CHAPTER X
THE BATTLE OF THE MIST
Thorogood, Lieutenant of the Afternoon Watch, climbed the ladder to the upper bridge as the bell struck the half-hour after noon. A blue worsted m.u.f.fler, gift and handiwork of an aunt on the outbreak of war, enfolded his neck. He wore a pair of gla.s.ses in a case slung over one shoulder and black leather gauntlet-gloves.
The Officer of the Forenoon Watch, known among his messmates as Tweedledee, was focusing the range-finder on the ship ahead of them in the line; he looked round as the new-comer appeared, and greeted him with a grin.
"Hullo, James," he said. "Your afternoon watch? Well, here you are."
He made a comprehensive gesture embracing the vast Fleet that was spread out over the waters as far as the eye could reach.
"Divisions in line ahead, columns disposed abeam, course S.E. Speed, 15 knots. Gla.s.s low and steady. The Cruisers are ahead there, beyond the Destroyers," he nodded ahead. "But you can"t see them because of the mist. The Battle-cruisers are somewhere beyond them again, with their Light Cruisers and Destroyers--about thirty miles to the southward. The hands are at dinner and all is peace. She"s keeping station quite well now." The speaker moved to the range-finder again and peered into it at the next ahead. "Right to a yard, James."
Thorogood nodded. "Thank you: I hope I"ll succeed in keeping her there. Any news?"
"News?" The other laughed. "What about?"
"Well," replied Thorogood, "the perishing Hun, let"s say."
The Navigator, thoughtfully biting the end of a pencil, came out of the chart-house with a note-book in his hand, in which he had been working out the noon reckoning.
"Pilot," said the departing Officer of the Forenoon Watch, "James is thirsting for news of the enemy."
"Optimist!" replied the Navigator composedly. "News, indeed! This isn"t Wolff"s Agency, my lad. This is a Cook"s tour of the North Sea."
He sniffed the damp, salt breeze. "Bracing air, change of scenery: no undue excitement--sort of rest cure, in fact. And you come along exhibiting a morbid craving for excitement."
"I know," said Thorogood meekly. "It"s the effect of going to the cinematograph. All the magistrates are talking about it. They say Charlie Chaplin"s got something to do with it. I suppose, though, there"s no objection to my asking what the disposition of our Light Cruisers happens to be, is there? It"s prompted more by a healthy desire to improve my knowledge before I take over the afternoon watch than anything else."
"They"re out on the starboard quarter," replied the late Officer of the Watch. "You can"t see them because of this cursed mist, but they"re there."
"Strikes me this afternoon watch is going to be more of a faith cure than a rest cure as the Pilot suggests," grumbled Thorogood.
"Battle-cruisers somewhere ahead, Cruisers invisible in the mist, Light Cruisers----"
The report of a gun, followed almost instantly by a loud explosion, came from far away on the port bow. A Destroyer that had altered course was resuming her position in the Destroyer line on the outskirts of the Fleet. A distant column of smoke and spray was slowly dissolving into the North Sea haze.
At the report of the gun the three men raised their gla.s.ses to stare in the direction of the sound. "Only one of the Huns" floating mines,"
said the Navigator. "She exploded it with her 8-pounder. Pretty shot."
"Well," said Tweedledee, "I can"t stay here all day. Anything else you want to know, James? What"s for lunch? I"m devilish hungry."
"Boiled beef and carrots," replied Thorogood. "_Mit_ apple tart and cream: the Messman can"t be well. Pills says its squando-mania. No, I don"t think I want to know any more. I suppose the log"s written up?"
"It is. Now for the boiled beef, and this afternoon Little Bright-eyes is going to get his head down and have a nice sleep."
The speaker prepared to depart.
"Hold on," said the Navigator. "I"m coming with you. I"ve just got to give the noon position to the Owner on the way."
They descended the ladder together, and left Thorogood alone on the platform.
The Battle-fleet was steaming in parallel lines about a mile apart, each Squadron in the wake of its Flagship. The Destroyers, strung out on either flank of the Battle-fleet, were rolling steadily in the long, smooth swell, leaving a smear of smoke in their trail. Far away in the mist astern flickered a very bright light: the invisible Light Cruisers must be there, reflected Thorogood, and presently from the Fleet Flagship came a succession of answering blinks. The light stopped flickering out of the mist.
The speed at which the Fleet was travelling sent the wind thrumming through the halliards and funnel stays and past Thorogood"s ears with a little whistling noise; otherwise few sounds reached him at the alt.i.tude at which he stood. On the signal-platform below, a number of signalmen were grouped round the flag-lockers with the halliards in their hands in instant readiness to hoist a signal. The Signal Boatswain had steadied his gla.s.s against a semaph.o.r.e, and was studying something on the misty outskirts of the Fleet. The Quartermaster at the wheel was watching the compa.s.s card with a silent intensity that made his face look as if it had been carved in bronze. The telegraph-men maintained a conversation that was pitched in a low, deep note inaudible two yards away. It concerned the photograph of a mutual lady acquaintance, and has no place in this narrative.
Thorogood moved to the rail and looked down at the familiar forecastle and teeming upper-deck, thirty feet below. Seen thus from above, the grey, sloping shields of the turrets, each with its great twin guns, looked like gigantic mythical tortoises with two heads and disproportionately long necks. It was the dinner hour, and men were moving about, walking up and down, or sitting about in little groups smoking. Some were playing cards in places sheltered from the wind and spray; near the blacksmith"s forge a man was stooping patiently over a small black object: Thorogood raised his gla.s.ses for a moment and recognised the ship"s cat, reluctantly undergoing instruction in jumping through the man"s hands.
The cooks of the Messes were wending their way in procession to the chutes at the ship"s sides, carrying mess-kettles containing sc.r.a.ps and slops from the mess-deck dinner. For an instant the Officer of the Watch, looking down from that alt.i.tude and cut off from all sounds but that of the wind, experienced a feeling of unfamiliar detachment from the pulsating ma.s.s of metal beneath his feet. He had a vision of the electric-lit interior of the great ship, deck beneath deck, with men everywhere. Men rolled up in coats and oilskins, s.n.a.t.c.hing half-an-hour"s sleep along the crowded gun-batteries, men writing letters to sweethearts and wives, men laughing and quarrelling, or singing low-toned, melancholy ditties as they mended worn garments: hundreds and hundreds of reasoning human ent.i.ties were crowded in those steel-walled s.p.a.ces, each with his boundless hopes and affections, his separate fears and vices and conceptions of the Deity, and his small, incommunicable distresses....
Beneath all that again, far below the surface of the grey North Sea, were men, moving about purring turbines and dynamos and webs of stupendous machinery, silently oiling, testing and adjusting a thousand moving joints of metal. There were adjoining caverns lit by the glare of furnaces that shone red on the glistening faces of men, silent vaults and pa.s.sages where the projectiles were ranged in sinister array, and chilly s.p.a.ces in which the electric light was reflected from the burnished and oiled torpedoes that hung in readiness above the submerged tubes.
Thorogood raised his eyes and stared out across the vast array of the Battle-fleet. Obedient to the message flashed from the Flagship a few minutes earlier, the Light Cruisers that had been invisible on the quarter now emerged from behind the curtain of the mist and were rapidly moving up to a new position. Presently the same mysterious, soundless voice spoke again:
YOU ARE MAKING TOO MUCH SMOKE
blinked the glittering searchlight, and anon in the stokeholds of the end ship of the lee line there was the stokehold equivalent for weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth....
For a couple of hours the Fleet surged onwards in silence and unchanged formation. The swift Light Cruisers had overtaken the advancing Battle-fleet, and vanished like wraiths into the haze ahead. The Captain and the Navigator had joined Thorogood on the bridge, and were poring over the chart and talking in low voices. The Midshipman of the Watch stood with eyes glued to the range-finder, turning his head at intervals to report the distance of the next ahead to the Officer of the Watch.
A messenger from the Coding Officer tumbled pell-mell up the ladder and handed a piece of folded paper to the Captain, saluted, turned on his heel and descended the ladder again. The Captain unfolded the signal and read with knitted brows. Then he turned quickly to the chart again.
For a moment he was busy with dividers and parallel-rulers; when he raised his head his eyes were alight with a curiously restrained excitement.
"Rather interesting," he said, and pa.s.sed the paper to the Navigator who read it in turn and grinned like a schoolboy.
"They have probably caught a raiding party in the mist, sir," he said, and bent over the chart.
Thorogood picked up the message and pursed his lips up in a short, soundless whistle.
"It"s too much to hope that their main fleet"s out," he said.
"Their main fleet"s sure to be in support somewhere," replied the Captain. "It"s a question whether they realise we"re all down on top of "em, though, and nip for home before we catch them."
A second messenger flung himself, panting, up the ladder, and handed in a second message.
"Intercepted wireless to Flag, sir."
The Captain read it and took a breath that was like a sigh of relief.
"At last!" he said.
The Navigator turned from the chart.
"_Der Tag_, sir?" he asked interrogatively with a smile.
The Captain nodded ahead at the haze curtaining all the horizon. "If we catch "em," he replied.
The signal platform was awhirl with bunting; the voice of the Chief Yeoman repeating hoists rose above the stamp of feet and the flapping of flags in the wind.
Thorogood turned to the Navigator. "Will you take on now?" he asked in a low voice. "If the balloon"s really going up this time I"d better get along to my battery."