It is a true saying, that "the pitcher which goes too often to the well
gets broken at last;" and thus it came about with me, or rather with the
_Kasanumi_.
As the days passed, we became aware of greatly increased activity on the
part of the garrison of Port Arthur. Cruising in the offing during the
daytime, well beyond the range of the Russian's biggest guns, yet near
enough at hand to make sure that our blockade of the port was effective,
the sound of violent explosions came floating off to us all day long,
telling us in unmistakable language that strenuous efforts were being
made to clear the channel of the sunken steamers wherewith we had
blocked it, at such heavy cost to ourselves. There could be but one
reason for such tremendous activity: it was doubtless that the enemy had
it in contemplation to send his fleet to sea, probably with the object
of finding a more secure shelter in the port of Vladivostock, a surmise
which was confirmed by our spies in Port Arthur.
If still further confirmation of this intention were needed, it was to
be found in the increased efforts which the Russians put forth to hamper
our mine-laying operations in the roadstead; for about this time it
became the practice of the enemy to send out a ship, sometimes two, or
even three, to lie at anchor in the roads all night. The ship, or
ships, always anchored well under the cover of the heaviest guns of the
fortress, yet so far out that her, or their, own heavy guns completely
commanded the waters of the roadstead, thus tremendously increasing the
difficulty of sowing those waters with mines.
Naturally, the presence of these ships in the roadstead offered an
almost irresistible temptation to our destroyers to essay the task of
sinking them, or at least putting them out of action; and this desire on
our part was smiled upon by Togo, to put the case mildly, for
information was now continually reaching us to the effect that the
formidable Baltic fleet was being rapidly prepared for sea, and that its
departure on its long voyage to the Far East was imminent; while Togo
was naturally anxious that the Port Arthur fleet--and the Vladivostock
fleet also, if possible--should be effectually disposed of before the
arrival of so powerful a reinforcement in Japanese waters. Therefore,
great as was the risk attending the attack of a powerfully armed ship at
anchor under the cover of several formidable forts, and careful as our
Admiral was, both of his ships and of his men, no attempt was made to
discourage us of the torpedo flotilla when our desire to attack was made
known; on the contrary, the desire was smiled upon, as I have said, and
nothing more than a word of caution was given against the incurring of
unnecessary risks.
Perhaps I ought to explain precisely what I mean by saying that the
desire of the commander of the torpedo flotilla to attack these ships
was "smiled upon" by the Admiral. He had not only "smiled upon" but had
given imperative orders that the torpedo fleet was to be employed upon
every possible occasion for the harassing and discomfiture of the enemy;
but hitherto the tactics employed had been for the destroyers and
torpedo-boats to attack in numbers, a division or even two or three
divisions being sent in at a time. It was due to my initiative that
these tactics were now to be altered, and that attacks were now to be
permitted by as few as two boats only. Up to now it had been our
regular practice for a large number of craft to creep in toward the
roadstead at a low speed until discovered by the enemy's searchlights,
and then dash in upon the foe at our utmost speed, through a hail of
shells, discharge our torpedoes as we circled round our quarry, and then
dash out again, trusting to our speed to carry us back into the zone of
safety. Of course this plan had its advantages, inasmuch as that the
more there were of us, the greater--in theory--the chance that some of
us would score a hit. But against this there was the fact that during
the final rush of the torpedo craft upon the enemy, the necessity to
maintain our highest speed throughout the entire period of the attack
involved forced draught, and consequently flaming funnels, which latter
of course immediately attracted the attention of the enemy and nullified
all our efforts to take him by surprise.
Now, I had by this time gained a considerable amount of experience of
torpedo warfare, and I had not failed to observe that in the majority of
cases where our attacks had failed, the failure had been due to the
above cause, combined with the fact that ten or a dozen craft ran a much
greater risk of being picked up by the enemy's searchlights than would
one or two. It had therefore seemed to me that, taking everything into
consideration, the prospects of successful attack by two craft--one to
support and assist the other in case of need--were as good as those of a
dozen craft, while the risk would be very much less, provided that the
attack were made coolly and circumspectly in accordance with a plan
which I had worked out. This plan was, in brief, to run for the harbour
at normal speed until we were practically within effective range, and
then, instead of dashing in at full speed, to stop our engines--the
throb of which was loud enough to be heard at a considerable distance on
a quiet night--and head directly for our quarry, discharging our
torpedoes when the momentum or "way" of the boat had carried her as far
as she would go, trusting to the subsequent confusion to enable us to
escape unscathed. I had fully explained this view of mine to the
Admiral, and had obtained his sanction to put my plan to the test.
Accordingly, on a certain night toward the middle of June, after the
Russians had been let severely alone for some forty-eight hours, the
_Kasanumi_, accompanied by the _Akaisuki_, my friend Ito's ship, left
the rest of the blockaders, with the object of putting my theory into
practice.
It was a splendid night for our purpose; there was a breathless calm,
the water was smooth as oil, and although there was certainly a moon,
she was in her last quarter, and did not rise until close upon one
o'clock in the morning. Moreover, the sky was overcast by a great sheet
of dappled cloud through which only a solitary star here and there
peeped faintly; it was consequently dark enough to afford us a
reasonable chance of getting within striking distance of our quarry
undetected.
When the Russians sent their ships out of harbour to lie all night in
the roadstead, as they did pretty frequently now, it was their custom to
get them out early in the afternoon, after their destroyers had
carefully swept the anchorage in search of mines; and it was my hope
that--we having left them alone for the preceding two days--they would
by this time be getting suspicious of such unwonted inactivity on our
part, and consequently would send out one, or perhaps even two ships, to
guard against a possible _coup_ on our part.
Our mine-laying craft very rarely got to work before one or two o'clock
in the morning, that being the hour when human vigilance is popularly
supposed to be least active; I therefore planned to arrive in the
roadstead about midnight, hoping that I should then catch the enemy off
his guard, snatching a rest in preparation for the moment when our
activities usually began.
Now, the thing which we had most to fear was a long-distance searchlight
established in a station on Golden Hill, at a height of some two hundred
feet above the sea-level. This searchlight was generally turned on at
dusk, and was kept unceasingly playing upon the anchorage and its
adjacent waters all through the night. It commanded the entire
roadstead, from a point three miles east of the harbour's mouth, right
round to the south and west as far as the Pinnacle Rock; and the
difficulty was how to avoid being picked up by it before we had
delivered our attack. But by this time I knew the seaward surroundings
of Port Arthur almost by heart. I knew, for instance--and this was most
important--that the searchlight station was placed so far back from the
edge of the crumbling cliff that the water immediately at the foot of
the latter, and for a distance of perhaps a hundred yards to seaward,
could not be reached by the beam of the light, and was therefore
enveloped in darkness, rendered all the deeper and more opaque by the
dazzling brilliance of the light; and I also knew that along the outer
edge of this patch of darkness there was a sufficient depth of water to
float a destroyer, even at dead low water. My plan, therefore, was to
make a wide sweep to seaward upon leaving the blockading squadron,
gradually turning east and north, and thus eventually to get into Takhe
Bay, some five miles east of Port Arthur anchorage, and from thence
creep along the shore to the westward, keeping as close in as the depth
of water would permit. There was only one difficulty about this, which
was that at a certain point not far from where the searchlight station
stood, there was a gap in the line of cliff where the ground sloped
steeply down to the water's edge for a short distance, and here of
course the beam of the light had uninterrupted play right up to the
beach; but I believed I could overcome this difficulty by simply
watching my opportunity and slipping past the gap when the searchlight
was not playing upon it.
All went well with us until about seven bells in the first watch
(half-past eleven o'clock) when a great bank of fog, for which those
seas are notorious, came driving in from the south-west, and in a moment
we were enveloped in a cloud so thick that, standing upon the bridge, I
could scarcely distinguish our aftermost funnel, and could not see our
taffrail at all. We were then about three miles from the shore, with
the indentation of Takhe Bay straight ahead of us, and near enough the
anchorage for a man on our signal yard to make out--before the fog
enveloped us, of course--that there were two ships at anchor in the
roadstead, one, a five-funnelled craft which I knew could only be the
_Askold_, while the other, showing four funnels, I gathered from his
description must be the armoured cruiser _Bayan_. The searchlight had
of course been in action ever since we had made the land, and as its
beam swept slowly over the ships it had revealed enough of their details
to enable us to easily identify them.
It was most exasperating that the fog should have swept down upon us
just when it did. Had it come an hour, or even half an hour, later, I
would have welcomed it, for we should then have had time to get up
within striking distance of the ships and, under cover of the fog, could
have approached them closely enough to have made sure of both, while
now! Well, it was useless to cry over what could not be helped; the
only thing to do was to make the best of things as they were, and to
hope that the fog might yet prove a friend in disguise, after all.
Fortunately, as the fog came sweeping up to us, I had the presence of
mind to hail the man on the yard--who was at that moment describing the
ships he saw riding at anchor in the roads--asking him to tell me
exactly how they bore from us. His reply was:
"They are square abeam, honourable Captain."
I immediately put my head in through the window of the wheelhouse and
demanded of the helmsman how we were at that moment heading. He
answered that we were then steering north forty degrees west, by
compass.
"Then," said I, "alter the course at once to west forty degrees south.
That," I added, addressing young Hiraoka, who was standing beside me,
"ought to take us to them, or near enough to enable us to sight them.
Kindly go aft, Mr Hiraoka, and hail the _Akatsuki_, telling her of our
shift of helm."
The youngster ran aft to do my bidding, the fog at that moment being so
thick that it was impossible to see one's hand before one's face, even
the beam of the distant searchlight being so effectually obscured that
it might have been extinguished for all that we knew to the contrary. I
had rung down for our engines to stop, so that we might not run away
from the _Akatsuki_, after shifting our helm, without informing her of
the alteration in our course, and everything was now so still that I had
no difficulty in distinguishing young Hiraoka's hail, and the reply from
the other destroyer, breaking through the soft swish and lap of water
under our bows. It was the _Akatsuki's_ lieutenant who was answering
our hail, and he had just acknowledged the intimation of our altered
course, and was ordering his own helmsman to make a like change, when,
without the slightest warning, I experienced a terrific shock which felt
exactly as though the ship had been smitten a savage blow from below by
a giant hammer. So violent was it that I was flung high in the air and
over the rail of the bridge on to the steel turtle-back deck beneath,
upon which I landed head-first with such violence that I immediately
lost consciousness. But before that happened I was sensible of two
things; one of them being a blinding flash of flame, coincident with the
shock, in which our bows, for a length of some ten or twelve feet,
seemed to crumple up and fly to pieces, while the other was that, as I
was tossed high in the air, I sustained a violent blow on the chest from
some heavy object which seemed to sear my flesh like white-hot iron.
Then down I came upon my head, and knew no more.
My first sensation, upon coming to myself, was that of a violent aching
all over my body, as though every bone in it had been broken. But the
aching of my head was even worse than that of my body, while as for my
chest, it smarted and throbbed as though the blade of a burning knife
rested upon it. I next became aware that I was in bed; and finally,
opening my eyes, I saw that I was the occupant of one of many beds in a
large, airy room which somehow seemed familiar to me, and which I
presently identified as the ward which I had once before occupied in the
hospital at our base among the Elliot Islands.
It was broad daylight, and the sun was shining brilliantly into the room
through the widely opened windows, which admitted a gentle, refreshing
breeze, pleasantly charged with ozone. Two dainty little women nurses
were doing something at a table at the far end of the room, which
happened to come within the range of my vision, and presently I heard
the gentle splash of water in that direction, which immediately brought
home to me the consciousness that my mouth and throat were parched. I
opened my mouth to call to the nurses that I was thirsty, but it was
only the very faintest of whispers that escaped my smarting lips. It
was enough, however, to immediately produce a gentle rustle on the other
side of my bed, and the next moment a pretty face was bending over me
and a pair of soft, dark, almond-shaped eyes were gazing sympathetically
into mine.
"Ah!" exclaimed the owner of those eyes, "at last the illustrious
Captain is himself again. Are you suffering very acutely, noble sir?"
"Suffering?" I whispered. "_Rather_! I ache as if I had been beaten
to a jelly, and I am as thirsty as a--as a limekiln. Can you by any
chance get me something to drink? A bucketful will do to start with."
"A bucketful!" she murmured, looking anxiously down at me as she laid
her long, slender, pointed fingers upon the pulse of my left hand where
it rested outside the coverlet. "But no," she continued, evidently
speaking to herself, "his pulse is almost normal, and there is no trace
of fever. A bucketful! Oh, these English!"
She shook her head, as though giving up some problem that she found too
difficult for solution, and shuffled off, with the curious gait peculiar
to Japanese women, without saying another word to me. She approached
the other two nurses, at the far end of the ward, and said something
which caused them both to turn and stare in my direction. Then the
senior of the party, accompanied by the girl whom I had so tremendously
astonished, came up to my bedside, looked at me, felt my pulse, and
shuffled away again, presently returning with one of those cups with a
spout, from which one can drink while in a recumbent position. She
placed the point of the spout between my lips, and the next moment I was
aware that I was imbibing some delicious broth. But the cup! It was
only about the size of an ordinary breakfast cup, and its contents were
gone before I could well taste them. I asked for more, and got a second
cupful; and then, as I was asking for still more, the Medical Staff of
the hospital entered the ward, and the whole crowd turned with one
accord and grouped itself around my bed.
The Chief, a keen, clever-looking little fellow, whose age it was
impossible to guess at since he was clean shaven, turned to the nurse
who was feeding me, and sharply demanded what it was that she was
administering. She explained, adding in all seriousness the information
that I had demanded a bucketful, whereupon he turned and regarded me
with upraised eyebrows, and laid his fingers upon my wrist.
"So you are suffering from extreme thirst, Captain, eh?" he demanded.