I assured him that, since the Olympus had doubtless
been sighted from the bridge several winks before she had been visible from his less-favourable vantage, they would probably have been too busy to respond to his call at the voice-pipe even had he tried to report what he saw.
“If I were you,” I said, “I would forget all about that, and try to explain how a cruiser that the Firebrand was about to ram bow-to-bow” (I had, of course, already heard something of that dare-devilish exploit) “could have looked to you like the Olympus ramping down on a right-angling course and threatening to slice off the Flyer’s stern with all her depth-charges. I quite understood that one ramming is a good deal like another, as far as a big ship hitting a destroyer fair and square is concerned, but——”
“’Twasn’t that first cru’ser ’tall, sir,” Melton interrupted, nuzzling into my “lammy” hood again to make himself heard. “Twas ’nother ’un, sir—a wallopin’ big un. The seas was stiff wi’ cru’sers fer a minit, sir, an’ no sooner was we clear o’ the first un than the second come tearin’ down on us, tryin’ to cut us in two amidships. An’ that last un was a battl’ cru’ser nigh as big as the ’Lympus, all shot up in the funnels and runnin’ wild an’ bloody-minded like a mad bull. We were pretty nigh to bein’ stopped dead, an’ if she hadn’t been slower’n cold grease wi’ her helm she’d ha’ eat us right up.”
There had been nothing of malice aforethought in my action in cornering Melton on the searchlight
platform that night, for, as it chanced, I had failed to learn up to that moment that he had been in the famous Firebrand at Jutland. Nor, with the wind and sea getting up as fast as the glass and the thermometer were going down, was the time or the place quite what a man would have chosen for anything in the way of cosy fireside reminiscence. But, both these facts notwithstanding, I felt that, since I was leaving the Flyer to go to another base directly she arrived in harbour on the morrow, it would be criminal to neglect the opportunity of hearing what was perhaps the most sportingly spectacular of all the Jutland destroyer actions related by one who was actually in it. I did not dare to distract Melton’s attention from his lookout by drawing him into talking while he was still on watch, but, when he was relieved at ten o’clock, I waylaid him at the foot of the ladder with a pot of steaming hot ship’s cocoa (foraged from the galley by a sympathetic ward-room steward) and both pockets of my “lammy” coat filled with the remnants of a box of assorted Yankee “candy” looted from the American submarine in which I had been on patrol the week before.
Melton rose to the lure instantly—or perhaps I should say “fell to the bribe”—for the British bluejacket, if only he were given a chance to develop, is quite as sweet of tooth as his brother Yank. Because I could hardly take him to the captain’s cabin, which I was occupying for the
moment, for a yarn, and because he, likewise, could not take me down to the mess deck to disturb the off-watch sleepers with our chatter, there was nothing to do but carry on as best we could in the friendly lee of one of the funnels.
It was a night of infernal inkiness by now, and only clinging patches of soft snow and their blanker blankness revealed the dimly guessable lines of whaler and cowls and torpedo tubes and the loom of the loftier bridge. The battleship line was masked completely by the double curtain of the darkness and the snow, and only a tremulous greyness, barely discernible in the intervals of the flurries of flakes where the starboard bow-wave curled back from the Olympus, gave an intermittent bearing to help in keeping station. Underfoot was the blackness of the pit, not the faintest gleam reflecting from the waves washing over the weather side to swirl half-knee high about our sea boots. Even overhead all that was visible were fluttering patches of snow flakes dancing through the haloes of pale rose radiance that crowned the tops of the funnels. The wail of the wind in the wireless aerials, the crash of the surging beam seas, the throb of the propellers, and the pussy-cat purr of the spinning turbines—these were the fit accompaniment to which Melton A.B. recited to me the epic of the Firebrand at Jutland.
The cocoa I quaffed mug for mug with Melton, down to the last of the sweet, sustaining “settlings”