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

But whatever we may have said about bombing attacks at sea, air raids on a town are not the least bit amusing until afterwards. The whistle of a descending bomb is the most uncanny and unpleasant sound it is possible to imagine, far and away nastier than the howling and screeching of a passing shell. Moreover, in an air raid on a town the visitors can hardly fail to hit some one or something, and it may possibly be us.

III

'The Secretary of the Admiralty announces that an action took place yesterday afternoon between British and German destroyers. The enemy suffered considerable damage, and were forced to retire. Our casualties were insignificant.' —Daily Press.

It is rather galling to find one of the most eventful and crowded hours of one's existence disposed of in four lines of cold print, not even the name of a ship mentioned!

It made the ship's company of the Mariner feel very small and insignificant, and the puffed-up, proud sort of feeling they had when they came out of their first real action oozed from them like gas from a punctured Zeppelin.

Sailors are peculiar animals. They long to frustrate and confound the Hun – that goes without saying; but, having done their best in this direction, they are equally desirous that their friends and relations shall be aware of the fact. Most of the men expected at least to see the Mariner's name in the newspapers. A good many of them, though they would not have admitted it, would have been highly flattered had their likenesses appeared in the Morning Mirror. 'A naval hero who has been doing his bit' would have sounded well as a superscription, though perhaps a trifle fulsome; while further photographs of the 'naval hero's' wife and family, his father and mother, the schoolmaster who had taught him, and the public-house which he sometimes patronised, would also have been suitable to the occasion. But unfortunately the newspapers took no notice of the affair; and, since the censorship of naval news was strict, they probably never even realised that such a ship as the Mariner existed. It was a pity, for, from the point of view of the men and their friends, anything and everything which appeared in the Press must, of necessity, be a fact. If a man went home and said he had been in an action which had never publicly been announced, it was possible that his immediate neighbours might believe what he said. It was more than probable, however, that 50 per cent. of outsiders would treat his story cum grano salis, and think that he had exaggerated. Corroborative evidence is always useful.

To Pincher Martin the recollection of his first action at sea is still a vague and shadowy impression of mingled fact and fancy. He had kept the forenoon watch, and on going below at noon had consumed his usual midday meal with great relish. Then, with a satisfied feeling of repletion, he stretched himself at full length on a hard and very uncomfortable mess-stool, and went off to sleep. He was not the only one; but he had kept the middle watch, so there was some excuse for him.

Towards three o'clock he was suddenly brought back to his senses by the prolonged and irritating jangle of an electric alarm-bell. 'Gawd!' he murmured, sitting up with a start, and rubbing his sleepy eyes; 'wot's the buzz now?'

He was not long in finding out, for at that same moment Petty Officer Casey put his head down the hatch. 'Below there!' he howled cheerfully. 'Tumble up! Enemy in sight! General Quarters!'

His words were punctuated by the sound of men running along the upper deck and the rumble of a gun. The report was faint but unmistakable, and it did not come from the Mariner.

Followed by various of his messmates, Pincher darted for the hatch, clambered up the steep ladder, and ten seconds later appeared at his gun on the forecastle breathless and inquisitive.

''Ere,' he queried, more by instinctive curiosity than because he really wanted the opinion of any one else, 'wot's up?'

'You stan' by to 'ump them projectiles!' grunted an A.B. 'This 'ere ain't the time to git askin' stoopid questions!'

Pincher obediently placed a lyddite shell in the loading-tray and waited.

Three British destroyers were in single line ahead, the fourth being away on some business best known to herself. The Mariner was the centre ship, and she quivered and shook to the thrust of her turbines; while, from the sensation of speed, and the great mass of white water heaped up under the stern of the next ahead, Pincher guessed they must be travelling at about thirty knots. Three or four miles away to port, rather difficult to see against the gray background of shore beyond, were the lean shapes of three other torpedo-craft. They also were steaming at high speed, and left a long white trail in the water astern of them, and seemed to be steering an approximately parallel course. They were German, of course, and as he watched a ripple of bright flame and a cloud of brown smoke leapt out from their leading vessel. They were firing, and at him. He felt rather frightened, and suddenly became possessed of a bitter resentment against the enemy who were striving to kill him and his shipmates. He had done them no personal wrong, so why should they try to take his life?

He held his breath and waited for the shell to drop, but the pause seemed interminable. Then he heard the sound of the reports, and saw three or four whity-gray splashes in the water between him and the enemy. The shell were fully six hundred yards short, and harmless. He breathed again.

Some order came through a voice-pipe to the gun; whereupon the sight-setter twiddled a small wheel and peered anxiously at a graduated dial, while the gunlayer, breathing heavily, applied his eye to the telescope. The muzzle of the gun began to move up and down in the air as the sights were kept on the enemy.

'Train right a bit, Bill!' came a smothered remark. 'Train right, damn yer eyes! That'll do! Keep her like that!'

A bell rang somewhere. A moment's pause, and then, with a sheet of flame and a crash, the weapon went off.

When once the business really started Pincher felt better. The anticipation, that awful period of suspense between the time of the enemy being sighted and the first shot being fired, was far and away worse than the actual fight itself. The noise and excitement acted as a sort of anæsthetic. They had a deadening effect which dulled the finer workings of his mind, and did away with most of his previous and poignant mental agony. He realised in a vague sort of a way that he might be killed; but the process of being under fire, when once it had started and the enemy was being fired at in return, was not nearly so bad as he had imagined it would be.

He had the task of placing a projectile in the loading-tray every time after the gun had fired, recoiled, ejected the spent cylinder neatly to the rear, and then had run out again and had been reloaded. He did it almost automatically, and without having to think about it. Time became an unknown quantity. Seconds sometimes seemed like hours, and hours may have dwindled to minutes for all he knew. All the sensations he was really conscious of at the time were a supreme desire to keep up the supply of shell, an overwhelming hatred for the enemy who dared to fire upon him, a most unpleasant feeling of heat, and an intolerable and raging thirst. The acrid taste and smell of the burning cordite may have produced the thirst; but, after five minutes of firing, Martin would have bartered everything he possessed for a mug of really cold water.

Incident succeeded incident with such rapidity that he could not concentrate his attention on any one particular thing. He saw great white splashes in the water, some of them perilously close. The noise of the Mariner's own guns overpowered every other sound, but between their reports he heard the fainter thudding of the enemy's weapons, the peculiar whining drone of hostile shell as they hurtled through the air, and the fiendish whirring and whizzing of their fragments as they burst. There came a jar and a metallic crash which told him that the ship had been hit somewhere close. He had no time to look round, but waited anxiously for the missile to pulverise; waited for what seemed minutes for the flame and roar of an appalling detonation and a shower of splinters which would sweep him to eternity. They never came. The shell had passed through the forecastle, and out again through the side of the ship, without exploding.

His own gun was firing very fast, and he could not see much, but in the rifts between the sheets of flame and clouds of smoke caused by its discharge he caught occasional glimpses of the enemy. They were still steaming fast, and seemed rather closer than before, and from the sea round about them spout after spout of spray leapt into the air as the British shell pitched. The brilliant gun-flashes still twinkled up and down their sides as they fired; but he was glad they were having a hot time.

The next time he saw them they seemed to have turned shorewards, while the British, still firing heavily, steamed in pursuit. Then, in the after-part of the middle German destroyer, the one the Mariner was firing at, he suddenly noticed a wicked red flash and a cloud of oily black smoke. A shell had gone home. He could have shouted in glee had he not been so breathless.

The long-range action lasted for a full fifty-five minutes, with both sides blazing away merrily the whole time. What damage was done to the enemy it was impossible to say, but it was clear that they suffered considerably, and that they were forced back to their own coast. As regards their numbers, guns, size, and speed the opposing craft were pretty evenly matched; and if the action had taken place in the open sea it would have been fought to a finish at close range, or until one or other of the combatants retired post-haste from the contest. In this eventuality, given average luck, it would not have been the British; not because the German is any less brave than his antagonist, but because he has fewer ships to risk, and is supposed to have orders not to give battle unless he has a good chance of winning. But man proposes and God disposes, and the fight was more or less a drawn one.

At length there came the time when the enemy could be pursued no longer, on account of the proximity of the shore. So close in had they steamed that some one in the Mariner even declared that he was able to count the windows in the buildings and the tiles on the red roofs; and though the tile part may have been an exaggeration, the window-counting certainly was not. The yellow, wave-lapped beach, with the turf-covered sand-dunes beyond it, looked strangely calm and peaceful; but concealed in those dunes were guns of almost every imaginable size from fourteen-inch downwards, some of which were reputed to be able to pitch their shell on a sixpence at a range of fifteen miles. The Mariner and her consorts were a long, long way inside this distance, and there was nothing for it but to discontinue the action, and to beat a hasty retreat.

Brother Boche, with his guns in among the dunes, was no fool. He was merely waiting for a good opportunity to open fire, and his chance came at the precise moment when the British helms went over and the destroyers started to steam seawards. Then the whole line of coast suddenly began to sparkle from end to end, and before one had time to think the shell were pitching. The fire of the destroyers, both as regards its volume and its accuracy, had been as nothing to this. Great white-water fountains seemed to spout up everywhere at the same moment, ahead, astern, and on either side. How many projectiles fell within a few feet of the ship during the next ten minutes it is impossible to say. The shooting was very accurate indeed – far too accurate to be pleasant. It was extremely unpleasant.

Words can convey no conception of the breathless sort of sensation caused by those falling shell. They howled like wolves and screeched like express trains passing through wayside stations. They fell into the water with heavy liquid plops, detonated in gigantic upheavals of water and with roaring concussions compared with which the reports of heavy guns faded into insignificance, and sent their jagged-edged fragments whirring off into space with the humming and buzzing of angry hornets. It was a sickening, uncanny feeling to see a fifty-foot geyser-like spout spring into the air a bare fathom off the stem, to notice the black patch at the spot in the water where the shell had burst as if one had emptied a bucket of ashes, and then to steam through the descending spray, and to smell the horrible, reeking stench of the explosive. It was more alarming still to see a bouquet of four or five such splashes jump into the air within a few feet of the stern or on either side of the ship. If a single one of these projectiles drove home the Mariner would probably be brought to a standstill, in which case her subsequent demolition and the slaughter of her crew would only be a matter of time. If three or four shells struck at once she would probably founder immediately.

It is one thing to be fired at by a similar vessel, and to be able to fire at her in reply; but it is something quite different to be subjected to the individual attention in broad daylight of a heavy ship, or many shore batteries, when there is no possible chance of retaliation. It leaves one breathless and cold; and though, perhaps, one may not actually show one's fear, one would give much to be elsewhere. It is only natural.

Shell from modern heavy guns can drive their way through the armoured sides of a battleship, but they will pulverise a destroyer into mere powder. There are no bombproofs, no funk-holes, no armour, not even a conning-tower – not that it would be used if there were. The officers and the men at the guns and torpedo-tubes are all on deck and in the open, while those below in the engine and boiler rooms have nothing between them and the deep sea but a steel skin barely thicker than a substantial biscuit-tin. Moreover, the greater portion of the hull is crammed with machinery, ammunition, and explosives; and, however much of a safeguard a destroyer's speed and small size may be, she must always seem very vulnerable to those who serve in her. I say 'seem' advisedly, for it is surprising how much hammering the tough little craft can withstand without being knocked out; while, as any gunner who is used to the game will tell you, she is not a very easy target to hit. But, for all that, one lucky shell may do the trick, in which case every man-jack of her crew may be killed or drowned. There is never much chance of escape if once the ship goes, and any man who says he relishes being under heavy fire in a T.B.D. is either a born hero or an Ananias. It is easy to make light of things after they have happened, but no words can adequately portray the inner feelings of the ordinary mortal while the ordeal is still in progress. They are indescribable.

But by some miraculous intervention of Providence the Mariner and her sister-ships escaped practically scot-free. According to people who witnessed the withdrawal from a distance, people who well knew the range and accuracy of the coast guns, the odds were a thousand to one that they would never escape, for at times they were hardly visible in the spray fountains leaping up all around them. They were literally buried in the splashes, but still they came on – and escaped.

It was not until afterwards that the men thoroughly realised how lucky they were. At the time, whatever they may have felt in their hearts or minds, there were no suggestions of fear in their faces, no trace of nervousness in their demeanour. They behaved just the same as usual – jeered uproariously when a shell fell a few feet short and deluged them with spray, and made facetious remarks when projectiles from 'Fractious Fanny,' as some one adroitly christened a particularly obnoxious 11·2, lumbered gracefully over their heads and exploded merrily in the sea a hundred feet or so beyond them. Perhaps they were a little more talkative than usual; perhaps their laughter was sometimes a little forced; but, for all that, they behaved as British bluejackets always do.

'I wouldn't 'a missed that there show fur a lot,' said Pincher Martin after supper the same evening.

'I reckons we kin think ourselves lucky ter git outa it,' Billings murmured with his mouth full. 'It's orl right lookin' back on it w'en once it's orl over; but it takes a bloomin' 'ero not ter 'ave a cold feelin' in 'is stummick wi' them there guns a-pluggin' at 'im.'

'Did you 'ave a cold feelin' in yer inside, Josh?' M'Sweeny queried anxiously.

'Course I 'ad. I wus cold orl over. I ain't no bloomin' 'ero. But, orl the same, Tubby boy, I reckons it's done us orl good ter 'ave a bit of a shake up like this 'ere. Makes us a sort of understan' 'ow every bloke aboard 'as 'is own job ter do; don't it?'

Joshua's way of expressing himself may have been crude, but M'Sweeny quite understood what he meant.

The engagement, short as it had been, had given the men confidence in themselves, each other, their officers, and their ship. It had banded them together in some extraordinary and quite inexplicable manner which no years of peace training could have done. Together they had been tried and had not been found wanting; and now, more than ever, they had become 'we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.' They felt themselves inspired with a new patriotism and a new ardour, and it was that very feeling which, on 21st October 1805, had helped their forebears to win the battle of Trafalgar.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DAY

I

All through the peaceful night of 30th May 1916 British squadrons were at sea steaming steadily eastward. Fighting-ships of almost every class were represented; great battleships and battle-cruisers, armoured cruisers of an older type, new and very fast light cruisers, the ubiquitous destroyers in their dozens, all converging silently towards the area on the other side of the North Sea which was presently to become the scene of the mightiest and most terrible battle in British naval history.

The Commander-in-Chief and the Admirals in command of squadrons may possibly have known that something unusual was in the air; but it is doubtful if any subordinate officers or men had the least inkling of what the next day would bring forth. They knew that a battle was always possible, and were ready and anxious for it. Off and on for nearly twenty-two months they had scoured the gray wastes of the North Sea, and had explored its grayer fogs, always hoping that the next dawn would bless their tired eyes with a view of the far-flung battle-line of the enemy stretched out across the horizon before them. But morning after morning the sun had risen to display the same bare and monotonous vista of sea and sky.

Sometimes the ocean was calm and peaceful, the sun shone undimmed, and the blue sky towards the horizon was piled high with mass upon mass of mountainous white cumulus. Sometimes they had fogs, when they could see barely a hundred yards; sometimes the prevailing North Sea mists, in which the visibility alternated between two and five miles. At other times the wind howled, and the leaden sea was whipped into fury by gales; while the sky became overcast with dark clouds and streaked with the white, frayed-out streamers of mares' tails. They had come to know the vagaries of their cruising ground by heart; but whatever its aspect the sea was ever innocent of the one thing they all wished to see – the German High Sea Fleet.

Their wistful longing was just as acute as that of the men in the storm-battered ships of Columbus when straining their eyes towards the western horizon for the first dim blue traces of the new continent; and now, through sheer disappointment, not a few of them had come to believe that the chance they all prayed and longed for would never come.

Daylight on 31st May found the Mariner and many other destroyers still steaming eastward in company with the battle-cruiser fleet under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty in the Lion. Certain light-cruiser squadrons, acting as scouts, were stationed some distance ahead of the heavier vessels. The morning – which had broken beautifully fine, with a calm sea – passed without incident, and it was not until shortly after half-past two in the afternoon that the advanced squadrons reported the enemy in force to the eastward.

It is impossible to give any idea of the thrill of excitement which passed through the officers and men of the ships when the facts became known. The bugles blared, and they hurried to their action stations. 'Enemy in force!' Did it mean that they were in touch with the High Sea Fleet? Had their chance come at last, the chance for which they had all been hoping ever since that fateful 4th August 1914?

Men looked anxiously at their neighbours to see how they took the momentous news; but nowhere did a face show signs of fear. On the contrary, their expression and demeanour testified to their implicit and unshaken confidence in themselves and their leaders. They laughed, jests passed from man to man and from group to group, and they went about their business with an intense keenness born of a new hope.

The big battle-cruisers swung rapidly into fighting formation and increased speed, their wash churning the calm sea into great waves. They presented a magnificent spectacle as they steamed into action with the smoke curling from their funnel-tops, white ensigns flying at each masthead, and the huge guns in their turrets pointing their lean muzzles skywards.

At two-thirty-five P.M. a considerable amount of smoke was sighted to the eastward, and a little less than an hour later the gigantic shapes of five hostile battle-cruisers were looming up over the horizon.

'All guns, load!' came the first order from the control positions. 'Salvos by director! Guns – ready!'

Inside a turret a burly A.B., clad in flannel shirt and trousers, spat solemnly on his hands, stretched out a hairy tattooed arm, and moved a small, brightly polished steel lever. Instantly a clattering hydraulic chain rammer uncoiled itself like a snake, and an enormous shell weighing three-quarters of a ton was pushed bodily out of the loading-tray to vanish into the open breech of the gun with a smack and a thud. The rammer was withdrawn, another man manipulated a handle, and two cream-coloured, sausage-shaped bundles with red ends rolled into the space just vacated by the projectile. They were the cordite charges, swathed in innocent-looking silk coverings, the red extremities being the muslin bags containing the powder-igniters. The silk, somehow, seemed strangely out of place in the gun-turret of a battle-cruiser. It reminded one irresistibly of the counter of a drapery establishment; but for many a long year artillery experts have known that a silk-covered cartridge leaves little or no burning residue in the breech of the gun when the weapon is fired. Hence its use.

Again the hairy, tattooed gentleman moved his lever, and the rammer, darting forward, propelled two quarter charges into the yawning breech of the gun. The operation was repeated, while a man fiddled for a moment with the lock, and then the great steel breech-block swung to with a clang.

'Right gun, loaded!' some one bawled, as something slipped into place with a click.

'Right gun, ready!' from another man.

The gunlayer watched a dial, and the gun's crew stood tense and expectant, while the huge breeches of the weapons moved ponderously up and down, with a wheezing and a groaning of the water through the hydraulic machinery. The turret twitched slowly to the right, stopped, and then moved again. Ammunition-cages containing more shell and cartridges ready for the next round came clattering up from the loading-chambers.

The officer in charge, a lieutenant with absurdly pink cheeks and curly hair, was stationed at his periscope, one end of which protruded through a hole in the armoured roof of the turret, and gave him a view of the surrounding sea.

'Can yer see anythink, sir?' some one asked in a hoarse whisper, his curiosity getting the better of him as the officer bent down to wipe the eyepiece of his instrument with a gaudy bandana handkerchief.

'Yes,' he answered cheerily, 'five battle-cruisers, some light cruisers, and a good many destroyers! Stand by. It'll be starting in a minute.' He replaced the handkerchief in his pocket, and applied his eyes to the periscope again.