The town which served as the base of the American destroyers has but one great street; it is called The Esplanade, and lies along the harbour edge and open to the sea. I saw it first in the wild darkness of a night in early March. Rain, the drenching, Irish rain, had been falling all the day, but toward evening the downpour had ceased, and a blustery south-east wind had thinned the clouds, and brought the harbour water to clashing and complaining in the dark. It was such a night as a man might peer at from a window, and be grateful for the roof which sheltered him, yet up and down the gloomy highway, past the darkened houses and street lamps shaded to mere lifeless lumps of light, there moved a large and orderly crowd. For the most part, this crowd consisted of American sailors from the destroyers in port, lean, wholesome-looking fellows these, with a certain active and eager manner very reassuring to find on this side of our cruelly tried and jaded world. Peering into a little lace shop decked with fragile knickknacks and crammed with bolts of table linen, I saw two great bronzed fellows in pea jackets and pancake hats buying something whose niceties of stitch and texture a little red-cheeked Irish lass explained with pedagogic seriousness; whilst at the other end of the counter a young officer with grey hair fished in his pockets for the purchase money of some yards of lace which the proprietress was slowly winding around a bit of blue cardboard. Back and forth, now swallowed up in the gloom of a dark stretch, now become visible in the light of a shop door, streamed the crowd of sailors, soldiers, officers, country folk and townspeople. I heard Devon drawling its oe's and oa's; America speaking with Yankee crispness, and Ireland mingling in the babel with a mild and genial brogue.
By morning the wind had died down; the sun was shining merrily, and great mountain masses of rolling white cloud were sailing across the sky as soft and blue as that which lies above Fiesole. Going forth, I found the little town established on an edge of land between the water and the foot of a hill; a long hill whose sides were in places so precipitous that only masses of dark green shrubbery appeared between the line of dwellings along the top and the buildings of the Esplanade. The hill, however, has not had things all its way. Two streets, rising at an angle which would try the endurance of an Alpine ram actually go in a straight line from the water's edge to the high ground, taking with them, in their ascent, tier after tier of mean and grimy dwellings. All other streets, however, are less heroic, and climb the side of the hill in long, sloping lateral lines. A new Gothic cathedral, built just below the crest of the hill, but far overtopping it, dominates and crowns the town; perhaps crushes would be the better verb, for the monstrous bone-grey mass towers above the terraced roofs of the port with an ascendancy as much moral as physical. Yet for all its vastness and commanding situation, it is singularly lifeless, and only the trickery of a moonlight night can invest its mediocre, Albert-Memorial architecture with any trace of beauty.
The day begins slowly there, partly because this south Irish climate is such stuff as dreams are made of, partly because good, old irreconcilables are suspicious of the daylight saving law as a British measure. There is little to be seen till near on ten o'clock. Then the day begins; a number of shrewd old fish wives, with faces wrinkled like wintered apples and hair still black as a raven's wing, set up their stalls in an open space by a line of deserted piers, and peasants from near by villages come to town driving little donkey carts laden with the wares; now one hears the real rural brogue, the shrewd give and take of jest and bargain, and a prodigious yapping and snarling from a prodigious multitude of curs. Never have I seen more collarless dogs. The streets are full of the hungry, furtive creatures; there is a fight every two or three minutes between some civic champion and one of the invading rural mongrels; many is the Homeric fray that has been settled by a good kick with a sea boot. Little by little the harbour, seeing that the land is at last awake, comes ashore to buy its fresh eggs, green vegetables, sweet milk and golden Tipperary butter. The Filipino and negro stewards from the American ships arrive with their baskets and cans; they are very popular with Queenstown folk who cherish the delusion that our trimly dressed, genially grinning negroes are the American Indians of boyhood's romance. From the cathedral's solitary spire, a chime jangles out the quarters, amusing all who pause to listen with its involuntary rendering of the first bar of "Strike up the band; here comes a sailor." And ever and anon, a breeze blows in from the harbour bringing with it a faint smell from the funnels of the oil-burning destroyers, a smell which suggests that a giant oil lamp somewhere in the distance has need of turning down. After the lull of noon, the men to whom liberty has been given begin to arrive in boatloads forty and fifty strong. The patrollers, distinguished from their fellows by leggins, belts, white hats, and police billie, descend first, form in line, and march off to their ungrateful task of keeping order where there is no disorder; then, scrambling up the water side stairs like youngsters out of school, follow the liberty men. If there is any newcomer to the fleet among them, it is an even chance that he will be rushed over the hill to the Lusitania cemetery, a gruesome pilgrimage to which both British and American tars are horridly partial. Some are sure to stroll off to their club, some elect to wander about the Esplanade, others disappear in the highways and byways of the town. For Bill and Joe have made friends. There have been some fifty marriages at this base. I imagine a good deal of match-making goes on in those grimy streets, for the Irish marriage is, like the Continental one, no matter of silly sentiment, but a serious domestic transaction. All afternoon long, the sailors come and go. The supper hour takes them to their club; night divides them between the movies and the nightly promenade in the gloom.
The glories of this base as a mercantile port, if there ever were any—and the Queenstown folk labour mightily to give you the impression that it was the only serious rival to London—are now over with the glories of Nineveh and Tyre. A few Cunard lithographs of leviathans now for the most part at the bottom of the sea, a few dusty show cases full of souvenirs, pigs and pipes of black, bog oak, "Beleek" china, a fragile, and vanilla candy kind of ware, and lace 'kerchiefs "made by the nuns" alone remain to recall the tourist traffic that once centred here. To-day, one is apt to find among the souvenirs an incongruous box of our most "breathy" (forgive my new-born adjective) variety of American chewing gum. If you would imagine our base as it was in the great days, better forget the port entirely and try to think of a great British and American naval base crammed with shipping flying the national ensigns, of waters thrashed by the propellers of oil tankers, destroyers, cruisers, armed sloops, mine layers, and submarines even. A busy dockyard clangs away from morning till night; a ferry boat with a whistle like the frightened scream of a giant's child runs back and forth from the docks to the Admiralty pier, little parti-coloured motor dories run swiftly from one destroyer to another.
From the hill top, this harbour appears as a pleasant cove lying among green hills. On the map, it has something the outline of a blacksmith's anvil. Taking the narrow entrance channel to be the column on which the anvil rests, there extends to the right, a long tapering bay, stretching down to a village leading over hill, over dale to tumble-down Cloyne, where saintly Berkeley long meditated on the non-existence of matter; there lies to the right a squarer, blunter bay through which a river has worn a channel. This channel lies close to the shore, and serves as the anchorage.
Over the tops of the headlands, rain-coloured and tilted up to a bank of grey eastern cloud, lay the vast ambush, the merciless gauntlet of the beleaguered sea.
VIII
THE DESTROYER AND HER PROBLEM
About a quarter of a mile apart, one after the other along the ribbon of deep water just off the shore, lie a number of Admiralty buoys about the size and shape of a small factory boiler. At these buoys, sometimes attached in little groups of two, three, and even four to the same ring bolt, lie the American destroyers. From the shore one sees the long lean hull of the nearest vessel and a clump of funnels all tilted backwards at the same angle. The air above these waspish nests, though unstained with smoke, often broods vibrant with heat. All the destroyers are camouflaged, the favourite colours being black, West Point grey and flat white. This camouflage produces neither by colour nor line the repulsive and silly effect which is for the moment so popular. Going aboard a destroyer for the first time, a lay observer is struck by their extraordinary leanness, a natural enough impression when one recalls that the vessels measure some three hundred feet in length and only thirty-four in width. Many times have I watched from our hill these long, low, rapier shapes steal swiftly out to sea, and been struck with the terror, the genuine dread that lies in the word destroyer. For it is a terrible word, a word heavy with destruction and vengeance, a word that is akin to many an Old Testament phrase.
Our great destroyer fleet may be divided into two squadrons, the first of larger boats called "thousand tonners," the second of smaller vessels known as "flivvers." Another division parts the thousand tonners into those which have a flush deck from bow to stern, and those which have a forward deck on a higher level than the main deck. All these types burn oil, the oil burner being nothing more than a kind of sprayer whose mist of fuel a forced draft whirls into a roar of flame; all can develop a speed of at least twenty-nine knots. The armament varies with the individual vessel, the usual outfit consisting of four four-inch guns, two sets of torpedo tubes, two mounted machine guns, and a store of depth charges.