“Wash-out! Not a Zeppelin. Bows of a battle cruiser sticking out of the water.”
“Good egg,” said someone. “Another Hun done in.”
It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that it might not have been a Hun. As a matter of fact it was theInvincible, or all that was left of her.
. . . . .
Outside the lower conning-tower a little group of messengers, electric light and fire and wreckage parties stood and discoursed. They were displaying an unwonted interest in the merits and demerits of swimming belts.
“Got yours on, Nobby?” inquired one boy-messenger of another.
“Yus,” was the reply in tense grave tones. “An’ if we sinks I’m goin’ to save Admiral Jellicoe an’ get the Victoria Cross.”
This pious flight of fancy apparently rather took his friend’s breath away, for there was a moment’s silence.
“You can ’elp,” he added generously. They were “Raggies” apparently....
. . . . .
Reaction came with the following dawn: a weariness of the soul that no fatigue of the flesh can equal. All one’s energies seemed needed to combat the overwhelming desire for sleep, and the sensitive plate which records even absurdities in the mind holds little save one recollection of that dawn. But whatever has grown dim and been forgotten, the memory of a journey aft along the mess-deck in search of a cup of tea will always survive. The grey daylight struggled through the gunports and mingled with the sickly glare of electric lights along the narrow vista of the mess-deck. One watch of stokers had been relieved, and they lay where they had dropped on coming up from the stokehold. On every available inch of space along the deck sprawled a limp bundleof grimy rags that was a man asleep. It was like picking a pathway through a charnel-house of ebon dead. They lay on their backs with outstretched arms, or face downwards with their arms under their foreheads, in every imaginable attitude of jointless, abandoned exhaustion. The warm, sour smell of perspiration mingled with the aftermath of cordite fumes....
The guns’ crews beside their guns were silent. They stood or sat, arms akimbo, motionless in the apathy of reaction and fatigue, following the passer-by with their eyes....
Aft in the medical distributing station all was still as death. Men lay motionless, snoring beside the stretchers and operating tables. But as the Onlooker passed, something moved inside the arms of a sleeping man. A stumpy tail wagged, and the ponderous bulk of Jumbo, the mascot bulldog, rose, shook himself and trotted forward, grinning a greeting from one survivor of Jutland to another.
Theyear or so before the war found the Submarine Service still in its infancy, untried, unsung, a jest among the big-ship folk of the Navy-that-floats, who pointed with inelegant gestures from these hundred-feet cigar-shaped egg-shells to their own towering steel-shod rams and the nineteen-thousand-odd tons behind each of them.
The Submarine Service had no leisure for jests at that time, even if they had seen anything particularly humorous about the comparison. In an intensely grim and practical way they were dreamers, “greatly dreaming”: and they knew that the day was not far off when these little wet ships of theirs would come into their own and hold, in the bow and stern of each fragile hull, the keys of death and of hell.
The Navy-that-Floats—the Navy of aiguillettes and “boiled shirts,” of bathrooms and Sunday-morning divisions—dubbed them pirates. Pirates, because they went about His Majesty’s business in football sweaters and grey flannel trousers tucked into their huge sea-boots, returning to harbour with a week’s growth of beard and memories of their last bath grown dim.
The Submarine Service was more interested in white mice[3]than pirates in those days, because it was growing up; but the allusion stuck in the memory of one who, at the outbreak of war, drew first blood for the submarines. He returned to harbour flying a tiny silk Skull-and-Crossbones at his masthead, to find himself the object of the Navy’s vociferous admiration, and later (because such quips exchanged between branches of the Naval Service are apt to get misconstrued in less-enlightened circles) of their Lordships’ displeasure.
The time had come, in short, when it was the turn of the Submarine Service to develop a sense of humour: humour of a sort that was apt to be a trifle dour, but it was acquired in a dour school. They may be said to have learned it tickling Death in the ribs: and at that game he who laughs last laughs decidedly loudest.
The materials for mirth in submarinecircles are commonly such as can be easily come by: bursting bombs, mines, angry trawlers, and the like. Things not in themselves funny, perhaps, but taken in conjunction—— However....
A sower went forth sowing; she moved circumspectly at night on the surface and during the day descended to the bottom, where her crew slept, ate sausages and fried eggs and had concerts; there were fourteen items on the programme because the days were long, and five instruments in the orchestra. For two nights she groped her way through shoals and sand-banks, negotiating nineteen known minefields, and only the little fishes can tell how many unknown ones. Early in the third night she fixed her position, completed her grim sowing (thereby adding a twentieth to the number of known minefields within a few square miles off the German coast) and proceeded to return home. At dawn she was sighted by two German seaplanes on patrol; she dived immediately, but the winged enemy, travelling at a hundred miles an hour, were on top of her before the swirl of her dive had left the water.
Now it must be explained that a certain electrically controlled mechanism in the interior of a submarine is so constructedthat if any shock throws it out of adjustment, a bell rings loudly to advertise the fact. As the submarine dived, two bombs dropped from the clouds burst in rapid succession dangerously adjacent to the hull.
The boat was still trembling from the concussion when sharp and clear above the hum of the motors rang out the electric bell referred to.
“Maria,” said a voice out of the shimmering perspective of machinery and motionless figures awaiting Death, “Give the gentleman a bag of nuts!”
In spite of nearly three years of war, the memory of the days when the big Navy laughed at its uncouth fledgling has not altogether died away from the minds of the Submarine Service. Opportunities for repartee come none too often, but they are rarely missed.
Now the branch of the parent Navy with which the Submarine Service has remained most in touch is the department concerned with mines and torpedoes. The headquarters of such craftmanship is properly a shore establishment: but following the custom of the Navy it retains the name of the hulk from which it evolved, and is known in Service circles as H.M.S.Vernon.
A certain submarine was returning from what (to borrow a phrase from German navalcommuniqués) may be described as an enterprise. It was one which involved a number of hazardous feats, not least of which was navigating submerged in an area from which the enemy had removed all buoys and lights, and was patrolling with destroyers and Teutonic thoroughness.
The submarine was proceeding thus at slow speed with her crew at their stations. Their countenances wore expressions similar to those on the faces of the occupants of a railway carriage travelling through a tunnel. One, a red-pated man, tattooed like a Patagonian chieftain, sat with his lips pursed up in a soundless whistle, watching a needle flicker on a dial, while he marked time to an imaginary tune with his foot.
A sharp metallic concussion jarred the outer shell of the fore compartment. It was followed a second later by another, farther aft, and then another. Six times that terrible sound jolted the length of the boat, and then all was silence. The noise made by a mine striking a submarine under water is one few have lived to describe, yet every man there interpreted it on the instant.
They waited in the uncomfortable knowledge that mines are sometimes fitted withdelay-action primers which explode them some seconds after impact. Then suddenly the tension broke. For the first time the red-headed man took his eyes from the dial, and his foot stopped its noiseless tattoo.
“Good oldVernon!” he said sourly. “Another blasted ‘dud’!”
Once clear of their own bases and the sight of war signal stations, the submarine is an outlaw on the high seas, fending for itself in the teeth of friend or foe. True there is an elaborate system of recognition signals in force, but the bluff seamen in command of the armed auxiliaries that guard the seaways round the coast have a way of acting first and talking afterwards. It is the way of the sea.
A homing submarine on the surface encountered one of these gale-battered craft, and in spite of vehement signals found herself under a rain of projectiles from the trawler’s gun. Realising that the customary signals were of no avail, the commanding officer of the submarine bethought him of a still more easily interpreted code. The second-in-command dived down the conning-tower, snatched the tablecloth off the breakfast table, and together they waved it in token of abject surrender.
The trawler ceased fire and the submarineapproached near enough to establish her identity with hand-flags. The white-bearded skipper of the trawler was moved to the depths of his Methody soul.
“Thank God!” he signalled back, “thank God I didn’t hit you!”
“Amen!” replied the hand-flags, and then after a pause: “What didyoudo in the Great War, daddy?”
Those who go down to the bottom of the sea in submarines are wont to say (in public at all events) that since they gave up groping among the moorings of the Turkish minefields in the Narrows, very little happens to them nowadays that is really exciting.
This of course is largely a question of the standard by which you are accustomed to measure excitement. Half an hour’s perusal of the official reports made by the captains of these little wet ships on return to harbour almost leads to the supposition that each writer stifled his yawns of boredom with one hand while he wrote with the other.
Yet to the initiated Death peeps out half a dozen times in the length of a page, between the written lines in which he is so studiously ignored. The culmination of years of training, ten seconds of calculated judgment and a curt order, which cost theGerman Navy a battleship, is rendered thus into prose: “5 a.m. Fired both bow torpedoes at 1,200 yards range at last ship in line. Hit. Dived.”
But let us begin at the beginning....
At three o’clock one summer morning a British submarine was sitting on the surface admiring the face of the waters. There was a waning moon, and by its light she presently observed a line of German light cruisers stealing across her bow. She waited, because they were steering west, and it is not the custom of such craft to go west alone; two minutes later she sighted the smoke of five battle cruisers also going west. She allowed the leading ship to come within 800 yards and fired a torpedo at her; missed, and found herself in the middle of a broadside of shell of varying calibres, all pitching unpleasantly close. She dived like a coot, and with such good-will that she struck the bottom and stopped there for a quarter of an hour putting things straight again.
At 4 a.m. the submarine climbed to the surface and found two squadrons of battleships blackening the sky with smoke, screened by destroyers on all sides and brooded over by Zeppelins. She fired at two miles range and missed the flagship, halved the range and fired again—this timeat the last ship in the line—and blew a hole in her side through which you could drive a motor omnibus. She then dived to a considerable depth and sat and listened to the “chug” of the destroyers’ propellers circling overhead and the detonations of their explosive charges. These gradually grew fainter as the hunt moved away on a false trail.
The submarine then came up and investigated; the remainder of the German Fleet had vanished, leaving their crippled sister to the ministrations of the destroyers, who were visible casting about in all directions, “apparently,” says the report dryly, “searching for me.” The stricken battleship, with a heavy list, was wallowing in the direction of the German coast, sagging through a right angle as she went. The menace that stalked her fetched a wide circle, reloading on the way, and took up a position ahead favourable for thecoup de grâce. She administered it at 1,500 yards range and dived, praising Allah.
Later, having breakfasted to the accompaniment of distant explosions of varying force, she rose to the surface again. It was a clear sunny morning with perfect visibility; the battleship had vanished and on the horizon the smoke of the retreating destroyers made faint spirals against the blue.
Since British submarines specialise in attacking enemy men-of-war only, their operations are chiefly confined to waters where such craft are most likely to be found. Those who read the lesson of Jutland aright will therefore be able to locate roughly the area of British submarine activity.
In the teeth of every defensive device known to Kultur, despite moored mines, explosive nets, and decoys of fiendish ingenuity, this ceaseless patrol is maintained. Winter and summer, from sunset to dawn and dawn to sunrise, there the little wet ships watch and wait. Where the long yellow seas break in clouds of surf across sandbanks and no man dares to follow, they lie and draw their breath. Their inquisitive periscopes rise and dip in the churning wake of the German minesweepers themselves. They rise out of the ambush of depths where the groundswell of a forgotten gale stirs the sand into a fog; and an unsuspecting Zeppelin, flying low, lumbers, buzzing angrily, out of range of their high-angle gun.
Here too come other submarines, returning from a cruise with the murder of unarmed merchantmen to their unforgettable discredit. They come warily, even in their own home waters, and more often than not submerged; but they meet the little wetships from time to time, and the record of their doubtful achievements remains thenceforward a song unsung.
A British submarine on patrol sighted through her periscope the periscope of another submarine. So close were the two boats that to discharge a torpedo would have been as dangerous to one as the other, and the commanding officer of the British boat accordingly rammed his opponent. Neither boat was travelling fast, and he had fully three seconds in which to make his decision and act on it.
Locked together thus, they dropped down through the depths; the German blowing all his tanks in furious efforts to rise; the other flooding every available inch of space in a determined effort to force his adversary down and drown him.
Now the hull of a submarine is tested to resist the pressure of the water up to a certain depth; after that the joints leak, plates buckle, and finally the whole structure collapses like a crumpled egg-shell. With one eye on the depth-gauge the British lieutenant forced the German down to the safety limit and, foot by foot, beyond it. Then gradually they heard the enemy begin to bump along their bottom; he had broken away from the death-lock and was rollinghelplessly aft beneath their hull. The sounds ceased and the needle on the dial jerked back and began to retrace its course. The British submarine rose, to contemplate a circle of oil slowly widening on the surface in the region of the encounter.
Few of these grim games of Peep-bo! are without a moral of some sort. A gentleman adventurer within the mouth of a certain river was aware of a considerable to-do on board flag-draped tugs and river-craft; he himself shared in the universal elation on sighting through his periscope a large submarine, also gaily decked with flags, evidently proceeding on a trial trip. He waited until she was abreast of him and then torpedoed her, blowing her sky-high. Remained then the business of getting home.
Dashing blindly down towards the open sea with periscope beneath the surface, he stuck on a sandbank and there lay, barely submerged. A Zeppelin at once located him: but in view of his position and the almost certain prospect of his capture, forbore to drop bombs; instead she indicated his position to a flotilla of destroyers and stood by to watch the fun. The commander of the submarine raised his periscope for a final look round and found a destroyer abreast his stern torpedo tube. He admitsthat things looked blackish, but there was the torpedo in the tube and there was the destroyer.
He fired and hit her; the next instant, released from the embrace of the mud by the shock of the discharge, the submarine quietly slid into deep water and returned home.
In big brass letters on an ebonite panel in the interior of the submarine is her motto—one word:Resurgam.
There are both heights and depths attainable by the Spirit of Man, concerning which the adventurer who has been there is for ever silent. His mother or his wife may eventually wring something out of him, but not another man. Readers of the following narrative must therefore content themselves with the bald facts and the consolation that they are true. What the man thought about during his two hours’ fight for life: how he felt when Death, acknowledging defeat, opened his bony fingers and let him go, is his own affair—and possibly one other’s.
Disaster overtook a certain British submarine one day and she filled and sank. Before the engulfing water could reach the after-compartment, however, the solitary occupant, a stoker petty officer, succeeded in closing the watertight door. This compartment was the engine-room of the boat, and, save for the glimmer of one lamp which continued to burn dimly through an “earth,” was in darkness.
Now it happened that this solitary living entity, in the unutterable loneliness of the darkness, imprisoned fathoms deep below the wind and sunlight of his world, had a plan. It was one he had been wont to discuss with the remainder of the crew in leisure moments (without, it may be added, undue encouragement) by which a man might save his life in just such an emergency as had now arisen. Briefly, it amounted to this: water admitted into the hull of a submarine will rise until the pressure of the air inside equalises the pressure of the water outside: this providing the air cannot escape. A sudden opening in the upper part of the shell would release the pent-up air in the form of a gigantic bubble; this, rushing surface-wards, would carry with it an object lighter than an equal volume of water—such, for instance, as a live man. It was his idea, then, to admit the water as high as it would rise, open the iron hatchway through which torpedoes were lowered into the submarine, and thus escape in the consequent evulsion of imprisoned air. It was a desperate plan,but granted ideal conditions and unfailing luck, there was no reason why it should not succeed. In this case the conditions for putting it into execution were, unfortunately, the reverse of ideal.
The water spurted through the strained joints in the plating and through the voice-pipes that connected the flooded forepart with the engine-room. With it came an additional menace in the form of chlorine gas, generated by the contact of salt water with the batteries; the effect of this gas on human beings was fully appreciated by the Germans when they adopted it in the manufacture of asphyxiating shells....
To ensure a rapid exit the heavy torpedo-hatch had to be disconnected from its hinges and securing bars, and it could only be reached from the top of the engines. The water was rising steadily, and the heat given off by the slowly cooling engines can be better imagined than described. Grasping a heavy spanner in his hand, the prisoner climbed up into this inferno and began his fight for life.
His first attempt to remove the securings of the hatch was frustrated by the weight of the water on the upper surface of the submarine; this would be ultimately overcome by the air pressure inside, but not tillthe water had risen considerably. Every moment’s delay increased the gas and some faster means of flooding the compartment had to be devised. The man climbed down and tried various methods, groping about in the choking darkness, diving below the scummy surface of the slowly rising tide to feel for half-forgotten valves. In the course of this he came in contact with the switchboard of the dynamo and narrowly escaped electrocution.
Shaken by the shock, and half suffocated by the gas, he eventually succeeded in admitting a quicker flow of water; the internal pressure lifted the hatch off its seating sufficiently to enable him to knock off the securings. The water still rose, but thinking that he now had sufficient pressure accumulated, he made his first bid for freedom. Three times he succeeded in raising the hatch, but not sufficiently to allow him to pass: each time the air escaped and each time the hatch fell again before he could get through.
More pressure was needed, which meant that more water would have to be admitted from the fore-compartment, and with it unfortunately more gas. First of all, however, the hatch had to be secured again. The man dived to the bottom of the boatand found the securing clips, swam up with them and secured the hatch once more. Then he opened the deadlight between the two compartments a little way, increased the inrush of water, and climbing back on to the top of the engines knocked the bolts away.
As he expected the hatch flew open, but the pressure was not now sufficient to blow him out. He started to climb out, when down came the hatch again, and fastened on his hand, crushing it beneath its weight. By dint of wedging his shoulder beneath the hatch he succeeded in finally releasing his hand and allowed the hatch to drop back into its place.
Loss of consciousness, nerve, or hope would have sealed his doom any moment during the past two hours, but even in this bitter extremity his indomitable courage refused to be beaten. Gassed, electrocuted, maimed, cornered like a rat in a hole, he rallied all his faculties for a final desperate effort. Crawling down again, he swam to the deadlight and knocked off the nuts to admit the full rush of water. The compartment would now flood completely, but it was his last chance. He climbed back under the hatch and waited.
The water rose until it reached the coaming of the hatch; with his final remnant ofstrength he forced up the hatch for the last time. The air leaped surface-wards, driven out by the water which impatiently invaded the last few feet it had striven for so long. With it, back through a depth of sixty feet, back to God’s sunlight and men’s voices and life, passed a Man.
The Navy-that-Floats and the Navy-that-Flies usually go about their work sustained by the companionship of others of their kin. From first to last their ways are plain for all men to behold. They fight, and if need be, die, heartened by the reek of cordite-smoke and cheering, or full-flight between the sun and the gaze of breathless armies. It is otherwise with the Navy-under-the-Sea.
Submarines may leave harbour in pairs, their conning-towers awash, and the busy hand-flags exchanging dry witticisms and personalities between the respective captains. But as the land fades astern, of necessity their ways part; it is a rule of the game in the Submarine Service that you do your work alone; oft-times in darkness, and more often still in the shadow of death.
There is appointed an hour and a day when each boat should return. After that there is a margin, during which a boat might return; it is calculated to coverevery conceivable contingency; and as the days pass, and the slow hours drag their way round the wardroom clock on board the Submarine Depot Ship, the silences round the fireplace grow longer and there is a tendency in men’s minds to remember little things. Thus he looked or lit a pipe: scooped the pool at poker: held his dog’s head between his hands and laughed.... After that a typewritten list of names is pinned on the wall of the little chapel ashore, and here and there among the rows of quiet houses on the hill some white-faced woman folds up empty garments and slowly begins to pack.... That is all. From first to last, utter silence and the Unknown.
In this way has been begotten a tradition peculiar to the Navy-under-the-Sea. In the parent Navy it is not meet to talk “shop” out of working hours; in the Navy-under-the-Sea every aspect of life is a jest; but neither in seriousness nor in jest does one refer to Death.
A certain lieutenant in command of a British submarine was returning from patrol in waters frequented by German men-of-war, when he rescued the crew of a Danish steamer torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. It was blowing a gale and his timely intervention saved the lives of the castaways.
The Depot Wardroom listened to the tale and approved. It even warned the hero that he might find himself the possessor of a pair of presentation binoculars if he weren’t careful. The hero expressed his views on that aspect of the affair (they need not be repeated here) and straightway forgot the incident.
He was on his way back from his next spell of patrol work a few weeks later when he again encountered in an open boat the crew of another torpedoed ship. They were Dutch this time, and they had been pulling for nineteen hours in a winter gale, so that their hands were flayed to the bone. These he also rescued and brought back with him to the base; thence they were sent in comfort to their native land to reflect at leisure on Germany’s methods of conducting submarine warfare, as compared with those of Great Britain.
A few days later a deputation of his brother submarine captains summoned the hero to the wardroom (what time the sun had risen over the fore-yard), and there, to the accompaniment of cocktails and an illuminated address, solemnly presented him with a pair of binoculars subtly fashioned out of beer bottles: in the wording of the gunner’s supply note that accompanied them“complete in case, tin, black-japanned.” That all things might be done decently and in order, the recipient was bidden to sign an official receipt-note for the same.
Now the moral of this may appear a trifle obscure; but it serves to illustrate the attitude towards life of the Navy-under-the-Sea. The lives of these defenceless victims of Hunnish brutality had been saved—therefore the occasion demanded not heroics, but high mirth. The hero of the affair admits to having partly missed the joke. But this may be accounted for by the fact that the binoculars were empty, and that later on, when presented with his monthly mess-bill, he discovered that the official receipt which bore his signature included the cocktails ordered by the deputation during the presentation ceremony. So much for the Jest of Life.
There is a private magazine which appears monthly in a certain east-coast port; it is edited by a submarine officer, written by submarine officers, and its circulation is confined chiefly to the Navy-under-the-Sea: but it affords the truest and clearest insight that can be obtained of the psychology of the Submarine Service.
The success of a publication of this nature depends upon raw personalities—indeed there is very little other “copy” obtainable; the readers demand it voraciously, and the victims chuckle and tear off the editor’s trousers in the smoking-room. Month by month, as you turn the witty pages, familiar names reappear, derided, scandalously libelled, mercilessly chaffed to make the mirth of the Mess. Then abruptly a name appears no more.
“Art called away to the north.Old sea-dog? Yet, ere you depart,Clasp once more this hand held forth....Good-bye! God bless your dear old heart!”
“Art called away to the north.Old sea-dog? Yet, ere you depart,Clasp once more this hand held forth....Good-bye! God bless your dear old heart!”
“Art called away to the north.Old sea-dog? Yet, ere you depart,Clasp once more this hand held forth....Good-bye! God bless your dear old heart!”
The above lines are quoted from the magazine in question, with the editor’s permission, and in reverent memory of a very gallant officer, to sum up, as no prose could, the attitude towards Death of these “gentlemen unafraid.”
It happened that another of Britain’s little wet ships went into the northern mists and returned no more. As was the custom, a brother officer of the Submarine Service went ashore to tell the tale to the wife of her commanding officer, returning from the task white and silent.
A few months later the officers of the flotilla to which the boat had belonged were asked to elect a sponsor for the little sonof their dead comrade. Now since the life of any one of them was no very certain pledge, they chose three: of whom one was the best boxer, another the best footballer, and the third owned the lowest golf handicap in their community. In due course the boy was destined to become a submarine officer also, and it behoved the Submarine Service to see that he was brought up in such a way as to be best fitted for that service, sure of hand and heart and eye.
Thus in life and death the spirit of the Navy-under-the-Sea endures triumphant. Prating they leave to others, content to follow their unseen ways in silence and honour. Whoever goes among them for a while learns many lessons; but chiefly perhaps they make it clear that the best of Life is its humour, and of Death the worst is but a brief forgetting....
[Image unavailable.
Thereis a tendency among some people to regard war as a morally uplifting pursuit. Because a man fights in the cause of right and freedom, it is believed by quite a large section of those who don’t fight that hegoes about the business in a completely regenerate spirit, unhampered by any of the human failings that were apt to beset him in pre-war days. Be that as it may, Able Seaman Pettigrew, wearer of no good conduct badges and incorrigible leave-breaker in peace-time, remained in war merely Able Seaman Pettigrew, leave-breaker, and still minus good conduct badges.
He stood at the door of a London public-house, contemplating the night distastefully. The wind howled down the muddy street, and the few lamps casting smears of yellow light at intervals along the thoroughfare only served to illuminate the driving rain. His leave expired at 7 a.m. the following morning, and he had just time to catch the last train to Portsmouth that night. To do Mr. Pettigrew justice, he had completed the first stage of his journey—the steps of the public-house—with that laudable end in view. Here, however, he faltered, and as he faltered he remembered a certain hospitable lady of his acquaintance who lived south of the river.
“To ’ell!” said Mr. Pettigrew recklessly, and swung himself into a passing bus. As he climbed the steps he noted that it passed Waterloo station, and for an instant theflame of good intent, temporarily dowsed, flickered into life again. His ship, he remembered, was under sailing orders. He found himself alone on top of the bus, and walked forward to the front left-hand seat. For a moment he stood there, gripping the rail and peering ahead through the stinging rain while the bus lurched and skidded on its way through deserted streets. Then his imagination, quickened somewhat by hot whisky and water, obliterated the impulse of conscience. He saw himself twenty-four hours later, standing thus as port look-out on board his destroyer, peering ahead through the drenching spray, gripping the rail with numbed hands....
“Oh—to’ell!” said Mr. Pettigrew again, and sitting down gave himself up sullenly to amorous anticipation....
He was interrupted by a girl’s voice at his elbow.
“Fare, please.”
He turned his head, and saw it was the conductress, a slim, compact figure swaying easily to the lurch of the vehicle. Her fingers touched his as she handed him the ticket, and they were bitterly cold.
“Nice night, ain’t it?” said Mr. Pettigrew.
“Not ’arf,” said the girl philosophically.“But there! it ain’t so bad for us ’s what it is for them boys in the trenches.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Pettigrew archly. “Them boys—’im, you means.”
The girl shook her head swiftly. Seen in the gleam of a passing lamp, her face was pretty, and glistening with rain. “Not me,” she said. “There was two—my brothers—but they went West. There’s only me left ... carryin’ on.” The bus lurched violently, causing the little conductress to lose her balance, and her weight rested momentarily against Mr. Pettigrew’s shoulder. She recovered her equilibrium instantly without self-consciousness, and stood looking absently ahead into the darkness.
“That’s what we’ve all got to do, ain’t it?” she said—“do our bit....”
She jingled the coppers in her bag, and turned abruptly.
Mr. Pettigrew watched the trim, self-respecting little figure till it vanished down the steps.
“Oh ’ell!” he groaned, as imperious flesh and immortal spirit awoke to renew the unending combat.
Five minutes later the conductress reappeared at Mr. Pettigrew’s shoulder.
“Waterloo,” she said. “That’s where all you boys gets off, ain’t it ...? You’re for Portsmouth, I s’pose?”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Pettigrew. He jerked to his feet, gripping his bundle, and made for the steps with averted head. “’Night,” he said brusquely. The bus slowed and stopped.
“Good luck,” said the girl.
. . . . .
The port look-out gripped the bridge-rail to steady himself, and stared out through the driving spray and the darkness as the destroyer thrashed her way down Channel. He was chosen for the trick because of his eyesight. “I gotter eye like a adjective ’awk,” Mr. Pettigrew was wont to admit in his more expansive moments, and none gainsaid him the length and breadth of the destroyer’s mess-deck. None gainsaid him on the bridge that night when suddenly he wheeled inboard and bawled at the full strength of his lungs:
“Objec’ on the port bow, sir!”
There was an instant’s pause; a confused shouting of orders, a vision of the coxswain struggling at the kicking wheel as the helm went over, and a man’s clear voice saying—“By God! we’ve got her!”
Then came the stunning shock of the impact, the grinding crash of blunt metal shearing metal, more shouts, faces seen white for an instant against the dark waters,something scraping past the side of the forecastle, and finally a dull explosion aft.
“Rammed a submarine and sunk the perisher!” shouted the yeoman in Mr. Pettigrew’s ear. “Wake up! what the ’ell’s up—are ye dazed?”
Mr. Pettigrew was considerably more dazed when he was sent for the following day in harbour by his captain. From force of custom on obeying such summonses, the ship’s black sheep removed his cap.[4]
“Put your damned cap on,” said the lieutenant-commander. Mr. Pettigrew replaced his cap. “Now shake hands.” Mr. Pettigrew shook hands. “Now go on leave.” Mr. Pettigrew obeyed.
. . . . .
For forty minutes the policeman on duty outside Waterloo Station had been keeping under observation a rather dejected-looking bluejacket carrying a bundle, who stood at the corner scrutinising the buses as they passed. Finally, with deliberate measured tread he approached the man of the sea.
“What bus do you want, mate?”
Mr. Pettigrew enlightened him as to the number.
“There’s been four of that number gonepast while you was standin’ ’ere,” said the policeman, not without suspicion in his tones.
“I’m very partickler about buses,” said Mr. Pettigrew coldly.
“Well,” said the constable, “’ere’s another one.”
The sailor waited till it slowed up abreast of them. His blue eyes were cocked on the rear end.
“An’this’ere’s the right one,” said Mr. Pettigrew.
He stepped briskly into the roadway, ran half a dozen paces, and swung himself on to the footboard beside the conductress.
[Image unavailable.
“ ... And regrets to report only one survivor.”—Admiralty Announcement.
“ ... And regrets to report only one survivor.”—Admiralty Announcement.
“ ... And regrets to report only one survivor.”—Admiralty Announcement.
The glass dropped another point, and the captain of the cruiser glanced for the hundredth time from the lowering sky to the two destroyers labouring stubbornly in the teeth of the gale on either beam. Then he gave an order to the yeoman of signals, who barked its repetition to the shelter-deck where the little group of signalmen stamped their feet and blew on their numbed fingers in the lee of the flag-lockers. Two of the group scuffled round the bright-coloured bunting: the clips of the halliardssnapped a hoist together, and vivid against the grey sky the signal went bellying and fluttering to the masthead.
The figures on the bridges of the destroyers wiped the stinging spray from their swollen eyelids and read the message of comfort.
“Return to base. Weather conditions threatening.”
They surveyed their battered bridges and forecastles, their stripped, streaming decks and guns’ crews; they thought of hot food, warm bunks, dry clothing, and all the sordid creature comforts for which soul and body yearn so imperiously after three years of North Sea warfare. Their answering pendants fluttered acknowledgment, and they swung round on the path for home, praising Allah who had planted in the brain of the cruiser captain a consideration for the welfare of his destroyer screen.
“If this is what they call ‘threatening,’”observed the senior officer of the two boats, as his command clove shuddering through the jade-green belly of a mountainous sea, flinging the white entrails broadcast, “if this is merely threatening I reckon it’s about time someone said ‘Home, James!’”
His first lieutenant said nothing. He had spent three winters in these grey wastes,and he knew the significance of that unearthly clear visibility and the inky clouds banked ahead to the westward. But presently he looked up from the chart and nodded towards the menace in the western sky. “That’s snow,” he said. “It ought to catch us about the time we shall make Scaw Dhu light.”
“We’ll hear the fog buoy all right,” said the captain.
“If the pipes ain’t frozen,” was the reply. “It’s perishing cold.” He ran a gauntletted hand along the rail and extended a handful of frozen spray. “That’s salt—andfrozen....”
The snow came as he had predicted, but rather sooner. It started with great whirling flakes like feathers about a gull’s nesting-place, a soundless ethereal vanguard of the storm, growing momentarily denser. The wind, from a temporary lull, reawakened with a roar. The air became a vast witch’s cauldron of white and brown specks, seething before the vision in a veritable Bacchanal of Atoms. Sight became a lost sense: time, space, and feeling were overwhelmed by that shrieking fury of snow and frozen spray thrashing pitilessly about the homing grey hulls and the bowed heads of the men who clung to the reeling bridges.
The grey, white-crested seas raced hissing alongside and, as the engine-room telegraphs rang again and again for reduced speed, overtook and passed them. Out of the welter of snow and spray the voices of the leadsmen chanting soundings reached the ears of those inboard as the voice of a doctor reaches a patient in delirium, fruitlessly reassuring....
Number Three of the midship gun on board the leading destroyer turned for the comfort of his soul from the contemplation of the pursuing seas to the forebridge, but snow-flakes blotted it from view. Providence, as he was accustomed to visualise it in the guise of a red-cheeked lieutenant-commander, had vanished from his ken. Number Three drew his hands from his pockets, and raising them to his mouth leaned towards the gunlayer. The gunlayer was also staring forward as if his vision had pierced that whirling grey curtain and was contemplating something beyond it, infinitely remote.... There was a concentrated intensity in his expression not unlike that of a dog when he raises his head from his paws and looks towards a closed door.
“’Ere,” bawled Number Three, seeking comradeship in an oppressive, indefinable loneliness. “’Ow about it—eh?...” The wind snatched at the meaningless words and beat them back between his chattering teeth.
The wind backed momentarily, sundering the veil of whirling obscurity. Through this rent towered a wall of rock, streaked all about with driven snow, at the foot of which breakers beat themselves into a smoking yeast of fury. Gulls were wailing overhead. Beneath their feet the engine room gongs clanged madly.
Then they struck.
The foremost destroyer checked on the shoulder of a great roller as if incredulous: shuddered: struck again and lurched over. A mountainous sea engulfed her stern and broke thundering against the after-funnel. Steam began to pour in dense hissing clouds from the engine-room hatchways and exhausts. Her consort swept past with screeching syren, helpless in the grip of the backwash for all her thrashing propellers that strove to check her headlong way. She too struck and recoiled: sagged in the trough of two stupendous seas, and plunged forward again.... Number Three, clinging to the greasy breech-block of his gun, clenched his teeth at the sound of that pitiless grinding which seemed as if it would never end....
Of the ensuing horror he missed nothing, yet saw it all with a wondering detachment. A wave swept him off his feet against a funnel stay, and receding, left him clinging to it like a twist of waterlogged straw. Hand over hand he crawled higher, and finally hung dangling six feet above the highest wave, legs and arms round about the wire stay. He saw the forecastle break off like a stick of canteen chocolate and vanish into the smother. The other destroyer had disappeared. Beneath him, waist deep in boiling eddies, he saw men labouring about a raft, and had a vision of their upturned faces as they were swept away. The thunder of the surf on the beaches close at hand drowned the few shouts and cries that sounded. The wire from which he dangled jarred and twanged like a banjo-string, as the triumphant seas beat the soul out of the wreck beneath him.
A funnel-stay parted, and amid clouds of smoke and steam the funnel slowly began to list over the side. Number Three of the midship gun clung swaying like a wind-tossed branch above the maelstrom of seething water till a wave drove over the already-unrecognisable hull of the destroyer, leaped hungrily at the dangling human figure and tore him from his hold.
Bitterly cold water and a suffocating darkness engulfed him. Something clawed at his face and fastened on to his shoulder; he wrenched himself free from the nerveless clutch without ruth or understanding; his booted heel struck a yielding object as he struggled surfaceward, kicking wildly like a swimming frog ... the blackness became streaked with grey light and pinpoints of fire. Number Three had a conviction that unless the next few strokes brought him to the surface it would be too late. Then abruptly the clamour of the wind and sea, and the shriek of the circling gulls smote his ears again. He was back on the surface once more, gulping greedy lungfuls of air.
A wave caught him and hurled him forward on its crest, spread-eagled, feebly continuing the motions of a swimmer. It spent itself, and to husband his strength the man turned on his back, moving his head from side to side to take in his surroundings.
He was afloat (he found it surprisingly easy to keep afloat) inside a narrow bay. On both sides the black cliffs rose, all streaked with snow, out of a thunderous welter of foam. The tide sobbed and lamented in the hollows of unseen caverns, or sluiced the length of a ledge to plash in cascades down the face of the cliff.
The snow had abated, and in the gathering dusk the broken water showed ghostly white. To seaward the gale drove the smoking rollers in successive onslaughts against the reef where the battered remains of the two destroyers lay. All about the distorted plating and tangle of twisted stanchions the surf broke as if in a fury of rapine and destruction....
Another wave gripped him and rushed him shoreward again. The thunder of the surf redoubled. “Hi! hi! hi! hi!” screeched the storm-tossed gulls. Number Three of the midship gun abandoned his efforts to swim and covered his face with his soggy sleeve. It was well not to look ahead. The wave seemed to be carrying him towards the cliffs at the speed of an express train. He wondered if the rocks would hurt much, beating out his life.... He tried desperately to remember a prayer, but all he could recall was a sermon he had once listened to on the quarter-deck, one drowsy summer morning at Malta.... About coming to Jesus on the face of the waters.... “And Jesus said ‘come.’ ...” Fair whizzing along, he was....
Again the wave spent itself, and the man was caught in the backwash, drawn under, rolled over and over, spun round and round,gathered up in the watery embrace of another roller and flung up on all fours on a shelving beach. Furiously he clawed at the retreating pebbles, lurched to his feet, staggered forward a couple of paces, and fell on hands and knees on the fringe of a snow-drift. There he lay awhile, panting for breath.
He was conscious of an immense amazement, and, mingled with it, an inexplicable pride. He was still alive! It was an astounding achievement, being the solitary survivor of all those officers and men. But he had always considered himself a bit out of the ordinary.... Once he had entered for a race at the annual sports at the Naval Barracks, Devonport. He had never run a race before in his life, and he won. It seemed absurdly easy. “Bang!” went the pistol: off they went, helter-skelter, teeth clenched, fists clenched, hearts pounding, spectators a blur, roaring encouragement....
He won, and experienced the identical astonished gratification that he felt now.
“You runs like a adjective ’are, Bill,” his chum had admitted, plying the hero with beer at the little pub halfway up the cobbled hill by the dockyard.
Then he remembered other chums, shipmates, and one in particular called Nobby.He rose into a sitting position, staring seaward. Through the gloom the tumult of the seas, breaking over the reef on which they had foundered, glimmered white. The man rose unsteadily to his feet; he was alone on the beach of a tiny cove with his back to forbidding cliffs. Save where his own footsteps showed black, the snow was unmarked, stretching in an unbroken arc from one side of the cove to the other. The solitary figure limped to the edge of the surf and peered through the stinging scud. Then, raising his hands to his mouth, he began to call for his lost mate.
“Nobby!” he shouted, and again and again, “Nobby! Nobby!... Nob-bee-e!” ...
“Nobby,” echoed the cliffs behind, disinterestedly.
“Hi! Hi! Hi!” mocked the gulls.
The survivor waded knee-deep into the froth of an incoming sea.
“Ahoy!” he bawled to the driving snow-flakes and spindrift. His voice sounded cracked and feeble. He tried to shout again, but the thunder of the waves beat the sound to nothing.
He retraced his steps and paused to look round at the implacable face of the cliff, at the burden of snow that seemed to overhang the summit, then stared again to seaward. A wave broke hissing about his feet: the tide was coming in.
Up to that moment fear had passed him by. He had been in turn bewildered, incredulous, cold, sick, bruised, but sustained throughout by the furious animal energy which the body summons in a fight for life. Now, however, with the realisation of his loneliness in the gathering darkness, fear smote him. In fear he was as purely animal as he had been in his moments of blind courage. He turned from the darkling sea that had claimed chum and shipmates, and floundered through the snow-drifts to the base of the cliff. Then, numbed with cold, and well-nigh spent, he began frantically to scale the shelving surfaces of the rock.
Barnacles tore the flesh from his hands and the nails from his finger-tips as he clawed desperately at the crevices for a hold. Inch by inch, foot by foot he fought his way upwards from the threatening clutch of the hungry tide, leaving a crimson stain at every niche where the snow had gathered. Thrice he slipped and slithered downwards, bruised and torn, to renew his frantic efforts afresh. Finally he reached a broad shelf of rock, halfway up the surface of the cliff, and there rested awhile, whimpering softly to himself at the pain of his flayed hands.
Presently he rose again and continued the dizzy ascent. None but a sailor or an experienced rock-climber would have dreamed of attempting such a feat single-handed, well-nigh in the dark. Even had he reached the top he could not have walked three yards in the dense snow-drifts that had gathered all along the edge of the cliffs. But the climber knew nothing about that; he was in search ofterra firma, something that was not slippery rock or shifting pebbles, somewhere out of reach of the sea.
He was within six feet of the summit when he lost a foothold, slipped, grabbed at a projecting knob of rock, slipped again, and so slipping and bumping and fighting for every inch, he slid heavily down on to his ledge again.
He lay bruised and breathless where he fell. That tumble came near to finishing matters; it winded him—knocked the fight out of him. But a wave, last and highest of the tide, sluiced over the ledge and immersed his shivering body once more in icy water; the unreasoning terror of the pursuing tide that had driven him up the face of the cliff whipped him to his feet again.
He backed against the rock, staring out through the driving spindrift into the menaceof the darkness. There ought to be another wave any moment: then there would be another: and after that perhaps another. The next one then would get him. He was too weak to climb again....
The seconds passed and merged into minutes. The wind came at him out of the darkness like invisible knives thrown to pin him to a wall. The cold numbed his intelligence, numbed even his fear. He heard the waves breaking all about him in a wild pandemonium of sound, but it was a long time before he realised that no more had invaded his ledge, and a couple of hours before it struck him that the tide had turned....
Towards midnight he crawled down from his ledge and followed the retreating tide across the slippery shale, pausing every few minutes to listen to the uproar of sea and wind. An illusion of hearing human voices calling out of the gale mocked him with strange persistence. Once or twice he stumbled over a dark mass of weed stranded by the retreating tide, and each time bent down to finger it apprehensively.
Dawn found him back in the shelter of his cleft, scraping limpets from their shells for a breakfast. The day came slowly over a grey sea, streaked and smeared likethe face of an old woman after a night of weeping. Of the two destroyers nothing broke the surface. It was nearly high water, and whatever remained of their battered hulls was covered by a tumultuous sea. They were swallowed. The sea had taken them—them and a hundred-odd officers and men, old shipmates, messmates, townies, raggies—just swallowed the lot.... He still owed last month’s mess-bill to the caterer of his mess.... He put his torn hands before his eyes and strove to shut out the awful grey desolation of that hungry sea.
During the forenoon a flotilla of destroyers passed well out to seaward. They were searching the coast for signs of the wrecks, and the spray blotted them intermittently from sight as they wallowed at slow speed through the grey seas.
The survivor watched them and waved his jumper tied to a piece of drift-wood; but they were too far off to see him against the dark rocks. They passed round a headland, and the wan figure, half frozen and famished, crawled back into his cleft like a stricken animal, dumb with cold and suffering. It was not until the succeeding low water, when the twisted ironwork was showing black above the broken water onthe reef, that another destroyer hove in sight. She too was searching for her lost sisters, and the castaway watched her alter course and nose cautiously towards the cove. Then she stopped and went astern.
The survivor brandished his extemporised signal of distress and emitted a dull croaking sound between his cracked lips. A puff of white steam appeared above the destroyer’s bridge, and a second later the reassuring hoot of a siren floated in from the offing. They had seen him.
A sudden reaction seized his faculties. Almost apathetically he watched a sea-boat being lowered, saw it turn and come towards him, rising and falling on the heavy seas, but always coming nearer ... he didn’t care much whether they came or not—he was that cold. The very marrow of his bones seemed to be frozen. They’d have to come and fetch him if they wanted him. He was too cold to move out of his cleft.
The boat was very near. It was a whaler, and the bowman had boated his oar, and was crouching in the bows with a heaving-line round his forearm. The boat was plunging wildly, and spray was flying from under her. The cliffs threw back the orders of the officer at the tiller as he peered ahead from under his tarpaulin sou’wester withanxiety written on every line of his weather-beaten face. He didn’t fancy the job, that much was plain; and indeed, small blame to him. It was no light undertaking, nursing a small boat close in to a dead lee shore, with the aftermath of such a gale still running.
They came still closer, and the heaving line hissed through the air to fall at the castaway’s feet.
“Tie it round your middle,” shouted the lieutenant. “You’ll have to jump for it—we’ll pull you inboard all right.”
The survivor obeyed dully, reeled to the edge of his ledge and slid once more into the bitterly cold water.
Half a dozen hands seemed to grasp him simultaneously, and he was hauled over the gunwale of the boat almost before he realised he had left his ledge. A flask was crammed between his chattering teeth; someone wound fold upon fold of blanket round him.
“Any more of you, mate?” said a voice anxiously; and then, “Strike me blind if it ain’t old Bill!”
The survivor opened his eyes and saw the face of the bowman contemplating him above his cork life-belt. It was a vaguely familiar face. They had been shipmatessomewhere once. Barracks, Devonport, p’raps it was. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and coughed as the raw spirit ran down his throat.
“Any more of you, Bill, ole lad?”
The survivor shook his head.
“There’s no one,” he said, “’cept me. I’m the only one what’s lef’ outer two ships’ companies.” Again the lost feeling of bewildered pride crept back.
“You always was a one, Bill!” said the bowman in the old familiar accent of hero-worship.
The survivor nodded confirmation. “Not ’arf I ain’t,” he said appreciatively. “Sole survivor I am!” And held out his hand again for the flask. “Christ! look at my ’ands!”