Sea-Hounds Part 5

An order from the Commander-in-Chief--which was picked up presently--to go to the a.s.sistance of the torpedoed ship and to "hunt submarine" had been antic.i.p.ated; but the real name of the steamer--finally transmitted correctly--brought to me at least a distinct shock. It was H.M.S.

_Marmora_, and the _Marmora_, the former P. & O. Australian liner, was an old friend. To anyone who loves the sea a ship, no matter of what kind, has a personality. But in the case of a ship in which he has sailed--lived in, worked and played in, been happy in, perhaps gone through certain dangers in--has more than a personality, it has a place in his heart. Many and many a morning since the first U-boat campaign was started I had read--and never without a lump rising in my throat--of the pa.s.sing of just such a friend, of the going out of the world of something--almost of "some one"--which I had always looked forward to seeing again. _Afric_, _Arabic_, _Aragon_, I knew their names well enough to compile the list alphabetically. It would have run to some score in length, and from every name would have led a long train of treasured memories. But the blow had never come quite this way before, never fallen quite so near at home. An especially dear friend had just been stricken less than a degree of lat.i.tude away; but the poignancy of that realisation was tempered by the thought that I was in a ship rushing to her a.s.sistance, a ship that could be as swift to succour as to avenge.

I must confess to a queerly mixed state of mind that next half-hour.

Consumed as I was with interest in our terribly purposeful progress leading up to the entrance into that grim drama approaching its climacteric act just beyond the sky-line, there were also vivid flare-backs of memory to the days of my friendship with the _Marmora_, arresting flashlights of the swift refreshing morning dive into the canvas pool on her forecastle, of lounging chairs ranged in long rows 'twixt snowy decks and awnings, of a phosph.o.r.escent bow-wave curling back and blotting the reflections of stars in a tropical sea. There was a picture of the clean sweet lines of her as--buff, black, and beautiful--she lay at the north end of the horseshoe of the Circular Quay at Sydney, with a rakish Messageries liner moored astern of her and a bluff Norddeutscher Lloyd packet ahead. It was her maiden voyage, and Australia, which had never seen so swift and luxurious a liner before, was receiving her like a newly arrived _prima donna_. I took pa.s.sage in her back as far as Colombo. That fortnight's voyage had been diverting in a number of ways, I recalled, but most of all, perhaps, as a consequence of the throwing together of a large party of Wesleyan missionaries from Fiji and the members of a London musical comedy company returning from its Australian "triumphs." I was just beginning to chuckle inwardly at the recollection of what one of the missionary ladies had said to a buxom chorus-girl who tripped out to the fancy dress cricket-match in her pink tights and a ballet skirt, when the ting-a-ling of a bell brought the captain to the radio-room voice-pipe.

"Message just received," I heard him repeat. "All right. Send it up." He slapped down the voice-pipe cover, and a messenger had handed him the signal before he had paced twice across the bridge.

"_Marmora_ just sunk," he read; "survivors picked up by P.B.'s _X_ and _Y_."

The sinking made no immediate change in our plans. There was still a chance we might be of use with the survivors, and also the matter of the U-boat to be looked after. With no abatement of speed, all three destroyers drove on. The navigating officer reckoned that in another fifteen minutes we should be sighting the rescuing craft, and probably wreckage; but when twice that time still left a clear horizon ahead, it began to appear as though there had been a mistake of some kind. And so there had, but it was a lucky mistake for us. It was some time later before they figured just how it had chanced, but what had happened was this. The _Marmora's_ last despairing call--doubtless sent out by a breaking-down radio--gave her position as some ten or twelve miles out from what it really was. The consequence was that, heading somewhat wide of the sinking ship, to which, however, on account of the presence of the patrol boats, which had evidently been close enough to come to her immediate a.s.sistance, we could have been of small use, we had steered directly for the one point where it was most desirable we should make our appearance at that psychological moment: for the point, in short, at which the coolly calculative skipper of the U-boat responsible for the outrage, after running submerged for an hour or more and doubtless figuring he had come sufficiently far from the madding crowd that would throng the immediate vicinity of the wreckage to be at peace, had come up to smoke his evening pipe and cogitate upon the Freedom of the Seas.

It was just as it began to become apparent that we were badly adrift as regards the point where the _Marmora_ had gone down that a whine from the lookout's voice-pipe reported to the bridge that it had sighted a "sail--port, ten."

"What is it?" asked back the captain.

"Looks like subm'rine," came the reply; and with one quick movement the captain had started the alarm-bell sounding "General quarters!" in every part of the ship. With every man knowing precisely what he had to do, and how to do it, there was incredible speed without confusion. Tumbling to their stations like hounds on a hot scent, they yet managed to avoid getting in each other's way, even in the narrow pa.s.sages and on the ladders. The loom of the conning-tower was plain to the naked eye, now that one knew where to look for it, but only for a few minutes. Even as a swiftly pa.s.sed sh.e.l.l was thrown into the open breech of the forecastle gun, came the look-out's whine through the voice-pipe, "She's going down, sir; she's gone!" The breech of the gun spun shut, but the eye of the sightsetter groped along an empty horizon.

"Never mind," muttered the captain grimly. "Couldn't have croaked him with one shot anyhow. Got something better'n sh.e.l.ls for him. Now for it," and his hand went back to pull the wire of a gong which gave certain orders to the men standing-by with the depth-charges. That, a word down the engine-room voice-pipe, and a fraction of a point's alteration in the course--and there was only one thing left to be done.

The time for that had not quite arrived.

Because a destroyer's engine-room telegraph-hand points to "Full speed!"

it does not necessarily mean that there are not ways of forcing more revolutions from the engines, of driving her still faster through the water should the need arise. Such a need now confronted the _Zip_, and, like the thoroughbred she was, her response was instant and generous.

The pulsing throb of her quickened till it was almost a hum; the quivering insistency of it struck straight to the marrow of the bones, drummed in the depths of one's innermost being. If there is anything to stir the blood of a man like a destroyer beginning to see red and go Berserk, I have yet to encounter it.

There must have been something like three miles to go from the point where the U-boat had been sighted to the point where the inevitable patch of grease would mark the place where it had submerged, and rather less than twice that many minutes had elapsed when the cry of "Oil slick--starboard bow!" came almost simultaneously from the look-outs in the foretop and on the bridge. Over went the helm a spoke or two, and the executive officer, in his hand a thin piece of board with a table of figures pasted on it, moved up beside the captain. Straight down the wobbly track of iridescent film drove the _Zip_, and when a certain length of it had been put astern, the captain turned and drew a lever to him with a sharp pull.

Three, four seconds pa.s.sed, and then, simultaneously with a heavy knocking thud, a round patch of water a hundred yards or so astern quivered and fizzed up sharply like the surface of a gla.s.s of whisky-and-soda after the siphon has ceased to play on it. Following that by a second or two, a smooth rounded geyser of foam boiled up a dozen feet or so, and then gradually subsided. That one, plainly, was a deep-set charge, whose force was expended far beneath the surface. A second one threw a geyser twice as high as the first, and a third, which fizzed and spouted almost simultaneously, blotted out a great patch of sternward sky with its smoke-shot eruption.

Presently the _Zop_ "struck oil," and then the _Zap_. Soon the m.u.f.fled booms of their rapidly scuttled depth-charges began to drum, while astern of them the foam-spouts nicked the sky-line like a stubby picket fence.

Perhaps the lad whom I later overheard describing that bombardment by saying that "'tween the three of us, we was scattering 'cans' like rice at a wedding" was guilty of some exaggeration; but it is a fact that they were spilling over very fast and, there is little doubt, with telling effect. The savageness of the bolts of wrath released by the exploding charges was strikingly disclosed when two of them chanced to be dropped at nearly the same time by destroyers a mile or more apart, when the under-sea "jolts" would meet half-way and form weird evanescent "rips" of dancing froth strongly suggestive of chain-lightning. The way in which even the most distant of the detonations made a destroyer "b.u.mp the b.u.mps," quite as though it was striking a series of solid obstructions, gave some hints of the bolts that were descending upon the lurking pirate.

At the end of a minute or two a quick order from the captain sent the wheel spinning over, and, with raucous grinding of helm, round we swung through sixteen points to head back in reverse over the path of destruction we had just traversed. Just as the steel runners of a racing skater throw ice when he makes a sudden turn, so the screws of a speeding destroyer hurl water. The stern sank deep into the propeller-scooped void, so that the high-tossed side-slipping wake buried it beneath a frothing flood. Through several long seconds I saw the water boiling above the waists of the men at the depth-charges, without appearing to disturb them in the least; then the wheel was spun back 'midships--and a spoke or two beyond to meet and steady her--the bow wave resumed its curled symmetry and the wake began trailing off astern again.

It was into a peaceful sea, indolently rolling, sunset tinged and slightly sleeked with a thin streak of oil, that we had raced five minutes before; it was a troubled sea, charge-churned and wave-slashed, that we now nosed back into to see what good our coming had wrought. The grey-blue-black of the long oil wake had been scattered into broken patches by the explosions. Most of these were pale, sickly, and highly anaemic in colour, and of scant promise; but for one, where fresh oil rising spread rainbow-bright upon the surface, the _Zip_ headed full tilt. The explosion here appeared to have been an unusually heavy one, for the sea was dotted with the white bellies of stunned fish, most of them floating high out of the water, with trickles of blood running from their upturned mouths and distended gills. A six or eight-foot shark, wriggling drunkenly along the surface with a broken back, was hailed with a howl of delight by the men, who claimed to see in the fact that the unlucky monster could not submerge his telltale dorsal, a sign that their Fritz might be in the same difficulty.

Another "can" or two was let go as we dashed through that iridescent "fount of promise"; and when we turned back to it again the wounded shark had ceased to wriggle and now floated inertly among his hapless brothers. But of Fritz--save for a glad new gush of oil--no sign.

Prisoners or wreckage are rated as the only indubitable evidence of the destruction of a U-boat, and neither of these were we able to woo to the surface in that busy hour which elapsed before the descending pall of darkness put a period to our well-meant efforts. During that time not the most delicate instrument devised by science for that purpose revealed any indication of life or movement in the depths below. As the water at this point was far too deep to allow a submarine to descend and lie on the bottom without being crushed, this fact appeared morally conclusive. It was this I had in mind when I tried to draw the captain out on the subject. "Of course there's no doubt we bagged him?" I hazarded, in a quiet interval when we were watchfully waiting for something to turn up, or rather come up. He smiled a rather tired smile.

"Oh, very likely we have," he replied. "But, unluckily, there's nothing we can lay our hands on to carry away and prove it. In case this particular Fritz doesn't come to life and sink another ship in the course of the next few days, there is just a chance that we may be credited with a 'Possible.' They never err on the optimistic side in sizing up a little brush of this kind, and perhaps it's just as well.

Anyhow, a game like this is worth playing on its own account, whether you come in with a scalp at your belt every time or not."

It was just as darkness was slowing down our anti-U-boat operations, that a signal came through stating that there were believed to be several survivors still alive among the wreckage of the _Marmora_, and ordering us to proceed to the scene of her sinking with all dispatch.

The moon was rising as we began to nose among the pathetic litter of sc.r.a.ps that was all that remained afloat of what, five or six hours previously, had been a swift and beautiful auxiliary cruiser.

There was enough light for us to be reasonably sure, at the end of an hour's search, that our mission was in vain; that there remained no living man to pick up. There was something strangely familiar, though, in the lines of a cutter which, in spite of a smashed gunwale, was still afloat, and I was just thinking of how grateful a lee, in the monsoon, the windward side of the old _Marmora's_ lifeboats had furnished for a deck-chair or two, when the captain, advancing the handle of the engine-room telegraph, turned to me with: "We're off to rendezvous with the _Lymptania_ now; I think we can promise you some real excitement in the course of the next day or two."

CHAPTER V

THE CONVOY GAME

The fantastic pile of multi-coloured slabs blotting out a broken patch of sky above the seaward end of the estuary, if it had been on land, might have been anything from a row of hangars, viewed in slant perspective, to the scaffolding of a scenic railway, or a "Goblin's Castle" in Luna Park. But there in the middle of the channel, the mountainous bulk could only be one thing, the _Lymptania_, the ship which our division of American destroyers had been ordered to escort on that part of its westbound voyage in which there was reckoned to be danger of submarine attack. Distorted by the camouflage, the tumbled ma.s.s of jumbled colours continued to loom in jagged indefinitiveness as we closed it from astern, and it was only when we had come up well abreast of it that the parts settled down into "ship-shapeliness," and the silhouette of perhaps the most famous of the world's great steamers sharpened against the sunlit afternoon clouds.

The change which had been wrought in the appearance of the _Lymptania_ since last I had seen her was almost beyond belief. Then she had been a hospital ship, with everything about her, from snowy whiteness to red crosses in paint and coloured lights, calculated to establish her character, to give her the protection of conspicuousness. Now she sought protection in quite the opposite way. Every trick of scientific camouflage had been employed to render her inconspicuous; while, if that failed, there were the destroyers. The protection of these big liners is a considerable undertaking, but it has its redeeming features. As U-boat bait they are unrivalled, and the number of German submarines which have been sent to the bottom as a direct consequence of attempting to sink one of them will make a long and interesting list when the time comes to publish it.

There was something almost awesome in the emptiness of the great ship, in the lifelessness of the decks, in the miles of blinded ports. The heads of a few sailors "snugging down" on the forecastle, a knot of officers at the end of the bridge, and two stewardesses in white uniforms leaning over the rail of one of the upper decks--that was all there was visible of human life on a ship which a few days before had been packed to the funnels with its thousands of American soldiers. A lanky destroyer gunner lounging by a ladder, described her exactly when he said to one of his mates: "Gee, but ain't she the lonesome one!"

The captain of the _Zip_ turned his gla.s.ses back to cover the little group of officers on the liner's bridge. "There's the skipper," he said presently. "I only hope he's well ahead of the game on the sleeps, for I wouldn't mind betting that he won't be leaving that bridge for a cup of coffee for some time. It's going to be an anxious interval for him--very anxious. It's quite beyond calculation, the value to the Allies at this moment of a ship of the size and speed of the _Lymptania_, and her skipper must know from what has happened the last week, that the Huns are all out to bag her this time, and he can hardly be able to extract any too much comfort out of the fact that it's about a hundred to one that we'll bag the Fritz that tries it--either before or after the event. Yes, it will be an anxious time for him--but," a grimly wry smile coming to his face as he turned his eyes to the opening seaward horizon, "even so, it'll be nothing to the time we're in for in the _Zip_ and all the rest of the escort. _He'll_ be able to sleep if he happens to take a notion to; _we_ won't, at least, not during the time we've got _her_ to shepherd. Again, he's only got the _chance_ of being hit by a torpedo to worry about; we've got the _certainty_ of being hit by head-seas that have as much kick in them to a driven destroyer as a tin-fish full of gun-cotton. Unless the weather gets either a good deal better or a shade worse, we're sure up against the real thing this time.

"The fact is," continued the captain, taking up the slack in the hood of his weather-proof jacket as a slight alteration of course brought a new slant of wind; "the fact is, I'd much rather see it get worse than better. If it would only kick up enough sea so that there was no chance of a submarine operating in it, she could drive right along on her own without any need of destroyers. But so long as we've this weather there's a possibility of a torpedo running in, we've got to hang on to the last shiver, and there are two or three things which are going to make 'hanging on' this particular trip just a few degrees worse than anything we've stacked up against before. This is about the way things stand: The _Lymptania's_ best protection is her speed; but while she is just about the fastest of the big ships, she is also just about the biggest of the fast ships. This means that the size of the target she presents goes a long way toward offsetting the advantage of her speed; so that the presence of destroyers--in any kind of weather a submarine can work in--is very desirable, and may be vital.

"Now the escorting of any steamer that makes over twenty knots an hour is a lively piece of business, no matter what the weather, for destroyers, to screen most effectively, should zigzag a good deal more sharply than their convoy, and that, of course, calls for several knots more speed. This can be managed all right in fair weather, or even in rough, where there is only a following or a beam sea; but where the seas come banging down from more than a point or two for'ard of the beam it is quite a different matter. In that event, the speed of the whole procession depends entirely on how much the destroyers can stand without being reduced to sc.r.a.p-iron. Naturally, the ship under escort endeavours to make her speed conform to the best the destroyers can do under the circ.u.mstances; but since an extra knot or two an hour might well make all the difference in avoiding a submarine attack, the tendency always is to keep the escorting craft extended to just about their limit of endurance.

"Just how the mean will be struck between what a fast steamer thinks its escorting destroyers _ought_ to stand, and what the destroyers really _can_ stand, depends upon several things. Perhaps the princ.i.p.al factor is the state of mind of the skipper of the steamer, and that, in turn, is influenced by the value of his ship--both actual and potential--and the danger of submarine attack at that particular time in the waters under traverse. When the destroyers set out to escort a very fast and valuable ship, steering into heavy head seas in waters where there are known to be a number of U-boats operating, they've got the whole combination working against them, and the result is--just what you're slated to see this trip. Best take a good look at the _Zip_ while you've got a chance; she may be quite a bit altered by the time we get back to port again. And you might take a squint at the _Flossie_ over there, too. She's our latest and swiftest, the Fotilla's pride. But this is her first experience of taking out an ex-ocean greyhound, and if, in a burst of fresh enthusiasm, she chances to tap any of these several extra knots of speed she is supposed to have--well, the _Flossie's_ sky-line in that case will be modified more than those of all the rest of her older and wiser sisters put together."

Those were prophetic words.

"The one thing that makes it certain that we'll be put to the limit to-night," resumed the captain, after he had rung up more speed on our coming out into opener water, "is the news in this morning's official announcement of the sinking of the _Justicia_. We seem just to have struck the peak of the midsummer U-boat campaign. It was scarcely a week ago that they got the _Carpathian_. Then, a few days later, came the _Marmora_ (you won't forget for a while the strafe we had at the U-boat which put her down), and now it's the _Justicia_, the biggest ship they've sunk in a year or so. That's the thing that must be worrying the skipper of the _Lymptania_, for it shows they're after the great troop-carriers. The way they stuck to the _Justicia_ proves they're not yet beyond taking some risk if the stake is high enough. Now and then some Fritz is found desperate enough to commit hari-kari by coming up close (if the chance offers) and making sure of getting his torpedo home. He gets what's coming to him, of course, but there is also a fair chance of his getting the ship he is after; and a fast liner for a U-boat is a poor exchange--from our standpoint. Naturally, these things all make the skipper of the _Lymptania_ anxious to minimise his risks by hitting up just as hot a pace as he can, and that, with her size and her power, will be just about full speed. I can't tell you to a knot how fast that is, but I can tell you this: if you were on the bridge of a destroyer going at that speed when it hit a good heavy head-sea, the only thing that would tell you it wasn't a brick wall she had collided with would be the sort of moist feeling about the pile-driver that knocked you over the side. So it looks like the rub is going to come in getting the _Lymptania_ to content herself with a speed at which--well, at which you can detect some slight difference between a head-sea and a brick wall from the bridge of the destroyer doing the b.u.t.ting. Whatever that proves to be, you'll have such a chance as you may never get again to see what stuff your Uncle Sam's destroyers are made of."

We made screening formation as soon as we were well clear of the barraged waters of the estuary, though the sea we had to traverse before entering the open Atlantic was considered practically empty of menace.

The _Lymptania_, making astonishingly little smoke for a coal-burner, worked up to somewhere near her top speed in a very short time; but, with the light-running seas well abaft the beam, the destroyers cut their zigzags round and about her with many knots in reserve. The big liner, with much experience to her credit, knew precisely what to do and how to do it, and the whole machine of the convoy worked as though pulled by a single string. Her very movements themselves seemed to give the various units of the escort their cues, for, though she steered a course so devious and irregular that no submarine could have possibly told how to head in order to waylay her, she was never "uncovered."

Ahead and abreast of her, going their own way individually, but still conforming their general movements to hers, the destroyers wove their practically impenetrable screen.

Whatever there was ahead, it was ideal destroyer weather for the moment, and all hands came swarming out on the dry sun-warmed deck to make the most of it while it lasted. An importunate whine from a nest of arms and legs sprawling abreast the midships torpedo-tubes attracted my attention for a moment as I sauntered aft to see what was afoot, and presently the rattle of dice on the deck and an imploring "Come on, you Seven!" told me they were "shooting c.r.a.ps," with, I shortly discovered, bars of milk chocolate and sticks of chewing-gum for stakes. Several others were playing "High, Low, Jack," and here and there--using elbows and knees to keep the bellying pages from blowing away--were little knots cl.u.s.tered about the latest Sunday Supplement from New York.

But quite the best thing of all was two brown-armed youngsters going through a proper battery warming-up with a real baseball. I had seen enthusiasts on two or three of the American units with the Grand Fleet playing catch right up to the moment "General Quarters" was sounded for target practice; but that was on the broad decks of battleships, with some chance of saving a ball that chanced to be m.u.f.fed. But here the pitcher had to wind-up with a sort of a corkscrew stoop to keep from hitting his hand against a stay, while the catcher braced himself with one foot against a depth-charge and the other against the mounting of the after-gun. There were four or five things that the ball had to clear by less than a foot in its flight from one to the other, but the only ones of these I recall now are a searchlight diaphragm and a gong which sounded from the bridge a standby signal to the men at the depth-charges. I actually saw that skilfully directed spheroid make two complete round-trips, from the pitcher to the catcher and back, before it struck the gong a resonant bing! caromed against the side of an out-slung boat and disappeared into the froth of the wake.

The pitcher and catcher were in a hot argument as to whether that was the twenty-sixth or the twenty-seventh ball they had lost overboard since the first of the month, but they fell quiet and turned sympathetic ears to my description of a net I had seen rigged on one of the American battleships to prevent that very trouble.

"Nifty enough," was the pitcher's comment when I had finished describing how the net was drawn taut right under the stern to prevent all leakage.

"Only thing is, the captain might rule it off on the score that it'd catch the 'cans' we was trying to drop on Fritz as well as the 'wild pitches.' Might do for harbour use, though. Lost b.a.l.l.s is a considerable drain even there."

It was just before dinner-time that the lengthening life of the seas gave warning that we were coming out into the Atlantic. The force of them was still abaft the beam, however, and their princ.i.p.al effect was to add a few degrees of roll, with an occasional deluge dashing in admonitory flood across the decks. But it was enough to make the Ward Room untenable, so that dinner had to be wolfed propped up on the transoms, one nicely balanced dish at a time. There would be about an hour more of this comparative comfort, the captain said, before we reached a position where the full force of the seas would be felt, but things would not really "begin to drop" till the _Lymptania_ altered course and headed westerly. "If you have any writing, reading, sleeping, or anything except just existing to do," he warned, as he kept his soup from overflowing by an undulant gesture of the hand which poised it, "better do it now. It's your last chance."

The forty winks I managed to s.n.a.t.c.h as a result of following up the sleeping part of that recommendation stood me in good stead in the times ahead. It took no little composing to doze off even as it was, and it was the sharp bang my head got from the siderail of my bunk that put a period to the nap I did get. The rolling had increased enormously, and though it was apparent we were not yet bucking into it, the swishing of the water on the forecastle overhead indicated that there had been enough alteration of course to bring the seas--on one leg of the zigzags at least--well forward of the beam. I climbed out, pulled on my weather-proof suit and sea-boots, and clambered up to the bridge.

There were still a couple of hours to go before dark, and in the diffused light of a bright bank of sunset clouds the gay dazzle colours of all the ships showed up brilliantly as they ploughed the whitecap-plumed surface of a sea which now stretched unbrokenly to the westward horizon. There was a world of power behind the belligerent bulk of swells which had been gathering force under the urge of a west-nor'-west wind that had chased them all the way from Labrador, and the destroyers, teetering quarteringly along their foam-crested tops, were rolling drunkenly and yawing viciously ahead of jagged wakes.

Still driving on at express speed, however, they continued to maintain perfect formation on the swiftly steaming _Lymptania_. The latter, apparently as steady as though "chocked up" in a dry-dock, drove serenely on in great swinging zigzags.

The captain came up from the chart-room and took a long look around.

"It's just about as I expected," he said, shaking his head dubiously.

"It isn't so rough but what a submarine might stage an attack if her skipper had the nerve; and it's a darn sight too rough for destroyers to screen the _Lymptania_ with her holding to anything like full speed.

It's all up now to _what_ speed she will try to hold us to."

"But what's the matter with this?" I protested. "We're still hitting the high places for speed, and, while I wouldn't call this exactly comfortable, we still seem to be making pretty good weather of it."