'And I will prepare destroyers against thee, every one with his weapons.'—Jeremiah xxii. 7.
The fighting and the destroyer attacks of the night are even more difficult to follow than the actions which took place during the afternoon and evening. The British heavy squadrons had withdrawn at dark to avoid the expected torpedo attacks of the hostile flotillas, and the retreating enemy, meanwhile, damaged and undamaged ships, some singly, others in pairs or in groups of four or five, still steamed hard for their own waters. It was upon these scattered units and divisions that the British destroyer attacks presently took place.
The Mariner and her next ahead had somehow become separated from the others after dark, and to Pincher this desperate rush after the enemy was an awesome business. Owing to the mist and the haze the night was unusually dark; but though with the retirement of the larger ships the incessant booming and thudding of the heavy guns ceased, frequent outbursts of fire from lighter weapons, sharp, blinding flashes of flame, the redder glare of exploding shell, the white gleam of searchlights, and the occasional thud of a distant, heavy explosion showed where torpedo attacks were being delivered. The night was an inferno.
It was very difficult to tell which were the attackers and which the attacked, and it was this very uncertainty, and the not knowing what was happening, which were so trying to the nerves. All they were aware of was that the German fleet, with many of its ships badly battered, was somewhere ahead of them. They all realised that a torpedo attack after dark was a desperate game at the best of times; but they had witnessed a succession of such awful scenes during the fighting of the afternoon and evening that their feelings of personal danger and the dread of being killed seemed to have gone. They felt themselves keyed up to the highest pitch of excitement, excitement so intense and so utterly abnormal that they had neither the time nor the inclination to think of themselves and their own danger. The German fleet was somewhere in the darkness ahead of them, and it was their duty to sink and destroy what they could. Nothing else seemed to matter.
Their chance was not very long in coming. The two destroyers were steering on a south-south-westerly course at twenty-five knots, and shortly after ten o'clock a band of lighter colour began slowly to encroach on the dark sky on the eastern horizon. Ten minutes later the dense blackness from about south-east to north-east had given way to the usual indigo blue of the night; and there, some distance abaft the port beam, and dimly silhouetted against the sky, were the blurred shapes of two vessels. They were fully two miles distant, perhaps more, and seemed to be steaming slowly on much the same course as the Mariner and her consort. What class of vessel they were it was quite impossible to determine. But, from their position and course, they were certainly not British; while, from the background of intensely dark cloud to the south-westward, it seemed unlikely that they had seen the destroyers.
The Mariner's next ahead must have seen the ships at much the same time, for she suddenly increased speed and turned slightly to port until she was steaming across the strangers' bows. The Mariner conformed to her movements.
Wooten, gazing through his glasses, felt himself quivering with excitement. Had his chance come, the chance for which they had all hoped and prayed? He gave some order over his shoulder to a man at a voice-pipe, who passed it to the torpedo-tubes. 'Lord!' he ejaculated to the first lieutenant, still busy with his binoculars, 'they look to me like two lame ducks, No. 1; but they're big ships, whatever they are.'
'I sincerely hope they are, sir,' MacDonald replied calmly. 'It's time we had a look in at something. Shall I go down to the tubes?'
The dark hulls of the enemy were hidden in the blinding glare of their searchlights.
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'Yes, do. And fire when your sights come on if you get no further orders. For God's sake, don't miss!'
The two great vessels were drawing rapidly nearer, and became more and more distinct. The leading destroyer was still altering her course gradually to port, until at last she remained steady on the opposite and parallel course to the enemy. The Mariner travelled in her wake, and the track they were following seemed as if it would take them past the ships, now nearly a mile and a half distant, at a range of about six hundred yards.
It was at this moment that the enemy first seemed to realise what was happening, for a gun suddenly boomed out from the leading vessel and a shell went screeching by overhead. Where it fell nobody saw. Almost instantaneously a searchlight flickered out, and after sweeping slowly across the water, fell full on the Mariner's leader and remained steady. Another beam shone out, another, and yet a fourth, until both destroyers were illuminated in a dazzling glare which for the moment blinded everybody on board. Then the guns started in in earnest.
The destroyers were steaming at about thirty knots, and the enemy at ten or twelve. In other words, attackers and attacked were nearing each other at the combined rate of about forty knots, or one and a half miles in two minutes fifteen seconds. It was the longest and most trying two and a quarter minutes that Wooten or any of his crew had ever experienced, for, though the speed of the approach tended to make accurate shooting difficult, the difficulty was largely mitigated by the point-blank range.
The dark hulls of the enemy were hidden in the blinding glare of their searchlights and the incessant sparkle and spurting of bright golden flame as their guns were fired as fast as they could be loaded. Filmy streamers of smoke from the discharges wreathed and eddied fantastically through the blue-white rays of the lights. The air suddenly began to reverberate with a succession of ear-splitting crashes, the screeching whistle of shell passing overhead, and the dull plop of others as they pitched in the water to raise their shimmering, ghostly spray fountains. There came the roaring thud of the explosions, and the same old familiar humming and buzzing as fragments drove through the air. But above the din and turmoil of the firing there was another and quite new noise: a short, sharp, metallic-sounding explosion in the air, followed by a hissing and soughing like the wind among trees—the enemy were using shrapnel.
There came a crash, and a sheet of brilliant greenish flame from aft. The ship seemed to wince, but still drove on. Another shell, bursting on the water a few feet short, sent its jagged splinters flying over the bridge and across the upper deck. Something whizzed within a few inches of Wooten's head, and there was an infernal clanging and clattering as slivers of steel drove through and against the ship's side and funnels. It was followed by the thud of a falling body, as one of the signalmen, standing just behind the coxswain at the wheel, slithered to the deck.
'Gawd!' he muttered, with an air of intense astonishment, sitting up and nursing his side; 'they've 'it me! Gawd blimy, blokes, they've 'it me?' But nobody had time to pay attention to him.
Another jar, the roar of a detonation, a burst of flame from the forecastle, and a whining and whirring of splinters! Another, close beside the foremost funnel, and a sound of splintering and crashing as some object fell and went overboard! Something red-hot and sharp grazed Wooten's cheek. He put up his hand to brush it aside, and his fingers came down sticky and wet.
A hideous metallic explosion in the air and a fiendish rattling of bullets upon steel, as a shrapnel burst and sent its contents flying on board. Willis, the coxswain, hit through the left shoulder, released his hold on the wheel and fell to his knees; but in an instant he was up again, steering the ship with his uninjured right hand.
Wooten suddenly felt a burning sensation in his left arm as if a red-hot knitting-needle had been passed through the flesh. The shock of it sent him staggering backwards, and he gritted his teeth with the pain. His left arm seemed numbed and useless, and a little trickle of blood ran down inside his coat-sleeve and pattered to the deck. The air was full of the sickening stench of explosives.
They were very close now. The enemy seemed to be nearly on top of them, and their huge blurred shapes, almost invisible in the glare of the searchlights and the vivid gun-flashes, seemed literally to obscure the horizon. But the destroyers still drove on. They had not been stopped.
The lights of the nearer ship suddenly went out, and a column of water and smoke shot into the air at her side. It hung there for a moment, glistening in the ruby and orange flashes of the guns, and then there came the thundering reverberation of a heavy underwater explosion quite close at hand. It seemed to compress the air, and caused the destroyers to stagger in their stride. A torpedo from the leading destroyer had gone home.
Wooten instinctively looked aft, and as he did so a little puff of dull flame flickered out amidships. It was followed by a loud, snorting hiss and a heavy splash as a torpedo left its tube. Another came almost instantaneously with the first.
The enemy's fire, though still furious, became very wild; and two minutes later, with the sound of a couple more thudding explosions ringing in their ears, the destroyers were out of danger. The roaring of the guns gradually died away, and then ceased altogether.
'Good God!' muttered Wooten, trembling in his excitement.
Daylight found the Mariner and her leader some distance across the North Sea, steaming slowly homewards. They were battered and leaking, while the Mariner was badly down by the stern and listed slightly to starboard. Her funnels were riddled through and through; there were gaping holes in her side and her deck where shell had penetrated, and many smaller punctures where splinters had struck and gone through. A large projectile, bursting on the forecastle, had torn the deck and the ship's side, and had flung the foremost gun off its mounting, killing or wounding every member of the gun's crew except one. The wardroom and one mess-deck were open to the sea; boats were splintered and useless; and the topmast, taking with it the aerial of the wireless telegraphy, had been shorn off and had gone overboard. The mizzen-mast also had disappeared, and a brand-new white ensign now fluttered from an improvised flagstaff in the stern. It was the only respectable-looking thing in the ship.
But the surprising thing was that neither vessel was vitally injured. They could both steam, though slowly, and by dint of plugging the more serious holes and keeping the pumps going, they were still tolerably seaworthy. How they had escaped from the inferno without being blown clean out of the water was nothing short of a miracle.
Casualties had been heavy. Wooten went about with his arm in a sling and a bandage round his head; but his hurts, though painful, were not sufficiently severe to incapacitate him for duty. The first lieutenant had not been so lucky, for he, peppered badly by a shell, had been confined to his bunk with more serious injuries.
The eight dead had been buried at dawn, and now the wounded lay in their hammocks on the battered mess-deck under the forecastle. Some of the slighter cases, with their hurts bandaged, were smoking cigarettes and talking quite cheerfully; others were asleep.
Pincher Martin was one of them. He had three neat little splinter-wounds in his back—three insignificant-looking and trivial little punctures which caused Brown, the surgeon-probationer, to purse his lips and to frown in his most professional manner when first he saw them. 'D'you feel any pain?' he had asked.
'Not unless I moves, sir,' the patient had answered with a wan smile, his tightly compressed lips giving the lie to his words.
An operation was impossible, and they dressed the wounds as best they could and made him comfortable; but the slivers of steel somewhere inside him hurt atrociously, and it was all he could do to refrain from moaning when they touched him. So Brown, seeing how things stood, dozed him with morphia, and poor Pincher, with his young face unnaturally haggard, drawn, and very white, was presently slumbering as peacefully as a child.
'Am safe,' the telegram said tersely, in Billings's ungrammatical English. 'Martin wounded, progressing favourable.—Joshua.'
Mrs Billings, drying her eyes with a handkerchief, read it for the third time. 'Emmeline!' she called softly, going to the door of the sitting-room at the back of the shop.
'Yes, mother.'
'There's news, my gal!'
'News!' cried her daughter, darting forward.
The elder woman sniffed loudly and held out the flimsy paper. 'Read that, my dear.'
The girl snatched it in her agitation. 'Martin wounded, progressing favourable,' she read slowly. 'My Bill wounded!' She stood there for a moment wide-eyed and swaying ominously. Then her pent-up feelings overcame her, and, collapsing suddenly on to a chair, she fell forward with her head on the table and her face buried in her hands. Her whole body shook with sobs.
Her mother was at her side in an instant. 'There, there, my pretty,' she murmured consolingly, patting her daughter on the shoulder; 'don't take on so. Don't cry, my gal. He's only wounded.' She was crying herself.
But Emmeline refused to be comforted. 'My Bill's wounded!' she moaned again and again.
Mrs Billings leant down and put her arms round the girl's neck. 'Don't take on so, dear,' she said huskily, with the tears streaming down her own face; 'it's all right, my pet. There, there,' as Emmeline shook with another paroxysm of sobbing, 'don't fret; it's all right; he's only wounded. We've—b-both got a—deal to be thankful for.'
Mother and daughter wept together.
For the last forty-eight hours they had both been living in a state of awful suspense. First had come the tidings of the engagement in the North Sea, with the depressing information that the British losses had been very heavy. Then came the news that eight destroyers had been sunk; but no mention of the Mariner. They had no means of finding out whether or not she had even taken part in the battle; but both of them, with dismal forebodings in their hearts, had made up their minds for the worst.
All day and all night the two women had prayed and hoped. The agony of their suspense was almost more than they could bear, and their hearts nearly broke during that frightful period of waiting. Emmeline, pale-faced and red-eyed, went to the railway station twice a day to procure the earliest copies of the morning and evening newspapers. Together they had read them eagerly, trying to piece together some sort of a connected narrative to relieve their tortured minds. But still there was nothing about the Mariner. They read about the desperate destroyer attacks on the German fleet, and of the losses incurred by the British flotillas. They could not bring themselves to believe that 'no news was good news.'
Emmeline looked up with the tears still trickling down her face, and reaching for her handkerchief, proceeded to dab her eyes. 'I'm a fool,' she said, sniffing; 'I suppose I ought to be thankful he isn't killed.'
Her mother kissed her gently. 'There, there, my dear,' she said softly; 'that's better. Be brave. It's all over now.'
The girl dried her eyes, rose from her chair, and walked slowly across to the mirror over the mantelpiece. 'Lor'!' she said bravely, a little smile hovering round the corners of her quivering mouth; 'I do look a sight, and no mistake!'
When the Mariner struggled home to her east coast port after the engagement, Martin was one of the first to be packed off to the local hospital. Then had followed an operation, and a fortnight's delay before he was sufficiently recovered to be sent to the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar. It was here that he again saw his mother and father, who came down for the day, called him a brave boy, and inconsiderately wept over him through sheer thankfulness.
Then, at four o'clock on one never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, Joshua Billings suddenly appeared. He was grinning sheepishly, and Pincher noticed at once that he wore the badge of a leading seaman.
''Allo, Josh!' he exclaimed, very much pleased to see him, and shaking his horny hand; ''ow goes it?'
'Orl right, Pinch. 'Ow's yerself?'
'Gittin' along fine, chum. They're sendin' me 'ome on leaf in four days. Wot's th' noos; an' wot's that?' Pincher pointed to the single anchor which adorned the sleeve of his friend's jumper.
Joshua looked solemn. 'I gits rated up ten days ago,' he explained; 'death vacancy. Poor ole Byles got laid out, yer remember. I'd sooner 'e wus still wearin' th' killick, poor bloke!' He spoke huskily.
Pincher nodded. 'Wot are yer doin' 'ere?' he asked.
'The ship's in dock, an' they gave us ten days' leaf,' answered his friend. 'By the way,' he added, 'I suppose you 'eard as 'ow you'd bin rated up.'
'Wot?'
'They've made yer an A.B.'
'S'welp me!' Pincher ejaculated; ''ave they?'
'Yus, they 'ave, Pinch; an' if yer don't watch it we'll see yer a leadin' seaman afore long.'
'Yer didn't come 'ere a purpose ter tell me that, did yer?' Martin queried suspiciously.
''Ow d'yer mean?'
''Ow's Hemmeline an' Mrs Fig—— yer ole woman? I've 'ad a letter from Hemmeline every day 'cept yesterday an' ter-day, an' I thought—— 'Ere!' Pincher suddenly blurted out, a vague hope dawning in his heart, 'why ain't you on leaf at Weymouth?'
'We come round 'ere ter give yer a chuck up, Pincher.'
'We! 'Oo d'yer mean? 'Er an' 'er mother?'
'Yus. They're outside. I come in fu'st to prepare yer like.'
'W'y couldn't yer 'ave said so afore?' Pincher demanded wrathfully. 'Bring 'er in!'
'Orl right, ole son; don't go gittin' rattled abart it. Me an' my missis'll go an' see Dogo Pearson, wot's wounded an' in another ward. I'll tell Hemmeline as 'ow you'd like ter see 'er, an' me an' the missis'll be back afore long.' Joshua winked twice and went away.
Two minutes later Emmeline was sitting by Pincher's bed. Her eyes were full of tears, tears of happiness, and to Pincher she was the most adorable thing in the world.
'Oh Hemmeline!' he sighed huskily, his throat working and his fingers clutching her hand. 'Oh Hemmeline!'
'Well, Bill, what's the matter?' she asked dreamily, turning her head and smiling at him through her long lashes.
''Ow I love you!'
'Silly boy!' she chided softly.
We will draw a veil over what happened next. The ward was a very public place; but the other patients discreetly turned their heads away and pretended not to see.
Mr and Mrs Joshua Billings were away for fully half-an-hour. To Emmeline and Pincher it seemed more like five minutes.
The wedding, a month later, was a very quiet one.
THE END.
Edinburgh: Printed by W. & R. Chambers, Limited.
Footnotes