CHAPTER XI

BOMBED!

It was generally admitted by flying-men, even before the failure of the attempts to destroy the _Goeben_ while ashore in the Dardanelles early in '18, that the air-bomb was a most uncertain and ineffective weapon against a large ship of any class, but especially so against a warship with deck armour.

The principal reason for this is that the blunt-nosed air-bomb, no matter from how high it may be dropped, has neither the velocity nor the structure to penetrate the enclosed spaces of a ship where its explosive charge would find something to exert itself against.

This is why an 18-pounder shell, penetrating to a casemate or engine-room, for instance, may easily do more damage to a warship than an air-bomb of ten times that weight expending its force more or less harmlessly upon an upper deck.

Merchant ships, with their inflammable and comparatively flimsy upper works, are more vulnerable to air-bombs than are warships, but even of these very few indeed have been completely destroyed as a consequence of aerial attack. Some of the gamest fights of the war on the sea have been those of merchant skippers who, in the days before their ships had guns of any description to keep aircraft at a distance, brought their vessels through by the exercise of the boundless resource which characterises their kind, usually by sheer skill in manoeuvring. A very remarkable instance of this character I heard of a few days ago from a Royal Naval Reserve officer who figured in it.

"I was in a British ship temporarily in the Holland-South American service at the time," he said, "and we were outward bound from Rotterdam after discharging a cargo of wheat from Montevideo. It was before the Huns had raised any objection to ships bound for Dutch ports using the direct route by the English Channel, and also before the U-boats had begun to sink neutrals on that run. Except for the comparatively slight risk of encountering a floating mine, we reckoned we were just about as safe in the North Sea as in the South Atlantic. Of course, we carried no gun of any kind--no heavy gun, I mean. We _did_ have a rifle or two, as I will tell you of presently.

"Why the attack was made we never had any definite explanation. In fact, the Germans themselves probably never knew, for they tumbled over themselves to assure the Holland Government that there was some misunderstanding, and that they would undertake that nothing of the kind should occur again.

"My personal opinion has always been that it was a sheer case of running amuck on the part of the Hun aviator responsible for the outrage; for, as I have said, we were empty of cargo, our marks were unmistakable, and we were steering a course several points off the one usually followed by the Dutch boats to England. Anyway, he paid the full penalty for his descent to barbarism.

"It was a clear afternoon, with a light wind and lighter sea, and we were steaming comfortably along at about nine knots, heading for the Straits of Dover, when the look-out at the mast-head reported a squadron of 'planes approaching from the south.

"Presently we sighted them from the bridge--five seaplanes, three or four points off our starboard bow. There had been reports of noonday raids on Calais for several days, and I surmised that those were Hun machines returning from some such stunt.

"Holding to an even course, the squadron passed over a mile or more to the starboard of us, and it was already some distance astern when I saw one of the machines--I think it was the one leading the 'V'--detach itself from the others and head swiftly back in our direction. There was nothing out of the way in this action at a time when every ship was held in more or less suspicion by both belligerents, and it seemed to me so right and proper that the chap should come and have a look at us, in case he had some doubts, that I did not even think it necessary to call the 'Old Man' to the bridge, or even send him word of what I took to be no more than a passing incident.

"Descending swiftly as he approached, the Hun passed over the ship diagonally--from port quarter to starboard bow--at a height of six or eight hundred feet.

"'That'll end it,' I thought. 'Our marks, and the fact that we're in ballast, ought to satisfy him.'

"But no. Back he came. This time he was a hundred feet or so lower, and flying on a line directly down our course, passing over us from bow to stern. Again he swung round and repeated the manoeuvre in reverse, this time at a height of not more than four hundred feet. He had done this five or six times before it occurred to me that he was taking practice sights for bombing; but not even then, when I saw him with his eye glued to his dropping-instrument, did it occur to me that he was doing anything more than trying his sights. It was at the next 'run' or two that the thing began to get on my nerves, and I called up the skipper on the voice-pipe and told him I did not quite like the look of the circus.

"The Old Man was in the middle of his afternoon siesta, but he tumbled out and came puffing up to the bridge at the double. He was no more inclined to take the thing seriously than I was, but, on the off-chance--which your careful skipper is always thinking of in the back of his brain-box--he rang up 'More steam' on the engine-room telegraph, and ordered the quartermaster to start zig-zagging, a stunt we had already practised a bit in the event of a submarine attack.

"'If he's just trying his eye,' said the Old Man, 'it'll give him all the better practice to follow us; while, it he's up to mischief, it may fuss him a bit.'

"The Hun had just whirled about three or four cables' length ahead of us, when the smoke rolling up from the funnel and the swinging bow must have told him that we were trying to give him a bit more of a run for his money. Circling on a wider turn, he came charging straight down the line of our new course, flying at what I should say was between two and three times the height of our masts. We were looking at the machine at an angle of about forty-five degrees--so that he must have been about as far ahead of us as he was high, say, a hundred yards--when I saw a small dark object detach itself from under the fuselage and begin to come directly towards us, almost as though shot from a gun.

"It was the only bomb I ever saw fall while I was in a sufficiently detached state of mind to mark what it looked like. 'Fall' hardly conveys a true picture of the way the thing seemed to approach, for the swift machine, speeding at perhaps a hundred miles an hour, must have imparted, at the instant of releasing, a good deal of lateral velocity.

"At first it was coming almost head on to the way I was looking at it, and, greatly foreshortened, it had so much the appearance of a round sand-bag that it is not surprising that the skipper took it for some kind of practice dummy. 'Probably a dud,' I remember him saying; 'but don't let it hit you. Stand by to duck!'

"My next recollection is of the thing beginning to wobble a bit, probably as the nose began to tilt downward; but still it seemed to be coming straight toward us rather than simply falling. I seem to recall that the seaplane passed overhead an appreciable space before the bomb, but I must have heard it rather than seen it, for I never took my eye off the speeding missile.

"The latter seemed at the least from fifty to a hundred feet above my head as it hurtled over the starboard end of the bridge, and I saw it with startling distinctness silhouetted against a cloud that was bright with the light of the sun it had just obscured. It was still wobbling, but apparently tending to steady under the combined influence of the downward pull of the heavy head and the backward drag of the winged tail. It appeared to be revolving.

"I have since thought, however, that I may have got the latter impression from a 'spinner' that is often attached to this type of bomb to unwind, with the resistance of the air, and expose the detonator.

"Down it came until it whanged against some of the standing rigging of the foremast--seeming to deflect inboard and downward slightly as a consequence--missed the mainmast by a few feet, and struck squarely against the side of the deckhouse on the poop.

"The scene immediately after the explosion of the bomb is photographed indelibly on my memory; the events which followed are more of a jumble. The detonation was a good deal less sharp than I had expected, and so was the shock from it. The latter was not nearly so heavy as that from many a wave that had crashed over her bows, but, coming from aft rather than for'ard, the jolt had a distinctly different feel, and by a man 'tween decks would hardly have been mistaken for that from a sea.

"It was the flash of the explosion--a huge spurt of hot, red flame--that was the really astonishing thing. It seemed to embrace the whole afterpart of the ship, and everything one of the forked tongues of fire was projected against burst into flame itself.

"The ramshackle deckhouse, which had been reduced to kindling wood by the explosion, roared like a furnace in the middle of the poop. Even the deck itself was blazing. I had once been near an incendiary bomb in a London air raid, and knew that nothing else could have produced so sudden and so fierce a fire.

"But I also knew that the first burst of flame is the worst in such a case, and that most of the fire came from the inflammable stuff in the bomb itself.

"As I had always heard that sand was better than water in putting out a fire of this kind, and knowing we carried several barrels of it for scrubbing the decks, I ordered it to be brought up and thrown on the flames, but stood by on the bridge myself in case the skipper, who was bawling down the engine-room voice-pipe for more steam, needed me for anything else.

"Luckily the sand was close at hand, and they were scattering it from buckets over the blazing deck within a minute or two. Except for the débris of the deckhouse, the fire was put out almost as quickly as it was started, and, between sand and water, even that was being rapidly got under control, when suddenly the Hun, whom I had almost forgotten in the rush of undoing his dirty work, flashed into sight again.

"The skipper had our ship zigzagging so short and sharp by this time that her wake looked like the teeth of a big, crazy saw, and this the Hun was unable to follow closely enough to get a fore-and-aft sight down her as he had done the first time.

"Coming up astern, he kicked out a bomb just before he was over her port quarter, but it only shot across her diagonally, and struck the water on her starboard side, about a hundred feet away. It went off with, if anything, a sharper crack than the one which had struck the poop, and the foam geyser the explosion shot up flashed a bloody red for the instant the water took to chill the glow of the molten thermit.

"Vanishing even more quickly was a ragged red star which fluttered for a moment beneath the surface of the water itself as the flame stabs shot out in all directions from the central core of the explosion.

"No water was thrown aboard us, and, near as I was to the explosion on the bridge, the rush of air could hardly be felt. Something that came tinkling down after striking the side of the charthouse, however--I picked it up when the show was over--turned out to be a thin fragment of the steel casing of the bomb.

"A similar fragment, twisted into a peculiar shape, struck the chest of a man leaning over the rail in the waist of the ship, inflicting a slight flesh wound the exact shape of a ragged capital 'C.'

"That any kind of a living man could really be trying to destroy a mere merchant ship in cold blood seemed to me so monstrous, so utterly impossible, that, until the second bomb was dropped, I was almost ready to believe that the first had been launched by accident. From then on we knew it was a fight for life.

"The Hun took a broader swerve in bringing his machine round for the next charge, and, ten times quicker on his helm than we were, anticipated our next shift of course, and came darting down on an almost straight fore-and-aft line again. The sudden cloud of our foreblown smoke--there was a following wind on the 'leg' they had put her on at the moment--which engulfed him at the instant his third bomb was released was the one thing in the world that could have made him miss so easy a 'sitter.' The quick 'side-flip' the sharply-banked 'plane gave to the dropped missile threw it wide by twice the distance the second had missed us. Though the detonation rang sharp and clear, and though a vicious spout of foam shot up, I could note no effect of the thing whatever on the ship. Whether that was his last bomb or not we could never be quite sure. At any rate, it was the last he tried to drop upon us, or upon any other ship for that matter.

"Just why he returned to the attack with his machine-gun we could only guess. It may have been, as is probable, that he was at the end of the small supply of bombs left from the raid he was doubtless returning from.

"Again, however, it is just possible that the fact that the fire was being got under control on the poop impelled him to adopt an attack calculated to drive the plucky chaps who were fighting it to cover.

"Anyhow, flying just high enough to clear the tops of the masts, he came swooping back, and it was upon the men trying to put out the fire--now confined to the wreckage--of the deckhouse--that he seemed to concentrate his attack. Two or three of these I saw fall under the rain of bullets, and among them was our freight clerk, who had also been knocked down by the explosion of the first bomb, but who, being hardly stunned by the shock, was soon on his feet again and leading the fire-fighters.

"He was a good deal of a character, this freight clerk. Although well educated, he had led a free and easy existence in various parts of the world. For a year previous to the war he had been a cowboy, and some queer trait in his character made him still cling to the _poncho_, or shoulder blanket, and baggy trousers, which are the main features of the Argentine cow-puncher's rigout. It was the Wild West rig that made me notice him when he was knocked down by the bomb and later by the machine-gun fire.

"He was scarcely more hurt the second time than the first, but the bullet which had grooved the outer covering of his brain-box seemed also to have put a new idea inside it. I saw him pull himself together in a dazed sort of way after the seaplane had passed, and then shake off the hand of a man who tried to help him, and dash off down the ladder, tumbling to cover, I thought.

"It must have been a minute or two later that I saw him, legs wide apart to keep his balance, pumping back at the Hun (who had swung close again in the interim) with a rifle--a weapon which I later learned was an old Winchester, which had been rusting on the wall of the freight clerk's cabin. He appeared to have had the worst of the exchange, for when I looked again he was sitting, with one leg crumpled crookedly under him, propped up against a bitt.

"He looked still full of fight, though, and seemed to be replenishing the magazine of the rifle from his bandoliers.

"The skipper sent me below to stir things up a bit in the engine-room at this juncture, and I did not see my cowboy friend until he had fought two or three more unequal rounds and was squaring away, groggy, but still unbeaten, for what proved the final one.

"I don't know whether he ever got credit for it or not, but the Old Man's plan of action at this juncture must pretty nearly have marked a mile-post in merchant ship defence against aerial attack. We had been instructed in, and had practised the zigzag before this, but that was about the limit of our resources in this line. 'Squid' tactics--smoke screening--had hardly been more than thought of for anything but destroyers. Yet the wily old skipper, literally on a moment's notice, brought off a stunt that could not have been improved upon if it had been the result of a year's thought and experience.

"The instant the Hun 'stumbled' when he struck the cloud of smoke that was pouring ahead of us, the skipper's ready mind began evolving a plan still further to besmudge the atmosphere. Today, with special instructions and special stuff ready to hand, a merchant captain, if he needed it, would simply tell the chief engineer to 'make smoke screen.'

"On this occasion the Old Man meant the same thing when I heard him yelling down the engine-room voice-pipe to 'Smoke up like hell!'

"About all the chief could do under the circumstances was to stoke faster and cut down the draught. This he did to the best of his ability, but the screen did not bear much resemblance to one of those almost solid streams of soot a modern destroyer can turn out by spraying oil freely and shutting off the air.

"Such as it was, however, the Old Man made the most of, and by steaming down the wind accomplished the double purpose of cutting down the draught fanning the fire on the poop and keeping a maximum of smoke floating above the ship.

"The smudge bothered the Hun, but by no means put an end to his machine-gun practice. Except for the freight clerk, who was still pumping back at the seaplane every time it swooped over, every one on the poop had been killed, wounded, or driven to cover, and, with no one to fight it, the fire was beginning to gain new headway.

"'Not good 'nuf by a mile,' I heard the Old Man muttering to himself as he eyed the quickly thinning trail of smoke from the funnels. 'Must do better'n that or 'taint no good.' Then I saw his bronzed old face light up.

"'X----!' he shouted, beckoning me to his side, 'duck below, clean out all the stuff in the paint lockers and chuck it in the furnaces, 'specially the oils and turps. Jump lively!'

"This was the job I went on when I said I saw the cowboy crumpled up against a bitt, but still full of fight.

"Linseed oil, turpentine, and some tins of fine lubricants--I had them all turned out of the fore-peak and carried, rolled, dragged, or tossed down to the stokehold.

"Most of the stuff was in kegs or cans small enough to go through a furnace door, and these we threw in without broaching them. The Old Man called me up twice--the first time to say that there was no increase in smoke, and wanting to know why I was so slow; and the second time to say that he had just got a bullet through his shoulder, and ordering me to come up and take over, as he was beginning to feel groggy.

"There was an ominous crackling and sputtering in the furnaces as I sprang for the ladder, and before my foot was on the lowermost rung, one of the doors jumped violently up on its top-swing hinges from the kick of an exploding tin or keg of oil. As it fell back with a clang the swish of sudden flame smote my ears, and then a regular salvo of muffled detonations. The last picture I had of the boiler-room was of the stokers trying to confine the infernos they had created by wedging shut the doors with their scoops.

"The whole ship was a-shiver with the roaring conflagration in her furnaces as I reached the upper deck, and, above a tufty, white frizzle of escaping steam, rolled a greasy jet of smoke that looked thick enough for a man to dance a hornpipe on it without sinking above his ankles. I found the Old Man, with a dazed sort of look in his eyes, and his jaw set like grim death, hanging on to the binnacle when I gained the bridge, and all he had the strength to say, before slithering down in a heap, was, 'Damn good smoke! Carry on--zigzag down wind! Think blighter has finished. Look to--fire.'

"The fact that the Hun was now circling the ship at considerable distance had evidently made the skipper believe that he had come to the end of his cartridges, and in this I am inclined to think the Old Man was right.

"Which fire, however, he referred to I was not quite sure about, but, in my own mind, I was rather more concerned about the one I had started with the ship's paint than the one the Hun's incendiary bomb had set going. Indeed, the 'fire brigade,' which had taken advantage of the lull to get a hose playing on the conflagration on the poop, was rapidly reducing the latter to a black mass of steaming embers. The cowboy was still snuggled up against the bitt, which he used to rest his right elbow on in the occasional shots he was lobbing over at the now distantly circling enemy. When I learned later what a crack shot the chap really was, I cannot say that I blamed the Hun for his discretion.

"What tempted him to make that fatal final swoop we never knew. It may have been sheer bravado, or he may have been trying to frighten off the fire-fighters again. Anyhow, back he came, allowing plenty of leeway to miss my smoke screen, and only high enough to clear the masts by forty or fifty feet.

"The cowboy saw him coming, and I can picture him yet as he lay there waiting, with his cheek against the stock of that old Winchester, and following the nearing 'plane through its sights. With the rare good sense of your real hunter, he didn't run any risk of frightening off his quarry with any premature shots. He just laid doggo, and held his fire.

"If the Hun had been content to sit tight and keep his head out of sight, the chances are nothing would have happened to him; but the temptation to have a closer look at his handiwork and to jeer at his 'beaten enemy' was too much for him. Banking as sharply as his big 'plane would stand, he leaned out head and shoulders above the wrecked poop, gave a jaunty wave of the hand, and opened his mouth to shout what was probably some sort of Hunnish pleasantry.

"The crack of the old Winchester reached my ears above the roar of the seaplane's engine, and the next thing I was clearly conscious of was the machine's swerving--sidewise and downward--and plunging straight into the trailing column of black smoke. The tip of its left wing fouled the main truck, but it still kept enough balance and headway to carry past and clear of the ship.

"It then slammed down into the water two or three hundred feet off our starboard bow, and it only took a point or two of alteration to bring it under our forefoot.

"The old ship struck the mark so fair that she cut the wreckage into two parts, and I saw fragments of wings and fuselage boiling up on both sides of our wake astern. I gave the order in hot blood, but I would do the same thing again if I had a week to think it over in, just as I would go out of my way to kill a poisonous snake.

"Of course we never knew definitely who was responsible for polishing off the Hun. For a while I thought it probable that the cowboy had only wounded him, and that his swerve into the smoke had been responsible for the dive into the sea, where the ship put the finishing touches on the job. But from the day that the cowboy showed me that he could hit tossed-up shillings with a target-rifle four times out of five I have been inclined to believe his assertion that he 'plunked the bloomin' blighter straight through the nut,' and that I and my smoke had nothing to do with it.

"Neither the skipper nor the cowboy were much hurt, and as for the ship, she probably suffered, in the long run, more from the loss of her paint and oil supply than from the Hun's bomb and the fire it started."