Part 3

"Hi, Manuelo" (this to a Philipino mess boy who stood looking on with impassive curiosity), "save three more breakfasts."

"Anything go for you?"

"Well, if here isn't our old Bump!"

The crowd gathered round Captain John who had established contact (this is military term quite out of place in a work on the Navy) with the eagerly sought, horribly elusive German.

"Go on, John, give us an earful. What time did you say it was?"

"About 5 A.M.," answered the captain. He stood leaning against a door and the fine head, the pallor, the touch of fatigue, all made a very striking and appealing picture. "Say about eight minutes after five. I'd just come up to take a look-see, and saw him just about two miles away on the surface, and moving right along. So I went under to get into a good position, came up again and let him have one. Well, the bird saw it just as it was almost on him, swung her round, and dived like a ton of lead."

The audience listened in silent sympathy. One could see the disappointment on the captain's face.

"Where was he?"

"About so and so."

"That's the jinx that got after the convoy sure as you live."

The speaker had had his own adventures with the Germans. A month or so he shoved his periscope and spotted a Fritz on the surface in full noonday. The watchful Fritz, however, had been lucky enough to see the enemy almost at once and had dived. The American followed suit. The eyeless submarine manoeuvred about some eighty feet under, the German evidently "making his get-a-way," the American hoping to be lucky enough to pick up Fritz's trail, and get a shot at him when the enemy rose again, to the top. And while the two blind ships manoeuvred there in the dark of the abyss, the keel of the fleeing German had actually, by a curious chance, scraped along the top of the American vessel and carried away the wireless aerials!

All were silent for a few seconds, thinking over the affair. It was not difficult to read the thought in every mind, the thought of _getting at the enemy_. The idea of our Navy is "Get after 'em, Keep after 'em, Stay after 'em, Don't give 'em an instant of security or rest." And none have this fighting spirit deeper in their hearts than our gallant men of the submarine patrol.

"That's all," said Captain John. "I'm going to have a wash up." He lifted a grease stained hand to his cheek, and rubbed his unshaven beard, and grinned.

"Any letters?"

"Whole bag of stuff. Smithie put it on your desk."

Captain John wandered off. Presently, the door opened again, and three more veterans of the patrol cruised in, also in ancient uniforms. There were more cheers; more friendly cries. It was unanimously decided that the "Trotsky" of the first lot had better take a back seat, since the second in command of the newcomers was "a perfect ringer for Rasputin."

"See anything?"

"Nothing much. There's a bit of wreckage just off shore. Saw a British patrol boat early Tuesday morning. I was on the surface, lying between her and the sunrise; she was hidden by a low lying swirl of fog; she saw us first. When we saw her, I made signals, and over she came. Guess what the old bird wanted ... _wanted to know if I'd seen a torpedo he'd fired at me_! An old scout with white whiskers, one of those retired captains, I suppose, who has gone back on the job. He admitted that he had received the Admiralty notes about us, but thought we acted suspicious.... Did you ever hear of such nerve!"

When the war was young, I had a year of it on land. Now, I have seen the war at sea. To my mind, if there was one service of this war which more than any other required those qualities of endurance, skill and courage whose blend the fighting men so wisely call "_guts_," it surely was our submarine patrol. So here's to the L boats, their officers and crews, and to the _Bushnell_ and her brood of Bantry Bay!

VI

OUR SAILORS

In the lingo of the Navy, the enlisted men are known as "gobs." This word is not to be understood as in any sense conveying a derogatory meaning. The men use it themselves;--"the _gobs_ on the 210." "What does a real _gob_ want with a wrist watch?" It is an unlovely syllable, but it has character.

In the days before the war, our navy was, to use an officer's phrase, more of "a big training school" than anything else. There were, of course, a certain number of young men who intended to become sailors by profession, even as some entered the regular army with the intention of remaining in it, but the vast majority of sailors were "one enlistment men" who signed on for four years and then returned to civilian life. The personnel included boys just graduated from or weary of high school, young men from the western farms eager for a glimpse of the world, and city lads either uncertain as to just what trade or profession they should follow or thirsting for a man's cup of adventure before settling down to the prosaic task that gives the daily bread.

To-day, the enlisted personnel of the Navy is a cross section of the Nation's youth. There are many college men, particularly among the engineers. There are young men who have abandoned professions to enter the Navy to do their bit. For instance, the yeoman who ran the little office on board Destroyer 66 was a young lawyer who had attained real distinction. On board the same destroyer was a lad who had been for a year or two a reporter on one of the New York papers, and a chubby earnest lad whose father is a distinguished leader of the Massachusetts bar. Of my four best friends, "Pop" had worked in some shop or other, "Giles" was a student from an agricultural college somewhere in western New York, "Idaho" was a high school boy fresh from a great ranch, and "Robie" was the son of a physician in a small southern city. The Napoleonic veterans of the new navy are the professional "gobs" of old; sailors with second enlistment stripes go down the deck the very _vieux de la veille_.

The sailor suffers from the fact that many people have fixed in their minds an imaginary sailor whom they have created from light literature and the stage. Just as the soldier must always be a dashing fellow, so must the sailor be a rollicking soul, fond of the bottle and with a wife in every port. Is not the "comic sailor" a recognized literary figure? Yet whoever heard of the "comic soldier"? This silly phantom blinds us to the genuine charm of character with which the sea endows her adventurous children; we turn into a frolic a career that is really one of endurance, heroism, and downright hard work. Not that I am trying to make Jack a sobersides or a saint. He is full of fun and spirit. But the world ought to cease imagining him either as a mannerless "rough-houser" or a low comedian. Our sailors have no special partiality for the bottle; indeed, I feel quite certain that a majority of every crew "keep away from booze" entirely. As for having a wife in every port, the Chaplain says that a sailor is the most faithful husband in the world.

As a lot, sailors are unusually good-hearted. This last Christmas the men of our American battleships now included in the Grand Fleet requested permission to invite aboard the orphan children of a great neighbouring city, and give them an "American good time." So the kiddies were brought aboard; Jack rigged up a Christmas tree, and distributed presents and sweets in a royal style. Said a witness of the scene to me, "I never saw children so happy."

One of the passions which sway "the gobs" is to have a set of "tailor-made" liberty blues. By "liberty blues" you are to understand the sailor's best uniform, the picturesque outfit he wears ashore. Surely the uniform of our American sailor is quite the handsomest of all. On such a flimsy excuse, however, as that "the government stuff don't fit you round the neck" or "hasn't any _style_," Jack is forever rushing to some Louie Katzenstein in Norfolk, Va., or Sam Schwartz of Charlestown, Mass., to get a "real" suit made. Endless are the attempts to make these "a little bit _different_," attempts, alas, which invariably end in reprimand and disaster. The _dernier cri_ of sportiness is to have a right hand pocket lined with starboard green and a left hand pocket lined with port red. A second ambition is to own a heavy seal ring, "fourteen karat, Navy crest. Name and date of enlistment engraved free." Sailors pay anywhere from twenty to seventy dollars for these treasures. To-day, the style is to have a patriotic motto engraved within the band. I remember several inscribed "Democracy or Death." The desire of having a "real" watch comes next in hand, and if you ask a sailor the time he is very liable to haul out a watch worth anywhere from a hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars.

Our sailors are the very finest fellows in the world to live with. I sailed with the Navy many thousand miles; I visited all the great bases, and _I did not see one single case of drunkenness or disorderly behaviour_. The work done by our sailors was a hard and gruelling labour, the seas which they patrolled were haunted by every danger, yet everywhere they were eager and keen, their energy unabated, their spirits unshaken.

VII

THE BASE

The town which served as the base of the American destroyers has but one great street; it is called The Esplanade, and lies along the harbour edge and open to the sea. I saw it first in the wild darkness of a night in early March. Rain, the drenching, Irish rain, had been falling all the day, but toward evening the downpour had ceased, and a blustery south-east wind had thinned the clouds, and brought the harbour water to clashing and complaining in the dark. It was such a night as a man might peer at from a window, and be grateful for the roof which sheltered him, yet up and down the gloomy highway, past the darkened houses and street lamps shaded to mere lifeless lumps of light, there moved a large and orderly crowd. For the most part, this crowd consisted of American sailors from the destroyers in port, lean, wholesome-looking fellows these, with a certain active and eager manner very reassuring to find on this side of our cruelly tried and jaded world. Peering into a little lace shop decked with fragile knickknacks and crammed with bolts of table linen, I saw two great bronzed fellows in pea jackets and pancake hats buying something whose niceties of stitch and texture a little red-cheeked Irish lass explained with pedagogic seriousness; whilst at the other end of the counter a young officer with grey hair fished in his pockets for the purchase money of some yards of lace which the proprietress was slowly winding around a bit of blue cardboard. Back and forth, now swallowed up in the gloom of a dark stretch, now become visible in the light of a shop door, streamed the crowd of sailors, soldiers, officers, country folk and townspeople. I heard Devon drawling its oe's and oa's; America speaking with Yankee crispness, and Ireland mingling in the babel with a mild and genial brogue.

By morning the wind had died down; the sun was shining merrily, and great mountain masses of rolling white cloud were sailing across the sky as soft and blue as that which lies above Fiesole. Going forth, I found the little town established on an edge of land between the water and the foot of a hill; a long hill whose sides were in places so precipitous that only masses of dark green shrubbery appeared between the line of dwellings along the top and the buildings of the Esplanade. The hill, however, has not had things all its way. Two streets, rising at an angle which would try the endurance of an Alpine ram actually go in a straight line from the water's edge to the high ground, taking with them, in their ascent, tier after tier of mean and grimy dwellings. All other streets, however, are less heroic, and climb the side of the hill in long, sloping lateral lines. A new Gothic cathedral, built just below the crest of the hill, but far overtopping it, dominates and crowns the town; perhaps crushes would be the better verb, for the monstrous bone-grey mass towers above the terraced roofs of the port with an ascendancy as much moral as physical. Yet for all its vastness and commanding situation, it is singularly lifeless, and only the trickery of a moonlight night can invest its mediocre, Albert-Memorial architecture with any trace of beauty.

The day begins slowly there, partly because this south Irish climate is such stuff as dreams are made of, partly because good, old irreconcilables are suspicious of the daylight saving law as a British measure. There is little to be seen till near on ten o'clock. Then the day begins; a number of shrewd old fish wives, with faces wrinkled like wintered apples and hair still black as a raven's wing, set up their stalls in an open space by a line of deserted piers, and peasants from near by villages come to town driving little donkey carts laden with the wares; now one hears the real rural brogue, the shrewd give and take of jest and bargain, and a prodigious yapping and snarling from a prodigious multitude of curs. Never have I seen more collarless dogs. The streets are full of the hungry, furtive creatures; there is a fight every two or three minutes between some civic champion and one of the invading rural mongrels; many is the Homeric fray that has been settled by a good kick with a sea boot. Little by little the harbour, seeing that the land is at last awake, comes ashore to buy its fresh eggs, green vegetables, sweet milk and golden Tipperary butter. The Filipino and negro stewards from the American ships arrive with their baskets and cans; they are very popular with Queenstown folk who cherish the delusion that our trimly dressed, genially grinning negroes are the American Indians of boyhood's romance. From the cathedral's solitary spire, a chime jangles out the quarters, amusing all who pause to listen with its involuntary rendering of the first bar of "Strike up the band; here comes a sailor." And ever and anon, a breeze blows in from the harbour bringing with it a faint smell from the funnels of the oil-burning destroyers, a smell which suggests that a giant oil lamp somewhere in the distance has need of turning down. After the lull of noon, the men to whom liberty has been given begin to arrive in boatloads forty and fifty strong. The patrollers, distinguished from their fellows by leggins, belts, white hats, and police billie, descend first, form in line, and march off to their ungrateful task of keeping order where there is no disorder; then, scrambling up the water side stairs like youngsters out of school, follow the liberty men. If there is any newcomer to the fleet among them, it is an even chance that he will be rushed over the hill to the _Lusitania_ cemetery, a gruesome pilgrimage to which both British and American tars are horridly partial. Some are sure to stroll off to their club, some elect to wander about the Esplanade, others disappear in the highways and byways of the town. For Bill and Joe have made friends. There have been some fifty marriages at this base. I imagine a good deal of match-making goes on in those grimy streets, for the Irish marriage is, like the Continental one, no matter of silly sentiment, but a serious domestic transaction. All afternoon long, the sailors come and go. The supper hour takes them to their club; night divides them between the movies and the nightly promenade in the gloom.

The glories of this base as a mercantile port, if there ever were any--and the Queenstown folk labour mightily to give you the impression that it was the only serious rival to London--are now over with the glories of Nineveh and Tyre. A few Cunard lithographs of leviathans now for the most part at the bottom of the sea, a few dusty show cases full of souvenirs, pigs and pipes of black, bog oak, "Beleek" china, a fragile, and vanilla candy kind of ware, and lace 'kerchiefs "made by the nuns" alone remain to recall the tourist traffic that once centred here. To-day, one is apt to find among the souvenirs an incongruous box of our most "breathy" (forgive my new-born adjective) variety of American chewing gum. If you would imagine our base as it was in the great days, better forget the port entirely and try to think of a great British and American naval base crammed with shipping flying the national ensigns, of waters thrashed by the propellers of oil tankers, destroyers, cruisers, armed sloops, mine layers, and submarines even. A busy dockyard clangs away from morning till night; a ferry boat with a whistle like the frightened scream of a giant's child runs back and forth from the docks to the Admiralty pier, little parti-coloured motor dories run swiftly from one destroyer to another.

From the hill top, this harbour appears as a pleasant cove lying among green hills. On the map, it has something the outline of a blacksmith's anvil. Taking the narrow entrance channel to be the column on which the anvil rests, there extends to the right, a long tapering bay, stretching down to a village leading over hill, over dale to tumble-down Cloyne, where saintly Berkeley long meditated on the non-existence of matter; there lies to the right a squarer, blunter bay through which a river has worn a channel. This channel lies close to the shore, and serves as the anchorage.

Over the tops of the headlands, rain-coloured and tilted up to a bank of grey eastern cloud, lay the vast ambush, the merciless gauntlet of the beleaguered sea.

VIII

THE DESTROYER AND HER PROBLEM

About a quarter of a mile apart, one after the other along the ribbon of deep water just off the shore, lie a number of Admiralty buoys about the size and shape of a small factory boiler. At these buoys, sometimes attached in little groups of two, three, and even four to the same ring bolt, lie the American destroyers. From the shore one sees the long lean hull of the nearest vessel and a clump of funnels all tilted backwards at the same angle. The air above these waspish nests, though unstained with smoke, often broods vibrant with heat. All the destroyers are camouflaged, the favourite colours being black, West Point grey and flat white. This camouflage produces neither by colour nor line the repulsive and silly effect which is for the moment so popular. Going aboard a destroyer for the first time, a lay observer is struck by their extraordinary leanness, a natural enough impression when one recalls that the vessels measure some three hundred feet in length and only thirty-four in width. Many times have I watched from our hill these long, low, rapier shapes steal swiftly out to sea, and been struck with the terror, the genuine dread that lies in the word _destroyer_. For it is a terrible word, a word heavy with destruction and vengeance, a word that is akin to many an Old Testament phrase.

Our great destroyer fleet may be divided into two squadrons, the first of larger boats called "thousand tonners," the second of smaller vessels known as "flivvers." Another division parts the thousand tonners into those which have a flush deck from bow to stern, and those which have a forward deck on a higher level than the main deck. All these types burn oil, the oil burner being nothing more than a kind of sprayer whose mist of fuel a forced draft whirls into a roar of flame; all can develop a speed of at least twenty-nine knots. The armament varies with the individual vessel, the usual outfit consisting of four four-inch guns, two sets of torpedo tubes, two mounted machine guns, and a store of depth charges.

These charges deserve a eulogy of their own. They have done more towards winning the war than all the giant howitzers whose calibre has stupefied the world. In appearance and mechanism they are the simplest of affairs. The Navy always refers to them as cans: "I dropped a can right on his head"; "it was the last can that did the business." Imagine an ash can of medium size painted black and transformed into a ponderous thick walled cylinder of steel crammed with some three hundred pounds of T.N.T. and you have a perfect image of one. Now imagine at one end of this cylinder a detonator protected by an arrangement which can be set to resist the pressure of water at various levels. A sub appears, and sinks swiftly. If it is just below the surface, the destroyer drops a bomb set to explode at a depth of seventy feet. The bomb then sinks by its own weight to that level at which the outward force of the protective mechanism is over-balanced by the inward pressure of the water; the end yields, the detonator crushes, the bomb explodes, and your submarine is flung horribly out of the depths almost clear of the water, and while he is up, the destroyer's guns fill the hull full of holes. Or suppose the submarine to have gone down two hundred feet. Then you drop a bomb geared to that depth upon him, and blow in his sides like a cracked egg. The sound of these engines travels through the water some twenty or twenty-five miles, and there have been ships who have caught the vibration of a distant depth bomb through their hulls and thought themselves torpedoed. I once saw a depth bomb roll off a British sloop into a half filled dry dock; the men scrambled away like mad, but returned in a few minutes to fish out a "can," that had sixty more feet to go before it could burst. It lay on the bottom harmless as a stone. The charges rest at the stern of a vessel, lying one above the other on two sloping runways, and can be released either from the stern or by hydraulic pressure applied at the bridge. The credit for this exceedingly successful scheme belongs to a distinguished American naval officer.

The destroyer has but one deck which is arranged in the following manner. I take one of the "thousand tonners" as an illustration. From an incredibly lean, high bow, a first deck falls back a considerable distance to a four-inch gun; behind the gun lies another open space closed by a two-storied structure whose upper section is the bridge and whose lower section a chart room. At the rear of this structure the hull of the boat is cut away, and one descends by a ladder from the deck which is on the level of the chart room floor, to the main deck level some eight feet below. Beyond this cut but one deck lies, the mere steel covering of the hull. Guns and torpedo tubes are mounted on it, the funnels rise flush from the plates; a life line lies strung along its length, and strips of cocoa matting try to give something of a footing.

The officers' quarters are to be found under the forward deck. The sleeping rooms are situated on both sides of a narrow passageway which begins at the bow and leads to the open living room and dining room space known as the ward room. In the hull, in the space beneath the wardroom lie the quarters of the crew, amidships lie the boilers and the engine room, and beyond them, a second space for the crew and the petty officers. A destroyer is by no means a paradise of comfort, though when the vessel lies in a quiet port, she can be as attractive and livable as a yacht. But Heaven help the poor sailor aboard a destroyer at sea! The craft rolls, dips, shudders, plunges like a horse straight up at the stars, sinks rapidly and horribly, and even has spells of see-sawing violently from side to side. Its worst motion is an unearthly twist,--a swift appalling rise at a dreadful angle, a toss across space to the other side of a wave, a fearful descent sideways and down and a ghastly shudder. "You need an iron stomach" to be on a destroyer is a navy saying. Some, indeed, can never get used to them, and have to be transferred to other vessels.