Stories of the Ships

by Lewis R. Freeman

"The battle cruisers altered course instantly to continue the chase of the enemy armoured cruisers, but the Admiral, doubtless realising that, scattered as we were, each of the rest of us (already conversant with his general instructions) would be his own best judge as to where he could be most useful, left us to pick our own quarries. I made up my mind at once to go after the light cruisers, and, signalling 'Come on, Kent' (the Captain of the Kent was my junior, and therefore subject to my orders in a case of this kind), headed off in the direction of what were still little more than three dark blurs on the south-westerly horizon. The Glasgow, which was a long way ahead to port, also decided (in view of instructions) in favour of going after the light cruisers, and, altering course sharply, passed astern of the battle cruisers and converged with the Kent and Cornwall in the chase. The Carnarvon, which for some reason was not steaming her best, and had been left a good distance astern, held on after the battle cruisers. The Bristol, which had been delayed in getting out of harbour, had been ordered to look after some steamers which had been following Von Spee, and which we believed to carry coal and provisions. We afterwards learned that one of them had a cargo of potatoes, and as potatoes chanced to be another of the many things which the Cornwall was short of at this time, I have always harboured the same kind of grudge against the Bristol for sinking these as I have against the Invincible for putting down my salt pork.

"As soon as it became evident what courses the Hun ships were steering, I signalled to the Kent to go after the port ship, which turned out to be the Nürnberg, while I gave my attention to the middle one of the three, the Leipzig. This would have left the Glasgow free to pursue and engage the third ship, the Dresden, which her twenty-six knots of speed should have enabled her to do handily. This plan, if it could have been carried out, would have made a clean sweep of Von Spee's squadron then and there, instead of giving the Dresden a new lease on life, and some weeks more of uncertainty for merchant vessels of both the South Atlantic and Pacific. Where it slipped up was through the fact that the Glasgow could not avoid engaging the Leipzig en passant while endeavouring to get within range of the Dresden, and, once having taken on the latter, she was, bulldog-like, reluctant to draw off until her opponent was finished. As there was no other ship fast enough to catch up the Dresden, her escape was inevitable.

"It was a little after four in the afternoon—almost to a minute the time I had reckoned it would be—that the fine burst of speed the Cornwall had been putting on brought the Leipzig well within range, and I gave the order to open fire. Previous to this the latter had been engaging in a very lively little running fight with the Glasgow, neither appearing to be inflicting serious damage to the other. The Hun's four-point-ones were about balanced by the Glasgow's equal number of four-inch, but the latter's two six-inch gave her a comfortable margin that would have decided the issue in her favour in the end. The German gunners, always at their best at the beginning of an action, were making good practice, however, and the Glasgow would have known she had had a fight on her hands before it was over.

"At the intervention of the Cornwall, with her fourteen six-inch guns, the Leipzig—very pluckily and properly—turned her attention to the heavier armed, and therefore the more dangerous, of her two adversaries. We began hitting her at our third salvo, and it must have been about the same time that a shell from one of her well-served four-point-ones came crashing into the Cornwall. I must say it was jolly good work for such comparatively small guns. The extremely high angle they had to be fired at, though, reduced their chances of hitting, and I recall especially one beautifully bunched salvo which struck the water so close to the far side of the ship that it might almost have been dropped from an air-ship.

"One of the gunners told me an amusing incident in connexion with that first hit. A boy, engaged in passing six-inch shells, was inclined to be rather nervous at the outset, and was coming in for a good deal of chaffing from his more callous mates. When the bang and jar of that first explosion ran through the ship, a shell had just been handed him to shove along, but, quivering all over, he stood rooted in his tracks and demanded to know what the noise was. A guffaw of laughter ran round, at the end of which an old gunner replied, 'That, me son, is our fust vaxinashun mark.' Gradually a grin of comprehension and reassurance replaced the look of terror on the lad's face as he realised that it isn't necessarily so serious a thing after all to have a shell burst above your head. 'Right-o!' he cried, passing the shell smartly on; ''and this proj. on to the 'Un an' prevent a small-pox epidemic breakin' out 'board 'is ship.' The joke had passed all the way round the ship before the fight was over, and there was red-hot rivalry to the end to keep the Hun's small-pox rate down by 'vaxinashun.' When you think of it, there's nothing funny about the joke at all; but there's nothing equal to the roughest of chaff to keep men's spirits up and their nerves steady in a fight, and it's because these lads of ours take fighting in the same happy-go-lucky spirit that they take their sport that they're such incomparable stayers—that they're always going stronger at the finish than when they started, no matter what the course.

"I remember another amusing little incident which occurred at about this stage of the game. Owing to the fact that there was no voice-pipe connexion from the bridge to the foretop and other 'nerve-centres,' it was imperative that I should fight the ship from the conning tower—an irksome necessity on account of the circumscribed vision. I found myself making occasional rounds of 'afternoon calls' to the various places with which I wanted to keep in closer touch, or from where I had a better chance to see how things were progressing than from the box of the conning tower, and one of these took me to the bridge, whose sole occupant was the signalman at the range-finder. Silhouetted black against the sky and with not enough cover to protect him from a pea-shooter, he was still going quietly about his work and apparently having the time of his young life.

"The Liepzig's gunnery had not begun to go to pieces at this juncture, and every little while one of those beautifully bunched little salvoes of four-point-ones would throw up its pretty nest of foam jets in the near-by water. A shell from one of these struck somewhere amidships as I came out upon the bridge, and I found the man at the range-finder just throwing an appraising glance over his shoulder to where the fragments of a whaler were mounting skyward in a cloud of smoke. 'My word, sir,' he greeted me with, 'but it's jolly glad I am I ain't back ther' w'ere the projers catch you 'tween decks. Now, up 'ere it's diff'rent—they just passes straight on into the water.'

"'They pass straight through!' I repeated. 'What do you mean by that?' 'Jest wot I sez, sir,' he replied. 'Look w'ere you're standin', sir! The canvas ain't 'arf stiff enuf to stop 'em.'

"I looked. On my left the canvas wind-shield was punctured with a smooth round hole at about the level of my waist, while on my right a similar strip had been pinked about even with the calf of my leg. From the upper hole the ragged ends of the painted canvas were bent inwards: from the lower hole, outwards.