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Title: White Ensigns
Date of first publication: 1943
Author: Henry Taprell Dorling (as "Taffrail") (1883-1968)
Date first posted: May 24, 2021
Date last updated: May 24, 2021
Faded Page eBook #20210548

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Chuck Greif
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net




                                 WHITE
                                ENSIGNS


                                  BY

                               TAFFRAIL

                (CAPTAIN TAPRELL DORLING, D.S.O., R.N.)


                            [Illustration]


                   G • P • PUTNAM’S SONS • NEW YORK


                  COPYRIGHT, 1943, BY TAPRELL DORLING

        All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must
           not be reproduced in any form without permission.

                           Second Impression


                                  PJ

             MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

                       Van Rees Press • New York


                                  TO

                       TWO GOOD AMERICAN FRIENDS

                         Margaret and Webster

                    WHO HAVE DONE MUCH FOR BRITAIN.

     The ships and principal characters of this story are entirely
                              fictitious.




                             WHITE ENSIGNS




CHAPTER I


Captain Peter Chenies, Royal Navy, had left the bridge soon after
midnight, when the middle watch had been taken over. The clock on the
bulkhead of his sea cabin showed twenty-three minutes past twelve.
Hanley, Lieutenant-Commander R.N.R., one of Chenies’ most trusted
officers, was in charge on the bridge outside. They had known each other
for over a year of war. Hanley could be depended upon to do the right
thing in any sudden emergency. Even the captains of His Majesty’s armed
merchant cruisers must rest sometimes, though a thump on the cabin door
or a voice through the unplugged voice pipe over the bunk would bring
Chenies out on to the bridge in something like thirty seconds.

Presently, he would climb into his bunk and compose himself to
slumber--clothes, sea boots and all. Before dawn he would be on the
bridge again to see the first gleams of daylight creeping up over the
rim of the heaving sea to the eastward, to run his eye over what routine
cipher messages had come through by wireless since he had retired--they
would have called him at once for anything requiring immediate action.
He would anxiously count the ships of the convoy as daylight broadened,
look round the horizon to see that it was clear, perhaps exchange a
signal or two with the convoy’s Commodore, a retired rear admiral whom
he’d known in the Navy years before.

Between seven and half-past, if nothing particular was going on, he
would retire to his cabin, presently to emerge in shorts, singlet, and
gym shoes for twenty minutes skipping, followed by half-a-dozen circuits
of the promenade deck at the double. Then a cigarette, a cup of tea, the
B.B.C.’s first news bulletin, and his morning bath. Next Chivers, his
steward, with breakfast. Beyond this Chenies never undressed at sea. It
simply wasn’t worth it. In this war things had a habit of happening in
split seconds.

And now, at twenty-three minutes past midnight, feeling wakeful, he was
sitting at his writing table, a pipe between his teeth and a gradually
cooling cup of cocoa in front of him, trying to think of something to
add to the letter to his wife. He wrote bits and pieces every day, and a
thick packet addressed to Mrs. Peter Chenies, Holmfield, Minchinhampton,
Gloucestershire, England, would be posted when the ship reached harbor.

When Maggie would receive it was quite another matter. Air mails weren’t
always available. Letters posted in the ordinary way sometimes took
weeks to reach her, and months might elapse before he received her
replies. By that time he’d often forgotten what he’d written, and the
affairs of the moment, important enough at the time, had become
meaningless and obscure.

Then, since the ship might be sent off here, there, or anywhere at a
moment’s notice, mails had a habit of going astray. “H.M.S. _Fonthill
Abbey_. C/O G.P.O., London,” was the only permissible address, and the
people at the Admiralty and the General Post Office, excellent though
they were, couldn’t be expected to know immediately if the ship had
suddenly been diverted to Iceland, the South Atlantic, or perhaps the
Indian Ocean. The mails might be on their way to one place, while the
two hundred and fifty officers and men to whom the parcels and letters
were addressed were proceeding at full speed in a direction completely
opposite. It was exasperating, but inevitable. One couldn’t really
grumble.

Letter writing was most unsatisfactory in wartime. Because of the
necessary censorship, there was so little one could say. One couldn’t
mention what the ship was doing, where she was, whither bound, whence
she had sailed. Nor could one describe the more exciting incidents like
encounters with enemy U-boats or aircraft, or the rescue of the
survivors of a torpedoed ship during a gale of wind. Many subjects were
taboo, and rightly so. One had to confine oneself to family affairs, to
vague generalities about one’s shipmates, to one’s state of health and
daily habits.

He would have liked to have written something about this particular
voyage, but he couldn’t. It had been even more strenuous than
usual--first, the difficulty of meeting the convoy at its predetermined
rendezvous because of the low visibility, and a heavily overcast sky
which had prevented the taking of sights for a full three days. This
meant that the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ position on the chart was largely a
matter of guesswork. It might be thirty or forty miles out, and so might
the convoy’s if they had had the same weather. Anyhow, the convoy had
been met thirty hours late.

Next, when it had been found, the breeze dropped and there followed two
days of thick mist hanging in patches like cotton-wool over the surface
of the sea. This had meant considerable difficulty in rounding up and
keeping touch with a large number of merchant ships of varying types,
speeds, and sizes, and not all of them British.

Then the barometer started to fall. The thickness lifted, but was
succeeded by a blustering southwesterly gale and a heavy breaking sea in
which some of the smaller ships had difficulty in keeping up.

It was one of the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ jobs to whip up the stragglers and
encourage the laggards. The speed of the convoy was always the speed of
its slowest ship, and most commodores, quite rightly, objected
strenuously to reducing the speed of the whole collection because of the
tardiness of a few.

So soon after daylight, and again before dusk, if there were any signs
of straggling, Chenies often steamed round the convoy with signals
hoisted, or else winking on his ten-inch searchlight. The purport of his
messages was generally the same--“Please do your best to keep up.”

It rather went against the grain to harry the masters of merchant ships
whose facilities for signaling did not approximate those of a
man-of-war, and who were probably doing their best already in the matter
of speed. Some of the older ships were coal-burners, and Chenies could
imagine the tired, grimy, sweating firemen down in the boiler rooms
flinging shovelful after shovelful of coal into the blazing furnaces
with the slippery steel floorplates underfoot moving through the most
impossible angles as the ships rolled and wallowed. Other men, working
with slush lamps, would be trimming coal in the dark recesses of the
bunkers. Theirs was the most unenviable job of all.

Chenies could almost hear the growls and grumbles ascending from the
bridges of the assorted flock as he took the _Fonthill Abbey_ past them
with the bunting fluttering from his triatic stay. “The blinkin’ Navy’s
busy again. Can’t they ever stop worrying us chaps?” was mild to what
they would really be saying.

Chenies knew the Merchant Navy pretty well. He had been at sea with many
convoys and had attended the conferences at ports where before sailing
the merchant ship masters were given their final instructions for the
conduct of their vessels during the forthcoming voyage. He had many
personal friends among the masters and officers and had heard their
tales of being stopped by enemy surface raiders, attacked with guns and
torpedoes by submarines or “E” boats, bombed or machine-gunned by
aircraft, blown up by mines. He had met men whose ships had been sunk
under them miles away from land, and had made long voyages in open boats
in vile weather. He knew of others who had not lived to tell the tale;
but those that did invariably went to sea again the moment they could
get a ship. There was no flinching or hanging back. Hardy, cool,
modest, and almost incredibly brave in the midst of danger, the
merchant seamen would be boiled, baked, and blistered before they’d be
driven off their rightful element by an enemy who knew no mercy or
humanity.

The merchant seamen were not trained to arms, yet in a hundred and one
individual encounters with raiders, U-boats, or aircraft, they behaved
like battle-tried veterans.

And the engineers and their men in the engine and boiler rooms. They,
too, deserved well of the country. They worked below the waterline, with
the thickness of a steel plate between them and the sea, where the
explosion of a mine or torpedo might convert the engine and boiler room
into a shambles of twisted metal, flooding water, and clouds of steam
from damaged boilers or fractured steampipes. On deck men might have a
chance of escaping with their lives. This chance was infinitely less for
those below.

And what of that extra knot coaxed out of some vibrating ship which
enabled her to escape from a pursuing U-boat or perhaps a bombing
airplane? What of the everyday repairs to machinery and boilers, the
ingenuity so often displayed in making good war damage or some temporary
breakdown?

Seamanship was for those on deck; but seamen and engineers were
interdependent when it came to steaming a ship from port to port. Like
the seamen, the engineers and their men were the last to consider
themselves brave or heroic. They talked little, and boasted not at all.
They considered themselves as normal people carrying on their peacetime
jobs with a good many additional dangers thrown in.

Yes. Chenies, like all those other naval officers who had come into
contact with them, regarded the men of the Merchant Navy as the salt of
the earth. It went against the grain to be forced to harry some of them
on these ocean voyages, but it simply had to be done--to keep the
convoys closed up and concentrated.

The gale had started to ease off the morning before, and by nightfall
had subsided entirely, to leave a long, smooth swell in which the
_Fonthill Abbey_ rolled and tumbled. Seated at the writing table in his
cabin, dallying with the idea of adding something to the letter to his
wife, Chenies could feel the change in movement every time the ship
altered course to the new leg of the zig-zag, with the convoy altering in
conformity. He could hear the noise of the breeze whistling outside his
cabin, sometimes thin and shrill like the sound of a fife, sometimes
deeper, like the throbbing of distant drums. The sound was never the
same for more than a few consecutive seconds. It altered as the ship
rose and fell.

Even through the closed door and carefully screened scuttles of his
cabin, the muted swish and gurgle of the water alongside as the ship
drove her way through it was always present in the background of his
hearing. Nearer at hand he could hear, and feel, the sound of the
steering wheel as the quartermaster moved it. When Hanley spoke to the
engine room through the telephone, he could almost hear what was said.
Never through all the long days and months spent at sea was Chenies
wholly divorced from responsibility. His officers, luckier, could turn
into their bunks, though generally in their clothes, and forget for a
time the cares and anxieties of wartime.

Outside, he knew, the night was moderately dark. There was no moon,
nothing but a few pale, silvery stars blinking through the frayed-out
cloud masses streaming across the sky from the southwestward. While
there was no more than a gentle breeze on the surface, it still blew
hard five or six thousand feet overhead.

No lights were being shown. The nearer ships of the convoy showed as
black silhouettes against the lighter background of sky whenever they
lifted to the swell. Even with the naked eye one caught sight of the
dim, whitened phosphorescence of wakes and bow waves as the vessels
plunged. They were keeping good station and were well closed up. Looking
through glasses one could almost count the whole collection. The
visibility was improving. It would have been too good from the point of
view of the enemy if the convoy had been in the submarine danger zone.

On board every one of those merchant ships, like the _Fonthill Abbey_,
men were alert and watchful.

The convoy steamed on.

Chenies wrote perhaps a dozen lines to his wife about nothing in
particular. Ideas would not come. Then his tiredness overcame him. He
yawned, stretched himself, and rose.

By five minutes to one he was stretched out on his bunk, asleep.


2.

Chenies, luckier than some, had been home for two periods of about a
week since the war started. On another occasion Maggie had spent five
days at the port where the _Fonthill Abbey_ was refitting.

Mrs. Chenies was busy enough at home. She belonged to the Women’s
Voluntary Service and was up to the eyes in work helping to look after
women and children evacuated to the country from their homes in the
bombed towns and cities. Minchinhampton, that little gray country town
in the rolling Cotswolds which centuries ago owed its prosperity to the
manufacture of woolen cloth, had fewer than four thousand inhabitants.
Its accommodation had been strained almost to bursting point,
particularly since the attacks on Bristol, only twenty-four miles away
as the crow flies.

Minchinhampton people had heard the buzzing of aircraft passing
overhead, followed by the thud of bursting bombs, and the rumble of
distant gunfire. They had seen the pale, questing fingers of
searchlights wheeling across the sky on the far horizon, the
bluish-white flashes of guns, and the golden sparkle of their shells
bursting high in the air, the chandelier-like clusters of flares falling
slowly to earth on their parachutes, the reddish-orange glow of fires in
the city reflected on the underside of the dark clouds.

Some of Minchinhampton’s evacuees, though grateful no doubt in their
hearts, were occasionally a little difficult to please. Chenies had
chuckled at his wife’s tale of a boy of five who hailed from the east
end of London. He, billeted in the house of a kind hostess with children
of her own, had been duly fed and bathed and bedded on the evening of
his arrival. On the second evening, after supper, a bath was again
suggested. The urchin surveyed the preparations with disgust. “Look
here, old hen!” he demanded fiercely. “D’you take me for a bloody duck?”

Then the mothers and fathers and cousins and aunts who appeared at week
ends to see the children. Most of them were grateful, though some
expected to be lodged and liberally fed in spite of the rationing.
Others complained if little Gladys or Alfie hadn’t been to the cinema
twice weekly, as they had been in the habit of doing from their own
homes, and didn’t receive their due quota of sweets or licorice “all
sorts.” It was useless to explain that the nearest cinema was three
miles away by bus, and that it opened just about the time young children
should be going to bed. Sweets, too, from being difficult to buy, were
gradually becoming unprocurable. Sugar was strictly rationed.

Mrs. Chenies, doing her best to smooth over difficulties, soon realized
that it takes all sorts to make a world.

She harbored no evacuees at Holmfield. Instead, she had two soldiers,
who slept in camp beds in a spare room. Steve and Willie were pleasant
boys, both of them, leaving the house each morning before seven and
returning at any time between eight o’clock and midnight, to creep
upstairs with hoarse whispers after leaving their boots in the kitchen.
They were immensely helpful during their free time at week ends, digging
over the garden, planting out the vegetables, painting the garage, and
polishing Mrs. Chenies’ car. They chopped wood, carried in the coal,
cleaned Mrs. Chenies’ best suede shoes with a preparation of their own
invention which completely ruined them, made a hutch in which they hoped
to keep rabbits, and occasionally laid the table under the direction of
Effie, the maid. No doubt they did some of the washing up as well, for
Effie ruled the pair with a rod of iron.

Mrs. Chenies’ letters to her husband were rather full of the perversity
of Mr. Wilkes, the gardener, and of what was happening to the cabbages,
the potatoes, the fruit trees, the rhubarb, the sweet peas, and all the
rest of it. Mr. Wilkes wanted the latter sown in his way, in the open,
the same as his father had done, and his grandfather before him. He
couldn’t see the sense of coddling sweet peas like babies--planting them
in paper containers in boxes which one kept under glass in the little
greenhouse till they sprouted, and then transferring them later to their
specially prepared bed in the open. All these newfangled ideas of
horticulture didn’t please Mr. Wilkes a little bit. “Let the durn things
take their chance along wi’ the rest,” said he.

There were times when Mrs. Chenies badly wanted her husband at home. Mr.
Wilkes had deteriorated since his departure. Chenies could tell the
recalcitrant one where he got off. His wife couldn’t. Mr. Wilkes went
his own way, regardless.

Every one of the older people in Minchinhampton knew everyone else, even
if they weren’t actually related. Newcomers were rather regarded as
barbarians from strange parts until they had lived there for at least
five years and had been duly assayed and proved worthy.

The Chenies’ were more or less accepted. For one thing, they both
belonged to Gloucestershire families. Mrs. Chenies came from
Cirencester, and Peter from a village in the Cotswolds within twenty
miles of it, where his father, old Admiral Chenies, had reigned for so
many years in the rambling old gray stone house in which he had been
born and brought up. Predeceased by his wife, the old man had died in
1924, aged eighty-seven. Peter was the only son. It irked his soul to be
forced to sell the old house; but a mortgage, with death and estate
duties, had swallowed up most of his patrimony. In any case the Manor
was far too large and expensive to keep up.

Five years after his father’s death, on retiring from the Navy, he had
bought the house at Minchinhampton. It stood by the road beside the
common with its old trees, and a view of the church tower and roofs of
the sleepy little town beyond. At the back it overlooked the Golden
Valley.

Minchinhampton knew the Chenies’ well. People often asked after “the
Cap’en,” just as they inquired about “Miss Toppy” and “Mister Tony,” his
daughter and son.

Toppy, aged twenty-five, very capable, with a fluent knowledge of
French, German, and Italian, had had an appointment in the Ministry of
Information since soon after the war. Disliking work in an office,
however, she was thinking of following in Father’s footsteps by joining
the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She put in an appearance at home for
very occasional week ends. Frances was her real name--Frances Elizabeth.
But she’d been “Toppy” since childhood. It was short for “Copper top,”
because her parents had discovered red lights in her hair. They still
persisted. She was an attractive person with decided opinions and a will
of her own.

Anthony, aged twenty-two, a lieutenant in a destroyer, had appeared
hardly at all since the war started. His ship had certainly been run off
her legs, and he had had more than his fair share of excitement for one
so young. Also, he had grown what purported to be a beard, which
occasioned a protest from his mother when she first saw it because it
destroyed his good looks and made him appear so old. But beards, it
seemed, had rather become the fashion in destroyers and submarines.
Apart from saving the trouble of shaving at sea, they were the Navy’s
prerogative and couldn’t be imitated by the Army or Royal Air Force.

Didn’t the “King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions” lay down
that--“The Captain is to permit all officers and men of the ship,
including the Royal Marines, to wear beards and moustaches if they so
desire. When the permission is taken advantage of, the use of the razor
is to be discontinued entirely, as moustaches are not to be worn without
the beard, nor the beard without moustaches.... The hair of the beard
and moustaches and whiskers is to be kept well cut and trimmed. The
Captain is to give such directions as may seem to him desirable on those
points, and is to establish, so far as practicable, uniformity as to the
length of the hair, beard, moustaches, or whiskers of the men....”

The Navy is nothing if not meticulous. It was quite useless for Mrs.
Chenies to protest.

That, with Tinker, the aged and beloved Sealyham, and Tiger, the cat
with the engaging manners, completes the catalogue of the Chenies
family.


3.

Peter loved his little house, as he loved Gloucestershire and the
Cotswolds. There was a fascination in the rolling plateaus and barren
limestone uplands, alternating with deep, narrow valleys, well-wooded
and traversed by their shallow, rapid streams. He loved the seventeenth
century, gray stone houses with their thick slate roofs which harmonized
so well with the landscape, the gray stone walls and the gray Cotswold
sheep.

He had spent so much time and trouble over his new home, and had hoped,
when he left the Navy after more than thirty years, to remain settled
and quiescent for the rest of his life. He wanted to call no man his
master, to play golf, when he felt so disposed, to ride and to fish, to
devote himself to his wife and two children and give them a fair deal in
life, to take an interest in his garden, and in local affairs, if people
wanted him. They might also travel a little, and have an occasional trip
to London to do a theater or two, and for Maggie to do her shopping
while he renewed acquaintances at his club.

It had all worked well enough to start with. They had had their jaunts
and travels. Life had been enjoyable. Variety, not routine, was
certainly the sauce of existence.

Toppy had done well at school and had early developed that taste for
languages which proved so useful afterward. Later, with one girl friend
or another, she had traveled over a large part of Europe. By the time
she was twenty-one she was in a tolerably well-paid post in London on
the staff of an organization which dealt with international affairs, and
that was only a beginning.

Tony, too, had passed into the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and had
duly gone to sea as a midshipman. Though not possessing the quick brain
of his sister, he was a hard worker and well-liked and very keen. Most
of the Service certificates signed by his captains said, “To my entire
satisfaction. A zealous and promising young officer.” These encomiums,
Tony said, were entirely because he had never been found out. He far
preferred to be considered a hard-boiled roysterer and a rip than a
plaster saint with a nice little golden halo. Some of his wilder
adventures might certainly have shocked his doting mother. Anyhow, in
due course he had become a sub-lieutenant.

With both his children provided for, Peter imagined he would be able to
sit back and relax, to enjoy the blessings of the land with the fruits
of his labors. For a time all went well, but not for very long.

Being a naval officer on the retired list, sound in wind and limb and
under the age of sixty, Peter Chenies was still liable to be recalled to
the Navy in the event of war. He had volunteered for service when the
Navy mobilized at the time of the Munich crisis, presenting himself at
the Admiralty with a horde of others, and having his name noted.

Nothing happened until the following January when, coming down rather
late to breakfast at Holmfield, he found a long official envelope beside
his plate with his other letters.

“Probably some foul communication about income tax,” he observed,
tearing open the envelope and extracting the contents. “No, by gum, it
isn’t!” he continued after a moment. “It’s my war appointment!”

“Your what?” his wife demanded. “What does it mean?”

“That if war comes I’m off to sea again,” he told her. “I’m to command
an armed merchant cruiser, Maggie. Just think of that, old dear! What
luck!” He was obviously pleased, and a little excited.

Mrs. Chenies looked distressed. It was on the tip of her tongue to say
that he was far too old to think of going to sea in command of a ship.
But that would annoy him. She checked herself in time.

“But Peter, dear,” she asked, “wouldn’t you be _far_ better in some
appointment ashore?”

“Ashore?” he echoed, looking at her. “Ashore, if I can get a command at
sea?”

Mrs. Chenies sighed as she poured out her husband’s coffee. “I hope
there’ll never be another war.”

She remembered the last war, when Peter had spent the whole four years
in command of destroyers. If war came again it would be bad enough
having Tony at sea. If Peter went also--well, she hardly dared to think
of it.


4.

The _Fonthill Abbey_, to which Peter had been appointed a month after
the outbreak of war, was a sixteen-knot, turbine-driven, twin-screw
passenger steamer of 14,200 tons, which had formerly been on the
Australian run. He joined her in the northern shipyard where she had
been converted into one of His Majesty’s armed merchant cruisers. They
had painted her gray, and had provided her, among other armament, with
eight six-inch guns.

The ship originally had accommodation for nearly seven hundred
passengers, but when Peter joined whole tiers of cabins had been
demolished to provide space for messdecks. All fripperies had
disappeared. Where there was originally paneling or tapestry, now there
was nothing but bare steel. Smoking rooms, lounges, and dining saloons,
bereft of most of their furniture and trimmings, were almost
unrecognizable as such. The _Fonthill Abbey_ was stripped for war.

Of the officers, all but Chenies and his executive officer Wenlock, a
commander from the retired list, belonged to the Royal Naval Reserve.
Some of them, and practically all the engineers, who had been given
temporary commissions in the R.N.R., had served in the ship in
peacetime.

Except for a handful of petty officers and a solitary Royal Marine
bugler, the ship’s company, which numbered about 250, was entirely made
up of naval pensioners, men of the Royal Naval and Royal Naval Volunteer
Reserves, and others who had joined the Navy especially for the war and
were being sent afloat after a few months’ intensive training. Among the
men were a score of Newfoundland fishermen, expert boatmen in all
weathers, and likely to be useful for boarding intercepted steamers.
Many of the peacetime stewards, as well as firemen and greasers, had
volunteered to stay on when the ship was taken over by the Admiralty.

The ship’s company was a likely crowd of men who worked well. They were
keen to do their best, but a good deal of hard, grueling work had to be
done in the way of “working up” before the _Fonthill Abbey_ could be
considered efficient as a warship.

Throughout the autumn and the first fierce winter of the war the ship
had formed part of the Northern Patrol of cruisers and armed merchant
cruisers which watched the northern exits of the North Sea. One cannot
specify her exact patrol ground, which varied from time to time, but for
bad weather, heavy seas, cold, and general nastiness, that grim stretch
of water between the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland was one of the worst
during winter. The _Fonthill Abbey’s_ normal routine was eighteen to
nineteen days out, followed by five days to a week in harbor for
refueling and storing. Officers and men had about three days’ leave
every six weeks, and well they deserved it.

Peter would never forget that first winter. Daylight came at about ten
in the morning and darkness at about half-past three. It was generally
heavily overcast, with low, driving clouds. Most of the time it blew
like the wrath of God, with a steep, leaden-colored toppling sea in
which the ship rolled and pitched, plunged and wallowed, with the spray
sweeping over her in sheets.

Then the fierce snow blizzards, which reduced the visibility to a few
hundred yards and coated every exposed part of the ship in a thick
layer. The driven spray, freezing as it fell, converted the coating into
solid ice, until masts, rigging, boat’s davits, rails, and the like
became three or four times their normal girth. There was floating ice
about on occasions, and several times they sighted icebergs. For days on
end the temperature never rose above zero, which meant thirty-two
degrees of frost. Men became frostbitten as, muffled almost to the eyes
in all the woolies they possessed, they strove to peer out through the
darkness. The lookouts kept tricks of only half an hour and spent the
next hour of their watch below chipping the ice from their oilskins and
inducing some semblance of warmth and feeling into their numbed limbs
and extremities.

“Wind northwesterly, force 9 to 10, tending to back during the
forenoon,” ran an entry in one of the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ reports of
proceedings. “Heavy breaking sea from same direction. Storms of snow and
hail, in which visibility did not exceed one cable. At 0130 port
lifeboat carried away by heavy sea. Hove ship to with wind on starboard
bow.”

That time the weather became worse before it improved. The ship remained
hove to for forty hours. There was nothing else to do.

The monotony of the gales was occasionally varied by a blanket of thick
fog through which the wind and cold persisted. The number of really fine
days, with sun and full visibility, could be counted on the fingers of
one hand. Unless they deliberately closed the shore to verify their
position because sights of the sun or stars had been unobtainable for
days, they rarely saw the land. Peter remembered sighting the
glittering, snow-covered peaks of Iceland, fifty or sixty miles away, on
no more than three occasions during the brief spells of really fine
weather.

For the rest, during the whole of that first long winter, they saw
little on patrol but the somber sky, and the gray, heaving sea dappled
with the white of breaking combers. The sight of another ship was rare,
and more often than not it was one of their consorts, with whom they
exchanged signals. Whenever this occurred the word was passed round from
mouth to mouth, and most of the men gathered on deck to feast their eyes
on the spectacle.

When, after their period on patrol, they met their relieving ship at the
appointed rendezvous and shaped course for home after turning over, the
whole atmosphere changed. There was more cheerful noise on the
messdecks, more singing and playing of harmonicas and accordions. There
was a queue at the barbers, and men might be seen darning their socks,
and ironing and furbishing up their best shoregoing uniforms. Also, they
washed and pressed the square blue-jean “dickeys,” or collars, with the
three rows of narrow white tape, worn at the back of their jumpers.

Some of the youngsters had been led to believe that the three rows of
tape commemorated Nelson’s victories at the Nile, Copenhagen, and
Trafalgar. The collar, officially introduced when the bluejacket’s
uniform was first established in 1857, was undoubtedly a survival from
the days when seamen sported pigtails and were in the habit of wearing a
square of cloth or a tied handkerchief round their necks to prevent the
flour, grease, or tar with which their queues were sometimes anointed
from soiling their clothing. The three rows of tape, however, had merely
been put there by way of ornament in 1857, and had since been copied by
most of the navies of the world. But the recently joined men soon
discovered that to wear new dark blue “dickeys” ashore was to brand
themselves as newcomers to the Navy. Preferring, in spite of their
youthful appearance, to be considered ancient mariners, they washed and
scrubbed their shoregoing “dickeys” until the pristine navy blue faded
to azure.

The _Fonthill Abbey_ had intercepted various neutral merchant ships,
boarding them if the weather permitted to examine their papers and
credentials, otherwise sending them into harbor for examination.

On one occasion they sighted a large merchant steamer coming out of a
bank of haze at a distance of twelve miles. Chenies, who had his glasses
on her, noticed her sudden alteration of course and the increase of
smoke from her funnel. He didn’t wait.

“Go on to full speed,” he ordered the navigator. “Steer straight after
her. --Warn the Commander we’ll be going to action stations. Have a
boarding boat’s crew ready.”

The helm went over, and the _Fonthill Abbey_ swung round in pursuit. Her
speed gradually increased.

The stranger’s outline was becoming dimmer--swallowed up in the mist on
the horizon. Was it merely mist, Chenies wondered, or real fog?
Searching for another ship in really thick weather was like looking for
a needle in a truss of hay, particularly if she didn’t wish to be found.
Meanwhile, he couldn’t bring her to with a shot across the bows. His
six-inch guns wouldn’t carry 24,000 yards.

The _Fonthill Abbey_ steamed on.

The strange ship might be good for about twelve knots, Chenies thought.
The _Fonthill Abbey_ could do nearly sixteen at a pinch. If they were
twelve miles apart on sighting, that meant a chase of three hours before
he was up to her, or about an hour and a half before he was within gun
range.

An hour and a half, and the time was about half-past two. It would be
getting dark by half-past four.

And what of the mist? Was it thickening into fog? No. It didn’t seem to
be. The stranger, though indistinct, was still visible after ten
minutes. The haze seemed to be hanging in patches over the surface of
the water. Consumed with impatience, Chenies would have given a month’s
pay to be in a destroyer. There, a simple order on the engine-room
telegraph would have sent her cutting through the swell at over thirty
knots. The _Fonthill Abbey_ seemed like a lumbering hearse in
comparison.

A message came up from the wireless office to say the stranger was using
her radio. They knew it was hers, because the wireless bearing coincided
with the compass bearing from the bridge. The signals were
unintelligible, but judging this was one of the occasions when it was
justifiable to break wireless silence, Chenies ordered a message to be
transmitted on the same wave length. “Cease using radio. Stop your
engines instantly.”

The radio ceased, but the ship ahead showed no signs of stopping her
engines. The mist was still patchy in places, though it seemed gradually
to be dispersing. The _Fonthill Abbey_ was gradually creeping up.

An hour passed ... an hour and three-quarters. The stranger was still
over four miles ahead, steaming in almost the contrary direction to that
in which she had been steering when first sighted.

Chenies gave more orders. One of the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ guns went off
with a crash and a spurt of flame and cloud of dun-colored cordite
smoke. The shot, as intended, fell slightly ahead of its target and to
one side.

It was enough. The steamer stopped. Those on board the armed merchant
cruiser could see she flew no ensign. Large white letters on her side
purported to show she was a neutral, but the letters were new, and very
clumsily painted. Moreover, the bottoms of the letters had been partly
washed away, which showed they had been painted since leaving harbor.

Chenies was taking no chances. Mindful of incidents of the last war, he
couldn’t be certain the steamer was not an armed raider in disguise.
Making a wide circle with his guns trained upon her, he signaled by
International Code flag signals, “What ship? Where bound?”

There was no reply. But men on board her were throwing things into the
sea and turning out and lowering boats, into which more men were
scrambling. Presently, looking through glasses, it could be seen that
only one man, an officer by the look of him, was left on board. He
sauntered aft, hoisted the German flag at the ensign staff, and then
went leisurely forward again and clambered down into one of the boats
waiting alongside.

One of the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ boats, meanwhile, in command of Lieutenant
Williams, R.N.R.--Roughneck Williams, as his messmates called him--was
in the water and pulling for all her crew were worth toward the
abandoned ship. On the way she met one of the German boats and stopped
while Williams ordered the Germans to return to their ship. Chenies saw
Roughneck’s angry gesticulations, and could imagine his lurid language.
But it had no effect. He heard afterward that the Germans pretended not
to understand.

So Williams’ party boarded the vessel, presently to signal back that
plates had been removed from the condenser and the seacocks opened. She
had been scuttled, and was making water fast.

The boarding party was ordered to return, and the steamer’s sinking was
accelerated by a few rounds of gunfire. In less than a quarter of an
hour she flung her bows skyward, and disappeared to the bottom--the
_Paraiso_, of over 6,000 tons, bound from Santos to a German port.
Roughneck brought back the Nazi ensign with its swastika and Iron Cross
and was apologetic at not being able to save the ship. The Germans, it
seemed, had made a thoroughly good job of the scuttling.

It was not until well after darkness had come, by which time the breeze
had risen and there was a little breaking sea, that the fifty-seven
Germans were rescued from three lifeboats and put below under guard. As
usual, full arrangements had been made for scuttling the ship on
sighting a British warship. The _Paraiso’s_ crew had even packed their
bags and suitcases ready for a hurried departure.

Later that evening, the _Paraiso’s_ captain requested an interview with
Chenies. Chenies saw him in his cabin. Captain Schultz was by no means
the typical Nazi, either in demeanor or appearance. He talked English
very nearly as well as Chenies himself.

He wished to know what was to become of him and his crew. Chenies could
only tell him that they would be handed over to a military guard on the
_Fonthill Abbey’s_ arrival in harbor, and would eventually find
themselves in a camp for prisoners of war. Provided they behaved
themselves, they would be well treated.

“Why did you try to run the blockade?” Chenies went on to ask him.

“We have orders so to do,” the German answered.

“Who from?”

“From the Führer through our Navy.”

“Does that apply to scuttling your ship, too?”

“Yes. We seamen must obey, Herr Kapitän.”

Chenies could understand that. The alternative to rigid obedience was a
concentration camp, if nothing worse.

“May I say something, Herr Kapitän?”

Chenies nodded. “Go on,” he said.

“I can never speak freely on board my own ship, Herr Kapitän. Not for
years can I say anything but it is reported. It is the same on shore.
The Gestapo, you understand.” And a look of hatred came over his face.
“They are everywhere. In foreign countries also.”

“There is no freedom in Germany,” he continued, his voice rising. “No
free talking, no thinking for yourself. --But not all Germans wanted to
fight with England. Many merchant seamen, certainly not!”

“Then I take it you’re not a Nazi?” Chenies asked.

Schultz winced.

“Me, a Nazi!” he exclaimed. “I tried to become an American citizen in
1935, but they won’t have me. My wife is Polish,” he added bitterly.
“What has happened to her and my three children since this war? I have
no news.” There was a look of misery on his face. He held out his hands
in a gesture of hopelessness.

Chenies looked sympathetic.

“You’ll be able to write,” he answered.

“You do not understand, Herr Kapitän.--To where do I write? The last
time I hear of my wife she was in Warsaw with the children. They live
with her parents while I’m away at sea. What has happened to them now
that Warsaw is bombarded and destroyed?”

“I can’t volunteer any opinion about that,” Chenies said. “As you’re a
German it’s a matter for your government.”

“The German government!” Schultz exclaimed. “What do they care for me? I
marry a Polish woman. My children are half Polish. Damn Hitler!” he
broke out, trembling with emotion. “Damn the Nazis who make war and
misery in all the world!”

Chenies wished that more Germans thought the same.




CHAPTER II


Chief Petty Officer Reginald Ebenezer Buttress, doyen of the C.P.O.’s
mess and one of the more elderly men in the _Fonthill Abbey_, was a
seaman of the older school who came of a naval family.

He was a shortish, deep-chested, stockily built man in the middle
fifties, nearly as broad as he was long. His tanned face was almost the
color of mahogany, his eyes bluish-gray and piercing, and his eyebrows
the bushiest you ever saw. His hair, rather thin on top, had originally
been auburn, but was now nearly gray. It matched his reddish beard and
mustaches, grown only since the war, which were trimmed in proper Navy
fashion and cut to a point.

Powerfully built, Buttress appeared fiercer than he really was. He could
certainly frighten the life out of newly joined ordinary seamen who, new
to the ways of the Navy, gave lame excuses for dereliction of duty or
tried to throw their weight about or argue the point. His voice, when he
chose to raise it, could be heard from one end of the ship to the other
in a deep-throated bellow. However, when chiding those who displeased
him he addressed them out of earshot of others, advancing his face to
within a foot of theirs, gazing at them with a steely glare, and
growling deep down in his throat like an angry bear.

“I don’t care who you are, what you are, where you came from, or what
your father was,” he would begin. “But you’re in the Navy now. You’re
an Ordinary Seaman wearing the King’s uniform. Someday, if you behave
yourself, you may be made Able Seaman and Leading Seaman. But you’ve got
to obey orders, my son, and jump to it. If I tell you to run, you’ve got
to run, or I’ll know the reason why. I’ve got me eye on you all the
time. ’Bout turn. Rejoin your part of the ship. Double march.”

Suitably chastened, the delinquent doubled away.

Fiercely energetic himself, Buttress detested sloth or anything
approaching slovenliness and didn’t hesitate to say so. He lived for
precision, neatness, and the teaching and training of the gunnery
school. Brought up in the meticulously disciplined atmosphere of Whale
Island, the Alma Mater of naval gunnery at Portsmouth, where he had
first gone through a course for seaman gunner in 1906, and which he had
constantly revisited to qualify for one higher gunnery rating after
another and still regarded as his spiritual home, he lived for guns and
gunnery. He even dreamt about them.

At “Whaley,” otherwise H.M.S. _Excellent_, smartness in movement and
appearance was the rule, and orders were obeyed at the rush, not at a
leisurely amble. In these days of war and the National Service Acts, all
sorts of young men came into the Navy’s net, for nearly everyone joined
through the ranks. If some of them came from public schools and the
Universities or were born to the purple, Buttress didn’t believe in
differential treatment.

If it came to that, most of the young seamen of this war differed from
the youngsters with whom he’d joined the Service way back in 1901. On
the average, the new breed was more cultured and refined, more
mechanically minded, less uncouth in habits and ideas. And among the
young men who’d joined up for “hostilities only” one met people from
every walk of life--artists, actors, and artisans, butchers and bakers,
theological students and clerks, haberdashers and undertakers’
assistants, comedians and men who played in dance bands, a man who had
run the steamheating plant at a lunatic asylum on the south coast of
England working side by side with a professional ratcatcher from
Somerset.

There were men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and
many of the Colonies. One lad from New Zealand, desperately keen on
joining the Navy, had tried to enter out there. Told he might have to
wait a month or six weeks before there was a vacancy, he became
impatient, worked his passage as an assistant steward in a passenger
ship, and joined up in England.

Buttress, steeped in the traditions of the Navy and of Whale Island,
treated them all alike. They were there to be drilled and disciplined as
seamen, a credit to the Navy, the ship, their officers, and himself. He
was no believer in favoritism. He did not suffer fools gladly, but hated
the sea lawyers, the slovens, or the shirkers even worse.

Among the younger men of the _Fonthill Abbey_ Buttress had the
reputation of being a proper old tartar on duty but a rare old bird in
his moments of relaxation. People went to him for advice in their
troubles and perplexities. Often during the dog watches or in the
evenings, when nothing else was happening, he would take voluntary
classes of men who wanted a rub-up in gunnery or seamanship before
passing for higher rating.

Though his words of praise were confined to a very occasional “Well
done, lads,” Buttress for his part was immensely proud of the
“youngsters,” as he was pleased to call them, and wouldn’t hear a word
against them. If anyone had told him that the young of Britain lacked
guts, or were in any way soft or sissy, Buttress would have called him a
damned liar!


2.

Apart from being right-hand man to Commander Wenlock, the _Fonthill
Abbey’s_ executive officer, Buttress was also the chief gunnery
instructor. With a petty officer and a pensioner sergeant of Royal
Marines to help him, he had the job of licking the guns’ crews into
shape.

Besides her 3-inch anti-aircraft piece and a number of machine guns for
dealing with dive bombers, the ship carried eight six-inch guns.
Originally mounted in a cruiser long since scrapped, they were by no
means new. All the same, they were good, useful weapons and the delight
of Buttress’ heart. He invariably spoke of them as “my guns,” and heaven
help any young officer who dared to interfere.

Twice every day at sea, once before dawn and again at dusk, the whole
ship’s company went to action stations and the guns’ crews and
ammunition supply parties were drilled and exercised. At other times
during the day the guns’ crews were drilled individually by their own
officers with Chief Petty Officer Buttress or one of his acolytes
looking on and occasionally holding up the proceedings to correct
mistakes.

Buttress, with the two others, also lectured to classes of seamen on
guns, projectiles, ammunition, fuses, fireworks, and anything else that
came under the general heading of gunnery. When he wasn’t doing that he
was organizing loading competitions among the guns’ crews for tins of
cigarettes provided by the officers from the canteen, drilling classes
of newly joined men with rifles in case the _Fonthill Abbey_ was ever
required to send an armed party ashore, and prowling round his beloved
weapons to see that everything connected with them was in perfect order.
Woe betide the man responsible if Ben Buttress discovered a speck of
rust on a breech block or something that looked like dirt or a piece of
fluff left in the bore.


3.

As has already been said, Buttress was steeped in the tradition of the
Service.

His father, who had married late in life, had lost an eye as a
nineteen-year-old able seaman at the capture of the Taku Forts in 1860.
Taking pity upon him, the authorities had permitted him to become a
sailmaker. Serving on in the Navy for another twenty-one years, he had
left it when canvas, hemp, masts, and yards, and the four winds of
heaven were still regarded as the main motive power in most of Her
Majesty’s ships. Except in the then newfangled “ironclads,” engines and
boilers were entirely secondary and for use only in cabins, emergency,
or in action.

After leaving the Service, Buttress the elder was employed for many
years in the sail loft at Portsmouth Dockyard, to see sails practically
abolished except in boats, and himself employed stitching awnings for
great battleships and cruisers that were as unlike the ships of his
early manhood as modern destroyers are unlike frigates. All the same,
sailmaking, or its modern equivalent, was still a craftsman job, and old
Buttress took an intense pride in it. He was an expert in the use of the
palm and needle.

Older people in Portsmouth still remember “Old One Eye,” for he didn’t
go the way of all flesh until the ripe old age of eighty-two, and that
was in 1923. He became garrulous as time went on. Folk remembered his
yarns of an old-time Navy, when ships were really ships and sailors
seamen. These new-fashioned men-o’-war didn’t resemble ships at all to
his way of thinking. As for the modern sailor, they were nothing but
“blurry scientists,” what with their mechanics and electrics and all.
They couldn’t hand, reef, or steer--didn’t know what it meant to cross
royal and t’gallant yards, or to shift the main topsail in a gale of
wind. Also, and what was much worse, they had smarmed hair and wore
wrist watches. They ate jam and had ice-cream bars and soda fountains in
the canteens of larger ships. Half of them didn’t take up their tots of
rum, either, but drew the money instead. Moreover, and this was their
greatest crime of all, they didn’t drink beer like ordinary human beings
in the pubs ashore. They went to the cinema, and became sick from eating
chocolate.

Chocolates and ice cream! Hair oil and wrist watches! Blister and burst
him, if these sort of things weren’t signs that the Navy had gone to the
dogs, his name wasn’t Buttress, one of the best sailmakers the Navy had
ever produced, single optic and all!

Stiffen his guts, he’d work blindfold! What’s more, he’d drink any
modern sailor under the table, old though he might be.

These ebullitions generally occurred after he’d had two or three pints
in one of the pubs on his way home in the evening.

“One Eye” never tired of telling how he had been spoken to by King
Edward VII when His Majesty had been making a tour of the Dockyard in
1903, the year after his Coronation.

Buttress, it seemed, had been specially pointed out by the Admiral
Superintendent, and with his neat white beard cut Navy fashion, his
polished pink cranium and fringe of snowy hair, and the black patch over
his left eye socket, he was certainly something of a show piece. As told
by Buttress the story ran something like this:

“The King he says to me, he says, ‘When was you born, Buttress, my man?’
‘The same year as Your Majesty, sir,’ says I. ‘Eighteen hundred an’
forty-one!’ The King laughs at that. ‘An’ a damn good vintage, too!’ he
says, with all the Admirals standin’ around him in their gold lace and
swords, him bein’ dressed in his yachtin’ suit. He goes on to ask where
I lost me port optic, so I says, respectful like, it got shot out by
some blinkin’ Chinee at the stormin’ of the Taku Forts way back in 1860.
An’ he says, while all the Admirals was fidgetin’ around and wantin’ to
get on ’cos there was plenty other things the King had to see an’ big
nobs to talk to, but he wouldn’t be hurried--well, he says to me, ‘That
was a long time ago, that was!’ I says to him it was, nearly as long ago
as Trafalgar. ‘But you wasn’t at Trafalgar,’ he says. ‘No, Your Majesty,
sir,’ says I. ‘It was me father who was at Trafalgar, along o’ Admiral
Collingwood in the _Royal Sovereign_.’ ‘Is that so,’ says he. ‘Like
father, like son, both gallant veterans. I congratulate you, Buttress,
my man!’ With that he shakes hands, wishes me the best of health, says
he likes havin’ old sailors like me still workin’ for his Navy, an’
passes on, me feelin’ that proud an’ flustered-like. But the King
hadn’t finished, for in a minute or two an orficer came back.
‘Buttress,’ he asks. ‘His Majesty wishes to know if they gave you his
Coronation Medal?’ I said no medal had come my way, though I knew one o’
the foremen riggers had got one. All I got, I said, was the China medal
for Taku, the medal an’ bronze star for that there ‘Gyppie business in
eighty-two, an’ the long service an’ good conduct medal for not being
caught out. Well, the orficer takes my name an’ number, an’ sure enough
I’m sent for by the Admiral Superintendent a week or two later, an’
presented with King Edward’s medal what he’d had struck special for the
likes o’ them who deserved it. A kind and thoughtful gentleman, King
Edward was. 1841. Him and me. ‘A damn good vintage,’ says he. I should
ruddy well think so.”


4.

Reginald Ebenezer Buttress, the one serving in the _Fonthill Abbey_,
still possessed his grandfather’s Naval General Service medal for
Trafalgar, issued forty-four years after the battle. It hung in a frame
over the mantelpiece in his living room in Kensington, with a faded
newspaper cutting describing the funeral of a Trafalgar veteran and the
many “floral tributes.” Beneath it, in another frame, hung “One Eye’s”
five medals on their varicolored ribbons.

Ben was proud of them, proud that they served as an outward and visible
sign of his naval ancestry. It wasn’t everyone who could boast of a
grandfather who had fought at Trafalgar, or a father like old “One Eye,”
who was something of a celebrity. Sons following their fathers in the
Royal Navy are not confined to the families of officers.

He himself had joined the Navy as a boy of fifteen in the old _St.
Vincent_ at Portsmouth. This was in 1901, before sail finally
disappeared from the Navy. At all events, sail drill still formed an
important part of the training in the old line-of-battle ship with her
three masts and black and white checkered sides which swung round her
buoy near Nelson’s _Victory_. Attached to the _St. Vincent_, too, were
two smart sailing brigs in which the boys spent the last months of their
training at sea. As Ben sometimes said in talking over old times, it was
a sight to warm the cockles of any seaman’s heart to see the brigs
beating out of the narrow bottleneck of Portsmouth harbor, or bowling
along with every stitch of canvas drawing in a stiff breeze in the
Channel off St. Catherine’s.

There was no softness about the training of boys in those days. The
discipline was harsh, the life strenuous, and the food scanty. Boys were
called out of their hammocks at five o’clock, followed three mornings a
week by a cold plunge, after which they were inspected for cleanliness.
Breakfast, at six o’clock, consisted of no more than dry bread and
cocoa, with fried salt pork once a week. At six-thirty they scrubbed
decks, followed at half-past seven by general sail drill aloft. At
eight-forty-five came divisions and prayers, after which classes were
sent to school and practical instruction, with a break at ten-thirty
when a hunk of dry bread was served out to each boy. Dinner, the only
square meal of the day, came at noon, pea soup and hot salt pork
alternating with fresh meat and potatoes. Twice a week, as a treat, they
were given suet pudding punctuated with a few currants. It went by the
name of “spotted dog.”

Instruction and work continued during the afternoon until four o’clock,
when came supper of dry bread with occasional dripping, or jam in huge
pots, reputed to be provided out of the kindness of her heart by the
wife of the captain. Tea, ladled out of a large tub, was provided
without milk or sugar. After supper, or earlier in the afternoon during
winter, boys went ashore to the recreation ground on two days in the
week, while Thursday afternoon was always set aside for making and
mending clothes. A certain amount of schooling and instruction continued
after four o’clock, or else classes took it in turns to scrub and wash
their hammocks, white duck suits, flannel vests, and underwear. A
minute amount of water was allowed for the operation, and to make
matters worse the “nozzers,” or novices, usually had their soap and
water purloined by those who had been longer on board and knew the
ropes.

The last meal of the day, a piece of bread with the boilings of the salt
pork if the ship’s cook happened to be in a good temper, came at seven
o’clock. An hour later hammocks were piped down and slung and the boys
turned in.

It was a hard life, Ben always said, nevertheless a life which made them
strong and hardy. His chief recollection was of always being hungry, and
of the cakes retailed by the bumboat at a penny a time. But they hadn’t
much money for luxuries. Their pay as nozzers, served out on Thursdays,
was no more than sixpence a day. Most of it was stopped for necessary
replacements of kit or saved for the three weeks leave at Mid-summer or
Christmas.

Boys were certainly taught and made to jump to it from the moment they
arrived on board. Official canings at the hands of a ship’s corporal for
practically any offense, but particularly smoking, took place before the
midday meal in the presence of the assembled multitude. Since the last
six boys in the early morning race over the mastheads were invariably
regarded as defaulters, these public beatings were of almost daily
occurrence. Nobody paid much attention to them, and it was part of the
unwritten law that they should be borne without a whimper. Smoking in
the heads, in the chains, or aloft during the dog watches was the most
frequent “crime.” Cigarettes, which sold ashore at one penny for a
packet of five, were smuggled on board in boots or socks and disposed of
at a penny apiece. Woe betide the boy caught smoking. There were plenty
of lynx-eyed, keen-nosed petty officers and ship’s corporals to play the
part of detectives.

All the instructors carried rope’s ends, or “stonikys,” with which they
lambasted the laggards, some even running up the rigging behind their
victims smiting indiscriminately at their laboring sterns and bare feet.
During sail drill a ship’s corporal with a whistling cane took post at
the foot of each ladder, and didn’t hesitate to lay about him at the
pipe, “Clear lower deck.” No one thought anything of it, and if a boy
showed signs of resentment, he was probably “put in the report” for
insolence, which meant an official beating.

The day one was promoted to “boy, first class” was a red-letter one. One
had first to be examined and to produce a complete set of clews and
lashings for one’s hammock, duly pointed and grafted in true Navy
fashion. But having got over the first hurdle and become a “first class
rock,” as they called it, one drew pay at one shilling a day and was
eligible to become a “petty officer boy” or “sub-instructor boy” with
badges to wear, and an additional threepence or sixpence a week, plus an
extra penny for a good conduct badge.

Having achieved the dizzy height of boy, first class, one became a real
sailor, and behaved accordingly. Nozzers wore soft serge caps with plain
cap ribbons, and trousers with a patch in the seat rather like riding
breeches, which they cordially detested. First class rocks, on the other
hand, were served out with the proper sailor’s cap with the
gold-lettered cap ribbon, H.M.S. _St. Vincent_, and the regulation cloth
trousers and “frock,” or best jumper. Consequently, when they went on
long leave, they could act the part of real sailors after removing the
red “watch stripes” still worn on the left or right shoulder by boys
under training but not afloat in the fleet. Also, since the H.M.S. _St.
Vincent_ cap ribbon stamped them as boys, they usually sported the cap
ribbon of some well-known battleship or cruiser.

Knife lanyards with pineapple knots, embroidered black silk
handkerchiefs, and high-heeled shoes were also the fashion. These, with
the cap ribbon of any ship in the Navy, and “tiddley” suits with tight
jumpers and bell-bottomed trousers cut far wider than the regulation
permitted, at ten shillings and sixpence a suit, could be obtained from
a gentleman called Jack Ward, of The Lighthouse, Walthamstow. His agents
at Portsmouth visited the ship with catalogues. Jack Ward, whoever he
may have been, did a roaring trade.

One swaggered a bit on leave, swore lustily, and adopted a deep sea
roll. To enhance their personal appearance, boys even greased their hair
with the skimmings of the ship’s cocoa begged from the cook.

After the _St. Vincent_ the boys migrated to the old five-masted
ironclad _Minotaur_ at Portland, where for three months they were
instructed in the elements of gunnery and did rifle practice on shore.
Later they went to the _Minotaur’s_ sister ship, the _Agincourt_, for a
final “shake-up” before being drafted to sea.

And a shake-up it certainly was, according to Reginald Ebenezer, worse
indeed than being a nozzer in the old _St. Vincent_. Those who survived
were as hard as nails and proper little sailors. The Navy had no use for
weaklings. Even the soles of their feet were as tough as leather. They
never wore boots on board except for Sunday divisions or when parading
to go ashore. Coming off from the shore, the order “Off Boots” was given
in the boat before they climbed on board the ship.

It was the men entered as boys and trained in this way who were the
leading seamen, petty officers, and warrant officers of the Fleet during
the war of 1914-18.

Someone once referred to them as the backbone of the Royal Navy.


5.

There is no need to follow Buttress’ twenty-one years in the Navy in
full detail. His first seagoing ship as a youth of seventeen was the
battleship _Hannibal_, in the Atlantic Fleet. Rated Ordinary and Able
Seaman in due course, he served a commission in the Mediterranean, and
was then sent back to Whale Island to pass for seaman gunner.

A commission in China followed, with promotion to leading seaman, then a
return to Whale Island to undergo a course and to pass for higher
gunnery rating. A petty officer in 1909 at the early age of
twenty-three, he was serving as an instructor in the gunnery school when
war broke out in August, 1914. To his intense mortification,
mobilization found him sent to one of the older battleships long past
the age for serving with the Grand Fleet under Admiral Sir John
Jellicoe. However, after a dreary spell of convoy work, during which
they saw nothing of the enemy, the old ship was sent to the Dardanelles
and had her full share of excitements in the landing and support of the
Army, and the attempts to force the Straits.

Considerably to his surprise, but also to his gratification, Buttress
was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for “coolness and gallantry
under fire on many occasions.” He had been in charge of a boat during
the first landings on the Gallipoli beaches, and later had distinguished
himself by carrying on practically singlehanded when the fore control
position of his ship was swept by splinters of a shell which killed or
wounded most of the people around him.

“Old One Eye,” then a widower of seventy-four, celebrated the occasion
by making a night of it with convivial friends in a private room of the
Admiral Collingwood at Landport. To his dying day the old boy couldn’t
remember who put him to bed, or how he got there.

“Dear Son,” he wrote some days later, “I was that pleased and proud when
I saw your name in the newspapers. A pity your dear Ma isn’t with us to
enjoy it, and your old Grandad would have cocked a chest like a pouter
pigeon if he’d knowed it. All the boys was patting me on the back like
I’d got the medal, not you, and Ginger Bate suggests a bit of a do at
the Admiral Collingwood. So me and seven of the boys got together and
had a bite of something to eat. We drank your health and I made a bit of
a speech. They tells me that after that someone got arguing the point
and broke up some furniture and stuff dancing on the table. It wasn’t
me, son, not at my age. The last I remember was old Barney Rogers
kissing the redheaded barmaid for a bet when she came in with a cargo of
drinks. She squawks and drops the tray and catches old Barney a clip
alongside his earhole which near lays him out, she being married to a
leading stoker. My share of the damage was 8/9, which was worth it.

“Your young lady’s as pleased as me. Write to your old Dad sometimes. I
don’t like news second fiddle from Laura.

                                                         Love from Dad.

P.S. My roomaticks isn’t too good. Come back safe.”

Coming home in 1916 and being rated Chief Petty Officer at the age of
thirty, Buttress, reporting at Whale Island, found himself sent on a
fortnight’s leave. It was then he married Laura Button, the fair-haired
cashier in a draper’s shop at Southsea. He had had his eye on her for
years. They had carried on a regular correspondence, and it was always
half understood that they were to be married eventually, though Laura
had always avoided naming the day. On his return from abroad, however,
she fell into his arms and suggested that it might happen just as soon
as Ben liked. They were very happy until Ben went off to sea again, this
time in a battleship of the Grand Fleet.

There came the Armistice and the surrender of the German Fleet, and
then, for Ben, a year in the Atlantic Fleet followed by two years as an
instructor at Whale Island. Next they sent him out to a battleship in
the Mediterranean. Laura, with her two small sons, remained at home in
the little house they had rented at Cosham.

Leaving the Navy on pension in 1926, Ben had cast round for something to
do. He had saved money, and at the age of forty didn’t feel like sitting
round on his hunkers doing nothing.

Then, through a friend of Laura’s, they had heard of that little
business in London--a combined tobacconist’s, sweet, and newspaper shop
near the corner of Brompton Road and Montpelier Street whose tenant had
died. Laura, investigating, reported favorably. Ben, too, saw
possibilities when he went into the details. So they decided to take the
plunge. They acquired the lease and good will of the shop, and by sheer
hard work and personality built it up into a thriving little business.

Laura had ideas for her sons. She, knowing all the disadvantages of the
Navy in the way of long absences and an unsettled life, wished them to
go into business, and to make money. Ben, who would have preferred them
to join the Navy, did not attempt to coerce them, but was secretly
overjoyed when both Alfred and William announced their desire of
following in Father’s footsteps.

So by the time Hitler had come into power and Germany was desperately
rearming, both the lads, with an interval of two years between them,
were in H.M.S. _Ganges_, the naval training establishment on shore at
Shotley, on the Stour opposite Harwich. Visiting the place for the
annual sports and prize-giving, Buttress was impressed with the
smartness and well-being of the boys, the excellence of their food, and
the interest taken in their welfare. They were treated like dukes and
earls compared with what he’d had to put up with in the old _St.
Vincent_ nearly forty years before. He never got cake for tea and potted
meat or jam for supper.

On each of the occasions Ben and Laura visited Shotley, the Commander
and the divisional Lieutenant had a word with them about their sons.
They were good lads and keen to get on, they said. Ben particularly
remembered the conversation with the Commander just after William, the
youngest, was rated a petty officer boy. The Commander knew all about
the Buttress who had served at Trafalgar, “Old One Eye,” and how Ben had
acquired the D.S.M.

“How did you find out all about that, sir?” Ben asked, rather pleased
with himself.

“We make a habit of finding out what we can about the boys’ families.
Your lad’s rather proud of his forebears, though he took a bit of
drawing out. This is the second son you’ve had here, Buttress, isn’t
it?”

“Yes, sir. There was Alfred, a couple of years ago. He’s an ordinary
seaman in the _Nelson_ now. Getting on well, he says, and about to pass
for A.B.”

“Any more coming along?” the Commander asked. “We can always do with
them.”

Ben shook his head.

“No, sir,” he replied. “That’s all our little lot, Alfie and Bill.”

“It’s never too late to mend,” said the officer, with a sly look in
Laura’s direction. “Buttress is a good old name. The more the merrier.”

It was one of the few occasions when Ben had seen Laura blush. It
certainly became her.

“I never heard of such a thing!” she said, when the Commander was safely
out of earshot. “Him telling me to have more babies at my time of life!”

“You shouldn’t look like you do,” Ben told her.

“Get away with you, you old silly,” said Laura, secretly rather pleased.
“I can’t help how I look.”

“You haven’t changed a bit since I first knew you,” said Ben, full of
gallantry.

Laura, at forty-four, was still an attractive woman.


6.

Came September, 1938, and Munich, with the mobilization of the Navy,
when Buttress rejoined as a pensioner of fifty-two but was sent home
again after ten days at Portsmouth.

A year’s suspense, followed by the outbreak of war with Germany.
Recalled to the Navy, Buttress refurbished his knowledge at Whale
Island, and was then appointed to the _Fonthill Abbey_.

During that first cruelly hard winter of the war, as has already been
said, they spent most of their time on patrol in the wild waste of water
round about Iceland. Christmas Day, indeed, had been spent in a furious
gale from the northwest, and a heavy toppling sea in which the ship
literally buried herself. The wind howled and shrieked in its fury, and
the spray, freezing as it fell, converted the snow driven on board by
the frequent blizzards into a thick layer of solid ice. The visibility
was never more than a couple of hundred yards, and the day was one of
the worst of Buttress’ long life at sea. Even the plum pudding and an
extra tot of rum served out by Captain Chenies’ orders did not alleviate
the wet and frozen misery. Later, in the spring of 1940, when the ship
was detached for convoy duty, there was not a soul on board who was not
supremely thankful.

Alfred and William Buttress, both able seamen by this time, were also
serving in the Fleet--one in a destroyer, the other in a cruiser. The
boys sometimes wrote to their father, though more often to their mother,
who laboriously redrafted their letters and sent the copies on to her
husband. It would never have done to send the originals. They were
heirlooms.

Ben, imagining things, sometimes felt anxious about his sons, though not
so anxious as their mother, who had her husband at sea as well. He, she
considered, had no right to be afloat in a ship at the respectable age
of fifty-five.

Ben, who would have hated to be in any sort of a job ashore, was even
more worried about his wife. During his occasional spells of leave, he
had seen something of the air-raid damage in London. And every time he
listened to the B.B.C. bulletins describing the bombing of London, his
heart nearly stopped beating.

Was Laura zealously going to the air-raid shelter whenever she heard the
alert wailing on the sirens, as she had promised faithfully to do, or
had she become inured and indifferent?

He couldn’t bear to think of her mangled and buried beneath a pile of
shattered debris, or laid out bleeding on the pavement. In this sort of
war, where even the women and children weren’t immune from bombs, life
at sea sometimes felt like a rest cure.

War was a wretched business, particularly a war of this kind. And what
would happen when it was all over? Laura was now bravely striving to
carry on the business singlehanded. From what she said in her letters
it was becoming more and more difficult.

So many of the regular customers had left London for the country to
avoid the bombing, or had been called up, or were doing war work. All
had been jolted out of their normal habits and were doing all they could
to economize. Sweets and chocolate were practically unobtainable and
supplies of cigarettes and tobacco precarious and heavily rationed. In
an effort to make ends meet Laura had launched out into a lending
library and stationery, but the sweets and cigarettes were what really
produced the profit and paid the rent. For the first time since the
business had been started a deficit stared her in the face, though war
or no war the rent had still to be faced. It was by no means
inconsiderable, and as things were at present had to be paid out of
savings. By the terms of their agreement they were bound until
1944--unless, of course, the shop happened to be bombed beforehand,
which didn’t seem too unlikely.

An antique dealer just down the Brompton Road toward the Oratory had
caught it already, and Laura would never forget the strange sight.

A bomb, bursting at the back, had blown out the front and center of the
house and converted it into a mass of shattered debris and rubbish,
leaving the attics and roof suspended precariously from the houses on
either side like some sort of aerial bridge. It collapsed in ruin before
many hours; but the most remarkable sight of all was outside on the
broad pavement, where one of the skeleton trees was hung and festooned
with blankets, sheets, counterpanes, pillowcases, shirts, blouses,
pajamas, and all manner of male and female undergarments hurled there by
the blast of the explosion. Though it meant the wreckage of somebody’s
home and business, Laura couldn’t help laughing when she saw it. As she
described it in a letter to her husband, it looked like washing day gone
wrong.

There were strange sights in London in the days of the intensive
blitz--whole streets littered with broken glass and shattered masonry,
broken and demolished buildings, which ordinarily looked so strong and
impervious, converted into heaps of rubble with blank walls and gaping
fireplaces facing the open air and pictures and photographs left hanging
for all the world to see. It was, Laura wrote, somehow indecent to see
people’s most treasured belongings exposed to the public gaze, with
chairs, sofas, tables, bookcases, clothes cupboards, bedsteads, and
washstands complete with chinaware, balanced insecurely on sloping,
shattered floors and liable at any moment to crash down into the pile of
wreckage beneath. Furniture which might have looked well in a room
appeared incredibly tawdry and forlorn in the full glare of daylight.

In Hyde Park, opposite Knightsbridge Barracks, on the grassy space where
they once played football, there was an area of several acres covered
with the miscellaneous debris of broken buildings. It was a huge,
sloping ramp, fully twenty-five feet high at its highest, with lorries
moving over it to tip their loads of shattered bricks and masonry.
Bricks still useful for building were neatly stacked near by, with heaps
of timber and boarding, some of it charred and blackened by fire. Other
pounds contained hundreds of doors, cisterns, tanks, radiators, piping,
lavatory basins, twisted girders.

The dismal collection grew almost daily according to the severity of the
air raids, and as the men of the Pioneer Corps and gangs of laborers
cleared the ruined areas.

But people all went about their jobs as normally as they could. Train,
tube, and bus services might be temporarily interrupted, but the swarm
of city workers and girls still found their way to business by devious
routes, or by being “lifted” in lorries and private cars. What was more,
they were entirely good-tempered about it.

Costermongers’ carts, laden with fish or miscellaneous vegetables and
drawn by their shaggy, fast-trotting little ponies, were still to be
seen in the streets. The open-air markets and junk stalls continued, and
the barrows piled high with flowers were still in evidence on Sundays.

The newspapers were still printed and delivered with the early morning
milk. Shops sold what they could, taxicabs plied for hire, and the
dustman collected the refuse. Even in the midst of the fiercest raids
the police, the A.R.P. men and women, the rescue squads, the regular and
auxiliary firemen, the men and women of the ambulance services, and
scores of willing helpers were in the streets assisting to put out
fires, or to rescue people buried in the ruins of demolished houses.
Doctors and nurses stood by their patients in the hospitals. Train
drivers and guards, railway employees, omnibus and tram drivers carried
on.

A woman doctor was awarded the George Medal for crawling beneath the
wreckage of a bombed hospital to administer an anesthetic to a girl
buried under girders and masonry. A slight subsidence might have
resulted in both rescuer and girl being trapped and fatally crushed. But
held and suspended by her ankles by a porter, the doctor gave the
injection.

Employees at a gas works which had been bombed and set on fire, thus
providing a target for further bombing, went from one gas holder to
another to close the inlet valves, in spite of the flames surrounding
them and the bomb and shell splinters dropping around.

When a high explosive bomb struck a hospital, two nurses climbed through
a first floor window, crawled across the floor of a ward in a highly
dangerous condition, and released several patients who were trapped. A
few minutes later the floor collapsed. A girl telephonist, acting as a
bicycle messenger during an air raid, twice crawled through a small
opening in the debris of a bombed house to render first aid to the
casualties, and afterward helped to release them.

A nurse shielded a patient from falling debris with her own body. The
names of a lift boy, a girl shop assistant, and a costermonger’s boy all
appeared in the _London Gazette_ for gallantry at fires or in air raids.

The inhabitants of London, men, women, and young people in their
’teens, could take it. So could those in the bombed cities, towns, and
villages throughout the length and breadth of Britain.

In spite of the heavy air raids Britain carried on.

So did Laura Buttress.




CHAPTER III


The officers and men of the _Fonthill Abbey_ were fairly typical of the
crews of other ex-passenger ships which had been taken over by the
Admiralty for service as armed merchant cruisers.

Apart from Chenies himself, Commander Richard Wenlock, R.N. (Retired),
the executive and gunnery officer of the ship, was the only officer on
board who had graduated, so to speak, through the Royal Navy. A man of
about forty-nine, tall and slim, with graying dark hair and brown eyes,
Wenlock was always meticulously dressed and careful of his appearance.
Even at sea, when most people, including Chenies, were content to wear
their oldest clothes, mufflers, and sea boots, the Commander usually
appeared in highly polished shoes and immaculately creased trousers. It
was up to him, he considered, to set an example to the other officers,
many of whom had little or no experience of the Navy and its customs.
The _Fonthill Abbey_ might be an armed merchant cruiser, but that was no
reason why officers or men should go unshaven, wear non-uniform shoes
with toe-caps, or such things as brightly-colored woolen caps or
mufflers knitted by their wives or sweethearts. Wenlock was rather a
stickler for uniform. If he could help it, nothing should be worn that
wouldn’t be allowed in the Flagship of the Home Fleet under the eye of
the Commander-in-Chief himself.

There were occasions, when the Captain himself appeared bareheaded on
the bridge in a brown suede coat worn over a canary-colored sweater,
with the ends of a bright red and blue United Services woolen scarf
flapping in the breeze, that Wenlock, deeply shocked, felt half inclined
to remonstrate. Not that Chenies would have changed his habits because
of what the Commander thought. The Captain had spent most of his time in
destroyers, where no one much cared what people wore at sea provided
they did their jobs. Wenlock had been a gunnery specialist before his
retirement in 1927, since when he had been the personnel manager of one
of the largest high-class department stores in London, with branches in
most of the big cities.

For the rest, Wenlock was fiercely busy about the ship and in his brief
spare time read a great deal and painted in water colors. Also, he was
something of an ornithologist, and played the harmonium on Sundays.

Of the thirty other officers in the wardroom all but three belonged to
the Royal Naval Reserve. The exceptions were Goodchild, the Surgeon
Lieutenant-Commander, who had been in practice at Bournemouth before the
war, and two lieutenants, Steel and Bartley, who all wore the wavy
stripes of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Steel, who had been in the
R.N.V.R. for eight years and had done his peacetime training and cruises
at sea with the Fleet, was an architect in civil life with a yacht of
his own. Bartley, no less useful, had no previous experience of the
Navy. Before the war he had been articled to a solicitor.

When the ship was at sea Chenies rarely went below, and then only for an
occasional half-hour when they were out of the operating zone of enemy
submarines and aircraft and the code and cipher messages regularly
coming in by wireless assured him that no trouble was brewing. He always
messed in his cabin abaft the bridge, but hating solitude and keen on
getting to know the officers, usually invited three of them to dine with
him when circumstances allowed it. Sometimes they played bridge
afterward, though more often they just sat and talked. In fine weather,
too, when nothing particular was happening, the Sub-Lieutenant or
Midshipman who had been the junior officer of the morning watch and was
normally relieved at seven-thirty was sometimes invited to breakfast
with the Captain. It was a better breakfast than that provided in the
wardroom, with omelets, kidneys and bacon, kedgeree, and really good
coffee.

So in one way or another Chenies got to know a good deal of the outlook,
careers and family histories of his shipmates. Their combined
experiences would have filled many books.

Percival, the senior Lieutenant-Commander, for instance, had been First
Officer of the _Fonthill Abbey_ in peacetime. Some years before the last
war, as an apprentice on his first voyage in a sailing ship, he had been
wrecked on an island in the Pacific and had subsisted for eight weeks,
according to his own account, on a diet of coconuts, limpets, seagulls
eggs, and land-crabs. He had been in the Navy through most of the last
war, and had finished up in a “Q” ship fighting enemy submarines. Then,
joining the Abbey Line as a junior officer, he had been in it ever since
except for his periods of naval training as an officer of the R.N.R.
Rather fat, florid, and easygoing, nothing ever disturbed Percival’s
equanimity or sense of humor unless they heard over the wireless that
Merseyside had been bombed. His wife and three children lived at Bootle.

Percival was a good seaman and shipmate. A talented amateur conjuror and
pianist, he was in great demand at evening entertainments. His droll
stories, Rabelaisian or otherwise according to his audience, were
inimitable.

Hanley, the other Lieutenant-Commander, had left the P. and O. three
years before the war on marrying a well-to-do widow from Australia.
Having been in the R.N.R. in the last war, he had volunteered for
service on the outbreak of hostilities, only to be told he was over the
age limit. That wouldn’t do for Hanley, so he dyed his graying hair to
preserve a youthful appearance, wrote to an Admiral he happened to have
met while serving as second officer of the _Assam_ years before, and
generally raised Cain until they appointed him to the Contraband
Control Service. Leaving his wife to run the chicken farm in Sussex, he
gaily refurbished his old uniform with new gold lace and repaired to his
place of duty, only to find that going out in tugs in all sorts of
weather to examine neutral steamers for contraband wasn’t at all his
idea of war service. Through an influential relation of his wife’s this
time, he managed to get himself sent to Portsmouth to refurbish his
somewhat antiquated knowledge of gunnery, after which he was appointed
to the _Fonthill Abbey_. What was more, they made him an acting
lieutenant-commander.

A man of few words, stolid and dependable, Hanley was one of Chenies’
most trusted officers. No one ever saw him flurried or excited or heard
him raise his voice above the tone he used in ordinary conversation. He
had leanings toward religion, though not obtrusively, and would have
shared his last shilling with anyone in distress. Tolerably well off, he
was in the habit of doing good turns to any of the men who came to him
with a genuine tale of woe. But the tale must be genuine. Hanley was no
soft-hearted old fool to be taken in. Several people had tried that, to
discover he had a rough side to his tongue when he chose to use it.

Tanner, the Junior Lieutenant, who for some abstruse reason went by the
name of “Tugboat Annie,” had also been with the Abbey Line before the
war, though not in the _Fonthill Abbey_. Apart from his height, which
was something over six feet, and his red hair and freckles, there was
nothing remarkable about his appearance. Aged about twenty-four, he was
a product of the Nautical College at Pangbourne and had been in the
R.N.R. before the war. He was reputed to be engaged to a young woman in
Bristol, though from the many signed photographs in his cabin and the
facility with which he made new female friends at every port they
visited, his bow had as many strings as a harp.

Rather boisterous on occasion, particularly when it came to playing
practical jokes and pulling the legs of his messmates, Tanner certainly
kept the wardroom lively--too lively according to Commander Wenlock’s
ideas, who, in his precise way, once referred to his irrepressible
junior as “a riotously disposed and somewhat disrespectful young
officer.”

Tanner was certainly rather prone to work off his superfluous energy by
inventing noisy games which they played in the wardroom after dinner,
sometimes to the detriment of the furniture and glasses. Wenlock was
horrified one night when, hearing sounds of raucous merriment, he put
his nose inside the wardroom to see the most respectable chief engineer,
Commander John Edward Jamieson, R.N.R., swathed in a rug like a sausage
and rolling himself across the floor while someone took the time with a
stop-watch and the others cheered him on. It seemed it was some new form
of obstacle race invented by Tanner. Whatever its disadvantages, it
caused the wildest hilarity. Moreover, John Jamieson, the father of five
grown sons and daughters and a pillar of the kirk, seemed to be enjoying
it as much as the others.

“Come on, sir,” someone shouted to Wenlock above the babel. “Have a shot
and see if you can beat the Commander.”

“God forbid!” said Wenlock, departing hurriedly. There was no knowing
what the bright young sparks mightn’t do when they really got going.

Then there was Tanner’s exploit with the trousers, the story of which
went the rounds of the ship and occasioned great amusement, except to
the victims of the joke.

Goodchild, the Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander, was tallish and rather
thin, while Paymaster Lieutenant-Commander Herbert was short and
distinctly plump. Ridley, one of the engineers, was betwixt and between.

And at half-past eleven at night, when all three were safely asleep in
their cabins, Tanner had the idea of abstracting their trousers and
transposing them. Ridley’s trousers went to Goodchild; Goodchild’s to
Herbert, and Herbert’s to Ridley.

There was considerable commotion next morning and shouting and ringing
for officers’ stewards, while Tanner and some of his cronies, listening
in a cabin near by, enjoyed the fun.

“Do these _look_ like my trousers?” the P.M.O. angrily asked his
steward, standing in the alleyway outside his cabin clad in his short
underpants and holding out the offending garment for inspection. “Have
_my_ trousers got a bright blue patch in the seat?”

The steward examined them.

“There’s no name in them, sir,” he stammered. “Only the tailor’s name on
the buttons.”

“Don’t stand there gibbering like a lunatic! Put out another pair, and
find out who these belong to.”

“Yes, sir.”

Goodchild was inclined to be taciturn and uncommunicative as he started
his breakfast. Then Herbert came into the wardroom and sat down
opposite. He also had a grievance.

“I don’t know what’s come over the officers’ stewards in this ship,” he
grumbled.

“What’s biting you now, Pay?” someone asked.

“Biting me? My idiot of a man’s lost my ruddy trousers and expects me to
wear a pair more suited to a giraffe. Do I look like a giraffe, or....”

“More like a giant panda, dear boy.”

“Panda, my foot!”

Goodchild looked up from his porridge.

“Do I understand you to say you’ve lost your trousers, Pay?” he wanted
to know.

“You do indeed, P.M.O.”

“And so have I.”

“And so’s Ridley,” Herbert’s neighbor put in.

“The mystery deepens,” said Goodchild.

“What d’you mean, P.M.O.?”

“Two pairs of trousers being exchanged might be a mistake, but three’s
beyond a coincidence. --Yes. I must make a few discreet inquiries.”

He proceeded to do so. It didn’t take him long to find out who was
responsible.

Herbert and Ridley, having recovered their apparel, thought nothing
further of it. Not so the Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander. He bided his
time.

There came the day when Tanner, having enjoyed a hectic week end in
London while the ship was refitting, came back rather listless and
jaded. Visiting the P.M.O. in his cabin, he requested something in the
nature of a pick-me-up or a tonic.

Goodchild’s eyes brightened.

“Yes,” he said, after feeling Tanner’s pulse, looking at his tongue and
the whites of his eyes, and taking his temperature. “I can see you’re
very run down.”

“Am I?” asked Tanner, somewhat alarmed at what he thought was a purely
temporary indisposition being taken seriously.

The P.M.O. wagged his head and looked very wise. He clicked his tongue.

“What you want is rest, my boy. Now go along to your cabin and turn in.
I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

“But I’ve got a date tonight!” Tanner exclaimed.

“No dates for you, Tanner,” said the P.M.O. firmly. “Away with you to
your cabin, and no nonsense.”

“But ... but, P.M.O.! For the love o’ Mike! I’ve got a very important
engagement, really I have!”

“No engagements for you, my boy. You’re on the sick list now, and under
my orders. So no argument, please. Away with you.”

“Oh, hell!” Tanner groaned, departing. “I’ll never come to you again for
sympathy.”

So the patient, who was anything but ill, was kept fuming in bed and fed
on slops. What was more, he was dosed with some vile medicine which
produced the strangest sensations in his inside.

Goodchild went to see him next morning after breakfast.

“What sort of a night have we had?” he inquired.

“Too ruddy awful for words,” said Tanner, proceeding to go into details.

“Rather restless, Tanner?”

Tanner intimated that restless wasn’t the word for it.

The P.M.O. chuckled.

“You can get up now, Tanner,” he said. “I think you’re on the road to
recovery.”

“But you haven’t even taken my temperature, you old fraud!” the invalid
exclaimed. “I’m not getting my money’s worth.”

“Perhaps not, Tanner,” Goodchild grinned. “But I think _I_ am.”

“You! Where do you come in? I thought _I_ was the invalid.”

“No doubt, Tanner. But perhaps your brief illness will teach you to mend
your ways, my boy.”

“I was only feeling a bit tired and under the weather, P.M.O. London’s
pretty exhausting when one’s only there once in a blue moon.”

“No doubt. But I wasn’t referring to your ... ’er goings-on in London,
whatever they may have been.”

“What then?” Tanner demanded.

“Your brief illness may teach you for the future _not_ to take liberties
with the P.M.O.’s trousers, or anyone else’s.” Goodchild smiled.
“Good-by, Tanner. You’re off the sick list now.”

Tanner was left speechless.

The P.M.O. had won.


2.

Young, the Senior Lieutenant, commonly known as “Dundee,” because he
hailed from that city, had been at sea since the age of fifteen. He,
too, was in the Royal Naval Reserve before the war--a husky, dependable,
rather serious-minded Scot with sandy-colored hair and bright blue eyes
who stood no nonsense from anyone, least of all from young Tanner, whom
he regarded as a brand to be snatched from the burning.

A good seaman, Young had spent nearly all his time at sea in cargo
liners voyaging out east to China and Japan. For two unhappy voyages,
however, he had been Second Officer of a passenger ship, and hoped
never to repeat the experience. Women were all very well in their proper
environment, which was on shore. At sea on long voyages they seemed to
go slightly mental, dolling themselves up to outvie the others or
attract the men, or spending most of their time in discussing each
other’s looks and failings. New cliques used to form every few days, and
new enmities. The calm seas, the balmy breezes, the brilliant moon, and
the starlit nights of the tropics were responsible for certain titbits
of scandal. Mrs. This had actually spent until half-past one talking to
Mr. That on the boat deck--or at least they called it talking.

All passengers were kittle-cattle in Young’s estimation, necessary
evils. They asked such cuckoo questions about the sea and ships and were
so ready to complain if the ship rolled or the overworked stewards
didn’t immediately fullfil their varied demands. Moreover, he hated
wearing a mess jacket at dinner and trying to make affable small talk at
table to some fluffy-haired grass widow with a painted face and flashing
eyes who did her best to vamp him. Women were the very devil on board
ship, particularly when they “adored” blue-eyed, reddish-haired sailors
with that strong, silent look about them. Young was not unattractive in
his peculiar way.

He was happily married, with a wife at Dundee and two sons aged five and
three who were replicas of himself. He possessed an intimate knowledge
of the works of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, of which he knew long
passages by heart. Most of his leisure was employed in making thrummed
woolen mats and knitting socks for himself and the children. Also he
collected postage stamps, and made little sailing ships which he
inserted in bottles. His great spatulate fingers were rarely idle.

Lieutenant Robert Wellington Ayres, next in seniority to Young, had been
in the New Zealand coastal trade before the war. Unmarried and with no
responsibilities, he was desperately keen to get to the scene of
fighting, so threw up his appointment and worked his way home to
England. There, by dint of pulling strings with someone who had met his
father in New Zealand, he was given a commission as a temporary
sub-lieutenant, R.N.R., and sent to an establishment where in a few
hectic weeks they taught him a certain amount of gunnery and a great
deal about minesweeping.

He had served in minesweeping trawlers in the early days of the war, and
had been blown up twice. Still a third little ship would have sunk
beneath him after a bombing and machine-gun attack by two enemy aircraft
if Ayres hadn’t held his fire until the Heinkels were at point-blank
range and brought one of them crashing down into the sea. The other,
misliking the entertainment, climbed and made off at full speed.

Two of the trawler’s crew had been killed by machine-gun fire, and three
others, including Ayres himself, wounded. The little ship was fairly
riddled with bullets and bomb splinters. Funnel, mast, ventilators,
superstructure, wheelhouse, ship’s side, and deck were punctured again
and again. The compass and engine-room telegraph were damaged; the
shrouds, rigging, and wireless aerial, practically every rope in the
ship, cut or stranded. One bullet went in through the open door of the
galley and punctured the oven door after wounding the cook.

Ayres achieved the nearly impossible by keeping his battered ship afloat
and bringing her safely back to harbor. He also had on board as trophies
two dazed survivors from the demolished Heinkel.

For that exploit, added to his minesweeping service since the beginning
of the war, Ayres wore the blue and white ribbon of the Distinguished
Service Cross. They had also promoted him to lieutenant.

It had irked him to be sent to a big ship like the _Fonthill Abbey_ on
recovering from his wound, but someone in authority had decided it would
be as well if he had a few months’ rest from the undoubtedly strenuous
life in small craft. He had already petitioned Chenies to be sent back
to his beloved trawlers, and the Captain, not wishing to stand in Ayres’
way, had written privately to a friend at the Admiralty. Chenies would
be sorry to lose Ayres, so was not altogether displeased when the reply
from the Admiralty was noncommittal. They knew all about Ayres, and his
name was on their list. The young man would be considered when a
suitable vacancy arose. Meanwhile, he must possess his soul in patience.


3.

The father of the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ engineering department was the
Commander (E), John Edward Jamieson, whom we have already met--rolled up
in the wardroom carpet after dinner at the instigation of Tanner.

White-haired and rather bald on top, red-faced and very burly.
Jamieson’s age was something of a mystery, though people said he was
nearer sixty than fifty. A great-hearted, hardworking, phlegmatic Scot,
Jamieson had the reputation of being a driver. He may have been, though
this did not prevent the officers and men of his department from loving
and trusting their old “Chief.” So did Chenies and all the others on
deck.

Nothing was ever too much trouble for Jamieson and his men. He
forestalled and smoothed over many difficulties. If something went wrong
below, he was first on the scene to put it right. This wartime running
with convoys meant that the ship was never at the same speed for more
than a few consecutive hours, whereas on her regular peacetime voyages
she had traveled for days on end at the normal economical speed for
which she was designed. Service in an armed merchant cruiser also meant
long periods at sea with short spells in harbor, which helped to
increase the strain on the boilers, turbines, pumps, and a mass of
auxiliary machinery. The ship required careful nursing. Many repairs and
minor defects which would normally have been made good in harbor by
shore labor, had to be undertaken at sea with the ship under way.

Jamieson had been with the Abbey Line for more than thirty-five years
and in the _Fonthill Abbey_ since her maiden voyage. He knew every inch
of her, every joint and steampipe, almost every bolt and rivet. She
wasn’t an easy ship, but it was his pride to keep her running and
efficient. The Chief was a wizard at improvising and contriving, but how
difficult his job sometimes was not even Chenies realized. What Chenies
did know was that the engineering department responded to every
emergency and never let him down.

Jamieson had never served with the Navy before the war. He regarded it
with a certain amount of distrust and suspicion, or had when they first
gave him rank in the R.N.R. as Commander (E). The Navy’s ways were not
his ways. All the same, his invariable reply to the request for an extra
turn of speed to make up for lost time, or for anything else out of the
ordinary, was a flick of his forefinger to the peak of his cap--his idea
of the naval salute--and the observation, “Aye, Cap’en. We’ll do it
somehow, if we burrst the old cow.” And he and his men always did what
was required, though nobody in Jamieson’s hearing would ever have been
permitted to refer to the _Fonthill Abbey_ by any epithet so
opprobriously bovine.

Working under the Chief’s orders were fourteen other engineer officers
holding various ranks in the R.N.R. from lieutenant-commander to
sub-lieutenant. Dyer, Speer, Edwards, Ridley, Fernie and the rest came
from all parts of the United Kingdom, one from Australia and another
from Canada. Three or four had belonged to the R.N.R. before the war and
had previous experience of the Navy. The others had been given temporary
rank in the R.N.R. when the _Fonthill Abbey_ was taken over by the
Admiralty and commissioned as a man-o’-war. What it really came to was
that they altered their uniforms and carried on with their old jobs
under the White Ensign instead of the Red.

Even from the engineering point of view, however, the new life took a
little getting used to. Naval ideas and customs were rather different
from those of the Merchant Navy. So was the naval discipline and routine
with its constant supervision--the daily musters and inspections, the
regular action stations before dark and dawn, the preparation for every
conceivable situation and emergency, the insistence upon rigid
compliance with the immutable laws of the Navy as set forth in that
substantial tome known as the King’s Regulations and Admiralty
Instructions with its appendices, brought more fully up to date by the
periodical Admiralty Fleet Orders.

In the Merchant Navy an officer or man was more or less his own master
when ashore. Moreover, by the terms of the Merchant Shipping Act he
could legally be discharged at the end of each voyage and had to be
signed on afresh for every new one. In the Royal Navy, on the other
hand, he belonged to the State all the time, from the moment he joined
the Service as a youngster until the day he left it as a hoary-headed
veteran. Even as a pensioner he was liable to be recalled for war.


4.

By the Captain’s orders Tanner was officially the “midshipmen’s nurse.”
In other words, it was part of his duty to supervise the instruction in
navigation, pilotage, and seamanship of the two “young gentlemen” of the
_Fonthill Abbey_, Messrs. Rigby and Hastings, both of whom wore the blue
patches of midshipmen R.N.R. For gunnery these two young officers were
handed over to Chief Petty Officer Buttress or one of his assistants.
For signals, which included a knowledge of flags, morse, semaphore, and
a smattering of wireless, not to mention a working acquaintance with the
codes and signal books, they were supposed to work with the yeoman of
signals and petty officer telegraphist.

Formal instruction was not easy, though Rigby and Hastings were excused
watchkeeping during the daytime to enable them to perfect their
knowledge of the maritime art. However, their instructors had other work
to do, while the two midshipmen, with the two sub-lieutenants, Scott and
Granville, kept regular watch on the bridge from dusk until seven-thirty
next morning. With four of them to share the watches, it meant they had
one full night in bed out of every four.

With the best intentions in the world, it _was_ a little difficult to
concentrate on book work on gunnery when one had kept four hours’ watch
the night before. Rigby and Hastings, being young, liked their full
whack of sleep almost as much as they liked their regular meals. Though
not exactly idle--indeed, they agreed between themselves that they were
quite the hardest-worked people in the ship--they welcomed the days that
were too rough for gun drill, or when all their instructors were
otherwise employed. They were glad, too, when the mornings were too
cloudy and overcast for the taking of sights and working out the noon
position. They wanted to fight the Germans, not to keep their noses
glued to books like glorified schoolboys, nor yet to work out abstruse
problems in spherical trigonometry.

When the ship had been on the Northern Patrol and a steamer was
intercepted, one or other of them had always gone away in the boarding
boat with Lieutenant Williams. They looked forward to that more than
anything else, for it lent a spice of adventure to their young lives. It
did provide a thrill to be lowered in a boat with a loaded revolver
belted round one’s middle and a party of armed seamen, added to which
“Roughneck’s” language was nautically picturesque. He rarely repeated
himself, and his lurid epithets added enormously to the vocabulary of
aspiring young officers. On one occasion, too, considerably to Rigby’s
disgust, for he was the senior of the pair, Hastings had formed one of
the party of three officers and ten men detailed to take an intercepted
steamer into harbor for further examination. Hastings had been away from
the _Fonthill Abbey_ for nearly three weeks and had had the time of his
life.

Periodically, the Commander read what he called the “riot act” to bring
up the midshipmen in the way he thought all young officers should go and
to develop their officerlike qualities. Once, when Tanner was too busy
to instruct them personally, he had set Rigby and Hastings to reading
their Seamanship Manuals to learn something about the lights shown by
ships and the rules for avoiding collisions at sea. Conferring
together, the couple decided that the reading could best be done
stretched out in a horizontal position on the bunks in their cabins.
There, as was perfectly natural, they presently fell asleep.

It was unfortunate that the Commander chose that particular morning for
one of his habitual prowls. Discovering the pair, he promptly exploded.

Sleeping in the morning, even if they had kept the first or middle watch
the previous night, was a disgusting habit only indulged in by such
people as bar-loafers, beer-swillers, pot-wallopers, and demi-mondaines.
When _he_ was a midshipman, he rarely slept at all. If one believed what
Wenlock said, which neither Rigby nor Hastings did, he himself had been
the smartest and best-behaved midshipman in the Navy, a model of all the
virtues, the apple of his commander’s eye, and a regular fountain of
energy. As for Rigby and Hastings, they were nothing but idle young
scamps. He trembled to think what their parents would say if they really
knew what their sons were like.... He went on for a full five minutes.

“Gosh!” said Hastings later. “The old boy certainly let us have it.
D’you think we’ll be reported to the Captain?”

“Don’t you worry,” Rigby grinned. “Old Wendy’s only got a bit of liver
this morning and had to let off steam at something.”

He was right. The Commander’s “hates” never lasted for very long. They
resulted in a bout of fierce energy for a day or two, and then all was
forgiven and forgotten. The hearts of the two midshipmen in the
_Fonthill Abbey_ were very much in the right place, and Wenlock knew
that as well as anyone. Their faults were the mere peccadilloes of
youth.

Rigby was the son of a country parson in Somerset. Shortish and
well-nurtured for his age, which was just over nineteen, he had fair
crinkly hair, rather bulging pink cheeks, and a pair of innocent-looking
blue eyes. Before the war he had been a cadet in the New Zealand
Shipping Company, and before that in the training ship _Worcester_.
Bursting with good spirits and _joie de vivre_, it was his chief aim in
life to become a good seaman of the tougher kind. His heart was really
in the sea, and it irked him to think of all the theoretical knowledge
he was supposed to acquire before passing for second mate. Mathematics
entered so largely into the examination, and he hated mathematics like
the plague.

Rigby would have bartered three months’ pay to be sent to some smaller
ship like a destroyer, a corvette, or a motor torpedo boat. They had all
the fun. Life for a junior officer in an armed merchant cruiser like the
_Fonthill Abbey_ savored of monotonous drudgery and seemed so dull and
purposeless. And living in a wardroom as a “dog’s body” among a crowd of
more senior officers was rather cramping to one’s style. One had to be
so careful to mind one’s P’s and Q’s--very different from the
rough-and-tumble existence in the cadet’s mess of the old _Durham_,
where thirty of them lived together and did all the seaman’s work on
deck.

No. Rigby wanted more responsibility and a chance of showing his mettle.
Above all, he wanted to see something of his enemy. Fellows much younger
than himself had had their chance. He felt green with jealousy at
hearing of their exploits and had half a mind to throw up the sea and
join the Royal Air Force, if they’d have him.

Hastings, six months younger than Rigby, was the very antithesis of his
shipmate. Just over six feet tall, clumsily built, very thin,
solemn-faced and earnest in his manner, he went by the name of “Lampy,”
which was short for lamp post. Rigby, when he wanted to annoy, referred
to him as “You fathom of misery.” He had none of Rigby’s boisterousness,
but was strong on mathematics and other theoretical subjects which left
Rigby cold. Hastings knew all about wireless telegraphy and the insides
of engines and motor cars. He also knew the names of all the stars in
the heavens and the habits of the tides and revolving storms. He spent
most of his spare time reading pseudo-scientific books, and at sea in
fine weather during the dog watches had almost to be dragged from his
cabin to play deck hockey. Violent exercise, he sometimes said, was
contrary to nature. Life being short, he far preferred to improve his
mind. For the rest he was an encyclopedia of miscellaneous knowledge,
punctilious in his behavior unless led astray by Rigby, and meticulous
almost to a fault. If anyone gave Hastings an order, they had the
satisfaction of knowing it would be obeyed to the very letter. He was
certainly useful about the ship; but he was desperately seasick in
really bad weather and treasured the secret ambition of deserting the
sea to become some sort of scientist.


5.

Lieutenant (Roughneck) Williams, R.N.R., sometimes called “Tarzan,” was
one of the most picturesque characters in the _Fonthill Abbey_.

Short, squat, deep-chested, slightly bowlegged, and immensely powerful,
he had a square red face with a deep scar running across the right
cheek, and beetling black eyebrows with a thatch of unruly black hair.
His eyes were dark and deep set, his chin blue even when freshly shaven.
There was thick black hair on the back of his huge hands. People who had
seen him stripped said he was covered with a thick mat of dark fur from
head to foot--hence “Tarzan.”

Apart from the fact that he was somewhere in the late forties and had
run away to sea at the age of fifteen, his origin was obscure. But there
was hardly a part of the world he hadn’t visited in one sort of ship or
another, hardly anything he hadn’t tried his hand at. According to his
own account, which was strictly true, he had even worked on an ostrich
farm in South Africa and a cattle station in Australia. He had been a
hobo in the United States, a clown in a traveling circus, and a minor
character in a film at Hollywood. The slash across his right cheek had
been received during an altercation in a waterside tavern in South
America. He had been mixed up in a revolution or two in Central America
and the Civil War in Spain. In prison twice, he had actually been
condemned to death on one occasion and would have been put against the
wall if the Government forces of a Central American republic hadn’t
captured the town at the last moment and caused the insurgents to fly
for their lives.

During the last war, having achieved his mate’s certificate, Roughneck
had been a sub-lieutenant, R.N.R., in minesweepers. All his other
adventures had come in the interval. He had never remained in any ship
for more than a voyage or two, never stayed in any job for longer than
was necessary to earn sufficient money to move on elsewhere. When this
war broke out he had been commanding a steamer on the Great Lakes.

Roughneck had no wife or parents, nothing in the way of kith and kin
except a few remote cousins in South Wales whom he hadn’t seen for
years. He was a rolling stone, free and utterly fearless, somewhat
uncouth at times in his manner and behavior, and one of the toughest
guys in a tough world.

Commander Wenlock, while recognizing Roughneck’s qualities, regarded him
with some suspicion because of his language and free-and-easy
unorthodoxy. Chenies loved him, for drawing him out, probing beneath his
rugged and somewhat simian exterior, he had discovered a heart of pure
gold. There was nothing the man wouldn’t do if it was put to him,
nothing for which he wouldn’t volunteer, and the more dangerous the
better.




CHAPTER IV


Young Tony Chenies, having completed his gunnery and other courses on
shore, was a sub-lieutenant in a destroyer when the war began. The
_Vexatious_ was over twenty years old, a veteran of the war that had
ended before Tony was born. With other ships of the Reserve Fleet, she
had been commissioned early in August 1939 for exercises and an
inspection by the King in Weymouth Bay.

They cheered the King as he passed through the lines of assembled ships
in the motor barge from the Royal Yacht _Victoria and Albert_. Trouble
was brewing with Germany. Everybody knew that, though many imagined it
might blow over. Anyhow, the ships were dressed overall with colored
bunting, and Weymouth was filled with its usual quota of summer visitors
and motor coaches with crowds of excursionists who had flocked there for
the King’s visit. The town was decorated. Yachts were much in evidence.
Bands played. People bathed from the crowded beach, and paddle steamers
laden with sightseers chugged dangerously round the fleet. All was
peace--a normal English summer.

The King left for London by train, and that same evening the fleet
started to disperse. The _Vexatious_, with the rest of her flotilla,
went to the Firth of Forth for working up exercises. There was much to
be done, for the greater proportion of the ship’s company was made up of
young men, pensioners, and reservists of various kinds. Some of them
had never served in destroyers before. Others had not been to sea for
some years. They were all keen to do their best, literally bursting with
zeal, but required a good deal of licking into shape before the
_Vexatious_ could be considered efficient as a fighting unit.

Except for three months’ destroyer training as a midshipman, Tony had
never served in a small ship before. His captain, Commander Rupert
Bickerstaff, was a retired officer recalled to the Navy. He had
commanded destroyers in the last war, but after eight years “on the
beach” in civil employment as manager of a fleet of lorries belonging to
a large transport firm, was quite prepared to admit to being a bit
rusty. The Service had developed and altered a whole lot since he had
left it in 1931.

The First Lieutenant, Richmond, who had been qualifying as a torpedo
officer in the _Vernon_ on mobilization, had served three years in
destroyers and was a tower of strength. So were Mr. Hebard, the Gunner,
and Mr. Walton, the Commissioned Engineer, who had his work cut out in
nursing his somewhat ancient boilers and turbines with new petty
officers and men unaccustomed to their particular idiosyncrasies.
However standardized, the machinery of no two ships behaves exactly
alike. Nor, for that matter, do ships. Stephen, the junior
sub-lieutenant, had no more destroyer experience than Tony, so they all
had a good deal to learn.

The ship’s company had to be organized and drilled for every emergency
that might arise. Guns and torpedoes had to be fired. They had to
practice towing and being towed, fire and collision stations, the repair
of damage sustained in action, laying out anchors, man overboard,
sending an armed party to board an intercepted ship.

The summer days passed in a whirl of activity. They were at it all day
and through much of the night. Before they were halfway through all they
wanted to do, however, there came the general mobilization of August 31.
War was imminent.

Shells and cartridges were got up for the guns and shell fuses.
Warheads were shipped on the torpedoes, the exercising heads landed, and
the depth charges primed. Brass work, which they had spent time in
scouring and polishing to normal peacetime brilliance, was ruthlessly
painted over. Additional stores, provisions, and clothing were embarked,
and all superfluities were landed, including the officers’ plain
clothes. The ship was rigorously darkened at night. Steam was ready, and
preparations made for slipping the cable and buoying its end. Extra
lookouts were placed, and the guns were ready for instant action. The
captain, fully dressed, slept in his sea cabin within a few feet of the
officer of the watch on the bridge. Tony, keeping the middle watch and
peering out through the darkness of the starlit summer night, felt the
same thrill of suppressed excitement as his father had experienced in
his destroyer away back in August 1914.

Anything might happen at any moment before a formal declaration of
war--enemy minelaying off British harbors, attacks by U-boats or
aircraft.

A short breathing space during which affairs grew from bad to worse, and
officers and men wrote letters to their wives, relations, and friends. A
rigid censorship was introduced, and Tony and Stephen, under the
direction of Number One, otherwise Richmond, the First Lieutenant, had
the job of compiling a list of the next of kin for every officer and man
in the ship. The addresses ranged from Houndsditch to the Hebrides.

Then, at 11:15 A.M. on Sunday, September 3, by which time the
_Vexatious_ was already at sea, there came the Prime Minister’s
broadcast and the British declaration of war against Germany. It came
almost as a relief after the suspense of waiting. It being Sunday, a
fair number of the men were below. A suppressed cheer came up from the
messdeck.

Number One and Tony were on the bridge with the Captain when the news
came through the loudspeaker fitted from the wireless room.

Bickerstaff had listened to the end without a smile on his face. He
remembered the last war. Some of his memories were none too pleasant,
even after twenty-one years.

“Will you speak to them, sir?” Number One suggested. “It’ll put their
tails up no end.”

The skipper nodded. “Yes,” he replied. “I’d better do it at once. Have
them mustered on the upper deck abaft the break of the foc’sle.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Tony never quite forgot the gist of that impromptu little speech, or its
audience, variously dressed in its oldest seagoing garments or blue
overalls, the cooks in their shirtsleeves, white trousers, and aprons,
gazing up at the Captain as he stood facing them from the top of the
ladder leading to the forecastle with the binoculars slung round his
neck and his hands gripping the rails. It was a lovely summer’s day,
with a bright sun, a blue sky dappled with rounded cumulus, and a calm
sea furred by a gentle breeze. Slipping along at twenty knots, the
_Vexatious_ was gently rolling to an almost invisible swell.

The paint on the foremost funnel was still badly blistered as the result
of a full power trial a few days before, Tony Chenies noticed. He found
himself wondering when it would be painted again. Paint work, he
imagined, rather went to blazes in wartime.

“All present, sir,” the First Lieutenant reported.

Bickerstaff nodded in reply.

“Men,” he said, “you’ve all heard the news, and I’ve not sent for you to
make a formal speech. Some of you, like myself, were in the last
business, the whole four years of it. You younger men haven’t had that
experience, and may be pleased at the idea of a fight. But I’d warn you
war, however necessary, is a beastly sort of business at the best of
times. Anyone who says he prefers war to peace is either a fool or a
knave. --However, we’re all in the Navy here. It’s our job to fight, and
we’re up against the toughest enemy we’ve ever had. You know as much as
I do about the goings on of Hitler and his Nazi gang. You know how
Germany’s been rearming for years, and is out to overrun Europe and
smash us if they can--smash us beyond recovery. I think it was Bismarck
who said that if we were ever defeated, we’d only be left with our eyes
to weep with. Judging from what the Germans have already done in Poland
and Czechoslovakia they’ll stick at nothing.

“Most of you will have heard the Prime Minister,” he continued. “I
merely want to warn you we’re in for no picnic. Unless I’m a rotten bad
judge, you’ll have plenty of sea time in all sorts of weathers and your
full share of excitement and danger. There are times when you’ll feel
fed up to the teeth with it all--I’m damn certain I shall--but remember
always when times are bad that you’re doing an important job for the
country, and that the country couldn’t get on without the Navy of which
you’re a part. The long and short of this business is that we’ve got to
endure and to fight on, whatever happens, until Hitler and his gang are
put in the place where they belong.”

The men cheered at that. Bickerstaff paused for a moment, looking from
face to face, then held up his hand for silence.

“I’m glad we’re all agreed about that,” he resumed, smiling. “But
remember it’ll be a tough job, tougher than we realize. What you have to
do is to stick it and do your damnedest, always. --I’m not in the habit
of handing out bouquets,” he went on after a slight pause, “but I’ve
been long enough in this ship to realize we’ve got the makings of a fine
ship’s company. You’ve worked well in these last few weeks. You’ll have
to work harder still before you’ve finished, so put your backs into it
and do your best. Well, that’s all I’ve got to say at the moment, but
good luck to us all and the old _Vexatious_.”

The men cheered again and again.

“All right, First Lieutenant,” said the Captain, turning to go back to
the bridge. “Carry on.”

That very evening, as though to give point to Bickerstaff’s words, the
passenger steamer _Athenia_ was torpedoed without warning by a German
U-boat 250 miles off the northwest coast of Ireland.


2.

Somebody once described naval war as “long periods of monotony
punctuated by moments of intense excitement.” That was wholly incorrect
so far as the _Vexatious_ was concerned during the first nine months of
the war.

Since monotony implies inactivity, the generalization was also incorrect
for every other ship of every type in the Royal Navy, including those
hundreds of merchant vessels and fishing craft which were taken over by
the Admiralty for purposes of war.

Up till 1935, year after year had seen the Navy pared and whittled down
in the interests of national economy. Lulled into a sense of false
security by the existence of a League of Nations which was supposed to
prevent future wars, the British public as a whole did not see the sense
of paying huge sums for the upkeep of a navy which they hoped might
never be called upon to fight again.

Moreover, under the terms of the various Naval Treaties, other nations
were permitted to build newer ships and better ones. Britain was content
to disarm to set the example to others--to refurbish her old battleships
instead of replacing them with new ones, to scrap many vessels that were
still useful, to cut down the number of her cruisers and destroyers, and
to reduce her naval personnel.

It was useless for realists in the House of Commons to point out that
British armaments were being reduced below danger point, or for the Navy
League and retired admirals to draw attention to the fact that
collective security was a delusion unless the majority of nations had a
will to peace and were prepared to act in unison. They were called
warmongers, scaremongers, and diehards. The country as a whole heeded
them not. The thoughts of the bulk of the population were centered upon
peace--peace at almost any price.

Then 1935--Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, Germany’s feverish rearmament
in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, and Japan consolidating her
unprovoked conquests in North China. People began to see the red light.
Why didn’t Britain, and the League of Nations, step in and prevent this
wanton aggression and the rearmament of Germany?

The answer was simple. All nations were not members of the League. Some
of those that were members were not wholehearted. Britain, with an old
and attenuated navy, a very small air force, and an army that was wholly
inadequate for her vast responsibilities all over the world, could not
shoulder the responsibility alone.

The red light of aggression was heeded at last. Hence the start of the
rearmament program in 1935, by which time many warship-building and
munition firms were moribund through inanition, and their experts had
gone to other occupations. It takes years to design and to build
warships and to manufacture their armaments, longer still if the plants
for constructing and equipping them have been allowed to fall into
disuse and the skilled craftsmen and workers to disperse.

The leeway of sixteen years could not be made good in three or four, a
fact of which Germany was fully aware. Britain was unprepared for war at
the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938. She was rearming
against the threat from a nation already armed, whose whole energy
seemed to be concentrated upon war and conquest. But in September 1939,
when war did come, the Navy, through years of parsimony and neglect, was
woefully weak for the vast responsibilities thrust upon it.

Nowhere was this weakness more dangerously evident than in the
destroyers and other small craft required for protecting the merchantmen
against the German U-boats, which had been stationed on the most crowded
trade routes round about Britain before the war was declared and before
the full convoy system could be put into operation. It naturally took
time for the system to be inaugurated, for the merchantmen were
scattered all over the oceans on their normal peacetime voyages. They
had first to be collected and brigaded and their escorts arranged.

Unofficial diaries are not allowed on board His Majesty’s ships in
wartime. If they had been permitted, Tony Chenies wouldn’t have kept
one. Apart from the natural aversion to writing which was evident in his
letters to his people, he literally hadn’t the time to keep such a
record.

With Stephen, the other sub, and Mr. Hebard, the Gunner, Tony kept a
regular three watches at sea. The Captain never left the bridge or his
tiny sea cabin immediately abaft it. Unless things were unusually quiet,
when he might indulge in a cat nap, the skipper and Number One shared
the night between them.

Depending on the weather and on the frequent difficulty of picking up a
homeward bound convoy in mid-Atlantic after several days without sights,
the _Vexatious’_ trips lasted anything between a week and fourteen days,
during which nobody removed their clothes except for a perfunctory wash
in the mornings. The weather was seldom good. They had fogs at all
times, and fogs, with a large number of merchantmen steaming in close
formation, and without lights at night, were the bane of the escorts.
But as summer gave way to autumn, and autumn to winter, they had the
fierce southwesterly gales.

The wind blew like the wrath of God, converting the long swell into a
huge, breaking sea which looked as high as houses when the ship was in
the hollows between them. At one moment, as the _Vexatious_ poised
herself on the crest of a steep comber with her forefoot and a portion
of her keel out of water, the whole laboring convoy might be in sight
with the clouds of spray driving high over their bridges and funnel
tops. At the next, when she dived dizzily down the weather face of some
foaming hillock and into the next watery valley, not a sign of another
ship might be visible.

Hanging on to the bridge rails with his sea-booted legs wide apart to
retain his balance, Tony had never experienced such motion before. The
old ship sometimes rolled more than fifty degrees from the vertical,
burying herself until the rushing water swept halfway across the upper
deck to the base of the funnels--reeling, staggering, fighting herself
free. She lurched and she wallowed, pitched and heaved herself to the
crests with a movement like that of a switchback at a fair. Sometimes,
combining a pitch with a roll, she adopted a corkscrew motion which was
wholly disconcerting and unpleasant. Occasionally, losing her rhythm,
she would fail to rise to an oncoming wave and plunge her sharp bows
clean into the heart of a wall of gray water. Thundering over the
forecastle, a liquid avalanche would come surging aft to burst against
the superstructure and to cascade on to the upper deck over the break of
the forecastle. At such times, even with lifelines rigged fore and aft,
it was dangerous to go along the upper deck. Cooked food was a practical
impossibility, and they had to be content with corned beef sandwiches
and something hot out of a vacuum bottle.

Watching the ship as she labored, Tony sometimes wondered how she stood
the strain, or how she ever righted herself after rolling over to some
impossible angle. Pitching as she did must put a terrible strain on that
long slender hull. The bows might be suspended in mid-air at one moment,
and the stern, with its rudder and propeller, the next. Occasionally,
balanced precariously amidships on the crest of a wave, both bow and
stern might momentarily be out of water. The old ship must be bending
like a sword blade. Indeed, one knew she was, for the awning jackstay,
stretched fore and aft about ten feet over the upper deck, was bar taut
at one instant and hanging in bights the next.

Tired out when he went off watch, Tony soon became adept at sleeping in
the worst of weathers. His cabin was in the flat before the wardroom.
There was no real ventilation. The atmosphere was cold and damp, charged
with the combined odors of humanity, wet clothing, food, tobacco, and
general fugginess. When the motion was really bad he had to lash himself
into his bunk, but always he was asleep within five minutes of his head
touching the pillow.

The scene on the battened-down messdecks in rough weather baffled
description. One-third of the men might be on watch on deck and in the
engine and boiler rooms. The rest slept how and where they could on the
messdecks. All wore their clothes, with oilskins, duffle coats, and sea
boots. Some lay on the deck, or the lockers along the ship’s side.
Others swayed in their bulging hammocks suspended from the beams
overhead. A few groaned in the various stages of seasickness. Dirty
water surged from side to side on the deck each time the ship rolled.
The seas crashed overhead and alongside. The atmosphere was thick and
indescribably horrid. The few electric lights shone redly through a sort
of miasma of clammy steam. They were hardy souls indeed who endured the
long hours of watchkeeping in the cold and wet on deck, or the heat and
oily steam of engine room and stokehold, and ate, slept, and had the
rest of their being in the fetid squalor of the heaving caverns which
were the messdecks. It was virtually impossible to keep the crowded
living spaces wholesome and tidy with the old _Vexatious_ plunging madly
into the teeth of a gale.

Yet Tony never heard a grumble from any of the men, even the youngest.
Some of them were fearfully and wonderfully seasick until they became
inured to the comfortless rough-and-tumble of a life which was entirely
new to them and was far more strenuous than anything they had undergone
before. They stuck it without complaint. They wouldn’t have been
elsewhere for worlds, certainly not in a big ship where the living might
be a bit easier.

This was rather borne in upon him when he heard the Captain and First
Lieutenant discussing an ordinary seaman who in his civil life before
the war had been a clerk with an insurance company.

“I’m wondering if we ought to apply for Ordinary Seaman Beecher’s relief
when we get back to harbor, sir,” Richmond said.

“What’s the matter with him, Number One?”

“He’s as keen as mustard, sir, but always as sick as a cat when it comes
on to blow a bit.”

“Is he the freckle-faced chap with ginger hair who works the port
telegraph going into harbor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is he likely to get over it?”

“He says he will, sir, though I have my doubts. I sent for him the other
day and asked how he’d like a transfer to a big ship. He nearly burst
into tears, poor chap.”

“Does his seasickness interfere with his job?” the Captain asked.

“No, sir. Not when he’s really got something definite to do on deck. He
doesn’t seem to eat anything much when its blowing though. ‘Can’t touch
his vittles, no ’ow,’ as Leading Seaman Jenks put it. He’s the leading
hand of Beecher’s mess and seems to have constituted himself his
unofficial sea daddy.”

Bickerstaff grinned.

“_That_ hoary old villain!” he laughed. “He’s much more likely to lead
friend Beecher astray if they go ashore together. --But am I to
understand that Beecher’s going off into a decline?”

“Oh, no, sir. He has most of his meals on deck.”

“Then give the lad another month or two before doing anything drastic.
He’ll probably get over it. He’s keen, you say. I’d rather have one
volunteer than a dozen pressed men. You never know what the depot might
send us in exchange for him. It’s really up to you, but I suggest you
stick tight for a bit and do nothing.”

“Aye aye, sir, I will.”

Bickerstaff started to load his pipe.

“I often wonder how I’d feel if I had to feed on the messdeck in a gale
of wind,” he observed. “From what I’ve observed it isn’t precisely a
health resort.”

“You’re telling me, sir. I go the rounds there, twice a day.”

“And if anyone tells me that the young of this country are in any way
soft or decadent I’ll call ’em a damned liar,” the Captain said. “That’s
just where Hitler and his pals are making their big mistake. --But
hush,” he continued, catching sight of Tony out of the corner of his
eye. “I observe the young are listening. We mustn’t fill them with
conceit and self-importance. --Mister Chenies?”

“Sir,” Tony answered.

“If I ever see you putting on airs, I’ll bite you full and hearty,
remember. Meanwhile, keep your eye on the steering. The quartermaster
seems to be trying to write his initials in the blinkin’ ocean.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And how often have I told you never to use the expression ‘very good,’
Mister Chenies?” demanded Bickerstaff, pretending to be angry. “I was
taught that in my first ship as a junior wart. You’ve got a naval father
and ought to know better. Use the proper naval answer, you young
rapscallion.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Tony, saluting.

He knew better than to take Commander Bickerstaff seriously when he had
a twinkle in his eye, though on occasions, when people really deserved
it, the skipper could bite very hard indeed. His language was sometimes
choicely forcible, and he himself referred to the biting process as
having someone’s “guts for a necktie.”


3.

In that first winter, the time spent by the destroyers in harbor between
successive trips was nominally supposed to be four days. During this
period they were intended to refuel, to rest their crews, to complete
with stores and provisions, and to effect what running repairs they
could with the help of a dockyard or depot ship. Every so often came
longer spells for boiler cleaning or docking, when officers and men were
allowed leave away from the port.

More often than not, however, and because of bad weather, convoys being
delayed or diverted, the acute shortage of escorts, and occasional
mishaps or casualties, the period spent in harbor between trips had
often to be cut down from four days to two, or even to thirty-six hours.

It was certainly strenuous going, both for the officers and men, who
badly needed rest, as well as for the ships, their machinery and
fittings, which were long past their youth. Figures convey little, but
from September until the end of January the _Vexatious_ spent between
seventy and eighty per cent of her time at sea, or between twenty-two
and twenty-five days a month. Without adding up the actual figures, Mr.
Walton, the Commissioned Engineer--“Our Little Jewel,” as the Captain
called him in his more affectionate moments--reckoned the old ship
averaged between eight and nine thousand miles’ steaming a month. It was
probably an underestimate.

It was always a frantic rush to complete the necessary work in harbor to
get the ship away to sea in time. While the “Little Jewel” scurried
round the dockyard wangling this, that, and the other in the way of
necessary stores, or persuading someone in authority to undertake
repairs which were beyond the slender resources of the ship, the First
Lieutenant, among a multitude of other jobs, had to get the ship
tolerably clean and habitable, draw stores, and make good defects on the
upper deck caused by heavy weather. There were always plenty of
these--fittings washed overboard, guard rails bent or broken, and the
like.

Mr. Hebard, the Gunner, had more than enough to do with the upkeep of
his guns, torpedoes, depth charges, and a mass of electrical equipment.
Sea and spray played havoc with such things as electrical circuits and
lubricating caps. Then in his charge was a miscellaneous assortment of
ammunition and stores, every item of which had to be accounted for. Mr.
Hebard, worthy man, was an excellent messmate and normally phlegmatic.
He sometimes played the mandolin in the wardroom and sang to his own
accompaniment in a fruity baritone--songs of the lower deck which were
occasionally sentimentally lugubrious, though more often unprintable.
But there were times when his complicated store books nearly drove him
into a frenzy of despair. The Captain hated paper work like the plague,
but it was quite useless for him to say, “Guns, this is wartime. A
murrain on your blasted store books! Why worry about the damn things?”

Mr. Hebard thought otherwise. Brought up to the mysteries of
storekeeping, accustomed for years to the meticulous ways of the Navy,
stores were Government property for which he was responsible. “Sir,” he
would say, mournfully shaking his head when the Captain told him not to
bother. “Sir, if I was to take your advice I’d be hung, drawered and
ruddy well quartered as a living example to all other gunners in the
Service. I’ve got a wife and four children, sir. What ’ud happen to them
if I was disgraced and made an example of?”

During the short time in harbor Bickerstaff was busy with a mass of
paper work and reports and had to pay formal visits to the Captain in
charge of the flotilla, who had his office ashore, as well as to the
Commander-in-Chief, who liked to see the commanding officers of all
ships working under his orders.

Tony, who was the nominal navigating officer, had charge of seven large
folios of charts and all the navigational books. What with new
minefields, British and German, the alterations in lights and buoys, and
the multiplicity of wrecks and areas dangerous to navigation, the chart
corrections were prolific indeed. Every one of them had to be inked in
by hand on the small table in the charthouse forward. It wasn’t until
Morgan, a midshipman R.N.R., joined the ship two months after the
outbreak of war that things became a little easier. Morgan was roped in
as Tony’s assistant.

Stephen, the junior Sub-Lieutenant, was the correspondence and
confidential book officer. For the correspondence he was assisted by an
A.B. to work the battered typewriter. The A.B., who received sixpence a
day for his labors, was at the beck and call of everyone in the ship who
needed him. He was a self-taught typist, using only two fingers of each
hand, and spoiling much paper and many carbons with groans and muttered
imprecations. There were a good many confidential books for Stephen to
look after and correct. They were constantly being superseded and
corrected, and the corrections had to be done accurately and zealously,
otherwise there might be trouble. Add to these sheaves of Admiralty and
other printed orders, and registers of all documents and outgoing and
incoming correspondence, and it will be realized that Stephen’s job was
no sinecure. He, too, was sometimes heard to groan that he had not
joined the Navy to become a blinking pen-pusher.

The doctor--otherwise temporary Surgeon Lieutenant Roderick Gordon
Maclean, R.N.V.R.--who joined the ship at much the same time as Morgan,
used to help Stephen out when he had nothing else to do. Apart from cut
fingers, bruises, and contusions the “Doc’s” medical duties were
comparatively light. The men were disgustingly healthy, and if one did
fall ill, he was usually whisked straight off to the hospital on arrival
in harbor. For the rest Maclean acted as mess, wine, and tobacco caterer
for the wardroom, and a very good one, too, wrote up the wine books,
censored the outgoing mail, and at sea did much of the ciphering and
deciphering of radio messages.

The Doc was popular with his messmates. Huge, husky, and brawny, he had
played Rugby football for his university and had abandoned a thriving
little practice near Kilmarnock to come to sea as a volunteer. From his
height, weight, and girth he was more suited to a battleship than a
destroyer, and complained that he had to curl himself in his narrow bunk
like a periwinkle in its shell. He played the ukulele and was thinking
of buying a saxophone.

“You and I can have some nice musical evenings, Guns,” he said one
evening at dinner in harbor. “We’ll buy a drum and a nice pair of
cymbals for our dear little midshipman. He’s itching to play.”

“God forbid!” said the First Lieutenant glumly, looking up from his
curried mutton. “If you devils are thinking of starting a jazz band I’ll
chuck my hand in.”

The skipper looked up from his end of the table.

“Don’t be such a Mouldy Mike, Number One,” he grunted. “Give the boys
their chance. Let’s have the sackbut, psaltery, harp, dulcimer, and all
other kinds of music. --No, honestly, I’m all for it.”

The doctor’s face brightened. Only the First Lieutenant looked a little
glum.




CHAPTER V


There were incidents in plenty while the _Vexatious_ was at sea in those
early months of the war. Some of them, the most lurid, became indelibly
stamped on Tony Chenies’ memory.

At about a quarter-past four one December morning, having kept the
middle watch, he groped his way along the heaving, darkened upper deck
and went below to his cabin. He was tired and chilled through to the
marrow.

His four hours on the bridge since midnight were among the most
cheerless he had ever experienced. The _Vexatious_, with her convoy, was
steaming against half-a-gale from the north-northwest with a heavy
toppling sea which seemed gradually to be getting steeper and more
confused. She pitched jerkily and uneasily, with occasional seas
breaking over the forecastle and the aftermath of wind-driven spray
sweeping as high as her bridge. The barometer was falling, and so was
the temperature.

To make matters worse, the night was overcast and as dark as the inside
of a cow, so that Tony had difficulty in keeping touch with the nearest
ships of the convoy at a distance of even two cables, or four hundred
yards. And if that weren’t bad enough, the frequent flurries of snow and
sleet driving down from windward sometimes blotted out the visibility to
little more than zero.

The skipper had been on the bridge most of the watch, though he hadn’t
interfered. Tony, however, felt confidence in his presence. Keeping
touch with the convoy had been anxious work. The merchant ships seemed
to be yawing all over the place. If he sheered too close in to the lines
during one of those blinding snow squalls he ran the risk of collision.
If he steered too far out, he ran the chance of losing them. It had been
a job to strike the happy mean; but Tony had managed it--somehow.
Bickerstaff’s, “Good work, Sub!” just before he left the bridge after
turning over to Number One and Stephen would have made Tony glow with
pride if he hadn’t been so numb with cold.

Reaching his cabin with chattering teeth, he flung off his oilskin and
reached under his pillow for the vacuum flask of hot beef extract which
he knew would be reposing there. The middle-aged Able Seaman George
Henry Flagg, Tony’s faithful retainer for the honorarium of ten
shillings a month, would have seen to that.

Flagg, being a creature of routine, never forgot anything. As a naval
pensioner, he had been a tram driver before being recalled to the Navy
at the outbreak of war, and having discovered that Tony was the son of
the Chenies with whom he had been shipmates years before, had
practically insisted on becoming his body servant, sea daddy, and Mother
in Israel rolled into one.

Intensely possessive, Flagg kept a jealous eye on Tony’s small wardrobe.
He mended his socks by the simple expedient of sewing the edges of the
holes together with coarse thread, saw to his laundry, ironed his
trousers, polished his shoes, and scrounged shirts and collars from
other officers--without their knowledge--if Tony ran short. He scrubbed
and polished the little cabin until it shone, stole canvas from the
store and laboriously teased it out and fashioned it into an elaborately
tasseled fringe for the boot-rack overhead. But Flagg _was_
possessive--at times almost tyrannical.

“No, Mister Cheenies, sir. We can’t have a clean shirt today. We’ve
already had our two for this week.”

“Flagg, you’re an old devil!” said Tony, full of wrath. “Give me back
that shirt at once!”

“With all doo respect, Mister Cheenies, sir, you’ll get no clean shirt
from me. We’ve had our ration till Sunday mornin’. You’ll wear the old
one, or none at all.”

“Dammit, Flagg, you’re mutinous!” Tony exclaimed.

“No, sir, beggin’ your pardon, not mutinous. I’m merely lookin’ arter
our interests--your interests, sir.”

Coming up to Tony one rainy afternoon when he was waiting to go ashore
in the motorboat, Flagg shook his head and clucked like a disapproving
hen. “We didn’t reely oughter be wearin’ our number one trousis on a day
like this,” he whispered hoarsely in Tony’s ear. “No, Mister Cheenies,
sir. What’ll our best trousis look like arter we done trampin’ through
the dockyard, an’ they not paid for yet.”

How the blazes did Flagg know that, Tony wondered. The old codger seemed
to know everything. However, he duly went ashore in the offending
garments. All the three other pairs were beyond redemption when one had
a date to dine with a sweet young thing and her family.

On that dismal morning in December, Flagg had duly left the vacuum
bottle under Tony’s pillow--the only really safe place with the ship
rolling as she was. With it, as an unexpected _bonne bouche_, were three
rather stale corned beef sandwiches wrapped up in a piece of the _News
of the World_ three weeks old.

Tony gratefully sipped and munched before wearily dragging off his sea
boots, damp stockings, and socks, and massaging his tired feet. Putting
on clean socks, he hoisted himself into his bunk, snuggled down under
three blankets, and switched off the light.

Warmth gradually returned. The ship plunged wildly. He could hear the
rush of the seas outside, and the regular chugging of the propellers
further aft. But neither the motion nor the usual sounds of the ship
ever disturbed Tony. He was tired, and had all the resilience of youth.
Within ten minutes he was asleep.

Some time later he was roused by a voice and someone tugging at his
shoulder.

“Mister Cheenies, sir, Mister Cheenies!”

Tony opened his eyes. The light in his cabin had been switched on.

“What is it?” he demanded sleepily, rolling over to see the burly,
oilskinned figure of his retainer, dripping with wet, standing beside
his bunk. “What d’you want, Flagg? It isn’t time....”

“The Cap’en wants you on the bridge, sir. I brought you along a cup o’
cocoa.”

Tony sat up blinking.

“What’s the time?” he yawned. “What’s happening?” He realized from the
vibration and sound of the propellers that the ship had increased speed.
Her motion had altered. He could hear seas rushing across the thin steel
deck overhead.

“It’s about half-past six, sir,” Flagg told him. “We’ve parted company
from the convoy an’ increased speed. It’s blowin’ somethin’ crool, sir,
and snowin’ hard at times.”

Tony groaned.

“Come on, sir,” Flagg implored him. “Show a leg. Drink your cocoa an’
turn out. It’s the Cap’en who wants you.”

“Hell!” Tony muttered, flinging his legs over the side of the bunk and
taking the proffered cup. “What’s the racket now?”

“We’ve picked up a distress signal, sir. A ship’s torpedoed an’ afire.”

Tony swallowed the cocoa at a gulp, thrust the cup back at Flagg, and
lowered himself from his bunk. Still blinking and yawning, he sat down
to pull on his thick stockings and sea boots.

Flagg stood by with his oilskin and sou’wester.

“If you take my tip, you’ll wear a towel round your neck, sir,” he
volunteered. “We’re taking it green over the forecastle.”

Tony stood up and was helped into his outer garment. Cramming a
sou’wester on his head he slung the glasses round his neck.

“Gloves, Flagg! Where the devil are my gloves?”

The A.B. produced the sodden sheepskin gantlets from the deck where Tony
had dropped them on coming below.

“For the love o’ Mike, watch your step goin’ forward, sir,” Flagg
cautioned. “Hang on to the lifeline an’ watch your chance. She’s all
over the shop in this here sea an’ the deck’s like a ruddy skatin’
rink.”

Tony left the cabin, climbed up the ladder into the dimly lit after
superstructure, moved aft over the sprawling bodies of sleeping men,
through a canvas screen and so out through the open door onto the
quarter deck. Holding on, he could see the white crests of the seas as
they raced by and vanished astern. Overhead the wind howled and shrieked
like a million banshees. After waiting a little to allow his eyes to
become accustomed to the darkness, he stepped out from under the lee and
started to claw his way forward.

The wind cut like a knife. The air was full of stinging spray. Water
broke across the upper deck as the _Vexatious_ rolled and the seas
dashed on board. He was breathless, wet almost to the waist by the time
he finally hoisted himself to the bridge and reported to the Captain.

Bickerstaff apologized for pulling him out of his warm bed, but young
Stephen, who should really be on watch, had fallen and twisted his ankle
and was being attended to by the doctor. Neither the Captain nor Number
One wished temporarily to blind themselves by gazing at the chart.

“Distress signals have come through,” the Captain continued. “They’re on
the file in the charthouse. We parted company from the convoy at
oh-six-one-oh and belted on to twenty-five, course two-seven-eight. I
don’t know if we can keep it up in this lop, but I hope so. Work out the
proper course from our latest position with the convoy. Let me know if
two-seven-eight’s all right as a course, and what time we’re likely to
reach her.”

Tony disappeared.

The distress signals came from the _St. Isabel_, a large British tanker.
Torpedoed twice by an enemy submarine, she reported first that her oil
cargo was on fire, and later that two of her boats had swamped while
being lowered. The ship was sinking slowly.

Apart from the _Vexatious_, two other destroyers were speeding to her
assistance, but the _Vexatious_ was the nearest. Working it out on the
chart, Tony estimated the _St. Isabel_ was thirty-eight miles away at
six o’clock. But it was rather a matter of guesswork. The weather had
been so overcast they had had no sights for days.

Leaving the charthouse he made his report.

“I think we should steer about five degrees to the southward, sir,” he
said. “If our positions are correct and we’re making good twenty-five,
we ought to be up to her just after seven-thirty.”

“What time’s it daylight,” Bickerstaff asked.

“About seven forty-five, sir,” Number One answered.

“Huh!” grunted the Captain. “What d’you make the visibility?”

“Possibly six miles between snow squalls, sir.”

“We might sight the glare in the sky,” the skipper continued. “On the
other hand, we mightn’t. God help the poor devils in a sea like this!”

Bickerstaff was thinking of a good many things at the same time. The
convoy he had left, after exchanging signals with the commodore and
senior officer of the escort, was protected by other destroyers, so he
had no apprehensions about that.

Two other destroyers from elsewhere, but farther away, were racing to
the _St. Isabel’s_ given position. That also was all to the good. When
would they arrive? That he didn’t know. They had not mentioned their
positions or speeds.

What was worrying Bickerstaff was that the U-boat, having lit a flaming
beacon that would be visible for many miles, might remain in the
vicinity to torpedo any rescuer.

And even supposing they found the _St. Isabel_, the rescue would be
confoundedly difficult. Two of her boats had already been swamped. What
other boats did she carry? Would they live in the sea that was running?
It seemed unlikely.

What was the alternative? To take the _Vexatious_ alongside the tanker
if survivors were still on board.

But to take a fragile ship like a destroyer alongside a great wallowing
ship like the _St. Isabel_, moreover, a ship that might be blazing from
end to end, was running a frightful risk. So much depended upon how she
was lying in relation to the direction of the wind and sea, how badly
she was on fire, and in which direction the flames were spreading.

If there were men left on board, it might be possible to fire a line
across and drag them one by one through the water to safety, but so much
depended on circumstances.

With these thoughts in his mind Bickerstaff took the First Lieutenant
aside out of earshot of the others. They consulted together for more
than five minutes before Number One left the bridge to turn out the
hands and to make various necessary preparations.

The _Vexatious_ plunged on.

A little later there came a hail from the port lookout.

“A light in the sky on the port bow, sir!” he sang out, as a sea broke
over the forecastle and a heavy burst of spray swept across the bridge.

“Where away?” asked the Captain, staggering to the man’s side.

“About a point and a half on the bow, sir. I saw it clearly.”

The _Vexatious’_ bows lifted momentarily. The spray subsided, to be
succeeded by a whistling snow squall which reduced the visibility to
zero for several minutes. It departed as suddenly as it had come as the
ship ran through it and emerged on the other side.

“There, sir. There!” the lookout man exclaimed, pointing.

This time the skipper and Tony saw it for themselves--a bright,
pinkish-orange glow spreading over the horizon and reflected on the
undersides of the low driving clouds. It reminded Tony of a brilliant
dawn with the sun just nearing the horizon before leaping into space.

Bickerstaff had his glasses to his eyes. He could see no actual flames.

“Steer straight for her, Chenies,” he ordered.

“Port fifteen, Quartermaster,” Tony howled down the voicepipe to the
lower bridge.

“Port fifteen it is, sir,” the reply came back.

“Steady!” from Tony after an interval.

“Steady it is, sir. Course two-five-six, sir.”


2.

They drew near the _St. Isabel_ in the gray half-light of the early
dawn. The wind still blew furiously, with a heavy, breaking sea as steep
as before. The tanker, which was one of those large ships with a bridge
structure about two-thirds of the way forward and her engines, boilers,
and funnels right aft, lay almost broadside to the wind and sea, rolling
heavily. Only the very end of the stern and funnel were visible as the
_Vexatious_ approached. The rest of the ship, over four hundred feet of
her, was obliterated in flame and dense clouds of rolling black smoke
blowing almost horizontally along the sea and rising as it went.

It was an awe-inspiring spectacle. The flames, driven by the wind,
seemed to be licking the very wave crests for hundreds of feet to
leeward of the stricken ship. They varied in color from vivid scarlet to
orange, pale yellow and sickly green, reminding Tony of some huge,
flickering fiery tulip beaten flat along the stormy sea. Beyond the
actual flames the billowing smoke was stained crimson by the reflected
glow of the conflagration. It flashed and sparkled, as though little
pockets of inflammable vapor had become ignited in mid-air. Low down,
over the ship herself, the seas breaking on board were converted into
clouds of white steam.

Reducing speed when within a mile, Bickerstaff took the _Vexatious_
nearer to the blazing ship, keeping well clear of the blinding smoke.
All the glasses on the destroyer’s bridge were leveled on the only
portion of the _St. Isabel_ that was visible, her stern with its
overhanging counter, the funnel and the deckhouses around it, as yet
apparently untouched by the fire. The wind was blowing from her port
quarter, so that the flames were blown forward rather than aft.

Tony could see no signs of any men in the _St. Isabel’s_ stern, the only
possible place they could be if still alive. He noticed, too, that the
two boats on the starboard side were missing, with the falls hanging
loose from the davit heads and trailing in the water.

It was almost daylight now and still blowing hard, with the wind cutting
the tops off the curling seas and sending them hurtling to leeward in
clouds of flying spindrift. However, there had been no snow squalls for
fully half an hour, something for which they were all thankful.

Bickerstaff, standing by the standard compass, and occasionally lifting
the binoculars to his eyes, was himself conning the _Vexatious_ through
the voice pipe to the lower bridge. The Asdic, that mysterious
instrument used for submarine detection and likened by Mr. Winston
Churchill to “impalpable fingers groping beneath the surface of the
sea,” was in use. The depth charges were ready, guns manned.

If a U-boat did happen to be in the vicinity of the _St. Isabel_ in the
hope of torpedoing a rescuer, the Captain thought she would probably be
to windward, clear of the smoke. As he could see no signs of life in the
tanker, no traces of boats with survivors, he thought it advisable to
make a careful cast round before closing the burning ship.

Taking the _Vexatious_ within two hundred yards of the _St. Isabel’s_
stern, where the heat of the fire could be felt and its muffled roaring
heard even above the howling of the wind and the sound of breaking seas,
he told a signalman to blow short blasts on the siren. The air was full
of the stench of crude petroleum.

The siren yelped. Nothing happened. No waving figures appeared on the
_St. Isabel’s_ after deck.

Bickerstaff shrugged his shoulders. “It looks to me as though they’d all
gone west, poor devils,” he said to Tony at his side.

“Would all her boats be aft, sir?” Tony asked with seeming irrelevance.

“Lord knows, Sub,” said the captain, his mind largely concentrated upon
other matters. “Why?”

“Because her wireless signal said _two_ boats had been swamped, sir.”

“What of it?”

Tony explained that though the _St. Isabel’s_ two starboard boats were
missing, two others were still visible turned in under their davits on
the port side abreast the funnels. Being deeply laden, the tanker was
evidently homeward bound, and in this wind and sea she would have
lowered her lee boats first on being torpedoed. These were the starboard
ones. They were swamped, and she’d reported it.

Bickerstaff, thinking of other things, looked puzzled. Beneath his
sou’wester his face was lined and gray, its normal sunburn hidden by the
salty deposit of windflung spray and the stubble of several days. He had
little chance to shave at sea.

“What exactly are you driving at, Sub?” he asked, his voice very tired.

“Only that her men may still be on board, sir,” Tony answered. “They got
off at least one signal _after_ two boats were swamped.”

Bickerstaff nodded.

“I see your point,” he said. “But that signal was sent off hours ago,
Chenies. If we felt the heat as we passed, what’s it like on board
there? The poor souls’ll probably have been burnt or suffocated to
death by this time, unless they were forced overboard in lifebelts. And
how long could they live in lifebelts in this sea?”

“Not long, sir,” Tony agreed. “But they may have had one of those
life-saving rafts.”

“Possibly, Chenies. What I’m going to do is to have a snoop round to
wind’ard. If they _are_ in lifebelts or on a raft they’ll be somewhere
along that. --Look.”

He was pointing to a broad slick of brown oil stretching out toward the
horizon from the _St. Isabel_ in the opposite direction toward which she
was drifting at the mercy of wind and sea. The thick oil, or maybe the
_St. Isabel_ carried petrol also, seemed to be burning close to the
ship. Further afield it spread in a gradually widening wake, converting
the breaking sea into a heavy swell. Its purport was plain enough.
Driving bodily to leeward the tanker was leaving the _oil_ behind her.
If any of her men had gone overboard in lifebelts or on a raft, they, or
their corpses, might be found somewhere near the oil track, or possibly
beyond it.

The _Vexatious_ steamed on at easy speed, rising and falling to the
seas, rolling from side to side; but no longer shipping heavy water.
Half a dozen watchful pairs of eyes from her bridge scanned the water
ahead.

Then something happened with dramatic suddenness.

“Contact! Red-four three! Contact!” a man shouted.

Bickerstaff, galvanized into activity, rapped out a question or two, and
was answered. There was no doubt about it. Something had been located by
the Asdic--something not visible on the surface.

“Starboard fifteen!” he ordered. “Twenty knots. Depth charges ready,
Sub! Sound the alarm gongs.”

Tony spoke hurriedly through a telephone, and was answered. Removing a
clip, he pressed an innocent-looking bell push. Klaxons sounded
throughout the ship. As the _Vexatious_ swung and increased speed men
rushed to their action stations.

“Steady!” Bickerstaff ordered, his voice showing his pent-up excitement.
“Cox’n at the wheel!”

“Contact!” came the man’s voice again. “Contact!”

The _Vexatious_ was increasing speed perceptibly. The First Lieutenant
arrived breathless on the bridge demanding to know what was happening.

At almost the same moment, Tony, looking through his glasses, saw
something lift on the top of a sea with the water breaking over it. It
was long and gray, with the broad hump of a conning tower at one end of
it. Just clear of the floating oil track it was perhaps half-a-point on
the starboard bow, and distant perhaps eight hundred yards.

“Look, sir! Look!” he exclaimed breathlessly, clutching the Captain by
the arm.

The object had already disappeared, swallowed up in the deep trough
between two waves, but Bickerstaff had seen it. With a calmness he
didn’t feel, he gave an order to the coxswain. The _Vexatious_ swung a
little--steadied.

The U-boat, for it could be nothing else, did not reappear.

Seconds seemed to dawdle into minutes as the destroyer steamed on. At
twenty knots she would cover eight hundred yards in about seventy-two
seconds. It felt more like a quarter of an hour before Bickerstaff gave
the order, “Stand by!”

The message was passed aft. Mr. Hebard would be ready there. They had
let go depth charges before, sometimes for practice, twice in earnest
without results, but never with such a heaven-sent target as this.
Shaking with pent-up excitement Tony found himself repeating over and
over in his mind, “Pray God there’s no hitch-up!”

Bickerstaff himself gave the necessary orders. A steel cylinder about
the size of an ordinary domestic dust bin rolled off the _Vexatious’_
stern into the sea. The throwers on each side of the ship projected two
others into the air. They curved over and fell some distance away. More
followed from the stern.

The men gazed aft, watching the sea. There came a lengthy pause--then
the thud of the first heavy explosion. Others followed. It felt as
though some titanic iron fist had struck the ship under water. She
shuddered to the blows. One after the other dome-shaped mounds of
whitened water rose from the surface of the sea. They looked like huge
puffballs on a lawn until they burst upward in gouts of heavy spray.

Turning sharply on her keel, rolling heavily as she went with the spray
flying over her upper deck, the _Vexatious_ recrossed the spot.

The Asdic still gave the unmistakable signs of a submarine.

More depth charges--more under-water explosions. Their thudding died
away.

“Lord!” said Bickerstaff suddenly, starting to fill his pipe. “I’m as
hungry as a python! --Starboard fifteen, cox’n!” he added down the voice
pipe. “Revolutions for twelve knots.”

The engine room reply gongs clanged. The ship started to circle.

Tony, whose heart was throbbing with excitement, had lost all sense of
time.

It may have been two, perhaps three, minutes later when the blunt bow of
a U-boat suddenly hove itself out of the water about three hundred yards
on the _Vexatious’_ port quarter. It rose in a flurry of spray with the
water cascading from it, lifted until it hung at an angle of thirty
degrees from the horizontal with the orifices of the bow torpedo-tubes
and about twenty feet of the keel clearly visible above the surface.

Such a contingency had been rehearsed--not once, but many times. The
U-boat, wounded and perhaps struggling to come to the surface to
surrender, must be killed. The _Vexatious_ was taking no chances.

One of her after four-inch guns roared, the shell striking the crest of
a sea and ricochetting into the distance. Another thud--a third and a
fourth. The two-pounder pom pom joined in.

At almost point-blank range, though with shooting made difficult by the
destroyer’s wild motion, the submarine was hit repeatedly. They could
see the dull red glow of explosions and the little puffs of yellowish
gray smoke as the shells drove home. In the midst of the smoke and
spray Tony thought he could see the gaping wounds torn in that blunt
gray bow. No conning tower appeared above the surface.

It was all over in less than a minute. A shell struck and burst.
Simultaneously, there came the bright orange flash of a heavy explosion
with masses of debris whirled high into the air through a cloud of
dun-colored smoke. The shattering roar of it seemed to shake the air and
to compress the eardrums. It was louder by far than the boom of a gun or
the thudding hammer blow of an exploding depth charge.

“God!” said Bickerstaff to himself. “That’s her torpedoes!”

Bits and pieces came splashing down into the sea. A large, twisted
fragment of gray-painted steel, with the rivets still in it, clanged on
the destroyer’s steel deck within three feet of the after torpedo tubes.

“How’s this for a blinkin’ memento!” said a seaman, pouncing upon it. He
dropped it at once. “Coo lummy!” he exclaimed, sucking his fingers. “The
ruddy thing’s nearly red-hot!” His friends laughed.

The smoke of the explosion drifted away and dispersed. There was no
trace of the U-boat to be seen. She had sunk stern first.

Steaming over the spot some minutes later, they saw the corpse of a
single German sailor in a lifebelt floating in the midst of a patch of
water heavily discolored by fresh oil and what looked like soot. There
was also a solitary hammock, some gratings, and fragments of floating
wood.

There were no survivors.


3.

Over a mile to leeward the _St. Isabel_ was still blazing furiously. The
_Vexatious_ was steaming downwind toward her when the yeoman of signals,
with his eye to his telescope, turned to the Captain.

“I can’t swear to it, sir,” he said, “but I think I can see figures
right aft in her.”

Bickerstaff, cramming the remains of a corned beef sandwich into his
mouth, raised his glasses and gazed in the direction.

“Gad!” he exclaimed after a moment, “I believe you’re right, yeoman. But
where the devil have they suddenly sprung from?”

Nobody could answer that. No men were visible when the _Vexatious_ first
steamed by the _St. Isabel’s_ stern.

The First Lieutenant, overhearing the conversation, came to the fore
side of the bridge.

“What d’you want done, sir?” he asked.

“I’m not lowering a boat in this sea unless everything else fails,”
Bickerstaff replied. He went on to point out that the _St. Isabel_ had
an overhanging counter stern. It _might_ be possible to take the
_Vexatious_ sufficiently close in to get a line across and a wire after
it. Both ships would be rolling and pitching; but in any case the
destroyer’s bows would be below the _St. Isabel’s_ stern. Her men must
lower themselves on rope’s ends. If any of them were burnt or injured,
they must be lowered by their friends. There was no other chance unless
the poor devils jumped overboard in their lifebelts and took their
chance of being picked up one by one.

“Have wires and rope’s ends ready on the forecastle, Number One, and
what heavy fenders you’ve got. I’ll take her up dead slow, and look
slippy about getting your wire across. Warn ’em not to jump on any
account, and see you’ve a man tending each rope’s end on the forecastle
as they lower themselves. I don’t want ’em falling in the pond. If they
do that, God help ’em! --I may smash up the ship, but there’s no other
way that I can see. All right, carry on, and good luck.”

“Good luck to you, sir,” said Richmond, turning to leave the bridge.
“You’ll need it.”

More than twenty disconsolate figures could be seen in the tanker’s
stern as the _Vexatious_ approached at her slowest manageable speed.
The faces of all of them were blackened. Some seemed to be dressed in
rags.

Richmond, with a number of men, had collected on the destroyer’s
forecastle. Tony Chenies was with them. So was Mr. Hebard. As they
approached, the heat was almost unbearable, the air full of the
suffocating reek of oil and the stench of burning. Beyond that little
group of men in the _St. Isabel_ the flames streamed out like huge
ragged banners straining in the gale. There was smoke everywhere, trails
and whorls of it eddying in every direction, and that dense black pall
to leeward. They could hear the roaring of the fire, a sizzling like the
sound of escaping steam as fire met water.

Thirty-three officers and men were rescued from the stricken _St.
Isabel_. Fifteen others had been lost--four in the fire or when the ship
had been torpedoed, the others when the boats had been swamped during
lowering.

Some of the survivors were badly burned and had to be lowered to the
_Vexatious’_ forecastle by their friends. The others, more able to fend
for themselves, slid down ropes and were dragged on board by many
willing helpers. The _St. Isabel’s_ captain was the last to leave.

How it was managed, or how long it took, nobody quite knew. Time and
time again Bickerstaff’s heart was in his mouth lest the wire should
part when the ships swayed in opposite directions with men dangling
overhead, or the _Vexatious’_ sharp bows came perilously near the _St.
Isabel’s_ stern. Once they did touch, with a shuddering crash which bent
the destroyer’s stem head and crumpled about two feet of the forecastle,
but that was the only time.

“Are you sure that’s the lot?” Bickerstaff howled through his megaphone
to the forecastle.

“That’s all, sir,” Number One shouted back.

There was no recovering the securing wire, the eye of which was over the
_St. Isabel’s_ bollards. It was allowed to run overboard as the
_Vexatious_ backed slowly astern. The bare end splashed into the sea.

“Lost overboard by accident,” Mr. Hebard observed, watching it with a
glum expression. “There goes my year’s income tax!”

“Come off it, Guns,” Tony laughed. “It’s cheap at the price.”

“Sez you, Mister Chenies. But you’re not the father of four children. No
wonder this ruddy war’s costing us nine millions a day.”

“Huh!” said Tony, waving a hand at the _St. Isabel_. “And what’s the
value of that ship, and all the oil that was in her?”

“Thank the Lord we got something as a make-weight,” said Mr. Hebard.

“I congratulate you, King of the Depth Charges. Good work!”

Mr. Hebard permitted himself to smile.

“If I wasn’t a teetotaller at sea I’d have a double tot o’ whisky
tonight, Mr. Chenies. But seeing that I am--”

“You’ll have one with me the first night in harbor,” said Tony. “If you
can be dragged away from your blasted storebooks we might even make a
proper binge of it, just to celebrate.”

“There’s something in that,” Hebard agreed. “All the same, Mister
Chenies, I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for the poor blokes inside
that U-boat.”

“Would they be sorry if it had been the other way round?” Tony inquired.

Mr. Hebard had no reply to that.


4.

The _Vexatious_ steamed up to windward along the oil slick, looking for
traces of overturned boats or men floating in lifebelts. She searched
for over an hour, to find nothing.

There was no saving the _St. Isabel_. She was sinking by the bows, her
captain said, and even if she were still afloat when the fire burnt
itself out it was unlikely she could ever be towed back to harbor. So
the _Vexatious_ fired a few shells along her waterline to accelerate
her end, and stood by until she reared her stern in the air and slid to
the bottom. Nothing remained to mark the presence of a once fine ship
except that thick cloud of black smoke rolling to leeward and the ever
widening patches of oil floating on the surface--these, and two capsized
boats and much wreckage floating on the water.

Using his wireless to report what had happened, Bickerstaff was ordered
to return to base with the survivors. By half-past eleven in the
morning, in weather that was gradually moderating and with a few patches
of clear blue in the sky to windward, the _Vexatious_ was steaming to
the eastward at twenty knots with the wind and sea astern. With six
officers and twenty-seven men from the _St. Isabel_ on board, her
accommodation was taxed to the limit. All the officers gave up their
cabins to those suffering from burns, and Maclean had his work cut out
in attending them. According to the First Lieutenant, it was the first
real honest-to-God job the Doc had done since joining the ship.

Later that day Captain Mortimer, the _St. Isabel’s_ master, came to see
Bickerstaff in his little sea cabin leading off the charthouse. Tall and
grizzled, with a bandage round his head, Mortimer wore his uniform
jacket, sadly the worse for wear, and a pair of borrowed gray flannel
trousers that were much too short for him.

His gratitude was almost pathetic. He had come, he said, to thank
Bickerstaff for saving their lives. He had heard of destroyer
seamanship, but he had never seen a ship handled like the _Vexatious_
during the rescue.

Bickerstaff, very embarrassed, cut it short. He hated being thanked.

“Tell me,” he asked. “Are they looking after you all right? I’m afraid
we’re a bit tight for accommodation, but we’ll be in harbor in less than
forty-eight hours.”

“Your chaps have done marvels, Commander. They’re mothering us like
children.”

“Good!” said Bickerstaff. “You’ve only to ask for what you want. We’re
not the _Queen Mary_, but all we have is yours. --Now tell me what
happened.”

The _St. Isabel_ had originally been with a convoy but had lost it when
a temporary breakdown had occurred in the engine room. Having effected
repairs she pushed on at full speed. The convoy had not been sighted
again, so the _St. Isabel_ went on alone.

The previous afternoon a U-boat had appeared on the surface some
distance astern. She opened fire with her gun, to which the tanker
replied. The duel went on for about forty minutes, after which the
U-boat disappeared.

“Did she hit you?” Bickerstaff inquired.

Captain Mortimer shook his head.

“No,” he replied. “She landed one or two pretty close, that’s all.
Shooting wasn’t easy in the sea that was running.”

“And you didn’t hit her?”

“I don’t think so. All I know is she disappeared. We thought she’d given
up the chase.”

Mortimer went on in his short clipped sentences, at times nearly
overcome with emotion. He was still suffering from the strain of his
experiences. Little wonder.

The night, he explained, had come down dark and stormy. Nothing had
happened until just after five in the morning, when the _St. Isabel_ was
torpedoed on the port side just abreast the bridge. Three minutes later
she was hit again forward. There was petrol in some of the tanks, and
this flared up in an instant. It set fire to the cargo of heavier oil,
and in less than no time the forepart of the ship was ablaze.

The ship, considerably down by the bows, was turned stern on to the wind
to keep the fire forward. Officers and men fought the flames with all
the appliances they had; but it was no good. Even the seas breaking on
board did nothing to damp it down. The fire drove aft in spite of
everything. Within ten minutes the bridge had to be abandoned. It all
went up in smoke and flame. All this time the wireless operator had been
sending off distress signals.

Then the after tanks started to catch fire, and the officers and men
were driven to the stern. The ship was doomed, so Mortimer had stopped
her broadside on to wind and sea to give the two starboard boats a lee.
They lowered them. First one had been swamped, and then the other.

“We heard the poor chaps shouting in the water,” Captain Mortimer
continued. “There was nothing we could do. It was pitch dark, blowing a
gale, and the spray driving over everywhere. It was pretty awful,
Commander,” he went on, wiping a gnarled hand across his forehead and
looking at Bickerstaff with a pair of pathetic brown eyes rather like a
dog’s. “We felt so utterly helpless. Those poor chaps went quick. We,
the rest of us, might last a bit longer before being burnt alive or
driven overboard in lifebelts. We could never have lowered the port
boats in the sea that was running.”

“What about your distress signals?” Bickerstaff asked.

“It was only by the mercy of God we ever got ’em off. Our two operators,
the eldest’s only twenty-three, stuck it out in their cabin near the
bridge until the place was practically red-hot around them. One of them,
young Winfrey, managed to make his way aft, _through_ the fire mark you.
His clothes were burnt to rags and he was all but done in when he
arrived. We did what we could. Your doctor says he’s a fifty-fifty
chance of saving him. He’s a hero, that little chap, and only nineteen.
So was Carver, the senior man.

“We never saw him again, Commander. I reckon he died in his radio cabin,
burnt, if he wasn’t suffocated first. The last chap to see him was
Winfrey. Carver pushed him out of the place and told him to skip for it
before it was too late. Winfrey starts arguing about it, so Carver
pushes him out bodily telling him not to be a bloody young fool. How
Winfrey ever got aft I don’t know.”

“I take off my hat to both of them,” said Bickerstaff quietly. “Let’s
hope Winfrey pulls through.”

Mortimer nodded. His face was very sad.

“Carver was only married at the end of last voyage,” he said, his voice
husky with emotion. “A nicer little thing than his wife you never saw.
She is my niece. How I’m to break the news I don’t know!”

“That’s the hellish part of war,” Bickerstaff murmured, not knowing what
else to say. “It’s worse for the people left behind.”

“Aye, Commander. That’s true. I’m a widower with grown-up children,
thank God!”

The rest of the story was soon told--how the flames in the _St. Isabel_
drove farther and farther aft until they licked round the after
superstructure and funnel. Driven below by the fumes and intolerable
heat, the thirty-three of them took refuge in the engine room. The end,
they expected, would come in a few hours.

Someone was sent on deck now and then to see if by any chance a ship was
coming to the rescue. No. They had not seen the _Vexatious_ as she
passed, had not heard the blasts of her siren. The roaring of the fire
and the noise of the seas drowned everything else. It wasn’t until they
heard those under-water thumps which someone recognized as the explosion
of depth charges that they realized another ship was anywhere near. They
came on deck then, in spite of everything, to see the _Vexatious_ up to
windward. If Bickerstaff could have heard the cheering, it would have
done him good.

The cheering redoubled when they saw the end of the U-boat. They had no
idea she was still in the vicinity.

“Well, we had the luck to get her,” Bickerstaff said.

“Aye, Commander. One less of the murdering devils. --But it’s you I’m
thinking of, and what we owe to you and your chaps.”

“Let’s take it all for granted,” the Commander smiled. “Say no more
about it.”


5.

Soon after daylight on the next morning but one the _Vexatious_ reached
her base and landed her passengers. An ambulance was waiting for the
injured, motor coaches for the others. Winfrey, the young wireless
operator, was on the way to recovery. Carried ashore on a stretcher,
with most of the visible part of him swathed in bandages, he was gaily
smoking a cigarette. A few farewells with words of gratitude, a little
burst of cheering, and the incident of the _St. Isabel_ was closed.

Just as Bickerstaff turned to go below he was intercepted by the yeoman
of signals.

“Signals, sir,” he said, thrusting a pad into his captain’s hands.

     “COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF TO _VEXATIOUS_. HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS ON
     YOUR SUCCESS. REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY TO LUNCH AT
     12:45. CAR WILL BE SENT.”

“Reply, ‘With much pleasure,’” Bickerstaff said.

     “CAPTAIN (D) TO _VEXATIOUS_. EXCELLENT WORK. WELL DONE. SHOULD LIKE
     TO SEE YOU AS CONVENIENT THIS FORENOON.”

     “CAPTAIN (D) TO _VEXATIOUS_, _VIGILANT_ AND _WRANGLER_. COMPLETE
     WITH FUEL TODAY THURSDAY. YOU WILL BE REQUIRED FOR DUTY AT 0600 ON
     SATURDAY.”

“Number One!” Bickerstaff called.

“Sir?”

“We’re off again at six o’clock the day after tomorrow. As it doesn’t
affect our seaworthiness, they’re evidently not worrying about that
damage forward. As soon as you’re ready we’ll shove off and go to the
oiler.”

Number One’s face fell. He had much to do in the ship. After sinking a
submarine and saving most of the _St. Isabel’s_ crew he had hoped for,
though not expected, at least three days in harbor. But necessity knows
no comfort. However, even two whole nights in bed was something for
which to be thankful. So he shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

“There’s certainly no peace for the wicked, sir.”

“Nor ever will be so long as this war lasts,” said Bickerstaff. “It’s a
rum sort of life taking it all round.”

Assuredly it was, thought Tony Chenies. If anyone had told him a year
before that he would see a great tanker on fire and a U-boat sunk in the
space of about two hours, he wouldn’t have believed him.

“Is it tonight or tomorrow night I’m going to have the pleasure of
drinking your health, Mister Chenies?” came the voice of Mr. Hebard
behind him. “I’m not forgetting that double tot you promised.”

“Trust you for that,” laughed Tony. “But I hadn’t forgotten. --Well,
Flagg?” as his retainer appeared with a questioning look on his face.

“Beg pardon, Mister Cheenies, sir, but will we be goin’ ashore for a
scamper ’s afternoon?”

“No, Flagg. We shall not scamper. We shall spend the afternoon asleep in
our bunk. We may go ashore tomorrow if nothing happens to prevent us.”

“And when shall we want our bath and shavin’ water, Mister Cheenies?”

“We’ll have our bath when we’ve secured alongside the oiler. Having
decided to grow a beard, our shaving water will not be required.”

Flagg’s eyes opened wide in amazement. He shook his head.

“You didn’t oughter, Mister Cheenies, sir,” he said, in a hoarse whisper
intended to be confidential. “You reely didn’t oughter. What’ll we look
like with whiskers? ’T isn’t as if....”

“D’you mean I _can’t_ grow a beard, you old reprobate?”

“That I couldn’t say, Mister Cheenies, sir. But what I do say is that
maybe that bit o’ ... beg pardon, the young person we sometimes goes
ashore to see, mightn’t like it. Some of ’em’s a bit particular. We
don’t want to get spoilin’ our prospects. No, sir. That ’ud never do.
How should I explain it if we was crossed in love, the same as I was at
your age when the party I was walkin’ out with took on with a hussar,
one o’ them blokes with thin legs an’ yellow stripes down his pants, an’
spurs. Me, spurned and forsook for the blinkin’ cavalry! Mortifyin’ to
the flesh? I should say it was.”

“I expect you soon got over it, you old villain,” said Tony, used to
Flagg’s familiarities.

“I got her photo still, sir,” said Flagg, looking sentimental. “I
haven’t got over it yet.”

“But you’re a married man, Flagg.”

“So I am in a manner o’ speakin’,” the able seaman replied, rubbing his
unshaven chin. “But there’s wimmen an’ wimmen, if you’ll understand
me. --Don’t you never grow a beard, Mister Cheenies. Take the advice o’
one who knows, one old enough to be your--”

“I’ve heard you say that before,” Tony managed to get in. “I wish you’d
stop dictating to me.”

“All for your good, Mister Cheenies. I know’d your father, an’ a proper
gentleman he was. I remember the time he said to me, ‘Flagg,’ he says,
‘Flagg. You’re the one man--’”

Perhaps it was as well that at that moment a boatswain’s pipe trilled
and a voice shouted an order. The _Vexatious_ was about to leave the
jetty.

Tony sighed with relief.

Flagg was sometimes a little overpowering, but so loyal, so anxious for
what he considered was Tony’s welfare that it was difficult to snub
him.




CHAPTER VI


The _Vexatious_ refitted early in the New Year, and Tony Chenies found
himself given eight days leave. He wanted no theaters, no dances or
parties with various relations and friends in London. He went straight
to Minchinhampton to make up for arrears of sleep, to wear plain
clothes, to do exactly as he liked when he liked, to be pampered as a
war-weary veteran by a doting mother.

Eight days--one hundred and ninety-two hours. It didn’t seem long after
all he had seen and done since the previous September. But it was very
pleasant, all the same. He felt like the mythical old retired bos’un who
hired a boy to call him at half-past five in the morning with the
message, “Please sir, the Commander wants you at once.” And the bos’un,
rolling over in his bed, replied, “Tell the Commander, with my
compliments, to go to hell!”

It was pleasant to hear the wind howling in the chimney and rattling the
windows, to look out of one’s window in the mornings and to see the
thick carpet of snow. Tony pitied the poor devils at sea.

Effie became his devoted slave--pressing his trousers, sewing on buttons
that Flagg had overlooked, wrinkling her nose at Flagg’s ideas of
darning, producing the food that he liked best, making no bones about
breakfast in bed, and keeping the independent boiler going full blast to
provide hot water for a late bath.

Even old Wilkes contributed to his entertainment with two pounds of
bloody beefsteak oozing through the local newspaper and obtained on the
sly from a friend who was a butcher. Wilkes’ gift cost Tony half-a-pound
of dark shag tobacco. Effie had also to be rewarded with ten shillings.

They both loved Tony in their own way.

Mrs. Chenies was able to make other arrangements for Steve and Willie,
the two soldiers billeted upon her. It was as well, for Toppy, on her
first holiday from the Ministry of Information, was at home for most of
Tony’s leave.

“Tony came on leave on Monday,” Mrs. Chenies wrote in a letter to her
husband. “Luckily I knew he was coming, so Toppy arranged her holiday at
the same time. I was very busy with the W.V.S. and the usual etceteras,
but they have both found plenty to do and I think are enjoying
themselves. They seem to be in and out of the rectory most of the time,
and the rectory gang in and out of here. I must say it’s a great asset
having the Dodsons so conveniently close. They’re always ready for
anything, and never at a loss for a suggestion.

“Some charming Americans, man and wife, have come to live in one of the
houses near us. They’re lively, and most kind and hospitable. Webster,
the husband, has work of some sort not far from here. We’ve all taken
them to our hearts, though Tinker is rather aloof and growly with Sammy,
their young spaniel. Margaret, the wife, is a darling--blond, blue-eyed,
and so spontaneous and open-hearted. I hope you’ll have the chance of
meeting them.

“Tony sleeps a great deal, and his appetite is as good as ever. It was
lucky he brought his naval ration card with him. We’d have been rather
lost without it. He’s looking very well, I think, though rather thin and
lined about the face--sort of old and tired looking. Also he’s grown
what purports to be a beard. It’s more like a sandy-red fringe, and
makes him look hideous. Toppy and I tried to make him shave it off. So
did the rectory party. But he’s very proud of it and utterly refused to
remove it. It seems beards have become the fashion in destroyers,
though goodness knows why. I suppose they think it makes them look older
and more sea-doggish. He’s very pleased with his ship, and likes all the
officers, particularly the captain. But he didn’t say much about what
they were doing, except that it was convoy work in the Atlantic and they
spent a long time at sea. I asked him to come and talk at the Women’s
Institute, but he refused point-blank. He goes back on Tuesday. Toppy
has given up the idea of joining the Wrens. She’s happier now at
Miniform, as she calls it, and has been put on to more interesting work.
She doubts if her languages would be much use in the Wrens.

“P.S. I’ve opened this letter to tell you that we saw in the papers this
morning that Tony’s captain, Bickerstaff, has been given the D.S.O. for
a successful action against an enemy submarine. One or two others,
including Tony, have been mentioned in despatches. Tony says he doesn’t
know what for, as he didn’t deserve it. But someone must think well of
him, so I hope you’re as proud of your son as I am. It took about an
hour’s hard pumping on the part of Toppy and myself to get a few
details. They sank the submarine all right and saved some of the crew of
a burning ship. Apparently it was all very difficult. But Tony didn’t
want to talk about it. You know how oysterish and reserved he becomes
when he’s asked questions. The rectory people spotted it in the papers
and rang up to congratulate him. They’ve got up a fork supper on the
spur of the moment with dancing in the drawing-room, but will have to
close down before midnight as tomorrow’s Sunday. They mustn’t desecrate
the Sabbath, or the whole village will be scandalized. You know how
their tongues wag at the least little thing....”


2.

Early one morning, on the way back to the base after their first convoy
trip after refitting, Mr. Hebard, who was keeping the morning watch,
suddenly sighted an open boat about two miles to windward. It was
blowing hard, with an overcast sky and a heavy, leaden-colored,
breaking sea, so that at times the boat was completely hidden in the
troughs. Keeping his glasses leveled, the Gunner waited till she rose on
a crest, and then made out that she was flying what looked like a dirty
white flag. For the moment he could see no figures.

His first act was to alter course to investigate, his second to call
Bickerstaff, who was dozing in his sea cabin after spending most of the
night on the bridge.

The Captain was up in less than a minute. He raised his glasses as the
boat lifted into sight.

“Mister Hebard,” he grunted. “There are probably men in her. I’ll take
the ship to wind’ard and drift down to make a lee. Nip down and have men
ready on the upper deck. You’ll want boat rope, fenders, rope’s ends,
and the life-saving net. Look smart, and send a hand along to warn
Number One.”

Mr. Hebard left the bridge in haste.

“Have the Doctor warned, too,” Bickerstaff shouted after him. “He might
be needed.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Within a few minutes the _Vexatious_ had stopped to windward of the
boat, and was slowly drifting toward her. Juggling with his propellers,
now slow ahead, now astern, Bickerstaff was keeping his ship in position
with the wind and sea on the port bow. The boat was a trawler’s boat.
Ten exhausted-looking men, dressed in the usual variety of garments,
were on board her. One of them was bailing. When nearly alongside,
Bickerstaff, looking down from the bridge, saw that the scooped-up water
was reddened with blood. Several of the occupants wore improvised
bandages. Another, badly wounded, lay prone on the bottom boards with
the water swishing round him.

They were hauled and helped on board. Two seamen, jumping into the boat,
lifted the badly wounded man. The right sleeve had been cut off his
jersey. The dirty bandages on his arm were soaked in blood. His teeth
were clenched in agony.

“Sorry, mate,” said one of the bluejackets. “We may have to hurt you a
bit.”

“Carry on,” the wounded fisherman replied. “Don’t mind me.”

It was not easy to transfer him to the rolling deck of the destroyer
from the boat plunging alongside. The pain must have been excruciating.
The man’s face showed it. But except for a hissing intake of breath as
he was lifted and passed to other hands and the _Vexatious_ rolled to
starboard, he never uttered a sound.

The improvised flag on the boathook was passed into the destroyer. Some
oars, the boat’s compass, and a few other things followed. The seamen
scrambled back on board. The boat itself, torn and punctured by
splinters, drifted astern as the _Vexatious_ steamed ahead--another
pitiful piece of drifting flotsam eloquent of enemy savagery at sea.
Turning his ship, Bickerstaff rammed her, cutting her in halves and
turning what remained into splintered wreckage. She was not worth
saving, and submarines, he had heard, sometimes stopped near drifting
boats to torpedo would-be rescuers.

Tony heard the whole tale later, when the _Evening Star’s_ skipper, a
bluff and breezy person called Tempest, dressed in borrowed clothes, sat
before the blazing stove in the wardroom clutching a glass of whisky in
one huge fist. He had eaten well.

“It was like this,” he explained. “We was on our usual fishin’ ground,
an’ at four o’clock yesterday mornin’ hauled our trawl an’ starts
guttin’ an’ stowin’ fish. All our deck lights was burnin’ as usual,
there bein’ no orders to the contrary. ’Bout five, or thereabouts, all
hands bein’ on deck, we was standin’ by to shoot the trawl agen.”

“What sort of weather, Skipper?” someone asked.

“Fine. Light southerly breeze, an’ a heavy ground swell from the sou’
west. Stars overhead, but pitch black otherwise. --Well, I’d just gone
to my room below the wheelhouse to take a sounding with the echometer
gadget when I hears the bang o’ a gun close to. I shins back on top fast
as I can make it an’ realizes we was bein’ attacked by somethin’,
couldn’t make out what, though I thinks of them damned U-boats. So I
shouts to the lads to douse all lights an’ rang down for full
ahead....”

Almost simultaneously, he went on to say, he saw the flash of a gun
about five hundred yards to starboard. The shell struck and burst in the
chartroom under his feet. It set the ship on fire, smashed the
wheelhouse windows, splintered doors and bulkheads, and filled the
wheelhouse with the sickening stench of explosive and burning.

The _Evening Star_ stopped, clearly visible in the light of her own
flames. They realized it was a U-boat by this time.

“The murderin’ devils pumps shell after shell into us at point-blank
range. I gives orders to abandon ship, there being nothin’ else to be
done. The lads starts hoistin’ out the boat over the port quarter. --I
lost all count o’ time wi’ things happenin’ as they was.”

Rather overcome with emotion he went on to describe how one man, a
fireman, had already been killed. Of the ten others, seven got down into
the boat, leaving Tempest himself and his second hand with a deckhand
with a badly lacerated arm on board the trawler, which was now blazing
furiously.

The submarine, coming within one hundred and fifty yards, continued her
fire. A shell hit the trawler’s bridge and blew it to pieces. Another
burst close to the stern of the boat lying alongside, its whizzing
fragments wounding the chief engineman and some others and perforating
the boat in many places. Another shell missed her by a few feet.

The wounded deckhand was passed down, and the second hand and skipper
followed. They cast off and backed astern with their oars. A few minutes
later the trawler sank by the stern.

A little later the submarine approached the boat within about fifteen
yards, then disappeared into the darkness leaving the ten fishermen to
their fate. They were about seventy miles from the nearest land. The
boat was leaking badly, and several of its occupants were wounded. They
had about a gallon of water and two dozen biscuits.

“The swine!” muttered Mr. Walton between his teeth, his fists tightly
clenched. “The unspeakable swine! Why do we trouble to rescue them, I
wonder?”

Tony Chenies was asking himself the same question. He wondered what
would happen to the survivors of a U-boat if the _Vexatious_ sank one
that afternoon. When the time came, he supposed, they would turn
soft-hearted and go all out to save the poor devils struggling in the
water, no matter what they had done beforehand. One couldn’t leave
people to drown. But the enemy had no such scruples, even with
noncombatants.

Tempest continued his story.

The boat lay to until dawn, and all through the next day her crew rowed
in the direction of land. The sun went down in an angry blaze of orange
and yellow which presaged wind. The breeze backed anti-clockwise and
increased in strength. Before long the smooth-bosomed hummocks of the
rolling swells were toppling and breaking in foam.

It became bitterly cold as the night came down, and the wind continued
to freshen. The sea grew steeper and more confused. The breaking crests
glimmered in the darkness and started to break on board. The boat was
enveloped in flying spray. The sound members of her crew, exhausted by
the day’s rowing, bailed with the single dipper and their boots to save
the lives of them all.

“It was the longest night I ever spent,” said Tempest. “She was full
nearly up to the thwarts most of the time, an’ we expectin’ every minute
to be our last. The wind, which was soon half-a-gale, was blowin’ us off
the land, not towards it. I weren’t the only one who thought we was
finished. Jimmy Haskins, him wi’ the wounded arm, that was, was pretty
near done. We’d bandaged him wi’ someone’s shirt an’ gives him sips o’
water through the night. There was no more we could do. About midnight I
serves out a biscuit an’ a sip o’ water to all hands, though some of ’em
couldn’t eat the biscuits. Then dawn comes, an’ the seas lookin’
horrible, wi’ the lads well nigh done in. I puts ’em to rowin’, to give
’em somethin’ to do more’n the good it could do, but it wasn’t no use,
they hadn’t the strength left. I’d just made up me mind to rig a sea
anchor wi’ the oars when we sighted smoke down to loo’ard. We’d seen
lights durin’ the night, which was trawlers. We’d lit flares, but no one
seen ’em. But when daylight comes an’ there’s smoke to loo’ard, I ties
the cook’s apron to the boathook an’ props it up. Also I prayed a
bit--reckon we all did ... we thought you’d miss us. Well, you know the
rest. I’m a plain man. I can’t say thank you like I feels--reckon none
of us can. But we’d ’a gone but for you. Thank God for the Navy, says
I.”

The incident of the _Evening Star_ was not an isolated one. From the
very beginning of the war certain U-boat commanders had not hesitated to
torpedo British and neutral merchant vessels on sight without giving
passengers and crew a chance of saving their lives.

It is doubtful if anyone in the Navy _really_ expected the Germans to
stick to the terms of a protocol, which they themselves had signed,
forbidding submarines to sink merchant ships without first putting
passengers and crew in a place of safety; but early in the New Year this
form of indiscriminate slaughter was increased. Enemy aircraft started
to make ruthless attacks with bombs and machine guns on merchantmen and
fishing craft, even firing on survivors in boats and on trawlers
rescuing the crews of others from the water. They also bombed and
machine-gunned lightships and the tenders relieving their crews and
supplying them with stores. Lightships, which served no military purpose
and were placed in position for the benefit of the seamen of all
nations, had always been regarded as sacrosanct in every previous war.
Not so with the Nazis.

It was murder, brutal and unrestrained. The chivalry of the sea seemed
dead.


3.

It was on a cold morning in March, with a blustering wind and sheets of
driving rain, that Bickerstaff went to make his usual report to the
Captain in command of his destroyer flotilla on bringing the
_Vexatious_ back into harbor after a trip with a convoy.

He shed his dripping raincoat, climbed the stairs, and opened a door
with the painted inscription, “DON’T KNOCK. COME IN.”

Captain Hardcastle, a keen-eyed, sunburned man in the early forties
wearing the ribbons of the D.S.O. and of the last war, sat at his table
in the far corner. The room overlooked the harbor, though there was
little to be seen through the rain-patterned windows.

A stove, with the wind roaring in its funnel, blazed in another corner.
The cream-colored walls were nearly covered with charts. Some of them
bore pins with heads of different colors with strings stretched between
them, others mysterious little flags and movable symbols. They all meant
something--convoy routes and the positions of convoys and individual
ships, the reported positions of enemy submarines. Another chart,
hatched in red and blue, showed British and enemy minefields, another
the channels regularly swept by the minesweepers.

A large diagram, dated along the top, had the name of every ship in the
flotilla down the side with broad lines of colored chalk indicating
whether she was at sea, in harbor, or in dock for repair or refitting.
The walls of the Captain’s office told much to the initiated.

There were four telephones on Hardcastle’s desk, the usual pile of
papers and correspondence on his blotting pad, and an “In” tray that was
nearly full.

His job of running the flotilla was no sinecure. A camp bed on the
opposite side of the room with a telephone nearby showed where he spent
most of his nights. A table with a blue cloth near the fire carried most
of his meals. They were always hurried meals.

The war was a war of “bits and pieces” as the Captain sometimes
expressed it. His destroyers and escort craft never operated in
flotillas, as they used to do in peacetime. They were at sea singly or
in couples, and there were never enough of them to go round. They were
overworked, and well he knew it. The officers and men showed the strain.
So did some of the older ships. Nevertheless, they carried on.

For himself Captain Hardcastle would have far preferred to be on the
bridge of his ship at sea, as he had been in the early days of the war
and had had the luck to sink a U-boat. But their Lordships at the
Admiralty and the Commander-in-Chief had decreed it otherwise. Captain
Hardcastle couldn’t possibly keep touch with his widely scattered
chickens from a ship at sea, and a small one at that. Nor could he issue
the necessary sailing orders, arrange the refits, supervise the fueling,
storing, and a hundred and one other things which kept his flock at sea
and running.

Here, ashore, with ample means of communication, and a considerable
staff, which included a number of Wrens, otherwise women and girls of
the Women’s Royal Naval Service, he could compete with the job--though
there were never enough destroyers.

The Wrens were magnificent. They didn’t care how long they worked or
what they had to put up with in the way of discomfort. Their pride was
in belonging to the Navy and in doing their jobs as well as men. Their
keenness was infectious. One found the daughters of Admirals and other
notabilities serving in the ranks. They also added a decorative touch to
an otherwise monastic establishment and brightened the dull routine
work. The men minded their manners and their language. The Wrens
sometimes darned the men’s socks and sewed on their failing buttons. One
of the young women, working in Hardcastle’s office, saw to it that fresh
flowers were provided for his room. In winter they came from her
parents’ greenhouse in a Somersetshire village. In spring and summer
they would come from the garden. Hardcastle was safely married. There
was no ulterior motive--nothing but abounding good nature and a liking
for color.

The Wrens certainly pulled their weight. They were very much part of
the Royal Navy in the war. Hardcastle swore by them.

All the same, office work of any kind irked him. The Navy was fighting,
and like all other sailors he yearned to be at sea. He was secretly
jealous of his own destroyer captains who had all the fun and
excitement.

The Captain, pipe in mouth, looked up as Bickerstaff entered the room.

“Oh. It’s you,” he said smiling. “How did the last trip go? Any
excitement?”

Nothing but the fag-end of a gale and a bit of thick weather,
Bickerstaff told him.

Hardcastle nodded.

“I fear I’ve got some bad news for you,” he said, and then, noticing
Bickerstaff’s change of expression, added, “at least I think it bad. You
mayn’t.”

“What is it, sir?”

“I’ve been ordered to detach four destroyers to help with the east coast
convoys. I fear the _Vexatious_ has to be one of them.”

“The east coast convoys!” Bickerstaff protested. “But we haven’t enough
to do the job properly here, sir. You’ll be frightfully shorthanded if
four of us are taken away.”

“You’re telling me!” said Hardcastle, shrugging his shoulders. “Don’t
think I haven’t shouted to keep you. I’ve been howling for more
destroyers ever since I came here, and so has the C. in C. You bet I
protested at four being pinched, and the C. in C. agreed. --But what’s
the use? Destroyers simply don’t exist for all the jobs they’ve got to
do in this sort of war. We could do with double the number and still run
’em off their legs.”

Bickerstaff nodded in agreement. He knew.

“But the east coast, sir,” he said. “Why the east coast?”

“Because, for the moment, there’s a temporary lull in submarine activity
in the Atlantic, I expect. Meanwhile, to keep us on our toes, the Hun’s
making himself obnoxious by using aircraft to bomb and shoot up our
coastal convoys. That’s the reason, I suspect.”

“So we’ll have excitement, sir?”

“It looks like it,” the Captain answered. “A good deal more excitement
than you’re getting here, and on the whole, I should imagine, better
weather.”

“I’d sooner stay here, sir. I’m used to the work.”

“I know. I’m sorry to lose you, and hope you’ll soon be back. But there
it is. When--”

The conversation was interrupted by a ring from one of the telephones on
the table. Hardcastle took up the receiver, pushed a cigarette box in
Bickerstaff’s direction, and waved to him to sit down.

The Commander listened to the one-sided conversation.

“Good morning.... Yes ... I hear you perfectly.... Then I’m to
understand you propose the _Whimbrel’s_ completion date shall be
extended by three days.... Yes, I know all about that. I saw the
Commander-in-Chief and Admiral Superintendent yesterday.”

The tone of the Captain’s voice was hardening. He was impatiently
stabbing his blotting pad with a pencil.

“ ...No. She’s definitely required for duty on Thursday. I haven’t the
ships to go round as it is.... Yes, night and day, and work double
shifts if you like. I’ll take full responsibility, but ask the Admiral
Superintendent if you like. The ship must on no account be delayed. It’s
got to be done.... Right. Good-by.”

He replaced the receiver.

“Some of these damn fellows don’t seem to realize there’s a war on and
how hard up we are,” he grumbled. “What were we talking about,
Bickerstaff? Oh, yes. When can you be ready to sail?”

“This afternoon, sir, as soon as I’ve completed with stores.”

“It’s not so urgent as all that,” Hardcastle said. “Have you any
defects?”

“No, sir. Nothing that matters.”

Hardcastle thought for a moment, rubbing his chin.

“Today’s Tuesday,” he said. “You’re wanted there by Saturday. If you
sail P.M. on Thursday it’ll be time enough. --Yes, Miss Charters, what
is it?”

A girl in blue W.R.N.S. uniform had entered the room.

“I’ve brought you the incoming signals up till ten o’clock, sir,” she
said.

“Anything vitally urgent, Miss Charters?”

“The _Virago’s_ reported condenser trouble, sir,” she said.

The Captain sighed.

“The _Virago’s_ condensers are one of the banes of my life,” he
answered. “They’re always going wrong. --She’s with that A. K. convoy,
isn’t she?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, Miss Charters. Leave the signals with me. You needn’t wait.
On your way back tell the Engineer Commander I’d like to have a word
with him.”

Miss Charters put the file of signals on the desk and retired.

“It’s one damn thing after another,” Hardcastle grumbled. “First they
take away you four, and now the _Virago’s_ busted herself! I hope it’s
not going to be serious. --Well, Bickerstaff, I mustn’t keep you. I
expect you’re up to the eyes in it. Are you dining anywhere tonight?”

“No, sir. I’ve no plans at all.”

“What about a spot of dinner at the yacht club? I’m taking the evening
off, for once.”

“Thanks very much, sir. I’d like it.”

“Rendezvous there between seven and seven-thirty, then. I shall come
back fairly early.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Bickerstaff, rising.

It was the first time Captain Hardcastle was to have a meal outside his
office for over ten days.




CHAPTER VII


The meeting room in the Naval Headquarters at the convoy assembly port
was uncomfortably crowded and the air blue with tobacco smoke. Between
thirty and forty merchant ship masters were collected there to be given
their last instructions before sailing in convoy that evening--their
exact places in the lines, all about the latest minefields and other
navigational dangers, what times they might expect to alter course, what
destroyers, corvettes, and armed trawlers were detailed to act as
escorts, what was to be done in the event of attack by enemy aircraft or
motor torpedo boats.

Bickerstaff, who had taken Tony Chenies with him as ex-officio
navigator, had never attended such a conference before. If they hadn’t
realized it previously, they now came to understand what meticulous
organization a coastal convoy required.

The Commander in charge of the gathering stood in front of a blackboard
and spoke for perhaps seven minutes in short, clipped sentences, and
then asked if everyone understood. One or two members of his audience
had suggestions to make, which were duly noted. A few asked questions,
which were answered.

“Well, Captains,” the naval officer said. “I think that’s about all.
You’ve got the rendezvous, and I want you to be under way at a time
that’ll get you there at half-past five at the latest. There you’ll find
your escorts, and will form up in the order shown on the blackboard. Is
that all clear?”

He was answered by a chorus of “yes” and “aye.”

“Commander Bickerstaff, here, of the _Vexatious_, whom most of you have
already been introduced to, is one of your escorts. He’s been on the
Atlantic convoy job since the war started, so you’re in good hands.”

Bickerstaff, shuffling his feet, looked supremely self-conscious. Who
was he to blurt out that in this gathering of seamen he felt rather like
a new boy at school, and that, in any case, convoy work in the Atlantic
was very different from that on the east coast?

So he said nothing, but glanced at Tony to see how he was taking it.
Tony, busy scribbling notes, was looking rather more earnest than usual.
As navigator of the _Vexatious_ he felt the responsibility.

“Well, good luck and a safe passage to you all,” the Commander was
saying. “Remember the old, old story you’re all sick of hearing. Keep
well closed up, and be careful about darkening ship at night. No
flashing torches, no matches, no smoking on deck. Send an officer round
before dark to make certain about your lights. But above all, keep
closed up, gentlemen.”

There were smiles and titters at that. How often were they told the same
thing? How often had they been begged, besought, and goaded through the
loudspeakers in their destroyer and other escorts to keep closer to the
next ship ahead, always closer? The Navy chaps were sticklers for close
station.

“Do we get Paddy Carver and the _Shellback_ along with us this time?” a
voice asked.

There was loud laughter. Paddy Carver of the _Shellback_, one of the
corvettes, was an old friend to most of the men in the room. Through
traveling on the same convoy route time and time again, he knew most of
the masters personally and all of them by name. He knew their ships also
and was renowned for the remarks howled through his loudspeaker in a
voice like the bull of Bashan as he circled the convoy twice, three
times, or four times a day shepherding the miscellaneous collection of
ships into closer station. The masters liked to see Paddy’s burly
figure hanging over the bridge rails of the _Shellback_, with his great
black beard blown by the wind. He looked so solid and dependable. His
very presence inspired confidence.

But Bickerstaff had never heard of Paddy Carver, much less met the great
man. So in the conference room that morning he whispered to his
neighbor, a gnarled-looking person with a bright mahogany-colored face
and thick reddish hair growing out of his ears.

“I thowt all folks knew Paddy Carver,” came the almost reproachful
answer. “He’s cap’en o’ one o’ these corvettes, an’ a graand chap. He
makes us laugh, the things he says. He’s champion as Haw-Haw. ‘Cher-many
calling. Cher-many calling.’ Takes yon blatherskite off to a T. He asks
after the wife an’ children, an’ how’s the allotment getting on wi’ all
the tribe digging for victory. ’Ee, but he’s a graand man is Paddy.
Keeps things cheerful. But if any of us chaps is in trouble, he’s there
reet on the spot every time.”

Bickerstaff made up his mind that Paddy Carver must be met on the first
possible opportunity.

The collective experiences of the merchant ship masters in that room
would have filled many books. They were men of all types and ages, some
young and spruce, others regular old seadogs. Most of them had been on
coastal work since they’d first gone to sea as boys fresh from school.
One that Bickerstaff talked to had spent two nights at home in three
months, reaching his house on one occasion at seven o’clock in the
evening and leaving again at 5 A.M. in the dark. Another had been
disabled after his ship was mined and sunk, but was now back at sea
again. The veteran of the party, sixty-three years old, had started life
in sail at the age of sixteen and was the possessor of a square-rigged
master’s ticket. He had gone into ocean-going steamers after that, but
was in the coastal trade before the last war and had been in it ever
since.

Taken in the mass, they were a tough and rugged-looking crowd,
dependable, phlegmatic, determined. Looking at them, Bickerstaff
realized why nothing, certainly no Germans, would ever break their
dogged spirit and courage.


2.

The convoy was marshaled and formed up by dusk. Before darkness came the
whole strange collection of ships--colliers, several deep-sea tramps,
and coasters of all ages, shapes, and sizes--was on its way south
shepherded by its escorts.

So far as the weather went it might almost have been summer. The air was
balmy. There was no breeze, and the smoke of many funnels trailed out in
a gradually thinning cloud toward the darkening horizon astern. In
places, where the vapor looked denser, one could tell when the men
laboring in the stokeholds had shoveled coal into the furnaces minutes
before.

The sea, unruffled by any wind, had the appearance of a sheet of dark
burnished steel. It undulated with an almost invisible swell, which
showed in moving lines of deep shadow on its metallic-looking surface.
High overhead in the zenith a few patches of woolly cirrus showed pink,
orange, and yellow against the vivid blue of the sky. Over the horizon
to the westward, where the long line of the coast appeared as a serrated
ridge of deep purple and indigo, the sky was still stained with the
brilliant afterglow of the sunset.

The night came and the stars shone out, to be reflected in pale
trackways of light wavering across the water. The vivid color in the sky
to the westward faded into pale opalescence and then into a deepening
misty blue. The details of ships gradually became indistinct, until they
appeared as black silhouettes sliding along over ruffles of disturbed
water.

The _Vexatious_, steaming at easy speed ahead of the convoy, rolled
gently with a motion that was more soothing than otherwise--in distinct
and pleasant contrast to the turbulent Atlantic, where it always seemed
to blow.

The smell of frying rose from the ship’s company’s galley beneath the
forecastle. Those on the bridge could hear the splash and gurgle of the
bow wave, the subdued throbbing of a fan down in one of the boiler
rooms. Somewhere below a man was playing a mouth organ. Rough voices
broke out into the familiar chorus:

    “Roll out the barrel,
     And we’ll have a barrel of fun.
     Roll out the barrel....”

It all seemed very unwarlike. But for the complete absence of lights,
the men clustered round the guns and the extra lookouts, it might almost
have been peacetime.

Bickerstaff was talking to the First Lieutenant on the bridge, talking
quietly so as not to be overheard.

“There’ll be no moon till about five o’clock in the morning,” the
Captain said, looking at the horizon to the eastward. “I shouldn’t at
all wonder if they didn’t have a crack at us tonight. I believe they had
planes over just before we sailed. Coastal Command were busy, anyhow.”

“I’m keeping all guns ready through the night, sir,” Richmond said. “Two
men on the lookout, that is, and the others standing by.”

“Keep ’em so,” Bickerstaff grunted. “You’d better send someone round at
intervals to keep ’em up to scratch. If anything does happen, it’ll be
in split seconds.”

“What about the officers’ watches, sir?”

“Arrange ’em as you like, Number One. I shall be up till daylight. I’m
taking no chances with the weather like this.”

The convoy moved on through the darkness.

Eight o’clock ... ten ... midnight ...

It had become much colder. A shrewd little breeze from the southeast was
furring the surface of the water into minute corrugations. It was
darker, too. The stars were slowly becoming obliterated in cloud
breaking away from the main mass of dark cumulus encroaching on the sky
to windward. The land was out of sight. Only the nearest ships of the
convoy could be seen as blurred black shadows forging through the night.

Bickerstaff stamped his sea-booted feet. Shivering, he sent a man down
for another sweater, undid his thick duffle coat to take another turn
round his neck with the woollen comforter knitted by his wife.

One o’clock ... a quarter past ...

The sky was still clouding over, and the night darker than ever.

The First Lieutenant was dozing in a deck chair on the lower bridge,
ready for an instant call. Tony Chenies, keeping the middle watch, found
comfort in a jug of hot thick ship’s cocoa sent up from the galley.

Skilton, the leading cook, was one of the oldest men in the ship, a
pensioner well on in the fifties who had been recalled to the Navy on
mobilization from a comfortable billet as chef of a hotel at
Bournemouth.

He was nothing much to look at, small and wizened with a face all
creased and crinkled like the skin of an old apple. But he was a demon
for work and certainly had a way with him in the galley, where he was a
fierce martinet. His wrath fell heavily on trespassers who tried to
borrow his utensils and implements to fry their fish and eggs and bacon
for tea. He knew the mess they made, with frying pans dirtied and fat
sizzling and smoking all over the top of the galley stove. Chastened
ordinary seamen would be hurled out of the galley followed by a torrent
of vituperation. “You dare to put your nose inside _my_ galley agen, my
lad, an’ I’ll cut the blinkin’ liver out o’ you!” the little man
stormed, brandishing a fish slice. “If you want cookin’ done, just you
ask me or one o’ my assistants!”

Cookie was a regular little tiger when roused. Moreover, he never seemed
to sleep. It was a matter of pride with him and his two assistants that
hot soup or cocoa was available all through the night when the ship was
at sea. And even in rough weather, with his pots and pans sliding and
spilling over his stove, he usually managed to provide hot meals for a
hundred men and more in a violently swaying box measuring perhaps twelve
feet by eight. It was only when the sea actually invaded his galley and
put out his fires that he confessed himself beaten by the elements.

Yes. There was dignity in the culinary art, even in a destroyer. Skilton
invariably wore a tall white cap and spotless white uniform and apron on
Sunday mornings if the _Vexatious_ happened to be in harbor and the
Captain went on his rounds. He saw to it, too, that his pots and pans
were brightly scoured and the galley clean and in apple-pie order.

Bickerstaff was a nailer for prying into holes and corners when the mood
was upon him. A pair of old shoes or greasy overalls hidden away behind
a locker excited his indignation. He even investigated Skilton’s stock
pot and inquired as to its ingredients.

People sometimes said of cooks at sea that the Almighty sent the food
and the devil the cooks. In the “good old days” to call a man a
something “son of a sea cook,” was to use a term of opprobrium. There
were always good cooks and bad cooks. In the days of sail, when the
seamen’s food consisted largely of salt pork, salt beef, and biscuit,
the cooks might often be crippled or wounded ex-seamen whose knowledge
of their art was gained through bitter experience on their victims.
Their victims, being sailors, not unnaturally growled, and “cookie” was
unpopular.

Sailors still growl, but for a more devoted and hardworking band of men
than the cooks of His Majesty’s Navy one had to go far. The authorities
had long since recognized that good food makes for contentment,
especially in war. Unpalatable, ill-cooked provender will produce a
hubbub of disgruntlement. “Feed the brute” is not merely excellent
advice to housewives. It applies also to cooks at sea.

No one would have dared to cavil at Bob Skilton.

The father of three children, ugly and harassed-looking, people
suspected him of being henpecked. Yet in his galley he was king, and
indefatigable in his efforts to please the ship’s company.


3.

The convoy plodded on.

It was at about ten minutes past three, by which time the sky was
heavily overcast and the cloud ceiling had dropped to about two thousand
feet, that the little group of people on the _Vexatious’_ bridge heard
the roar of a single aircraft overhead. Nothing could be seen against
the canopy of cloud; but the machine, judging from the sound of its
engine, seemed to be traveling more or less diagonally across the convoy
from east to west. There was no knowing whether it was friend or foe. By
orders from the bridge the crews of the _Vexatious’_ anti-aircraft guns
swung their muzzles skyward and followed the sound of the engine. The
machine guns were ready in case of a low-flying attack.

The pulsation seemed to recede on the starboard quarter. Then it
increased again, coming closer, then died away.

“The blighter seems to be circling overhead,” Bickerstaff murmured. “Is
it one of ours who’s lost his way, or is it--”

He never finished the sentence, for high overhead and almost immediately
astern the clouds suddenly took on a silvery sheen as though the moon
were behind them. The illumination brightened and broadened as a ball of
light appeared and seemed to hang suspended in the air. It was reflected
from the sea. The outlines of the nearer ships of the convoy stood out
in dark silhouette.

At the same instant one of the escort ships somewhere down the line
opened up with her pom-pom. Other ships chimed in, their gun flashes
sparkling red and orange against the background of black and silver.

As the thudding of the reports came traveling across the water and the
sky started to scintillate with the golden sparkle of exploding shell,
the single globe of white light, already glaringly brilliant, seemed to
disintegrate into five or six others. Falling slowly, they bathed sea
and sky alike in a radiance almost as bright as sunlight. A photograph
might have been taken of the _Vexatious’_ upper deck. Against the
dazzling silver sea every ship in the convoy appeared in full relief as
though cut out in black cardboard. They stretched far away toward the
horizon.

The noise of the guns completely drowned any sound of the airplane’s
engine. The firing persisted for over a minute and then died gradually
away. Next silence--a dead, uncanny silence broken only by the rippling
of water alongside and the sound of men’s voices.

“The blighter’s gone,” Tony heard himself say.

But still the chandelier-like cluster of the parachute flares dropped
slowly toward the sea. From each of its balls of brilliant incandescence
fell a little vertical trail of smoking red sparks.

Though nobody timed it, the glare must have continued for a full five
minutes. It made Tony Chenies feel as uncomfortable as when, as a small
child, he had been discovered stealing jam from the larder. He felt he
wanted to creep away under cover, to hide, for from somewhere up aloft
the convoy was being watched and reported. The sensation was eerie,
disquieting.

One by one those bright globes flickered out in mid-air, or became
extinguished when they met the water. Darkness came gradually, as if by
the slow drawing of a curtain. When it did finally come, the night
seemed doubly black. It took time to refocus one’s eyes.

Bickerstaff said nothing, but a good deal was running through his mind.

What was the meaning of that illumination? What did it portend?

Half-past three ... a quarter to four ... four o’clock ...

Number One came up yawning from the lower bridge to take over from Tony.
The helmsman, signalmen, and lookouts turned over to their reliefs in
whispers. Men took each other’s places at the guns. The morning watch
reliefs for the engine and boiler rooms found their way aft along the
darkened upper deck and disappeared below.

In his galley old Skilton, with his cap tilted over his eyes, lay prone
on a locker with his head pillowed on one arm. His legs were doubled up
almost to his chin. There was no room to stretch out. Nevertheless, he
was asleep, and snoring gently. One of his mates, a lanky youth softly
crooning “Little Old Lady” under his breath so as not to awaken his
superior, was stirring a great caldron of bubbling cocoa.

A figure in a balaclava helmet and dirty duffle coat appeared in the
doorway. It held out a tin mug.

“Got a drop to spare, Cookie boy?”

“_Ssh!_” hissed the cook’s mate, flicking a thumb over his shoulder in
the direction of the sleeping Skilton. “Don’t wake him! Give us your
mug, mate.”

The mug was duly filled.

Tony, leaving the bridge, went below to the charthouse. He took a
fleeting look at the dimly lit chart spread out on the table, and then
coiled himself down on the cushioned settee. It was much too short for
him and very hard. Turning over to keep the light out of his eyes he
tried to sleep.


4.

With the advance of one hour in the clocks, sunrise was not due till
about quarter-past seven. At about half-past six, when the sky to the
eastward had just started to lighten, there came a sudden shout from the
port lookout on the _Vexatious’_ bridge.

“Objects bearing red two-oh, sir!” he hailed.

Bickerstaff and Richmond could see them with the naked eye--two small
indistinct shapes at a distance of perhaps eight hundred yards. They
were motionless, and looked about the same size as ordinary fairway
buoys. But no buoys were shown on the chart in this particular
neighborhood. Moreover, why should two buoys be placed within a few
yards of each other?

The Captain and Number One raised their glasses practically
simultaneously. Bickerstaff dropped his a moment later. He remembered
the final paragraph in his sailing orders which said, “No friendly
vessels of any sort will be found on the convoy route during darkness
north of Latitude ----. As speed is imperative in dealing with enemy
motor craft, you are at liberty to take instant action against any ships
sighted without waiting to identify.”

And these _were_ motor craft. They were becoming plainer every minute.

Things began to happen.

Alarm gongs jangled. Bickerstaff shouted some orders down the voicepipe
to the lower bridge. The _Vexatious_ swung slightly to port and
steadied. The engine room, prepared for an emergency increase in speed,
answered the bridge telegraphs immediately.

The two motor craft were now dead ahead ... six hundred yards ... five
hundred. Number One was passing orders to the guns as Tony Chenies
arrived breathless on the bridge. Bickerstaff, with his glasses up, saw
a sudden white wash at the stern of both “E” boats. They were moving
ahead, gradually increasing speed and separating.

“Let ’em have it!” the Captain shouted.

One of the foremost four-inch guns went off with a great crash and a
sheet of golden flame which temporarily blinded everyone on the bridge.
A wave of warm cordite smoke came sweeping aft.

The _Vexatious_ was rapidly increasing speed; but so were the “E” boats.
Tony had a fleeting glimpse of both of them traveling all out, with
their broad wakes stretching astern and the V-shaped plumes of their
bow-waves. They were about five hundred yards ahead, steering divergent
courses. They must be traveling a full thirty-five knots. The
_Vexatious’_ full speed was--well, nobody quite knew what she could do
at a pinch, but she was very old.

Another gun roared out. A two pounder pom-pom, finding its sights
bearing on the enemy to port, suddenly chimed in with its deafening,
deep-throated cacophony. Someone was also using a light machine gun. Its
staccato chatter could be heard as a shrill treble accompaniment to the
din of the larger guns.

Breathless with excitement, Tony watched. It was difficult to see, but
the spectacle, with its noise and rapidity of movement, was even more
thrilling than the blazing _St. Isabel_ in the Atlantic.

Through the smoke and glare of the gun flashes, now scarlet, now golden,
he saw the tall white pillars of a four-inch shell striking the water
and the smaller spurts kicked up by the lighter projectiles from the
pom-pom. He saw the smoke and the dull red glow of their explosion.
Beyond, when she wasn’t obliterated by water and shell bursts, he could
see the dark hull of the enemy motorboat racing through the water with
her heavy bow wave and humped-up stern wash. She was traveling at full
speed and gradually edging away to the eastward, her lifted bow visible
at times against the pearly sheen of dawn encroaching on the sky over
the horizon.

The _Vexatious_, working up to full speed and vibrating with every ounce
of steam her boilers could give her, was following her enemy round. The
captain was evidently trying to make certain of one bird, though the “E”
boat was gaining rapidly.

Tony was watching the motorboat to port. It wasn’t until later that he
discovered that her consort to starboard had circled round, and was also
being engaged by the after guns and the starboard pom-pom. Some said
that the enemy had fired torpedoes at a range of a few hundred yards.
Mr. Hebard, who was at the after guns, later swore that he had seen the
telltale splashes as they were discharged, and their whitened tracks in
the water passing across the _Vexatious’_ wake. There was no reason to
disbelieve him, but at any rate the torpedoes missed. Mr. Hebard also
averred that his particular enemy had been hit before putting her helm
hard over and disappearing in the darkness. His evidence, however,
conflicted with that of other witnesses, who said that this particular
“E” boat nearly completed a full circle and then vanished to the
southward, still at full speed.

Things happened in split seconds. Guns blazing and roaring, orders being
shouted, and smoke and flame combined to give a series of fleeting
glimpses rather than any consecutive view of what happened. The whole
affair was over in a few minutes. It was later difficult to establish
any sort of sequence when a whole series of incidents occurred in such
rapid succession. Everyone had a different story. They were all
convinced that their tale was the correct one.

Anyhow, watching the “E” boat to port, Tony suddenly became conscious
that she was firing back. In a rift between the smoke and shell splashes
he caught sight of the bright sparkle of gun flashes from her lifted
forecastle, and a series of flaming trails speeding through the air in
his direction. The enemy was using tracer ammunition from some sort of
heavy machine gun. He heard a vicious “_Whee-uu_, _whee-uu_, _whee-uu_,”
overhead, series after series of them as they came over in bursts--then
a thudding clang as some part of the ship was hit. It was followed by a
second clang, and a third.

It was the first time Tony had been under fire. These things which
buzzed like swarms of angry hornets were heavy bullets. He felt rather
naked and unprotected, but more angry than frightened. The damned cheek
of it!

The “E” boat, twisting and turning, still seemed to be increasing her
lead.

Someone must have given the orders, for the pale, blue-white finger of
the _Vexatious’_ searchlight suddenly flashed out and swept forward,
with funnel and cordite smoke eddying through its brilliant ray. It
illuminated the enemy for a flickering instant--the dark hull and the
silvery whiteness of her wake and bow wave. The next moment, as the ray
moved farther ahead, the image was completely blotted out. Tony noticed
that where the light touched the water the sea became a wonderful
translucent blue.

“Damn and blast it!” Bickerstaff roared, forgetting his usual
politeness in the stress of the moment. “Give those nitwits the bearing,
and tell ’em to hold her! Train aft, damn it!”

What had really happened was that the men at the searchlight or those
controlling it could not see the target through the clouds of drifting
smoke.

The light moved slowly aft again, to hold the “E” boat in its glare
whenever she was not obliterated in smoke and spray. She was drawing
away, but the _Vexatious’_ guns still thudded.

Then, when Tony had made up his mind that the enemy would escape and he
was wishing with all his heart that he was in a brand-new thirty-six
knotter instead of an ancient relic of the last war, something happened.

There came a bright pale yellow flash from somewhere amidships in the
target--then a spurt of orange flame mingled with smoke. The searchlight
was full on her at the time. The bow wave and wake vanished. The next
thing Tony saw was a dark object like a blunt spearhead standing
vertically out of the water--the “E” boat’s bows.

He could have shouted with joy. There came a little burst of cheering
from some men on the upper deck.

“Well, that’s that,” said Bickerstaff breathlessly, as the guns ceased
firing and the turmoil died away. “Well done, Number One! Jolly good
work!”

Richmond grinned.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “It looked to me as if something touched off
her petrol and blew her stern off. Damn lucky shot. Are you going to
stop for any possible survivors?”

“Not on your life I’m not, with that other blighter sculling around!
We’ll tell one of the others.”

The _Vexatious_ swerved to port. With her searchlight still on, she
steamed past the remains of the “E” boat at a distance of little more
than a hundred yards. The water was covered with oil and splintered
wreckage. The sharp bows were gradually sinking lower in the water. They
could see no signs of any survivors. Still, it was wise to investigate.
Survivors were always useful. Bickerstaff, using his wireless, detailed
one of the escorting corvettes to proceed to the spot and search. An
hour later she reported. There were no survivors--only the corpses of
four men in lifebelts.

Until half an hour after daylight the _Vexatious_ hunted for the other
“E” boat, which might have been damaged. There were no signs of her. She
had vanished into the blue, probably streaking at full speed toward
Germany hoping to escape British fighter aircraft on the way.

The _Vexatious_ rejoined the convoy. Bickerstaff retired to his sea
cabin to make up for a sleepless night. Tony Chenies ate an enormous
breakfast in the wardroom and went to his cabin to sleep. He was too
tired even to brush his teeth.


5.

They had an air attack that afternoon, but the enemy was not
particularly venturesome.

The sky had cleared and the sun shone overhead in a dome of almost
cloudless blue. The Germans, flying at about seven thousand feet in a
series of V-shaped formations, first appeared as a swarm of midges high
up to the eastward. They came closer, the sun glinting like gold and
silver on their wings as they turned and came in to attack.

The anti-aircraft guns of the escorts pumped shell into the sky until
the blue became pockmarked with little puffs of smoke of browny-orange,
lilac, sooty black, and gray. The enemy came down on a long slant, to
scatter their bombs at random among the convoy. The sea spouted tall
pillars of white and gray in all directions while the guns redoubled
their uproar. No ship was hit, though there were many near misses. On
more than one occasion Bickerstaff’s heart was in his mouth as he
watched a small coaster steaming unconcernedly through what looked like
a forest of waterspouts.

Then, when least expected, one enemy aircraft seemed to crumple and halt
in mid-air. She started to flame, then to smoke, before falling to the
sea like a plummet leaving an inky trail behind her. She hit the water
with a splash and disappeared. Another machine broke away from her
formation with smoke pouring from her tail and made off to the eastward,
gradually getting lower. Nobody saw her end, but it was unlikely she
ever reached Germany.

Next a squadron of British fighters appeared from the direction of the
coast and engaged about three times their own number of opponents with
undaunted courage. The enemy promptly turned tail and fled. Firing
ceased for fear of hitting friends. The guns’ crews, clustered round
their weapons, cheered on the British team as though they were watching
a football match. Amid the roar of many engines one heard the
_rat-tat-tat-tat-ta_ of machine guns as the two parties met almost
immediately over the convoy. The sunlight flashed from many wings as the
machines swooped and circled and tumbled. It was a thrilling and
breath-taking performance to watch.

Another enemy started to smoke and came rushing toward the sea on a long
slant. About halfway down a small black dot detached itself from the
machine and started to fall vertically. A white flower-like parachute
opened out and retarded its headlong progress. A corvette put her helm
over and made for the spot where the airman might be expected to fall
into the sea.

A third airplane started to drop vertically, turning over and over like
an autumn leaf fluttering from a tree. No one in the _Vexatious_ saw
where she descended before the Germans disappeared to the eastward with
the British still in full pursuit.

As an official communiqué described it two days later:

“An attack by enemy motor torpedo boats was made on a convoy off the
east coast before daylight on Wednesday morning. After a short and
spirited engagement one of the enemy was sunk. We sustained no
casualties. An air attack was carried out on the convoy during the same
afternoon, one enemy machine being brought down and another damaged by
the ships’ gunfire. Fighters of the Coastal Command soon appeared on the
scene and drove off the attackers, four of the enemy being destroyed and
several more damaged before the chase had to be abandoned. Our aircraft
sustained no losses. All ships of the convoy reached their destination
in safety.”

Tony Chenies read the communiqué in the newspapers. He was secretly
disappointed at so terse a description of the “short but spirited
engagement” which had been so wildly exciting while it lasted.

But the old _Vexatious_ had something to show for it--two ragged holes
in her foremost funnel and three more through the seamen’s messdeck.

And Able Seaman Flagg had a grievance.

“I ask you to look at this here, sir,” he said, appearing in Tony’s
cabin with a rolled-up serge garment. “I calls it a blinkin’ houtrage!”

He unrolled his best jumper, torn and punctured in four places.

“It’s lucky you weren’t inside it, Flagg,” Tony laughed.

Flagg was not amused.

“Me inside it!” he snorted. “What I wants to know, Mister Cheenies, sir,
is if the Ad-miral-ity gives me a new shoregoin’ jumper instead o’ this
here one what fitted me perfect an’ hasn’t hardly been worn? Them
perishin’ Huns! Why must they go makin’ a target o’ my blinkin’ locker?
There are plenty o’ other lockers in the ship. Why single out me?”

Why indeed?


6.

Captain Hardcastle was right when he spoke of more excitement on the
East Coast than in convoy work in the Atlantic. Hardly a trip passed but
that the _Vexatious_ sighted enemy aircraft and saw bombs dropping among
the ships of her convoy. Sometimes, more venturesome, the hostile planes
came down to less than a hundred feet to use their machine guns.

The anti-aircraft guns of the _Vexatious_ and other escorts were
constantly in action. Once or twice merchant ships were sunk or damaged
by bombs or hit by machine guns. Several times enemy aircraft were
brought smoking down into the sea by the ships’ gunfire.

Aircraft of the Coastal Command were usually quickly on the scene to
chase the attackers back across the North Sea and to bring others
tumbling down from the sky. People got rather blasé about craning their
necks to watch the dog fights overhead, and on clear days to see the
whorls and twisting curves of the white vapor trails against the blue of
the sky as opposing machines circled, jockeyed for position, and engaged
each other. Men of the watch below, stretched out asleep in their
clothes after being on the alert on deck all night, grunted and turned
over when they heard the roar of aircraft engines and the rattle of
machine guns.

It was a strenuous time for everyone. Here, as elsewhere, the escorts
were all too few for the work in hand. The time spent in harbor was
reduced to a bare minimum. Moreover, navigation was never easy. Lights
and buoys were extinguished or removed, and the tides were strong and
uncertain. There were outlying shoals and sandbanks, and fog and haze
were not infrequent. The chart became more and more congested with the
symbols denoting wrecks dangerous to navigation, while the harbor
entrances and coastal channels were constantly being mined by enemy
aircraft dropping their cargoes by parachute during the hours of
darkness.

Several ships fell victim to this method of attack, and twice in three
weeks the _Vexatious_ had the job of rescuing survivors from stricken
ships. On one occasion she towed a damaged, unmanageable tramp for eight
hours in half-a-gale of wind and a roughish sea until salvage tugs came
out to take her over.

Yes. The work was full of incident and excitement. New situations and
problems arose nearly every day, and one never quite knew what would
happen next. It was a supreme test of seamanship and endurance, but
comfortless and extremely wearing. Bickerstaff and his officers averaged
perhaps one night in bed out of every eight or nine. Men fell asleep
over their meals, lay comatose on the messdeck lockers during their
watch below.

But the convoys continued to run. Oblivious alike to the dangers of
mines and the attacks by enemy aircraft and motor torpedo boats, the
processions of little coasters, some of them dating back to the
eighteen-nineties, plodded up and down the East Coast and along the
English Channel. The men in them were every bit as stout-hearted and
brave as those in the deepwater ships plying across the Atlantic in the
face of the U-boat campaign.

This particular phase of the _Vexatious’_ work, however, lasted just
under a month. She was suddenly sent north under secret orders. Not even
Bickerstaff knew what was in the wind until the ship reached her
destination and he went ashore to report.

Two days later, with a large troop convoy, they were on their way
to--Norway.




CHAPTER VIII


From the point of view of the navigator, the mountainous coast of Norway
is one of the most dangerous and inhospitable in the world. It presents
a multitude of fiords and narrow gulfs, hardly distinguishable one from
the other, with the snow-covered hills and glaciers always in the
background. For a depth of five or more miles off shore it is thickly
fringed with masses of clustered rocks and islets through which the surf
boils incessantly. It has fierce tides, strong rips, and whirling
eddies. In thick weather the soundings give little indication of the
proximity of land, for the hundred-fathom line often runs within a mile
of the shore. When the weather is stormy and cloudy, with the landmarks
often obscured by snowstorms, or rendered nearly indistinguishable by a
uniform covering of snow, navigation is a veritable nightmare.

It was thus on a morning in April when the _Vexatious_ was approaching
the coast, having been sent on ahead of a convoy of transports and
store-carriers bound for Namsos.

The two days’ passage across the North Sea had been about as bad as
could be imagined. At the outset it had blown a full gale from the
northwest with a heavy sea and sheets of blinding rain which shut down
the visibility to a mile. The wind started to lull soon after midnight
the first night out, but six hours later, just before daylight, the
convoy ran into thick fog, which persisted intermittently all through
the day and into the night.

By one o’clock the next morning the wind started to freshen from the old
quarter and five hours later was again blowing a full gale with heavy
rain mingled with driving snow. It became bitterly cold. The visibility
was less than a mile and the convoy was nearing its destination. The
position was full of anxiety.

The _Vexatious_, in so many words, was ordered to go ahead and try to
make a landfall or locate a certain lighthouse. Thus, at seven o’clock
on that wild morning, rolling and lurching in a furiously breaking sea
with no other ship in sight, Bickerstaff, the First Lieutenant, and Tony
were peering ahead over the bridge rails.

The visibility was still closing down when at about half-past seven a
rocky islet with the seas erupting over it and the spray flying to
leeward in masses of spindrift was sighted about half a mile away on the
starboard bow. It was quite unrecognizable from a hundred others shown
on the chart. A moment later more rocks and islands were sighted ahead.
They, too, could not be identified, and since no sights of the sun or
stars had been possible during the passage across the North Sea, the
_Vexatious’_ estimated position, with that of the convoy twenty-five
miles to seaward, might well be fifteen or twenty miles out.

The situation was unpleasant. The rocks and little islands the
_Vexatious_ was now skirting at reduced speed must be some of those
fringing the mainland, though what part of the mainland it was quite
impossible to guess. The lighthouse for which they were looking was a
red and white structure on an isolated cluster of rocks five miles off
the coast.

“I’m damned if I know!” Bickerstaff muttered to himself.

He was doing some hard thinking. So were Richmond and Tony.

The visibility had shut down to little more than five hundred yards,
with the reefs still in sight to starboard, a regular barrier of them.
The weather showed no signs of clearing, and the convoy of between
fifteen and twenty merchantmen, not counting the escorts, was
approaching the coast at about twelve knots. In little more than two
hours those ships and all they contained would be close up to the rocks
now in sight.

There was a cruiser present with the convoy, and she or one of the
escorts could be informed of the situation by wireless and advised to
turn the ships back until the visibility lifted. But the sailing orders
had enjoined strict wireless silence except in grave emergency or on
sighting the enemy. The reason was sufficiently obvious. Enemy surface
forces and submarines were probably at sea. One touch on a wireless key,
let alone a message, might bring them hurrying to the scene to see what
was in the wind. British covering forces were also at sea, but if the
Germans got in among the convoy anything might happen. Moreover, there
was always the enemy’s aircraft.

Bickerstaff made up his mind. He had nothing whatever to guide him. It
was like looking for a needle in the proverbial truss of hay, but hoping
and praying that the visibility might improve farther out, he swung the
_Vexatious_ out to sea and after steaming three miles started to zig-zag
over a broad front. The gale still blew furiously, but once clear of the
coast the sea became less confused and the motion easier.

For an hour they steamed to and fro at fifteen knots without a glimpse
of anything. The convoy, meanwhile, must be within about twelve miles of
the land, and was still approaching. The rain had ceased, but there were
frequent snow flurries which shut down the view to a few hundred yards.
In the intervals between the squalls one could see a mile, no more. The
peculiar, obliterating haze persisted.

Eight-forty-five. Unless the convoy had reduced speed or altered course,
its plotted position put it no more than eight or nine miles to the
westward. There was little time to spare.

Bickerstaff, munching at a sandwich which served him for breakfast, was
examining the chart.

“I don’t like it at all, Number One,” he said between mouthfuls, shaking
his head. “We don’t want the convoy blundering head on into stuff like
this,” dabbing a gloved finger on places on the chart where the closely
clustered dots and crosses indicating rocks and shoals obliterated all
else. “Remember the visibility close inshore? It was barely more than a
ship’s length at times.”

Richmond agreed.

“Added to which there’s the difficulty of turning the whole bunch in
thick weather and passing the orders down the line, sir,” he said.
“There’ll be a regular pot-mess, everyone getting the staggers and going
off on his own.”

“You’ve said it, Number One.”

“Then what’ll you do, sir?”

“I’ll carry on looking for this blinkin’ lighthouse for ten minutes
more. If we don’t sight it by then, and I doubt very much if we shall,
I’ll shape course direct for the convoy and suggest to the _Endymion_
that we wait till the weather clears. I know it’s urgent to get the
troops ashore, and all that, but we _can’t_ take the risk of wrecking
the whole outfit.”

The First Lieutenant agreed.

“But can we afford to wait ten minutes, sir?” he asked.

“Yes. I’ve worked it out. --Lord! Why the devil should we have weather
like this in April?”

“We’re pretty far north, sir.”

“We might be pretty nearly at the North Pole from the snow and perishin’
cold--_Grr!_ What a place! Why didn’t they send me to the tropics, for
the love o’ Mike? I’m no Arctic--”

“Rocks right ahead, sir!” Tony suddenly howled from his position on the
compass platform. “Port twenty, Quartermaster!” he shouted down the
voicepipe without waiting for further orders. There was a note of alarm
in his voice, as well there might be.

“Port twenty of helm on, sir,” came the comforting voice of the
helmsman.

They were passing through the tail end of a snow squall. The visibility
was no more than four hundred yards, and there, almost dead ahead,
Bickerstaff saw an area of leaping surf with ugly-looking fangs of dark
rock showing amidst the yeasty white.

The ship was steaming fifteen knots--four hundred yards in forty-eight
seconds.

She suddenly seemed very sluggish on her helm, and from where
Bickerstaff stood looking over the bridge rail the patch of surf seemed
to extend well across to the port bow. It was coming nearer.

Would she clear, or wouldn’t she?

“Hard a’ port!” he ordered. “Stop both engines! Half astern both!” His
heart was in his mouth, though his voice showed none of the emotion he
felt.

Tony was frankly alarmed. His mouth went dry. He felt sick inside,
desperately sick.

The rocks and surf were perilously close now, barely two hundred yards
away. They could see the broad streamers of kelp washing to leeward as
the waves surged over them.

But the _Vexatious_ had started to turn. Her speed was dropping. What
seemed to be the southern edge of the rocky patch was sliding away to
starboard.

“Stop both!” Bickerstaff ordered. “Helm amidships, Quartermaster!”

The snow squall was passing. An instant later, beyond the rocky area,
they saw the dim shadow of a tall, cylindrical object towering nearly a
hundred feet out of the water well clear on the starboard bow. There had
been no time for the _Vexatious_ to gather sternway. She was still
moving slowly ahead, and in a few seconds the shape resolved itself into
the tower of a red-painted lighthouse set upon a plinth of dirty white
with the sea boiling madly round its base.

“Lord! What a stroke of luck!” Bickerstaff breathed, his heart full of
thankfulness. “But a damn narrow squeak for us, all the same. If the
weather had been a bit thicker, well....” He shrugged his shoulders.

Within three-quarters of an hour the _Vexatious_ was rejoining the
convoy to seaward. She had sighted it at a distance of four miles, for
the visibility was rapidly improving. Her ten-inch signaling searchlight
started to blink.

“_Vexatious_ to _Endymion_,” it spelled out letter by letter. “Kya
Lighthouse bearing 087 distance 8½ miles.”

“_Endymion_ to _Vexatious_,” came the reply. “Thank you. Well done.”


2.

Namsos, twenty miles from the sea toward the head of a narrow fiord
zig-zagging inland between high, barren-looking hills nearly covered in
snow, had railway communication with Grong and Stenkjer and Trondheim to
the southward. Hence its use as a disembarkation port for part of the
Expeditionary Force. The little wooden-built town, with its jetty and
quay, surrounded by thick woods and overhung by the inevitable snow-clad
mountains, was typical of many others.

The _Vexatious_, however, was due to escort another convoy home. On that
first visit she stayed at Namsos for no longer than a few hours, just
time enough to see the first of the troops disembarking. They were in
the highest of spirits after their stormy passage across the North Sea.
Singing and shouting, they seemed pleased at the idea of coming to grips
with the enemy.

Greatly outnumbered, ill-prepared for the onslaught of the German
armored troops and motorized columns, too far from home to be provided
with fighter aircraft to keep off the enemy’s low-flying bombers using
their machine guns, harassed by the heavy fire of enemy light naval
craft at Stenkjer, where the railway line ran close to the arm of a
fiord with communication with the sea, the troops fought with desperate
courage and tenacity. They could do little against a determined enemy
who had prepared every detail of the campaign months beforehand and was
helped by traitorous elements within the country itself.

In something less than three weeks the campaign in southern Norway was
at an end, and the Navy was helping in the re-embarkation of troops at
Namsos and Andalsnes. For part of the time the _Vexatious_ was at
Namsos, a period which no one on board was likely to forget.

The tired troops were marching through the town to embark in small craft
and boats alongside the jetty for transport to the ships when the German
planes first came over. Every ship in the anchorage opened up with her
anti-aircraft guns as they appeared. The sky became dotted with the
varicolored smoke puffs of exploding shell, and one aircraft came
tumbling down in a black trail of smoke to disappear behind a hill. Then
came the eerie whistle of the falling bombs and the thudding crash of
their detonation as they struck. Some, falling in the water, raised
their ugly waterspouts. Others fell ashore in great bursts of smoke and
up-flung debris. No ship was hit on that occasion, though there were
several near escapes. On the outskirts of the little wooden town,
however, long tongues of bright flame and a gathering volume of smoke
drifting down wind told their tale.

There was a short respite, during which the sweating, steel-helmeted
crews of the anti-aircraft guns replenished their ammunition, snatched
some food and drink, and lit their inevitable cigarettes. They knew,
everyone knew who knew anything, what to expect next.

The Germans had occupied all the airdromes in the south. There could be
no fighter protection against the enemy bombers. Except for the gunfire
from the ships, Namsos was defenseless. Having seen what was going on,
the enemy would not spare it. Night might give some protection, but in
that high latitude dusk did not come until nine o’clock, with darkness
about an hour later. The night would last no longer than four hours, and
then the all revealing dawn.

The drone of distant engines sounded over the hills to the southward.

“Here come the sons of witches!” muttered a petty officer on the
_Vexatious’_ pom-pom platform, searching the sky through his glasses.
“Stand by, lads.”

Very soon the machines were in sight, a flock of nine midge-like shapes
flying in three little V-shaped groups of three each.

It seemed incomprehensible that such delicate, ethereal-looking things
could wreak incalculable devastation by killing and wounding hundreds,
shattering buildings, sinking ships, and setting towns and cities
ablaze. With the sunlight glinting on their wings they looked beautiful,
as harmless as dragonflies. Yet--

The drumming of the engines grew louder as they came on at something
over ten thousand feet. The first gun went off with a crash. In a moment
every other ship joined in. A little sloop became sheeted in flame and
clouds of dun-colored cordite smoke as her six four-inch guns fell to
work. The noise was deafening as four-inch, three-inch, and two-pounder
pom-poms hurled their projectiles skyward.

Once more those pretty, woolly-looking shell bursts of mauve, gray,
black, yellow, and white broke out against the clear blue of the
heavens. Once again the bombs came down with their eerie whistling....

The raids continued off and on all through the day. Ashore, the little
wooden town began to burn furiously with the showers of high explosive
and incendiaries. Embarkation had to cease. Inhabitants and troops alike
had to take shelter in the woods while Namsos was gradually reduced to a
smoking shambles.

The wooden wharf, on which were some tons of ammunition and hand
grenades, started to blaze redly. There were explosions, with little
gouts of multicolored sparks and flame shooting skyward. There was no
water supply ashore to deal with the fire, they all knew that.

But through the clouds of smoke drifting over the water a
bedraggled-looking trawler steamed stolidly shoreward. She flew a grimy
White Ensign, and was commanded by a lieutenant of the Royal Naval
Reserves.

Placing his little ship’s bows against the wharf, the commanding officer
held her there with the engines. Then, sending all but two of his men
aft to the comparative safety of the stern lest a heavier explosion than
usual should wreck the ship and kill all those in its immediate
vicinity, the Lieutenant and his two men tried to put out the fire with
hoses from the trawler’s forecastle.

“My God!” breathed Bickerstaff, watching with his heart in his mouth.
“That fellow’s got the guts of a lion!”

Bickerstaff was undemonstrative and not at all emotional, but his simple
remark came from a heart full of admiration. He knew bravery when he saw
it. The man commanding that trawler was a hero, nothing less.

For two hours the Lieutenant and his devoted men played their hoses on
the fire. But their puny streams of water could do nothing against a
blaze that was rapidly gaining ground, and might at any moment cause an
explosion which would destroy them. They were forced to give up the task
as hopeless. The trawler was seen to back astern, and for the moment
vanished from the picture.

It wasn’t until afterward that those on board the _Vexatious_ heard the
full story of that little ship. With their own eyes they had seen the
incident alongside the jetty at Namsos, and had marveled. But there was
much more to it than that.

Later it came out how that same ship was bombed six times in twelve
hours. Though she was not hit, a near miss damaged her engines.
Apparently she could still steam dead slow, and was able to go to the
help of other trawlers who were in difficulty. One, which had been
bombed, was blazing furiously and had to be beached.

The Lieutenant’s own ship was in a bad way, so he placed her close to
the shore under a beetling cliff which afforded a certain amount of
protection from the air from one direction. Landing his own men with the
crews of two other trawlers, he formed a camp ashore, arming it with all
the machine guns he possessed. While the engineers did what they could
to effect repairs to the ship, the party ashore kept watch day and
night. There was some chance of interrupted rest for those off duty, and
rest was what they most needed.

In five days the trawler endured thirty-one bombing attacks, while the
camp and gun positions ashore were repeatedly and mercilessly
machine-gunned. But so well had the camp been sited that only one man
was wounded.

The trawler was repaired, and got away. When leaving the fiord she was
sighted by an enemy airplane, which came low and signaled to her to
steer a certain course. This was tantamount to surrender.

The Lieutenant was not that sort of man.

Obey a German? Surrender while he still had a ship that would float and
could steam?

Never. Not he!

Reserving his fire until the plane was close enough to make certain of
hitting he opened up with every gun he possessed, and the German was
brought crashing down into the sea.

The trawler steamed on.

History does not relate what other adventures that little ship and her
gallant men endured before they reached home. The passage across the
North Sea in a sorely-damaged ship cannot have been wholly uneventful.

That Lieutenant of the Royal Naval Reserve became the first surviving
recipient of the Victoria Cross awarded to the Navy during the Second
Great War against Germany.


3.

At what precise time it happened Tony Chenies never troubled to find
out. With the almost continual firing and bomb explosions he lost all
count of time, but the most terrible and spectacular incident of the day
was when the sloop, which had brought one enemy plane flaming and
smoking from the sky and had damaged others, was herself hit.

Three planes were overhead at the time. Two remained at about nine
thousand feet. The third peeled off from the formation, came down in a
screaming dive, and seemed to flatten out at about a thousand feet.

All the guns were firing furiously at the attackers, who continued
their advance through the barrage. Black specks could be seen dropping
from the belly of the lowest plane. They grew larger and elongated as
they came down in a long slant. Their screeching became louder as they
fell. It was audible even above the tumult of the gunfire.

Minutes of suspense seemed to pass before those bombs struck the water
in a series of towering, whitish-gray splashes. There came the deep
_crump-crump_ of their detonation.

“My God, they’ve got her!” someone suddenly said in a strangled voice.

They had. A bomb had landed on board the sloop somewhere near the stern.
They could see the flash and smoke of its explosion, followed almost
simultaneously by a mighty upheaval of flame and yellow smoke and flying
wreckage behind which the whole afterpart of the little ship became
hidden. A fraction of a second later a shattering roar broke out across
the water. No words could adequately convey the immensity of that sound.
It came like the crack of doom, compressing the air and driving the
breath from men’s bodies. The sea danced and shimmered as though beaten
by heavy rain. The _Vexatious_ shook herself.

The gunfire presently ceased as the planes turned to the southward and
made off, one with black smoke pouring out of her tail. A deathly
silence followed.

The stricken sloop, her stern practically level with the water and her
afterpart a mass of tangled wreckage, was drifting helplessly on the
tide. She was on fire, with the flames and clouds of yellow smoke
pouring out of her. Her depth charges had exploded. All the ships near
by sent boats to succor the wounded, but many of her comparatively small
complement had been killed.

Time and time again the planes attacked. As often, the sloop’s gunners
manned their foremost guns and fired until all their ammunition was
spent. Her stern continued to blaze, and the fire could not be
controlled. She drifted ashore, to be carried off again when the tide
rose. Later, when she was carried farther out into the open fiord still
on fire she became a danger to navigation. Her survivors were rescued. A
destroyer, standing off, fired a torpedo. The devoted little ship rolled
slowly over, and sank bottom up in deep water.

She had fought gallantly, and to the end.

In the evening the enemy made further attacks upon Namsos, spraying the
town with incendiaries and high explosives, setting it on fire in many
more places. The conflagration spread until when the dusk came the whole
town was an inferno of leaping red and yellow flame, with the sparks and
heavy black smoke rolling skyward. When the night finally came the scene
was almost as bright as daylight.

Through this crackling, blazing hell, with occasional dumps of
ammunition exploding, the troops were shepherded into the small craft,
ships and boats which took them to the transports farther down the
fiord. Many of them were wounded. All showed traces of their ordeal. Too
tired in some cases even to eat or drink, they slept with their heads
pillowed on their haversacks. The naval beach parties, unshaven,
begrimed with smoke, and some of them bandaged, were the last to leave.
They had done magnificently.

Tony watched some of the exhausted troops coming on board.

“Good old ruddy Navy!” said a dirty, bandaged corporal, carrying his own
and someone else’s rifle and an assortment of kit. He sat himself down
on deck and in a moment was asleep.

The _Vexatious_ left before dawn with her upper deck and living spaces
crowded with exhausted men, some of them survivors from the sloop.
Maclean, assisted by Midshipman Morgan, did all he could for the
wounded. In the ship’s galley Skilton and his assistants were working
overtime. So were the officers’ cooks in the galley aft. Bluejackets
went round with sandwiches and mugs of soup and cocoa. It was one of the
occasions when Bickerstaff felt himself justified in authorizing an
extra issue of rum, rum, mixed with hot water and brown sugar, a full
tot to every man who needed it. Few refused. Someone produced an
accordion, someone else a mouth organ.

“Are we downhearted?” a raucous voice shouted.

“No-o-o!” came the answering chorus. --“_Roll out the barrel_....”

“Damn that blasted song!” growled Bickerstaff on the bridge. “I’d like
to throttle the man who wrote it. Can’t they think of anything else to
sing? I’m sick of barrels.”

“Shall I send down and have it stopped, sir?” someone asked.

“God forbid!” the Captain replied. “Let ’em sing, poor chaps. It’ll
cheer ’em up. Lord knows they can do with it.”

As the _Vexatious_ steamed down the fiord, the rosy glare of blazing
Namsos was reflected in the pall of smoke showing over the gaunt
silhouette of a great mountain. The color faded as the pale daylight
crept slowly out of the east. All that remained against the opalescence
of the dawn was a tall pillar of dark smoke rising high above the
mountains before drifting horizontally away on some upper air current.

The passengers were safely transferred to a transport. Four hours later
the _Vexatious_ was at sea steaming westward with a convoy. The
mountainous crags of Norway were slowly disappearing over the horizon
astern.

Mr. Hebard arrived on the bridge to relieve Tony halfway through the
forenoon watch. Nobody had had much sleep for the past forty-eight
hours. The regular watches were upset for the time being.

“I’ve come up to give you a spell, Mister Chenies. It’s time you had a
drop of shut-eye.”

“It’s time we all had a drop of shut-eye,” Tony answered. “I don’t seem
to have slept for days.”

“How many more shimozzles like yesterday are we going to get?” Mr.
Hebard queried. “If it goes on like that we’ll have to tow a lighter
astern carrying extra A.A. ammunition. I’ve been trying to reckon out
how much we expended.”

“Store books again?” laughed Tony, smothering a yawn.

“Someone’s got to keep tally, Mister Chenies. There’s rules and
regulations.”

“To hell with your rules and regulations in wartime, Guns! Who cares?”

“I dunno,” said Mr. Hebard. “I suppose _someone_ looks at the bloomin’
store books.”

“I wonder,” Tony said. “What a depressing occupation.”

“All I know is I get rude letters when the figures don’t tally, Mr.
Chenies. Anyhow, though we don’t get much money we _do_ see life, and
that’s a fact.”

“You’re telling me,” said Tony with deep feeling. “If anyone had told me
a year ago that I should see what I have I should have called him a
damned liar.”

“Aye,” Mr. Hebard agreed. “And we’ll see a lot more before we’ve put
that Hitler where he belongs. That’s got to be done before I go back to
growing sweet peas, carrots, and tomatoes in the nice little house and
garden it took me years to save up for. I got third prize for cucumbers
at the flower show, Mr. Chenies. It would have been first prize by now
if it hadn’t been for Hitler. Aye, it would indeed. I’m a born
gardener.”




CHAPTER IX


Dunkirk was blazing. It had been bombed day and night for weeks. The
funereal black pall of its burning oil tanks pouring into the sky and
constantly replenished was visible far beyond Dover, where the
_Vexatious_ was completing with fuel after being sent down from the
north “with all possible despatch,” as the sailing orders put it.

Every soul on board knew that the situation in France was serious. They
had been aware of it from the rare occasions when they had a chance of
looking at the newspapers in harbor. They knew it still better from the
regular news bulletins broadcast by the B.B.C. which reached them also
at sea.

Before passing the North Foreland they had seen that ominous dark cloud
in the sky over the French coast, and could hear the occasional rumble
of guns from the same direction. It sounded like the throbbing of
distant drums, and was not continuous. It might persist for a minute or
more and then die away, to revive after a short breathing space.

They noticed there was much more shipping about than was usual for
wartime. The anchorages off Ramsgate and in the Downs were well filled.
Later, passing by that tall buttress of white cliff between the South
Foreland and Dover, many more vessels could be seen at sea, some moving
in the direction of France, others proceeding toward Dover and
Folkestone. They formed a varied collection--destroyers, minesweepers,
trawlers, and drifters, cross-Channel steamers serving as transports,
white painted hospital ships, little coasters, tugs, and pleasure paddle
steamers, motor vessels, miscellaneous craft of many kinds, mostly
small. Their presence, with the other ships lying in Dover harbor, and
the steam and motor-boats passing between them and the shore, showed
that something unusual was in progress. So did the signals received on
arrival:

     “COMPLETE WITH FUEL. DESPATCH IS NECESSARY. KEEP STEAM AT FIVE
     MINUTES’ NOTICE. COMMANDING OFFICER IS TO REPORT AT VICE ADMIRAL’S
     OFFICE AFTER SECURING. ANY RIG. CAR WILL BE SENT TO ADMIRALTY
     PIER.”

It was followed by another:

     “INDICATE IMMEDIATELY EXTRA QUANTITIES OF ANTI-AIRCRAFT AMMUNITION
     AND CALIBERS THAT CAN BE EMBARKED FOR READY USE. INDICATE
     QUANTITIES OF PROVISIONS REQUIRED. AMMUNITION AND PROVISIONS
     TOGETHER WITH EMERGENCY RATIONS WILL BE SENT BEFORE SAILING.”

Giving himself time to change into a fairly respectable monkey jacket,
to slip out of his sea boots, and to replace his blue jersey with a
collar and tie, Bickerstaff got into his motorboat and went ashore. He
was still unwashed and unshaven.

The car was waiting at the landing steps.

“Are you Commander Bickerstaff, sir?” the Wren driver asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m ordered to take you to the Admiral’s office, sir.”

She was quietly efficient and uncommunicative. She probably knew what
Bickerstaff was longing to know, but he abstained from asking too many
questions, particularly when she was driving. He noticed how tired she
looked, how serious her expression.

She was a pretty girl, with curly corn-colored hair escaping under the
rim of her blue hat with the gold H.M.S. on the ribbon. She was almost
young enough to be his daughter--charming, well-spoken, intelligent,
intent on her job, “strict Service,” as the Navy would put it, with her
quiet “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir.” In point of actual fact she had hardly
slept during the last three days.

“Yes, sir,” she admitted. “We have been rather rushed lately.”

“D’you like it?” Bickerstaff asked, as they turned into a straight bit
of road with no traffic.

“Of course, sir. It’s my job.” And then, as an afterthought, “My
father’s in the Navy.”

“What’s the name?” Bickerstaff inquired.

“Hawksworth.”

“D’you mean the Vice-Admiral?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bickerstaff remembered. Vice-Admiral Hawksworth, who had retired some
years before the war, was at sea again as a Commodore of convoys, one of
the most strenuous and thankless jobs of the war at sea. His slim,
golden-haired daughter, who wished she had been born a boy, would have
liked to be at sea also. Instead, she was driving a car with the
equivalent rating of ordinary seaman. There were others like her.

The Admiral’s Office was buzzing with activity. Officers, orderlies and
messengers came and went. Telephone bells rang and people answered.
Passing by an open door with a petty officer guiding him Bickerstaff
caught a glimpse of a group of officers poring over a chart spread out
on a large table, with a tray containing the remains of someone’s
breakfast pushed to one side. A yeoman of signals stood by with a signal
pad. Beyond, a Wren sitting at a piled-up table was entering something
in a book. Another, with a pair of earphones clipped over her head, was
plotting something on a chart tacked to a matchboard partition.

It was not unlike other rooms in other naval ports, but the whole
atmosphere was different. People looked taut and anxious, and seemed to
be talking in whispers.

Shown into a crowded room Bickerstaff was introduced to a Commander who
obviously hadn’t slept properly for days. His face was lined and gray
with weariness. There were dark shadows under his eyes, and a thin
stubble on his chin. He wore a tattered monkey jacket with the lace all
frayed and torn.

There was the usual battery of telephones on a table near by, the usual
piles of papers and dockets. Another table carried a litter of charts,
with a dark blue volume of the _Channel Pilot_, a copy of the Tide
Tables, and parallel rulers and dividers. There was a safe and a tall
steel filing cabinet. Two other officers, both Commanders, were at work
in other corners of the room. A camp bed along the wall showed where
someone occasionally slept.

“So you’re _Vexatious_,” said Bickerstaff’s Commander, waving him to a
chair and holding out a packet of cigarettes. “I’m Hartopp, Staff
Officer Operations.”

“Are you giving me the lowdown?” Bickerstaff inquired.

“Yes. I doubt if you’ll be able to see the Vice-Admiral. He’s up to the
eyes in it. --Your ship’s oiling, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“How long will it take, d’you think?”

“We ought to be ready in about an hour from now.”

“Good! You got our signals about extra ammunition, provisions, and so
on.”

“Yes. The replies were being made as I left,” said Bickerstaff.

“You’ll need all the A.A. stuff you can stow. It’s being used up on the
other side like blazes. But our people’ll see to that. D’you know
Dunkirk?”

Bickerstaff said he had been there occasionally during the last war, but
only occasionally.

“Apt to be nasty if you don’t know it,” Hartopp returned. “It’s full of
banks and shoals, and the tides are the very devil. What about your
charts?”

“I’ve got the usual folios.”

A telephone buzzed. The S.O.O. picked up the receiver. He listened, and
replied.

“No,” he said. “I can’t talk to anyone now if it’s not urgent. I’m
engaged. If he leaves a message I’ll deal with it later and let him
know.... Yes, all right.... Exchange.... What about that call through to
Dunkirk? I’ve been waiting twenty minutes.... Yes. Hurry it along,
please.

“Sorry for these interruptions,” he continued, turning to Bickerstaff.
“Now your charts. If you’re not certain about yours being fully
up-to-date, ask for a special set on your way out. Third door down on
the left. The people there’ll give you the latest route orders and all
the dope you want.”

If he hadn’t done so before, Bickerstaff sensed the atmosphere of
urgency. From all this talk about Dunkirk and extra anti-aircraft
ammunition he realized that something especially important was brewing
on the other side of the Channel. But still he didn’t know precisely
what it was, except that Dunkirk was on fire.

“What’s the situation?” he asked.

“We’re withdrawing the B.E.F.,” he was told.

“Withdrawing it!”

“Haven’t you followed the news?”

“I’ve been at sea for....”

“Of course,” he was interrupted. “I forgot for the moment. The fact is
the confounded Hun’s crashed through everything with his tanks. The
B.E.F.’s fighting a rearguard action and retreating to the sea. They’ll
be cut off and pushed _into_ the sea unless they’re taken off. That’s
where we come in. We’re collecting every mortal thing we can, every sort
of ship or boat that’s available and can cross the Channel to work off
the beaches or alongside in Dunkirk. The weather’s good enough now,
thank God! If it comes on to blow, well ... I’m damned if I know.” He
shrugged his shoulders.

“How many troops?” Bickerstaff wanted to know.

“Something over a quarter of a million. I can’t give you the exact
figure, but that’s near enough to go on with.”

Bickerstaff gasped. A quarter of a million, he thought to
himself--250,000 men! How ever many destroyers and other craft would it
take to carry that number? Where would the ships come from? In ordinary
peacetime conditions the task would be difficult enough to tackle. In
war, with enemy interference ...

But Hartopp was speaking again and might almost have guessed his
listener’s thoughts. He described how the work must probably be carried
out under harassing artillery fire and continual bombing and
machine-gunning from the Luftwaffe. The R.A.F. were putting up a
magnificent show, but they simply hadn’t the aircraft for all the jobs
they had to do. They were fighting all out, as hard as they knew, and
the odds were fully fifty to one, probably more.

There came a ring on one of the telephones. It was the call to Dunkirk.
The S.O.O. spoke for two or three minutes in short, clipped sentences,
arranging, it seemed, about temporary repairs to a damaged destroyer.
Whatever happened she must carry on. If nothing could be done over that
side, they’d have a look at her when next she arrived at Dover. --Yes.
He’d see to it.

“Sorry to be so disjointed,” he said to Bickerstaff, scribbling a note
on a signal pad. “I’m kept pretty busy, as you can see. Where was I?”

“You’d mentioned the R.A.F.”

Hartopp went on to say how the Germans were advancing rapidly with the
avowed intention of annihilation. They had driven an armored spearhead,
so to speak, to the coast south of Cap Grisnez. Boulogne, held by a few
battalions, might fall very soon under the pressure of the advancing
hordes. Calais was also held for the time being, though the Lord only
knew how long the defense could be maintained. Dunkirk was under
artillery fire and bombing. The port itself, and a short stretch of
open beach to the northeast up toward Ostend, were all that remained for
the embarkation. If Dunkirk could be used, so much the better. It had
quays and jetties. If the ships had to lie off the open beaches and use
boats for ferrying men off, the job would be slow and difficult. If the
wind and sea rose, it might even be impossible. But the situation was
changing practically every hour. Bickerstaff must be guided by any
orders from the Senior Naval Officer at Dunkirk, those and his own
judgment. The Army had _got_ to be lifted. That was all there was to it.

“And I wish to God I could come with you!” Hartopp added with a sigh.
“Here am I, an old destroyer bird, cooped up with these telephones, and
you lucky devils getting all the fun. Well, I think that’s the lot.
You’re clear about the charts?”

“Perfectly.”

“Then get away as soon as you can, and let us know about ten minutes
before you leave. You’re sure there’s nothing else you want?”

“Nothing that I can think of.”

“Then that’s all. But take my tip and don’t make more signals than you
absolutely need. We’re overdone as it is. Act first and argue later. So
long, and good luck.”

Bickerstaff was outside in the passage before he knew it. It was with
rather mixed feelings that he collected his charts and route orders and
returned to his ship by the way he had come.

Little more than an hour later the _Vexatious_ slipped out to sea
through the gap in the breakwater. Her engine room telegraphs jangled as
she increased speed, steaming in the direction of that cloud of black
smoke which indicated the position of Dunkirk.

Her officers and men knew what was happening. Bickerstaff had called
them aft and made them a little speech. Some of the men were already
wearing their steel helmets. The gun’s crews were furbishing up their
weapons. The anti-aircraft and machine guns were ready for instant
action. Men with glasses were sweeping the blue sky to the eastward for
those speeding black specks which might herald a bombing attack. A
flight of British fighters roared overhead and disappeared in the same
direction.

The day was without wind, and a sea that was almost oily in its
calmness. A large and miscellaneous flotilla was steaming in the same
direction as the _Vexatious_. The Channel seemed dotted with ships.

The dark lump of Cap Grisnez, with the lighthouse on its summit, showed
over the horizon broad on the starboard bow. To the left of it the
buttress of tall white cliff between Wissant and Sangatte glimmered
almost like frosted silver in the sunlight. So clear was the weather
that looking through glasses one could even see the tall pillar of the
Dover Patrol Monument of the last war at Cap Blanc Nez. When that
memorial was raised to the seamen of 1914-18 people little thought they
would be fighting again in the same area in twenty years.

The sable cloud still hung in the sky in the direction of Dunkirk.
Freakish air currents high overhead had wafted the dark pall into the
semblance of a titanic black hand severed at the wrist with the index
finger pointing downward--pointing at the doomed town and its crowded
mass of troops and civilians against which the German hordes were
advancing.

Above the rippling sound of the _Vexatious’_ passage through the water
came the steady throbbing of bombs and gunfire. It grew louder as she
approached.


2.

In the light of after events Tony Chenies never properly remembered the
details of that first day.

In the midst of a crowd of other ships, a destroyer or two, trawlers,
tankers, tugs, store-carriers, and motor craft, some of them with
lifeboats in tow, the _Vexatious_ steamed past Calais and Gravelines
without incident, and ten miles on to Dunkirk.

Navigation was simple enough in daylight, with the buoys in place and
some of the banks showing. But in thick weather, or at night with all
the lights on shore or on the buoys extinguished, the area must be a
navigator’s nightmare. The tide ran like a mill-race, and for fully ten
miles seaward the coast was hedged round with a maze of dangerous shoals
and banks with narrow channels of tolerably deep water running between
them. And where there wasn’t shoal water there were minefields and
obstructions in profusion to entrap the unwary.

Tony didn’t know the coast, but had heard Bickerstaff saying something
to the First Lieutenant about the possibility of embarking troops in
boats from the nine-mile stretch of sandy beach east of Dunkirk and in
the direction of La Panne. The ships, unless they drew very little
water, would have to lie between half and three-quarters of a mile out
from the gently shelving shore. Looking at the large-scale chart it
seemed as though men might have to wade a quarter of a mile or more into
the sea before getting wet up to their armpits. Even the lightest boats
would ground some distance out, and there would come the usual
difficulty of refloating them and getting them off to the ships when
full up with their human cargoes. If it came on to blow at all and the
wind kicked up a surf, boatwork would be the very devil, particularly
with tired soldiers laden with all their paraphernalia. Quite apart from
any bombing or shelling by the Germans, one could see at a glance it
would be a difficult sort of business.

On that first trip of hers, however, the _Vexatious_ ran into Dunkirk
harbor and alongside the tidal basin. Within a few hundred yards of
where she lay warehouses and oil tanks were blazing to the heavens and
vomiting forth clouds of inky black smoke. The air was full of oily
smuts, and the very water covered in places with thick scum. Hardly a
minute passed without the whistle and crash of falling bombs, whole
clusters of them. Little could be seen of the sky for drifting smoke,
but now and again they could hear the rattle of machine guns or rifle
fire. Ships had already been sunk in the inner basin. Other wrecks were
restricting the already narrow channel between the twin wooden
breakwaters giving access to the port.

Bomb after bomb rained down through the pall wreathing and eddying
overhead. Time after time Tony heard their shrill crescendo. Once, out
of the tail of his eye, he glimpsed a muddy, whitish-gray waterspout
leaping out of the harbor within what looked like thirty feet of the
ship. The _Vexatious_ leaped and rattled to the explosion, the blast of
which knocked Tony’s steel hat sideways. A cascade of water came
tumbling down on deck, drenching many people and covering them with
evil-smelling mud blown up from the harbor bottom. Where all the
splinters went no one discovered.

Flagg, the ever faithful, was standing beside Tony at the time.

“So they calls this France, Mister Cheenies, sir,” he remarked
breathlessly, wiping the slime out of his eyes. “It’s a bit too impolite
for the likes o’ me.” His face, or what could be seen of it, was almost
the color of a Negro’s.

But there was work to be done, and that quickly. Troops were waiting on
the jetty, whence a naval officer in a steel helmet with a revolver
belted round his waist was shouting something to Bickerstaff on the
bridge and gesticulating with a walking stick. He had difficulty in
making himself heard above the uproar.

Ladders were passed down from the shore and the troops started to come
on board--exhausted, dirty men in bedraggled battle dress, some limping
and helped by their friends, some wounded and wearing bandages, some
scorched and blackened by fire--all unshaven, hungry and thirsty.

At least twenty men brought dogs slung over their shoulders, strange
animals of no known breeds and of many different colors--would-be
Pomeranians and fox terriers, reddish dogs, tight little black dogs all
sleek and shiny like top hats, black and white dogs with spindly legs
and long bushy tails, to all of which their owners are profoundly
attached.

“What’s to be done about these here dogs, sir?” a harassed-looking petty
officer asked Richmond.

“Let ’em be, Scroggins,” said the First Lieutenant, who loved all
animals.

“But supposin’ some of ’em’s cavalry, sir, and tries bringin’ horses?”

“Horses, elephants, crocodiles, and performing bears are barred,” said
Number One without a smile. “We must keep our sense of proportion,
Scroggins.”

Number One, Tony, young Stephen, and Mr. Hebard, who were superintending
the embarkation and shepherding and packing the troops on deck and below
wherever room could be found for them, hadn’t it in their hearts to
forbid the canine invasion. It would have been sheer inhumanity to leave
dogs behind in the blazing hell of Dunkirk, though what finally became
of them, except for one pug-like creature called Joe who was formally
adopted by the _Vexatious_, nobody ever discovered. Dogs landed in
England were normally impounded by the authorities to undergo six
months’ quarantine.

More bombs came crashing down while the troops came on board. One,
bursting on the jetty near by, sent its splinters hurtling through the
closely packed ranks. There came a call for stretcher bearers, and
Maclean, the young doctor, scrambled ashore with his medical bag to give
what help he could. There was little he could do beyond giving first aid
to some of the living, before, fuming with annoyance, Bickerstaff sent a
messenger to tell him to return. Maclean’s job was on board the ship.
There was more than enough for him to do there among the wounded.

How long that first embarkation took nobody discovered. If the times
were entered in the _Vexatious’_ log, they were probably inaccurate. But
after what seemed an age, Bickerstaff, having consulted the naval
officer on the jetty, ordered the work to cease. The ship was already
packed full--messdecks, the living spaces aft, and the whole of the
upper deck and forecastle. Another destroyer and some smaller craft
were waiting to come alongside and take her place.

The ladders were hauled ashore and the securing wires cast off. The
_Vexatious_ yelped thrice on her siren as Bickerstaff, using his engines
cautiously, started to back astern. A blanket of smoke drifting across
the narrow entrance made it difficult to see.

“Damn!” he muttered to himself, peering aft from the bridge. “She’s as
cranky and as sluggish as a cow in the family way! Half astern
starboard!” he gave the order. “Port fifteen!”

The extra weight of nearly six hundred men certainly made the ship very
difficult to handle. She seemed to heel over, and to remain there,
whenever the helm was put over. But Tony and the First Lieutenant were
lost in admiration at the way the Captain took the _Vexatious_
stern-first out of harbor through the long narrow channel between the
wooden breakwaters with a sluicing tide running across the entrance.

Tony gasped audibly as they missed an incoming trawler, which should
have waited, by a matter of a few feet. Bickerstaff, with his ship still
moving astern under difficult control, only avoided a nasty collision by
going full speed ahead on one engine at the critical moment. The ships
just slithered by each other without touching. Tony could have lobbed an
apple on to the trawler’s bridge, where stood a purple-faced officer
clutching the rails with his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

The Captain had noticed Tony’s agitation.

“All right, Sub,” he said airily. “Don’t get the wind up. You’ll have
plenty more to worry about before this show’s finished. As for that
potbellied pirate over there,” he added wrathfully, shaking his fist in
the trawler’s direction, “I’d gladly have his guts for a necktie, the
blundering, fat-faced old blighter!”

Once more “Cookie,” his mates, and many willing helpers were busy
providing thick sandwiches of bully beef, with hot soup, coffee, cocoa,
and tea to the famished soldiers, though on a far larger scale than at
Namsos. And the troops, duly grateful, blessed the Navy for its
foresight.

On her way back toward Dover, the _Vexatious_ was twice attacked by
formations of enemy aircraft, though the Germans kept up to about 3,000
feet and no bombs fell nearer than a hundred yards. But it was
sufficiently exciting to watch the destroyer’s anti-aircraft guns
pumping shell into the sky and at least two of the machines driven back
to the east and probably damaged.

At the height of the second attack, which was more determined than the
first, three British fighters appeared flying in rings round the greatly
superior mass of their opponents. The _Vexatious’_ guns ceased firing
during the dog fight that ensued. One heard the staccato stutter of
machine guns as the Spitfires sailed right into the enemy and fell to
work. There came a roar of cheering from the closely packed troops on
deck as a Heinkel burst into flame and smoke and came hurtling down to
the sea like a comet. Another enemy was brought down before the Germans,
misliking the entertainment, turned and fled in the direction of France.
Against the blue sky in the place where they had been three white
flower-like parachutes descended slowly toward the sea.

Dover was reached without further incident, and steaming alongside a
jetty the _Vexatious_ disembarked her troops. A defect in the engine
room caused by something being shaken off its seating by a bomb
exploding unpleasantly close occasioned a few hours’ delay before it was
put right.

It was half-past two in the morning when she finally slipped out through
the entrance in the breakwaters, and turned her bows in the direction of
that luminous reddish-gold glare in the sky on the French side of the
Channel.


3.

It was about an hour before dawn that the _Vexatious_ cautiously
threaded her way through the narrow anchorage off Dunkirk. The area
seemed to be crowded with shipping without lights.

On shore the fires were still raging in great flickering streamers of
orange and scarlet flame. The smoke cloud drifting overhead was
incarnadined on its underside as though in the blood-red light of a
rising sun. The night, however, had brought little respite to the
bombing. Attracted to the spot by the glare, the German aircraft were
still busy. One heard the constant thud of heavy explosions and saw the
yellowish-white flash of bombs exploding among the thickly clustered
buildings.

Bickerstaff had been instructed not to attempt entering Dunkirk, but to
anchor some three miles to the eastward and to use his boats for
embarking the troops collecting on the beaches. A considerable number of
ships were already anchored in the narrow channel off the coast between
Malo-les-Bains and La Panne--destroyers, minesweepers, tugs, trawlers,
and drifters. Their boats were at work, ferrying off the soldiers in
tens, twenties, and thirties at a time.

There was hardly a breath of wind or a ripple on the water, but the work
was slow and laborious. Because of the shallow water the ships had to
lie half or three-quarters of a mile from the shore. The boats returning
were so crowded that speed was impossible. Every round trip from ship to
shore and back again laden with men took something over half an hour,
though nobody kept count of time.

Choosing a convenient billet the _Vexatious_ let go her anchor. The
pearly light of the dawn was creeping up over the eastern horizon. The
broad stretch of the sands between the water’s edge and the dunes was
broken by great rectangular blocks of deep shadow, with thinner lines of
black stretching down to the sea. The effect was so peculiar that at
first those in the _Vexatious_ couldn’t realize what the dark shadows
represented--men in their thousands patiently awaiting their turn to be
embarked; hungry, thirsty, weary men, many of them wounded, who had
fought and marched and turned to fight again against the oncoming German
panzer divisions with the hordes of mechanized infantry behind them.
Looking at those waiting multitudes Bickerstaff realized that only a
miracle could save even half of them.

The day started to broaden. The boats were turned out and ready for
lowering. Within ten minutes, wearing his steel helmet and with a
revolver strapped round his waist, Tony Chenies was on his way ashore in
the motor boat with two other boats in tow. They took with them numbers
of petrol cans filled with water, cases of biscuit and corned beef,
provender for soldiers who hadn’t eaten a proper meal for days, but a
mere drop in the ocean for the huge numbers of famished, thirsty men
collected on the beaches and still arriving.

When full daylight came and the enemy realized what was in progress his
aircraft appeared overhead. They came first in pairs and in threes, then
in droves and swarms--diving down to within a few hundred feet of the
beaches to bomb and to machine-gun the waiting multitudes. Time and time
again fighters of the Royal Air Force sailed gallantly in to attack
vastly superior numbers of opponents, to bring many flaming and spinning
down from the sky and to send others into headlong flight. They attacked
with magnificent courage, risking everything and achieving a lot. But
bravery alone could not make up for lack of numbers. The Royal Air Force
had commitments in many other directions. For every enemy aircraft
destroyed in the neighborhood of Dunkirk there were hundreds more to
fill their places.

On some days the bombing was practically continuous. On others, when the
punished Luftwaffe was organizing and hiding its wounds, the sky was
sometimes clear of enemy aircraft for hours at a time.

It took over four hours before the _Vexatious_, using her own boats and
such others as were available, was laden with as many men as she could
accommodate. Throughout the whole of that period, so far as Tony could
recollect, aircraft came diving down from overhead. The air was full of
the roar of planes, the staccato _rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-ta_ of their
machine guns, the swishing whine of dropping bombs, and the dull
_cru-u-m-p_ as they burst in the water or along the sandy beaches. The
medley of sound increased in a confused crescendo as the anti-aircraft
guns of the ships in the anchorage found their targets and pumped a
barrage of shell into the sky. At times the gray outlines of the ships
were almost hidden in the reddish-brown clouds of their own cordite
smoke punctuated by the quick stabs of orange flame.

The bullets spurted into the dry sand to raise their little clouds of
dust. They lashed the water in swathes until its calm surface flashed
with silver as though from shoal after shoal of mackerel. The bombs
falling ashore seemed to bury themselves before bursting and raising
their geysers of brownish-gray. In the sea they flung up fountains of
whitish-gray spray which shimmered in the growing sunlight.

Both bullets and bombs were frightening at first. The noise, too, was
sometimes shattering to the senses. It seemed to overpower, to stun, and
to paralyze. One felt inclined to stop everything, to fling oneself flat
and burrow in the sand. Yet, before long, Tony and his boats’ crews
found themselves ignoring both bombs and bullets. Considering the number
of aircraft overhead the damage was insignificant--out of all proportion
to the magnitude of the attack.

There was a job of work to be done. That was all that mattered.
Recovering from their first feelings of helpless fear, Tony and his men
carried on.

Able Seaman Flagg, provided with a bulging haversack which there had
never been time to investigate, had insisted upon accompanying his
“Mister Cheenies.”

“Who the devil sent you here, Flagg?” Tony had demanded wrathfully,
seeing his henchman in the boat when she first left the ship. “Who told
you off?”

“No one _reely_ told me off, Mister Cheenies, sir,” the seaman replied,
looking at Tony with eyes of doglike devotion. “I volunteered like, and
Petty Orficer Scroggins says I wouldn’t be wanted for an hour or two.”

“Huh!” said Tony. “He did, did he?”

“Well, sir. I know’d _you’d_ want me to keep an eye on you.”

“The devil you did!” said Tony. “D’you take me for a baby in arms,
Flagg?”

“No, no, sir. I’m your sort o’ flag lootenant, like. You gives the
orders, an’ I sees ’em carried out.”

Tony gave way, and Flagg had certainly been useful. Transferring himself
to the beach after carefully divesting himself of his sea boots and
stockings and rolling his trousers well above his knees, he fussed like
an old hen with her chicks over trifles that didn’t matter. But bombs
and bullets alike left him completely unmoved. Until ordered to do so by
Tony, he didn’t even trouble to lie flat as enemy aircraft came whizzing
down from the sky. He argued that he presented a less conspicuous target
in a perpendicular position.

He was a real tower of strength when it came to helping the soldiers
into the boats.

“Any more for the fleet? One at a time, mates. Take your places in the
queue, if you please. Come on lad,” to a tired man nearly up to his
waist in water struggling to get into a bobbing whaler. “Give us your
blinkin’ musket. Now, put your right foot in me hands. Right. One, two,
three, an’ up she goes!”

He treated everyone alike, privates, corporals, sergeants,
subalterns--even majors and lieutenant-colonels. Indeed, with most of
them wearing battledress, it was not easy to tell them apart.

But Tony did hear the end of an argument with one rather senior officer.

“Are you aware I’m a major, my man?” the officer asked Flagg with some
show of indignation.

“Sorry if I offended, sir,” said Flagg, touching a finger to the rim of
his steel helmet as he stood nearly up to his waist in water. “But I
can’t help who you are, not even if you was Mister Churchill. Orders is
orders. If you don’t squeeze up tight an’ sit familiar in the
sternsheets of that there boat, there won’t be room for all. With all
doo respect, sir, please, kindly get a move on and tuck them blinkin’
legs o’ yours out o’ the way.”

The officer glowered, but obeyed.

“Easy, Flagg. Easy,” Tony chided. “You must be more civil.”

“Civil, Mister Cheenies, sir! How can I be civil if they gets spreadin’
themselves all over the shop an’ then arguin’ the point as to how they
sits. Who’s in charge here?”

The beaches and anchorage were under intermittent shell-fire from the
direction of the Belgian frontier by the time the _Vexatious_ left. But
occasional shells added little to the effect of the bombs. What was far
more serious was that Calais had fallen to the enemy, and ships
approaching Dunkirk and the beaches by the shortest and most usual
channel from the west were being heavily and accurately fired upon. The
distance to and fro between Dover and Dunkirk by this route was about
eighty miles. While an alternative passage of about 110 miles for the
double journey was laboriously swept and buoyed through the extensive
minefields in the English Channel, ships had to use another route
skirting their northern limit. This meant a wide detour. Instead of the
original round trip of eighty miles, the distance was lengthened by
nearly one hundred miles. This, by increasing the time spent in transit,
reduced the number of ships available at any one time for embarking
troops from the beaches or from Dunkirk. Moreover, the sweepers engaged
in clearing and buoying the shorter route were constantly and heavily
harassed by enemy aircraft all through the hours of daylight.

On her second trip back to Dover with troops, which she disembarked
alongside the jetty, the _Vexatious_ suffered no more inconvenience than
three half-hearted bombing attacks. Her anti-aircraft guns were again in
action, but no bombs fell really close, thanks to the Royal Air Force.

The tired troops on the upper deck cheered and cheered again as on one
occasion a solitary Spitfire charged straight into the middle of a
formation of eleven Germans, shot down one, and sent the rest hurtling
off to the eastward.

“Coo lummy!” said a weary, bandaged corporal, gazing up at the sky.
“They’re running like scalded cats.”

They were. Aircraft for aircraft, or man for man, the Royal Air Force
more than had the measure of the much-vaunted Luftwaffe.


4.

“Mister Chenies, sir.”

Reed, the wardroom steward, was gently shaking Tony by the shoulder.

“Mister Chenies, sir!” louder this time. “Wake up, sir.”

Tony didn’t stir.

Exhausted, he was asleep in a hard chair at the wardroom table, his head
bowed down and pillowed on his folded arms. His arms were on the dirty
white tablecloth, which bore the gruesome traces of past and recent
meals--stains, cups with their dregs and high-water marks of coffee or
cocoa, two empty beer bottles, dirty plates in profusion, bottles of
sauce, half a loaf of bread, and some butter in a saucer, a slab of
tinned beef that might have been carved with a hacksaw.

The decencies of life had completely gone by the board. With so much to
do, people snatched food how they could, when they could, and were
thankful for it. Also, the wardroom had been crowded with officers of
the Army--thirty or forty at a time, crammed into every corner they
could sit, some half asleep on the deck. They also had been fed. No man
had gone away hungry.

The wardroom stores were practically denuded except for tins of
sardines, bottles of anchovies, and a few tins of custard powder.
Whisky, gin, and cigarettes had given out. Only two bottles of beer
remained. Fresh meat and vegetables were exhausted. So were Reed’s
precious reserves of tinned sausages and soups, his potted meat and
tinned salmon. There was practically no fresh bread left, nothing but
ship’s biscuits. A swarm of locusts might have invaded the _Vexatious_.

But it must never be said that the Royal Navy had allowed its famishing
guests to depart hungry or thirsty. Reed, that loyal soul, had seen to
that so far as the officers were concerned. However, he was at his wits’
end as to how to supply the next consignment of guests that must descend
upon him before long. It had been as much as he had been able to do to
provide sandwiches of cold bacon for the Captain’s belated supper at
midnight.

Bickerstaff had wolfed his food on the dark bridge without noticing what
he was eating.

“Lord, Reed!” he had said gratefully. “You’ve saved my life. How are
things aft?”

“Terrible, sir,” Reed had answered. “The wardroom’s like Hampstead Heath
after a Bank Holiday. Your coffee’s in the thermos, sir. Anything else
you’d care for?”

“Nothing except my bunk,” Bickerstaff told him. “And God Almighty knows
when I’ll see that again!”

Reed himself had not enjoyed anything more than occasional twenty minute
cat-naps in the pantry during the past sixty hours. Nor had anyone in
the _Vexatious_. But nobody complained. If they had, they would have
been silenced. All hands were on their mettle.

It was long past midnight now. Another dawn was breaking in the east
beside and beyond the dark cloud and rufous glare in the sky which
showed the position of Dunkirk. The _Vexatious_ was steaming toward it,
rolling gently to a little sea. The wind had freshened. It augured ill
for boatwork off the open, shallow beaches, where the sea might be
breaking surf.

Reed, swaying to the gentle movement and listening to the comforting
rhythmic chugging of the propellers which told his experienced ear that
the ship was traveling at something like twenty knots, stood irresolute
at Tony’s elbow in the wardroom. Should he wake him, or should he not?

On the one hand, he felt he would like to let Tony slumber on, to enjoy
every precious minute of sleep he could get. The lad, like the rest of
them, had had a proper doing during the last few days, and young people
always needed more sleep than their elders. On the other hand, in ten
minutes or a quarter of an hour the ship would be close up to Dunkirk,
and Tony would be required on deck. Mr. Chenies never liked being
wakened in a hurry. He preferred the more leisurely method of yawning
and stretching himself, with a cup of tea or cocoa at his elbow. Tea was
already brewing over the Primus stove in the pantry outside. Reed, who
was well on in the forties and the father of a family, had seen to that.
He liked Tony.

Meanwhile the atmosphere in the wardroom was thick with the odors of
stale tobacco smoke, food, crowded humanity, damp clothing, and general
fugginess. The doctor, bulky with a kapok lifebelt worn under his monkey
jacket, lay stretched out asleep on the starboard settee along the
ship’s side. The opposite settee was occupied by Stephen, the junior
Sub-Lieutenant. Midshipman Morgan snored in an armchair with his
sea-booted feet on the unlit anthracite stove. Behind it, on the white
bulkhead, a note of incongruity was struck by a framed, colored picture
of an undraped blonde with blood-red fingernails. Reed, who strongly
disapproved of it, understood it had been presented to the mess by Mr.
Morgan.

“Mr. Chenies, sir,” said Reed again, returning to his attack on Tony’s
shoulder. “Wake up, sir.”

“Ugh!” Tony grunted, raising his head. “Whassa matter now?” He blinked
and gazed around him, not realizing for the moment where he was.

He yawned, leaning back to stretch himself. “What’s up, Reed?” he asked,
catching sight of the steward.

“We’re getting close up to the other side, sir. You’ll be wanted soon.”

“Half-past four,” Tony murmured, blinking at the clock on the bulkhead.
“How long have I been asleep, Reed? I meant to go to my cabin when I’d
had something to eat. Did I eat, Reed?”

Reed smiled in spite of his weariness.

“You did, sir, and you’ve lain doggo for just about an hour. It’s
getting on for daylight. We’ll be on the job again presently. Will you
have a cup of strong tea, sir?”

“Yes, please. With two spoonfuls of sugar.”

Reed disappeared. Tony rose to his feet, lit a cigarette, and proceeded
to wake Midshipman Morgan. Then he roused Stephen and the Doc.

There was considerable protest and grumbling.

“Lazy devils!” said Tony. “The sun’ll be up in another half-hour, and
we’ll be on the job again. --Phew! The stench in this confounded mess is
enough to suffocate. My mouth tastes as though I’d been sucking brass
filings for a week. What about a pick-me-up, Doc?”

Maclean was sitting on the edge of the settee with his head in his
hands.

“It’s poison you want, Tony, not a pick-me-up,” he said wearily. “You’re
too damnably robust and cheerful for this ghastly hour of the morning. I
feel about all in.”

“Huh!” Tony retorted. “You’re not the only one. What about the skipper
and Number One? What about the whole ship’s company? D’you think we’re
not tired?”

“Suffering Susan!” retorted the doctor. “I’m not complaining. I merely
observed it was time you were put into a lethal chamber, Tony. You’re
too ruddy cheerful.”

“Cheerful be sugared! I’m feeling like a bit of chewed string. But we’re
all in on this racket. We’ll have to carry on until we damn well drop.
Tell me, Doctor dear, how long can a bloke really go on for without
sleep?”

Maclean snorted.

“It depends on the bloke,” he answered. “You’re soft and well
nurtured....”

“Soft be blistered!” Tony hurled back. “For two pins I’d....”

It was at that moment that Reed banged down the trap-hatch for the
pantry, to pass out a huge metal teapot which he put on the sideboard.
It was followed by cups, a bowl of brown sugar, a tin of condensed milk,
and a plate of ship’s biscuits.

Tony proceeded to pour. The four helped themselves.

“Hear that?” Tony asked, listening as the rhythm of the propellers
slowed down.

“Hear what?” demanded Maclean.

“We’ve eased down,” Tony said. “That means we’re passing over the banks.
We’ll be on the job again inside twenty minutes. Be on the top line,
chaps.”

He stirred the tea in his cup and proceeded to swallow it in noisy
gulps. Three minutes later he was making his way forward along the upper
deck.


5.

The day that followed was one of the worst they had experienced. The
rising wind had raised surf on the beaches to add to the other
difficulties. Boat after boat was damaged. Others were capsized,
swamped, or washed bodily ashore. Always it was difficult to embark
tired, burdened soldiers unfamiliar with boats into small craft bumping
perilously among the breakers.

To add to everything else, the artillery fire, with the bombing and
machine-gunning from the air, was accentuated. Many men were killed or
wounded on the beaches.

So for one reason and another the work of embarkation from the shore was
greatly slowed up and impeded. Few of the men forming the boats’ crews
had enjoyed proper rest for days. Working to keep their craft
serviceable and afloat soon reduced them to a state of physical
exhaustion. Apart from getting the troops into the boats and ferrying
them off to the ships in the anchorage under fire, food and water had
also to be landed for those that remained ashore.

More boats were constantly arriving to join the veritable armada of
small craft used off the beaches. They came from all round the coast of
England from Yarmouth to Portland Bill, many of them manned by amateur
seamen or civilian volunteers. They included privately owned motor
craft, pleasure boats from beaches, strings of ships’ lifeboats in tow
of tugs, lifeboats of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, with
Dutch and French coasters and fishing boats. Pleasure paddle-steamers of
the sort that took peacetime excursionists from London to Southend and
Margate came also. Officers and men of the Merchant Navy lent a willing
hand. The boats came in their scores, many to be sunk or damaged by
bombs or gunfire, others to be cast up and broken on the beaches. Their
crews, or those of them that were unwounded, manned other boats--and
carried on. Their courage was magnificent.

On one occasion a large concourse of fishing drifters, motor-boats,
lifeboats, and other craft in convoy was approaching the channel leading
to Dunkirk when a horde of German bombers came over. Two destroyers
fully laden with troops on their way to England were in the vicinity,
and it was thought they would be attacked. The Nazis, however, ran true
to type. Avoiding the destroyers with their anti-aircraft guns, they
dived down on the defenseless small craft and literally smothered them
with heavy bombs and bullets from their machine guns. When the smoke and
spray of the attack cleared away only one or two of the small craft had
been badly hit, though the convoy had become disorganized and scattered.
One of the convoy leaders signaled to a destroyer, “Is it all right to
carry on to Dunkirk now?” On receiving a reply in the affirmative the
leader wheeled round at once and made for the harbor, his faithful flock
turning after him and resuming their original course.

The ships in the anchorage were still being bombed at intervals, and
their anti-aircraft guns were continually in action. Bickerstaff, on his
bridge, was fretting with impatience. He could see the breaking surf on
the beach, the concourse of boats plunging up and down, and the troops
endeavoring to embark. He could realize something of their difficulties,
and prayed to heaven that his own boats and crews would somehow emerge
from the tangle.

But surf never looks so heavy from the sea as it does from the shore,
and not even Bickerstaff fully understood what the beach parties were
really up against. When Tony returned to the ship with the first
boatloads of troops after nearly two hours, the Captain, tired out, was
inclined to be rather terse and to cavil at the delay. Tony had to
explain. The conditions on the beaches, if not impossible, were very
nearly so until the surf subsided.

“All right, Chenies,” the skipper said. “I know you and your chaps are
doing your damnedest. What about relieving you for a bit?”

“I’d much rather not, sir. We’d sooner carry on. We’re getting used to
it.”

Bickerstaff smiled. He liked that sort of spirit.

“I don’t know who I could send anyway,” he said. “I want Number One on
board to take over in case I’m knocked out.”

“I hope not, sir,” Tony put in. He had noticed various telltale gashes
in the _Vexatious’_ funnels and side, the results of a bomb bursting
fairly close on impact with the water. Two men had already been wounded.

“I can’t spare Stephen or the Gunner,” Bickerstaff continued. “They’ve
enough to do with the fire control. But we might relieve some of your
men.”

“They’ll be as sick as mud if you do that, sir.”

The Captain nodded.

“All right, Chenies. You know best. Get away again as soon as you can,
and good luck to you.”

So Tony and his party, refreshed with hurried coffee and sandwiches,
went back to the beach in their boats and carried on.

The surf continued. So did the shelling, the bombing, and
machine-gunning. Many times the R.A.F. fighters brought enemy bombers
hurtling from the sky in trails of flame and smoke. But even the R.A.F.
couldn’t be in all places at once with the huge numerical superiority
against which it was fighting.

Tony Chenies and his boats’ crews could only see what went on in their
immediate vicinity, where it was obvious to all concerned that the
withdrawal of the troops was not going too well. That was not due to any
human shortcomings but to the state of the weather and the many
difficulties involved in working in small boats on open beaches.

But nobody on the spot realized the full gravity of the situation. The
enemy had started to lay mines from aircraft during the night. Various
ships had already been sunk or badly damaged by bombs or in collision.
Wrecks were already starting to congest the inner harbor at Dunkirk.
During the night, too, two destroyers laden with troops had been
torpedoed and sunk by enemy motor torpedo boats or submarines while on
their way back to England. The loss of life had been grievous.

Only the Vice-Admiral in command at Dover, and the devoted band who
worked tirelessly with him throughout those anxious days and nights, had
their fingers fully on the pulse of one of the most complicated and
dangerous operations the Navy had ever undertaken. With his charts
spread out before him, and the minute-to-minute reports coming in by
radio and telephone, the Vice-Admiral had a bird’s eye view of the whole
complex picture as it was drawn.

There were times, no doubt, when he felt the urge to be in the midst of
the fighting on the other side of the Channel, like an Admiral on the
bridge of his flagship in action. Wisely, however, he resisted the
inclination. The conditions were constantly changing. He was dealing
with the movements of scores of ships and hundreds of boats. Had he left
the nerve center of the operation and cut himself adrift from his
communications even for an hour, the result might have been chaos.

His was the responsibility of sorting out the tangle, and of making the
rapid decisions that spelled success or failure.


6.

The Eastern Jetty at Dunkirk was primarily designed to break the sea in
the entrance to the harbor during heavy weather. It was a lattice-work
wooden structure about three-quarters of a mile long jutting out into
the sea with a narrow wooden pathway along the top. It was neither
designed nor built for berthing ships. Yet it was here, when the
embarkation from the surf-frilled beaches became too slow and too
difficult, that troopships and destroyers went alongside. It was here,
in the afternoon, that the _Vexatious_ was ordered to go.

Tony never forgot the sight as she lay off awaiting her turn. In the
background the pall of dense black smoke still drifted across the sky in
a sable curtain, with occasional eddies wafting across the entrance of
the inner harbor. Ships could be seen alongside the Eastern Jetty, the
narrow gangway of which was crowded with slowly advancing troops. The
area was under heavy shell-fire, while the enemy aircraft continued to
circle and to dive down from overhead. The crackle of machine guns and
rifles mingled with the roar of planes and the crash of bombs and
gunfire.

Whenever the smoke drifted clear and gave her gunners a clear view
overhead, the _Vexatious’_ anti-aircraft guns were in action. So heavy
and continuous had been the firing throughout the day that Mr. Hebard
was becoming anxious about his ammunition. The supply was running very
low.

Looking shoreward, it was difficult to make out details because of the
smoke, but time and time again Tony saw the telltale splashes and gouts
of grayish smoke raised by bombs or shells bursting in the water. Many
times, with a catch at his heart, he noticed reddish flashes and showers
of up-flung debris as the pier, or the ships alongside it, were hit.
Farther away, inside the harbor entrance, at least two ships, one of
which looked like a destroyer, were ablaze and apparently sinking.
However, it was impossible to see for certain.

It was into that witches’ caldron of fire, when some other ship backed
out and made room for her, that the _Vexatious_ must presently advance.
To Tony, standing there on the bridge, the prospect was unpleasant.
Though not directly hit, the ship had again been riddled with the
splinters of bombs falling close. Down in the engine room, Mr. Walton
and his men were struggling to repair a bad leak, which really required
the services of a dockyard. He had not reported it to the Captain, for
Bickerstaff, he knew, had more than enough to think about. So trusting
to providence and his own ingenuity, Walton carried on and hoped he
could “make do” for the time being. He was a marvel at improvisation. It
was not for nothing that his messmates called him “Our Little Jewel.”

Bickerstaff himself was an inspiration. Whatever he felt in his heart,
he handled his ship with his usual imperturbability while waiting to
take her alongside what looked like the brink of the nethermost pit. He
was even smoking his pipe. Beneath his steel helmet his tanned face was
grimed and covered with a frost of grayish stubble. His tired eyes were
red-rimmed with weariness. Tony couldn’t remember when the Commander had
last slept. He must be nearly dropping from sheer exhaustion. Yet he
carried on as though his ship were miles away from any enemy--a fine
example to his officers and men.

At last a destroyer appeared stern-first out of the smoke with her decks
packed with troops. Her siren yelped thrice as she backed into open
water preparatory to turning and making for home. A figure on her bridge
waved a hand at the _Vexatious_ as she slid past within a hundred feet.
Bickerstaff, using his glasses, thought he recognized a friend.

“Tiny, you old stiff!” he roared. “How goes it?”

“Who’s that calling me names?” came back.

“Bicky!” was the reply.

“Bicky! --What the blazes are you doing here?”

“Mucking around, old boy, the same as you. What’s it like inside?”

“A bit bloody at times; though not so bad as it might be!” floated over
the water. “They’ve knocked seven bells out of my foremost funnel and
wasted gallons of rum, blast ’em!”

“Rum?” howled Bickerstaff, mystified.

“Yes. A crop of bomb splinters through my spirit room. Over a month’s
supply gone west, the clumsy bustards! Good luck, Bicky,” as the ships
rapidly passed out of earshot, “see you later. We’ll have a....”

The rest was inaudible.

Bickerstaff had no idea that his friend “Tiny” Pym was even in command
of a destroyer. The last time they had met had been at a Navy Club
dinner in London some months before the war, when both had been wearing
the tail coats, the white ties, and waistcoats that were ordained for
such occasions.

Bickerstaff wondered when he would wear a boiled shirt again. As for his
tail coat, his wife would have seen to it that it was safely wrapped in
brown paper, with plenty of moth balls. How he hated the clinging stench
of them!

A signalman on the _Vexatious’_ bridge read out a message flashed from
the temporary signal station at the end of the pier.

“Come--alongside--ahead--of--second--transport--inside--lighthouse.”

“All right. Here goes,” said Bickerstaff, putting his lips to the voice
pipe leading to the wheelhouse. “Slow ahead together. Port
twenty. --Number One,” he added, “and you, Chenies. Have everything
ready for going alongside, and plenty of fenders. Let’s make an
evolution of getting these chaps on board.”

The guns were still firing spasmodically whenever enemy aircraft offered
satisfactory targets. Even as Richmond and Tony turned to leave the
bridge there came that fiendish whistling in the air followed by the
usual thumping crashes as three bombs fell ahead of the ship. The
_Vexatious_ shuddered to the explosions. A waterspout, leaping out of
the water perhaps thirty feet off her port bow, curled over in the
breeze and drenched practically every man on the forecastle. No
splinters came near the ship on this occasion.

Taking his ship close past the two outer transports, Bickerstaff took
her alongside the narrow wooden jetty, the top of which was jammed tight
with troops awaiting their turn to embark. Many were wounded. Unshaven
and grimy, they all showed traces of their prolonged ordeal. But their
bearing and demeanor were beyond all praise. They were being heavily
shelled and bombed. Fresh casualties were occurring almost every minute.
Yet there was no confusion, no pushing or shouting, no scramble to be
the first away. Stolid, patient, and full of pluck they awaited
salvation or death.

This was no defeated Army, but an Army which had fought until it could
fight no more and had been overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers
and mechanization.

In the midst of that crashing turmoil of battle Bickerstaff, his pipe in
his mouth and his “battle bowler” on his head, leaned over the rail of
his bridge watching the weary troops coming on board. Some came by way
of the improvised gangplanks between the jetty and the _Vexatious’_ high
forecastle. Others crawled down the ladders farther aft leading to the
lower upper deck. Bickerstaff was tired enough himself, weary almost to
the limit of his physical endurance. So were his officers and men. But
these soldiers, who had fought and fought so well, were more exhausted
still.

“God!” he breathed, lost in admiration. “They’re magnificent,
wonderful!”

And so they were--the young troops from every part of Britain, with some
middle-aged veterans of 1914-18. They were no less admirable than the
hundreds of civilians from every profession and walk of life who had
flocked to the work of rescue in their boats and pleasure craft, the
merchant seamen, fishermen, lifeboatmen, and longshoremen, the many
others serving in the Navy who would still have been civilians but for
the war.

It was a spectacle that would have gladdened the heart of Britain, if
Britain could have seen the behavior of her sons.

Once more, people lost all count of time while the troops, unused to
the way of a ship, stumbled and scrambled on board. Nobody could say to
twenty minutes when the embarkation started, or when the _Vexatious_
finally cast off and went stern-first away from the pier with some
hundreds of troops on board and a fresh crop of splinter holes through
her forecastle and bridge structure. There had been many narrow escapes,
both from bombs and exploding shells. Nobody troubled to count them.

The ship was dive-bombed as she drew clear of the smoke round the
pierhead, alongside of which a transport was on fire and apparently
sinking. She was dive-bombed again by three enemy planes as she turned
short under her propellers and headed for open water. Down below in the
engine room Mr. Walton and his men hadn’t fully succeeded in stopping
the leaks, though by some merciful dispensation of providence the ship
had suffered no further disabling damage, and no casualties beyond two
seamen very slightly wounded, and proud of it.

On the run across the Channel to Dover they were attacked another five
times, again without result. That was almost entirely due to the gallant
young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force, who were going bald-headed
for any enemy they saw even if outnumbered by thirty or forty to one. It
was stirring to watch those friendly planes, to realize the cold-blooded
heroism and self-sacrifice of their pilots.

The Channel was crowded with a stream of shipping--some vessels moving
in the direction of Dunkirk, others, like the _Vexatious_, returning.
There were ships large and small, every sort of ship, many varieties of
boats and motor craft. The Luftwaffe had an infinite number of targets
for their bombs and machine guns.

Yet only once during the passage those in the _Vexatious_ saw a ship
actually hit, when a trawler, two miles away, suddenly became enveloped
in an upheaval of smoke and spray. It cleared away, to show the little
vessel on fire with her stern cocked in the air. She was sinking fast.
Men could be seen taking to the water. A minesweeper, another trawler,
and some smaller craft hurried to her assistance. Bickerstaff also
would have gone if he had had room for more men. But he hadn’t. The
_Vexatious’_ upper deck, and all the available spaces below, were
crowded with as many as they could hold. In places, too tired even to
move when anti-aircraft guns came into action, soldiers lay asleep with
their heads pillowed on each other’s laps.

Very little A.A. ammunition remained when the _Vexatious_ slid in
through the opening in the breakwater at Dover. She must replenish to
full capacity before going to sea again. Moreover, as Mr. Walton
reported to the captain just before arrival, those leaks in the engine
room must be properly seen to by the dockyard.

“Why didn’t you let me know before?” Bickerstaff demanded.

“I hardly liked to bother you, sir,” the Commissioned Engineer
explained. “I reckoned we’d make do as far as Dover. But it isn’t worth
risking another trip and running the chance of stopping dead in
mid-ocean.”

“How’ve you kept her going all this time?”

Walton, wearing dirty brown overalls, shrugged his shoulders. He
personally had been in the engine room for over twelve hours, where
every bomb or shell bursting anywhere within a hundred yards had sounded
like the muffled clang of a titanic hammer striking the ship’s side. A
hundred times she had shaken and quivered to the shock of the
explosions, so that they could have sworn that her end was come.

“It was a bit of a job, sir,” the Engineer replied. “We had to keep
going all the time. We might have been done in otherwise, with all these
chaps on board.” He went on to explain the technicalities.

“Good for you, Chief,” Bickerstaff nodded. “I’ll make the necessary
signal when we arrive.”

Dusk had already fallen by the time they had landed all their troops at
the jetty at Dover, and had gone alongside a depot ship in another part
of the harbor for the damage in the engine room to be made good for the
time being.

Bickerstaff retired to his sea cabin and flopped onto his bunk without
removing his clothes, to be asleep in a few minutes. Some others
slumbered also, though many were busy drawing ammunition, provisions,
and stores.

It was past one o’clock in the morning before the _Vexatious_ was once
more on her way across the Channel.


7.

The breeze had died away. It was a golden summer’s morning, a morning
that promised great heat at midday. High up in the blue, larks were
singing above the cliffs round Dover. In the Channel there was hardly a
ripple on the water, a flat, oily calmness that seemed to offer ideal
conditions for embarking troops, even from open beaches.

But with daylight the enemy aircraft attacks had become intensified. All
the available strength of the Luftwaffe had been concentrated to
frustrate the withdrawal, to convert a retreat into annihilation. Relay
after relay of Germans came in to attack--plastering the whole of the
Dunkirk area with bombs, flying low over jetties, beaches, and ships,
machine-gunning as they went.

As the day wore on, British fighters, with the heavy anti-aircraft fire
poured in by the ships and such guns as there were on shore, brought
many of the attackers flaring and smoking down from the sky. But more
got through. For every one shot down at least a hundred more blackened
the sky, to come screaming down from the heavens. There was no
alleviation from the thudding of bombs, the crash of gunfire, and the
incessant crackling of machine guns.

The situation looked black indeed. The Eastern Jetty at Dunkirk provided
the most rapid means of getting the troops away. But the jetty itself
had been damaged and there had been many casualties. Worse still, ship
after ship had been sunk, set on fire, or had limped badly damaged home
to England for repair. Many boats, too, had been destroyed. The supply
of ships and boats was not inexhaustible.

What it came to now was that the withdrawal of troops could not be
continued from the jetty during daylight without running the risk of
complete failure. It must be postponed until dark. The tired troops
crowded there had to be ordered back to the beaches to take what cover
they could among the sand dunes.

Soon after five o’clock in the afternoon, having stopped to pick up the
crew of a trawler which had been bombed and sunk in mid-Channel, the
_Vexatious_, steaming a full twenty knots, was again approaching the
French coast. The rumble of gunfire still came from the direction of
Dunkirk and the thick smoke cloud lingered in the sky, but for the
moment all was quiet in the vicinity of the ship. Tony had seized the
opportunity to pay a hurried visit to the wardroom to eat some very
stale bread and jam sandwiches and to drink a cup of stewed, lukewarm
tea.

“Let me make you some more, Mister Chenies,” said the wardroom steward,
his head framed in the trap-hatch. “That stuff’s been on the table for
over an hour.”

“No time, Reed,” Tony told him, standing there with the cup in one hand
and a bitten sandwich in the other. “I must get back to the bridge.”

“I can have it ready in a few minutes, sir,” Reed remonstrated. “You’ve
had no proper meal today.”

“No time now, Reed,” said Tony, masticating. “We’re damn nearly over the
other side.”

“What about some sandwiches, sir? I’ve managed some cheese, and have a
tin or two o’ tongue stowed away. S’pose I make you up a packet and send
’em forrard? They might come in handy when you’ve a spare moment.”

Tony, bearded, unwashed, and wearier than he had ever been in the whole
of his life, grinned his satisfaction. He had reached the state when if
he had sat, even for a minute, he would have fallen fast asleep.

“Reed,” he replied. “You’re full of bright ideas. Bless you for the
sandwiches, and don’t forget the mustard with the tongue. Wrap ’em up in
paper.”

“Very good, Mister Chenies. I’ll see to it.”

Tony was not below more than five minutes. His haste may have saved his
life. Climbing up the steep ladder from the wardroom lobby he passed
through the after superstructure, and had just gone out through the door
leading to the upper deck and stepped a few paces when he felt a mighty,
thudding concussion from somewhere far below the waterline.
Simultaneously, the whole stern portion of the ship whipped up like a
released spring, flinging him into the air so that he fell heavily back
to the steel deck sprawling and half-sitting. The shock was sufficient
to knock the breath out of his body and left him dazed and nearly
stunned.

Half-lying, hurt and gasping from the heavy impact, he could still see
and understand. Time seemed leaden-footed. He noticed a wall of
whitish-blue water tinged with gray smoke and shot through with shafts
of brilliant sunlight bursting into the air alongside the ship abaft the
after funnel. Hanging there, it shut out all view of the forepart of the
ship. Thinning slightly, the upheaval suddenly became suffused by a
brilliant arch of prismatic coloring like an unnaturally bright rainbow.
How long it lasted Tony couldn’t know, for the next instant a deluge of
solid water descended upon him from above. It drenched him to the skin.
At the same time, the ship, still moving ahead, lurched bodily over to
port, throwing him hard up against some solid deck fitting with a spasm
of sickening pain in his side.

The splash, if it could be called by so puny a name, would naturally
fall aft because the _Vexatious_ had been steaming fast. The water went
draining away to port in a miniature cascade. Clinging on as best he
could, Tony realized the deck had tilted over to an almost incredible
angle. Looking to port, he could see the sea almost level with the edge
of the upper deck. It was as though he lay spread-eagled on a steeply
sloping roof.

Panting for breath, gritting his teeth with pain, he tried to rise. It
hurt evilly. But he very soon realized that standing was impossible
without falling. So crawling, dragging himself from handhold to
handhold, he managed to reach the starboard berthing rails, where he
held on.

The speed of the ship was diminishing. Tall plumes of high-pressure
steam were escaping from the engine or boiler rooms with a whistling
roar that made all else inaudible. A dense white cloud hung over the
funnels. Right forward on the upper deck Tony could see the dark figures
of men coming out from under the forecastle.

This whole stunning series of incidents had taken place in a few
seconds. To Tony, it had seemed more like minutes.

It suddenly flashed through his mind that the ship was
finished--sinking. Yes. Her bows had lifted. The port side of her stern,
although he couldn’t see it, must already be deep in the water. She
might be about to capsize.

Then what of Reed, whom he had last seen in the wardroom pantry about to
cut sandwiches?

What of the Doc, Stephen, Mr. Hebard, and Morgan, none of whom, so far
as he knew, had been in the forepart of the ship when he left the
bridge?

Walton, the Commissioned Engineer, had been sitting in his usual billet
behind his shelter at the top of the engine-room hatch, for Tony had
passed the time of day with him as he came aft. He felt quite sick at
the thought of what might have happened to the Chief. The little man was
sitting right over the spot where the explosion occurred, amidst all
that escaping steam--God!

And the officers’ stewards and cooks had their own small mess abaft the
wardroom. They rarely used it except for sleeping and at this time of
the afternoon were probably forward under the break of the forecastle
smoking with the rest of the men off watch. Still, one never knew.

But Maclean and some of the others might be in the cabin flat before the
wardroom. The Doc and Morgan, who had no regular cabins and usually
slept in the wardroom, were honorary members of any cabin that was
vacant for the time being. Reed was certainly in the pantry.

Meanwhile, the after part of the ship must already be flooding. Judging
from the effects of the explosion on him on deck--it could only have
been a mine under the bottom of the ship--those chaps down below might
well be stunned and knocked out. If the ship sank by the stern or
capsized as she seemed likely to do, they must inevitably be drowned.

It all passed through his mind very clearly, much too clearly to be
pleasant. Reed, being in the wardroom pantry, was in the most dangerous
position of all, or so it seemed to Tony.

The roar of the escaping steam was gradually becoming less. Its volume
was decreasing. In its stead, however, Tony saw flickers of orange flame
and whorls of black smoke which meant that oil fuel was on fire. The
blaze increased as he watched it.

The ship now lay nearly motionless, still heeling bodily over to port.
The water was becoming strained with the filthy black scum of escaping
oil fuel. And as Tony lay there, cursing the pain which reduced him to a
state of helplessness, he felt the _Vexatious_ shudder. Then came a
distinct shock from somewhere below. It might mean the collapse of a
bulkhead and the flooding of another compartment. Whatever the cause,
the old ship suddenly flung herself over to starboard with an abrupt
swing which brought the water lapping up the ship’s side close to the
edge of the deck where he clung to the berthing rails. She rolled
sluggishly back to port again, more slowly this time--remained steady
with a slight list to port.

Yes. The stern was several feet deeper than usual. Sitting up, Tony
could see the water close to the extreme end of the quarter deck. The
depth charges there were set to “safe.” He had heard the orders given
just before he left the bridge. It was a matter of routine whenever the
ship was in very shallow water. That was one thing off his mind, at any
rate. The depth charges couldn’t explode.

How deep was the water, he wondered. Three fathoms, five, ten?

The ship was close up to the shoals off Dunkirk. There might be no more
than a few feet under her bottom, which meant that if she sank a large
part of her would still remain above the surface. There was slight
consolation in that, somehow. It wasn’t like sinking in really deep
water.

But six feet of water or six hundred made little difference when the
ship sank if Reed and any others who happened to be below had been
knocked out. They’d be drowned. They _must_ be stunned. If not, why
hadn’t they come on deck?

“God!” Tony muttered to himself. “I _must_ do something!”

Praying for strength he dragged himself to his feet, staggered to the
door of the superstructure, passed slowly through it and toward the
wardroom hatch. The effort hurt him cruelly. His arms and legs were
uninjured, but he felt bruised all over, with an agonizing pain in his
side as though some of his ribs were broken.

All the electric lights had gone out. Peering down the hatch, he
couldn’t see if there was water in the wardroom lobby. Sitting down on
the hatch coaming he felt for the ladder with his feet, found it, and
started gingerly to lower himself. After what seemed minutes he found
himself on the deck below. So far, there was no water there. Since the
deadlights over the scuttles were always kept closed, the lobby was
almost as black as night. Tony carried no torch, so groped his way
toward the pantry door and entered. All was quiet below except for the
gentle lapping of water outside the ship and the subdued rumble of
escaping steam.

He stumbled over a body almost at once. Reed was lying on the deck.

“Reed!” Tony said, bending down to shake him by the shoulder. “Reed!
Pull yourself together, man!”

The steward groaned, muttering something that Tony couldn’t catch.

“Reed! For God’s sake--”

At that same instant Tony heard the whistling screech of a diving
airplane. It grew louder--louder.

“God!” he murmured, realizing what it meant.

The steel of the ship transmitted the sounds outside almost like a
telephone.

The plane came closer, its noise shriller and more penetrating--then the
frenzied chattering of machine guns followed by the familiar reports of
the _Vexatious’_ pom-poms. The ship vibrated to the discharges.

“Reed!” Tony shouted, dragging at the steward’s body. “Reed!”

He could hear no reply, so took the man by the shoulders and started to
tug him backward toward the door. He was no lightweight. The effort cost
Tony severe pain, but he forgot that.

The noise of firing continued, mingled with the roar of planes. There
were several aircraft now, and very close. The thump of a heavy
explosion in the water near by caused the _Vexatious_ to shudder. A
second bomb detonated in the sea, followed within a short breath by a
resounding crash and the clang of disintegrating metal.

The ship had been hit, and badly from the feel of it. She vibrated
convulsively, reeled as though struck by a heavy sea, listed farther
over to port. The pom-poms suddenly became silent, though the sound of
aircraft and the crackle of machine guns persisted. A high-toned,
increasing screeching terminated in the noise of a heavy splash.

It all happened in a few seconds.

Tony, redoubling his efforts, had managed to drag the still unconscious
Reed over the sill of the pantry door and toward the foot of the ladder
leading up into the superstructure. Heaven only knew how he could get
the man on deck. Negotiating that steep ascent and the small hatch above
with so awkward and heavy a burden wouldn’t have been easy at any time,
but now that Tony himself was injured it seemed impossible. Meanwhile
the ship was heeling more and more over to port. She seemed about to
capsize.

“Reed!” Tony yelled, desperate with anxiety. “Reed! Wake up, man!”

He shook the steward with all his strength, hurting himself in the
process. There was no reply, no movement that he could feel, though the
man still seemed to be breathing. If only there had been light to see,
it would have been better.

The planes seemed farther away now. The machine-gunning had ceased. He
could hear the splash and gurgle of water alongside.

Tony, bending down, tried to hoist the limp body on to his shoulder. A
spasm of agonizing pain warned him that it was more than he could do
unaided.

“Hell!” he muttered.

Trusting to luck that the ship wouldn’t roll over, he must crawl on deck
again and find someone else to help him. There was no alternative.

He had actually started up the ladder when he heard the heavy tread of
sea-booted feet on the deck overhead.

“Anyone down below there?” a voice roared--a well-known voice, the voice
of Able Seaman Flagg. He was shouting down the foremost hatch leading to
the cabin flat.

“Flagg!” Tony hailed him. “Come aft here! Wardroom lobby!”

Flagg came, breathing heavily, muttering away to himself.

“Gawd Ormighty, Mister Cheenies, sir! I knew you was somewheres aft. I
sees you leavin’ the bridge. Come on up, sir. It’s abandon ship. She’s
finished, the poor ole--”

“Come down, Flagg,” Tony broke in. “Reed’s knocked out. I can’t shift
him. I’ve had a bit of a crack myself.”

“My sufferin’ oath!” the A.B. exclaimed. “No sooner d’you get out o’ me
sight than somethin’ happens. Blast them bleedin’ Jerries! --All right.
I’m comin’, sir.” He put a heavy foot in Tony’s face as he started to
come backward down the ladder.

“Mind my head!” Tony hissed, lowering himself hurriedly. “Go easy, you
elephant! Reed’s at the foot of the ladder. Watch where you tread.”

“Sorry, sir. It’s all dark, an’ I’m no blinkin’ screech-owl. Are _you_
all right, Mister Cheenies, sir?”

“I can manage,” Tony replied, as Flagg landed on the deck beside him.
“Get hold of Reed and yank him on deck.”

“You first, sir.”

“Get hold of Reed and don’t argue!” Tony insisted, as the ship shuddered
again and lurched a little more to port.

Flagg started to obey with much heavy breathing.

“Haven’t I told you a million times always to carry a torch day and
night?” he grunted. “It’s that dark I can’t tell his bow from his stern.
Ah, that’s got ’im. Up she goes. Stand clear, sir.”

The seaman worked his way slowly up the slanting ladder with Reed slung
limply over one shoulder. How he managed it without letting his burden
fall Tony never understood.

Carried out, the steward was laid on deck. He breathed stertorously,
with a face that was ghastly in its pallor. There were no outward signs
of any injury.

“Stunned, that’s what he is,” said Flagg, when Tony joined him. “He’s
wearin’ his Mae West,” he continued, bending down to unbutton Reed’s
coat and noting the rubber lifebelt round his body. “I’ll blow it up in
case we goes swimmin’. Things don’t look too good to me.”

They didn’t. The _Vexatious_, now badly on fire forward, had rolled
still farther over to port. Her bridge and forecastle were invisible in
the clouds of black smoke mingled with white steam. The enemy aircraft
seemed to have gone, Tony noticed with intense relief. A trawler about
half a mile away to starboard was steaming hot-foot toward the
_Vexatious_. A motorboat was coming from another direction.

“I’ll look out for Reed,” Tony said hurriedly. “Go below, Flagg, and
search the cabin flat and the steward’s mess.”

The able seaman hesitated.

“Are you certain _you’re_ all right, sir?” he asked. “I shouldn’t--”

“For God’s sake get a move on!” Tony interrupted him. “You’ve no time to
waste. --Hurry, man. Hurry!”

Flagg obediently disappeared inside the superstructure. He was down
below for what seemed minutes, while Tony, filled with anxiety, watched
the oily water lapping the port edge of the upper deck. He had already
blown up Reed’s lifebelt, and started to inflate his own.

There were sounds from inside the superstructure, followed by the
emergence of Flagg with Midshipman Morgan in his arms. His head was
bleeding.

“He’s alive all right, sir,” the seaman announced, laying the boy down.
“I found him on the deck in the Chief Engineer’s cabin. Reckon he was
lying in the bunk an’ bumped his head when that there mine went off.”

“Is there anyone else?”

“No, sir. I’ve been in all the cabins, and the stooard’s mess. That’s
the lot, sir.”

“Thank God for that! Good work, Flagg.”

“Huh!” said the A.B. “What’ll we do next, sir? Go over the side, or
what? Mister Morgan’s wearin’ one o’ them stuffed waistcoats. He’ll
float right side up if one of us keeps his head up.”

Tony, sitting painfully on the deck beside Reed, looked down the sloping
deck at the water. Thick with oil fuel, it was creeping higher and
higher up the deck. The two rescuing craft were rapidly approaching. The
motorboat was within two hundred yards.

Tony didn’t like the look of the oil fuel, and said so. It was safer, he
thought, to stick to the ship until the end. Her rudder and screws must
already be very near the bottom. She mightn’t capsize completely if she
grounded. Besides, they had two injured people on their hands, and he
wasn’t feeling too full of beans. Some ribs were cracked, or something.
How were things forward, he asked anxiously. Were there many casualties?

Flagg didn’t know. All he could say was that the forepart was “a ruddy
pot-mess, and no mistake.” First the mine--then a bomb which had burst
somewhere near the bridge--then the machine-gunning which had silenced
the pom-poms, with bullets zipping all over the place.

Bake and blister the ruddy Huns, said he, full of venom. But one of the
unmentionables had been brought down before the pom-poms were put out of
action. Hit full in the nose she had nose-dived into the sea within
fifty yards of the ship. And a damn good--

He paused, listening.

“What’s up?” asked Tony.

“I believe the bustards are comin’ again!” said Flagg, his voice full of
anxiety. “I hear ’em.”

Tony could hear them now, the unmistakable roar coming closer--the
screeching, tearing sound as the machines dived to attack.

“Lie flat!” Flagg hissed, flinging himself on his stomach. Tony obeyed.

The smoke of the fire forward was drifting away to port in a thick
curtain. The next thing he saw was a plane flying low within about a
hundred feet of the ship, the sparkles of flame from her machine guns,
the reddish-green trails of tracer bullets.

He heard an angry crackle, and the impact of metal upon metal as the
bullets drove home. It sounded as though someone were rattling stones
inside a tin can.

“The dirty--” Flagg started to say.

But Tony didn’t hear the end of the remark. Something hit him hard near
the right shoulder.

The last thing he remembered was a twinge of searing pain, followed by a
peculiar sort of numbness.

The bright sunlight faded into darkness. That was all.




CHAPTER X


The moment Tony Chenies recovered consciousness and opened his eyes he
realized he was on board a ship. He lay flat on his back on a hardly
padded settee in a small white-painted compartment which swayed gently
from side to side. A ray of bright sunlight, with motes of dust dancing
through it, filtered through an open skylight overhead. The place smelt
horribly--a mixture of oil fuel and iodoform, or something like it.

He could hear voices somewhere near, but his view was restricted by a
line of blue tablecloth well above the level of his eyes. He was aching
all over, and trying to sit up to see brought him a spasm of acute pain.
He desisted.

Lord! Someone had stripped him to the waist. His right shoulder was
heavily bandaged. Lifting his right elbow was agony. He groaned without
meaning to.

The last thing he remembered was the deck of the _Vexatious_, with Reed
and Flagg and young Morgan. Then that damned plane with the black
crosses on her wings and fuselage had shot out of the smoke. Yes. He
remembered the chattering of her machine guns, those little streaks of
fire from her tracer bullets.

So he’d been shot, had he? He’d often wondered what it felt like to be
shot. He knew now. He remembered that thump in the shoulder which
knocked him out. It hurt him quite a lot now, though not nearly so much
as he imagined it would. There was a dull ache lower down around his
ribs. He remembered what had caused that--remembered how it had hurt him
to crawl up and down that ladder.

What had become of Reed, he wondered. Where were Flagg and Morgan?

He must have been overboard since leaving the _Vexatious_. His trousers
were ruined--clammy and horrible with oil fuel. They’d been quite a
decent pair of trousers, too. How much did the Admiralty give one to buy
a new kit?

Confound the oil fuel. His hair and beard and eyebrows were thick and
sticky with it, he discovered on putting up his left hand. His eyes
smarted. He could even taste the damn stuff in his mouth. He was
confoundedly thirsty.

“Flagg!” he called.

There was no reply.

“Flagg!” again.

Someone in his shirtsleeves with his arms bare and a pair of red rubber
gloves on his hands leaned over the end of the table to look at him.

“Who the hell are you?” Tony asked feebly. “Where’s Flagg? I want some
water.”

“I’m Maclean,” said the other. “Don’t you recognize a messmate?”

“Ugh!” Tony muttered, gritting his teeth. His shoulder was very painful.
It was far too much trouble to ask the Doc how the devil he thought a
fellow could recognize him upside-down, particularly when Maclean’s face
was all streaked like an African witch doctor’s.

“I’ll give you something to make you sleep,” the Doc said. “I won’t be a
second.”

“I’m thirsty, Doc.”

“Okay, old boy,” Maclean replied, vanishing. “We’ll see to that.”

He came back in a moment and gave Tony his drink. A strange
sub-lieutenant R.N.V.R. appeared with things on a tray. Tony heard
something tinkle.

“A bit closer,” said the Doc, sitting on the table close to his
patient’s head. “Now then, Chenies, your left arm, please.”

Tony felt fingers on his elbow, and the skin of his upper arm being
dabbed gently with wet cotton wool.

“Just a little prick,” said Maclean, reaching behind him.

Tony hardly felt the needle when it came.

“I wish you’d tell me what’s been happening,” he asked, as the doctor
stood up. “What about the skipper and the others?”

“The skipper’s all right,” Maclean told him. “You go to sleep and don’t
worry.”

“What about Number One, and the Chief, and Guns and Flagg? Where _is_
Flagg?”

“You’ll hear everything in good time. --Is that shoulder hurting much?”

“Rather so-so at times,” Tony confessed.

“You’ll feel it less and less. --Well, cheer-oh! You’ll be all right
before long.”

Maclean vanished. He was very busy.

The trawler steamed on, toward Dover.

For some minutes Tony watched that thin, flickering ray of sunshine
swaying backward and forward, to and fro, like the beam of a
searchlight. It was pleasant to watch, rather comforting.

He felt the regular throb of the engines, and the little ship curtsying
rhythmically to a gentle swell. Some gruff orders were shouted on the
deck overhead. The trample of heavy footsteps responded. There came the
familiar yelp of a destroyer’s siren--one peremptory short blast. She
was altering course to starboard.

His thoughts became muzzy and confused. Mingled with the sounds of the
ship came recollections of the _Vexatious_: Reed and tongue sandwiches;
Flagg and his funny old face; Bickerstaff shouting blasphemously at a
trawler sliding past his bows; the Gunner and his store accounts; the
Commissioned Engineer scrounging stores from the dockyard without
signing any receipts.

His mind suddenly flicked to Minchinhampton, with its gray stone houses
and walls, and that winter frost when the bath water refused to run away
and the overhead tank of another sanitary contrivance had to be thawed
out with a blow lamp. They’d been frozen up for days. --Hot rum at The
Bear, excellent!

His mother, he presumed, was still full of local activity and good
works. Father was probably at sea in his armed merchant cruiser and
enjoying it, ancient though he might be. A tough old boy was Father,
though sometimes rather antiquated in his notions.

Was Toppy still on the job in that huge white building of hers in
Bloomsbury, or had she decided to join the Wrens? She was too
independent and undisciplined for that, he fancied, too outspoken....

But he was drowsy. He found it difficult to think, impossible to
concentrate with a sort of mental jigsaw of scenes and people’s names
and faces whirling round inside his head.

But why worry, as the doctor said. An apple a day, and all that. Who was
the man who’d invented that slogan? Why an apple instead of a carrot?

No. Things were by no means too bad. He felt no pain at all. He was
positively comfortable, floating in air, or on air. The hard settee felt
like one of those patent mattresses they advertised in the magazines.

Was this the effect of the dope that the Doc had pumped into him, he
wondered drowsily. Whatever it was, it was strangely pleasant.

The ray of sunlight shining through the scuttle swayed gently from side
to side with the slow movement of the ship. At times it flashed with the
colors of the spectrum, red through orange, yellow, and green, to violet
and purple.

Purple--“Deep Purple,” the confounded tune, a sort of slow thing, that
young Morgan kept putting on the wardroom gramophone. He played it day
in and day out until people were sick of hearing it. A noisy blighter
was young Morgan. If he wasn’t playing the gramophone he had the
wireless going all out.

Morgan, Flagg, Reed, the skipper, and all the others. What had become of
them?

Tony Chenies shut his eyes. His thoughts were becoming increasingly
muzzy and confused.

He slept.


2.

It was irksome being in the hospital when one had the appetite of a
horse and felt perfectly well, apart from a little soreness. Tony had
had three weeks of it.

Beneath the bandages and strappings his right shoulder and ribs had hurt
a bit to start with. But the cracked ribs soon knitted, while the bullet
wound in his shoulder, the surgeons said, was a nice clean one with no
complications. It ached a little at times, but only hurt actively when
he forgot and tried to move it. They had kept him in bed to start with,
and then allowed him to sit out in the garden, even to walk when he felt
so disposed.

It was a pleasant place, that auxiliary hospital, a large country house
set in the midst of its own wooded park and gardens with a view of the
rolling Sussex downs in the far distance. The doctors were pleasantly
unofficial and the nurses charming, particularly the Canadian V.A.D.
girl with the blue eyes, corn-colored hair, and impertinent nose who
looked after Tony and spent some of her scanty leisure in writing his
letters. His right arm was out of action for the time being. Writing in
capital letters with his left hand took ages.

It was a mixed hospital for convalescent and lightly wounded officers of
all the three Services--military officers wounded in Norway and France,
some dare-devil young R.A.F. pilots, a Canadian, two New Zealanders, and
an Australian among them, itching to be back on the job, a sprinkling of
naval officers and pilots who had been in action in Norway and Dunkirk,
a Polish submarine officer and a Czech airman. They were good company,
and between them had seen practically every phase of the war up-to-date.
There was much to be discussed and talked about.

Air-raid alerts seldom troubled them. But they frequently heard the
drumming of engines, and looking hard overhead might see tiny,
insect-like shapes flying in formation high against the deep blue in the
zenith. Sometimes their position was given away by a sudden glint of
sunlight on a fleeting wing, sometimes by their white vapor trails in
the sky. They were usually British planes, the wounded pilots said,
cursing the fate that temporarily held them earthbound and inactive, and
envying their comrades up aloft. But how anyone could tell a Spitfire or
Hurricane from a Heinkel or Messerschmitt at that great height passed
Tony’s comprehension.

So far as their private lives went, and apart from those buzzing
airplanes, the war seemed very far away from the Old Hall and its
occupants. They might almost have been living as guests in a large and
comfortable country house. It stood perhaps three-quarters of a mile
from the old-fashioned village, with its church, three inns, its few
shops and little houses sprawling round the village green.

Major Colefax, the owner of the Old Hall, had rejoined the Army and was
somewhere abroad. His American wife, with two young daughters who
sometimes appeared for week ends, had transferred herself to a cottage
on the estate. The whole of the rambling old house with most of its
contents and all the new equipment necessary to transform it into a
temporary hospital, had been handed over as a gift to the British Red
Cross Society for the duration of the war. Mrs. Colefax’s many friends
in America were generous. Parcels of cigarettes, sweets, books, and
games arrived almost weekly.

It was glorious summer, and life went on much as usual. Most of the
younger gardeners, the grooms and men from the home farm had joined up.
But the older men carried on as they had for years. The carefully
weeded borders and rose garden were aglow with color. The yew hedges
were trimmed and the lawns regularly mowed, as were the putting greens
of the miniature golf course.

Tony had visitors, first his sister Toppy from London, then his mother
from Minchinhampton.

Toppy, who rarely showed her feelings, was matter of fact and almost
casual. She brought with her a parcel of little luxuries from Fortnum
and Mason’s, thinking that Tony might be starving. She was a little
disappointed to find her brother living on the fat of the land, with
milk, butter, and eggs in profusion. She didn’t like Tony’s beard, and
said so. It was the patchiest beard she had ever seen, and all beards
were disgusting.

Tony laughed.

“My beard’s my own,” he said. “How’d you like it if I said I hated the
way you did your hair, or the color of your lipstick? Live and let live,
Tops.”

Mrs. Chenies, when she arrived, was inclined to fuss. Considerably to
Tony’s embarrassment she also chose to regard him as some sort of hero,
the more so because he had been promoted to Lieutenant in the middle of
May. It was useless for Tony to tell her that he had served his full
time as a sub-lieutenant and was due for promotion anyhow. Dunkirk had
nothing to do with it. What was more, he hadn’t done any more than his
job. It had been rather tough at times, admittedly, but nothing whatever
to make a song and dance about.

He’d be in the hospital about five weeks, the doctors said. After that
they’d probably send him on a month’s sick leave. Then he’d be surveyed,
and would be sent off to sea again. He prayed to heaven it would be
another destroyer.

“But a destroyer, Tony!” Mrs. Chenies sighed. “Why not a big
battleship?”

Oh, my God! Tony thought.

“Do be sensible, Mother,” he said aloud. “I’d loathe being in a
battleship. I’d be the dog’s-body in the wardroom, the junior
watchkeeper roped in for all the lousy jobs. No thank you, Mother.
Destroying’s the life for me.”

Mrs. Chenies realized the futility of further discussion. Her husband
had served in destroyers all through the four years of the last war, and
wouldn’t have been elsewhere for worlds. Tony was only following in his
father’s footsteps.

They talked of Captain Chenies. How was the Old Man, Tony wanted to
know.

Mrs. Chenies hadn’t heard for more than three weeks, and then the letter
was strictly noncommittal. It said nothing of any excitements, or of
what the _Fonthill Abbey_ was doing, or where she was. However, Tony’s
father was still in the same ship, and apparently loving every minute of
it.

“He’s a proper tough old guy,” Tony observed. “Much tougher than I ever
thought. It’s a pity he wasn’t at Dunkirk. He’d have loved that.”

Mrs. Chenies shuddered. From what little information Tony had given her,
coupled with what she had read and heard broadcast, one member of the
family at Dunkirk was quite enough.


3.

Nobody else from the _Vexatious_ was convalescent at the Old Hall. Tony,
who had been temporarily patched up at Dover and rushed off to the
hospital, had heard nothing but garbled accounts of what had been the
end of his old ship--more important still, what had happened to his old
shipmates.

Eight days after his arrival, however, there came a letter from Stephen,
the sub.

“Dear Tony,” it said. “I had the devil’s own job to find out where you’d
been sent to hospital, and only discovered by accident through one of
the doctors here. I hope you’re getting better and all that, and before
I forget, congratulations on your second stripe.

“As for me, I got through without a scratch, and as they wanted extra
officers to run boats and so on, I volunteered to stay. I had four of
the most hectic days of my life, running one of those Dutch coasters,
and then, when she got knocked out by a near miss, being sent to a
motorboat with a very posh saloon and cabins. They weren’t at all posh
by the time we’d transported nearly 400 troops in seven trips. The
bombing and gunfire were pretty lousy, but you can imagine all that. I
really think we saw the worst of it before the old ship went. I was fed
to the teeth because four lovely Bren guns I’d ‘borrowed’ from the beach
at Dunkirk went with the Dutch ‘skoot,’ as I believe they call them.

“It was sad to see the last of the good old _Vexatious_, and to think of
the casualties, though it’s surprising there weren’t more. I’m
particularly sorry about poor little Walton. He was such a good fellow
and messmate, and a darned good engineer of a destroyer. Nothing was
ever too much trouble.

“The skipper escaped with a bullet through the thigh when that swine
machine-gunned us after the mine explosion. You’re the only other
officer casualty. What’s happened to Number One and Morgan I don’t know;
but the Gunner’s still here doing a job, and so is the Doc. This place
is full to bursting with the odds and ends of odd ships doing odder
jobs. It will take them some time to sort us all out. I hear a buzz we
may be sent on a fortnight’s leave, and must say most of us can do with
it. All my clothes have gone bar those I had on when the ship went, and
they’re mostly oil fuel. I had to do a drop of swimming before being
picked up. I’d been living in borrowed battle dress until some very
senior Commander asked who the hell I was!

“Considering all things, I think the old ship did pretty well, and it
was sad to see the last of her. I suppose we were lucky to get off with
nine killed, including the poor little Chief. Some ships had a good many
more than that. Most of our wounded seemed to be getting on well when I
last heard of them.

“I saw the skipper before they took him off to the hospital at Chatham.
He was cursing his fate at being knocked out and losing his ship. He
says he may not get another, though he’s such a darned good one I
rather doubt that. He sent you his chin-chin if I was writing, and asked
me to tell you he’d make, or was making, a report about that show of
yours aft. Reed has been telling everyone that you saved his life.

“I expect Flagg has written to you. He managed to save some of the
clothes from your cabin before the ship went, though I rather doubt what
value they’ll be with all that oil fuel and muck floating around.
However, he may have managed to transfer them to the trawler which came
alongside just before the old ‘V’ rolled right over and went under.

“I hope we’ll be shipmates again one of these days, and that you’re on a
fair way to recovery and a drop of leave. If you’ve time you might write
to my home address, Dunsford House, Abinger, Surrey.

“Cheer-oh and God stiffen the Huns!

                              Yours ever,
                                                         Steve.”

It was an unsatisfactory letter in a way. Assuming that Tony knew much
more than he did, it left so much unsaid, and evoked a whole flood of
questions. Which men had been killed and which wounded, Tony burned to
know. What had happened after he had been knocked out? How had Flagg
managed to save some of his belongings, quite apart from saving Tony
himself, young Morgan, and Reed, the wardroom steward?

Flagg must have done wonders, bless him!

Since he couldn’t write himself, Tony persuaded his pretty Canadian
V.A.D. friend to write to Stephen’s home address almost by return of
post. The envelope was marked, “Urgent. Please forward.”

Three days later there came a letter from Flagg, written from No. 54
Mess, Royal Naval Barracks, Devonport, and forwarded on from
Minchinhampton.

Flagg wrote much as he spoke, and with an almost complete absence of
punctuation. He had quite a lot to say.

“Mister Chenies Sir,” it began. “I lost sight of you after we lands at
Dover and they puts you in the ambulance so takes the pleasure and
liberty of writing to your home address trusting this will soon find you
recovered and in the pink as it leaves me at present but a bit tired.
Your uniform greatcoat number one monkey jacket what you bought six
months ago 2 prs. trousers five shirts two panjamas 2 prs. shoes no sox
but shaving gear binoculars one pullover I manages to save in a bedsheet
transferring same to trawler what saved some of us trusting this meats
with your approval. Gear was dooly handed over to an officer at Dover
who says what’s in my bundle. I says cloths belonging to you. He says
give me that stuff. I says okay buddy I’ll have your receipt. He gives
me receipt and says cloths will be sent to your home address but I can’t
read his signature though he looked onest. Trusting this is correct and
suitable because he couldn’t be no bilker wearing three stripes and
brass hat though very magesterial.

“It was a fair shame to see the good old ship go the way she did and to
see you knocked out the way you was. But you was lucky not to be corpsed
like the other poor chaps and the engineer orficer Mister Walton who we
liked. We buried two of ours at Dover along of others that tall
Signalman Clarges with the red hair what played the mandoline and was in
a laundry before the war likewise Stoker Masson. It was a fair treat the
funeral. Everything done proper with band eight coffins on a lorry with
flowers procession and firing party and all the rank and fashion and the
mourners behind. I feels all squeamishlike inside, thinking it might be
me or you. And what would my missus say Sir you being a batchelor and
having no encumbrances. I reckons we all done our bit allright and
deserves a pat on the back.

“Sir I takes liberty to ask you a favour. I sees the Assistant to the
Drafting Commander here at barracks Sir Lieutenant-Commander Chalmers
him knowing your father the Captain. I says I want to go to your ship
when you goes again. He says he don’t know how it can be managed him not
knowing where you’re going and maybe not a West Country ship. But Sir
perhaps it can be managed if you writes Lieutenant Commander Chalmers
whose an ameable gentleman and no frills and haw-haw. Having started
this war with you I begs leave to finish it trusting it meats with your
approval me having done your washing and cleaned up the cabin trusting I
gives satisfaction. Pleese write Mister Chenies Sir you can’t get on
without your faithful

                          George Henry Flagg
                                 A.B.

                                                        3 G.C. badges.”

Tony, amused and not a little touched, communicated with Lieutenant
Commander Chalmers as suggested. Chalmers’ reply was friendly, but
entirely noncommittal. Flagg, it seemed, had been sent on a fortnight’s
leave. When he returned he would probably be put through a refresher
gunnery course lasting a month or three weeks. After that, he must take
his turn for draft to a seagoing ship with hundreds of others, though if
Tony would write when he himself was appointed to a new ship he,
Chalmers, would see if anything could be done. He couldn’t hold out much
hope, however.

So that was that.




CHAPTER XI


In the second week of July, Tony was discharged from the hospital and
sent on sick leave. He went home to Minchinhampton, to be pampered and
cosseted and asked to relate his experiences, not merely once but a
score of times. He became sick and tired at the telling of it. And after
the request had been firmly refused by telephone, the local newspaper
sent its Mr. Harry Tasker to the house for a personal interview. He was
an obstinate and pertinacious young man.

“You don’t understand,” he said to Tony, having forced his way past a
flustered and indignant Effie, who had been told to admit no press
representatives at all. “We have our duty to do in enlightening the
public.”

“The hell you have!” Tony grunted, eyeing him with disfavor. “That
doesn’t give you the right to come barging in here, particularly after I
said no when your paper rang up.”

Mr. Tasker smiled. He was used to this sort of thing. If he always took
no for an answer, he’d probably get the sack.

“You’re well known in the neighborhood, Lieutenant Chenies,” he said
engagingly. “You were wounded at Dunkirk. People are clamoring for your
story. You’re a public hero.”

“Hero be blistered!” Tony burst forth. “And let people clamor. Why
should I satisfy their silly curiosity? What would you think if I came
butting into your house demanding this and that?”

“I’m not a public character,” Mr. Tasker explained. “You are, Lieutenant
Chenies, and this is a country district. You’re news, and we’re proud of
our local worthies.”

Tony replied that he loathed and detested this sort of vulgar personal
publicity. After all, he was only one of the many thousands who had been
at Dunkirk, and had played a very minor part. Moreover, naval officers
weren’t permitted to give interviews to the Press, which Mr. Tasker
ought to know.

But Mr. Tasker, or Mr. Tasker’s editor, had seen to that. He explained
with an air of triumph that the editor had rung up the appropriate
people at the Admiralty and the Ministry of Information. It seemed there
was no objection to the interview provided the copy was submitted for
approval and censorship before publication.

Tony’s last remaining guns were spiked. He had no alternative but to
surrender.

The result, which appeared the following week and occupied two-thirds of
a column, was fairly harmless. It referred to Tony as “this modest
stripling of little more than twenty summers, bearded like the pard, who
had seen more fighting in the last few months than many warriors have
seen in a lifetime, etc.” That was a bit over the edge, Tony
thought--rather nauseating. Thank heaven none of his naval friends was
likely to see it. If they did, he’d never hear the end of it.

Minchinhampton bore little resemblance to the peaceful little place he
remembered when on leave before the war. It was full of troops and
strange new faces. Most of Tony’s young men friends had joined the Army
or R.A.F. in one capacity or another. All the girls he knew and liked
were away from home in one or other of the Services, or doing war work.
Most of the older people, his mother included, were cooking or serving
in canteens, looking after evacuated mothers and children, or had joined
some branch of civil defense, the Women’s Voluntary Service, or the
Mechanized Transport Corps. All the older ladies were knitting
feverishly, some in khaki wool, others in the naval dark blue or the
bluish-gray of the R.A.F.

Volunteers, old Wilkes among them, were drilling in the evenings on the
common, which was being trenched to prevent the landing of enemy
aircraft. Concrete or wooden barriers were being erected on the roads to
prevent the passage of tanks and mechanized troops. They were guarded at
night by troops or volunteers who insisted upon inspecting identity
cards by the light of a shaded torch. More volunteers, armed with
binoculars, spent their nights on the church tower watching the starry
sky for German planes and German parachutists.

Margaret and Webster Barton, Mrs. Chenies’ American friends who had
taken a house near Holmfield and refused to be called by anything but
their Christian names by those they liked, were a real asset so far as
Tony was concerned. He had first met them during his few days leave in
the winter, and had been taken to their hearts, as he had taken them to
his. Bartons, Chenies and the Dodsons at the rectory treated each
other’s houses rather as their own, turning up at unconventional hours,
often staying to improvised meals, or organizing this and that by
telephone on the spur of the moment.

Yes. Life at Minchinhampton would have been very dull for Tony without
the Bartons. Solitary walks on the common with Tinker were alleviated by
meeting Margaret and Sammy, her spaniel, on their way back from shopping
in the village. Well-traveled, shrewd, and very observant, Margaret and
Webster were the most interesting friends Tony had ever had. They were
friends, real friends, utterly natural, spontaneously generous, and
open-hearted. They were Americans, technically aliens or foreigners,
with viewpoints and opinions that sometimes differed widely from Tony’s
own. They argued fiercely. All the same, he found it impossible to
consider them as anything but members of his own family.

Tony’s only other dissipation was being taken out to lunch and tea by
his doting parent, which soon began to pall. He could understand his
mother’s feelings, but disliked being treated as some sort of exhibit.
If only Toppy had been at home things would have been livelier. But
Toppy, worse luck, was full up with her work in London.

“Lady Essington-Blake has asked us to tea on Thursday,” Mrs. Chenies
said, looking up from her letters at breakfast one morning. “We’ll have
to go, Tony.”

Tony immediately assumed what his family called his “sea-boot face.”

“_That_ old battleship!” he groaned. “Why must we go, Mother? You know
how I loathe tea parties, and yapping to old ladies.”

Tony spoke with all the fierce intolerance of youth. To him Lady
Essington-Blake was formidable. The widow of one of the largest
landowners in the district, he remembered her as a white-haired lady of
almost incredible age, erect as a grenadier, austere and rigidly
Victorian in her outlook, and with an incisive manner of speaking. She
still kept up a sort of feudal state at Hatchetts, which he recollected
as a gray, rambling old mansion with a long, long drive, and full of
retainers, family portraits, gilt-framed mirrors, brocade-seated,
spindle-legged chairs, miscellaneous bric-a-brac in glass cases, and
cabinets collected from the Holy Land and Egypt, and a profusion of
china, and gilt and enamel clocks under glass domes.

He had seen Lady Essington-Blake perhaps half a dozen times in the last
ten years, and had studiously kept in the background. He was frightened
of her because of something that had happened during his first visit to
Hatchetts as a small boy on the occasion of her annual garden party to
most of the countryside and all of her tenants.

At that first garden party at Hatchetts as a small schoolboy Tony had
disgraced himself. It was partly the excitement at being in a great
crowd of people and winning a coconut, partly the heat coupled with the
results of eating large portions of the coconut with too many ices and
cream puffs in the refreshment tent. But the inevitable cataclysm was
inopportune and badly timed. It took place in public, to wit, on the
terrace where her ladyship, armed with her inevitable ear trumpet, was
bidding a gracious farewell to her guests. The band, Tony remembered,
had just played “God Save the King.”

Like most deaf people, Lady Essington-Blake had a clear and penetrating
voice.

“Who _is_ that disgusting little boy?” she demanded, fixing her basilisk
eye upon the wretched Tony and pointing with her instrument.

Mrs. Chenies made things worse by trying to apologize. It was the heat,
she explained. The child was always inclined to be bilious. Captain
Chenies tried to look as though Tony had nothing to do with him.

“Send for Thomas,” Lady Essington-Blake commanded. “Have the poor little
wretch taken care of.”

Thomas was the second footman.

It was an ignominy which Tony never forgot. If only he had had the
presence of mind to retire behind the shrubbery!

“We _must_ be polite to Lady Essington-Blake,” said Mrs. Chenies that
morning at breakfast. “She’s done such a lot since the war with these
canteens and things. She’s got three evacuated mothers and eleven
children at Hatchetts.”

“But what’s all that got to do with me?” Tony wanted to know. “Surely
she doesn’t want me to make funny faces for her evacuees!”

“She particularly asks me to bring you to tea,” Mrs. Chenies told him.
“She’ll even send a car for us.”

“Huh! And where the blazes does she get the petrol?”

Mrs. Chenies didn’t know.

“We’ll have to go, Tony,” she said firmly. “And you’ll have to wear your
uniform, dear. I don’t like you to be in plain clothes if army officers
are likely to be there. I believe she’s got some billeted upon her.”

It was with rather a bad grace that Tony finally assented. He could
think of no valid excuse for refusing.

And Lady Essington-Blake was no longer the awe-inspiring dragon he
remembered as a small boy, but a small, rather fragile-looking old lady
in a wheelchair, with silver hair, a lace cap, and benevolent blue eyes
which seemed to miss nothing. She was shrewdness itself, and knew
everything that was going on. Her conversation was lively and
interesting. For listening, she still used the disconcerting ear trumpet
in preference to one of the newer electrical devices for the deaf.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon. There were no other guests, and the
three of them had tea on the terrace outside the French windows of the
drawing room overlooking the flower beds and lawns at the back of the
house. Like Lady Essington-Blake herself, the garden seemed to have
shrunk in size since Tony had seen it last.

The time went much faster than he realized. The tray of drinks arrived
in due course--golden cider in a cut-glass jug, a glass carafe of fresh
tomato juice in a large bowl of crushed ice, decanters of whisky and
sherry, a siphon of soda water, another bowl of ice. The maid followed
Styles, the aged butler, with a plate of small biscuits, and another of
anchovies and olives on little rounds of toast. Tony marveled. This
munificence was almost pre-war.

“You needn’t wait, Styles.”

“Very good, m’ Lady.”

Tony did the pouring, sherry for his hostess and himself, tomato juice
for his mother. The sherry was pale and golden, and very dry.

“I’m forbidden this by my doctor,” Lady Essington-Blake chuckled,
sipping. “It’s bad for my rheumatism. But I never could resist Tio Pepe,
and this is an occasion. --You like it, young man?”

Tony, who was no connoisseur of wines, confessed that he did.

“So much the better,” said his hostess. “Yes. It’s a pleasant wine. I
was first introduced to it by my dear husband long before you were born,
in the days we used to hunt with the Cotswold. Well, well!” she sighed.
“England will never see those good old times again. And all because of a
vulgar little jackanapes of an Austrian paper-hanger wanting to rule
the world by murder and beastliness. I hope I live to see his
downfall.”

Half-past six came. Styles reappeared to announce the car at the front
door.

Mrs. Chenies and Tony got up to go.

“Styles!”

“M’ Lady?”

“Have those things been put in the car?”

“Yes, m’ Lady.”

“You’re sure you’ve made no mistake?”

“No, m’ Lady. They’re all in.”

“Very well, Styles. You may go.”

“Very good, m’ Lady.”

Styles bowed and retreated through the French window.

Mrs. Chenies and Tony shook hands with their hostess.

“I’m glad to have seen you, young man,” she said, holding Tony’s hand
and looking up into his eyes. “Your mother’s so often talked about you.
All the same, I’m not quite certain I like the beard, though no doubt
you’re following the fashion set by our dear King Edward and his sailor
son. --I expect you’ve young friends in the neighborhood you see now and
then?” she went on to ask, without giving Tony a chance of defending his
beloved beard.

“Oh, yes,” he replied, wondering what she was driving at.

“I know it isn’t easy to entertain nowadays,” the old lady continued
with an air of mystery. “So you’ll find a little something in the car
which may help you to give a small party. Be merry while you can, young
man. You’ll only be young once.”

“It’s awfully good of you,” Tony stammered, rather overcome. “I....”

“And there’s a memento of my dear husband which may be useful at sea,
and another little thing which may help to keep you warm in winter-- No,
no. I don’t want to be thanked,” as Tony strove to reply. “But if you
ever have time to write to a rather lonely old woman, she’ll always be
delighted to hear from you. We’re all thinking of the men at sea, and of
the Navy. D’you know what I’d be doing if I were fifty years younger,
instead of a useless, rheumatic old drudge with knobby fingers who can
barely knit?”

Tony hadn’t any idea, and said so.

“I’d be in the Navy myself, like my uncle Ned who fought in the
Crimea. --Yes, I’d be one of those Wren women.”

Tony smiled.

“I can’t quite imagine you obeying someone else’s orders and putting up
with naval discipline,” he said.

“I’d put up with anything if I thought it would send this man Hitler to
the place he belongs,” Lady Essington-Blake returned. “Well, God bless
you, dear boy. Knock the conceit out of these impudent Germans whenever
you get the chance, and write and tell me all about it. Good luck to
you.”

Lady Essington-Blake’s “little something” resolved itself into nine
bottles of the precious Tio Pepe, together with a large box of assorted
cocktail savories from a well-known firm in Piccadilly. One parcel
contained a sporting telescope which had been used for deerstalking by
the late Sir Richard Essington-Blake in the eighties of last century,
another a quart-size vacuum bottle in a leather case embellished with
Tony’s initials, with Lady Essington-Blake’s card with her own spidery
handwriting, “With best wishes from an old woman.”

“Now I know why she asked me for your full name over a month ago,” Mrs.
Chenies remarked. “But I never suspected this.”

“Talk of fairy godmothers,” said Tony, rather embarrassed and ashamed of
himself. “And to think that I--”

His mother guessed what was in his mind.

“Now you know what I meant when I said how good and kind-hearted she
was,” she put in.


2.

The enemy’s intensive air offensive, which afterward came to be known as
the Battle of Britain, started in the second week in August with
attacks on convoys in the English Channel, the Thames Estuary, and off
the east coast of England. As the days went on Portland, Portsmouth,
Dover, and other coastal towns, besides the fighter airdromes in the
south and southeast of England, were all heavily and repeatedly
attacked.

But the hordes of enemy dive bombers, accompanied by their clouds of
protecting fighters, were well and truly dealt with by the gallant young
men of the R.A.F. The Germans had planned a knockout blow designed to
overwhelm by sheer weight of numbers. It failed utterly. By August 15
four hundred and seventy-two enemy aircraft had been shot down. Within
three days their losses had risen to six hundred and ninety-seven.

No bombs fell anywhere near Minchinhampton, but nobody in England could
ever forget the late summer and autumn of 1940. Tony, now feeling
perfectly fit, was itching to be back at sea again. It irked him to be
tied idly by the leg as a pseudo-invalid while all this activity was
going on. Had the Admiralty forgotten his very existence?

He had almost made up his mind to go to London to see someone at the
Admiralty, when there came a letter from Richmond, who had been First
Lieutenant of the _Vexatious_. After inquiring how he was getting on and
apologizing for not having written before, Richmond came to the point.

“I was told this morning at the Admiralty that I am to be appointed in
command of a destroyer,” he wrote. “I can’t go into details in a letter,
but would you like to come as my Number One? I should naturally like
someone with destroyer experience. You’re the very chap, though I shan’t
take it amiss if you’d rather go somewhere else. However, it sounds
fairly amusing.

“I mentioned your name to the powers-that-be, and they were willing
provided you’re passed fit when you’re medically surveyed, or whatever
it’s called. Anyhow, send me a wire on receipt of this, and I’ll fix it
up.”

Beside himself with excitement, Tony showed the letter to his mother.
She read it without comment, though her expression showed what she felt.

“I suppose you’ll say yes, darling?”

“Of course,” said Tony, aware of what she was thinking. “You know,
Mother, I should simply hate being in a big ship. I’d feel sort of lost
in a multitude.”

“I know, dear.”

“And being offered a job as Number One of a destroyer’s pretty good
going for me. I’ve only been a lieutenant for three months. Most of the
Number One’s are far more senior.”

“Then I’m glad they think so well of you, dear. --You mustn’t mind about
me, Tony,” she added, her voice rather strained and unnatural. “I’m only
your stupid old mother. I naturally want--” She hesitated. “I want you
always to do what you think best. --And now I must go and see Effie
about the food.”

Within five minutes Tony had telephoned a telegram to Richmond.
“Delighted to come,” he said. “Feeling perfectly fit. Please hasten
medical survey. Sick doing nothing.”

Three days passed with Tony in a fever of impatience--four days. Then an
official letter from the Admiralty, in which he was instructed to
present himself in London for medical survey on a certain date at a
certain time.

They X-rayed him, examined him all over, prodded him, asked many
questions, finally to pronounce him fit in all respects for sea service.

Lunching with Richmond at his club he heard more about the new
appointment. Fifty of the older American destroyers were being handed
over to Britain, and Richmond was to command one of them. The crews were
to be sent to a Canadian port by liner, and the destroyers would be
brought over in batches.

“When do we sail from England, sir?” Tony asked, adding the “sir”
because Richmond was now his commanding officer, or presently would be.

“Early in September,” he was told. “I’m told it’ll be a bit of a hustle
over the other side. You’ll have to keep your wits about you, Chenies.
Strange ships, strange gear, and a new ship’s company. Think you can do
it?”

“I’ll have a darned good try, sir, or die in the attempt. What’s our job
when we get back?”

“Search me,” said Richmond. “Some sort of convoy work, I should
imagine.”

“And which of the home ports does our ship’s company come from?”

“I believe it’s Devonport, Chenies.”

“Then we simply must try to get Able Seaman Flagg, sir.”

“That old devil!” Richmond laughed. “He’s the most plausible and artful
old dodger I ever met.”

He might be, Tony admitted, going on to speak of Flagg’s letter and of
Lieutenant Commander Chalmers, the assistant to the Drafting Commander
at Devonport barracks. Did Richmond mind if Tony wrote asking for
Flagg’s services?

“I’m perfectly agreeable. I don’t know the name of our new ship. But if
Chalmers will play, ask for Flagg to be detailed for the crew of _Number
Fourteen_, that’s what the ship’s known as at present. --If it’ll help,
you can tell Chalmers you’ve consulted the C.O., and that the C.O.
concurs.”

“I will,” said Tony, making a note of _Number Fourteen_.


3.

An official list of awards for Dunkirk appeared in the newspapers late
in August. The _Vexatious_ had done well.

Among others, Bickerstaff had been awarded a bar to his D.S.O. Richmond,
Tony, and Maclean, the doctor, had been given the Distinguished Service
Cross. In the list of those who had earned the Distinguished Service
Medal appeared the name of Able Seaman George Henry Flagg.

Incidentally, Lieutenant Commander Chalmers had been helpful. Flagg had
duly been drafted to _Number Fourteen_.

It was early in September, after the first of the night bombing attacks
on London, that the _Duchess of Devonshire_ sailed from England for
Canada with a few passengers and about twelve hundred officers and men
of the Royal Navy, forming the crews for eight of the new ex-American
destroyers. Enemy submarines were active in the Atlantic, though from
that point of view the voyage passed without incident.

Most of Tony’s mornings and afternoons were busily occupied. Apart from
frequent consultations with Richmond, he had to sort out the crew of
_Number Fourteen_, and to interview each man separately to discover his
past history and the ships in which he had served. Some of them were new
entries who had just completed their training. A few of the older men
were pensioners, one a grizzled petty officer with a long row of ribbons
who had served with the naval guns in Serbia in the last war. Others had
been at sea since the outbreak of war and had served in battleships,
cruisers, aircraft carriers, and destroyers. They came from all over the
world. Many, like Tony himself, had already been in action in Norway, in
Holland, and at Dunkirk. One young A.B. had been present at the defeat
of the _Admiral Graf Spee_.

It was during this interviewing that Tony met a smart likely-looking
young leading seaman named Alfred Buttress, who had been in destroyers
through the whole of the war. He asked him the stock questions. What job
had he done in his last ship? Was he married or single? Where did he
live? Had he any special accomplishments? What was his age?

The answers were duly noted.

“Right, Buttress,” said Tony, dismissing him. “That’s all for the
present.”

But the man hesitated.

“You’ll pardon me asking you a question, sir,” he asked. “But your
name’s Chenies?”

“It is,” said Tony.

“And is it a relative of yours who’s captain of an armed merchant
cruiser called the _Fonthill Abbey_, sir?”

“My father,” Tony replied. “Why d’you ask?”

“Because the name’s familiar through my old dad,” said Buttress,
smiling. “He’s a pensioner chief petty officer in the _Fonthill Abbey_
along with your father, sir.”

“That’s a peculiar coincidence,” Tony said. “Two fathers and two sons in
two different ships. I wonder if we’ll ever run across the _Fonthill
Abbey_ in harbor. That ’ud be stranger still. We’ll go ship visiting
together, Buttress. Knock the old boys for their tot of rum, what?”

Buttress grinned.

“Sounds all right to me, sir,” he agreed.

“So you come of a naval family?” Tony asked.

“I’ve got one brother in the Service, sir. The old dad did his full
twenty-two, sir, and his dad before him, my grandad, that is. He was in
China in eighteen-sixty, sir, and in Egypt in eighty-two. I know, sir,
because we’ve got his medals at home. He finished up in the sail loft in
Pompey Dockyard, having lost an eye in China and turned over to
sailmaker from A.B.”

“A pretty stout record,” Tony agreed. “I hope you’re proud of it,
Buttress.”

“I am that, sir. My old dad got his D.S.M. at Gallipoli, sir. Then my
great-grandad was along with Admiral Collingwood in the _Royal
Sovereign_ at Trafalgar.”

“Trafalgar!” said Tony. “I congratulate you, Buttress. --Well, I’ll be
seeing plenty of you in the next few months, and one of your jobs as a
leading seaman and an experienced hand is to teach the ropes to the men
entered for ‘Hostilities Only,’ and to make proper seamen of them. Be
gentle with them to start with. They’re good stuff.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Then that’s all for now,” said Tony. “Send Ordinary Seaman Harvey in,
please.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Leading Seaman Buttress turned on his heel, replaced his cap, and left
the office. _Number Fourteen_ was lucky to get him, Tony decided. He was
a smart, alert fellow, slick with his answers and good at his job if
appearances were any guide. Moreover, he was certainly young to be
wearing the “killick,” or anchor, which denoted his rating as leading
seaman. The Navy was getting good men in these days. What with the
losses and the huge expansion it needed all the good men it could get.

Yes, Tony was busy enough during that voyage to Canada. There was a good
deal of paper work, and apart from mustering his new crew and organizing
them so far as possible for their duties and stations for the new ship,
they carried out a mild form of naval routine, with divisions in the
morning, physical drill twice a day, periodical inspections of the men’s
quarters, and a certain amount of instruction in seamanship for the
younger men.

There came the last day of the voyage, with everyone packing, changing
money at the purser’s office, and filling in the usual forms and
obtaining their landing cards. The ship was expected to berth at about
half-past nine next morning. Land would be in sight at daylight.




CHAPTER XII


Completed over twenty years before, the fifty destroyers handed over to
Britain by the United States in the autumn of 1940 had been part of the
huge American building program of 1917-18. Admittedly, as destroyers go,
they were old ships, but between forty and fifty British destroyers of
equal age had done yeoman service since September 1939. The _Vexatious_
was one of them. Her experiences were by no means exceptional.

Losses among the British flotillas had been heavy, particularly during
the Norwegian campaign and at Dunkirk. Italy had entered the war and
France had surrendered, which meant that the British Empire had to
shoulder practically the whole of the responsibility for the struggle at
sea. The area of operations at sea had greatly widened. Besides home
waters and the convoy routes in the Atlantic, the whole of the
Mediterranean, with the Red Sea and portions of the Indian Ocean, had
now become theaters of naval hostilities. Moreover, Germany’s occupation
of 2,000 miles of European Atlantic coast, from the North Cape of Norway
to the frontier between France and Spain, made it far easier for her
surface raiders, her U-boats and aircraft to prey upon the vital trade
in the Western Approaches to the British Isles.

More destroyers were urgently needed for convoy work in the Atlantic,
everybody knew that. Still more were required for operating with the
fleet. Double the number of destroyers and escort craft that Britain
possessed could usefully have been employed and still be overworked.
Their numbers did not even approximate the available total in 1917-18,
when Britain still lay as a geographical barrier athwart Germany’s exits
to the outer ocean and the naval situation was far less difficult and
dangerous than in the latter half of 1940.

Coming as it did at a most critical and perilous time, the reinforcement
from America of fifty fast, well-armed vessels was a most welcome
accession to Britain’s naval strength.

The fifty ships were steamed in batches to a Canadian port by their
American crews. There, after being turned over--forty-four to the Royal
Navy and six to the Royal Canadian Navy--they hauled down the Stars and
Stripes, hoisted the White Ensign, and set forth to join the
hard-pressed flotillas on the other side of the Atlantic.


2.

_Number Fourteen_, Tony’s ship, was not to be known by her new British
name, H.M.S. _Hamilton_, until she was halfway across the Atlantic on
her way to England, when the new names of the flotilla were made known
by radio. Like all her sisters, she had been given a place name common
to the British Empire and the United States. There were numerous
Hamilton counties or towns in America, another in Lanarkshire, Scotland,
others, among other parts of the Empire, in Ontario, Canada, and in
Australia and New Zealand. The ship’s nominal connection extended in
many different directions.

She was a four-funneled, flush-decker of 1,200 tons without a raised
forecastle, running down to a low “fantail” right aft. She had a speed
of over thirty knots, and carried four four-inch guns and twelve
torpedo-tubes, besides the armament and equipment for dealing with
submarines and aircraft.

Her whole design, lay-out, and internal arrangements were different from
those of any British destroyer. The captain and officers had their
wardroom and cabins in the forepart of the ship beneath the bridge. The
seamen lived on a large messdeck under the officers, the chief petty
officers farther forward again on the same level, and the stokers right
aft. The mess decks were fitted with two-or three-tiered bunks instead
of hammocks. In the wardroom and cabins the cupboards, chairs, table,
and other furniture were all of some light metal alloy.

The American guns, ammunition, torpedoes, depth charges, anti-submarine
equipment, engines, boilers, indeed, most fittings, varied from the
British. They would take some getting used to, so a day was spent with
the American officers and men explaining the details of this and that to
their British opposite numbers. Nobody could have been more helpful or
co-operative.

Richmond was introduced to the steering gear, engine-room, telegraphs,
telephones, and other instruments on the bridge by the American
Lieutenant Commander, and was given much good advice as to how the ship
handled in varying circumstances of wind and sea and going alongside.
Like British destroyers, it seemed she had an individuality all of her
own, and at times was inclined to be what her American captain called
“temperamental.” Sometimes she was as docile as a lamb. Occasionally,
for no apparent rhyme or reason, she took the bit into her mouth and
became mulish and obstinate. When this happened she had to be humored
and treated very gently. Forcing her was no good.

Tony was conducted round the ship on deck and below by _Number
Fourteen’s_ First Lieutenant, a typical product of Annapolis--keen,
efficient, very up-to-date in his work, and secretly regretful that he
was not coming “over the other side” in the ship. Staddon, the Engineer
Lieutenant Commander, R.N.R., and Biddle, his Chief Engine-Room
Artificer, went into a huddle with their American counterparts about
turbines, boilers, dynamos, oil fuel, boiler water, flooding
arrangements, and a multitude of pipes and valves for one purpose or
another. Mr. Small, the Gunner, and his chief assistant, Chief Petty
Officer Folland, had to adjust themselves to acquiring a rapid
knowledge of American torpedoes, depth charges, and electrical
appliances.

Able Seaman Flagg, initiated into the mysteries of the bosun’s store by
a sailor from Portland, Maine, was loud in his admiration for the
American white cotton canvas, the cordage, and everything else that the
store contained.

“You’d hardly believe all the stuff that’s in there, Mister Cheenies,
sir,” he said with his eyes goggling. “It’s like a shop, sir, more stuff
than ever I saw outside Woolworth’s! An’ that gob who took me round,
sir!”

“That what?” asked Tony, mystified.

“Gob, sir. That’s what their sailors is called--same as we’re called
matlows.”

“That’s a new one on me, Flagg. What of him, though?”

“He’s called Pendrick, sir. His grandfather came from Plymouth.”

“Don’t waste my time on family histories, Flagg,” said Tony impatiently,
trying to remember what he had been about to write in his notebook. It
was just like Flagg, the enthusiastic old ass, to come worrying him with
a complicated rigmarole about gobs and grandfathers when there was so
much to be done and to think about.

“No, Mister Cheenies, sir,” the A.B. replied, with rather an injured
expression in his doglike eyes. “But as I was goin’ to say, sir, that
there Pendrick’s just turned twenty-four and’s bin four years in the
navy. He’s drawin’ close on sixty dollars a month, sir. Three blinkin’
quid a week an’ all found! Did you ever hear the like o’ that, sir?”

Compared with Flagg’s pay, Pendrick’s was munificence indeed.

“It costs much more to live in America,” Tony informed him. Comparisons
in pay were certainly not to be encouraged.

“Yes, sir. But it’s not only the pay I’m thinkin’ about.”

“Then what _is_ on your mind?” Tony demanded, his exasperation beginning
to get the better of him.

“Pendrick knows some dames around here, sir,” Flagg explained, sinking
his voice to a throaty whisper. “He wants me to--”

“Dames! At your time of life, you old reprobate? I thought you were
married, Flagg?”

“’Gawd ’elp me, Mister Cheenies! O’ course I’m married. But it’s not
_them_ sort o’ dames you sees in films. You’ve took me up the wrong way,
sir. It’s a father an’ mother an’ a whole parcel o’ daughters wot
Pendrick’s friends with, a Canadian family. Seein’ as how I’m fresh out
from England an’ seen a bit, Pendrick says will I come along an’ have a
bite o’ supper tonight an’ spin ’em a yarn about the war, Dunkirk, sir,
an’ all that.”

Tony could imagine the sort of yarns that Flagg might spin when really
on his mettle.

“Is it all right for me to go, sir?” the A.B. inquired.

“Of course,” said Tony. “Why ever not?”

“Me bein’ a belligerent and Pendrick a nootral, sir, I thought
maybe--well, sir, you know what I mean.”

“I hope you’ll have a very pleasant evening with the--er ladies,” said
Tony. “Be careful of what you say, that’s all. Act as though Hitler were
under the table. In other words, be discreet.”

“I’ll see to that, sir,” said Flagg, beaming all over his face. “But a
bit o’ female society don’t come amiss now an’ then. It’s civilizin’, in
a manner o’ speakin’.”

Tony could agree with that also, though he was far too busy to remember
to ask what happened that evening with Pendrick and the “dames.”

Flagg, being a staid hand and the most senior A.B. in the ship, could no
longer be spared as Tony’s henchman and the guardian of his exiguous
wardrobe. He was wanted for more important duties, which did not please
Flagg, since being the First “Lootenant’s” personal attendant gave him
the entree of the wardroom, the pantry, and the cabin flat at all times.
This increased his importance on the mess deck. Flagg, if he had not
actually heard what the skipper had said to Jimmy the One, or Jimmy the
One to the engineer officer, was always capable of inventing something.
Thus, he was regarded as always being in possession of the latest
information of interest. If someone asked, “What’s the buzz, Georgie
boy?” wanting to know what was in the wind, Flagg either used his vivid
imagination or, if he could think of nothing sufficiently plausible,
tapped the side of his nose and looked mysterious.

Flagg selected his own successor, a tall, pale-faced lad called Rust.

“I’ll keep an eye on ’im, sir, an’ tell ’im what to do,” Flagg
volunteered. “He knows how to press trousers already.”

“The least important part of his duties,” said Tony. “What did you do
before you joined the Navy, Rust?”

“I was a milk roundsman, sir, before becoming a saxophone player in a
dance band, sir,” came the somewhat surprising answer.


3.

The ships had been refitted throughout. They were scrupulously clean and
fully supplied. Complete outfits of ammunition and other warlike
equipment were left on board, together with stores of all kinds.
Everything was handed over to the new owners--paint and cordage,
mess-traps, silver and china, all marked with the anchor and U.S.N.,
towels, sheets, blankets, mattresses, and pillows. Sextant, chronometer
watch, high-powered binoculars for the use of the officers and lookouts,
parallel rulers and instruments for navigation were not forgotten. A
typewriter, paper, envelopes, patent pencil sharpeners, pencils,
ink--everything and anything one could imagine, even to books and
magazines, an electric coffee machine in the wardroom, were all
provided. Storerooms were fully stocked with provisions, including
spiced tinned ham and tinned sausages and canned fruit and corn, which
do not normally find a place in the dietary of British bluejackets.
Since the American Navy is “dry,” the British victualing officer on
shore saw to it that the ships were duly provided with Navy rum.

When the time for the final turnover came, the American ensigns, jacks,
and pendants were hauled down for the last time, and the American crews
left their ships to travel home by rail. An hour later, with a band of
the Royal Canadian Navy playing at its head, a long column of British
seamen, eight ships’ companies, marched through the town from the
barracks where they had been accommodated.

At the head of the jetty alongside which the destroyers lay stood a
British Rear-Admiral and his staff. As each ship’s company marched by,
the officers saluted and the detachments were given the order “Eyes
left!”

The crews went on board their new ships and were fallen in on deck. When
all was ready, with men standing by the halliards, a bugler on the jetty
sounded the “Attention” followed by the “Admiral’s Salute.” The
brand-new White Ensigns appeared at the ensign staffs aft, the jacks
forward, and the white, red-crossed naval pendants at the main masthead.
The bugler sounded the “Carry On.” The brief ceremony was over. Another
eight destroyers had become British. Their crews started to settle down
in their new and unfamiliar surroundings.

For the next few days _Number Fourteen_ was at sea with the other
ships--exercising the men, carrying out steaming trials, trying out the
armaments. For Richmond and Tony it was a period of intense activity.
The crew had to be drilled for every conceivable emergency, from
repelling enemy aircraft and action stations to fire quarters, collision
stations, and taking or being taken in tow. Not a few of the men were
strange to destroyers. Others, the newcomers to the Navy, had not been
to sea except for the voyage out from England.

And then, after fueling up at another port, they set out for the long
stretch of nearly 2,500 miles across the Atlantic. The weather was
inclined to be turbulent, particularly for ships of only 1,200 tons. It
eventually came on to blow very hard indeed, with fierce squalls and a
steep, toppling sea and the wind whipping the spray off every surging
wave crest.

“Heavy breaking southwesterly sea, very steep,” ran one of the entries
in the _Hamilton’s_ bridge notebook. “Wind 7 to 8. Squalls of heavy
rain, with gusts force 9 to 10. Occasional thunder and lightning.”

All destroyers are lively in such conditions, and the _Hamilton_ and her
consorts, though dry enough on deck, were no exception. The heaviest
rolls were fifty-four degrees to port and forty-seven to starboard,
though not of course at the same time. The roll toward the wind and sea
never approximated to the roll to leeward. The motion was quick and
jerky, disconcerting enough to those who had never been in destroyers
before. Some of the younger men paid the usual penalty, and wished only
that they might die, and that quickly.

Most of the men lashed themselves in their bunks at night, as did the
officers off watch in the upper berths of the double cabins. Except for
a hurried wash and shave in the morning, few removed their clothes
during the entire voyage. Even partial cleanliness was something of an
ordeal with the ship throwing herself about as she did. Richmond, Tony,
a few of the petty officers, Flagg, young Buttress, and perhaps half a
dozen others, were the destroyer veterans of the party.

One of the other officers, a Lieutenant R.N.V.R., had been a chemist in
Prince Rupert, British Columbia, when the war began. The R.N.V.R.
Sub-Lieutenant was about to become a solicitor and had joined the Navy
as a seaman to serve some time in a trawler before being chosen to
qualify as an officer. What with mines, U-boats, bombs, and engagements
with enemy aircraft, he had already had his full share of experiences.

The Surgeon Lieutenant, whose first trip it was to sea in the Navy, had
forsaken a practice in the West End of London. He never once was seasick
and even during the most blowing weather was invariably immaculately
dressed with a clean white collar. Most of the others wore fishermen’s
high-necked jerseys, mufflers, sea boots, and their oldest of uniforms,
much patched and tattered. Not so the “Doc.”

Staddon, the engineer officer, and Mr. Small, the Gunner, have already
been mentioned. They proved themselves to be towers of strength at sea,
just as they had during the process of taking-over in Canada.

As has already been indicated, the previous histories of the men were as
varied as those of the officers. A good many corners had to be rounded
off and polished. There were a few square pegs, but the crew as a whole
were a keen lot of men and stout-hearted. By the time the coast of
Ireland was sighted as a gray-blue smudge on the horizon they were
beginning to get over the first throes of life in a small ship in bad
weather, and were working together with a will.

Already the _Hamilton_ showed signs of being a happy ship. Whatever
Richmond and Tony may have felt about the necessary minor readjustments,
they would never have admitted to any outsider that she wasn’t
incomparably the best and smartest ship of the flotilla--a flotilla soon
to be broken up and its units dispersed to the areas in which destroyers
were most needed.

For one busy week the _Hamilton_ lay in a British dockyard port
undergoing a few alterations and having her anti-submarine and
anti-aircraft armaments increased.

Speculation was soon rife among the crew as to where the ship would next
be employed. Bales of additional warm clothing were drawn from the Naval
Store Officer. Large gift bundles of hand-knitted jerseys, mufflers,
sea-boot stockings, gloves, and other things arrived from various
organizations in Britain and the United States which provided comforts
for the Royal Navy. Their receipt at once started a rumor that the
_Hamilton_ was shortly to be sent to the Arctic, though precisely what
for nobody could say.

“That’s all baloney,” said Able Seaman Flagg, arguing the point with the
leading cook. “I’ll bet you three tots o’ rum we won’t sight no icebergs
nor polar bears this commission.” He helped himself to a freshly baked
rock cake from a metal tray in the galley.

Cookie did not draw his rum, and said so. Anyhow, if Flagg had inside
knowledge as to where the ship was going, he might just as well share
it.

Flagg sucked his teeth and looked mysterious.

“Well,” he said, proceeding to masticate. “I did hear a buzz. Leastways,
it isn’t hardly a buzz, but me puttin’ two and two together from wot I
heard in high places.”

“You’re telling me!” Cookie laughed. He had been shipmates with Flagg
quite long enough to realize that he was no ordinary romancer.

“Ho!” said Flagg, somewhat nettled. “So you thinks I’m a liar, do you?”

“Not hardly a deliberate liar, Georgie. More a comedian, I should say.
You like a good yarn. Your two and two don’t always make four.”

“So that’s what you thinks, you old water spoiler! --Why d’you think
they’ve painted us in all these here fancy colors?”

Indeed, the _Hamilton’s_ service gray had been covered over with a
futuristic design in white, blue, and green with a few broad streaks of
black.

The cook didn’t know, and said so.

“But I knows,” said the wiseacre. “It’s so we’ll ’armonize with tropic
seas. An’ didn’t I hear the skipper askin’ the navigator wot charts we
had o’ Gibraltar and Sierra Leone? We’re goin’ somewheres ’ot, you mark
my words.”

But somehow cookie couldn’t reconcile those bales and bundles of winter
clothing with service in the tropics.

“When you’ve bin in the Navy as long as I have you’ll learn not to be
surprised at anything they does,” said Flagg, choosing another rock cake
and biting into it.

“There’s something in that,” the leading cook felt bound to admit. “I
volunteered for a big ship in the Mediterranean, so they send me here to
look after a lot o’ ungrateful perishers like you who don’t know what
good cooking is, and growl if you don’t get three rashers to your
breakfasts.”

“Wot about the corned beef hash?” Flagg queried, his mouth full.

“Good cooks are artists, which is more than I can say for some able
seamen I know of. Artists can’t make pictures without materials in a
gale o’ wind in the blinkin’ Atlantic!”

“If you’re an artist I’m an admiral,” said Flagg. “But never mind,
cookie. You don’t do so bad, reely. Don’t let it get you down, any’ow.”

“It’ll take a better man than you to get me down,” said cookie, as
Flagg’s hand went out again. “And now clear out o’ my galley, you old
scrounger. Those rock cakes are for the petty officers’ tea.”

“They’d be all right if you hadn’t skimped the currants,” said Flagg,
brushing crumbs off his jumper preparatory to moving off. “I was only
samplin’ your artistry. Well, so long, Cookie Boy. Keep your pecker up.
We’re goin’ somewheres ’ot, you mark my words.”

“Maybe you will one o’ these days,” said the cook to Flagg’s retreating
figure.

The _Hamilton_ was filled up with provisions and stores, then went to
sea for a short run to test her new armament and to make certain that a
slight defect in one of her turbines had been made good. All went well,
and on returning to harbor Richmond went ashore to report. He was back
in less than an hour.

“What’s the verdict, sir?” Tony asked, meeting him at the gangway.

“We sail at seven A.M. tomorrow, Chenies.”

“Where for, sir?” came Tony’s instinctive question.

Richmond smiled and shook his head. Various people were within earshot,
and one never talked about destinations in wartime.

“Our address,” he said, “is care of G.P.O., London. Come forward to my
cabin, Number One. --Quartermaster?”

“Sir?”

“Ask the engineer officer to speak to me.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

It was in the privacy of the captain’s cabin that Tony heard of their
new duty.

The _Hamilton_ was to join a newly formed convoy group for work in the
North Atlantic.




CHAPTER XIII


For more than four months during the winter the _Hamilton_ was engaged
in escorting Atlantic convoys--ten to twelve days out as a rule followed
by a nominal four days in harbor. But there were all too few ships for
the work, and some of them had a habit of developing defects or being
damaged in bad weather, so that the _Hamilton’s_ four days’ rest was
often shortened to forty-eight hours or less.

It was a grueling, monotonous job at any time, but particularly during
the furious gales and bitter cold of winter. Occasionally they had the
chance of opening fire on an inquisitive Focke Wulf which hovered
aggravatingly around reporting the position and composition of the
convoy for the benefit of the U-boats, while rarely venturing within
range. Once they picked up eight survivors from a U-boat which had been
depth-charged and sunk by someone else. Twice they rescued the men from
torpedoed merchant ships, one such party being on board for seven days,
which severely taxed their resources and already crowded living spaces.
But war at sea is not all excitement, action, and glory. The lucky
incidents like sinking a U-boat, bringing down an aircraft, or assisting
in the destruction of an enemy surface ship, come as brilliant flashes
of light in long periods of gray monotony. For the most part war is
simple drudgery, combined, so far as the smaller ships are concerned,
with the very acme of discomfort. Destroyers, escort ships, corvettes,
and trawlers all had an equally trying time.

Sometimes it blew like the wrath of God, with the fierce wind whipping
the crests off the steep, leaden-colored combers and hurtling them to
leeward in clouds of flying spindrift which almost hid the surface. The
old _Hamilton_ plunged and wallowed, burying her bows in the advancing
seas, flinging the heavy spray high over her bridge and funnel tops, and
quivering and shaking as though at any moment she might wrench herself
apart.

In really bad weather normal routine went by the board. Nobody ever took
off their clothes at sea for fear of being caught undressed on some
sudden alarm. Some hardly washed. They evolved a new and simplified
technique of living, snatching an hour or two of sleep whenever the
chance came, and eating scratch meals whenever they could be provided.
As often as not, when the galley--which was on deck--was out of action
through flooding or the motion was such that the cooks were unable to
keep their pots and pans on the stove, the meals were very scratch
indeed. Many was the time Tony sat wedged on the settee in the wardroom
eating a tin of sardines with his fingers.

All hands grew heartily tired of corned beef and tinned salmon, with
ship’s biscuit. Fresh meat and bread usually became exhausted three or
four days after leaving harbor. Hot soup, cocoa, and coffee appeared at
all times, and were most welcome. The sailors preferred tea--strong,
well-stewed tea the color of dark sherry liberally sweetened with brown
sugar and diluted with condensed milk. Jermyn, the doctor, thinking of
their digestions and mindful of his own reputation as a dietician, tried
to eradicate the habit. He might as well have attempted to remove the
pyramids singlehanded. Though grog, otherwise “Nelson’s blood,” has not
lost its popularity, tea is really the staple drink of the Royal Navy.

The winter gales sometimes brought blizzards and heavy snow, with
temperatures well down below freezing. The cold was frequently so
intense that ice from condensation formed on the bulkheads and ship’s
side in the crowded living spaces. On deck the guns, boats, ropes,
rails, indeed all deck fittings in exposed positions, became thickly
encrusted with ice, partly from frozen spray, partly from driving snow.
The thin stanchions of the berthing rails and the wire rails themselves
became swollen to the size of saplings. Entrenching tools were supplied
for de-icing, which was most important. Even in a ship of considerable
size, let alone a destroyer, the additional top weight of ice is
dangerous to stability.

There came the time when the afternoon before the _Hamilton_ arrived in
harbor after a particularly arduous convoy trip, Jermyn, the doctor,
came into Tony’s cabin to disturb his afternoon nap. He had been without
regular sleep for eight days.

“Number One,” he said, shaking him by the shoulder.

Tony was awake on the instant. He sat up blinking in his bunk.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve had to put the skipper on the sick list.”

“Hell!” Tony exclaimed. “He said he wasn’t feeling too well this
morning. What’s the matter?”

“Appendicitis.”

“Lord! Are you having to operate?”

“No,” said the doctor, “not with the ship tumbling about in half-a-gale
of wind and a heavy sea. The appendicitis wasn’t acute. All the same it
_was_ appendicitis, and he’d told Richmond to lie up in his bunk and had
given him something to make him sleep. He wouldn’t undertake the risk of
his carrying on. The ship was expected to reach harbor at daylight on
the morrow, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Tony, scrambling out of his bunk and into his sea boots.

“Then we should arrange for an ambulance to meet us the moment we get
alongside,” the doctor said. “He ought to be operated on as soon as
possible.”

They reached harbor without incident, and Richmond, rather apologetic
and very sorry for himself, was taken off to the hospital. Two hours
later Tony was reporting to the Captain in charge of the flotilla at his
office on shore.

“It’s a bad business about Richmond,” the Captain said. “He’ll be away
for some weeks, they tell me.”

“So I understand, sir.”

“And your ship’s wanted for a special job the day after tomorrow. You’ve
no defects that’ll prevent you from going to sea, I suppose?”

“Nothing that really matters, sir.”

“Good. How long have you been in destroyers, Chenies?”

“Just over sixteen months, sir. Ever since the outbreak of war.”

“You know the ropes pretty well, what?”

“Yes, sir. I think so.”

“Well, I propose leaving you in command, for the next trip, at any
rate,” the Captain told him. “See you don’t let me down.”

Tony felt very proud.

“I’ll do my best, sir,” he said, flushing with pleasure. “Thank you,
sir.”

“Whether or not the high-ups will confirm your remaining in command till
Richmond’s fit again I don’t know,” the Captain continued. “It all
depends on your next trip, I imagine. But I believe in giving young
chaps their chance, so look out you don’t put her ashore or do anything
desperate, or my name’ll be mud. You’ll be sailing at daylight on
Thursday. You’ll get your orders in due course.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And I’m sending you a sub-lieutenant R.N.V.R. to help out with the
watchkeeping. He’s a useful chap who’s spent most of his time in
destroyers. All right, Chenies. Good luck. That’s all.”

Tony felt himself walking on air as he made his way back to the ship. He
was sorry for Richmond, but to be trusted with even the temporary
command of an old destroyer in wartime as a lieutenant of less than a
year’s seniority was glory indeed. There were precious few who had been
given the chance.

He saw Richmond in the hospital before he sailed. The operation had been
successful. There were no complications.

“Good for you, Chenies,” the Lieutenant Commander said, when he heard of
Tony’s good fortune. “Don’t smash up the old ship while I’m away.”

“I’ll do my best not to put a hole in her,” Tony told him.

“Good hunting,” Richmond smiled. “If you manage to bag a U-boat, I’ll
whoop with joy and damn the rotten appendix that kept me out of it.
Don’t forget she’s tricky on the helm, and take it easy going alongside.
When are you sailing?”

“At cockcrow tomorrow.”

“Then so long, good luck again, and give the lads my blessing. They’re a
damn good crowd.”


2.

Tony, full of his new responsibility, was poring over the sailing orders
with a chart of the North Atlantic spread out before him. Snagg, the
Canadian Lieutenant R.N.V.R., stood beside him with parallel rulers,
dividers, and pencil. Snagg, originally a chemist in Prince Rupert,
British Columbia, was the _Hamilton’s_ navigator, and a most reliable
one.

The orders were comparatively simple, “1. Being in all respects ready
for sea,” they began, “H.M. Ship under your command will sail at 0700 on
Thursday, January 29, in time to rendezvous with Convoy L.X. in
Lat. ----  N. Long. ----  W. at 1030 the same day.

“2. The Convoy, which consists of the three ships named in the Appendix
and should be capable of a speed of 15 knots, will be escorted by
H.M.S.’s _Bechuana_, _Cutlass_, and _Claymore_. You will place yourself
under the orders of _Bechuana_, Senior Officer of the escort.

“3. After passing through positions M, L, and R, it is intended that
the Convoy shall be escorted to the meridian of ----  West. Fuel
permitting, escort force will then rendezvous with eastbound Convoy M.Q.
in Lat. ----  N. Long. ----  W. at about daylight on Monday, February
2nd, and accompany it to its destination....”

There was a good deal more about the waves upon which wireless watches
were to be kept, the latest-known positions of U-boats, the areas in
which British minefields had recently been laid, and the activities of
enemy aircraft in the Western Approaches.

“It looks to me like a fairly ordinary eight or nine day trip,” said
Tony.

“Provided the weather’s decent,” Snagg put in. “The glass is well up
now, but how long will it last?”

“What a doleful bloke you are,” Tony laughed. “What we all want is a
spot of excitement after these dreary months of flogging the
ocean. --Gosh! I’d give something to cop a nice fat U-boat on the
surface!”

“If you haven’t had your bellyful of excitement already, you’ll have had
it by the time this war’s ended,” said Snagg. “I’m a civilian, not a
roaring, ranting sailor. --All the same, I wouldn’t mind a U-boat.”

Tony glanced at the clock on the bulkhead of the charthouse. The time
was eighteen minutes past seven _P.M._

“Seeing that this is our last night in harbor and we’re all T.T. at
sea,” he said, “what we both really need, Snagg, is a drop of pink gin
before dinner. Lock up the charts and come down to the wardroom.”

“You’ve had many worse ideas than that, Number One,” the Canadian
replied, bundling the charts into a drawer and locking it. “I must
confess I like my drop o’ gin in moderation. But I’m a chemist, and I’ve
often wondered--”

“What?”

“Have you ever analyzed gin, Number One--beg pardon, I mean Captain?”

“Lord, no!” said Tony. “Why should I?”

“Who invented gin and Angostura bitters?”

“What a damnfool question. Are you going ga-ga, Snagg?”

“My queries are partly scientific. Who introduced pink gin into the
Navy? My old English grandmother always said that only charwomen drank
it.”

“Good luck to the charwomen,” said Tony.

“Quite. But who introduced it into the Navy?”

“How the blazes should I know? What’s it matter, anyhow?”

“I’m just wondering what we’ll do when there’s no more gin,” said Snagg
mournfully. “It’ll be rationed one of these days, if not abolished for
the duration.”

“There’s always beer,” Tony suggested.

“But I detest beer,” the Canadian observed. “That’s what’s worrying me.”

“Huh!” said Tony. “When the gin’s gone and you won’t drink honest beer
you’ll have to go T.T., my lad.”


3.

The outward trip with the convoy was not entirely uneventful. The
weather was fine with little wind, nothing but a long, smooth swell
rolling down from the westward. The sky remained obstinately overcast
with low cloud. At times a thin haze over the gray horizon shut down the
visibility to three or four miles. It was in these circumstances,
halfway through one forenoon, that a huge Focke Wulf Condor came sailing
out of the clouds about fifteen hundred feet overhead and on the
starboard bow of the convoy. Its arrival was quite unexpected. One
couldn’t say which was the more surprised, the convoy or the aircraft.

But the weather being hazy, the escorts and merchant ships had their
anti-aircraft guns manned and ready. Before even the _Hamilton’s_ alarm
bells had ceased ringing or Tony and the others on her bridge had put on
their steel helmets, the intruder was being fired at.

The guns started to thud, and the gray sky became heavily pockmarked
with the puffs of exploding shell--inky black, brown, and a curious
golden yellow. Smaller weapons chimed in. One heard the rattle of heavy
and light machine guns and saw the tracer bullets curving aloft like
flights of red-hot tomatoes.

It all happened very quickly.

The Focke Wulf swerved and dived, probably with the idea of making it
more difficult for the guns. Watching through glasses, Tony saw a parcel
of bombs leave the machine and come slanting down toward the sea. They
fell practically together, bursting with a roar and raising an elongated
upheaval of grayish-white smoke and spray which completely obliterated
the second ship in the convoy.

“Lord!” someone exclaimed on the _Hamilton’s_ bridge. “They’ve got her.”

“Don’t be a damn fool!” said Tony, turning on him.

Appearances were often deceptive, and he’d seen a good deal of bombing
at sea in one way and another. There was always much more water than
ship, and though near misses might sometimes do damage, hundreds of
bombs were dropped for every actual one that did harm. It was so in this
case. When the smoke and spray of the explosions had subsided, the
merchant ship was seen to be steaming on as though nothing had happened.

The enemy airplane, meanwhile, had come down to less than a thousand
feet and had started to climb toward the friendly cover of the clouds,
still pursued by shell bursts and the sparkling tracks of tracer
bullets.

The _Hamilton’s_ own guns were firing hard. So were those in the other
destroyers.

It seemed to Tony that the Focke Wulf would escape. Already she was
becoming blurred and indistinct in the clouds. Then, when he had almost
given up hope, he saw a thin smear of black smoke clear and distinct
against the prevailing gray.

It thickened rapidly into an inky trail arching across the sky. At the
spot where it started he noticed the reddish-golden glow of flame. Then
the airplane itself came into full view again, diving steeply down
toward the sea, and apparently out of control. Her forepart and wings
were clear and distinct. Her fuselage and after part were ablaze.

It was all over in a few seconds. As cheering burst out from the men on
the _Hamilton’s_ upper deck the Focke Wulf, flaring like a comet, hit
the sea in an upheaval of black smoke and spray. When it cleared away
nothing could be seen of the machine but a small part of the smoking
tail standing up out of the water at an angle of forty-five degrees.

The nearest destroyer, the _Cutlass_, raced to the scene. All signs of
the aircraft had disappeared before she got there. She found nothing but
a patch of oil littered with charred debris--that, and two dead bodies
in lifebelts.


4.

It was the next evening, some time before sunset, that the air suddenly
became strident with radio messages.

The _Hamilton_, tied to one particular wave length, did not get them
all, merely intercepts which showed that something unusual was happening
far over the horizon to the southward. An unknown warship with a convoy
was going into action. After that, silence. Tony fumed with impatience.
It was exasperating not to know details.

What ship was in action, and who was she fighting? Was it an ordinary
attack by U-boats or aircraft, or something more serious?

The leading telegraphist of the _Hamilton_ didn’t know. He had heard no
more than bits and pieces of messages, and garbled fragments at that.

But the _Bechuana_, the Senior Officer of the escort, knew more. An hour
later, just after dusk, she was signaling to the _Claymore_ and
_Hamilton_:

“Homeward bound convoy attacked by raider, probably pocket battleship,
in Latitude ----  Longitude ----. _Claymore_ take _Hamilton_ under your
orders and proceed with all convenient dispatch to position indicated,
searching area for possible boats and survivors and continuing after
daylight tomorrow until satisfied. Then proceed to nearest base. Keep
careful lookout in case raider breaks north.”

Twenty minutes later the _Claymore_ and _Hamilton_ were steaming
southward at twenty-three knots, the highest speed that was desirable in
view of their already considerable expenditure of fuel. The position
given was roughly two hundred and eighty miles distant. If the good
weather held, they should reach it shortly before daylight.

Tony spent a sleepless night on the bridge as the _Hamilton_ drove
southward in the _Claymore’s_ wake. Four times he sent down to the
wireless office to ask if there was any further news of the action, or
for whose boats or survivors they had been directed to search. As often
the reply came back that there was no further news--no wireless signals
at all except the usual routine messages. Full of his new
responsibility, Tony would have given a lot for more definite
information.

It was a fairly light night, with a three-quarter moon hidden behind a
canopy of thick cloud. A large ship like a battleship might be sighted
at two miles, certainly no more. Torpedo tubes and guns were kept manned
and ready for action. Officers and lookouts swept the dark horizon with
their glasses.

The _Claymore_, being the senior of the pair, had already made known her
intentions. “If raider is met,” she had said, “intend attacking with
torpedoes, ships separating and acting independently. After attack enemy
should be shadowed. If nothing sighted by daylight, ships will be
stationed five miles apart by signal.”

The hours passed, punctuated by jugs of hot cocoa and sandwiches from
the galley.

Midnight ... 2 A.M. ... 4.30 A.M. ...

It would be a death or glory business if the raider were sighted. Tony
had made up his mind to close in to decisive range before firing his
torpedoes, while trying to keep the pocket battleship silhouetted
against what light there was in the sky. The enemy mounted six
eleven-inch and numerous 5.9’s. The moment she opened fire, the
_Hamilton_ would reply with her four-inch. A mosquito fighting an
elephant, but in the deathless story of the night attacks at Jutland he
remembered reading that a lucky four-inch shell from a British destroyer
bursting on the bridge of a German battleship had killed many and
wounded more.

But no dark shape hove in sight to reward their vigilance--nothing.

At half-past six the first fingers of dawn came creeping over the sky to
the eastward. Three-quarters of an hour later it was almost broad
daylight, and the two destroyers started to diverge to cover a wider
area.

The visibility had increased to seven or eight miles, and the clouds
overhead were beginning to fray out and disperse. There was little or no
wind, and the long, westerly swell broad on the _Hamilton’s_ starboard
beam caused her to lurch heavily to port as she lifted to the smooth,
rolling hillocks. A man with a pair of binoculars had long since climbed
up the swaying ladder to the small crow’s nest halfway up the
_Hamilton’s_ foremast. He had orders to keep his eyes well skinned, and
was doing his level best. In point of fact, standing in a steel cylinder
not unlike an exaggerated oildrum which swayed giddily to and fro in a
sickening arc as the ship rolled, he was beginning to feel the pangs of
acute nausea, and wondered what was the correct and most tactful
procedure if the pangs reached fruition. No one had ever instructed him
on that point. Anyhow, he wished he had not drunk that tin mug of rather
greasy ship’s cocoa before climbing to his lofty eyrie. Being a
destroyer sailor was all very well. He had volunteered for small ships,
and liked them. Fifteen months before he had been a milk roundsman in
Peckham, and his nautical experience had been limited to a boat on the
Serpentine with his wife and two children.

Then, sweeping the horizon with his glasses, his qualms were suddenly
forgotten as he caught sight of a black object on the horizon to
starboard. He focused on the spot--whatever it was had disappeared. Yet
he could have sworn his eyes had not deceived him.

Ah! There it was again.

Putting his mouth to the lip of the voice pipe he hailed the bridge.

“Dark object bearing green three-oh, sir!” he reported. “Distance about
five miles.”

As yet they could see nothing from the bridge.

“Ask him what it looks like,” said Tony, the glasses to his eyes.

“Might be the conning tower of a submarine, sir,” the lookout man
replied. “I can’t see it all the time. It bobs up and down on the
swell.”

It wasn’t the conning tower of a U-boat. It was a ship’s boat flying
what looked like a flag. The _Hamilton_, signaling to the _Claymore_,
altered course toward it.

“Investigate boat and report,” said the _Claymore_.

A quarter of an hour later the boat was close ahead--a merchant ship’s
lifeboat painted gray, gashed and torn with parts of her gunwale
missing. She was crowded with men, some bailing, some trying to get out
the oars. Someone in the sternsheets was waving. The boathook, with a
bit of dirty blanket flapping from it, had been up-ended in the bows.
Looking through his glasses Tony could see no ship’s name on the boat’s
stern. But he saw that many of its occupants were bandaged.

The _Hamilton’s_ engines stopped--went slow astern. Tony conned the ship
to bring the boat close under the port bow. Leading Seaman Buttress,
with several other men, was on the destroyer’s forecastle.

“Here. Catch this, mate!” shouted a seaman. “We’ll pull you alongside.
Don’t get out your oars.” He threw a heaving line, which was caught by a
man in the boat.

Leaning over the port wing of the bridge, Tony looked down into the
boat. It contained more than thirty men, all dirty and dressed in
diverse clothing. One or two wore naval duffle coats. Most of them
seemed to be bandaged. A man in rolled-up shirtsleeves was evidently a
doctor. He was leaning over two obviously badly wounded men lying on the
flooded bottom boards, their heads pillowed on lifebelts, their faces
ashen-gray and ghastly.

A youngish man in the sternsheets wore a tattered uniform monkey jacket
with the stripes of a lieutenant of the Royal Naval Reserve.

“What ship d’you come from?” Tony asked him.

The officer didn’t seem to hear, but realized he was being addressed.

“We were sunk in action with an enemy raider yesterday afternoon,” he
said.

“I know,” said Tony. “But what ship d’you come from?” He already
realized that their pathetic remnant of a ship’s company came from a
warship.

The Lieutenant R.N.R. put his hand to his ear.

“I didn’t catch what you said, sir.”

“I asked what ship you came from,” Tony repeated, louder this time.

“The _Fonthill Abbey_, sir. Armed merchant cruiser.”

Tony’s heart nearly stopped.

“Are you the only survivors?” he managed to get out, hardly recognizing
his own voice.

“I think so. We picked up all we found floating around on wreckage.”

“Where’s the Captain?” Tony asked, feeling sick and dazed.

“I don’t know, sir. He may have got away, but the last we saw of him was
on board, wounded. She was badly on fire and sinking when he ordered us
to leave her. That was after dark.”

“My God!” Tony groaned.

He felt stunned. His father gone. It was unbelievable, dreadful to
contemplate. How in heaven could this terrible news be broken to his
mother? Probably she’d get one of those stereotyped official
communications starting with the words to the effect that the Lords
Commissioners of the Admiralty deeply regretted to inform her that ...

“Oh, God!” he murmured, clenching his fists.

He could imagine a telegram arriving at the house at Minchinhampton.
They might even telephone it. The news would be all over the little
place. Friends and neighbors would condole and try to be helpful and
sympathetic.

But the bottom would be blasted out of his mother’s little universe. She
rarely showed her feelings, but Tony very well knew how really devoted
she was.

And what of Toppy and himself?

One somehow couldn’t visualize existence or home without the old man.
He’d been part and parcel of their lives ever since they could remember,
their friend and helper, always generous and understanding. In his
mind’s eye Tony could see his father pottering round his garden and
tying up the sweet peas, chaffing old Wilkes or the postman, polishing
the car, playing the fool with Tinker, the Sealyham, and Tiger, the cat.

No. Life could never be the same without the old man.

And now he’d gone--in action, fighting a pocket battleship armed with
eleven-inch guns with a slow, unarmored tub of an armed merchant cruiser
mounting no weapon larger than a six-inch. It was just like him to go
bald-headed for an opponent who could blow him out of the water with a
single salvo, but--

Tony was brought back to mundane affairs by a report from Snagg that the
ship was gathering sternway. In his shocked agitation, he had forgotten
that he had given orders for slow astern. He rectified the omission,
gave the ship a touch ahead and brought her to a standstill.

On deck Leading Seaman Alfred Buttress made agonized inquiries from the
survivors as they were helped and hoisted on board, no easy job with a
rolling ship and so many badly wounded.

His father, Chief Petty Officer Reginald Ebenezer Buttress, was also
among the missing. The last time he had been seen was making his way
forward to the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ burning bridge. From what some of the
survivors said he had gone there to report to the Captain that all the
guns were out of action--that the ship could fight no more.

The _Fonthill Abbey_ had floated on into the night, they said, blazing
like a beacon. Then, after the sudden glare of a heavy explosion, she
had been seen no more.

But her tattered, begrimed White Ensigns were still flying when she
foundered. They had seen them in the light of the flames.

The survivors were pathetically proud of that.




CHAPTER XIV


The fog that had persisted for the first few days of the _Fonthill
Abbey’s_ voyage home from Canada had lifted. Captain Chenies was pleased
at that. Shepherding a large ocean convoy in close formation in the
thick weather prevailing on the Banks off Newfoundland was ever an
anxious job. The Captain had hardly slept--rarely left the bridge.

Now, three-quarters of the way across the Atlantic, with the convoy
intact and steaming well, with fine weather and a promising forecast and
the visibility a full twelve miles, Chenies was beginning to think of
home. The _Fonthill Abbey_ was overdue for refit, and needed it.
Jamieson, the Chief Engineer, who made light of most difficulties, had
begun to complain about the state of his boilers. Wenlock, the
Commander, was equally emphatic about the condition of his department.
Parts of the deck needed recaulking after the winter gales of the North
Atlantic. There were boats’ davits to be straightened, two lifeboats to
be replaced, and various alterations and additions to be made to the
armament as a result of war experience. The defect list was growing
almost daily. Three times the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ refit had been put off
because her services were urgently needed. In Wenlock’s opinion, and
Chenies and Jamieson cordially agreed, further to postpone it was asking
for trouble.

The officers and men, too, needed their ten days’ leave. They’d had a
particularly grueling time during most of the winter, and were beginning
to show signs of staleness. Day after day at sea with convoys provided
no chance of real rest or relaxation. Goodchild, the Surgeon Lieutenant
Commander R.N.V.R., who had the unpleasant job of scrutinizing most of
the men’s outgoing correspondence with the help of two assistant
censors, had reported privately to Chenies that the ship’s company was
beginning to think that it had been forgotten.

Chenies also would be glad of a rest, though winter with its cold
weather, short days, and inconveniences brought about by the early
black-out, wasn’t the best time of the year for leave in the country.
Minchinhampton wouldn’t be at its best. There would be little chance of
pottering about in the garden, seeing his friends, and doing all the
things he liked. Petrol and food were rationed. There was little or no
entertaining. All the same, Minchinhampton was home, and blessed. He’d
see his wife and Toppy, perhaps Tony as well if the lad could manage a
hurried week end. There would be Tinker and Tiger. No place was really
home without a dog and a friendly cat. They’d possessed dogs ever since
they’d been married. Life wouldn’t have been the same without them.

He had already planned in his mind that he would get his wife to join
him in London to give him a chance of seeing Toppy and of looking up
various old friends at the Admiralty. A couple of nights in London would
be enough. They’d take Toppy to a theater--if the theaters were still
running and there was something worth seeing.

Toppy was doing pretty well in her job, it seemed, and so was young
Tony. The lad rarely wrote direct to his father, but from his letters to
his mother it appeared he was enjoying himself in his ex-American
destroyer, strenuous though it might be. In his last letter the young
fire-eater had even ventured to hope that the war would last long enough
to give him the necessary seniority for a command of his own.

“I can think of nothing more dismal than the Navy in peacetime,” he had
written. “No excitement to keep one on one’s toes, no submarines or
aircraft, nothing but monotonous exercises at sea at reduced speed to
save fuel, and everyone trying to pretend it’s something like the real
thing. I remember what it was like before this war, and I can’t somehow
see myself liking that sort of thing after all that’s happened to me
since. If I’m not chucked out on the beach as a good many chaps were
after the last war, I think I’ll have to volunteer to go exploring in
the Antarctic or somewhere. I don’t particularly care for the dirt and
discomfort of this sort of life, but it would irk my simple soul still
more to go back to scrubbed decks and brass work, with me, in a frock
coat and telescope, having to keep a watchful eye to see that the
seagulls to windward aren’t too familiar with the paint work. They’re
badly brought-up birds with no manners at all. We don’t worry about such
things now.... I wish you could see this ship and the men,” he went on
to say. “Apart from a few old stagers who were in the Service before the
war, and one or two veritable ancients who served in the last spot of
bother and are back as pensioners for this, practically all of our hands
were in civil jobs all over the country and had no idea of being sailors
at all. Now they’ve got over their seasickness and we’ve trained them to
do their jobs, I must say I’m proud of them and a bit pleased with
myself for being responsible, or partly responsible, for having licked
them into shape, more or less. Their ideas of naval discipline are a bit
weird and wonderful after so short a time in the Service, but they’re a
grand crowd to work with and to be among. We’ve one man just rated A.B.
who was some sort of supervisor in a corset factory. You wouldn’t think
it if you saw him after two or three days at sea. We’ve another who was
a commercial traveler in ladies’ underwear, and a signalman who used to
be a tic-tac man to a bookie. It takes all sorts to make a wartime
Navy....”


2.

The time was after half-past four in the afternoon. The weather being
clear and the convoy in station, Chenies was in his sea cabin near the
bridge going item by item through the engine-room defect list with
Jamieson. It was a boring job which simply had to be done before the
ship reached harbor. Chenies, for his part, would have far preferred to
be enjoying the bright sun outside. Days with sun were none too frequent
during winter in the North Atlantic.

The trusty Young, the senior Lieutenant R.N.R., was on watch on the
upper bridge. With him was Mr. Rigby, midshipman. Goodchild, the Surgeon
Lieutenant Commander, and Herbert, the Paymaster Lieutenant Commander,
were also on the bridge, partly for an airing, partly to amuse
themselves by taking some pictures of the convoy with Goodchild’s cine
camera. Having done their best with the convoy, they wanted a few feet
of Young, insisting that he was photogenic.

“Now, Dundee, my bonny boy,” said the doctor, “if you’ll kindly drape
your rugged features over the compass and pretend to be busy, your
missus will have a permanent record of how you helped to win the war.
Rigby, if you’ll stand alongside Mr. Young pretending to take notes on a
signal pad it’d make a better picture--or you might point at the horizon
as though you’d suddenly sighted a submarine.”

But Rigby paid no attention. The _Fonthill Abbey_ was to starboard of
the convoy and steaming faster than the other ships to close the
Commodore, who was leading one of the lines. There was a signal to be
passed. It had something to do with an alteration of course some hours
after dark. And the midshipman, with his binoculars to his eyes, was
looking to port. He might idly be passing the time by gazing at the
ships as they steamed past. On the other hand, his attitude was a little
too tense for that, and he had had his glasses leveled on the same spot
for some time.

Young, with his lips hovering over the voice pipe leading to the lower
bridge preparatory to passing an order to the helmsman, noticed the
midshipman’s unusual concentration.

“Seen something, Rigby?” he asked.

“I can’t be certain, sir. But I thought I saw what might be a ship away
on the horizon beyond the convoy.”

“What sort of ship?” the Lieutenant wanted to know.

“I couldn’t make out, sir. She was very faint and far away, but I
thought I saw the top of a mast and bit of a funnel.”

“Where away?” Young asked, going to the midshipman’s side and lifting
his own glasses.

“You see that ship with the black funnel that’s making smoke, sir--the
fourth, no, the third from the right in the third column?”

Young nodded.

“What’s all the excitement?” asked the Paymaster Lieutenant Commander,
joining them. Goodchild, having now got three figures silhouetted
against a background of sky and sea laden with ships, stood in the
background pressing the button of his cine camera. He could hear it
whirring contentedly. With the excellent light it should provide a good,
sharp picture, but, oh, for the chance of something unique and really
thrilling. The doctor hadn’t had much luck with his photos--no
submarines being depth-charged or surrendering on the surface, no
aircraft crashing into the sea--no real, exciting action such as he had
sometimes seen.

“I can’t see anything,” Young said to Rigby. “Curse the confounded smoke
that ship’s making. It blankets everything and is visible for miles.
Rigby?”

“Sir?”

“Go down and tell the Captain you sighted a ship.”

“But I’m not certain, sir,” the midshipman objected, anxious lest he
should be “bitten” for causing a false alarm.

“Go down and tell him all the same,” the Lieutenant ordered.

Rigby went.

“And you two chaps clear off this bridge before the skipper comes up,”
Young continued. “I’ll get hell if he discovers you up here.”

“But what _is_ it Rigby’s sighted?” the doctor wanted to know.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a ship, maybe, it’s Rigby’s imagination.
Anyhow, make yourselves scarce and look sharp about it.”

Goodchild and Herbert departed, grumbling.

A minute later Chenies arrived on the upper bridge. Commander Wenlock
came with him. Rigby followed.

They all used their binoculars to peer out to port. Another minute
passed ... two minutes ... a few seconds more ...

Rigby’s eyesight was not at fault. A faint gray shape slid into view in
a clear gap between two of the ships in the convoy.

Chenies’ heart nearly missed a beat. Clearly through his powerful
glasses he could see a long gray hull, two gun turrets, and, overtopping
all, a squat funnel with a heavy control tower farther forward.

There was no mistaking that silhouette. Even at a distance of ten miles
the stranger was plainly recognizable as a warship, a foreigner--a
German pocket battleship! She was steaming at high speed, with a white
bow wave halfway up her sharp forefoot.

An “enemy report” went down to the wireless room, to be coded and
broadcast to the Admiralty--to all ships in the vicinity. Heaven only
knew who would pick it up, or if any ship powerful and fast enough to
bring the enemy to action was anywhere near. Meanwhile ...

“You see what she is, Wenlock?”

“I do, sir,” the Commander nodded, almost casually. “It’s come at last.”

“We’ll fight, Wenlock. Action stations, please.”

“Of course, sir,” the Commander said, stepping over to unclip and push a
red-painted button which sounded the alarm gongs throughout the ship.

They could hear their strident clangor, followed by the sound of voices
and rushing feet as the men ran to their stations.

“Full speed both,” Chenies ordered, putting his lips to the voice pipe
to the lower bridge. He followed it with a helm order.

There came the rattle of the telegraphs, followed by the jangle of the
reply gongs from the engine room.

Officers arrived breathless on the bridge.

“Wenlock,” Chenies said.

“Sir?”

“I’m going on ahead of the convoy. Then I’ll turn and engage, after
telling the convoy to scatter and make smoke. It’s their only chance.
It’ll be dusk in another half-hour,” he added, glancing at the sun, “and
dark by about six. You understand, Wenlock? In case--well, in case I’m
knocked out, you carry on.”

“I fully understand, sir,” the Commander said, looking his senior full
in the eyes. “I’d better be getting along to my station. Well, good
luck, sir,” he added impassively. “I daresay we’ve a sporting chance.”

Chenies did not reply to that. What chance could the sixteen-knot,
unarmored _Fonthill Abbey_ have against a faster enemy battleship armed
with six eleven-inch and a number of 5.9’s? The German could stand off
out of range and pound the armed merchant cruiser into a sinking
shambles. But that process might take time--time enough to save the
convoy. Dusk was coming. Darkness would soon follow.

The Commander turned to leave the bridge. Chenies halted him.

“You’ve got that letter, Wenlock?”

“Yes,” the Commander said. “Have you got mine, sir?”

Chenies nodded.

They didn’t discuss what was in these letters. It might have savored of
sentimentality. But it had long since been arranged that Wenlock should
carry a letter to Mrs. Chenies, and Chenies a letter to Wenlock’s wife,
just in case. The pair were very old friends. They had known each other
long before the war.

And Wenlock knew very well what Chenies intended to do. At various
conferences in the Captain’s cabin attended by all the senior executive
officers they had discussed the situation that had now arisen--an attack
upon the convoy by a heavily armed raider.

Some, no doubt, hoped that the situation might never arise, but if it
did it was Chenies’ intention to fight his ship until not a gun remained
fit for action. Everyone knew of the gallant fights against hopeless
odds of the _Rawalpindi_ and _Jervis Bay_. Like them, there must be no
thought of surrender. All the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ officers understood
that.

“Well, so long, Wenlock,” said Chenies. “Do your best, and thanks for
all you’ve done up to date for this ship. You’ve been a tower of
strength. --Good luck, old man, and God bless you.”

“God bless us all, sir,” the Commander replied, leaving the bridge to go
to his battle station. Wenlock was anything but emotional, but at that
moment there was something in his heart that he had never felt there
before, something glorious and inspiring that he could never have
described in words.

The enemy was closing in fast. Before the _Fonthill Abbey_ had drawn
ahead of the convoy, before even the merchantmen had time really to
scatter and partially to hide themselves behind a friendly smoke screen,
the German had opened fire. Chenies saw the orange sparkle of the gun
flashes and the billowing clouds of brown cordite smoke. There were some
seconds of suspense before, almost simultaneously with the thudding of
the guns, a cluster of tall, grayish-white spray fountains leaped into
the air in the midst of the convoy. For the moment no ship was hit, but
the fire seemed to be concentrated upon the largest and most
important-looking vessel in the convoy, a passenger liner with two
funnels.

Another salvo came hurtling through the air ... another ...

Chenies had no chance of seeing the result. Leaning over the compass on
the upper bridge he was watching the enemy, while bringing his ship
gradually round to port to get between the German and the convoy. The
convoy, meanwhile, acting independently, had started to scatter to the
southward. Some of the ships were dropping smoke floats, their blue-gray
vapor drifting across the sea in a low cloud.

The enemy, firing rapidly and at times all but hidden in smoke, was
closing fast ... 15,000 yards ... 12,000 ... 11,000.

The _Fonthill Abbey_, flying her battle ensigns, was still edging round
toward the enemy. She, also, started to drop smoke floats to add to the
artificial fog.

“Shall we open fire, sir?” someone asked.

“All right,” Chenies agreed. “Carry on.”

He gave the order not because there was much chance of hitting at long
range with the _Fonthill’s_ old pattern six-inch guns, but mainly to
draw the fire on his own ship while the convoy did its best to escape.
It would also keep the guns’ crews busy, and would give them the idea
that they were hitting back in the cataclysm that would presently burst
upon them.

The ship shuddered as two of her guns were fired practically
simultaneously. A hot, acrid cloud of cordite smoke enveloped the bridge
and drifted away aft.

The enemy had ceased firing. The sky was gradually clouding over, with
banks of heavy, purplish cumulus piling up over the western horizon. The
hidden sun must nearly be setting. Through the rifts in the cloud canopy
broad swathes of pale golden and greenish light shone up like the rays
of giant searchlights. Dusk and darkness would soon be coming--but not
soon enough.

Chenies was automatically filling his pipe preparatory to lighting it.
His eyes traveled aloft.

“Yeoman!” he said, turning to address a stout, grizzled chief petty
officer wearing the crown and crossed signal flags on his collar.

“Sir?”

“Harkness, send one of your people to hoist a newer ensign at the
starboard yardarm. That black-looking rag we’ve got up there is a
disgrace to the ship. --Hoist all the biggest ensigns we’ve got, and
damn the expense!”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Pensioner Chief Yeoman of Signals David Harkness, a veteran of the other
war, was never really surprised at anything. He was phlegmatic by
nature. Only his bushy eyebrows twitched a little. It struck him as
faintly incongruous that the skipper should be worrying his head about
new ensigns with a Hun battleship coming down fast and about to open
fire. The old _Fonthill_ would be copping hell in another minute or two.

The dirty black rag to which Chenies objected came fluttering down, and
a large White Ensign which had never been used went up in its place. It
streamed bravely in the wind, tugging at its halliards.

Harkness was no patriot of the flag waving variety, but it gave him
satisfaction to see the red cross of St. George brilliantly clear on its
white background with the little Union Flag in the upper canton--St.
George for England.

Man and boy he’d served under that ensign for nearly five and twenty
years. It was a grand old flag, quite the finest in the world.

Yes. Harkness was satisfied.

Licking his lips, he glanced at the oncoming enemy, wishing she would
open fire and get on with it. The suspense of waiting for the inevitable
was almost more than he could bear.

The _Fonthill Abbey’s_ guns were still firing. They were outranged.
Harkness could see occasional plumes of white spray leaping out of the
water short of the enemy and to the right.

The German battleship was turning to starboard. At first they had had a
foreshortened view of her, but now she was nearly broadside on, heading
slightly across the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ bows. The ships of the convoy
were well away to the southward, half hidden behind a bank of
grayish-white smoke of varying intensity. One of the merchantmen must be
on fire. A cloud of darker smoke, too dense to come from any funnels,
showed over the edge of the artificial smoke screen.

Chenies was using his glasses.

“Port fifteen,” he ordered, anxious to head off the enemy, to prevent
him if possible from reopening fire on the convoy.

Hardly had the ship started to turn under her helm when he saw the
brilliant red flashes and rolling clouds of dun-colored smoke which
showed that the battleship had fired a salvo.

This time, he realized, the _Fonthill Abbey_ was the target for those
hostile guns.


3.

Chief Petty Officer Buttress’ station in action was at the foremost
guns--to keep a watchful eye on the guns’ crews, to supervise the
ammunition supply, to assist in the repair of breakdowns, generally to
act as right-hand man to Lieutenant Tanner, R.N.R., who was the officer
of quarters with a midshipman, Hastings, as his number two.

Rushing from his mess at the first jangle of the alarm gongs, Buttress
had gone straight to his beloved guns, trying to button his jacket with
one hand and carrying his steel helmet and lifebelt in the other. In
point of fact he had been washing himself when the alarm sounded. He had
seen his guns’ crews mustered, the weapons cleared away, and ammunition
ready before reporting to Tanner, who reported to the bridge.

The enemy had opened fire on the convoy by the time Buttress had time to
look about him. He had heard the rumble of heavy gunfire, and saw the
shell splashes round the convoy.

“That’s no chicken fodder, Mr. Tanner, sir,” he observed, measuring the
spray fountains with a practiced eye. “That’s big stuff, well over
six-inch. Can you see what’s firing, sir?”

But Tanner couldn’t. The enemy was still hidden by the convoy.

The _Fonthill Abbey_, meanwhile, was working up to full speed and making
flag signals. The ships in the convoy were answering. A few minutes
later, as the armed merchant cruiser started to draw ahead, the ships of
the convoy began turning to starboard. The _Fonthill Abbey_ swung to
port.

Then, for the first time, Tanner and Buttress saw the enemy.

“God!” the Lieutenant muttered, peering through his glasses. “We’re up
against something this time, Buttress.” His mouth was tightly set.

“What is it, sir?”

“A pocket battleship, from the look of her.”

“Gawd!” Buttress murmured, his feelings very mixed. “What happens now,
sir?”

“We’re going in to engage,” the officer replied. “It’s the only chance
of saving the convoy. We might land her with a lucky hit,” he added,
though the doubt sounded in his voice.

Buttress sniffed.

“We might, sir,” he said. “On the other hand, we mightn’t. Six-inch guns
against eleven-inch isn’t exactly what you’d call fair. If it was a
cruiser now. Are there any of our ships anywhere near to do a _Graf
Spee_ on her, sir, or are we on our own?”

“I don’t know,” Tanner said. He might have added that unless some
reinforcement was sighted within a matter of minutes, the _Fonthill
Abbey_ was doomed.

Buttress was equally aware of the situation. He wasn’t worrying about
himself. At the back of his mind he was thinking of his wife, his two
naval sons, and the little shop in Knightsbridge. Laura came first in
his thoughts. He hoped the shop was still paying its way. If he were
knocked out, the widow’s pension wouldn’t amount to much.

Laura, bless her! She’d been a good wife to him, and a good mother to
young Alf and Willie. She didn’t always wear her heart for all the world
to see, but she was a fine woman. She was the contriver of the family,
and the shop was her idea and creation. They’d been through bad times
together but always managed to make ends meet and come up smiling.

Yes. Laura had a way with her. She was a good tough one, unemotional and
completely unmoved by setbacks and calamities. Even those long weeks
during which the bombs had crashed down nightly on London had not
frightened Laura. She’d merely been venomously angry with the devils who
encompassed all the ruin and destruction, worried not for herself but
for Hannibal the cat who slept most of the day and invariably set forth
on his nocturnal ramblings just before the mournful wail of the sirens
heralded the first shattering explosions.

It was a bit hard, Buttress thought, if he never saw Laura
again--especially hard when he’d made up his mind to a spot of leave.
Oh, well! There’d been many good men in the Navy who’d fought against
hopeless odds. And the Navy was in his blood, in a manner of speaking.
What of his father, “Old One Eye,” who’d been at Taku in 1860? What of
old grandad, who’d been with Admiral Collingwood at Trafalgar?
“S’trewth,” he told himself, though he would never have said it aloud.
“I’ve got something to live up to, and that’s a fact.”

“I’m glad, in a manner o’ speaking, sir,” he said to Tanner.

“Glad of what?” the Lieutenant wanted to know.

“Glad we’re not running away, sir.”

Tanner was almost amused.

“Can you see our captain running away?” he demanded.

“No, sir. I can’t, not with that there convoy. An’ thank Gawd for it,
says I. ’Twouldn’t be decent to let the convoy down.”

“You’ve said it,” Tanner returned. “It’s a death or glory stunt for us.
Chins up, Buttress.”

Buttress felt slightly nettled. He needed no encouragement to do his job
in action, particularly from an officer young enough to be his son.

“I’ve never known my chin down yet, sir. I--”

Conversation was interrupted by orders to the guns. In less than another
minute they had opened fire.

There was alleviation in that. Once his guns were in action Buttress had
no time for introspection. There was work to be done.


4.

A towering pillar of white spray, its base tinged with gray, suddenly
burst out of the sea some five hundred yards short of the _Fonthill
Abbey_ and to the right. It shot up to a height of over a hundred feet,
curled over like an ostrich plume, and tumbled in ruin, to leave a sooty
patch on the gray-green water.

A second great splash--followed almost instantaneously by a third. They
were closer this time. The enemy’s eleven-inch guns were reaching out at
their target, trying for the range.

Chenies, smoking his pipe, was conning his ship from the open upper
bridge. The _Fonthill Abbey_ had no armored fighting position, though
parts of the lower bridge round the wheelhouse were protected against
light splinters and machine-gun bullets. As a concession, and because it
was the rule for all the men in exposed positions in action, he wore his
steel helmet.

He could picture the German fire control officer over five miles away,
with the glasses to his eyes, looking at those spray pillars from the
other end. He would be giving orders to someone else, and electric
transmitters would pass the range and deflection to the guns. Inevitably
the German would lengthen his range and try for a straddle, with one
shot over, and the others short--or hits. It was only putting off the
evil moment, but to make it more difficult for the men controlling those
hostile guns, Chenies swung his ship to starboard--toward the spot where
the last salvo had fallen, toward the enemy. He was trembling a little
with excitement, but was not the least bit nervous or alarmed. He had
often wondered what it would be like to engage a more powerful and
faster opponent, and imagined one would feel helplessly frightened. Now
that the moment had come, he had never felt cooler in his life. It was
force of habit, he presumed, but rather surprising, all the same.

Down below Jamieson was giving his turbines every ounce of steam they
could absorb. The ship had worked up to full speed, and had occasional
spasms of shuddering as she drove along. A fraction over sixteen knots
seemed a veritable crawl. Chenies would have given a lot for another
three or four.

The range was closing fast. The _Fonthill Abbey’s_ guns were firing as
fast as their crews could load them, but their shell still seemed to be
falling short of the target. All the same, it was worth firing. A lucky
projectile might drive home.

Again the enemy burst into splashes of orange flame, brighter and more
visible now against the gradually darkening sky on the horizon. She
disappeared momentarily in clouds of thick brownish smoke.

Anxious seconds passed as the shell drove through the air. Then, with a
sound like the crack of doom, a projectile roared over the _Fonthill
Abbey_ to burst in the water just beyond. Two others fell short--one so
close that its hurtling splinters sprayed the after well deck and
superstructure abaft the funnel.

Three men fell wounded. A call went through for stretcher parties.

It was one shell of the third salvo that struck just above the waterline
abreast of the funnel, and brought the ship to a gradual standstill. She
shook to the shock of the explosion. A gout of mingled flame, smoke,
steam, and debris flew skyward.

How many men that single projectile killed instantaneously, drowned,
scalded, or maimed, nobody was ever to know. There was none to count.

The cloud of steam grew denser, and was presently reinforced by wisps of
evil black smoke. They thickened fast into billowing, rolling masses.
Lurid tongues of red fire flickered amongst the wreckage. They
lengthened, until they looked like the petals of a flame-colored,
wind-blown flower mingling with the darkening pall overhead. Oil fuel
was ablaze.

The _Fonthill Abbey_ was listing heavily to starboard. Her engines had
stopped, but she still carried her way, her speed diminishing every
second. She rolled gently in the almost imperceptible swell.

Thereafter, as the range decreased and the enemy’s 5.9’s joined in with
the heavier guns and poured shells into her, the ship was hit
continuously. There was no respite, no breathing space between the
thudding crash of bursting projectiles. Like a living thing, she winced
as they struck her. One couldn’t think. All sense of time vanished.

More men fell to that hail of steel slivers, killed or wounded. A shell
exploding beside one of the guns wiped out the entire gun’s crew and
blew the weapon off its mounting, whence, half hanging, it wrenched its
way overboard with the ever-increasing heel to starboard. A fire started
amongst some of the ready-use ammunition stacked near one of the other
guns. The flaming cordite communicated the blaze to the torn-up,
splintered planking of the deck, to cordage, to anything inflammable.
Working with beserk energy and courage, seamen threw some of the blazing
charges into the sea, fought and tore at the burning debris with their
bare hands. It was all they could do. Never the feeblest trickle of
water came from the slashed and punctured hoses. The pumps had stopped.

The fires gained strength and spread. Strive as they might, those
fighting them were gradually beaten back. Some of the broken lifeboats
on the boat deck added fuel to the flames. In the course of a few
minutes men performed many deeds of desperate gallantry and
self-sacrifice. Since no one saw them, they went unrecorded.

A seaman dragged a stricken messmate up the sloping deck away from the
encroaching flames, and protected him with his own body against the
flying shell splinters. The savior was killed by the next explosion.

The blackened figure of a fireman appeared from below with his
unconscious mate across his shoulders. How, bearing his heavy burden, he
had negotiated the steep steel ladders leading up from the stokehold
amidst that blinding inferno of searing flame, smoke, and scalding
steam, nobody could say. He collapsed on reaching the deck. His unseen
bravery went unrewarded. Neither rescuer nor rescued were among those
that survived.

Goodchild, the Surgeon Lieutenant Commander, helped by his staff and
some of the stewards, worked among the wounded in the dressing station
until they were driven forth by the stifling smoke and fumes. Leaving
the dead behind, they evacuated the wounded to the upper deck, and tied
the lifebelts round them. The ship was still under heavy and accurate
fire; but there, at any rate, the injured had some chance of their
lives. Down below, as the fires spread and gathered hold, the ship was
rapidly becoming a blazing furnace.

All electric power had failed when that first shell crashed home and
burst. In the wireless room the operators continued to transmit on an
auxiliary set. A shell bursting close outside drove a ragged sliver of
steel through the thin outer bulkhead. It mortally wounded a leading
telegraphist as he sat tapping out a message with his Morse key. He
collapsed across the table, whence the others lifted and laid him on the
deck. He lay there groaning and half-unconscious, breathing stertorously
with his eyes shut and his face a ghastly ashen gray. A pool of blood
was gradually encroaching on the thick green oilcloth covering the deck.
A friend knelt beside him, doing all he could, but there was no hope.

Meanwhile another man had taken his place at the transmitting key, and
the radio message went off into the ether. Heaven only knew if any other
ship received it, but the telegraphists, like everyone else in the ship,
were faithful to their duty, faithful unto death. They remained at their
posts until another shell smashed the wireless room and all it contained
into ruin, and started another fire.

The _Fonthill Abbey_ was a sinking ship--stopped and listing more
heavily to starboard as her compartments became flooded. All her guns
were out of action. She was blazing fore and aft, with a great pall of
smoke rising to the heavens before drifting sluggishly to leeward on
wings of some fitful air current.

But above the reek and din of battle, tattered and sadly blackened,
invisible sometimes in the murk of her destruction, the _Fonthill
Abbey’s_ White Ensigns still remained aloft. There was no thought of
hauling them down, no idea of surrender.

The nearest ships of the convoy, those that could be seen, that is, were
far away to the southward. The sky was darkening rapidly. A few stars
twinkled palely through the sparse rifts in the gathering clouds
overhead. Soon it would be night.


5.

When Chenies recovered consciousness night had come. Without knowing how
he had got there, he found himself lying on the starboard side of the
promenade deck halfway between one of the ladders leading to the boat
deck and the large double doors leading into the entrance lobby through
the superstructure. Someone had tied a lifebelt round him. His right leg
and side hurt abominably. It was almost as bright as daylight. Looking
down, he saw that his trouser leg had been torn away and that the limb
itself was roughly bandaged above the knee. The bandage was bloodstained
in parts, and there was more blood on the deck. He remembered the wound,
but not the bandaging. Who was responsible for that and the lifebelt?

The sea was stained wine-red with the dancing light of many fires. He
could hear the crackling of flames. The air was full of eddying smoke,
thick and pungent at times, at others thinning to a partial haze.
Looking around he realized he was on one of the few parts of the deck
that wasn’t actually burning. The bridge and boat deck above were well
ablaze, with tongues of flame occasionally licking along the underside
of the boat deck, and charred and flaming fragments dropping on to the
promenade deck, the torn planking of which was on fire within twenty
feet of where he lay. The flames seemed to be creeping forward toward
him, discoloring and blistering the paint on the superstructure. To his
left another blaze was slowly moving aft. The ship was listing to
starboard, listing so heavily that he could see the water quite close
through the open rails. If she heeled much more he would slide across
the deck and be thrown against the rails. After that, the sea was his
only salvation. Either the ship would capsize and force him into the
water, or he would be driven there by the fires. His lifebelt would keep
him afloat for a time, but could he swim? He doubted it. He felt
strangely weak and lethargic, very unwilling to move before he had to.

Incidents which seemed to have happened hours before flooded into his
memory like scenes from a play. They were vivid enough. Only their
sequence was blurred.

He remembered the first heavy shell hitting the ship and bringing her to
a gradual standstill--then two crashing explosions in the bridge
structure which reduced it to a mass of tangled wreckage, killed or
wounded nearly all of the people up there, and started fires which
rapidly gained the upper hand. He recollected being hurled off his feet
by a heavy impact, and a burning sensation in his thigh. It was not very
painful to start with. He picked himself up.

Harkness, the Chief Yeoman of Signals, was already dead, killed
instantaneously. A signalman lay close beside him. He too was beyond all
help. Only Rigby, the midshipman, pale-faced and badly shaken was left
alive.

“Rigby!” Chenies called.

The lad turned.

“Oh, sir,” he said. “You’re wounded. Can I do something?”

“No. I want you to go aft. Find the Commander. Tell him--ask--”

“What shall I ask, sir?” Rigby queried, as Chenies hesitated. Another
shell whinnied close overhead.

The Captain’s face was ghastly. The midshipman saw his torn clothing,
and blood running down his right leg to stain the once clean deck. He
was obviously in great pain.

“I _must_ do something for you, sir,” said Rigby, forgetting his own
fear. “Shall I get someone to attend to you?”

“No. Go aft. Find out about the damage, and what they’re doing about
these fires. Tell the Commander we may have to abandon ship, but not
till I give orders. I want the men kept under cover as long as possible.
Are we still firing, Rigby?”

“Yes, sir. Number one gun’s just gone off.”

“Then go and find the Commander, or failing him, Lieutenant Commander
Percival or one of the others, and give him my message. Cut along, boy.
Don’t wait.”

But Rigby still seemed unwilling.

“But you’re wounded, sir,” he objected. “And the bridge is on fire. If I
leave you--”

“Damn the fire!” Chenies broke in, as there came the crash of a shell
exploding farther aft. “And don’t you dare to bother about me. Now obey
orders. Get a move on, Mister Rigby.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And thank you, Rigby. You’re a good lad. Tell your parents I’m glad to
have had you as a shipmate if I don’t get the chance. Good luck to you.
Away you go.”

The midshipman saluted. He couldn’t trust himself to speak. He was
gulping as he disappeared down the broken ladder leading from the upper
to the lower bridge. The flames were already licking round its foot.

How Chenies descended by the same way a few minutes later he never
understood. It was a painful process, agonizing at times. On the wrecked
and burning bridge below there was nothing that he could do. Peering
into the shattered, smoke-filled wheelhouse he saw three men, two laid
out on the deck and another kneeling beside him.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The kneeling figure looked up.

“It’s Able Seaman Sykes, sir. Bridge messenger.”

“Are you all right?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Who are those others?”

“Petty Officer Bayles, sir, the Chief Quartermaster, and Able Seaman
McColl.”

“Dead?”

“McColl’s breathing, sir. Petty Officer Bayles--well, sir, it’s in his
head,” said Sykes, pointing.

Chenies, looking, suddenly felt sick. Death must have come swiftly,
before Bayles could have felt any pain.

“Can you lift McColl?” the Captain asked. “I’m no use to help. My right
leg’s useless.”

“I can manage him, sir.”

“Then get him down out of here before the fire spreads, and under cover
somewhere. Find someone to look after him. --Gently, man, gently!” as
Sykes, a burly fellow, hoisted his limp and unconscious burden over his
shoulder. “He’s not a sack of spuds.”

Chenies followed the able seaman out of the wheelhouse, and after nearly
collapsing on the bridge, managed to lower himself down the ladder to
the boat deck with the use of his arms and his one sound leg. It hurt
abominably.

The sky, or what he could see of it through the flames and dense clouds
of rolling smoke, had deepened almost to indigo. The _Fonthill Abbey’s_
guns were silent. Heaving sluggishly to the slight swell, she had
lurched still farther to starboard. Apart from the unconquerable fires,
Chenies could tell from the movement that she was a doomed ship.

By the mercy of God the enemy gunfire had ceased. The roaring crackle of
fires and the hiss of what sounded like escaping steam seemed almost
like dead silence after the crashing thunder of battle.

Some minutes later Lieutenant Commander Hanley, blackened and
disheveled, found Chenies sitting on the boat deck with his back against
the rails. The fire in the bridge structure had crept scorchingly near.

“Thank God I’ve found you, sir,” came Hanley’s first breathless words.
“But you’ve been hit, sir,” he added hurriedly. “Hadn’t--”

“Don’t bother about me,” Chenies put in. “Tell me what’s happened.”

The Commander had been killed early in the engagement, Hanley said, and
what had become of Percival, the next senior executive officer, he
didn’t know. As for himself, he had been trying to put out the fires in
the after part of the ship, a hopeless task. The pumps had failed. Even
if they hadn’t, the hoses were slashed to ribbons. The ship was burning
practically from end to end. The fires were gaining every minute.

“I sent young Rigby aft with a message,” said Chenies wearily.

Hanley had seen nothing of Rigby.

“What are our casualties, Hanley?”

“Very heavy, sir. More killed than wounded from what I’ve seen.”

Chenies sighed.

“It was murder,” he said. “What could we do against her?”

“Precious little, sir, except by some almighty fluke.”

“I hope nobody thinks we ought to have surrendered to save life.”

“Surrendered, sir?” said Hanley with an air of surprise. “Lord! We
couldn’t have done that.”

Chenies felt relieved.

“But suppose we’d run with the convoy?” he asked.

“You’ve nothing to blame yourself with,” said Hanley at once. “Speaking
as man to man, what else could you--”

“Not me, Hanley. All of us.”

“Well, sir? What else could _we_ have done? Most of the convoy will have
got away in the dark, or at least, I hope so. And why? Simply because we
stood and fought. We did our job, sir. Not a man in the ship would have
had it otherwise.”

“Thank God for that, Hanley.”

“Yes. But you’re knocked out, sir.”

“I can look after myself,” Chenies told him. “It’s the others I’m
thinking about.”

“Yes. I came up to say, sir, it’s a choice of two evils now. The fires
are gaining every minute, and the list’s increasing. The bulkheads are
going one by one, and she’s flooding fore and aft. It’s a question
whether she rolls over and sinks before we’re driven overboard by the
fires. I’d like your orders.”

“Abandon ship,” Chenies answered. “Get the men away now, Hanley.
Straight away.”

“But you, sir?”

“Abandon ship, Hanley. I’m the last to leave, anyhow.”

“But I can’t leave you like this, sir,” Hanley protested. “It’s--it goes
against the grain.”

“You heard what I said, Hanley. Abandon ship now, please!” Chenies
ordered. “I don’t want to argue, anyhow. I’ve lost my pipe, blast it!
Have you a cigarette on you?”

Hanley was able to oblige him, and bent down to light it.

“Is there anything else, sir?” he asked.

“No,” said Chenies, puffing out smoke. “But I can’t understand how
people can smoke gaspers when they might smoke a pipe. --Oh! I nearly
forgot. The ensigns, Hanley.”

“What about them, sir?”

“See they’re left flying. I’m damned if I’ll have ’em hauled down!”

Hanley nodded.

“Go on, Hanley. Abandon ship, and good luck to you all. I’ll come along
when I feel like it. Thanks and all that, old man. You’ve been a tower
of strength. It’s a pity it all ended like this, just as we were
expecting a bit of leave.”

Hanley saluted and went. He was far too overcome with emotion to speak.

It may have been three minutes later that Chenies fainted away, and
perhaps ten minutes after that that Chief Petty Officer Buttress found
his stricken Captain and carefully carried him below to the promenade
deck.

He was only just in time. The deck was burning within a few feet of
where the unconscious Chenies lay.




CHAPTER XV

To Buttress, and those six others who remained on the raft, the night
was interminable and bitterly cold. Their refuge was a large rectangular
contrivance with airtight metal compartments supporting a wooden
grating, and lifelines looped around it to which men in the water could
cling. Some of the compartments, however, had been punctured by shell
splinters, so that one side of the crazy thing was flooded and
constantly under water. To make matters worse, the rising breeze was
causing the swells to break, and at times sent the spray flying over its
occupants. Time and time again the steeper swells nearly brought about a
capsize. It was only prevented by men, with their legs trailing in the
icy water, balancing themselves precariously on its higher and undamaged
side. Everyone had long since been soaked to the skin. They were numb
with cold and weakening fast. It was touch and go if any of them lasted
until morning.

Eleven men had originally left the blazing _Fonthill Abbey_ in the raft,
and they were the last to go. Four, grievously injured and unable to
hold on, had slipped away and disappeared, in spite of the efforts of
the others to save them. There remained seven--Hooper, one of the young
Sub-Lieutenants, two A.B.’s called Streeter and James, Brewis, a young
officers’ steward, Ogden, a fireman, Buttress himself, and the badly
wounded Chenies. Streeter and Brewis were also wounded, the first-named
in the head and arm. Both were fully conscious but bore their hurts
without a murmur.

Hooper was the only officer in the party apart from Chenies. But Hooper
was an engineer by trade, and not very experienced in an affair like
this. Buttress made a point of consulting him about this and that, but
as the senior man of the seaman branch had taken over the command,
Hooper had no objection.

Chenies, still wearing his lifebelt and wrapped in an oilskin, had been
lashed to the gratings on the high, sound side of the raft. Buttress
watched over him, ready to cast him free if the thing overturned during
one of its wilder plunges. The Captain spent most of the time in a state
of insensibility, though occasionally he came to to mutter a few words.
Sometimes they were incoherent. Once he observed in a husky whisper that
it was “damn cold and wet,” and he had no feeling in his legs.

Buttress blessed the forethought that had led him to break open and
ransack two of the cupboards in the burning wardroom--originally the
ship’s writing room--at the last moment before embarkation. He had found
a bottle of liqueur brandy two-thirds full, an open tin of sweet
biscuits, and some little cartons containing malted milk tablets. These,
with a few tins of cigarettes, he had tied up in a curtain and
transferred to the raft.

They had no water, no other food. Originally, the raft had been provided
with wicker-covered demijohns of water and an airtight metal box
containing biscuit, condensed milk, and various concentrated foods. But
the precious demijohns and food box had been smashed by shell fire. All
that remained on the raft was a smaller tin box of flares.

The precious brandy had been scrupulously reserved for the wounded,
Buttress realizing that they must be suffering from shock, and that
people in such condition must be kept warm. Warm indeed! What a hope in
a crazy, plunging, half-submerged raft with the spray breaking over it.

All the same, the brandy might help. Since he had no cup, he emptied one
of the cigarette tins and doled out minute portions of the precious
spirit every hour or so to Brewis and Streeter, and to Chenies whenever
he became conscious. At what he thought was midnight, he served out one
sweet biscuit and four milk tablets to each person. That, he informed
them, must suffice until daylight. The cigarettes were useless. They had
five boxes of matches between them; but all were sodden and refused to
ignite. He wished he had not brought the cigarettes; but some of the
stoppered bottles of soda water he had seen in the wardroom cupboard.
One or two of the men were already complaining of thirst. God only knew
what agonizing pangs they might suffer later.

But Buttress still hoped. If they managed to survive until dawn they
would probably find themselves in an area strewn with the _Fonthill
Abbey’s_ floating wreckage. With any luck they might even see one of the
lifeboats with other survivors, or perhaps an empty boat with her food
and water still intact.

Buttress prayed that it might be so--prayed with all the simple fervor
that was in him that the Almighty would be merciful, and that he, as the
virtual leader of the little party, might be granted the strength to
help in saving the lives of the six men committed to his charge. He
prayed especially for the life of his Captain.


2.

Buttress had done all that was humanly possible for Chenies on board the
ship, bandaging him to the best of his ability after carrying him down
to the promenade deck.

Orders had already been given for the ship to be abandoned, but Chenies,
in a period of consciousness, had utterly refused to be taken to a boat.
He knew what Buttress knew--that some of the boats had been shattered by
shell fire, while the boat deck, whence in any case they must be
lowered, was well ablaze. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to
get them into the water. Any boats that were available might not be
sufficient to accommodate the survivors that remained.

Buttress had done the next best thing. Collecting some men, he had
managed to launch the life raft from the after end of the promenade
deck. It wasn’t until it was in the water that they realized it was
damaged and leaking.

But it was that or nothing. The ship, listing heavily to starboard,
might roll over and founder at any moment. Chenies, with a rope’s end
under his arms, was lowered down over the rail of the promenade deck and
lashed. He fainted away while it was being done. Others scrambled down
after Chenies.

It was simple suicide to remain close to the ship. She might roll over
on top of them. There might be explosions, or heavy suction, when she
went under. The float was provided with paddles, three of which
remained. So partly by paddling, partly by men swimming alongside, the
crazy raft was propelled ahead of the blazing _Fonthill Abbey_. It was
backbreaking work, but Buttress insisted. The sound members of his crew
took turns in going over the side and swimming. He himself set the
example.

Far away to the southward the undersides of the lowering clouds were
stained with ruby and orange. When the raft lifted on the swells, its
occupants could see the glare from three burning ships. Then, high above
the horizon in the same direction, came some pale, bluish-white globes
of light which grew until they shone on the sea like the reflection of a
full moon.

“What in hell’s those?” someone asked.

“Star shell,” Buttress replied, watching their gradual descent. “Ten to
one it’s that raider that did for us looking for the convoy.”

“I hopes there’s some of our ships knocking around that’ll do for her,
the ----!” growled the first speaker, adding some further unprintable
remarks about Hitler and the Germans that seemed appropriate to the
occasion.

“They’ll be dealt with in due course,” said Buttress. “Don’t you worry.
You save your breath and keep on paddling, my son.”

“Paddlin’!” laughed James, the unwounded A.B. “What’ll my old woman say
when she hears I’ve bin bathin’ in the blinkin’ Atlantic at this time
o’ year? Blackpool isn’t in it with this ruddy picnic. Did you ever
visit Blackpool, Chief Petty Officer Buttress?”

“No,” said Buttress severely. “I’ve got better things to do than visit
those outlandish places.”

James felt rebuked. Conversation lapsed. One by one the descending
blue-white flares in the sky flickered out and expired. They were not
followed by any flashes of gunfire, for which Buttress, for one, felt
duly thankful. It probably meant that the enemy had failed to locate the
convoy.

Hooper’s wrist watch had long since stopped through immersion, and
nobody else wore one. They had no means of telling the time; but it must
have been about two hours after leaving the ship that the end of the
_Fonthill Abbey_ came. The raft was perhaps four hundred yards away at
the time.

At one moment they were watching the dark hull of the ship with showers
of sparks and tongues of vivid flame hundreds of feet long pouring to
leeward out of it to join the dark curtain of smoke rising at an angle
until it was carried away on the wings of the freshening breeze.
Whirling debris seemed to be blazing in mid-air. Little puffs of
inflammable vapor seemed to burst into green and violet flame in the
midst of the smoke. In places the very hull of the ship seemed red-hot
and glowing. It was magnificent as a pyrotechnic display, but ghastly to
think of what it meant.

Then, quite suddenly, there came the thud of a heavy explosion. A column
of flame and heavy wreckage shot skyward from the _Fonthill Abbey’s_
stern as though from the eruption of a volcano. A magazine had exploded,
and in the silence that followed those on the raft heard objects
splashing down into the sea. Some were far too close to be pleasant.

That detonation was the beginning of the end, for the next moment they
saw the _Fonthill Abbey’s_ bows lifting as the stern started to
disappear in a series of bursting upheavals of spray and smoke tinged
blood-red in the glare of the fires farther forward.

The stem rose dripping out of the water until they could see the curved
forefoot. It lifted to an angle of about forty-five degrees, and hung
there with parts of the blazing bridge structure still visible above the
surface. Clouds of vapor mingled with the gradually diminishing flames.
Above the wash of the sea they could actually hear a loud sizzling as
the water invaded the burning areas. In the midst of the smoky reek
which hung over the sinking ship Buttress was vouchsafed a momentary
glimpse of the leaning foremast. The remains of two scorched and
tattered White Ensigns, unrecognizable as such, were still fluttering.
Overcome with emotion he felt proud that the old ship had flown her
colors to the bitter end. The _Fonthill Abbey_ had not disgraced
herself. The Captain would also be glad to hear about the ensigns.
Buttress would have told him if he had been capable of understanding.
But Chenies hadn’t spoken for some time. He had relapsed into a state of
coma.

“The old ship’s going!” someone muttered in an awed voice.

She was, for with a series of muffled thuds and more upheavals of spray,
the whole stern portion of the ship plunged deeper until the bows
pointed almost vertically skyward like the point of a broad-bladed
spear. The fires died away, and the fore part of the ship became darkly
silhouetted against a background of whitish gray. There came the
prolonged hiss of escaping air, and the thudding collapse of more
bulkheads.

The bows started to disappear, slowly at first, then faster, finally to
be pulled swiftly under the surface as though by some titanic hand.
There was another spurting uprush of mingled air and water, and the
noise of gurgling and splashing which soon died away. The air was still
full of the reek of burning and the pungent odor of oil fuel.

After the leaping glare of the fires the sudden darkness was Cimmerian.
So long as the ship had remained afloat, the survivors on the raft had
derived some comfort, a faint hope that some rescuing vessel might be
attracted to the spot by the flames.

Now that the ship was gone they felt terribly alone.


3.

The dismal night wore on.

The men, their limbs and bodies numb and their teeth chattering, were
beginning to give up hope. There was a limit to human endurance. Some of
them were beginning to think of deliberately dropping off the raft to
end an agony which could only be prolonged. Even Buttress was beginning
to feel dejected.

Chenies was in a very bad way. Buttress and the others took turns in
rubbing his arms and legs, a task of difficulty on a heaving,
waterlogged raft with a badly wounded man.

It seemed hours later that Brewis, the wounded officers’ steward, and
the youngest member of the party, suddenly announced he saw a ship.

“Go on, son, you’re dreamin’,” said James, the able seaman.

“I’m not dreaming!” Brewis insisted. “I saw her clear against the sky
when we lifted.”

“Where away?” Buttress demanded, as the raft slid down the watery slope
into the deep hollow between two swells.

Brewis pointed in the rough direction.

“Well keep your eyes skinned when we’re on top of the next sea.”

Brewis needed no encouragement. They all kept their eyes skinned. The
raft started to rise to the following wave crest.

“There!” Brewis pointed, rising insecurely to his knees for a better
view, and pointing.

“Steady on, you bloody young fool!” growled Buttress, clutching him by
the seat of his trousers. “You’ll be overboard in a minute! Where is
she?”

“You see a lightish patch on the horizon just to the left of that long
dark cloud--” Brewis began. “She’s--”

“By God he’s right!” James broke in. “I see her. A large ship, with no
lights. No more’n a couple o’ miles away.”

The raft topped the rolling crest and began to descend.

“Maybe it’s that bloody raider come back,” said Ogden, the fireman.

“Never mind who she is,” said Buttress excitedly. “James?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“If your fingers aren’t all thumbs like mine, open that box of flares.
Just take hold of the ring and pull off the metal strip. Be careful,” he
went on to warn him. “If they go overboard we’re finished.”

“The lid’s off,” James grunted. “What do I do next?”

“Take one of the flares by its wooden handle.”

“Okay, Chief. I’ve got it.”

“Now feel for a small thing sticking out at the side at the other end.”

“I can feel a bit of a pimple, Chief.”

“Good! When I give you the order, but not before, strike the pimple, as
you call it, smartly against some hard substance, and hold the flare
aloft at an angle of about forty-five degrees.”

“All set, Chief.”

The raft started to rise to the next rolling hummock.

“Stand by!” said Buttress, and then, a moment later. “All right. Let her
go, James.”

The A.B. obeyed orders and struck. The flare spluttered and emitted a
little shower of sparks before bursting into a glare which bathed the
raft and surrounding sea in a flood of brilliant ruby light. It burned
for about two minutes before dying away.

The next time the raft lifted they peered eagerly out into the darkness
for signs of the approaching ship.

“I believe she’s seen us!” young Brewis suddenly exclaimed. “Yes. She’s
steering toward us.”

“God!” the Chief Petty Officer muttered, his heart beating fast with
hope. “I hope you’re right, Brewis.”

“I know I’m right,” the officers’ steward replied. “She’s not steering
the same as when we first saw her. She’ll pass us quite close.”

The crest of the wave passed under them, and the raft started to descend
into the next trough. Minutes seemed to pass before they again began to
climb. The suspense became intolerable.

“Stand by with another flare,” Buttress ordered.

There was no need for another flare at the moment. The next time the
ship came into view they saw the faint diamond, ruby, and emerald
triangle formed by her dimmed steaming and low lights, which had just
been switched on. Their flare had been seen. The ship was coming
straight toward them. She was within half a mile.

“Captain, sir! Captain!” Buttress exclaimed, shaking Chenies in his
excitement. “There’s a ship coming, sir--a ship!”

Chenies groaned. At least he was alive.

“Maybe we’ll get our spell o’ leave after all,” observed Ogden, the
fireman. “Twice wrecked, once torpedoed, and now this. I always knew I
was never born to be drownded.”

“Put a sock in it,” James retorted. “You were born to be hanged, chum.”

“Keep silence, you two!” Buttress growled. “I want to hear if she hails
us. Keep that flare ready, James.”




POSTSCRIPT


     _Extracts from a letter written by Mrs. Robert P. Hanson, passenger
     in the United States steamship_ Philadelphian, _bound from Galway,
     Eire, to New York, to her mother in San Francisco._

As I shall be seeing you within a week of our arrival at New York, it
seems rather a waste of time to be writing now. But the urge is on me,
and you know what I am when I start.

We left Galway a very crowded ship after a tiresome journey across
Ireland, and a long wait before we could embark. Bob and I were lucky to
get a two berth room to ourselves, but with no private bathroom. Many
people are having to camp out on mattresses in the public rooms. The
ship was nearly full on leaving Lisbon, and what with another crowd at
Galway and the hordes of children, life is rather uncomfortable and
difficult. However, as we are refugees of a sort, I suppose we can’t
really complain. Bob says we’re lucky to have a passage at all, and
wouldn’t have unless he’d pulled strings.

On the second afternoon out things began to happen. I’ve only heard part
of the story at secondhand, but it seems that a German raider attacked a
convoy some distance ahead of us. We saw nothing of the battle, but had
a certain amount of information that came through on the radio. Anyhow,
that evening they were particularly careful about the black-out,
stewards coming round every so often to see that those circular steel
things--I can’t remember their names--were in place over our portholes,
which were tight shut. No lights were allowed on deck, and someone was
even scolded for lighting a cigarette. There was a sort of suppressed
excitement all over the ship as though people were expecting things to
happen. And sure enough they did.

Bob and I have the first dinner at seven o’clock, and usually take a
walk on deck afterward before settling down to read or play bridge. We
were on deck just before eight, a fine night with clouds all over the
sky, very dark and cold. We hadn’t been there more than a few minutes
when we saw a reddish glow in the sky a long way ahead. We couldn’t make
out what it was until we were told it was a ship on fire. That gave us a
funny feeling in our insides, particularly when it turned out to be
several ships on fire, one well separated from the others and we heading
toward the single one. It was a long way off, and presently disappeared
altogether, though not before we had seen some bluish glares in the sky
far away to the left. They looked exactly like the flares I’ve seen
dropped over London by the German planes before they start bombing. All
this gave us a lot to talk about. An officer told us that the burning
ships belonged to the British convoy that had been attacked.

Bob and I went to bed at our usual time, just after eleven o’clock. It
was after midnight, when I was still reading, that I noticed a different
rhythm in the engines. You know how easy it is when your ear’s on the
pillow. Then the ship stopped altogether, and I felt a sort of
vibration. Bob, who knows all about these things, said, “We’re going
astern. There’s something happening. Get your clothes on, Allie, and
come on deck.”

Well, we scrambled into some things over our pajamas, snatched our
lifebelts, and went on deck, thinking we might have been held up by a
submarine. But it wasn’t that at all. Our ship was stopped, and a boat
was being lowered to rescue some poor souls from a raft. There were
seven of them, all wet through and nearly dead from cold and exhaustion.
Three of them were wounded, one, a Captain in the British Navy, pretty
seriously. I, being emotional and highly strung, nearly wept when I saw
the poor things brought on board and taken to the ship’s hospital. They
were well looked after there. I gather they’d been six or seven hours
clinging to a waterlogged raft. We only just reached them in time--

       *       *       *       *       *

I am continuing this three days later. The rescued Captain’s name is
Chenies, and he had to be operated on for bad wounds in the leg and
side. Our ship’s doctor was helped by two others who happened to be
among the passengers. One of them told me that Captain Chenies has his
home at a place called Minchinhampton, where we once had American
friends. So Bob and I managed to see this Chenies for a few minutes.
He’s a nice man, somewhere in the fifties, who had left the Navy before
the war and came back to command an armed merchant cruiser. He’s still
very weak, but the doctors all say he’ll recover. He must be pretty
tough.

All the other survivors are going on well, and one, a funny old thing
called Mr. Buttress, is an old pet and has been telling me about his
wife and two sons in the Navy. He, too, came back for the war, and in
peacetime was running a little shop in Knightsbridge near Harrods. They
won’t say much about the battle, being apparently under orders not to
talk. We’re benevolent neutrals, I suppose, though still technical
“aliens” to them. Not that I ever feel the British are real foreigners
to us.

I must say I like these British sailors. They’re so simple and
unassuming. They’re all being lionized by the passengers, who are
getting up a concert and subscription to do something for them when we
arrive. Oh! I nearly forgot. Captain Chenies knows our American friends
at Minchinhampton, or at least his wife does. I’ve promised to send Mrs.
Chenies a cable when we arrive. He’ll be in the hospital some time yet.

       *       *       *       *       *

Later. We’ve been entertaining heroes unawares. We heard in the B.B.C.
news that the ship our survivors came from fought a German battleship
singlehanded and saved most of her convoy. You can imagine our
excitement at hearing this. Still more ado is being made of them, and
they simply hate it. There’s talk of having a special dinner for all
those well enough to attend the night before we arrive, with speeches
and toasts. Mr. Buttress came to see me just now and said, “Miss” (he
always calls me Miss), “Miss. I find all this fuss about us most
embarrassing. It’s likely to turn the men’s heads. May I be so bold as
to ask, Miss, that you will request the other passengers to forget we’re
on board?” Of course I said I’d do what I could, though I told him it
was about as difficult as stopping an avalanche with one’s bare hands.
He looked at me reproachfully when I said that. “I can’t stand it, Miss.
Really I can’t.” He’s got eyes rather like a sheepdog’s, sort of
half-sad and very faithful.

I’ve no doubt that the names of these men and the name of this ship must
already be known in America. So I fear, though of course I didn’t tell
him, that Mr. Buttress and his friends will be more embarrassed still
when we dock in New York. The news hounds will soon smell them out, poor
dears, if I know anything about them.


2.

     _A letter written by Toppy Chenies to her brother, Lieutenant
     Anthony Chenies, D.S.C., Royal Navy, H.M.S._ Hamilton, _c/o G.P.O.
     London._

NIND
My dear Tony,

We had your wire, days late and very discreet, since it tells us nothing
of where you are or if there’s any chance of your coming on leave.
You’re badly wanted.

It’s glorious about Father, and Mother and I feel frightfully proud. But
it’s more wonderful still to know that the old darling’s getting on so
well. We had a cable from him in New York, and another from someone
called Hanson who apparently knew Margaret and Webster here in England.
It’s as well Father’s out of England. His life wouldn’t have been worth
living here.

We’ve had a hectic time, telegrams and letters from the Admiralty and
shoals of people all over the country, some of whom we don’t even know
but may be Father’s friends. There have been dozens of others from
people wanting to interview us, and cables from America.

The story really begins with me sitting doing my usual job in the M.O.I.
and being rung up by a male voice asking if I was Miss Chenies. I said
yes, and was asked if I was any relation to Captain Chenies of the
_Fonthill Abbey_. I said yes, he was my father. Then the man asked if I
minded being interviewed. I said I’d simply detest it, but what on earth
did he want to interview me about. He hemmed and hawed a bit, and asked
if I hadn’t heard the news. I asked what news, and he replied that
Father had done a very gallant action, and his name would be all over
the world. Next it came out that Father was reported missing. God! But
that was awful. I can’t describe what I felt. I nearly passed out. I was
thinking of how Mother would take it.

My nice boss came to the rescue, and said he’d deal with any would-be
interviewers, and that I was to go straight home to Mother. So feeling
like nothing on earth, I collected a few things from my flat, and caught
the first train from Paddington, getting to Stroud in the early
afternoon, and then on to Minchinhampton by car. Mother was wonderfully
brave, but the next thirty-six hours were the most agonizing I’ve ever
endured. All sorts of people tried to help, but apart from the Dodsons
we naturally preferred to be alone. We took the telephone off its hook,
and told Effie to tell people we weren’t at home. Effie, incidentally,
spent most of her time weeping bitterly about “the pore Capting.” Yes. I
can joke about it now, but it was all pretty ghastly at the time. Our
whole world seemed upset, and Mother and I were wondering what to do,
and if we’d be able to carry on with the house.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, came a wire from the Admiralty telling
us that Father was safe, though wounded, and was going on well. We’d
already seen in the papers, and heard through the B.B.C., of course, of
what the _Fonthill Abbey_ had done, and how she’d saved her convoy, or
most of it. But you can imagine our feelings when we had this definite
news that the old dear had been picked up. Then, later, we heard he
would be landed in America.

The newspaper and photographer invasion started soon afterward, and the
very next day we came on here to this hotel at St. Ives, where we’ve
been for five days, and haven’t been bothered much up to the present. If
we are, we’ll pack up our traps and migrate elsewhere.

I can’t tell you how glad and proud I am to think that Father’s come
into his own. It’s the sort of thing he always longed for. Mother, who
sends her love to you, hopes they won’t send him to sea again because of
his wounds, which were in the right side and leg. Also she says the
socks she’s knitting for you are rather a lighter blue than usual and
does it matter?

Meanwhile, I wish you could get a few days’ leave.

                       Your affectionate sister,
                                                       Toppy.


_Cable from Chief Petty Officer Buttress, New York, to his wife in
London._

     DEAR LAURA AM SAFE IN GOOD HANDS AND HEALTH HOME SOON FOLKS HERE
     WONDERFUL DIFFICULT STAND KIND HOSPITALITY UNACCUSTOMED AMERICAN
     FOOD PREFER YOUR COOKING NONE THE WORSE EXPERIENCES BUT A BIT TIRED
     DEAR DONT BELIEVE NEWSPAPER YARNS MOSTLY SLUSH THUMBS UP DEAR WIFE
     HOPE YOU AND BOYS WELL WHAT PRICE FATHER NOW LOOKING FORWARD
     CELEBRATION LONDON TAKE CARE YOURSELF LOVING HUSBAND BEN BUTTRESS.


[The end of _White Ensigns_ by Henry Taprell Dorling (as "Taffrail")]