Our immediate impression was that all the aft of the ship had been carried away. Had she begun to settle stern foremost on the instant we should not have been surprised. We could hardly believe that the long, narrow perspective of the deck, with its groups dotting the length of it, could remain unshattered and afloat. We were sure the decks below must have been blown into air and water.
For the hundredth part of a second the Assiniboia appeared to stop still in her course, like a creature with its death-wound. She seemed stricken, stunned. But she gave another lurch, another swing to her huge person; and when the second shell came on, taking the range of that which had struck her, it plowed the waves astern. All seemed to be over in the space of between two breaths. By the time we could get our wits together sufficiently to ask what had happened she was once more driving onward.
It was splendid. It was sublime. It thrilled one with pride in pluck and seamanship. One could have hugged the brave old leviathan by the neck.
A British seaman, running down the deck on some errand, cried, as he passed us: “Got the old bucket aft, just above the water-line. But, Lor’! she don’t mind it! Didn’t do no ’arm. On’y killed Sammy Smelt, a steerage cabin-boy.”
But it was a beginning. Nothing could save us now but speed and the captain’s skill. The young officer who had helped to strip the covering off No. 5 strolled by us, smoking a cigarette.
“We’re showing her a pretty clean pair of heels,” he said, coolly, by way of dealing out encouragement. “Ship’s carpenter’s begun plugging up the hole. That won’t hurt us so long as we don’t get another.”
“What about the cabin-boy?” some one called out.
He shrugged his shoulders, saying, merely, “Doctor attending to the wounded.”
It was strange to be tearing through the seas, with that erratic course of the crazed leviathan, when at any second death might strike us from the air. I had often been under shell-fire, of course; but on land there was generally some dugout, some abri, in which one could seek shelter. What impressed me here was the vast exposure of it all. We could only stand with the heaven over us, ready to take to the boats, if need be, or equally ready to be blown into bits like little Sammy Smelt.