THE “MAURETANIA”
The morning after dawned bleak, with an easterly sea running wet, and
convulsive wind.
When the night began to lift a little at five bells in the morning
watch, the _Mauretania_ was in longitude 10° 37′, and, in the centre a
hall all vault and water, was vaulting her eastward way like a foxhound
in the teeth of the swell—making haste! as when the cockchafer is
conscious of the hawk not far.
She was deeply laden—with wheat; for twelve days previously, when
skies had darkened, she had been taken by Government from bearing
globe-trotters, and despatched to Canada for food-stuffs—she, like
her _Lusitania_ sister, having been built by Government subvention to
Government specification; and at the same time the _Inflexible_ group
of cruisers, too, had been laid down, with the same contract speed—25
knots: the idea being that, in war, the two globe-trotters, with their
cargo-carrying dead-weight of 80,000 tons, convoyed by the cruisers,
might maintain between them a food-supply of some 20,000 tons a week.
Hence she ran there pressed, pregnant, a rat in a tract of cats, three
of her four black-and-red funnels puffing breath, her crowd of cowls
showing steam, spray reaching to that four-storied street of top-hamper
that ran and sprang, three lines of lights still twinkling along her
length, like watchlights within some mansion of romance, which show
strange and garish in the glare of day. And the winds of that daybreak
sang weird snatches of sea-songs within her funnels’ throats, like
banshee-dirges and birds of boding, moaning omens.
For the sea is deep, and the 70,000 haughty horses that hauled her had
still far to snort and haul.
But at six minutes to seven by the ship’s chronometers she understood
that she was not alone, and felt safer.
Her captain, raw-eyed for lack of sleep, was drinking black coffee
among the trees of the verandah-café, when a message from the
wireless-room came in—bidding him report his whereabouts and course
to the _Inflexible_; and ten minutes later came another: “Prick your
course three points to port.”
The captain sprang up with a light in his eyes. “Which means hawks
about,” he said to his first officer: “the British must have a
destroyer or something out scouting.”
“And hawks about,” answered the other, “means hawks sent out
beforehand—the treacherous wretches: for war doesn’t seem to have been
declared till yesterday.”
They spoke, as it were, secretly, hoarsely, like conspirators.
“Prick her off,” said Captain Arthur, “and try her with another
half-knot: let her rip.”
And she went ripping, until the crow’s-nest was suddenly telephoning,
an agitated watchkeeper was pointing toward the clouds, and a surgeon
who had been idly eyeing the winds winnowing within his beard at the
lounge-door, glanced at the sky, and pitched with tidings toward the
bridge, employing his pipe as a pointer.
Up there in the air was a monoplane flying north-west, the size of a
swallow; and within two minutes her engine’s singing was with them.
“They’ve got me,” muttered the captain glass-gazing: “it’s a fight.”
“Or she may be British,” suggested the surgeon.
“British to the north,” the captain said, “she from the south. Be ready
for some red to-day.”
No voice there quivered; only, the eyes of the little knot of men spat
sparks of fire.
The monoplane was now nearly overhead, fifteen hundred feet up; but
before reaching the ship she swiftly wheeled on the winds, and was
winging south once more.
At the same time the surgeon exclaimed: “Look! another!”—pointing out
northward a speck greyer than the grey air; and the captain, having
fixed the glass on it, said, “Yes, a biplane—British—out scouting.”
But as he spoke the speck vanished.
For she had sighted the German and turned tail, as the German had
sighted her and turned tail.
But this movement of mutual horror was only momentary: for the biplane
had to stop the reconnaissance of the _Mauretania’s_ whereabouts from
being carried to the Germans; and the monoplane had to stop the fact of
that reconnaissance from being carried to the British; so both wheeled
to meet, climbing for life, the monoplane flying right overhead, so
that the _Mauretania_ group could clearly hear the roar of her flurry
droning, and see the little hydro-boots under her chassis by which she
had been launched down bow-rails from her parent-ship.
Ten seconds later the biplane, too, flew anew into sight, and anew
vanished skywards; and then the monoplane vanished skywards, trying
to outclimb her climbing adversary, while the men of the _Mauretania_
pored sternward upward at nothing, their nerves in a hell of
expectation of that murder in heaven, they murmuring words which were
unheard, but which served the purpose of concealing their wish to
shriek.
And before any more was seen of the planes, the added distraction of
“Ship Ahoy!” was upon them; and before they could look to see the
sighted ship, once more the planes were upon them—not behind, but
before now—hardly a league off, it seemed, on the starboard beam: for
thither they had now dashed their anguished wings, ranging the air in a
rage of flights, like fighting angels that fill space with wings: and
though nothing could be observed of them, a sound within the clouds was
distinctly heard—the pop of a pod bursting, a bomb; then the patter
of a packet of pins spilling somewhere; then six ticks, and now the
clouds parted with a crowd of particles—_débris_ and instruments
dribbling—and racing after to catch them two men raining, two men in
caps and padded wrappings, who passionately span in partnership or
competition, as at the starting-call of One, Two—Away! and slightly
behind the men a biplane diving, divided into two bits.
It seemed an age ere those men reached the sea, so that a shriek rent
the outraged breast—an age of over thirty-seven seconds. Ahead of the
_Mauretania_ when they set out earthward, they were somewhat astern
when, neck-and-neck, like tumblers racing, they span with a passion
which had waxed to the rapture of catherine-wheels into the splash that
they trashed up in vanishing.
Almost at the same moment the monoplane was again heard buzzing, a
blood-guilty thing, southward to regain her parent-ship.
That parent-ship already lay a little oblong of black, blocking the
continuity of the southern horizon; and four cables behind her stood
another oblong of black, stuck in the sea, heading north-eastward.
The _Mauretania_ men were like rats in a trap. In vain the glasses
investigated the north for any sign of the English, though far
south-westward there stood a third oblong of black—no one knew of what
flag.
“God, I’ll run for it,” Captain Arthur muttered to himself; and an
officer was flying from him with the order to bolt northward, when
he got the wireless: “Do not try flight, if sighted: the enemy are
the _Von der Tann_ and _Scharnhorst_”—on which the captain threw
up his hands, for the _Von der Tann_ had three knots more than the
_Mauretania_—was at one time the fleetest capital-ship on the sea.
And she grew rapidly big, swaggering like a bully, rolling through four
degrees, her starboard beam beaten by swell which she wedged like flesh
in her heavy haste, anon giving a view of all her eight deck-guns, like
eight notes-of-exclamation, waiting to exclaim, and dot themselves.
And she came in her colours—just saluted—with extra colours on stays
and masts, which the keen east wind was spitting on and whipping into
kettle-drums—kettle-drums which accompanied strains of band-music
floating from her over the ocean.
At her common-code signal to slacken speed to forty-two revolutions,
a redness of angry arrogance sprang to the _Mauretania_ captain’s
face.... “Foreigners on the sea giving orders....”
But there was no way out. Still no English on the sea—though that third
warship from the south-west had now grown so much bigger astern, that
the glasses made her out to be Yankee; and the first officer made the
remark: “Looks to me like the _Arkansas_.”
At the same time the _Mauretania’s_ speed died away to 6 knots; the
two Germans, too, slowed down—one two miles south, the other hardly a
thousand yards off; and now clouds of steam were wheeling about the sea
with the winds; a smell of heat reeked from the curbed turbines; and at
the engines’ venom of hissing the ships shivered.
So for some time they forged ahead, while the _Von der Tann_ signalled
to the _Scharnhorst_; the _Scharnhorst_ sent out a pinnace full of men
to the _Von der Tann_; and the _Von der Tann_, making preparations to
send a prize-crew to the _Mauretania_, lowered a launch.
On the _Mauretania_, meantime, there was so much agitation and
preoccupation with the enemy, that little heed had been paid to the
ship in the rear; till now a sound screaming out of a stream of steam
reached the ear—a sound of band-music—“Yankee Doodle Doo” on the breeze.
And all at once the _Arkansas_, a rear-admiral’s flag at her foremast,
was at the _Mauretania’s_ quarter, fifty yards off her, between her and
the _Von der Tann_, keeping the same speed.
Her flag-captain, a lank Yankee, could be seen with three
staff-officers in frock-coats perambulating his bridge with a brisk
and devil-may-care fling; then was seen looking down at a school
blackboard which some marines held up for him to see; then a laying of
heads together; and then the blackboard was being held up aport for
the _Mauretania’s_ glasses to read what was chalked large on it: “+Do A
Bolt+.”
And now was Captain Arthur a distracted man, he being under British
orders not to fly, and no time to wireless—Germans just coming.
After ten different impulses, he flew on an eleventh impulse to his
communications to order Full Ahead.
And as she spurted to the spur, the _Arkansas_, too, all her boilers
lighted up, her engines running full even while her screws had run slow
under a transformer, ordered Full Ahead.
The two were off together about N.E. by E., the battleship getting left
a little, with her only 20 knots, but bow-butting like a bounding bull,
ramming her monstrous mass at the rollers, crushing the ocean to a rush
of rubbish-stuff round her—streaming creams—like crushers crushing
rubble.
The two Germans, meanwhile, kept their crawl, lost in astonishment
at this sudden outcome, at their wits’ end: for to try to stop the
_Mauretania_ with a twelve-pounder or so meant a risk of striking
the _Arkansas_—an _Arkansas_ obviously battle-ready, her control and
gun-houses manned, torpedo-nets handy—the German combined weight being
only three thousand tons greater than her monstrous twenty-six.
As to what the _Arkansas_ was doing there, all alone, and with what
motive—this was a disturbing question for the Germans.
So it was only when the _Arkansas_ was quite a mile away that the _Von
der Tann_ at last signalled her; and something like the following
conversation took place between the Chief-signalmen of the two ships:
_The Von der Tann_: We are not combatants?
_The Arkansas_: Surely not.
_The Von der Tann_: Then, get out of the way!
_The Arkansas_: All right. But what’s your hurry?
_The Von der Tann_: I am about to fire!
_The Arkansas_: Try not to strike me.
A wild silence of five minutes followed this thing—the Germans not
giving chase, since they did not wish to separate, and since the
_Scharnhorst_ had not speed to steam with the _Mauretania_. So the
_Scharnhorst_, at a distance of three miles, beautifully aimed a
3·4-inch shell from her superstructure at the _Mauretania’s_ screws:
and the boom of a voice moved over the waters.
By a tragic chance the shell dropped upon the centre of the _Arkansas_
fore-turret, broke, blew away her aeroplane rails, dented the
trellis-work of her foremast, and lay dead the sons of four American
mothers.
Whereupon hell and frenzy broke up through the ocean that morning,
and Germany and America were at war: for it is not good to play with
volcanoes; but the war-fever and let’s-all-be-jolly was all on the
breeze and in the brain like a brandy and a wedding-breakfast, and
they wanted yankee-doodle, and they got it, and they hankered after
thunder, and were thunder-struck. In that second the _Arkansas_ left
the _Mauretania_ to take care of herself, knocked forty revolutions off
her screws, and the _Mauretania_ trembled to her bottom, and her men
were boxed doddering and staring by the back-blast and brawl of the
broadside that the _Arkansas_ vomited upon the _Von der Tann_.
War, then: and let the best-padded ear see afterwards what the
ear-specialist can do.
They were at pretty close quarters to begin a fight!—not three miles,
though the mist that the wind had in it made that far enough for
effective smashing.
Anyway, the _Von der Tann_ instantly answered with five of her
5·9-inch, and five of her eight 11-inch—one of these eight having been
struck on the chase. Some moments more, and the _Scharnhorst_ was in
it; and the three British who just then climbed above the north-east
horizon, and were struck in the ear by blustering air-waves, questioned
Heaven as to who was fighting whom.
However, a _Mauretania_ dope soon told them; and, concluding that the
_Arkansas_ had left her battle-squadron with the objective of seeing
the _Mauretania_ through, agile Jack dashed off his jacket, and was in
it.
They were the _Inflexible_, the _Invincible_, and a destroyer, the
_Swift_—say 36,000 tons: and, after steaming south three minutes so as
to clear the _Arkansas’_ bows, the _Inflexible_ got six twelve-inchers
trained upon the _Scharnhorst_, and from the horizon’s edge parted with
5100 lb. of blasting bad language in idiomatic Saxon.
At the same time the _Invincible_ engaged the _Von der Tann_, who,
having her broadside to the American, was raked fore-and-aft by the
British shells; and though not one quarter from that distance touched
her, her control platform with all its contents of gunnery-officer,
switchboard and crew flew like rooks, its mast collapsed, and her two
forward primary-guns torqued like candles at a fire.
However, most German ships (very wisely) had a second control amidships
between decks, where a series of tubes with total-reflection prisms
formed images on reflectors—like the periscopes of submarines—enabling
the ship’s fighter to see round the sea. And the _Von der Tann’s_
answer to the _Invincible_ was in broken English—broken English
armour above-belt, where two shells of her starboard _échelon_
struck—long-capped shells of low trajectory that flew straight like a
cuff, their fuses arranged to explode after penetration; and these,
piercing three armour-inches and some eight feet of coal in the upper
portion of her bunkers, bounded exultantly into the redoubt, where,
in the space between the main and protective decks, the pair of them
danced the serpentine-dance in purple amid a clatter like clapping and
applause of diabolic horse-laughter bawling, down among turbines and
furnaces.
The fore-bulkhead of the _Scharnhorst_, meantime, was full of
sea-water, she listed to starboard, and the _Mauretania_, who had
made paces like a scared hen to tuck her head below the horizon, was
standing motionless, steadily trembling like a mare among cobras, her
rudder and two starboard screws broken off her.
And every second the combat was closing up: for the hand that touched
the range-finder shook, gun-layers stood astonished and stung with
vapours, so that big guns that should have been firing two rounds a
minute were firing only one in three, and hits were leagues below all
target-practice averages.
To this result the mistiness and the ships’ rolling contributed; and,
in the case of the _Arkansas_, a swaying of her trellis-masts in her
rocking deranged the range-finding, while, in the case of the Germans,
the large number of their anti-mosquito guns, which they were using as
primary-armament guns, thickened the air with heated vapours, which
refracted the sunlight, with the effect of bewildering the sightings.
So they closed: for the horseflesh-eaters, having mettle from their
diet, would not strike their colours; and flight from the first had
been impossible for them owing to the _Scharnhorst’s_ want of speed: so
they closed and closed: six thunderclouds of smoke: the _Invincible_ a
creeping cloud; the _Swift_ a sweeping; the Germans to perish dearly;
the rest to have it finished quickly and sit and think of it.
And they were all in this position,
.Mau
.Ark .Invin
.Swi
.Von
.Sch .Inflex
the _Arkansas_ hardly any longer a mile from the _Scharnhorst_, her
bow now to the west, when all that war paused in awe at a thing
that happened: for the great battleship was in the very act of
overwhelming the wreck of the _Scharnhorst_ with the sharp wrath of
all a broadside,—jabbering quick-firers winking, and the bale of her
bellowing barbettes—when a _Scharnhorst_ 8·2-inch entered her well
under the water-line for’ard, and apparently burst in a magazine.
Whereupon a flame seems to have run through and through her; and she
set to stuttering such tons of thundering, like Etna rhetoric, as no
tongue can tell: took the ocean and shook it, as dreader and still
dreader she roared and roared in that redness of her death-throes,
while what was left of her 800 men were seen through a volcano of
reek leaping from her in every direction like sprats spattering from
a trap-net; then, like an old lion which, after roaring, gruffly guns
from his guts a humph of venom, and again a humph, and a humph, and
is done, and grunts, his eruption hushed, his say said; or like a
pump which, after pouring, chucks a gush, and a gush, and a gush, and
is done, and grunts, its eruption hushed; so the _Arkansas_, after
thundering, thumped a humph, and a humph, and a humph from her drum
to the sun, and was done, her death-anthem chanted, her death-passion
passioned, and was a skeleton before her burial, leaving over the sea a
mausoleum of smoke.
She had within her 290 tons of big-gun projectiles alone: so far over
the ocean her tragedy darkened the day with the shadows of night, and
many men on the _Scharnhorst_ were laid low under the sharp shower of
the lavas which she spouted.
Some moments more and a roller rolled foaming over the mastless hull of
the _Scharnhorst_; and she rose no more.
At the same moment the _Von der Tann_, sinking fast, started sharply
north-eastward to put a sure hole in the _Mauretania_ while she
could—heedless of the _Swift_, which was now tearing near to sting
and fly, pouring as she tore a rain of twenty-eight 4-inch shells a
minute—heedless of the _Inflexible_, which also was speeding near to
launch a torpedo—for little heed was left in any head on that sea, each
ship now a shrieking lazaretto: and, as the _Von der Tann_, now within
two thousand yards, sent out a needle at the stationary _Mauretania_,
the _Swift_ was ready to send needles from her two tubes, and the
_Inflexible_ to send.
But just then tragedy overwhelmed the _Swift_: for a shell from the
_Invincible_, still creeping well to eastward—a 12-inch shell shot
out of rent rifling—fell far short of the _Von der Tann_ into the
engine-room of the _Swift_, which stopped.
Upon which that low length of the _Inflexible_, with its tripod-masts
amidships, and topmasts like bayonets, went ranging on ahead of the
_Swift_, not far from her; and when the _Swift’s_ torpedo-crews had
recovered their feet, and two 18-inch needles flew out of her under
water at fifty miles an hour, the one to port appears to have been led
astray into the _Inflexible’s_ wake.
This hulled her; crumpled her screws; ruined her rudder; and she,
rudderless, steered askew by her port wing-screw, went her own way,
rushing perniciously for the _Von der Tann_, which with shattered
steering-gear was rushing her way, both bellowing at those terribly
close quarters with all their cannon still battle-worthy, billows
already breaking over the _Inflexible’s_ poop, over the _Von der
Tann’s_ beam.
And as they got near, entangled in some magnet-plight, as the bicycle
of the beginner heads straight for the lamp-post, and can’t be drawn
off, they were shut from each other by a column of water, which gushed
with a dogged gong-sound two hundred feet aloft from under the _Von der
Tann_—a torpedo from the _Swift_.
When this dropped back broad-showering, with it dropped showering a
rain of wreckage upon the _Inflexible’s_ deck.
And before it was over, every soul on both vessels dropped flat, as the
cracking ram of the _Inflexible_ went with a racket like Distraction
itself through the _Von der Tann’s_ six inches of armour; nor did it
stop; but walked on and on into the other ship, splitting the tympanum
with shrillness in a sombre dusk.
This probably preserved the German above water a minute longer; and
within that minute, while they so stood two-in-one, a Whitehead burst
beneath both beams—a Whitehead fired by the _Inflexible_, which had
missed, but had been whirled into the German’s wake.
Whereupon the twain started a little apart; a pillar of smoke that
mixed with the clouds rose round them, and remained steady in the air
like a temple, mucking their dusk into midnight: in which gloom, under
which tomb, the two settled down together, unseen, and still.
Some of their men escaped by leaping: for immediately upon the
_Arkansas_ tragedy the fleet of the _Mauretania’s_ boats had gone out,
save two whose bottoms had dropped out in sympathy with the tragedy;
and now, too, those of the _Invincible’s_ boats that could still float
were out, picking up swimmers.
And all were quickly filled, some trailing from their wales men whose
heads the waves swept over.
But the wind had lulled; the sun was now bright, the battle having
lasted forty minutes; the air hazy with gun-vapours; and yonder,
still lingering, the mound of smoke that the _Arkansas_ had left, and
crumbling yonder the pillar of cloud within which the _Inflexible_ and
_Von der Tann_ had foundered.
The _Swift_, though abandoned, was still visible, standing there bowed,
steep in the bows, like the camel that kneels and waits; and still
visible was the _Mauretania_, waiting large and tragic, listed to
starboard, showing all her deck-shape like a leaf, the sea like troops
of multitudinous wolves trooping upon her to have her.
She lingered there a long time: until with a sudden flurry, as of
resolve to make the plunge and try the new state under-sea, she skipped
ahead and left the sea, sucking after her Captain Arthur and some forty
of her men.
The loaded boats, meantime, made as best they could in the swell for
the _Invincible_, a stare of scare and amazement on those sailors’
faces, as of men who have passed through what the heart can’t fancy,
those within the boats gripping at the gunwales or seats, for the sea
seemed to reel fiercely round their ears.
In one boat sat Captain Stickney of the _Arkansas_ and the captain of
the _Scharnhorst_ side by side, the latter—a large German whose name
was Bergmann—having a gash across his freckled red neck.
This was visible, for his upper clothes had apparently been singed
off him, save his vest, which his buxom breasts bulged; and he kept
stanching the gash with a canvas rag, already wet through with red, for
the scratch ran like a tap.
The two captains uttered no word to each other for a long time; but
presently the American, producing a handkerchief sidewards with his
face averted, murmured: “Handkerchief?”
Up sprang Bergmann half-way in a surprise of politeness, and after
searching a second for expression, blurted in his big and vigorous
voice:
“Beautiful thank, my sir!”
“That’s it,” muttered the Yankee, gazing pensively over the sea.
Soon afterwards the boats were at the _Invincible_. But she was very
sick and feeble; and it was not until three nights later that tidings
of the fight arrived in Britain.
It arrived the same night in Peking, where Li Ku Yu, hearing that
result, clucked his tongue, with “As I thought! Man has learned to
destroy better than to build.”