The officer of the watch turned aside for a moment from the gyro across which he had been sighting. “I think she must be the ‘——,’ sir,” he said. “Some American millionaire had her in the Mediterranean, and, wanting to do his bit, brought her up to Portsmouth and turned her over to the Admiralty to do what they wanted with her so long as it would help to lick the Hun. She’s been mixed up in several kinds of stunts, and is supposed to have a U-boat or two to her credit. Her present skipper’s a Yank who came to her from a M.L. They say he’s no end of a character, but right as rain on his job and with a natural nose for trouble.
One of his hobbies is making his ship look what she isn’t, and, in order to see her as she would appear to a U-boat, he goes out and studies her through the periscope of one of our own submarines. When one of these isn’t handy, he sometimes goes out in a whaler and studies her through a stubby periscope poked over its gunwale. He got blown right out to sea one night when he was making some experiment from a whaler in ‘moonlight visibility,’ and didn’t get back till the next morning. It had no effect on his enthusiasm, though, for he was out on the same stunt the next night. No question about his nerve, nor his luck, nor his skill, for that matter. Smart seamanship probably has as much to do with the fact that he has never been torpedoed as has his fancy camouflage.”
I made up my mind at once that here was a man worth meeting and hearing the story of, but as the only base he seemed to have was not easy to reach, and as his ship was reported at sea on the only occasions I was free to go there, some weeks went by before I was able to carry out my plan of paying him a visit. Then, one morning, a nondescript craft, which might have been anything from a wood-pile to a Chinese junk half a mile away, came nosing inconsequentially through the lines of the Grand Fleet and moored alongside the very battleship in which I happened to be at that time.
“K—— has come in with the ‘——’ to ‘swing
compasses,’” the navigating officer announced to the ward-room. “He’s a ‘converted side-wheel river ferry-boat’ this morning, or something of the kind; and he’s going to get blown to sea in a ‘sudden gale,’ or something of the kind; and he says that, if anyone doesn’t believe it, to come aboard and he’ll give ’em something to stimulate their ‘stolid British imaginations.’”
As certain lockers of the “——” had not been entirely looted of their age-mellowed treasure when the yacht was dismantled for sterner service than lounging about limpid Mediterranean harbours, the doubters were, naturally, many; but it is pleasant to be able to record that those who came to scoff remained—to tea. Indeed, it was not until after tea that I had a chance for a half-hour’s yarn alone with K—— in the “banquet-hall-deserted” splendour of the stripped saloon. It was then that he told me how it was he chanced to “come across and get into the game.”
He used the latter expression several times, I remember, and to no one that I can recall having met, either on land or sea, was the grim work he was doing more of a “game” than to this brave, resourceful, devil-may-care Middle Westerner.
“I had had a fair bit of experience in yachting and boating during the last six or eight years before the outbreak of the war,” he said, settling back at ease in one of the two remaining lounging-chairs, “and most of it has stood me in good stead at one
time or another since I have been on the job over here. I sailed a single sticker on Lake Michigan for a number of seasons, and I used to run down from my home in Lake Forest to business in Chicago in my own motor-boat on and off during the summer. It was what I knew of the latter which got me on a ‘M.L.’ without any preliminary hanging about when I first came over early in the war. What I knew about sailing has been all to the good almost every day I have been at sea, from the time I lured on a U-boat by ringing up my ‘M.L.’ as a disabled fishing-smack to the time when I had to bring this poor little old girl into port under canvas after I had knocked out her propellers with one of her own depth-charges.” It was a fantastically amusing tale, that last. “It was the culmination of my experiments in scientific camouflage,” said K——, with a baleful smile. “Up to that time any contrivances to deceive the Hun were getting more and more intricate right along; since then they have tended more and more toward extreme simplicity. It was this way, you see, that I happened to work up to that depth-charge crescendo. From the first I had been striving to give the U-boat mixed impressions of me, especially on the score of which way I was going. This, as I soon found out from studying the thing in the proper way, is much easier to do in the case of a man whose observation is limited to a few feet above the water than in the case of one who has a more lofty
coign of vantage to con from. That is to say, it’s much easier to convey false impressions, especially regarding your direction, to a man with his eye to a periscope than to one in the foretop of a battleship, to take the two extremes. Trying now one thing and now another as I had more experience, I found that where at first every shot fired at me was directed ahead with a more or less approximate allowance for the ship’s progress in that direction, after a while they began to go oftener and oftener astern, indicating they were confused as to my rate of change. It was just as I was about to put the crowning touch on my efforts in ‘mixing direction’ that the trouble occurred. As the experiments with this particular contrivance never went any further, there will hardly be any harm in my telling you what it was and how it worked.