In spite of its "length and complication," that signal, as we saw it later in the Viceroy, was identical with the original to a T.
It was rather hard luck that Büg, which was the first station we visited without carrying our own lunch in the form of sandwiches, was also the only one where we were not offered shelter and refreshment. "Hindy" disappeared again during the next hour of waiting, and even had to be sent for when the whaler finally did arrive. The rest of us were so thoroughly chilled from standing out in the biting Baltic wind that we were only too glad to warm up a bit by "double-banking" the oars with the whaler's crew on the pull back to the destroyer. The sight of American and British officers bending to the sweeps with common bluejackets created a tremendous furore at the station. The photographers rushed out to the end of the jetty to make a permanent record of the astonishing sight, and from the significant glances all of the Germans were exchanging one gathered that they thought that theirs was not the only Navy in which there had been a revolution.
Climbing up to the bridge shortly after the Viceroy got under weigh for the run back to Kiel, I found the captain on watch with a hulking Number 8-bore shot-gun under his arm, at which vicious weapon the German pilot, pressing as far away from it as the restricted space allowed, kept stealing apprehensive sidelong glances with eyes ostensibly searching the horizon through his binoculars. On asking the captain what the artillery was for, he motioned me back beside the range-finder stand, where he presently joined me.
"I'm watching for ducks—great place for them along here," he said in a low voice; "but don't give it away to the Hun. He seems to think it's for him. It's old B——'s gun. He shot ducks with it from the bridge of his E-boat all over the Bight during the war."
"You don't mean to say that you'd stop the destroyer and circle back to pick up a duck in case you happened to wing one?" I asked incredulously.
"Wouldn't I?" he laughed. "Just tumble up if you hear a shot and see. There's no finer duckboat in the world than a destroyer if you got the sea room to handle her in."
It was an hour or two later that I was shaken out of a doze on a ward-room divan by a sudden jar, followed by the threshing of reversed screws. "The skipper's got his bird," I thought, and forthwith scrambled out and up the ladder, especially anxious to arrive in time to see the expressions on the face of the Germans when they realized that the "mad Englander" was going back in his warship to pick up a duck. Compared to that it turned out to have been an event of no more than passing interest which had happened. The pilot (perhaps because his mind was absorbed in the menace of that terrible 8-bore) had merely missed—by three or four miles as it transpired presently—the gate of the anti-submarine net fencing off that neck of the Baltic, with the result that the Viceroy had barged into that barrage at something like seventeen knots. Cutting through the first of what proved to be a double net, she brought up short against the second, the while her spinning propellers wound in and chewed to bits a considerable length of the former.
The seas were agitated for a half-mile on either side by the straining of the outraged booms, while from the savagely slashing screws floated up a steady stream of mangled metal floats like wienerwursts emerging from a sausage machine. Luckily, the cables of the nets were rusted and brittle, so that the propellers readily tore loose from them without injury. Backing off clear, the pilot ran down the boom until the buoys marking the gate were sighted, and from there it was comparatively open going to Kiel, which we reached at nine-thirty that evening.