eased down a bit. Only trouble is, she’s got to go it again. Look how we’ve dropped back.” And he gave the engine-room, by voice-pipe, a new “standard” speed, and threw the telegraph over to “Full.”
The pulsing throb began anew, and under the urge of speeding propellers the Zip, steering in narrowed zig-zags quickly regained her station. All of the destroyers, and the Lymptania as well, had eased down slightly, and the reduced speed meant also a reduction of the danger of another of those deep-sea dives, something no craft but a submarine is built to stand the strain of. But even as it was we were driving right up to the limit of endurance all the time, and the sea that did not come rolling up green right over the bows was the exception rather than the rule. From the forecastle right away aft there was never more than a few seconds at a time when the main deck was free of rollicking cascades of boiling brine, and there were moments when only the funnels and the after superstructure, rearing up like isolated rocks on a storm-beaten coast, were visible above the swirling flood. There were times when the men standing-by at the guns and torpedo-tubes seemed almost to be engulfed; yet none of them was swept away, and they even—from the way they kept joking each other in the lulls—appeared to be getting a good deal of sport out of the thing.
The barometer was falling, and both wind and
waves gained steadily in force as the afternoon lengthened and merged into a twilight that was itself already melting before the rising moon. Clouds were few and scattering, and it was plain there were to be no hours dark enough to offer any protection from submarine attack. Looming as large as ever, the big liner offered scarcely a better target on the side she was illuminated by the moonlight than on the one from which she was silhouetted against it. From either side a fifth of a mile of steel would “take a lot of missing,” and her captain, sensibly enough, would not ease his engines by a revolution more than was necessary to keep within his destroyer screen. It was plainly up to the destroyers to stick it to the limit, and that is just what they did. As I heard one of the men put it, it was the “bruisiest” bit of escort-work they had ever been—or probably ever will be—called upon to face, but every one of those Yankee destroyers stayed with it to the finish.
Now it would be the Zop that would emerge from under a mountainous sea and come drifting back without steerage weigh, rolling drunkenly in the trough, and now it would be the Zap. And now this or that result of a “hydraulic ramming” would disable one of the others temporarily. But, game to the last flake of brine-frosted camouflage, back they came to it again, and again, and yet again. Sunrise of the next day found them plugging on in station, and in station they remained
until the Lymptania, beyond the zone of all possible submarine danger, made a general signal of “Thank you,” and headed off to the westward on her own.
Out of the dim grey dawn of the morning after the night before, battered and buckled, but still unbroken, the wearily waggling line of the Lymptania’s late escort trailed back into harbour. The mussed-up silhouette of every one of them bore mute testimony to the way she had been put “through the mill,” and, in most cases, the things that met the eye were not the worst. The Zop needed every yard of the channel as she zig-zagged up it under a jury steering-gear, and the Zap, like a man dazed from a blow, would have sudden “mental hiati” in which she would straggle carelessly out of line with an inconsequential going-to-pick-flowers-by-the-roadside sort of air. The Zim’s idiosyncrasies had more of an epileptic suddenness about them, and her hectic coughing plainly indicated some kind of “lung trouble.” Our little Zip presented a very brave front to the outer world, but I heard hollow clankings punctuating the erstwhile even hum of the engines, while the drip, drip, drip and the drop, drop, drop through the crinkled sheet-steel sheathing of my cabin told that the deck-plates of the forecastle fitted a good deal less snugly than before they had played anvil to the lusty head-sea hammer.
But the Flossie, the “latest, the swiftest, the flotilla’s pride”—the wounds of all the rest of us put together were as nothing to those of the Flossie. In trying to maintain her pride of place at the head of the escort, she had, for a brief space, unleashed those extra knots of speed the captain had spoken of, and all that, and even more than, he had prophesied had come to pass. It was just such a swaggerer of a sea as that first one that Zip had dived into which did the trick, only, as the Flossie was going faster, the impact was somewhat more severe. She was a mile or more distant from us when it happened, and, watching from the bridge of the Zip, we simply saw her dissolve into a sky-tossed spout of foam. When she reappeared she was floating, beam-on, to the seas, and, for the moment, an apparently helpless hulk.