FOOTNOTES
[7] I.e. alluvial plain.
[8] ‘Enough!’
[9] Perquisite.
[10] Bugle.
THE DAY.
As the cathedral chimes struck eleven, Hubert Quality raised the corner of the blind and looked into the street.
A deep peace reigned; the cobbles of the road glistened from recent rain; wet wads of yellowed leaves padded the pavements. Very far away on the horizon, a fitful red quiver told of heathen fires lighted to the dark god Thor.
No human form was visible in the street. Yet Quality shrank from the uneasy sensation that some one was spying upon him.
Bracing himself with an effort, he looked up furtively into the indigo vault of the heavens—knowing the while that he was about to be subjected to some fresh demonstration of trickery on the part of his nerves.
Instantly, he started back with a stifled cry.
A face was watching him from the moon.
For several full seconds it bleached him, the unhuman stare of century-old eyes, before it blended again into the blank silver disc.
With shaking fingers, Quality dropped the curtain—the pallor of his face and the twitching of his features testifying to the cumulative effect of oft-repeated shocks.
For the past two weeks, his terror-maddened nerves had rent him with the strength of lunatic devils—making every heart-beat leap like a bead of quicksilver, and chopping up each breath into demi-semiquavers of panting panic. Only the consciousness of one supreme fact held them back from their objective—the wreck of Quality’s sanity.
On the morrow, their victim was going home.
It was his day.
The most cursory glance at his face proclaimed him the predestined prey of his imagination. His dreamy eyes, sensitive mouth, and delicate physique denoted him student—or visionary—rather than man of action, and, as such, averse from any act or form of violence.
During the siege and occupation of the town by the enemy, in his rôle of spectator, he had been plunged into a super-hell, in which he groped in a red delirium—fire-flecked and blood-smudged. His razor-keen sympathies supplying the lack of experience, he had died, by proxy, many deaths a day. He had seen human faces blasted by the red-hot touch of the Martian hand, and the sight had not been good to see. Above all, his ears were deafened by the constant terrific speech of great guns that spoke.
Peace—passionately he prayed for it. And to-morrow that peace would be his.
Soothed by the mere thought of his imminent release, he turned back again towards the room which he had grown to hate. It was a prim, mid-Victorian-looking apartment, stuffy from a porcelain stove and crowded with horsehair furniture. At the round table of highly polished walnut-wood, his landlady sat at her knitting.
Apparently about forty years of age, madame was of ponderous build, clumsy as a Flemish horse, with massive heaving shoulders, and broad hips. Abundant black hair was brushed back from her face and gathered in a knot on the top of her head. Her sallow skin was partially redeemed by the beauty of her eyes—velvet-brown and fringed with thick lashes. Her full lips were pencilled with a fine line of black down. It was a typical enough face of a daughter of the people, sprung from peasant stock and now the wife of a small tradesman.
This was the woman whom Quality feared with his very soul.
When he had first rented her apartment, she had reminded him of a woman in a fairy-tale, who, while apparently honest and homely, concealed under her ordinary exterior that element of the sinister supernatural that often accompanies such histories. Thus looked the pleasant-faced female, who afterwards figured as the ogress; thus appeared the harmless peasant, who changed nightly into a were-wolf.
It was not his fanciful idea of a composite personality, however, which inspired Quality’s dislike of his landlady. That had come with the knowledge that she was utterly lacking in the usual sentiments of humanity. Undisturbed by any horrors of the siege, and showing neither pity nor fear, she continued her daily routine with the mechanical precision of a machine. The sole interest that she ever showed in her boarder was connected with the weekly note.
It was since the War that his distaste had magnified into fear. And his fear was the craven terror of one who, amidst hostile surroundings, carries his very life on a tongue-string. For Fate, choosing her instrument with callous cruelty, had ordained that he should serve his country by means of those subterranean methods, for which the punishment is summary death.
Quality now eyed the woman with the oblique glance of suspicion.
How much did madame know? Did she merely suspect? Was her inaction a sign of ignorance? Or was she on crouch, biding her time to pounce?
Yet through the shifting mists of those dream-days of doubt and fear—when rustling leaves tracked him homewards, and his own shadow slipped away to denounce him—one fact remained real and potent. He knew that all appeal to madame’s feminine compassion would be vain. If she possessed his secret, she would certainly betray him.
Again he looked at her, marking, with strong dislike, the rust-red grain of her skin over her cheek-bones, the tight tartan-silk blouse, the stiff linen collar that made her neck appear so dirty by contrast. The room, with its hideous-patterned paper seemed to wall him in alive; the charcoal fumes from the stove to suffocate him.
Then, suddenly, he smiled. All this, too, would pass away. Next week, he would rub his eyes and wonder if—somewhere—on some alien planet, there really existed a strange, hostile room, tenanted by an unhuman, sawdust-stuffed woman. Both would dwindle down to a name on an envelope—merely an address.
In the reaction of spirits, he stooped to pick up madame’s ball of worsted.
‘The last time I shall do this for you, madame!’
Even as he spoke, his morbid mind quarrelled with his sentence; it seemed as though its finality left a loophole for sinister interpretation.
‘Bien!’
‘Shall you miss me, madame?’
‘Yes.’ Her ‘si’ was emphatic. ‘As one misses all men. Less work, but, unfortunately, less money.’
The speech, typical of the frugal housekeeper of grasping spirit, was reassuring. He smiled once more as he looked at the clock.
‘You’re late to-night, madame! You should save your eye-sight—or, better still, your oil and fuel. Aren’t you going to bed at all?’
She shook her head vehemently.
‘For me, I have no stomach for bed, at all, at all. To sleep would be but to see again that which I have, this day, seen. What? Have you not heard?’
He shook his head.
‘Ah! What misfortune! To-day, at noon, they shot M. Lemoine!’
M. Lemoine—the prominent citizen and advocate! Quality could not credit the news. His mind conjured up a vivid picture of that portly form and plum-coloured face, as madame proceeded.
‘Yes, m’sieur, I saw it. It was horrible. Two soldiers ran him down the steps of the hotel—quick, quick! yet, at every step, one saw him shrink. It was as though a hole had been pierced in him, so that the man came leaking through. At the top, there was the fine figure—so brave, so big; at the bottom, only a shrunken stranger, with eyes that ran, ran, and fingers that picked, and little bubbles around his lips, rising, rising. He—himself—was gone. There was no longer any M. Lemoine!’
Told in her native tongue, with pantomimic gesture to point her words, the recital was ghastly.
Breathing heavily, Quality cleared his throat to ask a question.
‘What was the charge?’
Surely the woman must notice the treacherous quiver of his voice! Her answer seemed to be delayed for an eternity.
‘The charge, m’sieur?—He was a spy!’
‘Ah!’
Quality sank down upon a bristly horsehair chair, the crocheted antimacassar slipping down behind his back. He looked around him with eyes of sick loathing. The clicking sound of madame’s needles maddened him; he had watched the incessant flash of steel for so many long-drawn-out evenings of strain.
The flawed mirror, set above the marble console table, reflected the room, duplicating the gilt clock on the mantelshelf and the pallid waxen fruit, cherished under crystal shades. Presently, however, the hateful vision blurred and faded away, and the home-sick man saw, in its stead, the picture that was engraved upon his mind.
Somewhere, far away from this place of thunder, bloodshed, and cold fears—geographical facts non-existent—was an isle that rocked gently, like an ark of safety, on the grey-green seas. And tucked away, within its very heart, approached only by grass-grown ruts, was a long, grey house. Sentinelled by age-old oaks, there brooded over it the very spirit of security and peace.
Again he sat in his own familiar study, surrounded by the good company of his books, while the fire burned red in the grate and his old hound dozed upon the rug at his feet. This was his proper place—his own milieu—of which he thought by day and dreamed by night.
His longings to escape magnified these nightly dreams into passions. He was always trying to get home. He took abortive railway journeys, when the train broke down and changed into inadequate rubbish, leaving him stranded in unfriendly country. Sometimes he boarded a steamer, which ploughed its way through fields and streets, ever seeking a far-receded sea. These nightmares were varied by the nerve-racking experience of ceaseless preparations for a journey, which ended in the poignant pang of reaching the station only to see the express dash through, its lighted windows merging into one golden streak.
Often, too, he tried to fly home—even as a bird—swooping from his bedroom window in vain essay at flight, and sinking lower into the darkness at each impotent stroke.
His distraught mind, flashing its S.O.S. signals across the sea, must have stirred the rest of those who slumbered safely in that lamppost-lit, policeman-guarded isle. For influence began its wire-pulling work, its efforts resulting in the promise of the special train that was to convey certain refugees homewards by way of neutral territory.
To-morrow would be the day.
‘I am going home—to-morrow!’
He silently repeated the words with a thrill of joyful anticipation, fingering his papers and passport the while, to assure himself of their truth. Thus fortified, he nerved himself for another question.
‘By the way, madame, speaking of poor M. Lemoine. Who—who gave information?’
‘A woman betrayed him.’
Involuntarily, Quality started. He had not before noticed the grating rasp of madame’s voice. It irritated him to unreasonable resentment and disgust.
‘A woman? Damnable!’
‘Plaît-il?’ Madame raised her brows in interrogation. ‘But why? M. Lemoine sold his secrets for gold. The woman sold her secret for gold. C’est égal!’
How furiously her needles flew! In just such manner must her forbears have sat, knitting and counting in the blood-sodden days of the Revolution.
‘But, madame’—Quality’s voice was vibrant with horror—‘how can you call it equal? It is inconceivable that a woman, with a woman’s heart beating within her breast, should sell a life merely for money!’
‘Ah, m’sieur!’—Madame laughed mirthlessly—‘it is easy to see that all your life you have had more than enough. For the others, though—What will they not do for gold?’
She proceeded to answer her own question by illustration.
‘My young brother killed the farmer that he worked for, the farmer’s wife, four children, and a farm-hand—all for the sake of the gold that was in the house. Alone he did it, with a hatchet—and he but a child of fifteen! Such a good lad, and regular with his Mass. It was merely the gold that maddened him, and yet they imprisoned him—le pauvre!’
At last Quality had heard the thrill of emotion in her voice. Looking up, he detected a bead of moisture in her eyes. The sight of her sorrow only added to the horror. On top of her calm recital of the crime, such sympathy for the juvenile monster was nauseating.
‘Your young brother must be a unique specimen,’ he said stiffly, speaking with an effort.
‘Not at all. Like all the rest of us. Like you, perhaps. Certainly, like me!’
A pleasant family history. To steady his nerves, Quality fingered his papers feverishly, repeating the while his magic formula: ‘To-morrow, I go home.’
Even as his lips silently framed the words, he started back, blinking his eyes, and momentarily stunned and deafened. For it seemed to him that a lighted express had shot, shrieking, through the room, like a rocket—thundering past him in a long golden streak.
It was only a fresh manifestation of infamous buffoonery on the part of his nerves, yet it left Quality utterly shaken. He felt suddenly stranded and abandoned. All his vague fears and doubts of the past days sharpened into a definite pang of fear.
Was he, in actual fact, going home to-morrow? Or was he called upon to undergo the supreme anguish of cheated hope? To see his prison-bars opening—only to slam again in his face?
As, still unstrung from shock, he looked round the room, he was a prey of minor optical delusions. Madame seemed to have swollen in bulk—the apartment to have grown distinctly smaller. He hated it with the savage hatred of a convict for his concrete cell.
Inaction became unendurable, and he pushed back his chair.
‘I’m going out, madame.’
‘No, m’sieur. No, no!’
‘Why not?’
Suspicion stabbed him anew at madame’s vehement outcry. Yet her next words were reassuring by reason of their sound common sense.
‘Because, m’sieur, it is too late. See, it wants but a little to midnight. It might arouse suspicion in this place, where every brick has an eye. To-morrow, you return to your own country. How imprudent to risk your liberty thus, at the eleventh hour!’
His head approved the wisdom of the woman’s words. Once again, he saw her as she was—callous, mercenary, possibly—but, for the rest, an ordinary hard-working housewife of her class.
Again he sat down, watching the flashing points of her needles, until his mind gave a sudden slip—and he found himself thinking with drowsy amusement of the Sheep in ‘Alice through the Looking-glass.’
He roused himself with a violent start—to find that madame had laid down her wool, and was watching him intently. The reflection from the lamp fell on her eyes, lighting therein twin balls of orange flame.
‘What is it, madame?’
‘Nothing! I thought I heard a knocking at the street door, that is all.’
‘I heard nothing. But, then, I was nearly asleep.’
‘Best so.’ Her voice thickened. ‘Get all the sleep you can—in preparation for the morrow!’
As she snatched up her knitting, he stared at her, all drowsiness dissipated by her words. He watched her furious energy, trying the while to conceive some adequate motive for her unusual vigil and her evident wish for his own company.
Of a sudden, instinct supplied the knowledge.
Madame was waiting for something to happen.
Like vultures scenting their prey, his nerves instantly swooped down on their victim, agonising him with the refined torture of mirage. As the parched traveller feasts hollow eyes on waving date-palm and bubbling well, so Quality, with aching intensity of longing, saw a clear picture of his own familiar room. He smelt the faint odour of worn leather; heard the crackling whisper of the wood fire; felt the muzzle of his hound moist against his hand.
Would the day never come? He looked at the clock, crookedly upheld by misshapen gilded cupids.
Only a quarter to twelve.
Slowly, slowly, the minutes ticked away. The night was dying hard.
Presently, Quality noticed that madame had laid down her needles and was again listening. Her tense attitude, flattened ears, and craning neck told of an intensity of purpose that would strain her aural organs beyond the limits of their powers.
He saw her sudden start—the involuntary wince.
‘Footsteps, m’sieur! Do you not hear them? Footsteps without in the street!’
‘I can hear nothing!’
‘But they are passing this way. Open the window, and see if there is anyone in the street!’
What was she? Quality could not decide. Merely the shrewd, suspicious housewife, with natural fears—or the composite fearsome creation of his diseased imagination?
With the reluctant step of one who fears a snare, he walked to the window, and, opening it, looked out into the street.
A deep tranquillity reigned without. The old houses, steeped in the milky bath of moonshine, seemed to sway gently, as though in sleep; the sable shadow of the drinking-fountain seemed to rock, as though the ancient town slumbered to the croon of some unheard lullaby.
‘Ah, how peaceful!’ Madame had arisen and was now standing by his side. Her breath, onion-flavoured from her last meal, fell on his cheek in hot puffs.
‘What a picture! And see the leaves, how they fly!’
At a sudden gust of wind, the withered foliage arose from the bare boughs like a flock of birds, and soared into the air in a mad ecstasy of flight—rising, wheeling, swooping—only to sink, feebly fluttering, to the pavement.
With a cold chill of premonition, Quality recalled his own dream of impotent flight.
‘See, the floating leaves are like revenants! Or, perhaps, the souls—ever rising in their thousands—swarming from field and trench. Whither? Whither?—Ah!’
She recoiled with a cry as a leaf, fluttering in through the window, brushed against her face, and then fell, brown and shrivelled, at her feet.
She stooped and picked it up.
‘Blasted!’
The sound of her whisper was terrible. In the moonlight, her face appeared to be blanched to a greenish-white hue. Involuntarily, Quality saw, in a lightning flash of clairvoyance, the white, dripping face of a peasant boy, with wolfish eyes glowing yellow, as he felt the edge of his axe with tremulous fingers.
‘Ah, m’sieur, our last night together!’ Inspired by unusual affection, madame pressed his arm. ‘To-morrow, you will be gone. But what of me? Hélas! what of me?’
‘You?’ Quality strove to speak naturally. ‘Oh, very soon I hope the Allies will make good, and your town be again cleared of the enemy.’
‘The enemy? Ah!’
Madame broke off abruptly. Following the direction of her gaze, Quality also looked at the fountain darkly carven against the luminous sky.
Obedient to the dictate of his mountebank nerves, it slightly altered its position. Or was it a shape that slipped farther into the depths of its shadow?
‘The enemy!’ Madame raised her voice shrilly, with startling lack of caution. ‘Who is the enemy? Have you ever given a thought to the lot of us who live in a province that to-day is French and to-morrow German? Can one say with certainty: “This one is French; that one German”? No, no, m’sieur! My name may be French as the wife of a French spouse, but I have German blood in my veins—German sympathies—love of the Fatherland—deep hatred for all his foes!’
Again the fountain moved, to give sign that it had heard.
In a last desperate effort to preserve his sanity, Quality slammed down the window, forcing a laugh the while.
‘Come, madame! That’s not a very friendly sentiment. You cannot mean what you say. You are overstrung—got nerves.’
‘Nerves? Bien! To-night, I see always M. Lemoine.’
She sank down heavily, her fingers groping for her knitting. The steel needles began to click with mechanical precision.
Quality looked at the clock. It wanted but three minutes to twelve.
The day was near its birth.
At the same moment, madame broke the silence.
‘Courage, m’sieur!’ Her teeth flashed in a smile. ‘We were both wrong. There were no footsteps, after all!’
Her words, vibrant with cheerful sympathy, awoke in Quality a response that was almost electric. Suspicion and fear melted at the warm touch of humanity. The devils that had possessed and tormented him, went out of him, leaving him wrapped in a foretaste of that peace that passeth understanding.
He saw the room dimly, as though through a veil of blue transparency, in a new guise. It was the abode of warmth and comfort—a domestic interior. Madame, smiling over her work, was a type of tranquil femininity.
Suddenly, without warning, the all-pervading calm was shattered.
There was the sound of loud knocking on the street door. The violent double-beat of Quality’s heart seemed almost its echo. He started upright, every frayed nerve at utmost stretch; his eyes searching madame’s face as though he would read therein the Riddle of the Sphinx.
There was a rapid, breathless exchange of question and answer.
‘There is some one at the door, madame.’
‘I hear.’
‘Who can it be?’
‘Who knows? Visitors, perhaps.’
‘At this hour! Why do you not open to them?’
‘Why? Marie will doubtless hear.’
In the pause that followed, the knocking again sounded, louder and more peremptory, as though the door were battered by the impact of a mailed fist.
Still mute to its summons, madame sat motionless, her needles flying with incredible rapidity.
Then, higher up in the building, a door opened. Hurried shuffling footsteps descended the stair and pattered along the passage.
‘C’est Marie.’
As she spoke, Madame raised her face, and, for the first time, Quality saw her eyes.
Swiftly he averted his own, shrinking back before that stare of unholy guilt.
She had betrayed him.
For a fractional measure of time, he was rent by the throes of an elemental passion to grip the woman’s throat and wring out her life in bubbling breaths. But the wholly foreign impulse came and passed almost simultaneously at the grating scream of a withdrawn bolt.
The sound of a man’s voice, sharp and peremptory, drowned the woman’s quavering tones in a rapid colloquy.
Then there was silence, followed by the slam of a door.
Quality’s whole frame shook in a tempestuous ague of suspense.
Had they gone again? Was the blow to be averted at the eleventh hour? Were his hopes yet to find consummation?
Even as he asked the question, the answer came.
There was the sound of heavy footsteps along the passage.
Once more, Quality’s hunted glance flickered around the room, with the sharpened sense of the trapped quarry, seeking desperately for some channel of escape.
His eyes fell upon the papers lying on the table before him. He began to read them with dull interest. Who was this Hubert Quality whose harmlessness and integrity were vouched for in black and white! What of him?
Bereft of all sense of identity—calmly expectant—he watched the door burst open.
It seemed the final performance of an oft-rehearsed drama. Inside—they were actually inside at last; these oft-dreamed-of figures of his fears—stern-faced men, wearing the grey Prussian uniform.
Before him was the officer, seemingly magnified to unhuman stature, in long, belted coat and spiked helmet. His eyes, blue and polar, raked the room. His voice, sharp and metallic, gave the word of command. He was no man, but merely a vehicle of inexorable justice—a machine that has found its range.
Slowly, slowly, Quality arose to his feet. He stretched out his hands.
Arose—only to sink back in his seat. For, at the sound of a woman’s laugh, he realised that he was but the spectator in another’s drama.
With a soldier on either side of her, madame stood rigid and frozen. No need for plea or denial; in her lying outburst of apostasy to the fountain, she had made her ultimate appeal.
As the spy passed through the doorway, Quality saw her face. And it was even as the face of M. Lemoine.
The clock struck twelve.
Through the shrivelled sheath of the dead night broke the glorious promise of the new day.
E. L. White.
IN THE NORTH SEA.
BY LIEUTENANT R.N.
The operation that I am about to describe was not one of primary importance, nor is it likely to be chronicled in the History of the War when that comes to be written; but it was nevertheless an incident of some interest and hazard, and serves to demonstrate the completeness of England’s command of the sea.
It was one day in March 1915 that we left our base and steamed eastward across the North Sea towards the enemy’s coast. We were not a strong force, but we were all fast ships, light cruisers and destroyers, and could show a clean pair of heels to any German big ships that we might meet. It was not expected, however, that the Germans would show themselves outside their ports, for it was less than two months since the Blucher had met her end at the hands of Beatty’s battle-cruisers, and the German squadrons were not prepared as yet, either morally or materially, for another encounter.
Accompanying us, that is escorted by us, were three seaplane carriers, the object of our operations being a repetition of the Christmas Day air raid.
All the way across we had fine calm weather, and our hopes ran high that the conditions would be sufficiently favourable for launching aircraft; for aircraft, and especially seaplanes which are encumbered with heavy air-resisting floats, are still sufficiently in their infancy to require very favourable weather conditions if they are to operate successfully at sea.
At daylight on the following morning we found ourselves some thirty odd miles off the enemy’s coast in a position favourable for launching our attack, and since, coincidently, some wily astrologer, in a fit of verbose optimism, had prophesied a naval battle for this date we had considerable hopes of ‘something doing.’
As day broke a heavy mist lay across our horizon which, spreading outward from the coast, limited visibility to two or three miles. We assured ourselves, however, that as soon as the sun rose the mist would clear, and so for about half an hour the squadron manœuvred to and fro, the while optimist and pessimist, according to their respective fancies, conceived momentary, and usually imaginary, changes in the density of the mist.
The pilots of the seaplanes were rapidly swallowing an early breakfast—it is one of the outstanding disadvantages of war that one has to eat and fight at times altogether repellent to the digestion—or else, with conscientious mechanics, were giving their engines a final test, as the familiar roar of the gnomes echoing from the carriers plainly told us.
But ere long the optimists proved themselves the truer prophets, for by 7 A.M. or so the mist was perceptibly thinner, and the flagship signalled the course which would bring us to our exact destination.
Stationed on each side of us as a submarine screen were divisions of destroyers, whilst the seaplane carriers, hauling out of line, formed up separately with their own destroyer escort.
At about 7.45 the preparatory signal flew from the flagship’s masthead, and with all hands at the guns we stood by, whilst the seaplane carriers prepared to hoist out their machines. But, alas for the aspirations of man, at this very moment a thick bank of fog gathered ahead of us, and in less than five minutes the squadron was enveloped in a ‘pea-soup’ fog, hiding ship from ship as effectively as if a cloud of poison gas had been launched at us.
Flying was definitely off, but only to be replaced by another game, for we were now steaming twenty knots direct at Germany, and it would ill befit the pride of the British Navy if a squadron of her daisiest ships stranded helplessly on the Hun coast.
But here was a problem. Before you turn a squadron the amount of the turn must be indicated to all ships; yet here visual signals were impossible—they would not have been visual in such a fog; syren signals were inadvisable on account of their noisy advertisement, and also the process of sound signalling is very slow; a wireless signal was an alternative, and was the quickest and surest way, but it was a way very liable to inform the enemy as to our whereabouts, for an English wireless call is as different to a German one as a gentleman to a Hun, so that any signal we made would be easily picked up by adjacent enemy stations, and the ‘strength’ of the signals would tell them how close we were.
War, however, is a succession of risks, and since the need demanded, the signal was made. (One hopes it caused a flutter in the German dovecots.)
The leading ships turned a right angle to starboard by two successive turns of four points, the rest of the squadron followed in their wake, and for a few minutes we ran parallel to the coast; the same signals and manœuvre repeated, and we had reversed our original course, and were steaming seawards with our stems to Germany.
How simple it sounds, doesn’t it? but the practical execution of such signals is not so easy in a fog, when the guide you are groping after cannot be seen and is able to show herself only by the bubbles which rise in her wake. Add to this that you have all had to reduce your speed by signal, which means that if you obey the signal a minute too late your excess speed causes you to rush up alongside your next ahead, or if you obey too soon you will drop astern and can no longer pick out those invaluable swirls and bubbles. But, worst danger of all, if one ship misses the signal and holds steadily on her course whilst her consorts ahead and astern and on each side of her turn at right angles, what is going to prevent a collision? ‘Joss,’ and ‘joss’ in large quantities, is the only preventative I can cite, and this was the very element that was absent that day.
One of the rear destroyers was the ‘lucky party’ who missed the signal—the first alter course signal by wireless—and she continued on her course, whilst those ahead and outside her altered across her bows.
The aforesaid ‘joss’ might have caused her to cross the line through a gap, but instead there suddenly loomed right ahead of her, out of the dense pall of fog, the blurred silhouette of a light cruiser, and before ever the engines could be reversed or the helm put over she had crashed bows on at twenty knots into the beam of the cruiser.
The comparatively frail bows of the destroyer crumpled under the blow like so much brown paper, and the boat recoiled with fifteen feet of her bow ‘concertina-ed’ in.
Yet never a soul on board of her was hurt. ‘Joss’ certainly made up leeway there, but in the bigger vessel such was not the case. The impact of the blow had lifted a torpedo tube off its mounting and had thrown it inboard against the casings, crushing five unfortunate men, of whom three lost their lives.
In addition the hull of the ship had suffered considerable damage, so that her speed was reduced to a bare ten knots, whilst the destroyer, at first able to steam six knots, could soon make no headway at all.
And all this, mark you, within thirty miles of the German coast in a ‘pea-soup’ fog, so that no sooner had the two ships collided and fallen apart than they were lost to sight of each other and of the remainder of the fleet, who continued their groping course seaward, the majority unaware that aught was amiss.
One destroyer, however, had noted the accident, and altering out from her station stood by her damaged consort and forthwith made preparations to take her in tow; for if one thing was more evident than another, it was the desirability of getting the damaged ships away to seaward before the fog should lift leaving them to be discovered by some inquisitive Hun submarine or aircraft patrol.
A wireless signal—it had to be done—was sent as soon as possible to the flagship from the damaged cruiser, and the squadron turned back on their track to try to locate and assist the damaged craft. But noon came—it was soon after 8 A.M. when the two ships collided—and there was no sign of the destroyer. The fog still hung thick over us all. Four P.M. came and passed and still we searched anxiously to and fro, peering continually into the thick wall of fog, and groping vaguely and blindly after our next ahead, catching a glimpse now and again of her mast or funnels only to lose her completely the next minute, and recommence the chase of her wake, assisted periodically by a fog buoy she veered astern.
From time to time, raucously and rashly, we would make signals on our syren hoping that the cripples would hear us, and periodically we tried wireless signals; but all to no effect, and night came leaving us still anxious for, and out of touch of our destroyer.
The damaged light cruiser was making her own way back to port, and two more destroyers that had lost touch with us during our fog manœuvring were also ordered home, but we should have been much happier for news of our ‘lame duck.’
The Germans still appeared to be unaware of our presence, despite our proximity to their coasts, but at any moment some prowling submarine might find us and give the show away, forcing us to scupper the destroyer lest she should fall into the enemy’s hands.
During the night the ships of our squadron were spread a couple of miles apart, so as to search over a greater area, but dawn on the next day came and still never a sign of our objective. We had received a signal of her estimated position, but neither she nor we were at all sure of our positions—it is not possible to be so in the North Sea amongst the variable currents, especially so in this case after so many alterations of course and speed and when it has not been possible to get a fix from the land or observations of the sun or stars for thirty-six hours. But with the new day the fog drifted away and there was soon a visibility of three or four miles.
Mr. Clerk of the Weather, however, was apparently unsatisfied with the capers he had already led us, and now substituted for the fog a rising wind and sea, so that we had visions of the damaged craft foundering before we might pick her up.
At 9 A.M. the flagship ordered one of the light cruisers to make all preparations for taking the destroyer in tow as soon as met with, but not until 2 P.M., thirty hours after the collision, did we at last sight her. She made a weird sight.
Her crumpled bows, unable to stand the strain of the ship’s motion any longer, had fallen off into the sea, so that from another ship one could look right into her and see her storerooms and other compartments, whilst the muzzle of her foremost gun, at ordinary times twenty feet or so back from her bows, now protruded over the ‘front’ of the ship like a tree outgrowing from a cliff.
The men’s living spaces right forward had retired to the bottom of the North Sea, and the waves were rolling in, unhindered, against the capstan engine, anchor chain lockers, and foremost mess decks. Yet the ship was still seaworthy, for a transverse bulkhead, which stretches across the ship and runs from the foc’sle deck right down to the keel, was keeping her watertight and preventing other compartments from being flooded—no small advertisement for the efficient work of our Corps of Naval Constructors.
The large area of this bulkhead, however, made it impossible to tow the ship bows first, for the pressure against it under such conditions would be tremendous and too much even for the efficiency of her construction.
The only alternative, therefore, was to tow her stern first. We knew this would be a fairly difficult operation, for she had already been twice in tow of the destroyer that had originally stood by her and each time the strain of the tow had parted the wires.
It was after an hour and a half’s work, by about 3 P.M., that we managed to get our wires into her, for it is no easy task in a seaway when one cannot have a boat, but must steam past as close to the other ship as safety will permit, towing astern of you a small hawser with a cask at the end, which the ship to be towed endeavours to pick up.
Then if she gets it you attach to the small hawser a larger hemp hawser, and to that the big wire by which you will tow, one end of which she hauls in and makes fast to herself, whilst you have the other end secured to your stern, and off you go. At least so you should in theory, but in this case we had secured the wire but two or three minutes when a wave lifted us up and simultaneously swung the destroyer’s stern off in an opposite direction, throwing a heavy strain on the wire which forthwith parted; so we had to start again.
This time we used the very largest wire we had, which was correspondingly more difficult to handle and harder to get to the destroyer, and not until 6 P.M., just as the light started to fail, were we able to get it to the destroyer. And all this time, you must remember, we made a sitting target for a submarine.
The remainder of the squadron were steaming round and round us acting as far as they could as a submarine screen, and individually, I don’t doubt, cursing us heartily for the length of time we were taking. But no enemy craft found us (such opportunities will be missed by fleets which operate in canals), and as twilight settled in we steamed slowly ahead, with rising hopes that this time the tow might hold and that we might succeed in getting her in.
Steaming at revolutions ordinarily sufficient to give us eight knots we made good four to five.
The sea was gradually getting up all the time, and the destroyer was towing crabwise through the water, not dead astern of us so as to give a straight haul, but out on our quarter which put variable strains and jerks on her and on the wire; more especially on the latter at the ‘nip’—that part where the wire led into the two ships, and where the bend due to her not being dead astern of us, came in.
The wind too was on our beam, and the seas rolling on swept the destroyer’s stern away from us causing our wire, a second later, to bring it back with a sudden jerk. Still for half an hour or so all went well, and the remainder of the squadron closed around us, zigzagging to and fro, as we all shaped course for home.
But fate, as you will guess, had no intention of giving up the game so easily, and at 6.45 P.M. our wire broke at the ‘nip.’ The ‘I-told-you-so’s’ were in evidence.
We had now no other wire strong enough to tow by, and so, to the disappointment of us all, another cruiser was detailed to take on the job. Disappointing as it was to us, it must have been far more than that to the destroyer. For thirty-six hours she had lain helpless, with alternate fears of being captured or of breaking up, and that after a sudden collision which would have been sufficient to shake the nerves of many. Four times had she hauled in towing wires, and on each occasion they had parted soon afterwards. Pitched and tossed about in the North Sea swell, tired and wet and with a good deal of their kit gone under, I should think that many of her crew were in that state of mind which is called ‘fed up.’ And now she had to start the game again.
But, profiting by our experience of how great the strain was under the particular conditions, the new cruiser took special precautions, the which I will not detail lest the Bosches benefit. By very clever seamanship and after over three hours’ hard work, mostly in the dark, the destroyer was again in tow, this time more securely; and so we started again on our journey home.
There is not really much more worth relating, for the wind, sea, a couple of snowstorms, our anxious lookout at daylight next morning to see if any enemy were about, and our precautions against submarine attack—these are everyday war events, and make dull reading.
Suffice it to say that our command of the sea was a sufficiently real factor to allow the cripple to be towed home unmolested a few hundred miles, and we came to our base as if no enemy fleet were within a thousand miles—who can accuse the Teuton of no sense of humour when he designated the water we steamed over the ‘German Ocean’?
So, comparatively tamely, concluded a trip which had at one time promised unusual excitement, but which anyhow gave us for four days some interest out of the ordinary, besides to some a fair measure of anxiety.
But wouldn’t Old Tirpitz be peevish if he knew of the chance he had missed?
Press Bureau: Passed for Publication.
MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK.
George Frederick Pollock, formerly senior Master of the King’s Bench and King’s Remembrancer, was born on June 1, 1821, and died on May 20, 1915, just before his ninety-fourth birthday. His faculties, his interests, and his affections remained as fresh as ever up to the last. Apart from his unusual personal charm as a human being, his range of reminiscences was extraordinary, not only by reason of his great age and retentive memory, but also of his native and characteristic versatility. I often urged him to collect them, and indeed a publisher offered to send a shorthand writer for as long as was necessary to dictate a volume. But he said that what he wanted was a ‘Boswell,’ and even if such a prodigy had been found George Pollock would most probably have been too tired or bored to go on for many days continuously.
In more recent years I made notes of most conversations that I had with him, but I fear that a full harvest could only have been achieved by everyone following my example, and even my own jottings were sadly casual.
I remember being startled by his remarking one day how delighted he was to see G.R. on the mail-carts. It made him feel ‘quite a boy again.’ He had not seen any of the Georges, but had been astonished, walking down Whitehall as a youth, to see a genial gentleman suddenly look out of his carriage window and put out his tongue. This turned out to be His Majesty King William IV, who wished to indicate to some old naval friends on the pavement that his elevation to the throne had not made him too proud. No wonder that my eldest daughter, on being taken to see him, promptly asked him for his impressions of the execution of Charles I, and was sadly disappointed to find that her great-great-uncle had not attended the ceremony.
George Pollock was no mere lawyer. He was, as his father, the Chief Baron, used proudly to announce to his friends, a first-rate mechanic, and had made a complete study and hobby of clocks and watches.[11] The family watches were always chosen by him and are still going as no other watches go, though they were always a little erratic at first. His accurate observation was never at fault, as when he took up a silver teapot at a wedding reception from among the presents and remarked that it had a hole in it. He told me that when he was leaving Wimbledon he saw his old plumber and said ‘I wish you could explain how it was that I always had to get my pipes put right once a year until ten years ago, when you were too busy and I had to attend to them myself, since when they have never gone wrong.’ The plumber smiled significantly and replied ‘Well, sir, we must live somehow.’ Members of the family who had mishaps with bicycles used to find that the mere mention of the name of Pollock evoked kindly welcome and sometimes even an offer to repair the machine free of charge. This was no doubt partly due to his own ungrudging benevolence. In an age when we are all being exhorted to economise it is refreshing to remember that an official in the Law Courts not so very long ago penetrated a large crowd on a London pavement and discovered George Pollock extended over a grating from which he was trying with an umbrella to extract a penny which an urchin in tears professed to have dropped down the abyss. He was a well-known arbitrator in patent cases. He had some knowledge of astronomy, and counted Sir George Airey and Sir Norman Lockyer among his friends, not to mention other scientific men such as Faraday, Owen, and Hooker.
The John Murray of his day consulted him as to publishing 500 copies of the ‘Origin of Species.’ Murray was extremely sceptical as to the soundness of the work, and thought 500 copies as large a number as it was prudent to print. He remarked that the Darwinian theory was as absurd as though one should contemplate a fruitful union between a poker and a rabbit. George Pollock read the book and remarked that the contents were probably beyond the comprehension of any scientific man then living. But he advised publishing 1000 copies, because Mr. Darwin had so brilliantly surmounted the formidable obstacles which he was honest enough to put in his own path. This is an interesting example of the way in which a man of good general ability, accustomed as a lawyer is to apply broad principles of reason to different kinds of subject-matter, may arrive at sounder conclusions than a specialist.
Talks with him were always a liberal education, because they gave first-hand impressions of an excellent observer in regard to many characters whose biographies are often written by persons who have not even seen the subject of the biography. It was thus thrilling for me, who had always admired the career of Mrs. Norton and read a recent account of her life, to hear that at a time when the differences between Mr. and Mrs. George Norton were most acute the Chief Baron put his house at the disposal of both so that Mrs. Norton should see her children there. She was accustomed to meet them in a room at one end of which George Pollock (on at least one occasion) sat and read the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ while she played with them at the other end. Usually his sister Mary was there. The heroines of history are not always wholly approved by their contemporaries. An old man, long since dead, told me that the advent of Florence Nightingale was not at first popular with the soldiers in the Crimea, because they felt embarrassed by the idea of female nursing. Similarly, Mrs. Norton was thought by some to be ‘playing to the gallery,’ and in the opinion of Baron Martin ‘talked to too many men’ on one occasion when crossing the Atlantic. But George Pollock nevertheless sympathised, as his father did, with her position as regards her children.
His talk, as might be expected, shed light on social usages of the past. One night the Duchess of Somerset was driving near Wimbledon and her carriage fell into a ditch. George Pollock was passing and assisted her and the coachman to get the vehicle out of the ditch and collect various toys and pieces of china back into the carriage. The next morning the Duchess, ‘in a refined manner,’ sent a military friend to convey her acknowledgments but did not come herself, since, for aught she knew, her benefactor might have had a ‘vulgar wife who would return the call.’
He mentioned that baths first came into fashion in the ’fifties, and caused much annoyance to a certain old colonel because they encumbered the officers’ luggage. ‘These young men,’ he complained, ‘keep washing themselves till there is not a bit of natural smell about them.’ The only unpardonable smell was of course tobacco. Even onions were preferable. Though the late King Edward introduced smoking as far as he could, even when his hosts drove him into the stable-room, George Pollock, despite his respect for the Church, felt it his duty, even in 1883, to remonstrate with a curate who smoked a cigar at a garden party.
His attitude to the divorce question interested me. He mentioned that all the lawyers of the time strongly supported the Act of 1857 in spite of ecclesiastical opposition. But he felt himself ‘incompetent to form an opinion’ on the question, which curiously illustrated the survival of the old Catholic tradition that marriage should be an institution entirely subject to ecclesiastical control and jurisdiction.
He naturally told many stories of his father and the law. One of his earliest memories was of mischievously abstracting Scarlett’s spectacles from the back of his coat just as he was about to read an important letter to the jury. This was in 1833, when he was a boy of twelve. He mentioned how his brother judges would give way to Maule for fear of his ability and sharp tongue till on one occasion Maule, after delivering judgment and then hearing all the other judgments, suddenly remarked: ‘After mature consideration, I differ from my learned brothers. I have come to the conclusion that my judgment was wrong, and the first misgivings that occurred to me about it were due to the fact that my brothers agreed with it.’
As a boy of eighteen he had attended the famous trial of John Frost and others whom his father ably defended on a charge of high treason at Monmouth. He used to relate with great gusto the objection to the proceedings taken on the ground that the list of witnesses had not been handed to the prisoners with the copy of the indictment as prescribed by the Act of Queen Anne. It was in that trial that a woman was closely cross-examined about the movements of her husband who had returned home very late and come straight up to bed. ‘As he was getting into bed,’ she said, ‘his words were⸺’ But here she was sharply interrupted by Counsel: ‘You must not tell us what he said, because that is not evidence; you can only tell us what he did.’
His grandfather, David Pollock, had come to London from Berwick and started a saddler and military contractor’s business at Charing Cross. David’s father was a bookseller at Berwick-on-Tweed, and his grandfather (George Pollock thought) was a cobbler at Perth in the seventeenth century. David died in 1815, and was embarrassed by the fact that Parliament did not allow enough money to cover the liabilities of the Duke of York, not to mention those of the Duke of Kent. He was sometimes in attendance on Royalty itself, when he had to present himself in Court dress. But David died solvent in 1815, and his business was carried on for two years afterwards by his widow and his son William. William died early at the age of thirty-five. Another son, David, who became before his death Lord Chief Justice of Bombay, was sixty-seven at the time of his death. He has been described as a singularly lovable man. Of the other sons George, my great-uncle’s godfather, was ultimately a Field-Marshal, and Frederick the Chief Baron of the Exchequer. It was quite usual for one of the sons to sleep under the counter if the house was more full than usual, and more than one slept there on the occasion of David’s funeral. The other son, John, was an adventurous solicitor. He was renowned for his prowess at racquets and generally as an athlete. In the same day he once walked from London to Windsor, won a foot race, and walked back again.
But the hero of George Pollock’s stories was usually his father, the Chief Baron, whose judgments bulk so large in the Common Law of England. Unlike his brother John, he thought taking exercise a bore unless it took the form of dancing or of leaping over tables and chairs, as a friend of mine who is still alive saw him doing at an hotel in Norwich after receiving a pair of white gloves, when he was about seventy-five years old. He drove up from Hatton every day in his family coach, though his sedentary habits never prevented his doing justice to his excellent brown sherry, a few bottles of which I once had the privilege of possessing in my own cellar. Though he kept very open house at Hatton, he had a frugal mind in less essential matters. Thus, on consulting Sir Harris Nicolas in regard to tracing the family coat of arms, he was told that it would cost £100 in London, but subsequently discovered that the same operation could be performed in Edinburgh for £20, which gave him great satisfaction. There is a romantic legend that the Pollocks were ruined by the Hanoverians in the Rebellion of 1715, and that the Pollock boar is to be found on a prison wall in Carlisle Castle, presumably carved by a Pollock in captivity. But the Chief Baron cared little for these things, and derived pleasure from recording that his father was a saddler and that he owed much to his mother’s co-operation in the family business and belief in himself when a boy. His career at Trinity College, Cambridge, was mainly due to her unsparing efforts.
He had a very human sympathy with prisoners. I have a volume of his notes of evidence, and in one of the murder trials he lays great stress to the jury on the fact that there was no Court of Criminal Appeal. There is a story of a certain burglar having been induced by the prison chaplain to atone for his crime by pleading guilty before the Chief Baron. But after an interval in the Court the burglar returned to the chaplain acquitted. ‘When I saw that good kind man sitting in Court,’ he explained, ‘I knew I should be acquitted and really could not bring myself to plead guilty.’
I have put together as much as I can have recorded of George Pollock’s reminiscences. Probably there is better material at the disposal of others, but perhaps this attempt to collect what I heard may stimulate a better qualified relation or friend to write something worthier of him. Such a collection would to some extent mitigate the loss of his winning personality. For a man to be missed as he now is after dying on the verge of his ninety-fourth birthday shows how little old age can extinguish a rare and singularly loving spirit. Up to the last he answered every letter by return of post, and his letters were as affectionate as on the other hand they were businesslike when the occasion demanded. We shall not see his like again. Even his type is gone. The combination of kindliness, geniality, and pawky humour that distinguished him is not to be found in our day.
‘Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis?’
E. S. P. Haynes.