“I don’t remember that either she or us switched
on recognition lights, but the Hun opened with ev’rything that would bear just before we slammed together. It must have been by the gun-flashes that I saw she had three funnels, wi’ what looked like some kind o’ marks painted on ’em in red. I saw our second funnel give a jump and crumple up as a proj hit it, an’ then a spurt o’ flame—from a big gun fired almost point-blank—looked to shoot right on to the bridge. I thought that it must have killed ev’ry man there an’ carried away all the steering gear. But no.
“The old Firebrand wi’ helm hard-a-port, went swingin’ right on thro’ the point or two more that saved her life. I could feel by the way she jumped an’ gathered herself that last second that the ol’ girl was still under control. Then we struck wi’ a horrible grind an’ crash, an’ I went sprawlin’ flat.
“If the Hun had hit us half a wink sooner, or if we had turned half a point less, we’d have been swallowed alive and split up in small hunks. As it was, we didn’t have a lot the worst o’ it, an’ p’raps we more than broke even. It was like a mastiff an’ terrier runnin’ into each other in the dark, an’ the terrier only gettin’ run over an’ the mastiff gettin’ a piece bit clean out o’ his neck. It was our port bows that come together, an’ for only a sort o’ glancin’ blow. But it was the stem o’ the Firebran’ that was turned in sharpest, an’ it was
her that was hittin’ up—by a good ten knots—the most speed. She was left in a terribl’ mess, but most o’ the damage was from her rammin’ the Hun, not from the Hun rammin’ her. While as for what she did to the Hun, the best proof o’ it was the more’n twenty feet of her side-platin’—an upper strake, wi’ scuttl’ holes in it an’ pieces o’ gutterway deck hangin’ to it—that we found in the wreck of our fo’c’sl’. If the hole that hunk of steel left behind it didn’t put that Hun out o’ bus’ness as a fightin’ unit till she got back to port an’ had a refit, I’ll eat it.”
I wasn’t quite clear in my mind whether Melton meant to imply that he would eat the hole in the Hun cruiser or the hunk of steel that came out of it, but there was no room for doubt that the violent crunch with which he emphasised the assertion had put a period to the life of his “All-Day Sucker,” which was never intended to be treated like chewing toffy. Dipping into the grab-bag of my “lammy” coat pocket for something with which to replace it, therefore, I brought up a stick of chewing gum, and he resumed his story in an atmosphere sweet with the ineffable odour of spearmint and escaping steam.
“How much the Hun was shook up by that smash,” Melton continued, “you can reckon from this: We was almost dead stopped for some minnits, an’ all out o’ control from the time of rammin’ till they started connin’ her from the
engine-room. There was one fire flickerin’ in the wreckage o’ the forebridge, an’ another somewhere ’midships, while there was also a big glare throwin’ up where the foremost funnel was shot away. We was as soft an’ easy a target as even a Hun could ask for; an’ yet that one was in too much of a funk wi’ his own hurts to let off a singl’ other gun at us in all the time that he must have been flounderin’ on at not much more’n point-blank range. Mebbe he was knocked up even more’n we thought. Nothin’ else would account for him not havin’ ’nother go at us.
“Just one wild bally mess—that was what the Firebran’ looked like when I got to my feet again an’ cast an eye for’ard. There was too much smoke an’ steam to see clear, an’ it was mostly flickers o’ red light where the fires were startin’, an’ big, black shadows full o’ wreckage. As it looked to me from aft—tho’, o’ course, the full effects wasn’t vis’bl’ till daylight, the bridge an’ searchlight platform an’ mast was shoved right back an’ piled up on the foremost funnel. The whaler an’ dingy was carried away, an’ my first thought, for I was sure she was sinkin’, was that we had no boats to put off in. I could see two or three wounded crawlin’ out o’ the raffle, but I knew that the most to be dished would be in the wreck o’ the bridge. The queerest thing o’ all was the flashes o’ green an’ blue light flutterin’ thro’ the tangled steel o’ the wreckage. At first I thought
I was sort o' seein' things; but fin'lly I figgered it out as the juice from the busted 'lectric wires short-circuitin'. It meant, I tol' myself, that the men under them tons o' steel was bein' 'lectrocuted on top o' bein' crushed.