Chapter XXXIII: The Raid by the River

The convoy of merchantmen, after a calm, quite uneventful voyage across the ambushed sea, put into a port on the Channel for the night, and the following morning dispersed to their various harbours. Some sort of coast patrol boat "not much bigger than an Admiral's launch," the words are those of my friend Steve Holzer of the Armed Guard, took the S.S. _Snowdon_ under her metaphorical wing, and brought her up the Thames. This _Snowdon_ was one of a fleet of twelve spry little tramps named for the principal mountains of the kingdom, a smart, well-equipped, well-ordered product of the Tyne. Steve, quick, clever, and alert, had got along capitally with the "limeys." His particular pals were a pair of twin lads about his own age, young, English, blond, and grey-eyed; young, slow to understand a joke, honest, good-tempered, and sincere. I have seen the postcard photograph of themselves which they gave Steve as a parting gift. Steve himself is a Yankee from the word go, a genuine Yankee from somewhere along the coast of Maine. He stands somewhat below medium height, is lean-faced and lean-bodied; his eyes twinkle with a shrewd good humour. A great lad. He tells me that his people have been seafaring folk for generations.

The _Snowdon_, escorted by her tiny guard, ran down the coast, entered the Thames estuary, passed the barriers, and finally resigned herself to the charge of a tug. Late in the afternoon, the mass of London began to enclose them, they became conscious of strange, somewhat foul, land smells; the soot in the air irritated their nostrils. The ship was docked close after dusk. The feeling of satisfaction which seizes on the hearts of seamen who have successfully brought a ship into port entered into their bosoms; everybody was happy, happy in the retrospect of achievement, in the prospect of peace, security, good pay, and good times.

Their vessel lay in a basin just off a great bend in the river, in a kind of gigantic concrete swimming pool bordered with steel arc-light poles planted in rows like impossibly perfect trees. To starboard, through another row of arc poles and over a wall of concrete, they could see the dirty majesty of the great brown river and the square silhouetted bulks of the tenements and warehouses on the other side. To port, lay a landing stage some two hundred feet wide, backed by a huge warehouse over whose dingy roof two immense chimneys towered like guardians. The space stank of horse; the river had lost the clean smell of the sea, and breathed a reek of humanity and inland mire. A mean cobbled-stone street led from a corner of the landing space past wretched tenements, fried fish shops, and pawnbrokers' windows exhibiting second rate nautical instruments, concertinas, and fraternal emblems. It was all surprisingly quiet.

Steve, hospitably invited to remain aboard, went to the starboard rail and stood studying the river. The last smoky light had ebbed from the sky; night, rich and strewn with autumnal stars, hung over the gigantic city, and a moon just passing the first quarter hung close by the meridian, and shone reflected in the pool-like basin and the river's moving tide. One of the huge chimneys suddenly assumed a great, creamy-curling plume of smoke which dissolved mysteriously into the exhalations of the city. From down in the crew's quarters came the musical squeals of a concertina, and occasional voices whose words could but rarely be distinguished. The arc lights by the basin edge suddenly flowered into a dismal glow of whitish yellow light strangled by the opaque hoods and under cups affixed by the anti-aircraft regulations. Another concertina sounded further down the street. The moonlight, like a kind of supernal benediction, fell on smokestack and funnel, on shining grey wire and solemn, rusted anchor, on burnished capstan and finger smoutched door. Heat haze, flowing in a swift and glassy river, shone above the smokestack in the moon.

Suddenly, Steve heard down the street a sustained note from something on the order of a penny whistle, and an instant later, a window was flung up, and a figure leaned out. It was too dark to see whether it was a man or a woman. Then the same whistle was blown again several times as if by a conscientious boy, and a factory siren with a sobbing human cry rose over the warehouses. At the same moment, the lights about the dock flickered, clicked, and died. There was a confused noise of steps behind, there were voices--"Hey, listen!" "Wot's that?" the last in pure cockney, and a questioning, doubting Thomas voice said: "A raid?" The figure of the captain was seen on the bridge. One of the ships' boys went hurrying round, doing something or other, probably closing doors. The twins strolled over to Steve, and informed him in the most casual manner that they were in for a raid. It was Steve's first introduction to British unemotionalism, and I imagine that it rather let him down. He says that he himself was "right up on his tiptoes." He also had a notion that bombs would begin to rain from the sky directly after the warning. The twins soon made it clear, however, that the warning was given when the raiders were picked up on the east coast, and that there was generally some twenty minutes or half an hour to wait before "the show" began. Every once in a while, somebody in the group would steal a look at the pale worlds beyond the serried chimney pots and at the moon, guiltless accomplice of the violence and imbecilities of men.

Presently, a number of star shells burst in fountains of coppery bronze. Every hatch covered, every port and window sealed, the _Snowdon_ awaited the coming of the raiders. Whistles continued to be heard, faint and far away. From no word, tone, or gesture of that English crew could one have gathered that they were in the most dangerous quarter of the city. For the one indispensable element of a London raid is the attack on the waterfront, the attack on the ships, the ships of wood, the ships of steel, the hollow ships through which imperial Britain lives.

There is little to be seen in a London raid unless you happen to be close by something struck by a bomb. The affair is almost entirely a strange and terrible movement of sound, a rising, catastrophic tide of sound, a flood of thundering tumult, a slow and sullen ebb.

"There! 'Ear that?" said some one.

Far away, on the edge of the Essex marshes and the moon-lit sea, a number of anti-aircraft guns had picked up the raiders. The air was full of a faint, sullen murmur, continuous as the roar of ocean on a distant beach. Searchlight beams, sweeping swift and mechanical, appeared over London, the pale rays searching the black islands between the dimmed constellations like figures of the blind. They descended, rose, glared, met, melted together. The sullen roaring grew louder and nearer, no longer a blend, but a sustained crescendo of pounding sounds and muffled crashes. A belated star shell broke, and was reflected in the river. A police boat passed swiftly and noiselessly, a solitary red spark floating from her funnel as she sped. The roaring gathered strength, the guns on the coast were still; now, one heard the guns on the inland moors, the guns in the fields beyond quiet little villages, the guns lower down the river--they were following the river--now the guns in the outer suburbs, now the guns in the very London spaces, ring, crash, tinkle, roar, pound! The great city flung her defiance at her enemies. Steve became so absorbed in the tumult that he obeyed the order to take shelter below quite mechanically. A new sound came screaming into their retreat, a horrible kind of whistling zoom, followed by a heavy pound. Steve was told that he had heard a bomb fall. "Somewhere down the river." Nearer, instant by instant, crept the swift, deadly menace. A lonely fragment of an anti-aircraft shell dropped clanging on the steel deck.

"You see," explained one of the twins in the careful passionless tone that he would have used in giving street directions to a stranger, "the Huns are on their way up the river, dropping a kettle on any boat that looks like a good mark, and trying to set the docks afire. The docks always get it. Listen!"

There was a second "zoom," and a third close on its heels.

"Those are probably on the _Ætna_ basins," said the other twin. "Their aim's beastly rotten as a rule. If this light were out, we might be able to see something from a hatchway. Mr. Millen (the first mate) makes an awful fuss if he finds any one on deck." "I know what's what, let's go to the galley, there's a window that can't be shut." ... The three lads stole off. Beneath a lamp turned down to a bluish-yellow flame, the older seaman waited placidly for the end of the raid, and discussed, sailor fashion, a hundred irrelevant subjects. The darkened space grew chokingly thick with tobacco smoke. And the truth of it was that every single sailor in there knew that the last two bombs had fallen on the _Ætna_ basins, and that the _Snowdon_ would be sure to catch it next. By a trick of the gods of chance, the vessel happened to be alone in the basin, and presented a shining mark. The lads reached the galley window.

By crowding in, shoulder to shoulder, they could all see. The pool and its concrete wall were hidden; the window opened directly on the river. Presently came a lull in the tumult, and during it, Steve heard a low, monotonous hum, the song of the raiding planes. More fragments of shrapnel fell upon the deck. The moon had travelled westward, and lay, large and golden, well clear of the town. The winter stars, bright and inexorable, had advanced ... the city was fighting on. Suddenly, the three boys heard the ominous aerial whistle, one of the twins slammed the window to, and an instant later there was a sound within the dark little galley as if somebody had touched off an enormous invisible rocket, ... a frightful "zoom," and impact ... silence. They guessed what had happened. A bomb intended for the _Snowdon_ had fallen in the river. Later somewhere on land was heard a thundering crash which shook the vessel violently. A pan or something of the kind hanging on the galley wall fell with a startling crash. "Get out of there, you boys," called the cook. Ship's galleys are sacred places, and are to be respected even in air raids. And then even more slowly and gradually than it had gathered to a flood, the uproar ebbed. The firing grew spasmodic, ceased within the city limits, lingered as a distant rumble from the outlying fields, and finally died away altogether. The sailors, released by a curt order, came on deck. The top of the concrete wall was splashed and mottled with dark puddles and spatters of water. All agreed that the bomb had fallen "bloody close." The peace of the abyss rules above. Far down the river, there was an unimportant fire.

Said Steve--"I certainly was sore when I didn't have any excitement on the way over in the convoy, but after that night in the _Snowdon_, I decided that being with the Armed Guard let you in for some real stuff. It's a great service."

With which opinion all who know the Guard will agree.