Sea-Hounds Part 6

The captain smiled indulgently. "You're right," he said, "as far as you go. We are indeed hitting the high places, but--the high places haven't started hitting us yet. Wait just about five or ten minutes," he added, turning his gla.s.ses to where the great liner, silhouetted for the moment against the sunset clouds, ploughed along on our port beam, "and you'll see the difference. Ah!" this as he steadied his gla.s.ses on where the boiling wake of the _Lymptania_, beginning to bend away in a sharp curve indicating a considerable alteration of course. "There she goes now.

Hold tight!"

With his hand on the engine-room telegraph, the captain gave the men at the wheel a course to conform to that of the _Lymptania_. Quick as a cat on her helm, the _Zip_ swung swiftly through eight points and plunged ahead. This brought on her bows seas that had been rolling up abeam, and we were up against the real thing at last.

The first sea, which she caught while she was still turning, the _Zip_ contented herself with slicing off the truculently-tossing top of before crunching it underfoot. It was a smartly-executed performance, and seemed to promise encouragingly as to the way she might be expected to dispose of the next ones. The second in line, however, which she met head-on and essayed the same tactics with, dampened her ardour--and just about everything and everybody else below the foretop--by detaching a few tons of its b.u.mptious bulk and raking her fore-and-aft with its rumbling green-white flood. The bridge was above the main weight of that blow, but 'midships and aft I saw men bracing themselves against a knee-deep stream. One bareheaded and bare-armed man, who had evidently been surprised in making his way from one hatch to another, I saw rolled fifteen or twenty feet and slammed up against the torpedo-tube which prevented his going overboard. He limped out of sight, rubbing his shoulder, and probably never knew how lucky he was in being caught by _that_ wave instead of one which came along a minute later.

The slams which she received from the next two or three seas left the _Zip_ in a somewhat chastened mood, and rather less sanguine respecting her ability to go on pulling off that little stunt of surmounting waves by biting them in the neck and then trampling their bodies under foot.

She was beginning to realise that she had a body of her own, and that there was something else around that could bite--yes, and kick, and gouge, and punch below the belt, and do all the other low-down tricks of the underhand fighter.

Languid and uncertain of movement, like a dazed prize-fighter, she was just steadying herself from the jolt a bustling brute of a comber had dealt her in pa.s.sing, when the skyline ahead was blotted out by the imminent green-black loom of a running wall of water which, from its height and steepness, might well have been kicked up by a Valparaiso "Norther" or a South Sea hurricane.

It may have been the chastened state of mind the last sea had left her in which was responsible for _Zip's_ deciding to take this one "lying down"; or again, it may be that she was acting, in reverse, after the example set by the rabbit who, because he couldn't go under the hill, went over it. At any rate, after one shuddering look at the mountainous menace tottering above her bows, she made up her mind that she was better off under the sea than on the surface, and deliberately dived. Of course, it was the Parthian kick the last sea had given her stern that was really responsible for her bows starting to go down at the very instant those of every other ship that one had had experience of would have been beginning to point skyward, but to all intents and purposes she looked, from the bridge, to be submerging of her own free and considered decision. The princ.i.p.al thing which differentiated it from the ordinary dive of a submarine was the fact that it was made at a sharper angle and at about four times the speed.

There was something almost uncanny in the quietness with which that plunge began; though, on the latter score, there was nothing to complain of by about half a second later. I have seen at one time or another almost every conceivable kind of craft, from a Fijian war canoe to the latest battlecruiser, trying to buck head seas, and invariably the wave that swept it had the decency to announce its coming by a warning knock on the bows. This time there was nothing of the kind. The retreating sea had lifted her stern so high that the forecastle was under water even before the coming one had begun to topple over on to it. The consequence was that there was no preliminary bang to herald the onrush of the latter.

The base of the mountainous roller simply flooded up over the diving forecastle and crashed with unbroken force against the bridge. We had collided with the "brick wall" right enough, and for the next few seconds at least the result was primal chaos.

I have a vivid but detached recollection of two or three things in the instant that the blow impended. One is of the helmsman, crouching low, with legs wide apart, locking his arms through the slender steel spokes of the wheel the better to steady her in the coming smash. Another is of the captain, with hunched shoulders and set jaw, throwing over the telegraph to stop the engines. But the clearest picture of all is of the submarine lookout on the port side--a black-eyed, black-haired boy with a profile that might have been copied from an old Roman coin--who was leaning out and grinning sardonically into the very teeth of the descending hydraulic ram. It was his savagely-flung anatomy, I believe, though I never made sure, which b.u.mped me in the region of the solar plexus a moment later and broke my slipping hold on the buckling stanchion to which I was trying to cling.

There was nothing whatever suggestive of water--soft, fluent, trickling water--in the first shattering impact of that mighty blow. It was as solid as a collision between ship and ship; indeed, the recollection I have of a railway wreck I was once in on a line in the Argentine Pampas is of a shock less shattering. It is difficult to record events in their proper sequence, partly because they were all happening at once, and partly because the self-centred frame of mind I was in at the moment was not favourable for detached observation. The noise and the jar of the crash were stupendous, yet neither of these has left so vivid a mental impression as the uncanny writhing of the two-inches-thick steel stanchion to which I was endeavouring to hold, and the nerve-racking sound of rending metal. I have no recollection of hearing the clink of broken gla.s.s, nor of being struck by pieces of it; yet all the panes of heavy plate which screened the forward end of the bridge--of a thickness, one had supposed, to withstand anything likely to a.s.sail them--were swept away as though they had been no more than the rice-paper squares of a j.a.panese window.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE THE GREAT LINER PLOWED ALONG]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WE HAD COLLIDED WITH THE "BRICK WALL"]

[Ill.u.s.tration: NOW SHE WAS BACK AT BASE]

The rush of water, of course, followed instantly upon the crash, yet, so vivid are my impressions of the things intimately connected with the blow itself that it seems as though there was an appreciable interval between the fall of that and the time when the enveloping cataclysm transformed the universe into a green-white stream of brine. From ahead, above and from both sides the flood poured, to meet and mingle in a whirling maelstrom in the middle of the bridge. There was nothing of blown spindrift to it; it was green and solid and flowed with a heave and a hurl that made no more of slamming a man to the deck than of tossing a life-buoy. I went the whole length of the bridge when I lost my grip on the port stanchion, brought up against the after-rail, and then went down into a tangle of signal flags. I remember distinctly, though, that the walls of water rushing by completely blotted out sea and sky to port and starboard, and that there was all the darkness of late twilight in the cavern of the engulfed bridge. Then the great sea tumbled aft along the main deck, and it grew light again.

The captain and the helmsman had both kept their feet, and the latter, dripping from head to heel, was just throwing over the engine-room telegraph as I shook off my mantle of coloured bunting and crawled back to my moorings at the stanchion. Immediately afterwards I saw him jump on to the after-rail and make some sort of negative signal to a couple of half-drowned boys who, waist-deep in swirling water, were pawing desperately among the depth-charges. Then he came over and joined me for a few moments.

"Some sea, that," he said, slipping down his hood and throwing back the brine-dripping hair from his forehead. "It's happened before, but never like that. Lord only knows what it's done to her. S'pose we'll begin to hear of that in a minute." He pointed to a string of porcelain insulators dangling at the end of twisted bits of wire in front of one of the paneless windows. "That's the remains of our auxiliary radio," he said, grinning; "and look at the fo'c'sle. Swept clean, pretty near.

Thank heaven, the gun's left. But, do you remember that heavy iron bar the muzzle rested on? Gone! It was probably that, with some of the sh.e.l.ls in the rack, that made all that rat-a-tat. But what of it? Look how she rides 'em now that she's eased down a bit. Only trouble is, she's got to go it again. Look how we've dropped back." And he gave the engine-room, by voice-pipe, a new "standard" speed, and threw the telegraph over to "Full."

The pulsing throb began anew, and under the urge of speeding propellers the _Zip_, steering in narrowed zig-zags quickly regained her station.

All of the destroyers, and the _Lymptania_ as well, had eased down slightly, and the reduced speed meant also a reduction of the danger of another of those deep-sea dives, something no craft but a submarine is built to stand the strain of. But even as it was we were driving right up to the limit of endurance all the time, and the sea that did not come rolling up green right over the bows was the exception rather than the rule. From the forecastle right away aft there was never more than a few seconds at a time when the main deck was free of rollicking cascades of boiling brine, and there were moments when only the funnels and the after superstructure, rearing up like isolated rocks on a storm-beaten coast, were visible above the swirling flood. There were times when the men standing-by at the guns and torpedo-tubes seemed almost to be engulfed; yet none of them was swept away, and they even--from the way they kept joking each other in the lulls--appeared to be getting a good deal of sport out of the thing.

The barometer was falling, and both wind and waves gained steadily in force as the afternoon lengthened and merged into a twilight that was itself already melting before the rising moon. Clouds were few and scattering, and it was plain there were to be no hours dark enough to offer any protection from submarine attack. Looming as large as ever, the big liner offered scarcely a better target on the side she was illuminated by the moonlight than on the one from which she was silhouetted against it. From either side a fifth of a mile of steel would "take a lot of missing," and her captain, sensibly enough, would not ease his engines by a revolution more than was necessary to keep within his destroyer screen. It was plainly up to the destroyers to stick it to the limit, and that is just what they did. As I heard one of the men put it, it was the "bruisiest" bit of escort-work they had ever been--or probably ever will be--called upon to face, but every one of those Yankee destroyers stayed with it to the finish.

Now it would be the _Zop_ that would emerge from under a mountainous sea and come drifting back without steerage weigh, rolling drunkenly in the trough, and now it would be the _Zap_. And now this or that result of a "hydraulic ramming" would disable one of the others temporarily. But, game to the last flake of brine-frosted camouflage, back they came to it again, and again, and yet again. Sunrise of the next day found them plugging on in station, and in station they remained until the _Lymptania_, beyond the zone of all possible submarine danger, made a general signal of "Thank you," and headed off to the westward on her own.

Out of the dim grey dawn of the morning after the night before, battered and buckled, but still unbroken, the wearily waggling line of the _Lymptania's_ late escort trailed back into harbour. The mussed-up silhouette of every one of them bore mute testimony to the way she had been put "through the mill," and, in most cases, the things that met the eye were not the worst. The _Zop_ needed every yard of the channel as she zig-zagged up it under a jury steering-gear, and the _Zap_, like a man dazed from a blow, would have sudden "mental hiati" in which she would straggle carelessly out of line with an inconsequential going-to-pick-flowers-by-the-roadside sort of air. The _Zim's_ idiosyncrasies had more of an epileptic suddenness about them, and her hectic coughing plainly indicated some kind of "lung trouble." Our little _Zip_ presented a very brave front to the outer world, but I heard hollow clankings punctuating the erstwhile even hum of the engines, while the drip, drip, drip and the drop, drop, drop through the crinkled sheet-steel sheathing of my cabin told that the deck-plates of the forecastle fitted a good deal less snugly than before they had played anvil to the l.u.s.ty head-sea hammer.

But the _Flossie_, the "latest, the swiftest, the flotilla's pride"--the wounds of all the rest of us put together were as nothing to those of the _Flossie_. In trying to maintain her pride of place at the head of the escort, she _had_, for a brief s.p.a.ce, unleashed those extra knots of speed the captain had spoken of, and all that, and even more than, he had prophesied had come to pa.s.s. It was just such a swaggerer of a sea as that first one that _Zip_ had dived into which did the trick, only, as the _Flossie_ was going faster, the impact was somewhat more severe.

She was a mile or more distant from us when it happened, and, watching from the bridge of the _Zip_, we simply saw her dissolve into a sky-tossed spout of foam. When she reappeared she was floating, beam-on, to the seas, and, for the moment, an apparently helpless hulk.

The captain's instant diagnosis of a couple of m.u.f.fled detonations which followed was entirely correct.

"That sea must have 'jack-knifed' the _Flossie_ so sharply," he said, "that the recoil took up the slack in the wires, releasing two 'cans'

she seems to have had set and ready. It's about the same thing as just happened to us, except that the tautened wire only rang the stand-by bell, the signal for the men to set the depth-charges. First thing I did after we came to the surface was to negative that supposed order. That was what I was doing when I waved to those boys who were clawing at the 'cans,' with their heads under water. Lucky they weren't carried away."

It was a chastened _Flossie_ which had gone floundering back to station a few minutes later, but somehow or other she had managed to carry on, and now she was back at Base. I won't "give comfort to the enemy" by trying to describe her appearance, but some hint of it may be gleaned from the laconic comment of one of the _Zip's_ signalmen, as the "Flotilla's Pride" was warping in to moor alongside the mother ship.

"Gee whiz!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "See the old _Vindictive_ limpin' home from Zeebruggy! S'pose they'll fill her up with concrete now an' block a channel."

The captain grinned as he overheard the remark where he waited by the starboard rail for the last of the mooring lines to be made fast. "It's not quite so bad as that," he said. "If need be, they'll have her, and all the rest of us, right as trivets in three or four days, and quite ready to take the sea again when our turn comes. It's all in the convoy game, anyhow, and not such bad fun after all, 'specially when it's behind you, and you've got a bath, and a change, and a lunch at the Club, and an afternoon of tennis in immediate prospect. Come along."

CHAPTER VI

YANK BOAT _versus_ U-BOAT

It was the turn of the tide and the turn of the day on the "quiet waters of the River Lee." Pale blue columns of smoke rose above the verdant boskiness which masked the squat brown cabins where the peat fires smouldered, and along the straggling stone wall which crowned the ridge the swaying heads of home-returning cows showed intermittently against the glowing western sky. The peacefulness of it was almost palpable. You seemed to breathe it, and could all but reach out with the hand and touch it.

It permeated even to the long lines of lean destroyers in the stream, and it was the subtly suggestive influence of it which had deflected homeward the minds of the motley-clad sailors who were lounging at ease about the stern of the first of a "cl.u.s.ter" of three of these--like a sheaf of bright multi-coloured arrows the trim craft looked, with the level rays of the setting sun striking across them where they lay moored alongside each other--and set tongues wagging of the little things which, magnified by distance, loom large in the imaginations of men in exile.

They were deep in the "old home town" stuff when I sauntered inconsequently aft on the off-chance of picking up a yarn or two, but as there appeared to be no one present from my part of the country, no immediate opportunity to break in presented itself. Equally an outsider was I when the flow of discussion turned to woollen sweaters and socks and m.u.f.flers, and the golden trails of romance leading back from the names and messages sewed or knitted into them.

No fair unknowns had ever sent _me_ any of these soft comforts, and after I had heard a l.u.s.ty youngster from Virginia tell how a "sweater address" he had written what he described as a "lettah that was good and plenty w'am, b'lieve me," replied that she was "jest goin' twelve years," and that her mother didn't think she ought to be thinking of marriage just yet--after that I didn't feel quite so bad over not having had a chance to open one of these "woolly" correspondences. There was some solace, too, in hearing a pink-cheeked young ex-bank clerk tell how the "abdominal bandage" (they name them, as a rule, after the garment that starts the correspondence), with whom he had exchanged something like a dozen letters of c.u.mulative pa.s.sion, brought the affair to a sudden and violent end by some indirect and inadvertent admission which showed that she remembered when Grant was President.

But when the talk drifted, as it always does in the end, to baseball and baseballers, I knew that there was going to be an opening for me presently, and stood by to take advantage of it. A three-year absentee from the bleachers, I was not sufficiently up on last season's pennant race "dope" to do more than make frequent sapient observations on this or that big-leaguer's stickwork or fielding as he was mentioned; but when they began to discuss, or rather to wrangle over, for discuss is far too polite a term, the theory of the game and to grow red in the face over such esoterics (or "inside stuff," to put it in "Fanese") as how and when a "squeeze" ought to be pulled off, I showed them the bulbous first joint of the little finger of my right hand--which there is no other way of acquiring than by the repeated telescopings of many seasons on the diamond--and was welcomed at last on equal terms. A seat was offered me on a depth-charge, across the business end of which an empty sack had been thrown to prevent a repet.i.tion of what came near happening the time a stoker, who was proving that Hans Wagner could never again be a popular idol now that we were at war with the Huns, punctuated his argument by hammering with a monkey-wrench on the firing mechanism.

They were not as impressed as they should have been when I told them that I learned the game under the tutelage of the mighty Bill Lange (this, of course, because the incomparable "Big Bill" was at his zenith long before their time); but they were duly respectful when I said I had played three years' Varsity baseball, and became quite deferential when I a.s.sured them I had also survived a season of bush-league in the North-West. There was some kind of electrician rating in the crowd who had been a bush-league twirler before his "wing went gla.s.s," as he put it, and he, it soon transpired, had played in one place or another with a number of my old team mates of the Montana League. Deep in reminiscence of those good old days, I quite forgot my subtle scheme of using baseball as a stalking-horse for destroyer yarns, when the arrival of some callers from a British sloop lying a mile or two farther down the harbour recalled it to me. They had been in the _Moonflower_, the man next me said, when she put a U-boat out of business not long before, and one of them--he had some sort of decoration for his part in the show--spun a cracking good yarn about it if you got him started. This latter I managed to do by asking him how it chanced that the _Moonflower_ was allowed to sport a star on her funnel. The story he told, the while he rolled cigarettes and worked his jaws on Yankee chewing-gum, revealed rather too much that may be used in some future surprise party to make it possible to publish just yet, but it had the desired effect of turning the current of reminiscence U-boatward. That was what I wanted, for, now that men from several other destroyers had come aboard and sauntered aft to join the party, the opportunity for finding out at firsthand just what the American sailors thought of the anti-submarine game at the end of a year and a half of it was too good to be missed.

There was a considerable variety of opinions expressed in that last hour of the second dog-watch on the intricate inside stuff of the anti-U-boat game, just as there had been about baseball, but there was one point on which they were practically agreed: that Fritz, especially during the last six months, was not giving them a proper run for their money. This is the way one of them, a bronzed seaman gunner, with the long gorilla-like arms of a Sam Langford, and gnarled knots of protuberant muscles at the angles of his jaws, epitomized it: "We sees Fritzie, or we don't. Mostly we don't, for he ducks under when he pipes our smoke.

If he's stalkin' a convoy there's jest a chance of him givin' us time for a rangin' shot at him on the surface. Then we waltzes over to his grease and scatters a bunch of 'cans' round his restin'-place. An' if the luck's with us, we gets him; an' if the luck's with him, we don't.

If we crack open his sh.e.l.l, down he goes; if we jest start him leakin', up he comes. Only dif'rence is that, in one case, it's all hands down, and in t'other, all hands up--'Kamerad!' In both cases, no fight, no run for our money. Now when we first come over, an' 'fore we'd put the fear o' G.o.d into Fritzie's heart, he wasn't above takin' a chance at a come-back now an' again. _Then_ there was occas'nal moments of ple'surabl' excitement, like the time when"--and he went on to tell of how an enterprising U-boat commander slipped a slug into the _Courser_ abreast her after superstructure, and "beat it" off before that stricken destroyer had a chance to retaliate. Only the fact that, by a miracle, the torpedo failed to detonate her depth-charges saved the _Courser_ from destruction, and even as it was, rare seamanship had been required to take her back to port. And he also told of the unlucky _John Hawkins_, which a U-boat had actually put down, and the grim situation which confronted the sailors when they found themselves sinking in a ship which carried a number of depth-charges set on the "ready." But all that, he said, with the air of an old man speaking of his departed youth, was before they had begun to learn Fritzie's little ways, and before Fritz, perhaps as a consequence, had begun to lose his nerve.

Now, far from being willing to put up a fight with a destroyer, it was only "once in a blue moon that he's got the guts to put up a sc.r.a.p even to save his own hide."

A slender fair-haired lad, with a quick observant eye which revealed him as a signalman even before one looked at his sleeve, cut in sharply at this juncture.

"Then there must have been a blue moon shedding its light over these waters last month," he said decisively. "I quite agree with you that Fritz hasn't got the nerve--or it may be because he's got too much sense--to take a chance at a destroyer any more. But in the matter of putting up a fight for his life--yes, even for giving a real run for the money--well, all I can say is that if you'd been out on the _Sherill_ about three weeks ago, you wouldn't be making that complaint about one particular Fritz at least. If going eighteen hours, with two or three destroyers and a sloop or two doing everything they know how to crack in his sh.e.l.l all the time, without chucking his hand in, and very likely getting clear in the end--if that isn't putting up a fight for life and giving a run for the money, I don't know what is."

I had heard this astonishing "battle of wakes and wits," as someone had christened it, referred to on several occasions, but had never had the chance to hear any of the details from one who had had anything like the opportunities always open to a signalman to follow what is going on.

"Most of the bunch have heard all they want to hear of it already," the lad replied with a laugh when I asked him to tell me the story; "and, besides, a more or less long-winded yarn of the kind I suppose you want would tire 'em to tears anyway. If you really want to hear something of it, come over to the _Sherill_ (that's her stern there, just beyond the _Flossie_) any time after eight bells. I go on watch then, but it's a 'stand easy' in port, and there'll be time for all the yarning you want."

I closed with that offer at once, and eight bells had not long gone before I had picked my precarious way over to the _Sherill_, and climbed the ladders to her snug little bridge. My man was there already, whiling away the time by rewriting an old college football song (he had been in his freshman year at Michigan when America came into the war) to fit destroyer work in the North Atlantic. I found him stuck at the end of the second line of the first verse, because the only rhymes he could think of for flotilla were Manila and camarilla, neither of which seemed sufficiently opposite to be of use, and he was rather glad of an excuse for putting the job by to await later inspiration.

I gave him a "lead" for the U-boat yarn he had lured me there to hear, and he launched into it at once. This is the story the young signalman of U.S.S. _Sherill_ told me, the while the red squares of the cottagers'

windows blinked blandly along the bank in the lengthening twilight and the purple shadows of the western hills piled deeper and duskier upon the "quiet waters of the River Lee."

"We were out on convoy," he said, speaking the first words slowly between the teeth which held the string of the tobacco sack from which the gently manipulated paper in his hand had been filled. "It was some kind of a slow convoy--probably a collier or an oiler or two--and there were only two of us on the job--the _McSmall_ and the _Sherill_. It was just the usual ding-dong sort of a drudge up to about four in the afternoon of the first day out, when the _McSmall_ made a signal that she had sighted a submarine on the starboard bow of the convoy, distant about five miles, and immediately stood off to the west to see if anything like a strafe could be started. She was more than hull-down on the horizon when I saw, by the way the angle of her funnels was changing, that she was manoeuvring to shake loose a few 'cans' into the oil-slick she had run into, but I remember distinctly that I felt the jolt of the under-water explosions stronger than from many we had kicked loose from the _Sherill_, and which had detonated only a hundred yards or so off. It's just a little trick the depth-charge has. The force of it seems to shoot out in streaks, just like an explosion in the air, and you may feel it strong at a distance and much less at fairly close range. So far as we ever learned, this opening salvo did not find its target.