THE BATTLE OF THE MIST
Thorogood, Lieutenant of the Afternoon Watch, climbed the ladder to the
upper bridge as the bell struck the half-hour after noon. A blue
worsted muffler, gift and handiwork of an aunt on the outbreak of war,
enfolded his neck. He wore a pair of glasses in a case slung over one
shoulder and black leather gauntlet-gloves.
The Officer of the Forenoon Watch, known among his messmates as
Tweedledee, was focusing the range-finder on the ship ahead of them in
the line; he looked round as the new-comer appeared, and greeted him
with a grin.
"Hullo, James," he said. "Your afternoon watch? Well, here you are."
He made a comprehensive gesture embracing the vast Fleet that was
spread out over the waters as far as the eye could reach.
"Divisions in line ahead, columns disposed abeam, course S.E. Speed,
15 knots. Glass low and steady. The Cruisers are ahead there, beyond
the Destroyers," he nodded ahead. "But you can't see them because of
the mist. The Battle-cruisers are somewhere beyond them again, with
their Light Cruisers and Destroyers--about thirty miles to the
southward. The hands are at dinner and all is peace. She's keeping
station quite well now." The speaker moved to the range-finder again
and peered into it at the next ahead. "Right to a yard, James."
Thorogood nodded. "Thank you: I hope I'll succeed in keeping her
there. Any news?"
"News?" The other laughed. "What about?"
"Well," replied Thorogood, "the perishing Hun, let's say."
The Navigator, thoughtfully biting the end of a pencil, came out of the
chart-house with a note-book in his hand, in which he had been working
out the noon reckoning.
"Pilot," said the departing Officer of the Forenoon Watch, "James is
thirsting for news of the enemy."
"Optimist!" replied the Navigator composedly. "News, indeed! This
isn't Wolff's Agency, my lad. This is a Cook's tour of the North Sea."
He sniffed the damp, salt breeze. "Bracing air, change of scenery: no
undue excitement--sort of rest cure, in fact. And you come along
exhibiting a morbid craving for excitement."
"I know," said Thorogood meekly. "It's the effect of going to the
cinematograph. All the magistrates are talking about it. They say
Charlie Chaplin's got something to do with it. I suppose, though,
there's no objection to my asking what the disposition of our Light
Cruisers happens to be, is there? It's prompted more by a healthy
desire to improve my knowledge before I take over the afternoon watch
than anything else."
"They're out on the starboard quarter," replied the late Officer of the
Watch. "You can't see them because of this cursed mist, but they're
there."
"Strikes me this afternoon watch is going to be more of a faith cure
than a rest cure as the Pilot suggests," grumbled Thorogood.
"Battle-cruisers somewhere ahead, Cruisers invisible in the mist, Light
Cruisers----"
The report of a gun, followed almost instantly by a loud explosion,
came from far away on the port bow. A Destroyer that had altered
course was resuming her position in the Destroyer line on the outskirts
of the Fleet. A distant column of smoke and spray was slowly
dissolving into the North Sea haze.
At the report of the gun the three men raised their glasses to stare in
the direction of the sound. "Only one of the Huns' floating mines,"
said the Navigator. "She exploded it with her 8-pounder. Pretty shot."
"Well," said Tweedledee, "I can't stay here all day. Anything else you
want to know, James? What's for lunch? I'm devilish hungry."
"Boiled beef and carrots," replied Thorogood. "_Mit_ apple tart and
cream: the Messman can't be well. Pills says its squando-mania. No, I
don't think I want to know any more. I suppose the log's written up?"
"It is. Now for the boiled beef, and this afternoon Little Bright-eyes
is going to get his head down and have a nice sleep."
The speaker prepared to depart.
"Hold on," said the Navigator. "I'm coming with you. I've just got to
give the noon position to the Owner on the way."
They descended the ladder together, and left Thorogood alone on the
platform.
The Battle-fleet was steaming in parallel lines about a mile apart,
each Squadron in the wake of its Flagship. The Destroyers, strung out
on either flank of the Battle-fleet, were rolling steadily in the long,
smooth swell, leaving a smear of smoke in their trail. Far away in the
mist astern flickered a very bright light: the invisible Light Cruisers
must be there, reflected Thorogood, and presently from the Fleet
Flagship came a succession of answering blinks. The light stopped
flickering out of the mist.
The speed at which the Fleet was travelling sent the wind thrumming
through the halliards and funnel stays and past Thorogood's ears with a
little whistling noise; otherwise few sounds reached him at the
altitude at which he stood. On the signal-platform below, a number of
signalmen were grouped round the flag-lockers with the halliards in
their hands in instant readiness to hoist a signal. The Signal
Boatswain had steadied his glass against a semaphore, and was studying
something on the misty outskirts of the Fleet. The Quartermaster at
the wheel was watching the compass card with a silent intensity that
made his face look as if it had been carved in bronze. The
telegraph-men maintained a conversation that was pitched in a low, deep
note inaudible two yards away. It concerned the photograph of a mutual
lady acquaintance, and has no place in this narrative.
Thorogood moved to the rail and looked down at the familiar forecastle
and teeming upper-deck, thirty feet below. Seen thus from above, the
grey, sloping shields of the turrets, each with its great twin guns,
looked like gigantic mythical tortoises with two heads and
disproportionately long necks. It was the dinner hour, and men were
moving about, walking up and down, or sitting about in little groups
smoking. Some were playing cards in places sheltered from the wind and
spray; near the blacksmith's forge a man was stooping patiently over a
small black object: Thorogood raised his glasses for a moment and
recognised the ship's cat, reluctantly undergoing instruction in
jumping through the man's hands.
The cooks of the Messes were wending their way in procession to the
chutes at the ship's sides, carrying mess-kettles containing scraps and
slops from the mess-deck dinner. For an instant the Officer of the
Watch, looking down from that altitude and cut off from all sounds but
that of the wind, experienced a feeling of unfamiliar detachment from
the pulsating mass of metal beneath his feet. He had a vision of the
electric-lit interior of the great ship, deck beneath deck, with men
everywhere. Men rolled up in coats and oilskins, snatching
half-an-hour's sleep along the crowded gun-batteries, men writing
letters to sweethearts and wives, men laughing and quarrelling, or
singing low-toned, melancholy ditties as they mended worn garments:
hundreds and hundreds of reasoning human entities were crowded in those
steel-walled spaces, each with his boundless hopes and affections, his
separate fears and vices and conceptions of the Deity, and his small,
incommunicable distresses....
Beneath all that again, far below the surface of the grey North Sea,
were men, moving about purring turbines and dynamos and webs of
stupendous machinery, silently oiling, testing and adjusting a thousand
moving joints of metal. There were adjoining caverns lit by the glare
of furnaces that shone red on the glistening faces of men, silent
vaults and passages where the projectiles were ranged in sinister
array, and chilly spaces in which the electric light was reflected from
the burnished and oiled torpedoes that hung in readiness above the
submerged tubes.
Thorogood raised his eyes and stared out across the vast array of the
Battle-fleet. Obedient to the message flashed from the Flagship a few
minutes earlier, the Light Cruisers that had been invisible on the
quarter now emerged from behind the curtain of the mist and were
rapidly moving up to a new position. Presently the same mysterious,
soundless voice spoke again:
YOU ARE MAKING TOO MUCH SMOKE
blinked the glittering searchlight, and anon in the stokeholds of the
end ship of the lee line there was the stokehold equivalent for weeping
and wailing and the gnashing of teeth....
For a couple of hours the Fleet surged onwards in silence and unchanged
formation. The swift Light Cruisers had overtaken the advancing
Battle-fleet, and vanished like wraiths into the haze ahead. The
Captain and the Navigator had joined Thorogood on the bridge, and were
poring over the chart and talking in low voices. The Midshipman of the
Watch stood with eyes glued to the range-finder, turning his head at
intervals to report the distance of the next ahead to the Officer of
the Watch.
A messenger from the Coding Officer tumbled pell-mell up the ladder and
handed a piece of folded paper to the Captain, saluted, turned on his
heel and descended the ladder again. The Captain unfolded the signal
and read with knitted brows. Then he turned quickly to the chart again.
For a moment he was busy with dividers and parallel-rulers; when he
raised his head his eyes were alight with a curiously restrained
excitement.
"Rather interesting," he said, and passed the paper to the Navigator
who read it in turn and grinned like a schoolboy.
"They have probably caught a raiding party in the mist, sir," he said,
and bent over the chart.
Thorogood picked up the message and pursed his lips up in a short,
soundless whistle.
"It's too much to hope that their main fleet's out," he said.
"Their main fleet's sure to be in support somewhere," replied the
Captain. "It's a question whether they realise we're all down on top
of 'em, though, and nip for home before we catch them."
A second messenger flung himself, panting, up the ladder, and handed in
a second message.
"Intercepted wireless to Flag, sir."
The Captain read it and took a breath that was like a sigh of relief.
"At last!" he said.
The Navigator turned from the chart.
"_Der Tag_, sir?" he asked interrogatively with a smile.
The Captain nodded ahead at the haze curtaining all the horizon. "If
we catch 'em," he replied.
The signal platform was awhirl with bunting; the voice of the Chief
Yeoman repeating hoists rose above the stamp of feet and the flapping
of flags in the wind.
Thorogood turned to the Navigator. "Will you take on now?" he asked in
a low voice. "If the balloon's really going up this time I'd better
get along to my battery."
As he descended the ladder the upper-deck was ringing with bugle-calls,
and the turrets' crews were already swarming round their guns. From
the hatchways leading to the lower-deck came a great roar of cheering.
Men poured up on their way to their action stations in a laughing,
rejoicing throng. Mouldy Jakes, with the ever-faithful Midshipman of
his turret at his side, was hurrying to his beloved guns, and greeted
Thorogood as he passed with a sidelong jerk of the head and the first
whole-souled smile of enjoyment a mess-mate had ever surprised on his
face. Further aft the Captain of Marines was standing on the roof of
his slowly revolving turret:
"Buck up, James," he shouted merrily. "'Johnnie, get your gun, there's
a cat in the garden'--We're going to see Life in a minute, my lad!"
He was right, but they were also destined to see Death, holding red
carnival.
Thorogood waved his arm and shouted an inarticulate reply as he ran aft
to the hatchway leading to the cabin flat. Officers were rushing past
on their way to their posts, exchanging chaff and conjecture as they
went. Thorogood descended to the cabin flat, jerked back the curtain
of his cabin, and hurriedly entered the familiar apartment. Opening a
drawer he snatched up a gas-mask and a packet containing first-aid
appliances which he thrust into the pocket of his swimming waistcoat,
together with a flask and a small tin of compressed meat lozenges.
Once before, earlier in the war, he had fought for life clinging to a
floating spar. Then succour had come in a comparatively short time,
but the experience had not been without its lesson.
He made for the door again and then paused on the threshold
hesitatingly. "Might as well," he said, and turning back picked up a
small photograph in a folding morocco frame and thrust it
half-shamefacedly into an inside pocket.
As he emerged into the flat again he met Gerrard, the Assistant
Paymaster, struggling into a thick coat outside the door of his cabin.
"Hullo!" laughed the A.P. "Having a last look at the old home, James?"
Thorogood patted his pockets. "Just taking in provisions in case I
have to spend the week-end on a raft. What's your action station?"
"Fore-top," was the reply. "Taking notes of the action. Now, have I
got everything? Thermos flask--watch--note-book--glasses--right! _En
avant, mon brave!_"
Thorogood reached the 6-inch battery breathless, and found the guns'
crews busy tricing up their mess-tables overhead. The Gunner was
passing along the crowded deck ahead of him. He stopped opposite the
after gun:
"They're out, lads!" he said grimly. "Give 'em hell, this time. Clear
away and close up round your guns--smartly then, my hearties!"
From the other side of the deck came the voice of Tweedledee giving
orders to his battery, raised above the clatter of the ammunition
hoists, the thud of projectiles as they were placed in the rear of each
gun, the snap and clang of the breech as the guns were loaded....
Fire and wreckage parties stood in little groups along the main-deck,
and first-aid parties were gathered at the hatchways; two Midshipmen,
pale and bright-eyed with excitement, talked in low voices by the
foremost gun: gradually a tense hush closed down upon the main deck;
the crews stood silent round their guns, waiting in their steel-walled
casemates for the signal that would galvanise them into death-dealing
activity against the invisible foe.
Ultimate victory no man doubted: death might sweep, swift and
shattering, along these electric-lit enclosed spaces where they stood
waiting; the great ship was being driven head-long by unseen forces
towards an unseen foe. But of that foe, none of the hundreds of men
between decks save the straining gunlayers with their eyes at the
sighting-telescopes would ever catch a single glimpse.
The silence was riven by a roaring concussion that seemed to shake the
framework of the ship. The great turret guns on the upper deck had
opened fire with a salvo, and, as if released by the explosion, a burst
of frantic cheering leaped from every throat and echoed and
reverberated along the decks. Somewhere in the outside world of mist
and sea, under the grey Northern sky, the Battle-Fleet action had begun.
* * * * *
The fore-top was a semi-circular eyrie, roofed and walled with steel,
that projected from the fore topmast some distance above the giant
tripod. It was reached by iron rungs let into the mast, and here
Gerrard, with the din of bugles and the cheering still ringing in his
ears, joined the assembled officers and men whose station it was in
action.
From that dizzy elevation it was possible to take in the disposition of
the vast Fleet at a single glance. It was like looking down on model
ships spread out over a grey carpet preparatory to a children's game.
A white flicker of foam at each blunt ram and the wind singing past the
hooded top alone gave any indication of the speed at which the ships
were advancing. It was an immense monochrome of grey. Grey ships with
the White Ensign flying free on each: grey sea flecked here and there
by the diverging bow-waves breaking as they met: a grey sky along which
the smoke trailed sullenly and gathered in a dense, low-lying cloud
that mingled with the haze astern.
The Lieutenant in the top drew Gerrard to his side. "Put your head
down here," he said, "out of the wind ... can you hear?" There was a
queer ring of exultation in his voice. "Guns!"
Gerrard bent down and strained all his faculties to listen. For a
moment he heard nothing but the hum of the wind and the vibration of
the engines transmitted by the mast. Then, faint and intermittent,
like the far-off grumble of a gathering thunderstorm, his ear caught a
sound that sent all his pulses hammering.
"Thank God I've lived to hear that noise!" muttered the Lieutenant. He
straightened up, staring ahead through his glasses in the direction of
the invisible fight.
For a while no one spoke. The tense minutes dragged by as the sounds
of firing grew momentarily more distinct. The uncertain outline of the
near horizon was punctuated by vivid flashes of flame from the guns of
the approaching enemy. They were still hidden by the mist and
apparently unconscious of the Battle-Fleet bearing down upon them like
some vast, implacable instrument of doom. The target of their guns
suddenly became visible as the Battle-cruisers appeared on the
starboard bow, moving rapidly across the limit of vision like a line of
grey phantoms spitting fire and destruction as they went. Misty
columns of foam that leaped up from the water all about them showed
that they were under heavy fire.
The Battle-Fleet was deploying into Line of Battle, Squadron forming up
astern of Squadron in a single line of mailed monsters extending far
into the haze that was momentarily closing in upon them. The curtain
ahead was again pierced by a retreating force of Cruisers beaten back
on the protection of the Battle-Fleet and ringed by leaping waterspouts
as the enemy's salvos pursued them.
As yet the enemy were invisible, but when the last ship swung into
deployment the mist cleared for a moment and disclosed them amid a
cloud of smoke and the furious flashes of guns. The moment had come,
and all along the extended British battle-line the turret guns opened
fire with a roar of angry sound that seemed to split the grey vault of
heaven. As if to mock them in that supreme instant the mist swirled
across again and hid the German Fleet wheeling round in panic flight.
The gases belched from the muzzles of the guns, together with the smoke
of hundreds of funnels caught and held by the encircling mist, reeled
to and fro across the spouting water and mingled with the grey clouds
from bursting shell. Through it all the two Fleets, the pursuing and
the pursued, grappled in blindfold headlong fury.
Thorogood's battery was on the disengaged side of the ship during the
earlier phases of the action. Across the deck they heard the guns of
Tweedledee's battery open fire with a roar, and then the cheering of
the crews, mingled with the cordite fumes, was drowned by an
ear-splitting detonation in the confined spaces of the mess deck,
followed by a blinding flash of light.
Tweedledee was flung from where he was standing to pitch brokenly at
the foot of the hatchway, like a rag doll flung down by a child in a
passion. He lay outstretched, face downwards, with his head resting on
his forearm as if asleep. Most of the lights had been extinguished by
the explosion, but a pile of cartridges in the rear of one of the guns
had caught fire and burned fiercely, illuminating everything with a
yellow glare.
Lettigne, Midshipman of the battery, was untouched; deafened and
deathly sick he took command of the remaining guns. He, who ten
seconds before had never even seen death, was slithering about dimly
lit decks, slippery with what he dared not look at, encouraging and
steadying the crews, and helping to extinguish the burning cordite. In
darkened corners, where they had been thrown by the explosion, men were
groaning and dying....
That shell had been one of several that had struck the ship
simultaneously. Mouldy Jakes opened his eyes to see a streak of light
showing through a jagged rip in a bulkhead. The light was red and hurt
his eyes: he passed his hand across his face, and it was wet with a
warm stickiness. His vision cleared, however, and for a few moments he
studied the drops of water that were dripping from the gash in the
plating. "Crying!" he said stupidly. The shells that pitched short
had deluged the fore-part of the ship with water, and it was still
dripping into the interior of the turret. Mouldy Jakes raised his
head, and a yard or two away saw Morton. The breech of one of the guns
was open, and Morton was lying limply over the huge breech-block. The
machinery was smashed and twisted, and mixed up with it were dead men
and bits of men....
A little while later the Fleet Surgeon, splashed with red to the
elbows, glanced up from his work in the fore-distributing station and
saw a strange figure descending the hatchway. It was Mouldy Jakes: his
scalp was torn so that a red triangular patch hung rakishly over one
eye. Flung over his shoulder was the limp form of an unconscious
Midshipman. For a moment he stood swaying, steadying himself with
outstretched hand against the rail of the ladder.
"Thought I'd better bring him along," he gasped. "Turret's knocked to
hell.... He's still alive, but he's broken all to little bits inside
... I can feel him... Morton, snottie of my turret ..."
Sickberth Stewards relieved him of his burden, and Mouldy Jakes sat
down on the bottom rung of the ladder and began to whimper like a
distraught child. "It's my hand..." he said plaintively, and extended
a trembling, shattered palm. "I've only just noticed it."
With his eye glued to the periscope of his turret the India-rubber Man
was fidgeting and swearing softly under his breath at the exasperating
treachery of the fog. The great guns under his control roared at
intervals, but before the effect of the shell-burst could be observed
the enemy would be swallowed from sight. Once, at the commencement of
the action, he thought of Betty; he thought of her tenderly and
reverently, and then put her out of his mind....
Lanes of unexpected visibility opened while an eye-lid winked, and
disclosed a score of desperate fights passing and reappearing like
scenes upon a screen. A German Battleship, near and quite distinct,
was in sight for a moment, listing slowly over with her guns pointing
upwards like the fingers of a distraught hand, and as she sank the mist
closed down again as it were a merciful curtain drawn to hide a horror.
An enemy Cruiser dropped down the engaged side of the line like an
exhausted participator in a Bacchanal of Furies. Her sides were riven
and gaping, with a red glare showing through the rents. Her decks were
a ruined shambles of blackened, twisted metal, but she still spat
defiance from a solitary gun, and sank firing as the fight swept past.
Hither and thither rolled the fog, blotting out the enemy at one
moment, at another disclosing swift and awful cataclysms. A British
Cruiser, dodging and zigzagging through a tempest of shells, blew up.
She changed on the instant into a column of black smoke and wreckage
that leaped up into the outraged sky; it trembled there like a dark
monument to the futile hate of man for his brother man and slowly
dissolved into the mist. A German Destroyer attack crumpled up in the
blast of the 6-inch batteries of the British Fleet, and the British
Destroyers dashed to meet their crippled onslaught as vultures might
swoop on blinded wolves. They fought at point-blank range, asking no
quarter, expecting none; they fought over decks ravaged by shrapnel and
piled with dead. The sea was thick with floating corpses and shattered
wreckage, and darkened with patches of oil that marked the grave of a
rammed Submarine or sunken Destroyer. Maimed and bleeding men dragged
themselves on to rafts and cheered their comrades as they left them to
their death.
Through that witches' cauldron of fog and shell-smoke the British
Battle-Fleet groped for its elusive foe. One minute of perfect
visibility, one little minute of clear range beyond the fog-masked
sights, was all they asked to deal the death-blow that would end the
fight--men prayed God for it and died with the prayer in their teeth.
But the minute never came. The firing died away down the line; the
dumb guns moved blindly towards the shifting sounds of strife like
monsters mouthing for the prey that was denied them, but the fog held
and the merciful dusk closed down and covered the flight of the
stricken German Fleet for the shelter of its protecting mine-fields.
It was not until night fell that the British Destroyers began their
savage work in earnest. Flotilla after flotilla was detached from the
Fleet and swallowed by the short summer night, moving swiftly and
relentlessly to their appointed tasks like black panthers on the trail.
Cut off from their base by the British Fleet the scattered German
squadrons dodged and doubled through the darkness, striving to elude
the cordon drawn across their path. They can be pictured as towering
black shadows rushing headlong through the night, with the wounded
groaning between their wreckage-strewn decks; and on each bridge, high
above them in the windy darkness, men talked in guttural
mono-syllables, peering through high-power glasses for the menace that
stalked them.... On the trigger of every gun there would be a
twitching finger, and all the while the blackness round them would be
pierced and rent by distant spurts of flame....
The wind and sea had risen, and over an area of several hundred square
miles of stormy sea swept the Terror by Night. Bursting star-shell and
questioning searchlight fought with the darkness, betraying to the guns
the sinister black hulls driving through clouds of silver spray, the
loaded tubes and streaming decks, the oilskin-clad figures on each
bridge forcing the attack home against the devastating blast of the
shrapnel. Death was abroad, berserk and blindfold. A fleeing German
Cruiser fell among a flotilla of Destroyers and altered her helm, with
every gun and searchlight blazing, to ram the leading boat. The
Destroyer had time to alter course sufficiently to bring the two ships
bow to bow before the impact came. Then there was a grinding crash:
forecastle, bridge and foremost gun a pile of wreckage and struggling
figures. The blast of the German guns swept the funnels, boats, cowls
and men away as a gale blows dead leaves before it. Then the Cruiser
swung clear and vanished into the darkness, pursued by the remainder of
the Flotilla, and leaving the Destroyer reeling among the waves like a
man that has been struck in the face with a knuckle-duster by a runaway
thief. In the direction where the Cruiser had disappeared five minutes
later a column of flame leaped skyward, and the Flotilla, vengeance
accomplished, swung off through the darkness in search of a fresh
quarry.
All night long the disabled Destroyer rolled helplessly in the trough
of the sea. The dawn came slowly across the sky, as if apprehensive of
what it might behold on the face of the troubled waters; in the growing
light the survivors of the Destroyer's crew saw a crippled German
Cruiser trailing south at slow speed. Only one gun remained in action
onboard the Destroyer, and round that gathered the bandaged remnant of
what had once been a ship's company. They shook hands grimly among
themselves and spat and girded their loins for their last fight.
The German Cruiser turned slowly over and sank while they trained the
gun....
A dismasted Destroyer, with riddled funnels and a foot of water
swilling across the floor plates in the engine-room, bore down upon
them about noon and took her crippled sister in tow. They passed
slowly away to the westward, leaving the circle of grey, tumbling sea
to the floating wreckage of a hundred fights and the thin keening of
the gulls.
The afternoon wore on: five drenched, haggard men were laboriously
propelling a life-saving raft by means of paddles in the direction of
the English coast that lay some hundred odd miles to the west. The
waves washed over their numbed bodies, and imparted an almost lifelike
air of animation to the corpse of a companion that lay between them,
staring at the sullen sky.
Suddenly one of the paddlers stopped and pointed ahead. A boat manned
by four men appeared on the crest of a wave and slid down a grey-back
towards them. The oarsmen were rowing with slow strokes, and
eventually the two craft passed each other within hailing distance.
The men on the raft stared hard.
"'Uns!" said one. "Bloody 'Uns.... Strictly speakin', we did ought to
fight 'em.... Best look t'other way, lads!"
His companions followed his example and continued their futile
mechanical paddling with averted heads.
The bow-oar of the German boat, who had a blood-stained bandage round
his head, also stared.
"_Engländer!_" he said. "_Verdammte Schweine!_" and added, "_Fünf!_
..." whereupon he and his companions also averted their heads, because
they were four.
They passed each other thus. The waves that washed over the raft
rolled the dead man's head to and fro, as if he found the situation
rather preposterous.