Sea-Hounds Part 9

As I picked my way forward to the little gla.s.sed-in cabin, which served the double purpose of navigating-bridge and wheel-house, I told myself that I was sure of two things--first, that the skipper, by birth, breeding, residence, and probably citizenship, was an American of Americans, and, second, that the chances were he would not admit that fact unless I "surprised him with the goods." An Englishman will often mistake a Canadian for an American but a Yankee himself will rarely make that error. I was sure of my man on a dozen counts, and resolved to lay in figurative ambush for him.

I all but had him within the hour. We were clear of the Heads, and the skipper, having turned over to Mac, was trying to forget that imperious call o' the sea he had chaffed 'Arry about by showing me round. He had explained the way a depth-charge was released, and was just beginning to elaborate on the functions of an old-fashioned lance-bomb.

"Now this fellow," he said, balancing the ungainly contrivance and giving it a gingerly twirl about his head, "is a good deal like the sixteen-pound hammer which I used to throw at college."

Knowing that the hammer-throw was not a Canadian event, I promptly cut in with "What college?" "Minnesota," he answered readily enough; adding, as I began to grin: "A good many Canadians go across there for the agricultural courses." I resolved to await a more favourable opportunity before bringing my "charge" point-blank. It came that afternoon, when I stood beside him on the bridge as he bucked her through ten miles of slashing head-sea, which had to be traversed to gain the shelter of a land-locked bay beyond a jutting point, where we were to lie up for the night. He was telling me U-boat-chasing yarns in the patchy intervals between the demands of _mal de mer_ and navigation, and one of them ended something like this: "Old Fritz--just as we intended he should--caught the reflection of the flame through his upturned periscope and, thinking his sh.e.l.ls had set us afire, rose gleefully to gloat over his Hunnish handiwork. Bing! I let him have it just like that."

The motion with which he flung the lemon he had been sucking as an antidote for sea-sickness could not have been in the least suggestive of what really happened; but that straight-from-the-shoulder, elbow-flirting, right-off-the-ends-of-the-fingers action was so like another motion with which I had long been familiar, that, with a meaning side-squint, I observed promptly:

"So you add baseball to your other accomplishments, do you? Did a bit of pitching, if I don't miss my guess? How long have you played?"

"Since I was a kid," he admitted with a grin that sat queerly on the waxy saffron of his sea-sick face. "Yes, I even 'tossed the pill' at college--that is, until a shoulder I knocked out trying to slide home one day spoiled my wing."

I knew I had him the instant that first admission left his lips. "Since the kids weren't playing sand-lot baseball in Canada twenty years ago,"

I said, ducking low to let the spray from a sea which had just broken inboard blow over, "you might just as well 'fess up and tell me which neck of the Mississippi Valley you hail from. Just as one Yankee to another," I pressed, as his piercing eye turned on me a look that seemed to bore right through and run up and down my spine; "even as one Middle Westerner to another, for I was born in Wisconsin myself."

For an instant his lips hardened into a straight line, and the flexed jaw-muscles stood out in white lumps on either side; then his mouth softened into a broadening grin, and a moment later he burst into a ringing laugh.

"Sure thing, old man, since you put it on 'sectional' grounds, and since we're going to be shipmates for a week, and"--fetching me a thumping wallop on the back--"since we both wear the same uniform, anyhow, curly stripe and all, I'll make a clean breast of it. I was born in Kansas--got a farm there, near a little burg called Stockton, to-day--and was never out of the Middle West in my life till I crossed over into Canada to enlist in the first year of the war. I felt I had to get into the show somehow, and the little old U.S.A. was hanging fire so in the matter of coming in that I just couldn't wait. I'll tell you the whole story when we're moored for the night."

I have never been able to recall my yarn with D---- that evening without a hearty guffaw. A rising barometer had cleared the grey smother of mist from the sea, but a shift of the wind from south-east to north-east exposed us to a blast which, chilled at its fount in the frozen fjords of Norway, knocked the bottom out of the thermometer and filled the air with needle-like shafts of congealed moisture that seemed to have been chipped from the gla.s.sy steel dome of the now cloudless sky. There was a filigree of frost masking the wheel-house windows before the early winter night clapped down its lid, and the men who went forward to pa.s.s a line through the ring of the mooring-buoy pawed the icy deck with their stiff-soled sea-boots without making much more horizontal progress than a squirrel treading its wheel.

It would have been bracing enough if there had been a cheery open fire, or at least a glowing little sheet-iron stove, to thaw and dry out at, as there is on most patrol craft, and even on many trawlers. But in the particular type to which M.L. ---- belonged (the units of which are said to have been built in fulfilment of a rush order given one winter on the a.s.sumption that the War would be over before the next) there was no refinements and few comforts. Heating is not included among the latter: the only stove in the boat being in the galley, where the drying of wet togs in restricted quarters is responsible for a queer but strangely familiar taste to the pea-soup and Irish stew which you never quite account for until you discover the line of grease on the corner of the tail of your oilskin or the toe of your sea-boot.

The diminutive electric heaters are true to the first part of their name rather than the last: that is to say, while they are undeniably electric, it is equally certain that they do not heat. There _is_ a certain amount of warmth in them, as I discovered the time I scorched my blankets by taking one to bed with me; but that is of use only when you can confine it and apply locally, which is rarely practicable in a small craft at sea, even when you have the time for it.

It will be readily understood, therefore, why on a M.L., at sea in really wintry weather, the only alternative to sitting up and being slowly but surely chilled to the marrow is to doff wet togs as soon as you come off watch, don dry ones, bolt your dinner, and turn in. This is just what we had to do on M.L. ---- that night; for, besides the really intense cold, a sea which came through the sky-light of the little dining-cabin early in the afternoon had drenched cushions and curtains, with enough left over to form an inch or two of swashing swirl upon the deck. Poor 'Arry, with the effects of the "call o' the sea" still showing in his hollow eyes and pasty cheeks, was not in shape to do much either in the way of "slicking up" or "snugging down"; while the extent of his culinary effort was limited to a kedgeree of half-boiled rice and pale canned salmon, and a platter of eggs fried "straight up," according to D----'s order, with the yolks glaring fish-eyedly at you from a smooth, waxy expanse of congealed grease. D----, who was still somewhat "introspective" himself, turned down the "straightups" straightaway, bent a look that was more grieved than angry on the forlorn 'Arry, and then, rising shiveringly, started edging along over the sodden divan toward his cabin door.

"As princ.i.p.al medical officer of this ship," he said through chattering teeth, "I prescribe the only treatment ever found to be efficacious in such circ.u.mstances as the present--bunk, blankets, and hot toddy."

There were two bunks in D----'s narrow cabin, and it was not until we had turned into these--he in the lower, I in the upper--that the mounting glow of soul and body thawed the reserve which had again threatened to grip him in the matter of where he came from, and set his tongue wagging of his life on the old home farm, and from that to a sketchy but vivid recital of things that he had done, and hoped still to do, as the skipper of a British patrol boat. It is the vision that the memory of that recital conjures up: D----, with a Balaclava helmet pulled low over his ears, gesticulating excitedly up to where I, the unblanketed portion of my anatomy shrouded to the eyes in a wool duffel-coat, leaned out over the edge of the bunk above--that I can never dwell on without laughing outright.

The story of the way in which it happened that D---- came over to get into the game in the first place did not differ greatly from those I have heard from a score or more of young Americans who, partly inspired by a sense of duty and partly lured by the promise of adventure, sought service in the British Army or Navy by pa.s.sing themselves off as Canadians. He had intended to enlist in the Army at first; but when he found that six months or more might elapse before he would be sent to the other side, he crossed at his own expense on the chance of avoiding the delay. At the end of a disappointing month spent in trying to enlist in some unit that had a reasonable expectation of going into active service at once, the intervention of an old college friend--an able young chemical engineer occupying a prominent post in Munitions--secured him a sub-lieutenant's commission in the R.N.V.R. Although, as he navely put it, the sea was no friend of his, it appears that the M.L.

game had proved congenial from the outset: so much so, indeed, that something like three years of service found him with two decorations and innumerable mentions to his credit, to say nothing of the reputation of being one of the most resourceful, energetic and generally useful men in a service in which all of those qualities are taken more or less as a matter of course. He had gone in as a Canadian for fear that he might be turned down as a Yankee, and then, to use his own words: "By the time the U.S.A. began to take a hand, I had told so many darn lies about hunting and fishing and farming in Alberta and British Columbia that I concluded it would be less trouble to go on telling them than to start in denying them. The boundary between Canada and the U.S.A. is more or less of an imaginary line, anyhow, and so is that between the average Yankee and Canuck. I reckon I've made it just as hot for the Hun as the latter as I would have as the former, and that's really the only thing that counts at this stage of the game." It was this last observation, I believe, which started D---- talking of his work.

"Generally speaking," he said, reaching up the match with which he had just lighted a cigarette to rekindle the tobacco in my expiring pipe, "the role of the M.L. is very much more defensive than it is offensive.

It is supposed to police certain waters, watch for U-boats, report them when sighted, and then carry on as best it can till a destroyer, or sloop, or some craft with a real punch in it, comes up and takes over.

Well, my idea from the first has been to make that 'defensive' just as 'offensive' as possible, and it's really astonishing how obnoxious some of us have been able to make ourselves to the Hun. Off-hand, since, with his heavier guns, the average Hun is more than a match for us even on the surface, there wouldn't seem much that we could do against him beyond running and telling one of our big brothers. The perfecting of the depth-charge gave us one very formidable weapon, however, and that of the lance-bomb another, though the days when Fritz was tame and gullible enough to allow himself to be enticed sufficiently near to permit the use of the latter are long gone by. The most satisfying job I ever did, though, was pulled off with a lance-bomb; and, since there is not one chance in a thousand of our ever getting away with the same kind of stunt again, there ought to be no kick on my telling you just how it happened.

"You see," he went on, pulling a big furry-backed mitten on the hand most exposed to the cold in gesticulation, and tucking the fingers of the other inside the neck of the Balaclava for warmth, "Fritz is an animal of more or less fixed habits, and so the best way to hunt him, like any other animal, is to begin by making a study of his little ways.

I specialised on this for some months, confining myself almost entirely to what he did in attacking, or when being attacked by, M.L.s, and ignoring his tactics with sloops, trawlers, and other light craft. It wasn't long before I discovered that his almost invariable practice--when it was a matter of only himself and a M.L.--was to get the latter's range as quickly as possible, endeavour to knock it out, or at least set it afire, by a few hurried shots, and then to submerge and make an approach under water for the purpose of making a closer inspection of the damage inflicted. In this way the danger of a hit from the M.L.'s gun was reduced to a minimum--an important consideration, as a holing by even a light sh.e.l.l might well make it impossible to submerge again. And a U-boat incapable of seeking safety in the depths is, in any part of the North Sea where it would have been likely to meet a M.L., just as good as done for.

"I also found that when explosions had taken place in the M.L., or when it was heavily afire by the time the U-boat drew near, it was the practice of the latter to come boldly up and finish the good work at leisure, with the addition of any of the inimitable little Hunnisms--such as firing on the boats, or ramming them, or running at full speed back and forth among the wreckage so as to give the screws a good chance to chop up the swimming survivors--of which _Unterseeboot_ skippers were even then becoming past masters.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A DEPTH CHARGE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: DISABLED DESTROYER IN TOW]

"In short," here D---- paused for a moment while he lifted the little electric heater and lighted a fresh cigarette on one of the glowing bars, "in short, I studied the vermin in just the same way I did the gophers and prairie-dogs when I started to exterminate them on my Kansas farm. I found out when they were most likely to come up, when to stay down; what things attracted them, and what repelled. Then I went after them. Of course, there was no chance for the clean sweep I made of the gophers and prairie-dogs, but we've still managed to keep our own little section of the beat pretty clear.

"Having satisfied myself regarding the Hun's penchant for stealing up, submerged, to gloat over the dying agonies of his victim, it seemed to me that the obvious thing to do was to lead him on with an imitation death-agony, and then have a proper surprise waiting for him when he came up to gloat. The first thing I started working on was how to 'burn up' and 'blow up' with sufficient realism to deceive the skipper of a submerged U-boat, and still be in shape to spring an effective surprise if he could be tempted into laying himself open to it.

"My first plan proved too primitive by far. I reckoned that the 'blowing-up' touch might be provided by dropping a depth-charge, and that of 'burning up' by playing my searchlight on the surface of the water on the side the approach was to be expected from. Neither was good enough. The 'can' might have been set to explode on the surface, but that could not be affected without running the chance of blowing in my own stern. But the bing of a depth-charge detonating well under the water is quite unmistakable, and the first U-boat I tried to lure with one made off forthwith, plainly under the impression that it was the object of an active attack. As for the searchlight, I saw that it wouldn't do the first time I went down and took a peep at a trial of it through the periscope of one of our own submarines. The beam did cast a patch of brightness discernible through the upturned 'eye' at a depth of from sixty to eighty feet, but it was neither red enough nor fluttery enough to suggest anything like a burning ship. I set to work to devise something more life-like, without ever waiting for a chance to draw a Fritz with it.

"First and last, I tried a goodly variety of 'fire' experiments," D---- continued, snuggling down for a moment with both arms under the blankets, "and I don't mind admitting that I'd like to have a few of 'em, smoke and all, flaming up all over this refrigerator right now. The thing I finally decided to try consisted of nothing more than a light, shallow tank of ordinary kerosene--paraffin oil, I believe they call it here--made fast to a small, roughly built raft. The _modus operandi_ was as simple as the contrivance itself. As soon as a U-boat was sighted, the raft was to be launched on the _opposite_ side, and kept about thirty feet out by means of a light boom. The next move was to be up to Fritz, and it was fairly certain he would do one of two things--submerge and make off, or remain on the surface and begin to sh.e.l.l us. In the latter case we were to start firing in reply, of course; but that was only incidental to the main plan. This was to wait until we were hit, or, preferably, until he fired an 'over,' the fall of which, on account of his low platform, he could not spot accurately, and then to fire the tank of kerosene. A line to a trigger, rigged to explode a percussion-cap, made it possible to do this from the rail. As the flames, besides giving off a lot of smoke, would themselves leap high enough to be seen from the other side, it was reasonable to suppose that Fritz would be deluded into thinking we were burning up, and make his approach a good deal more carelessly than otherwise. If he persisted in closing us on the surface, there would be nothing to it but to make what fight we could with our fo'c'sl' gun, and try to make it so hot for him that he would have to go down before his heavier sh.e.l.ls had done for us.

But if, following his usual procedure, he made his approach submerged, then there were two or three other little optical and aural illusions prepared for his benefit. I will tell you of these in describing how we actually used them."

D---- lay quiet for a minute, the wrinkles of a baleful grin of reminiscence showing on both sides of the aperture of the Balaclava.

"The first chance we had to try the thing out it nearly did us in," he chuckled presently. "No, Fritz had nothing to do with it. _He_, luckily for us, submerged and beat it off after firing three or four shots--probably through mistaking the smoke of a couple of trawlers just under the horizon for that of destroyers. It was all due to bad luck and bad judgment--princ.i.p.ally the latter, I'm afraid. It was bad luck to the extent that the U-boat was sighted down to leeward, so that there was no alternative but to put over my 'fire-raft' on the windward side. The bad judgment came in through my underestimating the force of the wind and the fierceness with which the kerosene would burn when fanned by it.

Scarcely had it been touched off before there was a veritable _Flammen-werfer_ playing against thirty or forty feet of the windward side, and in a way which made it impossible for a man to venture there to cast off the wire cables which moored the raft. As this cla.s.s of M.L.s have wooden hulls, you will readily see that this was no joke.

"The splash of the beam seas proved an efficacious antidote, so far as the hull was concerned, however; but how some other highly inflammable material I was carrying 'midships escaped being fired in the minute or more that I was swinging her through sixteen points to bring the raft to the leeward of her---- Well, I can only chalk that up to the credit of the special Providence that is supposed to intervene especially to save drunks and fools. You can bet your life I never let myself be tempted into making that break again, though it involved a trying exercise of self-restraint when it chanced that the very next Fritz I sighted also bore down the wind.

"The two or three U-boats which were sighted in the course of the next five or six weeks ducked under without firing a shot, and I was beginning to think that perhaps they had somehow got wind of my little plan and were taking no chances in playing up to it. Then, one fine clear morning, up bobs a Fritz about six thousand yards to windward, and begins going through his part of the show almost as though he was one of our own submarines with which I had been rehearsing. His firing at us was about as bad as mine at him; but he finally lobbed one over that was close enough, so I knew he couldn't tell whether it was a hit or not, and on that I touched off the fire-raft, which was soon spouting up a fine pillar of flame and smoke. To discourage his approach on the surface, I kept up a brisk firing to give him the impression that we were going to live up to British Navy traditions by going down fighting, and to convince him that it would be much safer to close under water.

This came off quite according to plan, and presently I saw the loom of his conning-tower dissolve and disappear behind the spout of one of our sh.e.l.ls, which looked to have been a very close thing.

"I stood on at a speed of five or six knots, but on a course which I reckoned he would antic.i.p.ate and allow for. When I figured that he was not over a mile away, I dropped a float over the stern with a time-bomb attached to it, the detonation of which in this way I had found by experiment to furnish a much more life-like imitation of an internal explosion in a ship--when heard in hydrophones, I mean--than that of a depth-charge. The periscope which was shortly poked cautiously up for a tentative 'look-see' could not, I am pretty nearly dead certain, have revealed anything to belie the impression I had laid myself out to convey--that M.L. ---- was an explosion-riven, burning, and even already, probably a sinking ship. Besides the gay gush of flames from the fire-raft, which must have appeared to be roaring amidships, lurid tongues of fire were also spouting out of the forrard and after hatches, and from several of the ports; while a thirty-degree list to starboard might well have indicated that she was about to heel over and go down. I had looked at her that way from a periscope myself, while I was studying the effect of some 'stage property' flares in comparison with ordinary gasoline 'blow-torches,' and knew how much she looked like the real thing even when you knew she wasn't. The list? Oh, that was a very simple matter. This cla.s.s of M.L.s is never on an even keel for long, anyhow, and the installation of a couple of tanks made it possible to pump water back and forth and give her any heel we wanted. We put her almost on her beam ends when we were experimenting on the thing, and without upsetting things much outside of the galley, which we had neglected to warn of what devilry was afoot.

"If we didn't look helpless and harmless enough for any Fritz to run right up alongside and 'gloat over,' I'll eat my hat; and that was what I was counting on this fellow doing. Indeed, I'll always think that was just what he _did_ intend to do eventually; only it was the way he went about doing it that was near to upsetting the apple-cart. It seemed reasonable to suppose that he would come up and do his gloating on the side he approached from, and so that was the side I had prepared to receive him on. The heavy list she was under to starboard would have made it possible to bring the gun to bear on him until he was almost under the rail, and then there would be a chance for a lance-bomb. If he came up on the other side by any chance, I had figured that the game would be all up; for there was the fire-raft to give it away, while the list would be on the wrong slant to give the gun a show. Well, whether it was accident or intent, that is just what he did--broached abeam to port, about half a cable's length off the sizzling tank of flaming kerosene.

"That next minute or two" (D---- sat up in bed in the excitement of the memory of that stirring interval, and I felt one of his gesticulating fists come with a thump against the bottom of my mattress) "called for some of the quickest thinking and acting I was ever responsible for pulling off. If he stayed up, it flashed to my mind, there was just the chance I might ram him; while if he ducked down, there would probably be a good opening for a depth-charge. I rang up full speed at the same time I was shouting orders to cast off the fire-raft, and to bash in one end of the starboard 'tilting-tank' with an axe. We had considered the possibility of this emergency arising, as much as we hoped it wouldn't, so that no time was lost in meeting it. The fire-raft, boom and all, was cast off clean, and quickly left astern. In scarcely less time was the tank emptied, though the sudden flood from it--it was on the upper deck, understand--came very near to carrying overboard the man who broached it. With motors, of course, we were running all out in 'two jerks,' and she was doing several knots over twenty when, with helm hard-a-starboard, she began rounding on the startled Fritz.

"There was no doubt about the fact that he _was_ startled, let me tell you. And, when you think of it, it must have been a trifle disconcerting to see the blown-up and burning boat he had come up to gloat over, and perhaps loot before she went down, suddenly settle back on an even keel and come charging down on him at twenty-five knots. The 'moony' fat phizes that showed above the rail of the bridge were pop-eyed with surprise--yes--and indecision, too, for there were several valuable seconds lost in deciding whether to come on up--she had risen to the surface with only an 'awash' trim--and make a fight with her gun, or to dive.

"I don't think it would have made a great deal of difference in his own fate which he did, but you can bet it made a lot of difference to me. I don't mind telling you that I was never gladder about anything in my life--at least anything since the rain that came at the end of a three-months' drought to save my corn-crop a few years back--than when those moon-faces went into eclipse and I saw him begin to submerge.

Although it had never formed a part of any plan I had ever worked out, I give you my word that I fully intended to ram him, and that would have meant--well, about the same thing as one airplane charging into another.

I should almost certainly have finished him, while at the same operation--but I don't need to tell you that a match-box like this was never made for bull-at-a-gate tactics. I've never heard of one of this cla.s.s of M.L.s getting home with a good square b.u.t.t at a U-boat, and I'm very happy to say that it didn't happen on this occasion. I don't think that we even so much as grazed his 'jump-string'; but the whole length of him was in plain sight sloping away from his surface swirl, and it was easy as picking ripe pippins to plant an 'ash-can' just where it was needed. The only aggravating thing about it was that, although oil came boiling up in floods for three days, there was never a Hun, nor even an unmistakable fragment of U-boat wreckage, picked up as a souvenir.

There was never any doubt about the sinking, however, for the trawlers located the wreck on the bottom with a sweep, and gave it a few more 'cans' for luck.

"But the best evidence in my own mind," concluded D----, pulling the blankets up higher over his shoulders as he settled back into the bunk, "is the fact that, six weeks later, the identical stunt I had tried this time actually lured another Fritz up to eat out of my hand almost exactly as I had been planning for. Now, if that first one had really survived and been able to return to base, it is certain that its skipper would have told what he saw, and that there would have been a general order (such as came out some months later when they finally did twig the game) warning all U-boats against coming up to gloat at close range over burning M.L.s. The fact that this second one was such easy picking proves beyond a doubt that the other never got back."

"That last was the one you 'threw the hammer' at, wasn't it?" I asked, leaning far out to make my words carry down to D----'s now blanket-m.u.f.fled ears.

"Yes," came the wool-dulled answer. "Tell you some other night. Gotta get warm now. Toddy can's empty. Make a tent of the blankets with your knees, and take the electric heater to bed in it, if you can't stop shivering any other way. Good night."

CHAPTER IX

"Q"

At three miles, as seen from the bridge of the battleship, the small craft which was steering a course that would bring her across our bows in the course of the next few minutes was absolutely nondescript, completely defying cla.s.sification. A mile closer, however, it appeared to be as plain as day that she was some ancient fishing boat, but bluffer of bow and broader of beam than the oldest of trawlers or drifters in the service. It was only when she was right ahead, and but six or eight cables' lengths distant, that a vagrant sun-patch came dancing along the leaden waters beyond her to form a scintillant background against which she stood out as what she was--the sweetest-lined little steam yacht that ever split a wave. The fishing-boat effect had been obtained by a simple arrangement of colours which effectually clipped the clippiness from her clipper bows and equally effectually discounted the graceful overhang of her counter.

In plain words, they had blocked in the lines of a bluff, squatty tug on her hull with some kind of paint that was very easy to see, and covered the rest of her with a paint that was very hard to see. A few changes in rig, and the alteration was complete.