blotted out a great patch of sternward sky with its smoke-shot eruption.
Presently the Zop “struck oil,” and then the Zap. Soon the muffled booms of their rapidly scuttled depth-charges began to drum, while astern of them the foam-spouts nicked the sky-line like a stubby picket fence.
Perhaps the lad whom I later overheard describing that bombardment by saying that “’tween the three of us, we was scattering ‘cans’ like rice at a wedding” was guilty of some exaggeration; but it is a fact that they were spilling over very fast and, there is little doubt, with telling effect. The savageness of the bolts of wrath released by the exploding charges was strikingly disclosed when two of them chanced to be dropped at nearly the same time by destroyers a mile or more apart, when the under-sea “jolts” would meet half-way and form weird evanescent “rips” of dancing froth strongly suggestive of chain-lightning. The way in which even the most distant of the detonations made a destroyer “bump the bumps,” quite as though it was striking a series of solid obstructions, gave some hints of the bolts that were descending upon the lurking pirate.
At the end of a minute or two a quick order from the captain sent the wheel spinning over, and, with raucous grinding of helm, round we swung through sixteen points to head back in reverse over the path of destruction we had just traversed. Just as the
steel runners of a racing skater throw ice when he makes a sudden turn, so the screws of a speeding destroyer hurl water. The stern sank deep into the propeller-scooped void, so that the high-tossed side-slipping wake buried it beneath a frothing flood. Through several long seconds I saw the water boiling above the waists of the men at the depth-charges, without appearing to disturb them in the least; then the wheel was spun back ’midships—and a spoke or two beyond to meet and steady her—the bow wave resumed its curled symmetry and the wake began trailing off astern again.
It was into a peaceful sea, indolently rolling, sunset tinged and slightly sleeked with a thin streak of oil, that we had raced five minutes before; it was a troubled sea, charge-churned and wave-slashed, that we now nosed back into to see what good our coming had wrought. The grey-blue-black of the long oil wake had been scattered into broken patches by the explosions. Most of these were pale, sickly, and highly anæmic in colour, and of scant promise; but for one, where fresh oil rising spread rainbow-bright upon the surface, the Zip headed full tilt. The explosion here appeared to have been an unusually heavy one, for the sea was dotted with the white bellies of stunned fish, most of them floating high out of the water, with trickles of blood running from their upturned mouths and distended
gills. A six or eight-foot shark, wriggling drunkenly along the surface with a broken back, was hailed with a howl of delight by the men, who claimed to see in the fact that the unlucky monster could not submerge his telltale dorsal, a sign that their Fritz might be in the same difficulty.
Another “can” or two was let go as we dashed through that iridescent “fount of promise”; and when we turned back to it again the wounded shark had ceased to wriggle and now floated inertly among his hapless brothers. But of Fritz—save for a glad new gush of oil—no sign. Prisoners or wreckage are rated as the only indubitable evidence of the destruction of a U-boat, and neither of these were we able to woo to the surface in that busy hour which elapsed before the descending pall of darkness put a period to our well-meant efforts. During that time not the most delicate instrument devised by science for that purpose revealed any indication of life or movement in the depths below. As the water at this point was far too deep to allow a submarine to descend and lie on the bottom without being crushed, this fact appeared morally conclusive. It was this I had in mind when I tried to draw the captain out on the subject. “Of course there’s no doubt we bagged him?” I hazarded, in a quiet interval when we were watchfully waiting for something to turn up, or rather come up. He smiled a rather tired smile. “Oh, very likely we
have,” he replied. “But, unluckily, there’s nothing we can lay our hands on to carry away and prove it. In case this particular Fritz doesn’t come to life and sink another ship in the course of the next few days, there is just a chance that we may be credited with a ‘Possible.’ They never err on the optimistic side in sizing up a little brush of this kind, and perhaps it’s just as well. Anyhow, a game like this is worth playing on its own account, whether you come in with a scalp at your belt every time or not.”
It was just as darkness was slowing down our anti-U-boat operations, that a signal came through stating that there were believed to be several survivors still alive among the wreckage of the Marmora, and ordering us to proceed to the scene of her sinking with all dispatch. The moon was rising as we began to nose among the pathetic litter of scraps that was all that remained afloat of what, five or six hours previously, had been a swift and beautiful auxiliary cruiser.