“I saw all these things out of the corner of my eye like, for my mind was centred on getting what the ‘T.I.’ wanted to know about his cruiser. I knew just what this was to a ‘t,’ for I’d taken many a turn of drill at the tubes. ‘Parallel courses, thousand yards range, speed about twenty-five,’ I shouted, jumping down again; ‘and you’ll have to slip her right smart or you’ll miss your chance.’ Right then the seas flattened down for a few seconds, and the ‘T.I.’, giving me an order of how to train her, set his sights and pulled the cocking lever. A moment later he fired, and the mouldie slipped out smooth and easy and started running straight and true for a point the Hun was going to arrive at about a minute later.”
Prince had been poking away at a sprayer as he talked, with the fluttering light-mote from the fire in the heart of the furnace playing on one of his squinting eyes in a way that, with the other quenched in shadow, gave his face a look of Cyclopean fierceness. “I jumped up on the tubes again to follow our little tin fish on its swim,” he resumed. “There seemed to be a bit of a flap on the cruiser, for its next salvo fell a long way short of us. One
of the shells—a five-or six-incher—did not explode, but bounced off the water and came ‘skip-jacking’ along straight for us. It kicked into the water twice before it reached us, the second time right at the base of the wave that was rolling up and hiding our sunken stern, and that seemed to give it just enough of an up-flip to make it clear the Nairobi’s shivering hull. It came so slow that I caught the glint of the copper band round its base, and so low that the after superstructure blotted it off from my sight as it passed over the stern. One of the after gun’s crew told me he could have reached up and patted it as it tumbled along over his head. He said it was going so slow that he hardly felt any wind at all from it. Perhaps that was because he had his own wind up, though, for it was making a great buzz, and must have been carrying a big ‘tail’ of air in its wake.
“I lost track of our mouldie when I ducked—no, I don’t mind admitting that’s just what I did, though it missed me by a mile—and before I could get my eye on its wake again it had gone home. I think they must have spotted it coming on the cruiser, for I saw her begin to alter course away just about the time I figured it was due to arrive. If they were altering to avoid the mouldie, they turned the wrong way, for it only brought right abreast the funnels what’d ‘a’ been a hit somewhere about the bridge. I’ve got a picture in my mind of what happened that I’m dead certain is as true
as a photograph, and the spout of water that went up must have been almost exactly amidships. If the hit had been anywhere for’rard it would never have broken her back the way it did, and she might have got away. The funny part of it was that it was not the ’midships section of her, where the mouldie hit, that seemed to be lifted by the explosion. That part of her seemed just to go to pieces and begin to sink all at once, while the bow and stern halves started to come up and close together like a jack-knife. She must have gone down inside of a minute or two, but things were happening so fast I don’t think I was looking when she disappeared.”
Prince, engrossed in his story, forgot that the end of his poker had a sheet of flame playing upon it, and the heat which crept back from the rosy-red tip gave his palm a sharp singe as he clutched the handle preparatory to executing one of his sweeping gestures. From then on to the end of his narrative he paused frequently to lick with his tongue the blistered cuticle, the stoker’s sovereign remedy for a slight burn. “I was just starting to give the ‘T.I.’ an account of what I had had a lot better chance to see than he had,” he went on thickly, still touching the blisters gingerly with an extended tongue-tip, “when I heard him growl, ‘Stand by! here’s another one. What speed d’you think she’s making?’ I was still standing up on top of the tubes, and—to get a better view—right in front of
the ‘T.I.’, with my waist on just about the level of his face. As I turned my head to look at the second Hun he straddled us fair with a full salvo. Most of it went over, but one proj struck right alongside and just about flooded us out. But there was something heavier than water that it sent aboard. I felt a sharp sting across my stomach, as if someone had given me a cut with a whip. As I put my hand down to it the whole front of my overall dropped away where a fragment of shell casing had shot across it. A few threads—I found out later—had been started on my singlet, but my hide was not even scratched. I heard the ‘T.I.’ give a yell, and when I looked round saw his face covered with blood, and a flap of skin from his forehead hanging down over one eye like a skye terrier’s ear. The piece of proj had caught him a nasty side-swipe, though without hurting anything but his looks in the least. And it wasn’t that he was yelling about, either, but at me for not giving him the course and speed of the second cruiser. He had the flap of skin tied up out of his eye—using a strip of my overall because neither of us could find a handkerchief—by the time I was back at the handle. I saw the blood dribbling over his sights, but he seemed to be seeing through them all right, for he was telling me how to train when I felt the helm begin to grind as it was thrown hard over to make a sudden alteration of course. She heeled fifteen or twenty degrees as she turned six points to starboard,
and the boil of her wake flooded across her stern three or four feet deep. The sudden heel threw me off my feet, and I pulled up just in time to see us rushing by, and just missing by a few yards, a stopped destroyer that was nothing but spurts of fire flashing under a rolling cloud of steam and smoke.
“She seemed to be afire all over, and about ready to blow up; yet, from the quick flashes of some of the spurts of fire, I knew they came from a hard-pumped gun that some stout-hearted lads were working to the last. There was nothing in the look of that spouting volcano of smoke and steam that would help a man to tell whether it was a battleship or a trawler, but I knew that it could be only the Nectar, our Division leader. We never saw her nor anyone in her again. She must have gone down within a few minutes, and anyone that survived fell into the hands of the enemy. She led us a fine dance while it lasted, and the only pity was that she couldn’t trip it to the end.
“That left the old Nairobi as the last of the Division, and I haven’t any recollection of any of the rest of the flotilla being in sight by then. Not that I had any time to look for them, though. Our sudden change of course to keep from ramming the Nectar spoiled our chance at the second Hun cruiser, but we were left no time to mourn that any more than the finish of the Nectar. Hardly had we left the wreck of her astern than a full salvo of