And out they were, for presently, on the wind that sang past the naked rails of the forebridge and the bellying halliards, came the first grumble of gunfire out of the haze ahead.
Perhaps it was the utter absence of colour, the dull grey monochrome of sea and sky, ships and smoke, that heightened the resemblance of what followed to the shifting scene of a cinema show. It robbed even dire calamity of all terror at the time. It seemed incredible that the cruiser on the starboard quarter, ringed all about with yeasty pinnacles of water, was one of ours, being hammered to extinction by the guns of an enemy invisible. The eye followed her dispassionately as she ran that desperate gauntlet of pitching salvos; and when the end came, and she changed in the flutter of an eyelid into a cloud of black smoke, it was some time before a subconscious voice said to the Onlooker: “There goes gallant Sir Robert ... and you’ll never shake Dicky Carter by the hand again....”
. . . . .
Equally remote and unreal were the effects of our own gunfire, seen and lost and glimpsed again in that ever-shifting North Sea haze. A crippled German destroyer, crawling out of range, down by the stern, like a hare whose hindquarters have been paralysed by a clumsy sportsman: an enemy light cruiser, dismasted, funnels over the side, one gun spitting defiance from a shambles of a battery as she sank: a great battleship listing over, all aswarm with specks of humanity—surely it was none of our noisy doing?
And then suddenly a salvo of 14-inch shells “straddled” us, and a yeoman of signals beside the Onlooker put out a hand and pulled him behind the shelter of a canvas wind-screen.
“Best get behind ’ere, sir,” he said. Then the absurdity of it struck them simultaneously, and they both laughed.
. . . . .
The insignificant duties of the Onlooker took him at a later phase in the action to the lower conning-tower. Situated far below the water-line and behind all the available armour, it is deemed the safest place in the ship, and is the salubrious resort of various seconds-in-command, waiting to step into the shoes of defunct superiors as occasion arose. They were not a cheerful company, since their rôle was pro tem. necessarily passive. Further, their knowledge of what was going on was limited to scraps of information that filtered down a voice-pipe from the upper conning-tower, through a variety of mediums all busily employed on other matters. The assistant constructor (sometime darling of International Rugby crowds), stood with his ear to the voice-pipe and wailed for news as a Neapolitan beggar beseeches alms. Suddenly he paused, and his face brightened.
“Disabled Zeppelin floating on the surface ahead,” he announced. There was a general brightening of the countenances around. Followed a long pause. Then:
“Wash-out! Not a Zeppelin. Bows of a battle cruiser sticking out of the water.”