An awfully big adventure

by Bartimeus

The irritable tension of those days is best forgotten now. Prices rose, ships sank, and the Navy said not a word. It was "doing its damnedest" in silence, according to its wont. And not even in forecastle or Wardroom did men so much as whisper what was afoot. To-day* the submarine remains merely as a stern corrective, curbing waste and extravagance, bracing the nation's nerve. The ingenuity of man is boundless, and science has not yet said her last word; human courage and devoted valour alone seem to have reached a point there is no transcending. It was these two factors which stemmed the flood at the moment of supreme crisis; on these the veil is at last lifted, and the tale now told in all simplicity and truth.

* Written in August, 1918.

The methods of the German submarine in its war against unarmed shipping gradually settled down to a routine which varied but little in the early phases of the conflict. It was the custom to attempt to torpedo at sight, on the principle of the least said the soonest mended. If the torpedo missed, as was not infrequently the case, the submarine broke surface a mile or so away from the ship and fired a shot across her bows. The merchantman had then two alternatives: to take to his heels and try to escape, or to heave to and abandon ship. In the latter case the submarine closed the derelict to within a few hundred yards and summoned the boats alongside. At the muzzle of a revolver the Captain was ordered into the submarine with his papers, and the crew of his boat directed to row a party of German sailors, bearing bombs, back to the ship. These worthies, having placed the bombs in the ship's vitals and looted the officers' quarters, returned to the submarine, propelled by the men they had robbed and whose ship they were engaged in sinking. In due course the bombs exploded and the ship disappeared. It was an economical method, since bombs cost less than torpedoes, and the formality of looting the ship helped to preserve its popularity.

For a while the Navy noted these methods and the little human failings of the enemy in silence. Then it drew a deep breath and made its plans accordingly. It argued that a man-of-war could be disguised as a tramp steamer and carry concealed armament. Such a vessel, by plying on the trade routes, must inevitably meet a submarine in time, and in her character of peaceful merchantman be ordered to abandon ship. The ship might be abandoned to all outward appearances, but still retain sufficient men concealed on board to fight the hidden guns when the moment came for her to cast disguise to the winds and hoist the White Ensign. Certain risks had to be taken for granted, of course; the almost inevitable torpedo sooner or later, the probability of a little indiscriminate shelling while the submarine approached, the possibility of being ultimately sunk before assistance could arrive. Yet the odds were on the submarine being sunk first, and the rest was on the knees of the gods.

An old collier of some 2,000 tons was selected from among the shipping at the disposal of the Admiralty and taken to a Dockyard port, where she unostentatiously underwent certain structural alterations. These included disappearing mountings for guns concealed beneath hatchway covers, and masked by deck-houses which collapsed like cards at a jerk of a lever. From the host of volunteers, among whom were retired Admirals, Captains, Commanders, and Lieutenants of the Royal Navy, a young Lieutenant-Commander was selected and appointed in command. His officers were volunteers from the Royal Naval Reserve, ex-merchant seamen, familiar enough with the rôle they were required to play, and in some cases with little mental scores of their own which required adjustment when the time came. The crew was mostly from the West Country, men of Devon with one or two traditions to uphold in the matter of brave adventure. It also included Welshmen and Irish with a pretty taste for a fight, and a few Scots, of the dour type, hard to frighten. They were picked from the Royal Navy, Fleet and Royal Reserves—merchant seamen and fishermen the last, many of whom had formed a nodding acquaintance with Death long before they received this invitation to a closer intimacy. Their ages ranged between 17 and 52.

They sailed from Queenstown under the Red Ensign; but before they left some of the crew trudged, as pilgrims to a shrine, and stood awhile among the mounds in that pathetic God's acre where the women and children of the Lusitania rest. They were then but freshly turned, those mounds, in their eloquent diversity of lengths, and men had not begun to forget....

For five weary months they endured the winter gales of the Atlantic, wallowing to and fro along the trade routes, outwardly a scallywag tramp, but behind her untidy bulwarks observing, with certain necessary modifications, the discipline and customs of his Majesty's Navy. With paint-pot and sail-cloth they improved the ship's disguise from time to time, and wiled away the heart-breaking monotony of the days by inventing fresh devices to conceal their character.

The ship's steward's assistant, when not engaged upon his office as "dusty boy," was ordered to don female attire over his uniform and recline in a prominent position on the poop in a deck-chair. This allurement was calculated to prove an irresistible bait. The Navigator, whose action station was the abandonment of the ship in the rôle of distracted Master, fashioned the effigy of a stuffed parrot and fastened it inside a cage which he proposed to take away with him in the boat, thus heightening the pathos of the scene and whetting the blood-lust of the enemy....

From time to time watchful patrols swooped down upon them, exchanged a few curt signals in the commercial code, and bade them pass on their imaginary occasions. Once a Cruiser, less easily satisfied than the remainder, bade the rusty-sided collier heave to, and sent an officer to board her; he climbed inboard at the head of armed men to find himself confronted, in the person of the "Master," with a term-mate of Britannia days and a grin he is not likely to forget. Then, early one spring morning, when the daylight was stealing out of grey skies across the Atlantic waste, the track of a torpedo bubbled across the bows and passed ahead of the ship. The moment for which they had waited five weary months had come.

In accordance with her rôle of tramp steamer in the early days of the War, the ship held steadily on her way, observing the stars in their courses, but not otherwise interested in the universe. Inboard, however, the alarm rang along the mess-decks and saloons, and men crawled into hen-coops and deck-houses to man the hidden guns. A few minutes later the submarine broke surface half a mile astern of the ship, and fired a shot across her bows. Whereupon the supposed collier stopped her engines, and lay rolling in the trough of the seas with steam pouring from her exhausts, while the crew, who had rehearsed this moment to a perfection never yet realised on the boards of legitimate drama, rushed to and fro with every semblance of panic. The Captain danced from one end of the bridge to the other, waving his arms and shouting; boats were turned out and in again amid a deliberate confusion that brought blushes to the cheeks of the ex-merchant seamen called upon to play the part.