SEA-HOUNDS

BRITISH BATTLE-SHIPS ON PATROL

SEA-HOUNDS

BY

LEWIS R. FREEMAN

Lieut. R.N.V.R.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1919

Published in the U.S.A 1919

By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

To

Commodore Sir DOUGLAS BROWNRIGG, Bart.

C.B., R.N., Chief Censor, Admiralty

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

SEA HOUNDS

CHAPTER I

THE MEN WHO CHANGED SHIPS

Between the lighter-load of burning beeves that came bumping down along their line at noon, a salvo of bombs slapped across them at one o’clock from a raiding Bulgar air squadron, a violent Levantine squall which all but broke them loose from their moorings at sundown, and a signal to raise steam for full speed with all dispatch at midnight, it had been a rather exciting twelve hours for the destroyers of the First Division of the ——th Flotilla, and now, when at dawn the expected order to proceed to sea was received, it began to look as though there might be still further excitement in pickle down beyond the horizontal blur where the receding wall of the paling purple night-mist was uncovering the Gulf’s hard, flat floor of polished indigo.

“It’s probably the same old thing,” said the captain of the Spark, repressing a yawn after he had given the quartermaster his course to enter the labyrinthine passage where puffing trawlers were towing back the gates of the buoyed barrages, “a

U-boat or two making a bluff at attacking a convoy. They’ve been sinking a good deal more than we can afford to lose; last week they got an oiler and another ship with the whole summer’s supply of mosquito-netting aboard—but that was off the south peninsula of Greece or up Malta way. Here they haven’t more than ‘demonstrated’ about the mouth of the Gulf for two or three months. They know jolly well that if they once come inside, no matter if they do sink a ship or two, that it’s a hundred to one—between sea-planes, ‘blimps,’ P.B.s, and destroyers—against their ever getting out again. There’s just a chance that they may try it this time, though, for they must know how terribly short the whole Salonika force is of petrol, and what a real mess things will be left in if they can pot even one of the two or three oilers in this convoy. You’ll see a merry chase with a kill at the end of it if they do, I can promise you, for the convoy is beyond the neck of the bag even now, and if a single Fritz has come in after them, the string will be pulled and the rest of the game will be played out here in the ‘bull-ring.’”

The captain had just started telling me how the game was played, when the W.T. [A] room called him on the voice-pipe to say that one of the ships of the convoy had just been torpedoed and was about to sink, and shortly afterwards a radio was received from the C.-in-C. ordering the flotilla to proceed to

hunt the submarine responsible for the trouble. Then the officer commanding the division leader flashed his orders by “visual” to the several units of the flotilla, and presently these were spreading fan-wise to sweep southward toward where, sixty to a hundred miles away, numerous drifters would be dropping mile after mile of light nets across the straits leading out to the open Mediterranean. Northeastward, where the rising sun was beginning to prick into vivid whiteness the tents of the great hospital areas, several sea-planes were circling upwards; and southeastward, above the dry brown hills of the Cassandra peninsula, the silver bag of an air-ship floated across the sky like a soaring tumble bug. The hounds of the sea and air had begun to stalk their quarry.

[A] Wireless Telegraph

“It’s a biggish sort of a place to hunt over,” said the captain, as the Spark stood away on a course that formed the outside left rib of the flotilla’s “fan,” and took her in to skirt the rocky coast of Cassandra; “and there’s so many in the hunt that the chances are all in favour of some other fellow getting the brush instead of you. And unless we have the luck to do some of the flushing ourselves, I won’t promise you that the whole show won’t prove no end of a bore; and even if we do scare him up—well, there are a good many more exciting things than dropping ‘ash-cans’ on a frightened Fritzie. It won’t be a circumstance, for instance, to that rough house we ran into at the

‘White Tower’ last night when that boxful of French ‘blue-devils’ wouldn’t stop singing ‘Madelon’ when the couchee-couchee dancer’s turn began, and her friend, the Russian colonel in the next box, started to dissolve the Entente by——”

The captain broke off suddenly and set the alarm bell going as a lynx-eyed lookout cut in with “Connin’ tower o’ submreen three points on port bow,” and, with much banging of boots on steel decks and ladders, the ship had gone to “Action Stations” before a leisurely mounting recognition rocket revealed the fact that the “enemy” was a friend, doubtless a “co-huntress.”

Although we were still far from where there was yet any chance of encountering the U-boat which had attacked the convoy, there were two or three alarms in the course of the next hour. The first was when we altered our course to avoid a torpedo reported as running to strike our port bow, to discover an instant later that the doughty Spark was turning away from a gambolling porpoise. The second was when some kind of a long-necked sea-bird rose from a dive about two hundred yards on the starboard beam and created an effect so like a finger-periscope with its following “feather” that it drew a shell from the foremost gun which all but blew it out of the water. It was my remarking the smartness with which this gun was served that led the captain, when a floating mine was reported a few minutes later, to order that sinister menace to

be destroyed by shell-fire rather than, as usual, by shots from a rifle. All the guns which would bear were given an even start in the race to hit the wickedly horned hemisphere as we brought it abeam at a range of six or eight hundred yards; but the lean, keen crew of the pet on the forecastle—splashing the target with their first shot and detonating it with their second—won in a walk and left the others nothing but a hundred-feet-high geyser of smoke-streaked spray tumbling above a heart of flame to pump their tardier shells into.

The captain gazed down with a smile of affectionate pride to where the winners, having trained their gun back amidships, were wiping its smoky nose, sponging out its mouth, polishing its sleek barrel, and patting its shiny breech, for all the world as though they were grooms and stable-boys and jockeys performing similar services for the Derby winner just led back to his stall.

“There’s not another such four-inch gun’s crew as that one in any ship in the Mediterranean,” he said, “which makes it all the greater pity that they have never once had a chance to fire a shot at anything of the enemy’s any larger than that Bulgar bombing plane they cocked up and took a pot at after he had gone over yesterday. I mean that they never had a chance as a crew. Individually, I believe there are two or three of them that have been through some of the hottest shows in the war. That

slender chap there in the blue overall was in the Killarney when she was shot to pieces and sunk by German cruisers at Jutland, and I believe his Number Two—that one in a singlet, with his sleeves rolled up and just a bit of a limp—was in the Seagull when she was rammed, right in the middle of an action with the Huns, by both the Bow and the Wreath. A number of ratings from the Seagull clambered over the forecastle of the Bow while the two were locked together, evidently because they thought their own ship was going down, while two or three men from the Bow were thrown by the force of the collision on to the Seagull. When the two broke loose and drifted apart men from each of them were left on the other, and by a rather interesting coincidence, we have right here in the Spark at this moment representatives of both batches. They, with two or three other Jutland ‘veterans’ who chance also to be in the Spark, call themselves the ‘Black Marias.’ Just why, I’m not quite sure, but I believe it has something to do with their all being finally picked up by one destroyer and carried back to harbour like a lot of drunks after a night’s spree. And, to hear them talk of it when they get together, that is the spirit in which they affect to regard a phase of the Jutland battle which wiped out some scores of their mates and two or three of the destroyers of their flotilla. Talking with one of them alone, he will occasionally condescend to speak of the serious side

of the show, but their joint reminiscences, in the constant by-play of banter, are more suggestive of tumultuous ‘nights of gladness’ on the beach at Port Said or Rio than the most murderous spasm of night fighting in the whose course of naval history. You’ve got a long and probably tiresome day ahead of you. Perhaps it might ease the monotony a bit if you had a yarn with two or three of them. They’ll be bored stiff standing by in this blazing sun with small prospects of anything turning up, and probably easier to draw out than at most times. Gains, there by the foremost gun, would be a good one for a starter. There is no doubt of his having seen some minutes of the real thing in the Killarney. Only don’t try a frontal attack on him. Just saunter along and start talking about anything else on earth than Jutland and the Killarney, and then lead him round by degrees.”

We were just passing the riven wreck of a large freighter as I sidled inconsequently along to the forecastle, and the strange way in which the stern appeared to be stirring to the barely perceptible swell gave ample excuse for turning to the crew of the foremost gun for a possible explanation. It was Leading Seaman Gains, as incisive of speech as he was quick of movement, who replied, and I recognized him at once as a youth of force and personality, one of the type to whom the broadened opportunities for quick promotion offered the Lower

Deck through the war has given a new outlook on life.

“She was a tramp with a cargo of American mules for the Serbs, sir,” he said, “and she was submarined two or three miles off shore. The mouldie cracked her up amidships, but her back didn’t break till she grounded on that sand spit there. At first her stern sank till her poop was awash at high tide—there’s only a few feet rise and fall here, as you probably know, sir—but when the bodies of the mules that had been drowned ’tween decks began to swell they blocked up all the holes and finally generated so much gas that the increased buoyancy lifted the keel of the stern half clear of the bottom and left it free to move with the seas. I have heard they intend to blow out her bottom and sink her proper for fear that end of her might float off in a storm and turn derelict.”

That story was, as I learned later, substantially true, but it had just enough of the fantastic in it to tempt the twinkling eyed “Number Two” to a bit of embroidery on his own account. He was the one with the muscular forearms and the slight limp. The suggestion of “New World” accent in his speech was traceable, he subsequently told me, to the many years he had spent on the Esquimault station in British Columbia.

“They do say, sir,” he said solemnly, rubbing hard at an imaginary patch of inferior refulgency

on the shining breech of his gun, “that she’s that light and jumpy with mule-gas, after the sun’s been beating on her poop all day, that she lifts right up in the air and tugs at her moorings like a kite balloon. And there’s one buzz winging round that they’re going to run a pipe-line to her end and use the gas for inflating——”

Gains, evidently feeling that there were limits to which the credulity of a landsman should be imposed upon, cut in coldly and crushingly with: “She’s not the only old wreck ’round here that they could draw on for ‘mule-gas’ if there’s ever need of it, my boy; and as for her rising under her own power—well, if she ever goes as far as you did under yours the night you jumped from the Seagull to the Bow I’ll——”

The gusty guffaw that drowned the rest of Gains’ broadside left us all on good terms, and, by a happy chance, with the “Jutland ice” already broken. Number Two, joining heartily in the laugh, said that, “nifty” as was his jump from the Seagull to the Bow, it wasn’t a “starter” to the “double back-action-summerset” with which Jock Campbell was chucked from the Bow to the Seagull. “We played a sort of ‘Pussy-Wants-a-Corner’ exchange, Jock and me,” he said, “for Jock was Number Four or ‘Trainer’ of the crew of one of the fo’c’sle guns of the Bow, and I was the same in the Seagull. We didn’t quite land in each other’s place when the wallop came, but it wasn’t

far from it; and we each finished the scrap in the other guy’s ship. You might pike aft and try to get a yarn out of Jock when ‘Pack up!’ sounds. He’s a close-mouthed tyke, though, and if you can get him to tell how he played the human proj, you’ll be doing more’n anyone else has been able to pull off down to now. He’s half clam and half sphinx, I think Jock is, and that makes a ‘dour lad’ when crossed with a ‘Glasgie’ strain. Which makes it all the sadder to have him qualify for membership in the ‘Black Marias,’ and me, because I finished in the Bow, froze out.”

I told him that I would gladly have a try at Jock later, provided only that he would first tell me what happened in his own case, adding that it wasn’t every British sailor who could claim the distinction of fighting the Hun from two different ships within the hour.

“It would have been a darned sight better for me if I’d confined my fighting to one ship,” he replied with a wry smile, “and it was mighty little fighting I got out of it anyhow. But sure, I’ll tell you what I saw of the fracas, and then you can take a chance at Jock. It was along toward midnight, and the Seagull was steaming in ‘line ahead’ with her half of the flotilla. The Killarney and Firebrand was leading us, with the Wreath and one or two others astern. I was at ‘action station’ with the crew of the foremost gun, and keeping my eye peeled all round, for some of the ships astern had just been

popping away at some Hun destroyers they had reported. All of a sudden I saw the officers on the bridge peering out to starboard, and there, coming up astern of us and steering a converging course, I saw the first, and right after, the second and third, of a line of some big lumping ships—some kind of cruisers. All of the flotilla must have thought they was our own ships, for no one challenged or fired all the time they came drawing up past us, making four or five knots more than the seventeen we were doing.

GERMAN SHELLS STRIKING THE WATER AT THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND

A BROADSIDE AT NIGHT AT THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND

“When the leader was about abreast the Killarney and inside of half a mile range, she flashed on some red and green lights, switched on her searchlights and opened fire. Ship for ship, the Huns were just about even with our line now, and the Firebrand and Seagull must have launched mouldies at the second and third cruisers at near the same moment. Hitting at that range ships running on parallel courses was a cinch, and both slugs slipped home. It was some sight, those two spouts of fire and smoke shooting up together, and by the light of ’em I could see that the Firebrand’s bag was a four-funneller, and ours a three. The first one keeled right over and began to sink at once, but the one our mouldie hit went staggering on, though down by the stern and with a heavy list to port.

“We would sure have put the kibosh on this one with the next torpedo if we hadn’t had to turn

sharp to port to avoid the Killarney just then, and so missed our last chance to do something in ‘the Great War.’ I lost sight of the Firebrand and took it for granted she had been blown up. It was not till a week afterwards that we learned she had turned the other way, engaged one Hun cruiser with gunfire, rammed another, just missed being rammed by a third, and finally crawled into port under her own steam.

“The Seagull came under the searchlights of the leading Hun cruiser for a few seconds as she came up abreast of the burning Killarney, and then the smoke and steam cut off the beam and I was blind as a bat for a minute. The Killarney had been left astern when I looked for her again, and seemed all in, with fires all over her and only one gun yapping away on her quarter-deck. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my old college friend, Gains, here, who was passing the projes, for that pert little piece. You’d never think it to look at him, would you?” Gains, feigning to discover something which needed adjustment in the training mechanism, ducked his head behind the breech of his gun at this juncture, and did not bob up again until a resumption of the yarn deflected the centre of interest back to Number Two.

“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

was slammed hard against the starboard wire rail, which must have kept me from being ditched then and there. A lot of the wreckage from the Bow’s shot-up bridge showered down on the Seagull’s fo’c’sl’, but my friend, Jock Campbell, floated down on the side toward the bridge, so I had no chance to welcome him. From where I was when I pulled up to my feet, it looked as if the Bow only lacked a few feet from cutting all the way through us, and as soon as I saw her screws beating up the sea as she tried to go astern, I had the feeling that the whole fo’c’sl’ of the Gull must break off and sink as soon as the ‘plug’ was pulled out. I was still sitting tight, though, when that howl started that we were already breaking off and going down, and—well, I joined the rush, and it was just as easy as stepping from a launch to the side of a quay. I’m not trying to make out a case for anybody, but the little bunch of us who climbed to the Bow from that half-cut-off fo’c’sl’ sure had more excuse than them that swarmed over from aft and leaving the main solid lump of the ship. But we none of us had no business clambering off till we were ordered. In doing that we were only asking for trouble, and we sure got it.

“The fo’c’sl’ of the Bow was all buckled up in waves from the collision, and there was a slipperiness underfoot that I twigged didn’t come from sea water just as soon as I stumbled over the bodies lying round the wreck of the port foremost gun

where I climbed over. We couldn’t get aft very well on account of the smashed bridge, and so the bunch of us just huddled up there like a lot of sheep, waiting for some one to tell us what to do. The captain had already left the bridge and was conning her from aft—or possibly the engine-room—at this time. From the way she was shaking and swinging, I knew they were trying to worry her nose out, putting the engines astern, now one and now the other. The clanking and the grinding was something fierce, but pretty soon she began to back clear.

“It was just a minute or two before the Bow tore free from her that the poor old Gull got the wallop that was finally responsible for doing her in. This was from a destroyer that came charging up out of the night and wasn’t able to turn in time to clear the Gull’s stern, with the result that she went right through it. Her sharp stem slashed through the quarterdeck like it was cutting bully beef, slicing five or ten feet of it clean off, so that it fell clear and sank. The jar of it ran through the whole length of the Seagull, and I felt the quick kick of it even in the Bow. In fact, I think the shock of this second collision was the thing that finally broke them clear of the first, for it was just after that I saw the wreck of the Seagull’s bridge begin to slide away along the Bow’s starboard bow, as what was left of it wriggled clear.

“It wasn’t much of a look I had at this last

destroyer, but I had a hunch even then that she was the Wreath, who had been our next astern. It wasn’t till a long time afterward that I learned for certain that this was a fact. The Wreath had followed us out of line when we turned to clear the stopped and burning Killarney, and then, when we messed up with the Bow, not having time to go round, she had to take a short cut through the tail feathers of the poor old Seagull. Then she tore right on hell-for-leather hunting for Huns, for it’s each ship for herself and the devil take the hind-most in the destroyer game more than in any other.

“I saw the water boiling into the hole in the side of the Seagull as the Bow backed away, and expected every minute to see the for’rard end of her break off and sink. But beyond settling down a lot by the head, she still held together and still floated. Bulkheads fore and aft were holding, it looked like, and there was still enough ‘ship’ left to carry on with. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the blurred wreck of her begin to gather stern way. But it was a fact. Though her rudder, of course, was smashed or carried away, and though she couldn’t go ahead without breaking in two, she was still able to move through the water, and perhaps even to steer a rough sort of course with her screws. As it turned out, it wouldn’t have made no difference whether we was in her or no; but just the same it was blooming awful, standing

there and knowing that you’d left her while she still had a kick in her. The ragged line where some of the wrecked stern of her showed against the phosphorescent glow of the churn of her screws—that was my good-bye peep at all that was left of the good old Seagull. Gains here, or Jock Campbell, can tell you what her finish was. I don’t like to talk about it.

“Some of us tried to get aft as soon as we were clear of the Seagull, but couldn’t make the grade over the wreck of the bridge. As all the officers and men who had been there had either been killed or wounded, or had gone to the after steering position they were now conning her from, we were as much cut off from them as though we were on another craft altogether. All the crews of her fo’c’sl’ guns—or such of them as were still alive—were in the same fix. So we just bunched up there in the dark and waited. Some of the wounded were in beastly shape, but there wasn’t much to be done for them, even in the way of first aid. Some shipmates of other times drifted together in the darkness, and I remember ’specially—it was while I was trying to tie up some guy’s scalp with the sleeve of my shirt—hearing one of them telling another of a wool mat he had just made, all with ravellings from ‘Harry Freeman.’ [B] Funny how it’s the little things like that a man remembers.

The gunner whose head I bound up was telling me just how the Bow happened to be strafed, but it went in one ear and out of the other.

[B] The bluejackets’ name for knitted woollen gifts from friends on the beach.

“But the queerest thing was me hearing some guy lying all messed up on the deck muttering something about skookum kluches, and some more Chinook wa-wa that I knew he couldn’t have picked up anywhere else but from serving in a ‘T.B.D.’ working up and down the old Inland Passage from Vancouver Island. I felt my way to where he was huddled up in the wreck of a smashed gun, told him that I was another tilicum from the ’Squimalt Base, and asked him what ship he had been there in. I knew there was a good chance that we’d been mates in the old Virago, and there even seemed a familiar sound to his voice. But I wasn’t fated ever to find out. He just kept on muttering, slipping up on some words as if something was wrong with his mouth, and I didn’t dare light a match, of course. When I tried to ease him up a bit by lifting so he’d lie straight—well, all of him didn’t seem to come along when I started dragging by his shoulders. I never did find what was wrong with him, for right then new troubles of my own set in.

“I was still down on my knees trying to locate what was missing with this poor guy, when—out of the corner of my eye, for it was near behind me—I spotted the flash of a ship challenging. Bow challenged back—from somewhere aft—and then what

I piped at once for a Hun destroyer switched on searchlights and opened fire. She was about two cables off on our port quarter, heading right for us and blazing away with one or two guns, probably all that would bear on that course. A second destroyer, right astern her, didn’t seem to be firing. I heard the bang and saw the flash of two or three shells bursting somewhere amidships, and then the Bow’s port after gun began to reply. The crews of all the others were knocked out, and so were the searchlights.

“Between the twenty-three from the Seagull and what were left of the Bow’s fo’c’sl’ guns’ crews, there must have been thirty-five to forty men bunched together there for’rard of the wreck of the bridge. When the firing started, the whole kaboodle of us did what you’re always under orders to do when you have nothing to stand up for—laid down. Or, rather, we just tumbled into a heap like a pile of dead rabbits.

“I went sprawling over the poor devil I was trying to help, and there were two or three on top of me. Into that squirming hump of human flesh one of the Hun’s projes landed kerplump. It didn’t hit me at all, that one, but I can feel yet the kind of heave the whole bunch gave as it ploughed through. Then it was like warm water was being thrown on the pile in buckets, but it wasn’t till I had scrambled out and found it sticky that I twigged it was blood.

“Bad as it was, it might have been a lot worse. There hadn’t been enough resistance to explode the proj, and so it killed only four or five and wounded, maybe, twice that, where it would have scoured every man jack of us into the sea and Kingdom Come if it had gone off. The next one found something in the wreck of the bridge hard enough to crack it off though, and it was a ragged scrap of its casing that drove in to the point of my hip and put a kink in my rolling gait that I’ve never quite shaken out yet. It wasn’t much of a hurt to what it gave some, though, ’specially a lad that caught the main kick of it and got ditched to starboard, some of him going under the wire rail, and some over.

“The Huns couldn’t have known how down and out the Bow really was, for there was nothing in the world but that one port gun to prevent their closing and polishing her off. The chances are they recognised her class, knew she was more than a match for the pair of them if she was right, and were glad to get off with no more’n an exchange of shots in passing. That was the end of the fighting for the Bow, and about time, too. Her bows were stove in, all the fore part of her was full of water, her bridge was smashed and useless, her W.T. and searchlights were finished, all but one gun was out of action, and—when they came to count noses next day—forty-two of her crew were dead. Far from looking for more trouble, it was now only a

question of making harbour, and even that—as it turned out—was touch-and-go for two days.

“It was about one in the morning when that brush with the destroyers came off, and after that there was nothing to do but hang on till daylight and they could clear a way to reach us from abaft the wreckage of the bridge. It was pretty awful, ticking off the minutes there in the darkness. A good many of the worst knocked about were talking a bit wild, but I never heard the guy with the Chinook wa-wa again. He must have died and been pitched over while I was being bandaged up. I did hear the ‘wool-mat-maker’ yapping again, though, saying how ‘target cloth’ was better to work on than canvas, and describing how to pull the stuff through in a loose loop, and then cut them so that they bunched up in ‘soft, puffy balls.’ Seems like I was cussing him when I dropped off to sleep.

“I must have bled a good deal, for I slept like a log for four or five hours, and woke up only when some one turned me over and began to finger my hip. It was broad daylight, but hazy, and the sun just showing through. Some of the wounded had already been carried aft, and they were mostly dead ones that were lying around. These were being sewed up in canvas to get ready to bury. I thought there was something familiar in the face of one guy I saw them laying out and sort of collecting together, but it wasn’t till later that it suddenly came to me that he was the one I had seen

by firelight when he stood up and looked at himself where he’d been shot in two.

“The two guys who bundled me up in a ‘Neil Robertson’ stretcher and packed me aft, picking their way over and through the wreckage, were both all bound up with rags, and so was about every one else I saw. They took me below into the wardroom, and then, because that was full up, on to some officer’s cabin, where they found a place for me on the deck. After a while, a little dark guy—he was also a good deal bandaged, and so splashed with blood that I didn’t notice at the time he was a sick bay steward—came in, washed my wound out with some dope that smarted like the devil, and tied it up. He worked like a streak of greased lightning, and then went on to some one else. That chap was Pridmore, and, let me tell you, he was the real ‘top-liner’ of all the heroes of the Bow. The surgeon had been killed at the first salvo the night before, leaving no one but him to carry on through all the hell that followed. And some way—God knows how—he did it; yes, even though he was wounded three or four times himself, and though he had to go without sleep for more’n two days to find time to dress and tend the thirty or forty crocks he had on his hands. He was sure the star turn, that Pridmore, and I was glad to read the other day that they had given him the D.S.M. Not that he’d have all he deserved if they hung medals all over him; but—well, a guy likes

to have something to show that what he’s done hasn’t been lost in the shuffle entirely.”

I made an entry of “Pridmore, sick bay steward, Bow,” in my notebook for future reference, and as I was returning it to my pocket a sudden list to starboard, accompanied by a throbbing grind of the helm, heralded a sharp alteration of course. Round she went through ten or twelve points, finally to steady and stand away on a course that seemed to lead toward the dip in the skyline between the jagged range of mountains back of Monastir and the point where a lowering bank of cirro-cumuli hid the ancient abode of the gods on the snow-capped summit of Olympus. On Number Two assuring me that his yarn was spun, that there was nothing more to it save an attempt he had made, in spite of his wound, to get into a fight that started when some of the wounded were hissed by a gang of dockyard “mateys”—I clambered back to the bridge to learn the significance of the new move. I still wanted to hear Gains’ story of the Killarney, but I had already sized him up sufficiently to know that he was not the type of man who would unbosom himself before his mates. With him, I knew, I should have to watch my chances, and endeavour to have a yarn alone. Number Two’s parting injunction was to “try and have a go at Jock Campbell, ‘the human proj.’ Jock’s the guy at the after gun that looks like he was rigged out for deep-sea diving,” he said.

“Most likely he’ll only growl at you at first, but if he won’t warm up any other way, try him with a yarn about a skirt. He’s ‘verra fond o’ a braw lass,’ is Jock Campbell.”

Our alteration of course, the captain told me, was the consequence of an order received by wireless directing him to cross over and hunt down a strip along the western shore of the gulf which was not being covered by the present formation of the division. “I’ve had a signal stating that they’re on the track of one U-boat, and there may be something to make them think another has slipped further along and is lying in ambush for the convoy about off Volo. They’re evidently keeping the rest of the division heading in to meet the convoy itself.”

The Spark stood on to the north-west until the Vardar marshes showed as an olive-green rim around the bend of the gulf, before turning southward again to skirt the steep shingle-strewn beach along the alluvial “fans” spreading down to the sea from the base of Olympus. The wild-looking Thessalian shepherds were just driving their motley flocks down to the open foreshore to freshen up in the rising midday sea breeze, and it was when I assured Jock Campbell (where I found him leaning on the breech of the after gun and staring landwards with his bushy brows puckered in the incredulous scowl of a man who can’t credit the evidence

of his own eyes) that it was an actual fact that the fuzzy black sheep were wading in and drinking—if sparingly—of the salt water, that a basis of conversation was finally established. Up to that moment he had given no sign that any of my carelessly thrown out tentatives had penetrated to his ears through the “telepad” rig-out which established his connection with the gunnery control. But when, bringing my lips close to his nearest “ear-muff,” I shouted that I had come up along that coast from Lharissa but a few weeks previously by motor and pack-train, and that, in lieu of any fresh water for many miles in either direction, I had actually seen the sheep and goats drinking in flocks from the sea, the look of hostile suspicion in his eyes was replaced by one of friendly interest.

“Weel, weel, y’u dinna say so?” he ejaculated, easing away the edge of the helmet over one ear; “the puir wee beasties!” Then he volunteered that he had once kept from freezing to death in a snowstorm on Ben Nevis by curling up among his sheep, and I told how I had once sheared sheep (not mentioning it was for only half a day, and that my “clip” was composed of about equal parts mutton and wool) on a back blocks station in Queensland. Then he described how he had seen a big merino ram butt a Ford car off the road up Thurso way, and I—with more finesse than veracity—capped that with a yarn of how I had

seen a flock of Macedonian sheep blown up by a Bulgarian air-bomb, and how one of them had landed unhurt upon a passing motor lorry load of forage—and gone right on grazing! I reckoned that might be calculated to remind Jock of something of the same character which had befallen him on a certain memorable occasion, and I was not disappointed.

“‘Twas verra like wha’ cam ma way on the nicht the Bow rammed the Seagull at the fecht aff Jutland,” he commented instantly, with no trace of suspicion in his voice. “Wad ye care to hear aboot it? Ye wud? Weel, then——.” As brief, as direct and to the point was the plain unvarnished tale Jock Campbell told me the while a noon-day storm awoke reverberant echoes of the Jovian thunders in the snow-caverns of Olympus and the Spark hunted down through the jade green waters of the Thessalian coast for a U-boat that was supposed to be lurking in their lucent depths “somewhere off Volo.”

“Ah was at ma action station at the port foremost gun,” he began, wiping his perspiring brow with a wad of greasy waste, which left an undulant trail of oil from the recoil cylinder in its wake, “when we gaed bang into a line o’ big Hun cru’sers, and we lat blaze at them and them at us. The range was short, and wi’ their serchlichts lichten us up oor position wasna that Ah wad ca’ verra pleasant. Up gaed a Hun cru’ser in a spoort

o’ flame and reek, hit, Ah thocht, by a mouldie launched by oor next astern. Ah was fair jumpin’ wi’ joy at the sicht, when a hale salvo o’ screechin’ projes cam bang inta the fo’c’sl. Ah minded the licht o’ them mair than the soun’, which was na great.

“The Huns had switched aff their serchlichts when they opened fire, so that noo the projes was bursting in inky mirk. I doubtna oor midships and after guns was firing, but na the foremost, for Ah dinna mind being blinded by their licht afore the Hun projes gan bursting. My ain gun wudna bear on the Huns, so Ah was just standing by for the time, ready to train if we turned.

“Twa salvos cam—maybe frae twa different cru’sers—ane after the ither, wi’ aboot half a meenit atween. Ye ken that the licht o’ a shell-burst is ower afore ye can even think, and a’ the furst ane showed me was just the gun crews, standin’, and bracin’ themsel’s like when a big sea braks inboard. It was ower like a flash o’ lichtnin, and the licht had gone oot afore Ah saw anybody blown up or knocked oot. But Ah felt a michty blast o’ air and an awfu’ shaikin o’ the deck, and then the bang o’ lumps o’ projes dingin’ ’gainst the bridge and smackin’ through bodies.

“The flash o’ the burst o’ the second salvo tellt me what havoc the first had wrocht, but by noo ma een was licht-blind and Ah cudna see weel. The sta’bo’d gun was twisht oot o’ shape, and a’ the

crew but ane were strechit on the deck. To a’ appearance that lad had been laid oot wi’ the ithers, but noo he was puin himsel’ to his feet and crawlin’ up the wreck o’ the gun when a proj frae the second salvo burst richt alow him. By the flash Ah saw him flyin’ inta the air, and—by the licht o’ anither flash a bittie efter—then his corp, wi’ twa or three ithers, gang ower the side. A lump o’ that last proj carried awa’ the Number Wan o’ ma ain gun, and, onlike some o’ the ithers, not a bit o’ him was left ahint. Ah mesel’ was knockit flat, but wasna much the worse for a’ that.

“That was the hinmost Ah saw o’ the Huns for that nicht, and the last I mind o’ the Bow was the dead and deein’ wha covert the fo’c’sl’, wi’ the licht o’ the fires burnin’ aft flickerin’ ower them. Then cam’ a cry frae the bridge that a ’stroyer was closin’ us to port, and then Ah mind hearin’ the captain shoutin’ an order ower and ower, like he wasna bein’ answered frae the ither end o’ the voice-pipe. ‘Hard-a-port!’ he roared, but weel micht he shout for ay, for the qua’termaster, wi’ a’ on the signal bridge, was dead by noo, and the helm was left jammed hard-a-sta’bo’d.

“Then Ah felt her shudder as the engines went full speed astern, and Ah got to ma feet in time to see she was headin’ straicht for the fo’c’sl’ o’ a T.B.D. that was steerin’ cross her bows. And richt after that she must ha’ struck wi’ a michty crash. The next thing Ah mindit—weel, Ah didna

mind much save that I was lyin’ on ma back in a sort o’ narrow way atween twa high wa’s, wi’ a turrible pain in ma back and mony sea-boots trampin’ ower ma face. The bashin’ o’ the boots didna hurt me, for Ah was kind o’ dazed; but Ah seem to mind turnin’ ma face to the wa’, just like ye do whan the flees are botherin’ ye in the mornin’.

“What brocht me roun’, I’m thinkin’, was the shock that Ah got whan that wa’ ’gan to shak’ up and doon, and then slid richt awa’, leavin’ me hingin’ ower the brink o’ a black hole, wi’ water souchin’ aboot the bottom o’t. ’Twas like wakin’ oot o’ a bad dream and findin’ that the warst o’ it was true.

“Ah was too groggy to ken richt awa’ that the Bow had rammed anither ship and that Ah had been pitched oot o’ her into the wan she’d hit. Quite natteral, Ah thocht masel’ still in the Bow, seem’ that Ah cud be nae mair use on the fo’c’sl’, which was a’ smashed and rippit up and drappin’ to bits, Ah thocht that Ah ought to run aft to see if Ah could gie a haun.

“But when Ah tried to get up, Ah fund the bane o’ ma spine was so sair that Ah cudna stand straicht, and a’ Ah cud do was to craw’ and stagger alang. Every mon Ah knockit agin, and every bit of wreck Ah felt ower, sent me sprawlin’. Whan I fund that there was no so mony funnels as Ah minded afore, and whan Ah cudna find the W.T.

hoose, Ah thocht that they had been shot awa’. Findin’ a crew at stations by a midships gun, Ah speired if they was short o’ hauns. They said they werna, so Ah gaed alang aft, lookin’ for a chance to be useful.

“Ah was thinkin’ to masel’, ‘she’s awfu’ little shot up’ (for ye ken Ah had expectit her to be a’ to bits frae the way Ah’d heard the projes burstin’ ahint the bridge), whan a syren gae a michty shriek a’ most at ma lug, and Ah turned to see anither T.B.D., spootin’ fire frae her funnels and throwin’ a double bow wave higher’n her fo’c’sl’, headin’ richt inta us. Ah cud see that her helm was hard-a-port by the way her wake was boilin’, but it was nae guid. She turned enough to keep frae rammin’ us midships, but she cudna miss oor stern.

“Ah had just been tellt by ane o’ the after gun’s crew to get oot o’ the wa’ (they not bein’ short o’ hauns), whan this new craft hove inta sicht. At first it lookit like she wad cut thro’ for’ard o’ me, leavin’ me ahint to drown in the wreck o’ the stern. Then Ah thocht she was comin’ richt at me, and Ah started crawlin’ back to whaur Ah had come frae. But she keepit turnin’ and turnin’, so that she hit at last richt abaft the after gun. Ah fell a’ in a heap at the shock, and, tho’ Ah was a guid ten feet frae whaur her stem cut in, the bulge o’ her crunched into the quarterdeck till she passed sae close that suthin’ stickin’ oot frae her

side—it micht hae been the lip o’ a mouldie-tube, Ah’m thinkin’—gae ma puir back a sair dig, and there Ah was amang the mess left o’ the gun and its crew. Ah was near to bein’ dragged owerboard after that T.B.D., and when she was gone Ah fund masel’—for the second time in ane night—hangin’ ower the raggit edge o’ a black hole listenin’ to the swish o’ ragin’ waters.

“And then, gin that and ma half-broken back werna enough for ony mon, Ah hear some ane shoutit that they thocht that last rammin’ had done in the auld Seagull, and that the time wad soon come to ’bandon ship.

“‘Seagull!’ says Ah; ‘dinna ye ken this ship is the Bow?’ Ah kind o’ went groggy after that, and Ah have a sort o’ dim remembrance that some ane flashit an ’lectric torch in ma face and said that Ah must have been pitchit ower whan the Bow rammed the Seagull, and that Ah prob’ly hadna shaken doon to ma new surroundin’s. Ah tried hard to speir what kind o’ a shakin’ doon they meant gin this hadna been ane. But Ah didna seem to have the power to mak’ ma words come straicht, and they said, ‘He’s gane a bit off his chuck,’ and ca’d some ane to carry me below.

“The pains runnin’ up and doon ma spine when Ah was lowered doon the ladder were ower much for me, and Ah passed off for a bit. Whan Ah cam roun’ Ah was bein’ shoved along the ward-room table—whaur Ah had been lyin’—to mak’ room for

a lad wi’ bandages roun’ his head and a’ drippin’ wi’ salt water. His ship had gone doon twa hours syne, and maist o’ the time he had been in the water or roostin’ on a Carley Float. That lad’s name was Gains, noo the gun-layer o’ the fo’most gun o’ the Spark—him Ah saw ye talkin’ wi’ just noo. He was strong and cheery himsel’, but fower o’ his mates were chilled to the bane, and Ah wacht ’em shiver to death richt afore ma een.

“It was aboot daylicht when we pickit up a’ that was left o’ the crew o’ the Killarney, and aboot an hour efter we fell in wi’ the Sportsman, wha passed us a hawser and tried to tow, stern-first, what was left o’ the Seagull. Ah didna see what was wrang, but they tellt me that the wreck o’ the stern and the helm bein’ jammed hard a-sta’bo’d made sae much drag that the cable partit. Then there was naithing else to do—sin’ the Seagull cudna steam—but to sink her wi’ gun-fire. The captain askit permission for this by W.T., and when it came they ditched the books and signals, transferred abody to the Sportsman, and then gae her a roun’ or twa at the water-line wi’ the Sportsman’s guns. Doon she gaed, and that,” he concluded with a grin, “is the true yarn o’ the sinkin’ o’ the Seagull. If only o’ ma mates try to mak’ ye b’lieve that she foundert ’count o’ bein’ hit and holed by a ‘human proj’ kent as Jock Campbell, I’m hopin’ ye’ll no listen to ’em.”

CHAPTER II

“FIREBRAND”

It was a little incident which occurred one night when the Grand Fleet was returning to Base from one of its periodical sweeps through the North Sea that set Able-seaman Melton talking of the things he had seen and felt and heard the time he was standing anti-submarine watch in the Firebrand, when her flotilla of destroyers mixed itself up with a squadron of German cruisers in the course of the “dog-fight” which concluded the battle of Jutland.

I had found him, muffled to the eyes and dancing a jangling jig on a sleet-slippery steel plate to keep warm, when I picked my precarious way along the coco-matted deck and climbed up to the after searchlight platform of the Flotilla Leader I chanced to be in at the time. A fairly decent day was turning into a dirty night, and the steadily thickening mistiness which accompanied a sodden rain in process of transformation into soft snow had reduced the visibility to a point where the Commander-in-Chief deemed it safer for the Fleet to put back to open sea and take no further chances

among the treacherous currents and rocky islands that beset the approaches to the Northern Base.

The Flagship, which had received the order by wireless, flashed “Destroyers prepare to take station for screening when Fleet alters to easterly course at nine o’clock,” and shortly before that hour the Flotilla Leader made the signal to execute. Almost immediately I felt the hull of the Flyer take on an accelerated throb as her speed was increased, and a moment later the wake began to boil higher as the helm was put hard-a-starboard to bring her round. We were steaming a cable’s length on the starboard bow of the Olympus, the leading ship of the squadron at the time, and the carrying out of the manœuvre involved the Flyer’s leading her division across the head of the battleship line and down the other side on an opposite course, so that the destroyers would be in a position to resume night-screening formation when the fleet had finished turning.

Just how the captain of the Flyer happened to cut his course so fine I never learned, but the patchiness of the drifting mist must have had a good deal to do with making him misjudge his distance. At any rate, just as we had turned through nine or ten points, I suddenly saw the ominously bulking bows of the Olympus come juggernauting out of the night, with the amorphous loom of the bridge and foretop towering monstrously above. The Flyer seemed fairly to jump out of the water

at the kick her propellers gave her as the turbines responded to the bridge’s call for “More steam,” and a spinning puff of smoke darkened the glow above the funnels for a moment as fresh oil was sprayed upon the fires beneath the boilers.

It was a good deal like a cat scurrying in front of a speeding motor-car, and the consequences would have been more or less similar had not one of the Olympus’s swarming lookouts, peering into the darkness from his screened nest, gathered hint of the disaster that menaced in time to warn the forebridge. The great super-dreadnought responded to her helm very smartly considering her tonnage, and she turned just far enough to starboard to avoid grinding us under. I could almost look up through the port hawse-pipe as the flare of her bow loomed above my head, and the man standing by the depth-charges on the all-but-grazed stern of the Flyer might well have been pardoned even if the story his mates afterwards told of his action on this occasion were true—that he had tried to fend off one of the largest battleships afloat with a boat-hook.

A silhouette against the barely perceptible glow at the back of the forebridge of a “brass-hatted” officer shaking his fist as though in the act of ramping and roaring like a true British sailor moved by righteous anger; a forty or fifty degree heel to starboard as the curling bow-wave of the Olympus thwacked resoundingly along her port side, and

the Flyer drove on into the sleet-shot darkness to blow off accumulated steam in rolling clouds, allow her fluttering pulse to become normal, and resume the even tenor of her way.

Melton, A.B., whistling over and over the opening bars of the chorus of “Do You Want Us to Lose the War?” started his metallically clanking jig again, but presently, like a man with something on his mind, sidled over and shoved his Balaklava-bordered face against the outside of the closely-reefed hood of my “lammy” coat, and muttered thickly something about being afraid he had got himself into trouble. When I had pulled loose a snap and improved communications by unmuffling a lee ear, I learned that it had just occurred to the good chap that he failed to report to the bridge the battleship he had sighted “fifty yards to the port beam,” and he was wondering whether there would be a “strafe” coming from the skipper about it.

“Fact is, sir,” he said, speaking brokenly as the galloping gusts every now and then forced a word back into his mouth, “that that rip-rarin’ stem, with the white foam flyin’ off both sides of it, bearing down right for where I was standin’—all that was so like what I saw the night of Jutland in the Firebrand that—that the turn it give me took my mind right back and—and I wasn’t thinkin’ o’ anything else till the ’Lympus was gone by.”

I assured him that, since the Olympus had doubtless

been sighted from the bridge several winks before she had been visible from his less-favourable vantage, they would probably have been too busy to respond to his call at the voice-pipe even had he tried to report what he saw.

“If I were you,” I said, “I would forget all about that, and try to explain how a cruiser that the Firebrand was about to ram bow-to-bow” (I had, of course, already heard something of that dare-devilish exploit) “could have looked to you like the Olympus ramping down on a right-angling course and threatening to slice off the Flyer’s stern with all her depth-charges. I quite understood that one ramming is a good deal like another, as far as a big ship hitting a destroyer fair and square is concerned, but——”

“’Twasn’t that first cru’ser ’tall, sir,” Melton interrupted, nuzzling into my “lammy” hood again to make himself heard. “Twas ’nother ’un, sir—a wallopin’ big un. The seas was stiff wi’ cru’sers fer a minit, sir, an’ no sooner was we clear o’ the first un than the second come tearin’ down on us, tryin’ to cut us in two amidships. An’ that last un was a battl’ cru’ser nigh as big as the ’Lympus, all shot up in the funnels and runnin’ wild an’ bloody-minded like a mad bull. We were pretty nigh to bein’ stopped dead, an’ if she hadn’t been slower’n cold grease wi’ her helm she’d ha’ eat us right up.”

There had been nothing of malice aforethought in my action in cornering Melton on the searchlight

platform that night, for, as it chanced, I had failed to learn up to that moment that he had been in the famous Firebrand at Jutland. Nor, with the wind and sea getting up as fast as the glass and the thermometer were going down, was the time or the place quite what a man would have chosen for anything in the way of cosy fireside reminiscence. But, both these facts notwithstanding, I felt that, since I was leaving the Flyer to go to another base directly she arrived in harbour on the morrow, it would be criminal to neglect the opportunity of hearing what was perhaps the most sportingly spectacular of all the Jutland destroyer actions related by one who was actually in it. I did not dare to distract Melton’s attention from his lookout by drawing him into talking while he was still on watch, but, when he was relieved at ten o’clock, I waylaid him at the foot of the ladder with a pot of steaming hot ship’s cocoa (foraged from the galley by a sympathetic ward-room steward) and both pockets of my “lammy” coat filled with the remnants of a box of assorted Yankee “candy” looted from the American submarine in which I had been on patrol the week before.

Melton rose to the lure instantly—or perhaps I should say “fell to the bribe”—for the British bluejacket, if only he were given a chance to develop, is quite as sweet of tooth as his brother Yank. Because I could hardly take him to the captain’s cabin, which I was occupying for the

moment, for a yarn, and because he, likewise, could not take me down to the mess deck to disturb the off-watch sleepers with our chatter, there was nothing to do but carry on as best we could in the friendly lee of one of the funnels.

It was a night of infernal inkiness by now, and only clinging patches of soft snow and their blanker blankness revealed the dimly guessable lines of whaler and cowls and torpedo tubes and the loom of the loftier bridge. The battleship line was masked completely by the double curtain of the darkness and the snow, and only a tremulous greyness, barely discernible in the intervals of the flurries of flakes where the starboard bow-wave curled back from the Olympus, gave an intermittent bearing to help in keeping station. Underfoot was the blackness of the pit, not the faintest gleam reflecting from the waves washing over the weather side to swirl half-knee high about our sea boots. Even overhead all that was visible were fluttering patches of snow flakes dancing through the haloes of pale rose radiance that crowned the tops of the funnels. The wail of the wind in the wireless aerials, the crash of the surging beam seas, the throb of the propellers, and the pussy-cat purr of the spinning turbines—these were the fit accompaniment to which Melton A.B. recited to me the epic of the Firebrand at Jutland.

The cocoa I quaffed mug for mug with Melton, down to the last of the sweet, sustaining “settlings”

in the bottom of the pot; but the candy I kept in reserve to draw on from time to time as it was needed to lubricate his tongue and stoke the smouldering fires of his memory. I started him off with a red-and-white “barber’s pole” stick, which took not a little fumbling with mittened hands to extract from its greased tissue paper wrapper, and the seductive fragrance of crunched peppermint mingled with the acrid fumes of burning petroleum as he leaned close and began to tell how the ——th Flotilla, to which the Firebrand belonged, screening the ——th B.S. of the Battle Fleet, came upon the scene toward the end of the long summer afternoon. He had witnessed Beatty’s consummate manœuvre of “crossing the T” of the enemy line with the four that remained of his battered First Battle Cruiser Squadron, and he had seen the main Battle Fleet baulked of its action the lowering mists and the closing in of darkness; but it was not until full night had clapped down its lid that the fun for the Firebrand really began.

“It was just ’twixt daylight an’ dark,” he said, reaching me a steadying hand in the darkness as the Flyer teetered giddily down the back of a receding sea, “that the flotilla dropped back to take stashun ’stern the battl’ships we was screenin’. The Killarney was leadin’ an’ after her came the Firebran’, Seagull, Wreath, an’ Consort, makin’ up the First Divishun. Wreath an’ Consort sighted some Hun U-boats and ’stroyers while this move was on,

an’ plunk’d off a few shots at ’em. Don’t think wi’ any fatal consequence. Then there come the rattle of light gun fire from the south’ard, like from cru’sers or battleships repellin’ T.B.D.’s. Then it was all serene for mor’n an ’our, an’ then all hell opens up.”

I suspected, from the sounds he made, that Melton had bitten into a block of milk chocolate without removing its wrapping of foil and paper, but presently his enunciation grew less explosive and more intelligible.

“It was Hun cru’sers drivin’ down on us from the starboard quarter that started the monkey-show,” he said, “an’ that bein’ the nor’west it was hardly where we’d reason to expect ’em from. It looks like we had ’em clean cut off, wi’ the ’hole Battl’ Fleet steamin’ ’tween ’em an’ their way back home, an’ that they was tryin’ to sneak through in the darkness. The Wreath, at the end o’ the line nearest ’em, spotted ’em first, and she, ’cause she didn’t want to give herself ’way wi’ flashin’, reported what she’d seen by low-power W.T. to the rest o’ the flotilla. Course I—standin’ watch aft—didn’t know nothin’ ’bout that signal, so that the first I hears o’ the Huns was when they all opened up on the poor ol’ Killarney, ’cause she was the leader. I s’pose, and she started firin’ back at their flashes.

“The leadin’ Hun flashed his searchlight on the Killarney as he opened up, but shut off sharp when

Killarney came back at him. I could see some o’ the projes flittin’ right down the light beam until it blinked off, an’ it was a flock of two or three of these that I kept my eye on all the way till they bashed into the Killarney’s bridge and busted. She was zigzaggin’ a coupl’ o’ points on Firebrand’s starboard bow just then, so my standin’ aft didn’t prevent my gettin’ a good look at what was happenin’. I could see the bodies o’ four or five men flyin’ up wi’ the wreckage o’ the explosion, an’ then, all in a minnit, she was rollin’ in flames from the funnels right for’ard. By the light o’ it I could see the crews o’ the ’midships and after guns workin’ ’em like devils, an’ twice anyhow, an’ I think three times, I saw a bright, shiny slug slip over the side, an’ knew they were loosin’ mouldies to try to get their own back from the Hun.

“The sea was boilin’ up red as blood where the light from the burnin’ Killarney fell on the spouts the Huns’ projes was throwin’ up all round her. She was the fairest mark ever a gun trained on, and p’raps that was what tempted the Hun to keep pumpin’ projes at her instead o’ givin’ more attenshun to the rest of the divishun trailin’ astern. That was what gave Firebran’ her first chance o’ alterin’ the Hun navy list that night.

“The second cru’ser in the Hun line was bearin’ right abeam to starboard by now, an’ I could see by her gun-flashes she was of good size, wi’ four long funnels fillin’ up all the deck ’tween her two masts.

She was firing fast in salvoes wi’ all the guns that would bear on the burnin’ Killarney. I could just make out by the light from the Killarney, which was growin’ stronger every minnit, that the crew of our after torpedo tube was gettin’ busy, an’ while I was watchin’ ’em, over flops the mouldie and starts to run. I knew it was aimed for one or t’other o’ the two leadin’ Huns, but wasn’t dead sure which till I saw the after funnels an’ mainmast o’ the second toppl’ over an’ a big flash o’ fire take their place. Then it looked like there was exploshuns right off fore an’ aft, and then fires broke out all over her from stem to stern. Next thing I knows, she takes a big list to starboard, an’ over she goes, wi’ more exploshuns throwin’ up spouts o’ steam, as she rolls under. The second mouldie—it got away right after the first—was never needed to finish the job. The Firebran’ had evened up the score for the Killarney, wi’ a good margin over.

“The captain turned away to reload mouldies after that, an’ just as we swung out o’ line I saw a salvo straddle the Killarney, and two or three shells hit square ’tween her funnels an’ after sup’rstruct’r’. They must have gone off in her engine room, for there was more steam than fire risin’ from her as we turned an’ left her astern, an’ she looked stopped dead. A Hun cru’ser was closin’ the blazin’ wreck o’ her, firm’ hard; but, by Gawd, what d’you think I saw. The only patch on the ol’ Killarney that was free o’ the ragin’ fires was

her stern, an’ from there the steady flashes of her after gun showed it was bein’ worked as fast an’ reg’lar as ever I seen it done at any night-firin’ practice. I looked to see her blow up every minnit, but she was still spittin’ wi’ that littl’ after gun when the sudden flashin’ up of the fightin’ lights for’ard turned my attenshun nearer home.

“I could just make out a line of what looked like ’stroyers headin’ cross our bows, an’ thought we’d stumbled into ’nother nest o’ Huns till they answered back wi’ the signal o’ the day, an’ I knew it was one of our own flotillas we’d been catchin’ up to. That flashin’ up o’ lights come near to doin’ for us tho’, for it showed us up to a big Hun steamin’ three or four miles off on the port beam, an’ he claps a searchlight on us an’ chases it up wi’ a sheaf o’ shells. The only proj that hit us bounced off wi’out doin’ much hurt to the ship, but some flyin’ hunks o’ it smashed the mouldie davit and knocked out most o’ the crews o’ the after tubes, includin’ the T.G.M. [C] That put a stop to reloadin’ operashuns wi’ a mouldie in only one o’ the tubes. By good luck we managed to zigzag out o’ the searchlight beam right after that, an’ was free to turn back an’ try to start a divershun for the poor ol’ Killarney.

[C] Torpedo Gunner’s Mate.

“Her fires looked to be dyin’ down when we first picked her up, but right after that some more projes bust on her an’ she started blazin’ harder than

ever. I watched for the spittin’ o’ that littl’ after gun, but when it come it looked to spurt right out o’ the heart o’ a blazin’ furnace, showin’ the fire was now burnin’ from stem to stern. One more salvo plastered over her, an’ that one got no reply. The good ol’ ‘Killy’ had shot her bolt, an’ her finish looked a matter o’ minnits.

“It was plain enough if anyone was still livin’ they was goin’ to need pickin’ up in a hurry, an’ the captain put the Firebran’ at full speed to close her an’ stan’ by to give a han’. Just then I saw a Hun searchlight turned on and start feelin’ its way up to where the Killarney was burning, wi’ a cru’ser followin’ up the small end o’ the beam, seemin’ to be nosin’ in to end the mis’ry. She did not bear right for a mouldie, but we opened up wi’ the foremost gun, an’ I saw the shells bustin’ on her bridge and fo’c’sl’ like rotten apples chucked ’against a wall. The light blinked off as the first proj hit home, but there was no way to tell if it was shot away or no. It was the second time that night that we’d done our bit to ease off the hell turned loose on the Killarney. Likewise it was the last. From then on we had our own partic’lar hell to wriggle out of, wi’ no time left to play ‘Venging Nemisus’ to our stricken sisters. Just a big bonfire sittin’ on the sea an’ lickin’ a hole in the night wi’ its flames—that was the last I saw of the ol’ Killarney.”

Melton paused for a moment as if engrossed in

the memories conjured up by his narrative, and I took advantage of the interval to hand him one of those most loved lollipops of Yankee youngster-hood, a plump, hard ball of toothsome saccharinity called—obviously from its resistant resiliency—an “All-Day Sucker.” When he spoke again I knew in an instant that a sure instinct had led him to make the proper disposition of the succulent dainty—that it was stowed snugly away in a bulging cheek like a squirrel’s nut, to melt away in its own good time.

“’Tween the glare of the burnin’ Killarney,” Melton went on after thrashing his hands across his shoulders for a minute to warm them up, “the gleam o’ the Hun cru’ser’s searchlight an’ the flash o’ our own gun-fire, we must all have been more or less blinded in the Firebrand, for we had run close to what may have been a part of the main en’my battl’ line wi’out nothin’ bein’ reported. Our firin’ had give us away, o’ course, an’ the nearest ships must have had their guns trained on us, waitin’ to be sure what we was. One o’ ’em must have made up his mind we was en’my even before we spotted ’em at all, for the first thing I saw was the white o’ the bow wave an’ wake as she turned toward us, prob’ly to ram. She’d have caught us just about midships if the bridge hadn’t sighted her an’ done the only thing open to do—turned to meet her head on.

“I don’t remember that either she or us switched

on recognition lights, but the Hun opened with ev’rything that would bear just before we slammed together. It must have been by the gun-flashes that I saw she had three funnels, wi’ what looked like some kind o’ marks painted on ’em in red. I saw our second funnel give a jump and crumple up as a proj hit it, an’ then a spurt o’ flame—from a big gun fired almost point-blank—looked to shoot right on to the bridge. I thought that it must have killed ev’ry man there an’ carried away all the steering gear. But no.

“The old Firebrand wi’ helm hard-a-port, went swingin’ right on thro’ the point or two more that saved her life. I could feel by the way she jumped an’ gathered herself that last second that the ol’ girl was still under control. Then we struck wi’ a horrible grind an’ crash, an’ I went sprawlin’ flat.

“If the Hun had hit us half a wink sooner, or if we had turned half a point less, we’d have been swallowed alive and split up in small hunks. As it was, we didn’t have a lot the worst o’ it, an’ p’raps we more than broke even. It was like a mastiff an’ terrier runnin’ into each other in the dark, an’ the terrier only gettin’ run over an’ the mastiff gettin’ a piece bit clean out o’ his neck. It was our port bows that come together, an’ for only a sort o’ glancin’ blow. But it was the stem o’ the Firebran’ that was turned in sharpest, an’ it was

her that was hittin’ up—by a good ten knots—the most speed. She was left in a terribl’ mess, but most o’ the damage was from her rammin’ the Hun, not from the Hun rammin’ her. While as for what she did to the Hun, the best proof o’ it was the more’n twenty feet of her side-platin’—an upper strake, wi’ scuttl’ holes in it an’ pieces o’ gutterway deck hangin’ to it—that we found in the wreck of our fo’c’sl’. If the hole that hunk of steel left behind it didn’t put that Hun out o’ bus’ness as a fightin’ unit till she got back to port an’ had a refit, I’ll eat it.”

I wasn’t quite clear in my mind whether Melton meant to imply that he would eat the hole in the Hun cruiser or the hunk of steel that came out of it, but there was no room for doubt that the violent crunch with which he emphasised the assertion had put a period to the life of his “All-Day Sucker,” which was never intended to be treated like chewing toffy. Dipping into the grab-bag of my “lammy” coat pocket for something with which to replace it, therefore, I brought up a stick of chewing gum, and he resumed his story in an atmosphere sweet with the ineffable odour of spearmint and escaping steam.

“How much the Hun was shook up by that smash,” Melton continued, “you can reckon from this: We was almost dead stopped for some minnits, an’ all out o’ control from the time of rammin’ till they started connin’ her from the

engine-room. There was one fire flickerin’ in the wreckage o’ the forebridge, an’ another somewhere ’midships, while there was also a big glare throwin’ up where the foremost funnel was shot away. We was as soft an’ easy a target as even a Hun could ask for; an’ yet that one was in too much of a funk wi’ his own hurts to let off a singl’ other gun at us in all the time that he must have been flounderin’ on at not much more’n point-blank range. Mebbe he was knocked up even more’n we thought. Nothin’ else would account for him not havin’ ’nother go at us.

“Just one wild bally mess—that was what the Firebran’ looked like when I got to my feet again an’ cast an eye for’ard. There was too much smoke an’ steam to see clear, an’ it was mostly flickers o’ red light where the fires were startin’, an’ big, black shadows full o’ wreckage. As it looked to me from aft—tho’, o’ course, the full effects wasn’t vis’bl’ till daylight, the bridge an’ searchlight platform an’ mast was shoved right back an’ piled up on the foremost funnel. The whaler an’ dingy was carried away, an’ my first thought, for I was sure she was sinkin’, was that we had no boats to put off in. I could see two or three wounded crawlin’ out o’ the raffle, but I knew that the most to be dished would be in the wreck o’ the bridge. The queerest thing o’ all was the flashes o’ green an’ blue light flutterin’ thro’ the tangled steel o’ the wreckage. At first I thought

I was sort o' seein' things; but fin'lly I figgered it out as the juice from the busted 'lectric wires short-circuitin'. It meant, I tol' myself, that the men under them tons o' steel was bein' 'lectrocuted on top o' bein' crushed.

“It looked like any one o' three or four things would be enough to finish the ol' Firebran'. I remember thinkin' that if she didn't blow up, she was sure to burn up; an' that if, by chance, she missed doin' one o' them, she was goin' to founder anyhow. She was already well down by the head, an’—leastways, it looked so to me at the time—still settlin’ fast. An’ I was just reflectin’ that, even if she was lucky enough not to burn up, or blow up, or founder, she was still too easy pickin’ for the Huns to miss doin’ her in one way or ’nother, when, thunderin’ out o’ the darkness an’ headin’ up to crumpl’ underfoot what was left o’ the stopped an’ helpless Firebran’, come a hulkin’ big battl’ cru’ser, the one I was just tellin’ you the ’Lympus set me thinkin’ on a while back.

“Starin’ at our own fires must have blinded me a good bit, or I’d have seen him sooner’n I did. He looked like he been gettin’ no end o’ a hammerin’, for his second funnel was gone, an’ out of the hole it left a big spurt o’ flame an’ smoke was rushin’ that would have showed him up for miles. There was a red hot fire ragin’ under his fo’c’sl’, too, an’ I saw the flames lashin’ round thro’ some jagged shell holes in his port bow. Lucky for us, he was

runnin’ for his life, an’ had no time to more than try to run us down in passin’.

“It must have been just from habit I yelled down my voice-pipe, for I knew they was no longer controllin’ her from the bridge; but the roarin’ o’ a fire an’ the clank of bangin’ metal was the only sounds that come back. When I looked up again the Hun was right on top of us, an’ I must have just stood there—froze—like to-night wi’ the ’Lympus. By the grace o’ Gawd, he hadn’t been abl’ to alter course enough to do the trick. His stem shot by wi’ twenty feet or more clearance, an’ it was only the fat bulge of him that kissed us off in passin’. It was by the glare o’ his fires, not ours, which throwed no light abaft the superstructure I was on, that I saw some of the hands was already workin’ to rig a jury steerin’ gear aft. Then he was gone, an’ much too full o’ his own troubles to turn back, or even send the one heavy proj that would have cooked us for good an’ all. A few minutes more, an’ the wreck o’ the Firebran’ begun gatherin’ way again, an’ when I saw her come round to her nor’westerly course an’ push ahead wi’out settlin’ any deeper, I knew that the bulkheads were holdin’ an’ that—always providin’ we run into no more Huns—there was a fightin’ chance o’ pullin’ thro’.

“There was about a hundred jobs that needed doin’ all at once, an’ ’tween the loss o’ dead an’ wounded—only about half the reg’lar ship’s company was fit for work. The bulkheads had to be

shored, for, wi’ the fo’c’sl’ crumpled up like a concertina an’ the deck an’ side platin’ ripped off from the stem right back to the capstan engine, she was open to the whole North Sea from the galley right for’ard. This made the first an’ second bulkheads o’ no use, an’ made the third bulkhead all that stood ’tween us an’ goin’ to the bottom. Then there was the fires—’bove deck an’ ’tween decks—that had to be put out ’fore they got to the magazines, an’ the engines to be kept goin’, an’ the ship to be navigated, an’ the wounded to be looked to. An’ on top o’ all this, the ship had to be got into some kind o’ fightin’ trim in case any more Huns come pokin’ her way. I won’t be havin’ to tell you it was one bally awful job, carryin’ on like that in the dark, an’ wi’ half the ship’s company knocked out.

“When I saw it was the first lieutenant that seemed to be directin’ things, I took it the captain was done for, an’ that was what everyone thought till, all o’ a sudden, he come wrigglin’ out o’ the wreck o’ the bridge—all messed up an’ covered wi’ blood, but not much hurt otherways—an’ began carryin’ on just as if it was ‘Gen’ral Quarters.’ Some cove wi’ the stump o’ his hand tied up wi’ First Aid dressin’ was sent up to relieve me on the lookout, an’ I was put to fightin’ fires an’ clearin’ up the wreck ’bove decks. As there ain’t much to burn on a ’stroyer if the cordite ain’t started, we were not long gettin’ the fires in hand, even wi’ havin’—cause the hoses an’ the fire-mains was

knocked out—to dip up water in buckets throwed over the side. Wi’ the wreckage, the most we could do was to dig out the dead an’ wounded an’ rig up for connin’ ship from aft.

“It was a nasty job when we started in on the wreck o’ the forebridge, for the witch-lights o’ the short-circuit were still dancin’ a cancan in the smashed an’ twisted steel plates an’ girders, an’ it kept a cove lookin’ lively to keep from switchin’ some of the blue-green lightnin’ into his own frame by way o’ his ax or saw. No one that had been on any part o’ the bridge was wi’out some kind o’ hurt, but the three dead was a deal less than was to be expected. There was also three very bad knocked up, an’ on one o’ them the surgeon—a young probasuner R.N.V.R.—performed an operashun in the dark. It was a cove he was ’fraid to move wi’out tinkerin’ up a bit, an’ he pulled him thro’ all right in the end. One o’ the crew of the foremost gun never turned up, an’ we figured he must have been lost overboard when she rammed.

“Pois’nous as it was workin’ on deck, that wasn’t a circumstance to what it must have been carryin’ on below. I didn’t see nothin’ o’ that end o’ the show, thank Gawd, but every man as came out o’ it alive said it was just one livin’ bloomin’ hell, no less. There was a good number o’ coves who did things off han’ that saved the ship from blowin’ up, or burnin’ up, or sinkin’, an’ three o’ the best o’ ’em was a engine-room artif’cer, a stoker P.O., and a

stoker that was in the fore stokehold when the bridge was pushed back an’ carried away that funnel. They ducked into their resp’rators, stuck to their posts a’ kept the fans goin’ till the fumes was all cleared away. Nothin’ else would have saved the foremost boiler—an’ wi’ it the ship herself—blowin’ up right then an’ there. Same way, gettin’ on the jump in backin’ up Number 3 bulkhead—the one that was holding back the whole North Sea—was all that kept it from bulgin’ in an’ floodin’ right back into the stokeholds. It was the chief art’ficer engineer that took on that job, an’ it was him, too, that stopped up the gaps left by the knocking down o’ the first and second funnels.

“Even after it at last seemed like we was goin’ to keep her from sinkin’ or blowin’ up, things still looked so bad to the captain that he ditched the box o’ secret books for fear o’ their fallin’ into the hands o’ the Hun. As we’d have been more hindrance than help to the Fleet, he did not try to rejoin the flotilla, but turned west an’ headed for the coast o’ England on the chance of makin’ the nearest base while she still hung together. All night she went slap-bangin’ along, wi’ the engines shakin’ out a few more rev’lushuns just as fast as it seemed the bulkhead was shored strong enough to stand the push o’ the sea.

“Mornin’ found her still goin’, but what a sight she was! My first good look at what was left o’ her give me the same kind o’ a shock I got the first

time I had a peep at my mug in a glass after havin’ small-pox in Singapore. She wasn’t a ship at all, any more’n my face was a face. She was just a mess, that’s all, an’ clinkin’ an’ clankin’ an’ wheezin’ and sneezin’ an’ yawin’ all over the sea. An’ the sea was empty all the way roun’, wi’ no ship in sight to pass us a tow-line or pick us up if she chucked in her hand an’ went down.

“We had our hands so full keepin’ her afloat an’ under weigh, that it wasn’t till four in the afternoon—more’n sixteen hours after we rammed the Hun cru’ser—that we found time to bury our dead. It was like gettin’ a turribl’ load off your chest when we dropped ’em over in their hammocks wi’ a fire-bar stitched in alongside ’em to take ’em down. Nothin’ is so depressin’ to a sailor as bein’ shipmates wi’ a mate that ain’t a mate no longer. Even the ol’ Firebran’ ’peared to ride easier an’ more b’oyant after the buryin’ was over, as if she knowed the worst o’ her sorrer was left behind.

“Luck took a turn against us again just after dark, for the wind shifted six or seven points an’ started blowin’ strong from dead ahead. We had to alter course some to ease off the bang o’ the seas a bit, an’ fin’ly the speed had to be slowed even slower’n before to keep the bulkhead from being driv’ in. But she weathered it, by Gawd she did, an’ next mornin’ the goin’ was easier. We made the Tyne at noon. It was just a heap o’ ol’ scrap-iron so far as the eye could see, that they let into

the Middle Dock the next day, but it was scrap-iron that had come all the way from Jutland under its own steam, an’ wi’ no help from no one save what was left o’ the lads as once manned a ’stroyer called the Firebran’.

“It hadn’t taken long to reduce her from a ’stroyer to scrap-iron, an’ it didn’t seem like it took much longer—time goes fast on home leave—to turn that scrap-iron back into a ’stroyer again. The ol’ Firebran’s got many a good kick in her yet, so they say, an’ I’d ask for nothin’ better’n to be finishin’ the war in her.”

I thanked Melton for his yarn, bade him good night, and was about to start picking my way to my cabin to turn in, when I sensed rather than saw that there was something further he wanted to say, perhaps some final tribute to his officers and mates of the Firebrand, I thought. There was a shuffling of sea-booted feet on the steel deck, a nervous pulling off and on of woollen mittens, and it was out.

“I just wanted to say, sir,” he said, “that I likes the Yankee Jackies very much; ’specially their candy an’ chewin’ gum. I was just wonderin’ if that last stick you give me was all——”

I emptied both pockets before I renewed my thanks to Melton and bade him a final good night. There are strange ingredients entering into the composition of the cement that is binding Britain and America together, and if there is any objection to chewing gum it certainly cannot be on the ground that it lacks adhesiveness.

CHAPTER III

“BACK FROM THE JAWS”

I had gone to the Nairobi, not because the rather routine stunt her flotilla was on promised any excitement, but rather because of the notable part she had played in the Jutland action and the fact that I had been assured that there was still in her an officer who was said to have figured prominently in the splendid account she had given of herself on that occasion. As luck would have it, however, this officer had been appointed to another destroyer only a day or two previously, so that no veteran of the great action remained in the ward room. A canvass of the ship’s company revealed that one of the stoker petty officers was a Jutland survivor, but before I could run him to cover some kind of a light cruiser affair had occurred down Heligoland Bight way which called for destroyer work in that direction, and the next two days, with the flotilla creasing up the brine at high speed and everyone at Action Stations most of the time, were not favourable for the “intimate reminiscence” I was bent on drawing out.

It was not until the flotilla, salt-frosted and low in fuel, was lounging along in the leisurely dalliance

of half-speed on the way back to base that I cornered Stoker Petty Officer Prince in the angle between the foremost torpedo tubes and the starboard rail, and engaged him in serious discussion of the shamefulness of supplying worn-out films to the Depôt Ship kinema. The second dog watch was only half gone, but in the hour that elapsed before it was over there was no mention of Jutland, or anything else connected with the war for that matter, though the talk ran the full gamut from cabbages to kings. I mean this quite literally, for he began by telling me of what his mother had raised in her allotment at Ipswich, and was describing how, when he was on a cruise in the Clio ten years before the war, he had once shaken hands with the King of Fiji, as eight bells went to call him on watch. It was a happy inspiration which prompted me to volunteer to go down and stand a part of his watch with him in the stokehold, for once on his own “dung-hill,” his restraint fell away from him and he spoke easily and naturally of the things which had befallen him there and on the deck above.

There is little in the small, neat compartment from which the oil fires of a modern destroyer are fed and controlled to suggest the picture which the name “stokehold” conjures up in the popular mind. There is no coal, no grime, no sweating shovellers, no clanging doors. Under ordinary conditions two leisurely moving men do all there is need of doing,

and with time to spare, and there are occasions at sea, in the winter months, when the stokehold is a more comfortable refuge than the chill fireless ward room. It was my remarking upon the grateful warmth of the stokehold after the cold wet wind that was sweeping the deck, which finally turned the current of Prince’s reminiscence in the direction I had been vainly endeavouring to deflect it for the last hour.

“It’s all comfy enough, sir, when she’s loafing along at fifteen or twenty knots,” he said, slipping aside a “flap” and peering in at his fires with the critical eye of a housewife surveying her oven of bread, “but just tumble in some time when, while she already plugging away at full speed, the engine-room rings up more steam. That’s the time she’s just one little bit of hell down here, sir, with the white sizzle of the fires turning the furnaces to a red that shows even with the lights on, and the plates underfoot getting so hot that you have to keep dancing to prevent the soles of your boots from catching fire. Why, long toward morning of the night after Jutland——”

It didn’t take much manœuvring from that vantage to back him up to the beginning for a fresh start of the story of what is unquestionably one of the most remarkable, as it was one of the most successful, phases of the Jutland destroyer action. The fact that, during the daylight action between the battle cruisers, he had ample opportunity for

observation (through his being on deck standing by in the event of emergency and without active duties to perform) makes him undoubtedly one of the most valuable witnesses of the opening phase of this the greatest of all naval battles. The story which I am setting down connectedly, he told me in the comfortable intervals of his leisurely fire-trimming, and, once he was warmed up to it, with little prompting or questioning from myself. Much of it was punctuated with frequent stabs and slashes with one of the short-handled pokers which perform for the stoker of an oil-burner a service similar to that rendered his brother of the coal-burner by his mighty “slice” of iron.

“Big as the difference is between being on deck and in the stokehold at ordinary times,” said Prince, turning round with glare-blinded eyes closed to narrow slits after cracking off the accumulating carbon from an oil-sprayer with his poker, “it is ten times more so when a fight is on, and I’ll always be jolly thankful that it was my luck not to be caged up down here during the daylight part of the Jutland show. I had my turn of it at night, and it was bad enough then, even though I knew it was blacker’n the pit above; but, in daylight, with everything in full view outside, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gone off my chuck if I’d had to go ‘squirrel-caging’ on here with one eye on the fires and the other on the Kilroy. But I didn’t. It was my luck to be off watch when the ball opened, so

that my ‘action station’ was just loafing round the deck and keeping a stock of leak-stopping gear—mushroom-spreaders and wooden plugs—ready to use as soon as we got holed. Not having anything to do with navigating the ship, or signalling, or serving the guns or torpedo tubes—though I did get a bit of a chance with a mouldie as it turned out—I not only had time to see, but also to let the sights ‘sink in’ like. For that reason, when it was all over, I was probably able to give a more connected yarn of what happened than anyone else in the ship, not excepting the captain. They’ll take a lot of forgetting, some of the things I saw that day.”

Prince went over and settled down at ease on the steel steps of the ladder. “The worst grudge I had against Jutland—save for the way it whiffed out the lives of some of my friends in some of the other destroyers—” he continued with a grin, “was for making me miss my tea that afternoon. We left base the night before, and about daybreak joined up with the ‘battlers,’ which was our way of speaking of the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, to which the flotilla was attached. It was a fairly decent day, and we were able to make good weather of it with the light wind and easy swell. I had stood the forenoon watch, had a bit of a doss in my hammock in the early part of the afternoon one, and had just gone down to tea before going on for the ‘First Dog.’ There had been some buzz in the morning about the Huns being out; but that was so old a

story that no one paid much attention to it. I was just getting my nose over the edge of a mug of tea when I heard the bos’un growling ‘Hands exercise action stations,’ and tumbled out on deck to go through the motions of getting ready for a fight that would never come off, or leastways that was how we felt about it. The ‘battlers’ were speeding up a bit, but there was not even a smudge of smoke on the horizon to hint of Huns. After rigging the fire-hoses and getting out my ‘plugs,’ I stood by for ‘what next,’ but nothing happened. At the end of half an hour the order ‘Hands fall out’ was passed, and, leaving everything rigged, down we went to tea again. The mugs we had left were stone cold by this time, and we were just raising a howl for a fresh lot when, ‘Bing!’ off goes the alarm bells, and up we rushes again, this time to find signs of what we had been looking and hoping for. A good many hours went by before we went below again, and all through the fight—when things would ease off a bit now and then—I would hear the ‘matlos’ grousing about missing their afternoon tea.

“The old Nairobi was nosing along under the port bow of the Lion as I came up, and so close that we saw her guns—trained out abeam with a high elevation, right above us. We seemed to be speeding up to take station farther ahead. There was nothing at all in sight (from the deck, at least; though probably there was a better look-see from

the bridge) in the direction the Lion’s guns were trained, and it was almost as if a bomb had been dropped from the sky when a shell came plumping down about half-way between our starboard quarter and her port bow. The fact is, having heard no sound of gunfire, I was so surprised that I foolishly asked someone if the Lion hadn’t blown out one of her tompions testing a circuit. The spout of foam should have told me better, but it goes to show what crazy things run through a man’s mind when he can only see effect without the cause. A few moments later I saw unmistakable gun-flashes blinking along the skyline to south’ard and knew that at last we were under the fire of the Huns. The next two or three shots fell singly, and were plainly merely attempts to get the range. Following the first ‘short,’ there were one or two ‘over,’ and then a fair hit. This one, falling almost straight, struck the fo’c’sl’ of the Lion, penetrated the deck and came out on the starboard side. I don’t think it exploded, and we were just far enough ahead to see past her bows to where it struck the water with a kind of spattery splash, not at all like the clean spout thrown by a shell which goes straight into the sea.

“Then there was a big spurt of flame from the Lion, and the screech of shells reached my ears, even before the heavy crash of her four-gun salvo. Watch as I would, I could not make out the distant fall of shot, but the fluttering flashes of the Hun guns to

the south’ard told where the target was. Firing opened up all along the line of our battle cruisers after that, and the racket from that and the fast falling enemy shells increased till it was a steady unbroken roar. The Hun shells were falling so straight that many of the ‘overs’ missed by only a few yards. The hits, of which there were quite a number on the leading ships, looked rather awful at the moment of exploding. There would be a wild gush of flame that seemed to be eating up everything it touched, and then, all of a sudden, it was gone, and only a few little fires would be left flickering on the deck. The shells which struck against the sides seemed to nip on into the sea almost before they began to explode. Neither these, nor even those which struck the decks and turrets, seemed to be doing much damage at this stage, and our own firing never slackened in the least. I think none of the destroyers were hit up to now, though there were a number of very near things from some of the ‘overs.’ Our turn was coming.

“This sort of a give-and-take fight had been going on for some time, when there was a sudden increase of the enemy’s fire. From the way the fresh fall of shot came ranging up, it was very plain that new ships were coming into action, while the fact that the splashes were higher and heavier than those from the first salvoes seemed to make it likely that some of the Hun battleships had now arrived at the party. As it turned out, this was just what

had happened, and, although we could not see them from the low decks of the destroyers, the first B.C.S. was soon under the fire of the whole Hun High Seas Fleet. It was to draw these on into action with our approaching Battle Fleet that Beatty now turned away to the north’ard.

“Right here was where the big moment of this part of the fight came. The Huns must have scented the chance of catching our battle cruisers on the ‘windy corner’ as they turned, for suddenly their fire slackened on the ships down the line and concentrated on the point where that line began to bend. It must have been something like the barrage they make at the Front, for at times the water thrown up by the bursting shell made a solid wall which completely cut off my view of the ships beyond it. The way it seemed to boil up and quiet down looked like there was some sort of general control over the bunched fire, though that sort of thing would be pretty hard to handle.

“The Lion caught only a corner of the ‘boil,’ and left it on her starboard quarter, but the shell or two that struck her started a fierce fire burning ’midships, and I did not see the guns of that turret again in action. The ‘P.R.’—the Princess Royal—turned in a quiet interval of the barrage, and seemed not to be hit, but the Queen Mary steamed right into it, and just seemed to dissolve in a big puff of smoke and steam. I have no special memory of the noise or shock of the explosion, but the pillar of smoke

shot up as sudden and solid as a ‘Jack-in-the-box.’ It was black underneath, but always with a crown of flame at the top, as though the gases were spouting up inside and taking fire as they met the air. Some of my mates said they saw big pieces of flying wreckage, such as plates from turrets and decks, but I only remember smoke and flame. I never saw a bit of the ‘Q.M.’ again. When the smoke cloud lifted she was gone completely, with nothing but a gap in the line to mark the place where she had been. The thing looked so impossible that the ‘T.I.’ (that was what we called the torpedo gunner’s mate, because he was also torpedo instructor), who was standing beside me, kept saying over an over again, ‘She’s not gone up! She’s not gone up!’

“Perhaps it was no more than a coincidence, but it has always struck me as being just a bit uncanny the way that barrage on the ‘windy corner’ seemed to ‘work by threes.’ The ‘Q.M.’ was third in line, and up she went after the Lion and ‘P.R.’ had passed unhurt. Then the Tiger and New Zealand weathered the turn safely, but the poor old Indefat.—Number three again—got hers. She went up under a rain of shells plumping down on her deck, just as the ‘Q.M.’ did, and I remember specially watching the top of a turret go spinning up into the air, till it almost disappeared, and then came slowly down again, till it was lost in the rising smoke of the explosion.

“The fire of the Huns began to be divided more

equally among the four surviving battle cruisers now, and the Nairobi was led a lively dance dodging about among the ‘overs.’ It was the big fire raging amidships that turned my eyes to the Lion again. One of the guns of the ’midships turret had a sickly droop to it, but the other three turrets were blazing away as merry as ever. We were close enough to see men on the bridge with the naked eye, and it suddenly occurred to me that one of the quietly moving figures there must be Admiral Beatty, who I knew hated to be cooped up in a conning tower in action. I could not be sure which he was, but everyone in sight looked no more concerned than if they had been steaming out for target practice. I didn’t have time to think of it then, but every time since that I’ve felt surer and surer that no man since the world began ever showed more real guts than Beatty in that part of the Jutland show.”

Prince stood up, and put a forty-five degree kink in his poker by slamming it over the steel rail of the ladder to emphasise his words, and then stopped talking for a minute or two while he worried it straight with a hammer.

“It was just about this time,” he resumed, squinting approvingly down the straightened bar, “that the Nectar hoisted the signal, ‘Second Division prepare for torpedo attack,’ and a few minutes later I saw the whole flotilla start streaming out, some ahead of the battle cruiser line, and some through it, toward the Huns. I also have some memory of

seeing the ——th flotilla, smoking like young factory chimneys, coming out astern of the line, but I had no chance to see what became of them.

“The range between us and the Huns had been decreasing for some time, and the battle cruisers at the head of the line loomed up pretty big and awful as we started to close them. I’ve never made quite sure yet whether we were sent out to repel an attack of the Hun destroyers, or whether they were sent out to repel our attack. Anyhow, there they were, filtering out through their battle cruisers just as we had filtered through ours. We met and turned them back something more than half-way between the lines, but before we got to that point we had to pass, first through the fire of the Hun heavies, and then through a still hotter zone where their secondaries were slapping down a barrage that took some fancy side-stepping to avoid coming to grief in. The Onward was the first of our division to fall by the wayside. She stopped a ’leven-inch shell with her engine-room, and got stopped in turn herself. Luckily it didn’t explode, or she would have been blown out of the water then and there. I saw her fall out of line and disappear in a cloud of steam, and that was the last peep we had of her for many weeks. When she finally rejoined the flotilla, we learned that she and another cripple—the Fencer, I think it was—had limped back home together. I don’t remember just where the Wanderer got hers, but I think it must have been from the Hun’s

secondaries. Anyhow, the first thing I remember was that she was gone, and that the Nectar was leading the Nairobi—all that was left of the division—on a course to cross the bows of the enemy battle cruisers. The Hun destroyers, which had no chance with us in a gun fight, had now turned tail and were heading back for the shelter of their battle line. Several of them appeared on fire, but I didn’t see any sinking.

“I am not quite sure what orders were made to the flotilla at this time, but I rather think that after the Hun attack had been stopped the signal was hoisted to return to the battle cruisers. I think that is what the other divisions did do, but for our division—or what remained of it—things were looking too promising just then to turn our backs on. I was standing by the foremost tubes at the time, and all of a sudden the Hun line began to turn away, and I saw that the leading ship was being heavily hit and that she was afire in two or three places. As she turned she presented us a fine broadside target at about three thousand yards, and the order came from the bridge to ‘Stand by foremost tubes and fire when sights come on.’

“The turning of the Hun battle cruiser line exposed us to the fire of a number of his light cruisers which had been seeking shelter behind it, and some smashing salvoes from these began to plump down all around us just as we got ready to launch the torpedoes. Though there was not one direct hit, we

were ‘straddled’ a dozen times, and the foam spouts tossed up by the shells exploding on striking the water made a wall of smoke and spray that almost shut off a view of our target. Shell fragments were slamming up against the funnels and tinkling on the decks, and I believe two or three men were hit by them, though not much hurt. It was this sudden savage shelling that spoiled the only chance we had at the Hun big ’uns. Just as the sights were coming on to the leading ship a salvo came down kerplump right abreast of the foremost tubes, throwing a solid spout of green water all over them. I saw both mouldies start to slide out, but only one struck the water and began to run. A moment later I saw that the other, for some reason we never found out, but probably because it had been knocked sideways by the rush of water or perhaps a fragment of shell, was hanging by its tail to the lip of the tube, with its war-head full of gun-cotton trailing in the sea. It cleared itself when the next sea slapped it against the side, and started diving and jumping about like a wounded porpoise, most likely because its propellers had been knocked out. Luckily, our speed carried us on before it had a chance to ‘boomerang’ back and blow up the old Nairobi. We could not watch the first torpedo run on account of the spouts from the falling shells, but though it started right to cross the enemy’s line, there was nothing to make us believe it scored a hit.

“Before there was time to grieve over losing our

chance at the battle cruisers the ‘T.I.’ called me to give him a hand with the ‘midships’ tubes, as one of his men had been knocked out. ‘There’s a light cruiser just going to bear for a shot,’ he yelled from his seat between the tubes as I ran round to the breech; ‘jump up and tell me what speed she’s making. I can’t see her fair from here.’ The trouble was that the awful speed the Nairobi was going at settled her down so low that, anywhere abaft the bridge, a man couldn’t see over the bow wave from the deck. But, standing on top of the tubes, I was high enough to get a good look at the Hun, when he wasn’t shut off by the spouts from the fall of shot. He was a small three-funnelled light cruiser, and every gun he had looked to be training on us. Another cruiser astern of him was also firing on the Nairobi, while two or three others were concentrating on the Nectar. She was getting it even hotter than we were, and all I could see of her—when one of her zigzags brought her to one side or the other so the bridge didn’t cut her off from my view—was some masts and funnels sliding along in the middle of a dancing patch of foam fountains. Both Nectar and Nairobi were replying for all they were worth with their foremost guns; the after ones were too low down to fire at such close range with much effect. I saw one of our shells bursting on the Huns, and why their shooting at us was so bad I have never quite understood. The fact we were settled so deep aft from our speed was plainly making a lot

of shells ricochet over what would otherwise have been hits, but, at the same time, the bows being so much higher out of the water offered all the more target for’ard. It was more ‘Joss’ than anything else, I suppose. Besides, the Nectar was just on the edge of getting hers anyhow.

“I saw all these things out of the corner of my eye like, for my mind was centred on getting what the ‘T.I.’ wanted to know about his cruiser. I knew just what this was to a ‘t,’ for I’d taken many a turn of drill at the tubes. ‘Parallel courses, thousand yards range, speed about twenty-five,’ I shouted, jumping down again; ‘and you’ll have to slip her right smart or you’ll miss your chance.’ Right then the seas flattened down for a few seconds, and the ‘T.I.’, giving me an order of how to train her, set his sights and pulled the cocking lever. A moment later he fired, and the mouldie slipped out smooth and easy and started running straight and true for a point the Hun was going to arrive at about a minute later.”

Prince had been poking away at a sprayer as he talked, with the fluttering light-mote from the fire in the heart of the furnace playing on one of his squinting eyes in a way that, with the other quenched in shadow, gave his face a look of Cyclopean fierceness. “I jumped up on the tubes again to follow our little tin fish on its swim,” he resumed. “There seemed to be a bit of a flap on the cruiser, for its next salvo fell a long way short of us. One

of the shells—a five-or six-incher—did not explode, but bounced off the water and came ‘skip-jacking’ along straight for us. It kicked into the water twice before it reached us, the second time right at the base of the wave that was rolling up and hiding our sunken stern, and that seemed to give it just enough of an up-flip to make it clear the Nairobi’s shivering hull. It came so slow that I caught the glint of the copper band round its base, and so low that the after superstructure blotted it off from my sight as it passed over the stern. One of the after gun’s crew told me he could have reached up and patted it as it tumbled along over his head. He said it was going so slow that he hardly felt any wind at all from it. Perhaps that was because he had his own wind up, though, for it was making a great buzz, and must have been carrying a big ‘tail’ of air in its wake.

“I lost track of our mouldie when I ducked—no, I don’t mind admitting that’s just what I did, though it missed me by a mile—and before I could get my eye on its wake again it had gone home. I think they must have spotted it coming on the cruiser, for I saw her begin to alter course away just about the time I figured it was due to arrive. If they were altering to avoid the mouldie, they turned the wrong way, for it only brought right abreast the funnels what’d ‘a’ been a hit somewhere about the bridge. I’ve got a picture in my mind of what happened that I’m dead certain is as true

as a photograph, and the spout of water that went up must have been almost exactly amidships. If the hit had been anywhere for’rard it would never have broken her back the way it did, and she might have got away. The funny part of it was that it was not the ’midships section of her, where the mouldie hit, that seemed to be lifted by the explosion. That part of her seemed just to go to pieces and begin to sink all at once, while the bow and stern halves started to come up and close together like a jack-knife. She must have gone down inside of a minute or two, but things were happening so fast I don’t think I was looking when she disappeared.”

Prince, engrossed in his story, forgot that the end of his poker had a sheet of flame playing upon it, and the heat which crept back from the rosy-red tip gave his palm a sharp singe as he clutched the handle preparatory to executing one of his sweeping gestures. From then on to the end of his narrative he paused frequently to lick with his tongue the blistered cuticle, the stoker’s sovereign remedy for a slight burn. “I was just starting to give the ‘T.I.’ an account of what I had had a lot better chance to see than he had,” he went on thickly, still touching the blisters gingerly with an extended tongue-tip, “when I heard him growl, ‘Stand by! here’s another one. What speed d’you think she’s making?’ I was still standing up on top of the tubes, and—to get a better view—right in front of

the ‘T.I.’, with my waist on just about the level of his face. As I turned my head to look at the second Hun he straddled us fair with a full salvo. Most of it went over, but one proj struck right alongside and just about flooded us out. But there was something heavier than water that it sent aboard. I felt a sharp sting across my stomach, as if someone had given me a cut with a whip. As I put my hand down to it the whole front of my overall dropped away where a fragment of shell casing had shot across it. A few threads—I found out later—had been started on my singlet, but my hide was not even scratched. I heard the ‘T.I.’ give a yell, and when I looked round saw his face covered with blood, and a flap of skin from his forehead hanging down over one eye like a skye terrier’s ear. The piece of proj had caught him a nasty side-swipe, though without hurting anything but his looks in the least. And it wasn’t that he was yelling about, either, but at me for not giving him the course and speed of the second cruiser. He had the flap of skin tied up out of his eye—using a strip of my overall because neither of us could find a handkerchief—by the time I was back at the handle. I saw the blood dribbling over his sights, but he seemed to be seeing through them all right, for he was telling me how to train when I felt the helm begin to grind as it was thrown hard over to make a sudden alteration of course. She heeled fifteen or twenty degrees as she turned six points to starboard,

and the boil of her wake flooded across her stern three or four feet deep. The sudden heel threw me off my feet, and I pulled up just in time to see us rushing by, and just missing by a few yards, a stopped destroyer that was nothing but spurts of fire flashing under a rolling cloud of steam and smoke.

“She seemed to be afire all over, and about ready to blow up; yet, from the quick flashes of some of the spurts of fire, I knew they came from a hard-pumped gun that some stout-hearted lads were working to the last. There was nothing in the look of that spouting volcano of smoke and steam that would help a man to tell whether it was a battleship or a trawler, but I knew that it could be only the Nectar, our Division leader. We never saw her nor anyone in her again. She must have gone down within a few minutes, and anyone that survived fell into the hands of the enemy. She led us a fine dance while it lasted, and the only pity was that she couldn’t trip it to the end.

“That left the old Nairobi as the last of the Division, and I haven’t any recollection of any of the rest of the flotilla being in sight by then. Not that I had any time to look for them, though. Our sudden change of course to keep from ramming the Nectar spoiled our chance at the second Hun cruiser, but we were left no time to mourn that any more than the finish of the Nectar. Hardly had we left the wreck of her astern than a full salvo of

large shells—I think they must have come from one of the battle cruisers, for they were much heavier than anything the light cruisers were firing—struck only thirty or forty yards short of us. The shells were bunched together like a salvo of air-bombs kicked loose all at once. The wall of water they threw up shut everything on that side off from sight for a few seconds, and when the spouts settled down there was a Hun destroyer inside of a mile away. I jumped up to give her course and speed to the ‘T.I.’, but before I had time more than to see that she had two funnels and many tubes the bursting projes from our foremost and midships guns began knocking her to pieces so fast that I soon saw there was no use of wasting a mouldie on the job.

“I saw the captain waving encouragement from the bridge to the crew of the midships guns, and, when the noise died down for a moment, I heard him shout, ‘You’ve got her! Give it to her!’ Just then another salvo was plastered a-straddle of us, and I saw a fragment of shell knock the sight-setter of the midships gun out of his seat. He looked a little dazed as he climbed back, but his eye must have been as good as ever, for I saw his next shot make a hit square on a whaler they were lowering from the sinking Hun and blow it to bits. A minute or two more, and the destroyer itself blew up and disappeared under a column of steam and smoke.

“That,” continued Prince, beginning to prod anew his neglected sprayers, “just about concluded

our day’s work. As there was no longer any prospect of getting in mouldie-range of any of the big Huns, and as none of the little Huns were in sight to fight with gun-fire, it must have occurred to the captain that it was time he was rejoining the flotilla. There was only some dark blurs on the north’ard skyline to steer for at first, and the Huns did all they knew to keep us from getting there, too. For a while we were doing nothing but playing ‘hide-and-seek’ among the salvoes they tried to stop us with, and I have heard since that the way the captain used his helm to avoid being hit at this stage of the show was rated as about the cleverest work of the kind in the whole battle.

“It was the Fifth B.S.—the Queen Elizabeth class—that we caught up to first, and a grand sight it was, the four of them standing up and giving battle to about the whole of the High Sea Fleet. They were taking a heavy pounding without turning a hair, so far as a man could see, and even when the Warspite had her steering gear knocked out and went steaming in circles it didn’t seem to upset the other three very much. We sighted our own Battle Fleet about six, and rejoined the flotilla in good time to be back with the battle cruisers when Beatty took them round the head of the Hun line and only failed to cut off their retreat through night coming on.

“Compared with what the next six or eight hours held for some of our destroyers—or even

with what we had just been through ourselves—the night for us was fairly quiet. We were in action once or twice, and I saw several ships—mostly enemy, but one or two of our own—go up in flame and smoke before I went on watch down here at midnight. But through it all the devil’s own luck which had been with us from the first held good. Although we were through the very hottest of the day action, and not the least of the night, the old Nairobi did not receive one direct hit from an enemy shell. She accounted for at least two Hun ships, saw the other three destroyers of her division sunk or put out of action, and returned to base with almost empty oil tanks and perhaps the largest mileage to her credit of any craft in the Jutland battle—all without a serious casualty or more than a few scratches to her paint. On top of it all, on the way back to harbour, by the queerest fluke you ever heard of, she rammed and exploded the air-chamber of a mouldie that had been fired by a Hun U-boat at the destroyer next in line ahead of her. As the Yanks say, ‘Can you beat it?’”

CHAPTER IV

HUNTING

“If it’s destroyer work you want, there are five of them getting under weigh at four o’clock,” said the “Senior Officer Present,” looking at his watch. “You’ll have just about time to pick up your luggage and connect if you want to go. I can’t tell you what they’re going to do—they won’t know that themselves till they get to sea, and their orders may be changed from hour to hour, and things may happen to send them to the Channel, France, or to several other places, on and off the chart, before they put in here again. But there’ll be work to do—plenty of it. That’s the best part of this corner of the North Atlantic in which our Allies have done the American destroyers the honour of setting them on the U-boats. Whatever else you may suffer from, it won’t be from ennui.” It was luck indeed, on two hours’ notice, to have the chance of getting out in just the way I had planned, where I had been quite prepared to stand-by for twice as many days, and I fell in with the arrangement at once.

Captain X—— ran his eye down a board where the names of a number of destroyers were displayed

against certain data indicating their whereabouts and disposition. “Zop, Zap, Zip, Zim, Zam,” he read musingly. “Zip—yes, I don’t think I can do better than send you on the Zip. Her skipper is as keen as he is able, and the Zip herself has the reputation of having something of a nose for U-boats on her own account. I’ll advise him you’re coming. Pick up your sea togs and put off to her as soon as you can. Good luck.” The American naval officer, like the British, never says “Good-bye” if it can possibly be avoided.

They were already preparing to unmoor as I clambered over the side of the Zip, and by the time I had shifted to sea-boots and oilskins in the captain’s cabin—which, unoccupied by himself during that strenuous interval, was to be mine at sea—she was swinging in the stream and nosing out into the creaming wakes of the two of her dazzle-painted sisters who were preceding her down the bay.

There are several things that strike one as different on going to an American warship after a spell in a British ship of the same class, but the one which surges to meet you and goes to your head like wine is the all-pervading spirit of vibrant, sparkling, unquenchable youthfulness. Everything you see and hear seems to radiate it—every throb of the engines, every beat of the screws—and at first you may almost get the impression that it comes from the ship herself. But when you start to trace it

down, you find it bubbles from a single fount, the men, or rather the boys—the lounging, laughing, devil-may-care boys. Theirs the alchemy to transform every one and everything that comes near them into the golden seeming of themselves.

This youthfulness of the American destroyers is in the crew rather than the officers, for the latter—especially the captain and executive—will average, if anything, a shade older than their “opposite numbers” in a British destroyer. There is a certain minimum of highly specialised work in navigating and fighting a destroyer which must be in the hands of officers and men who can have only attained the requisite training in long years of technical study and practical experience. Given these, and the remainder of the ship’s company—provided only that they have digestive organs that will continue to function when tilted through a dozen different slants and angles in as many seconds—can be trained to perfection in an astonishingly short time. Here it is that America has scored, for there is no doubt that the youngsters that have rushed to enrol themselves for her destroyer service are better educated and quicker in mind and body than those available for any other navy in the war. It is the incomparable adaptability these advantages have conspired to give him that has made the Yankee destroyer rating a combination of keenness and efficiency that leaves little, if anything, to be desired on either score.

Here is the way a British naval officer who is familiar with the work of the American destroyer flotilla expressed himself in this connection: “The ship’s company of any one of these American destroyers,” he said, “will average a good five years younger than that of a British destroyer. Off hand, one would say that this would tell against them, but, as a matter of fact, quite the contrary is the case.

“Given that the command and the technical operations are in the hands of highly trained and fairly serious-minded officers, you can’t have too much slapbang, hell-for-leather, devil-take-the-consequences spirit in the ship’s company. And where will you find that save in the youngsters—tireless, fearless, careless boys. They’ve found that out in the air services, and we’re finding it out in the destroyers. And right there—in these quick-headed, quick-footed super-boys of theirs—is where the Yankee destroyers have the best of us. It is they—working under consummately clever officers—that enabled the American destroyer flotilla to reach in a stride a working efficiency which we had been straining up to for three years.”

The green hills astern had turned grey and dissolved in mist and darkness before the captain was able to announce what work was afoot for us. The Zim and Zam, it appeared, were to be detached on some mission of their own, while the Zop, Zap,

and Zip, after “hunting” submarines for some time, were to proceed to a certain port, pick up the Lymptania, and escort her through the danger zone on her westward voyage. The captain was grinning as he finished reading the order. “I can’t give you any definite assurance,” he said, “that the hunt part of the stunt is going to scare up any U-boats, although the prospects this week are more promising than for some time; but”—he turned his level gaze to the westward, where the in-rolling Atlantic swells were blotting with undulant humps the fading primrose of the narrow strip of after-glow—“if this wind and sea keep the same force and direction for three or four days more, I’ll promise you all the excitement your heart can desire when we take on our escort duties. The last time we took out the old Lymptania—well, I’ve got marks on me yet from the corners I got banged up against, and as for the poor little Zip—but she’s had a refit since and most of the scars have been removed. As you will have ample chance to see for yourself, there isn’t a lot of dolce far niente in any of this life we lead in connection with our little game here, but if there is one phase of our activities that is farther removed from ‘peace, perfect peace’ than any other, it is trying to screen an ex-Atlantic greyhound that is boring at umpty-ump knots into a head wind and sea. Strafing U-boats is a Sunday-school picnic in comparison at any time; but it will be worse this week because they have just

put down a couple of big liners, and the skipper of the Lymptania, knowing they will be laying for him, will force her like he was trying to get his company the trans-Atlantic mail subsidy. For us to cut zigzags around that kind of a thing—but you’ll be able to judge for yourself. I only hope we can catch you a U-boat or two by way of preliminary, so as to lead up to the climax by slow degrees.”

Things were fairly comfy that night—that is, as comfort goes in a destroyer. There was a good stiff wind and a good deal more than a lop of sea running; but as both were coming on the quarter and we were plodding along at no great speed, the Zip made very passable weather of it. The bridge, save for occasional showers of light spray where a sea slapped over the side, was quite dry, and even on the long run of low deck amidships there were several havens of refuge where the men off watch could foregather to smoke and yarn without fear of more than an occasional spurt of brine. A dry deck does not chance every day that a destroyer is on business bent at sea, and when it does, like sunshine in Scotland, is a thing to luxuriate in.

“KAMERADING” WITH UPLIFTED PAWS

As the twilight deepened and melted into the light of a moon that was but a day or two from the full—“bad luck for the Lymptania convoy, that moon,” the captain had said as he noted how it was waxing on his chart—I came down from the bridge and worked along from group to group of the sailor

men where, lounging and laughing, they sheltered in the lee of funnel and boat and superstructure. The first one I pushed into was centred round a discussion, or rather an argument, between two boys, the one from Kansas and the other from Oklahoma, as to which had raised the best and biggest corn in the course of some sort of growing competitions they had once taken part in. Several others standing about also appeared to have come from one or other of those fine naval-recruiting States of the Middle West, and seemed to know not a little about intensive maize culture themselves. I was just ingratiating myself with this party by nodding assent and voicing an emphatic “Sure!” to one’s query of “Some corn that, mister, hey?” when I discovered a cosmopolitan group (two Filipino stewards, the coloured cook, and three or four bluejackets in sleeveless grey sweaters) collaborating in the arduous task of teaching a very sad-faced white mongrel to sit up on his haunches and beg. Or rather it was an elaboration of that classic trick. On drawing nearer I perceived that the lugubrious-visaged canine already had mastered begging for food, and that now they were endeavouring to teach him to beg for mercy. At the order “Kamerad!” instead of sitting with down-drooping paws, he was being instructed to raise the latter above his head and give tongue to a wail of entreaty. He was a brighter pup than his looks would have indicated,

and had already become letter perfect in the wail. “Kamerading” properly with uplifted paws, however, was rather too much for his balance, at least while teetering on the edge of a condensed milk case which was itself sliding about the deck of a careening destroyer. The dog had been christened “Ole Oleson,” one of the sailors told me, both because he was “some kind of a Swede” and because, like his famous namesake, he had tried to come aboard in “two jumps” the day they found him perched on a bit of wreckage of the Norwegian barque to which he had belonged, and which had been sunk by a U-boat an hour previously. The men seemed to be very fond of him, and I overheard the one who picked him up off the box to make a place for me to sit on, whisper into his cocked ear that they were going to try to catch a Hun in the next day or two for him to sharpen his teeth on.

These boys told me a number of stories in connection with the survivors they had rescued, or failed to rescue, from ships sunk by U-boats. Most of them were the usual accounts of firing on open boats in an attempt to sink without a trace, but there was one piquant recital which revealed the always diverting Hun sense of humour at a new slant. This was displayed, as it chanced, on the occasion of the sinking of “Ole’s” ship, the Norwegian barque. After this unlucky craft had been put down by shell-fire and bombs, the U-boat ran alongside

the whaler containing the captain and mate, and they were ordered aboard to be interrogated. Under the pretence of preventing any attempt to escape on the part of the remainder of those in this boat, the Germans made them clamber up and stand on the narrow steel run-way which serves as the upper deck of a submarine. No sooner were they here, however, than the Hun humorist on the bridge began slowly submerging. When the water was lapping round the necks of the unfortunate Norwegians, and just threatening to engulf them, the nose of the U-boat was slanted up again, this finely finessed operation being repeated during all of the time that the captain and mate were being pumped below by the commander of the submarine. No great harm—save that one of the sailors, losing his nerve when the U-boat started down the first time, dived over, struck his head on one of the bow-rudders and was drowned—was done by this little pleasantry, but it is so illuminative of what the Hun is in his lightsome moods that I have thought it worth setting down.

The American is more violent in his feelings than the Briton, and much more inclined to say what he thinks; and I found these boys—to use the expressive phrase of one of them—“mad clean through” at the Hun pirate and all he stands for. America—with more time to do that sort of thing—has undoubtedly gone farther than any other country in the war in trying to give her soldiers and sailors a proper idea of the beast they have

been sent out to slay. These lessons seem to have sunk home with all of them, and when it has been supplemented—as in the case of the sailors in the destroyers—by the first-hand teachings of the Huns themselves, it generally leaves a man in something like the proper state of mind for the task in hand. Not that I really think any of the Americans, when they have the chance, as happens every now and then, will carry out all the little plans they claim to be maturing, but—well, if I was an exponent of the U-boat branch of German kultur, and my unterseeboot was depth-charged by a British and an American destroyer, and I came sputtering up to the surface midway between them, I don’t think I would strike out for the lifebuoy trailing over the quarter of the one flying the Stars and Stripes. I may be wrong, but somehow I have the feeling that the Briton—be he soldier, sailor, or civilian—hasn’t quite the same capacity as the Yank for keeping up the temperature of his passion, for feeling “mad clean through.”

Joining another group bunched in the lee of a tier of meat-safes, I chanced upon a debate which threw an illuminative beam on the feelings of what might once have been classified as hyphenated Americans. At first the whole six or eight of them, in all harmony and unanimity, had been engaged in cursing Sinn Feiners, with whom it appeared they had been having considerable contact—physical

and otherwise—in the course of the last few months. Then one of the more rabid of them on this particular subject—he and one of his mates had been waylaid and beaten by a dozen hulking young Irishmen who resented the attentions the Yankees were receiving from the local girls—threw a bone of dissension into the ring by declaring that a Sinn Feiner was as bad as a Hun and ought to be treated the same way.

The most of them could hardly bring themselves to agree to this, but in the rather mixed argument which followed it transpired that the lad who had led the attack on Sinn Fein was named Morarity and had been born in Cork, and that the one who maintained that nothing on two legs, not even a Sinn Feiner, was as “ornery as a Hun,” was named Steinholz, and had been born in St. Louis of German parents.