Sea-Hounds Part 1

Sea-Hounds.

by Lewis R. Freeman.

CHAPTER I

THE MEN WHO CHANGED SHIPS

Between the lighter-load of burning beeves that came b.u.mping 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 pa.s.sage 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 p.r.i.c.k 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 Ca.s.sandra 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.

[Footnote 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 Ca.s.sandra; "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 circ.u.mstance, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l-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 sh.e.l.ls 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 c.o.c.ked 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 pa.s.sing 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 p.o.o.p 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 p.o.o.p 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 'p.u.s.s.y-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 sc.r.a.p 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.

"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 pa.s.sing 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GERMAN Sh.e.l.lS STRIKING THE WATER AT THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BROADSIDE AT NIGHT AT THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND]

"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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 h.e.l.l 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 st.i.tching it up in canvas with a fire-bar before dropping it overside the next day. I learned then that an 8-inch sh.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l-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 phosph.o.r.escent 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.