"Yes," he said. "Bestial swine. Brutal, bestial swine. If he'd been killed by the shell that broke his leg I wouldn't have minded. That would have been fair fight; and she—if it had been septic poisoning or disease; those are the risks all nurses run: the enemies they face and fight all day and night. But this!" He spoke in low, measured tones. "If I ever get to grips with a Hun after this——" The mask of icy self-control slipped for a moment from his face. His features worked and his hands made a movement somehow suggestive and brutal.
"Best have a drink," said the Gunner, soothingly, and as he spoke there was a trampling of men's feet overhead, muffled by the snow on the thin plating. The Quartermaster's pipe rippled and shrilled, to be succeeded by a hoarse sing-song bellow. "Boot and saddle" sounded in a cavalry barracks never stirred the stables as that rush of unseen feet overhead, breaking the peace of a Christmas afternoon in harbour, galvanised the Wardroom into sudden activity.
"Stand by to slip from the buoy," said the Gunner, and made for the hatchway. But the First Lieutenant was before him, bareheaded, cramming his Christmas mail into his pocket as he swung himself up the iron rungs of the ladder.
2
The Commander, who had been standing peering through his glasses for the last five minutes, lowered them suddenly and glanced at the chart clamped on the bracket beside him.
His First Lieutenant continued to stare across the grey sea to the north-west. Day was dawning, and the spray, flung from the reeling bows of the Destroyer, was like a frozen whip-lash on their faces. "Yes, that's them," he said, in a grimly ungrammatical undertone. To the naked eye nothing was visible above the ragged skyline, but every man on the bridge was standing gazing intently in the same direction, as if the wind carried with it the scent of the quarry they sought.
The Commander gave an order to the Signalman standing attentive beside the daylight searchlight, and immediately the shutters broke into a chattering "View halloa!"
A blink answered on the instant, where, two cables astern, the second boat in the line followed in the heaving wake. Out of the faint haze of smoke that almost screened the rest of the division from view, one after the other the answers flickered, and then the leader spoke. The lights all blinked back together.
"Signal passed, sir!" said the Yeoman.
"Right," replied the Commander. He bent over the chart again for an instant, and straightening, gave an order to the wheel.