“You don’t mean the recent attack on the drifter patrol—the one where two British destroyers stood the brunt of the attack of four Austrian destroyers and a light cruiser or two?” I asked. “I have always wanted to hear about that. I’ve heard Italian naval men say some very flattering things of the way the British carried on.”
“That’s the one,” he replied. “I was in the Flop—the one that got rather the worst banging up.”
“You’ve just got time for the yarn before your watch is over,” I said, settling myself into the nearest thing to a listening attitude that one can assume on the bridge of a destroyer bucking a north-east gale. “Fire away.”
I didn’t much expect he would “come through,” for I had failed in so many attempts to draw a good yarn by a frontal attack of this kind that I had little faith in it as compared with more subtle methods. Perhaps it was because rough methods were suited to the rough night; or it may have been only because K——’s mind (his non-working mind, I mean; not that closed compartment of sense and instinct with which he was directing his ship) had drifted back to the Adriatic, and he was glad of the chance to talk about it; at any rate, in the hour that had still to go before eight bells went for midnight, to the accompaniment of the banging of the seas on the bows and the obbligato of the spray beating on the glass and canvas of the screens, he told me the story I asked for.
“I don’t need to tell you,” he said, after giving the man at the wheel the course for the next zigzag, “that the Adriatic is full of various and sundry little traps and contrivances calculated to interfere as much as possible with the even tenor of the way of the Austrian U-boats which, basing at Pola and Trieste, sally forth in an endeavour to penetrate the Straits of Otranto and attack the commerce of the Mediterranean. You doubtless also know that this work is very largely in British hands. This is no reflection whatever on our Italian ally. Italy simply did not have the material and the trained men for the task in hand, and since Britain had both, it was naturally up to us to step in and take it over. This was done over two years ago; but, like the anti-submarine work everywhere, it is only now just beginning to round into shape to effect its ends. The winter of his discontent for the U-boat in these waters is closing in fast.
“You will understand, too, that these various anti-U-boats contrivances take a lot of looking after to prevent their interference with, or even their complete destruction, by enemy surface craft. All the good harbours are on the east coast of the Adriatic, and that sea is so narrow that swift Austrian destroyers can raid all the way across it at many points, and still have time to get back to their bases the same night. With our own bases—the only practicable ones available—at the extreme southern end of the Adriatic, our greatest
difficulty, perhaps, has been in guarding against these swift tip-and-run night-raids by the enemy’s speedy surface craft. I don’t know whether the fact that we seem to have about put an end to their operations of this kind is a greater tribute to our enterprise or the Austrians’ lack of it. The brush in question occurred as a consequence of the latest of the Austrian attempts to interfere with the measures which, he knows only too well, will ultimately reduce his U-boats to comparative impotence.
“I was Number Two in the Flop, which, with the Flip, was patrolling a certain billet well over toward the Austrian coast of the Adriatic. We had turned at about eleven o’clock, and were heading back on a westerly course, when the captain sighted a number of vessels just abaft the starboard beam. Being almost in the track of the low-hanging moon, they were sharply silhouetted; but the queer atmospheric conditions played such pranks with their outlines that, for a time, he was deceived as to their real character. The warm, coastal airs, blowing to sea for a few hours after nightfall, have a tendency to produce mirage effects scarcely less striking than those one sees on the desert along the Suez Canal. It was the distortion of the mirage that was responsible for the fact that the captain mistook two Austrian light cruisers for small Italian transports (such as we frequently encountered on the run between Brindisi and Valona or Santi Quaranti),
and that he reported what shortly turned out to be enemy destroyers as drifters.