"The surgeon of theEmden, though unwounded, was doing nothing at the time of our arrival, and, from the appearance of the wounded, it was evident that he had done very little during the twenty-four hours which had elapsed since the action. By way of excuse, he claimed that his staff were all killed and his dressings and instruments destroyed. Accepting this as the literal truth, we made a signal for more medical supplies to supplement those already brought, and Dr. Ollerhead, the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company'ssurgeon, who had come with us from Cocos Island, set to work to get the wounded ready to be transferred. Neither at that time, nor during the three days in which the surgeon of theSydneyworked without rest to save as many as possible of theEmden'seighty wounded, did the German surgeon render anything like the assistance that might have been expected from him under the circumstances.
"What disgusted us most, however, was to find before we left theEmdenthat therehadbeen ample supplies of uninjured dressings all the time. The action station of Dr. L——, the surgeon in question, had been in the stokehold, which was quite undamaged. A bent and twisted ladder or two formed the only obstacles to reaching and utilising the considerable stores of dressings, lotions, etc., which were still available there. Although it was true that the assistant surgeon was missing (he had come on deck after his station in the tiller flat aft had been struck, and was blown overboard by an exploding shell), it wasnottrue by a long way that there was not ample help, skilled and unskilled, available for at least first-aid dressing all around, and on this they had hardly made a beginning."
A brief quotation or two from the report of the surgeon of theSydneymay be interesting while on the question of the neglect of theEmden'swounded by their own surgeon. Referring to the wounded which had just been brought aboard, he says:
"In cases where large vessels of the leg or arm had been opened, we found torniquets of pieces of spun yarn, or a handkerchief, or piece of cloth bound around the limb above the injury. In some cases, I believe the majority, they had been put on by the patients themselves. One man told me he had put one on his arm himself. They were all in severe pain from the constriction, and in all cases where amputation was required, the presence of these torniquets made it necessary to amputate much higher than one would otherwise have done.There was little evidence of any skilled treatment before they arrived aboard."
"In cases where large vessels of the leg or arm had been opened, we found torniquets of pieces of spun yarn, or a handkerchief, or piece of cloth bound around the limb above the injury. In some cases, I believe the majority, they had been put on by the patients themselves. One man told me he had put one on his arm himself. They were all in severe pain from the constriction, and in all cases where amputation was required, the presence of these torniquets made it necessary to amputate much higher than one would otherwise have done.There was little evidence of any skilled treatment before they arrived aboard."
Again he writes:
"Some of the men who were brought off to theSydneypresented horrible sights, and by this time the wounds were practically all foul and stinking, and maggots 1/4 inch long were crawling over them, only 24 to 30 hours after injury.Practically nothing had been done to the wounded sailors, and they were roughly attended to by our party and despatched to us as quickly as possible."
"Some of the men who were brought off to theSydneypresented horrible sights, and by this time the wounds were practically all foul and stinking, and maggots 1/4 inch long were crawling over them, only 24 to 30 hours after injury.Practically nothing had been done to the wounded sailors, and they were roughly attended to by our party and despatched to us as quickly as possible."
Professional etiquette evidently operated to restrain the surgeon of theSydneyfrom stating in his report what he thought of these very palpable evidences of neglect on the part of his "opposite number" in theEmden. When I met him in theSydneylast winter I heard him express himself in no uncertain language on the subject,but I do not feel at liberty to quote him without his permission, and he has recently returned to Australia. I take it that he reckoned that to his medical brethren, to whom his report was especially addressed, the plain statements of the facts were sufficient to speak for themselves.
Lieutenant X—— credits the German officers with doing the best they could in helping him transfer the wounded. "Shortly after I came over the side," he said, "I took the opportunity to tell Von Müller that we reckoned he had fought very well. To this he merely answered with a rather surly 'No,' and turned away as though to hide his chagrin. Presently, however, he came up to where I was standing, and, speaking in a rather apologetic tone, said: 'Thank you very much for saying that, but I was not satisfied. We should have done better. You were very lucky in shooting away all my voice-pipes at the beginning.' I do not remember whether or not I told him that this was hardly enough to balance his own luck in getting both our range-finders in the first five minutes.
"The best of the whole lot of officers, however—indeed, the only one who showed anything like the spirit one would expect a British officer to display under similar circumstances—was Lieutenant ——, whom I encountered in connexion with my 'sweep' of North Keeling Island after the lot of Huns who landed there through the surf. I was a good deal puzzled to account for the sporting spirit of —— on this occasion—until he chanced to tell me that his mother wasEnglish! I had this little Keeling Island roundup all to myself, and, grim as some features of it were, it had also its amusing side, and you may be interested in hearing something of it.
"When we fired those last three broadsides into theEmdena good many men either jumped or were blown into the water, and of these a score or more were carried to the beach by the surf. Most of these, as I found later, were wounded in one way or another, and having no food or water, their sufferings during the day and a half before help reached them were unspeakable.
"From theEmdenthe bodies of men—some of which appeared to have life in them—were visible on the beach above high-water mark, and just before we left the wreck for good I noticed a party setting off along the shore to the right. If I had onlyfailedto notice this move, my rescue party would have reached the poor wretches eight or ten hours earlier than it did, and probably have saved several more lives than we saved. The unfortunate delay was also largely due to my ignorance of the fact that North Keeling Island was a coral atoll.
"When we got back to theSydneywith the last of the wounded from theEmdenI learned that our galley had already been sent away to take food and water to the men on the beach, but that, for some reason, it had gone in no further than the line of the outer reef where the surf began to break. I volunteered to go in the whaler to find what the trouble was, and ifpossible, make a landing with both boats. Just as I was about to go over the side, a young Australian lad—some kind of a Boy rating—came and asked to be taken along. I refused him rather shortly, as I thought it would be of more hindrance than help in the kind of job we had on hand. He disappeared quickly, and I did not see him again until we had taken the galley in through the surf and were pulling it up on the beach. Then he was discovered, curled up under the thwarts, where he had managed to stow himself away before we pulled off from theSydney. It was a lucky thing he came along, for, as it turned out, he was the only one of the lot of us who knew how to climb a coconut palm in true native fashion.
"It was impossible to take a boat through the surf anywhere near the point where theEmdenhad grounded, but some miles up the beach there appeared to be an opening in the reef through which a landing might be made. Watching our chances, we managed to shoot the whaler in without an upset, incidentally showing the way to the galley, which had been on the point of giving up the job after staving a hole in its bottom in attempting a passage at a less favourable point. Mustering my men, I set out to find the Huns. It was here that I went wrong.
"Knowing that the island was but a small one, and having seen a number of theEmden'smen making off to the right from the point where she was grounded, I figured that I would be likely to intercept them more quickly if I circled roundto the left and met them face to face than by trying to overtake them. As it was late, I was anxious to lose no time in getting them together and into the boats while there was still daylight to see to getting the latter through the surf. If the island had been anything but a coral atoll my reckoning would have worked out all right; as it was it upset things completely.
"The island was covered with coco palms, under which there was a thick growth of pandanus and some sort of salt grass, the latter forming a tangle which made walking extremely difficult, and ultimately forced me to take to the beach to get opener going. Even here progress was slow on account of the sand and coral clinkers, and it was already getting dark when we suddenly found our way barred by a swift-flowing tidal passage connecting the open sea and what I now saw for the first time—the lagoon in the heart of the coral atoll. The island, like all others of its kind, was in the shape of a rough letter 'C,' with water between the two tips, and therefore quite impossible to walk around.
"As it was out of the question trying to swim what was probably a shark-infested passage in the dark, especially as there was no certainty of finding our men on the other side, there was nothing to do but turn back. Here again I made the mistake of trying to take a short cut by striking straight across the island instead of sticking to the beach. I never saw the place in daylight which we stumbled into, and so can't say just what it was; it seemed, however, to bea sort of wilderness of reeds peopled with a million seabirds, many of them nesting. The roar of our guns in the battle was as nothing to the bedlam of screams which arose when I went slithering through a lot of eggs and flopped full length into a rising mass of beating wings. They came batting against us in the darkness throughout the several minutes we were groping our way back to the open of the beach.
"It was well after midnight when we got back to where the boats were, and so quite out of the question trying to do anything further in the way of searching for the Huns till daylight. Several of the latter had struggled in and given themselves up, and they told us that the rest were all at the point where they had first come ashore from theEmden, and suffering greatly from hunger and thirst. As we had expected to be putting back to theSydneywithin an hour or two of the time we landed, we had little food and water save that in the boats, and this wouldn't have gone very far with the lot of us if it had not been supplemented by the coconuts our young stowaway brought down for us.
"There was not much chance to rest that night on account of the small land-crabs which kept crawling over you the moment you dropped off to sleep, and it was not pleasant to think of how those more or less helpless Huns were faring a few miles farther down the beach. We started off at the first streak of dawn, and reached them by sun-up. The most of them were in even worse condition than I had feared, for it seemedinconceivable to me that they should not have contrived in some way or other to get hold of some coconuts to eat and drink. It turned out that they had not done so, however, and that, as a consequence, a number of them had died of thirst. The worst case, perhaps, was that of the assistant surgeon, whom I told you of as having been wounded and blown overboard by a shell. Delirious from thirst, he had managed to induce a sailor to fetch him a drink of salt water, and had died shortly afterwards as a result of drinking it. All the open wounds, since they had gone from twelve to eighteen hours longer without attention, were in even more terrible condition than those of the men we had found on theEmdenthe previous day.
"The only one of the lot who seemed to have any hold on himself was the Lieutenant —— I have mentioned. Luckily, he was not injured, and he appeared to have been doing everything he could to help those that were. It must have kept the plucky chap's hands full, for several of them were crazy, and a number of the wounded were too helpless to keep the crabs away. He and one or two of the least knocked out of the seamen had managed to keep these vermin pretty well away from the bodies of the living, but with the dead down along the water's edge they were already having their way.
"Finally, we got all the helpless of the wounded on to stretchers and started on their way to the boats. —— was the greatest help throughout, but I can't say as much for manyof the others of the unwounded, who were very grudging in the way they lent a hand. —— put up a stiff protest against going off without burying the dead, declaring that he was not going to leave them there for the crabs to eat up. When I pointed out that we had no implements for digging, and that I needed his help in getting the living off, he saw the reason of it and said he would come along. We did the best we could for the dead by covering them with palm leaves and coral clinkers.
"I made a wide circle around before we left, trying to be sure that none of the living was left behind. The Huns were not quite sure of their numbers, so there was no checking up the thing that way. I am quite positive that no living man was left in that immediate vicinity, and ---- felt equally certain that none had strayed away. This must have been just whatdidhappen, however, for, many weeks later, we had word from the Telegraph people to the effect that, when they landed on North Keeling Island to bury the dead, one of the crab-picked skeletons they found was in a sitting position against the bole of a palm tree. I've never tried to reconstruct the story of what happened, but it must have been rather awful at the best.
"It was rather a problem, calculating how to get every one off in two small boats, one of which had a hole in the bottom. The whaler would still float right side up, however, and we finally managed it by putting the badly wounded, with a pulling crew, in theSydney'scutter, which wassent to aid us in the morning, and the rest piling into the whaler and sitting in the water. Then a long tow-line was passed to the cutter (long enough to let her get out beyond the breakers before a strain came on it) and she pulled away with the whole procession. ——, in spite of all I could do to induce him to get into the whaler, insisted on swimming out through the breakers and boarding her outside. If he hadn't been starving and thirsting for forty-eight hours I would have put it down as pure swank; as it was, however, I can't believe he was actuated by anything else than a wish to ease off the load on the damaged boat while it was going through the breakers. He was a thoroughly good sport, that ——, and, as I told you, I was a good deal puzzled to account for it until I learned about his being half English.
"We reached theSydneyall right, and the whaler was just being hoisted in when I heard the Captain's voice from the bridge asking where Lieutenant X—— was. I looked up just in time to catch him staring down at me with open-eyed amazement. 'Oh, there he is!' he exclaimed, turning away with a grin on his face. That led me, for the first time in twenty-four hours, to take a look at what I could see of myself without a glass. It was my turn to grin—and to blush. Absolutely the sum total of my wardrobe was my shirt and a seaman's straw hat! Nothing else. To ease my feet from boots after standing on the scorching iron decks of theEmden, I had shifted to an old pair of dancing pumps when Ireturned to theSydneyand these, in the rush of departure, I had worn ashore. These, and my socks, must have been scoured off among the coral clinkers, and my cap probably went when we stumbled into the sea-birds' roost in the darkness. But where I lost my trousers, and what sailor gave me his hat, I have never been able to make out."
I asked Lieutenant X—— if it was true, as I had heard, that the officers of the victor and vanquished took advantage of the several days they spent together in theSydneybefore the Germans were disembarked at Colombo to foregather and talk the battle over.
"Except for the two Captains, who were necessarily thrown together a good deal and who drew a chart of the battle between them, emphatically no," he replied. "The wardroom officers held practically no conversation at all with those from theEmden. On their part there was shown no inclination to talk, and on our part that fact alone would have been enough to prevent any interchanges of a personal nature. It would have seemed rather like 'rubbing it in' if we had tried to draw them out on a subject that couldn't but be a painful one to them. Some of the men yarned together a bit, I believe, but you may be quite assured that (save for the exception I have mentioned) there was nothing of the kind between the officers. There wasn't a lot in common between us at the best."
The collier had come alongside a little after seven—two hours before daybreak at that time of year—and I awoke in my cabin on the boat deck just abaft the forward turret to the grind of the winches and the steady tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below.
On my way aft to the wardroom for breakfast, I stopped for a moment by a midships hatch, where the commander, grimed to the eyes, stamped his sea-boots and threshed his arms as a substitute for the warming exercise the men were getting behind the shovels and the barrows. He it was who was responsible—partly through systematisation, partly through infusing his own energetic spirit into the men themselves—for the fact that theZeusheld the Blue Ribbon, or the Black Ribbon, or whatever one would call the premier honours of the Grand Fleet for speedy coaling. Not unnaturally, therefore, he was a critical man when it came to passing judgment on the shifting of "Number 1 Welsh Steam" from hold to bunkers, and it was not necessarily to be expected that he would echo my enthusiasm when I told him that this was quite the smartest bit of coaling I had ever seen west of Nagasaki,something quite worth standing, shivering tooth to tooth, with a raw north wind, to be a witness of.
"It's fair," he admitted grudgingly, "only fair. A shade over 300 tons an hour, perhaps. 'Twould have seemed good enough before we put up the Grand Fleet record of 408. Trouble is, they haven't anything to put 'em on their mettle this morning. Now, if some other ship had come within fifty or sixty tons of their record this last week, or if we'd had a rush order to get ready to go to sea—then you might have hoped to see coaling that was coaling."
All through my porridge and eggs and bacon the steady tramp of the barrow-men on the forecastle-deck throbbed along the steel plates of the wardroom ceiling, and it must have been about the time I was spreading my marmalade (real marmalade, not the synthetic substitute one comes face to face with ashore these days) that I seemed to sense a quickening of the movement, not through any rush-bang acceleration, but rather through gradually becoming aware of increased force in action, as when the engines of a steamer speed up from "half" to "full." In a few moments an overalled figure, with a face coal-dusted till it looked like the face of the end-man in a minstrel show, lounged in to remark casually behind the day before yesterday morning's paper that we had just gone on "two hours' notice." A half-hour later, as the gouged-out collier edged jerkily away under the impulse of her half-submerged screw, the commander, agleam of quiet satisfaction in his steady eyes, remarked that "it wasn't such a bad finish, after all," adding that "the men seemed keen to get her out to sea and let the wind blow through her."
The ship's post-coaling clean up—usually as elaborate an affair as a Turkish bath, with rub down and massage—was no more than a douche with "a lick and a promise." Anything more for a warship putting off into the North Sea in midwinter would be about as superfluous as for a man to wash his face and comb his hair before taking a plunge in the surf.
Once that perfunctory wash-down was over, all traces of rush disappeared. What little remained to be done after that—even including getting ready for action—was so ordered and endlessly rehearsed that nothing short of an enemy salvo or a sea heavy enough to carry away something of importance need be productive of a really hurried movement. Just a shade more smoke from the funnels to indicate the firing of furnaces which had been lying cold, and the taking down or in of a few little harbour "comforts" like stove-pipes and gangways, forecasted imminent departure.
The expression regarding the fleet, squadron, or even the single ship ready to sail at a moment's notice is as much of a figure of speech as is the similar one about the army which is going to fight to the last man. A good many moments must inevitably elapse between the time definite orders come to sail and the actualgetting under weigh. But the final preparationscanbe reduced to such a routine that the ship receiving them can be got ready to sail with hardly more than a ripple of unusual activity appearing in the ebb and flow of the life of those who man her. No river ferry-boat ever cast off her moorings and paddled out on one of her endlessly repeated shuttlings with less apparent effort than theZeus, when, after gulping some scores of fathoms of Gargantuan anchor chain into her capacious maw, she pivoted easily around in the churning boil of reversed screws, took her place in line, and followed in the wake of the flagship toward the point where a notch in the bare rounded periphery of encircling hills marked the way to the open sea.
Nowhere else in the temperate latitudes is there so strange a meeting and mingling place of airs and waters as at the "Northern Base." The butterfly chases of sunshine and showers even in December and January are suggestive of nothing so much as what a South Pacific Archipelago would be but with fifty or sixty degrees colder temperature. Dancing golden sunmotes were playing spirited cross-tag with slatily sombre cloud-shadows as we nosed out through the mazes of the booms, but with the first stinging slaps of the vicious cross-swells of a turbulent sea, a swirling bank of fog came waltzing over the aimlessly chopping waters, and reared a vaporous wall across our path.
The flagship melted into the milling mists, and dimmed down to an amorphous blur withjust enough outline to enable us a sight to correct our position in line. In turn, the towered and pinnacled head-on silhouette of our next astern ship grew soft and shadowy, and where proper perspective would have placed the fourth was a swaying wisp of indeterminate image which might just as well have been an imminently wheeling seagull as a distantly reeling super-dreadnought. The comparison is by no means so ridiculous as it sounds, for only the day before a naval flying-man had told me how he once started to bring his seaplane down on sighting a duck (which was really some hundreds of feet in the air) because he took it for a destroyer, and how, later, he had failed to "straighten out" quickly enough because he thought a trawler was a duck in flight.
The lean grey shadows which slipped ghostily into step with us in the fog-hastened twilight of three o'clock might just as well (had we not known of the rendezvous) have been lurking wolves as protecting sheep-dogs.
"Now that we've picked up our destroyers," said the officer who paced the quarter-deck with me, "we'll be getting on our way. Let's go down to tea."
Smoke, masts, funnels, and wave-washed hulls, the Whistleresque outlines of our swift guardians had blurred to blankness as I looked back from the companion-way, and only a misty golden halo, flashing out and dying down on our port bow, told where the flotilla leader was talking to the flagship.
Tea is no less important a function on a British warship than it is ashore, and nothing short of an action is allowed to interfere with it. Indeed, how the cheerful clink of the teacup was heard in the prelude to the diapason of the guns was revealed to me a few days ago, when the Commander allowed me to read a few personal notes he had written while the light cruiser he was in at the time was returning to port after the Battle of Jutland. "The enemy being in sight," it read, "we prepared for 'Action Stations' and went to tea." A few minutes later, fingers which had crooked on the handles of the teacups were adjusting the nice instruments of precision that laid the guns for what was destined to prove the greatest naval battle in history.
Tea was about as usual with us that day, save that the officers who came in at the change of watch were dressed for business—those from the bridge and conning-tower in oilskins or "lammy" coats and sea-boots, and the engineers in greasy overalls. A few words of "shop"—steam pressure, revolutions, speed, force and direction of the wind, and the like—passed in an undertone between men sitting next each other, but never became general. The sponginess of the new "potato" bread and the excellence of the margarine came in for comment, and some one spoke of having rushed off a letter just before sailing, ordering a recently advertised "self hair-cutter." A discussion as to just how this remarkable contrivance worked followed,the consensus of opinion being that it must be on the safety-razor principle, but that it couldn't possibly be worth the guinea charged. All that I recall having been said of what might be taking us to sea was when an officer likely to know volunteered that we would possibly be in sight of land in the morning, and some speculation arose as to whether it would be Norway or Jutland. A recently joined R.N.V.R. provoked smiles when he suggested Heligoland.
The cabin which I had been occupying in harbour was one located immediately under the conning-tower, and used by the navigating officer when the ship was at sea, the arrangement being that I was to go aft and live in his regular cabin while we were outside. Going forward, after tea, I threw together a few things for my servant to carry back to my temporary quarters. Groping aft in Stygian blackness along the windward side of the ship, I encountered spray in clouds driving across even the lofty fo'c'sle deck. The wind appeared to have shaken off its flukiness as we cleared the headlands, and, blowing with a swinging kick behind it, was rolling up a sea to match. I did not need to be told by the sea-booted sailor whom I bumped on a ladder that it wasn't "goin' t' be no nite fer lam's," to know that there was something lively in the weather line in pickle, probably to be uncorked before morning.
The grate, robbed of its chimney, was cold and empty when I went in for seven o'clock dinner—half an hour earlier than in harbour—andthere was just the suggestion of chill in the close air of the wardroom. An engineer-lieutenant who started to reminisce about a winter cruise he had once made in the Arctic was peremptorily hushed up with a request to "talk about something warmer." A yarn about chasing theKönigsbergin the lagoons of East Africa was more kindly received, and an R.N.R.'s account of how his ship carried Moslem pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah on their way to Mecca brought a genial glow of warmth with it. There was something strangely cheering in his story of how, when there was a following simoon blowing across the brassy surface of the Red Sea, the Lascar stokers used to go mad with the heat and jump overboard in their delirium. The air seemed less dank and chill after that recital. I ventured a "sudorific" contribution by telling of the way they made "desert storms" in the California movies with the aid of buckets of sand and a "wind machine." The whole table showed interest in this—probably because it was so far removed from "shop"—and sat long over port and coffee planning a "blower" that would discharge both wind and sand—in sufficient quantities to give the "desert storm" illusion over the restricted angle of the movie lens—at the turning of a single crank. One does not need to be long upon a British battleship to find out that the inventive genius of the Anglo-Saxon race is not all confined to the American branch.
Between officers on watch and those restingto relieve, the after-dinner gathering around what had once been a fire was a small and rapidly dwindling one. As I got up to go to my cabin, the captain of marines quieted the pet cockatoo on his shoulder long enough to say, as we would probably be at "Action Stations" early in the morning, I might find it of interest to come up to his turret, where he had a "jolly smart crew." "We usually do 'B.J.1' at daybreak when we're out," he said, "just on the chance that we may flush some sort of a Hun in the early light. Quite like snipe-shooting, you know."
A "snotty" whom I met outside said something about the way the barometer had been chasing its tail on the drop ever since we got under weigh, and when I turned on the light in my cabin I noticed that the arrows on the navigating officer's instrument indicated a fall of thirty points since noon. The keen whistling of the rising wind shrilled with steady insistence, and the wide swinging swells from the open sea were lock-stepping along with a tread that was just beginning to lift the great warship in a swaggering Jack Tar roll.
On the floor of the cabin was a flannel bulldog with "manipulable" legs and a changeable expression. Its name was "Grip" (so "the pilot" had told me), and it had been his constant companion ever since it was presented to him on the eve of his first sailing as a midshipman. The only time they had ever been separated was on the occasion a colleague, who had borrowedit as a mascot in a game of poker, threw it overboard in chagrin when the attempt to woo fickle fortune proved a failure. Luckily, the ship was lying in a river, and the dog floated back on the next tide, and was fished out with no damage to anything but the compression bladder which worked its bark. The Navigating Officer left the companionable little beast in his cabin, so he explained, to give it the proper home touch for my first night at sea with the British Navy. Cocking "Grip" up in the genial glow of the electric grate in an attitude of "watchful waiting," I crawled into my bunk, pulled up the adjustable side-rail, and was rocked to sleep to the even throb of the turbines and the splish-splash of the spray against the screwed-down scuttle.
"We aren't having 'B.J.1' this morning," some one explained facetiously when I reported for "duty" at seven o'clock, "because we already have 'B.B.8.'" This last meant "Boreas Blowing Eight," he said, and I was just "nautical" enough to know that a wind of "8" in the Beaufort scale indicated something like fifty or sixty miles an hour.
"No U-boat will want to be getting within 'periscopic' distance of the surface of the sea that's running this morning," said a young engineer-lieutenant who had been in the submarine service, "and even if one was able to get a sight, its torpedo would have to have some kind of a 'kangaroo' attachment to jump the humps and hollows with. Fact is, it's rathermore than our destroyers are entirely happy with, and we've just slowed down by several knots to keep 'em from dipping up the brine with their funnels. Hope nothing turns up that they have to get a jump on for. A destroyer's all right on the surface, but no good as a submarine; yet an under-sea diver is just what she is if you drive her more'n twelve into a sea like the one that's kicking up now. Barometer's down sixty points since last night, and still going."
Breakfast that morning had little in common with the similar festal occasion at Base where, fresh bathed and shaven, each immaculate member of the mess comes down and sits over his coffee and paper much (save for the fact that the journal is two days old) as at home. Several places besides those of the officers actually on watch were empty, and by no means a few of those who did appear had that introspective look which is so unmistakable a sign of all not being well within the citadel. Even thePoldhu—the daily wireless bulletin of the Navy—had a "shot-to-pieces" look where "static" or some other esoteric difficulty was responsible for gaps in several items of the laconic summary. The last word in super-dreadnoughts does not have table-racks and screwed-down chairs. She isn't supposed to lose her dignity to the extent of needing anything in the way of such vulgar makeshifts. The fact remains that if the mightyZeushad chanced to have these things, she would have saved herself some china and several officersfrom "nine-pinning" down one side of a table and piling up in a heap at the end.
With the staid wardroom doing things like this, it was only to be expected that the mess decks would be displaying a certain amount of shiftiness. I was, however, hardly prepared for the gay seascape which unrolled before me when I had worried my way through the intricate barricade of a watertight bulkhead door in trying to skirmish forward to the ladders leading to the upper decks. For several reasons—ventilation and guns have something to do with it—it is not practicable to close up certain parts of a battleship against heavy seas to anything like the same extent as with the passenger quarters in a modern liner. It is only in very rough weather that this may give rise to much trouble, but—well, we were having rough weather that morning, and that little bit of the Roaring Forties I had stumbled into was a consequence of it.
Oilskinned, "sou'westered," sea-booted men, sitting and lying on benches and tables, was the first strange thing that came to my attention; and then, with a swish and a gurgle, the foot-deep wave of dirty water which had driven them there caught me about the knees, and sat me down upon a pile of hammocks, or, rather, across the inert bodies of two men (boys I found them to be presently) who had been cast away there in advance of me. Clambering over their unprotesting anatomies, I gained dry land at a higher level, and at a tactically defensible point, where a half-Nelson round a stanchion steadfastlyrefused to give way under the double back-action shuffle with which the next roll tried to break it. With two good toe-holds making me safe from practically anything but a roll to her beams' ends, I was free to survey the shambles at my leisure. Then I saw how the havoc was being wrought.
With a shuddering crash, the thousand-ton bludgeon of a wave struck along the port side, immediately followed by the muffled but unmistakable sound of water rushing in upon the deck above. To the accompaniment of a wild slap-banging, this sound came nearer, and then, as she heeled far to starboard under the impulse of the blow that had been dealt her, a solid spout of green water came tumbling down a hatchway—the fount from which the mobile tidal wave swaggering about the deck took replenishment. Two men, worrying a side of frozen Argentine bullock along to the galley from the cold-storage hold, timing (or, rather, mis-timing) their descent to coincide with that of the young Niagara, reached the mess-deck in the form of a beef sandwich. Depositing that delectable morsel in an inert mass at the foot of the ladder, the briny cascade, with a joyous whoof, rushed down to reinforce the tidal wave and do the rounds of the mess.
I was now able to observe that the sailors, marooned on the benches, tables, and other islands of refuge, were roughly dividable into three classes—the prostrate ones, who heaved drunkenly to the roll and took no notice of theprimal chaos about them; the semi-prostrate ones, who were still able to exhibit mild resentment when the tidal wave engulfed or threatened to engulf them; and the others—some lounging easily, but the most perched or roosted on some dry but precarious pinnacle—who quaffed great mugs of hot tea and bit hungrily into hunks of bread and smoked fish. These latter—hard-bit tars they were, with faces pickled ruddy by the blown brine of many windy watches—took great joy of the plight of their mates, guffawing mightily at the dumb misery in the hollow eyes of the "semi-prostrates" and the dead-to-the-world roll of "prostrates" with the reelings of the ship.
If there is one thing in the world that delights the secret heart of the average landsman more than the sad spectacle of a parson in the divorce court, it is the sight of a sea-sick sailor. Since, however, the average landsman reads his paper far oftener than he sails the stormy seas, the former delectation is probably granted him rather more frequently than the latter. At any rate, the one landsman in No. X Mess of H.M.S.Zeusthat morning saw enough sea-sick sailors to keep the balance on the parsons' side for the duration of the war, and perhaps even longer.
I made the acquaintance of one of the "prostrates" marooned on the beach of my hammock island through rescuing him from the assaults of a tidal-wave-driven rum tub. He was nursing a crushed package of gumdrop-like lozenges, oneof which he offered me, murmuring faintly that they had been sent him by his sister, who had found them useful while boating at Clacton-on-Sea last summer. Endeavouring to start a conversation, I asked him—knowing theZeushad been present at that mighty struggle—if they had had weather like this at the Battle of Jutland. A sad twinkle flickered for a moment in the corner of the eye he rolled up to me, and, with a queer pucker of the mouth which indicated that he must have had a sense of humour in happier times, he replied that he had only joined the ship the week before: "'Tis my first time at sea, sir, and I've come out to—to—this."
I gave him the best advice I could by telling him to pull himself together and get out on deck to the fresh air; but neither spirit nor flesh was equal to the initiatory effort. Looking back while I waited near the foot of a ladder for a Niagara to exhaust itself, the last I saw of him he was pushing mechanically aside with an unresentful gesture a lump of salt pork which one of the table-roosting sailors dangled before his nose on a piece of string.
Three flights up I clambered my erratic way before, on the boat deck in the lee of a launch, I found a vantage sufficiently high and sheltered to stand in comfort. The sight was rich reward for the effort. Save for an ominous bank of nimbus to westward, the wind had swept the coldly blue vault of the heavens clear of cloud, and the low-hanging winter sun to south'ard wasshooting slanting rays of crystalline brightness across a sea that was one wild welter of cotton wool. I have seen—especially in the open spaces of the mid-Pacific, where the waves have half a world's width to get going in—heavier seas and higher seas than were running that morning, but rarely—not even in a West Indian hurricane—more vicious ones—seas more palpably bent on going over, or through a ship that got in their way, rather than under, as proper waves should do. And in this obliquity they were a good deal more than passively abetted by a no less viciously inclined wind, which I saw repeatedly lift off the top of what it appeared to think was a lagging wave, and drive it on ahead to lace the heaving water with a film of foam or dust the deck of a battleship with snowy brine.
But it was the ships themselves that furnished the real show. Of all craft that ply the wet seaways, the battleship is the least buoyant, the most "unliftable," the most set on bashing its arrogant way through a wave rather than riding over it, and—with the increasing armour and armaments, and the crowding aboard of various weighty contrivances hitherto unthought of—this characteristic wilfulness has tended to increase rather than decrease since the war. As a consequence, a modern battleship bucking its way into a fully developed mid-winter gale is one of the nearest approaches to the meeting of two irresistible bodies ever to be seen.
The conditions for the contest were ideal thatmorning. Never were seas more determined to ride over battleships, never were battleships more determined to drive straight through seas. Both of them had something of their way in the end, and neither entirely balked the other; but, drawn as it was, that battle royal of Titans was a sight for the gods.
The battleships were in line abreast as I came up on deck, and holding a course which brought the wind and seas abeam. We were all rolling heavily, but with the rolls not sufficiently "synchronised" with the waves—which were charging down without much order or rhythm—to keep from dipping them up by the ton. If the port rail was low—as happened when the ship was sliding down off the back of the last wave—the next wave rolled in-board, and (save where the mast, funnels, and higher works amidships blocked the way) drove right on across and off the other side. If the port side had rolled high as an impetuous sea struck, the latter expended its full force against the ship, communicating a jar from foretop to stokeholds as shivering as the shock of a collision with another vessel.
Our own quarter-deck was constantly swept with solid green water, and even the higher fo'c'sle deck caught enough of the splash-up to make traversing it a precarious operation. But it was only by watching one of the other ships that it was possible to see how the thing really happened. If it was the wallowing monster abeam to port, the striking of a sea was signalisedby sudden spurts of spray shooting into the air all the way along her windward side, the clouds of flying water often going over the funnels and bridge, and not far short of the foretop. She would give a sort of shuddering stumble as the weight of the impact made itself felt, and then—running from bow to stern and broken only by the upper works, and occasionally, but not always, by the turrets—a ragged line of foam appeared, quickly resolving itself into three or four hundred feet of streaking cascades which came pouring down over the starboard side into the sea. Watching the vessel abeam to starboard, the phenomenon was repeated in reverse order. Save for the swaying foretop against the sky, either ship at the moment of being swept by a wave was suggestive of nothing so much as a great isolated black rock on a storm-bound coast.
But the most remarkable thing about it all was the astonishingly small effect this really heavy weather had upon the handling of the ships. Evidently they had been built to withstand weather as well as to fight, for they manœuvred and changed formation with almost the same meticulous exactitude as in protected waters. A gunnery officer assured me that—except for momentary interference in training some of the lighter guns—the fighting efficiency of the ship would hardly be effected by all their plungings and the clouds of flying spray. Their speed was, naturally, somewhat diminished in bucking into a head sea, yet no lack of seaworthinesswould prevent (should the need arise) their being driven into that same head sea at the full power of their mighty engines. The reason we were proceeding at somewhat reduced speed was to ease things off a bit for the destroyers.
Ah! And what of the destroyers? There they all were, the faithful sheep-dogs, when I came up, and at first blush I got the impression that they were making rather better weather of it than the battleships. That this was only an optical illusion (caused by the fact that they were farther away and more or less obscured by the waves) I discovered as soon as I climbed to the vantage of the after super-structure, and put my glass upon the nearest of the bobbing silhouettes of mast and funnel. Then I saw at once, though not, indeed, any such spray clouds or cascades of solid water as marked the course of the battleships, that she was plainly a labouring ship. A destroyer is not made to pulverise a wave in the bull-at-a-gate fashion of a battleship, and any exigency that compels her to adopt that method of progression is likely to be attended by serious consequences. If one of the modern type she will ride out almost any storm that blows if left to her own devices; but force her into it at anything above half-speed, and it is asking for trouble. Even before the destroyer I was watching began disappearing—hull, funnels, and all but the mastheads—between crest and crest of the onrushing waves, it was plain that both she and her sisters were having all they wanted; and I was not surprised when wordwas flashed to us that one of our brave little watch-dogs was suffering from a wave-smashed steering geer, and had asked permission to make for port if necessary. The permission was, I believe, granted, but—carrying on with some sort of a makeshift or other—her plucky skipper managed to stick it out and see the game through to the end.
There were a number of other ships in difficulties in that neck of the North Sea at this moment, and every now and then—by the wireless—word would come to us from one of them. Mostly they were beyond the horizon, but two were in sight. One (two smoke-blackened "jiggers" and a bobbing funnel-top beneath a bituminous blur to the east) was apparently a thousand-ton freighter. An officer told me that she had been signalling persistently since daybreak for assistance; but when I asked him if we were not going to help her, he greeted the question with an indulgent smile.
"Assistance will go to her in due course," he said, "but it will not be from us. That kind of a thing might have been done in the first month or two of the war, but the Huns soon made it impossible. Now, any battleship that would detach a destroyer at the call of any ship of doubtful identity would be considered as deliberately asking for what she might jolly well get—a torpedo."
Another ship which was plainly having a bad time was some kind of a cruiser whose long row of funnels was punching holes in a segment ofskyline. There was a suggestion of messiness forward, but nothing we attached any importance to until word was wirelessed that she had just had her bridge carried away by a heavy sea, and that the navigating officer had been severely injured. The latter was known personally to several of the wardroom officers, and at lunch speculation as to what hurt he might have received led to an extremely interesting discussion of the "ways of a wave with a man"; also of the comparative seaworthiness of light cruisers and destroyers. The things that waves have done to all three of them since the war began (to say nothing of the things all three have done in spite of waves) is a story of its own.
The barometer continued to fall all day, with the wind rising a mile of velocity for every point of drop. The seas, though higher and heavier, were also more regular and less inclined to catch the ship with her weather-rail down. The low cloud-bank of mid-forenoon had by early dusk grown to a heavens-obscuring mask of ominous import, and, by dark, snow was beginning to fall. The ship was reeling through the blackness of the pit when I clambered to the deck after dinner, so that the driving spray and ice-needles struck the face before one saw them by even the thousandth of a second. The darkness was such as one almost never encounters ashore, and it was some time before I accustomed myself to close my eyes against the unseen missiles (when turning to windward) without deliberately telling myself to do so in advance.
Into the Stygian pall the vivid golden triangles from the signal searchlights on the bridge flashed like the stab of a flaming sword. One instant the darkness was almost palpable enough to lean against; the next, the silhouette of funnels and foretop pricked into life, but only to be quenched again before the eye had time to fix a single detail. So brief was any one flash that the action in each transient vision was suspended as in an instantaneous photograph, yet the effect of the quick succession of flashes was of continuous motion, like the kinema. From where I stood, the heart of the fluttering golden halos, where a destroyer winked back its answer, were repeatedly obliterated by the inky loom of a wave, but the reflection was always thrown high enough into the mist to carry the message.
Returning to the wardroom by the way of the mess-decks, I saw the youth who had offered me the anti-seasick lozenges in the morning. Now quite recovered, he was himself playing the pork-on-a-string game with one of the only two "prostrates" still in sight. The following morning—though the weather, if anything, was worse than ever—all evidences of "indisposition" had disappeared.
For some days more we prowled the wet seaways, and then, well along into a night that was foggier, colder, and windier than the one into which we had steamed out, we crept along a heightening headland, nosed in the wake of the flagship through a line of booms, and opened abay that was dappled with the lights of many ships. A few minutes later, and the raucous grind of a chain running out through a hawse-pipe signalled that we were back at the old stand.
And since, like all the rest of our sisters of the Grand Fleet, we were expected to be ready to put to sea onxhours' notice, there was nothing for it but that the several hundred tons of coal which the mightyZeushad been snorting out in the form of smoke to contaminate the ozone of a very sizeable area of the North Sea should be replenished without delay. A collier edged gingerly out of a whirling snow-squall and moored fast alongside as I groped forward to retake possession of my cabin under the bridge, and I went to sleep that night to the grind of the winches and the steady tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below.
There are four sights in this war that have etched themselves more deeply upon the plates of my memory than any of a hundred others which are themselves unforgettable—my first heavy artillery bombardment in France, with a wallowing wave of men sweeping forward behind the smoke and dust clouds of an advancing barrage, the meteor trail across the northern sky of the first Zeppelin brought down over England, the fantastically foreshortened peaks of southern Macedonia—with Serb and Bulgar locked in death grips in the cockpit of a snow-choked valley—from an aeroplane, and the Grand Fleet taking form out of a North Sea mist on a winter's morning. And it is the last of these—though the only mind picture it has left is of endless lines of grey ships ploughing silently through grey waters to the blending line of sea and misty sky, while the others were pulsing with motion, vibrant with sound and vivid with the incomparable appeal of the drama in which the actors are fighting and falling, living and dying men—that stirs, and will stir, me longest and strongest of all.
Just why this is I cannot say, but some hintof it may be found in the fact—so well known to all lovers of the ocean—that with the sea it is more what onefeelsthan what oneseesthat moves; and with the Grand Fleet, which is instinct with the soul of the sea which it commands, it is perhaps the feeling that a single sweep of the eye comprehends the one mightiest force in mankind's mightiest struggle, which invests those silent lines of steaming warships with a power to stir the imagination (in my own case at least) as nothing else on earth can stir it, nor—save only the sight of those same ships going into action to fulfil the purpose for which they were created—ever will.
My first sight of the Grand Fleet at sea I owe to the ready thoughtfulness which those who know him best so often refer to in speaking of Admiral Sir David Beatty. For three days I had been "standing by" on the —— waiting to go out into the North Sea on a jaunt which had been vaguely described to me as likely to develop "interesting possibilities," and that famous cruiser was under steaming orders at the moment an invitation came from the Flagship of one of the Battleship Squadrons to come over to a concert being given that afternoon aboard the "Theatre-Ship"Gourko. There was just time to take the show in before our departure the Captain of the —— reckoned, and volunteered to sail the Staff Surgeon and me over in his galley.
There was a notable attendance at the concert, and in the little company which wereinvited to Admiral Madden's cabin for tea, after the playing of "God Save the King" and "The Star Spangled Banner" had signalised the end of an enjoyable programme, were at least a dozen men whose names would be entitled to head the list of the makers of modern naval history. While I was draining a single cup of tea I heard the Admiral who had won the Battle of the Falkland Islands explain the idiosyncrasies of North Sea meteorology; another, who had directed naval operations at the Dardanelles, expatiate on the difficulties of raising pigs on his Squadron's refuse since the "Food Economy" campaign got well under weigh in the Grand Fleet; a third, who had held high command at Jutland, outline a plan for elevating the popular taste for good music; and a fourth, who had done notable work at Dogger Bank, lay down the law on the points of Irish terriers. The only one whom I heard speak of "Things Naval" was the Commander-in-Chief, who was enticed into "shop" after inquiring how my plans were progressing in connexion with some voyages in light craft which I had asked permission to make.
On my telling him I expected to put to sea with the light cruisers in a couple of hours, he stood for a moment in thought, and then said quietly, "If you can throw your kit together and go aboard one of the battleships before the —— sails, I think that I can promise that you will see—in the course of the next thirty-six hours—a sight such as you have never seen before, one that you will never forget."
I hesitated for a moment, for a voyage in the historic ——, with the ever-present possibility of stumbling into an action with her, was something I had been planning for and counting upon for weeks.
"You can come out with us again in another week or so," said the Captain of the ——; "you may not be in a position to connect with what the Commander-in-Chief has to offer for a good deal longer than that."
"But my own ship is in quarantine," I said, suddenly recollecting that there had been a sporadic outbreak of mumps or something of the kind reported from theErinin the course of the last day or two.
"Between thirty and forty capital ships, to say nothing of light cruisers and destroyers, we ought to be able to find room to stow you away for a couple of days," cut in Admiral Beatty with just the flicker of one of his rare smiles. "Let Captain —— arrange it for you. Perhaps Admiral Sturdee"—and a moment later the victor of the Battle of the Falklands was extending me a warm invitation to come to his Flagship as his guest for the events of the next few days. By dint of the liveliest kind of hustling, I was just able to return to the ——, get my togs picked up and clamber aboard the barge Admiral Sturdee had kindly despatched before the grinding of chains on hawse-pipes told that the light cruisers were shortening in preparatory to weighing anchor and departing on their own little North Sea sideshow.
An hour later I had climbed the gangway of my new ship, greeted several friends of a former visit in the wardroom, made a hurried shift of uniform in the comfortable cabin which had been prepared for me, and was seated at dinner with Admiral Sturdee and his Staff. Of the personal side of my voyage with this most highly distinguished and most deservedly loved of British admirals—an experience the more treasured in that it chanced to coincide with the last occasion on which he was destined to go to sea on active service before taking over an important command ashore—it is not my purpose to write here.
At another time, with Admiral Sturdee's concurrence, I shall endeavour to set down a few of the things—mostly reminiscent of events in which he had played an historic part, with occasional observations on international developments, political and social,—of which he spoke at table, in quiet intervals on the bridge, or while taking a few minutes' refuge from the wind in the cold little box of his Spartan sea-cabin.
There was nothing to differentiate our preparations for departure on the following afternoon from those for one of the several kinds of routine work that a squadron of battleships performs in the course of its regular duties. The "buzz" had gone around, however, that we were going out for a "P.Z."—a general exercise of all the units of the Battleship and Battle Cruiser fleets, with their auxiliaries—and the smoke which began rolling up from scores of funnels asthe early afternoon hours wore on seemed to give confirmation to the theory that something was afoot which would result in the putting to sea of the massed might of the modern capital ships of the Navy. The British Lion was certainly going out on a prowl, and there was always the chance that he might be getting his claws into something. The infectious spirit of the "great game" blew like a fresh breeze through the mess-decks, and there was a new sparkle in every eye that met mine as I worked forward and upward to the fore bridge, a smile on every ruddy face, a jaunty set to every pair of swinging shoulders.
From the lofty vantage of the bridge I could see slim, gliding shapes—dusky Maltese against the brown-black background of a jutting headland—which were already threading the mazes of the booms, and knew that they were some of the sportive shoals of smaller craft—probably light cruisers—which would weave a far-flung circle of offence around the bulkier bullies of the Battle Fleet itself.
Now the long, low ships of a line that had been anchored for a mile on our starboard bow began slowly swinging in the boiling welter of reversed propellers, and then, when their dark noses were all pointing down the proper course as though strung on a single tow-line, they started in easy, effortless glide around the end of the squat, round-topped island which masked the exit through which they must pass.
"The 'Cats' are under weigh," said an officerat my elbow, pointing to where the graceful shadow of theTigerand the grim profile of theLionflitted in blank silhouette across a background, a stretch of cliff-begirt beach where the drifted snows of a recent storm still lay banked in a solid wall of dazzling white. Other shadows with historic names flashed into vivid contrast for a few moments, and then dissolved into misty indistinctness as they passed on to where their protective colouring merged with the watery background; and behind these glided the silhouettes of other ships which I knew to be "super-cats," ships with names yet unknown to fame, but which were reputed to be able to outrun and outclaw their predecessors by as wide a margin as they outbulked them. One by one the gaunt profiles sharpened into sudden brightness and then died down like the lights of a train dashing across a trestle into a deep cut.
"It will be our turn presently," the Flag Lieutenant said, as he turned a sheaf of signals just passed up to him. "Each division gets under weigh to a time-table, and any substantial deviation from this by even one ship would upset the schedule for all of the Squadrons following."
A quick order, the breaking out of a string of signal flags, the jerky, serpentine inrush of the already shortened anchor-chain, and our ship had caught the impulse of her accelerating screws and began slowly gathering headway. Down past the head of line after line she steamed, the men of each ship as she came abreaststanding at attention to salute the Flag of the Admiral. Eight ships in "Line Ahead," the Squadron glided easily up the flow toward the gate.
As we passed one great tower of steel after another a breezy midshipman began speaking of their "points" and "records" as he might have reviewed the exhibits at a Bench Show. There was theMarlborough, which the Germans had "sunk" with a torpedo at Jutland, and there—"that cubistic nightmare" (referring to her scientific camouflage)—the new "——," which was supposed to "absorb" torpedoes as a Stilton cheese does port, and to improve day by day under the treatment. "Thematloteswill tell you," he said, "that she goes off and mooches round the U-boat lanes just to tempt them to use up their mouldies on her so that there won't be so many left for merchant ships!"
And there was the ——, and he went on to tell me of one of her gunners who, writing home after the battle, had stated that there was a time when he had been unable to make his way aft from his turret on account of the heaps of dead bodies blocking the way.
"You know very well that we were not hit during the battle," the irate Captain, before whom the culprit had been forthwith, admonished. "What prompted you to tell such a mischievous lie?"
"I was upholding the glory of the Gran' Fleet, Sir," was the unabashed answer. "I couldn't bear to 'ave 'em thinkin' at 'ome that the blinkin'battle cruisers 'ad been 'avin' all the fun o' the go."
Another even line of foretops, seeming to float through the air above the skyline of an interposing island like a file of flying geese, told us, as we cleared the barrage, that another Squadron was getting under weigh; but these, with the "Cats" creeping off under their back-blown smoke trails, into a bank of purple mist, were all that were in sight when the swift winter twilight shut down and left us ploughing alone down the lane between our screening destroyers.
It was just at this time—in the short 'tween-daylight-and-dark interval—that a strange thing happened. The sea was smooth, silken smooth, with hardly more than an eight- or ten-knot breeze ruffling its surface, and the ship was—so far as pitch or roll were concerned—as steady as though chocked up in a dry dock. Suddenly, a couple of cables' lengths ahead, a thin white line of foam appeared, serpentining along at about right angles to our course. It appeared to be quite the same sort of little froth-path that one has come to know in the seas of all the world as the marker of the place where tide meets tide, a phenomenon indicating conflicting but rarely dangerous countercurrents.
I noted that a half-dozen glasses were trained on the wriggling streak, and was wondering what there could be about it to excite such anxious interest, when the Flotilla Leader on our port bow swung swiftly round through eight or ten points and came charging straight down towardsus. No helm ever spun a ship like that, I told myself, even before the violently tossing foam geyser under the "amok's" stern revealed that both helm and screws were doing their utmost to throw her back toward her original course. I had barely time to observe with astonishment that the destroyer on our starboard bow was plunging off in a totally different direction than her "opposite number," when an invisible hand seemed to reach up from below and seize our ship in its vice-like grip. Round swung that 25,000 tons of steel without offering any more apparent resistance than a drifting skiff or a floating log.
There was no knowing until that instant which way the ship was going to swing, and the Chief Navigating Officer's sharp "Hard-a-port!" down the voice-pipe was the only order there was any use in giving, when it became clear that we were being turned six or eight points to port on a course calculated to present pretty much of her whole starboard side for the oncoming destroyer to flatten itself against. The grind of the labouring helm ran like a shudder from stern to bow, but the avoidance of a collision was up to the destroyer rather than the battleship.
Out of the tail of my eye (as I focussed my attention on more imminent developments) I saw that the other battleships and destroyers were cutting capers similar to our own. No two of the dozen or more craft appeared to be steering the same course, and one or two of the destroyers, like helplessly skidding motors on a muddy street,had actually turned through thirty-two points and were heading back on their proper courses.
It was not an especially close call with our Flotilla Leader after all, for her helm cut into water, "standing still" sufficiently to give it a grip, while she yet had room to clear our swinging bows by a score of yards. Wallowing enormously, she spun swiftly round and darted back to her station, while the more ponderous battleship was still reeling dazedly like a half-drunken man trying to orientate after picking himself up from a fall. Then, silently and mysteriously as they had come, the treacherous swirls and eddies rolled on, and ten minutes later—a row of blurred black towers dimly discernible against the falling curtain of the night,—the Squadron was again in "Line Ahead" and steaming quietly toward the open sea in its wonted order.
"In its way, this is quite the nastiest bit of water in all the world," said Admiral Sturdee, turning from the rail of the bridge with an expression of relief on his face. "There is a number of places where the tides run more swiftly than here, but none (in my own experience at least) where they run in so many directions at the same time. The waters for miles are a continual succession of giant whirlpools. These make navigation difficult and uncertain all over the Firth, but in the zone of the tide-rip (as you have just seen) they are infernal. Sometimes—even in stormy weather—we go out without having any trouble whatever at the'rip'; again, as to-day, with little wind and less sea, it picks up a squadron of warships aggregating over two hundred thousand tons in displacement, and shakes them like a terrier worrying a string of sausages. When it's in this kind of a temper, threading the passages at the entrance of a South Pacific coral atoll (to most sailors the last thing in difficult navigation) is like sailing down a countryside canal in comparison. Have you ever seen anything like it?"
"Never at sea," I replied. "Indeed, the only time—anywhere—I ever saw waters take such wanton liberties with craft trying to navigate them was in the White Horse Rapids of the old Klondike route, and those boats were only twenty or thirty-footers of green whipsawed lumber. But aren't there certain kinds of weather when it is next to physically impossible for any kind of a ship to live here? When you get a well-developed gale blowing against the tide, for instance?"
"Ah, that's the combination that does it," said the Admiral with a grim smile, turning to go down to the Chart House with the Flag Captain. "You remember what happened to those two destroyers here in that blow of eight or ten days ago (only one survivor out of the crews of both), and you might ask X—— to tell you what befell the old '——' the night she started out into a storm."
The Flag Lieutenant came and leaned against the rail at my side. "It must have happenedjust about where we are now," he said, rubbing a cinder down into the inner corner of his eye and out on the bridge of his nose in approved fashion. "The tide-rip may ambush you almost anywhere inside of here, and—especially if the weather is thick—you are lucky if your ship doesn't end up somewhere along the forty or fifty miles of cliffy coast that hems in this accursed pocket of water. The old '——' did not go ashore, but her case is notable as being probably the worst bit of bashing a battleship ever had from seas alone.
"She was going out by herself—bound for the Mediterranean, if I remember rightly—and what happened is probably largely due to the fact that they drove her, with the tide, into the teeth of the storm (perhaps to get out where there was more sea-room as quickly as possible) instead of slowing down and taking it easy, as we would be inclined to do now, even with ships a good deal bigger and more powerful. Most of these things have to be learned by experience, and if the '——' hadn't learned the lesson and paid the price, probably one of the others of us would have had to.
"At any rate, she bucked right into a mountain of a wave that swept her with hundreds—perhaps thousands—of tons of solid green water. When it had passed, her bridges and superstructures—everything, indeed, but her mast and turrets—was crushed down and carried away. A number of men went over the side with the wreckage, and most of those above decks notcarried away were killed. The Captain was picked up on the quarterdeck, alive but with his legs broken. Nothing but a battleship could have survived such a blow, though it is quite possible that a more buoyant craft would have ridden higher over the wave and so shipped less solid water. I have seen a good many warships that have dragged themselves back to port after a battle, but never a one that presented such a sight as the poor old '——' did when she limped home the morning after the night before. She is still in commission, I believe, but there can't be an unreplaced rivet in her that doesn't have a crook in its neck to remind it that something hit her that night in Pentland Firth."
The Flag Lieutenant turned his glass for a moment toward a succession of flashes, in which a destroyer was pouring out its troubles to us from the outer darkness, and then leaned back on the rail again. "It would be hard to say whether the Firth is really our worst enemy or our best friend," he resumed presently. "There is a good deal to be said on both sides. First and last, it has probably bashed us about a good deal more than the Hun has; but, at the same time, there is no use denying that it has prevented him from making us a good deal of trouble he might have made if there had been an ordinary respectable sheet of water running right up to the front door of our refuge.
"In the first year of the war we used to let off guns at periscopes and the wash of conning towers every few days in the Firth, and the veryenterprising U-boat to which they were supposed to belong came to be known by the nickname of thePentland Pincher. Before very long, however, we learned that the supposed periscopes were only the necks of swimming cormorants, and the 'conning tower washes' certain characteristic little humps of Pentlandesque waves. We also learned—in one way or another—that a U-boat would have about as much chance of running submerged through one of those googly tide-rips as it would have of ascending the Thames to London, while for it to go down and try to rest on the bottom would be about like a Zeppelin trying to come to roost among the splintered peaks of the Dolomites. Indeed, the best way for you to visualise the bottom of Pentland Firth is to think how the Bernese Oberland looks from the summit of the Matterhorn. It is the currents of the Atlantic and the North Sea rendezvousing over such a bottom which makes the Pentland Firth what is probably the most temperamental bit of water in the Seven Seas."