Lewis R. Freeman

“ It was just as darkness was slowing down our anti-U-boat operations, that a signal came through stating that there were believed to be several survivors still alive among the wreckage of the Marmora, and ordering us to proceed to the scene of her sinking with all dispatch. The moon was rising as we began to nose among the pathetic litter of scraps that was all that remained afloat of what, five or six hours previously, had been a swift and beautiful auxiliary cruiser. ”

“ Underfoot was the blackness of the pit, not the faintest gleam reflecting from the waves washing over the weather side to swirl half-knee high about our sea boots. Even overhead all that was visible were fluttering patches of snow flakes dancing through the haloes of pale rose radiance that crowned the tops of the funnels. The wail of the wind in the wireless aerials, the crash of the surging beam seas, the throb of the propellers, and the pussy-cat purr of the spinning turbines—these were the fit accompaniment to which Melton A.B. recited to me the epic of the Firebrand at Jutland. ”

“ If there is one thing more than another that has impressed me in hearing these young British destroyer officers tell the “little games they have played with Fritz,” it is the fine sporting spirit in which they invariably insist in sharing the credit of an achievement with every other officer, and man, and ship that has in any way figured in the action. It was the fault of the Hun that we could no longer treat the enemy as we would an opponent in sport; but that only makes it all the more inspiring to see the fellow-players still keeping alive the old spirit among themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A silhouette against the barely perceptible glow at the back of the forebridge of a “brass-hatted” officer shaking his fist as though in the act of ramping and roaring like a true British sailor moved by righteous anger; a forty or fifty degree heel to starboard as the curling bow-wave of the Olympus thwacked resoundingly along her port side, and [Pg 38] the Flyer drove on into the sleet-shot darkness to blow off accumulated steam in rolling clouds, allow her fluttering pulse to become normal, and resume the even tenor of her way. ”

“ If there is anything to stir the blood of a man like a destroyer beginning to see red and go Berserk, I have yet to encounter it.
There must have been something like three miles to go from the point where the U-boat had been sighted to the point where the inevitable patch of grease would mark the place where it had submerged, and rather less than twice that many minutes had elapsed when the cry of “Oil slick—starboard bow!” came almost simultaneously from the look-outs in the foretop and on the bridge. ”

“ There are several things that strike one as different on going to an American warship after a spell in a British ship of the same class, but the one which surges to meet you and goes to your head like wine is the all-pervading spirit of vibrant, sparkling, unquenchable youthfulness. Everything you see and hear seems to radiate it—every throb of the engines, every beat of the screws—and at first you may almost get the impression that it comes from the ship herself. ”

“ The spotting of the surface wake of a deep-down submarine, and the holding of it after it almost disappears with the slowing down of the screws that make it, is quite another thing. That takes a man with more than a keen eye—it takes instinct, mixed with a lot of common sense. It’s a common thing to say of a successful look-out that he has a ‘quick nose for submarines.’ The expression is used more or less figuratively, of course; and yet the nose—the sense smell—is by no means a negligible factor in detecting the presence, and even the bearing, of a hunted U-boat. ”

“ There are only two or three conditions under which a destroyer can hope to surprise a U-boat on the surface, and none of these is approximated at the end of a clear North Sea summer afternoon with the stalking craft trying to approach from a direction which silhouettes its leanly purposeful profile against the golden glimmer of the sunset clouds. ”

“ Things were fairly comfy that night—that is, as comfort goes in a destroyer. There was a good stiff wind and a good deal more than a lop of sea running; but as both were coming on the quarter and we were plodding along at no great speed, the Zip made very passable weather of it. The bridge, save for occasional showers of light spray where a sea slapped over the side, was quite dry, and even on the long run of low deck amidships there were several havens of refuge where the men off watch could foregather to smoke and yarn without fear of more than an occasional spurt of brine. ”

“ All the guns which would bear were given an even start in the race to hit the wickedly horned hemisphere as we brought it abeam at a range of six or eight hundred yards; but the lean, keen crew of the pet on the forecastle—splashing the target with their first shot and detonating it with their second—won in a walk and left the others nothing but a hundred-feet-high geyser of smoke-streaked spray tumbling above a heart of flame to pump their tardier shells into. ”

“ It was just as it began to become apparent that we were badly adrift as regards the point where the Marmora had gone down that a whine from the lookout’s voice-pipe reported to the bridge that it had sighted a “sail—port, ten.”
“What is it?” asked back the captain.
“Looks like subm’rine,” came the reply; and with one quick movement the captain had started the alarm-bell sounding “General quarters!” in every part of the ship. With every man knowing precisely what he had to do, and how to do it, there was incredible speed without confusion. ”

“ Battleship, battle cruiser, light cruiser, destroyer, sloop, trawler, and all the other kinds and classes of patrol craft—each has its own distinctive smudge of smoke, its own peculiar way of revealing its identity by a blurred foretop, funnel, or superstructure long before its hull has lifted its amorphous mass above the sky-line. ”

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

“ There is a sort of fluttering ripple to the flash of a salvo that you can’t possibly mistake for that of the discharge of a single gun, and the flashes which we continued to see for some time were plainly those of salvo answering salvo. The flashes from the mingled salvoes of the heavy guns of the Hun raiders could not have been confused with those from the few light guns of the Strongbow any more than these could have been taken to come from the single gun of a U-boat. Everything pointed to just what we learned had taken place—a cruiser raid on the convoy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The last time we took out the old Lymptania—well, I’ve got marks on me yet from the corners I got banged up against, and as for the poor little Zip—but she’s had a refit since and most of the scars have been removed. As you will have ample chance to see for yourself, there isn’t a lot of dolce far niente in any of this life we lead in connection with our little game here, but if there is one phase of our activities that is farther removed from ‘peace, perfect peace’ than any other, it is trying to screen an ex-Atlantic greyhound that is boring at umpty-ump knots into a head wind and sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The actual shock to a ship of being struck by a shell 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 shelling so staggering, to mind if not to body. Of course everyone on the forebridge was knocked flat by the explosion of the shell which hit it, and [Pg 167] the worst of it was that the most of us didn’t get up again. ”

“ 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 glasses 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 glasses on where the boiling wake of the Lymptania, beginning to bend away in a sharp curve indicating a considerable alteration of course. ”

“ They know jolly well that if they once come inside, no matter if they do sink a ship or two, that it’s a hundred to one—between sea-planes, ‘blimps,’ P.B.s, and destroyers—against their ever getting out again. There’s just a chance that they may try it this time, though, for they must know how terribly short the whole Salonika force is of petrol, and what a real mess things will be left in if they can pot even one of the two or three oilers in this convoy. ”

“ Early in the afternoon a suspiciously cruising craft, which proved presently to be a friend, got a high-explosive shell under her nose as a consequence of her deliberation in revealing that fact. The smartness with which the men tumbled to quarters, and the almost uncanny speed with which the forecastle gun was served, boded well for developments in case the real thing turned up. ”

“ There is little in the small, neat compartment from which the oil fires of a modern destroyer are fed and controlled to suggest the picture which the name “stokehold” conjures up in the popular mind. There is no coal, no grime, no sweating shovellers, no clanging doors. Under ordinary conditions two leisurely moving men do all there is need of doing, [Pg 61] and with time to spare, and there are occasions at sea, in the winter months, when the stokehold is a more comfortable refuge than the chill fireless ward room. ”

“ 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 shell-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. ”

“ The shells were bunched together like a salvo of air-bombs kicked loose all at once. The wall of water they threw up shut everything on that side off from sight for a few seconds, and when the spouts settled down there was a Hun destroyer inside of a mile away. I jumped up to give her course and speed to the ‘T.I.’, but before I had time more than to see that she had two funnels and many tubes the bursting projes from our foremost and midships guns began knocking her to pieces so fast that I soon saw there was no use of wasting a mouldie on the job. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ On the score of lives, a tom-cat has nothing the best of a trawler. If it had been otherwise our whole fleet of them—and they, with the drifters, form the main strands of the finer meshes of our anti-U-boat net—would have been wiped out many times over.
“At the instant the jar of the first explosion made itself felt, the thought flashed through my mind that there actually was a U-boat lying on the bottom, and that the explosive charge on the sweep had been detonated against its hull. ”

“ Well,”—the captain smiled in a deprecatory sort of way—“the depth-charge isn’t exactly what you’d call a ‘weapon of precision,’ and so it follows that when you hit what you are after with one it must be largely a matter of luck. Judgment? Oh, yes, a certain amount of it, but I’d rather have luck than judgment any day. At any rate, this was my lucky day. Within fifteen seconds from the moment I felt the jolt of the detonating charge Fritz’s conning-tower was breaking surface on my starboard beam. ”

“ Fritz is as full of ways that are dark and of tricks that are vain as Ah Sin, but—with the hounds at his heels—nothing so foolish as that oil and bubble stunt of popular fiction.
“The first few of the ‘cans’ had evidently burst near enough to this Fritz to buckle his shell and release the oil and air, but his sharp right-angled turn to the left had taken him quite clear of the last of the charges, which had only been thrown away. Wounded and winged as he appeared to be, the next thing in order was to polish him off. Slowing down slightly, the captain steadied the Sherill on the wake. ”

“ The captain broke off suddenly and set the alarm bell going as a lynx-eyed lookout cut in with “Connin’ tower o’ submreen three points on port bow,” and, with much banging of boots on steel decks and ladders, the ship had gone to “Action Stations” before a leisurely mounting recognition rocket revealed the fact that the “enemy” was a friend, doubtless a “co-huntress.”
Although we were still far from where there was yet any chance of encountering the U-boat which had attacked the convoy, there were two or three alarms in the course of the next hour. ”

“ At the end of a minute or two a quick order from the captain sent the wheel spinning over, and, with raucous grinding of helm, round we swung through sixteen points to head back in reverse over the path of destruction we had just traversed. Just as the [Pg 108] steel runners of a racing skater throw ice when he makes a sudden turn, so the screws of a speeding destroyer hurl water. The stern sank deep into the propeller-scooped void, so that the high-tossed side-slipping wake buried it beneath a frothing flood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There may be circumstances under which he could work that particular brand of foxiness with profit, but if there is one place where you could be sure he would [Pg 148] not try anything of that kind on, it is when a destroyer has got his nose on his trail, with her eye and ears a-cock for just that kind of little first-aid to ‘can-dropping.’ For a submarine voluntarily to release air or oil when a destroyer is ramping round overhead would be just about like a burglar scattering a trail of confetti to baffle the pursuit of the police. ”

“ It was a little after one in the morning that one of the look-outs—perhaps ‘sniff-outs’ would be a better term under the circumstances—reported an oil smell to windward. The captain promptly ordered her headed up into the wind, with sniffers stationed to port and starboard, fore and aft. Every man on watch was sniffing away on his own, of course, and you can bet it would have been a funny sight if there had only been enough light for us to see one another in. ”