Читать книгу Stories of the Ships - Lewis R. Freeman - Страница 5

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The Captain had come for a breath of fresh air on the quarter-deck at the end of a grey winter's day, and it was the memories called up by the resemblance of the low, rounded, treeless hills which ringed the Northern Base to some other hills which he had good reason to carry a vivid mental picture of that set him talking of the Falklands.

"They're very much like these," he said, "those wind-swept hills around Port Stanley; indeed, I know of few other parts of the world so far apart geographically that have so much in common topographically and climatically. Their people, too, are a good deal like the northern Scots and Orcadians, with a dry sense of humour that usually manifests itself at your first meeting with them, when they tell you that the Falklands have two seasons, the cold and the snowy. The latter, they tell you,—because the snow stops up the chinks and keeps out the wind—is rather the warmer of the two. They are a sturdy, resolute lot, too, and we found that, quite expecting the coming of the German fleet and with no sure knowledge that British naval help would arrive in time, they had made all preparations to fight the enemy to the limit of their very primitive resources.

"And a jolly good fight they would have put up, too. The old Canopus (the battleship which did not come up in time to help Craddock at Coronel) had been grounded in the inner harbour and turned into a 'land fort.' Her heavy turret guns had been left aboard her, while those of her secondary batteries had been mounted at the most favourable positions on the hills. The 'standing army'—of something like thirty-five, I believe—had been recruited up to several times that figure, and all over the island firearms, ancient and modern, had been taken down and made ready for use. Von Spee's sailors and marines would have had many a ridge-to-ridge skirmish on their hands before they completed the conquest of the Falklands.

"The coming of Sturdee put an entirely different face on things," continued the Captain, smartly side-stepping the flying "grummet" which had been flicked across his path from out of a howling pack of flannelled "snotties" deep in the throes of hockey on the opposite side of the quarter-deck. "'When are the Huns coming?' was still the question on every tongue; but it was now put anticipatively rather than apprehensively. They had not long to wait.

"I shall never forget that morning they appeared. It was scarcely twenty hours from the time we had dropped anchor, and most of the ships of the squadron were rushing those odd and ends of cleaning up, overhauling, revictualling, and the like that always follow arrival in port. The Cornwall, with some repairs on one of her engines to be effected, was at six hours' notice, and the Bristol, for similar reasons, at somewhat longer. Only the Kent was ready to put to sea at once.

"I was in my bath when a signal reading 'Raise steam for full speed with all despatch' was handed me, and it did not need another signal, which arrived a few minutes later, to tell me that, by some amazing stroke of 'joss,' the enemy was near at hand. How near I did not dream until the guns of the old Canopus began to boom. Luckily, I was already shaved" (I liked that little touch), "but, even so, my finishing dressing and breakfasting within twelve minutes was a very creditable performance of its kind. I can't say much for the toilet I made, but the breakfast was a good hearty one, with porridge, eggs, and marmalade. With an action in the offing, and no knowing when you are going to have time to eat again, it is only common sense to fortify against an indefinite fast.

"By the time I reached the bridge the topmasts of an armoured and a light cruiser were visible, slipping along above the headland which cut off the harbour from the open sea. The events of the next few hours were to etch the profile of the latter ship indelibly upon my memory, for it was the Leipzig, coming up with the Gneisenau to destroy the Port Stanley Wireless Station. From the foretop of the Canopus they were able to see the Huns clearing for action; and the Glasgow and the Bristol, both of which were in the inner harbour, also had a clear view across the depressed neck of the peninsula. The other ships of the squadron saw no more than topmasts until they had raised steam and reached the open sea.

"Just how the Huns came to make the disconcerting discovery that there were modern battle cruisers concealed by the higher seaward end of the peninsula I learned from an officer who had been saved from the sinking Gneisenau, who told me the story in his guttural broken English. They had expected to find the Canopus at Port Stanley, he said, and perhaps the Cornwall and Carnarvon and other light cruisers; but anything of the class of the Invincible and Inflexible—'Mein Gott, Nein! Wen der Gunnery Ludenant sent word from der foredop down' (he sputtered) 'dot he zwei ships mit dreipodt madsts gesehen had, mein Kapdtin he say, "Nein, nein, es ist eempossibl. Ich will ein man mit der gut eyes up senden." Wen this man say, ya, he see zwei dreipodt madsts, mein Kapdtin, he say, "Der Teufel, now Ich must go quickt. Ein hour, zwei hour, we run, sehr schnell. Den komen aus der Inglish ships, und preddy soon Ich see dem komen mehr schell von uns." Den Ich say: "Mein Kapdtin, you must der mehr schnell gehen, or you must der fight machen." He say, "Ya, ya," und he mehr schnell try zu gehen. Nicht gut. No good. Den we up mit der Scharnhorst gekommen, und der Admiral, he say, "Nun will we der fight gemachen. Den we machen der fight. Nichts, no good. Kaput! Feenish!"'"

The Captain stopped at the windward end of the deck and let the breeze fan a brow that had grown red during his effort at literal rendition. A grin of pleased reminiscence sat on his face. "My word, but it must have given the Hun a jolly good jolt, that first sight of those 'dreipodt madsts!'" he explained finally, as he put on his cap and fell into step beside me again.

"If Von Spee ever had any time for arrière pensée before the sea closed over him," he resumed, "he must have reproached himself bitterly for not pushing on in force and attacking us in the harbour before we had steam up. If his whole squadron had come up as the Gneisenau and Leipzig did, they could undoubtedly have given us a very unpleasant hour or two while we were raising steam. We would have polished them off in the end, of course, but they would have done us a deal more harm than by the tactics they did follow. Again, there is a chance that, if the two armoured cruisers had pressed the attack alone—as they eventually were forced to do—they might have inflicted enough damage to our light cruisers to have made the escape of all three (instead of only one) of theirs a possibility. However, Von Spee's star of good fortune, which had been at its zenith at Coronel, was now sinking to near the horizon, and it was ordained that at the Falklands he should meet an enemy who was both faster and heavier armed than he, under conditions of sea and light which favoured him no whit.

"The battle of the Falklands was really won in the harbour of Port Stanley. It was all a question of how soon we could get out. If we could reach the enemy in anything like full force there was little doubt of the result. A delay of an hour or two, however, might have easily resulted in their scattering so effectually that the running down of the last of them would have been a matter of months, and months, too, marked with great losses of, and greater delays to, the merchant shipping of two hemispheres. Nothing short of the truly splendid efforts of the engine-room and stokehold personnel of Sturdee's ships would have given their gunners their chance to win the battle of the Falklands.

"Of the Cornwall's achievement in this respect I am especially proud. With one of the engines partially dismantled, we would have been doing all that was expected of us if we had been under full steam in six hours. Indeed, that was the very notice we had gone under, in order to do the overhauling desired. And now let me tell you what happened. It was ten minutes after eight when the signal to raise steam for full speed was received, and before half-past ten she was steaming out of the harbour. We could have got under weigh some minutes earlier than we did but for having to let the Invincible and the Inflexible, which had been lying inshore of us, pass out ahead. And before the day was over the old Cornwall, with the heartiest lot of lads that ever swung a scoop throwing coal under her boilers, covered a wide stretch of the South Atlantic at a speed a good knot or two better than she had averaged on her trial trip, or at any other time since then.

"There was one trivial but amusing little incident in connexion with the departure of the battle cruisers which stands out particularly clearly among my otherwise rather jumbled memories of those two hours of rush and hurry. We had been leading our usual hand-to-mouth existence in the matter of food for some weeks previous to this, and one of the things we had most looked forward to our call at Port Stanley for was revictualling. We were losing no time in getting provisions aboard, and at the moment the signal to raise steam was received a lighter containing, among other things, a large cask of beer and a lot of salt pork had just moored alongside. We were really in great need of the salt pork, and—well, there seemed to be a considerable desire for the beer also. However, when the Devil drives, or a reckoning is to be settled with the Hun, one can't wait for such incidentals as food and drink. Knowing that we had enough aboard to keep going on until the game was played out, I ordered the lighter to cast off and turned my attention to more pertinent matters. I recalled later that I heard the winch grinding once or twice after I gave the order, but, seeing the lighter floating away with the tide presently, thought no more about it for the moment.

"Carried hither and thither by the conflicting harbour currents, the lighter was half a cable's length or so off our port bow when the battle cruisers, spouting smoke like young volcanoes, came charging out to take up the chase of the Hun, and, by a strange chance, it was lounging indolently square athwart the course of the Flagship. The sharp bows of the Invincible shore it through like a knife, and her propellers, with those of the Inflexible, quickly reduced boat and cargo to bobbing bits dancing in their bubbling wake.[A]

"It really hurt me to see that good food and drink snatched almost out of our mouths, as it were, but I tried to put on a brave front and turn the matter off as a joke. 'Beer and pork sausage,' I remarked to one of my officers who had just come up to the bridge to report; 'the battle cruisers seem to have a good appetite for Hun diet this morning. I only hope they'll have as good luck gulping down the Huns themselves.'

"'It's only "sausage" they put their teeth in, I'm glad to say, sir,' he replied with a grin. 'The men managed to hoist the beer aboard somehow before casting off the lighter, and as I came along just now I heard some one ordering that the cask be put down in a "syfe plyce wher' it won't be 'oled if th' 'Un 'its us."'

"'My word!' said the Captain, with the same look on his face that it had worn on another occasion when he had told me of the 'banquets' that had been served on the Carmania when the Cornwall had foregathered with her at a certain mid-Atlantic rendezvous after the former had sunk the Cap Trafalgar. 'My word! but we did enjoy that beer when the time came to drink it. Yes, they shared and shared alike with the officers. Good old pirate law as to loot and salvage, you know.'

"The Kent, which was at five minutes' notice, was the first ship to get under weigh, probably with orders to keep the enemy in sight but not, of course, to try to engage them. The Glasgow was the next out, and then the Carnarvon. The Cornwall was ready to follow close on the heels of the latter, but, as I have told you, had to wait for the battle cruisers, which were now under weigh. We went out not far astern of the Inflexible, and the Bristol, which had been on long notice in the inner harbour, was last, at a considerable interval.

"The battle cruisers, with their turbines, worked up to full speed a great deal more rapidly than the ships with reciprocating engines, and, heading straight down the wake of the retreating Germans—now showing their fore-shortened silhouettes in 'Line Ahead' on the south-western horizon—they quickly drew away from all but the Glasgow. The latter, not long out of the dry dock and swiftest of the lot in any event, had passed the Kent and was holding a southerly course, evidently with the intention of keeping the Hun light cruisers in sight and reporting their movements.

"It took something like two hours after the British ships were out to convince Von Spee that all his efforts to go 'mehr schnell' were going to be of no avail. There was nothing left for him to do but to 'der fight gemachen.' In this he had two alternatives—to fight with all of his ships, or to fight a delaying action with a part of them and give the others a chance to escape. His choice was the one that any other sailor as gallant and able as Von Spee had proved himself to be would inevitably have taken. He plumped to fight with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and let the Nürnberg, Leipzig, and Dresden make the most of their chances of scattering to safety. His signal, as we learned it later from prisoners, was substantially this: 'Light cruisers will make every endeavour to escape to South American ports. Armoured cruisers will engage enemy, and endeavour to delay.'

"It was just about noon that I saw the tower-like, smoke-crowned silhouettes of the German ships gradually begin to lengthen, and when they held steady more or less beam-on I knew that the turn of eight points meant that Von Spee had made his decision. As the dark profiles began to draw apart—the two longest heading to port and the three shortest to starboard—I realised at once what that decision was. The armoured cruisers were going to try to draw the pursuit to the south, while the light cruisers sought safety by 'starring' on divergent courses to the south and south-west.

"I think there will be no harm in my telling you that in all the possible contingencies we had discussed under which we might meet the enemy, there was none which roughly approximated to the conditions imposed upon us by the fact that he had unexpectedly come upon us in harbour—surprising us no less than himself—and forcing us to tumble out in pursuit of him in much the same order as a farmer and his family sallying forth following an alarm in their hen roost. What we had generally agreed would happen was that we—ourselves spread over a wide expanse of sea in 'Line Abreast'—would sight the enemy steaming in similar formation, and in that event it was understood that our battle cruisers should attend to the two German armoured cruisers, while the rest of us took on such of his light cruisers as we could most readily bring to action. Though already scattered over many miles of sea, our problem was really only that of conforming this 'elastic' general plan to present conditions.

"The battle cruisers altered course instantly to continue the chase of the enemy armoured cruisers, but the Admiral, doubtless realising that, scattered as we were, each of the rest of us (already conversant with his general instructions) would be his own best judge as to where he could be most useful, left us to pick our own quarries. I made up my mind at once to go after the light cruisers, and, signalling 'Come on, Kent' (the Captain of the Kent was my junior, and therefore subject to my orders in a case of this kind), headed off in the direction of what were still little more than three dark blurs on the south-westerly horizon. The Glasgow, which was a long way ahead to port, also decided (in view of instructions) in favour of going after the light cruisers, and, altering course sharply, passed astern of the battle cruisers and converged with the Kent and Cornwall in the chase. The Carnarvon, which for some reason was not steaming her best, and had been left a good distance astern, held on after the battle cruisers. The Bristol, which had been delayed in getting out of harbour, had been ordered to look after some steamers which had been following Von Spee, and which we believed to carry coal and provisions. We afterwards learned that one of them had a cargo of potatoes, and as potatoes chanced to be another of the many things which the Cornwall was short of at this time, I have always harboured the same kind of grudge against the Bristol for sinking these as I have against the Invincible for putting down my salt pork.

"As soon as it became evident what courses the Hun ships were steering, I signalled to the Kent to go after the port ship, which turned out to be the Nürnberg, while I gave my attention to the middle one of the three, the Leipzig. This would have left the Glasgow free to pursue and engage the third ship, the Dresden, which her twenty-six knots of speed should have enabled her to do handily. This plan, if it could have been carried out, would have made a clean sweep of Von Spee's squadron then and there, instead of giving the Dresden a new lease on life, and some weeks more of uncertainty for merchant vessels of both the South Atlantic and Pacific. Where it slipped up was through the fact that the Glasgow could not avoid engaging the Leipzig en passant while endeavouring to get within range of the Dresden, and, once having taken on the latter, she was, bulldog-like, reluctant to draw off until her opponent was finished. As there was no other ship fast enough to catch up the Dresden, her escape was inevitable.

"It was a little after four in the afternoon—almost to a minute the time I had reckoned it would be—that the fine burst of speed the Cornwall had been putting on brought the Leipzig well within range, and I gave the order to open fire. Previous to this the latter had been engaging in a very lively little running fight with the Glasgow, neither appearing to be inflicting serious damage to the other. The Hun's four-point-ones were about balanced by the Glasgow's equal number of four-inch, but the latter's two six-inch gave her a comfortable margin that would have decided the issue in her favour in the end. The German gunners, always at their best at the beginning of an action, were making good practice, however, and the Glasgow would have known she had had a fight on her hands before it was over.

"At the intervention of the Cornwall, with her fourteen six-inch guns, the Leipzig—very pluckily and properly—turned her attention to the heavier armed, and therefore the more dangerous, of her two adversaries. We began hitting her at our third salvo, and it must have been about the same time that a shell from one of her well-served four-point-ones came crashing into the Cornwall. I must say it was jolly good work for such comparatively small guns. The extremely high angle they had to be fired at, though, reduced their chances of hitting, and I recall especially one beautifully bunched salvo which struck the water so close to the far side of the ship that it might almost have been dropped from an air-ship.

"One of the gunners told me an amusing incident in connexion with that first hit. A boy, engaged in passing six-inch shells, was inclined to be rather nervous at the outset, and was coming in for a good deal of chaffing from his more callous mates. When the bang and jar of that first explosion ran through the ship, a shell had just been handed him to shove along, but, quivering all over, he stood rooted in his tracks and demanded to know what the noise was. A guffaw of laughter ran round, at the end of which an old gunner replied, 'That, me son, is our fust vaxinashun mark.' Gradually a grin of comprehension and reassurance replaced the look of terror on the lad's face as he realised that it isn't necessarily so serious a thing after all to have a shell burst above your head. 'Right-o!' he cried, passing the shell smartly on; ''and this proj. on to the 'Un an' prevent a small-pox epidemic breakin' out 'board 'is ship.' The joke had passed all the way round the ship before the fight was over, and there was red-hot rivalry to the end to keep the Hun's small-pox rate down by 'vaxinashun.' When you think of it, there's nothing funny about the joke at all; but there's nothing equal to the roughest of chaff to keep men's spirits up and their nerves steady in a fight, and it's because these lads of ours take fighting in the same happy-go-lucky spirit that they take their sport that they're such incomparable stayers—that they're always going stronger at the finish than when they started, no matter what the course.

"I remember another amusing little incident which occurred at about this stage of the game. Owing to the fact that there was no voice-pipe connexion from the bridge to the foretop and other 'nerve-centres,' it was imperative that I should fight the ship from the conning tower—an irksome necessity on account of the circumscribed vision. I found myself making occasional rounds of 'afternoon calls' to the various places with which I wanted to keep in closer touch, or from where I had a better chance to see how things were progressing than from the box of the conning tower, and one of these took me to the bridge, whose sole occupant was the signalman at the range-finder. Silhouetted black against the sky and with not enough cover to protect him from a pea-shooter, he was still going quietly about his work and apparently having the time of his young life.

"The Liepzig's gunnery had not begun to go to pieces at this juncture, and every little while one of those beautifully bunched little salvoes of four-point-ones would throw up its pretty nest of foam jets in the near-by water. A shell from one of these struck somewhere amidships as I came out upon the bridge, and I found the man at the range-finder just throwing an appraising glance over his shoulder to where the fragments of a whaler were mounting skyward in a cloud of smoke. 'My word, sir,' he greeted me with, 'but it's jolly glad I am I ain't back ther' w'ere the projers catch you 'tween decks. Now, up 'ere it's diff'rent—they just passes straight on into the water.'

"'They pass straight through!' I repeated. 'What do you mean by that?' 'Jest wot I sez, sir,' he replied. 'Look w'ere you're standin', sir! The canvas ain't 'arf stiff enuf to stop 'em.'

"I looked. On my left the canvas wind-shield was punctured with a smooth round hole at about the level of my waist, while on my right a similar strip had been pinked about even with the calf of my leg. From the upper hole the ragged ends of the painted canvas were bent inwards: from the lower hole, outwards.

"''Twas from the 'Uns' last salvo but one, sir,' said the signalman, grinning down at me over the range-finder. ''Twould 'a' jest about plugged you in the knees. You was jest too late in comin' up, sir.'

"I believe I told him," said the Captain with a laugh, "that, while I should hate to be setting an example for unpunctuality on my own ship, I sincerely hoped and trusted that I should continue being equally late for 'appointments' of that kind. He was a brave chap, that one, and I'm glad to say my recommendation brought him a D.C.M. for the way he carried on that afternoon.

"It's very funny the things one 'imagines' in the course of an action, one in which you are being hit, I mean. There isn't a lot of your ship that you can see from a conning-tower, and so when anything happens—like the explosion of a shell, for instance—you (generally more or less sub-consciously, for your whole active mind is engrossed with fighting the ship) have to speculate on where it struck and what damage it did. Here is an example of one of my efforts in this line that afternoon. A terrific smashing-banging followed the explosion of a shell somewhere amidships, and from the nature of the racket I instantly jumped to the conclusion that it could be only one thing. 'After funnel carried away,' I announced to my Staff Paymaster, whom I had kept standing by to take notes and the time of any incidents I thought worth recording, though just why I concluded it was the after one I don't remember. 'After funnel carried away,' he repeated, and jotted down the entry against the time the disaster had occurred.

"Well, I carried on for the next hour or two with the distinct idea in my mind that one of the funnels was gone, and I even recall wondering several times in the course of the next hour or two whether any damage had been caused in the engine-room, or whether the wreckage was likely to get afire, or whether the smoke would be getting in the way of the guns. Indeed, it is quite possible I tried to get some assurance on these points by voice-pipe. I don't remember precisely. At any rate, it was quite definitely fixed in my mind that that funnel was gone, so that when the next time I poked out to have a look round, I found that it was not even dented, I could hardly believe my eyes. I really am not quite sure to this day what it was that made the infernal banging which I took to be that funnel going over the side.