"But surely," exclaimed Lennard, "you can do something to help those poor fellows. Are you going to leave them all to drown?"
"I have no orders, except to sink and destroy," replied Erskine between his teeth. "You must remember that this is a war of one country against a continent, and of one fleet against four. Ah, there"s another! A third-cla.s.s cruiser--I think I know her, she"s the old _Leger_--they must have thought they had an easy job of it if they sent her here. Low free board, not worth shooting at. We"ll go over her. No armour--what idiots they are to put a thing like that into the fighting line!"
He took the transmitter down and said:
"Stand by there, Castellan! Get your pumps to work, and I shall want full speed ahead--I"m going to run that old croak down--hurry up."
He put the transmitter back on the hooks and presently Lennard saw the bows of the _Ithuriel_ rise quickly out of the water. The doomed vessel in front of them was a long, low-lying French torpedo-catcher, with one big funnel between two signal-masts, hopelessly out of date, and evidently intended only to go in and take her share of the spoils.
Erskine switched off the searchlight, called for full speed ahead and then with clenched teeth and set eyes, he sent the _Ithuriel_ flying at her victim.
Within five minutes it was all over. The fifty-ton ram rose over the _Leger"s_ side, crushed it down into the water, ground its way through her, cut her in half and went on.
"That ship ought to have been on the sc.r.a.p-heap ten years ago," said Erskine as he signalled for half-speed and swung the _Ithuriel_ round to the westward.
"She"s got a sc.r.a.p-heap all to herself now, I suppose," said Lennard, with a bit of a check in his voice. "I"ve no doubt, as you say, this sort of thing may be necessary, but my personal opinion of it is that it"s d.a.m.nable."
"Exactly my opinion too," said Erskine, "but it has to be done."
The next instant, Lennard heard a sound such as he had never heard before. It was a smothered rumble which seemed to come out of the depths, then there came a shock which flung him off his feet, and shot him against the opposite wall of the conning-tower. The _Ithuriel_ heeled over to port, a huge volume of water rose on her starboard side and burst into a torrent over her decks, then she righted.
Erskine, holding on hard to the iron table to which the signalling board was bolted, saved himself from a fall.
"I hope you"re not hurt, Mr Lennard," said he, looking round, "that was a submarine. Let a torpedo go at us, I suppose, and didn"t know they were hitting twelve-inch armour."
"It"s all right," said Lennard, picking himself up. "Only a bruise or two; nothing broken. It seems to me that this new naval warfare of yours is going to get a bit exciting."
"Yes," said Erskine, "I think it is. Halloa, Great Caesar! That must be that infernal invention of Castellan"s brother"s; the thing he sold to the Germans--the sweep!"
As he spoke a grey shape leapt up out of the water and began to circle over the _Ithuriel_. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the transmitter from the hooks, and said, in quick, clear tones:
"Castellan--sink--quick, quick as you can."
The pumps of the _Ithuriel_ worked furiously the next moment. Lennard held his breath as he saw the waves rise up over the decks.
"Full speed ahead again, and dive," said Erskine into the transmitter.
"Hold tight, Lennard."
The floor of the conning-tower took an angle of about sixty degrees, and Lennard gripped the holdfasts, of which there were two on each wall of the tower. He heard a rush of overwhelming waters--then came darkness.
The _Ithuriel_ rushed forward at her highest speed. Then something hit the sea, and a quick succession of shocks sent a shudder through the vessel.
"I thought so," said Erskine. "That"s John Castellan"s combined airship and submarine right enough, and that was an aerial torpedo. If it had hit us when we were above water, we should have been where those French chaps are now. You"re quite right, this sort of naval warfare is getting rather exciting."
CHAPTER X
FIRST BLOWS FROM THE AIR
The _Flying Fish_, the prototype of the extraordinary craft which played such a terrible part in the invasion of England, was a magnified reproduction, with improvements which suggested themselves during construction, of the model whose performances had so astonished the Kaiser at Potsdam. She was shaped exactly like her namesake of the deep, upon which, indeed, her inventor had modelled her. She was one hundred and fifty feet long and twenty feet broad by twenty-five feet deep in her widest part, which, as she was fish-shaped, was considerably forward of her centre.
She was built of a newly-discovered compound, something like papier-mache, as hard and rigid as steel, with only about one-tenth the weight. Her engines were of the simplest description in spite of the fact that they developed enormous power. They consisted merely of cylinders into which, by an automatic mechanism, two drops of liquid were brought every second. These liquids when joined produced a gas of enormously expansive power, more than a hundred times that of steam, which actuated the pistons. There were sixteen of these cylinders, and the pistons all connected with a small engine invented by Castellan, which he called an accelerator. By means of this device he could regulate the speed of the propellers which drove the vessel under water and in the air from sixty up to two thousand revolutions a minute.
The _Flying Fish_ was driven by nine propellers, three of these, four-bladed and six feet diameter, revolved a little forward amidships on either side under what might be called the fins. These fins collapsed close against the sides of the vessel when under water and expanded to a spread of twenty feet when she took the air. They worked on a pivot and could be inclined either way from the horizontal to an angle of thirty degrees. Midway between the end of these and the stern was a smaller pair with one driving screw. The eighth screw was an ordinary propeller at the stern, but the outside portion of the shaft worked on a ball and socket joint so that it could be used for both steering and driving purposes. It was in fact the tail of the _Flying Fish_. Steering in the air was effected by means of a vertical fin placed right aft.
She was submerged as the _Ithuriel_ was, by pumping water into the lower part of her hull. When these chambers were empty she floated like a cork. The difference between swimming and flying was merely the difference between the revolutions of the screws and the inclination of the fins. A thousand raised her from the water: twelve hundred gave her twenty-five or thirty miles an hour through the air: fifteen hundred gave her fifty, and two thousand gave her eighty to a hundred, according to the state of the atmosphere.
Her armament consisted of four torpedo tubes which swung at any angle from the horizontal to the vertical and so were capable of use both under water and in the air. They discharged a small, insignificant-looking torpedo containing twenty pounds of an explosive, discovered almost accidentally by Castellan and known only to himself, the German Emperor, the Chancellor, and the Commander-in-Chief. It was this which he had used in tiny quant.i.ties in the experiment at Potsdam.
Its action was so terrific that it did not rend or crack metal or stone which it struck. It overcame the chemical forces by which the substance was held together and reduced them to gas and powder.
And now, after this somewhat formal but necessary description of the most destructive fighting-machine ever created we can proceed with the story.
There were twenty _Flying Fishes_ attached to the Allied Forces, all of them under the command of German engineers, with the exception of the original _Flying Fish_. Two of these were attached to the three squadrons which were attacking Hull, Newcastle and Dover: three had been detailed for the attack on Portsmouth: two more to Plymouth, two to Bristol and Liverpool respectively, on which combined cruiser and torpedo attacks were to be made, and two supported by a small swift cruiser and torpedo flotilla for an a.s.sault on Cardiff, in order if possible to terrorise that city into submission and so obtain what may be called the life-blood of a modern navy. The rest, in case of accidents to any of these, were reserved for the final attack on London.
When the _Ithuriel_ disappeared and his torpedo struck a piece of floating wreckage and exploded with a terrific shock, John Castellan, standing in the conning-tower directing the movements of the _Flying Fish_, naturally concluded that he had destroyed a British submarine scout. He knew of the existence, but nothing of the real powers of the _Ithuriel_. The only foreigner who knew that was Captain Count Karl von Eckstein, and he was locked safely in a cabin on board her.
He had been searching the under-waters between Nettlestone Point and Hayling Island for hours on the look-out for British submarines and torpedo scouts, and had found nothing, therefore he was ignorant of the destruction which the _Ithuriel_ had already wrought, and as, of course, he had heard no firing under the water, he believed that the three destroyers supported by the _Dupleix_ and _Leger_ had succeeded in slipping through the entrance to Spithead.
He knew that a second flotilla of six destroyers with three swift second-cla.s.s cruisers were following in to complete the work, which by this time should have begun, and that after them came the main French squadron, consisting of six first-cla.s.s battleships with a screen of ten first and five second-cla.s.s cruisers, the work of which would be to maintain a blockade against any relieving force, after the submarines and destroyers had sunk and crippled the ships of the Fleet Reserve and cut the connections of the contact mines.
He knew also that the _See Adler_, which was _Flying Fish II._, was waiting about the Needles to attack Hurst Castle and the forts on the Isle of Wight side, preparatory to a rush of two battleships and three cruisers through the narrows, while another was lurking under Hayling Island ready to take the air and rain destruction on the forts of Portsmouth before the fight became general.
What thoroughly surprised him, however, was the absolute silence and inaction of the British. True, two shots had been fired, but whether from fort or warship, and with what intent, he hadn"t the remotest notion. The hour arranged upon for the general a.s.sault was fast approaching. The British must be aware that an attack would be made, and yet there was not so much as a second-cla.s.s torpedo boat to be seen outside Spithead. This puzzled him, so he decided to go and investigate for himself. He took up a speaking-tube and said to his Lieutenant, M"Carthy--one of too many renegade Irishmen who in the terrible times that were to come joined their country"s enemies as Lynch and his traitors had done in the Boer War:
"I don"t quite make it out, M"Carthy. We"ll go down and get under--it"s about time the fun began--and I haven"t heard a shot fired or seen an English ship except that submarine we smashed. My orders are for twelve o"clock, and I"m going to obey them."
There was one more device on board the _Flying Fish_ which should be described in order that her wonderful manoeuvering under water may be understood. Just in front of the steering-wheel in the conning-tower was a square gla.s.s box measuring a foot in the side, and in the centre of this, attached to top and bottom by slender films of asbestos, was a needle ten inches long, so hung that it could turn and dip in any direction. The forward half of this needle was made of highly magnetised steel, and the other of aluminium which exactly counter-balanced it. The gla.s.s case was completely insulated and therefore the extremely sensitive needle was unaffected by any of the steel parts used in the construction of the vessel. But let any other vessel, save of course a wooden ship, come within a thousand yards, the needle began to tremble and sway, and the nearer the _Flying Fish_ approached it, the steadier it became and the more directly it pointed towards the object. If the vessel was on the surface, it of course pointed upward: if it was a submarine, it pointed either level or downwards with unerring precision.
This needle was, in fact, the eyes of the _Flying Fish_ when she was under water.
Castellan swung her head round to the north-west and dropped gently on to the water about midway between Selsey Bill and the Isle of Wight.
Then the _Flying Fish_ folded her wings and sank to a depth of twenty feet. Then, at a speed of ten knots, she worked her way in a zigzag course back and forth across the narrowing waters, up the channel towards Portsmouth.
To his surprise, the needle remained steady, showing that there was neither submarine nor torpedo boat near. This meant, as far as he could see, that the main approach to the greatest naval fortress in England had been left unguarded, a fact so extraordinary as to be exceedingly suspicious. His water-ray apparatus, a recent development of the X-rays which enabled him to see under water for a distance of fifty yards, had detected no contact mines, and yet Spithead ought to be enstrewn with them, just as it ought to have been swarming with submarines and destroyers. There must be some deep meaning to such apparently incomprehensible neglect, but what was it?
If his brother Denis had not happened to recognise Captain Count Karl von Eckstein and haled him so unceremoniously on board the _Ithuriel_, and if his portmanteau full of papers had been got on board a French warship, instead of being left for the inspection of the British Admiralty, that reason would have been made very plain to him.
Completely mystified, and fearing that either he was going into some trap or that some unforeseen disaster had happened, he swung round, ran out past the forts and rose into the air again. When he had reached the height of about a thousand feet, three rockets rose into the air and burst into three showers of stars, one red, one white, and the other blue. It was the Tricolour in the air, and the signal from the French Admiral to commence the attack. Castellan"s orders were to cripple or sink the battleships of the Reserve Fleet which was moored in two divisions in Spithead and the Solent.
The Spithead Division lay in column of line abreast between Gilkicker Point and Ryde Pier. It consisted of the _Formidable_, _Irresistible_, _Implacable_, _Majestic_ and _Magnificent_, and the cruisers _Hogue_, _Sutlej_, _Ariadne_, _Argonaut_, _Diadem_ and _Hawke_. The western Division consisted of the battleships _Prince George_, _Victoria_, _Jupiter_, _Mars_ and _Hannibal_, and the cruisers _Amphitrite_, _Spartiate_, _Andromeda_, _Europa_, _Niobe_, _Blenheim_ and _Blake_.
It had of course been perfectly easy for Castellan to mark the position of the two squadrons from the air, and he knew that though they were comparatively old vessels they were quite powerful enough, with the a.s.sistance of the sh.o.r.e batteries, to hold even Admiral Durenne"s splendid fleet until the Channel Fleet, which for the time being seemed to have vanished from the face of the waters, came up and took the French in the rear.
In such a case, the finest fleet of France would be like a nut in a vice, and that was the reason for the remorseless orders which had been given to him, orders which he was prepared to carry out to the letter, in spite of the appalling loss of life which they entailed; for, as the _Flying Fish_ sank down into the water, he thought of that swimming race in Clifden Bay and of the girl whose marriage with himself, willing or unwilling, was to be one of the terms of peace when the British Navy lay shattered round her sh.o.r.es, and the millions of the Leagued Nations had trampled the land forces of Britain into submission.
Just as she touched the water a brilliant flash of pink flame leapt up from the eastern fort on the Hillsea Lines, followed by a sharp crash which shook the atmosphere. A thin ray of light fell from the clouds, then came a quick succession of flashes moving in the direction of the great fort on Portsdown, until two rose in quick succession from Portsdown itself, and almost at the same moment another from Hurst Castle, and yet another from the direction of Fort Victoria.
"G.o.d bless my soul, what"s that?" exclaimed the Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Sir Compton Domville, who had just completed his final inspection of the defences of Portsmouth Harbour, and was standing on the roof of Southsea Castle, taking a general look round before going back to headquarters. "Here, Markham," he said, turning to the Commander of the Fort, "just telephone up to Portsdown at once and ask them what they"re up to."