Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1150 page)

But
, at that very moment, a big shell hit the destroyer on the side and there was a tremendous escape of steam. Believing — since she had seen one torpedo leave the tube before the smash came — believing that both her tubes had been fired, the destroyer turned away “at greatly reduced speed” (the shell reduced it), and passed, quite reasonably close, the light cruiser whom she had been hammering so faithfully till the larger game appeared. Meantime, the Sub-Lieutenant was exploring what damage had been done by the big shell. He discovered that only
one
of the two torpedoes had left the tubes, and “observing enemy light cruiser beam on and apparently temporarily stopped,” he fired the providential remainder at her, and it hit her below the conning-tower and well and truly exploded, as was witnessed by the Sub-Lieutenant himself, the Commander, a leading signalman, and several other ratings. Luck continued to hold! The Acting Sub-Lieutenant further reported that “we still had three torpedoes left and at the same time drew my attention to enemy’s line of battleships.” They rather looked as if they were coming down with intent to assault. So the Sub-Lieutenant fired the rest of the torpedoes, which at least started off correctly from the shell-shaken tubes, and must have crossed the enemy’s line. When torpedoes turn up among a squadron, they upset the steering and distract the attention of all concerned. Then the destroyer judged it time to take stock of her injuries. Among other minor defects she could neither steam, steer, nor signal.

Towing under Difficulties

Mark how virtue is rewarded! Another of our destroyers an hour or so previously had been knocked clean out of action, before she had done anything, by a big shell which gutted a boiler-room and started an oil fire. (That is the drawback to oil.) She crawled out between the battleships till she “reached an area of comparative calm” and repaired damage. She says: “The fire having been dealt with it was found a mat kept the stokehold dry. My only trouble now being lack of speed, I looked round for useful employment, and saw a destroyer in great difficulties, so closed her.” That destroyer was our paralytic friend of the intermittent torpedo-tubes, and a grateful ship she was when her crippled sister (but still good for a few knots) offered her a tow, “under very trying conditions with large enemy ships approaching.” So the two set off together, Cripple and Paralytic, with heavy shells falling round them, as sociable as a couple of lame hounds. Cripple worked up to 12 knots, and the weather grew vile, and the tow parted. Paralytic, by this time, had raised steam in a boiler or two, and made shift to get along slowly on her own, Cripple hirpling beside her, till Paralytic could not make any more headway in that rising sea, and Cripple had to tow her once more. Once more the tow parted. So they tied Paralytic up rudely and effectively with a cable round her after bollards and gun (presumably because of strained forward bulkheads) and hauled her stern-first, through heavy seas, at continually reduced speeds, doubtful of their position, unable to sound because of the seas, and much pestered by a wind which backed without warning, till, at last, they made land, and turned into the hospital appointed for brave wounded ships. Everybody speaks well of Cripple. Her name crops up in several reports, with such compliments as the men of the sea use when they see good work. She herself speaks well of her Lieutenant, who, as executive officer, “took charge of the fire and towing arrangements in a very creditable manner,” and also of Tom Battye and Thomas Kerr, engine-room artificer and stoker petty officer, who “were in the stokehold at the time of the shell striking, and performed cool and prompt decisive action, although both suffering from shock and slight injuries.”

Useful Employment

Have you ever noticed that men who do Homeric deeds often describe them in Homeric language? The sentence “I looked round for useful employment” is worthy of Ulysses when “there was an evil sound at the ships of men who perished and of the ships themselves broken at the same time.”

Roughly, very roughly, speaking, our destroyers enjoyed three phases of “prompt decisive action” — the first, a period of daylight attacks (from 4 to 6 P.M.) such as the one I have just described, while the battle was young and the light fairly good on the afternoon of May 31; the second, towards dark, when the light had lessened and the enemy were more uneasy, and, I think, in more scattered formation; the third, when darkness had fallen, and the destroyers had been strung out astern with orders to help the enemy home, which they did all night as opportunity offered. One cannot say whether the day or the night work was the more desperate. From private advices, the young gentlemen concerned seem to have functioned with efficiency either way. As one of them said: “After a bit, you see, we were all pretty much on our own, and you could really find out what your ship could do.”

I will tell you later of a piece of night work not without merit.

II

THE NIGHT HUNT

RAMMING AN ENEMY CRUISER

As I said, we will confine ourselves to something quite sane and simple which does not involve more than half-a-dozen different reports.

When the German fleet ran for home, on the night of May 31, it seems to have scattered — ”starred,” I believe, is the word for the evolution — in a general
sauve qui peut
, while the Devil, livelily represented by our destroyers, took the hindmost. Our flotillas were strung out far and wide on this job. One man compared it to hounds hunting half a hundred separate foxes.

I take the adventures of several couples of destroyers who, on the night of May 31, were nosing along somewhere towards the Schleswig-Holstein coast, ready to chop any Hun-stuff coming back to earth by that particular road. The leader of one line was Gehenna, and the next two ships astern of her were Eblis and Shaitan, in the order given. There were others, of course, but with the exception of one Goblin they don’t come violently into this tale. There had been a good deal of promiscuous firing that evening, and actions were going on all round. Towards midnight our destroyers were overtaken by several three-and four-funnel German ships (cruisers they thought) hurrying home. At this stage of the game anybody might have been anybody — pursuer or pursued. The Germans took no chances, but switched on their searchlights and opened fire on Gehenna. Her acting sub-lieutenant reports: “A salvo hit us forward. I opened fire with the after-guns. A shell then struck us in a steam-pipe, and I could see nothing but steam. But both starboard torpedo-tubes were fired.”

Eblis, Gehenna’s next astern, at once fired a torpedo at the second ship in the German line, a four-funnelled cruiser, and hit her between the second funnel and the mainmast, when “she appeared to catch fire fore and aft simultaneously, heeled right over to starboard, and undoubtedly sank.” Eblis loosed off a second torpedo and turned aside to reload, firing at the same time to distract the enemy’s attention from Gehenna, who was now ablaze fore and aft. Gehenna’s acting sub-lieutenant (the only executive officer who survived) says that by the time the steam from the broken pipe cleared he found Gehenna stopped, nearly everybody amidships killed or wounded, the cartridge-boxes round the guns exploding one after the other as the fires took hold, and the enemy not to be seen. Three minutes or less did all that damage. Eblis had nearly finished reloading when a shot struck the davit that was swinging her last torpedo into the tube and wounded all hands concerned. Thereupon she dropped torpedo work, fired at an enemy searchlight which winked and went out, and was closing in to help Gehenna when she found herself under the noses of a couple of enemy cruisers. “The nearer one,” he says, “altered course to ram me apparently.” The Senior Service writes in curiously lawyer-like fashion, but there is no denying that they act quite directly. “I therefore put my helm hard aport and the two ships met and rammed each other, port bow to port bow.” There could have been no time to think and, for Eblis’s commander on the bridge, none to gather information. But he had observant subordinates, and he writes — and I would humbly suggest that the words be made the ship’s motto for evermore — he writes, “Those aft noted” that the enemy cruiser had certain marks on her funnel and certain arrangements of derricks on each side which, quite apart from the evidence she left behind her, betrayed her class. Eblis and she met. Says Eblis: “I consider I must have considerably damaged this cruiser, as 20 feet of her side plating was left in my foc’sle.” Twenty feet of ragged rivet-slinging steel, razoring and reaping about in the dark on a foc’sle that had collapsed like a concertina! It was very fair plating too. There were side-scuttle holes in it — what we passengers would call portholes. But it might have been better, for Eblis reports sorrowfully, “by the thickness of the coats of paint (duly given in 32nds of the inch) she would not appear to have been a very new ship.”

A Fugitive on Fire

New or old, the enemy had done her best. She had completely demolished Eblis’s bridge and searchlight platform, brought down the mast and the fore-funnel, ruined the whaler and the dinghy, split the foc’sle open above water from the stem to the galley which is abaft the bridge, and below water had opened it up from the stem to the second bulkhead. She had further ripped off Eblis’s skin-plating for an amazing number of yards on one side of her, and had fired a couple of large-calibre shells into Eblis at point-blank range, narrowly missing her vitals. Even so, Eblis is as impartial as a prize-court. She reports that the second shot, a trifle of eight inches, “may have been fired at a different time or just after colliding.” But the night was yet young, and “just after getting clear of this cruiser an enemy battle-cruiser grazed past our stern at high speed” and again the judgmatic mind — ”I think she must have intended to ram us.” She was a large three-funnelled thing, her centre funnel shot away and “lights were flickering under her foc’sle as if she was on fire forward.” Fancy the vision of her, hurtling out of the dark, red-lighted from within, and fleeing on like a man with his throat cut!

[As an interlude, all enemy cruisers that night were not keen on ramming. They wanted to get home. A man I know who was on another part of the drive saw a covey bolt through our destroyers; and had just settled himself for a shot at one of them when the night threw up a second bird coming down full speed on his other beam. He had bare time to jink between the two as they whizzed past. One switched on her searchlight and fired a whole salvo at him point blank. The heavy stuff went between his funnels. She must have sighted along her own beam of light, which was about a thousand yards.

“How did you feel?” I asked.

“I was rather sick. It was my best chance all that night, and I had to miss it or be cut in two.”

“What happened to the cruisers?”

“Oh, they went on, and I heard ‘em being attended to by some of our fellows. They didn’t know what they were doing, or they couldn’t have missed me sitting, the way they did.]

The Confidential Books

After all that Eblis picked herself up, and discovered that she was still alive, with a dog’s chance of getting to port. But she did not bank on it. That grand slam had wrecked the bridge, pinning the commander under the wreckage. By the time he had extricated himself he “considered it advisable to throw overboard the steel chest and dispatch-box of confidential and secret books.” These are never allowed to fall into strange hands, and their proper disposal is the last step but one in the ritual of the burial service of His Majesty’s ships at sea. Gehenna, afire and sinking, out somewhere in the dark, was going through it on her own account. This is her Acting Sub-Lieutenant’s report: “The confidential books were got up. The First Lieutenant gave the order: ‘Every man aft,’ and the confidential books were thrown overboard. The ship soon afterwards heeled over to starboard and the bows went under. The First Lieutenant gave the order: ‘Everybody for themselves.’ The ship sank in about a minute, the stern going straight up into the air.”

But it was not written in the Book of Fate that stripped and battered Eblis should die that night as Gehenna died. After the burial of the books it was found that the several fires on her were manageable, that she “was not making water aft of the damage,” which meant two-thirds of her were, more or less, in commission, and, best of all, that three boilers were usable in spite of the cruiser’s shells. So she “shaped course and speed to make the least water and the most progress towards land.” On the way back the wind shifted eight points without warning — it was this shift, if you remember, that so embarrassed Cripple and Paralytic on their homeward crawl — and, what with one thing and another, Eblis was unable to make port till the scandalously late hour of noon on June 2, “the mutual ramming having occurred about 11.40 P.M. on May 31.” She says, this time without any legal reservation whatever, “I cannot speak too highly of the courage, discipline, and devotion of the officers and ship’s company.”

Her recommendations are a Compendium of Godly Deeds for the Use of Mariners. They cover pretty much all that man may be expected to do. There was, as there always is, a first lieutenant who, while his commander was being extricated from the bridge wreckage, took charge of affairs and steered the ship first from the engine-room, or what remained of it, and later from aft, and otherwise man[oe]uvred as requisite, among doubtful bulkheads. In his leisure he “improvised means of signalling,” and if there be not one joyous story behind that smooth sentence I am a Hun!