Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1137 page)

‘You never said this was going to happen,’ I said reproachfully to my A.B.

‘No more I did,’ said he, ‘It’s the night-patrol going out, Fact is, I’m so used to the bloomin’ evolution that it never struck me to mention it as you might say.’ Next morning I was at service in a man-of-war, and even as we came to the prayer that the Navy might ‘be a safeguard to such as pass upon the sea on their lawful occasions,’ I saw the long process sion of traffic resuming up and down the Channel — six ships to the hour. It has been hung up for a bit, they said.

FAREWELL and adieu to you, Greenwich ladies,

Farewell and adieu to you, ladies ashore!

For we’ve received orders to work to the eastward

Where we hope in a short time to strafe ‘em some more.
We’ll duck and we’ll dive like little tin turtles,
We’ll duck and we’ll dive underneath the North Seas,
Until we strike something that doesn’t expect us,
From here to Cuxhaven it’s go as you please I

The first thing we did was to dock in a mine-field,
Which isn’t a place where repairs should be done;
And there we lay doggo in twelve-fathom water

With tri-nitro-toluol hogging our run.

The next thing we did, we rose under a Zeppelin,
With his shiny big belly half blocking the sky.
But what in the — Heavens can you do with six-pounders?
So we fired what we had and we bade him good-lye.

SubmarinesI

The chief business of the Trawler fleet is to attend to the traffic. The submarine in her sphere attends to the enemy. Like the destroyer, the submarine has created its own type of officer and man — with a language and traditions apart from the rest of the Service, and yet at heart unchangingly of the Service. Their business is to run monstrous risks from earth, air, and water, in what, to be of any use, must be the coldest of cold blood.

The commander’s is more a one-man job, as the crew’s is more team work, than any other employment afloat. That is why the relations between submarine officers and men are what they are. They play hourly for each other’s lives with Death the Umpire always at their elbow on tiptoe to give them ‘Out.’

There is a stretch of water, once dear to amateur yachtsmen, now given over to scouts, submarines,destroyers, and, of course, contingents of trawlers. We were waiting the return of some boats which were due to report. A couple surged up the still harbour in the afternoon light and tied up beside their sisters. There climbed out of them three or four high - booted, sunken - eyed pirates clad in sweaters, under jackets that a stoker of the last generation would have disowned. This was their first chance to compare notes at close hand. Together they lamented the loss of a Zeppelin — ’a perfect mug of a Zepp,’ who had come down very low and offered one of them a sitting shot. ‘But what can you do with our guns? I gave him what I had, and then he started bombing.’

‘I know he did,’ another said. ‘I heard him. That’s what brought me down to you. I thought he had you that last time’

‘No, I was forty foot under when he hove out the big ‘un. What happened to you?’

‘My steering - gear jammed just after I went down, and I had to go round in circles till I got it straightened out. But wasn’t he a mug!’

‘Was he the brute with the patch on his port side?’ a sister-boat demanded.

‘Not This fellow had just been hatched. He was almost sitting on the water, heaving bombs over.’

‘And my blasted steering-gear went and chose then to go wrong,’ the other commander mourned.

‘I thought his last little egg was going to get me !’

Half an hour later I was formally introduced to three orfour quite strange, quite immaculate officers, freshly shaved, and a little tired about the eyes, whom I thought I had met before.

Labour and Refreshment

Meantime (it was on the hour of evening drinks) one of the boats was still unaccounted for. No one talked of her. They rather discussed motor-cars and Admiralty constructors, but — it felt like that queer twilight watch at the front when the homing aeroplanes drop in. Presently a signaller entered:

‘
V. 42
outside, sir; wants to know which channel she shall use.’ ‘Oh, thank you. Tell her to take so-and-so.’ ... Mine, I remember, was vermouth and bitters, and later on
V. 42
himself found a soft chair and joined the committee of instruction. Those next for duty, as well as those in training, wished to hear what was going on, and who had shifted what to where, and how certain arrangements had worked. They were told in language not to be found in any printable book. Questions and answers were alike Hebrew to one listener? but he gathered that every boat carried a second in command — a strong, persevering youth, who seemed responsible for every thing that went wrong, from a motor cylinder to a torpedo. Then somebody touched on the mercantile marine and its habits.

Said one philosopher: ‘They can’t be expected to take any more risks than they do. I wouldn’t, if I was a skipper. I’d loose off at any blessed periscope I saw.’

‘That’s all very fine. You wait till you’ve had a patriotic tramp trying to strafe you at your own back-door,’ said another.

Some one told a tale of a man with a voice, notable even in a Service where men are not trained to whisper. He was coming back, empty-handed, dirty, tired, and best left alone. From the peace of the German side he had entered our hectic home-waters, where the usual tramp shelled, and by miraculous luck, crumpled his periscope. Another man might have dived, but Boanerges kept on rising. Majestic and wrathful he rose personally through his main hatch, and at 2000 yards (have I said it was a still day?) addressed the tramp. Even at that distance she gathered it was a Naval officer with a grievance, and by the time he ran alongside she was in a state of coma, but managed to stammer: ‘Well, sir, at least you’ll admit that our shooting was pretty good.’

‘And that,’ said my informant,’ put the lid on!’

Boanerges went down lest he should be tempted to murder, and the tramp affirms she heard him rumbling beneath her, like an inverted thunderstorm, for fifteen minutes.

‘All those tramps ought to be disarmed, and we ought to have all their guns,’ said a voice out of a corner,

‘What? Still worrying over your “mug”?’ some one replied.

‘He was a mug!’ went on the man of one idea. ‘If I’d had a couple of twelves even, I could have strafed him proper. I don’t know whether I shall mutiny, or desert, or write to the First Sea Lord about it.’

‘Strafe all Admiralty constructors to begin with.

I could build a better boat with a 4-inch lathe and a sardine-tin than — ,’ the speaker named her by letter and number.

‘That’s pure jealousy,’ her commander explained to the company. ‘Ever since I installed — ahem — my patent electric wash-basin he’s been intriguin’ to get her. Why? We know he doesn’t wash. He’d only use the basin to keep beer in.’

Underwater Works

However often one meets it, as in this war one meets it at every turn, one never gets used to the Holy Spirit of Man at his job. The ‘common sweeper,’ growling over his mug of tea that there was ‘nothing in sweepin’,’ and these idly chaffing men, new shaved and attired, from the gates of Death which had let them through for the fiftieth time, were all of the same fabric — incomprehensible, I should imagine, to the enemy. And the stuff held good throughout all the world — from the Dardanelles to the Baltic, where only a little while ago another batch of submarines had slipped in and begun to be busy. I had spent some of the afternoon in looking through reports of submarine work in the Sea of Marmora. They read like the diary of energetic weasels in an overcrowded chicken-run, and the results for each boat were tabulated something like a cricket score. There were no maiden overs. One came across jewels of price set in the flat official phraseology. For example, one man who was describing some steps he was taking to remedy certain defects, interjected casually: ‘At this point I had to go under for a little, as a man in a boat was trying to grab my periscope with his hand,’ No reference before or after to the said man or his fate. Again: “Came across a dhow with a Turkish skipper. He seemed so miserable that I let him go.’ And elsewhere in those waters, a submarine overhauled a steamer full of Turkish passengers, some of whom, arguing on their allies’ lines, promptly leaped overboard. Our boat fished them out and returned them, for she was not killing civilians. In another affair, which included several ships (now at the bottom) and one submarine, the commander relaxes enough to note that: ‘The men behaved very well under direct and flanking fire from rifles at about fifteen yards.’ This was not I believe, the submarine that fought the Turkish cavalry on the beach. And in addition to matters much more marvellous than any I have hinted at, the reports deal with repairs and shifts and contrivances carried through in the face of dangers that read like the last delirium of romance. One boat went down the Straits and found herself rather canted over to one side. A mine and chain had jammed under her forward diving-plane. So far as I made out, she shook it off by standing on her head and jerking backwards; or it may have been, for the thing has occurred more than once, she merely rose as much as she could when she could, and then ‘released it by hand,’ as the official phrase goes.

Four Nightmares

And who, a few months ago, could have invented, or having invented, would have dared to print such a nightmare as this: There was a boat in the North Sea who ran into a net and was caught by the nose. She rose, still entangled, meaning to cut the thing away on the surface. But a Zeppelin in waiting saw and bombed her, and she had to go down again at once — but not too wildly or she would get herself more wrapped up than ever. She went down, and by slow working and weaving and wriggling, guided only by guesses at the meaning of each scrape and grind of the net on her blind forehead, at last she drew clear. Then she sat on the bottom and thought. The question was whether she should go back at once and warn her confederates against the trap, or wait till the destroyers which she knew the Zeppelin would have signalled for, should come out to finish her still entangled, as they would suppose, in the net? It was a simple calculation of comparative speeds and positions, and when it was worked out she decided to try for the double event. Within a few minutes of the time she had allowed for them, she heard the twitter of four destroyers’ screws quartering above her; rose; got her shot in; saw one destroyer crumple; hung round till another took the wreck in tow; said good-bye to the spare brace (she was at the end of her supplies), and reached the rendezvous in time to turn her friends.

And since we are dealing in nightmares, here are two more — one genuine, the other, mercifully, false. There was a boat not only at, but in the mouth of a river — well home in German territory. She was spotted, and went under, her commander perfectly aware that there was not more than five feet of water over her conning-towerso that even a torpedo-boat, let alone a destroyer, would hit it if she came over. But nothing hit anything. The search was conducted on scientific principles while they sat on the silt and suffered. Then the commander heard the rasp of a wire trawl sweeping over his hull. It was not a nice sound, but there happened to be a couple of gramophones aboard, and he turned them both on to drown it, And in due time that boat got home with everybody’s hair of just the same colour as when they had started!

The other nightmare arose out of silence and imagination. A boat had gone to bed on the bottom in a spot where she might reasonably expect to be looked for, but it was a convenient jumping off, or up, place for the work in hand. About the bad hour of 2.30 a.m. the commander was waked by one of his men, who whispered to him: ‘They’ve got the chains on us, sir!’ Whether it was pure nightmare, an hallucination of long wakefulness, something relaxing and releasing in that packed box of machinery, or the disgustful reality, the commander could not tell, but it had all the makings of panic in it, So the Lord and long training put it into his head to reply! ‘Have they? Well, we shan’t be coming up till nine o’clock this morning. We’ll see about it then. Turn out that light, please.’

He did not sleep, but the dreamer and the others did; and when morning came and he gave the order to rise, and she rose unhampered, and he saw the grey smeared seas from above once again, he said it was a very refreshing sight.

Lastly, which is on all fours with the gamble of the chase, a man was coming home rather bored after an uneventful trip. It was necessary for him to sit on the bottom for awhile, and there he played patience. Of a sudden it struck him, as a vow and an omen, that if he worked out the next game correctly he would go up and strafe something. The cards fell all in order. He went up at once and found himself alongside a German, whom, as he had promised and prophesied to himself, he destroyed, She was a mine-layer, and needed only a jar to dissipate like a cracked electriclight bulb. He wits somewhat impressed by the contrast between the single-handed game 50 feet below, the ascent, the attack, the amazing result, and when he descended again, his cards just as he had left them.