Chapter XIX U50
“Dainty, ahoy! Show a light at your gangway while I come aboard of you.”
It was a dark, boisterous night, with fiercely driving rain. Mark Redisham in his dripping oilskins was pacing the wet deck of the mine-sweeper, lying at anchor in a land-locked bay on the north-east coast.
The Dainty and her consorts had been at their perilous work dredging for explosive mines off the north of Ireland and in the Pentland Firth, battling day by day with stormy seas, incessant rains, and bitterly cold winds. It had been a most uncomfortable trip, and Mark and his shipmates were rejoicing in the prospect of a few days’ rest at home. Even the necessity of anchoring at night irritated them because of the delay.
The trawlers were lying now in the midst of a large flotilla of destroyers and light cruisers. Mark had read a flashlight signal from the bridge of one of the cruisers, inquiring which was the commodore of the mine-sweepers, and he had answered it with his electric torch. A pinnace was approaching the Dainty, and it was an officer in the stern sheets who had hailed him.
Mark held a lighted lamp in the open gangway, and the pinnace came alongside. The officer, a sub-lieutenant, climbed on board to speak with the skipper in the shelter of the wheel-house, leaving a midshipman in charge of the boat. Mark was about to enter into conversation with the bluejackets when the midshipman stood up. The lamplight shone in his face.
“Hullo, Rodney!” cried Mark in astonishment, recognising his brother. “What an unexpected meeting! How are you? Have you come off the Levity?”
They clasped hands.
“No,” Rodney answered. “No, the Levity is in the repair yard. She got a bit knocked about in the scrap we had with the enemy off Heligoland. But in any case, I was only aboard her temporarily. Destroyers don’t carry midshipmen as a rule, you know. I’ve been appointed to the Dauntless, the new light cruiser out there. Captain Damant is in command of her. She’s heaps better than the Atreus; in fact, she’s about the best light cruiser in the service. I thought you’d heard of my luck. I wrote to mother about it.”
“But I haven’t seen mother for over a week.” Mark explained. “I expect to see her to-morrow, though.”
“I’m afraid you won’t,” Rodney told him. “I believe you’ve got to sweep up a new mine-field that the Germans have laid south of the Dogger. That’s where the Rapid was sunk this morning.”
“The Rapid! Was she mined?”
“Yes, worse luck. No lives were lost, though; and, of course, she was obsolete, and no good for fighting, so it’s not very serious. We’d already paid the enemy in advance, seeing that Lieutenant Ingoldsby torpedoed one of their newest destroyers yesterday afternoon. I’m awfully glad to have met you. Give my love to mother and the girls when you get home, and tell them I’m getting to know the North Sea as well as I know our own garden. Good night.”
Mark drew back to make way for the lieutenant, who had been giving the skipper instructions for the sweeping of the new mine-field.
At daylight the next morning, having taken in fresh stores, the Dainty and her consorts steamed off.
On arriving at the scene of their duties they found another fleet of trawlers already at work, helped by an aeroplane. They combined in a systematic sweep of the known area and exploded some scores of mines without an accident. The new picking-up net lately introduced was doubtless the reason of this freedom from disaster.
Sweeping the seas for explosive mines indiscriminately laid by the enemy for the destruction of any ship which might run up against them, was not the only work in which the British steam trawlers and drifters were engaged. These stout little vessels, with their hardy crews of North Sea fishermen, were also engaged to act as scouts and messengers patrolling the coasts. Many of them were fitted with wireless masts, by means of which they sent out reports by code of anything suspicious which might be observed.
Thus, while the Dainty was still in the neighbourhood of the Dogger Bank, threading her way through a fleet of English herring smacks, Mark Redisham was able to send out a wireless message intimating that a German submarine of the largest and newest type had been seen. He gave her number as U50, and added that she had been watched taking in a supply of petrol and other stores from a captured English trawler manned by Germans.
Less than an hour afterwards two British destroyers were seen racing at top speed in the direction in which the enemy trawler had disappeared. They went out of sight. There came the sound of gun firing, and Mark afterwards heard that the trawler had been sunk and her German crew taken prisoners.
While the guns were firing and the Dainty was yet within sight of the drifters, Mark again saw the submarine, or, rather, he saw her periscopes moving above the surface about a mile away. At the same time the skipper was watching a confused cloud of black smoke through the rain mist on the western horizon.
“Looks like a big liner,” Snowling conjectured. “Give her a signal that there’s an enemy submarine prowlin’ around.”
Before going to his instrument room Mark looked searchingly at the smoke.
“That’s not a liner,” he decided. “There’s too much smoke for a liner. And there’s more than one. It looks like a patrol of cruisers.”
He sent off his wireless message and got one back to say that it had been received and understood. On returning to the deck he searched for signs of the submarine, but found none. The funnels of three British cruisers were now visible above the line of the sea. The Dainty was steered towards them. When their turrets and hulls came into view, Mark succeeded in identifying the ships as the armoured cruisers Pomona, Graemsay, and Ronaldsay. They were followed by a light cruiser and a division of destroyers. He signalled to them:
“Keep to the eastward of the fishing fleet.”
But his warning advice did not divert the warships from their course. They approached at easy speed in line-ahead formation, the Pomona leading.
“They’re all right, don’t you trouble,” observed Skipper Snowling. “I expect that that submarine has made off to Heligoland. They’re all of ’em afraid of the very sight of the White Ensign.”
The great, three-funnelled cruisers were a noble sight as they steamed along so steadily. Mark Redisham watched them through his binoculars, paying his attention to each one in turn and trying to discover in what small details of structure they differed one from another; for they were all three of the same class. Each was of twelve thousand tons displacement, each carried the same number of heavy guns, and each, as he knew, had the same complement of seven hundred and fifty officers and men.
As the Pomona came nearer he looked at the officers on the bridge. They wore their greatcoats, but he could still make out their respective ranks by their stripes and badges.
Suddenly one of them at the starboard end of the bridge pointed excitedly into the sea and shouted. Instantly there was a loud crash, an explosion. The whole ship staggered.
“Glory be!” cried Skipper Snowling. “That’s a torpedo! It struck her amidships!”
In the excitement of the next two hours Mark Redisham got a confused impression of all that happened. He saw the Pomona listing over in a cloud of smoke and escaping steam. She was sinking. The Graemsay and the Ronaldsay were putting out their boats as they closed upon her. Their engines were stopped as they took up positions about four hundred yards apart from her to give assistance.
Hardly had they stopped when there was a second heavy explosion, followed by a third. The Ronaldsay had been torpedoed under her after-magazine. The air was filled with flying wreckage, which fell among her boats.
The Dainty and her consorts, as well as the fishing smacks and steam drifters, hastened to the rescue. Already the cruisers’ picket boats and cutters had picked up many survivors from the Pomona. Some were returning to the Graemsay, when she, too, was hit by a fourth torpedo from the hidden enemy.
Looking round in the direction from which, as it seemed to him, the weapons had been fired, Mark Redisham saw the submarine’s two periscopes moving along the surface some three hundred yards away. Then the upper part of her conning-tower rose. The gunners on the stricken Graemsay immediately opened fire upon it, and their ship’s engines were put full steam ahead with the intention of running her down. But the cruiser was badly holed below water; she heeled rapidly and finally turned keel up.
In the meantime, the light cruiser and her flotilla of destroyers were coming down at racing speed, and the smacks and trawlers were drawing nearer. There were boats in plenty to give help to those who could swim or who had managed to seize upon floating wreckage; but, unfortunately, many had been killed or hopelessly maimed by the explosions, whilst others had not been able to escape from the stokeholds and lower decks, the loss amounting to the terrible total of sixty officers and fourteen hundred men.
“Seems to me,” said Harry Snowling, helping Mark Redisham to lift a wounded stoker from the dinghy to the Dainty’s deck, “as there must have been a whole crowd of submarines lyin’ in wait to do this. ‘Taren’t proper warfare, like gunfire in an open action.”
“I have seen only one,” returned Mark, standing up and glancing over the side. “The same one that we saw taking in petrol from that stolen trawler. She’s in sight even now, Harry. I can see her plainly, waiting, I suppose, to have a shot at the light cruiser—if she’s got any more torpedoes left. I can make out her number. It’s the U50. There’s a group of Germans on her conning-tower platform. I believe they’re gloating over what they’ve done. One of them’s a middy, with his arm in a sling. Ah! They’re going below now! They’re going to submerge.”
He did not guess—he did not dream of the possibility—but had he taken his binoculars, he might have distinguished the features of the “middy” to whom he referred, and recognised them as the features of Max Hilliger.