There was an amusing little incident I chanced
to see which illustrates the keenness of the spirit animating the men even in the moments of waiting. A favourable course had left the deck unswept by water for an hour, and a half-dozen boys, off watch, but too restless to turn in, were trying to kill time by helping the cook peel potatoes. It was one of these whom I saw stand up, take several swift strides forward across the reeling deck, draw a rag from the pocket of his “jeans,” and then, with great care and deliberation, begin to polish a patch of steel plate that was exposed in the angle of two strips of coco-matting. “Wha’ cher holystoning deck yetawhile fer, Pete?” one of his mates shouted. “Can’cher wait till we gets back to port? We may have to foul your pretty work with greasy Huns any minnit.” Unperturbed, Pete went right on rubbing, testing the footing every now and then with the sole of his boot. Only when the job, whatever it was, was done to suit his fastidious taste did he return to his seat on the reversed water-bucket and start peeling potatoes again. Not till a full dozen or more neatly skinned Murphies had passed under his knife did he vouchsafe to reply to the half-curious, half-pitying looks and remarks his mates had continued to direct at him. Then his explanation was as crushing as complete.
“It don’t look much as if you guys wants to get a Hun,” he observed finally, running a critical eye over them. “Oh, you do, do you? My mistake.
Well, then, don’t try to be funny with another guy that’s doing his best to effect that same good end. Now looka here. From where I sits to my gun-station is just six steps. Six for me, I mean; it’d be more for most of you ‘shorties.’ Now I just figures that step number four lands my foot square in the dribble of oil on that patch where there ain’t no matting; so what was more natural than for me to go and swab it up. Last time the gong binged I hit half a preserved peach, and sprained a wrist and ankle so bad that I woulda been dead slow on the gun if we’d had to fire it. Keeping my eye peeled for another piece of peach, I pipes that gob of oil, and so goes and gets rid of it. It’s painful having to explain a simple thing like that to you bone-heads, but, now that you got it, p’raps you’ll ease off on your beefing, and peel spuds. That don’t take no brains.”
Two or three times in the course of the morning the look-out’s shout of “Sail!” bearing this way or that, brought those in sound of it to their feet in the expectation that it would be followed by the welcome clanging of the alarm bell; and once or twice the wireless picked up the S.O.S.—they do not send it out that way now, but these letters are still the common term in use to describe the call of a ship in distress—of a steamer that had been torpedoed. But the sails turned out to be friends in every case, while both of the ships reported sinking were too far away for us to be of any use to them.
Early in the afternoon a suspiciously cruising craft, which proved presently to be a friend, got a high-explosive shell under her nose as a consequence of her deliberation in revealing that fact. The smartness with which the men tumbled to quarters, and the almost uncanny speed with which the forecastle gun was served, boded well for developments in case the real thing turned up.
“Do you always fire a blank across their bows when you don’t quite like the look of ’em?” I asked the captain innocently, as he gazed dejectedly through his glass at certain unmistakable evidences proving that he had been cheated of his quarry. “Blank!” indignation and half the look that sits on the face of a terrier who discovers that he has cornered his own family’s “Tabby” instead of the neighbour’s “Tom”; “blank!—did you ever see a blank ‘X-point-X’ that threw up a spout as high as a masthead, and all black with smoke? That was the worst punisher we have in our lockers; and, what’s more, it was meant to be a hit. And the next one would have been,” he added. “You can’t afford to waste any time where five or ten seconds may make all the difference between bagging and losing a Hun.”
“But how about bagging something that isn’t a Hun?” I protested. “I told you, I think, that I had arranged to go out next week on patrol in one of the American submarines; but after what I’ve just seen——”
“The burden of proof is up to the craft under suspicion,” cut in the captain, “and they ought to have no trouble in supplying it if they have their wits about them.” Then, with a grin, “But if you’re really going out on submarine patrol next week, why—I’ll promise to look twice before turning loose one of those—those ‘blanks.’” How he kept his word is another story.