Chapter VII: The “mauretania”

The morning after dawned bleak, with an easterly sea running wet, and convulsive wind.

When the night began to lift a little at five bells in the morning watch, the _Mauretania_ was in longitude 10° 37′, and, in the centre a hall all vault and water, was vaulting her eastward way like a foxhound in the teeth of the swell—making haste! as when the cockchafer is conscious of the hawk not far.

She was deeply laden—with wheat; for twelve days previously, when skies had darkened, she had been taken by Government from bearing globe-trotters, and despatched to Canada for food-stuffs—she, like her _Lusitania_ sister, having been built by Government subvention to Government specification; and at the same time the _Inflexible_ group of cruisers, too, had been laid down, with the same contract speed—25 knots: the idea being that, in war, the two globe-trotters, with their cargo-carrying dead-weight of 80,000 tons, convoyed by the cruisers, might maintain between them a food-supply of some 20,000 tons a week.

Hence she ran there pressed, pregnant, a rat in a tract of cats, three of her four black-and-red funnels puffing breath, her crowd of cowls showing steam, spray reaching to that four-storied street of top-hamper that ran and sprang, three lines of lights still twinkling along her length, like watchlights within some mansion of romance, which show strange and garish in the glare of day. And the winds of that daybreak sang weird snatches of sea-songs within her funnels’ throats, like banshee-dirges and birds of boding, moaning omens.

For the sea is deep, and the 70,000 haughty horses that hauled her had still far to snort and haul.

But at six minutes to seven by the ship’s chronometers she understood that she was not alone, and felt safer.

Her captain, raw-eyed for lack of sleep, was drinking black coffee among the trees of the verandah-café, when a message from the wireless-room came in—bidding him report his whereabouts and course to the _Inflexible_; and ten minutes later came another: “Prick your course three points to port.”

The captain sprang up with a light in his eyes. “Which means hawks about,” he said to his first officer: “the British must have a destroyer or something out scouting.”

“And hawks about,” answered the other, “means hawks sent out beforehand—the treacherous wretches: for war doesn’t seem to have been declared till yesterday.”

They spoke, as it were, secretly, hoarsely, like conspirators.

“Prick her off,” said Captain Arthur, “and try her with another half-knot: let her rip.”

And she went ripping, until the crow’s-nest was suddenly telephoning, an agitated watchkeeper was pointing toward the clouds, and a surgeon who had been idly eyeing the winds winnowing within his beard at the lounge-door, glanced at the sky, and pitched with tidings toward the bridge, employing his pipe as a pointer.

Up there in the air was a monoplane flying north-west, the size of a swallow; and within two minutes her engine’s singing was with them.

“They’ve got me,” muttered the captain glass-gazing: “it’s a fight.”

“Or she may be British,” suggested the surgeon.

“British to the north,” the captain said, “she from the south. Be ready for some red to-day.”

No voice there quivered; only, the eyes of the little knot of men spat sparks of fire.

The monoplane was now nearly overhead, fifteen hundred feet up; but before reaching the ship she swiftly wheeled on the winds, and was winging south once more.

At the same time the surgeon exclaimed: “Look! another!”—pointing out northward a speck greyer than the grey air; and the captain, having fixed the glass on it, said, “Yes, a biplane—British—out scouting.”

But as he spoke the speck vanished.

For she had sighted the German and turned tail, as the German had sighted her and turned tail.

But this movement of mutual horror was only momentary: for the biplane had to stop the reconnaissance of the _Mauretania’s_ whereabouts from being carried to the Germans; and the monoplane had to stop the fact of that reconnaissance from being carried to the British; so both wheeled to meet, climbing for life, the monoplane flying right overhead, so that the _Mauretania_ group could clearly hear the roar of her flurry droning, and see the little hydro-boots under her chassis by which she had been launched down bow-rails from her parent-ship.

Ten seconds later the biplane, too, flew anew into sight, and anew vanished skywards; and then the monoplane vanished skywards, trying to outclimb her climbing adversary, while the men of the _Mauretania_ pored sternward upward at nothing, their nerves in a hell of expectation of that murder in heaven, they murmuring words which were unheard, but which served the purpose of concealing their wish to shriek.

And before any more was seen of the planes, the added distraction of “Ship Ahoy!” was upon them; and before they could look to see the sighted ship, once more the planes were upon them—not behind, but before now—hardly a league off, it seemed, on the starboard beam: for thither they had now dashed their anguished wings, ranging the air in a rage of flights, like fighting angels that fill space with wings: and though nothing could be observed of them, a sound within the clouds was distinctly heard—the pop of a pod bursting, a bomb; then the patter of a packet of pins spilling somewhere; then six ticks, and now the clouds parted with a crowd of particles—_débris_ and instruments dribbling—and racing after to catch them two men raining, two men in caps and padded wrappings, who passionately span in partnership or competition, as at the starting-call of One, Two—Away! and slightly behind the men a biplane diving, divided into two bits.

It seemed an age ere those men reached the sea, so that a shriek rent the outraged breast—an age of over thirty-seven seconds. Ahead of the _Mauretania_ when they set out earthward, they were somewhat astern when, neck-and-neck, like tumblers racing, they span with a passion which had waxed to the rapture of catherine-wheels into the splash that they trashed up in vanishing.

Almost at the same moment the monoplane was again heard buzzing, a blood-guilty thing, southward to regain her parent-ship.

That parent-ship already lay a little oblong of black, blocking the continuity of the southern horizon; and four cables behind her stood another oblong of black, stuck in the sea, heading north-eastward.

The _Mauretania_ men were like rats in a trap. In vain the glasses investigated the north for any sign of the English, though far south-westward there stood a third oblong of black—no one knew of what flag.

“God, I’ll run for it,” Captain Arthur muttered to himself; and an officer was flying from him with the order to bolt northward, when he got the wireless: “Do not try flight, if sighted: the enemy are the _Von der Tann_ and _Scharnhorst_”—on which the captain threw up his hands, for the _Von der Tann_ had three knots more than the _Mauretania_—was at one time the fleetest capital-ship on the sea.

And she grew rapidly big, swaggering like a bully, rolling through four degrees, her starboard beam beaten by swell which she wedged like flesh in her heavy haste, anon giving a view of all her eight deck-guns, like eight notes-of-exclamation, waiting to exclaim, and dot themselves.

And she came in her colours—just saluted—with extra colours on stays and masts, which the keen east wind was spitting on and whipping into kettle-drums—kettle-drums which accompanied strains of band-music floating from her over the ocean.

At her common-code signal to slacken speed to forty-two revolutions, a redness of angry arrogance sprang to the _Mauretania_ captain’s face.... “Foreigners on the sea giving orders....”

But there was no way out. Still no English on the sea—though that third warship from the south-west had now grown so much bigger astern, that the glasses made her out to be Yankee; and the first officer made the remark: “Looks to me like the _Arkansas_.”

At the same time the _Mauretania’s_ speed died away to 6 knots; the two Germans, too, slowed down—one two miles south, the other hardly a thousand yards off; and now clouds of steam were wheeling about the sea with the winds; a smell of heat reeked from the curbed turbines; and at the engines’ venom of hissing the ships shivered.

So for some time they forged ahead, while the _Von der Tann_ signalled to the _Scharnhorst_; the _Scharnhorst_ sent out a pinnace full of men to the _Von der Tann_; and the _Von der Tann_, making preparations to send a prize-crew to the _Mauretania_, lowered a launch.

On the _Mauretania_, meantime, there was so much agitation and preoccupation with the enemy, that little heed had been paid to the ship in the rear; till now a sound screaming out of a stream of steam reached the ear—a sound of band-music—“Yankee Doodle Doo” on the breeze.

And all at once the _Arkansas_, a rear-admiral’s flag at her foremast, was at the _Mauretania’s_ quarter, fifty yards off her, between her and the _Von der Tann_, keeping the same speed.

Her flag-captain, a lank Yankee, could be seen with three staff-officers in frock-coats perambulating his bridge with a brisk and devil-may-care fling; then was seen looking down at a school blackboard which some marines held up for him to see; then a laying of heads together; and then the blackboard was being held up aport for the _Mauretania’s_ glasses to read what was chalked large on it: “+Do A Bolt+.”

And now was Captain Arthur a distracted man, he being under British orders not to fly, and no time to wireless—Germans just coming. After ten different impulses, he flew on an eleventh impulse to his communications to order Full Ahead.

And as she spurted to the spur, the _Arkansas_, too, all her boilers lighted up, her engines running full even while her screws had run slow under a transformer, ordered Full Ahead.

The two were off together about N.E. by E., the battleship getting left a little, with her only 20 knots, but bow-butting like a bounding bull, ramming her monstrous mass at the rollers, crushing the ocean to a rush of rubbish-stuff round her—streaming creams—like crushers crushing rubble.

The two Germans, meanwhile, kept their crawl, lost in astonishment at this sudden outcome, at their wits’ end: for to try to stop the _Mauretania_ with a twelve-pounder or so meant a risk of striking the _Arkansas_—an _Arkansas_ obviously battle-ready, her control and gun-houses manned, torpedo-nets handy—the German combined weight being only three thousand tons greater than her monstrous twenty-six.

As to what the _Arkansas_ was doing there, all alone, and with what motive—this was a disturbing question for the Germans.

So it was only when the _Arkansas_ was quite a mile away that the _Von der Tann_ at last signalled her; and something like the following conversation took place between the Chief-signalmen of the two ships:

_The Von der Tann_: We are not combatants?

_The Arkansas_: Surely not.

_The Von der Tann_: Then, get out of the way!

_The Arkansas_: All right. But what’s your hurry?

_The Von der Tann_: I am about to fire!

_The Arkansas_: Try not to strike me.

A wild silence of five minutes followed this thing—the Germans not giving chase, since they did not wish to separate, and since the _Scharnhorst_ had not speed to steam with the _Mauretania_. So the _Scharnhorst_, at a distance of three miles, beautifully aimed a 3·4-inch shell from her superstructure at the _Mauretania’s_ screws: and the boom of a voice moved over the waters.

By a tragic chance the shell dropped upon the centre of the _Arkansas_ fore-turret, broke, blew away her aeroplane rails, dented the trellis-work of her foremast, and lay dead the sons of four American mothers.

Whereupon hell and frenzy broke up through the ocean that morning, and Germany and America were at war: for it is not good to play with volcanoes; but the war-fever and let’s-all-be-jolly was all on the breeze and in the brain like a brandy and a wedding-breakfast, and they wanted yankee-doodle, and they got it, and they hankered after thunder, and were thunder-struck. In that second the _Arkansas_ left the _Mauretania_ to take care of herself, knocked forty revolutions off her screws, and the _Mauretania_ trembled to her bottom, and her men were boxed doddering and staring by the back-blast and brawl of the broadside that the _Arkansas_ vomited upon the _Von der Tann_.

War, then: and let the best-padded ear see afterwards what the ear-specialist can do.

They were at pretty close quarters to begin a fight!—not three miles, though the mist that the wind had in it made that far enough for effective smashing.

Anyway, the _Von der Tann_ instantly answered with five of her 5·9-inch, and five of her eight 11-inch—one of these eight having been struck on the chase. Some moments more, and the _Scharnhorst_ was in it; and the three British who just then climbed above the north-east horizon, and were struck in the ear by blustering air-waves, questioned Heaven as to who was fighting whom.

However, a _Mauretania_ dope soon told them; and, concluding that the _Arkansas_ had left her battle-squadron with the objective of seeing the _Mauretania_ through, agile Jack dashed off his jacket, and was in it.

They were the _Inflexible_, the _Invincible_, and a destroyer, the _Swift_—say 36,000 tons: and, after steaming south three minutes so as to clear the _Arkansas’_ bows, the _Inflexible_ got six twelve-inchers trained upon the _Scharnhorst_, and from the horizon’s edge parted with 5100 lb. of blasting bad language in idiomatic Saxon.

At the same time the _Invincible_ engaged the _Von der Tann_, who, having her broadside to the American, was raked fore-and-aft by the British shells; and though not one quarter from that distance touched her, her control platform with all its contents of gunnery-officer, switchboard and crew flew like rooks, its mast collapsed, and her two forward primary-guns torqued like candles at a fire.

However, most German ships (very wisely) had a second control amidships between decks, where a series of tubes with total-reflection prisms formed images on reflectors—like the periscopes of submarines—enabling the ship’s fighter to see round the sea. And the _Von der Tann’s_ answer to the _Invincible_ was in broken English—broken English armour above-belt, where two shells of her starboard _échelon_ struck—long-capped shells of low trajectory that flew straight like a cuff, their fuses arranged to explode after penetration; and these, piercing three armour-inches and some eight feet of coal in the upper portion of her bunkers, bounded exultantly into the redoubt, where, in the space between the main and protective decks, the pair of them danced the serpentine-dance in purple amid a clatter like clapping and applause of diabolic horse-laughter bawling, down among turbines and furnaces.

The fore-bulkhead of the _Scharnhorst_, meantime, was full of sea-water, she listed to starboard, and the _Mauretania_, who had made paces like a scared hen to tuck her head below the horizon, was standing motionless, steadily trembling like a mare among cobras, her rudder and two starboard screws broken off her.

And every second the combat was closing up: for the hand that touched the range-finder shook, gun-layers stood astonished and stung with vapours, so that big guns that should have been firing two rounds a minute were firing only one in three, and hits were leagues below all target-practice averages.

To this result the mistiness and the ships’ rolling contributed; and, in the case of the _Arkansas_, a swaying of her trellis-masts in her rocking deranged the range-finding, while, in the case of the Germans, the large number of their anti-mosquito guns, which they were using as primary-armament guns, thickened the air with heated vapours, which refracted the sunlight, with the effect of bewildering the sightings.

So they closed: for the horseflesh-eaters, having mettle from their diet, would not strike their colours; and flight from the first had been impossible for them owing to the _Scharnhorst’s_ want of speed: so they closed and closed: six thunderclouds of smoke: the _Invincible_ a creeping cloud; the _Swift_ a sweeping; the Germans to perish dearly; the rest to have it finished quickly and sit and think of it.

And they were all in this position,

.Mau

.Ark .Invin

.Swi

.Von

.Sch .Inflex

the _Arkansas_ hardly any longer a mile from the _Scharnhorst_, her bow now to the west, when all that war paused in awe at a thing that happened: for the great battleship was in the very act of overwhelming the wreck of the _Scharnhorst_ with the sharp wrath of all a broadside,—jabbering quick-firers winking, and the bale of her bellowing barbettes—when a _Scharnhorst_ 8·2-inch entered her well under the water-line for’ard, and apparently burst in a magazine.

Whereupon a flame seems to have run through and through her; and she set to stuttering such tons of thundering, like Etna rhetoric, as no tongue can tell: took the ocean and shook it, as dreader and still dreader she roared and roared in that redness of her death-throes, while what was left of her 800 men were seen through a volcano of reek leaping from her in every direction like sprats spattering from a trap-net; then, like an old lion which, after roaring, gruffly guns from his guts a humph of venom, and again a humph, and a humph, and is done, and grunts, his eruption hushed, his say said; or like a pump which, after pouring, chucks a gush, and a gush, and a gush, and is done, and grunts, its eruption hushed; so the _Arkansas_, after thundering, thumped a humph, and a humph, and a humph from her drum to the sun, and was done, her death-anthem chanted, her death-passion passioned, and was a skeleton before her burial, leaving over the sea a mausoleum of smoke.

She had within her 290 tons of big-gun projectiles alone: so far over the ocean her tragedy darkened the day with the shadows of night, and many men on the _Scharnhorst_ were laid low under the sharp shower of the lavas which she spouted.

Some moments more and a roller rolled foaming over the mastless hull of the _Scharnhorst_; and she rose no more.

At the same moment the _Von der Tann_, sinking fast, started sharply north-eastward to put a sure hole in the _Mauretania_ while she could—heedless of the _Swift_, which was now tearing near to sting and fly, pouring as she tore a rain of twenty-eight 4-inch shells a minute—heedless of the _Inflexible_, which also was speeding near to launch a torpedo—for little heed was left in any head on that sea, each ship now a shrieking lazaretto: and, as the _Von der Tann_, now within two thousand yards, sent out a needle at the stationary _Mauretania_, the _Swift_ was ready to send needles from her two tubes, and the _Inflexible_ to send.

But just then tragedy overwhelmed the _Swift_: for a shell from the _Invincible_, still creeping well to eastward—a 12-inch shell shot out of rent rifling—fell far short of the _Von der Tann_ into the engine-room of the _Swift_, which stopped.

Upon which that low length of the _Inflexible_, with its tripod-masts amidships, and topmasts like bayonets, went ranging on ahead of the _Swift_, not far from her; and when the _Swift’s_ torpedo-crews had recovered their feet, and two 18-inch needles flew out of her under water at fifty miles an hour, the one to port appears to have been led astray into the _Inflexible’s_ wake.

This hulled her; crumpled her screws; ruined her rudder; and she, rudderless, steered askew by her port wing-screw, went her own way, rushing perniciously for the _Von der Tann_, which with shattered steering-gear was rushing her way, both bellowing at those terribly close quarters with all their cannon still battle-worthy, billows already breaking over the _Inflexible’s_ poop, over the _Von der Tann’s_ beam.

And as they got near, entangled in some magnet-plight, as the bicycle of the beginner heads straight for the lamp-post, and can’t be drawn off, they were shut from each other by a column of water, which gushed with a dogged gong-sound two hundred feet aloft from under the _Von der Tann_—a torpedo from the _Swift_.

When this dropped back broad-showering, with it dropped showering a rain of wreckage upon the _Inflexible’s_ deck.

And before it was over, every soul on both vessels dropped flat, as the cracking ram of the _Inflexible_ went with a racket like Distraction itself through the _Von der Tann’s_ six inches of armour; nor did it stop; but walked on and on into the other ship, splitting the tympanum with shrillness in a sombre dusk.

This probably preserved the German above water a minute longer; and within that minute, while they so stood two-in-one, a Whitehead burst beneath both beams—a Whitehead fired by the _Inflexible_, which had missed, but had been whirled into the German’s wake.

Whereupon the twain started a little apart; a pillar of smoke that mixed with the clouds rose round them, and remained steady in the air like a temple, mucking their dusk into midnight: in which gloom, under which tomb, the two settled down together, unseen, and still.

Some of their men escaped by leaping: for immediately upon the _Arkansas_ tragedy the fleet of the _Mauretania’s_ boats had gone out, save two whose bottoms had dropped out in sympathy with the tragedy; and now, too, those of the _Invincible’s_ boats that could still float were out, picking up swimmers.

And all were quickly filled, some trailing from their wales men whose heads the waves swept over.

But the wind had lulled; the sun was now bright, the battle having lasted forty minutes; the air hazy with gun-vapours; and yonder, still lingering, the mound of smoke that the _Arkansas_ had left, and crumbling yonder the pillar of cloud within which the _Inflexible_ and _Von der Tann_ had foundered.

The _Swift_, though abandoned, was still visible, standing there bowed, steep in the bows, like the camel that kneels and waits; and still visible was the _Mauretania_, waiting large and tragic, listed to starboard, showing all her deck-shape like a leaf, the sea like troops of multitudinous wolves trooping upon her to have her.

She lingered there a long time: until with a sudden flurry, as of resolve to make the plunge and try the new state under-sea, she skipped ahead and left the sea, sucking after her Captain Arthur and some forty of her men.

The loaded boats, meantime, made as best they could in the swell for the _Invincible_, a stare of scare and amazement on those sailors’ faces, as of men who have passed through what the heart can’t fancy, those within the boats gripping at the gunwales or seats, for the sea seemed to reel fiercely round their ears.

In one boat sat Captain Stickney of the _Arkansas_ and the captain of the _Scharnhorst_ side by side, the latter—a large German whose name was Bergmann—having a gash across his freckled red neck.

This was visible, for his upper clothes had apparently been singed off him, save his vest, which his buxom breasts bulged; and he kept stanching the gash with a canvas rag, already wet through with red, for the scratch ran like a tap.

The two captains uttered no word to each other for a long time; but presently the American, producing a handkerchief sidewards with his face averted, murmured: “Handkerchief?”

Up sprang Bergmann half-way in a surprise of politeness, and after searching a second for expression, blurted in his big and vigorous voice:

“Beautiful thank, my sir!”

“That’s it,” muttered the Yankee, gazing pensively over the sea.

Soon afterwards the boats were at the _Invincible_. But she was very sick and feeble; and it was not until three nights later that tidings of the fight arrived in Britain.

It arrived the same night in Peking, where Li Ku Yu, hearing that result, clucked his tongue, with “As I thought! Man has learned to destroy better than to build.”