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CHAPTER XVI
MINOR INCIDENTS

I

'Signal just come through, sir,' said Rosser, the signal-man, thumping on the door of Wooten's cabin at half-past one in the morning.

The skipper grunted, sat up, switched on the light, and blinked. He was used to sudden calls and excursions in the middle of the night, and knew instinctively from the tone of the man's voice that the message was urgent.

'Read it out,' he sighed, throwing one leg out of the bunk.

'Menelaus, Monsoon, Manner, and Minx raise steam, and report when ready to proceed.'

'I thought so. What's the weather?'

'Very dark, and blowing a bit, sir,' said Rosser cheerfully, the moisture from his dripping oilskins forming a nice little puddle on the skipper's carpet. 'It's been raining hard this last half-hour.'

Wooten groaned. 'Right! Tell all the officers, and ask Mr Thompson to let me know how soon he'll be ready. And on your way forward tell Spry I want him.'

Spry, able seaman, was the captain's body-servant and general factotum.

Wooten threw open the small scuttle over his bunk and looked out. It was as black as pitch, the wind whistled and moaned mournfully, and a wave of moisture smote him in the face. It would be a wild and wet night at sea. Altogether a depressing night, there was not the least doubt about that. 'Ugh!' he grunted, slamming the scuttle to and drawing the bedclothes up to his chin.

Enter Spry.

'Usual sea-gear,' his master murmured.

The man nodded. He knew exactly what was wanted.

'We're in for a dusting, Spry.'

'We are that, sir. Will you 'ave your blue muffler or the white one?'

'The blue one, and the clean sweater.'

'You can't 'ave 'im, sir,' said the bluejacket, busy opening drawers and cupboards and pulling out clothes like a juggler. ''E's at the wash.'

'At the wash?'

'Yessir, and so's most of our flannel shirts and stiff collars. If we 're to be away long I'll 'ave to wash some shirts out, and you'll 'ave to wear them soft collars of yours.' Spry was always a pessimist in the small hours of the morning. 'Is there anything else you'll be wanting, sir?'

'No, thanks. Nothing bar the cocoa.'

Spry took a vacuum flask from a cupboard, and left the cabin to fill it. This also was a matter of routine; for cocoa, a cushion, and a rug were always put in the charthouse every night for Wooten's use when the ship was at sea.

The skipper clambered out of his bunk, lit a pipe, and dressed. This operation took him quite ten minutes. First came his ordinary garments, and a heavy woollen sweater and blue muffler; then a pair of thick socks; next a pair of fisherman's white woollen stockings worn over his trousers and reaching well above his knees; over them, a pair of rubber sea-boots. Next a uniform jacket, a lammy coat, another muffler, and an oilskin on top of everything. It was wet, and the weather was cold, and Wooten did not intend to be chilled through to the marrow if he could help it. His apparel was completed by a sou'-wester and a pair of glasses slung round his neck; and, thus arrayed, he clambered slowly up the ladder and waddled forward along the deck to the charthouse. It was too dark, and he was too bloated, to proceed briskly.

Hargreaves, the sub., yawning his head off, was already up there sorting out his charts.

'Morning, sir. D'you know where we're going?'

'Haven't the vaguest notion. The Menelaus is the boss, and will get the orders. She may tell us when we get outside.'

'How long are we likely to be away?'

'Don't know. Last time we left in a hurry we didn't come back for a fortnight. The time before, we were away for six weeks.'

'What' —

'If you ask me any more questions I shall be peevish,' Wooten interrupted. 'It's high time you knew that I'm not fit for polite conversation at this unholy hour of the morning.'

'Sorry, sir. I forgot.'

Half-an-hour afterwards, by which time steam had been raised, and the fact had been reported, Wooten climbed the ladder on to the bridge.

'Signal for destroyers to slip, sir,' came from Rosser a minute or two later, as a lamp winked frenziedly in and out in the darkness about a mile away. 'Form single line a'ead; speed ten knots.'

'Let go forward!' went the order to the first lieutenant on the forecastle.

There came the splash of the end of the wire as it fell into the water, and a moment later a hail from MacDonald. 'All gone, sir!'

'Half ahead port. Half astern starboard. Helm hard aport.'

The engine-room reply-gongs clanged, and the Mariner began to turn on her heel.

'Slow astern starboard – Stop starboard – Half ahead both – one-eighty revolutions,' in succession. 'Helm amidships. Steady!'

The four destroyers, falling into line astern of each other, groped their way down the congested harbour like wraiths in the night. Wooten glanced at the dark shapes of the other ships as they slid by. 'Lucky dogs!' he murmured. 'You've got a lie in. I envy you. This is not a night for poor old Peter to be at sea.'

He was right. By the time they reached the entrance the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind had increased. Then the bows lifted to the first swell, and a dollop of spray flew over them, and rattled against the bridge-screens.

'It's going to be wet,' Hargreaves observed glumly, securing the top button of his oilskin.

'It is,' the skipper agreed; 'damned wet!'

In ten minutes, by which time they were clear of the harbour, and speed had been increased to eighteen knots, the ship was prancing and curveting like a frisky pony, and the spray was flying over in sheets. Five minutes later the seas were coming in green over the upper deck.

'Oh hell!' the captain groused, stowing away his useless pipe after vainly endeavouring to relight its sodden contents; 'this is the limit! – Look out, sub.,' he added, glancing at the next ship ahead, whose dim shadow danced through a welter of spray a cable and a half in front. 'Shove her on a bit. You're astern of station, and dropping fast. Lord!' he added, 'I wish I knew where we're off to.'

His prayer was not answered until daylight, by which time they were far to the southward, and the Menelaus informed them of their destination. They were going to the warmest spot most of them had ever known, though they were not aware of it at the time. Warmth can come from the Huns as well as from the sun.

II

The intermittent rumble of heavy guns had sounded continuously all through the night, and with the approach of dawn and the commencement of the usual 'early morning hate,' the intensity of the dull reverberations increased. The Mariner and her consorts were within about twelve miles of the spot where the long line of opposing trenches debouched into the North Sea; but even at this distance they could see the brilliant illumination caused by the star-shell as they burst. The dark-blue sky above the horizon to the south-east was never free of them.

'Lor'!' said Billings in an awed whisper, watching the blue-white flashes as they burst suddenly out in the air, hung for a moment, and then waned slowly away, to be replaced by others; 'some poor blokes ain't arf gittin' it in the neck!'

There was a romance and an interest about the spectacle which it is rather difficult to define. For one thing, it was the closest they had ever been to the front; but here, on board the ship, everything was going on in the same old way, and the men went about their business as usual. But there, a bare twelve miles off, the deep-throated murmur of the guns showed that men were striving to kill each other, while the star-shell must have been flooding the closely packed trenches with unwelcome light. It seemed a little difficult to realise it, somehow.

The morning was cloudless and calm. The light increased, and as the sun neared the horizon a band of pale rose-madder and dull orange slowly began to encroach on the dark blue of the upper sky to the eastward. Before long they could see the hostile coast itself as a thin, blue-gray streak punctuated here and there by the spires and houses of the coast towns, magnified out of all proportion by the deceptive light. Hanging in the air, and all but invisible to the naked eye, was the bloated, caterpillar-shape of a German observation balloon. It looked ominous and menacing, and the Hun in the basket suspended beneath it was evidently going aloft to see whom his guns might devour for breakfast. The coast was reputed to bristle with weapons, some of them of prodigious range, and the men in the destroyer hoped fervently that they might not be victims of his wrath.

Then, quite suddenly, the dull blue above the broadening band of colour began to twinkle and sparkle with little spurts and splashes of bright yellow flame. They did not appear in ones, twos, or threes, but in batches of twenty or thirty at a time. The rumbling of the guns started afresh, for the flashes were the bursts of the enemy's anti-aircraft shell, fired at a swarm of allied aeroplanes making an early morning bombing attack; and, from the look of things, somebody was getting a tolerably hot time. More killing! It was rather like watching a gladiatorial combat in the arena; but it was a fine sight, and the 'Mariners' would not have missed it for worlds.

Presently, when the rosy light of the dawn had mounted up into space, the thudding of the distant guns ceased. The attack was over, and the bombs had evidently been dropped; but the clear sky over the shore was still flecked and stained with hundreds of smoke-puffs slowly dissolving on the gentle breeze. They showed blue and purple against the vivid contrasting colour beyond.

Air raids, and their subsequent reprisals, were a speciality of this locality. They took place nearly every morning and evening the Mariner was there; and as the visiting machines had a comparatively short distance to travel before reaching their objective, they were carried out by too many aeroplanes, and with too great a frequency, to be pleasant.

In the French town within reach of the aerial Hun business went on as usual; but at the first wailing of the warning hooter the inhabitants bolted to earth like rabbits to their burrow. Every house which possessed a cellar showed a small red flag over the doorway, and any one who cared to claim admittance was given shelter. Trams stopped and disgorged their living freights. Adipose tram conductors, elderly women dragging frightened children, ancient male civilians, poilus in their slate-blue uniforms, any one and every one, made a bee-line for the nearest symbol of a cellar and safety. It was a wise precaution which must have saved many lives; for, though the Hun may be given the credit of only wishing to damage places of 'military importance,' and to kill members of 'the armed forces of the enemy,' his bombs, as often as not, were liberally sprinkled upon the residential and commercial portions of the town. Added to this, every anti-aircraft gun in the neighbourhood – and there were many of them – sent its shell hurtling skywards to drive the invaders away. The bits had to fall somewhere; and if a jagged morsel of steel weighing one ounce falls on the head of a human being from a height, say, of ten thousand feet, there is nothing for it but a funeral and mourners. So it is wise to keep indoors in any case, wiser still to repair to somebody else's cellar if you do not possess one of your own.

But after the raids, when the inhabitants emerged from their burrows, the small boys and girls collected splinters and sold them as mementoes. The trade was very brisk, and prices sometimes ran high. Bomb fragments – and one could not help suspecting that many of these were manufactured at home in the quiet intervals – commanded fabulous sums. I still treasure a fleeting vision of a British army captain in khaki, flourishing five-franc notes, pursuing a sky-blue poilu down the street in the midst of an air raid. The Frenchman hugged to his bosom the dangerous remains of an aeroplane bomb, a wicked-looking affair painted bright yellow, and filled with some devilish compound guaranteed to kill or to cure. The Englishman wanted it badly, and, being the faster of the two, eventually overtook his quarry, and obtained the relic for fifteen francs. What he did with it I cannot say. One can hardly think that it was received with gratitude by his loving parents, or that it occupied the niche of honour in the hall of his rich but nervous aunt.

But whatever we may have said about bombing attacks at sea, air raids on a town are not the least bit amusing until afterwards. The whistle of a descending bomb is the most uncanny and unpleasant sound it is possible to imagine, far and away nastier than the howling and screeching of a passing shell. Moreover, in an air raid on a town the visitors can hardly fail to hit some one or something, and it may possibly be us.

III

'The Secretary of the Admiralty announces that an action took place yesterday afternoon between British and German destroyers. The enemy suffered considerable damage, and were forced to retire. Our casualties were insignificant.' —Daily Press.

It is rather galling to find one of the most eventful and crowded hours of one's existence disposed of in four lines of cold print, not even the name of a ship mentioned!

It made the ship's company of the Mariner feel very small and insignificant, and the puffed-up, proud sort of feeling they had when they came out of their first real action oozed from them like gas from a punctured Zeppelin.

Sailors are peculiar animals. They long to frustrate and confound the Hun – that goes without saying; but, having done their best in this direction, they are equally desirous that their friends and relations shall be aware of the fact. Most of the men expected at least to see the Mariner's name in the newspapers. A good many of them, though they would not have admitted it, would have been highly flattered had their likenesses appeared in the Morning Mirror. 'A naval hero who has been doing his bit' would have sounded well as a superscription, though perhaps a trifle fulsome; while further photographs of the 'naval hero's' wife and family, his father and mother, the schoolmaster who had taught him, and the public-house which he sometimes patronised, would also have been suitable to the occasion. But unfortunately the newspapers took no notice of the affair; and, since the censorship of naval news was strict, they probably never even realised that such a ship as the Mariner existed. It was a pity, for, from the point of view of the men and their friends, anything and everything which appeared in the Press must, of necessity, be a fact. If a man went home and said he had been in an action which had never publicly been announced, it was possible that his immediate neighbours might believe what he said. It was more than probable, however, that 50 per cent. of outsiders would treat his story cum grano salis, and think that he had exaggerated. Corroborative evidence is always useful.

To Pincher Martin the recollection of his first action at sea is still a vague and shadowy impression of mingled fact and fancy. He had kept the forenoon watch, and on going below at noon had consumed his usual midday meal with great relish. Then, with a satisfied feeling of repletion, he stretched himself at full length on a hard and very uncomfortable mess-stool, and went off to sleep. He was not the only one; but he had kept the middle watch, so there was some excuse for him.

Towards three o'clock he was suddenly brought back to his senses by the prolonged and irritating jangle of an electric alarm-bell. 'Gawd!' he murmured, sitting up with a start, and rubbing his sleepy eyes; 'wot's the buzz now?'

He was not long in finding out, for at that same moment Petty Officer Casey put his head down the hatch. 'Below there!' he howled cheerfully. 'Tumble up! Enemy in sight! General Quarters!'

His words were punctuated by the sound of men running along the upper deck and the rumble of a gun. The report was faint but unmistakable, and it did not come from the Mariner.

Followed by various of his messmates, Pincher darted for the hatch, clambered up the steep ladder, and ten seconds later appeared at his gun on the forecastle breathless and inquisitive.

''Ere,' he queried, more by instinctive curiosity than because he really wanted the opinion of any one else, 'wot's up?'

'You stan' by to 'ump them projectiles!' grunted an A.B. 'This 'ere ain't the time to git askin' stoopid questions!'

Pincher obediently placed a lyddite shell in the loading-tray and waited.

Three British destroyers were in single line ahead, the fourth being away on some business best known to herself. The Mariner was the centre ship, and she quivered and shook to the thrust of her turbines; while, from the sensation of speed, and the great mass of white water heaped up under the stern of the next ahead, Pincher guessed they must be travelling at about thirty knots. Three or four miles away to port, rather difficult to see against the gray background of shore beyond, were the lean shapes of three other torpedo-craft. They also were steaming at high speed, and left a long white trail in the water astern of them, and seemed to be steering an approximately parallel course. They were German, of course, and as he watched a ripple of bright flame and a cloud of brown smoke leapt out from their leading vessel. They were firing, and at him. He felt rather frightened, and suddenly became possessed of a bitter resentment against the enemy who were striving to kill him and his shipmates. He had done them no personal wrong, so why should they try to take his life?

He held his breath and waited for the shell to drop, but the pause seemed interminable. Then he heard the sound of the reports, and saw three or four whity-gray splashes in the water between him and the enemy. The shell were fully six hundred yards short, and harmless. He breathed again.

Some order came through a voice-pipe to the gun; whereupon the sight-setter twiddled a small wheel and peered anxiously at a graduated dial, while the gunlayer, breathing heavily, applied his eye to the telescope. The muzzle of the gun began to move up and down in the air as the sights were kept on the enemy.

'Train right a bit, Bill!' came a smothered remark. 'Train right, damn yer eyes! That'll do! Keep her like that!'

A bell rang somewhere. A moment's pause, and then, with a sheet of flame and a crash, the weapon went off.

When once the business really started Pincher felt better. The anticipation, that awful period of suspense between the time of the enemy being sighted and the first shot being fired, was far and away worse than the actual fight itself. The noise and excitement acted as a sort of anæsthetic. They had a deadening effect which dulled the finer workings of his mind, and did away with most of his previous and poignant mental agony. He realised in a vague sort of a way that he might be killed; but the process of being under fire, when once it had started and the enemy was being fired at in return, was not nearly so bad as he had imagined it would be.

He had the task of placing a projectile in the loading-tray every time after the gun had fired, recoiled, ejected the spent cylinder neatly to the rear, and then had run out again and had been reloaded. He did it almost automatically, and without having to think about it. Time became an unknown quantity. Seconds sometimes seemed like hours, and hours may have dwindled to minutes for all he knew. All the sensations he was really conscious of at the time were a supreme desire to keep up the supply of shell, an overwhelming hatred for the enemy who dared to fire upon him, a most unpleasant feeling of heat, and an intolerable and raging thirst. The acrid taste and smell of the burning cordite may have produced the thirst; but, after five minutes of firing, Martin would have bartered everything he possessed for a mug of really cold water.

Incident succeeded incident with such rapidity that he could not concentrate his attention on any one particular thing. He saw great white splashes in the water, some of them perilously close. The noise of the Mariner's own guns overpowered every other sound, but between their reports he heard the fainter thudding of the enemy's weapons, the peculiar whining drone of hostile shell as they hurtled through the air, and the fiendish whirring and whizzing of their fragments as they burst. There came a jar and a metallic crash which told him that the ship had been hit somewhere close. He had no time to look round, but waited anxiously for the missile to pulverise; waited for what seemed minutes for the flame and roar of an appalling detonation and a shower of splinters which would sweep him to eternity. They never came. The shell had passed through the forecastle, and out again through the side of the ship, without exploding.

His own gun was firing very fast, and he could not see much, but in the rifts between the sheets of flame and clouds of smoke caused by its discharge he caught occasional glimpses of the enemy. They were still steaming fast, and seemed rather closer than before, and from the sea round about them spout after spout of spray leapt into the air as the British shell pitched. The brilliant gun-flashes still twinkled up and down their sides as they fired; but he was glad they were having a hot time.

The next time he saw them they seemed to have turned shorewards, while the British, still firing heavily, steamed in pursuit. Then, in the after-part of the middle German destroyer, the one the Mariner was firing at, he suddenly noticed a wicked red flash and a cloud of oily black smoke. A shell had gone home. He could have shouted in glee had he not been so breathless.

The long-range action lasted for a full fifty-five minutes, with both sides blazing away merrily the whole time. What damage was done to the enemy it was impossible to say, but it was clear that they suffered considerably, and that they were forced back to their own coast. As regards their numbers, guns, size, and speed the opposing craft were pretty evenly matched; and if the action had taken place in the open sea it would have been fought to a finish at close range, or until one or other of the combatants retired post-haste from the contest. In this eventuality, given average luck, it would not have been the British; not because the German is any less brave than his antagonist, but because he has fewer ships to risk, and is supposed to have orders not to give battle unless he has a good chance of winning. But man proposes and God disposes, and the fight was more or less a drawn one.

At length there came the time when the enemy could be pursued no longer, on account of the proximity of the shore. So close in had they steamed that some one in the Mariner even declared that he was able to count the windows in the buildings and the tiles on the red roofs; and though the tile part may have been an exaggeration, the window-counting certainly was not. The yellow, wave-lapped beach, with the turf-covered sand-dunes beyond it, looked strangely calm and peaceful; but concealed in those dunes were guns of almost every imaginable size from fourteen-inch downwards, some of which were reputed to be able to pitch their shell on a sixpence at a range of fifteen miles. The Mariner and her consorts were a long, long way inside this distance, and there was nothing for it but to discontinue the action, and to beat a hasty retreat.

Brother Boche, with his guns in among the dunes, was no fool. He was merely waiting for a good opportunity to open fire, and his chance came at the precise moment when the British helms went over and the destroyers started to steam seawards. Then the whole line of coast suddenly began to sparkle from end to end, and before one had time to think the shell were pitching. The fire of the destroyers, both as regards its volume and its accuracy, had been as nothing to this. Great white-water fountains seemed to spout up everywhere at the same moment, ahead, astern, and on either side. How many projectiles fell within a few feet of the ship during the next ten minutes it is impossible to say. The shooting was very accurate indeed – far too accurate to be pleasant. It was extremely unpleasant.

Words can convey no conception of the breathless sort of sensation caused by those falling shell. They howled like wolves and screeched like express trains passing through wayside stations. They fell into the water with heavy liquid plops, detonated in gigantic upheavals of water and with roaring concussions compared with which the reports of heavy guns faded into insignificance, and sent their jagged-edged fragments whirring off into space with the humming and buzzing of angry hornets. It was a sickening, uncanny feeling to see a fifty-foot geyser-like spout spring into the air a bare fathom off the stem, to notice the black patch at the spot in the water where the shell had burst as if one had emptied a bucket of ashes, and then to steam through the descending spray, and to smell the horrible, reeking stench of the explosive. It was more alarming still to see a bouquet of four or five such splashes jump into the air within a few feet of the stern or on either side of the ship. If a single one of these projectiles drove home the Mariner would probably be brought to a standstill, in which case her subsequent demolition and the slaughter of her crew would only be a matter of time. If three or four shells struck at once she would probably founder immediately.

It is one thing to be fired at by a similar vessel, and to be able to fire at her in reply; but it is something quite different to be subjected to the individual attention in broad daylight of a heavy ship, or many shore batteries, when there is no possible chance of retaliation. It leaves one breathless and cold; and though, perhaps, one may not actually show one's fear, one would give much to be elsewhere. It is only natural.

Shell from modern heavy guns can drive their way through the armoured sides of a battleship, but they will pulverise a destroyer into mere powder. There are no bombproofs, no funk-holes, no armour, not even a conning-tower – not that it would be used if there were. The officers and the men at the guns and torpedo-tubes are all on deck and in the open, while those below in the engine and boiler rooms have nothing between them and the deep sea but a steel skin barely thicker than a substantial biscuit-tin. Moreover, the greater portion of the hull is crammed with machinery, ammunition, and explosives; and, however much of a safeguard a destroyer's speed and small size may be, she must always seem very vulnerable to those who serve in her. I say 'seem' advisedly, for it is surprising how much hammering the tough little craft can withstand without being knocked out; while, as any gunner who is used to the game will tell you, she is not a very easy target to hit. But, for all that, one lucky shell may do the trick, in which case every man-jack of her crew may be killed or drowned. There is never much chance of escape if once the ship goes, and any man who says he relishes being under heavy fire in a T.B.D. is either a born hero or an Ananias. It is easy to make light of things after they have happened, but no words can adequately portray the inner feelings of the ordinary mortal while the ordeal is still in progress. They are indescribable.

But by some miraculous intervention of Providence the Mariner and her sister-ships escaped practically scot-free. According to people who witnessed the withdrawal from a distance, people who well knew the range and accuracy of the coast guns, the odds were a thousand to one that they would never escape, for at times they were hardly visible in the spray fountains leaping up all around them. They were literally buried in the splashes, but still they came on – and escaped.

It was not until afterwards that the men thoroughly realised how lucky they were. At the time, whatever they may have felt in their hearts or minds, there were no suggestions of fear in their faces, no trace of nervousness in their demeanour. They behaved just the same as usual – jeered uproariously when a shell fell a few feet short and deluged them with spray, and made facetious remarks when projectiles from 'Fractious Fanny,' as some one adroitly christened a particularly obnoxious 11·2, lumbered gracefully over their heads and exploded merrily in the sea a hundred feet or so beyond them. Perhaps they were a little more talkative than usual; perhaps their laughter was sometimes a little forced; but, for all that, they behaved as British bluejackets always do.

'I wouldn't 'a missed that there show fur a lot,' said Pincher Martin after supper the same evening.

'I reckons we kin think ourselves lucky ter git outa it,' Billings murmured with his mouth full. 'It's orl right lookin' back on it w'en once it's orl over; but it takes a bloomin' 'ero not ter 'ave a cold feelin' in 'is stummick wi' them there guns a-pluggin' at 'im.'

'Did you 'ave a cold feelin' in yer inside, Josh?' M'Sweeny queried anxiously.

'Course I 'ad. I wus cold orl over. I ain't no bloomin' 'ero. But, orl the same, Tubby boy, I reckons it's done us orl good ter 'ave a bit of a shake up like this 'ere. Makes us a sort of understan' 'ow every bloke aboard 'as 'is own job ter do; don't it?'

Joshua's way of expressing himself may have been crude, but M'Sweeny quite understood what he meant.

The engagement, short as it had been, had given the men confidence in themselves, each other, their officers, and their ship. It had banded them together in some extraordinary and quite inexplicable manner which no years of peace training could have done. Together they had been tried and had not been found wanting; and now, more than ever, they had become 'we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.' They felt themselves inspired with a new patriotism and a new ardour, and it was that very feeling which, on 21st October 1805, had helped their forebears to win the battle of Trafalgar.