Pincher Martin, O.D.: A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy

by H. Taprell Dorling

When once the business really started Pincher felt better. The anticipation, that awful period of suspense between the time of the enemy being sighted and the first shot being fired, was far and away worse than the actual fight itself. The noise and excitement acted as a sort of anæsthetic. They had a deadening effect which dulled the finer workings of his mind, and did away with most of his previous and poignant mental agony. He realised in a vague sort of a way that he might be killed; but the process of being under fire, when once it had started and the enemy was being fired at in return, was not nearly so bad as he had imagined it would be.

He had the task of placing a projectile in the loading-tray every time after the gun had fired, recoiled, ejected the spent cylinder neatly to the rear, and then had run out again and had been reloaded. He did it almost automatically, and without having to think about it. Time became an unknown quantity. Seconds sometimes seemed like hours, and hours may have dwindled to minutes for all he knew. All the sensations he was really conscious of at the time were a supreme desire to keep up the supply of shell, an overwhelming hatred for the enemy who dared to fire upon him, a most unpleasant feeling of heat, and an intolerable and raging thirst. The acrid taste and smell of the burning cordite may have produced the thirst; but, after five minutes of firing, Martin would have bartered everything he possessed for a mug of really cold water.

Incident succeeded incident with such rapidity that he could not concentrate his attention on any one particular thing. He saw great white splashes in the water, some of them perilously close. The noise of the Mariner's own guns overpowered every other sound, but between their reports he heard the fainter thudding of the enemy's weapons, the peculiar whining drone of hostile shell as they hurtled through the air, and the fiendish whirring and whizzing of their fragments as they burst. There came a jar and a metallic crash which told him that the ship had been hit somewhere close. He had no time to look round, but waited anxiously for the missile to pulverise; waited for what seemed minutes for the flame and roar of an appalling detonation and a shower of splinters which would sweep him to eternity. They never came. The shell had passed through the forecastle, and out again through the side of the ship, without exploding.

His own gun was firing very fast, and he could not see much, but in the rifts between the sheets of flame and clouds of smoke caused by its discharge he caught occasional glimpses of the enemy. They were still steaming fast, and seemed rather closer than before, and from the sea round about them spout after spout of spray leapt into the air as the British shell pitched. The brilliant gun-flashes still twinkled up and down their sides as they fired; but he was glad they were having a hot time.

The next time he saw them they seemed to have turned shorewards, while the British, still firing heavily, steamed in pursuit. Then, in the after-part of the middle German destroyer, the one the Mariner was firing at, he suddenly noticed a wicked red flash and a cloud of oily black smoke. A shell had gone home. He could have shouted in glee had he not been so breathless.

The long-range action lasted for a full fifty-five minutes, with both sides blazing away merrily the whole time. What damage was done to the enemy it was impossible to say, but it was clear that they suffered considerably, and that they were forced back to their own coast. As regards their numbers, guns, size, and speed the opposing craft were pretty evenly matched; and if the action had taken place in the open sea it would have been fought to a finish at close range, or until one or other of the combatants retired post-haste from the contest. In this eventuality, given average luck, it would not have been the British; not because the German is any less brave than his antagonist, but because he has fewer ships to risk, and is supposed to have orders not to give battle unless he has a good chance of winning. But man proposes and God disposes, and the fight was more or less a drawn one.

At length there came the time when the enemy could be pursued no longer, on account of the proximity of the shore. So close in had they steamed that some one in the Mariner even declared that he was able to count the windows in the buildings and the tiles on the red roofs; and though the tile part may have been an exaggeration, the window-counting certainly was not. The yellow, wave-lapped beach, with the turf-covered sand-dunes beyond it, looked strangely calm and peaceful; but concealed in those dunes were guns of almost every imaginable size from fourteen-inch downwards, some of which were reputed to be able to pitch their shell on a sixpence at a range of fifteen miles. The Mariner and her consorts were a long, long way inside this distance, and there was nothing for it but to discontinue the action, and to beat a hasty retreat.

Brother Boche, with his guns in among the dunes, was no fool. He was merely waiting for a good opportunity to open fire, and his chance came at the precise moment when the British helms went over and the destroyers started to steam seawards. Then the whole line of coast suddenly began to sparkle from end to end, and before one had time to think the shell were pitching. The fire of the destroyers, both as regards its volume and its accuracy, had been as nothing to this. Great white-water fountains seemed to spout up everywhere at the same moment, ahead, astern, and on either side. How many projectiles fell within a few feet of the ship during the next ten minutes it is impossible to say. The shooting was very accurate indeed—far too accurate to be pleasant. It was extremely unpleasant.

Words can convey no conception of the breathless sort of sensation caused by those falling shell. They howled like wolves and screeched like express trains passing through wayside stations. They fell into the water with heavy liquid plops, detonated in gigantic upheavals of water and with roaring concussions compared with which the reports of heavy guns faded into insignificance, and sent their jagged-edged fragments whirring off into space with the humming and buzzing of angry hornets. It was a sickening, uncanny feeling to see a fifty-foot geyser-like spout spring into the air a bare fathom off the stem, to notice the black patch at the spot in the water where the shell had burst as if one had emptied a bucket of ashes, and then to steam through the descending spray, and to smell the horrible, reeking stench of the explosive. It was more alarming still to see a bouquet of four or five such splashes jump into the air within a few feet of the stern or on either side of the ship. If a single one of these projectiles drove home the Mariner would probably be brought to a standstill, in which case her subsequent demolition and the slaughter of her crew would only be a matter of time. If three or four shells struck at once she would probably founder immediately.

It is one thing to be fired at by a similar vessel, and to be able to fire at her in reply; but it is something quite different to be subjected to the individual attention in broad daylight of a heavy ship, or many shore batteries, when there is no possible chance of retaliation. It leaves one breathless and cold; and though, perhaps, one may not actually show one's fear, one would give much to be elsewhere. It is only natural.