Part 10

Presently a bosun entered. A man somewhere in the thirties, brisk and athletic. One could see him counting the assembled sailors as he came, the numbers forming on his soundless lips. The talk died away.

"How many men here?" said the bosun abruptly.

Several of the sailors began counting. There was much turning round, a deal of whispered estimations. Every one appeared to be looking at everybody else. Finally a deep voice from a corner said:

"Thirty-five."

"Any one down for leave?"

Some half dozen members of a gun crew just home from a long journey, called out that leave had been given them.

"Anybody on sick list?"

There was no answer. In the ensuing silence, the bosun checked off the answers on his list.

"I suppose you all want to go out."

"Sure!"

"Get in line." The bosun backed away, and looked with an official eye at the sturdy group.

"All here, pack up and stand by. At eleven o'clock have all your baggage at the drill office. I'll send a man up to get the mail."

The line broke up, keen for the coming adventure. Giles, the signalman, walked at a brisk pace to his quarters... You would have seen a lad of about twenty-two years of age, between medium height and tall, and unusually well built. Some years of wrestling--he had won distinction in this sport at school--had given him a tremendously powerful neck and chest, but with all the strength there was no suggestion of beefiness. The friendliest of brown eyes shone in the clean-cut, handsome head, he had a delightful smile, always a sign of good breeding. In habit he was industrious and persevering, in manner of life clean and true beyond reproach. Giles is an American sailor lad, a _real gob_, and I have described him at some length because of this same reality. The sooner we get to know our sailors the better.

Back in his quarters, he busied himself with packing his bag. Now packing one of those cylindrical bags is an art in itself. First of all, each garment must be folded or rolled in a certain way, the sleeve in this manner, the collar in that (it is all patiently taught at training stations) then the articles themselves must be placed within the bag in an orderly arrangement, and last of all, toilet articles and such gear must be stowed within convenient reach. A clean smell of freshly washed clothes and good, yellow, kitchen soap rose from the tidy bundles. In went an extra suit--"those trousers are real broadcloth, don't get 'em nowadays, none of that bum serge they're trying to wish on you," a packet of underwear tied and knotted with wonderful sailor knots, and last of all handkerchiefs, soap, and other minor impedimenta done up in blue and red bandanna handkerchiefs. You simply put the articles on the handkerchiefs and knot the four corners neatly over the top. There you have the sailor. Only at sea does one realize to what an extent the bandanna handkerchief is a boon to mankind. When the bag was packed, it was a triumph of industry and skill. Shouldering it, the sailor walked to the drill office. He was early. A good substantial luncheon had been prepared. There were plates of hearty sandwiches. Just before noon, a fleet of "buses" took them to the pier.

The day was clear but none too warm, and great buffeting salvos of dust-laden wind blew across the befouled and busy waters of the port. A young, almost boyish ensign gave each man his final orders, and a kind of identification slip for their captains. The sailors of the Guard, wearing reefers and with round hats jammed tightly on their heads, stood backed against a wind that curled the wide ends of their blue trousers close about their ankles. Presently, grimy, hot, and pouring out coils of brownish, choking smoke, a big ocean-going tug glided over to the wharf and took them aboard. Then bells ran, the propeller churned, and the tug turned her corded nose down the bay. The convoy lay at anchor at the very mouth of the roads. A miscellaneous lot of vessels, mostly of British registration; some new, some very, very old. The pick of the group was a fine large vessel with an outlandish Maori name; Giles heard later that she had just been brought over from New Zealand. The inevitable grimy-decked tankers and ammoniacal mule boat completed the lot. An American cruiser lay at the very head of the line, men could be seen moving about on her, and there was much washing flapping in the wind. The tug went from vessel to vessel, landing a signalman here, a gun crew there. One by one the lads clambered aboard to shouts of "See you later," and "Soak 'em one for me." Giles was almost the last man left aboard the tug. Presently he darted off busily to a clean little tramp camouflaged in tones of pink, grey, and rusty black. The tug slid alongside caressingly. There were more bells; a noise of churning of water. Over the side of the greater vessel leaned a number of the crew, a casual curiosity in their eyes. Seafaring men in dingy jerseys opening at the throat and showing hairy chests. A putty-faced ship's boy watched the show a little to one side. Presently an officer of the ship, young, deep-chested and with a freshly-healed, puckering, star-shaped wound at the left hand corner of his mouth, came briskly down the deck and stood by the head of the ladder.

Giles caught up his bag, clambered aboard, and reported. The officer brought him to the captain. Then when the formalities were over, the second mate took him in charge, and assigned the lad his quarters and his watches.

The convoy set sail the next morning just as a pale, cold, and unutterably laggard dawn rose over a sea stretching, vast and empty, to the clearly marked line of a distant and leaden horizon. The escorting cruiser, flying a number of flags, was the first to get under way; and behind her followed the merchantmen in their allotted positions, each ship flying its position flag.

Giles watched the departure from the bridge. Behind him the vast city rose silent above the harbour mist; ahead, rich in promise of adventure and romance, lay the great plain of the dark, the inhospitable, the unsullied, the heroic sea.

XXXI

GRAIN

This is "Idaho's" story. He told it to me when I met him coming home early this summer. We were crossing in a worthy old transatlantic which has since gone to the bottom, and Idaho, at his ease in the deserted smoking room, unfolded the adventure. "Idaho, U.S.N.," we called him that aboard, is a very real personage. I think he told me that he was eighteen years old, medium height, solidly built, wholesome looking. The leading characteristic of the young, open countenance is intelligence, an intelligence that has grown of itself behind those clear grey eyes, not a power that has grown from premature contact with the world. Until he joined the Navy, I imagine that Idaho knew little of the world beyond his own magnificent West. I consider him very well educated; he declares that preferring life on his father's ranch to knowledge, he cut high school after the second year. He is a great reader, and likes good, stirring poetry. He is an idealist, and stands by his ideals with a fervour which only youth possesses. And I ought to add that Idaho, in the words of one of his friends, is "one first-class signalman." This is Idaho's story, pieced together from his own recital, and from a handful of his letters.

The crowd aboard the naval tug was so festive that morning, and there was such a lot of scuffling, punching, imitation boxing and jollying generally that Idaho did not see the vessel to which he had been assigned till the tug was close alongside. Then, hearing his name called out, the lad caught up his baggage, and walked on into the open side of a vast, disreputable tramp. The lad later learned that she had been brought from somewhere in the China Sea. The _Sebastopol_, Heaven knows where she originally got the name, was a ship that had served her term in the west, had grown old and out of date, and then been purchased by some Oriental firm. Out there, she had carried on, always seaworthy in an old-fashioned way, always excessively dirty, always a day over due. When the submarine had made ships worth their weight in silver, the _Sebastopol_ must have been almost on the point of giving up the ghost. Presently, the war brought the old ship back to England again. Her return to an English harbour must have resembled the return of a disreputable relative to an anxious family. And in England, in some tremendously busy shipyard, they had patched her up, added a modern electrical equipment and even gone to the length of new boilers. But her engines they had merely tuned up, and as for her ancient hull, that they had dedicated to the mercy of the gods of the sea.

Once aboard, and assigned to his station and watches, the lad had leisure to look over his companions. The _Sebastopol_ carried a crew from Liverpool, and was officered by three Englishmen and a little Welsh third mate. The Captain, a first mate of many years' experience, to whom the war had given the chance of a ship, was in the forties; tall and with a thin, stern mouth under a heavy brown moustache; the first mate was a mere youngster: the second, a middle-aged volunteer, the third, an undersized, excitable Celt with grey eyes and coal black hair touched with snow white above the ears. The Welshman took a liking for Idaho; used to question him in regard to the West, being especially keen to know about "opportunities there after the war." He had a brother in Wales whom he thought might share in a farming venture. Of the captain the lad saw very little; and the first mate was somewhat on his dignity. Practically every man of the crew had been torpedoed at least once, many had been injured, and had scars to exhibit. All had picturesque tales to tell, the gruesomest ones being the favourites. The best narrator was a fireman from London, a man of thirty with a lean chest and grotesquely strong arms; he would sit on the edge of a bunk or a chair and tell of sudden thundering crashes, of the roaring of steam, of bodies lying on the deck over which one tripped as one ran, of water pouring into engine rooms, and of boilers suddenly vomiting masses of white hot coal upon dazed and scalded stokers. It was the melodrama of below the water line. Then for days the narrator would keep silent, troubled by a pain in one of his fragmentary teeth. All the men kept their few belongings tied in a bundle, ready to seize the instant trouble was at hand. The cook complained to Idaho that he had lost a gold watch when the _Lady Esther_ was torpedoed off the coast of France, and advised him paternally to keep his things handy. One of the oilers, a good-natured fellow of twenty-eight or nine, had been a soldier, having been invalided out of the service because of wounds received late in the summer on the Somme. An interesting lot of men for an American boy to be tossed with, particularly for a lad as intelligent and observing as our Idaho. The boy was pleased with his job and worked well. He did not have very much to do. Signalling aboard a convoyed ship, though a frequent business, is not an incessant one. He knew that his work would come at the entrance to the zone. Sometimes he picked up messages intended for others. "_Mt. Ida_, you are out of line," "_Vulcanian_, keep strictly to the prescribed zigzag plan." Now he would see the _Sicilian_ asking for advice; now there would be a kind of telegraphic tiff between two of the vessels of the "Keep further away, hang you" order. Twenty ships running without lights through the ambush of the sea, twenty ships, twenty pledges of life, satisfied hunger ... victory. In other days, one's world at sea was one's ship; a convoy is a kind of solar system of solitary worlds. Hour after hour, the assembled ships straggled across the great loneliness of the sea.

The crew had a grievance. It was not against their officers, but against his majesty's government, against "a bloody lot of top hats." A recent regulation had forbidden sailors to import food into the United Kingdom, and all the dreams of stocking up "the missus'" larder with American abundance had come to naught. Idaho says that there was an engineer who was particularly fierce. "Don't we risk our lives, I arsk yer," he would say, "bringing stuff to fill their ruddy guts, and now they won't even let us bring in a bit of sugar for ourselves." The rest of the crew would take up the angry refrain; a mention of the food regulations was enough to set the entire crew "grousing" for hours.

And then came trouble, real trouble.

On the fifth day out Idaho, called for his early watch, found the boat wallowing in a heavy sea. The wind was not particularly heavy, but it blew steadily from one point of the compass, and the seas were running dark, wind-flecked, and high. The _Sebastopol_, accustomed to the calm of eastern seas, was pitching and rolling heavily. Presently the cargo began to shift. Now, to have the cargo shift is about the most dangerous thing that can happen to a vessel. One never can tell just when the centre of gravity of the mass will be displaced, and when that contingency occurs, the big iron ship will roll over as casually and as easily as a dog before the fire. It takes courage, plenty of courage, to keep such a ship running, especially if you are down by the boilers or in the engine room. You have to be prepared to find yourself lying in a corner somewhere looking up at a ceiling which, strange to say, has a door in it. The _Sebastopol_ leaned away from the wind like a stricken man crouching before a pitiless enemy; the angle of her smokestack more than anything else betraying the alarming list. In her stricken condition, the ship seemed to become more than ever personal and human. Presently her old plates bulged somewhere and she began to leak.

The vessel carried a cargo of grain, in these days more than ever a cargo epical and symbolic; a holdful of rich grain, grain engendered out of fields vast as the sea, bred by the fruitful fire of the sun, rippled by the passing of winds from the mysterious hills, grain, symbolic of satisfied hunger, ... victory. A cargo of grain, life to those on land, to those on board, danger and the possibility of a violent if romantic death. The crew, too occupied with the emergency to curse the stevedores, ran hither and thither on swift, obscure errands. And the weather grew steadily worse, the leak increasing with the advance of the storm. Down below, meanwhile, a force of men hardly able to keep their balance, buffeted here and there by the motion of the ship, and working in an atmosphere of choking dust, transferred a number of bags from one side to another. Unhappily, the real mischief was due to grain in bins, and with this store little could be done. And always the water in the hold increased in depth.

The pumps, orders had been given to start them directly the leak was noticed. Three minutes later, the machinery and the pipes, fouled with grain, refused to work. They saw bubbles, steam, a trickle of water that presently stopped, and lumps of wet grain that some one might have chewed together, and spat forth again. Idaho did a lot of signalling in code to the guide ship of the convoy. The _Sebastopol_ began to drop behind. An order being given to sleep up on the boat deck so as to be ready to leave at any instant, the men dragged their bedding to whatever shelter they could find. The captain appeared never to take any time off for sleep. Day after day, through heavy seas, under a sky torn and dirty as a rag, the old _Sebastopol_ listing badly and sodden as cold porridge, carried her precious cargo to the waiting and hungry east. Giving up all hope of keeping up with her sisters, she fell behind, now straggling ten, now fifteen miles astern. At length the weather changed; the sea became smooth, blue and sparkling, the sky radiant and clear.

Then the destroyers came. There was a parley, and the other vessels of the convoy zigzagged wildly for a while in order to allow the _Sebastopol_ to catch up. But in spite of all attempts, the old ship fell behind again and was suffered to do so, lest the others, compelled to adopt her slow speed, be seriously handicapped in their race down the gauntlet. Then it was discovered that the leak had gained alarmingly; there was even talk of abandoning the vessel and taking to the boats. A try was made to pump out the boat with an ancient hand engine. The contrivance clogged almost at once. According to Idaho, it was much like trying to pump out a thick bran mash such as they give sick calves. And they were only two days from land. Barely afloat, just crawling, and with the submarine zone ahead of them.... But the gods were kind, and the old boat and the solitary destroyer went down the Channel and across the Irish Sea as safely as clockwork toys across a garden pool. Yet they passed quite a tidy lot of wreckage. Nearer ... nearer all the time, till late one afternoon two big tugs raced to meet them at the mouth of a giant estuary. The _Sebastopol_ was at the end of her tether. Another day, and it would have been a case of taking to the boats.

The tugs hurried her into a waiting dry dock.

Idaho, his papers signed, his bag upon his shoulder, got into a little tender which was to take him over to the harbour landing. Looking up, he saw some of the crew leaning over the rail.... They grinned with friendly, soot-streaked faces, waved their arms.... The _Sebastopol_ was safe, the rich cargo of grain, the life-giving yellow grain was safe.... The tug slid off into the busy, noisy riverway.

And thus came Idaho of the Armed Guard to the Beleaguered Isles.

XXXII

COLLISION

"......Regret to report collision in latitude x and longitude y between tank steamships _Tampico_ and _Peruvian_......"--_Extract from an Admiralty paper_.

When supper was over, the two sailors of the Armed Guard attached to the ship went out on deck for a breath of evening air. It was just after sundown, a clean calm rested upon the monstrous plain of the sea; one golden star shone tranquil and lonely in the west. The convoy was almost at the border of the zone. To the left the lads could see the twin funnels of the big grain ship; the tattered, befouled horse boat, the little, rolling tramp said to be full of T.N.T., and the long low bulks and squat houses of the two tanks.

"Whoever's on that tramp is some bird at signals," said the bigger of the boys, my friend "Pop." "Generally starts to answer my signal before I'm through. Know who's aboard her, Robbie?"

"I think it's that big new guy from the Pennsylvania" answered Robbie, meditatively.

"Dalton's on the horse boat, isn't he?"

"Sure, either he or Ricci. Pete Johnson's on the first tank, and that fresh little Rogers guy's on the other."

There was a pause. Pop spat with unction over the side.

Suddenly their vessel entered a fog bank, passing through a detached island or two of it before plunging on into the central mass. The convoy instantly faded from sight. Every now and then, out of the wall of grey ahead, a little swirl of fog detached itself, and floating down the darkening deck, melted into the opaque obscurity behind. Drops of moisture began to gather on the lower surface of the brass rails of the companion ways; wires grew slippery to the touch; little worm-like trails of over-laden drops slid mechanically down sloping surfaces. The fog, thickening, flowed alongside like a vaporous current. Overhead, however, the sky was fairly clear, though the greater stars shone aureoled and pale. There was very little sound, merely the steady hissing of the calm water alongside, occasional voices heard in a tone of consultation,--the heavy slam of a door. An hour passed. The fog showed no sign of lifting, seeming rather to become of denser substance with the dark. Pop was glad that there was no ship following directly behind, and wondered if the others were dragging fog buoys. The ship's bell rang muffled and morne in the fog. Suddenly, out of the clinging darkness, out of the oppressive obscurity, there came, momentary, brazen, and incredibly distant a dull and muffled sound. So far away and mysterious was its source that the sound might have been imagined as coming from the dark beyond the stars. An instant later, as if the only purpose of its mysterious existence had been to sink a tanker, the fog melted into the night, and a little wind, a little, timid, trembling breath brushed the great plume of smoke from the funnel lightly aside. A bright starlit night came into being as if by enchantment, as if created out of the fog by the intervention of divine will.

The motionless black shapes of the colliding tankers could be seen far, far astern. After the crash, they had drifted apart. The wireless was crackling, blinker lights flashed their dots and dashes of violet white, a whistle blew. "Am standing by," came a message. The chief of the convoy sent out a peremptory command. Presently a light appeared on one of the vessels, a little rosy glow like a Chinese lantern. The glow sank, disappeared, and rose again, having gathered strength. One of the tankers was on fire. Soon a second glow appeared close by its stern. A glow of warm, rosy orange. In a few minutes they could see tongues of fire, and two boats rowing away from the vessel. They did not know that the men in the boats were rowing for their lives through a pool of oil which might take fire at any instant. A few minutes passed; the light grew brighter. Suddenly, there was a kind of flaming burst: a great victory of fire. The tanker, well down by the head, floated flaming in an ocean that was itself a flame, floated black, silent, and doomed to find an ironic grave in the waters under the fire. Great masses of smoke rose from the burning pool into the serene sky, and hid the vessel when she sank. Half an hour later, a little, rosy light lay at the horizon's rim. Suddenly, like a lamp blown out, it died.

XXXIII

THE RAID BY THE RIVER

The convoy of merchantmen, after a calm, quite uneventful voyage across the ambushed sea, put into a port on the Channel for the night, and the following morning dispersed to their various harbours. Some sort of coast patrol boat "not much bigger than an Admiral's launch," the words are those of my friend Steve Holzer of the Armed Guard, took the S.S. _Snowdon_ under her metaphorical wing, and brought her up the Thames. This _Snowdon_ was one of a fleet of twelve spry little tramps named for the principal mountains of the kingdom, a smart, well-equipped, well-ordered product of the Tyne. Steve, quick, clever, and alert, had got along capitally with the "limeys." His particular pals were a pair of twin lads about his own age, young, English, blond, and grey-eyed; young, slow to understand a joke, honest, good-tempered, and sincere. I have seen the postcard photograph of themselves which they gave Steve as a parting gift. Steve himself is a Yankee from the word go, a genuine Yankee from somewhere along the coast of Maine. He stands somewhat below medium height, is lean-faced and lean-bodied; his eyes twinkle with a shrewd good humour. A great lad. He tells me that his people have been seafaring folk for generations.