Читать книгу Australia in Arms - Phillip F. E. Schuler - Страница 11

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Now the course set by the Minotaur, once the Convoy was well clear of the Western Australian coast, was not the ordinary trade route to Colombo. In the first place we steamed farther west, and then shaped a course to pass some 60 or 70 miles to the east of Cocos Islands. This was on the opposite side of that group to the ordinary track of the mail steamers. The reason for the change of route was to ensure protection. Other courses were open to us; for instance, the one which would have led us amongst the Deia Garcia Islands off the Madagascar coast. However, our destinies were guided by information received by wireless on the Flagship from the Admiralty. The troops were not aware of it, but there was a Japanese squadron operating round the coasts of Java and in this distant way protecting our flank. The speed of the Convoy varied from 9½ to 11 knots an hour, though the usual run for a day was about 244 knots.

The black sheep of the fleet—if one may call a vessel such—was the Southern, the 4,000-ton vessel which I have already referred to as following the Orvieto, the Flagship of the central line. She became the cynosure of every eye, regarded in turn with interest, mirth, derision, and finally anger and compassion. There was something in the attitude of the steamer with her great heavy bows that suggested she was always doing her best to keep up, and always she seemed to be stoking. One pictures her ghost stalking each night along her confined decks looking with alarm at the terrific pace! (10 knots) and wondering for how long it would continue. Not the least amusing part was that sometimes, gathering speed, she made spurts, and all but "came aboard" the Orvieto, taking this opportunity of hauling her speed cone part way down the mast, with an arrogance that she hastily had to abandon some ten minutes later. It was never quite understandable why she was chosen as a transport, and I have heard since that it was a hasty bargain of the Government when an early departure of the force was contemplated. The Medical Board had condemned certain ships as overcrowded, and this ship was taken on as an extra vessel, thereby reducing the speed of the Convoy by at least a knot an hour. The shortsightedness of this policy will be apparent when one calculates that the ships were hired by the day. With the Southern absent, one and a half knots an hour would have been added to the speed of the Convoy. This meant the dropping of 36 knots in a day, which in a voyage of thirty-five days was the same as two days wasted. Now, reckoning coal at 15s. a ton, as a Government price, the cost of that first Convoy a day was at least £6,000. That is to say, probably a great deal more than £12,000 was flung away by keeping the Southern. I cannot help including this incident. Captain Kiddle, of the Minotaur, had been given power by the Navy Office to discard the vessel if she was a nuisance, and it was thought at one time of turning her into a hospital ship at Colombo; in fact, that zealous officer signalled to Captain Gordon Smith, commanding the Convoy, telling him "to distribute the horses and men when you get to Colombo, and then allow her [the Southern] to return to the obscurity from which she should never have emerged." Unfortunately, for some reason this was not done, and she remained there faithfully with us till the end of the voyage—the constant source of our gibes.

Routine on the transports was not a very strenuous affair after the hard days of drill in the training camps and the long marches. To begin with, there was very little marching; only on the Orvieto and ships like the Euripides, where there was a certain length of deck available, did it permit of companies of men being marched round the ship. Many is the time I have sat writing in my cabin listening to the steady tramp of unbooted feet along the decks above, and the bands, stationed amidships, thumping out march after march. Never, however, could I grow accustomed to the distant squeal of the bagpipes, a band of which we were unfortunate enough to have with us. One threw down one's pen and tried to piece together some melody in the panting pipes.

A QUIET AFTERNOON ON A TROOP DECK.

TATTOOING WITH HOME-MADE ELECTRICAL NEEDLE.

To face p. 36.

Each day the men roused out at réveillé, sounded at six o'clock, and did physical jerks (exercises) before breakfast. Then they cleaned ship and prepared for the ten o'clock inspection by the officer in command of the troops, who went round with the Medical Officers and the Captain. The troops by this time would be mustered on deck, gathered in groups, learning all about rifles, machine guns, signalling, listening to lectures by the officers on trenches and the way to take cover, sniping, observation, and even aiming at miniature targets realistically made by enthusiastic leaders. At 11.30 the main work was over for the day. For an hour or two in the afternoon there were more exercises, but as the ships steamed into the tropics this afternoon drill was relaxed. The officers attended classes, and regular schools were formed and an immense amount was done to advance their technical knowledge. Besides all this, there were boat and life-belt drills and occasional night alarms to vary the monotony—but a precaution very necessary indeed. As the Convoy for the greater part of the six weeks' voyage steamed without lights, or only lights very much dimmed, work for the day ceased at dusk. Always there were guards and orderly duties, for the correct running of the ship, which occupied about a hundred men on the largest transport with a definite duty each day.

It was on the voyage that the skin sun-tanning process began, to be carried to perfection in Egypt, and later on the Gallipoli Peninsula. A pair of "slacks" (short pants) and a shirt and white hat was enough for the men to wear on deck. They did not put on boots for three weeks, and their feet became as hard as those of the mariners. One heard them stumping round the deck with muffled tramp. But the physical exercises regularly given, the rifle exercises and the earlier training, and high standard demanded on enlistment, made this first contingent into a force of young athletes.

It was the raiding Emden that rendered the precautions taken on the first Convoy that left Australia so very essential—a matter which subsequent contingents knew nothing of, with the German commerce and warships swept from the seas. The anxiety of Captain Gordon Smith—the naval officer on the Flagship of the Convoy responsible for the safe conduct of each transport, as the Minotaur's captain, and subsequently Captain Silver of the Melbourne, was responsible for the whole fleet—at times turned to exasperation as he watched the lines of transports through his telescope. The dropping out of a ship from the long column through a temporary engine defect, the losing of position, the constant disregard by the New Zealand transport of instructions (they pulled out of the line deliberately to engage in target practice), and other matters, caused caustic, and characteristically naval, signals to go flying up and down the divisions. Once, when boxes and the like were being thrown overboard, providing ample evidence to the enemy, if found, of the track of the Convoy, the signal was made: "This is not a paperchase." At night too, when some ship incautiously showed lights through an open porthole, or a saloon door was left open on deck, after certain warnings, would buzz the message: "You are showing too much light; turn off your dynamos." When it came to the merchant skippers steering by stern lights hung over each vessel just above the propeller, throwing a phosphorescent light on the whitened waters, it was a task at the same time their terror and their despair, especially when orders came to draw closer together, during the nights' steaming in the vicinity of Cocos Islands. The transports were forbidden to use their wireless, and a buzzer was provided, with a "speaking" radius of about 15 miles, for intercommunication throughout the fleet. Relative to the tension at this period, I will make an extract from my notes written on the Orvieto:—

"So we sailed on, drawing nearer and nearer into the middle of the Indian Ocean. Looking at the chart each day, I feel that while we are a large fleet, the largest that has ever crossed this ocean, after all the seas are very broad. There is comfort as well as uneasiness in the thought. It will be as difficult for a foreign ship to find us as for us to run into a foreign ship by some chance. However, the lads are taught to grow accustomed to meet any emergency and to muster on deck with lights out. … It was on the night before we reached Cocos Islands—to be exact, 7th November—shortly after our evening meal, while the troops were lying about the decks loath to turn in on such a hot night, that the lights suddenly went out altogether. I remember wandering out of the saloon, having last seen the glowing end of General Bridges' cigar, and stumbled on companies of troops falling into their lines. I got to my station amidships, and remained there for what seemed hours, but which in reality was fifteen minutes, while I could only hear whispering voices round me, and just make out dim, silhouetted figures and forms. There were muffled commands. It was eerie, this mustering in the dark. I had been in alarms at night in a darkened camp, when I had risen from warm blankets and the hard ground and stumbled over guide-ropes to one's company down the lines, but to feel one's way round a crowded deck was a very different proposition. Over the whole fleet had been cast this shadow, for, in turn, each of the ships disappeared from sight. I hardly like to contemplate what would have happened to the soldier who ventured, thoughtlessly, to light a cigarette at this moment. The Australian is a good talker, and it seems impossible to absolutely stifle conversation. The ship was strangely quiet. However, the alarm was exceedingly well carried out. … Yet little did we dream that this testing was shortly to be put into stern actuality. On the following Saturday night, while we were steaming with very dimmed lights, cabin shutters closed, making the interior of the ship intensely stuffy, all lights went out. Yet that night, with a single light thrown on the piano, we held a concert. But the very next night the evening meal was taken before dusk, and at 7.30 all lights were again extinguished. In not one of the ships was a dynamo generating. The fleet had become almost invisible, like phantom ships on a still sea. One undressed in the dark, and felt one's way from point to point, bumping into people as one went. A few candles stuck in heaps of sand flickered in the smoke-room. It did not take long to get round that the reason for this drastic step was because it was thought that, if any danger threatened—which none of us thought it did, with the escort of warships around us—then to-night was the night. … "

How we passed the Emden on this very evening, quite ignorant of our danger and of that daring cruiser's destruction, needs to be related in a separate chapter.