This feeling, strong enough in ordinary times—when it was but a peaceful merchantman one watched from and but peaceful merchantmen that one saw—is intensified manifold when it is a warship’s bridge one paces, and only the silhouettes of ships of war that notch the far horizon. Battleship, battle cruiser, light cruiser, destroyer, sloop, trawler, and all the other kinds and classes of patrol craft—each has its own distinctive smudge of smoke, its own peculiar way of revealing its identity by a blurred foretop, funnel, or superstructure long before its hull has lifted its amorphous mass above the sky-line.
And now to the sky-line riddles one was given to read, and to be thrilled by as the puzzle revealed itself, had been added the great troop convoy from America, my first sight of one of which was just unfolding. H.M.S. Buzz, in which I chanced to be
out at the time, was not one of the escorting destroyers, and it was only by accident that the course she was steering to join up with a couple of other ships of her flotilla on some kind of “hunting” stunt took her across that of the convoy, and passed it in inspiring panoramic review before our eyes. From dusky blurs of smoke trailing low along the horizon, ship after ship—from ex-floating palaces with famous names to angular craft of strange design which were evidently the latest word in standardised construction—they rose out of the sea (as our quartering course brought us nearer) until a wide angle of our seaward view was blocked by an almost solid wall of steadily steaming steel.
There was a lot to stir the imagination in that sight—aye, fairly to grip you by the throat as a dawning sense of what it portended sank home. In the abstract it was the living, breathing symbol of the relentless progress of America’s mighty effort, a tangible sign of the fact that her aid to the Allies would not arrive too late. What it stood for concretely is best expressed in the words of the young R.N.R. sub-lieutenant who was officer of the watch at the time.
“It looks to me,” he said, with a pleased smile, as he lowered his glass after a long scrutiny of the advancing lines of ships, “as though there’d be jolly near forty thousand new Yanks to be catered for in Liverpool by to-morrow evening.”
“Yes,” I said somewhat dubiously, my mind suddenly assailed by a misgiving awakened by the thousands of yards of torpedo target presented by the sides of those placidly ploughing ships, “that is, assuming that they get there safely. But they’re only just entering the danger zone now, and there’s a lot of water got to stream under their keels before they berth in the Mersey.
“I don’t know anything about convoys, or the ways of protecting them; but all the same, it looks to me as though that bunch of troopers would offer a mark like the map of Ireland to a U-boat, and a lot more vulnerable one.”
Young P—— laughed as he bent, squint-eyed, to take a bearing on a destroyer zigzagging jauntily with high-flung wake in the van of the approaching fleet.
“That’s what everyone—even an old sailor—says the first time he sights one of the big transatlantic convoys,” he said; “and if there are any skippers new to the job in that lot there, that’s just what they’re saying. It’s all through failure to appreciate—indeed, no one who has not seen the ins and outs of it would be in a position to appreciate—the effectiveness of the whole anti-submarine scheme, and, especially, what almost complete protection thoroughly up-to-the-minute screening—with adequate destroyers and other light craft—really affords. As a matter of fact, every soldier in that convoy is probably a good deal safer now—and