“It’s all comfy enough, sir, when she’s loafing along at fifteen or twenty knots,” he said, slipping aside a “flap” and peering in at his fires with the critical eye of a housewife surveying her oven of bread, “but just tumble in some time when, while she already plugging away at full speed, the engine-room rings up more steam. That’s the time she’s just one little bit of hell down here, sir, with the white sizzle of the fires turning the furnaces to a red that shows even with the lights on, and the plates underfoot getting so hot that you have to keep dancing to prevent the soles of your boots from catching fire. Why, long toward morning of the night after Jutland——”
It didn’t take much manœuvring from that vantage to back him up to the beginning for a fresh start of the story of what is unquestionably one of the most remarkable, as it was one of the most successful, phases of the Jutland destroyer action. The fact that, during the daylight action between the battle cruisers, he had ample opportunity for
observation (through his being on deck standing by in the event of emergency and without active duties to perform) makes him undoubtedly one of the most valuable witnesses of the opening phase of this the greatest of all naval battles. The story which I am setting down connectedly, he told me in the comfortable intervals of his leisurely fire-trimming, and, once he was warmed up to it, with little prompting or questioning from myself. Much of it was punctuated with frequent stabs and slashes with one of the short-handled pokers which perform for the stoker of an oil-burner a service similar to that rendered his brother of the coal-burner by his mighty “slice” of iron.
“Big as the difference is between being on deck and in the stokehold at ordinary times,” said Prince, turning round with glare-blinded eyes closed to narrow slits after cracking off the accumulating carbon from an oil-sprayer with his poker, “it is ten times more so when a fight is on, and I’ll always be jolly thankful that it was my luck not to be caged up down here during the daylight part of the Jutland show. I had my turn of it at night, and it was bad enough then, even though I knew it was blacker’n the pit above; but, in daylight, with everything in full view outside, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gone off my chuck if I’d had to go ‘squirrel-caging’ on here with one eye on the fires and the other on the Kilroy. But I didn’t. It was my luck to be off watch when the ball opened, so
that my ‘action station’ was just loafing round the deck and keeping a stock of leak-stopping gear—mushroom-spreaders and wooden plugs—ready to use as soon as we got holed. Not having anything to do with navigating the ship, or signalling, or serving the guns or torpedo tubes—though I did get a bit of a chance with a mouldie as it turned out—I not only had time to see, but also to let the sights ‘sink in’ like. For that reason, when it was all over, I was probably able to give a more connected yarn of what happened than anyone else in the ship, not excepting the captain. They’ll take a lot of forgetting, some of the things I saw that day.”
Prince went over and settled down at ease on the steel steps of the ladder. “The worst grudge I had against Jutland—save for the way it whiffed out the lives of some of my friends in some of the other destroyers—” he continued with a grin, “was for making me miss my tea that afternoon. We left base the night before, and about daybreak joined up with the ‘battlers,’ which was our way of speaking of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, to which the flotilla was attached. It was a fairly decent day, and we were able to make good weather of it with the light wind and easy swell. I had stood the forenoon watch, had a bit of a doss in my hammock in the early part of the afternoon one, and had just gone down to tea before going on for the ‘First Dog.’ There had been some buzz in the morning about the Huns being out; but that was so old a
story that no one paid much attention to it. I was just getting my nose over the edge of a mug of tea when I heard the bos’un growling ‘Hands exercise action stations,’ and tumbled out on deck to go through the motions of getting ready for a fight that would never come off, or leastways that was how we felt about it. The ‘battlers’ were speeding up a bit, but there was not even a smudge of smoke on the horizon to hint of Huns. After rigging the fire-hoses and getting out my ‘plugs,’ I stood by for ‘what next,’ but nothing happened. At the end of half an hour the order ‘Hands fall out’ was passed, and, leaving everything rigged, down we went to tea again. The mugs we had left were stone cold by this time, and we were just raising a howl for a fresh lot when, ‘Bing!’ off goes the alarm bells, and up we rushes again, this time to find signs of what we had been looking and hoping for. A good many hours went by before we went below again, and all through the fight—when things would ease off a bit now and then—I would hear the ‘matlos’ grousing about missing their afternoon tea.
“The old Nairobi was nosing along under the port bow of the Lion as I came up, and so close that we saw her guns—trained out abeam with a high elevation, right above us. We seemed to be speeding up to take station farther ahead. There was nothing at all in sight (from the deck, at least; though probably there was a better look-see from
the bridge) in the direction the Lion’s guns were trained, and it was almost as if a bomb had been dropped from the sky when a shell came plumping down about half-way between our starboard quarter and her port bow. The fact is, having heard no sound of gunfire, I was so surprised that I foolishly asked someone if the Lion hadn’t blown out one of her tompions testing a circuit. The spout of foam should have told me better, but it goes to show what crazy things run through a man’s mind when he can only see effect without the cause. A few moments later I saw unmistakable gun-flashes blinking along the skyline to south’ard and knew that at last we were under the fire of the Huns. The next two or three shots fell singly, and were plainly merely attempts to get the range. Following the first ‘short,’ there were one or two ‘over,’ and then a fair hit. This one, falling almost straight, struck the fo’c’sl’ of the Lion, penetrated the deck and came out on the starboard side. I don’t think it exploded, and we were just far enough ahead to see past her bows to where it struck the water with a kind of spattery splash, not at all like the clean spout thrown by a shell which goes straight into the sea.
“Then there was a big spurt of flame from the Lion, and the screech of shells reached my ears, even before the heavy crash of her four-gun salvo. Watch as I would, I could not make out the distant fall of shot, but the fluttering flashes of the Hun guns to