“The fires in the fore shell-room and magazine were eventually got under control by flooding, and we were fairly cushy when we dropped anchor at base a little before daybreak.”
K—— lurched over to the starboard rail and counted the dark blurs that represented the units of the straggling convoy. He was wiping snow and spray from his face as he slid back on the roll to our stanchion.
“Fine place, Southern Albania,” he muttered. “Plenty of heat and dust and sunshine and——”
I never did hear what the rest of those Albanian attractions were. At that juncture dusky figures emerging from the deeper gloom of the ladder heralded the appearance of the middle watch, and for those relieved, including myself, the world held just one thing—a long, narrow bunk, with a high side rail to prevent the occupant from rolling out. You go at your sleep on a destroyer as a dog dives at a bone, for you never know how long it may be before you get another chance.
The Senior Naval Officer (or the S.N.O., as they clip it down to) at X—— had prepared me for finding an interesting human exhibit in the sharp-nosed, stub-sterned little craft snuggled up to the breast of its mothership for a drink of petrol, or whatever other life-giving essence she lived and laboured on, but hardly for the highly diversified assortment that was to reveal itself to me during those memorable days we were to rub shoulders and soak up blown brine and grog together as they threaded the gusty sea lanes of her winter North Sea patrol.
“I am sending you out on M.L.[D]——,” the S.N.O. had said as he gazed down with an affectionate smile at the object of his remarks, “for several reasons, but principally on account of the men that are in her. You’ll find them a living, breathing object-lesson in the adaptability of the supposedly stodgy and inflexible Anglo-Saxon race. Her skipper, to use one of his own favourite expressions, is a live wire—always seems to be able to spark when there’s trouble in the wind. He came from somewherein Western Canada, I believe. Seems to have tried farming there for a spell, and I think he said something once about running his own agricultural tractor. At any rate, in some way or another, he has picked up more practical knowledge of petrol engines than many of our so-called experts.
[D]Motor launch.
“The fact is,” continued the S.N.O. as we turned back towards his office at the end of the quay, “the fact is that D——, though he never saw salt water before he crossed the Atlantic to do his bit in the War, and though he never has got and never will get, I’m afraid, his sea-legs, is in many respects the most useful M.L. Officer I have ever had to do with, and that’s saying a good deal, let me assure you.
“He’s always sick as a dog from the time he puts to sea to the time he returns to port. The only thing that is liable to be more sick is the Hun submarine he once gets his nose on. I’ve heard him say in a joking way, two or three times, that he always could scent a Hun as far as he could a skunk—I think that’s what he calls it; and from some of the things he’s done I must confess I’m more than half inclined to believe him. Perhaps his most remarkable achievement, however, is that of taking eight or ten men, just as green as he was himself regarding the sea, and making of them a crew that will handle that cranky little lump of a craft pretty nearly as smartly as old trawler-men would on the nautical side, and at the same time having a fund of resource always on tap that ispositively uncanny—almost Yankee, in fact,” he added with a smile. “Indeed, I believe D—— speaks of having knocked about the States a bit, which may account for some of the ‘wooden-nutmeg’ tricks he has played on the U-boats. Try to get him to tell you some of them. You’ll hardly be allowed to write much of them for a while yet—certainly not until they have become obsolete through the introduction of new devices; but you’ll find it good material some day.”
M.L. —— looked more diminutive than ever as I was rowed out to her anchorage in the chill grey mists of the following morning; but a raw cold, which had been striking through to the marrow of my bones, dissolved, as by magic, before the friendly warmth of the welcome which awaited me, when I had clambered up the sawn-off Jacob’s Ladder and over the wobbly wire rail. A slender but lithely active chap in a greasy overall and jumper, to give it the Yankee name, gave me a finger-crushing grip with his right hand, while with his left he deftly caught and saved from immersion my kit-bag, which had fallen short in the toss that had been given it from below. Just for an instant the absence of visible insignia of rank made me think that he was a petty officer of engineers, or something of the kind; then the magnetism of his personality flowed to me through the medium of his hand-clasp, and I knew I was looking into the eyes of a man whowould not be likely to figure for long as anything less than “Number One” on any kind of job he ever undertook.
“You’re just in time for a ‘square,’” he said heartily, leading the way to the tiny hatch and preceding me down the ladder. “You’ll be needing it, too, after that pull with nothing more than that sloppy dish-wash kaffy-o-lay that you get at the hotel at this hour of the morning on your stomach. Don’t try to bluff me that you had anything more. I know by sad experience. NowI’llgive you something that’ll stick to your ribs. What do you say to some Boston baked beans and a ‘stack o’ hots’? Guess I know what a ’Murican likes. Sorry my maple syrup’s gone, but here’s some dope I synthesised out of melted sugar and m’lasses—treacle, they call it over here.”
Reaching the lower deck, we edged along to a transom at the end of a table which all but filled the tiny dining-cabin.
“Shake hands with Mac,” said the skipper by way of introducing me to a tall and extremely good-looking youth in a Cardigan jacket, duffel trousers, and sea-boots, who rose with a smile of welcome as we dropped down beside him. “Mac’s a Canuck, like myself,” he went on, after asking me if I liked my eggs “straight up” or “turned over,” and passing the order on to a diminutive Cockney with a comedian’s face, who came tripping in almost as though wafted on the “smell o’ cooking” whichpreceded him through the opened galley door.
“Mac learned his sailoring on his dad’s yacht on Lake Ontario, and I learned mine driving a ‘deep-seagoing’ side-wheel tractor on a ranch in Alberta. Only time I was ever afloat before I became a ‘Capt’in in the King’s Navee’ was on a raft on the old Missouri, in Dakota; and that isn’t really being afloat, you know, for ’bout one half the water of that limpid stream is mud and the other half catfish. A great pair of old salts, we two—hey, Mac?
“And the rest of the crew’s no more ‘saline’ than its ‘orfficers.’ That’s the way they say it, ain’t it, Mac? Little ’Arry, the galley-slave, was a knock-about artist in the London music-halls before he ‘eard the sea a-callin’, and now he doesn’t ’eed nothin’ else, do you, Harry? And you’ll hear the sea a-callin’ that nice big breakfast of yours just as soon as we get outside the Heads, won’t you, Harry? And then you won’t ’eed nothin’ else for quite a while. And so’ll Mac hear the sea a-calling his breakfast, and so’ll I, and so’ll all the rest of us—every mother’s son. It’s a fine lot of Jack Tars we are, the whole bunch of us. Did I tell you that one of my quartermasters is an ex-piano-tuner, and that the other was a Salvation Army captain before he entered the Senior Service for the duration? And my Chief—that’s him you hear alternating between tinkering and swearing at the engines on the other side of that bulkhead you’re leaning against—owned a motor-boat of his own before the War, andappears to have divided his waking hours between racing that and his stable of motor-cars? You can tell he was a gentleman once by the fluency of his cussing. He’s the only man I’ve met over here that could give yours truly any kind of a run in dispensing the pungent persiflage; but I had the advantage of driving mules as a kid.
“But cussing, though it helps with a lot of things, doesn’t make a sailor, and the Chief’s no more of a Jack Tar than me or Mac or Harry. Fact is, that the only man aboard who ever made his living out of the sea before the war is a fisherman from the Hebrides; and even the glossary in the back of my Bobbie Burns won’t translate his lingo. Two or three times, when the sea has been kicking up a bit, he has managed to tell us that no self-respecting God-fearing sailor would be oot in such weather. Possibly he’s been right; but, as none of us are sailors, we don’t feel called on to pay much attention to his ravings. Our duty is to harass any Huns that encroach on our beat; and the fact that we’ve had a modicum of success in that line proves you don’t have to be a sailor to qualify for the job. Which don’t mean, though,” he concluded with a smile of sad resignation as he rose and reached for his oil-skins, “that I don’t hope and pray that I’ll develop the legs and stomach of a sailor before the war’s over.”
When breakfast was eaten, forward and aft, all hands were piped on deck, and in less than tenminutes M.L. —— was under way and threading the winding channels of a cliff-begirt Firth to the mist-masked waters of the North Sea.
As I picked my way forward to the little glassed-in cabin, which served the double purpose of navigating-bridge and wheel-house, I told myself that I was sure of two things—first, that the skipper, by birth, breeding, residence, and probably citizenship, was an American of Americans, and, second, that the chances were he would not admit that fact unless I “surprised him with the goods.” An Englishman will often mistake a Canadian for an American but a Yankee himself will rarely make that error. I was sure of my man on a dozen counts, and resolved to lay in figurative ambush for him.
I all but had him within the hour. We were clear of the Heads, and the skipper, having turned over to Mac, was trying to forget that imperious call o’ the sea he had chaffed ’Arry about by showing me round. He had explained the way a depth-charge was released, and was just beginning to elaborate on the functions of an old-fashioned lance-bomb.
“Now this fellow,” he said, balancing the ungainly contrivance and giving it a gingerly twirl about his head, “is a good deal like the sixteen-pound hammer which I used to throw at college.”
Knowing that the hammer-throw was not a Canadian event, I promptly cut in with “What college?”“Minnesota,” he answered readily enough; adding, as I began to grin: “A good many Canadians go across there for the agricultural courses.” I resolved to await a more favourable opportunity before bringing my “charge” point-blank. It came that afternoon, when I stood beside him on the bridge as he bucked her through ten miles of slashing head-sea, which had to be traversed to gain the shelter of a land-locked bay beyond a jutting point, where we were to lie up for the night. He was telling me U-boat-chasing yarns in the patchy intervals between the demands ofmal de merand navigation, and one of them ended something like this: “Old Fritz—just as we intended he should—caught the reflection of the flame through his upturned periscope and, thinking his shells had set us afire, rose gleefully to gloat over his Hunnish handiwork. Bing! I let him have it just like that.”
The motion with which he flung the lemon he had been sucking as an antidote for sea-sickness could not have been in the least suggestive of what really happened; but that straight-from-the-shoulder, elbow-flirting, right-off-the-ends-of-the-fingers action was so like another motion with which I had long been familiar, that, with a meaning side-squint, I observed promptly:
“So you add baseball to your other accomplishments, do you? Did a bit of pitching, if I don’t miss my guess? How long have you played?”
“Since I was a kid,” he admitted with a grin that sat queerly on the waxy saffron of his sea-sick face. “Yes, I even ‘tossed the pill’ at college—that is, until a shoulder I knocked out trying to slide home one day spoiled my wing.”
I knew I had him the instant that first admission left his lips. “Since the kids weren’t playing sand-lot baseball in Canada twenty years ago,” I said, ducking low to let the spray from a sea which had just broken inboard blow over, “you might just as well ’fess up and tell me which neck of the Mississippi Valley you hail from. Just as one Yankee to another,” I pressed, as his piercing eye turned on me a look that seemed to bore right through and run up and down my spine; “even as one Middle Westerner to another, for I was born in Wisconsin myself.”
For an instant his lips hardened into a straight line, and the flexed jaw-muscles stood out in white lumps on either side; then his mouth softened into a broadening grin, and a moment later he burst into a ringing laugh.
“Sure thing, old man, since you put it on ‘sectional’ grounds, and since we’re going to be shipmates for a week, and”—fetching me a thumping wallop on the back—“since we both wear the same uniform, anyhow, curly stripe and all, I’ll make a clean breast of it. I was born in Kansas—got a farm there, near a little burg called Stockton, to-day—and was never out of the Middle West in mylife till I crossed over into Canada to enlist in the first year of the war. I felt I had to get into the show somehow, and the little old U.S.A. was hanging fire so in the matter of coming in that I just couldn’t wait. I’ll tell you the whole story when we’re moored for the night.”
I have never been able to recall my yarn with D—— that evening without a hearty guffaw. A rising barometer had cleared the grey smother of mist from the sea, but a shift of the wind from south-east to north-east exposed us to a blast which, chilled at its fount in the frozen fjords of Norway, knocked the bottom out of the thermometer and filled the air with needle-like shafts of congealed moisture that seemed to have been chipped from the glassy steel dome of the now cloudless sky. There was a filigree of frost masking the wheel-house windows before the early winter night clapped down its lid, and the men who went forward to pass a line through the ring of the mooring-buoy pawed the icy deck with their stiff-soled sea-boots without making much more horizontal progress than a squirrel treading its wheel.
It would have been bracing enough if there had been a cheery open fire, or at least a glowing little sheet-iron stove, to thaw and dry out at, as there is on most patrol craft, and even on many trawlers. But in the particular type to which M.L. —— belonged (the units of which are said to have beenbuilt in fulfilment of a rush order given one winter on the assumption that the War would be over before the next) there was no refinements and few comforts. Heating is not included among the latter: the only stove in the boat being in the galley, where the drying of wet togs in restricted quarters is responsible for a queer but strangely familiar taste to the pea-soup and Irish stew which you never quite account for until you discover the line of grease on the corner of the tail of your oilskin or the toe of your sea-boot.
The diminutive electric heaters are true to the first part of their name rather than the last: that is to say, while they are undeniably electric, it is equally certain that they do not heat. Thereisa certain amount of warmth in them, as I discovered the time I scorched my blankets by taking one to bed with me; but that is of use only when you can confine it and apply locally, which is rarely practicable in a small craft at sea, even when you have the time for it.
It will be readily understood, therefore, why on a M.L., at sea in really wintry weather, the only alternative to sitting up and being slowly but surely chilled to the marrow is to doff wet togs as soon as you come off watch, don dry ones, bolt your dinner, and turn in. This is just what we had to do on M.L. —— that night; for, besides the really intense cold, a sea which came through the sky-light of the little dining-cabin early in the afternoon haddrenched cushions and curtains, with enough left over to form an inch or two of swashing swirl upon the deck. Poor ’Arry, with the effects of the “call o’ the sea” still showing in his hollow eyes and pasty cheeks, was not in shape to do much either in the way of “slicking up” or “snugging down”; while the extent of his culinary effort was limited to a kedgeree of half-boiled rice and pale canned salmon, and a platter of eggs fried “straight up,” according to D——’s order, with the yolks glaring fish-eyedly at you from a smooth, waxy expanse of congealed grease. D——, who was still somewhat “introspective” himself, turned down the “straightups” straightaway, bent a look that was more grieved than angry on the forlorn ’Arry, and then, rising shiveringly, started edging along over the sodden divan toward his cabin door.
“As principal medical officer of this ship,” he said through chattering teeth, “I prescribe the only treatment ever found to be efficacious in such circumstances as the present—bunk, blankets, and hot toddy.”
There were two bunks in D——’s narrow cabin, and it was not until we had turned into these—he in the lower, I in the upper—that the mounting glow of soul and body thawed the reserve which had again threatened to grip him in the matter of where he came from, and set his tongue wagging of his life on the old home farm, and from that to a sketchy but vivid recital of things that he had done,and hoped still to do, as the skipper of a British patrol boat. It is the vision that the memory of that recital conjures up: D——, with a Balaclava helmet pulled low over his ears, gesticulating excitedly up to where I, the unblanketed portion of my anatomy shrouded to the eyes in a wool duffel-coat, leaned out over the edge of the bunk above—that I can never dwell on without laughing outright.
The story of the way in which it happened that D—— came over to get into the game in the first place did not differ greatly from those I have heard from a score or more of young Americans who, partly inspired by a sense of duty and partly lured by the promise of adventure, sought service in the British Army or Navy by passing themselves off as Canadians. He had intended to enlist in the Army at first; but when he found that six months or more might elapse before he would be sent to the other side, he crossed at his own expense on the chance of avoiding the delay. At the end of a disappointing month spent in trying to enlist in some unit that had a reasonable expectation of going into active service at once, the intervention of an old college friend—an able young chemical engineer occupying a prominent post in Munitions—secured him a sub-lieutenant’s commission in the R.N.V.R. Although, as he naïvely put it, the sea was no friend of his, it appears that the M.L. game had proved congenial from the outset: so much so, indeed, thatsomething like three years of service found him with two decorations and innumerable mentions to his credit, to say nothing of the reputation of being one of the most resourceful, energetic and generally useful men in a service in which all of those qualities are taken more or less as a matter of course. He had gone in as a Canadian for fear that he might be turned down as a Yankee, and then, to use his own words: “By the time the U.S.A. began to take a hand, I had told so many darn lies about hunting and fishing and farming in Alberta and British Columbia that I concluded it would be less trouble to go on telling them than to start in denying them. The boundary between Canada and the U.S.A. is more or less of an imaginary line, anyhow, and so is that between the average Yankee and Canuck. I reckon I’ve made it just as hot for the Hun as the latter as I would have as the former, and that’s really the only thing that counts at this stage of the game.” It was this last observation, I believe, which started D—— talking of his work.
“Generally speaking,” he said, reaching up the match with which he had just lighted a cigarette to rekindle the tobacco in my expiring pipe, “the rôle of the M.L. is very much more defensive than it is offensive. It is supposed to police certain waters, watch for U-boats, report them when sighted, and then carry on as best it can till a destroyer, or sloop, or some craft with a real punch in it, comes up and takes over. Well, my idea fromthe first has been to make that ‘defensive’ just as ‘offensive’ as possible, and it’s really astonishing how obnoxious some of us have been able to make ourselves to the Hun. Off-hand, since, with his heavier guns, the average Hun is more than a match for us even on the surface, there wouldn’t seem much that we could do against him beyond running and telling one of our big brothers. The perfecting of the depth-charge gave us one very formidable weapon, however, and that of the lance-bomb another, though the days when Fritz was tame and gullible enough to allow himself to be enticed sufficiently near to permit the use of the latter are long gone by. The most satisfying job I ever did, though, was pulled off with a lance-bomb; and, since there is not one chance in a thousand of our ever getting away with the same kind of stunt again, there ought to be no kick on my telling you just how it happened.
“You see,” he went on, pulling a big furry-backed mitten on the hand most exposed to the cold in gesticulation, and tucking the fingers of the other inside the neck of the Balaclava for warmth, “Fritz is an animal of more or less fixed habits, and so the best way to hunt him, like any other animal, is to begin by making a study of his little ways. I specialised on this for some months, confining myself almost entirely to what he did in attacking, or when being attacked by, M.L.s, and ignoring his tactics with sloops, trawlers, and otherlight craft. It wasn’t long before I discovered that his almost invariable practice—when it was a matter of only himself and a M.L.—was to get the latter’s range as quickly as possible, endeavour to knock it out, or at least set it afire, by a few hurried shots, and then to submerge and make an approach under water for the purpose of making a closer inspection of the damage inflicted. In this way the danger of a hit from the M.L.’s gun was reduced to a minimum—an important consideration, as a holing by even a light shell might well make it impossible to submerge again. And a U-boat incapable of seeking safety in the depths is, in any part of the North Sea where it would have been likely to meet a M.L., just as good as done for.
“I also found that when explosions had taken place in the M.L., or when it was heavily afire by the time the U-boat drew near, it was the practice of the latter to come boldly up and finish the good work at leisure, with the addition of any of the inimitable little Hunnisms—such as firing on the boats, or ramming them, or running at full speed back and forth among the wreckage so as to give the screws a good chance to chop up the swimming survivors—of whichUnterseebootskippers were even then becoming past masters.
A DEPTH CHARGE
DISABLED DESTROYER IN TOW
“In short,” here D—— paused for a moment while he lifted the little electric heater and lighted a fresh cigarette on one of the glowing bars, “in short, I studied the vermin in just the same way I did the gophers and prairie-dogs when I started toexterminate them on my Kansas farm. I found out when they were most likely to come up, when to stay down; what things attracted them, and what repelled. Then I went after them. Of course, there was no chance for the clean sweep I made of the gophers and prairie-dogs, but we’ve still managed to keep our own little section of the beat pretty clear.
“Having satisfied myself regarding the Hun’s penchant for stealing up, submerged, to gloat over the dying agonies of his victim, it seemed to me that the obvious thing to do was to lead him on with an imitation death-agony, and then have a proper surprise waiting for him when he came up to gloat. The first thing I started working on was how to ‘burn up’ and ‘blow up’ with sufficient realism to deceive the skipper of a submerged U-boat, and still be in shape to spring an effective surprise if he could be tempted into laying himself open to it.
“My first plan proved too primitive by far. I reckoned that the ‘blowing-up’ touch might be provided by dropping a depth-charge, and that of ‘burning up’ by playing my searchlight on the surface of the water on the side the approach was to be expected from. Neither was good enough. The ‘can’ might have been set to explode on the surface, but that could not be affected without running the chance of blowing in my own stern. But the bing of a depth-charge detonating well underthe water is quite unmistakable, and the first U-boat I tried to lure with one made off forthwith, plainly under the impression that it was the object of an active attack. As for the searchlight, I saw that it wouldn’t do the first time I went down and took a peep at a trial of it through the periscope of one of our own submarines. The beam did cast a patch of brightness discernible through the upturned ‘eye’ at a depth of from sixty to eighty feet, but it was neither red enough nor fluttery enough to suggest anything like a burning ship. I set to work to devise something more life-like, without ever waiting for a chance to draw a Fritz with it.
“First and last, I tried a goodly variety of ‘fire’ experiments,” D—— continued, snuggling down for a moment with both arms under the blankets, “and I don’t mind admitting that I’d like to have a few of ’em, smoke and all, flaming up all over this refrigerator right now. The thing I finally decided to try consisted of nothing more than a light, shallow tank of ordinary kerosene—paraffin oil, I believe they call it here—made fast to a small, roughly built raft. Themodus operandiwas as simple as the contrivance itself. As soon as a U-boat was sighted, the raft was to be launched on theoppositeside, and kept about thirty feet out by means of a light boom. The next move was to be up to Fritz, and it was fairly certain he would do one of two things—submerge and make off, or remainon the surface and begin to shell us. In the latter case we were to start firing in reply, of course; but that was only incidental to the main plan. This was to wait until we were hit, or, preferably, until he fired an ‘over,’ the fall of which, on account of his low platform, he could not spot accurately, and then to fire the tank of kerosene. A line to a trigger, rigged to explode a percussion-cap, made it possible to do this from the rail. As the flames, besides giving off a lot of smoke, would themselves leap high enough to be seen from the other side, it was reasonable to suppose that Fritz would be deluded into thinking we were burning up, and make his approach a good deal more carelessly than otherwise. If he persisted in closing us on the surface, there would be nothing to it but to make what fight we could with our fo’c’sl’ gun, and try to make it so hot for him that he would have to go down before his heavier shells had done for us. But if, following his usual procedure, he made his approach submerged, then there were two or three other little optical and aural illusions prepared for his benefit. I will tell you of these in describing how we actually used them.”
D—— lay quiet for a minute, the wrinkles of a baleful grin of reminiscence showing on both sides of the aperture of the Balaclava. “The first chance we had to try the thing out it nearly did us in,” he chuckled presently. “No, Fritz had nothing to do with it.He, luckily for us, submerged and beat itoff after firing three or four shots—probably through mistaking the smoke of a couple of trawlers just under the horizon for that of destroyers. It was all due to bad luck and bad judgment—principally the latter, I’m afraid. It was bad luck to the extent that the U-boat was sighted down to leeward, so that there was no alternative but to put over my ‘fire-raft’ on the windward side. The bad judgment came in through my underestimating the force of the wind and the fierceness with which the kerosene would burn when fanned by it. Scarcely had it been touched off before there was a veritableFlammen-werferplaying against thirty or forty feet of the windward side, and in a way which made it impossible for a man to venture there to cast off the wire cables which moored the raft. As this class of M.L.s have wooden hulls, you will readily see that this was no joke.
“The splash of the beam seas proved an efficacious antidote, so far as the hull was concerned, however; but how some other highly inflammable material I was carrying ’midships escaped being fired in the minute or more that I was swinging her through sixteen points to bring the raft to the leeward of her—— Well, I can only chalk that up to the credit of the special Providence that is supposed to intervene especially to save drunks and fools. You can bet your life I never let myself be tempted into making that break again, though it involved a trying exercise of self-restraint when itchanced that the very next Fritz I sighted also bore down the wind.
“The two or three U-boats which were sighted in the course of the next five or six weeks ducked under without firing a shot, and I was beginning to think that perhaps they had somehow got wind of my little plan and were taking no chances in playing up to it. Then, one fine clear morning, up bobs a Fritz about six thousand yards to windward, and begins going through his part of the show almost as though he was one of our own submarines with which I had been rehearsing. His firing at us was about as bad as mine at him; but he finally lobbed one over that was close enough, so I knew he couldn’t tell whether it was a hit or not, and on that I touched off the fire-raft, which was soon spouting up a fine pillar of flame and smoke. To discourage his approach on the surface, I kept up a brisk firing to give him the impression that we were going to live up to British Navy traditions by going down fighting, and to convince him that it would be much safer to close under water. This came off quite according to plan, and presently I saw the loom of his conning-tower dissolve and disappear behind the spout of one of our shells, which looked to have been a very close thing.
“I stood on at a speed of five or six knots, but on a course which I reckoned he would anticipate and allow for. When I figured that he was notover a mile away, I dropped a float over the stern with a time-bomb attached to it, the detonation of which in this way I had found by experiment to furnish a much more life-like imitation of an internal explosion in a ship—when heard in hydrophones, I mean—than that of a depth-charge. The periscope which was shortly poked cautiously up for a tentative ‘look-see’ could not, I am pretty nearly dead certain, have revealed anything to belie the impression I had laid myself out to convey—that M.L. —— was an explosion-riven, burning, and even already, probably a sinking ship. Besides the gay gush of flames from the fire-raft, which must have appeared to be roaring amidships, lurid tongues of fire were also spouting out of the forrard and after hatches, and from several of the ports; while a thirty-degree list to starboard might well have indicated that she was about to heel over and go down. I had looked at her that way from a periscope myself, while I was studying the effect of some ‘stage property’ flares in comparison with ordinary gasoline ‘blow-torches,’ and knew how much she looked like the real thing even when you knew she wasn’t. The list? Oh, that was a very simple matter. This class of M.L.s is never on an even keel for long, anyhow, and the installation of a couple of tanks made it possible to pump water back and forth and give her any heel we wanted. We put her almost on her beam ends when we were experimenting on the thing, and without upsettingthings much outside of the galley, which we had neglected to warn of what devilry was afoot.
“If we didn’t look helpless and harmless enough for any Fritz to run right up alongside and ‘gloat over,’ I’ll eat my hat; and that was what I was counting on this fellow doing. Indeed, I’ll always think that was just what hedidintend to do eventually; only it was the way he went about doing it that was near to upsetting the apple-cart. It seemed reasonable to suppose that he would come up and do his gloating on the side he approached from, and so that was the side I had prepared to receive him on. The heavy list she was under to starboard would have made it possible to bring the gun to bear on him until he was almost under the rail, and then there would be a chance for a lance-bomb. If he came up on the other side by any chance, I had figured that the game would be all up; for there was the fire-raft to give it away, while the list would be on the wrong slant to give the gun a show. Well, whether it was accident or intent, that is just what he did—broached abeam to port, about half a cable’s length off the sizzling tank of flaming kerosene.
“That next minute or two” (D—— sat up in bed in the excitement of the memory of that stirring interval, and I felt one of his gesticulating fists come with a thump against the bottom of my mattress) “called for some of the quickest thinking and acting I was ever responsible for pulling off.If he stayed up, it flashed to my mind, there was just the chance I might ram him; while if he ducked down, there would probably be a good opening for a depth-charge. I rang up full speed at the same time I was shouting orders to cast off the fire-raft, and to bash in one end of the starboard ‘tilting-tank’ with an axe. We had considered the possibility of this emergency arising, as much as we hoped it wouldn’t, so that no time was lost in meeting it. The fire-raft, boom and all, was cast off clean, and quickly left astern. In scarcely less time was the tank emptied, though the sudden flood from it—it was on the upper deck, understand—came very near to carrying overboard the man who broached it. With motors, of course, we were running all out in ‘two jerks,’ and she was doing several knots over twenty when, with helm hard-a-starboard, she began rounding on the startled Fritz.
“There was no doubt about the fact that hewasstartled, let me tell you. And, when you think of it, it must have been a trifle disconcerting to see the blown-up and burning boat he had come up to gloat over, and perhaps loot before she went down, suddenly settle back on an even keel and come charging down on him at twenty-five knots. The ‘moony’ fat phizes that showed above the rail of the bridge were pop-eyed with surprise—yes—and indecision, too, for there were several valuable seconds lost in deciding whether to come on up—shehad risen to the surface with only an ‘awash’ trim—and make a fight with her gun, or to dive.
“I don’t think it would have made a great deal of difference in his own fate which he did, but you can bet it made a lot of difference to me. I don’t mind telling you that I was never gladder about anything in my life—at least anything since the rain that came at the end of a three-months’ drought to save my corn-crop a few years back—than when those moon-faces went into eclipse and I saw him begin to submerge. Although it had never formed a part of any plan I had ever worked out, I give you my word that I fully intended to ram him, and that would have meant—well, about the same thing as one airplane charging into another. I should almost certainly have finished him, while at the same operation—but I don’t need to tell you that a match-box like this was never made for bull-at-a-gate tactics. I’ve never heard of one of this class of M.L.s getting home with a good square butt at a U-boat, and I’m very happy to say that it didn’t happen on this occasion. I don’t think that we even so much as grazed his ‘jump-string’; but the whole length of him was in plain sight sloping away from his surface swirl, and it was easy as picking ripe pippins to plant an ‘ash-can’ just where it was needed. The only aggravating thing about it was that, although oil came boiling up in floods for three days, there was never a Hun, nor even an unmistakable fragment of U-boatwreckage, picked up as a souvenir. There was never any doubt about the sinking, however, for the trawlers located the wreck on the bottom with a sweep, and gave it a few more ‘cans’ for luck.
“But the best evidence in my own mind,” concluded D——, pulling the blankets up higher over his shoulders as he settled back into the bunk, “is the fact that, six weeks later, the identical stunt I had tried this time actually lured another Fritz up to eat out of my hand almost exactly as I had been planning for. Now, if that first one had really survived and been able to return to base, it is certain that its skipper would have told what he saw, and that there would have been a general order (such as came out some months later when they finally did twig the game) warning all U-boats against coming up to gloat at close range over burning M.L.s. The fact that this second one was such easy picking proves beyond a doubt that the other never got back.”
“That last was the one you ‘threw the hammer’ at, wasn’t it?” I asked, leaning far out to make my words carry down to D——’s now blanket-muffled ears.
“Yes,” came the wool-dulled answer. “Tell you some other night. Gotta get warm now. Toddy can’s empty. Make a tent of the blankets with your knees, and take the electric heater to bed in it, if you can’t stop shivering any other way. Good night.”
At three miles, as seen from the bridge of the battleship, the small craft which was steering a course that would bring her across our bows in the course of the next few minutes was absolutely nondescript, completely defying classification. A mile closer, however, it appeared to be as plain as day that she was some ancient fishing boat, but bluffer of bow and broader of beam than the oldest of trawlers or drifters in the service. It was only when she was right ahead, and but six or eight cables’ lengths distant, that a vagrant sun-patch came dancing along the leaden waters beyond her to form a scintillant background against which she stood out as what she was—the sweetest-lined little steam yacht that ever split a wave. The fishing-boat effect had been obtained by a simple arrangement of colours which effectually clipped the clippiness from her clipper bows and equally effectually discounted the graceful overhang of her counter.
In plain words, they had blocked in the lines of a bluff, squatty tug on her hull with some kind of paint that was very easy to see, and covered therest of her with a paint that was very hard to see. A few changes in rig, and the alteration was complete.
“Quite the cleverest and simplest bit of camouflage I ever saw,” said the captain, lowering his binoculars. “It’s only the fact that we’re looking down on her from a considerable height against that bright sheet of water that gives a chance to follow her real lines at all. From the deck—and even more so from the bridge of a submarine, or through its periscope—it would be a lot easier to tell what sheisn’tthan what sheis. As a matter of fact, I can’t say that I know what she is even now. It is evident that shewasa yacht, and no end of a beauty at that. But now, in that guise—probably some sort of patrol or anti-U-boat worker, for a guess, perhaps a ‘Q.’”
The officer of the watch turned aside for a moment from the gyro across which he had been sighting. “I think she must be the ‘——,’ sir,” he said. “Some American millionaire had her in the Mediterranean, and, wanting to do his bit, brought her up to Portsmouth and turned her over to the Admiralty to do what they wanted with her so long as it would help to lick the Hun. She’s been mixed up in several kinds of stunts, and is supposed to have a U-boat or two to her credit. Her present skipper’s a Yank who came to her from a M.L. They say he’s no end of a character, but right as rain on his job and with a natural nose for trouble.One of his hobbies is making his ship look what she isn’t, and, in order to see her as she would appear to a U-boat, he goes out and studies her through the periscope of one of our own submarines. When one of these isn’t handy, he sometimes goes out in a whaler and studies her through a stubby periscope poked over its gunwale. He got blown right out to sea one night when he was making some experiment from a whaler in ‘moonlight visibility,’ and didn’t get back till the next morning. It had no effect on his enthusiasm, though, for he was out on the same stunt the next night. No question about his nerve, nor his luck, nor his skill, for that matter. Smart seamanship probably has as much to do with the fact that he has never been torpedoed as has his fancy camouflage.”
I made up my mind at once that here was a man worth meeting and hearing the story of, but as the only base he seemed to have was not easy to reach, and as his ship was reported at sea on the only occasions I was free to go there, some weeks went by before I was able to carry out my plan of paying him a visit. Then, one morning, a nondescript craft, which might have been anything from a wood-pile to a Chinese junk half a mile away, came nosing inconsequentially through the lines of the Grand Fleet and moored alongside the very battleship in which I happened to be at that time.
“K—— has come in with the ‘——’ to ‘swingcompasses,’” the navigating officer announced to the ward-room. “He’s a ‘converted side-wheel river ferry-boat’ this morning, or something of the kind; and he’s going to get blown to sea in a ‘sudden gale,’ or something of the kind; and he says that, if anyone doesn’t believe it, to come aboard and he’ll give ’em something to stimulate their ‘stolid British imaginations.’”
As certain lockers of the “——” had not been entirely looted of their age-mellowed treasure when the yacht was dismantled for sterner service than lounging about limpid Mediterranean harbours, the doubters were, naturally, many; but it is pleasant to be able to record that those who came to scoff remained—to tea. Indeed, it was not until after tea that I had a chance for a half-hour’s yarn alone with K—— in the “banquet-hall-deserted” splendour of the stripped saloon. It was then that he told me how it was he chanced to “come across and get into the game.”
He used the latter expression several times, I remember, and to no one that I can recall having met, either on land or sea, was the grim work he was doing more of a “game” than to this brave, resourceful, devil-may-care Middle Westerner.
“I had had a fair bit of experience in yachting and boating during the last six or eight years before the outbreak of the war,” he said, settling back at ease in one of the two remaining lounging-chairs, “and most of it has stood me in good stead at onetime or another since I have been on the job over here. I sailed a single sticker on Lake Michigan for a number of seasons, and I used to run down from my home in Lake Forest to business in Chicago in my own motor-boat on and off during the summer. It was what I knew of the latter which got me on a ‘M.L.’ without any preliminary hanging about when I first came over early in the war. What I knew about sailing has been all to the good almost every day I have been at sea, from the time I lured on a U-boat by ringing up my ‘M.L.’ as a disabled fishing-smack to the time when I had to bring this poor little old girl into port under canvas after I had knocked out her propellers with one of her own depth-charges.” It was a fantastically amusing tale, that last. “It was the culmination of my experiments in scientific camouflage,” said K——, with a baleful smile. “Up to that time any contrivances to deceive the Hun were getting more and more intricate right along; since then they have tended more and more toward extreme simplicity. It was this way, you see, that I happened to work up to that depth-charge crescendo. From the first I had been striving to give the U-boat mixed impressions of me, especially on the score of which way I was going. This, as I soon found out from studying the thing in the proper way, is much easier to do in the case of a man whose observation is limited to a few feet above the water than in the case of one who has a more loftycoign of vantage to con from. That is to say, it’s much easier to convey false impressions, especially regarding your direction, to a man with his eye to a periscope than to one in the foretop of a battleship, to take the two extremes. Trying now one thing and now another as I had more experience, I found that where at first every shot fired at me was directed ahead with a more or less approximate allowance for the ship’s progress in that direction, after a while they began to go oftener and oftener astern, indicating they were confused as to my rate of change. It was just as I was about to put the crowning touch on my efforts in ‘mixing direction’ that the trouble occurred. As the experiments with this particular contrivance never went any further, there will hardly be any harm in my telling you what it was and how it worked.
“I had already, with the aid of a couple of slanting fins, attached something after the fashion of bilge-keels, only just below the water-line on either quarter, worked up a fairly satisfactory ‘bow wave’ aft, and I was endeavouring to supplement this by a scheme for making it appear as though the sky was moving past her funnel in the direction it wasn’t. You see, I was working on the same principle which deceives you when you think the standing train you are in is in motion when you see the one on the next track start up.
“As the U-boat skipper’s ‘look-see’ is oftenlimited to a hurried sort of a peep, I figured that if I could contrive to keep a rather conspicuous imitation sky of canvas running past the masts and funnels in the same direction she was going, only faster, it might create the illusion—in the distorted ‘worm’s eye’ vision of the man at the periscope—that she was going in the opposite direction. I studied some make-shift rigs from water-level through a periscope, and made up my mind the scheme was worth trying.”
K—— relighted his cigar and resumed with a sad smile.
“I still think the idea was good,” he said, “but it took too complicated an installation to carry it out, especially on a small craft with a low freeboard. There were gearings and transmissions and rollers, and heavens knows what not, needed to make the endless strip of canvas ‘sky’ run smoothly, and there were also many wires and ropes. It was one or the other of the latter which was responsible for the disaster, for while the thing was still in the ‘advanced experimental’ stage a U-boat popped up close by one day—probably a bold attempt on its skipper’s part to see if he really saw what he thought he had seen—and I spun the ‘——’ around on her tail (one of the nice things about her is that she will turn in a smaller circle than most destroyers) and tried, first choice, to ram him, and, second choice, to drop a depth-charge down the hole he had ducked into. I was toolate to ram by a few seconds, and there must have been a good fathom or two of clearance between my keel and the conning-tower I had driven for. The bridge and the two periscopes he had ‘turtle-necked’ in showed clean and sharp in the clear water as I leaned over the port side of the bridge—the easiest chance a man ever had for kicking off a ‘can’ just where it ought to go. As I turned to the depth-charge release I already had visions of him falling apart like a cracked egg, with bobbing bubbles and howling Huns coming up to the surface together. It was only a couple of days before that I had picked up several British fishermen—all that were left alive after a U-boat skipper had vented his morning hate by shelling the boat in which they were leaving their sinking trawler—and I was still mad enough to want to ram Heligoland if a chance had offered. I felt a kind of savage joy in the chance to put that tin of T.N.T. where it would wipe out a bit of the score I had been checking up against the Hun, and I seemed to see a sort of a Hand of Fate in the fist I was reaching up to the handle of the release. It couldn’t miss, I told myself, and—well, it didn’t.
“The explosion ‘jolted’ at the proper interval all right, but not in the proper place, nor in the proper way. I was watching for the up-boil squarely in the middle of the right-angling propeller swirl of the submarine, but that was receding, smooth and unbroken, when the crash came. Thefact is, I never did see the spout from that charge—for the very good reason that it was tossed up almost under the ‘——’s’ counter, where it knocked off the blades of both propellers and all but blew in her stern. The depth-charge had fouled a trailing wire from some of my ‘stage scenery sky’ and been dragged along to detonate close astern. I saw her taffrail shiver and kick upwards, and the shock was strong enough to upset my balance even on the bridge. That last was the first thing that made me sure something had slipped up, for, ordinarily, the jolt from a properly set ‘can’ is no more than that from a sharp bump against the side of a quay. I mean the jolt as felt on the bridge, of course; below, and especially in the engine-room or stokehold, it is a good deal more severe. It was the shattering jar of this one that told me it had gone wrong, and then, when she began to lose way and refuse to answer her helm—the rudder had been knocked out, too, but not enough so that it couldn’t be tinkered up to serve temporarily—I knew it was something serious.
“It was a good deal of a relief to find that, badly buckled as some of the plates were, she wasn’t making any more water aft than the pumps could easily take care of. That was the first thing I looked after, and the next was the U-boat; or rather, we were looking out for both at the same time. If there was one thing more than another that helped to reconcile me to the double disappointment ofmissing my crack at the Hun and knocking my own ship out, it was the fact which soon became apparent, that Fritz never knew about the latter. If hehadknown the shape I was in, he could have finished me off a dozen times over during the hour or more the ‘——‘ was lying helpless, and before the first armed trawler showed up in answer to my S.O.S. Just why he didn’t, I could never make quite sure, but the chances are it was one or both of two things. It is quite possible that the biff from the depth-charge—which must still have been almost as near to him as it was to me when it exploded—may have done the submarine really serious injury, perhaps even sinking it. We never found any evidence, however, that this had been the case. Whether he was damaged or not, there is no doubt that his close call gave him a bad scare. There could have been nothing in the explosion to tell him that it did any harm to his enemy, and, since he did not have his periscope up, there was no way he could see what had happened. Doubtless expecting another ‘can’ any moment, and knowing well that it would be only a matter of an hour or two until there would be a lot more craft joining in the chase, it is probable that he followed the tactics which you can always count on a U-boat following when it knows a hunt is on—that is, to submerge deeply and lose no time in making itself just as scarce as possible in the neighbourhood where the hue-and-cry has started. That’s the onlyway I can account for the fact that this particular pirate didn’t have a revenge after his own Hunnish heart. We were about evenly matched for guns probably, and doubtless I would have had rather better than an even break on that score, because a surface craft can stand more holing than a submarine. But there was nothing to prevent his taking a sneaking sight through his periscope from a safe distance and then slipping a mouldie at us, which, helpless as we were for a while, there would have been no way of avoiding. A moving ship of almost any class, provided it has a gun to make him keep his distance, has a good fighting chance of saving herself from being torpedoed by the proper use of her helm; a disabled ship, though she has all the guns in the world, has no show if the Fritz really thinks she’s worth wasting two or three torpedoes on. If he has his nerve, and any luck at all, he ought to finish the job with one.
“So I think you’ll have to admit,” said K—— with a whimsical smile, “that, under the circumstances and considering what might have happened, I felt that I had no legitimate kick coming in having to take her home under sail. Fact is, I considered myself in luck to have a ship to take home at all. The rudder, luckily, though a good deal bent and twisted, had not been blown away. It took a lot of nursing to turn it, and, when we finally got her off under mainsail, forestaysail and jib, the eccentricities it developed took a lot of gettingused to. Although it was quite fortuitous on our part, the course we steered during the thirty hours we put in returning to base was the most complex and baffling lot of zigzagging I ever had anything to do with. If a U-boat skipper lying in wait for us could have told what she was going to do next, I can only say that he would have known a lot more than I did.
“At the end of an hour or two a couple of trawlers hove in sight and closed us to be of what help they could in screening. They made a very brave show of it until we got under weigh, and then they were led just about the wooziest dance you ever heard tell of. By a lucky chance, for me, not for the trawlers, there was a spanking breeze on the port quarter (for the mean course to base, I mean); and it wasn’t long before the little old girl, even under the comparatively light spread of sail on her, was slipping away at close to nine miles an hour. That won’t surprise you if you noticed the lines of her. I’ve turned back in her log and found where she’s run for thirty-six hours at fourteen miles, even with the drag of her screws, which always knock a knot or two off the sailing speed of a yacht with auxiliary power.
“Well, that nine miles an hour was a good bit better than those trawlers could do under forced draught, and after falling astern for a while, they started to catch up by shortening their courses by cutting my zigzags. That was where the fun camein. It would have been easy enough if I had been zigzagging according to Hoyle. But where I didn’t know myself just what she was going to do next, how was I going to signal it to them, will you tell me? About every other time that they tried to anticipate my course they guessed wrong, and were worse off than before as a consequence. They must have been a very thankful pair when one of the two destroyers which finally came up took them off to hunt the submarine. The other destroyer stood by to escort me in. Her skipper offered me a tow, but I was anxious to save face as much as possible by returning on my own, and so declined. In case of an attack it would have been better to have him screening than towing anyhow. In the end, when we got in to where the sea room was restricted, I was glad to take a hawser from a tug they sent to meet me to keep from putting her on the mud.
“You may well believe that effectually put an end to my experiments with ‘movable sky,’ and other similar mechanical complexities,” K—— continued with a laugh. “Indeed, from that time on I have been inclining more and more to simpler things, rig outs that are sufficiently free from wheels within wheels to leave the mind clear for the real work in hand, which, after all, is putting down the Hun, not merely deceiving him as to what you are. You see how simple a setting our present one is; yet it is very complete in its way, and Ihave reasonable hopes of success with it. No, I can hardly tell you just what I am driving at with it, or just how I am going to go about it. In a month or two, when its possibilities have been exhausted and it has become a wash-out perhaps I shall be a bit freer to talk about it.
“Come and spend a day or two with me at the end of about six weeks, when my present round of stunting will probably be over, and I’ll tell you all the ‘Q’ yarns that the law allows. The Hun is dead wise to the game on principle, so there can’t be any point in keeping mum any longer on stunts that he’s twigged a year or so ago, and which you’d have about as much chance of taking him in with as you’d have in trying to sell a gold brick on Broadway.”
Three months went by before I was able to take advantage of K——’s invitation to pay him a visit at what he had called his “business headquarters,” and as I had naturally expected that she would have played many and diverse parts in the interim, it was with some surprise that I found the “——” still “dressed” as she had been when I last saw her.
“We’ve never quite been able to pull it off,” K—— explained, “and the waiting, and the not-quites and the might-have-beens have given me no end of a dose of that kind of hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. But we’ve at least beenlucky enough not to queer the game by showing our hand, so that there’s still as good a chance as ever to make good with it under favourable circumstances. For that reason, the less we say about it for the present the better. That’s in regard to this particular stunt, I mean. As for the rest of the ‘Q’ stuff that we’ve brought off, or tried to bring off, during the last three years—I’m at your service to-night after dinner. The Germans have been publishing accounts of some of the stunts, under the title of ‘British Atrocities,’ for some months now, but as there are slight variations from the truth here and there, you may still be interested in getting some of the details a bit nearer the original fount.
“They claimed, for instance, that when one of their ‘heroic’ U-boats ran alongside an armed British patrol boat, which had surrendered to it, to transfer a boarding-party, an officer of the M.L. rushed on deck and threw down on the deck of the submarine what the skipper of the latter took to be a packet of secret books, and that this ‘packet,’ exploding, eventually resulted in the sinking of the guileless German craft. Now, about the only thing which is correct about that account is the statement that a U-boat was sunk. It wasn’t an armed M.L. that surrendered to Herr Ober-Lootenant—armed M.L.’s don’t do that sort of thing, take my word for it—but an unarmed, or practically unarmed, pleasure yacht, which hadapparently become disabled and blown to sea. And the trusting U-boat did not come alongside to put aboard a prize crew to navigate its captive to a German port as they’d try to make you believe, but only to sink it with bombs placed in the hold, so as to save shells or a torpedo. And it wasn’t a packet of secret books that put the pirate down, but a ‘baby,’ andmybaby at that. No, I don’t mean that I threw a real child of mine to Moloch—I haven’t any to throw—but only that the idea of this literalenfant terrible, with a percussion cap on the top of his head and a can of T.N.T. for a body, originated under my hat.
“It’s not surprising that the Huns didn’t get the thing straight at first, though I believe one of their later versions does have a child in the cast, for none of the Germans present have yet returned to tell just what happened. About half of them never will see their beloved ‘Vodderland’ again, and I don’t mind telling you that I’m not wearing any crepe on my sleeve on that account, either. Do you know”—K——’s face flushed red and his brow contracted in the anger the thought aroused—“that those —— pirates were going right ahead to sink what they thought was nothing but a pleasure yacht, with a number of women and children in it, although it was plain as day to them that the one boat carried would founder under a quarter of our number? That’s your Hun every time, and it was just that insensate lust of his to murderanything helpless that I reckoned on in baiting my trap. I felt dead certain—— But I’ll tell you the whole yarn this evening.”
Several bits of salvage from the “——’s” pleasure-yacht days figured in the little feast K—— had spread that evening, and I remember particularly that the Angostura was from a bottle Commodore P—— had himself secured at the time when that incomparable bitter was distilled in a little ramshackle pile-built factory at Ciudad Bolivar, on the upper Orinoco. And the coffee that same genialbon vivanthad had blended and sealed in glass by an old Arab merchant at Aden, while the Benedictine had cost him a climb on foot through an infernally hot August afternoon to an ancient monastery inland of Naples. It was between sips of Benedictine—from a priceless little Morning Glory-shaped curl of Phœnician glass, picked up in Antioch one winter by the owner, and overlooked in the “stripping” operations—that K—— told me the story of the first of what he called his “Q-rious” operations.
“There was a story attached to just about every little package of food and drink P—— left in the yacht,” said K——, unrolling the gold foil from a cigar whose band bore the name of a Piñar del Rio factory which is famed as accepting no order save from its small but highly select list of private customers in various parts of the world; “and in the several letters he has written begging me to makefree with them he has told me most of the yarns. The consequence was that, while the good things lasted—they’re most of them finished now—I was getting in the way of enjoying eating and drinking them, telling where they came from and how they were come by, just about as much as good old P—— himself must have done. In fact, I think that their possible loss was about my worst worry when I tried my first ‘Q’ stunt on.
“The success of any kind of stunt for harrying the U-boat is very largely a matter of psychology, and this is especially so in the ‘Q’ department. The main point of it is to make the enemy think you are more harmless than you really are. There is nothing new in the idea, for it is precisely the same stunt the old pirate of the Caribbean was on when he concealed his gun-ports with strips of canvas and approached his victims as a peaceful merchantman. As a matter of fact, I think it was the Hun himself who started the game in this war, for I’m almost dead sure that we had tried nothing of the kind on—in a systematic way, at any rate—up to the time one of his U-boats rigged up a mast and sails and lured on victims by posing as a fisherman in distress.
“Obviously, it’s a game you can’t use any kind of craft that is plainly a warship in, and the burning question always is as to how far you will sacrifice punishing power to harmlessness of appearance. A light gun or two is about as far as youcan go in the way of shooting-irons, and even these are very difficult to conceal on a small boat. Likewise a torpedo tube. I tried that first stunt of mine without either, and that’s where the psychology came in.
“Most of the ‘Q-boats’ they were figuring on at that time were of the slower freighter type, with a rather powerful gun mounted for’ard and concealed as well as possible by something rigged up to look like deck cargo.
“That was, however, all well and good as far as it went, I figured, but, from such study of the Hun’s little ways as I had been able to make, I had my doubts as to whether an old cargo boat would prove tempting enough bait to put a Fritz in the proper mental state for a real ‘rise’—one in which he’d deliver himself up to you bound and gagged, so to speak.Thatwas the kind of a thing I wanted to make a bid for, and, by cracky, I pulled it off.
“From all I could pick up, from the inside and outside, about the ships that had already been torpedoed, I came to the conclusion that the Hun would go to a lot more trouble, and take a deal bigger chance, to put down a vessel with a number of passengers than he would with a freighter. And even that early in the War a U-boat had exposed itself to being rammed by a destroyer, when it could have avoided the attack entirely by foregoing the pleasure of a Parthian shot at a lifeboat which was already half-swamped in the heavy seas.Thatwas the little trait of the Hun’s that I reckoned on playing up to when I began to figure on taking the ‘——’ out U-boat strafing without any gun larger than a Maxim aboard her. I’d have been glad enough of a good four-incher, understand, if there had been any way in the world it could have been concealed. But there wasn’t, and rather than miss getting into the game at all, I was quite content to tackle it with such weapons as were available. That was where my ‘che-ild’ came in.
“On the score of weapons available, there were only two—the lance-bomb and the depth-charge. For the kind of game I had in mind, it was to the former that I pinned my faith. It was powerful enough to do all the damage needful to the shell of a submarine if only a chance to get home with it could be contrived. ‘Getting it home’ has always been the great difficulty with the lance-bomb, and up to that time the only chap to have any luck with it was the skipper of a M.L.—another Yank, by the way, who came over and got into the game in the same way, and about the same time, that I did. He had been the champion sixteen-pound hammer-thrower in some Middle Western college only a year or two before, and, by taking a double turn on his heeling deck, managed to chuck the bomb (which is on the end of a wooden handle, much like the old throwing hammer) about three times as far as anyone ever dreamed of, and cracked in the nose of a lurking U-boat with it.
“Unluckily, I was not a hammer-thrower, and so had to try to bring about an easier shot. It was with this purpose in view that I submitted a proposal to reconvert the ‘——’ temporarily to the outward seeming of a pleasure yacht; to make her appear so tempting a bait that the Hun’s lust forschrecklichkeit, or whatever they call it, would lure him close enough to give me a chance at him. They were rather inclined to scoff at the plan at first, principally on the ground that the enemy, knowing that there was no pleasure yachting going on in the North Sea, would instantly be suspicious of a craft of that character. I pointed out that there was still a bit of yachting going on in the Norfolk Broads, which the Hun, with his comprehensive knowledge of the East Coast, might well know of, and that there would be nothing strange in a craft from there being blown to sea in a spell of nor’west weather. Of course, the ‘——’ isn’t a Broads type by a long way, but I didn’t expect the Hun to linger over fine distinctions any more than the trout coming up for a fly does. The sequel fully proved that I was right.
“It was largely because the stunt I had in mind promised to cost little more than a new coat of paint and a few rehearsals, which could easily be carried on in the course of our ordinary patrol duties, that I finally received somewhat grudging authorisation to go ahead with it. It was not till the whole show was over that I learned from thelaughing admission of the officer who helped secure that authorization, that the fact that the output of real M.L.’s was becoming large enough so that they were about independent of the use of yachts and other pleasure craft for patrol work, also had a good deal to do with the granting of it.
“I already had several well-trained machine-gunners in the crew, so that about the only addition I had to make to the ship’s company was a half-dozen boys to masquerade as ladies. As they were not meant to stand inspection at close range, nothing elaborate in the way of costume or makeup was necessary. They wore middy jackets, with short duck skirts, which gave them plenty of liberty of action. Most of them (as there was nothing much below the waist going to show anyway) simply rolled up their sailor breeches and went barelegged, and one who went in for white stockings and tennis shoes was considered rather a swanker. Their millinery was somewhat variegated, the only thing in common to the motley units of head-gear being conspicuousness. There was a much beribboned broad-brimmed straw, a droopy Panama, a green and a purple motor veil, and a very chic yachting effect in a converted cap of a lieutenant of Marines with a red band round it. Less in keeping, if more striking, was a Gainsborough, with magenta ostrich plumes, a remnant from some ‘ship’ theatricals.