not difficult to read the thought in every mind, the thought of
_getting at the enemy_. The idea of our Navy is "Get after 'em, Keep
after 'em, Stay after 'em, Don't give 'em an instant of security or
rest." And none have this fighting spirit deeper in their hearts
than our gallant men of the submarine patrol.
"That's all," said Captain John. "I'm going to have a wash up." He
lifted a grease stained hand to his cheek, and rubbed his unshaven
beard, and grinned.
"Any letters?"
"Whole bag of stuff. Smithie put it on your desk."
Captain John wandered off. Presently, the door opened again, and
three more veterans of the patrol cruised in, also in ancient
uniforms. There were more cheers; more friendly cries. It was
unanimously decided that the "Trotsky" of the first lot had better
take a back seat, since the second in command of the newcomers was "a
perfect ringer for Rasputin."
"See anything?"
"Nothing much. There's a bit of wreckage just off shore. Saw a
British patrol boat early Tuesday morning. I was on the surface,
lying between her and the sunrise; she was hidden by a low lying
swirl of fog; she saw us first. When we saw her, I made signals, and
over she came. Guess what the old bird wanted ... _wanted to know if
I'd seen a torpedo he'd fired at me_! An old scout with white
whiskers, one of those retired captains, I suppose, who has gone back
on the job. He admitted that he had received the Admiralty notes
about us, but thought we acted suspicious.... Did you ever hear of
such nerve!"
When the war was young, I had a year of it on land. Now, I have seen
the war at sea. To my mind, if there was one service of this war
which more than any other required those qualities of endurance,
skill and courage whose blend the fighting men so wisely call
"_guts_," it surely was our submarine patrol. So here's to the L
boats, their officers and crews, and to the _Bushnell_ and her brood
of Bantry Bay!
VI
OUR SAILORS
In the lingo of the Navy, the enlisted men are known as "gobs." This
word is not to be understood as in any sense conveying a derogatory
meaning. The men use it themselves;--"the _gobs_ on the 210." "What
does a real _gob_ want with a wrist watch?" It is an unlovely
syllable, but it has character.
In the days before the war, our navy was, to use an officer's phrase,
more of "a big training school" than anything else. There were, of
course, a certain number of young men who intended to become sailors
by profession, even as some entered the regular army with the
intention of remaining in it, but the vast majority of sailors were
"one enlistment men" who signed on for four years and then returned
to civilian life. The personnel included boys just graduated from or
weary of high school, young men from the western farms eager for a
glimpse of the world, and city lads either uncertain as to just what
trade or profession they should follow or thirsting for a man's cup
of adventure before settling down to the prosaic task that gives the
daily bread.
To-day, the enlisted personnel of the Navy is a cross section of the
Nation's youth. There are many college men, particularly among the
engineers. There are young men who have abandoned professions to
enter the Navy to do their bit. For instance, the yeoman who ran the
little office on board Destroyer 66 was a young lawyer who had
attained real distinction. On board the same destroyer was a lad who
had been for a year or two a reporter on one of the New York papers,
and a chubby earnest lad whose father is a distinguished leader of
the Massachusetts bar. Of my four best friends, "Pop" had worked in
some shop or other, "Giles" was a student from an agricultural
college somewhere in western New York, "Idaho" was a high school boy
fresh from a great ranch, and "Robie" was the son of a physician in a
small southern city. The Napoleonic veterans of the new navy are the
professional "gobs" of old; sailors with second enlistment stripes go
down the deck the very _vieux de la veille_.
The sailor suffers from the fact that many people have fixed in their
minds an imaginary sailor whom they have created from light
literature and the stage. Just as the soldier must always be a
dashing fellow, so must the sailor be a rollicking soul, fond of the
bottle and with a wife in every port. Is not the "comic sailor" a
recognized literary figure? Yet whoever heard of the "comic
soldier"? This silly phantom blinds us to the genuine charm of
character with which the sea endows her adventurous children; we turn
into a frolic a career that is really one of endurance, heroism, and
downright hard work. Not that I am trying to make Jack a sobersides
or a saint. He is full of fun and spirit. But the world ought to
cease imagining him either as a mannerless "rough-houser" or a low
comedian. Our sailors have no special partiality for the bottle;
indeed, I feel quite certain that a majority of every crew "keep away
from booze" entirely. As for having a wife in every port, the
Chaplain says that a sailor is the most faithful husband in the world.
As a lot, sailors are unusually good-hearted. This last Christmas
the men of our American battleships now included in the Grand Fleet
requested permission to invite aboard the orphan children of a great
neighbouring city, and give them an "American good time." So the
kiddies were brought aboard; Jack rigged up a Christmas tree, and
distributed presents and sweets in a royal style. Said a witness of
the scene to me, "I never saw children so happy."
One of the passions which sway "the gobs" is to have a set of
"tailor-made" liberty blues. By "liberty blues" you are to
understand the sailor's best uniform, the picturesque outfit he wears
ashore. Surely the uniform of our American sailor is quite the
handsomest of all. On such a flimsy excuse, however, as that "the
government stuff don't fit you round the neck" or "hasn't any
_style_," Jack is forever rushing to some Louie Katzenstein in
Norfolk, Va., or Sam Schwartz of Charlestown, Mass., to get a "real"
suit made. Endless are the attempts to make these "a little bit
_different_," attempts, alas, which invariably end in reprimand and
disaster. The _dernier cri_ of sportiness is to have a right hand
pocket lined with starboard green and a left hand pocket lined with
port red. A second ambition is to own a heavy seal ring, "fourteen
karat, Navy crest. Name and date of enlistment engraved free."
Sailors pay anywhere from twenty to seventy dollars for these
treasures. To-day, the style is to have a patriotic motto engraved
within the band. I remember several inscribed "Democracy or Death."
The desire of having a "real" watch comes next in hand, and if you
ask a sailor the time he is very liable to haul out a watch worth
anywhere from a hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars.
Our sailors are the very finest fellows in the world to live with. I
sailed with the Navy many thousand miles; I visited all the great
bases, and _I did not see one single case of drunkenness or
disorderly behaviour_. The work done by our sailors was a hard and
gruelling labour, the seas which they patrolled were haunted by every
danger, yet everywhere they were eager and keen, their energy
unabated, their spirits unshaken.
VII
THE BASE
The town which served as the base of the American destroyers has but
one great street; it is called The Esplanade, and lies along the
harbour edge and open to the sea. I saw it first in the wild
darkness of a night in early March. Rain, the drenching, Irish rain,
had been falling all the day, but toward evening the downpour had
ceased, and a blustery south-east wind had thinned the clouds, and
brought the harbour water to clashing and complaining in the dark.
It was such a night as a man might peer at from a window, and be
grateful for the roof which sheltered him, yet up and down the gloomy
highway, past the darkened houses and street lamps shaded to mere
lifeless lumps of light, there moved a large and orderly crowd. For
the most part, this crowd consisted of American sailors from the
destroyers in port, lean, wholesome-looking fellows these, with a
certain active and eager manner very reassuring to find on this side
of our cruelly tried and jaded world. Peering into a little lace
shop decked with fragile knickknacks and crammed with bolts of table
linen, I saw two great bronzed fellows in pea jackets and pancake
hats buying something whose niceties of stitch and texture a little
red-cheeked Irish lass explained with pedagogic seriousness; whilst
at the other end of the counter a young officer with grey hair fished
in his pockets for the purchase money of some yards of lace which the
proprietress was slowly winding around a bit of blue cardboard. Back
and forth, now swallowed up in the gloom of a dark stretch, now
become visible in the light of a shop door, streamed the crowd of
sailors, soldiers, officers, country folk and townspeople. I heard
Devon drawling its oe's and oa's; America speaking with Yankee
crispness, and Ireland mingling in the babel with a mild and genial
brogue.
By morning the wind had died down; the sun was shining merrily, and
great mountain masses of rolling white cloud were sailing across the
sky as soft and blue as that which lies above Fiesole. Going forth,
I found the little town established on an edge of land between the
water and the foot of a hill; a long hill whose sides were in places
so precipitous that only masses of dark green shrubbery appeared
between the line of dwellings along the top and the buildings of the
Esplanade. The hill, however, has not had things all its way. Two
streets, rising at an angle which would try the endurance of an
Alpine ram actually go in a straight line from the water's edge to
the high ground, taking with them, in their ascent, tier after tier
of mean and grimy dwellings. All other streets, however, are less
heroic, and climb the side of the hill in long, sloping lateral
lines. A new Gothic cathedral, built just below the crest of the
hill, but far overtopping it, dominates and crowns the town; perhaps
crushes would be the better verb, for the monstrous bone-grey mass
towers above the terraced roofs of the port with an ascendancy as
much moral as physical. Yet for all its vastness and commanding
situation, it is singularly lifeless, and only the trickery of a
moonlight night can invest its mediocre, Albert-Memorial architecture
with any trace of beauty.
The day begins slowly there, partly because this south Irish climate
is such stuff as dreams are made of, partly because good, old
irreconcilables are suspicious of the daylight saving law as a
British measure. There is little to be seen till near on ten
o'clock. Then the day begins; a number of shrewd old fish wives,
with faces wrinkled like wintered apples and hair still black as a
raven's wing, set up their stalls in an open space by a line of
deserted piers, and peasants from near by villages come to town
driving little donkey carts laden with the wares; now one hears the
real rural brogue, the shrewd give and take of jest and bargain, and
a prodigious yapping and snarling from a prodigious multitude of
curs. Never have I seen more collarless dogs. The streets are full
of the hungry, furtive creatures; there is a fight every two or three
minutes between some civic champion and one of the invading rural
mongrels; many is the Homeric fray that has been settled by a good
kick with a sea boot. Little by little the harbour, seeing that the
land is at last awake, comes ashore to buy its fresh eggs, green
vegetables, sweet milk and golden Tipperary butter. The Filipino and
negro stewards from the American ships arrive with their baskets and
cans; they are very popular with Queenstown folk who cherish the
delusion that our trimly dressed, genially grinning negroes are the
American Indians of boyhood's romance. From the cathedral's solitary
spire, a chime jangles out the quarters, amusing all who pause to
listen with its involuntary rendering of the first bar of "Strike up
the band; here comes a sailor." And ever and anon, a breeze blows in
from the harbour bringing with it a faint smell from the funnels of
the oil-burning destroyers, a smell which suggests that a giant oil
lamp somewhere in the distance has need of turning down. After the
lull of noon, the men to whom liberty has been given begin to arrive
in boatloads forty and fifty strong. The patrollers, distinguished
from their fellows by leggins, belts, white hats, and police billie,
descend first, form in line, and march off to their ungrateful task
of keeping order where there is no disorder; then, scrambling up the
water side stairs like youngsters out of school, follow the liberty
men. If there is any newcomer to the fleet among them, it is an even
chance that he will be rushed over the hill to the _Lusitania_
cemetery, a gruesome pilgrimage to which both British and American
tars are horridly partial. Some are sure to stroll off to their
club, some elect to wander about the Esplanade, others disappear in
the highways and byways of the town. For Bill and Joe have made
friends. There have been some fifty marriages at this base. I
imagine a good deal of match-making goes on in those grimy streets,
for the Irish marriage is, like the Continental one, no matter of
silly sentiment, but a serious domestic transaction. All afternoon
long, the sailors come and go. The supper hour takes them to their
club; night divides them between the movies and the nightly promenade
in the gloom.
The glories of this base as a mercantile port, if there ever were
any--and the Queenstown folk labour mightily to give you the
impression that it was the only serious rival to London--are now over
with the glories of Nineveh and Tyre. A few Cunard lithographs of
leviathans now for the most part at the bottom of the sea, a few
dusty show cases full of souvenirs, pigs and pipes of black, bog oak,
"Beleek" china, a fragile, and vanilla candy kind of ware, and lace
'kerchiefs "made by the nuns" alone remain to recall the tourist
traffic that once centred here. To-day, one is apt to find among the
souvenirs an incongruous box of our most "breathy" (forgive my
new-born adjective) variety of American chewing gum. If you would
imagine our base as it was in the great days, better forget the port
entirely and try to think of a great British and American naval base
crammed with shipping flying the national ensigns, of waters thrashed
by the propellers of oil tankers, destroyers, cruisers, armed sloops,
mine layers, and submarines even. A busy dockyard clangs away from
morning till night; a ferry boat with a whistle like the frightened
scream of a giant's child runs back and forth from the docks to the
Admiralty pier, little parti-coloured motor dories run swiftly from
one destroyer to another.
From the hill top, this harbour appears as a pleasant cove lying
among green hills. On the map, it has something the outline of a
blacksmith's anvil. Taking the narrow entrance channel to be the
column on which the anvil rests, there extends to the right, a long
tapering bay, stretching down to a village leading over hill, over
dale to tumble-down Cloyne, where saintly Berkeley long meditated on
the non-existence of matter; there lies to the right a squarer,
blunter bay through which a river has worn a channel. This channel
lies close to the shore, and serves as the anchorage.
Over the tops of the headlands, rain-coloured and tilted up to a bank
of grey eastern cloud, lay the vast ambush, the merciless gauntlet of
the beleaguered sea.
VIII
THE DESTROYER AND HER PROBLEM
About a quarter of a mile apart, one after the other along the ribbon
of deep water just off the shore, lie a number of Admiralty buoys
about the size and shape of a small factory boiler. At these buoys,
sometimes attached in little groups of two, three, and even four to
the same ring bolt, lie the American destroyers. From the shore one
sees the long lean hull of the nearest vessel and a clump of funnels
all tilted backwards at the same angle. The air above these waspish
nests, though unstained with smoke, often broods vibrant with heat.
All the destroyers are camouflaged, the favourite colours being
black, West Point grey and flat white. This camouflage produces
neither by colour nor line the repulsive and silly effect which is
for the moment so popular. Going aboard a destroyer for the first
time, a lay observer is struck by their extraordinary leanness, a
natural enough impression when one recalls that the vessels measure
some three hundred feet in length and only thirty-four in width.
Many times have I watched from our hill these long, low, rapier
shapes steal swiftly out to sea, and been struck with the terror, the
genuine dread that lies in the word _destroyer_. For it is a
terrible word, a word heavy with destruction and vengeance, a word
that is akin to many an Old Testament phrase.
Our great destroyer fleet may be divided into two squadrons, the
first of larger boats called "thousand tonners," the second of
smaller vessels known as "flivvers." Another division parts the
thousand tonners into those which have a flush deck from bow to
stern, and those which have a forward deck on a higher level than the
main deck. All these types burn oil, the oil burner being nothing
more than a kind of sprayer whose mist of fuel a forced draft whirls
into a roar of flame; all can develop a speed of at least twenty-nine
knots. The armament varies with the individual vessel, the usual
outfit consisting of four four-inch guns, two sets of torpedo tubes,
two mounted machine guns, and a store of depth charges.
These charges deserve a eulogy of their own. They have done more
towards winning the war than all the giant howitzers whose calibre
has stupefied the world. In appearance and mechanism they are the
simplest of affairs. The Navy always refers to them as cans: "I
dropped a can right on his head"; "it was the last can that did the
business." Imagine an ash can of medium size painted black and
transformed into a ponderous thick walled cylinder of steel crammed
with some three hundred pounds of T.N.T. and you have a perfect image
of one. Now imagine at one end of this cylinder a detonator
protected by an arrangement which can be set to resist the pressure
of water at various levels. A sub appears, and sinks swiftly. If it
is just below the surface, the destroyer drops a bomb set to explode
at a depth of seventy feet. The bomb then sinks by its own weight to
that level at which the outward force of the protective mechanism is
over-balanced by the inward pressure of the water; the end yields,
the detonator crushes, the bomb explodes, and your submarine is flung
horribly out of the depths almost clear of the water, and while he is
up, the destroyer's guns fill the hull full of holes. Or suppose the
submarine to have gone down two hundred feet. Then you drop a bomb
geared to that depth upon him, and blow in his sides like a cracked
egg. The sound of these engines travels through the water some
twenty or twenty-five miles, and there have been ships who have
caught the vibration of a distant depth bomb through their hulls and
thought themselves torpedoed. I once saw a depth bomb roll off a
British sloop into a half filled dry dock; the men scrambled away
like mad, but returned in a few minutes to fish out a "can," that had
sixty more feet to go before it could burst. It lay on the bottom
harmless as a stone. The charges rest at the stern of a vessel,
lying one above the other on two sloping runways, and can be released
either from the stern or by hydraulic pressure applied at the bridge.
The credit for this exceedingly successful scheme belongs to a
distinguished American naval officer.
The destroyer has but one deck which is arranged in the following
manner. I take one of the "thousand tonners" as an illustration.
From an incredibly lean, high bow, a first deck falls back a
considerable distance to a four-inch gun; behind the gun lies another
open space closed by a two-storied structure whose upper section is
the bridge and whose lower section a chart room. At the rear of this
structure the hull of the boat is cut away, and one descends by a
ladder from the deck which is on the level of the chart room floor,
to the main deck level some eight feet below. Beyond this cut but
one deck lies, the mere steel covering of the hull. Guns and torpedo
tubes are mounted on it, the funnels rise flush from the plates; a
life line lies strung along its length, and strips of cocoa matting
try to give something of a footing.
The officers' quarters are to be found under the forward deck. The
sleeping rooms are situated on both sides of a narrow passageway
which begins at the bow and leads to the open living room and dining
room space known as the ward room. In the hull, in the space beneath
the wardroom lie the quarters of the crew, amidships lie the boilers
and the engine room, and beyond them, a second space for the crew and
the petty officers. A destroyer is by no means a paradise of
comfort, though when the vessel lies in a quiet port, she can be as
attractive and livable as a yacht. But Heaven help the poor sailor
aboard a destroyer at sea! The craft rolls, dips, shudders, plunges
like a horse straight up at the stars, sinks rapidly and horribly,
and even has spells of see-sawing violently from side to side. Its
worst motion is an unearthly twist,--a swift appalling rise at a
dreadful angle, a toss across space to the other side of a wave, a
fearful descent sideways and down and a ghastly shudder. "You need
an iron stomach" to be on a destroyer is a navy saying. Some,
indeed, can never get used to them, and have to be transferred to
other vessels.
[Illustration: American destroyer on patrol]
The destroyer is the capital weapon against the submarine. She can
out-race a sub, can fight him with guns, torpedoes, or depth charges;
she can send him bubbling to the bottom by ramming him amidships.
She can confuse him by throwing a pall of smoke over his target; she
can beat off his attacks either above or below the surface. He fires
a torpedo at her, she dodges, runs down the trail of the torpedo,
drops a depth bomb, and brings her prey to the surface, an actual
incident this. Her problem is of a dual nature, being both defensive
and offensive. To-day, her orders are to escort a convoy through the
danger zone to a position in latitude x and longitude y; to-morrow,
her orders are to patrol a certain area of the beleaguered sea or a
given length of coast.
Based upon a foreign port, working in strange waters, the destroyer
flotilla added to the fine history of the American Navy a splendid
record of endurance, heroism and daring achievement.
IX
TORPEDOED
If you would understand the ocean we sailed in war-time, do not
forget that it was essentially an ambush, that the foe was waiting
for us in hiding. Nothing real or imagined brooded over the ocean to
warn a vessel of the presence of danger, for the waters engulfed and
forgot the tragedies of this war as they have engulfed and forgotten
all disasters since the beginning of time. The great unquiet shield
of the sea stretched afar to pale horizons, the sun shone as he might
shine on a pretty village at high noon, the gulls followed alert and
clamorous. Yet a thundering instant was capable of transforming this
apparent calm into the most formidable insecurity. In four minutes
you would have nothing left of your ship and its company but a few
boats, some bodies, and a miscellaneous litter of wreckage strewn
about the scene of the disaster. Of the assassin there was not a
sign.
All agreed that the torpedo arrived at a fearful speed. "Like a long
white bullet through the water," said one survivor. "Honest to God,
I never saw anything come so fast," said another.
"Where did it strike?" I asked the first speaker, a fine intelligent
English seaman who had been rescued by a destroyer and brought to an
American base.
"In a line with the funnel, sir. A great column of steam and water
went up together, and the pieces of the two port boats fell all
around the bridge. I think it was a bit of one of the boats that
struck me here." He held up a bandaged hand.
"What happened then?"
"All the lights went out. It was just dusk, you see, so we had to
abandon the boat in the darkness. A broken steam pipe was roaring so
that you couldn't hear a word any one was saying. She sank very
fast."
"Did you see any sign of the submarine?"