“To have a look at the light guns in the stern and get some cigarettes from my cabin; I have smoked all I had.”
“To your cabin?” and Kursel grinned. “I have just come from there, I’ll go with you.”
Indeed, he seemed likely to be a useful companion, as he knew the most sheltered way.
Having got as far as the officers’ quarters, I stopped in amazement. Where my cabin and the two adjoining ones had been was an enormous hole! Kursel laughed heartily, thoroughly enjoying his joke, but growing angry I waved my hand and quickly retraced my steps. Kursel overtook me in the battery and offered me a cigar.
The fires in the lower battery had all been got under and, encouraged by this success, we determined to try our luck in the upper battery. Two firemen produced some new half-made hoses; one end of them we fastened to the water-main with wire, and the other we tied to the nozzle. Then, armed with these and using damp sacks to protect us from the flames, we leaned out through the church hatch whence, having succeeded after some little time in putting the fire out which had been burning in the dressing station we were able to go into the upper battery. All hands worked splendidly, and we soon had extinguished the fire in the part assigned to the church. Then another fire started abaft the centre 6-inch turrets—the place which had been selected, on account of its being protected, for putting the cartridge boxes of the 47-millimetre guns taken down from the bridges. Their removal had been well ordered, for no sooner had we set about extinguishing the fire which was now raging near them than they began to explode. Several of the men fell killed and wounded, and great confusion at once ensued.
“It’s nothing—it will cease in a moment,” said Kursel.
But explosions became more and more frequent. The new hoses were destroyed, one after the other, and then, suddenly, quite close, there was a loud crash, accompanied with the ring of tearing iron. This was not a 6-inch shell, but the “portmanteaus” again. The men became seized with panic, and, listening to nothing and nobody, rushed below.
When we went down into the lower battery, bitterly disappointed at our want of luck just when things seemed beginning to go so well, something (it must have been a splinter of some kind) struck me in the side and I staggered.
“Wounded again?” enquired Kursel, taking his cigar out of his mouth and leaning tenderly over me.
I looked at him and thought: “Ah! if only the whole fleet were composed of men as cool as you are!”