Chapter II: Part 2

"I'm fed up with it," continued Sam, still in his mood of heavy reflection, "abso-bloomin'-lutely fed up! Marchin' 'ere, marchin' there, march all day, march all night; w'en you do stop, nothin' to eat; march back w'ere you come from, then right about face and march ag'in till you don't know w'ere you are. I joined the bloomin' army to fight, not to go on a blighted walkin'-tour!"

"Fight!" chimed in the little man. "You ought to 'a' been wiv us the other day! Talk about fightin'! Our company fought three thousand on 'em for hours an' hours--all alone. We killed 'undreds of 'em, me an' about a dozen others, till we 'ad to retreat. That's wot I calls fightin'!"

"Is it?" sneered Sam. "You wos one o' that picket guard wot run away from a cow, you mean. Fightin'! That ain't fightin'--bein' shot at by swine you can't see. I ain't 'ad a sight o' one on 'em yet, not one--an' yesterday forty men of our company was killed w'ere we laid in a 'tater-field. Ain't that so, Bill?"

"Forty-two," corrected Bill, "an' you couldn't find some of 'em after the shell 'ad 'it 'em."

"That's it," continued Sam, "shells! Shells plumpin' down and chokin' yer, shells over'ead as if the sky was breakin' in and droppin' down in bullets. Shells! That's wot I can't stand--bein' 'it on the back of the 'ead w'en you're lyin' down an' takin' cover accordin' to orders. It fair got on my nerves--all day, shells, shells, shells, an' not a mouthful to eat, an' then, at the end, right about face, quick march, we're beat. Beat! We'll see if we get beat! No,--it's just bloomin' silly--they march us orf our feet for a week just to make us a target for their damn artillery and then tell us we're licked and 'ave got to march back double-quick. I'm fed up wiv it. I've chucked the blank army. Chucked it, d'yer 'ear?" he turned savagely on the little man.

"You're right, mate," said the little man, standing up to refill his tankard at the barrel. "So 've I. W'y should we fight? That's wot I arsks yer. We're the pore workin'-man--we ain't got no property," he developed the manner of a street-corner orator, and thumped his tankard on the table. "We ain't got no stake in the country. Let them as 'as got a stake in the country fight for it, says I. Not get a pore _h_onest workin'-man to go an' do it for 'em. 'Tain't right, mates. That's w'y I chucked the bloomin' army, I don't mind tellin' yer--because I felt it wasn't right! I'm a _h_onest workin'-man an' I don't believe in war."

"'Ear, 'ear," said Bill sleepily.

"Chuck it!" commented Sam unsympathetically, regarding the hands of the orator. "You a workin'-man! You ain't never done a day's work in yer life, unless you calls work pickin' pockets at the races. I don't want no Socialism--an' I don't want no war, neither. I wants to get back to my missus an' the kids an' a regular job."

"'Ear, 'ear," said Bill. "Wot price the Ole Kent Road on a Saturday night, Sam?"

"That's wot I was thinkin'. Is to-night Saturday, Bill?"

"Cursed if I know," was the reply. "I've lost count."

Sam sat gloomily looking into the fire. In his brain was a vision of the great thoroughfare, lined with naphtha flares, thronged with people who clustered about the stalls, here and there the blaze of lights upon the white-and-gold façade of a picture-palace, the yellowish radiance of a public-house. He visualised it now, distant from it, as the rustic looks back to his village, sentimentally. There the incidents, commonplace enough, sordid even, which had made his life something individual to himself, had linked themselves one by one.

"Bill," he said huskily, "if I saw those blank foreigners marchin' up the Ole Kent Road, I'd go for 'em--if there wasn't a man to 'elp me."

"'Ear, 'ear!" said Bill. "So would I."

"I've got a bit o' skirt meself wot lives just off the Ole Kent Road," said the third man in a tone of reminiscence. "Let's 'ave some more beer. I say," he remarked suddenly, having refilled his mug, "if the army comes back it'll be a fair cop for us, won't it?"

"I ain't goin' back," said Sam sturdily, still gazing into the fire. "I'm fed up--and w'en I'm fed up I'm fed up."

Bill had wakened at the suggestion.

"But s'pose they come back, Sam? Wot'll we do?"

The third man interposed.

"'Tain't wot we'll do. It's wot they'll do. They'll shoot us, by Gawd they will!" Panic came into his sharp little white face. He was desperately in earnest. "They'll shoot every man of us!"

"_They_ won't come back," said Sam.

"Ho! Won't they? And 'aven't they countermarched before? W'y--I 'eard an officer say only this afternoon that they'd be 'avin' another go at 'em to-morrow."

"Did yer, really?" asked Bill, now thoroughly frightened.

"'Strue as I stand 'ere!--'We'll march back quick an' catch 'em,' 'e said," the little man invented rapidly. "An officer in the cavalry, it was. Staff-officer, shudn't wonder."

"Oh, my Gawd!" cried Bill, his beer-muddled faculties dispersing before a gale of fear. "'Ere, Sam--I'm orf! Come on! You brought me into this, yer know--I didn't want to desert. I told yer so, lots o' times--an' now!--Come on!--I ain't goin' to stop 'ere to get shot!"

"'Arf a mo!" said the little man. "'Tain't no good runnin' orf in that uniform. Wot we've got to do is to find some togs. Then if they comes back we're just _h_onest rustics, see?"

Sam stood up. The sudden panic of his companions had communicated itself to his slower brain. He also trembled at the prospect of recapture.

"That's the ticket, mate. You've got it. You're a smart little cove. Wot's yer name?" This, he implied, was condescension.

"Hoswald--Hoswald Smiff--my farver was a toff, a flash cove, 'e was. Come on, mates--there's sure to be some togs upstairs--shudn't wonder if they've left some dibs be'ind 'em, too."

"They left the beer, anyway," said Bill. His tone implied that people who left beer would leave anything.

Rather unsteadily, the trio ascended the steep and narrow stairs of the inn. Sam carried a lighted candle which Oswald Smith had found in the kitchen. A disappointment awaited them. In every room the drawers stood open, empty, their contents carried off. The trio swore in harmony and in fugues. They cursed with the pointless fluency of drunken men baulked of an intention. Then they lurched downstairs again.

"Wot'll we do now?" asked Bill, his face pale with fright. "They'll be on us before morning, sure!"

"Certain!" said Oswald.

"I ain't goin' back," said Sam doggedly. "I'm fed up." He stood and tried to think, his mind harassed by the necessity for a disguise which had been suggested to it.

Bill drank deeply from his tankard and, in the middle of the draught, was visited by a brilliant idea.

"I know," he cried. "Let's cut the letters orf our uniforms. They won't be able to tell w'ere we come from an' we can make up some yarn--say we found 'em--'ad our own togs pinched by the soldiers."

The others seized on the suggestion. To their alcoholised brains the plan seemed more than feasible; it was certain of success. Feverishly and clumsily they ripped the regimental letters from each other's uniforms and cast them into the fire. The identification labels, everything which could point to their connection with the army, followed. They stood, anonymous it seemed to them, in their stripped khaki.

"That's done wiv," said Sam, with a heavy sigh. "Let's 'ave some more beer."

Joyous now, their minds relieved of the fear of recapture, the trio refilled their tankards and their pipes. They settled themselves again.

"I say, mates," said Oswald, "ever 'eard the yarn of the bloke 'oo----?" He told the story and, ere the noisy laughter which greeted the end had died away, began another. He revealed himself as a fellow of rare social qualities. His repertory of anecdotes, many of them relating shady episodes of his own career, was inexhaustible. On his own confession he was a sharper or worse; the humour of his experiences the eternal humour of the sharp-witted clown and the dull policeman. He diversified his entertainment with comic songs rendered with more verve than elegance. Bill obliged with others of a sentimental nature. They drank beer and more beer. They bellowed out choruses whose rhythm was marked by the heavy beating of tankards upon the table and laughed and shouted as though they sat at a "free-and-easy" in the Old Kent Road. The fire blazed up the chimney, fed by chairs demolished one after another. Such merry men as they could not condescend to the fetching of fuel. The room was thick with tobacco-smoke. On the floor little lakes of beer communicated by a rivulet whose source was the spigot of the barrel. The three men gave themselves up to a roaring orgy. They forgot entirely the army which was marching away from them, the other army which approached.

At last, in an atmosphere heavy with debauch, they slumbered, three worthless soldiers of whom any army was well rid.

* * * * *

Sam was awakened from a muddled dream of a tenement near the Old Kent Road by a rough hand upon his shoulder and the sound of a peremptory voice.

"All-ri', Bill," he murmured, "revalley 'asn't sounded yet." Then he opened his eyes, tried to orientate himself in his surroundings. It was morning. He was in an unfamiliar room and the room was filled with unfamiliar men, dressed in a strange uniform. His shoulder was again roughly shaken. The voice, uttering words foreign to him, but whose meaning was not in doubt, spoke again. A strange stern face was thrust close to his. Sam got on his feet, still bewildered. Immediately he felt his arm firmly grasped. His companions were undergoing similar treatment. At the sight of them, the incidents of the previous night returned to his memory. Recapture? He was reassured by the foreign incomprehensible language about him. He would give himself up comfortable as a prisoner. His dangers were over.

Oswald was in the grasp of two stalwart captors, the frightened eyes in his cunning little face looking up wildly into their unemotional countenances. Bill, who had slid with his head under a chair in the stupor which followed their orgy, was less easy to awaken. The strange soldiers kicked him liberally, eliciting sleepy curses but scarce a movement.

Sam could not repress a grin; Bill's morning recall to the sorrows of this waking world was usually made in this manner.

Then he was pushed on by a firm, unrelenting hand which reminded him vividly of that of a policeman. As he was propelled through the door he had a glimpse of Bill being hoisted bodily on to his feet by several of the strange soldiers. Behind him, Oswald was asking imploring questions in his thin expostulating voice. They received no reply. The trio were pushed swiftly, inexorably, into the street.

Outside in the bright sunshine they perceived that the village was full of cavalrymen garbed in an unfamiliar uniform. Their position was obvious. They had been captured by the enemy's advance-guard. Just without the door they were halted and the danger of any movement was explained to them in dumb show by a soldier who allowed them a disconcerting view down the muzzle of a rifle.

In front of the inn was a rustic bench and table, occupied at the moment by a big, fair-moustached man who bent over a map. Around him a group of officers stood waiting in respectful attitudes. Presently the fair-moustached man looked up and said a few words to one of the officers. He had a good-humoured, smiling face, that man. The trio contemplated it anxiously and drew some comfort from its jovial appearance.

Sam turned to his companions.

"Mates," he said huskily, "we're copped. But mind, we don't know nuffink. We ain't goin' to give the boys away, are we?"

"No, Sam," replied Bill, even more huskily. "Wot'll they do to us, d'yer think?"

"Nuffink," was the answer. "We're soldiers--they don't shoot prisoners."

Oswald drew a long breath of relief at this. Sam looked at him sharply.

"Mind--not a word, you little skunk--or I'll bash yer 'ead in."

"All right, mate," said Oswald. "I ain't goin' to peach."

The good-humoured officer on the bench spoke a couple of sharp words. Immediately the prisoners were pushed in front of him. A pair of very blue eyes looked over them, seemed to smile at them, they thought and hoped.

"What are you?" he asked sharply in English.

"Soldiers, sir," replied Sam quickly. Not very confident of the discretion of his companions, he was anxious to make himself the spokesman of the party.

"Indeed? What corps?"

The blue eyes smiled on Sam. He felt them dangerously fascinating. It was with an effort that he kept himself from a reply and remained silent. His dull faculties were desperately on the defensive.

"What corps?"

No answer.

The officer drew out a heavy gold watch. He smiled outright at them.

"I give you five minutes. If you do not reply, you will be shot against that wall."

"We're soldiers--prisoners of war, sir," said Sam. "You can't shoot prisoners of war."

"Indeed!" The blue eyes above the fair moustache looked innocently amused. "You call yourselves soldiers--to what corps do you belong? To what regiment? Where are your shoulder-straps?" He got angry suddenly. "Tell me at once what regiments--what time they passed here, or you go against that wall!"

Sam set his teeth and went pale. The consequences of their anonymity became plain to him. He met the eyes of the quick-witted little Cockney rogue. The cunning, ill-shaped face was lit with a feverish excitement.

"Don't yer see, mate?" he whispered eagerly. "Our chaps 'ave give 'em the slip. 'E wants to find out wot corps passed through 'ere----"

"Silence!--Answer, you!"

The fascinating blue eyes looked at Sam, almost mesmerised him.

"We're soldiers--prisoners o' war," he repeated doggedly.

"Soldiers! Soldiers without regiments--without corps! Prove it then, my man. Quick! I have no time to waste. Where are your shoulder-straps? Your identification papers?"

The trio remained silent. The officer adopted a more cajoling tone.

"Come, come, my man. You don't want to throw your lives away on a trifle. I am willing to treat you as prisoners of war if you prove to me that you are soldiers. Tell me your regiments."

The trio stood in stubborn silence, the ex-navvies rather sheepish, the Cockney rogue watching the questioner with quick and knowing eyes. "No? Then you are spies." He turned to his men and uttered a brief order, pointing to Sam.

On the instant the ex-navvy found himself pushed with his back against the wall, looking into a grim row of rifle-barrels. The squad that menaced him stood equably waiting the word of command. The officer rose, walked across to him and smiled in his face. Once more he drew out his watch.

"One minute," he said pleasantly. "One minute to prove that you are a soldier and no spy."

Sam stood as erect as suddenly enfeebled knees would let him. He felt the bricks of the wall pushing against his back in the instinctive retreat of his body from the imminent danger. His eyes were fixed on the officer who stood calmly regarding his watch. He felt sick and dizzy and very cold. He shivered as in a mantle of ice. His mouth went dry. The panic-stricken part of his brain began an attempt to count the seconds without any revolt at the stubborn decision of his directing self. One, two, three--twenty--thirty--the minute seemed endlessly long. He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, striving desperately to bring himself to speech in the fraction of time which remained to him. He succeeded.

His voice came raucously, an agonised appeal.

"Mates!--Remember--the Ole Kent Road!"

The officer uttered a sharp sound and the windows shook with the loud report of the rifles. In a thin haze of smoke, the prisoners saw Sam lurch forward, his arms outstretched, swaying on his toes for one ghastly moment ere he pitched.

The officer calmly replaced his watch and brushed past Oswald. He seized Bill by the arm.

"You!" he said, with that sudden and disconcerting anger of his. "Will you speak?"

Bill stood sheepishly staring at him.

"The Ole Kent Road--'Ome!" he mumbled to himself. Relentless hands pushed him against the wall. At his feet lay Sam, a dark pool forming under him.

"Will you speak?" vociferated the officer.

"'Ome," mumbled Bill. "'Ome!--Oh, Gawd!"

He ignored the demand--seemed not to hear it.

The officer, exasperated, stamped upon the gravel. Again he uttered the sharp order, again the windows shook. Bill slid down the wall with his head on his breast.

The officer turned to the survivor, the petty rogue, nurtured fatherless in a London slum. "Now, my man," he said cheerfully. "You see I am not to be trifled with. Come--tell me what corps passed through here yesterday." He added with a smile of contempt, "These scruples are absurd in a deserter."

A cunning grin came over Oswald's face.

"Yah!" he said. "Deserter, am I? So I am, but I ain't goin' to peach on my pals. They've give yer the slip right enough--an' yer knows it. Yah!" He finished with an ugly grimace.

A moment later, he also stood with his back to the wall.

"Yah!" he cried, and grinned as at some private joke.

The rifles spoke and he spun and fell. In his pocket was the officer's gold watch.

At the foot of a bullet-marked wall lay three worthless soldiers. Far away, a beaten army, lost for the nonce in the fog of war, rallied itself without molestation for another struggle.

NERVES!

A heavy north-east gale was setting with a flowing tide into the River Ems. Out at sea dark grey rainclouds blew raggedly over a background but little lighter in colour. The distant sea stretched away, cheerless and leaden, to a horizon that was whelmed in a grey mist where the elements met, indistinguishable. The nearer waters broke in a confused turmoil of white-caps on either hand. A heavy swell rolled dark between these shoals. Up the estuary a blur of dirty brown smoke, rising from behind a line of bleak sand-dunes, smudged the sagging sky. It rose from the little town of Emden, round the corner. A couple of tall posts, wireless "aerials," stood out black against the smoke.

In the river, just off the low sandy point, lay a long, four-funnelled cruiser. In the heavy rain-squalls which swallowed her every few minutes she looked like a thing of mist, so well did the grey of her hull and superstructure blend with the grey of sea and sky. She pitched slowly and gently at the taut-stretched cables of her bow anchors, her nose pointed seawards towards the incoming tide. From her steam-pipes the white vapour which issued, deafeningly stridulant, was torn violently away in horizontal pennons. At her peak a small flag blew out stiffly. At her stern, the ensign--black rectangular cross on white, centred with the crowned eagle and quartered with a small black cross upon the national colours, black, white and red--flattened itself out in the wind with loud claps as the gale half-released it for a second and then seized upon it again.

To and fro upon her navigating bridge the oilskin-clad officer of the watch paced restlessly. Under his sou'-wester, anxious, strained eyes peered from a haggard face whose weather-beaten brow was paled to an unhealthy yellow. Up and down he went, but never for a moment did he take those anxious eyes from the dark channel ahead of the ship's bows. The look-outs, posted at each end of the bridge close behind the canvas "dodger," gazed with equal fixity towards the sea. On their faces the same tension, the same evidence of sleepless nights, was visible. Behind them, in a wheelhouse from which the glass panels had been removed, stood a couple of quartermasters. Stiffly motionless behind the steering telemotor they conversed in low nervous voices. The hands of one of them, a giant of a man, shook continuously as he held them pendent against his thighs.

A blue-uniformed officer with gold bands across his cuffs appeared upon the bridge and approached the lieutenant. They saluted each other with a friendly nod after the formal fingers to the brow.

"Any orders yet, Herr Leutnant?" asked the new-comer. He was a heavily built man with a bluish nose that bent birdlike from between protruding eyes. He worried continually with thumb and finger at a ragged grey moustache. He followed the lieutenant to a position in the centre of the bridge.

"We start directly," said the navigating lieutenant in a weary voice. "When the Herr Kapitän returns."

Both stared silently down at the roof of the conning-tower just below them, and at the two long guns which emerged from the turret in front of it. The open manhole in the conning-tower vitalised the familiar objects with a touch of grim expectation.

"Ach!" said the engineer at last gloomily. "It is perhaps better--I cannot sleep here--I cannot read."

"Sleep!" echoed the lieutenant. "I have not slept for a week. I see always those cursed destroyers slipping through the mist--I see them when I close my eyes--I see them when I am on duty--I know no longer whether I see them or not--and worse than the destroyers----" he broke off suddenly.

"Ach, ja," said the engineer, "you have had a bad time--but you can at least see the danger coming--sometimes, down there, I begin to imagine things--I have not let myself imagine, Herr Leutnant--I have read the sublime words of Zarathustra--I could always read them--but now I can, no longer. How long have we been here, Bielefeld?" he finished abruptly.

"Four days."

"Ach so! I thought it was a week--what days!"

"Jawohl!"

The two men fell silent again, staring at the sea. Once the lieutenant made a quick movement of alarm, whipped out his binoculars, and gazed into the grey distance. He put them back after some minutes without a word. On the whole ship was no other sound than the strident rasp of the escaping steam and the drone of the gale through the wind-tautened stays.

The engineer spoke again.

"What does Borkum say?"

"Enemy disappeared into the offing--could not keep their stations in this weather."

"It is our chance, then."

"Yes--perhaps."

"You fear----?"

"Everything--in this rat-trap. The picket-boats are all in. If only we could start!"

"Jawohl--anything is better than this--besides, the movement of the engines is soothing--this stillness day after day is unnerving. If only we had some good Welsh coal! This soft stuff! One burns and burns and gets no heat!"

"And advertise ourselves to every cursed scout in the North Sea!"

A sailor, heavy in oilskins, drew up and saluted.

"The Herr Kapitän is coming, Herr Leutnant."

The engineer disappeared. His friend went to the starboard rail of the bridge and looked over. A motor-boat was approaching in a smother of flying spray.

A boatswain's whistle shrilled loudly. A minute later the captain came up the ladder onto the bridge, shaking the water from his oilskins like a wet dog and dabbing at his square reddish beard with a handkerchief. The lieutenant saluted, searching his commander's face for a hint of the orders he bore. The captain's eyes were hard, the eyes of a man who had been contemplating desperate possibilities. His bluish lips cut in a thin straight line across his beard. He spoke curtly.

"Get the starboard anchor up. Tell the Herr Stabs-Ingenieur I wish to speak to him."

He went heavily into the wheelhouse and bent over the chart. Outside, the lieutenant blew his whistle and shouted an order. An instant later the shrill piping of the boatswain repeated the call. There was a scurry of men along the deck towards the bows and the clank of a capstan hauling in the heavy chain.

The staff-engineer stood in conversation with the captain. In the low murmur of their voices certain words were emphasised by repetition--"Knots--this coal--revolutions--coal." The captain nodded.

"Do your best," he said briefly.

"We make a dash for it?" queried the engineer. Still he worried at his ragged moustache and the protruding eyes above his beaklike nose moved with little quick stares like a frightened bird.

The captain smiled grimly.

"We rejoin the fleet--while we can--those are the orders. We will do our best and God be with us--do you find that maxim in Zarathustra, Herr Wollenmetz?"

The engineer shrugged his shoulders.

"Ach! I know no longer, Herr Kapitän--anything is better than this--anything!"

"We start at once," said the captain and went out onto the bridge without more words. The ship's bugler saluted and stood stiffly to attention as he emerged.

"Battle stations!" said the captain.

The howl of the gale in the rigging was lost in the sternly joyous run of brazen notes, taken up and repeated all over the vessel. For a minute or two the erstwhile deserted decks swarmed with hurrying men. They disappeared rapidly into turrets, fighting-tops, fire-control stations or stood, alert, behind the unprotected anti-torpedo guns.

There was a buzz of excited voices which would not easily be hushed. At last the never-diminished tension of four long days of inaction was broken. They were going to move, to do something. No longer were they to lie there, waiting, waiting, while perhaps at any minute destruction was creeping stealthily towards them under the surface of the water. They forgot the wearing vigils of the previous weeks at sea, the unrelieved strain of watching the horizon for a grey spot in daytime or a blur closer at hand in the obscurity of the night. They forgot the awful minutes which dragged out, heavy with their lives, as they approached an unknown ship, forgot the paralysing uncertainty when the wireless began on its mysterious message, reporting her. They forgot the night alarms, the perpetual dodging of the hostile cruisers, the chases and the escapes and the last fierce pursuit, which had driven them, all but out of coal, behind the shelter of Borkum Island. The memory of these things was blotted out by the nerve-sapping suspense of the past four days, while they waited for a chance to elude the hostile cruisers watching for them in the offing. Now they experienced the gladness of a release as from an untangible but none the less close prison. Nevertheless, all of this emotional and mental strain was marked in eyes dark-rimmed and faces that had grown thinner. The alacrity of their movements now was not the alacrity of men who leap, calm-souled and confident, to test their strength in a crisis; it was the fussiness of neurotics who are glad to translate their nerve force into physical action as an escape from the barren travail of their brains.

Volumes of black smoke rolled heavily from the four funnels of the cruiser, were blown rapidly by the gale in one thick all-obliterating mist towards the low shores. An engine-room telegraph clanged harshly while the port anchor, dripping black mud, came slowly up to the hawse-hole. Again the telegraph clanged. There was a flurry in the water astern, and the long grey cruiser commenced to move along the dark fairway into the stormy grey of the autumn afternoon.

Quickly she got into her stride. On the port bow the island of Borkum was beginning to loom up just distinguishable through the driving scud. The wireless was talking with it. Borkum reported with steady regularity: "No enemy in sight." The cruiser hurried down the eastern branch of the Ems, meeting a heavy swell that rolled darkly towards her to be divided into two thin translucent curtains of water poised like wings on either side of her bows. The shoals to port and starboard glimmered away into the distance, wide stretches of running, leaping, jostling white-caps. The water under their lee showed an ugly, dirty yellow that contrasted with the black waves of the channel. On the bridge the navigating lieutenant still peered anxiously into the veiled horizon. Every now and then he glanced back at the welter of black smoke issuing from their funnels and muttered fluent curses that were the perverted expression of the prayer in his heart. Behind him stood the captain and the commander, conversing in the intervals of raising their binoculars to their eyes.

At every minute a message from the wireless room was brought to the captain. Borkum was still talking. Suddenly the tenor of its messages changed. "Two British cruisers passing the minefield in the Western Ems." A moment later Emden reported three submarines at the fork of the channel behind. The captain smiled grimly. He could not now go back, but apparently he had given his warders the slip. He went to the engine-room telephone and spoke a few words to the chief. In answer the masses of black smoke from the funnels rolled out even more densely than before. The curtains of flying water at the bows rose a little higher and remained at the elevation. Borkum announced: "Mines evidently swept or damaged--cruisers untouched." In fact, in slight lulls of the gale, slow dull booms were audible to leeward. The batteries on the island were firing. The captain turned and laughed with the commander. The situation could not be more favourable. They had as good as escaped.

A few long minutes and they had reached the open sea. Borkum was a grey blur on their port quarter, the land to the east of them passed into invisibility. Here they felt the full force of the gale. The cruiser nosed into great waves that leaped green above the bows and fell with a heavy thud upon the deck. She endeavoured to combine a steady roll with violent pitching, and the officers on the bridge clutched at the rail with one hand while with the other they pressed their glasses hard against their eyes. The veils of driving mist which swept continuously across the waters might hide a menace that would loom up at any instant as destruction. Suddenly a telephone bell rang in the wheelhouse behind them. A man ran out, saluted and reported:

"Submarine right ahead--about 1000 metres."

The message came from an observing station on the foremast. The three officers on the bridge searched the sea in front of them with their binoculars. Yes! No! Yes! The navigating lieutenant saw a flitting patch of foam on the dark sea, a splash in the air as a wave lifted. He recognised it instantly as a periscope cutting through the water, coming straight towards them. They must shoot--shoot at once! He turned to his superiors. The captain had already shouted one order, was now yelling instructions to the men at the port anti-torpedo guns. The cruiser turned slightly to starboard. Onward drove the patch of foam, aiming apparently at their side. The lieutenant felt his left hand hurt him--it was the intensity of his nervous grip upon the rail. Behind him he heard a sudden order, followed instantly by the sharp, splitting report of the light guns. At the same moment the circle of a conning-tower broke the surface of the sea, followed by a glistening whale-back. As it emerged he saw it veiled in a sheet of flame, a film of smoke. He had a glimpse of a great hole in the whale-back and then the submarine dived nose foremost, kicking up her stern in the air as she went. For one awful, ghastly second the lieutenant had a view of the large initial in her conning-tower. It was U--Unterseeboot!--They had sunk one of their own submarines!

He turned to see the face of his captain fixed in an expression of horror. Everyone on the bridge was trembling. They had lost command over themselves, and they knew it. No one spoke. With a fierce effort of will the lieutenant pressed his glasses to his eyes, scanned the horizon. What was that? He saw a dark spot rising and falling, circling against the grey sky like a black gull wheeling in the gale. It was a seaplane, daringly reconnoitring even in this weather. It was discovery. Borkum confirmed the fear. "Cruisers turning back to sea--difficult to range in this weather."

The guns' crews at the anti-torpedo armament had also seen the aeroplane. A shot cracked out, automatically, without orders. The captain, losing all control over his nerves after the last shock, ran along the bridge to the port rail and excitedly ordered them to continue. "Fire!" he shouted. "Fire! A hundred marks to the crew that brings it down!" His face worked with an insane hatred, his voice was the voice of a man out of himself. It seemed that he wished to revenge his terrible mistake upon the aeroplane. Crack! Crack! Crack! went the guns, while the men behind the rubber shoulder-pieces swore violent oaths. The firing had continued for a couple of minutes or more when the telephone bell rang again.

"The lieutenant in the observing station wishes to know what you are firing at, Herr Kapitän!"

The captain was about to discharge a volley of oaths upon the man when a sharp cry from the commander stopped him. The captain looked again through his glasses. It was suddenly obvious to everybody that the aeroplane was no aeroplane but in actual fact a wheeling gull.

"Cease fire, you--(objurgatory)--fools!" yelled the captain. In a nervous rage he bit furiously at the red beard below his lip. "Tell the Herr Leutnant Feldmann to keep a better look out!" he said savagely to the messenger.

Eight bells sounded. The navigating lieutenant was relieved. He descended from the bridge and stood for a moment in a warm spot in the lee of the forward funnel, trying to achieve a yawn that kept opening his mouth without filling his lungs. His blood, drugged with fatigue-toxins, was in urgent need of more oxygen, but his overtaxed nerves failed to synchronise the action of the muscles. His eyes burned in his head. He stumbled down the companionway, rubbing at them, and took off his dripping oilskins outside the wardroom door. His servant appeared and was ordered to bring him a stiff tumbler of brandy. Then he entered the empty wardroom and flung himself full length upon a sofa. He tried to shut his eyes, but found himself obstinately staring wide awake at a paint-blister on the bulkhead. Disconnected thoughts--visions, rather, of craft of various types driving through the gale passed through his brain. Especially the black dot of the seaplane which was no seaplane danced before his eyes, maddening him with its refusal to be banished. Behind a door in his consciousness was the horror of the sunk submarine--he fought hard to keep that door closed, and caught himself staring into it in intervals of relaxed vigilance. He could not sleep, try as he would. Even the strong spirits failed to narcotise him. If anything they spurred his harassed brain into greater activity. He fretted for a drowsiness that would not come. At last, with a curse, he rose and walked out of the wardroom.

Outside he stood for a moment, hesitating, craving for companionship like a sick man who lies awake at night. He ran over the list of his comrades at their battle stations. Then he made his way down to the engine-room.

A stifling atmosphere, hot, damp and thick with the smell of oil, assailed him as he descended the steep iron ladder. The sweat broke out on his brow as he passed along a gloomy narrow corridor, just wide enough for a man, between packed boiler-tubes ranged on both sides to the roof like bottles in a wine merchant's vault. He emerged finally into a large space, brilliant with electric light. On a platform at one end stood the staff-engineer with some of his assistants, surrounded by a formidable array of indicator-dials, telegraphs, telephones, speaking-tubes, and other fittings of whose use he had but a vague idea. The engineer still worried at his little grey moustache as he gazed below him to where the turbines hummed in their casings. It was comparatively quiet down here. Only a few men were visible, but the lieutenant knew that a hundred or so were labouring fiercely in the bowels of this mass of mechanism which gave the ship her life. From a manhole at the other end of the engine-room a couple of men were drawing out what seemed to be a corpse, its naked torso black as with an explosion. It was a stoker who had collapsed. The staff-engineer frowned as the limp body was carried off to the sick bay. He turned and snarled irritably at the question of the lieutenant.

"250 revolutions and not a turn more can we get out of this Gott-verfluchte coal. That is the tenth man in the last quarter of an hour. There's no use in worrying us. We can do no more. Go and tell that to the Herr Kapitän and leave us to our work."

"It seems clear in front, but there is a couple of cruisers somewhere behind," observed the lieutenant in a placatory voice.

"I don't care if Hell's in front of us and the Devil himself behind!" roared the engineer, losing self-control in the exasperation of his nerves. "We should at least get something that would give some heat there. _Gott sei dank!_ Do you know how many tons of this muck we are burning per hour?" he finished savagely.

The lieutenant waited for the answer.

"Thirty tons per hour--and we are only getting 250 revolutions--go and tell that to the Herr Kapitän!"

The lieutenant's own irritation was inflamed by this display of temper.

"We didn't supply the coal----"

The engineer overwhelmed him with a roar of curses, and finished with an angry order to leave his engine-room. His bulging, birdlike eyes glared with an insane hatred.

The lieutenant returned a bitter retort that had no justification in fact and climbed up the ladders to the deck. There he stood swaying for a moment or two, chilled to the bone by the change in temperature, although he was on the lee side of the superstructure. Raindrops splashed heavily upon him from above. The ship was plunging and rolling more than ever, and he noticed the motion after the comparative quiet below. The gale had evidently freshened. He shivered with cold and half-turned to go below again. Then he changed his mind and stumbled forward, slipping at every step on the wet, unstable deck.

In the forward turret was his friend Gunnery Lieutenant Arenschmidt. He opened the steel door and entered. The narrow metal box into which the breeches of two 8·2 guns protruded was lit by electric lamps behind wire guards. It was filled with the crews of the two guns, seated comfortably on the floor with their backs against the walls. In the shell-bins at the top of the ammunition-hoists a projectile lay ready for each gun. The gunnery lieutenant rose as his friend entered and held out his hand with a smile. He was a jolly young man, this lieutenant, whose manly beauty, marred though it was by a student sabre-cut, fluttered many a female heart. He spoke now with all his usual boisterous good-humour.

"Hallo, Bielefeld! Glad to see you! Giving them the slip after all?"

Despite the buoyancy of his tone the navigating-lieutenant noticed that his lips trembled and that his eyes were deadly serious.

Ere any reply was possible, a bell rang sharply. The gunnery lieutenant jumped away from his friend. The indicators from the forward fire-control station marked a direction, an elevation and a range. The navigating lieutenant stood back away from the alert groups behind the breeches. He felt the floor turning with him while the ship lurched heavily. A moment later he heard a muffled thud and everything shook. The starboard gun had been fired. He heard the hiss of the air-blast clearing the fumes from the firing-chamber, and then the breech was swung open. The hydraulic chain-rammer, jointed like a foot-rule, pushed another shell into place, followed by its charges. The hoists rattled as another projectile came up in readiness. The bell rang again. The crew at the port gun were suddenly busy. There was another shock. What was happening? What were they firing at? The navigating-lieutenant dashed out of the turret, closing the door quickly behind him.

As he ran up the ladder to the bridge, he heard a roar in the air, and a moment later a great sheet of flame leaped up just in front of the forward funnel with a colossal detonation. The blast of the explosion flung him to the deck. He picked himself up, bruised, dazed, but uninjured, and looked for the enemy. The turret had swung its two guns over to starboard, and as he followed their direction they discharged with a couple of almost simultaneous reports. He steadied himself and gazed hard into the distance. In the mist on the horizon he thought he distinguished a long, low band of brownish smoke, and at one end of it a dark spot and a tiny twinkle of flame. A minute later the roar of heavy projectiles tearing through the air came to his ears. Instinctively he flung himself flat upon the deck in the shelter of a gun-turret of the starboard battery. The sharp, splitting report of the gun in that turret was blotted out on the instant by a fearful upheaval that leaped from the centre of the ship with such a blast of noise as seemed to burst his ears. He had a glimpse, he knew not how, of a sheet of lurid flame and of a mighty upspout of water on the ship's flank. In the awful silence which ensued--a silence so profound that he wondered if he were permanently deafened--he staggered to his feet. The turret in front of him had been burst open, the gun protruded askew at a curious angle. He gazed at it, motionless, as though rendered imbecile with the shock. Then a chorus of agonised screams and shrieks came from the turret and continued. He heard them with a sense of relief, so terrible was that unbroken silence. Recovering his wits, he looked about him. The second gun-shield of the starboard battery had also been destroyed, the bridge was a hanging mass of contorted scrap-iron, the wireless "aerials" streamed away to leeward in the gale. The two forward funnels had disappeared and torrents of black smoke were welling up from the level of the deck, obliterating everything. In that smoke, tongues of fire licked upwards, whether from the furnaces or from a conflagration he did not know. Automatically he began to run towards the conning-tower. Without defining itself, the thought that the captain should be informed of the state of affairs impelled him. As he went he heard again the roar of projectiles. Again he flung himself flat. This time the enemy was not so successful. A shell burst somewhere on the fore-castle. The rest flung up spouts of water all around that fell again with a heavy splash. An instant later he was hammering at the lid of the manhole in the conning-tower.

The lid was unfastened from within. He pushed it aside and slid in, feet foremost. The round steel box was filled with fumes. Through them he perceived several bodies stretched out upon the floor. He stumbled over one of them, and the handkerchief over the man's face slipped aside. It was the commander. He heard the voice of one of the gunnery-lieutenants at a telephone communicating with a fire-control station, followed by rapid orders to the electricians turning the handles of the range indicators. At another telephone a man was making frantic but ineffectual efforts to get a reply from the wireless room. A junior officer at the steering wheel gave him a slow strained grin, almost like an expression of pain. The captain glared at him with eyes in which there flamed a Berserk madness.

"Well!" he shouted, sticking his red beard into the lieutenant's face.

The navigating lieutenant gave his information, staggering with the heavy lurches of the ship. It flashed on his mind while he spoke that she no longer rose so buoyantly to the waves. The captain listened, his face twitching insanely, puckering his fierce eyes. When the lieutenant spoke of the blur of smoke on the horizon he sprang round and peered out through the narrow slit between the wall and the roof. Then he turned with a cry of panic.

"They are all round us! Starboard your helm! West-by-north-west!"

The ship came round on her new course with a wallowing roll. The captain peered again through the observation slit.

Suddenly there was a fearful shock, a deafening roar, and the slit was vividly illuminated. The conning-tower had been again struck. The captain toppled backward on his heels, an object of sickening horror. The top of his head was gone. The gunnery-lieutenant sank quietly to his knees and slid over sideways. The officer at the helm was leaning over the wheel, motionless and staring. A splinter had gone through his brain. Lieutenant Bielefeld sprang to take his place. Three men beside himself, rangetakers and electricians, were left alive in the conning-tower. They seemed in a stupor, dazed by the shock.

"Telephone to Lieutenant von Waldkirch that he is now in command!"

An electrician roused himself, attempted to obey, and reported:

"The communications are broken, Herr Leutnant."

"One of you go and fetch him--he is in the after fire-control station."

A man wrenched at the lid of the manhole.

"It will not open, Herr Leutnant--it is jammed."

The lieutenant glanced at the observation slit. The aperture was no longer regular. In front of him it gaped, behind him it was closed.

"So!--then we will carry on!" His face had gone deathly pale, but his lips were tight-pressed. "Telephone to such guns as you can--independent firing!" He himself leaned over to the voice-funnel from the engine-room. "Wollenmetz!--Wollenmetz!"

The reply came in a gush of fluent curses, evidently roared with full lung-power at the other end and terminating with: "What is it?"

"Are you all well down there?" shouted the lieutenant.

"All well! We have a shell in the engine-room, the men in the forward stokeholds are all suffocated--and we have dropped to 100 revolutions--what is happening with you above? Tell me for God's sake! It is hell here!"

"We carry on--_für Gott und Kaiser_!" yelled the lieutenant in reply.

At the helm, he kept the cruiser steadily on her new course. Every moment he expected to feel the shock of more hits but none came. Evidently they were getting out of range. It seemed curious with the known lessening of the ship's speed, but there was the fact. Encouraged, he shouted down the tube to the engine-room to get all the speed they could. "We are running out of danger!" he added cheerfully. "Find out what has happened to the ship if you can--all communications are broken." For a long time he waited for a reply, but none came. His shouts down the tube elicited no response. Thus isolated from the life of the ship of which he was actually in command he kept on his course, bearing every now and then a little more to the west in his fear of the ships towards the north-east. How long he continued thus he could not tell. Every now and then he glanced at the clock in front of him. It marked always the same time. It was broken.

Rolling heavily, the cruiser ran onward, unmolested. The three men began to converse cheerfully. The possibility of escape now seemed to them a probability. The lieutenant also began to indulge the same hope, but the whereabouts of the ship which had engaged them worried him.

Suddenly there was a terrific shock, another red illumination of the slit at the top of the armour-wall, another tremendous roar. Two men who had been leaning against the wall fell dead without a scratch. The impact had killed them. The other man had sprung to the lid of the manhole, was beating against it with his fists and screaming like a maniac. Presently he sank down and hid his face in his hands, moaning like a terror-stricken child. The lieutenant ignored him in an agony of apprehension. Were they overtaken?

Outside, explosion followed explosion. The floor of the conning-tower listed steeply to starboard, and with every lift and drop of the vessel the bodies about his feet slid towards the wall. Suddenly, to his horror, he saw a wisp of smoke issuing from the voice-tube leading to the engine-room. What had happened? Had they stopped? As the ship dived down a wave he tuned himself to sensitiveness. He felt the momentary race of the screws threshing the air, just perceptible. Thank God, they were still moving! The succession of detonations outside never ceased. He could only guess at their effect and the direction from which the projectiles came. Assuming the enemy to be still to starboard, he put the helm hard over in a last despairing effort to run out of range. The compass card whirled round in the wrong direction! The steering-gear had gone.

The ship no longer rose to the seas. She rolled heavily from side to side in the trough of the waves. The lieutenant looked around helplessly at the bodies on the floor, at the wrecked indicators, at the useless wheel, at the man who rocked to and fro with his head in his hands. His continuous pitiful moaning exasperated the lieutenant to madness. He drew his revolver and commanded him, with frenzied vehemence, to be quiet. The man stared wildly at the muzzle of the revolver, opened his mouth as though about to shriek, and collapsed in a dead faint.

The lieutenant turned from him and went to the observation slit. As the ship lifted clumsily sideways on a wave he had a view of a dark grey cruiser driving through the mist, quite close--on the port side! This was a new unsuspected enemy. Water was streaming from her decks as she rose buoyantly on the sea. A string of flags fluttered along a halyard from her mast. She seemed as normal as a ship on manoeuvres. Suddenly half a dozen spurts of bright flame broke from her dark sides. The lieutenant felt the ship under his feet shiver and stagger in a deafening roar. Then he felt the weight of his body heavy against the wall of the conning-tower. He was lying almost horizontal against that wall. Through the slit he looked out upon confused water only, in the place of sea and sky. A great wave rolled straight towards him, splashed against the conning-tower, poured through the slit in a torrent. He sprang back in pitch darkness, fighting with both hands in a last instinctive struggle for life. The solid floor went from under him, human hands clutched at his legs, blindly feeling up his trousers. He kicked--choking--in a rayless night.

* * * * *

Hull-down on the horizon a German battle-cruiser was reporting a strange vessel that had suddenly appeared, challenged and received her fire, and then run back into the midst of British cruisers which had immediately sunk her. Emden sent disquieting answers to urgent enquiries.

The great wireless station at Nauen received the news of another inexplicable disaster.

THE AIR SCOUT (1914)

A large level meadow bit squarely into the edge of the woodland. The centre of the space enclosed on three sides by trees as by a wall was an empty stretch of turf, browned by much traffic and littered with scraps of paper which are the inevitable deposit of any congregation of human beings. The left-hand side was occupied by a neat row of slate-grey motor-lorries. The right showed an equally neat array of tents and sheds over which hung a faint film of wood-smoke. At regular intervals along the third side a series of placards was affixed to the tree-trunks, each exhibiting a conspicuous number like stands at a cattle-show. The stands, however, were vacant. In front of the sheds on the right stood a little group of men in khaki, and near them two men in shirt and trousers were busy at a portable forge whence issued the film of smoke. The hammer-strokes of those men were visible and evidently delivered with force, yet, curiously enough, at a little distance they appeared to fall in silence.

[This description must not be taken as representing the vastly developed organization of the flying services to-day (1917). The incident is, of course, quite imaginary. The story was written some time before the war.]

A vast noise that came from beyond the wood swallowed all other sounds. The drowsy air of the hot noon trembled with concussions so rapid that they merged into one deep-throated, deafening roar. The field was the aeroplane depot of the Army. The roar was the roar of the battle which that Army was fighting.