As of Old
An Engagement When Pistol and Cutlass Revived Memories of Notable Sea Fights of the Past
A friendly ghost of the old grappling and boarding days at sea came to give the color of romance to one of the encounters between British and German ships in the latter part of April, 1917. And a touch of ancient charm is given to the experience in the fact that the hero of the engagement was a gallant and daring midshipman, for the honors really fall to Midshipman Donald Gyles of the good ship Broke—a British destroyer.
Appropriately too, it was a dark and calm night. The Broke (whose commander was Capt. Evans, the antarctic explorer) and the sister destroyer Swift were steaming leisurely in a westerly course on patrol duty. Suddenly, quite in the vein of romance, the lookout of the Swift made out, not more than six hundred yards distant, a flotilla of six German destroyers. Here was a how-d’ye-do, when you consider that a distance of a thousand yards is a disagreeably close range in these days of far-speaking guns. The Germans were the first to fire, but the Swift lost no time in making reply and also put on steam in an attempt to ram the foremost enemy destroyer. She failed of her purpose and ran beyond the enemy line, but turning about she sent a torpedo into one of the enemy ships and made a second dash at the leader, which again escaped a ramming and took to flight. The Swift gave chase.
The Broke was giving excellent account of herself meanwhile. She had torpedoed one of the enemy and then opened fire with every gun. The other enemy destroyers were frantically working for full speed. The Broke swung around and rammed one of them square abreast the after funnel, so that the two boats were locked. Then began the desperate hand-to-hand conflict reminiscent of ancient days. The Broke raked the enemy’s decks point blank with fire from big guns, maxims, rifle and pistol. Two other German destroyers came to the rescue and poured a furious fire on the Broke, killing twelve of the eighteen men of the gun crew.