E2 was a wet, strained, and uncomfortable boat for the rest of her
cruise. She sank steamers, burned dhows; was worried by torpedo-boats
and hunted by Hun planes; hit bottom freely and frequently; silenced
forts that fired at her from lonely beaches; warned villages who might
have joined in the game that they had better keep to farming; shelled
railway lines and stations; would have shelled a pier, but found there
was a hospital built at one end of it, "so could not bombard"; came
upon dhows crowded with "female refugees" which she "allowed to
proceed," and was presented with fowls in return; but through it all
her chief preoccupation was that racked and strained gun and mounting.
When there was nothing else doing she reports sourly that she "worked
on gun." As a philosopher of the lower deck put it: "'Tisn't what you
blanky _do_ that matters, it's what you blanky _have_ to do." In other
words, worry, not work, kills.
E2's gun did its best to knock the heart out of them all. She had to
shift the wretched thing twice; once because the bolts that held it
down were smashed (the wire hawser must have pretty well pulled it off
its seat), and again because the hull beneath it leaked on pressure.
She went down to make sure of it. But she drilled and tapped and
adjusted, till in a short time the gun worked again and killed
steamers as it should. Meanwhile, the whole boat leaked. All the
plates under the old gun-position forward leaked; she leaked aft
through damaged hydroplane guards, and on her way home they had to
keep the water down by hand pumps while she was diving through the
nets. Where she did not leak outside she leaked internally, tank
leaking into tank, so that the petrol got into the main fresh-water
supply and the men had to be put on allowance. The last pint was
served out when she was in the narrowest part of the Narrows, a place
where one's mouth may well go dry of a sudden.
Here for the moment the records end. I have been at some pains not to
pick and choose among them. So far from doctoring or heightening any
of the incidents, I have rather understated them; but I hope I have
made it clear that through all the haste and fury of these multiplied
actions, when life and death and destruction turned on the twitch of a
finger, not one life of any non-combatant was wittingly taken. They
were carefully picked up or picked out, taken below, transferred to
boats, and despatched or personally conducted in the intervals of
business to the safe, unexploding beach. Sometimes they part from
their chaperones "with many expressions of good will," at others they
seem greatly relieved and rather surprised at not being knocked on the
head after the custom of their Allies. But the boats with a hundred
things on their minds no more take credit for their humanity than
their commanders explain the feats for which they won their respective
decorations.