IV. The Hunt
The Blimp rose from her moorings, soaring seaward, and straightway the roar of her propeller cut off each of the occupants of the car into a separate world of his own silence. The aerodrome with its orderly row of hangars dropped away from under them with incredible swiftness. Fields became patchwork, buildings fell into squares and lozenges without identity. Figures which a minute or two before had been noisy, muscular, perspiring fellow-men working on the ropes, were dots without motion or meaning, and faded to nothingness.
A flock of seagulls rose from the face of the cliff, whirled beneath them like autumn leaves, and dropped astern. The parallel lines of white that were breakers chasing each other to ruin on a rock-bound coast merged into the level floor of the Atlantic, and presently there was nothing but sea and blue sky with the rushing wind between, and this glittering triumph of man’s handiwork held suspended like a bauble midway.
The pilot turned in his seat and grinned over his shoulder at the observer. The grin was the only visible portion of his face: the rest was hidden by flying-helmet and goggles and worsted muffler. The grin said: “It’s a fine morning and the old bus is running like a witch. What’s the odds on sighting a Fritz?”
The observer laughed and shouted an inaudible reply against the roar of the wind. He pulled a slip of chewing gum out of his pocket, bit off a piece, and passed the rest to the pilot. Then he adjusted the focus of the high-power glasses and began methodically quartering out the immense circular expanse of sea beneath them.
Half an hour had passed when the wireless operator in the rear leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. His listeners were to his ears, and he was scribbling something on a slate. “S.O.S.—S.O.S.”—a bearing from a distant headland—“fourteen miles—S.O.S.—S.O.S.—come quickly—I am being shelled—S.O.S.—Subma——” The operator paused with his pencil above the slate, waited a moment, and handed the slate forward.
The message, soundless, appealing, that had reached them out of the blue immensity had ceased abruptly. The pilot glanced from the compass to a small square of chart clamped before him, and slowly turned the wheel. Then he looked back over his shoulder and grinned again.
A quarter of an hour later the pilot extended a gauntletted hand and pointed to the rim of the horizon. A faint smudge of smoke darkened into a trailing cloud, and presently they saw ahead of it the forepart of a ship, driving through the water at a speed which clove a white, irregular furrow across the surface of the sea. She was swerving from side to side like a hunted buck, and as the dirigible dipped her nose and the hum of the wind redoubled to a roar in the ears of the crew, they saw away to the west a tiny cigar-shaped object. At intervals a spurt of flame shot from it, and a little pale mushroom-shaped cloud appeared above the steamer as the shrapnel burst.
The Blimp swooped at eighty miles an hour upon that cigar-shaped object. The observer braced his feet and grasped the bomb release lever, his jaws still moving about the piece of chewing-gum. The sea, flecked with little waves, rushed up to greet them. They had a glimpse of the submarine’s crew tumbling pell-mell for the conning-tower hatchway, of the wicked gun abandoned forward still trained on the fleeing merchantman. The next instant the quarry had shot beneath them. A sharp concussion of the air beat upon the fragile car and body of the airship as her nose was flung up and round. The dirigible’s bomb had burst right forward on the pointed bows, and the submarine was diving in a confused circle of broken water and spray.
The Blimp turned to drop another bomb ahead of the rapidly vanishing wake, and then marked the spot with a calcium flare, while the wireless operator jiggled a far-flung “Tally ho!” on the sending-key of his apparatus.
The tramp disappeared below the horizon, and they caught disjointed scraps of her breathless tale while they circled in wide spirals above the watery arena.
Three motor launches were the first upon the scene, each with a slim gun in the bows, and carrying, like hornets, a sting in their tails. They were old hands at the game, and they spread out on the hunt with business-like deliberation under the directions of the Blimp’s Morse lamp. The captain of the inshore boat (he had been a stockbroker in an existence several æons gone by) traced a tar-stained finger across the chart, and glanced again at the compass. “Nets—nets—nets,” he mumbled. “The swine probably knows about those to the northwest ... He daren’t go blind much longer. Ha!”
“Feather three points on your port bow,” winked the Blimp. Over went the motor launch’s helm, and the seaward boat suddenly darted ahead in a white cloud of spray. Bang! a puff of smoke drifted away from the wet muzzle of her gun; half a mile ahead a ricochet flung up a column of foam as the shell went sobbing and whimpering into the blue distance.
“Periscope dipped,” waved a pair of hand-flags from the boat that had fired. And a moment later, “Keep out of my wake! Am going to release a charge.”
For an hour that relentless blindfold hunt went forward, punctuated by exploding bombs and depth charges, and the crack of the launches’ guns as the periscope of the submarine rose for an instant’s glimpse of his assailants and vanished again. Twice the enemy essayed a torpedo counter-attack, and each time the trail passed wide. Then, crippled and desperate, he doubled on his tracks, and for a while succeeded in shaking off the pursuit. Nets, as he knew, lay ahead, and nets were death; safety lay to the southward could he but keep submerged; but the water, spurting through the buckled plating and rivets started by the bursting depth charges, had mingled with the acid in the batteries and generated poison gas, which drove him to the surface. Here he turned, a couple of miles astern of his pursuers, and manned both guns, a hunted vermin at bay. As his foremost gun opened fire, a heavy shell burst a few yards abeam of the submarine, and the captain of the nearest motor launch raised his glasses. It was not a shell fired from a motor launch.
“The destroyers,” he said. “Now why couldn’t they have kept away till we’d made a job of it?” On the horizon the masts and funnels of a flotilla of destroyers appeared in line abreast, approaching at full speed, firing as they came. The next instant a shell from the submarine burst on the tiny forecastle of the launch, shattering the gun, gun’s crew, and wheelhouse. The coxswain dropped over the wrecked wheel and slowly slid to the deck like a marionette suddenly deprived of animation. The lieutenant R.N.V.R. who had once been a stockbroker stood upright for an instant with his hands to his throat as if trying to stem the red torrent spurting through his fingers, and then pitched brokenly beside the coxswain.
The captain of the submarine counted the approaching destroyers, opened the seacock to speed the flooding of his doomed craft, gave a swift glance overhead at the Blimp swooping towards them for the coup-de-grâce, and ordered Cease Fire. Then he waved his hands in token of surrender.
V. Overdue
The thin light of a sickle moon tipped the crest of each swift-running sea with silver. The rest was a purple blackness, through which the north wind slashed like a knife, and the sound of surf on a distant shoal was carried moaning. At intervals a bank of racing clouds trailed across the face of the moon, and then all was inky dark for a while.
It was during one of these periods of obliteration of all things visible that a slender, perpendicular object rose above the surface of the sea. Gradually the dim light waxed again: a wave, cloven in its path, passed hissing on either side in a trail of spray, and the object slowly projected until it topped the highest wave. Presently about its base a convulsive disturbance in the water was followed by the appearance of a conical shape, a solid blackness against the streaked glimmering obscurity of the water breaking all about its sides and streaming in cascades from the flat railed-in top. A hatchway opened, and two figures crawled out, clinging to the rail of their swaying foothold while the full force of the wind clawed and battered at their forms. They maintained a terse conversation by dint of shouting in turn with their lips to each other’s ears, while the conning-tower of the submarine on which they stood moved forward in the teeth of the elements.
For half an hour they went plunging and lurching onwards, clinging with numbed hands to the rail as a green sea swept about their legs, wiping the half-frozen spray from their eyes to search the darkness ahead with night-glasses. Then one pointed away on the bow.
“How’s that?” he bawled. A point on the bow something dark tumbled amid the waves and flying spindrift. The other stared a moment, shouted an order to the invisible helmsman through a voice-pipe, and the wind that had hitherto been in their streaming eyes smote and buffeted them on the left cheek. A scurry of sleet whirled momentarily about them, blotting out the half-glimpsed buoy; the taller of the two figures put out an arm and smote his companion on the back. They had made that buoy at dawn the previous day, and then, according to the custom of British submarines in enemy waters, submerged till nightfall. Now, despite the set of the tides and currents and the darkness, they had found it again, and with it their bearings for the desperate journey that lay ahead.
For two hours they groped their way onwards through what would have been unfathomable mysteries to a landsman. Compass, chart, and leadline played their part: but not even these, coupled with the stoutest heart that ever beat, avail against unknown minefield and watchful patrols. Thrice the two alert, oilskin-clothed figures dived through the hatchway into the interior of the submarine, and the platform on which they had been standing vanished eerily beneath the surface as a string of long, dark shapes went by with a throb of unseen propellers. Once when thus submerged an unknown object grated past the thin shell with a harsh metallic jar, and passed astern in silence. Then it was that the captain of the submarine removed his cap, passing his sleeve quickly across his damp forehead, and the gesture was doubtless accepted where all prayers of gratitude find their way.
The first gleam of dawn, however, found no submarine on the surface. It showed a business-like flotilla of destroyers on their beat, and a long line of net drifters at anchor in the far distance amid sandbanks. An armed trawler with rust-streaked sides and a gun forward was making her way through the cold, grey seas in the direction of the drifters; a hoist of gay-coloured signal flags flew from her stump of a mast, and at the peak a tattered German ensign. The crew were clustered for warmth in the lee of the engine-room casing, their collars turned up above their ears, and their hands deep in their pockets. They were staring ahead intently at the line of nets guarding the entrance to the harbour they were about to enter. None noticed a black speck that peeped intermittently out of their tumbling wake thirty yards astern, and followed them up the channel. Three or four fathoms beneath that questioning speck, in an electric-lit glittering steel cylinder, a young man stood peering into the lens of a high-power periscope, both hands resting on a lever. He spoke in a dull monotone, with long intervals of silence; and throughout the length of that cylinder, beside valve and dial and lever, a score of pairs of eyes watched him steadfastly.
“She’s given her funnel a coat of paint since last month ... port ten—steady! steady!... There’s the gate vessel moving.... The skipper is waving to hurry him up.... Wants his breakfast, I suppose.... That must be the big crane in the dockyard.... There are flags hung about everywhere.... Starboard a touch.... It’s getting devilish light.... There’s something that looks like a battle-cruiser alongside....”
There was a long silence, then the figure manipulating the periscope suddenly stood upright.
“We’re through,” he said quietly. “And that’s their new battle-cruiser.”
. . . . .
In the smoking-room of a British submarine depot a group of officers sat round the fire. Now and again one or other made a trivial observation from behind his newspaper; occasionally one would glance swiftly at the clock and back to his paper as if half afraid the glance would be intercepted. The hands of the clock crept slowly round to noon; the clock gave a little preliminary whirr and then struck the hour.
“Eight bells,” said the youngest of the group in a tone of detachment, as if the hour had no special significance. A grave-faced lieutenant-commander seated nearest the door rose slowly to his feet and buttoned up his monkey jacket.
“You goin’, Bill?” asked his neighbour in a low voice.
The upright figure nodded. “He’d have done as much for me,” he replied, and walked quickly out of the room.
No one spoke for some minutes. Then the youngest member lowered the magazine he was holding in front of him.
“Do they cry?” he asked.
“No,” said two voices simultaneously. “’Least,” added one, “not at the time.”
The silence settled down again like dust that had been disturbed; then the first speaker leaned forward and tapped the ashes out of his pipe.
“Well,” he observed, “they didn’t get him cheap, at all events. I’m open to a bet that he sent a Boche or two ahead of him to pipe the side.”
The group nodded a grim assent.
“Yes,” said one who had not hitherto spoken. “I reckon you’re right. But we shan’t hear till the war’s over. They know how to keep their own secrets.” He puffed at his pipe reflectively.
“Anyhow, thank God I’m a bachelor,” he concluded. He lifted a fox-terrier’s head between his hands and shook it gently to and fro. “No one need go and tell our wives if we don’t come back—eh, little Blinks?” The dog yawned, gave the hands that held him a perfunctory lick, and resumed his interrupted nap sprawling across his master’s knees.
. . . . .
Among the letters intercepted shortly afterwards on their way to a South American State from Germany was one that contained the following significant passage:
“ ... Yesterday all Kiel was beflagged: we were to have had a half-holiday on the occasion of the trials of the great new battle cruiser——. Owing to an unforeseen incident, however, the trials were not completed. Our half-holiday has been postponed indefinitely....”