THE SUBMARINE FIGHTS FOR ENGLAND
Can you imagine a narrow belt of foam, rushing over the sea like a live thing with irresistible and sinister suggestion of something terrible below? That is what I saw as I stared down at the toy theatre, the little, coloured microcosm.
Then the inevitable happened. Der Friesland was struck full amidships. A wall of white water rose up out of the sea. Above it, in an instant, spread a huge black fan of smoke, dark as ebony against the sun. At that moment, my brother put the helm hard down and we flew off at an angle. Even as we did so, it seemed that the side of our ship received a terrific blow. We lurched in the conning-tower; we were flung against the starboard wall. There was a nerve-wracking pause, and then, with a jerk, the submarine righted herself, simultaneously as the faintest indication of a mighty explosion fell through the water and came through our armoured walls.
"Too close!" my brother gasped. "I ought to have allowed for these German torpedoes—look, John, look!"
The recoil from the explosion of Der Friesland had nearly sent us to the bottom, but we were righted again, and we saw upon the table, quivering and indistinct, a piteous mass of unrecognisability, wreathed in black fumes, from which flared out angry bursts of fire, like Vesuvius in eruption. All this horror was sinking—sinking into the table, it seemed. Blazing all over, broken in two, the wreck of the monster went lower and lower in the water.
She was done. Bernard gave a great sob, and then hoarse orders rang through the submarine.
Within two minutes we were upon the surface. The hatch was open. My brother and myself stood there, gasping in the sunlight at the ruin we had made. The sea was covered with debris and dotted with the heads of swimming sailors. There was one boat afloat, crammed with men, under whose weight it hesitated, trembled, and sank like a stone, as we looked on.
"Good God!" I cried, "can't we help them, Bernard?"
"No can do," he answered, in Navy slang. "It can't be done, old soul. That's that. I'm damned sorry though."
We were rolling in a grey sea, churned by the monster's dying struggles. It was a desolate waste, patched with horror. Far away, on the port bow, something small and blurred was showing. It was either smoke or the hull of a big ship.
"The first transport!" Bernard said. "We had better be ..."
He did not finish his sentence. Something shrieked overhead like an invisible express train. There was a sound like a clap of thunder, and a fountain of spray rose a hundred yards away from us.
We wheeled round. Not quarter of a mile away, and heading straight for us, we saw two immense, white ostrich feathers, divided as by the blade of a knife. Each instant they grew larger.
One of the convoying destroyers had made a grand detour and was coming for us at the charge.
Then, I cannot say when or how, there was a sound like two great hands clapping together in the air above us. Instantaneously, the plates of the deck and conning-tower rang like gongs, followed by little splashing sounds, as if someone was throwing eggs.
I had no idea what it was. "What the devil ..." I was beginning, when Bernard explained.
"Shrapnel," he said, and held out his left arm to me. It ended in what looked like a bundle of crimson rags.
"Damn the blighters!" he said, "they've blown off my left hand. Quick, John, or we shall lose the trick. Your handkerchief!"
I pulled it out mechanically.
"Knot it round my arm—yes—there—just above the wrist. Thank God you're strong! Now then, you've got to twist it. Got anything for a lever?"
The only thing I could find was a silver-mounted fountain pen, a Christmas present from Doris the year before. I whipped it into the knot of the handkerchief, turned it round and secured it. The whole thing did not take more than ten seconds. I had hardly finished, when Bernard skipped inside the conning-tower. I followed him. The hatchway slid into its place with a clang, and as we heard another terrific explosion above us, I wrenched the rudder lever over, Bernard signalled below to fill the tanks, and through the portholes I saw the welcome green creep up, the light disappear, and felt the gratings sinking beneath my feet. I shouted down for Dickson—the first name I could think of.
Dickson max. was up in a second.
"Get the bottle of rum," I said, "the Captain's hurt."
It came. I held it to my brother's lips. He took a little and gave one deep groan.
Dickson max. stood like a statue. He never asked a question. It was wonderful.
"Who fired that torpedo?" Bernard asked.
"I did, sir. Mr. Scarlett showed me how."
"You will be pleased to know, Mr. Dickson, that you have sunk the German battleship, Der Friesland, with probably a thousand souls on board. This will be remembered."
"You are hurt, sir?"
"Get down to the torpedo tubes. Load the empty one and stand by for orders."
Dickson vanished.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Right as rain. Now then, we've got to find those transports. I took their bearings before we sank. Meanwhile I think we'll get a little deeper, out of harm's way."
He told me what to do. I pulled the necessary lever and spoke orders to Bosustow at the engines. The needle on the manometer quivered and rose. We went down to thirty feet. Immediately, it seemed as if the world above, the noise of battle, everything, faded away. We were buzzing along in the depths of the sea, just as we had been, intact, unhurt, until I looked at Bernard's hand. He was rather pale, but as pleased in face as if he was just tumbling into the "Sawdust Club" at Portsmouth.
"I say," he said, "won't the daily papers spread themselves over this!"
Somehow or other, a beastly little fly must have got into the conning-tower. It settled on me. I put up my hand to brush it away. My hand came back—pink, and I stared stupidly at it.
"You silly blighter!" my brother said, "didn't you know you'd lost half your ear?"
I suppose we ran, deep under water, at the top speed of which the motors were capable for at least another ten minutes. Adams was called up to the wheel and Bernard went down. I stood where I was until the man below shouted up. "Captain calling for you, sir!"
I tumbled down into the centre of the submarine, looking first aft to where the huge Cornishman, Bosustow, was quietly moving about his engines.
"Forrard, sir," said Bosustow, and I hastened round the gangway towards the bows. Scarlett, the Dicksons, and Bernard were standing by the torpedo tubes. Bernard turned to me.
"That concussion has snookered our tubes a bit," he said. "You see we aren't quite accustomed to this new German mechanism. Scarlett says, and I quite agree, that it's a toss up if we can make correct aim under water. I think we shall have to go for that transport on the surface."
He looked at me with quick interrogation. I knew what he meant. Already we had done more than anyone in the world would have thought possible. It was no time for sentimentalism or heroic thoughts, and we knew that, whatever happened, we had earned imperishable fame. We were safe now. Should we run another risk? That was what my brother was asking me. Even his iron nerve doubted itself for an instant.
"The only thing I can see to do," I answered, "is to let 'em have it in the open—out of the trenches, bayonet attack, what?"
"My own opinion entirely, sir," said Scarlett. "Damn it, begging your pardon, sir, we've not 'alf give 'em it yet!"
For a moment my brother's glance rested on the two eager boys. Was he justified in flinging them to death after they had done so much, behaved so splendidly?
They knew it. By some intuition, the young devils saw it at once.
"Oh, let's have another smack at them, sir!" they said in chorus.
Without another word, Bernard limped along the gratings and I helped him up into the conning-tower again. We rose to the surface.
The stars in their courses fought for Sisera! When we went out on deck, the first transport was scarcely a mile away from us on the starboard quarter. We had judged it to a tick.
But she was no longer heading west. She had turned tail. She was a Hamburg-Amerika liner converted to a transport, and thick black smoke poured out of her four funnels as she raced back towards Heligoland and safety.
"She's got nearly three thousand troops on board, I'll bet you a manhattan," Bernard said. "We must get her, we simply must!"
Turning to the west, we saw at least five destroyers rushing for us like express trains. Whether they had seen us come up or not I cannot tell, but they knew well enough what our manœuvre would be, and they were not a mile and a half away.
"Get down. Tell Bosustow to cram it all on. Increase the spark. We've got to do twenty knots if we scrap the whole thing."
I was there in a moment, I told Bosustow what the skipper had said. The big man was quietly chewing tobacco, and he spat down on the accumulators as he made a motion to salute. He moved like a slug over his roaring engines, but even as he did so, the angry hum, the muffled explosions, rose into a steel symphony like Tchaikovsky's "1812"! I felt the ship leap forward like a whippet out of leash. When I stumbled up on deck again, the wind was whistling all round the conning-tower. It blew my cap off into the sea.
We gained, we gained enormously, but so did the pursuing destroyers.
We soon knew that. There were sounds behind us like a little street-boy whistling to a friend. They were firing their bow machine guns, taking no careful aim, at the fearful pace they were going, but all around us fountains of foam rose in the sea as we plunged onwards.
"You know, John," said my brother, "it's a difficult thing for any gunners at all to fire their bow chasers at a little bobbing thing like a submarine. Of course, they may get us with a lucky shot, but I don't think they will."
They didn't.
The great liner saw us coming and slanted off obliquely to the north. It wasn't any use at all. We had the heels of her, though we knew that at any moment our engines might give out, owing to the fearful strain we were putting on them.
It was Scarlett who fired the torpedo—"must let the old blighter have his chance!" my brother said—and it went straight and true to the Princessin Amalia, as we afterwards learned she was.
I think that was the worst of all. We torpedoed her from six hundred yards. There was no explosion, as there was in the case of the battleship. We could see everything far more distinctly. She simply broke in two and sank in three minutes, defenceless, impotent.
"Poor chaps!" I said, as we watched.
"Fortune of war!" Bernard answered—"Yes, poor chaps! At the same time, remember that they're the same sort of fellows who have been crucifying flappers in Belgium and taking out the whole male population of harmless villages and shooting them before breakfast. They would have been doing that all over Norfolk in thirty hours, if"—he paused—"if you hadn't been rejected by the R.N.F.C. and also been the right hand of the late lamented Doctor Upjelly. We must get down quickly, or else ..."
He had turned and was holding his binoculars to his eyes.
"Good heavens!" he said, "what's that?"
I turned, and I saw that the five destroyers were sweeping away in a great curve to the north. They were pursuing us no longer.
"What is it?" I cried.
The answer didn't come from my brother, though I heard it plainly enough. It was like thunder many miles away—a huge, dull boom such as I had never heard before.
"Why, they're running!"
"I should rather think so, old soul!"
"Are they afraid of us? What is that noise?"
"That, my dear young friend, unless I am very much mistaken, is one of the twelve-inch guns of His Majesty's ship, Vengeance. Cruiser-battleship, young John. I happen to know she's been lying off Harwich for the last week, waiting orders. Our friend, Lieutenant Murphy, has sent my wires to good purpose, and 'now we shan't be long!'"
Again the great, menacing boom, but this time we saw something.
From the deck of a submarine the range of vision is only two miles. The last destroyer was almost disappearing on the horizon, when she suddenly jumped out of the sea and fell to pieces like a pack of cards.
"That's old Snorty Bethune-Ranger!" my brother said, wagging his head gravely. "Best gunner commander in the fleet, and I know he's on board the Vengeance. Now don't you think we'll have the boys up and let 'em chortle a bit?"
"I'll go and call them."
I was just going in when I was gripped by the arm so hard that I winced.
"Look there!" said my brother.
I followed his pointing right arm and saw something far up in the sky, something like a crow, which grew larger every second.
"One of their hydroplanes, off the deck of the second transport. She's going to try and drop bombs on us."
"Will she do it?"
"Can a duck bark?" Bernard answered contemptuously. "Of course, she may be lucky, but it's never happened yet. The worst of it is that they can see us thirty feet below the surface. Still, old sport, she can't do much—hear her coming?"
I did. There was a noise like a motor-bicycle in the sky, and the crow grew to an eagle, developed into an aeroplane, such as I had seen so often in the illustrated papers.
"I suppose we'd better submerge, though I don't want to run from a beastly mechanical kite, after sinking Kaiser Bill's lovin' enthusiastic soldiers, all in the box, complete, one shilling! I say, John, would you like a little bit of sport?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I don't suppose this fellow is going to do us any harm, and any way, it's a toss up. Now you rather pride yourself as a wild-fowler, don't you?"
"If I hadn't been a wild-fowler," I said, "we shouldn't have been where we are now."
"Quite so. Now, there's a rack of excellent rifles down below, and dozens of clips; see if you can't pick this Johnny off."
He bellowed down through the hatch.
"Bring up a magazine rifle and some ammunition. Look sharp!"
I got the rifle in a few seconds. I think we were both perfectly reckless. I know I was. I laughed as I tucked the gun into my shoulder. There was a complicated arrangement of sights, but I never even snapped up the foresight. It did not seem worth while; the mark was so big.
The hydroplane fetched a sweep of quarter of a mile round us, and then came head on. I could see the pilot distinctly and, a little below him, the gentleman who was getting ready to drop his bombs.
It was quite delightful. They were not going at a higher speed than a flock of widgeon. To me, it was child's play.
I plugged the bomb expert with the second shot. Then, and I really rather pride myself on what I did next, I hit the long, sausage-like petrol tank and ripped it up. There was a huge roar, an overhead explosion, and as the whole beastly thing turned a somersault and fell, I am pretty certain, too, that I put the pilot out of his pain with my last shot.
We were surrounded by ships—they had come racing north out of Harwich just in time. The big Vengeance was still booming away, but two snaky-like destroyers were coming up hell for leather and a big seven thousand ton cruiser was not more than three hundred yards from us.
Puff! puff! A white pinnace, with a shining brass funnel, swirled round and came up on our quarter. My brother and myself, together with the two Dickson boys, were standing by the conning-tower.
The pinnace was full of men. It was steered by a youngish-looking, clean-shaved officer, wearing the badges of a lieutenant.
Adams, Scarlett, and Bosustow were over the side in a minute, a coil of rope ran out, boat-hooks appeared from nowhere. There was a subdued hum of chatter, as the men from the cruiser greeted the three heroes of the submarine.
Then I heard a sharp and rather squeaky voice.
"Hallo, Whelk!" it said.
Bernard leant over the rail; he was nearly done, but he found voice to answer that hail.
"That you, Reptile?" he muttered, "you are more like a stuffed frog than ever!"
Such are the greetings and amenities of the Navy. But the last thing I remember hearing that afternoon came from the lieutenant in charge of the pinnace.
"I say, excuse me for mentioning it, but 'well done,' you fellows!"