Sea-Hounds Part 4

"I was just starting to give the 'T.I.' an account of what I had had a lot better chance to see than he had," he went on thickly, still touching the blisters gingerly with an extended tongue-tip, "when I heard him growl, 'Stand by! here's another one. What speed d'you think she's making?' I was still standing up on top of the tubes, and--to get a better view--right in front of the 'T.I.', with my waist on just about the level of his face. As I turned my head to look at the second Hun he straddled us fair with a full salvo. Most of it went over, but one proj struck right alongside and just about flooded us out. But there was something heavier than water that it sent aboard. I felt a sharp sting across my stomach, as if someone had given me a cut with a whip.

As I put my hand down to it the whole front of my overall dropped away where a fragment of sh.e.l.l casing had shot across it. A few threads--I found out later--had been started on my singlet, but my hide was not even scratched. I heard the 'T.I.' give a yell, and when I looked round saw his face covered with blood, and a flap of skin from his forehead hanging down over one eye like a skye terrier's ear. The piece of proj had caught him a nasty side-swipe, though without hurting anything but his looks in the least. And it wasn't that he was yelling about, either, but at me for not giving him the course and speed of the second cruiser.

He had the flap of skin tied up out of his eye--using a strip of my overall because neither of us could find a handkerchief--by the time I was back at the handle. I saw the blood dribbling over his sights, but he seemed to be seeing through them all right, for he was telling me how to train when I felt the helm begin to grind as it was thrown hard over to make a sudden alteration of course. She heeled fifteen or twenty degrees as she turned six points to starboard, and the boil of her wake flooded across her stern three or four feet deep. The sudden heel threw me off my feet, and I pulled up just in time to see us rus.h.i.+ng by, and just missing by a few yards, a stopped destroyer that was nothing but spurts of fire flas.h.i.+ng under a rolling cloud of steam and smoke.

"She seemed to be afire all over, and about ready to blow up; yet, from the quick flashes of some of the spurts of fire, I knew they came from a hard-pumped gun that some stout-hearted lads were working to the last.

There was nothing in the look of that spouting volcano of smoke and steam that would help a man to tell whether it was a battles.h.i.+p or a trawler, but I knew that it could be only the _Nectar_, our Division leader. We never saw her nor anyone in her again. She must have gone down within a few minutes, and anyone that survived fell into the hands of the enemy. She led us a fine dance while it lasted, and the only pity was that she couldn't trip it to the end.

"That left the old _Nairobi_ as the last of the Division, and I haven't any recollection of any of the rest of the flotilla being in sight by then. Not that I had any time to look for them, though. Our sudden change of course to keep from ramming the _Nectar_ spoiled our chance at the second Hun cruiser, but we were left no time to mourn that any more than the finish of the _Nectar_. Hardly had we left the wreck of her astern than a full salvo of large sh.e.l.ls--I think they must have come from one of the battle cruisers, for they were much heavier than anything the light cruisers were firing--struck only thirty or forty yards short of us. The sh.e.l.ls were bunched together like a salvo of air-bombs kicked loose all at once. The wall of water they threw up shut everything on that side off from sight for a few seconds, and when the spouts settled down there was a Hun destroyer inside of a mile away. I jumped up to give her course and speed to the 'T.I.', but before I had time more than to see that she had two funnels and many tubes the bursting projes from our foremost and mids.h.i.+ps guns began knocking her to pieces so fast that I soon saw there was no use of wasting a mouldie on the job.

"I saw the captain waving encouragement from the bridge to the crew of the mids.h.i.+ps guns, and, when the noise died down for a moment, I heard him shout, 'You've got her! Give it to her!' Just then another salvo was plastered a-straddle of us, and I saw a fragment of sh.e.l.l knock the sight-setter of the mids.h.i.+ps gun out of his seat. He looked a little dazed as he climbed back, but his eye must have been as good as ever, for I saw his next shot make a hit square on a whaler they were lowering from the sinking Hun and blow it to bits. A minute or two more, and the destroyer itself blew up and disappeared under a column of steam and smoke.

"That," continued Prince, beginning to prod anew his neglected sprayers, "just about concluded our day's work. As there was no longer any prospect of getting in mouldie-range of any of the big Huns, and as none of the little Huns were in sight to fight with gun-fire, it must have occurred to the captain that it was time he was rejoining the flotilla.

There was only some dark blurs on the north'ard skyline to steer for at first, and the Huns did all they knew to keep us from getting there, too. For a while we were doing nothing but playing 'hide-and-seek' among the salvoes they tried to stop us with, and I have heard since that the way the captain used his helm to avoid being hit at this stage of the show was rated as about the cleverest work of the kind in the whole battle.

"It was the Fifth B.S.--the _Queen Elizabeth_ cla.s.s--that we caught up to first, and a grand sight it was, the four of them standing up and giving battle to about the whole of the High Sea Fleet. They were taking a heavy pounding without turning a hair, so far as a man could see, and even when the _Warspite_ had her steering gear knocked out and went steaming in circles it didn't seem to upset the other three very much.

We sighted our own Battle Fleet about six, and rejoined the flotilla in good time to be back with the battle cruisers when Beatty took them round the head of the Hun line and only failed to cut off their retreat through night coming on.

"Compared with what the next six or eight hours held for some of our destroyers--or even with what we had just been through ourselves--the night for us was fairly quiet. We were in action once or twice, and I saw several s.h.i.+ps--mostly enemy, but one or two of our own--go up in flame and smoke before I went on watch down here at midnight. But through it all the devil's own luck which had been with us from the first held good. Although we were through the very hottest of the day action, and not the least of the night, the old _Nairobi_ did not receive one direct hit from an enemy sh.e.l.l. She accounted for at least two Hun s.h.i.+ps, saw the other three destroyers of her division sunk or put out of action, and returned to base with almost empty oil tanks and perhaps the largest mileage to her credit of any craft in the Jutland battle--all without a serious casualty or more than a few scratches to her paint. On top of it all, on the way back to harbour, by the queerest fluke you ever heard of, she rammed and exploded the air-chamber of a mouldie that had been fired by a Hun U-boat at the destroyer next in line ahead of her. As the Yanks say, 'Can you beat it?'"

CHAPTER IV

HUNTING

"If it's destroyer work you want, there are five of them getting under weigh at four o'clock," said the "Senior Officer Present," looking at his watch. "You'll have just about time to pick up your luggage and connect if you want to go. I can't tell you what they're going to do--they won't know that themselves till they get to sea, and their orders may be changed from hour to hour, and things may happen to send them to the Channel, France, or to several other places, on and off the chart, before they put in here again. But there'll be work to do--plenty of it. That's the best part of this corner of the North Atlantic in which our Allies have done the American destroyers the honour of setting them on the U-boats. Whatever else you may suffer from, it won't be from ennui." It was luck indeed, on two hours' notice, to have the chance of getting out in just the way I had planned, where I had been quite prepared to stand-by for twice as many days, and I fell in with the arrangement at once.

Captain X---- ran his eye down a board where the names of a number of destroyers were displayed against certain data indicating their whereabouts and disposition. "_Zop_, _Zap_, _Zip_, _Zim_, _Zam_," he read musingly. "_Zip_--yes, I don't think I can do better than send you on the _Zip_. Her skipper is as keen as he is able, and the _Zip_ herself has the reputation of having something of a nose for U-boats on her own account. I'll advise him you're coming. Pick up your sea togs and put off to her as soon as you can. Good luck." The American naval officer, like the British, never says "Good-bye" if it can possibly be avoided.

They were already preparing to unmoor as I clambered over the side of the _Zip_, and by the time I had s.h.i.+fted to sea-boots and oilskins in the captain's cabin--which, unoccupied by himself during that strenuous interval, was to be mine at sea--she was swinging in the stream and nosing out into the creaming wakes of the two of her dazzle-painted sisters who were preceding her down the bay.

There are several things that strike one as different on going to an American wars.h.i.+p after a spell in a British s.h.i.+p of the same cla.s.s, but the one which surges to meet you and goes to your head like wine is the all-pervading spirit of vibrant, sparkling, unquenchable youthfulness.

Everything you see and hear seems to radiate it--every throb of the engines, every beat of the screws--and at first you may almost get the impression that it comes from the s.h.i.+p herself. But when you start to trace it down, you find it bubbles from a single fount, the men, or rather the boys--the lounging, laughing, devil-may-care boys. Theirs the alchemy to transform every one and everything that comes near them into the golden seeming of themselves.

This youthfulness of the American destroyers is in the crew rather than the officers, for the latter--especially the captain and executive--will average, if anything, a shade older than their "opposite numbers" in a British destroyer. There is a certain minimum of highly specialised work in navigating and fighting a destroyer which must be in the hands of officers and men who can have only attained the requisite training in long years of technical study and practical experience. Given these, and the remainder of the s.h.i.+p's company--provided only that they have digestive organs that will continue to function when tilted through a dozen different slants and angles in as many seconds--can be trained to perfection in an astonis.h.i.+ngly short time. Here it is that America has scored, for there is no doubt that the youngsters that have rushed to enrol themselves for her destroyer service are better educated and quicker in mind and body than those available for any other navy in the war. It is the incomparable adaptability these advantages have conspired to give him that has made the Yankee destroyer rating a combination of keenness and efficiency that leaves little, if anything, to be desired on either score.

Here is the way a British naval officer who is familiar with the work of the American destroyer flotilla expressed himself in this connection: "The s.h.i.+p's company of any one of these American destroyers," he said, "will average a good five years younger than that of a British destroyer. Off hand, one would say that this would tell against them, but, as a matter of fact, quite the contrary is the case.

"Given that the command and the technical operations are in the hands of highly trained and fairly serious-minded officers, you can't have too much slapbang, h.e.l.l-for-leather, devil-take-the-consequences spirit in the s.h.i.+p's company. And where will you find that save in the youngsters--tireless, fearless, careless boys. They've found that out in the air services, and we're finding it out in the destroyers. And right there--in these quick-headed, quick-footed super-boys of theirs--is where the Yankee destroyers have the best of us. It is they--working under consummately clever officers--that enabled the American destroyer flotilla to reach in a stride a working efficiency which we had been straining up to for three years."

The green hills astern had turned grey and dissolved in mist and darkness before the captain was able to announce what work was afoot for us. The _Zim_ and _Zam_, it appeared, were to be detached on some mission of their own, while the _Zop_, _Zap_, and _Zip_, after "hunting" submarines for some time, were to proceed to a certain port, pick up the _Lymptania_, and escort her through the danger zone on her westward voyage. The captain was grinning as he finished reading the order. "I can't give you any definite a.s.surance," he said, "that the hunt part of the stunt is going to scare up any U-boats, although the prospects this week are more promising than for some time; but"--he turned his level gaze to the westward, where the in-rolling Atlantic swells were blotting with undulant humps the fading primrose of the narrow strip of after-glow--"if this wind and sea keep the same force and direction for three or four days more, I'll promise you all the excitement your heart can desire when we take on our escort duties. The last time we took out the old _Lymptania_--well, I've got marks on me yet from the corners I got banged up against, and as for the poor little _Zip_--but she's had a refit since and most of the scars have been removed. As you will have ample chance to see for yourself, there isn't a lot of _dolce far niente_ in any of this life we lead in connection with our little game here, but if there is one phase of our activities that is farther removed from 'peace, perfect peace' than any other, it is trying to screen an ex-Atlantic greyhound that is boring at umpty-ump knots into a head wind and sea. Strafing U-boats is a Sunday-school picnic in comparison at any time; but it will be worse this week because they have just put down a couple of big liners, and the skipper of the _Lymptania_, knowing they will be laying for him, will force her like he was trying to get his company the trans-Atlantic mail subsidy. For us to cut zigzags around that kind of a thing--but you'll be able to judge for yourself. I only hope we can catch you a U-boat or two by way of preliminary, so as to lead up to the climax by slow degrees."

Things were fairly comfy that night--that is, as comfort goes in a destroyer. There was a good stiff wind and a good deal more than a lop of sea running; but as both were coming on the quarter and we were plodding along at no great speed, the _Zip_ made very pa.s.sable weather of it. The bridge, save for occasional showers of light spray where a sea slapped over the side, was quite dry, and even on the long run of low deck amids.h.i.+ps there were several havens of refuge where the men off watch could foregather to smoke and yarn without fear of more than an occasional spurt of brine. A dry deck does not chance every day that a destroyer is on business bent at sea, and when it does, like suns.h.i.+ne in Scotland, is a thing to luxuriate in.

As the twilight deepened and melted into the light of a moon that was but a day or two from the full--"bad luck for the _Lymptania_ convoy, that moon," the captain had said as he noted how it was waxing on his chart--I came down from the bridge and worked along from group to group of the sailor men where, lounging and laughing, they sheltered in the lee of funnel and boat and superstructure. The first one I pushed into was centred round a discussion, or rather an argument, between two boys, the one from Kansas and the other from Oklahoma, as to which had raised the best and biggest corn in the course of some sort of growing compet.i.tions they had once taken part in. Several others standing about also appeared to have come from one or other of those fine naval-recruiting States of the Middle West, and seemed to know not a little about intensive maize culture themselves. I was just ingratiating myself with this party by nodding a.s.sent and voicing an emphatic "Sure!"

to one's query of "Some corn that, mister, hey?" when I discovered a cosmopolitan group (two Filipino stewards, the coloured cook, and three or four bluejackets in sleeveless grey sweaters) collaborating in the arduous task of teaching a very sad-faced white mongrel to sit up on his haunches and beg. Or rather it was an elaboration of that cla.s.sic trick.

On drawing nearer I perceived that the lugubrious-visaged canine already had mastered begging for food, and that now they were endeavouring to teach him to beg for mercy. At the order "Kamerad!" instead of sitting with down-drooping paws, he was being instructed to raise the latter above his head and give tongue to a wail of entreaty. He was a brighter pup than his looks would have indicated, and had already become letter perfect in the wail. "Kamerading" properly with uplifted paws, however, was rather too much for his balance, at least while teetering on the edge of a condensed milk case which was itself sliding about the deck of a careening destroyer. The dog had been christened "Ole Oleson," one of the sailors told me, both because he was "some kind of a Swede" and because, like his famous namesake, he had tried to come aboard in "two jumps" the day they found him perched on a bit of wreckage of the Norwegian barque to which he had belonged, and which had been sunk by a U-boat an hour previously. The men seemed to be very fond of him, and I overheard the one who picked him up off the box to make a place for me to sit on, whisper into his c.o.c.ked ear that they were going to try to catch a Hun in the next day or two for him to sharpen his teeth on.

These boys told me a number of stories in connection with the survivors they had rescued, or failed to rescue, from s.h.i.+ps sunk by U-boats. Most of them were the usual accounts of firing on open boats in an attempt to sink without a trace, but there was one piquant recital which revealed the always diverting Hun sense of humour at a new slant. This was displayed, as it chanced, on the occasion of the sinking of "Ole's"

s.h.i.+p, the Norwegian barque. After this unlucky craft had been put down by sh.e.l.l-fire and bombs, the U-boat ran alongside the whaler containing the captain and mate, and they were ordered aboard to be interrogated.

Under the pretence of preventing any attempt to escape on the part of the remainder of those in this boat, the Germans made them clamber up and stand on the narrow steel run-way which serves as the upper deck of a submarine. No sooner were they here, however, than the Hun humorist on the bridge began slowly submerging. When the water was lapping round the necks of the unfortunate Norwegians, and just threatening to engulf them, the nose of the U-boat was slanted up again, this finely finessed operation being repeated during all of the time that the captain and mate were being pumped below by the commander of the submarine. No great harm--save that one of the sailors, losing his nerve when the U-boat started down the first time, dived over, struck his head on one of the bow-rudders and was drowned--was done by this little pleasantry, but it is so illuminative of what the Hun is in his lightsome moods that I have thought it worth setting down.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "KAMERADING" WITH UPLIFTED PAWS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HELPING THE COOK TO PEEL POTATOES]

The American is more violent in his feelings than the Briton, and much more inclined to say what he thinks; and I found these boys--to use the expressive phrase of one of them--"mad clean through" at the Hun pirate and all he stands for. America--with more time to do that sort of thing--has undoubtedly gone farther than any other country in the war in trying to give her soldiers and sailors a proper idea of the beast they have been sent out to slay. These lessons seem to have sunk home with all of them, and when it has been supplemented--as in the case of the sailors in the destroyers--by the first-hand teachings of the Huns themselves, it generally leaves a man in something like the proper state of mind for the task in hand. Not that I really think any of the Americans, when they have the chance, as happens every now and then, will carry out all the little plans they claim to be maturing, but--well, if I was an exponent of the U-boat branch of German kultur, and my _unterseeboot_ was depth-charged by a British and an American destroyer, and I came sputtering up to the surface midway between them, I don't think I would strike out for the lifebuoy trailing over the quarter of the one flying the Stars and Stripes. I may be wrong, but somehow I have the feeling that the Briton--be he soldier, sailor, or civilian--hasn't quite the same capacity as the Yank for keeping up the temperature of his pa.s.sion, for feeling "mad clean through."

Joining another group bunched in the lee of a tier of meat-safes, I chanced upon a debate which threw an illuminative beam on the feelings of what might once have been cla.s.sified as hyphenated Americans. At first the whole six or eight of them, in all harmony and unanimity, had been engaged in cursing Sinn Feiners, with whom it appeared they had been having considerable contact--physical and otherwise--in the course of the last few months. Then one of the more rabid of them on this particular subject--he and one of his mates had been waylaid and beaten by a dozen hulking young Irishmen who resented the attentions the Yankees were receiving from the local girls--threw a bone of dissension into the ring by declaring that a Sinn Feiner was as bad as a Hun and ought to be treated the same way.

The most of them could hardly bring themselves to agree to this, but in the rather mixed argument which followed it transpired that the lad who had led the attack on Sinn Fein was named Morarity and had been born in Cork, and that the one who maintained that nothing on two legs, not even a Sinn Feiner, was as "ornery as a Hun," was named Steinholz, and had been born in St. Louis of German parents.

The wherefore of this they explained to me severally presently, when it turned out that their views--as regards their duties as Americans--were precisely similar. Like all good Yankees, they said, they had it in for both the Hun and the Sinn Feiner; but, because each of them had a _name_ to live down, he felt it inc.u.mbent on himself to out-strafe his mates in the direction from which that name came. It was a bit nave, that confession, but at the same time highly instructive; and I wouldn't care to be the Hun or Sinn Feiner that either of those ex-hyphenates had a fair chance at.

A very domestic little party I found cuddled up aft among the depth-charges. One lad--he had been a freshman at Cornell, I learned later, and would not wait to train for a commission, so keen had he been to get into the war--was just back from a week's leave in London, and was telling about it with much circ.u.mstance. There were many things that had interested and amused him, but the great experience had been three days spent as a guest in an English home at Wimbledon. The head of the family, it appeared, was some kind of a City man, and, encountering the doubtless aimlessly wandering Yank at Waterloo, had forthwith carried him home. Everything had bristled with interest for the young visitor, from the marmalade at breakfast and the port at dinner to croquet on the lawn and a punt on the Thames at Richmond. But the best of it all had been that he had brought a standing invitation from the same family to any of his mates who might be coming up to London while the war was on.

During the refit, which was supposed to be imminent, two of these, who had plumped for the great London adventure, had screwed up their courage to following up the invitation to the hospitable home in question. Out of his broader experience, their worldly mate was tipping them off against possible breakers. This is the only one I remember: "You'll find," he said, gesturing with an admonitory finger that could just be dimly guessed against the phosph.o.r.escence of the tossing wake, "that they don't seem to have any great grudge 'gainst us for licking them and going on our own in '76; but go easy on rubbing it in just the same, 'cause you're a guest in the house. Best forget the Revolution while you're over here. That sc.r.a.p was more'n a hundred years ago, and we've got another on now. Half the people you meet here never heard of it, anyhow, and when you mention it to them they think you refer to another Revolution in France which came off about the same time."

It was at about this juncture that a change of course brought seas which had been quartering a couple of points forward of the beam, and in a jiffy the swift spurts of brine had searched out the last dry corner of the deck and sent scurrying to shelter every man who had not a watch to stand. Three times I was completely drenched in groping forward from the after-superstructure to the ward-room, under the bridge, so that I was a good deal inclined to take it as a joke--and a rather ill-timed one at that--when an ensign about to turn in on one of the transoms muttered something about being thankful that we were going to have _one_ quiet night when a man could s.n.a.t.c.h a wink of sleep. I asked him if he referred to the night we expected to be in port waiting for the _Lymptania_, but the fact that he had already dozed off proved that he really had not been trying to be funny at my expense. Indeed, it was a fairly quiet night, as nights go in destroyers; but, even so, I needed a good high sideboard to keep from rolling out of the captain's bunk, and then two sofa pillows and my overcoat to keep from pulping my shoulder against the sideboard.

We were still sliding easily along at the same comfortable umpteen knots in the morning, but with the breaking of the new day a subtle change had come over the spirit of the s.h.i.+p. It was just such a change as one might observe in a hunter as he pa.s.ses from a plain, where there is little cover, to a wood where every tree and bush may hide potential quarry.

And that, indeed, was precisely the way it was with us. The night before we were "on our way"; this morning we were ploughing waters where U-boats were _known_ to be operating. It was only a couple of days previously that the good old _Carpathia_ had been put down, and not many hours had pa.s.sed since then but what brought word, by one or another of the almost countless ways that have been devised to trace them, of an enemy submarine working in those waters. We were ready enough the night before, ready for anything that might have turned up; but this morning we were more than that.

There was a new tenseness now, and a feeling in the air like that which follows the click-click after a trigger is set to "hair." It was as though everyone, everything, even the good little _Zip_ herself, was crouched for a spring.

There was an amusing little incident I chanced to see which ill.u.s.trates the keenness of the spirit animating the men even in the moments of waiting. A favourable course had left the deck unswept by water for an hour, and a half-dozen boys, off watch, but too restless to turn in, were trying to kill time by helping the cook peel potatoes. It was one of these whom I saw stand up, take several swift strides forward across the reeling deck, draw a rag from the pocket of his "jeans," and then, with great care and deliberation, begin to polish a patch of steel plate that was exposed in the angle of two strips of coco-matting. "Wha' cher holystoning deck yetawhile fer, Pete?" one of his mates shouted.

"Can'cher wait till we gets back to port? We may have to foul your pretty work with greasy Huns any minnit." Unperturbed, Pete went right on rubbing, testing the footing every now and then with the sole of his boot. Only when the job, whatever it was, was done to suit his fastidious taste did he return to his seat on the reversed water-bucket and start peeling potatoes again. Not till a full dozen or more neatly skinned Murphies had pa.s.sed under his knife did he vouchsafe to reply to the half-curious, half-pitying looks and remarks his mates had continued to direct at him. Then his explanation was as crus.h.i.+ng as complete.

"It don't look much as if you guys wants to get a Hun," he observed finally, running a critical eye over them. "Oh, you do, do you? My mistake. Well, then, don't try to be funny with another guy that's doing his best to effect that same good end. Now looka here. From where I sits to my gun-station is just six steps. Six for me, I mean; it'd be more for most of you 'shorties.' Now I just figures that step number four lands my foot square in the dribble of oil on that patch where there ain't no matting; so what was more natural than for me to go and swab it up. Last time the gong binged I hit half a preserved peach, and sprained a wrist and ankle so bad that I woulda been dead slow on the gun if we'd had to fire it. Keeping my eye peeled for another piece of peach, I pipes that gob of oil, and so goes and gets rid of it. It's painful having to explain a simple thing like that to you bone-heads, but, now that you got it, p'raps you'll ease off on your beefing, and peel spuds. _That_ don't take no brains."

Two or three times in the course of the morning the look-out's shout of "Sail!" bearing this way or that, brought those in sound of it to their feet in the expectation that it would be followed by the welcome clanging of the alarm bell; and once or twice the wireless picked up the S.O.S.--they do not send it out that way now, but these letters are still the common term in use to describe the call of a s.h.i.+p in distress--of a steamer that had been torpedoed. But the sails turned out to be friends in every case, while both of the s.h.i.+ps reported sinking were too far away for us to be of any use to them. Early in the afternoon a suspiciously cruising craft, which proved presently to be a friend, got a high-explosive sh.e.l.l under her nose as a consequence of her deliberation in revealing that fact. The smartness with which the men tumbled to quarters, and the almost uncanny speed with which the forecastle gun was served, boded well for developments in case the real thing turned up.

"Do you always fire a blank across their bows when you don't quite like the look of 'em?" I asked the captain innocently, as he gazed dejectedly through his gla.s.s at certain unmistakable evidences proving that he had been cheated of his quarry. "Blank!" indignation and half the look that sits on the face of a terrier who discovers that he has cornered his own family's "Tabby" instead of the neighbour's "Tom"; "blank!--did you ever see a blank 'X-point-X' that threw up a spout as high as a masthead, and all black with smoke? That was the worst punisher we have in our lockers; and, what's more, it was meant to be a hit. And the next one would have been," he added. "You can't afford to waste any time where five or ten seconds may make all the difference between bagging and losing a Hun."

"But how about bagging something that isn't a Hun?" I protested. "I told you, I think, that I had arranged to go out next week on patrol in one of the American submarines; but after what I've just seen----"

"The burden of proof is up to the craft under suspicion," cut in the captain, "and they ought to have no trouble in supplying it if they have their wits about them." Then, with a grin, "But if you're really going out on submarine patrol next week, why--I'll promise to look twice before turning loose one of those--those 'blanks.'" How he kept his word is another story.

It was about an hour or two later that the wireless winged word that seemed at last to herald the real thing. It was the S.O.S. of a steamer, and conveyed merely the information that she had just been torpedoed, with her lat.i.tude and longitude. The position given was only thirty or forty miles to the northward, and though the name in the message--it was _Namoura_ or something similar--could not be found on any of our s.h.i.+pping lists, the _Zop_, as senior s.h.i.+p, promptly ordered course altered and full speed made in the hope of arriving on the scene in time to be of some use. With every minute likely to be of crucial importance, it was not an occasion to waste time by waiting or asking for orders. A swift exchange of signals between s.h.i.+ps, a hurried order or two down a voice-pipe, an advancing of the handle of the engine-room telegraph, a throwing over of the wheel, and we had spun in the welter of our tossing wake and were off on a mission that might prove one of either mercy or destruction, or, quite conceivably, both. The formation in which we had been cruising when the signal was received gave the _Zip_ something like a mile lead at the get-away, and this--though one of the others was a newer and slightly faster s.h.i.+p--she held gallantly to the end of the race. By a lucky chance, though there was a snoring wind and a lumpy sea running, the course brought both abaft the beam and permitted us to run nearly "all out" without imposing a serious strain on the s.h.i.+p. The difference between running before and bucking into seas of this kind I was to learn in a day or two. For the moment, conditions were all that could be asked to favour our getting with all dispatch into whatever game there was to be played.

Many a so-called express train has travelled slower than any one of those three destroyers was ploughing its way through solid green water.

For a few seconds after "Full speed!" had been rung down to their engine-rooms, swift-spinning smoke rings had shot up from their funnels and gone reeling off down to leeward; then, with perfect synchronisation of draught and oil, the duskiness above the mouths of the stumpy stacks had cleared, and only the mirage on the horizon astern betrayed the up-spouting jets of hot gases. Only the vibrant throb of the speeding engines--so pervading that it seemed to pulse like heart-beats through the very steel itself--gave hint of the mightiness of the effort that speed was costing. With that throb stilled--and the mounting wake quenched--the progress of that thousand tons or so of steam-driven steel would have seemed scarcely less effortless than that of an aeroplane.