Sea-Hounds Part 8

I had heard the story in Taranto a year previously, and knew it to be somewhat apocryphal at best. "I didn't mean that kind of 'slap-bang,'" I said. "I was under the impression that the destroyers had some rather lively work down there on one or two occasions."

"There were several brushes which might have been called lively while they lasted," he admitted. "I was in one of them myself just before I was transferred north."

"You don't mean the recent attack on the drifter patrol--the one where two British destroyers stood the brunt of the attack of four Austrian destroyers and a light cruiser or two?" I asked. "I have always wanted to hear about that. I've heard Italian naval men say some very flattering things of the way the British carried on."

"That's the one," he replied. "I was in the _Flop_--the one that got rather the worst banging up."

"You've just got time for the yarn before your watch is over," I said, settling myself into the nearest thing to a listening att.i.tude that one can a.s.sume on the bridge of a destroyer bucking a north-east gale. "Fire away."

I didn't much expect he would "come through," for I had failed in so many attempts to draw a good yarn by a frontal attack of this kind that I had little faith in it as compared with more subtle methods. Perhaps it was because rough methods were suited to the rough night; or it may have been only because K----'s mind (his non-working mind, I mean; not that closed compartment of sense and instinct with which he was directing his ship) had drifted back to the Adriatic, and he was glad of the chance to talk about it; at any rate, in the hour that had still to go before eight bells went for midnight, to the accompaniment of the banging of the seas on the bows and the obbligato of the spray beating on the gla.s.s and canvas of the screens, he told me the story I asked for.

"I don't need to tell you," he said, after giving the man at the wheel the course for the next zigzag, "that the Adriatic is full of various and sundry little traps and contrivances calculated to interfere as much as possible with the even tenor of the way of the Austrian U-boats which, basing at Pola and Trieste, sally forth in an endeavour to penetrate the Straits of Otranto and attack the commerce of the Mediterranean. You doubtless also know that this work is very largely in British hands. This is no reflection whatever on our Italian ally. Italy simply did not have the material and the trained men for the task in hand, and since Britain had both, it was naturally up to us to step in and take it over. This was done over two years ago; but, like the anti-submarine work everywhere, it is only now just beginning to round into shape to effect its ends. The winter of his discontent for the U-boat in these waters is closing in fast.

"You will understand, too, that these various anti-U-boats contrivances take a lot of looking after to prevent their interference with, or even their complete destruction, by enemy surface craft. All the good harbours are on the east coast of the Adriatic, and that sea is so narrow that swift Austrian destroyers can raid all the way across it at many points, and still have time to get back to their bases the same night. With our own bases--the only practicable ones available--at the extreme southern end of the Adriatic, our greatest difficulty, perhaps, has been in guarding against these swift tip-and-run night-raids by the enemy's speedy surface craft. I don't know whether the fact that we seem to have about put an end to their operations of this kind is a greater tribute to our enterprise or the Austrians' lack of it. The brush in question occurred as a consequence of the latest of the Austrian attempts to interfere with the measures which, he knows only too well, will ultimately reduce his U-boats to comparative impotence.

"I was Number Two in the _Flop_, which, with the _Flip_, was patrolling a certain billet well over toward the Austrian coast of the Adriatic. We had turned at about eleven o'clock, and were heading back on a westerly course, when the captain sighted a number of vessels just abaft the starboard beam. Being almost in the track of the low-hanging moon, they were sharply silhouetted; but the queer atmospheric conditions played such pranks with their outlines that, for a time, he was deceived as to their real character. The warm, coastal airs, blowing to sea for a few hours after nightfall, have a tendency to produce mirage effects scarcely less striking than those one sees on the desert along the Suez Ca.n.a.l. It was the distortion of the mirage that was responsible for the fact that the captain mistook two Austrian light cruisers for small Italian transports (such as we frequently encountered on the run between Brindisi and Valona or Santi Quaranti), and that he reported what shortly turned out to be enemy destroyers as drifters.

"The captain had just made a shaded lamp signal to the _Flip_, calling attention to the ships and their supposed character, when the white, black-curling bow-wave of the two leaders caught his eye and made him suspect they were warships. The alarm bell clanging for 'Action Stations' was the first intimation I had that anything was afoot. In the Adriatic, as everywhere else, everyone in a destroyer turns in 'all standing'; so it was only a few seconds until I was out of my bunk and up to my station on the bridge. It was not many minutes later before I found myself in command of the ship.

"It was now clear that the force sighted consisted of two enemy light cruisers and four destroyers, the latter disposed two on each quarter of the rear cruiser. They were closing on us at high speed at a constant bearing of a point or two abaft the beam. It was up to the _Flip_, as senior ship, to decide whether to fight or to run away on the off-chance of living to fight another day, something which was hardly likely to happen in the event we closed in a real death grapple. The disparity between our strength and that of the enemy would have entirely justified us in doing our utmost to avoid a decisive fight, had it been that the cards on the table were the only ones in the game. But this was hardly the case. Out of sight, but still not so many miles distant, was another subdivision of our destroyers, while overwhelming forces would ultimately be hurrying up to our aid in case the enemy could be delayed long enough. To close in immediate action was plainly the thing, and the _Flip_ was turning in to challenge even as she made us a signal indicating that this was her decision. A moment more, and we were turning into line astern of her.

"Out of the moon-track now, the outlines of the enemy ships were indistinct and shadowy, and it was from the dull blur of opacity above the slightly phosph.o.r.escent glow of the 'bone' in the teeth of the leading cruiser that the opening shot was fired. It lighted her up brilliantly for the fraction of a second, and the ghostly geyser from the bursting sh.e.l.l showed up distinctly a few hundred yards ahead of the _Flip_. Both the sharpened image of the cruiser in the light of the gun-fire and the time of flight of the sh.e.l.l helped us with the range, and the fall of shot from the _Flip's_ opener looked like a very near thing. We followed it with one from our fo'c'sl' gun, which was a bit short, and the next, if not a hit, was only slightly over. At this juncture, all six of the enemy ships came into action with every gun they could bring to bear, and the _Flip_ and the _Flop_ did the same.

For the next few minutes things happened so fast that I can't be sure of getting them in anywhere near their actual sequence.

"We began hitting repeatedly, and with good effect, after the first few shots, and the _Flip_ also appeared to be throwing some telling ones home. The enemy were hitting the both of us about the same time, however, and, of course, with many times the weight of metal we were getting to him. At this juncture the skipper of the _Flip_, evidently figuring that the Austrians, now that they were fully engaged and had a good chance of polishing us off, would not break off the fight, turned southward with the idea of drawing them toward the other forces which we knew would be rushing up in response to the signal we had sent out the instant the character of the strange ships was evident.

"The _Flip_, like a big squid, began smoke-screening heavily as she turned, the _Flop_ following suit. The sooty oil fumes poured out in clouds thick enough to walk on, but unluckily, neither our course nor the state of the atmosphere was quite favourable for making it go where it would have served us best. Possibly it was because the _Flip_ was making a better screen than the _Flop_, or possibly it was because they were concentrating on the 'windy corner' just as we were rounding it. At any rate, trying to observe through our rather patchy smoke the effect of what appeared to be a couple of extremely well-placed shots of ours on the leading cruiser, I suddenly became aware that all four of the destroyers and the second cruiser were directing all of their fire upon the poor little _Flop_. I don't recall exactly whether I twigged this before we began to feel the effects of it or not, but I am rather under the impression that I seemed to sense it from the brighter brightness--a gun firing directly at you makes a more brilliant flash than the same gun laid on a target ahead or astern of you--of the flame-spurts even before I was aware of the sudden increase of the fall of shot.

"They had us ranged to a yard by this time, of course, and the captain turned away a couple of points in an endeavour to throw them off. I recall distinctly that it was just as the grind of the ported helm began to throb up to the bridge that a full salvo--probably from one of the cruisers--came crashing into us. My first impression was that we were blown up completely, for of the two sh.e.l.ls which had struck for'ard, one had brought down the mast and the other had scored a clean hit on the forebridge. There was also a hit or two aft, but the immediate effects of these were not evident in the chaos caused by the others. This was absolutely beyond description.

"The actual shock to a ship of being struck by a sh.e.l.l of even large calibre is nothing to compare with that from almost any one of these seas that are crashing over us now. But it is the noise of the explosion, the rending of metal, and the bang of flying fragments and falling gear that makes a heavy sh.e.l.ling so staggering, to mind if not to body. Of course everyone on the forebridge was knocked flat by the explosion of the sh.e.l.l which hit it, and the worst of it was that the most of us didn't get up again. The sub and the middy who were acting as Control Officers were blown off their platform and so badly knocked up that they were unable to carry on. One signalman and one voice-pipe man were killed outright.

"The rest of us were only shaken up or no more than slightly wounded by this particular sh.e.l.l, but the one which brought down the mast added not a little both to casualties and material damage. The radio aerials came down with the mast, of course, and it was some of the wreckage from one or the other that fell on the captain, wounding him severely in both arms. Dazed and shaken, he still gamely stuck to the wreck of the bridge, but the active command now fell to me.

"This damage, serious as it was, was by no means the extent of that inflicted by this unlucky salvo. A third sh.e.l.l, as I shortly learned, had pa.s.sed through the fore sh.e.l.l-room and into the fore magazine. In which it exploded I could not quite make sure, but both were set on fire. This fire got to some of the cordite before it was possible to get it away, and the ensuing explosion killed or wounded most of the supply parties and the crews of the twelve-pounders. It was brave beyond all words, the fight those men made to save the ship down in that unspeakable h.e.l.l-hole, and it was due wholly to their courage and devotion that the explosion was no worse than it was. This trouble, luckily, was hardly more than local, but a number of good lives was the price of keeping it so.

"There was one other consequence of that salvo, and though it sounds funny to tell about it now, it might well have made all the difference in the world to us. In the bad smashing-up of the bridge of any ship by sh.e.l.l-fire the means of communication with the rest of her--the voice-pipes, telephones, telegraphs, etc.--are among the first things to be knocked out. This means, if there are no alternatives left, that directions have to be relayed around by shouting from one to another until the order reaches the man to carry it out. This would be an awkward enough expedient for a ship that is not under fire and fighting for time and her life. What it is with the enemy's sh.e.l.l exploding about you, and with your own guns firing, I will leave you to imagine. Well, we had all this going on, and besides that a fire raging below that always had the possibilities of disaster in it until it was extinguished. Also, we were already short-handed from our losses in killed and wounded. There wasn't anyone to spare to relay orders about in any case. But what capped the climax was this: When the mast was shot down, some of the raffle of rigging or radio fouled the wires leading back to both of the sirens, turning a full pressure of steam into them and starting them blowing continuously. It was almost as though the poor maimed and mangled _Flop_ were wailing aloud in her agony.

"I didn't think of it that way at the time, though, for I had my hands full wailing loud enough myself to make even the man at the wheel understand what I wanted him to do. Luckily, the engine-room telegraph, though somewhat cranky, was still in action, and orders to other parts of the ship we managed to convey by flash-lamp or messenger. It was ten minutes or more before they contrived to hush the sirens--it was cutting off their steam that did it, I believe--and by then a new and even more serious trouble had developed through the jamming of the helm. It was hard over to starboard at that, so that the _Flop_ simply began turning round and round like a kitten chasing its tail. This involuntary manoeuvre had one favourable effect in that it seemed to throw the Austrian gunnery off for a bit, though one sh.e.l.l which penetrated and exploded in the after tiller-flat shortly after she began cutting capers did not make it any easier to coax the jammed helm into doing its bit again.

"Our 'ring-around-the-roses' course had resulted in our coming much nearer to the enemy, who, seeing a chance to finish us off, was trying to close the range at high speed. Our rotary course brought them on a continually shifting bearing, and it was while they were coming up on our port bow at a distance of less than a mile that it suddenly became evident that the cruisers were about to present us the finest and easiest kind of a torpedo target. The captain, who, in spite of his wounds, was still trying to stick the show through, saw the opening as soon as I did, and, because there was no one else free to attempt the trick, tackled it himself. But it was a case of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. With every ounce of nerve in him he tried to make his almost useless hands work the forebridge firing-gear. The chance pa.s.sed while he still fumbled frantically but vainly to release the one little messenger--a mouldie--that would have been enough to square accounts, and with some to spare. It was the hardest thing of all--not being able to take advantage of that opening.

"It was twenty minutes before the helm was of any use at all, and the Austrians had only their lack of nerve to thank for not putting us down while they had a chance. It must have been because they were afraid of some kind of a trap, for there were a half-dozen ways in which a force of their strength could have disposed of a ship as helpless and knocked-out generally as was the _Flop_. The _Flip_ had also been hard hit, and when I had a chance for a good look at her again it appeared that her mast, like ours, was trailing over the side. She was still firing, however, and it was she rather than the enemy that was trying to close. We were quite cut off from wireless communication, as all attempts to disentangle the aerials from the wreckage of the mast had been unsuccessful; but it was evident that help was coming to us, and that the Austrians had in some way got wind of it. At any rate, our immediate responsibilities were over. We had prevented the enemy from reaching his objective, and possibly delayed him long enough for some of our other ships to have a chance at harrying his retreat. It was now up to us to limp to port on whatever legs we had left.

"We were still a long way from being out of action even now, but with the fires continuing to burn fiercely in the fore magazine and sh.e.l.l-room, with the helm threatening to jam every time course was altered, and with a considerable mixture of water beginning to make its presence felt in the oil, there was no telling what complications might set in at any moment. As one of the Italian bases in Albania was rather nearer than any port on the other side of the Adriatic, it was for that we set our still erratic course.

"Our troubles were not yet over, however. Just as the moon came down and sat on the sea preliminary to setting, squarely against the round yellow background it formed I saw the silhouette of the conning-tower of a U-boat. At almost the same instant the helm jammed again. Then it worked free for a few seconds, but only to jam presently, just as before. This continued during two or three minutes, and just as it was w.a.n.gled right and we began to steady again I saw the wake of a torpedo pa.s.s across our bows. Half a minute later another one missed us in the same way, and by about the same distance. I have always thought that nothing but that providential jamming of the helm just then saved us from intercepting both of those mouldies.

"The fires in the fore sh.e.l.l-room and magazine were eventually got under control by flooding, and we were fairly cushy when we dropped anchor at base a little before daybreak."

K---- lurched over to the starboard rail and counted the dark blurs that represented the units of the straggling convoy. He was wiping snow and spray from his face as he slid back on the roll to our stanchion.

"Fine place, Southern Albania," he muttered. "Plenty of heat and dust and sunshine and----"

I never did hear what the rest of those Albanian attractions were. At that juncture dusky figures emerging from the deeper gloom of the ladder heralded the appearance of the middle watch, and for those relieved, including myself, the world held just one thing--a long, narrow bunk, with a high side rail to prevent the occupant from rolling out. You go at your sleep on a destroyer as a dog dives at a bone, for you never know how long it may be before you get another chance.

CHAPTER VIII

PATROL

The Senior Naval Officer (or the S.N.O., as they clip it down to) at X---- had prepared me for finding an interesting human exhibit in the sharp-nosed, stub-sterned little craft snuggled up to the breast of its mothership for a drink of petrol, or whatever other life-giving essence she lived and laboured on, but hardly for the highly diversified a.s.sortment that was to reveal itself to me during those memorable days we were to rub shoulders and soak up blown brine and grog together as they threaded the gusty sea lanes of her winter North Sea patrol.

"I am sending you out on M.L.[D] ----," the S.N.O. had said as he gazed down with an affectionate smile at the object of his remarks, "for several reasons, but princ.i.p.ally on account of the men that are in her.

You'll find them a living, breathing object-lesson in the adaptability of the supposedly stodgy and inflexible Anglo-Saxon race. Her skipper, to use one of his own favourite expressions, is a live wire--always seems to be able to spark when there's trouble in the wind. He came from somewhere in Western Canada, I believe. Seems to have tried farming there for a spell, and I think he said something once about running his own agricultural tractor. At any rate, in some way or another, he has picked up more practical knowledge of petrol engines than many of our so-called experts.

[Footnote D: Motor launch.]

"The fact is," continued the S.N.O. as we turned back towards his office at the end of the quay, "the fact is that D----, though he never saw salt water before he crossed the Atlantic to do his bit in the War, and though he never has got and never will get, I'm afraid, his sea-legs, is in many respects the most useful M.L. Officer I have ever had to do with, and that's saying a good deal, let me a.s.sure you.

"He's always sick as a dog from the time he puts to sea to the time he returns to port. The only thing that is liable to be more sick is the Hun submarine he once gets his nose on. I've heard him say in a joking way, two or three times, that he always could scent a Hun as far as he could a skunk--I think that's what he calls it; and from some of the things he's done I must confess I'm more than half inclined to believe him. Perhaps his most remarkable achievement, however, is that of taking eight or ten men, just as green as he was himself regarding the sea, and making of them a crew that will handle that cranky little lump of a craft pretty nearly as smartly as old trawler-men would on the nautical side, and at the same time having a fund of resource always on tap that is positively uncanny--almost Yankee, in fact," he added with a smile.

"Indeed, I believe D---- speaks of having knocked about the States a bit, which may account for some of the 'wooden-nutmeg' tricks he has played on the U-boats. Try to get him to tell you some of them. You'll hardly be allowed to write much of them for a while yet--certainly not until they have become obsolete through the introduction of new devices; but you'll find it good material some day."

M.L. ---- looked more diminutive than ever as I was rowed out to her anchorage in the chill grey mists of the following morning; but a raw cold, which had been striking through to the marrow of my bones, dissolved, as by magic, before the friendly warmth of the welcome which awaited me, when I had clambered up the sawn-off Jacob's Ladder and over the wobbly wire rail. A slender but lithely active chap in a greasy overall and jumper, to give it the Yankee name, gave me a finger-crushing grip with his right hand, while with his left he deftly caught and saved from immersion my kit-bag, which had fallen short in the toss that had been given it from below. Just for an instant the absence of visible insignia of rank made me think that he was a petty officer of engineers, or something of the kind; then the magnetism of his personality flowed to me through the medium of his hand-clasp, and I knew I was looking into the eyes of a man who would not be likely to figure for long as anything less than "Number One" on any kind of job he ever undertook.

"You're just in time for a 'square,'" he said heartily, leading the way to the tiny hatch and preceding me down the ladder. "You'll be needing it, too, after that pull with nothing more than that sloppy dish-wash kaffy-o-lay that you get at the hotel at this hour of the morning on your stomach. Don't try to bluff me that you had anything more. I know by sad experience. Now _I'll_ give you something that'll stick to your ribs. What do you say to some Boston baked beans and a 'stack o' hots'? Guess I know what a 'Murican likes. Sorry my maple syrup's gone, but here's some dope I synthesised out of melted sugar and m'la.s.ses--treacle, they call it over here."

Reaching the lower deck, we edged along to a transom at the end of a table which all but filled the tiny dining-cabin.

"Shake hands with Mac," said the skipper by way of introducing me to a tall and extremely good-looking youth in a Cardigan jacket, duffel trousers, and sea-boots, who rose with a smile of welcome as we dropped down beside him. "Mac's a Canuck, like myself," he went on, after asking me if I liked my eggs "straight up" or "turned over," and pa.s.sing the order on to a diminutive c.o.c.kney with a comedian's face, who came tripping in almost as though wafted on the "smell o' cooking" which preceded him through the opened galley door.

"Mac learned his sailoring on his dad's yacht on Lake Ontario, and I learned mine driving a 'deep-seagoing' side-wheel tractor on a ranch in Alberta. Only time I was ever afloat before I became a 'Capt'in in the King's Navee' was on a raft on the old Missouri, in Dakota; and that isn't really being afloat, you know, for 'bout one half the water of that limpid stream is mud and the other half catfish. A great pair of old salts, we two--hey, Mac?

"And the rest of the crew's no more 'saline' than its 'orfficers.'

That's the way they say it, ain't it, Mac? Little 'Arry, the galley-slave, was a knock-about artist in the London music-halls before he 'eard the sea a-callin', and now he doesn't 'eed nothin' else, do you, Harry? And you'll hear the sea a-callin' that nice big breakfast of yours just as soon as we get outside the Heads, won't you, Harry? And then you won't 'eed nothin' else for quite a while. And so'll Mac hear the sea a-calling his breakfast, and so'll I, and so'll all the rest of us--every mother's son. It's a fine lot of Jack Tars we are, the whole bunch of us. Did I tell you that one of my quartermasters is an ex-piano-tuner, and that the other was a Salvation Army captain before he entered the Senior Service for the duration? And my Chief--that's him you hear alternating between tinkering and swearing at the engines on the other side of that bulkhead you're leaning against--owned a motor-boat of his own before the War, and appears to have divided his waking hours between racing that and his stable of motor-cars? You can tell he was a gentleman once by the fluency of his cussing. He's the only man I've met over here that could give yours truly any kind of a run in dispensing the pungent persiflage; but I had the advantage of driving mules as a kid.

"But cussing, though it helps with a lot of things, doesn't make a sailor, and the Chief's no more of a Jack Tar than me or Mac or Harry.

Fact is, that the only man aboard who ever made his living out of the sea before the war is a fisherman from the Hebrides; and even the glossary in the back of my Bobbie Burns won't translate his lingo. Two or three times, when the sea has been kicking up a bit, he has managed to tell us that no self-respecting G.o.d-fearing sailor would be oot in such weather. Possibly he's been right; but, as none of us are sailors, we don't feel called on to pay much attention to his ravings. Our duty is to hara.s.s any Huns that encroach on our beat; and the fact that we've had a modic.u.m of success in that line proves you don't have to be a sailor to qualify for the job. Which don't mean, though," he concluded with a smile of sad resignation as he rose and reached for his oil-skins, "that I don't hope and pray that I'll develop the legs and stomach of a sailor before the war's over."

When breakfast was eaten, forward and aft, all hands were piped on deck, and in less than ten minutes M.L. ---- was under way and threading the winding channels of a cliff-begirt Firth to the mist-masked waters of the North Sea.