concert by the "talent" in the flotilla. The opening number was
always a selection by the Club Orchestra, perhaps a march of Sousa's,
for the Navy is true to its own, or perhaps Meacham's "American
Patrol." Then came a long four-reel movie, "Jim the Penman," "The
Ring of the Borgias," "Gladiola" or "Davy Crockett." The last
terrifying flickers die away, the footlights become rosy; the curtain
rises on "The Musical Gobs." We behold a pleasant room in which two
people in civilian clothes sit playing a soft, crooning air on
violins. Suddenly a knock is heard at the door. One of the
performers rises, goes to the door, then returns and says to his
partner:
"There's some sailors out there (great laughter in the audience);
they say they can play too. Want to know if they can't come in and
play with us."
"Sure, tell 'em to come in."
"Come in, boys."
From behind the back drop, a subdued humming suddenly bursts and
blossoms into "Strike up the band; here comes a sailor." Enter now
three pleasant looking, amiably grinning lads playing the tune.
Chairs are brought out for the newcomers and the "Musical Gobs,"
genuine artists all, play several airs. Another knock is heard and a
singer, a petty officer with a good tenor, also begs to join them.
The curtain goes down in a perfect tempest of applause. The screen
descends once more, and all present sing together the popular songs
whose text is shown, "Gimme a kiss, Mirandy," and "It's a long way to
Berlin, but we'll get there." This feature was always a favourite.
We then have a clog dancer, two more comic films and the National
anthems. When the show is over, almost everybody wandered to the
canteen to get "a bite to eat." To o'erleap the bars of the ration
system with a real plate of ham and eggs, served club style, was an
experience.
So if you were aboard a destroyer that night, you would have heard
Jack whistling the new tunes, and his officers discussing golf scores.
XIII
STORM
Sooner or later, destroyer folk are sure to say something about _the_
storm. It happened in December and raged for a full three days.
Readers will have to imagine what it meant to destroyer sailors; the
boat dancing, tipping and rolling crazily without a second's respite;
no warm food to eat because a saucepan could not be kept on the stove
or liquids in a saucepan; no rest to be had. Imagine being in the
lookout's station in such a storm, wondering when the tops of the
masts were going to crash down on one's head. It was a hard time.
Yet two-thirds of the American flotilla were out in it, and _not a
single vessel lost an hour from her patrol_. Indeed the American
vessels were about the only patrol boats to stay out during the
tempest.
One day in the wardroom of the good old Z, some of the officers began
to tell of it. The first narrator was the radio officer, a tall
blond Westerner with big grey eyes, and a little sandy moustache.
"I knew we were in for something when I saw the clouds racing over
_against_ the wind. Didn't you notice that, Duke? It kept up for
quite a while, and kept getting colder and colder. It wasn't one of
these squally storms, but one of these storms that starts with a
repressed grouch, nurses it along, and finally decides to have it
out. Whoopee! Some night, that first one. Everybody stayed on
their feet. Couldn't have slept if you'd had the chance to. To get
about, you grabbed the nearest thing handy, hung on for dear life,
took a step, grabbed the next thing handy and so on. The old hooker
did the darndest stunts I ever saw or felt. I came in to get my coat
hanging in that corner, and the first thing I knew I was lying on the
floor over in the other corner trying to fight my way to my feet
again. One of the men in the boiler room got burned by being thrown
against a hot surface. Did I tell you how I tried to lie down?
Well, just as I had actually succeeded in getting over to this
transom and stretching out preparatory to strapping myself in (you
have to strap yourself tight in these destroyer bunks same as in an
aeroplane) the old craft sank or swooped or did something more than
usually funny, and left me hanging in the air about a foot and a half
above the bunk. I must have looked like the subject of an experiment
in levitation. A minute later either the bunk came up and caught me
a wallop in the back, or I fell down like a ton of brick or we met in
mid air, anyway, I thought my spine had been carried away. Then all
of a sudden the library door opened and dumped about a hundred pounds
of books on me.
"It was really dangerous to go on deck, for the waves could easily
have torn one from the life line. One of the boats did, I think,
lose a man overboard, but by wonderful luck managed to fish him out
again." It is the engineer officer speaking. He is somewhat older
than the average destroyer officer; somewhere on the edge of the
forties, I should say; of medium height, lean; and with hazel eyes, a
thin high nose and a thin, firm mouth. "I was just getting through
my watch, had my foot on the ladder, in fact, when the boat that we
lost got smashed in. A wave about the size of a young mountain
climbed aboard, hit the deck, caught the boat, and then poured off
with the kindling wood. Then to make things interesting, right when
it was blowing the hardest, the men's dog took it into his head to
come on deck. Of course, he was only a three months' pup then, and
didn't know any better. (He does now though, he won't stick his nose
out when the weather's bad.) Well, he slipped his collar or
something, and ran on deck. The water was washing about under the
torpedo tubes like the breakers at Atlantic City, and the deck plates
were buckling. Takes a destroyer to do that. But I keep forgetting
the dog. The little brute backed up between two of the stacks and
started yapping out a puppyish bark at the world to starboard. It
was funny in a way to see the little brute there with his short hair
blown backwards and his feet braced on the wet deck. Everybody
yelled, and one of the men ran out hanging on to the life line, and
not a minute too soon either, for a second later a big wave came
thumping down on us, and there was Maloney, the big dark fellow you
were talking to this morning, hanging on to the wire by one arm, with
the fool dog squashed under the other, and the whole Irish Sea trying
to wash them both overboard. I was afraid he'd lose his balance or
have the handle that travels along the wire torn out of his grasp.
But he got to shelter all right, the darn dog yapping steadily all
the time. We had two, almost three days of it, and it never let up
one bit. One of our boats got caught in it with only a meagre supply
of oil, but managed to make a French port. I've heard that there
actually wasn't enough oil left in her tanks to have taken her three
miles further. Other destroyers, too, had boats smashed up, and one
of 'em came in with her smokestacks bent up for all the world like
the crooked fingers of a hand. Some had depth charges washed
overboard. It certainly was the worst blow that I remember."
Here the navigator came over with a twinkle in his eye, and touched
me on the shoulder.
"Don't let him fill you with that dope," said he, "that storm wasn't
in it with the storms we have on the other side off Hatteras."
"Hatteras, my neck," said the other. "What do you think you are,
anyway--Hell-Roaring Jake the Storm King?"
And then the talk shifted to something else.
XIV
ON NIGHT PATROL
It was the end of the afternoon, there was light in the western sky
and on the winding bay astern, but ahead, leaden, still, and slightly
tilted up to a grey bank of eastern cloud, lay the forsaken and
beleaguered sea. The destroyer, nosing slowly through the gap in the
nets by the harbour mouth, entered the swept channel, increased her
speed, and trembling to the growing vibration, hurried on into the
dark. High, crumbling, and excessively romantic, the Irish coast
behind her died away. Tragic waters lay before her. Whatever
illusory friendliness men had read into the sea had vanished; the
great leaden disk about the vessel seemed as insecure as a mountain
road down whose length travellers cease from speaking for fear of
avalanches. "A vast circular ambush." Somehow the beholder cannot
help feeling that the waters should show some sign of the horrors
they have seen. But the sea has engulfed all, memories as well as
living men, engulfing a thousand wrecks as completely as time engulfs
a thousand years.
The dark came swiftly, almost as if the destroyer had sailed to find
it in that bank of eastern cloud. There was an interval of twilight,
no dying glow, but a mere pause in the pale ebb of the day. The
destroyer had begun to roll. Looking back from the bridge one saw
the lean, inconceivably lean, steel deck, the joints of the plates
still visible, the guns to each side with their attendant crews, a
machine gun, swinging on a pivot like a weather vane, the gently
swaying bulk of the suspended motor dories and life boats, the four
great tubes of the funnels rising flush from the plates, and crowned
with a tremble of vibration from the oil flames below. And all this
lean world swung slowly from side to side, rocking as gently as a
child's cradle, swayed as if by some gentle force from within.
The destroyer was out on patrol. A part of the threatened sea had
been given to her to watch and ward. She was the guardian, ... the
avenger.
The supper hour arrived, men came in groups to the galley door, some
to depart with steamy pannikins, there was a smell of good food very
satisfying to children of earth. In the officer's wardroom when
dinner was over, and the negro mess boys were silently folding the
white cloth, securing the chairs, and tidying up, those not on watch
settled down to a friendly talk. All the lights except one bulb
hanging over the table in a pyramidal tin shade had been switched
off. It was very quiet. Now and then one could hear the splash of a
wave against the side, a footfall on the deck overhead, or the tinkle
of the knives and forks which the steward was putting away in a
drawer. The hanging light swayed with the motion of the ship,
trailing a pool of light up and down the oaken table. Cigarette
smoke rose in wisps and long, languorous oriental coils to the clean
ceiling. A sailor or two came in for his orders. Hushed voices
talking apart, a direction to do this or that, a respectful
business-like "yes, sir," a quiet withdrawal by the only door. It
was all very calm, it had the atmosphere of a cruise, yet those
aboard might have been torpedoed any minute, struck a mine, crashed
into a submarine fooling about too near the surface (this has
happened) or been sunk in thirty seconds by some hurrying, furtive
brute of a liner which would have ridden over them as easily as a
snake goes over a branch. The talk flowed in many channels, on the
problems of destroyers, on the adventures of other boats, on members
of the crew soon to be advanced to commissioned rating, and under the
thought under the words, could be discerned the one fierce purpose of
these fighting lives; the will to strike down the submarine and open
the lanes of the sea. Oh, the vigilance, the energy, the keenness of
the American patrol! There were tales of U-boats hiding in suspected
bays, of merchantmen swiftly and terribly avenged, of voices that
cried for help in the night, of life boats almost awash in whose foul
waters the dead floated swollen and horrible. The war of the
destroyer against the submarine is a matter of tragic melodrama.
The wandering glow of the swaying lamp now was reflected from the
varnished table to one keen young face, now to another. "Running a
destroyer is a young man's game," says the Navy. True enough. Pray
do not imagine them, as a crew of "hell-driving boys." The destroyer
service is the achievement of the man in the early thirties, of the
officer with a young man's vigour and energy and the resolution of
maturity. After all, the Navy Department is not yet trusting vessels
worth several million dollars and carrying over a hundred men to
eager youngsters who have no background of experience to their
energy, good-will and bravery. If you would imagine a destroyer
captain, take your man of thirty-two or -three, give him blue eyes, a
keen, clear-cut face essentially American in its features, a sailor's
tan, and a sprinkling of grey hair. A type to remember, for to the
destroyer captain more than to any other single figure do we owe our
opportunity of winning the war.
The evening waned, the officers who were to go on watch at twelve
stole off to get a little sleep before being called. The navigator
and the senior engineer slept on the transoms of the wardroom. A
junior officer lingered beneath the solitary ever-swinging light,
reading a magazine. A little hitch worked itself into the
destroyer's motion, a swift upward leap, a little catch in mid air, a
descent ending in a quiver. The voice of the waters grew louder,
there were hissing splashes, watery blows, bubbly gurgles.
The sleeping officers had not paused to undress. Nobody bothers to
strip on a destroyer. There isn't time, and a man has to be ready on
the instant for any eventuality.
The door giving on a narrow passageway to the deck opened, and as it
stood ajar, the hissing of the water alongside invaded the silent
room. A sailor in a blue reefer, a big lad with big hands and
simple, friendly face, entered quietly, walked over a transom and
said:
"Twelve o'clock, sir."
"All right, Simmons," said the engineer, sitting up and kicking off
the clothes at once with a quick gesture. Then he swung his legs
over the side of the bunk, pulled on a coat and hat and wandered out
to take his trick at the bridge.
He found a lovely, starlit night, a night rich in serenity and
promised peace, a night for lovers, a poet's night. There was
phosphorescence in the water, and as the destroyer rolled from side
to side, now the guns and rails to port, now those to starboard stood
shaped against the spectral trail of foam running river-like
alongside. One could see some distance ahead over the haunted plain.
The men by the guns were changing watch; black figures came down the
lane by the funnels. A sailor was drawing cocoa in a white enamel
cup from a tap off the galley wall. The hatchway leading to the
quarters of the crew was open; it was dark within; the engineer heard
the wiry creak of a bunk into which some one had just tumbled. The
engineer climbed two little flights of steps to the bridge. It was
just midnight. It was very still on the bridge, for all of the ten
or twelve people standing by. All very quiet and rather solemn. One
can't escape from the rich melodrama of it all. The bridge was a
little, low-roofed space perhaps ten feet wide and eight feet long,
it had a front wall shaped like a wide, outward pointing V, its sides
and rear were open to the night. The handful of officers and men on
watch stood at various points along the walls peering out into the
darkness. Phosphorescent crests of low, breaking waves flecked the
waters about; it was incredibly spectral. In the heart of the bridge
burned its only light, a binnacle lamp burning as steadily as a light
in the chancel of a darkened church, the glow cast the shadow of the
helmsman and the bars of the wheel down upon the floor in radiations
of light and shade like the stripes of a Japanese flag. The captain,
keeping a sharp lookout over the bow, gave his orders now and then to
the helmsman, a petty officer with a sober, serious face.
Suddenly there were steps on the companionway behind, the dark
outline of some messenger appeared, a shadow on a background of
shades. The sailor peered round for his chief and said, "Mr. Andrews
sent me up, sir, to report hearing a depth bomb or a mine explode at
12.25."
"Was it very loud, Williams?"
"Yes, sir, I should have said that it wasn't more than a few miles
away. We all heard it quite distinctly down below."
Evidently some devil's work was going on in the heart of the
darkness. The vibration had travelled through the water and had been
heard, as always, in that part of the ship below the water line.
Williams withdrew. The destroyer rushed on into the romantic night.
"Must have spotted something on the surface," said some one.... A
radio operator appeared with a sheaf of telegrams. "Submarine seen
in latitude x and longitude y," "Derelict awash in position so and
so." "Gun fire heard off Cape Z at half past eleven"--it all had to
do with the channel zone to the south. The captain shoved the sheaf
into a pocket of his jacket.
Suddenly, through the dark, was heard a hard, thundering pound.
"By jingo, there's another," said somebody. "Nearby, too. Wonder
what's up?"
"Sounded more like a torpedo this time," said an invisible speaker in
a heavy, dogged voice. A stir of interest gripped the bridge; one
could see it in the shining eyes of the young helmsman. Two of the
sailors discussed the thing in whispers, fragments of conversation
might have been overheard.--"No, I should have said off the port
bow." "Isn't this about the place where the _Welsh Prince_ got
hers?" "Listen, didn't you hear something then?"
From somewhere in the distance came three long blasts, blasts of a
deep roaring whistle.
"Something's up, sure!"
The destroyer, in obedience to an order of the captain, took a sharp
turn to port, and turning, left far behind a curving, luminous trail
upon the sea. The wind was dying down. Again there were steps on
the way.
"Distress signal, sir," said the messenger from the radio room, a
shock-haired lad who spoke with the precise intonation of a Bostonian.
The captain stepped to the side of the binnacle, lowered the flimsy
sheet into the glow of the lamp, and summoned his officers. The
message read: "S.S. _Zemblan_, position x y z torpedoed, request
immediate assistance."
An instant later several things happened all at once. The "general
quarters" alarm bell which sends every man to his station began to
ring, full speed ahead was rung on in the engine room, and the
destroyer's course was altered once more. Men began to tumble up out
of the hatchways, figures rushed along the dark deck; there were
voices, questions, names. The alarm bell rang as monotonously as an
ordinary door bell whose switch has jammed. But soon one sound, the
roaring of the giant blowers sucking in air for the forced draught in
the boiler room, overtopped and crushed all other fragments of noise,
even as an advancing wave gathers into itself and destroys pools and
rills left along the beach by the tide. A roaring sound, a deep
windy hum. Gathering speed at once, the destroyer leaped ahead. And
even as violence overtook the lives and works of men, the calm upon
the sea became ironically more than ever assuring and serene.
[Illustration: To enjoy their leisure between watches these officers
of an American destroyer lash themselves into their seats. A
destroyer travelling at high speed in a heavy sea is like a bucking
broncho.]
"Good visibility," said somebody on the bridge. "She can't be more
than three miles away now. Hello, there's a rocket."
A faint bronzy golden trail, suddenly flowering into a drooping
cluster of darting white lights gleamed for a furtive instant among
the westering winter stars.
"I saw her, sir!" cried one of the lookouts.
"Where is she, O'Farrell?"
"Quite a bit to the left of the rocket, sir. She's settling by the
head."
The beautiful night closed in again. O'Farrell and the engineer
continued to peer out into the dark. Suddenly both of them cried
out, using exactly the same words at exactly the same time, "Torpedo
off the port bow, sir!"
The thing had become visible in an instant. It could be seen as a
rushing white streak in the dark water, and was coming towards the
destroyer with the speed of an express train, coming like a bullet
out of a gun.
The captain uttered a quick word of command. The wheel spun, the
roaring, trembling ship turned in the dark. A strange thing
happened. Just as the destroyer had cleared the danger line, the
torpedo, as if actuated by some malevolent intelligence, porpoised,
and actually turned again towards the vessel. The fate of the
destroyer lay on the knees of the gods. Those on the bridge
instinctively braced themselves for the shock. The affair seemed to
be taking a long time, a terribly long time. An instant later, the
contrivance rushed through the foaming wake of the destroyer only a
few yards astern, and continuing on, disappeared in the calm and
glittering dark. A floating red light suddenly appeared just ahead
and at the same moment all caught sight of the _Zemblan_.
She was hardly more than half a mile away. Somebody aboard her had
evidently just thrown over one of those life buoys with a
self-igniting torch attachment, and this buoy burned a steady orange
red just off that side on which the vessel was listing. The dark,
stricken, motionless bulk leaned over the little pool of orange
radiance gleaming in a fitful pool; round the floating torch one
could see vague figures working on a boat by the stern, and one
figure walking briskly down the deck to join them. There was not a
sign of any explosion, no breakage, no splintered wood. Some ships
are stricken, and go to their death in flames and eddying steam, go
to their death as a wounded soldier goes; other ships resemble a
strong man suddenly stricken by some incurable and mysterious
disease. The unhappy _Zemblan_ was of this latter class. There were
two boats on the water, splashing their oars with a calm regularity
of the college crews; there were inarticulate and lonely cries.
Away from the light, and but vaguely seen against the midnight sky,
lay a British patrol boat which had happened to be very close at
hand. And other boats were signalling--"_Zemblan_--am coming." The
sloop signalled the destroyer that she would look after the
survivors. Cries were no longer heard. Round and round the ship in
great sweeps went the destroyer, seeking a chance to be of use,--to
avenge. Other vessels arrived, talked by wireless and disappeared
before they had been but vaguely seen.
Just after two o'clock, the _Zemblan's_ stem rose in the air, and
hung suspended motionless. The tilted bulk might have been a rock
thrust suddenly out of the deep towards the starry sky. Then
suddenly, as if released from a pose, the stern plunged under,
plunged as if it were the last act of the vessel's conscious will.
The destroyer cruised about till dawn. A breeze sprang up with the
first glow of day, and scattered the little wreckage which had
floated silly-solemnly about. Nothing remained to tell of an act
more terrible than murder, more base than assassination.
XV
CAMOUFLAGE
In the annals of the Navy one may read of many a famous duel, and if
the code duello were in existence to-day, I feel certain that the
present would not be less fiery than the past. The subject which
stirs up all the discussion is camouflage. To ask at a crowded
table: "What do you think of camouflage," is to hurl a very apple of
discord down among your hosts. For there will be some who will stand
by camouflage to the last bright drop of blood, and strive to win you
to their mind with tales that do "amaze the very faculties of eyes
and ears." You will hear of ships melting into cloud, of vessels
apparently going full speed backward, of ships whose funnels have one
and all been rendered invisible. And now the mocker is sure to ask
the pro-camouflager in the most serious of tones if he ever saw the
ship disguised as a sunset which the Germans unhappily discovered on
a rainy day. The signal gun of the anti-camouflage squad now having
sounded, the assault begins with a demand of "What's your theory?"
The pro's reply something about breaking up spaces of colour, optical
illusions--"if you draw horizontal lines along a boat's hull, she
will appear longer; if you draw vertical or angular parallels, the
vessel will appear shorter." The anti's answer that such an
expedient might possibly, just possibly, deceive an idiot child for
exactly five and one-eighths seconds, as for deceiving a wily
Hun,--Good Night! "Do you mean to tell me," cries the devotee of
camouflage, growing angry, "that a ship painted one flat, dead colour
is less visible against the sea than one whose surface is broken up
into many colours?" "Yes, that's what I mean," retorts the anti.
"You know as well as I do that a thing that looks like Vesuvius in
eruption is ten times more easily seen than a boat painted a dull
neutral grey."