've
never tried to reconstruct the story of what happened, but it must have
been rather awful at the best.
"It was rather a problem, calculating how to get every one off in two
small boats, one of which had a hole in the bottom. The whaler would
still float right side up, however, and we finally managed it by putting
the badly wounded, with a pulling crew, in the _Sydney's_ cutter, which
was sent to aid us in the morning, and the rest piling into the whaler
and sitting in the water. Then a long tow-line was passed to the cutter
(long enough to let her get out beyond the breakers before a strain came
on it) and she pulled away with the whole procession. ----, in spite
of all I could do to induce him to get into the whaler, insisted on
swimming out through the breakers and boarding her outside. If he hadn't
been starving and thirsting for forty-eight hours I would have put it
down as pure swank; as it was, however, I can't believe he was actuated
by anything else than a wish to ease off the load on the damaged boat
while it was going through the breakers. He was a thoroughly good sport,
that ----, and, as I told you, I was a good deal puzzled to account for
it until I learned about his being half English.
"We reached the _Sydney_ all right, and the whaler was just being
hoisted in when I heard the Captain's voice from the bridge asking where
Lieutenant X---- was. I looked up just in time to catch him staring
down at me with open-eyed amazement. 'Oh, there he is!' he exclaimed,
turning away with a grin on his face. That led me, for the first time in
twenty-four hours, to take a look at what I could see of myself without
a glass. It was my turn to grin--and to blush. Absolutely the sum total
of my wardrobe was my shirt and a seaman's straw hat! Nothing else.
To ease my feet from boots after standing on the scorching iron decks
of the _Emden_, I had shifted to an old pair of dancing pumps when I
returned to the _Sydney_ and these, in the rush of departure, I had worn
ashore. These, and my socks, must have been scoured off among the coral
clinkers, and my cap probably went when we stumbled into the sea-birds'
roost in the darkness. But where I lost my trousers, and what sailor
gave me his hat, I have never been able to make out."
I asked Lieutenant X---- if it was true, as I had heard, that the
officers of the victor and vanquished took advantage of the several days
they spent together in the _Sydney_ before the Germans were disembarked
at Colombo to foregather and talk the battle over.
"Except for the two Captains, who were necessarily thrown together a
good deal and who drew a chart of the battle between them, emphatically
no," he replied. "The wardroom officers held practically no conversation
at all with those from the _Emden_. On their part there was shown no
inclination to talk, and on our part that fact alone would have been
enough to prevent any interchanges of a personal nature. It would have
seemed rather like 'rubbing it in' if we had tried to draw them out on
a subject that couldn't but be a painful one to them. Some of the men
yarned together a bit, I believe, but you may be quite assured that
(save for the exception I have mentioned) there was nothing of the kind
between the officers. There wasn't a lot in common between us at the
best."
II. LIFE IN THE FLEET
A BATTLESHIP AT SEA
The collier had come alongside a little after seven--two hours before
daybreak at that time of year--and I awoke in my cabin on the boat deck
just abaft the forward turret to the grind of the winches and the steady
tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below.
On my way aft to the wardroom for breakfast, I stopped for a moment by
a midships hatch, where the commander, grimed to the eyes, stamped his
sea-boots and threshed his arms as a substitute for the warming exercise
the men were getting behind the shovels and the barrows. He it was who
was responsible--partly through systematisation, partly through infusing
his own energetic spirit into the men themselves--for the fact that
the _Zeus_ held the Blue Ribbon, or the Black Ribbon, or whatever one
would call the premier honours of the Grand Fleet for speedy coaling.
Not unnaturally, therefore, he was a critical man when it came to
passing judgment on the shifting of "Number 1 Welsh Steam" from hold
to bunkers, and it was not necessarily to be expected that he would
echo my enthusiasm when I told him that this was quite the smartest bit
of coaling I had ever seen west of Nagasaki, something quite worth
standing, shivering tooth to tooth, with a raw north wind, to be a
witness of.
"It's fair," he admitted grudgingly, "only fair. A shade over 300 tons
an hour, perhaps. 'Twould have seemed good enough before we put up the
Grand Fleet record of 408. Trouble is, they haven't anything to put 'em
on their mettle this morning. Now, if some other ship had come within
fifty or sixty tons of their record this last week, or if we'd had a
rush order to get ready to go to sea--then you might have hoped to see
coaling that was coaling."
All through my porridge and eggs and bacon the steady tramp of the
barrow-men on the forecastle-deck throbbed along the steel plates
of the wardroom ceiling, and it must have been about the time I was
spreading my marmalade (real marmalade, not the synthetic substitute
one comes face to face with ashore these days) that I seemed to sense a
quickening of the movement, not through any rush-bang acceleration, but
rather through gradually becoming aware of increased force in action,
as when the engines of a steamer speed up from "half" to "full." In a
few moments an overalled figure, with a face coal-dusted till it looked
like the face of the end-man in a minstrel show, lounged in to remark
casually behind the day before yesterday morning's paper that we had
just gone on "two hours' notice." A half-hour later, as the gouged-out
collier edged jerkily away under the impulse of her half-submerged
screw, the commander, a gleam of quiet satisfaction in his steady eyes,
remarked that "it wasn't such a bad finish, after all," adding that "the
men seemed keen to get her out to sea and let the wind blow through
her."
The ship's post-coaling clean up--usually as elaborate an affair as a
Turkish bath, with rub down and massage--was no more than a douche with
"a lick and a promise." Anything more for a warship putting off into the
North Sea in midwinter would be about as superfluous as for a man to
wash his face and comb his hair before taking a plunge in the surf.
Once that perfunctory wash-down was over, all traces of rush
disappeared. What little remained to be done after that--even including
getting ready for action--was so ordered and endlessly rehearsed that
nothing short of an enemy salvo or a sea heavy enough to carry away
something of importance need be productive of a really hurried movement.
Just a shade more smoke from the funnels to indicate the firing of
furnaces which had been lying cold, and the taking down or in of a few
little harbour "comforts" like stove-pipes and gangways, forecasted
imminent departure.
The expression regarding the fleet, squadron, or even the single ship
ready to sail at a moment's notice is as much of a figure of speech
as is the similar one about the army which is going to fight to the
last man. A good many moments must inevitably elapse between the time
definite orders come to sail and the actual getting under weigh. But
the final preparations _can_ be reduced to such a routine that the ship
receiving them can be got ready to sail with hardly more than a ripple
of unusual activity appearing in the ebb and flow of the life of those
who man her. No river ferry-boat ever cast off her moorings and paddled
out on one of her endlessly repeated shuttlings with less apparent
effort than the _Zeus_, when, after gulping some scores of fathoms of
Gargantuan anchor chain into her capacious maw, she pivoted easily
around in the churning boil of reversed screws, took her place in line,
and followed in the wake of the flagship toward the point where a notch
in the bare rounded periphery of encircling hills marked the way to the
open sea.
Nowhere else in the temperate latitudes is there so strange a meeting
and mingling place of airs and waters as at the "Northern Base." The
butterfly chases of sunshine and showers even in December and January
are suggestive of nothing so much as what a South Pacific Archipelago
would be but with fifty or sixty degrees colder temperature. Dancing
golden sunmotes were playing spirited cross-tag with slatily sombre
cloud-shadows as we nosed out through the mazes of the booms, but with
the first stinging slaps of the vicious cross-swells of a turbulent sea,
a swirling bank of fog came waltzing over the aimlessly chopping waters,
and reared a vaporous wall across our path.
The flagship melted into the milling mists, and dimmed down to an
amorphous blur with just enough outline to enable us a sight to correct
our position in line. In turn, the towered and pinnacled head-on
silhouette of our next astern ship grew soft and shadowy, and where
proper perspective would have placed the fourth was a swaying wisp of
indeterminate image which might just as well have been an imminently
wheeling seagull as a distantly reeling super-dreadnought. The
comparison is by no means so ridiculous as it sounds, for only the day
before a naval flying-man had told me how he once started to bring his
seaplane down on sighting a duck (which was really some hundreds of feet
in the air) because he took it for a destroyer, and how, later, he had
failed to "straighten out" quickly enough because he thought a trawler
was a duck in flight.
The lean grey shadows which slipped ghostily into step with us in the
fog-hastened twilight of three o'clock might just as well (had we
not known of the rendezvous) have been lurking wolves as protecting
sheep-dogs.
"Now that we've picked up our destroyers," said the officer who paced
the quarter-deck with me, "we'll be getting on our way. Let's go down to
tea."
Smoke, masts, funnels, and wave-washed hulls, the Whistleresque outlines
of our swift guardians had blurred to blankness as I looked back from
the companion-way, and only a misty golden halo, flashing out and dying
down on our port bow, told where the flotilla leader was talking to the
flagship.
Tea is no less important a function on a British warship than it is
ashore, and nothing short of an action is allowed to interfere with it.
Indeed, how the cheerful clink of the teacup was heard in the prelude
to the diapason of the guns was revealed to me a few days ago, when the
Commander allowed me to read a few personal notes he had written while
the light cruiser he was in at the time was returning to port after the
Battle of Jutland. "The enemy being in sight," it read, "we prepared
for 'Action Stations' and went to tea." A few minutes later, fingers
which had crooked on the handles of the teacups were adjusting the nice
instruments of precision that laid the guns for what was destined to
prove the greatest naval battle in history.
Tea was about as usual with us that day, save that the officers who came
in at the change of watch were dressed for business--those from the
bridge and conning-tower in oilskins or "lammy" coats and sea-boots,
and the engineers in greasy overalls. A few words of "shop"--steam
pressure, revolutions, speed, force and direction of the wind, and
the like--passed in an undertone between men sitting next each other,
but never became general. The sponginess of the new "potato" bread
and the excellence of the margarine came in for comment, and some one
spoke of having rushed off a letter just before sailing, ordering a
recently advertised "self hair-cutter." A discussion as to just how this
remarkable contrivance worked followed, the consensus of opinion being
that it must be on the safety-razor principle, but that it couldn't
possibly be worth the guinea charged. All that I recall having been said
of what might be taking us to sea was when an officer likely to know
volunteered that we would possibly be in sight of land in the morning,
and some speculation arose as to whether it would be Norway or Jutland.
A recently joined R.N.V.R. provoked smiles when he suggested Heligoland.
The cabin which I had been occupying in harbour was one located
immediately under the conning-tower, and used by the navigating officer
when the ship was at sea, the arrangement being that I was to go aft and
live in his regular cabin while we were outside. Going forward, after
tea, I threw together a few things for my servant to carry back to my
temporary quarters. Groping aft in Stygian blackness along the windward
side of the ship, I encountered spray in clouds driving across even the
lofty fo'c'sle deck. The wind appeared to have shaken off its flukiness
as we cleared the headlands, and, blowing with a swinging kick behind
it, was rolling up a sea to match. I did not need to be told by the
sea-booted sailor whom I bumped on a ladder that it wasn't "goin' t'
be no nite fer lam's," to know that there was something lively in the
weather line in pickle, probably to be uncorked before morning.
The grate, robbed of its chimney, was cold and empty when I went in for
seven o'clock dinner--half an hour earlier than in harbour--and there
was just the suggestion of chill in the close air of the wardroom. An
engineer-lieutenant who started to reminisce about a winter cruise he
had once made in the Arctic was peremptorily hushed up with a request
to "talk about something warmer." A yarn about chasing the _Königsberg_
in the lagoons of East Africa was more kindly received, and an R.N.R.'s
account of how his ship carried Moslem pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah
on their way to Mecca brought a genial glow of warmth with it. There
was something strangely cheering in his story of how, when there was
a following simoon blowing across the brassy surface of the Red Sea,
the Lascar stokers used to go mad with the heat and jump overboard in
their delirium. The air seemed less dank and chill after that recital.
I ventured a "sudorific" contribution by telling of the way they made
"desert storms" in the California movies with the aid of buckets of sand
and a "wind machine." The whole table showed interest in this--probably
because it was so far removed from "shop"--and sat long over port and
coffee planning a "blower" that would discharge both wind and sand--in
sufficient quantities to give the "desert storm" illusion over the
restricted angle of the movie lens--at the turning of a single crank.
One does not need to be long upon a British battleship to find out that
the inventive genius of the Anglo-Saxon race is not all confined to the
American branch.
Between officers on watch and those resting to relieve, the
after-dinner gathering around what had once been a fire was a small and
rapidly dwindling one. As I got up to go to my cabin, the captain of
marines quieted the pet cockatoo on his shoulder long enough to say, as
we would probably be at "Action Stations" early in the morning, I might
find it of interest to come up to his turret, where he had a "jolly
smart crew." "We usually do 'B.J.1' at daybreak when we're out," he
said, "just on the chance that we may flush some sort of a Hun in the
early light. Quite like snipe-shooting, you know."
A "snotty" whom I met outside said something about the way the barometer
had been chasing its tail on the drop ever since we got under weigh,
and when I turned on the light in my cabin I noticed that the arrows
on the navigating officer's instrument indicated a fall of thirty
points since noon. The keen whistling of the rising wind shrilled with
steady insistence, and the wide swinging swells from the open sea were
lock-stepping along with a tread that was just beginning to lift the
great warship in a swaggering Jack Tar roll.
On the floor of the cabin was a flannel bulldog with "manipulable"
legs and a changeable expression. Its name was "Grip" (so "the pilot"
had told me), and it had been his constant companion ever since it was
presented to him on the eve of his first sailing as a midshipman. The
only time they had ever been separated was on the occasion a colleague,
who had borrowed it as a mascot in a game of poker, threw it overboard
in chagrin when the attempt to woo fickle fortune proved a failure.
Luckily, the ship was lying in a river, and the dog floated back on
the next tide, and was fished out with no damage to anything but the
compression bladder which worked its bark. The Navigating Officer left
the companionable little beast in his cabin, so he explained, to give
it the proper home touch for my first night at sea with the British
Navy. Cocking "Grip" up in the genial glow of the electric grate in an
attitude of "watchful waiting," I crawled into my bunk, pulled up the
adjustable side-rail, and was rocked to sleep to the even throb of the
turbines and the splish-splash of the spray against the screwed-down
scuttle.
"We aren't having 'B.J.1' this morning," some one explained facetiously
when I reported for "duty" at seven o'clock, "because we already have
'B.B.8.'" This last meant "Boreas Blowing Eight," he said, and I was
just "nautical" enough to know that a wind of "8" in the Beaufort scale
indicated something like fifty or sixty miles an hour.
"No U-boat will want to be getting within 'periscopic' distance of
the surface of the sea that's running this morning," said a young
engineer-lieutenant who had been in the submarine service, "and even if
one was able to get a sight, its torpedo would have to have some kind
of a 'kangaroo' attachment to jump the humps and hollows with. Fact
is, it's rather more than our destroyers are entirely happy with, and
we've just slowed down by several knots to keep 'em from dipping up the
brine with their funnels. Hope nothing turns up that they have to get a
jump on for. A destroyer's all right on the surface, but no good as a
submarine; yet an under-sea diver is just what she is if you drive her
more'n twelve into a sea like the one that's kicking up now. Barometer's
down sixty points since last night, and still going."
Breakfast that morning had little in common with the similar festal
occasion at Base where, fresh bathed and shaven, each immaculate member
of the mess comes down and sits over his coffee and paper much (save
for the fact that the journal is two days old) as at home. Several
places besides those of the officers actually on watch were empty,
and by no means a few of those who did appear had that introspective
look which is so unmistakable a sign of all not being well within
the citadel. Even the _Poldhu_--the daily wireless bulletin of the
Navy--had a "shot-to-pieces" look where "static" or some other esoteric
difficulty was responsible for gaps in several items of the laconic
summary. The last word in super-dreadnoughts does not have table-racks
and screwed-down chairs. She isn't supposed to lose her dignity to the
extent of needing anything in the way of such vulgar makeshifts. The
fact remains that if the mighty _Zeus_ had chanced to have these things,
she would have saved herself some china and several officers from
"nine-pinning" down one side of a table and piling up in a heap at the
end.
With the staid wardroom doing things like this, it was only to be
expected that the mess decks would be displaying a certain amount of
shiftiness. I was, however, hardly prepared for the gay seascape which
unrolled before me when I had worried my way through the intricate
barricade of a watertight bulkhead door in trying to skirmish forward to
the ladders leading to the upper decks. For several reasons--ventilation
and guns have something to do with it--it is not practicable to close
up certain parts of a battleship against heavy seas to anything like
the same extent as with the passenger quarters in a modern liner. It
is only in very rough weather that this may give rise to much trouble,
but--well, we were having rough weather that morning, and that little
bit of the Roaring Forties I had stumbled into was a consequence of it.
Oilskinned, "sou'westered," sea-booted men, sitting and lying on benches
and tables, was the first strange thing that came to my attention; and
then, with a swish and a gurgle, the foot-deep wave of dirty water which
had driven them there caught me about the knees, and sat me down upon a
pile of hammocks, or, rather, across the inert bodies of two men (boys I
found them to be presently) who had been cast away there in advance of
me. Clambering over their unprotesting anatomies, I gained dry land at a
higher level, and at a tactically defensible point, where a half-Nelson
round a stanchion steadfastly refused to give way under the double
back-action shuffle with which the next roll tried to break it. With two
good toe-holds making me safe from practically anything but a roll to
her beams' ends, I was free to survey the shambles at my leisure. Then I
saw how the havoc was being wrought.
With a shuddering crash, the thousand-ton bludgeon of a wave struck
along the port side, immediately followed by the muffled but
unmistakable sound of water rushing in upon the deck above. To the
accompaniment of a wild slap-banging, this sound came nearer, and
then, as she heeled far to starboard under the impulse of the blow
that had been dealt her, a solid spout of green water came tumbling
down a hatchway--the fount from which the mobile tidal wave swaggering
about the deck took replenishment. Two men, worrying a side of frozen
Argentine bullock along to the galley from the cold-storage hold, timing
(or, rather, mis-timing) their descent to coincide with that of the
young Niagara, reached the mess-deck in the form of a beef sandwich.
Depositing that delectable morsel in an inert mass at the foot of the
ladder, the briny cascade, with a joyous whoof, rushed down to reinforce
the tidal wave and do the rounds of the mess.
I was now able to observe that the sailors, marooned on the benches,
tables, and other islands of refuge, were roughly dividable into three
classes--the prostrate ones, who heaved drunkenly to the roll and took
no notice of the primal chaos about them; the semi-prostrate ones, who
were still able to exhibit mild resentment when the tidal wave engulfed
or threatened to engulf them; and the others--some lounging easily, but
the most perched or roosted on some dry but precarious pinnacle--who
quaffed great mugs of hot tea and bit hungrily into hunks of bread and
smoked fish. These latter--hard-bit tars they were, with faces pickled
ruddy by the blown brine of many windy watches--took great joy of the
plight of their mates, guffawing mightily at the dumb misery in the
hollow eyes of the "semi-prostrates" and the dead-to-the-world roll of
"prostrates" with the reelings of the ship.
If there is one thing in the world that delights the secret heart of the
average landsman more than the sad spectacle of a parson in the divorce
court, it is the sight of a sea-sick sailor. Since, however, the average
landsman reads his paper far oftener than he sails the stormy seas, the
former delectation is probably granted him rather more frequently than
the latter. At any rate, the one landsman in No. X Mess of H.M.S. _Zeus_
that morning saw enough sea-sick sailors to keep the balance on the
parsons' side for the duration of the war, and perhaps even longer.
I made the acquaintance of one of the "prostrates" marooned on the
beach of my hammock island through rescuing him from the assaults
of a tidal-wave-driven rum tub. He was nursing a crushed package of
gumdrop-like lozenges, one of which he offered me, murmuring faintly
that they had been sent him by his sister, who had found them useful
while boating at Clacton-on-Sea last summer. Endeavouring to start
a conversation, I asked him--knowing the _Zeus_ had been present at
that mighty struggle--if they had had weather like this at the Battle
of Jutland. A sad twinkle flickered for a moment in the corner of the
eye he rolled up to me, and, with a queer pucker of the mouth which
indicated that he must have had a sense of humour in happier times, he
replied that he had only joined the ship the week before: "'Tis my first
time at sea, sir, and I've come out to--to--this."
I gave him the best advice I could by telling him to pull himself
together and get out on deck to the fresh air; but neither spirit nor
flesh was equal to the initiatory effort. Looking back while I waited
near the foot of a ladder for a Niagara to exhaust itself, the last I
saw of him he was pushing mechanically aside with an unresentful gesture
a lump of salt pork which one of the table-roosting sailors dangled
before his nose on a piece of string.
Three flights up I clambered my erratic way before, on the boat deck in
the lee of a launch, I found a vantage sufficiently high and sheltered
to stand in comfort. The sight was rich reward for the effort. Save
for an ominous bank of nimbus to westward, the wind had swept the
coldly blue vault of the heavens clear of cloud, and the low-hanging
winter sun to south'ard was shooting slanting rays of crystalline
brightness across a sea that was one wild welter of cotton wool. I have
seen--especially in the open spaces of the mid-Pacific, where the waves
have half a world's width to get going in--heavier seas and higher seas
than were running that morning, but rarely--not even in a West Indian
hurricane--more vicious ones--seas more palpably bent on going over,
or through a ship that got in their way, rather than under, as proper
waves should do. And in this obliquity they were a good deal more than
passively abetted by a no less viciously inclined wind, which I saw
repeatedly lift off the top of what it appeared to think was a lagging
wave, and drive it on ahead to lace the heaving water with a film of
foam or dust the deck of a battleship with snowy brine.
But it was the ships themselves that furnished the real show. Of all
craft that ply the wet seaways, the battleship is the least buoyant,
the most "unliftable," the most set on bashing its arrogant way through
a wave rather than riding over it, and--with the increasing armour and
armaments, and the crowding aboard of various weighty contrivances
hitherto unthought of--this characteristic wilfulness has tended to
increase rather than decrease since the war. As a consequence, a modern
battleship bucking its way into a fully developed mid-winter gale is one
of the nearest approaches to the meeting of two irresistible bodies ever
to be seen.
The conditions for the contest were ideal that morning. Never were seas
more determined to ride over battleships, never were battleships more
determined to drive straight through seas. Both of them had something of
their way in the end, and neither entirely balked the other; but, drawn
as it was, that battle royal of Titans was a sight for the gods.
The battleships were in line abreast as I came up on deck, and holding
a course which brought the wind and seas abeam. We were all rolling
heavily, but with the rolls not sufficiently "synchronised" with the
waves--which were charging down without much order or rhythm--to keep
from dipping them up by the ton. If the port rail was low--as happened
when the ship was sliding down off the back of the last wave--the next
wave rolled in-board, and (save where the mast, funnels, and higher
works amidships blocked the way) drove right on across and off the other
side. If the port side had rolled high as an impetuous sea struck, the
latter expended its full force against the ship, communicating a jar
from foretop to stokeholds as shivering as the shock of a collision with
another vessel.
Our own quarter-deck was constantly swept with solid green water, and
even the higher fo'c'sle deck caught enough of the splash-up to make
traversing it a precarious operation. But it was only by watching one
of the other ships that it was possible to see how the thing really
happened. If it was the wallowing monster abeam to port, the striking of
a sea was signalised by sudden spurts of spray shooting into the air
all the way along her windward side, the clouds of flying water often
going over the funnels and bridge, and not far short of the foretop.
She would give a sort of shuddering stumble as the weight of the impact
made itself felt, and then--running from bow to stern and broken only
by the upper works, and occasionally, but not always, by the turrets--a
ragged line of foam appeared, quickly resolving itself into three or
four hundred feet of streaking cascades which came pouring down over the
starboard side into the sea. Watching the vessel abeam to starboard, the
phenomenon was repeated in reverse order. Save for the swaying foretop
against the sky, either ship at the moment of being swept by a wave
was suggestive of nothing so much as a great isolated black rock on a
storm-bound coast.
But the most remarkable thing about it all was the astonishingly
small effect this really heavy weather had upon the handling of the
ships. Evidently they had been built to withstand weather as well as
to fight, for they manoeuvred and changed formation with almost the
same meticulous exactitude as in protected waters. A gunnery officer
assured me that--except for momentary interference in training some of
the lighter guns--the fighting efficiency of the ship would hardly be
effected by all their plungings and the clouds of flying spray. Their
speed was, naturally, somewhat diminished in bucking into a head sea,
yet no lack of seaworthiness would prevent (should the need arise)
their being driven into that same head sea at the full power of their
mighty engines. The reason we were proceeding at somewhat reduced speed
was to ease things off a bit for the destroyers.
Ah! And what of the destroyers? There they all were, the faithful
sheep-dogs, when I came up, and at first blush I got the impression
that they were making rather better weather of it than the battleships.
That this was only an optical illusion (caused by the fact that they
were farther away and more or less obscured by the waves) I discovered
as soon as I climbed to the vantage of the after super-structure, and
put my glass upon the nearest of the bobbing silhouettes of mast and
funnel. Then I saw at once, though not, indeed, any such spray clouds
or cascades of solid water as marked the course of the battleships,
that she was plainly a labouring ship. A destroyer is not made to
pulverise a wave in the bull-at-a-gate fashion of a battleship, and
any exigency that compels her to adopt that method of progression is
likely to be attended by serious consequences. If one of the modern
type she will ride out almost any storm that blows if left to her own
devices; but force her into it at anything above half-speed, and it
is asking for trouble. Even before the destroyer I was watching began
disappearing--hull, funnels, and all but the mastheads--between crest
and crest of the onrushing waves, it was plain that both she and her
sisters were having all they wanted; and I was not surprised when word
was flashed to us that one of our brave little watch-dogs was suffering
from a wave-smashed steering geer, and had asked permission to make for
port if necessary. The permission was, I believe, granted, but--carrying
on with some sort of a makeshift or other--her plucky skipper managed to
stick it out and see the game through to the end.
There were a number of other ships in difficulties in that neck of the
North Sea at this moment, and every now and then--by the wireless--word
would come to us from one of them. Mostly they were beyond the horizon,
but two were in sight. One (two smoke-blackened "jiggers" and a bobbing
funnel-top beneath a bituminous blur to the east) was apparently a
thousand-ton freighter. An officer told me that she had been signalling
persistently since daybreak for assistance; but when I asked him if we
were not going to help her, he greeted the question with an indulgent
smile.
"Assistance will go to her in due course," he said, "but it will not
be from us. That kind of a thing might have been done in the first
month or two of the war, but the Huns soon made it impossible. Now, any
battleship that would detach a destroyer at the call of any ship of
doubtful identity would be considered as deliberately asking for what
she might jolly well get--a torpedo."
Another ship which was plainly having a bad time was some kind of a
cruiser whose long row of funnels was punching holes in a segment of
skyline. There was a suggestion of messiness forward, but nothing we
attached any importance to until word was wirelessed that she had just
had her bridge carried away by a heavy sea, and that the navigating
officer had been severely injured. The latter was known personally
to several of the wardroom officers, and at lunch speculation as to
what hurt he might have received led to an extremely interesting
discussion of the "ways of a wave with a man"; also of the comparative
seaworthiness of light cruisers and destroyers. The things that waves
have done to all three of them since the war began (to say nothing of
the things all three have done in spite of waves) is a story of its own.
The barometer continued to fall all day, with the wind rising a mile of
velocity for every point of drop. The seas, though higher and heavier,
were also more regular and less inclined to catch the ship with her
weather-rail down. The low cloud-bank of mid-forenoon had by early dusk
grown to a heavens-obscuring mask of ominous import, and, by dark, snow
was beginning to fall. The ship was reeling through the blackness of
the pit when I clambered to the deck after dinner, so that the driving
spray and ice-needles struck the face before one saw them by even the
thousandth of a second. The darkness was such as one almost never
encounters ashore, and it was some time before I accustomed myself to
close my eyes against the unseen missiles (when turning to windward)
without deliberately telling myself to do so in advance.
Into the Stygian pall the vivid golden triangles from the signal
searchlights on the bridge flashed like the stab of a flaming sword. One
instant the darkness was almost palpable enough to lean against; the
next, the silhouette of funnels and foretop pricked into life, but only
to be quenched again before the eye had time to fix a single detail.
So brief was any one flash that the action in each transient vision
was suspended as in an instantaneous photograph, yet the effect of the
quick succession of flashes was of continuous motion, like the kinema.
From where I stood, the heart of the fluttering golden halos, where a
destroyer winked back its answer, were repeatedly obliterated by the
inky loom of a wave, but the reflection was always thrown high enough
into the mist to carry the message.
Returning to the wardroom by the way of the mess-decks, I saw the youth
who had offered me the anti-seasick lozenges in the morning. Now quite
recovered, he was himself playing the pork-on-a-string game with one of
the only two "prostrates" still in sight. The following morning--though
the weather, if anything, was worse than ever--all evidences of
"indisposition" had disappeared.
* * * * *
For some days more we prowled the wet seaways, and then, well along into
a night that was foggier, colder, and windier than the one into which
we had steamed out, we crept along a heightening headland, nosed in the
wake of the flagship through a line of booms, and opened a bay that
was dappled with the lights of many ships. A few minutes later, and the
raucous grind of a chain running out through a hawse-pipe signalled that
we were back at the old stand.
And since, like all the rest of our sisters of the Grand Fleet, we
were expected to be ready to put to sea on _x_ hours' notice, there
was nothing for it but that the several hundred tons of coal which the
mighty _Zeus_ had been snorting out in the form of smoke to contaminate
the ozone of a very sizeable area of the North Sea should be replenished
without delay. A collier edged gingerly out of a whirling snow-squall
and moored fast alongside as I groped forward to retake possession of
my cabin under the bridge, and I went to sleep that night to the grind
of the winches and the steady tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the
decks below.
A NORTH SEA SWEEP
There are four sights in this war that have etched themselves more
deeply upon the plates of my memory than any of a hundred others which
are themselves unforgettable--my first heavy artillery bombardment
in France, with a wallowing wave of men sweeping forward behind the
smoke and dust clouds of an advancing barrage, the meteor trail across
the northern sky of the first Zeppelin brought down over England,
the fantastically foreshortened peaks of southern Macedonia--with
Serb and Bulgar locked in death grips in the cockpit of a snow-choked
valley--from an aeroplane, and the Grand Fleet taking form out
of a North Sea mist on a winter's morning. And it is the last of
these--though the only mind picture it has left is of endless lines of
grey ships ploughing silently through grey waters to the blending line
of sea and misty sky, while the others were pulsing with motion, vibrant
with sound and vivid with the incomparable appeal of the drama in which
the actors are fighting and falling, living and dying men--that stirs,
and will stir, me longest and strongest of all.
Just why this is I cannot say, but some hint of it may be found in
the fact--so well known to all lovers of the ocean--that with the sea
it is more what one _feels_ than what one _sees_ that moves; and with
the Grand Fleet, which is instinct with the soul of the sea which it
commands, it is perhaps the feeling that a single sweep of the eye
comprehends the one mightiest force in mankind's mightiest struggle,
which invests those silent lines of steaming warships with a power to
stir the imagination (in my own case at least) as nothing else on earth
can stir it, nor--save only the sight of those same ships going into
action to fulfil the purpose for which they were created--ever will.
My first sight of the Grand Fleet at sea I owe to the ready
thoughtfulness which those who know him best so often refer to in
speaking of Admiral Sir David Beatty. For three days I had been
"standing by" on the ---- waiting to go out into the North Sea on a
jaunt which had been vaguely described to me as likely to develop
"interesting possibilities," and that famous cruiser was under steaming
orders at the moment an invitation came from the Flagship of one of
the Battleship Squadrons to come over to a concert being given that
afternoon aboard the "Theatre-Ship" _Gourko_. There was just time to
take the show in before our departure the Captain of the ---- reckoned,
and volunteered to sail the Staff Surgeon and me over in his galley.
There was a notable attendance at the concert, and in the little
company which were invited to Admiral Madden's cabin for tea, after
the playing of "God Save the King" and "The Star Spangled Banner" had
signalised the end of an enjoyable programme, were at least a dozen
men whose names would be entitled to head the list of the makers of
modern naval history. While I was draining a single cup of tea I heard
the Admiral who had won the Battle of the Falkland Islands explain the
idiosyncrasies of North Sea meteorology; another, who had directed naval
operations at the Dardanelles, expatiate on the difficulties of raising
pigs on his Squadron's refuse since the "Food Economy" campaign got well
under weigh in the Grand Fleet; a third, who had held high command at
Jutland, outline a plan for elevating the popular taste for good music;
and a fourth, who had done notable work at Dogger Bank, lay down the
law on the points of Irish terriers. The only one whom I heard speak of
"Things Naval" was the Commander-in-Chief, who was enticed into "shop"
after inquiring how my plans were progressing in connexion with some
voyages in light craft which I had asked permission to make.
On my telling him I expected to put to sea with the light cruisers in
a couple of hours, he stood for a moment in thought, and then said
quietly, "If you can throw your kit together and go aboard one of the
battleships before the ---- sails, I think that I can promise that you
will see--in the course of the next thirty-six hours--a sight such as
you have never seen before, one that you will never forget."
I hesitated for a moment, for a voyage in the historic ----, with the
ever-present possibility of stumbling into an action with her, was
something I had been planning for and counting upon for weeks.
"You can come out with us again in another week or so," said the Captain
of the ----; "you may not be in a position to connect with what the
Commander-in-Chief has to offer for a good deal longer than that."
"But my own ship is in quarantine," I said, suddenly recollecting that
there had been a sporadic outbreak of mumps or something of the kind
reported from the _Erin_ in the course of the last day or two.
"Between thirty and forty capital ships, to say nothing of light
cruisers and destroyers, we ought to be able to find room to stow you
away for a couple of days," cut in Admiral Beatty with just the flicker
of one of his rare smiles. "Let Captain ---- arrange it for you. Perhaps
Admiral Sturdee"--and a moment later the victor of the Battle of the
Falklands was extending me a warm invitation to come to his Flagship as
his guest for the events of the next few days. By dint of the liveliest
kind of hustling, I was just able to return to the ----, get my togs
picked up and clamber aboard the barge Admiral Sturdee had kindly
despatched before the grinding of chains on hawse-pipes told that the
light cruisers were shortening in preparatory to weighing anchor and
departing on their own little North Sea sideshow.
An hour later I had climbed the gangway of my new ship, greeted several
friends of a former visit in the wardroom, made a hurried shift of
uniform in the comfortable cabin which had been prepared for me,
and was seated at dinner with Admiral Sturdee and his Staff. Of the
personal side of my voyage with this most highly distinguished and most
deservedly loved of British admirals--an experience the more treasured
in that it chanced to coincide with the last occasion on which he was
destined to go to sea on active service before taking over an important
command ashore--it is not my purpose to write here.
At another time, with Admiral Sturdee's concurrence, I shall endeavour
to set down a few of the things--mostly reminiscent of events in
which he had played an historic part, with occasional observations on
international developments, political and social,--of which he spoke at
table, in quiet intervals on the bridge, or while taking a few minutes'
refuge from the wind in the cold little box of his Spartan sea-cabin.
* * * * *
There was nothing to differentiate our preparations for departure on the
following afternoon from those for one of the several kinds of routine
work that a squadron of battleships performs in the course of its
regular duties. The "buzz" had gone around, however, that we were going
out for a "P.Z."--a general exercise of all the units of the Battleship
and Battle Cruiser fleets, with their auxiliaries--and the smoke which
began rolling up from scores of funnels as the early afternoon hours
wore on seemed to give confirmation to the theory that something was
afoot which would result in the putting to sea of the massed might of
the modern capital ships of the Navy. The British Lion was certainly
going out on a prowl, and there was always the chance that he might be
getting his claws into something. The infectious spirit of the "great
game" blew like a fresh breeze through the mess-decks, and there was a
new sparkle in every eye that met mine as I worked forward and upward to
the fore bridge, a smile on every ruddy face, a jaunty set to every pair
of swinging shoulders.
From the lofty vantage of the bridge I could see slim, gliding
shapes--dusky Maltese against the brown-black background of a jutting
headland--which were already threading the mazes of the booms, and knew
that they were some of the sportive shoals of smaller craft--probably
light cruisers--which would weave a far-flung circle of offence around
the bulkier bullies of the Battle Fleet itself.
Now the long, low ships of a line that had been anchored for a mile
on our starboard bow began slowly swinging in the boiling welter
of reversed propellers, and then, when their dark noses were all
pointing down the proper course as though strung on a single tow-line,
they started in easy, effortless glide around the end of the squat,
round-topped island which masked the exit through which they must pass.
"The 'Cats' are under weigh," said an officer at my elbow, pointing to
where the graceful shadow of the _Tiger_ and the grim profile of the
_Lion_ flitted in blank silhouette across a background, a stretch of
cliff-begirt beach where the drifted snows of a recent storm still lay
banked in a solid wall of dazzling white. Other shadows with historic
names flashed into vivid contrast for a few moments, and then dissolved
into misty indistinctness as they passed on to where their protective
colouring merged with the watery background; and behind these glided the
silhouettes of other ships which I knew to be "super-cats," ships with
names yet unknown to fame, but which were reputed to be able to outrun
and outclaw their predecessors by as wide a margin as they outbulked
them. One by one the gaunt profiles sharpened into sudden brightness and
then died down like the lights of a train dashing across a trestle into
a deep cut.
"It will be our turn presently," the Flag Lieutenant said, as he turned
a sheaf of signals just passed up to him. "Each division gets under
weigh to a time-table, and any substantial deviation from this by even
one ship would upset the schedule for all of the Squadrons following."
A quick order, the breaking out of a string of signal flags, the jerky,
serpentine inrush of the already shortened anchor-chain, and our ship
had caught the impulse of her accelerating screws and began slowly
gathering headway. Down past the head of line after line she steamed,
the men of each ship as she came abreast standing at attention to
salute the Flag of the Admiral. Eight ships in "Line Ahead," the
Squadron glided easily up the flow toward the gate.
As we passed one great tower of steel after another a breezy midshipman
began speaking of their "points" and "records" as he might have reviewed
the exhibits at a Bench Show. There was the _Marlborough_, which the
Germans had "sunk" with a torpedo at Jutland, and there--"that cubistic
nightmare" (referring to her scientific camouflage)--the new "----,"
which was supposed to "absorb" torpedoes as a Stilton cheese does port,
and to improve day by day under the treatment. "The _matlotes_ will tell
you," he said, "that she goes off and mooches round the U-boat lanes
just to tempt them to use up their mouldies on her so that there won't
be so many left for merchant ships!"
And there was the ----, and he went on to tell me of one of her gunners
who, writing home after the battle, had stated that there was a time
when he had been unable to make his way aft from his turret on account
of the heaps of dead bodies blocking the way.
"You know very well that we were not hit during the battle," the irate
Captain, before whom the culprit had been forthwith, admonished. "What
prompted you to tell such a mischievous lie?"
"I was upholding the glory of the Gran' Fleet, Sir," was the unabashed
answer. "I couldn't bear to 'ave 'em thinkin' at 'ome that the blinkin'
battle cruisers 'ad been 'avin' all the fun o' the go."
Another even line of foretops, seeming to float through the air above
the skyline of an interposing island like a file of flying geese, told
us, as we cleared the barrage, that another Squadron was getting under
weigh; but these, with the "Cats" creeping off under their back-blown
smoke trails, into a bank of purple mist, were all that were in sight
when the swift winter twilight shut down and left us ploughing alone
down the lane between our screening destroyers.
It was just at this time--in the short 'tween-daylight-and-dark
interval--that a strange thing happened. The sea was smooth, silken
smooth, with hardly more than an eight- or ten-knot breeze ruffling its
surface, and the ship was--so far as pitch or roll were concerned--as
steady as though chocked up in a dry dock. Suddenly, a couple of cables'
lengths ahead, a thin white line of foam appeared, serpentining along
at about right angles to our course. It appeared to be quite the same
sort of little froth-path that one has come to know in the seas of all
the world as the marker of the place where tide meets tide, a phenomenon
indicating conflicting but rarely dangerous countercurrents.
I noted that a half-dozen glasses were trained on the wriggling streak,
and was wondering what there could be about it to excite
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