always those cursed destroyers slipping through the mist--I see them
when I close my eyes--I see them when I am on duty--I know no longer
whether I see them or not--and worse than the destroyers----" he broke
off suddenly.
"Ach, ja," said the engineer, "you have had a bad time--but you can at
least see the danger coming--sometimes, down there, I begin to imagine
things--I have not let myself imagine, Herr Leutnant--I have read the
sublime words of Zarathustra--I could always read them--but now I can,
no longer. How long have we been here, Bielefeld?" he finished abruptly.
"Four days."
"Ach so! I thought it was a week--what days!"
"Jawohl!"
The two men fell silent again, staring at the sea. Once the lieutenant
made a quick movement of alarm, whipped out his binoculars, and gazed
into the grey distance. He put them back after some minutes without a
word. On the whole ship was no other sound than the strident rasp of
the escaping steam and the drone of the gale through the wind-tautened
stays.
The engineer spoke again.
"What does Borkum say?"
"Enemy disappeared into the offing--could not keep their stations in
this weather."
"It is our chance, then."
"Yes--perhaps."
"You fear----?"
"Everything--in this rat-trap. The picket-boats are all in. If only we
could start!"
"Jawohl--anything is better than this--besides, the movement of the
engines is soothing--this stillness day after day is unnerving. If only
we had some good Welsh coal! This soft stuff! One burns and burns and
gets no heat!"
"And advertise ourselves to every cursed scout in the North Sea!"
A sailor, heavy in oilskins, drew up and saluted.
"The Herr Kapitän is coming, Herr Leutnant."
The engineer disappeared. His friend went to the starboard rail of the
bridge and looked over. A motor-boat was approaching in a smother of
flying spray.
A boatswain's whistle shrilled loudly. A minute later the captain came
up the ladder onto the bridge, shaking the water from his oilskins like
a wet dog and dabbing at his square reddish beard with a handkerchief.
The lieutenant saluted, searching his commander's face for a hint of
the orders he bore. The captain's eyes were hard, the eyes of a man who
had been contemplating desperate possibilities. His bluish lips cut in
a thin straight line across his beard. He spoke curtly.
"Get the starboard anchor up. Tell the Herr Stabs-Ingenieur I wish to
speak to him."
He went heavily into the wheelhouse and bent over the chart. Outside,
the lieutenant blew his whistle and shouted an order. An instant
later the shrill piping of the boatswain repeated the call. There was
a scurry of men along the deck towards the bows and the clank of a
capstan hauling in the heavy chain.
The staff-engineer stood in conversation with the captain. In
the low murmur of their voices certain words were emphasised by
repetition--"Knots--this coal--revolutions--coal." The captain nodded.
"Do your best," he said briefly.
"We make a dash for it?" queried the engineer. Still he worried at his
ragged moustache and the protruding eyes above his beaklike nose moved
with little quick stares like a frightened bird.
The captain smiled grimly.
"We rejoin the fleet--while we can--those are the orders. We will do
our best and God be with us--do you find that maxim in Zarathustra,
Herr Wollenmetz?"
The engineer shrugged his shoulders.
"Ach! I know no longer, Herr Kapitän--anything is better than
this--anything!"
"We start at once," said the captain and went out onto the bridge
without more words. The ship's bugler saluted and stood stiffly to
attention as he emerged.
"Battle stations!" said the captain.
The howl of the gale in the rigging was lost in the sternly joyous
run of brazen notes, taken up and repeated all over the vessel. For a
minute or two the erstwhile deserted decks swarmed with hurrying men.
They disappeared rapidly into turrets, fighting-tops, fire-control
stations or stood, alert, behind the unprotected anti-torpedo guns.
There was a buzz of excited voices which would not easily be hushed.
At last the never-diminished tension of four long days of inaction was
broken. They were going to move, to do something. No longer were they
to lie there, waiting, waiting, while perhaps at any minute destruction
was creeping stealthily towards them under the surface of the water.
They forgot the wearing vigils of the previous weeks at sea, the
unrelieved strain of watching the horizon for a grey spot in daytime
or a blur closer at hand in the obscurity of the night. They forgot
the awful minutes which dragged out, heavy with their lives, as they
approached an unknown ship, forgot the paralysing uncertainty when the
wireless began on its mysterious message, reporting her. They forgot
the night alarms, the perpetual dodging of the hostile cruisers, the
chases and the escapes and the last fierce pursuit, which had driven
them, all but out of coal, behind the shelter of Borkum Island. The
memory of these things was blotted out by the nerve-sapping suspense
of the past four days, while they waited for a chance to elude the
hostile cruisers watching for them in the offing. Now they experienced
the gladness of a release as from an untangible but none the less
close prison. Nevertheless, all of this emotional and mental strain
was marked in eyes dark-rimmed and faces that had grown thinner. The
alacrity of their movements now was not the alacrity of men who leap,
calm-souled and confident, to test their strength in a crisis; it was
the fussiness of neurotics who are glad to translate their nerve force
into physical action as an escape from the barren travail of their
brains.
Volumes of black smoke rolled heavily from the four funnels of the
cruiser, were blown rapidly by the gale in one thick all-obliterating
mist towards the low shores. An engine-room telegraph clanged harshly
while the port anchor, dripping black mud, came slowly up to the
hawse-hole. Again the telegraph clanged. There was a flurry in the
water astern, and the long grey cruiser commenced to move along the
dark fairway into the stormy grey of the autumn afternoon.
Quickly she got into her stride. On the port bow the island of Borkum
was beginning to loom up just distinguishable through the driving
scud. The wireless was talking with it. Borkum reported with steady
regularity: "No enemy in sight." The cruiser hurried down the eastern
branch of the Ems, meeting a heavy swell that rolled darkly towards
her to be divided into two thin translucent curtains of water poised
like wings on either side of her bows. The shoals to port and starboard
glimmered away into the distance, wide stretches of running, leaping,
jostling white-caps. The water under their lee showed an ugly, dirty
yellow that contrasted with the black waves of the channel. On the
bridge the navigating lieutenant still peered anxiously into the veiled
horizon. Every now and then he glanced back at the welter of black
smoke issuing from their funnels and muttered fluent curses that were
the perverted expression of the prayer in his heart. Behind him stood
the captain and the commander, conversing in the intervals of raising
their binoculars to their eyes.
At every minute a message from the wireless room was brought to the
captain. Borkum was still talking. Suddenly the tenor of its messages
changed. "Two British cruisers passing the minefield in the Western
Ems." A moment later Emden reported three submarines at the fork of
the channel behind. The captain smiled grimly. He could not now go
back, but apparently he had given his warders the slip. He went to
the engine-room telephone and spoke a few words to the chief. In
answer the masses of black smoke from the funnels rolled out even
more densely than before. The curtains of flying water at the bows
rose a little higher and remained at the elevation. Borkum announced:
"Mines evidently swept or damaged--cruisers untouched." In fact, in
slight lulls of the gale, slow dull booms were audible to leeward. The
batteries on the island were firing. The captain turned and laughed
with the commander. The situation could not be more favourable. They
had as good as escaped.
A few long minutes and they had reached the open sea. Borkum was a
grey blur on their port quarter, the land to the east of them passed
into invisibility. Here they felt the full force of the gale. The
cruiser nosed into great waves that leaped green above the bows and
fell with a heavy thud upon the deck. She endeavoured to combine a
steady roll with violent pitching, and the officers on the bridge
clutched at the rail with one hand while with the other they pressed
their glasses hard against their eyes. The veils of driving mist which
swept continuously across the waters might hide a menace that would
loom up at any instant as destruction. Suddenly a telephone bell rang
in the wheelhouse behind them. A man ran out, saluted and reported:
"Submarine right ahead--about 1000 metres."
The message came from an observing station on the foremast. The three
officers on the bridge searched the sea in front of them with their
binoculars. Yes! No! Yes! The navigating lieutenant saw a flitting
patch of foam on the dark sea, a splash in the air as a wave lifted.
He recognised it instantly as a periscope cutting through the water,
coming straight towards them. They must shoot--shoot at once! He turned
to his superiors. The captain had already shouted one order, was now
yelling instructions to the men at the port anti-torpedo guns. The
cruiser turned slightly to starboard. Onward drove the patch of foam,
aiming apparently at their side. The lieutenant felt his left hand
hurt him--it was the intensity of his nervous grip upon the rail.
Behind him he heard a sudden order, followed instantly by the sharp,
splitting report of the light guns. At the same moment the circle of
a conning-tower broke the surface of the sea, followed by a glistening
whale-back. As it emerged he saw it veiled in a sheet of flame, a film
of smoke. He had a glimpse of a great hole in the whale-back and then
the submarine dived nose foremost, kicking up her stern in the air as
she went. For one awful, ghastly second the lieutenant had a view of
the large initial in her conning-tower. It was U--Unterseeboot!--They
had sunk one of their own submarines!
He turned to see the face of his captain fixed in an expression of
horror. Everyone on the bridge was trembling. They had lost command
over themselves, and they knew it. No one spoke. With a fierce effort
of will the lieutenant pressed his glasses to his eyes, scanned
the horizon. What was that? He saw a dark spot rising and falling,
circling against the grey sky like a black gull wheeling in the gale.
It was a seaplane, daringly reconnoitring even in this weather. It
was discovery. Borkum confirmed the fear. "Cruisers turning back to
sea--difficult to range in this weather."
The guns' crews at the anti-torpedo armament had also seen the
aeroplane. A shot cracked out, automatically, without orders. The
captain, losing all control over his nerves after the last shock,
ran along the bridge to the port rail and excitedly ordered them to
continue. "Fire!" he shouted. "Fire! A hundred marks to the crew that
brings it down!" His face worked with an insane hatred, his voice was
the voice of a man out of himself. It seemed that he wished to revenge
his terrible mistake upon the aeroplane. Crack! Crack! Crack! went the
guns, while the men behind the rubber shoulder-pieces swore violent
oaths. The firing had continued for a couple of minutes or more when
the telephone bell rang again.
"The lieutenant in the observing station wishes to know what you are
firing at, Herr Kapitän!"
The captain was about to discharge a volley of oaths upon the man when
a sharp cry from the commander stopped him. The captain looked again
through his glasses. It was suddenly obvious to everybody that the
aeroplane was no aeroplane but in actual fact a wheeling gull.
"Cease fire, you--(objurgatory)--fools!" yelled the captain. In a
nervous rage he bit furiously at the red beard below his lip. "Tell the
Herr Leutnant Feldmann to keep a better look out!" he said savagely to
the messenger.
Eight bells sounded. The navigating lieutenant was relieved. He
descended from the bridge and stood for a moment in a warm spot in
the lee of the forward funnel, trying to achieve a yawn that kept
opening his mouth without filling his lungs. His blood, drugged with
fatigue-toxins, was in urgent need of more oxygen, but his overtaxed
nerves failed to synchronise the action of the muscles. His eyes burned
in his head. He stumbled down the companionway, rubbing at them, and
took off his dripping oilskins outside the wardroom door. His servant
appeared and was ordered to bring him a stiff tumbler of brandy. Then
he entered the empty wardroom and flung himself full length upon
a sofa. He tried to shut his eyes, but found himself obstinately
staring wide awake at a paint-blister on the bulkhead. Disconnected
thoughts--visions, rather, of craft of various types driving through
the gale passed through his brain. Especially the black dot of the
seaplane which was no seaplane danced before his eyes, maddening him
with its refusal to be banished. Behind a door in his consciousness
was the horror of the sunk submarine--he fought hard to keep that door
closed, and caught himself staring into it in intervals of relaxed
vigilance. He could not sleep, try as he would. Even the strong spirits
failed to narcotise him. If anything they spurred his harassed brain
into greater activity. He fretted for a drowsiness that would not come.
At last, with a curse, he rose and walked out of the wardroom.
Outside he stood for a moment, hesitating, craving for companionship
like a sick man who lies awake at night. He ran over the list of his
comrades at their battle stations. Then he made his way down to the
engine-room.
A stifling atmosphere, hot, damp and thick with the smell of oil,
assailed him as he descended the steep iron ladder. The sweat broke
out on his brow as he passed along a gloomy narrow corridor, just wide
enough for a man, between packed boiler-tubes ranged on both sides to
the roof like bottles in a wine merchant's vault. He emerged finally
into a large space, brilliant with electric light. On a platform at one
end stood the staff-engineer with some of his assistants, surrounded
by a formidable array of indicator-dials, telegraphs, telephones,
speaking-tubes, and other fittings of whose use he had but a vague
idea. The engineer still worried at his little grey moustache as he
gazed below him to where the turbines hummed in their casings. It was
comparatively quiet down here. Only a few men were visible, but the
lieutenant knew that a hundred or so were labouring fiercely in the
bowels of this mass of mechanism which gave the ship her life. From
a manhole at the other end of the engine-room a couple of men were
drawing out what seemed to be a corpse, its naked torso black as with
an explosion. It was a stoker who had collapsed. The staff-engineer
frowned as the limp body was carried off to the sick bay. He turned and
snarled irritably at the question of the lieutenant.
"250 revolutions and not a turn more can we get out of this
Gott-verfluchte coal. That is the tenth man in the last quarter of an
hour. There's no use in worrying us. We can do no more. Go and tell
that to the Herr Kapitän and leave us to our work."
"It seems clear in front, but there is a couple of cruisers somewhere
behind," observed the lieutenant in a placatory voice.
"I don't care if Hell's in front of us and the Devil himself behind!"
roared the engineer, losing self-control in the exasperation of his
nerves. "We should at least get something that would give some heat
there. _Gott sei dank!_ Do you know how many tons of this muck we are
burning per hour?" he finished savagely.
The lieutenant waited for the answer.
"Thirty tons per hour--and we are only getting 250 revolutions--go and
tell that to the Herr Kapitän!"
The lieutenant's own irritation was inflamed by this display of temper.
"We didn't supply the coal----"
The engineer overwhelmed him with a roar of curses, and finished with
an angry order to leave his engine-room. His bulging, birdlike eyes
glared with an insane hatred.
The lieutenant returned a bitter retort that had no justification in
fact and climbed up the ladders to the deck. There he stood swaying
for a moment or two, chilled to the bone by the change in temperature,
although he was on the lee side of the superstructure. Raindrops
splashed heavily upon him from above. The ship was plunging and rolling
more than ever, and he noticed the motion after the comparative quiet
below. The gale had evidently freshened. He shivered with cold and
half-turned to go below again. Then he changed his mind and stumbled
forward, slipping at every step on the wet, unstable deck.
In the forward turret was his friend Gunnery Lieutenant Arenschmidt.
He opened the steel door and entered. The narrow metal box into which
the breeches of two 8·2 guns protruded was lit by electric lamps
behind wire guards. It was filled with the crews of the two guns,
seated comfortably on the floor with their backs against the walls. In
the shell-bins at the top of the ammunition-hoists a projectile lay
ready for each gun. The gunnery lieutenant rose as his friend entered
and held out his hand with a smile. He was a jolly young man, this
lieutenant, whose manly beauty, marred though it was by a student
sabre-cut, fluttered many a female heart. He spoke now with all his
usual boisterous good-humour.
"Hallo, Bielefeld! Glad to see you! Giving them the slip after all?"
Despite the buoyancy of his tone the navigating-lieutenant noticed that
his lips trembled and that his eyes were deadly serious.
Ere any reply was possible, a bell rang sharply. The gunnery
lieutenant jumped away from his friend. The indicators from the
forward fire-control station marked a direction, an elevation and
a range. The navigating lieutenant stood back away from the alert
groups behind the breeches. He felt the floor turning with him while
the ship lurched heavily. A moment later he heard a muffled thud and
everything shook. The starboard gun had been fired. He heard the hiss
of the air-blast clearing the fumes from the firing-chamber, and then
the breech was swung open. The hydraulic chain-rammer, jointed like a
foot-rule, pushed another shell into place, followed by its charges.
The hoists rattled as another projectile came up in readiness. The
bell rang again. The crew at the port gun were suddenly busy. There
was another shock. What was happening? What were they firing at? The
navigating-lieutenant dashed out of the turret, closing the door
quickly behind him.
As he ran up the ladder to the bridge, he heard a roar in the air, and
a moment later a great sheet of flame leaped up just in front of the
forward funnel with a colossal detonation. The blast of the explosion
flung him to the deck. He picked himself up, bruised, dazed, but
uninjured, and looked for the enemy. The turret had swung its two guns
over to starboard, and as he followed their direction they discharged
with a couple of almost simultaneous reports. He steadied himself and
gazed hard into the distance. In the mist on the horizon he thought
he distinguished a long, low band of brownish smoke, and at one end
of it a dark spot and a tiny twinkle of flame. A minute later the
roar of heavy projectiles tearing through the air came to his ears.
Instinctively he flung himself flat upon the deck in the shelter of a
gun-turret of the starboard battery. The sharp, splitting report of the
gun in that turret was blotted out on the instant by a fearful upheaval
that leaped from the centre of the ship with such a blast of noise as
seemed to burst his ears. He had a glimpse, he knew not how, of a sheet
of lurid flame and of a mighty upspout of water on the ship's flank. In
the awful silence which ensued--a silence so profound that he wondered
if he were permanently deafened--he staggered to his feet. The turret
in front of him had been burst open, the gun protruded askew at a
curious angle. He gazed at it, motionless, as though rendered imbecile
with the shock. Then a chorus of agonised screams and shrieks came
from the turret and continued. He heard them with a sense of relief,
so terrible was that unbroken silence. Recovering his wits, he looked
about him. The second gun-shield of the starboard battery had also been
destroyed, the bridge was a hanging mass of contorted scrap-iron,
the wireless "aerials" streamed away to leeward in the gale. The two
forward funnels had disappeared and torrents of black smoke were
welling up from the level of the deck, obliterating everything. In
that smoke, tongues of fire licked upwards, whether from the furnaces
or from a conflagration he did not know. Automatically he began to
run towards the conning-tower. Without defining itself, the thought
that the captain should be informed of the state of affairs impelled
him. As he went he heard again the roar of projectiles. Again he flung
himself flat. This time the enemy was not so successful. A shell burst
somewhere on the fore-castle. The rest flung up spouts of water all
around that fell again with a heavy splash. An instant later he was
hammering at the lid of the manhole in the conning-tower.
The lid was unfastened from within. He pushed it aside and slid in,
feet foremost. The round steel box was filled with fumes. Through
them he perceived several bodies stretched out upon the floor. He
stumbled over one of them, and the handkerchief over the man's face
slipped aside. It was the commander. He heard the voice of one of the
gunnery-lieutenants at a telephone communicating with a fire-control
station, followed by rapid orders to the electricians turning the
handles of the range indicators. At another telephone a man was making
frantic but ineffectual efforts to get a reply from the wireless room.
A junior officer at the steering wheel gave him a slow strained grin,
almost like an expression of pain. The captain glared at him with eyes
in which there flamed a Berserk madness.
"Well!" he shouted, sticking his red beard into the lieutenant's face.
The navigating lieutenant gave his information, staggering with the
heavy lurches of the ship. It flashed on his mind while he spoke that
she no longer rose so buoyantly to the waves. The captain listened, his
face twitching insanely, puckering his fierce eyes. When the lieutenant
spoke of the blur of smoke on the horizon he sprang round and peered
out through the narrow slit between the wall and the roof. Then he
turned with a cry of panic.
"They are all round us! Starboard your helm! West-by-north-west!"
The ship came round on her new course with a wallowing roll. The
captain peered again through the observation slit.
Suddenly there was a fearful shock, a deafening roar, and the slit
was vividly illuminated. The conning-tower had been again struck. The
captain toppled backward on his heels, an object of sickening horror.
The top of his head was gone. The gunnery-lieutenant sank quietly to
his knees and slid over sideways. The officer at the helm was leaning
over the wheel, motionless and staring. A splinter had gone through
his brain. Lieutenant Bielefeld sprang to take his place. Three men
beside himself, rangetakers and electricians, were left alive in the
conning-tower. They seemed in a stupor, dazed by the shock.
"Telephone to Lieutenant von Waldkirch that he is now in command!"
An electrician roused himself, attempted to obey, and reported:
"The communications are broken, Herr Leutnant."
"One of you go and fetch him--he is in the after fire-control station."
A man wrenched at the lid of the manhole.
"It will not open, Herr Leutnant--it is jammed."
The lieutenant glanced at the observation slit. The aperture was no
longer regular. In front of him it gaped, behind him it was closed.
"So!--then we will carry on!" His face had gone deathly pale,
but his lips were tight-pressed. "Telephone to such guns as you
can--independent firing!" He himself leaned over to the voice-funnel
from the engine-room. "Wollenmetz!--Wollenmetz!"