Читать книгу The Scarlet Stripe--being the adventures of a naval surgeon - Henry Taprell Dorling - Страница 9

Table of Contents

I AM not going to say much more about the war. After six weeks’ leave, however, I was again appointed to a destroyer, the Thais, with the same commanding officer and first lieutenant with whom I had served in the Merlin at Harwich.

Commander Duffle, I discovered on joining, had written to some one at the Admiralty applying for me to be sent to his new ship the moment he saw the cancellation of my death in the newspapers. I was glad to be back with two old friends, and they, I think, were glad to see me. They certainly killed the fatted calf at dinner the night of my arrival.

The Thais was a brand new ship just out from her builders on the Clyde, and her West-Country ship’s company, though many of them had served in destroyers before, were all strangers to me. They were a likeable crowd. Indeed, these wartime destroyer crews, brought together into one small ship from the four corners of the earth, seemed to get on with, and to know, each other and their officers in a way that is never quite possible in peace.

Their collective war experience was amazing. Officers and men had served in battleships, battle-cruisers, light-cruisers, and small craft all over the world. Several had been present at the battles of the Heligoland Bight, the Dogger Bank, and Jutland. Others had been at the capture of Tsingtau by the Japanese, in the Cameroons, in the naval operations in East Africa, with the gunboats in Mesopotamia, or in destroyers or monitors off the Belgian Coast. At least one, in the Glasgow, saw the sinking of the Good Hope and Monmouth on that eventful evening off Coronel, while four had been present at Sir Doveton Sturdee’s victory off the Falkland Islands.

We had several R.N.R. men, Scottish fishermen, who had spent most of the war minesweeping, and a sprinkling of ‘hostility men,’ volunteers from the shore who had joined the Navy for three years, or the duration of the war. Among these latter were a Welsh schoolmaster, a North-Country miner, a Yorkshire policeman, an architect’s pupil, and a man who had been apprenticed to a coffin-maker and knew all about elm and oak caskets with brass fittings and leaden shells. His name was Fox, and I remember he once told me that the rapid spread of cremation was putting a good many skilled craftsmen out of business. However, Fox was very useful on board—not for making coffins, but for mending locker-lids and doing other odd jobs in the carpentry line.

There was also the young fellow who had been an odd-job man in a licensed victualler’s business, the victuals, I afterwards discovered, being mainly liquid. He, when I really got to know him, provided a fund of information on beer and the wiles of publicans.

The war careers of the seven officers in the wardroom had been as diversified as those of the men. The skipper and the engineer lieutenant-commander had spent most of their time in destroyers, while the first lieutenant, Bob Preston, had been at the Battle of the Falklands and in the Dardanelles. Even our R.N.V.R. midshipman, Oswald Bray, had been blooded before joining the Navy. Escaping from school with or without the consent of his people, and still too young to join up, he had driven an ambulance belonging to a British Red Cross Unit serving on the Italian front. If some professional scribbler with a little imagination could have written down the yarns I heard from our officers and men, he would have had material for many books.

The Thais nominally belonged to the 13th Destroyer Flotilla based on Rosyth and attached to the Battle-Cruiser Fleet. I say ‘nominally,’ because most of the time we were detached from the flotilla. The ship was a giddy hermaphrodite, convertible at a few hours’ notice from a destroyer into a fast minelayer by the simple process of whipping out the after 4-inch gun and after pair of torpedo-tubes, and substituting forty mines on their sinkers on the sort of tram-lines bolted along the after end of our upper deck. When we were actually laying mines at night, it was my job to stand aft with a stop-watch and to give tongue at the proper time for each mine to be dropped over the stern. So far as I can recollect, they had to be laid 150 feet apart, and the time interval between each depended upon the speed we were steaming.

Sometimes we were used as a destroyer pure and simple, and sometimes for laying eggs in the Heligoland Bight or off the Belgian Coast. We had our fair share of filthy weather, and a good deal of excitement in one form or another. Apart from minelaying expeditions, however, the chief destroyer incidents I remember were a running fight in November 1917, when British battle-cruisers, light-cruisers, and destroyers met a force of Germans sixty miles north-west of Heligoland; an expedition round the Skaw right into the Kattegat to mop up any enemy patrols we found there; and a perfectly stinking spell of duty patrolling a long line of anti-submarine nets in the middle of the North Sea.

On the first of these occasions our ship polished off, and rescued the crew of, an enemy outpost-boat which had already been in action. The chief thing I remember about this was the readiness with which our prisoners exchanged their buttons and cap-ribbons for cigarettes and soap. In the Kattegat affair, in which we had expected great things, we were bitterly disappointed by meeting only a couple of enemy trawlers and a patrol-boat, which were duly sunk by some of our destroyers after their men had been made prisoners.

During the ten days we spent patrolling the line of anti-submarine nets in the North Sea, half-way between the Firth of Forth and the Skagerrack, we had the most abominable weather I think I have ever experienced in a small ship—a full-blooded gale from the north-west with a truly mountainous sea. It was during this period that we saw two burning sailing ships on the same night, neutrals bringing pit-props to England which had been set on fire by a German submarine earlier in the day. They were blazing like volcanoes, alight from end to end, with their masts, rigging, and what remained of their sails picked out in flame like set-pieces at a firework display. With the ships drifting slowly before the wind, the tongues of flame must have been leaping a full hundred feet into the air, while clouds of rolling smoke, their upper surface black against the dark sky, and their undersides tinged orange and scarlet and pink with the glare, went hurtling to leeward on the wings of the wind. Those two flaming beacons and the glare in the sky must have been visible for seventy miles, and every breaking wave-top was dyed a bright red. It was the most magnificent display I have ever seen—but what ghastly waste!

We managed to rescue the crew of one of these ships, which, more or less by luck, we discovered in an open boat about seventeen miles to leeward of their vessel. It was blowing a full gale at the time, with our ship rolling anything up to forty-five degrees either way. After some difficulty we managed to get them on board—sixteen Swedes and a huge Norwegian elk-hound which subsequently became our property. They had been in their boat for over ten hours and had given themselves up for lost. In another hour or two they would have gone, for their boat was nearly full of water and they themselves were numb and helpless with cold when we dragged them on board with ropes. Remembering my own experience of seven months before I could sympathise from the bottom of my heart, and could fully understand their gratitude when we gave them dry clothes and filled them up with corned beef, ships’ biscuit, and stiff tots of Navy rum.

Speaking of rum, however, reminds me that the Swedish skipper had with him two bottles of ‘aquavit,’ a most potent spirit made, he told me, from fermented potatoes. All I can say is, it tasted like it, though it was certainly very warming when swallowed.

Our really eventful time, however, came early in 1918, when we minelaying destroyers formed a flotilla of our own at Immingham, on the Humber, and sometimes did two or three trips a week to lay mines in the enemy’s swept channels in the Heligoland Bight after dark. The work of the 20th Flotilla, however, together with various of the other incidents I have mentioned, have been described elsewhere,[1] and in greater detail and with more accuracy than I could ever hope to do it. I need not attempt it again here. Indeed, it would be presumptuous.

The war had lasted a good deal longer than any one had expected. My twenty-sixth birthday came in March 1918, and I hadn’t yet qualified as a doctor. The future had to be thought of, and rather against my will I had to send in my application to be released from the R.N.V.R. in order that I might pass my ‘finals.’ The Admiralty must have had other cases of the same sort to consider, for almost at once I was granted permission. So in April I left the Thais and went back to the old, old grind at the hospital in London among a completely new set of faces.

I can’t say I cared for it. I was considerably older than most of the other students—in fact, rather an anachronism. But it was something of a relief to be allowed to wear uniform, and to think that my name still figured in the Navy List. If I had appeared in plain clothes when practically every other healthy man of my age was in uniform, I should have had a difficult job to explain that I wasn’t a war dodger. As it was, the Admiralty still gave me my pay and retained a partial hold upon my services, for the moment I qualified I should be entered willy-nilly in the Navy as a surgeon lieutenant. However, the armistice came long before I was a fully-fledged doctor.

I will not describe my work at the hospital; but a rather amusing thing happened when I went up for one of my viva voces. It happened that two years and three weeks after the date on which the Parham had been sunk, I was awarded the naval Distinguished Service Cross, presumably because I was the only officer in the boat which reached Ireland. I do not mention this in any boastful spirit; but merely because the rather aged and very eminent surgeon who examined me happened to spot the letters D.S.C. after my name.

“A Doctor of Science, young gentleman?” he asked, giving me a queer searching look over the top of his glasses as though I were some sort of impostor. “A D.Sc! Surely you are very young for that—— er, distinction?”

I had to explain that I was not a Doctor of Science, and could see that his opinion of me as a budding doctor of any sort fell considerably when he had asked me a few questions in the subject in which I was being examined. All the same, the description of the sinking of the Parham and our boat journey that he made me give him took up a good many minutes which he might otherwise have spent in probing my lamentable lack of knowledge even more fully than he did.

“Dear me!” he said, staring at me and clicking his tongue. “A hundred and fifty miles from land—one hundred and fifty miles!—But tell me, young gentleman, why did you not kill and eat the dog?”

I had to explain that Bingo was Bingo, and that, in any case, he was probably inedible.

But my distinguished examiner would not have it.

“No, no, young gentleman,” he said solemnly, wagging his head and putting his finger-tips together. “The animal, partaken raw, might have been strongly flavoured; indeed, rather unpalatable. Nevertheless, dog-flesh may be perfectly wholesome and sustaining. I am told that the Chinese regard it as a delicacy, yes.” He paused.

“So next time, young gentleman,” he suddenly continued, “be damned to your sentimentality!—Eat the dog!”

I sincerely hoped there would be no next time; but it was quite evident to me that the learned professor hadn’t seen old Bingo. Nobody in his senses would have thought of eating him.

I just succeeded in scraping through that particular ordeal, which assuredly I should not have done at that time if my examiner had not got so hot and bothered over the poor old hound.

My knowledge was not profound. I had found it so hard to start learning afresh. It was difficult to get one’s nose to the grindstone after all the excitement of destroyer life in wartime. Concentration was impossible.

In the middle of 1921, some time after qualifying, and after holding various odd jobs in the medical line which led to nothing, I finally joined the Navy as a surgeon lieutenant. Three months later, after a course at Haslar Hospital, I was appointed to a ship in the Atlantic Fleet, where I spent two uneventful years punctuated by the usual visits to Devonport to give leave at Easter, Midsummer, and Christmas; the usual cruise to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean in the spring; a trip to the Baltic one summer; the invariable visits to seaside resorts, where we were invaded by crowds of sightseers; and the autumn sojourn at Invergordon for exercises at sea in the Moray Firth. The post-war Navy, I soon found, was exceedingly strenuous. We were kept hard at it.

In those days I was still a giddy bachelor and pitied those officers whose wives trailed round from port to port after their husband’s ships. With no settled homes of their own, they seemed to live in one set of furnished rooms after another, billeting themselves on their parents when the babies started to arrive.

It struck me that most naval officers, particularly those with nothing but their pay, married extraordinarily young, and generally to girls without a bean in the world. But N.O’s., I think, who are generally caught young and spend their lives among men, are inclined to regard any presentable young woman as an angel without wings. The girls, on the other hand, seemed to think they would have a good time by marrying naval officers. No doubt some of them did; but it was pitiful to see the screwing and scraping that sometimes went on to make two ends meet.

I had had no serious affairs with women and had no illusions on the subject. Experiences in my student days had shown me something of the seamy side of life and I had learnt a good deal from my own two sisters—earnest, hard-bitten females without a spark of gaiety or romance about them. I think they rather took after my mother, who was very severe and puritanical. As children we were never allowed to read secular books on Sunday, and well I remember those Sabbath gatherings in the drawing-room after tea, when, with my mother at the piano, the three of us sang through the contents of a little book called, Divine Songs for Children. I can remember some of the verses now, particularly those dealing with ‘Obedience to Parents’:—

‘Have you not heard what dreadful plagues

Are threatened by the Lord,

To him that breaks his father’s law

Or mocks his mother’s word?

‘What heavy guilt upon him lies!

How cursed is his name!

The ravens shall pick out his eyes

And eagles eat the same.’

We were brought up to regard God as a cruel, unforgiving Omnipotence who would not hesitate to strike us dead if we dared to misbehave. To tell the truth, however, I rather saw the funny side of the verses just quoted, and remember asking my mother why the ravens should be so obliging as to pick out naughty children’s eyes as a bonne bouche for the eagles. I can’t remember what she replied.

The same little book was also very severe against lying:—

‘The Lord delights in them that speak

The words of truth; but ev’ry liar

Must have his portion in the lake

That burns with brimstone and with fire.

‘Then let me always watch my lips,

Lest I be struck to death and Hell,

Since God a book of reck’ning keeps,

For ev’ry lie that children tell.’

I remember my awful feelings of remorse after an episode with a pot of strawberry jam in the store cupboard which the three of us filched and ate at a sitting. We lied like troopers, and somehow managed to get away with it. I suppose the Lake of Fire and Brimstone awaits us yet.

This book, however, is not the story of my childhood, but of my later life; and June 1924 found me in the P. & O. mail steamer Mangalore on my way out to China as medical officer of the sloop Peony, already on the station. My age was thirty-two.

It was in the Mangalore that I first met Hermione.