THE WAR OF ATTRITION
A wonderfully deep-blue sea stretched away to meet a light-blue sky, which was dotted with soft wool-like patches of cloud. There was a slight smooth swell from the south-west, and the air was cool and salt-laden. Looking from the conning-tower the hull of the boat could be clearly seen as she rose and fell to the waves, the sunlight flashing back steel-blue from her grey side six feet below the surface. It was a day that showed the sea at its best – a high Northern latitude in June, and a high barometer producing conditions under which it seemed to be a shame to be at war.
There were two men on the submarine's conning-tower. The smaller of the two was her captain, a fair-haired man with a Prussian name which seemed hardly to fit in with his Norse features. The other man hailed from Bavaria – a tall, thin, large-headed individual, with wide-set eyes and a nose and lower lip that hinted of Semitic ancestry. The big U-boat jogged along at half speed, beating up and down in erratic courses – keeping always to a water area of perhaps ten miles square.
The two officers leaned against a rail, their heads and shoulders twisting and turning continuously as they watched the distant horizon. Each carried heavy Zeiss glasses slung round the neck, and from time to time one of them would search carefully the western sea and sky, his doing so invariably infecting his companion into doing the same. The U-boat was running with a little less than half her normal cruising buoyancy – for speed of diving and not surface speed was the important qualification for her for that day. From the open conning-tower lid came the dull hum of the engines; while as the boat rolled, a shaft of sunlight, shining down the tower itself, sent a circle of yellow light swinging slowly from side to side across the deck beneath the eye-piece of the periscope.
"Is it a big convoy this time, sir?" The First Lieutenant spoke without checking his continual twisting and turning as he glanced at every point of the skyline in turn.
"Yes, it is a big convoy. But there is no doubt of their course or their speed. We shall be among them before the sunset."
"You would not then dive now? That is, if you are sure – "
"I do not dive till I am sure. And also we will want all the battery power we have before the dark. Did I not say it was a big convoy?"
"You think there will be a big escort?"
"We will see. I know it will be an escort I do not like to take a chance with."
The Lieutenant fidgeted awhile, his glasses at his eyes. His Captain looked at his profile and at the glint of perspiration on the slightly shaking hands, and yawned. His face, as he swung round again to scan the horizon astern, looked bored and perhaps a little lonely. A submarine is a small ship in which to coop up incompatible natures, and the terrible losses of personnel in the Imperial submarine service had sadly reduced the standard of officers. He felt sometimes as if he were an anachronism, an officer of nineteen-fourteen who had miraculously lasted four years. He felt that it had been only the fact that a misdemeanour had caused him to be driven forth to the big ships for two years that had saved him from sharing the unknown fate of his contemporaries. Well, he reflected, it was only a matter of time before he would join them. The law of averages was stronger than his luck, wonderful though the latter had been. He extracted a cigar from his case and reached out a hand to take his subordinate's proffered matchbox. As he did so he glanced again at his companion's face, and a sudden feeling of understanding, and perhaps a touch of compassion, made him ask —
"Well, Müller? You have something that worries you. What is it, then?"
The First Lieutenant turned and took a careful glance round the circle of empty ocean. Then his speech came with a rush —
"I want to know what you think, sir. You don't seem to worry about it. I know you can do nothing more – that one can only do one's work as best one can and all that – but I still feel restless. How is it going to end? We are winning? Yes – oh yes, we are winning, but we have done that four years, and how far have we got? Before I came into submarines I believed all they told us, but now I know that we are not strangling England at sea, and that we never can now. What are we going to do next? Is it to go on and on until we have no boats left? Gott! I want to do something that will frighten them – something that will make them understand what we are – something that will make them scream for pity." He paused, gulped, and stared again out to the westward. The Captain straightened himself up against the rail and stretched his arms out in another prodigious yawn.
"My good Müller," he said, "you cannot carry the cares of Germany on your back. Leave that to the Chancellor. One can be sufficiently patriotic by doing one's work and not asking questions that others cannot answer. As to the submarine war – well, blame the men who would not let the Emperor have his way, that hindered him when he would have built an equal fleet to the English. I do not mean the Socialists – I mean others as well. I mean men who grudged money for the Navy because they wanted it for the Army. Curse the Army! If we had had a big fleet we would have won the war in a year, but now – ach! Look now, Müller – you have read Lichnowsky's Memoirs? Yes, I know you are not allowed to, but I know you have. Now I say that what he says at the end is true, – that the Anglo-Saxon race is going to rule the West and the sea, that we shall only rule Middle Europe, and we were fools to play for Middle Europe when we might have had the sea. We would now give all the Russias and Rumania and all our gains just for Gibraltar and Bermuda, for if we had those stations all the rest would come to us. We fight now for our honour, but if it were not for that – and that is everything – we would give our enemies good terms."
"But if that is true – if we can gain no more – we have lost the war!"
The Captain shrugged. "We will have won what we do not want, and lost all that we do; but we shall have won, I suppose. It depends on our diplomatists. If we can get but a few coaling-stations we shall have won, for it would all come to us when we were ready again. But you will not gain a victory by a great stroke as you say you wish, Müller. The war is too big now for single strokes, and the English will not scream for mercy now because of frightfulness. They are angry, and they hate us now."
"But you yourself have sunk a liner, and you showed them as she sank that the orders of Germany must be obeyed."
The Captain's face did not alter at all. "I did do so, and I would do so again. My honour is clear, because I obeyed my orders. Would you have dared to question?"
"No – by God! and I would do it gladly." The Lieutenant's face worked, and he scowled as he glanced astern. "I would wish that every ship of every convoy carried women."
The Captain laughed almost genially. "It is easy to see you are not a Prussian," he said. "It does not matter whether you like or dislike a thing. All that counts is whether or not it is to the advantage of the State. So the Roman World-Empire was made. Myself, I doubt if killing women pays us; there is this talk now of the boycott of Germany after the war. They add time to the boycott for every time we fire on ships that are helpless, and the boycott is to be by sailors. I would laugh at such a threat if it was from any others, but sailors are not to be laughed at. They are likely to mean what they say. It is as I said: if we had fought to the West and to the sea, no man would have dared to threaten us with a sea-boycott now."
"But even with our small Navy we have held the English checked. It is not our Navy that is lacking. What is it, then?"
"It is the Navy. It should have been as big as the English Fleet. And the men – Gott! Müller. I tell you, if we had done the Zeebrugge attack ourselves, and I had been there, I would feel that my honour and the Navy's honour was safe, that we could stop and make peace. I would be proud to die on such a service, and I envy the Englishmen we buried when it was over."
"But this is – Herr Capitan, you talk as if you were an Englander – "
The Captain whirled on him, his eyes sparkling dangerously. "Dummkopf!" he said. "Report me if you like. I hate the English and I love my Fatherland, but report me if you like. Ach! You may report me in Hell, too; for I know – I know – "
He stopped suddenly and tilted back his head to listen. The First Lieutenant shrank back from him, his mouth open and his hands feeling for the periscope support. A faint murmur of sound came down wind from the fleecy cloud-banks to the west. The Captain jumped to the opening of the conning-tower and stood, impatient and anxious by the lip, until his lieutenant had slipped and scrambled half-way down the ladder.
Then he jumped down himself, pulling the lid to after him. Simultaneously there came a rush and roar of air from venting tanks, the stem of the boat rose very slightly as her bow-gun went under, and in twenty seconds the submarine was gone, and the bubbles and foam of her passage were fading into the level blue of the empty sea. A minute later she showed a foot of periscope a cable's length away, and a small airship topped the western horizon and came slowly along towards her. The periscope vanished again, and forty feet below the surface the captain watched a gauge needle beside the periscope creep round its dial inch by inch till it quivered and steadied at the forty-metre mark.
"Diving hands only. Fall out the rest. Remain near your stations. Lower the periscope." The First Lieutenant barked out a repetition of each order as the Captain spoke. There was a shuffling of feet, some guttural conversation that spoke of a flicker of curiosity among the men of the crew, and then all was quiet but for the hum of motors and the occasional rattle of gearing as the hydroplane wheels were moved. The Captain moved forward to the wardroom, removing his scarf and heavy pilot-cloth coat as he walked. "Order some food, Müller," he said. "I'm hungry – that airship was farther ahead of them than usual." He threw himself down in a long folding-chair and stretched out his sea-booted legs. "I won't come up to look now until I hear them. Relieve the listeners every half-hour, Müller. I want to have good warning. We should hear a big convoy like this at twenty miles to-day." The curtain rings clashed and a seaman spoke excitedly as he entered. The Captain nodded and reached out to the table for his coffee-cup. "Just the bearing we expected," he said, "but if they sound as faint as he says there's time to get something to eat first."
It was a big new standard ship which drew the unlucky card in the game of "browning shots." The torpedo hit her well forward, its tell-tale track being unperceived in the slight running swell until too late. A big bubble of water rose abreast the break of the forecastle till it reached deck-level, then it broke and flung a column of spray, black smoke, and fragments skyward. As the ship cleared the smoke-haze, she was obviously down by the head and steering wildly. Two auxiliary patrol vessels closed on her at full speed, and the nearest freighter increased speed and cut in ahead of her in readiness either to tow or screen. The torpedoed ship, after yawing vaguely for a few minutes, steadied back to the convoy's course, slowing her engines till she only just retained steerage way. There was a rapid exchange of signals between her and the escort vessels, and then an R.N. Commander on an adjacent bridge gave a sigh of relief. "Good man that," he said. "We'll have him in dry dock to-morrow. It hasn't flurried him a bit, and I like his nerve."
The explosion had caused more than the salvage vessels to leap into activity. The white track of the torpedo showed clearly after it had gone home, and the first to take action was a tramp, across whose bows the track passed. The tramp was a ship of the early 'nineties, and her full speed was at the most nine knots, but her skipper at once jammed her helm hard over to steer along the torpedo-wake with a somewhat optimistic hope of ramming. Two destroyers and an armed auxiliary did the same thing, with the result that the tramp skipper found himself suddenly in the cross-wash of the warships as they passed him at a few yards' distance at twenty knots. Somebody on the bridge of one of them screamed a profane warning at him through a megaphone, and the skipper, after a hurried glance at the quivering destroyers' sterns, jumped to the telegraph and stopped his engines. A couple of seconds later his ship shook to a great detonation, and a mighty column of water rose and broke close ahead of him. He starboarded his helm and swung round after the rest of the convoy, his ship shaking to successive explosions as more escorting vessels arrived at the spot where he had turned.
As his torpedoes left the tubes the U-boat captain barked out an order. The attack had been fairly simple, but his hardest problem was only beginning. The boat's bow dipped sharply in answer to the tilted hydroplanes, and she began her long slide down to the two-hundred-foot mark. She had got to fifty before a sound like a great hammer striking the hull told them of a successful torpedo-run. The Captain looked up from his watch and smiled. A moment later he was watching the gauges with a grave and impassive face. He knew that the fact of his torpedo hitting would mean greater difficulty for him in the next few hours than he would have known had he missed altogether. At a hundred feet the first depth-charge exploded, smashing gauge-glasses, electric lamps, and throwing a couple of men off their feet. The boat rocked and rolled under the shock, while orders were roared through voice-pipes for more emergency lights to be switched on. More charges exploded as the boat slid downwards, but each charge was farther away than the last. The half-light of the hand-lamps round the periscope showed the source of a sound of pouring waters – two rivets had been blown right out of the inner hull close before the conning-tower. The Captain shouted orders, and the submarine levelled off her angle and checked at the fifty-metre line, while two men began frantically to break away the woodwork which stretched overhead and prevented the rivet-holes being plugged. At that depth the water poured in through the holes in solid bars, hitting the deck, bouncing back and spreading everywhere in a heavy spray which drenched circuits and wires.
"Müller! where the devil are you? Start the pumps – I can't help it if they hear us. Start the pumps, fool!"
"But you will come up? You will – "
"Schweinhund! Gehorsamkeit! Go!"
The pumps began to stamp and clatter as they drove the entering water out again, but above the noise of the pumps the Captain could hear the roaring note of propellers rushing far overhead. If it had not been for those infernal rivets, he thought, he would have been at three hundred feet by now, but he could not risk the extra wetting which a pressure of a hundred and thirty pounds to the inch on the entering water would give to his circuits. The weight of extra water in the bilges was nothing – he could deal with that – though the thought of the six hundred odd fathoms of water between him and the bottom was a thing to remember anxiously in case of his getting negative buoyancy; but if this continual spray of salt water reached his motor circuits it would be fatal. He cursed the men who were vainly trying to block the rivet-holes with wood wedges, and jumping on the periscope table he tried to guide the end of a short plank – intended as a baffle-plate – across the stream. As he stood working, a terrific concussion shook the U-boat from stem to stern. The bows rose till men began to slip aft down the wet deck, and from aft came a succession of cries and shouted orders, "Close all doors! the after-hatch is falling in – Come up and surrender – Lass uns heraus!" The Captain rose from the deck beneath the eye-piece, shaky from his fall from the table. He hardly dared look at the gauge, but he kept his head and his wits as he gave his orders. With the motors roaring round at their utmost power and an angle up by the bow of some fifteen degrees, the U-boat held her own, and as tank after tank was blown empty, she slowly gained on the depth gauge and began to climb. As she rose, she was shaken again and again by the powerful depth-charges that were being dropped on the broken water left by the air-bubble from her after compartment – a surface-mark now a quarter of a mile astern.
Beneath the conning-tower more and more men were gathering, some calm, some white, trembling, and voluble. The boat broke surface with her stem and half her conning-tower showing, then levelled a little and tore along with the waves foaming round her conning-tower and bridge. From inside they could clearly hear the shells that greeted her, and in a moment there was a rush of men up the ladder. Among the first few the Captain saw his First Lieutenant's legs vanish upwards, and at the sight a sneering smile showed on his sunburnt face. The first man to open the lid died as he did so, for a four-inch shell removed the top of the conning-tower before he was clear of it. The escort was taking no chances as to whether the boat's appearance on the surface was intentional or accidental, and they were making the water for a hundred yards around her fairly boil with bursting shell. As the boat tore ahead, holding herself up on her angle and her speed, a few men struggled out of her one by one past the torn body of the first man to get out. Two of them leaped instantly overboard, but the next clawed his way up to a rail, and while others scrambled and fought their way overside, and shells crashed and burst below and around him on water and conning-tower casing, he stood upright a moment with arms raised high above his head. At the signal the firing ceased as if a switch had been turned by a single hand, and he subsided in a huddled heap on the bridge as the riddled submarine ran under. Down below the Captain still smiled, leaning with his elbows on the periscope training-handles and watching the hurrying men at the ladder's foot, until the great rush of water and men, that showed that the end had come, swept him aft and away across the border-line of sleep.
THROUGH AN ADMIRALTY WINDOW
The room was exactly the same as any room in any Government building, except that the Naval observer would have at once noticed one fact – that the furniture was of the unchanging Admiralty pattern. The roll-top desk, the chairs, and even the lamp-shades, would have been to him familiar friends. They were certainly familiar to the Post-Captain who sat at the desk. Captain Henry Ranson had been a noted Commander before his retirement – a man of whom many tales, both true and apocryphal, still circulated when Senior Officers of the Fleet forgathered at the lunch intervals of Courts-Martial and Inquiries. He had little opportunity in his present War appointment to display any of the characteristics on which his Sagas had been based, for neither seamanship, daring, or, well – Independent Initiative, were quite in keeping with the routine of an Admiralty Office.
To-day he was feeling the claustrophobia of London more acutely than usual. The sun was shining through the big window across the room, and he wanted to rise and look out at the blue sky and white cloud-tufts that he knew to be showing over the buildings across the Horse Guards Parade. His desk gave him no view through the window – he knew the weakness of his powers of concentration on his eternal paper work too well to have allowed himself such a distraction; but as the door opened to admit his clerk – a firm and earnest civilian with the zeal of monastic officialdom shining through his spectacles – he rose abruptly and moved out into the sunlight glare.
"Yes, Collins? What is it?"
"A small matter, sir, which is not quite in order. If you will glance through this you will no doubt agree with me."
The Captain took the sheets from the clerk's outstretched hand and moved a little away from the glaring light to read.
Sir, – I have the honour to bring to your notice the conduct of Skipper A. P. Marsh, of the Admiralty tug Annie Laurie, on the 22nd-23rd November 1917, and I beg to recommend him for decoration in view of the following facts: —
On November 21st, 1917, the steamer Makalaka, homeward bound with corn, was shelled by a U-boat when near the Irish coast. The enemy was dealt with by a patrol in the vicinity, but the Makalaka, proceeding east at full speed in accordance with instructions, was thrown out of her reckoning by a damaged compass, and found herself at dusk on a lee shore off the Galway coast, with her shaft broken (a result of shell damage which had not been realised to be serious at the time it was incurred). Skipper Marsh, seeing her flares from his patrol to seaward, most gallantly closed her and took her in tow in a rising N.W. gale. In view of the probability of the attempt to tow failing, the crew of the Makalaka were taken aboard the tug, but the towing was continued through a full gale lasting twenty-four hours until the ship was out of danger. – I have the honour to be, sir, &c.
The Post-Captain folded the letter carefully and placed it on his desk. The clerk retrieved it, and moved towards the door. The Captain turned, "What are you going to do with that, Collins?"
"I take it that it needs only the usual reply, sir – that this is not approved – with a reference to the regulation bearing on the case."
"Why not approved, Collins?"
The clerk was shocked, and his tone showed it. "Because that decoration is for gallant action in face of the enemy, and this case does not come within its scope. In any case the man will get salvage." [The Captain made an impatient gesture.] "If the Royal Humane Society care to – " he stopped, because the Captain had walked to the window, and, in obvious inattention to the speaker, was staring out across the wide Horse Guards and far beyond the fleecy clouds that drifted across the sky over the great sea of buildings that hemmed him in.
Captain Ranson had gone on a journey – back through forty years of time, and across eighty-one degrees of longitude.
He ran up the gangway, straightened his helmet and dirk-belt, and approached the Commander, who, a tall dark-featured figure, was standing looking down on the boat as she rose and fell alongside to the gentle heave of the Indian Ocean – "Second cutter manned, sir."
The Commander turned and looked the boy over beneath his heavy eyebrows. "When are you going to set up a new port shroud?" he asked.
The Midshipman fingered the seam of his trousers, and looked carefully at the buttons on the Commander's tunic – "I thought, sir, that is, we've got a new shroud all fitted, but I thought – the coxswain said, sir – that the old one would do for to-day as the wind's nothing…"
The barometric indications of the Commander's eyes showed threatening weather. He took the boy's arm in the grasp of a heavy hand and led him to the rail abreast the swinging mastheads of the boat.
"Now listen, young gentleman," he said. "What the coxswain said isn't evidence. It's you that command that boat, and you that will handle and command her. Don't talk to me again as if you were a schoolboy." The Midshipman shivered and squinted cautiously up to see if the storm-signals were still in evidence. The dark stern eyes were looking down at him in a way that made him feel as if he was some luckless worm that had unhappily bored its way up into the publicity of an aviary. The Commander moved his hand and turned the boy to face him. "Now, you remember this, young gentleman, only seamen come through gales safely – it's the fools that go to sea with rusty shrouds and weak rigging. And if you're to be a seaman you must never go to sea, even in a flat calm, unless your ship is ready for a gale of wind. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then don't forget it, or I'll have you beaten till you grow corns. Now shove off, and pull away three cables on the port bow, drop your anchor on the shoal, and fit that new shroud. Remain there till the ship has got under way, done her night-firing, and signalled you to carry on. You will then close and weigh the target moorings, having the target ready for hoisting when the ship comes back to you. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"What have you got on your anchor?"
"A hundred and twenty fathom, sir – of four-inch." "That is enough – there is thirty fathom on the shoal – Carry on!"
The Midshipman ran down the gangway, and, jumping into the cutter, "Carried on." The Commander was an officer of whom the boat-midshipmen stood in awe, and they were always thankful when the ordeal of reporting a possibly unready boat to him as "ready" was over.
The last shot kicked up a yellow fountain of spray in the glare of the searchlight, and ricochetted, humming, over the target and on towards Malaya. A rocket sailed up from the distant ship – the searchlight flickered out a couple of Morse signs and went out, and in the velvety darkness of a tropic night the hands went forward in the cutter to weigh the anchor, the process of "shortening-in" having been accomplished a full hour ago. As the Midshipman stood up to superintend the operation, he saw a queer white line spreading and brightening along the horizon to the westward. A dash of rain struck his face, and a little gust of wind moaned past him. The crew looked up from their work to wonder, and in a matter of seconds the squall was on them. The wet hawser slipped and raced out, the hands jumping aft to get clear of the leaping turns as the cutter swung and drew hard on her anchor to the pressure of a tremendous wind. The white line rushed down on them, and showed as a turmoil of frothing sea, beaten flat by the wind into a sheet of phosphorescence veiled by low-flying spray. For a few minutes they crouched and endured the sudden cold and wet, then a yaw of the boat sent the bowmen forward with suspicion in their minds. "Up and down, sir – anchor's aweigh," came the report, in a voice that started as a roar, but reached the Midshipman aft as a faint high wail. The Midshipman faced round to leeward, and thought hard. He had been anchored on the only possible shoal, and once driven off that there was no holding-ground till he should reach the edge of the surf off Trincomalee, twenty miles away – all between being chartered as "Five hundred and no bottom." He called to the coxswain and clawed his way forward, picking up men by name as he passed them. They hove up their anchor, secured mainsail, awning, and mainmast in a dreadful tangle of rope and canvas to the anchor-ring – hitched an outlying corner of the tangle to a bight far up the hawser, and threw all over the bows. The cutter steadied head to wind, and the hands moved aft to raise the bow and protect themselves against the steady driving of the spray.
The Midshipman lay across the backboard, staring out to the port-quarter. Through the white haze he could see, at regular intervals, a quick-flashing gleam of yellow light. He knew what it was, and it did not comfort him. It was all he could see of the twenty-thousand candlepower of Foul Point Light, and although it was not getting much clearer it was certainly "drawing" from aft forward. He had the rough lie of the coast in his head, and he was just realising two things – first, that in spite of the sea anchor he was being blown to leeward and ashore at an incredible rate; and second, that if he could not round Foul Point across the wind, he was going to be food for the big surf-sharks before the morning.
He roused the crew again, and set them to the oars. Before half the oars were out he had realised the futility of the effort, and was trying to get them back without further damage. He corrected his error with the loss of four oars and several feet of the cutter's gunwale – broken off when the wind tore the long ash oars away. As he remembered later, it was at this point that Foul Point Light began to show clearly through the spray, and that his coxswain began to sing an interminable hymn in the stern-sheets, and that the dark-faced Celtic stroke-oar, a man who had the reputation of being the worst character in all the ship, took over the helpless coxswain's duty. The Midshipman was staring fascinated at the swinging beam of light that was beating on them from the sand-spit broad on the quarter, when the stroke-oar's voice in his ear changed him from a boy to an officer – "What'll you do now, sir?"
The question was answered on the instant – "All hands, up masts and sails. Close-reef both, and pass the hawser aft. Lash out now, lads, and get down to it."
That twenty-minute evolution, by the light of a hurricane-lamp, was a nightmare. The mainsail and mainmast were all snarled up in miscellaneous turns of roping. The hawser was wet and cold, and seemed fifty times its original length, but the work was done. He had felt that no shroud, however new, would stand the strain he was going to put on the masts, and though the men cursed and swore at the delay and toil involved, he got what he wanted from them. One at a time the masts were hove up and clamped in position against the half-solid wind – the hawser, cut to length, clove-hitched round each masthead, and frapped clear round the cutter, with the whole hove taut with "Spanish Windlasses," till his clumsy hemp shrouds were braced to the strain. Then he braced himself by a glance at the light, swinging well over their heads now that they were close enough in to feel the first lift and heave of the outer surf, and yelled an order. The foresail rose, clattered furiously a moment against the mast, and then filled with a bang. "Set mainsail!" The cutter heeled over till her lee gunwale dipped – the masts bent and creaked, and the old boat went tearing into the wind on the best and last sail of her varied life. The Midshipman and the stroke-oar clung to the long tiller that was curved like a fishing-rod under the strain. There were no gusts or variations in the wind: it beat solidly against the canvas, heeling the cutter to the verge of capsizing, and driving her through the water at steamer speed. The leeway was extraordinarily great – the boat going sideways almost as fast as she went ahead; but that leeway saved her from going over. They cut through the outer surf off the point, the boat leaking from the sprung keel to the opened seams where the frapping hawser-turns bit into her thin sides – the crew baling furiously to keep their minds from the expectation of a great crash that would tell of a mast tearing its heel up and out through the weather side. It lasted for barely half an hour, but the arm-weary Midshipman felt as if it had been a four-hour watch. As the light drew aft, he eased his sheets and swung up the channel, still at racing speed, but safely bound for harbour. His memories in after years of the next few hours were vague and clouded by sleep. He remembered the sun rising as they drew in towards the silent white-walled dockyard; the swish of sand under the keel as he ran her hard up the boat-camber beach, and nothing more, till he woke to see the dreaded Commander – a tall white-clad figure – standing over him, looking with keen appraising eyes at the mass of hawser-turns that swathed boat and masts, and at the bodies of the snoring crew that lay on the hot sand around her.