Part 4

In the river, just off the low sandy point, lay a long, four-funnelled cruiser. In the heavy rain-squalls which swallowed her every few minutes she looked like a thing of mist, so well did the grey of her hull and superstructure blend with the grey of sea and sky. She pitched slowly and gently at the taut-stretched cables of her bow anchors, her nose pointed seawards towards the incoming tide. From her steam-pipes the white vapour which issued, deafeningly stridulant, was torn violently away in horizontal pennons. At her peak a small flag blew out stiffly. At her stern, the ensign--black rectangular cross on white, centred with the crowned eagle and quartered with a small black cross upon the national colours, black, white and red--flattened itself out in the wind with loud claps as the gale half-released it for a second and then seized upon it again.

To and fro upon her navigating bridge the oilskin-clad officer of the watch paced restlessly. Under his sou'-wester, anxious, strained eyes peered from a haggard face whose weather-beaten brow was paled to an unhealthy yellow. Up and down he went, but never for a moment did he take those anxious eyes from the dark channel ahead of the ship's bows. The look-outs, posted at each end of the bridge close behind the canvas "dodger," gazed with equal fixity towards the sea. On their faces the same tension, the same evidence of sleepless nights, was visible. Behind them, in a wheelhouse from which the glass panels had been removed, stood a couple of quartermasters. Stiffly motionless behind the steering telemotor they conversed in low nervous voices. The hands of one of them, a giant of a man, shook continuously as he held them pendent against his thighs.

A blue-uniformed officer with gold bands across his cuffs appeared upon the bridge and approached the lieutenant. They saluted each other with a friendly nod after the formal fingers to the brow.

"Any orders yet, Herr Leutnant?" asked the new-comer. He was a heavily built man with a bluish nose that bent birdlike from between protruding eyes. He worried continually with thumb and finger at a ragged grey moustache. He followed the lieutenant to a position in the centre of the bridge.

"We start directly," said the navigating lieutenant in a weary voice. "When the Herr Kapitän returns."

Both stared silently down at the roof of the conning-tower just below them, and at the two long guns which emerged from the turret in front of it. The open manhole in the conning-tower vitalised the familiar objects with a touch of grim expectation.

"Ach!" said the engineer at last gloomily. "It is perhaps better--I cannot sleep here--I cannot read."

"Sleep!" echoed the lieutenant. "I have not slept for a week. I see always those cursed destroyers slipping through the mist--I see them when I close my eyes--I see them when I am on duty--I know no longer whether I see them or not--and worse than the destroyers----" he broke off suddenly.

"Ach, ja," said the engineer, "you have had a bad time--but you can at least see the danger coming--sometimes, down there, I begin to imagine things--I have not let myself imagine, Herr Leutnant--I have read the sublime words of Zarathustra--I could always read them--but now I can, no longer. How long have we been here, Bielefeld?" he finished abruptly.

"Four days."

"Ach so! I thought it was a week--what days!"

"Jawohl!"

The two men fell silent again, staring at the sea. Once the lieutenant made a quick movement of alarm, whipped out his binoculars, and gazed into the grey distance. He put them back after some minutes without a word. On the whole ship was no other sound than the strident rasp of the escaping steam and the drone of the gale through the wind-tautened stays.

The engineer spoke again.

"What does Borkum say?"

"Enemy disappeared into the offing--could not keep their stations in this weather."

"It is our chance, then."

"Yes--perhaps."

"You fear----?"

"Everything--in this rat-trap. The picket-boats are all in. If only we could start!"

"Jawohl--anything is better than this--besides, the movement of the engines is soothing--this stillness day after day is unnerving. If only we had some good Welsh coal! This soft stuff! One burns and burns and gets no heat!"

"And advertise ourselves to every cursed scout in the North Sea!"

A sailor, heavy in oilskins, drew up and saluted.

"The Herr Kapitän is coming, Herr Leutnant."

The engineer disappeared. His friend went to the starboard rail of the bridge and looked over. A motor-boat was approaching in a smother of flying spray.

A boatswain's whistle shrilled loudly. A minute later the captain came up the ladder onto the bridge, shaking the water from his oilskins like a wet dog and dabbing at his square reddish beard with a handkerchief. The lieutenant saluted, searching his commander's face for a hint of the orders he bore. The captain's eyes were hard, the eyes of a man who had been contemplating desperate possibilities. His bluish lips cut in a thin straight line across his beard. He spoke curtly.

"Get the starboard anchor up. Tell the Herr Stabs-Ingenieur I wish to speak to him."

He went heavily into the wheelhouse and bent over the chart. Outside, the lieutenant blew his whistle and shouted an order. An instant later the shrill piping of the boatswain repeated the call. There was a scurry of men along the deck towards the bows and the clank of a capstan hauling in the heavy chain.

The staff-engineer stood in conversation with the captain. In the low murmur of their voices certain words were emphasised by repetition--"Knots--this coal--revolutions--coal." The captain nodded.

"Do your best," he said briefly.

"We make a dash for it?" queried the engineer. Still he worried at his ragged moustache and the protruding eyes above his beaklike nose moved with little quick stares like a frightened bird.

The captain smiled grimly.

"We rejoin the fleet--while we can--those are the orders. We will do our best and God be with us--do you find that maxim in Zarathustra, Herr Wollenmetz?"

The engineer shrugged his shoulders.

"Ach! I know no longer, Herr Kapitän--anything is better than this--anything!"

"We start at once," said the captain and went out onto the bridge without more words. The ship's bugler saluted and stood stiffly to attention as he emerged.

"Battle stations!" said the captain.

The howl of the gale in the rigging was lost in the sternly joyous run of brazen notes, taken up and repeated all over the vessel. For a minute or two the erstwhile deserted decks swarmed with hurrying men. They disappeared rapidly into turrets, fighting-tops, fire-control stations or stood, alert, behind the unprotected anti-torpedo guns.

There was a buzz of excited voices which would not easily be hushed. At last the never-diminished tension of four long days of inaction was broken. They were going to move, to do something. No longer were they to lie there, waiting, waiting, while perhaps at any minute destruction was creeping stealthily towards them under the surface of the water. They forgot the wearing vigils of the previous weeks at sea, the unrelieved strain of watching the horizon for a grey spot in daytime or a blur closer at hand in the obscurity of the night. They forgot the awful minutes which dragged out, heavy with their lives, as they approached an unknown ship, forgot the paralysing uncertainty when the wireless began on its mysterious message, reporting her. They forgot the night alarms, the perpetual dodging of the hostile cruisers, the chases and the escapes and the last fierce pursuit, which had driven them, all but out of coal, behind the shelter of Borkum Island. The memory of these things was blotted out by the nerve-sapping suspense of the past four days, while they waited for a chance to elude the hostile cruisers watching for them in the offing. Now they experienced the gladness of a release as from an untangible but none the less close prison. Nevertheless, all of this emotional and mental strain was marked in eyes dark-rimmed and faces that had grown thinner. The alacrity of their movements now was not the alacrity of men who leap, calm-souled and confident, to test their strength in a crisis; it was the fussiness of neurotics who are glad to translate their nerve force into physical action as an escape from the barren travail of their brains.

Volumes of black smoke rolled heavily from the four funnels of the cruiser, were blown rapidly by the gale in one thick all-obliterating mist towards the low shores. An engine-room telegraph clanged harshly while the port anchor, dripping black mud, came slowly up to the hawse-hole. Again the telegraph clanged. There was a flurry in the water astern, and the long grey cruiser commenced to move along the dark fairway into the stormy grey of the autumn afternoon.

Quickly she got into her stride. On the port bow the island of Borkum was beginning to loom up just distinguishable through the driving scud. The wireless was talking with it. Borkum reported with steady regularity: "No enemy in sight." The cruiser hurried down the eastern branch of the Ems, meeting a heavy swell that rolled darkly towards her to be divided into two thin translucent curtains of water poised like wings on either side of her bows. The shoals to port and starboard glimmered away into the distance, wide stretches of running, leaping, jostling white-caps. The water under their lee showed an ugly, dirty yellow that contrasted with the black waves of the channel. On the bridge the navigating lieutenant still peered anxiously into the veiled horizon. Every now and then he glanced back at the welter of black smoke issuing from their funnels and muttered fluent curses that were the perverted expression of the prayer in his heart. Behind him stood the captain and the commander, conversing in the intervals of raising their binoculars to their eyes.

At every minute a message from the wireless room was brought to the captain. Borkum was still talking. Suddenly the tenor of its messages changed. "Two British cruisers passing the minefield in the Western Ems." A moment later Emden reported three submarines at the fork of the channel behind. The captain smiled grimly. He could not now go back, but apparently he had given his warders the slip. He went to the engine-room telephone and spoke a few words to the chief. In answer the masses of black smoke from the funnels rolled out even more densely than before. The curtains of flying water at the bows rose a little higher and remained at the elevation. Borkum announced: "Mines evidently swept or damaged--cruisers untouched." In fact, in slight lulls of the gale, slow dull booms were audible to leeward. The batteries on the island were firing. The captain turned and laughed with the commander. The situation could not be more favourable. They had as good as escaped.

A few long minutes and they had reached the open sea. Borkum was a grey blur on their port quarter, the land to the east of them passed into invisibility. Here they felt the full force of the gale. The cruiser nosed into great waves that leaped green above the bows and fell with a heavy thud upon the deck. She endeavoured to combine a steady roll with violent pitching, and the officers on the bridge clutched at the rail with one hand while with the other they pressed their glasses hard against their eyes. The veils of driving mist which swept continuously across the waters might hide a menace that would loom up at any instant as destruction. Suddenly a telephone bell rang in the wheelhouse behind them. A man ran out, saluted and reported:

"Submarine right ahead--about 1000 metres."

The message came from an observing station on the foremast. The three officers on the bridge searched the sea in front of them with their binoculars. Yes! No! Yes! The navigating lieutenant saw a flitting patch of foam on the dark sea, a splash in the air as a wave lifted. He recognised it instantly as a periscope cutting through the water, coming straight towards them. They must shoot--shoot at once! He turned to his superiors. The captain had already shouted one order, was now yelling instructions to the men at the port anti-torpedo guns. The cruiser turned slightly to starboard. Onward drove the patch of foam, aiming apparently at their side. The lieutenant felt his left hand hurt him--it was the intensity of his nervous grip upon the rail. Behind him he heard a sudden order, followed instantly by the sharp, splitting report of the light guns. At the same moment the circle of a conning-tower broke the surface of the sea, followed by a glistening whale-back. As it emerged he saw it veiled in a sheet of flame, a film of smoke. He had a glimpse of a great hole in the whale-back and then the submarine dived nose foremost, kicking up her stern in the air as she went. For one awful, ghastly second the lieutenant had a view of the large initial in her conning-tower. It was U--Unterseeboot!--They had sunk one of their own submarines!

He turned to see the face of his captain fixed in an expression of horror. Everyone on the bridge was trembling. They had lost command over themselves, and they knew it. No one spoke. With a fierce effort of will the lieutenant pressed his glasses to his eyes, scanned the horizon. What was that? He saw a dark spot rising and falling, circling against the grey sky like a black gull wheeling in the gale. It was a seaplane, daringly reconnoitring even in this weather. It was discovery. Borkum confirmed the fear. "Cruisers turning back to sea--difficult to range in this weather."

The guns' crews at the anti-torpedo armament had also seen the aeroplane. A shot cracked out, automatically, without orders. The captain, losing all control over his nerves after the last shock, ran along the bridge to the port rail and excitedly ordered them to continue. "Fire!" he shouted. "Fire! A hundred marks to the crew that brings it down!" His face worked with an insane hatred, his voice was the voice of a man out of himself. It seemed that he wished to revenge his terrible mistake upon the aeroplane. Crack! Crack! Crack! went the guns, while the men behind the rubber shoulder-pieces swore violent oaths. The firing had continued for a couple of minutes or more when the telephone bell rang again.

"The lieutenant in the observing station wishes to know what you are firing at, Herr Kapitän!"

The captain was about to discharge a volley of oaths upon the man when a sharp cry from the commander stopped him. The captain looked again through his glasses. It was suddenly obvious to everybody that the aeroplane was no aeroplane but in actual fact a wheeling gull.

"Cease fire, you--(objurgatory)--fools!" yelled the captain. In a nervous rage he bit furiously at the red beard below his lip. "Tell the Herr Leutnant Feldmann to keep a better look out!" he said savagely to the messenger.

Eight bells sounded. The navigating lieutenant was relieved. He descended from the bridge and stood for a moment in a warm spot in the lee of the forward funnel, trying to achieve a yawn that kept opening his mouth without filling his lungs. His blood, drugged with fatigue-toxins, was in urgent need of more oxygen, but his overtaxed nerves failed to synchronise the action of the muscles. His eyes burned in his head. He stumbled down the companionway, rubbing at them, and took off his dripping oilskins outside the wardroom door. His servant appeared and was ordered to bring him a stiff tumbler of brandy. Then he entered the empty wardroom and flung himself full length upon a sofa. He tried to shut his eyes, but found himself obstinately staring wide awake at a paint-blister on the bulkhead. Disconnected thoughts--visions, rather, of craft of various types driving through the gale passed through his brain. Especially the black dot of the seaplane which was no seaplane danced before his eyes, maddening him with its refusal to be banished. Behind a door in his consciousness was the horror of the sunk submarine--he fought hard to keep that door closed, and caught himself staring into it in intervals of relaxed vigilance. He could not sleep, try as he would. Even the strong spirits failed to narcotise him. If anything they spurred his harassed brain into greater activity. He fretted for a drowsiness that would not come. At last, with a curse, he rose and walked out of the wardroom.

Outside he stood for a moment, hesitating, craving for companionship like a sick man who lies awake at night. He ran over the list of his comrades at their battle stations. Then he made his way down to the engine-room.

A stifling atmosphere, hot, damp and thick with the smell of oil, assailed him as he descended the steep iron ladder. The sweat broke out on his brow as he passed along a gloomy narrow corridor, just wide enough for a man, between packed boiler-tubes ranged on both sides to the roof like bottles in a wine merchant's vault. He emerged finally into a large space, brilliant with electric light. On a platform at one end stood the staff-engineer with some of his assistants, surrounded by a formidable array of indicator-dials, telegraphs, telephones, speaking-tubes, and other fittings of whose use he had but a vague idea. The engineer still worried at his little grey moustache as he gazed below him to where the turbines hummed in their casings. It was comparatively quiet down here. Only a few men were visible, but the lieutenant knew that a hundred or so were labouring fiercely in the bowels of this mass of mechanism which gave the ship her life. From a manhole at the other end of the engine-room a couple of men were drawing out what seemed to be a corpse, its naked torso black as with an explosion. It was a stoker who had collapsed. The staff-engineer frowned as the limp body was carried off to the sick bay. He turned and snarled irritably at the question of the lieutenant.

"250 revolutions and not a turn more can we get out of this Gott-verfluchte coal. That is the tenth man in the last quarter of an hour. There's no use in worrying us. We can do no more. Go and tell that to the Herr Kapitän and leave us to our work."

"It seems clear in front, but there is a couple of cruisers somewhere behind," observed the lieutenant in a placatory voice.

"I don't care if Hell's in front of us and the Devil himself behind!" roared the engineer, losing self-control in the exasperation of his nerves. "We should at least get something that would give some heat there. _Gott sei dank!_ Do you know how many tons of this muck we are burning per hour?" he finished savagely.

The lieutenant waited for the answer.

"Thirty tons per hour--and we are only getting 250 revolutions--go and tell that to the Herr Kapitän!"

The lieutenant's own irritation was inflamed by this display of temper.

"We didn't supply the coal----"

The engineer overwhelmed him with a roar of curses, and finished with an angry order to leave his engine-room. His bulging, birdlike eyes glared with an insane hatred.

The lieutenant returned a bitter retort that had no justification in fact and climbed up the ladders to the deck. There he stood swaying for a moment or two, chilled to the bone by the change in temperature, although he was on the lee side of the superstructure. Raindrops splashed heavily upon him from above. The ship was plunging and rolling more than ever, and he noticed the motion after the comparative quiet below. The gale had evidently freshened. He shivered with cold and half-turned to go below again. Then he changed his mind and stumbled forward, slipping at every step on the wet, unstable deck.

In the forward turret was his friend Gunnery Lieutenant Arenschmidt. He opened the steel door and entered. The narrow metal box into which the breeches of two 8·2 guns protruded was lit by electric lamps behind wire guards. It was filled with the crews of the two guns, seated comfortably on the floor with their backs against the walls. In the shell-bins at the top of the ammunition-hoists a projectile lay ready for each gun. The gunnery lieutenant rose as his friend entered and held out his hand with a smile. He was a jolly young man, this lieutenant, whose manly beauty, marred though it was by a student sabre-cut, fluttered many a female heart. He spoke now with all his usual boisterous good-humour.

"Hallo, Bielefeld! Glad to see you! Giving them the slip after all?"

Despite the buoyancy of his tone the navigating-lieutenant noticed that his lips trembled and that his eyes were deadly serious.

Ere any reply was possible, a bell rang sharply. The gunnery lieutenant jumped away from his friend. The indicators from the forward fire-control station marked a direction, an elevation and a range. The navigating lieutenant stood back away from the alert groups behind the breeches. He felt the floor turning with him while the ship lurched heavily. A moment later he heard a muffled thud and everything shook. The starboard gun had been fired. He heard the hiss of the air-blast clearing the fumes from the firing-chamber, and then the breech was swung open. The hydraulic chain-rammer, jointed like a foot-rule, pushed another shell into place, followed by its charges. The hoists rattled as another projectile came up in readiness. The bell rang again. The crew at the port gun were suddenly busy. There was another shock. What was happening? What were they firing at? The navigating-lieutenant dashed out of the turret, closing the door quickly behind him.