Kitabı oku: «H.M.S. –», sayfa 10

GRIT

The Captain of H.M. T.B.D. Upavon was in a bad humour. He had decided when he left harbour that this patrol was going to be an uninteresting one, as the area allotted to him covered no traffic lane, and was therefore unlikely to hold an enemy within its boundaries. The dulness of a blank horizon had continued to confirm him in his opinion since the patrol began. He spoke from his arm-chair as the First Lieutenant struggled into his oilskins preparatory to going on deck for the First Watch.

"I don't care what courses you steer so long as you work along to the west'ard and keep the alterations logged. Beat across in twelve-mile tacks, and tell your relief to do the same. I'll be keeping the morning, and I'll turn round and work east at six. Got it?"

The First Lieutenant intimated that he had "got it," and, pulling his sou'wester well down over his ears, passed out: he was none too cheerful at the moment himself. The rain had been beating down in heavy streams since dusk, and the long oily swell that had been with them since leaving harbour had, although it had not wetted their rails, made the steady rolling rather monotonous.

The big tramp steamer might have had a fighting chance if it had not been for the torpedo. It hit fairly abreast her bridge, and two boats at the port-davits broke to splinters above the explosion, while the wireless instruments developed defects that would have taken a week to cure. The Chief Mate never saw the periscope. The explosion, and the sight of a hard white line stretching away to port at right angles to their course, were impressed on his brain simultaneously. It was a few seconds later when he rose shakily to his feet and mechanically set the engine-room telegraphs to "stop." As he did so, the Captain arrived with a rush on the bridge and released him from his post. He hurried below to examine the damage, and to fight, by every means possible to seamanship, the great Atlantic waters that he knew must by then be flooding nearly half the hold-space of the ship. Ships have reached harbour with worse damage than she had received, and she might have added another name to the list of tributes to good seamanship had not the enemy risen astern of them to complete his work. A shell hummed over them, skimming the tilted deck from two thousand yards away. The second shell arrived as the tramp's stern-gun fired, and the steamer quivered to a dull rumbling shock that told of a well-delayed fuse and a raking shot.

The tramp's big propeller threshed along, half out of water, as her Captain rang down for speed with which to dodge and manœuvre; but the vicious shells came steadily home into her, and it was a question only of whether the straining bulkheads forward would go before her stern was blown in. The stern-gun could hardly be depressed enough to get a clear view of its target, and Fritz knew it. The Chief Mate reckoned that it was about the twelfth shell that finished them. Following its explosion, he heard a noise that told him much, – a hissing, rushing sound of air from beneath his feet – the sigh of flooding holds.

There was little time, but they did what they could. The gun's crew, wrestling with a refractory cartridge-box lid, hardly seemed to look up as the tramp sank, carrying them down as so many British seamen have gone down, intent only on the job in hand. In five minutes' time the ocean was clear again save for a half-dozen bobbing heads clustered round a small white upturned boat.

The sea, that from the deck of the tramp had seemed to be only a long gentle swell, now appeared tremendous and threatening. With a cable's length between their smooth crests the big hills came majestically on, giving the numbed survivors glimpses of the empty spaces of the sea at intervals before lowering them back to the broad dark valleys between. For a few minutes the men simply paddled their feet in silence as they clung with unnecessary strength to the life-lines, stem, and stern-posts of the capsized boat; then the Chief Mate called to two of them by name. He gave the white-bearded, semi-conscious figure he supported into their charge and commenced diving, or rather ducking down, under the gunwale. He was blue with cold and weariness before he gained his object – a heavy eighteen-foot ash oar. The other two men came to his assistance, and between them they succeeded in passing the oar-loom across and under the boat, and in working it about until it caught and held at the far side. It took the Chief Mate a ghastly quarter of an hour before he could climb to the swaying keel, but once there he easily hauled the lighter of his assistants up beside him. With the other man steadying the loom in position, they swung their weight back on the painter clove-hitched to the bending blade. Time after time the oar slipped and had to be replaced, and on each failure the cramped workers panted and shivered a while before patiently setting to the task again. As they toiled, the send of the swell worked the boat broadside on, and suddenly as they threw back on the line she came sharply over, throwing them into the sea before they could clutch the rising gunwale with their hands. Followed an hour of heart-breaking baling with caps and hands, and then one by one the six came aboard – the old Captain, who in the face of active work was recovering consciousness, insisting on being at any rate one of the last three to leave the water.

The Chief Mate collapsed at once across the after-thwart. He had been working with the strength of desperation, and the effort had been great. The others knelt or sat on the thwarts, staring around them as they swung periodically on the crests of the waves in hungry desire for the sight of help. One man faced aft and began swearing, cursing the cold, the Germans, the war, and, in a curious twist of recollection, the ship's cook, who had died twenty minutes before, but who had done so suffering under the accusation of having stolen the swearer's sugar ration. The Captain rose, steadying himself by a hand on the gunwale: "Stop that swearing, you," he said; "lay aft here and rummage these lockers. You other hands, muster the gear in the boat and clear away the raffle. Mr Johnson, you and I will bail for an hour; the boat is leaking, and we'll take the first spell. We want warming, I think."

The Chief Mate raised his head from against the thwart – "I can't bale, sir; let the men do it. I'm done."

"Mr Johnson, I'm sixty-five years old and I'm going to bale, and I'm captain of this ship."

The Chief Mate clawed himself up to a kneeling position, and taking a sodden cap from the stern-sheets set feebly to work. As he went on he warmed a little, and the deadly feeling of despair began to leave him. The movements of men about him as they hunted for missing masts and oars roused him at length to an oath at a seaman who lurched against him.

An hour later the dusk closed down, and with two men baling wearily the boat rose and fell to what was undoubtedly a threatening sea, tugging and jerking at her sea anchor. The other four crouched in the stern-sheets, huddled together to find warmth beneath the beating rain.

"If the sail wasn't gone, sir, would you 'ave tried to make land?" A seaman spoke, his cheek against the Chief Mate's serge sleeve.

"I would, Hanson; and if we had two sound oars, I'd use those too," said the old Captain. "But even like this, I'm not going to give in or stop trying."

One of the balers dropped his cap and leaned sideways across the stern-sheets. "Tell 'em the truth, sir," he said. "I know, and both you officers know. If we had sails and oars too and a fair wind, we couldn't make land under a week. We'll not live three days in this cold and on this ration, and there's no traffic here. For Gawd's sake stop shammin', an' let's take our medicine quiet."

The Chief Mate swore and started to rise, but the Captain checked him. "One moment, Mr Johnson," he said, and turned to the ex-baler: "Listen now, my lad; it's not that you're afraid, it's just that you haven't got guts, that's your trouble. I'm an old man and I've got to die soon anyhow, so it oughtn't to matter to me. But I tell you that I'm going to work till I freeze stiff on this job, and I'll never stop trying if every one of you does. It's true, there isn't much chance for us, but there is a chance, and I won't let go of it. If we were told to come this route, it means some one else may be told to use it. There may be a ship just over the horizon now. I tell you, I don't want some one to pick me up drifting about and say, 'They haven't been dead an hour yet; if they'd used a bit more pluck they'd have pulled through. No, by God, the man that sank my ship thinks he's finished me, but as long as I can lift a hand I'll try to beat him. I'll sail ships yet in his dirty German teeth, and I'll take you with me in my fo'c'sle. Now get on and bale till your watch is up."

The man reached forward to the floating cap and without a word continued to use it, ladling the icy water overside in pitifully small quantities. The white-bearded captain subsided again beside the Chief Mate.

The Upavon was still rolling heavily as her Captain came on the bridge for the morning watch. She rolled a little uneasily now, and there was a suspicion of a "top" to the seas as they lifted her. The Captain glowered at the crescent moon – having lost none of his ill-humour in the night, – while the Sub-Lieutenant nervously turned over the watch to him.

"And we're to turn east at six, and the First Lieutenant said to be careful to log all alterations – "

The Captain dismissed him abruptly and turned away. As if he didn't know his own orders! Nice thing to be told them by a young cub like that! He would alter round just when he liked, of course. Damn the rain! He'd alter course now and run down before the wind. If those young beggars thought he was going to spend the next two hours facing the rain, they were very much mistaken. Why, when he'd been their age he'd faced more rain than they were ever likely to meet, so – he spoke an order, and the ship came slowly round through ten points of the compass.

"Steady, now. How's her head? South? All right; put that in the log – time, four-twenty…"

It was six-thirty, and the dawn and two cups of cocoa had removed a good deal of the Captain's temper. He lit a cigarette and faced to windward to look at the coming weather.

"M'm," he soliloquised; "and it's going to breeze up a bit too. There'll be some breaking seas by noon."

As he was turning to continue his pacing of the bridge, he started and fumbled for his binoculars. He stared a while to windward, and then, without lowering the glasses, spoke —

"Starboard fifteen, quartermaster… Steady, now… Steer for that white boat on the port bow, – see it?.. Messenger! go down and tell the First Lieutenant I want him; and call the surgeon, too."

A MAXIM

 
When the foe is pressing and the shells come down
In a stream like maxim fire,
When the long grey ranks seem to thicken all the while,
And they stamp on the last of the wire,
When all along the line comes a whisper on the wind
That you hear through the drumming of the guns:
"They are through over there and the right is in the air,"
"And there isn't any end to the Huns."
Then keep along a-shooting till you can't shoot more,
And hit 'em with a shovel on the head.
Don't forget a lot of folk have beaten them before,
And a Hun'll never hurt you if he's dead.
If you're in a hole and your hopes begin to fail,
If you're in a losing fight,
Think a bit of Jonah in the belly of the whale,
'Cause-he-got-out-all-right.
 

FROM A FAR COUNTRY

Announced by the jangling of the curtain that he had almost brought down with his heavy suit-case, a cheerful curly-haired officer entered noisily and dropped into one of the Wardroom arm-chairs. He stretched his legs out and, lighting a cigarette, leaned back luxuriously.

"Well?" said a chorus of voices, "well– how's London?"

The curly-haired one smiled reminiscently. "Still standing, still standing," he replied. "No place for you though, I'm afraid. You're none of you good-looking enough to pass as Yanks or Colonials."

"Oh, cut it out. Tell us what it's like. You know, you're the first one to go there from us for a year, and we want to know."

"What? all about it? All right; chuck a cup of tea across and I'll give you the special correspondent's sob-stuff. Aah! that's better; this train-travelling has given me a mouth like – I won't say what. Well, I'll try and tell you what I thought of it and the people that live there. I may say at once that they are civilised to the extent that they'll take English money without complaining about it, and —all right, I'll get on.

"Well, you know how I went off laden with meat and other cards till I was bulging, and how I reckoned to find people looking hungry at me as if they were reckoning what I'd boil down to in a stock-pot? Well, I've got all these cards still – didn't need 'em. I'd usually left them in my other coat when I got started on meals, and as they've got the trick of camouflaging fish and eggs till you don't know what you're eating, it wasn't worth hunting 'em out. All London seems to live on eggs, and where the deuce they all come from I don't know; they must be using up dumps of them. Oh, and another thing, I'd forgotten that in London they don't grow electric lighters on every bulkhead, and it was lucky I had a few matches with me. The first day I was stopped by fellers wanting a light off my cigarette just three times in a dog-watch, but the other days I didn't get asked at all – I'd lost the country-cousin look, I s'pose. Men? Yes, there's a fair sprinkling there still, but nothing under forty, I should say. Yes, there seem to be crowds of women. Perhaps there are actually more, or it may be that the shortage of men makes 'em look more; but there do seem to be heaps of them. It just made me marvel, too, at the extraordinary lack of imagination the women have. They still wear devilish short skirts, and yet there isn't one in forty of 'em that has a foot and ankle that one could call it decent to show. You'd think they'd see one another's defects and get wise, but they don't. I suppose that now the secret's out about their legs, they reckon it's too late to hide the truth and they face it out; but I'm surprised the young ones don't camouflage themselves a bit and get a fair start. Theatres? Yes; I went through the list, revues and all. I read Arnold Bennett's account of a music-hall – you know the book? Yes, I read it in the train going down. Well, I gathered from his description that things had flashed up a bit since the dear dead days of nineteen-sixteen, and that I would find myself in a hall of dazzling Eastern et-ceteras; but, my word! it was like tea at the Vicarage. I don't know what revue Arnold Bennett found, but I guess I missed it. It's true, I saw one perfectly reckless lieutenant drop a programme out of a box into the orchestra; but as the orchestra didn't notice it, and I doubt if the lieutenant did either, it could hardly be put down to riotous conduct induced by drink and sensual music. Oh, I noticed one thing – all the theatre programmes had directions printed as to what to do in case of air-raids during the performance. They had it printed small and sandwiched in between the hats by Suzanne and dresses by Cox announcements. I liked that. It was British and dignified. I'd like to have sent some copies to Hindenburg. News? Yes, I heard a whole lot, but it was mostly denied in the papers next morning. It's a queer town for rumours. I think they all live too close together, and they get hysterical or something – like in that Frenchman's book, you know, the 'Psychology of Crowds,' or something like that. They weren't worrying much about the war, though. I stopped to look at the tape-messages in the club, and there was an eight-line chit on the board mentioning that the Hun was coming on like a gale o' wind towards Paris, while the rest of the board had eight full-length columns on the latest Old Bailey case, and there was another column coming through on the machine with a crowd waiting for more. No, I'm not trying to be cynical. I read 'em all, but I hadn't quite got the London sense of proportion in two days, and it worried me that there was no more war news coming.

"Cost? Yes, rather. I've spent whole heaps of bullion, and I'll have to ask the Pay for an advance now. It's quite easy; you just exist and the cash trickles off you. There's not so much of the old 'men in uniform free' or 'half-price to officers' going now. There aren't many civilians left, and I guess they're just taking in one another's washing. Everything that isn't a necessity is double price at least, and I believe the shopkeepers would like to make breathing a luxury too. On the whole, I'm glad I only had a few days there. The air's so foul, you know. Mixture of scent and petrol, I think. Oh but, by the way, I saw a hansom – a real hansom – in Regent Street. Quite a neat well-kept one, too. No, nothing new in the way of dresses. Just the same as nineteen-sixteen, as far as I could see. There may have been some good-looking faces among the thousands in the West-end streets, but they were cancelled by the awful legs underneath. I wonder they ever manage to get married. Well, I saw thousands of that kind of female – more than one ever saw before; but I met some others who squared things up in my mind. Ten hours a day and clean the car herself for one, and oxyacetyline welding eight hours and overtime for another at two-five a week. Doing it to win the War, and not because they wanted to or liked it. Made me feel small to be on leave when I talked to 'em. And then, as I was leaving the hotel, a whole crowd of Swiss porters and servants, that had been fairly coming the Field-Marshal over me for three days, came oiling round me for tips, and pocketed the cash without a word when they got it; and – and – while they were doing it, a Scotch corporal walked past the taxi with three wound-stripes on his arm and four notches on his bayonet hilt. It's all a bit too puzzling for me. As soon as I got settled in one impression, I'd get jolted out of it by another. Heigho! I'm not sorry to have gone there to look, and I'm not sorry to be back." He rose, and moving across the Wardroom, flung open the door of his tiny cabin and passed in. His voice sounded hollow through the thin partition. "Hi! outside there – some shaving water eck dum," and then a contented murmur – "Lord! but it's good to be home again."

THE CRISIS

 
When the Spartan heroes tried
To hold the broken gate,
When – roaring like the rising tide —
The Persian horsemen charged and died
In foaming waves of hate.
 
 
When with armour hacked and torn
They gripped their shields of brass,
And hailed the gods that light the morn
With battle-cry of hope forlorn,
"We shall not let them pass."
 
 
While they combed their hair for death
Before the Persian line,
They spoke awhile with easy breath,
"What think ye the Athenian saith
In Athens as they dine?"
 
 
"Doth he repent that we alone
Are here to hold the way,
That he must reap what he hath sown —
That only valour may atone
The fault of yesterday?"
 
 
"Is he content that thou and I —
Three hundred men in line —
Should show him thus how man may try
To stay the foemen passing by
To Athens, where they dine?"
 
 
"Ah! now the clashing cymbal rings,
The mighty host is nigh;
Let Athens talk of passing things —
But here, three hundred Spartan kings
Shall greet the fame the Persian brings
To men about to die."
 

A SEA CHANTY

 
There's a whistle of the wind in the rigging overhead,
And the tune is as plain as can be.
"Hey! down below there. D'you know it's going to blow there,
All across the cold North Sea?"
 
 
And along comes the gale from the locker in the North
By the Storm-King's hand set free,
And the wind and the snow and the sleet come forth,
Let loose to the cold North Sea.
 
 
Tumble out the oilskins, the seas are running white,
There's a wet watch due for me,
For we're heading to the east, and a long wet night
As we drive at the cold North Sea.
 
 
See the water foaming as the waves go by
Like the tide on the sands of Dee;
Hear the gale a-piping in the halliards high
To the tune of the cold North Sea.
 
 
See how she's meeting them, plunging all the while,
Till I'm wet to the sea-boot knee;
See how she's beating them – twenty to the mile —
The waves of the cold North Sea.
 
 
Right across from Helgoland to meet the English coast,
Lie better than the likes of we, —
Men that lived in many ways, but went to join the host
That are buried by the cold North Sea.
 
 
Rig along the life-lines, double-stay the rails,
Lest the Storm-King call for a fee;
For if any man should slip, through the rolling of the ship,
He'd be lost in the cold North Sea.
 
 
We are heading to the gale, and the driving of the sleet,
And we're far to the east of Three.
Hey! you German sailormen, here's the British Fleet
Waiting in the cold North Sea.