who, writing home after the battle, had stated that there was a time
when he had been unable to make his way aft from his turret on account
of the heaps of dead bodies blocking the way.
"You know very well that we were not hit during the battle," the irate
Captain, before whom the culprit had been forthwith, admonished. "What
prompted you to tell such a mischievous lie?"
"I was upholding the glory of the Gran' Fleet, Sir," was the unabashed
answer. "I couldn't bear to 'ave 'em thinkin' at 'ome that the blinkin'
battle cruisers 'ad been 'avin' all the fun o' the go."
Another even line of foretops, seeming to float through the air above
the skyline of an interposing island like a file of flying geese, told
us, as we cleared the barrage, that another Squadron was getting under
weigh; but these, with the "Cats" creeping off under their back-blown
smoke trails, into a bank of purple mist, were all that were in sight
when the swift winter twilight shut down and left us ploughing alone
down the lane between our screening destroyers.
It was just at this time--in the short 'tween-daylight-and-dark
interval--that a strange thing happened. The sea was smooth, silken
smooth, with hardly more than an eight- or ten-knot breeze ruffling its
surface, and the ship was--so far as pitch or roll were concerned--as
steady as though chocked up in a dry dock. Suddenly, a couple of cables'
lengths ahead, a thin white line of foam appeared, serpentining along
at about right angles to our course. It appeared to be quite the same
sort of little froth-path that one has come to know in the seas of all
the world as the marker of the place where tide meets tide, a phenomenon
indicating conflicting but rarely dangerous countercurrents.
I noted that a half-dozen glasses were trained on the wriggling streak,
and was wondering what there could be about it to excite such anxious
interest, when the Flotilla Leader on our port bow swung swiftly round
through eight or ten points and came charging straight down towards
us. No helm ever spun a ship like that, I told myself, even before the
violently tossing foam geyser under the "amok's" stern revealed that
both helm and screws were doing their utmost to throw her back toward
her original course. I had barely time to observe with astonishment
that the destroyer on our starboard bow was plunging off in a totally
different direction than her "opposite number," when an invisible hand
seemed to reach up from below and seize our ship in its vice-like grip.
Round swung that 25,000 tons of steel without offering any more apparent
resistance than a drifting skiff or a floating log.
There was no knowing until that instant which way the ship was going
to swing, and the Chief Navigating Officer's sharp "Hard-a-port!" down
the voice-pipe was the only order there was any use in giving, when it
became clear that we were being turned six or eight points to port on
a course calculated to present pretty much of her whole starboard side
for the oncoming destroyer to flatten itself against. The grind of the
labouring helm ran like a shudder from stern to bow, but the avoidance
of a collision was up to the destroyer rather than the battleship.
Out of the tail of my eye (as I focussed my attention on more imminent
developments) I saw that the other battleships and destroyers were
cutting capers similar to our own. No two of the dozen or more craft
appeared to be steering the same course, and one or two of the
destroyers, like helplessly skidding motors on a muddy street, had
actually turned through thirty-two points and were heading back on their
proper courses.
It was not an especially close call with our Flotilla Leader after all,
for her helm cut into water, "standing still" sufficiently to give it
a grip, while she yet had room to clear our swinging bows by a score
of yards. Wallowing enormously, she spun swiftly round and darted back
to her station, while the more ponderous battleship was still reeling
dazedly like a half-drunken man trying to orientate after picking
himself up from a fall. Then, silently and mysteriously as they had
come, the treacherous swirls and eddies rolled on, and ten minutes
later--a row of blurred black towers dimly discernible against the
falling curtain of the night,--the Squadron was again in "Line Ahead"
and steaming quietly toward the open sea in its wonted order.
"In its way, this is quite the nastiest bit of water in all the world,"
said Admiral Sturdee, turning from the rail of the bridge with an
expression of relief on his face. "There is a number of places where
the tides run more swiftly than here, but none (in my own experience
at least) where they run in so many directions at the same time. The
waters for miles are a continual succession of giant whirlpools. These
make navigation difficult and uncertain all over the Firth, but in
the zone of the tide-rip (as you have just seen) they are infernal.
Sometimes--even in stormy weather--we go out without having any trouble
whatever at the 'rip'; again, as to-day, with little wind and less sea,
it picks up a squadron of warships aggregating over two hundred thousand
tons in displacement, and shakes them like a terrier worrying a string
of sausages. When it's in this kind of a temper, threading the passages
at the entrance of a South Pacific coral atoll (to most sailors the last
thing in difficult navigation) is like sailing down a countryside canal
in comparison. Have you ever seen anything like it?"
"Never at sea," I replied. "Indeed, the only time--anywhere--I ever saw
waters take such wanton liberties with craft trying to navigate them was
in the White Horse Rapids of the old Klondike route, and those boats
were only twenty or thirty-footers of green whipsawed lumber. But aren't
there certain kinds of weather when it is next to physically impossible
for any kind of a ship to live here? When you get a well-developed gale
blowing against the tide, for instance?"
"Ah, that's the combination that does it," said the Admiral with a grim
smile, turning to go down to the Chart House with the Flag Captain. "You
remember what happened to those two destroyers here in that blow of
eight or ten days ago (only one survivor out of the crews of both), and
you might ask X---- to tell you what befell the old '----' the night she
started out into a storm."
The Flag Lieutenant came and leaned against the rail at my side. "It
must have happened just about where we are now," he said, rubbing a
cinder down into the inner corner of his eye and out on the bridge
of his nose in approved fashion. "The tide-rip may ambush you almost
anywhere inside of here, and--especially if the weather is thick--you
are lucky if your ship doesn't end up somewhere along the forty or fifty
miles of cliffy coast that hems in this accursed pocket of water. The
old '----' did not go ashore, but her case is notable as being probably
the worst bit of bashing a battleship ever had from seas alone.
"She was going out by herself--bound for the Mediterranean, if I
remember rightly--and what happened is probably largely due to the fact
that they drove her, with the tide, into the teeth of the storm (perhaps
to get out where there was more sea-room as quickly as possible) instead
of slowing down and taking it easy, as we would be inclined to do now,
even with ships a good deal bigger and more powerful. Most of these
things have to be learned by experience, and if the '----' hadn't
learned the lesson and paid the price, probably one of the others of us
would have had to.
"At any rate, she bucked right into a mountain of a wave that swept her
with hundreds--perhaps thousands--of tons of solid green water. When it
had passed, her bridges and superstructures--everything, indeed, but her
mast and turrets--was crushed down and carried away. A number of men
went over the side with the wreckage, and most of those above decks not
carried away were killed. The Captain was picked up on the quarterdeck,
alive but with his legs broken. Nothing but a battleship could have
survived such a blow, though it is quite possible that a more buoyant
craft would have ridden higher over the wave and so shipped less solid
water. I have seen a good many warships that have dragged themselves
back to port after a battle, but never a one that presented such a sight
as the poor old '----' did when she limped home the morning after the
night before. She is still in commission, I believe, but there can't
be an unreplaced rivet in her that doesn't have a crook in its neck to
remind it that something hit her that night in Pentland Firth."
The Flag Lieutenant turned his glass for a moment toward a succession of
flashes, in which a destroyer was pouring out its troubles to us from
the outer darkness, and then leaned back on the rail again. "It would
be hard to say whether the Firth is really our worst enemy or our best
friend," he resumed presently. "There is a good deal to be said on both
sides. First and last, it has probably bashed us about a good deal more
than the Hun has; but, at the same time, there is no use denying that it
has prevented him from making us a good deal of trouble he might have
made if there had been an ordinary respectable sheet of water running
right up to the front door of our refuge.
"In the first year of the war we used to let off guns at periscopes
and the wash of conning towers every few days in the Firth, and the
very enterprising U-boat to which they were supposed to belong came
to be known by the nickname of the _Pentland Pincher_. Before very
long, however, we learned that the supposed periscopes were only the
necks of swimming cormorants, and the 'conning tower washes' certain
characteristic little humps of Pentlandesque waves. We also learned--in
one way or another--that a U-boat would have about as much chance of
running submerged through one of those googly tide-rips as it would
have of ascending the Thames to London, while for it to go down and
try to rest on the bottom would be about like a Zeppelin trying to
come to roost among the splintered peaks of the Dolomites. Indeed, the
best way for you to visualise the bottom of Pentland Firth is to think
how the Bernese Oberland looks from the summit of the Matterhorn. It
is the currents of the Atlantic and the North Sea rendezvousing over
such a bottom which makes the Pentland Firth what is probably the most
temperamental bit of water in the Seven Seas."
With scarcely a motion, save the quiet insistent urge of the spinning
turbines--something sensed rather than felt, save in the after part of
the ship--we ploughed on into a night that required small effort to
fancy as filched from a Mediterranean April or a North Pacific June. The
breeze--no more than a zephyr purring contentedly over our starboard
quarter--was redolent with the "landsy" smell of the North Scottish
hills, and the indolent ebony billow heaving in from the North Sea had
just enough energy to rise with a friendly swish and blink blandly up at
us through the "eye-holes" of the hawse-pipes.
"We're watching you," those transient foam flashes seemed to signal,
"but we're not going to try to do anything to disturb you, leastways not
to-night. Might just as well make a stand-easy of your watch."
It must have been the almost tropical mildness of the night which turned
the Admiral's mind, after he had rejoined us on the bridge, back to
his days in the South Seas. Leaning lightly on the rail, and with only
an occasional step aside for a squint at the soft round glow of the
binnacle, or a swift glance to where barely discernible flashes of white
revealed the bow-wave and wake of a screening destroyer, he spoke of
the stirring events of ninety-nine when, commanding H.M.S. _Porpoise_,
and weeks away from the nearest cable, he had co-operated with the
American naval forces there in an endeavour to save the Samoas from the
grip of a far extended tentacle of the German octopus, already stirring
in its slime and reaching outwards to fasten its hold upon any of the
desperately desired "sun-places" its suckers might encounter.
On a later occasion Admiral Sturdee narrated at length the events of
the astonishing drama that was played out by the reef and palm of fair
Apia, and dwelt on the significance which attached to them in the
light of later developments; but for the moment--under the influence
of this "maverick" of a tropic night that had strayed into a North
Sea January--it was of the softer side of the idyllic South Pacific
existence that he spoke. The Chief Navigating Officer, who had once
been in a cruiser on the Australian station, came and joined us when
his watch was over, and for an hour--or was it two or three?--we
talked of _siva-sivas_ and _hulas_, of swims with the village maidens
in the pool under the sliding waterfall of Papa-sea; of moonlight
dances under the coco-palms of Tutuila, of _kava_ drinking and _luaus_
of hot-stone-roasted sucking pig; of missionaries, traders, and
"black-birders"; of Stevenson, Louis Becke, and "Bully" Hayes; of the
thousand and one customs and characters, dangers and delights, that go
to complete the idyll in those sensuous latitudes fanned by the perfumed
breath of the South-East "Trade."
The Admiral was just telling of his youthful embarrassment the first
time the _taupo_ or village maiden of Apia insisted on encircling his
neck with the same fragrant garland of _Tiare Tahiti_ which was looped
around her own, when a signal was brought him by the Flag Lieutenant.
He read it by the reflected light from the binnacle, grinned amusedly,
and handed it to the Flag Captain. The ripple of a quick smile ran over
the grave countenance of the latter, and the play of light and shadow on
two or three other faces which pushed into the pale glow of the binnacle
seemed to indicate that the signal was something out of the regular
routine orders. Presently the Admiral beckoned me inside the glassed-in
bridge cabin and handed me the sheet of white paper. This, as nearly as
may be set down, was what I read.
"S.N.O. at ---- reports unusual sound in hydrophones. Supposed to be
hostile submarine ---- miles S.E. of ---- Island."
"---- miles sou'-east of ---- Island," mused the Admiral. "H'm. Just
about the position of the Squadron at the present moment. H'm.... Think
I may as well go down and get a few hours' sleep. Have to turn out early
in the morning. Be sure and be up here at daybreak," he added, turning
to me. "Perhaps you'll find the sea will not be quite as empty then as
it seems to be to-night."
Giving my arm a friendly squeeze in passing, he disappeared down the
ladder, followed by his Flag Lieutenant.
"The Admiral doesn't appear to be much disturbed about that U-boat we
are supposed to be steaming over," I remarked to the Commander, who had
come up a few minutes previously.
"What U-boat?" he asked. "Oh, the one in the signal. Well, hardly. He
knows by long experience that the average U-boat skipper won't take any
risks he can avoid with a warship behind a destroyer screen, especially
where there is a chance of throwing his mouldies into some merchantmen
and drowning a lot of women and children. There is only one thing the
Hun is more careful about than his torpedoes, and that is his own thick
hide."
The waning moon had risen just before midnight, and my last look round
before turning in revealed, to port, one line of destroyers--swift,
blue-grey arrows--shooting smoothly along in the light of it, and, to
starboard, another line of dark shadows silhouetted against the silvered
waters to the south-east, with the leader cutting a fluent furrow across
the moon-track itself.
The "To-ra-loo" of the imperious call to "Action Stations" awoke me
before dawn on the following morning, and it was through a tangle of
men, hammocks, and unreeling fire-hose, and in the bedlam of clanging
water-tight doors and the banging of hurrying feet upon steel ladders,
that I wriggled forward and upward toward the fore bridge. The sharp
blast which cut my face as I emerged upon the boat deck gave warning
that the weather had indulged in one of its sudden overnight changes,
and that the day would be one of characteristic North Sea rawness.
Ducking through a fluttering string of mounting bunting on the signal
bridge, I gained the next ladder and came out upon the fore bridge, with
an open view before me at last.
Early as it was, Admiral Sturdee was there before me, and wearing no
more protection against the penetrating cold than was afforded by an
ordinary service cap and uniform, a short overcoat, and a light pair
of overshoes. In contrast, I felt almost ashamed of the ponderous
duffle coat--a half-inch thick of solid wool, and equipped with a heavy
hood--with which I had fortified myself against the weather.
"You're just in time," he greeted me cheerily with. "Come and look who's
here."
It was an ashen grey morning, with a low mist just beginning to thin
into luminous strata in the light of the rising sun. Overhead it was
clear, with indications good for a brightening all around before long.
At first I was conscious of only the ships of our own Squadron, with
those of the Second Division steaming hard to close up the "night
interval" between them and those of the First. Then, abeam to port, I
espied a similar line, and beyond that another and still another. And
farther still, slipping ghostily along in the depths of the retreating
mist, was even another line.
"Shades of Father Neptune!" I gasped. "Do they go on into the Skager
Rak? Where did they all come from?"
The Admiral smiled, led me over to the starboard side, and pointed to
where, dimly discernible against the smoke pall with which they had
smudged the immaculate south-eastern heavens, but still unmistakable,
was a file of great ships driving hard to push up to their appointed
station.
"Some of them have come a long way,"[B] he said, with a twinkle in his
steady grey eye, "but we're all the gladder to have them here. As for
the others," he went on, going back to the port side, "we're almost at
the extreme right of our present formation, and, until the sun licks up
a bit more of this mist, you will not be able to see more than halfway
across the Battle Fleet, to say nothing of the battle cruisers and all
the other ships that are out to-day. It's far from being a favourable
morning on which to have your first view of the Grand Fleet at sea;
just about the same shifting sort of visibility, indeed, that we had at
Jutland."
"It may be so," I assented; "yet to me there is a suggestion of
going-on-to-the-ends-of-the-earth in the way those farthest lines melt
into the mist that would be quite absent if it was clear enough really
to see the last of them. As it is, it takes no effort at all of the
imagination to fancy those lines going on, and on, and on, into the
farthest bight of the farthest sea in which their power is felt. I
wouldn't have a clear horizon for the world to-day. The Grand Fleet will
never be so big to me as it is this morning. I know just how big it is
(for I've learned the names of all its units, ship by ship), and I know
just about how much sea it takes up (for I've looked down on the whole
of it from a 'kite' at Scapa); but to-day--to me--it reaches to the
ends of the Seven Seas, and I don't want any shifting of the scenery to
destroy my illusion."
The Fates were kind, for that mask of luminous mist (though it
interfered considerably with the effectiveness of the "P.Z." as an
exercise) did not clear away sufficiently during all the time we were
out to make it possible to see, from even the loftiest vantage, the
whole of the Fleet at one time. So that first illusion still holds,
and so strongly that I cannot visualise it--even to-day, many weeks
after--without a catch in my breath and a "choky" feeling in the throat.
I have seen "all the way across" the Grand Fleet several times in the
interim, and once I have been with it when it tore across the North
Sea on what appeared the hottest kind of a scent; and yet--that first
impression has kept a place all its own.
Straight on eastward pressed the swiftly steaming Fleet, straight
on into the alternately advancing and receding mist wall, until the
snowbirds from the "other side"--wind-blown victims of the capricious
shift of weather--were fluttering about our bows, and the blurred
outline of what appeared to be a rocky coast rose distantly in the
smother ahead. Then, at a signal from the Flagship, we turned ten or a
dozen points and stood away to the south on a course that might lead
anywhere from the Skager Rak to Heligoland Bight. _That_ manoeuvre
would have been a sight for a clear to-day, and to be followed from
a balloon, if one were to have his choice of vantages. A hundred
ships--more or less--were steering steadily on one course. Suddenly a
string of multi-coloured bunting breaks out beside the half-blurred
blue-black tower of a unit steaming somewhere toward the middle of the
formation, and instantly the whole great body begins to turn. Vastly
more than a million tons of steel are wheeling in unison at the flutter
of that single signal, and yet in any one ship no more than a few quiet
words down a voice-pipe--orders less loud and no more peremptory than
that with which one would bring his spaniel to heel--have been spoken.
"Steady by compass!" you hear (if you chance to be standing close to the
quiet-voiced Chief Navigating Officer bending above the binnacle); and
presently, "Port fifteen!" At practically the same moment those same
orders have been given on the leading battleship of every line, and
round they go together, throwing swirling wakes with short sharp waves
running off their outer curves and transiently smooth patches in the
embrace of the inner ones. When the turn is complete and the leading
ships ploughing the desired course, the laconic "Midships" completes the
brief series of orders.
To a novice the countless destroyers shuttling in every direction
between, ahead, and astern of the turning lines of battleships and
wallowing wildly in the confused welter of conflicting wakes appear
to be wheeling as aimlessly as range cattle "milling" in a blizzard.
In reality their moves are calculated to a nicety, and they turn and
"click" to place with almost the precision of the plungers of the
combination of a safe.
The "flexibility" of the Grand Fleet, in spite of its increasing
size--it has seldom if ever gone to sea but what it was stronger by many
thousands of tons than when it last emerged--is a source of never-ending
wonder to one to whom it has not become a commonplace by endless
repetition, and the swiftness and ease with which it changes form at the
will of the Commander-in-Chief never fails to remind me of one of those
fascinating wire toys which an ingenious child can push or pull into a
great variety of geometrical shapes. A few points' alteration of course
changes a squadron--or a half dozen of them steaming abreast--into any
desired "Line of Bearing," which might be what would happen in case
it was deemed advisable to start zigzagging to avoid a submarine. A
squadron may go from "Line Ahead" to "Line Abreast" in anywhere from
a few seconds to a few minutes, according to the course the latter is
going to hold, and so on through other formations, simple and complex.
How this works in practice I had a good opportunity to see before we
returned to Base.
The general practice on a "P.Z." for the Grand Fleet is to make a
comprehensive sweep around the North Sea for two or three or four
days, and then--if none of the enemy has been caught up in the net--to
chivy together as large a force as possible of battle cruisers, light
cruisers, and anything else available and have a sham fight with them.
Failing in the former on this occasion, recourse had been had to the
latter, and our Squadron was just getting ready to "open" on some dusky,
mist-masked shapes suspected of being the "enemy," when the incident
occurred to which I have referred.