“Turning to port took us over into the line of the other Division, and the first thing I knew the Seagull had poked in and taken station astern of the Bow, which was leading it. Just then some Hun ship, I think it was the same one that strafed the
Killarney, opened on the Bow from starboard, the bursting shell splashing all over her from the funnels right for’ard. Bow turned sharp to port to try to shake off the searchlights, and Seagull altered at same time to keep from turning in her wake and running into the shells she was side-stepping. All of a sudden I saw another destroyer steering right across our bows, and to keep from ramming her the captain altered back to starboard. That cleared her stern by an eyelash, but the next second I saw that it was now only a question of whether Seagull would ram Bow, or Bow would ram Seagull. How a dished and done-for quartermaster, falling across his wheel as he died, decided it in favour of Bow I did not learn till later.
“The Hun shells were tearing up the water astern of the Bow for half a minute as she began to close us; then they stopped, and the smash came at the end of five or ten seconds of dead quiet. It was pitchy dark, with the flicker of fires on the deck of the Bow making trembly red splotches in the smoke and steam. A sight I saw by the light of one of those fires just before the wallop is my main memory of all the hell I saw in the next quarter hour. It has lasted just as if it was burned into my brain with a hot iron, and it figures in one way or other in every nightmare I’ve had since.”
The humorous twinkle in the corner of the man’s eye, which had persisted during all of his recital up
to this point, suddenly died out, and he was staring into nothingness straight ahead of him, where the picture his memory conjured up seemed to hang in projection.
“It was just before we struck,” he went on, speaking slowly, and in an awed voice strangely in contrast to the rather bantering tone he had affected before; “and the bows of the Bow were only ten or fifteen yards off, driving down on us in the middle of the double wave of greeny-grey foam they were throwing on both sides. By the light of a fire burning in the wreck of her bridge I saw a lot of bodies lying round on her fo’c’sl’, and right then one of them picked itself up and stood on its feet. It was a whole man from the chest up, and from a bit below the waist down, but—for all that I could see—nothing between. Of course, there must have been an unbroken backbone to make a frame that would stand up at all, but all the shot-away part was in shadow, so I saw nothing from the chest to the hips. It was just as if the head and shoulders were floating in the air. I remember ’specially that it held its cap crushed tight in one of its hands. The face had a kind of a calm look on it at first. Then it turned down and seemed to look at what was gone, and I could see the mouth open as if to holler. Then the crash came, and I didn’t see it again till they were stitching it up in canvas with a fire-bar before dropping it overside the next day. I learned then that an 8-inch shell had done the
trick—rather a big order for one man to try to stop.”
He took a deep breath, blinked once or twice as though to shut out the gruesome vision, and when he resumed the corners of a sheepish grin were cutting into and erasing the lines of horror that had come to his face in describing it.
“There’s no use of my claiming that I was thrown over to the Bow by the shock,” he continued, the twinkle flickering up in his eye again, “like Jock was pitched over to the Seagull. That did happen to three or four ratings from the Seagull, though, one signalman and a chap standing look-out being chucked all the way from the fore bridge. But in the case of most of the twenty-three of us who found ourselves adorning the Bow’s fo’c’sl’ when the ships broke away, it was the result of a ‘flap’ started by some ijits yelling that we were cut in two and going down. What was more natural, then, with the Bow looming up there big and solid—she was a good sight larger than the Gull—that the ‘rats’ should leave the sinking ship for one that looked like she might go on floating for a while. I’m not trying to make an excuse for what happened, but only explaining it. The Lord knows we paid a big enough price for it, anyhow.
“The Bow hit us like a thousand o’ bricks just before the bridge, and cut more than half-way through to the port side. The shock seemed to knock the deck right out from under my feet, and I