[B] The bluejackets’ name for knitted woollen gifts from friends on the beach.
“But the queerest thing was me hearing some guy lying all messed up on the deck muttering something about skookum kluches, and some more Chinook wa-wa that I knew he couldn’t have picked up anywhere else but from serving in a ‘T.B.D.’ working up and down the old Inland Passage from Vancouver Island. I felt my way to where he was huddled up in the wreck of a smashed gun, told him that I was another tilicum from the ’Squimalt Base, and asked him what ship he had been there in. I knew there was a good chance that we’d been mates in the old Virago, and there even seemed a familiar sound to his voice. But I wasn’t fated ever to find out. He just kept on muttering, slipping up on some words as if something was wrong with his mouth, and I didn’t dare light a match, of course. When I tried to ease him up a bit by lifting so he’d lie straight—well, all of him didn’t seem to come along when I started dragging by his shoulders. I never did find what was wrong with him, for right then new troubles of my own set in.
“I was still down on my knees trying to locate what was missing with this poor guy, when—out of the corner of my eye, for it was near behind me—I spotted the flash of a ship challenging. Bow challenged back—from somewhere aft—and then what
I piped at once for a Hun destroyer switched on searchlights and opened fire. She was about two cables off on our port quarter, heading right for us and blazing away with one or two guns, probably all that would bear on that course. A second destroyer, right astern her, didn’t seem to be firing. I heard the bang and saw the flash of two or three shells bursting somewhere amidships, and then the Bow’s port after gun began to reply. The crews of all the others were knocked out, and so were the searchlights.
“Between the twenty-three from the Seagull and what were left of the Bow’s fo’c’sl’ guns’ crews, there must have been thirty-five to forty men bunched together there for’rard of the wreck of the bridge. When the firing started, the whole kaboodle of us did what you’re always under orders to do when you have nothing to stand up for—laid down. Or, rather, we just tumbled into a heap like a pile of dead rabbits.
“I went sprawling over the poor devil I was trying to help, and there were two or three on top of me. Into that squirming hump of human flesh one of the Hun’s projes landed kerplump. It didn’t hit me at all, that one, but I can feel yet the kind of heave the whole bunch gave as it ploughed through. Then it was like warm water was being thrown on the pile in buckets, but it wasn’t till I had scrambled out and found it sticky that I twigged it was blood.
“Bad as it was, it might have been a lot worse. There hadn’t been enough resistance to explode the proj, and so it killed only four or five and wounded, maybe, twice that, where it would have scoured every man jack of us into the sea and Kingdom Come if it had gone off. The next one found something in the wreck of the bridge hard enough to crack it off though, and it was a ragged scrap of its casing that drove in to the point of my hip and put a kink in my rolling gait that I’ve never quite shaken out yet. It wasn’t much of a hurt to what it gave some, though, ’specially a lad that caught the main kick of it and got ditched to starboard, some of him going under the wire rail, and some over.
“The Huns couldn’t have known how down and out the Bow really was, for there was nothing in the world but that one port gun to prevent their closing and polishing her off. The chances are they recognised her class, knew she was more than a match for the pair of them if she was right, and were glad to get off with no more’n an exchange of shots in passing. That was the end of the fighting for the Bow, and about time, too. Her bows were stove in, all the fore part of her was full of water, her bridge was smashed and useless, her W.T. and searchlights were finished, all but one gun was out of action, and—when they came to count noses next day—forty-two of her crew were dead. Far from looking for more trouble, it was now only a
question of making harbour, and even that—as it turned out—was touch-and-go for two days.