and started on their way to the boats. ---- was the greatest help
throughout, but I can't say as much for many of the others of the
unwounded, who were very grudging in the way they lent a hand. ---- put
up a stiff protest against going off without burying the dead, declaring
that he was not going to leave them there for the crabs to eat up. When
I pointed out that we had no implements for digging, and that I needed
his help in getting the living off, he saw the reason of it and said he
would come along. We did the best we could for the dead by covering them
with palm leaves and coral clinkers.
"I made a wide circle around before we left, trying to be sure that none
of the living was left behind. The Huns were not quite sure of their
numbers, so there was no checking up the thing that way. I am quite
positive that no living man was left in that immediate vicinity, and
---- felt equally certain that none had strayed away. This must have
been just what _did_ happen, however, for, many weeks later, we had word
from the Telegraph people to the effect that, when they landed on North
Keeling Island to bury the dead, one of the crab-picked skeletons they
found was in a sitting position against the bole of a palm tree. I've
never tried to reconstruct the story of what happened, but it must have
been rather awful at the best.
"It was rather a problem, calculating how to get every one off in two
small boats, one of which had a hole in the bottom. The whaler would
still float right side up, however, and we finally managed it by putting
the badly wounded, with a pulling crew, in the _Sydney's_ cutter, which
was sent to aid us in the morning, and the rest piling into the whaler
and sitting in the water. Then a long tow-line was passed to the cutter
(long enough to let her get out beyond the breakers before a strain came
on it) and she pulled away with the whole procession. ----, in spite
of all I could do to induce him to get into the whaler, insisted on
swimming out through the breakers and boarding her outside. If he hadn't
been starving and thirsting for forty-eight hours I would have put it
down as pure swank; as it was, however, I can't believe he was actuated
by anything else than a wish to ease off the load on the damaged boat
while it was going through the breakers. He was a thoroughly good sport,
that ----, and, as I told you, I was a good deal puzzled to account for
it until I learned about his being half English.
"We reached the _Sydney_ all right, and the whaler was just being
hoisted in when I heard the Captain's voice from the bridge asking where
Lieutenant X---- was. I looked up just in time to catch him staring
down at me with open-eyed amazement. 'Oh, there he is!' he exclaimed,
turning away with a grin on his face. That led me, for the first time in
twenty-four hours, to take a look at what I could see of myself without
a glass. It was my turn to grin--and to blush. Absolutely the sum total
of my wardrobe was my shirt and a seaman's straw hat! Nothing else.
To ease my feet from boots after standing on the scorching iron decks
of the _Emden_, I had shifted to an old pair of dancing pumps when I
returned to the _Sydney_ and these, in the rush of departure, I had worn
ashore. These, and my socks, must have been scoured off among the coral
clinkers, and my cap probably went when we stumbled into the sea-birds'
roost in the darkness. But where I lost my trousers, and what sailor
gave me his hat, I have never been able to make out."
I asked Lieutenant X---- if it was true, as I had heard, that the
officers of the victor and vanquished took advantage of the several days
they spent together in the _Sydney_ before the Germans were disembarked
at Colombo to foregather and talk the battle over.
"Except for the two Captains, who were necessarily thrown together a
good deal and who drew a chart of the battle between them, emphatically
no," he replied. "The wardroom officers held practically no conversation
at all with those from the _Emden_. On their part there was shown no
inclination to talk, and on our part that fact alone would have been
enough to prevent any interchanges of a personal nature. It would have
seemed rather like 'rubbing it in' if we had tried to draw them out on
a subject that couldn't but be a painful one to them. Some of the men
yarned together a bit, I believe, but you may be quite assured that
(save for the exception I have mentioned) there was nothing of the kind
between the officers. There wasn't a lot in common between us at the
best."
II. LIFE IN THE FLEET
A BATTLESHIP AT SEA
The collier had come alongside a little after seven--two hours before
daybreak at that time of year--and I awoke in my cabin on the boat deck
just abaft the forward turret to the grind of the winches and the steady
tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below.
On my way aft to the wardroom for breakfast, I stopped for a moment by
a midships hatch, where the commander, grimed to the eyes, stamped his
sea-boots and threshed his arms as a substitute for the warming exercise
the men were getting behind the shovels and the barrows. He it was who
was responsible--partly through systematisation, partly through infusing
his own energetic spirit into the men themselves--for the fact that
the _Zeus_ held the Blue Ribbon, or the Black Ribbon, or whatever one
would call the premier honours of the Grand Fleet for speedy coaling.
Not unnaturally, therefore, he was a critical man when it came to
passing judgment on the shifting of "Number 1 Welsh Steam" from hold
to bunkers, and it was not necessarily to be expected that he would
echo my enthusiasm when I told him that this was quite the smartest bit
of coaling I had ever seen west of Nagasaki, something quite worth
standing, shivering tooth to tooth, with a raw north wind, to be a
witness of.
"It's fair," he admitted grudgingly, "only fair. A shade over 300 tons
an hour, perhaps. 'Twould have seemed good enough before we put up the
Grand Fleet record of 408. Trouble is, they haven't anything to put 'em
on their mettle this morning. Now, if some other ship had come within
fifty or sixty tons of their record this last week, or if we'd had a
rush order to get ready to go to sea--then you might have hoped to see
coaling that was coaling."
All through my porridge and eggs and bacon the steady tramp of the
barrow-men on the forecastle-deck throbbed along the steel plates
of the wardroom ceiling, and it must have been about the time I was
spreading my marmalade (real marmalade, not the synthetic substitute
one comes face to face with ashore these days) that I seemed to sense a
quickening of the movement, not through any rush-bang acceleration, but
rather through gradually becoming aware of increased force in action,
as when the engines of a steamer speed up from "half" to "full." In a
few moments an overalled figure, with a face coal-dusted till it looked
like the face of the end-man in a minstrel show, lounged in to remark
casually behind the day before yesterday morning's paper that we had
just gone on "two hours' notice." A half-hour later, as the gouged-out
collier edged jerkily away under the impulse of her half-submerged
screw, the commander, a gleam of quiet satisfaction in his steady eyes,
remarked that "it wasn't such a bad finish, after all," adding that "the
men seemed keen to get her out to sea and let the wind blow through
her."
The ship's post-coaling clean up--usually as elaborate an affair as a
Turkish bath, with rub down and massage--was no more than a douche with
"a lick and a promise." Anything more for a warship putting off into the
North Sea in midwinter would be about as superfluous as for a man to
wash his face and comb his hair before taking a plunge in the surf.
Once that perfunctory wash-down was over, all traces of rush
disappeared. What little remained to be done after that--even including
getting ready for action--was so ordered and endlessly rehearsed that
nothing short of an enemy salvo or a sea heavy enough to carry away
something of importance need be productive of a really hurried movement.
Just a shade more smoke from the funnels to indicate the firing of
furnaces which had been lying cold, and the taking down or in of a few
little harbour "comforts" like stove-pipes and gangways, forecasted
imminent departure.
The expression regarding the fleet, squadron, or even the single ship
ready to sail at a moment's notice is as much of a figure of speech
as is the similar one about the army which is going to fight to the
last man. A good many moments must inevitably elapse between the time
definite orders come to sail and the actual getting under weigh. But
the final preparations _can_ be reduced to such a routine that the ship
receiving them can be got ready to sail with hardly more than a ripple
of unusual activity appearing in the ebb and flow of the life of those
who man her. No river ferry-boat ever cast off her moorings and paddled
out on one of her endlessly repeated shuttlings with less apparent
effort than the _Zeus_, when, after gulping some scores of fathoms of
Gargantuan anchor chain into her capacious maw, she pivoted easily
around in the churning boil of reversed screws, took her place in line,
and followed in the wake of the flagship toward the point where a notch
in the bare rounded periphery of encircling hills marked the way to the
open sea.
Nowhere else in the temperate latitudes is there so strange a meeting
and mingling place of airs and waters as at the "Northern Base." The
butterfly chases of sunshine and showers even in December and January
are suggestive of nothing so much as what a South Pacific Archipelago
would be but with fifty or sixty degrees colder temperature. Dancing
golden sunmotes were playing spirited cross-tag with slatily sombre
cloud-shadows as we nosed out through the mazes of the booms, but with
the first stinging slaps of the vicious cross-swells of a turbulent sea,
a swirling bank of fog came waltzing over the aimlessly chopping waters,
and reared a vaporous wall across our path.
The flagship melted into the milling mists, and dimmed down to an
amorphous blur with just enough outline to enable us a sight to correct
our position in line. In turn, the towered and pinnacled head-on
silhouette of our next astern ship grew soft and shadowy, and where
proper perspective would have placed the fourth was a swaying wisp of
indeterminate image which might just as well have been an imminently
wheeling seagull as a distantly reeling super-dreadnought. The
comparison is by no means so ridiculous as it sounds, for only the day
before a naval flying-man had told me how he once started to bring his
seaplane down on sighting a duck (which was really some hundreds of feet
in the air) because he took it for a destroyer, and how, later, he had
failed to "straighten out" quickly enough because he thought a trawler
was a duck in flight.
The lean grey shadows which slipped ghostily into step with us in the
fog-hastened twilight of three o'clock might just as well (had we
not known of the rendezvous) have been lurking wolves as protecting
sheep-dogs.
"Now that we've picked up our destroyers," said the officer who paced
the quarter-deck with me, "we'll be getting on our way. Let's go down to
tea."
Smoke, masts, funnels, and wave-washed hulls, the Whistleresque outlines
of our swift guardians had blurred to blankness as I looked back from
the companion-way, and only a misty golden halo, flashing out and dying
down on our port bow, told where the flotilla leader was talking to the
flagship.
Tea is no less important a function on a British warship than it is
ashore, and nothing short of an action is allowed to interfere with it.
Indeed, how the cheerful clink of the teacup was heard in the prelude
to the diapason of the guns was revealed to me a few days ago, when the
Commander allowed me to read a few personal notes he had written while
the light cruiser he was in at the time was returning to port after the
Battle of Jutland. "The enemy being in sight," it read, "we prepared
for 'Action Stations' and went to tea." A few minutes later, fingers
which had crooked on the handles of the teacups were adjusting the nice
instruments of precision that laid the guns for what was destined to
prove the greatest naval battle in history.
Tea was about as usual with us that day, save that the officers who came
in at the change of watch were dressed for business--those from the
bridge and conning-tower in oilskins or "lammy" coats and sea-boots,
and the engineers in greasy overalls. A few words of "shop"--steam
pressure, revolutions, speed, force and direction of the wind, and
the like--passed in an undertone between men sitting next each other,
but never became general. The sponginess of the new "potato" bread
and the excellence of the margarine came in for comment, and some one
spoke of having rushed off a letter just before sailing, ordering a
recently advertised "self hair-cutter." A discussion as to just how this
remarkable contrivance worked followed, the consensus of opinion being
that it must be on the safety-razor principle, but that it couldn't
possibly be worth the guinea charged. All that I recall having been said
of what might be taking us to sea was when an officer likely to know
volunteered that we would possibly be in sight of land in the morning,
and some speculation arose as to whether it would be Norway or Jutland.
A recently joined R.N.V.R. provoked smiles when he suggested Heligoland.
The cabin which I had been occupying in harbour was one located
immediately under the conning-tower, and used by the navigating officer
when the ship was at sea, the arrangement being that I was to go aft and
live in his regular cabin while we were outside. Going forward, after
tea, I threw together a few things for my servant to carry back to my
temporary quarters. Groping aft in Stygian blackness along the windward
side of the ship, I encountered spray in clouds driving across even the
lofty fo'c'sle deck. The wind appeared to have shaken off its flukiness
as we cleared the headlands, and, blowing with a swinging kick behind
it, was rolling up a sea to match. I did not need to be told by the
sea-booted sailor whom I bumped on a ladder that it wasn't "goin' t'
be no nite fer lam's," to know that there was something lively in the
weather line in pickle, probably to be uncorked before morning.
The grate, robbed of its chimney, was cold and empty when I went in for
seven o'clock dinner--half an hour earlier than in harbour--and there
was just the suggestion of chill in the close air of the wardroom. An
engineer-lieutenant who started to reminisce about a winter cruise he
had once made in the Arctic was peremptorily hushed up with a request
to "talk about something warmer." A yarn about chasing the _Königsberg_
in the lagoons of East Africa was more kindly received, and an R.N.R.'s
account of how his ship carried Moslem pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah
on their way to Mecca brought a genial glow of warmth with it. There
was something strangely cheering in his story of how, when there was
a following simoon blowing across the brassy surface of the Red Sea,
the Lascar stokers used to go mad with the heat and jump overboard in
their delirium. The air seemed less dank and chill after that recital.
I ventured a "sudorific" contribution by telling of the way they made
"desert storms" in the California movies with the aid of buckets of sand
and a "wind machine." The whole table showed interest in this--probably
because it was so far removed from "shop"--and sat long over port and
coffee planning a "blower" that would discharge both wind and sand--in
sufficient quantities to give the "desert storm" illusion over the
restricted angle of the movie lens--at the turning of a single crank.
One does not need to be long upon a British battleship to find out that
the inventive genius of the Anglo-Saxon race is not all confined to the
American branch.
Between officers on watch and those resting to relieve, the
after-dinner gathering around what had once been a fire was a small and
rapidly dwindling one. As I got up to go to my cabin, the captain of
marines quieted the pet cockatoo on his shoulder long enough to say, as
we would probably be at "Action Stations" early in the morning, I might
find it of interest to come up to his turret, where he had a "jolly
smart crew." "We usually do 'B.J.1' at daybreak when we're out," he
said, "just on the chance that we may flush some sort of a Hun in the
early light. Quite like snipe-shooting, you know."
A "snotty" whom I met outside said something about the way the barometer
had been chasing its tail on the drop ever since we got under weigh,
and when I turned on the light in my cabin I noticed that the arrows
on the navigating officer's instrument indicated a fall of thirty
points since noon. The keen whistling of the rising wind shrilled with
steady insistence, and the wide swinging swells from the open sea were
lock-stepping along with a tread that was just beginning to lift the
great warship in a swaggering Jack Tar roll.
On the floor of the cabin was a flannel bulldog with "manipulable"
legs and a changeable expression. Its name was "Grip" (so "the pilot"
had told me), and it had been his constant companion ever since it was
presented to him on the eve of his first sailing as a midshipman. The
only time they had ever been separated was on the occasion a colleague,
who had borrowed it as a mascot in a game of poker, threw it overboard
in chagrin when the attempt to woo fickle fortune proved a failure.
Luckily, the ship was lying in a river, and the dog floated back on
the next tide, and was fished out with no damage to anything but the
compression bladder which worked its bark. The Navigating Officer left
the companionable little beast in his cabin, so he explained, to give
it the proper home touch for my first night at sea with the British
Navy. Cocking "Grip" up in the genial glow of the electric grate in an
attitude of "watchful waiting," I crawled into my bunk, pulled up the
adjustable side-rail, and was rocked to sleep to the even throb of the
turbines and the splish-splash of the spray against the screwed-down
scuttle.
"We aren't having 'B.J.1' this morning," some one explained facetiously
when I reported for "duty" at seven o'clock, "because we already have
'B.B.8.'" This last meant "Boreas Blowing Eight," he said, and I was
just "nautical" enough to know that a wind of "8" in the Beaufort scale
indicated something like fifty or sixty miles an hour.
"No U-boat will want to be getting within 'periscopic' distance of
the surface of the sea that's running this morning," said a young
engineer-lieutenant who had been in the submarine service, "and even if
one was able to get a sight, its torpedo would have to have some kind
of a 'kangaroo' attachment to jump the humps and hollows with. Fact
is, it's rather more than our destroyers are entirely happy with, and
we've just slowed down by several knots to keep 'em from dipping up the
brine with their funnels. Hope nothing turns up that they have to get a
jump on for. A destroyer's all right on the surface, but no good as a
submarine; yet an under-sea diver is just what she is if you drive her
more'n twelve into a sea like the one that's kicking up now. Barometer's
down sixty points since last night, and still going."
Breakfast that morning had little in common with the similar festal
occasion at Base where, fresh bathed and shaven, each immaculate member
of the mess comes down and sits over his coffee and paper much (save
for the fact that the journal is two days old) as at home. Several
places besides those of the officers actually on watch were empty,
and by no means a few of those who did appear had that introspective
look which is so unmistakable a sign of all not being well within
the citadel. Even the _Poldhu_--the daily wireless bulletin of the
Navy--had a "shot-to-pieces" look where "static" or some other esoteric
difficulty was responsible for gaps in several items of the laconic
summary. The last word in super-dreadnoughts does not have table-racks
and screwed-down chairs. She isn't supposed to lose her dignity to the
extent of needing anything in the way of such vulgar makeshifts. The
fact remains that if the mighty _Zeus_ had chanced to have these things,
she would have saved herself some china and several officers from
"nine-pinning" down one side of a table and piling up in a heap at the
end.
With the staid wardroom doing things like this, it was only to be
expected that the mess decks would be displaying a certain amount of
shiftiness. I was, however, hardly prepared for the gay seascape which
unrolled before me when I had worried my way through the intricate
barricade of a watertight bulkhead door in trying to skirmish forward to
the ladders leading to the upper decks. For several reasons--ventilation
and guns have something to do with it--it is not practicable to close
up certain parts of a battleship against heavy seas to anything like
the same extent as with the passenger quarters in a modern liner. It
is only in very rough weather that this may give rise to much trouble,
but--well, we were having rough weather that morning, and that little
bit of the Roaring Forties I had stumbled into was a consequence of it.
Oilskinned, "sou'westered," sea-booted men, sitting and lying on benches
and tables, was the first strange thing that came to my attention; and
then, with a swish and a gurgle, the foot-deep wave of dirty water which
had driven them there caught me about the knees, and sat me down upon a
pile of hammocks, or, rather, across the inert bodies of two men (boys I
found them to be presently) who had been cast away there in advance of
me. Clambering over their unprotesting anatomies, I gained dry land at a
higher level, and at a tactically defensible point, where a half-Nelson
round a stanchion steadfastly refused to give way under the double
back-action shuffle with which the next roll tried to break it. With two
good toe-holds making me safe from practically anything but a roll to
her beams' ends, I was free to survey the shambles at my leisure. Then I
saw how the havoc was being wrought.
With a shuddering crash, the thousand-ton bludgeon of a wave struck
along the port side, immediately followed by the muffled but
unmistakable sound of water rushing in upon the deck above. To the
accompaniment of a wild slap-banging, this sound came nearer, and
then, as she heeled far to starboard under the impulse of the blow
that had been dealt her, a solid spout of green water came tumbling
down a hatchway--the fount from which the mobile tidal wave swaggering
about the deck took replenishment. Two men, worrying a side of frozen
Argentine bullock along to the galley from the cold-storage hold, timing
(or, rather, mis-timing) their descent to coincide with that of the
young Niagara, reached the mess-deck in the form of a beef sandwich.
Depositing that delectable morsel in an inert mass at the foot of the
ladder, the briny cascade, with a joyous whoof, rushed down to reinforce
the tidal wave and do the rounds of the mess.
I was now able to observe that the sailors, marooned on the benches,
tables, and other islands of refuge, were roughly dividable into three
classes--the prostrate ones, who heaved drunkenly to the roll and took
no notice of the primal chaos about them; the semi-prostrate ones, who
were still able to exhibit mild resentment when the tidal wave engulfed
or threatened to engulf them; and the others--some lounging easily, but
the most perched or roosted on some dry but precarious pinnacle--who
quaffed great mugs of hot tea and bit hungrily into hunks of bread and
smoked fish. These latter--hard-bit tars they were, with faces pickled
ruddy by the blown brine of many windy watches--took great joy of the
plight of their mates, guffawing mightily at the dumb misery in the
hollow eyes of the "semi-prostrates" and the dead-to-the-world roll of
"prostrates" with the reelings of the ship.