THE DAY--AND THE MORNING AFTER
Looking back on a kaleidoscope of great events, one is apt to be struck
by the wealth of insignificant detail with which memory burdens itself.
Of all the thunderous panorama in which a Fleet Action presents itself
to the imagination, very little is recorded in the mind of a participant
at the time. Later on a man may fit the details together into an orderly
comprehensive tableau for the benefit of relations and others, supplying
from hearsay and imagination all that he missed as an insignificant
actor in the great drama.
Groping among the memories of the Battle of Jutland and the part played
therein by the fleet flagship, it is not unnatural, therefore, that a
private of marines should come most readily to mind. He it was who in
enjoyment of his office of servant jerked aside the curtain of a cabin
door about 3.15 p.m. on May 31st, 1916, and announced in laconic tones
that the fleet was going to “Action Stations” in half an hour’s time.
The Onlooker had kept the morning watch, and was engaged on his bunk in
what is colloquially known as a “stretch off the land.”
“Eh?” he said.
“’Arf an hour,” repeated the messenger of Mars. There was in his tone
that note of impassive stoicism usually reserved for the announcement
that the Onlooker’s gold links had gone, in the cuffs of a shirt, to the
wash--or similarly soul-shaking tidings. The latter descended from his
bunk in search of the sinews of war.
“Where the devil’s my gas-mask?” he queried, after a breathless search.
“’Andy,” replied the stoic. He rummaged in an obscure “glory-hole” and
produced in turn his master’s boot-cleaning gear, his own ditty-box,
private stock of tobacco, fiancée’s portrait, and finally his master’s
gas-mask. This, emptied of a further assortment of his personal
possessions, he gravely handed to the Onlooker.
That worthy rapidly collected his remaining impedimenta and struggled
into a “British warm”; as he did so certain obscure warnings of the
distant past (those far-off days when we read handbooks and attended
lectures on war in the abstract) came back to mind. “By the way,” he
said--“underclothing. In the Russo-Japanese war they always put on clean
underclothing before going into action, I remember. Septic wounds, and
all that. When did I have a clean shift last?”
His official valet closed his eyes, as if contemplating a vista of time
greater than the human memory could in justice be expected to span.
Finally he shook his head gloomily. “Couldn’t rightly say, but----”
“Never mind,” interrupted the Onlooker hastily. “I haven’t time now,
anyway,” and made for the door. His servant’s impassive countenance
softened; perhaps he was reflecting that they might never again
forgather in that cabin. “It’s goin’ to be cold up there----” he jerked
his head towards the upper-deck and forebridge, and eyed his master
compassionately. “Better ’ave your woolly muffler--what your wife
knitted for you.”
The Onlooker was touched. “Thank you,” he said. “If I may borrow it for
the afternoon....”
* * * * *
The clatter of cups and saucers in the neighbouring pantry guided his
footsteps to the wardroom in search of tea. That the warning had gone
round was evident from the prevalent wakefulness (unusual at that hour)
of all the occupants of the mess. Everyone was garbed for the fray
according to his prospective rôle or individual taste. Costumes ranged
between cricketing flannels and duffle overalls with Balaclava helmets
and sea-boots.
It might reasonably have been expected that one topic and one only--“Der
Tag”--would have been on everyone’s lips. The German Fleet was out: was
even then being lured north by the battle cruisers, and the Fleet was
rushing to meet it in battle-array. The hour for which the Fleet had
waited twenty-two weary months was about to strike: and no one even
mentioned it.
The affectation was somehow peculiarly British. Drake epitomised it for
all time when he declared there was time to finish the game and beat the
Spaniards too; but it is a question whether the self-conscious
imperturbability of that game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe equalled that of
the Fleet flagship’s wardroom as its members sat in noisy banter round
the tea table, munching bread-and-jam with a furtive eye on the
clock....
It was left to the commander-in-chief’s flag lieutenant to break the
spell. He put down his cup with a clatter, picked up his telescope, and
rose to his feet, fastening the toggles of his duffle coat.
“Well, boys ...?” he said, and walked towards the door as the bugles
began to blare along mess-deck and battery.
* * * * *
Concealment of his emotions is not a marked characteristic of the
British bluejacket or marine, whatever affectations may be cherished by
his officers in that respect. The exultant speculations, prophecies, and
thanksgiving of a thousand men, crowded in those confined spaces, met
the ear with a noise like the sea. Commonplace sounds suddenly acquired
a thrilling significance, and the clang of the securing chains of the
guns as they were released, the tireless drone of the turbines far
below, shrilling pipe and blare of bugle overhead, combined to set the
pulses at a gallop. The Onlooker passed forward through that electrical
tide of emotion and laughing men that surged towards the hatchways, and
_en route_ overtook a leading seaman. He was normally a staid,
unemotional individual, known best (from the standpoint of censor) as an
incorrigible letter-writer. He was capering, literally capering, along
the battery. And as he capered he shouted:
“They’re out, lads! they’re out! Christ! They’re out this time!”
And out they were, for presently, on the wind that sang past the naked
rails of the forebridge and the bellying halliards, came the first
grumble of gunfire out of the haze ahead.
Perhaps it was the utter absence of colour, the dull grey monochrome of
sea and sky, ships and smoke, that heightened the resemblance of what
followed to the shifting scene of a cinema show. It robbed even dire
calamity of all terror at the time. It seemed incredible that the
cruiser on the starboard quarter, ringed all about with yeasty pinnacles
of water, was one of ours, being hammered to extinction by the guns of
an enemy invisible. The eye followed her dispassionately as she ran that
desperate gauntlet of pitching salvos; and when the end came, and she
changed in the flutter of an eyelid into a cloud of black smoke, it was
some time before a subconscious voice said to the Onlooker: “There goes
gallant Sir Robert ... and you’ll never shake Dicky Carter by the hand
again....”
* * * * *
Equally remote and unreal were the effects of our own gunfire, seen and
lost and glimpsed again in that ever-shifting North Sea haze. A
crippled German destroyer, crawling out of range, down by the stern,
like a hare whose hindquarters have been paralysed by a clumsy
sportsman: an enemy light cruiser, dismasted, funnels over the side, one
gun spitting defiance from a shambles of a battery as she sank: a great
battleship listing over, all aswarm with specks of humanity--surely it
was none of our noisy doing?
And then suddenly a salvo of 14-inch shells “straddled” us, and a yeoman
of signals beside the Onlooker put out a hand and pulled him behind the
shelter of a canvas wind-screen.
“Best get behind ’ere, sir,” he said. Then the absurdity of it struck
them simultaneously, and they both laughed.
* * * * *
The insignificant duties of the Onlooker took him at a later phase in
the action to the lower conning-tower. Situated far below the water-line
and behind all the available armour, it is deemed the safest place in
the ship, and is the salubrious resort of various seconds-in-command,
waiting to step into the shoes of defunct superiors as occasion arose.
They were not a cheerful company, since their rôle was _pro tem._
necessarily passive. Further, their knowledge of what was going on was
limited to scraps of information that filtered down a voice-pipe from
the upper conning-tower, through a variety of mediums all busily
employed on other matters. The assistant constructor (sometime darling
of International Rugby crowds), stood with his ear to the voice-pipe and
wailed for news as a Neapolitan beggar beseeches alms. Suddenly he
paused, and his face brightened.
“Disabled Zeppelin floating on the surface ahead,” he announced. There
was a general brightening of the countenances around. Followed a long
pause. Then:
“Wash-out! Not a Zeppelin. Bows of a battle cruiser sticking out of the
water.”
“Good egg,” said someone. “Another Hun done in.”
It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that it might not have been a Hun. As
a matter of fact it was the _Invincible_, or all that was left of her.
* * * * *
Outside the lower conning-tower a little group of messengers, electric
light and fire and wreckage parties stood and discoursed. They were
displaying an unwonted interest in the merits and demerits of swimming
belts.
“Got yours on, Nobby?” inquired one boy-messenger of another.
“Yus,” was the reply in tense grave tones. “An’ if we sinks I’m goin’ to
save Admiral Jellicoe an’ get the Victoria Cross.”
This pious flight of fancy apparently rather took his friend’s breath
away, for there was a moment’s silence.
“You can ’elp,” he added generously. They were “Raggies” apparently....
* * * * *
Reaction came with the following dawn: a weariness of the soul that no
fatigue of the flesh can equal. All one’s energies seemed needed to
combat the overwhelming desire for sleep, and the sensitive plate which
records even absurdities in the mind holds little save one recollection
of that dawn. But whatever has grown dim and been forgotten, the memory
of a journey aft along the mess-deck in search of a cup of tea will
always survive. The grey daylight struggled through the gunports and
mingled with the sickly glare of electric lights along the narrow vista
of the mess-deck. One watch of stokers had been relieved, and they lay
where they had dropped on coming up from the stokehold. On every
available inch of space along the deck sprawled a limp bundle of grimy
rags that was a man asleep. It was like picking a pathway through a
charnel-house of ebon dead. They lay on their backs with outstretched
arms, or face downwards with their arms under their foreheads, in every
imaginable attitude of jointless, abandoned exhaustion. The warm, sour
smell of perspiration mingled with the aftermath of cordite fumes....
The guns’ crews beside their guns were silent. They stood or sat, arms
akimbo, motionless in the apathy of reaction and fatigue, following the
passer-by with their eyes....
Aft in the medical distributing station all was still as death. Men lay
motionless, snoring beside the stretchers and operating tables. But as
the Onlooker passed, something moved inside the arms of a sleeping man.
A stumpy tail wagged, and the ponderous bulk of Jumbo, the mascot
bulldog, rose, shook himself and trotted forward, grinning a greeting
from one survivor of Jutland to another.