CHAPTER IV

HUNTING

"If it's destroyer work you want, there are five of them getting under weigh at four o'clock," said the "Senior Officer Present," looking at his watch. "You'll have just about time to pick up your luggage and connect if you want to go. I can't tell you what they're going to do--they won't know that themselves till they get to sea, and their orders may be changed from hour to hour, and things may happen to send them to the Channel, France, or to several other places, on and off the chart, before they put in here again. But there'll be work to do--plenty of it. That's the best part of this corner of the North Atlantic in which our Allies have done the American destroyers the honour of setting them on the U-boats. Whatever else you may suffer from, it won't be from ennui." It was luck indeed, on two hours' notice, to have the chance of getting out in just the way I had planned, where I had been quite prepared to stand-by for twice as many days, and I fell in with the arrangement at once.

Captain X---- ran his eye down a board where the names of a number of destroyers were displayed against certain data indicating their whereabouts and disposition. "_Zop_, _Zap_, _Zip_, _Zim_, _Zam_," he read musingly. "_Zip_--yes, I don't think I can do better than send you on the _Zip_. Her skipper is as keen as he is able, and the _Zip_ herself has the reputation of having something of a nose for U-boats on her own account. I'll advise him you're coming. Pick up your sea togs and put off to her as soon as you can. Good luck." The American naval officer, like the British, never says "Good-bye" if it can possibly be avoided.

They were already preparing to unmoor as I clambered over the side of the _Zip_, and by the time I had shifted to sea-boots and oilskins in the captain's cabin--which, unoccupied by himself during that strenuous interval, was to be mine at sea--she was swinging in the stream and nosing out into the creaming wakes of the two of her dazzle-painted sisters who were preceding her down the bay.

* * * * *

There are several things that strike one as different on going to an American warship after a spell in a British ship of the same class, but the one which surges to meet you and goes to your head like wine is the all-pervading spirit of vibrant, sparkling, unquenchable youthfulness. Everything you see and hear seems to radiate it--every throb of the engines, every beat of the screws--and at first you may almost get the impression that it comes from the ship herself. But when you start to trace it down, you find it bubbles from a single fount, the men, or rather the boys--the lounging, laughing, devil-may-care boys. Theirs the alchemy to transform every one and everything that comes near them into the golden seeming of themselves.

This youthfulness of the American destroyers is in the crew rather than the officers, for the latter--especially the captain and executive--will average, if anything, a shade older than their "opposite numbers" in a British destroyer. There is a certain minimum of highly specialised work in navigating and fighting a destroyer which must be in the hands of officers and men who can have only attained the requisite training in long years of technical study and practical experience. Given these, and the remainder of the ship's company--provided only that they have digestive organs that will continue to function when tilted through a dozen different slants and angles in as many seconds--can be trained to perfection in an astonishingly short time. Here it is that America has scored, for there is no doubt that the youngsters that have rushed to enrol themselves for her destroyer service are better educated and quicker in mind and body than those available for any other navy in the war. It is the incomparable adaptability these advantages have conspired to give him that has made the Yankee destroyer rating a combination of keenness and efficiency that leaves little, if anything, to be desired on either score.

Here is the way a British naval officer who is familiar with the work of the American destroyer flotilla expressed himself in this connection: "The ship's company of any one of these American destroyers," he said, "will average a good five years younger than that of a British destroyer. Off hand, one would say that this would tell against them, but, as a matter of fact, quite the contrary is the case.

"Given that the command and the technical operations are in the hands of highly trained and fairly serious-minded officers, you can't have too much slapbang, hell-for-leather, devil-take-the-consequences spirit in the ship's company. And where will you find that save in the youngsters--tireless, fearless, careless boys. They've found that out in the air services, and we're finding it out in the destroyers. And right there--in these quick-headed, quick-footed super-boys of theirs--is where the Yankee destroyers have the best of us. It is they--working under consummately clever officers--that enabled the American destroyer flotilla to reach in a stride a working efficiency which we had been straining up to for three years."

* * * * *

The green hills astern had turned grey and dissolved in mist and darkness before the captain was able to announce what work was afoot for us. The _Zim_ and _Zam_, it appeared, were to be detached on some mission of their own, while the _Zop_, _Zap_, and _Zip_, after "hunting" submarines for some time, were to proceed to a certain port, pick up the _Lymptania_, and escort her through the danger zone on her westward voyage. The captain was grinning as he finished reading the order. "I can't give you any definite assurance," he said, "that the hunt part of the stunt is going to scare up any U-boats, although the prospects this week are more promising than for some time; but"--he turned his level gaze to the westward, where the in-rolling Atlantic swells were blotting with undulant humps the fading primrose of the narrow strip of after-glow--"if this wind and sea keep the same force and direction for three or four days more, I'll promise you all the excitement your heart can desire when we take on our escort duties. The last time we took out the old _Lymptania_--well, I've got marks on me yet from the corners I got banged up against, and as for the poor little _Zip_--but she's had a refit since and most of the scars have been removed. As you will have ample chance to see for yourself, there isn't a lot of _dolce far niente_ in any of this life we lead in connection with our little game here, but if there is one phase of our activities that is farther removed from 'peace, perfect peace' than any other, it is trying to screen an ex-Atlantic greyhound that is boring at umpty-ump knots into a head wind and sea. Strafing U-boats is a Sunday-school picnic in comparison at any time; but it will be worse this week because they have just put down a couple of big liners, and the skipper of the _Lymptania_, knowing they will be laying for him, will force her like he was trying to get his company the trans-Atlantic mail subsidy. For us to cut zigzags around that kind of a thing--but you'll be able to judge for yourself. I only hope we can catch you a U-boat or two by way of preliminary, so as to lead up to the climax by slow degrees."

Things were fairly comfy that night--that is, as comfort goes in a destroyer. There was a good stiff wind and a good deal more than a lop of sea running; but as both were coming on the quarter and we were plodding along at no great speed, the _Zip_ made very passable weather of it. The bridge, save for occasional showers of light spray where a sea slapped over the side, was quite dry, and even on the long run of low deck amidships there were several havens of refuge where the men off watch could foregather to smoke and yarn without fear of more than an occasional spurt of brine. A dry deck does not chance every day that a destroyer is on business bent at sea, and when it does, like sunshine in Scotland, is a thing to luxuriate in.

As the twilight deepened and melted into the light of a moon that was but a day or two from the full--"bad luck for the _Lymptania_ convoy, that moon," the captain had said as he noted how it was waxing on his chart--I came down from the bridge and worked along from group to group of the sailor men where, lounging and laughing, they sheltered in the lee of funnel and boat and superstructure. The first one I pushed into was centred round a discussion, or rather an argument, between two boys, the one from Kansas and the other from Oklahoma, as to which had raised the best and biggest corn in the course of some sort of growing competitions they had once taken part in. Several others standing about also appeared to have come from one or other of those fine naval-recruiting States of the Middle West, and seemed to know not a little about intensive maize culture themselves. I was just ingratiating myself with this party by nodding assent and voicing an emphatic "Sure!" to one's query of "Some corn that, mister, hey?" when I discovered a cosmopolitan group (two Filipino stewards, the coloured cook, and three or four bluejackets in sleeveless grey sweaters) collaborating in the arduous task of teaching a very sad-faced white mongrel to sit up on his haunches and beg. Or rather it was an elaboration of that classic trick. On drawing nearer I perceived that the lugubrious-visaged canine already had mastered begging for food, and that now they were endeavouring to teach him to beg for mercy. At the order "Kamerad!" instead of sitting with down-drooping paws, he was being instructed to raise the latter above his head and give tongue to a wail of entreaty. He was a brighter pup than his looks would have indicated, and had already become letter perfect in the wail. "Kamerading" properly with uplifted paws, however, was rather too much for his balance, at least while teetering on the edge of a condensed milk case which was itself sliding about the deck of a careening destroyer. The dog had been christened "Ole Oleson," one of the sailors told me, both because he was "some kind of a Swede" and because, like his famous namesake, he had tried to come aboard in "two jumps" the day they found him perched on a bit of wreckage of the Norwegian barque to which he had belonged, and which had been sunk by a U-boat an hour previously. The men seemed to be very fond of him, and I overheard the one who picked him up off the box to make a place for me to sit on, whisper into his cocked ear that they were going to try to catch a Hun in the next day or two for him to sharpen his teeth on.

* * * * *

These boys told me a number of stories in connection with the survivors they had rescued, or failed to rescue, from ships sunk by U-boats. Most of them were the usual accounts of firing on open boats in an attempt to sink without a trace, but there was one piquant recital which revealed the always diverting Hun sense of humour at a new slant. This was displayed, as it chanced, on the occasion of the sinking of "Ole's" ship, the Norwegian barque. After this unlucky craft had been put down by shell-fire and bombs, the U-boat ran alongside the whaler containing the captain and mate, and they were ordered aboard to be interrogated. Under the pretence of preventing any attempt to escape on the part of the remainder of those in this boat, the Germans made them clamber up and stand on the narrow steel run-way which serves as the upper deck of a submarine. No sooner were they here, however, than the Hun humorist on the bridge began slowly submerging. When the water was lapping round the necks of the unfortunate Norwegians, and just threatening to engulf them, the nose of the U-boat was slanted up again, this finely finessed operation being repeated during all of the time that the captain and mate were being pumped below by the commander of the submarine. No great harm--save that one of the sailors, losing his nerve when the U-boat started down the first time, dived over, struck his head on one of the bow-rudders and was drowned--was done by this little pleasantry, but it is so illuminative of what the Hun is in his lightsome moods that I have thought it worth setting down.

The American is more violent in his feelings than the Briton, and much more inclined to say what he thinks; and I found these boys--to use the expressive phrase of one of them--"mad clean through" at the Hun pirate and all he stands for. America--with more time to do that sort of thing--has undoubtedly gone farther than any other country in the war in trying to give her soldiers and sailors a proper idea of the beast they have been sent out to slay. These lessons seem to have sunk home with all of them, and when it has been supplemented--as in the case of the sailors in the destroyers--by the first-hand teachings of the Huns themselves, it generally leaves a man in something like the proper state of mind for the task in hand. Not that I really think any of the Americans, when they have the chance, as happens every now and then, will carry out all the little plans they claim to be maturing, but--well, if I was an exponent of the U-boat branch of German kultur, and my _unterseeboot_ was depth-charged by a British and an American destroyer, and I came sputtering up to the surface midway between them, I don't think I would strike out for the lifebuoy trailing over the quarter of the one flying the Stars and Stripes. I may be wrong, but somehow I have the feeling that the Briton--be he soldier, sailor, or civilian--hasn't quite the same capacity as the Yank for keeping up the temperature of his passion, for feeling "mad clean through."

Joining another group bunched in the lee of a tier of meat-safes, I chanced upon a debate which threw an illuminative beam on the feelings of what might once have been classified as hyphenated Americans. At first the whole six or eight of them, in all harmony and unanimity, had been engaged in cursing Sinn Feiners, with whom it appeared they had been having considerable contact--physical and otherwise--in the course of the last few months. Then one of the more rabid of them on this particular subject--he and one of his mates had been waylaid and beaten by a dozen hulking young Irishmen who resented the attentions the Yankees were receiving from the local girls--threw a bone of dissension into the ring by declaring that a Sinn Feiner was as bad as a Hun and ought to be treated the same way.

The most of them could hardly bring themselves to agree to this, but in the rather mixed argument which followed it transpired that the lad who had led the attack on Sinn Fein was named Morarity and had been born in Cork, and that the one who maintained that nothing on two legs, not even a Sinn Feiner, was as "ornery as a Hun," was named Steinholz, and had been born in St. Louis of German parents.

The wherefore of this they explained to me severally presently, when it turned out that their views--as regards their duties as Americans--were precisely similar. Like all good Yankees, they said, they had it in for both the Hun and the Sinn Feiner; but, because each of them had a _name_ to live down, he felt it incumbent on himself to out-strafe his mates in the direction from which that name came. It was a bit naïve, that confession, but at the same time highly instructive; and I wouldn't care to be the Hun or Sinn Feiner that either of those ex-hyphenates had a fair chance at.

A very domestic little party I found cuddled up aft among the depth-charges. One lad--he had been a freshman at Cornell, I learned later, and would not wait to train for a commission, so keen had he been to get into the war--was just back from a week's leave in London, and was telling about it with much circumstance. There were many things that had interested and amused him, but the great experience had been three days spent as a guest in an English home at Wimbledon. The head of the family, it appeared, was some kind of a City man, and, encountering the doubtless aimlessly wandering Yank at Waterloo, had forthwith carried him home. Everything had bristled with interest for the young visitor, from the marmalade at breakfast and the port at dinner to croquet on the lawn and a punt on the Thames at Richmond. But the best of it all had been that he had brought a standing invitation from the same family to any of his mates who might be coming up to London while the war was on. During the refit, which was supposed to be imminent, two of these, who had plumped for the great London adventure, had screwed up their courage to following up the invitation to the hospitable home in question. Out of his broader experience, their worldly mate was tipping them off against possible breakers. This is the only one I remember: "You'll find," he said, gesturing with an admonitory finger that could just be dimly guessed against the phosphorescence of the tossing wake, "that they don't seem to have any great grudge 'gainst us for licking them and going on our own in '76; but go easy on rubbing it in just the same, 'cause you're a guest in the house. Best forget the Revolution while you're over here. That scrap was more'n a hundred years ago, and we've got another on now. Half the people you meet here never heard of it, anyhow, and when you mention it to them they think you refer to another Revolution in France which came off about the same time."

It was at about this juncture that a change of course brought seas which had been quartering a couple of points forward of the beam, and in a jiffy the swift spurts of brine had searched out the last dry corner of the deck and sent scurrying to shelter every man who had not a watch to stand. Three times I was completely drenched in groping forward from the after-superstructure to the ward-room, under the bridge, so that I was a good deal inclined to take it as a joke--and a rather ill-timed one at that--when an ensign about to turn in on one of the transoms muttered something about being thankful that we were going to have _one_ quiet night when a man could snatch a wink of sleep. I asked him if he referred to the night we expected to be in port waiting for the _Lymptania_, but the fact that he had already dozed off proved that he really had not been trying to be funny at my expense. Indeed, it was a fairly quiet night, as nights go in destroyers; but, even so, I needed a good high sideboard to keep from rolling out of the captain's bunk, and then two sofa pillows and my overcoat to keep from pulping my shoulder against the sideboard.

We were still sliding easily along at the same comfortable umpteen knots in the morning, but with the breaking of the new day a subtle change had come over the spirit of the ship. It was just such a change as one might observe in a hunter as he passes from a plain, where there is little cover, to a wood where every tree and bush may hide potential quarry. And that, indeed, was precisely the way it was with us. The night before we were "on our way"; this morning we were ploughing waters where U-boats were _known_ to be operating. It was only a couple of days previously that the good old _Carpathia_ had been put down, and not many hours had passed since then but what brought word, by one or another of the almost countless ways that have been devised to trace them, of an enemy submarine working in those waters. We were ready enough the night before, ready for anything that might have turned up; but this morning we were more than that.

There was a new tenseness now, and a feeling in the air like that which follows the click-click after a trigger is set to "hair." It was as though everyone, everything, even the good little _Zip_ herself, was crouched for a spring.

There was an amusing little incident I chanced to see which illustrates the keenness of the spirit animating the men even in the moments of waiting. A favourable course had left the deck unswept by water for an hour, and a half-dozen boys, off watch, but too restless to turn in, were trying to kill time by helping the cook peel potatoes. It was one of these whom I saw stand up, take several swift strides forward across the reeling deck, draw a rag from the pocket of his "jeans," and then, with great care and deliberation, begin to polish a patch of steel plate that was exposed in the angle of two strips of coco-matting. "Wha' cher holystoning deck yetawhile fer, Pete?" one of his mates shouted. "Can'cher wait till we gets back to port? We may have to foul your pretty work with greasy Huns any minnit." Unperturbed, Pete went right on rubbing, testing the footing every now and then with the sole of his boot. Only when the job, whatever it was, was done to suit his fastidious taste did he return to his seat on the reversed water-bucket and start peeling potatoes again. Not till a full dozen or more neatly skinned Murphies had passed under his knife did he vouchsafe to reply to the half-curious, half-pitying looks and remarks his mates had continued to direct at him. Then his explanation was as crushing as complete.

"It don't look much as if you guys wants to get a Hun," he observed finally, running a critical eye over them. "Oh, you do, do you? My mistake. Well, then, don't try to be funny with another guy that's doing his best to effect that same good end. Now looka here. From where I sits to my gun-station is just six steps. Six for me, I mean; it'd be more for most of you 'shorties.' Now I just figures that step number four lands my foot square in the dribble of oil on that patch where there ain't no matting; so what was more natural than for me to go and swab it up. Last time the gong binged I hit half a preserved peach, and sprained a wrist and ankle so bad that I woulda been dead slow on the gun if we'd had to fire it. Keeping my eye peeled for another piece of peach, I pipes that gob of oil, and so goes and gets rid of it. It's painful having to explain a simple thing like that to you bone-heads, but, now that you got it, p'raps you'll ease off on your beefing, and peel spuds. _That_ don't take no brains."

Two or three times in the course of the morning the look-out's shout of "Sail!" bearing this way or that, brought those in sound of it to their feet in the expectation that it would be followed by the welcome clanging of the alarm bell; and once or twice the wireless picked up the S.O.S.--they do not send it out that way now, but these letters are still the common term in use to describe the call of a ship in distress--of a steamer that had been torpedoed. But the sails turned out to be friends in every case, while both of the ships reported sinking were too far away for us to be of any use to them. Early in the afternoon a suspiciously cruising craft, which proved presently to be a friend, got a high-explosive shell under her nose as a consequence of her deliberation in revealing that fact. The smartness with which the men tumbled to quarters, and the almost uncanny speed with which the forecastle gun was served, boded well for developments in case the real thing turned up.

"Do you always fire a blank across their bows when you don't quite like the look of 'em?" I asked the captain innocently, as he gazed dejectedly through his glass at certain unmistakable evidences proving that he had been cheated of his quarry. "Blank!" indignation and half the look that sits on the face of a terrier who discovers that he has cornered his own family's "Tabby" instead of the neighbour's "Tom"; "blank!--did you ever see a blank 'X-point-X' that threw up a spout as high as a masthead, and all black with smoke? That was the worst punisher we have in our lockers; and, what's more, it was meant to be a hit. And the next one would have been," he added. "You can't afford to waste any time where five or ten seconds may make all the difference between bagging and losing a Hun."

"But how about bagging something that isn't a Hun?" I protested. "I told you, I think, that I had arranged to go out next week on patrol in one of the American submarines; but after what I've just seen----"

"The burden of proof is up to the craft under suspicion," cut in the captain, "and they ought to have no trouble in supplying it if they have their wits about them." Then, with a grin, "But if you're really going out on submarine patrol next week, why--I'll promise to look twice before turning loose one of those--those 'blanks.'" How he kept his word is another story.

It was about an hour or two later that the wireless winged word that seemed at last to herald the real thing. It was the S.O.S. of a steamer, and conveyed merely the information that she had just been torpedoed, with her latitude and longitude. The position given was only thirty or forty miles to the northward, and though the name in the message--it was _Namoura_ or something similar--could not be found on any of our shipping lists, the _Zop_, as senior ship, promptly ordered course altered and full speed made in the hope of arriving on the scene in time to be of some use. With every minute likely to be of crucial importance, it was not an occasion to waste time by waiting or asking for orders. A swift exchange of signals between ships, a hurried order or two down a voice-pipe, an advancing of the handle of the engine-room telegraph, a throwing over of the wheel, and we had spun in the welter of our tossing wake and were off on a mission that might prove one of either mercy or destruction, or, quite conceivably, both. The formation in which we had been cruising when the signal was received gave the _Zip_ something like a mile lead at the get-away, and this--though one of the others was a newer and slightly faster ship--she held gallantly to the end of the race. By a lucky chance, though there was a snoring wind and a lumpy sea running, the course brought both abaft the beam and permitted us to run nearly "all out" without imposing a serious strain on the ship. The difference between running before and bucking into seas of this kind I was to learn in a day or two. For the moment, conditions were all that could be asked to favour our getting with all dispatch into whatever game there was to be played.

Many a so-called express train has travelled slower than any one of those three destroyers was ploughing its way through solid green water. For a few seconds after "Full speed!" had been rung down to their engine-rooms, swift-spinning smoke rings had shot up from their funnels and gone reeling off down to leeward; then, with perfect synchronisation of draught and oil, the duskiness above the mouths of the stumpy stacks had cleared, and only the mirage on the horizon astern betrayed the up-spouting jets of hot gases. Only the vibrant throb of the speeding engines--so pervading that it seemed to pulse like heart-beats through the very steel itself--gave hint of the mightiness of the effort that speed was costing. With that throb stilled--and the mounting wake quenched--the progress of that thousand tons or so of steam-driven steel would have seemed scarcely less effortless than that of an aeroplane.

An order from the Commander-in-Chief--which was picked up presently--to go to the assistance of the torpedoed ship and to "hunt submarine" had been anticipated; but the real name of the steamer--finally transmitted correctly--brought to me at least a distinct shock. It was H.M.S. _Marmora_, and the _Marmora_, the former P. & O. Australian liner, was an old friend. To anyone who loves the sea a ship, no matter of what kind, has a personality. But in the case of a ship in which he has sailed--lived in, worked and played in, been happy in, perhaps gone through certain dangers in--has more than a personality, it has a place in his heart. Many and many a morning since the first U-boat campaign was started I had read--and never without a lump rising in my throat--of the passing of just such a friend, of the going out of the world of something--almost of "some one"--which I had always looked forward to seeing again. _Afric_, _Arabic_, _Aragon_, I knew their names well enough to compile the list alphabetically. It would have run to some score in length, and from every name would have led a long train of treasured memories. But the blow had never come quite this way before, never fallen quite so near at home. An especially dear friend had just been stricken less than a degree of latitude away; but the poignancy of that realisation was tempered by the thought that I was in a ship rushing to her assistance, a ship that could be as swift to succour as to avenge.

I must confess to a queerly mixed state of mind that next half-hour. Consumed as I was with interest in our terribly purposeful progress leading up to the entrance into that grim drama approaching its climacteric act just beyond the sky-line, there were also vivid flare-backs of memory to the days of my friendship with the _Marmora_, arresting flashlights of the swift refreshing morning dive into the canvas pool on her forecastle, of lounging chairs ranged in long rows 'twixt snowy decks and awnings, of a phosphorescent bow-wave curling back and blotting the reflections of stars in a tropical sea. There was a picture of the clean sweet lines of her as--buff, black, and beautiful--she lay at the north end of the horseshoe of the Circular Quay at Sydney, with a rakish Messageries liner moored astern of her and a bluff Norddeutscher Lloyd packet ahead. It was her maiden voyage, and Australia, which had never seen so swift and luxurious a liner before, was receiving her like a newly arrived _prima donna_. I took passage in her back as far as Colombo. That fortnight's voyage had been diverting in a number of ways, I recalled, but most of all, perhaps, as a consequence of the throwing together of a large party of Wesleyan missionaries from Fiji and the members of a London musical comedy company returning from its Australian "triumphs." I was just beginning to chuckle inwardly at the recollection of what one of the missionary ladies had said to a buxom chorus-girl who tripped out to the fancy dress cricket-match in her pink tights and a ballet skirt, when the ting-a-ling of a bell brought the captain to the radio-room voice-pipe. "Message just received," I heard him repeat. "All right. Send it up." He slapped down the voice-pipe cover, and a messenger had handed him the signal before he had paced twice across the bridge.

"_Marmora_ just sunk," he read; "survivors picked up by P.B.'s _X_ and _Y_."

The sinking made no immediate change in our plans. There was still a chance we might be of use with the survivors, and also the matter of the U-boat to be looked after. With no abatement of speed, all three destroyers drove on. The navigating officer reckoned that in another fifteen minutes we should be sighting the rescuing craft, and probably wreckage; but when twice that time still left a clear horizon ahead, it began to appear as though there had been a mistake of some kind. And so there had, but it was a lucky mistake for us. It was some time later before they figured just how it had chanced, but what had happened was this. The _Marmora's_ last despairing call--doubtless sent out by a breaking-down radio--gave her position as some ten or twelve miles out from what it really was. The consequence was that, heading somewhat wide of the sinking ship, to which, however, on account of the presence of the patrol boats, which had evidently been close enough to come to her immediate assistance, we could have been of small use, we had steered directly for the one point where it was most desirable we should make our appearance at that psychological moment: for the point, in short, at which the coolly calculative skipper of the U-boat responsible for the outrage, after running submerged for an hour or more and doubtless figuring he had come sufficiently far from the madding crowd that would throng the immediate vicinity of the wreckage to be at peace, had come up to smoke his evening pipe and cogitate upon the Freedom of the Seas.

It was just as it began to become apparent that we were badly adrift as regards the point where the _Marmora_ had gone down that a whine from the lookout's voice-pipe reported to the bridge that it had sighted a "sail--port, ten."

"What is it?" asked back the captain.

"Looks like subm'rine," came the reply; and with one quick movement the captain had started the alarm-bell sounding "General quarters!" in every part of the ship. With every man knowing precisely what he had to do, and how to do it, there was incredible speed without confusion. Tumbling to their stations like hounds on a hot scent, they yet managed to avoid getting in each other's way, even in the narrow passages and on the ladders. The loom of the conning-tower was plain to the naked eye, now that one knew where to look for it, but only for a few minutes. Even as a swiftly passed shell was thrown into the open breech of the forecastle gun, came the look-out's whine through the voice-pipe, "She's going down, sir; she's gone!" The breech of the gun spun shut, but the eye of the sightsetter groped along an empty horizon.

"Never mind," muttered the captain grimly. "Couldn't have croaked him with one shot anyhow. Got something better'n shells for him. Now for it," and his hand went back to pull the wire of a gong which gave certain orders to the men standing-by with the depth-charges. That, a word down the engine-room voice-pipe, and a fraction of a point's alteration in the course--and there was only one thing left to be done. The time for that had not quite arrived.

Because a destroyer's engine-room telegraph-hand points to "Full speed!" it does not necessarily mean that there are not ways of forcing more revolutions from the engines, of driving her still faster through the water should the need arise. Such a need now confronted the _Zip_, and, like the thoroughbred she was, her response was instant and generous. The pulsing throb of her quickened till it was almost a hum; the quivering insistency of it struck straight to the marrow of the bones, drummed in the depths of one's innermost being. If there is anything to stir the blood of a man like a destroyer beginning to see red and go Berserk, I have yet to encounter it.

There must have been something like three miles to go from the point where the U-boat had been sighted to the point where the inevitable patch of grease would mark the place where it had submerged, and rather less than twice that many minutes had elapsed when the cry of "Oil slick--starboard bow!" came almost simultaneously from the look-outs in the foretop and on the bridge. Over went the helm a spoke or two, and the executive officer, in his hand a thin piece of board with a table of figures pasted on it, moved up beside the captain. Straight down the wobbly track of iridescent film drove the _Zip_, and when a certain length of it had been put astern, the captain turned and drew a lever to him with a sharp pull.

Three, four seconds passed, and then, simultaneously with a heavy knocking thud, a round patch of water a hundred yards or so astern quivered and fizzed up sharply like the surface of a glass of whisky-and-soda after the siphon has ceased to play on it. Following that by a second or two, a smooth rounded geyser of foam boiled up a dozen feet or so, and then gradually subsided. That one, plainly, was a deep-set charge, whose force was expended far beneath the surface. A second one threw a geyser twice as high as the first, and a third, which fizzed and spouted almost simultaneously, blotted out a great patch of sternward sky with its smoke-shot eruption.

Presently the _Zop_ "struck oil," and then the _Zap_. Soon the muffled booms of their rapidly scuttled depth-charges began to drum, while astern of them the foam-spouts nicked the sky-line like a stubby picket fence.

Perhaps the lad whom I later overheard describing that bombardment by saying that "'tween the three of us, we was scattering 'cans' like rice at a wedding" was guilty of some exaggeration; but it is a fact that they were spilling over very fast and, there is little doubt, with telling effect. The savageness of the bolts of wrath released by the exploding charges was strikingly disclosed when two of them chanced to be dropped at nearly the same time by destroyers a mile or more apart, when the under-sea "jolts" would meet half-way and form weird evanescent "rips" of dancing froth strongly suggestive of chain-lightning. The way in which even the most distant of the detonations made a destroyer "bump the bumps," quite as though it was striking a series of solid obstructions, gave some hints of the bolts that were descending upon the lurking pirate.

At the end of a minute or two a quick order from the captain sent the wheel spinning over, and, with raucous grinding of helm, round we swung through sixteen points to head back in reverse over the path of destruction we had just traversed. Just as the steel runners of a racing skater throw ice when he makes a sudden turn, so the screws of a speeding destroyer hurl water. The stern sank deep into the propeller-scooped void, so that the high-tossed side-slipping wake buried it beneath a frothing flood. Through several long seconds I saw the water boiling above the waists of the men at the depth-charges, without appearing to disturb them in the least; then the wheel was spun back 'midships--and a spoke or two beyond to meet and steady her--the bow wave resumed its curled symmetry and the wake began trailing off astern again.

It was into a peaceful sea, indolently rolling, sunset tinged and slightly sleeked with a thin streak of oil, that we had raced five minutes before; it was a troubled sea, charge-churned and wave-slashed, that we now nosed back into to see what good our coming had wrought. The grey-blue-black of the long oil wake had been scattered into broken patches by the explosions. Most of these were pale, sickly, and highly anæmic in colour, and of scant promise; but for one, where fresh oil rising spread rainbow-bright upon the surface, the _Zip_ headed full tilt. The explosion here appeared to have been an unusually heavy one, for the sea was dotted with the white bellies of stunned fish, most of them floating high out of the water, with trickles of blood running from their upturned mouths and distended gills. A six or eight-foot shark, wriggling drunkenly along the surface with a broken back, was hailed with a howl of delight by the men, who claimed to see in the fact that the unlucky monster could not submerge his telltale dorsal, a sign that their Fritz might be in the same difficulty.

Another "can" or two was let go as we dashed through that iridescent "fount of promise"; and when we turned back to it again the wounded shark had ceased to wriggle and now floated inertly among his hapless brothers. But of Fritz--save for a glad new gush of oil--no sign. Prisoners or wreckage are rated as the only indubitable evidence of the destruction of a U-boat, and neither of these were we able to woo to the surface in that busy hour which elapsed before the descending pall of darkness put a period to our well-meant efforts. During that time not the most delicate instrument devised by science for that purpose revealed any indication of life or movement in the depths below. As the water at this point was far too deep to allow a submarine to descend and lie on the bottom without being crushed, this fact appeared morally conclusive. It was this I had in mind when I tried to draw the captain out on the subject. "Of course there's no doubt we bagged him?" I hazarded, in a quiet interval when we were watchfully waiting for something to turn up, or rather come up. He smiled a rather tired smile. "Oh, very likely we have," he replied. "But, unluckily, there's nothing we can lay our hands on to carry away and prove it. In case this particular Fritz doesn't come to life and sink another ship in the course of the next few days, there is just a chance that we may be credited with a 'Possible.' They never err on the optimistic side in sizing up a little brush of this kind, and perhaps it's just as well. Anyhow, a game like this is worth playing on its own account, whether you come in with a scalp at your belt every time or not."

It was just as darkness was slowing down our anti-U-boat operations, that a signal came through stating that there were believed to be several survivors still alive among the wreckage of the _Marmora_, and ordering us to proceed to the scene of her sinking with all dispatch. The moon was rising as we began to nose among the pathetic litter of scraps that was all that remained afloat of what, five or six hours previously, had been a swift and beautiful auxiliary cruiser.

There was enough light for us to be reasonably sure, at the end of an hour's search, that our mission was in vain; that there remained no living man to pick up. There was something strangely familiar, though, in the lines of a cutter which, in spite of a smashed gunwale, was still afloat, and I was just thinking of how grateful a lee, in the monsoon, the windward side of the old _Marmora's_ lifeboats had furnished for a deck-chair or two, when the captain, advancing the handle of the engine-room telegraph, turned to me with: "We're off to rendezvous with the _Lymptania_ now; I think we can promise you some real excitement in the course of the next day or two."