Part 6
At times memories crowded so that they became confused. I was not sure, for instance, whether it was T----, of the _Eimoo_, or P----, of the _Levuka_, whom I had seen go over the rail into shark-infested Rotrura Lagoon to jerk the kink out of an air-hose before his diver strangled; or which of two otherwise well-remembered “B.I.” skippers it was that waded in, barehanded, and floored every one of a bunch of Lascars who were fighting with their knives; or whether it was the mate or the skipper of the East African coaster who, with one of his thighs being torn to ribbons by the beast’s hind claws, kept his grip on the throat of a young leopard that had slipped from its cage, and which he was afraid might become panic-stricken and jump overboard before it could be recaptured; or whether it was the captain of a “Burns, Philips” or a “Union” steamer that I had seen put out through the tortuous passage of Suva Bay when the wind was snapping the tops from the coconut palms, and the barometer was at 28.50 and still falling, just because the wife of the missionary on some obscure little bit of the Fijian Archipelago to the north was expecting to become a mother and needed the attention of the ship’s doctor.
I would have gone on to the end of my “watch” thinking of the bravery--moral and physical--the ready nerve and the general “sufficiency unto occasion” of my old friends, but most that had been brave had also been kind and considerate, and every now and then I found my mind occupied with recollections of the little things they had done for me, or that I had seen them do for others. There was B----, of the old _Changsha_, running from Yokohama to Sydney, who went miles off his course just to satisfy my whim to pass over the spot where _Mary Gloster_ was buried at sea. What an afternoon that was! The Straits of Macassar “oily and treacly,” just as Kipling had described them, and the milk-warm land breeze wafting the odours of the spice groves of Celebes. B---- had his volume of Kipling and I had mine, and between us was the reef-freckled chart of Macassar Straits with Borneo to starboard, Celebes to port, and a thousand dotted lines indicating islets and reefs and rocks--mostly lurking, half-submerged--in between.
“By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank, We dropped her--I think I told you--and I pricked it off where she sank-- (Tiny she looked on the grating--that oily, treacly sea--) Hundred and eighteen East, remember, and South just three. Easy bearings to carry....”
read B----, running his finger along the chart.
“Aye, easy to carry. _Here’s_ the spot,” and he marked it with a circled dot. Then we “dead reckoned” the latitude from the noon sight, and “shot” for the longitude as we “came to the Union Bank.” And finally, when we were over the spot as near as might be determined from hasty reckoning, nothing would do but B---- must start the lead going to determine the depth. Never shall I forget the way his face lit up when the leadsmen droned out “Fourteen,” and there were tears glistening in his eyes as he turned back a couple of pages and read--
“And we dropped her in fourteen fathoms; I pricked it off where she sank.”
“I might have known that Kipling worked it out with a chart,” he exclaimed; “but what a thrill it gives one to find it exact, even to the soundings!”
The margins of “The _Mary Gloster_,” in my “Seven Seas,” bear the pencilled records--now thumbed and fingered into dim blurs--of our “mid-sea madness” to this day, and there is nothing that I treasure more. B---- would never have taken his 5,000-ton freighter miles off her course, at the cost of some hours of time and a number of tons of good Nagasaki coal, had he been any less daft about Kipling than I was. But all British sailors love Kipling; as a class, I have always felt that they had a fuller appreciation of the message of “the uncrowned Laureate” than have any others.
For an hour at least I must have turned in fancy the pages of Kipling, now with this well-remembered skipper, now with that, until the recollection of how kind old N----, of a Liverpool Para-Manaos freighter, had read to me “The Hymn Before Action” one night when I was half delirious from the Amazon “black-water” fever he had been nursing me through set the current of my thought on another tack. N---- was only one of a dozen who had coddled me through some sort of tropical illness or patched me up after some sort of a smash-up.
It was R----, of the Valparaiso-Panama coaster, who had put my hand in splints after it had been crushed between the gangway and a dug-out full of ivory nuts off some pile-built village of Ecuador, and it was my fault rather than his that the little finger was still crooked. And it was H----, of the big White Star freighter on the Australia-South Africa run, who laboured for an hour in helping the ship’s doctor worry back into place the shoulder I had dislocated in the “sports” one afternoon; and it was D----, of the Rangoon-Calcutta “B.I.,” who had reduced with horse-liniment the ankle I had sprained in dodging out of the path of a temperamental water-buffalo while ashore at Akyab; and it was A----, of the Lynch river boat plying from Basra to Bagdad, who stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the bazaar of then almost unheard-of Kut-el-Amara had amused themselves with bouncing rocks off my head because (this was during the Turco-Italian war) they imagined I looked like an “alien enemy.”
A---- was killed when the Turks shelled his ship--then a transport--early in the Mesopotamian operations, I remembered, and this led my thoughts off to the long watch I kept by the bedside of poor old Y----, on whose “B.P.” steamer I had been roaming in and out among the Solomons, New Hebrides, Fijis and other islands of western Polynesia for two months. Y----’s heart had been giving out for a number of years, and now very hot weather following, the excitement of seeing his ship through an unusually heavy hurricane had hastened an end long inevitable. He knew his “number was up,” and so he told me, that night, of things he wanted me to explain and set right for him in Australia. It was the thinking of these, and the visit that I subsequently paid to his wife and children in the Illawara, that finally brought my mind back to that other bereaved family in the little red house beneath my window.
The short night had passed, the fog had lifted, and now in the early morning light I saw a milkman stop his cart a half-dozen doors from the Fryatt home and go softly tip-toeing on his near-by deliveries to avoid making unnecessary noise. Out of the retreating fog-bank to seaward two small freighters took sharpened line and headed for the harbour mouth. They were much of a size and type, but the gay red and white splashes on the bows of the more northerly ones indicated she sailed under the flag of an enterprising Scandinavian country, while the unbroken black of the side of the other told just as plainly that she was British. As I watched, the shifting of the shadows on the sides of the Norwegian told me that she was altering her course sharply every few hundred yards--“zigzagging” to minimise the danger from submarine attacks. A wise precaution, I told myself; now what about the other? I took up my glass and held it on the Briton. One, two, three, four, five minutes passed. All the time the wave curled evenly back from her forefoot; not a ripple of shifting light or shadow told of deviation in her course of the fraction of a point.
“Straight on to your goal, little ship,” I said, saluting with my glass.
But I might have known as much. That was Fryatt’s way, and that was the way all my friends of the Red Ensign did, and always will do. “Good luck, fair weather and snug berths to you all; aye, and a quiet haven when the last watch, the long watch, is finally over!”
* * * * *
Knots of troubled sailor men still gathered along Harwich quay this morning, but now that I understood by what they were moved I no longer hesitated to mingle and talk with them. Their slow anger was steadily mounting--gradually crowding out all other feelings--with every word that was spoken, with every hour that passed; but among them were still men who were stunned and dazed, who could not understand how a thing so monstrous really could have happened.
“But w’y, w’y ha’ the ’Uns done it?” persisted a grizzled old salt, turning his troubled eyes to mine after all the others had shaken their heads perplexedly.
“It is just possible,” I said, “that the Germans believe that the execution of one skipper who attempted to ram one of their submarines will make the others think twice before trying to do the same thing.”
Two or three of the older men fairly snorted in their incredulity that even the Germans should thus cheaply rate the British sailor, but the plausibility of the theory soon convinced even these.
“Do you re’ly believe the ’Uns think that o’ us?” one of them finally ventured.
“I do,” I replied, “for there is nothing else to think.”
The old man took a deep breath and turned his eyes away to sea. “God pity all ’Uns!” he muttered, and “God pity ’em!” “God pity ’em!” echoed his mates.
THE PASSING OF A ZEPPELIN
In the year that had gone by since the first great air-raid on London we knew that much had been done in the way of strengthening the defences. Just what had been done we did not, of course, and do not, know. We knew that there were more and better guns and searchlights, and probably greatly improved means of anticipating the coming of the raiders and of following and reporting their movements after they did come. At the same time we also knew that the latest Zeppelin had been greatly improved; that it was larger, faster, capable of ascending to a greater altitude, and probably able to stand more and heavier gun-fire than its prototype of a year ago. It seemed to be a question, therefore, of whether or not the guns could range the raiders, and, if so, do them any vital damage when they did hit them. The aeroplane was an unknown quantity, and, in the popular mind at least, not seriously reckoned with. London knew that the crucial test would not come until an airship tried again to penetrate to the heart of the metropolitan area, and awaited the result calmly if not quite indifferently.
The Zeppelin raids of the spring and early summer, numerous as they had been, had done a negligible amount of military damage and scarcely more to civil property. The death list, too, had, mercifully, been very low. It seemed significant, however, that the main London defences had been avoided during all of this time, indicating, apparently, that the raiders were reluctant to lift the lid of the Pandora’s box that was laid out so temptingly before them for fear of the possible consequences. Twice or thrice, watching with my glasses after I had been awakened by distant bomb explosions or gun-fire, I had seen a shell-pocketed airship draw back, as a yellow dog refuses the challenge that his intrusion has provoked, and glide off into the darkness of some safer area. “Would they try it again?” was the question Londoners asked themselves as the dark of the moon came round each month, and, except for the comparatively few who had had personal experience of the terror and death that follow the swath of an air-raider, most of them seemed rather anxious to have the matter put to the test.
Last night--just twelve “darks-of-the-moon” after the first great raid of 1915--the test came. It was hardly a conclusive one, perhaps (though that may well have come before these lines find their way into print), but it was certainly highly illuminative. I write this on my return to London from viewing--twenty miles away--a tangled mass of wreckage and a heap of charred trunks that are all that remain of a Zeppelin and its crew which--whether by accident, intent, or the force of circumstances will probably never be known--rushed in where two others of its aerial sisters feared to fly, and paid the cost.
There was nothing of the surprise (to London, at least; as regards the ill-starred Zeppelin crew none can say) in last night’s raid. The night grew more heavily overcast as the darkness deepened, and towards midnight stealthy little beams of hooded searchlights pirouetting on the eastern clouds told the home-wending Saturday night theatre crowd that, with the imminent approach of the raiders, London was lifting a corner of its mask of blackness and throwing out an open challenge to the enemy. This was the first time I had known the lights to precede the actual explosion of bombs, and the cool confidence of the thing suggested (as I heard one policeman tell another) that the defence had something “up their sleeves.”
It was towards one in the morning when I finished my supper at a West End restaurant and started walking through the almost deserted streets to my hotel. London is anything but a bedlam after midnight, but the silence in the early hours of this morning was positively uncanny. Now, with the last of the ’buses gone and all trains stopped, only the muffled buzz of an occasional belated taxi--pushing on cautiously with hooded lights--broke the stillness.
Reaching my room I pulled on a sweater, ran up the curtain, laid my glass ready and seated myself at the window, the same window from which, a year ago, I had watched those two insolently contemptuous raiders sail across overhead and leave a blazing wake of death and destruction behind them. On that night, I reflected, I had felt the rush of air from the bombs, and--later--had watched the firemen extinguishing the flames and the ambulances carrying the wounded to the hospitals. Would it be like that to-night? I wondered (there was now no doubt that the raiders were near, for the searchlights had multiplied, and far to the south-east, though no detonations were audible, quick flashes told of scattering gun-fire), or would the defence have more of a word to say for itself this time? I looked to the eastern heavens where the shifting clouds were now “polka-dotted” with the fluttering golden motes of a score of searchlights, and thought I had found my answer.
There was no wheeling and reeling of the lights in wide circles, as a year ago, but rather a steady persistent stabbing at the clouds, each one appearing to keep to an allotted area of its own. “Stabbing” expresses the action exactly, and it recalled to me an occasion, a month ago, when a “Tommy,” who was showing me through some captured dug-outs on the Somme, illustrated, with bayonet thrusts, the manner in which they had originally searched for Germans hiding under the straw mattresses. There was nothing “panicky” in the work of the lights this time, but only the suggestion of methodical, ordered, relentless vigilance.
“Encouraging as a preliminary,” I said to myself; “now” (for the night was electric with import) “for the main event!”
There was not long to wait. To the south-east the gun-flashes had increased in frequency, followed by mist-dulled blurs of brightness in the clouds that told of bursting shells. Suddenly, through a rift in the clouds, I saw a new kind of glare--the earthward-launched beam of an airship’s searchlight groping for its target--but the shifting mist-curtain intervened again even as one of the defending lights took up the challenge and flashed its own rapier ray in quick reply. Presently the muffled boom of bombs fleeted to my ears, and then the sharper rattle of a sudden gust of gun-fire. This was quickly followed by a confused roar of sound, evidently from many bombs dropped simultaneously or in quick succession, and I knew that one of two things had happened--either the raider had found its mark and was delivering “rapid fire,” or the guns were making it so hot for the visitor that it had been compelled to dump its explosives and seek safety in flight. When a minute or more had gone by I felt sure that the latter had been scuttled, and that it was now only a question of which direction the flight was going to take.
Again the eastward searchlights gave me the answer. By twos and threes--I could not follow the order of the thing--the lights that had been “patrolling” the eastern sky moved over and took their station around a certain low-hanging cloud to the south. The murky sheet of cumulonimbus seemed to pale and dissolve in the concentrated rays, and then, right into the focus of golden glow formed by the dancing light motes, running wild and blind as a bull charges the red mantle masking the matador, darted a huge Zeppelin.
Perhaps never before in all time has a single object been the centre of so blinding a glare. It seemed that the optic nerve must wither in so fierce a light, and certainly no unprotected eye could have opened to it. Dark glasses might have made it bearable, but could not possibly have resolved the earthward prospect into anything less than the heart of a fiery furnace. Indeed, it is very doubtful if the bewildered fugitive knew, in more than the most general way, where it was. Cut off by the guns to the south-east from retreat in that direction, but knowing that the North Sea and safety could be reached by driving to the north-east, it is more than probable that the harried raider found itself over the “Lion’s Den” rather because it could not help it than by deliberate intent.
What a contrast was this blinded, reeling thing to those arrogantly purposeful raiders of a year ago! Supremely disdainful of gun and searchlight, these had prowled over London till the last of their bombs had been planted, and one of them had even circled back the better to see the ruin its passing had wrought. But _this_ raider--far larger than its predecessors and flying at over twice as great a height though it was--dashed on its erratic course as though pursued by the vengeful spirits of those its harpy sisters had bombed to death in their beds. If it still had bombs to drop its commander either had no time or no heart for the job. Never have I seen an inanimate thing typify terror--the terror that must have gripped the hearts of its palpably flustered (to judge by the airship’s movements) crew--like that staggering helpless maverick of a Zeppelin, when it finally found itself clutched in the tentacles of the searchlights of the aerial defences of London.
All this time the weird, uncanny silence that brooded over the streets before I had come indoors held the city in its spell. The watching thousands--nay, millions--kept their excitement in leash, and the propeller of the raider--muffled by the mists intervening between the earth and the 12,000 feet at which it whirred--dulled to a drowsy drone. Into this tense silence the sudden fire of a hundred anti-aircraft guns--opening in unison as though at the pull of a single lanyard--cut in a blended roar like the Crack o’ Doom; indeed, though few among those hushed watching millions realised it, it _was_ literally the Crack o’ Doom that was sounding. For perhaps a minute or a minute and a half the air was vibrant with the roar of hard-pumped guns and the shriek of speeding shell, the great sound from below drowning the sharper cracks from the steel-cold flashes in the upper air.
It was guns that were built for the job--not the hastily gathered and wholly inadequate artillery of a year ago--that were speaking now, and the voice was one of ordered, imperious authority. Range-finders had the marauder’s altitude, and the information was being put at the disposal of guns that had the power to “deliver the goods” at that level. What a contrast the sequel was to that pitiful firing of the other raid! Only the opening shots were “shorts” or “wides” now, and ten seconds after the first gun a diamond-clear burst blinking out through a rift in the upper clouds told that the raider--to use a naval term--was “straddled,” had shells exploding both above and below it. From that instant till the guns ceased to roar, seventy or eighty seconds later, the shells burst, lacing the air with golden glimmers, and meshed the flying raider in a fiery net.
For a few seconds it seemed to me that, close-woven as was the net of shell-bursts, the flashes came hardly as fast as the roar of the guns would seem to warrant, and I swept the heavens with my glasses in a search for other possible targets. But no other raider was in sight; there was no other “nodal centre” of gun-fire and searchlights. Suddenly the reason for the apparent discrepancy was clear to me. The flashes I saw (except for a few of the shrapnel bullets they were releasing) were only the misses; the hits I could not see. The long-awaited test was at its crucial stage. Empty of bombs and with half of its fuel consumed, the raider was at the zenith of its flight, and yet the guns were ranging it with ease. It was now a question of how much shell-fire the Zeppelin could stand.
In spite of the fact that the airship--so far as I could see through my glasses--did not appear to slow down or to be perceptibly racked by the gun-fire, I have no doubt what the end would have been if the test could have been pressed to its conclusion in an open country. But bringing a burning Zeppelin down across three or four blocks of thickly settled London was hardly a thing the Air Defence desired to do if it could possibly be avoided. The plan was carried to its conclusion with the almost mathematical precision that marked the preliminary searchlight work and gunnery.
From the moment that it had burst into sight the raider had been emitting clouds of white gas to hide itself from the searchlights and guns, while the plainly visible movements of its lateral planes seemed to indicate that it was making desperate efforts to climb still higher into the thinning upper air. Neither expedient was of much use. The swirling gas clouds might well have obscured a hovering airship, but never one that was rushing through the air at seventy miles an hour, while, far from increasing its altitude, there seemed to be a slight but steady loss from the moment the guns ceased until, two or three miles further along, it was hidden from sight for a minute by a low-hanging cloud. Undoubtedly the aim of the gunners had been to “hole,” not to fire the marauder, and it must have been losing gas very rapidly even--as the climacteric moment of the attack approached--at the time increased buoyancy was most desirable.
The “massed” searchlights of London “let go” shortly after the gun-fire ceased, and now, as the raider came within their field, the more scattered lights of the northern suburbs wheeled up and “fastened on.” The fugitive changed its course from north to north-easterly about this time, and the swelling clouds of vapour left behind presently cut off its foreshortened length entirely from my view. A heavy ground mist appeared to prevail beyond the heights to the north, and in the diffused glow of the searchlights that strove to pierce this mask my glasses showed the ghostly shadows of flitting aeroplanes--manœuvring for the death-thrust.
The ground mist (which did not, however, cover London proper) kept the full strength of the searchlights from the upper air, and it was in a sky of almost Stygian blackness that the final blow was sent home. The farmers of Hertfordshire tell weird stories of the detonations of bursting bombs striking their fields, but all these sounds were absorbed in the twenty-mile air-cushion that was now interposed between my vantage point and the final scene of action.