The U-boat hunters Part 7

"Can he make steam?"

"Yes, sir. Their engineer has two ribs busted in and a piece of shrapnel in his neck and part of his foot shot away. But he's all right. He was lying down when I first saw him, cursing the Germans blue. Then he says: 'Put me on my feet, men.' A couple of oilers put him on his feet. I thought he was going to give orders to make steam, but he only wanted to be stood up so as he could curse the Germans a little better. Lying down interfered with his wind. He rolled it out in one steady stream for ten minutes. He was an Italian, or maybe a Spaniard, and his English wasn't perfect, but he could talk like h.e.l.l. He's all right. He'll get steam up, sir."

By and by they did make steam and begin to move on a course our skipper wigwagged to them. The skipper left the surgeon aboard, and at twenty knots the 352 steamed more circles around the steamer, all lookouts meanwhile skinning their eyes afresh for signs of the sub. We could make out a lot of smoke on the southern horizon. It was the convoy we had left in the morning. An hour later the _Luckenbach_ found her legs.

Our cripple broke no records for speed, but she was making revolutions, and by five o'clock we rejoined the convoy with her alongside.

So here is an eight hours' log for the 352: At nine in the morning she was responding to S O S-ing ninety miles away; at five in the afternoon we had her tucked away for the night in the column.

The tall quartermaster came up on the bridge to stand his watch. We were in our regular position, at the head of the column at twenty knots. He looked back at the fleet. "There you are, Lucky Bag. They must have had you checked up and counted in, a big s.h.i.+p and a three-million-dollar cargo, this morning, and here you are to-night--one they didn't get."

THE DOCTOR TAKES CHARGE

Every American destroyer over here rates a young surgeon. What some of these surgeons don't know about seagoing can be found in about six hundred pages of Knight's "Modern Seamans.h.i.+p," but that does not matter much. Let them look after the casualties; there are capable young naval officers to look after the seagoing end.

Most of these young surgeons have a taste for adventure. If they had not, they would not be over here. The 352 drew one, born and raised in a Southern State. Before coming over here he had viewed the Atlantic once or twice from a distance, which did not quite content him. His ancestors must have crossed that same Atlantic to get to America, and somewhere within him was a high-pitched string that vibrated to every thrill of that same ocean now.

He used to speak of these things in the smoking-room of the King's Hotel here, which is where every destroyer officer comes at least once between cruises to get a--cup of coffee. He would have liked to make a few sea voyages when he was a little younger, but if a fellow is ever going to amount to anything he has to settle down sometime and become a respectable member of society--so his folks were always saying, and so he took up medicine. He liked his profession. A doctor can do a heap of good in a suffering world--especially if people will only let him. But so many people want a young doctor to be experienced before they ever will call him in! "Get experience," they say; and not a doggone one in a dozen'll ever give a fellow any chance to get the experience. "What the most of 'em want is for some one else to give us the experience." He did as well as the next young doctor, but at times he would grow almost melancholy sitting before the smoking-room fire telling of his waiting for business in his home town.

He was not at all melancholy by nature. He could keep the ward-room mess ringing with darky stories on a quiet night in port. His messmates called him Doc; and when the s.h.i.+p was at sea they were all glad to see him on the bridge studying things out. He had plenty of time for that.

In two cruises his only cases were one quartermaster, who got hove across the bridge and broke his nose, and a gunner's mate who broke his leg by being bounced out of his bunk one windy night. They were a disgustingly healthy lot, these destroyer crews.

But he felt pleased just to be out to sea. These high hills of moving water sure did give a little s.h.i.+p heaps of action sometimes. He would watch them from the bridge. He would watch the officer of the watch too, and the man at the wheel, and the lookouts with their eyes skinned for U-boats, and the signal quartermasters balanced on the flying bridge and sending their messages in a jumping sea-way. He would go down to the chart house with the navigator and stand by to pa.s.s him dividers and parallels. He would stop to sigh when he thought that if somebody had only tipped him off in time he might have gone to Annapolis and right now be a young naval officer das.h.i.+ng around on one of these same destroyers. Still, being a surgeon on one of them wasn't too bad. If they had a battle or anything, a s.h.i.+p's doctor wasn't going to be too far away.

It was in his third cruise that the 352 got the S O S which resulted in the rescue of the big steamer spoken of. There had been other S O S's--any number of them--but this time there was something doing for our young doctor. When she signalled that nine of her people had been wounded by sh.e.l.l and shrapnel fire, and the 352's skipper ordered a deck officer and a whale-boat away, he also told Doc to break out his medical gear and go along. Doc already had his surgical gear ready; from the first word of the sh.e.l.ling he had gone below, and now everything was laid out ready for action on the ward-room transom.

Over to the s.h.i.+p they went, all hands in life-vests, and while the deck officer of the 352 was cross-questioning the captain and engineer, and looking around to see how much damage had been done and so on, Doc was rigging up an operating-table between the chart house and the chart deck rail, slinging the table in sort of hammock style so that when the s.h.i.+p rolled she would not roll his patients overboard.

Doc was no mean little operator. The great danger to most of the wounded men was of infection. One after the other, he had his cases up, asked about four questions, had about four looks, and went to it. No knowing that the U-boat might pop up again and try a few more sh.e.l.ls, or that a bulkhead would not give way, or a boiler blow up when they tried to make steam below. No knowing; no.

Up they came to his swinging table, where Doc took a probe, poked into the wound, wrapped cotton around the probe, soaked it in iodine, jabbed it in, twisted it around, swabbed it out, dressed it down, slapped the patient on the chest, said "Next," and did it all over again.

"Next! You'd think it was a blessed barber's shop," Doc heard one of them say. Only he was an officer--by the back of his head Doc knew it--some of them would have told him what they thought of his rapid-fire action. But it was no time for canoodling--it was war, and they were all rated as grown men and so able to stand a few little painful touches.

One terribly wounded patient gave him worry. On him Doc worked with great care. He was working on him, all the others being attended to, when the 352's deck officer came to say that he was going back to the destroyer to report. "The captain of this s.h.i.+p wants to abandon her,"

said the deck officer.

"Abandon s.h.i.+p and we will never be able to get this man I got here now off her--not in this sea, sir," said Doc. "And if he's left alone for two hours, he'll sure die."

"I'll signal what the skipper says." The officer went off with his crew in the whale-boat, leaving a hospital steward and a signal quartermaster to stay with the doctor.

Doc was working away on his hard case when his quartermaster came to say that the 352 had signalled that they were to stay aboard and that the steamer was to get under way and steer a course south half east magnetic.

The doctor, without looking up, said: "All right."

"Shall I tell the steamer's captain, sir?"

This time Doc looked up. "Why, of course, tell him. Why not? Why do you ask me that?"

"You are the ranking naval officer aboard here, sir. I take orders from you now, sir."

For about four seconds Doc neglected his patient. That was so; so he was.

"Yes, tell the captain."

The quartermaster ran up the bridge ladder. Doc gazed over the chart-rail down to the deck, up and around on the s.h.i.+p. "Doggone!" he breathed. "I am the ranking--I'm the only naval officer present." Then he shook his head and bent to his patient. He might have the rank, but the last thing he was going to do was to b.u.t.t in on any regular s.h.i.+p's officers.

The disabled s.h.i.+p went on to her new course, south half east magnetic, with the destroyer steaming twenty-knot circles around her. And late in the afternoon they made the convoy. By night she was tucked in the rear of twenty other s.h.i.+ps, the doctor and his emergency staff still aboard.

They were to remain aboard until the steamer made port.

That same night something happened. On the steamer they did not know just what it was. They saw a column of white, a column of black--those who happened to be looking--another column of white, from the big s.h.i.+p of the fleet. And then dark came. There were radios flying about, but they were code messages and the radio man could not decode them because the first thing the steamer captain had done that morning when it looked as though the U-boat was going to make them take to the boats was to heave the code-books overboard. In the morning they would know.

Morning came, but with it not a s.h.i.+p in sight. Of twenty s.h.i.+ps and a group of destroyers the night before, not one now. It was his signal-officer who thought it out first. "U-boats thick last night, sir, and the convoy must 'a' got orders to disperse or else change course,"

he said to the doctor.

"That sounds like good dope to me too." He turned to the steamer's captain. "Where were you bound, sir?"

"To Havre."

The doctor could see nothing else but to proceed to Havre, and on a zigzag course. The old captain did not know about the zigzagging; he had never done any zigzagging and did not know why he should now--besides, it mixed his reckoning all up.

The doctor said he would fix the zigzagging part of it, and, telling his hospital steward to have a special eye out for the very sick man, went into the chart house and proceeded to explain the zigzagging stuff. He paused to recall all he had ever learned while elbowing the 352's navigator over the chart-table; also the answers he had got to his questions while so doing.

You steer 45 degrees off the course you really want to make for so many minutes and then you steer 90 degrees from that for the same number of minutes back toward the course you really want to make--see, so--and that gives so many minutes to the good--see. That was one way.

"How many minutes?" asked the captain.

Doc had to stop and think that over. "Twice the square of the total minutes--no, no. Take twice the sum of the squares of the minutes on the two legs--and get the square root and then you have the hypothenuse of the two sides of the triangle; that is, you have the number of minutes'

steaming you make good on your real course."

The old skipper knew nothing of square roots or hypothenuses or anything that looked like 'em, and he had always laid his course out by compa.s.s points.

"All right," said Doc, and after a while laid out the zigzag courses in compa.s.s points.

The old fellow did not quite like it, so all that day Doc alternated between his bad patient and the bridge to keep the skipper rea.s.sured about the zigzagging. Also he urged the crew to have a special watch out for U-boats.

That night Doc and the seasoned signal quartermaster stood alternate watches on the bridge. Doc would take a nap; the quartermaster would take a nap; between them they were figuring to keep a sort of official navy lookout. There were s.h.i.+p's crew men on the lookout too, but the reaction from the sh.e.l.ling had set in. Doc used to find them asleep in the bridge wings.

Just before dawn of the second morning Doc saw a shadow looming on their starboard bow. He had another look. It was another steamer--a big one.

She was drawing nearer. "See that?" he called to the man at the wheel.

"See what?" sort of drowsed out the man at the wheel.

The trusty quartermaster from the 352 was getting a wink under the bridge-rail. Doc yelled to him, at the same time grabbing up the megaphone and roaring into the night air: "Where you-all going? Where the devil you-all going? Can't you-all see where you're going? Keep off--keep off."