Chapter XIII: Storm

Sooner or later, destroyer folk are sure to say something about _the_ storm. It happened in December and raged for a full three days. Readers will have to imagine what it meant to destroyer sailors; the boat dancing, tipping and rolling crazily without a second's respite; no warm food to eat because a saucepan could not be kept on the stove or liquids in a saucepan; no rest to be had. Imagine being in the lookout's station in such a storm, wondering when the tops of the masts were going to crash down on one's head. It was a hard time. Yet two-thirds of the American flotilla were out in it, and _not a single vessel lost an hour from her patrol_. Indeed the American vessels were about the only patrol boats to stay out during the tempest.

One day in the wardroom of the good old Z, some of the officers began to tell of it. The first narrator was the radio officer, a tall blond Westerner with big grey eyes, and a little sandy moustache.

"I knew we were in for something when I saw the clouds racing over _against_ the wind. Didn't you notice that, Duke? It kept up for quite a while, and kept getting colder and colder. It wasn't one of these squally storms, but one of these storms that starts with a repressed grouch, nurses it along, and finally decides to have it out. Whoopee! Some night, that first one. Everybody stayed on their feet. Couldn't have slept if you'd had the chance to. To get about, you grabbed the nearest thing handy, hung on for dear life, took a step, grabbed the next thing handy and so on. The old hooker did the darndest stunts I ever saw or felt. I came in to get my coat hanging in that corner, and the first thing I knew I was lying on the floor over in the other corner trying to fight my way to my feet again. One of the men in the boiler room got burned by being thrown against a hot surface. Did I tell you how I tried to lie down? Well, just as I had actually succeeded in getting over to this transom and stretching out preparatory to strapping myself in (you have to strap yourself tight in these destroyer bunks same as in an aeroplane) the old craft sank or swooped or did something more than usually funny, and left me hanging in the air about a foot and a half above the bunk. I must have looked like the subject of an experiment in levitation. A minute later either the bunk came up and caught me a wallop in the back, or I fell down like a ton of brick or we met in mid air, anyway, I thought my spine had been carried away. Then all of a sudden the library door opened and dumped about a hundred pounds of books on me.

"It was really dangerous to go on deck, for the waves could easily have torn one from the life line. One of the boats did, I think, lose a man overboard, but by wonderful luck managed to fish him out again." It is the engineer officer speaking. He is somewhat older than the average destroyer officer; somewhere on the edge of the forties, I should say; of medium height, lean; and with hazel eyes, a thin high nose and a thin, firm mouth. "I was just getting through my watch, had my foot on the ladder, in fact, when the boat that we lost got smashed in. A wave about the size of a young mountain climbed aboard, hit the deck, caught the boat, and then poured off with the kindling wood. Then to make things interesting, right when it was blowing the hardest, the men's dog took it into his head to come on deck. Of course, he was only a three months' pup then, and didn't know any better. (He does now though, he won't stick his nose out when the weather's bad.) Well, he slipped his collar or something, and ran on deck. The water was washing about under the torpedo tubes like the breakers at Atlantic City, and the deck plates were buckling. Takes a destroyer to do that. But I keep forgetting the dog. The little brute backed up between two of the stacks and started yapping out a puppyish bark at the world to starboard. It was funny in a way to see the little brute there with his short hair blown backwards and his feet braced on the wet deck. Everybody yelled, and one of the men ran out hanging on to the life line, and not a minute too soon either, for a second later a big wave came thumping down on us, and there was Maloney, the big dark fellow you were talking to this morning, hanging on to the wire by one arm, with the fool dog squashed under the other, and the whole Irish Sea trying to wash them both overboard. I was afraid he'd lose his balance or have the handle that travels along the wire torn out of his grasp. But he got to shelter all right, the darn dog yapping steadily all the time. We had two, almost three days of it, and it never let up one bit. One of our boats got caught in it with only a meagre supply of oil, but managed to make a French port. I've heard that there actually wasn't enough oil left in her tanks to have taken her three miles further. Other destroyers, too, had boats smashed up, and one of 'em came in with her smokestacks bent up for all the world like the crooked fingers of a hand. Some had depth charges washed overboard. It certainly was the worst blow that I remember."

Here the navigator came over with a twinkle in his eye, and touched me on the shoulder.

"Don't let him fill you with that dope," said he, "that storm wasn't in it with the storms we have on the other side off Hatteras."

"Hatteras, my neck," said the other. "What do you think you are, anyway--Hell-Roaring Jake the Storm King?"

And then the talk shifted to something else.