Sea-Hounds Part 13

"No water was thrown aboard us, and, near as I was to the explosion on the bridge, the rush of air could hardly be felt. Something that came tinkling down after striking the side of the charthouse, however--I picked it up when the show was over--turned out to be a thin fragment of the steel casing of the bomb.

"A similar fragment, twisted into a peculiar shape, struck the chest of a man leaning over the rail in the waist of the ship, inflicting a slight flesh wound the exact shape of a ragged capital 'C.'

"That any kind of a living man could really be trying to destroy a mere merchant ship in cold blood seemed to me so monstrous, so utterly impossible, that, until the second bomb was dropped, I was almost ready to believe that the first had been launched by accident. From then on we knew it was a fight for life.

"The Hun took a broader swerve in bringing his machine round for the next charge, and, ten times quicker on his helm than we were, antic.i.p.ated our next shift of course, and came darting down on an almost straight fore-and-aft line again. The sudden cloud of our foreblown smoke--there was a following wind on the 'leg' they had put her on at the moment--which engulfed him at the instant his third bomb was released was the one thing in the world that could have made him miss so easy a 'sitter.' The quick 'side-flip' the sharply-banked 'plane gave to the dropped missile threw it wide by twice the distance the second had missed us. Though the detonation rang sharp and clear, and though a vicious spout of foam shot up, I could note no effect of the thing whatever on the ship. Whether that was his last bomb or not we could never be quite sure. At any rate, it was the last he tried to drop upon us, or upon any other ship for that matter.

"Just why he returned to the attack with his machine-gun we could only guess. It may have been, as is probable, that he was at the end of the small supply of bombs left from the raid he was doubtless returning from.

"Again, however, it is just possible that the fact that the fire was being got under control on the p.o.o.p impelled him to adopt an attack calculated to drive the plucky chaps who were fighting it to cover.

"Anyhow, flying just high enough to clear the tops of the masts, he came swooping back, and it was upon the men trying to put out the fire--now confined to the wreckage--of the deckhouse--that he seemed to concentrate his attack. Two or three of these I saw fall under the rain of bullets, and among them was our freight clerk, who had also been knocked down by the explosion of the first bomb, but who, being hardly stunned by the shock, was soon on his feet again and leading the fire-fighters.

"He was a good deal of a character, this freight clerk. Although well educated, he had led a free and easy existence in various parts of the world. For a year previous to the war he had been a cowboy, and some queer trait in his character made him still cling to the _poncho_, or shoulder blanket, and baggy trousers, which are the main features of the Argentine cow-puncher's rigout. It was the Wild West rig that made me notice him when he was knocked down by the bomb and later by the machine-gun fire.

"He was scarcely more hurt the second time than the first, but the bullet which had grooved the outer covering of his brain-box seemed also to have put a new idea inside it. I saw him pull himself together in a dazed sort of way after the seaplane had pa.s.sed, and then shake off the hand of a man who tried to help him, and dash off down the ladder, tumbling to cover, I thought.

"It must have been a minute or two later that I saw him, legs wide apart to keep his balance, pumping back at the Hun (who had swung close again in the interim) with a rifle--a weapon which I later learned was an old Winchester, which had been rusting on the wall of the freight clerk's cabin. He appeared to have had the worst of the exchange, for when I looked again he was sitting, with one leg crumpled crookedly under him, propped up against a bitt.

"He looked still full of fight, though, and seemed to be replenishing the magazine of the rifle from his bandoliers.

"The skipper sent me below to stir things up a bit in the engine-room at this juncture, and I did not see my cowboy friend until he had fought two or three more unequal rounds and was squaring away, groggy, but still unbeaten, for what proved the final one.

"I don't know whether he ever got credit for it or not, but the Old Man's plan of action at this juncture must pretty nearly have marked a mile-post in merchant ship defence against aerial attack. We had been instructed in, and had practised the zigzag before this, but that was about the limit of our resources in this line. 'Squid' tactics--smoke screening--had hardly been more than thought of for anything but destroyers. Yet the wily old skipper, literally on a moment's notice, brought off a stunt that could not have been improved upon if it had been the result of a year's thought and experience.

"The instant the Hun 'stumbled' when he struck the cloud of smoke that was pouring ahead of us, the skipper's ready mind began evolving a plan still further to besmudge the atmosphere. Today, with special instructions and special stuff ready to hand, a merchant captain, if he needed it, would simply tell the chief engineer to 'make smoke screen.'

"On this occasion the Old Man meant the same thing when I heard him yelling down the engine-room voice-pipe to 'Smoke up like h.e.l.l!'

"About all the chief could do under the circ.u.mstances was to stoke faster and cut down the draught. This he did to the best of his ability, but the screen did not bear much resemblance to one of those almost solid streams of soot a modern destroyer can turn out by spraying oil freely and shutting off the air.

"Such as it was, however, the Old Man made the most of, and by steaming down the wind accomplished the double purpose of cutting down the draught fanning the fire on the p.o.o.p and keeping a maximum of smoke floating above the ship.

"The smudge bothered the Hun, but by no means put an end to his machine-gun practice. Except for the freight clerk, who was still pumping back at the seaplane every time it swooped over, every one on the p.o.o.p had been killed, wounded, or driven to cover, and, with no one to fight it, the fire was beginning to gain new headway.

"'Not good 'nuf by a mile,' I heard the Old Man muttering to himself as he eyed the quickly thinning trail of smoke from the funnels. 'Must do better'n that or 'taint no good.' Then I saw his bronzed old face light up.

"'X----!' he shouted, beckoning me to his side, 'duck below, clean out all the stuff in the paint lockers and chuck it in the furnaces, 'specially the oils and turps. Jump lively!'

"This was the job I went on when I said I saw the cowboy crumpled up against a bitt, but still full of fight.

"Linseed oil, turpentine, and some tins of fine lubricants--I had them all turned out of the fore-peak and carried, rolled, dragged, or tossed down to the stokehold.

"Most of the stuff was in kegs or cans small enough to go through a furnace door, and these we threw in without broaching them. The Old Man called me up twice--the first time to say that there was no increase in smoke, and wanting to know why I was so slow; and the second time to say that he had just got a bullet through his shoulder, and ordering me to come up and take over, as he was beginning to feel groggy.

"There was an ominous crackling and sputtering in the furnaces as I sprang for the ladder, and before my foot was on the lowermost rung, one of the doors jumped violently up on its top-swing hinges from the kick of an exploding tin or keg of oil. As it fell back with a clang the swish of sudden flame smote my ears, and then a regular salvo of m.u.f.fled detonations. The last picture I had of the boiler-room was of the stokers trying to confine the infernos they had created by wedging shut the doors with their scoops.

"The whole ship was a-shiver with the roaring conflagration in her furnaces as I reached the upper deck, and, above a tufty, white frizzle of escaping steam, rolled a greasy jet of smoke that looked thick enough for a man to dance a hornpipe on it without sinking above his ankles. I found the Old Man, with a dazed sort of look in his eyes, and his jaw set like grim death, hanging on to the binnacle when I gained the bridge, and all he had the strength to say, before slithering down in a heap, was, 'd.a.m.n good smoke! Carry on--zigzag down wind! Think blighter has finished. Look to--fire.'

"The fact that the Hun was now circling the ship at considerable distance had evidently made the skipper believe that he had come to the end of his cartridges, and in this I am inclined to think the Old Man was right.

"Which fire, however, he referred to I was not quite sure about, but, in my own mind, I was rather more concerned about the one I had started with the ship's paint than the one the Hun's incendiary bomb had set going. Indeed, the 'fire brigade,' which had taken advantage of the lull to get a hose playing on the conflagration on the p.o.o.p, was rapidly reducing the latter to a black ma.s.s of steaming embers. The cowboy was still snuggled up against the bitt, which he used to rest his right elbow on in the occasional shots he was lobbing over at the now distantly circling enemy. When I learned later what a crack shot the chap really was, I cannot say that I blamed the Hun for his discretion.

"What tempted him to make that fatal final swoop we never knew. It may have been sheer bravado, or he may have been trying to frighten off the fire-fighters again. Anyhow, back he came, allowing plenty of leeway to miss my smoke screen, and only high enough to clear the masts by forty or fifty feet.

"The cowboy saw him coming, and I can picture him yet as he lay there waiting, with his cheek against the stock of that old Winchester, and following the nearing 'plane through its sights. With the rare good sense of your real hunter, he didn't run any risk of frightening off his quarry with any premature shots. He just laid doggo, and held his fire.

"If the Hun had been content to sit tight and keep his head out of sight, the chances are nothing would have happened to him; but the temptation to have a closer look at his handiwork and to jeer at his 'beaten enemy' was too much for him. Banking as sharply as his big 'plane would stand, he leaned out head and shoulders above the wrecked p.o.o.p, gave a jaunty wave of the hand, and opened his mouth to shout what was probably some sort of Hunnish pleasantry.

"The crack of the old Winchester reached my ears above the roar of the seaplane's engine, and the next thing I was clearly conscious of was the machine's swerving--sidewise and downward--and plunging straight into the trailing column of black smoke. The tip of its left wing fouled the main truck, but it still kept enough balance and headway to carry past and clear of the ship.

"It then slammed down into the water two or three hundred feet off our starboard bow, and it only took a point or two of alteration to bring it under our forefoot.

"The old ship struck the mark so fair that she cut the wreckage into two parts, and I saw fragments of wings and fuselage boiling up on both sides of our wake astern. I gave the order in hot blood, but I would do the same thing again if I had a week to think it over in, just as I would go out of my way to kill a poisonous snake.

"Of course we never knew definitely who was responsible for polishing off the Hun. For a while I thought it probable that the cowboy had only wounded him, and that his swerve into the smoke had been responsible for the dive into the sea, where the ship put the finishing touches on the job. But from the day that the cowboy showed me that he could hit tossed-up shillings with a target-rifle four times out of five I have been inclined to believe his a.s.sertion that he 'plunked the bloomin'

blighter straight through the nut,' and that I and my smoke had nothing to do with it.

"Neither the skipper nor the cowboy were much hurt, and as for the ship, she probably suffered, in the long run, more from the loss of her paint and oil supply than from the Hun's bomb and the fire it started."

CHAPTER XII

AGAINST ODDS

The news from all the Fronts had been discouraging for several days, and it only needed that staggering announcement of the destruction of practically a whole convoy and its escort, in the North Sea, to cap the climax of gloom. This is what I had read in the fog-hastened autumn twilight, by the feeble glow of a paint-masked street lamp, in the Stop Press column of the evening paper a Strand newsboy had shoved into my hand.

"Two very fast and heavily-armed German raiders attacked a convoy in the North Sea, about midway between the Shetland Islands and the Norwegian coast, on October 17th. Two British destroyers--H.M.

ships _Mary Rose_ (Lieutenant-Commander Charles L. Fox) and _Strongbow_ (Lieutenant-Commander Edward Brooke)--which formed the anti-submarine escort, at once engaged the enemy vessels, and fought until sunk after a short and unequal engagement. Their gallant action held the German raiders sufficiently long to enable three of the merchant vessels to effect their escape. It is regretted, however, that five Norwegian, one Danish, and three Swedish vessels--all unarmed--were thereafter sunk by gunfire without examination or warning of any kind and regardless of the lives of their crew or pa.s.sengers.... Anxious to make good their escape before British forces could intercept them, no effort was made to rescue the crews of the sunk British destroyers or the doomed merchant ships, but British patrol craft which arrived shortly afterward rescued some thirty Norwegians and others of whom details are not yet known.... The enemy raiders succeeded in evading the British watching squadrons on the long dark nights, both in their hurried outward dash and homeward flight.

"It is regretted that all the eighty-eight officers and men of H.M.S. _Mary Rose_ and forty-seven officers and men of H.M.S.

_Strongbow_ were lost. All the next-of-kin have been informed."

A few days later a second Admiralty report announced that ten survivors of the _Mary Rose_ had reached Norway in an open boat, and also gave a few further particulars of the action in which she had been lost. From this it appeared that she had been many miles ahead of the main convoy when the latter was attacked, and that, possessed of the speed, with many knots to spare, to have avoided an action in which the odds were a thousand to one against her, she had yet deliberately steamed back and thrown down the gage of battle to the heavily armed German cruisers.

Just why her captain chose the course he did was not, and never will be, fully explained. He went down with his ship, and to none of those who survived had he disclosed what was in his mind. It was certainly not "war," the critics said, but they also agreed that it was "magnificent"

enough to furnish the one ray of brightness striking athwart the sombre gloom of the whole disheartening tragedy. "He held on unflinchingly,"

concluded an all-too-brief story of the action issued to the public through the Admiralty, some time later, "and he died, leaving to the annals of his service an episode not less glorious than that in which Sir Richard Grenville perished."

From the time I read these Admiralty announcements I had the feeling that some, if not all, of those ten survivors of the _Mary Rose_ would surely be able to offer more of an explanation of why her captain took her into battle against such hopeless odds than any that had yet been suggested to the public, and in the months which followed I made what endeavour I could to locate and have a talk with one of them. It was not long before the ten were scattered in as many different ships, however, and though I had the names and official numbers of two or three, almost a year went by before I chanced upon the first of them. Indeed, it was but a day or two previous to the first anniversary of the loss of the _Mary Rose_ and _Strongbow_ and the destruction of the Norwegian convoy that, in the course of a visit to a Submarine Depot Ship at one of the East Coast bases, I sauntered forward one evening and fell into conversation with a st.u.r.dily built, steady-eyed young seaman--some kind of torpedo rating, evidently, by the red worsted "mouldie" on his sleeve--who had just clambered up to the forecastle from the deck of a hulking "L" moored alongside.

"How do you like submarin-ing?" I had asked him, by way of getting acquainted.

"Not so bad, sir," he replied with a smile, "though it's a bit stuffy and rather slow after destroyers. With them there's something doing all the time. I was in one of the 'M' cla.s.s before I volunteered for submarines. P'raps you've heard of her--the _Mary Rose_, sunk a year this month, in----"

"Wait a moment," I cut in, as the ribbon he was wearing caught my eye; "you're one of the men I've been looking for for a number of months. Ten to one you're Able Seaman Bailey, who received the D.S.M. for his part in the action, and who is specially mentioned in the Admiralty story"

(refreshing my memory from a note-book) "for having, 'despite severe shrapnel wounds in the leg, persisted in taking his turn at an oar' of the Norwegian lifeboat which picked up the _Mary Rose_ survivors, and for his 'invincible light-heartedness throughout.'"