Chapter VII: The Day--And the Morning After

Looking back on a kaleidoscope of great events, one is apt to be struck by the wealth of insignificant detail with which memory burdens itself. Of all the thunderous panorama in which a Fleet Action presents itself to the imagination, very little is recorded in the mind of a participant at the time. Later on a man may fit the details together into an orderly comprehensive tableau for the benefit of relations and others, supplying from hearsay and imagination all that he missed as an insignificant actor in the great drama.

Groping among the memories of the Battle of Jutland and the part played therein by the fleet flagship, it is not unnatural, therefore, that a private of marines should come most readily to mind. He it was who in enjoyment of his office of servant jerked aside the curtain of a cabin door about 3.15 p.m. on May 31st, 1916, and announced in laconic tones that the fleet was going to “Action Stations” in half an hour’s time.

The Onlooker had kept the morning watch, and was engaged on his bunk in what is colloquially known as a “stretch off the land.”

“Eh?” he said.

“’Arf an hour,” repeated the messenger of Mars. There was in his tone that note of impassive stoicism usually reserved for the announcement that the Onlooker’s gold links had gone, in the cuffs of a shirt, to the wash--or similarly soul-shaking tidings. The latter descended from his bunk in search of the sinews of war.

“Where the devil’s my gas-mask?” he queried, after a breathless search.

“’Andy,” replied the stoic. He rummaged in an obscure “glory-hole” and produced in turn his master’s boot-cleaning gear, his own ditty-box, private stock of tobacco, fiancée’s portrait, and finally his master’s gas-mask. This, emptied of a further assortment of his personal possessions, he gravely handed to the Onlooker.

That worthy rapidly collected his remaining impedimenta and struggled into a “British warm”; as he did so certain obscure warnings of the distant past (those far-off days when we read handbooks and attended lectures on war in the abstract) came back to mind. “By the way,” he said--“underclothing. In the Russo-Japanese war they always put on clean underclothing before going into action, I remember. Septic wounds, and all that. When did I have a clean shift last?”

His official valet closed his eyes, as if contemplating a vista of time greater than the human memory could in justice be expected to span. Finally he shook his head gloomily. “Couldn’t rightly say, but----”

“Never mind,” interrupted the Onlooker hastily. “I haven’t time now, anyway,” and made for the door. His servant’s impassive countenance softened; perhaps he was reflecting that they might never again forgather in that cabin. “It’s goin’ to be cold up there----” he jerked his head towards the upper-deck and forebridge, and eyed his master compassionately. “Better ’ave your woolly muffler--what your wife knitted for you.”

The Onlooker was touched. “Thank you,” he said. “If I may borrow it for the afternoon....”

* * * * *

The clatter of cups and saucers in the neighbouring pantry guided his footsteps to the wardroom in search of tea. That the warning had gone round was evident from the prevalent wakefulness (unusual at that hour) of all the occupants of the mess. Everyone was garbed for the fray according to his prospective rôle or individual taste. Costumes ranged between cricketing flannels and duffle overalls with Balaclava helmets and sea-boots.

It might reasonably have been expected that one topic and one only--“Der Tag”--would have been on everyone’s lips. The German Fleet was out: was even then being lured north by the battle cruisers, and the Fleet was rushing to meet it in battle-array. The hour for which the Fleet had waited twenty-two weary months was about to strike: and no one even mentioned it.

The affectation was somehow peculiarly British. Drake epitomised it for all time when he declared there was time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too; but it is a question whether the self-conscious imperturbability of that game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe equalled that of the Fleet flagship’s wardroom as its members sat in noisy banter round the tea table, munching bread-and-jam with a furtive eye on the clock....

It was left to the commander-in-chief’s flag lieutenant to break the spell. He put down his cup with a clatter, picked up his telescope, and rose to his feet, fastening the toggles of his duffle coat.

“Well, boys ...?” he said, and walked towards the door as the bugles began to blare along mess-deck and battery.

* * * * *

Concealment of his emotions is not a marked characteristic of the British bluejacket or marine, whatever affectations may be cherished by his officers in that respect. The exultant speculations, prophecies, and thanksgiving of a thousand men, crowded in those confined spaces, met the ear with a noise like the sea. Commonplace sounds suddenly acquired a thrilling significance, and the clang of the securing chains of the guns as they were released, the tireless drone of the turbines far below, shrilling pipe and blare of bugle overhead, combined to set the pulses at a gallop. The Onlooker passed forward through that electrical tide of emotion and laughing men that surged towards the hatchways, and _en route_ overtook a leading seaman. He was normally a staid, unemotional individual, known best (from the standpoint of censor) as an incorrigible letter-writer. He was capering, literally capering, along the battery. And as he capered he shouted:

“They’re out, lads! they’re out! Christ! They’re out this time!”

And out they were, for presently, on the wind that sang past the naked rails of the forebridge and the bellying halliards, came the first grumble of gunfire out of the haze ahead.

Perhaps it was the utter absence of colour, the dull grey monochrome of sea and sky, ships and smoke, that heightened the resemblance of what followed to the shifting scene of a cinema show. It robbed even dire calamity of all terror at the time. It seemed incredible that the cruiser on the starboard quarter, ringed all about with yeasty pinnacles of water, was one of ours, being hammered to extinction by the guns of an enemy invisible. The eye followed her dispassionately as she ran that desperate gauntlet of pitching salvos; and when the end came, and she changed in the flutter of an eyelid into a cloud of black smoke, it was some time before a subconscious voice said to the Onlooker: “There goes gallant Sir Robert ... and you’ll never shake Dicky Carter by the hand again....”

* * * * *

Equally remote and unreal were the effects of our own gunfire, seen and lost and glimpsed again in that ever-shifting North Sea haze. A crippled German destroyer, crawling out of range, down by the stern, like a hare whose hindquarters have been paralysed by a clumsy sportsman: an enemy light cruiser, dismasted, funnels over the side, one gun spitting defiance from a shambles of a battery as she sank: a great battleship listing over, all aswarm with specks of humanity--surely it was none of our noisy doing?

And then suddenly a salvo of 14-inch shells “straddled” us, and a yeoman of signals beside the Onlooker put out a hand and pulled him behind the shelter of a canvas wind-screen.

“Best get behind ’ere, sir,” he said. Then the absurdity of it struck them simultaneously, and they both laughed.

* * * * *

The insignificant duties of the Onlooker took him at a later phase in the action to the lower conning-tower. Situated far below the water-line and behind all the available armour, it is deemed the safest place in the ship, and is the salubrious resort of various seconds-in-command, waiting to step into the shoes of defunct superiors as occasion arose. They were not a cheerful company, since their rôle was _pro tem._ necessarily passive. Further, their knowledge of what was going on was limited to scraps of information that filtered down a voice-pipe from the upper conning-tower, through a variety of mediums all busily employed on other matters. The assistant constructor (sometime darling of International Rugby crowds), stood with his ear to the voice-pipe and wailed for news as a Neapolitan beggar beseeches alms. Suddenly he paused, and his face brightened.

“Disabled Zeppelin floating on the surface ahead,” he announced. There was a general brightening of the countenances around. Followed a long pause. Then:

“Wash-out! Not a Zeppelin. Bows of a battle cruiser sticking out of the water.”

“Good egg,” said someone. “Another Hun done in.”

It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that it might not have been a Hun. As a matter of fact it was the _Invincible_, or all that was left of her.

* * * * *

Outside the lower conning-tower a little group of messengers, electric light and fire and wreckage parties stood and discoursed. They were displaying an unwonted interest in the merits and demerits of swimming belts.

“Got yours on, Nobby?” inquired one boy-messenger of another.

“Yus,” was the reply in tense grave tones. “An’ if we sinks I’m goin’ to save Admiral Jellicoe an’ get the Victoria Cross.”

This pious flight of fancy apparently rather took his friend’s breath away, for there was a moment’s silence.

“You can ’elp,” he added generously. They were “Raggies” apparently....

* * * * *

Reaction came with the following dawn: a weariness of the soul that no fatigue of the flesh can equal. All one’s energies seemed needed to combat the overwhelming desire for sleep, and the sensitive plate which records even absurdities in the mind holds little save one recollection of that dawn. But whatever has grown dim and been forgotten, the memory of a journey aft along the mess-deck in search of a cup of tea will always survive. The grey daylight struggled through the gunports and mingled with the sickly glare of electric lights along the narrow vista of the mess-deck. One watch of stokers had been relieved, and they lay where they had dropped on coming up from the stokehold. On every available inch of space along the deck sprawled a limp bundle of grimy rags that was a man asleep. It was like picking a pathway through a charnel-house of ebon dead. They lay on their backs with outstretched arms, or face downwards with their arms under their foreheads, in every imaginable attitude of jointless, abandoned exhaustion. The warm, sour smell of perspiration mingled with the aftermath of cordite fumes....

The guns’ crews beside their guns were silent. They stood or sat, arms akimbo, motionless in the apathy of reaction and fatigue, following the passer-by with their eyes....

Aft in the medical distributing station all was still as death. Men lay motionless, snoring beside the stretchers and operating tables. But as the Onlooker passed, something moved inside the arms of a sleeping man. A stumpy tail wagged, and the ponderous bulk of Jumbo, the mascot bulldog, rose, shook himself and trotted forward, grinning a greeting from one survivor of Jutland to another.