"tuning" up on the launching-stage, the ship is swung dead into the
teeth of the wind and put at full speed. This matter of wind direction
is very important, for its variation by a fraction of a point from
"head-on" may easily make a crooked run and a fluky launching. As
the latter would almost inevitably mean that both plane and pilot
must be churned under the swiftly advancing fore-foot of the ship, no
precautions calculated to avoid it are omitted. Besides a wind-pennant
at one end of the bridge, assurance is made doubly sure by the turning
on of a jet of steam in the mathematical centre of the extreme tip of
the launching-stage. When the back-blown steam streams straight along
the middle plank of the stage, the wind is "right."
The captain, from the bridge, lifts a small white flag as a signal to
the wing-commander that all is ready. The latter nods to the pilot, who
starts his engine at full speed, while two mechanicians, braced against
cleats on the deck, hold back the tugging seaplane. If the "tone" of the
engine is right, the wing-commander (standing in front of the plane, and
a little to one side) brings down his red-and-yellow flag, with a sharp
jerk, falls on his face to avoid a collision, and the machine, freed
from the grip of the men holding it, jumps away. The next two seconds
tell the tale, for if a seaplane "gets off the deck" properly, the rest
of its flight is not likely to be "eventful."
At practice, a seaplane sails over and drops its detachable wheels near
a waiting drifter, which picks them up and returns them to the ship.
The machine swoops low, and "kicks" loose the "spares" at a hundred
feet or less above the surface of the water, and a pilot who let his
wheels go from a considerably greater altitude drew a growl from the
bridge, as a long fall is likely to injure them. Its flight over, a
seaplane returns to the ship by alighting on the water several hundred
yards astern, and floundering up alongside as best it can. With a high
wind and a choppy sea, it is rough work. The machine is so "balanced"
that its tractor propeller should revolve in the air and clear the
water by several inches, even in a rough sea. It will occasionally
strike into "green water," however, which is always likely to shatter
the ends of the blades, if nothing else. The sheathing of the blades
with metal affords considerable protection, though a certain risk is
always present. The operation of picking a seaplane up and hoisting it
inboard is a nice piece of seamanship at best, but in bad weather is a
practicable impossibility. With a wind much above thirty miles an hour,
indeed, only a very real need is likely to induce a "mother ship" to
loose her birds from the home nest. With a sea too rough to make it
possible for a seaplane to live in it, it is sometimes possible to carry
on imperative reconnaisance by sending up an ordinary aeroplane (some of
which are always carried); though the latter must, of course, make its
landing on _terra firma_ when its work is over.
The wind had been freshening considerably all afternoon, but with no
more than thirty miles an hour showing on the indicator, there was no
reason for not letting me have my "balloon ride."
As the time approached for its ascent, the balloon was allowed to rise
far enough from the deck to permit its car to be pushed underneath the
centre of it, in order that the latter might not be dragged in the
"getaway." I could now see that the monster had rather the form of the
"bag" of an airship than the "silkworm-with-stomach-cramps" shape of
the regulation modern observation balloon. Its nose was less blunt than
that of the "sausage," and the ropes were attached so that it would be
pulled with that nose boring straight into the wind, instead of tilted
upwards like that of its army prototype. The three "stabilisers" at its
stern were located, and appeared to function, similarly with those of
the "sausage."
The basket was mid-waist deep, and just big enough to hold comfortably
two men sitting on the strips of canvas which served as seats.
Supplementing our jackets, two small life-preservers of the ordinary
type were lashed to the inside of the basket. When I asked about
parachutes, I was told that, while it was customary to carry them, on
this occasion--as they were worse than useless to a man who had not
practised with them--it was best not to bother myself with one. "Stick
to the basket if anything happens," some one said; "it will float for
a month, even if full of water." Some one else admonished not to blow
up my jacket until we had stopped rising, lest it (from the expanding
air, I suppose) should in turn blow me up. Then we were off. The last
thing I noticed on the deck was the ship's cat, which I had observed a
few moments previously rubbing his arched back ecstatically against a
sagging "stabiliser," making a wild leap to catch one of the trailing
guide-ropes.
"He always does that," I heard my companion saying behind me. "Some day
perhaps he will catch it, and then--if it happens at a time when there
isn't an opportunity to wind in and let him down easy--I'm afraid there
won't be a one of his nine lives left in the little furry pancake it
will make of him when he hits the water. It's surprising how the water
will flatten out a--anything striking it at the end of a thousand feet
fall. Only the week before last----"
To deflect the conversation to more cheering channels, I began to
exclaim about the view. And what a view it was! The old _Xerxes_ was
lying well down towards one end of the mighty bay, so that without
turning the head one could sweep the eyes over the single greatest
unit of far-reaching might in the whole world war, the Grand Fleet of
the British Navy. And in no other way than in ascending in a balloon
or a flying machine could one attain a vantage from which the whole of
the fleet could be seen. Looking from the loftiest fore-top, from the
highest hill of the islands, there was always a point in the distance
beyond which there was simply an amorphous slaty blur of ships melting
into the loom of the encircling land. But now those mysterious blurs
were crystallising into definite lines of cleavage, and soon--save
where some especially fantastic trick of camouflage made one ship look
like two in collision, or played some other equally scurvy trick on the
vision--I could pick out not only battleships, but cruisers, destroyers,
submarines, ranged class by class and row on row. Even the method in
the apparent madness with which the swarms of supply ships, colliers,
oilers, trawlers, and drifters were scattered about was discernible.
Save for the visibility, which was diamond-clear in the slanting light
of the low-hanging winter sun, it was just an ordinary, average Grand
Fleet day. A squadron of battleships was at target practice, and--even
better than their own gunnery officers--we could tally the foam-jets
of the "wides" and "shorts" and the narrowing "straddles." A squadron
of visiting battle-cruisers had just come to anchor and were swinging
lazily round to the tide. Two of them bore names which had echoed to
the ends of the world; the names of two of the others--from their
distinctive lines and great size, I recognised them as twin giants I had
seen still in the slips on the Clyde scarcely a year previously--the
world has never heard. A lean, swift scout-cruiser, with an absence of
effort almost uncanny, was cleaving its way out toward the entrance
just as a line of destroyers came scurrying in after the rolling
smoke-pall the following wind was driving on ahead of them. Out over
the open seas to the east, across the hill-tops of the islands, dim
bituminous dabs on the horizon heralded the return of a battleship
squadron, the unceremonious departure of which two days previously had
deprived me of the last two courses of my luncheon. In the air was
another "kite"--floating indolently above a battleship at anchor--and
a half-dozen circling aeroplanes and seaplanes. Countless drifters and
launches shuttled in and out through the evenly lined warships.
We were now towing with the cable forming an angle of about sixty
degrees with the surface of the water, and running up to us straight
over the port quarter. The ship had thinned down to an astonishingly
slender sliver, not unsuggestive of a speeding arrow whose feathered
shaft was represented by the foaming wake.
"She's three or four points off the wind," commented my companion, "and
yet--once we've steadied down--you see it doesn't make much difference
in the weather we make of it. A head wind is desirable in getting up
to keep from fouling the upper works amidships, but we hardly need to
figure it down to the last degree as in launching a seaplane. When we're
really trying to find something, of course, we have to work in any slant
of wind that happens to be blowing. The worst condition is a wind from
anywhere abaft the beam, blowing at a faster rate than the towing ship
is moving through the water. In that case, the balloon simply drifts
ahead to the end of its tether, swings around, and gives the ship a tow.
If the wind is strong enough--say, forty miles an hour, with the ship
doing twenty--to make her give a good steady pull on the cable, it is
not so bad; but when it is touch-and-go between ship and wind the poor
old 'kite' is all over the shop, and about as difficult to work in as to
ride in--which is saying a good deal."
"What do you mean by work?" I asked.
"Looking out for things and reporting them to the ship over the
telephone," was the reply. "Perhaps even trying to run them down and
destroy them."
"Can't we play at a bit of work now?" I suggested. "Supposing we were at
sea, and you saw what you thought to be the wake of the periscope of a
U-boat a few miles away. What would you do?"
My companion laughed. "Well," he said, "if I had the old _Xerxes_ down
there on the other end of the string, I should simply report the bearing
and approximate distance of the periscope over the telephone, and let
her do the rest."
"And what would 'the rest' consist of?" I asked.
"Principally of turning tail and running at top speed for the nearest
protected waters," was the reply, "and incidentally 'broad-casting' a
wireless giving position of the U-boat and the direction it was moving
in."
"But supposing it was a destroyer we had 'on the string'?" I persisted;
"and that you had no other present interest in the world beyond the
finding of one of these little V-shaped ripples. The _modus operandi_
would vary a bit in that case, wouldn't it?"
"Radically," he admitted. "I would give the destroyer what I figured
was the shortest possible course to bring her into the vicinity of
the U-boat. As long as the wake of the periscope was visible, I would
correct that course from time to time by ordering so many degrees to
port or to starboard, as the case might be. As soon as the periscope
disappeared--which it would do, of course, just as soon as the eye at
the bottom of it saw the 'kite'--I would merely make a guess at the
submarine's most likely course, and steer the destroyer to converge
with that. Our success or failure would then hinge upon whether or not
I could get my eye on the submarine where it lurked or was making off
under water. In that event--provided only there was enough light left
to work with--it would be long odds against that U-boat ever seeing
Wilhelmshaven again. Just as you guide a horse by turning it to left or
right at the tug of a rein, so, by giving the destroyer a course, now
to one side, now to the other, until it was headed straight over its
prey, I would guide the craft at the other end of the telephone-wire to
a point from which a depth-charge could be dropped with telling effect.
If the conditions were favourable, I might even be able to form a rough
estimate of the distance of the U-boat beneath the surface, to help in
setting the hydrostat of the charge to explode at the proper depth. If
the first shot fails to do the business, we have only to double back
and let off another. Nothing but the coming of night or of a storm is
likely to save that U-boat once we've spotted it."
"Is it difficult to pick up a submarine under water?" I asked.
"That depends largely upon the light and the amount of sea running,"
was the reply. "Conditions are by no means so favourable as in the
Mediterranean, but, at the same time, they are much better than in
some other parts of the North Sea and the Atlantic. The condition of
the surface of the water also has a lot to do with it. You can see a
lot deeper when the sea is glassy smooth than when it is even slightly
rippled. Waves tossed up enough to break into white-caps make it still
harder to see far below the surface, while enough wind (as to-day) to
throw a film of foam all over the water cuts off the view completely.
On a smooth day, for instance, a drifter which lies on the bottom
over there--deeper down than a U-boat is likely to go of its own free
will--is fairly clearly defined from this height. To-day you couldn't
find a sunk battleship there."
I remarked on the fact that, in spite of the heavy wind, our basket was
riding more steadily than that of any stationary observation balloon I
had ever been up in at the front. "It 'yaws' a bit," I observed, "but I
have never been up in a balloon with less of that 'jig-a-jig' movement
which makes it so hard to fix an object with your glasses."
"The latest 'stabilisers' have just about eliminated the troublesome
'jig-a-jig,'" replied my companion.
He turned to me with a grin. "You're in luck," he said. "Ship's heading
up into the wind to let a seaplane go just as they're ready to wind us
in. You'll learn, now, why they call one of these balloons a 'kite.'
There they go! Hold fast!"
There was a sudden side-winding jerk, and then that perfectly good
seascape--Grand Fleet, Orkneys, the north end of Scotland, and all--was
hashed up into something full of zigzag lines like a Futuristic
masterpiece or the latest thing in "scientific camouflaging." My
friends on the deck told me, afterwards, that the basket did _not_
"loop-the-loop," that it did _not_ "jump through," "lie down," and "roll
over" like a "clown" terrier in a circus; but how could they, who were
a thousand feet away, know better than I, who was on the spot? When I
put that poser to them, however, one of them replied that it was because
_they_ had their eyes open. The only sympathetic witness I found was
one who admitted that, while the "kite" itself behaved with a good deal
of dignity, the basket _did_ perform some evolutions not unremotely
suggestive of a canvas water-bucket swung on the end of a rope by a
sailor in a hurry for his morning "souse."
COALING THE GRAND FLEET
A signal came one morning, ordering the Grand Fleet to prepare to
proceed to sea, and, almost as though the sparks of the wireless that
caught the winged word had themselves lighted the laid and waiting
fires, wreaths and coils of smoke began crowning some scores of towering
funnels which a few moments before had loomed only in gaunt silhouette
against the round snow-clad hillsides which ring the Northern Base.
Presently a dust-begrimed collier shook herself free from the moorings
which held her to one of the battleships, and, floundering nervously as
though anxious to get out of the way as quickly as possible, nosed off
into the sooty wakes of three of her untidy sisters who had been coaling
the other ships of the division.
Shortly the Engineer-Commander, his immediate duties at an end for the
moment, came up for a breath of fresh air, and fell into step with me on
the quarter-deck.
"There you have (so far as the Navy is concerned) the Alpha and the
Omega of the coal," he said, motioning with his mittened hand, first
toward the retiring colliers, and then, with a sweeping gesture, to
where the thickening smoke-columns were beginning to blend in a murky
stratum of streaky black above the even lines of the anchored ships.
"All the energy (save only human force, and that stored in food and
explosives) of the Fleet comes aboard from its colliers or oilers,"
he continued; "all that is left of it--after making steam to run the
turbines and dynamos, and for working the condensers, cooking, and
heating--goes up through the funnels or down through the clinker
hoppers."
Then he told me of an incident which had occurred a day or two
previously. "Some one came into the wardroom," he said, "and remarked
casually that the wireless had just picked up a signal from a ship about
to go ashore in the heavy storm then driving outside. 'What is she?'
several officers asked with quick concern. 'Only a collier,' was the
reply, and everybody, reassured, resumed the reading of their newly
arrived papers. 'I was afraid it was a destroyer,' was the only comment
any one made.
"That is just to show," said the Engineer-Commander, "how few in a
warship (save those of us whose work is the conversion of it into
energy) stop to think how vitally important coal really is to us. As
a matter of fact, one can easily imagine circumstances in which the
loss of a collier would be far more serious than that of a destroyer,
cruiser, or even of a battleship."
It will doubtless surprise one not already informed in the matter to
know that the average modern battleship lying at anchor and waiting
to be ordered to sea may easily consume twenty-five tons of coal a
day, which figure will be raised from 50 to 100 per cent. by one or
two harbour spins at half or quarter-speed for target practice. The
condensers make the greatest demand for coal in a battleship not under
steam, with the running of dynamos for the numerous and constantly
increasing electrical devices next in order. The galleys where the
cooking and baking is done, are third on the list of consumers, with the
cheery open grates--which are installed wherever practicable--accounting
for the remainder.
The course of the coal from the hold of the collier to where, on the
fire-bars, its potential energy is transformed into kinetic power to
furnish power for a battleship is an interesting one, though I should
not care to follow it quite so closely as did the ring of an officer I
met not long ago. Emerging from the hold of a collier after a couple of
hours spent there directing sack-filling, he missed a large signet-ring
which he had been wearing when he descended into the dusty hole. Search
was, of course, out of the question; but, by a lucky chance, he happened
to mention his loss to one of the men who had been working in the hold.
He, in turn, spoke of it in the mess-decks, which was the only reason
that led the stoker, who, three days later at sea, found a shining
lump of metal among the clinkers he was raking out to dump, to bring
it to the officer in question. The gnarled, ash-pitted lump bore no
resemblance to a ring; but a distorted, but still recognisable, section
of the seal identified it beyond a doubt. It had been shovelled into a
sack of coal, hoisted in the latter to the deck, dumped into a chute,
finally to work out of the bottom of a bunker into the stokehold and
be thrown under the boilers. A man can make the descent from the deck
through an empty bunker to the stokehold without great discomfort, but
would hardly survive being shut up in the former for long with the coal.
The speedy coaling of even an eight-knot tramp is almost always
desirable; with a warship it may often mean the difference between
success and failure. All of the principal navies of the world have
given the matter much study and experiment, but down to this day no
practicable contrivance has been evolved which will go far toward
eliminating the variable human element in coaling. Something can be done
with mechanical carriers where a ship can berth alongside high bunkers,
but nothing of the kind appears to have been devised that is not too
bulky to carry about in either a warship or a collier. The construction
of a warship makes it impracticable to have large openings into which
coal might be hoisted in bulk from a collier. The American Navy coals
its battleships by hoisting that fuel to the decks with huge mechanical
"grabs," but, according to such information as is available to me at
this moment, this method (while effecting a saving in labour), does not
approach for speed records the British have put up by man-handling the
coal at every stage of its transit, except the hoisting.
Since a few minutes' time lost in the putting to sea of the million tons
or so of warships which the British hold in leash against any sally in
force of the German Fleet might easily be enough to spoil the chance
of a decisive engagement, quick coaling has perhaps been given more
attention in the Grand Fleet since the war than at any other time in
the history of the British Navy. The time in which the various classes
of ships can put to sea after receiving orders varies in different
emergencies, and is hardly a proper topic of discussion in any detail.
The coal in the bunkers of no ship is allowed to fall below a very high
fixed minimum at any time, and even ships on special missions at sea
always have enough in hand to allow them to reach and play a vigorous
if tardy part in any conceivable kind of a general engagement that may
ensue. The pursuance of this policy is responsible for the frequent and
speedy coalings which are so much a feature of the regular "grind" at
the Northern Base.
A ship may coal at any hour of the day or night--especially if she is
just in from the sea and there appears to be a chance of her being
called upon to put out again on short notice--but the usual time is the
morning. Barrows and sacks are brought out, and such other preparations
as practicable are made the night before. Breakfast is served at an
early hour, every one--officers and men--coming down to it in their
"coaling togs." The latter may be any old kind of a rig-out calculated
to keep the coal-dust from penetrating to a minimum section of the hide
of the wearer. A one-piece overall is a favourite garment with both
men and officers, and a white summer cap-cover--worn like a cook's
head-dress--serves a useful purpose in keeping the dust out of the
hair. A layer of vaseline about the eyes makes it easier to remove the
dust with soap and water after coaling, and a failure to take this
precaution leaves one with the make-up of a moving-picture villain for
two or three days. Practically all of the officers, with the exception
of the paymasters and medical staff, have duties in connexion with
coaling. Ordinarily, these are confined to directing various stages of
the operation, but occasionally--perhaps to stimulate action when speedy
work is desirable, or for the sheer exhilaration of exercise--one will
take a spell with a shovel or barrow. On several ships of the Grand
Fleet the _Padre_ is one of the most useful "coalers."
The decks are black with waiting men as the collier comes alongside,
and the instant the mooring-lines are made fast several hundred of
them--each with a broad short-handled scoop--clamber over her rail and
leap down into the open holds. Others toss down bundles of the sacks in
which the coal is hoisted aboard. These sacks are a highly important
and distinctive factor in British naval coaling, the ingenious way
in which they are used being largely responsible for the remarkable
speed-records which have been put up. They are made of extremely heavy
jute, bound with light manilla rope, and of a size sufficient to hold
two hundredweight of coal. At the mouth are two beckets or iron rings,
through which the strop is rove. Each sack weighs in the neighbourhood
of 16 lb., even when new; water-soaked and smeared with a paste of
coal-dust, its weight may be increased by from 20 to 50 per cent. Before
the war, the cost of a sack was about 11_s._ 6_d._, but the rise in jute
must have made it much greater at the present time.
The sacks are filled by scoop in the holds of the collier, and dragged
together in bunches of about a dozen each. The wire cable from the
hoisting-boom is run through the rings at the mouth of each sack and
made fast. As the winch winds in, it tightens and takes up the slack,
thus drawing the mouths of the sacks together and preventing the
spilling of coal in hoisting. The instant the sacks are hoisted to the
deck of the warship a man casts loose one end of the wire cable, and on
the swinging back of the whip it is pulled out of the rings, and the
coal left ready for the barrowmen.