WHERE THE GREAT LINER PLOWED ALONG
The captain smiled indulgently. “You’re right,” he said, “as far as you go. We are indeed hitting the high places, but—the high places haven’t started hitting us yet. Wait just about five or ten minutes,” he added, turning his glasses to where the great liner, silhouetted for the moment against the sunset clouds, ploughed along on our port beam, “and you’ll see the difference. Ah!” this as he steadied his glasses on where the boiling wake of theLymptania, beginning to bend away in a sharp curve indicating a considerable alteration of course. “There she goes now. Hold tight!”
With his hand on the engine-room telegraph, the captain gave the men at the wheel a course to conformto that of theLymptania. Quick as a cat on her helm, theZipswung swiftly through eight points and plunged ahead. This brought on her bows seas that had been rolling up abeam, and we were up against the real thing at last.
The first sea, which she caught while she was still turning, theZipcontented herself with slicing off the truculently-tossing top of before crunching it underfoot. It was a smartly-executed performance, and seemed to promise encouragingly as to the way she might be expected to dispose of the next ones. The second in line, however, which she met head-on and essayed the same tactics with, dampened her ardour—and just about everything and everybody else below the foretop—by detaching a few tons of its bumptious bulk and raking her fore-and-aft with its rumbling green-white flood. The bridge was above the main weight of that blow, but ’midships and aft I saw men bracing themselves against a knee-deep stream. One bareheaded and bare-armed man, who had evidently been surprised in making his way from one hatch to another, I saw rolled fifteen or twenty feet and slammed up against the torpedo-tube which prevented his going overboard. He limped out of sight, rubbing his shoulder, and probably never knew how lucky he was in being caught bythatwave instead of one which came along a minute later.
The slams which she received from the next twoor three seas left theZipin a somewhat chastened mood, and rather less sanguine respecting her ability to go on pulling off that little stunt of surmounting waves by biting them in the neck and then trampling their bodies under foot. She was beginning to realise that she had a body of her own, and that there was something else around that could bite—yes, and kick, and gouge, and punch below the belt, and do all the other low-down tricks of the underhand fighter.
Languid and uncertain of movement, like a dazed prize-fighter, she was just steadying herself from the jolt a bustling brute of a comber had dealt her in passing, when the skyline ahead was blotted out by the imminent green-black loom of a running wall of water which, from its height and steepness, might well have been kicked up by a Valparaiso “Norther” or a South Sea hurricane.
It may have been the chastened state of mind the last sea had left her in which was responsible forZip’sdeciding to take this one “lying down”; or again, it may be that she was acting, in reverse, after the example set by the rabbit who, because he couldn’t go under the hill, went over it. At any rate, after one shuddering look at the mountainous menace tottering above her bows, she made up her mind that she was better off under the sea than on the surface, and deliberately dived. Of course, it was the Parthian kick the last sea had given her stern that was really responsible for her bowsstarting to go down at the very instant those of every other ship that one had had experience of would have been beginning to point skyward, but to all intents and purposes she looked, from the bridge, to be submerging of her own free and considered decision. The principal thing which differentiated it from the ordinary dive of a submarine was the fact that it was made at a sharper angle and at about four times the speed.
There was something almost uncanny in the quietness with which that plunge began; though, on the latter score, there was nothing to complain of by about half a second later. I have seen at one time or another almost every conceivable kind of craft, from a Fijian war canoe to the latest battlecruiser, trying to buck head seas, and invariably the wave that swept it had the decency to announce its coming by a warning knock on the bows. This time there was nothing of the kind. The retreating sea had lifted her stern so high that the forecastle was under water even before the coming one had begun to topple over on to it. The consequence was that there was no preliminary bang to herald the onrush of the latter.
WE HAD COLLIDED WITH THE BRICK WALL
The base of the mountainous roller simply flooded up over the diving forecastle and crashed with unbroken force against the bridge. We had collided with the “brick wall” right enough, and for the next few seconds at least the result was primal chaos.
I have a vivid but detached recollection of two or three things in the instant that the blow impended. One is of the helmsman, crouching low, with legs wide apart, locking his arms through the slender steel spokes of the wheel the better to steady her in the coming smash. Another is of the captain, with hunched shoulders and set jaw, throwing over the telegraph to stop the engines. But the clearest picture of all is of the submarine lookout on the port side—a black-eyed, black-haired boy with a profile that might have been copied from an old Roman coin—who was leaning out and grinning sardonically into the very teeth of the descending hydraulic ram. It was his savagely-flung anatomy, I believe, though I never made sure, which bumped me in the region of the solar plexus a moment later and broke my slipping hold on the buckling stanchion to which I was trying to cling.
There was nothing whatever suggestive of water—soft, fluent, trickling water—in the first shattering impact of that mighty blow. It was as solid as a collision between ship and ship; indeed, the recollection I have of a railway wreck I was once in on a line in the Argentine Pampas is of a shock less shattering. It is difficult to record events in their proper sequence, partly because they were all happening at once, and partly because the self-centred frame of mind I was in at the moment was not favourable for detached observation. The noise and the jar of the crash were stupendous, yetneither of these has left so vivid a mental impression as the uncanny writhing of the two-inches-thick steel stanchion to which I was endeavouring to hold, and the nerve-racking sound of rending metal. I have no recollection of hearing the clink of broken glass, nor of being struck by pieces of it; yet all the panes of heavy plate which screened the forward end of the bridge—of a thickness, one had supposed, to withstand anything likely to assail them—were swept away as though they had been no more than the rice-paper squares of a Japanese window.
The rush of water, of course, followed instantly upon the crash, yet, so vivid are my impressions of the things intimately connected with the blow itself that it seems as though there was an appreciable interval between the fall of that and the time when the enveloping cataclysm transformed the universe into a green-white stream of brine. From ahead, above and from both sides the flood poured, to meet and mingle in a whirling maelstrom in the middle of the bridge. There was nothing of blown spindrift to it; it was green and solid and flowed with a heave and a hurl that made no more of slamming a man to the deck than of tossing a life-buoy. I went the whole length of the bridge when I lost my grip on the port stanchion, brought up against the after-rail, and then went down into a tangle of signal flags. I remember distinctly, though, that the walls of water rushing by completely blotted out sea and sky to port and starboard, and that there was allthe darkness of late twilight in the cavern of the engulfed bridge. Then the great sea tumbled aft along the main deck, and it grew light again.
The captain and the helmsman had both kept their feet, and the latter, dripping from head to heel, was just throwing over the engine-room telegraph as I shook off my mantle of coloured bunting and crawled back to my moorings at the stanchion. Immediately afterwards I saw him jump on to the after-rail and make some sort of negative signal to a couple of half-drowned boys who, waist-deep in swirling water, were pawing desperately among the depth-charges. Then he came over and joined me for a few moments.
“Some sea, that,” he said, slipping down his hood and throwing back the brine-dripping hair from his forehead. “It’s happened before, but never like that. Lord only knows what it’s done to her. S’pose we’ll begin to hear of that in a minute.” He pointed to a string of porcelain insulators dangling at the end of twisted bits of wire in front of one of the paneless windows. “That’s the remains of our auxiliary radio,” he said, grinning; “and look at the fo’c’sle. Swept clean, pretty near. Thank heaven, the gun’s left. But, do you remember that heavy iron bar the muzzle rested on? Gone! It was probably that, with some of the shells in the rack, that made all that rat-a-tat. But what of it? Look how she rides ’em now that she’seased down a bit. Only trouble is, she’s got to go it again. Look how we’ve dropped back.” And he gave the engine-room, by voice-pipe, a new “standard” speed, and threw the telegraph over to “Full.”
The pulsing throb began anew, and under the urge of speeding propellers theZip, steering in narrowed zig-zags quickly regained her station. All of the destroyers, and theLymptaniaas well, had eased down slightly, and the reduced speed meant also a reduction of the danger of another of those deep-sea dives, something no craft but a submarine is built to stand the strain of. But even as it was we were driving right up to the limit of endurance all the time, and the sea that did not come rolling up green right over the bows was the exception rather than the rule. From the forecastle right away aft there was never more than a few seconds at a time when the main deck was free of rollicking cascades of boiling brine, and there were moments when only the funnels and the after superstructure, rearing up like isolated rocks on a storm-beaten coast, were visible above the swirling flood. There were times when the men standing-by at the guns and torpedo-tubes seemed almost to be engulfed; yet none of them was swept away, and they even—from the way they kept joking each other in the lulls—appeared to be getting a good deal of sport out of the thing.
The barometer was falling, and both wind andwaves gained steadily in force as the afternoon lengthened and merged into a twilight that was itself already melting before the rising moon. Clouds were few and scattering, and it was plain there were to be no hours dark enough to offer any protection from submarine attack. Looming as large as ever, the big liner offered scarcely a better target on the side she was illuminated by the moonlight than on the one from which she was silhouetted against it. From either side a fifth of a mile of steel would “take a lot of missing,” and her captain, sensibly enough, would not ease his engines by a revolution more than was necessary to keep within his destroyer screen. It was plainly up to the destroyers to stick it to the limit, and that is just what they did. As I heard one of the men put it, it was the “bruisiest” bit of escort-work they had ever been—or probably ever will be—called upon to face, but every one of those Yankee destroyers stayed with it to the finish.
Now it would be theZopthat would emerge from under a mountainous sea and come drifting back without steerage weigh, rolling drunkenly in the trough, and now it would be theZap. And now this or that result of a “hydraulic ramming” would disable one of the others temporarily. But, game to the last flake of brine-frosted camouflage, back they came to it again, and again, and yet again. Sunrise of the next day found them plugging on in station, and in station they remaineduntil theLymptania, beyond the zone of all possible submarine danger, made a general signal of “Thank you,” and headed off to the westward on her own.
Out of the dim grey dawn of the morning after the night before, battered and buckled, but still unbroken, the wearily waggling line of theLymptania’slate escort trailed back into harbour. The mussed-up silhouette of every one of them bore mute testimony to the way she had been put “through the mill,” and, in most cases, the things that met the eye were not the worst. TheZopneeded every yard of the channel as she zig-zagged up it under a jury steering-gear, and theZap, like a man dazed from a blow, would have sudden “mental hiati” in which she would straggle carelessly out of line with an inconsequential going-to-pick-flowers-by-the-roadside sort of air. TheZim’sidiosyncrasies had more of an epileptic suddenness about them, and her hectic coughing plainly indicated some kind of “lung trouble.” Our littleZippresented a very brave front to the outer world, but I heard hollow clankings punctuating the erstwhile even hum of the engines, while the drip, drip, drip and the drop, drop, drop through the crinkled sheet-steel sheathing of my cabin told that the deck-plates of the forecastle fitted a good deal less snugly than before they had played anvil to the lusty head-sea hammer.
But theFlossie, the “latest, the swiftest, the flotilla’s pride”—the wounds of all the rest of us put together were as nothing to those of theFlossie. In trying to maintain her pride of place at the head of the escort, shehad, for a brief space, unleashed those extra knots of speed the captain had spoken of, and all that, and even more than, he had prophesied had come to pass. It was just such a swaggerer of a sea as that first one thatZiphad dived into which did the trick, only, as theFlossiewas going faster, the impact was somewhat more severe. She was a mile or more distant from us when it happened, and, watching from the bridge of theZip, we simply saw her dissolve into a sky-tossed spout of foam. When she reappeared she was floating, beam-on, to the seas, and, for the moment, an apparently helpless hulk.
The captain’s instant diagnosis of a couple of muffled detonations which followed was entirely correct.
“That sea must have ‘jack-knifed’ theFlossieso sharply,” he said, “that the recoil took up the slack in the wires, releasing two ‘cans’ she seems to have had set and ready. It’s about the same thing as just happened to us, except that the tautened wire only rang the stand-by bell, the signal for the men to set the depth-charges. First thing I did after we came to the surface was to negative that supposed order. That was what I was doing when I waved to those boys who were clawing atthe ‘cans,’ with their heads under water. Lucky they weren’t carried away.”
NOW SHE WAS BACK AT BASE
It was a chastenedFlossiewhich had gone floundering back to station a few minutes later, but somehow or other she had managed to carry on, and now she was back at Base. I won’t “give comfort to the enemy” by trying to describe her appearance, but some hint of it may be gleaned from the laconic comment of one of theZip’ssignalmen, as the “Flotilla’s Pride” was warping in to moor alongside the mother ship.
“Gee whiz!” he ejaculated. “See the oldVindictivelimpin’ home from Zeebruggy! S’pose they’ll fill her up with concrete now an’ block a channel.”
The captain grinned as he overheard the remark where he waited by the starboard rail for the last of the mooring lines to be made fast. “It’s not quite so bad as that,” he said. “If need be, they’ll have her, and all the rest of us, right as trivets in three or four days, and quite ready to take the sea again when our turn comes. It’s all in the convoy game, anyhow, and not such bad fun after all, ’specially when it’s behind you, and you’ve got a bath, and a change, and a lunch at the Club, and an afternoon of tennis in immediate prospect. Come along.”
It was the turn of the tide and the turn of the day on the “quiet waters of the River Lee.” Pale blue columns of smoke rose above the verdant boskiness which masked the squat brown cabins where the peat fires smouldered, and along the straggling stone wall which crowned the ridge the swaying heads of home-returning cows showed intermittently against the glowing western sky. The peacefulness of it was almost palpable. You seemed to breathe it, and could all but reach out with the hand and touch it.
It permeated even to the long lines of lean destroyers in the stream, and it was the subtly suggestive influence of it which had deflected homeward the minds of the motley-clad sailors who were lounging at ease about the stern of the first of a “cluster” of three of these—like a sheaf of bright multi-coloured arrows the trim craft looked, with the level rays of the setting sun striking across them where they lay moored alongside each other—and set tongues wagging of the little things which, magnified by distance, loom large in the imaginations of men in exile.
They were deep in the “old home town” stuff when I sauntered inconsequently aft on the off-chance of picking up a yarn or two, but as there appeared to be no one present from my part of the country, no immediate opportunity to break in presented itself. Equally an outsider was I when the flow of discussion turned to woollen sweaters and socks and mufflers, and the golden trails of romance leading back from the names and messages sewed or knitted into them.
No fair unknowns had ever sentmeany of these soft comforts, and after I had heard a lusty youngster from Virginia tell how a “sweater address” he had written what he described as a “lettah that was good and plenty w’am, b’lieve me,” replied that she was “jest goin’ twelve years,” and that her mother didn’t think she ought to be thinking of marriage just yet—after that I didn’t feel quite so bad over not having had a chance to open one of these “woolly” correspondences. There was some solace, too, in hearing a pink-cheeked young ex-bank clerk tell how the “abdominal bandage” (they name them, as a rule, after the garment that starts the correspondence), with whom he had exchanged something like a dozen letters of cumulative passion, brought the affair to a sudden and violent end by some indirect and inadvertent admission which showed that she remembered when Grant was President.
But when the talk drifted, as it always does inthe end, to baseball and baseballers, I knew that there was going to be an opening for me presently, and stood by to take advantage of it. A three-year absentee from the bleachers, I was not sufficiently up on last season’s pennant race “dope” to do more than make frequent sapient observations on this or that big-leaguer’s stickwork or fielding as he was mentioned; but when they began to discuss, or rather to wrangle over, for discuss is far too polite a term, the theory of the game and to grow red in the face over such esoterics (or “inside stuff,” to put it in “Fanese”) as how and when a “squeeze” ought to be pulled off, I showed them the bulbous first joint of the little finger of my right hand—which there is no other way of acquiring than by the repeated telescopings of many seasons on the diamond—and was welcomed at last on equal terms. A seat was offered me on a depth-charge, across the business end of which an empty sack had been thrown to prevent a repetition of what came near happening the time a stoker, who was proving that Hans Wagner could never again be a popular idol now that we were at war with the Huns, punctuated his argument by hammering with a monkey-wrench on the firing mechanism.
They were not as impressed as they should have been when I told them that I learned the game under the tutelage of the mighty Bill Lange (this, of course, because the incomparable “Big Bill” was at his zenith long before their time); but theywere duly respectful when I said I had played three years’ Varsity baseball, and became quite deferential when I assured them I had also survived a season of bush-league in the North-West. There was some kind of electrician rating in the crowd who had been a bush-league twirler before his “wing went glass,” as he put it, and he, it soon transpired, had played in one place or another with a number of my old team mates of the Montana League. Deep in reminiscence of those good old days, I quite forgot my subtle scheme of using baseball as a stalking-horse for destroyer yarns, when the arrival of some callers from a British sloop lying a mile or two farther down the harbour recalled it to me. They had been in theMoonflower, the man next me said, when she put a U-boat out of business not long before, and one of them—he had some sort of decoration for his part in the show—spun a cracking good yarn about it if you got him started. This latter I managed to do by asking him how it chanced that theMoonflowerwas allowed to sport a star on her funnel. The story he told, the while he rolled cigarettes and worked his jaws on Yankee chewing-gum, revealed rather too much that may be used in some future surprise party to make it possible to publish just yet, but it had the desired effect of turning the current of reminiscence U-boatward. That was what I wanted, for, now that men from several other destroyers had come aboard and sauntered aft to jointhe party, the opportunity for finding out at firsthand just what the American sailors thought of the anti-submarine game at the end of a year and a half of it was too good to be missed.
There was a considerable variety of opinions expressed in that last hour of the second dog-watch on the intricate inside stuff of the anti-U-boat game, just as there had been about baseball, but there was one point on which they were practically agreed: that Fritz, especially during the last six months, was not giving them a proper run for their money. This is the way one of them, a bronzed seaman gunner, with the long gorilla-like arms of a Sam Langford, and gnarled knots of protuberant muscles at the angles of his jaws, epitomized it: “We sees Fritzie, or we don’t. Mostly we don’t, for he ducks under when he pipes our smoke. If he’s stalkin’ a convoy there’s jest a chance of him givin’ us time for a rangin’ shot at him on the surface. Then we waltzes over to his grease and scatters a bunch of ‘cans’ round his restin’-place. An’ if the luck’s with us, we gets him; an’ if the luck’s with him, we don’t. If we crack open his shell, down he goes; if we jest start him leakin’, up he comes. Only dif’rence is that, in one case, it’s all hands down, and in t’other, all hands up—‘Kamerad!’ In both cases, no fight, no run for our money. Now when we first come over, an’ ’fore we’d put the fear o’ God into Fritzie’s heart, he wasn’t above takin’ a chance at a come-back now an’again.Thenthere was occas’nal moments of ple’surabl’ excitement, like the time when”—and he went on to tell of how an enterprising U-boat commander slipped a slug into theCourserabreast her after superstructure, and “beat it” off before that stricken destroyer had a chance to retaliate. Only the fact that, by a miracle, the torpedo failed to detonate her depth-charges saved theCourserfrom destruction, and even as it was, rare seamanship had been required to take her back to port. And he also told of the unluckyJohn Hawkins, which a U-boat had actually put down, and the grim situation which confronted the sailors when they found themselves sinking in a ship which carried a number of depth-charges set on the “ready.” But all that, he said, with the air of an old man speaking of his departed youth, was before they had begun to learn Fritzie’s little ways, and before Fritz, perhaps as a consequence, had begun to lose his nerve. Now, far from being willing to put up a fight with a destroyer, it was only “once in a blue moon that he’s got the guts to put up a scrap even to save his own hide.”
A slender fair-haired lad, with a quick observant eye which revealed him as a signalman even before one looked at his sleeve, cut in sharply at this juncture.
“Then there must have been a blue moon shedding its light over these waters last month,” he said decisively. “I quite agree with you thatFritz hasn't got the nerve—or it may be because he’s got too much sense—to take a chance at a destroyer any more. But in the matter of putting up a fight for his life—yes, even for giving a real run for the money—well, all I can say is that if you’d been out on theSherillabout three weeks ago, you wouldn’t be making that complaint about one particular Fritz at least. If going eighteen hours, with two or three destroyers and a sloop or two doing everything they know how to crack in his shell all the time, without chucking his hand in, and very likely getting clear in the end—if that isn’t putting up a fight for life and giving a run for the money, I don’t know what is.”
I had heard this astonishing “battle of wakes and wits,” as someone had christened it, referred to on several occasions, but had never had the chance to hear any of the details from one who had had anything like the opportunities always open to a signalman to follow what is going on. “Most of the bunch have heard all they want to hear of it already,” the lad replied with a laugh when I asked him to tell me the story; “and, besides, a more or less long-winded yarn of the kind I suppose you want would tire ’em to tears anyway. If you really want to hear something of it, come over to theSherill(that’s her stern there, just beyond theFlossie) any time after eight bells. I go on watch then, but it’s a ‘stand easy’ in port, and there’ll be time for all the yarning you want.”
I closed with that offer at once, and eight bells had not long gone before I had picked my precarious way over to theSherill, and climbed the ladders to her snug little bridge. My man was there already, whiling away the time by rewriting an old college football song (he had been in his freshman year at Michigan when America came into the war) to fit destroyer work in the North Atlantic. I found him stuck at the end of the second line of the first verse, because the only rhymes he could think of for flotilla were Manila and camarilla, neither of which seemed sufficiently opposite to be of use, and he was rather glad of an excuse for putting the job by to await later inspiration.
I gave him a “lead” for the U-boat yarn he had lured me there to hear, and he launched into it at once. This is the story the young signalman of U.S.S.Sherilltold me, the while the red squares of the cottagers’ windows blinked blandly along the bank in the lengthening twilight and the purple shadows of the western hills piled deeper and duskier upon the “quiet waters of the River Lee.”
“We were out on convoy,” he said, speaking the first words slowly between the teeth which held the string of the tobacco sack from which the gently manipulated paper in his hand had been filled. “It was some kind of a slow convoy—probably a collier or an oiler or two—and there were only two of us on the job—theMcSmalland theSherill. It wasjust the usual ding-dong sort of a drudge up to about four in the afternoon of the first day out, when theMcSmallmade a signal that she had sighted a submarine on the starboard bow of the convoy, distant about five miles, and immediately stood off to the west to see if anything like a strafe could be started. She was more than hull-down on the horizon when I saw, by the way the angle of her funnels was changing, that she was manœuvring to shake loose a few ‘cans’ into the oil-slick she had run into, but I remember distinctly that I felt the jolt of the under-water explosions stronger than from many we had kicked loose from theSherill, and which had detonated only a hundred yards or so off. It’s just a little trick the depth-charge has. The force of it seems to shoot out in streaks, just like an explosion in the air, and you may feel it strong at a distance and much less at fairly close range. So far as we ever learned, this opening salvo did not find its target.
“Meanwhile theSherillwas escorting to the best of her ability alone. Or at least we thought we were alone. About half an hour after theMcSmallhad laid those first ‘cans,’ however, one of the quartermasters reported sighting a periscope on the port quarter of the convoy, about five hundred yards distant, and headed away. We signalled its presence to the convoy, turned eight points to port, and drove at full speed for the point where the wake of the moving finger had pinched out.
“We had received a report that morning to the effect that two submarines were operating in these waters, and there is just the chance, therefore, that this was a joint attack. Everything considered, however, we have been inclined to believe that the Fritz we were now starting to make the acquaintance of was the same one which theMcSmallwas still assiduously hunting some miles off to the westward. It was a mighty smart piece of ‘Pussy-wants-a-corner’ work, shifting his position like that under the circumstances; but it was quite possible if the Fritz only had the guts for it, and that I think you’ll have to admit this particular one had.
“It’s seconds that count in a destroyer attack on a U-boat, and the captain hadn’t lost a tick in jumping into this one. The dissolving ‘V’ which the ducked-in periscope had left behind it was still visible in the smooth water when theSherill’sforefoot slashed into it, and it was only a few hundred yards beyond that a slow undulant upcoiling of currents marked, faintly but unmistakably, the under-water progress of the game we were after. There was no oil-slick, understand, because an uninjured submarine only leaves that behind—except through carelessness—when it dives after a spell on the surface running under engines. Then the exhausts cough up a lot of grease and oil, and a layer of this, sticking to the stern, leaves a trail that rises for some little time after submergence,and which almost any kind of a dub who has been told what to look for can follow.
“The spotting of the surface wake of a deep-down submarine, and the holding of it after it almost disappears with the slowing down of the screws that make it, is quite another thing.Thattakes a man with more than a keen eye—it takes instinct, mixed with a lot of common sense. It’s a common thing to say of a successful look-out that he has a ‘quick nose for submarines.’ The expression is used more or less figuratively, of course; and yet the nose—the sense smell—is by no means a negligible factor in detecting the presence, and even the bearing, of a hunted U-boat. I will tell you shortly how it figured in this particular instance.
“That wake was swirling up so strong when we struck it that it was plain the submarine was still only on the way down, and it was no surprise when, a few seconds later, the distinct form of it was visible, close aboard under the starboard side of the bridge.
“I don’t mean that it was distinct in the sense that you could see details such as the bow or stern rudders, or even the conning-tower, but only that a moving cigar-shaped blob of darker green could be plainly made out. The for’ard end was rather more sharply defined than the after, probably because the swirl from the propellers made uneven refraction about the tail. It was doubtless a good deal deeper than it looked, and the fact that itcould be seen at all must have been almost entirely due to the fact that the absence of wind left the surface quite unrippled.
“The appearance of the submarine abreast the bridge was our cue to get busy, and I won’t need to tell you that we went to it good and plenty. We were primed for just that kind of an emergency, and we slapped down a barrage in a way that looked more like chucking coppers for kids to scramble after than the really scientific planting of high explosives that it was. For a minute or two the little oldSherill, dancing down the up-tossed peaks of the explosions, jolted along like the canoe you are dragging over a ‘corduroyed’ portage. Then the going grew smooth again, and under a hard-over right rudder we turned back rejoicing to gather in the sheaves. Yes, it looked quite as simple as harvesting on the old home farm, and it didn’t seem that there could be anything left to do but to go back and pick up with the rake what the mower had brought low. And so it would have been on an ordinary occasion, which, unluckily, this was not. From the first to last, indeed, it was quite the contrary.
“The whole map of that little opening brush was spread out before us as we came back, and almost as clearly, for the moment, as though modelled in coloured clay. TheSherill’swake, though it had obliterated that of the submarine, coincided with the tell-tale swirl of the latter we had followed,while the round patches of spreading foam made the dizzily dancing buoys temporarily superfluous as markers of the spots where the depth-charges had exploded. Like every other story that is writ in water, this one was rapidly dissolving; but, from all that we needed to learn from it, the record was as complete as a bronze relief.
“That there was to be another chapter to the story became evident before we had doubled back half the length of that part of the wake we had sprinkled with ‘cans.’ At about the point where two-thirds of that sheaf of depth-charges had been expended a clearly defined wake of oil and bubbles turned sharply off to the left. The presence of that little trail cleared up several important points right then and there without following it any farther, though I will hardly need to tell you that we didn’t drop anchor to hold a court of inquiry over it. The vital thing it told us was that—strange as it seemed—our under-water bombardment had not sent the U-boat to the bottom, nor even injured it sufficiently to compel it to come to the surface. But that it was injured, and probably fairly badly, was proved by the wake of oil and bubbles. Don’t ever let any one delude you with that yarn about the way Fritz sends up oil and bubbles to baffle pursuit. There may be circumstances under which he could work that particular brand of foxiness with profit, but if there is one place where you could be sure he wouldnottry anything of that kind on, it is when a destroyer has got his nose on his trail, with her eye and ears a-cock for just that kind of little first-aid to ‘can-dropping.’ For a submarine voluntarily to release air or oil when a destroyer is ramping round overhead would be just about like a burglar scattering a trail of confetti to baffle the pursuit of the police. Fritz is as full of ways that are dark and of tricks that are vain as Ah Sin, but—with the hounds at his heels—nothing so foolish as that oil and bubble stunt of popular fiction.
“The first few of the ‘cans’ had evidently burst near enough to this Fritz to buckle his shell and release the oil and air, but his sharp right-angled turn to the left had taken him quite clear of the last of the charges, which had only been thrown away. Wounded and winged as he appeared to be, the next thing in order was to polish him off. Slowing down slightly, the captain steadied theSherillon the wake.
“As we passed the point where this was rising, the rate at which it was extended gave the approximate speed of the U-boat, and the fact that this was not above three knots seemed only another indication that all was not well with him. Holding on past the ‘bubble fount,’ we passed over the point below which the U-boat must have been moving, but now he was so much more deeply submerged than before that no hint of his outline was visible on either side. We knew he was there, however, andwhen we hit the proper place shook loose another shower of ‘cans’ over him.
“There is nothing deeply mysterious about the calculations in dropping depth-charges, for in no sense of the term can it be called an instrument of precision. Indeed, it is of the bludgeon rather than the rapier type. If you have a wake to guide, you approximate his speed and course from that, guess at his depth, set the charge at the corresponding depth from which you judge its explosion will do most good, and then, allowing for your own speed and course, release it at a point which you reckon the target will have reached by the time the charge gets down on a level with it. It is something like bomb-dropping from an aeroplane, only rather less accurate, because you don’t see your target as a rule.
“This is more than compensated for, however, by the greater vulnerability of its target and the fact that the force of an under-water explosion is felt over a wider area than that of an air-bomb. That’s about all there is to it. Success in ‘can-dropping’ depends about half on the skill and judgment of the man directing it, and about half on luck. Or perhaps I should say that fifty-fifty was about the way it stood when we started in at the game. Naturally, as we have accumulated experience, skill and judgment begin to count for more and luck for less, though we are a long way from reaching the point where the latter is eliminated entirely.
“Again we circled back to pick up the pieces, and again we found only a wake of oil and bubbles angling sharply off from where the ‘cans’ had been dropped. It was encouraging to note that both oil and bubbles were rising faster than before, but there was surprise and disappointment in the fact that they were now streaming along at a rate which indicated Fritz was hitting an under-water speed of six or seven knots.
“By now it was plain what his method was, however. This was to steady on his course till his hydrophones, which all U-boats are fitted with, of course, told him we were bearing down on him, and then to start making ‘woggly’ zigzags. The captain was doing some deep thinking as we headed in for the next attack, and I noticed him following his stopwatch with more than usual care as he jiggled off the ‘cans.’
“One of the detonations had a different kick from the others, and I was just speculating if it had been a hit, when up comes Fritz, rolling like a harpooned whale.
“We were just turning sharp under left rudder and, not wanting to take any chances, the captain gave orders for all guns fearing to open fire. No. 1 and No. 2 of the port battery got off about five rounds apiece, and when the splashes from the exploding shells had subsided Fritz had gone. It looked like a hundred to one that we had finished him—until we ran into another of those darn wakesof oil and bubbles reeling off at a good five or six knots.
“Again we ‘canned’ him, and again the thickening trail of grease gave promise that, if nothing else, we were at least bleeding him hard, perhaps to death. As there was no doubt that he was still a going concern, however, the captain decided on a change of tactics, to try attrition, so to speak, instead of direct assault.
A LIMIT TO THE NUMBER OF CANS A DESTROYER CAN CARRY
“There is, of course, a limit to the number of ‘cans’ a destroyer can carry, and those which still remained he wanted to husband against a better chance to use them with effect. The several remaining hours of daylight would be enough, if the U-boat could be kept running at maximum speed, to exhaust its batteries in and force it to come to the surface for lack of power to keep going submerged. A submarine, you understand, unless it can lie on the bottom, which was impossible here on account of the depth, must keep under weigh to maintain its bouyancy, so it follows that the exhaustion of its batteries leaves no alternative but coming up. That was what we were now driving at with this one.
“About this time, hearing the radio of theCushmanclose aboard, the captain sent a signal requesting her help in clearing up the job in hand. She hove in sight presently, accompanied by theFanny, which was out with her on some special stunt of their own. They had an hour to spare for us, andin that time we played just about the merriest little game of hide-and-seek that any of our destroyers have had with a Fritz since the Yanks came over.
“He wasn’t left time to sit and think for a single minute. Now a destroyer would come charging up his wake from astern and shy a ‘can’ at his tail; now one would ambush him from ahead and try and have one waiting where his nose was going to be.
“It was a good deal like when three or four of us kids used to spear catfish in a muddy pool. We were always grazing one, but never quite getting it. And, believe me, the wake of one of those catfish didn’t have anything on the wake of that Fritz for sinuosity.
“He was zigzagging constantly, and just after charges had been dropped on him he twice broached surface. It was only for a few seconds though, and never long enough to offer a target for even a ranging shot. Once we tried to ram, but he turned as he submerged, and the forefoot cut into nothing more solid than his propeller swirl.
“After theCushmanandFannyleft us to resume their own job theSherilltook up the chase again on her own account. There were still about three hours to go till dark, and two of these we spent in keeping our quarry on the jump by every trick we knew. Then we stood away, and gave him a chance to come up and start charging on the surface. When it finally became evident that he was not going to take advantage of our consideration on this score, we closed in again, picked up his wake, sentdown another ‘can’ or two to tell him what we thought of him.
“The last of these must have been near to a hit, for it brought up oil bubbles three feet in diameter, with smaller bubbles of air inside of them. The oil-slick left behind by his wake was so heavy that, even in the failing light, it was visible for several miles. He was now making about five knots. We followed that broad slick of oil for some time after darkness had fallen, and it was not till a little before midnight that we lost it.
“There wasn’t much hope of regaining touch before daybreak, but on the off-chance the captain started circling in a way that would cover a lot of sea, and yet not take us too far from the centre of interest.
“It was a little after one in the morning that one of the look-outs—perhaps ‘sniff-outs’ would be a better term under the circumstances—reported an oil smell to windward. The captain promptly ordered her headed up into the wind, with sniffers stationed to port and starboard, fore and aft. Every man on watch was sniffing away on his own, of course, and you can bet it would have been a funny sight if there had only been enough light for us to see one another in. Nosing—I can use the term literally this time—slowly along, turning now to port, now to starboard, as the oil smell was strongest from this side or that, within ten minuteswe picked up a slick which, even in the darkness, it was evident was trending to south’ard. For an hour and a half we zigzagged up along that wake, keeping touch by smell until just before three o’clock, when the new well-risen moon showed it up distinctly to the eye. No,” answering my frivolous interruption, “I don’t recall noticing at the time that it was abluemoon.
“Ten minutes later we came up to where the wake turned to south-westward, and had a brief glimpse of Fritz trying to evade detection by running down the moon-path. He was plainly near the end of his juice, and taking every chance that offered to charge on the surface. He ducked under before there was time for a shot, but, knowing that he could hardly stay there for long, we continued following down his wake.
“It was broad daylight when, at half-past four, we sighted him again, running awash about five hundred yards ahead and slightly on the starboard bow. Ordering the bow gun to open fire, the captain put theSherillat full speed and headed in to ram. The shots fell very close, but no hit was observed.
“He turned sharply to port, preparing to dive. We tried to follow with full left rudder, but missed by twenty feet. His conning-tower and two periscopes showed not over thirty feet from the port side as we swept by. It was too close for a torpedo, nor was there a fair chance for a depth-charge.The port battery was opening on him as he submerged.
“The strengthening breeze began kicking up the surface about this time, making it difficult to follow the wake. It was six o’clock before we circled into it again, to find that Fritz was now trying to blind pursuit by steering his course so that the wake led away straight toward the low morning sun. It was probably by accident rather than design that his now reversed course also laid his wake across some of the zigzags of his old oil-slick. At any rate, between that and the sun, we got off the scent again, and did not get in touch till an hour later, when a thin blue-white vapour to the eastward revealed the blow-off of his exhaust where he had resumed charging on the surface.
“He was a good five miles away, but we turned loose at him with the bow gun and started closing at full speed. At almost the same time, the British sloopMoonflower—the same one we were talking about this evening—stood in from eastward, also firing at the enemy, who was about midway between us.
“Fritz disappeared under the foam-spouts thrown up by the fall of shot, and, although two more destroyers joined in the hunt, which was continued all that day and on to nightfall, no further trace of him was discovered. Even if he did not sink at once, the chances are all against his being in shape ever to get back to base. But just thesame,” he concluded, with a wistful smile, “it would have been comforting to have had something more tangible than the memory of an oil smell and thirty-six hours without sleep as souvenirs of that little brush.”
It had been dark for an hour where the waters of the River Lee were streaming seaward with the ebbing tide, but the tree-tops along the crest of the eastward hills were silvering in the first rays of the rising moon. The signalman was looking at it when I bade him good night and started down the ladder to the main deck.
“I hope it isn’t a blue one,” he said with a grin; “we’re expecting to go out again tomorrow.”
Boring into a North Sea blizzard in a destroyer off the coast of Norway is not exactly the kind of thing that one would think would turn a man’s thoughts to sunny climes, with scented breezes blowing over flowery fields, and cobalt skies arching over sapphire waters, and all that sort of thing; but the human mind moves in a mysterious way, and that is just what Lieutenant K—— started talking about the night we were shepherding the northbound convoy together, after it had been temporarily scattered by what had proved to be an abortive German light cruiser raid.
Sea-booted, mufflered and goggled, and ponderous where his half-inflated “Gieve” bulged beneath his ample duffle-coat, he leaned over the starboard rail of the bridge for a space to get the clear view ahead that the frost-layer on the wind-screen denied him from anywhere inboard. Then, just ducking a sea that rolled in tumultuously fluent ebony over the forecastle gun and smothered the bridge in flying spray, he nipped across and threw a half-Nelson around a convenient stanchion before the pitch, as she dived down the back of theretreating wave, threw him against the port rail.
“Got ’em all in line again,” he said, pushing his face close to mine. “That’s something to be thankful for, anyhow. Didn’t expect to round up half of ’em before we had to stand away to pick up the southbound. Piece of uncommon good luck. Now we can stand easy for a spell.”
I was about to observe that “stand easy” didn’t seem to me quite the appropriate term to apply to the act of keeping one’s balance on a craft which was blending thirty-degree rolls with forty-degree pitches to form a corkscrew-like motion of an eccentricity comparable to nothing else in the gamut of human experience, when he continued with: “Not much like what I was enjoying a month ago, this,” indicating the encompassing darkness with a rotary roll of his head. “I was in a destroyer at an Italian base then—Brindisi—with the smell of dust and donkeys and wine-shops in the air, and straight-backed, black-haired, black-eyed girls, with rings in their ears and baskets of fruit—soft red and yellow and blue fruit—on their heads. Now it’s”—and she put her nose deep into a wave that dealt her a sledge-hammer blow and sent spray flying half-way to the foretop in a solid stream—“this, just this. Grey by day, black by night, and slap-bang all the time. No light, no colour, no atmosphere, no——”
“I quite understand,” I cut in. “No straight-backed girls with rings in their ears and fruit-basketson their heads. Of course, there’s more light and colour down there than here; but wasn’t there also a bit of slap-bang to it now and then?”
“Ay, there was a bit,” he replied. “There was the time——” He started to tell me the already time-worn yarn of the Yarmouth trawler skipper and the Grimsby trawler skipper, each of whom, enamoured of the same Taranto maid, wooed her while the other was absent on patrol; of how one of them, looking through his glass as he stood in toward the entrance on one of his return trips, saw his rival walking on the beach with arm round the waist of the artful minx in question, and her red-and-yellow kerchief-bound head resting on his shoulder; of how the one on the trawler, consumed by a jealousy fairly Latin in its intensity, swung round his six-pounder, discharged it at the faithless pair, and—so crookedly did the rage-blind eyes see through the sights—hit a fisherman’s hut half a mile away from his target!
I had heard the story in Taranto a year previously, and knew it to be somewhat apocryphal at best. “I didn’t mean that kind of ‘slap-bang,’” I said. “I was under the impression that the destroyers had some rather lively work down there on one or two occasions.”
“There were several brushes which might have been called lively while they lasted,” he admitted. “I was in one of them myself just before I was transferred north.”
“You don’t mean the recent attack on the drifter patrol—the one where two British destroyers stood the brunt of the attack of four Austrian destroyers and a light cruiser or two?” I asked. “I have always wanted to hear about that. I’ve heard Italian naval men say some very flattering things of the way the British carried on.”
“That’s the one,” he replied. “I was in theFlop—the one that got rather the worst banging up.”
“You’ve just got time for the yarn before your watch is over,” I said, settling myself into the nearest thing to a listening attitude that one can assume on the bridge of a destroyer bucking a north-east gale. “Fire away.”
I didn’t much expect he would “come through,” for I had failed in so many attempts to draw a good yarn by a frontal attack of this kind that I had little faith in it as compared with more subtle methods. Perhaps it was because rough methods were suited to the rough night; or it may have been only because K——’s mind (his non-working mind, I mean; not that closed compartment of sense and instinct with which he was directing his ship) had drifted back to the Adriatic, and he was glad of the chance to talk about it; at any rate, in the hour that had still to go before eight bells went for midnight, to the accompaniment of the banging of the seas on the bows and the obbligato of the spray beating on the glass and canvas of the screens, he told me the story I asked for.
“I don’t need to tell you,” he said, after giving the man at the wheel the course for the next zigzag, “that the Adriatic is full of various and sundry little traps and contrivances calculated to interfere as much as possible with the even tenor of the way of the Austrian U-boats which, basing at Pola and Trieste, sally forth in an endeavour to penetrate the Straits of Otranto and attack the commerce of the Mediterranean. You doubtless also know that this work is very largely in British hands. This is no reflection whatever on our Italian ally. Italy simply did not have the material and the trained men for the task in hand, and since Britain had both, it was naturally up to us to step in and take it over. This was done over two years ago; but, like the anti-submarine work everywhere, it is only now just beginning to round into shape to effect its ends. The winter of his discontent for the U-boat in these waters is closing in fast.
“You will understand, too, that these various anti-U-boats contrivances take a lot of looking after to prevent their interference with, or even their complete destruction, by enemy surface craft. All the good harbours are on the east coast of the Adriatic, and that sea is so narrow that swift Austrian destroyers can raid all the way across it at many points, and still have time to get back to their bases the same night. With our own bases—the only practicable ones available—at the extreme southern end of the Adriatic, our greatestdifficulty, perhaps, has been in guarding against these swift tip-and-run night-raids by the enemy’s speedy surface craft. I don’t know whether the fact that we seem to have about put an end to their operations of this kind is a greater tribute to our enterprise or the Austrians’ lack of it. The brush in question occurred as a consequence of the latest of the Austrian attempts to interfere with the measures which, he knows only too well, will ultimately reduce his U-boats to comparative impotence.
“I was Number Two in theFlop, which, with theFlip, was patrolling a certain billet well over toward the Austrian coast of the Adriatic. We had turned at about eleven o’clock, and were heading back on a westerly course, when the captain sighted a number of vessels just abaft the starboard beam. Being almost in the track of the low-hanging moon, they were sharply silhouetted; but the queer atmospheric conditions played such pranks with their outlines that, for a time, he was deceived as to their real character. The warm, coastal airs, blowing to sea for a few hours after nightfall, have a tendency to produce mirage effects scarcely less striking than those one sees on the desert along the Suez Canal. It was the distortion of the mirage that was responsible for the fact that the captain mistook two Austrian light cruisers for small Italian transports (such as we frequently encountered on the run between Brindisi and Valona or Santi Quaranti),and that he reported what shortly turned out to be enemy destroyers as drifters.
“The captain had just made a shaded lamp signal to theFlip, calling attention to the ships and their supposed character, when the white, black-curling bow-wave of the two leaders caught his eye and made him suspect they were warships. The alarm bell clanging for ‘Action Stations’ was the first intimation I had that anything was afoot. In the Adriatic, as everywhere else, everyone in a destroyer turns in ‘all standing’; so it was only a few seconds until I was out of my bunk and up to my station on the bridge. It was not many minutes later before I found myself in command of the ship.
“It was now clear that the force sighted consisted of two enemy light cruisers and four destroyers, the latter disposed two on each quarter of the rear cruiser. They were closing on us at high speed at a constant bearing of a point or two abaft the beam. It was up to theFlip, as senior ship, to decide whether to fight or to run away on the off-chance of living to fight another day, something which was hardly likely to happen in the event we closed in a real death grapple. The disparity between our strength and that of the enemy would have entirely justified us in doing our utmost to avoid a decisive fight, had it been that the cards on the table were the only ones in the game. But this was hardly the case. Out of sight, but still not so many miles distant, was another subdivisionof our destroyers, while overwhelming forces would ultimately be hurrying up to our aid in case the enemy could be delayed long enough. To close in immediate action was plainly the thing, and theFlipwas turning in to challenge even as she made us a signal indicating that this was her decision. A moment more, and we were turning into line astern of her.
“Out of the moon-track now, the outlines of the enemy ships were indistinct and shadowy, and it was from the dull blur of opacity above the slightly phosphorescent glow of the ‘bone’ in the teeth of the leading cruiser that the opening shot was fired. It lighted her up brilliantly for the fraction of a second, and the ghostly geyser from the bursting shell showed up distinctly a few hundred yards ahead of theFlip. Both the sharpened image of the cruiser in the light of the gun-fire and the time of flight of the shell helped us with the range, and the fall of shot from theFlip’sopener looked like a very near thing. We followed it with one from our fo’c’sl’ gun, which was a bit short, and the next, if not a hit, was only slightly over. At this juncture, all six of the enemy ships came into action with every gun they could bring to bear, and theFlipand theFlopdid the same. For the next few minutes things happened so fast that I can’t be sure of getting them in anywhere near their actual sequence.
“We began hitting repeatedly, and with goodeffect, after the first few shots, and theFlipalso appeared to be throwing some telling ones home. The enemy were hitting the both of us about the same time, however, and, of course, with many times the weight of metal we were getting to him. At this juncture the skipper of theFlip, evidently figuring that the Austrians, now that they were fully engaged and had a good chance of polishing us off, would not break off the fight, turned southward with the idea of drawing them toward the other forces which we knew would be rushing up in response to the signal we had sent out the instant the character of the strange ships was evident.
“TheFlip, like a big squid, began smoke-screening heavily as she turned, theFlopfollowing suit. The sooty oil fumes poured out in clouds thick enough to walk on, but unluckily, neither our course nor the state of the atmosphere was quite favourable for making it go where it would have served us best. Possibly it was because theFlipwas making a better screen than theFlop, or possibly it was because they were concentrating on the ‘windy corner’ just as we were rounding it. At any rate, trying to observe through our rather patchy smoke the effect of what appeared to be a couple of extremely well-placed shots of ours on the leading cruiser, I suddenly became aware that all four of the destroyers and the second cruiser were directing all of their fire upon the poor littleFlop. I don’t recall exactly whether I twigged thisbefore we began to feel the effects of it or not, but I am rather under the impression that I seemed to sense it from the brighter brightness—a gun firing directly at you makes a more brilliant flash than the same gun laid on a target ahead or astern of you—of the flame-spurts even before I was aware of the sudden increase of the fall of shot.
“They had us ranged to a yard by this time, of course, and the captain turned away a couple of points in an endeavour to throw them off. I recall distinctly that it was just as the grind of the ported helm began to throb up to the bridge that a full salvo—probably from one of the cruisers—came crashing into us. My first impression was that we were blown up completely, for of the two shells which had struck for’ard, one had brought down the mast and the other had scored a clean hit on the forebridge. There was also a hit or two aft, but the immediate effects of these were not evident in the chaos caused by the others. This was absolutely beyond description.
“The actual shock to a ship of being struck by a shell of even large calibre is nothing to compare with that from almost any one of these seas that are crashing over us now. But it is the noise of the explosion, the rending of metal, and the bang of flying fragments and falling gear that makes a heavy shelling so staggering, to mind if not to body. Of course everyone on the forebridge was knocked flat by the explosion of the shell which hit it, andthe worst of it was that the most of us didn’t get up again. The sub and the middy who were acting as Control Officers were blown off their platform and so badly knocked up that they were unable to carry on. One signalman and one voice-pipe man were killed outright.
“The rest of us were only shaken up or no more than slightly wounded by this particular shell, but the one which brought down the mast added not a little both to casualties and material damage. The radio aerials came down with the mast, of course, and it was some of the wreckage from one or the other that fell on the captain, wounding him severely in both arms. Dazed and shaken, he still gamely stuck to the wreck of the bridge, but the active command now fell to me.
“This damage, serious as it was, was by no means the extent of that inflicted by this unlucky salvo. A third shell, as I shortly learned, had passed through the fore shell-room and into the fore magazine. In which it exploded I could not quite make sure, but both were set on fire. This fire got to some of the cordite before it was possible to get it away, and the ensuing explosion killed or wounded most of the supply parties and the crews of the twelve-pounders. It was brave beyond all words, the fight those men made to save the ship down in that unspeakable hell-hole, and it was due wholly to their courage and devotion that the explosion was no worse than it was. This trouble,luckily, was hardly more than local, but a number of good lives was the price of keeping it so.
“There was one other consequence of that salvo, and though it sounds funny to tell about it now, it might well have made all the difference in the world to us. In the bad smashing-up of the bridge of any ship by shell-fire the means of communication with the rest of her—the voice-pipes, telephones, telegraphs, etc.—are among the first things to be knocked out. This means, if there are no alternatives left, that directions have to be relayed around by shouting from one to another until the order reaches the man to carry it out. This would be an awkward enough expedient for a ship that is not under fire and fighting for time and her life. What it is with the enemy’s shell exploding about you, and with your own guns firing, I will leave you to imagine. Well, we had all this going on, and besides that a fire raging below that always had the possibilities of disaster in it until it was extinguished. Also, we were already short-handed from our losses in killed and wounded. There wasn’t anyone to spare to relay orders about in any case. But what capped the climax was this: When the mast was shot down, some of the raffle of rigging or radio fouled the wires leading back to both of the sirens, turning a full pressure of steam into them and starting them blowing continuously. It was almost as though the poor maimed and mangledFlopwere wailing aloud in her agony.
“I didn’t think of it that way at the time, though, for I had my hands full wailing loud enough myself to make even the man at the wheel understand what I wanted him to do. Luckily, the engine-room telegraph, though somewhat cranky, was still in action, and orders to other parts of the ship we managed to convey by flash-lamp or messenger. It was ten minutes or more before they contrived to hush the sirens—it was cutting off their steam that did it, I believe—and by then a new and even more serious trouble had developed through the jamming of the helm. It was hard over to starboard at that, so that theFlopsimply began turning round and round like a kitten chasing its tail. This involuntary manœuvre had one favourable effect in that it seemed to throw the Austrian gunnery off for a bit, though one shell which penetrated and exploded in the after tiller-flat shortly after she began cutting capers did not make it any easier to coax the jammed helm into doing its bit again.
“Our ‘ring-around-the-roses’ course had resulted in our coming much nearer to the enemy, who, seeing a chance to finish us off, was trying to close the range at high speed. Our rotary course brought them on a continually shifting bearing, and it was while they were coming up on our port bow at a distance of less than a mile that it suddenly became evident that the cruisers were about to present us the finest and easiest kind of a torpedo target. The captain, who, in spite of his wounds,was still trying to stick the show through, saw the opening as soon as I did, and, because there was no one else free to attempt the trick, tackled it himself. But it was a case of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. With every ounce of nerve in him he tried to make his almost useless hands work the forebridge firing-gear. The chance passed while he still fumbled frantically but vainly to release the one little messenger—a mouldie—that would have been enough to square accounts, and with some to spare. It was the hardest thing of all—not being able to take advantage of that opening.
“It was twenty minutes before the helm was of any use at all, and the Austrians had only their lack of nerve to thank for not putting us down while they had a chance. It must have been because they were afraid of some kind of a trap, for there were a half-dozen ways in which a force of their strength could have disposed of a ship as helpless and knocked-out generally as was theFlop. TheFliphad also been hard hit, and when I had a chance for a good look at her again it appeared that her mast, like ours, was trailing over the side. She was still firing, however, and it was she rather than the enemy that was trying to close. We were quite cut off from wireless communication, as all attempts to disentangle the aerials from the wreckage of the mast had been unsuccessful; but it was evident that help was coming to us, and that the Austrians had in some way got wind of it. Atany rate, our immediate responsibilities were over. We had prevented the enemy from reaching his objective, and possibly delayed him long enough for some of our other ships to have a chance at harrying his retreat. It was now up to us to limp to port on whatever legs we had left.
“We were still a long way from being out of action even now, but with the fires continuing to burn fiercely in the fore magazine and shell-room, with the helm threatening to jam every time course was altered, and with a considerable mixture of water beginning to make its presence felt in the oil, there was no telling what complications might set in at any moment. As one of the Italian bases in Albania was rather nearer than any port on the other side of the Adriatic, it was for that we set our still erratic course.
“Our troubles were not yet over, however. Just as the moon came down and sat on the sea preliminary to setting, squarely against the round yellow background it formed I saw the silhouette of the conning-tower of a U-boat. At almost the same instant the helm jammed again. Then it worked free for a few seconds, but only to jam presently, just as before. This continued during two or three minutes, and just as it was wangled right and we began to steady again I saw the wake of a torpedo pass across our bows. Half a minute later another one missed us in the same way, and by about the same distance. I have always thoughtthat nothing but that providential jamming of the helm just then saved us from intercepting both of those mouldies.