Personally, though they have been true friends to me, I loathe
destroyers, and all the raw, racking, ricochetting life that goes with
them--the smell of the wet "lammies" and damp wardroom cushions; the
galley-chimney smoking out the bridge; the obstacle-strewn deck; and
the pervading beastliness of oil, grit, and greasy iron. Even at
moorings they shiver and sidle like half-backed horses. At sea they
will neither rise up and fly clear like the hydroplanes, nor dive and
be done with it like the submarines, but imitate the vices of both. A
scientist of the lower deck describes them as: "Half switchback, half
water-chute, and Hell continuous." Their only merit, from a landsman's
point of view, is that they can crumple themselves up from stem to
bridge and (I have seen it) still get home. But one does not breathe
these compliments to their commanders. Other destroyers may be--they
will point them out to you--poisonous bags of tricks, but their own
command--never! Is she high-bowed? That is the only type which
over-rides the seas instead of smothering. Is she low? Low bows glide
through the water where those collier-nosed brutes smash it open. Is
she mucked up with submarine-catchers? They rather improve her trim.
No other ship has them. Have they been denied to her? Thank Heaven,
_we_ go to sea without a fish-curing plant on deck. Does she roll,
even for her class? She is drier than Dreadnoughts. Is she permanently
and infernally wet? Stiff; sir--stiff: the first requisite of a
gun-platform.
"SERVICE AS REQUISITE"
Thus the Cæsars and their fortunes put out to sea with their subs and
their sad-eyed engineers, and their long-suffering signallers--I do
not even know the technical name of the sin which causes a man to be
born a destroyer-signaller in this life--and the little yellow shells
stuck all about where they can be easiest reached. The rest of their
acts is written for the information of the proper authorities. It
reads like a page of Todhunter. But the masters of merchant-ships
could tell more of eyeless shapes, barely outlined on the foam of
their own arrest, who shout orders through the thick gloom alongside.
The strayed and anxious neutral knows them when their searchlights pin
him across the deep, or their syrens answer the last yelp of his as
steam goes out of his torpedoed boilers. They stand by to catch and
soothe him in his pyjamas at the gangway, collect his scattered
lifeboats, and see a warm drink into him before they turn to hunt the
slayer. The drifters, punching and reeling up and down their ten-mile
line of traps; the outer trawlers, drawing the very teeth of Death
with water-sodden fingers, are grateful for their low, guarded
signals; and when the Zeppelin's revealing star-shell cracks darkness
open above him, the answering crack of the invisible destroyers' guns
comforts the busy mine-layers. Big cruisers talk to them, too; and,
what is more, they talk back to the cruisers. Sometimes they draw
fire--pinkish spurts of light--a long way off, where Fritz is trying
to coax them over a mine-field he has just laid; or they steal on
Fritz in the midst of his job, and the horizon rings with barking,
which the inevitable neutral who saw it all reports as "a heavy fleet
action in the North Sea." The sea after dark can be as alive as the
woods of summer nights. Everything is exactly where you don't expect
it, and the shyest creatures are the farthest away from their holes.
Things boom overhead like bitterns, or scutter alongside like hares,
or arise dripping and hissing from below like otters. It is the
destroyer's business to find out what their business may be through
all the long night, and to help or hinder accordingly. Dawn sees them
pitch-poling insanely between head-seas, or hanging on to bridges that
sweep like scythes from one forlorn horizon to the other. A
homeward-bound submarine chooses this hour to rise, very
ostentatiously, and signals by hand to a lieutenant in command. (They
were the same term at Dartmouth, and same first ship.)
"What's he sayin'? Secure that gun, will you? 'Can't hear oneself
speak," The gun is a bit noisy on its mountings, but that isn't the
reason for the destroyer-lieutenant's short temper.
"'Says he's goin' down, sir," the signaller replies. What the
submarine had spelt out, and everybody knows it, was: "Cannot approve
of this extremely frightful weather. Am going to bye-bye."
"Well!" snaps the lieutenant to his signaller, "what are you grinning
at?" The submarine has hung on to ask if the destroyer will "kiss her
and whisper good-night." A breaking sea smacks her tower in the middle
of the insult. She closes like an oyster, but--just too late. _Habet!_
There must be a quarter of a ton of water somewhere down below, on its
way to her ticklish batteries.
"What a wag!" says the signaller, dreamily. "Well, 'e can't say 'e
didn't get 'is little kiss."
The lieutenant in command smiles. The sea is a beast, but a just
beast.