CHAPTER II
ON PATROL
"Bright sort of evening, Meredith," was Wakefield's greeting as he came on board. "I see you've had the engines running. Any trouble down below?"
Cedric Wakefield was a burly, pleasant-faced youth of twenty-four, upon whose broad shoulders rested the weight of responsibility of M.L. 1071, her crew and equipment. In those far-off days before practically the whole civilised world was plunged into the throes of war Wakefield was farming in Canada. Had anyone suggested that within a few months he would be treading the deck of a diminutive warship flying the White Ensign, Wakefield would have scouted the idea. The peril of the German menace had hardly made itself felt as far as Western Canada was concerned; while the young Englishman, coming straight from a Public School to the thinly populated slopes of the Rockies, little thought that the call of duty would bring him home hot-foot to fight for King and Country.
But when war broke out with startling suddenness Cedric promptly "packed up," worked his passage from Quebec to Liverpool as a fireman, and upon arrival in the Old Country promptly joined the R.N.V.R. as an ordinary seaman. In less than twelve months he was granted a commission, and after a brief course in gunnery and navigation was given command of a motor launch.
Quiet-spoken, he found that the fact of being in command was not without its disadvantages. At first he possessed hardly sufficient self-confidence to give an order loudly and peremptorily. But by degrees the force of authority asserted itself, and when necessary he could bellow like a bull and make himself heard in a gale of wind. He was daring, but at the same time cautious. He could make up his mind in an instant, and rarely was his judgment at fault, while his courageous bearing in many a tight corner had won the admiration and confidence of his crew.
Judging by their previous occupations, the crew of M.L. 1071 were a "scratch lot." There were two clerks, a butcher, a chauffeur, an insurance agent, a London County Council schoolmaster, an hotel porter, a theological student and a poacher, although the latter was camouflaged under the designation of farm labourer. And these men, volunteers all, had been banded together under the White Ensign to do their level best to make things mighty unpleasant for Fritz by means of a quick-firer and an assortment of particularly obnoxious depth-charges. True, up to the present, opportunities for direct action had been denied them, but nevertheless it was not for want of trying.
It was certainly a beast of a night. The moon had risen, but her light hardly penetrated the white eddying wreaths of vapour. Viewed from the deck of M.L. 1071, the hull of her parent ship appeared to terminate twenty yards away, while her steel masts and fighting-tops, grotesquely distorted by the erratic mists, were visible at one moment like pillars of silver, while at another they appeared to be cut off at less than fifteen feet above the deck. Already three of the six vessels detailed for the forty-eight hours' patrol had been swallowed up in the mist, as with lights screened they groped their way blindly towards the invisible mouth of the harbour and the seemingly boundless expanse of sea and fog beyond.
With the air reverberating with the roar of the exhausts and the deck quivering under the pulsations of the throttled motors, Wakefield and Meredith made their way to the diminutive wheel-house, where the coxwain (ex-theological student) was standing by the steering-wheel and peering with a studied professional manner into the dimly illuminated compass-bowl.
"All ready?" inquired the skipper in stentorian tones. "Let go for'ard!... Let go aft!"
The engine-room telegraph bells clanged as Wakefield thrust the starboard indicator to easy ahead and the port one to half-speed astern. Literally spinning round on her heel, M.L. 1071 edged away from the Hesperus, the towering hull of which was quickly swallowed up in the mist.
"Good enough, Sub!" exclaimed Wakefield. "We're right in the wake of the next ahead. Now carry on. It's my watch below. Give me a shout if anything's doing, and get them to call me at four bells."
Left in charge, Meredith prepared to make the best of his four hours' "trick." Experience had long since taught him that warmth and dryness were absolutely essential on night patrol. Clad in two thick woollen sweaters, serge-trousers and pilot-coat, and wearing woollen gloves, sea-boots, muffler, oilskins and sou'wester, he was well equipped for the work in hand. The three-sided erection known as the wheel-house afforded little protection from the spray, as the windows had to be kept wide open otherwise the moisture settling on the glass panes would render the mist still more baffling than it actually was.
Right for'ard the dim outlines of the look-out could be discerned, as, crouching to dodge as far as possible the clouds of spray, the man peered through the darkening mist. It was his duty to see that M.L. 1071 kept fairly in the bubbling wake of the boat next ahead. Fifty yards astern another M.L., unseen but plainly audible, was likewise making use of the swirl of No. 1071's twin propellers as a guide through the fog-laden water.
So well, so good. Provided the flotilla kept station in "single column line ahead," there was little cause for the science of navigation except on the part of the navigating officer of the leading M.L. It was a case of seamanship, a sort of marine follow-my-leader work, until on arriving at a certain rendezvous the boats had to work independently; and No. 1071 had been detailed for the Outer Patrol stunt.
At a reduced speed of ten knots and an M.L. is a difficult craft to handle at slow speed—the flotilla plugged seawards.
The short steep tide rip at the harbour's mouth gave place to the long sullen undulations of the North Sea. Although navigation was carried on without steaming lights, the chances of collision were hardly worth taking into consideration, since the noise of the exhausts could be plainly audible for a distance of a couple of miles.
For the best part of an hour the flotilla held on then just before midnight came an order from the leading M.L. for the boats to proceed independently.
Meredith, hitherto inactive, roused himself.
"Port fifteen!" he ordered. "Course east a half north!"
"East a half north it is, sir," repeated the coxwain.
In obedience to the Sub's order, a man made his way aft and paid out the patent log-line. The mileage as recorded by this instrument and the course as determined by the magnetic needle were the sole factors used to take the M.L. to her appointed station, four miles from a prominent headland and right in the steamer-track of vessels proceeding northwards from the Firth of Forth. Kenneth felt no particular enthusiasm for this kind of work. It was Duty, spelt with a capital D. Whether the patrol were essential to safeguard shipping had yet to be proved. For the best part of a twelvemonth M.L.'s were constantly on duty off the headland, yet on no occasion had a U-boat been definitely sighted. There had been false alarms. A boat-hook stave floating perpendicularly and drifting with the tide had caused the waste of a couple of depth-charges and incidentally the slaughter of thousands of fish; a derelict fore-topmast had been responsible for the expenditure of twenty rounds of six-pounder ammunition.
On the other hand, what might have happened had the Auldhaig M.L. Patrol not been in existence can well be conjectured. The slow-moving tramps chartered by the Admiralty to take naval stores to the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow would have afforded easy targets to U-boat commanders but for the constant vigilance on the part of the M.L.'s. In effect, the little patrol boats had frightened off the modern pirates, thereby performing a useful though somewhat monotonous rôle in the question of Sea Power.
"'Tany rate, I'm afloat," soliloquised Meredith. "Better than sitting tight in a muddy trench and being strafed day and night by Boche artillery; but I wish to goodness I'd been in the Dover Patrol. There's no Zeebrugge this end of the North Sea to make things a bit lively."
"Wireless message, sir."
Meredith turned abruptly to find an operator proffering a leaf from a signal pad.
"Anything important?" he asked.
The lad—he was one of the two ex-bank clerks—smiled.
"Looks like business this time, sir," he replied. "A U-boat's been shelling Aberspey. One of our blimps nearly got one home, and Fritz sheered off and was lost in the mist."
Switching on an electric torch, Meredith read the message. It was couched in matter-of-fact official terms and left much to the imagination. Briefly, the U-boat was believed to be damaged and incapable of submerging. It was last sighted at 22.30 (half-past ten), steering eastward and apparently on fire aft.
"Very good; inform the skipper," said Kenneth. "Yes; we stand a chance of seeing something this time."
In less than a couple of minutes Wakefield was on deck.
"Some wheeze, this, Meredith!" he exclaimed gleefully. "With luck we may spot little Fritz. I don't think it's much use following the directions given in this signal. There'll be a swarm of destroyers and all that sort of fry buzzing around already, and if the skipper of the U-boat is up to snuff he'll have altered course to the south'ard. We'll just stand on and keep our wits on the alert. If he's legging it to the south'ard he'll cut athwart our course. I'll try what luck we can get with the hydrophone first."
The M.L.'s engines were stopped, and the boat rolled heavily in the oily swell. Over her starboard side a weird contraption of wires was lowered, the wires terminating in submerged metal plates, while inboard they led to a complicated device known as a hydrophone. In the wireless-room a man sat with receivers clipped to his ears. He was not listening to wireless messages, but for the sound of a U-boat's propellers.
"Anything doing?" inquired Meredith for the twentieth time, as the minutes slowly passed.
This time the listener did not shake his head.
"Fancy I hear something, sir," he reported. "Would you like to listen?"
Kenneth took the proffered ear-pieces and clipped them to his head. Very faintly he could hear the characteristic thud of a marine motor.
"Evidently she's knocking around," he observed, as he handed the apparatus to the operator. "All right; carry on."
Slowly the man revolved a handle until the thudding sound reached a maximum intensity. A glance at the compass showed that the hydrophones were pointing east by south. Still turning the handle, he noted that the volume of sound gradually decreased until a certain point; then it began to increase again, reaching a state of maximum intensity in a bearing south by east. That was all the operator required. Experience had taught him that the source of emission of the sound came from a direction midway between the two maxima, while a further test revealed the fact that the U-boat was moving in a southerly direction.
"If only this blessed fog would lift!" exclaimed Wakefield when his Sub communicated the result of the hydrophone test.
"Get the gear inboard, Meredith. See that the ammunition is brought up and the gun cleared for action. Now for a game of blind man's buff."
"None of our submarines are about here, I suppose?" asked Meredith.
"Not within seventy miles," replied the skipper. "So if we do have the luck to run across a submarine, we'll go for the brute bald-headed."
"And if Fritz can't dive?"
"Then, of course, we'll have to try our best to tickle his ribs with a shell while he's on the surface. Tricky work, but we'll keep him fully occupied with our little pea-shooter"; and Wakefield indicated the six-pounder, by the side of which the gun-layer was standing ready and alert to train the weapon upon its objective.
A quarter of an hour passed. Both officers realised that in this game of hide-and-seek the U-boat stood a better chance, since she could hear the noisy explosions of the M.L.'s exhausts, especially if she floated motionless with her motors switched off. Again, if it came to a trial of gunnery, the odds were tremendously in favour of the Hun, since the U-boat mounted a couple of 4.7-inch or even 6-inch weapons.
Wakefield was counting on the chance of catching his foe napping, and that, if the U-boat were able to dive, she would submerge precipitately. It was then that the depth-charges would play their deadly part.
Conscious of a peculiar sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, Meredith confessed to himself that "he had the wind up." Faced with the possibility of going into action for the first time, he both dreaded and welcomed the chance. Fervently he gave thanks for the fact that it was dark, and that none of his comrades could see his face. For his own part, he felt that every vestige of colour had vanished from his usually bronze features.
Again M.L. 1071 was brought to a standstill and recourse made to the hydrophone. The result was disappointing. Except for a faint rumbling that could only be ascribed to the surf lashing the distant cliffs, not a sound was recorded. Apparently the U-boat was again capable of submerging, and was lying doggo on the bed of the North Sea, while the destroyers engaged in hunting her had passed beyond the range of the M.L.'s hydrophone.
"We'll just carry on," decided Wakefield. "The fog looks like lifting."
Overhead the moonlight was streaming down through a thin layer of mist, while the range of visibility varied from fifty to five hundred yards as banks of dispersing vapour bore down before the light easterly wind.
Wiping the moisture from the lenses of his powerful night glasses, Meredith raised the binoculars and scanned the limited expanse of visible sea. Even as he did so a weird greyish object swept across his field of vision.
"By Jove!" he ejaculated.
"By Jove, what?" asked Wakefield sharply. "Good heavens! Yes, there she is!"
He jerked the telegraph indicator to full speed ahead.
"See her, Clarkson?" he shouted to the gun-layer. "Two points on your starboard bow. Let her have it."