Part 10

It must be remembered that the ship was now openly a man-of-war, flying the White Ensign, with guns unmasked. At 1.20 P.M., two hours and twenty minutes after first sighting the submarine, a torpedo struck the ship abreast the engine-room, hurling blazing wreckage and water in all directions. With far-seeing thoroughness of organisation this moment had been anticipated sooner or later for months past. Accordingly, at the order of "Abandon ship," the men previously detailed launched the remaining boat and a raft, and paddled clear of the doomed vessel. The Captain and crews of two guns and both torpedo tubes, the Navigator, Assistant Paymaster, and Quartermaster remained on board. For the ensuing eighty minutes, while the fire in the poop continued to blaze furiously, and the ammunition in the vicinity detonated like a succession of gigantic Chinese crackers, the periscope circled suspiciously round the ship and boats. At 2.30 the submarine rose to the surface in a position on which none of the guns on board would bear, and began once more shelling the ship and boats with vindictive fury.

For twenty minutes the remnant on board endured this ordeal, lying face downwards and motionless on the splintered planking. It is recorded that during the hottest of the fire one of the foremost gun's crew requested, in a hoarse whisper, to be allowed to take his boots off. The officer in his vicinity inquired the reason for this strange request, to which the man replied that he didn't think he had much longer to live, and, on the whole, thought he'd prefer not to die with his boots on. He subsequently explained that he came of a respectable family.

By means of the voice-pipe connecting him with the guns' control, the Captain cheered and encouraged his men through that long agony. Small wonder they loved an officer who exhorted them in such a pass to "keep merry and bright"; who quoted Bairnsfather to the boyish officer in the control when shells were bursting all about his head ("If you know of a better 'ole, go to it!"); who, when the wounded Navigator, blinded with blood at the opposite end of the bridge, called that he was done, replied: "You're all right! Hang on, 'cos we've got him cold!" and found time to steady the guns' crews with, "Remember the V.C. The King has given the ship, lads."

At 2.50 P.M. the submarine abruptly ceased shelling and submerged. Then, with only a periscope showing, he steamed once more past the ship. As he came abeam under-water, the British Captain played one of his few remaining trump cards, and discharged a torpedo; it missed by inches, and passed unnoticed. Going very slowly, the enemy then crossed the bow and came down the starboard side. One last desperate chance remained, and the second torpedo was fired. In an agony of suspense they watched the trail of bubbles flicker towards the periscope, held their breath for the explosion, and saw the tell-tale wake pass a foot astern of the periscope. They had shot their bolt, and the game was up. A wireless signal was immediately sent out for urgent assistance, as the wary enemy had sighted the last torpedo and promptly dived. The ship was sinking fast, and to wait for another torpedo or further shelling would have meant the useless sacrifice of life. A United States destroyer, an armed yacht, and two British destroyers that had been hovering below the horizon, rushed up at full speed and took charge of the wounded. The ship sank thirty-four hours later, with her colours flying, after strenuous endeavours had been made to save her.

Despite the almost incredible gruelling the crew had undergone, all survived the action. The officer in charge of the after-gun received the Victoria Cross, and one of the gun's crew was selected by ballot for a similar honour. The remainder, including the hand told off for the depth-charges, who has since succumbed to his wounds, were awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal.

Much of the tale remains untold, but it is best brought to an all too brief conclusion in the words of the official report written by the officer, who, as his head and shoulders appeared above the bridge screen at the conclusion of the action, brought forth the following ecstatic shout from one of the "panic party": "Blimey! there's the Skipper still alive! Gawd, wouldn't them perishin' 'Uns give ninepence an inch for 'im!" This officer's report concludes as follows:

It is hardly necessary for me again to refer to the behaviour of my crew--the tactics I carried out were only possible through the utmost confidence I had in my ship and my crew. I would especially bring to your notice the extreme bravery of Lieutenant Bonner, R.N.R., the officer in charge, and the 4-in. gun's crew. Lieutenant Bonner, having been blown out of his control by the first explosion, crawled into the gun hatch with the crew. They there remained at their posts with a fire raging in the poop below and the deck getting red hot. One man tore up his shirt to give pieces to the gun's crew to stop the fumes getting into their throats, others lifted the boxes of cordite off the deck to keep them from exploding, and all the time they knew they must be blown up, as the secondary supply and magazine were immediately below. They told me afterwards that communication with the bridge was cut off, and although they would be blown up, they also knew they would spoil the show if they moved, so they remained until actually blown up with their gun.

Then, when, as wounded men, they were ordered to remain quiet in various places during the second action, they had to lie there unattended and bleeding, with explosions continually going on aboard and splinters from the enemy's shell-fire penetrating their quarters. Lieutenant Bonner, himself wounded, did what he could for two who were with him in the wardroom. When I visited them after the action they thought little of their wounds, but only expressed their disgust that the enemy had not been sunk. Surely such bravery is hard to equal. The strain for the men who remained on board after the ship had been torpedoed, poop set on fire, cordite and shells exploding, and then the enemy shell-fire can easily be imagined. I much regret that two officers and seven men were wounded, and am very grateful to U.S.S. _Noma_ for taking charge of the two most dangerous cases. I--we--deeply regret the loss of one of H.M. ships, and still more the escape of the enemy. We did our best, not only to destroy the enemy and save the ship, but also to show ourselves worthy of the Victoria Cross the King recently bestowed on the ship.

I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant,

(Signed) GORDON CAMPBELL, Captain, R.N.

III

"NOT IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ENEMY"

(1918)

1

THE GLEANER

The motor-launch chugged to the limit of her beat and wheeled with her bows to a rusty sunset. The wind had been freshening steadily since noon and the steep grey seas were edged with spray, streaked like the flanks of an over-spurred horse. The motor-launch, from a monotonous corkscrew roll, changed to a jerky see-saw that enveloped her in a bitterly cold cascade at every downward plunge.

The R.N.V.R. Lieutenant in command leaned with one broad shoulder against the side of the wheel-shelter, his legs braced far apart and his oilskin flapping wetly against his leather sea-boots. As each successive welter of spray drove past his head he raised a pair of glasses and searched the horizon to the westward where the sombre November sunset was fast fading.

Somewhere below that horizon the homeward-bound convoy was approaching, and his orders were to patrol a given length of the swept channel up the coast on the look-out for floating mines that might have drifted by chance currents from distant mine-fields. Twice since dawn the sweepers had passed over that water and reported the fair-way clear; but with a dozen shiploads of wheat to pass up it in the morning, no one was taking any chances. "Patrol till dark; floating mines to be sunk by gun or rifle fire," said his orders. The R.N.V.R. Lieutenant had been reckoned a good shot with a rifle in the days when he was an Admiralty clerk, and spent his Saturday afternoons on a rifle range at Wormwood Scrubs; he glanced from the bucking deck of his command to the rifle hanging in slings over the Coxswain's head, and smiled rather doubtfully to himself. As if in challenge to that smile, the Signalman on the other side of the Coxswain suddenly extended his telescope and arm in a straight line to seaward.

"Mine awash, sir," he shouted. "Two points on the port bow." The Coxswain raised his eye from the binnacle and moved the wheel through half a turn.

The Lieutenant stared through his glasses. "Umph," he said. The crew of the muffled six-pounder in the bows emerged from the fore hatchway and began to cast off the clips securing the lid of the ammunition box.

In silence they stared at the dull green globular object that bobbed past them in the trough of a sea, the soft lead horns projecting ominously as the waves washed over the rounded surface.

"One of ours," said the Lieutenant, with a swift expert glance. He stepped inboard a pace and studied a chart. "Hell! It's come a long way--must ha' been Tuesday's gale."

The launch held on her course till she had reached the limit of the safety zone of a bursting mine; stopped, and brought the gun to the ready. The gun-layer adjusted his sight, and the tiny gun platform rolled in sickening lurches.

"She may steady for a moment," said the Lieutenant, without conviction. "Choose your time." The gunlayer chose it.

"Bang! A puff of smoke dissolved about the muzzle and the shell sent up a column of foam a yard beyond the preposterous target.

"Try again," said the Lieutenant, and unslung the rifle. "Fire on the downward roll."

The gunlayer fired on the downward and then on the upward roll, and each time the shell went sobbing away into the Channel haze, and the dark, smooth object still bobbed in the fast-fading light amid the waves. The Lieutenant kicked aside his seventeenth empty brass cylinder and snapped the rifle bolt angrily. "There's the smoke of the convoy," he shouted to his second in command, who was firing from aft and swearing in a monotonous undertone that sounded like a litany. "It's right in their track." For the ensuing half-hour they kept up the fruitless fusillade until dusk blotted out the target.

The R.N.V.R. Lieutenant rang down for half-speed. "Secure the gun," he said, curtly, and to the Coxswain: "Close the blighter; we've got to make a rope's end fast and tow it inshore out of the fairway." The Coxswain gave his Commanding Officer a searching, incredulous glance, as if he doubted his sanity, and spun the wheel round, but the Lieutenant was lurching aft on his way to the cabin hatch. He paused en route and thrust a head and shoulders into the engine-room. "Bring a can of lubricating oil aft an' a handful of waste," he shouted to the unseen occupant, and dived into his cabin.

Under direction of the First Lieutenant, a grass line was uncoiled and one end made fast to a cleat; there was no time to be lost, for the dusk was falling fast and the convoy with its attendant escorts was a bare five miles away. The motor-launch circled round the floating mine, visible only by reason of the intermittent whiteness of the broken water about it. The Sub-Lieutenant stared at it half-fascinated, the coils of the line in his hands. For a moment he felt an angry resentment against the minesweepers; this, assuredly, was their business. Then he remembered that they had garnered their grim harvest and returned to port. The motor-launch was only a gleaner.

"Now then!" He turned to see his Captain at his elbow, stark naked as the moment he was born, glistening with oil like a wrestler of old. "Give us the rope's end. Drop down to leeward when I shout--an' stand by with a hot grog."

The speaker knotted the rope loosely over one muscular shoulder and measured the distance to the mine with a dispassionate eye. "If I bungle it and foul one of the horns," he said, "it'll blow the boat to smithereens. You'd better stand by with life-belts for yourselves."

"What about you?" asked the Sub. His Captain gave a little grim laugh. "If that egg breaks, there won't be much of me to put a belt round," and without further ado he slid over the stern into the water.

The crew of the launch watched the receding head and shoulders as their Commanding Officer was carried to leeward on the crest of a wave, and the Sub-Lieutenant, paying out loose coils of rope into the dark water, murmured: "That's a man for you! They had a glimpse of white gleaming body, as the swimmer circled cautiously round the floating mine and the waves lifted or dropped him into their hollows. Then for a moment he vanished and the watching group aft held their breath.

"If he grabs for the ring bolt and catches hold of a horn----" said the Coxswain, and left the sentence unfinished. The seconds passed. Then out of the darkness came a thin hail. The Coxswain jumped to the wheel; the second in command flung the slack line over the stern, and the launch dropped down to leeward.

The numb, exhausted figure hauled over the side a minute later, to be wrapped in blankets and massaged back to speech, resumed his clothes and clumped forward to the wheel-house as the launch turned inshore with the mine in tow.

He stared into the darkness astern as the line tautened. "God knows if there are any more farther up the coast... But our beat's clear. Full speed, Coxswain!"

2

THE MILLIONTH CHANCE

Three hundred feet above mother earth sat an able seaman of the Royal Navy, reflecting on the strangeness of his profession. For the first eighteen months of the War he had been a loading number of one of a Battleship's six-inch guns; as such he spent most of his waking hours punching a dummy projectile into the breech of a "loader," or, when not at meals or asleep, following critically the fortunes of cinema artistes as portrayed on the Grand Fleet films. There came a day after that when the vagaries of fortune transplanted him to a Dover Monitor, where he grew accustomed to the roar of fifteen-inch shells from the Belgian coast batteries passing overhead, or pitching short of his floating home in a thunderous upheaval of white water. Finally he returned to his depot suffering from gun-deafness, to find himself in due course one of a working party attached to a high-power Naval Wireless Station, and still a little hard of hearing.

No one had consulted him as to his personal inclinations in the matter of these changes; indeed, he never asked himself if it was merely blind chance that ruled his comings and goings, or Fate, far-seeing, omniscient, working to an appointed end. Destiny, as he knew it, always appeared in the guise of a ship's corporal with a Muster List and a stump of pencil. He paid his debts, tucked his "papers" into the lining of his cap, shouldered his bag and hammock, and passed without concern to such future as awaited him.

Whatever the effect of heavy gunfire on his hearing, his nervous system remained unimpaired; so much so that, as he sat swaying in a "boatswain's stool," three-quarters of the way up one of the four hundred and thirty feet wireless masts, slapping creosote on to the wooden lattice work with a brush, he hummed a little tune to himself:

"Laugh while you may, There's still to-day-- You may be dead ter-morrer!"

He crooned contentedly, and desisted from his labours to survey, like Moses of old, the landscape o'er.

Below him, seen through a thin veil of shifting mist, stretched smooth grey downs and a network of roads. Directly beneath, tiny figures moved among the buildings of the wireless station; on the slope of a far hillside rows of conical tents showed white in a passing gleam of sunshine. Something moving along one of the roads held his interest for a moment and the song came to an end; a field-gun battery going out to exercise; horses the size of mice. He wondered what it must be like to be an airman and pepper an enemy battery with a machine-gun. Wouldn't they scatter! Horses all mixed up with the traces, plunging. Pap! pap! pap! would go the machine-gun with the goggled face behind it, laughing triumphant... Fine, it 'ud be.

He bent his head back and stared up into the low-lying clouds that seemed to hover just overhead. Was it because he had been thinking of aeroplanes, or did he really hear the hum of an engine coming down out of the mist? The slender lattice-work above him rose towering for another hundred feet, taking the eye criss-cross along its diminishing perspective until it made you giddy. The sailor knotted his brows and cursed his deafness as he strained to listen. Surely it was an aeroplane. He could feel the vibration of its engine rather than hear it. Or was it the wind droning in the taut wire stays that spread earthward on every side.

Then, swift as a falling stone, flashing dark through the mist, he saw the machine, apparently coming straight for him.

"Look out!" he shouted, and as he spoke the whirring thing crashed fairly into the mast fifty feet above him with a splintering concussion that shook the framework like a whip. The bluejacket ducked his head as a shower of fragments descended, and sat waiting for the thing to fall. Nothing happened. The last piece of shattered propeller dropped clattering down the lattice for a little distance, rebounded and vanished into space. Only the humming of the wind broke a silence that had somehow become dreadful; dreading he knew not what, the man looked up.

There was the plane, with her nose jammed securely between the bars of the crossed lattice, embedded as far as the wings. The fuselage stuck out into the air at right angles to the mast like a dragonfly that had flown blindly against a sticky window... The sight was extraordinary.

The A.B. craned his head downwards. The small figures on the earth were running to and fro like ants. But where was the pilot? He peered up at the motionless wreck and shouted. No reply came. Odd! He'd better go and see about the pilot, who evidently hadn't seen the mast in the fog, and, by the millionth chance, hit it.

Taking with him the rope that secured the boatswain's-stool he commenced to climb. P'raps the bloke was stunned--dead, more likely. Anyhow, he couldn't leave him there in his seat with the likelihood of the machine breaking off from its nose and falling to the earth any moment. Just as well he'd been there at the moment when it happened; that was chance, too, in a way... Rum turn, altogether.

Foot by foot, from cross-bar to girder and girder to cross-bar he climbed, and finally reached the point of impact. The lattice was smashed to matchwood here, and the mast swayed dizzily above the damaged place. Another pull and a heave enabled the rescuer to look down on the unconscious figure who had been the puppet of so incredible a whim of fate. He lay face upwards across one of the wings where he had been flung by the force of the collision. His arms were outstretched, and both legs, from his knees down, hung over the edge of the wing into three hundred and fifty feet of space. The machine had but to sag a couple of feet, or the unconscious figure stir ever so little....

The able seaman took a deep breath. Far below him--perhaps half an hour's climb--men with ropes were toiling upwards to the rescue. Overhead the damaged mast shivered and creaked in the wind; a yard away on the curved surface of the wing lay the pilot, spread-eagled and motionless. "_That_ ain't no place for you!" said the bluejacket. He knotted the rope round his body, made the other end fast to the mast, and gingerly tested the frail platform. Would it stand the weight of both?

Inch by inch he crawled out along the wing, stretched forth a hand, and grabbed the pilot's gauntleted wrist. Then unfastening the rope from his own body he tied it round the insensible figure, and slowly, breathlessly, with many a pause and muttered oath at the tumultuous thumping of his heart--which seemed as if it must bring down the mast--he drew the body off the wing and regained the mast. Sitting in the V-shaped angle of the cross-girders he lashed the boy's shoulders securely to the nearest upright, and with the limp legs across his lap, produced and with difficulty lit the stump of a clay pipe. His hand shook and the perspiration trickled cold behind his ears; but presently his lips parted, and in a not too certain voice he began again his interrupted song:

"Laugh while you may, There's still to-day-- You may be dead ter-morrer!"

3

CHINKS

"The Hohangho," read the First Lieutenant, turning the pages of a three-day-old paper, "has shifted its course. It is estimated that upwards of three-quarters of a million souls perished in the inundation of villages." He puffed at his pipe and eyed the inmates of the Destroyer's Wardroom with solemnity. "They give it a four-line paragraph.... Three-quarters of a million----"

"Shortage of paper," said the Lieutenant in Command. "'Sides, they were only Chinks. What's a million Chinese more or less? Don't suppose anybody worried about it. When I was on the China Station----"

"But," interrupted the First Lieutenant, "when you come to think of it, that's about half the total British casualties so far in the War. Wiped out--phut! In one act! Men, women, and children!

"You don't think of 'em quite like that," replied the Captain of the Destroyer, stirring his cup of coffee. He braced his back against a stanchion to steady himself to the roll of the ship. "There are four hundred millions of the blighters, remember. They all look alike; they've no religion, no ambition, no aim in life except to scratch together enough for the next meal----"

A Signalman came tumbling down the ladder, water streaming from his oilskins.

"Please, sir, Officer of the Watch says there's a glare ahead looks like a ship a-fire. Shall he increase speed?"

The Captain, who had descended for a cup of coffee, and still wore his sea-boots and duffle coat, snatched up his cap and was on the bridge with his glasses to his eyes in fewer seconds than it takes to write these lines.

The Destroyer was slashing her way past a head sea and the sound of the wind and waves made speech difficult. The Gunner was on watch, peering ahead into the darkness through binoculars.

"Oil ship, sir, by the looks of it," he shouted.

The Captain studied the far-off glare in silence for a moment, and gave an order to the telegraph-man.