10
I had completed everything I came up to London to do by 4 P.M., and found on looking up a timetable at the club that I had just time to get to the station and catch a train back to the Base. I got to the terminus with a few minutes to spare, and on going to the bookstall to buy something to read I saw a familiar figure standing beside the stall turning the pages of a magazine. It was a Commander of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, a tough old yachtsman called Armitage. I did not know him well, but I had heard a good deal about him from Thorogood. He was well over fifty and was, I believe, a very rich man. Yet he spent the first three years of the war slamming about in the North Sea, and he was now stationed at the Base in charge of the Armed Motor Launches.
He nodded a greeting at me and gathered a bundle of papers. "Going down by this train?" he said. "Let's find a carriage together. I'd like to have a yarn with you."
As luck would have it, we got a carriage to ourselves, and after we had started and Armitage had got a gigantic bulldog pipe in full blast, he broached the topic that was uppermost in the minds of all of us those days.
"It's this blockship business that's been worrying me," he said. "Even with the crews cut down to the bare minimum and disembarking surplus steaming parties before they get across, there'll be an awful lot of men on board when they sink themselves."
"Yes," I said; "but they've got boats. They'll just have to pull across the harbour under cover of your smoke screen"—the motor launches were detailed to lay the smoke screen inshore—"and the Destroyers will pick up the boats outside."
Armitage nodded and puffed his enormous pipe. "That's all right as long as the wind holds. But supposing the wind shifts and blows the harbour clear of smoke?"
I was silent. We all knew there was a possibility of such a thing happening, but that had been taken into consideration by the gallant lads who had volunteered for the job.
"I saw the Admiral this morning," continued Armitage, "after talking it over with some of my boys. I told him six motor launches would volunteer to go inside the harbour and bring off the blockships' crews."
I stared at him. "But..." I said, "have you seen the photographs of the place? There's a machine-gun about every two yards round the harbour, to say nothing of any destroyers there may be moored alongside the Mole. You'll get smothered with gunfire at point-blank range before the blockships are abandoned."