“It’s a biggish sort of a place to hunt over,” said the captain, as the Spark stood away on a course that formed the outside left rib of the flotilla’s “fan,” and took her in to skirt the rocky coast of Cassandra; “and there’s so many in the hunt that the chances are all in favour of some other fellow getting the brush instead of you. And unless we have the luck to do some of the flushing ourselves, I won’t promise you that the whole show won’t prove no end of a bore; and even if we do scare him up—well, there are a good many more exciting things than dropping ‘ash-cans’ on a frightened Fritzie. It won’t be a circumstance, for instance, to that rough house we ran into at the
‘White Tower’ last night when that boxful of French ‘blue-devils’ wouldn’t stop singing ‘Madelon’ when the couchee-couchee dancer’s turn began, and her friend, the Russian colonel in the next box, started to dissolve the Entente by——”
The captain broke off suddenly and set the alarm bell going as a lynx-eyed lookout cut in with “Connin’ tower o’ submreen three points on port bow,” and, with much banging of boots on steel decks and ladders, the ship had gone to “Action Stations” before a leisurely mounting recognition rocket revealed the fact that the “enemy” was a friend, doubtless a “co-huntress.”
Although we were still far from where there was yet any chance of encountering the U-boat which had attacked the convoy, there were two or three alarms in the course of the next hour. The first was when we altered our course to avoid a torpedo reported as running to strike our port bow, to discover an instant later that the doughty Spark was turning away from a gambolling porpoise. The second was when some kind of a long-necked sea-bird rose from a dive about two hundred yards on the starboard beam and created an effect so like a finger-periscope with its following “feather” that it drew a shell from the foremost gun which all but blew it out of the water. It was my remarking the smartness with which this gun was served that led the captain, when a floating mine was reported a few minutes later, to order that sinister menace to
be destroyed by shell-fire rather than, as usual, by shots from a rifle. All the guns which would bear were given an even start in the race to hit the wickedly horned hemisphere as we brought it abeam at a range of six or eight hundred yards; but the lean, keen crew of the pet on the forecastle—splashing the target with their first shot and detonating it with their second—won in a walk and left the others nothing but a hundred-feet-high geyser of smoke-streaked spray tumbling above a heart of flame to pump their tardier shells into.
The captain gazed down with a smile of affectionate pride to where the winners, having trained their gun back amidships, were wiping its smoky nose, sponging out its mouth, polishing its sleek barrel, and patting its shiny breech, for all the world as though they were grooms and stable-boys and jockeys performing similar services for the Derby winner just led back to his stall.
“There’s not another such four-inch gun’s crew as that one in any ship in the Mediterranean,” he said, “which makes it all the greater pity that they have never once had a chance to fire a shot at anything of the enemy’s any larger than that Bulgar bombing plane they cocked up and took a pot at after he had gone over yesterday. I mean that they never had a chance as a crew. Individually, I believe there are two or three of them that have been through some of the hottest shows in the war. That
slender chap there in the blue overall was in the Killarney when she was shot to pieces and sunk by German cruisers at Jutland, and I believe his Number Two—that one in a singlet, with his sleeves rolled up and just a bit of a limp—was in the Seagull when she was rammed, right in the middle of an action with the Huns, by both the Bow and the Wreath. A number of ratings from the Seagull clambered over the forecastle of the Bow while the two were locked together, evidently because they thought their own ship was going down, while two or three men from the Bow were thrown by the force of the collision on to the Seagull. When the two broke loose and drifted apart men from each of them were left on the other, and by a rather interesting coincidence, we have right here in the Spark at this moment representatives of both batches. They, with two or three other Jutland ‘veterans’ who chance also to be in the Spark, call themselves the ‘Black Marias.’ Just why, I’m not quite sure, but I believe it has something to do with their all being finally picked up by one destroyer and carried back to harbour like a lot of drunks after a night’s spree. And, to hear them talk of it when they get together, that is the spirit in which they affect to regard a phase of the Jutland battle which wiped out some scores of their mates and two or three of the destroyers of their flotilla. Talking with one of them alone, he will occasionally condescend to speak of the serious side
of the show, but their joint reminiscences, in the constant by-play of banter, are more suggestive of tumultuous ‘nights of gladness’ on the beach at Port Said or Rio than the most murderous spasm of night fighting in the whose course of naval history. You’ve got a long and probably tiresome day ahead of you. Perhaps it might ease the monotony a bit if you had a yarn with two or three of them. They’ll be bored stiff standing by in this blazing sun with small prospects of anything turning up, and probably easier to draw out than at most times. Gains, there by the foremost gun, would be a good one for a starter. There is no doubt of his having seen some minutes of the real thing in the Killarney. Only don’t try a frontal attack on him. Just saunter along and start talking about anything else on earth than Jutland and the Killarney, and then lead him round by degrees.”