Pincher Martin, O.D.: A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy

'I don't want to hear all that. What d'you mean by refusing duty?'

Smith, or Schmidt, as he probably was, licked his lips. 'I say to zis man, why he treat me like zat? And zen zis man,' indicating Martin, 'heet me on ze head with ze steeck and hurt me mooch.' He pointed to a large lump on the side of his cranium.

'That ain't true, sir,' Joshua interrupted. 'If Pinch – ordinary seaman Martin – 'adn't sloshed 'im 'e'd 'a got me.'

The sub. scratched his beardless chin thoughtfully, for he hardly knew what to do. 'Look here,' he said at last, addressing the culprit sternly, 'you are a prisoner of war, and have to obey orders. If I have any further trouble with you, your hands and feet will be tied, and you will be put in the fish-hold for the rest of the passage. I will also report you on arrival in England, and have you court-martialled and shot. I mean what I say, mind; but I will give you this one warning, so you had better take it to heart. Do you understand what I say?'

'I onterstan',' said Schmidt, fidgeting nervously.

'Remove the prisoner and let him carry on with his work,' the officer ordered. 'If he offers any further violence shoot him at once.' He winked. Billings grinned understandingly, and the hapless German was led away in a cold and clammy perspiration. They had no further trouble with him.

Hargreaves was no fool, and, being fully aware that idleness only breeds discontent and bickering, took very good care to keep his prisoners busy. They were not treated with undue severity, and received exactly the same food as their captors; but they experienced for the first time the rigours of British naval discipline. All day long they were kept hard at work in scrubbing and scraping the Anna to a state of hitherto undreamt-of cleanliness; while at night all of them – except the cook and the man on watch in the engine and boiler room, who perforce had to be allowed a certain amount of liberty, but were kept under constant supervision – slept in the stuffy little forecastle, with an armed sentry standing guard at the door.

Nothing on earth would induce the bluejackets to poke their noses inside the place, much less to inhabit it. They preferred to snatch what sleep they could under the stars; for though – thanks to the energy instilled into the unwilling Germans – the forecastle had been scrubbed far cleaner than it had ever been before, its cleanliness was merely superficial, and it was still well infested with 'hanimals,' as Billings called them.

'Them bugs is pisenous German bugs,' he had remarked, wrinkling his nose in disgust. 'Maybe them 'Uns is used ter 'em. I ain't, an' I'll watch it I don't go ter sleep in a place wi' wild hinsects a-suckin' o' me blood. It ain't fit an' proper, an' I sleeps on deck.'

Incidentally, it was the cook who gave Hargreaves one of the finest frights of his life. At midnight on the night they had come on board, the sub., leaving Billings in charge as officer of the watch, with orders to steer west and to call him at once if anything happened, retired to rest in a small compartment under the wheelhouse which had evidently been used as a charthouse, cabin, and storeroom all rolled into one. It was innocent of insects other than cockroaches, and had a cushioned locker at one side; while the rest of the space was filled with nets, cordage, canvas, paint, oil, and a quantity of food. Dependent from hooks in the ceiling were several dried fish, two bloated sausages, and a large raw ham. The place was stuffy and odorous; but Hargreaves was tired, and so, swathed in a blanket, he soon settled off to sleep on the locker with the door wide open.

Towards two in the morning some slight sound caused him to wake up with a start, and on opening his eyes his blood nearly froze in his veins. There, in the door, clearly silhouetted against the flood of moonlight beyond, was the dark figure of a man peering into the room in an attitude of rapt, listening attention. He was the German cook, from the shape of his bullet-head, and in one hand he held a murderous-looking knife with a long and glittering blade. He could only be there for one purpose, and his knife could only be intended for Hargreaves's throat.

The sub.'s first impulse was to shout for help, for an armed sentry should have been on the deck outside. Then he scouted the idea as impracticable, for the man would be upon him the instant he raised his voice, so he lay still, hardly daring to breathe. Then, with a feeling of great relief, he suddenly remembered the loaded automatic pistol under his pillow. He withdrew it softly, cocked the hammer without making a sound, and then, with the weapon poised, his finger on the trigger, and his nerves tingling, made up his mind to fire on the first sign of aggression.

The cook, treading stealthily, entered the room and looked round to the right and left. He next came towards the locker on which the sub. lay, and seemed to be examining the ceiling intently. Then he raised his knife for the blow.

The muzzle of the pistol went up and followed his every movement, but an instant later the sub. dropped the weapon with a chuckle of amusement… The German was busily cutting a couple of inches off a particularly succulent sausage hanging from its hook.

When Hargreaves laughed his visitor dropped the knife with a clatter, and leapt from the room like a rabbit. The sub.'s mirth overcame him completely.

'Is everythink orl right, sir?' queried the anxious voice of Pincher Martin, who had been just outside the door the whole time.

'Yes,' spluttered the officer; 'there's nothing the m-matter.'

'Beg pardon, sir; only th' cook jumped art o' this 'ere door as if 'e'd see'd a ghost, sir. 'E seems a bit scared like.'

He was, poor man, badly scared, nearly as frightened as the sub. himself had been a few moments before; but he never quite realised how very near death the cravings of his stomach had led him. After all, no ordinary person is in the habit of making a hearty meal off a pungent, onion-flavoured sausage at two o'clock in the morning! All's well that ends well, but cookie escaped sudden death by the skin of his teeth.

Hargreaves never suffered his discipline to relax, and all through the second day of the passage the work of cleaning the ship went on. Even the German skipper, a very fat person, was pressed into service, and, since nothing else could be found for him to do, he volunteered to spend the morning in scrubbing out the wheelhouse.

'I hope onter-see boot com' an' tak' us all back to Germany!' he remarked feelingly in very bad English after half-an-hour's hard work on his hands and knees.

'If one does I'm afraid you won't get there,' retorted the hard-hearted sub-lieutenant with a wicked twinkle in his eye.

'If we sight a German submarine all the prisoners will be thrown overboard in life-belts, so that she'll have to stop to pick you up. Then, while she's doing it, I shall ram her at full speed.'

The German believed him implicitly. The brutal British were capable of anything. 'Ach!' he exclaimed, sitting up on his haunches and wiping the drops of perspiration from a very scared face, 'dey vill nod pick us op. Ve shall be drown!'

'But surely your own countrymen won't stand by and see that happen?' said Hargreaves with pleasant curiosity.

'I do not know. Bot efen ef dem pick us op, you dry do sink der onter-see boot, so ve drown anyhows! I haf wife an' childrens, capitan,' he added agitatedly; 'many childrens. Von, do, dree, four, fif, six childrens. I doo old do fight. Ach!' he suggested with an oily smile, 'you safe me an' drown de ozzers. Dey not marriet. Dey not care!'

The sub. shook his head. 'I'm sorry,' he said; 'war is a very terrible thing.'

'I hope ve do not see onter-see boot!' murmured the other. 'Ach!' he nodded, noticing Hargreaves's grinning face; 'you choke, es et nod?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'You make fon, hey? You no drown der prisoners?'

'Depends upon how you behave yourselves,' came the noncommittal reply.

The skipper fell to with redoubled energy.

The weather was fine and the sea calm, but the Anna's engines and boiler were long past their early youth, and they had steamed across the North Sea at a speed of barely seven knots. It was a heart-rending performance; and though Coggins, the stoker petty officer, exhorted the German fireman to shovel coal on the furnace until he was purple with passion and they were limp with weariness, the steam pressure to the engines dropped and dropped.

Shortly after noon on the second day, by which time they were on the Dogger Bank with not a vestige of another vessel in sight – there is not much fishing done in war-time – the climax came. It was not exactly due to the boiler, though the propeller had been revolving more and more slowly; but all of a sudden there came a peculiar grinding sound from the engine-room, and the screw refused duty altogether.

A moment or two later Coggins, breathless and blasphemous, appeared at the top of the hatch. 'It's no good, sir,' he wailed; 'it's no – good. I've done me best to tinker up they damned hengines to get 'em to 'eave round, but now the metal's bin and run in the cross'ead, and they won't 'eave round no more.'

'Is there nothing we can do to it?' queried the sub.

'I ain't seen nothin' aboard we can patch 'im up with, sir. Them hengines – them – hengines – ain't fit to crack nuts, let alone be aboard a ship!'

The sub. bit his lip, for there they were, well out of sight of land, the ship helpless, and nothing in sight. But he had been trained as an engineer himself, and was better at the job than some people imagined.

'I'll come and have a look at it,' he announced. 'We must do something. I can't sail the damned ship home, and there's nobody here to tow us!'

Eventually, after three hours' hard labour, they succeeded in repairing the damage with a piece of sheet-brass filched from somewhere else. It is doubtful if any fully qualified engineer would have passed the repair as either safe or satisfactory; but by the time they had finished, and were black, bad-tempered, and greasy, the engines were persuaded to produce the revolutions for four knots without running very hot. Even four knots was better than drifting aimlessly about the sea with the prospect of being bagged by a submarine or dying of thirst and starvation.

The next thing which refused duty was the boiler itself. It gave out at eight o'clock the same evening, and once more Coggins, looking more like a demon from the nethermost pit than a respectable stoker petty officer of his Majesty's Navy, a rabid teetotaler, a strict chapel-goer, and the father of four children who attended Sunday school regularly, arrived on deck in a state of incoherent vituperation.

'And what's the matter now?' Hargreaves inquired.

'The biler, sir. 'E ain't bin cleaned for eight months, them Germans says. The uptake and toobes is all sooted up, and we carn't get no steam to the hengines no'ow!'

The sub. sighed. 'How long's it going to take to clean it?'

''Bout six or seven hours, sir.'

'Well, carry on with it at once.'

In ordinary circumstances a boiler is cleaned when it is stone-cold and the fires are drawn; but Coggins, in some miraculous manner unknown to any one save himself and his victims, goaded the Germans into such a state of frenzied activity that they swept the tubes and uptakes in five hours. They did it with the fires damped down but still alight, and what they suffered from the heat only they themselves knew. But the job was done somehow, the firemen were revived with neat navy rum, and by one o'clock the next morning the Anna Schrœder resumed her journey at the exasperating speed of 3·75 knots.

They eventually arrived in a certain harbour late the same evening without further mishap; and Hargreaves, after seeing the prize and the prisoners turned over to the responsible authorities, and his own men comfortably housed and fed in the Sailors' Home, retired to an hotel, ate a hearty meal, had a hot bath well impregnated with Jeyes's Fluid, borrowed a suit of pyjamas, a razor, and a new toothbrush from the manager, and then turned in and slept for nearly twelve hours.

Little more remains to be told, for the next morning they left by train to rejoin their ship, taking with them sundry mementoes from the prize. They have passed through many vicissitudes since, but neither the sub. nor his men will ever forget the Anna Schrœder.

CHAPTER XVI

MINOR INCIDENTS

I

'Signal just come through, sir,' said Rosser, the signal-man, thumping on the door of Wooten's cabin at half-past one in the morning.

The skipper grunted, sat up, switched on the light, and blinked. He was used to sudden calls and excursions in the middle of the night, and knew instinctively from the tone of the man's voice that the message was urgent.

'Read it out,' he sighed, throwing one leg out of the bunk.

'Menelaus, Monsoon, Manner, and Minx raise steam, and report when ready to proceed.'

'I thought so. What's the weather?'

'Very dark, and blowing a bit, sir,' said Rosser cheerfully, the moisture from his dripping oilskins forming a nice little puddle on the skipper's carpet. 'It's been raining hard this last half-hour.'

Wooten groaned. 'Right! Tell all the officers, and ask Mr Thompson to let me know how soon he'll be ready. And on your way forward tell Spry I want him.'

Spry, able seaman, was the captain's body-servant and general factotum.

Wooten threw open the small scuttle over his bunk and looked out. It was as black as pitch, the wind whistled and moaned mournfully, and a wave of moisture smote him in the face. It would be a wild and wet night at sea. Altogether a depressing night, there was not the least doubt about that. 'Ugh!' he grunted, slamming the scuttle to and drawing the bedclothes up to his chin.

Enter Spry.

'Usual sea-gear,' his master murmured.

The man nodded. He knew exactly what was wanted.

'We're in for a dusting, Spry.'

'We are that, sir. Will you 'ave your blue muffler or the white one?'

'The blue one, and the clean sweater.'

'You can't 'ave 'im, sir,' said the bluejacket, busy opening drawers and cupboards and pulling out clothes like a juggler. ''E's at the wash.'

'At the wash?'

'Yessir, and so's most of our flannel shirts and stiff collars. If we 're to be away long I'll 'ave to wash some shirts out, and you'll 'ave to wear them soft collars of yours.' Spry was always a pessimist in the small hours of the morning. 'Is there anything else you'll be wanting, sir?'

'No, thanks. Nothing bar the cocoa.'

Spry took a vacuum flask from a cupboard, and left the cabin to fill it. This also was a matter of routine; for cocoa, a cushion, and a rug were always put in the charthouse every night for Wooten's use when the ship was at sea.

The skipper clambered out of his bunk, lit a pipe, and dressed. This operation took him quite ten minutes. First came his ordinary garments, and a heavy woollen sweater and blue muffler; then a pair of thick socks; next a pair of fisherman's white woollen stockings worn over his trousers and reaching well above his knees; over them, a pair of rubber sea-boots. Next a uniform jacket, a lammy coat, another muffler, and an oilskin on top of everything. It was wet, and the weather was cold, and Wooten did not intend to be chilled through to the marrow if he could help it. His apparel was completed by a sou'-wester and a pair of glasses slung round his neck; and, thus arrayed, he clambered slowly up the ladder and waddled forward along the deck to the charthouse. It was too dark, and he was too bloated, to proceed briskly.

Hargreaves, the sub., yawning his head off, was already up there sorting out his charts.

'Morning, sir. D'you know where we're going?'

'Haven't the vaguest notion. The Menelaus is the boss, and will get the orders. She may tell us when we get outside.'

'How long are we likely to be away?'

'Don't know. Last time we left in a hurry we didn't come back for a fortnight. The time before, we were away for six weeks.'

'What' —

'If you ask me any more questions I shall be peevish,' Wooten interrupted. 'It's high time you knew that I'm not fit for polite conversation at this unholy hour of the morning.'

'Sorry, sir. I forgot.'

Half-an-hour afterwards, by which time steam had been raised, and the fact had been reported, Wooten climbed the ladder on to the bridge.

'Signal for destroyers to slip, sir,' came from Rosser a minute or two later, as a lamp winked frenziedly in and out in the darkness about a mile away. 'Form single line a'ead; speed ten knots.'

'Let go forward!' went the order to the first lieutenant on the forecastle.

There came the splash of the end of the wire as it fell into the water, and a moment later a hail from MacDonald. 'All gone, sir!'

'Half ahead port. Half astern starboard. Helm hard aport.'

The engine-room reply-gongs clanged, and the Mariner began to turn on her heel.

'Slow astern starboard – Stop starboard – Half ahead both – one-eighty revolutions,' in succession. 'Helm amidships. Steady!'

The four destroyers, falling into line astern of each other, groped their way down the congested harbour like wraiths in the night. Wooten glanced at the dark shapes of the other ships as they slid by. 'Lucky dogs!' he murmured. 'You've got a lie in. I envy you. This is not a night for poor old Peter to be at sea.'

He was right. By the time they reached the entrance the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind had increased. Then the bows lifted to the first swell, and a dollop of spray flew over them, and rattled against the bridge-screens.

'It's going to be wet,' Hargreaves observed glumly, securing the top button of his oilskin.

'It is,' the skipper agreed; 'damned wet!'

In ten minutes, by which time they were clear of the harbour, and speed had been increased to eighteen knots, the ship was prancing and curveting like a frisky pony, and the spray was flying over in sheets. Five minutes later the seas were coming in green over the upper deck.

'Oh hell!' the captain groused, stowing away his useless pipe after vainly endeavouring to relight its sodden contents; 'this is the limit! – Look out, sub.,' he added, glancing at the next ship ahead, whose dim shadow danced through a welter of spray a cable and a half in front. 'Shove her on a bit. You're astern of station, and dropping fast. Lord!' he added, 'I wish I knew where we're off to.'

His prayer was not answered until daylight, by which time they were far to the southward, and the Menelaus informed them of their destination. They were going to the warmest spot most of them had ever known, though they were not aware of it at the time. Warmth can come from the Huns as well as from the sun.

II

The intermittent rumble of heavy guns had sounded continuously all through the night, and with the approach of dawn and the commencement of the usual 'early morning hate,' the intensity of the dull reverberations increased. The Mariner and her consorts were within about twelve miles of the spot where the long line of opposing trenches debouched into the North Sea; but even at this distance they could see the brilliant illumination caused by the star-shell as they burst. The dark-blue sky above the horizon to the south-east was never free of them.

'Lor'!' said Billings in an awed whisper, watching the blue-white flashes as they burst suddenly out in the air, hung for a moment, and then waned slowly away, to be replaced by others; 'some poor blokes ain't arf gittin' it in the neck!'

There was a romance and an interest about the spectacle which it is rather difficult to define. For one thing, it was the closest they had ever been to the front; but here, on board the ship, everything was going on in the same old way, and the men went about their business as usual. But there, a bare twelve miles off, the deep-throated murmur of the guns showed that men were striving to kill each other, while the star-shell must have been flooding the closely packed trenches with unwelcome light. It seemed a little difficult to realise it, somehow.

The morning was cloudless and calm. The light increased, and as the sun neared the horizon a band of pale rose-madder and dull orange slowly began to encroach on the dark blue of the upper sky to the eastward. Before long they could see the hostile coast itself as a thin, blue-gray streak punctuated here and there by the spires and houses of the coast towns, magnified out of all proportion by the deceptive light. Hanging in the air, and all but invisible to the naked eye, was the bloated, caterpillar-shape of a German observation balloon. It looked ominous and menacing, and the Hun in the basket suspended beneath it was evidently going aloft to see whom his guns might devour for breakfast. The coast was reputed to bristle with weapons, some of them of prodigious range, and the men in the destroyer hoped fervently that they might not be victims of his wrath.

Then, quite suddenly, the dull blue above the broadening band of colour began to twinkle and sparkle with little spurts and splashes of bright yellow flame. They did not appear in ones, twos, or threes, but in batches of twenty or thirty at a time. The rumbling of the guns started afresh, for the flashes were the bursts of the enemy's anti-aircraft shell, fired at a swarm of allied aeroplanes making an early morning bombing attack; and, from the look of things, somebody was getting a tolerably hot time. More killing! It was rather like watching a gladiatorial combat in the arena; but it was a fine sight, and the 'Mariners' would not have missed it for worlds.

Presently, when the rosy light of the dawn had mounted up into space, the thudding of the distant guns ceased. The attack was over, and the bombs had evidently been dropped; but the clear sky over the shore was still flecked and stained with hundreds of smoke-puffs slowly dissolving on the gentle breeze. They showed blue and purple against the vivid contrasting colour beyond.

Air raids, and their subsequent reprisals, were a speciality of this locality. They took place nearly every morning and evening the Mariner was there; and as the visiting machines had a comparatively short distance to travel before reaching their objective, they were carried out by too many aeroplanes, and with too great a frequency, to be pleasant.

In the French town within reach of the aerial Hun business went on as usual; but at the first wailing of the warning hooter the inhabitants bolted to earth like rabbits to their burrow. Every house which possessed a cellar showed a small red flag over the doorway, and any one who cared to claim admittance was given shelter. Trams stopped and disgorged their living freights. Adipose tram conductors, elderly women dragging frightened children, ancient male civilians, poilus in their slate-blue uniforms, any one and every one, made a bee-line for the nearest symbol of a cellar and safety. It was a wise precaution which must have saved many lives; for, though the Hun may be given the credit of only wishing to damage places of 'military importance,' and to kill members of 'the armed forces of the enemy,' his bombs, as often as not, were liberally sprinkled upon the residential and commercial portions of the town. Added to this, every anti-aircraft gun in the neighbourhood – and there were many of them – sent its shell hurtling skywards to drive the invaders away. The bits had to fall somewhere; and if a jagged morsel of steel weighing one ounce falls on the head of a human being from a height, say, of ten thousand feet, there is nothing for it but a funeral and mourners. So it is wise to keep indoors in any case, wiser still to repair to somebody else's cellar if you do not possess one of your own.

But after the raids, when the inhabitants emerged from their burrows, the small boys and girls collected splinters and sold them as mementoes. The trade was very brisk, and prices sometimes ran high. Bomb fragments – and one could not help suspecting that many of these were manufactured at home in the quiet intervals – commanded fabulous sums. I still treasure a fleeting vision of a British army captain in khaki, flourishing five-franc notes, pursuing a sky-blue poilu down the street in the midst of an air raid. The Frenchman hugged to his bosom the dangerous remains of an aeroplane bomb, a wicked-looking affair painted bright yellow, and filled with some devilish compound guaranteed to kill or to cure. The Englishman wanted it badly, and, being the faster of the two, eventually overtook his quarry, and obtained the relic for fifteen francs. What he did with it I cannot say. One can hardly think that it was received with gratitude by his loving parents, or that it occupied the niche of honour in the hall of his rich but nervous aunt.