“Hair wasn’t a very important item, but they all seemed to take so much pleasure in ‘coiffeuring’ that I took good care not to discourage their efforts in that direction. The spirit that you enter that kind of a game in makes all the difference in the world in its success, and these lads—and, indeed, the whole lot of us—were like children playing house. All of them were blondes—even a boy born in Durban, who had more than a touch of the ‘tar brush,’ and one—a roly-poly young Scot, who had made himself a pair of tawny braids from rope ravellings—looked like a cross between ‘Brunnhilde’ and ‘The Viking’s Daughter.’
“It was only during rehearsals, of course, that these lads were ‘ladies of leisure.’ The rest of the time I kept them on brass polishing and deck-scrubbing, with the result that the little old ‘——’ regained, outwardly at least, much of her pristine ship-shapiness. The ‘gentlemen friends’ of the ‘ladies’ were even more of a ‘make-ship’ product than the latter.
“Indeed, they were really costumes rather than individuals. I don’t mean that we used dummies, but only that there were eight or ten flannel jackets and boater hats laid ready, and these were to be worn more or less indiscriminately by any of the regular crew not on watch. Their rôle was simply to loll on the quarterdeck with the ‘ladies’ while the U-boat was sizing us up, then to join for a few minutes in the ‘panic’ following the hoped-forattack, and finally to beat it to their action stations.
“That a ‘baby’ was by far the most effective disguise for the first lance-bomb we hoped to chuck home was obvious at the outset. Both of them had heads, their general shapes (when dressed) were not dissimilar, while the ‘long clothes’ of the infant was found to have a real steadying effect on the missile, on the same principle that ‘streamers’ act to bring an air-bomb down nose-first. Of course, a child in arms, like this one was to be, wasn’t just the kind of thing one would take pleasure yachting; but I knew the Huns took their nurslings to beer gardens, and thought that that might make them think that the Englanders—who were incomprehensible folk anyhow—might take this strange way of accustoming their young to the waves which they sang so loudly of ruling.
“The decisive consideration, however, was the fact a baby was the only thing except a jewel-case that a panicky woman in fear of being torpedoed would stick to. As you can’t get a lance-bomb in a jewel-case, it was plainly ‘baby’ or nothing.
“In the end, because I was afraid that none of the feminine make-ups was quite good enough not to awaken suspicion at close range—I decided that the heaving over of the ‘baby’ should be done by a ‘gentleman’ instead of by a ‘lady.’ As one of the seamen put it, it was only ‘nateral that thenipper’s daddy ’ud be lookin’ arter ’im in time of danger,’ and I had read of sailors being entrusted with children on sinking ships. The man I picked for the job—the ‘father of the che-ild,’ as he soon came to be called—was not the one who had proved the best in distance throwing in the trials, but rather one on whose cold-blooded nerve I knew I could count in any extremity.
“He was a Seaman Gunner, named R——, and was lost a year ago when a rather desperate ‘Q’ stunt he had volunteered for miscarried. He had just the touch of the histrionic desirable for the intimate little affair in question, and the way he played his part fully justified my selecting him.”
K—— leaned back in his chair and blew smoke rings for a minute before resuming his story. “There are some kind of stunts, like this one I’ve been trying to bring off for the last two or three months,” he said, “that always seem to hang fire; and there are others where, from first to last, everything comes up to the scratch on time, just like a film drama. That first one I’m telling you about was like that, everybody—even to the U-boat—coming on to its cue. Indeed, when I think of it now, the whole show seems more like a big movie than anything else.
“By the time we were letter perfect in our parts, there came two or three days of just the kind of a storm I wanted to make a good excuse for a dinky little pleasure boat being out in the middle of the North Sea. I took care, of course, to be ‘blown’to the last position at which an enemy submarine had been reported.
“Then, where a destroyer or a M.L. might have cruised round for a month without sighting anything but fog and the smoke of some of our own ships on the horizon, we picked up a Fritz running brazenly on the surface the first morning. That was first blood for my harmless appearance right there, for he must have seen us some time previously of course, and had we looked in the least warlike, would have submerged before even our lookout spotted his conning-tower.
“As it was, he simply began closing us at full speed, firing as he came. It was rotten shooting at first, as shooting from the very poor platform a submarine affords usually is, but, at about three thousand yards, he put a shell through the fo’c’sl’, luckily above the water-line. The next minute or two was the most anxious time I had, for, if he made up his mind to do it that way, there was nothing to prevent his sticking off there and putting us down with shell-fire.
“Perhaps if the two or three shots which followed had been hits, that is what he would have done. It was probably his disgust at the fact that they were all ‘overs’ that determined him to close in and finish the job with bombs. Possibly, also, the fact that I appeared to be starting to abandon ship at this juncture convinced him finally that the yacht had no fight in her, and it may well be thatthe temptation to loot had something to do with his decision. I could never make quite sure on those points, for Herr Skipper never confided what was in his mind to the one officer who survived him. At any rate, he came nosing nonchalantly in and did just what I had been praying for the last month he would do—poked right up alongside. The heavy sea that had been running for the last two or three days had gone down during the night, so that he was able to stand in pretty close without running much danger of bumping.
“The extent of my abandoning ship had been to follow the old sea rule of saving the women and children first. Or rather, we put the women off in our only boat; the baby, I won’t need to tell you, was somehow ‘overlooked.’ The boat was lowered in full view of the Hun, who was about fifteen hundred yards distant at the moment, and there was a little unrehearsed incident in connection with it that must have done its part in convincing him that what he was witnessing was a genuine piece of ‘abandon.’ One of the girls—it was the blonde ‘Brunnhilde,’ I believe—not wanting to miss any of the fun, started to hang back and tried to bluff them into letting her stay by swearing that she’d rather face the Hun than desert her child. As a matter of fact, the ‘Gainsborough’ had more claim on the kid than ‘Brunnhilde,’ for she—I mean he—had cadged its clothes from a sweetheart who worked in a draper’s shop. If I had been therepersonally, I’m afraid ‘Brunnhilde’s’ little bluff would have won through, for a man whose wits are keen enough to spring a joke at a crisis has always made an especial appeal to me. To the bo’sun, however, orders were orders, and his answer to the recalcitrant blonde’s insubordination was to rush her to the rail by the slack of her middy jacket, and to help her over it with the toe of his boot.
“The ‘K——’s’ low freeboard made the drop a short one, and, luckily, ‘Brunnhilde’ missed the gun’nel’ of the whaler and landed gently in the water, from where she was dragged by the ready hands of her sisters a few moments later. They do say, though, that she turned a complete flip-flop in the air, and that there was a display of—well, if a Goerz prism binocular won’t reveal the difference between a pair of blue sailor’s breeches and French lingerie at under a mile, all I can say is that we’ve much overrated German optical glass. As I learned later, however, the Huns, observing only the fall and missing the revealing details, merely concluded that the Englanders were jumping overboard in panic, and dismissed their last lingering doubts and suspicions.
“The girls were already instructed that they were to lie low and keep their peroxide curls out of sight as long as they were within a mile or so of the submarine, so as not to tempt the latter to follow them up for a look-see at closer range. Theboat had orders to pull astern for a while, and then, if the Hun was observed to come alongside the ‘——’ as hoped, to turn eight or ten points to port and head up in the direction from which he had appeared. The reason for this manœuvre, which was carried out precisely as planned, you will understand in a moment.
“On came Fritz, coolly contemptuous, and on went the show, like the unrolling of a movie scenario. For a while I was fearful that he might order back my boat to use in boarding me with, but as soon as he was close enough to be sure that I had no gun he must have decided so much trouble was superfluous. He had only one gun, it was evident—the gunners kept sweeping it back and forth to cover from about the bridge to the engine-room as they drew nearer—and presently I saw men, armed with short rifles, coming up through both fore and after hatches. Far from exhibiting any signs of belligerency, I still kept three or four of my ’flannelled fools’ mildly panicking. Or, rather, Iorderedthem to panic mildly. As a matter of fact, they did it rather violently—a good deal more like movie rough stuff than the real thing.
“Little difference it made to Fritz, though, who seemed to take it quite as a matter of course that the British yachtsman should show his terror like a Wild West film drama heroine. On he stood, and when he came within hailing distance, a burly ruffian on the bridge—doubtless the skipper—shoutedsomething in guttural German-English which I never quite made out, but which was probably some kind of warning or other. I don’t think I saw any of my crew exactly ‘Kamerading’, but I needn’t tell you that every man in sight was doing his best to register ‘troubled passivity’, or something like that. I had anticipated that I might not be in a position to signal his cue to R——, and so had arranged that he should keep watch from a cabin port, and to use his own judgment about the time of his ‘entrance.’ I was afraid to have him on deck all the time for fear the ‘che-ild’ might be subjected to too careful a scrutiny. R—— was just in flannels, understand, so there was nothing suspicious in his own appearance. He did both his play-acting and his real acting to perfection, neither overdoing nor underdoing one or the other.
“The U-boat was close alongside, rapidly easing down under reversed propellers, before R—— appeared, just as natural an anguished father with a child as you could possibly ask for. Two or three of the Huns covered him with their carbines as he dashed out of the port door of the saloon—that one just behind you—but lowered the muzzles again when they saw it was apparently only a half-distracted parent trying to signal for the boat to come back for him and his babe. I have no doubt that there were some very sarcastic remarks passed on that U-boat at this juncture about the courage of the English male.Ifthere were, the next act ofthe coolest and bravest boy I ever knew literally forced the words down their throats.
“The whaler which, following its instructions, had been pulling easterly for some minutes, now bore about four points on the port quarter, so that R——, in his apparent endeavour to call its attention to the deserted babe, could not have seemed to have been doing anything suspicious when he swung the bundle above his head and rushed to the rail almost opposite the U-boat’s conning-tower. That rotary upward and backward swing was absolutely necessary for getting distance with, and without it there was no way that forty or fifty pound infant could have been hurled the fifteen feet or more which still intervened. As it was, it landed, fair and square, in the angle formed by the after end of the conning-tower and the deck. At the same instant our machine-guns opened up through several of the port scuttles, which had been specially enlarged and masked with that end in view, and in a few seconds there was not an unwounded Hun in sight. The gunners had been the first ones sprayed, with the result that they were copped before firing a shot. Their torpedoes, or course, were too close, and not bearing properly enough to launch.
“Immediately following the explosion of the bomb and the opening of the machine-gun fire a strange thing happened. I saw the U-boat’s bow-rudders begin to slant, saw her begin to gather way,heard the hum of motors as the rattle of the Maxims (their work completed) died out, and—down she went, and with three hatches open, and a ragged hole abaft the conning-tower where the ‘baby’ had exploded in its final tantrum. I could never get any sure explanation of this from any of the survivors we fished up out of the water, but everything points to the probability that the skipper—perhaps inadvertently, as the up-kick of the bomb blew him overboard—pulled the diving klaxon, and the officer in the central control room, not knowing just how things stood above, proceeded to submerge as usual. Doubtless the men who should have been standing by to close the hatches in such an emergency had been caught by the machine-gun fire. With every man below tied down with his duties in connection with submerging her, it is quite conceivable that nothing could be done, once she was below the surface, to stop the inrush of water, and that she was quickly beyond all hope of bringing up again. I didn’t have a fair chance to size up the hole ripped open by the bomb, but rather think that also was large enough to have admitted a good deal of water.
“It was rather disappointing in a way, having her go down like that, for as things had turned out, it was a hundred to one we should otherwise have captured her almost unharmed. There was a good deal of solace, however, in the fact that none of the Huns were getting back to tell what happened tothem, so that this identical stunt was left open for use again. As a matter of fact, variations of it were used a number of times, by one kind of craft or another, before an unlucky slip-up—the one which finished poor R——, by the way—gave the game away and started us veering off on other tacks. I have had a number of successes since that time,” concluded K——, pouring me a glass of the yacht’s 1835 Cognac as a night cap, “but never a one which was quite so much like taking candy from a child as that ‘opener.’”
There was always a strange and distinctive fascination to me in standing on the bridge of one ship and watching other ships—and especially lines of ships—push up and sharpen to shape above the edge of the sea.
This feeling, strong enough in ordinary times—when it was but a peaceful merchantman one watched from and but peaceful merchantmen that one saw—is intensified manifold when it is a warship’s bridge one paces, and only the silhouettes of ships of war that notch the far horizon. Battleship, battle cruiser, light cruiser, destroyer, sloop, trawler, and all the other kinds and classes of patrol craft—each has its own distinctive smudge of smoke, its own peculiar way of revealing its identity by a blurred foretop, funnel, or superstructure long before its hull has lifted its amorphous mass above the sky-line.
And now to the sky-line riddles one was given to read, and to be thrilled by as the puzzle revealed itself, had been added the great troop convoy from America, my first sight of one of which was just unfolding. H.M.S.Buzz, in which I chanced to beout at the time, was not one of the escorting destroyers, and it was only by accident that the course she was steering to join up with a couple of other ships of her flotilla on some kind of “hunting” stunt took her across that of the convoy, and passed it in inspiring panoramic review before our eyes. From dusky blurs of smoke trailing low along the horizon, ship after ship—from ex-floating palaces with famous names to angular craft of strange design which were evidently the latest word in standardised construction—they rose out of the sea (as our quartering course brought us nearer) until a wide angle of our seaward view was blocked by an almost solid wall of steadily steaming steel.
There was a lot to stir the imagination in that sight—aye, fairly to grip you by the throat as a dawning sense of what it portended sank home. In the abstract it was the living, breathing symbol of the relentless progress of America’s mighty effort, a tangible sign of the fact that her aid to the Allies would not arrive too late. What it stood for concretely is best expressed in the words of the young R.N.R. sub-lieutenant who was officer of the watch at the time.
“It looks to me,” he said, with a pleased smile, as he lowered his glass after a long scrutiny of the advancing lines of ships, “as though there’d be jolly near forty thousand new Yanks to be catered for in Liverpool by to-morrow evening.”
“Yes,” I said somewhat dubiously, my mind suddenly assailed by a misgiving awakened by the thousands of yards of torpedo target presented by the sides of those placidly ploughing ships, “that is, assuming that they get there safely. But they’re only just entering the danger zone now, and there’s a lot of water got to stream under their keels before they berth in the Mersey.
“I don’t know anything about convoys, or the ways of protecting them; but all the same, it looks to me as though that bunch of troopers would offer a mark like the map of Ireland to a U-boat, and a lot more vulnerable one.”
Young P—— laughed as he bent, squint-eyed, to take a bearing on a destroyer zigzagging jauntily with high-flung wake in the van of the approaching fleet.
“That’s what everyone—even an old sailor—says the first time he sights one of the big transatlantic convoys,” he said; “and if there are any skippers new to the job in that lot there, that’s just whatthey’resaying. It’s all through failure to appreciate—indeed, no one who has not seen the ins and outs of it would be in a position to appreciate—the effectiveness of the whole anti-submarine scheme, and, especially, what almost complete protection thoroughly up-to-the-minute screening—with adequate destroyers and other light craft—really affords. As a matter of fact, every soldier in that convoy is probably a good deal safer now—andright on in through this so-called danger zone to harbour—than he was marching down Broadway to the pier—at least, if Broadway is like it was when I used to put in to New York as a kid in theBaltic.”
“But will you tell me,” I protested, “how a U-boat, firing two or three torpedoes from, say, just about where we are now, could possibly miss a mark like that?”
“Well, it would take a bit of missing from hereabouts, I admit,” was the reply; “only, if there is any Fritz still in the game with the nerve to try it, he would also be missing himself.”
“What would happen to him?” I asked.
“One or all of two or three things might happen,——” P—— answered, after ordering a point or two alteration in course to give safe berth to the nearing destroyer.
“He might get his hide holed by gunfire, he might get split open by a depth-charge, he might get rammed, and he might get several other things. With all the luck in his favour, he might even get a transport. But there’s one thing I can assure you he wouldn’t get—and that’s back to his base. There may be two or three bearings from which one of these big convoys appears to present a mark as wide and unbroken as the map of Ireland; but there’s nothing in heaven or earth to save the Fritz who hasn’t learned by the sad example of nosmall number of his mates that it is quick suicide for him to slip a mouldie down one of them.”
“You mean that he doesn’t try it? that he’s afraid to take the chance?” I asked somewhat incredulously, for I had somehow come to regard Fritz, though a pirate, as a dashing and daring one when the stake was high enough.
“Except under very favourable circumstances, yes,” was the reply; “and now that, with the coming of the American destroyers and patrol boats, we are able to do the thing the way we want to, what Fritz might reckon as ‘very favourable circumstances’ are becoming increasingly fewer and farther between. Now a few months ago, when we were just getting the convoy system under weigh, and when there was a shortage of every kind of screening craft, things were different. Fritz’smoralwas better then than it is now, and we didn’t have the means of shaking it that we have piled up since. At our first convoys, straggling and little schooled in looking after themselves, he used to take a chance as often as not, if he happened to sight them; but even then he rarely got back to tell what happened to him. There was the one that tried to celebrate the advent of ‘Peace-on-Earth-Good-Will-to-Men’ last Christmas Day by sinking theAmperi, which was one of a convoy theWhack(in which I was Number Two at the time) was helping to escort. Well, I couldn’t say much for his ‘Good-Will-toward-Men,’ but he certainly found a shortcut to ‘Peace-on-Earth,’ or at least the bottom of the sea.
“Now that chap took a real sporting chance, and got his reward for it—both ways. I mean to say, that he sunk the ship he went after all right—which was his reward one way; and that we then sunk him—which was his reward the other way. There was a funny coincidence in connection with that little episode which might amuse you. We were——”
He paused for a moment while he spelled out for himself the “Visual” which one of the escorting destroyers was flashing to the convoy leader, but presently, with a smile of pleased reminiscence, took up the thread of his yarn. This is the story that young Sub-Lieutenant P——, R.N.R., told me the while we leaned on the lee rail of the bridge and watched the passing of those miles-long lines of packed troopers as, silently sure of purpose, superbly contemptuous of danger, they steamed steadily on to deliver their cargoes of human freight one step further towards the fulfilment of its destiny.
“It was Christmas Day, as I told you,” he said, bracing comfortable against the roll, “and a cold, blustering, windy day it was. Several days previously we had picked up a small slow convoy off a West African port, and were escorting it to a port on the West Coast of England. The escort consisted only of theWhackand theSmack, the skipper of the latter, as the senior officer, being in command. None of the ships—they were mostly slowfreighters—had had much convoy experience to speak of at the time, and we were having our hands full all the way keeping them in any kind of formation. They seemed to be getting worse rather than better in this respect as we got into the waters where U-boat attacks might be expected, but this may have been largely due to the weather, which was—well, about the usual mid-winter brand in those latitudes. In fact, we were just becoming hopeful that the rising wind and sea, both were about ‘Force 6,’ might make it impossible for submarines to operate during the day or so that still must elapse before reaching port, when trouble began.
“All the morning thePlato, which had been a bad straggler throughout, had been falling astern, and finally theSmackorderedWhackback to prod her on and do what could be done in the way of screening her. She still continued to lose distance, however, so that, at noon, we were nearly out of sight of the main convoy, of which little more than smoke and topmasts could be seen on the northern horizon.
“At that hour theSmack, doubtless because he had received some report of the presence of U-boats in his vicinity, ordered us to rejoin the convoy. We left an armed trawler to do what it could for the loiteringPlato, and started off at the best rate the weather would allow to make up the distance lost. It was at this juncture that theamusing little coincidence I mentioned a while ago occurred.
“A patrol-boat, of course, does not carry a padre, any more than it does a number of the other comforts and luxuries provided in cruisers and battleships, and for that reason we hadn’t been able to do very much in the way of a Christmas service. Several of the ship’s company were somewhat religiously inclined, however, and these, in lieu of anything better, had asked for and received permission to hold a bit of a song service, in case there was opportunity for it, during the day. As the morning had been a rather full one, no suitable interval offered until their rather poor apology for a Christmas dinner was out of the way, and we were headed back to join the convoy. Then they went to it with a will, and for the next hour or more fragments of Yuletide songs came drifting back to my cabin to mingle with a number of other things conspiring to disturb the forty winks I was trying to snatch while the going was good. After a while, it appears, having run through their repertoire of Christmas songs, they started in on Easter ones, ‘Bein’ that they was mo’ or less on the same subject,’ as one of them explained to me later. They had just boomed the last line of a chorus which concluded with ‘We shall seek our risen Lord,’ when a signal was received stating that a periscope had been sighted by some ship of the convoy, and, sure enough, off they had to go toseek—well, I wouldn’t take the Hun quite so near his own valuation of himself to put it as the song does, but all the same that quick new kick of the screws told me as plain as any words, even before I read the signal, that the oldWhackwas jumping away to seeksomethingthat had risen.
“The convoy was dead ahead of us at a distance of about seven miles when I reached the bridge, and, the visibility being unusually good for that time of year, I could see all of the ships distinctly, as they steamed in two columns of three abreast. I was even able to recognise theAmperiin the centre of the leading line. We were just comforting each other with the assurance that it was getting too rough for a U-boat to run a torpedo with any chance of finding its mark, when a huge spout of water jumped skyward right in the middle of the convoy. When it subsided, theAmperi, with a heavy list to port, could be seen heading westward, evidently with her engines and steering gear disabled, while the rest of the convoy, smoke rolling from their funnels, were ‘starring’ on northerly courses.
“The alarm was rung, and as the men rushed to action stations a signal was made to theSmackasking what was wrong. She replied, ‘Amperitorpedoed; join me with all dispatch.’ This, of course, we had already started to do, though the wind and sea were knocking a good many knots off our best speed. It was evident enough that theAmperihad received a death-blow, so that we were not surprised to find them abandoning ship as we began to close her.
“Rotten as the weather was for it, this was being conducted most coolly and skilfully, and three boats had already left her before we came driving down to her assistance.Smackhad signalled us to pick up survivors, and we had stood in, at reduced speed, to 250 yards of the now heavily heeling ship, with the intention of proceeding on down, to the leeward of her to the aid of two of her boats, when we sighted three or four feet of periscope sticking out of the water, one point on the starboard bow and at a distance of about a couple of hundred yards. To see anything at all in rough water like that, you understand, a periscope has to be poked well above the slap of the waves, and that about equalizes the greater difficulty there is in picking up the ‘feather’ when it’s choppy.
“I was at my action station with the 12-pounder batteries at this juncture, but as it looked like a better chance for the depth-charges than the guns, no order to open fire was given just yet. The captain ordered the helm to be steadied, and rang up ‘Full speed ahead’ to the engine-room. We passed the periscope ten yards on the port side, and when the stern was just coming abreast it, two charges were released together. As they were both set for the same depth it is probable that the one staggeringly powerful explosion we felt was caused bytheir detonating simultaneously. The shock was as solid as though we had struck a rock, and I could feel a distinct lift to the ship before the impact of it. There was something so substantially satisfying about that muffled jar that it seemed only in the natural course of things that it effected what it was intended to. The bow of the U-boat broke surface almost immediately, the fact that it showed before the conning-tower proving at once that she was hard hit and heavily down by the stern. Indeed, the deck of her from the conning-tower aft was fated never again to feel the rush of sea air.
“She was now less than a hundred yards right astern of us, and heading, in a wobbly sort of way, like a half-stunned porpoise floundering away from the ‘boil’ of a depth-charge, on just about the course theWhackhad been on when she kicked loose her ‘cans.’
“The skipper put the helm hard-a-starboard, with the idea of turning to ram, at the same time ordering me to open fire with the port twelve-pounder. That was what I had been waiting for. The gun-crew was down to three—through the others having been detailed for boat work in connection with picking up the survivors from theAmperi—but that didn’t bother a good deal in a short and sweet practice like this one. The ship was bobbing like a cork from the seas, in addition to her heavy heel from the short turn and the vibration from the grind of the helm. But neither did any of these little things matter materially, forwe’d always made a point of carrying out our target practice under the worst conditions.
“The first round, fired at three hundred yards, was an ‘over’ by a narrow margin, but the second, at two hundred yards, was a clean hit on the conning-tower, carrying away the periscope and the stays supporting it. The explosion of this shell appeared to split the whole superstructure of the conning-tower, from the bridge to the deck. I did not see anyone on the bridge at this moment, and if there had been he must certainly have been killed. The fact that the submarine seemed to have been blown to the surface by the force of our exploding depth-charges rather than to have come up voluntarily, may account for the fact that no head was poked above the bridge rail as she emerged. If she had come up deliberately it would have been the duty of the skipper and a signalman to pop out on to the bridge at once to be ready for eventualities. Evidently they had no chance to do so on this occasion, and as a consequence spun out their thread o’ life by anywhere from twenty to thirty seconds—whatever that was worth to them.
“My third shot plumped into her abaft the conning-tower, and the explosion which followed it had a good deal more behind it than the charge of a twelve-pounder shell. Before I had a chance to see what had blown up, however, we had rammed her, and whatever damage that shot had caused dissolvedin the chaos of what proved the realcoup de grâce. That ramming was undoubtedly one of the prettiest little jobs of its kind, one of the most neatly finessed, ever brought off.
“Since running over the submarine and dropping the depth-charges the captain had turned theWhackthrough thirty-two points, a complete circle. This brought her back to a course just at right angles to the beam of the now helpless enemy, toward which she was driven to the limit of the last kick of the engines. Just before the moment of impact the screws were stopped dead, so as to sink the bow and reduce the chance of riding over the U-boat and rolling it under her stem, as has occasionally happened, instead of cutting it straight in two. The jar, when it came, was terrific, throwing from his feet every man not holding to something; yet there was that in the clean, sweet crunch of it that told me that it had accomplished all the heart could desire, even before the next second furnished graphic ocular evidence of it.
“The sharp, fine bows of theWhackdrove home well abaft the conning-tower, and—though the staggering jar told of the resistance met—for all the eye could see, cut through like a knife in soft butter. Indeed, the amazing cleanness of the cut has always seemed to me the most remarkable feature of the whole show. The bow end of the U-boat, with the conning-tower, was the section which was cut off on my side—port—and the even cross-sectionof it that gaped up at me was very little different from that I once saw when one of our own submarines was being sawed through amidships in connection with some repairs. Even the plating did not appear to be bent or buckled. The impression that ring of shining clean-cloven steel left on my mind was of a cut as true and even as could have been done in dock with an acetylene flame. This was largely imagination, of course; and yet how photographic my mind-picture is you may judge from the fact that I have distinct recollection of seeing the thin circle of red lead where it showed all the way round beneath the grey of the outer paint.
“The heavily tilted main deck of the interior of this section of the U-boat did not appear to be flooded at this juncture, though any water that had been shipped, of course, would have been in the now submerged bows. I have a jumbled recollection of wheels and levers and switchboards, fittings of brass and steel, and what I took to be three torpedoes—one on the port side, and two, one above the other, on the starboard. The most arresting thing of all, however, was the figure of a solitary man, the only one, strange to say, that anybody reports having seen. He was scrambling upward toward the opening, and I have never been quite sure whether he was ‘Kamerad-ing’ with his uplifted hands, or whether they were raised preparatory to the dive it is quite probable he intended to make into the sea.
“Whichever the attitude was, it had no chance to serve its purpose. The stern section of the U-boat—the one most heavily damaged by the depth-charges—was seen to sink abreast the starboard 12-pounder battery by the crew of that gun, but the forward part—the one with the conning-tower, which I had seen into the interior of—buoyed up by the water-tight compartments in the bows, continued to float. Observing this, the Captain ordered the helm put a-starboard, and as we turned, the 4-inch gun and my 12-pounder opened up together. My very first round, fired over the port quarter, hit and exploded fairly inside the gaping end of the section, right where I had last seen the man with upraised hands. That, and the two or three smashing hits by the 4-inch gun, finished the job. A whirlpool in the sea marked the rush of water into the severed end, and this section—for all the world as though it had been a complete submarine—tossed its bows, with their elephant-ear-like rudders, skyward, and planed off on an easy angle toward the bottom. Its disappearance was complete. There were no survivors, and practically no floating wreckage. Only a spreading film of oil and a tangle of torn wakes slowly dissolving in the wash of the driving seas marked the scene of the action. It had lasted something over ten minutes.
“TheWhacksuffered considerable damage from the impact with the submarine, though not enoughto give us serious worry, even in so heavy a sea. The stem was bent over to port, like a broken nose, and the buckling plates caused her to make quite a bit of water. We had no trouble coping with this, however, and made port, with the survivors of theAmperiaboard, without difficulty. There we soon had the—well, not unmixedly unpleasant—news that theWhack’swounds were of a nature somewhat comparable to what the Tommy in France calls a ‘Blighty.’ Without having any real permanent harm done her, she was still enough banged up to need a special refit, the period of which, of course, the most of us would be able to spend at home on leave. Yes, indeed,” he concluded, grinning pleasedly, “that was a ripping piece of ramming in more ways than one.”
P—— went over and bent above the shivering “Gyro,” for a moment, took a long look through his glasses at the last of the now receding convoy, and then came back and rejoined me by the rail.
“There was one little thing I neglected to tell you about,” he said presently, “and that was the part theSmackplayed in that show. Although theWhackgot all thekudosfor the sinking, there is a decided possibility that a bit of a stunt theSmackbrought off before ever we came up may have been largely if not entirely responsible for us getting the chance we did.
“Smack, you see, was near at hand when theAmperiwas torpedoed, and the instant her Captainsaw the spout of water shoot up in the air, he altered course and drove at full speed for the point he reckoned the submarine would be most likely to be encountered. He reports that he had the good fortune to hit it, while it was still submerged, and that the shock was severe enough to throw men off their balance. Shortly after that a periscope appeared, and it was this that gave theWhackher chance to drop her depth-charges.
“Now, not unnaturally, the Captain of theSmackhad good reason to believe that his striking the U-boat, even if he only grazed her, had something to do with her reappearance on the surface at a moment when she must have known a strenuous hunt for her was in progress. Unluckily, for his claim, however, the bows of theSmack, when she came to be docked, did not show sufficient evidences of having been in heavy collision to warrant the conclusion that the U-boat had been enough damaged to have gone to the surface from that cause alone. Under the circumstances, therefore, there wasn’t anything else to do but give the credit for bringing her up toWhack’sdepth-charges, while of course, the fact that it was also theWhackthat rammed her was obvious enough. The consequence was, as I said, thatwegot all thekudos.”
He gazed for a few moments at the back-curling bow-wave, before resuming. “Yes,wegot all thekudos,” he said slowly; “but, all the same, I’ve never been able to figure why Fritz didn’t douse hisperiscope and try to dive deeper when he saw theWhackrounding toward him, if it wasn’t because there was something pretty radically wrong with him already. I can’t help thinking that the oldSmackhad a lot to do with starting that Fritz on his downward path, even if it was theWhackthat gave him the final shove.”
It was very characteristic, that last little explanation of P——’s. If there is one thing more than another that has impressed me in hearing these young British destroyer officers tell the “little games they have played with Fritz,” it is the fine sporting spirit in which they invariably insist in sharing the credit of an achievement with every other officer, and man, and ship that has in any way figured in the action. It was the fault of the Hun that we could no longer treat the enemy as we would an opponent in sport; but that only makes it all the more inspiring to see the fellow-players still keeping alive the old spirit among themselves.
It was generally admitted by flying-men, even before the failure of the attempts to destroy theGoebenwhile ashore in the Dardanelles early in ’18, that the air-bomb was a most uncertain and ineffective weapon against a large ship of any class, but especially so against a warship with deck armour.
The principal reason for this is that the blunt-nosed air-bomb, no matter from how high it may be dropped, has neither the velocity nor the structure to penetrate the enclosed spaces of a ship where its explosive charge would find something to exert itself against.
This is why an 18-pounder shell, penetrating to a casemate or engine-room, for instance, may easily do more damage to a warship than an air-bomb of ten times that weight expending its force more or less harmlessly upon an upper deck.
Merchant ships, with their inflammable and comparatively flimsy upper works, are more vulnerable to air-bombs than are warships, but even of thesevery few indeed have been completely destroyed as a consequence of aerial attack. Some of the gamest fights of the war on the sea have been those of merchant skippers who, in the days before their ships had guns of any description to keep aircraft at a distance, brought their vessels through by the exercise of the boundless resource which characterises their kind, usually by sheer skill in manœuvring. A very remarkable instance of this character I heard of a few days ago from a Royal Naval Reserve officer who figured in it.
“I was in a British ship temporarily in the Holland-South American service at the time,” he said, “and we were outward bound from Rotterdam after discharging a cargo of wheat from Montevideo. It was before the Huns had raised any objection to ships bound for Dutch ports using the direct route by the English Channel, and also before the U-boats had begun to sink neutrals on that run. Except for the comparatively slight risk of encountering a floating mine, we reckoned we were just about as safe in the North Sea as in the South Atlantic. Of course, we carried no gun of any kind—no heavy gun, I mean. Wedidhave a rifle or two, as I will tell you of presently.
“Why the attack was made we never had any definite explanation. In fact, the Germans themselves probably never knew, for they tumbled over themselves to assure the Holland Government that there was some misunderstanding, and that theywould undertake that nothing of the kind should occur again.
“My personal opinion has always been that it was a sheer case of running amuck on the part of the Hun aviator responsible for the outrage; for, as I have said, we were empty of cargo, our marks were unmistakable, and we were steering a course several points off the one usually followed by the Dutch boats to England. Anyway, he paid the full penalty for his descent to barbarism.
“It was a clear afternoon, with a light wind and lighter sea, and we were steaming comfortably along at about nine knots, heading for the Straits of Dover, when the look-out at the mast-head reported a squadron of ’planes approaching from the south.
“Presently we sighted them from the bridge—five seaplanes, three or four points off our starboard bow. There had been reports of noonday raids on Calais for several days, and I surmised that those were Hun machines returning from some such stunt.
“Holding to an even course, the squadron passed over a mile or more to the starboard of us, and it was already some distance astern when I saw one of the machines—I think it was the one leading the ‘V’—detach itself from the others and head swiftly back in our direction. There was nothing out of the way in this action at a time when every ship was held in more or less suspicion byboth belligerents, and it seemed to me so right and proper that the chap should come and have a look at us, in case he had some doubts, that I did not even think it necessary to call the ‘Old Man’ to the bridge, or even send him word of what I took to be no more than a passing incident.
“Descending swiftly as he approached, the Hun passed over the ship diagonally—from port quarter to starboard bow—at a height of six or eight hundred feet.
“‘That’ll end it,’ I thought. ‘Our marks, and the fact that we’re in ballast, ought to satisfy him.’
“But no. Back he came. This time he was a hundred feet or so lower, and flying on a line directly down our course, passing over us from bow to stern. Again he swung round and repeated the manœuvre in reverse, this time at a height of not more than four hundred feet. He had done this five or six times before it occurred to me that he was taking practice sights for bombing; but not even then, when I saw him with his eye glued to his dropping-instrument, did it occur to me that he was doing anything more than trying his sights. It was at the next ‘run’ or two that the thing began to get on my nerves, and I called up the skipper on the voice-pipe and told him I did not quite like the look of the circus.
“The Old Man was in the middle of his afternoon siesta, but he tumbled out and came puffing up to the bridge at the double. He was no moreinclined to take the thing seriously than I was, but, on the off-chance—which your careful skipper is always thinking of in the back of his brain-box—he rang up ‘More steam’ on the engine-room telegraph, and ordered the quartermaster to start zig-zagging, a stunt we had already practised a bit in the event of a submarine attack.
“‘If he’s just trying his eye,’ said the Old Man, ‘it’ll give him all the better practice to follow us; while, it he’s up to mischief, it may fuss him a bit.’
“The Hun had just whirled about three or four cables’ length ahead of us, when the smoke rolling up from the funnel and the swinging bow must have told him that we were trying to give him a bit more of a run for his money. Circling on a wider turn, he came charging straight down the line of our new course, flying at what I should say was between two and three times the height of our masts. We were looking at the machine at an angle of about forty-five degrees—so that he must have been about as far ahead of us as he was high, say, a hundred yards—when I saw a small dark object detach itself from under the fuselage and begin to come directly towards us, almost as though shot from a gun.
“It was the only bomb I ever saw fall while I was in a sufficiently detached state of mind to mark what it looked like. ‘Fall’ hardly conveys a true picture of the way the thing seemed to approach, for the swift machine, speeding at perhapsa hundred miles an hour, must have imparted, at the instant of releasing, a good deal of lateral velocity.
“At first it was coming almost head on to the way I was looking at it, and, greatly foreshortened, it had so much the appearance of a round sand-bag that it is not surprising that the skipper took it for some kind of practice dummy. ‘Probably a dud,’ I remember him saying; ‘but don’t let it hit you. Stand by to duck!’
“My next recollection is of the thing beginning to wobble a bit, probably as the nose began to tilt downward; but still it seemed to be coming straight toward us rather than simply falling. I seem to recall that the seaplane passed overhead an appreciable space before the bomb, but I must have heard it rather than seen it, for I never took my eye off the speeding missile.
“The latter seemed at the least from fifty to a hundred feet above my head as it hurtled over the starboard end of the bridge, and I saw it with startling distinctness silhouetted against a cloud that was bright with the light of the sun it had just obscured. It was still wobbling, but apparently tending to steady under the combined influence of the downward pull of the heavy head and the backward drag of the winged tail. It appeared to be revolving.
“I have since thought, however, that I may have got the latter impression from a ‘spinner’ that isoften attached to this type of bomb to unwind, with the resistance of the air, and expose the detonator.
“Down it came until it whanged against some of the standing rigging of the foremast—seeming to deflect inboard and downward slightly as a consequence—missed the mainmast by a few feet, and struck squarely against the side of the deckhouse on the poop.
“The scene immediately after the explosion of the bomb is photographed indelibly on my memory; the events which followed are more of a jumble. The detonation was a good deal less sharp than I had expected, and so was the shock from it. The latter was not nearly so heavy as that from many a wave that had crashed over her bows, but, coming from aft rather than for’ard, the jolt had a distinctly different feel, and by a man ’tween decks would hardly have been mistaken for that from a sea.
“It was the flash of the explosion—a huge spurt of hot, red flame—that was the really astonishing thing. It seemed to embrace the whole afterpart of the ship, and everything one of the forked tongues of fire was projected against burst into flame itself.
“The ramshackle deckhouse, which had been reduced to kindling wood by the explosion, roared like a furnace in the middle of the poop. Even the deck itself was blazing. I had once been near anincendiary bomb in a London air raid, and knew that nothing else could have produced so sudden and so fierce a fire.
“But I also knew that the first burst of flame is the worst in such a case, and that most of the fire came from the inflammable stuff in the bomb itself.
“As I had always heard that sand was better than water in putting out a fire of this kind, and knowing we carried several barrels of it for scrubbing the decks, I ordered it to be brought up and thrown on the flames, but stood by on the bridge myself in case the skipper, who was bawling down the engine-room voice-pipe for more steam, needed me for anything else.
“Luckily the sand was close at hand, and they were scattering it from buckets over the blazing deck within a minute or two. Except for the débris of the deckhouse, the fire was put out almost as quickly as it was started, and, between sand and water, even that was being rapidly got under control, when suddenly the Hun, whom I had almost forgotten in the rush of undoing his dirty work, flashed into sight again.
“The skipper had our ship zigzagging so short and sharp by this time that her wake looked like the teeth of a big, crazy saw, and this the Hun was unable to follow closely enough to get a fore-and-aft sight down her as he had done the first time.
“Coming up astern, he kicked out a bomb just before he was over her port quarter, but it only shot across her diagonally, and struck the water on her starboard side, about a hundred feet away. It went off with, if anything, a sharper crack than the one which had struck the poop, and the foam geyser the explosion shot up flashed a bloody red for the instant the water took to chill the glow of the molten thermit.
“Vanishing even more quickly was a ragged red star which fluttered for a moment beneath the surface of the water itself as the flame stabs shot out in all directions from the central core of the explosion.
“No water was thrown aboard us, and, near as I was to the explosion on the bridge, the rush of air could hardly be felt. Something that came tinkling down after striking the side of the charthouse, however—I picked it up when the show was over—turned out to be a thin fragment of the steel casing of the bomb.
“A similar fragment, twisted into a peculiar shape, struck the chest of a man leaning over the rail in the waist of the ship, inflicting a slight flesh wound the exact shape of a ragged capital ‘C.’
“That any kind of a living man could really be trying to destroy a mere merchant ship in cold blood seemed to me so monstrous, so utterly impossible, that, until the second bomb was dropped, I was almost ready to believe that the first had beenlaunched by accident. From then on we knew it was a fight for life.
“The Hun took a broader swerve in bringing his machine round for the next charge, and, ten times quicker on his helm than we were, anticipated our next shift of course, and came darting down on an almost straight fore-and-aft line again. The sudden cloud of our foreblown smoke—there was a following wind on the ‘leg’ they had put her on at the moment—which engulfed him at the instant his third bomb was released was the one thing in the world that could have made him miss so easy a ‘sitter.’ The quick ‘side-flip’ the sharply-banked ’plane gave to the dropped missile threw it wide by twice the distance the second had missed us. Though the detonation rang sharp and clear, and though a vicious spout of foam shot up, I could note no effect of the thing whatever on the ship. Whether that was his last bomb or not we could never be quite sure. At any rate, it was the last he tried to drop upon us, or upon any other ship for that matter.
“Just why he returned to the attack with his machine-gun we could only guess. It may have been, as is probable, that he was at the end of the small supply of bombs left from the raid he was doubtless returning from.
“Again, however, it is just possible that the fact that the fire was being got under control on the poop impelled him to adopt an attack calculatedto drive the plucky chaps who were fighting it to cover.
“Anyhow, flying just high enough to clear the tops of the masts, he came swooping back, and it was upon the men trying to put out the fire—now confined to the wreckage—of the deckhouse—that he seemed to concentrate his attack. Two or three of these I saw fall under the rain of bullets, and among them was our freight clerk, who had also been knocked down by the explosion of the first bomb, but who, being hardly stunned by the shock, was soon on his feet again and leading the fire-fighters.
“He was a good deal of a character, this freight clerk. Although well educated, he had led a free and easy existence in various parts of the world. For a year previous to the war he had been a cowboy, and some queer trait in his character made him still cling to theponcho, or shoulder blanket, and baggy trousers, which are the main features of the Argentine cow-puncher’s rigout. It was the Wild West rig that made me notice him when he was knocked down by the bomb and later by the machine-gun fire.
“He was scarcely more hurt the second time than the first, but the bullet which had grooved the outer covering of his brain-box seemed also to have put a new idea inside it. I saw him pull himself together in a dazed sort of way after the seaplane had passed, and then shake off the hand of a manwho tried to help him, and dash off down the ladder, tumbling to cover, I thought.
“It must have been a minute or two later that I saw him, legs wide apart to keep his balance, pumping back at the Hun (who had swung close again in the interim) with a rifle—a weapon which I later learned was an old Winchester, which had been rusting on the wall of the freight clerk’s cabin. He appeared to have had the worst of the exchange, for when I looked again he was sitting, with one leg crumpled crookedly under him, propped up against a bitt.
“He looked still full of fight, though, and seemed to be replenishing the magazine of the rifle from his bandoliers.
“The skipper sent me below to stir things up a bit in the engine-room at this juncture, and I did not see my cowboy friend until he had fought two or three more unequal rounds and was squaring away, groggy, but still unbeaten, for what proved the final one.
“I don’t know whether he ever got credit for it or not, but the Old Man’s plan of action at this juncture must pretty nearly have marked a mile-post in merchant ship defence against aerial attack. We had been instructed in, and had practised the zigzag before this, but that was about the limit of our resources in this line. ‘Squid’ tactics—smoke screening—had hardly been more than thought of for anything but destroyers. Yet thewily old skipper, literally on a moment’s notice, brought off a stunt that could not have been improved upon if it had been the result of a year’s thought and experience.
“The instant the Hun ‘stumbled’ when he struck the cloud of smoke that was pouring ahead of us, the skipper’s ready mind began evolving a plan still further to besmudge the atmosphere. Today, with special instructions and special stuff ready to hand, a merchant captain, if he needed it, would simply tell the chief engineer to ‘make smoke screen.’
“On this occasion the Old Man meant the same thing when I heard him yelling down the engine-room voice-pipe to ‘Smoke up like hell!’
“About all the chief could do under the circumstances was to stoke faster and cut down the draught. This he did to the best of his ability, but the screen did not bear much resemblance to one of those almost solid streams of soot a modern destroyer can turn out by spraying oil freely and shutting off the air.
“Such as it was, however, the Old Man made the most of, and by steaming down the wind accomplished the double purpose of cutting down the draught fanning the fire on the poop and keeping a maximum of smoke floating above the ship.
“The smudge bothered the Hun, but by no means put an end to his machine-gun practice. Except for the freight clerk, who was still pumping backat the seaplane every time it swooped over, every one on the poop had been killed, wounded, or driven to cover, and, with no one to fight it, the fire was beginning to gain new headway.
“‘Not good ’nuf by a mile,’ I heard the Old Man muttering to himself as he eyed the quickly thinning trail of smoke from the funnels. ‘Must do better’n that or ’taint no good.’ Then I saw his bronzed old face light up.
“‘X——!’ he shouted, beckoning me to his side, ‘duck below, clean out all the stuff in the paint lockers and chuck it in the furnaces, ’specially the oils and turps. Jump lively!’
“This was the job I went on when I said I saw the cowboy crumpled up against a bitt, but still full of fight.
“Linseed oil, turpentine, and some tins of fine lubricants—I had them all turned out of the fore-peak and carried, rolled, dragged, or tossed down to the stokehold.
“Most of the stuff was in kegs or cans small enough to go through a furnace door, and these we threw in without broaching them. The Old Man called me up twice—the first time to say that there was no increase in smoke, and wanting to know why I was so slow; and the second time to say that he had just got a bullet through his shoulder, and ordering me to come up and take over, as he was beginning to feel groggy.
“There was an ominous crackling and sputteringin the furnaces as I sprang for the ladder, and before my foot was on the lowermost rung, one of the doors jumped violently up on its top-swing hinges from the kick of an exploding tin or keg of oil. As it fell back with a clang the swish of sudden flame smote my ears, and then a regular salvo of muffled detonations. The last picture I had of the boiler-room was of the stokers trying to confine the infernos they had created by wedging shut the doors with their scoops.
“The whole ship was a-shiver with the roaring conflagration in her furnaces as I reached the upper deck, and, above a tufty, white frizzle of escaping steam, rolled a greasy jet of smoke that looked thick enough for a man to dance a hornpipe on it without sinking above his ankles. I found the Old Man, with a dazed sort of look in his eyes, and his jaw set like grim death, hanging on to the binnacle when I gained the bridge, and all he had the strength to say, before slithering down in a heap, was, ‘Damn good smoke! Carry on—zigzag down wind! Think blighter has finished. Look to—fire.’
“The fact that the Hun was now circling the ship at considerable distance had evidently made the skipper believe that he had come to the end of his cartridges, and in this I am inclined to think the Old Man was right.
“Which fire, however, he referred to I was not quite sure about, but, in my own mind, I was rather more concerned about the one I had started withthe ship’s paint than the one the Hun’s incendiary bomb had set going. Indeed, the ‘fire brigade,’ which had taken advantage of the lull to get a hose playing on the conflagration on the poop, was rapidly reducing the latter to a black mass of steaming embers. The cowboy was still snuggled up against the bitt, which he used to rest his right elbow on in the occasional shots he was lobbing over at the now distantly circling enemy. When I learned later what a crack shot the chap really was, I cannot say that I blamed the Hun for his discretion.
“What tempted him to make that fatal final swoop we never knew. It may have been sheer bravado, or he may have been trying to frighten off the fire-fighters again. Anyhow, back he came, allowing plenty of leeway to miss my smoke screen, and only high enough to clear the masts by forty or fifty feet.
“The cowboy saw him coming, and I can picture him yet as he lay there waiting, with his cheek against the stock of that old Winchester, and following the nearing ’plane through its sights. With the rare good sense of your real hunter, he didn’t run any risk of frightening off his quarry with any premature shots. He just laid doggo, and held his fire.
“If the Hun had been content to sit tight and keep his head out of sight, the chances are nothing would have happened to him; but the temptation to have a closer look at his handiwork and to jeer athis ‘beaten enemy’ was too much for him. Banking as sharply as his big ’plane would stand, he leaned out head and shoulders above the wrecked poop, gave a jaunty wave of the hand, and opened his mouth to shout what was probably some sort of Hunnish pleasantry.
“The crack of the old Winchester reached my ears above the roar of the seaplane’s engine, and the next thing I was clearly conscious of was the machine’s swerving—sidewise and downward—and plunging straight into the trailing column of black smoke. The tip of its left wing fouled the main truck, but it still kept enough balance and headway to carry past and clear of the ship.
“It then slammed down into the water two or three hundred feet off our starboard bow, and it only took a point or two of alteration to bring it under our forefoot.
“The old ship struck the mark so fair that she cut the wreckage into two parts, and I saw fragments of wings and fuselage boiling up on both sides of our wake astern. I gave the order in hot blood, but I would do the same thing again if I had a week to think it over in, just as I would go out of my way to kill a poisonous snake.
“Of course we never knew definitely who was responsible for polishing off the Hun. For a while I thought it probable that the cowboy had only wounded him, and that his swerve into the smoke had been responsible for the dive into the sea, wherethe ship put the finishing touches on the job. But from the day that the cowboy showed me that he could hit tossed-up shillings with a target-rifle four times out of five I have been inclined to believe his assertion that he ‘plunked the bloomin’ blighter straight through the nut,’ and that I and my smoke had nothing to do with it.
“Neither the skipper nor the cowboy were much hurt, and as for the ship, she probably suffered, in the long run, more from the loss of her paint and oil supply than from the Hun’s bomb and the fire it started.”