H.M.S. –

II

"Yes, I've got leave now, and Cairnley's in hospital; he had a couple of splinters in him, and they packed him off, though he wanted to get leave and treat himself. The old packet's got to be just about rebuilt from the deck up, and he's certain to get a bigger one instead. He's going to take me on with him, – good thing for me, – as I'll be pretty young to be Number One of one of the Alpha class ships. I tell you, it was a devilish funny show, and all over in a second. It came on absolute pea-soup at four and we had only heard the guns in the action. Never saw a thing. We had been out away from the line four hours. Had nothing but wireless touch to tell us they had got into a mix-up. We went to stations at full speed trying to close on them, and we'd hardly got ready when the Hun showed up four hundred yards off. My word! she was smart on it. She was only a cruiser, but in the fog she showed up like the Von der Tann, and she was going all of twenty-four. She let fly at the moment we saw her, and she spun round and charged right off. We let go too as she fired, but her turning to ram saved her. We turned too and bolted, and she just cut every darned thing down from the casing up. The mast went on the first salvo, one funnel and most of the guns. The shooting was just lovely, and if it hadn't been such close range we'd have been shot down in one act. As it was, they just shaved us clean as if we'd gone full speed under a low-level bridge. At six hundred yards we could only see her gun-flashes, and we yanked round across her bow and opened out. The skipper gave her five minutes and then levelled up on the same course we had been on before, and eased a bit to keep station on her beam. We did a bit of clearing up and he sent for me. He was on the bridge – which had damn little left on it, bar him, – it was a proper wreck – and told me to arrange hands to shout orders to the engine-room if required, as the telegraphs were gone. The wheel was all right – or at least the gearing was, – the wheel itself had only a bit of rim and two spokes on it. He told me to get what fish we could fire set for surface, and that he was going to go for her again and fire at twenty-five yards. I thought he was mad, but I went down and got 'em ready. (The gunner was killed.) I shouted up to him when I had done, and had mustered a tube's crew, and we whacked on full bat again and began to close. You see we had crossed her bow once, and Cairnley reckoned then that she would have altered back to her original course of East, so he had kept on her port beam at about a mile, going the same speed. I did not get what he was driving at till afterwards. At the time I thought he was just going to do it again, because he thought he ought to make another effort. We saw her first this time as we were closing on the opposite side, and the skipper told them to poop off the bow gun, which was all we had, to wake them up. They woke up all right, and we got the same smack from all along her side we'd had before. She was just abaft our starboard beam going the same course, and I was wondering what the deuce he'd meant by telling me to train the tubes to port, when we went hard a-port and came round all heeled over and shaking. I just thought to myself, Well, if the Hun keeps on and doesn't try to ram, we're going to look damn silly, when I saw her again and she was ramming. Her guns did no good then, – the change was too quick for any sights to be held on. He banged away all right, and I believe he put more helm on – but he couldn't get us. The skipper had said twenty-five yards, but it looked to me like feet. He was going all out, and so were we, and I pulled off as his stem showed abreast the tubes – all spray and grey paint – and those fish hit him abaft the second funnel. Eh? Well, perhaps it was a few yards, but it's the closest I've seen to going alongside a gangway. Well, that's all I knew about it for half an hour. The bang put me out. Skipper said he turned back and searched for her, but it was so thick then he couldn't have found an island except by mistake. We'd been hit below water too and couldn't steam much. We got a tow home. Good egg! Here's St Pancras, and there's a flapper – thirty if she's a day – Good old blinkin' London!"

THE QUARTERMASTER

A LANDFALL

The dawn came very slowly – a faint glow in the sky spreading until first the streaming forecastle and then the dirty-yellow seas could be seen. The destroyer was steaming slowly along the coast with the wind just before the beam. She made bad weather of it, lurching at extraordinary angles from side to side, yawing from two to four points off her course, and throwing her stern up as each wave passed under her, until the water spouted in the wake of her slowly-moving propellers. The wind and the mist had come together, and the visibility extended to perhaps three or four foaming wave-crests away. They knew within a dozen miles where they were, but a dozen miles is too vague a reckoning to make a mine-guarded harbour from, and her captain, with the greatest respect for the fact that he was on a dead lee shore, and a most inhospitable and rocky shore at that, was feeling for the land with an order for "Hard-over" helm running through his head. Occasionally he ceased his staring out on the lee bow to look back along the deck. The sight each time made him frown and tighten his lips. The beam-sea was sweeping across the ship regularly every half-minute. The water shot across her 'midships three feet deep, and foaming like a Highland burn in spate. The squat funnels showed through the turmoil of water and spray, streaked diagonally upwards with crusted white salt, through which showed patches of red funnel-scale; from them came a steady roaring note – the signal of suppressed power below them. Battened-down as she was, he knew that the hatches were not submarine ones; built as they were on a foundation little thicker than cardboard, they could not keep out such seas, and he visualised the turmoil and discomfort there must be beneath him on the flooded decks. He, personally, had not seen in what state she was below, having been on the bridge for the last nine hours, but he felt he would like to take a look at his own cabin and see if his worst foreboding – a foot of water washing to and fro across a sodden carpet – was true.

He glanced at his wrist-watch, and then to the east. Half-past seven and full daylight. Well, he thought, it might as well be just dawning still for all the light there was. Air and sea were the same colour, a creamy dull white, and they merged into one at a range of perhaps five hundred yards. If only he could – he raised his head sharply and turned to face out on the beam. Bracing his feet and gripping the rail with wet-gloved fingers he held his breath in an intensity of listening concentration. Yes, it was clearer that time, a faint high whine broad on the beam. He walked, timing the roll so that he had no need to clutch for support, to where the helmsman crouched over a wildly swinging compass-card, and gave an order. The destroyer came bowing and dipping round till she met the full drive of the sea ahead. With a roar and a crash the water tumbled in over the forecastle, shaking the bridge, and falling in tons over the ladders on to the upper deck. The destroyer still turned, shaking from end to end, until she had the sea on the other bow. The telegraph reply-gongs rang back the acknowledgment of an order, and easing to barely steerage-way, the ship settled in her new position – hove-to in the direction from which she had come overnight. The faint sound he had heard had seemed too distant for the captain to be assured of his position, and until he could hear it clearly and from fairly close he was not going to risk taking a departure from it. He knew that hove-to as she was the destroyer was going to be driven closer in, and with a steep-to shore he could allow her to accept the leeway for some time. He moved across and stood on the other side of the bridge, looking out to leeward, his attitude less strained and anxious now, as the ship was making fairly easy weather of it. The motion, it is true, was far more uncomfortable. She sidled, dived, and wallowed in a way that would have thrown a man unaccustomed to T.B.D.'s completely off his feet; but far less water was coming aboard, and the amount that did so arrived on a bearing from which she was better fitted to receive it. At the end of twenty minutes the captain began to resume his rigid attitude. There was something wrong somewhere. Sounds came erratically through fog, but this could not be counted on. He knew he had made no mistake in the sound he had heard. It was certainly the high note of the lighthouse, and not a steamer's whistle. The low note should have been heard in between the high ones, but the fact of not having heard the low was not surprising to him. One seldom heard both notes in a fog. But this silent gap was a nuisance, considering the rate at which they must be closing the land. At half an hour from his first hearing the sound he turned uphill to gain the wheel again, but froze still as the voice of the fog-horn came afresh, this time with no possibility of doubt. A great thuttering roar broke out, as it seemed, almost overhead, a deep bass note that made the air quiver. The captain jumped amidships and barked an order. The wheel spun hard down and the telegraphs whirred round, bringing the destroyer diving and leaping back head to sea. Looking aft, the captain had a glimpse of three pinnacle rocks showing a moment in the trough between two seas, and then the fog shut down over them again, leaving only the regular deep roar of the fog-signal, that grew gradually fainter astern. Two points at a time he eased the ship round till she was hove-to on the opposite tack, then he called to another oilskinned figure that stood swaying to the roll by the helmsman. "Will you take her now?" he said; "I am going to look for some breakfast. Hold her like this half an hour, and then turn her down wind for the run in. The tide's setting us well round the point now. All right?"

"Yes, sir. I'll lay it off again on the chart before I turn. That was a queer hole in the fog, sir."

"Yes, quite a big blank. Glad it wasn't much bigger. Still, we could see four cables under the land, and the land's alright if you've got your stern to it."

With a huge yawn of relief he stretched his arms back and up, then started down the thin iron ladder on his perilous trip to the inevitable chaos and confusion of his cabin.

NIGHT ROUNDS

It was a dark night with no moon, while only occasionally could a star be seen from the leader's bridge. The next astern could be made out by the bands of blue-white phosphorescence that fell away from her bow, but the rest of the line was quite invisible. The flotilla slid along at a pace that to them was only a jog-trot, but which would have been considered rather too exciting for night work by the big ships. The night was calm, with hardly a breath of wind, while the hush—hush—hush from the bow-waves seemed to accentuate the silence and to increase the impression the destroyers gave of game moving down on a tiptoe of expectancy to the drinking-pool, ready at a sight or sound to spring to a frenzy of either offensive or defensive speed. On the leader's bridge men spoke in low tones, as if afraid that they might be overheard by the enemy – actually to enable them to listen better to whatever sound the echoes from the sea might carry. On bridges and at gun-stations look-outs stared out around them at the night, and there was no need for the officers to be anxious as to whether their men kept good watch or slept. The crews knew the rules of destroyer-war in the Narrow Seas – that "The first one to see, shoots; and the first one to hit, wins." It is true that they did not always see first. There were exceptions. Not so long before, they had been seen at a range of perhaps half a mile by an officer on the low unobtrusive conning-tower of a submarine. This officer had instantly and accurately smitten on the back of the head the sailor who shared his watch, and had rapped out one word "Down!" The sailor (evidently quite accustomed to this procedure) had vanished down the conning-tower like a falling stone, the officer's boots chasing the man's hands down the ladder-rungs. The lid had clanked down and locked just a few seconds before a little "plop" of water closed over the swirling suction that showed where a big patrol submarine had been. The boat was English (that is to say, her Captain was Scotch, and her First Lieutenant Canadian, while the remainder of her officers and men together could hardly have mustered half a dozen men from the Home Counties), but she had no intention of risking explanations at short range with her own friends. She had been warned of their coming, but she looked on it as a piece of extraordinarily bad luck to have been met with at visibility range on such a dark night and to have been inconvenienced into a matter of ninety feet in a hurry. But it is known that submarines dive for almost everything and swear at everybody.

As the flotilla moved on its way a portent showed on the bow to landward. A faint red glow began to light up the low clouds over the Belgian frontier, and the bridge look-outs whispered together as they watched it brighten. As it grew clearer it showed to be not one light, but a rapid-running succession of instantaneous lights far inland. The white pencil of a searchlight beam showed and swung to the zenith and back – perhaps half-way between the watchers and the flicker in the sky. Ten minutes later, as the light drew farther aft, a faint murmur of sound (that began as a mere suspicion, and grew to be unmistakably but barely audible) announced the origin of the glow.

On the leader's bridge the tall officer in the overcoat spoke to the shorter one in the "lammy." "That's a bit on the big side for a night raid – they must be attacking round by – "

"Yes, sir; there's something like what they call 'drum-fire' going on. Wonder why they put searchlights on for it, though?"

"Can't guess. They'll have 'em on on the coast in a minute too, if I know them. Perhaps when they hear guns inland they think it's airbombs coming down. There they go! Two of 'em – "

The searchlights came on together, and on such a clear and dark night they seemed startlingly close. They swept the heavens over and back, steadied awhile pointing inland, and went out again, leaving an even inkier blackness than before, and setting the watchers blinking and rubbing their dazzled eyes. Away to the south-east the pulsating growl of the guns continued, though the breadth and height of the glow in the sky was gradually decreasing.

"There isn't any fighting on near the coast now, sir. That must be away down in France. If they'd only fire slow we'd be able to get a sort of range by the flash."

"You'd have to hold your watch for some time, then," said the taller officer. "I haven't the inland geography well enough in my head to say where it is, but that scrap's nearer seventy than sixty miles from here. Good Lord! And I suppose we'll read in the papers when we get in that 'there was activity at some points.'"

"And from here it looks like Hell. What it must be like close to – ! Wish we could run up one of the canals and join in, sir."

"You'd be too late if we could. It's dying out now. Just as well, too; it keeps all the look-outs' heads turned that way. How's the time? All right, we'll turn now and try back."

The glow faded and passed, and left the velvety dark as blank as before. The leader swung round on a wide curve, and, as if held by one long elastic hawser, the flotilla followed in her gleaming wake. At the same cantering speed as they had come, they started on the long beat back of their bloodthirsty prowl, at the moment when the Scotch submarine officer turned over the watch to his Canadian subordinate.

"I've sheered right out now, and they ought to be clear of us all right, but keep your eyes skinned for them and nip under if you see them again. They're devilish quick on the salvoes in this longitude, and 'pon my soul I don't blame 'em either."

IN THE BARRED ZONE

A MATTER OF ROUTINE

There was little or no wind, and only a gentle swell from the south. The ships rose and fell lazily as they steamed to the south-eastward, while only occasionally a handful of light spray fell across a sunlit forecastle, drying almost as it fell. But if the air was still the ships were certainly not so – as vast as a great moving town, the Fleet was travelling at the speed of a touring car. From the Flagship's foretop the view was extraordinary. Destroyers or light cruisers when pressed seem to be slipping along with something always in hand and with no apparent effort; a battleship, however, seen under the same conditions, makes one think of St Paul's Cathedral being towed up the Thames; she carries a "bone in her teeth," and her bows seem to settle low and her stern to rise. In this case the Grand Fleet was hurrying – moving south-east at full speed, because – well, they might just cut the enemy off; but the Hun was canny, and knew exactly the danger-limit in this game of "Prisoner's base."

The visibility was good, and as far as the eye could see the water was torn and streaked with the wakes of ships – cruisers, destroyers, battleships, and craft of every queer and imaginable warlike use. The great mass of steel hulls had one thing only in common – they could steam, and could steam always with something in hand above the "speed of the Fleet." From the ships came a faint brown haze of smoke that shimmered with heat and made the horizon dance and flicker. From the foretop, looking aft, it seemed incredible that there could be any power existing which could drive such a huge beamy hulk as the Flagship was, and leave such a turmoil of torn and flattened water astern. Battleships in a hurry are certainly not stately; an elderly matron in pursuit of a tram-car shows dignity compared to any one of them. But if they looked flustered and undignified, they carried a cargo which no one could smile at. "Battleships are mobile gun-platforms." I forget who said that – probably Admiral Mahan – but it is true; and if these ships showed an ungraceful way of moving, they certainly complied with the definition of gun-platforms. The low-sloped turrets all pointed the same way – out to the starboard bow. The long tapering guns moved up and down, following the horizon against the roll, and sighing as they moved, as if the hydraulic engines were weary of the long wait. On the tops of the turrets the figures of officers could be seen pacing to and fro across the steel – checking now and then to stare at the southern horizon. Somewhere out there beneath the blazing sun were the scouts, and beyond them – well, that question was one that the scouts were there to answer. The smaller ships in sight seemed like motor-cycle pacers escorting a long-distance foot-race. With their sterns low and their bow-waves running back close to the beautifully-shaped hulls, they gave the impression of sauntering along at their leisure and of looking impatiently over their shoulders at the big heavy-weights astern of them. A destroyer division suddenly heeled and altered course like redshank, each ship turning as the leader swung, and with a fountain of spray at their sharp high stems they cut through the intervals of a Battleship division, swinging up again together to the south-east course as they cleared. The watcher in the top had seen the trick before, but familiarity could not prevent his eyes from widening a little as he saw the stem of his next astern throw up a little cloud of spray as it met the foaming V-wake that followed a few yards from the leader's counter. He smiled as he thought of an old picture in 'Punch' of a crowd of small children urging and dragging a huge policeman along to a scene of disturbance. The darting, restless destroyers seemed like the small bloodthirsty boys – hurrying on ahead to see the fun, and then back to wait for the ponderous but willing upholder of the law – anxious to miss nothing of the excitement.