Читать книгу The Scarlet Stripe--being the adventures of a naval surgeon - Henry Taprell Dorling - Страница 5

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I HAD been four and a half years a medical student at Westminster Hospital when war broke out. My age was 22½, and I had passed everything except my finals.

My people were not altogether pleased when I announced my intention of joining up. I suppose their objections were only natural. I was an only son and my parents weren’t any too well off. They had denied themselves a good deal to pay my school bills and for my medical training, for I hadn’t the brains to win scholarships. I was approaching the time when I might expect to find myself launched out into the world as a full-fledged doctor. Looking back, I can understand their anxiety when they saw the chance of my career and future livelihood knocked on the head for the time being.

On the other hand there was a war on, and I naturally wanted to see something of it. Some people even said it might be over by Christmas, and lots of our students had joined the Army in the ranks immediately it started. Many of the staff had also appeared in the uniform of the R.A.M.C., and, disappearing one by one, had been relieved by older men.

War, I argued, was a young man’s job, and this might be the only war that I should ever see. I didn’t feel particularly brave. Most certainly I didn’t want to be killed; but if I waited until I qualified assuredly I should miss it.

It was a tougish business to bring my people to my way of thinking; though after a lot of persuasion they eventually relented. I felt a selfish beast at insisting, particularly when my mother wept and persuaded herself that I should be killed.

But what could a fellow do? Hundreds of men of my age were joining up every day. I felt ashamed to be seen about in the streets in civilian clothing. Every recruiting poster seemed to scream at me. I went about in mortal terror of being given a white feather by one of that band of misguided females who at that time paraded London looking for victims. Why shouldn’t I join?

It was my ambition to get into the Navy; but the question was how to set about it. No doubt I could have joined as a bluejacket, while the fact that I had been in the O.T.C. at my public school and had got the usual certificate, might even help me to get a commission in the R.N.V.R. as a sub-lieutenant. To tell the truth, though, I didn’t want to lose touch altogether with my future profession. I wished to go to sea with something to do in the doctoring line. The stumbling block was that I wasn’t fully qualified.

Here again I was rather at cross purposes with my father. Himself a physician in Hampstead, he wanted me eventually to join him and to take over his excellent practice when he retired. He certainly didn’t want me to enter the Navy permanently, which afterwards I did. For some strange reason he seemed to regard the naval medical profession as a dead end, a comfortable sinecure for the unambitious and the lazy. He frequently warned me against it, maintaining that one got no real experience afloat, and that one lost touch with the latest developments.

I don’t know why these prejudices should exist, for prejudices they certainly are. I have found as many good and keen doctors in the Navy as out of it, and to my mind a naval surgeon has advantages which are by no means to be sniffed at. He may be subject to a good many rules and regulations, though I doubt if there are many more restrictions afloat than there are ashore. But the pay of the naval doctor is not so bad, he sees something of the world for nothing, mixes with pleasant people, and, when he eventually retires, receives a pension. Keeping up to date with the latest developments of his profession must surely depend upon himself to a great extent. I’d sooner be a naval surgeon any day than a G.P. with a practice in a poor district.

But I am aware that an idea exists that, as a class, we are men of little ambition, which only shows how little most people know about the Service. Speaking of this reminds me of the tale of two young women, one of whom had a medical friend who had suddenly announced his intention of joining the Navy.

“My dear!” said one of them in imparting the news. “What do you think! My Bobby’s decided to become a naval doctor.”

“Oh!” replied the other, “I do hope he’ll be able to earn a living. They do specialise in some funny things nowadays, darling, don’t they?”

The last speaker, apparently, can never have heard of a naval doctor; but then, comparatively few people have. Doctors never by any chance figure as the heroes in any of the naval novels I have ever read, and Marryat’s naval surgeons were a peculiar sort of people addicted to the bottle and other vices.

However, my mind was made up. I heard that the Admiralty were calling for volunteers from among senior medical students for service as surgeon probationers R.N.V.R. in small ships. I didn’t know what the devil a surgeon probationer might be; but a man called Farquharson, one of my lot, told me he had already sent in his name. I followed suit, and two days later was told to present myself at the Medical Director General’s Department at the Admiralty. They hustled things about in those days.

I arrived at the Admiralty to find a good many other fellows on the same lay, some from my own hospital. I needn’t describe my interview with rather a fierce-looking old gentleman in naval uniform with four gold stripes on his coat sleeves and red in between them. I was very polite and called him ‘Sir.’ He asked me all about myself and what I had done, grunted once or twice, and then asked me to sign a paper and said I’d do if I passed the medical exam. There was nothing much to be frightened of in that, merely the usual chest-tapping, and coughing, and saying ninety-nine. A week later, having received my outfit allowance, I was as proud as a peacock in naval uniform.

With the thin wavy line of gold and scarlet on the cuffs of my new monkey jacket, brass buttons with the crown and anchor, and naval cap, I was a surgeon probationer of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. I had to salute senior naval officers when I met them in uniform, and was subject to all the pains and penalties of the Naval Discipline Act, whatever that might be. Henceforward I had to comport myself as an officer and a gentleman, though I must confess this important fact rather slipped my memory on my last night in London with some friends before taking up my first appointment in an armed yacht based upon Grimsby. If I remember rightly, they removed my trousers.

I don’t propose to say anything very much about my month’s service in the Carola, commanded by a retired lieutenant-commander R.N. She was an old steam yacht taken over by the Admiralty. Armed with a couple of 6-pounders she was used for patrol work off the East Coast, our general routine being three or four days’ lolloping about at sea followed by thirty-six hours in harbour, during which we coaled.

The Carola rolled and pitched like nothing on earth, far worse than any destroyer, and she certainly taught me not to be seasick. The time, however, hung heavily on my hands. Apart from a cut finger or two, and a case of pneumonia which we packed off to hospital the moment we returned to harbour, I had practically nothing to do in the doctoring line. Instead, I used to spend hours at a time on the bridge, where the skipper, and the two sub-lieutenants R.N.R. who kept ‘watch and watch,’ taught me a certain amount about navigation and chart-work. That sort of thing had always interested me, and often I wished I had been able to join as an executive officer instead of as an embryo doctor.

Doctors, I believe, are really supposed to be non-combatants, and I think I’ve seen it somewhere that they’re liable to be shot if found by the enemy with arms in their possession. Rather a one-sided business I always thought it. I know jolly well that both in the Navy and the Army doctors aren’t any more immune than other people.

Early in October I was sent to the Phoenician, a destroyer in one of the flotillas based on Harwich and afterwards in the Firth of Forth. I was in her for a year and a month; but I needn’t say much of our many comings and goings in the North Sea. We had all sorts of weather, good and otherwise; but the fogs, gales of wind, and heavy seas seemed to predominate. We also had our fair share of excitement—the Dogger Bank scrap in January 1915; many excursions to the Heligoland Bight to round up enemy minesweepers and outpost boats; hunting submarines; and, of course, our everlasting screening work whenever the big ships went to sea. With the rest of our flotilla we left Harwich for the Firth of Forth in March 1915, and thereafter were attached to Sir David Beatty’s battle-cruiser squadron. He kept us pretty busy.

But North Sea destroyer work has been described so often, and by people far better qualified than myself, that I needn’t mention it here. After all, I’m only a doctor and I don’t profess to have the gift of the gab or to be able to write about things naval without committing an occasional solecism.

However, I can say something about my messmates in the wardroom—our fire-eating little skipper, Cassidy, who was as strong as a horse, but so short that he had to stand on a wooden stool to see over the canvas spray-dodgers on the bridge. He had the most remarkable flow of language I’ve ever heard, and heaven help any one who ran foul of him when he was feeling peevish. He’d ‘have his guts for a necktie,’ right enough. Cassidy usen’t to drink anything at sea, unless it was a small tot of rum and water after he’d been hours on the bridge in vile weather. But he had occasional ‘busts’ in harbour, and sometimes started breaking up the wardroom furniture and volunteering to fight the lot of us. After a particularly hectic evening, it might take the first lieutenant, the gunner, and myself to put him to bed in his cabin. However, I liked Cassidy well enough, and I must say he was a star turn at handling the ship.

Darley, the first lieutenant, was a quiet fellow and much liked by us all. The men loved him too, and I don’t really know how the ship would have got on without him. He seemed to run everything, and even had the knack of keeping the skipper in order when his fits of belligerency came over him.

Martin, the engineer lieutenant, and Carlton, the sub, were both charming people. The way that ‘the chief,’ as we called Martin, drove the ship and kept her in running order was a marvel to me. We never seemed to have the engine and boiler-room mishaps from which some of the other ships suffered, and the chief was always at his best in any emergency. The sub used to run our sailors’ band, which was decidedly a home-made and noisy affair of drums and trumpets.

But once he got us into trouble. Our depot ship never went to sea, but always lay at a buoy in the Firth of Forth. Once, when her moorings were lifted, she had to raise steam to shift billet. To do this she had to pass down one side of a line of destroyers and up the other. We blew the usual whistles and stood to attention as she passed down, and then, when she had sounded the ‘Carry On,’ our band suddenly broke into ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave.’ We were rather amused.

About twenty minutes later, after circling round the end of the trot, the depot ship passed us again on the other side on her way to pick up her new buoy. The band, as before, was quite ready, and this time played ‘Rolling Home to Merry England.’

We looked upon it as rather a good joke, but the captain of the depot ship didn’t. Lacking any sense of humour at all, he made a signal, ‘Captain repair on board,’ and gave little Cassidy a proper dressing-down in his cabin for what he said was disrespect to a senior officer. The yarn, of course, was soon round the flotilla and lost nothing in the telling. It didn’t increase Captain Carp’s popularity.

But the Keyham was not much use to us as a depot ship. She took weeks to do any small job that meant a good deal to us and our comfort and efficiency at sea, and I remember one rather hectic row because some of the destroyers had each to send half a dozen men to clear out one of her storerooms.

No. The Keyham was not the mother to us that some depot ships were to their flotillas. She seemed to do as little as she could, though the men seemed to be falling over each other on board her and getting in each other’s way. It is the little things that make a difference. For instance, instead of sending us our fresh provisions, stores, and mails in a steamboat when we returned after three or four days at sea, we generally had to collect them in our dinghies or whalers. It often meant a pull of about three-quarters of a mile in beastly weather and a sluicing tide. It didn’t seem to occur to Captain Carp or his officers that our fellows got practically no sleep when the ship was at sea, and certainly had no chance of taking their clothes off.

Little Mr. Eyers, our torpedo gunner, was a great character. No taller than the captain, he also had to stand upon a stool when keeping watch on the bridge, but he was a cheery customer and a little terror for getting things done. Moreover, he was the biggest scrounger I ever met. If we wanted extra paint or stores that we weren’t really entitled to, Mr. Eyers was the man who was sent to the dockyard or the depot ship by the first lieutenant. How he did it I never discovered; but he invariably came back with a boat-load, more than we really needed. He once stole three drums of white enamel of some special brand that had been issued to the depot ship for trial. Mr. Eyers saw it lying in the gangway unattended and promptly purloined it. When the loss was discovered, signals flew here, there, and everywhere asking if any one had seen the missing stuff. Nobody had. It came in very useful next time we painted out the mess-decks and wardroom.

In his spare time the gunner used to do joinery in his cabin with wood he’d stolen from somewhere. I still possess an ingenious little folding chair he gave me.

As there was no cabin for me, I used to sleep on one of the settees in the wardroom. Every night at sea a bottle half-full of rum used to be put in one of the racks in the sideboard, so that the officer coming off watch wet and cold could help himself to a tot before he turned in. One morning, soon after four o’clock, I was woken up by the deuce of a commotion. I opened my eyes to see Mr. Eyers lying back in one of the armchairs, cursing and groaning.

“What the deuce is the matter?” I asked, sitting up in my blankets.

“Matter!” he exclaimed, very indistinctly. “I’ve been and gone and poisoned me ruddy self!”

What had happened was that the sub had been amusing himself tittivating the wardroom furniture with some of that quick-drying, mahogany-coloured combined stain and varnish. It, also, had been put in a bottle in the wardroom sideboard, and the gunner, taking it for rum, had helped himself to a hearty dollop without troubling to use a tumbler.

The result may be imagined. The stuff congealed in his mouth and inside him, and after removing his false teeth he was pulling out long streamers, for all the world like a conjuror, blaspheming as he did it. I, of course, laughed like a fool, which made him angrier and more incoherent still.

“Can’t you do nothin’ to help ’stead o’ sittin’ there grinnin’ like a blinkin’ gargoyle?” he demanded, full of rage. “I’m full o’ the perishin’ muck. I’m poisoned, that’s what I am! Where’s your ruddy stummick pump?”

I hadn’t a stomach pump, and if I had I shouldn’t have dared to use it. Instead, I gave him stiff doses of castor oil and calomel out of the medicine chest. He was a bit pale and wan next day, and complained bitterly of lack of sleep; but at the end of thirty-six hours was more or less his own cheery self again. I guarantee Mr. Eyers never heard the end of that particular incident. It was all over the ship in two hours, and all round the flotilla in forty-eight. I even heard him spinning the yarn, with suitable embellishments, against himself. But if I dared to mention it he glared at me like a wild beast. I was the villain of the piece.

Mr. Eyers had a fund of quaint information. It was he who gave me what he declared was an infallible recipe for becoming gloriously hilarious on a single glass of weak whisky and soda. Neither Mr. Eyers nor myself was the least given to the bottle; but no doubt he thought the tip might one day be useful to me. If he were to be believed, it was a recipe which was much favoured by chorus girls when they were feeling down in the dumps, though what the gunner knew about ladies of the chorus I never really discovered. He was a married man with a numerous progeny. Anyhow, the dodge was to drop cigarette ash into an ordinary tumbler of whisky and soda, which was then drunk in the usual way. Purely from curiosity, I tried it—indeed, we all tried it. Nothing whatever happened. The cigarette ash merely spoilt an otherwise passable tipple.

Another dodge of Mr. Eyers’s was the drinking of a wineglass of ordinary olive oil before one went on a prolonged ‘binge’ or ‘bust’ in London or elsewhere. Taken beforehand, he said, the oil floated on top of the liquor and prevented the fumes thereof from reaching one’s brain.

What was the advantage, you may ask?

Well, Mr. Eyers said it enabled one to assimilate at least double one’s ordinary allowance of alcohol without ill-effects, though what particular joy there was in that I never quite found out. But just to see what would happen I tried the olive oil recipe. What did happen was immediate and disastrous. I was violently sick. Never again!

Yes, the thirteen months I spent in the Phoenician were happy ones. I liked the ship and I liked my messmates, though I must confess the amount of time we spent at sea in beastly weather sometimes made things rather irksome.

It was in November 1915 that I was appointed to the Merlin, one of the new ‘M’ class destroyers in the 10th Flotilla at Harwich. She was altogether a bigger, better, and faster ship than the old Phoenician, and again I got on well with my messmates and the ship’s company.

Most of our jaunts were in the North Sea and escorting the traffic to and fro between Orfordness and the Hook of Holland. Occasionally we had little excitements with enemy submarines and destroyers, while sometimes we did a spell at Dover, which we hated, and once or twice were sent to assist with the escort work in the Channel. I think we did our fair share of sea-time and duly earned our pay.

But I should like to say a word or two of the Merlin’s ship’s company, for they were a good and cheery crowd. I am reminded of them by a letter I received only the other day from one of our old A.B.’s, a man called Rennard who joined up for the war. I think I had better quote it at some length. It conjures up a host of memories.

“I tried many times to turn over to carpenter or shipwright,” he writes, “but left the service an A.B. I acted as far as tools and materials would allow as carpenter’s crew, with a bit of sign-writing to fill in the spare time. You say you remember ‘Doggo’ Pearson’s face. We used to call him ‘Doggo’ or ‘Ugly.’ He was a rough diamond but good-natured, and did not resent it in the least. I remember when going on leave once he and Brockwell—the coxswain of the motor-boat—had had a drop too much and went for a shave and clean up in London, and said ‘yes’ to all the barber’s proposals. It cost them fifteen shillings; but in ‘Doggo’s’ case it was well spent. He came out quite handsome—face clear of spots and pimples; hair, which was naturally nice, well-trimmed, and really looking good. I often wonder if he ever reached the height of his ambition, for he confided to me several times that when his time was up in the Navy he wanted to be a brewer’s drayman, and to this end he used to ride about on a dray when on leave and help with the beer down the cellar. You may not be aware, sir, that the custom is that the drayman gets a pint at each house of call.

“Petty Officer Nason was a grand chap. I believe he kept his widowed mother nearly all his Navy time. He was good to get on with if you did your corner. The coxswain, Von Yules as we called him (Chief Petty Officer Ewles), was another good one who did much to make the Merlin as happy and comfortable as she was. ‘Pincher’ Martin, Chief Stoker, had a stock phrase for all deck hands when they appeared at the hatch to his storeroom wanting something or other—‘Ain’t got none.’ This was before he was even asked for anything. When stores were drawn he served out waste, etc. with a lavish hand, and then in a few days—‘Ain’t got none.’ He was a likeable chap, though. I was in his good books, and could use his vice and bench and fill his store with sawdust and chips without a protest. I was sorry when he went sick and left the ship.

“On looking back I seem to be doing a review of the troops, so will carry on with it. It may interest you to see some of the chaps from another angle. I wonder how they would cut me up? There was Dempster, A.B., a dour Scotsman, who came near to Harry Lauder’s Scotsmen. He used to pick up all the bargains in the ‘pusser’s’ list, buy them on his slop-chit, and then send them home to his family. Stoker Camp was a bank-clerk in private life. I think he should be able to shovel coppers into bags. Stoker Parrish, always smiling, was in the Cressy when she was lost. I don’t think he ever got over the shock to his nerves. A.B. ‘Cock’ Faulkner, a happy-go-lucky, cheery messmate, was afterwards killed in a raid on Chatham Barracks by aircraft. Stoker Petty Officer ‘Daisy’ Adams; a cheerful, talkative man made Chief Stoker, and the job seemed to get him under. Chief Petty Officer ‘Oxo,’—I can’t remember his proper name—the torpedo gunner’s mate; he and I were in the same watch on the torpedo-tubes for night cruising for two years. He always took lookout in his turn, and I lived a commission in the Behring Sea many times over with him.

“Leading Seaman ‘Gus’ Razzell—a good torpedoman, I believe, who, had he made the going when it was good during the war, would have done well in the Navy. Ordinary Seaman ‘Brigham’ Young, a country lad who was reputed to say once when trying to give a date—‘Let’s see. It will be two years next dung-spreading time!’

“Petty Officer Mercer, a good chap in every way. A.B. Crisp, a quiet chap, very humorous in a dry way. Signalman Stone, very quiet, could look with such scorn at any misguided soul who asked ‘What’s the buzz?’ he, as a signalman, being supposed by us to have inside knowledge of everything. Able Seaman Bertie (‘Beery’) Kinshott, a curious chap like the book Chinamen. He seldom smiled, and never got rattled or vexed. I have seen him lose a considerable sum gambling without seeming to be even interested. Leading Seaman ‘Western Ocean’ Greasley had been in the merchant service. He had quite a sergeant-major’s style when calling the hands in the morning. Able Seaman Smalls, rather a mean sort. He used to run a Crown and Anchor board, and would bank lots of money from the Merlin. A.B. ‘Paddy’ Welch was lost in the Ariadne, a minelayer. A.B. ‘Snowy’ White, a quiet chap who could read signals and used to have many jokes with new hands reading signals and pretending they meant ‘Enemy in sight,’ and so on.

“To conclude, I don’t regret my time spent in the Navy. It was an education that I have not lost by. I wonder what became of Mr. Crocker, the torpedo gunner? He was a man I liked very much. I sometimes go for lunch to a small hotel kept by an R.N.R. engineer. He was in the Vindex, the aircraft-carrier that used to lie near us at Harwich. (Since the war I have been many times in her to the Isle of Man.) Well, this engineer was telling us all about the air-raid on Sylt, and didn’t know I’d been in the Navy. I said I knew the Vindex very well, and always thought she was the supply ship for petrol for the destroyers’ motor-boats. Then I sprung the old yarn about her being moored up to her buoys for so long that, when moved, she had to be towed off a pile of her own empty jam and milk tins. I don’t think it went down very well at the time!”

How well I remember them all.

But it is not my early time in destroyers that I want to write about. The unrestricted German submarine campaign started in February 1917, and in April an Admiralty memo came round asking for the names of surgeon probationers who would volunteer for ‘special service.’ We knew more or less what that meant. Among other anti-submarine measures they were commissioning decoy ships, ordinary merchantmen with naval crews and hidden guns. The idea was that these ‘Q Ships,’ tramps and coasters some of them, should go about disguised as bait for submarines. If necessary they should let themselves be torpedoed. Then, when the submarine came to the surface at close range, the supposed tramp would break the White Ensign, disclose her hidden guns, and open fire. It was a risky business for those who went to sea in them.

I turned over the idea in my mind for a day or two before asking the Merlin’s skipper to put in my name as a volunteer. He stared at me in amazement.

“Why the blazes d’you want to go in for a job like that?” he asked. “Aren’t you seeing your fair share of the war in destroyers?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Then why d’you want to leave?” he demanded. “Don’t you like being here?”

“It’s not that, sir,” I told him.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a change, sir,” I tried to explain. “It sounds rather exciting, and all that.”

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “I should jolly well think so! All the same, much as I admire your spirit, I wish to heaven you’d reconsider it. I can’t stand in your way, of course; but we shall all be damned sorry to lose you. Have you really made up your mind?”

I told him that I had.

“Very well, doc,” he said. “I think you’re rather an ass; but I’ll send in your name.”

And three weeks later I was ordered to report at the Admiralty. They dined me in the wardroom the night before I left, and the skipper made a pretty little speech to which I had to reply. I felt unutterably mouldy when I left the Merlin next morning, and all hands and the cook came on deck to say good-bye.

The Merlin had a crew of about ninety all told, and as we were a happy ship we were like a large family, knowing each other far more intimately than was ever possible in a big ship. The officers knew all the men by name, and all about them, and I’ve no doubt the men knew all about us and discussed us on the mess decks.

They were a darned good crowd. I nearly wept when I left them. Almost I regretted my decision.