The Mediterranean. A bright sea and sky disfigured by a ring of curling black smoke—a death-screen for the last agonies of a torpedoed troopship. Amid her littering entrails she settles swiftly, the stern high upreared, the bows deepening in a wash of wreckage. Boats, charged to inches of freeboard, lie off, the rowers and their freight still and open-mouthed awaiting her final plunge. On rafts and spars, the upturned strakes of a lifeboat, remnants of her manning and company grip safeguard, but turn eyes on the wreck of their parent hull. Into the ring, recking nothing of entangling gear or risk of suction, taking the chances of a standing shot from the lurking submarine, a destroyer thunders up alongside, brings up, and backs at speed on the sinking transport. Already her decks are jammed to a limit, by press of a khaki-clad cargo she was never built to carry. This is final, the last turn of her engagement. The foundering vessel slips quickly and deeper. "Come along, Skipper! You've got 'em all off! You can do no more! Jump!"
OUR WAR STAFF
Some years before the war we were lying at an East Indian port, employed in our regular trade. The military students of the Quetta Staff College were in the district, engaged in practical exercise of their staff lessons. On a Sunday (our loading being suspended) they boarded us to work out in detail a question of troop transport. It was assumed that our ship was requisitioned in an emergency, and their problem was to estimate the number of men we could carry and to plan arrangement of the troop decks. Their inspection was to be minute; down to the sufficiency of our pots and pans they were required to investigate and figure out the resources of our vessel. The officer students were thirty-four in number; at least we counted thirty-four who came to us for clue to the mysteries of gross and register and dead-weight tonnage. In parties they explored our holds and accommodation, measured in paces for a rough survey, and prepared their plans. Their Commandant (a very famous soldier to-day) permitted us to be present when the officers were assembled and their papers read out and discussed. In general it was estimated that the work of alteration and fitting the ship for troops would occupy from eight to ten working days. Our quota—of all ranks—averaged about eleven hundred men.
A BRITISH SUBMARINE DETAILED FOR INSTRUCTION OF MERCHANT OFFICERS
The work was sound and no small ingenuity was advanced in planning adaptations, but the spirit of emergency did not show an evidence in their careful papers. The proposed voyage was distinctly stated to be from Newhaven to Dieppe, and it seemed to us that the elaborate accommodation for a prison, a guard-room, a hospital, were somewhat ambitious for a six-hour sea-passage. In conversation with the Commandant, we were of opinion that, to a degree, their work and pains were rather needless. Carrying passengers (troops and others) was our business; a trade in which we had been occupied for some few years. He agreed. He regarded their particular exercise in the same light as the 'herring-and-a-half' problem of the schoolroom: it was good for the young braves to learn something of their only gangway to a foreign field. "Of course," he said, "if war comes it will be duty for the Navy to supervise our sea-transport." We understood that their duty would be to safeguard our passage, but we had not thought of supervision in outfit. The Commandant was incredulous when we remarked that we had never met a naval transport officer, that we knew of no plans to meet such an emergency as that submitted to his officers. It was evident that his trained soldierly intendance could not contemplate a situation in which the seamen of the country had no foreknowledge of a war service; it was amazing to him that we were not already drilled for duties that might, at any moment, be thrust upon us. Pointing across the dock to where two vessels of the Bremen Hansa Line were working in haste to catch the tide, he affirmed that they would be better prepared: their place in mobilization would be detailed, their duties and services made clear.
We knew of no plans for our employment in war service; we had no position allotted to us in measures for emergency. We were sufficiently proud of our seafaring to understand a certain merit in this apparent lack of prevision: we took it as in compliment to the efficiency and resource with which our sea-trade was credited. Was it not on our records that the Isle of Man steamers transported 58,000 people in the daylight hours of an August Bank Holiday. A seventy-mile passage. Trippers. Less amenable to ordered direction than disciplined troops. A day's work, indeed. Unequalled, unbeaten by any record to date in the amazing statistics of the war. There was no need for supervision and direction: we knew our business, we could pick up the tune as we marched.
We did. On the outbreak of war we fell into our places in transport of troops and military material with little more ado than in handling our peace-time cargoes. The ship on which the Staff students worked their problems set out on almost the very route they had planned for her, but with no prison or guard-room or hospital, and sixteen hundred troops instead of eleven: the time taken to fit her (including discharge of a cargo) occupied exactly four days. We saw but little of the naval authority.
