The Navy eternal

by Bartimeus

IV. H.M.S. “Mary Rose”

H.M.S. Mary Rose left a Norwegian port in charge of a west-bound convoy of merchant ships in the afternoon of October 16th, 1917. At dawn on the 17th, from her position ten or twelve miles ahead of the convoy, flashes of gunfire were sighted astern. The captain of the Mary Rose, Lieutenant-Commander Charles Fox, who was on the bridge at the time, remarked that he supposed it was a submarine shelling the convoy, and promptly turned his ship to investigate; all hands were called to action stations. Mary Rose had increased to full speed, and in a short time three light cruisers were sighted coming towards them at high speed out of the morning mist; Mary Rose promptly challenged, and receiving no reply, opened fire with every gun that would bear at a range of about four miles. The German light cruisers appeared to have been nonplussed by this determined single-handed onslaught, as they did not return the fire until the range had closed to three miles. They then opened fire, and the Mary Rose held gallantly on through a barrage of bursting shell until only a mile separated her from the enemy. Up to this point the German marksmanship was poor, but as the British destroyer turned to bring her torpedo tubes to bear, a salvo struck her, bursting in the engine-room, and leaving her disabled, a log on the water. All guns, with the exception of the after one, were out of action, and their crews killed or wounded, but the after gun continued in action under the directions of Sub-Lieutenant Marsh, R.N.V.R., as long as the gun would bear. The captain came down from the wrecked bridge and passed aft, encouraging and cheering his deafened men. He stopped beside the wrecked remains of the midship gun and shouted to the survivors of its crew: “God bless my heart, lads, get her going again, we’re not done yet!”

The enemy were now pouring a concentrated fire into the motionless vessel. One of the boilers, struck by a shell, exploded, and through the inferno of escaping steam, smoke, and the vapour of bursting shell, came that familiar, cheery voice: “We’re not done yet.”

As the German light cruisers sped past, two able seamen (Able Seaman French and Able Seaman Bailey), who alone survived among the torpedo tubes’ crews, on their own initiative laid and fired the remaining torpedo. Able Seaman French was killed immediately, and Able Seaman Bailey badly wounded. Realising that the enemy had passed ahead, and that the 4-inch gun could no longer be brought to bear on them, the captain set about destroying his ciphers. The First Lieutenant (Lieutenant Bavin), seeing one of the light cruisers returning towards them, called the gunner and bade him sink the ship. The captain then gave the order, “Abandon ship.” All the boats had been shattered by shell fire at their davits, but the survivors launched a Carley raft and paddled clear of the ship. The German light cruiser detailed to administer the coup de grâce then approached to within 300 yards and poured a succession of salvos into the already riddled hull. The Mary Rose sank at 7.15 a.m. with colours flying. The captain, first lieutenant, and gunner were lost with the ship, but the handful of survivors, in charge of Sub-Lieutenant J. R. D. Freeman, on the Carley raft, fell in some hours later with a lifeboat belonging to one of the ships of the convoy. Sailing and rowing, they made the Norwegian coast some forty-eight hours later, and were tended with the utmost kindness by the Norwegian authorities. All survivors unite in testifying to the cheerful courage of the senior surviving officer, Sub-Lieutenant Freeman, throughout the last phase of this ordeal. Able Seaman Bailey, who, despite severe shrapnel wounds in the leg, persisted in taking his turn at the oar, is also specially mentioned for an invincible light-heartedness throughout.

The distinguished naval critics with whose assistance we are wont to belittle the achievements of our Navy, will have doubtless much to say about this action. From the point of view of tactics, it lies open to unquestionable criticism. Unhappily (since he was killed), there is no record of what was in the mind of the captain of the Mary Rose when he made that single-handed dash in the face of such preposterous odds. The convoy which was in his charge lay ahead of him, and, as he apparently supposed, was being attacked by the gunfire of a hostile submarine. When, on rushing to the rescue, he realised that it was to meet not a submarine, but three of Germany’s newest and fastest light cruisers, it is conceivable that the original intention of rescue was not supplanted in his mind by considerations of higher strategy. He held on unflinchingly, and he died, leaving to the annals of his service an episode not less glorious than that in which Sir Richard Greville perished.

CHAPTER V
THE FEET OF THE YOUNG MEN

He was nearer seventy than sixty: that is to say, he was an old man as they reckon age afloat. There was a stoop about his shoulders that hinted at the burden of his years, but his eyes, blue and direct beneath ragged white eyebrows, were young enough; and a man’s eyes are the mirrors of his spirit.

He stood on the quarter-deck of the armed yacht under his command, pacing slowly to and fro, with those craggy brows almost meeting above his great beak of a nose. There had been a day when a fleet would have trembled at the portent, and walked delicately, like Agag. That was when he was an admiral though, and the flag-lieutenant would have popped his head into the secretary’s cabin and murmured, “Blowing up for a storm—stand by!” Now, as he stalked with that unforgettable jerky stride of his up and down the narrow confine of the yacht’s poop, he was only a commander of the Royal Naval Reserve—a “dug-out” from the Retired List—with three curly rings of lace on the cuffs of a monkey-jacket cut in a style unfamiliar to the present generation.

Aft by the ensign-staff he halted, and pulled a letter out of the breast-pocket of the quaintly-cut monkey-jacket. It had come by the morning mail, a typewritten letter, on paper bearing the crest of Admiralty, and it was worded as tactfully as circumstances and the nature of the contents would allow. It referred to the strain of war under modern conditions. It reminded the Admiral that a critical stage of the world conflict had now been reached; and the two postulates, taken in conjunction, pointed to the necessity for young men being employed in all commands afloat. Their Lordships had therefore decided, with regret ... etc. etc.

That letter did what the strain of modern war had not yet done—it made the Admiral’s hand tremble: he tore it into small pieces and dropped them over the side. The stoop of his old shoulders seemed to have become suddenly accentuated. His firm mouth slackened: he looked what they said he was, an old man.

“Youth will be served,” said he, and watched the last scrap of paper float away on the tide. “I daresay they know best.... They think they do ... anyway, that’s something, nowadays.” Then he drew forth an enormous bandana handkerchief, trumpeted a blast of defiance from his historic nose, and stumped forward to the bridge to take his last command to sea for the last time.

. . . . .

It was late the following afternoon, when the yacht was upon the port bow of a convoy of merchantmen, that the look-out at the crosstrees gave tongue. The Admiral was in the chart-house, sprawling affectionately over the chart with notebook and pencil. He enjoyed having the chart-house to himself these days. The flag-captains and navigators of bygone flagships had always bored him, fussing at either elbow whenever he looked at a chart....

“Periscope port bow!” bawled the look-out, and simultaneously the alarm gongs jarred at every gun position and action station. The Admiral was beside the quarter-master in two bounds.

“There she goes, sir,” cried the officer of the watch, and indicated with outstretched finger the wicked streak of bubbles that flickered in the wake of a torpedo: it passed ahead, but through his glasses the Admiral was watching the sparkling water for the periscope’s feather.

He sighted it almost on the instant, half a mile abeam, an object no bigger than a broom-handle above the wave-tops.

Once, thirty years before, in a moment of crisis, he had acted as he did then. It was a wholly unconstitutional proceeding, but on the former occasion it had averted a collision between two battleships of the line. On both occasions it saved a few precious seconds. He grasped the spokes of the wheel with his own hands and wrenched the helm hard-a-starboard before the quartermaster realised he was at his elbow.

The officer of the watch had sprung to the telegraph, and down below the gongs were ringing madly for full speed.

The yacht’s owner had built her for speed. He was a rich man, and could afford to gratify a whim. In this case he gratified it to the utmost designer and engineers were capable of; but never till this moment had a rich man’s craze been so completely justified. Her knive-edge swan bows clove the dancing waves in twin sickles of spray as she heeled over to her helm and then steadied on the mark that was already swiftly dipping before the unexpected onslaught.

The periscope vanished thirty seconds before the yacht passed over the wash of the unseen scourge: but as it passed the Admiral jerked a lever twice, and turned, staring aft down the broken wake that had obliterated all traces of the submarine. By means of the lever he had released a couple of explosive charges, and as he stood shading his eyes from the sun, two great columns of foam leaped into the air.

“Hard-a-starboard!” he croaked, and over went the helm again. He stepped to the gun control voice-pipe: “Stand by the port guns!” and as he gave the order a greenish-brown cylindrical shape, streaked with rust and spouting oil from gaping seams, appeared in the centre of the boiling scum and foam left by the explosion. Slowly it righted itself, and the hull and conning-tower of a submarine lay on the surface with a heavy list. As the yacht swung round, the port guns opened fire: a shell burst on the armoured conning-tower, shattering the periscope and blowing great fragments of steel high into the air. Another penetrated the hull and exploded internally, clouds of vapour pouring from the rents in the shell. The coxswain steadied the wheel, heading the bows straight for the great whale-like object.

Now the cunning of an old seaman is the cunning of a grey fox. The Admiral held up his hand, and the officer of the watch jerked the telegraphs to “stop.” The stern of a vessel driven at high speed is drawn down by the thrust of the propellers. The moment the engines stop, the stern rises again and the bows dip. In this case they dipped as they struck the submarine squarely just abaft the conning-tower, and clove through the rounded hull like a hatchet through a fungus.

They had a glimpse on either bow of the halves of a submarine, still kept afloat by the buoyancy of her tanks and closed compartments. It was only a momentary glimpse—of glistening, shattered machinery and mangled bodies, of hands raised in prayer or anguish.... Then both broadsides broke out, pouring a salvo at point-blank range into those smoking segments that vanished amid the flames of bursting shell and leaping water.

They rescued one prisoner—as is not infrequently the case, the captain. Him the Admiral caused to be warmed and dried and restored with hot drinks while the yacht, assisted by two destroyers, rounded up the scattered convoy. Then the Admiral interrogated his prisoner. “You are very young,” he said at the conclusion of the interview.

The Prussian clicked his heels. “It is a young man’s war,” he said.

“So they tell me,” replied the Admiral dryly.

. . . . .

His relief was waiting on the quay beside his baggage when the yacht—her dainty bows looking like the features of a professional pugilist—tripped back to harbour. He was a young lieutenant-commander, fresh from the Grand Fleet—a contemporary, in fact, of the Admiral’s son. And early the following morning the Admiral went over the side—not as he might have done ten years earlier, with guard and band, to the shrill twitter of a pipe. He paused at the gangway, and laid his left hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

“The race is to the swift,” he said, “the battle to the strong. Good luck to you, my lad. You want a bigger gun forward, if you can get ’em to give it to you, and remember she turns quicker on port helm.... She’s a good little ship.”

“Thank you awfully, sir,” said the lieutenant-commander. “She’s a ripping little ship, and I’m only sorry I’m——”

The Admiral doffed his cap after the manner in which a forgotten naval generation saluted.

“Be damned to your sorrow, sir,” he said. “It’s a young man’s war,” and turned to descend the ladder to the dinghy that waited alongside.

CHAPTER VI
GIPSIES OF THE SEA

August 4th, 1914, probably found the yachtsmen of Great Britain less unprepared for war with Germany than any other civilian community in the Empire.

Men turn to the sea as a profession for a variety of reasons; but the amateur yachtsman embraced the sea as a mistress with a complete and very genuine passion. To those who seek her thus, the sea has much to tell; she will whisper a thousand secrets ’twixt dusk and dawn to the little ships resting snug in her curlew-haunted creeks, or riding lazy to a long cable in the lee of desolate sand-banks—things denied to the busy wayfarer on her wide thoroughfares.

Yachtsmen as a class are meditative folk. A man who spends his week-ends alone, or in the company of one other in a three-ton yacht, has opportunities for reflection denied to the devotees of other pursuits. He learns more than the ways of the tides and Primus stoves.

In the queer, uneasy tranquillity of the decade before the war there came in gradually increasing numbers to our east and south-east coasts an unobtrusive visitor. Few people encountered him, because he chose sequestered places to visit, but the yachtsman met him, talked much with him, and afterwards sat in the cuddy and smoked many pipes, thinking about him and his unholy thirst for information.

There were other yachtsmen, of a more restless and inquiring turn of mind, who went farther afield with lead-line and compass, “observin’ ’ow the world was made.” Where the short yellow seas stumbled across leagues of shoals, and windmills and the brown sails of barges broke the sky-line above low-lying sand-hills, they learned and saw many things. One even wrote a book about these things,[2] that he who ran might read. The trouble was that people ashore entrusted with the destinies of Empire were running about so busily that they hadn’t time to read. They were catching votes and such-like, as children snatch at falling leaves in autumn. So the yachtsman carried on yachting and cultivating the acquaintance of the slow-speaking, slow-moving skippers of the coast-wise traffic and the crab-gaited community that manned the east-coast fishing craft. Useful men to know sometimes at the pinch of a sudden crisis.

Then, with the red dawn of August 4th, 1914, came war at last, and the yachtsman pulled a deep breath of something like relief, knocked out the ashes of his pipe, and went ashore, forbearing to say “I told you so” to the harassed Whitehall officials he went in search of. This was a war of the sea, and the yachtsman clewed up his business ashore, sent his wife to stay with her mother, and placed all his knowledge of the coasts of Northern Europe and the seas between them at the disposal of the Navy.

Now the Navy was very busy. Like the yachtsman, it had not been altogether blind to signs and portents, because the sea is a wonderful conductor of electricity—and other things. But it had its own theories on naval warfare: among others it opined that, properly speaking, this was an affair of big ships and frequent battles. To fight battles you require dexterity in the use of weapons—highly scientific and technical weapons at that. They themselves had been learning to wield these weapons since they were twelve years old or thereabouts. The yachtsman’s acquaintance with lethal arms was limited to a 12-bore scatter-gun and a revolver, with which he enlivened Sunday afternoons becalmed by potting at empty bottles.

“Just wait till we’ve mopped up these fellows in the North Sea,” said the Navy—“it won’t take long—and then we’ll talk things over, old chap.”

So the yachtsman waited, and after a while the Navy found itself waiting, because the fellows in the North Sea had retired to Kiel, thumped their chests and said they were waiting too. Thus modern naval warfare developed from glowing theory into rather wearisome fact.

The yachtsman had not been altogether idle in the meanwhile. He manned every available motor-boat in the kingdom, and patrolled the coast under the White Ensign with a rifle and a rather complicated signalling apparatus. When the supply of motor-boats ran out, the wealthier yachtsmen built their own, fitted them out at their own expense, and manned them. They manned them indiscriminately: one was a captain, another was a deck-hand, and yet another club-mate the engineer. It mattered not a whit how or where a man served as long as the spray was in their faces and the dawn came up out of their beloved sea. They messed together in cheerful communism, save when they found themselves under the immediate observation of the brass-bound Navy. Then they grew self-conscious and the captain fed in splendid isolation: the deck-hand, who was his next-door neighbour in Surbiton and owned a bigger yacht, touched his cap when he spoke and called him “sir.”

The Navy noted these things and smiled—not derisively, but with affection, as men smile at dogs and children. But it was also keenly observant: it was taking the measure of these enthusiastic amateurs, without undue haste, deliberately, parting reluctantly with ancient prejudice and shibboleth. This is the Navy’s way.

The motor-boats did their work consistently well and without ostentation. They conducted an efficient examination service among the teeming coast-wise traffic of the south-east coast, through which not a needle could have been smuggled in a bargeload of hay: this was a duty for which the yachtsman was admirably suited. It required tact, for the pre-war coaster was a touchy fellow and accustomed to keep himself to himself: furthermore, it called for intimate co-operation with the Custom officers of coast and estuary ports; but these the yachtsmen had known and drunk a pot of beer with any time during the past five-and-twenty years.

The motor-boats found themselves shepherding wayward fishing fleets out of forbidden waters suddenly hedged about with incomprehensible prohibitions; they guarded them on their lawful occasions; and because they knew them and their fathers before them, knew also when to caution wrong-doers and when to confiscate nets and sails. This, it may be remarked in passing, is a wisdom not learned in paths ashore nor yet in the training colleges of the Navy. They served as tenders to the big ships and towed targets for the smaller ones. They brought battle cruisers their love-letters, and acquired both skill and cunning in sinking floating mines with rifle-fire.

Thus, in due course, was their probation accomplished. The Navy had observed it all, mostly without comment or eulogy. But when the time was ripe it produced a standardised type of motor patrol boat, armed and equipped in all respects as little men-of-war.

“Now,” said the Navy to the yachtsman, “shake hands as one of us, and then suffer us to train you for a little while—even to putting you wise about depth-charges and Hotchkiss guns—ere you have your heart’s desire.”

The yachtsmen leant an ear to the Navy Staff Instructors (wise men from a torpedo school called the “Vernon”) with eager willingness. “But where,” asked the Navy, “are the rest of you? There aren’t enough to go round the boats we’ve ordered.”

The yachtsmen, labouring at applied mechanics and the true inwardness of high-explosive bombs, said nothing. There had been a time when their numbers would have more than sufficed for all the country’s needs. But some were lying under the sandy soil of Gallipoli, or the marshes of Flanders, and others were whittling model yachts out of bits of wood in Dutch internment camps: the roll of honour in well-nigh every yacht club in the kingdom supplied the answer. The matter was not one for either cavil or regret. A man can die but once, and so long as he dies gloriously the region of discussion as to his whereabouts is passed.

Then came the oversea gipsies to fill the vacant places of those of their brethren who had finished their last long trick. From Auckland, Sydney, and Winnipeg they came; from Vancouver, Wellington, Toronto, and Montreal. They were strangers to Crouch and Solent, but the yachtsmen of England welcomed them into the mysterious indissoluble free-masonry of all sea-lovers, which under the White Ensign is called to-day the R.N.V.R.

Now, of their achievements in the Motor Boat Patrol worthier pens than mine have written. They have endured monotony—which is the lot of many in modern war—and, what is more difficult, have maintained their efficiency and enthusiasm throughout. They perform duties which are in no way connected with glory in any shape or form, and have been content to wait their turn for greater things with willing cheerfulness. And some have attained that glory, buying it lightly at the price of life.

Thus far we have attempted to record the doings of the small yachtsman—by your leave the truest of all sea gipsies. But there were others, owners of ocean-going steam-yachts and Atlantic Cup racers, whose experience of the sea differed little from that of the rugged professional. These, on the outbreak of war, proceeded to the nearest dockyard demanding guns, and men who could shoot them, in the King’s name. They got the guns and the men, and they reinforced the trawler patrol and examination service from the Shetlands to the Lizard. When it is remembered that few of these gallant sportsmen possessed masters’ “tickets”: that 300-ton yachts are not built to keep the seas in winter off the outer Hebrides, and yet kept them: when the number of losses and groundings during the period they were commanded by amateurs is compared with the subsequent tale of their achievements under the professional seamen who succeeded them—then some true insight into the value of the deep-sea yachtsmen’s work will be obtained. This is not the time to recount in detail the performances of the individual or his yacht. The Navy knows them, but the Navy, according to its wont, is silent. Some day, however, when the lawns that overlook the Solent are thronged once more, and the harbours of the Riviera again reflect the graceful outlines of these slim Amazons of the sea, smoking-room and tea tables will hear the tales—or some of them. And there will be some for ever untold, because the men who might have told them have passed into the Great Silence.

One story, however, will serve to illustrate the spirit in which the deep-sea yachtsman answered the call.

There was a certain man living overseas who at the outbreak of war was approached by his son. “I’m going over to enlist,” said the boy. Now the boy’s mother was an invalid, and this was the only son.

The father smoked in silence for a minute, considering his son’s announcement.

“No,” he replied at last, “not yet. If you are killed, your mother would die. I’ll go over first.”

His son laughed indignantly with the scorn of youth. “You’re too old, dad,” he said; “you’re fifty-five.”

“Fifty-three,” amended the older man. “Fifty-three, and I’ve got a master’s ticket.” This was a man who raced his own yacht across the Atlantic in the days of piping peace. “But I’ll act fair by you,” he continued. “I’ll go over and volunteer, and if they won’t have me I’ll come back and you can go instead—and God go with you.”

They shook hands on the deal, and the older man went.

Volunteers of fifty-three—even with masters’ tickets—were not being eagerly sought after in the Navy at the beginning of the war. The volunteer perhaps realised this, and so it happened that Whitehall accepted his age at his own estimate—forty-five.

It was older than he looked or felt; and if his clear eyes are any index to character it was the first and last lie he ever told.

His son awaited the return of the prodigal with some impatience; finally he received a letter bidding him to keep cheerful and look after his mother. His parent was at the time of writing in charge of an armed guard, nursing a leaky Norwegian windjammer through a north-easterly gale in the region of Iceland. He eventually battled her and a contraband cargo into Stornoway, and got the first bath and dry clothes he had had for ten days. He said he was very happy and doing his bit; and this I hope and believe he still is.

. . . . .

It is this love of the sea and familiarity with it in all its conditions that have served the R.N.V.R. officer in moments of stress in a manner which the frequent D.S.C.’s among them testify. But there are other incidents that have passed without such recognition because they came in the plain path of duty or were incidental to the sea-gipsy’s love of adventure. One of these deserves mention, because the two great Reserve services, the R.N.R. and the R.N.V.R., joined hands in the affair and saw it through together.

Two divisions of British drifters were lying in a cross-Channel port awaiting orders to return to their base. It was in the winter, and a south-easterly gale was blowing. The subsequent meteorological records testify to its being the worst that year.

The order to return came to the senior officer of the drifters qualified by “as soon as the weather has moderated sufficiently.” The senior officer of one division was an officer of the Royal Naval Reserve, and of the other a sub-lieutenant of the Volunteer Reserve. He of the R.N.R. looked at the sky and the breakers bursting in sheets of foam against the breakwater and thence to the barometer, and opined that it wasn’t good enough.

The R.N.V.R. sub-lieutenant said he was tired of harbour and guessed he’d have a bump at it. The R.N.R. sub-lieutenant damned his eyes for a fool, but made the signal for shortening cable in his own division. The gale abated slightly, and the two divisions wallowed out in line ahead through the flying scud.

In mid-Channel they encountered a 4,000-ton steamer, derelict and drifting, down by the head, before the gale. The R.N.V.R. man watched her sluggish plunge and scend in the steep wind-whipped troughs, and decided she wasn’t as bad as she pretended to be.

“Take charge of both divisions of drifters,” he signalled to his confrère in the tiny flagship of the other division, “and take them into harbour. I am going to board.”

He then bade his skipper put his craft alongside the yawning derelict, and called for volunteers to accompany him. His men were no cowards, but they weren’t tired of life, and most of them had wives and families. “I’ll come,” said the cook, however.

They ran down wind under the sheering bulwarks, and the R.N.V.R. sub-lieutenant and the cook leaped at a trailing fall, climbed up it hand over hand, and tumbled on to the deserted upper deck of the steamer.

In the meanwhile, the R.N.R. sub-lieutenant had proceeded to windward, commended his command to their respective skippers, launched his cockleshell of a boat and drifted down in it, half-swamped, until he, too, was able to catch the fall, and so climbed inboard. He was in time to see the R.N.V.R. knock off the cable stoppers and let go both anchors. The drifters were swallowed by the mist and rain and proceeded to their base, calling on their gods to witness they were no cowards, but that there were limits to what a man could be expected to do for sheer love of adventure.

A swift survey of the derelict disclosed the fact that her No. 2 hold was flooded, either as the result of a mine or torpedo. On the other hand, all bulkheads were holding, and the engine-room was untouched. Said the R.N.R. man: “If we could get steam on her, I’d up killick and take this hooker into the Downs.” But three men cannot raise steam and navigate a 4,000-ton steamer without assistance, so they made themselves comfortable and waited.

Late in the afternoon a destroyer arrived, the salt spume crusting her funnels, and the handflags busy above her bridge screens.

“Prepare to abandon derelict. Will go ahead and veer a grass-line,” said the destroyer, in much the tone that a parent might adopt to an offspring who has nearly succeeded in getting itself run over by a motor-car.

“Well, now,” said the R.N.V.R. to the R.N.R., “that’s a funny thing: I’m bothered if I can read that signal. But my sight isn’t what it used to be.”

“I can make semaphore all right,” replied the R.N.R., “but when it comes to reading it I get all of a dither. ’P’raps the cook can read it.”

The cook replied at once that it was Greek to him, or words to that effect. The destroyer, accordingly, after waiting some time and growing more angry, went up to windward and anchored.

“Now,” said the R.N.V.R. to the R.N.R., “you talked a lot about your semaphore. Just make them a signal to send us a dozen engine-room ratings and an engineer officer, and we’ll raise steam and proceed to the Downs. Thank them for coming to see us, by the way. They’re getting peevish.”

The R.N.R., in terms of diplomatic suasion, signalled accordingly, and towards dusk a drenched boatload of the Royal Navy, Engine-room Department, arrived on board. Refreshed with Madeira from the captain’s saloon, they proceeded to the engine-room, filled the boilers, lit the furnaces, and had steam raised by daylight. The steamer then slipped her cables, which had become too foul to weigh, substituted an Admiralty-pattern kedge for the lost anchors, and proceeded modestly under her own steam and the destroyer’s escort to the Downs.

A month later the R.N.V.R. met the R.N.R. ashore.

“’Member that derelict we salved together,” said the R.N.V.R. “I’ve been up to London to see about salvage and all that.”

The R.N.R. brightened considerably.

“She’s worth £120,000, light,” he said.

“She is,” was the reply, in detached tones such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer might employ to outline his Budget; “but she was on Government charter. As she was salved by”—he took a long breath—“Naval officers, there ain’t any salvage.”

CHAPTER VII
THE DAY—AND THE MORNING AFTER

Looking back on a kaleidoscope of great events, one is apt to be struck by the wealth of insignificant detail with which memory burdens itself. Of all the thunderous panorama in which a Fleet Action presents itself to the imagination, very little is recorded in the mind of a participant at the time. Later on a man may fit the details together into an orderly comprehensive tableau for the benefit of relations and others, supplying from hearsay and imagination all that he missed as an insignificant actor in the great drama.

Groping among the memories of the Battle of Jutland and the part played therein by the fleet flagship, it is not unnatural, therefore, that a private of marines should come most readily to mind. He it was who in enjoyment of his office of servant jerked aside the curtain of a cabin door about 3.15 p.m. on May 31st, 1916, and announced in laconic tones that the fleet was going to “Action Stations” in half an hour’s time.

The Onlooker had kept the morning watch, and was engaged on his bunk in what is colloquially known as a “stretch off the land.”

“Eh?” he said.

“’Arf an hour,” repeated the messenger of Mars. There was in his tone that note of impassive stoicism usually reserved for the announcement that the Onlooker’s gold links had gone, in the cuffs of a shirt, to the wash—or similarly soul-shaking tidings. The latter descended from his bunk in search of the sinews of war.

“Where the devil’s my gas-mask?” he queried, after a breathless search.

“’Andy,” replied the stoic. He rummaged in an obscure “glory-hole” and produced in turn his master’s boot-cleaning gear, his own ditty-box, private stock of tobacco, fiancée’s portrait, and finally his master’s gas-mask. This, emptied of a further assortment of his personal possessions, he gravely handed to the Onlooker.

That worthy rapidly collected his remaining impedimenta and struggled into a “British warm”; as he did so certain obscure warnings of the distant past (those far-off days when we read handbooks and attended lectures on war in the abstract) came back to mind. “By the way,” he said—“underclothing. In the Russo-Japanese war they always put on clean underclothing before going into action, I remember. Septic wounds, and all that. When did I have a clean shift last?”

His official valet closed his eyes, as if contemplating a vista of time greater than the human memory could in justice be expected to span. Finally he shook his head gloomily. “Couldn’t rightly say, but——”

“Never mind,” interrupted the Onlooker hastily. “I haven’t time now, anyway,” and made for the door. His servant’s impassive countenance softened; perhaps he was reflecting that they might never again forgather in that cabin. “It’s goin’ to be cold up there——” he jerked his head towards the upper-deck and forebridge, and eyed his master compassionately. “Better ’ave your woolly muffler—what your wife knitted for you.”

The Onlooker was touched. “Thank you,” he said. “If I may borrow it for the afternoon....”

. . . . .

The clatter of cups and saucers in the neighbouring pantry guided his footsteps to the wardroom in search of tea. That the warning had gone round was evident from the prevalent wakefulness (unusual at that hour) of all the occupants of the mess. Everyone was garbed for the fray according to his prospective rôle or individual taste. Costumes ranged between cricketing flannels and duffle overalls with Balaclava helmets and sea-boots.

It might reasonably have been expected that one topic and one only—“Der Tag”—would have been on everyone’s lips. The German Fleet was out: was even then being lured north by the battle cruisers, and the Fleet was rushing to meet it in battle-array. The hour for which the Fleet had waited twenty-two weary months was about to strike: and no one even mentioned it.

The affectation was somehow peculiarly British. Drake epitomised it for all time when he declared there was time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too; but it is a question whether the self-conscious imperturbability of that game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe equalled that of the Fleet flagship’s wardroom as its members sat in noisy banter round the tea table, munching bread-and-jam with a furtive eye on the clock....

It was left to the commander-in-chief’s flag lieutenant to break the spell. He put down his cup with a clatter, picked up his telescope, and rose to his feet, fastening the toggles of his duffle coat.

“Well, boys ...?” he said, and walked towards the door as the bugles began to blare along mess-deck and battery.

. . . . .

Concealment of his emotions is not a marked characteristic of the British bluejacket or marine, whatever affectations may be cherished by his officers in that respect. The exultant speculations, prophecies, and thanksgiving of a thousand men, crowded in those confined spaces, met the ear with a noise like the sea. Commonplace sounds suddenly acquired a thrilling significance, and the clang of the securing chains of the guns as they were released, the tireless drone of the turbines far below, shrilling pipe and blare of bugle overhead, combined to set the pulses at a gallop. The Onlooker passed forward through that electrical tide of emotion and laughing men that surged towards the hatchways, and en route overtook a leading seaman. He was normally a staid, unemotional individual, known best (from the standpoint of censor) as an incorrigible letter-writer. He was capering, literally capering, along the battery. And as he capered he shouted:

“They’re out, lads! they’re out! Christ! They’re out this time!”

And out they were, for presently, on the wind that sang past the naked rails of the forebridge and the bellying halliards, came the first grumble of gunfire out of the haze ahead.

Perhaps it was the utter absence of colour, the dull grey monochrome of sea and sky, ships and smoke, that heightened the resemblance of what followed to the shifting scene of a cinema show. It robbed even dire calamity of all terror at the time. It seemed incredible that the cruiser on the starboard quarter, ringed all about with yeasty pinnacles of water, was one of ours, being hammered to extinction by the guns of an enemy invisible. The eye followed her dispassionately as she ran that desperate gauntlet of pitching salvos; and when the end came, and she changed in the flutter of an eyelid into a cloud of black smoke, it was some time before a subconscious voice said to the Onlooker: “There goes gallant Sir Robert ... and you’ll never shake Dicky Carter by the hand again....”

. . . . .

Equally remote and unreal were the effects of our own gunfire, seen and lost and glimpsed again in that ever-shifting North Sea haze. A crippled German destroyer, crawling out of range, down by the stern, like a hare whose hindquarters have been paralysed by a clumsy sportsman: an enemy light cruiser, dismasted, funnels over the side, one gun spitting defiance from a shambles of a battery as she sank: a great battleship listing over, all aswarm with specks of humanity—surely it was none of our noisy doing?

And then suddenly a salvo of 14-inch shells “straddled” us, and a yeoman of signals beside the Onlooker put out a hand and pulled him behind the shelter of a canvas wind-screen.

“Best get behind ’ere, sir,” he said. Then the absurdity of it struck them simultaneously, and they both laughed.

. . . . .

The insignificant duties of the Onlooker took him at a later phase in the action to the lower conning-tower. Situated far below the water-line and behind all the available armour, it is deemed the safest place in the ship, and is the salubrious resort of various seconds-in-command, waiting to step into the shoes of defunct superiors as occasion arose. They were not a cheerful company, since their rôle was pro tem. necessarily passive. Further, their knowledge of what was going on was limited to scraps of information that filtered down a voice-pipe from the upper conning-tower, through a variety of mediums all busily employed on other matters. The assistant constructor (sometime darling of International Rugby crowds), stood with his ear to the voice-pipe and wailed for news as a Neapolitan beggar beseeches alms. Suddenly he paused, and his face brightened.

“Disabled Zeppelin floating on the surface ahead,” he announced. There was a general brightening of the countenances around. Followed a long pause. Then:

“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 the Invincible, 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 bundle of 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.

CHAPTER VIII
THE NAVY-UNDER-THE-SEA

The year 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 submarine circles 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 constructed that 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 naval communiqués) 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 with delay-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 old Vernon!” 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 submarine approached 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 did you do 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 the German 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 time at 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 the coup 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 wet ships 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 rolling helplessly 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 admits that 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 till the 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 boat and 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 of strength 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 cover every 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!”

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 son of 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....

CHAPTER IX
THE PORT LOOK-OUT

There is 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 he goes 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 the flame 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 gone past 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.

CHAPTER X
THE SURVIVOR

“ ... 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 halliards snapped 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—and frozen....”

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 of terra 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 menace of 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 like the 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 on the 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 with anxiety 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 shipmates somewhere 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!”

CHAPTER XI
THE Nth BATTLE SQUADRON

No propaganda poster artist with an eye to lurid backgrounds could have secured such an effect. Great buttresses of cloud, inky black with their burden of unshed snow, were banked about the sunset. The snow that had fallen during the past week rested like a shroud upon peak and headland, promontory and cliff-top, encircling the sombre waters of Ultima Thule with a dazzling white girdle. Against this background lay the Grand Fleet, an agglomeration of tripod masts and superimposed structures, as familiar a feature of the scene as the surf that broke endlessly about the cliffs, or the unappeased calling of the gulls. A little to the westward, however, where the cloud-masonry was split and reft by crimson shafts of light, an outstretched wing of the vast battle fleet struck an oddly unfamiliar note. Instead of the tripod masts and hooded control-tops, slender towers of latticed steel rose in pairs from each hull. Against the black clouds, every ensign in the fleet was clearly discernible; but it was not the White Ensign that showed up so vividly above the strangers. It was the “Stars and Stripes” painted with the glory of a northern winter sunset.

Only a few weeks had elapsed since they arrived, rust-streaked and travel-stained, as ships might well be that had battled through one winter gale after another from Chesapeake Bay to Ultima Thule; and at the sight of them the grey, war-weary battle fleet of Britain burst into a roar of welcome such as had never before greeted a stranger within its gates in either peace or war. For—and herein lies the magic of the thing—these were not merely allies swinging up on to the flank of a common battle-line, but kinsmen joining kinsmen as an integral part of one fleet. The rattle of their cables through the hawse pipes was drowned by the tumult of cheering, and forthwith the American Admiral dispatched a telegram to Washington, whose laconic business-like brevity alone did justice to what may prove the most significant message of history: “Arrived as per schedule,” it said.

This linking of the two navies may need an explanation. It may be asked (it will be asked if I know anything of the talkers in this war): Could not the American Fleet co-operate in the war without merging its identity in that of the British? The answer is this: Victory in modern naval warfare demands more than mere co-operation between allied squadrons. Navies fight otherwise than armies, whose generals can meet and confer even during the crisis of a battle. Squadrons working in unity afloat require one controlling intellect, one source of orders and information; one pair of shoulders, and one only, to take the burden of final responsibility.

Hence, to the sure shield of civilisation and the allied cause has been added a formidable buckler. The Grand Fleet has had grafted into its side a new rib and a stout one.

It must be realised, however, that a common speech between two nations does not necessarily mean that their respective navies talk in the same tongue. The system of signalling in the American Fleet, the significance of flags, the arrangement of codes and ciphers, are peculiarly and completely theirs. The meanings of the flags had nothing in common with the British. Their system has been evolved through generations; is, so to speak, their navy’s mother tongue. The signalmen of the Nth Battle Squadron, blowing on their numbed fingers amid the snows of Ultima Thule, had to forget in twenty-four hours what had been laboriously taught them for years. They had to master a different-coloured alphabet as it is sighted two miles away tangled up in halliards or half obscured by funnel and (mayhap) battle smoke. Manœuvres on a scale they had hitherto regarded as exceptional: Fleet exercises and squadron competition, intership signalese (whereby the movement of a semaphore arm through fifteen degrees of the arc meant things undreamed of in their philosophy), tricks which northern visibility plays with daylight signalling—these things were their daily and nightly portion.

In the words of one of them, “it was a tough proposition,” and they tackled it like tigers. In a fortnight they were through with it. In a month the British signal boatswains rubbed their telescope lenses and said they were damned.

But the communication problem didn’t end there. Wireless plays an even more important part than visual signalling in naval warfare. It is important enough in peace, and the American Fleet had by no means neglected the subject. But aerial conditions in the region of Manilla differ considerably from those in the North Sea. Speaking radiographically, the North Sea is the most crowded thoroughfare in the world. All through the twenty-four hours ships and submarines and shore wireless stations are talking, talking, talking. British warnings to shipping on its lawful occasions, streams of lies from Berlin (branded at the outset “German Press Message”), cipher cryptograms from three Admiralties, destroyers bleating in a fog, appeals from a hunted merchantman—all these interspersed with the gibbering Telefunken of the German submarine.

Now the American wireless experts have been concerned principally with covering long distances. The development of “spark” and power in a comparatively undisturbed ether was the main preoccupation of their operators. From this serene condition, ships and silent cabinets passed into the windy parrot-house of the North Sea. Here, power, as they understood the term, was negligible. The greatest distance required of their Hertzian waves was a preposterous 400 miles or so. But not only had they to thread a way unbroken through this aerial Babel, but, what was even more difficult, the operator was required to detect and read messages on one tune in a vast discord of diverse and unfamiliar notes. It is even said that an Englishman’s touch on a sending key differs from that of an American as radically as the spoken accent differs. Yet, after a month of assiduous practice, the former are in a fair way to presenting as few difficulties to communication as the latter.

So much for the technical aspect of the affair. But there is another to consider: each nation having evolved, perfected, and adopted a system, considers it, ipso facto, the best system in the world. To ask a segment of that nation to dump the cherished thing overboard and adopt the theory and practice of another nation “likely not so good” is demanding much. That the order was obeyed instantly goes without saying. But let it be noted that it was obeyed in a spirit of uncritical loyalty and whole-souled enthusiasm by every man concerned from Admiral to Signal Boy. To this the British Commander-in-Chief has testified.

But after all, these matters are merely externals. In adopting British methods of communications and staff work for the smooth working of the whole, the American ships have not lost a jot of their identity. Their customs remain, with their traditions, American—indeed, they are but thrown into stronger relief; and the British Fleet around them is noting, drawing comparisons with intent interest, as two scions of the same family might meet and study gesture or physiognomy, searching eagerly for kindred traits. And daily the bonds are tightening.

. . . . .

The Admiral commanding the force of American battleships which constitutes the Nth Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet stood and thawed before the burnished radiator in his cabin.

“Now,” he said, “you’ve spent a day on board this ship. What struck you most? what remains your most vivid impression?”

I had been waiting for the question, and wondering what the deuce I was going to say. A man who spends ten crowded hours in unfamiliar surroundings, trying to draw comparisons between them and his accustomed environment, finds his impressions at the end of it like a jigsaw puzzle that has been upset.

I looked at him as he stood taking me in, and in the quizzical, humorous smile hovering about his eyes, in the set of his very imperturbable mouth, in his wholly comfortable attitude before the radiator, I read my answer. It was something that had been struggling for expression at the back of my brain all day.

“Well, sir,” I said (and then wished I could have embarked on my explanation as our sailors do with “It’s like this ’ere, sir”), “to all intents and purposes you’ve dropped out of the skies plop into the middle of the Grand Fleet. It’s a fleet that has been 3-1/2 years at war. It belongs to the oldest and most conservative—if not the proudest—navy in the world. It’s got the Armada and the Nile and Copenhagen and Trafalgar and Jutland to its credit, and, I fancy, it takes a largish size in hats on the strength of it. It certainly has a standard by which to judge strangers.”

“Sure,” said the Admiral softly, with his eyes on the far-off snowy hills.

I took a long breath. I’m not used to making stump speeches to admirals. “Well, from the moment your ships rounded that headland the British Fleet has been sizing you up. Every boat that is manned and leaves your ship, every officer or man who moves about your decks, is being watched and criticised and studied by several thousand pairs of eyes. You live in the limelight.”

“Sure,” said the Admiral, so softly that it was hardly more than a gentle expiration between his teeth. He may have been wondering when I was coming to the point.

“Well, sir,” I continued, “all that is apt to make a very good man indeed self-conscious. I came over on the look-out for self-consciousness, like a lady visitor looks out for wet paint on board. I’ve been ten hours in your flagship, and I’ve talked to samples of every rank and rating. I’ve only seen one person self-conscious under friendly scrutiny.”

“Ah?” said the Admiral. His eyebrows lifted a shade.

“I caught sight of myself in a looking-glass,” I explained....

Not that this absence of self-consciousness is the outcome of indifference. The American Squadron is keenly alive to the intent observation it is undergoing. Its method of showing how aware was perhaps the most graceful imaginable. For a few days it visited one of the fleet’s more southerly bases, and the ships’ companies were given leave to visit a great town. Six thousand five hundred men availed themselves of this permission. They were greeted by the inhabitants with an enthusiasm that might well have thrown a staider and older set of men off their balance. The traditional British methods of extending hospitality were thrust upon these youngsters fresh from a long and arduous voyage. It might have resulted in a tamasha that would have made the memory of Mafeking night seem like a temperance revival by comparison. Yet when those six thousand five hundred mortal men returned to their ships and the bonds of discipline—nine only were slightly under the influence of liquor. Nine all told.

Apropos of this visit, it may be added that it occurred at Christmas-time. Now, the flagship of the American Squadron is, I believe, known in the United States as the “Christmas-ship.” Americans are all probably familiar with the origin of this name; but for the benefit of my own countrymen, I must relate their pretty tradition. Every Christmas Day this particular ship lies in New York harbour; on Christmas Eve the crew goes ashore into the slums and Bowery, and every man invites a child to a dinner on board the following day. The little guests are carefully chosen. They are the type of child that would not otherwise eat a Christmas dinner, would not probably eat a dinner at all. The poorest of the poor, from gutter and dive and archway. And not only do these pathetic little guests get dinner, but also a suit of clothes, a toy, and a present of money.

For the first time the Christmas just passed found the “Christmas-ship’s” moorings in New York harbour empty. She was lying at the base I have referred to within reach of a great British city. But the tradition remained the same. They had forty-eight hours in which to arrange the whole thing, but they did it. They added one stipulation that has not been laid down in New York. Preference was to be given in the matter of selection to those waifs whose fathers had laid down their lives in battle.

Britannia, noting this story, may remember and echo the words of the greatest of all child lovers:

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these....”

To the naval officer a ship’s personnel is necessarily an absorbing study. The human element is one in which he works and lives, and whatever the development of the machine, man and his ways afloat must ever remain the primary factor in a navy’s efficiency. It goes without saying that when the personnel belongs to the ship of another nation the interest is largely charged with curiosity.

I attempted to convey something of this interest to the captain of an American battleship, who was my host for the day. We were sitting in his cabin; and the talk had ranged from the Yukon to Brooklyn Yard, and was what a certain weekly paper would call “Mainly About People.”

I hinted at my interest in the men not without diffidence, because to ask the captain of a man-of-war if you can go and look at his ship’s company as a matter of curiosity is tantamount to demanding leave of a stranger to go and smoke a pipe in his nursery while his children are being bathed. A mess deck is an intimate place.

“Want to see the men?” he echoed, and thrust on his cap. “I’ll show ’em to you.” He was a mighty man possessing volcanic energy and a voice designed to carry orders through a gale. “Come right along.”

We plunged straightway into the seething life of the mess-deck and living spaces of the great ship, the captain leading; and as we threaded a path forward, men stepped aside, stood quietly to attention until we passed, and resumed their tasks or leisure. Workshops, kitchens, laundry, bakeries, dental surgery, sick bay, mess-rooms, round we went in a swift, slightly bewildering rush, while the “owner” jerked explanations over his shoulder. He displayed a familiarity with the details of it all that was to say the least of it interesting to one of another navy, whose captains claim to be not indifferent “ships’ husbands.”

Our whirlwind tour carried us into a speckless electric bakery piled high with fragrant loaves. The captain had flung open and closed the door of an oven secured by an ingenious but rather complicated latch. As we emerged I commented on his evident familiarity with the internal fitting of his ship’s bakery. “Built her,” he explained, and plunged, doffing his cap, into the sick bay. There were over a thousand men on board, and about half a dozen of them had found their way here.

“Well, T——,” said the captain, addressing by name an able seaman of a stature well-nigh equalling his own, “how’s that hand getting on?”

The man stood up and met his captain’s eyes without embarrassment; just, in fact, as one citizen regards another.

“Nicely, thank you, sir,” he replied.

“Hit your man in a softer place next time,” said the captain, and the seaman laughed, nursing his bandaged hand.

“I will, surely,” he said. A chuckle ran round the sick bay. I had the sensation of a stranger left trying to fathom a family joke.

“Want to talk to ’em?” asked the captain a minute later, as we stopped to watch a veteran superintending the splicing of a five-inch wire by two ordinary seamen. “Here, B——,” he called one of the youngsters, again by name. The boy dropped his marling-spike and responded smartly. “Where were you raised?” asked the captain.

“Kentucky, sir,” came the reply in the soft Southern drawl. The lad stood before us without a trace of sheepishness or apparently aware of any distinction in being thus singled out by his captain by name from amongst a thousand other men. The captain nodded. “Trade?” “Farm-hand, sir.”

It was my turn, and I asked him the question no sailor has ever been able to answer. “Why did you come to sea?” He grinned, showing two rows of perfect teeth. “Him,” he said, and jerked his head over his shoulder at the other ordinary seaman wincing beneath the whispered exhortations of his instructor. “Him an’ me ...” adding, “He’s my chum....” Strong men have tried to write books on all that was contained in these two sentences; most have died with the task unfinished.

We had concluded lunch—a meal that commenced with iced grape-fruit (grape-fruit in Ultima Thule, harkee!)—when the captain beckoned me to accompany him on another tour. It was of a more official nature this time, and included a routine inspection of the storerooms and magazines, and I joined the little group of officers who hurried in the wake of that tall, striding figure with gold lace round the peak of his cap, who knew his ship as I know the inside of my pocket. We were a band of strenuous adventurers in search of the unfindable. Never did red-shirted miners ply pick and shovel in the first days of the Klondyke rush as that captain laboured through the long afternoon in search of Dust. Up and down the shafts leading to speckless storerooms, hand over hand by burnished steel rungs into the uttermost bowels of the ship we went; and as we passed, the captain’s hand was for ever going out to run along a transverse frame or search the interior of a cofferdam in the same fruitless quest. Perspiration ran down our faces, but the break-neck pace never slackened. “Light!” barked the captain, and the breathless first lieutenant obediently flashed an electric torch into some crannyhole.... The hunt checked while the captain craned and peered, and then moved on. The first lieutenant’s sigh of relief was always audible above the ring of our footsteps. Once as the procession sped along some labyrinth among the shell-rooms the captain’s finger shot out accusingly to indicate a junction-box on the white enamelled bulkhead (an infinitesimal detail in the vast complexity of a battleship). It was an affair of brass secured by small screws, but one of the screws was missing.

“Spoke about that last week,” rapped out the captain, already a dozen yards ahead. The first lieutenant looked at the junction-box as we hurried on, and wiped his face.

“Gee!” he said. Then he eyed me with mingled desperation and pride.

“Some captain,” he said.

I dropped out of the running about four o’clock because we were in the neighbourhood of the gunroom (steerage, they called it) where I had been invited to tea. I took with me an uneasy recollection of the first lieutenant’s reproachful eyes as I sheered out of the procession, but it was speedily obliterated by the interest and charm of the ensuing hour. The American midshipman is the senior of his British “opposite number” by perhaps a couple of years—but there the difference begins and ends. The half-shy warmth of my welcome; the rather oppressive decorum of the assembly as we took our places round the tea-table, were not otherwise than it would have been in a British gunroom under similar conditions; the quick thaw that synchronised with the rapid disappearance of buttered toast and jam was Youth asserting itself over International Courtesies.

The meal (they explained that they had picked up the habit of “seven-bell tea” from us, and the lesson had not been ill-learned) was nearing its close when a sudden shout of laughter obliterated the hum of chaff and conversation. Every eye turned on a midshipman at the end of the table, whose face was slowly turning carmine to the roots of his curly hair. The President extended his closed fist, thumb pointing downwards. One after another the remainder followed suit until every member sat thus with the exception of the blushing victim. He looked the length of the long table twice, gathered his cup and plate together, and without further ado vanished beneath the table to the accompaniment of unbridled mirth.

If nothing else had been needed to emphasise the fact, I realised in that moment that I was in a gunroom of the Eternal Navy.

There was no question of “showing off” before a stranger—indeed they had forgotten my existence; it was not even ragging. It was just that I had accidentally witnessed the workings of some great Law, immutable and inexplicable as Fate, in full swing about my uncomprehending head.

The meal progressed as if nothing had occurred to break its serenity. I pleaded for light.

“It’s just our mail, you see,” explained the President. “Something has happened to our mails. All the rest of the ships get theirs regularly and ours hasn’t fetched up once since we’ve been here.”

“It’s the fault of the ship’s name,” chipped in another (the ship bore the name of a great American State); “d’rectly the bags reach Liverpool, someone looks at the labels an’ says, ‘Here, ain’t that somewhere in America?’ an’ back they go. They’ve been goin’ backwards an’ forwards for months.” “With Fritz takin’ pot-shots at them as they come and go,” added a voice.

Muffled requests for reinforcements of buttered toast drifted up from underneath the table. “Well?” I queried, still hopelessly in the dark. “Oh, well, you see, anyone who mentions the word ‘mail’ at meals just has to quit an’ go underneath the table; we’ve made it a rule.”

A British midshipman who draws a dirk in the gunroom stands a round of port after dinner. To each navy its own etiquette—and penalties.

It was when we had lit our pipes (the exile had been suffered to return to our midst) and sprawled in comfort, elbows on table, that the real inner meaning of this great Alliance dawned fully upon me. Together we refought Jutland as it has been refought in scores and scores of gunrooms amid tobacco smoke and the shifting of spoons and matches across a tablecloth; after that, it was baseball instead of rugger; Annapolis instead of Dartmouth training college; but it all amounted to a common ideal, voiced, not by politicians or diplomats, but by a nation’s youth in common speech with ours.

I visited the compact double cabins—only they called them staterooms—each with its intimate links with home suggested by the backs of familiar books on a shelf and photographs pinned to the heads of bunks. In fancy I made obeisance to the smiling American girlhood that has good cause to be proud of its knights: and so back to the gunroom, where one of the gay company had just sat down to the piano.

We perched round on the table and the backs of chairs, and sang. They were the latest patriotic songs from the United States, tuneful, emotional jingles whereby every nation going to the wars shamelessly strives to voice its inner feelings. And when the player’s repertoire was ended we started afresh; while the more energetic fox-trotted to and fro across the narrow deck space.

Tune and words have since escaped me; but the refrain of the last song lingers still by reason of its significance in these sombre days. “We’re coming over, we’re coming over!” roared the young voices; and I stole a glance at the lean faces, at the laughing, confident eyes all about me—“AND WE WON’T COME BACK TILL IT’S OVER, OVER THERE!”

I came nearer to feeling sorry for the Hun than I had since the war started.

CHAPTER XII
MYSTERY