As I said, we will confine ourselves to something quite sane and
simple which does not involve more than half-a-dozen different
reports.
When the German fleet ran for home, on the night of May 31, it seems
to have scattered--"starred," I believe, is the word for the
evolution--in a general _sauve qui peut_, while the Devil, livelily
represented by our destroyers, took the hindmost. Our flotillas were
strung out far and wide on this job. One man compared it to hounds
hunting half a hundred separate foxes.
I take the adventures of several couples of destroyers who, on the
night of May 31, were nosing along somewhere towards the
Schleswig-Holstein coast, ready to chop any Hun-stuff coming back to
earth by that particular road. The leader of one line was Gehenna, and
the next two ships astern of her were Eblis and Shaitan, in the order
given. There were others, of course, but with the exception of one
Goblin they don't come violently into this tale. There had been a good
deal of promiscuous firing that evening, and actions were going on all
round. Towards midnight our destroyers were overtaken by several
three-and four-funnel German ships (cruisers they thought) hurrying
home. At this stage of the game anybody might have been
anybody--pursuer or pursued. The Germans took no chances, but switched
on their searchlights and opened fire on Gehenna. Her acting
sub-lieutenant reports: "A salvo hit us forward. I opened fire with
the after-guns. A shell then struck us in a steam-pipe, and I could
see nothing but steam. But both starboard torpedo-tubes were fired."
Eblis, Gehenna's next astern, at once fired a torpedo at the second
ship in the German line, a four-funnelled cruiser, and hit her between
the second funnel and the mainmast, when "she appeared to catch fire
fore and aft simultaneously, heeled right over to starboard, and
undoubtedly sank." Eblis loosed off a second torpedo and turned aside
to reload, firing at the same time to distract the enemy's attention
from Gehenna, who was now ablaze fore and aft. Gehenna's acting
sub-lieutenant (the only executive officer who survived) says that by
the time the steam from the broken pipe cleared he found Gehenna
stopped, nearly everybody amidships killed or wounded, the
cartridge-boxes round the guns exploding one after the other as the
fires took hold, and the enemy not to be seen. Three minutes or less
did all that damage. Eblis had nearly finished reloading when a shot
struck the davit that was swinging her last torpedo into the tube and
wounded all hands concerned. Thereupon she dropped torpedo work, fired
at an enemy searchlight which winked and went out, and was closing in
to help Gehenna when she found herself under the noses of a couple of
enemy cruisers. "The nearer one," he says, "altered course to ram me
apparently." The Senior Service writes in curiously lawyer-like
fashion, but there is no denying that they act quite directly. "I
therefore put my helm hard aport and the two ships met and rammed each
other, port bow to port bow." There could have been no time to think
and, for Eblis's commander on the bridge, none to gather information.
But he had observant subordinates, and he writes--and I would humbly
suggest that the words be made the ship's motto for evermore--he
writes, "Those aft noted" that the enemy cruiser had certain marks on
her funnel and certain arrangements of derricks on each side which,
quite apart from the evidence she left behind her, betrayed her class.
Eblis and she met. Says Eblis: "I consider I must have considerably
damaged this cruiser, as 20 feet of her side plating was left in my
foc'sle." Twenty feet of ragged rivet-slinging steel, razoring and
reaping about in the dark on a foc'sle that had collapsed like a
concertina! It was very fair plating too. There were side-scuttle
holes in it--what we passengers would call portholes. But it might
have been better, for Eblis reports sorrowfully, "by the thickness of
the coats of paint (duly given in 32nds of the inch) she would not
appear to have been a very new ship."