“At last the end came! It seemed to have been hours since I began to fire, but it couldn’t really have been more than a minute; for even German destroyers will cover half a mile in that time. The range was down to 1,000 yards when he loosed a torpedo, and at that very precise instant a shell, ricochetting upwards, caught him close to the water line of his high forepeak and burst in his vitals. I saw instantly a great flash blaze up from his funnels as the high explosive smashed his engines, boilers and fires into scrap. He reared up and screamed exactly like a wounded horse. It sounded rather awful, though it was only the shriek of steam from the burst pipes; it made one feel how very live a thing is a ship, how in its splendid vitality it is, as Kipling says, more than the crew. He reared up and fell away to port, and two more of my shells hit him almost amidships and tore out his bottom plates like shredded paper. I could hear the rending crash of the explosions through my ear-protectors, and through the continuous roar of my own curtain fire. He rolled right over and was gone! He vanished so quickly that for a moment my shells flew screaming over the empty sea, and then I stopped the gunners. My battle had lasted for one minute and forty seconds!
“ ‘But what about the torpedo?’ you will ask. I never saw it, but the Officer of the Watch told me that it had passed harmlessly more than a hundred feet away from us. ‘You sank the destroyer,’ said the Officer of the Watch, grinning, ‘but my masterly navigation saved the ship. So honours is easy, Mr. Marine. If I had had those guns of yours,’ he went on, ‘I would have sunk the beggar with about half that noise and half that expenditure of Government ammunition. I never saw such a wasteful performance,’ said he. But he was only pulling my leg. All the senior officers, from the Owner downwards, were very nice to me and said that for a youngster, and a Soldier at that, I hadn’t managed the affair at all badly.
“I thought that the guns’ crews had done fine and told them so; but the chief gunner—a stern Marine from Eastney—shook his head sadly. No. 3 gun had been trained five seconds late, he said, and was behind the others all through. He seemed to reckon the sinking of the destroyer as nothing in condonation of the shame No. 3 had brought upon his battery. I condoled with him, but he was wounded to the heart.
“The Officer of the Watch said that all the time the destroyer was charging she was firing small stuff at our platform with a Q.-F. gun on her forepeak. And I knew nothing about it! This is the simple and easy way in which one earns a reputation for coolness under heavy fire.”
CHAPTER V
WITH THE GRAND FLEET: THE TERRIERS
AND THE RATS
“You missed a lot, Soldier,” said the Sub-Lieutenant to his friend the Marine Subaltern, “through not being here at the beginning. Now it is altogether too comfortable for us of the big ships; the destroyers and patrols get all the fun while we hang about here in harbour or put up a stately and entirely innocuous parade of the North Sea. No doubt we are Grand in our Silent Might and Keep our Unsleeping Vigil and all the rest of the pretty tosh which one reads in the papers—but in reality we eat too much for the good of our waists and do too little work for our princely pay. But it was very different at the beginning. Then we were like a herd of wild buffaloes harassed day and night by super-mosquitoes. When we were not on watch we were saying our prayers. It was a devil of a time, my son.”