Pincher Martin, O.D.: A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy

III

It was immediately after the destroyer action between the lines that the Mariner first sighted another body of ships looming up to the southward. The new-comers, about sixteen large ships accompanied by many smaller vessels, came on at full speed towards the scene of action, and at first the men in the destroyers imagined them to be the battleships of the British Grand Fleet. Their spirits rose accordingly, for with the arrival of these powerful units the enemy's battle-cruisers, cut off from their base, could not escape annihilation. But a few minutes later, when the great ships had come nearer, their unfamiliar shape and unusual light-gray colouring proclaimed them for what they really were – the battleship squadrons of the German High Sea Fleet.

Some of the destroyers which were favourably placed at once dashed in to attack with torpedoes, retiring as soon as they had fired, and before very long most of them had rejoined the heavier vessels.³⁸ Their next chance of doing something was to come after nightfall.

From about six-fifteen onwards it is very difficult to give a comprehensive account of what occurred, for with the arrival on the scene of the British Grand Fleet, the German main squadrons turned and retired to the southward. Sir John Jellicoe chased at full speed; and, as he says in his despatch, 'the enemy's tactics were of a nature generally to avoid further action,' while he refers to his own ships as the 'following' or 'chasing' fleet. Moreover, in the engagements which ensued, the enemy were favoured by the weather, for banks of heavy mist and smoke-clouds from the hostile destroyers reduced the visibility to six miles or less, and periodically screened the opponents from each other's view.

The fighting between the opposing battleships, which began at six-seventeen P.M., seems to have resolved itself into a series of ship to ship and squadron to squadron encounters rather than a formal fleet action; but, while our vessels remained in their organised divisions throughout, the enemy, soon after the fight began, seem to have become more or less scattered, and to have had a trail of injured ships struggling along in rear of their main body.

A hostile vessel would suddenly loom up out of the haze a bare eight or ten thousand yards distant, to be greeted with salvo after salvo of shell as the British battleships drove by. She would reply to the best of her ability; but, whereas our vessels had just come into action, and their shooting was very accurate, the German firing was not good, and had little or no result. Ship after ship of the enemy appeared through the murk to be fired at heavily for three, four, or five minutes, then to disappear in the haze, badly hammered and perhaps on fire.

To give some idea of what took place during this period it is advisable to quote largely from the official despatches of Sir John Jellicoe and Sir David Beatty. There was the battleship Marlborough, which, with the First Battle-Squadron, came into action with the retiring enemy at six-seventeen P.M. at a range of eleven thousand yards. She first fired seven rapid salvos at a German vessel of the Kaiser class, then engaged a cruiser, and again a battleship, doing them all serious injury. At six-fifty-four she was struck by a torpedo, the only one which took effect out of the many fired by the hostile destroyers; but, though damaged and with a considerable list to starboard, she remained in the line, and opened fire again at a cruiser at seven-three P.M. Nine minutes later she started to fire fourteen rapid salvos at another battleship, hitting her badly and forcing her out of the line. Her firing throughout was most effective and accurate, and this in spite of the injury caused by the underwater explosion of the torpedo.

The First Battle-Squadron closed the range to nine thousand yards, and wrought great havoc with its fire, but only one of its vessels, the Colossus, was struck, despite the hail of shell from the enemy.

The Second Battle-Squadron was in action with other German battleships between six-thirty and seven-twenty P.M., and also with a battle-cruiser which had dropped astern seriously injured; while the Fourth Battle-Squadron, with which was Sir John Jellicoe's flagship the Iron Duke, engaged two battleships, as well as battle-cruisers, cruisers, and light cruisers. The vessels of the Fourth Light-Cruiser Squadron remained ahead of the British battleships until seven-twenty P.M., when they moved out to counter the attack of hostile destroyers, and successfully drove them off. They did it again an hour later, in company with the Eleventh Destroyer Flotilla, and came under a heavy fire from the enemy's battleships at ranges of between six thousand five hundred and eight thousand yards. It was then that the Calliope, flying the broad pendant of Commodore Le Mesurier, was hit several times, and suffered casualties, but luckily escaped serious injury. In the course of these attacks torpedoes were fired at the foe, while four hostile destroyers were sunk by the British fire.

At seven-fourteen Sir David Beatty, who, with his battle-cruisers, was apparently separated from Sir John Jellicoe, sighted two battle-cruisers and two battleships in the mist. He promptly engaged them, and, setting one on fire, so damaged another that she was forced to haul out of the line. The enemy's destroyers thereupon emitted dense volumes of gray smoke, under cover of which the enemy turned away and disappeared.

But they were very soon relocated by the British light cruisers acting as scouts, and between eight-twenty and eight-thirty-eight P.M. Sir David was once more in action at ten thousand yards. During this period the Lion forced one of the enemy, badly on fire and with a heavy list to port, out of the line; the Princess Royal set fire to a three-funnelled battleship; and the New Zealand and the Indomitable caused another vessel to leave the line heeling over and blazing furiously. The enemy then disappeared in the mist and were no more seen.

These various semi-isolated actions, and particularly the performance of the Marlborough, which fired at no fewer than five different ships between six-seventeen and seven-twelve, show only too well how the mist aided the foe; but in spite of it, the enemy was badly beaten, and suffered far greater casualties than the British.

At nine P.M. darkness was rapidly approaching, and at about this time the British heavy forces retired temporarily from the immediate neighbourhood to avoid hostile destroyer attacks, remaining, however, in positions between the enemy and his base from which the battle could be renewed at daylight. At the same time the light cruisers and destroyers were ordered in to do what damage they could.

To those in certain of the destroyers which were present during the latter part of the afternoon and evening, and happened to be unengaged, the sensation was a most uncanny one. Their area of vision was bounded by a narrow circle of four or five miles radius, but all round them until nightfall the air resounded and shook with the distant rumble and the nearer thudding of heavy guns as the great ships engaged each other. The uproar never ceased. Fighting seemed to be furious and continuous; but though the vessels of the Mariner's flotilla were steaming to the southward with their guns ready and torpedo-tubes manned, it was not until after darkness had fallen that they were vouchsafed another chance of using them. But they saw many signs of the battle. At one moment they would catch a glimpse of a huge British battleship vomiting flame and smoke as she engaged some invisible opponent. She would fade away in the mist, to be followed presently by a fleeting vision of two light cruisers, one British and the other German, their sides a quivering spangle of gun-flashes as they mutually hammered each other. They also would disappear, swallowed up in the haze; and a British destroyer, steaming at full speed, would dash across the horizon on some errand of destruction, with smoke pouring from her funnels and an immense white wave piled up in her wake.

They passed the bows of a sunken enemy light cruiser standing up out of the sea like some gigantic spearhead; and once, just before dark, they sighted what remained of a sorely wounded German cruiser. She was sinking fast. Her guns were silent, and she lay over to an alarming angle, with a blaze of orange and cherry-coloured flame leaping and playing about her from end to end. The whole interior of the ship must have been a raging furnace; and a mushroom-shaped pall of dark smoke, its under-side stained a vivid carmine by the flames, hung over her like a canopy, and added its contribution to the thickness of the atmosphere. The sea was strewn with wreckage, masses of débris, and floating corpses wearing life-belts.

And so the night came.

IV

'And I will prepare destroyers against thee, every one with his weapons.' —Jeremiah xxii. 7.

The fighting and the destroyer attacks of the night are even more difficult to follow than the actions which took place during the afternoon and evening. The British heavy squadrons had withdrawn at dark to avoid the expected torpedo attacks of the hostile flotillas, and the retreating enemy, meanwhile, damaged and undamaged ships, some singly, others in pairs or in groups of four or five, still steamed hard for their own waters. It was upon these scattered units and divisions that the British destroyer attacks presently took place.

The Mariner and her next ahead had somehow become separated from the others after dark, and to Pincher this desperate rush after the enemy was an awesome business. Owing to the mist and the haze the night was unusually dark; but though with the retirement of the larger ships the incessant booming and thudding of the heavy guns ceased, frequent outbursts of fire from lighter weapons, sharp, blinding flashes of flame, the redder glare of exploding shell, the white gleam of searchlights, and the occasional thud of a distant, heavy explosion showed where torpedo attacks were being delivered. The night was an inferno.

It was very difficult to tell which were the attackers and which the attacked, and it was this very uncertainty, and the not knowing what was happening, which were so trying to the nerves. All they were aware of was that the German fleet, with many of its ships badly battered, was somewhere ahead of them. They all realised that a torpedo attack after dark was a desperate game at the best of times; but they had witnessed a succession of such awful scenes during the fighting of the afternoon and evening that their feelings of personal danger and the dread of being killed seemed to have gone. They felt themselves keyed up to the highest pitch of excitement, excitement so intense and so utterly abnormal that they had neither the time nor the inclination to think of themselves and their own danger. The German fleet was somewhere in the darkness ahead of them, and it was their duty to sink and destroy what they could. Nothing else seemed to matter.

Their chance was not very long in coming. The two destroyers were steering on a south-south-westerly course at twenty-five knots, and shortly after ten o'clock a band of lighter colour began slowly to encroach on the dark sky on the eastern horizon. Ten minutes later the dense blackness from about south-east to north-east had given way to the usual indigo blue of the night; and there, some distance abaft the port beam, and dimly silhouetted against the sky, were the blurred shapes of two vessels. They were fully two miles distant, perhaps more, and seemed to be steaming slowly on much the same course as the Mariner and her consort. What class of vessel they were it was quite impossible to determine. But, from their position and course, they were certainly not British; while, from the background of intensely dark cloud to the south-westward, it seemed unlikely that they had seen the destroyers.

The Mariner's next ahead must have seen the ships at much the same time, for she suddenly increased speed and turned slightly to port until she was steaming across the strangers' bows. The Mariner conformed to her movements.

Wooten, gazing through his glasses, felt himself quivering with excitement. Had his chance come, the chance for which they had all hoped and prayed? He gave some order over his shoulder to a man at a voice-pipe, who passed it to the torpedo-tubes. 'Lord!' he ejaculated to the first lieutenant, still busy with his binoculars, 'they look to me like two lame ducks, No. 1; but they're big ships, whatever they are.'

'I sincerely hope they are, sir,' MacDonald replied calmly. 'It's time we had a look in at something. Shall I go down to the tubes?'

'Yes, do. And fire when your sights come on if you get no further orders. For God's sake, don't miss!'

The two great vessels were drawing rapidly nearer, and became more and more distinct. The leading destroyer was still altering her course gradually to port, until at last she remained steady on the opposite and parallel course to the enemy. The Mariner travelled in her wake, and the track they were following seemed as if it would take them past the ships, now nearly a mile and a half distant, at a range of about six hundred yards.

It was at this moment that the enemy first seemed to realise what was happening, for a gun suddenly boomed out from the leading vessel and a shell went screeching by overhead. Where it fell nobody saw. Almost instantaneously a searchlight flickered out, and after sweeping slowly across the water, fell full on the Mariner's leader and remained steady. Another beam shone out, another, and yet a fourth, until both destroyers were illuminated in a dazzling glare which for the moment blinded everybody on board. Then the guns started in in earnest.

The destroyers were steaming at about thirty knots, and the enemy at ten or twelve. In other words, attackers and attacked were nearing each other at the combined rate of about forty knots, or one and a half miles in two minutes fifteen seconds. It was the longest and most trying two and a quarter minutes that Wooten or any of his crew had ever experienced, for, though the speed of the approach tended to make accurate shooting difficult, the difficulty was largely mitigated by the point-blank range.

The dark hulls of the enemy were hidden in the blinding glare of their searchlights and the incessant sparkle and spurting of bright golden flame as their guns were fired as fast as they could be loaded. Filmy streamers of smoke from the discharges wreathed and eddied fantastically through the blue-white rays of the lights. The air suddenly began to reverberate with a succession of ear-splitting crashes, the screeching whistle of shell passing overhead, and the dull plop of others as they pitched in the water to raise their shimmering, ghostly spray fountains. There came the roaring thud of the explosions, and the same old familiar humming and buzzing as fragments drove through the air. But above the din and turmoil of the firing there was another and quite new noise: a short, sharp, metallic-sounding explosion in the air, followed by a hissing and soughing like the wind among trees – the enemy were using shrapnel.

There came a crash, and a sheet of brilliant greenish flame from aft. The ship seemed to wince, but still drove on. Another shell, bursting on the water a few feet short, sent its jagged splinters flying over the bridge and across the upper deck. Something whizzed within a few inches of Wooten's head, and there was an infernal clanging and clattering as slivers of steel drove through and against the ship's side and funnels. It was followed by the thud of a falling body, as one of the signalmen, standing just behind the coxswain at the wheel, slithered to the deck.

'Gawd!' he muttered, with an air of intense astonishment, sitting up and nursing his side; 'they've 'it me! Gawd blimy, blokes, they've 'it me?' But nobody had time to pay attention to him.

Another jar, the roar of a detonation, a burst of flame from the forecastle, and a whining and whirring of splinters! Another, close beside the foremost funnel, and a sound of splintering and crashing as some object fell and went overboard! Something red-hot and sharp grazed Wooten's cheek. He put up his hand to brush it aside, and his fingers came down sticky and wet.

A hideous metallic explosion in the air and a fiendish rattling of bullets upon steel, as a shrapnel burst and sent its contents flying on board. Willis, the coxswain, hit through the left shoulder, released his hold on the wheel and fell to his knees; but in an instant he was up again, steering the ship with his uninjured right hand.

Wooten suddenly felt a burning sensation in his left arm as if a red-hot knitting-needle had been passed through the flesh. The shock of it sent him staggering backwards, and he gritted his teeth with the pain. His left arm seemed numbed and useless, and a little trickle of blood ran down inside his coat-sleeve and pattered to the deck. The air was full of the sickening stench of explosives.

They were very close now. The enemy seemed to be nearly on top of them, and their huge blurred shapes, almost invisible in the glare of the searchlights and the vivid gun-flashes, seemed literally to obscure the horizon. But the destroyers still drove on. They had not been stopped.

The lights of the nearer ship suddenly went out, and a column of water and smoke shot into the air at her side. It hung there for a moment, glistening in the ruby and orange flashes of the guns, and then there came the thundering reverberation of a heavy underwater explosion quite close at hand. It seemed to compress the air, and caused the destroyers to stagger in their stride. A torpedo from the leading destroyer had gone home.

Wooten instinctively looked aft, and as he did so a little puff of dull flame flickered out amidships. It was followed by a loud, snorting hiss and a heavy splash as a torpedo left its tube. Another came almost instantaneously with the first.

The enemy's fire, though still furious, became very wild; and two minutes later, with the sound of a couple more thudding explosions ringing in their ears, the destroyers were out of danger. The roaring of the guns gradually died away, and then ceased altogether.

'Good God!' muttered Wooten, trembling in his excitement.

Daylight found the Mariner and her leader some distance across the North Sea, steaming slowly homewards. They were battered and leaking, while the Mariner was badly down by the stern and listed slightly to starboard. Her funnels were riddled through and through; there were gaping holes in her side and her deck where shell had penetrated, and many smaller punctures where splinters had struck and gone through. A large projectile, bursting on the forecastle, had torn the deck and the ship's side, and had flung the foremost gun off its mounting, killing or wounding every member of the gun's crew except one. The wardroom and one mess-deck were open to the sea; boats were splintered and useless; and the topmast, taking with it the aerial of the wireless telegraphy, had been shorn off and had gone overboard. The mizzen-mast also had disappeared, and a brand-new white ensign now fluttered from an improvised flagstaff in the stern. It was the only respectable-looking thing in the ship.

But the surprising thing was that neither vessel was vitally injured. They could both steam, though slowly, and by dint of plugging the more serious holes and keeping the pumps going, they were still tolerably seaworthy. How they had escaped from the inferno without being blown clean out of the water was nothing short of a miracle.

Casualties had been heavy. Wooten went about with his arm in a sling and a bandage round his head; but his hurts, though painful, were not sufficiently severe to incapacitate him for duty. The first lieutenant had not been so lucky, for he, peppered badly by a shell, had been confined to his bunk with more serious injuries.

The eight dead had been buried at dawn, and now the wounded lay in their hammocks on the battered mess-deck under the forecastle. Some of the slighter cases, with their hurts bandaged, were smoking cigarettes and talking quite cheerfully; others were asleep.

Pincher Martin was one of them. He had three neat little splinter-wounds in his back – three insignificant-looking and trivial little punctures which caused Brown, the surgeon-probationer, to purse his lips and to frown in his most professional manner when first he saw them. 'D'you feel any pain?' he had asked.

'Not unless I moves, sir,' the patient had answered with a wan smile, his tightly compressed lips giving the lie to his words.

An operation was impossible, and they dressed the wounds as best they could and made him comfortable; but the slivers of steel somewhere inside him hurt atrociously, and it was all he could do to refrain from moaning when they touched him. So Brown, seeing how things stood, dozed him with morphia, and poor Pincher, with his young face unnaturally haggard, drawn, and very white, was presently slumbering as peacefully as a child.